Indian Strategic Studies: 10/13/22

13 October 2022

China wins human rights vote at UN, exposing flaws of Biden’s reform plan

Craig Singleton

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) this week voted down a proposal from the United States, Britain, Turkey, and others to hold a debate about the Chinese government’s persecution of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang province. The vote marked a major diplomatic victory for Beijing and a setback for the Biden administration’s plan to reform the council via deeper engagement.

In August, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a long-delayed report concluding that the Chinese government committed “serious” human rights violations against Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities. Based on witness interviews, the report noted that “allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention” were “credible,” as were “allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”

The report assessed that the “extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention [of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities] … may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The report was released hours before former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet stepped down from her position after announcing she would not seek a second four-year term for “personal reasons.”

British Official Stresses Threat From China Even Amid Russian Aggression

David E. Sanger

A top British intelligence official will warn in a speech on Tuesday that while Russia’s aggression has created an urgent threat, China’s expanding use of technology to control dissent and its growing ability to attack satellite systems, control digital currencies and track individuals pose far deeper challenges for the West.

In an interview on Monday ahead of his address, the official, Jeremy Fleming, who heads GCHQ — the British electronic intelligence-gathering and cyber agency made famous for its role in breaking the Enigma codes in World War II — also said he was skeptical about how far China would go to support Russia’s aggression.

“I don’t think that this is a ‘relationship without limits,’” he said, using the term that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China employed when they met at the Beijing Olympics early this year, just before the invasion of Ukraine. In light of Russia’s dismal battlefield performance and its brutality, he said, China “needs to be weighing up the advantages and disadvantage of continuing to align themselves strongly with Russia.”

Democracies must stand firm against Xi Jinping’s next assault on human rights

Sophie Richardson

The Chinese Communist Party is set to open its 20th National Congress on Oct. 16. Xi Jinping will almost certainly secure a third term as party general secretary — and therefore continue his profound assault on human rights across the country and around the globe. Are the world’s democracies up to the task?

Over the past decade, Xi’s regime has conducted brutal assimilationist campaigns with especially grim consequences for Tibetans, Uyghurs, people in Hong Kong, and others. He has reengineered the party state, reversing previous decades of slow progress toward legal reform. From the 2016 counterterrorism law to the 2017 Foreign Nongovernmental Organization Activities in China law to the Orwellian 2020 “national security” law imposed on Hong Kong, Xi’s entourage has used the law to entrench party power.

Xi’s repression has not stopped at China’s borders. In relentless pursuit of global power, Chinese authorities have dramatically expanded their capacity to commit human rights violations around the world. State-owned enterprises and Belt and Road Initiative projects often violate labor, land and Indigenous people’s rights and harm the environment in other countries. Other governments are pressured to forcibly return refugees and asylum seekers.

More Missile Defenses for Ukraine Russia has a military setback, and Putin bombs cities in response.

Russia’s missile assault on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Monday is a reminder that the Kremlin retains a considerable capacity to wreak havoc. The best response is to provide Ukraine with more weapons, including better air defenses.

The attacks follow the Russian pattern going back to the beginning of the invasion. Ukraine registers an apparent military success, as it (or someone) did in striking the Kerch bridge between Russia and Crimea. Russia responds with an attack on civilian targets or infrastructure that is important for civilians such as water or electricity plants.

Mr. Putin blamed Ukraine for the Kerch bridge attack, which blew up the main lifeline to supply Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed from Ukraine in 2014. He called the bridge attack a “terrorist” act, which is what his entire Ukraine campaign has been.

Pakistan: An Eye For An Eye In Balochistan – Analysis

Tushar Ranjan Mohanty

On September 30, 2022, three Military Intelligence (MI) and two Frontier Corps (FC) personnel were killed while several others were injured in an explosion at a sweet shop in the main market of Kohlu town (Kohlu District) in Balochistan. The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), through social media, claimed responsibility for the incident, claiming that it had targeted a ‘secret agency hideout’.

On September 25, 2022, six Pakistan Army officials, including two majors, were killed after a helicopter ‘crashed’ during a rescue mission near Khost in the Harnai District of Balochistan. BLA ‘spokesperson’ ‘Jeehand Baloch’ claimed responsibility, asserting that the helicopter had been shot down by rocket launchers, and that two ‘enemy personnel’, identified as Naib Subaidaar Kaleem Ullah of FC 114 Wing Loralai Scouts and personnel of secretive agency Mohammad Faisal r/o Qasoor Punjab, had been ‘arrested’.

