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Sorry for the delay folks.....Meat world will have it's pound of flesh...... WAR - 08-29-2020-to-09-04-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** Sorry for the delay....HC (432) 08-08-2020-to-08-14-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****...

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(436) 09-05-2020-to-09-11-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR - 09-05-2020-to-09-11-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (433)...

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WAR - 09-12-2020-to-09-18-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (434) 08-22-2020-to-08-28-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR - 08-22-2020-to-08-28-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (435)...

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Overnight Defense: Trump sows confusion over Afghanistan troop levels | Trump tells Iran not to ‘f— around’ with US | Supervisor of soldiers who appeared at Democratic convention faces discipline

Happy Friday and welcome to Overnight Defense. I’m Rebecca Kheel, and here’s your nightly guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. CLICK H…

thehill.com

Overnight Defense: Trump sows confusion over Afghanistan troop levels | Trump tells Iran not to 'f--- around' with US | Supervisor of soldiers who appeared at Democratic convention faces discipline

By Rebecca Kheel - 10/09/20 05:41 PM EDT

Happy Friday and welcome to Overnight Defense. I'm Rebecca Kheel, and here's your nightly guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. CLICK HERE to subscribe to the newsletter.
THE TOPLINE: What exactly is the U.S. plan for troops in Afghanistan?

That’s the question many have been asking since President Trump tweeted all U.S. troops “should” be “home by Christmas” hours after national security adviser Robert O’Brien said there would be about 2,500 troops there early next year.

We took a look at the ensuing confusion, which was further stoked by the fact that the Pentagon and U.S. military have yet to comment.

The key question is whether Trump has actually ordered a withdrawal or is just tweeting campaign rhetoric in the final stretch before the election.

“What we are seeing here is the internal conflict of a president of the United States focused on keeping his foreign policy promises 26 days before an election and the national security professionals charged with mitigating against a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan,” Andy Keiser, a principal at the lobbying firm Navigators Global who worked on Trump’s 2016 transition team, said in an email.

A senior administration official said Trump's tweet "really laid down a marker as the commander in chief, and we all follow his lead."

“The president has been clear in his many previous statements of his intentions to bring U.S. troops home safely and soon from Afghanistan," the official said.

Contradictions aplenty: Both a full withdrawal and O’Brien’s drawdown would contradict other officials’ assurances they would review conditions on the ground before dropping below 4,500 troops.

“We’ll be watching very carefully to assess the conditions of Taliban compliance with the terms of its agreement, and that will be used to inform decisions on further and future withdrawals,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration’s envoy for Afghanistan negotiations, told a House panel last month.

Trump’s desire for full withdrawal also accelerates the timeline laid out in the administration’s agreement with the Taliban.

The agreement, signed in February, called for a full U.S. withdrawal by May 2021. But, the deal stipulates that will only happen if the Taliban upholds its commitment to deny safe haven to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups intent on attacking the West — something the U.S. military says it has yet to do.

“The Taliban has still not shown conclusively that they're going to break with al Qaeda,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said in September. “So there are still some things out there that concern me about the Taliban's either ability or willingness to comply with all the terms of the deal.”

The practical effects: Trump’s talk of a full withdrawal comes after negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban got underway last month after months of delay.

Regional experts are warning the conflicting messages from Trump and O’Brien risk rocking the delicate intra-Afghan talks.

“It I'm sure is causing a lot of questions and reconsideration of different strategies because the U.S.’s plan for assistance to Afghanistan significantly affects each of the elements of the negotiation,” said Scott Worden, director of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Afghanistan and Central Asia programs. “So this will cause those that are in the negotiation to seek greater clarity before they make commitments to each other on a way forward.”

If Trump proceeds with a full withdrawal by December, Worden added, the United States loses leverage to ensure the Taliban upholds its counterterrorism commitments. The Taliban’s leverage in the intra-Afghan talks would also increase because its main goal is to end the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, he said.

TRUMP DROPS F-BOMB ON IRAN: Trump’s two-hour “radio rally” Friday with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh including some particularly harsh words for Iran.

“Iran knows that, and they’ve been put on notice: If you f--- around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are gonna do things to you that have never been done before,” Trump said in the interview, which was billed as a “radio rally” while he continues recovering from COVID-19 at the White House.

Trump has frequently threatened Iran, though rarely in such profane terms.

Context: U.S.-Iran tensions have run particularly high throughout the Trump presidency after he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed harsh sanctions on Tehran.

At the beginning of the year, the two countries appeared to be on the brink of war after Trump ordered a drone strike in Iraq that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

As the U.S. election nears, regional experts expect Iran to hold off on any particularly provocative action that could provoke the U.S. and international community as it hopes Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden defeats Trump and returns to the Obama-era nuclear deal.

ARMY RESERVE DISCIPLINING SUPERVISOR AFTER DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION ROW: A supervisor of two Army reservists who appeared in uniform at the Democratic National Convention will be disciplined, though the soldiers themselves will not be.

Army Reserve spokesman Lt. Col. Simon Flake confirmed to The Hill on Friday the disciplinary action following an investigation into the incident. Military Times first reported the news.

“The investigation determined the two soldiers who appeared on television were not at fault,” Flake said in a statement. “The investigation found their supervisor violated a Department of Defense directive and an Army regulation that governs soldier political activities. The supervisor at fault will receive the appropriate level of disciplinary action for violating the governing standards.”

Flake did not elaborate on how the supervisor will be disciplined, nor if he or she is a civilian employee or member of the military.

Flashback: In August, two unidentified soldiers from the 9th Mission Support Command based out of Hawaii stood behind the delegates from American Samoa as they nominated Biden during the Democratic National Convention’s roll call.

The image of the soldiers clad in camouflage raised immediate eyebrows as observers questioned whether they violated military rules against politicking while in uniform. At the time, Democratic officials called the composition of the shot an "oversight."

The next day, the Army announced it was launching an investigation.

ICYMI
-- The Hill: Democrats launch inquiry into Pentagon's moves on a national 5G network
-- The Hill: Finland could buy billions in either F-35 or F-18 fighters, State Department announces
-- The Hill: EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence chief briefed lawmakers of foreign influence threats to Congress
-- Stars and Stripes: Army hits 2020 recruiting, retention goals amid pandemic, but top officials say more diversity needed
-- Navy Times: CNO: More than 190 ships have had COVID-19 cases
-- Associated Press: Ex-Guantanamo commander sentenced for lying in man’s death
-- Foreign Affairs op-ed by Hillary Clinton: A National Security Reckoning

 

[Housecarl]

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Pakistan is vulnerable to the impending ideological storm in Afghanistan

If the Taliban take over from the Afghan government, they will have a tough time deciding which group of warriors will have the lead in governance.

indianexpress.com

Pakistan is vulnerable to the impending ideological storm in Afghanistan
If the Taliban take over from the Afghan government, they will have a tough time deciding which group of warriors will have the lead in governance.
Written by Khaled Ahmed | Updated: October 10, 2020 9:24:17 am


Former Chief Executive Officer of the Unity Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and now leader of the High Council for National Reconciliation, Abdullah Abdullah, was in Pakistan in the last week of September seeking the latter’s help in getting the Taliban to stop killing and sit down with the government in Kabul and talk about the future of the country. Persian-speaking Abdullah was immediately likeable, quoting Pakistan’s national poet Allama Iqbal in Persian and speaking Urdu with TV hosts. In terms of public relations, he was an immediate success in contrast to President Ashraf Ghani, whose earlier visit was marked with stiffness because of his scepticism about Islamabad’s “friendship” with his government.

Both visits were a parable of paradox. Ghani was a Pakhtun deeply suspicious of Pakistan, Abdullah, a Tajik, seemed upbeat. The Pakhtun represent the external image of Afghanistan but they are deeply divided. Tajik Abdullah is supposed to be pro-India but appears to have forgotten what Pakistan did after all the commanders facing up to the Soviet invasion of 1979 took refuge in Pakistan. Clearly, the “charismatic” Pakhtun Hekmatyar was preferred over the Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. For Pakistan, the choice was natural: Afghanistan was an extension of its own Pakhtun Belt on the Durand Line, and the Tajiks were peripheral to its strategic interest. Today, Pakistan is disenchanted with the old policy of Talibanisation of Pakistan.

India has traditionally been connected with the Tajiks of northern Afghanistan and developed political-social relations with them — like Tajiks getting their higher education in India — while Pakistan got into trouble with its side of the Afghan jihad. The last leader of the Taliban — Mullah Fazlullah —played havoc with the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s north until he was ousted from there. While in Afghanistan, he delivered the most lethal blow to Pakistan — the 2014 massacre of children at an army-run school in Peshawar, killing 132 children. (Ehsanullah Ehsan, the man who planned the massacre, was caught by Pakistan but was able to mysteriously escape; yet another indicator of Pakistan’s vulnerability while dealing with Afghanistan.) Somehow, one believes that the Pakistani Taliban sheltering in Afghanistan will remain separated from the Afghan Pakhtuns in the post-US phase.


But it is the Haqqani Network Pakistan is delivering on in the latest phase of diplomacy. The Haqqanis, married into the Gulf Arab aristocracy, are the strongest group of fighters in Afghanistan. A joint cell of the Islamic State or Daesh and the Haqqani network recently carried out major attacks in Kabul, including an attack on a Sikh temple in March. Pakistan is supposed to get the Haqqanis to agree that the Taliban and other jihadi outfits like Islamic Jihad would stop killing and sit across the table with the Afghan government. In 2012, the US had tried to persuade Pakistan about joint action against the Haqqanis and Mullah Fazlullah but Pakistan wouldn’t see the two as one force. Once again, it is Pakistan’s outreach to the Haqqani Network that is being considered an important factor in discussing the future of Afghanistan.

Pakistan is supposed to be facing off a possible Indian penetration into Afghanistan but its real danger is from the jihadi outfits — the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban, Islamic State, al Qaeda, etc — with warriors from the northern neighbourhood like Uzbeks and Uighurs. If the Taliban take over from the Afghan government, they will have a tough time deciding which group of warriors will have the lead in governance. They will likely end up dividing the country into infighting satrapies. The sharia will have to come back to regain consensus, and much of the social development under the Afghan government and American guidance will be rolled back. And there will be civil war redux, and consequently a lot of refugees — women and children — racing across the borders.

Aware of the coming chaos, Pakistan is wire-fencing its border with Afghanistan and there are people on the other side who don’t want it and Pakistan army personnel are being killed daily on the Durand Line. Who could be behind this? The Pakistani Taliban, who can easily be bribed by anyone, are thought to be behind it. Pakistan, disenchanted finally with its “strategic depth” dream, is nonetheless fatally unafraid of “the dream of sharia”. The Haqqani Network can help because it is the strongest group fighting under one command but its ideological worldview is different from the average Pakistani, barring the rare general like Shahid Aziz who will disappear after retirement and join the Islamic State in Syria and achieve the kind of martyrdom Pakistan couldn’t allow — fighting to the last against the evil of the US.

Pakistan is vulnerable to the coming ideological storm in Afghanistan. Its border provinces are rebellious and receptive to the new wave of strict Islam, helped no less by the deeply aggrieved and “believing” populations that it allowed to be crushed by its jihadis.

The writer is consulting editor, Newsweek Pakistan

 

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NATO to ponder mission in Afghanistan amid US whirlwind pullout plans

<strong> AT News </strong> KABUL: The NATO has said they will consult on the future of their mission in Afghanistan and will decided together

menafn.com

NATO to ponder mission in Afghanistan amid US whirlwind pullout plans



Date
10/9/2020 2:20:10 PM

(MENAFN - Afghanistan Times) AT News

KABUL: The NATO has said they will consult on the future of their mission in Afghanistan and will decided together on when to leave Afghanistan as US President Donald Trump said to bring home all the remaining troops by Charismas
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg repeated the alliance's longstanding position that it will end its mission in Afghanistan only when conditions on the ground permit.

'We decided to go into Afghanistan together, we will make decisions on future adjustments together, and when the time is right, we will leave together,' Stoltenberg said at a news conference after talks with North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev.

'NATO is in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for international terrorists. And we have to remember that the reason NATO is in Afghanistan is an attack on the United States. When the United States was attacked on 9/11 of 2001, then NATO for the first time in our history invoked our collective defence clause Article 5. And hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Europe, from Canada, have served shoulder to shoulder with US soldiers in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from once again controlling that country. And we are committed to our mission in Afghanistan because it is in our security interests to make sure that Afghanistan does not once again become a platform where terrorists can plan, organize and conduct terrorist attacks on our own countries,' he said.

He reiterated support to the peace process. 'We welcome the talks between the government in Afghanistan and the Taliban. And as part of the peace effort we have reduced our presence in Afghanistan.'

He said 'not so long ago we had more than one hundred thousand troops in a big combat operation. And now we have roughly 12,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan and they support, they train, assist and advise the Afghan security forces.'

He added, 'we will consult on the future of our mission in Afghanistan. It is important that we coordinate our efforts; and out of the 12,000 troops that are now in Afghanistan a significant part of those are European troops (…). And then of course, we have the American troops in addition. So this is really an effort of all Allies and partners and our approach is a conditions-based approach. We will make decisions based on the conditions on the ground, because we think it is extremely important to continue to be committed to the future of Afghanistan, because it is in our interest to preserve the long-term security of Afghanistan.'

