WAR 10-27-2018-to-11-02-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(339) 09-01-2018-to-09-07-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-07-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(340) 09-08-2018-to-09-14-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...9-14-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(341) 10-20-2018-to-10-26-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...0-26-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/deciphering-russias-middle-east-strategy/

Deciphering Russia’s Middle East strategy

25 Oct 2018 | Connor Dilleen

Much has been written about Russia’s ambitions in Syria and the Middle East, and there are numerous elements to Moscow’s strategy in the region. President Vladimir Putin has made clear his desire to restore Russia to great-power status and to build its profile as a global problem-solver. The Middle East offers him the opportunity to demonstrate Russia’s credentials.

Moscow’s foreign policy clearly reflects realist assumptions about the role of hard power as the defining feature of international politics. But such a broad characterisation does little to help illuminate Putin’s long-term ambitions in Syria and across the Middle East, the details of which remain obscure. There are also contradictions and a lack of clarity in Russia’s pattern of engagement in the region that likewise make it difficult to discern Russia’s objectives with any confidence.

Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war has been its most substantial recent foray into the Middle East. Moscow’s actions have been carefully calibrated and have tipped the balance in favour of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, but its motives for getting involved in the first place are complicated.

The original pretext was the targeting of Islamic State, but Moscow’s broader goal was to spoil Washington’s plans for regime change. Russia has also sought to present its actions in Syria as those of a mediator and peacebuilder, through its promotion of the 2017 Astana peace process.

Russia’s actions in Syria are part of a broader regional strategy that is both complex and fragile. Under Putin, Russia has sought to build ties with every state in the region, but has arguably prioritised countries closely aligned with the US—particularly Israel and Turkey—in order to undermine US interests in the region. Moscow’s decision to back Assad in Syria potentially prejudices Russia’s ongoing relations with traditional partners Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which seek to overthrow Assad and counter growing Iranian influence in the region.

The complex web of partnerships Russia has built in the Middle East equips it to play the role of mediator between regional adversaries. In mid-2018, Russia offered to broker an agreement between Israel and Iran that Iranian forces would remain a minimum of 100 kilometres from Israel. Russia has also negotiated multiple ceasefires in Syria, but has tended to adroitly use ceasefires to divide opposition groups and give the Assad regime breathing space to rebuild or refocus its forces.

Russia is also promoting itself as a mediator in other Middle East theatres, including in the conflict in Yemen, and appears determined to supplant the US as the principle negotiator in regional conflicts.

Looking beyond the façade of good global citizen that Putin is carefully crafting, it’s clear that Moscow’s primary motive is to advance its geopolitical ambitions.

Following its Syrian intervention, Russia was awarded a 49-year deal for access to Syria’s Tartus naval base, Russia’s only base on the Mediterranean, and secured indefinite access to Syria’s Khmeimim air force base. Likewise, Russia’s mediation in the Yemen conflict occurred in the context of Moscow’s unfulfilled ambitions to secure rights to a naval base giving access to the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. It is also pursuing access to military bases in Egypt, Libya and Sudan.

However, the web of relationships that Moscow is managing could unravel rapidly, with potentially disastrous consequences. Russia’s relationship with Turkey turned frosty in 2015 following the downing of a Russian jet by Turkish forces. Moscow responded by deploying air defence missile systems into northern Syria. Russian warplanes also bombed a Turkish aid convoy, and there was a real risk that the tensions would spiral into war.

Similarly, when a Russian military aircraft was recently shot down by Syrian forces targeting Israeli aircraft that were using the Russian aircraft as a shield, Moscow reacted by blaming Israel and supplying Syria with advanced air defence systems, dramatically increasing Syria’s capacity to target Israeli aircraft.

Such events test Russia’s capacity to sustain the competing bilateral relationships that underpin its Middle East strategy. Moscow’s posture has been helped by the fact that its intervention in Syria has to date been relatively low-cost in both manpower and munitions. But Putin and his inner circle likely remain mindful of the US’s disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be careful to avoid escalation.

Russia has similarly been wary of committing to reconstruction plans, and has sought to diffuse responsibility for post-war planning and reconstruction to regional partners. Moscow unsuccessfully approached European countries to share the cost of reconstruction in Syria, estimated at US$250 billion, and the fact that it followed its requests with a veiled threat of continued refugee flows from Syria to Europe spoke volumes about its playbook.

It’s also not clear whether Russia is seeking a definitive end to the civil war. As demonstrated in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and eastern Ukraine, Russia prefers to freeze conflicts rather than resolve them, as this provides it with additional levers with which it can sustain its influence and interests.

And herein lies the problem sitting at the heart of Russia’s Middle East strategy—Putin’s posturing and efforts to portray Russia as a constructive actor in Middle East peace sit at odds with the hard realist core of Russia’s ambitions in the region. Russia also appears to be as much motivated by a desire to subvert US and European interests as it is interested in establishing a network of client states and military bases across the region.

So far, Russia’s regional partners have played along with this charade, and Russia has also managed to deflect the true costs of the Syrian conflict. But over time, the risk of Russia being called out on its actions will increase, and as noted elsewhere, it will then learn that it is easier to get involved in a war than to get out of one.

Author
Connor Dilleen has worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments. Image courtesy of Mil.ru via Wikimedia Commons.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…..

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Posted for fair use.....
https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/the-ticking-nuclear-budget-time-bomb/

The Ticking Nuclear Budget Time Bomb

Kingston Reif and Mackenzie Eaglen
October 25, 2018
Commentary

In a little-noticed comment before his controversial July summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump expressed a desire to talk to his Russian counterpart about their countries’ extensive nuclear modernization plans. Trump characterized his own government’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the aging nuclear arsenal as “a very, very bad policy.” He seemed to express some hope that the two countries, which together possess over 90 percent of the planet’s nuclear warheads, could chart a different path and avert a new arms race.

Still, it’s not clear Trump is actually interested in a different path. He said on Monday, in the context of his decision to withdraw the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, that “We have far more money than anybody else by far. We’ll build [the U.S. nuclear arsenal] up until” other nuclear-armed states such as Russia and China “come to their senses.”

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, there has been heated debate about the appropriate role and number of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy. What has largely been above debate, however, has been the need for a strong and credible arsenal so long as nuclear weapons exist — a top policy and budgetary priority of recent administrations of both parties.

But a reckoning is coming, the result of a massive disconnect between budgetary expectations and fiscal reality. Despite claims that nuclear weapons “don’t actually cost that much,” the simple fact is that unless the administration and its successors find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, spending to maintain the current arsenal — to say nothing of a buildup — will pose a significant affordability problem. Trying to recapitalize nearly the entire arsenal at roughly the same time means less money is likely to be spent on each individual modernization program, thereby increasing the time and cost required to complete each one. The absence of reasonable planning will also result in more suboptimal choices when hard decisions become inevitable. The current path is an irrational and costly recipe for sucking funding from other defense programs and/or buying fewer new nuclear delivery systems and reducing the size of the arsenal. The longer military and political leaders continue to deny this reality, the worse off America’s nuclear deterrent and armed forces will be.

The Third Wave of Nuclear Modernization Spending
During the Cold War, the United States upgraded its nuclear forces in two major waves. The first wave, which took place between 1951 and 1965, saw the Defense Department devote a high point of 17 percent of its annual budget to building and maintaining atomic arms, according to the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. President Ronald Reagan oversaw a second wave that lasted for over a decade and peaked at nearly 11 percent of department spending.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, nuclear spending dropped, as did security expenditures more generally. But while the defense budget at large climbed back up after 9/11, nuclear weapons spending remained relatively flat. Between 2001 and 2017, it comprised no more than 4 percent of Pentagon spending, as the Bush administration in particular deferred modernizing the nuclear arsenal amid the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sustaining the arsenal will require a third wave of major upgrades. The Obama administration committed to a major overhaul of the arsenal in 2010, part of its effort to win Republican support for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated last fall that the plans Trump inherited from his predecessor to maintain and upgrade the arsenal over the next 30 years would cost $1.2 trillion in today’s dollars. That CBO projection includes about $400 billion in modernization spending that falls largely in the mid-2020s to early 2030s, as well as relatively stable, though steadily increasing, operations and sustainment costs over the entire 30-year period. At its peak in the late 2020s and early 2030s, spending on nuclear weapons would consume about 8 percent of estimated total national defense spending.

The United States currently possesses approximately 3,800 nuclear warheads, down from a mid-1950s high of over 30,000. The CBO estimate captures spending on the triad of nuclear delivery systems (ballistic missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers), on command and control systems at the Defense Department, and on nuclear warheads and their supporting infrastructure at the Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Most of the programs to buy new systems are in the early stages, and a few others have yet to begin.

The CBO’s projection of $400 billion in nuclear modernization spending might be a best-case scenario. Because the Pentagon has not built intercontinental ballistic missiles or ballistic missile submarines in a long time, the department’s independent Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office has acknowledged that the confidence levels for nuclear upgrade cost estimates are relatively low. This means that, even if the programs are managed perfectly, they could end up costing a lot more than the estimates project. The land- and sea-based missile programs, as well as the plan to build over 100 B-21 long-range bombers, could, by our count, each cost as much as $150 billion after including inflation, easily putting them among the top ten most expensive Pentagon acquisition programs.

On top of all of this, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review proposes expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities by calling for new warheads and new missiles to counter Russia, more bomb production infrastructure, and a greater emphasis on nuclear command and control. These proposals would likely add additional tens of billions to the $1.2 trillion price tag. So too could a U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty and failure to extend New START, which is slated to expire in 2021. In particular, the verifiable New START caps on Russian deployed nuclear forces aid U.S. military planning by reducing the need to make worst-case assessments that could prompt additional costly nuclear force investments.

Third Wave of Nuclear Modernization: Unique Challenges
Compared to the first two waves of nuclear modernization spending, several factors are poised to make the third recapitalization effort more challenging.

Whereas the first two waves lasted roughly a decade, the third appears likely to take at least two decades to complete. This is due in part to the fact that it now takes longer to buy new weapons systems than it did in the past. Today’s systems are typically more complex, and the Pentagon purchasing bureaucracy is more risk-averse.

In addition, the rising cost of the nuclear mission coincides with a major planned increase in conventional modernization spending confronting the armed forces, specifically the Air Force and Navy. Average annual spending to upgrade strategic nuclear forces during the third modernization wave is scheduled to initially overlap with large increases in projected spending on conventional weapon system modernization programs. These include the programs to purchase and develop the F-35A stealth fighter, the KC-46A aerial refueling tanker, a new generation of surface ships and submarines, and the Army’s replacement for the Humvee, Bradley, and its entire helicopter fleet.

The Trump administration is also pursuing new initiatives to maintain America’s dominant military position against Russia and China. The administration wants a bigger Navy, a bigger Air Force, hypersonic weapons, new types of missile defenses, and a new military department focused on space. But in most cases the administration has yet to budget for these.

The Pentagon’s own projected spending over the next five years barely keeps pace with inflation, which means real defense spending would flatline, not increase, in the years ahead. In fact, Trump recently suggested that his Fiscal Year 2020 defense budget request could be even lower than projected. These projections probably significantly underestimate the true amount of funding needed to implement the administration’s National Defense Strategy in the next five to 10 years. For example, CBO estimates that the Navy’s plan to purchase 301 new ships over the next 30 years will cost $170 billion more in today’s dollars than the service’s own estimate. The strategy proposes to find savings by calling for shedding weapons that don’t contribute to countering Russia and China and through a process of finding efficiencies. But it remains to be seen how big the funding shifts to counter Moscow and Beijing will be — to say nothing about whether Congress will approve cuts to legacy weapons systems ill-suited to great power conflict. And past efficiency proposals have rarely been realized, been too small, or only been accomplished after an upfront investment first.

Furthermore, a significant portion of the overall cost of nuclear weapons is fixed. Key components of the supporting infrastructure — such as the command and control systems and nuclear laboratories — remains about the same size whether one buys 10 nuclear weapons or 10,000. The CBO evaluated the pros and cons of several options to reduce spending on nuclear weapons, which range from blended reductions to each or several legs of the triad to moving to a dyad. These options do provide real cost savings, but they are small relative to the overall budget and won’t be enough to solve the conventional modernization challenge on their own.

The CBO’s most extreme option, deploying a 1,000-warhead dyad without ICBMs and with two fewer new ballistic missile submarines than the planned purchase of 12, would save $175 billion over 30 years, but only part of that would fall during the “bow wave” of conventional modernization spending. Moreover, the Pentagon will likely be reluctant to advocate any plan that could weaken both conventional and nuclear deterrence at the same time, namely delaying or cutting the B-21 bomber program (another option considered by the CBO). That said, reductions to the nuclear modernization program could improve the acquisition outcomes of the programs involved and ease some of the hard choices facing the overall defense enterprise. While each leg of the triad has entrenched bureaucratic and political constituencies, ignoring the gulf between current nuclear modernization plans and likely budgets will only result in even more suboptimal choices in the future.

To make matters worse, defense spending during the Cold War was under less pressure in general than it is today. The Pentagon now has to contend with new internal budgetary challenges like rapidly rising health care and compensation costs. According to one recent analysis, “just maintaining the size of the force will likely necessitate 2 to 3 percent growth above inflation in” the military personnel and operations and maintenance budget accounts.