Afghanistan: Suicidal Course – Analysis

Giriraj Bhattacharjee

On October 5, 2022, a suicide bomber detonated his device inside a mosque in the Ministry of Interior (MoI) in Kabul city, killing at least four worshippers and injuring 25. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident. Interestingly, this incident coincides with the reported deterioration of relations between Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Haqqani Network led by Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, which is mediating talks between TTP and the Pakistani government.

A day earlier, On October 4, 2022, Canada based freelance Afghan Journalist Bilal Sarwary tweeted a voice recording of a senior TTP commander mufti Noor Sayed Mehsud, “the TTP Emir, Mufti Noor Wali [Mehsud] has instructed him for a full-fledged war against Taliban if it does not refrain from transgressions”. The incidents of ‘transgressions’ include the house search of Commander Maulvi Abdullah Bajauri and ‘expulsion’ of 25 TTP families from Nangarhar to a desert in Helmand. Pro-TTP social media accounts, however, maintain that it was a small dispute sorted out through negotiations.

Family affair: US Army pursues synced electronic warfare systems

Colin Demarest

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is assembling a family of systems to provide soldiers with electronic warfare, signals intelligence and cyber capabilities that they can employ from near and far, on the ground and in the air.

The projects — essentially siblings — are known as the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team, TLS-BCT; the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade, TLS-EAB; and the Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large, or MFEW-AL.

Each serves its own purpose and is in its own stage of development. But what Army and industry officials emphasize is their future synergy: how each piece fits neatly into the puzzle of electromagnetic spectrum domination.

“We don’t expect these systems to do their own mission; they have to be used in tandem, whether we’re using an MFEW-Air Large in the air to get range [or] looking at long-range precision fires with [TLS-EAB],” William Utroska, who works with the Army’s Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told reporters in August at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Former Joint Chiefs chair calls for talks to end Ukraine war

Ben Armbruster

A former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said on Sunday that the United States needs to work toward ending the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, amid reports of escalating violence and talk of increased threats of nuclear weapons use.

Retired Admiral Mike Mullen — the nation’s top military officer during parts of the Bush and Obama administrations — assessed on ABC’s This Week that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “cornered animal,” a situation that he said “speaks to the need to get to the table” and negotiate.

Referring to President Biden’s recent warning of a nuclear conflict, Mullen added, “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.”

Putin Unleashed Missile Hell On Ukraine (And More Is Coming)

Jack Buckby

Russia launched its biggest air strike campaign since the beginning of the war in Ukraine early on Monday morning, targeting the capital city of Kyiv, as well as Lviv, Ternopil, and Zhytomyr in western Ukraine.

Central Ukraine also came under fire, with rockets landing in Kremenchuk and Dnipro. Carnage was also seen in Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv in the east. The world responded in horror as the strikes came thick and fast, killing at least 11 people in Kyiv as of Monday afternoon.

Ukrainian authorities told citizens across the country to seek shelter as the bombardment of rockets continued through the early hours.

The strikes were indiscriminate, targeting civilian infrastructure and residential buildings. Perhaps.

The World According to Xi Jinping What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes

Kevin Rudd

In the post–Cold War era, the Western world has suffered no shortage of grand theories of history and international relations. The settings and actors may change, but the global geopolitical drama goes on: variants of realism and liberalism compete to explain and predict state behavior, scholars debate whether the world is witnessing the end of history, a clash of civilizations, or something else entirely. And it is no surprise that the question that now attracts more analytical attention than any other is the rise of China under President Xi Jinping and the challenge it presents to American power. In the run-up to the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as Xi has maneuvered to consolidate his power and secure an unprecedented third term, Western analysts have sought to decode the worldview that drives him and his ambitions for China.

One important body of thought has been largely absent from this search for understanding, however: Marxism-Leninism. This is odd because Marxism-Leninism has been China’s official ideology since 1949. But the omission is also understandable, since most Western thinkers long ago came to see communist ideology as effectively dead—even in China, where, in the late 1970s, the CCP leader Deng Xiaoping set aside the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something more akin to state capitalism. Deng summed up his thoughts on the matter with characteristic bluntness: Bu zhenglun, “Let’s dispense with theory,” he told attendees at a major CCP conference in 1981. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role of the market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that maximized China’s participation in a global economic order led by the United States.

