Witnesses to D Day

By Roger Angell

Source Link

On June 6, 1944, D Day, I was an Air Force sergeant in the Pacific, half a world away, but, like almost everyone around the globe, I followed the extraordinary event with acute interest. Some future New Yorker colleagues of mine had a closer look. Gardner Botsford, a top-level editor at the magazine for almost forty years, was a young infantry officer aboard a landing craft at Omaha Beach, and he can be seen clearly in one of the most famous photographs of the day, on the starboard side of the picture, in left profile, standing tensely behind the soon-to-be-dropped gate. As he revealed in a memoir, “A Life of Privilege, Mostly,” he had a double task that day, since he was also on an intelligence mission to make contact, within two days, with members of the French underground, at a farmhouse a mile or two inland. He did indeed perform this mission, along with much more, including extended combat, which he talked about only late in life, and with extreme reluctance. The price of this could be seen sometimes during the course of a passing thunderstorm, when he would fall silent and grip his chair.

Cross-Channel Trip

By A. J. Liebling

Source Link

Three days after the first Allied landing in France, I was in the wardroom of an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large) that was bobbing in the lee of the French cruiser Montcalm off the Normandy coast. The word “large” in landing-craft designation is purely relative; the wardroom of the one I was on is seven by seven feet and contains two officers’ bunks and a table with four places at it. She carries a complement of four officers, but since one of them must always be on watch there is room for a guest at the wardroom table, which is how I fitted in. The Montcalm was loosing salvos, each of which rocked our ship; she was firing at a German pocket of resistance a couple of miles from the shoreline. The suave voice of a B.B.C. announcer came over the wardroom radio: “Next in our series of impressions from the front will be a recording of an artillery barrage.” The French ship loosed off again, drowning out the recording. It was this same announcer, I think—I’m not sure, because all B.B.C. announcers sound alike—who said, a little while later, “We are now in a position to say the landings came off with surprising ease. The Air Force and the big guns of the Navy smashed coastal defenses, and the Army occupied them.” Lieutenant Henry Rigg, United States Coast Guard Reserve, the skipper of our landing craft, looked at Long, her engineering officer, and they both began to laugh. Kavanaugh, the ship’s communications officer, said, “Now what do you think of that?” I called briefly upon God. Aboard the LCIL, D Day hadn’t seemed like that to us. There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective.

WHAT FREE MEN WILL DO: 75 YEARS ON, LESSONS FROM D-DAY FOR TODAY’S ARMY

COL. COLE C. KINGSEED

Source Link

Seventy-five years ago, the Allies stormed the Normandy beaches to confront Nazi totalitarianism and liberate Europe. D-Day, June 6, 1944, was a watershed event in World War II and arguably the defining moment of the 20th century in the West. To paraphrase Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: American soldiers, in conjunction with America’s allies, came for one purpose only, not to gain anything for themselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that the United States had for conquest, but to preserve freedom—systems of self-government in the world … to make sure that Hitler could not destroy freedom in the world. It just shows what free men will do rather than be slaves.

By any standard, D-Day was the most complex and daring military operation in the history of Western warfare. By the time the full moon rose above the blood-stained French beaches, nearly 156,000 Allied soldiers had been deposited on the Continent. It was the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. But why is D-Day relevant to today’s American Army? What lessons can our fighting force derive from what Eisenhower termed “the Great Crusade”?

Importance of Coalition Warfare

Modi 2.0 and India’s Complex Relationship With China

By Ankit Panda

Source Link

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party have won a powerful mandate in India’s 2019 general elections.

As India forms a new government and Modi begins a second five-year term, one of the fundamental foreign policy challenges that will remain high on the agenda in New Delhi is the nature of the bilateral relationship with China.

Modi’s second term begins in a turbulent global context, with no sign that either the United States or China will unilaterally capitulate in the bilateral competition that exists between them.

During Modi’s first term from 2014-2019, India unambiguously recognised that its strategic interests in Asia would be best served by betting on the United States.

But beyond the great power rivalry context, Modi will carry forward a complex bilateral agenda with China into his second term.

