Diplomacy & Crisis News

Eight years ago, Pedro Domingos envisioned an artificial intelligence breakthrough he called “the master algorithm” – a single, universal machine learning model that would be able to derive all past, present, and future knowledge from data. By this definition, the master algorithm would generalize to almost any task that humans can do, revolutionizing the global economy and automating our daily lives in countless ways.

Today, the spectacular rise of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has a lot of observers speculating that the master algorithm, or at least its primordial form, has been found. ChatGPT and its siblings show great promise in generalizing to a vast range of use cases – any domain where data exists and where knowledge can be represented by tokenized language is fair game.

The power and apparent simplicity of this vision is seductive, especially in the public sector. Leading tech companies in the federal space are already probing the potential for LLMs to transform government bureaucracies, processes, and data management. The funding lavished on OpenAI and other research and development teams for LLMs is based on business cases for digital assistants, customer service chatbots, internet or database search, content generation, content monitoring, etc. The possibilities are vast.

Some of these are common to the public and private sectors, and LLMs will be exquisitely useful in addressing them. But not every problem or solution can or should be dual use. Governments face wicked problems that the private sector does not. Right now, LLMs are only half of the answer for the most difficult problems in government – disaster response, counter drug trafficking, and military operations, to name a few. These are tasks where data is scarce, dirty, and intermittent in ways that are hard to fathom by commercial expectations. They demand decisions, actions, and human judgment in high-stakes scenarios where false positive or false negative hallucinations from an LLM could be deadly, or catastrophic. In a sensor-saturated future, where every relevant aspect of our existence can be captured as data, sophisticated LLMs may finally, truly, completely eat the world. That future, and the manifestation of a genuine master algorithm, is still a long way off.

What we need now is a salt to the LLM’s pepper – a complement that relies less on mountains of human-generated or human-curated data, is still highly generalizable, and can give humans predictive insight that is immediately relevant to the problem sets faced by the public sector in the physical world. To find it, we can look back at the previous machine learning hype cycle starting in 2015, when AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and OpenAI Five helped create a fresh wave of excitement about the potential of reinforcement learning (RL).

In each of these cases, an RL algorithm mastered a complex strategy game and defeated human world champions in that game. OpenAI Five’s achievements in the globally popular videogame Dota II are particularly interesting because its research team used an approach called “self-play” to train the model. Unlike AlphaGo and AlphaStar, which benefited from training on historical gameplay data from humans, OpenAI Five learned entirely by playing against itself. By scaling and parallelizing self-play instances, the OpenAI Five team was able to train the model on 45,000 years of Dota gameplay over the course of 10 real-time months.

In later projects involving multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in a virtual environment, OpenAI researchers found that individual reinforcement learning “agents” playing against each other in teams were able to cooperate to achieve objectives and discover novel and unforeseen actions entirely through self-play, with no outside direction from humans. In other words, these MARL agents quickly mastered a complex game, and then learned new ways of interacting with their environment to win the game – alien tactics that humans did not or could not discover by themselves.

This is inductive reasoning on steroids. With MARL, it becomes possible to rapidly simulate thousands of alternate versions of a given scenario, and then analyze and learn from those scenario iterations. By identifying patterns in these iterations and understanding how variables like agent decision making and environmental features change outcomes, MARL can help us plan and understand future actions. Dr. Strange’s character in the movie Infinity War provides an analogy for this: he “goes forward in time” to examine over 14 million possible futures of the war between the Avengers and Thanos. Ultimately, he finds just one in which the Avengers are able to defeat their nemesis, and this foresight helps the good guys win in the end.

What if we created a relevant abstraction of the real world – a virtual environment with representative physics and a focus on the behaviors, interactions, and decisions between intelligent agents? If we get this balance between physics and intelligence right, this MARL environment would allow us to peer into the future and optimize our decision making in new and powerful ways.

Consider the specific problem of counter drug trafficking operations. Every year, thousands of drug-carrying vessels transit the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, delivering vast quantities of illegal drugs to ports in the north. The United States’ Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) uses every resource at its disposal – Navy and Coast Guard ships, maritime patrol aircraft, and more – to detect and interdict as many of these shipments as possible. This is an exceptionally difficult wide area search problem, and JIATF-S simply cannot cover the entire ocean all of the time. On average, JIATF-S only detects about 10% of estimated maritime smuggling events. Even when these vessels are detected, approximately one in five get away.

MARL could help address this problem by simulating JIATF-S operations thousands of times over, revealing through agent behavior and decisions the optimal placement and employment of scarce patrol ships, aircraft, and other resources to detect and interdict more illicit vessels. MARL could also help JIATF-S planners experiment with tactics and long-term strategies, simulating scenarios where new technologies or methods are used to help with search, or new overseas bases become available for operations. These simulations could also be used to understand how changes in the environment or drug cartels’ trafficking operations affect the JIATF-S mission.

This type of experimentation with MARL could greatly benefit other national security use cases such as military wargaming, systems engineering, mission planning, and command and control. It could also enable similar use cases across each of these areas, creating a common tool and a common thread between the acquisitions and procurement community and the warfighting community. For example, if a MARL simulation platform helps a wargamer quickly create an experiment to test a novel idea or a hypothetical capability, the same tool could just as easily be used by an operational commander’s staff to compare and contrast differing friendly courses of action. MARL could also help mission planners develop and refine adversary courses of action and enhance red cell efforts.

If we evolve this idea from Charmander to Charizard, we can envision a capability that approaches clairvoyance. In the future, the MARL tool could automatically run simulations based on critical real-world data injects: a new adversary troop movement is detected, a new weapon system is deployed, critical infrastructure is suddenly damaged, or a new weather pattern emerges in the operational environment. It is not unrealistic to think that MARL could rapidly provide decision makers with a window into the future for these types of events, in conjunction with the automation and alerting delivered by other machine learning capabilities like LLMs and computer vision. If MARL could become a crystal ball, perhaps the time has come for a deeper look.

Jaim Coddington is a member of Spear AI and the Marine Corps Reserve. His graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government focused on the role of technology in public policy. All views expressed in this article are privately held and do not represent the official positions of any public or private organization.

This article was first published by RealClearDefense.

Image: Shutterstock.

Although American special operators may play a role in recovering hostages taken by Hamas militants, the United States currently has no plans to put conventional “boots on the ground” to support Israeli combat operations, a State Department official explained during a press conference on Tuesday.

The presence of an American aircraft carrier strike group led by the world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is meant to send a strong message of deterrence, but does not signal America’s intent to join the fray, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.

“The United States has also enhanced our military force posture in the region to strengthen our deterrence,” Biden said. “Let me say again to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation. I have one word: Don’t.”

This announcement came after Hamas launched a surprise offensive against Israel on Saturday, with militant extremists targeting Israeli civilians with a brutality American Defense officials described as “unprecedented.” These attacks include the killing of hundreds at a music festival and the systemic murder of children as Hamas militants poured over the border into Israel.

“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room, and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms,” Israeli Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv told CNN. CNN was not able to confirm the general’s claims, but stories about these deaths have permeated both social and news media since the fighting began.

The United States has already begun providing military assistance to Israel, with interceptors for the nation’s various air defense systems – including the widely touted Iron Dome – chief among the list of munitions.

“My team has been in near constant communication with our Israeli partners and partners all across the region and the world from the moment this crisis began,” President Biden said. “We’re surging additional military assistance, including ammunition, and interceptors to replenish Iron Dome. We are going to make sure that Israel does not run out of these critical assets to defend its cities and its citizens.”

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sanboxx News.

Image: U.S. Navy. 

When it comes to gauging the Italian economic outlook, we would do well to remember Herb Stein’s famous aphorism: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If ever that aphorism was true, it has to be in regard to the Italian government’s continued ability to issue ever larger amounts of debt to cover its budget deficits. This is especially the case when there is little prospect that Italy will ever reduce the size of its public debt mountain.

Needless to add another round of the Italian sovereign debt crisis is the last thing that the world economy needs at this time of synchronized world economic slowing. The Italian economy is some ten times the size of that of Greece and it has a $3 trillion government bond market. If the 2010 Greek debt crisis shook world financial markets, how much more so would an Italian debt crisis do so today?

A principal reason to brace ourselves for another round of the Italian debt crisis is that all of the factors that might allow that country to reduce its debt burden are now moving in the wrong direction. This has to be of particular concern when today’s Italian public debt to GDP ratio is 145 percent or some 20 percentage points higher than it was at the time of the 2012 Italian debt crisis.

Purely as a matter of arithmetic, the three factors that might improve a country’s public debt burden are a healthy primary budget surplus (the budget balance after excluding interest payments), lower interest rates at which the government can borrow, and a faster pace of economic growth. Unfortunately, in Italy’s current case, all three of these factors are going in the opposite direction.

Far from producing a primary budget surplus, the disappointing Italian budget presented this week by the Meloni government implies a meaningful primary budget deficit. At the same time, in the context of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy tightening and investor questions about the direction of the current government’s economic policy, Italian 10-year government bond yields have risen sharply to close to 5 percent. That is their highest level since the 2012 Italian debt crisis.

Meanwhile, far from experiencing rapid economic growth, the Italian economy seems to be on the cusp of another economic recession: The fall-out from ECB monetary tightening to regain inflation control. Such a recession would hardly inspire confidence in Italy’s ability to grow its way from under its debt mountain given its sclerotic growth record. Since joining the Euro in 1999, the level of Italy’s per capita income has barely changed.

