Diplomacy & Crisis News

The United States operates some of the most advanced and capable tactical aircraft ever to take to the skies, but what does it cost to train the pilot? More than you might think.

Back in 2019, the U.S. Air Force worked with the RAND Corporation to conduct an analysis of what the branch spends on bonuses and incentive pay aimed at retaining existing pilots, versus the cost of recruiting and training new pilots to replace them. According to the 73-page report, this comparison was of particular import at the time (and today) because the commercial-airline industry has been aggressively pursuing qualified pilots to replace its own aging workforce, encouraging highly-trained Air Force pilots to get out of the military and take on cushier jobs ferrying passengers between New York and LA.

Related: How long does it take to become an Air Force fighter pilot?

New pilots versus old, in terms of dollars and cents

There are a number of variables to take into consideration when trying to determine the right pilot force structure. High levels of retention mean high levels of expertise, but it also means higher personnel costs across the board as aviators continue to progress in their careers toward higher pay grades. An all-senior pilot force also creates problems as those senior pilots begin to reach retirement age. Conversely, an all-junior (or recruited) pilot force offers lower costs in terms of payroll and bonuses, but comes with the high initial cost of recruitment and training.

Obviously, the right structure is a mix of the two, with a number of senior aviators sticking around being the pay structure, bonuses, and incentives make it worthwhile as compared to commercial or civilian endeavors, and a number of aspiring aviators coming in each year to train for their military careers. This offers a mixture of experience, skill sets, and costs that allows the pilot corps to be sustainable over the long haul, but in order to manage this balance, the Air Force must have a thorough understanding of what such a mixture will cost for the purposes of budget allocation.

Of course, the first step in making this determination is assessing exactly how much it costs to train a person off the street to fly a hundred million dollars worth of state secrets into enemy airspace and live to tell the tale.

Related: How fighter pilots plan combat missions

Pilot training costs vary widely

In order to assess the cost of training a pilot, RAND had to consider a number of things outside the direct expenses incurred by the student (housing, payroll, etc), like the cost per flight hour for aircraft leveraged and the support costs incurred by maintaining these training fleets. Costs from each stage of training, from flight screening all the way through assignment to formal training units, were included.

The analysis found that the cost of training pilots varied greatly based on the platform. For instance, it costs about ten times more to train a pilot to fly America’s premiere air superiority fighter, the F-22 Raptor, than it costs to train a pilot to fly a C-17 cargo plane. This, of course, makes a great deal of sense seeing as aircraft like the F-22 costs far more per hour to operate than more utilitarian platforms like the C-17.

Related: What is Air Force fighter pilot training like?

Here’s how much the U.S. Air Force spends training its pilots:

The chart below shows the Air Force cost of training one pilot on each platform, according to the RAND Corporation analysis from 2018, as well as today’s updated figures when adjusted for 2023’s inflation, using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

Aircraft 2018 Dollars 2023 Dollars A-10 $5,961,000.00 $7,194,795.47 B-1 $7,338,000.00 $8,856,804.09 B-2 $9,891,000.00 $11,938,218.76 B-52 $9,688,000.00 $11,693,202.24 C-130J $2,474,000.00 $2,986,063.41 C-17 $1,097,000.00 $1,324,054.80 C-5 $1,397,000.00 $1,686,148.18 F-15C $9,200,000.00 $11,104,197.01 F-15E $5,580,000.00 $6,734,936.88 F-16 $5,618,000.00 $6,780,802.04 F-22 $10,897,000.00 $13,152,440.00 F-35A (basic) $10,167,000.00 $12,271,340.00 F-35A (transition) $9,467,000.00 $11,426,460.12 KC-135 $1,196,000.00 $1,443,545.61 RC-135 $5,447,000.00 $6,574,408.82

Figures obtained from “The Relative Cost-Effectiveness of Retaining Versus Accessing Air Force Pilots” by the Rand Corporation

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article first appeared at Sandboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

In recent weeks Israel has been facing its most severe internal political and judicial crisis in recent times. At the center of it stands a controversial judicial reform aiming to weaken the power of the supreme court in the national decisionmaking process.

The country’s supreme court is regarded by many Israelis as a beacon of liberal human rights. Yet others see it as an undemocratic institution with too much power. The judicial reform put forward by the government included plans to curtail the power of the judiciary in several ways, including:

1. Merely requiring a simple majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) to overrule court decisions;
2. Increasing the government representation on the committee which appoints the supreme court judges;
3. Canceling the legal requirements that ministers have to obey the advice of legal advisers, guided by the attorney general.

The reaction to the proposed reform has been unprecedented in Israeli history: massive protests took place across the country, with as many as 200,000 people flooding the streets in Tel Aviv and over 500,000 countrywide; a countrywide strike was called out by Israel’s Histadrut trade union; and as many as 750 reservists of the Israeli Defense Forces stopped answering their call-ups for training. Reserve and military officers from Israel’s Military Intelligence Special Operations Division warned in an open letter the “legislation in question will destroy everything we have served and fought for. We will not let that happen.” On the evening of Monday, March 27, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze of the legislation. Laying aside the internal political implications, we expect the long-term strategic-political consequences for the U.S.-Israel relationship, as well as for the United States’ future standing in the Middle East, to be paramount.

The relationship with America has historically been an important one, as the United States has been decisive in ensuring the security and safety of Israel in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. However, the relationship has become strained over the last months and has led the Biden administration to change its rhetoric towards Israel. Statements released by the administration have been increasingly admonitory and interfering with Israeli internal politics. This is highly unusual, as the United States does normally not openly do so towards allies, and, historically, U.S. administrations have adopted this policy towards Israel. This change occurred as a result of several factors, including pressure from the Jewish-American community, which has been very supportive of the opposition to Netanyahu’s government, and radical progressive figures within the Democratic Party and the Congress that are exerting strong pressure on the administration to take a clear stand against the proposed judicial reform.

During a call between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu, Biden “underscored his belief that democratic values have always been, and must remain, a hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship, that democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.” After meeting  Netanyahu on January 30, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that “the relationship between our countries, what we come back to time and again is that it is rooted both in shared interests and in shared values. That includes our support for core democratic principles and institutions.”

This strong attitude towards Israel has not gone unnoticed and has been widely criticized, including by right-wing Knesset member and Minister of National Missions Orit Strock, who tweeted in Hebrew: “Dear Mr. Blinken, I understand that you decided to give our prime minister a lesson in democracy. Well, democracy is first of all the duty of a country to determine its course according to the votes of its citizens, each of which is given equal weight, without foreign involvement.”

Since the (temporary) freezing of the judicial reform, the tension between Washington and Jerusalem has further increased. On 28 March, Biden announced that Netanyahu will not receive an invitation to the White House “in the near term,” and told reporters that “like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned. I’m concerned that they get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. I’ve sort of made that clear.” Even for the United States, which recently described the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich as “offensive, concerning and dangerous,” such comments are unprecedented. Additionally, they coincide with a time of fragile internal and external security in the country, as the religious holidays of Passover, Ramadan, and Easter coincided this year.

Netanyahu himself has strongly rebuked the Biden administration, emphasizing that “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.” Yet Israel now finds itself in an insecure position where it stands to lose political and public support from Washington, and is slowly moving towards diminished economic, political, and security support from its oldest and most powerful ally. This is especially threatening in light of Iran’s rise as a nuclear power, as inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency found uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent in Iran’s nuclear facilities. Moreover, the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah have recently expanded their infrastructure, and Israel suffered increased aggression during Passover, with thirty-four rockets fired at Israeli territory from Lebanon—the worst bombardment since the 2006 Lebanon war.

The harsh American involvement in Israel’s internal affairs has been met with bold condemnation from within countries. Instead of weakening the Israeli government and Netanyahu, the Biden administration’s statements invigorated his supporters within both the public and the government coalition. Even center and left-wing political figures expressed their dislike of the U.S. policy towards Israel.

Moving forward, this is expected to have decisive consequences regarding America’s standing in the Middle East in general and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in particular. The image of the United States as a power determined to stand in support of its allies while respecting their internal political processes and refraining from interference in their internal affairs has suffered a strong blow. Pro-American allies in the Arab world—like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, and Lebanon—will have to take into consideration that the United States might wish in the future to interfere in their own internal affairs, in particular with regard to their willingness to adopt democratic procedures and to go along with issues of human rights and the treatment of minorities. These will make them think twice regarding U.S. pledges of support in case of real and concrete threats to their security from radical powers—in particular, Iran.

The United States’ conduct in the recent internal turmoil will have two major implications in Israel.

First, and most importantly, it exposed the limited power of the United States vis-a-vis Israel. Washington has come to realize that Israel’s dependence on the United States does not deter it from making it clear that it will not tolerate an exceeding American interference in its internal affairs. Moreover, at this stage, it has become clear that U.S. interference in support of the opposition to Netanyahu’s government has no real effect on its policy. More than ever, the Israeli government seems determined to implement the judicial reform.

Second, the statements against Netanyahu will certainly weaken the United States’ image as an “honest broker” in a peace process leading toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This faux pas has cost the United States authority in the Middle East, and will make it more challenging for Washington to move ahead on an American peace initiative in the region. This comes alongside a general insecurity about U.S. global leadership in light of Washington’s failed efforts to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine, the Trump-led era, and the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

All in all, the judicial reform and the protests have caused an unprecedented situation, the long-term consequences of which are not yet clear. We can only expect that the precedent of military insubordination will lead to a bandwagon effect, especially regarding missions in the occupied territories. The White House is expected to soften its stance over the coming days and weeks, but Israel still finds itself vulnerable and in tension with its most powerful ally. Nevertheless, Israel has set clear boundaries for the Biden administration, demonstrating that foreign interference with Israeli internal affairs will not be accepted in the future. It is yet unclear how this will play out in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the changed U.S.-Israel relationship will make the arduous peace process even more complicated in the future.

Even so, the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security has not wavered. U.S. National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby announced during a press conference on March 22 that “[…] the President, in his discussion with Prime Minister Netanyahu, made clear that our support for Israel’s security will remain ironclad. Nothing is going to change about that. President Biden has, through his entire public life, been one of Israel’s strongest supporters and friends, and that will not change.”

Professor Zaki Shalom is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Professor Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University. He has published extensively on various facets of Israel’s defense policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the role of the superpowers in the Middle East, and Israel’s struggle against Islamic terror.

Sophia Schmidt is a research intern at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, Israel. She holds a B.A. from the University of Oxford.

Image: Shutterstock.

Military adventures in far-off regions require a reliable forward outpost, friends in the neighborhood, and, most importantly, the fuel to get there. Since the Gulf War began in 1990, the United States has looked to Saudi Arabia to fill these requirements. In exchange for their hospitality, camaraderie, and oil at a reasonable price, the Saudis received American protection and weapons—adynamic colloquially called “oil for security.” The relationship between a strictly democratic state and an unapologetically authoritarian kingdom went steady for nearly two and a half decades. On paper, the partnership was an exceptional triumph of realpolitik in a period of idealistic geopolitics.

However, as America wraps up its interventions in the region, it no longer requires a forward outpost. Nor does it need a military ally in the region with whom to exchange intelligence. The only things keeping the partnership alive are Saudi Arabia’s vast oil deposits and leadership in OPEC. Yet Saudi oil policy has run contrary to U.S. interests. OPEC’s production quotas have kept oil prices worldwide high, twisting the knife in a struggling American economy. Additionally, the Saudi military intervention in Yemen using American weapons and intelligence has kept the region unstable and damaged America’s international reputation. Current U.S. policies have utterly failed to address these imbalances. It’s time for an ultimatum: Riyadh must provide the oil or lose the security.

The Middle East is a region lacking a structure for stability. It has neither a clear military and/or political hierarchy nor an effective economic union between its disparate states. The closest thing it has to an economic union is OPEC, whose mandate only coordinates oil production and as such only counts oil producers amongst its member states. And while the borders in the Middle East are artificially drawn, for the most part, the religious and ethnic rivalries are very real. This state of affairs leaves a constant power vacuum that no individual state can fill, while also making negotiation on a personal and political level extremely difficult.

Among the states in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is in the most unique position. The reach of its borders and the factors within them create peculiar geopolitical realities that serve as both boons and disadvantages.

Saudi Arabia lies upon one of the largest oil deposits in the world, earning it the envy of all countries—developing or otherwise. Oil is such a dominant industry in the country that any instability in its global price generally directly corresponds with instability in the Saudi economy. If tomorrow oil became worthless, or even just halved in price, Saudi Arabia’s economy would almost certainly collapse. To prevent this scenario from taking place, Saudi Arabia has aggressively maintained its position in OPEC, fighting to manipulate the global oil market and keep its economy flourishing, often at the expense of the rest of the world.

