Nepal Is Caught Between the US and China on Tibetan Refugee Issue

Santosh Sharma Poudel

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On May 20, U.S. Under-Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, who is also the Joe Biden administration’s Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, Uzra Zeya, visited Nepal. Her trip followed a flurry of high-level visits by American officials since Nepal’s ratification of the $500-million Millennium Challenge Compact, in February 2022.

During her visit, Zeya met with high-level officials, including Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. However, it was her visit to two Tibetan refugee camps in Kathmandu that caught the most media attention.

Enroute to Nepal, Zeya stopped in India, where she met with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists. Days before she embarked on her South Asian tour, the president of the Tibetan government-in-exile Penpa Tsering had toured the U.S.

Russia-Ukraine war at 100 days: Compassion fatigue is here

Andrew Mitrovica

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After some time, the potent impulse to help subsides. Empathy wanes, too, replaced by a measure of powerlessness, a numbness, a detachment, and a divide between healer and patient.

It has not taken years, but only 100 days for compassion fatigue to begin, I sense, to creep into how people outside Ukraine feel about what is still happening to people inside Ukraine.

You may have sensed this as well. The outrage and gloom that once were so acute have dulled into resignation. A war that once seemed so close has become, in many ways, distant. The once enthusiastic expressions of solidarity have evaporated in favour of the routine, often mundane, aspects of life.

America Is Using Sanctions To Wage A Technology War On Russia

Robert Farley

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How goes the technology war against Russia? Immediately after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the United States and an alliance of other countries established some of the most aggressive technological sanctions in history against Moscow.

In some ways, this resembled the effort to strangle Russian technology during the Cold War, cutting the Soviet Union off from development in international technology was central to U.S. grand strategy during the Cold War. Indeed, isolating the Soviets was one of the most consistent aspects of a U.S. containment policy that varied widely in its application.

Chip Reliance Breaks Under Cold War-Esque Sanctions

The Truman and Eisenhower administrations came to the conclusion that cutting Russia off from technology would have a long-term detrimental effect on Soviet economic power, and consequently on Soviet military power. The same calculation is in play now; the sanctions are intended to cripple, in the long-term, the growth of Russian science and technology.

Spotlight on Damage to Ukraine’s Farms amid the Russia-Ukraine War

Caitlin Welsh, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. and Jennifer Jun

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Russia’s attacks across Ukraine’s agriculture sector and its theft of Ukrainian grain point to an intentional Russian effort to undermine Ukraine’s agricultural capacity. Prior to the war, Ukraine was one of the top exporters of wheat, corn, barley, and sunflower oil, with 400 million people relying on Ukraine’s exports for their food security. Russia’s war diminishes the country’s ability to produce the agricultural commodities that support food security within its own borders and worldwide. Satellite imagery from March and April and open-source evidence shows the impacts of these attacks on various types of agricultural infrastructure in Ukraine.

Agromol Dairy Farm

Satellite imagery acquired on April 15, 2022, and video evidence from March 31, 2022, suggest a deliberate attack on a major agricultural production facility: the Agromol dairy farm in Shestakove, a small agricultural village roughly 30 kilometers northeast of the city of Kharkiv.

A Force for the Future A High-Reward, Low-Risk Approach to AI Military Innovation

Michael C. Horowitz, Lauren Kahn, and Laura Resnick Samotin

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Gunpowder. The combustion engine. The airplane. These are just some of the technologies that have forever changed the face of warfare. Now, the world is experiencing another transformation that could redefine military strength: the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Merging AI with warfare may sound like science fiction, but AI is at the center of nearly all advances in defense technology today. It will shape how militaries recruit and train soldiers, how they deploy forces, and how they fight. China, Germany, Israel, and the United States have all used AI to create real-time visualizations of active battlefields. Russia has deployed AI to make deepfake videos and spread disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine. As the Russian-Ukrainian war continues, both parties could use algorithms to analyze large swaths of open-source data coming from social media and the battlefield, allowing them to better calibrate their attacks.

Chokepoints China’s Self-Identified Strategic Technology Import Dependencies

Ben Murphy

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China’s "Science and Technology Daily," a state-run newspaper, published a revealing series of articles in 2018 on 35 different Chinese technological import dependencies. The articles, accessible here in English for the first time, express concern that strategic Chinese industries are vulnerable to any disruption to their supply of specific U.S., Japanese, and European “chokepoint” technologies. This issue brief summarizes the article series and analyzes the Chinese perspective on these import dependencies and their causes.

