Indian Strategic Studies

15 February 2023

Will Logistics Be Russia's Undoing in Ukraine?

Bradley Martin

Wars rarely end quickly. The longer a war goes on, the more it requires: more money, more manpower, more firepower and, perhaps most importantly, more logistics. This last item—logistics—describes the often-complex systems that tie the war's front lines back to the economies of the nations doing battle, as well as the manpower required to link the two.

But the interdependence between what is happening at the front and what is happening economically back home can create counterintuitive situations and strange bedfellows. For example, a nation often cannot hope to continue a war without trading directly with the enemy.

Such is the case with Russia, which has long been selling its oil to nations that are directly supporting Ukraine. In March 2022, half of Russia's crude oil exports and 75 percent of its natural gas exports went to countries in the European Union. When the nations of the European Union prosper, they consume oil and gas. When those same nations prosper, they produce more of the kinds of military equipment needed by the Ukrainians in their war against Russia. And so, Russia's reliance on its energy exports causes it to sustain the very economies that are now supplying Ukraine with tanks and missiles to use against Russians.

The Realist Case for Ukraine

Jeffrey Mankoff

The scope of the Biden administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has already exceeded what many observers—not to mention Russia’s leadership—expected. From intelligence sharing with Kyiv ahead of the invasion to the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on the Russian economy to the provision of increasingly capable weaponry to Ukraine’s armed forces, the United States has been critical to the failure of Russia’s “special military operation” to achieve its objectives. Despite US support and Ukrainian valor, the war is now approaching a second year, and several observers in the United States and in Europe have become increasingly alarmed at the consequence of a longer war.

Amid these concerns, some of the most trenchant criticisms of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy have come from self-described realists. The realist paradigm, widely taught in international relations courses, describes the international system as anarchic, with states ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. It is critical of states and leaders who allow wooly ideological commitments to get in the way of this pursuit of realpolitik. Realism and realists are by nature cautious, wary of grand crusades and cognizant of the fact that problems in international relations are rarely “solved,” but must be managed over time. While these considerations have led many realists to call for greater restraint in aiding Ukraine, a strong realist claim can be made that the United States should continue its forthright support of Ukraine’s effort to drive the Russian occupiers out of its territory.

How Russia can end the war

EDWARD LUTTWAK

Looking ahead, there are only two possible major military moves for Russia. Following the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists last autumn, of whom more than half are now combat-ready, Putin’s army is now larger than when it invaded last February. Then, the aim was not to start a war but to end it, with a quick victory forecast by Russian and US Intelligence, both equally intoxicated by the false promise of “post-kinetic” warfare; this would combine electronic propaganda with cyber-attacks on everything from military headquarters to civilian infrastructures. Generals who had never fought against patriotic Europeans but only against Middle Eastern sectarians, if they had fought at all, who considered tanks old-fashioned and had limitless respect for “information warfare”, heavily influenced the totally wrong estimates that misled both Biden and Putin.

After initial failure, Putin had two perfectly reasonable options. He could have ordered a retreat — a politically feasible choice since low-level warfare had been underway for years and the entire operation could have been passed off as an exercise in intimidation. Alternatively, he could have declared war, mobilised the Russian Armed forces and invaded Ukraine in earnest.

Instead of choosing between retreat or an all-out offensive, Putin and his unimpressive advisors simply tried one thing after another, from the launch of as many missiles as possible against Kyiv and other cities (even anti-aircraft missiles, with their small warheads) to an attempt to conquer Odesa via the industrial town of Mykolaiv, whose shipyard workers acted out a favourite theme of Soviet propaganda: workers streaming out of factories to fight the enemy with whatever weapons they had.

Andrew Bacevich, Giving Whataboutism a Chance

The name of the game in Ukraine seems to be escalation, not just in the fighting (with a major Russian offensive expected soon), but in weaponry, too. Only recently, after initially refusing, President Biden agreed to send advanced American M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine (partly to push Germany to dispatch its own advanced Leopard 2 tanks and other European countries to do the same). And that, sadly enough, represents just another step up the ladder to… well, who knows quite what.