Most importantly, the overall federal fiscal outlook is far direr. The most recent CBO estimates suggest that the United States will add somewhere between $12 to $13 trillion in new debt from spending over the next decade. Autopilot mandatory entitlement programs drive 89 percent of the spending growth leading to that new debt, with defense and non-defense discretionary spending splitting the last 10 percent. Net interest payments alone will surpass defense spending levels by 2023.

The growth of mandatory spending in all categories, coupled with the recent tax cuts, will balloon the national debt to the highest level relative to GDP in the nation’s history. This will increase pressure to slash discretionary expenditures, including defense.

While Congress approved a major increase to defense spending in fiscal year 2018, the Budget Control Act caps return in 2020 and 2021. Without amendment, these could result in a $171 billion national defense spending decline, or 13 percent of the total planned for those two years. Absent a “grand bargain” that eluded lawmakers in 2011 and led to the Budget Control Act’s spending caps, sustaining real growth in the defense budget will be almost impossible. This will make it difficult to afford both conventional and nuclear modernization in tandem.

Additionally, bipartisan political support for increasing nuclear weapons spending is fragile and far from assured in the future. The elections in 2018 and 2020 could drastically change the composition of the legislative and executive branches and put in power leaders who are critical of excessive nuclear spending levels. Most immediately, a Democratic victory in the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterms would see Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) take the gavel at the House Armed Services Committee. Smith has been quite critical of nuclear weapons specifically and overall defense spending more broadly. Combined with growing skepticism in the Senate among senior members, such as Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the return to a divided Congress does not bode well for the nuclear modernization effort.

Finally, support for nuclear modernization inside the Pentagon could wane. In recent years, both uniformed and civilian defense officials have repeatedly averred that the nuclear modernization plan is the number-one priority among all other competing modernization necessities. Officials and commanders often speak of the nuclear deterrent — and its modernization — in terms of its “fundamental” importance as a “bedrock” or “backstop” for all other defense activities.

However, such support is not assured moving forward. Over the past 18 months, the national security community has rapidly reoriented its thinking toward long-term competition with Russia and China, thereby elevating the relevance of conventional modernization. There would be precedent for such a shift — in the 1980s, defense officials acquiesced to reductions in planned nuclear modernization and expansion to keep the conventional forces modernization effort in full swing.

Disarmament by Default
Numerous Pentagon officials and outside experts have cautioned that the current nuclear upgrade plan cannot be sustained without significant and sustained increases to defense spending — which are unlikely to be forthcoming — or cuts to other military priorities.

The Nuclear Posture Review acknowledges that the cost to upgrade the nuclear arsenal is “substantial,” but claims the bill is affordable because the high point of spending on nuclear weapons will be no more than 6.4 percent of Pentagon spending, a lower percentage than during the Cold War. Or as Defense Secretary James Mattis frequently states, “We can afford survival.” And yet these statements obfuscate the severity of the nuclear budget problem facing the U.S. government.

Unlike the 2017 CBO projection, the administration’s estimate curiously does not include the major costs NNSA must incur to upgrade nuclear warheads and their supporting infrastructure. Congress approved over $11 billion for NNSA’s nuclear weapons activities for FY2019, an increase of nearly 20 percent above the Obama administration’s final (FY2017) budget request.

The Pentagon’s estimate also does not appear to account for the potential for significant cost growth, whether due to program mismanagement or upward revisions due to improved cost estimating methodology once more and better data are available. Unanticipated cost growth is a feature of most Pentagon acquisition programs, but because the key nuclear modernization programs are so large, variances in cost estimation can have especially significant effects.

At a service level, the opportunity costs of spending on nuclear weapons are particularly stark. The Navy has repeatedly warned that the projected $128 billion cost to develop and purchase 12 new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines will crater its shipbuilding budget. Similarly, the Air Force’s new ICBM program will compete with other service priorities, such as the F-35 and new tanker programs. The CBO estimates that by the early 2030s, spending on nuclear weapons will peak at 15 percent of the Pentagon’s total projected acquisition costs, more than triple the current share.

The bottom line is that rebuilding the nuclear arsenal is unlikely to be executable. As Gen. Robert Kehler, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command, bluntly put it in November, “I am skeptical that we are capable of remaining committed to a long-term project like this without basically messing with it and screwing it up.”

Indeed, a possible, if not likely, outcome is that the current plans will collapse under their own weight, forcing reductions in U.S. nuclear forces based on fiscal and political pressure rather than on strategic decisions — but not before hundreds of millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars are squandered.

Options to Improve Affordability
While the third wave of nuclear modernization poses significant planning challenges, it need not prevent the United States from fielding a strong and credible deterrent. There are numerous steps that the Defense and Energy Departments and Congress could take to make the nuclear modernization program more affordable, improve understanding of the long-term budget challenges, and better articulate the strategic and programmatic risks built into the current program.

First, the Pentagon and Congress should start a dialogue about contingency plans for reducing the scale and scope of the nuclear modernization effort. Critics of the spending plans have argued that the United States has more nuclear weapons than it needs for its security and can safely pursue more cost-effective options to sustain the arsenal, such as scaling back the plans to replace the sea- and especially land-based legs of the triad, while still retaining a credible and devastating deterrent.

Of course, pressure on the defense budget cannot be relieved solely by reducing nuclear weapons spending. But adjusting the structure and/or trimming the size of the arsenal — either unilaterally or bilaterally with Russia — could yield significant savings.

Second, every dollar Washington spends to bolster its nuclear arsenal is a dollar that can’t be spent on non-nuclear military capabilities to counter Russia and China. Military planners and lawmakers must develop a better understanding of the mismatch between currently projected defense spending and the long list of defense projects the Pentagon and Congress would like to carry out, including nuclear modernization, force structure expansion, conventional modernization, research and development on new technologies, and continued investment in readiness and compensation growth.

Third, at the very least, Congress should require the Trump administration to explain how it proposes to pay for its growing wish list under different levels of projected defense spending, including scenarios in which planned “efficiencies” from reform do not materialize or defense spending drops back down to Budget Control Act levels. Congress should also require the Pentagon to provide more information about the acquisition risks facing nuclear and conventional modernization programs, including a more lucid explanation of the uncertainty inherent in cost estimating.

Lawmakers could also consider requiring modernization programs to include reserve funding to guard against major cost overruns and better account for developmental risk. Further, Congress could task the Government Accountability Office watchdog or a federally funded research and development center to more comprehensively assess the overall affordability of the spending plans and whether the Pentagon’s planning and budgeting processes are following best practices. Lastly, all involved should avoid gimmicks like the special fund Congress has legislated to pay for the Columbia-class program, which could counterproductively force the Air Force and Army to pay for the new boats. Navigating the disconnect between the scope of the nuclear modernization effort and expected defense spending requires serious choices, not bureaucratic kabuki dances.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Whether one believes America’s nuclear weapons spending plans are good or bad policy, pursuing them poses a massive fiscal challenge that America’s military and political leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

Kingston Reif is the Director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association. Mackenzie Eaglen is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
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https://www.defensenews.com/news/yo...-us-warship-while-centcom-commander-on-board/

Your Marine Corps

Two Iranian fast boats approach US warship while CENTCOM commander is on board

By: Shawn Snow  
20 hours ago
Comments 34

Two Iranian fast boats approached the U.S. Wasp-class amphibious assault ship Essex on Friday while it was operating in the Persian Gulf, according to U.S. defense officials.

The commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, was on board the Essex at the time of the incident, officials have confirmed.

“Today’s interaction with U.S. 5th Fleet forces and the IRGCN [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy] was characterized as safe and professional," U.S. Naval Forces Central Command told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement. “The U.S. Navy continues to operate wherever international law allows.”

The IRGCN has a history of harassing U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf — an activity some analysts have noted recently has decreased.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that since Jan. 2016 there had been an average of more than two “unprofessional” encounters a month between Iranian fast boats and U.S. warships, for a total of nearly 50 incidents over a two-year period.

But the last “unprofessional” encounter occurred on Aug. 14, 2017, NAVCENT told Marine Corps Times.

During that incident, an Iranian drone operating without any navigational lights flew near U.S. aircraft conducting night operations aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz.

Marines with 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit are currently embarked on the Essex. The Essex also is hauling Marine Corps F-35Bs.

The presence of the F-35s is a first for the U.S. Central Command area of operations.

CNN was first to report the encounter between the Iranian fast boats and the Essex.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://mwi.usma.edu/era-drone-swarm-coming-need-ready/

The Era of the Drone Swarm Is Coming, and We Need to Be Ready for It

Zachary Kallenborn | October 25, 2018

Drone swarm technology—the ability of drones to autonomously make decisions based on shared information—has the potential to revolutionize the dynamics of conflict. And we’re inching ever closer to seeing this potential unleashed. In fact, swarms will have significant applications to almost every area of national and homeland security. Swarms of drones could search the oceans for adversary submarines. Drones could disperse over large areas to identify and eliminate hostile surface-to-air missiles and other air defenses. Drone swarms could potentially even serve as novel missile defenses, blocking incoming hypersonic missiles. On the homeland security front, security swarms equipped with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) detectors, facial recognition, anti-drone weapons, and other capabilities offer defenses against a range of threats.

But while drones swarms represent a major technological advancement, unlocking their full potential will require developing capabilities centered around four key areas: swarm size, customization, diversity, and hardening.

Swarm Size
In general, the more drones in a swarm, the more capable the swarm. Larger underwater swarms can cover greater distances in the search for adversary submarines or surface vessels. Larger swarms can better survive some defenses. The loss of a dozen drones would significantly degrade the capabilities of a twenty-drone swarm, but would be insignificant to a thousand-drone swarm.

Media reports indicate that China has successfully tested a swarm of one thousand drones. And China appears to be interested in swarm capability as a method of attacking US aircraft carriers. Although Intel has fielded a swarm of 1,218 drones, this does not appear to be a true drone swarm, relying on programmed behaviors instead of inter-drone communication.

There is little reason to believe swarm size could not continue growing significantly. Building a large swarm primarily requires the ability to handle massive amounts of information. More drones mean more inputs that could affect the swarm’s behavior and decisions. And on a basic level, more drones mean a greater risk of one drone crashing into another.

Of course, the importance of swarm size will depend on the mission. Stealthier missions against softer targets do not require thousands of drones. And large numbers of drones could be detrimental, drawing unnecessary attention from defenders. But massive attacks on adversary bases and other hard targets might need exactly that. An attack on a hardened target means greater expectation of loss and greater need to mass offensive power.

Diversity
A future drone swarm need not consist of the same type and size of drones, but incorporate both large and small drones equipped with different payloads. Joining a diverse set of drones creates a whole that is more capable than the individual parts. A single drone swarm could even operate across domain, with undersea and surface drones or ground and aerial drones coordinating their actions.

Current drone swarms consist primarily of small, identical, sensor drones, but simple multi-domain swarms have already been developed. One such swarm involves a flying drone collaborating with a walking drone. The aerial drone maps the nearby area and the ground-based drone uses that information to plan its actions. Another experiment demonstrated a swarm of five differently sized ground drones, each equipped with different sensors and different functions. The five drones work together to carry out a basic human rescue mission, transporting a dummy to a different location.

Drones within the swarm may serve different roles based on their different capabilities. Attack drones carry out strikes against targets, while sensor drones collect information about the environment to inform other drones, and communication drones ensure the integrity of inter-swarm communication.

Small sensor drones can provide reconnaissance for larger attack drones, gathering information on adversary targets and relaying it to attack drones to carry out strikes. Even the drones specifically tasked with conducting attacks can be diverse. A drone swarm could incorporate attack drones of different sizes, optimized for different types of targets. A swarm intended to suppress enemy air defenses could include drones equipped with anti-radiation missiles for defeating ground-based defenses, while other drones might be armed with air-to-air missiles for countering adversary aircraft.

Cheap dummy drones might actually prove to be disproportionately valuable contributors to a swarm’s mission, absorbing attacks to protect more sophisticated drones or separating from the main swarm to draw away defenders. But the key here is that diversity enables more complex behaviors.

Customization
Customizable drone swarms offer flexibility to commanders, enabling them to add or remove drones as needed. This requires common standards for inter-drone communication, so that new drones can easily be added to the swarm. Similarly, the swarm must be able to adapt to the removal of drone, either intentionally or through hostile action.

Customization also allows commanders to adapt the swarm to the needs of a situation. For missions demanding a smaller profile, a commander may remove drones. A commander may also vary the capabilities of the swarm itself, adding drones equipped with different types of sensors, weapons, or other payloads.

At the extreme end, a customizable drone swarm could break-apart or merge together into a single unit while in the field. This would enable rapid response to changing battlefield dynamics. For example, a small group of undersea drones could break off from the larger mass to investigate a possible adversary vessel. If the new target presents a significant threat, the full swarm may re-form to tackle the challenge.

Research on drone swarm customization shows the concept is possible, but development is still in the early stages. A recent study in the scientific journal Nature demonstrated a basic mergeable robotic nervous system. A handful of very simple robots merge together to form a single, larger robot, or separate into smaller groups.

In the future, providing commanders with a drone swarm could be akin to providing a box of Legos. Commanders may be given a collection of drones that can be combined in different ways as the mission demands. This enables rapid responsiveness to changes in the military environment.

Hardening
Drone swarming creates significant vulnerabilities to electronic warfare; protecting against this vulnerability is critical. Drone swarm functioning inherently depends on the ability of the drones to communicate with another. If the drones cannot share information due to jamming, the drone swarm cannot function as a coherent whole.

Vulnerabilities to electronic warfare depend on the composition of the drone swarm. Swarms may incorporate drones specifically designed to counter jamming.