Introduction

Speaking to Chinese scientists in September 2020, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China warned that the PRC is at the mercy of foreign countries that supply it with “chokepoint” technologies. “We rely on imports for some critical devices, components, and raw materials,” he said. PRC leadership concerns about strategic technologies are not new. Many Chinese policy documents issued in the last several years identify categories of technology with particular importance for PRC national security and economic competitiveness. And others, notably China’s 2016 National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy, fret that certain “key and core technologies are controlled by others,” a phrase that Xi also frequently uses. However, as a rule, these policies and other PRC state-run media content rarely go into detail about exactly which “key and core technologies” (关键核心技术) are “controlled by others” (受制于人), nor do they specify just who these “others” are.

Facebook’s Content Moderation Failures in Ethiopia

Caroline Allen, Guest Contributor

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Disinformation and hate speech posted on social media amplifies and escalates social tensions, and can lead to real-world violence. The problem is particularly pronounced in small, developing, and already fragile states like Ethiopia and Burma, where Facebook propaganda has been linked to the genocide of the Rohingya people.

Facebook knows that this is a problem, yet it has barely adjusted its content moderation strategies in smaller countries struggling with conflict and ethnic divisions. The 2021 “Facebook Files” leak demonstrates this by documenting Facebook’s repeated content moderation failures in Ethiopia.

Social media has served as a lightning rod for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, especially as the civil war has escalated. Some language posted on Facebook has verged on incitement to genocide. Dejene Assefa, an activist with over 120,000 followers, called for patriots to take up arms against the Tigrayan ethnic group in October 2021, writing that, “The war is with those you grew up with, your neighbor. If you can rid your forest of these thorns… victory will be yours.” His post was shared over nine hundred times before it was reported and taken down. Assefa’s words can still be found in posts across Facebook.

How the Robot Sophia Raises Ethical Questions for AI-Enabled Warfare

Christina Huynh

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In 2017, Saudi Arabia granted a robot, known as Sophia, citizenship. While Sophia is built with a basic machine-learning model with software designed for general reasoning and responses, Sophia still has more rights than Saudi Arabian women. For instance, Sophia may get married, obtain a passport, travel abroad, and wear any clothing desired without permission from a male guardian. If Sophia has the equivalent rights of a male citizen in Saudi Arabia, then she must also have the right to defend herself or join the military. The question is, should robots equipped with artificial intelligence determine who lives and dies in war?

The dilemma of focus is the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons systems in warfare. According to the Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, “lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) are a special class of weapon systems that use sensor suites and computer algorithms to independently identify a target and employ an onboard weapon system to engage and destroy the target without manual human control of the system.” Keeping in mind that robot autonomy falls on a spectrum based on how “on-the-loop” or involved humans are in control, LAWS has full autonomy and is completely independent from the human (out-of-the-loop). Thus, the introduction of LAWS will change the ethics and operational structure of warfare.

The US is heavily reliant on China and Russia for its ammo supply chain. Congress wants to fix that.

Bryant Harris

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WASHINGTON — The United States has relied almost entirely on China — and to a lesser extent Russia — in recent years to procure a critical mineral that is vital to producing ammunition.

The mineral antimony is critical to the defense-industrial supply chain and is needed to produce everything from armor-piercing bullets and explosives to nuclear weapons as well as sundry other military equipment, such as night vision goggles.

Antimony is now on the front lines of recent congressional efforts to shore up the strategic reserve of rare earth minerals, known as the national defense stockpile. The stockpile includes a multitude of other minerals critical to the defense-industrial supply chain such as titanium, tungsten, cobalt and lithium, but lawmakers expect will become insolvent by fiscal 2025 absent corrective action.

The US Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare On The Nation – OpEd

John W. Whitehead

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Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

GROW, BORROW, RECRUIT, AND REORGANIZE: HOW THE MILITARY CAN GET THE PERSONNEL IT NEEDS FOR DIGITAL WAR

Megan O'Keefe

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“Americans have not yet grappled with just how profoundly the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution will impact our economy, national security, and welfare.”

That’s how former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, the chair and vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), opened their letter introducing the commission’s final report, released last year. Despite regular news stories about how various government entities are endeavoring to include AI and other technologies into their existing operations, the military is in a similar place to the rest of American society. Recently, two scholars working with the military on AI, Brandon Leshchinskiy and Andrew Bowne, said total cultural change was necessary for the military to embrace future warfare. They specifically argued that the military could not continue to apply incremental fixes to a problem that required greater creativity. At the heart of the new and creative solutions this challenge requires is managing talent.