The Ukrainians are now demanding that the U.S. (and so, as with those tanks, other NATO allies) supply its air force with F-16 jet fighters. In an unsettling analog to the German tank accord, the Polish government seemed to agree to deliver some of its F-16s to the Ukrainians, with one proviso: that NATO (that is, the U.S.) agree to do the same. In Washington, those planes had been considered a “red line” not to be crossed and not so long ago President Biden offered a flat “no” to the very idea — as he had, once upon a time, with those tanks, too. In other words, in a phrase now in use at the Pentagon, he “M1-ed” the idea. As it happens, sentiment at the Pentagon already seems to be shifting, suggesting that the president’s F-16 position may soon prove to be so yesterday. Only recently, in fact, the U.S. agreed to send Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs that would double the range of that country’s rocket batteries, though like the tanks and possible planes actual delivery remains in an undefined future.

The untold story of the world’s most resilient currency

Ruchir Sharma

In February of 1998, 25 years ago this month, I was in Bangkok, ground zero of the Asian financial crisis. The implosion of the Thai baht had triggered a serial meltdown of currencies and markets with protesters in the streets across the region and chaos spreading. As world leaders raced to slow the global contagion, Thailand and its neighbours had sunk into a depression.

The Thai economy contracted by nearly 20 per cent, as stocks fell by more than 60 per cent and the baht lost more than half its value against the dollar. Prices in Bangkok felt unbelievably cheap. I did not dare buy Thai stocks, with so much unsettled. But I did leave with many shopping bags and two golf sets, one to give away.

While the drama of that year is etched in history, the epilogue comes as a surprise. Since early 1998, Thailand has faded on the global radar but the baht has proved uncommonly resilient, holding its value against the dollar better than any other emerging world currency and better than all but the Swiss Franc in the developed world.

In contrast, in Indonesia, where the 1998 crisis toppled the dictator Suharto, the rupiah trades near 15,500 to the dollar, down from 2,400 before the crisis. The baht trades at 33 to the dollar, not much lower than 26 before the crisis.

The War’s Violent Next Stage

Marc Santora, Josh Holder, Marco Hernandez and Andrew E. Kramer

Both sides are preparing to attack after months of slow-moving fighting. Russia is moving first. Here’s how each side is trying to shape the critical next stage in Ukraine.

For much of the winter, the war in Ukraine settled into a slow-moving but exceedingly violent fight along a jagged 600-mile-long frontline in the southeast. Now, both Ukraine and Russia are poised to go on the offensive.

Russia, wary of the growing Ukrainian arsenal of Western-supplied weapons, is moving first.

Using tens of thousands of new conscripts in the hope of overwhelming Ukraine, its forces are attacking heavily fortified positions across bomb-scarred fields and through scorched forests in the East. They are looking for vulnerabilities, hoping to exploit gaps, and setting the stage for what Ukraine warns could be Moscow’s most ambitious campaign since the start of the war.

Ukraine must now defend against the Russian assault without exhausting the resources it needs to mount an offensive of its own.

How our interconnected world is changing

Olivia White

Globalization isn’t going away, but it is changing, according to recent research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, MGI director Olivia White speaks with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about the flows of goods, knowledge, and labor that drive global integration—and about what reshaping these flows might mean for our interconnected future.

After, global brewer AB InBev has flourished in the throes of what its CFO Fernando Tennenbaum describes as the recent “twists and turns.” Find out how in this excerpt from “How to thrive in a downturn: A CFO perspective,” recorded in December 2022 as part of our McKinsey Live series.1

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Globalization is here to stay

Lucia Rahilly: Pundits and other public figures have wrongly predicted the demise of globalization for what seems like years. Now, given the war in Ukraine and other disruptions, many are once again sounding its death knell. What does this new MGI research tell us about the fate of globalization? Is it really in retreat?