Until recently, the Italian government has had little difficulty in financing itself on relatively favorable terms despite its public debt mountain. That was largely due to the fact that under its aggressive quantitative program, the ECB covered almost the totality of the Italian government’s net borrowing needs. However, since July 2023, the ECB has completely terminated its bond buying programs. This makes the Italian government very much more reliant on the financial markets to meet its borrowing needs.

With Italy’s highly compromised public finances, it is especially important that its government instill investor confidence so that it is capable of managing a very difficult economic situation. For this reason, it has to be regretted that the far-right Meloni government has failed to deliver on its economic promises. Among its more disappointing missteps have been its botched windfall tax on bank profits and the introduction of a budget that envisages a 5.3 percent budget deficit that puts it on a collision course with the European Commission.

In recent days, the markets have refocused attention on Italy’s shaky public finances and sent the Italian-German government bond spread to its highest level since the start of the year. The Italian government should take note of the market’s shot across its boughs and change economic course soon if it wants to avoid a full-blown Italian debt crisis next year.

Desmond Lachman joined AEI after serving as a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. He previously served as deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Policy Development and Review Department and was active in staff formulation of IMF policies. Mr. Lachman has written extensively on the global economic crisis, the U.S. housing market bust, the U.S. dollar, and the strains in the euro area. At AEI, Mr. Lachman is focused on the global macroeconomy, global currency issues, and the multilateral lending agencies.

This article was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

After a strong start to 2023, Chinese economic activity has sharply fallen short of expectations. Exports have collapsed. Consumption, production and investment have slowed, while inflation levelled out and the unemployment rate edged up. The Chinese renminbi hit new lows in August and September 2023, driven by worries about the domestic economy.

Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers has made ominous comparisons between China, Russia and Japan, saying that ‘people are going to look back at some of the economic forecasts about China in 2020 in the same way they looked back at economic forecasts for Russia that were made in 1960 or for Japan in 1990’.

As always, there are cyclical and structural factors at play in the unfolding economic outlook. Among the cyclical factors are scars from the COVID-19 pandemic — deteriorating balance sheets, an ailing property sector and a limited macroeconomic policy response. Meanwhile, structural pressures are weighing on confidence as regulatory, security and political stability concerns continue to mount.

After three years of pandemic pressure, the balance sheets of households, enterprises and local governments are stretched. Unlike the United States, China’s government did not hand out large subsidies to households and enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without that demand-side stimulus, Chinese consumption has been sluggish.

Financially, China’s biggest worries revolve around the property sector. If this sector were to collapse, the consequences would be very damaging.

But one difference between China’s situation and that of, for example, the 2007–08 US subprime crisis, is the lack of visible negative equity in Chinese property. This is due to the substantial down payments required in China, especially for second or third property purchases, which range from 60 to 90 per cent. If property prices were to drop — and they haven’t yet substantially in most areas — the property sector’s contribution to financial crisis risk would be smaller than that of the United States in the global financial crisis, although the resultant losses in terms of household wealth and economic growth could still be large.

Fiscal and monetary responses to China’s current woes have been modest, both during and after the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is despite China’s facing deflation rather than inflation risk, in contrast to the United States and Europe. Since late 2020, real interest rates have been relatively flat, even increasing over several quarters when the consumer price index fell faster than the policy rate.

The lack of aggregate easing reflects current policy objectives. Supply-side reforms have dominated demand-side considerations in policy thinking.

There are also structural pressures on Chinese growth. Not least among them are regulatory actions that severely dampened business confidence, especially among technology companies and foreign-invested enterprises.

Some of these policies were implemented to address national security concerns, while others were attempts to deal with legitimate regulatory problems, such as consumer protection and fair competition. They reflect the increasing weight the government assigns to security issues and the costs it is willing to bear as a result.

The government has moved to offset some of these negative policy impacts. As a part of its broader policy mix, it has announced new policies aimed to shore up confidence and support private enterprise, foreign-invested firms and consumption. The government’s 31-point plan released in July 2023 highlights the importance of the private sector and fair competition, eliminating barriers to entry, protecting property rights and drawing private enterprises into national projects.

But the changing geopolitical environment weighs down on the economy. Both China and the United States are attaching growing importance to concerns about national security that impact trade and investment.

Given that both countries share similar concerns, though not necessarily identical definitions of political stability and national security, cooperation to address the challenges posed by globalisation is possible. Such cooperation first requires more dialogue. Conversation is valuable even — or especially — when the political terrain is rough.

Third parties can also play an important role in stabilising relations. The European Union’s ‘de-risking’ approach, even if just partial decoupling by another name, is a helpful example. In Asia, particularly with ASEAN, regional relations can play a stabilising role.

Has China’s economic miracle ended? The answer is probably yes, as no miracle lasts forever. Higher incomes and the higher labour costs they create, deteriorating external conditions and an ageing population all present serious long-term headwinds against high growth.

But China is neither the Soviet Union in the 1960s nor Japan in the 1990s. For China, sectors like technology platforms, electric vehicles, green energy and electronics are now vibrant sources of innovation and growth. A major financial crisis, like a blow-up of the property sector, is still unlikely. The economic impact of demographic shifts will be partially countered by artificial intelligence and the digital economy.

Regulatory changes have dampened some sectors, but China’s ability to average above 9 per cent growth for 40 years suggests some flexibility remains. The recent announcement of the new policy package also demonstrates that policymakers do respond to economic challenges.

Economic activity probably suffered its last major drop, in July 2023. August data suggests that the economy is bottoming out, albeit very gradually. Casual observation confirms that economic recovery was under way in September.

But the fog of geopolitics is unlikely to recede any time soon. Many of the challenges China faces, like sustaining growth while security uncertainties are on the rise, are global. Finding ways to address these concerns within global frameworks that promote open trade and investment will be crucial to navigating the uncertainties ahead.

Yiping Huang is Professor and Deputy Dean at the National School of Development and Director of the Institute of Digital Finance, Peking University.

This article was first published by the East Asia Forum.

Image: Shutterstock.

Hamas’ savage assault on Israel is only the latest nightmare for President Joe Biden. The breakout by the Islamist proxy of Iran marks a new low point of this increasingly Jimmy Carter-esque presidency. 

Yet, Democrats and the media have been shocked by recent polls showing Biden neck-and-neck with his contenders. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump could both beat Biden in notional matchups. Some Democrats have yet to panic, but they should: Biden’s position will deteriorate further this winter. 

First, there is “Bidenomics.” A White House insulated from the public by a sympathetic media sent the president out to tout his economic record this summer and fall—a big mistake. Since Biden took office, cumulative inflation of nearly 20 percent means that the government has effectively vaporized one-fifth of voters’ savings and purchasing power. Unlike a stock market decline, this is lost money and buying power that cannot be recovered in the future. 

Unfortunately for Biden, matters are getting worse, not better. When the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports third-quarter GDP growth on October 26, it will likely show a healthy-sounding two-to-three percent. But the real economy is getting worse, and voters know it, judging from Biden’s meager 37 percent approval for handling the economy according to the RealClearPolitics average. 

The manufacturing sector has been in a slump for a year. Housing is unaffordable. Consumers have blown through savings from the pandemic and racked up a record amount of high-interest credit card debt. Student loan payments have just resumed. Gasoline prices will likely increase until a recession arrives. High-interest rates will put many companies that need new capital under stress or into bankruptcy. Commercial real estate is headed for a more profound crisis, which in turn will put financial organizations that carry those real estate companies’ loans into distress. The economy will likely contract this quarter, leading to a stock market decline. A second quarter of economic contraction in the new year would lead to a technical recession being declared just as the election campaign heats up next summer. 

The foreign policy outlook is just as poor. Biden’s popularity went negative after the humiliating 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden’s aides have hoped that success in Ukraine would wipe away that shame. However, the much-touted spring and summer Ukrainian counteroffensive failed. Both parties in Congress support continued funding of Ukraine’s military and government, but the public has soured. Polls now show a majority of voters want an end to the U.S. largesse. Voters see China and Iran as serious threats that require attention and aren’t buying the Beltway expert argument that the United States needs to wage a draining proxy war with Russia to scare Beijing and Tehran. 

Voters will only become more displeased that Washington appears to care more about Ukraine’s borders than our own. Biden’s summer charm offensive on China—he sent several cabinet officials to Beijing, one of whom literally bowed to China’s vice premier—has yielded nothing of value. His Europe-first foreign policy also seems to have breathed new life into terrorism sponsored by Iranian and its proxies, including Hamas.

Back at home, Biden faces the real prospect of third-party challengers who will sap votes from the Democrats in key states. Liberal activist Cornel West will run as an independent. Robert Kennedy Jr. also just decided to do so, given his treatment by the Democrat establishment and progressive media, who refused even to countenance discussion of his points of view. 

Democrats comfort themselves that Republicans are in disarray, having ousted the latest lackluster Republican Speaker of the House. But all Republicans need a  Speaker who can do a decent job of communicating the crises at the border and on the budget. Even though they must eventually compromise with Democrats, given the balance of power in Washington, all Republicans have to do is put up a fight and stay generally on message until all attention turns to the presidential race. That could happen beginning in January when Trump could stumble in the Iowa Caucuses, likely at the hands of DeSantis.  