U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine’s War Strategy, Officials Say

Julian E. Barnes

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WASHINGTON — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has provided near-daily updates of Russia’s invasion on social media; viral video posts have shown the effectiveness of Western weapons in the hands of Ukrainian forces; and the Pentagon has regularly held briefings on developments in the war.

But despite the flow of all this news to the public, American intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures, according to current and former officials.

Governments often withhold information from the public for operational security. But these information gaps within the U.S. government could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to decide how to target military aid as it sends billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine.

Top general details plan to train Ukrainians on rocket artillery

Dan Lamothe and Cate Cadell

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The U.S. military has devised a plan to train a platoon of Ukrainian soldiers at a time on how to use sophisticated multiple-launch rocket artillery, the Pentagon’s top general said Wednesday, raising the likelihood that more of the weapons could be sent to Ukraine.

The plan is contingent on an initial group of Ukrainian soldiers showing proficiency on it, said Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The transfer of additional rocket artillery to Ukraine from existing U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps stocks also would require explicit approval from the Biden administration.

“We’ve got to start this thing with a program that is rational and deliberate and gets them trained to a standard where they become effective,” Milley said, speaking to reporters as he returned to Washington from France. “It will do no good to just throw this weapon system into the battle. You’ve got to be trained on it to get the maximum effective use out of the weapon as a precision system.”

After 100 Days, Russian Offensive Crawls Toward Eventual Defeat

Pavel K. Baev

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Russian military strategists argue that modern wars are decided in the high-intensity initial period; and the multi-pronged large-scale offensive into Ukraine was indeed launched, on February 24, 2022, with the aim of achieving a decisive success in the first couple of weeks. Yet as the war crossed the symbolic 100 days milestone last weekend (June 4), nothing resembling a victory was discernible on Russia’s strategic horizon, even if the aims have been reduced to conquering the devastated Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian troops keep pushing into the ruins of Sievierodonetsk behind heavy artillery barrages, but they cannot deliver anything resembling the elegant enveloping operations that are so highly valued by Russia’s military theorists (Svoboda.org, June 3). The sequence of minor tactical successes over the last couple of weeks may, in fact, bring strategic defeat closer, as tired battalion tactical groups take more casualties and can only be merged together rather than reinforced due to the lack of reserves (Riddle, June 3).

Russian high command has given up on concepts describing the modern battlefield as an interplay of high-technology weapons systems, and it has fallen back on Soviet-era field manuals prescribing massive applications of firepower. This archaizing of operational planning is accompanied by the de-modernization of Russian force structures: legacy weapon systems are being reintroduced, while vintage armaments such as T-62 tanks are recovered from old depots (Ferra.ru, May 30). The Russian Air Force can neither establish control over the airspace nor provide effective ground support, so it is artillery that dominates the open but densely built-up front lines of the battle for Donbas (Meduza, June 3). Numerical advantage in large guns is still on the Russian side, but the accelerated delivery of various Western artillery systems, including M777 howitzers from the United States and its allies, will soon give the Ukrainian army a significant edge (Izvestia, May 19). What makes Russian command even more nervous is Washington’s decision to supply Ukraine with the M142 HIMARS guided missiles with a range of 70 kilometers, which could punish the Russian tactics of amassing artillery in fixed positions (Svoboda.org, June 1).

NATO Is Out of Shape and Out of Date

Edward Lucas

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Is NATO brain-dead or back in business? Less than three years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron famously diagnosed “the brain death of NATO.” Rhetoric aside, his point was fair at the time: Europe’s dearth of strategic thinking combined with the unpredictability of U.S. policy under then-President Donald Trump spelled serious trouble for the Cold War-era alliance.

Now, all talk is of NATO’s revival and resurgence. Russia’s war on Ukraine has given an urgent new relevance to the bloc’s core mission of territorial defense. NATO members appear to have found a new unity of purpose, supplying Ukraine with weapons, reassessing the threat from Russia, hiking defense budgets, and bolstering the security of the alliance’s eastern frontier. But the “honeymoon,” in the words of Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, was brief. As the war drags on, strains are showing, and the alliance is still shaky.