Communication drones could serve as relays to share information, provide alternate communication channels, or simply detect possible jamming and issue retreat orders. Drone swarms could also incorporate drones equipped with anti-radiation missiles and other anti-jamming weapons.

Advances in technology may also harden the swarm against electronic warfare vulnerabilities. Novel forms of communication may weaken or entirely eliminate those vulnerabilities. For example, drone swarms could communicate on the basis of stigmergy. Stigmergy is an indirect form of communication used by ants and other swarming insects. If an ant identifies a food source, it leaves pheromones for future ants to find. If the next ant also finds food there, it leaves its own pheromones, creating a stronger concentration to draw even more. Applied to a drone swarm, an approach like this that uses environmental cues could mitigate vulnerabilities to jamming.

Developing drone swarm technology is a multi-service, interagency challenge. Drone swarms offer significant capability for the US Navy in searching for submarines or serving as surface weapons platforms. The Navy is already developing a basic autonomous boat swarm capability, and the US Marine Corps has successfully tested small swarms for infantry to carry out strikes and electronic warfare attacks. Drone swarms offer the US Air Force a novel platform for operations to suppress enemy air defenses, and Greg Zacharias, former chief scientist of the Air Force, believes future F-35 pilots will incorporate information collected from drone swarms. Robotic collaboration could improve the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to detect CBRN usages and map disaster impacts.

But for all of these actors and all of these missions, truly unlocking the swarm’s potential will require US military stakeholders to deliberately emphasize improvements in four key areas: size, diversity, customization, and hardening. Failure to do so will mean being on the wrong side of the power of the swarm.

Zachary Kallenborn is the lead author with Philipp Bleek of “Swarming Destruction: Drone Swarms and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Weapons” forthcoming in The Nonproliferation Review. The article rigorously analyzes these and other applications of drone swarms. Zachary is a freelance researcher at the National Defense University, where he is conducting a study on emerging technology and CBRN terrorism and is also an analyst at the Cadmus Group where he writes, edits, and analyzes FEMA doctrine.

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, Department of Defense, or any of the author’s current or past employers or funders.

 

[Housecarl]

How long have we here been saying "they" needed to "fix" Pakistan?....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://mwi.usma.edu/afghanistan-become-war-without-end/

How Did Afghanistan Become a War Without End?

Robert Cassidy | October 23, 2018

War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.

Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic. If that is so, then war cannot be divorced from political life; and whenever this occurs in our thinking about war, the many links that connect the two elements are destroyed and we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense.

Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.

– Carl von Clausewitz

The war in Afghanistan hit the seventeen-year mark for the United States and its partners this month. Soldiers in the US-led coalition have been fighting and killing and dying for almost eight years longer than the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. The reasons for this protracted stalemate are manifold, but the momentum that would bring the war in Afghanistan to an end remains elusive in large part because the coalition has until now been unable to link the grammar of war to the political object it seeks. For the logic of strategy to work, ends should drive means, not the other way around. The value of the political object, or the worth of the ends sought, determines how long and what costs the United States should be willing to pay. In Afghanistan, if those political goals are articulated clearly, their worth should relate directly to the will of the US polity to persevere in the war to a successful end.

How the Seventeen-Year War Happened
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, the horror, devastation, and anguish engendered by those attacks animated the collective will of the US government, its armed forces, and its people, in theory, to employ the means necessary to achieve the object of punishing the al-Qaeda perpetrators, removing the Taliban regime that afforded al-Qaeda sanctuary, and preventing Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary for terrorists ever again. With almost three thousand dead and the unprecedented destruction of key buildings and symbols of US power, Americans perceived the value of the object to be very high.

The problem was, however, that the American senior leadership after 9/11 emphasized the means over the ends in Afghanistan, and so in the urgency to respond to the attacks, the how and what replaced the why and to what end. During the years following the 9/11 attacks, US senior leaders did not fully analyze or understand how to align the actions the country could undertake with ends that involved peace and a stable Afghanistan inhospitable to al-Qaeda. The Bush administration opposed the notion of nation building and focused instead on targeting individuals for killing and capturing. For the first several years, the United States relied too heavily on warlords, tolerated venal Afghan leadership, and employed air power indiscriminately, thus inadvertently killing civilians. All of this aggrieved many Afghans and pushed some into support for a resurgent insurgency.

What’s more, after the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan turned into a secondary and poorly resourced effort for the United States, with a limited number of special operations and conventional forces conducting strikes and raids to kill or capture key leaders. There was a dearth of troops and resources committed to addressing the challenge of stabilizing the country. During the middle of the aughts, when the United States was mired in Iraq, there were vacuums of security in the east and south of Afghanistan. Pakistan helped the Taliban fill those vacuums.

The US leadership was also unable or unwilling to comprehend or to ruthlessly go after other real enemies who directly or indirectly aided and abetted the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other groups like the Haqqani network in Afghanistan. Physical sanctuary, materiel, recruits, funds, and ideology emanated from Pakistan, adding to funds and ideology that had flowed from Saudi Arabia and other sponsors into South Asia for decades.

After seventeen years of war in Afghanistan the number of Afghan security force deaths is over thirty-eight thousand, the number of Afghan civilian deaths is over thirty thousand, and the number of US combat deaths in the country, so far, is just over twenty-four hundred. The monetary cost of the war in Afghanistan to the United States has been about $1 trillion. As the eighteenth year of war for the US-led coalition in Afghanistan concludes its first month, it remains stalemated. Afghan security forces, with US advisors, continue to contest the Taliban for influence and control over key population areas, mainly but not exclusively in the east and the south—where the principally Pashtun Taliban sustain an intense and existential insurgency on the Afghan side of the Pashtun Belt, near their sanctuary on the other side of the Durand Line, in Pakistan. Just last week, in what was possibly their boldest and significant actions of the war, the Taliban attacked a group of senior Afghan and American officials in Kandahar, killing the provincial chief of police and chief of intelligence. Unprecedentedly in this war, the senior US military commander in Afghanistan was among the group. He was uninjured but it was arguably the closest call of the senior US commanders to date.
Can We Win?
The stated policy objective of the current administration since August 2017 has been to win in Afghanistan. This offers some reason for optimism since it contrasts to the previous policies, which evolved through various stages but were never articulated with sufficient clarity and thus largely amounted to simply seeking not to lose. But what would a win look like in Afghanistan?

A win would be a durable Afghan state, with the government, the security forces, and the population aligned against a marginalized or reconciled Taliban. Another reason to be a bit more sanguine is that this current strategy is based on conditions on the ground being met, not arbitrary timelines. The strategy called for an increase of about thirty-five hundred US forces—bring the total to over fourteen thousand—to advise and assist the Afghan security forces. NATO countries are also contributing additional troops, increasing the total number of coalition troops in Afghanistan to more than twenty-one thousand.

This modest increase in troops isn’t enough to break the strategic stalemate. However, it will support growing the elite Afghan Special Security Forces, building the capacity of the Afghan Air Force, and improving the other security forces by employing more advisers with tactical units that do the fighting. That should allow the Afghan security forces to win more battles against the Taliban and gather marked operational momentum that will complement efforts to alter Pakistan’s harmful strategic proclivities.

Perhaps most significantly, the current year-old strategy stipulates that “we must see fundamental changes in the way Pakistan deals with terrorist safe-havens in its territory” for the strategy to gain momentum. The United States did start withholding funds from Pakistan with more seriousness this year, but withholding funds is not nearly good enough to bring the required change, and is woefully disproportionate to the years of Pakistan’s odious actions. Pakistan has not stopped its support of terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan in any measurable ways. Pakistan sustains the Taliban, and the sanctuary it provides the group explains the stalemate.

Until America’s senior leaders show the ruthlessness to publicly avow the dire strategic impediments that Pakistan’s duplicity causes, and summon the will to bring about the end of sanctuaries, Afghanistan’s war will not end. But there are major obstacles to doing so in the unified, whole-of-government fashion required. For example, the Department of Defense’s and Department of State’s perspectives on Afghanistan and terrorism diverge in significant ways. DoD reports, including the most recent one, attest that the Taliban and the Haqqani network, along with a host of other Islamist terrorist groups, benefit from sanctuary in Pakistan. The reports observe that highest regional concentration of terrorist groups in the world exists in Pakistan and threatens Afghanistan.

The most recent State Department report on terrorism does identify the Haqqani network as one of the dozen foreign terrorist organizations operating out of Pakistan. But, what strains credulity is that it does not name Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism. The Haqqani network is Pakistan’s and its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’s favorite proxy for launching the most grisly and lethal attacks in Afghanistan. The time has long since come to employ punitive measures aimed at those institutions and individuals in Pakistan that advise and fund the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Pakistan is one of the most egregious state sponsors of Islamist terrorists. Being more pointed and tough, by designating Pakistan as the state sponsor of terrorism that it is, would be a clear measure and signal that America is resolved to see this war through to a successful outcome.

War, therefore, is an act of policy. Were it a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence, war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out of office and rule by the laws of its own nature.
– Carl von Clausewitz

It seems that since the Vietnam War senior American civilian and military leaders have often ignored the key idea from Clausewitz—that in war military objectives cannot be divorced from political purposes, and the ultimate directives and decisions on the aims in war reside with the senior political leaders of the state. Strikes and raids that kill or capture enemy leaders do disrupt and impede Islamist militant groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani network, but their effects are impermanent, elusive. Strikes and raids interdict and suppress Taliban infrastructure but they are not decisive and do not amount to strategy or strategic momentum.

In theory, we fight wars to fulfill a political purpose and to achieve objectives by aligning the means and methods of war toward that purpose. In theory, the purpose of war is a better peace. And while, ideally, there is no difference between the theory and practice of war, as history has shown repeatedly, there almost always is. The purpose of war is to serve policy. Unchecked by reason, unguided by policy, the nature of war is to serve itself. When war and violence serve each other, absent strategy, it is perpetual killing and violence serving more violence and killing.

War and violence decoupled from strategy and policy—or worse yet, mistaken for strategy and policy—have contributed to war without end in Afghanistan. In its wars since September 11, 2001, the United States has accrued some of the most capable, best equipped, and exceedingly seasoned combat forces in remembered history. They attack, win battles, execute raids, and conduct strikes with great nimbleness and adroitness. But absent strategy, these tactical and operational successes where our forces assault compounds to kill or capture insurgents and terrorists are fleeting. Divorced from political objectives, successful tactics are without enduring meaning. Stating that there is a new strategy for Afghanistan does not necessarily mean that there is a strategy that is being implemented in the necessary and comprehensive way.

For seventeen years the United States has been consistently and explicitly demanding that Pakistan stop supporting Islamist terrorists against America, Afghanistan, and other states. Pakistan’s continued support for the Taliban is the biggest strategic impediment to a successful conclusion of the war. A policy to win requires a strategy that aligns political will, intellectual capital, and capacity to defeat the enemy’s strategy. Political will relates directly to the ends sought whereas capacity relates to the means each belligerent employs. Intellectual capital is required to align the means and ends with a strategy that will end the war and bring peace at the costs in time and magnitude acceptable and commensurate with the value ascribed to the policy. In other words, how much is the United States willing to pay to avoid another 9/11-like attack by preventing Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary again?

For a strategy to work, it must focus on taking away the main sources of strength that allow the Taliban to continue fighting. Those are things without which the insurgency would whither. A win requires beating back Taliban capacity in Afghanistan and taking away the will of the insurgency by stopping the states and nonstate groups that provide material, ideological, and sanctuary support. Pakistan is the state that provides most support to the Taliban. Pakistan’s sanctuary and support are the sources of strength without which the Taliban will not survive.



Robert Cassidy, PhD, a retired US Army colonel, is the inaugural Chamberlain Project teaching fellow at Wesleyan University and a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. His published work focuses on Afghanistan and irregular war. He has served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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, Department of Defense, or any of the institutions with which the author is associated.

 

[China Connection]

Israel is not going to sit as Iran keeps bringing in stuff to Syria. To do something it has to take out Russian staff along with the Russian radar system the Russians have brought in.

Putin would not be too happy at such a stage.

 

[Housecarl]

Israel is not going to sit as Iran keeps bringing in stuff to Syria. To do something it has to take out Russian staff along with the Russian radar system the Russians have brought in.

Putin would not be too happy at such a stage.

At this point going after the beginning of the supply chain is going to be more productive, though it will be akin to kicking a hornet's nest....

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/...on/sectioncollection/world&version=highlights

Dozens Dead in Eastern Syria After Clashes with Islamic State
By The Associated Press
Oct. 27, 2018


Islamic State militants killed at least 40 Syrian fighters backed by the United States, captured several alive and regained areas they lost earlier this month in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border in some of the most intense fighting in weeks, a war monitor and an agency linked to the extremist group reported on Saturday.

Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, have been on the offensive since early September under the cover of airstrikes by the American-led coalition to capture the last pocket held by the Islamic State in Syria.

Friday’s fighting lasted until the early hours of Saturday began when Islamic State militants, taking advantage of a sandstorm, launched a counteroffensive against the Syrian Democratic Forces in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour that borders Iraq, activists said.

Colonel Sean Ryan, spokesman for the American-led coalition, said they have no confirmation of exact figures “as both sides are taking casualties.” He called it a “difficult fight.”

“The sandstorm allowed an ISIS counterattack, which was surprising given the conditions, but now the air is clear and the Coalition will continue to increase air and fire support to assist our partners,” Col. Ryan said using a the acronym to refer to the extremist group.

