News & commentary by Dave Maxwell. Edited and published by Daniel Riggs.
1. U.S. proposes interim power-sharing government with Taliban in Afghanistan
2. Retying the Gordian Knot: US Special Operations Command as a service
3. Biden Endorses Female Generals Whose Promotions Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction
4. Support for QAnon Is Hard to Measure. Polls May Overestimate It
5. Xi Jinping’s Eager-to-Please Bureaucrats Snarl His China Plans
6. The Stories China Tells: The New Historical Memory Reshaping Chinese Nationalism
7. How the US military is preparing for a war with China
8. What Is Biden’s ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’?
9. A Hack Like This Could Start the Next World War
10. This Is How the Biggest Arms Manufacturers Steer Millions to Influence US Policy
11. ‘Weaponised the internet’: The rise of extreme right-wing groups in Australia
12. Opinion | U.S. Military Power, and the Lessons of History
13. Whispers from Wargames About the Gray Zone
14. Abandon Old Assumptions About Defense Spending
15. A hip-fired electromagnetic anti-drone rifle
16. The Women Who Changed War Reporting
17. FDD | Biden Must Do More to Deter Russian Aggression and Uphold Global Norms
18. Why is military history in retreat at universities?
19. Special Operations News Update - Monday, March 8, 2021 | SOF News
1. U.S. proposes interim power-sharing government with Taliban in Afghanistan
The Washington Post · by Karen DeYoung · March 8, 2021
I will leave this to the Afghanistan experts for comment.
2. Retying the Gordian Knot: US Special Operations Command as a service
militarytimes.com · by John F. Mulholland · March 7, 2021
LTG Mulholland is opposed to USSOCOM as a service. But I will continue to argue that USSOCOM needs service authorities and not just "service-like" responsibilities and authorities. The commander of special operations should have a seat in the tank as a member of the Joint Chiefs. This can be done without making SOF a separate service if the Pentagon fully implements the intent of Section 922 of the NDAA. And that is the real issue: How and when will the Pentagon fully comply with the law and Congressional intent for effective SOF civilian oversight. And remember one of the provisions of Section 922 was to insert the ASD SO/LIC into the administration chain of command: POTUS, SECDEF, ASD SO/LIC, and USSOCOM.
I agree that Ezra Cohen overstepped his bounds but he is no longer in a position of power and LTG Mulholland does give him the benefit of the doubt recognizing he was likely a man in the moment when he made his statement.
Key quotes:
“Forcing USSOCOM into a formal service role would be a self-inflicted wound that would jeopardize the best aspects of SOF performance over the last four decades.
In short, to compel USSOCOM and USSOF into its own formal Service would force it to behave in a way intrinsically opposed to it purpose for existence.
To force USSOCOM into pure “service-hood” would divert the command massively — and disastrously — from its original intent to be an operationally focused headquarters fixed on generating and employing the world’s finest special operations force.
The relationship between USSOCOM and the services, I’d offer, has never been better, closer or more mutually beneficial than it is today.
Such an action would, indeed, tie a new Gordian Knot around the neck of USSOF. To what end? To fix what problem? Who seeks such a solution?
To the last point I would again ask are we implementing the law in Section 922 of the NDAA and meeting Congressional intent? After all it was the wisdom of Congress that underpins all the arguments LTG Mulholland makes and gave us USSOCOM.”
3. Biden Endorses Female Generals Whose Promotions Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper · March 7, 2021
A civil-military relations issue.
4. Support for QAnon Is Hard to Measure. Polls May Overestimate It
defenseone.com · by James Shanahan
Maybe some good news. Maybe there are not as many whack jobs out there that we thought or that the online proliferation of the cult would appear to indicate.
5. Xi Jinping’s Eager-to-Please Bureaucrats Snarl His China Plans
WSJ · by Chun Han Wong
Is China like north Korea or is north Korea like China? Some interesting similarities here:
Some of Beijing’s proposed remedies only seem to encourage more bureaucracy. As the pandemic’s economic fallout heaped pressure on officials struggling to meet poverty-relief targets, party authorities ordered in April a fresh push to curb red tape.
Among its demands: compiling an anthology of Mr. Xi’s remarks on “formalism and bureaucratism” and making it required reading for all cadres.
Within weeks, a party publisher had released a 136-page volume featuring 182 passages, and government agencies and state businesses started arranging seminars for officials to study the text.
The publishing arm of the party’s disciplinary commission released six new books last year, including a comic, to teach officials how to recognize and prevent “formalistic” practices.
6. The Stories China Tells: The New Historical Memory Reshaping Chinese Nationalism
Foreign Affairs · by Jessica Chen Weiss · March 4, 2021
Excerpts:
“The CCP faces an uphill battle in selling its newly revised version of China’s World War II history to audiences outside China. Part of the problem lies in Western historiography and prejudice, Mitter writes: China’s role in the war has been neglected for so long in Western countries that few people in those places have an interest in learning more. Mitter has tried to correct that in this book, building on the scholarship of his previous and also excellent work Forgotten Ally.
