WAR 06-16-2018-to-06-22-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(325) 05-26-2018-to-06-01-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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(326) 06-02-2018-to-06-08-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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(327) 06-09-2018-to-06-15-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****/page3

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For links see article source.....
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https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-y...irport-yemen-military-says-idUKKBN1JC04J?il=0

Arab coalition close to capturing Hodeidah airport, Yemen military says

Reuters UK
4 hours ago

Mohammed Ghobari
5 Min Read

ADEN (Reuters) - Forces from an Arab alliance entered the airport in Yemen’s main port city of Hodeidah Saturday, the coalition-backed Yemeni military said, in an offensive that could give the allies a strong edge over the Iran-aligned Houthi movement.

Victory for the Saudi-led alliance in their first attempt to capture a strategic part of a well-defended city would put the Houthis on the defensive in the three-year conflict, since Hodeidah is the group’s sole Red Sea port.

The U.N. special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, arrived in the Houthi-held capital Sanaa on Saturday. The United Nations, which failed to find a diplomatic solution to head off the assault, fears the fighting will cut off the only lifeline for millions of Yemenis facing starvation.

“The U.N. envoy has accomplished nothing so far. He provides a cover for the continued aggression,” Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam said on Houthi-run media ahead of Griffith’s visit.

The battle for Hodeidah, by far the largest in the conflict, could have ramifications beyond the city of 600,000. Yemen’s conflict is part of a regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Related Coverage

Factbox - Who is fighting in Yemen's messy civil war?

French special forces on the ground in Yemen - Le Figaro

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal and his embrace of nuclear state North Korea have added to Iran’s isolation and put pressure on the Islamic Republic to preserve its interests in Yemen and other Arab states.

Ground troops — which include United Arab Emirates forces, Sudanese and Yemenis drawn from various factions — have surrounded Hodeidah’s main airport compound but have not seized it, a Yemeni military source and residents said.

“We need some time to make sure there are no gunmen, mines or explosive in the building,” the military source said. The military’s media office said technical teams were de-mining the surrounding area.

Fighting led to the closure of the northern entrance of the western city Hodeidah, which leads to Sanaa, residents said.

That has blocked a key exit out of the city and made it more difficult to transport goods from the port, the country’s largest, to mountainous regions.

Aly Omar said he and his family spent three days trapped in the Manzar neighbourhood abutting the airport as fighting raged all around them.

“We didn’t have any food, or drink or anything, not even water,” Omar said, standing in a hospital on Friday night beside his son, who was wounded by an air strike.

“I treated him on a bus after he was injured in an air strike, which is unacceptable. I call on the United Nations and the Red Cross to open a way for us to get out of the situation we’re in. Our kids, women and elderly are stuck ...”

Samy Mansour, head of the emergency room at Al-Thawra Hospital, received two dead and 12 wounded.

“We’re still treating people on the scene and transporting them to the hospital,” he said.

FEARS OF FAMINE
The offensive in Hodeidah could trigger a famine imperilling millions of lives, the U.N. has warned. Around 22 million people in Yemen depend on the humanitarian aid efforts, with 8.4 million at risk of starvation.

“Humanitarian agencies cannot currently access areas south of the city where people are most likely to have been injured, affected and displaced, leaving us without a clear picture of needs,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s office in Yemen.

Humanitarian organisations were forced to pause almost all operations in Hodeidah, it said.

The Arab alliance, which launched the operation in Hodeidah four days ago, says it can seize the city quickly enough to avoid interrupting aid to the millions facing starvation.

Riyadh accused the Houthis of using the port to smuggle Iranian-made weapons, including missiles that have targeted Saudi cities - accusations denied by the group and Tehran.

If the Hodeidah fighting drags on, causing big coalition casualties and an outcry over a humanitarian catastrophe, it may work in the Houthis’ favour. If the Houthis are pushed out, the coalition could get the upper hand in the war.

The coalition has superior weaponry, including fighter planes. The resilient Houthis, highly experienced in mountain warfare, have advanced on sandal-shod feet and by pick-up truck in battles across Yemen.

Britain, France and the United States back the coalition and provide it with various kinds of aid. French special forces are on the ground in Yemen with UAE forces, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Saturday, citing two military sources.

Houthis rule the most populous areas of Yemen, a poor nation of about 30 million people that had been destabilised by internal splits and by al-Qaeda before the war erupted.

Air strikes, blockades and fighting have killed more than 10,000 people since the war started. The Saudi-led alliance intervened in 2015 to restore an internationally recognised Yemeni government in exile and thwart what Riyadh and Abu Dhabi see as efforts by their archfoe, Iran, to dominate the region.

Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari in Aden, Ghaida Ghantous in Dubai and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in Geneva; writing by Michael Georgy; editing by Larry King

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
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https://www.realcleardefense.com/ar...red_non-strategic_nuclear_weapons_113537.html

Russian Air-Delivered Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons

By Mark B. Schneider
June 15, 2018

Before starting a discussion of Russian non-strategic or tactical air-delivered nuclear weapons, it is important for the reader to understand that these weapons do not exist in isolation. They are part of what amounts to a Russian non-strategic nuclear Triad composed of: 1) ground-based nuclear capable short- to intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles; 2) a sea-based force of nuclear-capable cruise missiles carried on both surface ships and submarines; and 3) an air-delivered non-strategic nuclear force of Backfire bombers and a variety of long-range fighter aircraft which carry both nuclear bombs and nuclear-capable ballistic and cruise missiles. Russia’s non-strategic nuclear Triad has the same resilience, flexibility, survivability, and defense penetration ability of Russia’s better known strategic Triad. Only Russia, and apparently China, have a non-strategic nuclear Triad. Russia is secretive about its non-strategic nuclear capabilities, particularly its low-yield weapons; hence, it is unlikely that the picture derived from open sources is complete.

Russia routinely practices the first use of nuclear weapons in major theater exercises. Indeed, in 2014, Russian expatriate Nikolai Sokov wrote, “…nuclear exercises have been conducted with targets in Europe, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and even the continental United States,” and, “…all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes.”[1] The implication of this is that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons in a variety of conflicts, including minor ones, which was suggested by its Secretary of the National Security Council Nikolai Patrushev in October 2009. He said that existing policy allowed the first use of nuclear weapons even in “local” wars.[2] Indeed, in 2010, the official newspaper of the Far East Military District said, “To suppress a large center of the separatists’ resistance and to achieve minimal losses of the attacking troops a low-yield ‘nuclear’ attack was mounted against the enemy.”[3]

Russia’s strategy of limited nuclear strikes is characterized in the U.S. as an “escalate to de-escalate” nuclear strategy.[4] Russia calls its strategy “de-escalation of aggression,” but it does not characterize nuclear first use as “escalation.” The Russian belief is that its introduction of nuclear weapons will terminate the conflict in the Russian favor. When Russia first announced its simulated first use of nuclear weapons in the Zapad 1999 theater war exercise, then-Defense Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev asserted, “Our Army was forced to launch nuclear strikes first [in Zapad-1999] which enabled it to achieve a breakthrough in the theater situation.”[5] This is perhaps the classic high-level statement of Russia’s view regarding the impact of its introduction of nuclear weapons into a war against NATO.

Russia will not be invaded by NATO. The current focus of Russia’s strategy appears to be to deter a NATO counterattack after a Russian invasion of a weak NATO state (e.g., the Baltic republics) as former STRATCOM commander General (ret.) Kevin Chilton pointed out in April 2018 and what NATO Deputy Commander Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Bradshaw said in February 2015.[6] In 2017, then-Director of the DIA Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart said Russia has built nuclear de-escalation “…into their operational concept, we’ve seen them exercise that idea…”[7]

Russia’s Non-Strategic Nuclear Capable Aircraft
According to the Russian Federation Defense Ministry (MoD), a mission of the Russian Air Force (now called the Aerospace Force) is the “…destruction of enemy objects and troops using both conventional and nuclear ordnance.”[8] Writing in 2000, Nikolai Sokov stated Russian Air Force “aircraft are versatile, being able to use both conventional and nuclear short-range missiles and air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs). Even more important, even in a nuclear role they can be employed for substrategic missions, in line with the latest Military Doctrine…”[9] Little has changed since 2000 except that Russia’s non-strategic capabilities have grown much larger.

The role of strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian Aerospace Force is much greater than in the U.S. Air Force. All Russian fighters are reportedly nuclear capable.[10] This includes the world’s only close support aircraft that can carry tactical nuclear bombs.[11] As Dave Johnson, then with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, writes, “The Russian non-strategic Air Force differs considerably from our own. For delivery of non-strategic nuclear weapons, Russia is fielding new dual-capable fighter aircraft such as the SU-34 and modernizing its fleet of existing dual-capable aircraft (SU-24M2 FENCER) and developing new air and sea-launched cruise missiles.”[12]

Nuclear-capable missiles play a major role in Russia’s strategy. Against advanced air defenses, this can be an advantage in the nuclear mission where the procurement of large numbers of expensive missiles is not necessary. Russia is modernizing both its air-launched missiles and, according to Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva, it has also been “…developing new nonstrategic nuclear weapons…”[13] A 2008 joint report of the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy pointed out there has been “…increased training for nuclear operations in all military branches…”[14]

The growing Russian air-delivery capability for non-strategic nuclear weapons is composed of Backfire bombers, a declining number of legacy Soviet fighters, a growing variety of high performance 4.5 generation multi-role fighters and soon the first nuclear-capable Su-57 5th generation want-to-be fighters.[15] (In reality, it is somewhere between a 4.5 and 5th generation fighter.) No other nation, except perhaps China, is introducing so many types of new fighter aircraft, each type produced in relatively modest numbers. Small numbers of legacy aircraft are also being modernized with 4.5 generation technology as is the Backfire bomber.

The reported limited stealth of the Su-57 fighter (.5 square meter RCS) and other developmental problems resulted in the termination by India of its joint program with Russia to develop an improved Su-57.[16] The Su-57 is highly maneuverable and outclasses Western 4.5 generation fighters in most or even all respects, but its limited stealth will not allow it to penetrate advanced defenses primarily because of its stealth. It will be heavily dependent on ECM and/or stand-off missiles capable of being carried internally. In May 2018, the Russian Defense Ministry released a video of the Su-57 launching from its bomb-bay an offensive missile (possibly a Kh-59), estimated to be able to launch a 500-lb warhead at least 150 miles.[17] The Su-57 reportedly also carries “…the Izdelie 810, the Kh-58USHke, Kh-35UE and the Brahmos-NG among others.”[18] State-run Sputnik News says the Brahmos is nuclear capable.[19] External carriage of larger missiles is certainly possible, but that would turn the Su-57 into a 4.5 generation fighter. In May 2018, Russian Defense Minister General of the Army Sergei Shoigu said that advanced operational, tactical cruise missiles (Russian terminology for ranges from several hundred kilometers to about 1,000-km) had been launched from the Su-57 in Syria.[20]

The bottom line is that there is no indication Russia in the mid-term will have any fighter aircraft that can engage in direct attack against heavily defended targets as the F-35 can. However, we must remember that there is little in the way of advanced integrated air defense in NATO or, indeed, in any country Russia borders except China, and for the foreseeable future, this is unlikely to change. (The U.S. has the elements of an advanced system, but they are not integrated or devoted in sufficient numbers to air defenses against large attacks). Direct attack capability is much less important for the nuclear mission because Russia has a large array of nuclear-capable non-strategic missiles which we and our allies lack.

Russian problems in developing stealth aircraft (which they will eventually achieve) have resulted in more emphasis on very long-range dual-capable theater missile strike capability than in the United States. While we should not model our forces on those of Russia, there are certain advantages in having dual-capable, stealthy long-range cruise missiles on fighters. Indeed, for similar reasons, we are putting conventional JASSM, JASSM-ER and LRASM on our 4th generation fighters.

Arms control limitations, assuming compliance which frequently is not the case in Russia, hits dual-capable long-range air-launched cruise missiles very hard. They can only be deployed on heavy bombers if their range is 600-km or more. Conventional-only long-range ALCMs can be carried by anything that flies. Hence, there is no incentive for Russia to be candid regarding which of its missiles are nuclear capable. This gives the normally secretive Russians even more incentive to keep such developments secret. To some extent, this is counter-balanced by Russia’s tendency to make nuclear threats, which requires revealing its nuclear capabilities. In some cases, it has done so.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review states that the Russian non-strategic nuclear force includes a “…number of air delivered weapons including air-to-surface missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, gravity bombs, and depth charges for medium-range bombers, tactical bombers, and naval aviation…”[21] These are generic categories, and in many of them, there is more than one type of Russian system involved. One of the biggest threat developments over the last decade has been the proliferation of highly accurate Russian long-range dual-capable cruise missiles. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review states, Russia “is also building a large, diverse, and modern set of non-strategic systems that are dual-capable (may be armed with nuclear or conventional weapons).”[22] Dave Johnson, now a staff officer in the NATO International Staff Defense Policy and Planning Division, has written that, “…the capabilities now available to Russia consist of redundant, overlapping, long-range, dual-capable missile coverage of nearly all of Europe from within Russian territory, airspace, and home waters.”[23] He also noted regarding Russia’s precision strike weapons systems, that “…all… are dual-capable or have nuclear analogs.”[24]

This is very important for the Russian nuclear mission. First, if Russian dual-capable missiles are accurate enough for effective conventional attacks, they represent a dramatic increase in high-intensity conventional warfare capability, and they have more than enough accuracy for the precision low-yield nuclear weapons the Russians began speaking about as instruments of the nuclear “de-escalation” concept in the 1990s.[25] Second, we must keep in mind that if any of these nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of 600-km or more are launched from any aircraft other than a heavy bomber, this generates a New START Treaty violation, giving Russia an incentive to conceal the range and/or the nuclear capability of these missiles. Still, there is still significant information available in open sources.

Russian Long-Range Dual Capable Strike Missiles
One of Putin’s five nuclear “superweapons” he unveiled in his March 1, 2018 State of the Nation address was the Kinzhal “hypersonic missile” (actually it is an “aeroballistic missile”[26]) which he said was capable of “delivering nuclear and conventional warheads in a range of over 2,000-km.”[27] Putin displayed a video showing it hitting a land-based bunker and an Aegis cruiser. Deputy Russian Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said that ten Kinzhals are operational on the Mig-31 fighters and TASS, the main official Russian news agency, reports that an “aeroballistic missile,” apparently the Kinzhal, will be carried by the Su-34 long-range strike fighter.[28] Because the Su-34 is slower than the Mig-31, the Kinzhal won’t fly as far as it can when launched by a Mig-31, but its range will still be quite considerable. The Mig-41, the successor to the Mig-31, will reportedly be able to fly at 4,500-km per hour.[29] If the Kinzhal, or its successor, is deployed on a Mig-41, presumably it will fly further than its 2,000-km+ range when launched by the Mig-31, although heating problems may have to be solved.

The Kinzhal is not limited by the New START Treaty and can legally be deployed on any aircraft big enough to carry it outside of Treaty constraints. In the future, this might include the Backfire bomber, the Su-30SM, the Su-35S, the Su-57 and the Mig-41. Its range will depend on the altitude and speed to which it can be carried before launch. No Western country has such a nuclear-capable missile system. The only Western fighter-launched nuclear missile is the medium-range French ASMPA, which has both a strategic and tactical mission.