He said the NATO had decided to go into Afghanistan together and they will make decisions on future adjustments together and when the time is right, the will leave together. 'And this has been the message from NATO Allies for many, many years and it continues to be the message from NATO Allies.'

'We should have the small remaining number of four Brave men and women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas,' Trump tweeted.

MENAFN0910202001690000ID1100931669



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Grand Strategy Is Total: French Gen. André Beaufre on War in the Nuclear Age - War on the Rocks

Gen. André Beaufre (1902 – 1975), the father of contemporary French strategic thought and required reading at French military schools, epitomizes better

warontherocks.com

Grand Strategy Is Total: French Gen. André Beaufre on War in the Nuclear Age

Michael Shurkin

October 8, 2020

Commentary

Gen. André Beaufre (1902 – 1975), the father of contemporary French strategic thought and required reading at French military schools, epitomizes better than anyone two traits that make modern French military theory unusually rich. The first is failure. Beaufre had a hand in 20th-century France’s greatest military catastrophes, the trauma of which spurred his generation to think — hard — about modern conflict. The second is an intellectual tradition that goes back more than two centuries and has been dominated by highly analytical and literate generals “sick with rationality,” to cite Gen. Lucien Poirier (1918 – 2013), another of France’s great warrior-philosophers from Beaufre’s generation. Beaufre’s thinking is Cartesian: He began by challenging the most fundamental premises and then, step by step, logically built out complex intellectual structures with the rigor of a geometrician. Bernard Brodie, the eminent RAND political scientist who in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the architects of American nuclear strategy and no intellectual lightweight, went so far as to complain in a review of Beaufre’s books of the French general’s insistence on riding an “intellectual high horse.” Brodie clearly knew French but apparently not the French, and the self-described “pragmatist” of the American school understandably was at once deeply impressed and put off by Beaufre’s foreign method. For less particular Americans, Beaufre is a marvel of lucidity. He is also a key for accessing a rich and distinctly different way of thinking about war with direct applications for today, whether one is pondering Afghanistan or how to deal with China.


There is a single thread that runs through Beaufre’s half-dozen books about strategy, which he wrote in the years between his retirement from the French army in 1961 and his death. That thread is a desire to understand the nature of war in the modern nuclear era, and to use that insight to resurrect strategy and elaborate a strategic method appropriate for great powers today. Beaufre of course was not alone. On this side of the Atlantic, men like Brodie and Herman Kahn did brilliant work on the subjects of nuclear strategy and deterrence. Beaufre was fluent in English and well versed in the Americans’ thinking. On the French side, Beaufre shared the space with Raymond Aron and three other generals (Charles Ailleret, Pierre Marie Gallois, and Poirier) who, together with Beaufre, are considered the architects of French nuclear strategy and referred to as “the Four Generals of the Apocalypse.”


‘25 Years of Almost Uninterrupted Failures’


Compared to the Americans, at least, strategy was not a parlor game for Beaufre. He was a member of the generation of French officers that was at war without reprieve from 1940 to 1962: Beaufre served on the headquarters staff during the fall of France in 1940, a defeat whose effect on the officers who lived it cannot be overstated; commanded field units with the Free French in Tunisia, Italy, France, and Germany from 1943 to 1945; worked on the staff of Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in Indochina; led a division in Algeria; and was the overall commander of French forces in the Suez War in 1956. These disasters (not counting the 1943 – 1945 campaigns, wherein the French forces rallied to the Allied cause fought brilliantly and victoriously) saw France stripped of its empire and its great-power status. They compelled Beaufre to strive to understand what had gone wrong. “After 25 years of almost uninterrupted failures,” he wrote, “we have the duty to search down to the bones to discover the deep reasons for such a contrary fate.” After all, he wrote, “The vanquished deserves its fate because its defeat always results from faults in its thinking that it must have committed either before or during the conflict.” In other words, before getting to nuclear weapons, Beaufre needed to understand war and strategy, and then build a strategic vision around that understanding that made sense in the nuclear era.


The most important of Beaufre’s strategic works is the first, his masterpiece, Introduction to Strategy, which he published in French in 1963 and in English in 1965. (Citations here are of the current French edition; translations are my own, though Beaufre corrected the English editions of his works, which therefore can be considered authoritative.) If you read one book of French post-1945 military theory, it should be Beaufre’s Introduction. The slim volume offers with extraordinary concision and order a rich vision of modernity and what might be described as a universal field theory for strategy and conflict in the modern world. Beaufre called his idea “total strategy,” and he strove in the Introduction and the subsequent works — which are all basically elaborations of the ideas presented in the Introduction — to explain what it was and how to do it.


Beaufre’s first step was to define strategy. He offered what amounts to a rephrasing of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Beaufre was a deeper thinker than Foch and absolutely a better writer, and yet he did not stray far from the master with respect to the essentials. One can imagine the venerable marshal reading Beaufre and exclaiming, “Yes, yes, that’s what I was trying to say!” Thus, citing Foch, Beaufre defined strategy as the “art of the dialectic of wills that employ force to resolve their conflict.” In this dialectic, the “decision” each side seeks to impose is psychological, not material. It amounts to convincing the adversary that engaging in or pursuing a struggle is useless. Beaufre continued:

This duel of wills produces the opposition of two symmetrical games, with each seeking to strike the decisive point of the other through a preparation intended to frighten, paralyze, and surprise — all actions with a psychological goal, we note in passing. One can therefore discern in any strategy two distinct and essential elements: 1) the choice of a decisive point that one wants to strike (a function of the adversary’s vulnerabilities); 2) the choice of preparatory maneuver that would permit reaching the decisive point. But as each of the two adversaries is doing the same thing, the opposition of the two preparatory maneuvers will bring success to whichever of the two adversaries stops the adversary’s maneuver and conducts his own to its objective. It is what Foch called the classic strategy of “conserving liberty of action.” The struggle of wills boils down therefore to a struggle for liberty of action, with each seeking to conserve it while denying it to the adversary.

Beaufre constructed his vision of strategy around the “principle” of liberty of action. In any conflict, one must think through how to preserve one’s liberty of action while denying it to one’s adversary. That requires “economy of force,” meaning knowing how to “apportion one’s means rationally between protecting against the adverse preparatory maneuver, one’s own preparatory maneuver, and the decisive action.” And it involves concentration of force, so as to be able to strike at the right place, in the right way, at the right time. But that, naturally, requires liberty of action. Strategy, he wrote, is the art of “reaching the decisive point thanks to the liberty of action obtained through a correct economy of force.”


‘The Only Good Strategy Is Total’


What distinguishes Beaufre from Foch is his broadening of Foch’s concepts in light of his own reading of Carl von Clausewitz, his own bitter experience, and the development of nuclear weapons, which made direct confrontation between major powers — and even the very idea of seeking a “decision” through battle — suicidal. Strategy could no longer be military, it had to be “total.” “The only good strategy,” he insisted in Strategy of Action, “is total.” One element of this was a reappreciation of Clausewitz’s insight that war was “politics by other means.” Beaufre went to great lengths to emphasize that military action always must be subordinate to politics and seen as but one part of a larger cluster of actions that a country could and should undertake to achieve desired political ends. This was, he argued in his memoir of the Suez War, one of the key lessons from that debacle, in which France, Britain, and Israel conspired to toppled Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and seize the Suez Canal without preparing the ground diplomatically and politically, thereby dooming the campaign regardless of anything that might be achieved in battle. Beaufre certainly would not endorse the American penchant for delegating strategy to the military (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), and repeatedly expecting military action to yield the desired political outcome. Total strategy meant subordinating military strategy “to a comprehensive strategic conception, which itself is dictated by the political concept and elaborated and executed by politicians.” In Strategy for Tomorrow he explained further:

Military war generally is no longer decisive in the literal sense of the word. Political decision, always necessary, can only be obtained through a combination of limited military action with appropriate actions taken in the psychological, economic, and diplomatic domains. The strategy of war, previously governed by military strategy, which for a while gave preeminence to military leaders, now depends on a total strategy led by the heads of the government, with military strategy only playing a subordinate role.

Continued

 

[Housecarl]

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Like any good student of Foch, Beaufre placed great emphasis on the importance of will, of acting upon it, and of sapping that of the adversary. It follows that everything that has a psychological effect should be brought to bear, while military action, which usually is a material action taken upon material things, matters only in so far as it affects psychology. And it is imperative that military action complement all the other actions taken in parallel, or taken beforehand to prepare the military action. One can see here connections between Beaufre’s ideas and French counter-insurgency doctrine, a subject Beaufre addressed in his strategic works and made the topic of a separate book.


Why Does France Have Nukes? Beaufre Explains.


Beaufre wrote positively about nuclear weapons because they brought an end to direct confrontations between great powers, and he thought deeply about what they did and did not mean for great-power competition. In the Introduction and subsequent books like Deterrence and Strategy, Beaufre laid out the thinking behind French and American theories of deterrence, including American concepts such as graduated response, and tactical nuclear weapons. Beaufre approved of tactical weapons — which the French sometimes referred to as “pre-strategic” — because their use created an escalatory step below full-blown nuclear war, thereby signaling that France was serious about using nuclear weapons and giving the adversary the option to stop before the French reached for their strategic, thermonuclear arms. This argument was part of French military policy and doctrine during the Cold War and helped explain and motivate France’s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the 1970s. His approach also can be seen in the French military’s Cold War and current view that the real function of conventional forces in a conflict against a major power is simply to make the adversary amass a much larger force to defeat it, and thereby reveal its intentions. Whereupon it would be nuked. This explains, among other things, why the French army post-1945 has never been built to survive a prolonged major conflict: That is not its strategic function.


Beaufre also was a staunch advocate of the Atlantic relationship and NATO, although he explained and justified France’s sometimes standoffish relationship with that institution. He also made the case not just for why France needed its own nuclear capabilities (basically because President John F. Kennedy’s “graduated response” doctrine made clear that the United States would not necessarily choose to defend Europe when it came down to it), but also why France’s nuclear arsenal benefited the United States and indeed the rest of the world (or at least Europe) as well. One interesting detail is Beaufre’s assertion, apparently based on contemporary French think tank studies, that a nuclear-armed country need only be able to destroy 10 – 15 percent of an adversary’s resources (i.e., its cities) to benefit from the “equalizing” effect of nuclear weapons. In this light, the size of France’s nuclear arsenal, which stands at about 300 warheads, makes sense. He also argued that for a small country’s nuclear capabilities to have the desired deterrence effect, it had to show itself to be at least a little irrational and cultivate a measure of uncertainty about how it might respond to a given action.


Nuclear weapons may have precluded a Third World War, but they did not, however, bring peace. On the contrary, Beaufre observed in the Introduction, “Major war and true peace will have died together,” giving way to a permanent state he described as “Peace-War,” which amounted to what prevailed during the Cold War and arguably continues to this day. While there would be no more “direct” war, or war in the “major key,” as he sometimes put it, there would always be war in the “minor key.” Beaufre meant “permanent” and “always” literally: We are, now and forever, only at complete peace with our allies and perhaps those who are third parties to our conflict with our adversaries. This means we had better have a strategy for waging an indirect strategy against our adversaries, which by the way invariably means doing whatever one can to pull third parties away from the adversaries and thereby limit their liberty of action.


War in the minor key was above all “indirect,” a term that Beaufre explicitly borrowed from the British military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart (1895 – 1970), a longtime friend and correspondent. It was, quite simply, what one did when one’s liberty of action was too constrained by the risk of escalation or one’s own relative material weakness to attempt a more direct strategy. An “indirect strategy” therefore amounted to “the art of exploiting optimally the narrow margin of liberty of action” that still exists to achieve decisive success despite “the sometimes-extreme limits on the military means that can be employed.” Moreover, “the narrower the margin for liberty of action, the more important it is to exploit it, because that alone makes it possible to attack the status quo that nuclear deterrence is supposed to preserve.” Great powers have to adopt indirect strategies to fight one another, weaker powers have to adopt them to fight greater ones. It could, moreover, involve nearly anything that might have some effect on the adversary’s psychology, though probably not military action, which might be of use as a complement to other actions but almost never will be sufficient on its own. “Military action no longer plays more than an auxiliary role in the framework of a maneuver of total strategy in the minor key,” Beaufre wrote, “where decision will result from economic, diplomatic, or political actions appropriately combined.”


Indirect Strategy


Beaufre, perhaps because of his own personal experience, focused on two ways in which military force could be used to support an indirect strategy. One was what he referred to as an “artichoke maneuver” or grignotage (nibbling), which is what he saw Hitler doing in the late 1930s when he remilitarized the Rhineland and annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia (or, more recently, what Russia did in Crimea and Ukraine). The basic idea is to conduct carefully calculated “below the threshold” acts of aggression, preferably in a region or against an interest that is not vital to one’s adversaries. Hitler, as Beaufre saw it, understood that the real obstacle was not Czech or Austrian resistance, but rather the opposition of Britain and France. Hitler therefore correctly focused on the diplomatic and political aspects of what he wanted to achieve, carefully preparing the ground before taking any overt military action, which, when it did come, was so quick as to present the international community a fait accompli before it had time to react. When the dust settled, both Britain and France, thanks to his diplomatic and political efforts, were willing to accept what Hitler had done and comfort themselves that this time would be the last. According to Beaufre, they fundamentally did not recognize Hitler’s “maneuver” for what it was, which was an indirect strategy within the context of Peace-War.


