WAR 09-09-2017-to-09-15-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

I figured I'd better get the new thread started while I could....HC


(285) 08-19-2017-to-08-25-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...8-25-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(286) 08-26-2017-to-09-01-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-01-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(287) 09-02-2017-to-09-08-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-08-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

----

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...gerous-generation-nato-chief-jens-stoltenberg

Nato chief: world is at its most dangerous point in a generation

Exclusive: Jens Stoltenberg warns of converging threats as Russia mobilises estimated 100,000 troops on EU’s borders

Daniel Boffey in Tapa
Friday 8 September 2017 13.00 EDT

The world is more dangerous today than it has been in a generation, the head of Nato has said, days before the mobilisation of an estimated 100,000 Russian troops on the EU’s eastern borders, and as a nuclear crisis grows on the Korean peninsula.

Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of the military alliance, said the sheer number of converging threats was making the world increasingly perilous.


In the court of Kim Jong-un: a ruthless, bellicose despot, but not mad
Read more
Asked in a Guardian interview whether he had known a more dangerous time in his 30-year career, Stoltenberg said: “It is more unpredictable, and it’s more difficult because we have so many challenges at the same time.

“We have proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea, we have terrorists, instability, and we have a more assertive Russia,” Stoltenberg said during a break from visiting British troops stationed in Estonia. “It is a more dangerous world.”

From next Thursday, over six days, Russian and Belarusian troops will take part in what is likely to be Moscow’s largest military exercise since the cold war. An estimated 100,000 soldiers, security personnel and civilian officials, will be active around the Baltic Sea, western Russia, Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, without the supervision required under international agreement.

On the other side of the world, in the face of local protests, the South Korean government has deployed the controversial US Thaad missile defence system as it looked to counter potential future attacks from North Korea, which recently launched a ballistic missile over Japan, threatened the US Pacific territory of Guam and tested a possible thermonuclear device.

Donald Trump has threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on the North Koreans should further threats be made against the US, and kept up the threat on Thursday, saying he is building up US military power.

“It’s been tens of billions of dollars more in investment. And each day new equipment is delivered – new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world, the best anywhere in the world, by far,” Trump said. “Hopefully we’re not going to have to use it on North Korea. If we do use it on North Korea, it will be a very sad day for North Korea.”

Trump has ruled out talks with Pyongyang for the time being and Washington’s diplomatic focus is now on efforts to secure agreement at the United Nations for much tighter economic measures, including an oil embargo and possibly a naval blockade.

Speaking during his visit to the Estonian military base in Tapa, a former Soviet Union airstrip about 75 miles (120km) from the border with Russia, Stoltenberg was coy when asked if he backed the US president’s bellicose threats to Pyongyang, blamed by some for exacerbating the current situation in south-east Asia.

“If I started to speculate about potential military options I would only add to the uncertainty and difficulty of the situation so I think my task is not to be contribute to that. I will support efforts to find a political, negotiated solution,” he said.

Pushed on whether he could even envision a military solution to the crisis in Korea, Stoltenberg said: “I think the important thing now is to look into how we can create a situation where we can find a political solution to the crisis.

“At the same time I fully understand and support the military message that has been implemented in the region by South Korea and to some extent Japan, as they have the right to defend themselves. They have a right to respond when they see these very aggressive actions. I also support the presence of US troops and capabilities in Korea.”


Retreating Isis fighters prepare for 'last stand' in Syria
Read more
Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister whose 10 years in power were marked for his success in improving Norway’s environmental footprint, took over the role of Nato secretary general in 2014, forming a close working relationship with Barack Obama.

Soon after Trump’s election last year, however, in response to suggestions that the White House might back away from Nato, Stoltenberg made a pointed intervention highlighting the lives lost by the alliance’s members coming to the aid of the US after the 9/11 attacks. Trump had described Nato as obsolete during his election campaign.

In May, Stoltenberg took on the role of placater-in-chief after the US president used the occasion of the opening of Nato’s new building in Brussels, and the unveiling of a memorial to 9/11, to castigate 23 of the 29 Nato members for not spending enough on defence. A number of leaders were visibly startled by the nature and timing of the speech.

Asked this week whether Trump was the ideal person to unpick the current fraught security situation, Stoltenberg insisted the 29 Nato members were united within the alliance. “Donald Trump is the elected president of the United States,” he said. “And Nato is a collective alliance of 29 democracies. And that’s part of democracy, that different political leaders are elected.”

He said he did not believe there was an imminent threat to Nato members, and that an increase in defence spending had strengthened the alliance in recent years.

Stoltenberg has completed a tour of the four battle groups stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, forming the Nato advanced forces defending the eastern borders.

Stoltenberg said the troops’ “defensive” mobilisation was a message to Russia that an attack on one Nato ally was an attack on all, and that he remained confident of the security of eastern Europe. But he expressed concern at Moscow’s imminent failure to live up to its international obligations for exercises involving more than 13,000 troops to be open to observers, including overflights. Some Baltic states estimate that about 100,000 Russian troops will be involved in this year’s exercise and Poland claims the Kremlin has requisitioned more than 4,000 train carriages to move military personnel west.

“Russia has said it is below 13,000. They briefed that on the Nato-Russia council a few weeks ago,” Stoltenberg said. “That was useful but at the same time we have seen when Russia says that an exercise has less than 13,000 troops that’s not always the case. We have seen that in Zapad 2009 and 2013 – the two previous Zapad exercises. There were many more troops participating.”

Stoltenberg said Nato had always offered up its exercises to scrutiny, “while Russia has not opened any exercise to open observation since the end of the cold war”.

 

[Housecarl]

Just like in Afghanistan....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/w...ldren-for-suicide-attacks-in-nigeria-20170908

WATCH: Boko Haram increasingly exploiting poor children for suicide attacks in Nigeria

2017-09-08 17:01

Lagos - Recruiters from the Nigerian armed group Boko Haram are targeting people living in extreme poverty and using them to fuel the group's violent campaign in northern Nigeria.

Almost 20 000 people have been killed and about two million displaced in the conflict in Nigeria where suicide attacks, especially by young girls, are on the rise.

Al Jazeera's Catherine Soi reports from Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria.

Watch the report here

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-for-simultaneous-war-with-china-and-pakistan

India army chief: we must prepare for simultaneous war with China and Pakistan

General says Himalayan standoff could become larger conflict with China, which Pakistan would then use to its advantage

Associated Press
Wednesday 6 September 2017 21.07 EDT

India’s army chief said on Wednesday the country should be prepared for a potential two-front war given China is flexing its muscles and there is little hope for reconciliation with Pakistan.

General Bipin Rawat referred to a recent 10-week standoff with the Chinese army in the Himalayas that ended last week. He said the situation could gradually snowball into a larger conflict on India’s northern border. Rawat said Pakistan on the western front could take advantage of such a situation.

Xi Jinping says a dark shadow looms over the world after years of peace
Read more

The Press Trust of India news agency quoted Rawat’s remarks at a seminar organised by the Center for Land Warfare Studies, a thinktank in New Delhi.

India fought a war with China in 1962 and three wars with Pakistan, two of them over control of Kashmir, since securing independence from Britain in 1947. All three countries are nuclear powers.

Rawat said credible deterrence did not take away the threat of war. “Nuclear weapons are weapons of deterrence. Yes, they are. But to say that they can deter war or they will not allow nations to go to war, in our context that may also not be true,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

India last week agreed to pull troops from the disputed Doklam plateau high in the Himalayas, where Chinese troops had started building a road. The 10-week standoff was the two nations’ most protracted in decades, and added to their longstanding strategic rivalry.

Warfare lies within the realm of reality.
Bipin Rawat, Indian general
“We have to be prepared. In our context, therefore, warfare lies within the realm of reality,” Rawat said.

His comments came a day after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and China’s president, Xi Jinping, agreed on a “forward-looking” approach to Sino-India ties, putting behind the Doklam standoff.

Xi and Modi met on the sidelines of a summit of the Brics emerging economies in the south-eastern Chinese port city of Xiamen. The Brics nations are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougla...-brics-while-overlooking-doklam/#f36ee0893829

Asia #ForeignAffairs

SEP 7, 2017 @ 06:30 AM

China Tries To Make A Friend Of India At BRICS Meeting, But Is It Too Late?

Douglas Bulloch , CONTRIBUTOR
I write about the political economy of China and its major industries
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

A little over a week ago China and India were carefully walking back from a near three-month standoff in the Himalayas during which both sides had spoken of war. At the time I suspected that Chinese President Xi Jinping was concerned about the potential loss of face occasioned by the prospective absence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the BRICS summit this week in Xiamen.

Now that the meeting has taken place, however, it seems I underestimated the urgency of ensuring Modi attended, and how peripheral Doklam must be to China's wider strategic vision.

Also on Forbes: How Looming Doklam Winter Could Cool China-India Border Dispute Quicker Than Diplomacy

In fairness, China may have simply misjudged the Doklam incident. For all the talk of China's salami-slicing territorial expansion, the original decision to build the road that India objected to may have been taken locally and simply not been fully thought through -- creating a headache for Beijing -- rather than being a plan hatched at the highest levels. Nonetheless, the firmness of India's response and the disregard it showed for China's clear demands that it withdraw from Chinese sovereign territory was striking. It was expected that Modi would receive some cold shoulder this week even though China had been obliged to climb down to ensure his presence. Yet as we have seen this week, nothing could be further from the truth.


China comes a'courting

During the Doklam hostilities, one important revelation was the increasing warmth shared between New Delhi and Washington. The strategic implications were unmistakable when U.S. President Donald Trump spoke of securing the assistance of India for a reinvigorated effort to stabilize Afghanistan.

Part of this rapprochement has seen an obvious deterioration in U.S.-Pakistan relations, but the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan and increasing friendship with India has geopolitical implications for China's all-weather friendship with Pakistan. Equally India and Japan's deepening engagement, and speculation about a recent shipment of India's BrahMos missiles to Vietnam won't have gone unnoticed in Beijing either.

Despite all this, Xi Jinping heaped compliments on Modi and India, and in a firmly positive speech that made no mention of Doklam, Xi praised the encouraging "development momentum of China-India relations," heralding cooperative ventures in industry, culture and international organizations. More surprising still, India secured a big concession with the language included in a BRICS statement which made direct mention of Pakistan-based terror groups, previously thought to have been excluded at the insistence of Pakistan's ally, China.

BRICS reborn

Aside from the consternation this will cause in Islamabad -- who might reasonably conclude that the "all-weather friendship" is perhaps not exactly all-weather after all -- it also raises the intriguing spectacle of China elevating the status of the BRICS for reasons as yet unclear.

The organization derives from an emerging markets investment strategy pioneered by Goldman Sachs but has never truly developed beyond a bit of institutional cooperation here and there. Now Russia is heavily sanctioned and struggling while Brazil's economy has collapsed, leaving the China and India only two serious powers left. China and India, however, increasingly see each other as regional rivals and only weeks ago nearly went to war.

Whether India is willing to cooperate meaningfully with China remains to be seen, but they will accept the flattery. Nevertheless, this incident suggests that China, or at least Xi Jinping, recognizes that hostility with India hinders, rather than helps China's strategic interests. The Belt and Road Initiative, for example, looks rather different if the principle power in the Indian ocean objects to it.

More long term, if India follows China's spectacular growth run over the last few decades -- and given its current trajectory and demographics, this seems more likely than not -- then China's vast overcapacity has only one possible outlet. China, in other words, can't afford to make an enemy of India.

Shutting the gate?

A bit of institutional flattery may only serve to delay the inevitable, but China's unexpected overtures to India are easy to comprehend if you observe the growing alignment between India, the U.S., Japan and Vietnam. China sees this, and is concerned enough to try and prevent it. Therefore, smoothing over Doklam tensions and trying to beef up the BRICS as a platform for Indo-Chinese cooperation may be wise policy, if it gives India reasons not to cozy up to Vietnam, Japan and the U.S.

Alternatively, after years of obstruction over India's effort to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, China's explicit support for Pakistan, and now the surprisingly bitter exchanges over Doklam, it may be far too late.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archi...shabaab-fighters-in-2-separate-airstrikes.php

US kills 4 Shabaab fighters in 2 separate airstrikes

By Bill Roggio & Alexandra Gutowski | September 8, 2017 | Bill@gmail.com |

The US military killed four Shabaab fighters in two separate airstrikes in central and southern Somalia between Sept. 5 and 7. The US military has stepped up its attacks on al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa after the jihadist outfit has regained ground over the past two years.

In the first strike, on Sept. 5 in the Bay Region of central Somalia, three Shabaab fighters were killed, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) noted in a press release on its website. AFRICOM launched the attack “in support of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali National Army (SNA) forces that were operating in the area.”

In the second operation, on Sept. 7 in the town of Barawe in southern Somalia, US aircraft killed one Shabaab operative.

Barawe is a contested area in southern Somalia, and Shabaab leaders have been headquartered in the town in the past. Shabaab recently killed several Ugandan troops along the Barawe-Mogadishu corridor.

Both AFRICOM press releases noted that Shabaab “has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and is dedicated to providing safe haven for terrorist attacks throughout the world.”

AFRICOM noted in the press release associated with the Sept. 7 operation in Barawe that it was “within the parameters of the authorities granted by the President in March 2017, which allows U.S. forces to conduct lethal action against al-Shabaab within a geographically-defined area in support of partner forces in Somalia.”

At the end of March, the Trump administration loosened the restrictions on the US military to use force against Shabaab after the Department of Defense noted that Shabaab has become more lethal and dangerous. The group has killed hundreds of African Union and Somali forces while overrunning bases in southern Somalia, and has maintained its safe havens while expanding areas under its control during 2016.

The US State Department, in its Country Reports on Terrorism 2016, said that al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa has prospered over the past year “due largely to lapses in offensive counterterrorism operations during 2016.” Additionally, State noted that Somali security forces “remained incapable of securing and retaking towns from al-Shabaab independently,” and while not explicitly stated, hinted that the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is failing.

AFRICOM has stepped up operations against Shabaab. Since the beginning of June, the US military has announced ten strikes against Shabaab. The targets have varied. A June 11 operation hit a Shabaab command center and logistics node. A July 4 attack targeted Shabaab fighters as they massed for an attack in the south. A July 29 airstrike killed Ali Muhammad Hussein, a senior Shabaab leader, in a strike on the Mogadishu Attack Network.

AFRICOM has loosely described raids against targets such as IED facilities and training camps as “counterterrorism operations,” when in reality these are military operations, since they are often launched against well-defended and well-defined targets in areas under direct Shabaab control. Like other al Qaeda branches, Shabaab controls a significant amount of territory and operates a military, intelligence and services, and governs areas it controls.

US operations targeting Shabaab and its predecessor, the Islamic Courts Union, since 2007:
Sept. 7, 2017 – AFRICOM killed one Shabaab fighter in a strike in the town of Barawe.
Sept. 5, 2017 – AFRICOM killed three Shabaab fighters in a strike in the Bay Region.
Aug. 16-17, 2017 – AFRICOM launched three strikes in Jilib and killed seven Shabaab fighters.
Aug. 11, 2017 – AFRICOM targeted Shabaab twice the Banadir area; the number of Shabaab casualties was not disclosed.
July 29, 2017 – AFRICOM killed Ali Muhammad Hussein, a senior Shabaab leader, in a strike on the Mogadishu Attack Network near the town of Tortoroow in southern Somalia.
July 4, 2017 – AFRICOM strikes Shabaab forces as they amassed 300 miles south of Mogadishu.
June 11, 2017 – US forces killed eight Shabaab fighters in an attack that targeted a command and logistic node in southern Somalia.
May 5, 2017 – A US soldier was killed near Barii while conducting an “advise and assist” mission with local forces against Shabaab.
Jan. 7, 2017 – US forces launched a self-defense strike near Gaduud during a counterterrorism operation to disrupt Shabaab. No Shabaab fighters were killed.
Sept. 28, 2016 – US forces kill nine Shabaab fighters during a raid on a Shabaab IED factory near Galcayo.
Sept. 26, 2016 – US forces kill four Shabaab fighters during raids on training camps near Kismayo.
Sept. 5, 2016 – The US launched two “self-defense strikes” near Tortoroow after a large Shabaab force attacked a “a Somali-led counterterrorism operation.” Four Shabaab fighters were killed.
Aug. 30, 2016 – US forces killed two Shabaab fighters after they attacked a Somali counterterrorism force near Gobanale.
June 21, 2016 – US troops “conducted a self-defense strike against Shabaab, killing three. The operation was conducted after it was assessed the terrorists were planning and preparing to conduct an imminent attack against US forces.”
May 31, 2016 – Somali troops, backed by US forces, killed Shabaab member Mohammed Dulyadeen, a.k.a. Mohammed Kuno and Kuno Gamadere, during an operation near Gaduud.
May 27, 2016 – The US killed Abdullahi Haji Da’ud, “a senior military commander” for Shabaab, in south-central Somalia.
May 13, 2016 – The US launched “defensive fire missions” which “took place in remote locations in Somalia under al-Shabaab control.”
May 12, 2016 – The US launched “defensive fire missions” which “took place in remote locations in Somalia under al-Shabaab control.”
May 12, 2016 – The US launched “defensive fire missions” which “took place in remote locations in Somalia under al-Shabaab control.”
May 9, 2016 – The US launched “defensive fire missions” which “took place in remote locations in Somalia under al-Shabaab control.”
March 31, 2016 – The US killed Hassan Ali Dhoore, a dual hatted al Qaeda and Shabaab leader who also served in the Amniyat, in an airstrike.
March 10, 2016 – US Special Operations Forces targeted a Shabaab training camp in Awdigle raid.
March 5, 2016 – The US military announced that it launched an airstrike which targeted a Shabaab’s “Raso Camp” north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. The US justified the strike on al Qaeda’s official East African branch by saying that fighters there “posed an imminent threat.” More than 150 Shabaab fighters are said to have been killed.
Dec. 2, 2015 – US killed Abdirahman Sandhere, a.k.a. Ukash, a senior Shabaab leader, and two other “associates” in an airstrike.
March 12, 2015 – The US military confirmed that it killed Adan Garaar, a senior official in the Amniyat and “a key operative responsible for coordinating al-Shabaab’s external operations” in a drone strike.
Feb. 3, 2015 – US troops targeted and killed Yusuf Dheeq, the head of the Amniyat.
Dec. 29, 2014 – US forces killed Tahlil Abdishakur, the leader of the Amniyat, in an airstrike in Somalia.
Sept. 1, 2014 – The US military killed Ahmed Godane, the co-founder of and emir of Shabaab, also known as Sheikh Mukhtar Abu Zubayr, in an airstrike south of Mogadishu.
Jan. 25, 2014 – A US airstrike killed Sahal Iskudhuq, a senior Shabaab commander who served as a high-ranking member of the Amniyat.
Oct. 23, 2013 – A US drone strike killed Anta Anta “the mastermind of al Shabab’s suicide missions.”
Oct. 5, 2013 – US Special Operations Forces targeted Shabaab’s external operations chief Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir (Ikrima), but fails to capture or kill him. A Swedish and a Sudanese Shabaab fighter were killed.
Jan. 2012 – A US airstrike killed Bilal al Berjawi, a British national of Lebanese descent.
Sept. 2009 – US Special Operations Forces killed Saleh ali Nabhan, a top al Qaeda and Shabaab leader who was involved in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings.
May 2008 – A US airstrike killed senior Shabaab and al Qaeda leader Aden Hashi Ayro.
March 2008 – A US airstrike targeted a safe house in Somalia.
Spring 2008 – The US killed Aden Hashi Ayro and Sheikh Muhyadin Omar in an airstrike in the spring of 2008. Before his death, Ayro was the leader of Shabaab.
June 2007 – US targeted Saleh ali Nabhan, a top al Qaeda and Shabaab leader who was involved in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings.
Jan. 2007 – The US military targeted Abu Taha al-Sudani (or Tariq Abdullah), Qaeda’s leader in East Africa, and either Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. Fazul is al Qaeda’s operations chief for East Africa, while Sudani is the chief strategist and ideologue. Sudani is thought to have been killed in that airstrike (Shabaab said he was killed in an airstrike in 2007.)

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal. Alexandra Gutowski is a military affairs analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/09/russias-zapad-17-has-already-succeeded/140846/?oref=d-river

Russia’s Zapad-17 Has Already*Succeeded

By Lt. Col. Jyri Raitasalo
Read bio
September 8, 2017

Moscow’s message of larger-than-life military power has been eagerly amplified by Western politicians and media outlets.

Russia organizes large-scale strategic military exercises once a year in some part of its vast nation. Every four years, this exercise takes place in the Western Strategic Direction, between the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, under the heading of Zapad (“West”). These quadrennial exercises are not a new phenomenon, but the forthcoming Zapad-17 exercise has received a huge amount of attention in the West, even before it has formally*started.

The exercise itself will take place in mid-September inside Russia (including Kaliningrad) and Belarus near the borders of Poland and the Baltic states. It is the climax of a long exercise season for the Russian and Belarussian armed forces. Multiple preparatory training events and “snap exercises” have preceded the main*event.

Russian officials say Zapad-17 will include fewer than 13,000 troops, but Western estimates put the number around 100,000. The “real” size of the exercise is hard to measure; there are technical ways to make it look smaller than it actually is — *for example, dividing the big exercise into several parallel exercises taking place “autonomously.” But the huge difference shows the mistrust and tensions between Russia and the*West.

Large-scale military exercises are never “just” military exercises. They are always also ways to show off, communicate, and develop the fighting power of national or alliance-wide armed forces. In the current security situation in the Baltic region, Zapad-17 sends a clear message: Russia has massive conventional military power and is ready to use*it.

After Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria, Zapad-17 seems much more dangerous than its 2013 predecessor. Indeed, Russia itself seems more dangerous to Western societies in general, and Western media particularly, which have granted Moscow an aura of brilliant and highly-tuned information warfare and cyber attack capability. Supposedly, the “little green men” and the deniability that they provided Russia in its land-grab showed something new in the field of statecraft and great-power*politics.

I argue that what we are witnessing today is not Russia excelling in the dark arts of information warfare or “hybrid warfare,” but rather that we in the West have a depressingly low understanding of the workings of great-power politics and adversarial great-power behavior. Zapad-17 is a case in point. The exercise has not even started and our societies have been fretting about it for at least six months. All possible and many impossible Zapad-17-related scenarios have been played out through a media frenzy that is still picking up speed as the main event approaches. Zapad-17 has been labelled “a Trojan horse,” “the World War 3 threat,” and* “demonstrative preparation for war on the West,” to give just some examples. Meanwhile, Russia itself has largely kept quiet as multitudes of experts and news outlets filled Western airwaves with Zapad “news” and*analysis.

Take the 4,162 train cars that the Russian Ministry of Defence reportedly reserved for moving troops to Belarus and back. With one Excel spreadsheet made public in late 2016, the West has been made to guess for eight months. Will Russia invade Belarus? What is the role of the nascent 1st Guards Tank*Army?

At least two factors are amplifying the messages transmitted by Zapad-17. The first is related to alliance politics within NATO. The other is the current malfunctioning of the U.S. domestic political*system.

The Cold War’s end gave NATO an existential problem: what should it do in a world that cannot threaten Europe? The alliance’s answer was to shift its focus to war elsewhere in the world, discarding much of the know-how, military capability, and ethos of conventional deterrence and large-scale warfighting. Now powerful Russian forces loom once more. For many Europeans, Zapad-17 is scary because the military tools of deterrence are almost absent from the European scene. If European military capabilities were sufficient, Zapad-17 would be one exercise among others. Some have reacted by sounding alarms; others, more constructively, are seizing the moment to press alliance leaders to recreate the analytical tools, doctrines, and capabilities necessary to the defense of*Europe.

In the United States, meanwhile, Russia has become the main theme around which domestic politics is being played. Russian hacking, information warfare, fake news and troll factories have consumed U.S. politics and the vitality of the Trump administration. As in Europe, weakness has allowed Russia to look more powerful than it actually*is.

So what should the West do about Zapad-17? Certainly, intelligence and military authorities should keep close track of the exercise, just as they would any other deployment or action by major world powers, and adjust military readiness accordingly. In the longer term, NATO as an alliance and European states individually should indeed refocus on high-end capability and territorial defense. But crying wolf all the time — in the case of Zapad-17, for more than six months — hinders our ability to track, discuss, and react to Russia’s military*prowess.

Anyway, soon we will know what happens during and after Zapad-17. The main event is about to open in a military theater near*you.

Lt. Col. Jyri Raitasalo is docent of strategy and security policy at the Finnish National Defence University, where he previously served as head lecturer of strategy. The views expressed here are his own. Full bio

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...rias-deir-al-zor-statement-idUSKCN1BJ2J3?il=0

September 8, 2017 / 1:30 PM / Updated 27 minutes ago

U.S.-backed SDF launches operation in Syria's Deir al-Zor: statement

John Davison
3 Min Read

BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S.-backed Syrian militias have launched an operation against Islamic State in the north of Deir al-Zor province, a statement said on Saturday.

Assaults would aim to drive the jihadist militants out of areas they hold north and east of the Euphrates river, close to the Iraqi border, said the statement from the Deir al-Zor Military Council, which is fighting as part of the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance (SDF).

A senior SDF official told Reuters on Friday they would launch attacks from the south of Hasaka, which is controlled by the Kurdish YPG militia, as part of a wider offensive to drive Islamic State out of Raqqa city and territory to its southeast.

With U.S.-led air cover and special forces on the ground, the alliance of mostly Kurdish and Arab militias is fighting to seize Raqqa, upstream along the Euphrates River.

Spearheaded by the YPG, the SDF says it has taken 65 percent of Raqqa city from Islamic State.

In the Deir al-Zor assault, the SDF would push towards the Euphrates River from the east of the province, which borders Iraq.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported that the SDF had already made advances against IS in Deir al-Zor after fierce clashes and seized several hills and a village in the province’s northwestern countryside.

The operation will likely bring the U.S.-backed militias into closer proximity with the Syrian military and allied forces, who have advanced on Deir al-Zor city.

The Syrian army reached its enclave in Deir al-Zor city this week, on the western bank of the Euphrates, breaching an Islamic State siege that had lasted three years.

With the help of Russian air power and Iran-backed militias, the advance capped months of steady progress east against Islamic State across the desert.

The eastwards march has on occasion brought the Syrian army and its allies into conflict with U.S.-backed forces.

Still, the rival campaigns have mostly stayed out of each other’s way, and the U.S.-led coalition has stressed it is not seeking war with Damascus.