Finally, there is Biden’s visibly deteriorating health. The Constitution created a strong presidency because it is necessary to manage a giant executive branch, act decisively in a crisis, and cut deals in the shared powerlessness that marks much of bureaucratic and legislative Washington. Paradoxically, it is the presidency, not the Congress, that is the most democratic institution in town. The president alone is elected by the whole country, and he alone has the power to advocate decisively for the people’s interests. Does anyone think Biden is getting better at performing this role? Instead of Biden, the highly ideological White House staff operates the executive branch. Voters grasp this dangerous situation, with large majorities saying Biden is too old to govern. 

Therefore, Biden will likely lose altitude on the real economy, the stock market, foreign affairs, and his health. His opponents on the Left and Right will gain strength. Growing numbers of Democrats perceive this, as indicated by more and more Left-leaning pundits calling for him to step aside. Come winter, they will have even stronger arguments to dump Biden.  

Christian Whiton is a senior fellow for strategy and trade at the Center for the National Interest.  He was a senior advisor in the George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump administrations.

Image: Shutterstock.

The Ukraine Foreign Legion (also known as the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine) is made up of fighters from many countries, including the U.S., U.K., Poland, Israel, Afghanistan, and others looking to resist Russian aggression. These fighters have primarily law enforcement and military backgrounds and use a variety of small arms.

The Ukraine Foreign Legion seems to be getting some of the odder variants of the equipment being donated by countries around the world. Today we are going to take a peek at those small arms.

Definitive sources about front-line equipment can be tough to find. We’ve turned mostly to social media sources including Ukraine Weapon’s Tracker, War Noir, and several more across Twitter and Instagram. These types of accounts source social media posts displaying numerous scenes and weapons in use by the Ukraine military. From those photos, we’ve gathered a small list of the current small arms of the Ukraine Foreign Legion.

FN FNC

As Sandboxx News covered early in the war, the FN FNC became one of the more common rifles of the Ukraine Foreign Legion. These Belgium-donated rifles armed the Belgian military for decades and were only been recently replaced. These piston-operated guns are a bit on the heavy side and lack modularity, but they are well-made rifles. They fire the 5.56 NATO round, which is quickly becoming more and more common amongst Ukraine’s fighters as the war progresses.

FN SCAR-L

The Ukraine Foreign Legion also uses Belgium’s latest assault rifle, the FN SCAR-L, which also fires the 5.56 round. This is a short-stroke gas-piston gun that is much more modern than the FNC. It features rails for optics and accessories and is a bit lighter (which is what the L in its name indicates). The FN SCAR-L is a very accurate gun and is well-known for its reliability.

CZ BREN

The Bren is another short-stroke gas-piston gun that’s very similar to the SCAR, so much so it’s often joked that the Bren is the Czech SCAR. The Czech Republic donated the weapons to Ukraine and they’ve been popular with the Foreign Legion. The Bren is a modern, modular rifle that’s accessory-ready, fairly light, and quite reliable. The gun comes in either 5.56 or 7.62, but we’ve only seen a 5.56 variation in use in Ukraine.

CZ VZ 58

The VZ 58 is AK-like in appearance but a very different weapon than the AK. This rifle came into service in 1959 and used a rather novel operating system in the form of a gas-operated, hinged-locking, piece-assisted breechblock. It’s quite reliable and fires the classic 7.62x39mm round of which Ukraine likely has plenty. Although the gun is somewhat outdated it is not obsolete.

M4 RIFLES

The United States has donated a number of small arms to Ukraine, including modern M4 carbines, which have been seen in service with the Foreign Legion. These direct-impingement rifles provide a very reliable and lightweight carbine for troops. They are very modular and easy to outfit with modern accessories. In the past, we’ve seen these rifles have issues in freezing environments, so hopefully, the soldiers issued M4s know to take precautions.

NUMEROUS AK VARIANTS

Unsurprisingly there are a ton of AK-types in Ukraine, including the Russian-made AKM and AK 74 series alongside the RPK light machine gun. These rifles either fire the 7.62×39 or the 5.45×39 and can be either fixed- and or folding-stock types. Countries like Serbia have donated their AK variants to Ukraine, and we’ve even seen Chinese Type 56 rifles used by the Ukrainian forces. It’s somewhat difficult to tell which AKs have gone to the Ukraine Foreign Legion, but they most certainly have been seen wielding them.

PKM

Another unsurprising sight is the PKM belt-fed machine gun. This medium machine gun fires the 7.62x54R and has been seen in the hands of American volunteers fighting in Ukraine. This belt-fed support weapon is one of the better medium machine guns out there. It operates on the same principle as the Kalashnikov and is perfectly suited for the Ukrainian winter. It’s also light for its design and quite effective.

M249 SAW/ FN MINIME

The Belgian FN Minime became the American M249 SAW. The two weapons are largely the same and with both Belgium and the United States donating weapons to Ukraine, it’s tough to say which is which by looking at photos. This 5.56 caliber, belt-fed, light machine gun provides a squad with a designated support weapon and is much easier to use in urban areas and tight quarters than a medium machine gun. These guns offer portability for a machine gun with a reliable open-bolt design.

M240/FN MAG MACHINE GUNS

Like the M249 and Minime, the FN MAG and M240 are largely the same gun but with different designations. The M240 is my favorite medium machine gun. It’s insanely reliable and quite accurate and capable. It’s admittedly heavy but easy to use and quite effective. This 7.62 NATO machine gun offers a general-purpose machine gun for infantry and vehicle use and is at home in both defense and offense. It’s tough to find a more reliable machine gun out there.

CZ SCORPION

According to an interview hosted by Czech news agency Seznam Zpravy, a Czech member of the Ukraine Foreign Legion carried the CZ Scorpion and P10C at his air defense position.

With his primary weapon being an anti-air weapon, the use of a smaller, lighter SMG, in the form of the Scorpion, makes sense as it’s easier to carry along the heavy anti-air weapon. The Scorpion is a direct blowback, 9mm submachine gun designed for the Czech military and police forces. It’s a modular weapon with plenty of rails for accessories. The SMG features a folding stock making it even more compact for an easy-carrying design.

CZ P10C

The same Czech fighter carried a CZ P10C which is a modern 9mm handgun. This polymer frame, striker-fired design, has become quite popular. The handgun is fairly standard in design but quite accurate with a nice trigger and that famed Czech reliability.

AND BEYOND

Dozens of different types of weapons have been donated to Ukraine and everything from Steyr AUGS to Mossberg 500s has made its way to the country. As such, it’s likely impossible to catalog all the firearms used by the Ukraine Foreign Legion. However, the above is a good start. If you know of any we should add to the list, please list them below.

Travis Pike is a former Marine Machine gunner who served with 2nd Bn 2nd Marines for 5 years. He deployed in 2009 to Afghanistan and again in 2011 with the 22nd MEU(SOC) during a record-setting 11 months at sea. He’s trained with the Romanian Army, the Spanish Marines, the Emirate Marines, and the Afghan National Army. He serves as an NRA certified pistol instructor and teaches concealed carry classes.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: U.S. Military/U.S. Government/Creative Commons. 

After this weekend’s horrific Hamas assault on Israel, the ball is now in Jerusalem’s court, and the most important question is how the Netanyahu government will respond. Inevitably, that’s a complicated issue.

Israel’s immediate goals are obvious. It needs to rescue the Israelis who have been taken hostage, cripple Hamas militarily to prevent or deter another Hamas attack, and simultaneously prevent a wider war with Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hizballah, which could cause more Israeli casualties and complicate the IDF’s operations against Hamas in the near term.

These goals translate into four obvious military objectives for the IDF. Israel wants to rescue its hostages, kill or capture as much of the Hamas leadership as possible, destroy as much of Hamas’s military capabilities as possible, and defend or deter attacks on Israel by Hizballah, Iran, or other members of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance.”

In turn, these objectives shape themselves into three obvious military options for Israel at this point.

The first would be to maintain the “siege” of Gaza that Jerusalem has already declared both to prevent Hamas leaders and fighters from fleeing and to try to convince the Palestinian population to turn on Hamas—either to provide Israel with better information on Hamas or even move them to take up arms against Hamas. This would be coupled with continued air strikes and special operations forces (SOF) attacks to kill or grab Hamas leaders, destroy Hamas military forces, and free Israeli hostages as Israeli intelligence identifies them.

The second would be a larger version of the first. It would maintain the siege, but rather than limiting the Israeli strikes to just air and SOF, it would include much larger Israeli ground incursions, with infantry and armor punching into Gaza whenever possible to smash Hamas militarily, kill or capture its leaders, and find and free the Israeli hostages similar to other operations into Gaza Israel has conducted in years past. While some such Israeli ground operations might last for days, the goal would be to limit them to just hours and avoid re-occupying any parts of Gaza for any length of time.

The last option would be a major ground invasion of Gaza. In this case, the IDF would re-occupy all of Gaza and then systematically search out and kill or capture the Hamas leadership and its military forces, and likewise find and free the Israeli hostages.

Again, obviously, the first option would minimize Israeli costs and risks—at least in the short term—but would be least likely to succeed in achieving Israel’s goals and objectives. Moreover, a prolonged siege of Gaza could still prove politically and militarily onerous as Palestinian suffering continues while little is accomplished and the damage to Israel fades into memory.