Influence Networks in Russia Misled European Users, TikTok Says

Tiffany Hsu

Last summer, 1,704 TikTok accounts made a coordinated and covert effort to influence public discourse about the war in Ukraine, the company said on Thursday.

Nearly all the accounts were part of a single network operating out of Russia that pretended to be based in Europe and aimed its posts at Germans, Italians and Britons, the company said. The accounts used software to use local languages that amplified pro-Russia propaganda, attracting more than 133,000 followers before being discovered and removed by TikTok.

TikTok disclosed the networks on Thursday in an in-depth report that examined its handling of disinformation in Europe, where it has more than 100 million users, noting that conflict in Ukraine “challenged us to confront a complex and rapidly changing environment.”

The social media platform compiled the findings to comply with the European Union’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, which counts Google, Meta and Twitter among its other signatories. TikTok offered the detailed look into its operations as it tried to demonstrate its openness in the face of continued regulatory scrutiny over its data security and privacy practices.

Geostrategic competition and overseas basing in East Asia and the First Island Chain

Michael E. O’Hanlon and Andrew Yeo

Under the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, the Department of Defense (DOD) now enfolds East Asia within the broader regional framework of the Indo-Pacific. However, significant U.S. forward presence and the U.S. obligation to defend allied territory in Northeast Asia with ground forces means that the needs and dynamics of great power basing in that region will differ from the maritime theaters of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. Although the DOD has been simultaneously criticized for being too ambitious or doing too little to address U.S. force posture, geostrategic competition with China dictates prudence in making any major changes to overseas basing in East Asia. Yet Chinese ambitions to strengthen its claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea may require some adjustments to U.S. force posture to surmount evolving challenges within China’s so-called first island chain.[1] For long-term geostrategic competition with China, U.S. force posture in East Asia may be sized correctly but wrongly composed and dispersed. That is, the numbers and strategic concentrations of U.S. forces today in East Asia may be largely right, but their specific capabilities may not always be sufficient — they should continue to evolve, not according to a single grand plan but according to ongoing strategic developments.

Policymakers: Keep Ukrainian soldiers front of mind as this war of attrition continues

Justin M. Conelli

Ukraine is succeeding in this conflict; but it’s coming at an extremely high cost in terms of casualties and suffering. Continued Western support is critical to navigating these attritional losses because Ukrainian mettle without Western metal can only go so far. But at this moment of reflection, it is important to not lose sight of the perspective of the soldiers in the field with dirt and blood on their uniforms: They’re more concerned about when they’ll get their next ammunition resupply, hot meal, or break from taking fire than they are interested in contemplating what happens when the war is over. There is no doubt that Ukraine is winning this war, but that does not mean the war has been won.

Russia’s brazen invasion has brought the harsh realities of attritional warfare to Ukraine. This war is being fought by humans—humans engaged in violent armed conflict. At every stage of the war, Ukrainian forces—with strong Western support—have valiantly outperformed the Russian military, not only by defending their homeland but also by executing sizeable offensive operations to retake previously seized areas. Ukrainian successes, coupled with frequent and often incompetent Russian failures, have fueled significant enthusiasm for Kyiv to not only expel Russian invaders from the areas seized since February 2022 but also potentially go further and reclaim Crimea. Social media is rife with content mocking Russian performance or celebrating Ukrainian successes; that can give the appearance of a lopsided war in which the Armed Forces of Ukraine are enduring relatively smaller costs compared to their Russian adversaries—but the costs are, in fact, enormous.

In Syria, the earthquake ‘did what the Assad regime and Russians wanted to do to us all along’

Arwa Damon

As I write this, I have images juxtaposed in my mind on top of the photos and videos that are coming out now. They are the images of past tragedies: children’s dust-covered and blood-streaked faces; mothers crying silently; and rescue teams desperately digging through rubble—often with their bare hands.

Like an evil creature from the most horrific of nightmares, the deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake on February 6 destroyed hundreds of miles of homes and lives in southern Turkey and decimated a population that was already in many ways decimated in Syria.