Reporting by John Davison; Writing by Ellen Francis; Editing by Dale Hudson

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-isis-intel-20170908-story.html

Vast new intelligence haul fuels next phase of fight against Islamic State

W.J. Hennigan, Contact Reporter
September 8, 2017, 3:15 PM | Reporting from Washington

U.S. intelligence analysts have gained valuable insights into Islamic State’s planning and personnel from a vast cache of digital data and other material recovered from bombed-out offices, abandoned laptops and the cellphones of dead fighters in recently liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.

In the most dramatic gain, U.S. officials over the last two months have added thousands of names of known or suspected Islamic State operatives to an international watch list used at airports and other border crossings. The Interpol database now contains about 19,000 names.

The intelligence haul — the largest since U.S. forces entered the war in mid-2014 — threatens to overwhelm already stretched counter-terrorism and law enforcement agencies in Europe, where Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris, London and Stockholm this year.

With the extremist group’s army and self-declared caliphate fast shrinking, U.S. officials are concerned that foreign-born militants who once flocked to Iraq and Syria will try to escape before the U.S.-led coalition or other military forces can kill them.

In recent weeks, U.S.-backed ground forces have sent an estimated 30 terabytes of data — equal to nearly two years of nonstop video footage — to the National Media Exploitation Center in Bethesda, Md., a little-known arm of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence.

Analysts there are scrutinizing handwritten ledgers, computer spreadsheets, thumb drives, mobile phone memory cards and other materials for clues to terrorist cells or plots in Europe or elsewhere.

"The reason electronic exploitation is so critical is that enemy forces doesn't fake those records," an intelligence official said. "When you interrogate someone they can hide facts, but logs of phone calls and video clips don't lie. That stuff isn't made-up."

The material came from Mosul, the militants’ self-declared capital in Iraq, which was recaptured July 9 after an eight-month battle. Other intelligence was found in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, which was retaken on Aug. 31, and from Raqqah, the group’s self-declared capital in Syria, where fighting is still underway.

“We've gotten significant amounts of intelligence as a result of the fall of these places — much is still being analyzed,” Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told The Times during a visit to Amman, Jordan, last month. “It has helped us to identify at least some of their aspirations.”

U.S. officials said they have gleaned planning ideas and outlines of potential operations rather than ongoing terrorist plots. But they also have gathered details into the group’s leadership and the hierarchy of fighters under command.

The biggest windfall came from what officials said were meticulous Islamic State records about the foreign fighters who arrived since convoys of black-flagged militants first stormed out of northern Syria and into Iraq in 2014, capturing large parts of both countries and the world’s attention.

The records include their names, aliases, home countries and other personal information.

The data has been shared with a 19-nation task force in Jordan, code-named Operation Gallant Phoenix, that tries to track foreign fighters in an effort to disrupt terrorist cells and networks. The task force is led by the U.S. military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command.

“If we find information about foreign fighters from a certain country, we go through proper procedures to make sure it's shared,” said Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat Islamic State. President Obama appointed McGurk in 2015 and President Trump has kept him on.

“So it is a very comprehensive campaign, militarily, on the ground, taking territory back; collecting information; processing it; and then building the database and the system so it can be shared and acted upon,” McGurk said in Amman.

With few U.S. troops on the ground, most of the intelligence is gathered by Iraqi security forces and U.S.-backed Syrian militias who have been trained to gather, bag and tag material to be analyzed back in the states.

A phone from the pocket of a dead fighter often includes phone numbers that can assist counter-terrorism investigations far afield. Indeed, intelligence recovered from the battlefield since 2015 has led to arrests or broken up plots in at least 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Canada, officials said.

Matthew Levitt, a former counter-terrorism official at the FBI and Treasury Department now with the nonpartisan Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said obtaining an alias, driver’s license, passport number or biometric data can be crucial to blocking a terrorist plot.

“Time and again, we’ve found that even the smallest bit of information can prove critical,” he said. “It could help us discover a person we never knew about or provide new leads on an underground cell.”

U.S. officials say Islamic State has lost 60% of the territory it captured in 2014, and its force has been halved to about 15,000 fighters. The recent intelligence indicates that they are concentrating forces and shifting their operations base to the Middle Euphrates River Valley, which lies between Iraq and Syria.

An estimated 8,000 fighters have moved to the valley, which stretches more than 150 miles from Deir el Zour in eastern Syria down to Rawa in western Iraq. They include most of the group’s leaders and their families, as well as key aides for administrative functions.

A U.S. special operations task force tracked and killed three leaders, who allegedly oversaw weapons research and drone operations, in the valley this week, officials said. In all, more than 35 military commanders, weapons production experts, financial facilitators and external attacks plotters have been killed there in the past year.

Islamic State founder Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi is believed to be hiding in the area, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, who completed his tour this month as top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. He predicted the militants would make their “last stand” in the valley.

“That’s where they believe their last sanctuary is,” he told reporters on Aug. 31.

Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War in Washington, warned that the battle is far from over. Islamic State’s leadership ranks have proven resilient and its harsh Islamist message continues to find an audience among disaffected youth.

“The noose is tightening, so to speak, but these guys don’t quit,” she said. “The remaining terrain won’t be taken quickly or easily. And even when it is taken, there’s no guarantee that accomplishment will mark the end.”

william.hennigan@latimes.com
Twitter: @wjhenn
ALSO:
U.S. special operations forces face growing demands and increased risks
The U.S. is launching 'danger-close' drone strikes so risky they require Syrian militia approval
The U.S. military is targeting Islamic State's virtual caliphate by hunting & killing its online operatives one-by-one

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/iranian-unconventional-warfare-in-yemen

Iranian Unconventional Warfare in Yemen

by Paul W. Taylor
Journal Article | September 9, 2017 - 12:52am

While publicly available details of Iran’s involvement in Yemen and its purposes there are limited, its support of Houthi rebels fighting against the Yemeni central government reportedly includes financial assistance, provision of arms, military training and operational advice. In fact, Iran has recently increased its support to include sending unmanned aerial and surface systems, naval mines, advanced weaponry such as surface-to-air and anti-ship cruise missiles, and military advisers.[ii] Such a campaign is best characterized as unconventional warfare.

This paper seeks to analyze the Iranian conduct of unconventional warfare in Yemen, and address the feasibility of the operation, suitability to the strategic position of Iran, and acceptability of likely costs.

This conflict represents a complex proxy war between Iran and the U.S./Saudi coalition. Iran provides support directly to the Houthis, but also via its proxy Hezbollah (both deny providing any support), while the U.S. provides support to Saudi Arabia in its operations in Yemen, which include both direct military action and foreign internal defense in support of the Yemeni government.[iii]

Complicating the analysis is the fact that rival armed groups, including local affiliates of Al Qaida and Daesh, are also fighting against the Yemeni government and sometimes each other, and that other states are providing support to the government. This creates a highly unstable security environment, which the Houthis could benefit from, but it makes planning more difficult and increases the number of possible adversaries. However, instability in Yemen is itself a valuable objective for the Iranian sponsor, since this creates friction for Saudi Arabia, other Sunni states, and the U.S., all of which represent a bloc against which Iran is seeking to balance.

Feasibility

The likelihood of success in this operation can be assessed on the basis of several key factors, including availability of sanctuary, political identity and cohesion, government control, favorability of terrain, willingness of the movement to cooperate, the capability and effectiveness of its guerrilla forces and supporting organizations, and applicable sponsor capabilities.

Sanctuary is vital to any insurgency, as it provides time and space to rest, refit, retrain, and plan.[iv] The Houthis do not have the benefit of a sanctuary outside the borders of Yemen, but they do have effective control over a substantial area of northwest Yemen surrounding its core territory in Sa’ada and including Sanaa.[v]

A strong political identity is vital to the long-term success of an insurgency, as it provides strategic direction, moral cohesion, and recruiting power; ethnic and sectarian identities are often especially salient.[vi] The Houthis have the elements necessary for a strong and unified identity, but reporting suggests that, as of 2015, they have failed to cohere into a cognizable political body, with some factions motivated primarily by non-ideological facts, such as avenging killings of family members, disenfranchisement by the government, and tribal agendas.[vii] No clear political objectives have been enunciated by the Houthi leadership.

An insurgency also relies on the relative lack of control of the government over its territory, as this creates space for the insurgency to operate and spread their message and opportunities to repurpose both legitimate and illegitimate trade to their ends.[viii]* Yemen fits the bill in this regard, as the central government has been struggling to survive and maintain control since before the Arab Spring in 2011, and in 2014 lost the capital.[ix]

Logistical considerations are favorable in that Iran has aid that is useful to the Houthis and developed the means to provide that aid covertly. Iran ships its material aid via cargo vessels, most likely to the port of Mukalla, where they are transferred to smaller fishing vessels for final delivery to Houthi controlled areas.[x] The cargo vessels often are unaware of the nature of their cargo, as the supplies are concealed within shipments of humanitarian aid and other legitimate cargo.[xi]

Acceptability

The direct costs of the operation, such as the provision of aid and employment of forces, will likely be relatively small compared to direct military engagement, and will likely be of the same order of magnitude as Iran’s support to Hezbollah or Bashad al-Assad. With the lifting of sanctions following the Iran Nuclear Deal, these costs should be quite bearable. Because relatively few Iranian forces are required, and Hezbollah can be relied upon to provide support in this area (though it denies providing support), the manpower costs required will be minimal.[xii]

The risk of widening the conflict to direct Iran/Saudi or Iran/U.S., while significant in terms of gravity, is an unlikely outcome so long as Iranian support remains covert and generally deniable, which is facilitated by the difficulty of concretely determining the source or destination of supplies smuggled about cargo vessels.[xiii]* Neither the U.S. nor Saudi would seek to engage Iran directly, and will be careful to avoid escalatory miscalculations, further mitigating the risk. However, they may seek to impose other costs on Iran for its support to the Houthis, such as diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions, the return of which would likely be quite costly. Even so, given its history of surviving oppressive sanctions regimes, the Iranian leadership and public will likely be willing to weather such set-backs rather than change course.

Additionally, the increased instability in Yemen, while generally redounding to the benefit of Iran by creating friction along the Saudi border, could create a “blowback” effect if it creates space for Sunni extremists with possible intensions to target Iran. However, these groups are already targeting Iran from Syria, as can be seen in the recent attack in Tehran. It is difficult to know how the Iranian public will react to further attacks, however, given their lack of recent experience with them
.
Suitability

Houthi and Iranian interests and objectives are generally aligned, but significant issues exist. Iranian objectives are to create costs and friction for Saudi Arabia and the U.S., obtain a foothold in the Bab-el-Mandeb, encircle Saudi Arabia, expand its influence and develop levers of power for future use.[xiv] Its interests here are thus similar to those it seeks in its support to Hezbollah, if Saudi Arabia is swapped for Israel.

However, while the Houthis are anti-U.S., anti-Israel, and anti-Saudi, they also reportedly lack a clear political agenda or organization.[xv]* While this has made joining the cause an easy choice for Shiite Yemenis with grievances against the government, it also makes it difficult to determine their precise objectives, or to predict the eventual result of success. For example, some Houthis may more strongly identify as Yemeni monarchists, rather than as devout Shiites, possibly leading to a less-than-satisfactory level of cooperation with the new government. However, if the conflict becomes prolonged, there will likely be time for Iran to foster the client/sponsor relationship. In addition, the alliance of the Houthi rebels with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted by the Houthis in 2011,[xvi] may facilitate this process and provide necessary political organization.

Conclusion

Taking into account the factors affecting the feasibility, acceptability, and suitability of an Iranian unconventional warfare campaign in Yemen, and the strategic interests of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula, the balance of factors suggests that Iranian sponsorship of the Houthi rebels is a viable option with a strong chance of success at an acceptable level risk.

The long pole in the tent is the political organization and clear objectives of the Houthi rebels. This can be improved over time with a combination of advice to the Houthi/Saleh leadership and information operations. And while the cohesion of the Houthi rebels is somewhat questionable, there is reason to believe that this will improve with time as the crucible of conflict crystallizes the Houthi resistance. Additionally, Iran’s core objectives in this campaign (friction for adversaries, foothold in the Bab-el-Mandeb, encirclement of Saudi Arabia, and expanding influence and power) do not require a consolidated Yemen, only a viable partner in eastern Yemen. Focusing on this core territory and its relevant populations will help Iran achieve its ends while minimizing the gravest risks.

End Notes
Global Security. (2015, February 05). Houthi / al-Shabab al-Mum'en. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/shabab-al-moumineen.htm
[ii]* Saul, J., Hafezi, P., & Georgy, M. (2017, March 22). Exclusive: Iran steps up support for Houthis in Yemen's war - sources. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-iran-houthis-idUSKBN16S22R
[iii] Global Security. (2015, February 05). Houthi / al-Shabab al-Mum'en.
[iv] United States. Joint Chiefs of Staff. (2013). Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations. Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[v] Saul, Hafezi, and Georgy (2017).
[vi] Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations (2013).
[vii] Global Security. (2015, February 05). Houthi / al-Shabab al-Mum'en.
[viii] Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations (2013).
[ix] Crilly, R. (2017, March 29). Iran sends Afghan proxy forces to Yemen as support for Houthis increases. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/iran-sends-afghan-proxy-forc...
[x] Saul, Hafezi, and Georgy (2017).
[xi] Bandari, A. A. (2016, November 11). Iran's Unit 190: The special force smuggling weapons by land, sea and air. Retrieved June 23, 2017, from http://raseef22.com/en/politics/2016/11/08/irans-unit-190-special-force-...
[xii] Global Security. (2015, February 05). Houthi / al-Shabab al-Mum'en.
[xiii] Saul, Hafezi, and Georgy (2017).
[xiv] Saul, Hafezi, and Georgy (2017).
[xv] Global Security. (2015, February 05). Houthi / al-Shabab al-Mum'en.
[xvi] Crilly (2017).
*
Average:
0
Your rating: None
Tags: Iran unconventional warfare UW yemen
About the Author

Paul W. Taylor
Paul W. Taylor is an enlisted Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, now employed by Cydecor and providing support to the U.S. Navy. Paul holds a JD and MA from Seton Hall University, where he focused on security and rule of law issues. The views expressed are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Navy or Cydecor.

Comments
Add New Comment

by cammo99 | September 10, 2017 - 6:19am
Login or register to post comments
This is an excellent analysis of the Iranian expansion into the South West of Yemen. A nation once dominated by Egypt and remains under the watchful eye of the Saudis.
Another question is how has the Iranian Navy evaded blockades and continues delivering weapons and one assumes experts to the region?
How formidable is the Iranian Navy and private shipping across from the African Continent?
This is not made clear in the article.
It would seem if there is Iranian and Houthi vulnerability it is in the possibility they might be blockaded and support cut off.
It also suggests that Iran to maintain its support is willing to take risks and confront the USN and US War Planes and other coalition opposition seeking to impose a blockade of weapons.
The second question is, how did the Obama administration which set out to blockade Iranian support fail?

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-russia-north-korea-nuclear-missiles-british-officials/28726626.html

IRAN

Report: British Suspect Iran Or Russia May Have Helped North Korea Nuclear Program

September 10, 2017 00:49 GMT

Britain's Telegraph newspaper is reporting that U.K. officials fear that Iran or Russia may have helped North Korea’s "sudden advancement" in the development of nuclear weapons.

The paper on September 10 said the British Foreign Office is investigating whether "current and former nuclear states" helped Pyongyang develop nuclear weapons capable of being mounted on missiles.

"Iran is top of the list of countries suspected of giving some form of assistance, while Russia is also in the spotlight," the paper reported.

Unidentified senior officials told the newspaper it was "not credible" that North Korea's scientists alone could have accomplished the nuclear advances.

"North Korean scientists are people of some ability, but clearly they’re not doing it entirely in a vacuum," the paper quoted a U.K. government minister as saying.

North Korea on September 3 said it had successfully tested an advanced hydrogen bomb that can be loaded onto an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a move condemned by the United States, Russia, China, and most other world powers.

Based on reporting by The Telegraph

----

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog...lp_from_iran_in_building_nuclear_weapons.html

September 10, 2017

Report: British government believes North Korea got help from Iran in building nuclear weapons

By Rick Moran

According to reports in the Sunday Express and the Telegraph, British officials are convinced that the Iranians assisted North Korea in developing its nuclear arsenal.

The British government also believes that Russia gave vital assistance to North Korea in their ICBM program.

Senior Whitehall sources have told The Sunday Telegraph it is not credible that North Korean scientists alone brought about the technological advances.

One Government minister reportedly said: “North Korean scientists are people of some ability, but clearly they’re not doing it entirely in a vacuum.

Another Foreign Office source reportedly added: “For them to have done this entirely on their own stretches the bounds of credulity.”

Whilst Iran is reportedly top of the list of countries suspected of assisting North Korea in some form, Russia is also suspected of doing so.

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson also hinted at his department’s concerns last week as he took questions from MPs about the North Korea crisis.

Mr Johnson said: “There is currently an investigation into exactly how the country has managed to make this leap in technological ability.

“We are looking at the possible role that may have been played, inadvertently or otherwise, by some current and former nuclear states.”

It comes amid rising fears of World War 3 after North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear weapon test last week – describing it as an advanced hydrogen bomb for a long-range missile.

In the 1990s, the CIA pointed the finger at Pakistan and the nuclear black market network developed by "The Father of the Pakistan Bomb" A.Q. Khan as assisting both North Korea and Iran in going nuclear. In 2004, Khan confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. He later retracted that confession, but the proof of his activities is overwhelming.

Khan's specialty was centrifuge technology, machines that are vital in enriching uranium to bomb grade levels. Iran now has advanced centrifuges that we were assured by the Obama administration were under constant surveillance and could not be used to enrich uranium beyond the 5% level (85% enrichment is the minimum necessary to construct a bomb).

But what the British government is concerned about is that centrifuge technology requires first world expertise. North Korea could not possibily have built machines that required such precise engineering so that they could spin hundreds of times a second. The comings and goings of Iranian scientists to and from North Korea has long been noted.

As for Russia, it is believed that the rocket engines used in North Korea's advanced ICBM's came from Ukraine. If any nation knew how to smuggle those rocket engines out of Ukraine, it would be Russia.

North Korea has received a lot of help in developing it's nuclear and missile programs. Those nations who assisted Kim Jong-un in this endeavor could have blood on their hands if the US finds it necessary to take these programs out.

48 comments

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Ec...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

September 9, 2017 4:25 am JST

Holes forming in US nuclear umbrella, some in Japan argue

Ex-defense minister floats possibility of hosting American nukes

TOKYO -- Debate is growing in Japan over whether the American commitment to defend allies with nuclear force will hold as Washington's own defense interests loom larger, and whether stationing nuclear weapons here could shore up this key deterrence strategy.

The cure

To former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba, the time has come to discuss letting the U.S. military bring nuclear weapons within the country's borders. "Is it right to say that Japan will not host them but will take shelter under the American umbrella?" the veteran lawmaker in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party asked in a television appearance Wednesday.

The proposal speaks to concern that the nuclear umbrella might not work as advertised. With North Korea having developed an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the U.S. and working on a miniaturized warhead to go with it, Washington could think twice about responding in kind to a nuclear attack on Japan for fear of retaliation, the thinking goes. Ishiba and peers worry that if Pyongyang realizes this, the American pledge to defend Japan with nuclear force could lose credibility and thus its power as a deterrent.

Enabling the U.S. military to bring a portion of its nuclear capabilities to Japan -- by letting nuclear-missile-equipped submarines call on bases here, for example -- could make Pyongyang more reluctant to move against Japan. And unlike during the Cold War, when the U.S. deployed many tactical nuclear weapons in West Germany, the arms could be kept in Japan only temporarily, blunting public opposition.

Worse than the disease?

But adopting such a plan would prove tougher it sounds. Japan's three "non-nuclear principles" bar bringing nuclear weapons within its borders, in addition to proscribing their manufacture and possession. Altering this bedrock credo would risk a severe public backlash, not to mention objections from such neighbors as China and Russia. Nor is the move particularly well-supported within the LDP. Japan's thinking is "the same as ever" as far as the principles are concerned, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters Friday.

Whether taking in nuclear weapons would boost deterrence is itself questionable. Nuclear-armed American submarines frequently patrol the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, according to an official in Japan's Ministry of Defense, and could launch a nuclear attack on North Korea at any time.

In fact, "if it's understood that there are nuclear weapons here, Japan could end up becoming more of a target," warned an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here.

Besides, the American extended-deterrence scheme, including the nuclear umbrella, is "unwavering," Onodera said.

Related stories
North Korean workers abroad face growing crackdown
North Korea's anniversary prompts watch for new provocation
US seeks to tighten North Korea's choke collar
Interview: Kim Jong Un better heed warning, says US Navy commander
North Korea threat: Trump approves more Seoul firepower

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/taiwanese-activist-goes-trial-china-033154005.html

Taiwanese activist goes on trial in China

AFP • September 10, 2017

A Taiwanese democracy activist went on trial in central China Monday on charges of attempting to subvert the Chinese government, in a case that has further soured cross-strait relations.

Supporters of Lee Ming-cheh, an NGO worker who was arrested during a trip to the Chinese mainland in March, gathered outside the courthouse in Hunan province's Yueyang city, according to photos on social media.

A live broadcast of the trial on the official social media account of the Yueyang intermediate court said that Lee was being tried on charges of "subverting state power".

His wife and mother arrived in Hunan Sunday to attend the trial. Both women were accompanied by several officials from Taiwan's semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation, which handles relations with the mainland.

Lee has long supported civil society organisations and activists in China, according to Amnesty International.

He had shared "Taiwan's democratic experiences" with his Chinese friends online for many years and often mailed books to them, said the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.

After Lee went missing Chinese authorities confirmed he was being investigated for suspected activities "endangering national security".

Beijing has repeatedly ignored Taipei's requests for information on Lee's whereabouts and details of the allegations against him.

Relations between the two sides have worsened since Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen took office in May last year. Since then Beijing has cut off all official communications with Taipei.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory waiting to be reunified. It wants Tsai to acknowledge the island is part of "One China", which she has refused to do.

1 reaction

----

Update...

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-09-11-04-17-07

Sep 11, 4:17 AM EDT

TAIWAN DEMOCRACY ACTIVIST PLEADS GUILTY IN CHINESE TRIAL

BY EMILY WANG
ASSOCIATED PRESS

YUEYANG, China (AP) -- A Taiwanese pro-democracy activist pleaded guilty Monday to subverting state power in China's first criminal prosecution of a nonprofit worker since Beijing passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations.

Lee Ming-che's supporters, though, quickly said he had been forced to confess to crimes he hadn't committed.

Lee told the court in the central Chinese city of Yueyang that he had "spread articles that maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China, China's existing system and China's government." He said he had also organized people and wrote articles "intended to subvert the state's power."

Subversion of state power is a vaguely defined charge often used by authorities to muzzle dissent and imprison critics.

Lee's wife, Lee Ching-yu, who was in Yueyang for the trial, had warned that he might be pressured into pleading guilty. China's wide-ranging crackdown on civil society has featured a string of televised "confessions" - believed to have been coerced - from human rights activists accused of plots to overthrow the political system.

On Monday, his supporters blasted the legal process.

"This trial is illegal," said Hsiao I-Min, who traveled to Yueyang with Lee's wife, and is with the Taiwanese non-governmental organization Judicial Reform Foundation. Lee "was forced to confess a false truth."

"Pursuing democracy and freedom is not a crime," Hsiao continued. "Mr. Lee was accused by the Chinese government of discussing and spreading ideas about democracy from the West. We think this is a basic human right."

Dozens of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong marched to the China Liaison Office on Monday to protest Lee's prosecution.

Former lawmaker and social activist Lee Cheuk-yan said Beijing was simply looking for ways to silence its critics.

"With this regime, whenever you criticize them about their human rights record, then they will take it as subversion," said Lee.

Security was tight at the Yueyang City Intermediate People's Court, with barricades on the streets, dozens of security personnel patrolling the perimeter and reporters ordered to leave the area.

Lee Ming-che, 42, has conducted online lectures on Taiwan's democratization and managed a fund for families of political prisoners in China. He cleared immigration in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory of Macau on March 19 but never showed for a planned meeting with a friend later that day.

Amnesty International and other rights organizations have called for his immediate release.

The new law says foreign NGOs must not endanger China's national security and ethnic unity, and subjects nonprofit groups to close police supervision. It is seen as an attempt to clamp down on perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party's control.

Relations between Taiwan and China have been near an all-time low since the election of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, whose Democratic Progressive Party has advocated Taiwan's formal independence. China cut off contacts with Taiwan's government in June, five months after Tsai was elected.

Lee's co-defendant, Peng Yuhua, who is from mainland China, also pleaded guilty. Peng said he had founded an organization called Palm Flower Co. to pressure China to accept a multiparty political system. Lee was his deputy in charge of education, Peng said.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-troops-russia-backed-syrian-214912149.html

US troops and Russia-backed Syrian forces set to come into contact as they close in separately on Isis

The Independent
Rachel Roberts, The Independent • September 9, 2017

US-backed forces and Syrian government troops, supported by Russia and Iran, look set to come into contact as they each make separate advances against Isis in Syria.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) launched an offensive against Isis along the border with Iraq on Saturday, bringing them into a race with government forces marching in the same direction against the extremists.

The duelling battles for Deir Ezzor highlight the importance of the oil-rich eastern province, which has become the latest focus of the international war against tIsis, raising concerns of an eventual clash between the two sides.

The US-trained Deir Ezzor Military Council said it was calling its operation Jazeera Storm, after the familiar name for northeast Syria. The Military Council is a part of the predominantly-Kurdish SDF which enjoys broad U.S. military support. The SDF are the US's primary ally in the fight against Isis in Syria.

The race to reach the Iraqi border will shape future regional dynamics, determining whether the United States or Russia and Iran will have more influence in the strategic area once the extremist group is defeated.

Iran has been one of President Bashar al-Assad's strongest backers since the crisis began in March 2011 and has sent thousands of Iranian-backed fighters and advisers to fight against insurgent groups trying to remove him from power.

The US-backed fighters are up against a huge challenge to reach Deir Ezzor, especially while they are still fighting to liberate Raqqa from Isis. Three months into the battle, they have liberated around 60 per cent of the city, and much more difficult urban fighting still lies ahead.

This week, Syrian troops and their Iranian-backed allies reached Deir Ezzor, breaking a nearly three-year-old Isis siege on government-held parts of the city in a major breakthrough in their offensive against Isis. In a victory statement, the Syrian military said Deir el-Zour will be used as a launching pad to liberate the remaining Isis-held areas along the border with Iraq.