Nor is the middle option necessarily Goldilocks’s “just right” solution. While it incurs fewer costs and risks and entails a greater likelihood of success, it doesn’t guarantee that Israel gets what it wants or at an acceptable price.

The last, most extensive option seems most consistent with Israel’s mood and public statements so far. Moreover, it is exactly what Egypt has encouraged Israel to do in the past as the only way to remove the festering sore of Hamas’s control over Gaza, a major problem for both Cairo and Jerusalem. But it too has its own costs and risks.

Firstly, because the Egyptians are right. If Israel is determined to smash Hamas and potentially even remove them Gaza, re-occupying Gaza for a matter of weeks or months and methodically rooting it out is the only way to do so, but that would mean Israeli forces engaging in protracted guerilla warfare in a dangerous urban environment. It would risk heavy Israeli military casualties, heavy Palestinian civilian casualties, and possibly the death of many hostages as well.

Moreover, if Israel succeeds in extirpating Hamas from Gaza but then pulls out quickly to avoid another permanent occupation, as seems likely, it would leave the huge unknown of who would rule in Gaza in place of Hamas? Jerusalem could see an even worse leadership seize power—zealous Salafi Jihadists like ISIS—or no leadership at all leading to civil war.

Because of the potential for high casualties, a major assault on Gaza would also be the most problematic for Israel’s rapprochement with the Arab states—which was undoubtedly one of the principal targets of the Hamas offensive, and of Iran’s support for that offensive. And finally, a major offensive that threatened Hamas’s military viability and its control of Gaza is also the most likely to provoke intervention by Iran and its other allies.

Finally, Prime Minister Netanyahu will doubtless add his own personal political and legal calculations as well. This is his war. It happened on his watch. If he is seen as “winning” it, he can probably hold on to power which he seems to calculate is the only way to avoid prison. If he is seen as losing the war, he probably loses everything: power, his reputation, even his freedom. And in the end, none of us knows what Bibi believes “victory” over Hamas would look like.

Kenneth M. Pollack is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries.

This article was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

The September 2021 announcement of Australia’s transition to nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) under the AUKUS program indicated that ‘at least eight’ would be acquired. More recently, the rhetoric has firmed up to eight, with the program director telling a Senate committee in May that there would be three Virginia-class SSNs and five AUKUS SSNs. Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead implied that this was the full extent of the program and that decisions for what followed would be left for a future government.

A decision to stop at eight overlooks critical strategic, industrial and personnel considerations that determine the number of submarines Australia acquires.

Since the 2009 defence white paper, successive reviews have affirmed the need for 12 submarines supported by a base on each coast providing specialised infrastructure, workshops and a submarine squadron staff. While nuclear propulsion provides much greater mobility, a submarine can only be in one place at a time. Once its position is revealed by counter-detection or its own offensive actions, uncertainty over its location is removed and with that, its deterrent value diminishes for a period. Added to the reality of our geography, a force able to deploy at least two submarines on each coast would require at least 12 SSNs to provide ongoing uncertainty (for an adversary) and, if needed, operational impact.

It takes three to four submarines to guarantee having one available for deployment. The ‘rule of three’ was validated by the Coles review, but that doesn’t include any spare capacity to cope with unexpected defects. The UK and French experiences confirm that four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are required to sustain one at sea—noting that SSBNs operate in a much lower mechanical and operationally stressed environment than SSNs.

Industrial issues are significant factors in the cost of ownership and effectiveness of the force. Australia intends to build the AUKUS SSNs in Adelaide. That is thoroughly commendable, but we should expect delays and difficulties as we learn how to do it. In all shipbuilding programs, the time and cost of successive vessels reduces as the workforce and processes are optimised. Typically, based on Australian (and global) experience, the third submarine will cost some 40% less than the first, with much smaller reductions anticipated as later submarines are built.

This only works if the building program is continuous. Stop–start shipbuilding is a well-known recipe for prolonged delays and grossly inflated costs, as demonstrated by Britain’s Astute class, which, according to a House of Commons Defence Committee report in early 2010, was already by then 57 months late and 53% over budget.

Once we have mastered the complexities of building SSNs, as I am sure we will, we shouldn’t stop building.

Australia is planning on a three-year interval between delivery of submarines, driven by the time it will take to generate a crew from our small submarine personnel base and limited sea training capacity in operational Collins-class and US and UK submarines.

Construction of the first submarine will take longer and reduce to a steady state after three or four are built and the workforce has made its way up the learning curve and processes have been optimised. The building process is a production line—at any time, submarines will be in different states of completeness. Construction time doesn’t determine the drumbeat for delivery; rather, construction starts in sufficient time to achieve the delivery drumbeat.

Three years is a slow drumbeat industrially. Shorter would be more efficient but is currently not feasible because of personnel limitations. The personnel training limitation should ease once Australia has at least six SSNs at sea. The drumbeat could then be shortened. A slow drumbeat is more expensive due to idle production but is also likely to contribute to a loss of skilled workers; witness the UK’s experience at Barrow in Furness because of the slow Astute drumbeat.

A construction program building eight submarines at a three-year drumbeat would take 21 years. Submarines typically have a hull life of 25–30 years. Thus, this production line would have nothing to build for four to nine years, and would then be then back into stop–start shipbuilding.

A force of 10 SSNs at a three-year drumbeat with a planned 27-year life is the minimum to provide a continuous-build program, avoiding the stop–start situation. A force of 12 could achieve a shorter drumbeat in the later stages when the personnel restrictions are not so severe.

Decisions on the final size of the force must be made now, at the program’s inception. They drive industrial issues such as the size of facilities, production-line technology, the supply chains supporting the force and the ordering of long lead items such as the reactor. The decision cannot responsibly be left for a future government.

My study of British, French and US submarine-crewing policies, summarised in my 2018 ASPI report, concluded that a force of 10 SSNs with 10 crews was essential to generate the minimum critical mass of experienced personnel. A smaller force will not generate sufficient highly experienced personnel to oversee the safe technical and operational aspects of the program. That calculation assumed one base and one submarine squadron. Two-ocean basing with an additional 200 highly experienced squadron staff, a key link in the operational and safety chain, would require at least 12 SSNs.

Britain’s Royal Navy has six or seven SSNs and four SSBNs operating from one base in a single squadron. Its personnel situation is dire. High wastage rates and shortfalls in many critical categories have reportedly necessitated drafting non-volunteers to submarine training and cannibalising parts and crew to get even one submarine to sea. At times, the RN is unable to achieve even one. Is that where Australia is heading?

The issues are undoubtedly more complex than simply the size of the force, but it reinforces the point that a force of eight SSNs requiring six to seven crews is below critical mass, vulnerable to personnel shortfalls, will struggle to sustain two SSNs deployed, and won’t be able to sustain two-ocean basing.

Even more problematic is whether Australia can achieve an operational, sustainable and deployable SSN capability from eight boats made up of a mix of Virginia and AUKUS designs. The mix of classes adds to the complexity, cost and risk because it entails two supply chains and differing major onboard equipment, spares, and training systems and simulators.

Australia requires at least 12 SSNs to sustain two-ocean basing with two deployable on each coast in the good times. A force of 18—nine on each coast—would be more resilient, reliably providing two deployable SSNs, with three available in the good times.

Eight is plainly insufficient on all counts.

Leaving the decision for a later government will mean greater expense and increase the risk that the program doesn’t produce the needed strategic capability, while stripping funds from other key defence capabilities. A lack of decision, along with Australia’s failure to join the AUKUS SSN initial design effort, indicates inadequate commitment.

A ‘damn the torpedoes’ transition to SSNs could leave us with no submarine capability.

If Australia is not prepared to, or cannot, invest the resources to achieve a viable SSN force, we are better off not continuing down this path.

Peter Briggs is a retired submarine specialist and a past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: The Mariner 4291 / Shutterstock.com

The world’s eyes are fixed on the war between Israel and Hamas following the terrorist organization’s surprise attack on Israel over the weekend.

As the dust settles down, the real impact of Hamas’ terrorist attack is becoming evident. However, there are still Israelis and foreign nationals alive and in the hands of the terrorists inside Gaza. The U.S. military has offered to help the Israelis with any rescue operations.  

US COMMANDOS AND HOSTAGE RESCUE IN ISRAEL

According to the Department of Defense, there are U.S. advisors from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) on the ground in case their Israeli counterparts require help with planning for potential hostage rescue operations inside Gaza. The Messenger news portal reports that the special operators have augmented an existing special operations element in the U.S. embassy.

There are 50 confirmed hostages in the hands of Hamas, including potentially 20 Americans, per the latest estimates. The terrorist group claims to have more than 100 people in its hands. Although the terrorist organization threatened to kill one hostage for every Israeli airstrike, that hasn’t happened yet. To dissuade any hostage rescue attempts, Hamas terrorists very likely have spread the hostages across Gaza in safe houses or underground.

So, in the event the Israelis request help, which U.S. special operations units would be doing the advising?

Mainly the Army’s Delta Force and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), previously known as SEAL Team SIX. These two units are Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC) assault components and specialize in counterterrorism and hostage rescue operations.

Delta Force has had a history of advising domestic and foreign units during crises. During the Waco siege incident in Texas in 1993, which claimed the lives of 86 people, including four federal agents, Delta Force operators traveled to the Lone Star state to advise the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) on how it could storm the compound belonging to the religious cult Branch Davidians. The Delta Force commandos couldn’t participate in the operation because of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the use of military forces within the United States.

