In an unprecedented gesture that seals the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a global statesman, US President Barack Obama on Thursday wrote a piece for the prestigious Time magazine calling him India's "reformer-in-chief".17 May 2019
Barack Obama writes on PM Modi, calls him India's reformer-in-chief in rare Time article
In an unprecedented gesture that seals the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a global statesman, US President Barack Obama on Thursday wrote a piece for the prestigious Time magazine calling him India's "reformer-in-chief".Win, Hold, Fold, or Run? Afghanistan in the Spring of 2019
By Anthony H. Cordesman
The war in Afghanistan is at a critical stage. After some eighteen years of conflict, the United States has still not come firmly to grips with the need to properly assess the tactics and gains by the Taliban and other threats in Afghanistan, the potential ability of the Afghan government to overcome its many critical limitations, and how to choose and actually implement some form of a consistent U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
This presentation presents a survey of open source metrics and data on the situation in Afghanistan in the spring of 2019. It focuses on the areas where it is possible to map and quantify current developments – recognizing that such indicators can only cover part of the complex issues involved. It does, however, present material that helps address three key challenges shaping Afghanistan’s future:
The need to address all of the key threats involved in the war – including those generated by the Afghan government and U.S. actions.
Peacemaking in Afghanistan: Procedural and Substantive Challenges
Dr. Nilofar Sakhi
The peace process in Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. Either the current peace deal will bring together a war torn country or further divide it. Whether the outcome leads the country toward progress and development, or undermines and jeopardizes the current gains and achievements made over the last eighteen years remains to be seen.
In early May, the Afghan government hosted a national four-day Consultative Peace Loya Jirga. Three thousand people had been invited from all over Afghanistan to share their opinions on the national peace process. While the current administration has argued this traditional method of consultation would be inclusive of women, youth, Afghan returnees from neighboring countries, and representatives of ulemas, among others and, therefore, gather the opinions of a wide cross section of society, opponents of the government are suspicious. Former President, Hamid Karzai, is among a group of political elites boycotting the Loya Jirga despite his previous and active participation in the Afghan peace process. They claim the process is being used by the current government to influence its grip on power. Others view this as a blatant attempt by President Ashraf Ghani to use the Loya Jirga as a platform for his forthcoming election campaign.
Sri Lankan Suicide Bombings: Islamic State’s Deadly Input
By: Sudha Ramachandran
On April 21, multiple suicide attacks on churches and high-end hotels in Sri Lanka killed 253 people, including 40 foreigners, and injured at least 500 others (Sunday Times, April 28). The suicide bombings, which are among the deadliest terrorist attacks in the world since the September 11 attacks in the United States, have drawn attention to the Islamic State (IS) group’s links with local radicals in the island.
A day after the attacks, the Sri Lankan government spokesman said that a little-known local Islamist group, the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), had carried out the suicide bombings. But the NTJ was not acting alone, he said, adding that the government would investigate whether the group had “international support” (Ceylon Today, April 22).
The Easter Sunday suicide bombings were complex and displayed a high-level of co-ordination. They required resources and expertise beyond the capability of the NTJ, an outfit that until recently was known for its inflammatory rhetoric and vandalism of Buddhist statues rather than serial suicide bombings (New Indian Express, April 22). Ongoing investigations indicate that IS supported local Islamist radicals in the attacks. While the NTJ and another little-known Sri Lanka-based Islamist group, Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim (JMI) “provided the manpower, the Islamic State’s input included ideological inspiration, expertise in bomb-making, and perhaps even resources,” a senior Sri Lankan police official told Terrorism Monitor. [1]
Here's how GCHQ scours Huawei hardware for malicious code
By AMIT KATWALA
A nondescript business park on the outskirts of Banbury could play a hugely important role in the UK’s future security.
Since 2010, the humdrum business park has been the home of the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) - a unique partnership between the mobile giant and the UK authorities that aims to ensure that UK infrastructure isn’t compromised by the involvement of the Chinese firm.
Those fears are in the news again, with fresh scrutiny over Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G plans, triggered by a public confrontation between the company and the United States. But, as the existence and work of the HCSEC demonstrates, this is only the latest stage in Huawei’s long and complicated relationship with the UK security services.