The Syrian conflict began with a popular uprising against Assad in 2011, which was initially viewed by the western world as heralding a positive new dawn for democracy in the Middle East.

The subsequent chaos has drawn in the US, Russia and regional powers with peace talks failing to resolve a war.

“The first step is to free the eastern bank of the Euphrates and the areas Isis still holds,” Ahmed Abu Kholeh, head of the Deir Ezzor Military Council, told Reuters after the announcement of their offensive.

“We’re not specifying a timeframe but we hope it will be a quick operation,” he said at the town of al-Shadadi in Hasaka province, adding that he did not know where the battle would move on to once that objective has been achieved.

He said SDF fighters did not expect clashes with Syrian government forces, but if fired upon “we will respond”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported that SDF forces had advanced against Isis in Deir Ezzor's northwestern countryside, seizing several hilltops and a village.

Meanwhile, Syrian government forces and their allies reached Deir Ezzor military airport on the other side of the Euphrates, where troops had been holed up since 2014, surrounded by Isis, the commander in the pro-Assad alliance said.

The alliance includes Iran-backed militias and the powerful Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah.

The advance came days after the army and its allies broke the siege of the main part of the city, which had been separated from the airport by Isis attacks a few months before.

Syrian troops have now recaptured an oilfield southwest of Deir Ezzor and seized part of a main highway running downstream to the city of al-Mayadeen, to which many Isis militants have retreated, the British-based Observatory said.

Isis fighters in Syria still control much of Deir Ezzor province and half the city, as well some territory further west near Homs and Hama, where government forces recaptured several villages on Saturday, pro-Damascus media reported.

But the group has lost most of its caliphate which from 2014 stretched across swathes of Syria and Iraq, including oil-rich Deir Ezzor.

The SDF is still battling to eliminate Isis from the final areas it controls in Raqqa, northwest of Deir Ezzor.

Talks between Russia, Iran and opposition backer Turkey in the Kazakh capital Astana are set to take place next week, possibly followed by a separate track at the United Nations in Geneva in October or November.

Assad’s government has participated in previous rounds from a position of power as Damascus clawed back much territory, including the main urban centres in the west of the country and increasingly in eastern desert held by the jihasists.

Syria’s non-Islamist opposition holds some pockets of territory in western Syria, and the SDF, which is dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia, controls much of Syria’s northeast.

In June, after the SDF shot down a Syrian government fighter plane, the Syrian army called this a “flagrant attack" and "an attempt to undermine the efforts of the army as the only effective force capable with its allies ... in fighting terrorism across its territory.

“This comes at a time when the Syrian army and its allies were making clear advances in fighting the Daesh (Isis) terrorist group,” it added.

Additional reporting by Reuters

71 reactions

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-09-10-09-44-42

Sep 10, 9:57 PM EDT

MYANMAR ACCUSED OF LAYING MINES, CAUSING ROHINGYA INJURIES

COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh (AP) -- Myanmar's military has been accused of planting land mines in the path of Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence in its western Rakhine state, with Amnesty International reporting two people wounded Sunday.

Refugee accounts of the latest spasm of violence in Rakhine have typically described shootings by soldiers and arson attacks on villages. But there several cases that point to anti-personnel land mines or other explosives as the cause of injuries on the border with Bangladesh, where 300,000 Rohingya have fled in the past two weeks.

AP reporters on the Bangladesh side of the border on Monday saw an elderly woman with devastating leg wounds: one leg with the calf apparently blown off and the other also badly injured. Relatives said she had stepped on a land mine.

Myanmar has one of the few militaries, along with North Korea and Syria, which has openly used anti-personnel land mines in recent years, according to Amnesty. An international treaty in 1997 outlawed the use of the weapons; Bangladesh signed it but Myanmar has not.

Lt. Col. S.M. Ariful Islam, commanding officer of the Bangladesh border guard in Teknaf, said on Friday he was aware of at least three Rohingya injured in explosions.

Bangladeshi officials and Amnesty researchers believe new explosives have been recently planted, including one that the rights group said blew off a Bangladeshi farmer's leg and another that wounded a Rohingya man. Both incidents occurred Sunday. It said at least three people including two children were injured in the past week.

"It may not be land mines, but I know there have been isolated cases of Myanmar soldiers planting explosives three to four days ago," Ariful said Friday.

Myanmar presidential spokesman Zaw Htay did not answer phone calls seeking comment Sunday. Military spokesman Myat Min Oo said he couldn't comment without talking to his superiors. A major at the Border Guard Police headquarters in northern Maungdaw near the Bangladesh border also refused to comment.

Amnesty said that based on interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis by its own weapons experts, it believes there is "targeted use of landlines" along a narrow stretch of the northwestern border of Rakhine state that is a crossing point for fleeing Rohingya.

"All indications point to the Myanmar security forces deliberately targeting locations that Rohingya refugees use as crossing points," Amnesty official Tirana Hassan said in a statement Sunday. She called it "a cruel and callous way of adding to the misery of people fleeing a systematic campaign of persecution."

The violence and exodus began on Aug. 25 when Rohingya insurgents attacked Myanmar police and paramilitary posts in what they said was an effort to protect their ethnic minority from persecution by security forces in the majority Buddhist country.

In response, the military unleashed what it called "clearance operations" to root out the insurgents. Accounts from refugees show the Myanmar military is also targeting civilians with shootings and wholesale burning of Rohingya villages in an apparent attempt to purge Rakhine state of Muslims.

Bloody anti-Muslim rioting that erupted in 2012 in Rakhine state forced more than 100,000 Rohingya into displacement camps in Bangladesh, where many still live today.

Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and persecution in Myanmar and are denied citizenship despite centuries-olds roots in the Rakhine region. Myanmar denies Rohingya exist as an ethnic group and says those living in Rakhine are illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archi...s-drone-strikes-against-the-islamic-state.php

The IRGC touts drone strikes against the Islamic State

BY AMIR TOUMAJ | September 9, 2017 | amir@defenddemocracy.org | @AmirToumaj

Late last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) publicized its drone strikes against the Islamic State near the Iraqi border in Syria. The IRGC deployed the drones as part of its revenge campaign against the Sunni jihadists, and also to show off Iran’s growing fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

In early August, the Islamic State raided an IRGC position near Jamouna, about 37 miles northeast of the US base in Tanf, Syria. The self-declared caliphate’s offensive led to the deaths of dozens of Iraqi militiamen fighting for the Seyyed al Shuhada Brigades. Several Iranian operatives embedded in the militia were killed as well.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s loyalists captured and beheaded an Iranian officer. Photos of the dead Iranian, portrayed as a “martyr” by IRGC-affiliated sites, subsequently went viral. So the IRGC and allied Shiite jihadists vowed to exact retribution.

But first, in an attempt to cover up its embarrassing loss, the IRGC peddled a conspiracy theory saying the US struck the Iranian-led forces right before the Islamic State’s assault. The conspiracy was entirely self-serving, as the IRGC did not want to admit that Baghdadi’s goons delivered a stinging blow to its forces. [See FDD’s Long War Journal report, IRGC-controlled militia accuses US of strike to hide Islamic State raid near Syrian border.]

The IRGC wasn’t finished, however. Later in August, IRGC-affiliated websites released footage of a drone strike by the Seyyed al Shuhada Brigades against the Islamic State in Syria’s Badia desert. The footage is consistent with that of an Iranian Shahed-129 drone, according to Adam Rawnsely, an analyst who spoke with FDD’s Long War Journal. The images showed the Iraqi militiamen undertaking reconnaissance and launching a drone strike against an Islamic State technical. The footage also showed more strikes, though it was not immediately clear if they were from the same operation. That attack was just the beginning of the IRGC’s “revenge” operations against the Sunni jihadists, according to IRGC-affiliated media.

Then, on Aug. 24, Iran’s state media reported that the Iranian-led Afghan Fatemiyoun Division, backed by the IRGC’s drone unit, repelled an Islamic State assault close to Wadi al Waer, approximately 35 miles northeast of Jamouna by the Iraqi border. Footage from the drone is also consistent with that of a Shahed-129, according to Rawnsely. An IRGC-affiliated media outlet, citing “a field source,” later added that other units were positioned there and participated in the assault. They included the “resistance front’s” missile unit, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi militias from the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and Iranian “advisers.” While the IRGC often claims its operatives are in Syria merely as advisers, they have played a far more active role, directly leading forces in combat.

The IRGC’s drone operations against the Islamic State show how it is using multiple tactics in its irregular warfare, and directly backing its Shiite foreign legion with Iranian assets. The Islamic State demonstrated in Mosul and elsewhere that small, weaponized drones can be particularly effective in guerrilla-style warfare, even if only for a time. Iran’s UAV capability is more advanced, but is being deployed for similar ends.

The Iranian footage from eastern Syria highlighted several other noteworthy aspects of the IRGC’s battles with the so-called caliphate. IRGC-led forces dug trenches around the perimeter of their positions in an attempt to foil the Islamic State’s notoriously destructive suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (SVBIEDs). The videos included scenes acquired from the cameras of Islamic State fighters. And an Iranian reporter interviewed some of the IRGC-led militiamen following the battles, with Persian voice overs inserted into the clips.

While the IRGC claims to have killed more than 190 Islamic State combatants in the operations, it has yet to provide evidence to support this claim. The footage suggests far fewer jihadists were killed and the IRGC is known to exaggerate its enemies’ death toll.

The IRGC-led operation by Syria’s border with Iraq is part of an Iranian-Russian-Syrian offensive that aims to retake much of Deir Ezzor province. This week, pro-regime forces broke the Islamic State’s multi-year siege of Deir Ezzor city. Tehran supports the Assad regime’s territorial conquest and also wants to secure territory on both sides of the border for its own purposes.

Tehran is showing off its drones for other reasons as well. The UAVs are intended to bolster an aging, ill-equipped, and underfunded air force, thereby providing the Islamic Republic with more offensive capabilities.

Just this week, Iran’s Press TV reported that the commander of the Army Khatam al Anbiya Air Defense Base had inaugurated a new UAV base. The state media report highlighted that drones have been “playing a significant role against takfiri terrorists as well as monitoring US warships in the Persian Gulf.”

Last month, an Iranian drone buzzed a US aircraft in the Persian Gulf. Earlier in the year, the US shot down Iranian drones flying near US forces in Tanf. Iran leaked a video of one of its drones trailing an American one. An Iranian operator boasted that he could strike the US drone, even though that was a dubious claim.

Iran will continue to invest in and deploy its drones in combat and propaganda. The UAVs are contributing notably to Iran’s battles against the Islamic State, but are also intended to send a message to the US as well.

Images and videos from the IRGC-led battles against the Islamic State in eastern Syria

Footage of the IRGC-controlled Seyyed al Shuhada Brigades launching a drone strike against the Islamic State:

Video: https://twitter.com/_/status/900395498321977349

Iranian state media’s footage of an IRGC drone attack against Islamic State fighters:

Video: https://twitter.com/_/status/901101888669712386

IRGC-affiliated media posted the map below showing the location of a drone strike near Wadi al Waer in August:

http://www.longwarjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Map-Aug-29.jpg

IRGC-led forces dug a trench that was intended to neutralize the Islamic State’s SVBIEDs:

http://www.longwarjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IRGC-drone-footage-2-768x337.png

---

Amir Toumaj is a Research Analyst at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/08/the-iran-deal-is-on-thin-ice-and-rightly-so/

ARGUMENT

The Iran Deal Is on Thin Ice, and Rightly So

The Trump administration has a compelling case that Iran’s regional conduct makes the JCPOA no longer sacrosanct.

BY JAMES JEFFREY
SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

The future of the Iran deal is again under question. President Donald Trump garnered much attention in July by stating he no longer wanted to certify that Iran is in compliance with the agreement, which is required by law to occur every 90 days and thus due again next month. European leaders reacted by affirming their support for the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the Iranian government responded by claiming that it was in compliance — but would take measures to accelerate its nuclear program if Washington were to stop its compliance. Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certified Iran’s compliance again in June, weakening the president’s case.

But given the extraordinary threat that Iran poses with its expansionism in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, as well as the ongoing administration review of Iran policy, the status of the JCPOA cannot be sacrosanct.

It’s clear that those within Trump’s orbit are already thinking hard about the best way to remake U.S. policy toward Iran. Former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton recently published a detailed “game plan” for pulling out of the agreement and adopting a course of political pressure on Iran amounting almost to regime change. And this week, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley laid out the case for Iran’s non-compliance in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), without endorsing a specific action by the administration.

The Trump administration, Haley noted, sees the agreement as flawed because it is time-limited, front-loaded in Iran’s favor, and does not end enrichment. Thus, it does not totally exclude Iran’s path to the accumulation of sufficient fissile material for a nuclear device. Moreover, it does not effectively address prior nuclear weaponization efforts, which were left to an opaque side deal between the IAEA and Iran, which now blocks inspections of military facilities.

But a primary problem with the agreement, in Haley’s view, is that it does nothing to curb Iran’s aggressive regional expansionism. This behavior, which profoundly worries every friendly Middle East leader, kicked into high gear just weeks after the JCPOA was signed in 2015. International agreements, particularly concerning weapons of mass destruction, are obviously important in themselves, but their strategic context should not be ignored. For example, while there has been little genuine angst over the Israeli nuclear weapons program, regional and global concern about Iranian nukes has been profound due to its destabilizing regional policies.

The Obama administration’s behavior stoked Iran’s aggressive regional approach. U.S. officials in the previous administration were slippery on the issue of “linkage” between the agreement and Iran’s disruptive regional agenda. At times, such as a speech Vice President Joseph Biden made at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in April 2015, officials argued that the agreement was simply concerned with nuclear restraints, and Iran’s regional behavior would be dealt with in other ways. But it never was — not in Syria, Yemen, or elsewhere. Rather, the administration’s implicit position appeared best reflected in President Barack Obama’s 2015 interview with the Atlantic, wherein he argued that the long game engendered by the agreement would help return Iran to respectability and calm the region, while also signaling that he was not overly troubled by Iran’s depravations. He opined that Saudi Arabia had to find a way to “share the neighborhood” with Iran, and that backing U.S. allies in the region too strongly against Iran would only fan the flames of conflict.

But Iran’s behavior is now too dangerous to ignore. Tehran has facilitated Bashar al-Assad’s scorched-earth policy, encouraged Russia to intervene in Syria, and abetted the rise of the Islamic State by allowing Assad and its clients in Iraq to oppress Sunni Arabs to the point of embracing the jihadist organization. While the JCPOA itself did not enable Iran’s regional policies or finance its expeditionary campaigns — which were well-funded before 2015 — the agreement encouraged Iran’s behavior. Certainly its huge arms purchases from Russia would not have been possible under the oil export and foreign deposit sanctions, and the agreement gave Iran a “seal of approval” facilitating its aggressiveness.

Leveraging the Iran deal to pressure Tehran, or even negotiating a more restrictive agreement, may look at first blush like mission impossible. Despite the nibbling at the edges described above, there is as yet no serious Iranian JCPOA violation. Under these conditions, as Richard Nephew and Ian Goldberg argue in Foreign Policy, there is little likelihood that the United States could convince the agreement’s other signatories and third parties to again implement U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, which brought Iran to the negotiating table last time.

While this fact seemingly argues for leaving the agreement alone, there are other considerations that the administration must take into account. This includes a looming crisis in the Middle East: The Iranian-Assad-Russian campaign for dominance in Syria, and the American-led Coalition campaign to destroy the Islamic State, are both coming to a close. This leaves the United States and its partners with the choice of pulling out of enclaves in Syria and northern Iraq, which were established to fight the Islamic State but useful to counter the Iranian alliance, or if not, face possible direct military confrontation with Iran and its surrogates in both countries, as they see these enclaves as obstacles to Iranian domination of the Levant. Under such circumstances, no aspect of Iranian relations, including the JCPOA, can be immune from a re-think.

The United States can take measures here short of a full-scale JCPOA annulment — which, given the difficulties imposing international sanctions, would likely be a diplomatic disaster. European allies, for example, recently joined the United States in challenging an Iranian missile test “in defiance of” U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the JCPOA. The issue of blocked IAEA access to Iranian military facilities should also be reviewed.

Iran’s expectation of commercial benefits from the JCPOA is also its Achilles’ heel. The administration could discourage global firms from doing business with Iran by leaving open its final position on the deal, and thus placing at risk their business with America. This is a technical violation of the JCPOA’s terms, but of the most unrealistic condition — the commitment to support Iranian economic development. While such actions would disappoint Iran, they are unlikely to drive Tehran from an otherwise beneficial agreement.

Furthermore, as Haley signaled in her AEI remarks, the law passed by the U.S. Congress requiring the president to certify that Iran is abiding by the Iran deal defines “compliance” more broadly than the JCPOA terms does. In contrast to the Iran deal, the president is required to certify that sanctions relief is in the vital national security interests of the U.S. The president thus could hold Iran in “non-compliance” under that act without necessarily stopping — or allowing Congress to stop — American compliance with the terms of the JCPOA. Under JCPOA Paragraph 36, the United States could also reinstitute token or partial sanctions in response to Iranian actions without pulling out of the agreement.

To many in the international community — especially Europe, but less so in the countries closer to Iran — such steps are anathema. But few if any countries really consider preserving the JCPOA their overriding interest in the Middle East: Even in Europe, what really impacts populations is threats from the Islamic State and unchecked refugee flows, which are largely a result of Iran’s policies in Syria. Moreover, a possible collapse of the U.S.-led Middle East security system by an unchecked Iran endangers them more than it does the United States.

No matter what Trump or another president does, the Iran deal is poised to run up against an uncomfortable political reality. Under the JCPOA, Congress must formally terminate sanctions — which until now have only been waived by the executive branch – by January 2024. It defies credulity to think that anything like today’s Congress, given anything like Iran’s current behavior, would take such a step by 2024. But not doing so would violate a key JCPOA provision and block Iranian formal adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocol. Under these conditions, it may be feasible to pressure those in the international community favorable to the JCPOA to rethink overall relations with Iran, as the “price” for salvaging the agreement’s nuclear restraints.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thediplomat.com/2017/09/fina...he-south-china-sea-is-the-taiwan-strait-next/

Finally, Strategic Clarity in the South China Sea. Is the Taiwan Strait Next?

Routine FONOPS in the South China Sea are long overdue — as are Taiwan Strait passages.

By Joseph Bosco
September 07, 2017

Despite its recent tragic incidents, the United States Navy has adopted a cool-headed new approach to Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea. Long overdue, it is a clear, firm, enforcement of the international maritime order and reflects a strategic vision that should be applied across the board in America’s China policy.

Pacific Command (PACOM) under Admiral Harry Harris announced this week that, henceforth, PACOM will conduct FONOPS on a regular schedule so that each individual transit will be seen by China and others as a routine happening and not a special, provocative event. The Navy laid the foundation for this sensible new posture with the three operations already conducted this year.

All were authentic FONOPS that challenged the excessive maritime claims of China and/or other nations around disputed land features — which is the stated purpose of the FONOPS program. This contrasts markedly with the four transits the Navy made through China-claimed waters in 2015-16. Those confusing operations were all “innocent passages,” meaning they not only did not challenge China’s sweeping claim of vast territorial seas, but actually conceded it.

Now that the Navy has re-established the international law of the sea as the new normal in the South China Sea, it would be useful to apply the same approach to transits through the Taiwan Strait, an equally clear case for freedom of navigation. The Navy’s Strait passages in the past have been separated by inordinately long intervals that in Beijing’s mind tended to concede China’s claim to that body of water. When transits were resumed sporadically, China would portray them as U.S. provocations.

After World War II, the U.S. Navy did not bother much with the Strait since U.S. policy did not include Taiwan, or South Korea, as important security interests. That misguided policy changed dramatically when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. President Truman rushed the Seventh Fleet back into the Taiwan Strait where it continued operating essentially unchallenged for the next 22 years.

Then in 1972, to prepare for his historic opening to China, President Nixon decided to show his good faith to Mao Zedong by preemptively withdrawing the fleet from the Strait, and it apparently stayed out until the 1995 Taiwan Strait crisis. When China fired missiles toward Taiwan to protest a U.S. visit by Taiwan’s president, President Clinton responded by sending the Nimitz carrier battle group through the Strait. But after Beijing’s angry protest, Washington explained it away as a weather diversion, effectively conceding it needed China’s permission to use the Strait.

When China again fired missiles the following March to oppose Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, Clinton sent two carriers to the region, but after Beijing threatened a “sea of fire” if they entered the Strait, they stayed out. And Navy ships avoided the Strait for the next decade, apparently under the impression that it was official U.S. policy.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld learned of the self-imposed Taiwan Strait abstinence in 2005, he directed the Navy to commence regular Strait transits. Pacific Commander Admiral Timothy Keating put an exclamation point on the Navy’s new posture in 2007 when Beijing objected to a transit by the USS Kitty Hawk after it was denied a scheduled Hong Kong port visit.

Keating’s response: “We don’t need China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Strait, it is international waters. We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose, as we have done repeatedly in the past, and will do in the future.”

However, given the Obama administration’s reluctance to challenge China’s illegal claims in the South China Sea, it is unclear whether similar shackles were imposed on the Navy’s operations in the Taiwan Strait. The Trump administration gave Beijing a six-month extension of “strategic patience” to help resolve the North Korean crisis, only to be met with further duplicity and self-serving obstructionism. It should now feel unconstrained to assert America’s interests in the Taiwan Strait and in support of Taiwan’s overall security and democratic identity.

Just as the strategic ambiguity that clouded the Navy’s South China Sea operations has now been cleared away, the same should be done regarding any doubts Beijing may harbor as to the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan. A telephone call from President Trump to President Tsai Ing-wen would be an appropriate way to convey the message.

Joseph Bosco is a former China country director in the office of the secretary of defense, 2005-2006.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/5...-convoy-attack-in-afghanistan/article/2633992

5 US troops wounded in convoy attack in Afghanistan

by Jamie McIntyre | Sep 11, 2017, 9:51 AM

Five U.S. troops were among the service members wounded after a suicide attacker targeted their convoy near the village of Qal'eh-ye Musa Bala in Parwan province, according to a U.S. military statement.

The attack was carried out with a vehicle laden with explosives. Other wounded included members of the NATO Operation Resolute Support mission, and Afghan civilians.

"The wounded service members were taken to the Bagram Airfield hospital for treatment. None of the injuries are considered life threatening," said a statement from Operation Resolute Support.

Navy Capt. Bill Salvin, a spokesman for the mission, said a Georgian soldier and a military working dog were also wounded in the attack.

The Afghan civilians were evacuated to a local hospital and their condition is unknown, the statement said

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/north-korea-us-china/539364/

Can North Korea Drag the U.S. and China Into War?

History offers clues about the likely course of a dangerous dynamic in east Asia.

GRAHAM ALLISON 10:41 AM ET

Amid the exchange of threats between North Korea and the United States, ongoing North Korean nuclear and missile tests, and U.S. talk of “all options,” there is growing concern about the real possibility of war with North Korea. What many have not yet reckoned with is an even darker specter. Could events now cascading on the Korean Peninsula drag the U.S. and China into a great-power war?

The good news is that no one in a position of responsibility in either the U.S. or Chinese government wants a military conflict. Everyone knows that war between the world’s two largest economies would be catastrophic. This leads many observers to conclude that war between the U.S. and China is inconceivable.

But when we say that something is inconceivable, we should remind ourselves that this is a claim about what we can conceive—not about what is possible in the world. To stretch our imaginations, we need look no further than history.

While history never repeats itself, as Mark Twain observed, it does sometimes rhyme. So we should ask: What past events resemble the current predicament posed by North Korea’s nuclear advance, and how can they provide perspective on what we are now seeing—or even clues to what may happen?

History offers many examples of smaller third parties dragging larger powers into war. This risk is particularly acute in cases where a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides observed this dangerous dynamic more than 2,400 years ago when describing the causes of the war between a rising Athens and a ruling Sparta. This problem—Thucydides’s Trap—creates a special vulnerability for the primary competitors. Actions by third parties that would otherwise be inconsequential or readily managed can trigger cascades of reactions that end in wars no one wanted. In classical Greece, Corinth and Corcyra were the culprits; in 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassination of the archduke; and potentially North Korea’s nuclear quest today. Thucydides’s insight applies not only to a change in the overall balance of power, but also to shifts in a decisive dimension of military power.

Among the precedents that can illuminate risks these dynamics create in the ongoing North Korean crisis, three stand out: Korea 1950, World War I, and the recurring dilemma posed as an adversary approaches the nuclear threshold.


In discussion with a group of Chinese military officers in Beijing in June, I asked whether North Korea’s Kim Jong Un could drag China and the U.S. into war. One bright young PLA colonel responded: absolutely not. I then asked whether this had ever happened before. He thought not—but then several of his colleagues reminded him of what happened in 1950.

In that case, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, launched a surprise attack on South Korea. His troops drove down the Korean Peninsula to the point that they were on the verge of reunifying the country. At the last minute, the U.S. came to South Korea’s rescue. An American division under the command of General Douglas MacArthur pushed North Korean troops back up the peninsula. MacArthur’s troops crossed the 38th parallel (which had been the dividing line between the North and South at the end of World War II) and were rapidly approaching the Yalu River that marks the border between Korea and China. But then, to MacArthur’s amazement, China attacked. A peasant army beat American troops back down the roads that they had come up, back down to the 38th parallel, where the U.S. was forced to settle for an armistice.

When the war ended, more than 50,000 Americans, several hundred thousand Chinese, and millions of Koreans had perished.

As my Chinese interlocutors noted, that was less than a year after Mao had won China’s long, bloody civil war. At that point, China’s GDP was less than 1/50th that of the U.S. And the U.S. was the world’s sole nuclear superpower, who had just five years earlier dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan’s surrender in World War II. Today, China’s economy has already overtaken America’s in size, and China has nuclear weapons of its own. The proposition that China will not tolerate a unified Korea that is a U.S. military ally is, from the Chinese perspective, a simple settled fact.

While U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in June emphasized that any war in Korea will be “catastrophic,” he also confidently stated in August that war with North Korea would mean “the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” But what Mattis did not address—and what no member of Congress has asked him to address—is: What about China?

The U.S. sees China’s reluctance to rein in its troublesome ally, and its attempt to squeeze South Korea over its deployment of missile defense systems as seriously as it is squeezing North Korea, as evidence of a China that is trying to use the crisis to push the U.S. out of its neighborhood.

For China, American actions in dealing with North Korea are part of a larger mosaic in which the U.S. is seeking to contain the natural growth of Chinese power; to persuade South Korea and Japan to deploy missile defenses—including THAAD and Aegis systems—to erode China’s nuclear deterrent threat against the U.S.; and to enlarge the U.S. alliance system to include others, even India, in a strategy the U.S. calls “hedging” against China—which is operationally indistinguishable from containment.

