Tag Archives: foreign policy

US Defense, Foreign Policies

Posted on by
Reply

Russia, China, Iran, and Islamists are waging unconventional warfare around the world, and the United States currently lacks a clear strategy to counter the threat, according to a recent report by the Army Special Operations Command.

“This challenge is hybrid warfare combining conventional, irregular, and asymmetric means, to include the persistent manipulation of political and ideological conflict,” states the Army white paper, Counter-Unconventional Warfare.

Foreshadowed by Iranian actions throughout the Middle East, and by Chinese “unrestricted warfare” strategists in the 1990s, hybrid warfare has now reached its most brazen form in Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine.

[“Non-kinetic”] tools…include covert and clandestine special operations commando activities combined with political, intelligence, diplomatic, and financial warfare methods to counter the activities of states like Russia, China and Iran, and insurgent activities by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

And

US government “lacks a cohesive [information warfare] strategy to counter adversary [unconventional warfare] campaigns conducted by state and non-state actors….”

Russian examples include

using special operations forces, intelligence agents, political provocateurs, and news media reporters, as well as transnational criminal elements in eastern and southern Ukraine.

“Funded by the Kremlin and operating with differing degrees of deniability or even acknowledgement, the Russian government uses ‘little green men’ for classic [unconventional warfare] objectives,” [according to the white paper].

Examples of the People’s Republic of China’s…techniques…include

unconventional warfare [based on the book,] Unrestricted Warfare…calls for using all means to defeat enemies, including cyber attacks, ecological warfare, financial warfare, and terrorism.

“China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare,” [according to the white paper]. “These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare.”

Examples include China’s threat several years ago to sell off large US debt holdings to protest US arms sales to Taiwan, and cutting off sales of rare earth minerals to Japan in a dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Chinese news outlets also are used in media warfare….

Iran’s techniques are more limited in scope, but no less deadly:

“…Iran provides ‘material support to terrorist or militant groups such as HAMAS, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, and Iraqi Shia groups,’ [according to the white paper]. “Hezbollah is the primary terrorists’ proxy for Iran working together with a campaign of terror against Israel, the United States, and other western nations.”

It’s entirely possible that an administration more interested in American global interests would have missed this, also. It’s virtually certain, though, that this administration, bent as it is on American withdrawal from the world, wouldn’t have cared even had it recognized any of this.

The Free Beacon‘s article is well worth reading in its entirety, and so is the USA SpecOps’ white paper on the matter.

Talk, But Don’t Act

Posted on by
Reply

Now the White House policy is hitting the State Department’s ability to keep secrets from our enemies.

Weeks before the State Department’s Nov 16 shutdown of its unclassified email system in the face of unprecedented hacking attacks, auditors took the department’s management to task for ignoring warnings about their lax security habits and chronic failure to enact protections against high-tech intruders.

The situation was so bad, the auditors say in a highly censored report, that they “identified control deficiencies across a total of 102 different systems reviewed over five years, yet many of the same deficiencies have persisted.”

State’s leadership, though, claims it’s no big deal, and certainly not as bad as the auditors say.

The State’s bureaucracy disputes the audit’s finding that State’s info-tech weaknesses amount to a “significant deficiency” in its security….

And anyway, according to State’s Chief Information Officer Steven Taylor,

[W]e have created a foundation for correcting several existing weaknesses and an ability to address new issues as they arise.

Talking about talking. Never mind that the auditors noted that

OIG [State’s Office of the Inspector General] has reported deficiencies related to risk management since its FY 2010 audit. Many of the same deficiencies remained uncorrected in FY 2014.

And

[W]e identified control deficiencies across a total of 102 different systems reviewed over 5 years, yet many of the same deficiencies have persisted.

These all are highly intelligent people, professionals in their field, who surely know what they’re doing—and not doing. I have to wonder about the motivations behind their decision to talk, but not act.

The audit can be read here and here.

Free Speech, PRC Style

Posted on by
Reply

During visits to more than 20 schools, the regional paper [Liaoning Daily] wrote last week, it found exactly what it said it was looking for: some professors compared Chinese Communist Party co-founder Mao Zedong to ancient emperors, a blasphemy to party ideology upholding Mao as a break from the country’s feudal past. Other scholars were caught pointing out the party’s failures after taking power in 1949. Some repeatedly praised “Western” ideas such as a separation of powers in government.

“Dear teachers, because your profession demands something higher of you, and because of the solemnity and particularity of the university classroom, please do not speak this way about China!” implored the article….

Yep.

Recall, also, the PRC’s ongoing suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, in cynical repudiation of its commitment to the Hong Kongese and the Brits as part of the turnover agreement between the Brits and the PRC.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

Posted on by
1

The US has agreed to extend “negotiations” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program into June.

Iran is expected to continue receiving some $700 million in oil export revenues that has been stuck overseas because of US sanctions.

Yet Iran gave nothing in return for the extension. Regarding those $700 million, the US gets nothing; Iran gets that for free, and they are free to use the money to expand its centrifuge program, continue its plutonium reactor program, develop its missile delivery program, and so on.

Isn’t that the Point?

Posted on by
Reply

From the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal article at the time I wrote this post:

Russian Foreign Minister Says Sanctions Are Aimed at Hurting Economy

It’d be a poor set of sanctions, even for the Obama administration, if they weren’t having the intended effect.

And he had this:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday accused the West of “seeking regime change” in his country by imposing sanctions against Moscow.

Probably not, just behavior change. But if regime change did happen, what would be the downside for us? At worst, we’d just get another KGB has-been or another oligarch in charge. But the Russian government might get replaced by something better. It is, after all, on the far left side of the distribution curve for quality of governments.

The present Russian government has annexed the Ukraine’s Crimea and is occupying eastern Ukraine, and it has invaded, partitioned, and now occupies parts of Georgia. It’s conducted damaging cyber warfare against the Baltic States. It’s repositioning ground forces near the Polish and erstwhile Ukrainian border.

Back to that behavior change: get Vlad to withdraw from Ukraine, and maybe the sanctions will get lifted. Go one better: get him to withdraw from Georgia and pull back from the Polish and restored Ukrainian borders. See how that works, Sergei Viktorovich.