In December 2015, President Vladimir Putin stated, “Both the Calibre [Kalibr] missiles and the Kh-101 rockets are generally showing very good results. We now see that these are new, modern and highly effective high-precision weapons that can be equipped either with conventional or special nuclear warheads.”[30] Putin’s revelation about the Kh-101 is largely ignored in the West, even though the Russian Defense Ministry has said the same thing about the Kh-101.[31] The Kh-101 is very important because it is stealthy, highly accurate, and has a very long-range (4,500-km). There are reports in the Russian state media that it will be deployed on the improved version of the Backfire bomber.[32]

The Backfire bomber is an extremely important system because it is the subject of a very substantial upgrade (the Tu-22M3M), and will be operational this year carrying the new Kh-32 1,000-km range cruise missile, according to TASS.[33] The Kh-32 is described in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review as being nuclear capable.[34] Sputnik News confirms this saying, “…the Kh-32 can carry either conventional or nuclear munitions.”[35] State-run Russia Beyond the Headlines also says its range is 1,000-km and it can be armed “…with a nuclear or conventional 500-kilogram (1,102 lb) warhead and hit targets within a few yards.”[36]

Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian Government, reports the new version of the Backfire (Tu-22M3M) can carry the Kh-101 and the Kh-555, both long-range air-launched cruise missiles.[37] The Kh-101 is nuclear capable, according to Putin and the Russian MoD. The Kh-555 was long reported to be the conventional modification of the Kh-55 (AS-15) nuclear air-launched cruise missile. However, Sputnik News says it is dual capable: “Second, in addition to the nuclear option, the Kh-555 can carry up to 410 kg of conventional munitions.”[38] It also noted that it was five times as accurate as the Kh-55.

There are also two other new missiles associated with the improved Backfire. It reportedly might also carry the, “Kh-SD missile and the supersonic Kh-MT, both [are] still under development. The new munitions offer ranges of up to 2,000 and 1,000 kilometers, respectively, and combine stealthy airframes with modern guidance systems and warheads.”[39] While the type of warheads is not mentioned, it would be very unusual if they were not nuclear capable.

In 2012, the Commander of the Russian Air Force Colonel General Alexander Zelin stated that the Su-34 long-range strike fighter would be given “…long range missiles…Such work is underway and I think that it is the platform that can solve the problem of increasing nuclear deterrence forces within the Air Force strategic aviation.”[40] This may be the Kinzhal but it does have enough range to give it a true strategic capability. For a very long-range strike, the Kh-101 would be better.

Dual-Capable Hypersonic Missiles
Russia is developing hypersonic weapons and should deploy them soon.[41] As Katarzyna Zysk, Associate Professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, notes, “Russia has been developing missiles that can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, also known as dual capable delivery systems. Such systems can be used not only on cruise and ballistic missiles but also on the new hypersonic cruise missiles that Russia has been researching and developing. The program is likely intended to be nuclear-capable as well, given that their purpose will be to strike high-value targets with high reliability…”[42] Interfax, Russia’s main non-governmental news agency, reports that the Russian Zircon hypersonic missile, which DIA says has a range of between 500-1,000-km, can be fitted to aircraft.[43]

Short- and Medium-Range Nuclear Capable Air-launched Missiles
The legacy Soviet non-strategic missile systems were either nuclear or dual-capable but lacked precision accuracy in land attack. This includes a number of systems which had ranges of under 600-km or at least were alleged to have such a range for arms control reasons. As described above, the successors to the medium-range Soviet cruise missiles are long-range nuclear-capable cruise missiles, despite arms control compliance issues.

The Soviet nuclear-capable Kh-22 (AS-4 Kitchen) 300-km range land-attack cruise missile, carried by the Backfire bomber, is still operational although it will be replaced by the long-range Kh-32. The Kh-22 is supersonic (Sputnik News says Mach 4 in its terminal dive), and it is difficult to intercept.[44] The Soviet supersonic short-range Kh-15 (AS-16), carried by the Backfire, was nuclear-only but Sputnik News reports it is still operational and the nuclear version “…was later complemented by a conventional variant.”[45] This implies a considerable increase in accuracy. Izvestia also reports that the Backfire can launch nuclear Kh-15 missiles.[46]

In 2017, Boris Obnosov CEO of the Tactical Missiles Corporation said that before 2020 Russia would add “…a new family of items [cruise missiles] with a range of 200km, 400km, 600km and 1,000km.”[47] He did not mention warhead type, but dual-capability is the norm.

During the Cold War, Russian fighters carried nuclear bombs and short-range nuclear missiles with a range of up to 100 miles.[48] The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review and Russian expert Alexei Arbatov, former Vice Chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, said Russia now has non-strategic nuclear bombs and air-to-surface missiles but provide no detail on the ranges of these missiles.[49]

Russian Development of Advanced Earth Penetration Nuclear Weapons
There have been repeated statements by the Directors of the Russian Sarov nuclear weapons laboratory about Russian development of nuclear earth penetrator weapons. The most detailed of these was by former Atomic Energy Minister and then-Director of Sarov Viktor Mikhaylov, who in December 2002 stated, “The scientists are developing a nuclear ‘scalpel’ capable of ‘surgically removing’ and destroying very localized targets. The low-yield warhead will be surrounded with a superhardened casing which makes it possible to penetrate 30–40 meters into rock and destroy a buried target—for example, a troop command and control point or a nuclear munitions storage facility.”[50] This is extremely advanced performance.

Mikhaylov did not say whether the warhead was strategic or tactical or whether it was a bomb or missile warhead. There is no reason it can’t be used for both strategic and tactical missions just as the U.S. B61 Mod 12 will be. As former Air Force Chief of Staff General Norty Schwartz wrote in his memoirs, “A lower yield means potentially less collateral damage and less radioactive fallout that civilians might encounter, with no sacrifice to target accuracy.”[51] The Russian combination of low-yield, deep earth penetration and presumably precision or near-precision accuracy, will result in even lower collateral damage. Such deep penetration opens up the possibility of complete radioactive containment of a very low-yield explosion while retaining the ability to destroy targets of the type Mikhaylov described.

Russian Air Defense Non-Strategic Warheads
Russia has retained a variety of nuclear air and missile defense weapons. Russian press reports to this effect have been confirmed in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review which states that Russia has nuclear anti-aircraft missiles and anti-ballistic missiles.[52] In addition to its new role as a launcher of Kinzhal offensive dual capable ballistic missiles, the Russian Mig-31 is Russia’s dedicated air defense interceptor. In this role, according to aviation journalist Piotr Butowski, it can carry the R-33S (AA-9) missiles fitted with a nuclear warhead.[53] This missile is reportedly also carried by the Mig-29.[54] Because of the small size of an air-to-air missile, this has to be low-yield warhead.

Continued…..

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons
Since 2003, when it began to attack then non-existent U.S programs to develop low-yield nuclear weapons, the official Russian talking points would not confirm press reports that Russia had developed and even deployed new low-yield nuclear weapons. However, there is substantial evidence this is the case. A declassified year 2000 CIA report observed, “Moscow’s military doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons has been evolving and probably has served as the justification for the development of very low-yield, high-precision nuclear weapons. The range of applications will ultimately be determined by Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine, and could include artillery, air-to-air weapons, ABM weapons, anti-satellite weapons or multiple rocket launchers against tanks or massed troops.…”[55] In 2009, the bipartisan U.S. Strategic Commission report said Russia was developing “…low-yield tactical nuclear weapons including an earth penetrator.”[56] (This may be the weapon Mikhaylov spoke about.) The existence of several Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons of these types, although not their yields, is acknowledged in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.[57] However, it does note that, “Russia’s belief that limited nuclear first use, potentially including low-yield weapons, can provide such an advantage is based, in part, on Moscow’s perception that its greater number and variety of non-strategic nuclear systems provide a coercive advantage in crises and at lower levels of conflict.”[58]

Prior to the start of the Russian propaganda attack, some Russian Generals were candid about the role of low-yield Russian nuclear weapons in the nuclear “de-escalation of aggression” strategy. In 1999, Colonel General Vladimir Muravyev, then-Deputy Commander of the Strategic Missile Force, said, “…the deterrent actions of strategic forces…[involve] strikes with both conventional and nuclear warheads with the goal of de-escalating the military conflict,” and Russian forces “…should be capable of conducting ‘surgical’ strikes…using both highly accurate, super-low yield nuclear weapons, as well as conventional ones…”[59]

Conclusion
Clearly, Russia has a very large margin of superiority in all types of non-strategic nuclear weapons including air-delivered weapons, which are varied and numerous. The Russian Aerospace Force and the other services can launch types of theater nuclear attacks that we cannot match. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review began to address this problem in a variety of ways including Trident a low-yield nuclear warhead capability, a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile, improved dual capability aircraft readiness and, reportedly, earlier availability of the F-35 nuclear capability in Europe. Russia reportedly already has all of these capabilities except that it cannot match F-35 stealth.[60] These decisions have been welcomed by the nations that are most threatened by Russia, China and North Korea. These programs have the potential to enhance our deterrent considerably.

Dr. Mark B. Schneider is a Senior Analyst with the National Institute for Public Policy. Before his retirement from the Department of Defense Senior Executive Service, Dr. Schneider served in a number of senior positions within the Office of Secretary of Defense for Policy including Principal Director for Forces Policy, Principal Director for Strategic Defense, Space and Verification Policy, Director for Strategic Arms Control Policy and Representative of the Secretary of Defense to the Nuclear Arms Control Implementation Commissions. He also served in the senior Foreign Service as a Member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff.

Notes:
[1] Nikolai N. Sokov, “Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike ‘de-escalation’,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
March 13, 2014, available at https://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation.
[2] “Russia to broaden nuclear strike options,” Russia Today, October 14, 2009, available at http://rt.com/news/russia-broaden-nuclear-strike/.
[3] John W. Parker, Russia’s Revival: Ambitions, Limitations, and Opportunities for the United States (Washington,
D.C.: Institute for National Strategic Studies, January 2011), p, 23, available at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/Fulltext /u2/a546683.pdf.
[4] Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, (Washington D.C., US, Department of Defense, February 2018),
8, 30, available at https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/ 200187 2886/-1/-1/1/2018-NUCLEAR-POSTURER
EVIEW-FINAL-REPORT.PDF.
[5] Vladimir Sokirko, “Top-ol, Top-ol!!” Moskovskiy Komsomolets, December 23, 1999.
[6] “041318 Air Force Association, National Defense Industrial Association, and Reserve Officers Association
Capitol Hill Forum with General Kevin Chilton, Former Commander, United States Strategic Command, on
‘Defending the Record of U.S. Nuclear Deterrence’,” April 13, 2018, available at http://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/
a2dd917a42ae2315bb4cb580c94585ded78d6b.pdf.: “The Latest Security Challenges Facing NATO,” Royal United Services Institute, February 29, 2015, available at http://www.rusi.org/go.php?.
[7] “S ARMED SERVICES HEARING ON WORLDWIDE THREATS,” Political Transcript Wire, May 23, 2017,
available at http://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/1902238886?accountid=155509.: “The Latest Security Challenges Facing NATO,” op. cit.
[8] “Air Force,” Russian Federation Ministry of Defense, no date, available at http://eng.mil.ru/en/structure/forces/ air.htm. (Accessed on May 16, 2018).
[9] Nikolai Sokov, “A New Old Direction in Russia’s Nuclear Policy,” Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue No. 50, September 2000,” available at http://www.acronym.org.uk/old/archive/50newold.htm.
[10] Alexander Mladenov, “Best in the Breed,” Air Forces Monthly, May 2017, p. 51.
[11] Piotr Butowski, “2015 Russian Airpower Almanac,” Air Force Magazine, July 2015, p. 62, available at http:// www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Magazine Documents/2015/July 2015/0715russia.pdf.
[12] Dave Johnson, Nuclear Weapons and Russia’s Approach to Conflict, (Paris: Foundation pour la Recherche Strategique, 2016), p. 46, available at https://www.frstrategie.org/web/documents/publications/recherches-et-documents/2016/201606.pdf.
[13] “STATEMENT OF GENERAL PAUL SELVA, USAF VICE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF BEFORE THE 115TH CONGRESS HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE MILITARY ASSESSMENT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS REQUIREMENTS 8 MARCH 2017,” p. 4, available at http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/ AS00/20170308/105640/HHRG-115-AS00-Wstate-SelvaUSAFP-20170308.pdf.
[14] U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Defense, National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Defense September 2008), p. 8, available at https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/nuclearweapons policy.pdf.
[15] Alexander Mladenov, “Russia’s Tactical aircraft deliveries,” Air International, February 2018, pp. 32-33.: Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., pp. 8, 54.: “Russia to Receive Su-57 Production Models With Interim Engines in 2018-19 – Ministry,” Sputnik, August 24, 2017, available at https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/professional/ docview/1931 597365?accountid=155509.
[16] Dr. Mark B. Schneider, “The F-35 vs. the Russian Su-35 and the PAK FA,” Real Clear Defense, November 5, 2015, available at http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2015/11/05/the_f-35vstherussiansu-35andthepak_ fa_108649.html.: Joseph Trevithick, “It’s No Surprise India Finally Ditched Its Stealth Fighter Program With Russia,” The War Zone, April 23, 2018, available at http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...tched-its-stealth-fighter-program-with-russia.
[17] Tyler Rogoway, “Russia’s Su-57 Fighter Launches A New Cruise Missile From Its Weapons Bay,” The War Zone, May 2018, available at http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...ing-a-new-cruise-missile-from-its-weapons-bay.
[18] Tyler Rogoway, “Russia's New Fighter Uses Long-Range Weapons To Overcome Its Weaknesses,” Foxtrot Alpha, August 20, 2015. available at https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/russias-new-fighter-uses-long-range-weapons-to-overcome-1725502172.
[19] “India Successfully Test-Fires Supersonic Brahmos Missile From Su30MKI,” Sputnik News, November 22, 2017, available at https://sputniknews.com/military/201711221059323479-india-tests-air-version-brahmos.
[20] “Russian stealth jet fired new cruise missile in Syria – minister,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, May 25, 2018, available https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/2043737995?accountid=155509: “Shoigu: Advanced cruise missiles launched from Su-57 in Syria in Feb,” Interfax, May 25, 2018, available at https://dialog. proquest.com/professional/docview/2044293726?accountid=155509.
[21] Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 54.
[22] Ibid., p. 9.
[23] Dave Johnson, Russia’s Conventional Precision Strike Capabilities, Regional Crises, and Nuclear Thresholds,
(Livermore: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, February 2018), p. 39, available at https://cgsr.llnl.gov/
content/assets/docs/Precision-Strike-Capabilities-report-v3-7.pdf.
[24] Ibid., p. 57.
[25] Mark B. Schneider, “Deterring Russian First Use of Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons,” Real Clear Defense, March
12, 2018, available at http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/08/lower-yield-weapons-will-raise-not-lowerth resholdnuclear-use/140610/.
[26] “Russian commander comment on Putin’s weapons announcement,” BBC Monitoring of the Former Soviet Union, May 5, 2018, available at https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/2010308306?accountid=155509.
[27] “Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly,” The Kremlin, March 1, 2018, available at http://en.kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/56957.
[28] “The Su-34 strike fighter Upgrading a Hellduck: Russia’s Su-34 to Get State of-the-Art Overhaul,” Sputnik News,
December 10, 2016, available at https://sputniknews.com/russia/20161210104840 2800-russia-su-34-strike
fighter-modernization/.: Piotor Butowski, “Daggers, Stones and Foxbats,” Air International, April 2018, pp. 12-13.
[29] “Orbital Warrior: What to Expect From Russia's Next Gen Interceptor MiG-41,” Sputnik News, August 27, 2017, available at https://sputniknews.com/military/201708271056829517-mig-31-41-russia-interceptor-aircraft-features/.
[30] “Meeting with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu,” Kremlin.ru, December 8, 2015, available at http://en.kremlin. ru/events/president/news/50892.: “In the course of the last 24 hours, aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces have performed 82 combat sorties engaging 204 terrorist objects in Syria,” Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, December 9, 2015, available at http://eng.mil.ru/en/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12071355 @egNew.
[31] “Strategic Tu-95MS bombers destroyed the ISIS militants’ command post and storages in Syria with a missile attack, Defense ministry of the Russian Federation,” August 5, 2017, available at http://eng.mil.ru/en/newspage/ country/more.htm?id=12132186@egNews.: “In the course of the last 24 hours, aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces have performed 82 combat sorties engaging 204 terrorist objects in Syria,” op. cit.
[32] Alexander Fedor, “Flexible Strategic Fist,” Oborona.ru. December 12, 2015, available at http://www.oborona.ru/ includes/periodics/armedforces/2015/1214/145317358/detail.shtml. (In Russian.)
[33] “Russia’s upgraded strategic bomber to join Aerospace Force in October,” TASS, May 15, 2018, available at http ://tass.com/defense/1004329.
[34] Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 8.: “Tu-22M3 launching a Kh-32 cruise missile,” June 27, 2013, available at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtsWTuZQhvQ.: David Cenciotti, “New image of a Russian Tu-22M Backfire with cruise missile emerges,” The Aviationist.com, December 16, 2013, available at http://theaviationist.com/2013/ 12/16/tu-22-cruise-missiles/.
[35] “Winged Snipers: Best of the Best of Russia’s Ballistic and Cruise Missiles,” Sputnik News, December 23, 2017, available at https://sputniknews.com/military/201712231060272064-russian-air-launched-ballistic-cruise-missiles/.
[36] Nikolai Litovkin, “New Russian cruise missiles to hit targets from the stratosphere,” Russia Beyond the Headlines, August 30, 2016, available at https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/0...s-to-hit-targets-from-the-stratosphere_625441.
[37] “Russia: First Tu-22M3M bomber due 2018, 30 to be upgraded,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, May 21, 2017, available at http://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/1900529954?accountid=155509.
[38] “Winged Snipers: Best of the Best of Russia’s Ballistic and Cruise Missiles,” op. cit.
[39] “Russia’s Backfire Bomber Is Back!”, War is Boring, June 13, 2014, available at https://warisboring.com/russias-backfire-bomber-is-back-2618703120b7#.yt12goy29.
[40] “Russian strategic aviation to be reinforced with Su-34 frontline bombers,” Interfax-AVN, March 19, 2012, available at https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/929015018?accountid=155509.
[41] “Army; Russian military to receive hypersonic weapons shortly - Defense Ministry,” Interfax, January 20, 2017, available at http://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/1860284808?accountid=155509.
[42] Katarzyna Zysk, “Nonstrategic nuclear weapons in Russia’s evolving military doctrine,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 22, 2017, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2017.1362908.
[43] “Russia developing Mach 6 capable cruise missile,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, September 14, 2016, available at http://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/1819149161?accountid=155509.: U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Russia Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations, (Washington D.C.: Defense Intelligence Agency, 2017), p. 79, available at http://www.dia. mil/Portals/27/.
[44] “BALLISTIC AND CRUISE MISSILE THREAT,” (Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: National Air and Space Intelligence Center, 2017) p. 37, available at http://www.nasic.af.mil/Portals/19/images/Fact Sheet I mages/2017%20Ballistic%20and%20Cruise%20Missile%20Threat_Final_small.pdf?ver=2017-07-21-083234-343.:
“Winged Snipers: Best of the Best of Russia’s Ballistic and Cruise Missiles,” op. cit.
[45] Ibid.
[46] “Russian pilots training to destroy US missile defences,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, June 2, 2016, available at https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/1793203837?accountid=155509.
[47] “Russia to develop cruise missiles capable of striking targets at 1,000km range,” TASS, July 20, 2017, available at http://tass.com/defense/957105.
[48] John M. Collins, American and Soviet Military Trends Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, (Georgetown University, 1978), p. 253.
[49] Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 54.: Russia Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations, op. cit., p. 31.; Alexei Arbatov, “Arbatov Analyzes Possible Tactical Nuclear Weapons Reductions,” Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kuryer Online, May 17, 2010. (Translated by World News Connection.)
[50] Quoted in Mark Schneider, “The Future of the U.S. Nuclear Deterrent,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 27, No. 4 (October 31, 2008), p. 348, available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01495930802358539.
[51] General (ret.) Norty Schwartz, Suzie Schwartz and Ronald Levinson, Journey Memoirs of an Air Force Chief of Staff, (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), p. 318.
[52] Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 54.
[53] Piotr Butowski, “‘Foxhound’ Toolbox,” Combat Aircraft, March 2018, p. 74.
[54] Butowski, “2015 Russian Airpower Almanac,” op. cit., p. 61.
[55] “Evidence of Russian Development of New Subkiloton Nuclear Warheads [Redacted],” Intelligence
Memorandum, Central Intelligence Agency, August 30, 2000, approved for release October 2005, pp. 6, 10,
available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001260463.pdf.
[56] William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger, America’s Strategic Posture - The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, (Washington D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2009), p. 12,
available at http://media.usip.org/reports/strat_posture_report.pdf.
[57] Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 53.
[58] Ibid., p. XI-XII.
[59] James R. Howe, “Exploring the Dichotomy Between New START Treaty Obligations and Russian Actions and
Rhetoric,” Vision Centric, Inc., February 17, 2016, available at https://www.exchangemonitor.com//wp-content/
uploads/2016/04/Thu-9am-Future-Nuclear-Arms-Control-Stacked.pdf.
[60] Schneider, “Deterring Russian First Use of Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons,” op. cit.: Schneider, “The F-35 vs. the Russian Su-35 and the PAK FA,” op. cit.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.nationaldefensemagazine....g-for-possible-conflict-on-european-peninsula