Also within its borders are the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the most important sites in Islam. Simply controlling these cities grants Saudi rulers a place high in the leadership of Islam. At the same time, their presence puts pressure on (or perhaps gives an excuse for) the state to adhere more strictly to the rules of the Quran, creating an extremely conservative, rigid society. It is because of this that foreigners are often unwelcome in the country, and relations with non-Muslim nations can often be driven by the sentiment of Muslims rather than the state apparatus itself.

While its leaders see regional hegemony as an obvious next step in Saudi power, the existence of Iran complicates this endeavor. The two states are roughly comparable in power and influence in the area, and have been locked in a struggle for dominance since the removal of Baathist Iraq as a relevant competitor in the early 2000s. The states’ adherence to rival branches of Islam only makes the competition more bitter. Iran has served as the champion of Shia Islam, backing numerous Shia militant groups throughout the Middle East such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. While Saudi Arabia’s arid climate and long borders make it an unattractive target for conventional warfare, they leave it dangerously open to infiltration by smaller militant groups.

To further its own influence and minimize the risk these groups pose to its stability and national defense, Saudi Arabia has committed itself to counter-militancy. This policy has manifested most clearly in the ongoing Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the country in which the Houthi movement is based. With the help of U.S. training, weapons sales, and intelligence, coalition forces have led an intensive bombing and ground campaign with the aim of ousting the Houthis and restoring the former Yemeni government. The conflict has created one of the largest humanitarian crises in history. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, millions are displaced, and millions more are starving. The intervention has no clear end date, and beyond being a massive humanitarian catastrophe serves as a blight on American international reputation by virtue of its second-hand involvement.

While Saudi policy was more palatable during America’s own intervention in the Middle East, upon taking a step back it is clearly antithetical to American interests in almost every way. The United States needs cheap oil, or else its economy grinds to a halt: Saudi Arabia is directly involved in keeping oil expensive. The United States needs the Middle East to be stable so that it is not dragged into another conflict: the Saudi-Iranian rivalry endangers that stability. The United States needs to recover its international reputation after its disastrous Middle East wars: cooperation with Saudi intervention in Yemen makes that considerably more difficult.

Current U.S. policy does little to address these glaring relationship deficiencies. There has been a malaise in American Middle Eastern diplomacy since the Afghanistan pullout. Yet America’s leverage is considerable. Saudi Arabia needs American weapons for its national defense, and it needs American expertise to maintain these weapons. Despite the recent cooling of some tensions, there is no strong evidence that the country’s rivalry with Iran is a thing of the past. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is no longer vital to America’s interests. Completely severing the relationship now would have almost no effect in comparison to severing it ten years ago. Even in the economic area, there are possible alternatives to Saudi oil that could be explored such as Venezuela, Nigeria, the UAE, Brazil, or even America itself. The United Stat should utilize its leverage, and demand that Saudi Arabia hold up its side of the oil-for-security bargain or else look elsewhere for defense.

Gerard A. Neumann is a student at Columbia University.

This essay was a runner-up in the 2023 John Quincy Adams Society Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest.

With its sights set squarely on countering Chinese threats in the Pacific and Russian aggression in Europe, the U.S. now has at least five secretive new warplanes in development. These programs range from next-generation air superiority fighters that will fly amid a constellation of AI-driven support drones to dual-cycle scramjet-powered hypersonic strike drones very similar to the long-awaited SR-72 concept.

With new multi-static anti-stealth radar arrays and more advanced integrated air defense systems continuing to come online, the U.S. Air Force has stated that it believes even the mighty F-22 Raptor will no longer be survivable enough in near-peer contested airspace as soon as 2030. The Raptor is widely considered to be the stealthiest fighter ever to take to the skies, so the broader context one can glean from concerns about its survivability is clear: the U.S. needs a slew of new offensive and defensive warplanes it can rely on to dominate the skies over its opponents. These warplanes will also have to defend our own airspace against a sea of new stealth fighters and bombers being hurriedly developed by Russia and China.

In order to meet the combined threat of new air defenses and increasingly potent enemy warplanes, the U.S. now has two different but deeply connected stealth-bomber programs at some stage of development, alongside two similarly connected stealth-fighter programs. But perhaps the most secretive of all of these new programs is an Air Force Research Laboratory effort to field fully-functioning dual-cycle scramjet engine systems for a low-observable hypersonic drone designed to fly three different types of combat missions.

Related: What kind of fighter could the latest military tech really build?

1) NGAD: The US Air Force’s next air superiority fighter will come with its own drone wingmen

The F-22 Raptor is widely seen as the most capable air-superiority fighter on the planet, but with fewer than 150 combat-ready airframes left in service, America’s apex predator of the skies is an endangered species. That’s where the U.S. Air Force’s NGAD program comes in.

Unlike other efforts to field new warplanes, NGAD isn’t aiming to develop a single jet, but rather a whole family of systems that can be spread across multiple airframes, including a bevy of support drones that will fly alongside the crewed fighter. This new family of systems will specialize in air combat with the stated aim of dominating enemy airspace. However, like all modern tactical aircraft, it will have multi-role capabilities that will allow for air-to-ground engagements as well.

NGAD is expected to lean further into current aviation trends of cockpit automation and data fusion, taking many of the more monotonous or complex flight control functions out of the pilots’ hands to allow them to focus on the fight, especially while directing support drones to engage air or surface targets on the fighter’s behalf. While not confirmed, it’s expected that the NGAD fighter will leverage now-in-development adaptive cycle engines for increased thrust, improved fuel economy, and a dramatic jump in thermal management (and as a byproduct of that, more energy production for advanced systems like directed energy weapons).

In 2020, it was announced that a full-sized technology demonstrator for the NGAD program had not only already been flown, but had even broken multiple records. While it’s important to note that a technology demonstrator is not the same thing as a flying prototype and may not even look like the new air dominance warplanes the U.S. will eventually field, it sounds as though the NGAD program is progressing at full speed.

The expected sticker price for America’s new NGAD fighters will likely begin at around $200 million per airframe. Its support drone costs are expected to range wildly from attritable low-cost platforms like the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, at around $1.3 million apiece, to fully-functioning unmanned stealth fighters at a per-unit cost of around $100 million which is greater than the F-35A’s per-unit cost. That may sound pretty steep, but it’s worth noting that America’s F-22 Raptor, which saw price increases due to the abrupt cancellation of the line, ended up ringing in at around $337 million per jet (when rolling development costs into production) in 2011 dollars. That’s a whopping $442 million today. The Air Force has stated that it does not intend to purchase NGAD fighters as 1:1 replacements for the F-22, so the total number of fighters this program will deliver remains uncertain.

Related: America’s NGAD fighter might actually be nothing like you think

2) B-21 Raider: The US Air Force’s next stealth bomber will sneak past radars that can even spot stealth fighters

Despite its sleek, futuristic aesthetic, Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber has now been in service for more than a quarter-century. Now, as China and Russia continue developing their own B-2 competitors, the firm is looking to expand America’s lead in this field with the B-21 Raider that is currently in development.

The B-21 will draw heavily from the B-2’s successful flying-wing design that Northrop has long specialized in, yet will be a fair bit smaller, carrying an anticipated 30,000-pound payload into the fight, rather than the B-2’s impressive 60,000. Despite the shrinkage, the B-21 will still be rated to carry just about every nuclear and conventional munition we’ve come to expect out of America’s bomber fleets, while leveraging stealth technology said to be at least “two generations ahead” of the famously sneaky B-2.

Unlike stealth fighters, which are detectable (though not targettable) using low-frequency radar bands, the flying-wing design leveraged by both the B-2 and B-21 is said to be extremely stealthy against all radar frequencies. This makes these long-range bombers perfectly suited for strike operations in a heavily contested airspace in the initial days of conflict. If a war were to break out with China, for instance, it would almost certainly begin with U.S. stealth bomber fleets engaging anti-ship defenses on Chinese shores to allow aircraft carriers to close in.

Today, there are at least six B-21 Raider airframes in some stage of production, and unlike most clean-sheet builds for new warplanes in U.S. history, the Raider is expected to conduct its first test flights with all its mission systems already installed and operational. If all goes well, that will dramatically reduce the time between first flight and initial operating capability. The U.S. Air Force capped the per-unit price for its new stealth bomber at $550 million per airframe in 2010, which when adjusted for inflation, puts the Raider’s anticipated cost at around $729.25 million each. That figure might make your eye twitch, but the U.S. is said to have spent as much as $2 billion each on its original stealth bomber when rolling R&D costs into procurement.

Related: How the B-21 Raider could shift power in the Pacific 

3) F/A-XX: The US Navy’s new stealth fighter will share systems with NGAD while delivering a huge jump in range

After decades of trying to force every fighter the U.S. has ever developed into carrier duty culminating in the acquisition nightmare that has been the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the U.S. Navy’s next stealth fighter is being developed specifically to thrive on America’s flattops.

Being developed under the name F/A-XX, the “F/A” prefix indicates that this new aircraft will be expected to not only deliver multi-role capabilities like all modern fighters but will also be expected to excel at both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat operations. The U.S. Navy and Air Force have both indicated that the stealth fighter to emerge from the F/A-XX effort will share some common systems with the NGAD program, which will allow this new fighter to be fielded more rapidly. That will also mean the Navy’s next jet will benefit from the same modular software and hardware architecture intended to allow for frequent low-cost updates to these aircraft as technology matures around them.

Aside from the requisite boost in stealth and data fusion capabilities the U.S. prioritizes in new fighter programs, the Navy’s F/A-XX will also need to deliver a huge increase in fuel range over the Super Hornets and F-35Cs currently operating at sea. China’s area-denial bubble, or the area of the Pacific that falls within reach of China’s advanced hypersonic anti-ship missiles like the DF-ZF, now extends more than 1,000 miles from Chinese shores, while Navy jets like the F/A-18E and F-35C have a combat radius of only around 650 miles. That means American carriers cannot sail close enough to China to fly combat sorties without placing the carriers themselves at risk of being sunk.

The F/A-XX is expected to address this capability gap by leveraging both larger fuel stores and the aforementioned more-efficient adaptive cycle engines likely destined for the NGAD, while also benefitting from mid-air refueling provided by carrier-based MQ-29 drones. The Navy has not yet released cost estimates for this fighter, but it will likely ring in at a comparable price to the NGAD.

Related: Carrier Woes: The Navy’s fighters can’t reach China

4) Wingman Bomber: The US Air Force’s B-21 Raider will fly with an extremely advanced drone stealth bomber

During a keynote speech delivered at the Air Force Association’s 2022 Warfare Symposium earlier this year, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall revealed that the United States is exploring the idea of an uncrewed stealth bomber platform that could fly missions ahead of the optionally-crewed B-21 Raider to expand upon America’s deep penetration strike capabilities in hotly contested airspace. This new bomber platform would be expected to have a “comparable range” to that of the new globe-spanning bomber, with payload capabilities to be determined in large part by price point… which is currently estimated to land somewhere near the incredible figure of $300 million or more per drone.

An unclassified Request for Information the Air Force has released to industry partners calls for this new drone stealth bomber to have at least a 4,000-pound payload capacity and a combat radius of 1,500 miles. Yet, as Aviation Week’s Steve Trimble has pointed out, it seems likely this aircraft will need to be able to match the B-21’s range in order to serve its purpose as a means of support on long-duration missions.

A substantially cheaper drone stealth bomber that can fly ahead of the B-21 Raider could offer a huge strategic value. Raider crews could use these uncrewed bombers to target anti-ship weapons that are too well defended to risk engaging crewed aircraft, or they could engage air defense systems to allow for a safer route to the objective. Of course, at half the cost of a B-21, we’re still talking about a drone stealth bomber that costs as much as three or more F-35s. Nevertheless, the F-35 very likely couldn’t reach these targets, to begin with, whereas these new drone stealth bombers will be able to.

With the B-21 expected to replace both the B-2 Spirit and the B-1B Lancer, it makes sense for the U.S. to consider fielding less-expensive drone stealth bombers as a supplement to its next-generation bomber fleets. This program is still in the early stages of development, with Air Force officials currently assessing which of the B-21’s systems should be migrated to the stealth drone and which can’t be due to cost limitations.

5) Mayhem: The highly secretive US Air Force effort to field a hypersonic stealth drone could finally bring the SR-72 to fruition

Hidden within the long list of hypersonic weapon programs drawing funds from Pentagon coffers, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Mayhem Program appears to be developing a dual-cycle scramjet propulsion system for more than just missiles. The effort was originally tasked with fielding larger scramjet systems capable of propelling larger payloads further distances than unspecific “existing systems.”

Although Mayhem is regularly referred to as a missile program, a closer look at the branch’s issued Requests for Information (ROIs) suggests Mayhem is more likely aimed at fielding an uncrewed, reusable hypersonic drone platform capable of conducting two different specified mission sets: strike operations and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, missions.