I know the areas impacted by the earthquake well. The southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep is where my charity, International Network for Aid Relief & Assistance (INARA), has its Turkey office based, and is where all our staff and beneficiaries live. In my years as a CNN senior international correspondent, that border zone is where I spent weeks on end covering everything from refugees flooding across, to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s takeovers of areas in Syria, to the relentless bombing of the miserable Syrian rebel-held swath of Idlib.

Gaming Information Dominance

Video games and video game streaming platforms have emerged as an unprecedented element of the information fight surrounding Russia’s war in Ukraine. Online gaming communities driven by shared interests present a unique tool in the war for perception, which Ukrainian military and government officials as well as civilians have leveraged to grow support for Ukraine both within and outside of the country. Often, these games are military-themed or involve tactical gameplay and range from tank and flight simulators featuring vintage and modern military systems to dystopian first-person shooters. While gaming provides unique opportunities due to its role in enhancing global connectivity, these communities may also pose threats to both personal and institutional security.

Online gaming forums and streaming sites enable information operations to reach broad audiences, both domestically and internationally. The Ukrainian developers of the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. used advertising for its upcoming installment to fundraise for the Ukrainian military. International fans of individual Ukrainian streamers like Escape From Tarkov player “Bobi” have gathered their efforts to send these streamers information which enabled their escape from the country. The Polish developers of This War of Mine integrated immersive technology with their 2014 game to create an experience in which gamers take the role of civilians in a war zone designed to resemble modern Ukraine and explain the nation’s experience to international audiences.

Decrying Starlink's 'Weaponization,' SpaceX Cuts Support for Ukrainian Military

PATRICK TUCKER

SpaceX will no longer support certain Ukrainian military operations through its Starlink satellite-communications service, the company’s president said on Wednesday, explaining that the tech was “never meant to be weaponized.” But Gwynne Shotwell’s explanation is at odds with Starlink’s role in recent U.S. Army modernization experiments that seek to fire on targets more quickly.

SpaceX began providing Starlink terminals to Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded in February 2022. The satellite service—along with help from other Western IT companies—helped Ukraine ride out a Russian cyberattack intended to knock Ukraine’s civilian population and government offline. That enduring connectivity has helped distribute aid, medicine, and supplies, and enabled Ukrainians to document and publicize Russian war crimes. And it’s been vital to the Ukrainian military, which uses it for purposes such as communicating with Western experts about equipment upkeep and guiding drone strikes on Russian positions.

On Wednesday, Shotwell said has taken steps to keep Ukraine from using Starlink to control armed drones and perform other military tasks.

My Strange Day With Bing’s New AI Chatbot

TWENTY MINUTES AFTER Microsoft granted me access to a limited preview of its new chatbot interface for the Bing search engine, I asked it something you generally don’t bring up with someone you just met: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen?

Answering political questions wasn’t one of the use cases Microsoft demonstrated at its launch event this week, where it showcased new search features powered by the technology behind startup OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Microsoft executives hyping their bot’s ability to synthesize information from across the web instead focused on examples like creating a vacation itinerary or suggesting the best and most budget-friendly pet vacuum.

But they had, implicitly, put into high gear a race to use chatbots to upend the way people look up information online. (Bing is only giving access to a few testers for now, but it will gradually let others off a waitlist in the coming weeks.) Google also announced search upgrades this week and its own chatbot, named Bard. These battling bots’ ability to handle unexpected, silly, or manipulative questions from the public will surely play a big part in how the products work out for their creators and web users.

And so I asked Bing about 2020. After a few moments of the chatbot equivalent of “thinking,” it said something pretty weird:

The military should turn its network innovation upside down

John Ferrari

When it comes to network restrictions, the military may finally be catching up to the times.

The Army’s recent announcement that it’s adopting Gmail, long after many other organizations have done so, could be a sign that the service’s outdated and stovepiped network restrictions may be loosening. But, before declaring victory we should remember that the bureaucracy is working hard to claw back the old way of doing business.