Rami Abdurrahman who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that since Friday, Islamic State militants have killed more than 60 fighters from the Syrian Defense Forces, wounded others and captured at least 20. He added that some fighters fled the battlefield as the Islamic State carried out suicide car bomb attacks.

The Observatory and the Deir Ezzor 24 activist collective said Islamic State fighters captured the village of Sousa, an area they had lost control of earlier this week.

The ISIS-linked Amaq news agency said that more than 40 fighters were killed and posted a video of six gunmen captured alive.

An SDF official did not immediately respond to inquiries sent by The Associated Press.
The Observatory said that the fighting continued until early Saturday and gunmen attacked SDF positions on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in east Syria.

The last pocket held by IS in Syria is home to thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire.

Brett McGurk, the White House envoy for the war against the Islamic State, told a conference in Bahrain on Saturday that “the military mission in Syria is the enduring defeat of ISIS.” He said he expected IS would be defeated over the coming months.

“It is very difficult because we are in the last stages, where almost every ISIS fighter is in a suicide belt,” Mr. McGurk said. “It’s very difficult fighting but we will get it done.”

On Saturday, a summit on Syria attended by the leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Turkey began in Istanbul. The four issued a joint statement agreeing that there could be no military solution to the war.

Syria’s civil war, which began as a popular uprising and then dissolved into a fractured and complex conflict, has raged for more than seven years, shattering the country, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced.

Last week, United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland said in Geneva that some 15,000-people including Islamic State fighters and their families live in the area.

“A lot of civilians there are being attacked from all sides,” Mr. Egeland said.

Mr. McGurk said that the United States and the SDF are holding some 700 foreign fighters in Syria, adding that they are determined that “these people cannot get out of Syria to threaten our homelands or yours.” He said the coalition is working with some countries to make sure that “we could try to repatriate these people.”

While the process is underway, Mr. McGurk added, the United States is working to ensure that they are housed in a facility inside Syria that meets international standards “so that these people cannot commingle and repeat any of the problems that we’ve seen in the past.”

SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told the Kurdish ANHA news agency on Friday that an international tribunal should be set up to try the foreign Islamic State fighters his group is holding. He said that the SDF has apprehended more than 700 non-Syrian Islamic State fighters in addition to their families.

 

[danielboon]

Armed and Ready: Ramstein receives largest ammo shipment in years
By Senior Airman Joshua Magbanua, 86th Airlift Wing Public Affairs / Published October 24, 2018

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jeric Hernandez, 86th Munitions Squadron quality assurance inspector, inspects a fresh shipment of large ordnance on Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Oct. 19, 2018. Ramstein recently received one of its largest munitions shipments in recent history. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Magbanua)
PHOTO DETAILS / DOWNLOAD HI-RES 1 of 3
U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jeric Hernandez, 86th Munitions Squadron quality assurance inspector, inspects a fresh shipment of large ordnance on Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Oct. 19, 2018. Ramstein recently received one of its largest munitions shipments in recent history. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany -- The 86th Munitions Squadron on Ramstein Air Base, Germany, received its largest shipment of ordnance in recent history. Approximately 100 containers with a variety of munitions rolled into Ramstein during the month of October.

Master Sgt. David Head, 86th MUNS Munitions Operations section chief, noted that a delivery of such magnitude has not taken place since the late 20th century.

“This is the largest shipment of its kind since Operation Allied Force, which took place in 1999,” he said, referring to a 78-day campaign where aircraft flew 900 sorties to counter ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe. “The munitions that we received will be used for future theater operations and the evolving U.S. European Command presence.”

Master Sgt. Arthur Myrick, 86th MUNS munitions flight chief, added that the stockpile would be used to support NATO’s European Deterrence Initiative and augment the Air Force’s War Reserve Materiel in Europe.

According to officials, EDI aims to increase responsiveness and readiness by pre-positioning ammunition, fuel and equipment to enhance the U.S. Department of Defense’s ability to provide a rapid response against threats made by aggressive actors.

Myrick expounded on the importance of his squadron’s role in the Air Force’s global operations.

“We’re a major airlift hub for U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa, so our main job is to get munitions where they need to be on time,” he said. “These are real-world munitions to fulfill real-world objectives. That’s the reason we are downloading these things: to make sure we have the capability to move the fight forward if need be.”

Head and Myrick both praised the work of their Airmen and thanked other local units for assisting in the historic shipment.

Whether it’s taking unloading large shipment of bombs, or delivering small-arms ammunition to warfighters downrange, Airmen of the 86th MUNS expressed their commitment to making their impact felt wherever the Air Force flies. https://www.ramstein.af.mil/News/Ar...tein-receives-largest-ammo-shipment-in-years/

 

[danielboon]

At this point going after the beginning of the supply chain is going to be more productive, though it will be akin to kicking a hornet's nest....

I believe Israel will wait until Iran does something stupid and then Israel will take out Damascus

 

[Housecarl]

I believe Israel will wait until Iran does something stupid and then Israel will take out Damascus

I was thinking in terms of the manufacturing plants in Iran...

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/turkey-shells-us-backed-kurdish-militia-positions-syria-133924570.html

Turkey shells US-backed Kurdish militia positions in Syria: state media

AFP • October 28, 2018

Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey's military on Sunday fired artillery shells at a Kurdish militia in Syria that is backed by the United States but deemed a terrorist group by Ankara, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

The shelling targeted YPG positions on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in northern Syria, Anadolu said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to launch a new offensive in Syria east of the Euphrates, and on Friday said he was giving the YPG a "final warning".

Anadolu reported that the strikes, which hit a hill near the Zur Maghar village across the Euphrates from the city of Jarablus in the Aleppo province, were in response to fire from the area.

The shelling comes a day after Erdogan hosted a summit in Istanbul on the Syrian conflict with the leaders of Russia, France and Germany.

The YPG, which holds swathes of northern and northeastern Syria, forms the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-Arab alliance that has received extensive American support in the fight against the Islamic State group in the war-torn country.

However Ankara is bitterly opposed to the YPG, regarding it as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a deadly insurgency in Turkey since 1984. The PKK is designated as a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies.

Washington's support of the YPG remains a major point of contention between the US and Turkey, and a large-scale offensive east of the Euphrates could aggravate already tense relations between the NATO allies.

Turkey has also repeatedly threatened an attack on the YPG-controlled Syrian city of Manbij, where US troops are deployed.

To ease tensions, Washington and Ankara agreed to have troops conduct coordinated patrols around the city, and such a patrol went ahead on Sunday, Turkish armed forces said.

Earlier this year, Turkey launched operation "Olive Branch" in Syria west of the Euphrates, successfully ousting YPG forces from their enclave in Afrin.

Ankara has long opposed the YPG controlling a continuous stretch of territory on its border up to Iraq, fearing the creation of an autonomous region or even independent entity that could embolden Turkey's own Kurds.

36 reactions

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…...

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.atimes.com/article/despite-pr-duress-saudi-6bn-to-pakistan-comes-with-strings/

Middle East \ Saudi Arabia

Despite PR duress, Saudi $6bn to Pakistan comes with strings

Saudi Arabia's crisis over Khashoggi murder is Imran Khan's gain, but Pakistan may still be expected to up military cooperation with the kingdom

By Suddaf Chaudry October 28, 2018 10:23 AM (UTC+8)
Comments 5

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan returned home this week from Saudi Arabia with a pledge of $6 billion in loans. Khan was likely able to secure the deal with fewer strings than a previous rejected offer, due to enormous international scrutiny on the kingdom in the wake of the Jamal Khashoggi murder. But the latest package may require a deepening military partnership with Saudi Arabia.

Khan headlined on day one of the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh on October 23, even as many western officials withdrew.

The kingdom’s generosity comes at a critical time for Pakistan, which is facing a fiscal crisis and last month saw $300 million in US military aid suspended by the Trump administration.

“Trump’s decision has stripped the military of resources, forget about the rest of the country,” Pakistani military scientist Ayesha Siddiqa told Asia Times.

On Khan’s return to Pakistan, he stated in a televised address that Pakistan will help end the conflict in Yemen.

“We are trying our best to act as a mediator to resolve the Yemen crisis,” Khan said. Observers have interpreted this statement by Khan as being linked to the terms surrounding the loans, as there were no other significant points mentioned by the PM regarding his visit.

Riyadh in 2015 launched a coalition to fight the Houthi rebels in Yemen and sought military support from Islamabad, but Pakistan’s parliament voted against joining the war.

Saudi Arabia just two weeks ago offered loans to ease Pakistan’s financial woes, but Islamabad refused. “There were too many conditions attached,” said Minister of Information Fawad Chaudry.

When asked what led to Pakistan shifting its position to accept the Saudi loans, Chaudry said: “ There is a change in politics. Obviously Saudi Arabia needs some support. I think the situation has changed now.”

With Saudi Arabia’s reputation under pressure, Pakistan was likely able to negotiate more acceptable terms, but those have not yet been disclosed.

“The terms could not be elaborated due to the fact that it is not in the interest of the mediation currently taking place,” Chaudry told Asia Times.

He said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would likely present its findings on the terms surrounding the deal next month.

The Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment on the terms.

“They need to bring this to the parliament to tell us what conditions are attached by the Saudis and what they expect from Pakistan in return,” said Miftah Ismail, Pakistan’s former federal finance minister.

“There was no discussion, therefore. Until we understand what transpired at the conference it is hard for us to really know if this is a good decision or not,” said Ismail.

Yemen, Balochistan in focus
According to a diplomat close to discussions in Saudi Arabia, this loan is not only a commercial deal, but the kingdom is also interested in Balochistan.

Balochistan is of strategic interest to both Iran and Saudi Arabia, bordering the Islamic Republic and located north of the Arabian Sea.

Saudi Arabia has faced allegations of backing anti-Shiite jihadist groups in Balochistan, namely Jundullah and Jaish al-Adl, and a heightened influence could be dangerous for Pakistan’s security.

“If you increase investment, it is not just money that pours in. With the money comes influence,” analyst Siddiqa said.

“It’s hard to imagine a $6 billion gift with no strings attached,” said Michael Kugelman, a scholar on Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

“There’s a very good chance Saudi Arabia placed some type of conditions on this support. Riyadh may have made it quite clear that Pakistan will need to rein in its recent efforts to position itself as a neutral actor in the Saudi-Iranian regional rivalry,” Kugelman said.

“Pakistan has an Iran problem and a Saudi problem. [The Pakistani military] is allowing the Saudis to build up their capacity in Balochistan, which is in effect a certain kind of encirclement around Iran,” said Siddiqa.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have maintained a defense partnership since 1983, though it is very difficult to pinpoint the exact number of Pakistani personnel in the kingdom. According to Kamal Alam of the London-based think tank RUSI, there are at least 1,200 Pakistani trainers in various Saudi security and military sectors.

A source close to the Pakistani military said the number is far higher, however.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he told Asia Times there are upwards of 7,000 Pakistani military personnel in the kingdom.

“One of the big questions coming out of this new deal is whether Riyadh has now asked Islamabad to operationalize that military presence and be willing to join Saudi military efforts in Yemen,” Kugelman said.

“Islamabad has long resisted this ask from Saudi Arabia, but with this financial assistance Islamabad is now getting, Riyadh has more leverage,” he added.

According to a political source briefed on the matter but who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject, the Pakistani armed forces have been under mounting pressure from the Saudis to join the conflict in Yemen.

The Saudi-led intervention has never been more controversial, with Yemen facing what the United Nations last week said could become the worst famine in living memory.

Upon his return from Saudi Arabia, Khan said: “My fellow Pakistanis, today I am here with good news for all of you. We were facing really hard times. We were under high pressure to pay heavy debts. But thanks to Saudi Arabia’s extension of assistance, we are out of this pressure.”

The coming months will reveal if Pakistan is prepared for the reasons behind the kingdom’s generosity and whether the country can continue to deflect military requests in Yemen.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…...

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.atimes.com/is-china-a-new-imperial-power/

China | Opinion

Is China a new imperial power?

By Chandra Muzaffar October 26, 2018 3:08 PM (UTC+8)
Comments 9

Is China a new imperial power threatening some of the developing economies in Asia and Africa? This is a perception that is being promoted through the media by certain China watchers in universities and think-tanks mainly in the West, by various politicians, and by a segment of the global NGO community.

The peddlers of this perception argue that by giving out loans for development to poor countries, China is snaring them in a debt trap. It is a trap that ensures that they are perpetually under China’s control. Is there such a debt trap? To find out, this article will look at three Asian countries before turning to Africa.

Pakistan has taken loans from China for projects under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The US$50 billion CPEC is a network of infrastructure projects that are under construction throughout Pakistan that will connect China’s Xinjiang province with Gwadar Port in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.

A number of these projects will strengthen Pakistan’s energy sector, which is vital for its economic growth. They will help to reduce its severe trade deficit. Debt servicing of CPEC loans, which will only start this year, amounts to less than $80 million.

Pakistan’s largest creditors are not China but Western countries and multilateral lenders led by the International Monetary Fund and international commercial banks. As researchers Hussein Askary and Jason Ross note, its foreign debt “is expected to surpass $95 billion this year and debt servicing is projected to reach $31 billion by 2022-2023.” There is evidence to show that its creditors “have been actively meddling in Pakistan’s fiscal policies and its sovereignty through debt rescheduling programs and the conditionalities attached to IMF loans.”