How we fight: Army issues all-new handbook for multi-domain war

SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

WASHINGTON — After six years of theorizing, wargames, and discussion, Multi-Domain Operations has finally matured from a futuristic concept to a practical handbook on waging great-power war.

On Oct. 11, the Army will formally issue the new edition of Field Manual FM 3-0, Operations. It’s a top-to-bottom rewrite that is shorter, more streamlined, and tightly focused on how commanders can execute multi-domain operations, not in years to come with as-yet unbuilt tech, but with the Army that exists today.

What’s new here is not the multi-domain concept itself. The idea in essence calls for ever-closer, increasingly computerized coordination amongst the armed services across all five “domains” — land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace — to defeat high-tech nation-states like China. Instead, what’s new in FM 3-0 is its all-out effort to explain multi-domain in traditional military terms, and a conscious effort to make it applicable to the present day, rather than some vague future conflict.

The Balance of Power Is Shifting Among Nuclear-Energy Titans

DANIEL SHATS and PETER W. SINGER

A startling statement arrived in July from Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency: “advanced economies” no longer lead the global nuclear energy industry. Since 2017, Russian and Chinese reactor designs have accounted for 87 percent of new installed nuclear reactors worldwide. And in this area, as in others in their strategic partnership, China is gradually supplanting Russia, and is set to become the world’s leading nuclear-power producer before 2030.

Russia has long been a dominant nuclear energy power, the result of first-mover advantage and many decades of accumulated scientific expertise. One of the first countries to develop nuclear power, Russia helped China build its first nuclear reactor between 1956 and 1958. Bilateral cooperation ceased in 1959 as Sino-Soviet relations soured.

A Russian Tactical Nuke Wouldn’t Confer Much Battlefield Advantage, Experts Say

PATRICK TUCKER

As Russian officials up their nuclear saber-rattling and the Pentagon games out what might happen if Russia were to use one of its 2,000 or so lower-yield nuclear weapons, experts caution that even a relatively small nuclear blast would have far-reaching political and environmental effects. But it would not help Russia win the war.

You might be used to thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of the civilization-destroying half-megaton-class warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles. But both the United States and the Soviet Union had a number of smaller nuclear weapons in the one- to 50-kiloton range throughout the Cold War. These are sometimes referred to as “tactical” nuclear weapons, which technically refers to the delivery system but also speaks to their likely use as part of a conventional conflict rather than to deter one. U.S. inventories of these peaked in 1967 and fell afterward, especially when the Cold War ended.

Russia chose a different path, according to this 2017 Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab paper. “Recognizing that nuclear weapons were the only affordable means to offset the superior conventional weaponry of NATO, Russia continued to invest in a robust research and development program focused on low-yield nuclear weapons,” its authors wrote.

To Protect America, Loosen Visa Caps for STEM Experts

ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN and BRETT BRUEN

When it comes to immigration policy, there’s little that the authors—a former Trump administration official and a former Obama administration official—have in common. However, we both recognize that attracting the world’s best in key fields is critical to U.S. competitiveness and national security—and that today’s visa caps are imperiling those efforts.

Congress should lift the cap on visas for certain advanced STEM degree holders, allowing more of the brightest engineers, scientists, and tech innovators to bring their talents and ideas to our shores. This is a simple step, but it is not small or symbolic; it is crucial to the future of the industries that produce cutting-edge military and commercial technology. Foreign-born scientists and engineers hold more than half of the defense industrial base’s advanced degrees. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in artificial intelligence and semiconductor-related programs were born abroad.

The U.S. remains the most desirable destination for the world’s best scientists and engineers — a feat that China, despite extensive investments, hasn’t come close to replicating—yet. But other nations have made the process of studying and working within their borders easier, even as America has shut doors and erected more obstacles. Today, top Indian STEM graduates are projected to face decades of wait time before being issued a green card. Such delays are driving talent away. More than half of AI PhDs who leave the country after graduating say they did so because of immigration issues.

Thinking Like A Cyber-Attacker To Protect User Data

A component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer, MIT researchers have found.

Modern computer processors contain many computing units, called cores, which share the same hardware resources. The on-chip interconnect is the component that enables these cores to communicate with each other. But when programs on multiple cores run simultaneously, there is a chance they can delay one another when they use the interconnect to send data across the chip at the same time.

By monitoring and measuring these delays, a malicious agent could conduct what is known as a “side-channel attack” and reconstruct secret information that is stored in a program, such as a cryptographic key or password.

