News & commentary by Dave Maxwell. Edited and published by Daniel Riggs.
1. Lack of Pentagon nominees could be harbinger of slow process
2. This video of 10th Mountain soldiers shows exactly what not to do when clearing a room
3. From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism
4. What Can the Pentagon Realistically Get from Its Advisory Boards?
5. Experts Tell Congress How To Turn Innovation Into Reality
6. Cybersecurity and your water: Hacker attempted to poison Florida city's water supply
7. The Asia-Pacific is Biden’s Top Security Priority
8. The World Health Organization Must Be Made to Change
9. Lessons for the States on Energy Security
10. FDD | Oberlin 'professor of peace' called for destruction of Israel in 1989 speech
11. Army switches up cyber leadership
12. General Officer Assignments (Army)
13. Hackers Tied to Russia's GRU Targeted the US Grid for Years
14. Nuclear warfare or cyber warfare: which is the bigger threat?
15. The Mysterious Origins of the Secretary of Defense ‘Exclusion’ Clause: Truman, Hoffman, and the Chowder Marines
16. SecDef Austin to Troops: If You've Seen Extremism in the Ranks, Tell Your Commander
17. Twitter reveals state-backed influence operations from Armenia, Iran and Russia
18. Putting Human Rights at the Center of U.S. Foreign Policy
19. Feast to Famine: Nine Recommendations for Maintaining American Military Primacy with Reduced Funding
20. Biden Wants to Compete With China. Here’s How.
21.Women linked to Abu Sayyaf suicide bombings arrested in Sulu
22. A U.S. strategy paper on China draws a tepid response in Beijing
1. Lack of Pentagon nominees could be harbinger of slow process
Defense News · by Aaron Mehta · February 23, 2021
Not good news. I thought we would be able to do better during this administration.
2. This video of 10th Mountain soldiers shows exactly what not to do when clearing a room
taskandpurpose.com · by Paul Szoldra · February 23, 2021
It is one helluva terrible video. You can see it at the link. However, what you also must watch is how the Command Sergeant Major Mario Terenas responded using social media on Instagram. He owns the problem. The CSM's actions and message should be a lesson for all leaders and Public Affairs professionals. His response should be shown in all leadership courses in PME and at DINFOS. I have great respect for the CSM. I am sure the leaders of these terribly trained soldiers in the video are going to get their due from the CSM.
3. From Citizen Soldier to Secular Saint: The Societal Implications of Military Exceptionalism
tnsr.org · by Susan Bryant · February 23, 2021
Please go to the link to view this in proper format since it will not come through in the message. This is an essay that should be discussed not only in PME institutions but in civilian graduate schools that focus on national security as well.
4. What Can the Pentagon Realistically Get from Its Advisory Boards?
defenseone.com · by Eliahu Niewood
Excerpts:
“Unfortunately, the ability to bring the right subject matter expertise to bear has been hindered by the ever-growing timelines for getting consultants and members approved for studies and membership. If the current review results in cutting that timeline down from many months to a small number of weeks, the agility and applicability of all the boards would be greatly improved.
As well, the Board was often called on to assess ideas that purported to be 10X. Far more often than not, they turned out to be physically infeasible, impractical, or of little real impact.
If the current review identifies best practices like these and helps spread them across the various DoD advisory boards while articulating the benefits they provide, the pause in board activities to make that happen will be well worth it.
What Can the Pentagon Realistically Get from Its Advisory Boards?
A former chair says the boards provide a lot, could do better — and help weed out impractical or oversold ideas.
The recently mandated zero-baseline review of the Department of Defense’s advisory boards was partially motivated by controversial recent changes to the membership of specific boards. Setting politics aside, however, the review is a great opportunity to review the effectiveness and impact of these boards. Do they serve a useful purpose? What does the Pentagon get from them?
Steve Blank, Raj Shah, and Joe Felter recently argued in Defense One that these boards should be restructured to produce ideas with revolutionary, “10X” impact. This is certainly an admirable goal, but it is probably worthwhile to incorporate into the review both a better sense for where those 10X ideas come from and the other benefits that DoD gets from those boards.
10X ideas in the national security space are rare, but the ones that have come along and really changed warfare—like nuclear weapons, ICBMs, stealth, GPS, precision munitions, and satellite-based sensing—came not from “crazy outsiders” or insiders versed in processes and politics. Rather, they arose from efforts to bring together people who understood the national security mission gaps with people who knew the limits of technology and what it took to make it real.”