Related: A Delta Force perspective on Russia’s paratrooper operations

WHICH UNITS WOULD THE JSOC SPECIAL OPERATORS BE ADVISING?

The special operators would mainly be advising the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit or Sayeret Matkal. This is the Israeli Defense Force’s tier one unit and maintains a very close relationship with Delta Force and its British counterpart, 22 Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment.

Sitting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a veteran of the unit, as was his brother, Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, who commanded the special operations unit and was killed during the famous hostage rescue Operation Entebbe in 1976.

However, the sheer number of hostages means that the elite Sayeret Matkal would need help. Another unit that would play a significant role in any hostage rescue operations is the Shayetet 13, the tier one unit of the Israeli Navy and the equivalent of SEAL Team SIX. Equally capable as its Army brethren, Shayetet 13 will likely lead any hostage rescue missions in locations close to the sea, though it’s quite capable of operating in urban environments.

Mista’arvim units from the military, border police, and police might also play a part in hostage rescue operations. These counterterrorism units are comprised of Arab-speaking Israelis who can hide very well among Tel Aviv’s Arab enemies.

The dense urban environment of Gaza will present difficulties to Israeli special operators. But competent special operations forces shouldn’t have serious problems from that.

Related: China fears the urban warfare displayed in Ukraine could save Taiwan

WHAT’S GOING ON?

On Saturday, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel in several places and wrought havoc on military bases and civilian communities alike.

The Palestinians caught the Israelis by complete surprise, running amok for hours before they encountered any significant resistance by the Israeli military, which had most of its forces positioned hours away along the West Bank.

In a few short hours, Hamas terrorists released on innocent Israeli civilian generations of hate, competing with the Islamic State (ISIS) in the brutality of their war crimes.

As Israel mourns, the casualty figures continue to rise. As of Wednesday, Israeli officials state that at least 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and policemen have been killed and more than 2,700 wounded in the terrorist attacks.

Casualties are equally heavy on the other side. Israeli officials have recovered more than 1,500 bodies of Hamas terrorists in Israel, while Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 civilians and wounded over 5,000 in Gaza. Although the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is trying to minimize civilian losses by alerting, in some cases, which buildings will be bombed, the airstrikes continue to kill civilians at an alarming rate. With more than two million people squeezed in 140 square miles (about 7.5 times the size of Rhode Island), a lot of which are urban neighborhoods, there is not much room for civilians to hide in Gaza.

According to the IDF, in five days of combat, Hamas has launched more than 4,500 rockets and munitions against Israel, while the Israeli Air Force has struck almost 2,300 targets.

The Israeli Defense Force will launch its ground offensive against Gaza anytime now. In an impressive feat of organization and logistics, Tel Aviv mobilized more than 360,000 reservists in just 72 hours. For comparison, it took the Russian military weeks to gather its 300,000 reservists for deployment to Ukraine last autumn. It is likely that any hostage rescue attempts will take place before the ground invasion to maximize their chances of success.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations and national security. He is a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and is pursuing a J.D. at Boston College Law School.

This article was first published by Sanboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

It must be dawning on Hamas that it has made a serious mistake. A senior Hamas official said the group was open to discussing a truce with Israel, having “achieved its targets.” What he meant was that the terrorists desperately want a ceasefire since they are now the targets of Israeli strikes. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded succinctly to the truce offer: “every member of Hamas is a dead man.”

The international community is rightly disgusted by the brutal Hamas terror attacks in Israel. The images over the weekend were beyond revolting: Families were slaughtered in their homes, elderly people massacred at a bus stop, and hundreds of young revelers at a peace festival hunted down and shot. Not to mention the scores of people kidnapped—including Americans—and the sight of screaming young women being hauled away by Hamas thugs to suffer unspeakable acts.

Amid this nightmare, it is fair to ask: What was Hamas thinking? 

Sure, the group rolled out its usual talking points. Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh praised the attackers and the scenes of heroic deeds, sacrifices, courage, and pride. Hamas politburo member Moussa Abu Marzouk denied that the terrorists had purposefully targeted civilians. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lauded Hamas while also saying Iran was uninvolved. (Meanwhile, Iranian citizens booed the Palestinian flag at a soccer match.) Hamas fellow traveler groups, like those at Harvard, rushed out implausible statements blaming Israel for the bloodshed. Progressives in Congress demanded an immediate ceasefire, backing the Hamas line, and now face calls they be expelled. 

The bipartisan response of most Americans was outrage. Former President Barack Obama spoke for many when he said we must “stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel, as it dismantles Hamas.” Note his use of the word “dismantle.” This is the same language the United States has used concerning terror groups like ISIS and al Qaeda. Hamas is not just to be defeated but taken apart, eradicated, and ended.

Hamas’ “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” can well be compared to Al Qaeda’s “Operation Holy Tuesday,” the September 11, 2001 attacks. Both actions came as a surprise, were technically well executed, and resulted in unprecedented deaths. And in both cases, the terrorists miscalculated the depth and severity of the reaction they would face.

9/11 dramatically changed American attitudes regarding how to combat terrorism. The U.S. government was authorized, morally, legally, and politically, to hunt down terrorists by any means necessary. Activities that in previous decades would have been undertaken cautiously, after long internal debate, became mostly routine. Global covert action was unleashed. Extraordinary renditions became ordinary. Americans cheered the assassinations of terror leaders. Such strikes are now so non-controversial that when al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri was droned last July, President Biden barely got any credit.

Israel has now been issued the same type of global hunting license to take out Hamas and any of its co-conspirators. Whether in Gaza or elsewhere, Hamas leaders are in the target group for a “Wrath of God” style response. The expected IDF push into Gaza will eject Hamas from power and end its use of the strip as a launching pad for Iranian rockets.

So, what did Hamas hope to achieve? One notion is that they struck to split Israel’s divided polity further, hit them when they were distracted by politics and the High Holy Days. But, like 9/11, the attack had the opposite effect and created instant political unity.

Maybe they planned to draw Israel into a bloody stalemate in Gaza. Yes, when the IDF ground invasion comes, it will be bloody, as urban warfare always is. But no, it will not be a stalemate. Hamas will be driven from power.

Maybe Hamas thinks they can attract international sympathy by hyping Palestinian civilian casualties. Hamas uses civilians as human shields precisely for this purpose—it benefits from high body counts. But Israel seeks to minimize needless deaths, and the world knows it.

Plus, Hamas has already provided a stark contrast. There will be no scenes of Israeli troops dragging elderly people from their cars for summary execution, no IDF soldiers loading Palestinian women into trucks to rape and murder them, and no children being held hostage with the threat of death hanging over them. There is no moral relativism here. The Israelis are the good guys. Hamas is a clear and present evil.

Hamas felt that it could disrupt Arab-Israeli rapprochement. Ismail Haniyeh explicitly denounced the normalization efforts. But the rulers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other countries in the region have no use for the kind of radicalism Hamas preaches and the chaos it creates. Hamas is not their idea of the face of the Arab future. They also recognize that Hamas is a creature of Shiite Iran, an enduring adversary of the Sunni Arab states. So, Israel needs to convince Arab states to actively participate in the Gaza reconstruction effort once Hamas is eliminated. Let them build Gaza into a model Palestinian society, bolstered by tourism and trade instead of UN handouts and Iranian weapons.

Maybe Hamas thinks it can spark a wider war, with Hezbollah attacking in the north, perhaps a West Bank uprising, maybe even Iran intervening directly. This is all possible, but given the international reaction, it is unlikely. Any terror group that joins the fighting will suffer the same consequences as Hamas. If Iran seeks to intervene, the war could escalate to the point where it draws in the United States, NATO, or other proponents of the rules-based international order.

So, whatever Hamas intended by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it has failed. Unlike its previous encounters with Israel, the terror organization may have unleashed an unlimited war that would culminate in the group’s utter destruction. There will be no international pressure on Israel to limit its objectives until Hamas is driven from Gaza. And even then, Hamas leaders will be hunted relentlessly for years to come.

Maybe the people of Gaza will discover how much better life can be when freed from living under the thumb of violent extremist overlords and given a chance to develop their society in peace and freedom. Maybe then “land for peace” can become a reality.

James S. Robbins is a senior fellow for National Security Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council and Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics.

Image: Shutterstock. 

When adversaries tell you what they want, it is best to believe them. For decades, the regime in Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas loudly demanded, “Death to Israel. Death to America.” The mistake in the West was to dismiss such calls as political theater—offering concessions and “grand bargains” instead. The savagery of Hamas’ Iranian-backed attacks on Israel should leave no doubt: America’s enemies mean what they say. If the United States is to fully support Israel in defending itself at this critical hour of need, it is urgent that the White House radically and publicly reverse course on Iran—a major supporter of Hamas.

For decades, Tehran has provided Hamas with arms, training, and support. The regime reportedly assisted the unprecedented barbarism that Hamas unleashed on Israel over the weekend. Clearly, Tehran does not fear meaningful retaliation from the United States for promoting such violence. A major reason: The White House’s conciliatory approach to Iran has been misguided from the start.

President Joe Biden entered office promising to roll back the Trump White House’s previous maximum pressure campaign on Iran. Biden’s official intention was to “de-escalate” tensions with Iran’s clerical regime through a “strategy of deterrence, of pressure, and diplomacy,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It was a fine sentiment. Unfortunately, it was the wrong strategy.

