WAR 10-07-2017-to-10-13-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(289) 09-16-2017-to-09-22-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-22-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(290) 09-23-2017-to-09-29-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-29-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(291) 09-30-2017-to-10-06-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...0-06-2017___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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3 Green Beret's dead in Niger
Started by AlfaMan‎, 10-04-2017 07:09 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?525387-3-Green-Beret-s-dead-in-Niger

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.realcleardefense.com/ar..._found_dead_after_attack_in_niger_112447.html

U.S. Officials: 4th Us Soldier Found Dead After Attack in Niger

By Lolita C. Baldor
October 07, 2017

WASHINGTON (AP) — After an extensive search, a U.S. soldier who had been missing for nearly two days in Niger was found dead, a result of a deadly ambush by dozens of Islamic extremists on a joint patrol of American and Niger forces, U.S. military officials said Friday.

The soldier, whose name has not been released, was one of four U.S. troops and four Niger forces killed in the attack.

His body was found by Niger soldiers on Friday near where the ambush occurred, and then transferred into U.S. custody at a safer location further from the attack site, said Army Col. Mark Cheadle, spokesman for U.S. Africa Command. The soldier’s body was then moved onto an American helicopter by U.S. forces in a somber ceremony and then taken away for formal identification.

Eight Niger soldiers and two U.S. troops were wounded in the attack, but they were evacuated from the area on Wednesday after the attack unfolded. Cheadle said there was no indication the missing soldier was ever taken captive by the enemy forces.

U.S. officials described a chaotic assault in a densely wooded area, as 40-50 extremists in vehicles and on motorcycles fired rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns at the patrol, setting off explosions and shattering windows. The soldiers got out of their trucks, returning fire and calling in support from French helicopters and fighter jets that quickly responded to the scene, according to officials. It’s unclear if the French aircraft were armed or if they fired on the insurgents.

The officials weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials say they believe extremists linked to the Islamic State group were responsible for the attack about 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Niger’s capital, Niamey.

The U.S. and Niger forces were leaving a meeting with tribal leaders when they were ambushed.

Cheadle said there were no armed aircraft overhead as the U.S. and Niger forces went on their mission, but there was surveillance. The meeting with local leaders, he said, had been considered a low threat mission that wasn’t likely to lead to an encounter with any enemy forces.

He said there were about a dozen U.S. forces accompanying a company of Niger troops, for a total of about 40 service members in the joint mission.

Most of the U.S. troops were Army special forces, but the soldier found Friday was not a Green Beret, other U.S. officials said.

In the frenetic aftermath of the attack, a wide array of forces from the U.S., Niger and France were tapped to search for the missing soldiers. Cheadle said more than 100 troops either took part in the search or were prepared to join it. It’s not clear if the U.S. sent ground forces in to search, but Niger troops were actively looking for the soldier.

U.S. forces killed in the attack were: Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, 35, of Puyallup, Washington; Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, 39, of Springboro, Ohio; and Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright, 29, of Lyons, Georgia. All three were members of the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Wright’s father, Arnold, said his son grew up playing sports with his three brothers and liked to joke around. He followed both his parents and one of his brothers into the Army. And his brother, Will, who also served in the military, described his younger brother as “an amazing special forces soldier and an amazing friend.” Will Wright said the two were just 13 months apart, were very close and shared a special bond over their military service.

Cheadle told Pentagon reporters that U.S. Africa Command is still gathering information about the attack, but no formal investigation has been launched. And he added the U.S. military is absolutely “resolved to go after those who attacked” the troops.

According to a statement by Niger’s army chief of staff, the joint patrol was attacked by “terrorist elements” in a dozen vehicles and about 20 motorcycles.

The statement said the deaths and injuries came “after intense fighting, during which elements of the joint force showed exemplary courage.”

U.S. special operations forces have been routinely working with Niger’s forces, helping them to improve their abilities to fight extremists in the region. That effort has increased in recent years, the Pentagon said.

Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad are putting together a 5,000-strong G5 Sahel force to fight the growing threat from extremists in the vast Sahel region. The first units are expected to deploy in October and all battalions should be on the ground by March 2018.

The Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution in June welcoming the deployment, but at U.S. insistence it did not include any possibility of U.N. financing for the force.

That force will operate in the region along with a 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, which has become the deadliest in the world for U.N. peacekeepers, and France’s 5,000-strong Barkhane military operation, its largest overseas mission.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...onia-independence-tensions-rise-idUSKBN1CC0CN

OCTOBER 7, 2017 / 4:54 AM / UPDATED 12 MINUTES AGO

Spaniards take to streets as Catalonia independence tensions rise

Raquel Castillo, Sam Edwards
5 MIN READ

MADRID/BARCELONA (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people gathered across Spain on Saturday as Catalonia prepared to declare independence, many dressed in white and calling for talks to defuse Spain’s worst political crisis for decades.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who has maintained a hard line as the crisis has escalated, told El Pais newspaper on Saturday his government would “prevent any declaration of independence amounting to anything”.

The wealthy northeastern region of Catalonia, with its own language and culture, held a referendum on Oct. 1 on independence, in defiance of the Spanish constitutional court which had ruled the vote illegal.

The Catalan authorities say around 90 percent of those who voted supported a split from Spain. Madrid says secession is illegal under the Spain’s 1978 constitution. Residents of Catalonia who oppose secession largely boycotted the vote.

The crisis is a political test for Rajoy, who has been uncompromising. Some 900 people were injured during the vote when police tried to disrupt voting, firing rubber bullets and charging crowds with truncheons.

The political stand-off has divided the country, pushed banks and companies to move their headquarters outside Catalonia and shaken market confidence in the Spanish economy, prompting calls from the European Commission for Catalan and Spanish leaders to find a political solution.

“I hope that the Catalonia that makes pacts, is moderate and for many years contributed to Spain’s economic growth and improvement in welfare and wealth returns. It can’t be in the hands of extremists, the radicals and the (far-left secessionist party) CUP,” he said.

PEACEFUL PROTESTS

RELATED COVERAGE
Spain's PM says could use constitutional powers to stop Catalan independence


In peaceful protests called across 50 Spanish cities on Saturday morning, thousands gathered dressed in white and carrying banners calling for peace and dialogue between leaders.

In Barcelona, protesters chanted “let’s talk” in Catalan, while many carried signs criticizing political leaders for not finding a diplomatic solution to the impasse.

“This is producing a social rupture in Catalonia and this has to be resolved through dialogue, never via unilateralism,” Jose Manuel Garcia, 61, an economist who attended the protest dressed in white said.

“I‘m very worried. This will end badly and everyone will lose (without dialogue).”

While Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont has said he is open to mediation, Rajoy has demanded he give up the independence campaign before discussions can be held.

In Madrid thousands gathered beneath the enormous Spanish flag in Colon Plaza waving their own flags, singing and chanting “Viva España” and “Viva Catalonia”.

“I’ve come because I feel very Spanish and makes me very sad what’s happened,” said Rosa Borras, 47, an unemployed secretary who had joined a noisy gathering in central Madrid.

Borras, wearing a “Catalonia, we love you” sticker and surrounded by thousands waving Spanish flags, added: “I wanted to be here for unity, because I also feel very Catalan. My family lives in Catalonia.”

EU CONCERN

Rajoy’s government mobilized thousands of national police to stop Sunday’s vote, leading to clashes with would-be voters as they tried to close polling stations in schools and remove ballot boxes.

The police violence drew widespread condemnation and forced the government to issue an apology on Friday, although tensions continued to rise after reports of plans for the Catalan parliament to vote on a unilateral declaration of independence on Tuesday.

The crisis has also caused disquiet among Spain’s European Union partners, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has discussed it with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, an EU official told Reuters.

Concern is growing in EU capitals about the impact of the crisis on the Spanish economy, the fourth largest in the euro zone, and on possible spillovers to other economies.

European finance ministers, gathering in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday for a regular meeting, could discuss the issue, although it is not formally on the agenda, EU officials said.

The support given in public statements by EU leaders to Rajoy is combined with concern expressed in private about how the Spanish government’s use of police to prevent Catalans from voting last week in the independence referendum could backfire.

Some EU states are worried that talk of Catalan independence could fuel secessionist feelings in other parts of Europe.

Reporting by Raquel Castillo; Writing by Paul Day; Editing by Alexander Smith and Peter Graff

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/world/middleeast/isis-iraq-surrender.html

ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse

By ROD NORDLAND
OCT. 8, 2017

Video

DIBIS, Iraq — The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs.

More than a thousand prisoners determined to be Islamic State fighters passed through that room last week after they fled their crumbling Iraqi stronghold of Hawija. Instead of the martyrdom they had boasted was their only acceptable fate, they had voluntarily ended up here in the interrogation center of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq.

For an extremist group that has made its reputation on its ferociousness, with fighters who would always choose suicide over surrender, the fall of Hawija has been a notable turning point. The group has suffered a string of humiliating defeats in Iraq and Syria, but the number of its shock troops who turned themselves in at the center in Dibis was unusually large, more than 1,000 since last Sunday, according to Kurdish intelligence officials.

The fight for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, took nine months, and by comparison, relatively few Islamic State fighters surrendered. Tal Afar fell next, and more quickly, in only 11 days. Some 500 fighters surrendered there.

The Iraqi military ousted the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, from Hawija in 15 days, saying it had taken its forces only three days of actual heavy fighting before most of the extremists grabbed their families and ran. According to Kurdish officials, they put up no fight at all, other than planting bombs and booby traps.

Seen up close, the fighters’ pretense of bravado soon disappears.

Their shoes were taken from them, their pockets emptied and their belts discarded, and, as they stood facing the wall, the backs of their dishdashas were stained with the evidence that some of them had not been to a toilet in days.

One of the men smelled so bad that when he was taken into the small interrogation room, those inside were startled. He filled the doorway, appearing even larger than his actual size. The interrogator unbuckled his hip holster, resting his right hand on his pistol. Everyone in the room seemed scared of the man, even though his hands were tied behind his back. His thick black hair was Medusa-wild and shoulder-length, though his handsome face had only a wisp of black stubble on the chin.

“Hello,” a visitor said. “Where’s your beard?” The Islamic State requires all men to grow full beards.

“I’m only 21, I can’t grow it yet,” he said, clearly embarrassed.

Kurdish interrogators allowed a dozen of the surrendered fighters to be interviewed by a reporter as they arrived at the local headquarters of the Asayish, the Kurdish intelligence service, in the town of Dibis, near the Kurds’ front lines opposite Hawija. Officers monitored all interviews.

Many of the fighters claimed to have been just cooks or clerks. So many said they had been members of the Islamic State for only a month or two that interrogators suspected they had been coached to say that. Gone was the contempt for the world’s opinion, spewed out in one violent video after another — many of them made in Hawija, where grisly killings, especially of Kurdish prisoners, were the norm during their three-year reign over that Sunni Arab city in northern Iraq.

Most of the prisoners, though, claimed to have never seen a beheading, or even heard of such a thing.

At first, the beardless fighter seemed an exception, admitting defiantly that he had been fighting for the group for two years, alongside family members. He readily gave his name: “Maytham Muhammed Mohemin,” he said, practically spitting it out. His hands were bound behind his back and he was effectively sitting on them, forced back into a red plastic lawn chair, yet the three Kurdish officers in the room kept more than an arm’s length away in case he lunged for their weapons.

During the interview, he grew nervous. He said he was from Hawija and had joined the Islamic State because he believed in its cause, because his elder brother had, and because the $100 a month pay was better than anything else around.

He had arrived in Dibis on Thursday afternoon with eight companions, seven Iraqis and an Egyptian, after they dropped their weapons in Hawija that morning. Since the beginning of the Iraqi offensive two weeks earlier, they had spent most of the time burrowed in foxholes to escape the relentless American bombing and shelling by advancing Iraqi forces, and had passed days without sanitary facilities or food.

Finally, the Islamic State wali, or governor of Hawija, told the men to turn themselves in to the Kurdish forces, known as the pesh merga, and to flee the advancing Iraqi Army and its Shiite militia allies, the Iranian-trained Hashed al-Shaabi, notorious for killing not only Islamic State prisoners but also their entire families.

“The governor told us each to ‘solve your own problem and find your own solution for yourself,’ ” Mr. Mohemin said. “He said, ‘Go to the pesh merga, not to the Hashed.’ ”

Mr. Mohemin denied ever attending a beheading but later, prompted by an Asayish intelligence officer, he admitted going to one, he said, because he had been ordered to.

“I was scared,” he said. “I never saw anything like that in my life.”

His prospects are grim. His pregnant wife had fled to Dibis a week before him, but it was unlikely he would see her or their expected child, their first, anytime soon. His elder brother was killed in combat. His father and little brother, one too old to pledge to the Islamic State and the other too young, had disappeared.

The interrogator, Lt. Pisthiwan Salahi, said Mr. Mohemin was not only an Islamic State soldier but also a member of an elite suicide squad known as the Seekers of Martyrdom, according to informers. If convicted of that affiliation by an Asayish court, his sentence would be long; if he was connected to any killings, possibly lifelong.

Mr. Mohemin’s narrative differed. “I was just a common soldier,” he said. “I never killed a civilian. I wasn’t even on the front line.” The lieutenant scoffed at him. “Well, twice I was on the front line, just for a day, but not against the Kurds,” Mr. Mohemin said. More scoffing. “Well once against the Kurds, but only shooting from a distance. I couldn’t see anyone.”

Kurdish officials have been perplexed by the number of fighters who have surrendered. Many of the militants said they were ordered by their leaders to turn themselves in to the Kurds, who were known to take prisoners instead of killing them. But Capt. Ali Muhammed Syan, chief of the Asayish interrogators in Dibis, said even the fighters did not seem to know why their leaders were telling them to quit. “Maybe it’s some deal,” he said. “Maybe it’s just bad morale, I don’t know.”

To identify the militants, Kurdish intelligence officers pored over videos from Hawija, such as ones showing pesh merga prisoners in orange jump suits in individual cages on the backs of pickup trucks, being paraded through town to be stoned, then set afire or beheaded in public. Crowds of thousands participated.

One by one the Islamic State prisoners were taken out of the waiting room line to be interviewed, each telling pretty much the same story. “I pledged to ISIS in January 2015 and left in March,” said Raad Abdullah Ahmad, 31. “My family disowned me after that. Imagine having no family. I left because I didn’t like what they did to people.”

Another, Hussein Jamal, 21, said he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014 but had remained only 45 days.

“Ask him why he didn’t come out sooner then,” one of the interrogators suggested.

“I was afraid,” Mr. Jamal said.

“Ask them why they fled this way,” another of the interrogators suggested.

Both men said that they were certain that the Hashed al-Shaabi militias would kill them, but that the Kurds would not.

“Why not?”

“They are more civilized than we are,” Mr. Ahmad said. “They know who is good and who is bad.”

Mr. Mohemin had shrunk back into his red chair after an hour of talking and looked much smaller than before. When asked if he thought he would see his wife again, or his new child, he said, “I don’t know,” and looked at the floor.

The lieutenant did not take his eyes off him for a second. “They’re just planning to go underground and make sleeper cells,” he said.

Mr. Mohemin shook his head. “This is the end of this state,” he said. He had wet his trousers, adding to the smell, but did not ask to use a toilet. “I believe if the governors are telling us to surrender, it really means that this is the end.” He swore to God that he was telling the truth.

Follow Rod Nordland on Twitter @rodnordland.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/...=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article

Yemenis See Turning Point After Ousting Qaeda Militants in South

By SAEED AL-BATATI and ERIC SCHMITT
OCT. 7, 2017

AZZAN, Yemen — As hundreds of Yemeni troops rolled in here in August to attack Qaeda militants, secondary school students were sitting for final exams. Helicopters buzzed overhead and armed vehicles patrolled the streets, but the school’s principal, Saleh Al Wahidi, did not dismiss his students.

“I did not suspend the exams simply because I did not expect a battle,” said Mr. Wahidi, a 62-year-old man with a carrot-colored goatee.

Indeed, the Yemeni forces, backed by advisers and air power from the United Arab Emirates and the United States, had deliberately left an escape route for the outnumbered Qaeda fighters to flee, allowing the Yemenis to seize this strategically important town without taking casualties.

Control of Azzan, a pivotal crossroads town in Shabwa Province that has long been a Qaeda stronghold in southern Yemen, has seesawed back and forth between the government and the insurgents since 2011, and the government takeover offers evidence, Yemeni officials say, that the tide is turning for good in its favor.

The offensive in Shabwa is also the latest phase of an increased American campaign against Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen since President Trump took office. Known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, it is widely considered the terrorist group’s most dangerous worldwide affiliate, with a particular focus on trying to blow up commercial airliners.

Here and elsewhere in the country’s central and southern regions, American-backed Yemeni forces have been waging a shadow war against more than 3,000 members of the Qaeda affiliate and their tribal fighters. Since Feb. 28, the United States has conducted more than 100 airstrikes against Qaeda militants in Yemen, according to the Pentagon, nearly three times the total for all of last year.

The Yemenis in recent weeks have also captured some important Qaeda operatives. Their interrogations have given the Yemeni forces and their American and Emirati partners valuable insights into the insurgents’ leadership hierarchy, propaganda plans and local networks, a United States official said.

Here in Azzan, Mr. Wahidi said that residents had been tipped off about the impending attack by homegrown troops in the advancing force. “Those are our sons,” Mr. Wahidi said as he reclined on a hard pillow and chewed khat, the narcotic leaves widely consumed in Yemen and the Horn of Africa. “Most of the soldiers graduated from Azzan secondary school.”

The night before, residents said, warplanes hovered over the town and dropped flash bombs at suspected Qaeda militants gathering in the nearby mountains. Ahead of their arrival, the Yemeni troops also fired machine guns that rocked the town, another tactic to scare the militants.

As the insurgents melted away, the Yemenis marched toward a military camp on a small hill overlooking Azzan that the Qaeda fighters had used. Mohammad Al Qumishi, the commander of the forces, locally known as Shabwani Elite Forces, bragged about the success of his troops in hunting down senior Qaeda operatives in Shabwa.

“We have captured eight big heads,” said Mr. Qumishi, adding that local residents who sold arms to Al Qaeda were released after pledging to no longer deal with the militants.