And no one should forget that U.S. allies also have deep national interests at stake in this crisis. This multiplies the number of third parties that could pull the U.S. and China into war, just as Britain and Germany were drawn by smaller powers in to what became World War I.


For South Korea, the priority in this drama is to avoid war in its immediate neighborhood. As South Korean President Moon Jae In said recently: “I can confidently say there will not be a war again on the Korean Peninsula.”

Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s agenda in dealing with developments in North Korea focuses on two overriding objectives. First, he opposes any U.S. action that could trigger a North Korean attack on Japan, especially by a missile carrying a nuclear warhead. Second, he is using the heightened sense of risk among Japan’s citizens to advance his deep commitment to revise the pacifist constitution the U.S. imposed on Japan after World War II, and to rebuild a military to levels commensurate with Japan’s position as the third largest economy in the world.

With so many competing perspectives in this multi-party odyssey, risks that one or more of the parties misunderstand what the others are doing increase exponentially.

World War I offers the classic analogy. How could the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand have provided the spark for a conflagration that ended in such devastation it required historians to create an entirely new category: World War? A century after that event, historians are still wrestling with that question.

The two centennial books that do the most to advance this debate are Chris Clark’s The Sleepwalkers and Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace. Both note the deeper forces driving events in the decade running up to 1914, including in particular a rising Germany that challenged Britain’s rule. But both also emphasize the contingent choices leaders made—without fully seeing the consequences their actions would bring.

At the end of the “Great War,” what had happened to every one of the principal actors and his primary objectives? All of them had lost what they cared about most: the Austro-Hungarian emperor ousted and his empire dissolved; the Russian czar, who had attempted to support fellow Slavs in Serbia, overthrown by the Bolsheviks; the German kaiser, who had supported his only ally in Vienna, dismissed; France bled for an entire generation never to recover as a great power; Britain shorn of its treasure and youth, a nation that for a century had been the world’s creditor turned into a debtor on a path to slow decline. Had they been given a chance for a do-over, none of the leaders of the major states in 1914 would have made the choices he did. But they did, and war between great powers happened.

Similar tensions and fears to those that drove Britain and Germany along the road to World War I also emerge when an adversary approaches a decisive threshold in military power. Since the advent of atomic weaponry in 1945, there have been seven cases in which a state stood on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons that would pose a genuine existential threat to its adversary. In each case, its nuclear-armed competitor seriously considered a military attack to prevent that happening. In late 1949, after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic device, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff urged President Truman to authorize a strike to disarm Moscow. As China approached the nuclear tipping point in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union planned to attack Beijing and even consulted the U.S. about the option. As India approached the threshold, China also considered military strikes; as Pakistan did so, India considered striking; and now, as North Korea continues its weapons development, the U.S. is publicly invoking the military option. In all of these cases, as a government weighed the potential consequences of attack versus living with a nuclear-armed adversary, it chose the latter.

Only one state executed military plans to prevent an adversary from getting nuclear weapons: Israel. In 1981, it destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak before it could produce plutonium. In 2007, it destroyed a nuclear reactor North Korea had sold to Syria, one that would by now have produced enough plutonium for several nuclear weapons. In neither of these cases, however, had Israel’s adversary yet acquired nuclear weapons, and in both cases it had only one target to destroy. In contrast, North Korea already has by one estimate up to 60 nuclear weapons today, and in the words of former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak, destroying all of North Korea’s hidden nuclear facilities could require a “house-to-house search.”

What insights or clues can we glean from these cases for dealing with the North Korean crisis today? As the most influential modern practitioner of applied history, Henry Kissinger, has cautioned, “History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes.” Instead, it can “illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations.” The intellectual challenge for “each generation is to discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”

Video: How North Korea Became a Crisis

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GRAHAM ALLISON is a former director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans. He is the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...stallations-in-iraqs-south-idUSKCN1BM1BJ?il=0

#WORLD NEWS
SEPTEMBER 11, 2017 / 4:42 AM / UPDATED 10 HOURS AGO

Tribal clashes, political void threaten oil installations in Iraq's south

Aref Mohammed, Ahmed Rasheed
5 MIN READ

BASRA/BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - Worsening clashes among tribes and a political void is threatening security at oil installations in Iraq’s main southern oil producing region, officials and security sources said.

Iraq has concentrated security forces in the north and west of the OPEC oil producer in the biggest campaign since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to retake territory lost to the Sunni extremist group Islamic State in 2014.

That has created a void in the south, home to Iraq’s biggest oilfields, where fighting between rival Shi‘ite Muslim tribes over farmland, state construction contracts and land ownership has worsened in the past few weeks.

The surge in violence risks undermining government plans to lure new investment to the oil and gas sector it needs to revive an economy hit by a surge in security spending and destruction by Islamic State.

Stability in Basra, the main southern city at the edge of the Gulf, is of vital importance as a hub for oil exports accounting for over 95 percent of government revenues.

Officials said tribal clashes had not affected oil output yet. But this could change as recent fighting with mortars and machine guns had come close to the key West Qurna oil phase 1, West Qurna phase 2 and Majnoon oilfields north of Basra city.

“Tribal feuds have been exacerbating recently and such a negative development could threaten the operations of the foreign energy companies,” said Ali Shaddad, head of the oil and gas committee in Basra’s provincial council.

State-run South Oil Co. (SOC) said the violence had started scaring oil workers and foreign contractors who in some cases had refused to move drilling rigs over security concerns.

“Tribal fighting near oilfields sites is definitely affecting the energy operations and sending a negative message to foreign oil firms,” Abdullah al-Faris, a media manager at SOC, said.

Iraq’s government has dispatched thousands of soldiers and policemen into Basra which had been like the rest of the mainly Shi‘ite south relatively peaceful since 2003.

Security force have tried to disarm tribesmen, which had seized large caches of light and heavy weapons from Saddam Hussein’s army in the chaos following the 2003 invasion.

But security officials said forces were stretched as troops were preparing another offensive against Islamic State, or Daesh, in the north to retake Hawija town.

Strategically located east of the road from Baghdad to Mosul and near the Kurdish-held oil region of Kirkuk, Hawija fell to Islamic State in 2014.

“We need larger forces to control rural areas and restrain lawless tribes in the south,” said Army Lieutenant Colonel Salah Kareem who serves in a brigade that was based in Basra before being moved to Mosul.

“This is a difficult job for now as most troops are busy with fighting Daesh,” he said.

TOP OFFICIALS QUIT

The security challenges have been worsened by a political void after top local officials quit over graft charges.

Basra’s governor Majid al-Nasrawi stepped down last month and left for Iran after Iraq’s anti-corruption body began investigating graft allegations against him.

In July the head of the provincial council, Sabah al-Bazoni, was arrested and sacked after the watchdog accused him of taking bribes and misuse of power.

Graft has been a major concern in Iraq but analysts say both men had also been caught in a political battle as parties from the country’s Shi‘ite majority were gearing up for national elections in April 2018. Basra is seen as the ultimate prize given its oil wealth and investment potential.

Bazoni, who belongs to former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition, had been at odds with Nasrawi from the Shi‘ite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq over managing the province and distributing contracts for basic services and rebuilding infrastructure in Basra.

Disagreements over how to award state contracts had escalated with each party publishing files alleging corruption against the other rivals, two Basra politicians said on condition of anonymity.

“For some political parties having the upper hand in Basra is a key objective to expand their power,” said Baghdad-based analyst Jasim al-Bahadli, an expert on Shi‘ite armed groups.

“Basra is forming the triangle of money, power and influence,” he said.

Two officials working with foreign oil companies operating in the south said the departure of top officials raised worries that the tribal clashes could get worse.

“We need to see security challenges addressed to avoid working in a difficult operating environment,” said one official working at a foreign oil firm in Basra, asking not to be named.

Editing by Ulf Laessing and Susan Thomas

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...ent-bid-to-silence-dissent-idUSKCN1BL129?il=0

#WORLD NEWS
SEPTEMBER 10, 2017 / 3:36 PM / UPDATED 3 HOURS AGO

Saudi clerics detained in apparent bid to silence dissent

Reuters Staff
6 MIN READ
(Reuters) - Several prominent Saudi clerics have been detained in an apparent crackdown on potential opponents of the conservative kingdom’s absolute rulers amid widespread speculation that King Salman intends to abdicate in favor of his son.

Saudi sources told Reuters that Salman al-Awdah, Awad al-Qarni and Ali al-Omary were detained over the weekend. Officials could not be reached or declined to comment.

All three are outside the state-backed clerical establishment but have large online followings. They have previously criticised the government but more recently kept silent or failed to publicly back Saudi policies, including the rift with Qatar over supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Awdah was imprisoned from 1994-99 for agitating for political change and leadership of the Brotherhood-inspired Sahwa (Awakening) movement. He later called for democracy and tolerance during the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011.

Saudi officials have dismissed reports that the king may soon pass the throne to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who already dominates economic, diplomatic and domestic policy.

But the al-Saud family has always regarded Islamist groups as the biggest internal threat to its rule over a country in which appeals to religious sentiment cannot be lightly dismissed and an al Qaeda campaign a decade ago killed hundreds. In the 1990s, the Sahwa demanded political reforms that would have weakened the ruling family.

“Mohammed bin Salman is very likely to be the next king but any dissenting voices that could challenge this succession could also be considered destabilizing from the regime perspective,” said Jean-Marc Rickli, head of global risk at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

“You put that in the context of the Qatar rift and it is very difficult right now in the Gulf to have an opinion that is not considered biased or adversarial because the situation is so polarized on all sides.”

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and transport links with Qatar in June over its alleged support for Islamist militants, a charge Doha denies.

‘HYPERSENSITIVE’

In the past two years, Crown Prince Mohammed has launched radical reforms to foster economic diversity and cultural openness, testing the kingdom’s traditions of incremental change and rule by consensus.

Resistance has not been met kindly, with the authorities increasingly silencing independent actors, said Stephane Lacroix, a scholar of Islam in Saudi Arabia.

“It’s a much broader attempt to crush Islamists regardless of whether they act in opposition or not,” he said. “This (the arrests) would be [Prince Mohammed] and the regime trying to impose a much stricter political order.”

The crackdown is not limited to Islamists. Civil liberties monitors say freedom of expression is increasingly constrained in Gulf Arab states including Saudi Arabia.

“There is a general climate of being hypersensitive and almost paranoid,” said Madawi al-Rasheed, visiting professor at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics. “There is no room for any kind of dissent at the moment.”

The government toughened its stance following the Arab Spring after it averted unrest by increasing salaries and other state spending but the Brotherhood gained power elsewhere in the region.

The group represents an ideological threat to Riyadh’s dynastic system of rule, and its use of oaths of allegiance and secret meetings are anathema to the Saudis.

It was listed by Riyadh as a terrorist organization in 2014 and diplomats and analysts say there is little prospect that would change.

Taking power in January 2015, King Salman initially appeared willing to allow the Brotherhood a role outside politics, for example by not stopping affiliated preachers such as Awdah from speaking publicly on religious or social issues.

That appears to have changed in recent months, as a shift in the official discourse targeted Islamists and arrests increased, said Lacroix.

“What happened a couple of days ago is an acceleration of the process,” he said, although it is unclear what specifically prompted the detentions.

Awdah tweeted on Friday welcoming a report that suggested the row between Qatar and other Arab countries may be resolved.

“May God harmonize their hearts for the good of their people,” he wrote after a telephone call between Crown Prince Mohammed and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

STANDING IN THE MIDDLE

Awdah comes from Buraidah, heartland of the kingdom’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam.

Criticism of the ruling family in the 1990s earned him praise from Osama bin Laden, whom he eventually denounced. His Sahwa movement was later undermined by a mixture of repression and co-optation.

Some clerics, however, maintained large followings through YouTube sermons. Awdah has 14 million Twitter followers.

He supported resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq as “jihad”, or holy war, but then emerged as an ally in the government’s campaign against violent jihadists.

In 2011, Awdah called for elections and separation of powers, principles antithetical to strict Islamist ideology. He has since been largely quiet on issues of domestic reform.

Qarni, who was detained at home in Abha in Saudi Arabia’s south, had also expressed support for reconciliation with Qatar, hopes for which were quickly dashed when Saudi Arabia ended any dialogue with Qatar, accusing it of “distorting facts”.

“It seems today in Saudi Arabia that not supporting openly and enthusiastically what is happening against Qatar basically makes you an agent of Qatar,” said Lacroix.

“People who don’t take a stance stand in the middle, and there’s no middle ground for the Saudis now.”

Editing by Catherine Evans

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.realcleardefense.com/ar...ail&utm_term=0_694f73a8dc-b1925ac2a5-81835773

Understanding 9/11 and the Terrorist Threat Today

By John Amble
September 11, 2017

Sixteen anniversaries of 9/11 have now come. Sixteen. For many reasons, mostly obvious, we place the attacks of that day in a category with Pearl Harbor: both were national tragedies, both inflicted unprecedented death tolls on American soil, both were criticized as intelligence failures, and both launched America into war. Of course, for most Americans, December 7 passes each year with maybe a general awareness, perhaps a moment of acknowledgement when FDR’s words—“a day that will live in infamy”—work their way into our consciousness.

But on each anniversary of 9/11, a host of TV networks still show documentaries about the attacks and their aftermath. It is still occasion for a multitude of think pieces to emerge into the sunlight—some new and important, others less so. Of course, sixteen anniversaries are a lot fewer than seventy-five. Yet, it’s hard not to wonder whether on December 7, 1957, the sixteen-year anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks was marked as prominently as that of 9/11 is today. I don’t expect that it was.

Of course, by 1957, the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan had been formally over for a number of years, we were at peace with Japan, and America had moved on to other dominant security challenges. We had managed our way through the Berlin Blockade, we had already fought a new war in the region, in Korea, we had flexed our muscle independently during the Suez Crisis, and the Cold War had taken its position as the paradigm through which we viewed US security.

But sixteen years on from the 9/11 attacks, our men and women in uniform are still in the country where the attacks were planned, we’re still trying to figure out the right mix of inputs to get an optimal—or even acceptable—strategic output there, and we’re struggling to confront the ideology that underwrote those attacks, around the world and at home.

And if those facts are in part why we still feel this solemn anniversary so strongly, why we mark it like we do—why that day really doesn’t feel very long ago—then perhaps a worthy addition to the many articles that will be published today would be one that seeks to understand this event, the enduring threat, and our ongoing commitment to countering it.

To that end, the following five books are valuable tools with which to think about 9/11, its causes, its aftermath, and the threat we face today. The list is, of course, not comprehensive. But each has played a role in illuminating these issues to me, and I’m confident that they will for others, too.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

That this book is inarguably the most widely known background of al-Qaeda and the genesis of the attacks against New York and Washington is for good reason. There are many others that tackle the task of delivering a biography of the organization, but Wright’s 2007 work remains among the best. Well researched and accessibly written, if one book can not only tell al-Qaeda’s story but also provide a clear lens through which to understand the group, this Pulitzer Prize winner is it.

Eli Berman, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism

This book’s central thesis seeks to explain how religiously oriented terrorist groups function. But its greatest value, in the context of this list, is its explanation of how the Taliban took control of an Afghanistan that had been riven by civil war. With Afghans faced by an oppressive mix of government corruption and violent warlord opportunism, something as simple as making the country’s most important highway safe for people to travel is a powerful success with which to earn popular support. Re-reading this book again recently, I couldn’t help but contrast our own efforts in the country, which appear by comparison both often unsuccessful and perhaps misdirected.

Robert R. Fowler, A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al-Qaeda

Fowler was a Canadian diplomat working as a representative of the United Nations secretary-general in Niger when, in 2008, he was kidnapped by members of the al-Qaeda organization in the region. Released four months later, this memoir of his time in captivity sheds fascinating light on two aspects of the global jihadist movement, such as it is. First, the role of a charismatic leader who inspires followers to join a violent cause is made manifest in the shadowy and elusive form of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, commander of the forces that captured Fowler. Second, the relationship between Belmokhtar, al-Qaeda senior leadership, and other jihadists operating in the region offers a telling glimpse into the series of schisms that has dramatically reshaped the jihadist milieu in the past sixteen years.

William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State

A number of books about ISIS have been published since it supplanted the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but McCants has given readers one of the best. He explains how the group’s ruthless—and shrewd—strategy propelled it so rapidly into a position of dominance over al-Qaeda and power in Iraq and Syria. It is particularly worth reading now, as the group finds itself on its back foot in the region but still at the core of a threat that has increasingly been brought back to Western streets.

J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam

Berger’s book about homegrown terrorism is not the newest to have been published. It was written in 2009, and while another generation of Americans have taken up arms for ISIS or planned attacks at home, this book offers the most balanced view I have encountered of why they have done so. Berger blends an assessment of radicalization patterns with deep research into a wide range of cases that plays to his strengths as an investigative journalist to produce an excellent work on the nature and the magnitude of the threat posed by homegrown terrorists.

John Amble is the editorial director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is a military intelligence officer in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Follow him on Twitter: @johnamble.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US government.

This article appeared originally at Modern War Institute.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummmm.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.gulf-times.com/story/563509/Blockade-aimed-at-putting-Qatar-under-guardianship

Blockade aimed at putting Qatar under guardianship: FM

September 12 2017 12:35 AM

Agencies/Geneva
*Siege violating international laws and human rights, Sheikh Mohamed tells UN rights council

*Doha reiterates it is ready for talks to end Gulf crisis that has entered the fourth month

HE the Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani has underlined that Qatar's open support for human rights, public opinion and the right of people to self-determination is one of the most important reasons for attempts to impose guardianship on it and to undermine its media.

Addressing the 36th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday, the foreign minister reiterated Qatar's readiness for a dialogue to end the Gulf crisis, within the framework of mutual respect and preservation of the sovereignty of the states. Any results reached should be applicable to all parties, he said.

The minister insisted that "it is no secret that the real motives behind the siege and the severing of diplomatic relations with the State of Qatar were not aimed at fighting terrorism. But rather an attempt to force Qatar into a state of trusteeship to interfere in its foreign policy, to undermine its sovereignty and to interfere in its domestic policy."

Qatar cannot tolerate this situation, he said.

Sheikh Mohamed expressed Qatar's appreciation for the Kuwaiti mediation, led by Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah.

He said Qatar firmly believed in dialogue to resolve the crisis, "despite the depth of the wound in the hearts of the Qatari people, which was caused by the policies of the siege countries" and their policy of spreading lies and fabrications.

Sheikh Mohamed noted Qatar has been subjected to exceptional circumstances and challenges for more than three months as a result of an illegal siege imposed by a number of countries. The blockade clearly violates international human rights laws and conventions, in particular the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations General Assembly resolution, the provisions of international law and the rules governing relations between states.

He pointed out that the present crisis began with the hacking of the website of the Qatar News Agency and spreading false news attributed to His Highness the Emir, followed by malicious media campaigns against Qatar, and false accusations that Qatar funds terrorism.

The closure of the air, sea and land borders was in violation of the provisions of international law and international trade rules, which had a negative impact on the freedom of trade and investment, he said noting that the siege countries had taken many illegal measures that constituted a grave violation of civil, economic and social rights, including prohibiting the entry of Qatari citizens into or passing through their countries, as well as preventing their citizens from traveling to or residing in Qatar.

He added that these measures led to the separation of many families , especially women and children, and the deprivation of many Qatari students of their right to continue their education in universities. "Many other basic rights and freedoms, such as the right to work , the right to own private property and freedom of movement are still ongoing."

Referring to the controversy following a telephone conversation between His Highness the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the foreign minister said his country was taken aback when Saudi Arabia disputed a readout of the "positive" call.

"Unfortunately, we have seen - half an hour later - a retaliation from their side by issuing a statement that what we have issued is a lie," he told reporters on the sidelines of the rights council.

He, however, stressed his country's "readiness for dialogue to end this crisis.

"We are willing to talk to them, we are ready to engage if it is based on principles which are not violating the international law and respect the sovereignty of each country."

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...deal-north-korea-nuclear-crisis/#.WbdaN7KGPIU

North Korean nuclear crisis tests Japan’s mettle, has experts debating how to respond

BY REIJI YOSHIDA AND TOMOHIRO OSAKI
STAFF WRITERS
SEP 11, 2017
ARTICLE HISTORY
PRINT SHARE

Another war on the Korean Peninsula — this time a nuclear one — is beginning to look more possible than ever before, stirring anxiety in Japan and prompting debate over how it should respond.

Amid the crisis, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has maintained close contact with U.S. President Donald Trump, holding teleconferences at an unprecedented rate and fully supporting his threat to use the military option if necessary.

Abe’s full support for Trump has caused concern among Japanese liberals dedicated to the war-renouncing Constitution. But at the same time, few alternatives to backing its security ally the United States have actually been proposed.

The Japan Times recently interviewed three noted Japan-based security experts to get their views on how Tokyo should respond.

While their views and proposals all differ, all emphasized that the crisis should be seen in a broader context, though much of the public’s attention has been drawn to the military threat directly posed by North Korea.

Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior research fellow at the Sasagawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo, pointed out that the North’s recent development of an ICBM has not really increased the direct threat to Japan: Pyongyang has for years deployed dozens of intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can directly hit Japan and may even have mountable nuclear warheads as well.

What is altogether the more alarming aspect of the crisis is that a failure to stop Pyongyang will encourage many other nations and terrorist groups to pursue the same strategy — developing nuclear arms while defying international pressure, Watanabe said.

Allowing North Korea to be a nuclear power “would lower the hurdles for other countries to own nuclear weapons. Many nations would try to acquire nuclear weapons, and some would succeed,” Watanabe said.

“It would mean the collapse of the NPT system,” Watanabe said, referring to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The public appears to be mainly worried that North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities could weaken the U.S. nuclear umbrella protecting Japan.

But the collapse of the NPT system and the spread of atomic weapons to rogue nations and terrorist groups is considered a more scary scenario for Japan and the rest of the world, Watanabe said.

“What Japan should do now is to try to have China, Russia, Europe and Southeast Asian countries understand that” and jointly stop Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, Watanabe said.

In that sense, it would be “suicidal” for Japan to develop and possess nuclear weapons of its own because it would only hasten the demise of the NPT, he said.

Watanabe also pointed out that anti-nuclear sentiment obviously remains strong in Japan in light of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

According to a Japanese-South Korean poll joint conducted in June and July by the Tokyo-based Public Opinion Research Center and the Seoul-based Hankook Research Co., 74.7 percent of 1,000 Japanese respondents said they oppose the idea of Japan possessing nuclear weapons.

In South Korea, however, 67.2 percent of Korean respondents support going nuclear.

Watanabe said openly keeping U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan and sharing control with Washington may be one way for Tokyo to strengthen its nuclear deterrence against Pyongyang.

But it would be extremely difficult for the government to make that decision, given the strong public aversion to atomic weapons, Watanabe said.

Narushige Michishita, professor of international relations at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, has been observing the North Korean crisis in a level-headed manner despite the heated public debates over the dangers facing Japan.

Michishita argues that Pyongyang has no reason to directly attack Japan unless war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula and Japan attempts to support U.S. forces during a second Korean War.

“I myself don’t believe the risks for Japan have increased as is perceived among the public in general,” he said. “The North Koreans won’t regard Japan as an enemy as long as Japan does not help defend South Korea. Rather, they want to normalize their relationship with Japan,” he said.

Michishita agrees with other experts that the situation has become significantly more dangerous for Japan.

Pyongyang’s “lofted” midrange missiles would be even more difficult to intercept at such high speeds, and a hydrogen bomb would be far more destructive than anything seen at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Michishita said.

Having said that, Michishita doesn’t believe nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is likely for now. Instead, North Korea is more likely to keep showcasing its military superiority over archenemy South Korea and even engage in a military clash or two while simultaneously threatening the U.S. and Japan against interfering with its arms programs, Michishita said.

“It is South Korea that is facing the greatest risk now,” he said.

Both Watanabe and Michishita maintain that Abe is taking the right approach by building a close relationship with Trump and fully endorsing his administration’s policies.

“What Abe has achieved is a great success. Now Trump trusts him very much, so it is unlikely the U.S. will take any unilateral action without consulting Abe,” Michishita said.

“That is really good for Japan.”

In the meantime, Kyoji Yanagisawa, a former assistant chief Cabinet secretary, offered a different opinion.

The former Defense Ministry official was one of the most outspoken opponents of Abe’s successful effort to reinterpret, rather than amend, the Constitution and enact security laws in 2015 that gave the Self-Defense Forces greater legal leeway to support the U.S. military.

Under Article 9 of the Constitution, Japan’s use of force is strictly limited to self-defense. But under Abe’s reinterpretation and the new security laws, Abe claims the right to collective self-defense can be used to support the U.S. if Japan’s “survival” is deemed at stake.

The U.N. right allows Japan to attack a third country that is attacking an ally — presumably the U.S. in Japan’s case — even if Japan itself is not under attack.

“Without the security laws, Japan would be able to draw a line to distance itself from any war involving America. But now it can’t, which has increased the danger” to Japan, Yanagisawa said.

At the same time, Yanagisawa believes Japan has already exhausted its diplomatic options in dealing with the North Korea crisis.

It is only the U.S. that can negotiate with North Korea because Pyongyang is developing nuclear weapons out of fear that the regime of leader Kim Jong Un could eventually be ousted by Washington, Yanagisawa said.

“Whether the nuclear weapons program can be stopped or not all hinges on the U.S.-North Korea relationship,” Yanagisawa said.

“Japan is not a player. There is nothing Japan can do now,” he argued.

Watanabe of the Sasagawa Peace Foundation, however, would disagree.

He argued it is Abe who has actively involved the U.S. in the North Korean crisis.

“After Trump took power, the U.S. has followed initiatives pushed by Japan,” Watanabe said, adding that this differs significantly from the practices of past Japan-U.S. relationships.

This is partly because Trump is still unable to find enough senior government officials who can formulate key policies, Watanabe said.

“Now Trump looks willing to listen to what Abe says,” he said. “I don’t think Abe is simply trying to get into line with Trump.”

--

--

7 Comments
The Japan Times Online

pcman • 16 minutes ago
Japan has to maintain two defensive postures. One is an independent capability if North Korea threatens Japan's economic, military or political status separate from the US and South Korea. Second is a capability to support a Korean conflict that will involve US forces. In the first, Japan needs a deterrent capability to prevent North Korean aggression against Japan. That should be an overwhelming military force that could destroy North Korea if Japan is attacked. The second should be mainly defensive with air-to-air, surface -to-air and surface and sub sea power to cover US and Japanese operations supporting a Korean conflict.