The media do not highlight this, which is, in fact, Pakistan’s real debt trap. Neither do they inform the public that CPEC loans are for projects that are of immense and direct value to the Pakistani people. Their value will be further enhanced when the new Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan visits China on November 3 and broadens the CPEC to emphasize cooperation in agriculture and social-sector development.

Distortions and half-truths have also colored media accounts of China’s relationship to the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota. The construction of the port was a Sri Lankan idea, not a Chinese initiative. The Sri Lankan government reached out to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and Japan among others to finance its construction. For different reasons, its request was turned down. It was only then that the government approached China, which agreed to help.

As Askary and Ross point out in an Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) study of August 30, contrary to media reports, Hambantota on the south coast of Sri Lanka has tremendous potential. It is “located just 6-9 nautical miles from one of the busiest and most important commercial shipping lines on the planet.”

The Chinese-built port was opened for commercial use in 2010. Unfortunately, usage was below par. Because of poor revenue, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority was forced to sign an agreement whereby a Chinese state-run enterprise “took a 99-year lease of 70% of the port and 85% ownership of the port and industrial area with the obligation to continue investing in upgrading the facilities there…. The purpose of this deal was to relieve Sri Lanka of the burden of this debt.”

In the case of the third example, Malaysia, which witnessed a change of government in May, major infrastructure projects funded by Chinese state companies could not be implemented because the nation is in a financial crunch. Besides, the projects were obviously lopsided favoring the Chinese companies more than their Malaysian partners. In announcing his decision, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad made it very clear that the lopsidedness was due more to the previous Malaysian government than its Chinese counterpart.

From the three cases in Asia, it would be patently wrong to label China a new imperial power. A quick look at Africa will reinforce this view. The “majority of African debt is not held by China but by Western countries and such Western-backed institutions as the IMF and World Bank,” Askary and Ross point out.

Nonetheless, many African states have Chinese debt. This in itself is not a problem – provided loans are utilized for the public good. In this regard, infrastructure financing under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – building ports, railways and fiber-optic cables – appears to be a major component of China’s involvement in Africa.

The $4 billion Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway, which began commercial operations this year, would be one such example. The $3.2 billion Madaraka Express railway between Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya would be another case in point.

The exception in Africa is perhaps the tiny East African state of Djibouti. In the last two years, it has borrowed $1.4 billion from China. This is more than three-quarters of Djibouti’s gross domestic product. It is alleged that China has leveraged upon this to open its first overseas military installation in Djibouti. It should be noted at the same time that Djibouti also hosts the largest US military base in Africa.

Djibouti aside, Chinese ventures in Africa have been almost totally economic. The quid pro quo for the Chinese, it is true, has been access to the continent’s rich natural resources. But it is always access, never control. Control over the natural resources of the nations they colonized was the driving force behind 19th-century Western colonialism.

Control through pliant governments and, in extreme cases, via regime change continues to be a key factor in the West’s – especially the United States’ – quest for hegemony over Africa and the rest of the contemporary world.

It is because China’s peaceful rise as a global player challenges that hegemony that the centers of power in the West are going all out to denigrate and demonize China. Labeling China as a new imperial or colonial power is part of that vicious propaganda against a nation, indeed a civilization that has already begun to change the global power balance.

It is a change – toward a more equitable distribution of power – that is in the larger interest of humanity. For that reason, the people of the world should commit themselves wholeheartedly to the change that is embracing all of us.

A version of this article first appeared as a letter to The Star newspaper, Malaysia.

Asia Times is not responsible for the opinions, facts or any media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Spooky Doge
�� 4-4 BAL
‏ @IntelDoge
10m10 minutes ago

#BREAKING: A Chinese military aircraft entered South Korea's air defense zone without notice on Monday according to defense authorities in Seoul (YONHAP)

Spooky Doge
�� 4-4 BAL
‏ @IntelDoge
10m10 minutes ago

Important to see how South Korean officials respond to this incident, I'm sure we'll see something soon from someone.



Global: MilitaryInfo
‏ @Global_Mil_Info
3m3 minutes ago
Replying to @IntelDoge

This is not the first time something liked this has happened. Usual diplomatic channels will be echoed. Fighters were likely scrambled based on interdiction protocols.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Instant News Alerts
‏ @InstaNewsAlerts
10m10 minutes ago

#BREAKING: After 18 years #German chancellor Angela Merkel gives up leadership of CDU via @News_Executive

 

[danielboon]

The Chinese military command monitoring Taiwan and the South China Sea has been ordered war-ready his week Chinese president Xi Jinping ordered the Southern Theatre Command, responsible for monitoring the South China Sea and Taiwan, to boost its military capabilities to prepare for a possible conflict, according to a Hong Kong newspaper.

During a visit to the region on Thursday (Oct. 25), Xi said it was necessary to “concentrate preparations for fighting a war,” reported the South China Morning Post, citing a transcript of Xi’s speech from state broadcaster China Central Television. “We need to take all complex situations into consideration and make emergency plans accordingly.”

State news wire Xinhua also noted the speech, saying Xi “underlined the importance of preparing for war and combat.”

In recent years China has increasingly asserted itself in the South China Sea, building militarized islands atop reefs and fortifying other specks of land it occupies. China claims nearly the entire sea, using as justification its “nine-dash line,” which encircles most of the waterway. An international tribunal invalidated that claim in July 2016, but China disregarded its findings.

China has rapidly modernized and expanded its navy (paywall), which last year became the world’s largest, with more warships and submarines than the United States. Though the US Navy remains more advanced, admiral Philip Davidson, who leads the US’s Indo-Pacific Command, said in his Senate confirmation process (pdf) earlier this year that China “is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”

On the same day of Xi’s speech, Chinese defense minister Wei Fenghe said his country would not give up “one single piece” of its territory and warned that “repeated challenges” to its sovereignty over Taiwan would result in direct military action.

Such rhetoric isn’t entirely new: In November 2017, for example, Xi told the military it should be ready to “fight and win wars.” But it does add to an already tense situation in one of the world’s geopolitical hotspots. On Sept. 30, a Chinese destroyer almost collided with a US warship in the South China Sea, after making what American military officials described as an “unsafe and unprofessional” maneuver.

Such incidents will likely continue. https://qz.com/1440601/chinese-military-command-monitoring-taiwan-south-china-sea-ordered-war-ready/

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Bloomberg
‏Verified account @business
11m11 minutes ago

BREAKING: Angela Merkel will quit as head of Germany's Christian Democratic party after nearly 20 years, source says https://bloom.bg/2DbscMx



posted for fair use and discussion
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...rce=twitter&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business

Merkel to Give Up CDU Party Leadership in Dramatic Move
Bloomberg News
October 29, 2018, 4:22 AM CDT

Angela Merkel Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will quit as head of her Christian Democratic party after nearly two decades, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

The euro fell shortly after the news report emerged.

More information is available on the Bloomberg Terminal




posted for fair use and discussion
https://www.wsj.com/articles/german...coalition-another-setback-1540749894?mod=e2tw

German Voters Deal Angela Merkel’s Coalition Another Setback

Vote in Hesse marks the second major setback in recent weeks, further exposing Merkel to a potential challenge to her leadership

By Bojan Pancevski
Updated Oct. 29, 2018 5:22 a.m. ET

BERLIN—Chancellor Angela Merkel and her beleaguered government suffered a new blow after both her party and its coalition partner suffered losses in Sunday’s election in one of Germany’s wealthiest states.

The poor showing in Hesse, home to Germany’s financial industry, further exposes Ms. Merkel to a potential challenge to her leadership of the Christian Democratic Union, a possible step toward replacing her as chancellor.

Ms. Merkel’s conservatives dropped to 27% of the vote in Hesse, while the Social Democrats, the Chancellor’s junior coalition partners in the federal government, fell to 19.8%, according to exit polls by the ZDF broadcaster. In the last election, in 2013, the parties got 38.3% and 30.7% respectively.

The vote in Hesse marks the second major setback in recent weeks for both parties, which suffered similar losses in Bavaria earlier this month.

The results are likely to lend support to rivals Ms. Merkel within her party and increase the pressure to replace her as chairwoman at a party convention in December, according to Robin Alexander, a political journalist who wrote a best-selling book about Ms. Merkel’s decision to open the country’s borders to a large influx of asylum seekers in 2015.

They could also boost the drive among the Social Democrat grass roots to leave the coalition in a bid to stop the bleeding of votes. After exit polls were released, Andrea Nahles, the Social Democrat leader, said she would be making a series of proposals to improve the work of the government and that the success of those efforts would determine whether the party would remain in the coalition.

“Federal politics have contributed to these loses. The state of the coalition is not acceptable,” Ms. Nahles said in a news conference. She said that her party’s continued participation in the government would depend on the implementation of a new “binding roadmap” for the coalition that she would present in the coming days.

A woman cast her ballot on Sunday in state elections in Hesse, which hosts one of Europe’s key financial centers, Frankfurt.
A woman cast her ballot on Sunday in state elections in Hesse, which hosts one of Europe’s key financial centers, Frankfurt. Photo: torsten silz/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Both parties have seen their ratings plummet since the federal election in September 2017. Last week, a nationwide Emnid poll found that Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc has shrunk to a record low of 24% support, down from 32.9%, while the Social Democrats dropped from 20.5% to 15%.

Hesse, home to about six million people, is currently ruled by a coalition between the conservatives and the Greens, who nearly doubled their 2013 result and are projected to win 19.8% of the vote. The Social Democrats aren’t part of the ruling coalition in Hesse.

The coalition in Hesse could continue with a majority of just one seat in parliament.

The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, is projected to nearly triple its 2013 showing to 13% in Hesse, according to the exit polls, and would then be represented in all of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments as well as in the federal assembly.

Hesse, an affluent region that hosts one Europe’s key financial centers, Frankfurt, boasts near full employment, with joblessness at only 4.4%, below the national average.

Yet despite its success, Hesse has become the latest state to be engulfed by the polarization of German politics that has upended the party system since the migration crisis of 2015.

“Voters here were very satisfied but we had no chance against this hurricane blowing in your face from Berlin,” said Volker Bouffier, the acting prime minister of Hesse and local CDU leader. “We need less quarrels in Berlin, or better yet none at all.”

The political turmoil has severely diminished Ms. Merkel’s conservatives and the Social Democrats, who have ruled in a so-called Grand Coalition since 2013, while parties on the right and the left such as the AfD and the Greens continue to rise.

The political turmoil has severely diminished Ms. Merkel’s conservatives and the Social Democrats, who have ruled in a so-called Grand Coalition since 2013, while parties on the right and the left such as the AfD and the Greens continue to rise.

Ms. Merkel said last week that no more time should be “wasted” on debating the events of 2015.

But in a sign of a mounting rebellion, one of her key leadership rivals, the health care minister Jens Spahn, appeared on television on Sunday night after the polls closed in Hesse to say that the party had to find new ways to regain its strength before the December leadership election.

“We must strive to have debates, and not to try to shut them down,” Mr. Spahn said.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 29, 2018, print edition as 'German Voters Deal Merkel Fresh Setback.'

 

[Lilbitsnana]

ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
47m47 minutes ago

#BREAKING: Explosion rocks central Tunis, capital of Tunisia


ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
49m49 minutes ago

#BREAKING: Suicide bomber detonates explosive vest in centre of Tunisian capital - Sky News Arabia


ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
40m40 minutes ago

#UPDATE: Looks like a failed attack, two wounded, suicide bomber is the only fatality thankfully


ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
37m37 minutes ago

#BREAKING: Local sources now reporting at least 6 police officers dead and multiple others wounded after suicide bombing in Tunisian capital


ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
34m34 minutes ago

#UPDATE: Correction: Reports say 9 wounded, including 8 police officers, no fatalities apart from suicide bomber- Sky News Arabia

 

[Lilbitsnana]

more on Tunisia

David Daoud
‏Verified account @DavidADaoud
55m55 minutes ago

David Daoud Retweeted LBCI Lebanon News

A woman has blown herself up in the midst of Tunisia’s capital, Tunis - LBCI quoting Tunisian TV.


Michael A. Horowitz
‏Verified account @michaelh992
59m59 minutes ago

Initial reports suggest the explosion was near a police van, resulting in at least two injuries #Tunisia

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…..

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-10-15/beijings-nuclear-option?fa_package=1123220

November/December 2018 Issue

Beijing’s Nuclear Option

Why a U.S.-Chinese War Could Spiral Out of Control

By Caitlin Talmadge

As China’s power has grown in recent years, so, too, has the risk of war with the United States. Under President Xi Jinping, China has increased its political and economic pressure on Taiwan and built military installations on coral reefs in the South China Sea, fueling Washington’s fears that Chinese expansionism will threaten U.S. allies and influence in the region. U.S. destroyers have transited the Taiwan Strait, to loud protests from Beijing. American policymakers have wondered aloud whether they should send an aircraft carrier through the strait as well.

Chinese fighter jets have intercepted U.S. aircraft in the skies above the South China Sea. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has brought long-simmering economic disputes to a rolling boil.

A war between the two countries remains unlikely, but the prospect of a military confrontation—resulting, for example, from a Chinese campaign against Taiwan—no longer seems as implausible as it once did. And the odds of such a confrontation going nuclear are higher than most policymakers and analysts think.

Members of China’s strategic com*munity tend to dismiss such concerns. Likewise, U.S. studies of a potential war with China often exclude nuclear weapons from the analysis entirely, treating them as basically irrelevant to the course of a conflict. Asked about the issue in 2015, Dennis Blair, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, estimated the likelihood of a U.S.-Chinese nuclear crisis as “somewhere between nil and zero.”