The Shabwani force is made up of 4,000 local tribesmen who fought off Shiite militia in northern Yemen in 2015. The forces were trained by Emirati military instructors in a desert area of nearby Hadramout Province, and took orders from the Emiratis during the recent offensive. An unidentified number of other troops are being trained in the same area.

Months before, the Emirati trainers promised local tribal leaders that the Emirati Red Crescent would dole out money to revive crumbled social services if the local fighters helped push Al Qaeda from their territory. The elders agreed, and the town’s main schools and hospital were painted on time, but teachers and other public servants who would run these facilities say they have not been paid in several months.

Yemen analysts say counterterrorism may not be the only motive driving the offensive here. Shabwa is home to major oil and gas facilities that are being reopened and involve international companies, which means commercial interests may also be at stake, said Elisabeth Kendall, a Yemen scholar at the University of Oxford who visited the country in August.

That said, Ms. Kendall noted that there are clear signs that the offensive has put a dent in Al Qaeda’s fortunes. The group publicly warned residents in August against joining the Emirati-led Yemeni forces. “It attempts to merge A.Q.A.P.’s religious agenda with local tribal concerns, distilling a complex political landscape into a simple apocalyptic battle of good guys versus bad guys,” she said, referring to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The streets of Azzan, a commercial gathering place for thousands of people from four neighboring districts in Shabwa, are unpaved and dusty. Trash covers the ground, the result of years of uncollected garbage. Electricity works for only about five hours a day. Water is also unavailable most of the day. On working days, Azzan is packed with thousands of shoppers; during the weekend in Yemen, the streets are nearly empty except for some passing African immigrants.

Tough-looking soldiers manning two checkpoints at the entrance to the town carefully check cars and search for weapons or cameras. Armed tribesmen must relinquish their guns if they wish to enter. Celebratory gunfire during nighttime weddings was banned. The result is that security has improved for the first time in years, residents said.

The town has held significance since 2011, when Qaeda militants seized control here, exploiting a security vacuum as the government of Yemen’s long-serving president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, faced major protests during the Arab Spring calling for his ouster.

Yemeni government forces launched a major military offensive and recaptured the town in 2012. The militants withdrew to the mountains and from there plotted a deadly counteroffensive.

The militants reclaimed Azzan in 2013, but this time under the pretext of stopping thugs who had robbed and killed local people. At the same time, the militants made concerted efforts to fix public services like electricity, water and sanitation. Steel trash bins brought in by the Qaeda fighters are still scattered in the city’s dirty streets.

In 2014, Yemen’s army launched yet another offensive and retook the town. In the following months, militants mounted relentless attacks against government forces. Pockmarked houses still bear the scars of these heavy gun battles. Part of the city’s main hospital, built during the British reign before 1967, was leveled by airstrikes. Wealthy residents left their ruined houses standing in the hope of receiving promised compensation from the government.

When a Saudi-led coalition began a new bombing campaign against the militants in 2015, security and vital services crumbled, opening a vacuum that enabled Al Qaeda to make another comeback. Residents said that the militants did not declare Azzan an Islamic emirate as they had in the past, instead sending operatives to the town to kidnap security personnel.

Most residents said they abhorred the militants, but a few still speak highly of the strict order they imposed and the amenities they provided. “They brought back peace and put an end to robbery and theft,” said Abdul Rahman Al Ashmali, whose relative was kidnapped by Al Qaeda in 2013. “Power and water services were available all the time.”

Qaeda militants who ruled Azzan are now hiding in the Saeed region, a rugged area in the Shabwa and Moudea districts in Abyan Province, about 50 miles west of here, said Mr. Qumishi, the Yemeni commander. “Several months ago, they pulled all of their arms and important documents from Azzan as they were predicting our arrival,” he said.

Saeed Al-Batati reported from Azzan, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on October 8, 2017, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Yemen Sees Turning Point in Qaeda Fight After Ousting Militants in South.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/J...an-control-of-military-in-Constitution-clause

October 8, 2017 1:55 am JST

Abe suggests civilian control of military in Constitution clause

Comment seen as bid to allay fears of Self-Defense Forces becoming too powerful

TOKYO -- Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Saturday he would consider incorporating a clause in the amendment to the Constitution proposed by his Liberal Democratic Party calling for civilian control of the Self-Defense Forces.

In a public debate pitting leaders of eight political parties against each other ahead of snap lower-house elections on Oct. 22, Abe said that explicitly mentioning the SDF in the Constitution as proposed by the LDP "would not change the relationship between the Defense Ministry and self-defense officials."

"If we clearly state civilian control [in the Constitution], it will clarify" what the amendment would say, Abe said.

The prime minister's comment is seen as trying to allay growing concern that officials in the SDF may assume more power than civilians under the LDP's plan to revise Article 9 of the Constitution.

During the debate, which was streamed online, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, head of the newly launched Kibo no To, or Party of Hope, pointed out that talks regarding Constitutional reform have too narrowly focused on the amendment to Article 9, adding: "That said, I think it's a part we shouldn't avoid as we review the Constitution as a whole."

Her comments indicated she at least regards the article as worthy of debate.

When demanded by Koike why he chose to dissolve the lower house and have a snap election in the face of North Korea's nuclear missile threat, the prime minister replied that he wants to "reaffirm the public's trust in our policy of pressuring [North Korea]," adding that "we can work on the resolution of the issue by prioritizing Japan's interests, taking advantage of opportunities, including President Trump's visit in November."

He also said the election is "something that lies at the foundation of democracy, and it shouldn't be affected by North Korea's threat."

Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of the LDP's junior partner Komeito, took a jab at Koike, who now leads an emerging counterforce against the ruling coalition. "The Party of Hope plans to endorse over 100 individuals from the Democratic Party," he said. "The party decided to endorse them on condition that those individuals accept the security legislation. But those are people who in the past demanded abolishing the legislation, changing [their position] overnight."

(Nikkei)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41511790

Royal Navy could lose 'fight on beaches' ships in planned cuts

By Mark Urban
Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight
5 October 2017
From the section UK 411 comments

The Royal Navy could lose its ability to assault enemy held beaches, under plans being considered in the Ministry of Defence, BBC Newsnight understands.

Two specialist landing ships - HMS Albion and Bulwark - would be taken out of service under the proposals.

The plan - part of a package of cost-cutting measures - has caused alarm among senior Royal Marine officers.

The MoD told the BBC that no decisions have been made yet and that discussion of options was "pure speculation".

It is understood the head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Philip Jones, formulated the move as part of a package designed to balance the books and free up sailors for the service's two new aircraft carriers.

Critics say the proposal would deprive the Royal Marines of its core mission.

Among other cuts envisaged are a reduction of 1,000 to the strength of the Royal Marines and the early retirement of two mine-hunting vessels and one survey vessel.

A senior Royal Marine officer blamed the introduction of the new carriers for exacerbating the senior service's financial and manning problems.

He told the BBC: "This is the worst procurement decision of the past half century - that's what the Royal Marines are being sacrificed for."

The proposed cuts are part of a raft of "adjustments" being considered by all three services - the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force - as the Ministry of Defence struggles to balance its books.

The Royal Air Force could slow down orders of its new F35 fighter, and the Army could lose dozens of helicopters as part of their efforts towards the same goal.

In 2015 there was a Strategic Defence and Security Review, a paper intended to act as a blueprint for the coming five years.

However the depreciation of sterling has made big buys of foreign equipment more expensive and the armed forces have crammed the programme with too many projects, creating a hole in the budget.

The government announced "additional work to review national security capabilities" in July - a review by stealth - under the leadership of its national security adviser Mark Sedwill.

The proposed cuts to the Royal Navy have been put forward as part of this exercise.

Under the 1997 defence review, a group of ships was created to improve the UK's ability to land its commando brigade, even in the face of opposition.

At a glance: 2015 Strategic Defence Review
Defence Review: Fighting old battles?
Royal Navy 'woefully low' on warships

The helicopter carrier Ocean, two specialist landing ships - Albion and Bulwark - and four logistic support ships were to be acquired to allow the 5,000 strong force to continue performing operations such as the 1982 Falklands landing, or the one on the Faw peninsula during the 2003 Iraq conflict.

With the retirement of HMS Ocean already announced, and the new plans to lose the two landing ships, the Royal Marines' ability to use landing or hovercraft to get ashore would be drastically curtailed.

In recent years, as an economy measure, the Royal Navy has only been crewing Albion or Bulwark alternately - they are big ships, each requiring a complement of 325.

While the government has dubbed 2017 "the Year of the Royal Navy" and emphasised its commitment to a new national shipbuilding strategy, observers at the MoD noticed that this blueprint contained no commitment to renew the amphibious warfare fleet.

The service is already committed to putting its two new carriers into service, replacing Trident, buying a new class of hunter-killer submarines, and two new types of frigate.

"The Royal Navy has got us into this mess", said a senior MoD figure, referring to the department's budgetary black hole, "so it's up to them to take the pain necessary to get us out of it".

With budgetary responsibility devolved to service chiefs, it fell to the head of the Navy Admiral Sir Philip Jones, to come up with proposals for how he could run the fleet within the financial and personnel limits he has been set.

Watch Mark Urban's report on iPlayer.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41507960

China congress: Military facelift a sign of bigger changes

4 hours ago
From the section China

Of the many noteworthy developments that have characterised Chinese President Xi Jinping's first five-year term, none stands out as much as military reform, and this reveals a great deal about the coming political trajectory in China, writes political analyst Cheng Li.

Xi Jinping did not shy from the bold and broad undertaking of military reform and it has resulted in profound changes to the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Even beyond the monumental purges of top generals, whose shameless corruption extended to practices like selling military titles, Mr Xi has worked with single-minded purpose to organise and modernise China's military.

His efforts have centred on marginalising the four so-called "general departments" of the PLA that functioned as a virtual arm of government the military leadership and had undermined the authority of the civilian-led Central Military Commission (CMC).

He also transformed China's military operations from a Russian-style, army-centric system toward what analysts call a "Western-style joint command"; and swiftly promoted "young guards" to top positions in the officer corps.

It will take years to fully assess the impact of these reforms. But further changes appear to be in the works.

Judging from the list of military and police delegates to the forthcoming congress where China's future leaders are to be unveiled, the largest turnover of senior officers in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is set to occur.

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Shuffling the decks
An extraordinary 90% of the 300 military delegates will be first-time attendees.

At most, only 17% (seven of 41) of the military representatives with full membership on the 18th Central Committee will retain their seats.

This would constitute the largest-ever turnover of military elite in the history of the PRC.

The new top military leadership will most likely consist of Mr Xi's long-time friends Gen Zhang Youxia, Gen Li Zuocheng, and Adm Miao Hua, along with the newly promoted commanders of the PLA army, navy, air force, and strategic support force.

In addition to their perceived loyalty to Xi Jinping, these generals are known for their extended military service, combat experience, and professional knowledge of modern warfare.

The degree of military reshuffling also offers a clue to broader leadership changes, particularly the likelihood of Mr Xi further consolidating power.

With firm control over the military, Mr Xi has set the stage for a massive turnover in the party leadership at the 19th Party Congress.

Of the 376 members of the 18th Central Committee, 38 (about 10%) have already been purged on corruption charges and other transgressions.

Those purged comprise one Politburo member (former Chongqing party secretary Sun Zhengcai), 19 full members, and 18 alternate members.

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In addition, about 200 members (53% of the committee) have either retired or will soon retire and, so will not be considered for the 19th Central Committee.

So the turnover rate between the 18th and 19th Central Committees could be as high as 70%, making it the largest turnover since the 9th Party Congress in 1969 at the peak of the Cultural Revolution.

Factional politics certainly help explain the fall of some prominent officials.

But Mr Xi can also make a strong case that the overall objective of his anti-corruption campaign has been to restore faith in a ruling party that had lost trust among the Chinese public.

Nevertheless, Mr Xi and his strongest political ally, the anti-corruption tsar Wang Qishan, seem to understand that the unprecedentedly widespread campaign has earned them many political enemies.

What began with the military ends with the civilian administration.

The biggest risk for Mr Xi and Mr Wang is that, having purged a large crop of corrupt officials, they have become wary of spending political capital to accelerate institutional reforms.

This may explain why they have striven to win public support and demonstrate that the leadership agenda aligns with the country's best interests.

Just as military reform aimed to assert civilian control over the military and spur its modernisation through initiatives like structural transformation and a strategic overhaul, the upcoming congress will likely pursue some structural changes, which can move toward improving governance.

But what does this mean for the make-up of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee?

All the President's men
Mr Xi's confidants in the current Politburo - director of the general office of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee Li Zhanshu, and director of the central organisation department Zhao Leji - will most likely enter it.

Protégés from his years in Zhejiang province who were known for their strong support for market reform, namely Chongqing party secretary Chen Min'er, Jiangsu party secretary Li Qiang, and Beijing party secretary Cai Qi, are positioned to obtain seats in the new Politburo - Mr Chen and Li Qiang may even be contenders for the Standing Committee.

Shanghai party secretary Han Zheng and director of the office of the central economic leading group Liu He, two seasoned economic technocrats, are expected to emerge as two of the top economic decision-makers in the national leadership after the congress.

While strong ties to Mr Xi help explain their rapid political career advancement in recent years, a number of civilian leaders, except for Cai Qi, already serve on the Central Committee as full or alternate members.

Institutional norms and regulations, including age requirements, continue to apply to these leaders' expected promotion path.

A majority of the national leaders after the 19th Party Congress will have been born in the 1950s, just as a majority of the provincial and ministerial leaders will have been born in the 1960s.

It is almost certain that the new Politburo, including the Standing Committee, will consist of a few leaders who are protégés of Mr Xi's predecessors.

Jiang Zemin's confidant Xu Qiliang, who also has a good relationship with Mr Xi, will likely remain as both a Politburo member and vice chairman of the CMC after the 19th Party Congress.

Hu Chunhua, a sixth-generation front-runner and protégé of Hu Jintao, is also a strong contender for the Politburo Standing Committee.

So the biggest question will be whether or not Xi Jinping unites the party establishment by forming a team of rivals and deepening China's political institutionalisation.

Abiding by established rules and norms and respecting the peaceful transition of power all carry profound implications for the future direction of the country.

More than the success or failure of any single campaign or initiative, observers in China and abroad are eager to see how Xi Jinping and his colleagues address this crucial issue in just a few short weeks.

Cheng Li is Director of and Senior Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at The Brookings Institution. His latest books include Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership (2016) and The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China (2017).

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.atimes.com/article/iraqi-kurdistan-fly-regional-spiders-turkey-iraq-iran/

Iraqi Kurdistan the fly to regional spiders Turkey, Iraq, Iran

Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara are all reasonably aligned, not only in Syria but also in Iraq. The web may yet become twisted but there seems no imminent risk of rough play

By PEPE ESCOBAR
OCTOBER 6, 2017 12:21 PM (UTC+8)
Comments 1

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just visited Tehran and met with President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

That’s a major geopolitical move by any standards. Iran and Turkey are both part of the Astana negotiations aimed at effecting closure in Syria. Both are regarded by Beijing as key nodes in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Both are observers – and future full members – of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Both may soon be incorporated into the BRICS-Plus concept. Both are key nodes in Eurasian integration.

Inevitably, though, the meeting was eclipsed by the September 25 referendum called by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq.

At the Erdogan-Rouhani joint appearance, the two seemed fully in synch.

Erdogan: “There is no country other than Israel that recognizes it. A referendum that was conducted by sitting side by side with Mossad has no legitimacy.”

Rouhani: “Turkey, Iran and Iraq have no choice but to take serious and necessary measures to protect their strategic goals in the region, and the wrong decisions made by some of the leaders of this region must be compensated for by them.”

Is that it? Not really. Remember Twin Peaks: “the owls are not what they seem.” Shadow play is very much in effect.

Move on, nothing to see here

First of all, there’s Iraq, threatened with actual amputation. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi Abadi is adamant that the KRG’s wily, unelected tribal capo Masoud Barzani must scrap the referendum. Barzani, for his part, says the drive to independence will always remain and must be factored in by Baghdad.

Hysteria apart, there won’t be an Iraqi invasion. As it stands, the realistic worst-case scenario is Baghdad custom officials stationed at the KRG’s borders with both Turkey and Iran. As for the possibility of the KRG annulling the referendum in the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which they have de facto annexed, that would require interstellar diplomacy.

Still, in the ultra-extreme event of Baghdad being forced to intervene to recover Kirkuk, it now may factor in the possible support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Suspicion is rife in Baghdad that the referendum would never have happened without a green light from Washington. After all, balkanization remains an extremely seductive proposition for a large swathe of the US deep state.

Washington’s game is slippery enough. The Trump administration, via Secretary Tillerson, officially called the referendum “illegitimate.” The main, but unstated, reason is that the referendum appears to strengthen (it doesn’t, necessarily) new axis-of-evil member Iran.

Barzani, meanwhile, doesn’t seem fond of disappearing – or dying, like his rival Jalal Talabani – anytime soon. So what is to be done?

Let’s start with Iran. Tehran is a historical ally of Iraqi Kurds. So rough play is a no-no, even considering that Iran’s Kurds – who are, granted, not as separatist as the KRG – might now start entertaining their own ideas.

As Asia Times has learned, there was a crucial meeting last week of the national security and foreign policy commission at the Iranian Parliament, attended by Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the powerful Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). On the agenda: non-recognition of the referendum; worries about Iraq’s territorial integrity; the nightmare of Iranian Kurdish peshmerga being instrumentalized by the CIA.

Currently, the KRG is a mess. There is no working parliament, no elected politicians in charge. Tehran is worried that in the context of such a vacuum the KRG’s usefulness as a Trojan Horse may be intensified by a US-Israel-House of Saud alliance.

Still, the last thing Tehran needs is yet another war, with the unwelcome side effect of destroying good relations with its regional Kurdish ally, Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

The official position of the Iranian Foreign Ministry is that so long as the whole thing is restricted to a symbolic referendum – with no practical moves towards independence – Tehran can live with it.

Will the spiders turn on each other?

The intersection of Iran and Turkey is equally engrossing. In their face-to-face meeting, Supreme Leader Khamenei emphasized better economic relations, while Erdogan emphasized the need for a strong Iran-Turkey political alliance. How the hyper-volatile Erdogan may be taken at his word is an open question.

And that bring us to Syria’s Kurdish question. And what Turkey may be up to, both in Syria and Iraq.