Beaufre contrasted Hitler’s masterful execution of indirect strategy with Britain and France’s handling of the Suez Crisis, which he saw firsthand as the commander of French forces. According to Beaufre, British and French civilian leaders neglected the diplomatic and political aspects of the crisis, with the result that they, among other things, failed to secure American acquiescence. Without appropriate diplomatic and political actions, it was unlikely that any purely military action would bring about the political outcome the two countries desired. As it happened, the military strategy that emerged in the months leading up to the invasion, because of the hesitations of French and above all British civilian leaders (according to Beaufre), did not meet the requirements Beaufre thought had to be met for the operation to succeed: If the military action were to have any chance of success, especially absent the appropriate diplomatic and political maneuvers, Beaufre reasoned, it would have to be aggressive and, above all, fast. Beaufre probably would have applauded the First Persian Gulf War: a long and careful diplomatic and political preparation followed by an aggressive military operation intended to achieve a clear political objective.


Beaufre also derived from his experiences the belief that in the nuclear age major powers — both to deter or respond to adversaries’ attempts at the artichoke maneuver or to conduct it themselves — had to have robust conventional capabilities that featured rapid power projection and high mobility. He was haunted in particular by what he saw from his vantage point on the general staff in Paris in the late 1930s and 1940. The French army at the time was large and well equipped, but it had only one speed: total war enabled by full national mobilization. When confronted by Hitler’s aggressions in the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia, France had to choose between all or nothing. What it desperately needed was the ability to project, rapidly, a limited force that could engage in a limited war. It might have countered or maybe even deterred the Germans by giving French policymakers an intermediate option between all or nothing, i.e., a measure of liberty of action. Indeed, French doctrine commonly describes “maneuver” in terms of something one does to create possibilities. One must therefore have the means to maneuver, to do something. This idea is fundamental to French military policy today.


The other approach is what Beaufre called “maneuver by lassitude,” which typically is pursued through guerrilla warfare, either by a weaker adversary or a great power through a proxy. Because military means cannot bring a decision, one strives to tire the adversary out and make it want to quit. To do this, one distinguishes between the “interior maneuver,” where the conflict is taking place, and the “exterior maneuver.” The real action is the exterior maneuver: One tries to influence public opinion internationally and in the counter-insurgent’s home country, encourage or discourage foreign intervention, and use diplomacy and whatever economic tools are at one’s disposal. One promotes a political line, uses propaganda, lies, and meddles overtly or covertly. “The central idea of exterior maneuver,” Beaufre explained, “is to assure oneself the maximum liberty of action while paralyzing that of the adversary through a thousand ropes of deterrence, the way the Lilliputians were able to chain down Gulliver.” The desired effect is psychological, although one goes about achieving it by deploying every tool at one’s disposal. Whatever works.


As for the interior maneuver, the fight itself, what matters is holding on — which requires a strict application of economy of force and organizing and deploying one’s forces to foster sustainability over the long term. Sustainability and not military victory must be the organizing principle driving the military strategy, for military action cannot bring about victory. The objective was to convince (convaincre) the enemy, not vanquish (vaincre) it, which was not possible. Meanwhile, one must cultivate confidence and hope among those on one’s side, while diminishing the confidence and hope of the adversary’s side. This fight is entirely psychological and most likely will require countering whatever sustains the enemy — its ideology, its religion, etc. — with viable alternatives. This was, according to Beaufre, not done either by the French in Indochina or Algeria, or by the Americans in Vietnam. He no doubt would have judged American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq similarly.


Beaufre Would Not Negotiate with the Taliban


Beaufre made clear that prevailing in a war of lassitude in any case would take a very long time, and one of the worst things one could do was announce a deadline. He was, it follows, unequivocally hostile to the idea of negotiating with the enemy in this kind of conflict, for all it does is communicate to the enemy’s side one’s fatigue and one’s intention to leave, thereby confirming it in the hope that sooner or later it will get everything it wants. An enemy like Vietnamese Communists or (Afghanistan’s Taliban) might agree to sit at the negotiating table, but only as another tactic to tire their opponent. Beaufre also would have deplored the continual overreliance on the military both to dictate strategy and to achieve “political decisions,” Americans’ inattention to politics and lack of appreciation for the psychological and ideological factors driving insurgencies, and, apparently, neglect of any possible “external maneuver.” The American approach to “psyops” from Vietnam to Afghanistan is inherently tactical. It needs to be applied to the strategic level, where it must define the campaign strategy rather than being an accessory to it.


Among Beaufre’s lessons for contemporary Americans is the need to think of the United States in a state of perpetual Peace-War with its adversaries, which required developing appropriate total strategies to prevail. Beaufre advised a planning process that featured identifying one’s own and one’s adversaries’ motivations and vulnerabilities — not military vulnerabilities but rather psychological ones, soft spots that, if acted upon, could limit adversaries’ liberty of action and sap their will. Of course, at the same time one has to act to prevent the adversary from doing the same, hence the need for self-awareness. All this requires in-depth analyses of the internal politics of one’s own nation and one’s adversaries, and a keen appreciation of the bounds of everyone’s liberty of action. Military action might be necessary, but it almost never would be sufficient, and it would have to be integrated into a comprehensive indirect strategy. The decisive maneuver would be some combination of actions intended to have a desired psychological effect that also impinged on the enemy’s liberty of action. Winning this kind of conflict required being armed with ideas, ideologies, political lines, diplomatic muscle, the skills to manipulate international forums like the United Nations, economic sanctions, propaganda, and possibly the means to conduct “insidious” actions that cause harm yet fall below the threshold required for sparking a direct confrontation. One might, for example, conduct cyber attacks, or acts of sabotage to a nuclear facility, while trying to coordinate diplomatic and economic sanctions. There also had to be as part of any total strategy actions that target third parties, countries that one needs to win away from the enemy to strengthen one’s own liberty of action and diminish that of the adversary. Finally, however one does this all, one has to act purposefully. Analyze. Plan. There is no room for improvisation, not at the strategic level.


If this all seems aggressive, it is. Beaufre, heir to Foch, did not fall far from the offensive à outrance (offensive to excess) school. The idea is simple: If you do not take the offensive, your enemies will, and while you might not have an appropriate total strategy, your enemies will, and do. Vladimir Putin, Beaufre would point out, would have learned strategy from Lenin, who had strong ideas about the relationship between politics and war and his own vision of “total war” ; the Chinese, Beaufre would remind us, have Lenin, of course, but also Mao.

Michael Shurkin is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

 

[jward]

India’s Drone Dreams – And Reality

The recent Armenia-Azerbaijan clashes have once again brought armed drones under the spotlight. What lessons should India draw from them?

By Abhijnan Rej

October 12, 2020

An MQ-9 Reaper performs a low pass during an air show demonstration May 29, 2016, at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico.

Credit: Flickr/U.S. Air Force
The Nagorno-Karabakh clashes have once again brought the question of the efficacy of unmanned aerial combat vehicles (UACVs) in warfare to the fore. Aided by impressive photos of Armenian tanks and artillery positions being decimated by Azerbaijan’s drones, many have argued that it illustrates the changing character of war, and increasing pressure on mechanized forces from up above, especially in the absence of air superiority. Others, including The Diplomat’s new defense contributor Jacob Parakilas, point out that the “tanks versus drones” debate is much more complicated than the way in which it is often presented. India, too, has followed the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict closely, its forces trying to infer lessons as they seek to induct UACVs.

Commenting on the use of drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh clashes, in answer to a query from the Economic Times, India’s Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria, noted, “drones are an important part for surveillance and intelligence gathering. Their role in the build up to a conflict is very important. However, once the conflict starts, they do become susceptible to enemy action…” As the Indian air force chief reminded that newspaper, India, like Azerbaijan, has possessed loitering munitions (colloquially, suicide drones) for more than a decade. It should be noted that during the recent Nagorno-Karabakh clashes, Azerbaijan has fielded the Turkish-designed Bayraktar TB2 drone responsible for some of the dramatic footage of kills.

Bhadauria’s comments are especially pertinent as India discusses the purchase of armed as well as unarmed drones from the United States. In July of this year, the Trump administration tweaked an existing export control denial regime to allow the sale of drones flying at speeds of less than 800 kilometers per hour, paving the way for their sale to India. While the U.S. had approved the sale of 30 unarmed SeaGuardians (the naval variant of General Atomics’ Predator-Bs), an Indian press report suggests that the U.S. remains wary of Predator-B sales to India given fears that the technology could be leaked to Russia through “system of systems” issues.

This report also notes that the Indian Army remains in favor of acquiring armed Reapers (another moniker for Predator-Bs) against the Navy’s preference for 22 SeaGuardians. The SeaGuardians are also expected to bolster India’s anti-submarine warfare efforts, especially given its demonstrated ability to dispense sonobuoys, along with other intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance missions through a maritime Automatic Identification System.

With the 2018 signing of the U.S.-India Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement – which facilitates secure exchange of military information and data – India and the U.S. in principle could coordinate their maritime domain awareness (MDA) activities through SeaGuardians, just like the agreement leads to greater MDA coordination using the P8 surveillance aircraft which India possesses as well. On top of that, should both countries conclude the geospatial intelligence Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement later this year, as expected, India could leverage it through the acquired Reapers to improve the accuracy of their targeting and kills.

Recent Indian news reports also suggest India, following the ongoing standoff with China in Ladakh, is also planning on acquiring more Heron surveillance drones from Israel, while planning to arm around 90 already in service. Israel remains the leading supplier of surveillance drones to India. India has also pushed forward the indigenous Rustom-2 surveillance drone trials following the Ladakh crisis, a significant upgrade from Rustom-1 first flown in 2010.

While much of the discussion around India’s acquisition of drones, their features as well as numbers, will now be determined by budgetary constraints following the COVID-19 pandemic as well as, to a much lesser degree, the lessons from the Nagorno-Karabakh clashes (or lack thereof), what is interesting is that there are already lingering questions about the efficacy of armed drones for India given the capabilities of its adversaries. Beyond the well-known issue that UACVs are best suited for relatively uncontested operational environments and minimal air defenses – which is certainly not something Pakistan or China provides – lies a political question around escalation control.

To wit: Despite the Indian media gushing about the role of a Reaper in the U.S. assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January (the implication being that should India also procure them, it too would be able to launch such operations against Pakistan-based elements), the fact of the matter is that, as far as Pakistan is concerned, it would not matter if India uses a drone or a fighter jet to target individuals or groups on its territory. It would react in similar ways to both. (Writing in these pages in January after the Soleimani kill, I concluded that India simply didn’t have a Soleimani-type option when it came to Pakistan, for a variety of reasons.)

It is true that UACVs remove one crucial equation from the risk calculations behind an airstrike scenario – the possibility of a pilot being killed or captured, as was the case with an Indian fighter pilot in February last year. But by the same token, that could incentivize the use of an Indian armed drone capabilities against Pakistan, generating significant escalation risks. At the same time, China has continued its pursuit of counter-drone capabilities including those based on electronic warfare, along with other capabilities. It is therefore unlikely that an Indian UACV capability would make a significant difference in a conflict with China.

What could matter to India is a pursuit of smaller armed drones, like the nine-meter long XQ-58 Valkyrie, operating as a swarm as “loyal wingmans” to human-operated jets. As analyst Paul Scharre, in describing the benefits of cooperative drone-swarming put it, “it allows you to build large numbers of low-cost expendable agents that can be used to overwhelm an adversary.” “This reverses the long trend of rising aircraft costs and reducing quantities.” Alas, these are still experimental technologies far beyond the reach of India’s extremely limited military-industrial base.

posted for fair use
India’s Drone Dreams – And Reality

 

[jward]

..Hummms along..

US forces hit Taliban with airstrikes in Helmand province
By ABDUL KHALIQ39 minutes ago


LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (AP) — American forces carried out several airstrikes in support of Afghan security forces under attack by the Taliban in southern Helmand province, a spokesperson for the U.S. military in Afghanistan said Monday.
Col. Sonny Leggett said the recent Taliban attacks in Helmand are “not consistent” with a U.S.-Taliban deal signed in February and undermine ongoing intra-Afghan peace talks. He said the airstrikes do not violate the February deal.
The Taliban “need to immediately stop their offensive actions in Helmand Province and reduce their violence around the country,” Leggett said in a statement on Twitter, quoting Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.

Leggett said that U.S. forces have and will continue to provide support in defense of Afghan national security forces under attack by the Taliban.
The announcement of U.S. strikes came after a gunbattle on Monday was reported in and around Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.
Witnesses reported sporadic shooting in the city and said some residents fled from the districts of Nad Ali and Nawa because of the fighting.

Omer Zwak, spokesperson for the provincial governor in Helmand, said Taliban fighters had started their coordinated attacks in different parts of the province over the past week and that these had intensified over the weekend.
“The Taliban have destroyed several bridges over the main highway, so the highway is closed right now and no one can travel,” said Zwak.
Representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban are holding intra-Afghan negotiations in Qatar, a Gulf country where the Taliban have had a political office for many years. The negotiations are meant to end the country’s decades-long war.
___
posted for fair use

US forces hit Taliban with airstrikes in Helmand province

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (AP) — American forces carried out several airstrikes in support of Afghan security forces under attack by the Taliban in southern Helmand province, a spokesperson for the U.S. military in Afghanistan said Monday.

apnews.com

 

[jward]

Dozens killed in spate of attacks in central Mali





Issued on: 13/10/2020 - 18:42

Soldiers of FAMA (Malian Armed Forces) stand and salute during the national anthem at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of Mali's independence in Bamako, on September 22, 2020. © Michele Cattani, AFP


Suspected Islamist militants killed 25 people including 13 soldiers in multiple attacks in central Mali, burning down an army base and ambushing troops sent as reinforcements, the army and local authorities said on Tuesday.