As Joseph Trevithick over at The War Zone noted late last year, Mayhem’s formal name recently changed from “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-Mission Air-Breathing Demonstrator” to “Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR and Strike,” and the effort has also been referenced as a “Multi-Mission Cruiser.” This strongly suggests that we’re not talking about a missile you fire at a target and forget about. The removal of the word “expendable” in conjunction with the “multi-mission” moniker both suggest Mayhem aims to field a reusable, autonomous platform that leverages what will likely be the world’s first dual-mode or turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) hypersonic propulsion systems.

In other words, Mayhem aims to field a turbine-based scramjet system that can function at all airspeeds from subsonic to supersonic and then hypersonic. Today’s ramjet and scramjet systems don’t function reliably until they’re moving at extremely high speeds, which are currently achieved using rockets that fire before the propulsion systems come online.

This concept is tantalizingly similar to the longstanding discussion about Lockheed Martin’s planned successor to the Mach 3.5-capable SR-71 Blackbird, known as the SR-72. All the way back in 2018, Lockheed Vice President Jack O’Banion seemed to indicate that an SR-72 demonstrator may have already flown, and he stated clearly that a full-sized propulsion system had already been built and tested. “The aircraft is also agile at hypersonic speeds,” O’Banion told a crowd at the 2018 SciTech Forum, “with reliable engine starts.”

A hypersonic strike and ISR platform would have far-reaching strategic ramifications: from the ability to deliver less-expensive non-hypersonic ordnance to targets at speeds above Mach 5 to rapid intelligence gathering even in places where satellite coverage is compromised. While the world worries about who is fielding new hypersonic missiles, it seems the Air Force is secretly planning to win the hypersonic aircraft race before the rest of the world even knows it’s begun.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in August 2022.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Mike Mareen / Shutterstock.com

The U.S. Treasury Department recently sanctioned a multi-jurisdiction procurement ring supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran’s drone and military programs. Concurrent with Iran’s continued proliferation of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, both the Biden administration and Congress have sought to stem the flow of American components found in downed Iranian unmanned aerial systems.

Yet while preventing transfers of such Western equipment to Iran is both necessary and understandable, Asia has long served as a critical hub for military and missile technology to the Islamic Republic. An increase in the pace and scope of penalties targeting Tehran’s networks and fronts in Asia will be essential to disrupting Iran’s drone program.

The latest U.S. penalties center around an Iranian electronics firm known by an English transliteration of its acronym, PASNA. First sanctioned in 2018 for seeking technology with military applications from China and for reportedly providing material support to the sanctioned Iran’s Electronics Components Industries—a subsidiary of the sanctioned Iran Electronics Industries, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Iran’s sanctioned Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL)—PASNA continued its activities after exposure in 2018 through fronts, aliases, and affiliates, both in Iran and Malaysia.

Beyond exposing these fronts, the Treasury Department also sanctioned the managing director of PASNA, Mehdi Khoshghadam, as well as four suppliers of electronic goods and microelectromechanical systems to PASNA operating in both Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. These penalties build on recent efforts by the Treasury Department to disrupt other Iranian drone technology procurement rings in Asia. Last month, the department targeted five firms operating in China and Hong Kong that sold aerospace components and light-aircraft engines to Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries, which is a subsidiary of the Iran Aviation Industries Organization, itself another MODAFL subsidiary.

Iran’s ability to erect, sustain, and even recreate front companies across jurisdictions despite Washington’s increased willingness to crack down on drone procurement, production, and proliferation networks should come as a surprise to no one. Oil shippers and shadowy fronts across Asia have long helped the Islamic Republic generate illicit revenues through the sale or storage of crude oil and petrochemicals, including at the height of U.S. sanctions.

For Tehran, which has a robust domestic defense industrial base, continued illicit procurement of drone components is a sign of the growing importance these low-flying unmanned aerial systems play in bolstering the revolutionary regime’s status and security.

Iran’s transfer of drones to Russia marked a historic first in Tehran’s relationship with Moscow, and one that the Islamic Republic is reportedly already cashing in on. Over the past three decades, it was Iran who served as a junior partner to Russia, purchasing Russian weapons like surface-to-air missile systems, fighter jets, and even diesel-electric submarines. Now it is Iranian weapons that are helping preserve Russian long-range strike platforms like cruise and ballistic missiles and helping sustain Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Regionally, variants of Iranian drones have become a regular feature of low-intensity conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen where they bolster the capabilities of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” and strike U.S. persons, interests, and partners. On the home front, while drones were once seen as the purview of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, these weapons are being increasingly diffused through Iran’s Armed Forces and branches of Iran’s Artesh, or national military.

Additionally, over the past few years, Iran has taken to directly launching drones from its own territory, striking at adversaries while operating beneath their threshold for the overt use of force. Of particular importance here have been loitering munitions or suicide drones. Such weapons have been launched by Iran in a combined arms operation with land-attack cruise missiles against Saudi Arabian oil facilities in 2019, as well as against moving targets like an Israeli-owned oil tanker in 2021.

All of this is to suggest that sporadic or graduated sanctions against Iranian procurement or proliferation networks will not handicap Iran’s drone program overnight nor will it deter future drone use by Iran. For example, there is no reason why Washington waited half a decade to sanction the head of an entity that was already subject to sanctions and still engaging in sanctionable activity, as was the case with PASNA and its managing director.

Conversely, sustained pressure against managers, boards, companies, and networks alike—especially when levied in large tranches rather than meted out over time—does stand a chance at both exposing and impeding the supply chains that feed Iran’s drone program. This is especially the case when focused on jurisdictions across Asia where illicit Iranian activity continues. Washington must therefore allocate more time, resources, and political capital to keep pace with this threat.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow focusing on Iranian political and security issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to its Iran Program, Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP), and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP).

Image: Shutterstock.

When discussing the various inconvenient friendships of convenience in which the United States is entangled, Pakistan is a country that comes to mind almost immediately. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, the South Asian nation has had a difficult time maintaining pace with other economic juggernauts in the neighborhood—namely, China and India. Though Pakistan’s stagnating agrarian-based economy deserves its fair share of the blame for the country’s current state, the directionless and at times counterintuitive national-defense policies adopted by the ruling elite have also played their part in this downward spiral.

In its seventy-five years of existence, Pakistan has fought four wars with its archrival India, gone through a civil war that saw the liberation of its eastern wing (now known as Bangladesh), and has been facing waves of terrorism for the past two decades. As a result of such constant geopolitical turmoil, the country’s democratic institutions have continued to erode over time, paving the way for military dictators to rule the country for over half of its lifespan. Even in times when elected civilian governments have existed, the all-powerful military establishment has continued to exert its dominance over defense and foreign policy.

And to the detriment of both Pakistani and American long-term interests, the military establishment has consistently maintained its policies of appeasing and sponsoring terrorist groups. Outfits like al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, have been known to have institutional support from the Pakistani military through its premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Among the multitude of reasons why the Pakistani military establishment has chosen this calamitous approach is an eternal quest for “strategic depth.” Pakistan is sandwiched between India in the east and Afghanistan and Iran in the west. Given the intense and bloodied rivalry with India, a country four times as big in land mass and almost seven times as big in population, the Pakistani military establishment determined that the best approach would be to install a puppet government in Afghanistan.

In the view of the country’s top military brass, this would give Pakistan the strategic depth the nation needed to offset India’s growing military and geopolitical stature. To achieve this decade-long goal, the military establishment, through the ISI, has been arming, training, and logistically supporting certain terrorist groups deemed to be both capable of establishing their rule in Afghanistan and loyal to Pakistani interests.

For the United States, Pakistan’s cozy relationship with armed militant groups was a trump card in the Cold War, when these very groups were used to take down the mighty Soviet military as it invaded Afghanistan starting in 1979. Washington provided extensive financial support to the Mujahideen through a CIA-run covert program, Operation Cyclone. Using these funds, ISI operatives ran training camps for thousands of Mujahideen fighters. The effort paid off when the Soviets fully withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. The Soviet Union could never recover from this geostrategic low and ended up being dissolved in 1991.

Fast forward a few more years and the extremists, ever loyal to their ISI handlers, won control of Afghanistan, giving Pakistan the much-coveted comfort of ‘strategic depth’, and giving the United States a victory in the Cold War. Win-win situation, right? The thousands of Americans and the millions of Afghanis affected by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath would say otherwise. You see, Operation Cyclone was all about creating a lethal guerrilla force, capable of defeating the mighty Soviets. This task was accomplished successfully, but as we learned in the era of former President George W. Bush, “Mission Accomplished” can often mean something different than its literal meaning.

Eventually, the monster that the U.S.-Pakistani partnership of convenience created would come back to haunt both countries. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington pressed the Pakistani military establishment to completely dissociate itself from any and all radical Islamist terror groups, an ultimatum that some Pakistani policymakers found hard to swallow. In subsequent years, Pakistan continued to covertly nurture these terrorist groups, using them against India and the Western-backed government in Afghanistan.

As Pakistan continued to adhere to its strategy of double-facedness, the United States kept bestowing its former ally with political and financial accolades. Pakistan was even given arguably the most prestigious friendship bracelet that America issue—being designated a major non-NATO ally (MNNA). Currently, only nineteen countries have been declared MNNAs, with the most controversial and questionable being Pakistan. Additionally, in the last two decades, Pakistan was provided with billions of dollars of American taxpayer money in military aid to earn its support in the post-9/11 War in Afghanistan.

Yet the policy of backstabbing continued. In fact, when asked about who is most responsible for the 2021 Fall of Kabul into Taliban hands, any seasoned and impartial member of the United States Intelligence Community will point toward Pakistan and the ISI in a heartbeat. In the last few years, American leaders and policymakers have become increasingly wary of Pakistan’s deceitful practices. This has pushed Pakistan more towards China’s sphere of influence, with the latter signing on to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015, a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project seen as the centerpiece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The United States has two options in its partnership with Pakistan. The first option is to conduct exhaustive lobbying efforts through international organizations to woo Pakistan’s military leadership. Specifically, the United States can use its influence over the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to secure bailout packages for Pakistan’s cash-strapped economy. In exchange, Pakistan can be made to grant certain assurances that it will use its intelligence capabilities to monitor potential threats to the United States and its allies from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The alternative is to accept Pakistan’s status as China’s “all-weather friend” and focus on boosting ties with a country that sees both Pakistan and China as adversaries: India. Obviously, this approach would mean abandoning a geopolitically important country and leaving it in the hands of an increasingly powerful rival. If you accept domino theory, this may not seem like the finest strategy, but it sure is an option. Now, it is up to the decisionmakers in Washington to make the call as soon as possible. As onlookers, we can only hope that they make the right one.

Zoraiz Zafar is a student at Colorado College.

This essay was a runner-up in the 2023 John Quincy Adams Society Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest.

Image: Shutterstock.

In a speech shortly after he took power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev declared “It’s obvious, comrades, that we all need to change. All of us.” The line foreshadowed perestroika—Gorbachev’s effort to reform the USSR’s deteriorating political and economic system. It was, as he later described to the United Nations, an endeavor by which the USSR was “restructuring itself in accordance with new tasks and fundamental changes in society as a whole.” Yet, despite Gorbachev’s optimism, perestroika failed; the Soviet system simply did not have the capacity to pull off such massive change without collapsing.

With this in mind, it is worth noting the significance of U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s recent speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. His remarks mark a profound shift in American strategic and economic thinking; a confession that much of what the United States has been doing and saying for decades has been wrong, and a recognition that painful and urgent reform is necessary.

As Gorbachev learned, recognizing the need for change and successfully enacting such change are two wildly different things. Is the Biden administration on the path to learning the same painful lesson?

The Failure of the “Old” Washington Consensus

Sullivan’s speech does not just reflect his individual views—the whole event was billed in the days leading up to it as an “outline” of “the Biden administration’s international economic doctrine.” It also builds upon views that Sullivan and others in the administration have been developing for quite a while.

In brief, the speech was a strong repudiation of the United States’ strong free-market economic policies for the past forty-odd years. Sullivan challenged the idea that markets always allocate capital effectively and in socially optimal ways, that “in the name of oversimplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods—along with the industries and jobs that made them—moved overseas. And the postulate that deep trade liberalization would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He also acknowledged the mistake of favoring the financial sector over the “real economy” (involving material goods): “our industrial capacity—which is crucial to any country’s ability to continue to innovate—took a real hit.”

Sullivan noted that much of international economic policy, predicated on the notion that economic integration could result in countries adopting essentially Western political values, turned out to be dead wrong. “Economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions in the region, or stop Russia from invading its democratic neighbors,” he admitted. The China shock in particular was not adequately anticipated or addressed.