Tehran and Ankara have been on viciously opposite sides during six years of war in Syria, only to somewhat converge at the Astana de-confliction negotiations chaired by Moscow.

Tehran is part of the “4+1” (Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, plus Hezbollah) fully supporting Shi’ite militias in Syria (as well as the Popular Mobilization Units, or PMUs, in Iraq). Turkey was allied with both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and fully engaged in keeping borders unobstructed for both Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) and Islamic State jihadis, seen as tools for regime change in Damascus.

And yet it’s easy to forget that even when Ankara was denouncing Tehran as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, at the height of the war in Syria, the two countries kept diplomatic relations. Moreover, the liberation of Aleppo by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) only happened with the relative speed that it did because Ankara ordered its proxies to back off.

Ankara has been forced to accept that Moscow runs the show in Syria. As much as the Turks may disagree with President Putin’s special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentiev, that a “moderate rebel” Syrian National Army won’t be tolerated, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has admitted on the record that Moscow, Tehran and Ankara are jointly involved in setting up a new de-escalation zone in the crucial city of Afrin. That would make it more difficult for Syrian Kurds to advance their independence agenda, something that answers to Ankara’s interests.

As for Iraq, it’s virtually certain that Ankara won’t impose
serious economic sanctions on Erbil. All bark, no bite.

So, in the end, as it stands, we have Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara reasonably aligned – not only in Syria but also in Iraq. How long this will last in the ultimate regional spider’s nest is anyone’s guess.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.atimes.com/us-china-rivalry-presents-dilemma-asia-pacific-middle-powers/

OPINION

US-China rivalry poses dilemma for Asia-Pacific middle powers

By GIOVANNI DI LIETO
OCTOBER 7, 2017 6:29 AM (UTC+8)

Are the US and China serving up another Cold War? Or is there room for alternative blocs to stake their claims in a multipolar world order?

Whether they like it or no, the liberal middle powers in the Asia-Pacific region such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia are pivotal actors in this global struggle and are in dire need of facing tough questions on their geopolitical futures.

Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States set in motion a further departure from the unipolar world order created in the early post-Cold War years. This was when the US provided military and economic dominance through defence alliances with the major trading partners in the aligned regions in the absence of any serious competitor.

In essence, this ephemeral global order was based on the US-led exchange of security for free trade. However, with the relentless rise of China’s market economy and industrial power, the Asia-Pacific strategic space is now in a critically evolutionary phase.

Security or economic gains, Which is it to be?

Now the geopolitical hierarchy is splitting between the military order, still dominated by the US, and the economic order, whose dominance is being overtaken by China. In the middle of this split competition between the US and China, most of the Asia-Pacific countries are striving to deal with China for economic gains without giving away the American security umbrella.

For the past two decades, the stability of the emerging dual order between the US and China depended first and foremost on the US ability and willingness to provide its liberal allies with a security bulwark against destabilizing actors at their geographical and moral borders, chiefly Islamist terrorism, and the various nationalistic and totalitarian forces.

But now President Trump’s isolationist and transactional foreign policy may put an abrupt end to this somewhat balanced dynamic. On the other hand, China is gradually using its trade and investment might to push weaker trading partners away from their strong bilateral security ties with the US, in exchange for tighter economic cooperation.

This emerging condition requires a geopolitical paradigm shift under political, security, economic and legal perspectives. To this avail, it is about time for the liberal middle powers in the Asia-Pacific region to address the hard questions about the impact of the US-China dual hierarchy on the regional order and beyond.

A hard choice between the two super powers

First and foremost, it is crucial to understand whether the liberal Asia-Pacific order can thrive and depend over the long term on a dual yet competitive Sino-American hegemony. In particular, it remains to be seen whether the various Asia-Pacific middle powers will have the nerve and strength to hold consistent preferences and design long-standing strategies for the regional order in the ebb and flow of the US-China relationship.

These middle powers also need to devise alternative strategies should the US fail to remain a credible provider of security in the region, especially under conditions of economic decline, lest they end up like helpless children watching in dismay as their parents fight over who is going to look after them.

In such a contingency, as China grows more prosperous and militarily buoyant, it becomes key to wonder how long it will take the Asian superpower openly to push the middle powers into loosening their security ties with the US and giving up features of democratic governance.

Moreover, if push comes to shove, will these countries side with their security patron or with their leading economic partner?

To prepare for this eventuality, liberal middle powers are more than ever urged to question how Russia and India can actively operate in the Asia-Pacific strategic space. At any rate, the key problem is whether Russia and India can either be balancing or aggravating forces against the destabilizing actors poised to unleash as a byproduct of possible US-China proxy conflicts between regional minnows.

An ancillary yet momentous issue thus arises as to what kind of trade and security legal frameworks the liberal Asia-Pacific countries could and should develop to harness the US-China competitive relationship, as well as Russian and Indian disruptions.

As the existing spaghetti bowl of their economic partnerships levitate under increasing geopolitical strain, the liberal Asia-Pacific middle powers had better draw up possible synergies with European trade partners looking for an alternative to China’s new Silk Roads, as well as with those Latin American countries with an appetite for new geopolitical routes outside of the US influence across the Pacific Ocean.

Ultimately, the overarching question is whether liberal blocs of Eurasian and Pacific middle powers can emerge or fall through the cracks of the US-China dual order as a peaceful and productive way to nurture more balanced geopolitical postures in a multipolar world.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://apnews.com/728073a31a7047b09ee673b126619b9a/Turkey-shells-Syria's-northern-Idlib-province

Turkey shells Syria’s northern Idlib province

By SARAH EL DEEB and ZEYNEP BILGINSOY
Today

BEIRUT (AP) — Turkish forces on Sunday shelled areas along its border with Syria’s northwestern province, an area dominated by al-Qaida-linked militants, as Turkey’s president says an operation in the area to enforce a “de-escalation” zone was underway “without problems.”

Speaking Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the de-escalation zones would be applied in Idlib with “Russia outside, Turkey inside” with Syrian opposition fighters it backs.

“The process, which began with a step yesterday and started to be applied this morning, is continuing as you know and that effort is continuing in a calm way without problems” Erdogan said, speaking in the western province of Afyonkarahisar at the closing ceremony of his ruling party’s conference.

Earlier Sunday, Mustafa Sejari, spokesman for a Turkey-backed Syrian armed group, said Turkish artillery responded with shells after coming under attack from al-Qaida-linked fighters across the border. Turkey’s private Dogan news agency reported that Turkey fired seven howitzer rounds into Idlib on Sunday.

The tension came a day after Turkey’s president announced that his country has launched a “serious” operation in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province with Turkey-backed Syrian opposition forces, following international efforts for de-escalation in the war-torn country.

Sejari said the operation aims to deploy Turkish-backed opposition fighters in the province currently dominated by al-Qaida-linked militants.

“So far our forces have not entered Idlib,” Sejari said in an exchange of messages with The Associated Press.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Turkish shells fell near a displaced people’s camp along the border, causing a panic but no casualties. The Observatory said the shelling was followed by brief clashes and the lobbing of missiles as tension continued. The Observatory also said al-Qaida-linked militants have deployed new fighters to the area where the brief clashes occurred, in Kafr Lusin village, along the border.

The Observatory and another activist-operated news service, Thiqa, meanwhile reported that what appeared to be Turkish troops have entered Syria in a number of vehicles to deploy at an area between Idlib and Aleppo province. The reports say Turkish forces were escorted by al-Qaida-linked militants to Darat al-Ezzah area, which is only miles from Afrin, a Kurdish dominated enclave in western Syria. A Kurdish militiaman in Afrin confirmed that four Turkish vehicles were deployed in the area. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

There was no immediate Turkish comment on the reports. It was not immediately clear why or how there was an escort by al-Qaida-linked militants.

Erdogan said Sunday that Turkey would not allow a “terror corridor” by the Kurdish militia aiming to link its territories from eastern Syria to the Mediterranean.

He was referring to the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militants that Turkey considers terrorists. The official Turkish news agency Anadolu said Saturday the new deployment would serve as a “wall” between Kurdish-controlled Afrin in northwestern Aleppo and Idlib province.

The plan to enforce a de-escalation zone in Idlib involves deploying Turkish special forces and observation points, according to Sejari, from the Turkish-backed Al-Mutasim Brigades. He said the plan is to also foil “foreign projects” that aim to occupy the north of Syria under the pretext of fighting terrorism, in an apparent reference to the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces.

Last year, the Turkish army launched a cross-border operation with Syrian opposition fighters to clear an area along its border of the Islamic State group and prevent the dominant Kurdish group from forming a contiguous entity from northeast to northwest Syria. There are no known plans by the Kurdish forces to take on al-Qaida-linked militants in Idlib.

Also, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters late Saturday that Turkish observers would deploy in safe areas with no risk. He also said that Russian and Iranian observers would also be deployed in some areas, without providing further details.

Deploying Russian and Iranian observers could potentially be a controversial issue, considering that the Syrian opposition, backed by Turkey, views the two countries as enemies because of their support for the Syrian government.

Also Sunday, activists and residents of Maaret al-Numan in southern Idlib said an airstrike in the town’s market killed at least eight people. Abdul-Rahim Almumar, a town resident, said it struck at a busy car park near a market, causing major destruction and a high death toll. The strike also caused a fire in an area store.

Almumar said at least 10 were killed, including at least two children. The Observatory put the death toll at 11 saying it was likely to climb as search and rescue operations continued.
____

Bilginsoy contributed to this report from Istanbul.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-foreigners-army-fight-abroad/28782155.html

Russia

Putin Decrees Foreigners In Russian Army Can Fight In Wars Abroad

October 09, 2017 09:57 GMT

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree that allows foreign citizens serving in the Russian Army on a contractual basis to take part in Russian military operations abroad.

The decree on amendments to the Russian law on military service was published on October 9.

According to the amendments, foreign nationals serving in the Russian Armed Forces as contractors can be sent "to participate in Russian peacekeeping and counterterrorist operations abroad."

Putin signed a law in 2003 allowing foreign citizens to serve on a contractual basis as soldiers, sailors, and sergeants, but not officers.

Russia has been conducting military operations backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government in the war in the Middle Eastern country since September 2015.

The Russian Defense Ministry has not said whether foreign nationals serving in the Russian Army were ever sent to Syria.

The Russian military contains both contract soldiers and conscripts.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.economist.com/news/asia...nesian-politics-are-becoming-less-predictable

Indonesian politics are becoming less predictable

A weak economy and rising religiosity are to blame

Oct 5th 2017 | JAKARTA
WITH an eager smile and only a few tufts of hair on his chin, Ibrahim, a 30-year-old protester in Jakarta, does not seem like much of a Muslim firebrand. Yet on September 29th he and his four-year-old son, Alid, who clutched a flag emblazoned with the opening lines of the Koran, joined thousands of hard-line Islamists marching in protest against the government. Their concern? Communism and the “criminalisation” of Islam in the world’s most populous Muslim country, he says. In a feat of doublethink, he rails against capitalism, too: “There’s no distribution of wealth, so the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.” Ibrahim may have a fuzzy idea of what exactly he is protesting against. But his muddled ideology could still present a threat to President Joko Widodo, commonly known as Jokowi, who is likely to seek a second five-year term in 2019.

Jokowi’s election in 2014 was hailed by enthusiastic observers as a turning-point in Indonesian politics. When campaigning he emphasised his probity and humility. He promised to improve crumbling roads, ports and airports, remove graft from politics and boost foreign investment. Comparisons were made to Barack Obama, on the basis that the two men both had a certain gawky charm and both appeared to inspire an enormous amount of hope. An avid user of social media, Jokowi regularly uploads short clips on YouTube, making him seem far more accessible than most politicians. A hand-held video of a lunch he hosted for King Salman of Saudi Arabia, which shows the monarch slurping soup (from a golden spoon) has been watched 2m times.

In his first year Jokowi appeared to be the reformer that liberals had dreamed of. He scrapped a wasteful fuel subsidy and introduced a popular health-insurance scheme, which soon enrolled 130m members, or half the population. State spending on infrastructure shot up by 51% in 2014-15, to 209trn rupiah ($15.5bn). He has let the corruption commission do its job, unlike parliament, which has repeatedly attempted to neuter it. All of this means he has a huge personal appeal, with approval ratings of around 68% in both urban and rural areas, and among people with different levels of education.

Ratings and slatings
Nonetheless, Jokowi’s chances of being re-elected have started to look shaky. A survey conducted in September by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, an Indonesian think-tank, found that only 50% of those polled would vote for him. That suggests that the race in 2019 might be as tight as the one in 2014, which Jokowi won with 53% of the vote. An upset in the election in April for the governor of Jakarta, in which Jokowi’s ally, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (or Ahok), lost despite high approval ratings and the advantage of incumbency, has made Indonesian politics look far more unpredictable.

Part of the problem for Jokowi, who is Muslim but broadly secular in his outlook, is rising religiosity. During his presidential campaign, rumours circulated that he was actually Christian. When he ran for governor of Jakarta in 2012, Ahok, who is Christian, was his running-mate and then deputy. During Ahok’s campaign for governor, Islamist activists pilloried him for his religion. And they claimed, misleadingly, that he had criticised the Koran. As a result, he is now serving a two-year sentence for blasphemy. A group called the Islamic Defenders Front, which was behind the rally on September 29th, organised huge protests against him. They are not the only religious agitators. In August in East Java a 30-metre statue of Guan Yu, a Chinese deity, was partially covered with a white sheet after local Muslims threatened to tear it down.

According to the Institute of South-East Asian Studies in Singapore, most Muslim Indonesians take a relaxed approach to certain aspects of their religion, such as going on the haj (only 11% say that is extremely important). In other areas, however, they appear to be more doctrinaire: the majority think that women should wear a hijab and 67% think that instituting sharia would “strengthen moral values”. Religious violence surged after the overthrow of Suharto, Indonesia’s long-serving strongman, in 1998, but then appeared to dissipate; it is again becoming more common. “It is quite clear that there is a rise of tribalism across the world and we are not immune from it,” says Tom Lembong, the head of the investment-promotion agency.

Yet religion would not be such a handy tool for Jokowi’s opponents if the economy were faring better. Since 2014 annual GDP growth has hovered around 5%, slightly below the levels achieved under Jokowi’s predecessor and well below the rates Indonesia registered in the 1970s and 1980s. The fall in commodity prices, coupled with dauntingly complex regulations, has caused foreign investment to slump. The proportion of a company’s shares that can be in foreign hands varies from industry to industry, with different rules for everything from carmaking to berry cultivation. Infrastructure spending has also slowed down since 2014. Structural reforms, including an overhaul of the tax system, are sorely needed. Yet Mr Lembong says no big reforms are in the works.

The result can be glimpsed in Tanah Abang, a wholesale clothes market in central Jakarta. On a weekday morning few customers explore its labyrinthine aisles of fabrics, jeans and patterned dresses. Instead most shopkeepers chat among themselves. Manual labourers sprawl on bags full of merchandise, looking at their smartphones or sleeping. The workers complain that sales have slumped over the past two years and that there are not enough jobs for young people.

Rehmad Yogi, a 22-year-old who works in a shop where the female mannequins sport headscarves, thinks the economy is the “most important thing”. He says he supports Prabowo Subianto, a former general who was Jokowi’s adversary in 2014 and probably will be again in 2019. Nanto, who is 19, travels 60km from his home town of Bogor on a motorbike each day for work. He, too, prefers Mr Prabowo, though he worries that he is “too violent”. Sang Phim, who works at a stall selling knock-off sportswear, is an enthusiastic supporter of Jokowi, who is the “best president of Indonesia”. Yet even he seems cautious. Every time Indonesians go to the polls they appear to be more and more influenced by religion, he says anxiously.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Jokowi at bay"

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....And they aren't in danger from Iranian "activities" already? I seem to recall the Iranians violating the Geneva Convention with those sailors a while back, never mind their "illegal" actions overseas....

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http://thehill.com/opinion/national...litary-a-terrorist-group-will-ultimately-hurt

Designating Iran's military a terrorist group will ultimately hurt American troops

By James Durso, opinion contributor — 10/09/17 10:20 AM EDT
13 Comments
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Iran responded to news that the United States might designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group by reminding the U.S. it would “consider the American army to be like Islamic State all around the world.” That scenario should give our leaders pause.

In 2007, the U.S. designated the group’s overseas operations arm, the Quds Force, as one that supports terrorist organizations. The new sanctions will move up the ladder to the parent organization, the IRGC, which is already under sanctions for ballistic missile development.

Hopefully, the U.S. announcement of the IRGC sanctions is just bad timing, as this week Iran indicated it is open to talks about its ballistic missile program. Iran is likely to see new sanctions against the IRGC as preparatory to a negotiated easing of the missile sanctions, so the Guards will remain under (new) sanctions if the ballistic missile talks bear fruit. If the threat of terrorism sanctions can force Iran to discuss its ballistic missile program with the U.S., great, but once the terrorism sanctions are in place Iran has zero motivation to talk about missiles because the intent behind terrorism sanctions is to keep them in place until a new, complaisant regime is in place in Tehran.

The IRGC is also a major economic actor in Iran, one that the Iranian government is trying to rein in through discreet corruption investigations and asset seizures. Thus, the U.S. is probably attempting to shape the internal situation in Iran by telegraphing that it will treat with favored, non-IRGC related businesses and entities in the future.
*
The U.S. has grappled with the status of the IRGC before. As recounted in "The Twilight War" by David Crist:

“On February 20 [2007], J.D. Crouch chaired a meeting with senior officials in the Situation Room to recommend to the president a wide range of actions to expose the Quds Force. The debate centered on whether to designate the entire guard or just its covert Quds Force as a terrorist organization. While no one disagreed about most of the plans, the military dissented about designating either group as a terrorist organization. Marine Lieutenant General John Sattler attended the meeting for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Friendly, positive, and unflappable, the head of the Joint Staff’s plans and policy office expressed the concern of the chairman that designating military officers of another country as “terrorist” could backfire, especially if it was reciprocated against American special forces officers, who frequently operated clandestinely and have provided military assistance and training to insurgents.

“The United States has always carefully avoided declaring military officers engaged in activities sanctioned by their governments as terrorists to avoid the same being done to us,” Sattler pointed out.

The last time the U.S. designated a formal military structure of a sovereign state as a criminal organization was during the Nuremberg Trials when Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS was declared as such for its involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Designating the IRGC a terrorist entry probably sounds great after that third beer, but none of the people advocating this idea, or their children, are likely to suffer the consequences. Yes, IRGC commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari may be a bad man, but Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler? No.