The attacks were the deadliest since the Aug. 18 military coup that overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, and came just days after scores of jailed militants were freed by the interim government in a prisoner swap.
Nine soldiers were killed in the first attack that took place overnight against a base in Sokoura near the border with Burkina Faso, an army statement said

At around 8:30 a.m. (0830 GMT) on Tuesday, another three soldiers were killed in an ambush at a bridge near the base as their unit headed to the scene of the first attack, it said.
Nine militants were killed in clashes with the reinforcement unit and two of their vehicles destroyed by the air force.
In a third assault about 40 minutes later near the town of Bandiagara, gunmen ambushed a commercial truck, killing 12 traders and one soldier, according to Moulaye Guindo, the mayor of nearby Bankass, to which the traders were en route.

A witness said he saw nine bodies at the military base and helped transport 20 wounded to local medical centres.
"They (jihadists) took all the vehicles and burned those they could not take away. The camp is burned," said the witness, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.

A transitional government has been appointed since the military coup. But regional and international powers fear the violence could further destabilise the West African nation and undermine a French-directed military campaign against insurgents linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State in the wider Sahel region.

(REUTERS)

Dozens killed in spate of attacks in central Mali

Suspected Islamist militants killed 25 people including 13 soldiers in multiple attacks in central Mali, burning down an army base and ambushing troops sent as reinforcements, the army and local authorities…

www.france24.com

 

[jward]

Air Force Says New Hypersonic Missile Will Hit Targets 1,000 Miles Away In Under 12 Minutes
An Air Force Global Strike Command official has given us an indication of how fast the Air Force’s new Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon will fly.
ByThomas NewdickOctober 13, 2020

• The War Zone

AIR FORCE / GIANCARLO CASEM
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The U.S. Air Force says the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle warhead in its forthcoming AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon hypersonic missile will fly at an average speed of between 5,000 and 6,000 miles per hour. This would be roughly between Mach 6.5 and Mach 8. At that speed, it will take only 10 to 12 minutes to strike targets 1,000 miles away. Air Force Major General Andrew Gebara, Air Force Global Strike Command’s (AFGSC) Director of Strategic Plans, Programs, and Requirements, disclosed the information in an interview with Air Force Magazine.
Expected to be the first hypersonic weapon to become operational with the U.S. military, the Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon, or ARRW, which is pronounced “arrow,” will be carried by the command’s B-52H strategic bombers.

“This thing is going to be able to go, in 10-12 minutes, almost 1,000 miles,” Gebara said in the interview, which you can read in full here. “It’s amazing.”

This appears to be the first time that the Air Force has officially commented on ARRW’s speed with any specificity. Before now, it was understood that the weapon would be capable of hypersonic speeds, which are simply defined as anything above Mach 5.
To attain hypersonic speeds, the missile consists of a solid-fuel rocket booster, fitted with pop-out tail fins, and an unpowered boost-glide vehicle. After being propelled to a specific speed and altitude atop the rocket booster, the wedge-shaped boost-glide vehicle continues to its target at hypersonic speed.

USAF
A computer-generated rendering of the AGM-183A prior to deploying its unpowered boost-glide vehicle
It’s also worth noting that General Gebara might have been talking about the average speed of ARRW’s boost-glide vehicle warhead. In the past, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had said that the boost-glide vehicle being developed for its Tactical Boost Glide (TBG) program could potentially hit a peak speed of Mach 20. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor on both of these programs and ARRW’s boost-glide vehicle is understood to be derived from the TBG one.
During flight tests in 2010 and 2011, DARPA’s Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), another wedge-shaped boost-glide vehicle, reached peak speeds of Mach 20. The Pentagon has also said that the Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB), a conical design that the U.S. Army and Navy are developing together, has demonstrated its ability to reach a peak speed of Mach 17.
More information about ARRW’s speed may begin to emerge as live-fire flight testing begins. Presently, the first launches of AGM-183A prototypes are set to take place in October 2021.
Lockheed Martin first received the contract to develop the AGM-183A in 2018. A first captive-carry test flight of an ARRW test round took place aboard a B-52H at Edwards Air Force Base in California in June 2019, and a last such test occurred in August 2020.


The Air Force plans to buy at least eight prototype ARRWs, some of which could potentially be used to field a limited operational arsenal of these weapons in the coming years. The service’s present goal is to reach initial operational capability with the weapon in September 2022.
However, the program is already running behind schedule and this timeline might not be met. It has seen costs spiral by nearly 40 percent and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, has warned there could be further delays.
Of course, that the B-52 will become the service’s principal platform for the carriage of air-launched hypersonic weapons should come as no surprise, as we at The War Zone have discussed before. The Stratofortress is particularly well suited to fulfilling this role compared to other existing American combat aircraft.
Gebara also confirmed that the B-52 will be able to carry two ARRWs on each of its two underwing pylons. A four-missile load-out is something that we previously anticipated here.

USAF
A B-52H carries an AGM-183A aloft during the first captive-carry test on June 12, 2019.
Regardless of which platform carries the ARRW, it’s clear that it will provide the Air Force with a significantly enhanced short or no-notice strike capability, especially against time-critical or otherwise high-value and highly defended targets — providing the next phase of test work proves successful. Combined with its speed and level atmospheric flight profile, the boost-glide vehicle will be able to maneuver in flight, making it even tougher for hostile air defenses to defeat. We explained more about the advances offered by hypersonic weapons in this previous article.
We also now know ARRW has a range of at least 1,000 miles, which will allow its launch platform to remain outside the reach of hostile defenses, at least in most cases.
It’s an area in which the United States is now concentrating its efforts in a bid to match similar developments in both China and Russia.
It is certainly interesting to hear a leading Air Force official muse about the speed of the service’s new hypersonic missile, and the weapon’s ability to strike targets hundreds of miles away in mere minutes makes it clear why the service is so keen to get it into service quickly. However, there are plenty more hurdles to overcome before it becomes an operational part of the U.S. Air Force inventory.
Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com

please see article for video and additional photos
posted for fair use

Air Force Says New Hypersonic Missile Will Hit Targets 1,000 Miles Away In Under 15 Minutes

An Air Force Global Strike Command official has given us an indication of how fast the Air Force’s new Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon will fly.

www.thedrive.com

 

[jward]

US Army solidifies requirements to counter small drones

By: Jen Judson   1 day ago

Iraqi forces test-fly a drone carrying two grenades. They aimed to use the drone against Islamic State fighters, who used small drones to drop explosives on advancing Iraqi forces. (Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)



WASHINGTON — Pentagon leaders approved in late September a set of requirements to help counter small drones, laying a path for how industry can develop technology to plug into a single command-and-control system, according to the general in charge of the effort.

The defense secretary delegated the Army in November 2019 to lead the effort to take a petting zoo of counter-small unmanned aircraft systems, or C-sUAS, many of which were rooted in urgent needs from Middle East conflicts, and to consolidate capability into a select group of interim systems. Army Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, who is leading the effort through the Joint C-sUAS Office, spoke to Defense News on Oct. 2 ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

That part of his project would be followed by the development and fielding of a long-term system.

The office has already taken 40-plus systems and whittled the selection down to three systems-of-systems approaches — one from each service — for fixed and semi-fixed sites. The office also settled on the Light-Mobile Air Defense Integrated System from the Marine Corps as a mounted or mobile system; Bal Chatri, Dronebuster and Smart Shooter for dismounted, hand-held systems; and one command-and-control system.

The C2 system is called Forward Area Air Defense C2 and is sponsored by the Army, but it does include interoperable systems from the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

The threat is changing, according to Gainey, as the use of signals evolves. What this means is the long-term solution must bring in new technology and easily swap out old capabilities.

“It’s how rapidly we can integrate it, and by writing those requirements standards, it’s a big win for us because now if you’re building to that, then we allow industry to compete in this process by building component technology that can integrate into this open architecture,” Gainey said.

The Army will host a virtual industry day at the end of the month to share its requirements.

While Gainey was careful to avoid divulging classified requirements, he said the initial C-sUAS systems focused on Group 1 drones (such as Raven and Wasp) and Group 2 drones (such as ScanEagle). The program will also focus on Group 3 drones (such as Shadow), he added.

“We have a capability out there that can get after Group 3,” Gainey said, “but we know we need more focus in this area.”

Overcoming the threat of drone swarms will also receive increased attention, he added.

The plan is to test available capabilities at common ranges twice a year, he explained.

Meanwhile, industry is conducting several demonstrations a year, “so we have a good pulse of what technology they’re working on,” Gainey said. “What our efforts are doing is trying to help focus them in.”

Because the Joint C-sUAS Office was established in the middle of a budget cycle, Gainey said, the Army is working through the funding aspects; not just to keep interim systems funded, but to ensure there’s enough to develop a long-term capability.

The Army wants to get the first set of possible capabilities out to a test range in February or March, Gainey said. “We’ll see how quickly we can pull it together,” he added.

Additionally, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, is helping the Joint C-sUAS Office by leveraging directed-energy and high-power microwave pursuits into a C-sUAS solution.

Lt. Gen. L. Neil Thurgood, the RCCTO’s director, told Defense News ahead of the AUSA conference, that it would field a high-power microwave capability developed by the Air Force in February 2021 to perform operational tests on it.

“It will be the first of its type that we put in theater,” he said, adding that it would likely go into the Central Command or U.S. Africa Command areas of operation.

The high-power microwave will be fielded along with a directed-energy capability as part of the Army’s Indirect Fires Protection Capability Increment 2 in fiscal 2024, which is designed to defend fixed sites from rockets, artillery and mortars as well as drones and cruise missiles.
posted for fair use

US Army solidifies requirements to counter small drones

The requirements are set to counter small unmanned aircraft systems, and the Army-led joint office is seeking an enduring solution.

www.defensenews.com

 

[jward]

US and Russia reach ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on extending New Start nuclear pact

• • Trump administration has insisted without success that Beijing be part of talks and hopes to extend arrangement to China
  • US negotiator Marshall Billingslea says Russia still needs to give final approval and give authority to nail down details

Agence France-Presse
Published: 5:09am, 14 Oct, 2020
Updated: 5:09am, 14 Oct, 2020

Marshal Billingslea, US special envoy for arms control, attends a news conference in Vienna in June. Photo: AP

The United States said Tuesday it had reached an “agreement in principle” with Russia on extending New Start, the two nations’ last major nuclear accord, which is due to expire in February.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been insisting without success that China enter the nuclear reduction agreement but, with US elections three weeks away, signalled it was willing to keep the treaty largely as is for now.
“We are in fact willing to extend the New Start treaty for some period of time provided that they, in return, agree to a limitation – a freeze – on their nuclear arsenal,” US negotiator Marshall Billingslea said.
“We believe that there is an agreement in principle at the highest levels of our two governments,” he said at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

Russian anti-submarine ship Aleksin fires missiles during the Navy Day parade in Baltiysk in July. Photo: 2020

Billingslea cut short a trip to Asia last week to meet his Russian counterpart in Helsinki, saying he sensed a mood for compromise.
He said that Russia still needed to give final approval to the “gentleman’s agreement” and give authority to nail down the details.

“We are ready to strike this deal. We can strike it tomorrow, in fact. But Moscow is going to have to show the political will to do so as well,” he said.
Billingslea said that the United States was still insisting on the participation of China – whose nuclear programme is quickly growing but is still a fraction the size of the Russian and US arsenals.

“Everything we agree with the Russians must be framed and must be formatted in a way that allows us to extend that arrangement to the Chinese when they are finally brought to the negotiating table,” Billingslea said.
Did Trump reveal secret US weapon in interview?
11 Sep 2020

He said that the United States was also seeking verification measures from Russia and was willing to undertake reciprocal steps.
“If we know anything about the Russians it is that they are serial treaty violators,” he said.

posted for fair use

US and Russia remain at odds over nuclear weapons pact

Washington and Moscow give clashing accounts about extending their last major disarmament treaty.

www.scmp.com

 

[Housecarl]

See my comment in last week's thread.

 

[jward]

..I saw it, moved it, and deleted a fat fingered typo. Good time to discuss my raise? ; )..

See my comment in last week's thread.

Regardless of Russia's "cooperation" with Beijing, Moscow's biggest concern is future aggressive actions by the CCP against their far east territory as well as rising radicalized Muslim expansion, to include now Turkish actions. The Russians don't have the boots to counter this, only the firepower.

 

[Housecarl]

..I saw it, moved it, and deleted a fat fingered typo. Good time to discuss my raise? ; )..

How about +20% cudo per diem?

 

[jward]

How about +20% cudo per diem?

hmm. yer the maps/money/maff fella. Is that good nuff or should I hold out for more?