5. Experts Tell Congress How To Turn Innovation Into Reality
breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Excerpts:
“To get innovators on board, Kitchen added, “the Pentagon’s also going to have to reconsider its one-size-fits-all approach to intellectual property.” Innovative private-sector software firms live or die by their trade secrets, making them deeply reluctant to hand them over to the Defense Department to the extent traditional contracting arrangements often require.
You also need to help innovative firms – especially smaller ones – protect their IP against espionage, Fox said. The Pentagon should provide “a mechanism to plug in securely,” she argued, probably through some kind of high-security cloud computing architecture.
Once you’re properly focused on software over hardware, Fox argued, you can make your program much more flexible, adaptable, and easy to upgrade over time. You do that, she said, by making them “modular… from the very beginning.” This approach, known more formally as modular open systems architecture, is basically the Lego approach to weapons system design. You establish strict technical standards for how different subsystems (modules) fit together, but as long as companies meet those standards, they can innovate however they want, allowing you to plug-and-play a wide range of different components as new technologies become available.
Experts Tell Congress How To Turn Innovation Into Reality
Emphasizing venture capital, modular open architecture, and software development will help turn neat ideas into battle-ready weapons, acquisition gurus told Congress. But having separate bureaucracies for Research & Engineering and Acquisition & Sustainment may be a problem.”
6. Cybersecurity and your water: Hacker attempted to poison Florida city's water supply
The Hill · by Mark Montgomery and Annie Fixler · February 23, 2021
From my FDD colleagues.
Excerpts:
“The United States has more than 148,000 public water systems and more than 70,000 water and wastewater utilities. Many of these facilities “lack the required technical and financial capabilities to address all emerging risks, such as cyber risks,” according to a 2016 National Infrastructure Advisory Council Report.
The situation has not improved over the past five years.
The Cyberspace Solarium Commission concluded in March 2020 that “water utilities remain largely ill-prepared to defend their networks from cyber-enabled disruption.” In fact, the former chief technology officer for the state of New Jersey called water and wastewater “probably the least mature sector [of 16] from a cybersecurity standpoint.”
As the sector-specific agency (SSA) and risk manager for the water and wastewater industry, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for identifying and assessing cyber risks to the industry. The EPA’s cybersecurity budget, however, is a fraction of that of the Department of Energy, the SSA for the closest comparable lifeline sector.”
7. The Asia-Pacific is Biden’s Top Security Priority
thediplomat.com · by Steven Stashwick · February 23, 2021
We also have to be careful about prioritizing based on geographic locations. Our four major revisionist (China and Russia) and rogue/revolutionary (Iran and north Korea) powers operate on a global basis. Prioritizing resources based on geographic locations may not necessarily be the most effective way to compete and counter our adversaries. We will need a global force posture to compete globally.
8. The World Health Organization Must Be Made to Change
WSJ· by Craig Singleton · Feb. 23, 2021
An important critique of the WHO from my FDD colleague.
9. Lessons for the States on Energy Security
realclearenergy.org · by Dr. Brenda Shaffer
We have to get our houses in order in the states. From one of our senior advisors at FDD.
10. FDD | Oberlin 'professor of peace' called for destruction of Israel in 1989 speech
fdd.org · by Benjamin Weinthal Research Fellow · February 23, 2021
From my FDD colleague.
Excerpt (truth in advertising: Rabbi Cooper is a fellow board member on the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea)
11. Army switches up cyber leadership
c4isrnet.com · by Mark Pomerleau · February 23, 2021
Excerpt:
“Leaders have said this tighter synergy allows for greater advancements in cyber policy, doctrine and capabilities because doctrine writers can sit alongside operations on mission. It also allows operators and commanders to easily transition lessons learned to the schoolhouse to update curricula.
Army Cyber Command is in the midst of a multiyear effort to transition from just cyberspace operations to an “information advantage,” which seeks to fold in the larger information domain to include electromagnetic spectrum operations and information operations.”
12. General Officer Assignments (Army)
Despite the Administration and DOD transition the Army keeps rolling along. A lot of changes are coming. Note a "power couple" departing from Korea.
13. Hackers Tied to Russia's GRU Targeted the US Grid for Years
Wired · by Andy Greenberg
It is only a matter of time.
Excerpts:
“While none among the ever-growing list of hacker groups targeting industrial control systems around the world appears to have used those control systems to trigger actual disruptive effects in 2020, Dragos warns that the sheer number of those groups represents a disturbing trend. Caltagirone points to a rare but relatively crude intrusion targeting a small water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida earlier this month, in which a still-unidentified hacker attempted to vastly increase the levels of caustic lye in the 15,000-person city's water. Given the lack of protections on those sorts of small infrastructure targets, a group like Kamacite, Caltagirone argues, could easily trigger widespread, harmful effects even without the industrial-control system expertise of a partner group like Electrum.