•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Paul Antonio • 15 hours ago
The awful truth is that South Korea and Japan could hold a weapon that would be a credible threat: a kinetic weapon. They could launch the payload via satellite, and have it in geostationary orbit over the DPRK. These warheads would be non-detonating, but wouldn't need to be. The kinetic damage of any warhead falling from orbit to the ground would be devastating.
The issue here, as the Japanese advisors suggest is if North Korea is allowed to develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal the threshold of other nations/state actors to then attain the same is lowered.

Ronsoppinion • 18 hours ago
There are only two ways Japan can deal with North Korea, the first is a missile defense system like THAAD, the second is although Japan is covered by the United States umbrella have your own Nuclear weapons, Japan is in a dangerous area, China and NK have Nuclear Weapons, Iran would like them, Pakistan and India have them, it seems to me in the future most countries in the area will be Nuclear with all it's dangers.

•Reply•Share ›

Canaan • a day ago
"Allowing North Korea to be a nuclear power “would lower the hurdles for other countries to own nuclear weapons."

Not unless they are also backed by Chinese superpower. The only reason the U.S. didn't pre-empt NK's nukes with force decades ago was that to do so meant war with China

Inside Iran, by contrast, there was certainly no confidence that Israel or the U.S. would not use force ultimately. But there is no analogue to China in the Iran equation.

•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Christina Tsuchida • a day ago
Does not the proximity of So. Korea to the No. make nuke war impossible between those nations? Japan is farther away, but not so far as to make a nuke bomb 10 times the size of Hiroshima's bomb safe for No. Korea--or is it? Indeed, nuking even just US forces in Japan--would that not create a world-wide fall-out disaster? Is not the phrase "nuclear umbrella" falsely giving an image of protection? There is no "prevention" in preparing a counterattack because criminal states dream they will be able to strike first with the element of surprise, thus averting any military response. Scientists have long told us of the "nuclear winter" due to follow any nuke war. Are No. Korean scientists kept in ignorance of this consequence? Their anonymity has not been protected with secrecy--they all appeared on NHK last night.

•Reply•Share ›
−
Avatar
DutchCynic • a day ago
The threat of North Korean nuclear capability IMHO lies in the potential that it will seek out groups elsewhere in the world willing to attack the US (or Japan for that matter) with a nuclear terrorist attack. The regime is already know for its ties to groups such as Hezbollah etc. Fanatical Islam would relish at the opportunity to detonate a nuclear device in place such as Rome in its quest to isolate further the Islamic world from the West.
North-Korea could in that case deny involvement and further play out China against the US. The convergence of deep hatred against the Western (Capitalist) way of life by radical islamist and "communists" makes such a scenario plausible.

•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Ronsoppinion DutchCynic • 18 hours ago
I rather think any terrorists exploding a device in Europe or the United States,the Military would look at NK , Iran, or others, and would receive the appropriate response, the CIA know who is looking to buy Nuclear Devices.

•Reply•Share ›

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thefederalist.com/2017/09/11/talk-little-nukes-cover-lacking-foreign-policy-strategy/

NATIONAL SECURITY

Talk About ‘Little Nukes’ Is Cover For Lacking A Foreign Policy Strategy

This is a bad idea whose time has already come and gone, and the nuclear warriors’ ideas are just as bad now as they were 15 or 20 years ago.

By Tom Nichols
SEPTEMBER 11, 2017

Every American president since Ronald Reagan has left office with fewer nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and reduced the centrality of nuclear arms in American defense planning. But advocates of nuclear warfighting might have new reason to be optimistic that policy will swing back their way under President Trump.

According to a report in Politico, the Trump administration is considering returning to an idea defeated years ago in Congress, the construction of “mini-nukes” that could take out buried or heavily shielded facilities without doing a lot of damage to surrounding areas or populations.

Here we go again. This is a bad idea whose time has already come and gone, but with Trump in office, some of the nuclear warriors who have been waiting to put a stamp on U.S. strategy have quietly returned to the bureaucracy, and their ideas are just as bad now as they were 15 or 20 years ago.

The Pointless Nuclear Posture Review
The nuclear door is opening in the coming year because it’s time for another round of the pointless exercise known as the “Nuclear Posture Review” (or NPR), a full examination of the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security. It’s not that doing such reviews is inherently a bad idea, but if the last three—done in 1994, 2002, and 2010—are any indication, the result will be affirming the nuclear conventional wisdom along with whatever bumper sticker is important to the administration at the time.

In 1994, it was “hedging.” That is, the NPR conducted under Bill Clinton determined that we were doing everything we were supposed to do, but could do it a bit smaller, while hedging against any current or future threats. What was supposed to be a no-assumptions, top-to-bottom review ended up as a ringing endorsement of the nuclear status quo, a kind of Mini-Me of our Cold War strategy.

In 2002, the Bush 43 administration classified important parts of the NPR but let it slip anyway that the new wrinkle was to draw up plans for nuclear use against a group of smaller states—Iran, North Korea, Syria, and some other miscreants—while vowing to plunge tons of money into a “responsive infrastructure,” another way of saying that future threats would be dealt with by flooding Virginia’s 703 area code with consulting contracts.

The 2002 NPR was a flop, even among the people who were supposed to understand it. After a series of mishaps (including a B-52 crew accidentally flying nuclear weapons across the United States without knowing it), a blue-ribbon panel in 2008 led by former defense secretary James Schlesinger concluded that even the Air Force wasn’t clear about what nuclear weapons were supposed to do or why we had them. In the end, the Bush 43 NPR—which was mostly an artifact of 9/11—pretty much disappeared without trace, as it should have.

The 2010 NPR was much like its 1994 counterpart, in which all options were kept open while reaffirming Barack Obama’s commitment to a nuclear-free world. It kept the basic structure of our nuclear deterrent while wishcasting for a world in which we didn’t need nuclear weapons. From a “purely strategic point of view,” as political scientist Stephen Walt noted at the time, the 2010 NPR and its carefully hedged promises were “largely meaningless.”

This time, Trump has issued an order that begins: “To pursue peace through strength, it shall be the policy of the United States to rebuild the U.S. Armed Forces,” then calls for a United States nuclear deterrent that is “modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.” As opposed, apparently, to our current antique, fragile, rigid, delicate, unready deterrent.

It’s Not Just a Waste of Money, But Dangerous
What all this government-speak really means is: spend a lot of money on building a new generation of smaller nuclear weapons, and pay a lot of contractors to explain to everyone how to use them. This would all be bad enough, except that creating a more varied fleet of smaller and more usable nuclear weapons is itself a dangerous idea.

During the Cold War, the United States maintained a strange menagerie of nuclear forces, based on the assumption that we were outnumbered and outgunned by the Soviets and the Chinese, and might need to escalate to nuclear weapons because we’d be losing on the battlefield. What’s more, we wanted Moscow to know that we’d have no choice, and thus the Soviet leaders would be deterred from starting a war of aggression that would run a massive risk of going nuclear, and eventually destroying both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This was a risky strategy borne of existential necessity. The current drive to create smaller nuclear weapons then concoct a menu of options for using them, however, is a needless foray into discretionary first use, in the name of giving the president “flexibility” when in reality it would just add to the temptation to use weapons that should be ruled out immediately for any reason less than the survival of the United States.

This renewed obsession with using nuclear arms springs from two sources. One is purely a function of the military-industrial complex: there are a lot of companies and institutions that have been itching to see nukes become relevant again, and thus reopen a flow of contracts and funding that dried up after the Soviet collapse.

Nuclear Weapons Are Not Magical
The second issue, however, is more reasonable and pressing. U.S. strategists are understandably frustrated at the inability to translate America’s gigantic military power into a reliable deterrent against the shenanigans of Vladimir Putin in Europe, the risk-taking lunacy of the weird dumpling running North Korea, or the shrewd game of catch-me-if-you-can played for the last few decades by the Iranians. Military planners want to be able to offer the president a reliable way to squash an incipient threat, particularly from a nuclear program, quickly and completely. Nothing, the reasoning goes, can do the job like a nuclear weapon.


This belief in the magical properties of nuclear arms, however, is just so much wishful thinking. A small nuclear weapon is not going to deter Putin from seizing a chunk of the Baltics, no more than it will stop Kim Jong Un from destroying Seoul or Tokyo before we dispatch him to his maker. And the Iranians know—as do we—that no American president is going to throw a nuclear weapon, no matter how small, into the tinderbox of the Middle East.

These realities highlight the bigger problem with nuclear strategy that has plagued American thinking since the Cold War: too many strategic debates, when stymied, default to nuclear force as a crutch, a kind of dummy variable that balances difficult equations without making hard or costly choices. Is it expensive to keep a large force in Europe or Korea? No worries, we’ll cover the gap with nukes. Not enough air power to destroy an Iranian program if it rears its head? Nukes.

This is not strategy; it is a placeholder for strategy. If America is serious about deterring smaller powers and defending our allies in Europe and Asia, we need to increase the size of our conventional forces rather than tinkering with new kinds of nuclear forces. This would be expensive and take time, but it would be a far more reliable path than trying to buy a shortcut to deterrence with tiny nukes and Strangelove-like ideas about using them.

Whether all this gets past Defense Secretary James Mattis or survives into the new NPR remains to be seen. Unfortunately, the advocates for nuclear use finally have the one piece of the puzzle they needed: an administration led by a president who does not seem to understand nuclear weapons, and who is willing to let tough talk about the world’s most dangerous weapon take the place of a responsible strategy.

-

Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. Views expressed here are his own. Follow him on Twitter, @RadioFreeTom.

------

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/09/trump-reviews-mini-nuke-242513

DEFENSE

Trump review leans toward proposing mini-nuke

It would be a major reversal from the Obama administration, which sought to limit reliance on nuclear arms.

By BRYAN BENDER 09/09/2017 07:33 AM EDT Updated 09/09/2017 08:51 PM EDT
Comments 121

The Trump administration is considering proposing smaller, more tactical nuclear weapons that would cause less damage than traditional thermonuclear bombs — a move that would give military commanders more options but could also make the use of atomic arms more likely.

A high-level panel created by President Donald Trump to evaluate the nuclear arsenal is reviewing various options for adding a more modern "low-yield" bomb, according to sources involved in the review, to further deter Russia, North Korea or other potential nuclear adversaries.

Approval of such weapons — whether designed to be delivered by missile, aircraft or special forces — would mark a major reversal from the Obama administration, which sought to limit reliance on nuclear arms and prohibited any new weapons or military capabilities. And critics say it would only make the actual use of atomic arms more likely.

"This capability is very warranted," said one government official familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to speak publicly about the yearlong Nuclear Posture Review, which Trump established by executive order his first week in office.

"The [nuclear review] has to credibly ask the military what they need to deter enemies," added another official who supports such a proposal, particularly to confront Russia, which has raised the prominence of tactical nuclear weapons in its battle plans in recent years, including as a first-strike weapon. "Are [current weapons] going to be useful in all the scenarios we see?"

The idea of introducing a smaller-scale warhead to serve a more limited purpose than an all-out nuclear Armageddon is not new — and the U.S. government still retains some Cold War-era weapons that fit the category, including several that that can be "dialed down" to a smaller blast.

Yet new support for adding a more modern version is likely to set off a fierce debate in Congress, which would ultimately have to fund it, and raises questions about whether it would require a resumption of explosive nuclear tests after a 25-year moratorium and how other nuclear powers might respond. The Senate is expected to debate the issue of new nuclear options next week when it takes up the National Defense Authorization Act.

The push is also almost sure to reignite concerns on the part of some lawmakers who say they already don’t trust Trump with the nuclear codes and believe he has dangerously elevated their prominence in U.S. national security by publicly dismissing arms control treaties and talking opening about unleashing "fire and fury" on North Korea.

"If the U.S. moves now to develop a new nuclear weapon, it will send exactly the wrong signal at a time when international efforts to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons are under severe challenge," said Steven Andreasen, a State Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who served as the director of arms control on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. "If the world's greatest conventional and nuclear military power decides it cannot defend itself without new nuclear weapons, we will undermine our ability to prevent other nations from developing or enhancing their own nuclear capabilities and we will further deepen the divisions between the U.S. and other responsible countries."

The details of what is being considered are classified, and a National Security Council spokeswoman said "it is too early to discuss" the panel's deliberations, which are expected to wrap up by the end of the year.

But the review — which is led by the Pentagon and supported by the Department of Energy, which maintains the nation's nuclear warheads — is undertaking a broad reassessment of the nation's nuclear requirements — including its triad of land-based, sea-based and air-launched weapons.

The reassessment, the first of its kind since the one completed for President Barack Obama in 2010, is intended "to ensure that the United States' nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies," Trump directed.

The United States has long experience with lower-yield nuclear devices, or those on the lower range of kilotons. For example, the bombs the United States dropped on Japan in World War II were in the 15- to 20-kiloton range, while most modern nuclear weapons, like the W88 warhead that is mounted on submarine-launched missiles, are reportedly as large as 475 kilotons. The device tested by North Korea earlier this week was reportedly 140 kilotons.

So-called mini-nukes were a prominent element of the American arsenal during the early decades of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union's conventional military capabilities far outstripped those of the United States and military commanders relied on battlefield nuclear weapons to make up for the vulnerability.

In the early 1950s, the Pentagon developed a nuclear artillery rocket known as the "Honest John" that was deployed to Europe as a means of deterring a massive Russian invasion. The Pentagon later introduced the so-called Davy Crockett, a bazooka with a nuclear munition in the range of 10 to 20 tons.

"We even had atomic demolition munitions," said Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's top weapons tester in the 1990s, who also managed nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy. "They were made small enough so that U.S. Army soldiers could carry them in a backpack. It was a very heavy backpack. You wouldn’t want to carry them very far."

Paul Ryan, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are pictured. | AP
WHITE HOUSE
Trump gets cozy with Democrats, and Republicans say ‘I told you so’
By ELIANA JOHNSON, BURGESS EVERETT and HEATHER CAYGLE

More recently, during the administration of George W. Bush, the Pentagon sought to modify one of its current warheads — the B61 — so it could be tailored to strike smaller targets such as underground bunkers, like the type used by North Korea and Iran to conceal illicit weapons programs. The so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator was intended to rely on a modified version of the B61, a nuclear bomb dropped from aircraft. But that effort was nixed by Congress.

The nuclear review now reviving the issue is taking some of its cues from a relatively obscure Pentagon study that was published in December, at the tail end of the Obama administration, the officials with knowledge of the process said.

That report by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, set off what one Pentagon official called a "dust-up" when it urged the military to consider "a more flexible nuclear enterprise that could produce, if needed, a rapid, tailored nuclear options for limited use should existing non-nuclear or nuclear options prove insufficient."


But the finding "emerged from a serious rethinking about how future regional conflicts involving the United States and its allies could play out," John Harvey, who served as adviser to the secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical and biological programs between 2009 and 2013, recounted at a Capitol Hill event in June.

"There is increasing concern that, in a conventional conflict, an adversary could employ very limited nuclear use as part of a strategy to maximize gains or minimize losses," he explained. Some call this an "'escalate to win' strategy."

Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at an appearance before a defense industry group last month, described the rationale this way: "If the only options we have now are to go with high-yield weapons that create a level of indiscriminate killing that the president can't accept, we haven't provided him with an option."

But critics question the logic of responding to Russian moves in kind.

"[Vladimir] Putin's doctrine and some of his statements and those of his military officers are reckless," said Andrew Weber, who served as assistant secretary of Defense responsible for nuclear policy in the Obama administration. "Does that mean we should ape and mimic his reckless doctrine?"

"The premise that our deterrent is not credible because we don't have enough smaller options — or smaller nuclear weapons — is false," he added in an interview. "We do have them."

For example, he cited the B61, which recently underwent a refurbishment and can be as powerful as less than a kiloton up to 340 kilotons, and the W80, which is fitted to an air-launched cruise missile that can deliver a nuclear blast as low as five kilotons or as high as 80, according to public data.

A new, more modern version of a low-yield nuke, he added, would "increase reliance on nuclear weapons. It is an old Cold War idea."

Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that advocates reducing nuclear arms, also took issue with the argument for more nuclear options.

"They decry the Russian argument," he said of the proponents, "but it is is exactly the policy they are now favoring: advocating for use of a nuclear weapon early in a conflict."

Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is pictured. | AP
House Republicans lash Mnuchin, Mulvaney behind closed doors
By RACHAEL BADE and KYLE CHENEY

"It is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which we would need a military option in between our formidable conventional capabilities and our current low-yield nuclear weapons capabilities," added Alexandra Bell, a former State Department arms control official. "Lawmakers should be very wary of any attempt to reduce the threshold for nuclear use. There is no such thing as a minor nuclear war."

Others also express alarm that depending on what type of device the review might recommend, it might require the United States to restart nuclear tests to ensure its viability. The United States hasn't detonated a nuclear weapon since 1992.

"If we actually started testing nuclear weapons, all hell would break loose," said Coyle, who is now on the board of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, a Washington think tank. "In today’s environment, if the U.S. were to test low-yield nuclear weapons, others might start testing. Russia, Iran, China, Pakistan, India. It would certainly give North Korea reason to test as often as they wanted.”

In Cirincione's view, the idea is fueled by economic, not security reasons.

"This is nuclear pork disguised as nuclear strategy," he said. "This is a jobs program for a few government labs and a few contractors. This is an insane proposal. It would lower the threshold for nuclear use. It would make nuclear war more likely. It comes from the illusion that you could use a nuclear weapon and end a conflict on favorable terms. Once you cross the nuclear threshold, you are inviting a nuclear response."

But others involved in the deliberations contend that if the administration seeks funding for a new tactical nuke, it might get a far more receptive audience in Congress.

Already Republicans are pushing to build a new cruise missile that some say would violate the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia — a direct response to Moscow's violations of the arms control pact. The Senate is expected to debate the issue next week when it takes up the defense policy bill, which includes a controversial provision similar to one already passed by the House.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
CORRECTION: A previous version misstated the power of the "Davy Crockett" nuclear device.

 

[Housecarl]

Full article at The Australian is behind a "pay wall".... HC

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/non-state-actors-biggest-threat-in-war-against-the-west

Non-State Actors Biggest Threat in War Against the West

by The Australian
SWJ Blog Post | September 12, 2017 - 3:54pm

French counter-insurgency expert David Galula once explained that protracted guerilla warfare was so cheap to maintain and so expensive to suppress that it even*tually could produce a crisis within the counter-insurgency camp.

In the context of tension between North Korea and the US, the “fire and fury” rhetoric from President Donald Trump sends a message to other nations as much as to North Korea: a war with the US would be so costly as to be *inconceivable. As Republican senator Lindsey Graham has emphasised: “If thousands are going to die, they will die over there.”

More rational non-allied states will have calculated the calamity of a state-on-state war with the US and its allies. That is why the risk of future warfare will increase significantly from non-state actors working by, with and through other nations, and novel interactions between technology, terrorists, insurgents, international drug traffickers and cyber criminals.

Every attack on a Western country since the end of World War II has been conducted by a non-state actor.

A cheaper alternative to conventional conflict for opponents of the US and its allies like us is to engineer endless “wars of the flea”, as guerilla war authority Robert Taber described them. In the war against the flea, the state suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend against a small, agile, ubiquitous enemy.

This war will take place across a variety of terrains, through a network of borderless non-state actors. Whether it’s al-Qa’ida, Islamic State, Antifa G20 rioters, Somali pirates, WikiLeaks, the Taliban or transnational criminal organisations, these players continue to have an impact on warfare, domestic security, regional stability and investment.

Non-state actors and states that use them as proxies have understood the power of decentralised, globally networked operating models where each node along the network can be a force multiplier and disproportionately amplifying their efforts…

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://mwi.usma.edu/measure-counterinsurgency-success-afghanistan/

HOW DO WE MEASURE COUNTERINSURGENCY SUCCESS IN AFGHANISTAN?

Alex Deep | September 12, 2017

Daniel R. Green, In the Warlords’ Shadow: Special Operations Forces, the Afghans, and Their Fight Against the Taliban (Naval Institute Press, 2017)

-

After the initial success of a combination of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and 5th Special Forces Group Green Berets fighting alongside the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan quickly descended into prolonged insurgency. For the better part of a decade, US conventional forces struggled to grasp effective means by which to conduct counterinsurgency, while special operations forces focused on the direct targeting of high-profile insurgents, terrorists, and their associated networks. The situation improved in major population centers where the top-down approach of promoting central government through security, governance, and development lines of effort remained under the close supervision of US and Afghan officials. The Taliban, however, remained a rural insurgency where measuring success along these lines of effort was difficult, and the top-down approach was ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Much as Green Berets fought against a similarly rural insurgency during the Vietnam War through the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, US special operations forces conceived the village stability operations program in 2011. In many ways, the purpose of this program was to shift focus from direct action targeting and centralized counterinsurgency to the development of decentralized efforts in rural Afghan villages and districts. This involved placing special operations forces teams in villages under the de facto control of the Taliban in order to establish local security from which governance and rule of law could develop. Now that the war effort has again shifted to centralized training of Afghan security forces and the direct targeting of terrorist networks, the Taliban has reasserted itself in rural Afghanistan, a fact that a few thousand extra US troops will not change.

Daniel R. Green offers an appraisal of village stability operations in southeastern Afghanistan in his book, In the Warlords’ Shadow: Special Operations Forces, the Afghans, and Their Fight Against the Taliban. Whereas previous attempts at counterinsurgency had focused on a top-down approach of training national security forces to fight the Taliban across the country, village stability operations took a bottom-up approach wherein special operations teams recruited, vetted, and trained villagers for the Afghan Local Police program. Although Green does well to frame the challenges facing US and coalition forces in dealing with the Afghan insurgency, his perspective on village stability operations is detached from the mechanisms that were essential to its success. That is, he recognizes that village stability operations provided a more effective means by which to conduct counterinsurgency, but he does not delve into how special operations teams actually accomplished the series of tasks that made village stability operations possible. Without this analysis, his book is more an update to his previous work on the situation in Uruzgan province rather than anything particularly compelling about village stability operations specifically or the US approach to counterinsurgency generally.

Green sets up this book seemingly intent on figuring out a better way to measure success in counterinsurgency. To begin, he establishes the futility of using metrics such as the number of enemy that US forces kill (a callback to the notorious “body count” figures of the Vietnam War), development projects that US forces complete, or meetings that US forces hold with Afghan government and security officials. As an Army Green Beret who conducted village stability operations in eastern Afghanistan, I was optimistic that the author planned on analyzing new measures of success in a systematic way. However, rather than develop a methodology to determine alternate metrics, Green goes into a series of personal accounts that describe his visits with teams of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets conducting village stability operations across southeastern Afghanistan. Green compares his observations during these trips with those he made in Uruzgan province during a previous deployment as part of a Provincial Reconstruction Team several years earlier. Since the security situation had improved in the intervening period, Green jumps to the conclusion that village stability operations deserved the credit.

Despite this potentially faulty assumption, Green selects thoughtful indicators of improved security that could translate into new ways of measuring success in counterinsurgency. For Green, village stability operations provided the security that allowed district governments and local markets to function properly. So, metrics such as the number of government officials who reside in the district, the number of meetings between these officials and local elders that take place in the district center, and the number of development projects that Afghans appropriate and allocate through official government channels serve as useful data points in determining a return of governance and rule of law. In addition, Green posits that as security improves, local markets become more robust, thus reducing the cost of staple goods and increasing economic activity in general. He developed a survey in order to measure these new metrics, which he intended on distributing to the various sites at which special operations teams were conducting village stability operations. Although Green logically arrives at his potential new metrics, his survey relies on responses from Americans rather than Afghans on data points that are either subjective and therefore subject to bias, or largely unknowable to Americans and therefore unreliable. That being said, it would have been interesting to see the results of his analysis. But he unfortunately never distributes the survey so the veracity of these new metrics of success in counterinsurgency remain unknown.

Apart from an incomplete attempt at discerning different ways to measure success in counterinsurgency, Green also takes on the task of developing a means by which to determine where to build new sites for village stability operations based on likelihood of success. He hypothesizes that districts in which special operations teams were able to recruit their allocation of Afghan Local Police likely share some common features. So, Green collected data from 114 sites across Afghanistan with the aim of creating a double regression analysis in order to determine statistically significant variables in successful districts. Inexplicably however, Green uses the number of Afghan Local Police in a district as his dependent variable and metric of success. In other words, Green claims that the mere presence of a greater number of Afghan Local Police in a district corresponds to the success of the program. This is antithetical to his previous claim about new ways of measuring success in counterinsurgency. Again, despite this issue, it would have been interesting to see his data, but he does not provide the results of the analysis for others to interpret, critique, or attempt to reproduce in later tests. Instead, he states that he had issues with data quality and then makes general claims about features of “successful” districts without providing any evidence.

Although a great description of Uruzgan province and its idiosyncrasies, Green’s account displays a largely topical understanding of village stability operations. While claiming that its success was due to its local nature, his perspective was almost entirely at the provincial level, relying on brief visits to local sites for the types of meetings during which local Afghan politicians, security force leaders, and elders would be incentivized to offer optimistic and ingratiating accounts in front of provincial officials. I experienced many of these largely ceremonial events during my deployments to Afghanistan, during which officials espouse the efforts of the Afghan security forces, pay homage to coalition forces, and request additional support either through development projects or Afghan Local Police allocation. So, although Green uses these meetings to display the progress against the Afghan insurgency that teams conducting village stability operations were able to make, he misses the more difficult point of how they were able to do so.

Special operations teams had a myriad of tasks to complete along security, governance, and development lines of effort when conducting village stability operations that were essential to its success. Teams that conducted detailed human terrain mapping to assess traditional bases of power and tribal dynamics tended to be able to gain elder support for the Afghan Local Police program. From there, teams had to fuse multiple intelligence sources to illuminate supportive and disruptive elements of Afghan society, while vetting potential Afghan Local Police recruits. Once recruited, teams had to train these villagers in how to secure the surrounding population, and mentor the local government on how to support its security force. All the while, teams worked with government officials to promote rule of law at district centers, support Afghan-led development initiatives, and encourage district and provincial officials to work together. Green alludes to some of these tasks, but mostly in generalities, making claims about special operations teams being able to do amazing things without analyzing the factors that contributed to their success or lack thereof.