On top of these issues, Sullivan went on, are two new challenges: the climate crisis and economic inequality, the latter of which is partially a consequence of previous economic thinking. These two issues have fundamentally changed the economic landscape and require a new approach to economics. Trickle-down economics, labor union squashing, tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate concentration—all the product of strong free-market thinking—have made things worse. The combined result of all of these factors have endangered democratic stability in both America and other countries. As such, Sullivan argues, there is a need for a new approach to economics that takes into account these new realities, including a return of industrial policy.

All of this sounds awfully familiar to Donald Trump’s denunciations over the “rape” of America and calls to “make things” again, but with much more moderated language. In fact, the more intellectual cohort of the so-called New Right has been advocating for such changes over the past few years, from the hitherto heterodox economic think tank American Compass to the industrial policy-focused journal American Affairs. I myself have argued along these lines, noting America’s long and storied history of utilizing industrial policy to pursue national development.

That the Biden administration—and thus, implicitly, Washington policy officialdom—is now reading from the same music sheet is a welcome development. President Joe Biden’s agenda, per Sullivan, is centered around the capacity to build, produce, and innovate. The first step towards such is investing at home through a modern American industrial strategy. Sullivan argues, though some would contest this, that although industrial policy as a word went away, the practice did not. He cites the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as an example.

Overall, Sullivan’s speech highlights a growing recognition that a new approach to economics is needed, especially in light of changing domestic and international economic conditions and realities.

The Coming Failure of the “New” Washington Consensus

Sullivan’s remarks are certainly welcome, but admitting that there is a problem is merely the first step to addressing it. The Biden administration faces three major obstacles that will frustrate, if not completely demolish, its efforts at reform.

First, the popular name for this new economic policy—the “New Washington Consensus,” a clear reference to the old, free-market-oriented Washington Consensus—suggests a failure to fully let go of the current paradigm. It is a symptom of a broader problem in Western policy circles, which is an inability to articulate and justify a forward-looking vision for society without leaning on past glories—see no further than the recurrent attempts to cast economic development programs as “a Marshall Plan for [insert country/region here],” the “Green New Deal,” the “Longer Telegram” for addressing the challenge posed by China, and so on. One gets the feeling that Western policymaking is intellectually exhausted and out of ideas. At the very least, there is a failure of imagination at play here, which is concerning when broad and serious reform is at stake.

Second, the speech is dishonest about what the Biden administration—and U.S. policymakers more broadly—says its intentions are for its relationship vis-à-vis China. Sullivan stressed the United States is “competing with China on multiple dimensions, but we are not looking for confrontation or conflict. We’re looking to manage competition responsibly and seeking to work together with China where we can.” Sullivan’s position—and, implicitly, the administration’s—is, as Todd N. Tucker summarized, “We are not trying to constrain China's growth. Their development and that of others is good for the world and stability.”

This rings hollow. Since the current administration took office, it has implemented significant export controls on semiconductors and blacklisted numerous Chinese companies via the Department of Commerce, whose secretary, Gina Raimondo, has stated that the United States must work with European states to “slow down China’s rate of innovation.”

An observer might point out that the intention here is to pursue “a healthy economic competition,” per Sullivan’s description, in contrast to China’s current approach of liberally pilfering U.S. intellectual property and systemically breaking and abusing the current trade system. That is true. But putting aside that industrial espionage and intellectual theft are, realistically, the rules of the game in geoeconomic competition—something the United States is intimately familiar with—Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze made a key observation a few days ago while analyzing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s own speech on competing with China. Tooze, summarizing Yellen’s nominal stated position (and, implicitly, the Biden administration’s position), noted that “a strong and self-confident America has no reason to stand in the way of China’s economic and technological modernization except in every area that America’s national security establishment, the most gigantic in the world, defines as being of essential national interest. For this to be anything other than hypocrisy, you have to imagine that we live in a goldilocks world in which the technology, industrial capacity, and trade that are relevant to national security are incidental to economic and technological modernization more broadly speaking.”

Washington, it seems, wants to have it both ways: it recognizes it must engage in the painful (but necessary!) reform, which would realistically require a limited drawdown of the American-led unipolar world order, while also somehow maintaining that order, refusing to give an inch to the prospect of multipolarity. The feasibility of this is an open question.

Third, and most importantly, while Sullivan’s speech recognizes the urgent need to address America’s multiple economic problems and challenges, it is yet unclear whether such change can be realistically achieved at this point in the country’s current political and socio-economic context. Having written ardently in favor of this sort of change, I am now skeptical given the broader structural economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and Washington’s reactions to these events. Our position is simply far weaker than it used to be, and domestic political unity has eroded over the past three years.

As Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune has noted, “the single most dangerous period for a political system is when it has ignored a looming crisis for years and decades, and then finally, backs snugly perched against a wall that cannot be moved, tries to apply wide-reaching reforms.” It is here that political revolutions are most liable to occur; consider the French Revolution, the fall of the Qing dynasty, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the current cause célèbre of defenders of the American-led order, the war in Ukraine, has its origins in a similar situation; the Maidan Revolution occurred in large part because the politically bankrupt Yanukovych regime tried and failed to save the country’s economy, described in 2014 by the Washington Post as “a legacy of 23 years of incompetent economic management.”

It's good that policymakers are finally admitting our problems are real. But, as Gorbachev could attest, fixing these problems requires buy-in from multiple levels of society, which may not be so disposed toward change.

Consider Wall Street. Can U.S. banks, the originators of credit and the economy’s most essential actors, truly accept that the Trente Glorieuses of American finance have ended? The current low-interest rate environment has already led these institutions to increase spending on lobbying in DC by 20 percent. Will venture capitalists, private equity firms, and investors—those who have gotten fantastically wealthy in the pro-speculation environment of the past few decades—welcome a world where options are limited? A world where investing in tech app companies that deliver 5-10x returns in two years is no longer an option, and instead money must be directed towards long-term (ten to twenty years), low-return (relative to tech), risk-loaded projects like factories, refineries, and the like? Common sense says such change would be fought every step of the way.

What about the military-industrial sector? Will the major prime contractors, who have gotten rich off of the current financial paradigm while failing to deliver productivity, be open to painful adjustments? Will the U.S. Army be receptive to arguments that their budget must be cut to empower the Navy? Will various congressmen really vote in favor of closing down unnecessary bases, factories, and other job-producing facilities in their own home districts? Will hundreds of former senior-level military officials, including influential and media-savvy types, embrace a fiscally necessary end to their lucrative consulting gigs?

Perhaps most concerningly, what of nonprofits and the broader media space? Much of the sector’s recent growth was due to surplus capital and a low-interest rate environment—billionaires being able to fund NGOs and media empires because there was plenty of money. Think Jeff Bezos’ famous acquisition of the Washington Post, private equity companies’ buying of newspapers, or even cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s $200 million“strategic investment” in Forbes. Now that the (low-interest rate) party is over, the preference for the service sector is ending, and economic adjustments must be made, much of the money that allowed these socially important but economically “unproductive” enterprises will vanish. In the past week alone, Buzzfeed News shut down, Vice Media closed its flagship program and is looking to sell itself, Insider cut 10 percent of its staff, and Disney will be laying off 7,000 employees in its news division—including Nate Silver, the founder of the opinion poll analytics website FiveThirtyEight (a favorite of the Washington DC class). Will this throng of employees, and others like them, who are typically college-educated and politically savvy, not fight back like mad to prevent “change” that is taking their jobs, even if said jobs are fiscally unsustainable in a new economic environment? This notion alone should cause Democrats and many Republicans to take pause and worry.

Has Time Run Out?

At this point in time, implementing a U.S. industrial strategy will not be easy, if at all feasible. While still wealthy and powerful, the United States faces internal political division, multiple external challengers, and, perhaps most worryingly, strongly entrenched internal interests that would take a firm line against any sort of radical but needed change in the country’s national and international economic doctrine. Without a clear plan of attack, the Biden administration’s agenda—to say nothing of any potential successor administration's efforts after the 2024 election—could well founder.

Policymakers and experts must address this reality and come to grips with its implications. Otherwise, the country risks waking up one day, like the French monarchy, to tiles being thrown from the roofs by enraged citizens—an eerie prelude of what could follow.

Carlos Roa is the Executive Editor of The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

Despite high expectations following the Velvet Revolution of 2018 that overthrew the regime of ex-President Serzh Sargsyan, the democratic landscape of Armenia has remained bleak in recent years. The current government of the country is steadily backsliding towards non-democratic governance, and perhaps even authoritarianism.

Of special concern has been the persecution of political activists and journalists, as reflected in the annual reports of a number of NGOs specialized in evaluating the functioning of democratic institutions. Reports about Armenia’s democratic environment also include human rights violations, the persecution of political activists and members of LGBTQ+ community, as well as instances of domestic violence.

For instance, Freedom House, in its most recent annual report, downgraded its assessment of political rights and civil liberties in Armenia. The report revealed that large-scale measures were being taken against political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists by the country’s authorities.

Moreover, in its report last May, Google’s Threat Analysis Group revealed the unlawful use by “government-backed actors” of spyware called Predator, created by the North Macedonian company Cytrox. The software had been used to target journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists in the country, with local media outlets reporting that the electronic devices of several Armenian opposition politicians have been hacked. Yet Predator is not the only spyware being used; an Armenian opposition leader Artur Vanetsyan once claimed that the Pegasus spyware had been installed on his phones in 2021. Despite the claim and the following scandal, the use of Pegasus against Armenian journalists and opposition figures has apparently not been discontinued. According to a study conducted by social media specialists in Armenia in November 2022, Pegasus may still monitor the key opposition and media personalities.

Political Arrests

The worrying developments do not stop with such spying. It is apparent that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has also begun persecuting members of the previous government he overthrew. For instance, two former defense ministers have been arrested on what have been described as politically-motivated charges. Former Defence Minister Seyran Ohanyan, who served from 2008 to 2016, was arrested in 2020 on charges of embezzling over $2 million in state funds. The same charge was also brought against another former defense minister, David Tonoyan, who was detained in 2021.

The ex-minister Tonoyan, two other generals, and an arms dealer were arrested by the National Security Service (NSS) in September 2021 as part of a criminal investigation into the supplying of an allegedly outdated missile to Armenia’s armed forces. However, experts believe the arrest of Tonoyan had a political motivation—he was simply made a scapegoat for Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war with neighboring Azerbaijan in 2020. Having served as the defense minister between 2018 and 2020, Tonoyan resigned a week after his country’s capitulation in the war over Karabakh but obviously could not escape the persecution. It’s worth noting that Tonoyan, contrary to what one would assume, defended Pashinyan’s signing of the trilateral statement of November 2020 that ended the war. “Despite the fact that the Armenian Armed Forces, the entire system of the Ministry of Defense and the government did their best to be successful, calling the agreement reached to end the Karabakh war a ‘betrayal’ or ‘defeat’ is an insult,” he said in response to criticism voiced following Armenia’s signing of the deal.

The political persecution does not stop there; members of the country’s political opposition have been targeted, namely Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) party members. Artavazd Margaryan, head of Dashnaktsutyun faction in the Council of Elders (the municipality council) of Artashat, was detained for seventy-two hours along with the party’s activist Gerasim Vardanyan in January this year. The arrest was mocked by Margaryan’s lawyer, who posted on social media: “The detention is obviously illegal; it is devoid of any logic. You won’t believe it, but Margaryan had such charges only because he has a phone.”

Some arrests may end up in a tragedy, as was in the case of Armen Grigorian. A notable opposition personality, Grigorian fainted in court and later passed away in the summer 2022. He was put in pre-trial custody for two months, despite committing no crimes and despite lawyer and family concerns about his health. As each day went by, his immune system got worse.

Rapid Political Change

What is perhaps most surprising is how fast Armenia’s trajectory from budding democracy towards increasing illiberalism occurred. After the ruling government won the snap elections in the summer of 2021, things began to shift quickly. The government resumed its interrupted task of finding “the enemies of the people”—a process evocative of Stalin-era purges—with increased speed after receiving what Prime Minister Pashinyan calls a “steel mandate” from his people following the 2020 war. The representatives of the Armenian diaspora communities living in various countries around the world were one of the initial targets in this fight. For instance, the authorities in Yerevan refused to let Mourad Papazian, the chairman of an Armenian diaspora organization in France, enter the country in July 2022. Papazian, who has never committed a crime, was solely prohibited from entering Armenia due to his alleged involvement in anti-Pashinyan protests in Paris in 2021.

Pashinyan’s blacklist does not stop with Papazian. At Zvartnots airport on August 1, Armenian security personnel approached two Dutch-Armenians, Massis Abrahamian and Suneh Abrahamian, and informed them that they had been designated persona non grata in Armenia. Similar to Papazian, these two diaspora activists were prohibited from entering the country because they spoke out against Armenia’s current government.