How AI-Powered Data Will Become Every Army Commander’s Wingman

Kris Osborn

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Information is now considered a full-fledged weapon of war due to recent technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), high-speed computing, and secure networking technologies, all of which are now shaping weapons development and operational planning.

The Army’s Project Convergence “campaign of learning,” for example, used AI-enabled computing to organize, analyze, and distribute otherwise unmanageable amounts of networked sensor data across multiple domains in seconds. This process, now evolving to incorporate other U.S. military services and even international partners, shortens the sensor-to-shooter time from minutes to seconds. For instance, commanders moving toward hostile forces in a combined arms maneuver formation can receive threat and targeting information in near real time in order to quickly launch necessary counterattacks and defenses. Moreover, the incoming information is organized in seconds by Firestorm, an AI-capable computer that performs analytics on data arriving from drones, aircraft, ground troops, and even armored vehicles. A synergized view of the battlefield is presented to human decisionmakers, offering them specific recommendations regarding which weapon or counterattack method would be optimal for a particular threat scenario.

Can Nuclear Energy Come Back from the Grave?

NICK BUTLER

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LONDON – Nuclear power has been in decline since the Fukushima disaster in Japan more than a decade ago, but it may be poised for a comeback. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring natural-gas prices have led some to argue that nuclear energy can help solve the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. Is the industry back in business, or will this prove to be another false dawn?

Until recently, nuclear power’s prospects seemed poor. Plants built in the 1970s and 1980s are nearing the end of their working lives, while Germany and Japan decided to shut down theirs for political reasons. Of the relatively few new nuclear plants currently being built, many have been blighted by management failures and technical faults. The flagship EPR pressurized water reactors at Flamanville in northern France and Olkiluoto in Finland are, respectively, 13 and 12 years behind schedule. Hinkley Point in southwest England, which was supposed to have provided the power to cook Britain’s Christmas turkeys in 2023, may now be operational in 2027. Inevitably, all of these projects are massively over budget.

What the Ukraine War Should Teach China

MINXIN PEI

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CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA – As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its fourth month, the endgame remains murky. But one thing is clear: Russia’s military has taken a beating from Ukrainian forces that, at the start of the conflict, were thought to be no match for it. For China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which shares many of the deficiencies that are undercutting Russia’s effectiveness on the battlefield, this should be a wake-up call.

One such deficiency is corruption. Of the world’s 20 largest economies, Russia rates the worst in this domain. Perhaps it should not have been surprising, then, that Russia’s military – long considered one of the world’s strongest – has been severely weakened by a variety of abuses. Judging by the number of senior generals arrested for corruption in China in the last decade, the rot inside the PLA may run just as deep.

The Unintended Impacts of U.S. Weapons Supplied to Afghanistan

Erica Mumford

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The loss and leakage of U.S. equipment due to poor oversight and accountability of weapons strengthened the Taliban’s forces. The U.S. delivered a significant amount of security assistance to Afghanistan since 2002 — for nearly 20 years before the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. The large quantity of weapons, ammunition and equipment provided to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) has had unintended and negative impacts for the security and humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, as well as toward achieving U.S. policy goals. The scale of such shortcomings is likely to have long-term security implications in the region.

Security Assistance Poses a Dilemma for the U.S.

In 2020, U.S. military aid amounting to $16.22 billion was supplied to 143 recipients globally. Security assistance is a global systemic risk, as the majority of illicit weapons were at one point diverted from legal channels. Not only do the proliferation risks seen in Afghanistan raise doubts regarding the effectiveness of the billions of dollars of U.S. security assistance distributed globally, but it also puts in question the policy of supplying weapons to government-backed forces in conflict-affected countries. Security assistance and weapons supplied to Ukraine could similarly lead to unintended consequences of arms proliferation to Russian forces, and beyond Ukraine’s borders in years to come.

China, Cambodia Breaking Ground on Joint Port Project

David Rising and Sopheng Cheang

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Cambodia denied again Tuesday that it will allow any Chinese military presence at a port where it and China are beginning an expansion this week. The joint project has prompted concern in the United States and elsewhere that it will be used by Beijing as a naval outpost on the Gulf of Thailand.

Chief government spokesman Phay Siphan described the expansion of the Ream Naval Base as “cooperation between China and Cambodia” and said the Chinese ambassador to Cambodia will preside over the groundbreaking on Wednesday along with Cambodia’s defense minister and other senior military officials.