Rather than a true appraisal of village stability operations, Green produced a memoir that captured his time in Afghanistan. In its final chapter, he makes wide-ranging claims about civil-military relations, the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the shift to the all-volunteer force that seem merely to reflect Green’s opinions and have little, if anything, to do with his book. Even when he attempts to provide recommendations based on his analysis of village stability operations, he offers mostly platitudes like “move beyond your comfort zone” and “do what is required, not what’s comfortable.” It becomes clear in the notes section that this book is a personal war story coming to a close, as seven of Green’s twenty-four sources are his own previous works, suggesting that he relied little on outside research beyond his own experiences. In the end, Green makes interesting points defining the problem with earlier counterinsurgency efforts and has produced a well-documented personal account of his trials and tribulations in Afghanistan, but fails to substantiate his claims about village stability operations or counterinsurgency.

--

Maj. Alex Deep is an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is a Special Forces Officer with ten years of service and multiple deployments to Afghanistan in conventional and special operations task forces.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US government.

 

[Housecarl]

Senate Rejects Bipartisan Push for New US War Authorization
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Bipartisan-Push-for-New-US-War-Authorization

Bombshell Report-Pentagon Falsifying Paperwork For Weapons To Syrian Rebels
Started by Buick Electra‎, Today 10:38 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ifying-Paperwork-For-Weapons-To-Syrian-Rebels

US Threatens To Cut Off China From SWIFT If It Violates North Korea Sanctions
Started by Possible Impact‎, Yesterday 06:51 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...om-SWIFT-If-It-Violates-North-Korea-Sanctions

The Winds of War Blow in Korea and The Far East
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-of-War-Blow-in-Korea-and-The-Far-East/page46

---

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/i..._term=Editorial - Military - Early Bird Brief

NEWS
ISIS UNCOVERED
SEP 12 2017, 12:32 PM ET

ISIS Recruits Fighters for the Philippines Instead of Syria

by ROBERT WINDREM

A video released by ISIS asks would-be fighters to go to the Philippines instead of Syria and Iraq, the latest sign that the terror group is shifting its recruiting tactics as it loses ground to coalition forces in the Middle East.

The seven-minute, English-language video, released by the official ISIS media operation late last month, includes messages from several fighters in the Southern Philippines, and scenes from battles with government troops near the city of Marawi, including the pillaging of a Catholic church.

One of the fighters calls on Muslims in "East Asia, specifically those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, and Singapore" to migrate and fight alongside the ISIS-linked militants in the Philippines.

A militant identified as "Abul-Yamaan from Marawi" proclaims: "Come forth to the land of jihad. Perform hijrah. Come forth to … Marawi."

U.S. intelligence officials and private sector analysts like Flashpoint Intelligence, which NBC News uses to track terrorist groups, say that Asia has become a new focus for ISIS. The terror group now sees the southern Philippine islands, where a Muslim insurgency has simmered for decades, as the best destination for Islamic militants, and is using videos and social media in both English and languages spoken in the southern Philippines to boast of its exploits and recruit fighters.

"ISIS wants to be seen as global and the Philippines provides them with an opportunity," said a U.S. official.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during an Aug. 1 press conference in Washington that U.S. intelligence is aware ISIS fighters from other countries are operating in Philippines.

"We already see elements of ISIS in the Philippines, as you're aware, gaining a foothold," said Tillerson. "Some of these fighters have gone to the Philippines from Syria and Iraq. We are in conversations with the Philippine government, with Indonesia, with Malaysia, with Singapore, with Australia, as partners to recognize this threat, try to get ahead of this threat."

Tillerson did not provide numbers.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official noted that Philippine Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eduardo Ano said in June that among the dead in the continuing battle for Marawi were Saudis, Pakistanis, Malaysians and Indonesians. The official said there's no reason to doubt Ano's assessment.

Related: U.S. May Begin Airstrikes Against ISIS in Philippines

Al Qaeda Affiliate Switches Allegiance to ISIS
There are three major ISIS-aligned Islamist groups on the island of Mindanao — Maute, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), and Abu Sayyaf, formerly an al Qaeda offshoot. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon the ISIS emir of Southeast Asia in 2016.

The allied pro-ISIS groups began battling government forces in Marawi, a city of 200,000, in May, and clashes continue as government soldiers try to evict the militants from the city. More than 60 Philippine soldiers have been killed and more than 200 wounded in the fighting.

The ISIS call for jihadis to travel east to the Philippines, however, comes at a time when the U.S. is rethinking whether a significant number of ISIS fighters will relocate from the caliphate, as originally believed.

Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, said last month that U.S. intelligence has not yet seen a large flow.

"At one point, we were worried about this out-rush, outflows, massive outflows of foreign fighters once the battlefield situation changed in Iraq and Syria and that Western countries, countries in the region, would be flooded with returnees," Rasmussen said, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum. "I think now speaking kind of broadly, that's less likely than we first assessed."

U.S. intelligence officials say that instead, most fighters will likely stay in Iraq and Syria and continue to fight as insurgents. Moreover, they say, there are fewer of them, many having been killed in action.

The ISIS affiliates in Mindanao, meanwhile, also face another challenge — their former comrades.

The largest indigenous Islamist force, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had battled government forces on the island since the 1960s, reached a ceasefire deal with the government in 2014. Other groups, including BIFF, rejected the deal, and MILF and the Moro National Liberation Front found themselves fighting BIFF, Maute, Abu Sayyaf and several other splinter groups.

MILF launched an offensive against BIFF three weeks ago in a region south of Marawi.

Since 2001, the U.S. has provided military aid, mostly special operations training, to the Philippines to fight terrorism. This summer Philippine forces used U.S.-supplied gunships to attack the Islamist groups. In 2012, the U.S. launched its own airstrikes against Islamist targets in the country. As NBC News reported in August, the U.S. has recently weighed carrying out fresh airstrikes against ISIS in the Philippines.

 

[Housecarl]

DOT.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ce-may-not-overcome-hurdles-to-submarine-sale

Japan and India Discuss Defense as China Gets Bolder

By Isabel Reynolds , Iain Marlow , and Nc Bipindra
September 13, 2017, 3:00 PM PDT

- Two leaders to discuss defense cooperation at 10th summit
- Failure of Australian bid likely to curb Japanese enthusiasm

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe holds his 10th summit with India’s leader Narendra Modi on Thursday, underscoring the importance of strategic ties between the countries as the two face an increasingly assertive China. Supplying submarine technology would lock Japan and India into an even tighter defense relationship for years to come.

Despite the close relationship between the two right-leaning nationalist leaders, Japan is hesitant to plunge into negotiations on submarine exports. A bid to supply Australia with an adapted version of its Soryu subs failed last year, despite the deepening security ties between the two nations.

Japan is among the countries India contacted for information about cooperating on its plans for six diesel submarines to add to the underwater fleet it is seeking to build to counter that of China, in a project worth about 500 billion rupees ($7.8 billion). The two governments held their first round of talks on overall defense technology cooperation last week, but are not currently in negotiations on the submarine project, according to a Japanese foreign ministry official who asked not to be named.

In India, an official from the Ministry of Defence who asked not to be named citing rules, said the process for submarine procurement had just been initiated with the Japanese submarine builder. It will be a long, drawn process, said another Ministry of Defence official.

Indian Navy spokesman D. K. Sharma said he had no comment on the matter.

While the Japanese government is not ruling out a deal, here are some reasons why it probably won’t be the front runner.

Price Tag

Japan only loosened its decades-old self-imposed ban on defense exports in 2014. The exclusively domestic focus of the industry has kept it small in scale, resulting in higher costs, which are off-putting for India. The two countries have, for example, been negotiating a possible sale of ShinMaywa’s US-2 amphibious aircraft for years, but have so far failed to agree on a price.

The roughly $12 billion yen ($109 million) per plane price tag, depending on specifications, is one of the key sticking points, according to the Japanese foreign ministry official. He added that the talks would take some time.

Make in India

Modi’s campaign to have more high-tech goods made on Indian soil will make any submarine deal more difficult. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd, the two firms that build Japan’s submarines, will be concerned about whether they can maintain quality, according to Abhijit Singh, a former naval officer who is now at New Delhi’s Observer Research Foundation.

"That doesn’t work because if Indians build it and something goes wrong then the Japanese reputation takes a knock," Singh said in an interview. Both companies declined to comment on the matter.

Japanese Reluctance

"There is still some hesitancy in the political-defense community of Japan," over loosening restrictions on defense exports, said Hiroshi Hirabayashi, a former Japanese ambassador to India, who now serves as president of the Japan-India Association. In line with its pacifist constitution, Japan until recently treated the U.S. as virtually the only exception to the ban.

Singh noted that Japan remained "secretive" about its submarine technology, which is among the most sensitive for any government.

Submarine Suitability

Japan’s Soryu submarine is far larger than the model India is seeking. "It’s too sophisticated for India’s needs and Japan knows this," former naval officer Singh said. That would mean a re-design, which adds a fresh element of risk to a complex process.

India has widened its search for the right submarine, said K.V. Kuber, a New Delhi-based independent defense analyst who has been on several government-appointed panels on military procurement.

"The choice was always between DCNS (renamed as Naval Group) and HDW (Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft)," Kuber said. "I now see the options have included the traditional Russians, Spain’s Navantia, and a new entrant in this game, Mitsubushi Kawasaki, along with Sweden’s Kockums." The process has the "fundamental strength of letting the choice of the platform and the potential vendors be determined by the market forces."

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....that's a real 180 from the Obama Admin.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://scout.com/military/warrior/A...ay-Toward-High-Tech-Defenses-For-Th-101452534

Pentagon Preps to Destroy Enemy ICBMs in 2030

The Multi-Object Kill Vehicle can simultaneously destory ICBMs and decoys with a single interceptor

Scout Warrior - 19 hours ago

A US military upgraded Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle, or EKV, a kinetic-force weapon that slams into its targets, destroyed an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time during a Missile Defense Agency test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system several months ago.

The Missile Defense Agency's first-ever successful intercept of an ICBM target using a Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, using the kinetic force of an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) to destroy the target, is paving the way toward advanced future kill vehicles able to discern and attack multiple approaching threats, industry and Pentagon officials said.

During the test, an ICBM-class target was launched from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a Missile Defense Agency statement said.

"Multiple sensors provided target acquisition and tracking data to the Command, Control, Battle Management and Communication (C2BMC) system," the statement added.

The intercept, taking place over the Pacific Ocean, used X-band radar to track the target for using a fire control solution to destroy the ICBM.

All of this is seen by developers as a crucial step toward a new future system, called Multi-Object Kill Vehicle, or MOKV. It is designed to release from a Ground Based Interceptor and destroy approaching Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs -- and also take out decoys traveling alongside the incoming missile threat.

Development of the MOVK is intended to evolve from existing tests with the EKV, however industry and Pentagon developers do not want to rush the system in order to ensure it is well suited to destroy emerging threats anticipated five, ten or more years from now, Norm Montano, Raytheon EKV Program Director, told Scout Warrior in an interview last year. While many months ago, Montano's comments bear even greater relevance now - as tensions with North Korea rise quickly and many analyze the regime's fast-advancing ability to hit US targets with an ICBM.

"The threat is evolving. North Korea is frequently testing. You can't underestimate the learning that they are doing. We don't want to rush MOKV. We want to get there and get there right," Montano said. "If we move too fast we might not get all the learning that we need."

Decoys or countermeasures are missile-like structures, objects or technologies designed to throw off or confuse the targeting and guidance systems of an approaching interceptor in order to increase the probability that the actual missile can travel through to its target.

If the seeker or guidance systems of a “kill vehicle” technology on a Ground Base Interceptor, or GBI, cannot discern an actual nuclear-armed ICBM from a decoy – the dangerous missile is more likely to pass through and avoid being destroyed. MOKV is being developed to address this threat scenario.

“We will develop and test MOKV command and control strategies in both digital and hardware-in-the-loop venues that will prove we can manage the engagements of many kill vehicles on many targets from a single interceptor. We will also invest in the communication architectures and guidance technology that support this game-changing approach,” a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, told Scout Warrior in a previous written statement.

]The Missile Defense Agency has awarded MOKV development deals to Boeing, Lockheed and Raytheon as part of a risk-reduction phase able to move the technology forward, Lehner said.

Steve Nicholls, Director of Advanced Air & Missile Defense Systems for Raytheon, told Scout Warrior last year that the MOKV is being developed to provide the MDA with “a key capability for its Ballistic Missile Defense System - to discriminate lethal objects from countermeasures and debris. The kill vehicle, launched from the ground-based interceptor extends the ground-based discrimination capability with onboard sensors and processing to ensure the real threat is eliminated.”

MOKV could well be described as a new technological step in the ongoing maturation of what was originally conceived of in the Reagan era as “Star Wars” – the idea of using an interceptor missile to knock out or destroy an incoming enemy nuclear missile in space. This concept was originally greeted with skepticism and hesitation as something that was not technologically feasible.

Not only has this technology come to fruition in many respects, but the capability continues to evolve with systems like MOKV. MOKV, to begin formal product development by 2022, is being engineered with a host of innovations to include new sensors, signal processors, communications technologies and robotic manufacturing automation for high-rate tactical weapons systems, Nicholls explained.

The trajectory of an enemy ICBM includes an initial “boost” phase where it launches from the surface up into space, a “midcourse” phase where it travels in space above the earth’s atmosphere and a “terminal” phase wherein it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere and descends to its target. MOKV is engineered to destroy threats in the “midcourse” phase while the missile is traveling through space.

An ability to destroy decoys as well as actual ICBMs is increasingly vital in today’s fast-changing technological landscape because potential adversaries continue to develop more sophisticated missiles, countermeasures and decoy systems designed to make it much harder for interceptor missile to distinguish a decoy from an actual missile.

As a result, a single intercept able to destroy multiple targets massively increases the likelihood that the incoming ICBM threat will actually be destroyed more quickly without needing to fire another Ground Based Interceptor.

Raytheon describes its developmental approach as one that hinges upon what’s called “open-architecture,” a strategy designed to engineer systems with the ability to easily embrace and integrate new technologies as they emerge. This strategy will allow the MOKV platform to better adjust to fast-changing threats, Nicholls said.

The MDA development plan includes the current concept definition phase, followed by risk reduction and proof of concept phases leading to a full development program, notionally beginning in fiscal year 2022, Nicholls explained.

“This highly advanced and highly technical kill vehicle takes a true dedication of time and expertise to properly mature. It is essential to leverage advancements from other members of the Raytheon kill vehicle family, including the Redesigned Kill Vehicle,” Nicholls said.

While the initial development of MOKV is aimed at configuring the “kill vehicle” for a GBI, there is early thinking about integrating the technology onto a Standard Missile-3, or SM-3, an interceptor missile also able to knock incoming ICBMs out of space.The SM-3 is also an exo-atmopheric "kill vehicle," meaning it can destroy short and intermediate range incoming targets; its "kill vehilce" has no explosives but rather uses kinetic energy to collide with and obliterate its target. The resulting impact is the equivalent to a 10-ton truck traveling at 600 mph, Raytheon statements said.

“Ultimately, these Multi-Object Kill Vehicles will revolutionize our missile defense architecture, substantially reducing the interceptor inventory required to defeat an evolving and more capable threat to the homeland,” a Missile Defense Agency spokesman said.

Visit Warrior

Kris Osborn can be reached at Krisosborn.ko@gmail.com
To Ask Military Expert KRIS OSBORN Questions, VISIT THE WARRIOR FORUMS.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/14/inside-putins-libyan-power-play/

ARGUMENT

Inside Putin’s Libyan Power Play

The Kremlin is trying to prove it can succeed where Washington failed in ending the country's slide into chaos.

BY LINCOLN PIGMAN, KYLE ORTON
SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Libya, which has been wracked by instability and violence since 2011, is re-emerging as a geopolitical hotspot. With opposing forces fighting for control of the war-torn country — the main two being the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Libyan National Army (LNA) — foreign powers have begun taking sides, internationalizing the conflict. For Western observers, the growing involvement of Russia, a major ally of LNA commander Khalifa Haftar, represents a particular concern.

Coming on the heels of the Russian military intervention in Syria, Moscow’s role in Libya’s civil war may seem, at first glance, like déjà vu. Once again, it appears that the Kremlin is working to consolidate the power of a pro-Russian regional strongman and establish a “crescent of Russian influence” across the Middle East. And given the similarities between Haftar and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, some degree of anxiety is understandable. Like Assad, who has long appealed to foreign governments by referring to Syrian rebels as terrorists, Haftar often frames himself as a bulwark against violent extremism in Libya, where the Islamic State remains active and Islamists have formed powerful militias and entered mainstream politics.

Yet Russia’s actual strategy does not involve bombing Libya into submission so it accepts “Moscow’s man” as its leader. Russia’s intentions in Libya are far more cooperative with the international community — though no less in its own national interests.

To be sure, Russia has invested in Haftar. It has received him in Moscow like a foreign leader already in office, arranging meetings with high-ranking ministers as well as security officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. Haftar’s image as a “leading political and military figure,” as the general was recently described by Deputy Foreign Minister Gennadiy Gatilov, is further burnished by shots of Haftar aboard the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, which visited Libya during its tour of the Mediterranean.

Of course, material assistance counts for more than photo opportunities and kind words. And here, too, the Kremlin has delivered: Moscow has printed around $3 billion in Libyan dinars on behalf of the Haftar-allied Central Bank of Libya and dispatched Russian technicians to help refit, renew, and upgrade the military capabilities of the LNA, which almost entirely relies on Soviet weaponry.

In accordance with a U.N. arms embargo, Russia cannot be seen to be directly arming Haftar’s forces. But it could send weapons through Egypt, a pro-Haftar neighbor that borders the Haftar-held parts of eastern Libya and is said to have hosted Russian special forces. Moreover, some in Libya — like Abdelbasset al-Badri, the GNA’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a Haftar ally who visited Moscow in March — openly encourage the deployment of Russian forces to Libya as part of a Syria-style intervention. Haftar, when asked about military cooperation with Moscow, has said he would “welcome any role” for Russia in Libya.

Russia expects to gain three things from its support of Haftar. First, Moscow hopes Haftar will eventually wield enough political power to give Russia pride of place in making economic deals, thus making up for the financial losses — $150 million in profits from construction projects, $3 billion from a Russian Railways contract, up to $3.5 billion in profits from energy deals, and at least $4 billion in arms sales — incurred because of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fall. With oil production in Libya at 700,000 barrels per day in January and the country’s so-called oil crescent controlled by Haftar’s forces, energy is an especially lucrative area of cooperation. In July, Russian state oil giant Rosneft began purchasing oil from Libya’s National Oil Corp. as part of a yearlong contract meant to be, in the words of one Russian official, an initial step toward the “renewal of contracts concluded under Qaddafi.”

Second, Russia looks to Haftar to help consolidate its military position on the Mediterranean Sea, allowing Moscow to project power near Europe’s coasts and reinforce its outreach to the Middle East and North Africa. In 2008, Qaddafi broached the subject of Russian naval bases in Libya. Although none were ultimately leased, Russian officials have resurrected the idea, discussing with Haftar the possibility of opening a base near Benghazi. Granted, Russia’s intervention in Syria has already secured a lasting military presence in the region, most notably through a 49-year lease on a naval base in Tartus. But a presence in Libya makes Russia’s overtures toward regional governments look far more realistic, while frustrating European attempts to punish Russian assertiveness.

Finally, Russia seeks the political dividends of being able to settle regional crises. To that end, it would be an enormous gamble if Russia relied exclusively on Haftar, whose ability to consolidate his control over the entire country is still very much in doubt. His rivals include not only the GNA but also Misrata-based rebels, and any uncertainty over his military predominance threatens Russian interests in Libya, particularly long-term arrangements like leases on bases or contracts. In Syria, by contrast, Assad has been in power for years and benefits from a deeply divided opposition and large numbers of Iranian ground forces. Haftar does not possess these advantages, and Russia is averse to the kind of investment that delivering them to him would require.

Russia, therefore, has adopted a strategy of hedging its bets. Rather than back Haftar alone, Russia has also engaged the U.N.-backed GNA. Despite its partnership with Haftar, Russia continues to formally endorse U.N. peacemaking efforts in Libya. While the Kremlin often obfuscates in its dealings with the international community, Moscow’s deference to the United Nations on key matters — such as the arms embargo, which Haftar desperately wants lifted — may signal that it remains open to brokering a Libyan peace deal with the help of international partners.

There is evidence to suggest Moscow’s ultimate strategy is to set itself up as a broker between Libya’s rival partners rather than engineer a total victory for Haftar. In May, Russian pressure helped bring about a key meeting between Haftar and GNA Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, the first in 16 months. The Russian government has also received Sarraj in Moscow, albeit only once — Haftar visited Moscow for a third time this August — and with less fanfare. Just this week, Sarraj’s deputy, Ahmed Maiteeq, visited Russia, meeting with Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov in Grozny and Russian Middle East hand Mikhail Bogdanov in Moscow. He may not have sat down with President Vladimir Putin, but neither has Haftar.

“We do not wish to be associated with either side of the conflict,” said Lev Dengov, the head of a Russian working group on Libya that is run jointly by the Foreign Ministry and the lower house of parliament, in a recent interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant. He added that neither Haftar nor Sarraj could realistically govern Libya alone and dealt a blow to Haftar’s counterterrorism credentials by saying he played no role in the liberation of the city of Sirte from the Islamic State. Dengov instead gave credit to “groups that answer to the government in Tripoli,” where the GNA is based, and called Sarraj an “opponent of radical Islam.”

Russia stands to gain more from a coalition government in Libya with Haftar as the head of its armed forces than a government entirely under Haftar’s control. The former would imply a measure of political reconciliation between the country’s primary warring parties and thus sufficient stability to justify securing the long-term economic investments and military facilities that Russia seeks without fearing they could be abruptly lost as they were after Qaddafi’s fall.

Increased Russian involvement in Libya is hardly universally popular. The United States in particular views Russia’s role with caution: The head of U.S. Africa Command recently warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that Moscow “is trying to exert influence on the ultimate decision of who becomes and what entity becomes in charge of the government inside Libya.”

Yet President Donald Trump has ruled out nation building or maintaining a military presence in Libya — a position that limits Washington’s ability to affect or decide what happens there. While a light footprint has its perks — especially for those averse to long-term commitments or foreign entanglements — it will not provide Washington with the influence necessary to shape local political outcomes. In the absence of the United States, other foreign governments will inevitably fill that vacuum and seek to broker a peace of their own.

Russia has signaled its interest in the Libyan conflict, expressed its desire for a solution involving the international community, and demonstrated its willingness to invest financial and military resources. It will likely find some support abroad for its peacemaking effort, as its policy aligns with those of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The European Union is also eager for a peace deal, as it desperately needs to reduce the influx of refugees from across the Mediterranean. France, for one, has adopted an approach to Libya’s war resembling Russia’s balancing act, another sign that there may be takers on the continent.

Ultimately, the main return Russia seeks on its investment in Libya is neither a base nor a contract. It is the ability to substantiate one of the central narratives that it has told the world and its own citizens in recent years: that what the United States breaks, Russia can fix. Russian officials regularly tout Libya’s descent into chaos after NATO’s 2011 intervention, heavily criticized by then-Prime Minister Putin, as the perfect example of the instability that U.S.-led interventions cause. If Putin’s Libyan adventure pays off, Russia will have shown that it can shape lasting political outcomes abroad without costly ground invasions or destructive air campaigns. Such a psychological victory may be the most valuable reward of all.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.politico.eu/article/russias-military-exercises-zapad-opportunity-not-threat/

A Russian military opportunity

Belarus emphasis on making the exercise transparent gives Western observers a glimpse at Moscow’s capabilities.

By KEIR GILES
9/14/17, 4:07 AM CET Updated 9/14/17, 2:21 PM CET

CAMBRIDGE, England — The Zapad military exercise, to be held jointly by Russia and Belarus this week, has spawned alarming predictions of covert Russian aggression against its Baltic neighbors, and even Belarus itself.

But Zapad is like Christmas: It comes around at a predictable time, yet the excitement and the long build-up obscure the original meaning of the event.

Zapad is a routine, scheduled exercise. It’s receiving even more attention than usual this year only because Russia is seen to pose a greater threat to European security. The seizure of Crimea and offensive actions against Ukraine are still fresh in our minds.

It is true that previous Russian exercises on this scale left troops in a position to undertake military operations immediately afterward, against Georgia in 2008 and against Ukraine in 2014.

Some in the Baltics have expressed concern the same could happen to them. But not every major Russian exercise ends with the invasion of a neighbor.

Both of those moves were precipitated by an immediate political crisis. From Russia’s point of view, what was happening in Georgia and Ukraine posed an immediate security threat.

There is no such crisis currently along Russia’s northwestern periphery. If anything, the likelihood Russia will launch any kind of unfriendly action off the back of Zapad is lower than it was in 2013.

At the time, before the threat of Russian military adventurism against its Western neighbors was so generally recognized, there was no established NATO ground presence in the Baltic states.

Now, the small but significant Enhanced Forward Presence battalions provide a substantial insurance policy against Russian deviations from the exercise scenario.

As ever, the primary purpose of the exercise is to practice for war and to test Russia’s preparedness in terms of command and control, organization, logistics and specific capabilities.

On the flip side, that means it is also an opportunity for Western observers to watch what takes place and draw their own conclusions.

The Russian military has changed at a rapid pace. A number of aspects of the planned exercise will be of particular interest to analysts and the armed forces of other countries.


ALSO ON POLITICO
All quiet on the eastern front

ALIIDE NAYLOR
One of these will be the role, if any, of the VIO, the “information operations troops” that have been active in joint Russian-Belarusian exercises in previous years, but whose establishment in the Russian order of battle was only formally announced in February.

With Russia’s use of “information warfare” a hot topic, these troops should be watched closely for indications of how Russia plans to wage it at the tactical and operational levels.

Despite Russia’s reluctance to invite observers to the exercise, the opportunities for studying the proceedings are better than ever before — in particular, because of Belarus’ emphasis on making the exercise open and transparent. Major Western media have been invited to cover Zapad by the Belarusians, although emphatically not by the Russians.

Europe’s alarm at the prospect of Russian military adventurism puts Moscow in a comfortable position.

The fear fits with Russia’s rhetoric and its regular hints at direct military action against its neighbors and competitors further afield. Russia may not be providing information on the scope and scale of the exercise, but Western media — with its speculation and scare stories — are doing the Kremlin’s work for it.

Belarus, instead, has shown it wants to calm tensions and insure itself against both accidental and deliberate departures from the exercise scenario.

Minsk chose to hold the exercise across the middle of the country, as opposed to in close proximity with the Polish, Lithuanian or Ukrainian borders. This was deliberate, in order to reduce the chances of misinterpretation or incidents where Russian troops and aircraft come close to NATO borders — or to Ukraine, which is understandably concerned at the prospect of an increased Russian presence on its northern flank.