Also notable is how quickly religious freedoms have also been declining in the country. In 2020, the NSS launched an investigation into Sashik Sultanyan, the chairperson of the Yezidi Center for Human Rights, after the latter publicly stated that Armenia’s Yazidi community was facing discrimination. Despite the criticism by international human rights NGOs, Sultanyan’s trial was in progress as of late 2022. If convicted, the activist will face six years in prison on the charge of being a part of an “anti-state” conspiracy.

Likewise worth mentioning is the deteriorating condition of media freedom as well. According to the Resource Center on Media Freedom in Europe, media freedom remains restricted in Armenia, “among threats of violence, strong political inferences, and expensive defamation lawsuits.” An Armenian-based NGO, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, has recorded fifteen cases of journalists experiencing physical violence between January and September 2022. Moreover, most print and broadcast outlets are affiliated with political or larger commercial interests.

Despite earlier promises during and after the 2018 Velvet Revolution that brought Nikol Pashinyan and his team to power, and even the 2021 snap elections during which the war-torn society gave another chance to the incumbent government after the devastating defeat in the conflict against Azerbaijan, the political climate in Armenia has been changing, unfortunately in the negative direction. As one Armenian expert expresses, the country`s leader “has turned hatred into a principle of governance and lies into a form of governing.”

Aleksandar Srbinovski is a journalist with over fifteen years of experience working in print and online media. He has worked for Nova Makedonija, Newsweek, Europa, Blic, Politika, ABC News, Vecher, TV Sitel, and Skok. He holds a BA in journalism from the Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje and has pursued continued training with the University of Oklahoma.

Image: Shutterstock.

This week Israel is celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its independence. On any travel website, a fair assessment of Israel’s achievements during its first seven and a half decades would earn it a rank between “outstanding” and “exceptional.” Indeed, if asked, I would give it a rank that does not exist on travel websites: a miracle. And yet, during the past four months, this miracle has experienced nothing short of a Perfect Storm.

What are the components of the miracle and what are the makings of this Perfect Storm?

The Miracle of Israel…

First and foremost, Israel is an economic miracle. By 2021 its GDP has already reached $488 billion—a 1,860 percent increase since 1980. The economies of France and Germany grew during the same forty-one years by 246 percent and by 361 percent, respectively. By 2021, Israel’s per capita GDP already reached $52,15—a 720 percent increase since 1980—and is now higher than that of both Germany and France.

Another dimension of the economic miracle is the appreciation Israel received as the “Start-up Nation.” In 2021, Israelis registered almost twice as many patents per one million people than France: 1,851 versus 1,011. Israeli companies also have an impressive presence in the U.S. stock exchanges: currently, some 107 Israeli companies with a market value of $165 billion are listed in the U.S. market.

Yet the Start-up Nation could not have come about without an infrastructure of research and education in science and technology, creating a society immersed in a culture of technology. Israel’s success in these realms accounts for the very high grade it received in the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which includes factors like university degrees per capita. In 2021, Israel was ranked 22nd in this index, with a score of 0.919. By contrast, France was given an HDI score of 0.903 that year, placing it at 28th, six notches below Israel.

Within this context, one of Israel’s most successful sectors is its highly advanced military-industrial complex. The latest on this front is a multi-billion deal to sell advanced anti-missile Arrow 3 systems to Germany and a deal being finalized to export the David Sling system to Finland. Currently, the largest customer of Israeli arms, importing multi-billion dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition, is India.

Adding to these economic miracles is that, in recent years, Israel has been the finding of huge natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. These reserves will allow the country to become for the first time energy independent and provides the context for an important dimension of Israel’s integration in the region: its membership in the new Eastern Mediterranean Energy Cooperation group that includes Egypt, Jordan, Greece, Cyprus, and the Palestinian Authority.

The recent widening of the network of Arab states that have signed and begun implementing peace and normalization agreements with Israel is yet another dimension of Israel’s success. By this writing, Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan have survived many challenges over forty-four years and twenty-nine years, respectively. Then, in 2002, the same Arab League that in 1948 decided to prevent Israel’s creation by invading Palestine, and that expelled Egypt because of President Anwar Sadat’s peace offensive, now adopted the Arab Peace Initiative (API) that offered Israel to be integrated into the region under some conditions.

And in October 2020, four additional Arab countries dropped the conditions stipulated in the API and signed peace and normalization agreements with Israel, commonly known as the Abraham Accords: Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan.

Moreover, in October 2022, a U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon agreement on their economic boundaries was signed, allowing the reciprocal exploitation of natural gas fields in the Eastern Med. Most remarkable: the agreement was clearly green-lighted by Hezbollah, a movement that continues to be formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and is heavily supported and armed by Iran.

An equally miraculous component of the new regional environment were the new forms of defense cooperation agreements reached between Israel and its neighbors: with Jordan, in the fight with ISIS, especially in southern Syria; with Egypt, in the fight against ISIS-related and Al-Qaida-related terrorists in the Sinai; and with Abu Dhabi, in the installation of a state-of-the-art anti-rocket and anti-cruise missile systems. Similarly, relations between the Israeli and the Bahraini armed forces and between the Israeli and Moroccan armed forces have become increasingly intimate.

Not less miraculous has been the rapid development of Israel’s now exploding cultural scene. The wave of Russian Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1990s added at least three more symphony orchestras to the Jewish state, and in the last two decades, the country experienced an explosion in the Israeli film and video world. Culture, as an important dimension of the quality of life, may also affect life expectancy. By 2021, Israel’s has reached 83.3 years, compared to 76.4 years in the United States.

The final dimension of the miracle is that, at least until this writing, Israel continues to be a thriving democracy. Indeed, this is possibly the biggest miracle of all, since none of Israel’s founding fathers, with the sole exception of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, came from any country that had previously experienced democratic government.

…Challenged by the Perfect Storm

Yet now, this truly amazing miracle finds itself at the epicenter of a Perfect Storm. For some 16 weeks, Israel has been experiencing mass protests the likes of which it has never seen. On each of the past Saturday nights, a quarter of a million Israeli—the equivalent of 8.5 million Americans—have taken to the streets. These protestors include many members of the Israeli elite: physicians, lawyers, retired judges, and leaders of Israel’s financial community and of its industrial sector. Many among them are either the leaders or the soldiers of the Start-up Nation.

Many thousands among the Israelis protesting are also IDF reservists—veterans of its various arms and special forces as well as of the Mossad and Shabak. What brings so many of them to leave the comfort of their homes and head to the nearest town square? This time the challenge against which they are mobilized appears not to be threats to their country’s physical existence but rather to the organizing principles of its creation: the core of a Jewish-democratic state.

What comprises the six dimensions of the challenge, together making it a Perfect Storm?

The first and arguably the most important of these is the attempt of Israel’s new government to redistribute power between the country’s executive and legislative branches and its judiciary. How was this to be achieved? Largely in three ways.

First, by changing the process of appointing Israel’s judges primarily by changing the composition of the committee that nominates Israel’s supreme court judges, providing politicians a far greater day in this critically important process.

Second, by significantly weakening the Supreme Court’s power to veto a law passed by the Knesset in the event that it views such a law as contradicting one or more of Israel’s Basic Laws. How was this weakening to be achieved? By amending a basic law to include an “over-ride” clause that would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court vetoes of legislation that was adopted by the Knesset.

Third and finally is the suggested legislation to significantly limit the judges’ liberty to rule what government officials’ conduct could be regarded as “reasonable.” One recent example was whether the court could rule that an individual’s appointment as Minister in the government should be rejected as unreasonable in the event that this individual was twice indicted and convicted on corruption charges.

In addition to these three key components, the legal dimension of the Perfect Storm includes a tsunami of legislative proposals that would legalize corruption. One example is a bill that would allow elected officials to receive gifts from individuals or firms to fund their personal legal and medical expenses.

The second dimension of the Perfect Storm is an attempt to violate one of the basic principles stipulated as early as 1948 by Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion; namely, “the unity of command.” This principle stipulated that the state must possess a monopoly of force—that is, one civilian government that commands one army and one police force. So critically important was this principle to Ben Gurion and so truly was he convinced that the alternative was complete anarchy and chaos, that in the embryonic state’s very early days, when it had very few weapons with which to defend itself, he gave the order to sink the Altalena—a ship carrying arms and ammunition to “the Irgun” that, in his view, comprised a militia that still resisted merging into the defense forces of the newly created state.

Now, seventy-five years later, the new Israeli government coalition agreement gives two right-wing extremist leaders, the dual finance and defense minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, roles and responsibilities over powerful administrative bodies and law enforcement agencies—primarily the border patrol and the Coordinator of Government Operations in the [occupied] Territories. These bodies, which for decades have been under the sole command of the minister of defense and the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, were now to be placed under the partial control of these extremist leaders. The proposed change could prove catastrophic by allowing these individuals to inflame Palestinian-Israeli relations and by implementing policies that encourage violence.

The third, related dimension of the Perfect Storm is the recent further deterioration of Israeli-Palestinian relations, not only accelerating a likely slide to a Third Palestinian Intifada, but also threatening the sustainability of the aforementioned Abraham Accords. This slide is not entirely new—it has been brewing for some years, through the tenure of different Israeli governments. Moreover, the slide’s causes are located as much on the Palestinian side as on the Israeli side, with the diminishing credibility of the Palestinian Authority, its president, and its security services.

Yet the views of some members of the new Israeli government also undermine all efforts to protect and defend the occupied Palestinian population from the violence exercised by extremist Jewish settlers, as happened some six weeks ago in Huwara—an Arab town in the West Bank, where settlers went on a rampage in response to the murder there of two Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist.

The fourth dimension fueling the Perfect Storm could be called “burden sharing.” At its core is a new draft law that would exempt Haredi (ultra-orthodox) students from military service. This is a problem that has grown exponentially during the past decades. In 1992, a manageable 4 percent of eighteen-year-old males received such exemptions. By 2022, this number has reached 16.4 percent. One can only guess how many additional ultra-orthodox Jewish students will be exempted from military service if the proposed new draft law will be enacted. And who will be expected to continue serving in the IDF? Of course: the hundreds of thousands of largely secular Israelis who are now in the streets protesting.

The fifth dimension of the Perfect Storm is the threat to Israel’s most important alliance: that with the United States and with America’s Jewish community. From Israel’s early days, this alliance was based on the values that America and Israel share as two liberal democracies, two nations of immigrants, and, more recently, as two countries that are challenged by Islamic terrorism. Yet the proposed changes in Israel’s political system and other developments comprising the Perfect Storm threaten the “common values” basis of the very close ties between the United States and Israel. Clear warnings to that effect have already been issued by President Joe Biden; by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken; by Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Bob Menendez, and by many leaders of the American Jewish community. Additionally, to date, President Biden has put on hold any invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House.

The sixth and final dimension of the Perfect Storm is the ever-developing Iranian nuclear threat—a threat that recently reached another milestone with Iran apparently enriching uranium up to 84 percent. Indeed, in testimony given to the U.S. Congress by General Mark Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs, he assessed Iran as only two weeks away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb and only a few months away from producing nuclear weapons.

Yet this multi-dimensional Perfect Storm also produced some remarkably positive news: the Israeli liberal democratic center and center-left that went to sleep—if not into depression following the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the September 2000 launching of the Second Palestinian Intifada—has finally woken up. And it has woken up big time. It has finally realized that it cannot permit the committed, active, mobilized right wing to dominate the country and to set its agenda, and that they must now be called up for reserve service in the struggle over what kind of a state they want Israel to be. For Israel’s political Right, this is a classical case of “overreach”: in attempting to go too far and to achieve too much in the service of an agenda far too extreme, the Israeli Right awakened the country’s center and center-left, and the latter are showing no signs of going back to sleep.

Thus, the Perfect Storm seems to have opened a new chapter in Israel’s social history.

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel Chair of Israeli Politics and Society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. From 2005–2019 he was the Center’s founding director. During 2019–2022 Feldman served as president of Sapir Academic College in Israel, located less than two miles from the Gaza Strip.

The author would like to thank his colleague, Professor Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies, for his generous help in researching the economic data relevant to this article.

Image: Shutterstock.

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Denys Kryvenko is the first person I met just a few days before the April 2023 opening of the Superhumans Center in Lviv, Ukraine. Denys is a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian war hero from a small village who lost both legs and an arm fighting in Bakhmut. Before the war, he was, like many other twenty-four-year-olds, just playing sports, lifting weights, and chasing girls.

Then the war came. His thoughts turned to his country and to protecting his family. Now Denys is a triple amputee who is being photographed. Nick, the photographer, captured Denys’s aspirations for the future during a photo shoot with a pensive pose.