But foreign countries and their citizens hardly pose the biggest obstacle to China’s quest to use history to burnish its legitimacy: the CCP itself is the main barrier. Even when the party allows a more thorough investigation of the wartime past, it still ruthlessly suppresses narratives—whether about Hong Kong, Tibet, or Xinjiang—that challenge its increasingly ethnonationalist definition of who and what belongs to China. And as filmmakers navigate the party’s limited tolerance for ambiguity, the result is often big-budget films that emphasize the scale and horror of World War II without the kind of nuance that would humanize its victims and perpetrators. For many Western critics, these films provide too much “loud spectacle and cheap sentiment,” writes Mitter, describing the critical responses to Zhang Yimou’s Flowers of War, which chronicles Japan’s brutal occupation of Nanjing, and Feng Xiaogang’s Back to 1942, which recounts the Henan famine.
...
For China’s neighbors and rivals, the CCP’s mixture of cooperation and confrontation defines the “China challenge”: how to work with Beijing on controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, slowing climate change, and preventing nuclear proliferation while also parrying the effects of China’s growing authoritarianism and pugilistic nationalism. Beijing’s attempt to recast the history of World War II might help them do so. Without endorsing the CCP’s version of history or excusing Beijing’s aggression abroad and abuses at home, leaders in Washington and elsewhere could more explicitly acknowledge China’s contributions to ending World War II and creating the existing order. Doing so might mitigate the growing sense among Chinese citizens that the United States and its partners will never allow China to play a leading role on the world stage. That recognition could in turn help Washington press the CCP to pull back on its campaign to intimidate and punish its critics abroad. An agreement of that kind would not solve many of the problems plaguing relations between the United States and China. But it is precisely the kind of carefully finessed arrangement that Washington and Beijing will have to get much better at crafting if they are to achieve anything resembling peaceful coexistence.”
7. How the US military is preparing for a war with China
Asia Nikkei· by James Stavridis · March 7, 2021
Conclusion: "Taken together, it seems clear that the U.S. military is stepping up its presence and combat capability in the Western Pacific, and positioning for a conflict with China over the coming decades."
8. What Is Biden’s ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’?
Bloomberg · by Hal Brands · March 7, 2021
Excerpts:
“The Joe Biden administration hasn’t wasted time staking out its proposed grand strategy: “Foreign policy for the middle class.”
That idea, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has explained, is the central organizing concept for America’s global role: “Everything we do in our foreign policy and national security will be measured by a basic metric: Is it going to make life better, safer and easier for working families?”
A foreign policy for the middle class is the product of sustained intellectual effort by the new administration. It has implications for issues ranging from foreign economic policy to the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The concept is rooted in a recognition that winning the pivotal contest of our time, the clash between America and China, will require fortifying the domestic foundations of U.S. power. Above all, it constitutes Biden’s answer to the fundamental question America faces — whether it can preserve its traditions of enlightened internationalism and liberal democracy against the forces of aggressive unilateralism and illiberal populism that were on display under President Donald Trump.
9. A Hack Like This Could Start the Next World War
Bloomberg · by Tim Culpan · March 8, 2021
Excerpts:
“So far, despite dozens of cyberattacks among superpowers over the past two decades, the world has kept spinning on its axis and life for most people has continued on largely unhindered. That could change at any moment.
...
And so the cyber capabilities will grow and incursions continue, tit-for-tat. All you need is one such hack to have gone too far and to trigger an outsize response, one that results in a set of chain reactions with multiple and continuous cyber retaliations paralyzing power grids, data transmission, agriculture, information flow, transportation systems, and food supply chains. While it may lack the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb or explosive force of missile strikes, the devastation could be as widespread and even lead to military confrontation.
That’s why the best hope may be that the cyber equivalent of nukes are developed and obtained — and publicly acknowledged — by all major powers. These would be perceived to have the potential to overwhelm and cause so much upheaval and destruction that using them would be impossible. Yet their mere existence may once again give rise to the notion — and fear — of mutually assured destruction, and its paradoxical benefit: peace.
10. This Is How the Biggest Arms Manufacturers Steer Millions to Influence US Policy
military.com · by Stephen Losey · March 7, 2021
Excerpts:
"These connections make for cozy relationships and highly useful contact lists," the report says. "Overworked and underpaid congressional staffers can also hope that lucrative lobbying jobs await them at the same companies who come to them pushing their own agendas."
The so-called "revolving door" also exists on Capitol Hill, the report adds. Over the last 30 years, nearly 530 staffers have both worked for a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees of both houses of Congress or the Defense Appropriations subcommittees, and then as a lobbyist for defense companies.
The report highlights former Defense Secretary Mark Esper as an example of the revolving door in action. Esper worked for the Senate Foreign Relations and House Armed Services committees in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as an assistant deputy secretary of defense, before moving to Raytheon's government relations office. After seven years in that job, President Donald Trump made him secretary of the Army and then head of the Defense Department.