Modi Reimagines India’s Role in the World

BY HARSH V. PANT 

Source Link

A week into Narendra Modi’s second term as India’s prime minister, he has already signaled his foreign-policy vision for the next several years. On May 30, he named Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to his cabinet. Jaishankar will serve as the powerful minister of external affairs. Typically, the post would go to a high-ranking party member or political ally. But Jaishankar, a former foreign secretary, is a technocrat. One of the most respected foreign service officers in recent times—he was India’s longest-serving envoy to Beijing, an ambassador to the United States, and a key player in the successful conclusion of the U.S-India civil nuclear deal under Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh—he is not even a member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His appointment underscores Modi’s penchant for boldness, especially when the stakes are high.

The Dollar Underpins American Power. Rivals Are Building Workarounds.

By Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope

Source Link

U.S. allies, looking to buck American control over international trade, are developing alternate systems that don’t rely on U.S. currency.

The catalyst was the Trump administration’s decision last year to reimpose trade sanctions on Iran after pulling out of the 2015 nuclear-weapons deal. The U.K., Germany and France didn’t support the sanctions, which include a ban on dollar transactions with Iranian banks. So they are fine-tuning a system to enable companies to trade with Iran without using dollars.

India wasn’t happy either. Iran is a longtime trading partner, and India wants Iranian oil. India began using a similar alternative system in November, and shipping records show it already is being used by international companies to trade with Iranian businesses subject to sanctions.

China and Russia, also eager to break free of U.S. control, are promoting their own alternatives to the global bank-transfer system, which the U.S. effectively controls, and are striking deals to trade with yuan and rubles instead of dollars.

THE REAL ORIGINS OF THE U.S.-CHINA COLD WAR

BY CHARLES EDEL AND HAL BRANDS

Source Link

How should Washington deal with an authoritarian regime that is expanding its influence abroad and repressing its citizens at home? That is the question the United States faces today in dealing with Xi Jinping’s China. But it is not a new challenge. After World War II, the United States faced another authoritarian state intent on expanding its borders, intimidating its neighbors, undermining democratic institutions, exporting its authoritarian model, and stealing U.S. technology and know-how. The result, after a period of initial debate and uncertainty in U.S. policy, was the Cold War: a 40-year competition over power, influence, and the contours of global order.

As tensions between Beijing and Washington harden, there is a growing fear that China and the United States are entering a new cold war—another multi-decade struggle to shape the international system. There is also a growing debate about who or what is responsible for the deterioration in the relationship. Is it the vaulting ambition and personalistic rule of Xi Jinping? The nature of Communist rule in China? The tragic qualities of international relations? America’s own behavior and global ambitions?

China’s US Travel Alert: Weaponizing Tourism Amid the Trade War?

By Ankit Panda

Source Link

This week, China announced a new alert for its citizens that may travel to the United States. A release carried by the state-run Xinhua news agency noted that given “the frequent occurrence of shootings, robberies and theft in the United States,” Chinese citizens would be advised to “fully assess the risks of traveling there.” The alert is valid until the end of the year.

On first glance, the alert bore a resemblance to the reports on human rights in the United States that China has released in recent years as a response to Washington’s own assessments of human rights in China. Given the release of the alert on June 4 — the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 — perhaps this was intentional.

The alert also comes as reports of Chinese travelers being interrogated at U.S. ports of entry have grown. In April 2019, prominent Chinese scholar Zhu Feng was blocked from entry. Other scholars and prominent Chinese have also either voluntarily restricted their travel to the United States or have faced difficulties in procuring visas.

On the Anniversary of Tiananmen Square, What Is Xi Jinping Thinking?

by Carlos Roa

Source Link

When soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on protestors at Tiananmen Square thirty years ago today, Western observers were quick to predict that the regime of the Chinese Communist Party would soon implode.

Who could blame them? Like with the Arab Spring protests of early 2011, it seemed at the time that an unstoppable tide of freedom and vitality was sweeping over the world. On the same day as the Tiananmen Square massacre, Solidarity stormed to victory in Poland’s legislative election, setting the stage for the fall of Communism in that country. Mass demonstrations were underway in Hungary, and revolutions would soon sweep over the entirety of the Eastern Bloc.

Yet now, thirty years later, the CCP is not only still in power, but it is seemingly stronger than ever before. The Party’s efforts to erase the June Fourth Incident (as the Tiananmen Square event is known in the mainland) from public memory means that few people within the country know that it even occurred. A CBS correspondent in Beijing recently attempted to show the picture to recent passersby, none of whom could identify the picture or where it was taken. The country’s professional censors need to be taught about what really happened in 1989 on the first week of their job.

Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all time, is first released in the USSR.

Beijing After Tiananmen, Part 2: Life Under Martial Law

By Bonnie Girard

Source Link

The great divide between Beijing’s 9 million Chinese residents and the infinitesimally small foreign population of less than 1,000 became starkly evident as the city sunk into the long, siege-like period of martial law which followed the massacre of June 4,1989.

I was a member of the tiny foreign population that lived under martial law in Beijing during that second half of 1989. There were no more than a few hundred of us, and some nationalities and regions were represented more than others. The majority of foreigners left in Beijing were from countries that had not gone to the expense of evacuating their embassy staffs. By definition, therefore, there were very few foreign residents left from the richer countries, such as the United Kingdom, most of Western Europe, the United States, or Australia.

The US Must Build Saudi Arabia’s First Nuclear Reactors

BY SAGATOM SAHA

Source Link

For all the attention on Iran’s atomic ambitions and the U.S.withdrawal from a deal meant to hold them in check, there is another nuclear story unfolding in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia intends to award the contracts to build its first two nuclear reactors next year, en route to building 16 of them by 2040. It is a matter of national security that the United States re-establish its leading position in the global nuclear trade by successfully pursuing this and similar projects.

Riyadh’s nuclear ambition is not a one-off story; it represents a larger revival of nuclear power generation. Nuclear may be declining in the developed world, but it is poised for growth in the world’s emerging economies for environmental and technological reasons. The Trump administration should capitalize on these trends to fulfill its promise to revitalize America’s domestic nuclear industry while reducing risk of ceding influence to China and Russia.

What a War With Iran Would Look Like

By Ilan Goldenberg 

Source Link

Tensions between Iran and the United States are at their highest point in years. The 2015 Iran nuclear agreement is teetering. The Trump administration is using sanctions to strangle the Iranian economy and in May deployed an aircraft carrier, a missile defense battery, and four bombers to the Middle East. Washington has evacuated nonessential personnel from its embassy in Baghdad, citing intelligence suggesting that Iran is increasingly willing to hit U.S. targets through its military proxies abroad.

The United States also stated that Iran almost certainly perpetrated the recent damage to oil tankers flagged by Saudi Arabia, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and claimed that Iran had temporarily loaded missiles onto small boats in the Persian Gulf. In early May, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton publicly threatened a response to any Iranian attacks, “whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards [sic] Corps or regular Iranian forces.”

The U.S.A. Unmasked!

by Frank Li

Source Link

With President Trump escalating the hostility against China from a trade war to commercial sabotage (The U.S. vs. China: From the Trade War to Commercial Sabotage!), America has unmasked itself, once again in a big way for the third time this century, that it is not a model for the rest of the world to emulate, from democracy to free market capitalism, but a declining and dangerous empire for the world to deal with ...

In this post, I will unmask America as follows:

America has unmasked itself in a big way three times in this century.

China's comeback vs. America's decline.

It's time to re-write parts of human history!

It's time to re-write parts of American history!

It's time to correct a bunch of century-old western lies!

Let me elaborate on each ...

Why Are Right-Wingers So Obsessed With Electromagnetic Pulses?

By AARON MAK

Source Link

On March 26, Donald Trump issued an executive order to ward off the apocalypse. The “Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses” instructs the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies to evaluate the potential damage of a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse attack and implement measures to protect the U.S. should such an event occur.

A large-scale EMP attack that affects the entire nation would, in theory, involve a foreign power detonating a nuclear missile in the atmosphere above the U.S. The explosion would produce gamma rays that could then disrupt all sorts of electronic equipment on the ground below—cellphones, power grids, the works. It’s not hard to imagine how our society could devolve into a survivalist hellscape if it were suddenly stripped of functioning electronics.

Undeterred Cyber Adversaries Require a More Aggressive American Response

By Bradley Bowman & Annie Fixler

Source Link

America is under attack. In this case, rather than bombs and bullets, undeterred adversaries are using the cyber domain. Every day, they launch thousands of cyberattacks against American individuals, companies, and government agencies—persistently and incrementally chipping away at our security.

This relentless barrage may seem like an inevitable reality of 21st century life. However, given the stakes for American national security, simply shrugging and accepting the cyber status quo would be a dangerous mistake. The U.S. has established deterrence in other warfighting domains. Washington can—and must—do the same in the cyber domain.

The cyber challenge is undoubtedly immense and complex. General Paul Nakasone, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, testified in February, that America is in “constant contact” with its adversaries in cyberspace. In 2017, federal agencies suffered more than 35,000 cybersecurity incidents, a 14 percent increase compared to 2016. In North America alone, cyberattacks cost nearly $158 billion annually or about 0.8 percent of GDP.

Trade War Becomes Cold War

by Jim Welsh

Source Link

The expectation of a global rebound in the second half of 2019 was predicated on a positive resolution in the trade talks between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and the European Union. With a burst of stimulus from the Peoples Bank of China and Chinese fiscal stimulus since last summer, the global economy was beginning to show signs of improvement.

A positive outcome on trade was likely to engender a pick-up in business investment in the U.S. and globally, as the uncertainty of the trade issue was removed. With solid job growth, the highest wage growth in ten years, and Consumer Confidence near 20 year highs, a trade deal would have provided a boost that was likely to lift core inflation above 2.0% and drive the unemployment rate lower. This outcome would have eliminated any chance the Federal Reserve would lower rates before the end of 2019 and potentially raise the specter of an increase. Since the majority of markets participants were expecting the Fed to lower rates, the prospect of an increase would have caught investors off balance.

Much has changed since May 5 when President Trump indicated tariffs would increase form 10% to 25% on May 10. As I noted in a bit of understatement in the May 3 Macro Tides:

Buildings Can Be Designed to Withstand Earthquakes.

By Thomas Fuller, Anjali Singhvi, Mika Gröndahl and Derek Watkins

Source Link

When the shaking started at 5:46 a.m., Yasuhisa Itakura, an architect at a big Japanese construction company in Kobe, was sitting at his desk finishing a report he had toiled over all night. His office swayed, but the books stayed on their shelves and nothing fell off his desk.

“I thought to myself, this earthquake is not that big,” Mr. Itakura said.

It was, in fact, catastrophic. The Great Hanshin earthquake of January 17, 1995, killed more than 6,000 people in and around the industrial port city.

Mr. Itakura had been cushioned from the violence of the earthquake because his three-story office building was sitting on an experimental foundation made from rubber — an early version of an engineering technique called base isolation.

The technique that protected Mr. Itakura’s building is used in roughly 9,000 structures in Japan today, up from just two dozen at the time of the Kobe earthquake. Thousands of other buildings in the country have been fitted with shock-absorbing devices that can greatly reduce damage and prevent collapse.

The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War

By William J. Astore

Source Link

From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing -- and yet more bombing. Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington’s many conflicts. Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of “Made in USA” bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.

Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America’s wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What’s driving this process? 

Rethinking US Grand Strategy

Peter Layton

Source Link

Great power competition is today’s defining strategic issue. Crucially this competition is seen as remaining below the level of great power armed conflict, instead ranging across diverse areas including economic, diplomatic, cyber, information campaigns and proxy wars. Such diversity gives the great powers much more choice in the grand strategies they could potentially use to advance their interests than during the Cold War bi-polar confrontation.

In sharp contrast, American grand strategy thinking has today been captured by a single approach. A recent review of contemporary US grand strategy proposals found the neorealist international relations theory dominates. This way of looking at how the world works has been further narrowed down to the ‘balancing’ subtype.[1] Demonstrating how entrenched this theory now is, the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s approach is effectively neo-realism 101 with balancing at centre stage.[2]

Confronting Iran: To What End?

By Paul Rogers

Source Link

Paul Rogers writes that during May, there was a marked increase in tensions between the US and Iran, increasing the potential for a potentially catastrophic new war in the Middle East. In this article, Rogers responds by exploring what’s motivating Washington, and key regional allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia, to run the risk of such destruction. He also argues that, given the risk of war, it is essential for the remaining members of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to ensure that this agreement survives.

Summary

The escalation of tensions and threats between Iran and the United States during May has increased the potential for a new war in the Middle East with potentially catastrophic social and economic consequences. This briefing seeks to clarify what interests Washington and its key regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, see as worth risking such destruction. And what might be the alternatives?

Introduction

McMaster's Poison Pill Advice on North Korea

by Daniel R. DePetris 

Source Link

H. R. McMaster has had an illustrious career. In his thirty-four years in the U.S. Army, he earned a reputation among his superiors for being an outside-the-box thinker and an aspiring officer. As a twenty-eight year-old Army tank captain in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment during the 1991 Gulf War, McMaster’s unit obliterated a much larger Iraqi Republican Guard force in the desert, destroying thirty tanks, twenty personnel carriers, and thirty trucks in a span of twenty-three minutes. He dazzled some of his fellow officers during his command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tel Afar, Iraq, where he routed Al Qaeda militants from a city that was essentially run by the group.

We all know McMaster’s history—it screams “insider” and “national security expert.” Which is why the former national security adviser’s recent comments pertaining to North Korea on the Axios on HBO program are so head-scratching. Some would even call them crazy.

The first drive-in theater opens, in Camden, New Jersey, United States.

Shaping U.S. Strategy to Meet America's Real-World Needs

By Anthony H. Cordesman

Source Link

It is all too easy to talk about strategy in broad conceptual terms, but strategy does not consist of what people say, it consists of what they actually do. The is not a minor issue as the United States shifts back from the period in which the Cold War ended and it had no serious peer competitors, and ideas like "the end of history" and "Globalism" seemed to promise a steady march towards development, peace, and democracy.

It is all too clear that the U.S. must now a focus on major competitors like China and Russia, deal with more limited regional threats like Iran and North Korea, and deal with broad areas of global instability due to threats from extremists and terrorists. These challenges are further compounded by ongoing U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and the challenge of meeting defense costs that total $750 billion in the President's defense budget request for FY2020.

Data Governance Principles for the Global Digital Economy

Source Link

In January 2019, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for the upcoming G20 summit in Osaka to “be the summit that [starts] world-wide data governance.” The rise of the data economy has driven unprecedented growth and innovation in recent decades but is also generating new policy challenges for global leaders. Figuring out how to govern the complex data ecosystem, both enabling its potential and managing its risks, is becoming a top priority for global policymakers.

In partnership with the Omidyar Network, the CSIS Technology Policy Program and Project on Prosperity and Development developed a set of data governance principles for the G20 member states, which can inform the development of data governance frameworks around the world.

Discussions of data governance are not happening in a vacuum. Laws, conventions, frameworks, norms, and protocols around data have existed for decades. Data governance is implicitly or explicitly wrapped up in existing governance mechanisms around privacy, digital trade and e-commerce, and human rights law. Few of these, however, anticipate emerging technology trends that have extended the reach of digital tracking into the physical world and have allowed us to derive detailed insight from the immense ocean of data generated by the digital economy.

Disruptive Technologies for Defence Transformation: 2018 Post Show Report

Source Link

Thank you for your interest in the Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation Post Event Report - DOWNLOAD CONTENT NOW

We’re Running Out of Spectrum for Both New and Old Technologies

By JANE C. HU

Source Link

5G is coming, and with it, the promise of faster internet that will support innovations like streaming virtual reality, self-driving cars, and smart home and city infrastructure. But before it rolls out to the masses, critical infrastructure details will need to be ironed out—for instance, what radio frequency bands telecommunication companies can use for this new technology. That’s a decidedly unsexy detail, and one most people don’t think about much. We want our radio and TV broadcasts and cellphone reception to just work. Who cares how? But now might be a good time to start caring. New technologies will require frequency bandwidth, leading to clashes between new, shiny innovations and older technologies we still need but take for granted.

Right now, there’s a conflict brewing over a specific spectrum band. Radio, TV, cellphones, satellites, submarines, Wi-Fi, and any other device that can send or receive messages do so using a designated portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to prevent interference between different types of devices. Currently, weather forecasting uses the band between 23.6 and 24 GHz, but in recent years, telecommunications companies have been eyeing the band around 24 GHz for 5G use. NOAA and NASA have raised concerns to the Federal Communications Commission that 5G’s use of nearby bands could affect their ability to keep tabs on hurricanes. Neil Jacobs, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the House Science Committee earlier this month that interference from neighboring bands could result in a 77 percent data loss. Jacobs says that would have both immediate effects, like limiting our ability to predict and track developing storms, and cascading ones, like the potential for government agencies like NOAA to halt the launch of new satellites, since many of them would no longer be effective. But the FCC appears to be pushing on. In April, it auctioned off about 2,900 licenses to use the band between 24.25 and 25.25 GHz, and bidding officially ended Tuesday.

Cyber Warfare And The Future Of Cyber Security

Source Link

Cyber warfare was a staple of movies in the 1990s: just think of Tron, Hackers, or the classic (and terrible) WarGames.

In 2019, though, cyber warfare is no longer science fiction. States are increasingly seeing the cyber realm as an important military theater and deploying considerable resources to develop new types of attacks and ways to defend against them.

This is partly why there has been so much talk about cyber security in recent years. The techniques that companies, states, and individuals are deploying to keep themselves safe are growing more sophisticated year on year. Cyber security is no longer the preserve of multinationals and highly paid consultants: today, even individuals are taking steps to avoid becoming a victim of cyber warfare.

Cyber warfare attacks are generally targeted at critical infrastructures such as power grids, nuclear enrichment facilities, and missile launch systems.

House committee pushes for a window into cyberwar

By Derek B. Johnson

Source Link

Members of the House Armed Services Committee want Congress to be kept in the loop when the executive branch launches offensive operations in cyberspace.

In a legislative draft of the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Emerging Threat Capabilities is seeking to amend Title 10 of U.S. law to require that the Secretary of Defense notify congressional defense committees whenever the department engages in sensitive military cyber operations.

The draft bill would also include additional parameters that further define what offensive or defensive operations constitute a "sensitive military cyber operation."

"The committee notes that the Department's definition of and threshold for sensitive military cyber operations notifications is not aligned with the intent of the committee," the report states. "As military cyber operations increase in frequency and scope, the committee expects to be continually notified and kept fully and currently informed, in order to conduct oversight."

Public Attribution of Cyber Incidents

By Florian Egloff and Andreas Wenger 

Source Link

Florian Egloff and Andreas Wenger write that cyber incidents are increasingly being publicly attributed to specific perpetrators. However, the public attributions issued by states and cybersecurity companies often lack both transparency and verifiability. Our authors contends that strengthening trust in public attributions requires institutional mechanisms at the international level as well as the engagement of the state, the corporate sector and civil society.

Who did it? Identifying the perpetrators of cyber incidents has long been considered to be among the technically more demanding challenges. This remains true today. Owing to the structure of the internet, it is fairly easy for the attackers to achieve a degree of technical anonymity. This gives the attackers an advantage, since the affected party will often not know at first who carried out the attack. The multifaceted and usually time-consuming forensic search for the perpetrator is known as the attribution process. If the affected party believes they have identified the culprit, it must decide whether, and how, to react to the cyber incident. One possible course of action is public attribution, in which responsibility for the cyber incident is publicly assigned to a specific perpetrator.

The GCHQ’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process

By Nicholas Weaver

Source Link

In the U.S. there has been a long debate about “vulnerability equities”—that is, whether the government should disclose a vulnerability it discovers to the vendor, which will then allow users to apply a patch and be defended against exploitation, or keep the vulnerability secret to enable the government’s exploitation of targets. There is little data on how the process works. But the U.S. has the potential to learn how the British handle the same problem.

Recently, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)—which is a division of the GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA)—disclosed a major vulnerability to Microsoft. The company regards this vulnerability, colloquially known as “BlueKeep” but really just CVE-2019-0708, as serious enough to justify providing patches for out-of-support Windows XP and 2003. Although it does not affect Windows 8 and 10, this vulnerability is otherwise reportedly very powerful, enabling an unauthenticated attacker to gain complete control of the remote system. This is the sort of “god mode” exploit that intelligence agencies prize, because it allows them to break into otherwise highly secure targets.

Tactics, Tech and Work of Close Combat Experts is Turning Warfare ‘Upside Down’

by Todd South

Source Link

The days are coming when a squad leader on a battlefield, far from headquarters and large supporting units, will pull out something that looks like a smartphone, open an app and push a button and something in front of his squad will explode.

That’s one piece of a large vision that is emerging from work being done by the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, said one of its originators, retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales.

Scales, a Vietnam veteran and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, was speaking this week at the annual National Defense Industrial Association’s Armaments Systems Forum.

“We used to believe that operational art drove tactical art,” Scales said. “We’re seeing now that it’s the opposite.”…

Read on.

Tactics, tech and work of close combat experts is turning warfare ‘upside down’

By: Todd South   

Source Link

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — The days are coming when a squad leader on a battlefield, far from headquarters and large supporting units, will pull out something that looks like a smartphone, open an app and push a button and something in front of his squad will explode.

That’s one piece of a large vision that is emerging from work being done by the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, said one of its originators, retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales.

Scales, a Vietnam veteran and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, was speaking this week at the annual National Defense Industrial Association’s Armaments Systems Forum.

“We used to believe that operational art drove tactical art,” Scales said. “We’re seeing now that it’s the opposite.”

Exploring the Multi-Spectrum: A Treatise on the American-Donovian War of 2030 and The Prosecution of Multi-Spectrum Warfare

Anthony Orbanic

Source Link

The Mad Scientist team executed its 2019 Science Fiction Writing Contest to glean insights about the future fight with a near-peer competitor in 2030. We received 77 submissions from both within and outside of the DoD. This story was one of our semi-finalists and features a futuristic look at warfare and its featured technologies.

In retrospect, the conflict between the United States and Donovia that began in March, 2030 introduced the world tomulti-domain warfare. For the first time in nearly a century, the United States engaged in conflict with a near-peer opponent. The conflict secured its place in history for not just being the biggest since World War II but also being the first conflict to utilize drones, cyber-warfare and artificial intelligence on a massive scale.

In particular, the conflict brought the concept of “Multi-Domain Warfare” into the common lexicon. According to Gen. David E. Perkins, Commanding General of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, the concept “requires the ability to maneuver and deliver effects across all domains in order to develop and exploit battlefield opportunities across a much larger operational framework. It must include whole-of-government approaches and solutions to military problems and address the use of multinational partner capabilities and capacity.”

Military Power Revue Nr. 1 / 2019

Source Link

This edition of the Swiss Military Revue features six articles on assorted aspects of military power, four of which are in German, one in French and one in English. More specifically, the articles look at 1) trends in strategic missile defense and related implications for Europe; 2) the ‘Gerasimov doctrine’ and its place in Russian military science; 3) what the rapid evolution of cyberspace means for Swiss security and defense; 4) how offset businesses affect security-related technology and industry in Switzerland; 5) the evolution of military strategic communication and the trend of its ever-increasing integration, and 6) how factors including the economy, climate change, geopolis and more influence the energy security of armed forces.

India's Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World

By Shyam Saran

Source Link

The foremost foreign policy challenge for the incoming government will be to adapt to a changing world order. Even as Western dominance has diminished, no power has emerged that is capable of inheriting its mantle. Therefore, the current phase of disruption and altered relations among states is likely to continue. It is also becoming clear that the US and China are moving from competition to confrontation. Balancing relations with these two countries will become more difficult and India will have to contend with pressures to join one camp or another. Against this geopolitical backdrop, the new government will have to fashion a foreign policy that offers opportunities for expanding India’s strategic space even as it seeks to tackle increasingly complex challenges. Some of these are discussed below.

Challenges, Old and New

The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States

By Nimmi Kurian

Source Link

India’s neighbourhood policy makes for a feel-good narrative of reimagining borders as bridges and speaks a comfortable cosmopolitan language, laying claim to a universal vision of globalism. The country’s diplomatic engagement has begun to acquire a level of diversity and complexity in recent years with a host of subregional initiatives such as the Bay of Bengal Multi-Sectoral Initiative for Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), the Mekong Ganga Economic Cooperation (MGC), and the Bangladesh China India Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIM). The past five years have seen a further deepening of this idea at the substantive as well as rhetorical levels with initiatives such as the Neighbourhood First policy, the rechristened Act East policy, Prime Minister Modi’s high-profile visits to South Asian capitals, and the setting up of a States Division at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).1 

But for all its enthusiastic rhetoric, there is a curious paradox at the heart of India’s subregional discourse. While the border states are projected as bridges between India and the neighbourhood, in actual practice India’s neighbourhood policy remains unambiguously top-down and continues to be firmly led and steered by New Delhi. This is both puzzling and problematic since the notion of subregional cooperation is fundamentally premised on making geographically proximate border regions within two or more countries important sites of cooperation. Standing this logic virtually on its head, it is New Delhi that has regularly hosted BIMSTEC’s Working Groups on regional governance issues such as disaster management, customs cooperation and regulation of passenger and cargo vehicular traffic. A comparison with the working of China’s subregional discourse is both revealing and sobering. China’s border province of Yunnan, for example, regularly hosts the Greater Mekong Sub-region Working Groups on a range of regional governance issues such as environment, tourism and agriculture. The centralising impulse is again all too evident in India’s discourse on border trade, for instance in Dharchula, Uttarakhand, an ancient border town located on the trans-Himalayan trading routes with Nepal and China. Trade permits required to conduct trade are no longer issued at the border but instead in Dehradun, the state capital, entailing protracted procedural delays and costs. Taken together, dichotomies such as these represent a classic instance of suboptimal subregionalism at work, a discourse that has clearly ended up aiming low and hitting lower.2