Denys wants to become a contact psychologist at the Superhumans Center, which is a special position. Military veterans typically don’t like to open up and talk. Since Denys is a veteran himself, it will be easier in group and individual sessions to encourage others to talk about their experience and the heavy fighting they have seen in the Donbas. Denys is motivated to give back and to help others who have been through the same wartime experiences. He will help them heal.

Two days later, on April 14, Superhumans launched its medical center outfitted with a prosthetics lab, elaborate rehabilitation rooms including a swimming pool, and PTSD treatment rooms in an afternoon ceremony that celebrated Denys and a dozen patients. At the ceremony, Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, Ukrainian minister of health Viktor Liashko, French minister of solidarity and health François Braun, Superhumans co-founder Andrey Stavnitser, CEO Olga Rudnieva, and American philanthropist Howard G. Buffett all spoke, but the focus remained on Denys and the other patients include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old.

“We are honored to be a part of this extraordinary effort to bring world-class care to Ukrainians who have suffered life-altering injuries from this war. They are truly superhumans,” said Buffett, Chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a war on civilians, and many men, women, and children will lose their lives, or their limbs, even long after the war ends due to the pervasive presence of landmines. This Center is a step towards giving Ukrainians a chance to rebuild their lives and their country. We must also do everything possible to end this war and the daily devastation it creates for all Ukrainians.”

Buffett is right. As a result of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world. Reports of civilians being injured or killed by mines have become an almost daily occurrence. Overall, the war has also taken a devastating toll on the civilian population. No one knows the exact figure because it remains classified, but more than 12,000 Ukrainians are believed to currently need prosthetics. This would be a challenge for the world’s wealthiest states. For Ukraine, it is simply beyond the country’s resources.

This is where Superhumans steps in. Through a $16.3 million gift from the Howard Buffett Foundation and others, the Center is taking on some of the more complex cases involving multiple limbs or complex injuries that the state cannot handle or afford. Superhumans provides all services to civilians and soldiers free of charge. The price tag for providing Denys with three prosthetic limbs plus rehabilitation is more than $100,000.

Then there’s the incalculable and ever-present physical and mental anguish. The World Health Organization warns that one in four Ukrainians are currently at risk of a severe mental disorder as a result of the war. Huge numbers of Ukrainians will require professional support for many years to come.

There is another hidden wound from this monstrous war, elusive yet common. Something so fundamental that Ukraine and the world cannot rebuild without it. Millions face a loss of faith in the future. It is vital to rebuild the human spirit by restoring belief in a meaningful life filled with skills and purpose.

“Superhumans is not just the name of a project. I think it is a new social contract encapsulated in a single word. It is a philosophy representing not only of a clinic but a entire country. Superheroes instead of victims. Superpowers instead of disabilities. We want to build not just a clinic, but a super-country for Ukrainians. Because all of them are superhumans,” said First Lady Olena Zelenska.

Zelenska’s words encapsulate the new Center’s vision of a Ukraine where limb difference is only part of a person’s story, but by no means the whole story. Denys doesn’t feel limited. Neither does the very first Superhumans patient, Vitalii Ivashchuk, who is already climbing the tallest mountain in Ukraine with his bionic arm and driving at fast speeds. “My hand is completely restored, and I’m only getting started,” Ivashchuk said.

Michele Anenberg Poma is a team member at the Superhumans Center. She tweets @MAnenbergPoma.

Image: Superhumans.

There are intense and often heated differences between Turkey watchers over the outcome of the presidential elections that are just around the corner on May 14. Individuals have really dug into their respective camps with little room left in the middle: folks are convinced that Recep Tayyip Erdogan will definitely win or lose by a large margin. Both sides cite relatively compelling narratives for their position based on a myriad of explanatory factors: their experience as journalists or scholars, or, based on references to polls, the country’s economic situation.

The truth is, at this point in the calendar, it’s a guessing game. For my part, I am on record predicting that Erdogan has a greater chance of holding onto power for a third five-year term than opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu has of winning. I have attempted to explain my rationale in other opinion pieces and interviews. At this point, however, it is worth pondering, should my prediction come to pass, who or what factors will account for Erdogan staying in office?

To begin, there is the most obvious element: Turkish voters themselves. In the event that Erdogan scores a legitimate victory, much of that could be attributed to voter demands. The majority of Turks going to the polls on May 14 will not prioritize the rule of law, democracy, and other governance issues as their top priority. If they did, we would not see Erdogan polling in the 40 percent margins. Instead, voters are primarily motivated by their desire to hedge: “in voting, who do I believe will take care of my economic interests?” To address this motivation, Erdogan has turned on the monetary taps in the last few weeks: bonuses for retirees, free natural gas to households, and increases to the minimum wage. Kilicdaroglu’s problem here is that he is not in a position to convince voters that he can deliver better on pocketbook issues than Erdogan—the latter is already in a position to demonstrate such and thus tempt voters. He controls the purse strings of state resources, which are already being utilized to buy citizens’ votes.

By contrast, French and Israeli citizens have recently taken to the streets, protesting about governance issues they feel threaten the very viability of their democratic futures. In France, largely over the non-deliberative way in which the age of retirement was raised, voters are demanding government accountability. In Israel, in defiance of the government’s attempt to curtail judicial independence, citizens have engaged in mass protests. In both cases, voters are motivated by democratic governance issues. If a significant number of Turks attempted to replicate these two examples, the Erdogan government would likely use brute force to suppress such challenges, as displayed during the Gezi Park protests of 2013.

Linked to voter demands is the main opposition, the “Nation Alliance”—the six opposition parties who took the decision to nominate Kemal Kilicdaroglu as their candidate. Unfortunately, one can observe that, from the outset, this opposition bloc never prioritized the rule of law and democratic governance issues beyond rhetoric. Instead, it has been focused on the division of political spoils. The process of deciding who the alliance’s presidential candidate would be, for example, turned into a dysfunctional squabble and nearly broke apart the alliance. Given that the alliance’s main campaign promise is to transition Turkey back to a parliamentary system of governance (that would deprioritize the powers and position of the presidency), one wonders why alliance leaders fought so hard on who the presidential candidate would be. If the objective was to defeat Erdogan and re-establish the rule of law and democratic governance in Turkey, numbers suggest that nominating Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu would have been the best choice. Kilicdaroglu’s insistence on being the nominee instead lays bare the limits of the opposition’s democratic priorities. The intense rivalry to become the presidential nominee has been mirrored in the debates over determining the list of parliamentary candidates. Until the April 12 deadline (when all parties have to submit their parliamentary candidate lists), intense horse-trading over which party in the alliance would allot how many safe seats was the focus of attention. This basically signaled to voters the one thing they are already relatively accustomed to: politicians and political parties are only interested in securing their positions in government.

Throw into the mixture that there are two independent candidates, which divides the opposition vote, and the chances of defeating Erdogan in the first round of voting. More importantly, however, the candidacies of Muharrem Ince—who dismally ran against Erdogan in 2018 and failed—and Sinan Ogan are widely perceived as opportunistic, spurred on by Erdogan to tarnish and divide the opposition camp.

In the final analysis, supposing an Erdogan victory, voters will be grievously let down by opposition political elites who did their very best to not defeat Erdogan. In the event that Kilicdaroglu loses, much of the blame will be attributed to his lackluster candidacy.

Of course, none of these explanatory factors considers the possibility of chicanery and foul play that may come to determine who ultimately wins the presidency. There is a decent chance that undemocratic means may be utilized by Erdogan and/or state institutions to ensure a third term for the country’s longest-serving leader. In many ways this is already apparent: the Supreme Election Council has already accepted Erdogan’s unconstitutional candidacy to run for president. Additionally, there is little by way of press freedoms and access to media coverage that is not already exclusively pro-Erdogan.

A third term for Erdogan will likely curtail what remains of Turkey’s faltering democracy. Erdogan will likely use this opportunity to crack down on what little remains of critical voices within the country’s media and public space, while at the same time trying to turn a new page with the country’s allies in the West. By whatever means Erdogan is able to secure victory, both Washington and Europe will likely choose to remain silent and find new ways to work with him, based on their respective interests. If his re-election is perceived to be illegitimate, don’t expect the West to call this out. A new Erdogan term will likely result in old ways of finding paths to accommodate him.

Sinan Ciddi is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power. Follow Sinan on Twitter @SinanCiddi.

Image: Shutterstock.

Space transportation company SpaceX provided this month what was a spectacle in two senses. One was the physical show of launching the most powerful rocket ever built. The other was how the whole affair, which ended with an explosion just four minutes into what was programmed to be an orbital mission, was described as a success, with congratulations from government officials and cheering by the company’s employees.

This way of defining success and failure reflects SpaceX’s engineering strategy, which involves launching a series of test vehicles with the expectation that each vehicle probably will have something wrong but will provide a learning experience to guide modifications on later versions. The upper stage of the Starship rocket, which never separated from its booster during this month’s launch, had already compiled a record of successive fiery crashes during earlier test flights.

This strategy is much different from the one that the government’s space agency, NASA, has had to follow. A failure of a NASA mission is regarded as a failure, period, and is not praised as a stepping-stone to some future hoped-for success. Because of that, the engineering that goes into a NASA mission is a more meticulous and time-consuming process aimed at achieving success in the fullest sense of the word every time a rocket is launched.

When NASA ignited its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket last November—making it at the time the most powerful rocket ever launched—it was only after numerous delays, which have been typical of NASA missions, as engineers checked every possible point of failure with the intention of making everything go right the first time. That first use of the SLS, in what NASA designated as Mission One of the Artemis program, was a success in the full sense, sending a spacecraft looping around the moon on a twenty-five-day mission.

This difference in the methodology of these two space programs is indicative of an expectation of perfection that often gets applied to government but not to the private sector. Some of the government agencies concerned are, like NASA, doing something as difficult as rocket science. Some routinely must address problems in which there are big information gaps—such as the intelligence agencies, that get looked to most on the very problems on which the information gaps are the biggest. Despite the inherent challenges involved—including the determination of adversaries to keep secrets and the unpredictability of many future events—when the intelligence community is unable to fill one of those gaps correctly on a matter that for some reason gets heightened public attention, this gets described as an “intelligence failure” amid calls for the problem to be “fixed.”

Understanding of such inherent challenges often is not extended to governmental missions but routinely is to all manner of activities in the private sector. In baseball, batters do not know what pitch the pitcher will deliver, and even the best batters in the major leagues fail to get a hit two-thirds of the time. But they do not get condemned for each out as a “batting failure.”

The chief reason for the differential treatment is that government programs are subject to politics, and politics involves incentives to find fault and demand accountability, regardless of the inherent challenges of a mission and the impossibility of achieving perfection. Those incentives are part of the process of one-upping political opponents and of politicians making names for themselves. The epitome of the process is the public congressional hearing in which committee members highlight in front of television cameras the less-than-perfect performances of governmental departments and demand changes. Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who heads the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said of SpaceX’s explode-and-learn method, “Government programs are not allowed to operate that way because … we have all the stakeholders being able to watch over and tell you no.”

The intense partisanship of current American politics intensifies this process. The motivation is strong to highlight any failings that can be associated with the other party, even if it is only some problem that falls in the area of responsibility of an executive branch agency, and that branch happens to be headed by a president of the other party.

Politics may underlie differential treatment between NASA and SpaceX regarding launch-related measures on the ground. At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the launch pads used for the largest rockets have flame trenches and water deluge systems that mitigate the effects of a blast-off. In SpaceX’s move-fast-and-break-things approach, no such infrastructure was constructed at its facility in Texas. The huge Starship rocket took off from a platform atop one corner of an ordinary-looking concrete slab.

As a result, effects on the ground were substantial, extending well beyond the SpaceX facility itself. The launch blasted a crater into the slab and threw debris more than a half mile away, onto a public beach, adjoining wetlands, and the ocean. A road to the beach remained closed until chunks of concrete and rebar could be cleared away. An enormous cloud of dirt and dust coated houses and cars in the town of Port Isabel, miles to the north. Some local activists have expressed concerns but there has not been a critical response from officialdom. Had this been a NASA operation—with a Democrat as head of the executive branch in Washington and Republicans in control in Texas—it is likely the official response would have been different.

Zero failures may sound like a beneficially aspirational, even if not practically achievable, standard to apply to government programs, but the application has costs. One is that it may simply not be the best approach for tackling large problems and achieving major goals. SpaceX’s own experience is suggestive. Although the company had numerous early failures as it was developing smaller rockets, such experimentation eventually led to the Falcon 9, which is now a profitable and reliable workhorse rocket for orbital missions. Imposing a less flexible standard on government programs may help to make self-fulfilling any argument that such programs are inherently less effective than risk-taking counterpart efforts in the private sector.