If Iran reciprocates, U.S. military personnel captured by Iran or its surrogates would lose Geneva Conventions protections or the intermediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Iran or its surrogates may not follow the conventions based on what we have seen of their treatment of Iranian-American civilians, but, on the other hand, the U.S. Navy crews who wandered into Iranian waters in early 2016 and were captured by the IRGC Navy received passable treatment.

The U.S. has no shortage of sanction options that won’t place its military personnel, most likely special operations forces, at more risk than they bear right now. It’s time to make our smart guys at the Treasury and State departments find a better way.


James D. Durso (@James_Durso) is the managing director at consultancy firm Corsair LLC. He was a professional staff member at the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission and the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and served as a U.S. Navy officer for 20 years specializing in logistics and security assistance. His overseas military postings were in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and he served in Iraq as a civilian transport advisor with the Coalition Provisional Authority. He served afloat as supply officer of the submarine USS SKATE (SSN 578).

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-i...lists-revolutionary-guards-idUSKBN1CF0R0?il=0

October 10, 2017 / 12:56 AM / Updated 28 minutes ago

Iran has 'all options on table' if U.S. blacklists Revolutionary Guards

Reuters Staff
4 Min Read

LONDON (Reuters) - Iran told the United States on Tuesday that it will keep “all options on table” if President Donald Trump designates its elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.

It came hours after the government said Washington itself would be aiding terrorism if it took such an action.

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to announce this week his final decision on how he wants to contain Iran’s regional influence.

Trump is also expected to “decertify” a landmark 2015 deal Iran struck with world powers to curb its nuclear program in return for the lifting of most international sanctions. Trump’s announcement would stop short of pulling out of the agreement, punting that decision to Congress which would have 60 days to decide whether to reimpose sanctions.

He is also expected to designate Iran’s most powerful security force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as a terrorist organization.

U.S. sanctions on the IRGC could affect conflicts in Iraq and Syria, where Tehran and Washington both support warring parties that oppose the Islamic State militant group.

“The Americans are too small to be able to harm the Revolutionary Guards,” Ali Akbar Velayati, the top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying by ISNA. “We have all options on the table. Whatever they do, we will take reciprocal measures,” he added.

The Iranian nuclear deal, agreed in 2015 and supported by European countries, Russia and China, lifted international sanctions on Iran in return for it agreeing to curbs on its nuclear program.

“FIRM, DECISIVE AND CRUSHING”
Washington maintains separate unilateral sanctions on Iran over its missile program and allegations that it supports terrorism in the Middle East. It already blacklists some individuals and entities for supporting IRGC activities, but not the Guards themselves.

The Guards have a vast economic empire in Iran. Designating them terrorists could make it more difficult for some Iranian businesses to take advantage of the lifting of sanctions to interact with global banks, which are required to verify that their clients are not on terrorism blacklists.

Iran’s rial has dropped against the U.S. dollar in recent days in a sign of concern about Trump’s policy. The rial was quoted in the free market around 40,400 to the dollar, currency exchangers in Tehran told Reuters, compared to 39,200 last week. Several exchangers said they had stopped selling dollars from Monday and were waiting to assess the trend in the market.

An Iranian government spokesman said that the world should be “thankful” to the Revolutionary Guards for fighting against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

“By taking a stance against the Revolutionary Guards and designating it a terrorist group, the Americans would be joining the terrorists’ camp,” Mohammad Baqer Nobakht said in a weekly news conference broadcast live on state television.

IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Sunday that if Washington designated the Guards a terrorist organization, they “will consider the American army to be like Islamic State all around the world.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on Monday that Tehran would give a “firm, decisive and crushing” response if the United States goes ahead with such a plan.

Washington aims to put more pressure on the IRGC, especially over its missile program. Trump said in September that recent IRGC missile tests illustrated the weakness of the nuclear deal reached by his predecessor Barack Obama.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Iran purposefully excluded its military capability from the nuclear deal, as “it is not intended as leverage or a bargaining chip in future negotiations”.

In an article published in the Atlantic on Monday Zarif added: “No party or country need fear our missiles … unless it intends to attack our territory.”

Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Peter Graff

 

[Housecarl]

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NATO’s Expanding Military Exercises Are Sending Risky Mixed Messages

Ralph S. Clem
October 10, 2017

Russia’s recently concluded Zapad-2017 military exercise generated considerable attention in both the mainstream media and on think tank websites. As Michael Kofman explained in War on the Rocks, Zapad-2017 was surely a significant occurrence that deserves close — but not hyperbolic — scrutiny and after-action analysis.

But as the strategic competition between Moscow and NATO deepens, Zapad should also make those of us in the West take a look in the mirror and examine NATO’s own increasingly ambitious military training events, together with those of its member states and non-NATO partners.

Indeed, the full extent and the possible consequences of NATO’s heightened and geographically expanded exercise rhythm is not fully appreciated amidst the blizzard of publicity about Russia’s activities. These military exercises (i.e., those that involve fielded forces, as opposed to table-top kriegsspiel-style “war games”) are important because they send powerful geopolitical messages.

But are the right messages being conveyed? This invigorated NATO exercise activity is intended to assure allies and deter Russia, a policy the alliance underscored at its Warsaw Summit in 2016, and Washington affirmed with the European Reassurance and, later, Deterrence Initiatives. However, the deterrence element, as manifested in what NATO capabilities are being exercised and where these exercises are taking place, is confusing and potentially destabilizing.

Exercising is Good, But Only if You Do the Right Exercises
In reaction to the Russian invasion of Crimea and instigation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, NATO leaders at their September 2014 Wales Summit

agreed to establish an enhanced exercise program with an increased focus on exercising collective defense including practicing comprehensive responses to complex civil-military scenarios.

Taking that guidance to heart, the alliance and its member states have significantly increased both the number of exercises and participants therein.

Because many NATO exercises overlap, and some are international but not strictly NATO-sponsored or even sponsored by NATO members, it is difficult to arrive at a complete picture of the scale of the alliance’s total effort. That said, in 2013 (the last full pre-Crimea year), the three main training events in which NATO members participated involved some 22,000 personnel. By 2016 that number had grown to more than 139,000 in eight major exercises, with the grand total — including those hosted by non-NATO countries — even larger.

Consequently, the “exercise gap” between Russia (which has historically conducted much larger exercises) and NATO, seen by some as problematic, has shrunk considerably. NATO’s numbers have risen dramatically, whereas Russia’s, although still larger in terms of personnel engaged, have declined.

In that light, it is concerning that NATO’s emphasis on “complex civil-military scenarios” in that same Wales Summit declaration — a clear reference to the much-discussed Russian “hybrid warfare” threat — downplays what is really the threat:

the prospect of a high-end fight with Russia. To get a better sense of what a realistic threat scenario should look like, even a cursory reading of Kofman’s day-to-day summaries of what the Russians were up to in Zapad-2017 ought to give pause if you are thinking that “little green men” showing up unannounced is the alliance’s major concern.

Mind the Suwa³ki Gap
In other words, how the alliance trains to meet the Russian threat will be unproductive if the threat, as demonstrated in Zapad-2017 and other major Russian exercises, is misconceived (as seems to be the case). Here is one example among many: Saber Strike is one of the U.S. Army Europe’s premier military exercises. Since 2011 it has bound together American, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish forces in combined arms training in the southern Baltic littoral states. In recent years, other NATO and non-NATO countries have also joined the exercise. This year’s Saber Strike adds the element of exercising NATO’s four new battalion-sized Enhanced Forward Presence battle groups, key components of the much-heralded “assurance to deterrence” upgrade intended to underscore the alliance’s commitment to defend some of its easternmost members.

One of the key training events of Saber Strike 17 was the movement of the U.S.-led Battle Group Poland (BGP) from its base in eastern Poland through the strategically vital Suwa³ki Gap and into southern Lithuania. Lest one be misled by the name “Battle Group,” it is essentially one U.S. cavalry squadron with Stryker armored combat vehicles supplemented by 150 British army light dragoons. In concert with the Polish Army’s 15th Mechanized Brigade and its battalion of Soviet era T-72 tanks, it “focused on transitioning from a hybrid warfare scenario, which is a counterinsurgency battlefield, to a static defensive operation to prevent a mass enemy attack.”

That is to say, once the hypothetical hybrid warfare threat has been dealt with, they are supposed to plug the Suwa³ki Gap. This assumes that others have tied down or neutralized the very real ground, air, or missile threats from Russia’s Kaliningrad bastion on their left flank. That will be a tall order for BGP and its Polish parent unit if, on entering the gap, they encounter the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army coming the other way. Responsible NATO officials surely understand that this iteration of Saber Strike ought to be seen as a placeholder for what would be a much larger effort if and when they had to fight the Russians here. But this scenario calls into question the larger issue of where and how, realistically, NATO would seek to stem a concerted Russian attack.

You Fight Like You Train. But Where is the Fight?
Based on current evidence, one might wonder if NATO has this figured out. For example, during a recent combined joint forces exercise in Estonia, the U.S. Air Force employed the A-10 Warthog in the close air support role. Anticipating correctly that any airfield in Estonia capable of handling these jets, in particular the NATO air base at Ämari, would have been neutralized by the Russians immediately after hostilities began, the exercise planners built in the seizure of a highway landing strip by British troops from which the A-10s could operate.

As it happens, this particular stretch of road is about 125 miles from the Russian border, on the other side of which will be enough offensive and defensive firepower to render it and all of Estonia off limits to NATO forces for the first days or even weeks of any war with Russia. This scenario is the very definition of the term anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), the high-end fight which the U.S. Air Force, especially, has said is its principal challenge in any combat with a peer or near-peer adversary. As I wrote in War on the Rocks before, the forward deployment within Europe of NATO air power in the early days of hostilities against Russia is a terrible idea. But, as most of these NATO exercises demonstrate, there is a strong political necessity to message assurance to the Estonians and our other allies by pushing precious assets forward, both in training events and with troop rotations such as the battle group battalions. Apparently this is a more compelling requirement than practicing from bases and areas that make better military sense, which the Russians might actually see as a deterrent.

There is No Longer a Neutral Corner
As Reid Standish noted, non-NATO states, including formerly staunchly neutral Sweden and Finland, have been steadily integrating into NATO exercises or inviting NATO units to participate in their own training maneuvers. For example, Sweden’s largest military exercise in decades — Aurora 17 — just ended, and featured NATO and Finnish forces joining the “fight” in a scenario that is a thinly disguised Russian attack on the strategic island of Gotland and on the Stockholm area.

Last year, fighter aircraft from the U.S. Air Force operated out of a Finnish air base close to the Russian border, and this year will participate in the multinational Arctic Challenge Exercise 17 in Finland. In May, NATO and Swedish troops wrapped up their participation in Finland’s Arrow 17 mechanized combat training exercise.

The U.S. Army in Europe has also included non-NATO member militaries in the Saber Guardian exercises this year on its southeastern flank (member states Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania). Notable among these are Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, all of which have experienced some level of armed conflict with Russia. In 2017, U.S. and other NATO forces have participated again in military training events in Ukraine (Rapid Trident) and Georgia (Noble Partner).

Further adding to the complexity of the NATO/non-NATO mix is the participation of Sweden, Finland, Georgia, and Ukraine in NATO’s Response Force, which “the Alliance can deploy quickly, wherever needed.” Finland, in fact, will assign four of its F/A-18 fighters and support personnel for the NRF in 2018. The need for the non-member units to meet NATO standards provides a convenient rationalization, at least from the alliance’s perspective, for their participation in NATO exercises.

Mixed Messaging
Clearly, NATO has undertaken to push its presence into areas where its footprint was light or even non-existent. For example, early this year some 330 U.S. Marines were deployed to northern Norway. This is the first time since World War II that foreign troops will be based in that country. The nuance that they are there on a rotational basis will be lost on Moscow. Subsequently, Norwegian, U.S., and U.K. forces embarked on a major exercise in Norway’s Finnmark region above the Arctic Circle, the purpose of which, according to a senior Norwegian official, “underlines the importance of further allied participation in training and exercises in Norway, especially in the North.”

Or consider that in July of this year, the United States moved a battery of Patriot surface-to-air-missiles to Lithuania as part of the Tobruq Legacy exercise, marking the initial deployment of this system in the Baltic states. The Lithuanian Minister of Defense said that: “The deployment of Patriots is important because it demonstrates that such moves are no longer a taboo in the region.” That is another way of saying that through an exercise event, NATO is willing to introduce a highly visible and destabilizing element to assuage an ally’s security concern, even if the deployment is temporary. On the other hand, NATO raises the alarm when the Russians do the same — as was the case with the movement of Islander-M missiles to Kaliningrad. Where that one-upmanship stops is an important but open question.

Further, as noted above, NATO has significantly increased its presence and activity in the non-NATO states of Finland and Sweden. Whether this is a prelude to those countries joining NATO or not, this adds significant military capability to the NATO mix of forces and shores up its flank in the Baltic Sea region. In that sense, the messaging is positive for NATO. The benefits of allowing greater participation by non-NATO states in southeastern Europe, in particular Ukraine and Georgia, is less clear, and on balance is more destabilizing than it is worth and could easily pull NATO into a conflict with Russia.

Do These Exercises Convey Deterrence?
With the rising tensions between NATO and Russia post-Crimea, we now see a much higher military operational tempo and forward troop presence on both sides, increasing the likelihood of inadvertent armed confrontation. Against that backdrop, since the invigoration and propagation of NATO military exercises is intended to convey a more aggressive, forward-leaning stance, does it effectively contribute to stability and security via conventional deterrence?

Writing in this forum, Michael Petersen described the essence of deterrence: “To deter an adversary, that adversary must understand that its enemy has a viable military answer to the adversarial challenge.” One of the means by which that understanding might be conveyed is through military exercises where the equipment, logistics, tactics, and military skills of one party are such that an impression sufficient to deter aggression is made on another party. In fact, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army Europe’s commanding general, said exactly that:

Deterrence means you have to have the capability to compel or defeat a potential adversary. You have to demonstrate that capability and the will to use it, and these exercises are that demonstration.

But these NATO exercises as they exist certainly do not, in and of themselves, contribute to deterring Russian aggression in any meaningful way. First, they are too small, largely lacking in heavy armor and artillery (where the Russians have a significant advantage), and do not typically involve all combat arms. Second, they do not fully engage the huge logistics train that would be required to move forces of sufficient size to halt a large-scale Russian attack through the Baltic states or Belarus.

Further, the alliance persists in entertaining the fiction of forward deploying to fight the Russians in the Baltic region, when every serious study of that scenario indicates this would be militarily unsound unless large, heavy forces were already in place or nearby. Considerable thought has already been given to the enhancement of the U.S. Army’s deterrence posture in Europe. But until these and other recommendations are fully implemented and exercised, pretending NATO can engage the Russians early in the Suwa³ki Gap or Estonia in a manner depicted in current exercises is a dangerous illusion, and to practice it is a waste of time at best.

In the larger context of how to deter further Russian aggression in Europe, the current state of play of NATO’s military exercise program is not yet of a scale and complexity to provide the necessary value added. Achieving a better result requires not only the budget support for larger and more complex exercises, but also improved planning of what those maneuvers ought to involve and, as importantly, where they should be conducted. The Russian Army’s General Staff, watching videos of companies of NATO light infantry maneuvering through the woods of Estonia or securing a road junction in Lithuania, will not be impressed.
*
Ralph S. Clem is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Florida International University, and is a retired Air Force Reserve intelligence officer.

 

[Housecarl]

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Nobody Loves Deterrence, But We’ll Keep Doing It Anyway

Joshua Rovner
October 9, 2017

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of “The Brush Pass,” a new column by Joshua Rovner (@joshrovner1)*on intelligence, strategy, and statecraft.

On Oct. 1, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert declared that North Korea “will not obtain a nuclear capability,” even though it achieved a nuclear capability a long time ago. North Korea obtained fissile material in the 1990s, conducted its first test in 2006, and has spent the last two years publicly flaunting its growing missile capability. Puzzled observers mocked the administration for boldly announcing it will never allow a country to own something it already owns. Others worried that the administration’s casual ignorance, alongside the president’s bluster, were injecting dangerous instability in the ongoing nuclear standoff.

While the Trump administration’s language is characteristically outlandish, the underlying sentiment is hardly new. Indeed, policymakers have aggressively committed to nuclear nonproliferation for decades, and are rarely willing to acknowledge nonproliferation failures. When friends like Israel and sometime partners like South Africa went nuclear, the United States allowed them to retain the pretense of ambiguity, neither admitting nor fully denying their new capability. When rivals like the Soviet Union and China were on the nuclear threshold, Washington thought seriously about preventive military strikes.

The one thing the United States almost never does is embrace deterrence. Policymakers are loath to accept the fact that rivals possess the capability to wreak mass destruction on the United States. They prefer to remove that capability, rather than deterring rivals from using it. Counter-proliferation – cajoling a state to eliminate its nuclear capability, or using military strikes to destroy nuclear facilities – holds out the prospect of restoring a safer time. Deterrence, on the other hand, is a holding action, a precarious effort to reduce the risk of terrible violence. And the holding action may not last long. Adversaries are fully capable of expanding and improving their capabilities, which can upset what one analyst famously called the delicate balance of terror.

One reason policymakers are reluctant to engage in deterrence is because they doubt all states can be deterred. Some leaders are irrational and unreceptive to deterrent threats. Others might be rational, but unreliable custodians of nuclear power who do not fully control site security and launch procedures. Relying on deterrence in these cases is insufficient, according to skeptical policymakers, because it does nothing to reduce the danger of loose nukes and accidental or unauthorized launches.

Leaders also hate the fact that nuclear adversaries restrict U.S. freedom of action. The United States maintains extraordinary military capabilities and usually enjoys a favorable conventional balance when it intervenes in other regions. This allows it to pursue a variety of interests and to extend its influence in distant locations. U.S. leaders fear that proliferation by other countries undermines these advantages and constrains their actions. They don’t like the prospect of being deterred.