Huawei opened its first office in the UK in 2001, but its involvement in critical infrastructure increased after 2005, when BT contracted it to supply routers and other transmission equipment as part of a £10bn network upgrade. At the time, BT was under no obligation to inform the British government that it had granted contracts to a company with close links to a foreign state. A later government report said ministers had been “put in the position of trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted”.
INSIDE CHINA'S MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
THE WOMAN REMEMBERS the first time she got a smartphone.
It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in Xinjiang and waited for the children’s passports.
China’s Great Nuclear Wall
BY: Aaron Kliegman
When it comes to nuclear arms control, China is great at playing hard to get. Beijing is the elusive beauty, a difficult but attractive target for those who seek nuclear disarmament. Powerful yet mysterious, shrouding its nuclear program in a haze of opacity, the Chinese government never actually gives its pursuers what they want. And China knows that only makes them more interested. Indeed, Beijing leads on its suitors with seductive promises of reducing its arsenal of nuclear weapons, only to demand more in return from other states before taking any steps. And then the cycle begins anew, with no fewer nuclear weapons in China.
To illustrate the point, go back to June 1982, when the United Nations General Assembly held a second special session on disarmament. At the gathering, the late Huang Hua, then China's foreign minister, presented a concrete proposal: if the United States and the Soviet Union halted the testing, improving, or manufacturing of nuclear weapons and reduced their arsenals by 50 percent, the Chinese government would be ready "to join all other nuclear states in undertaking to stop the development and production of nuclear weapons, and to further reduce and ultimately destroy them altogether." Just six years later, however, as the United States and the Soviet Union were drafting the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START I, which significantly reduced each country's nuclear arsenal, China changed its standard for joining arms-control talks. The 50-percent threshold was just a start; Moscow and Washington also had to make further "drastic reductions" in their arsenals. Then, in 1995, after Moscow and Washington signed START I and START II, Beijing changed its standard yet again. China would not, according to nuclear expert Brad Roberts, consider disarmament until the Americans and Russians "reduced their arsenals far beyond START II numbers, abandoned tactical nuclear weapons, abandoned ballistic missile defense, and agreed to joint no-first-use pledge," under which they would vow never to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. No matter the circumstance, China was simply not interested in nuclear arms control.
Challenges for the US in China’s Military Modernization
By Ankit Panda
Tensions between the United States and China are resurgent in May over the issue of trade as long-standing negotiations between the two sides fall apart.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defence’s release of an annual report on Chinese military capabilities for American lawmakers has drawn attention to China’s ongoing military modernization and expansion.
This year’s report mostly continues to discuss trends that have been highlighted in recent years, with a focus on Beijing’s use of espionage to steal military intellectual property, its growing expeditionary capabilities – including the development of a second indigenous aircraft carrier – and investment in emerging technologies.
The Pentagon’s report makes clear that the U.S. sees Chinese initiatives in the Xi Jinping era, such as the “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Made in China 2025”, as strategic and economic threats.
U.S.-China Trade Talks Stumble on Beijing’s Spending at Home
By Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson
BEIJING — One year ago, when he began a multibillion-dollar trade war with China that shook the global economy, President Trump demanded that Beijing end lavish government spending aimed at making the country a world power in computer chips, robotics, commercial aircraft and other industries of the future.
Today, as the two sides struggle to reach a truce, the Trump administration is finding just how difficult that will be.
Trade talks between the United States and China nearly ground to a halt this past week, and a seemingly intractable dispute over subsidies is a big part of it. Robert E. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, accused China last Monday of reneging on what he described as “good, firm commitments on eliminating market-distorting subsidies.” Vice Premier Liu He, the leader of China’s negotiating team, said that it was normal for negotiations to have ups and downs, but has also nodded to the subsidies issue in vowing repeatedly over the last several days not to bend on China’s principles.
China, Russia and the return of the civilisational state
BY ADRIAN PABST
The 20th century marked the downfall of empire and the triumph of the nation state. National self-determination became the prime test of state legitimacy, rather than dynastic inheritance or imperial rule. After the Cold War, the dominant elites in the West assumed that the nation-state model had defeated all rival forms of political organisation. The worldwide spread of liberal values would create an era of Western hegemony. It would be a new global order based on sovereign states enforced by Western-dominated international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.