But while Western observers should welcome this openness by Belarus, the enhanced visibility in the country could also distract from Zapad’s most significant developments.

Foreign observers and journalists will see some of what is happening in Belarus during the exercise itself, but none of the much larger maneuvers over the border in Russia. And if they leave Belarus when the exercise is officially over, it will be too soon to tell if all Russia’s troops and equipment really leave as well.

Increased media coverage of what happens in Belarus between September 14-20 could divert attention from the real story, which could happen elsewhere or later. As ever, we will need to look beyond the headlines for the real meaning of Zapad.

Keir Giles is a senior consulting fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security.

RELATED CONTENT
All quiet on the eastern front
In Baltic borderlands, residents unperturbed by Russia’s Zapad military maneuvers.
This is how Trump can earn a rare win in the Middle East
Supporting an independent Iraqi Kurdistan is the right thing to do. It’s also the smart thing to do.
The problem isn’t Putin, it’s Russia
As relations worsen, US must realize Russia will not soon, if ever, become a liberal democracy.
Street fighting, man!
Renaming streets can annoy your rivals. Perhaps the EU and UK should give it a go.
The man who would beat Putin
For Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff, relentless pressure from the Kremlin is a sign his candidate is on the right track.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/arti...ato-u-s-take-hard-look-readiness-fight-europe

NATO, U.S. Take Hard Look at Readiness for Fight in Europe

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 | KAITLIN LAVINDER

One of Russia’s largest military exercises begins today – and it’s targeted toward the West. Zapad, which literally means “West” in Russian, is a recurrent exercise held in Russia’s western and central districts. The last one was in 2013, just a year before Russia invaded Crimea. This year’s exercise could see up to 100,000 Russian and Belarusian troops training for potential conflict with the West. So, is Europe prepared? The answer is, kind of.

Since Russia’s incursions into Crimea in 2014 and Georgia in 2008, Europe and the U.S. have been acutely aware of the need to train for conventional warfare. The problem is, for more than two decades, the U.S. and NATO have placed most of their resources in counterterror and counterinsurgency training.

“NATO and U.S. NATO forces have in the last 15 years since 9/11 retooled heavily, and not just materially but psychologically… to fight the counterinsurgency and conflicts other than major conventional war,” retired Brigadier General Peter Zwack, who was the U.S. defense attaché to Russia from 2012-14, told The Cipher Brief.

Jim Townsend, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy during the Obama Administration, explained that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Cold War appeared over and the U.S. and its allies had to figure out what new threat environment they faced.

After a decade of smaller conflicts like the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the Kosovo War in 1998-99, the answer came in earnest on September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing thousands of people.

After 9/11, the U.S. decided, “our fighting is not going to be high-end against a peer; it’s going to be dealing with counterterrorism,” Townsend, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told The Cipher Brief.

There was a “dismantling of the Cold War structure,” he said. “We redid our force structure in terms of brigades, battalions, corps… tanks and B52s, all that stuff was put on the back shelf.”

And the same goes for NATO. “NATO began to shape the force structure of all the other allies to be light, to be strategic and be able to move out of Europe to other places to take on the fight [against terrorism],” he said.

But then, 2008 happened. Russia – an all but forgotten adversary in the age of the war on terror – invaded Georgia, a European country that had declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia now occupies Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.

Georgia was the “trigger,” said Latvia’s defense attaché to the U.S. Colonel Dzintars Roga. That’s when we saw that Russia is “doing not what they are saying,” he told The Cipher Brief. So Latvia decided to put more attention on training its National Guard units for conventional warfare, he said. But the professional armed forces couldn’t follow suit, because they were heavily committed to NATO missions dealing with counterinsurgency, said Roga.

Then, 2014 happened – Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, causing an international uproar – forcing Latvia to “allocate the time” to look at conventional training “more seriously,” Roga said.

“When Crimea happened, we were absolutely flat-footed,” said Townsend, who was serving in the Obama Administration at the time. The NATO Wales Summit in September 2014 was supposed to be about how NATO should retool post-Afghanistan. Instead, it turned into “oh my God, we have got to retool ourselves to handle a fight in Europe,” Townsend said.

The U.S. and NATO both “haven’t really exercised as a complete military in a long time,” said Zwack, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute of National Security Studies at the National Defense University. “So all of us are having now to respond to what you would call a more conventional military aspect of the type that we were dealing with in the Cold War.”

How are the U.S. and NATO refocusing?

U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley has made readiness of the total army his number one priority. At a U.S. Army Reserve Command Senior Leader Conference in April 2016, Milley said that since 2005, Russia’s external behavior and foreign policy showed it is becoming an aggressive power.

“No one has seen aggressive foreign policy by any country in Europe for 70 years where armies, or surrogate armies, have crossed the borders of sovereign, independent countries,” he said. “That is a big deal. It’s got everybody’s attention now. Ten thousand years of recorded history tells us that aggression left unanswered leads to more aggression.”

Therefore, the U.S. is putting more money into things like its premier training centers – Fort Irwin in California, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and Hohenfels in Germany.

“It’s been about five years since the Army adjusted its training regime to place greater emphasis on high intensity combined arms operations along with lower end counterinsurgency training,” retired Lieutenant General Guy Swan told The Cipher Brief.

Swan said that additional funding is now going to the Decisive Action Training Environment for brigade-level training rotations that “had been lower priority in past years.”

European countries are shifting more resources to this kind of conventional training as well. Latvia’s biggest military base in Adazi, for example, is getting a major upgrade. Col. Roga said, “When I visited [Adazi] in July this year, I was surprised at how the base looks like, because I was a commander in this base in an infantry brigade, I left in 2013, and now in a 2017 visit I couldn’t recognize it – how many soldiers [and] equipment we have.”

NATO is also refocusing on readiness, with major readiness initiatives coming out of both the Wales and Warsaw summits. In addition, NATO is “beefing up” its intelligence capabilities, said Townsend, and it’s looking at how to move allied militaries quickly throughout Europe, in case of an attack.

This year, four NATO member states deployed troops to the Baltics and Poland on a rotational basis. And further south, NATO is increasing “air and maritime defensive activities in the Black Sea region,” Romanian Ambassador to the U.S. George Cristian Maior told The Cipher Brief. “For instance, the recent Saber Guardian exercise brought together in Romania over 25,000 troops from over 20 allies and partners, which trained for a wide range of defensive actions,” he said.

“NATO is very very busy right now trying to very quickly get stronger and better in terms of this ability to fight in Europe,” Townsend said.

But that doesn’t mean that NATO is reverting to a total Cold War mentality. Rather, it’s more of a “morphing,” said Townsend, where Europe and the U.S. have to “race to get up to speed on what armor should look like,” the use of tanks, and those kinds of things – while at the same time, the 9/11 legacy of needing to train for counterinsurgency and counterterror “hasn’t gone away.”

Col. Roga described this as a mixing of “old elements and new elements.”

And LTG Swan said it’s more “multidimensional than just conventional tank-on-tank warfare, which is what I grew up with in the 1980s and even up to the Desert Storm period.” Rather, it’s “multi-domain,” he said, “where it’s not just traditional land warfare, but now you’ve got the cyber dimension, you’ve got a mix of conventional and unconventional tactics being used, you’re seeing things that we don’t normally associate with combined arms military operations – things like intimidation, political action, assassination, even terrorism interspersed with conventional military affairs.”

So no, the U.S. and Europe are not having to totally retrain their militaries to face a Cold War era-like Russian threat. But even so, the Americans and Europeans are not fully prepared to deal with a resurgent Russia or the threat of conventional war, because of the shift in focus from Russia to terror after the Cold War and after 9/11.

“We walked away from the Russians,” said Swan, “the Russians never went away.”

Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @KaitLavinder.

NATO, U.S. Take Hard Look at Readiness for Fight in Europe
SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 | KAITLIN LAVINDER

PHOTO: ISTOCK.COM/NELSON_A_ISHIKA
The Newsletter
Get exclusive analysis delivered to your inbox daily.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
One of Russia’s largest military exercises begins today – and it’s targeted toward the West. Zapad, which literally means “West” in Russian, is a recurrent exercise held in Russia’s western and central districts. The last one was in 2013, just a year before Russia invaded Crimea. This year’s exercise could see up to 100,000 Russian and Belarusian troops training for potential conflict with the West. So, is Europe prepared? The answer is, kind of.

Since Russia’s incursions into Crimea in 2014 and Georgia in 2008, Europe and the U.S. have been acutely aware of the need to train for conventional warfare. The problem is, for more than two decades, the U.S. and NATO have placed most of their resources in counterterror and counterinsurgency training.

“NATO and U.S. NATO forces have in the last 15 years since 9/11 retooled heavily, and not just materially but psychologically… to fight the counterinsurgency and conflicts other than major conventional war,” retired Brigadier General Peter Zwack, who was the U.S. defense attaché to Russia from 2012-14, told The Cipher Brief.

Jim Townsend, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy during the Obama Administration, explained that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Cold War appeared over and the U.S. and its allies had to figure out what new threat environment they faced.

After a decade of smaller conflicts like the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the Kosovo War in 1998-99, the answer came in earnest on September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing thousands of people.

After 9/11, the U.S. decided, “our fighting is not going to be high-end against a peer; it’s going to be dealing with counterterrorism,” Townsend, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told The Cipher Brief.

There was a “dismantling of the Cold War structure,” he said. “We redid our force structure in terms of brigades, battalions, corps… tanks and B52s, all that stuff was put on the back shelf.”

And the same goes for NATO. “NATO began to shape the force structure of all the other allies to be light, to be strategic and be able to move out of Europe to other places to take on the fight [against terrorism],” he said.

But then, 2008 happened. Russia – an all but forgotten adversary in the age of the war on terror – invaded Georgia, a European country that had declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia now occupies Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.

Georgia was the “trigger,” said Latvia’s defense attaché to the U.S. Colonel Dzintars Roga. That’s when we saw that Russia is “doing not what they are saying,” he told The Cipher Brief. So Latvia decided to put more attention on training its National Guard units for conventional warfare, he said. But the professional armed forces couldn’t follow suit, because they were heavily committed to NATO missions dealing with counterinsurgency, said Roga.

Then, 2014 happened – Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, causing an international uproar – forcing Latvia to “allocate the time” to look at conventional training “more seriously,” Roga said.

“When Crimea happened, we were absolutely flat-footed,” said Townsend, who was serving in the Obama Administration at the time. The NATO Wales Summit in September 2014 was supposed to be about how NATO should retool post-Afghanistan. Instead, it turned into “oh my God, we have got to retool ourselves to handle a fight in Europe,” Townsend said.

The U.S. and NATO both “haven’t really exercised as a complete military in a long time,” said Zwack, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute of National Security Studies at the National Defense University. “So all of us are having now to respond to what you would call a more conventional military aspect of the type that we were dealing with in the Cold War.”

How are the U.S. and NATO refocusing?

U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley has made readiness of the total army his number one priority. At a U.S. Army Reserve Command Senior Leader Conference in April 2016, Milley said that since 2005, Russia’s external behavior and foreign policy showed it is becoming an aggressive power.

“No one has seen aggressive foreign policy by any country in Europe for 70 years where armies, or surrogate armies, have crossed the borders of sovereign, independent countries,” he said. “That is a big deal. It’s got everybody’s attention now. Ten thousand years of recorded history tells us that aggression left unanswered leads to more aggression.”

Therefore, the U.S. is putting more money into things like its premier training centers – Fort Irwin in California, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and Hohenfels in Germany.

“It’s been about five years since the Army adjusted its training regime to place greater emphasis on high intensity combined arms operations along with lower end counterinsurgency training,” retired Lieutenant General Guy Swan told The Cipher Brief.

Swan said that additional funding is now going to the Decisive Action Training Environment for brigade-level training rotations that “had been lower priority in past years.”

European countries are shifting more resources to this kind of conventional training as well. Latvia’s biggest military base in Adazi, for example, is getting a major upgrade. Col. Roga said, “When I visited [Adazi] in July this year, I was surprised at how the base looks like, because I was a commander in this base in an infantry brigade, I left in 2013, and now in a 2017 visit I couldn’t recognize it – how many soldiers [and] equipment we have.”

NATO is also refocusing on readiness, with major readiness initiatives coming out of both the Wales and Warsaw summits. In addition, NATO is “beefing up” its intelligence capabilities, said Townsend, and it’s looking at how to move allied militaries quickly throughout Europe, in case of an attack.

This year, four NATO member states deployed troops to the Baltics and Poland on a rotational basis. And further south, NATO is increasing “air and maritime defensive activities in the Black Sea region,” Romanian Ambassador to the U.S. George Cristian Maior told The Cipher Brief. “For instance, the recent Saber Guardian exercise brought together in Romania over 25,000 troops from over 20 allies and partners, which trained for a wide range of defensive actions,” he said.

“NATO is very very busy right now trying to very quickly get stronger and better in terms of this ability to fight in Europe,” Townsend said.

But that doesn’t mean that NATO is reverting to a total Cold War mentality. Rather, it’s more of a “morphing,” said Townsend, where Europe and the U.S. have to “race to get up to speed on what armor should look like,” the use of tanks, and those kinds of things – while at the same time, the 9/11 legacy of needing to train for counterinsurgency and counterterror “hasn’t gone away.”

Col. Roga described this as a mixing of “old elements and new elements.”

And LTG Swan said it’s more “multidimensional than just conventional tank-on-tank warfare, which is what I grew up with in the 1980s and even up to the Desert Storm period.” Rather, it’s “multi-domain,” he said, “where it’s not just traditional land warfare, but now you’ve got the cyber dimension, you’ve got a mix of conventional and unconventional tactics being used, you’re seeing things that we don’t normally associate with combined arms military operations – things like intimidation, political action, assassination, even terrorism interspersed with conventional military affairs.”

So no, the U.S. and Europe are not having to totally retrain their militaries to face a Cold War era-like Russian threat. But even so, the Americans and Europeans are not fully prepared to deal with a resurgent Russia or the threat of conventional war, because of the shift in focus from Russia to terror after the Cold War and after 9/11.

“We walked away from the Russians,” said Swan, “the Russians never went away.”

Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @KaitLavinder.

EUROPE NATO RUSSIA
RELATED ARTICLES

The War of Words Between Europe and Turkey
FRITZ LODGE AND KAITLIN LAVINDER

Putin Praises Trump, Downplays Arms Race
LEONE LAKHANI

Trump's Win Creates Uncertainty in Europe
KAITLIN LAVINDER

-

RECENT BRIEFS
Russia’s Looming Military Exercise: A 21st Century Trojan Horse?
Callie Wang
Crashes at Sea Dog U.S. Navy in Crowded Waters
Levi Maxey
The Legacy of Leadership Decapitation after 9/11
Bennett Seftel
Will U.S. Human Rights Efforts Wilt Under Trump?
Fritz Lodge
Egypt's President Stands on Shifting Sands
Bennett Seftel

 

[Housecarl]

North Korea just launched another missile. - 9/14/2017
Started by eXe‎, Today 03:05 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ust-launched-another-missile.-9-14-2017/page2

The Winds of War Blow in Korea and The Far East
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-of-War-Blow-in-Korea-and-The-Far-East/page48

--

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...n-for-nuclear-weapons/?utm_term=.7ce5d443c764

A South Korean delegation asks Washington for nuclear weapons

By Josh Rogin September 14 at 2:54 PM

The heated debate in South Korea over redeploying U.S. nuclear weapons on its territory has now reached Washington. A senior delegation of South Korean lawmakers is in town making the case to the Trump administration and Congress that such a move is needed to confront North Korea’s growing nuclear capability and place more pressure on China.

“We are here to ask for redeployment of tactical nuclear warheads in South Korea,” Lee Cheol Woo, the head of the intelligence committee of South Korea’s National Assembly, told me Thursday morning.

Lee is heading a delegation of members of the Liberty Korea Party, the opposition to President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party. He is also the chairman of the assembly’s special committee for nuclear crisis response.

Moon told CNN yesterday that he does not agree that tactical nuclear weapons should be reintroduced to South Korea or that Seoul should develop its own nuclear weapons. He warned it could “lead to a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia.” But Lee’s delegation believes that as the North Korea nuclear crisis worsens, a push by the Trump administration or Congress could help persuade Moon’s government to change its position, as it has already done regarding the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.

“The ruling party came to power based on their opposition to the deployment of THAAD and having tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea,” Lee said. “But if there were to be additional requests from the U.S. government, then they would have to listen to the many voices that are asking for the additional deployment of nuclear warheads.”

The delegation will meet with the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Joe Yun, and senior Asia-focused lawmakers including Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

The delegation touts rising South Korean public support for their initiative. Even before Kim Jong Un’s latest nuclear test, South Korean polls showed that 68 percent support reintroducing nuclear weapons and that 60 percent support South Korea developing nuclear weapons of its own.

The United States stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea for most of the Cold War, but they were removed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. After South Korea’s defense minister suggested this month it’s worth reviewing the idea, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “it ought to be seriously considered.” Trump administration officials have said they are not ruling out the possibility, should the South Korean government request it.

Adding nuclear weapons to the already volatile situation on the Korean peninsula seems to run counter to the stated U.S. goal of completely denuclearizing the peninsula. But proponents of the idea lay out three key reasons it could be helpful.

First, North Korea is very close to achieving the capability to launch nuclear weapons via both intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles. That changes the calculus of strategic deterrence. Putting nukes in South Korea would strengthen the ability of the United States and South Korea to retaliate, thereby bolstering that deterrence.

Separately, the Chinese government would surely oppose putting nuclear weapons back in South Korea. Beijing has been subjecting the South Korean economy to severe punishment in response to the THAAD deployment. But the threat of South Korea going nuclear could push Beijing into doing more to rein in Pyongyang.

Lastly, since North Korea is now a de-facto nuclear state, putting nukes back in South Korea could be a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Pyongyang.

But what about Moon’s warning about potential escalation? Kim Tae Woo of Konyang University, a member of Lee’s special committee, said that the benefits of the move outweigh the risks. “First of all, we want to destroy the North Korean belief that they can decouple the alliance by threatening the U.S. continent,” he said. “And also we have to destroy the Chinese belief that China can let the North Korea nuclear program go on.”

The current U.S. strategy is to cooperate with Beijing to increase pressure on North Korea to change its calculus and eventually bring it back to the table. “But do you think the current strategy is working?” Kim said.

So long as Moon is in power, prospects for putting nukes back in South Korea will remain slim. The Trump administration would be unwise to publicly break with Moon on such an important issue. Alliance unity is an important signal to Pyongyang and Beijing. But ignoring the fact that North Korea’s nuclear advancement is changing the strategic situation is also deeply unwise. The only thing worse than failing to prevent a new nuclear arms race would be losing it.

30 Comments

Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security. Follow @joshrogin

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.thedailybeast.com/us-military-american-isis-fighter-reportedly-surrenders

NABBED

U.S. Military: American Fighting for ISIS ‘Surrenders’

The U.S. citizen fighting for ISIS was captured in Syria, a well-placed source told The Beast. It’ll be a crucial test for the Trump administration on handling wartime detentions.

BETSY WOODRUFF
SPENCER ACKERMAN
09.14.17 10:30 AM ET

The U.S. military confirmed a Daily Beast report Thursday that an American fighting in Syria for the so-called Islamic State has been taken into custody.

“The U.S. citizen is being legally detained by Department of Defense personnel as a known enemy combatant,” Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said.

A source familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast earlier that the American was captured by Kurdish forces. Other military spokespeople indicated that the fighter “surrendered” on or around Tuesday.

In either case, the detention of an American fighting for ISIS on an active battlefield would set up a major decision for Donald Trump about the future of wartime captures.

According to The Daily Beast’s source, the U.S. citizen was initially taken into custody by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the mostly Kurdish local proxy that the American military is using to fight ISIS on the ground in Syria. That source said the Kurds then turned the captive over to American forces. It is not clear where the American is currently being held, nor if the International Committee of the Red Cross has had access to him.

Neither the U.S. military command overseeing the war against ISIS nor the Justice Department, which plays a substantial role in deciding what to do with U.S. citizen detainees, are disputing this reporting.

“We are aware of the report that a U.S. citizen believed to be fighting for ISIS surrendered to Syrian Democratic Forces on or about Sept. 12,” said the spokesman, Maj. Earl Brown.

 

[Garryowen]

He should lose his citizenship, at the very least. Becoming an enemy combatant should get him a trial for treason.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/arti...ail&utm_term=0_694f73a8dc-2974c1ea67-81835773

Al Qaeda Thrives Across Weak West African States

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 | BENNETT SEFTEL

Earlier this year, The Cipher Brief examined the deteriorating security situation across North Africa, contending that al Qaeda’s regional offshoot, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was poised to wreak havoc and generate further instability throughout the Sahel. Over the past nine months, this appears to have been the case as AQIM has accelerated its operations and stretched its target set into new territories.

Last week, the U.S. evacuated more than 100 Peace Corps volunteers from the West African country of Burkina Faso, which has witnessed an uptick in extremist related activity since January. The announcement came one month after a mid-August terrorist attack on a prominent Turkish café in the Burkina Faso capital city of Ouagadougou left nearly 20 people dead, including foreigners from Kuwait, Canada, France, Lebanon, Nigeria, Senegal, and Turkey. Although no group formally claimed responsibility, the incident bears the hallmark of atrocities carried out by AQIM, which is known for targeting locations frequented by Westerners.

AQIM was created in January 2007 as a rebranding of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. The group initially fixated its operations in and around Algiers, Algeria’s capital, conducting more than 600 attacks against the Algerian government. Eventually, the Algerian army pushed AQIM southward, where it hijacked an ethnic Tuareg-nationalist rebellion in Mali and assumed control over the northern Mali region of Azawad in 2012. From that launching point, AQIM has orchestrated attacks throughout the Sahel region, including at several western hotels in Mali and in neighboring Burkina Faso.

Of all the al Qaeda affiliates, AQIM is most notorious for snatching foreigners and turning hostages into profit. Between 2008 and 2014, AQIM received approximately $91.5 million dollars in ransom payments, nearly three times the amount of the second largest total generated by al Qaeda’s Yemeni offshoot during that same time span. AQIM’s aptitude for hostage taking was enhanced after it relocated in northern Mali, a popular destination for western tourists and aid workers.

However, AQIM is not the only terrorist organization that has carved out a stronghold in northern Mali in recent years. Other jihadist groups, such as Ansar Dine, led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, and al Mourabitoun, led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, have also taken advantage of Mali’s political volatility to establish sanctuaries where they can organize, plan, and coordinate attacks. This March, the two groups, as well as the smaller but no less important Macina Liberation Front, merged into one entity called “Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen,” or the Group to Support Islam and Muslims, under the leadership of Ghaly, and pledged allegiance to Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah, al Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the head of AQIM Abu Musab Abdul Wadud.

Wadud welcomed the unification on Twitter and Telegram, posting an audio message saying, “I take this opportunity to call on all jihadi groups to follow the example of their brothers in the Sahel and the Sahara, and to hasten to join together and achieve unity,” according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements released by extremist movements.

Although these militant groups had maintained their own varying levels of ties to al Qaeda, their union served an important purpose: it strengthened the al Qaeda network’s operational capacity by bringing these factions under one umbrella where they could share resources. Furthermore, according to Michael Shurkin, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND corporation, the specific “inclusion in the group of Mali’s Macina Liberation Front, which rallies some radicals in the Peul (Fulani, in English-speaking countries) ethnic group, underscores one of the most dangerous developments yet: violent extremism has taken root among the region’s diverse ethno-linguistic communities and profits from and exacerbates inter-communal conflicts and resentments.”

Efforts to beat back AQIM have been led by the French, who intervened in Mali in 2013 to prevent AQIM and its associated militias from capturing Mali’s capital, Bamako. The French successfully halted AQIM’s advances, killing many senior AQIM operatives, including former top military commander Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, and deployed a force of approximately 4,000 troops to northern Mali to deter another AQIM-led uprising.

“I want to underscore the importance of partnerships, in this case between the U.S. and France,” explains David Shedd, Cipher Brief Expert and former Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “France has played, and continues to play, a very important role in combatting AQIM.”

“The French have stepped up to their responsibility to go after these Islamic extremist groups, which have the potential of reaching into Europe should they not be curtailed on the ground in Mali, Mauritania, Libya, and elsewhere in North Africa,” Shedd continues.

However, patrolling northern Mali has taken a toll on the French government and military alike. In circumstances reminiscent of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq, a weak central government in Mali has left the French to shoulder the burden of keeping an al Qaeda franchise under wraps. Whether the French will be able or willing to continue this counterterrorism mission is uncertain.

The lack of strong central governance in many countries in the Sahel is a key factor that has contributed to AQIM’s flourishing. With these governments unable to hold territory or provide basic social services to many in need, AQIM has been able hunker down in ungoverned spaces.

“[AQIM’s] expansion has occurred over the years because it has been able to successfully recruit and infiltrate within various ethnic groups that have legitimate grievances,” Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph Atallah, who previously served as the Africa Counterterrorism Director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told The Cipher Brief last month.

“And with a youth bulge like there is in North Africa across the band of the Sahel, many of them are without jobs, and they can’t seem to fit into society the right way where they can feed themselves, get married, and build a family,” Atallah explained. “So these groups come in and recruit from within those pools.”

Therefore, according to Shedd, an important starting point for the U.S. is to work with local governments and partners to address the root causes driving people to join terrorist organizations. Burkina Faso boasts one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, while in Niger, approximately 8 million of the countries 19 million citizens are without safe drinking water. Helping to provide education, healthcare, and even access to clean water could go a long way in suppressing the allure of terrorism.

“[We] need to enhance outreach with partner nations in that area so that improving civil society is a priority as part of the counterterrorism efforts,” says Shedd. “That means coming in with education and other longer term efforts that address the grievances associated with some of the things that AQIM takes advantage of.”

With the French growing weary and international counterterrorism efforts concentrated on defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq, AQIM seems well positioned to carry on its spate of attacks essentially unchallenged. And until vital steps are taken to tackle problems and improve the lives of many in the Sahel, it appears that AQIM will continue to find abundant populations from which to draw support.

Bennett Seftel is deputy director of analysis at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @BennettSeftel.