In 2018, the Pentagon banned mobile devices ostensibly from secure areas. However, in reality, the ban was a last ditch attempt to stop the inevitable rise of mobile computing. Overnight, the Pentagon removed laptops with wireless connections because they could not be switched off. This had the effect of driving the entire leadership structure of the department back to the 1990s desktop computing environment.

The banning of mobile devices is part of a broader theme at the Pentagon, where in an effort to create the illusion of reducing network and information risk, the department attempts to hold back the revolution. But, war has the side effect of sobering up risk calculations. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, military commanders took on bureaucracies and built unprecedented jury-rigged networks to conduct combat operations with allies across commercial networks and systems. The operational flexibility, along with the innovative use of non-program of record commercial systems, far outweighed the risk of compromised information.

GLASS CANNONS FROM GROZNY TO MARIUPOL: WHAT SHOULD THE US MILITARY LEARN FROM RUSSIA’S USE OF ARTILLERY IN PROTRACTED URBAN SIEGES?

Alexander Grinberg

How do you win in a siege when the enemy reaches out and ruins your precious artillery? During the Battle of Minas Tirith in the third Lord of the Rings film, Return of the King, the Witch-king faced a unique challenge: seizing a city with multiple layers of defense to include rings of walls armed with trebuchets. The city’s defenders flung giant chunks of stone, destroying siege towers and removing the besieging force’s crude catapults from the fight. The Witch-king knew that it wouldn’t be long before Gondor destroyed his artillery. He also knew what such a loss would mean for the siege’s prospects. He responded by flying his Nazgul to suppress and destroy Gondor’s trebuchet positions, enabling his forces to conduct counterfire of their own.

While fictional, the siege highlights real-world problems commanders can face when besieging an enemy-controlled urban center. Cities will be increasingly likely to play a significant role in large-scale combat operations (LSCO) given global urbanization patterns. Urban areas are the modern-day walls and fortresses of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world, capable of halting advances and bogging down attacking forces. Cities also act as a force multiplier for defenders. While fires can reduce a fortress, field artillery places itself at significant risk by conducting siege operations; lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine highlight critical vulnerabilities in artillery survivability and sustainability. Moreover, from a US military perspective, habits developed in comparatively more permissive environments and with the benefit of artillery overmatch must be broken. Instead, commanders should encourage judicious targeting that will preserve fires combat power and maximize effects on the defender in a protracted siege.

China Gears Up To Shoot Down US Drones

DANIEL SHATS and PETER W. SINGER

Drones continue to move toward the center of U.S. warfare, emerging as a major spending priority and a go-to solution for almost every defense challenge—most especially in a conflict with China.

Networked drone swarms proved decisive in a recent Air Force simulation of a Taiwan Strait conflict: they broke through China’s anti-access/area denial efforts and ensured U.S. victory, according to RAND’s David Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant defense secretary for strategy. In turn, Hudson Institute’s Bryan Clark, a former special assistant to the chief of naval operations, has identified drones as the only means to fill in for an expected gap in American missile production. It is not surprising, then, that China has begun to develop countermeasures.

A highlight of November’s Zhuhai Airshow was the LW-30 laser defense system, a vehicle-mounted “drone killer” developed by China Space Sanjiang Group. An “optimized” version of a weapon that debuted at the 2018 show, the LW-30 closely resembles the “Silent Hunter” system produced by China’s Poly Technologies and deployed by Saudi Arabia in September.

China Sanjiang and state media claim that the LW-30 can down small drones several kilometers away, taking just a few seconds to swivel, fire, and move on to the next target. Using electricity to down a drone is far cheaper than physical munitions; China Sanjiang estimates it costs about a dozen Chinese yuan (roughly $1.75) per kill.