This assurance is misguided. If deployed against China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ signature approach to war has been simple: punch deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock out the opponent’s key military assets at minimal cost. But the Pentagon developed this formula in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of which was a nuclear power.

If deployed against China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation.

China, by contrast, not only has nuclear weapons; it has also intermingled them with its conventional military forces, making it difficult to attack one without attacking the other. This means that a major U.S. military campaign targeting China’s conventional forces would likely also threaten its nuclear arsenal. Faced with such a threat, Chinese leaders could decide to use their nuclear weapons while they were still able to.

As U.S. and Chinese leaders navigate a relationship fraught with mutual suspicion, they must come to grips with the fact that a conventional war could skid into a nuclear confrontation. Although this risk is not high in absolute terms, its consequences for the region and the world would be devastating. As long as the United States and China continue to pursue their current grand strategies, the risk is likely to endure. This means that leaders on both sides should dispense with the illusion that they can easily fight a limited war. They should focus instead on managing or resolving the political, economic, and military tensions that might lead to a conflict in the first place.

A NEW KIND OF THREAT
There are some reasons for optimism. For one, China has long stood out for its nonaggressive nuclear doctrine. After its first nuclear test, in 1964, China largely avoided the Cold War arms race, building a much smaller and simpler nuclear arsenal than its resources would have allowed. Chinese leaders have consistently characterized nuclear weapons as useful only for deterring nuclear aggression and coercion. Historically, this narrow purpose required only a handful of nuclear weapons that could ensure Chinese retaliation in the event of an attack. To this day, China maintains a “no first use” pledge, promising that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The prospect of a nuclear conflict can also seem like a relic of the Cold War. Back then, the United States and its allies lived in fear of a Warsaw Pact offensive rapidly overrunning Europe. NATO stood ready to use nuclear weapons first to stalemate such an attack. Both Washington and Moscow also consistently worried that their nuclear forces could be taken out in a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear strike by the other side. This mutual fear increased the risk that one superpower might rush to launch in the erroneous belief that it was already under attack. Initially, the danger of unauthorized strikes also loomed large. In the 1950s, lax safety procedures for U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on NATO soil, as well as minimal civilian oversight of U.S. military commanders, raised a serious risk that nuclear escalation could have occurred without explicit orders from the U.S. president.

The good news is that these Cold War worries have little bearing on U.S.-Chinese relations today. Neither country could rapidly overrun the other’s territory in a conventional war. Neither seems worried about a nuclear bolt from the blue. And civilian political control of nuclear weapons is relatively strong in both countries. What remains, in theory, is the comforting logic of mutual deterrence: in a war between two nuclear powers, neither side will launch a nuclear strike for fear that its enemy will respond in kind.

The bad news is that one other trigger remains: a conventional war that threatens China’s nuclear arsenal. Conventional forces can threaten nuclear forces in ways that generate pressures to escalate—especially when ever more capable U.S. conventional forces face adversaries with relatively small and fragile nuclear arsenals, such as China. If U.S. operations endangered or damaged China’s nuclear forces, Chinese leaders might come to think that Washington had aims beyond winning the conventional war—that it might be seeking to disable or destroy China’s nuclear arsenal outright, perhaps as a prelude to regime change. In the fog of war, Beijing might reluctantly conclude that limited nuclear escalation—an initial strike small enough that it could avoid full-scale U.S. retaliation—was a viable option to defend itself.

STRAIT SHOOTERS
The most worrisome flash point for a U.S.-Chinese war is Taiwan. Beijing’s long-term objective of reunifying the island with mainland China is clearly in conflict with Washington’s longstanding desire to maintain the status quo in the strait. It is not difficult to imagine how this might lead to war. For example, China could decide that the political or military window for regaining control over the island was closing and launch an attack, using air and naval forces to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bombard the island. Although U.S. law does not require Washington to intervene in such a scenario, the Taiwan Relations Act states that the United States will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” Were Washington to intervene on Taipei’s behalf, the world’s sole superpower and its rising competitor would find themselves in the first great-power war of the twenty-first century.

In the course of such a war, U.S. conventional military operations would likely threaten, disable, or outright eliminate some Chinese nuclear capabilities—whether doing so was Washington’s stated objective or not. In fact, if the United States engaged in the style of warfare it has practiced over the last 30 years, this outcome would be all but guaranteed.

The most worrisome flash point for a U.S.-Chinese war is Taiwan.

Consider submarine warfare. China could use its conventionally armed attack submarines to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bomb the island, or to attack U.S. and allied forces in the region. If that happened, the U.S. Navy would almost certainly undertake an antisubmarine campaign, which would likely threaten China’s “boomers,” the four nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines that form its naval nuclear deterrent. China’s conventionally armed and nuclear-armed submarines share the same shore-based communications system; a U.S. attack on these transmitters would thus not only disrupt the activities of China’s attack submarine force but also cut off its boomers from contact with Beijing, leaving Chinese leaders unsure of the fate of their naval nuclear force. In addition, nuclear ballistic missile submarines depend on attack submarines for protection, just as lumbering bomber aircraft rely on nimble fighter jets. If the United States started sinking Chinese attack submarines, it would be sinking the very force that protects China’s ballistic missile submarines, leaving the latter dramatically more vulnerable.

Even more dangerous, U.S. forces hunting Chinese attack submarines could inadvertently sink a Chinese boomer instead. After all, at least some Chinese attack submarines might be escorting ballistic missile submarines, especially in wartime, when China might flush its boomers from their ports and try to send them within range of the continental United States. Since correctly identifying targets remains one of the trickiest challenges of undersea warfare, a U.S. submarine crew might come within shooting range of a Chinese submarine without being sure of its type, especially in a crowded, noisy environment like the Taiwan Strait. Platitudes about caution are easy in peacetime. In wartime, when Chinese attack submarines might already have launched deadly strikes, the U.S. crew might decide to shoot first and ask questions later.

Adding to China’s sense of vulnerability, the small size of its nuclear-armed submarine force means that just two such incidents would eliminate half of its sea-based deterrent. Meanwhile, any Chinese boomers that escaped this fate would likely be cut off from communication with onshore commanders, left without an escort force, and unable to return to destroyed ports. If that happened, China would essentially have no naval nuclear deterrent.

The situation is similar onshore, where any U.S. military campaign would have to contend with China’s growing land-based conventional ballistic missile force. Much of this force is within range of Taiwan, ready to launch ballistic missiles against the island or at any allies coming to its aid. Once again, U.S. victory would hinge on the ability to degrade this conventional ballistic missile force. And once again, it would be virtually impossible to do so while leaving China’s nuclear ballistic missile force unscathed. Chinese conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles are often attached to the same base headquarters, meaning that they likely share transportation and supply networks, patrol routes, and other supporting infrastructure. It is also possible that they share some command-and-control networks, or that the United States would be unable to distinguish between the conventional and nuclear networks even if they were physically separate.

To add to the challenge, some of China’s ballistic missiles can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead, and the two versions are virtually indistinguishable to U.S. aerial surveillance. In a war, targeting the conventional variants would likely mean destroying some nuclear ones in the process.

Furthermore, sending manned aircraft to attack Chinese missile launch sites and bases would require at least partial control of the airspace over China, which in turn would require weakening Chinese air defenses. But degrading China’s coastal air defense network in order to fight a conventional war would also leave much of its nuclear force without protection.

Once China was under attack, its leaders might come to fear that even intercontinental ballistic missiles located deep in the country’s interior were vulnerable. For years, observers have pointed to the U.S. military’s failed attempts to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1990–91 Gulf War as evidence that mobile missiles are virtually impervious to attack. Therefore, the thinking goes, China could retain a nuclear deterrent no matter what harm U.S. forces inflicted on its coastal areas. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles are larger and less mobile than the Iraqi Scuds were, and they are harder to move without detection. The United States is also likely to have been tracking them much more closely in peacetime. As a result, China is unlikely to view a failed Scud hunt in Iraq nearly 30 years ago as reassurance that its residual nuclear force is safe today, especially during an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war.

China’s vehement criticism of a U.S. regional missile defense system designed to guard against a potential North Korean attack already reflects these latent fears. Beijing’s worry is that this system could help Washington block the handful of missiles China might launch in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on its arsenal. That sort of campaign might seem much more plausible in Beijing’s eyes if a conventional war had already begun to seriously undermine other parts of China’s nuclear deterrent. It does not help that China’s real-time awareness of the state of its forces would probably be limited, since blinding the adversary is a standard part of the U.S. military playbook.

Put simply, the favored U.S. strategy to ensure a conventional victory would likely endanger much of China’s nuclear arsenal in the process, at sea and on land. Whether the United States actually intended to target all of China’s nuclear weapons would be incidental. All that would matter is that Chinese leaders would consider them threatened.

LESSONS FROM THE PAST
At that point, the question becomes, How will China react? Will it practice restraint and uphold the “no first use” pledge once its nuclear forces appear to be under attack? Or will it use those weapons while it still can, gambling that limited escalation will either halt the U.S. campaign or intimidate Washington into backing down?

Chinese writings and statements remain deliberately ambiguous on this point. It is unclear which exact set of capabilities China considers part of its core nuclear deterrent and which it considers less crucial. For example, if China already recognizes that its sea-based nuclear deterrent is relatively small and weak, then losing some of its ballistic missile submarines in a war might not prompt any radical discontinuity in its calculus.

The danger lies in wartime developments that could shift China’s assumptions about U.S. intentions. If Beijing interprets the erosion of its sea- and land-based nuclear forces as a deliberate effort to destroy its nuclear deterrent, or perhaps even as a prelude to a nuclear attack, it might see limited nuclear escalation as a way to force an end to the conflict. For example, China could use nuclear weapons to instantaneously destroy the U.S. air bases that posed the biggest threat to its arsenal. It could also launch a nuclear strike with no direct military purpose—on an unpopulated area or at sea—as a way to signal that the United States had crossed a redline.

If such escalation appears far-fetched, China’s history suggests otherwise. In 1969, similar dynamics brought China to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
In early March of that year, Chinese troops ambushed Soviet guards amid rising tensions over a disputed border area. Less than two weeks later, the two countries were fighting an undeclared border war with heavy artillery and aircraft. The conflict quickly escalated beyond what Chinese leaders had expected, and before the end of March, Moscow was making thinly veiled nuclear threats to pressure China to back down.

If nuclear escalation appears far-fetched, China’s history suggests otherwise.

Chinese leaders initially dismissed these warnings, only to radically upgrade their threat assessment once they learned that the Soviets had privately discussed nuclear attack plans with other countries. Moscow never intended to follow through on its nuclear threat, archives would later reveal, but Chinese leaders believed otherwise. On three separate occasions, they were convinced that a Soviet nuclear attack was imminent. Once, when Moscow sent representatives to talks in Beijing, China suspected that the plane transporting the delegation was in fact carrying nuclear weapons. Increasingly fearful, China test-fired a thermonuclear weapon in the Lop Nur desert and put its rudimentary nuclear forces on alert—a dangerous step in itself, as it increased the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch. Only after numerous preparations for Soviet nuclear attacks that never came did Beijing finally agree to negotiations.

China is a different country today than it was in the time of Mao Zedong, but the 1969 conflict offers important lessons. China started a war in which it believed nuclear weapons would be irrelevant, even though the Soviet arsenal was several orders of magnitude larger than China’s, just as the U.S. arsenal dwarfs China’s today. Once the conventional war did not go as planned, the Chinese reversed their assessment of the possibility of a nuclear attack to a degree bordering on paranoia. Most worrying, China signaled that it was actually considering using its nuclear weapons, even though it had to expect devastating retaliation. Ambiguous wartime information and worst-case thinking led it to take nuclear risks it would have considered unthinkable only months earlier. This pattern could unfold again today.

KEEP THEM GUESSING
Both the United States and China can take some basic measures to reduce these dangers. More extensive dialogue and exchange—formal and informal, high level and working level, military and political—could help build relationships that might allow for backchannel de-escalation during a conflict. The two countries already have a formal military hot line in place, although it does not connect political leaders. A dedicated and tested infrastructure for senior military and political leaders to reliably and easily communicate during wartime would provide at least one off-ramp in the event of a crisis.

But better communication can only do so much for a problem that ultimately stems from military doctrine and grand strategy. Given that the United States’ standard wartime playbook is likely to back China into a nuclear corner, it would be logical for Washington to consider alternative strategies that would leave China’s nuclear capabilities untouched. For example, some analysts have proposed coercing China through a distant naval blockade, and others have suggested confining any U.S. campaign to air and naval operations off China’s coast. The goal in both cases would be to avoid attacks on the Chinese mainland, where the bulk of Chinese nuclear forces reside.

The problem with these alternatives is that the mainland is also where the bulk of Chinese conventional capabilities are located. The United States is unlikely to voluntarily leave these capabilities intact, given its predilection for reducing its own casualties and rapidly destroying enemy forces. If China is using its mainland bases to lob ballistic missiles at U.S. troops and allies, it is hard to imagine a U.S. president ordering the military to hold back in the interest of de-escalation. U.S. allies are particularly unlikely to accept a cautious approach, as they will be more exposed to Chinese military power the longer it is left intact. No one wants a U.S.-Chinese war to go nuclear, but a U.S. campaign that avoids escalation while letting China’s conventional forces turn Taiwan—not to mention Japan or South Korea—into a smoking ruin would not seem like much of a victory either.