 

[jward]

The Military's Puzzling Plan To Have SpaceX Deliver A C-17's Worth Of Cargo Anywhere In An Hour

A new partnership with SpaceX and other companies could revolutionize how quickly the DoD can deliver cargo worldwide, but major questions remain.
ByBrett Tingley
October 13, 2020


U.S. Army General Stephen R. Lyons, commander of U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), recently stated that new space technologies being developed by industry partners could soon be able to deliver large loads of cargo to anywhere on the planet in just one hour.
Lyons made the comments while speaking at the National Defense Transportation Association's virtual Fall Meeting on October 7. TRANSCOM has forged a partnership with both SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to pursue rapid delivery concepts. XArc is a consulting firm offering expertise in space station and spaceport design, planetary surface systems, and other technology development programs aimed at space exploration and commercialization.

Here's Why The USAF Is Suddenly Talking Cargo Drops From Space And Spying On Other GalaxiesBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The Pentagon Moves To Launch Its Own Experimental Mini Space StationBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Work Begins On Starlink-Like Constellation Of Small Hypersonic Missile-Tracking SatellitesBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The Air Force And SpaceX Are Teaming Up For A 'Massive' Live Fire ExerciseBy Brett Tingley Posted in The War Zone
SpaceX Exec Says Company Would Launch A Weapon Into Space In 'Defense Of This Country'By Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone

TRANSCOM provides transportation services and solutions to every branch of the armed forces, as well as various other defense and governmental organizations. By providing a vast logistical network that spans every transportation domain, TRANSCOM boasts that it offers "the most responsive strategic mobility capability the world has ever seen."

Lyons told attendees at the National Defense Transportation Association's virtual meeting that the new rapid delivery architecture SpaceX and XArc are working on could be in place as soon as next year:

"Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour. Think about that speed associated with the movement of transportation of cargo and people. There is a lot of potential here and I'm really excited about the team that's working with SpaceX on an opportunity, even perhaps, as early as [20]21, to be conducting a proof of principle. I had no sense for how fast SpaceX was moving, but I've received their update and I can tell you they are moving very rapidly in this area."

TRANSCOM
A slide from Lyons's virtual presentation.
According to a USAF fact sheet, the C-17 Globemaster has a top speed of around 520 mph and a maximum payload of around 82 tons, although normal payloads are around roughly 60 tons or less. In comparison, a rocket that can deliver cargo to anywhere in the world in 60 minutes would require an average speed of around 9,000 miles per hour.
A TRANSCOM press release says that the unprecedented types of point-to-point space launches Lyons is describing will require the DoD to examine every "legal, diplomatic, statutory, and regulatory issues that must be addressed to enable the normalization of high-frequency, point-to-point, commercial space launches." To that end, the command has signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADA) with its industry partners in order to facilitate this radical new form of transportation.

DOD
Many of the details of TRANSCOM's vision for these space-launch cargo deliveries are still unknown and it's likely those details are what the CRADAs will explore. For example, it's unknown if these launches will consist of an entire stack landing vertically or a cargo capsule being dropped from suborbital space.
The TRANSCOM press release announcing this CRADA also does not mention how much each of these launches will cost, but an average SpaceX Falcon 9 launch costs anywhere from $50 million to $62 million. That's still less than the cost of an average NASA launch, but drastically more than a C-17 flight. The C-17's cost per flight hours varies depending on how it is calculated, but taking a $30,000 per hour figure, 18 hours of flight time to get halfway around the world would cost roughly $540,000, which is around 1/100th the cost of a SpaceX launch.
With this in mind, some budgetary experts have already cast doubts on TRANSCOM's plans, noting that it will likely be decades before the concept of space-based cargo deliveries could be cost-effective.

Other experts have questioned the concept altogether, noting that point-to-point space launches will usher in a new host of issues that must be addressed before this concept gets off the ground. Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation told Breaking Defense's Theresa Hitchens that TRANSCOM's plans open up a regulatory can of worms:

It seems like it would provide a host of traffic management questions, as well as spaceport issues. Where would these craft be taking off/landing? Will we have spaceport bases in allied territory, and if not, how does this benefit our troops overseas if we still have to move them through ground transportation systems?

It isn't exactly clear what kind of scenarios would require this type of high-cost rapid transport, either. One could imagine using the system for moving very time-sensitive equipment and supplies to forward operating locations, but even if the cost is far less than an actual SpaceX orbital launch, it would still likely be a huge investment every time it is used. The exact infrastructure requirements are also unknown as is just how such heavy loads will be delivered safely. Suborbital flights would drastically increase the available payload of a system like Falcon 9, as opposed to its orbital insertion mission, but safely landing tens of tons of cargo in some sort of a cost-effective manner remains a question mark, albeit one that will be really interesting to see solved.
This certainly isn't the first time the U.S. military has fancied the ability to move things around the globe, including people, far faster than existing airlift concepts can provide. In 2018, now-retired Air Force General Carlton Everhart, then-head of that service's Air Mobility Command (AMC), which is part of TRANSCOM, made similar comments about space-based logistics after having sat down with SpaceX, as well as Virgin Orbit.

“Think about this. Thirty minutes, 150 metric tons, [and] less than the cost of a C-5 [cargo plane],” Everhart said. “I said, I need to get me some of that. How do I do that?”
Those remarks prompted many of the same questions that still exist now. Those same issues have dogged similar efforts that have come and gone since the 1960s, including the abortive Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion (SUSTAIN) effort, which received support from the Pentagon's National Security Space Office and U.S. Marine Corps in the 2000s and was said to be "doable" by the end of the 2010s. You can read more about that project and other efforts in the context of Everhart's 2018 comments in this past War Zone piece.

DOD
A briefing slide from circa 2009 describing "conclusions" from a study the University of North Dakota did regarding the SUSTAIN concept. By the end of that year, the program was effectively canceled.
Still, SpaceX is no stranger to giving the DoD what it wants. It has previously teamed up with the U.S. Air Force to offer datalink services through their Starlink satellite constellations for the USAF’s burgeoning Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). ABMS is designed to link U.S. forces and allies across all domains, enabling real-time data fusion and sharing on an unprecedented level. Dr. Will Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has previously stated that data is now an essential warfighting resource as valuable as jet fuel, and is “the key to next-gen warfare.” SpaceX was recently awarded around 40% of the U.S. Space Force’s launch service contracts through 2024 and another $149 million to develop early warning satellites for the Space Development Agency (SDA).
While Lyons’s comments about the potential for planet-wide deliveries in one hour may sound like an exaggeration, it does follows along with other recent comments made by other military brass. Just last year, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Steven Kwast claimed that existing cutting-edge technology makes it possible to “deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour."

While TRANSCOM hasn't mentioned delivering personnel using rockets, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has stated that the company's Starship rocket will soon enable point-to-point travel - for those willing to withstand the Gs such a trip would exert on the body. Kwast's comments remain peculiar, but using rockets for rapid transport across the globe could point in the direction of his claims. Still, we are not talking about a man rating for the system at this time, at least according to TRANSCOM.

~1000, as all seats would be “coach” & no toilets, pilot area or food galley needed. Most flights would only be 15 to 20 mins. It’s basically an ICBM traveling at Mach 25 that lands.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 26, 2019​

This development is only the most recent in a strengthening partnership between the DoD and industry partners like SpaceX and other commercial spaceflight firms. As space continues to play an increasingly vital role for the militaries of the 21st century, and as it becomes increasingly contested, it’s likely we will begin to see more radical developments like this one that has the potential, at least in theory, to change military logistics and other aspects of warfare forever.
Contact the author: Brett@thedrive.com

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0&feature=emb_logo


posted for fair use

The Military's Puzzling Plan To Have SpaceX Deliver A C-17's Worth Of Cargo Anywhere In An Hour (Updated)

A new partnership with SpaceX and other companies could revolutionize how quickly the DoD can deliver cargo worldwide, but major questions remain.

www.thedrive.com

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

Posted for fair use.....

Is Change Coming? Smartly Reshaping and Strengthening America’s Nuclear Deterrent - War on the Rocks

How might America’s nuclear weapons plans change in the years ahead? Buoyed by the revelation of President Donald Trump describing a potential secret new

warontherocks.com

Is Change Coming? Smartly Reshaping and Strengthening America’s Nuclear Deterrent

Christine Parthemore and Andy Weber

October 14, 2020

Commentary

How might America’s nuclear weapons plans change in the years ahead? Buoyed by the revelation of President Donald Trump describing a potential secret new nuclear weapon system to Bob Woodward, continuing U.S.-Russian dialogue on nuclear weapons, and the upcoming November elections, experts are speculating about what the next four years may mean for U.S. nuclear policy.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has indicated that, if elected, he would seek a posture aligned with his stated belief “that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and, if necessary retaliating against — a nuclear attack.” This would be a pivot from Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which elevated the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense planning by, among other things, describing America’s nuclear forces as a hedge against large-scale conventional attacks and strategic cyber attacks. The declaratory shift — along with elevation of so-called low-yield nuclear options that are considered more usable, and support for more dual conventional and nuclear systems that could be indistinguishable in the absence of verification measures — increased concern that the Trump administration viewed nuclear weapons as acceptable for warfighting, not just deterrence.

If re-elected, Trump would likely continue this posture and may even go beyond these expansions. However, there remains hope that recent changes may be reversed, given the budget pressures exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, or if ongoing arms control talks with Russia succeed in creating an agreement to cap or reduce nuclear capabilities beyond what the current New START Treaty mandates.

Notably, there is a bit of bipartisan, common ground emerging. Language in the Democratic Party platform indicates a President Biden would likely pursue future nuclear arms control approaches more creatively than the bilateral U.S.-Russian paradigm of the past, to include new technologies and other nations. The platform names China specifically, but experts in both U.S. parties and internationally are also weighing the pros and cons of involving the United Kingdom and France, and even including non-nuclear weapons-possessing states, signing onto agreements to show broader political support or to take on narrow roles like contributing to verification. Trump takes this approach as well, albeit for somewhat different reasons, namely to target China and because he generally believed he could get better deals — and that if not, existing arrangements harmed U.S. security anyways.

Even with some similarities in arms control ideas, the execution between the two parties would likely differ starkly. Regardless, this emerging bipartisan agreement on some characteristics of future arms control work could create political space for reducing exorbitant U.S. nuclear weapons plans.

Adjusting U.S. nuclear weapons plans is notoriously difficult, as nearly every president has experienced. Yet it is urgent to halt and reverse the trend of increasing nuclear capabilities that lower the threshold for nuclear war and increase miscalculation risks. Any changes will require clear instruction from the president right at the start of his term. We humbly offer that such presidential direction should center on reducing or eliminating new “low-yield” capabilities and systems that increase uncertainty over whether assets are conventional or nuclear, whether by new arms control arrangements or by bold unilateral action.

Arms Control Steps for the Next Four Years

In the first weeks after being sworn in next Jan. 20, the president should sign a national security directive that provides clear instruction for shaping an updated Nuclear Posture Review. Declaring that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear forces is for deterrence or responding to nuclear attacks would be an important shift for either commander-in-chief and a good start.

However, even that would require further presidential direction. Otherwise, the related instruction to nuclear planners would be overly vague. The Pentagon could easily respond that the full, current plan for modernizing and expanding U.S. nuclear forces already fits this rubric. Current arms racing could continue unchecked. While some argue that current U.S. efforts are simply replacing aging assets, many do in fact introduce new capabilities — for example, in the enhanced accuracy and stealth of a new nuclear air-launched cruise missile transcending the abilities of its Cold War era predecessor.

This presidential directive should then make clear that matching Russia tit for tat on every type of nuclear capability is not required for effective deterrence and war planning — and nor is it desirable. While the current Nuclear Posture Review acknowledges that the United States doesn’t need to quantitatively “match or mimic” Russia’s arsenal of non-strategic nuclear capabilities, plans and statements from some Obama and Trump administration officials spoke of the need to qualitatively match or exceed Russia’s nuclear forces. Even this step leaves room for debate in terms of the potential roles of specific weapons systems, and so the presidential directive should indicate what parts of current U.S. nuclear plans should be prioritized for alteration.

Some nuclear experts argue that planned upgrades to U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles should be reduced or eliminated in the near term. True, these plans are incredibly expensive, and the intercontinental ballistic missile forces have been plagued by numerous issues, including coming far too close to potentially catastrophic incidents. However, they are not altering the already complex geopolitical landscape as significantly as other planned changes in U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities.

The more dangerous trends in current U.S. nuclear plans do not involve these Cold War weapons, as problematic as they are. Instead, nuclear weapons that represent increased blurring between conventional and nuclear warfare, and those that are intended to have lower thresholds for use and thereby weaken deterrence, are a more pressing issue.

Topping that list are the new long-range standoff nuclear air-launched cruise missile, the resurrection of previously retired nuclear submarine-launched cruise missiles, and lower-yield nuclear warheads for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Each of these convey that the United States is expanding its envisioned roles of nuclear weapons. They also introduce greater ambiguity into the strategic environment by expanding the scenarios in which an adversary in combat would not know if they were being attacked by a conventional weapon or with a lower- or higher-yield nuclear blast — raising uncertainty and the risk of escalation in ways that no country needs more of these days.

Each of these capabilities is unnecessary and counterproductive if the sole purpose of the U.S. arsenal is to deter or respond to a nuclear attack. Some argue that the standoff cruise missile and other weapons enhance U.S. capabilities for limited retaliatory strikes in the event of a limited nuclear strike by an adversary. However, the United States already has nuclear options capable of such limited strikes. More important, strategic nuclear weapons are better suited for deterring such a first strike by an adversary, as they better convey that any use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its protected allies would be met with an unacceptable level of devastation.