Army Troops Train for Urban Conflict in Europe

6/14/2018
By Vivienne Machi

PARIS — The Army must train and prepare for urban combat in Europe as the possibility of state-on-state warfare reemerges, a top commander said June 14.

The service is “working assiduously” on generating unit and headquarters readiness to fight large-scale conventional combat operations and maintain a strategic advantage on the ground, Lt. Gen. Christopher Cavoli said at the Eurosatory air and land defense conference outside Paris. Cavoli assumed the role of U.S. Army Europe commander in January.

Army troops are also training for a possible conflict in urban environments, he noted.

“It’s always preferable to avoid urban fights, and to the extent that we believe we’re going to be dragged into one, it changes quite a bit about your organization and it changes quite a bit about the weapon systems you use and the way you use” them, he told reporters.

U.S. Army Europe will train in its own facilities, and also conduct exercises in larger centers, such as the French military’s centre d’entrainement aux actions en zone urbaine — or CENZUB — a purpose-built training center in northern France for honing urban warfare skills, Cavoli said. U.S. and allied troops also benefit from continued joint exercises, such as the Exercise Saber Strike 18 taking place June 3-15 across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy released in February directed U.S. military leaders to pivot from concentrating on the counterinsurgency fights of the last two decades and to prepare for great power competition with Russia and China.

Moscow continues to act aggressively toward its European neighbors. As the prospect of confronting enemy troops in Europe appears more likely, U.S. Army Europe must examine how to best configure itself to be prepared for rapid deployment should a crisis arise, Cavoli said.

"The question is, can I get my forces, my land power into place quickly enough to achieve the speed that makes us strategically relevant?” he said. “What do we need in place beforehand, [and] how do we set the theater we are going to use?”

Troops in Europe need to ensure that there are sufficient intelligence and signals assets on hand so that commanders have the information they need in order to make decisions. They must also have a robust logistics capability and plan for getting equipment quickly into the field, he noted.

“For air forces, this is easy. For space forces, it is nearly constant. For naval forces, it is easy. For land forces, it is largely a question of deployability or pre-position,” he said. “Both of these are extraordinarily expensive propositions.”

Heavy equipment transport trucks and rail cars to deliver equipment to the battlefield are in short supply across the NATO alliance, and many areas in Europe have insufficient rail systems, he said.

The United States and its allies must also prepare for the need to destroy “as much of the enemy’s force as possible with the minimum economy of force,” Cavoli said.

For the last 15 years, troops have honed their skills for counterinsurgency and other low-intensity missions, “but massive destruction was not one of the things we optimized them for,” he said. This will require a change of mindset, which in turn affects how the Army selects its weapons and munitions, and how those capabilities are organized into units, he added.

Any future land conflict in Europe will require large forces that can operate across all domains, Cavoli said. “It is no longer possible to arrive with a ground force without support from the air and the sea, and it is no longer possible to operate without a strong exercise of maneuver through space and cyber operations," he added.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://apnews.com/41e79932256f42c9...illing-of-Pakistan-Taliban-chief-'significant'

Pakistan: Killing of Pakistan Taliban chief ‘significant’

By AMIR SHAH and MUNIR AHMED
Yesterday

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Pakistan’s caretaker Prime Minister Nasir-ul-Mulk described the killing of Pakistan Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan as a “significant development in the fight against terrorism.”

Mulk made the comment in a telephone conversation Friday night with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and thanked him for sharing information about Fazlullah’s killing, said a Pakistan government statement.

The call was initiated by Ghani, who tweeted that Fazlullah’s killing was “the result of tireless human intel by Afghan security agencies.”

A U.S. official said the U.S. believes that it is likely the strike killed Fazlullah, but efforts are ongoing to confirm his death. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary information.

In his tweet, Ghani said he also called Pakistan’s Army Chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa. In both conversations Ghani said he urged Pakistan “to take practical steps to bring Afghan Taliban residing in Pakistan to the negotiation table.”

Thursday’s drone strike, which reportedly killed Fazlullah and five other insurgents when missiles slammed into the car in which they were driving, occurred just hours before Afghanistan’s Taliban began a three-day cease fire.

The cease-fire, which took effect at midnight Thursday, marks the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which follows the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when the faithful fast from sunrise to sunset. The Afghan Taliban announced their cease-fire after Ghani unilaterally declared a temporary cease-fire for the holidays on June 7.

In Afghanistan’s eastern Logar provincial capital of Pul-e-Alam dozens of unarmed Taliban celebrated the Eid holiday, several greeting Afghan security forces, provincial police chief spokesman Shahpur Ahmadzai said Saturday in a telephone interview.

“We didn’t allow them to enter the city with their weapons,” said Ahmadzai, adding at least 80 Taliban entered the city in the last two days to visit their families.

The Associated Press spoke to Abdullah Faizani, a Taliban fighter from Logar’s Baraki district, who said it has been seven years since he has been to the provincial capital. He said he and 32 friends were in the capital on their motorcycles, many of them festooned with the Afghan flag.

“I am so happy for the cease-fire and it is sad when every day Afghans are killing each other,” said Faizani, adding that 15 of his friends died in battles with Afghan security forces in one year. They were all Taliban.

Although he wants an extended cease-fire, he said he would not lay down his weapons permanently until “all the foreign troops leave Afghanistan.”

Atta-ul-Rahman Salim, deputy head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, said Taliban fighters from across the country were reportedly entering into government controlled areas to visit their families “and they were being welcomed by government security forces.”

Meanwhile, in his conversation with Ghani, Mulk said that Fazlullah’s death would be received throughout Pakistan with relief as Pakistanis had borne the brunt of terrorist attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which Fazlullah headed.

The Pakistan government statement also said an “action had finally been taken against an enemy of the people and state of Pakistan.”

Fazlullah was killed in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar province. He had ordered the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that he could not confirm Fazlullah’s death because of the remoteness of the area but also because Afghanistan’s Taliban are not present in that area.
__

Ahmed reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writer Kathy Gannon in Islamabad and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this story.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/

Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim Summit

Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald
June 15, 2018
Commentary

The long-awaited Trump-Kim summit achieved nothing of substance: a photo op and a largely meaningless commitment to denuclearize from North Korea in exchange for equally meaningless security commitments from the United States. It is easy to be underwhelmed by a summit that delivered little and leaves North Korean nuclear weapons firmly in place. Indeed, North Korea has had its status as a nuclear-armed power legitimized by securing a high-profile meeting on equal footing with a sitting president of the United States.

However, accelerating the de facto acceptance of North Korea as a member of the nuclear club may be the summit’s most positive, if unintended, effect. Even if President Donald Trump or the U.S. government never admits it, the summit moves the United States and North Korea closer to a relationship characterized by deterrence rather than by the threat of regime change, military provocation, and crisis. That process toward a stable deterrent relationship is not automatic. Indeed, Trump’s bellicose language over the last year had suggested that the United States might refuse to acknowledge North Korea’s nuclear status and the requirements of deterrence that accompany it. But Trump has now invested political capital in a diplomatic process that can be stretched out indefinitely: North Korea and the United States can now “negotiate in good faith” toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in much the same way nuclear-armed states “pursue negotiations in good faith” toward disarmament under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty: slowly and without any imminent prospect of success.

This is a positive development. To understand why accepting North Korea’s nuclear capabilities is so important, we need to understand the dangers of the alternative: a relationship characterized by the threat of regime change, preventive force, and periodic military crises. Our research on escalation dynamics within nuclear crises — periods of unusual tension and military escalation when two nuclear-armed states stand on the brink of war — suggests that such a relationship with North Korea would be unusually dangerous. Any genuine crisis between North Korea and the United States would be volatile, hard to control, and likely to lead to nuclear escalation.

We come to this conclusion by distinguishing between two sources of danger in nuclear crises. First, leaders might deliberately choose to use nuclear weapons because there are strong strategic incentives to use nuclear weapons before the adversary does. Second, a crisis might spiral across the nuclear threshold even if leaders do not want it to. Some crises are harder to control than others, even if leaders want to keep them contained.

Comparing a potential U.S.-North Korea crisis with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis on these two dimensions is instructive and sobering. The comparison suggests it might be more likely that nuclear weapons would be used in a crisis between the United States and North Korea than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, widely thought to be the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.

The Cuban Missile Crisis saw relatively low risk of deliberate first use: Neither Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev nor U.S. President John F. Kennedy saw much value in using nuclear weapons first. The United States had more nuclear weapons and better delivery vehicles than the Soviet Union, but did not have the capability to inflict a first strike that would eliminate the Soviets’ ability to respond. The U.S. government did not know where all the Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the USSR’s arsenal. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, by 1962 the United States knew it could not deliver a “splendid first strike,” and that any such strike “would have led to unacceptably high casualties both in Europe and in the United States” and “destroyed us as well as the Soviets.” While some in the U.S. government believed there were significant strategic advantages from striking first, Kennedy appears to have been deeply skeptical that those advantages were politically significant and generally unimpressed by the benefits that U.S. nuclear superiority offered in the crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis did, however, have significant potential for uncontrolled escalation. U.S. and Soviet military forces came into contact with each other on several occasions during the crisis in ways that could easily have led to nuclear use. Both sides’ command and control systems were unreliable and suffered from numerous shortcomings that could have made escalation hard to control. Neither side had a clear sense of the other’s red lines for nuclear use, and communications between the two sides were slow and unreliable: it was only in the aftermath of the crisis that the so-called “hotline” between Washington and Moscow was established. As a group of senior U.S. officials later recalled: “the gravest risk in this crisis was … that events would produce actions, reactions, or miscalculations carrying the conflict beyond the control of one or the other or both.”

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the danger came primarily from the risk of uncontrolled escalation rather than a deliberate decision by either leader to use nuclear weapons first. By contrast, a potential U.S. crisis with North Korea would likely involve the dangers both of uncontrolled nuclear use and deliberate nuclear escalation.

First, both North Korea and the United States would have incentives to deliberately use nuclear weapons first as a crisis escalated. For North Korea, using nuclear weapons early in a conventional conflict might be the only way to prevent a conventional defeat by the United States. Just as Pakistan today uses the threat of early nuclear use to deter its more powerful Indian neighbor, and as the United States and its European allies did throughout much of the Cold War to deter the Soviet Union, North Korea today appears to have adopted what Vipin Narang calls an “asymmetric escalation” posture: threatening nuclear first use to deter and (if necessary) blunt an attack by a more conventionally powerful adversary.

The United States would also face temptations for first nuclear use in a hypothetical crisis. A nuclear strike might be crucial to removing North Korea’s ability to use nuclear weapons against U.S. forces, or to retaliate against South Korea, Japan, or the cities of the United States. As David Barno and Nora Bensahel argue, only a “surprise nuclear strike provides a decisive option. There is simply no other way to destroy North Korea’s nuclear capabilities while minimizing the risk of massive conventional or nuclear retaliation.” Barry Posen, arguing against a U.S. war with North Korea, acknowledges that “a surprise American nuclear attack would offer the greatest chance of eliminating the North Korean nuclear arsenal and of preventing a conventional counterattack,” making it a potentially attractive option if war was deemed inevitable or necessary by U.S. planners. North Korea has a much smaller arsenal than the hundreds of warheads possessed by the Soviet Union in 1962, and the U.S. has far greater counterforce capabilities than it did then: A U.S. disarming strike against North Korea is therefore more plausible and potentially attractive than it was against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Both sides therefore face incentives for deliberate first nuclear use in a potential crisis. But the dangers of uncontrolled escalation would also be high. First, little is known about the reliability of North Korea’s command and control systems or whether it might be set up to “fail-deadly” or “fail-safe” if — as would be likely — the regime came under significant assault in the early stages of any military confrontation. North Korea would likely face pressures to “use or lose” their nuclear weapons in any military crisis since it would rightly fear that its nuclear capabilities would be affected by U.S. military operations. And notwithstanding recent negotiations, there remain few well-established or institutionalized avenues for crisis negotiation or communication between the two sides, raising the risk of miscommunication and making it harder to deescalate a military crisis once started. Lastly, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is considerable uncertainty about what either side’s red lines for nuclear use would be. Would the United States use nuclear weapons if North Korea used chemical weapons against Seoul? Would North Korea use nuclear weapons if the US engaged in airstrikes aimed at North Korean command and control systems? We simply don’t know.

On the other hand, in a relationship characterized by deterrence in which North Korea’s nuclear capabilities are accepted, we could expect more clarity about each side’s red lines, fewer fears of an unexpected attack or efforts at regime change, and more established avenues for communication within crises.

A nuclear crisis with North Korea would not feature the large nuclear arsenals and superpower competition that characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nonetheless, a U.S.-North Korea crisis would take the most dangerous aspect of the Cuban Missile Crisis — a high degree of non-controllability — and add potentially strong incentives for deliberate first nuclear use by both sides. Such a crisis would be volatile, liable to suddenly escalate, and deeply dangerous. The risk of nuclear use would be high.

But none of this means the two countries will automatically shift to a relationship characterized by stable and mutual deterrence. After all, the United States does not like being deterred, and accepting North Korea’s nuclear capabilities requires accepting constraints on U.S. foreign policy in the region. In the Cold War, it was not until after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the United States and Soviet Union were able to achieve a more stable relationship characterized primarily by deterrence. The Trump-Kim summit, for all its faults, offers the prospect of moving the two countries toward a similarly stable relationship, by framing the two countries as equals, lessening overt hostilities, and initiating an indefinite diplomatic process toward a vaguely defined end goal. That is something we should be grateful for.

Mark S. Bell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Julia M. Macdonald is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/the-military-logic-behind-assads-use-of-chemical-weapons/

The Military Logic Behind Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons

Luke O’Brien and Aaron Stein
June 15, 2018
Commentary

When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime uses chemical weapons, as it has done on at least four different occasions in the past five years (August 2013, March 2017, April 2017, and April 2018), conspiracy theorists and Russian propaganda outlets immediately kick into gear to begin denying it. They posit that the Syrian regime would never use chemical weapons because, after all, it is already winning the civil war. Instead, these outlets suggest, the anti-Assad opposition (working with external powers) stages “false flag” events to provide excuses for an American military strike aimed at toppling the regime.

These denials are absurd for a number of reasons, one of which is that there is an obvious – but often overlooked – rationale for the regime’s use of chemical weapons. The Syrian conflict has demonstrated the value of these weapons for Assad’s enemy-centric approach to counter-insurgent warfare, which is premised on the idea of using overwhelming force to punish local populations where insurgents are active. Rather than working to deliver services and stability to contested spaces to compel popular support, the intent is to re-establish central government control through naked aggression.

Conspiracy theorists who suggest that chemical weapons attacks are fabricated to invite U.S. intervention also ignore the fact that the United States faces a number of political constraints on the use of force in Syria. The regime concludes that, in certain instances, the value of using chemical weapons exceed the potential costs of external military intervention. The result is a decision to use these weapons as they were intended: to win wars and to terrorize a population into submission.

Assad’s enemy-centric approach has boosted the regime’s near-term security by helping to offset its military weakness and drive down the cost of killing as many people as possible. While chemical weapons tend to be seen as largely an occasional horror, or a rogue threat from terrorist groups, the Assad regime has, once again, demonstrated their value for warfighting – and is likely to use them again. This poses a challenge for the United States, which has emphasized nonproliferation as the most effective tool to prevent the spread and to eliminate stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. As the war in Syria continues, it remains as critical as ever to accept that chemical weapons have value for the aggressor, and to devise political means to compel states to trade away these dangerous weapons.

The Syrian Arab Army: Doctrine and Logistics

American counter-insurgency doctrine emphasizes the need to isolate and defeat the insurgent actor, empower the population to support such operations, and gain legitimacy with the population. The Syrian Arab Army and its backers, by contrast, favor mass punishment and ethnic cleansing, part of an approach referred to as “draining the swamp.” Chemical weapons have proved to be more psychologically damaging to populations than conventional munitions, and are thus well-suited to the regime’s strategy of mass punishment.

For Assad, chemical weapons also compensate for the limitations of his army’s older, less sophisticated weapons. While the use of precision-guided munitions has grown in militaries around the world, they are still a comparatively small part of most countries’ arsenals, limited to anti-tank roles or against naval targets. As a result, most states are forced to use unguided munitions instead. Many targets, if sufficiently protected, can weather most unguided attacks by sheltering in structures, tunnels, or fighting positions. For example, it can take upwards of 147 unguided 155mm artillery shells to destroy a moderately-sized structure. Most of the shells fired won’t even hit the building. Those that land near the building will be unable to strike any of those sheltering inside unless many fragments have chipped away at the concrete wall. Though manifestly unpleasant, the majority of people seeking shelter are likely to survive.

Chemical weapons, however, can seep into these buildings with relative ease, as long as the shells land even reasonably close to the target. In Syria as well as in other conflicts, the anti-Assad opposition has dug fairly sophisticated tunnel systems that are, in theory, impervious to the regime’s heavy artillery and unguided bombs. To effectively target these buried facilities, Assad has turned to chemical weapons, which often descend and concentrate in low-lying areas. The advantage is clear: The regime can ensure heavy casualties with a small amount of effort, either by incapacitating or killing combatants, or by terrorizing these groups and the civilians who live alongside them.

These tactics are not unusual. In 1988, the Iraqi government used chemical weapons to kill civilians hiding in basements in Halabja. Indeed, the Iraqi army was quite transparent that this was their intent. To quote Ali Hassan al-Majid, known more widely as “Chemical Ali” for his use of chemical weapons during the Anfal campaign, “I told the mustashars [village heads]… I said I cannot let your village stay because I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die. You must leave right now.” In Yemen in the 1960s, Egyptian forces used nerve agent to target civilians and insurgent sheltering in caves near Royalist strongholds.

Chemical munitions are also relatively cheap to produce. Unlike expensive precision-guided munitions (and the advanced command, control, communications, and intelligence systems needed to use them), even smaller and less advanced states can field chemical weapons programs relatively cheaply. As the CIA observed when assessing Iraq’s chemical weapons program in the 1980s:

The chemical warfare program has been a relatively cheap investment for Iraq. We estimate the program has cost slightly above $200 million in capital expenditures during the past decade, less than 2 percent of Iraq’s military expenditures over the same period.

Chemical weapons, it has been estimated, cost approximately $600 to generate one civilian casualty per square kilometer, as opposed to $2,000 to achieve comparable effects using conventional weapons. If you’re an army forced to fight a war on the cheap, chemical weapons make a great deal of sense.

International Retaliation: Weathering the American Cruise Missile Storm

Conspiracy theorists are fond of asserting that Assad would never use chemical weapons because this would be provoking Western military reprisals. This argument underestimates both the value of chemical weapons to the Assad regime and the serious constraints on Western action in Syria.

The regime presumably weighs the expected cost of retaliatory strikes against the clear military benefit of chemical weapons use. The United States, for its part, has to balance the desire to punish the regime for violating its commitment not to use chemical weapons with other factors, like protecting American troops in northeast Syria and limiting the risk of unintended escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have signaled that they do not want to risk such escalation over the war in Syria. Thus, Assad can count on the presence of Russian forces in Syria to act as a deterrent against strikes that could threaten regime stability. He can reasonably assume that American military action has to be refined to try and prevent unintended escalation, and will therefore be relatively small in scale. In addition, Assad has almost certainly dispersed chemical weapons storage facilities and production centers to ensure that they cannot be destroyed from the air. The likely outcome, therefore, is that American airstrikes will set the program back but won’t completely destroy the program. Assad can assume that Russian diplomatic and military support – combined with American hesitance to topple his regime – will protect him from regime-threatening external intervention.

Weapons of War

In many ways, our popular imagination views chemical weapons as magical McGuffins to be pursued by Bond villains, two-dimensional terrorists, and commandos, not as actual battlefield weapons that help state actors defeat insurgents. They are less military history and more Michael Bay. To those unfamiliar with chemical weapons, reports of their use can take on a feeling of unreality, like a mustachioed villain tying someone to a railroad track. The truth, however, is that chemical weapons remain of military value. Understanding this allows us to see past transparent propaganda campaigns and instead grapple with the long-term psychological and humanitarian impact civilians are subject to after chemical weapons use.

Understanding how chemical weapons are of value to state actors also allows us to focus our resources in the right place. The idea of terrorists using chemical weapons may capture the popular imagination, but it is the far lesser threat when compared to state use, where professional militaries trained to maximize lethality use the weapons to achieve military effects. Russia has proposed a new treaty focused on non-state actor chemical weapons use. Clearly, this effort is misdirected, and a naked attempt to distract from the fact that its ally is using chemical weapons in a war Moscow is directly supporting.

The clear logic underpinning Assad’s use of chemical weapons should challenge widely held assumptions about the prohibitive norm against the use of weapons of mass destruction. The Syrian regime is pursuing a straightforward strategy of mass punishment to defeat an internal threat to its survival, and has demonstrated chemical weapons’ value for warfighting.

Chemical weapons are not distinct from Assad’s war machine. They’re as much a part of it as his artillery, his aircraft, and his tanks. By treating chemical weapons as a unique and discrete threat instead of an integrated part of the regime’s military means, it becomes difficult to devise policies to deter and prevent future use. If the United States and the international community chooses to respond to future chemical weapons use with military strikes, they will have to consider imposing costs on conventional warfighting capabilities as well, because Assad’s conventional and unconventional systems work in concert to achieve strategic effects — the destruction of the insurgency. However, any such effort would be beholden to political considerations about American strategy and appetite for risk.

Assad has, thus far, absorbed the costs of chemical weapons use and correctly anticipated his relative safety from Western airstrikes. But it is important to look beyond the current conflict in Syria and consider the implications for future conflicts. To prevent chemical weapons attacks, paradoxically, the policy community has to accept that chemical weapons are not unique weapons. Regimes have integrated them into conventional battle plans, making chemical weapons part of a broad spectrum of munitions options for fighting and winning wars. The ideal policy response is to incentivize regimes to voluntarily disarm, making a political choice to trade away a valuable tool, in return for some form of inducement. Indeed, the United States and Russia pursued this policy in September 2013, only for the Assad regime to hold some weapons back and eventually use them again to support combat operations. The policy failed, but its premise — general state disarmament — remains an important policy goal for the United States.

In the absence of disarmament, it is important to accept chemical weapons as part of a state’s war fighting capabilities, not a niche or exotic capability. Policymakers should think less John le Carré and more John Keegan – using historical analysis to craft effective policy options to deter and prevent future use, with an eye toward creating the conditions for the eventual total elimination of chemical weapons.

Luke J. O’Brien is an analyst and military historian and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks. He is also an Army reserve officer, and as such his views are his own and not those of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government. He can be found on Twitter as @luke_j_obrien.

Aaron Stein is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

 

[Housecarl]

If this starts to happen it will be a VERY GOOD SIGN!...

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/06/103_250770.html

South Korea proposes movement of North Korean artillery away from border

Posted : 2018-06-17 10:24
Updated : 2018-06-17 12:17

South Korea proposed that North Korea move its long-range artillery away from the heavily fortified border in an effort to reduce tensions during last week's rare cross-border military talks, government sources here said Sunday.

During Thursday's general-grade meeting, the first in more than a decade, Seoul made a series of suggestions, including relocating the artillery pieces to areas 30 to 40 kilometers away from the Military Demarcation Line separating the two Koreas, the insiders said.

The two sides held the talks to follow up on the Panmunjom Declaration from the April 27 inter-Korean summit at the truce village, which calls for joint efforts to alleviate military tensions and "practically eliminate the danger of war."

"We conveyed our position to the North that in light of consultations between the North and the United States over the denuclearization issue, we have to craft measures to drastically reduce military tensions by removing practical threats," a source said on condition of anonymity.

"I understand that (the South) suggested moving the North's artillery that threatens the Seoul metropolitan area to rear areas so as to actively implement the Panmunjom Declaration," the source added.

Seoul's defense ministry later denied that it proposed the movement of the North's artillery farther north.

According to a 2016 South Korean defense white paper, the North has 14,100 artillery pieces, including 5,500 multiple rocket launchers, a majority of which have been deployed near the border.

Pyongyang is known to possess a variety of rocket systems, including 170 mm-caliber self-propelled howitzers and 240 mm multiple rocket launchers that can easily target Seoul and surrounding areas.

The North's longer-range 300 mm multiple rocket launcher is seen as more formidable, as it is capable of reaching key U.S. military installations in Pyeongtaek in Gyeonggi Province and the headquarters of the South's Army, Navy and Air Force in the Gyeryongdae military compound in South Chungcheong Province.

During Thursday's talks, the two Koreas agreed to completely restore their western and eastern military communication lines. They also exchanged opinions on demilitarizing the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom on a "trial basis" and agreed to thoroughly implement a 2004 bilateral agreement on preventing accidental clashes in the West Sea.

Seoul is expected to propose holding following-up military talks late this month or next month. (Yonhap)

 

[Housecarl]

Yeah, "War on the Rocks" has put up some interesting stuff this last week....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/r...russias-strategy-for-great-power-competition/

Raiding and International Brigandry: Russia’s Strategy for Great Power Competition

Michael Kofman
June 14, 2018
Commentary

No one knows if the next six years of Vladimir Putin’s reign will be his last, but signs suggest they will be the most difficult for Washington to navigate in what is now widely acknowledged on both sides as a long-term confrontation between Russia and the West. Moscow has weathered an economic crisis brought on by low oil prices and Western sanctions, domestic political scandals, and international setbacks. More importantly, just as America’s own national security documents begin to frame great power competition as the defining challenge to U.S. power, Russia is yet again adapting its approach based on the experience of the past three years. Russian leaders may not have something that would satisfy the Western academic strategy community as a deliberate “grand strategy,” but they nonetheless possess a strategic outlook and a theory of victory for this competition. That theory is based less on direct competition and more on raiding, a stratagem that holds promise for revisionist ambitions and the weaker side in the conflict.

Raiding is the way by which Russia seeks to coerce the United States through a series of operations or campaigns that integrate indirect and direct approaches. Modern great power competition will thus return to forms of coercion and imposition reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but enacted with the technologies of today. Although raiding will be Moscow’s principal approach to competition, international brigandry may be the best term to describe elements of Russian behavior that the West considers to be “bad” or “malign.” These are acts of indirect warfare, both centrally planned and enacted on initiative by entities within the Russian state empowered to shape policy – often in competition with each other. Brigandry may come with negative legalistic connotations, a byword for outlaw, but here the term is meant to define a form of irregular or skirmish warfare in the international system conducted by a partisan.

Russia is, at times, miscast as a global spoiler or retrograde delinquent. Delinquents commit minor offenses and have no plan. Spoilers react to plans, but have little strategy of their own. Raiders, by contrast, launch operations with a strategic outlook and objectives in mind. And while often weaker than their opponents, raiders can be successful. The structure of the international system and the nature of the confrontation lends itself to the use of raiding, which increasingly appears to be the chosen Russian strategy. By focusing on deterring the high-end conventional fight and restoring nuclear coercive credibility, both important in and of themselves, the United States national security establishment may be fundamentally overlooking what will prove the defining Russian approach to competition.