Finally, leaders have moral qualms about deterrence. The perverse logic of mutually assured destruction is that nuclear-armed states are safer if they are equally vulnerable. If all sides realize that aggression is suicidal, they will not act. This logic has never been appealing to policymakers, who struggle against the idea that it is morally acceptable to leave their citizens open to annihilation and to hold millions of foreigners hostage. Ronald Reagan viewed deterrence as a “sad commentary on the human condition” and pleaded for alternatives like missile defense: “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than avenge them?” Instead of accepting the logic of deterrence, presidents from both parties invested in offensive tools for preempting enemy capabilities, and defensive tools for protecting against an attack.

Policymakers aren’t the only ones who find deterrence distasteful. Military officers are often uncomfortable with the idea. Their professional norms stress the importance of distinguishing civilians from legitimate military targets. Nuclear weapons make this difficult or impossible, given their vast destructive power. And they would always prefer to fight at the conventional level, where the United States possesses durable advantages.

Scholars and defense analysts also struggle with deterrence. Even those who are receptive to its logic face the basic problem of making inferences about non-events. It would be much easier to test deterrence theory if there were clear variation in outcomes, but this has not been the case: No one has used nuclear weapons in anger since 1945. So while scholars often talk about when and how deterrence works – I’m no exception – they rely more on deductive logic than empirical tests. As Austin Long put it to me recently, “What is needed are novel methods of collecting data without blowing up the world.”*Until that happens, academics and commentators will remain in the unsettling position of writing about immensely important issues, and sometimes making important policy recommendations, on a very thin empirical foundation. Policymakers can be forgiven for taking their advice with a grain of salt.

Everyone has a different reason for disliking deterrence. Policymakers don’t like the strategic risks involved, and officers don’t like the implications for conventional operations. Neither group is comfortable with the fundamental moral problems of nuclear weapons. And scholars, whose research ought to be useful, are inherently hamstrung by a lack of data.

Despite all these problems, however, deterrence remains the least risky option for dealing with emerging nuclear rivals. The United States usually goes through a period of consternation when a hostile state acquires nuclear weapons, but it soon learns that deterrence is the safest route to security. While U.S. leaders continue to invest in technologies they might use for preventive attacks, they are unlikely to take the risk. Meanwhile, they shore up U.S. retaliatory capabilities, and issue periodic reminders of their willingness to use them. They are not enthusiastic about deterrence, but they do it anyway.

The U.S. response to Soviet and Chinese nuclear acquisition is instructive. Years before the Soviet Union conducted its first test, high-profile hawks advocated preventive military strikes. These calls resurfaced during the Berlin airlift and the Korean War; the idea of taking out the handful of Soviet nuclear installations was alluring. But the president ultimately rejected these calls as too risky. Similarly, the Kennedy administration toyed with preventive attacks as China marched towards the bomb in the early 1960s. It worried that Mao Zedong might be so irrational that he was impossible to deter. The Johnson administration feared this as well, and it even reached out to Moscow to see about coordinating diplomatic actions to dissuade China from nuclear tests. Moscow demurred, and Johnson ultimately chose caution.

The same pattern may be at work today. President Donald Trump and his advisors stress that military options are available, and the president hasn’t been shy about threatening to use them. But these options carry enormous risks. Some observers warn that North Korea is likely to escalate quickly because its doctrine depends on striking first. Even if it doesn’t cross the nuclear threshold, it can credibly threaten South Korean with conventional and chemical weapons. In addition, military action against North Korea threatens to escalate into a wider conflict with China. The United States has good reasons to show restraint, much as it showed restraint after the Soviet Union and China went nuclear.

Deterrence is not emotionally satisfying, especially when dealing with morally odious regimes. It offers no conclusive solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation. What it does is buy time. This is significant because emerging nuclear powers tend to mellow as years go by. The moment of acquisition is fraught with danger, especially when a state demonstrates the ability to mate warheads with ballistic missiles, as is now the case with North Korea. Yet the danger steadily attenuates as nuclear powers discover the limits of what they can accomplish with their arsenals, and as other states adjust to new facts on the ground. In this way deterrence offers short and long-term benefits. It reduces the immediate risk of war, and it lays the groundwork for better relations in the future. Deterrence may be unloved, but it is irreplaceable.

Joshua Rovner is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University. He is the author of*Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence*(Cornell, 2011), and writes widely about intelligence and strategy. *

 

[Housecarl]

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ICAN and the search for the fortunate islands

10 Oct 2017|Rod Lyon

This year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has stirred mixed reactions. The Norwegian Nobel Committee states that the organisation received the prize ‘for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’. Some commentators have seen the award as rewarding a new, more activist, civil-society-based approach to peace, bypassing the old institutionalised, state-centred model. Others are less charitable (see here and here, for example).

Certainly the award maintains the committee’s reputation for surprising choices. Its reasoning’s arguable too. For one thing, I wouldn’t have thought the humanitarian consequences of direct use of nuclear weapons were in need of much publicity. They’ve been well known since the bombing of Hiroshima. For those of a more scientific mind, Samuel Glasstone and Philip Dolan’s 1977 text, The effects of nuclear weapons, covers the ground. And as for the nuclear ban treaty, it’s primarily a diplomatic symbol of disarmament—a norm-setter—rather than a practical instrument.

More ominously, though, the award can be seen as reinforcing the judgement that the tide’s going out on nuclear disarmament, not coming in. Several years back, one international security analyst drily observed that any year in which the international community had time to focus on the problem of small arms (like AK-47s) was actually a good year in international security. A similar observation might be made here: with all due respect to ICAN, any year in which the most notable achievement in the disarmament field is a civil society group’s advocacy of disarmament is actually an awful year for the broader objective.

Some will think those judgements too harsh, and I suppose much depends on how one sees ICAN’s signal achievement during the year—namely, its advocacy of the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Fans say the treaty’s unique and special—the first time the international community has outlawed nuclear weapons. Others hold a bleaker view. I must confess my sympathies lie with that second group. The ban treaty was adopted in July at the United Nations by 122 nations that gave up exactly nothing. None of the 122 actually deploys nuclear weapons or benefits from an extended nuclear guarantee from a nuclear-weapon state. And all of them have already previously undertaken, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not to build nuclear weapons.

Still, the treaty’s a worrying sign: as the requirements of nuclear arms control are becoming more demanding, large segments of the world appear to have been lulled into the false security of believing that the best approach to nuclear weapons is just to ban them. That’s a dopey idea. So far, it has taken the combined efforts of many players, over decades, to define a global nuclear order that—in William Walker’s words—turns on two linked systems: a managed system of deterrence and a managed system of abstinence. At a single stroke, the ban treaty delegitimises the first and defines an alternative vision of the second.

In their efforts to insist that nuclear weapons are just like long-lived anti-personnel landmines—marginal to international security—ban advocates risk pulling down the long pole in the tent of the current global order. By making the perfect the enemy of the good—after all, its signatories don’t believe any nuclear weapons are ‘good’—the ban treaty will probably make great-power nuclear arms control harder, not easier. Gradual, verifiable reductions in nuclear arsenals, which have seen US and Russian warhead numbers fall by tens of thousands and increased strategic stability between the superpowers, are, in any event, becoming more difficult to negotiate now that the ceilings are dropping to levels more commensurate with anticipated missions and relations between the great powers are souring. But having the ban enthusiasts shout unhelpfully from the sidelines that the real number should be zero warheads, not 1,550, or 1,000, or 300, is just going to make the process even more constipated.

Nuclear-weapon states that sign the ban treaty—and none look likely to do so—would (under Article 4) receive a period of grace within which to rid themselves of their satanic burdens. But no such period of grace would extend to signatories—like Australia—that currently shelter under another state’s nuclear umbrella. Under the subclauses of Article 1, they’re obliged to renounce their own nuclear umbrella and denounce the broader existence of nuclear umbrellas in the modern world.

In short, we’d confront a world of unreality if we headed down the path that the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize propose. Putting things in their proper perspective, the pursuit of nuclear disarmament is the geopolitical equivalent of poet Ernest Dowson’s search for the fortunate islands. Dowson’s hero, of course, was doomed to a protracted and potentially fruitless search ‘in the seas of no discovery’. ICAN’s approach is much more direct: it proposes finding the fortunate islands by banning the unfortunate ones.

Author
Rod Lyon*is a senior fellow at ASPI. Edited image courtesy of Flickr user Matej Duzel.

 

[Housecarl]

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The Storm Gathers and America is Unready

Dakota L. Wood
October 11, 2017

Winston Churchill summarized the theme of his seminal history of World War II as “[h]ow the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.”

His first volume, The Gathering Storm, recounted many instances of failure among the leading figures of the 1930s to appreciate the growing danger of Hitler’s rise to power. Churchill’s history highlighted how the good intentions and virtuous character of Britain, France, and the United States hindered them from taking actions that could very well have prevented a war that claimed the lives of some 60 million people. He marveled at

[how] easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; … how counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.
​

In 2011, the United States faced a federal budget crisis. The government had hit its debt ceiling, yet needed to accommodate a mounting annual budget deficit. The two major political parties were at an impasse on how to authorize more debt while somehow slowing the annual growth in federal spending.

Enter the Budget Control Act of 2011. It was intended to incentivize the parties to reduce federal budget growth by legislating mandatory cuts so painful — to the country’s security, in particular — that the parties would find some compromise in their positions that would allow them to avoid such harsh consequences. The effort to compromise failed, and the cuts became law, drastically reducing spending on defense through the early 2020s. Meanwhile, operational employment of the military was kept at high levels, accelerating the consumption and degradation of equipment, supplies, and people.

Unable to pay for the large force needed to sustain operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a variety of commitments around the world, the military shrank in size but saw little reduction in its workload. In fact, it started consuming itself, deferring maintenance and modernization to pay for current readiness and the immediate expenses of fuel, ammunition, and replacement of equipment lost in combat operations. As the fewer people, units, and equipment prematurely aged, the delayed arrival of replacement items worsened the material condition of the force, exacerbated further by the lack of funding for repair parts and maintenance personnel.

The military is now in a death spiral: too small for its workload; underfunded to repair and replace the equipment it is rapidly wearing out; ill-served by obsolescent critical infrastructure at its ports, bases, and airfields, and increasingly unready for the rigors and scope of a major conventional conflict should the United States find itself drawn into one, which has happened every 20 years or so with frightful regularity since the Civil War.

Gen. Daniel B. Allyn, until recently the vice chief of staff of the Army, has testified that only “one-third of our BCTs [brigade combat teams], one-fourth of our combat aviation brigades, and half of our division headquarters” are considered ready.*Currently, of the Army’s 31 brigade combat teams only three would be available to immediately deploy to a conflict. As recently as 2012, the Army had 45 brigade combat teams and nearly the entire Army was involved in the rotational base supporting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U.S. Air Force is 24 percent short of the fighters it needs. It is also short 1,000 pilots and over 3,000 maintainers. Only four of its 32 combat-coded squadrons are ready to execute all wartime missions. Prior to 1991, the Air Force purchased more than 500 aircraft a year to offset platforms aging out of its inventory. Since then it has averaged fewer than 100 per year, and the operational tempo has only gotten worse.

The Marine Corps “is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of the force to operate in an ever-evolving operational environment,” according to Gen. Glenn Walters, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. Only 41 percent of the Corps’ aviation platforms are considered flyable.

At only 276 combatants, the Navy has two-thirds the ships it did near the end of the Cold War. It now has the smallest battle fleet since before World War I. Of its 18 classes of ships, only seven are currently in production. The recent spate of ship collisions and a grounding imply problems in basic ship-handling skills.

Meanwhile, China has increased its spending on defense over 650 percent since the early 1990s. Beijing is rapidly building a blue-water navy and fielding a fifth-generation stealth fighter to compete with America’s F-22.

Russia continues to occupy Ukraine and to actively support separatist rebels carving out territory in the southeast of the country. It has salvaged the tyrannical regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and actively threatens NATO members in the north of Europe.

North Korea has become a nuclear power and is closing in on its goal of possessing missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to any spot on the planet. It can already hit the United States. Iran sustains its support of terror groups such as Hizballah and has worked to undermine effective governance in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. An assortment of odious terrorist groups continues to ravage portions of the Middle East and Africa.

Yet like France and Britain in the 1930s, the United States has neglected to keep its military strong enough to confront regimes threatening the peace and security of the free world and of America itself.

Churchill repeatedly warned his countrymen of the dangers of complacency, misguided priorities, and weakness of will, of the foolishness to see the world and major competitors as being anything other than what they truly are. While praising the virtues and spirit of moderation that defined the English-speaking peoples of his day, he also urged them to recognize the necessity of having the courage to take timely action when dangers threatened and clearly visible trends in an eroding ability to provide for their common defense were leading toward disaster.

A similar state of affairs afflicts the United States today. To the extent America intervenes in the affairs of others, it is because the United States has been attacked first, an ally is in dire need of assistance, or an enemy threatens broader regional stability.

Americans and their elected representatives in Congress consistently prefer to focus on matters at home. In their zeal to achieve a peaceful, easy life for all, they have consistently pushed to increase spending on all manner of domestic interests from healthcare to education, subsidized crop insurance, and alternative energy options, even as they’ve expanded federal benefits to an increased percentage of our number. But these have increasingly come at the cost of providing for the nation’s defense, arguably the preeminent responsibility and obligation of the federal government.

Churchill recognized that a nation’s priorities in spending must align with its security interests and that a failure to do so — combined with an unwillingness to make corrections in the face of clear danger — reveal a loss of will, courage, and clear-eyed thinking.

Some in America do recognize these dangers and, like Churchill, have the wisdom and courage to sound the alarm. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has been quite blunt, saying:

[N]othing has done more damage to the readiness of our armed forces than the continuing resolutions that stop us from taking initiative, than the lack of budgetary predictability … I bring this up because if we don’t get budgetary predictability, if we don’t remove the defense caps, then we’re questioning whether or not America has the ability to survive.*It’s that simple.
​

A few others — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), among them — have been equally plainspoken. But many more of their colleagues need to join them. The Heritage Foundation is doing its part to inform the discussion with its Index of U.S. Military Strength, among other efforts, but more needs to be done to raise awareness of worsening shortfalls in the ability of the U.S. military to protect national security interests.

The United States stands at a crossroads. Its decision on whether its investment in defense will be commensurate with its security and economic interests will dictate whether it continues to lead the free world as the preeminent global power or cedes it place to hungrier, more confident powers that do not share our values or interests.
*
Dakota L. Wood is the senior research fellow for defense programs in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and the editor of the “2018 Index of U.S. Military Strength.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.realcleardefense.com/ar...acement_key_to_nuclear_deterrence_112461.html

Minuteman III Replacement: Key to Nuclear Deterrence

By Constance Douris
October 11, 2017

In order to*deter nuclear*aggression against its homeland and vital interests, the U.S. must demonstrate that its strategic arsenal is capable of surviving an attack and then retaliating with devastating force against the aggressor.*In other words, the losses an attacker would suffer must*demonstrably*exceed any potential gains.*Thus, the paradox of nuclear strategy is that when weapons are postured effectively, they will never be used.* We buy and maintain*nuclear weapons in the hope they will remain in their submarines and silos forever.

The nuclear triad consists of submarines, bombers and land-based intercontinental missiles (ICBMs). Each part of the triad uniquely complicates an aggressor’s calculus when contemplating whether to attack the U.S. or its allies. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis confirmed last month that the U.S. nuclear deterrent will remain a triad, stating he had been persuaded that “the triad and its framework is the right way to go.”

The Pentagon is currently conducting a Nuclear Posture Review which is expected to be completed by December or early next year. The review is assessing each element of the triad to determine what the U.S. needs to retain its nuclear deterrent to stay ahead of emerging threats. Secretary Mattis specified that the review is not taking into account any specific adversary, but is being evaluated to “face unpredictable circumstances in the future.”

The modernization of the land-based leg of the triad, called the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), is of particular concern. This is because it will compete for funding with other acquisition priorities such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, B-21 bomber and KC-46 aerial refueling tanker. In addition, other parts of the nuclear triad are due for modernization at the same time, including the Navy’s Columbia-class submarine program, the warheads and bombs maintained by the Department of Energy and nuclear command and control systems.

Minuteman-III missiles were first fielded in the 1970s and have undergone various upgrades since. According to Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein, the currently deployed Minuteman-III ICBMs are 45 years old and are overdue for replacement. Hence, the Air Force requested $5.6 billion over the next five years in the fiscal year 2018 President’s Budget Request for the GBSD program.

Minuteman-III ICBMs are located in underground silos in Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. They have a range of at least 6,000 miles and are able to carry up to three warheads each. However, the U.S. currently deploys only one warhead per missile. As of June 2017, the U.S. has 400 deployed ICBMs with about 100 or so in reserve for testing, which occurs four or five times per year.

ICBMs are useful because they act as a targeting “sponge.” An adversary would have to launch at least one warhead at each to destroy them all, depleting its arsenal. If an attacker fails to destroy all of the ICBMs, those remaining could be used to deliver a second-strike response, which would cause great damage to the aggressor. These missiles also force an adversary to target the continental U.S. to even attempt to destroy the entire nuclear arsenal.

The GBSD program cannot be delayed due to budget battles. This would put the reliability of the missiles at risk because the probability of failure at launch increases when their solid-propellant cores age. If there is a postponement of the program, the number of operational ICBMs would significantly drop in the 2030s and create a capability gap since the number of missiles an adversary would have to fire to destroy all the underground missiles would decrease.

In August 2017, the Air Force selected two contractors, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, to begin the second phase of the defense acquisition system, the Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction phase. The Air Force plans to decide on a single contractor for the third phase of the acquisition process in fiscal year 2021. This is where GBSD will be developed, built and tested.

Each component of the nuclear triad is essential to deterrence and needs to be modernized to ensure aggressors are dissuaded from launching a nuclear attack at the U.S. or its allies. Modernization of the land-based triad in particular must not be delayed otherwise its target sponge value and missile reliability will diminish. A nuclear attack is less likely to occur when potential adversaries understand that the U.S. will respond with unstoppable destruction.

Constance Douris*is Vice President of the Lexington Institute. She has published articles and white papers on the smart grid, nuclear deterrence, missile defense and European security.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/11/china-spy-games-espionage-243644

NATIONAL SECURITY

China grabbed American as spy wars flare

A focus on Russia overshadows Beijing's aggressive tactics, including the kidnapping of a suspected American operative.

By ALI WATKINS 10/11/2017 05:00 AM EDT
Comments 18

The sun was setting over Chengdu when they grabbed the American.

It was January 2016. The U.S. official had been working out of the American consulate in the central Chinese metropolis of more than 10 million. He may not have seen the plainclothes Chinese security services coming before they jumped him. In seconds he was grabbed off the Chengdu street and thrown into a waiting van.

The Chinese officials drove their captive — whom they believed to be a CIA officer — to a security facility where he was interrogated for hours, and, according to one U.S. official, filmed confessing to unspecified acts of treachery on behalf of the U.S. government.

It wasn’t until the early morning hours of the following day that other U.S. officials — who were not immediately informed by their Chinese counterparts of the consular official’s capture — arrived to rescue him. He was eventually released back to their custody and soon evacuated from the country.

Both Chinese and U.S. officials kept quiet about the previously unreported incident, described to POLITICO and confirmed by multiple U.S. officials. But it threatened to spill into an international incident in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. U.S. officials strongly protested the abduction to their Chinese counterparts and, according to one official, issued a veiled threat to kick out suspected Chinese agents within the U.S.

U.S. officials consider the abduction an unusually bold act in a long-simmering spy game between Washington and Beijing, one recently overshadowed by a newly aggressive Russia. But U.S. officials and China experts say the two countries are engaged in an espionage battle that may be just as fierce, if far less publicized.

“The Chinese have not gone away,” one counterintelligence official who recently left government said. “The things going on with Russia right now really have distracted from China.”

POLITICO spoke with more than half a dozen current and former national security officials for this story. Almost all requested anonymity to more freely discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

China’s ongoing espionage within the U.S. was clear at a July pre-trial hearing at a Washington courthouse for former CIA officer Kevin Mallory, charged in June with passing at least three top secret U.S. government documents to a Chinese intelligence operative in exchange for $25,000 in cash.

“Your object is to gain information, and my object is to be paid for it,” prosecutors said the 60-year-old Mallory, then a government contractor, wrote in a message to a Chinese agent.

During the packed hearing, Mallory, who sat quietly in a dark jumpsuit, showed little emotion as prosecutors played a recording of a phone call he made to his family in which he frantically directed his children to find a device on which he stored information, including CIA material, for his Chinese contacts.

On the recording, Mallory can be heard worriedly shushing his son as the boy begins to describe the device—perhaps out of well-grounded fear that federal investigators might be listening.

Government witnesses testified that data Mallory allegedly stored on the device was sensitive enough to compromise critical U.S. intelligence gathering inside China—and specific enough to reveal and gravely endanger U.S. sources there.

The CIA and State Department declined to comment.

Some officials and China experts said Beijing uses a softer touch in its espionage. Where Moscow stomps, Beijing tiptoes — focusing heavily on the theft of economic secrets and making no known effort to influence U.S. electoral politics.

China is an important, if uneasy, strategic partner for the U.S. — particularly as President Donald Trump seeks Beijing’s help in taming North Korea’s nuclear program. And American corporations that care little about Russia’s stunted economy want good relations with China’s potential market of more than 1 billion consumers.

“It’s a much more sophisticated effort than Russia’s,” Daniel Blumenthal, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute and a former commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said of Chinese spying. “They’re stronger, they’re more ambitious, they’re more powerful. And there are more U.S. stakeholders who want a positive relationship with China.”

Mallory is just one of two U.S. government employees charged this year with passing U.S. state secrets to China.

The other, 60-year-old Candace Marie Claiborne, was a State Department veteran whose postings included Beijing and Shanghai. A March federal indictment charged her with accepting tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts from Chinese officials, including a laptop computer and international vacations, in return for U.S. government documents on U.S.-China economic relations.

U.S. officials interviewed by POLITICO said that, while visiting China, their colleagues are often “pitched,” or approached by suspected Chinese intelligence operatives believed to be trying to recruit them.


Korean People's Army soldiers are pictured here. | Getty Images
DEFENSE
Why North Korea is a black hole for American spies
By JACQUELINE KLIMAS


Chinese efforts to recruit spies expand far beyond U.S. government employees. In a 2014 counter-recruitment video, titled “Game of Pawns,” the FBI tells the story of Glen Duffie Shriver, who as a U.S. student in Shanghai struck up a relationship with a woman he eventually discovered was a Chinese government operative. Shriver took $70,000 from the woman as he sought a U.S. government job that would give him access to secret information he could pass to his handlers. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

“We live in a very sheltered society," Shriver says in the video. "And when you go out among the wolves, the wolves are out there."

One former U.S. official said the cases show the way Chinese intelligence services, which long sought to appeal mainly to Chinese-Americans, are now recruiting from a far broader pool.

“The way the Chinese have gotten more aggressive is, they’ve looked at recruiting more than just ethnic Chinese,” one Obama-era National Security Council official said.

Officials and experts are especially concerned about China’s 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management, which saw the theft of personal data from millions of U.S. federal workers. That information went well beyond Social Security numbers or birthdays—officials confirmed that China-linked hackers accessed troves of “SF-86” forms. That extensively detailed document—required for government employees seeking a security clearance—includes everything from relationships to the month-by-month minutia of a personal history.

The scope and detail of the files may serve as a kind of recruitment road map for years, Michelle Van Cleave, former director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said at a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing this summer.

“The threat will grow as a result of their successes against us, because of the integration of those cyber successes and their human espionage capabilities,” Van Cleave said. “I'm looking at what was lost through the OPM breach ... and I'm saying this is, this is staggering. This is staggering.”

The snatching in Chengdu is an extreme illustration of current and former officials' description of intense surveillance of Americans by Chinese security authorities in China. The officials described how their rooms or belongings were “tossed” — searched by Chinese operatives — while they were staying in the country.

“They were as fundamentally aggressive in their activity [as the Russians],” one former U.S. diplomatic official told POLITICO. Calling China’s approach more “subtle” than Russia’s, he added: “They always knew what we were doing and where we were.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.defensenews.com/news/yo...security-force-assistance-brigade-volunteers/

AUSA

Army offers automatic promotions to Security Force Assistance Brigade volunteers

By: Meghann Myers  
9 hours ago

The Army is preparing to graduate the first class of the Military Training Adviser Academy and stand up its first Security Force Assistance Brigade. To attract talent for the next five planned brigades, there are now new incentives to volunteer.

When the Army first launched the plan for SFABs earlier this year, noncommissioned officers and officers who signed up were offered $5,000 upon graduation and a choice of follow-on orders after a three-year tenure in the SFAB.

Now, according to the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, there are big promotion opportunities in store.

“In this first iteration, we have suspended the need for professional military education” for NCOs who have been selected for promotion but haven‘t made it to the required schools, Lt. Gen. Thomas Seamands, the Army G-1, told Army Times on Wednesday. “If they’re otherwise qualified, they will get promoted, and when they return from a deployment, they’ll get their professional military education.”

This suspends a 2016 regulation requiring soldiers to attend in-residence leadership training before pinning on new rank.


New guidance helps soldiers stay in STEP for promotion

Under new promotion policy, Army identifies scheduling priorities for soldiers who need to attend NCO Education System courses.

By: Jim Tice


And to shore up the E-5 ranks, which will be the lowest ranking but also most numerous soldiers in an SFAB, the Army is offering a near-automatic promotion to rising E-4s who sign on.

“For those soldiers who are specialist-promotable … regardless of what the cutoff score is, when they graduate from the academy at Fort Benning, they will be awarded 799 points – the number they need to get promoted regardless of what their MOS is,” Seamands said.

That promotion boost should continue throughout a former SFAB member’s career, he added. All graduates of the Military Training Adviser Academy will get a skill identifier for their records.

“That’ll give us the ability to track them over their career; it’ll also give us the ability to give special guidance to a promotion board, that we want to select those officers,” Seamands said.

The G-1 has already rewritten promotion board guidance to give weighted consideration to soldiers who have done an SFAB rotation.

“I think long term, promotion boards will recognize their contributions,” he said.

And for those who simply want to see some action, SFABs offer that as well, Seamands added.

“If you go back to 2008, the force was deploying at an incredible rate. Today, there are some units that will not deploy if you come in now, over the course of a three-year period,” he said. “If you want to deploy, and citizens come in for the sense of adventure, you can do that by volunteering for the SFAB.”

 

[Housecarl]

The "testing" during the Spanish Civil War comes to mind....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/technolog...an-conflict-next-year/141677/?oref=d-topstory

Armed Ground Robots Could Join the Ukrainian Conflict Next Year

BY PATRICK TUCKER
READ BIO
OCTOBER 10, 2017

At AUSA, officials showed off a robot shaped by the hard lessons of hybrid war.

Ukrainian military leaders and defense industry officials showed off their experimental Phantom robot on Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army show in Washington, D.C. It has an extendable frame that can be outfitted with treads like a tank or with six wheels, and armed with anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers, or machine guns. Currently in testing, the Phantom could be sent into action against Russian-backed forces as early as next year, they said.

Russia, too, has a wide array of ground bots it could dispatch to the conflict, though Moscow has not signaled its readiness to do that. But Russian drones of the flying variety have been used to tremendous effect there. They identify enemy positions to target fires. They hijack cell-tower signals to deliver false messages and texts, an effect experienced by Ukrainian soldiers and even NATO soldiers outside the country.

Meanwhile, the Russians have been quite up-front about using ground robots in Syria, although Russian media outlets reporting on their missions have been all over the map. Such unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, include the Platforma-M, the Nerehta, and the Uran-9. Still, the Russians are not known to have deployed UGVs in the destabilization war against their Western neighbor.

“What’s interesting about the Ukrainian conflict is that it’s the Ukrainian side that is developing unmanned systems it thinks will help it fight. Phantom is one such machine,” said Samuel Bendett, an associate research analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses’ International Affairs Group.

The Phantom — occasionally spelled “Fantom” in promotional literature — was designed with input from frontline Ukrainian troops who have been slugging it out against Russian forces.

Maj. Gen. Andriy Kovalchuk, the chief of staff and first deputy commander of Ukraine’s Airborne Armed Forces, described hard lessons about defending their products and weapons from Russian forces, and particularly highly sophisticated electronic warfare attacks.

Video

In the early days of the conflict, “civilians were trying to make something that can stand against Russian electronic warfare systems,” he said through an interpreter. Since then, he said, scores of small business have propped up to productize hard-won info on Russian electronic warfare artifacts.

Three-plus years of those difficult experiences are embedded in the robots like the Phantom. It has a backup microwave communication link and can return to its last waypoint when the link to the operator is jammed or severed. If all else fails, or the electronic warfare environment is too tough to allow and wireless control, you can also steer the robot with a 7 kilometer cable, like a 19th-century diver connected to the surface via a breathing tube—which goes to show how, in warfare, every step forward can be a step back.

Video

Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, ... FULL BIO

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/middle-east/al-qaeda-spinoffs-rise-syrian-ashes

Al Qaeda Spinoffs Rise from Syrian Ashes

OCTOBER 12, 2017 | BENNETT SEFTEL

One of the most worrisome trend lines in the Syrian civil war has been the accelerated growth of al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which seized control of Syria’s northwestern Idlib province over the summer and has transformed into the de facto face of the country’s anti-Assad campaign.

Throughout the six-year-old Syrian civil war, numerous militias, such as the Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sham, have taken up arms against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as they attempt to force the loathed leader from power.

Other rebel factions, however, including the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, have prioritized ousting ISIS from its strongholds in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa as well as in Syria’s eastern Deir e-Zour province.

As different groups gain or cede territory over the course of the conflict, HTS’ power and prestige among the Syrian people has only increased.

“HTS is emerging as the most formidable fighting force in Syria and is attracting more and more jihadists – foot soldiers and leaders – from other groups inside the country,” says Emile Nakhleh, Cipher Brief expert and a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service. “HTS’ three-pronged strategy of appearing more Syrian, more focused on Assad, and more anti-Shia is enhancing its credibility and legitimacy, and propelling it to the forefront of the anti-Assad jihad in Syria.”

Last month, while speaking at an event at the New America Foundation, former White House counterterrorism director Joshua Geltzer called the threat posed by al Qaeda in Syria billed the jihadist group as the al Qaeda network’s “largest global affiliate,” with an estimated force of at least 10,000 fighters.

Al Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot developed in 2011 against the backdrop of Syria’s civil war. The group, then known as Jabhat al-Nusra or the al-Nusra Front, quickly emerged as one of the most potent rebel movements fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In January 2012, it released its first video outlining its objectives: overthrow Assad and institute an Islamic government in Syria based on Sharia law.

The U.S. State Department designated al-Nusra Front as a terrorist organization in December 2012, and the organization continued to serve as al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria until last summer when its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani announced that his group was “splitting” from the al Qaeda network and rebranding itself as Jabhat Fateh el-Sham (JFS).

Counterterrorism experts immediately dismissed the idea that a real separation had occurred. Pointing out that just a few months prior, al Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri had issued a statement in which he offered his blessing for al-Nusra to break away from al Qaeda and unite with other jihadi factions fighting in Syria, many saw this simply as a means of procuring new partnerships and additional sources of financing from individuals and organizations hesitant to support an overt al Qaeda branch. Moreover, during his video announcement, Julani declared his reverence for Osama bin Laden and his intention to establish an Islamic state in Syria, further indicating his continued adherence to al Qaeda’s doctrine.

This January, JFS merged with four smaller Syrian jihadist factions to form an umbrella organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which now dominates the two million people living in Idlib province, the most populous area held by rebels.

Since the group’s latest rebranding, it has accumulated strength at an alarming rate, managed to essentially push its main rival, the Turkish-backed Ahrah al Sham, out of Idlib province, and worked to present itself as an anti-Assad force fighting on behalf of the Syrian people instead of a purely jihadist movement – all while likely retaining its clandestine ties to al Qaeda, according to counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross.

Earlier this month, HTS faced a minor setback after two of its significant fighting factions, Nour el-Din al-Zinki and Jaish al-Ahrar, broke away from the alliance. Then last week, HTS announced a change in leadership as Julani was appointed to head the organization in place of Abu Jaber al-Sheikh, who was selected as leader when the groups merged in January. HTS gave no reason for the resignation, adding in a statement that al-Sheikh had been appointed head of its Shura Council.

Nonetheless, by emphasizing its anti-Assad campaign, HTS has managed to tighten its grip on Idlib province and galvanize support under the radar while ISIS bears the blunt of U.S. and international force.

“Jihadist groups have a tendency to intermingle the local with the transnational, so we should not take its current local prioritization as unchangeable,” Gartenstein-Ross told The Cipher Brief. “But,” he said, “the group is currently emphasizing the local, while its overarching objectives remain transnational.”

And despite its targeted, anti-Assad messaging in Syria, HTS’ long-term objectives still align with al Qaeda’s desire to attack the “far enemy,” the United States.

“If HTS believes that American forces and military operations in Syria aim at thwarting HTS’ goal of toppling the Assad regime and establishing a Sunni emirate, the group will begin to engage American troops in Syria,” Nakhleh explains.

“Once it achieves its short-and medium term objectives, the threat to the U.S. becomes more real.”

Bennett Seftel is deputy director of analysis at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @BennettSeftel.

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[Housecarl]

This compared to the rantings by the "loyal opposition" that Trump wants a 10 fold increase in nukes and their wanting to remove his launch authority...This is at least coherent....HC

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/trumps-threat-to-nuclear-order/

TRUMP’S THREAT TO NUCLEAR ORDER

KINGSTON REIF AND KELSEY DAVENPORT
OCTOBER 12, 2017

If you thought “repeal and replace,” or perhaps, “repeal and not replace,” was only a strategy for the botched Obamacare repeal effort, you’d be wrong. It seems to also describe the game plan of President Donald Trump and Republican hawks in Congress when it comes to the agreements and norms that underlie the global nonproliferation regime.

The Trump administration and Congress face critical decisions over the next several months that could have bigly consequences for the international nuclear order. These include whether to continue implementing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, what to do about North Korea’s rapidly advancing nuclear and ballistic missile programs, whether to salvage the longstanding arms control architecture with Russia, and how to chart a path forward for America’s aging weapons, including determining their role in U.S. strategy.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age over 70 years ago, rarely has the world faced as difficult an array of nuclear weapons-related security challenges as we are facing now. As the Stimson Center’s Michael Krepon recently wrote, “The global nuclear order is wobbly. The nuclear safety net, thickly woven out of treaties to reduce nuclear dangers and proliferation prevention, as well as decreased U.S. and Russian force levels, is unraveling.”

And to make matters worse, rarely have we seen an administration and its supporters so determined to discard proven and effective nuclear risk reduction measures.

The president has expressed virulent hostility toward two cornerstone nuclear agreements negotiated by President Barack Obama: the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia, and the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran. Trump will likely declare in a major speech this week that the Iran agreement is not in the national interest. He has impulsively and recklessly threatened to respond to North Korean provocations with “fire and fury” and shunned diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. He has also flirted with increasing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. And the Republican-controlled Congress is poised to pass legislation that would deal a major, if not mortal, blow to the U.S.-Russia arms control enterprise.

It is not an exaggeration to say that by the end of Trump’s first term, the world could be facing a new nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia, an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program capable of producing enough nuclear material for several nuclear warheads in a matter of weeks, a deployed North Korean arsenal of several intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads, and a crisis of confidence in some allied capitals about the U.S. commitment to their security that prompts them to explore their own nuclear weapons programs.

If this future comes to pass, it would mean heightened risks of nuclear proliferation, increased odds of global nuclear competition, and, most unnervingly, greater possibilities for nuclear weapons use.

What can be done to head off these outcomes? Some might think building bomb shelters is the best option, though we think that energy would be misdirected. Instead, the American public, concerned members of Congress, and key U.S. allies have an important role to play in encouraging the administration to maintain nuclear risk reduction commitments that continue to benefit U.S. and global security and build on these efforts to further reduce nuclear risks.

A Broken U.S.-Russia Nuclear Relationship

Key pillars of the U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control architecture, like the bilateral relationship more broadly, are under siege and their future in doubt.

The biggest threat is Russia’s alleged violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a cornerstone agreement that helped to halt and reverse the Cold War nuclear arms race and remove a significant threat to Europe. The United States has accused Russia of testing and deploying ground-launched cruise missiles in contravention of the pact, which eliminated all U.S. and Russian nuclear delivery systems with a range of 500 to 5,550 kilometers. Moscow denies it is violating the agreement, and instead has accused Washington of breaching the accord.

Meanwhile, both sides continue to retain nuclear force postures that would allow each country to launch hundreds of weapons within minutes of a decision to do so. Put another way, the fate of the world depends to a large degree on the good judgement of Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two countries are also in the throes of ambitious, multi-hundred-billion-dollar efforts to sustain and replace their nuclear arsenals at levels greatly exceeding any rational defense requirement. U.S. and NATO officials have expressed concern that Russia is developing new nuclear warheads and lowering the threshold for when it might consider using them.

For its part, the Trump administration has yet to articulate a clear policy toward Russia or bilateral arms control. Trump has said he would like to improve relations with Moscow and that the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals should be significantly reduced. However, he has also pledged to strengthen and expand U.S. nuclear capabilities, denounced New START, and reportedly responded negatively to Putin’s suggestion to extend that treaty.

New START is one of the few remaining bright spots in the U.S.-Russia arms control relationship, and at least some administration officials continue to see value in it. The treaty includes a comprehensive suite of monitoring and verification provisions that help to ensure compliance with the limits it imposes on deployed strategic nuclear forces. New START is set to expire on Feb. 5, 2021, but can be extended by up to five years without further Duma or Senate approval if both presidents agree.

Republican hawks in Congress, sensing an opportunity created by Trump’s nuclear bravado and Russia’s misbehavior, are seeking to cripple what remains of the arms control relationship. For example, in an attempt to counter Russia’s INF treaty violation, both the House- and Senate-passed versions of the fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would provide funding for research and development on a new U.S. road-mobile ground-launched cruise missile with a range prohibited by the treaty. The House bill would also prohibit the use of funds to extend New START unless Russia returns to compliance with the INF treaty.

Construction of a new missile for deployment in Europe would set the stage for the U.S. to violate the treaty and increase the risks of destabilizing U.S.-Russia nuclear competition. Moreover, connecting New START extension with INF treaty compliance is counterproductive. By “punishing” Russia’s INF violation in this way, the United States would simply free Russia to expand the number of strategic nuclear weapons pointed at the United States after New START expires in 2021.

If the INF treaty dissolves completely and New START is allowed to expire in 2021, there would be no limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces for the first time since the early 1970s.

Unraveling the Iran Nuclear Deal

The multilateral nuclear deal the United States and its partners negotiated with Iran is unquestionably a success. But that has not stopped Trump from setting his sights on killing the agreement—if not outright, then slowly by a thousand cuts.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has dramatically reduced the risk posed by Iran’s nuclear program. The stringent limitations on Iran’s enrichment activities combined with unprecedented monitoring and transparency measures creates high confidence that any possible effort by Iran to pursue nuclear weapons in the next 15 years or more would be detected promptly.

By every metric, Iran is meeting its commitments under the deal. The most recent quarterly report from the International Atomic Energy Agency points toward compliance, and the European Union said outright in late September that all parties agree there have been no violations of the agreement.

However, the metric for judging the success of the nuclear accord has shifted in Washington. Now, the deal is under threat for failing to meet goals it was never designed to achieve, such as halting ballistic missile activities and reigning in Iran’s support for terrorism. Trump is also taking aim at the fact that not all provisions in the deal are permanent—conveniently ignoring that few arms control and nonproliferation agreements are unlimited in duration.

As a result, the Trump administration, supported by some members of Congress, is pushing to renegotiate parts of the agreement. In this scenario, Trump would withhold a certification to Congress tied to the nuclear deal, on grounds that Iran is violating the deal, or that the agreement is no longer in U.S. national security interests. The plan seems to be to threaten to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions, pursue tougher non-nuclear penalties, and possibly, threaten military action to try and get a better deal—without offering Tehran anything in return.

But there is no legitimate case for withholding certification. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has admitted Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said last week that the deal benefits national security. This approach of withholding certification without good cause and trying to ramp up the pressure to squeeze out new concessions won’t work and risks killing the deal. Given the growing threat posed by North Korea, the international community can ill-afford a second self-inflicted nuclear crisis.

In addition to risking the deal, trying to coerce further concessions out of Iran shows blatant disregard for Washington’s negotiating partners, who have repeatedly said renegotiation is not an option. If the United States pursues this approach, it will have not only lost credibility in future nuclear negotiations, but also isolated itself and ceded leadership on nonproliferation efforts.

Inflaming the North Korean Nuclear Crisis

To be fair to Trump, his administration did not inherit an effective strategy for dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat. Obama’s policy, known as strategic patience, paired increasing economic and diplomatic pressure with an untenable approach to negotiations—a requirement that North Korea take steps toward denuclearization as a precondition for talks. This passive approach gave North Korea time to increase its stockpile of fissile material and advance its ballistic missile programs, a trajectory that is continuing under Trump.

But rather than seizing the opportunity for a fresh approach to North Korea, the Trump administration settled on a repackaged version of strategic patience, dubbed “maximum pressure and engagement.” To date, the administration has emphasized the pressure portion of the equation. This has included supporting additional multilateral sanctions at the UN and unilateral U.S. measures, such as the wide-ranging Sept. 21 executive order that target entities and banks that continue to do business and facilitate transactions with North Korea. The Trump administration’s approach also takes a tougher line on China, publicly chastising Beijing and targeting Chinese entities for violating U.S. restrictions.

If the focus on additional sanctions and implementation of existing measures were paired with full support for Tillerson’s calls for negotiations, progress might be possible. North Korea has not shut the door on talks, though it is emphasizing that denuclearization is not on the table while Pyongyang is under threat from hostile U.S. policy.

Trump, however, is undercutting Tillerson by publicly rebuking the secretary of state’s pursuit of talks as “wasting” time, and is instead engaged in an impulsive and reckless exchange of threats and counterthreats with Kim Jong Un. At his first U.N. General Assembly speech, Trump belittled Kim as “Rocket Man” and threatened to “destroy” North Korea if it continued its aggressive acts. The mixed messages sent by Trump and Tillerson are also sowing confusion in Pyongyang, Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo as to what U.S. policy is and under what conditions the United States will agree to talks. In addition to obfuscating Washington’s position, vague threats also increase the chances of a North Korean miscalculation, such as mistaking a U.S. flyover of the peninsula for a preventative military strike, which could lead to military conflict.

North Korea’s nuclear advances in the nine months since Trump took office clearly illustrate that a pressure-only approach will not change Pyongyang’s calculus, and only increases the chances that Washington and Pyongyang blunder into a war.

Absent a sustained U.S. diplomatic effort to engage in talks without preconditions – paired with a reduction in inflammatory rhetoric—North Korea will likely stay on the path of expanding its fissile material stockpile and refining its ballistic missiles. This will continue to destabilize the regional security situation and, in conjunction with Trump’s past questioning of the value of the U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea, could prompt these countries to take steps toward developing their own nuclear deterrents, engaging in conventional arms racing, or adopting more aggressive defense postures.

Trump and the Bomb

It is against this rocky backdrop that the Trump administration is conducting a Nuclear Posture Review that could add new weapons to the U.S. arsenal and increase their role in U.S. policy. The review, which formally began in April, is slated to be completed by the end of the year, (though this date could slip).

Reports indicate that a number of revisions to existing policy are on the table, including development of new types of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, accelerating the Obama administration’s excessive and costly plan to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal, heightening ambiguity about the conditions under which the United States would contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, and letting New START expire in 2021. Most alarmingly, NBC News reported Wednesday that Trump told his military advisors in a July meeting that he wanted to increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to its Cold War peak of over 30,000 warheads. Both Trump and Mattis have denied the report.

Proponents of these steps argue that they are necessary to strengthen the credibility of deterrence and reassurance of U.S. allies in a more dangerous world. But in reality they reflect a naïve, reckless, and even theological belief in the power of nuclear weapons to leverage outcomes that they are not capable of effectively or safely leveraging. There is no evidence that assigning a bigger role to nuclear weapons will strengthen deterrence of adversaries or compel those adversaries to make different choices about their arsenals.

Moreover, the biggest threat to allies’ confidence in the U.S. commitment to their security is not the absence of additional nuclear war-fighting options, but Trump’s repeated assaults on the value of the U.S.-led alliance system and uncertainty in key allied capitals about what U.S. policy actually is on important foreign policy issues.

If included in the Nuclear Posture Review, the proposals the Trump administration is reportedly considering would be unnecessary and destabilizing, lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and add to the already unsustainable price tag to sustain U.S. nuclear forces. And pursuing new, lower-yield weapons and heightening ambiguity about when they might be used would inflame already acute and widespread fears in the United States and around the world that Trump can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.

Avoiding Catastrophe

For decades, U.S. leadership has limited the spread of nuclear weapons, drastically reduced the global inventory of these weapons, brought about a halt to all nuclear testing by all but one state (North Korea), and created an informal taboo against nuclear weapons use.

But today the global nuclear order is under increasing strain due to the growing North Korean threat, stalled progress on global disarmament, rising tensions between several nuclear-armed states, and global technological advances in the missile defense, cyber, and space domains that are putting new pressures on nuclear stability.

Rather than hasten the unraveling of several longstanding nuclear risk reduction efforts, the Trump administration should maintain and reinforce existing arms control and nonproliferation measures.

This should include seeking to preserve the network of agreements that make up the bilateral U.S.-Russia arms control architecture, key pillars of which have their origin in the vision of President Ronald Reagan. Taken together, these agreements continue to constrain Russia’s nuclear forces, provide stability, predictability, and transparency in the bilateral relationship, and have only increased in value as the U.S.-Russia relationship has deteriorated.

The administration should confront Russia in direct talks focused on securing the removal of its noncompliant INF missile systems. It should also pursue, in consultation with allies, firm but measured steps to ensure that Russia does not gain a military advantage by violating the treaty. This could include punitive economic measures as well as further augmenting U.S. conventional offensive and defensive capabilities in Europe.

In addition, Trump should take Russia up on its willingness to begin talks to extend New START until 2026. Extending New START would be an easy win for the president. It would help head off unconstrained nuclear competition, strengthen U.S. and global security, reassure allies unsettled by both Trump and Putin, and set the stage for further nuclear reductions in the future.

To reduce global concerns about itchy nuclear trigger fingers, Trump and Putin should issue a joint statement reaffirming the 1985 statement by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states through diplomacy must also remain a central plank of U.S. strategy. That includes sustaining the Iran deal and developing options to build on the agreement. Negotiations for a follow-on agreement or a regional approach to expand some of the restrictions in the deal with Iran would strengthen regional and international nonproliferation barriers.

Washington also needs to rethink and retool its failed strategy on North Korea. Pursing a pressure-heavy approach that is not balanced by sustained diplomatic outreach will only feed North Korea’s justification that augmenting its nuclear arsenal is necessary for the security of the regime. Diplomacy has worked in the past to halt North Korea’s nuclear progress and can work again. Entering into talks without preconditions and examining what the United States can put on the table in return for North Korean nuclear concessions—such as rolling back joint military exercises with South Korea, offering security assurances, or providing limited sanctions relief—stands the best chance of halting North Korea’s advancing capabilities.

Finally, the president must recommit to the vital task of alliance management. Buttressing reassurance in the face of the growing North Korean nuclear threat and a more assertive Russia would be hard enough without contradictory messages about U.S. commitment to its allies and the administration’s policy for dealing with key nuclear challenges. The administration must recognize that the concerns of allies cannot be ameliorated by placing greater emphasis on nuclear threats and weapons and instead emphasize stepped-up dialogue, intelligence gathering, and, as appropriate, conventional military preparedness.

The Trump administration’s nuclear policy is still being formulated, but a number of early indicators are cause for deep concern. U.S. diplomatic and political leadership, backed by military might, has been essential to reducing global nuclear weapons risks and stemming proliferation. While the existing network of agreements has been far from perfect, it has served U.S. security well. Walking away from effective measures to reduce the nuclear threat would be the height of folly and put us all at greater risk.


Kingston Reif is the Director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, where Kelsey Davenport is the Director for Nonproliferation Policy. You can follow them on Twitter @KingstonAReif and @KelseyDav.

 

[Housecarl]

I'm putting this here because of the number of parties involved beyond North Korea in the article.... HC

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/would-china-and-russia-support-a-north-korean-insurgency/

Would China and Russia Support a North Korean Insurgency?

It likely depends on North Korea’s use of weapons of mass destruction in a conflict with the U.S. and South Korea.

By Franz-Stefan Gady
October 12, 2017

A U.S.-South Korean military victory over North Korea is not preordained. In fact, as a I argued yesterday (See: “Military Stalemate: How North Korea Could Win a War With the US”), a bloody military stalemate is just as likely as a costly victory over the Kim Jong-un regime. However, it goes without saying that we should continue to entertain the possibility that Republic of Korea (ROK) and U.S. forces succeed in defeating the conventional forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Yet, what happens the day after the Second Korean War?

For one thing, it seems clear that North Koreans will not greet U.S. and ROK forces as liberators. As John Reid wrote for The Diplomat in May:

It would be a grave error to assume that North Koreans will simply be overwhelmed with joy at having food, iPhones, and K-pop. Much like in post-war Iraq, the vacuum created by the loss of an authoritarian regime cannot simply be filled with platitudes of freedom and liberty.​

Indeed, there is a real possibility that a violent collapse of the Kim Jong-un regime could lead to an insurgency in a post-DPRK North Korea. We tend to forget that the North Korean state has been built up around a “guerilla myth,”as Bruce Cumings notes.

A 2017 study by the U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI) at SAIS finds that a collapse of the North Korean state could “open the door to potential civil war inside the DPRK as well as resistance to an intervention seeking to reunify the Korean peninsula.” Consequently, “politicians and military planners alike must take seriously the possibility of insurgency in any state following rapid and violent governmental change.” A number of factors could make North Korea ripe for an insurgency.

First, there likely would be a large stockpile of unsecured weapons available to insurgents. Of course, this would depend on the duration of the conventional military campaign and the scale and scope of destruction. Nevertheless, various sources have indicated that the DPRK is actively preparing for an insurgency in the event of an invasion and would therefore likely have taken care to store stockpiles of weapons for conducting insurgency operations not to be used for conventional warfare.

The USKI study notes that securing these weapons would prove difficult and would require at least 50,000 soldiers: “In a plausibly worst-case scenario, such as the violent collapse of the regime, it would likely be impossible to secure many of these stockpiles, as looting of stockpiles would happen too quickly. As a result, any insurgency in the North would likely be well-armed.”

Second, over 8 million North Koreans have undergone some form of military training in their lifetime. DPRK military reserve forces alone consist of close to 7.5 million or roughly 30 percent of the entire population of the country. The reserve force consists of reserve military training units, Worker-Peasant Red Guards, the Red Youth Guard, and paramilitary units. (Some of these units only have access to obsolete weapons or indeed are unarmed).

In addition, the DPRK has a large number of special operations forces (up to 200,000) specifically trained for insurgency operations. “These units could readily provide the same type of cadre similar forces provided to the post-regime insurgency in Iraq,” the USKI study states. “This would be particularly important in terms of being able to organize and train would-be insurgents in unconventional warfare.”

The make-and-break factor in conducting a victorious insurgency campaign is the availability of sanctuaries. “The potential for sanctuary for a North Korean insurgency is perhaps the single most important and highly contingent factor in a post-regime collapse scenario,” the USKI study underlines. Only two countries would be able to offer sanctuaries: China and Russia. USKI discusses China (but not Russia):

Like Pakistan and Syria in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, China would not overtly provide sanctuary, but the costs of raids into Chinese controlled territory to target insurgents could be substantial. China would thus pay relatively limited costs while ensuring the post-regime consolidation in North Korea will be slow and costly. It could also tacitly use sanctuary for insurgents as a bargaining chip in an effort to achieve its objectives, such as a Korean peninsula free of external forces—including those of the United States.​

One of the major questions in an insurgency scenario is whether Kim Jong-un and his acolytes would be able to coordinate an insurgency campaign from China or Russia. Retired Admiral James Stavridis tells The Diplomat that China or Russia “would probably provide” sanctuary to Kim Jong-un from where he could coordinate a military campaign against the U.S.-ROK occupiers.

Bruce Bennett, a North Korea expert and defense analyst for the RAND Corporation, concurs: “It is always possible that Russia or China could offer the Kim family a safe haven after a failed North Korean attack on South Korea,” Yet Bennett also points out to The Diplomat that Chinese and North Koreans harbor a deep-seated animosity toward one another. “So I do not believe that Kim Jong-un would be willing to accept such an offer [of sanctuary] from China—he would not trust the Chinese.”

(China’s position would also depend on whether it chooses to militarily intervene under the terms of the 1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance.)

Russia might be a different story, according to Bennett. But this would be subject to Kim’s use of weapons of mass destruction during the initial phase of a possible Second Korean War.

“A Russian offer might be different, but even with Russia Kim Jong-un knows that the several billion dollars he has an overseas bank accounts won’t do him much good if the Russian government ever decides to take action against him (politics trumps wealth),” Bennett notes. “And if he has used nuclear weapons or other WMD, Russia would be under incredible pressure to turn him over to international justice. I am skeptical that he would view such a possibility as being safe for him.”

Consequently, after a closer look, the possibility of insurgency sanctuaries for the Kim regime in China or Russia seems possible but farfetched. First, it appears implausible to begin with that Kim Jong Un would survive the use of WMDs in a conflict with South Korea and the United States. The retaliation would be massive, as I explained previously:

In the event of a North Korean nuclear attack (or even signs of preparations for one), KMPR specifically calls for surgical strikes against key leadership figures of the communist regime and military infrastructure with the missiles part of a so-called kill chain consisting of integrated information, surveillance, and strike systems, as well as the Korea Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) system.​

Second, even if Kim and other senior North Korean leaders would manage to make it through the first hot phase of a military clash between DPRK and U.S.-ROK forces, it is highly unlikely that either China or Russia would be willing to offer sanctuary following the launch of WMDs.

Third, given Kim’s apparent mistrust of China or Russia it it is difficult to imagine that he would put his life in the hands of two countries that in the past, according to North Korean thinking, have repeatedly failed to support the DPRK and historically (e.g., the Korea War) not lived up to the expectations of Pyongyang.

Consequently, if Kim would have to pick between WMDs or sanctuaries in China or Russia, based on most publicly available information about the thinking of the North Korean leadership, he would most probably pick the former and still attempt to conduct an insurgency even without access to the latter.