-

RELATED ARTICLES

Network Take: Clapper and McLaughlin say Spain a Likely Target
THE CIPHER BRIEF STAFF

Does Moderate Political Islam Exist?
FRITZ LODGE

Hawala Networks: The Paperless Trail of Terrorist Transactions
BENNETT SEFTEL

-

EXPERT COMMENTARY
David R. Shedd
Economic Development in West Africa Can Counter Terror
DAVID R. SHEDD

FORMER ACTING DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Michael Shurkin
Sahel Governments Need More Security Assistance
MICHAEL SHURKIN

SENIOR POLITICAL SCIENTIST, RAND CORPORATION

-

RECENT BRIEFS
Russia’s Looming Military Exercise: A 21st Century Trojan Horse?
Callie Wang
Crashes at Sea Dog U.S. Navy in Crowded Waters
Levi Maxey
The Legacy of Leadership Decapitation after 9/11
Bennett Seftel
Will U.S. Human Rights Efforts Wilt Under Trump?
Fritz Lodge
Egypt's President Stands on Shifting Sands
Bennett Seftel

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://warontherocks.com/2017/09/southern-asia-is-heating-up-an-indian-perspective/

SOUTHERN ASIA IS HEATING UP: AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

GURMEET KANWAL
SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of “Southern (Dis)Comfort,” a new series from War on the Rocks and the Stimson Center. The series seeks to unpack the dynamics of intensifying competition — military, economic, diplomatic — in Southern Asia, principally between China, India, Pakistan, and the United States. Catch up on the rest of the series here.

Strife-torn Southern Asia is the second most unstable region in the world after West Asia. India has unresolved territorial disputes with both China and Pakistan. As the Line of Actual Control with China has not been demarcated, there are frequent patrol face-offs. A major standoff, that lasted over two months (mid-June to late August 2017) at the India-Bhutan-China tri-boundary region, has been resolved, but could flare up again. Though there is a cease-fire on the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, of late it is being observed more in the breach. China colludes with Pakistan in the nuclear warhead, ballistic missile, and military hardware fields. This has emboldened Pakistan’s deep state — the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate — to sponsor terrorism as an instrument of state policy to destabilise Jammu and Kashmir and attack cities in India through mercenary jihadists. A large-scale terrorist strike in future, similar to the attacks on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and at Mumbai in November 2008, could lead to war.

The unresolved territorial disputes and repeated terrorist attacks have the potential to trigger conflict, which may not remain limited. India, China, and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states and a miscalculation during conflict may result in rapid escalation to nuclear exchanges. Also, given the Chinese-Pakistani collusion, India is likely to be confronted with a two-front situation during a future conflict with either of them. To navigate the emerging instability in Southern Asia and shifting adversarial relationships with Pakistan and China, India will need to intensify its third most consequential relationship — its strategic partnership with the United States.

India-Pakistan Relations: Stuck in a Groove

Though an ugly stability has prevailed for some time, new risks are emerging in the Indian-Pakistani relationship. The situation demands that India strengthen its military capabilities while deepening U.S engagement. Despite grave provocation from Pakistan over the last three decades, India has consistently observed strategic restraint to keep the level of conflict low so as not to hamper Indian economic growth. However, two attacks by ISI-sponsored terrorists forced India to retaliate assertively. The first was an attack on the Pathankot Air Base in January 2016, a week after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a bold, unscheduled halt in Lahore in a bid to meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and reach out to the leadership of Pakistan. The second was on a military camp at Uri near the Line of Control in September 2016.

Taking the Pakistan Army completely by surprise, Indian Special Forces launched multiple surgical strikes across the Line of Control and caused extensive damage. In a one-night operation, six to eight teams crossed the Line of Control at several points over a wide front and destroyed terrorist launch pads in the near vicinity of the line. Regular Pakistani Army soldiers at these launch pads are also likely to have been killed or injured. The strikes had a salutary effect and infiltration levels dropped sharply in the months that followed.

India’s new policy is clearly to maintain a posture of tactical assertiveness under the umbrella of strategic restraint. The aim is to raise the cost for the Pakistan Army and the ISI for waging their war for Kashmir through asymmetric means. The level of the punishment inflicted and the caliber of the weapons employed for the purpose are likely to be raised with each new provocation until the cost becomes prohibitive for the Pakistan Army and the ISI. In case there is a major terrorist attack in India in future and there is credible evidence of the involvement of the organs of the Pakistani state, stronger military retaliation is likely.

The impact of the deterioration in relations is that the “ugly” stability prevailing in Southern Asia has been further undermined. A miscalculation on either side could lead to conventional conflict with nuclear undertones. India’s political leaders and the armed forces believe there is space for conventional conflict below the nuclear threshold. For now, tactical assertiveness under an umbrella of strategic restraint remains the favored approach. However, the Indian public’s patience is wearing thin and its willingness to countenance escalation as an appropriate response to terrorism may be increasing. These domestic pressures, combined with the army’s ongoing search for a limited-war strategy and military modernization, could lead New Delhi to give sanction to proactive offensive operations along the lines of Cold Start in the event of another terrorist-initiated spark. The belief in Western capitals is that conventional conflict between India and Pakistan could rapidly escalate to nuclear exchanges. India’s consideration of escalatory, Cold Start-like operations — and Pakistan’s development of tactical nuclear weapons and its plans to neutralize India’s superiority in conventional military forces through their early use — fuel these concerns.

India-China Relations: Clash of Worldviews

The Indian-Chinese relationship has been stable at the strategic level, but marked by political, diplomatic, and military instability at the tactical level. However, the modus vivendi that has managed relations for decades appears to be fraying. An enhanced U.S.-Indian relationship can help manage deepening Chinese-Pakistani ties.

Besides the long-standing territorial dispute between the two countries, transgressions across the Line of Actual Control by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are frequent despite the Border Peace and Tranquillity Agreement (1993) and several other accords, all of which forbid such activities. As was well reported, India and China were embroiled in a contest of wills in the India-Bhutan-China tri-boundary over the summer. The crisis started when the Indian Army crossed into territory disputed by Bhutan and China to stop PLA soldiers from constructing a motorable road toward a Bhutan Army outpost. In contrast to past border disputes involving India and China, Beijing insisted New Delhi had intervened across a settled international boundary and, therefore, had to withdraw its forces before negotiations could commence. As it was unfolding, Indian strategic thinkers interpreted the incident as no less than an attempt by Beijing to force New Delhi to “acknowledge the power disparity between the two sides and show appropriate deference to China.”

China refuses to allow Masood Azhar, the founder of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad — a U.N.-designated terrorist group — be designated as a terrorist by the U.N. sanctions committee. It has blocked India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group as it wants simultaneous entry for Pakistan, one of the world’s worst proliferators. China objects every time an Indian political leader visits Arunachal Pradesh — an Indian state that it claims — and even lodged a protest at the visit of the Dalai Lama to a monastery in the state.

The China-Pakistan relationship has been described by both as an “all-weather friendship.” The collusion between the two states has deepened with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) beginning to take shape. CPEC is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that seeks to extend China’s strategic outreach deep into the Indo-Pacific region, giving a fillip to its flagging economy by generating large-scale construction activity and creating new markets for its products. Passing through the disputed territories of Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the $54 billion project will link Xingjiang Province of China with Gwadar Port on the Makran Coast west of Karachi. New Delhi fears that the presence of PLA personnel in Pakistan in large numbers to protect CPEC and related investments could further vitiate the security environment.

Stabilizing Influence: Indo-U.S. Strategic Partnership

The Indo-U.S. defense relationship has witnessed a remarkable rise in recent years. During his tenure at the Pentagon’s helm, Ash Carter memorably remarked that the Indo-U.S. relationship was “destined to be one of the most significant partnerships of the 21st century.” These sentiments, widespread in New Delhi and Washington, have led to concrete advances, such as the conclusion of a Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and India’s designation as a Major Defense Partner of the United States.

Some expectations on both sides are yet to be met. For instance, India has not signed the Communication and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement or the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, which the Pentagon says must be concluded before Washington would be able to establish encrypted communication links with New Delhi and share sensitive data, such as targeting information, during both peacetime and crisis scenarios. Nevertheless, the overall trend in the relationship is clear, with defense trade between the two powers totalling more than $10 billion over the last decade. The partnership is likely to gradually rise to the next level, including joint threat assessment, joint contingency planning, and joint operations when the vital national interests of both countries are threatened.

Washington is also well-positioned to help New Delhi deal with the emerging competitive realities of its strategic environment.

One of the motivations behind this growing strategic partnership is to provide a hedge for both against what is increasingly being perceived as China’s not-so-peaceful rise. In case China behaves irresponsibly and uses military force somewhere in the Indo-Pacific, both India and the United States will need a strong partnership to manage the consequences. American support is essential to the revitalization of Indian military power, whether through arms sales, technology transfers, or co-production of weapons systems, all of which are on the table. The Doka La standoff serves as a reminder that India can ill afford to continue lagging in terms of the pace and scope of its defense-modernization process. Ties to the United States must also be leveraged in countering Beijing’s provocative diplomatic and military maneuvers. Washington has been steadfast in its support for New Delhi’s bid for NSG membership and Azhar’s designation as a global terrorist despite Beijing’s intransigence. It has also bolstered Indian naval capabilities via maritime exercises such as Malabar and the sale of maritime surveillance and anti-submarine platforms that are essential for tracking and countering China’s presence in the Indian Ocean.

The United States could also work with India to mitigate dangers emanating from Pakistan. Washington’s maintenance of ties to Rawalpindi is predicated upon ensuring that nuclear warheads never fall into jihadist hands. U.S.-Pakistani cooperation on nuclear security serves Indian interests, but there are other areas in which Washington could be a better friend to New Delhi.

First, the United States could help India bolster its standoff strike and surveillance capabilities along the Indo-Pakistani border. Israel has already offered India armed drones. The prospective sale of U.S.-made, unarmed Sea Guardian drones signals that intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is a priority area of collaboration. Persistent American concerns that such transfers could violate its nonproliferation obligations under the Missile Technology Control Regime may be on the wane. Equally important, the United States could put more pressure on Pakistan to cease its support to anti-Indian terrorists. Washington’s decision last year to withhold $300 million from Rawalpindi in military reimbursements, the debate in policy circles as to whether the United States should designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, and the Modi-Trump joint statement’s emphasis on stopping “cross-border terrorist attacks perpetrated by Pakistan-based groups” are indicators of a potential New Delhi-Washington convergence on Pakistan. Resurgent India is now at a breakout moment in its history. As a status-quo power that has shunned military alliances and maintained its strategic autonomy, India is being gradually propelled by China’s military assertiveness to hedge its bets, especially by courting deeper ties to Washington. India must reassert its primacy in Southern Asia by looking and acting outwards. It is India’s manifest destiny to play a leading role in shaping the emerging order in the Indo-Pacific region.

Gurmeet Kanwal is Distinguished Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi and Adjunct Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington, D.C.

 

[Housecarl]

Explosion on London Underground Train - 8:20 local time Rush Hour!
Started by Melodi‎, Today 02:12 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ground-Train-8-20-local-time-Rush-Hour!/page2


North Korea expert: 'No way to stop' Kim Jong Un's regime
Started by Dennis Olson‎, Yesterday 03:10 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ea-expert-No-way-to-stop-Kim-Jong-Un-s-regime

--------

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-%96-and-Doesn%92t-%96-for-Nuclear-Deterrence

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://thediplomat.com/2017/09/what-north-korea-means-and-doesnt-for-nuclear-deterrence/

What North Korea Means – and Doesn’t – for Nuclear Deterrence

Rather than underscoring the enduring logic of nuclear deterrence, the case of North Korea highlights its flimsiness.

By John Borrie, Tim Caughley, and Wilfred Wan
September 15, 2017

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — North Korea — is an ongoing awkward case for the international community. Despite different approaches and efforts over decades to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, North Korea has developed a nuclear arsenal and continues to carry out nuclear test detonations, most recently on September 3. Moreover, it continues to improve its missile delivery systems, clearly with a view to fielding intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) able to strike targets as far away as its nuclear-armed adversary across the Pacific. Its latest missile test — over Japan once more — came days after the adoption of the latest round of United Nations sanctions in response to its sixth nuclear test.

With no end to the crisis in sight, proponents of nuclear deterrence have spun the North Korean case as proof of the futility of any international effort to move away from continued reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence. For instance, France, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly condemned the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 122 countries, on the grounds that it “offers no solution to the grave threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program, nor does it address other security challenges that make nuclear deterrence necessary.” Yet other approaches to tackling North Korea’s WMD-related programs have not been conspicuously successful either. Nor was it anyone’s intent in the ban treaty negotiations to presume to devise a solution tailored to North Korea.

That the difficulty of dealing with North Korea is being used as a prop to support existing policies and practices of nuclear deterrence is worth study. On the face of it, the presence and readiness to use nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia would seem to be the security problem, not the solution. Yet nuclear deterrence proponents argue that nuclear weapon-based deterrence is, in effect, the only way to contain the North Korean regime, while ignoring the asymmetric security dynamics that led to this situation — and where it might lead. Even were such a claim true, it simply does not follow that it validates continued reliance on nuclear deterrence in other regions or contexts, especially in view of our improving level of understanding of the sheer spectrum of causes of risk of inadvertent or deliberate nuclear use, and of the “near misses” that have occurred in the nuclear age.

Instead, the case of North Korea underlines the not-insignificant risks associated with nuclear weapons in any hands, including the ways in which this distorts the security perceptions and choices of others. In this sense, North Korea is revealing on at least three counts for wider nuclear weapons policies and practices. Firstly, the relative lack of predictability of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, expose inherent contradictions in the notion of stability founded upon nuclear deterrence. Secondly, while North Korea’s opacity is extreme, lack of transparency is characteristic of the nuclear weapons program of all of the nuclear-armed states. Thirdly, Pyongyang’s brazen threats reflect a systemic normalization of the nuclear warfighting “option.” While other nuclear-armed states refrain from similar rhetoric, they have invested substantially to enhance the effectiveness, flexibility, and thus, the usability of nuclear weapons — a trend that should elicit greater concern.

This article briefly explores each of these three points and considers what this means for nuclear weapon-risk reduction on a global scale.

The “predictability” of nuclear deterrence

It is worth recalling that nuclear deterrence emerged, intellectually and doctrinally, in a Cold War bipolar environment in which nuclear weapons were already being deployed. After the particular scare of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, special emphasis and effort was placed by policymakers and theorists on both sides on notions of strategic stability and — in the U.S. context — on the rationality of policymakers in order to avert the death and destruction that would be brought upon by nuclear use, while at the same time making every preparation for such use. Yet even at the time nuclear deterrence wasn’t necessarily widely considered as realistic, as in the 1950s and 1960s “there was no evidence on which to base claims that the arms race… would end peacefully.” That things turned out as they did indicates good luck played a part to a degree that appears under-appreciated today.

This raises discomforting questions about the Korean situation. Can Western nuclear decision-makers be confident that the North Korean leadership understands deterrence in the same way they do, and for that matter are persuaded that it might not be better to just use nuclear weapons and sit out the consequences in their deeply-dug tunnels and bunkers once some line is crossed? Has either side acted in a manner so consistent and predictable that it reassures the other, and greatly reduces the possibility of nuclear use? The fact is that little is really known about the North Korean leadership’s state of mind. Nor can it be assumed that in the current age of relentless public spin, “fake news,” and the social media maelstrom, the nuclear decision-makers of this hermetically isolated regime correctly interpret what they are seeing and hearing about leaders on the other side.

Brinksmanship involving nuclear-armed powers, as on the peninsula, reflect the inherent risk of escalation that accompanies steps taken to preserve the credibility of the threat of nuclear weapon-use. With use postures unknown to those outside closed elites within their governments, and no uniform commitment to confining use to strictly retaliatory situations, the ingredients are in place for crises that can take the world to the nuclear brink. Such crises can take many forms. The U.S., for instance, sped up deployment of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea in response to Pyongyang’s increased pace of missile testing, which in turn has resulted in redoubled North Korean testing and vocal opposition from China and Russia. Elsewhere, escalating tensions in disputed Kashmir in 2016 reportedly led Pakistan’s Defense Minister Muhammad Asif to threaten the use of tactical nuclear weapons against India.

Nuclear weapons programs as black boxes

For nuclear deterrence proponents, the maintenance of strategic stability hinges in part on the straightforward answers nuclear weapons provide to questions of “What deters? How much is enough? And what if deterrence fails?” Yet the presence of North Korea and the other second-generation proliferators undercuts the simplicity of the answers. The extreme opacity of the North Korean regime, for instance, highlights the challenge of capability assessment. Only in July 2017 did the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency conclude that Pyongyang had developed a miniaturized nuclear warhead (a claim made in 2016), and there remains dispute as to whether its July 2017 test demonstrated possession of ICBM technology. Any incorrect or out-dated misconceptions about capabilities calls into question the applicability of defense and security postures — a critical blow to the supposed elegance of deterrence doctrine.

Indeed, the secrecy associated with nuclear weapons programs further hinders the predictability critical to the value of nuclear deterrence. Opacity may be sound logic from a national perspective — preserving both the security of a deterrent and the ambiguity central to use credibility — but it has the concurrent effect of increasing the possibility for escalation. Indeed, the likelihood of inadvertent or deliberate nuclear use is likely underestimated, considering the long history of (known) near misses, false alarms, and accidents, and in light of the rudimentary state of knowledge regarding the susceptibility of components to hacking and cyber-attack. While the U.S. and the Soviet Union hardly operated with perfect information during the Cold War, the multitude of new unknowns today — including a larger number of nuclear-armed states — throws additional wrenches into the environment.

The dearth of information extends beyond capabilities. Little is known about the laws and regulations North Korea has in place — if any — to preserve the safety and security of its stock-piled materials, even as it ramps up development and expands its activity across multiple sites. The case represents an extreme but not an exception, as the availability of such information varies significantly across possessor states. With the construction of a crude nuclear bomb identified as a primary risk scenario, and nuclear ambition expressed by terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, threats of material theft and facility sabotage cannot be taken lightly. The information deficit thus undermines the viability of nuclear weapon-based deterrence both directly and indirectly — especially as the non-state threat demands its unnatural application.

Nuclear usability

The central paradox of nuclear deterrence rests in the rationale that it is “the very lethality of nuclear weapons that lessens the likelihood of their use sufficiently to make us safe.” There is no advantage to use given the inevitability of retaliation, as advanced by policymakers and theorists, and thus it follows states are reassured that nuclear weapons must not and therefore will not be used. Yet, as the credibility of the threat of use relies upon “risk, unpredictability, and extreme consequences,” states continue to be enhancing the possibility of escalation. Further, they appear to be lowering the very threshold for use — chipping away at the shared understanding of “unacceptable costs” key to the upkeep of nuclear deterrence.

Again, the North Korean exposes the precarious logic of nuclear weapon-based deterrence. Its repeated and specific threats of use call into question whether the regime is constrained by the use “taboo.” The nature of its recent tests — emanating from multiple sites, with ranges that match those of U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea, and in the latest instances flying over Japan — coupled with an ever-improving capacity to weaponize its missiles add further cause for concern. With the Trump administration offering its own harsh rhetoric in response (a stark departure from predecessors), nuclear deterrence appears at risk of playing out to a catastrophic conclusion.

Yet nuclear deterrence proponents should be alarmed that nuclear-armed states are not merely normalizing the nuclear warfighting option with their rhetoric but with their practices and policies. Modernization programs widespread across possessor states have made these armaments more effective in locating and destroying targets, not just more credibly usable in a deterrent sense, but attractive for actual warfighting. Exacerbating this is the use of delivery systems — such as the air-launched cruise missiles maintained by the U.S., Russia, and France — that expand conventional and nuclear flexibility. Alarmingly, these program and military strategies are built on assumptions about the controllable nature of nuclear conflict and of the toxic, long-lasting radiation that would result.

Stepping back from the brink

Challenges to the predictability of nuclear deterrence upend the possibility that it can serve as a foundation for strategic stability much longer. They put unprecedented strain on the (fallible) human safeguards in place against nuclear use, making manifestly clear the need for fail-safes and mechanisms for de-escalation and prevention of catastrophic accident or misperception. Following the Cuban Missile crisis for instance, the two nuclear superpowers created a Moscow-Washington hotline. Yet half a century later, in a far more complex global environment, there remains a dearth of such dedicated communications channels and emergency hotlines beyond a bilateral basis. Even where such mechanisms exist, they have not been immune to political maneuvering: North Korea disabled its military hotline with Seoul in response to joint US-ROK military drills in 2013 and following the ROK suspension of cooperation at Kaesong in 2016.

The significance of such last lines of defense illustrates the volatility of crisis situations in the first place, and the need to preserve what meager stability can be gleaned through deterrence prior to reaching the brink. Information plays a key role, with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the U.S. and Russia a potential model for multilateral information-sharing, for example on air-launched cruise missiles and delivery systems. The reduction of the operational status of nuclear-tipped missiles, the separation of conventional from nuclear stockpiles, or their command and control systems, and bans on entire classes of weapons (such as cruise missiles or short-range nuclear-capable tactical missiles) can reinforce the clarity that underwrites deterrence, lessening the possibility for escalation.

Still, risk reduction demands more than a lengthening of the fuse. Instead, it is essential to overturn the trend towards normalizing nuclear warfighting. Yes, the very norm of nuclear deterrence contains the idea that “there are circumstances so extreme that they would remove all inhibitions on nuclear use.” Yet, current rhetoric and modernization efforts help to expand the spectrum of “acceptable” circumstances. To reverse the trend, all nuclear-armed states should adopt no-first-use policies (in the vein of China and India), or eliminate launch-on-warning postures. More effective measures will require a reappraisal of nuclear deterrence in this day and age and its alleged benefits versus its risks, especially when other means of deterrence are available, such as precise conventional weapons and cyber.

Conclusion

The crisis on the Korean peninsula continues to loom. Six-Party Talks are long stalled; the long succession of UN sanctions has done little to slow the steady development of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes. For nuclear deterrence proponents, the bleak picture provides a reaffirmation of the value of nuclear weapons. What else is to stop Kim Jong-Un from following through with his brazen threats? Why else would he pause before attacking South Korea, Japan, even the U.S., if not for the knowledge that retaliation is inevitable?

As argued, however, the case of North Korea underscores not the enduring logic of nuclear deterrence but its flimsiness. It is a microcosm of global nuclear risk, a logical consequence of the central role ascribed to nuclear weapons in the security landscape. As the fuse for nuclear confrontation burns ever shorter, the idea of strategic stability rooted in nuclear weapon-based deterrence appears increasingly shaky. The recent adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons indicates a clear majority of states recognize the severity of the situation and see nuclear deterrence as a dangerous relic of the past — even as nuclear-armed states and their allies remain enmeshed in its logic.

Yet, there is common ground in re-evaluating these long-held beliefs on nuclear deterrence as a contribution to nuclear risk reduction. A focus on risk reduction has been an important point of policy convergence for the international community, and must remain so. Ultimately, the threat of escalation into nuclear conflict cannot be taken lightly, as the North Korean situation underlines. As former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, there are “no ‘right hands’ that can handle these ‘wrong weapons.’”

John Borrie is the Chief of Research with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). Tim Caughley is retired; he was formerly Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR, Director of the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs in Geneva, and Deputy Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament. Wilfred Wan is a researcher with UNIDIR.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://news.usni.org/2017/09/15/expert-u-s-see-china-number-one-adversary-not-trading-partner

Expert: U.S. Should See China as ‘Number One’ Adversary, Not Trading Partner

By: John Grady
September 15, 2017 11:48 AM

The People’s Republic China needs to be seen by the United States as its principal potential adversary in the years ahead, not as a commercial partner that America cannot live without, a leading expert on maritime issues said Wednesday.

Answering an audience question at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Seth Cropsey, director of seapower programs at the Hudson institute, said, “China should be our Number One concern; it’s not.” He added that Chinese leaders want to restore it to the status of a great state, overcoming a 19th and early 20th-century history of European imperialism, “not only at sea, but especially at sea. They’ve invested a lot in satellite technology, in cyber technology, building a fleet” that potentially could be larger than the United States’ in the not-too-distant future.

[http://www.heritage.org/defense/eve...oking-american-seapower-and-what-do-about-it]

Cropsey, the author of Seablindness: How Political Neglect is Choking American Seapower and What to Do about It, said, the Chinese “have their own way of looking at things” from their island-building campaign to their use of “lawfare,” to bolster territorial claims in the East and South China Seas and disregard international court rulings when those claims are rejected. He said President Donald Trump was correct in judging Beijing’s commercial policies. “They’re mercantilists, not free traders.”

While China’s close neighbors say how important their economic and commercial ties to Beijing are for their own development, privately they are very concerned about its increasingly assertive behavior on their borders. Cropsey said out of the limelight and away from microphones they say, “if you guys [the United States] get out … if China becomes the hegemon, they will treat us like dogs” as it did in the past when it was a great power.

In his remarks before the question-and-answer session, he said, “I wish I could be optimistic about the future” of the challenges facing the United States not only from a transoceanic Chinese navy, but as it concerns Russian behavior in the Baltic and Black Seas, Iran’s continuing development of anti-ship weaponry and the tolls the continuing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan are taking on the fleet and the Marine Corps.

Trying to meet the combatant commanders’ requirements for presence that call for 370 to 400 ships with the 276 ships now in the fleet “is an exercise in futility” and leads to accidents such as the ship collisions suffered in U.S. 7th Fleet. Cropsey said 350 ships “is the absolute bare minimum to meet [today’s] requirements.” He pointed out the administration’s call for a fleet that size is to be built over 30 years and “it doesn’t provide the immediate kind of relief that is necessary” to reduce today’s high operating tempo.

As to the additional $50 billion more in the coming year’s defense program over this year’s, he said much of the money that will go to the Department of the Navy is earmarked for repairs, maintenance and fixing shipyards and port facilities not shipbuilding.

Several times in his remarks and answers, Cropsey said it takes “political will and political judgment” in the executive branch and Congress to provide for national security, even as they have to address the current unexpected hundreds of billions in costs that will be associated with recovery from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

“These judgments go back to money.”

He called for a “mix of less technologically-stuffed ships” to be put into the construction program. “Our ships are being built as more and more complex systems,” he said in answer to a question. That also means “changing the way we fight,” employing more unmanned systems in air, on the surface and underwater and inviting more “cooperation and coordination with private industry than is expected of operators today.”

Crospey said in answer to follow-up questions on whether Defense Secretary James Mattis understands the Department of the Navy’s long-term investment needs he said, “If he doesn’t, who does?” As to the roles of the service secretaries, he said Mattis views them as “administrative officials who are there to make sure direction from the top is carried out [and] conducted in a professional way.”

Cropsey said another change from those Cold War days is how the Navy views its role. He said the Navy appears to be adopting a direction of moving away from power projection to sea control with the exception of the South China Sea.