But today we are witnessing the end of the liberal world order and the rise of the civilisational state, which claims to represent not merely a nation or territory but an exceptional civilisation. In China and Russia the ruling classes reject Western liberalism and the expansion of a global market society. They define their countries as distinctive civilisations with their own unique cultural values and political institutions. The ascent of civilisational states is not just changing the global balance of power. It is also transforming post-Cold War geopolitics away from liberal universalism towards cultural exceptionalism.
China’s Global Port Play
By Eleanor Albert
Last month, Hong Kong-based Orient Overseas International Ltd. (OOIL) announced the $1.8 billion sale of its holdings in the Port of Long Beach, California’s container terminal. The sale came amid pressure from U.S. regulators for the Chinese firm to divest from one of the United States’ largest commercial ports citing national security concerns. While OOIL operated the Long Beach port for years, the firm was taken over in July 2017 in a $6.3 billion buyout by the mainland state-owned shipping and logistic giant China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company known as COSCO.
The Long Beach news came and went, but it reveals that China’s port building plans are more complex than conventional wisdom suggests. Most of the world’s focus concentrates on Chinese ports in the developing world, like that of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota or Pakistan’s Gwadar, but the reality is that Beijing is investing in the development and operation of commercial ports worldwide, not just in Asia and Africa, but in more far flung parts of Europe and the Americas.
Pentagon Builds Deterrent Force Against Possible Iranian Attac
By Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will deploy a Patriot antimissile battery to the Middle East to shore up defenses against Iranian threats, part of a series of carefully calibrated deployments intended to deter attacks by Iranian forces or their proxies, Pentagon officials said on Friday.
A single Patriot antimissile battery will return to the Persian Gulf, just a few months after four batteries were withdrawn from the region. The Pentagon also said it would replace one Navy ship in the region with a more capable vessel, the Arlington, an amphibious ship designed to carry Marines and combat helicopters.
Officials said the new deployments were part of the original request made last weekend by the military’s Central Command after the Trump administration said new intelligence showed that Iran was mobilizing proxy groups in Iraq and Syria to attack American forces. As a result, the Pentagon sent B-52 bombers this week to Al Udeid air base in Qatar, and the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier passed through the Suez Canal on its way to the Persian Gulf.
They Were ‘Comrades in Arms’ Against ISIS. Now the U.S. Is Eyeing the Exit.
By Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt
RMEILAN, Syria — Dressed in camouflage and sipping tea, the Syrian commander who emerged as America’s closest ally in the battle that defeated Islamic State looked to an unsettling future.
The commander, the Kurdish leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces, known by the nom de guerre Mazlum Kobani, praised his alliance with the United States in a rare interview recently and said he hoped American troops would stay in Syria.
But if they do not, he said, he is still fully prepared to defend his militia’s hard-fought gains during years of fighting the terrorist group.
“We were comrades in arms — we are on the same front fighting ISIS,” he said of the Americans, sitting in a furnished trailer in a compound that once belonged to the Syrian state oil company.
US war against Iran is impossible, claims Iranian general
Patrick Wintour
The deployment of a US aircraft carrier to Iran’s regional waters is nothing but psychological warfare and part of a plan to intimidate Tehran, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Gen Hossein Salami, has told parliamentarians in a closed-door session.
The IRGC commander said a US war against Iran was impossible, claiming Washington lacked the necessary military strength.
Another senior commander claimed Iran had the firepower to “hit the US in the head” during the session in Tehran on Sunday.
The combined remarks represent another ratcheting up of the bellicose rhetoric between Washington and Tehran, since Iran began a partial withdrawal last week from 2015 the nuclear deal.
Russia’s Eurasian Strategy
By Jeronim Perović
Jeronim Perović argues that due to tensions with Ukraine and the West, Russia is seeking to shift towards Asia and to expand its influence in the post-Soviet space. Indeed, he contends that Moscow wants to reposition itself as a central Eurasian great power. To further this goal, and accrue additional international leverage, Russia has led the way in creating the Eurasian Economic Union, a surprisingly robust multilateral organization that is reshaping the regional geopolitical and economic landscape. Perović suggests that Eurasia is changing and it’s time for Europe to pay attention.