Even as the Biden White House negotiated with Iran, the clerical regime’s proxies and militia groups steadily increased their attacks against U.S. partners and forces in the Middle East. Hamas is one of those groups. While its grotesque escalation against Israel over the weekend was unprecedented in its brutality, its intensification of violence was also in line with Tehran’s method of entertaining negotiations with Washington on the one hand while spreading terror and chaos on the other. Sadly, this tactic is not new. Like Iran, Russia has played a similar double game in Europe.

President Biden entered office with plans to improve U.S.-Russian relations. “We want a stable, predictable relationship” with the Kremlin, he asserted. The White House quickly sealed a nuclear arms control deal with Russia to extend the New START Treaty and—astonishingly—entrusted the Kremlin to act as our intermediary in negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program. In less than a year, all of these efforts were in cinders.

Russia burned the New START Treaty, repeated its taunts to topple American power worldwide, launched the largest European land war since World War II, and continues to kill innocent Ukrainians with drones made in Iran. Three years into this administration, Washington’s relationship with Moscow is anything but stable or predictable, and we no longer use Russia as our formal go-between with Iran.

The fact is that America does not have a specific “Iran problem” or a “Russia problem.” Tehran and Moscow are just the most prominent examples of America’s larger rogue state problem. Regimes are finding that overtly challenging the United States and its allies through direct or proxy violence reaps rewards and concessions. Hamas’ attack from Gaza is only the most recent — and most murderous — manifestation of this intensifying trend.

From Venezuela to North Korea, Syria to Niger, restive, revisionist, and repugnant regimes are flouting—and in some cases unraveling—the old order of rules and alliances that America built up over decades. In its place, these rogues seek to topple that order and establish an alternative world where might makes right. Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the violent overture of this strategy. With the support of Iran, Hamas’s assault on Israel is the murderous counterpoint. The United States tried to sanction Putin’s war machine with mixed results. In responding to Hamas’ violence, Washington has a clear moral and political imperative to make Iran an object lesson for other rogues and predatory regimes.

The White House can start by reverting to America's previous—and successful—policy of maximum pressure on Iran. This means targeting the clerical regime’s cash—money it uses to fund terror operations like the one we just witnessed. The U.S. Treasury must close the permissive gaps in our current sanctions that allow Tehran to sell over a million barrels of illicit oil per day and immediately freeze the $6 billion in funds that the Biden administration allowed the regime to access in August. The White House claimed that it could shut off Iran’s access to these funds at any time. Now is absolutely the right time to do just that.

If we are going to fully support Israel in defending itself — and we must — the world must see that Hamas and Iran are defeated. The economic carrots for Tehran must be replaced with only sticks.

Peter Doran is a senior adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X @PeterBDoran.

Image: Shutterstock.

Much early commentary about the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting has followed a familiar script that appears each time a foreign state or group commits a sudden, violent act large enough to shock the global public. At least as much attention has been given to asking how Israel, with its vaunted intelligence and security services, could have failed to predict—and, presumably, to ward off preemptively—the assault as to the discussion of the fundamental circumstances underlying the violence. Among declarations of “intelligence failure,” one hears related terms that are used often enough to have become clichés, such as “connecting the dots” and “failure of imagination.”

Viewing the Israel-Hamas situation with this script misrepresents what does and does not tend to be knowable by governments, as well as what is most important for a government to know to protect its citizens from harm.

It is impossible to make well-founded judgments about all the failures that may have occurred without detailed knowledge of the relevant communications and interactions inside Israeli officialdom. Lack of such knowledge has not stopped many outside commentators from nonetheless offering opinions on the subject—another familiar pattern in reactions to shocking events. At some point, the inevitable commission of inquiry in Israel will perhaps make some relevant information public.

However, one should not place great hope in such inquiries because they tend to be political exercises whose shortcomings are seldom recognized. Those conducting the investigation are under pressure to satisfy a public yearning for an explanation based on an understandable and fixable problem. This yearning is powered by the intense emotions that a recent tragedy has aroused. It is not beyond such inquiries to twist explanations to satisfy that yearning, as the 9/11 Commission in the United States did, in the process of selling its proposed organizational fix, by misrepresenting what intelligence agencies did or did not say about jihadist terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

After the last previous Arab attack that was a national shock to Israel—the Egyptian offensive in the Sinai that began the Yom Kippur War fifty years ago this month—the subsequent Israeli commission of inquiry concluded that to avoid such surprises in the future, the Israeli intelligence community needed to become more decentralized. The 9/11 Commission made the opposite argument in pushing for greater centralization of the U.S. intelligence community. Both commissions cannot be correct. Each was satisfying a public and political desire for some change, which could be considered a “fix” to the organizational status quo.

The most basic distinction, too little understood, concerning knowledge of foreign threats, is between tactical knowledge of plans and intentions for a specific attack and strategic knowledge of a foreign danger that could materialize in several forms of attack.

The tactical type of knowledge is typically difficult for any government to obtain, even with a highly professional intelligence service. A small terrorist group can make plans and preparations surreptitiously, eschewing vulnerable means of communication and acting ruthlessly toward suspected informants. Hamas is a larger organization with broader responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, but it also is quite capable of acting surreptitiously and ruthlessly. There is no reason to doubt that Hamas places high emphasis on, and is adept at, keeping secrets.

The more strategic type of knowledge is generally more obtainable. It has been easily obtainable regarding the possibility of serious Palestinian violence against Israel because it is based on circumstances in the Palestinian territories that have been playing out for many years.

Specifically, strategic knowledge of the threat of violence against Israel is based on the anger and resentment that inevitably result from occupation, denial of political and human rights, and the denial of a reasonable daily life. The anger and resentment can take and have taken various forms. This month’s horrific attack by Hamas is one form. There are others. Even before the current round of fighting in and around Gaza, the chance of a new popular uprising, or intifada, in the West Bank was high. It is still high today.

The strategic type of knowledge is at least as valuable as the tactical type because it is the basis for fundamental solutions to long-term problems. Responding to specific or possible threats with tactical intelligence can have a whack-a-mole quality. In defending against a terrorist group, this means the group switches plans and targets when it appears that an earlier plan has been foiled or precluded. 

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would be hard-pressed to continually counter all the possible avenues of violent expression of Palestinian resentment. The Israeli leadership has been criticized for focusing on occupation in the West Bank in ways that drew IDF resources away from the areas near the Gaza Strip. That is a fair criticism, although if the violence this month had instead started with a West Bank intifada, questions probably would have been raised in the opposite direction about where IDF troops had been deployed.

The most basic failure in the Israeli government has been the perpetuation of occupation and suppression of Palestinian rights (including a suffocating blockade of the Gaza Strip) that perpetuates the kind of anger that, in turn, perpetuates violence, including the violence seen this month. This judgment does not require any detailed knowledge of communications within the Israeli government. It is based on policies that are plain for all to see and on experiences elsewhere in the world when one ethnic or religious group oppresses another.

What is less certain is the extent to which this failure involves a lack of understanding—an “intelligence failure” in the broadest sense—or policy decisions taken despite such awareness. Israeli leaders have indicated that they expect perpetual violence from subjugated Palestinians but are willing to deal with that as the price for keeping the land and their other policies intact. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel will control “all of the territory” and “live forever by the sword.” Israel leaders speak of periodically “mowing the lawn” with overwhelming military force to reduce Palestinian capability and will. The devastation the IDF is inflicting on Gaza is the latest mowing.

There are other indications, however, that Israeli leaders mistakenly believed that the periodic lawn-mowing, the walling off of ugly happenings in the West Bank, the distracting effect of “peace” agreements with Arab states, the occasional gesture making life in Gaza slightly less miserable, and other tactics to “shrink” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be sufficient to keep Palestinian violence much below the level of the Hamas assault. Such a belief partly reflects motivated thinking; the desire to keep all of the West Bank and to contain Gaza as a half-forgotten open-air prison led Israeli leaders to believe that this could be done at an acceptable price regarding anti-Israeli violence.

The policies of successive U.S. administrations toward Israel have encouraged such a false belief. After a Trump administration that based its own Middle East policy on the same belief and on giving the Israeli government whatever it desired, the Biden administration has picked up on the notion that normalization agreements with Arab states can give the appearance of “peace” in the Middle East while sufficiently sidelining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so that the administration can devote its attention to other matters such as China and the war in Ukraine.

This kind of administration thinking is reflected in national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s untimely and now much-criticized remarks, just eight days before the Hamas attack, describing favorable things happening in the Middle East that were permitting the United States to turn its attention elsewhere and leading Sullivan to declare, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” The remarks certainly deserve criticism, but not because Sullivan failed to peer intently enough into some crystal ball that would have enabled him to predict Hamas’s attack. The statement was faulty in two other respects.

One is to confuse stability and instability with whatever disorder occurs when one speaks. Instability is the potential for trouble to occur. A table with a rickety leg is unstable even if it is not in the process of collapsing right now. The Middle East was still an unstable place, worthy of attention, even on weeks when the death toll from its conflicts was relatively low.

Sullivan’s second fault was to ignore some of the bloodshed that already was occurring, specifically in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where even before this month, casualties were rising. From the beginning of 2015 (Israel’s last big war in Gaza was in 2014) through August of this year, deaths from violence between Israelis and Palestinians totaled 1,595 Palestinians—more than the casualties Hamas reportedly inflicted on Israel in its weekend assault—along with 144 Israelis.