Ukraine Conflict Doubles Down Into Long War Of Attrition – OpEd

Andrew Hammond

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Moscow promised it would be a short “special military operation.” Yet last week’s annexation by Moscow of Ukrainian territory has probably guaranteed the war will stretch on beyond 2022, as it enters a new, even riskier phase.

The annexation of about 15-20 percent of Ukraine represents the largest forcible annexation of land in Europe since 1945. It includes about 45,000 square miles, including much of the nation’s heavy industry and agricultural wealth.

Almost 230 days into the war, there is much speculation about what will come next but there is only one certainty: The conflict has entered a more dangerous phase. Russia’s latest moves also mean it is probable the conflict will become a lengthy war of attrition and is increasingly likely to extend not only into 2023 but possibly for years to come.

The Geopolitical Minefields Of A Turkic World – Analysis

James M. Dorsey

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has blown new life into Turkey’s vision of a Turkic world that stretches from Anatolia to Xinjiang in north-western China.

“Central Asia now resembles the 1990s when there was a huge competition between global and regional powers for influence over the resource-rich region. The shadow of Russia on the region, coupled with the desire of the Central Asian states to counterbalance Russia and China, has helped further foster relations between Turkey and the Central Asian states on politics and defense,” said Eurasia scholar Isik Kuscu Bonnenfant.

Opportunity for Turkey may be beckoning, but geopolitical minefields pockmark it.

For starters, Turkey’s successful development of a battle-proven killer drone makes it a party to conflicts in Central Asia and a de facto participant in wars in the Caucasus, where Turkey is interested in good relations with Azerbaijan but also its arch-enemy Armenia.

How Xi Jinping Can Strengthen the Chinese Economy

NANCY QIAN

CHICAGO – Xi Jinping is poised to become the first three-term president in Chinese history when the Communist Party of China’s 20th National Congress convenes this month. That makes this an opportune time to take stock of Xi’s economic-policy record from the past ten years and explore some obvious steps to improve economic performance in the next term.

When Xi assumed China’s top political position in 2012, the economy was thriving, but it also had many serious problems. GDP had been growing at an average annual rate of 10% for over a decade. But a slowdown was inevitable, and GDP growth rates have indeed declined almost every year since 2008. Moreover, inequality was rising, with the Gini index having increased by 13% between 1990 and 2000. By the start of this century, inequality in China had surpassed that of the United States for the first time in the post-1978 reform era.

Meanwhile, pollution was literally killing China. By 2013, Beijing’s air had an average of 102 micrograms of PM2.5 particles per cubic meter, whereas Los Angeles – a city historically known for its air pollution – had a PM2.5 reading of only around 15. Chinese city dwellers increasingly complained about the cardiopulmonary illnesses and early mortality associated with pollution. And China was also plagued by water pollution, owing to the chemical runoff from its factories, farms, and mines. In rural areas, entire villages and towns sometimes had to move because their water supply had been irreparably contaminated.

Blowing Down the CPC’s House of Cards

MINXIN PEI

CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA – At the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this month, Xi Jinping will almost certainly be confirmed for a third term as the Party’s general secretary and China’s president. With that, he will become China’s longest-serving paramount leader since Mao Zedong, and the rules and norms that are supposed to govern the CPC regime will be shattered.

Those rules and norms were put in place largely by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who took power in 1978. Deng knew firsthand the damage the Party’s ideological fanaticism could do. During the Cultural Revolution, one of his sons was paralyzed by rampaging Red Guards. Deng himself was stripped of his official positions and sent to work at a factory in a remote province for four years – one of three times he was purged from government during his long revolutionary career.

To ensure that China would never again be gripped by such terror, Deng – with the support of other veteran revolutionaries who had survived the Cultural Revolution – restored collective leadership and imposed age and term limits for most senior CPC positions. In the decades that followed, China’s top leaders served no more than two terms, and Politburo members respected an implicit age limit of 68.

A New Chance for the World Bank

LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS

WASHINGTON, DC – Outside of the security domain, overhauling the World Bank offers US President Joe Biden’s administration its greatest opportunity for a key foreign-policy achievement. The World Bank should be a major vehicle for crisis response, post-conflict reconstruction, and, most importantly, for supporting the huge investments necessary for sustainable and healthy global development. But currently it is not.

The remarkable feature of the World Bank’s financial model is that even before it is reformed, which is very necessary, and even without considering its ability to mobilize private-sector finance, each $1 of appropriated funds from the United States catalyzes a permanent increase in lending of more than $15 dollars. (This is because other countries contribute to the Bank as well, and paid-in capital is leveraged many times over.)

China: How Long Will Xi Jinping’s Third Term In Office Last?

Gu Ting, Jenny Tang and Jojo Man

Ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping is widely expected to seek a third term in office at the party congress, which opens in Beijing on Oct. 16.

What is less predictable is how long that term will be, and how much support he will need from rival factions in the party to achieve it, analysts told RFA.

“No major leaks have occurred so far,” Li Cheng, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, told RFA in a recent interview, adding that the closed-doors nature of internal negotiations wasn’t unusual, but the lack of leaks ahead of the congress was “a rare phenomenon.”

Currently, analysts are unsure of who will make it into the 25-member Politburo, still less of the makeup of the next Politburo standing committee, current a seven-member body at the heart of political power in China.

Kremlin, shifting blame for war failures, axes military commanders

Mary Ilyushina and Natalia Abbakumova

Russian Ground Forces Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, who over a 44-year military career was best-known for scorched-earth tactics in campaigns he led in Syria and Chechnya, was named overall operational commander of the war in Ukraine in April. He lasted about seven weeks before being dismissed as part of what appeared to be a wider shake-up in response to heavy losses and strategic failures.

Around the same time, Col. Gen. Andrey Serdyukov, another four-decade serviceman, the commander in chief of the elite airborne troops, was stripped of his post after nearly all divisions of the airborne forces suffered major losses.

And just last week Col. Gen. Alexander Zhuravlev, the head of the Western Military District responsible for Kharkiv, where Russian forces lost huge swaths of territory in early September, was removed after four years on the job, according to Russian business daily RBC.

No Surprise That OPEC-Plus Sides With Russia Over Biden In Oil Market

Dan Eberhart

OPEC-plus's headline-grabbing decision to cut production by 2 million barrels per day in November is a slap in the face to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders.

While the actual drop will be about 1.2 million barrels a day due to the Saudi-led cartel’s ongoing failure to hit production targets, the reduction is still a heavy blow to President Joe Biden’s efforts to rein in energy prices.

Even if executed at a 60% level, the OPEC-plus cuts will push inventory draws into bullish territory. That puts benchmark Brent crude on the path to reach $100 a barrel before the end of the year. The assault on oil markets comes when the global economy is already teetering on the cusp of recession and right as the northern hemisphere heads into the cold winter months.

OPEC-plus leaders claim their decision is in response to an “uncertain” global economic outlook and the need for long-term guidance in the oil market and that it needs more spare production capacity to deal with the volatile market going forward.

More than half of Ukraine’s tank fleet now reportedly consists of captured Russian armor Tanks for the laughs!

JARED KELLER

Despite its ongoing war with Russia, the Ukrainian military is only growing larger and larger — and not just thanks to the massive influx of aid from Western countries.

The British Ministry of Defense reported in an intelligence update on Friday that Ukrainian troops had likely captured “at least” 440 Russian tanks and an additional 650 armored vehicles, adding that “over half of Ukraine’s currently fielded tank fleet potentially consists of captured vehicles.”

Those tank capture numbers line up with estimates from the open-source research group Oryx, which suggests based on visual evidence that Ukrainian forces have likely captured some 457 tanks since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February.

“Re-purposed captured Russian equipment now makes up a large proportion of Ukraine’s military hardware,” the MoD said. “The failure of Russian crews to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering highlights their poor state of training and low levels of battle discipline.”

US, China already gunning for 6G military supremacy

GABRIEL HONRADA

With 5G broadband networks still being rolled out worldwide, the US and China are racing for supremacy in next-generation 6G, with significant implications for future warfighting.

An August report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) notes that China is following a centralized command model in applying 6G technology to military purposes. On the other side, the US is relying more on enabling lower levels of command and operators to take the initiative to make critical decisions.

The IISS report says that 6G technology may play a key role in China’s hypersonic weapons program, including in solving the current communication blackout at hypersonic speeds.

In January, South China Morning Post reported that Chinese researchers had developed a 6G laser device that can penetrate the signal-blocking plasma layer on the surface of missiles in hypersonic flight. The report also noted that the breakthrough has other military applications, such as detecting stealth aircraft or high-speed space communications.

The Best Way to Respond to Saudi Arabia’s Embrace of Putin

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, REP. RO KHANNA and JEFFREY SONNENFELD

This week, Saudi Arabia colluded with Russia — deciding to cut 2 million barrels a day of oil production at the OPEC+ meeting, thus raising the price of gas to Russia’s advantage. The shocking move will worsen global inflation, undermine successful efforts in the U.S. to bring down the price of gas, and help fuel Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

The Saudi decision was a pointed blow to the U.S., but the U.S. also has a way to respond: It can promptly pause the massive transfer of American warfare technology into the eager hands of the Saudis. Simply put, America shouldn’t be providing such unlimited control of strategic defense systems to an apparent ally of our greatest enemy — nuclear bomb extortionist Vladmir Putin.

That is why we are proposing bicameral legislation in the Senate and House on Tuesday that will immediately halt all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. For several years now, our colleagues have been considering similar proposals, but those measures haven’t passed. Due to intense bipartisan blowback to Saudi’s collusion with Russia, we think this time is different. Based on our conversation with colleagues, our legislation is already garnering bipartisan support in both chambers.

US Army adopts new multidomain operations doctrine

Jen Judson

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army, recognizing it will operate not just on land but also across air, sea, space and cyberspace, is releasing its first new doctrine in 40 years.

The 280-page doctrine for multidomain operations, titled “Field Manual 3-0,″ will make its debut at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, which runs Oct. 10-12.

Army leaders said it will be a key guide for the force, but stressed the service will continue to evolve the doctrine as it moves forward with its biggest weapon system modernization push since the 1980s. The service hopes to have a fully modernized force by 2030.

“There is not a time in recent history that is so potentially dangerous,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville writes in the manual’s foreword. “Russia, our acute threat, is conducting an unprovoked war on the sovereign country of Ukraine. Our pacing challenge, China, with an economy nearly equal in size to ours, is building a world-class military to challenge us and threatening its neighbors, including Taiwan.”

US information attacks undermine global security, stability

American media recently revealed that some social media companies have discovered and shut down huge amounts of fake accounts that are suspected to be operated by the US military to carry out secret information warfare in order to better manipulate overseas audiences. As a matter of fact, the American military’s secret information warfare is no news anymore and relevant combat forces have already formed a primary scale and are likely to exert negative impacts on global security and stability.

Weaponization of social media

What the US media recently revealed about the military’s information warfare is just the tip of the iceberg. From Operation Mockingbird launched during the Cold War to buy the media to manipulate public opinions to the “washing powder” and “white helmet” activities in the new century that gave the excuse to start wars on Iraq and Syria, the US has become pretty adept at fabricating and spreading disinformation to get what it wants. Within the US military, information warfare and psychological warfare have become important forms of combat. The US Commandant of the Marine Corps David Berger said the Marines Corps hope to take the upper hand in the information race because controlling, understanding and using the information usually puts them at an advantage.

Five reasons why the Crimean bridge explosion is significant

JULIA MUELLER

An explosion Saturday caused the partial collapse of Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, an apparent attack that struck both Russia’s supply lines and a symbol of Russian power in the area.

According to reports and videos of the incident, a truck blew up and ignited fuel tanks on a passing train, cutting off part of the lone bridge passage to Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The incident comes after Russia made an escalatory move to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of causing the bridge explosion, which he called a terrorist act, and is expected to meet with his Security Council Monday. Ukraine has not assumed responsibility.

Executive Order On Enhancing Safeguards For United States Signals Intelligence Activities

Section 1. Purpose. The United States collects signals intelligence so that its national security decisionmakers have access to the timely, accurate, and insightful information necessary to advance the national security interests of the United States and to protect its citizens and the citizens of its allies and partners from harm. Signals intelligence capabilities are a major reason we have been able to adapt to a dynamic and challenging security environment, and the United States must preserve and continue to develop robust and technologically advanced signals intelligence capabilities to protect our security and that of our allies and partners. At the same time, the United States recognizes that signals intelligence activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside, and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information. Therefore, this order establishes safeguards for such signals intelligence activities.

Sec. 2. Signals Intelligence Activities.

(a) Principles. Signals intelligence activities shall be authorized and conducted consistent with the following principles:

(i) Signals intelligence activities shall be authorized by statute or by Executive Order, proclamation, or other Presidential directive and undertaken in accordance with the Constitution and with applicable statutes and Executive Orders, proclamations, and other Presidential directives.