11. ‘Weaponised the internet’: The rise of extreme right-wing groups in Australia
news.com.au · March 5, 2021
Excerpts:
“A relatively new group to Australia – the National Socialist Network – claims to have an active footprint in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth and a number of regional cities.
The nation’s spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, says increasing numbers of young Australians – some just 14 years old – are being radicalised by both extreme right wing and Islamist groups.
12. Opinion | U.S. Military Power, and the Lessons of History
The New York Times · by Stuart Gottlieb · March 7, 2021
Excerpt: "American military power and leadership were eventually required to restore the peace, and they remain just as vital today. And while a more sustainable balance between force and diplomacy is sorely needed, it would be a mistake to think that we can trade one for the other."
13. Whispers from Wargames About the Gray Zone
warontherocks.com · by Robert C. Rubel · March 8, 2021
Excerpts:
“Military wargames are undertaken for specific reasons, and their design is usually based on a set of well-defined objectives. The process of gaming is therefore disciplined, which is necessary given the expense in terms of time, effort, and resources needed to conduct them. Especially in the case of research games, as opposed to those conducted solely for educational purposes, one or more specific research questions are established that guide design, execution, and analysis. Normally a “hot wash” — a plenary discussion of what happened in the game in which all the participants compare notes — is conducted, and sometime later, perhaps weeks or months, analysts prepare a game report. Such discussions, analyses, and reports are usually focused on answering the research questions and addressing game objectives. Yuna Wong and Garret Heath recently called for the employment of more rigorous research tools to determine whether wargaming actually works. Such a project might be able to produce answers with respect to the formal objectives of games, but likely would not be able to shed any light on the more subtle ability of games to reveal things not connected to their objectives.
Wargames, being weakly structured research tools, can reveal so much more, but it takes a sensitive and discerning observer to detect the weak signals or “whispers” — indications that might be easily ignored and that might be counterintuitive or even threatening. Yet it is these whispers we are interested in here. They can reveal the underlying logic of human competition, which is especially relevant today.”
14. Abandon Old Assumptions About Defense Spending
warontherocks.com · by Robert Levinson · March 8, 2021
Excerpts:
“Arguments about how big a Navy or an Air Force the United States should have, or how much to spend on defense overall, can be grounded in an assessment of what the nation needs for its security, rather than simply what it can afford, because it may be able to afford much more spending on defense and much else.
The most influential economist in history, John Maynard Keynes, said in 1936: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Perhaps the United States needs to abandon some old assumptions and listen to other economists who aren’t so defunct.”
15. A hip-fired electromagnetic anti-drone rifle
ZDNet · by Greg Nichols
Gives new meaning to "shooting from the hip."
16. The Women Who Changed War Reporting
The Atlantic · by George Packer · March 6, 2021
Excerpts:
“Women no longer face the barriers that confronted Becker’s Vietnam reporters, but they are still less likely than men to gain easy admittance to the insular world of U.S. military officers and national-security officials. So perhaps it makes sense that the most thoroughly Iraqi book of the war by an American journalist has been written by a woman. Getting a book like The Spymaster of Baghdad into readers’ hands at this stage of the post–September 11 conflicts is an uphill battle. But as Iraq begins to be rebuilt by its people, there is real value in revisiting the country through an all-Iraqi narrative. The Spymaster of Baghdad achieves through an excellent yarn what Fire in the Lake achieved through the epic synthesis of history, politics, and culture. Coker’s Iraq, like FitzGerald’s Vietnam, emerges as its own country, more impressive than the stage of an American drama that absorbed us for a few years, more real than the projection of American fantasies and traumas, returning to its own people, finding its own destiny.”
17. FDD | Biden Must Do More to Deter Russian Aggression and Uphold Global Norms
fdd.org · by Anthony Ruggiero · March 5, 2021
Excerpts:
“Meanwhile, while the Biden administration and the European Union have so far proven unwilling to heed Navalny’s call to target major Russian oligarchs, the allies should at least enforce their existing sanctions by targeting individuals and entities that facilitate sanctions evasion. For example, Navalny’s organization alleges that Bortnikov’s son Denis “acts as a ‘wallet’ for his father’s ill-gotten gains to hide their true beneficiary and avoid existing sanctions.”
The new sanctions are an important first step toward fulfilling Biden’s pledge to stand up to Russian aggression and reinvigorate the transatlantic alliance. But those sanctions are not enough. Additional transatlantic action can help the United States and its allies deter further CW use and uphold global norms against CW use and violations of human rights."
18. Why is military history in retreat at universities?
universityworldnews.com · by Nathan M Greenfield · March 6, 2021
19. Special Operations News Update - Monday, March 8, 2021 | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · March 8, 2021
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“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
- Ulysses S. Grant
“A political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.”
- George F. Kennan
"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
- John Stuart Mill