Raiding as a tactic is not a new experience for the United States, but considered in a strategic context, the concept may lend itself more useful than the hodgepodge of gray zone, and other neologisms the community is often stuck referencing to explain the modern character of war. More importantly, raiding is a long established concept at the operational and strategic level of warfare, unlike “Russian hybrid warfare,” which has devolved into a kitchen sink discussion about Russian bad behavior. Indeed, raiding was once the principal form of warfare throughout Europe. Raiding is new in the sense that it is actually quite old as a strategy for competition between powers before the prominence of industrial scale warfare. Today, in our manuals, a raid is viewed as an operational tool rather than strategic concept, as can be seen in Joint Operations (JP 3-0), which describes a raid as “an operation to temporarily seize an area in order to secure information, confuse an adversary, capture personnel or equipment, or to destroy a capability culminating in a planned withdrawal.”

Raids are often conducted over phases, including infiltration, denying the enemy the opportunity to reinforce, followed by surprise attack and withdrawal. Raiding plays much more to Russian strengths, leveraging agility and a simplified chain of command ( i.e. deinstitutionalized decision making, and a strong desire to achieve political ends, but not to get stuck with the costs of holding terrain). This is a strategy of limited means and it is also lucrative. Thus, raiding is not about territorial expansion or global domination. We should consider this term when seeking to understand how classical great powers like Russia use their toolkits in strategic competition.

Great Power Spoiler or Great Power Raider?

Once the Cold War ended, Washington became accustomed to seeing Russia as a largely irrelevant power, unable to contest American foreign policy and too weak to effectively pursue its own interests. However, the 1990s and early 2000s were an anomalous period of time, with Russia missing as an actor in European politics, and taciturn on the international stage. In truth, it was not simply Russia’s absence from international politics, but the dearth of other powers in general that made this a period of unipolarity and the primacy of one state in international affairs well above and beyond the power of others. Denizens of Washington tended to forget or ignore the second word in the term Charles Krauthammer coined in 1990 to describe American primacy in the post-Cold War period: the “unipolar moment.” He wrote:

The most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity. No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for decades. Now is the unipolar moment.

That moment lasted longer than many had expected, but the decades did pass, and great power competition has reemerged.

The Russo-Georgian War in 2008 led to a turning point in bilateral relations. There was a sense in Washington that somewhere things had gone awry in Russia policy, and a desire emerged to reset relations with Moscow, in the hope that successful cooperation on areas of mutual interest would demonstrate the benefits of integration with the West, and into a U.S.-led international order. Suffice it to say that dream did not come to fruition.

Around 2015, after its intervention in Syria, Russia became increasingly seen as a global spoiler. Still the view prevailed that Moscow was resurgent, but brittle in terms of the foundations of power. This is a hubristic and overly optimistic interpretation. Such a vision is borne of the consistent mythos in America’s outlook that Russia is dangerous, but no more than a paper tiger that will eventually fade from the global stage. The endless trope that Russia doesn’t have a long game is a self-serving delusion. As Russia seeks to navigate through mounting international challenges posed by its confrontation with the United States it is increasingly forcing Washington and its allies to respond to a series of operations, campaigns, and calculated and not so calculated gambits.

Effective nuclear and conventional deterrence has long resulted in what Glenn Snyder described as a stability-instability paradox. This holds that the more stable the nuclear balance, the more likely powers will engage in conflicts below the threshold of war. If war is not an option and direct competition is foolish in light of U.S. advantages, raiding is a viable alternative that could succeed over time. Therefore, Russia has become the guerrilla in the international system, not seeking territorial dominion but raiding to achieve its political objectives. And these raids are having an effect. If Moscow can remain a strategic thorn in Washington’s side long enough for Beijing to become a global challenge to American leadership, Washington may have no choice but to negotiate a new great power condominium that ends the confrontation , or so Moscow hopes.

At the heart of a raid is the desire to achieve a coercive effect on the enemy. Even if unsuccessful, a raid can positively shape the environment for the raider by the damage and chaos it can inflict. At the tactical level, it is about military gains, but large raiding campaigns in the past sought political and economic impact on the adversary, typically ending with a withdrawal. The French word for this form of warfare was chevauchee, or mounted raid, describing an approach to conflict that eschewed siege warfare. The chevauchee was prominent in the 14th century, and the quintessential raider of that time was the English Black Prince, Edward III’s son. The Black Prince led two extensive raiding campaigns in 1355 and 1356 during the Hundred Years War, looting, burning and pillaging the French countryside. He was forced to adopt this form of warfare in part because the English lacked the means to siege French cities. Thus, the goal became to destabilize France to convince its feudal sovereigns that they were on their own. He did this with raids that targeted economic resources and thereby destroyed the political credibility of the French monarchy.

In Spain, the term for this form of warfare was cabalgadas, prolonged raiding operations conducted by infantry, a common feature of the War of the Two Pedros (1356 to 1379). In North Africa, raids were called razzia. America’s martial traditions are also rooted in raiding, from Roger’s Rangers during the French and Indian War, to the Revolutionary War, or the famous cavalry raids of the Civil War.

Russia has extensive experience in raiding as a form of warfare. The Russian term for raiding is nabeg. Long before the Mongol invasion in 1237 to 1240 and the formation of the Russian Empire, the first raids by the Rus began in 860 against the Byzantine Empire. These raids went on until 1043. Peter the Great was also no stranger to raiding operations in wartime. Hundreds of years later, during the latter years of the Great Northern War, Russian galley fleets with thousands of raiders successfully attacked Sweden, including Gotland, Uppland, and the Stockholm archipelago. The Red Army had its armored raids of World War II, like the 24th Tank Corps raid on Tatsinskaya during the last stages of the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942.

Raiding is an effective riposte to a strong but distracted opponent, and becomes popular when the technologies of the time create a rift between the political objectives sought and the means available to attain them. This makes traditional forms of warfare too costly, too risky, or unsuitable to the goals desired. Raiding proved prevalent before the modern nation-state system was formed in 1648 and subsequently exported by Europeans to the rest of the world. However, today the modern nation-state construct is weak. Do states truly have economic, information, or cyber borders? How do you demark these borders, defend them, and deter adversaries from crossing them? Much of the infrastructure for this digital age lives in exposed global domains, lies under the sea in international waters, in space, and cyberspace. All of it is vulnerable and ripe for exploitation.

The Modern Chevauchee

Russia will continue to use other instruments of national power to raid the West as part of a coercive campaign intended to at minimum weaken and distract Washington and, at maximum, coerce it into concessions on Russian interests. This is not a short-term strategy for victory, and it would be wrong to assume that these raids are centrally directed given the diverging security factions, clans, and personalities seeking to shape Russian foreign policy. Mark Galeotti cleverly coined “adhocracy” to describe this system. The image of Putin sitting in the Kremlin pulling knobs and levers, or the mythical Gerasimov Doctrine (a linguistic invention that its author has forsworn), have become tragic caricatures in the current zeitgeist. On the contrary, raiding has historically been conducted by detachments with a simplified chain of command, pre-delegated authority, and substantial leeway in how to prosecute their campaign. Raiding is not for deliberate strategists, but for those able to capitalize on leaner, fail fast, and fail cheap approaches.

Russia is not raiding to erode the liberal international order, at least not intentionally. That is the inevitable consequence of Russian behavior from a Western perspective, but not its objective. Such evaluations are frankly expressions of Anglo-Saxon political ideology more so than astute analysis of how Moscow actually tries to influence the international system. Russia does not believe there is any such thing as a liberal international order, nor does it see NATO as anything other than America’s Warsaw Pact, an organization structured around the projection of U.S. military power. As such, what the Kremlin understands the current international order to be is simply a system built around American unipolarity, and the best way to change this construct is to accelerate a transition from unipolarity to multipolarity (or what their policy establishment now calls a “polycentric” world).

Suffice it to say this transition will take a long time because, as William Wohlforth argued in 1999, unipolarity is more stable than it seems. Before 2014, many in Moscow thought they could just wait for this shift in power to happen. It’s important to understand that Russian elites too believe time is on their side. Many misread the 2007-2008 financial crisis as the beginning of rapid decline in the West. The confrontation has now forced Russian leadership to become active in pursuing the long-stated objectives of its own foreign policy, and they won’t stop until a settlement is made.

The center of gravity, in Russian military thought, is the adversary’s will to fight and a country’s ability to engage in war or confrontation as a system. Therefore, the purpose of operations, particularly at a time of nominal peace, is to shape adversary decision-making by targeting their economic, information, and political infrastructure. Senior Russian officers see the modern character of war (correlation of forms and methods) as placing greater emphasis on non-kinetic means, particularly when compared to warfare in the 20th century. Russia’s chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, famously had this posited as a 4:1 non-military to military ratio in one article. Another important trend in Russian military thought identifies the decisive period of conflict as the confrontation or crisis preceding the outbreak of force-on-force violence and the initial period of war. Much of this Russian discourse focuses on non-contact warfare, the ability of long range precision weapons, paired with non-kinetic capabilities in global domains to inflict damage throughout the enemy’s system.

This vision seeks to reconcile the natural proclivities of a General Staff (i.e. planning for high-end warfare, buying expensive capabilities, and seeking larger conventional formations) with an understanding that modern conflicts will play out without set battle lines and meeting engagements. Russia seeks to shape the environment prior to the onset of conflict, and immediately thereafter, imposing costs and inflicting damage to coerce the adversary, in the hope that an inherent asymmetry of interests at stake will force the other side to yield. Russian officers are certainly not partisans, nor do they vocally advocate for raiding, but it is hard to escape the fact that the central tenets of current Russian military thought resemble more the coercive theory of victory of a chevauchee than they do of industrial scale warfare.

Raiding should not be confused with hybrid warfare. Raiding is an established historical approach to warfare, with discernible phasing, objectives, ways, and an overall strategy. The application of hybrid warfare to describe Russian operations has usually been confusing and disjointed in practice. Today, the term is increasingly relegated to European conversations about Russian information warfare and political chicanery.

The Strategic Terrain of Great Power Competition

Moscow is constrained by the structural realities of its competition with Washington. There is no way for Russia to fundamentally alter a balance of power that dramatically favors the United States. America’s GDP is more than five times that of Russia’s adjusted for purchasing power parity and ten times greater in raw terms. Washington sits at the head of the world’s most powerful network of allies in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. And U.S. conventional military superiority is underwritten by a defense budget that is many times the size of Russia’s.

This is why Stephen Walt was right when he argued in March that the current competition is dissimilar to the Cold War (China, however, might prove a different story). It is not borne of a bipolar system, has no universalist ideological conflict behind it, and will not shape international politics as that period of confrontation did. Despite shrill cries by Max Boot, this is also no war, and the United States should do its best to keep it that way. We are still in what can broadly be described as a great power peace. Ever since the great powers built nuclear weapons, large-scale warfare has proven too risky and costly, thereby displacing competition into a host of proxy conflicts or actions short of warfare. Occasional conflicts do occur, such as the Sino-Soviet border conflict 1969, or Kargil War in 1999, but these have tended to be among young, and relatively minor nuclear powers, during the early stages of their nuclear arsenal development. Major nuclear powers, with established nuclear deterrents, eschew conventional wars because they understand that no one wins a nuclear war.

International orders historically have been created from the ashes of a great power war. As such, powers that want to create a multipolar world order have no quick or easy way of realizing such a vision. Therefore, Russia is stuck playing on a largely fixed strategic board, where the rules and institutions created by the West both favor the United States and constrain revisionism. That’s the end of the good news.

However, not all is well with the U.S.-led liberal international order. One need only to look to Russia’s war with Ukraine, successful projection of power in Syria, and sustained efforts at political subversion. Russia’s strategy is aimed at pursuing a great power condominium, seeking to secure former Soviet space as a de facto sphere of influence and its status as one of the principal players in the international system. The approach is rooted in convincing the United States that Russia is a great power with special rights, including the primacy of its security over the sovereignty of its neighbors and a prominent role in organizations governing world affairs. The Russian dream is to return to a status and recognition the Soviet Union held during a very particular time of its history, the détente of 1969 to 1979, when Washington saw Moscow, albeit reluctantly, as a co-equal superpower. In the face of structural constraints, Russia has found a viable path to getting what it wants from the United States via a strategy of coercion, leveraging raids and a wider campaign of international brigandry to impose outsized costs and retain Western attention.

In the early 2000s, when Russia was weak, Putin hoped to make a deal, trading Russian support for the U.S. so-called War on Terror in exchange for certain prerogatives: being treated as a great power, a free hand in its near abroad, and a U.S. ‘hands off’ approach in the former Soviet space. Back then, Moscow sought to explain why Russia deserves a seat at the table, but it was judged in Washington as too weak and irrelevant. When that approach didn’t work, Russia sought to demonstrate that its power and influence was grossly underestimated. Starting with the 2008 Russia-Georgia War, Moscow began using force to prevent NATO expansion. In Ukraine and Syria, Russia illustrated to what at times seems an overly post-modern Western political establishment that military power is still the trump card in international relations, despite what then-Secretary of State John Kerry had to say about 19th century behavior.

Russia’s successful use of force got the West to rethink Moscow’s capabilities and intentions, but it did not lead to a recognition of Russian interests, or a renegotiation of the post-Cold War order and Russia’s place in it, as the Kremlin had hoped. In place of a great power condominium, Russian leaders earned a lasting confrontation. Russia may have the power to filch Crimea from Ukraine, but it is still judged too weak to force a renegotiation of the security framework in Europe or attain major concessions from the United States. After Congress passed sanctions in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in July 2017 and the executive branch closed ranks to prevent any rapprochement, it became clear that no deal was in the offing between the Kremlin and the White House.

Russia still seeks recognition of its great power status in the international system, believing that with it will come privilege, security, and a privileged sphere of influence over its neighbors. The Russian leadership’s strategic outlook has not changed, but demonstrating renewed military strength and resolve has proven insufficient for their country to get a deal with the United States. Washington is still full of policymakers who see Russian power as brittle, believing Moscow doesn’t have a long game. The Russian leadership has no alternative but to settle in for a prolonged geopolitical confrontation, banking on their own resilience, and the ability to impose costs on the basis of an old and familiar strategy of raiding.

Goodbye Nation-State, Hello Raiding

Ironically, as the driver of globalization and the growth of global interdependence, it is the West that has done the most to make raiding against itself so lucrative. Global connectivity, labor flows, migration both legal and illegal, proliferation of information technologies such as social media, together with the creation of supranational entities like the European Union are all enabling factors. Great powers like China and Russia often strive for autarky, seeking to fence off their kingdoms from influences that might create interdependence and allow uncontrolled outside influence. Beijing built the ”great firewall of China,” while Russia has also sought to wall itself off and impose statist control over the invisible ties that connect it to the rest of the international community.

Moscow’s latest battle that sparked protests was its attempt to censor Telegram, a popular messaging app, a contest which has escalated into millions of IPs blocked. These countries seek to create advantage in the great power competition by securing themselves from those technological trends which make modern states borderless. They are building forts. At the same time, they have come to recognize that liberal democracies are open plains ripe for raiding. The 21st century, with all its technological advancements and global interconnectedness, is naturally reviving forms of warfare that shaped Europe in 13th and 14th centuries.

Cyber operations are perhaps the most obvious instrument for modern day raiding. Both Russia and China have made good use of it to raid the U.S. politically and economically, pillaging and looting like in the days of yore. Those Russian attacks not intended to damage are perhaps even more worrisome intrusions designed to gain access and lay the groundwork for future strikes against critical infrastructure such as “energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and manufacturing.” Russia’s recently closed San Francisco consulate was reportedly an intelligence hub for physically mapping fiber optic networks, and a host of activities described as “extraordinarily aggressive intelligence-collection efforts” considered to be “at the very forefront of innovation.”

However, military raiding is back as well. The Russian campaign in Ukraine’s Donbass region is only posing as a form of industrialized warfare. In reality, this was meant to be a raid. It began with infiltration, and its strategic centerpiece is a low-cost effort to coerce Ukraine into federalization in a bid to retain control over Kyiv’s strategic orientation. Moscow never wanted to hold on to the Donbass and still does not. If anything, it long sought to return it to Ukraine in exchange for federalization, though, at minimum, Russia is happy at the destabilizing effect that this conflict has on Ukraine’s policy and economy. Put aside cyber and political warfare campaigns, the four-year conflict in Ukraine is at face value a sustained raid that Moscow had hoped to close out with the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements. Russia empirically lacks the manpower to take over Ukraine, nor did it want to own and pay for parts of the country either. At its core the war in the Donbass is the modern equivalent of the Black Prince’s great chevauchee campaigns in France.