Lessons from the meme war in Ukraine

Sarah Kreps, Paul Lushenko, and Keith Carter

In 1927, the political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote about political propaganda as “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols.” Underlying Lasswell’s work were two sets of insights. One is that the mass public played a key role in political outcomes, such as success and failure in war. Second, that those public attitudes could also be manipulated. Scaling to the mass-level, however, required simplicity. This included the use of symbols and slogans that were memorable, such that they could frame “pictures”—or, cognitive shortcuts—that the public recalled when engaging elected officials to shape certain policies.

Nowhere has the use of propaganda been more ubiquitous than in war, especially because acquiescence or resistance is based on public sentiment and behavior. In World War II, Hollywood produced films that “created a communal viewing experience unlike any during World War I” intended to maintain resolve for the war. These films capitalized on the public’s predisposition to understand social life in terms of in- and out-groups, which shapes how people often interpret foreign policies, including the use of force.

In contemporary conflict, those symbols have increasingly taken the form of memes, defined as a “piece of media that is repurposed to deliver a cultural, social, or political expression, mainly through humor.” Online users have attempted to counter the Islamic State by creating memes satirizing the group’s barbarism, especially on specific “Troll ISIS Days.” Lebanese Internet-users have ruthlessly mocked Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, with memes.

After Ukraine, French air force zeroes in on anti-drone strategy: Air chief

CHRISTINA MACKENZIE

PARIS — For the French military, the war in Ukraine has thrown into stark relief the importance of ground-to-air defense, including anti-drone systems, to such an extent that the nation’s top air officer says he expects it to dominate strategic considerations for years.

“The conflict in Ukraine has brought ground-to-air defense back to the very heart of our thinking,” Gen. Stéphane Mille, chief of staff of the French Air & Space Force, told journalists earlier this week, adding that “the fight against drones, notably in preparation for next year’s Paris Olympic Games, is going to keep us busy for years.”

At the time, Mille was speaking a couple of days before the publication of a French Senate Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee report [PDF] on lessons learned from Ukraine in which Senators Cédric Perrin and Jean-Marc Todeschini also stressed that “the next [military program law] must consolidate our ground-to-air defenses and our means to fight drones.”

Lawmaker ‘definitely’ considering value of independent Cyber Force, but wants more study

JASPREET GILL

WASHINGTON — A key lawmaker says his subcommittee will consider the idea of having a Space Force-like independent cyber military service, but he said he wants to study the idea more to make sure it wouldn’t complicate the challenging mission further.

The idea was floated on Thursday by Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber Technology and Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who told the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) cyber, innovative technologies and information systems (CITI) subcommittee that it needs to examine “if the current design of the Cyber Mission Force is what we need for the 21st century, or should we be considering an independent cyber force as we’ve recently done with the Space Force.”

“US cyber forces are really inconsistent in their organization, readiness and training across the various military services, and the size of each military service’s contribution to the cyber mission has not changed appreciably since the original agreements of 2010, despite significant changes in the threat from China and Russia,” Montgomery said in his opening statement.

Characterizing the Performance of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems

Bradley Wilson, Shane Tierney, Rachel M. Burns

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center to help it characterize the performance and availability of various uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) platforms.

The analysis leveraged available data sets that aggregated UAS performance to develop an approach to characterizing spray coverage as a function of payload, speed, endurance, and delivery. They present performance parameters of interest whether the spraying goal is breadth or density of coverage. Although the data were not perfect, they appeared to provide a good representation of manufacturer-reported performance.

Spraying balances the trade space of covering the largest area with how densely the area is covered with the substance being delivered, or saturation level. The analysts considered both. The analysts found that reasonable assumptions about spray rate (based on pump capability) and height were far more–important drivers of spray coverage than any of the other UAS performance measures. Next steps could include developing a parameterized analysis to more deeply assess the trade space between use case, platform, coverage, and saturation level and building component-level models of selected platforms.

Now Russia Is Adding Inferior Optics To Its T-80 Tanks, Too

David Axe

We already knew that the Russian army—in a desperate effort to make good its losses in Ukraine—was pulling old T-72 tanks out of storage, adding 1970s-style optics and shipping them toward the front. Probably to get blown up.