Another potential cost is that fixation on a failure and insistence on fixing it may introduce new problems in the fix. This is true, as I have described at length elsewhere, of much of the intelligence “reform” enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which has been established in popular discussion as a landmark “intelligence failure.”

The inordinate focus on a happening that the public and political class can easily and immediately brand as a failure may obscure larger issues at stake that by their nature are not so easily branded. A leader’s effort to avoid the easily identified type of failure may lead to policies that inflict greater costs on the nation than the failure would.

A leading example is the war in Afghanistan. The messy end in August 2021 to the U.S. involvement in the war has been repeatedly and vigorously labeled as a failure, especially by political opponents of President Joe Biden, who ordered that final withdrawal. But the withdrawal was a necessary pulling of the plug on a two-decade military expedition that had become a feckless effort at nationbuilding and entailed far more costs than anything incurred during the few days of denouement. The very swiftness of the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani regime and its security forces demonstrated the fecklessness and how even the best-planned withdrawal would have looked ugly. Three previous U.S. administrations (including the Trump administration, which negotiated a withdrawal agreement but did not execute it) shied away from pulling the plug and risking exposure to denunciations of “failure,” and in so doing kept the war going indefinitely.

Another sort of failure that those earlier administrations wanted to avoid—bearing in mind the general awareness of the history of the 9/11 attack—was an anti-U.S. terrorist attack that had some connection, however tenuous, to Afghanistan, which would be blamed on any president who had earlier withdrawn U.S. troops from that country. The anxiety about avoiding that type of failure obscured the reality that the Afghan Taliban, who took over the country in August 2021, constitute an insular movement that does not do international terrorism and is an enemy of the Islamic State, or ISIS, which is the group with a presence in Afghanistan that would be most likely to perpetrate such terrorism. A reminder of this reality came this week with word that a Taliban operation killed a leader of the local ISIS element who had planned a bombing at the Kabul airport that killed thirteen U.S. service members during the August 2021 withdrawal.

That news did not interrupt the political game of pouncing on a single “failure” to the exclusion of broader realities. The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul of Texas, grudgingly acknowledged the desirability of the ISIS leader’s demise but said that “this doesn’t diminish the Biden administration’s culpability for the failures that led to the attack” at the airport.

The subject of terrorism in the post-9/11 era has been especially prone to a zero-failures mindset that has spawned avoidable costs that exceed the potential harm of the feared terrorism itself. Those costs have included not only the material and human costs of foreign wars such as the one in Afghanistan but also encroachments on personal liberty and the moral stain of resorting to torture.

Public policy, foreign and domestic, should never be thought of as a duty to reduce the probability of even a highly feared contingency to zero, regardless of the costs of trying to do so. Public policy is necessarily a matter of weighing non-zero risks and costs of various contingencies and objectives, with the pursuit of some objectives being unavoidably in conflict with the pursuit of other objectives. This means that even the most carefully constructed policy will see some failures. 

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as a 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. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a Contributing Editor for this publication.

Image: Shutterstock.

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Israel turns seventy-five this week. Most Israelis certainly didn’t anticipate this kind of commemoration as the country is engulfed in its biggest domestic crisis since its inception.

Yet this crisis is turning into the very gift that Israelis are giving to themselves and others for their birthday. It turns out that for all the talk that democracy cannot take root in countries where there is no democratic tradition, Israel’s demographic makeup tells a very different story. Notwithstanding that the majority of its population today has immigrated from across the Middle East, people are strongly committed to their freedoms.

With now sixteen straight weeks of demonstrations often totaling up to 4 percent of the entire population, one sees the depth of the Israeli public’s commitment to democracy. Nowhere else in the Middle East would even one week of such demonstrations be met with anything but massive bloodshed—and this extraordinary grassroots movement is a reminder that Israelis won’t tolerate the threat to end the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. Israelis won’t accept a majoritarian approach to the country that fails to respect the rights of minorities and preserves the rule of law.

The Israeli public has been aroused by what they see as a threat to Israel’s democratic character. Many of those demonstrating now have never demonstrated before. Reservists from elite air, naval, and commando units; the high-tech sector; the universities going on strike, hospitals offering only emergency services—all this forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for a pause and to signal he understands that any such judicial change must reflect a broad consensus in Israel. The story is not over by any means, but the Israeli public has acted in an unprecedented way because it perceived a threat to the democratic fabric of the country. At this point, the tide seems to have turned in favor of the grassroots democracy movement.

There are many lessons from this crisis that will be discussed for some time, but one of them surely is how a society that is fundamentally resilient can self-correct, especially when seeking to preserve its democratic identity. In Israel’s case, being a Jewish-democratic state is part of its ethos and that means both sides of the hyphen must flourish or they will each whither. In this framework, a Jewish-democratic state has meant equal voting rights whether one is Jewish or not for the last seventy-five years.

It is true that the Palestinian issue has not been the focus of the grassroots democracy movement in Israel. But there is no way to preserve Israel as a Jewish democracy without addressing the Palestinian issue. Those Israelis who favor yielding land in the West Bank do so not just to maintain dignity for Palestinians, but to ensure that Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic. This is critical to understand. For those Israeli leaders who take two states for two peoples off the table, they leave only one state as the answer—or their silence and the absence of a story to tell about the endgame of the conflict with the Palestinians leaves a vacuum. On the inside in Israel, there are extremist ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich who are only too happy to fill it.

But we also see there are those on the outside who, from a very different perspective, will seek to fill the intellectual and policy vacuum left by seemingly departing from two states for two peoples as a goal.

A case in point is the recent Foreign Affairs article written by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, entitled “Israel’s One State Reality.” Regrettably, they offer a one-sided view of the conflict and present a picture that seems divorced from reality. In the Barnett et al telling, there is only a denial of Palestinian rights. One would not know that there are rejectionist threats against Israel. That Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas deny Israel’s right to exist, support terror against it—and would even if there was no occupation—and acquire and develop weapons to act on their aims. Barnett et al note Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and say that Israel retained control over the territory’s entry and exit points and the air and sea around it. Why? No mention is made of the fact that even after Israel withdrew, Hamas continued to carry out attacks against it and still does eighteen years later.

Hamas has never put the development of Gaza over its aims of resistance against Israel. It went from having roughly 3,000 rockets after the 2014 conflict to having over 30,000 in the 2021 conflict. Hamas used that time not just to acquire rockets but to build an underground city of tunnels, exploiting materials (concrete, electrical wiring, steel, and wood) that could and should have been used to develop and build Gaza above ground. The tunnels weren’t to protect the people of Gaza by creating shelters. Rather, their purpose was to protect Hamas leaders, fighters, and weapons and to be used to try to infiltrate Israel. If Barnett et al are concerned about Israel’s control of entry and exits from Gaza, why not call for Hamas to give up its rockets and stop building tunnels in return for a Marshall Plan for Gaza and an end to such Israeli control? Why not call on Hamas to accept a two-state solution?

But sadly the authors are more concerned with indicting Israel than promoting Palestinian needs and rights. In a world in which the authors are indifferent to the threats that Israel faces, it is not a leap to argue, as they do, to condition military aid to Israel in order to terminate Israeli military rule over Palestinians. How do the authors think the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas would react to an American cut-off of military assistance to Israel? Would that make conflict less likely? Would that reassure others in the region about the threats they are likely to face? Wouldn’t the forces that produce failed and failing states in the region—Iran’s greatest export—perceive great opportunity in such a circumstance? We have seen a foretaste this spring. Amid all the announcements that Israeli pilots and elite forces were threatening to refrain from reserve duty due to the democracy demonstrations, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah openly talked about Israel’s early collapse. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya rushed to Beirut amid talk about the possibilities of a united front.

None of this is a concern to the authors. They are far more concerned with Israel being a Jewish state which “fosters a form of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic one…” For the authors, this is a sin, and while they acknowledge that it is not a perfect fit, they still apply the apartheid label to Israel. But apartheid was an ideology of subjugation of a large majority by a small minority; it promulgated a legal structure to ensure the power and control of the white minority over the black majority of people, permitting them to live only in certain areas, to have only certain kinds of jobs, go to certain schools, with limited access to any legal remedies. Is there inequality in Israel (as there is in the United States and in other democracies)? Yes. Is it written into the law, no. Is there a minority oppressing a majority with a legal edifice justifying it? No.

But the apartheid label fits the authors’ purpose of indicting Israel and justifying its call for creating equality in one state. There is equality before the law in Israel of its citizens, including its Arab citizens who vote and hold parliamentary and judicial office, even if this is not necessarily realized in the daily reality of those citizens. Obviously, the Palestinians in the West Bank are treated differently.

And, to be fair, there is a drift toward a binational state that needs to be arrested and reversed. We wrote a book about the need for Israel to have a political leadership that will make the hard decisions—and override the inevitable backlash of those like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and extremist settlers—to ensure that Israel does not become a binational state where either it gives up being a democracy or it gives up being a Jewish state.

By definition, in a binational state, Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic. For the extreme in Israel, they see no contradiction between being Jewish and denying rights to Palestinians. We do. Unlike the authors, who see the extremist vision having “strong grounding in Zionist thought and practice,” we see that vision as a fundamental contradiction of Zionism and its basic values. The most important Zionist theorists and leaders shared a deep belief in democracy and the rights of all people, including that the rights to Arabs must not be denied.

In no small part, the backlash today in Israel and the strong movement domestically to save Israel’s democratic character is a response to an extremist vision of Israel. They see the Supreme Court as the institutional safeguard against those trying to impose their values on the country—whether it is to block the religious parties trying to impose their values on the secular majority in Israel or it is the settler-dominated parties who don’t want the Court to block their ability to claim private Palestinian land.

One of the basic things that Barnett et al fail to see is that the democracy movement has the potential to address not just the internal threat to Israel’s democratic character but also the one posed by continuing occupation of Palestinians. Drifting toward a binational state is also a threat to Israel as a Jewish democracy. Yes, to date that drift has seemed far too abstract to produce a serious public backlash against it—especially with Hamas in control of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority characterized by dysfunction and corruption, and no sign of any Palestinian willingness to compromise. But with an aroused Israeli public more sensitive to the threats to democracy, it may no longer be possible to postpone the necessary debate on the dangers of a binational state.

While Barnett et al put the onus only on Israel, two states for two peoples requires something of the Palestinians as well. In fact, a serious Palestinian move to reform the Palestinian Authority or a determined and more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest against occupation could help stimulate the debate in Israel. Violence plays into the hands of those in Israel who favor one state. They see it as definitive proof that Israeli territorial concessions will make it more vulnerable and not more secure. But ultimately one state is a threat to Israel and the drift toward it needs to be addressed.

For Barnett et al, one state is not just a reality, it appears desirable. But this, too, is a misreading because there is no such thing as a one-state solution. The authors fail to understand that the separate national identities of Israelis and Palestinians are deeply rooted and will not melt away. Both Israelis and Palestinians have paid a heavy price to preserve who they are. Israelis have built a state in an environment where they were rejected and wars were forced on it. Does a country with a flourishing culture and which successfully achieved its raison d’être by ingathering more than a million Jews from the Soviet Union, as well as providing a home to Jews from Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, and throughout discriminated communities in the Middle East, suddenly yield that identity? Does a country of close to ten million—over seven million Jews and two million Israeli Arab citizens—that has persevered through wars to become the “start-up” nation with a GDP per capita now ahead of Germany, Britain, France, and Japan, say their state and identity has failed?

Palestinians, too, have persevered. In their dispersal, in the refugee camps, and through two intifadas and profound suffering, they have not surrendered their identity. Ahmed Ghneim, a Fatah activist who remains close to Marwan Barghouti, once explained why he favored two states: “in one state, one of us [Israelis or Palestinians] will feel the need to dominate the other.” Ghneim is right. A binational state would guarantee that the conflict would turn inward. For a country that does not share the same language, religion, or experience, this would turn into a nightmare very quickly.

Two states for two peoples may be difficult to achieve but it serves both Israeli and Palestinian interests. Barnett et al are too focused on their one-state reality to address how it would be certain to doom both Israelis and Palestinians to enduring conflict. Indeed, the bloodiest wars are civil wars. Having a flag and a soccer team is not enough. The authors ignore that in the Middle East there is not a post-nationalism reality. Every state in the region that is characterized by more than one sectarian, tribal, or national identity is either at war internally or completely paralyzed. Does anyone really want Israel-Palestine to look like the tragic conflicts that have engulfed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, or Yemen? Is that the future that we should hope for these two peoples?

Yes, it is hard to go from where we are to two states for two peoples. And, yes the United States tried three times to achieve an end of conflict result requiring major compromise. You would not know from the authors of the essay that the Palestinians were a large part of the failure of those efforts, even if there is enough blame to go around. Even if the end of conflict moment is not at hand, Israel needs to have a policy that has two states for two peoples as a destination. The starting point for getting there is having that as a vision; moving to improve the realities on the ground for Palestinians; reforming the Palestinian Authority the way it was done in 2007 when Salaam Fayyad came in and restored law and order and created transparency economically; pressing the Israelis to help a reforming PA to deliver; restoring a sense of possibility for both Palestinian and Israeli public.