But most of those earlier Palestinian casualties dribbled onto the tally sheet in weekly or daily encounters in which West Bank residents fell victim to the IDF or Israeli settlers. Being less noticeable, they did not deter a senior official from talking about “quiet” in the region. Nor do they influence perceptions among the public, which is largely unaware of such deaths apart from the occasional brief mention on the inner pages of a few newspapers. 

It is only big, sudden, shocking events that break through the firewall of public ignorance. The general perception of what constitutes an “intelligence failure” is not a gap in knowledge and understanding that most affect a government’s ability to protect its citizens, but instead, something that happens to surprise politicians and the public—who in turn assume that intelligence and security services must have been just as surprised.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: Shutterstock. 

As Israel responds to the horrific attack by Hamas last weekend, a number of American observers have argued that the United States needs to take direct action against Iran as the ultimate sponsor, widening the conflict. While there is no question that Iran has provided material support to Hamas, and thereby shares some responsibility as a state supporter of terrorism, the initial U.S. intelligence suggests that Iran did not order the attack and that top Iranian officials were taken by surprise. Apart from the question of moral responsibility, however, the United States also obviously has to consider the practical costs to its interests of escalation against Iran, which are immense. Most of those arguing for action have not in any way addressed these costs. The United States should offer Israel strong support as they take action to dismantle Hamas in Gaza and warn Iran that widening the war would be disastrous for them, but also refrain from taking any actions that would draw in Iran. Our goal should be to keep the conflict narrowed to Gaza if possible. 

If the United States were to undertake military action against Iran, it would be the first time in many decades that the enemy would possess the capability to inflict widespread damage and casualties outside its own immediate vicinity. Iran’s ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and suicide drones have been mass-produced and have demonstrated their accuracy in episodes like the September 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, the October 2018 missile strike against Islamic State elements in northeast Syria, and the retaliation against U.S. forces in Iraq in January 2020 after the U.S. drone strike which killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani. When we engaged Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, neither had systems with anywhere near this sort of accuracy and effectiveness. 

One consequence that we should expect to see in a U.S.-Iran clash is a disruption of oil supplies. U.S. aircraft would definitely need to use bases in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, with U.S. forces deployed in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also likely being involved in supporting the mission. Iran would likely respond with missile and drone strikes against critical oil infrastructure, which pose a greater threat to oil than trying to interdict shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, given the long lead-time to repair some of these facilities. Iran chose to target only a subset of the critical units of Abqaiq in 2019, allowing Saudi Aramco to route around the damage at a facility that runs well below nameplate capacity. The 2019 strike demonstrated their capabilities, designed to stay below the threshold at which President Trump would involve U.S. forces. This time, it would likely aim to inflict maximum damage with a larger target set. Defenses have improved marginally, but a large enough drone swarm and ballistic missiles could cause a significant oil disruption. With 2024 a critical presidential election year, a broad range of knock-on domestic impacts on the United States could result from a lasting oil price spike and a subsequent recession. 

This also would put Gulf Arab partners in an awkward position vis a vis their own populations. The Hamas attack against Israel has, regrettably, had broad and deep resonance in the Arab world as judged by the reaction on social media. It is very much akin to the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, where Arab public reactions transcended Sunni-Shia divisions even as sectarian conflict raged in Iraq. Gulf Arab states would not be able to halt a U.S. decision to strike Iran and would inevitably be placed in the position of having to side with Washington even as they faced Iranian reprisals and resulting economic dislocations. 

Lastly, a direct U.S.-Iran clash would probably precipitate Iran’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), leaving it with massive damage to its facilities but retaining the know-how to rebuild it in a few years. It would increase, not decrease, the likelihood that Iran will eventually move from threshold status to becoming a nuclear weapons state. Iran hawks often posit that a brittle Iranian regime would fall due to such a conflict, but that is hard to predict and would not necessarily result in a cessation of nuclear activities. Other regime types could still want the geopolitical benefits of nuclear weapons or threshold status. 

It is possible that either Iran or Israel could choose to widen the war themselves or that Hezbollah could do so, but the United States should seek to discourage this to the extent possible. Hezbollah has a much larger capacity to inflict harm on Israel than Hamas via its increasingly sophisticated missile arsenal, but Iran has seen this as a deterrent to prevent Israel from striking its nuclear facilities rather than as something they would use up and exhaust lightly. There has already been a series of small incidents on Israel’s northern border, but this can happen without the situation reaching a critical mass where it escalates out of control. Whether they can stand by as Israel rolls into Gaza in force is still an open question, but there are strong arguments for restraint on the Iranian side as well as for Hezbollah. It is a danger, but one which Hezbollah and Iran may seek to keep under control. Israel also could eventually decide that it needs to take Iran on directly, but the dire consequences of doing so could prevent that. Given the consequences for U.S. regional interests and the fact that it would not permanently resolve the nuclear file, Washington should encourage restraint. 

The best outcome is the one the Biden administration seems to be pursuing—keeping the conflict as contained as possible. The United States should stand with Israel as they root out Hamas in Gaza and give Israel plenty of leeway in what is clearly going to be a gruesome fight, understanding that collateral damage and large-scale civilian casualties cannot always be avoided. However, U.S. interests pull strongly against the idea of widening the war to punish Iran. It is unfortunate, but enemy capabilities do matter when making these calculations. 

Greg Priddy is a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Israeli Defense Forces. 

To date, the formula for the United States’ strategic interaction with most allies has been fairly direct:  It revolved around the idea that allies need to defend themselves from attack until US forces can sweep in to their rescue, bringing a professional military with long-range weapons, modern aircraft, deep lockers of munitions, and other advanced capabilities to bear.  Where these capabilities were crucial, the U.S. established forward bases, rather than handing the relevant capabilities to allies. This defensive formula was marvelously successful during the Cold War in preventing US allies from perceiving one another as significant threats, while serving as a guarantee of American support should the USSR or its proxies threaten an ally.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, this defensive strategy was allowed to atrophy; the absence of a peer adversary enabled the United States and its allies to imagine that a rules-based international order would dominate without robust western enforcement.

Though reliance on this strategy has persisted, it is fundamentally inapplicable to today’s problems:  Small states on the border of large, nuclear-armed autocracies face an ongoing, existential threat from conventional attack. Only the local balance of forces and the assessed probability and cost of victory stop their autocratic neighbors from exploiting local weakness and attacking them. The autocratic, nuclear armed neighbors have the option to limit the response of the United States by threatening to use their nuclear arsenals.

The reality of intimidation and invasion is utterly foreign to the voting public in the United States, who have grown used to the idea that conventional wars are only fought overseas. The oceanic moats, coupled with the peaceful southern and northern borders of the United States, have limited the threats from foreign powers – the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 being the two notable exceptions of the 20th century.

For US allies located along the borders of China, Russia, and Iran, however, the threat of invasion – and the likelihood of genocide directed against nations and ethnicities opposed to these autocratic regimes – remains a real threat. For them, successful deterrence is an existential strategic consideration. For the United States, a successful attack on one of these states would be a disaster in terms of prestige and in some cases would cause severe economic disruption. But such an attack falls short of constituting an immediate, existential threat to the United States.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated an enduring truth:  While the United States’ polity is willing to support allies to fight ‘good wars,’ the US lacks the patience required to remain unambiguously committed to long, expensive wars, an appetite for taking on significant risk, and a willingness to commit the requisite resources for decisive victories in distant conflicts with even near-peer adversaries. 

Deterring the United States 

Russian threats of nuclear escalation have shaped US policy in Ukraine to a massive extent:  Rather than providing the Ukrainians with the means to achieve a swift and decisive victory, the US and NATO allies have held back, contributing only enough support to keep Ukrainians from being defeated or to achieve small, tactical victories.  Even advanced air defense systems, which could clear the sky of Russian aircraft and support the Ukrainians’ ability to achieve air superiority over their own territory, have been largely withheld. In order to avoid provoking the Russians, the systems provided by the United States and NATO have been deliberately crippled to prevent their use outside the historical borders of Ukraine. 

Furthermore, by publicly debating and discussing every new capability long before providing it, Western allies have eliminated the element of surprise from the Ukraine arsenal. Consequently, the Russians are free from diverting resources toward self-defense, operating from a geographic sanctuary. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military and state has no such sanctuary from Russian attack – though much of their logistics, and almost all their supplies, are provided from NATO states. Russia is war with all of Ukraine; Ukraine is able to wage war only on the forces that Russia chooses to expose.

With rare exception, the Ukrainians can attack only the Russian forces that are actually on Ukrainian territory (including Crimea and Donbas). Russian bombs and drones regularly target Ukrainian infrastructure, including electrical stations, dams, hospitals, schools, and shipping terminals; the Ukrainians have almost no ability to match these attacks. And when the NATO allies provide advanced, long-range weapons, they come with provisions that these weapons not be used in Russia, because very few policy makers in NATO want to risk escalation with the potential of nuclear consequences.