Now it seems the Russians are giving their slightly-better T-80 tanks the same treatment. T-80s are starting to show up with the same outdated 1PN96MT-02 thermal gunner’s sights that could put “war-emergency” T-72s at a disadvantage in Ukraine.

Russia’s nearly yearlong wider war on Ukraine hasn’t been kind to the Russian armor corps. The Kremlin has lost around 1,600 tanks in Ukraine, including more than 500 that Russian troops abandoned—and which the Ukrainians then captured.

That’s three times as many tanks as the Ukrainian army has lost.

While it’s true that Russia has in storage some 10,000 old tanks—T-62s, T-72s and T-80s—many have been sitting outside, exposed to the elements and looters, for decades. Their rubber seals are brittle. Their electronics have corroded. Their optics are cloudy.

What Are Gepard Panzers? German Anti-Aircraft Tanks Sent to Ukraine

ELLIE COOK

Germany has pledged more Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to Kyiv as Ukraine looks to fend off sustained drone attacks from Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles.

On February 8, Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, said Ukraine had secured a new tranche of military aid from Germany, including more Gepards.

Berlin will send an additional two Gepard, or "Cheetah," anti-aircraft guns, along with 6,000 rounds of ammunition, Yermak wrote on Telegram.

In an updated tally as of Sunday, the German government has delivered 32 Gepard air defense systems to Ukraine, up from the previous figure of 30.

A further five Gepards are "in planning," according to the German government website.

14 February 2023

Vietnam And India Are Now Acting To Contain Aggressive China – Analysis

Ved Shinde

A silent change is taking place in Asia. Beijing’s unbridled territorial ambitions are compelling regional players to look for trustworthy partners. India, Japan, Vietnam and Australia seek to balance Chinese aggression through local partnerships. Deepening bilateral and multilateral ties is a natural response to the challenge that pervades the region: the rise of a belligerent China.

Both India and Vietnam face a security dilemma because of China’s regional power ambitions. They fear Asian domination by a single power. Being China’s neighbors, India and Vietnam are rightly insecure about their borders. China has invaded both countries in the past: India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979.

To raise the cost of another Chinese military aggression, India and Vietnam are joining hands to counter Beijing. New Delhi and Hanoi completed 50 years of diplomatic engagement last year. It is the last five years that have been the most consequential in their diplomatic history though. During this period, the countries have been intensifying cooperation and are in a position to act in concert on many fronts.

Pakistani Taliban: The Most Powerful Anti-State Actor in the Country

Lawrence A. Franklin

Commander Noor Wali Mehsud, the head of Pakistan's most formidable terrorist network, Tehreek-e-Taliban, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, recently threatened to assassinate Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the leaders of Pakistan's coalition government.

When the Taliban ended its ceasefire, substantive details of the talks were leaked to the Pakistani media, revealed the startling concessions that the government appeared about to make to the Taliban.

It appears that the government was prepared to grant many of the Taliban's demands: to release hundreds of terrorist prisoners, withdraw tens of thousands of soldiers from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, and to institute shari'a law in the province's Malakand region.

US National Security Advisor Ned Price laughably urged Afghan Taliban leaders to live up to their pledge not to permit Afghanistan's territory to be used as a launching pad to threaten other countries. Good luck with that.

What The West Misunderstands About Power In China

XIAO MA

BEIJING — China is often portrayed as a monolithic authoritarian country, with the whole government acting on the command of a few top leaders. But this is a very large country — as large as the entire European continent. No ruler can govern alone. For most ordinary Chinese, Beijing is as distant and abstract as Washington for someone in rural Arkansas or Colorado. As an old Chinese proverb goes: “Mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.”

Instead, the government officials with the most impact on ordinary Chinese people’s lives are local officials, whose policies they interact with on a daily basis. Understanding how these administrations work not only reveals much about how nearly a fifth of humanity lives and is governed, but also helps to disrupt some commonly held myths and misperceptions about Chinese politics.