Raiding is not a direct imposition by conquest, nor is it a fait accompli. Behind a raid lies neither the desire for domination nor for limited territorial gains. From the outset, the adversary seeks to withdraw. This is why Crimea does not fit this model, although there is much evidence to suggest that Russia initially seized Crimea without the intent to annex it ( i.e. it was first meant as part of a game of coercive diplomacy). That said, Ukraine illustrates the fundamental problems with raiding:
Raids are easier to launch than they are to manage. The fitful and messy escalation in Ukraine is a hallmark of raiding, when the character of war is not defined by two armies meeting in the field, or a militarily superior power seeking to simply impose its will on a weaker adversary via large-scale industrial warfare. If Russia wanted to crush the Ukrainian military, it could do it, but instead it wants to raid. Since 2015, the conflict has evolved to unconventional warfare throughout Ukraine’s territory, with state-sponsored assassinations, acts of terror, and industrial sabotage becoming the norm.

As Russia grows more confident, and the confrontation intensifies, raiding may become more military in nature. Moscow’s position in Syria is ideal for campaigns elsewhere in the Middle East where it can establish itself as a power broker on the cheap, with countries in the region already choosing to hedge and deleverage from their dependency on relations with the United States. This is ultimately an iterative experience: Some raids or acts of brigandage have clearly backfired. The best recent example of blowback was the failed Russian mercenary attack on February 7 east of Deir Ezzor. That night in the desert was the brainchild of one of Russia’s “mini-garchs” and infamous backers of the Wagner mercenary group, together with the internet troll factory, Yevgeny Prigozhin. While not exactly the brightest horseman, he has been closely linked to Russian efforts in information, political, and other forms of indirect warfare.

The Middle East is a flanking theater in the competition, one where the United States is visibly weak, and its allies are interested in any alternative external power to reduce their own dependency on Washington. Russia will look for ways to raid America’s influence there without taking ownership, security responsibilities, or otherwise over extending itself. The military campaign in Syria came cheaply, taught Russia that it can indeed project power outside its region, and challengeds America’s monopoly on use of force in the international system.

The Black Prince’s Strategy

Forget the decisive Mahanian battle. The typical conventional wars, which the United States frequently wargames, but probably will never get to fight (thanks to nuclear deterrence), are poorly aligned with how adversaries intend to pursue their objectives. Avoiding disadvantages in direct competition is undoubtedly important, as Russia and China have equally invested in conventional and nuclear capabilities, but it is precisely because of our investments in these realms that we have made raiding lucrative. The surest way to spot a raid is when the initiating power doesn’t actually want to possess the object in contest but is instead seeking to inflict economic and political pain to coerce a more important strategic concession out of their opponent. This is not to say that limited land grabs or conventional warfare will disappear from the international arena, but raiding poses a more probable challenge to the United States and its extended network of allies.

Great power raiding is not meant to represent a unified field theory of adversary behavior in the current competition. Not everything aligns neatly with this concept, nor can the actions of a country with numerous instruments of national power be reduced so simply. Nonetheless, raiding for cost imposition and outright pillage, together with other behaviors by intelligence services and elites that may be summed up as in international brigandry, do encapsulate much of the problem. The Russian long game is to raid and impose painful costs on the United States, and its allies, until such time as China becomes a stronger and more active contender in the international system. This theory of victory stems from the Russian assumption that the structural balance of power will eventually shift away from the United States towards China and other powers in the international system, resulting in a steady transition to multipolarity. This strategy is emergent, but the hope is that a successful campaign of raiding, together with the greater threat from China, will force Washington to compromise and renegotiate the post-Cold War settlement.

Can Russia win? If winning is defined as Moscow attaining influence and securing interests in the international system not commensurate with the relative balance of power, but rather based the amount of damage they have inflicted by raiding – quite possibly. If the raider has staying power, and makes a prolonged strategic burden of itself, it can get a favorable settlement even though it is weaker, especially if its opponent has bigger enemies to deal with. Throughout history, leading empires, the superpowers of their time, have had to deal and negotiate settlements with raiders.

Here, conventional military might and alliances count for a lot less than you might hope. Today, you don’t need mounted riders for a raiding campaign or for acts of international brigandry. Moscow successfully rode past NATO, all of America’s carrier strike groups, and struck Washington with a campaign of political subversion. The technology involved may be innovative or new, but this form of warfare is decidedly old. To deal with it, Washington will not require panel discussions, new acronyms, and the construction of a center of excellence, but instead to revisit the history of conflict, international politics, and strategy.

Michael Kofman is a Senior Research Scientist at CNA Corporation and a Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Previously he served as program manager at National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm….

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/libya-intervention-by-invitation-26297

Libya: Intervention by Invitation

NATO and the EU have been formally requested by Libya to mount civilian stabilization operations.

Jeffrey Stacey
June 16, 2018

President Macron appears to be gradually positioning France as a global leader now that America’s President Donald Trump has lapsed into a proto-isolationist grand strategy. The latest example is Libya. With Macron’s help, Libya’s factional leaders have agreed to hold fresh presidential and parliamentary elections in December, which the United Nations Security Council just endorsed unanimously. However, conditions in Libya remain acutely fragile, with fighting continuing and no current peace agreement in place. With a serious risk of foreign meddling from western adversaries looming in the background, France and its allies risk a “mini Syria” if they do not act in concert to augment their Libyan stabilization efforts.

Libya is at a crucial crossroads. In some ways, it is closer to the stability that evaporated two years after western intervention overthrew Gaddafi, but in other ways less so as indicated by the recent large-scale bombing in Tripoli. It is incumbent on the allies working with Libya—the U.S., France, Italy, and the UAE— to rid the country of extremism. Furthermore, the allies must band together to persuade the various Libyan parties to agree to a new UN-backed power-sharing agreement. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) also need to move forward on the delayed deployments of civilian stability operations Libya has requested. Additionally, all concerned parties need to prevent Russia from intervening further to the detriment of Libya’s security.

The main sticking point in the negotiations over the UN Special Representative’s power-sharing proposal is whether the Defense Minister position should be held by a civilian or whether a general could hold it. There is widespread expectation that General Haftar, leader of the so-called Libya National Army (LNA), would take up the position after the agreement of a deal. Haftar has just returned from a stint in a French hospital, and he wasted no time in harshly criticizing the coming election. While the UN has made considerable progress in the past six months, different Libyan factions continue to engage each other militarily, imperiling the likelihood of an agreement that will be adhered to by all parties.

Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj leads the Government of National Accord (GNA), but at the moment Libya has been suffering through a triad of mid-level instability. First there is the presence of ISIS in Sirte, second an attempt by the LNA to take the country by force in the east, and third the political instability that features rival parliaments in Tripoli and Benghazi. For some time it appeared as if Haftar and the LNA were likely to be successful in their drive to overtake the whole of the country, but more recently the GNA and its allies have made modest gains, while several militias previously loyal to Haftar no longer are. In part because of this, there is a legitimate window of opportunity for a successful power-sharing agreement to be reached at the behest of the dogged UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) Ghassan Salame.

At a time when the Trump Administration appears to have taken its eye off the ball in Libya, Russia has ramped up its intervention in Libya. Moscow has undertaken a full-fledged backing of Haftar”s forces in an attempt even to replace the UN as the broker among the various parties. This Russian intervention has all staged from a Russian base in western Egypt where special forces and military advisors are deployed. Russian efforts have even recently moved more into the open, including a port of call from a Russian aircraft carrier that gave Haftar a ceremony and a secure phone call with the Russian Defense Minister. Yet there is still ample time for NATO and the EU to upgrade their efforts to aid the GNA, in particular now that Italy has committed troops to help stem refugee flows from Libya’s coastal areas.

NATO and the EU have been formally requested by Libya to mount civilian stabilization operations, and both have accepted and committed informally to coordinating their operations. However, in part because of Libyan instability and in part because of Europe’s keen focus on the Libyan refugee situation, neither the EU nor NATO has fully deployed their operations. European governments have been consumed with viewing Libya through the refugee prism, understandably in part due to the incipient challenge of integrating refugees in their societies and the acute domestic political fallout.

However, it is imperative for the EU and NATO to move forward. It is critical to get their deployments in ahead of any deeper Russian incursion, or a renewed threat from the LNA. Doing so will augment the UN’s sharpened lead approach, as well as help to prevent refugees from migrating en masse to Europe. The imperative for action has grown with the stalled UN attempt to broker greater stability and with the U.S. appearing to sit this simmering crisis out.

The best hope the UN has to achieve even a marginal degree of stability is for the EU and NATO operations to proceed. This is because such operations would have a timely impact in helping the UN create more sustained stability. In essence, the western powers should be playing a more prominent role in notoriously unstable Libya because at this moment there is a legitimate opportunity to turn the corner in a more stable direction. This is also important because although some observers have called for Egypt to play a prominent role alongside the western tandem, this is less advisable in light of how closely Egypt is now working with Russia.

Libyan leaders have spent the last several years sparring, politically and militarily, but lately, there has been sustained talk of a basis on which to come together and unify the disparate parts of Libya. For example, the large-scale Tripoli bombing aside, there has been measurable progress in registering Libyans for the next national election with over 2.5 million Libyans registered. Moreover, the U.N.-backed GNA government and the central bank in Tripoli have just agreed on public spending of 42 billion Libyan dinars ($31 billion) for 2018, an increase from 37 billion last year.

For its part, the UN views this embryonic stability as a critical juncture and has re-launched an updated version of its efforts to broker stability among the competing factions in Libya. Thus far, the most important actors on the ground have positively received the initiative, although Haftar recently commented that the UN-backed government was now “void and expired.” In fact, technically speaking this is true, for the formal mandate has expired, thereby galvanizing the UN into active mode to get a new agreement in place for the GNA.

The most compelling question in this context is whether General Haftar of the east-based LNA will compromise with the UN and the West-backed GNA, and in particular whether he will accept a civilian defense role as opposed to a military one. Recently he has swung between being supportive of the diplomatic path being spearheaded by the UN SRSG and rejecting it. With the EU and NATO operations in place and joining the UN to form a kind of UN-led triumvirate, Haftar is more likely to compromise and consent to becoming a civilian defense minister.

Over the past several years the Libyans have repeatedly made formal requests of NATO and the EU to mount civilian stabilization operations in Libya, and both organizations now need to accede to these requests and set near-term dates taking action. For example, while the EU has approved both, they have been slow in proceeding toward full deployment. In addition, although technically the EU mission exists, it is not even headquartered inside Libya.

One of the most important reasons for the West to get its collective act together is to secure a solid western operational foothold ahead of any additional moves by Russia. The danger is that Russia has gradually been consolidating its position for months now. Also, Russia has been courting Haftar for the past year, by hosting him in Moscow and directly funding the LNA in addition to also supplying it with weapons and logistics assistance.

Western civilian operations in Libya also represent a compelling opportunity for the EU and NATO not only to coordinate their operations, but actually to go so far as to engage in joint planning and fully conjoined—as opposed to merely complementary—operations on the ground. These two pivotal overlapping western security organizations have recently been attempting to overcome their long-running tensions and jealousies. For example, staff to staff meetings in Brussels have been making marked progress in working together both in Brussels and in the field. In fact, a broad contingent of current and former EU and NATO officials believe Libya amounts to an important test case for deploying conjoined operations.

But by far the most crucial reason for western operations to be deployed forthwith in Libya is to shore up the tentative progress the UN is making for establishing a new unity government. According to conventional wisdom, Libya has been an unstable basket case ever since the NATO operation removed the Qaddafi regime during President Obama's first term in 2011. In reality, there were over two years of relative stability. However, gradually an eventually acute problem metastasized with no actor ever figuring out how to deal with the strong presence of well-armed militias in Libya. Over time, those militias gradually achieved superiority over the politicians in Tripoli.

It was not until the summer of 2014 that Libya descended into full-fledged instability and actual civil war. Things remained relatively unstable until the UN managed to stand up the GNA government in 2017. President Obama has described the failure to follow up the air campaign and Gaddafi’s removal with a post-conflict stability operation as the “worst mistake” of his presidency. However, this failure was also Europe’s for there were European leaders who had to be prodded by America into supporting a European stability operation in Libya. The U.S. push for this Germany-spearheaded effort was viewed as the price to be paid for Germany having abstained on the UN Security Council resolution that gave legitimacy to the allied intervention in Libya. However, the EU was unable to achieve the consensus required to move forward, and as a result, Libya’s descent ensued.

Although NATO and EU civilian operations have been delayed, there is a general understanding of what the overlapping EU and NATO missions should comprise, both in Brussels and in Tripoli. NATO could deal more with training the military and aiding in securing Libya’s borders, while the EU could zero in on training the police and paramilitary forces. The EU could also focus its efforts on Tripoli, Benghazi, and Sirte through Rule of Law capacity building with the GNA government. Two imperatives are essential here, first, that both civilian operations should be conjoined (i.e., jointly planned and operated by NATO and the EU) and, second, that both operations should be implemented in sync with the overall leadership of the UN and its Special Representative. Again, the necessity of these operations to provide crucial assistance to the UN’s efforts to broker a new government agreement cannot be overstated.

Libya also features in the newfound “hot peace” between Russia and the West, with Russia systematically intervening around the globe to the detriment of the western security alliance. Most recently, Russia has harmed core U.S. national security interests by bombing the U.S.-backed moderate rebel forces in Syria, thereby allowing President Assad to retain power and steadily retake territory with the help of Iran. Russia likely sees in Libya a chance to weaponize additional refugees for the further destabilization of Europe.

It has been unhelpful that Europeans have been overly focused on stemming the tide of refugees from Libya’s shores. Surprisingly, the EU even flirted with the idea of reaching out to Russia to assess if Russia could be helpful to the EU with reducing the migrant flow to Europe. It is not entirely clear why High Representative Mogherini broached this topic in recent months, for this would play right into Putin’s hands and bring Russian malfeasance into the Libyan theater sooner and with greater confidence.

In conclusion, stability in Libya is worth expending considerable western operational capital, as the price of instability would be ISIS’s return, greater refugee flows, further populism in Europe, and the realistic prospect of a “second Syria.”

Dr. Jeffrey A. Stacey was a State Department official in the Obama Administration. Author of “Integrating Europe” by Oxford University Press, Stacey is an international development consultant residing in Washington, D.C.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Guy Elster
‏Verified account @guyelster
15m15 minutes ago

#BREAKING Blast outside governor's office in Nangarhar, #ISIS stronghold in #Afghanistan, near Indian consulate,casualties feared

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Amichai Stein
‏Verified account @AmichaiStein1
4m4 minutes ago

#BREAKING: A woman shouted "Allahu Akbar" and attacked two people with a knife at a supermarket in La Seyne-sur-Mer, France.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

The Jerusalem Post
‏Verified account @Jerusalem_Post
12m12 minutes ago

BREAKING Blast kills 31 people in northeast Nigerian state of Borno http://dlvr.it/QXZp9Z




Blast kills 31 people in northeast Nigerian state of Borno
By REUTERS
June 17, 2018 15:29

Breaking news

Breaking news. (photo credit: JPOST STAFF)

MAIDUGURI - A blast killed at least 31 people in the northeast Nigerian state of Borno, two residents said on Sunday.

They said the blast occurred in the Damboa local government area in the south of the state, which is at the epicenter of an Islamist militant insurgency, on Saturday around 8:30 p.m. local time.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

The Jerusalem Post
‏Verified account @Jerusalem_Post
44m44 minutes ago

BREAKING Turkey says its air strikes kill 35 Kurdish militants in northern Iraq http://dlvr.it/QXbLph


posted for fair use and discussion

Turkey says its air strikes kill 35 Kurdish militants in northern Iraq
By REUTERS
June 17, 2018 17:57

Breaking news

Breaking news. (photo credit: JPOST STAFF)

ANKARA - Turkish warplanes killed 35 militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in air strikes in northern Iraq's Qandil mountain region on Friday, the Turkish military said.

Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan had said on Saturday that Turkish warplanes had struck a meeting of the outlawed PKK in Qandil, where he believed high-profile militants had been hit.

The Turkish military in its statement on Sunday, released via Twitter, did not specify whether the air strikes it referred to were the ones Erdogan had talked about on Saturday.

The Turkish military has ramped up air strikes in northern Iraq, targeting PKK bases in Qandil, close to the Iraq-Iran border, where Ankara suspects high-ranking members of the militant group are located.

The PKK, which has fought a decades-old insurgency against the state in southeastern Turkey, is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and European Union.

Ankara has also recently stepped up its warnings of a potential ground offensive into the Qandil region, with Erdogan vowing to "drain the terror swamp" in Qandil.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/17/taliban-refuse-to-extend-truce-with-afghan-forces

Taliban refuse to extend truce with Afghan forces

Militants posed for selfies with soldiers and handed out red roses during Eid ceasefire

Memphis Barker in Islamabad and Sami Yousafzai
Sun 17 Jun 2018 12.05 EDT

Afghanistan’s first taste of peace in 17 years is expected to end after the Taliban refused to extend a three-day ceasefire during which civilians, militants and soldiers hugged and danced together over the festival of Eid.

The Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said: “The ceasefire ends tonight [Sunday] and our operations begin tomorrow, inshallah [God willing].”

The Taliban’s decision to take up arms once more comes despite the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, on Saturday indefinitely extending the Afghan government’s own ceasefire and his request that the militant group follow suit to prolong the first countrywide lull in hostilities since the US invasion in 2001. Hopes are nevertheless higher than ever before that an agreement can one day be reached.

On Sunday the Taliban ordered their fighters not to enter major cities after an Islamic State suicide bombing killed 26 people in Narangahar province, near the city of Jalalabad. Another Isis suicide attack in Jalalabad on Saturday killed 17.


Isis claims deadly suicide bombing as Afghans celebrate Taliban ceasefire
Read more

However, the ceasefire between Afghan forces and the Taliban was scrupulously observed and some analysts said the order to fighters not to enter cities stemmed from concern that they might enjoy peace too much.

“Of course the leadership might fear some of them just stay,” said Thomas Ruttig, of the Afghan Analysts Network (AAN).

Over three days, Afghans witnessed the kind of scenes few dreamed possible. Thousands of Taliban fighters were welcomed into Kabul, Kunduz, Ghazni and other cities. Some posed for selfies with soldiers, some handed out red roses, and in Kabul some sought out a famous ice-cream parlour.

News of the ceasefire’s end came as a blow to many fighters. “I and thousands of Afghan Taliban definitely want the ceasefire extended,” Muhammadullah, 22, told the Guardian. “I went to the city and the mosques were full of people, I did not notice anything against the Islamic rules. After the sweet three days of peace, going back to bloodshed looks strange. How can you even compare peace with war?”

The Taliban senior council met on Sunday to discuss the ceasefire and Ghani’s overture. According to insiders, the leadership was stunned by the jubilant scenes in city centres.

The hardline deputy leader and son of Mullah Omar, Mullah Yaqoob, was particularly dismayed. In an audio message obtained by the Guardian, he said there had been “no permission for mixing with Afghan forces”, which he said “totally disobeyed the terms of the ceasefire”.

One senior Taliban member said the leadership, recognising the pressure for peace within the group’s ranks, was considering a 10-day ceasefire over the next Eid festival, in September.

However, he said there was disappointment that Ghani had not been more specific on the subject of US troop withdrawal. “Ghani should have created a timeline,” he said. “That might have created attraction to extend the ceasefire.”

Michael Kugelman, of the Wilson Centre, said a tit-for-tat extension had never been likely. “If the Taliban’s to agree to a reconciliation process, it will do so at a time of its own choosing and not by reciprocating the government’s own moves,” he said.

Progress towards peace is not helped by hardliners’ belief that they are winning the war, a view not contradicted by the latest report from the US watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. It said a surge in bombing raids under the Trump administration had not won back any of the 15% of the country under Taliban control – the highest level on record.

Yet civilian pressure on the Taliban to negotiate is growing. A convoy of 80 civilians on a 400-mile peace march from the capital of Helmand province, Lashkar Gah, to Kabul has come to symbolise the stubborn determination of the public to end a war that has brought so much loss.

Conditions abroad have also rarely been as conducive for talks. Pakistan, long thought of as a spoiler, has held an increasing number of bilateral negotiations with Afghanistan since the middle of 2017, partly under pressure from China, its key ally in the region. On 12 June the army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, visited Kabul and expressed support for the ceasefire.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44513368

Colombia election: Voters choose between extremes

9 minutes ago

Voters in Colombia have been casting ballots to choose the next president of the country.

They had a stark choice between the business-friendly Ivan Duque, a newcomer to politics, and leftist ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro.

The future of a historic but controversial peace deal with Farc rebels hangs in the balance.

Corruption, the economy and inequality have all been big themes in campaigning for the run-off vote.

Polls closed at 16:00 (21:00 GMT) and results are expected in the coming hours.

Divided Colombia chooses between political opposites
Swapping the battlefield for the football pitch
Q&A: Colombia's civil conflict
The two men in the running for the top job could not be more different, says the BBC's Katy Watson in Bogota.

Mr Duque, who is supported by a popular former president, the conservative Alvaro Uribe, comfortably won the first round last month and polls also give him the lead this time.

The orthodox economist says he will rewrite the 2016 agreement which gave Farc rebels an entitlement to representation in Congress, and will revisit crimes allegedly committed by the rebels during the brutal long-running conflict.

For his part, Mr Petro says he wants to tackle social inequality, redistribute land and end Colombia's reliance on extractive industries in favour of renewable energy.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44328938

South Africa's cash-in-transit heists: A national emergency?

17 June 2018

The shaky footage could come from a film: men standing on the grassy verge wielding AK-47s, bombs exploding, and the sound of gunfire.

But this is not the latest action blockbuster. This is a small South African town in the middle of the day, and what the shocked driver is recording from the relative safety of his own vehicle is a scene being repeated across the nation on an almost daily basis: a cash-in-transit heist.

It is an epidemic which has seen millions of rand disappear into the hands of highly organised criminal gangs - a crime spree which some say can be traced back to the police themselves, and that others suggest is being orchestrated by criminals already serving time behind bars.

It is, according to those in the know, seen as high prestige and low risk - at least, for those carrying out the attacks.

What is happening?
Since the start of the year, there have been more than 150 "cash-in-transit" robberies - equating to more than one a day.

There are a number of approaches. It can involve a gang swooping on an armoured vehicle as it drives down the road, shooting out the tyres before using explosives to get the doors open.

Or the security guard can be targeted when they are at their most vulnerable: as they leave the premises carrying the cash, in what is known as a "cross pavement" attack.

The latter is where the real rise has come in, Anneliese Burgess, a journalist who has spent the last few years researching the phenomenon for her book, Heist! South Africa's cash-in-transit epidemic, tells the BBC.

"It is extraordinary: the incredible brazenness of these acts," she explains. "They just attack people, just shoot them in the back of the head."

"These gangs of criminals do not have due respect for the lives of our people here in this country," agrees Brig Hangwani Mulaudzi, South African Police Service spokesman.

"The nature of criminal conduct is scary - they are using explosives. It is groups of people firing high-calibre firearms."

Who are the robbers?
The gangs, according to Yusuf Abramjee, an anti-crime activist, range in size from about 10 to 20 members, and are just as confident in conducting a broad daylight strike in the cities as they are out in the countryside.

And when they strike, they are well prepared: AK47s, other assault rifles and commercial-grade explosives - allowing them to blow the back of a van off, and then walk away with the money.

"What we are dealing with is organised crime," Mr Abramjee says.

But these are no ordinary criminals, says Ms Burgess. The "foot soldiers" - the men who carry out the heists - have worked their way up from home burglaries and car-jackings to become part of these gangs.

"By the time you are selected, you are seen as the cream of the crop, so to speak," Burgess tells the BBC.

At the top, she adds, are about 200 "kingpins", who will work across province boundaries to carry out attacks with, as Mr Abramjee notes, apparent "military precision".

That high level of organisation has led some, like Mr Abramjee, to believe people with experience in the armed forces may be involved.

And then there are the policemen.

Ms Burgess can list a number of cases which have been directly linked to police officers - although, she points out, most of them are working at a "low level" within the service, helping make the arrest dockets disappear when gang members are finally apprehended.

There have been other cases when police officers have been far more involved, including one former officer in South Africa's elite unit, the Hawks, who was allegedly due to pocket tens of millions of rand for his role keeping a gang out of trouble in just one heist.

He has since been found guilty.

Brig Mulaudzi, however, is keen to say corruption within the force is not endemic, and those who are have been weeded out.

The problem, he adds, is also not limited to the police.

"The issue of corruption - in terms of how the money is moved - that is information which is confidential, but these guys are able to get it," Brigadier Mulaudzi points out.

Mr Abramjee agrees: "We are dealing with insider involvement. Most certainly these are not random acts. They know where the cash depots are."

What are the authorities doing?
As videos and pictures of the heists and their aftermath continue to go viral, questions are being asked about how the situation was allowed to reach this point.

There was a 104% rise in cash-in-transit robberies from 2016 to 2017, when there were 378. With 153 to 31 May, it seems 2018 will hit a similar high.

"These people are making off with millions of rand," Mr Abramjee points out. "We are dealing with a national crime emergency."

It has not been helped by what Brig Mulaudzi admits was a "vacuum" of intelligence within the police force. But, he says, that is now being rectified.

There has, Ms Burgess says, been "an enormous" crackdown on the gangs over the last four or five weeks. Last week, officers arrested 13 cash-in-transit suspects - including one gang's alleged "number two" - in the space of just 24 hours, according to TimesLive.

But arrests are one thing.

"We have to get to a point where we are able to successfully prosecute them," Ms Burgess points out.

But what if jail time is not enough? There are rumours that some of these heists are being ordered by people already serving time.

One inmate boasted to South Africa's Sunday Times that he could make tens of thousands of rand as a go-between, organising the gangs and the guns needed to carry out the heists, despite being in prison.

Is it true? Brig Mulaudzi tells the BBC the police are not ruling it out, but - like Ms Burgess - he is not entirely convinced.

"I don't understand what the people inside can really help with," Ms Burgess says.

However, she is aware of several gangs who will be released in the medium- to short-term who are already making plans for their release - and it does not involve living a crime-free life.

"They all say it is incredibly easy and incredibly lucrative; the consequences are minimal," she says, raising the question: why would you give it up?

 

[Lilbitsnana]

News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
14m14 minutes ago

BREAKING: At least 5 dead, after a SUV carrying 12 people illegal immigrants crashed following a high-speed chase with U.S. Border Patrol vehicles near the Texas-Mexico border, all 12 passengers were ejected from the vehicle.



News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
19m19 minutes ago

BREAKING: ISIS terrorists have killed 2 drivers and kidnapped 7 more after attacking trucks on the Kirkuk-Baghdad highway in #Iraq

 

[Lilbitsnana]

News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
4m4 minutes ago

BREAKING: With 96% of votes counted, Conservative Ivan Duque wins Colombia presidential election, he has 54% of the vote. While leftist ex guerrilla Gustavo Petro gets 41%. Duque wants to make changes to peace deal with FARC rebels.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Guy Elster
‏Verified account @guyelster
2m2 minutes ago

#Syria|n State TV says US coalition attacked one of the army positions in east of the country. The coalition has not yet commented on this

 

[danielboon]

Netanyahu: Israel will hit Iran throughout Syria, not only along border -

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...CBAC&usg=AOvVaw3_VllYfLRYI7TjQwbQIcaS&ampcf=1

 

[Lilbitsnana]

ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
17m17 minutes ago

#UPDATE: @SkyNewsArabia_B @AlHadath @BREAKING_PTV @guyelster @Dannymakkisyria and many others all now reporting US strikes on SAA forc



Danny Makki
‏ @Dannymakkisyria
12m12 minutes ago

Update: A number of casualties and fallen in the U.S attack on #SAA positions around #DeirEzzor


ETA: lots more posts made to Ongoing Syria thread
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...flict-In-Syria&p=6914076&posted=1#post6914076

 

[Lilbitsnana]

posted for fair use and discussion
https://www.rt.com/news/430046-syria-army-positions-strike/

US-led coalition strikes Syrian army positions in Deir ez-Zor province – SANA
Published time: 17 Jun, 2018 22:39
Edited time: 17 Jun, 2018 22:41
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US-led coalition strikes Syrian army positions in Deir ez-Zor province – SANA

US-led coalition aircraft have reportedly bombed Syrian military positions in the Al Bukamal area of Deir ez-Zor province in eastern Syria, state media outlet SANA reports, citing a military source.

The strike, according to the military source, allegedly targeted a Syrian “military position” in al-Harra, southeast of Al Bukamal. There are dead and wounded following the strike, the source added.

DETAILS TO FOLLOW

 

[Lilbitsnana]

News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
15m15 minutes ago

UPDATE: Syrian military says there are a number of casualties after a U.S air-strike targeted a Syrian military position in al-Harri south East of Al-Boukamal in #DeirEzzor, unconfirmed reports there were also Hezbollah and Iranian forces at that position.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://nypost.com/2018/06/16/saudi-backed-yemeni-forces-take-back-airport-from-rebels/

Saudi-backed Yemeni forces take back airport from rebels

By Eileen AJ Connelly June 16, 2018 | 9:00pm

Government forces supported by a Saudi-led coalition reportedly took the Hodeida airport in Yemen’s main port city from Houthi rebels Saturday.

Yemen’s exiled government said it had control of the airport and forces were clearing mines from nearby areas.

Houthi-linked civil aviation authorities denied that the Iran-backed rebels lost control of the airport, but said airstrikes had completely destroyed it. The attacks came on the fourth day of the coalition’s assault.

The port city on the Red Sea handles more than 70 percent of the country’s imports. Fierce fighting to control the city of 600,000 continues, disrupting the main gateway for food shipments to the starving nation.

Thousands of people in and around Hodeida were unable to leave as the roads were shut down and airstrikes rained down on the city, Yemeni rights activists said.

In an emergency meeting, UN officials worked to broker a cease-fire, proposing to take control of parts of the port to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.

A shutdown of the port could send a country already teetering on the brink of famine over the edge. Upwards of 8.4 million people are already at risk of starvation.

Battles continued outside Hodeida and coalition forces were working to cut off the main road that connects the port city to the capital, Sanaa.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-bombs-syrian-positions-syrian-military-source-tells-222723307.html

Syria state media says U.S. bombs Syrian positions; U.S. denies report

Reuters • June 17, 2018

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian state media, citing a military source, reported on Monday that U.S.-led coalition aircraft had bombed "one of our military positions" in eastern Syria, leading to deaths and injuries, but the U.S. military denied carrying out strikes in the area.

The strike took place in al-Harra, southeast of Albu Kamal, Syrian state media said. There were no immediate details on casualties.

A commander in the military alliance backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also told Reuters that drones, "probably American," had bombed positions of Iraqi factions between Albu Kamal and Tanf and Syrian military positions.

"No member of the U.S.-led coalition carried out strikes near Albu Kamal," Major Josh Jacques, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, told Reuters.

The U.S.-led coalition is supporting an alliance of Syrian Arab and Kurdish militia fighting Islamic State northeast of Albu Kamal.

The Syrian army, alongside allied Iran-backed militias including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraqi groups, drove Islamic State from Albu Kamal and its environs last year, but the jihadists have since staged attacks in the area.

U.S. forces are also based in Tanf, southwest of Albu Kamal in the Syrian desert near the borders of Iraq and Jordan.

Last week, Assad said he regarded the United States as an occupying power in Syria and that the position of his state was to "support any act of resistance, whether against terrorists or against occupying forces, regardless of their nationality."

(Reporting By Laila Bassam and Angus McDowall, additonal reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Daniel Wallis)

2 reactions

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Regardless if it was US coalition, Russia, Israel, Turkey or ISIS who did the attack, Iran and/or Syria are going to do some kind of response.



Christian Turner
‏ @CombatChris1
30m30 minutes ago

Deir Ezzor : #US warplanes attacked pro-Assad militias near #Boukmal killing twenty and wounding dozens of others. The Iranian backed militias included the Martyrs Brigades, Imam Ali Brigades, Asaib Ahl al Haq and the Iraqi Mobility Movement.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Amichai Stein
‏Verified account @AmichaiStein1
6h6 hours ago

#BREAKING: US authorities have detected up to 3,000 nuclear-related facilities in North Korea, which could mean that the inspection will take considerable time - According to the SK Munhwa Ilbo daily newspaper

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Amichai Stein
‏Verified account @AmichaiStein1
17m17 minutes ago

#BREAKING: Trump announces he's directing Pentagon to create 'space force' as independent service

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Steve Herman
‏Verified account @W7VOA
3m3 minutes ago

There was a brief lockdown here at the @WhiteHouse. No details on what prompted it.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
11m11 minutes ago

UPDATE: U.S official tells CNN that the air-strike targeting pro-regime fighters close to the Iraq-Syria border Sunday was carried out by Israel, at least 50 fighters were killed and dozens more injured.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

Global: MilitaryInfo
‏ @Global_Mil_Info
9m9 minutes ago

#NorthKorea: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plans to visit China as early as Tuesday to brief President Xi Jinping on his recent summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and discuss a negotiating strategy.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

parallel universe
Retweeted
BreakingNNow
‏ @BreakingNNow
32m32 minutes ago

#BREAKING: Reports that several people have been injured after a shooting in Central Malmo, Sweden.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2...8.06.18&utm_term=Editorial - Early Bird Brief

The US Navy is fed up with ballistic missile defense patrols

By: David B. Larter  
2 days ago

The U.S. Navy’s top officer wants to end standing ballistic missile defense patrols and transfer the mission to shore-based assets.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said in no uncertain terms on June 12 that he wants the Navy off the tether of ballistic missile defense patrols, a mission that has put a growing strain on the Navy’s hard-worn surface combatants, and the duty shifted towards more shore-based infrastructure.

“Right now, as we speak, I have six multi-mission, very sophisticated, dynamic cruisers and destroyers ¯ six of them are on ballistic missile defense duty at sea,” Richardson said during his address at the U.S. Naval War College’s Current Strategy Forum. “And if you know a little bit about this business you know that geometry is a tyrant.

“You have to be in a tiny little box to have a chance at intercepting that incoming missile. So, we have six ships that could go anywhere in the world, at flank speed, in a tiny little box, defending land.”

Richardson continued, saying the Navy could be used in emergencies but that in the long term the problem demands a different solution.

“It’s a pretty good capability and if there is an emergent need to provide ballistic missile defense, we’re there,” he said. “But 10 years down the road, it’s time to build something on land to defend the land. Whether that’s AEGIS ashore or whatever, I want to get out of the long-term missile defense business and move to dynamic missile defense.”

The unusually direct comments from the CNO come amid growing frustration among the surface warfare community that the mission, which requires ships to stay in a steaming box doing figure-eights for weeks on end, is eating up assets and operational availability that could be better used confronting growing high-end threats from China and Russia.

US Navy ballistic missile intercept test fails
The U.S. Navy conducted a failed ballistic missile intercept Wednesday with its SM-3 Block IIA off the coast of Hawaii.
By: David Larter

The BMD mission was also a factor in degraded readiness in the surface fleet. Amid the nuclear threat from North Korea, the BMD mission began eating more and more of the readiness generated in the Japan-based U.S. 7th Fleet, which created a pressurized situation that caused leaders in the Pacific to cut corners and sacrifice training time for their crews, an environment described in the Navy’s comprehensive review into the two collisions that claimed the lives of 17 sailors in the disastrous summer of 2017.

Richardson said that as potential enemies double down on anti-access technologies designed to keep the U.S. Navy at bay, the Navy needed to focus on missile defense for its own assets.

“We’re going to need missile defense at sea as we kind of fight our way now into the battle spaces we need to get into,” he said. “And so restoring dynamic maneuver has something to do with missile defense.

The Navy has had some success with land-based BMD with its AEGIS Ashore system in Romania, which uses what looks like a cruiser superstructure with SPY arrays and missiles to create a missile defense shield. Another AEGIS Ashore is planned for Poland in 2020 and last year Japan announced plans to buy the system, which could relieve some of the pressure on 7th Fleet ships once operational.

AEGIS Ashore installations are run around the clock by three shifts of 11 personnel each.

Rotational deployment blues

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has been outspoken about the need for the Navy to become less predictable and more agile to respond to an evolving security environment. Mattis thinks the kind of predictable rotational deployments that dispatch carriers to predictable locations such as the Persian Gulf are not appropriate with near-peer competitors making moves globally.

Instead, Mattis wants the Navy to pursue a concept called “dynamic force employment,” having the Navy deploy at odd times and show up in unexpected places, all the while spending less time underway to preserve surge readiness for a major conflict.

But BMD missions work against that kind of unpredictability and consume an out-sized portion of readiness the Navy generates through its deployment model.

Is Secretary of Defense Mattis planning radical changes to how the Navy deploys?
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has made clear as the military’s top civilian that he has a very different vision for how the military will be used in the future. Recent comments have hinted at big changes on the horizon for the Navy and how it deploys.
By: David Larter

Because of the U.S. Navy’s standing commitments around the globe, the fleet has to have a constant forward presence. This means that for every ship that’s forward on deployment, there is a ship back in the states that has just come back from deployment and is in surge status, another ship that is in maintenance and unavailable, and still another ship that is in its training cycle and preparing to relieve the ship on patrol.

With six ships underway doing BMD, that means there are 18 ships tied up in the cycle preparing to do the mission.

“That’s a good chunk of the surface fleet,” said Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who has studied this issue extensively.

Some of the decline in training and readiness has come from the increasing burden of BMD on the fleet, he said.

“Over time this is one of the places the Navy has made sacrifices in training and readiness,” Clark said. “Because of the high demand, when the [cruisers and destroyers] go into their training cycles they’ve had to do abbreviated versions of the work-ups that focus specifically on missile defense instead of training for the full range of missions those ships are capable of performing.”

And rotating forward deployed ships back to the states for repairs and overhaul is another burden on the force.

The Navy has four BMD destroyers forward deployed in Rota, Spain, which deployed between 2013 and 2014. But those ships were slated to rotate out after six years, a deadline that is rapidly approaching.

In January, then-Fleet Forces head Adm. Phil Davidson described the impact that rotation was having on the ships he needs to fill out carrier strike groups for deployment.

“We sent four destroyers with a certain capability over to Rota, with the idea that they were going to be there each about six years and we were going to replace them with four ships with better capability when that capability was aligned,” Davidson told the audience at Surface Navy Association’s annual conference. “I can tell you that the four ships I’ve got to send next, I’m already pulling them out of strike groups to do the modernization they need to go over there.”

“Then I’m going to get four ships back that then are going to require their docking availability and some modernization as well. Pretty soon this looks like eight ships that are out of the strike group rotation for three years. We’re going to need a bigger Navy to apply that kind of policy.”

The mission could be done for far less money and impact on the fleet from shore-based installations, said Thomas Callender, also a retired submariner and analyst with the Heritage Foundation.

“It takes, what, [33] sailors to run an AEGIS Ashore installation instead of 300 on a DDG?” he said. “And ultimately, if its on land, does it even need to be sailors that run it?”

 

[Lilbitsnana]

News_Executive
‏ @News_Executive
20m20 minutes ago

BREAKING: A week after the historic summit between U.S President Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, South Korea and the United States have decided to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise slated for August. - Seoul's defense ministry

 

[Lilbitsnana]

I'll take "China" for $400 (unknown 3rd party)



ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
3m3 minutes ago

ELINT News Retweeted BNO News

Damn!

ELINT News added,
BNO News
Verified account @BNONews
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says a saboteur has been caught within the company's ranks after changing code and sending highly sensitive data to unknown third parties - CNBC

 

[Lilbitsnana]

ELINT News
‏ @ELINTNews
1m1 minute ago

#BREAKING: Unconfirmed reports at this hour that Iraqi paramilitary factions have fired 50 rockets at Al-Assad Airbase which stations US troops there in Anbar, Iraq in retaliation for last nights strike on Syrian border killing dozens of Iraqi and Syrian fighters

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
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http://www.scmp.com/news/china/dipl...s-nuclear-arsenal-amid-military-modernisation

China adds to nuclear arsenal amid military modernisation drive

Country now has 280 warheads, according to think tank, which calls nuclear states’ renewed focus on deterrence and capacity ‘a very worrying trend’

PUBLISHED : Monday, 18 June, 2018, 8:02pm
UPDATED : Monday, 18 June, 2018, 10:18pm
Lee Jeong-ho
32 Comments

China is pushing ahead with modernising its nuclear weapon delivery systems and has added to its arsenal as it boosts military expenditure, according to a report released by an independent think tank on Monday.

As of January, the country had 280 warheads, up from 270 a year earlier, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in an annual report.

But it said none of the nuclear warheads were deployed on missiles or located on bases with operational forces. They were instead classified as “other warheads” – meaning they are being stored or have been retired.

Beijing should stop threatening Taiwan because it’s not strong enough to fight the US, island’s ex-premier says

China is the world’s second biggest spender on military, allocating US$228 billion for defence last year – up 5.6 per cent from 2016. That was its lowest increase in military spending since 2010, but was in line with gross domestic product growth and inflation.

It was a long way off the US$610 billion military spend of the United States, which again topped the list last year.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan also expanded their nuclear weapon stockpiles and accelerated development of new missile delivery systems for land, sea and air, according to the report.

Both countries had added about 10 warheads as of January, with India’s total at 130 to 140, and Pakistan’s at 140 to 150, the think tank said. None of those warheads were deployed on missiles.

India and Japan increase military spending, ‘driven by China tension’
North Korea also advanced its nuclear weapon capabilities, including testing a thermonuclear weapon in September.

“Despite the clear international interest in nuclear disarmament reflected in the conclusion of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Treaty in 2017, the modernisation programmes under development in states possessing nuclear weapons indicate that genuine progress towards nuclear disarmament will remain a distant goal,” said Shannon Kile, a senior researcher with the SIPRI disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation programme.

Other nuclear-armed states either reduced the total number of warheads or did not add to their arsenals.

The US cut its nuclear warheads to 6,480 as of January from 6,800 a year earlier, while Russia went from 7,000 to 6,850 this year, the report said.

There was no change from last year for the United Kingdom at 215 warheads, France at 300, Israel at 80, and North Korea with 10 to 20.

But although they reduced their arsenals, the US and Russia accounted for nearly 92 per cent of all nuclear weapons in the world.

“Despite making limited reductions to their nuclear forces, both Russia and the USA have long-term programmes under way to replace and modernise their nuclear warheads, missile and aircraft delivery systems, and nuclear weapon production facilities,” the report said.

For Japan and South Korea, nuclear threat far from over

Jan Eliasson, chairman of the SIPRI Governing Board, said: “The renewed focus on the strategic importance of nuclear deterrence and capacity is a very worrying trend.

“The world needs a clear commitment from the nuclear weapon states to an effective, legally binding process towards nuclear disarmament.”

Nine countries – the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – now have some 14,465 nuclear weapons between them, down from a total of 14,935 last year.

The SIPRI was set up in Sweden in 1966 to carry out research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.


This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: nuclear arsenal has grown, institute says

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/missile-deployments-only-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/


Missile deployments only the tip of the iceberg

18 Jun 2018 | Ewen Levick

The news that China has deployed bombers and cruise missiles to contested reefs and islands in the South China Sea has caused significant concern. The move allows Beijing to target ships in disputed waters with a missile capable of manoeuvring around defence systems at Mach 3. It has also placed northern Australia within reach of Chinese warplanes.

The deployment has certainly changed the regional strategic picture. Yet modern conflict, as practised by revisionist states like China and Russia, doesn’t often pit conventional capabilities head-to-head. Instead, those nations change facts on the ground (or sea) and influence opponents’ decision-making while keeping their actions ‘plausibly deniable’, or short of a reaction threshold that might bring superior Western militaries into open conflict.

Beijing, for example, has used fishermen, armed paramilitary vessels, media, and psychological and legal tactics to the same effect as missiles and planes. It’s also advancing in another domain that is comparatively less discussed—underwater.

As Andrew Davis and James Mugg observed in ‘The next big grey thing’, the world’s oceans are one of the last places left to hide something as large as a ballistic missile submarine (thanks to the poor propagation of light and radio waves through water). The challenges of ‘seeing’ underwater mean it’s still possible to float about near an American aircraft carrier or downtown Stockholm in a metal hull the size of six double-decker buses and remain undetected.

The opaqueness of water is perfectly suited to ‘hybrid’ strategies that use plausible deniability as a modus operandi. So what might Beijing’s hybrid strategy look like under the waves?

The People’s Liberation Army is busy expanding its undersea toolbox. It has developed autonomous undersea gliders that can dive six kilometres deep to undertake sonar countermeasures, track surface and subsurface targets, or create a surveillance network that may enable over-the-horizon torpedo launches. In addition, it’s rumoured to be building an ‘underwater Great Wall’ of seabed sensors that feed into fibre-optic cable stations on the same reefs housing the latest missiles.

Other states’ capabilities also indicate platforms that Beijing may possess. Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, for example, operates at least two vessels—the surface ship Yantar and a converted ballistic missile submarine—believed to be equipped with unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV)s that can manipulate objects on the ocean floor. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the PLA is developing capabilities similar to those of the Yantar or even of the USS Jimmy Carter, which is rumoured to be able to tap undersea cables and deploy UUVs, although little open-source evidence is available.

This pattern of investment suggests three strategic goals. First, the PLA is advancing its ability to monitor vessels passing through contested waters. If reports of the underwater Great Wall are reasonably accurate, then the system would give Beijing unrivalled information about submarine and surface vessel movements in the South China Sea. Like air defence identification zones, the system strengthens Beijing’s de facto control over its maritime claims—a key component of the idea that legitimacy is granted by facts, known as doctrinal unilateralism. Beijing may be hoping that if it controls a contested area for long enough, its claims will eventually gain legitimacy.

Second, Beijing is seeking to raise the costs of foreign intervention in a conflict in the South China Sea, particularly over Taiwan. Chinese strategists will have noted that one reason Russia continues to occupy Crimea is that, as far as Washington is concerned, the costs of re-taking the peninsula are greater than its strategic value. The PLA is investing in underwater assets, alongside other anti-access and area denial capabilities, in the hope that Taiwan falls victim to the same strategic equation. Some argue that it already has. This would facilitate other hybrid tactics, such as incursions by fishing vessels in radio contact with armed coast guard ships.

Third, it’s possible that Beijing is seeking new ways of intimidating or spying on other states. The ocean bed is crisscrossed by telecommunications cables that carry 98% of global internet and phone data and 95% of American strategic communications. The cables are vulnerable: most are roughly the width of a soda can and covered in a thin rubber coat, and they’re not protected under Law of the Sea conventions. If Beijing has UUVs that can find and manipulate seafloor objects, it could tap into or sever Taiwanese cables in order to exert economic pressure, create a contested information environment (as Russia did in Crimea) or even prevent foreign drones from operating over the South China Sea.

There are still plenty of questions. It’s unclear how China’s remote undersea sensors and gliders communicate with one another given the strict limitations that water places on data transmission. The US is also investing in underwater capabilities that might negate the strategic advantage that China’s platforms offer. Yet an opaque environment facilitates an opaque strategy—the missiles and planes deployed to contested reefs are only the tip of the iceberg.

Author
Ewen Levick is an international security analyst and the online editor of Australian Defence Magazine. Image courtesy Flickr user scott1346.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

BNO News
‏Verified account @BNONews
7m7 minutes ago

"Minor" explosion reported at Southgate tube station in London, causing a "small number" of non-life threatening injuries - police