However, there still looms the danger that North Koreans would launch an insurgency without coordination by Kim and senior DPRK leaders. “[Th]e DPRK regime has had more than six decades to propagandize the North Korean population,” USKI elaborates. “Even if the regime has only inculcated 10 percent of the population with this xenophobic racist propaganda, this means it can provide a mobilizing ideology for over two million potential insurgents.”

Whether China or Russia would quietly support a North Korean insurgency that is not led by Kim remains an open question.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/1...y-terror-not-suspected-in-town-shootings.html

6 hours ago

Sweden: Police say terror not suspected in town shootings

Associated Press

STOCKHOLM – Police in southern Sweden say several people have been injured in a small town known for past gang violence and that the incident is not being investigated as terrorism.

Police said two of the injured were hurt during a shooting and that a total of four people were taken to the hospital late Thursday.

They said there was nothing about the outbreak of violence in central Trelleborg to suggest it was terror-related.

Police say a K-9 unit is searching for weapons and officers are interviewing witnesses. No suspects are in custody.

Trelleborg is a Swedish port town located 33 kilometers (20 miles) south of Malmo and 64 kilometers (40 miles) southeast of Copenhagen, Denmark.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...97043e57a22_story.html?utm_term=.05b06befcf2a

Middle East

Lethal roadside bomb that killed scores of U.S. troops reappears in Iraq

By Kareem Fahim and Liz Sly
October 12 at 3:00 AM
Comments 15

IRBIL, Iraq — A roadside bomb that killed an American soldier in Iraq this month was of a particularly lethal design not seen in six years, and its reappearance on the battlefield suggests that U.S. troops could again be facing a threat that bedeviled them at the height of the insurgency here, U.S. military officials said.
*
The device was of a variety known as an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP, according to initial investigations, a weapon notorious for its destructive and deadly impact on armored vehicles and the service members inside them, two U.S. military officials said.

EFPs were among the most lethal weapons faced by U.S. forces before a troop withdrawal in 2011. The devices were considered a hallmark of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias battling the U.S. occupation after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. But the technology used to make them proliferated, and cruder versions were also deployed by Sunni militants.

U.S. military officials were quick to stress that they had not determined who was responsible for the attack. The Islamic State militant group — the only threat to U.S. and Iraqi troops over the past three years — was not known to have previously used the weapons, the officials said, though it may have acquired the expertise to make them. The officials talked about the investigation in response to questions about the circumstances of the bombing.

The Islamic State did not make any public claim of responsibility after the attack, on Oct.*1, which killed Spec. Alexander W. Missildine and wounded another soldier, according to the U.S. military. At the time it was struck, Missildine’s vehicle was traveling south on a major road in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, according to Col. Charles D. Constanza, a deputy commander for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

Col. Ryan Dillon, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said “investigations are continuing into the type and quality of the bomb to better determine where it originated. To say whether ISIS did it or not — we have not determined that yet. We are not ruling anything out,” he said.*

The question of the type of bomb used and its origin is sensitive because it comes amid an intensifying drive within the Trump administration to counter the expansion of Iranian influence in the region in recent years.

It also coincides with threats from some of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias who have fought in uneasy alliance with the United States against the Islamic State but are making it clear that they want U.S. troops to leave now that the militant group is almost defeated.*

The Asaib Ahl al-Haq group, which claimed responsibility for carrying out many of the attacks against U.S. troops in the years before 2011, said in a statement after the recapture of Mosul in July that the “resistance factions expect their return to the country after the defeat of ISIS.”

“If they are going to stay in any guise, the resistance factions will deal with them as occupiers just like they dealt with them before,” the statement warned. Another group, Kitaeb Hezbollah, issued a similar warning last month.

But it was also possible that the weapon was used by the Islamic State or another armed group “masquerading” in order to implicate the Shiite militias, said one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Dubbed “superbombs” because of their extraordinary lethality, EFPs are precision-made bombs with a copper or steel plate that is propelled in the form of a projectile whose high temperature and velocity can penetrate even the most heavily armored vehicles.*

The bombs showed up in Iraq about a year after the U.S. invasion. U.S. officials at the time said they were being supplied by Iran with the help of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Workshops were subsequently discovered in Iraq, including in areas where Sunni insurgents were active, and as early as 2007, Iraq’s al-Qaeda affiliate began using a crude version of the bomb.

“The proliferation of knowledge of EFPs has been around for some time. It’s out there,” Dillon said.

The bombs have since been used in Afghanistan, by the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab in Somalia and by the al-Quds Brigades affiliate of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, according to Greg Robin, an expert in explosive devices for the Sahan Research Group, a security consultancy. He said the quality of the workmanship can offer clues as to the provenance of the weapons.*

In addition to their sheer destructive power, the cunning design of the EFP has exacted a psychological toll. Early versions were set off by the heat of a passing vehicle, allowing the weapon to be deployed without an operator or remote detonator.

Later versions were initiated by the vehicles’ electronic signal jammers — effectively using technology designed to thwart other IEDs as a trigger.

Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report.

Read more:
The year after ISIS
After victory over ISIS, Mosul discovers the cost: Homes were turned into graves
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/355181-new-probe-launched-into-deadly-ied-attack-in-iraq

New probe launched into deadly IED attack in Iraq

By Ellen Mitchell - 10/12/17 02:43 PM EDT
Comments 21

The top U.S. military land commander in Iraq said a second investigation has been opened to*determine who is responsible for the deadly*roadside bomb that killed a U.S. soldier early this month.

“I’ve been able to complete an investigation on the type of munition. ... The prime minister of Iraq has directed a second investigation to try to determine who the perpetrators could be of that particular attack,” said Maj. Gen. Robert White, head of Combined Joint Forces Land Component in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Spc. Alexander Missildine was killed and another U.S. soldier was injured*on Oct. 1*in Nineveh Province*when an*improvised explosive device (IED)*detonated near their convoy.

Missildine is the 13th U.S. service member*killed fighting against ISIS since the start of the campaign in 2014.

White told Pentagon reporters from a video feed in Iraq that the bomb was an explosively formed penetrator,*a particularly deadly form of IED that can penetrate*armored vehicles. The type of bomb*has been used over the last 15 years in Iraq and has also been seen in Syria and Afghanistan.

ISIS has not been known to use such an IED, and the explosion took place where the terrorist organization has not been for some time, raising concerns that another group or militia may be responsible.

“I don’t want to make any assumptions on which group perpetrated the attack until I see the results of the investigation,” White said. “But that particular spot has seen violence in the last month or two.”

White also said Iraqi forces have all but destroyed ISIS strongholds in the country.

Though the forces still must clear several population centers, ISIS leaders “know they are losing,” White said.

“They can see it coming, and they are starting to run away, and they are starting to ask for surrender, which is something you would not have seen a year ago. The physical caliphate has been destroyed. It will be finished off in another part of the world here shortly.”

U.S.-backed forces have also pushed ISIS from 80 percent of its self-declared capital of Raqqa in Syria.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://taskandpurpose.com/army-rolls-new-field-manual-focused-us-adversaries-evolving-capabilities/

Army Rolls Out New Field Manual Focused On US Adversaries’ Evolving Capabilities

By Corey Dickstein, Stars and Stripes on October 11, 2017

The Army has reshaped its primary operating concept to focus on large-scale combat against enemies with technology and capabilities similar to American forces after 16 years of fighting insurgent groups in the Middle East and southwest Asia.

The Army on Tuesday rolled out its updated field manual during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting in Washington. Titled FM 3-0 Operations, the field manual emphasizes the service’s need to adapt to potential battlefields where enemies have modern tanks, artillery, air forces, drones and cyber capabilities.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, said Tuesday that adversaries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have spent nearly two decades studying the U.S. military’s strengths and vulnerabilities as it has fought terrorist groups. Those nations have invested in modernizing their forces and preparing them to exploit vulnerabilities developed while the United States focused on fighting insurgents.

“Our advantage has steadily eroded,” he said.

It marks the first major overhaul since 2011 of the field manual, which defines the Army’s fighting priorities for soldiers, said Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Lundy, the commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

The shift in focus was necessitated primarily by adversaries such as Russia, which has used advanced military techniques against Ukrainian forces since intervening in the civil war there in 2014.

“The environment has changed, and it has changed dramatically,” Lundy said. “Threats today are much more sophisticated and capable.”

The need for the United States to fight such a near-peer adversary is now more likely than at any time since the Cold War, he said.

And such a war would be “significantly more dangerous” than the combat American soldiers have faced in Afghanistan and Iraq through the last 16 years, said Lundy, who helped write the new manual during the last seven months.

The new fighting manual places increased emphasis on large-scale combat that would include multiple Army divisions of some 20,000 soldiers, which means refocusing the Army to deploy full divisions and even corps as opposed to the brigade combat teams that it has deployed independently during recent wars, Lundy said.

It also means ensuring the divisions have built-in cyber warfare and aerial defense capabilities, which have not been required on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Lundy highlighted Russia’s use of drones to scout the locations of Ukrainian forces before releasing massive long-range artillery barrages, such as an attack in July 2014 near the beginning of the conflict when an entire Ukrainian army battalion was virtually destroyed.

Many near-peer adversaries, including Russia, use long-range artillery as their primary offensive weapon, Lundy said. To counter such a threat, the United States must be able to shoot down or jam the drone systems from the battlefield. It also must be able to protect its force from incoming artillery or fire from aircraft, he said.

“We haven’t been shot at by anything in the air until about six months ago when [the Islamic State] started doing it with unmanned systems,” the general said. “The threat had gone away, so we weren’t investing in that. We’ve got to change that now.”

To change the Army’s emphasis to focusing on large-scale operations it means units will adjust their training at home and at regional combat training centers. While the Army has spent the last three years adjusting its training center rotations to prepare units to fight insurgents and near-peer enemies, Lundy said future rotations will place increased emphasis on fighting modern armies capable of launching debilitating cyber and air attacks on the unit.

Preparing the Army to fight a near-peer adversary is ultimately a deterrent to other countries who do not want to engage an Army that they cannot destroy, Lundy said.

“This is about thinking differently about warfighting than we have for the last 16 years and filling in our capability gaps,” he said.” “It’s about preparing to fight a near-peer fight today and deterring our adversaries from wanting that fight.”

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/arti...nnish-model?cid=int-now&pgtype=hpg&region=br2

October 9, 2017

The Finnish Model

To Improve Europe’s Militaries, Look North

By Elisabeth Braw

When Mikael Granlund was called up for service in Finland’s military seven years ago, he could have tried to get an exemption. For an elite ice hockey player such as Granlund, who now plays for the National Hockey League team Minnesota Wild, a year in the armed forces can bring serious athletic setbacks. But Granlund didn’t try to be exempted.

“For a Finn, it’s an honor to do military service,” the 25-year-old Granlund said this month. “It’s just something you do if you want your country to stay independent.” What about athletes? “Professional athletes do it, too,” Granlund added. “It’s just something you want to do.”

Granlund is not alone. Each year, several of Finland’s top athletes join the Finnish Defence Forces as conscripts. So do music stars, who could similarly try to be exempted. Though the FDF—like most armed forces—exempts would-be conscripts only for health-related reasons, in many countries young men fake illnesses in order to avoid service. And young star athletes and artists would, one might think, have a good reason to avoid the draft, as their careers could suffer irreparably from a year away from the limelight. (Next year’s cohort of conscripts will include one of the country’s biggest pop stars, Robin, who will enter the navy.)

Indeed, as Granlund’s and Robin’s enlistments show, the FDF has managed a feat that other armed forces could learn from: it has made itself an attractive destination for conscripts and professional troops alike. This helps explain why the armed forces routinely have more applicants than openings for noncommissioned officer positions. According to a May Eurobarometer poll, 95 percent of Finns trust their army, a higher rate than anywhere else in the European Union. (In Germany, 66 percent trust the army; across the EU, the average is 75 percent.)

Granlund and many other Finns may consider conscription a patriotic duty, but militaries cannot count on citizens’ love 87 percent of the country’s citizens support President Vladimir Putin’s handling of foreign affairs, only around 37 percent of its young men perform military service, which in theory is mandatory for everyone....

(Rest behind subscription wall...HC)

 

[Shacknasty Shagrat]

It is stuff like this that I find very concerning.
I wonder what the paper blizzard is for.
There is a lot of what appears to be scurrying going on in world capitols today.
I am unable to copy the video clip.
There are many other less public ways to quickly get copiers into the White House.
These are the big, high dollar copiers.
SS

' Steve Herman‏Verified account @W7VOA 9m9 minutes ago

A procession of copy machines to the West Wing. – at The White House

https://twitter.com/W7VOA

[video]http://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/918920795715440641[/video]
[video]https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/918920795715440641[/video]

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...es-the-most-dangerous-nuclear-threat-no-22709

China's Undewater Nukes: The Most Dangerous Nuclear Threat No One Is Talking About?

Robert Farley
October 13, 2017

Deployed appropriately, any of the more modern submarines can strike the United States with nuclear missiles. The Type 096 can strike the U.S. from secure areas near China’s coast. The Pentagon currently believes that China will build around eight SSBNs in total, giving the PLAN the capacity to maintain multiple boats on continuous patrol. Much depends, however, on whether China shifts its overall nuclear posture from minimal deterrence to active pursuit of secure second strike capability.

China’s nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs, or “boomers”) are soon to become a major worry for the United States. How does this change the balance of power in the Pacific?

History of Program:

China completed its first SSBN, the Type 092 “Xia” boat, in 1981. The sub did not enter service until 1987, however, and has reportedly never conducted a deterrence patrol. The sub (various rumors over the years have asserted that a sister ship was built, and lost) represented a triumph of China’s limited submarine building industry, but did not constitute a meaningful deterrent.

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China’s second effort, the Type 094 class, has resulted in a much more effective group of boats. The Type 094s displace about 11,000 tons submerged, and carry 12 JL-2 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), capable of launching a nuclear warhead some 7,500 kilometers.

Reports vary on whether the missiles can carry MIRVs, but given Chinese advances in this area it is likely that these and future boats will carry them in the future. Thus far China has constructed around four Type 094 class subs, the minimum necessary for conducting continuous deterrent patrols.

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(This first appeared towards the end of 2015.)

The next step is the Type 096 “Tang” SSBN. Reports vary widely on the design parameters and expected deployment dates, but it will undoubtedly be larger, quieter, and carry more missiles with more warheads. The Type 096 is expected to carry up to 24 JL-3 SLBMs, with a range of 10,000 kilometers.

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Deployed appropriately, any of the more modern submarines can strike the United States with nuclear missiles. The Type 096 can strike the U.S. from secure areas near China’s coast. The Pentagon currently believes that China will build around eight SSBNs in total, giving the PLAN the capacity to maintain multiple boats on continuous patrol. Much depends, however, on whether China shifts its overall nuclear posture from minimal deterrence to active pursuit of secure second strike capability.

Strategies:

The Type 092 boat is practically undeployable, and has effectively been retired. The PLAN has been conducting extensive exercises with the Type 094 boats, presumably in preparation for their first deterrent patrols. The PLAN has developed an extensive infrastructure for servicing these boats. However, the Type 094 class cannot operate independently in conditions of high intensity conflict. The boats are reputedly noisier than 1970s era Soviet SSBNs, making them easy prey for American attack subs.

In light of this disadvantage, it seems likely that China will adopt the “bastion” concept that guided Soviet SSBN deployment during the Cold War. The Soviets adopted the bastion strategy because of concern about the survivability of its SSBNs, and because of paranoia about a decapitating American first strike. If anything, China’s boats remain less survivable than the Soviet subs of the late Cold War, and China is considerably more vulnerable to pre-emptive nuclear attack than the Soviet Union. Consequently, a bastion strategy might make sense. However, the PLAN needs to accelerate the development of its anti-submarine warfare capabilities in order to pose a genuine threat to American attack submarines.

On the one hand, the noisiness of China’s boomers make them easy for U.S. attack boats to find. On the other hand, and insecure nuclear deterrent does not bode well for crisis stability. As Brendan Thomas-Noone and Rory Medcalf have suggested, noisy SSBNs present tempting targets for nuclear attack submarines. In a war, the United States (or Japan, or India) might press this advantage by engaging in a concerted effort to destroy China’s boomers. This was precisely the strategy the U.S. Navy envisioned in the 1970s and 1980s; attacking the “bastions” in which Soviet SSBNs patrolled.

While sinking the SSBNs seems attractive, a concerted campaign might produce a “use it or lose it” mentality in the Chinese Communist Party, and would undoubtedly heighten concerns about U.S. escalatory intentions. In short, the vulnerability of Chinese SSBNs is both an opportunity and a problem for the United States.

Effects on Deterrence:

In practical terms, the expansion of the Chinese submarine nuclear deterrent doesn’t have much effect on the United States. As was the case with the Soviet Union, and is the case with Russia, China has plenty of good reasons to refrain from launching. The decision to devote resources to the SSBN fleet may well result from concerns over U.S. nuclear primacy; the idea that the United States could decisively destroy China’s nuclear forces on the ground. The deployment of additional submarines undoubtedly makes China’s second strike deterrent somewhat more secure, but the United States would require excessively high confidence to undertake a first strike against under any conditions.

As the world’s most powerful navies have found, SSBNs are a mixed blessing. They suck up cash and resources at every stage of design and development, and return very little in terms of operational value. The United States Navy has grudgingly settled on an Ohio replacement boat, although not without controversy. The ability of the United Kingdom to replace its existing SSBN force is an open political question. Even the Russians have been slow to replace their aging, Cold War era boomers. Moreover, “bastion” strategies are particularly costly, as they force the deployment of support units in the vicinity of the boomer.

The more interesting questions come down the road, as China tries to catch the United States (and Russia) on quieting technology. If future PLAN boomers have sufficient stealth to operate independently, then the Chinese deterrent strategy could come to resemble the American more closely than the Soviet. This would, incidentally, free up surface and subsurface anti-submarine units for other work.

In any case, the presence of additional Chinese boomers adds a wrinkle to the escalation-management problems that will arise if China and the United States ever go to war. The development of the Indian SSBN force, which has lagged behind the Chinese for some time, could further complicate the nuclear politics of the Indo-Pak. But most likely, Chinese boomers will spend their careers doing what everyone else’s boomers do; hide deep in the ocean, waiting for an order that will probably never come.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as an Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.