He denied, however, a report in the Washington Post citing an anonymous Chinese official that the facility on the northern side of the Cambodian base would be used in part by the Chinese military.

What’s the Status of the Much-Discussed China-Nepal Railway?

Biswas Baral

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The story starts in December 1975, during the trip to China of U.S. President Gerald Ford.

As first reported in the BBC, Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, were talking to Deng Xiaoping, the vice premier of China. With his trip coming shortly after India’s annexation of the Kingdom of Sikkim, Ford asked Deng if India would now look to invade Nepal.

Assuring the American duo that China is doing all it can to prevent such an eventuality, Deng added, “…but what we can do is quite limited. Perhaps things will get better when our railroad into Tibet is accomplished.”

China seems to have understood the strategic value of a trans-border railway to Nepal, by way of Tibet, even back then. But the idea of that extended Chinese rail-line was put on hold until China was better equipped to take up such an ambitious enterprise.

In a Connected Era, We Talk Too Much About Individual Weapons

TRAVIS SHARP, CHRIS BASSLER and TYLER HACKER

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Each year, the U.S. defense community devotes considerable attention to individual weapons. Since 2021, for example, congressional proceedings have mentioned the F-35 aircraft more than 420 times, including in speeches and reports discussing its flight performance, economic implications, and more. The time spent appraising specific platforms is understandable given the huge investments and cutthroat politics surrounding these projects, not to mention that the budget boils everything down to line items. Yet this extensive attention is misplaced.

Modern weapons do not operate alone, but as subcomponents of battle networks or reconnaissance-strike complexes of sensors, shooters, enablers, and deciders. These “networked force packages,” as we call them, form a middle layer between individual platforms and force structure. In basic terms, a networked force package is two or more interconnected weapons that perform a military mission.

The U.S. defense community should adopt a similar approach to analyzing the operational value and cost-effectiveness of the things it buys, or proposes to buy. This approach will align weapons assessment with how the U.S. military fights. It will also further leverage an enduring advantage over China and Russia: the U.S. openness to rigorous analysis.

Global arms industry getting shakeup by war in Ukraine – and China and US look like winners from Russia’s stumbles

Terrence Guay

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As the U.S. and its allies pour significant sums of money into arming Ukraine and Russia bleeds tanks and personnel, countries across the world are rethinking defense budgets, materiel needs and military relationships. Countries that historically have had low levels of defense spending such as Japan and Germany are bulking up, while nations that purchase most of their weapons from Russia are questioning their reliability and future delivery.

My research in this area suggests that, however this war eventually ends, the repercussions for the global defense industry, and for the countries whose companies dominate this sector, will be enormous. Here are four takeaways.

1. Russia will be the biggest loser

Russia’s general sales pitch for its weapons has been they’re “cheaper and easier to maintain than Western alternatives.” This is why Russia accounted for 19% of the world’s arms exports from 2017 to 2021, second only to the U.S., which had 39% of the market.

Russia’s Use of Cyberattacks: Lessons from the Second Ukraine War

Mitchell Orenstein

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Russia, probably more than any other leading power, launches cyberattacks against other countries as a matter of routine. Sometimes, Russian cyberattacks accompany military action, as in the current war in Ukraine. At other times, Moscow uses cyberattacks to disrupt or weaken societies, for instance during the 2016 US Presidential election. Russia also uses its formidable cyber arsenal to threaten governments in response to a specific event, for instance when Finland welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to speak at its parliament in April.

What do Russian actions during the Second Ukraine War (which started in February 2022) reveal about Moscow’s approach to cyberattacks? Do officials in the Kremlin think about cyber activities differently in wartime versus peacetime? What might these differences say about Russia’s vaunted cyber arsenal going forward?

Scientists Found a Way to Make Shock-Absorbing, Reusable Body Armor

CAROLINE DELBERT

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Mechanical engineers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have found a new way to build body armor with a lightweight elastomer material that relies on a complex liquid crystal structure. The resulting armor is “lighter, stronger, and reusable,” according to the university’s press release. That could be a game-changer in the highly deformable world of body armor.

Sung Hoon Kang—senior author of the new paper, published in February in the journal Advanced Materials—is part of the tantalizingly named Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI), established in 2012 to study “science associated with materials and structures under extreme conditions and demonstrating extreme performance.” Its projects are funded by organizations like the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, with areas of study including things like how materials behave in Earth’s mantle.