This fear of nuclear escalation has spread to private citizens and corporations. Elon Musk crippled the capabilities of Starlink, for example, to prevent the Ukrainians from engaging in effective attacks on Russian assets, including in Crimea.  This sort of restraint can only teach autocrats to expect that they will be treated with the same level of appeasement if they can make nuclear threats. So how is the United States to deter a Russian invasion of the Baltic republics, an Iranian attack on its oil-rich neighbors along the Persian Gulf or Israel, and a Chinese attack or blockade of Taiwan?

The answer is simple:  The United States can’t be the state making the tactical decisions about how to respond and when to escalate in the face of an imminent or ongoing invasion. When US allies are faced with existential, non-nuclear threats, they need to have the capability not only to fend off the threat, but also to engage in direct reprisals on the attacking power, in order to both degrade the attacker’s capabilities and to extract a high economic and political price. If these capabilities are provided only when they are urgently needed, their deployment will depend on ever-fluctuating political will in the United States.  

Distributed Deterrence and Taiwan 

The essence of distributed deterrence lies in providing the allies of the United States with the capability not only to defend their own territory, but also to engage in muscular reprisals and conventional escalation without the United States being a direct part of the tactical decision loop.

The lessons for Taiwan are obvious:  If Western behavior in Ukraine is any guide, we can expect that any advanced capabilities that the United States provides after an invasion, or in the midst of one, are going to be limited in utility. They are going to be constrained by the difficulty of shipping materiel through an active naval war zone, and anything that could generate surprise or escalation will be slow in coming, limited in quantity, and most likely disabled so that it cannot be used outside Taiwan.

Taiwan needs to have all the weapons, ammunition, food, medicines, and other supplies on hand to sustain a long confrontation with China, and Taiwan needs the ability to escalate on their own behalf, since they are the ones under existential threat. While Taiwan does not have a nuclear capability at the moment, failure to provide a robust conventional deterrent may lead its leadership to develop such weaponry. For Taiwan, nuclear escalation is particularly unattractive:  The international condemnation of Taiwan and the hardening of Chinese that would come from Taiwan launching a first nuclear attack, even in the context of a conventional invasion, would almost certainly result in a Chinese victory, albeit at potentially devastating cost to the CCP. The time to develop an effective strategic nuclear deterrent does not match against the short timelines for a likely invasion, unless the Taiwanese have managed to secretly run such a program over the past several years.

In the lead-up to an invasion, it is easy to imagine the CCP expanding their ongoing grey-zone warfare against Taiwanese assets. In addition to today’s ongoing, flagrant violations of Taiwanese airspace and maritime territory, China could begin intercepting shipping, engaging in cyber-warfare, or attacking key targets with missiles or air strikes. Such maneuvers would degrade Taiwanese warfighting and economic capabilities while attempting to cow the population. The Taiwanese require the capability to respond to attacks on their key economic and military assets with attacks on similar assets in China. The goal would be to increase the perceived costs of such attacks, by giving Taiwan the ability to use conventional forces to cause considerable damage and embarrassment to the CCP. Conventional and sudden escalation is currently outside the scope of Taiwan’s capabilities, but this needs to change.

Taiwan does have some substantial, differentiated advantages which the United States can reinforce. First, China is far from being an autarchic regime; China’s economy is dependent on the maritime import of raw materials. Without foreign food, the Chinese population starves. Without foreign energy supplies, the lights don’t stay on. Taiwan is perfectly situated to interdict shipping to and from China; Tomahawk missiles based in Taiwan would have the range to attack facilities and ships in every Chinese port.

Secondly, Taiwan has built up a culture and infrastructure that specializes in extremely efficient manufacturing for complex electronic systems. The popular perception of Taiwan is as a manufacturing and technological powerhouse centered on building advanced computer chips at TSMC; in fact, this is only a fraction of the outsize role that Taiwan plays in the global semiconductor and electronics supply chain.  Taiwan is good – perhaps the best – at rapidly ramping up from prototype to mid-or-large scale production for complex electronic products. There are places that offer cheaper labor (i.e., inland China, Vietnam, and Penang), but Taiwan has one of the most dense concentrations of skills and equipment, and thus is one of the most attractive places to bring electronics into production quickly, at scale.

Today, many military systems look a lot like consumer electronics. In fact, many consumer products, like drones (a market dominated by China’s DJI at the moment) are being routinely repurposed as munitions and as armed ISR platforms. Even high-end military systems like missiles and torpedoes are essentially very complex sensing and processing platforms that happen to include propulsion systems and explosive payloads. Manufacturing these systems can be done with the same kind of tooling and cost reduction in scale that is routinely achieved in consumer electronics.

The United States and NATO could benefit from encouraging Taiwan to become a center for the manufacturing of such weapons systems. Today, advanced munitions are reliant on a highly bureaucratic, antiquated manufacturing and contracting system. As a result, a Tomahawk missile costs $1.5-2M today,  the United States only has about 4,000 of them, and the supply is likely to shrink to less than 1000 units as part of an ongoing modernization program.  Similarly, a modern torpedo costs as much as several million dollars. Lightweight Mark 54 systems are cheaper but still in the million dollar per unit range, a Harpoon anti-ship missile costs $1.5M, and Patriot anti-aircraft missile unit costs are in the $4m range.  Even systems that are intended for much wider deployment are quite expensive:  Javelin missiles go for about $80,000, with a $100,000 launcher.  A shoulder-launched Stinger anti-aircraft missile is now priced at about $400,000. 

These munitions are being hand-built like Ferraris, not churned out in volume like iPhones. In short, the industry is in a low-volume, high-price, sole-sourced trap.

These are, as a result, expensive munitions that can be expended profligately, and the numbers of them that are being manufactured – low hundreds per year of the Tomahawks, for instance – are not nearly adequate to support a distributed deterrence model. The Taiwanese alone need thousands of each of high-end munitions (and much more) in order to have a credible deterrent against China. It is essential to the security of the United States to ensure that the Taiwanese have an unambiguous ability to sink a thousand-ship invasion flotilla, with capacity to spare to attack infrastructure and other targets:  In addition to a ~800-ship navy, China has hundreds of civilian amphibious transport ships available for sea lift, and hundreds of maritime militia ships; this count does not include the many thousands of merchant ships either owned or flagged in China.

An obvious solution would be for the United States, in conjunction with the companies that supply arms to the U.S. military, to license the Taiwanese to manufacture these kinds of munitions in quantity. Simple commercial contract vehicles, like those commonly used for consumer electronics, would serve to create dramatically improved incentives for cost reduction compared to what currently dominates the defense contracting world. By offering take/pay contracts for large volumes of these munitions and launch systems, the United States could harness the enormous skill and power of the Taiwanese manufacturing ecosystem to rapidly drop the cost of these systems:  Imagine doubling or tripling the spend on Tomahawks, but getting 10 or 20x the number of munitions.  This is the kind of volume and price ramp that the Taiwanese electronics ecosystem routinely achieves for consumer goods, and they do it in time for the Christmas shopping season, again and again. By moving to commercial contract vehicles and enlisting the help of Taiwan’s mighty electronics industry, the United States can help the Taiwanese to defend themselves.

Furthermore, as the volumes go up and the costs come down, these manufacturing lines and suppliers can be duplicated here in the United States, in a transfer of manufacturing capability and expertise. Reducing the costs of these munitions will create a situation where the United States can afford to enable distributed deterrence by our allies across the globe.

One objection that many will raise:  What happens if China does successfully invade Taiwan, and Taiwan is a manufacturing center for these munitions? One response:  All of these munitions have been around for decades and have been expanded around the world. While the most recent upgrades may hold some mystery, the older generations have surely all been reverse engineered. In addition, the plants where these munitions will be manufactured can be set up so that, in the event of an invasion, they can be rapidly and comprehensively destroyed. And lastly, the key recent upgrades are embodied in specific subsystems, chips, and software - providing the chips and the finished subsystems is not necessarily the same as providing the means to replicate them at scale. Key technologies that are encapsulated in isolated subsystems - and especially in chips made in the US - could be held back and only manufactured in the United States, for the most advanced platforms. And given the extensive nature of Chinese espionage here in the US, it’s time to think less about keeping secrets and more about delivering capabilities.

Right now, the CCP would be reasonable in viewing a fight in the Taiwan straits as one in which they would likely lose only ships and planes that they put into play. This is much like Putin’s situation before the Ukraine invasion; the Russian army units put into Ukraine were at risk, but assets within Russia were safe from attack. Enabling the Taiwanese to attack Chinese assets far afield and deep within China fundamentally changes this calculus.

Victory in the Taiwan straits is a matter of maintaining the status quo, while in parallel driving a rapid reduction in Western dependence on key and strategic goods production in China.  As Hal Brands points out, China has engaged in the fastest buildup of military capability in modern history over the past few years, and our current deterrence strategies are failing.  Distributed deterrence is less about what we will do to deter an invasion, and more about enabling deterrence for our allies, who are under direct and existential threat.

The Chinese leadership explicitly declared their intent to have the capability to invade and integrate Taiwan by 2027; given their record in Hainan, the South China Sea, Tibet, and Hong Kong, we should take them at their word.  The most straightforward path for deterring China from an invasion is to furnish the Taiwanese with the capabilities and technology required to defend themselves, and to punish Chinese aggression. A commitment to sail to Taiwan’s aid, while valuable, is insufficient.

Michael Hochberg earned his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech, and currently runs Periplous LLC, a strategy consulting company.  He founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service.  He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics, and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, etc.

This article was first published by RealClearDefense.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense.