Alert over Chinese cyber campaign targeting critical networks

Alex Scroxton

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The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), alongside intelligence agencies from the Anglophone Five Eyes alliance, has issued guidance highlighting a campaign of Chinese state-sponsored activity targeting critical national infrastructure (CNI) networks.

Working alongside Microsoft – which has attributed the campaign of malicious activity to an advanced persistent threat actor it has dubbed Volt Typhoon having recently revised its threat actor naming taxonomy – the intelligence community’s disclosure includes technical indicators of compromise and examples of the tactics, techniques and procedures being used by the group.

“It is vital that operators of critical national infrastructure take action to prevent attackers hiding on their systems, as described in this joint advisory with our international partners,” said NCSC operations director Paul Chichester.

“We strongly encourage providers of UK essential services to follow our guidance to help detect this malicious activity and prevent persistent compromise.”

According to Microsoft, Volt Typhoon has been active for approximately two years, and has targeted multiple CNI operators in the US Pacific island territory of Guam, as well as in the US itself. Organisations targeted include communications services providers, manufacturers, utilities, transport operators, construction firms, IT companies, educational institutions and government bodies.

According to The New York Times, the focus on Guam is particularly concerning given the territory’s proximity to Taiwan, and its value to the US in mounting a military response in Taiwan’s defence should China attack it.

Microsoft said that based on the behaviour it has observed, Volt Typhoon “intends to perform espionage and maintain access without being detected for as long as possible”.

Decoupling Is Already Happening—Under the Sea

Elisabeth Braw

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Subsea cables carrying internet traffic connect the world by traveling through risky waters. That, as the world now knows, makes them vulnerable to geopolitically motivated harm. But the cables are a remnant of more peaceful times, when operators didn’t have to worry about geopolitics. Now it’s no longer safe to build new cables connecting, say, the United States and China. We’re entering the era of the undersea Iron Curtain.

U.S. Apathy Paved the Way for China in Africa

Howard W. French

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In April 1997, toward the end of the protracted demise of the United States’ longtime Cold War client Mobutu Sese Seko, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, flew to the capital of what was then called Zaire to try to persuade the besieged dictator to step down.

As I stood outside the drawing room of the palace where Mobutu and Richardson met in the morning, an aide to Richardson sidled up to me and whispered an invitation in my ear. If I, as the New York Times bureau chief for the region, would like to fly with them to the southern city of Lubumbashi to meet Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader whose Rwanda-backed forces were taking over Zaire, I should walk toward Richardson’s parked motorcade and stand there and stand by, not saying a word to anyone.

In the golden sunshine late that same afternoon, I was aboard Richardson’s jet as it approached Lubumbashi low over the surrounding scrubland and landed. The ongoing civil war had long ago interrupted commercial air traffic into Zaire’s second largest city, but Lubumbashi sits in the heart of the mining region of a country so richly endowed in minerals that it has been called a geological scandal, and because of this there was hardly any space to park on the airport’s aprons. In anticipation of Kabila’s victory, which indeed did not lie far into the future, private jets that had flown in the executives of Western mining companies seeking new deals for themselves occupied almost every spot.

A lot can happen in a quarter of a century, though—especially when you’re not paying attention, as has largely been the case with the United States regarding Africa. Back then, there was so much talk about the enormous profits that lay ahead for Western companies in the business of extraction, once the corruption and chaos of the Mobutu era was put in the past, that many people in Zaire (now renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and throughout Central Africa thought the United States had sponsored Kabila’s takeover of the country in order to dominate its mineral wealth into the indefinite future.

China Is Developing and Developed at the Same Time

Philippe Benoit

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The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted unanimously that China should no longer be considered a “developing country.” A major motivation is to deny China the preferential treatment it receives as a developing country under the World Trade Organization, the U.N. climate framework, and other international arrangements. Indeed, from Africa to Latin America and even Europe, China is very much adopting the role of a rich global power.

And yet, China continues to exhibit many traits of a developing country, including in energy and other areas, and particularly outside the major urban centers most visible to foreigners. The truth about China’s status as a developing country is far more complex.

China has transformed itself from a low-income country in the 1990s into the world’s second-largest economy, with many attributes of a rich global power projecting its economic and diplomatic influence abroad. Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron became another in a line of European leaders to visit China, soliciting closer business ties, while also hoping to encourage Beijing to exercise its influence on Moscow regarding the invasion of Ukraine. China is projecting itself increasingly in international affairs, with the largest number of foreign postings (surpassing the United States) and repeatedly mobilizations of its military (third behind the U.S. and Russia) to the disquiet of its neighbors and others. Indeed, China is acting very much like a wealthy global power.

But China also still exhibits various characteristics of a developing country, including a population of more than 200 million people without access to clean cooking technologies; widespread pollution; and a ranking under the Human Development Index—which focuses on health and education outcomes—of 79th out of 191 countries (scoring below, for example, Sri Lanka and Iran). Even its continuing heavy reliance on coal, a cheap but dirty fuel, is arguably a developing country trait that contrasts with the substantially lower shares achieved by advanced economies such as those of the European Union and the United States.

China is expected soon to graduate from “middle income” into “high income” under the World Bank country classification system—which arguably is part of the reasoning underlying the U.S. House vote—but this change won’t immediately erase its developing country aspects. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that it will take China until 2030 to provide basic clean cooking access to all. Moreover, China is still, in U.S. dollar terms, far from the income levels enjoyed in developed Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economies; notably, its GDP per capita is currently half that of Portugal and equates to the average income of the world population across all developed and developing countries.

‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade

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Wall Street forecasts are now even more optimistic than Beijing’s unreachable growth target RUCHIR SHARMAAdd to myFT A shopping centre in Beijing. When retail sales came in way below analysts’ estimates, one attributed this to ‘seasonal adjustment’, as if spring had come unexpectedly © Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images ‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade on twitter (opens in a new window) ‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade on facebook (opens in a new window) ‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade on linkedin (opens in a new window) Save current progress 0% Ruchir Sharma MAY 21 2023 236 Print this page Receive free Chinese economy updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Chinese economy news every morning. The writer is chair of Rockefeller International Something is rotten in the Chinese economy, but don’t expect Wall Street analysts to tell you about it. 

There has never been a bigger disconnect, in my experience, between some of the rosier investment bank views on China and the dim reality on the ground. Perhaps reluctant to back off their calls for a reopening boom this year, sellside economists keep sticking to their forecasts for growth in gross domestic product in 2023, and now expect it to come in well above 5 per cent. That’s even more optimistic than the official target, and wildly out of line with dismal news from Chinese companies. Hopes for a reopening boom were based on the premise that, once released from lockdown, Chinese consumers would go on a spending spree, but company reports show no sign of one. If China’s economy were growing at 5 per cent, then based on historical trends corporate revenues should be growing faster than 8 per cent. Instead, revenues grew at 1.5 per cent in the first quarter. Corporate revenues are now growing slower than officially stated GDP in 20 of China’s 28 sectors, including consumer favourites from autos to home appliances. 

Weak revenues are in turn depressing earnings for consumer goods companies, which normally track GDP growth quite closely, but shrank in the first quarter. Instead of a reopening rush, the MSCI China stock index has fallen 15 per cent from the January peak and consumer discretionary stocks are down 25 per cent since then. If the analysts were right, and consumer demand was picking up in what one described as a “boomy” economy, imports would be strong. Imports fell 8 per cent in April. When retail sales and industrial output came in way below analysts’ estimates last week, one attributed this miss to “seasonal adjustment”, as if spring had come unexpectedly this year. China’s credit growth is weakening too, up by just Rmb720bn ($103bn) in April, half as fast as forecasters expected. 

Revitalizing Strategic Analysis for a New Era of Competition

Anthony H. Cordesman , Benjamin Jensen , and Adrian Bogart

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The current methods and processes used across the U.S. government to analyze national security fall far short of the requirements necessary to meet the needs of the nation. Strategic analysis has become too limited and does little more than set broad goals without describing how to integrate military power with other instruments of statecraft or assess their true costs. Moreover, it struggles to keep up with the rapid military and economic changes in rival states such as Russia and China.

The result is inevitable: stilted progress and diminishing marginal returns. Efforts to align the national security enterprise, such as the recent Joint Concept for Competing, stall inside a bureaucracy that struggles to translate concepts and goals into realistic plans and budgets. Absent a revitalization of wargames, net assessment, red teaming, and data science—methods that stress analyzing alternatives and competitive decisionmaking—twenty-first-century strategy will remain a collection of hollow promises.

The Need for a Truly Integrated Mix of National Security Strategies

Current approaches to strategic analysis often fail to tie strategy to the plans, programs, and budgets across the federal government. This failure is all too clear in the FY 2024 budget requests. There is no integrated national security strategy of the kind called for in the Joint Concept for Competing. The Department of Defense (DOD) request does not have a matching national security section in the budget requests for the Departments of State, Homeland Security, or Energy. In addition, the steadily rising costs of the Department of Veterans Affairs are not tied to any integrated plan for military personnel in the DOD. In other words, there is no proper accounting for the cost of securing the nation’s interests.

There is only a marginal effort to link the DOD’s military budget requests to national strategy or annual threat assessments. The secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Staff no longer issue the annual posture statements used to help ensure strategy was openly tied to planning, programming, and budgeting data. The FY 2024 defense budget request illustrates these failures. The budget summaries only cite vague strategic goals, and the detailed budget documents are little more than shopping lists for the individual military services and defense agencies. Even when some budget requests have titles such as “Pacific Deterrence” and “European Deterrence” that have the potential to outline a strategy for a given combatant command or region, they are not tied to other agencies or a larger, whole-of-government plan accessible to Congress and the public at large.

A Persistent Crisis in Central America

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Violence and corruption in Central America, particularly in the Northern Triangle countries, is causing a wave of outward migration. Since taking office, the Biden administration has pledged to tackle the root causes of the problem, which the Trump administration’s restrictive measures and pressure on regional governments did nothing to address. Meanwhile, efforts at reform across the region face opposition from entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo. Explore WPR’s extensive coverage of the Central America crisis.

For years, Central America has contended with the violence and corruption stemming from organized crime and the drug trade. More recently, the countries of the region also found themselves at the center of U.S. domestic politics, due to the many desperate Central Americans who make their way across Mexico to seek asylum at the United States’ southern border.

The steady stream of outward migration is driven by ongoing turmoil, particularly in Nicaragua and the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The three Northern Triangle countries rank among the most violent in the world, a legacy of the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, which destabilized security structures and flooded the region with guns. In that context, gangs—often brought back home by deportees from the U.S.—have proliferated, and along with them the drug trade and corruption, fueling increasing lawlessness. Popular unrest has done little to produce political solutions, leading many of the most vulnerable to flee.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump instrumentalized migration for domestic political purposes, while also using threatened cuts in U.S. development aid to pressure governments in the region to do more to hamper the outflow and to take in migrants returned from the U.S. border. But his administration did little to help regional governments address the root causes of the crisis—graft and violence. His successor, President Joe Biden, pledged to return to a more conventional approach of using development aid and high-level support for anti-corruption efforts to address the region’s political, economic and security deficits. But in practice, his approach to the crisis on the southern U.S. border since taking office has represented more continuity than change. Clearly, the issue will remain no less of a challenge for his administration, even as the migration flows have begun to shift.

War is ruthless, but should the U.S. be ruthless when it goes to war? | Column

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Make no mistake, America was ruthless in World War II. The national leadership of that era — Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman — demanded unconditional surrender of the nation’s enemies. To achieve that objective, the U.S. military fire-bombed cities in Germany and Japan that killed many tens of thousands of non-combatants. U.S. and Allied armies obliterated the Third Reich. America then dropped two nuclear devices on Japan that killed more tens of thousands.

The much-maligned atom bomb compelled the unconditional surrender of imperial Japan. The result of American ruthlessness led to the creation of two of the most successful democratic countries in the world. But first, the Japanese had to be defeated, come to recognize the fact and then accept the unyielding truth of it. Victory achieved, lasting peace with both countries followed.

Killing on an industrial scale was the means to achieving positive ends. No, I am not suggesting that the U.S. go nuclear to achieve its goals. Nor am I recommending that we return to the days of attempting to “bomb our enemies back into the stone age.” It is now well known that aerial bombardment can have the opposite effect desired. You need only look to current events in Ukraine to see this phenomenon in action.

However, and although no doubt arguable, the ends achieved in World War II may have justified the terrible means used. Unconditional surrender was achieved over the Japanese militarists. Hitler’s malign regime was annihilated. The ruthlessness adopted by Roosevelt and Truman may have been based in their fear of the possible existential threat posed to the American state.

Is America still willing to be ruthless to win? It does not seem so, at least while lacking an existential threat. War-fighting rules of engagement in Afghanistan became restrictive following initial repetitive battlefield successes, especially during the Obama years. The Trump White House subsequently loosened those rules. However, the Taliban cared nothing for the Western humanitarian values and international law that rules of engagement represented, butchering innocents if it served their aims. They did, however, over time, exhibit an unsurprising far greater strength of will and resolve. They were, after all, fighting on their native soil. If the U.S. is constrained by our values and respect for law, what to do?

Biden, McCarthy looking to close US debt ceiling deal for two years

Richard Cowan, Andy Sullivan, Jarrett Renshaw

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WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) - The White House and congressional Republicans on Friday are putting the final touches on a deal that will raise the U.S. government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling for two years while capping spending on everything but military and veterans, according to a U.S. official.

Negotiators for Democratic President Joe Biden and House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy appeared to be nearing a deal on Thursday as the two sides reached agreement on key issues, such as spending caps and funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the military.

However, items including work requirements for recipients of federal aid were still holding up the deal, the official said.

The deal under consideration would increase funding for discretionary spending on military and veterans while essentially holding non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, the official said, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal discussions.

The White House is considering scaling back its plan to boost funding at the IRS to hire more auditors and target wealthy Americans, the official said.

The defense and veteran affairs funding matches Biden’s budget released earlier this year, a second U.S. official said.

The agreement would leave many details to be sorted out in the weeks and months ahead.

Each will have to persuade enough members of their party in the narrowly divided Congress to vote for any eventual deal, no small feat with far-right Republicans saying they wouldn’t back any deal without sweeping spending cuts and progressive Democrats resisting new work requirements on anti-poverty programs.

“The only way to move forward is with a bipartisan agreement. And I believe we will come to an agreement that allows us to move forward and that protects the hardworking Americans of this country,” Biden said on Thursday.

US Army receives mixed signals from industry on ‘radio as a service’

Colin Demarest

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PHILADELPHIA — U.S. Army officials are considering what’s next for an initiative known as radio as a service, after receiving feedback from industry that swung from enthusiasm to skepticism.

The Army published a request for information regarding the as-a-service tack, a potential pivot away from the traditional means of buying and maintaining radios, and received 15 responses by March.

Input ranged from “folks wanting to be the the manager of the process, all the way to folks providing us everything that a lower tactical network needs,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, the project manager for tactical radios at the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, or PEO C3T, said May 24 at an industry conference in Philadelphia.

At the same time, other vendors came “back and said, ‘Nope, we’re not going to play,’” Daiyaan said. “That was a response, and that’s data. We’ll appreciate that and take that to heart.”

The Army has hundreds of thousands of radios — too many to quickly and cost-effectively modernize given security deadlines and constant competition with China and Russia, which have sophisticated signals intelligence that can cue onto communications. Service leaders have said the as-a-service method, while experimental, could drive down costs and boost adaptability.

As initially teased in December by Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo, radio as a service would be more akin to a subscription offered by some makers of consumer products. It could mirror other deals in which companies furnish goods and services on a rolling basis, keep them up to date and handle quality control.

“We left that RFI very open, very generic. We approached it from: We don’t want to shape your response,” Daiyaan said. “It’s such a novel idea that we didn’t want to take things off the table.”

The colonel expects to speak with senior leaders about the effort in the coming weeks. PEO C3T is tasked with overhauling the Army’s battlefield connectivity tools.

“What we’re trying to figure out is if there’s something in there to explore,” Daiyaan said. “I believe there’s something there to explore.”

Opinion: At 100, Henry Kissinger is still teaching us the value of ‘Weltanschaüng’

David A. Andelman

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Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

Twelve years ago, invited to speak at a small gathering at New York’s cultural center 92nd Street Y, I ran a gauntlet of protesters who’d gathered for the arrival of the featured speaker on the main stage. It was Henry Kissinger and I watched in wonder as they gathered to protest “a talk given by the renowned war criminal.”

They were back three years later when Kissinger was speaking there again. This time demonstrators were targeting “his history concerning Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Angola and elsewhere.”

The events they were protesting were decades in the past – at the peak of the Vietnam War and innumerable other crises that then-US Secretary of State Kissinger had done his best to drive to some rational conclusion.

Most of the demonstrators were only barely alive when these events were unspooling, when Kissinger was without question deeply affecting the outcome of each.

But the catalog of their grievances only testifies to the broad scope of people, places and events that he has influenced in the course of a remarkable career.

If there is one lesson, however, to take away from his years in office and the decades since, it is the sweep of his utterly rational and dispassionate view of the world and all that makes it tick. He called it “weltanschaüng” or worldview.

The cost of the global arms race

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At the end of the cold war America’s president, George H.W. Bush, popularised the idea that cutting defence spending would boost the economy. “We can reap a genuine peace dividend this year and then year after year, in the form of permanently reduced defence budgets,” he declared in 1992. The world took note. America went from shelling out 6% of its gdp on defence in 1989 to roughly 3% in ten years (see chart 1). Then came the 9/11 attacks and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, talk of war between America and China over Taiwan, and tensions concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions, countries are tooling up as never before in this century.

Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia’s Way

Daniel Davis

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From almost the opening days of the Russia-Ukraine War, a running theme among Western analysts has been that the Russian military has badly underperformed and the Ukrainian Armed Forces constantly exceeded expectations.

Few seem to have noticed, however, that the pendulum on the battlefield has shifted.

Shift for Russia in Ukraine

Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.

Washington policymakers need to update their understanding of the current trajectory of the war to ensure the U.S. is not caught off guard by battlefield events – and that our interests don’t suffer as a result.

There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated. Russia’s initial battle plan was flawed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

Moscow allocated an invasion force that was too small for the task, dispersed across four axes of advance (ensuring that none would be strong enough to succeed on its own), and was not equipped with supplies to sustain a long war.

Ukraine was more prepared for an invasion than many originally believed and took impressive action quickly to stem the Russian advance, blunting each axis, and imposing serious casualties on the invaders.

In contrast to Russian blunders, Zelensky’s troops initially performed well at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels such that Russia was forced into a major withdrawal of the bulk of its armored forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv barely a month into the war.

Russian Deployments

The Biden Administration’s New Vision for Global Trade and Investment

BENTLEY ALLAN

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In two landmark speeches in recent weeks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan articulated the core principles of a new international economic order centered on industrial policy. In this vision, the U.S. government will take an active role in reshaping supply chains to ensure its national security, fight climate change, and reduce inequality. Contrary to common conception, Yellen and Sullivan argued, pursuing industrial policy at home is compatible with an open, fair, and cooperative global economic order.

The two speeches declared the intent of President Joe Biden’s administration to revise the rules and practices that drive global trade and investment. However, a number of questions surround the strategy and vision that Yellen and Sullivan tabled.

WHAT DOES INDUSTRIAL POLICY HAVE TO DO WITH INTERNATIONAL ORDER?

Industrial policy is any intentional government effort to bolster priority industries or create structural economic change. It has been an integral part of climate politics since China pushed to increase its market share of wind and solar manufacturing in the 1990s. Yellen’s and Sullivan’s speeches took industrial strategy global. They expressed a goal of drawing countries into new efforts to create rules and investments that will drive decarbonization and increase geopolitical resilience, among other aims.

Two kinds of global industrial policy are emerging: foreign industrial policy and joint industrial policy. Foreign industrial policy refers to countries using the tools of foreign policy to advance their domestic industrial policies abroad. Joint industrial policy is when countries align their domestic strategies through international coordination. Both varieties were highlighted in the speeches and are currently being advanced by U.S. officials and agencies.

U.S. foreign industrial policy involves using its existing foreign policy apparatus—diplomatic, financial, and trade tools—to friendshore global supply chains. One key goal is to strategically deploy finance so that other countries can contribute to U.S. industrial strategy goals, such as diversifying the battery supply chain. For example, Washington is seeking to focus its overseas financing through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which funds clean energy and semiconductor supply chain projects overseas. And Washington has used the International Development Finance Corporation to make an equity investment in a nickel and cobalt mining facility in Piaui, Brazil.

Europe’s Losers Have Become Its Winners Again

Caroline de Gruyter

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One of the nicer stories doing the rounds in Brussels these days is about how Europe’s COVID-19 recovery funds are spent. We’re talking here about the roughly $869 billion in grants and loans the European Union’s 27 national leaders earmarked in 2020 for projects to kick-start their economies after the pandemic. By now, all member states have proposed dozens of different projects, with some of them already implemented. In Brussels, around 80 officials are working around the clock to process and evaluate these applications, and check project details against a list of criteria such as green transition, digital innovation, economic and social resilience, and so on.

A Moment of Truth for Russia's Wagner Group in Bakhmut

Christian Esch, Christina Hebel, Alexander Chernyshev, Fedir Petrov, Alexander Sarovic, Christoph Reuter, Fritz Schaap und Andrey Kaganskikh

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The clip that Yevgeny Prigozhin recently posted to his Telegram channel could easily have been mistaken for a poorly made horror film. It shows a field at night, bloodied dead bodies lying in the light of Prigozhin’s flashlight. Also in the video is Prigozhin himself, a brawny, bald man wearing a pistol in a holster. "These are boys from Wagner who died today. Their blood is still fresh!" he growls. The camera pans further, and only now can viewers see that there are four grisly rows of bodies. Dozens of corpses in uniform, many of them with no boots.

Then Prigozhin steps directly in front of the camera and explodes. His face contorted in anger, he hurls insults at Russian military leaders who, he says, are failing to provide him with the munitions he needs. "You will eat their entrails in hell," he yells. "Shoigu, Gerasimov, where is the fucking ammunition?" It is an outburst of rage against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but staged for better effect and loaded with profanity and contempt. Prigozhin sounds like a bandit challenging his rivals on the outskirts of town at night. Like he would like to turn both Shoigu and Gerasimov into corpses that he could then lay next to his boys.

Russia last week celebrated its World War II victory over Nazi Germany with the usual military parade on Red Square, a speech by the president and marching music. But whatever uplifting images the Kremlin wanted to create in Moscow, they were overwhelmed by Prigozhin’s nighttime parade of corpses and his abuse, recorded in a field somewhere near Bakhmut in the Donbas, where he had sent the Wagner Group fighters to their deaths.

Prigozhin, a businessman from St. Petersburg, has good contacts within Putin’s closest circle and is the leader of a notorious mercenary unit that is active from Syria to Mali. Prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he was very rarely in the public eye. Now, though, the war has given him a new role and a new stage.

His is the story of one man's rise to unimaginable power. Within Putin’s dictatorship, it appears that Prigozhin can do whatever he likes. He can promise people their freedom or send them to their deaths, he can humiliate powerful men and openly threaten his enemies. And his story is also that of an outfit that fights without mercy – and, in this war’s longest battle in Bakhmut, is sacrificed without mercy.

Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 455 of the invasion

Tom Ambrose, Martin Belam 

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Washington is looking into reports that American vehicles were used by Ukraine inside Russia, the White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday. He said the US has been clear with Kyiv that it does not support any such use of US-made equipment.

It came as the Kremlin said the use of US-made military hardware by pro-Ukrainian fighters who conducted a raid on a Russian border region this week was testament to the west’s growing involvement in the Ukraine conflict. The Russian military said on Tuesday it had routed militants who attacked the border region of Belgorod with armoured vehicles the previous day, killing more than 70 “Ukrainian nationalists” and pushing the remainder back into Ukraine.

Ukraine will not be able to join Nato as long as the war is going on, the alliance’s chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Wednesday. “I think that everyone realised that, to become a member in the midst of a war, is not on the agenda,” Reuters reports he said at an event organised by the German Marshall Fund of the US thinktank in Brussels. “The issue is what happens when the war ends.”

Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports that the police evacuated a family of four children and three adults from Toretsk in Donetsk after the latest round of shelling. The children’s mother says that they have already come under fire five times and run under mines. Suspilne says they lived 300 metres from the frontline and about 800 metres from the positions of the Russian army, but now plan to go to stay with relatives in Vinnytsia.

Russian private army Wagner lost more than 10,000 fighters in the drawn-out battle for Bakhmut, according to the group’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He said about 20% of the 50,000 Russian prisoners recruited to fight in the 15-month war died in the eastern Ukrainian city, Reuters reported. The figure was in stark contrast with claims from Moscow that it has lost just over 6,000 troops in the war, and is higher than the official estimate of the Soviet losses in the Afghanistan war of 15,000 troops between 1979 and 1989.

The World Health Organization assembly passed a motion on Wednesday condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, including attacks on healthcare facilities. The motion passed by 80 votes to 9, with 52 abstentions and 36 countries absent, Reuters reported.

The European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) expects to spend €1.5bn (£1.3bn) in Ukraine next year in support of infrastructure and the economy, a senior source at the bank has said. It comes on top of €3bn already projected for 2022 and the remainder of 2023. The funds have helped the economy continue to function, ensure there was no run on banks and civil servants continued to be paid.

New Cooperative Cybersecurity Models Needed In An Era Of Global Risk

Chuck Brooks

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Cybersecurity risks to national security are evolving as hybrid wars are changing the threat landscape. There is an urgency to examine the scope and limitations of existing strategies and frameworks in the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance and identify the core cybersecurity challenges that the U.S. and its allies must overcome.

In 2010, President Barack Obama declared cybersecurity a top priority and announced the creation of a new White House office dedicated to cybersecurity issues. This decision responded to growing cyber-attacks against U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure, and private sector entities. Since then, cybersecurity has remained a top national security priority for the United States with subsequent administrations continuing to prioritize cybersecurity issues and invest in efforts to improve the nation's cybersecurity posture.

In the past few years, a tense geopolitical environment and evolving technology have rapidly increased the complexity of cybersecurity risks and their implications for U.S. national security. Hybrid war and the changing threat landscape in cyberspace have increased the risks of confrontation between nation-states. The scope and limitations of cybersecurity strategies and cyber warfare doctrines developed by the United States and its allies needs more collaboration and implementation to address the core challenges that the United States and its allies are facing.

Society’s refusal to have enough babies is what will save it from the existential threat of A.I., Eric Schmidt says

TRISTAN BOVE

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Advocates of stronger regulation of artificial intelligence have a long list of concerns and possible dangers backing up their argument, from short-term threats such as spreading believable misinformation to more existential far-off risks of superintelligent A.I. taking over humanity (or “going Terminator,” in Elon Musk’s words). A more medium-term fear is that A.I. will be one of the biggest job disrupters in recent history, with Goldman Sachs calculating in March the technology could soon replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs in the U.S. and Europe. But the peril of losing our jobs to A.I. could be undermined by another existential risk afflicting society, says former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt: the developed world’s rapidly declining birth rate.

“Here are the facts. We are not having enough children, and we have not been having enough children for long enough that there is a demographic crisis where people who are my age are going to be taken care of by younger generations,” Schmidt said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London Wednesday.

Schmidt pushed back against the “narrative” that new technologies are inevitably going to cause disruption and lead to widespread job loss, saying that when it comes to A.I., the net benefit will likely be positive because of enhanced efficiency and the technology’s ability to replace professions that are already getting harder to fill in a shrinking labor market.

In the U.S., a historically tight labor market could become even tighter in the coming decades as a result of fewer children being born. Aside from a pandemic-induced “baby bump” in 2021, U.S. fertility rates—the number of children each woman would be expected to have in her lifetime—has been on a mostly steady decline since the mid-2000s, including a record-breaking 4% drop in 2020.

Quantum Technology: Applications and Implications

James Andrew Lewis and Georgia Wood

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Quantum physics is the “study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level.” Quantum technologies exploit the properties identified by quantum physics to provide new capabilities in computing, communications, and sensing.

While quantum phenomena have been studied for decades, important technologies based on those phenomena have only appeared relatively recently. Some of these technologies will offer significant advantages for business and national security. Others will create new risks for encryption and stealth. This makes quantum an important topic for policymaking and an important area for cooperation between the United States and its allies. This paper, written to introduce a general audience to the topic, looks at key quantum technologies, timelines for deployment, and national policies for quantum innovation.

The principles of quantum physics can be perplexing and often counterintuitive, with terms like “spooky” or “entanglement” used to describe how quantum physics works. While a basic understanding of those principles is important for evaluating progress and potential, the more immediate policy questions are how to accelerate research, how to develop new quantum technologies, and how to use (or in some cases, protect against) these technologies’ different applications.

Quantum research is carried out by universities, government labs, and companies in more than a dozen countries. The infrastructure for research and services includes quantum computers and the specialized chips they use, new kinds of sensors, quantum communication devices, and unique software, since the software needed for quantum computing is very different from conventional computing software. Quantum is more than computing, also having applications for sensing, encryption, and communications. The number of companies offering quantum technologies and services is growing rapidly. Some quantum applications, like sensing, will enter into widespread use before quantum computers do, and some quantum applications are closer to entering commercial use than others.

Quantum Computing

How AI Is Reshaping The World Of Intelligence – Analysis

Matt Ince*

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the foundation for major innovations across the intelligence cycle. This trend will probably continue over the coming years, creating additional analytic bandwidth and reshaping how intelligence products are crafted and communicated to their intended audiences.

However, despite its potential to drive transformational change within intelligence ecosystems, AI is not a viable substitute for the human in the loop. Highly trained, digitally savvy intelligence professionals will almost certainly remain in high demand.

The benefits of at-scale AI integration

AI has so far dominated the technology discussion in 2023. Tools like OpenAI’s text-generator ChatGPT and image generators like Stable Diffusion and Dall-E have been the subject of growing intrigue and excitement. Microsoft has unveiled an AI-enhanced version of its Bing search engine. And Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has announced its own AI-powered chatbot, Bard.

Many of these technologies can be used to enable and optimise how intelligence is collected, processed, analysed, and disseminated. If used correctly, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can save valuable analyst time by completing a number of essential intelligence collection and processing tasks. Examples might include scraping the web for the latest protests incident data, conducting literature reviews on emerging issues of geostrategic importance, or creating and curating routine open-source intelligence feeds.

Emerging machine learning (ML) applications, such as natural language processing (NLP), will similarly reduce the need for analysts to undertake numerous activities, such as speech-to-text transcription, voice identification, and language translation. These are tasks that are generally much more time consuming for humans to complete.

Incorporating AI and greater levels of automation into the intelligence assessment processes is likely to enhance intelligence professions’ sensemaking capabilities as well as their ability to surface new insights to clients. Emerging AI-powered data analytics tools will help analysts to identify otherwise difficult to detect warning signs which, if left unnoticed, risk increasing the potential for strategic surprises.

Army looking at the possibility of ‘AI BOMs’

MARK POMERLEAU

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — The Army is exploring the possibility of asking commercial companies to open up the hood of their artificial intelligence algorithms as a means of better understanding what’s in them to reduce risk and cyber vulnerabilities.

The notion is referred to as an artificial intelligence bill of materials, or AI BOMs. This stems from software BOMs, or SBOMs, which are lists that provide the components of a piece of software, essentially providing the supply chain “nutritional value” of code so those adopting it into their systems know every piece that it’s made of to better understand potential risks or threat vectors to their networks.

“We’re toying with the notion of an AI BOM [program]. That’s because really, we’re looking at things from a risk perspective. Just like we’re securing our supply chain, semiconductors, components, subcomponents, we’re also thinking about that from a digital perspective,” Young Bang, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told reporters at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting X on Thursday.

Bang was sure to clarify that if the Army goes down this path, it’s not seeking to gain access to a vendor’s intellectual property.

“I just want to make sure we’re explicit about this: It’s not to get a vendor’s IP, it’s really about how do we manage the cyber risk and the vulnerabilities,” he said.

AI BOMs pose a slightly more challenging issue than software, he said, because opening the hood could allow someone – not necessarily the Army – to gain access to intellectual property and potentially reverse engineer it.

“Arguably, depending on what you request out of that BOM, you have the ingredients to potentially backwards engineer their algorithm. We don’t want to impinge on their IP. We’re not going to try to reverse engineer and do it ourselves,” Bang said. “The intent is to say, ‘can we look at the observability, the traceability of how you actually develop the algorithms, what are the features and the parameters you tested, what are the datasets that you use to ensure we have more trusted, for lack of better words, outcomes.’ And that there’s no risk like Trojan triggers, poisoned datasets, or prompting of unintentional outcomes over the algorithm. We really need to think about that. But again, while it’s pretty clear on the software and the data side, it’s not about IP.”

China’s “Blue Dragon” Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Makes America and India Restless

Patrick Mendis

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In his recent critical Foreign Affairs essay, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” Ashley J. Tellis argued that the Biden administration’s India policy is “misplaced.” He accused Washington of overlooking “India’s democratic erosion” because the United States needs a reliable partner in South Asia to challenge the rise of China. The article’s perceptive analysis of the U.S.-India security partnership notes that the relationship is hardly based on mutually assured democratic trust. He notes, for example, that India is breaking with the West in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War and instead “goes it alone.”

Tellis’ conclusion is that “India’s security partnership with the United States will remain fundamentally asymmetrical for a long time to come.” While New Delhi would want Washington to prevail in a major conflict with Beijing in the East China Sea or the South China Sea, it is “unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.” This assessment is predicated largely on India’s nominal “strategic autonomy” in its foreign policy. India has evolved with a history of Soviet and Russian military ties as well as a lingering record of border conflicts with China.

However, China’s unprecedented military and economic capabilities have increasingly challenged New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. A matured India may not have a strategic alternative to sustain the past; it must thus work harmoniously and collaboratively with Washington for its national interest and civilizational heritage.

The “Return to History”

For the civilizational states of China and India, the past is often prologue. In his book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar wrote that New Delhi believes it faces an inevitable “return to history,” rather than the Fukuyaman “end of history,” in the emerging international governance of multipolarity.

Pakistan-Israel Relations: A Chance of Normalization?

Ido Gadi Raz

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Pakistan has declared that it will not recognize Israel as long as the Palestinian issue is not resolved, but the normalization agreements between Israel and the Muslim countries that began in September 2020 with the Abraham Accords revived the question of relations between the countries. The connection between Pakistan’s struggle with India over Jammu and Kashmir and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Pakistan’s relations with Iran, and the Sunni radicals in Pakistan are central barriers to the establishment of diplomatic relations. On the other hand, private initiatives for advancing relations between Israel and Pakistan that developed after the Abraham Accords renewed the Pakistani discourse on the issue, and could serve as a lever for diplomatic relations in the long term. Pakistan’s proximity and dependence on the Sunni Gulf countries, which have warmed their relations with Israel since the Abraham Accords, create an opening for indirect partnerships between Israel and Pakistan. The US-Pakistani connection, which has grown closer in recent years, could also serve as a foundation for future diplomatic ties.

Keywords: Pakistan, Abraham Accords, India, Afghanistan, Iran

Introduction

As of early 2023, Israel and Pakistan do not have diplomatic relations. While it appears that Israel is willing to establish diplomatic relations, Pakistan, alongside other Muslim countries such as Kuwait, Tunisia, and Yemen, insists on not recognizing the Jewish state as long as there is no resolution to the Palestinian issue. Nor ostensibly has the signing of the normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in 2020 (the Abraham Accords) influenced Pakistani policy, which remains as it was regarding Israel. Then-Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan left no room for doubt when he responded to a controversial report on a visit by a Pakistani citizen to Tel Aviv in November 2020: "Why would someone from Pakistan go [to Israel], when our policy is not to recognize Israel?"

Behind Khan's sharp statement are several core issues in Pakistani foreign and domestic policy that have prevented it from normalizing relations with Israel so far. What are the chances that Pakistan and Israel will establish official diplomatic relations? This article addresses the question by analyzing the primary elements influencing the two countries, as well as the salient geopolitical events since the signing of the Abraham Accords.

Historical Overview[1]

Between Kashmir and Palestine

China Hacks US Critical Networks in Guam, Raising Cyberwar Fears

ANDY GREENBERG LILY HAY NEWMAN

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AS STATE-SPONSORED HACKERS working on behalf of Russia, Iran, and North Korea have for years wreaked havoc with disruptive cyberattacks across the globe, China's military and intelligence hackers have largely maintained a reputation for constraining their intrusions to espionage. But when those cyberspies breach critical infrastructure in the United States—and specifically a US territory on China's doorstep—spying, conflict contingency planning, and cyberwar escalation all start to look dangerously similar.

On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed in a blog post that it has tracked a group of what it believes to be Chinese state-sponsored hackers who have since 2021 carried out a broad hacking campaign that has targeted critical infrastructure systems in US states and Guam, including communications, manufacturing, utilities, construction, and transportation.

The intentions of the group, which Microsoft has named Volt Typhoon, may simply be espionage, given that it doesn’t appear to have used its access to those critical networks to carry out data destruction or other offensive attacks. But Microsoft warns that the nature of the group's targeting, including in a Pacific territory that might play a key role in a military or diplomatic conflict with China, may yet enable that sort of disruption.

"Observed behavior suggests that the threat actor intends to perform espionage and maintain access without being detected for as long as possible," the company's blog post reads. But it couples that statement with an assessment with "moderate confidence" that the hackers are “pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.”

Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant says it has also tracked a swath of the group's intrusions and offers a similar warning about the group's focus on critical infrastructure “There's not a clear connection to intellectual property or policy information that we expect from an espionage operation,” says John Hultquist, who heads threat intelligence at Mandiant. “That leads us to question whether they’re there because the targets are critical. Our concern is that the focus on critical infrastructure is preparation for potential disruptive or destructive attack.”

China’s Youth Unemployment Problem

NANCY QIAN

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CHICAGO – This month, China released official statistics showing that its unemployment rate for young people (16-24 years old) reached a record high of 20.4% in April. Worse, the news comes just one month before another 11.6 million students will graduate from college and vocational schools and enter the job market.

True, the lockdowns under the government’s zero-COVID policy were much more draconian and economically damaging than other countries’ containment policies, and they were enforced for more than a year longer in most cases. So, it is not surprising that China’s economic recovery has lagged others. For comparison, the US youth unemployment rate hit 14.85% at its pandemic peak in 2020, before declining to 9.57% in 2021, and to 6.5% today.

But while most of China’s pandemic-related obstacles to employment have been lifted, the fundamental conditions for reducing China’s youth unemployment are not improving. While the long-run post-pandemic jobless rate will be lower than it is now, it is still likely to remain higher compared to the pre-pandemic years. There are many reasons for this, but one key issue is the large gap between the “reservation wage” rate that young graduates are willing to accept and the rate that firms are willing to pay.

This mismatch reflects the extent to which the cost of living has outpaced the growth in salaries. According to a 2021 survey, jobs for new graduates in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing paid an average of only CN¥5,290 ($749) per month. That is just enough to rent a 25-square-meter (269 square feet) apartment (Chinese cities now have some of the world’s most expensive real estate). And these young people can see that a job with such a low starting salary is unlikely to provide the income progression needed to support a family ten years down the line. Since urban white-collar workers are typically expected to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days per week, a dual-career couple with a child must rely heavily on a nanny. Yet in Shanghai and Beijing, nannies, who usually come from the countryside and often have not graduated from high school, earn CN¥6,000 per month on average – more than recent college graduates.

Stress-Testing Chinese-Russian Relations ANALYSIS

Robert E. Hamilton 

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A debate over the nature of the China-Russia relationship has raged for almost two decades. One side believes the two are strategic partners; the other believes their ties are an “axis of convenience” lacking depth.

Understanding the true nature of their relationship is of vital importance to U.S. national security. A true strategic partnership represents a grave threat; less robust ties between the two give the U.S. more latitude in dealing with them.

We can gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of China-Russia ties by observing how they interact in regions of the world where they both have important interests at stake. Four regions emerge as key here: Central Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and East Asia.

The statements could not have been more different. As Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up his visit to Russia in March, the two governments released a joint statement that described their relations as having reached “their highest level in history.” The same day, White House spokesperson John Kirby dismissed the relationship as “a marriage of convenience.”

The difference between the two statements neatly frames a debate about Sino-Russian relations that has continued for almost two decades. One side insists that ties between Beijing and Moscow are a true strategic partnership; the other argues they are thin and frail, with shared resistance to the United States. the only thing binding them together. As Bobo Lo argued in his 2008 book, this view sees the relationship as an “axis of convenience.”

While useful as shorthand descriptions of the relationship, both the strategic partnership and axis of convenience views are limited in their ability to explain it. A more nuanced view of China-Russia ties emerges from examining their interaction “on the ground” in regions where both have important interests at stake.

The Debate: Strategic Partnership or “Axis of Convenience”