Syria’s ‘Cold’ Civil War Could Easily Get Hot Again

Alexander Clarkson

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Back in June 2011, when news began to filter out from Syria of the first signs of armed resistance against the Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad, few could have predicted the level of disruption to the global order that the conflict in Syria would go on to produce. After months of brutal violence against protesters inflicted by the Assad regime, local inhabitants around the town of Jisr al-Shughour in the northern province of Idlib seized a police station on June 4, triggering a major shift whose implications few observers fully understood. Two days later, armed resistance led by police officers who had defected to the opposition in the face of approaching Syrian military units marked the beginning of a conflict that would reshape the politics of the Middle East and Europe.

A vast toll of human suffering compounded by regime atrocities—including the use of poison gas—as well as the devastation wrought by the Islamic State, factional infighting among a fractured rebel movement and attempts by Syrian Kurdish militias to carve out their own quasi-state led to a fracturing of Syrian society that does not look like it will be resolved anytime soon. Huge waves of Syrian migration fueled by endless combat and economic collapse created a diaspora network of up to 11 million refugees spread across Lebanon, Turkey, Germany and many other states that now links the politics of the countries in which they have settled with developments in the communities from which they have fled. .

World Bank slashes global growth forecast to 2.9%, warns of 1970s-style stagflation

Karen Gilchrist

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The World Bank on Tuesday slashed its global growth forecast and warned that many countries could fall into recession as the economy slips into a period of stagflation reminiscent of the 1970s.

Global economic expansion is expected to drop to 2.9% this year from 5.7% in 2021 — 1.2 percentage points lower than the 4.1% predicted in January, the Washington-based bank said in its latest Global Economic Prospects report.

Growth is expected to then hover around that level through 2023 to 2024 while inflation remains above target in most economies, the report said, pointing to stagflation risks.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resultant surge in commodity prices have compounded existing Covid pandemic-induced damage to the global economy, which the World Bank said is now entering what may be “a protracted period of feeble growth and elevated inflation.”

More bodies found in Mariupol as global food crisis looms

BERNAT ARMANGUÉ and YURAS KARMANAU

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BAKHMUT, Ukraine (AP) — Workers pulled scores of bodies from smashed buildings in an “endless caravan of death” inside the devastated city of Mariupol, authorities said Wednesday, while fears of a global food crisis escalated over Ukraine’s inability to export millions of tons of grain through its blockaded ports.

At the same time, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled fiercely for control of Sievierodonestk, a city that has emerged as central to Moscow’s grinding campaign to capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, known as the Donbas.

As the fighting dragged on, the human cost of the war continued to mount. In many of Mariupol’s buildings, workers are finding 50 to 100 bodies each, according to a mayoral aide in the Russian-held port city in the south.

Leverage the Joint Intellectual Capacity of Senior PME

Colonel Heather Levy

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In May 2020, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) called for updated leader development strategies, including professional military education, to better counter the rapidly changing security environment and help the services develop intellectual overmatch against adversaries. The vision statement defines overmatch as rooted in producing officers that are strategically minded, critical thinkers, and creative joint warfighters. The JCS paper also includes talent management and an outcomes-based model. The services continue to address these and other proposals for improving the military’s strategic capacity through human intellectual capital, but there is room for additional improvement in how the war colleges tackle senior professional military education. All requirements can be tailored into an interwar approach to leverage the intellectual capital already resident in the senior service colleges, with little or no additional financial cost.

In the interwar period, the Marine Corps revolutionized its small force to take ownership of amphibious landing operations. They wrote doctrine, developed an operationally focused headquarters and task-force organizational structure, and conducted training in conjunction with Navy exercises to counter the hard lessons learned at Gallipoli. Through a rigorous wargaming and war exercises program, the Marine Corps was able to modify and validate the organizational, equipment, logistics, and supply requirements to support their audacious new doctrine.

The Fight of Our Lives

GEORGE SOROS

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DAVOS – Since the last Davos meeting, the course of history has changed dramatically. Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening. Even when the fighting stops, as it eventually must, the situation will never revert to the status quo ante. Indeed, the Russian invasion may turn out to be the beginning of World War III, and our civilization may not survive it.

The invasion of Ukraine did not come out of the blue. The world has been increasingly engaged over the past half-decade, or longer, in a struggle between two diametrically opposed systems of governance: open society and closed society. Let me define the differences as simply as I can.

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society, the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state. Other issues that concern all humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to this systemic struggle. That’s why I say our civilization may not survive.