Of course, Beijing could also take steps to ameliorate the problem, but this is just as unlikely. China has chosen to mount both conventional and nuclear warheads on the same missiles and to attach both conventional and nuclear launch brigades to the same bases. It likely sees some strategic advantage in these linkages. Precisely because these entanglements raise the prospect of nuclear escalation, Beijing may believe that they contribute to deterrence—that they will make the United States less likely to go to war in the first place.

But just as China benefits if the United States believes there is no safe way to fight a war, the United States benefits if China believes that war would result not only in China’s conventional defeat but also in its nuclear disarmament. In fact, the United States might believe that this fear could give it greater leverage during a conflict and perhaps deter China from starting one at all.

In short, neither side may see much value in peacetime reassurance. Quite the opposite: they may be courting instability. If this is the case, however, then U.S. and Chinese leaders should recognize the tradeoffs inherent in their chosen policies. The threat of escalation may make war less likely, but it also makes war radically more dangerous if it does break out. This sobering reality should encourage leaders on both sides to find ways of resolving political, economic, and military disputes without resorting to a war that could rapidly turn catastrophic for the region and the world.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-plan...ise-off-norway-amid-nato-drills/29570878.html

Russia

Russia Plans Missile-Firing Exercise Off Norway Amid NATO Drills

October 29, 2018 19:12 GMT
RFE/RL

The Russian Navy plans to test missiles in international waters off Norway's coast this week, Norwegian and NATO officials say, as the Western military alliance conducts its largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on October 29 the alliance was informed last week about the planned tests.

"Russia has a sizable presence in the north, also off Norway," Stoltenberg told the Norwegian news agency NTB.

"Large [Russian] forces take part in maneuvers and they practice regularly," he added.

Russian officials did not immediately comment on the planned missile tests, which come amid persistent tension between NATO and Russia, which seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and backs separatists in an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine but accuses the alliance of provocative behavior near its borders.

A spokesman for Avinor, which operates Norwegian airports and air-navigation services, said Russia had informed them about the tests in a so-called NOTAM, a notice to pilots about potential hazards along a flight route.

The spokesman, Erik Lodding, told the dpa news agency that it was "a routine message."

The tests are to take place from November 1-3, west of the coastal cities of Kristiansund, Molde, and Alesund.

"There is nothing dramatic about this. We have noted it and will follow the Russian maneuvers," Norwegian Defense Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen said.

On October 25, NATO launched its Trident Juncture exercise, which Stoltenberg has called a "strong display" of its capability, unity, and resolve at a time of growing danger in Europe.

The live-field exercise is set to run to November 7.

It involves around 50,000 soldiers, 10,000 vehicles, and more than 300 aircraft and ships from all 29 NATO allies, plus partners Finland and Sweden.

The aim of the drills stretching from the North Atlantic to the Baltic Sea is to practice the alliance's response to an attack on one of its members.

Russia held large military exercises called Zapad-2017 (West-2017) in September 2017 in its western regions jointly with Belarus, which also borders several NATO countries, and last month conducted massive drills across its central and eastern regions.

With reporting by dpa and Interfax

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/years-fighting-insurgencies-army-pivots-training-major-war-090042200.html

After years of fighting insurgencies, the Army pivots to training for a major war

Sean D. Naylor
National Security Correspondent, Yahoo News • October 30, 2018

WASHINGTON — In mock battles at the Army’s massive combat training centers in California’s Mojave Desert, Louisiana’s pine forests and Germany’s mud, the service is spending less time preparing troops for meetings with village elders and more time training soldiers how to respond to artillery barrages and attacks from enemy fighter bombers.

After spending the last 17 years fighting grinding counterinsurgencies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is shifting its gaze. This year’s National Defense Strategy charged the military with preparing for high-intensity conflict against major nation-state threats like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The Army is falling in line.

The change is popular with the current crop of generals, to judge from their comments at the recent Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting and exposition in Washington, D.C. But if the military’s post-Korean War history is any guide, the Army’s next war is more likely to be another messy insurgency than a conflict with a major power. Army senior leaders say that they can prepare adequately for both. Others are not so sure.

“We have a bad habit of not being able to stop the pendulum in the middle,” said retired Col. Joe Collins, a professor at the National War College. That context has some observers — including the general arguably most associated with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — cautioning that as the Army gears up for war on the European plains, it must not forget the lessons it has paid such a high price in blood to learn.

“It is reasonable to refocus a fair amount on higher-end tasks on which we didn’t focus a great deal during the years of back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan,” said retired Gen. David Petraeus, who at different periods was the senior U.S. commander for each of those wars. “But we do need to retain the lessons that we learned too often the hard way in those counterinsurgency campaigns.”

The Army has been here before. After withdrawing from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, the service turned its attention to preparing for war in Europe against the Soviet Union and wanted nothing more to do with the sort of battles it had fought in the jungles of southeast Asia. “We did walk away from it,” said retired Lt. Gen. Guy Swan, vice president of education at the Association of the U.S. Army. The only lesson the Army seemed to learn from Vietnam was that it didn’t want to fight a counterinsurgency again.

But the Army doesn’t get to pick its wars. When President George W. Bush nominated Gen. George Casey to lead the military effort in Iraq in June 2004 as that country was starting its slide into anarchic civil war, he was selecting a general who had achieved four-star rank without ever reading a book on guerrilla warfare. It’s unlikely that Casey was alone in that regard among the Army’s senior leaders. The full cost of that institutional amnesia became clear only as the United States and its allies lost control of Iraq to Sunni insurgents and Iranian-sponsored Shi’a militias. By the time the U.S. military had climbed back up the steep counterinsurgency learning curve towards the end of 2007, almost 4,000 American troops were dead.

One of the faulty assumptions that Army officers made in the years between Vietnam and Iraq was that units trained for high-intensity conflict would be able to handle anything else. “If we can face the Russians, then we can handle these guerrillas,” was how Swan described their attitude. “And that was not the case.”

Today’s senior Army leaders seem convinced that the service can combine training for tank-on-tank battles with preparation for counterinsurgency and other forms of low-intensity conflict. Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command, acknowledged that the service could not afford to completely turn its back on the sort of warfare it had been conducting in Afghanistan and Iraq. “The future of war will be a hybrid threat,” he told reporters at the recent Army association meeting in Washington, D.C. . “There’ll be everything from tanks and missiles and fighter-bombers down to criminal gangs, terrorists, suicide bombers and guerrilla cells. … We’re going to have to do all of that, the full spectrum of conflict.”

Other generals sounded the same theme. But occasionally there were faint echoes of the post-Vietnam mantra that, as Swan put it, “any tank unit can handle guerrillas.” “We don’t forget the lessons learned” from Iraq and Afghanistan, said Brig. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who heads 7th Army Training Command in Grafenwoehr, Germany. But “it’s easy” to transition from a high-intensity fight “to a counterinsurgency,” he told an audience at the meeting. “It’s harder,” he said, to make the opposite switch.

Today’s colonels and generals made their careers conducting counterinsurgency campaigns, but the Army has always been more comfortable preparing for high-intensity, artillery-intensive warfare than for the dirty, messy business of putting down insurgencies, not to mention peacekeeping (now almost officially a dirty word in the service). As the Army’s commitment to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to wind down, “there was almost a sense of relief that we can go back to ‘real soldiering,’” like after Vietnam, said Petraeus.

Army officers simply have a greater comfort level with conventional wars, he said, and “it’s about getting resources,” he said. “And big wars get you big resources.”
Swan said there was “some truth” to that theory, but he argued the major reason the Army defaults to high-intensity conflict is because that sort of war is the “most dangerous” to American interests, even if a less likely scenario. “If you’re an army that’s expected to fight and win the nation’s wars, I think you have to lean towards the higher end of the spectrum,” Swan said.

Even Petraeus, who as a lieutenant general oversaw the 2006 publication of the service’s counterinsurgency doctrine manual, says it is “reasonable” for the Army to refocus on high-end conflict. But, he added, the service must remember that all operations include a mix of offense, defense and stability.

Today’s senior Army leaders say that won’t happen again. “Whether we want to or not, we’re going to find ourselves doing a peacekeeping operation or doing a stability operation, doing another counterinsurgency somewhere in the world,” Townsend said.

Others are not so sure. “I’m concerned that while the Army says we’re not going to do that, they’re not making the adjustments in our education and our training that ensure that our forces and our junior officers and [non-commissioned officers] see this as not a binary but a continuum which they’ve got to be prepared to fight in,” said retired Col. John Agoglia, who was the director of the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan from 2008 to 2010.

That training and education will grow in importance in the coming years as fewer and fewer soldiers will have firsthand experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Already, comparatively few junior officers and enlisted soldiers have the benefit of that experience. That might present the Army with a challenge, said Swan, who cited as an example his son, a first lieutenant who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point two years ago. “He hasn’t deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, and what he’s been doing has been tank gunnery,” Swan said. “He is focused on Russians and other high-end competitors.”

The training centers, which include permanent opposing forces (essentially home teams that visiting units train against), could shift back to a counterinsurgency scenario “very quickly,” said Mario Hoffmann of the Training and Doctrine Command’s intelligence directorate. However, doing so would require “an enormous increase” in the number of role players involved (who usually play civilians on the battlefield) as well as an expansion of the facilities for training units in urban warfare, he said at the AUSA annual meeting. Even now, Hoffmann said, even though most training is focused on the “metal-on-metal” combined arms threat, every unit rotating through every combat training center “should be fighting elements of irregular warfare, to include insurgencies or guerrillas or terrorists.”

But how should the Army prepare to fight across the full spectrum of conflict when there is an inevitable zero-sum element to decisions about how to spend training resources, particularly the resource of time? A day spent on counterinsurgency, perhaps by training how best to interact with Afghan village elders, is a day not spent training for tank warfare on the plains of Europe.

The Army is, in part, answering this question by creating conventional Army units that specialize in low-intensity conflict, a task that has been normally carried out by Special Forces. Scarred by the experience of trying and failing to win counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq with its own combat formations, the service is planning for campaigns in which its role is to advise and assist host nation forces in putting down insurgencies, rather than to do the fighting itself.

“We think the United States Army in particular but the military writ large will be in an advise-and-assist role for years and decades to come,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters. He acknowledged that the Army’s traditional experts at this work are its Special Forces, who call it “foreign internal defense.” However, Milley said, “there’s simply not enough of them” to handle the workload on their own.

Milley’s solution to this problem is the Security Force Assistance Brigade, a new type of unit that includes the officers and sergeants of a regular infantry brigade, but not the junior soldiers. The idea is that the SFABs will train and advise foreign militaries, to include accompanying their partner units into combat. One is already in Afghanistan, another is scheduled to deploy next spring, three more are planned for the active force and one for the National Guard.

Each SFAB (pronounced “ess-fab”) will have about 800 soldiers, and the Army is putting significant resources towards its goal of filling them with some of the Army’s most talented soldiers. “That is a big change from what you saw after Vietnam,” said Guy Swan. “They’re putting the best and brightest in those units, at the expense of a lot of other missions,” in the process causing “some angst in the rest of the Army,” he said.

The SFABs are “a demonstrable symbol” that the Army’s leaders recognize that the service will continue to be involved in low-intensity conflicts, and “we have to capture those lessons learned and we have to put them into a formation,” said Maj. Gen. Charles Flynn, the assistant deputy chief of staff in the Army’s operations directorate, at an event hosted by Defense One.

However, while the SFABs appear to be evidence that the Army is preparing for a future characterized by low-intensity conflicts, Milley suggested that at least as important to him was that the SFABs would free up for high-intensity operations upwards of half-a-dozen brigades’ that are currently deployed on advise-and-assist missions. “What these SFABs do there is as we deploy them we should be able to recoup or get back the conventional brigades … that we’ve ripped apart,” Milley said.

Another advantage is that if the service needs to rapidly expand the number of combat brigades in a national emergency, the SFABs, could be quickly fleshed out with junior soldiers, according to Swan. “Those outfits were a way to husband end strength and key billets,” he said. “If the next chief sees that same logic, then I think they will survive.”

One test of how much priority the Army will continue to place on counterinsurgency is whether the colonels who command SFABs get promoted to one-star generals and selected for key jobs like assistant division commander at the same rate as their peers who command regular infantry, armor and artillery brigades, Petraeus said. When the Army stood up much smaller advisor teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, the colonels who commanded them were promoted at a much lower rate than their combat arms peers.

“The Army doesn’t have a brilliant track record with a lot of these programs like that,” said Agoglia. “SFABs?” he said. “They’re only going to last until the next chief of staff comes in and maybe he gets tired of it.”

3,183 reactions

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-indicts-10-chinese-over-scheme-steal-aerospace-221840873.html

World

US indicts 10 Chinese over scheme to steal aerospace tech

Paul HANDLEY, AFP • October 30, 2018

The United States indicted 10 Chinese, including two intelligence officers, over a five-year scheme to steal technology from US and French aerospace firms by hacking into their computers.

The indictments came 20 days after the Department of Justice obtained the unprecedented extradition of a senior Chinese intelligence official from Belgium to stand trial in the United States for running the alleged state-sponsored effort to steal US aviation industry secrets.

The Justice Department said the Chinese Ministry of State Security, through its Jiangsu province unit, engineered the effort to steal the technology underlying a turbofan engine used in US and European commercial airliners.

The engine was being developed through a partnership between a French aerospace manufacturer with an office in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and a US firm, it said.