A vital question then becomes whether to unilaterally remove these excessive nuclear weapons from U.S. plans, echoing the smart changes made by President George H.W. Bush in his Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, or to seek to use them in bargaining with Russia (and potentially others) in new arms control agreements. Either way, this is a discussion to hold at the highest levels with allies, with the president then sending resulting instructions down to his defense and diplomatic leaders to implement.

The next administration should pursue a modern follow-on to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that Russia breached, and that the United States, to Russia’s relief, then unilaterally scrapped. A new nuclear INF-like treaty should seek to prohibit putting nuclear warheads on the tips of ground-launched cruise missiles of any range. The United States and Russia are both concerned that the other will deploy systems capable of swapping in a nuclear warhead without their knowledge. The high risks brought by the dual conventional-nuclear capabilities of these systems mean they make everyone less secure. They may therefore present optimal conditions for arms control dialogue. If so, verification concepts could mimic past processes or include newer approaches such as a recent U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research design for verifying the absence of nuclear warheads on dual-capable systems at specific sites.

Both Russia and the United States wished to end the INF Treaty in part because China was not a part of it. In the past several decades, China has significantly ramped up its conventional intermediate range missiles. Thankfully, China has not yet put nuclear weapons on its cruise missiles. The challenge of this buildup is one to be addressed diplomatically at the high political level and through non-nuclear means of deterrence. The spread of conventional cruise missiles makes the prospect of mixing-in indistinguishable nuclear variants a recipe for nuclear miscalculation. Focusing such an agreement on just nuclear-armed, ground-launched cruise missiles would be an important first step. Hopefully it would be followed by efforts to ban similar nuclear ballistic missile systems. The United States should lead this effort.

Washington should also develop arms control measures for cutting off future nuclear options that are (hopefully) not yet under serious consideration, but that nevertheless concern many countries. These should include concepts to help prevent the proliferation of nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles and nuclear drones.

Arms Control Is Challenging but Necessary

No matter who is elected in November, changes may be coming to U.S. nuclear plans and programs. This would be a welcome shift, but it will require strong leadership and clear direction from the president. This instruction should prioritize reversing the trend toward new U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities, especially those that heighten risks of escalation and miscalculation. The next administration should take full advantage of the growing bipartisan agreement that the future of nuclear arms control will take new forms and include more players.

This work is not easy, of course, for any president. But these measures warrant serious consideration, as they could drive a critical shift in reducing the roles of weapons of mass destruction in how the United States pursues national security, and serve to strengthen America’s nuclear deterrent, while lowering the palpable risk of nuclear war.


Christine Parthemore is the chief executive officer of the Council on Strategic Risks, where she also leads the Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons. She was formerly senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.

Andy Weber is a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks. His decades of U.S. government service included five-and-a-half years as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.

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[jward]

NATO in the Arctic: Keep Its Role Limited, For Now
David Auerswald

October 12, 2020

The adage “Don’t just do something. Stand there!” could easily describe NATO’s policies in the Arctic for the last 30 years. Consequently, the alliance has taken a largely hands-off approach to the region.
Nevertheless, individual NATO members with territory or territorial waters in the Arctic (Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and the United States) have taken the initiative to advance their Arctic interests. Recently, the United States has taken a more assertive role in the region. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out Russian and Chinese Arctic behavior at the May 2019 Arctic Council ministerial meeting, the U.S. Air Force has stationed more fifth-generation fighter planes in Alaska than exist in any other location on the planet, and the U.S. Navy reactivated the Second Fleet with responsibilities for the North Atlantic. The Defense Department and individual services have released, or will release, several Arctic strategies. The U.S. Coast Guard published an Arctic Strategic Outlook in April 2019, followed by an Arctic strategy from the Defense Department in June 2019 and the U.S. Air Force in July 2020. The Navy and Army are expected to follow suit with revised Arctic strategies in late 2020 and 2021 respectively.

So far, all of those strategies reference the value of regional partnerships with like-minded states, which begs the question — should NATO play a greater role in the Arctic? Some argue yes, saying that NATO should create an Arctic security forum with Russia or engage in visible contingency planning. Others disagree, believing that since there is no consensus within the alliance on actions in the Arctic, the matter should be left to individual member states. Camille Grand, NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment, said when asked about the topic in an a recent interview, “I don’t think we are there yet.”

NATO itself should play a very limited, direct role in the Arctic. The alliance should only engage in circumscribed contingency planning and conduct the occasional large exercise like Trident Juncture in 2018. To do more risks weakening alliance unity and needlessly antagonizing Russia. Specifically, NATO should avoid creating a new alliance command dedicated to the Arctic, pushing for Sweden and Finland to join the alliance, or establishing a new Arctic security forum between NATO and Russia. These policy options have been floated in expert dialogues and ought to be tabled, at least for now. Rather than coordinating through NATO, which would continue today’s policy, member states and their non-NATO partners should meet Arctic security threats by engaging in more frequent and deeper unilateral, bilateral, or coalition-of-the-willing defense cooperation focused on cold weather training, regular military exercises, and rotational force deployments. This is a subtle but important distinction. Some physical activities would look the same in this alternative policy, but they would not be under a NATO moniker.

Context and Threats
Climate change is transforming the geopolitics of the Arctic. The Arctic is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the globe, with corresponding ice-melt, softening of permafrost, higher waves and erosion, and more frequent wildfire events. That translates into the potential for more access to the Arctic, resource extraction, and maritime activity, but also more threats to the human security of Arctic populations, some of whom live in NATO countries.
America’s rivals are taking an increased interest in Arctic issues. Russia — long an Arctic power — has renewed, expanded, and developed new military facilities across its Arctic territory, mainly but not exclusively centered on the Northern Sea Route. Moreover, the Russian navy has conducted exercises in the Baltic, Barents, and Norwegian Seas, while ground exercises simulate battle between Arctic states. Commercial fishing vessels are moving farther north in pursuit of previously unavailable fish stocks, threatening the livelihood of coastal communities. Three of the eight Arctic states — Finland, Russia, and Sweden — are not NATO members and Russia, at least, has strong reasons to object to a greater NATO role in the region. Finally, Moscow will take the two-year rotating chair of the Arctic Council and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum in May 2021. China’s regional actions include increased scientific, diplomatic, and maritime activities, as well as significant investment in the region. All these trends are outside NATO’s control but could affect NATO member perceptions and behavior.

While NATO members are facing several challenges to their interests in the Arctic, developing a common policy within the alliance on what to do about this is incredibly difficult. NATO decisions depend on consensus, or at least on members withholding a veto of a pending initiative. Just because there are five NATO members in the Arctic does not mean that each supports a greater NATO role in the Arctic. Canada’s Arctic and Northern Policy Framework, for instance, repeatedly emphasizes “Canada’s enduring Arctic sovereignty,” and the need to “enhance Canada’s military presence” and “Canada’s domain awareness” (emphasis added), with some references to bilateral security cooperation but no mention of NATO. Canada is not the only country that might object to a stronger alliance role in the Arctic. Alliance members in Southern and Eastern Europe might see an increased Arctic focus as syphoning away NATO resources from security challenges in the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Ukraine, or the Baltic Sea. In short, a greater alliance role in the Arctic requires convincing skeptical allies, and doing that might not be worth the diplomatic effort.

None of the above, with the possible exception of Russian militarization along the Northern Sea Route, constitutes a military threat to NATO. That said, three military-security threats merit discussion: Russian forces in the Arctic could threaten European NATO members or threaten North America, and China’s scientific activities in the Arctic could lay the groundwork for future military activities.
Russia could attack or attempt to coerce European NATO members from the Russian Arctic. However unlikely, Russia might be tempted to open up a front in the Arctic during a conflict with NATO elsewhere. Moreover, a military crisis that starts in the Baltic states or the Black Sea region could spillover inadvertently into the Arctic. NATO members could threaten or strike Russian targets in the Arctic from air or sea-based platforms if they saw the Russian Northern Fleet or ground forces north of the Arctic Circle as a potential threat during a crisis. A military conflict could also occur due to miscalculation or accidents in the Barents Sea or north Atlantic between each side’s naval or air forces.
Russia could threaten the United States or Canada using long-range assets in the Russian Arctic to deter NATO entry in conflicts or “gray zone” activities in the Baltic states or the Black Sea region. Russia’s recent Arctic militarization does not change the fact that they have possessed the ability to attack North America via long-range weapons (on missiles, submarines and bombers) fired through the Arctic for decades.

Although Beijing does not currently possess sustained military assets in the Arctic, Chinese scientific or economic activities in the Arctic could serve as a Trojan horse for defense activities, intelligence collection, or non-defense influence/aggression. For example, research vessels sailing through Arctic waters could also gather electronic/signals intelligence, map the ocean floor to aid submarine navigation or detection, or plant sonar buoys. Each has potential military applications. Other Chinese activities — like economic influence attempts or control of rare earth supplies — though potentially troubling from a Western security perspective, are not direct military threats relevant to NATO’s charter.

Policy Options for NATO in the Arctic
When considering NATO’s role in the Arctic given this contextual background, four primary options merit consideration: enhance non-NATO training, partnerships, and operations in the Arctic; create a NATO Arctic Command; invite Sweden and Finland to join NATO; and establish a NATO-Russia security forum.
Accelerate Non-NATO Training and Exercises

NATO members could continue or perhaps accelerate current unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral operations and partnerships outside the confines of the alliance. This option is consistent with what the U.S. Navy is already doing with its Second and Sixth Fleets alongside Norway (a marine rotational force, submarine port calls, bomber flybys, and more regular exercises) and with Iceland (rotational presence of P-8 and tanker aircraft). Additional rotations and exercises would build shared expertise in cold weather operations across participatory states and signal western resolve toward Russia. These initiatives would be outside the alliance but consistent with NATO’s focus on training and exercises in the alliance’s Connected Forces Initiative. Last but not least, a significant rotational presence and exercises would allow for more robust monitoring of China’s Arctic activities.

Russia is sensitive to NATO training and exercises in the Arctic. By avoiding an alliance moniker, informal activities by individual NATO states or groups of states will be less likely to trigger a counterproductive Russian response. In the past, Moscow has issued diplomatic statements and conducted military exercises when upset by NATO military activity in the Arctic. For example, Russia blocked GPS signals during NATO’s 2018 Trident Juncture exercise. Russia staged live-fire exercises after a May 2020 NATO exercise in the Barents Sea and in February 2020 just before NATO’s Cold Response exercise in Norway. There are numerous smaller examples of Russian pilots and ships acting in aggressive ways during NATO training operations. Another advantage of this option is that it avoids having to convince southern or eastern European NATO members to devote resources to cold weather training, potentially at the expense of more traditional training, particularly if defense budgets are constrained in a COVID-19 or post-pandemic world.
Establish a NATO Arctic Command

An alternative, alliance-oriented option would be to create a NATO Arctic Command headquarters that would exercise operational control of NATO forces in high latitudes. An Arctic Command could be modeled on NATO’s new Multinational Division North that is tasked with the defense of the Baltic states. The headquarters would add a dedicated NATO planning, command, and control unit with expertise in the high north, which would presumably clarify command relationships within NATO in the event of an Arctic crisis or conflict. And like the Multinational Division North, the alliance could have redundant headquarters facilities, with one in theater (perhaps in Norway) and another facility outside the Arctic.
This option has several downsides. It duplicates some of the existing bilateral capabilities and relationships in the U.S.-Norwegian defense partnership, and in the coordination on north Atlantic defense between the U.S. Second and Sixth Fleets and NATO’s renewed Joint Forces Command. Perhaps more importantly, an Arctic Command would prioritize a collective NATO response to security challenges. In principle, that is consistent with NATO’s purpose and a good thing.

Practically, however, it creates problems within the alliance. The Canadians might see prioritizing a NATO response as weakening their sovereign control of their own territory. The Danes might agree with Canadian sentiment. An Arctic Command also goes against the spirit expressed by Arctic coastal states (specifically Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States, to say nothing of Russia) in the Ilulissat and Chelsea Declarations, which emphasized national over multinational control and regulation of the majority of Arctic waters. Finally, having an Arctic Command begs the question of whose forces would be under that command, which brings us back to the reluctance of many NATO members to contribute to an Arctic force. In sum, this option would require building intra-alliance consensus on the need for another command, and then training the forces that would be dedicated to or rotated through it. The former is difficult, and the latter is unnecessary.

 

[jward]

continued. .. .


Invite Sweden and Finland to Join NATO
In response to heightened insecurity in the Arctic, NATO could formally invite Sweden and Finland to join the alliance. Their membership would mean that seven of the eight Arctic states would be NATO members, and this would present an uninterrupted alliance land bridge across the European Arctic as well as on the Baltic Sea’s north and south coasts. Open source assessment shows that both countries have potent forces. Finland would add significant ground forces to NATO’s capabilities. Sweden has advanced aircraft in its Gripen fighter planes, fast patrol boats, and submarines. In all likelihood, both countries would be welcomed into the alliance with little complaint from current members.
But this option presupposes that Sweden and Finland actually want to join NATO and have the public support to do so. While both countries maintain close ties with NATO, they have decided to remain outside the alliance, in large part due to concerns about how Russia would react in response. Moreover, their membership could actually complicate NATO defense planning, as both countries are within range of many Russian military systems and Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia. Reinforcing either country would require crossing the Baltic Sea, flying through contested airspace, or traversing a vulnerable rail bridge from Denmark or the two southern rail routes from Norway into Sweden, or crossing the Scandinavian mountains separating central and northern Norway from Sweden. Even then, NATO forces would still need to cross the Gulf of Bothnia or traverse the inhospitable terrain in Finnmark, Norway to reach Lapland, Finland — all of which is, again, within easy range of Russian firepower.

This option would risk creating a major crisis with Russia. Moscow has repeatedly warned that bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO would be seen as an overt threat to Russian territory. The resulting political crisis could escalate, leading to miscalculation or accidents. Finally, Russian rhetoric aside, adding the two countries to NATO would do nothing to fundamentally change Russian military plans, as they already have to factor Western-leaning Sweden and Finland into their security calculations. Lastly, adding the two would do nothing to alleviate Chinese security threats.

Create an Arctic Security Forum Between NATO and Russia
The final NATO option considered here would be to create a new NATO-Russia forum to discuss Arctic security issues. Proponents of Arctic security forums argue that they could foster better communication and incident de-escalation by establishing a regional military code of conduct, among other things. They also could take pressure off existing non-security Arctic forums, like the Arctic Council, to address military issues. All of this makes a forum attractive.

This option seems infeasible, however, if we are talking about NATO participation in such a forum. The NATO-Russia Council, an existing forum aimed at a similar mission set, suspended military-to-military consultations after the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea. For better or worse, NATO as an institution shows no signs of relaxing that prohibition. For this option to work, Russia’s military and defense establishment would have to participate at a senior level, and Russian personnel abide by the agreements made. Russia failed to do the former when it came to the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable. Likewise, dangerous Russian flybys and naval activities demonstrate their willingness to flaunt agreed-upon codes of conduct in international waters and airspace, to say nothing of their actions in Ukraine, the Black Sea, and Syria.

Recommendation
The Arctic is receiving increased scrutiny from Western security officials, and the question of NATO’s role in the Arctic is a primary topic of discussion. Given the effects of climate change, Russia’s activities in the Arctic, and a growing Chinese role in the region, it may be tempting for NATO officials to assert a role for the alliance in the Arctic. However, the threat environment does not require a robust set of NATO actions at this time.
For the time being, a collective NATO response to Arctic security challenges is inadvisable. Instead, individual member states should pursue and increase rotational presence operations and regional exercises. These would help to alleviate immediate security threats and, because they involve NATO members, would prepare the alliance for a greater Arctic role in the future, should that be necessary. These would also build on current NATO policy and the policies of NATO’s Arctic members. Alliance members that flank the Arctic should continue to develop military capabilities (e.g. for maritime domain awareness and surface presence, high-latitude communications and positioning systems, and long-term cold weather sustainment) that signal Western intent and support more robust options (i.e., a NATO Arctic Command or inviting Sweden and Finland into NATO) should the security situation deteriorate. These unilateral, bilateral, and coalitional actions would provide Russia with concrete incentives to engage in benign behavior.

Someday, NATO may be forced into action in the Arctic. People will say, “Don’t just stand there. Do something!” Yet today is not that day. For now, willing NATO members and partners should focus on more robust training, exercises, and a rotational presence in the Arctic. If done outside of formal NATO command, these actions could advance the alliance’s own security interests and prepare it for an increased regional role should actions by Russia and China force its hand.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not those of the National War College, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government entity.
Dr. David Auerswald is a professor of security studies at the U.S. National War College in Washington, D.C. He has published books on International Security Assistance Force operations, Congress and national security, Congress and civil-military relations, the politics of coercive diplomacy, and the Kosovo conflict.

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NATO in the Arctic: Keep Its Role Limited, For Now - War on the Rocks

The adage “Don’t just do something. Stand there!” could easily describe NATO’s policies in the Arctic for the last 30 years. Consequently, the alliance

warontherocks.com

 

[Housecarl]

So are we going back to the concept of the RDF? If so, then IMHO the AAI concept for an RDF light tank should be looked at again with the new tech available......

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Soldiers to evaluate new light tank prototypes

An upcoming soldier vehicle assessment for the Mobile Protected Firepower competitive entries could be a determining factor in helping the Army choose a winner.

www.defensenews.com

Soldiers to evaluate new light tank prototypes

By: Jen Judson   7 hours ago

BAE Systems will build an M8 Buford armored gun system with new capabilities for its prototype for the U.S. Army's mobile protected firepower vehicle. (BAE Systems)


WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is preparing a soldier vehicle assessment of two different light tank prototypes for infantry brigade combat teams that will start in January 2021 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The assessment will run through June 2021, according to the service.

BAE Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems were chosen in December 2018 to each build 12 prototypes of the Army’s future mobile protected firepower, or MPF, vehicle identified in the service’s ground combat vehicle strategy published in 2015. The service had found the capability one the service lacks.

GDLS is building a vehicle that takes the United Kingdom’s AJAX chassis and combines it with an M1 Abrams tank turret.

BAE Systems' design is an updated M8 Buford armored gun system with new capabilities and components.

“I just had my deep dive today on the SVA [soldier vehicle assessment] with the 82nd [Airborne],” Maj. Gen. Brian Cummings, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, told Defense News in a recent interview.

Work is ongoing to prepare ranges and roads for the arrival of the prototypes, he said.

The MPF is going to be critical for the infantry because it provides infantry brigade combat teams with an organic capability to take care of impediments to forward progression such as gunfire from a machine gun nest or another enemy vehicle.

The Army is expected to choose a winner in 2022. The first units will get MPF in fiscal 2025. The Army plans to initially build 26 vehicles, with an option to build 28 more and retrofit eight prototypes.

https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/LYHkBRV4S-MnPXxluJ4UH1a_30w=/600x0/filters:quality(100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/mco/QFPVSYJCRBGLPK7NLS5TFDIAKQ.jpg

General Dynamics’ offering for the Army’s mobile protected firepower vehicle combines a version of its latest Abrams turret with a chassis that leverages experience from the United Kingdom’s AJAX program. (Richard Watt/British Defence Ministry)

GDLS told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference that it has delivered three vehicles to the Army. One is at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, going through characterization and mobility testing and preparing for firing. Another is at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona, undergoing desert testing and preparing for soldier training.

Five more prototypes are in “some form of checkout, getting ready for their final inspection report to deliver to the government,” a GDLS spokesperson said, and the company is on track to deliver all of the vehicles this year.

BAE is looking forward to the assessment because the two prototypes are so different from one another, said Jim Miller, the company’s senior business development director for combat vehicles.

The BAE’s offering is smaller — fitting in between the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and a Stryker in terms of size — while GDLS' vehicle is bigger, as it’s based on the M1 Abrams chassis.

The BAE’s MPF prototype can be transported via a C-130 aircraft. Three can fit on a C-17 aircraft. And even though it is small, it has the survivability of BAE’s Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, Miller said.

The Army is requiring the vehicle be C-17 transportable.

Soldier assessments for other recent competitions have weighed heavily into decisions, Miller added. “I think the soldier vehicle assessment is going to be really important,” he said. “Did we get this right? Now which one is closer to the mark?”


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About Jen Judson
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for nearly a decade. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

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Iran Ready for Arms Trade with 'Many Friends,' US left in 'Isolation'

"Iran will be relieved from arms restrictions as early as Oct. 18. Naturally, from that date, we'll trade, on the basis of our national interests, with other countries in this field," Iranian mission to the U.N. spokesperson Alireza Miryousefi told Newsweek.

www.newsweek.com

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Iran Says It's Ready to Start Buying and Selling Weapons With 'Many Friends,' While US Left in 'Isolation'
By Tom O'Connor On 10/15/20 at 4:38 PM EDT





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Iran's Revolutionary Guard Surrounds U.S. Navy In Persian Gulf Encounter

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An Iranian official has told Newsweek that the Islamic Republic was looking forward to buying and selling weapons with a number of international partners as a United Nations arms embargo preventing it from doing so was set to lift in days, a development that the United States has condemned as damaging to global security.

The expiration of the decade-old U.N. restrictions, set to take place Sunday, would come after a largely unsuccessful U.S. campaign to convince countries to defy the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the accompanying U.N. Security Council resolution 2231 to extend the ban on Iran's arms industry.

With Washington's calls to the U.N. left unheeded, Iran's permanent mission to the international body said the lack of support for the U.S. initiatives was telling of its position vis-à-vis the international community.

"It is abundantly clear that the U.N.—and the overwhelming majority of its member states—reject the U.S.' so-called maximum pressure policy on Iran," Iranian U.N. mission spokesperson Alireza Miryousefi told Newsweek, "and that its attempts to even further violate the JCPOA and UNSCR 2231 have led to its isolation."

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Iran has yet to formally announce any specific country arms deals. Officials, however, have repeatedly discussed the prospect of doing business with U.S. rivals Russia and China, who have been vocally critical of President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign to isolate Iran.

Asked if Tehran had any particular nations in mind, Miryousefi said his country had options beginning on Sunday.

"Iran has many friends and trading partners, and has a robust domestic arms industry to ensure its defense requirements against foreign aggression," he told Newsweek. "In accordance with the timeline stated in resolution 2231, Iran will be relieved from arms restrictions as early as Oct. 18. Naturally, from that date, we'll trade, on the basis of our national interests, with other countries in this field."

Iranian military forces fire a rocket during a military exercise in the Persian Gulf, near the strategic Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran, in this photo published on September 10. The three-day navy exercise's objectives were said to devise "tactical offensive and defensive strategies for safeguarding the country's territorial waters and shipping lanes." AFP/Handout/Islamic Republic of Iran Army
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The U.S. mission to the U.N. did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment, however, the Trump administration has long argued that freeing Iran up for the weapons trade would run counter to its own interests and those of regional partners such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Though the U.S. joined Iran along with China, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom in 2015 to forge the JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration abandoned the deal in 2018, branding the Islamic Republic "the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism." Since then, the U.S. has rolled out increasingly tough sanctions to strangle the Iranian economy.

Such tightening economic restrictions have ratcheted up tensions in the Middle East. Here, opposing agendas from Washington and Tehran have clashed in the likes of the Persian Gulf and Iraq, where in January the U.S. killed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani in a fiery strike that further fueled the two countries four-decade feud.

Iran Says Trump No 'Tough Guy' After He Told Country Not to 'F**k with Us'
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Today, the Pentagon says Iran remains what Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Army General McKenzie deemed in June to be "the greatest threat to stability and security in the region."
"For more than 40 years, the Iranian regime has defied international norms by conducting malign activities that destabilize the region and threaten global commerce, security and stability," Pentagon spokesperson Army Major Rob Lodewick told Newsweek. "Iran contributes little to the world stage but aggression, violence, and instability."

Such behavior, he argued, may only be encouraged by allowing Iran to enter the international arms market.

"A regime that refuses to cease such destabilizing activity should not be allowed to openly expand and export its arsenal of advanced conventional weapons and ballistic missiles," Lodewick said, "much of which will end up in the hands of the terrorist groups and proxies that Iran uses to undermine security in the region."

U.S. concerns are compounded by the prospect of Iran getting access to advanced military equipment like Russian Su-30 and Chinese J-10 fighter jets, two aircraft referenced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a June tweet.

Earlier this month, Russia's ambassador to Iran Levan Jagarian said that Moscow would have "no problem" selling the state-of-the-art S-400 surface-to-air missile system to Tehran.

Russian forces test fire an S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system in the Astrakhan region, September 15. The coveted weapon has already been purchased by Belarus, India, China and Turkey, with prospective buyers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well. Russian Ministry of Defense

But an immediate flood of foreign weapons to Iran was unlikely, according to Nicole Grajewski, a fellow at the International Security Program of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

She told Newsweek that the Islamic Republic "understands the limitations of its relationship with both Russia and China."

She said that for Iran and Russia, their individual financial constraints could hamper the extent of their military relationship. Bottom line, both countries are cash-strapped.

All but $1 billion in 1990s arms deals were largely "settled in write-offs of outstanding Soviet debts to Iran and in various barter deals, mostly Iranian oil handed over to Russia for resale," she told Newsweek.

Today, Moscow needs hard currency.

"For this reason, Iran may find China as a more desirable option," she added. "China might be more circumspect about the Trump Administration's recent imposition of unilateral sanctions on those who provide Iran with weapons than Russia. So there are lots of considerations that Iran needs to take into account."

Venezuela Calls U.S. 'Greatest Threat to World Peace' Amid New Sanctions
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Additionally, Iran remains bound for three more years by restrictions against acquiring weapons that could contribute to its capability to produce nuclear weapons—a goal it has always denied seeking. Such equipment include ballistic missile systems, drones and other certain aircraft-related technology that Tehran would need U.N. Security Council approval to acquire.

With these considerations in mind, Tehran has already boosted ties with Moscow and Beijing in a series of talks and potential agreements that range from trade to security.

But even with Iran's potential to further fortify these relationships, conduct joint exercises and obtain certain weapons post-arms embargo, she argued that "the Trump Administration's concerns are certainly misplaced" when it comes to its adversary's newfound purchasing power.

"It reflects the obvious tension between assertions that the maximum pressure campaign is weakening Iran and crippling the country's economy and statements that portray Iran as this omnipotent actor," Grajewski told Newsweek. "The Trump Administration has failed to have a serious and nuanced assessment of the roots of Iran's malignant foreign policy activity, and it shows."

A Lebanese army convoy patrols a street in Ain Qana after an explosion rocked a Hezbollah site in the southern village on September 22. The billboard bears pictures of the head of the Hezbollah Lebanese Shiite Muslim movement Secretary-General Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah (L), Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (C) and its late founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, director of Virginia Tech's School of Public and International Affairs, also found fault with the Trump administration's logic when assessing Iran's financial state, ongoing sanctions on certain weapons systems and the broad international support for the JCPOA.

After what he called "an embarrassing defeat for the Trump administration" at last month's U.N. Security Council meeting, where only one other country—the Dominican Republic—backed a U.S. proposal to extend the arms embargo, Boroujerdi said France, Germany and the U.K. were hedging to save the nuclear deal by avoiding escalation with Iran.

He also expressed skepticism toward the Trump administration's argument that lifting the arms embargo would necessarily accelerate Iran's military support to its partnered militias across the Middle East.

"We have heard this argument for the past 40 years," Boroujerdi said, telling Newsweek that Iran "has been very much worried about the return address" when it exports weapons.

But, while Iran may be eager to supply certain equipment such as weapons and rockets to its armed allies, he said Iran has refrained from supplying more advanced, powerful equipment to avoid an all-out regional escalation.

"It sort of has been a gentleman's agreement," Boroujerdi said, "that, despite the rhetoric, every side of the conflict has observed so far."

 

[Housecarl]

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Taliban assaults Helmand capital as U.S. officials plead for a ‘reduction in violence’ | FDD's Long War Journal

U.S. officials continue to maintain that the Taliban committed to a "reduction in violence" as part of the withdrawal agreement. The deal says no such thing, and the Taliban continues to mount attacks.

www.longwarjournal.org

Taliban assaults Helmand capital as U.S. officials plead for a ‘reduction in violence’

By Bill Roggio | October 15, 2020 | admin@longwarjournal.org | @billroggio


The Taliban launched an all-out assault on Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, as U.S. officials continue to wrongly claim that those attacks are in violation of the U.S.-Taliban withdrawal deal.

The Taliban launched its offensive on Lashkar Gah last weekend and shut down the road linking the provincial capital with neighboring Kandahar City. Taliban fighters struck Police Districts 3 and 4, the Babaji area of the city and “three districts that are near the center of the province,” TOLONews reported. Two of the districts appear to be Nawa and Nad Ali.
Afghan police abandoned several checkpoints, ceding the areas to the Taliban.

Afghan Commandos have been deployed to help retake areas of the city. Two Afghan helicopters collided in Nawa district, killing a reported eight to 15 soldiers. The Taliban claimed that Afghan Army Commandos and four pilots were killed in the crash.

The fighting has been so intense that the U.S. military has been forced to launch airstrikes to help beat back the Taliban. Colonel Sonny Leggett, the spokesman for U.S. Forces Afghanistan, said that the military “will continue to provide support in defense of the ANDSF under attack by the Taliban.”

"The Taliban need to immediately stop their offensive actions in Helmand Province and reduce their violence around the country. It is not consistent with the US-Taliban agreement and undermines the ongoing Afghan Peace Talks."
Gen Scott Miller, Commander
— USFOR-A Spokesman Col Sonny Leggett (@USFOR_A) October 12, 2020

U.S. officials, including General Scott Miller, the commander of USFOR-A and Resolute Support Mission, and Ross Wilson, the Chargé d’Affaires for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Afghanistan, have wrongly said that the Taliban’s offensive violates the U.S.-Taliban withdrawal agreement that was signed between the two on Feb. 29, 2020.

(1/2) I strongly second Gen. Miller’s call for the #Taliban to stop its offensive in #Helmand and reduce its violence around the country. This violence, which is not consistent with the U.S.-Taliban agreement, leads only to unacceptable loss of life and destruction. //t.co/qsMjVQ9LIQ
— Chargé d’Affaires Ross Wilson (@USAmbKabul) October 13, 2020

“It is not consistent with the US-Taliban agreement,” Miller stated.

“This violence, which is not consistent with the U.S.-Taliban agreement, leads only to unacceptable loss of life and destruction,” Wilson tweeted.

However, the deal, which has been published at the U.S. State Department’s web site, makes no mention of requiring the Taliban to commit to “reduction in violence.” Nor is there clause that indicates that the Taliban must reduce its attacks on Afghan forces in the deal. In fact, the only mention of the term “reduction” is related to the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
“A permanent and comprehensive ceasefire will be an item on the agenda of the intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations,” the deal reads.

It is possible that there is a side deal between the U.S. and the Taliban that requires the latter to commit to a “reduction in violence,” but if this is true, the Taliban has explicitly denied this, and has claimed it is living up to its end of the bargain. There have been reports of a so-called “secret annex,” but that is supposed to only contain plans for U.S. troop withdrawals.

U.S. military officers have claimed that the Taliban has committed to a reduction in violence in the past. For instance, just five days after the signing of the U.S.-Taliban withdrawal deal , the military launched airstrikes against the Taliban in Helmand. At the time, Leggett, the USFOR-A spokesman, said that the “Taliban leadership promised the international community they would reduce violence and not increase attacks. We call on the Taliban to stop needless attacks and uphold their commitments.”

The Taliban responded by saying that it only agreed to reduce their attacks as the U.S. and the Taliban finalized their deal. Once the deal was signed, it would resume offensive operations against Afghan forces, as it was permitted to do so. [See FDD‘s Long War Journal Report, U.S. military perplexed by Taliban living up to letter of agreement]

U.S. officials have intentionally mischaracterized the withdrawal deal by claiming that it indicated the Taliban would break with Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that the Taliban would hunt down and “destroy” Al Qaeda, even though it has been its steadfast ally for three decades. Instead, the Taliban was consulting with Al Qaeda and reassuring them that the agreement would not sever the relationship even as it was negotiating with the U.S. [See FDD’s Long War Journal reports, [See FDD’s Long War Journal report, U.N.: Taliban “regularly consulted” with Al Qaeda throughout negotiations with U.S. and Analysis: Taliban leader declares victory after U.S. agrees to withdrawal deal.]

Instead, the Taliban made the oft-repeated commitment that it would prevent Al Qaeda from attacking the U.S. and its allies. This is the same ‘commitment’ the Taliban made numerous times prior to Sept. 11, 2001. The Taliban has made similar promises since 9/11, yet it has harbored Al Qaeda and other terror groups that have continually plotted against the U.S. and its allies.

Meanwhile the Taliban claims that Al Qaeda or any other foreign terror group is not operating on its soil. If Al Qaeda isn’t present in Afghanistan, then it can’t be considered a legitimate counterterrorism partner, as Pompeo and others have somehow claimed. [See FDD’s Long War Journal report, Taliban falsely claims al Qaeda doesn’t exist in Afghanistan.]

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

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

Posted for fair use.....

North Korea’s Two New Strategic Missiles: What Do We Know and What Do They Mean for US Deterrence? - Modern War Institute

North Korea has conducted its annual military parade to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the state’s communist ruling party. The parade featured a tear-filled speech by Kim Jong-un […]

mwi.usma.edu

North Korea’s Two New Strategic Missiles: What Do We Know and What Do They Mean for US Deterrence?

Joe Varner | October 15, 2020




North Korea has conducted its annual military parade to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the state’s communist ruling party. The parade featured a tear-filled speech by Kim Jong-un outlining the challenges facing Pyongyang, including Covid-19 and sanctions, and thanking the members of the armed forces for their service. The parade has historically generated a degree of excitement internationally as North Korea tends to showcase new equipment to demonstrate its military power to its neighbors and to the United States. This year’s parade did not disappoint, with new strategic systems in the spotlight intended to convey Pyongyang’s capability to present new challenges to the United States’ and its allies’ security and nuclear deterrence.

This year’s parade featured what appear to be essentially clones of the Russian Armata main battle tank, the US M1128 mobile gun system, the Japanese Komatsu light armored vehicle, and the Russian Tor air defense missile system. The North Koreans also showcased an anti-tank guided missile vehicle not seen since its first appearance in 2018, and a new anti-ship cruise missile. Pyongyang’s Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the longest range tested missile in its arsenal, was also displayed, along with the giant KN-25, which “blurs the distinction” between multiple-launch rocks systems and short-range ballistic missiles—although it appeared to have a chassis problem.

Most notable on display was a new solid-fuel submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), believed to be the Pukguksong-4, with a range that at least would allow it to strike South Korea and all of Japan with nuclear warheads. Initial assessment from the International Institute for Strategic Studies and 38 North suggests that the Pukguksong-4 is shorter in length than its predecessor Pukguksong-3. But it is larger in diameter, possibly 2.5 meters, which is on par with Russia’s Bulava, China’s JL-2, and the US Trident II SLBMs. There are visual indications of improvements to the rocket engines and solid fuel system. The Pukguksong-4 appears to be constructed with wound filament rocket casings for the fuselage that North Korea has had the capability to produce since 2017. Wound filament allows for the construction of a lighter rocket, and therefore, increased range and payload.

It is believed that the Pukguksong-4 was developed for service on North Korea’s modified Romeo-class ballistic missile submarine with two or three of these weapons mounted in the extended submarine sail. But at the parade the Pukguksong-4 was not supported by sailors but by ground forces and was transported on a transporter erector launcher, or TEL vehicle. This raises the prospect that it could be a land-based derivative of the Pukguksong-3 SLBM, just as the Pukguksong-2 was a land-based derivative of the Pukguksong-1 SLBM. The nose cone suggests that the Pukguksong-4 could carry three warheads, likely on one multiple re-entry vehicle as the United States, UK, France, and the Soviet Union did in the early days of their nuclear deterrent development. Given advancements, it is very likely that the Pukguksong-4 has a range greater than its predecessor’s two thousand–kilometer range, but not great enough to strike targets in Guam. There is the concerning prospect that the Pukguksong-4 is the basis of a new compact, land-based, road-mobile ICBM with at least three warheads that could deploy to a launch site with a much smaller signature than North Korea’s existing ICBMs and launch much more quickly than a liquid-fueled ICBM, perhaps just a matter of minutes.

Finally, and most importantly, as expected Pyongyang unveiled a new liquid-fueled ICBM, likely designated either Hwasong-16 or KN-27. Experts agree that the new ICBM is about twenty-five to twenty-six meters long, making it the largest road-mobile ICBM in the world (although the Russian liquid-fueled Sarmat ICBM now under development appears bigger). The diameter of the new missile is likely between 2.5 and 2.9 meters and its first stage is liquid powered, potentially by a cluster of four RD-250-type engines for a total sea-level thrust twice that of the Hwasong-15 ICBM. The second stage remains a bit of a mystery. Note that a road-mobile ICBM and TEL vehicle of this size has a huge signature in a country that does not have a great deal of roadway and the fact that it is liquid fueled makes it vulnerable to discovery and attack before launch. As well, it is worth noting that the size and configuration of the TEL vehicle indicate that North Korea now has developed a domestic capacity to manufacture both the vehicles and the ICBMs to go with them, meaning their deterrent effect will continue to grow.

By way of comparison the new missile’s launch weight of 100,000–150,000 kilograms is significantly greater than that of the Chinese DF-41 solid-fuel, road-mobile ICBM (80,000 kilograms) and the Soviet/Russian solid-fuel, rail-mobile SS-24 ICBM (104,500 kilograms). As Vann H. Van Diepen and Michael Elleman noted at 38 North, it could deliver 2,000–3,500-kilogram payload of three or four warheads in one multiple re-entry vehicle to any point in the continental United States. It could also deploy a massive warhead to a US target like the Soviet-era SS-18 Mod 1 ICBM, which was geared to first-strike and counterforce attack. North Korea’s new ICBM may also designed to deliver multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles and missile defense decoys, although this is likely at some time in the near strategic future.

Its size, power, and payload make the missile perfect for city-busting countervalue attacks on the United States, and by extension most of North America, and potentially in the future for counterforce strikes depending on its level of accuracy. The missile could also be intended to overwhelm US missile defenses that fire a salvo of four interceptor missiles at each warhead. The United States would need twelve to sixteen interceptors per missile for a potential successful kill—at a cost of around a billion dollars. Even a small force of North Korea’s new missiles with their heavy payload of several warheads would thereby provide the basis of a credible deterrent where some warheads would likely get through to North American cities presenting a real challenge to existing US missile defenses, if not rendering them irrelevant in the near future.

All of this suggests very strongly that North Korea is developing a nuclear deterrent along the path of other traditional nuclear powers, which will include a variety of strategic systems—a deterrent that, for anybody who still harbors hope that denuclearization is possible, they have no intentions of giving up. A likely test of either of the Pukguksong-4 SLBM or the new ICBM could come in the next month or two, possibly prior to the US presidential election for potential impact on its outcome. Both strategic systems represent a serious challenge to US security interests at home and abroad and will most likely require a new and robust approach to nuclear deterrence, force structure, doctrine, and the size of US Missile Defense.

Joe Varner is a consultant on defense diplomacy, strategic intelligence, and military operations. He is an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute and author of “Canada’s Asia-Pacific Security Dilemma.” He served as Director of Policy to the Minister of National Defence and Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada the Hon. G. Peter McKay from 2008 to 2014.

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