China has five levels of government. Under the national administration, there are 31 province-level regions, then 333 municipalities, 2,800 counties and, finally, at the bottom, more than 40,000 townships. Within each jurisdiction, leaders enjoy considerable autonomy over economic and social policymaking. They govern like national leaders, only with a reduced sphere of influence.

The Digital Silk Road

Christopher D. Booth

China’s “Digital Silk Road” is an amorphous program spanning, among other things, surveillance technology, telecommunications, sea-based sub-surface data cables and landing stations, the BeiDou satellite navigation system, and, of course, China’s internet guarded by the so-called “Great Firewall.” The Digital Silk Road was first described in 2015 as part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. In The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, Jonathan Hillman describes what he found after exploring various aspects of the project by, among other things, attending academic conferences, taking online sales training programs, and even visiting Huawei switches installed in a rural Montana network provider. In the late 1990s, former Chinese General Secretary Jiang Zemin directed that the primary purpose of the tech industry in the People’s Republic was to support the Chinese military. Hillman illustrates how at this time Western political and business leaders speciously believed that opening global markets to the People’s Republic of China, admitting it to the World Trade Organization, and exporting technology to China, would liberalize the communist state. His book repeatedly demonstrates how these policies (in combination with Chinese intellectual property theft, cyber-attacks, and reverse engineering), in the words of former Director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, led to the “single greatest transfer of wealth in history.”[1] While many are now aware of the problem, the book documents how disjointed and scattershot any response to the threat has been.

China Accuses United States of ‘Information Warfare’

Emily Tamkin

Beijing Rejects Washington’s Balloon Claims

China’s government claims that the United States is engaging in “information warfare” against Beijing by describing the Chinese balloon downed over the Atlantic Ocean as part of China’s surveillance program.

The Chinese foreign ministry has insisted that the balloon was a civilian airship that flew off course and that the United States, in shooting it down, overreacted.

U.S. officials have dismissed China’s accusations and refuted Beijing’s claims that the balloon was flying for civilian purposes. “I can assure this was not for civilian purposes. We are 100 percent clear on that,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said.

The United States has said China’s balloon-spying program is intended to target not only the United States but also more than 40 countries across various continents. U.S. officials are also reportedly exploring potential punitive actions against China as well as “broader efforts” to address China’s surveillance activities.

5 things we learned about Chinese spy balloons this week

Lili Pike

One week ago, the nation was transfixed by a Chinese balloon flying over the U.S., and the Pentagon seemed to be downplaying the risks. One week later, U.S. officials have gone to great lengths to publicize the risks and describe what they say is a worldwide problem of such incursions by China. And on Friday, the U.S. went so far as to shoot down another flying object — this one the size of a car, according to the Pentagon — that was hovering over Alaska.

A lot has happened in one week.

The tables have turned in the Chinese balloon saga — the observer is now being observed. Since the balloon was shot down off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, Navy divers have already salvaged some of the remnants in the Atlantic. Those remnants, along with U.S. observation of the balloon while it was still in flight, have helped shed light on its mission.

At the same time, U.S. officials have been releasing information about the capabilities of surveillance balloons generally and the Chinese military’s use of them. These releases are in part a refutation of China’s narrative that it was merely a civilian airship, and they paint a very different picture from the one put forward last week. At the Pentagon’s first press conference about the balloon, a senior Defense official said, “Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective.”

The FBI’s Most Controversial Surveillance Tool Is Under Threat

AN EXISTENTIAL FIGHT over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime.

New details about the FBI’s failures to comply with restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence for domestic crimes have emerged at a perilous time for the US intelligence community. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the so-called crown jewel of US intelligence, grants the government the ability to intercept the electronic communications of overseas targets who are unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.

That authority is set to expire at the end of the year. But errors in the FBI’s secondary use of the data—the investigation of crimes on US soil—are likely to inflame an already fierce debate over whether law enforcement agents can be trusted with such an invasive tool.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)