The companies were not named, but earlier indictments pointed to Cincinnati, Ohio-based GE Aviation, one of the world's leading aircraft engine manufacturers.

Meanwhile France's Safran Group, which was working with GE Aviation on engine development, has an office in Suzhou.

The operation first became public in September when the US indicted a Chinese-American engineer for helping steal files at the direction of a top official of the Jiangsu State Security bureau.

Then on October 10 the Justice Department announced it had obtained the extradition of Xu Yanjun, the deputy division director of the Jiangsu bureau, from Belgium where he had apparently been lured and arrested in a counterintelligence operation.

Tuesday's indictments named the two officials of the Jiangsu security bureau who apparently worked under Xu, six hackers who worked under them, and two men who worked for the French company.

The case has added to rising tensions between Beijing and Washington over geopolitics, trade, hacking and corporate espionage.

After Xu's arrest, China said the United States was "making something out of thin air."

The new indictments detailed efforts to use malware and phishing techniques to hack into target computers and remove data on the engines and parts.

"At the time of the intrusions, a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was working to develop a comparable engine for use in commercial aircraft manufactured in China and elsewhere," the Justice Department said.

"For the third time since only September, the National Security Division, with its US Attorney partners, has brought charges against Chinese intelligence officers from the JSSD and those working at their direction and control for stealing American intellectual property," said Assistant Attorney General John Demers.

"This is just the beginning. Together with our federal partners, we will redouble our efforts to safeguard America's ingenuity and investment."

The FBI worked ont he case together with France's General Directorate for Internal Security.

15 reactions

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.militarytimes.com/flash...tens-new-push-against-us-backed-syrian-kurds/

Flashpoints

Turkey’s Erdogan threatens new push against US-backed Syrian Kurds

By: Suzan Fraser, The Associated Press  
13 hours ago

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s president said Tuesday his country has finalized plans for a “comprehensive and effective” operation that would target a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia in Syria east of the Euphrates River, a move that could further increase tension in the area where U.S.-led coalition forces are based.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks came days after the Turkish military shelled Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, militia positions and following repeated warnings to expand Ankara’s operations to northeastern Syria.

Turkish forces have already forced the Syrian Kurdish forces from west of the Euphrates in two cross-border operations, in 2016 and 2018. Ankara considers the militia a terror threat and an extension of Kurdish rebels waging an insurgency within Turkey.

"Soon, we will descend on them with more comprehensive and effective" force, said Erdogan, who has long vowed to clear all of northern Syria of the militia. He spoke to ruling party legislators.

The official Anadolu news agency said Turkish artillery strikes Sunday hit Kurdish trenches and positions on a hill in the village of Zor Moghar, in northern Aleppo province.

American support for Kurdish-led forces to combat Islamic State militants has incensed Turkey. Washington and Ankara agreed over the summer to a deal that would effectively push the Kurdish militia out of a key northern Syrian town, relieving some tension between the two NATO members.

Under the deal, American and Turkish troops would jointly patrol Manbij, which lies west of the Euphrates. Turkey’s defense minister, Hulusi Akar, said in comments carried by Anadolu that training has been completed and that patrols would begin imminently. After Manbij, Turkey’s “point of work, field” would be the region east of the Euphrates, he said.

It's unclear how a potential Turkish offensive east of the Euphrates would affect U.S. troops operating with Kurdish fighters there.

Associated Press writer Zeynep Bilginsoy in Istanbul contributed to this report.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...kurds-accuse-turkey-of-jeopardizing-is-fight/

Flashpoints

US-backed Syria Kurds accuse Turkey of jeopardizing ISIS fight

By: The Associated Press  
13 hours ago

ANKARA, Turkey — U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria said Wednesday they are temporarily suspending their campaign against the last batch of territory held by Islamic State militants in northeast Syria, accusing Turkey of jeopardizing their efforts.

In a new spike in tensions along the border, Turkey said its military shelled Kurdish positions across the border in Syria, east of the Euphrates River. It was the second time this week Turkish artillery targeted Kurdish positions in northeast Syria, an area where troops of the U.S.-led coalition are also based.

The U.S.-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces said Turkey has carried out at least six attacks against villages along the borders, killing one fighter and a border guard and damaging properties.

The SDF accused Turkey of supporting the IS militants in their advances, saying it was responsible for "temporarily stopping the battle to fight terrorism carried out by our forces against the last holdout of the terrorist group."

Such continued attacks on Kurdish positions, the statement said, "would cause a long-term halt to our military campaign."

It is the second time SDF has halted its months-long campaign against IS in northern Syria in the wake of rising tension with Turkey. Earlier this year, a Turkish offensive against a Kurdish enclave in northwest Syria prompted the SDF to declare a halt to its operations. At the time, the SDF said it sent its fighters to defend the enclave, and accused Turkey of jeopardizing the anti-IS campaign.

Turkey considers the militia a terror threat and an extension of Kurdish rebels waging an insurgency within Turkey. U.S. support for the Kurdish-led forces has resulted in increased tension between Washington and Ankara.

Despite an agreement between Ankara and Washington to cooperate in Syria in a strategic town in the north, Turkey had recently threatened to expand its operations in Syria to go after Kurdish forces working in northeast Syria, where the campaign against IS continues.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this week his country has finalized plans for a "comprehensive and effective" operation to drive the Kurdish militia from the region.

The state-run Anadolu news agency said four Kurdish fighters were killed and six were wounded in the attack on Wednesday. It said Turkish artillery units targeted Kurdish militiamen in Syria’s Kobani region, a stronghold of the Kurdish fighters. The Turkish defense ministry later said the Kurdish militia fired on Turkish targets and that Turkish troops retaliated, killing 10 fighters. The Associated Press could not immediately verify the death toll.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/boko-haram-attacks-kill-12-nigeria-094809743.html

Boko Haram attacks kill 12 in Nigeria

AFP
29 minutes ago

Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - At least 12 civilians were killed in multiple Boko Haram jihadist attacks targeting two villages and a camp for those displaced by the bloody conflict in northeastern Nigeria, civilian militia and residents told AFP Thursday.

Jihadists in seven trucks late on Wednesday attacked Bulaburin and Kofa villages as well as a camp in Dalori village outside the Borno state capital of Maiduguri.

"The terrorists attacked and completely burnt Bulaburin and Kofa villages and burnt half the Dalori two IDP (internally displaced persons) camp," militia leader Babakura Kolo told AFP.

"They killed nine people in Bulaburin, two people in Dalori, and one in Kofa and looted food supplies before setting them on fire," Kolo said.

The attack was launched in Kofa where the jihadists opened fire indiscriminately and killed one person as residents fled, said Kofa resident Musa Goni.

"They then moved to nearby Bulaburin where they gunned down nine people and burnt the village after stealing food," Goni said.

At Dalori 2 IDP camp, which houses 10,000 homeless people, the jihadists engaged troops and civilian militia guarding the camp in a shootout before overrunning the makeshift facility, civilian militia camp member Solomon Adamu said.

"When the Boko Haram gunmen came they stopped on the road overlooking the camp and started firing," said Adamu who took part in the fight.

"Soldiers and civilian JTF (militia) at the gate engaged them in gunfight but were forced to withdraw into the camp because we were out gunned," he said.

Residents were forced to flee nd two were killed while several were injured, according to Adamu.

The jihadists invaded the camp after overrunning troops and the militia and "burnt half the camp" by setting fires and firing rocket-propelled grenades on buildings.

"One grenade didn't explode and is still lying in the camp, waiting for bomb disposal units to evacuate it," Adamu said.

The area has been attacked multiple times before by the Boko Haram faction loyal to Abubakar Shekau.

Dalori, which is about 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Maiduguri, houses about 50,000 people in makeshift camps.

In June 2017, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at the camp. The attack injured several residents but killed only the bombers.

It followed a separate attack at nearby Kofa village, where female suicide bombers exploded and killed at least 16 people.

In January 2016, at least 85 people were killed when militant fighters stormed and torched Dalori village and tried to gain access to the camps.

Despite government insistence that Boko Haram jihadists are near defeat, Nigeria is still hit by heavy fighting.

The conflict has claimed more than 27,000 lives since 2009 and nearly two million people still cannot return to their homes in the Lake Chad region.

In recent months, Boko Haram has carried out major attacks on military targets, killing dozens.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Didn't see a new thread, so adding here.


Guardian news
‏Verified account @guardiannews
1h1 hour ago

Egypt attack: Gunmen kill seven Coptic Christians in bus ambush


posted for fair use and discussion



Associated Press

Fri 2 Nov 2018 21.13 EDT


Egypt attack: Gunmen kill seven Coptic Christians in bus ambush

Local Islamic State affiliate claims responsibility for attack on three buses carrying Christian pilgrims

Associated Press

Fri 2 Nov 2018 21.13 EDT

Relatives react during the funeral of one of the people killed after a bus carrying Coptic Christians was attacked in Egypt’s southern Minya province. Photograph: STR/EPA

Islamic militants have ambushed three buses carrying Christian pilgrims on their way to a remote desert monastery south of the Egyptian capital of Cairo, killing seven people and wounding 19, Egyptian officials said.

All but one of those killed were members of the same family, according to a list of the victims’ names released by the Coptic Orthodox church, which said among the dead were a boy and a girl, age 15 and 12 respectively.
Egypt launches massive operation targeting Islamic militants in Sinai
Read more

The local Islamic State affiliate, which spearheads militants fighting security forces in the Sinai Peninsula, claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement, according to SITE, a US-based group that monitors and translates militants’ statements.

It said the attack was revenge for the imprisonment by Egyptian authorities of “our chaste sisters”. It did not elaborate.

It also said the attack left 13 Christians killed and another 18 wounded, but it was not immediately possible to independently verify the claim.

The Islamic State has repeatedly vowed to go after Egypt’s Christians as punishment for their support of president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. As defence minister, el-Sissi led the military’s 2013 ouster of an Islamist president, whose one-year rule proved divisive. It has claimed responsibility for a string of deadly attacks on Christians dating back to December 2016.

El-Sissi, who has made the economy and security his top priorities since taking office in 2014, wrote on his Twitter account that Friday’s attack was designed to harm the “nation’s solid fabric” and pledged to continue fighting terrorism.
Gunmen kill Christian worshippers at Coptic church near Cairo
Read more

The attack is likely to cast a dark shadow on one of el-Sissi’s showpieces — the World Youth Forum – which opens Saturday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and hopes to draw thousands of local and foreign youth to discuss upcoming projects, with Egypt’s 63-year-old leader taking centre stage.

“They want to embarrass el-Sissi and show that the state is unable to protect the Copts,” said Begemy Naseem Nasr, the priest of the church of Saint Mary in Minya. “Egypt is the target here and we all know that.”

Friday’s attack is the second to target pilgrims heading to the St. Samuel the Confessor monastery in as many years, indicating that security measures in place since then are either inadequate or have become lax. The previous attack in May 2017 left nearly 30 people dead.

It is also the latest by IS to target Christians in churches in Cairo, the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and Tanta in the Nile Delta.
Coptic Christians accuse Egyptian government of failing to protect them
Read more

Those attacks left at least 100 people dead and led to tighter security around Christian places of worship and Church-linked facilities. They have also underlined the vulnerability of minority Christians in a country where many Muslims have since the 1970s grown religiously conservative.

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, said Friday’s attackers used secondary dirt roads to reach the buses carrying the pilgrims, who were near the monastery at the time of the attack. Only pilgrims have been allowed on the main road leading to the monastery since last year’s attack.

The Interior Ministry maintained that only one bus was attacked, but the latest statement by the church said three buses were targeted and put the death toll at 7 and the wounded at 19, including two in critical condition.

The Interior Ministry said police were pursuing the attackers, who fled the scene.

Egypt’s Christians, who account for some 10 percent of the country’s 100 million people, complain of discrimination in the Muslim majority country. Christian activists say the church’s alliance with el-Sissi has offered the ancient community a measure of protection, but failed to end frequent acts of discrimination that boil over into violence against Christians, especially in rural Egypt.

In Minya, the scene of Friday’s attack, Christians constitute the highest percentage of the population – about 35 percent – of any Egyptian province.
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[danielboon]

Air War
Air War
@TheAirWar
·
10h
#BREAKING: #USNavy & #USMC units currently on deployment at #PersianGulf & #HormuzStrait will be on high alert from tomorrow due to possibility of any hostile military activity of #IRGC Navy after the return of #US sanctions on #Iran's Islamic Regime. #SanctionsAreComing
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EndGameWW3 Retweeted
Air War
Air War
@TheAirWar
#USMC's VMFA-211 has 6 F-35Bs on deployment with #USNavy USS Essex LHD-2 amphibious assault ship, they will start armed patrol flights over #PersianGulf & #HormuzStrait from tomorrow morning:
169414= CF-05
169415= CF-00
169416= CF-01
169587= CF-02
169588= CF-03
169589= CF-04
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10:15 PM · Nov 2, 2018 · Twitter Web Client
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Air War
Air War
@TheAirWar
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10h
Replying to
@TheAirWar
Furthermore 6
@USMC
F-35Bs (VMFA-211),
@usairforce
has now 6 F-22As of 94th FS on forward deployment at Al-Dhafra AB, #UAE which can be used for any strike mission against #IRGC Navy bases & its anti-ship missile launchers installed in the coasts of #PersianGulf & #HormuzStrait
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Morteza kordafshari
Morteza kordafshari
@MKordafshari
·https://mobile.twitter.com/TheAirWar/status/1058543264637300736