Given the complex realities of the Middle East, it is not enough for an idea to have abstract appeal. It has to provide very detailed, real-world answers that would satisfy deeply held nationalist aspirations on each side of this conflict. One state cannot and will not do that. If one state may seem too simple and misguided, that is because it is.

Ambassador Dennis Ross is counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. Ambassador Ross’s distinguished diplomatic career includes service as special assistant to President Barack Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, special advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Middle East Envoy to President Bill Clinton, and Director of Policy Planning for President George H.W. Bush.

David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations. He is also an adjunct professor in Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In 2013–2014, he worked in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of State, serving as a senior advisor to the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.

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On April 13, Russia’s Institute of Technological Development for the Fuel-Energy Complex organized a panel to discuss energy cooperation between Moscow and African countries. One of the experts, Gabriel Anicet Kotchofa, who served as Benin’s ambassador to Russia, explained that “in Africa, we are waiting for Russia—for what Russia can do. I will tell you something that is never said today: we are tired of Europe.”

As a graduate of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas and a Russian citizen, Kotchofa is not a neutral commentator. Nonetheless, recent energy trends support his proclamation. African countries are exponentially multiplying their imports of Russian oil in response to European sanctions and price caps, providing the Kremlin with additional flexibility in the financing of its war against Ukraine.

Morocco imported 600,000 barrels of Russian diesel in the entirety of 2021. In February 2022 alone, approximately double that number arrived in the North African country’s Mediterranean ports. Last month, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s diesel exports, which just returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Moscow is fulfilling a need in Africa. The International Energy Agency noted that the coronavirus pandemic provoked debt crises in twenty African countries, which will exacerbate the subsidy burdens that these nations already face as a result of frequent oscillations in energy prices. Paired with the fact that factories have still not recovered from pandemic restrictions, African countries are looking for outside aid from new sources. “Significant parts of [African refineries] are idle or underloaded due to equipment deterioration, maintenance problems, [and] interruptions in the supply of raw materials,” said Lyudmila Kalinichenko, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, during the aforementioned panel. At the same time, Africa’s population is growing vertiginously.

As such, African countries are faced with two compounding challenges: energy refinery shortages and rising demand. One solution they have pursued is to step up their reliance on imports. Accordingly, these nations have turned to Russian gas companies happy to gain access to new markets. Some African companies have taken advantage of this realignment of imports and exports to deceive European countries seeking replacements for the Russian energy that used to flow under the Baltic Sea.

In Morocco, for instance, an MP accused several energy companies of forging documents about the origins of Russian gas quickly resold to Europe at a higher price upon arrival. These companies have allegedly mixed Russian oil into their domestic components to alleviate pressure from local extraction processes and augment their profits from both Russian sellers and European buyers. The gas Moscow is sending to Africa is clearly not all being used to satisfy domestic demand.

Beyond energy, relations between the EU and Africa have been deteriorating for the past few decades. Russian disinformation tactics, which have been scaled up since the start of the Russo-Ukraine war, partly explain this trend.

Despite European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s assurances that the EU has “no sanctions on food and agricultural products,” Senegalese president Macky Sall repeatedly voiced concern that European trade restrictions have blocked mechanisms that allow African countries to pay for indispensable Russian grains and fertilizers. On the military side, France’s inability to protect Malians from jihadist terrorist groups led to a complete withdrawal of its forces in 2022. This sparked widespread anti-French sentiment in West Africa, leading to attacks on businesses and diplomatic buildings in addition to shocking images of French flags being burned.

Russian propaganda has fueled this discontent. The Kremlin’s state-funded television networks like RT have signed deals with their African counterparts to shape minds about the ongoing war in Ukraine while repeating to audiences that France and the United States have harmed African interests. The recent U.S. intelligence leak adds detail about how Russian officials brainstormed propaganda initiatives to “realign” African public opinion on Western influence.

Russia has not spared energy debates from its carefully crafted narratives. During the panel, Kotchofa argued that African countries have been “forced to conclude unprofitable contracts with European partners in which over 90 percent of oil and petroleum products are exported from the continent.” He added that since Russia is blessed with its own array of natural resources, it feels “no need to take raw materials” from others. Such rhetoric is frequently repeated in the media and diffused throughout Africa, even if it blatantly ignores Russia’s increase in cobalt, gold, and diamond mining and the proliferation of joint ventures between Russian and African companies.

Indeed, Russia has entered into natural resource deals with about twenty African countries. In November 2021, the Russian State Space Corporation “Roscosmos” signed a cooperation agreement with Zimbabwe to expand its satellite intelligence in the country as a way to locate mineral deposits. Earlier this year, a columnist in one of Russia’s largest state-owned news sources, RIA Novosti, noted that Congo’s immense trove of resources represents the financial “contract of the century” before claiming that Russia feels no urge to repeat Europe’s “neo-colonialism.” He then exposed Moscow’s media-based strategy: “African leaders often do not have to explain why they need Russia…[our] PR on the continent is good and self-supporting.”

Western and Russian observers alike make the mistake of saying that Beijing and Moscow’s replacement of French influence in Africa demonstrates that the United States is losing ground on the continent. In reality, French and American interests in Africa are not interchangeable.

However, the United States and France do agree that it is strategically advantageous to oppose Russia. Their unity against the Kremlin will strengthen as Russians take the place of the French. And if Russian companies pool resources into Africa only to be outmatched by China while the United States directs its attention toward Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, Moscow’s increased involvement in Africa suddenly does not look so bad. With this logic, perhaps the United States should not rush to extend diplomatic ties to the disillusioned African countries tempted by Russian energy exports.

This argument has a critical flaw, however. It contradicts the sanctions policy that the U.S. Treasury Department has pursued since the start of the war in Ukraine: erode Moscow’s ability to financially support its wartime operations. With the recent news that Russia’s oil is being shipped to Europe through Africa, the Biden administration should think of the growing continent as inseparable from its Russia strategy rather than as a separate theater. This is especially the case for the North African countries that border the Mediterranean.

As one of the Russian experts said during the panel, “We are currently shipping Russian oil and petroleum products across the sea in the Mediterranean, in the Spanish port of Ceuta, and in the Greek port of Kalamata. But what prevents us from using the port infrastructure of North African countries for these purposes?” If American policymakers want to hinder the scope of Russia’s military operations, they cannot turn a blind eye to the African countries that have begun accepting enormous shipments of Russian oil and may fall prey to the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, and U.S. oil and gas companies must synchronize their efforts to achieve this goal. The first can scale up humanitarian aid, the second can provide further support to independent media organizations, and the third can provide competitive alternatives to Russian oil sailing to the African coast.

Russian experts are seriously thinking about how they can use Africa as an eager energy market and a natural resource hub to gain ground on the battlefield. American experts must do the same, focusing on the African countries that receive substantive aid from the West and are prepared to counter the Kremlin’s gas diplomacy and the way Russian media has portrayed the war in Ukraine.

Axel de Vernou is a sophomore at Yale University studying Global Affairs and History with a Certificate of Advanced Language Study in Russian. He is a Research Assistant at the Yorktown Institute.

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There is growing discussion that Department of Defense (DoD) procurement programs are not nimble enough to meet emerging threats from peer competitors such as China. The timeline for the development of new defense capabilities is lengthy, impeding the nation’s ability to offset swiftly and efficiently growing capabilities of potential adversaries. Critics say that the Department is not adequately accelerating the development of game-changing technologies and not effectively leveraging commercial technology. They have called for comprehensive procurement reform as the solution to these problems.

In fairness, the Pentagon has often proven itself more than able to use existing procurement authorities rapidly and effectively when urgency demands quick action. For example, in 2008, in response to warfighter needs in Afghanistan and Iraq for enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, the Air Force successfully developed and deployed the MC-12 Liberty aircraft in less than eight months following congressional funding approval. Similarly, in order to protect soldiers and Marines from improvised explosive devices, the Department of Defense rapidly acquired a new armored vehicle, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protect (MRAP). The decision to buy, followed by the actual commencement of production, took less than a year. More recently, the Air Force used its Rapid Capabilities Office to develop the new B-21 Raider bomber on time and on budget (so far!).

The challenge that remains is fostering an even greater collective effort to expedite weapons development. How can the nation better accelerate the DoD acquisitions process? What can be learned from the experience of the private sector to help? How might DoD adapt the intelligence community’s successful experiment, establishing In-Q-Tel, for military procurement? What can be done to harness private capital markets to help fund and speed Pentagon building programs, such as the renovation of our Navy’s shipyards?

When Aversion to Risk is a Negative

Complicating the challenge of improving the procurement process is the natural tendency toward risk aversion within any large government organization such as DoD, governed by a complex regulatory structure. Innovation carries risk. The safer approach, one surmises, is to follow the careful procurement system that has been developed incrementally by thousands of Pentagon regulations over the course of decades. Moving fast can mean less review, and hence carry greater risk for failure. Only when the need for speed is urgent and clearly demanded by top leadership, such as was the case with MRAP’s or Operation Warp Speed, does the bureaucracy turn to quicker procurement techniques available in the legal toolbox. Much as no one was ever fired at DoD for buying IBM computers in the 1960s, no one in the building is fired today for taking a careful, safe approach to procurement under the guidelines of a manifold regulatory system.

Another aspect of the challenge requiring consideration is congressional authority. Procurement laws and rules only address “how” the contracting process is pursued for the development and purchase of a weapons system. They do not address the issue of authorization—i.e., “what” Congress has empowered the Pentagon to do on a specific weapons system or program, including the expenditure of funds. The Air Force developed and deployed the MC-12 aircraft only after receiving congressional permission. The plane’s development was specifically authorized and funded by Congress, as was the Space Development Agency’s satellite constellation. Unless funding is first approved by Congress, DoD cannot lawfully commence the contracting process for the development of any new system.

This approach of detailed congressional authorization tends to be somewhat more pronounced for the DoD than for other government entities. Most federal agencies are governed by broadly worded authorizations that give them latitude for innovative purchasing and, in many cases, the ability to guarantee credit. The Department of Defense, on the other hand, tends to be controlled by a more detailed, annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) process that delimits exactly what it can and cannot develop and buy over specific time periods. The end result is an awkward system of annual funding for complex, long-term programs and institutionalized, cultural reluctance by the Pentagon to move innovatively unless specifically authorized by Congress.

An Alternative Approach?

A good illustration of the problem is DoD’s approach to experimenting with venture capital compared to other agencies. The CIA, in collaboration with other members of the intelligence community, created its own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, almost a quarter century ago. NASA followed suit a few years later with the creation of the Mercury Fund. In both instances, the CIA and NASA relied on their general statutory authority to set up these programs.

In 2002, Congress created the Army Venture Capital Corporation to invest in startups relating to power technology, but its funding robustness has so far been largely limited to its original appropriation. More recently, in December 2022, Secretary of Defense Austin established an Office of Strategic Capital whose mission will include partnering the Pentagon with public and private capital markets However, at this point, its ability to raise capital funding in the markets remains an open question as it continues to await specific congressional authorization to operate and guarantee credit, as well as an appropriation that can be used to support program funding, corporate investments, and reserves against lending or guarantees. Language contained in the Senate Report for NDAA 2023 contained wording that would have done much of that, but it was not incorporated into the final congressional conference report for the bill.

Change and innovation are hard. With rising strategic challenges in the Pacific and around the world, the Pentagon and the Hill must continue to work together to find more ways to speed the acquisition process. The Pentagon should continue, whenever possible, to use alternative approaches provided by existing procurement regulations to accelerate strategic weapons development. The regulatory success of such initiatives as Operation Warp Speed, MRAP, or the MC-12W aircraft might serve more often as an approach to speed up other programs. At the same time, Congress could consider providing the Pentagon with broader empowerment language for specific programs under the annual NDAA and appropriations process, as Capitol Hill has long done with other agencies. For example, Congress, if willing, could give DoD’s new Office of Strategic Capital just a few lines of NDAA wording to empower more open, Pentagon access to capital markets to support the application of commercial technology and major recapitalization projects.

The bottom-line reality is that practical approaches and solutions are available, both through the regulatory and legislative processes. More red tape can be cut, better enabling faster production of weapons systems to meet growing challenges in a multi-polar world.

Chuck Blanchard, a former general counsel of the Army and Air Force, is an Arnold & Porter partner specializing in government contracts law.

Ramon Marks, a retired Arnold & Porter partner, is Vice Chair of Business Executives for National Security (BENS).

The views expressed in this article are strictly their own.

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