In light of its rift with Ukraine and tensions with the West, Moscow is seeking a more influential role in the post-Soviet space and is reorienting its policy towards Asia. Rather than breaking with the West, Russia wants to reposition itself as a central Eurasian great power. In order to gain influence in “Greater Eurasia” and accrue additional international leverage, Russia has led the way in creating the Eurasian Economic Union, a surprisingly robust multilateral organization that is reshaping the regional geopolitical and economic landscape. Eurasia is changing. It is time for Europe to pay attention.
A Confrontation from Hell
AMIN SAIKAL
The Iranian regime has worked hard to strengthen its national security within a supportive regional framework, and would be no pushover in a conflict with the United States. On the contrary, Iran's response to any major military assault could result in an uncontrollable regional inferno.
CANBERRA – Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power once called genocidal wars “a problem from hell.” As US President Donald Trump’s administration ratchets up tensions with Iran, the world must now reckon with the prospect of a “confrontation from hell” between the two countries.
For now, both the United States and Iran say they do not want a war. Yet, step by inexorable step, they are moving onto a collision course. The US has significantly stepped up its military deployment in Iran’s neighborhood, dispatching the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East to warn the Iranian regime against taking any threatening actions. Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, have decried the move as psychological warfare and regard it as a provocation aimed at drawing their country into a military conflict.
Can the East Save the West?
PARAG KHANNA
Asia’s emergence as the world’s geopolitical and economic center has lent global prestige to a new paradigm for achieving sustainable growth alongside social solidarity. With many other countries already studying the Asian playbook, the United States and Europe could benefit from doing the same.
SINGAPORE – The past two decades have been either the best of times or the worst of times, depending on where you are sitting. Just when the global East was converging economically with the West, the two regions began to diverge psychologically. While America and Europe turned inward, toward pessimism and despair, Asia embraced globalization with growing confidence and optimism.
At the same time, Asians devised a new set of principles to govern the majority of the world’s population, and their models are spreading faster than Western-style democracy and development paradigms. As the world undergoes a rebalancing of power, the most important feature of the change is not economic or geopolitical, but intellectual. The years between the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and US President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 will be remembered as a historical rupture. The post-war decades of Western political and economic dominance are already behind us.
At a time of permanent cyberwar, the UK must stand firm against Russia
Tim Stevens
The British government has directly accused the Kremlin of responsibility for a series of cyber-attacks on British, American and Ukrainian targets between 2015 and 2017. These include the World Anti-Doping Agency and the US Democratic National Committee in 2016.
The task of revealing cyber-attackers’ identities has in the past been delegated to junior ministers. Not this time. Instead, the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, condemned Russia’s actions as “reckless and indiscriminate”and affirmed the government’s confidence in its assessment of Russia’s culpability.
Underlining the close security relationship between the UK and its European allies, the Dutch have disclosed that they expelled four Russians in April. These agents were, with the help of British intelligence, thwarted in the process of a cyber-attack on the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. These events transpired shortly after the chemical attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.
Trump treats Germany like “America’s worst ally”
Constanze Stelzenmüller
While at times weak or problematic, recent criticism of Germany hints at the larger truth that Germany must begin to understand the responsibility it bears in Europe and on the world stage in order to confront the challenges that face it, argues Constanze Stelzenmüller. This post originally appeared in the Financial Times.
North Korea, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela: America currently has disputes with a lot of countries. Europeans, meanwhile, have done quite well at keeping their heads down. A U.S.-EU trade truce is still holding. And NATO’s 70th anniversary festivities in Washington came and went in early April without tweet fireworks from the president threatening U.S. withdrawal.
There was one notable exception to this queasy peace, however: Germany.
At a think-tank event during the NATO celebrations, vice-president Mike Pence castigated Germany for its inadequate defense spending and for being a “captive of Russia.” A few weeks later, presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump opined on Fox Business that Angela Merkel’s welcome of refugees in 2015 had been Germany’s “downfall” and “one of the worst things to ever happen” to the country.
The Brain of the Pentagon
BY ELIOT A. COHEN
When the memorial service for the former defense official Andrew W. Marshall, who recently passed away at the age of 97, was held, an eclectic throng attended. Former senior Cabinet officials, generals (the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave one of the eulogies), professors, think tankers, and bureaucrats from several continents showed up. There were historians, anthropologists, economists, journalists, and political scientists. But it was not a gathering of the establishment, for these were the cranky insiders rather than the complacent wielders of authority. And all of us thought of ourselves as members of what is affectionately known as St. Andrew’s Prep.
Andy came to Washington in 1969 from the Rand Corporation to work for Henry Kissinger. His friend James Schlesinger recruited him from there to create and run the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon in 1973, and he retired out of that job an astounding 42 years later. In that time, he influenced not only the senior civilian and military leadership of the Pentagon (emphatically, some more than others), but generations of students of national-security affairs.
Economists often don’t know what they’re talking about
The most intriguing and indisputable thing we have learned about economists in recent decades is that they don’t know nearly as much as they thought they knew. We see evidence of this all the time. Just recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy had created 263,000 payroll jobs in April. This was almost 40 percent morethan the 190,000 that economists had predicted.
Something new and different seems to be happening in labor markets, as the growth in jobs has continued to be unexpectedly strong. But just what it is, how long it will last and whether it might soon be reversed are mysteries to most of us, including most economists.
It’s part of the larger problem. As an economic journalist for roughly half a century, I have slowly and somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that many economists (and this applies across the political spectrum) often don’t know what they’re talking about — a shortcoming that is sometimes acknowledged and sometimes isn’t.
Economists often don’t know what they’re talking about
By Robert J. Samuelson
The most intriguing and indisputable thing we have learned about economists in recent decades is that they don’t know nearly as much as they thought they knew. We see evidence of this all the time. Just recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy had created 263,000 payroll jobs in April. This was almost 40 percent more than the 190,000 that economists had predicted.
Something new and different seems to be happening in labor markets, as the growth in jobs has continued to be unexpectedly strong. But just what it is, how long it will last and whether it might soon be reversed are mysteries to most of us, including most economists.
It’s part of the larger problem. As an economic journalist for roughly half a century, I have slowly and somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that many economists (and this applies across the political spectrum) often don’t know what they’re talking about — a shortcoming that is sometimes acknowledged and sometimes isn’t.
Keep Reading
Battle at Kitee
Cassandra Ulrich
The Mad Scientist team executed its 2019 Science Fiction Writing Contest to glean insights about the future fight with a near-peer competitor in 2030. We received 77 submissions from both within and outside of the DoD. This story was one of our semi-finalists and features a futuristic look at warfare and its featured technologies.
Staff Sergeant Ayrer stepped off the transport in Kitee, Otso already wearing his gear, or Smashsuit, as the troops called it. Tailor-made to hug Ayrer’s muscular build, the durable, seal-gray battle suit fit him like a second skin, yet able to stop bullets and protect from landmine blasts. Hurt like heck, though. He pulled on the gloves and made fists to activate the super strength capability, only possible if the suit recognized his genetic signature. Donning his helmet, he blinked on the controls which enabled a neurological connection to his mind. He pinged his partner, Droid Ella or D-ella for short, with just a thought and smiled when it pinged back and synced their positions.
Ayrer swung the strap of a rifle-shaped laser gun over his head and across his chest. An elongated pack already lay flush against his back. He peered up into the darkened cloud cover. Flashes of fire power in the distance lit up the sky like some strange fireworks show. Glancing over the data projected on his face-shield, he noted the position and condition of each soldier under his command. His squad contained two autonomous droids, three autonomous vehicles, and five humans. This team stood as a sign of the times, quite normal for a war in 2030.
How We Collectively Can Improve Cyber Resilience
Three steps you can take, based on Department of Homeland Security priorities.
At the 2019 RSA Conference earlier this year, Chris Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), outlined several key priorities the agency is focused on for protecting US critical infrastructure. The US government is at the forefront when it comes to cybersecurity trends, so being aware of its focus can help private sector organizations improve cyber situational awareness and reduce risk.
Protecting Networks and Data from Nation-State Actors
CISA watches the usual suspects: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Its key focus here is supply chain risk and minimizing the government's attack surface by keeping what it views to be risky vendors' equipment and applications out of US critical infrastructure networks.
In 2018, the US government banned technology from Russia-based Kaspersky Labs. With a heavy focus on China and 5G, it is now heavily focused on Huawei. Overall, the government is concerned that technology equipment from perceived risky foreign vendors could be used for malicious purposes.
Social Network Analysis of DoD Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Michael Kidd
Is the national security of the United States (US) impacted by a strike in India, a bombing in France, a trade war with Russia, or an earthquake in Mexico? Is there social liability within our supply chains as the result of unscrupulous sub-vendors? In most cases the answer is, “We don’t know.” While commanders can quickly assess whether they have assets located in a specific area and may know if they have a strategic vendor at the location, there is little visibility into the location or identification of companies that provide significant products or services to the Department of Defense (DoD).
This article utilizes a case study approach, leveraging social network mapping software to present a cost-effective approach of visualizing the complexity of DoD supply chains, and identifying structural and geographic supply network risks.
Supply Network Landscape
New authorities mean lots of new missions at Cyber Command
By: Mark Pomerleau
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Leaders at U.S. Cyber Command have used new authorities to conduct more cyberspace operations in the last few months than in the previous 10 years, senior Department of Defense officials said.
“I would say that in 8, 9, 10 years under the old decision process, I can count on less than two fingers the number of operations conducted,” a senior Department of Defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters in April.
The new process, called National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 13 and minted in August 2018, replaced an Obama administration-era process, which required presidential approval for offensive and defensive cyber operations outside U.S. networks.
Despite praising new offensive cyber authorities, officials are still unclear how the process will work exactly.
CYBERCOM’s Out-of-Network Operations: What Has and Has Not Changed Over the Past Year?
By Robert Chesney
I’d like to draw attention to Mark Pomerleau’s interesting piece at Fifth Domain examining the operational impact at CYBERCOM of several recent developments, including National Security Presidential Memorandum 13 (NSPM 13), doctrinal/policy innovations under the headings of “persistent engagement” and “defending forward,” and new/clarified authorities associated with the most-recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I’ve written at length (e.g., here and here) about several of these developments before. Mark’s article is a handy glimpse behind the curtain regarding how things are coming along in light of those changes. Two things stood out to me:
1. The tempo and nature of out-of-network operations
It appears the collective impact of these changes has made a significant difference in the nature and tempo of CYBERCOM’s operations outside the Department of Defense (DOD) Information Network.
New authorities mean lots of new missions at Cyber Command
By: Mark Pomerleau
Leaders at U.S. Cyber Command have used new authorities to conduct more cyberspace operations in the last few months than in the previous 10 years, senior Department of Defense officials said.
“I would say that in 8, 9, 10 years under the old decision process, I can count on less than two fingers the number of operations conducted,” a senior Department of Defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters in April.
The new process, called National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 13 and minted in August 2018, replaced an Obama administration-era process, which required presidential approval for offensive and defensive cyber operations outside U.S. networks.
Despite praising new offensive cyber authorities, officials are still unclear how the process will work exactly.
The (evolving) art of war
by Peter Dizikes
In 1969, the Soviet Union moved troops and military equipment to its border with China, escalating tensions between the communist Cold War powers. In response, China created a new military strategy of “active defense” to repel an invading force near the border. There was just one catch: China did not actually implement its new strategy until 1980.
Which raises a question: How could China have taken a full decade before shifting its military posture in the face of an apparent threat to its existence?
“It really comes down to the politics of the Cultural Revolution,” says Taylor Fravel, a professor of political science at MIT and an expert in Chinese foreign policy and military thinking. “China was consumed with internal political upheaval.”
That is, through the mid-1970s, leader Mao Zedong and his hardline allies sought to impose their own visions of politics and society on the country. Those internal divisions, and the extraordinary political strife accompanying them, kept China from addressing its external threats — even though it might sorely have needed a new strategy at the time.
How military leaders got a clearer view of the cyber environment
By: Mark Pomerleau
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U.S. Cyber Command’s first dedicated facility is providing government leaders a more holistic view of the global cyber environment and helping them make more informed decisions.
The Integrated Cyber Center and Joint Operations Center, or ICC/JOC, is Cyber Command’s first dedicated facility and doubles as the U.S. government’s first truly integrated cyber center. It became operational in August 2018.
Cyber Command and NSA mark the opening of a new integrated cyber facility and joint operations center.
Staffers there work with domestic and international partners to provide more rapid sharing of threat information while deconflicting global cyber operations.
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