That means the rise in even relatively unskilled groups poses a real threat, Caltagirone says. The number of groups targeting industrial control systems has been continually growing, he adds, ever since Stuxnet showed at the beginning of the last decade that industrial hacking with physical effects is possible. "A lot of groups are appearing, and there are not a lot going away," says Caltagirone. "In three to four years, I feel like we're going to reach a peak, and it will be an absolute catastrophe."
14. Nuclear warfare or cyber warfare: which is the bigger threat?
aspistrategist.org.au · by John Powers · February 24, 2021
It is not either/or, it is both/and - both can be catastrophic in their own ways though one might be much more likely that the other. One can likely be deterred better than the other was well.
I will quibble a little with this excerpt. Our adversaries view politics as war by other means.
15. The Mysterious Origins of the Secretary of Defense ‘Exclusion’ Clause: Truman, Hoffman, and the Chowder Marines
warontherocks.com · by Paula Thornhill · February 24, 2021
Some interesting history here.
16. SecDef Austin to Troops: If You've Seen Extremism in the Ranks, Tell Your Commander
military.com · by Stephen Losey · February 23, 2021
I cannot emphasize this enough: We have to be careful not to play into the narrative of the extremist organizations. Yes, we must root out extremism. But an overreaction by military leaders is what the extremists would like to see happen as it will not only generate more sympathizers, if not recruits, it will undermine the good order and discipline of the military.
17. Twitter reveals state-backed influence operations from Armenia, Iran and Russia
washingtontimes.com · by Ryan Lovelace
18. Putting Human Rights at the Center of U.S. Foreign Policy
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
Hear, hear.
19. Feast to Famine: Nine Recommendations for Maintaining American Military Primacy with Reduced Funding
mwi.usma.edu · by Charles Dvorak · February 24, 2021
Conclusion:
“Collectively, these recommendations point to two overarching requirements that will emerge in the face of substantial budget cuts: reducing personnel and systems while also increasing flexibility. These recommendations are not made lightly; implementing them would mean major, even transformational, changes for the US military. However, if the Department of Defense does not begin conceptualizing ways of redefining the role and capabilities of the US military, budgetary pressures will likely force that decision in the long run. It will be in America’s interest to shape that process now rather than in the throes of economic upheaval, the challenges of a future war, or both.”
An interesting recommendation here. I have seen this proposed elsewhere:
20. Biden Wants to Compete With China. Here’s How.
Foreign Policy · by Elise Labott · February 22, 2021
To borrow from the Clinton era, "its values, stupid."
Conclusion: Biden, in his inaugural address, urged the United States to “lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.” That starts by strengthening withered institutions and restoring the rule of law, the pillars of U.S. democracy, and the soft power that did once—and can again—give the United States a competitive edge.
21. Women linked to Abu Sayyaf suicide bombings arrested in Sulu
Not a good sign for the Philippines. But good job in preventing potential bombings.
Excerpts:
“But Western Mindanao Command chief Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan later told reporters that the women had undergone an “orientation” programme on suicide bombing and were assembling explosives in their homes.
“They are using wives and widows now because they are having a hard time recruiting men, and it is more difficult to identify and detect the female suicide bombers,” Vinluan was quoted by news reports as saying.
Earlier this month, at least four Abu Sayyaf members surrendered to authorities, the military said, bringing to almost 100 the number of fighters who have turned themselves in over the last year.”
22. A U.S. strategy paper on China draws a tepid response in Beijing
CNBC · by Evelyn Cheng · February 24, 2021
Which should not be surprising to anyone.
Excerpts:
“Scattered online commentary about "The Longer Telegram" have remained dismissive.
In a roughly 30-minute video from Feb. 5 that has more than 900,000 views, Fudan University professor Shen Yi dismissed as a joke the paper's attempt to replicate Kennan's efforts.
An online article from Feb. 7 by Zhongnan University of Economics and Law professor Qiao Xinsheng said in an online article the strategy paper fails to accurately analyze the Soviet Union's own difficulties and that the U.S. should not expect China to "disintegrate."
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“I think that Ronald Reagan wanted to hear other people's views, and he always listened carefully, and from time to time he changed his own mind about a position. And especially he took pains to listen carefully to foreign leaders with whom he was dealing.”
-Jeane Kirkpatrick
"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“Get beyond love and grief: exist for the good of Man.”
- Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy