Dear reader,

I started a new job a few weeks ago as an editor in the communications department of a defense technology company.

You haven’t heard from me much since then, and the reason is simple: A full-time day job, plus editing two newsletters (Duffel Blog and The Ruck) while trying to monitor the latest Chinese spy balloon shoot-down, is a lot. It turns out that I am, in fact, a mere mortal.

So, the pace of The Ruck is changing from weekly to occasional. I have already paused billing for paid subscribers.

I know this is a bummer. I’ll still use this space to write about national security and even share interesting documents (The CIA’s social media policy is sitting on my desk, for example). But it will be less frequent, at least for the time being.

Thanks for your patience, and thank you for your support.

Hello again and happy Thursday. I’m your host, Paul Szoldra. Time again for the rundown of national security news in The Ruck. As usual, there’s a lot happening this week—including the most recent TikTok acting shady news story (I’m sensing a trend) and a Swiss hacker kinda just stumbling on the TSA’s super secret “No Fly” list.

Let’s get to it…

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• Yet another new and groundbreaking story on TikTok: The service has a secret “heating” button that can make a video go viral, according to Forbes. A powerful lever of influence in the hands of a few.

  • “For TikTok, fears of political manipulation are tied to concern that the Chinese government could coerce the platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, into amplifying or suppressing certain narratives on TikTok. TikTok has acknowledged that it previously censored content critical of China, and last year, former ByteDance employees told BuzzFeed News that another ByteDance app, a now-defunct news aggregator called TopBuzz, had pinned ‘pro-China messages’ to the top of its news feed for U.S. consumers. ByteDance denied the report.”

  • “TikTok declined to answer questions about whether employees located in China have ever heated content, or whether the company has ever heated content produced by the Chinese government or Chinese state media.”

  • They didn’t even issue a non-denial denial. 🤔

• A U.S. Navy SEAL listed in "an active deserter status since March 11, 2019" was killed last week while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces on an operation in Bakhmut, according to Time Magazine.

  • “He only had one uniform…He used duct tape to tape armored plates to his chest and back to go on target until he was given a plate carrier,” a friend said of former Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Daniel Swift’s time in Ukraine. “After our SEAL Team Six guy left, he led our team in [Kherson Oblast], Severodonetsk, and Svyatohirsk, and continued to lead the team after I left. He was one of the hardest and most tactically proficient men I have ever met.” 

• A North Korean man was sentenced to 45 months in prison for money laundering offenses. He "is the first ever North Korean national to be extradited to the United States and is subject to deportation,” according to the Justice Department.

  • Mun Chol Myong, a 55-year-old businessman living in Malaysia, was extradited to the U.S. in 2021 after being arrested by Malaysian authorities in 2019, VOA reports.

  • He “used a network of front companies and falsified records to hide more than $1.2 million in illicit transactions” to get luxury goods around U.S. sanctions and into the hands of North Korean customers.

• Three men with a “dubious explanation of their night-time dive near critical infrastructure” in Gdansk, Poland, were rescued by Polish authorities and then let go.

  • “Since then, doubts over their intentions have mounted. They were rescued not far from the Naftoport facility at the Port of Gdansk, which receives tanker shipments of oil and other and petroleum products. They were also found near an area where there are plans to build a new floating natural gas terminal,” CBS reports.

  • “Officers apparently saw nothing suspicious at first in the fact that the men were diving near critical infrastructure at night with no permit and atypical amber-hunting equipment, and the local police did not pursue the matter.”

  • Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says the divers posed no threat to public safety.

• A Swiss hacker wrote about how easy it was to find an airline’s open server on the internet and snag an interesting file: NoFly.csv, a 2019 copy of the TSA’s “No Fly” list with roughly 1.5 million entries.

  • According to The Daily Dot, the list included several notable figures, including Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout and “16 potential aliases for him.”

  • “The aliases comprised different, common misspellings of his last name and other versions of his first name, as well as different birthdays. Many of the birthdays aligned with the recorded date Bout was born.”

  • Congressman Dan Bishop, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee says Congress “will be coming for answers” about the breach, according to CNN.

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• Japan’s 1st Airborne Brigade was joined by paratroopers from the U.K. and Australian armies for the first time ever during its parachute drop training earlier this month, according to Nippon. It was “apparently intended to make a display of the group's solidarity at a time when China is stepping up maritime activities.”

• SpaceX⁩ is now offering a product called Starshield for defense and intelligence agencies described as “custom-built spacecraft, sensors, and secure communications services leveraging SpaceX’s investment in its Starlink network of broadband satellites.”

• An Iranian lawmaker claims Tehran is getting Russian Su-35 fighter jets in the next few months.

  • “We have also ordered a number of other military equipment from Russia, including air defense systems, missile systems and helicopters, most of which will also arrive soon.”

  • A payback from Moscow for a generous supply of Iranian Shahed-136 drones.

• The former head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York has been charged with money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions on Russia.

  • “As alleged, Charles McGonigal, a former high-level FBI official, and Sergey Shestakov, a Court interpreter, violated U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “They both previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better.”

  • McGonigal and Shestakov were arrested on Saturday. Both pleaded not guilty and were released on $500,000 and $200,000 bail, respectively.

• A striking lead in The New York Times:

  • WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is racing to boost its production of artillery shells by 500 percent within two years, pushing conventional ammunition production to levels not seen since the Korean War as it invests billions of dollars to make up for shortfalls caused by the war in Ukraine and to build up stockpiles for future conflicts.

• The U.S. will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine “in a matter of months,” which has persuaded Germany to send its own Leopard 2s.

  • A Kremlin official criticized the move as absurd, so I’ll take that as a vote of confidence. Good move, America.

New & notable reports

• Battle Management: DOD and Air Force Continue to Define Joint Command and Control Efforts (GAO)

• China Maritime Report No. 25: More Chinese Ferry Tales: China's Use of Civilian Shipping in Military Activities, 2021-2022 (U.S. Naval War College)

• Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations (Stanford Internet Observatory, OpenAI, and Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology)

• Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base (CSIS)

• Public Perceptions of China in 13 European Countries | August 2022 (International Republican Institute)

You’re caught up. One more thing before you go: Check out “The Prince” podcast from The Economist. If you’re looking for a well-done primer on China and its leader Xi Jinping that will get you smarter on a long drive, there’s nothing better. I really enjoyed it.

What’d I miss? Let me know in the comments.

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I love hearing from readers. Drop a question or comment on this dispatch by using the button below. Or send tips and links via email: paulszoldra@protonmail.com.

See you next week. —Paul

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Happy Thursday, and welcome back to The Ruck. Here’s what’s happening in the national security world this week.

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• Somalia has launched its “most significant offensive…in more than a decade” against the al-Shabab extremist group, the AP reports, and this time, “Somali fighters are in the lead, backed by U.S. and African Union forces.”

  • Government forces claim they have already recaptured an al-Shabab stronghold in the port town of Harardhere.

• The Pentagon is tapping into its arms stockpile in Israel “to help meet Ukraine’s dire need for artillery shells,” according to The New York Times.

  • “The Ukrainian army uses about 90,000 artillery rounds a month, about twice the rate they are being manufactured by the United States and European countries combined, U.S. and Western officials say. The rest must come from other sources, including existing stockpiles or commercial sales.”

• Meanwhile, Ukraine is worried about a possible Russian offensive launched from Belarus. Moscow and its close ally have been taking part in joint military exercises, leading to fears the training could be a pretext for a cross-border incursion.

  • “In all areas of our responsibility we are building these fortifications to be able to defend and mount counter-offensives clandestinely,” Senior Lt. Anton, a 32-year-old Ukrainian soldier, told NBC News. “The potential offensive from the Belarusian side could come from anywhere. That’s why we are getting ready for all scenarios.” 

  • Belarus’ exiled opposition leader, however, is skeptical. "I doubt that a possible attack can take place on land, but missiles can be launched from Belarus territory at any moment," Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said. “Putin knows that the participation of Belarusian troops could raise unpredictable consequences.”

• “Weapons are crucial because this war is very difficult. This is not the end of the war. Russia is not defeated…” says Polish President Andrzej Duda, urging the West to provide more weapons. “This moment will answer the question: will Ukraine survive or not?”

• Regardless of where or how it happens, talk of Russia mounting a spring offensive continues. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Kremlin “is likely preparing to conduct a decisive strategic action in the next six months intended to regain the initiative and end Ukraine’s current string of operational successes.”

• Ukraine wants Western tanks, and Britain has broken the taboo after announcing it will supply more than a dozen Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Kyiv. This “will heap further pressure on Germany” to supply its own Leopard tanks to Ukraine, according to The Guardian.

• In other news, "there is little indication that the Intelligence Community’s exquisite collection capabilities were generating information that was valuable to policymakers,” wrote the authors of a review of information from classified reports between December 2019 to January 2020 with insight into the novel coronavirus spread in China.

  • “Officials were instead relying on public reporting, diplomatic cables and analysis from medical experts — some examples of so-called open source intelligence, or OSINT.”

• President Joe Biden’s lawyers found six more classified documents in the private library of his Wilmington, Delaware home.

  • The context from AP: “The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration is under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.”

• Japan and India are conducting their first joint fighter jet training—“a historic milestone in the two nation’s defense and security ties amid China’s military buildup and regional assertiveness,” according to The Diplomat.

  • Flying together out of two Japanese air bases, Japan’s Air Force is bringing four F-2 and four F-15 fighters, while the Indian Air Force will fly four Su-30 MKI fighter jets, two C-17 transport planes, and one IL-78 tanker.

• Welcome home, Taylor Dudley. After months of negotiations and nearly a year in detention, the 35-year-old American Navy veteran has been released from Russian custody. Russian border patrol police detained the Lansing, Michigan native “in April 2022 after crossing from Poland into Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave which is territory governed by Moscow between Poland and Lithuania,” CNN reported. “He was in Poland attending a music festival, and it is not clear why he crossed the border.”

New & notable reports

• DOD Financial Management: Greater Attention and Accountability Needed over Government-Furnished Property (GAO)

  • “The DOD has struggled for decades to accurately account for government property in the possession of its contractors. DOD estimated that the value of such unaccounted property is over $220 billion—but that amount is likely significantly understated. This is one of the reasons that federal auditors are unable to audit DOD's financial statements.”

• Battle Management: DOD and Air Force Continue to Define Joint Command and Control Efforts (GAO)

• The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan (CSIS)

• Taiwan: Political and Security Issues (CRS)

  • A good three-page overview of China’s democratic neighbor—including the island's history, policies from Taipei, Beijing, and the United States, and updates on the evolving security environment.

  • “In August 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Taiwan since 1997. The PRC’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) responded to the visit by conducting exercises in six locations around Taiwan. PRC state media portrayed the activities as intended to demonstrate how the PLA could isolate and attack Taiwan, including by blockading ports, attacking military bases on Taiwan’s east coast, and controlling access to the Bashi Channel in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. The exercises, which included missile test-launches over Taiwan, were unprecedented in scale and established a ‘new normal’ in which PLA ships and aircraft now operate closer to Taiwan and with more regularity. The PRC also suspended some cooperation with the United States and announced sanctions against Pelosi and her family. Pelosi’s successor as Speaker in the 118th Congress, Kevin McCarthy, stated in July 2022 that he, too, would like to lead a delegation to Taiwan as Speaker.”

  • “As the PLA has become more capable, the cross-Strait balance of military power has shifted in the PRC’s favor…Near-daily PLA operations in and above waters around Taiwan increase the demands on Taiwan’s military to monitor and respond to such activities, and could compress the time available for Taiwan to respond if the PLA attacks.”

• Russia’s Iranian-Made UAVs: A Technical Profile (RUSI)

  • Defending against Iran's Shahed drones "has proved to be frustratingly complicated." They "fly low and slow, and once acquired are easy to shoot down," but low radar and thermal signatures make them harder to spot from afar.

• Chinese Lessons From The Pacific War: Implications For PLA Warfighting (CSBA)

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I love hearing from readers. Drop a question or comment on this dispatch by using the button below. You can also join me in the Subscriber Chat. Or send tips and links via email: paulszoldra@protonmail.com (anonymity guaranteed).

See you next week. —Paul

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Happy Thursday, and welcome back to The Ruck.

I launched this newsletter in August 2022, and since then, I’ve settled on this format: a reported column on national security followed by a news digest called The Rundown. And the dispatches have gotten somewhat lengthy—last week’s on U.S. military pilots training China’s Navy was pushing 2,200 words.

After a few months of this, I’ve realized that I’d much rather deliver either one or the other in a single dispatch—and many readers have told me they especially enjoy the news digest.

So from now on, my usual approach will be to send a weekly rundown of national security news. But when I have something interesting to say, like how I think the rise of China’s Marine Corps is something to watch, I will write about that instead.

What’s this mean for you? Not much, really.

I’m letting you know the format is changing—you’ll keep getting The Ruck in your inbox as usual. But if you’d like to make changes to your account in light of this, I totally understand. You can click here to update your user profile. Or, if you’re not a subscriber yet, you can sign up below:

Now, without further ado… here’s what’s happening in the national security world. Thanks for reading.

• The US is sending Ukraine nearly $3 billion in additional aid, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Despite what you may hear in some reports, they are not tanks. Although you can technically get away with calling them “tank-like.”

  • How will Ukraine use such vehicles? Task & Purpose talked to experts.

    “They provide tremendous overwatch to infantry,” said retired Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who led the 1st Cavalry Division and served as head of Multi-National Corps-Iraq. “You’re able to move them in a relatively secure vehicle to a position of advantage. I’m sure the Ukrainians will be able to get more [troops] in them because they don’t have quite as much kit as we do — possibly as many as 10 folks in the back of that thing.” 

  • Anyway, that and many other big-ticket items are in the latest package:

• Chinese researchers claim they have broken the RSA algorithm that underpins most online encryption. "If it’s true — a big if — it would be a secret like out of the movies, and one of the biggest things ever in computer science.”

  • The research paper they submitted in December is here. I’m not smart enough to understand any of it, but maybe you are.

• A 57-year-old Georgia man has pleaded guilty to taking $400,000 in bribes from an Afghan company he helped obtain millions of dollars in contracts, the Justice Department says. He also “received bribes to sign false letters of recommendation for visas authorized for Afghan nationals who worked as translators with U.S. forces in Afghanistan.”

• Retired Army Maj. Gen. Pat Donahoe spoke out in Army Times now that he is out of uniform. The Army inspector general concluded the two-star “had violated Army policies during three separate incidents on Twitter.” And yet one of those instances was a military officer standing up in support of women in uniform.

  • “We value the women that serve in the United States Army,” he said. “And we’ve got to say that loudly and proudly…It’s a challenge to the cohesion of the Army, when an entire population inside the Army feels that senior leaders aren’t willing to defend them publicly, and we should never step away from that duty as senior leaders.”

• In a new op-ed, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice argue that "time is not on Ukraine's side" and urge the West to send more to Ukraine, including, above all, "mobile armor.”

  • "Both of us have dealt with Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced he believes time is on his side: that he can wear down the Ukrainians and that U.S. and European unity and support for Ukraine will eventually erode and fracture...For Putin, defeat is not an option.”

• “Taiwan has asked to join discussions on China’s protest against US chip sanctions at the World Trade Organization, seeking a voice on a debate that could have ramifications for the global chip industry,” Bloomberg writes.

• President Joe Biden has his very own classified documents scandal. The Justice Department has launched a review after about 10 documents were found in Biden’s post-vice presidential office in downtown Washington, according to The Washington Post.

  • “One additional batch” of classified docs was also found in a separate location, NBC reported.

  • There are major differences between the two presidential instances, and we’re still waiting to see where the Trump case goes. But the nonpartisan view from The Ruck is consistent: Taking classified files home with you is wrong. So anyway…

Duffel Blog

Here's an article full of classified info, because who even gives a shit anymore?

FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” with classified information being sent over her private email server, but he said no charges should be filed. So we’re just going to release a bunch of classified information right here, because really, who even gives a shit anymore…

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10 years ago · Erik Sullivan

• A hacker red team from the Inspector General tested the Department of the Interior and found "outdated and ineffective" password requirements while cracking 16% of the agency's 85,000+ accounts in the first 90 minutes of testing. Oh my.

• The Covid-19 vaccine is no longer mandatory in the Department of Defense. The Pentagon rescinded the mandate after Congress forced the administration’s hand with legislation signed into law on Dec. 23.

  • The full memo on the policy change is here. Notably, it provides latitude to commanders “to consider, as appropriate…when vaccination is required for travel to, or entry into, a foreign nation.”

• A Chinese man attending school in Boston, Massachusetts, has been indicted on accusations that he threatened a fellow Chinese student for posting pro-democracy flyers on campus. “Post more, I will chop your bastard hands off," he allegedly said.

  • According to the Justice Department, Xialoei Wu “also allegedly told the victim that he had informed the public security agency in China about the victim’s actions and that the public security agency in China would ‘greet’ the victim’s family.”

  • Flashback to October: DoJ accuses seven Chinese men and women of conducting surveillance for Beijing and intimidating a Chinese national living in the United States.

  • As Human Rights Watch reported in 2021, Chinese pro-democracy students going to school in Australia said it “weighed heavily” on their minds the thought of “authorities punishing or interrogating their parents back home,” leading to self-censorship.

• Canada is buying a National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System from the United States and sending it to Ukraine as a gift. How thoughtful.

  • “This is the first Canadian donation of an air defense system to Ukraine,” says Canada Defense Minister Anita Anand. “In the face of Russia’s brutal airstrikes on Ukraine, this air defense system will help to protect Ukrainian population centers and critical infrastructure against drone, missile, and aircraft attacks.

• This is useful: ChatGPT for Search Engines, a Chrome extension that displays results alongside Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo from the artificial intelligence wonder that has captivated the tech world.

  • I plan to write more about ChatGPT eventually. I’ve noticed an explosion of commentary and excitement in tech over this AI tool that interacts with humans in a conversational way to answer questions, generate ideas, and do all kinds of interesting things.

  • It’s far from perfect and has plenty of limitations. Sometimes its answers are flat-out wrong. But it is very cool and easy to use. Such AI technology will have national security implications, too. For example, it will likely lead to an explosion in state-sponsored propaganda littering the internet and cybersecurity threats. More to come on this.

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I love hearing from readers. Drop a question or comment on this dispatch by using the button below. You can also join the Subscriber Chat. Or send tips and links via email: paulszoldra@protonmail.com.

See you next week. —Paul

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SOMETIME AROUND 2008, the U.S. State Department sent an email to Daniel Duggan, a former Marine Harrier pilot, informing him that he was legally required to seek authorization before training a foreign air force. A couple of years later—according to a recently unsealed federal indictment—Duggan, who moved to Australia after leaving the Corps as a major in 2002, allegedly exchanged emails with a fellow ex-Navy fighter pilot about instructing “Chinese pilots in Field Carrier Landing Practice” in South Africa. By 2012, Duggan and others from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and China were allegedly involved in a scheme to train Chinese military pilots to master one of naval aviation’s most critical skills: landing on an aircraft carrier.

The fine art and science of landing on a carrier deck is best accomplished with three main components: advanced flight control systems, a well-trained naval aviator using their aircraft and instruments to land and catch an arresting wire safely, and a fellow pilot working below as a landing signal officer to talk them through a maneuver “similar to a controlled crash” onto a ship potentially sailing through a storm under blackout conditions with its runway pitching from side to side. It’s incredibly difficult and dangerous.

The Pentagon’s latest report on the Chinese military notes that its “growing force of aircraft carriers extend air defense coverage of deployed task groups beyond the range of land-based defenses and will enable operations at increasingly longer ranges.”

The key to that extended air defense is a skill that most militaries don’t have, but China—with its three aircraft carriers of the People’s Liberation Army Navy—now has indigenous pilots who were apparently trained by at least two of America’s best.

Duggan maintains his innocence, and his wife, Saffrine, says her husband has “been caught in a geopolitical storm for working in China, doing work that has been done there for decades by western, African and European pilots for decades with the full knowledge of these governments.”

But the U.S. government disagrees. “Neither Duggan nor any of the coconspirators sought or obtained an export license or other authorization” to export defense services, articles, “and/or military training to the [People’s Republic of China] or Chinese foreign nationals, as required,” the indictment says.

The former Marine could soon be extradited from Australia to the United States for trial and, if convicted, faces a lengthy prison sentence on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and violating arms export regulations. The indictment, filed in 2017 but only recently unsealed after Duggan’s arrest in Australia, reveals more specifics of his alleged side hustle training Chinese pilots in South Africa when he wasn’t flying corporate clients on mock “Top Gun” missions over Tasmania.

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Duggan, who boasted of “several hundred carrier landings…a third them being at night” on American, British, and Spanish carriers during a 12-year career in the Marines, got an interesting email in September 2010. A British executive of a South Africa-based test flight academy recently negotiated the purchase of a T-2 Buckeye jet trainer from an American aircraft dealer and needed help. Named as the firm’s chief operating officer and anonymized as “Coconspirator D” in court documents—the executive allegedly described “aircraft carrier training Coconspirator D had been conducting for Chinese pilots and solicited Duggan’s help in conducting that training.”

Two more events from Jan. 11, 2011, stand out in the indictment: Duggan giving a presentation called “The Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Mission Success,” according to an email from a Chinese national who owned a business in China that “acquired military training, equipment and technical data for the PRC government and military.” The other is a payment to Duggan of $9,500 Australian (about $6,377 US) from that same firm. It was the first of many alleged payments to Duggan for “personal development training” that would add up to more than $100,000 Australian from the company, which sometimes picked up the tab when Duggan traveled to Beijing, Shengyang, and Hulodao.

Also in the indictment:

• “In or around March 2011, DUGGAN drafted and gave to Coconspirator B a multi-page assessment that reviewed aspects of the PRC’s aircraft carrier training program and proposed carrier aviation training-related services.”

• “Between on or about March 5, 2012 and April 15, 2012, DUGGAN provided defense services in connection with the military training described…to Chinese pilots in South Africa.”

• “On or about September 10, 2012, DUGGAN, while in the PRC, was negotiating the terms of his services and wrote in an email that he hoped his children would be set for life as a result.”

It’s worth mentioning that these are allegations, and Duggan’s lawyers will challenge them vigorously in court. Indeed, his attorney is fighting extradition and maintains that his client is an Australian citizen who renounced his U.S. citizenship and broke no laws.

Nevertheless, the indictment gives us a window into how Beijing apparently convinced “at least 30” former Western jet and helicopter pilots to train its military using a colorful cast of characters:

Duggan is currently in jail in Australia. When and if he’s brought back to the U.S., I’ll be watching closely because I’m curious how and why a former Marine officer would do something like this. Still, most of this occurred at a time when the U.S. military delivered relief supplies to Beijing and invited Chinese officers on its ships. And the timeline of allegations against Duggan ended after 2012; an indictment was filed in 2017, and he was arrested in 2022. What took so long?

According to Reuters:

Duggan moved to Australia in 2002 after a decade in the U.S. Marines, later moving to Beijing in 2014 where he worked as an aviation consultant. He returned to Australia from China weeks before he was arrested, according to his lawyer.

Perhaps the former Marine thought those days in South Africa were old memories, but the U.S. government didn’t forget.

Meanwhile, according to media reports, the unnamed South African flying school is apparently the Test Flying Academy of South Africa. Australian police “have searched the property of, but not charged” Keith Hartley, a former British military pilot serving as the company’s COO, Reuters reported.

And what of the former U.S. Navy officer and fighter pilot known only as “Coconspirator E?” E also allegedly instructed Chinese pilots and made the introduction to Duggan, but little is known beyond that. Except for this, mentioned later in the indictment:

We know the name Daniel Duggan and the charges against him. But there may still be another indictment in a federal court being kept under seal—perhaps identifying a second U.S. instructor of Chinese military pilots. This person’s existence is reported here in The Ruck for the first time, but all we know is they flew F-18s for the U.S. Navy. Their identity remains unknown.

You can read the full indictment here.

• The State Department Inspector General opened an audit on Dec. 14 to determine "whether U.S. Embassies Kabul and Kyiv managed, safeguarded, and disposed of sensitive security assets in advance of the evacuation and suspension of operations at each post.”

• US Green Berets are testing a new highly mobile 120mm mortar system known as “Sling,” which comes mounted on the back of a vehicle and can apparently fire 16 rounds per minute out to 4+ miles. In an era of counter-battery radar, this is an impressive “shoot and scoot” indirect fire capability for small special operations teams.

• A remarkable visual investigation by The New York Times using security camera footage, documents, eyewitnesses, and cell phone cameras shows the culprit of war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine: Russia’s 234th Air Assault Regiment led by Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov.

  • “A chilling pattern emerged: soldiers routinely used the phones of victims to call home to Russia, often only hours after they were killed.”

• China’s War Against Taiwan Has Already Started by Anne Applebaum is a long read worth your time.

  • “Sometimes Chinese pressure on Taiwan has been military, involving the issuing of threats or the launching of missiles. But in recent years, China has combined those threats and missiles with other forms of pressure, escalating what the Taiwanese call ‘cognitive warfare’: not just propaganda but an attempt to create a mindset of surrender.”

• TikTok spied on Forbes journalists covering the company, “improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees.” If you’re shocked, you shouldn’t be…

The Ruck

The TikTok national security threat

WHAT’S DANGEROUS about people dancing in front of a cell phone camera? The U.S. government has been trying to answer that question for the past two years with TikTok, a wildly addictive app used by many U.S. military service members and an estimated 135 million other Americans…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes · Paul Szoldra

• Federal prosecutors arrested an employee of Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, “on suspicion of treason after an internal BND investigation revealed that he had allegedly been leaking classified information to Russia.”

  • According to Reuters, a tip from a “Western intelligence agency” of BND material in Moscow’s hands helped Berlin find the suspected mole. He was identified as Carsten L. and was reportedly head of technical reconnaissance for the German spy agency.

• The US Army is buying prototype “Tactical Dronut” systems that can fly in tight spaces. The small drone has no exposed propellers and “can operate in buildings, tunnels, and other enclosed spaces” to capture video and snag data for ground troops.

  • You can see one of them flying on the company website.

• A Chinese J-11 fighter pilot “performed an unsafe maneuver” that brought it within 20 feet of the nose of a US RC-135 aircraft flying over the South China Sea. The Air Force spy plane captured video of the PLAN jet while flying in international airspace.

  • China released its own video from the J-11 cockpit.

• President Biden signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act into law on Dec. 23, allotting $816.7 billion to the Department of Defense.

  • Here’s the bill summary from the Congressional Budget Office.

  • The Senate Armed Services Committee has a more concise 18-page summary here.

  • China predictably blasted the bill for providing aid to Taiwan and said it hyped the “China threat” (which is quite real). Beijing then tamped down the rhetoric and showed it desired peace. Just kidding! It launched a show of force against its island neighbor with “71 planes and seven ships” scrambling around Taiwan over a 24-hour period.

  • Chinese airpower can “communicate the ability to bring dominant military power to bear in and around Taiwan, countering the undercurrent of US strength,” an Air Force officer wrote of such sorties last year, saying they were a form of psychological warfare.

  • “The message [Chinese Air Force] incursions communicate is clear. Gone are the days of asymmetric airpower advantages that allowed US political leaders to defend Taiwan at a relatively low cost. Instead, the [Chinese Air Force] poses a credible threat to US air superiority and will impose great costs on defenders of the island.”

• The State Department has approved the sale of the Volcano anti-tank mine-laying system to Taiwan. The system can transform a vehicle or helicopter into “something like a Pez dispenser for mines,” according to Defense News.

• Taiwan has extended mandatory military service from four months to one year. "Peace will not drop from the sky... Taiwan is on the frontline of authoritarian expansion," said President Tsai Ing-wen.

  • Flashback: There’s much more to Taiwan’s defense.

• Documents stolen in a hack of Russian state broadcaster VGTRK “show that China and Russia have pledged to join forces in media content by inking cooperation agreements at the ministerial level,” according to the Intercept.

  • Signatories to the 2012 agreement “include large state media outlets as well as online media companies and businesses in the private sector. Among those who signed were the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which has a streaming service; Migu Video, a gaming company under the state-run China Mobile; and SPB TV, a streaming service headquartered in Switzerland and owned by a Russian national…The agreement lists 64 joint media projects that had either been launched or were in development.”

• New & notable reports:

  • Women in Special Operations: Improvements to Policy, Data, and Assessments Needed to Better Understand and Address Career Barriers (GAO)

  • Combat Drones in Ukraine (Air & Space Operations Review)

  • Hypersonics: Between Rhetoric and Reality (Air & Space Operations Review)

  • China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress (CRS)

  • Navy Large Unmanned Surface and Undersea Vehicles: Background and Issues for Congress (CRS)

  • The People's Liberation Army's Search for Overseas Basing and Access (Rand)

  • In Focus: The Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (CRS)

  • In Focus: The Economic Impact of Russia Sanctions (CRS)

  • In Focus: China’s Engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean (CRS)

  • In Focus: PATRIOT Air and Missile Defense System for Ukraine (CRS)

  • The Global Economic Disruptions from a Taiwan Conflict (Rhodium Group)

  • Leader Loss: Russian Junior Officer Casualties (CEPA)

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That’s everything in The Ruck this week. Thanks for reading. It’s wonderful to be back. Happy New Year!

If you found this valuable, I hope you’ll consider subscribing or sharing this dispatch with your network. Word of mouth is the best way you can help me grow in 2023. Thank you.

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—Paul

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Today I’m announcing a new addition to my Substack publication: The Ruck subscriber chat.

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While my weekly dispatches often expand in detail on a topic and run down news, sometimes (and I mean, a lot of times), I want to talk about national security developments and share my sense of what’s happening in the world. I also want to learn from you and other readers so The Ruck can be the best it can be in 2023 and beyond.

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MARTIN KOSZTA WAS NOT officially an American citizen, but that didn’t matter to the captain of the U.S. Navy warship demanding his release from the custody of a foreign government in July 1853.

It had been only a few days since Commander Duncan Ingraham and the crew of the USS St. Louis had arrived in the Turkish port city of Smyrna. But word quickly spread that Koszta, a Hungarian by birth who had immigrated to the United States in 1849, had been taken prisoner on an Austrian warship named Hussar.

Koszta had fought as a soldier in Hungary’s failed bid for independence from the Austrian Empire and fled to the U.S. Having lived there for nearly two of the required five years, he had declared his intention to become an American and received his “first paper” toward citizenship. But he had returned on private business to Turkey, and the Austrian Empire cared only about his revolutionary past. He was brutally kidnapped and placed under guard in the harbor “pending his forced return to Austria for probable execution,” according to The Foreign Service Journal.

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As American diplomats protested in vain to Austrian and Turkish officials, Ingraham visited Koszta on July 1 aboard the Hussar, where “a brief but dramatic conversation took place between the prisoner and the American,” according to the Journal:

Ingraham asked Koszta how long he had been in the United States. One year and eleven months, he replied.

With the intention of settling there permanently? Yes.

When and where did he file a “first paper,” the declaration of his desire to become an American citizen? On July 31, 1852, in the Court of Common Pleas for the City and County of New York.

“Do you want the protection of the American flag?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Then you shall have it,” declared the Commander.

I’ve been thinking about this historical footnote lately; I’ll return to it in a moment. First, I want to direct your attention to an official United States government website for American families who pray they never view it.

“If you’ve come to this page, the State Department has informed you that your loved one has been determined to be wrongfully detained,” says The State Department’s Hostage Affairs Family Portal. “You are in an unexpected and extraordinarily stressful situation.”

The families of some 60 Americans have read such words, probably in tears at each horrible sentence. “You are trying to understand the circumstances of your loved one’s wrongful detention, identify people and institutions who can help, and understand possible actions you and your advocates can take to resolve this crisis.”

“You want to have the confidence you and your government are doing everything possible to secure your loved one’s release and safe return home,” it adds.

Mark Swidan. Walid Fiatihi. Austin Tice. Paul Whelan. Jeff Woodke. Theary Seng. Some we don’t even know about. Nowadays, dozens of American citizens remain wrongly detained around the world. And the U.S. Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is tasked with getting them out. It’s worth recalling the “Koszta Affair” since it informs today’s state of play.

The morning after Ingraham’s visit with Koszta on July 2, 1853, was “a day I shall long remember,” an officer on the USS St. Louis wrote in his diary. Onboard the ship, sailors were cutting loose the deck guns and readying shells as the captain of the Hussar read a note from Commander Ingraham.

“Sir: I have been directed by the American Charge at Constantinople to demand the person of Martin Koszta, a citizen of the United States, taken by force on Turkish soil and now confined on board the brig Hussar, and if a refusal is given, to take him by force. An answer to this demand must be returned by 4 o’clock p.m.”

Notably, it wasn’t a fair fight: The Hussar was sailing with two other Austrian warships, armed with twelve more guns than the St. Louis. Yet shortly before the deadline, a lifeboat was lowered from the Hussar. Inside were several uniformed figures with a disheveled young man. It was Martin Koszta. A deal had been reached. He was on his way home. “The danger of bloodshed and its incalculable consequences were over,” The Foreign Service Journal said.

“It created at the time quite a sensa­tion both at home and throughout Europe and…everyone ap­plauded Captain Ingraham for his decisive action on that occasion,” read the St. Louis officer’s diary entry. “We were all cer­tain of victory in case it came to blows, but many a gallant life would have been sacri­ficed, and many a family at home plunged into mourning for a beloved son or husband!’’

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Sailors nearly went to war to protect the life and liberty of one man of questionable U.S. citizenship. And so the precedent was set: Americans jailed abroad were worth a lot to the United States of America.

“Our Government is bound to protect the rights of our naturalized citizens everywhere to the same extent as though they had drawn their first breath in this country,” President James Buchanan told Congress a few years later. “We recognize no distinction between our native and naturalized citizens.”

Fast forward 160 years, and “there are two things that we care about,” says Roger Carstens, a retired Army Special Forces officer who has been Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs since 2020. “Are they wrongfully detained, and do they have a blue passport? Because if you have a blue passport and another country or terrorist group takes you, you’ve got to know your country is coming to get you.”

Nowadays, American special operators sometimes pull off daring rescues to free hostages from captivity. But in the nuclear age, the U.S. doesn’t typically send warships into foreign ports brandishing deck guns. Instead, the State Department works behind the scenes to bring loved ones home, even if the country “wrongfully detaining your loved one may be as committed to wrongfully detaining your loved one as the U.S. government is to securing their release.”

That is a good way of describing Russia. Because after months of negotiations involving a potential swap of Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, Moscow said it would release one American, and one only: Griner.

"I landed at 4:30 in the morning, and at 9:30, Paul called from the penal colony in Russia. I explained to him, I said, 'Paul, it was one or nothing. We were not going to be able to get you out. We're going to keep working on it, but I understand you're a little frustrated with that," Carstens said in a recent interview.

Carstens noted that national security experts assessed that releasing Bout six years ahead of schedule was not a major risk to American security. And “to me,” Carstens said, “what's unacceptable is not Viktor Bout. What's unacceptable is an American wrongfully detained and held in a foreign jail cell. We have a moral obligation. Having a blue passport means something. While it's tough to make some of the decisions that we've made, we start from the premise and from the belief that it's our moral obligation to get an American.”

May they all come home soon.

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• At least six Indian soldiers were injured after a clash with hundreds of Chinese troops in a disputed border area on Dec. 9, according to Times of India.

  • A similar brawl in June 2020 killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.

  • “Face-offs with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have become a common feature along the border in Arunachal Pradesh, particularly in the Yangtse area,” a senior Indian Army officer recently told The Telegraph. “They have happened on average two or three times a month, recently, and the incursions have increased in frequency over the last two years.”

• American special operators conducted a pre-dawn helicopter raid in Syria on Dec. 11 that killed two ISIS officials, says U.S. Central Command.

• Recruited for Navy SEALs, Many Sailors Wind Up Scraping Paint is an article in The New York Times with a compelling narrative and eye-catching news:

  • “On average, about 70 percent of each class over the last decade has rung the bell. But the rate suddenly soared in 2021, reaching as high as 93 percent.”

  • “Classes that started with 150 recruits were finishing with fewer than 10. In Navy records, nearly all the dropouts appeared to be voluntary, but sailors said that, in reality, a majority were sick or injured. It was not unusual, they said, to see men carried to the bell because they could not walk.”

• A Libyan man who allegedly “played a key role” in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is now in U.S. custody.

• “Americans are now closely divided on whether Washington should support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes,’ according to a recent survey.

  • “A large majority of those who think Ukraine has the advantage in the current conflict say the United States should support Ukraine for as long as it takes (71% vs. 48% overall). By contrast, a majority of those who think Russia has the advantage think the United States should pressure Ukraine to settle for peace as soon as possible (60% vs. 47% overall).”

• The U.S. Air Force conducted its first successful launch of its hypersonic Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) on Dec 9.

  • A B-52H Stratofortress let the prototype missile fly for the first time off Southern California, where “it reached hypersonic speeds greater than five times the speed of sound, completed its flight path and detonated in the terminal area,” the service said. “Indications show that all objectives were met.”

• Not even a year into the war, Russia “may soon be forced to use older, unreliable rockets and artillery shells” from 40 years ago.

• The Army is fielding the RQ-28A short-range recon quadcopter from Skydio. The drone is a "rucksack portable" design with vertical take-off and landing capability that can fly for about 35 minutes. An outstanding capability to give infantry platoons and squads.

That’s it for The Ruck this week. Thanks so much for reading.

This will be my last dispatch of 2022. I’m taking a holiday publishing break. But I plan to be back in your inbox on Jan. 5, 2023. Happy New Year!

I’ll see you then. —Paul

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HOBNOBBING WITH THE NATIONAL SECURITY ELITE at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. I find myself drinking a beer next to the Director of the National Security Agency and constantly saying excuse me after bumping into defense contractors.

I spot Senator Lindsey Graham and text my wife that he’s two feet away. Strangely, an alert hits my phone from Google Photos, reminding me where I was exactly 18 years earlier: loading up the Humvee before another patrol in Afghanistan. In the frame, Doc P. and G. are hunkered down in the back of a thin-skinned truck before we head outside the wire into the mountain snow.

I take a selfie. Now out of camouflage and unblemished by the windblown dust of Khost Province, I’m wearing a suit jacket and tie as I mingle with the masters of the military-industrial complex.

It’s easy to spot the generals and admirals, always followed by six or seven people as they walk past. Aides of generals, aides of aides, uniformed drivers, and people holding papers of vital national interest. Marines and soldiers in uniform. Marines and soldiers in suits. Sailors of the Year flown in from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Junior ROTC guards holding the door open while saying, “good evening, sir.” Air Force officers looking at me suspiciously. Civilian public relations types and think tankers. Karl Rove. And was that a Space Force guy?

We are gathered here to close out 2022 and talk about the trials and tribulations of the national security establishment. The humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 punched a hole through the heart of the military and veteran world. At the top, perhaps a brief period of soul-searching occurred: What does the United States do now? What is our role in the world? Do we look inward and become more isolated?

Those questions will persist. But Feb. 24, 2022, largely ended such debate for most people in this room, now sipping whiskey and wine underneath the plane that spirited President Ronald Reagan around the world to bring a message of peace through strength. Russia’s rapid blitzkrieg into Ukraine earlier this year has morphed into a modern-day version of the Soviet nightmare in Afghanistan. And the defense establishment of the western world once again sees triumph over Moscow on the horizon.

Next year? A couple of years from now? It’s hard to say. But there is one thing everyone knows: The Russians hope this war ends soon so they can go home. The Ukrainians hope this war ends soon because they are home.

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Here in the California hills, it’s obvious what needs to be done for those on the frontlines 6,000 miles away: Kyiv needs more guns. More ammo. Air defenses. Advanced drones. Specifically, Gray Eagles. Send them Gray Eagles, one senator urges repeatedly. Faster. The spring counteroffensive is coming. Ukraine needs anything and everything the west can give.

“Ukraine is spending the money really well,” says Congressman Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “That’s why they are winning.”

Meanwhile, the American defense industrial base struggles to keep up with demand. One executive warns that we’ve burned through five years of our Javelin stockpile and 13 years of Stinger missiles. Thirteen. Russia, fortunately, has burned through much of its own stocks.

“Certainly, we all would like to have greater stockpiles than we had in the last several years,” says Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, noting efforts within NATO to encourage European partners to up their capacity for making bullets, bombs, and missiles. “We shouldn’t have to do this by ourselves.”

For some reason, Wormuth dodges when a reporter asks whether the U.S. wants Ukraine to win. It’s quite obvious that most western officials would love that. Why else are they providing Kyiv with billions of dollars in weapons and training? I imagine her saying, of course, we want Ukraine to beat Russia! We’ve been working on that ever since Moscow sent “little green men” into the country in 2014 and seized Crimea and the Donbas in gross violation of international law.

Instead, Wormuth says this:

“I think what the U.S. wants to do is to put the Ukrainians in the strongest possible position to be able to defend their sovereignty and be able to engage with the Russians from a position of strength…”

“Given what is at stake in Ukraine, not just for the Ukrainians but for NATO and for the entire free world, it’s in our interests to give them what they need to defend their territory and push the Russians out.”

And so the fight continues; Ukrainian defenders seize and hold land daily. Crimea is next in their sights.

What is China learning from this? Have a better plan for seizing Taiwan than the morons in Moscow, obviously. Should we worry about Beijing making a move? No, says Senator Joni Ernst. “We should be pounding the hell out of the Russians. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Ukraine’s mastery of the information and messaging space is being closely studied. And in Russia’s missiles and drones attacking civilian infrastructure, we can also discern a message: This is how Russia influences the populations it wishes to keep under its heel. The suicide drones and long-range missiles inflict physical damage and terror, but of far greater concern here is Moscow’s goal to break western will. The Ukrainians hold fast. Will their backers in the western world continue to do the same?

“This is no time to hold back on our resources or our resolve…” says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “Let’s be clear: We will not be dragged into Putin's war. But we will stand with Ukraine as it fights to defend its citizens and its sovereignty. And we will stand strong with our NATO allies. And we will defend every inch of NATO territory.”

He pauses for a beat, and the room thunders with applause.

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• The US is considering a “dramatic expansion” of training for Ukrainian forces. As many as 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers a month can potentially be trained at a U.S. base in Germany on infantry maneuvers and artillery support. The training plan is currently under interagency review.

• Northrup Grumman publicly revealed its B-21 Raider, the first new bomber fielded by the U.S. in 30 years. Built to replace the B-2 Spirit, the Raider is a stealth, long-range strategic bomber that can slip into enemy territory undetected to deliver conventional or nuclear weapons.

  • "It won't need to be based in-theater. It won't need logistical support to hold any target at risk," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the unveiling. “Fifty years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft. Even the most sophisticated air-defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky." 

• In other news, we're minus one Marine Corps F-35B in Japan for the time being.

• Iranian assassination and kidnapping plots are raising alarms among western officials. Tehran has stepped up such efforts to target former American government officials and dissidents by “offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to jewel thieves, drug dealers and other criminals in murder-for-hire schemes,” officials told The Washington Post.

  • “I’m still shocked that the Islamic Republic has tried on two occasions to eliminate me, an American citizen, on U.S. soil. And not paid a price,” says Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, who lives in New York City.

• “Evidently, no country in NATO, other than the US, has sufficient initial weapons stocks for warfighting or the industrial capacity to sustain large-scale operations,” according to RUSI analysts sharing lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “This must be rectified if deterrence is to be credible and is equally a problem for the RAF and Royal Navy.”

• Defense Secretary Austin has established the Office of Strategic Capital, essentially a Pentagon version of a venture capital firm, to invest in companies working on advanced technology vital to national security. “While existing offices rely on grants and contracts to deploy capital, OSC is investigating the use of non-acquisition-based tools, such as loans and loan guarantees,” the Pentagon says.

• Two Navy ships recently played a game of warship chicken in San Diego Bay. Live-streaming video caught the USS Momsen and USS Harpers Ferry “headed straight toward each other before each ship turns left.” This was way too damn close.

• The Defense Intelligence Agency wants to “take the lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine crisis, particularly as it...relates to indications and warning, and apply that to China, China-Taiwan- type scenarios,” says a top official. “This is a warning problem of our lifetime.”

• Poland has taken in the highest number of Ukrainian refugees of any European nation, with nearly 1.5 million people taken in. Germany has sheltered more than a million Ukrainians, according to CRS.

  • “Although many of the refugees have been welcomed, the willingness and capacity of European countries to host Ukrainian refugees over the long term is unclear.”

• Edward Snowden has sworn allegiance to Russia and received a passport, according to his lawyer. Many assumed he had sworn an oath to Russia over a decade ago, but it’s nice to see that it’s now official.

• "The former Director of Operations of the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) Office in Busan, South Korea, was sentenced today to five years in prison for his role in a bribery conspiracy and lying to federal investigators,” the Justice Department said on Dec. 2.

  • Xavier Monroy “used his position of influence as a public official…by steering over $3.3 million in husbanding services contracts for U.S. military ships to DK Marine,” a South Korea-based company that services and supplies ships.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping is not so low-key urging Putin to negotiate and shut up about nukes. “Solving the Ukraine crisis through political means is in the best interest of Europe and the common interest of all countries in Eurasia,” Xi said after meeting European Council President Charles Michel in Beijing. He added that “it is necessary to avoid escalation and expansion of the crisis.”

• “Thanks to a Ukrainian in occupied Kherson, we now know how Russian occupiers are using Telegram to surveil Ukrainians—and how dangerous its design flaws are,” writes Matt Tait, a former GCHQ information security specialist at :

  • “If you take away just one thing from this post, let it be this: Telegram is not safe to use as a chat or call app. It nearly cost Ihor his life. Ukrainians—and frankly everyone else too—should find another encrypted application for chats and calls. A good choice would be something like WhatsApp, but Apple’s iMessage or Signal are also good choices if your contacts are also using those.”

• FBI Director Chris Wray is worried about China’s ability to control the TikTok recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations,” Wray said.

  • “All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray said on Dec. 3.

  • According to a new WSJ report, negotiations between TikTok and the U.S. government have again been delayed.

The Ruck

The TikTok national security threat

WHAT’S DANGEROUS about people dancing in front of a cell phone camera? The U.S. government has been trying to answer that question for the past two years with TikTok, a wildly addictive app used by many U.S. military service members and an estimated 135 million other Americans…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes · Paul Szoldra

• The Army’s “Be All You Can Be” slogan is making a comeback. The familiar phrase from recruiting commercials of the 1980s and 1990s won out during audience testing and research of about 200 different taglines, according to Gen. Alex Fink, the Army’s chief of enterprise marketing.

  • “We're trying to establish a brand refresh that's going to last for a long time,” Fink said. “If we do this well, we think this could last for 15 to 20 years or more.”

  • Let’s hope so. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers in FY2022.

• Meanwhile, the Navy will bring in sailors who score as little as 10 points on a 99 scale for the military entrance test. “Great,” was how one sailor responded to the news in a Navy Facebook group. “More fucking idiots to piss me off.”

• Two Russian airbases far from the frontlines were attacked on Monday. Ukraine did not claim responsibility, but Moscow says long-range Ukrainian drones damaged at least two warplanes in the attack. Moscow responded with a mass strike against Ukraine with air and sea-launched missiles.

  • According to The Guardian: “If confirmed as a Ukrainian operation, the strike on the Engels airbase would be the most daring attack behind Russian lines to date. The airbase is a crucial site for Russian air force operations against Ukraine and for the country’s strategic nuclear forces. It has a nuclear weapons storage bunker with warheads that can be deployed on Russia’s long-range strategic bombers.”

  • Retired Australian Army General Mick Ryan has a great writeup in on what conclusions to draw.

    • "The first implication is that Ukraine clearly now has ability to undertake targeting at very long distances...This doesn’t mean at all that Ukraine is going to attack Moscow. But it will cause some sleepless nights in the capital."

    • “It is not, as some are sure to claim, an escalation. But it is a necessary political and military measure for Ukraine to limit the humanitarian harm of Russia’s brutal drone and missile attacks.”

• The US and Australia are expanding military ties, notably increasing the "rotational presence of U.S. forces in Australia," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says. "That includes rotations of bomber task forces, fighters and future rotations of U.S. Navy and U.S. Army capabilities."

• US Central Command says an Iranian patrol boat "attempted to blind the bridge" of a Navy warship in the Strait of Hormuz on Dec. 5 "by shining a spotlight.” The boat also “crossed within 150 yards” of the USS Lewis B. Puller and USS The Sullivans, which was “dangerously close, particularly at night.”

• And finally, these are the 4,408 glorious pages we’ve all been waiting for: The House and Senate text of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2023 is hot off the presses.

  • Here’s a summary from the House Armed Services Committee.

  • “The $858 billion plan — which includes roughly $817 billion in Defense Department spending — also includes billions of dollars in additional funding to help the Pentagon cope with inflation and continue certain programs that the Biden administration had sought to cancel. The latest version of the bill comes as the U.S. aims to bolster critical munitions production and lessen the defense supply chain’s reliance on China,” writes Defense News, noting the bill could be signed into law before the end of the month and would increase the military budget by 8%.

You’re all caught up. On a supremely awesome personal note, I recently talked about military conspiracy theories on the podcast of comedian Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show. I hope you’ll check it out.

See you next week!

—Paul

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Dear reader,

This will be a Rundown-only dispatch with news on a jailed Chinese spy, more gear going to Ukraine, potential Russian prison swaps, and more. I’m traveling this week but will be back on a regular schedule in December. Until then, there’s a lot of national security news to catch you up on. Let’s go…

🚨 The Rundown

• Drones and artificial intelligence helped stop 70 tons of explosives from reaching Yemen.

  • Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, recently shared details of a Nov. 8 operation to seize a stateless dhow in the Gulf of Oman. The boat was apparently picked up by “networked sensors” of surface drones, buoys, and other probes that detect illegal activity.

  • “The team in the operations center received an immediate signal. So did the drones,” Kurilla said. “And, without any orders and without the team in the operations center even pushing a button, the closest drone took pictures.”

  • A patrol craft arrived in 30 minutes to encircle the four-man crew. It took another five days for sailors and Coast Guardsmen to unload what was packed in the cargo hold: A massive haul of explosive material believed to have been sent from Iran to Houthi rebels—Tehran’s proxy force against regional rival Saudi Arabia.

  • "This was … enough to fuel more than a dozen medium-range ballistic missiles depending on the size," said Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, 5th Fleet commander.

• The first Chinese intelligence officer ever extradited to the United States to stand trial was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Nov. 16.

  • Xu Yanjun, 42, a deputy division director of China’s Ministry of State Security, used “aliases, front companies, and universities to deceive aviation employees and solicit information,” such as aircraft design secrets from GE Aviation.

  • “The Chinese government tasked an officer of its spy service to steal U.S. trade secrets so it could advance its own commercial and military aviation efforts, at the expense of an American company,” said FBI Director Chris Wray. “As long as the Chinese government continues to break our laws and threaten American industry and institutions, the FBI will work with its partners across the globe to bring those responsible to justice.”

  • Xu also facilitated Beijing’s hacking of a French aerospace company and served as a handler for a spy inside the U.S. Army.

    The Ruck

    How China got a spy inside the US Army

    CHINA STEALS SECRETS through a “network of defense attachés, academics, and spies operating in and out of China,” according to federal court documents, and one of them was until 2018 serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national, was…

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    4 years ago · 5 likes · Paul Szoldra

  • I detailed that specific case in The Ruck dispatch linked above; I also recommend this fascinating article by Bloomberg on Xu and how he was ultimately caught. The huge amount of evidence the FBI discovered on his iCloud account is a gold mine of Chinese spying insight.

• Taiwan prosecutors charged Army Col. Hsiang Te-en with corruption and accused him of signing a “pledge of surrender” to China in a potential war in the Taiwan Strait.

  • Hsiang, the head of Taiwan’s Army Infantry Training Command’s Operations Research and Development Division, was paid about $20,000 and filmed a video in his military uniform in which he said he would “serve the motherland” to usher in “peaceful reunification as early as possible,” according to the indictment.

• Speaking of Taiwan, the United States "adopting 'strategic clarity' is more likely to provoke than to deter a PRC attack on Taiwan,” says Bonnie Glaser.

• Swedish investigators say they found “explosive residue” at the site of the damaged Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea. The pipeline supplying Russian gas to Europe suffered several leaks after underwater explosions were detected by seismologists on Sept. 26. I think we can now drop the hedging of “sabotage seems certain.”

  • So, who did it? Three nations are investigating that question right now. Two of those countries, Denmark and Sweden, say that “several hundred kilograms” of explosives were used, but attribution remains murky. Russia is the primary suspect.

• The Pentagon says another $400 million in gear is heading to Ukraine.

  • Big ticket items include additional munitions for Kyiv’s recently-acquired National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems that protect the skies from drones and missiles, along with High Mobility Artillery Rockets, precision-guided artillery, and hundreds of trucks.

  • There’s also this interesting bit: “150 heavy machine guns with thermal imagery sights to counter Unmanned Aerial Systems.”

  • The U.S. has provided Ukraine about $20 billion in security assistance since 2014.

• In other words, “it’s costing peanuts for the US to defeat Russia,” notes Timothy Ash in a cost-benefit analysis published at the Center for European Analysis.

  • “The assistance represents 5.6% of total US defense spending. But Russia is a primary adversary of the US, a top-tier rival not too far behind China, its number one strategic challenger,” Ash writes. “In cold, geopolitical terms, this war provides a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives.”

  • “…on so many levels, continued US support for Ukraine is a no-brainer from a bang for buck perspective. Ukraine is no Vietnam or Afghanistan for the US, but it is exactly that for Russia. A Russia continually mired in a war it cannot win is a huge strategic win for the US.”

• That operational success has revealed an “uncomfortable reality,” according to the National Defense Industrial Association: “significantly depleted” U.S. defense stockpiles.

  • “According to the Defense Department, in the six months from March to September, the United States supplied Ukraine with more than 800,000 155mm artillery rounds. From Sept. 28 to Oct. 28, it donated another 100,000 rounds. The September production capacity, meanwhile, was only 14,400 rounds per month. While the exact number of 155mm artillery rounds the United States possesses is unknown, this gap between utilization and production will significantly deplete its reserves over time.”

  • “The U.S. defense industrial base is operating in a distinctly different environment than it was five years ago — great power competition is again paramount, and there is an unexpected need to replenish U.S. military stockpiles.”

• Meanwhile, Russia is warming to a prisoner swap with the United States: Moscow wants back a man nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”—Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer—in exchange for Americans Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.

  • President Joe Biden gave his blessing to the potential trade in the summer.

  • Two-for-one is a reasonable trade. But it still stinks to free a man who made millions by selling weapons to very bad people. It wouldn’t be the first time. Here are some other prisoner swaps that freed Americans.

  • Warming does not mean happening. At least not yet. “Russia and the United States have discussed swapping Griner and Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, for Bout, but no deal has materialized amid heightened tensions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine,” Reuters reported.

• Over the weekend, protests erupted across China to oppose the government’s unpopular “zero-Covid” policy. Hundreds of people gathered in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and various other cities to demand the policy be loosened, shouting slogans like “say no to covid tests, yes to food. No to lockdowns, yes to freedom.”

  • The context from China expert Bill Bishop in: “China has hundreds protests every day around the country, but some of the protests over the last few days have been remarkable for their size, messaging, and geographic and demographic distribution. Perhaps most worrying for the leadership and the security services, for whom ‘political security’ is task number one, are the gatherings at many universities around the country, given the long history of student movements in modern China.”

  • According to Foreign Policy: “Police initially seemed uncertain about how to handle the protests, but they quickly pivoted to breaking up crowds and carrying out widespread arrests. The approach still varies from city to city. As of early Monday night in China, these suppression measures seemed to seriously reduce the protests.”

• And finally, the Pentagon published its “China Military Power Report” on Tuesday, detailing security and military developments from Beijing. The “authoritative assessment” from the Department of Defense digs into China’s strategy, military forces and capabilities, and technology.

  • Here’s the link to the full 196-page report.

I’ll probably have more from that report once I have time to dig into it. But please let me know via email if something in there catches your attention: paulszoldra@protonmail.com.

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As always, thanks for reading and supporting The Ruck. See you next week!

—Paul

I’ll never forget Thanksgiving in 2004. We were out on patrol in eastern Afghanistan. It was just another day for Marine infantrymen tasked with winning hearts and minds and driving around, praying for the Taliban to start a fight. As usual, they didn’t.

We got back to the base late—so late in fact, that when we walked into the chow hall, the officers had stopped serving everyone Thanksgiving dinner and the crowd had moved on. About a dozen Marine grunts stumbled in from the dark and looked around. Turkey would have been nice, but we made due with Otis Spunkmeyer muffins and near beer. We ate and we cracked jokes and we talked about home and we wondered about our families on Thanksgiving as they worried about us.

I’m thankful for that memory. I’m also thankful that I’m able to share it with you here in The Ruck, where I’ve been publishing weekly dispatches on national security since August. So, on this Thanksgiving, I wanted to tell you that I’m grateful for you joining me and wish you well wherever you are. May it be filled with turkey, family, and friends. Or if you’re in a pinch, muffins will do fine.

I wrote a guest column for Semafor that was published today. I explain why the much-speculated invasion of Taiwan is still a way’s off. Here’s how it begins:

Are the United States and China about to go to war over Taiwan? Speculation over a potential war in the future has been replaced by talk that it may happen soon: The U.S. Chief of Naval Operations even suggested it could happen next year. As the Washington consensus hardens against China in the runup to the 2024 U.S. elections, such talk will likely proliferate.

Despite a troubling situation along the Taiwan Strait, speculation is just that. Taiwan will be under considerable pressure from Beijing in the coming years — especially during its own presidential race in 2024 — but an invasion is not coming. At least not yet.

And finally, a programming note: This Thanksgiving edition doesn’t have a rundown of national security news, but I will have an expanded dispatch of exactly that coming out on Tuesday. There won’t be the usual Thursday dispatch since I’ll be traveling mid-week to watch a friend retire from the Marine Corps, and on Friday, will be headed to Simi Valley, California, for the Reagan National Defense Forum. Send me an email if you’ll be there, too. I’m at paulszoldra@protonmail.com.

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See you next week!

SPEND ENOUGH TIME AROUND THE MILITARY and you’ll hear warnings about “skylining” yourself.

In combat, it means not walking conspicuously on hilltops and ridges, which can attract enemy attention. The phrase usually implies avoiding unethical, illegal, or immoral acts that will get you on the “skyline” of higher-ups or the press. And the Navy SEAL community—an active-duty force of about 2,500 elite commandos—has often been on the skyline.

“War crimes, drug use, sexual assault on deployment, and homicide are just some of the charges against active-duty SEALs in recent years,” wrote Matthew Cole, journalist and author of Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six, in an article published in February at The Intercept:

“In a span of two years, two SEAL Team 6 operators killed a Green Beret while deployed to Mali; a group of SEALs turned in their platoon chief, Eddie Gallagher, accusing him of an array of war crimes, including the stabbing death of an unarmed, injured Islamic State fighter; rampant drug use was discovered in an East Coast SEAL unit; and an entire SEAL platoon was sent home from a deployment to Iraq after military leaders learned that they’d been drinking excessively and one of the operators was accused of sexual assault.”

More recently, an article in The New York Times exposed a “culture of brutality, cheating and drugs” during initial SEAL training at BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL. The August exposé came after a candidate died in training; officials uncovered drugs in his car and found about 40 others using drugs to pass the grueling course.

“What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” a senior SEAL leader told The Times. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”

The case remains under investigation, but the SEALs have been here before: Scandal erupts, officials promise to reform and institute changes, and the world moves on… until the next scandal. Such was the case in late 2004 when incidents of “drug and alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, domestic violence, and physical altercations caused the removal of 33 SEALs from service” over 15 months, wrote Naval Academy researchers. “It was recognized by many in the community that these losses exceeded those lost in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and something needed to be done.”

In response, officials gathered dozens of SEALs on San Clemente Island, California, in 2005 to create a new SEAL Ethos, hoping it would remind every SEAL to “lead by example in all situations” and “serve with honor on and off the battlefield.” But a research paper published a decade later by a SEAL officer revealed that it wasn’t the magic bullet officials had hoped.

“Ultimately, we SEALs are both a source of the problem and the solution in this fight for the soul of Naval Special Warfare,” wrote then-Lt. Forrest Crowell of an increasing shift away from the ethos and loss of the “quiet professional” mindset common in special operations units. “If we do not fix ourselves, who will fix us?”

Fast forward to 2019. Officials are again on the defensive in the wake of a scandal. Adm. Colin Green, the top commander of Naval Special Warfare (NSW), submits a memo on ethics in the SEALs to his boss at U.S. Special Operations Command.

In the 22-page document recently obtained by The Ruck through a Freedom of Information Act request, Green outlined the stakes: “While a tactical decision may win or lose a firefight, one ethical breach may provide our enemies with examples to sway an undecided population away from our interests and foster fear and hate to support an insurgency. We have seen this play out in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the burning of Qur'ans in Afghanistan, and more recently, countless examples of propaganda [by] counter-revisionist states.”

Green may have been talking about the Middle East, but a SEAL scandal in the Pacific can give propagandists in Beijing and international media plenty to work with. And not only that, SEALs doing drugs or worse can lead to national security leaders and the public questioning their effectiveness on the battlefield.

“We advantage NSW when we acknowledge that the ethical standards of an operator are as valuable to our Force as their tactical performance,” Green wrote. And yet the assessment revealed that the ethos of 2005 was “not universally accepted” and noted that some members thought it hindered their creativity and aggression in combat.

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Here’s what else officials found:

• “Undefined ethical standards.” Despite clearly defined tactical performance standards, the memo revealed nothing similar for operators on ethics.

• “Tribal whitespace” between completion of initial operator training—where SEALs receive constant ethical mentorship—and SEALs’ experience in their assigned team, where they spend about four to eight years with little reinforcement of ethics training. “We assess this as our most critical gap” in an operator’s career, Green’s memo said.

• “Cultural alignment and misguided loyalty.”

  • “A few members of the unit may have a negative impact on an otherwise positive unit culture. If these negative culture influencers have tactical credibility from their experiences on the battlefield, newer members of the unit may develop negative habits as they are drawn away from the ethical foundation that was laid during formal codified schoolhouse training.”

The memo recommended several changes, including discussing ethical events proactively, implementing new training requirements, and expanding 360-degree peer evaluations across the force. NSW officials ignored my queries on what progress has been made. Still, a military unit's ethical success or failure depends on supervision, and as one SEAL told CBS two years after the memo was delivered, “our lack of order and discipline comes from weak leadership and not enforcing the standards.”

"It's gonna take good guys in the teams staying there, fighting the good fight, calling them out. And then some outside entity coming in and doing a full review of everything," said retired SEAL Eric Deming. "It's gotta come from outside, and there's gotta be somebody that's got some integrity."

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🚨 The Rundown

• President Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali on Monday.

  • “The two leaders spoke candidly about their respective priorities and intentions across a range of issues,” according to the White House readout of the meeting. “President Biden explained that the United States will continue to compete vigorously with the PRC, including by investing in sources of strength at home and aligning efforts with allies and partners around the world. He reiterated that this competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication.”

  • “President Biden and President Xi reiterated their agreement that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won and underscored their opposition to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.”

  • Here’s the Chinese readout of the meeting.

  • After the meeting, Biden said, “we're going to compete vigorously. But I'm not looking for conflict, I'm looking to manage this competition responsibly.”

  • "I do not think there's any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan," he told reporters.

• Just in time, the 2022 Annual Report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission just dropped. There’s a lot in this 785-page (!) report, which I’m still digging into. But there’s also this 40-page executive summary as an easier read.

  • Here’s the Taiwan chapter of the report.

• On Tuesday, an Iranian-made Shahed “suicide drone” attacked a Liberian-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman. “This unmanned aerial vehicle attack against a civilian vessel in this critical maritime strait demonstrates, once again, the destabilizing nature of Iranian malign activity in the region,” said Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command.

• The Department of Defense has experienced “over 12,000 cyber incidents since 2015,” says a new GAO report. While hackers continue targeting the military and defense industrial base, the watchdog found that the DoD leadership doesn’t have an “accurate picture” of the problem and hasn’t “fully implemented” processes for managing incidents.

• Here’s an interesting video: Ukrainians using an automatic grenade launcher as an indirect fire weapon, correcting after impact using a DJI drone. It takes them about 90 seconds to get the gun up and fire then leave the area before the Russians can respond.

  • “This is your modern robotics battlefield,” says Marine Lt. Col. Travis Hord. “Ignore it at your own peril.”

• A missile strike on a Polish border town sparked fears the War in Ukraine was expanding. Russia denied the strike, and it’s looking more likely that the missile may have been fired by Ukrainians defending their cities from a Russian missile barrage.

  • “We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda. “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”

  • The Ukrainian General Staff says Russian forces launched over 90 cruise missiles and nearly a dozen drones on Tuesday against critical infrastructure in several cities, according to the latest battlefield assessment from the Institute for the Study of War.

  • “Ukrainian Air Force Command reported that Ukrainian air defense and ground forces shot down 75 missiles and 10 Shahed-136 drones,” the assessment said. “US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted on November 16 that the US-provided National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) had a 100% success rate in intercepting Russian missiles. As ISW previously reported, Russian forces likely used a substantial portion of their high-precision weapon systems in the November 15 attack.”

  • “This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears ultimate responsibility,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

• And finally:

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“You will see an AI-generated ‘deep fake’ that looks and talks like me,” he said on Twitter, using a term coined in 2017 to describe imagery that has been deceptively edited to alter a person’s identity. The tech has been used to place Vladimir Putin on SNL for laughs among other amusements. Scammers have pretended to be CEOs and Navy admirals to trick people out of cash. But this seemed different; it was a live video call.

“It is not me,” McFaul said. “This is a new Russian weapon of war. Be careful.”

McFaul later said he wasn’t entirely sure who was behind the calls. But given his passionate support of Ukraine in its fight to eject Russia after eight years of war, he believed it was “obviously designed to undermine Ukraine’s diplomatic and war efforts.”

Was it the work of pranksters? Russian spies? One thing was clear: It wasn’t the first time. Since the Feb. 24 invasion, several Kremlin adversaries have been targeted by deepfakes.

As Russia attacked Kyiv and multiple cities on March 2, Ukrainian intelligence warned that a deep fake “provocation” was coming. And sure enough, on March 16 a deceptively-edited video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared on Ukrainian national news. Lay down your arms and surrender, the fake Zelenskyy ordered in a video that was a big hit on Russian social media. The crude deepfake was quickly debunked, but one researcher suspected it was “the tip of the iceberg.” He was right.

In April, several lawmakers in Europe were duped by “individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls.” Latvian lawmaker Rihards Kols was one of those fooled, though you can hardly blame him. Even the man he thought he was speaking with, Leonid Volkov, was impressed by his computer-generated doppelgänger.

“Looks like my real face,” said Volkov, an ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “But how did they manage to put it on the Zoom call? Welcome to the deepfake era.”

In June, mayors of Berlin, Madrid, and Vienna all thought they were speaking with their counterpart in Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. Instead, Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey’s office learned they were “dealing with a deepfake,” per The Guardian:

It was only after about 15 minutes, when the supposed Kyiv mayor at the other end of the line started to talk about the problem of Ukrainian refugees cheating the German state of benefits, and appeared to call for refugees to be brought back to Ukraine for military service, that Giffey grew suspicious.

This is the part where I would love to put a happy spin on this. To tell you that deepfakes are extremely high-tech and inaccessible to most people. But that’s not the truth. It’s easy to do for novices, and nation-states with heavy computing power and big information warfare budgets are even better at it. So, we should anticipate this getting worse.

The use of deepfakes in war may have begun in Ukraine, but it won’t end there. And I can envision potential scenarios to defend against. Here are two:

• Using deepfakes to harass or intimidate military service members and their families. In 2016, ISIS posted kill lists of U.S. military members online. In 2018, Russians duped Ukrainian families into giving away their loved ones’ positions via text message. These are examples of information operations meant to sow chaos and fear. In the future perhaps, a deepfake military officer will inform a family their loved one has been killed. Or maybe a faked video of a military leader issuing false orders will lead to battlefield action. At any rate, deepfakes are likely to be one of many tools in “combined arms” IO campaigns.

• Using deepfakes to embarrass or blackmail those with access to classified information. That’s about 4 million Americans under threat. Hostile intelligence services have used deepfake photos to “create fake social media accounts from which they have attempted to recruit sources.” Deepfake video has also been used in sextortion rackets. And as I wrote about last week, Americans are giving away an alarming amount of biometric data—a deepfake building block—each day on popular social media apps.

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While most deepfakes are easily detectable today, “the sophistication of the technology is rapidly progressing to a point at which unaided human detection will be very difficult or impossible,” according to CRS.

“It will likely be a never-ending battle,” says Dr. Thomas P. Scanlon, a senior cybersecurity engineer and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “Similar to malware and anti-virus software.” Indeed, the FBI warned in June of an “increase in complaints reporting the use of deepfakes…to apply for a variety of remote work and work-at-home positions.”

So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that mad scientists at DARPA are working on this problem. The agency’s Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program aims to develop algorithms that detect various deep fakes automatically. Indeed, researchers have already made progress, as evidenced by a public showing of their research last month. Yet adversaries will continue to adapt, and the fix can’t come soon enough.

“This video was probably the first use of deepfakes in the context of war,” DARPA program manager Dr. Matt Turek said of the Zelenskyy video posted early in the war. “And if it had been more compelling, it might have changed the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

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🚨 The Rundown

• Russia ordered its troops to retreat from Kherson to the other side of the Dnipro River, a major strategic victory for Ukraine. Moscow sent many of its best troops to defend the city, which fell under Russian control less than a week into the invasion. “It’s evidence of the fact that they have some real problems, the Russian military,” says President Biden.

• An estimated 458 Russian convicts have died fighting in Ukraine. That number comes from researchers who noticed consecutive numbering on posthumous award letters sent to families of those fighting with the Wagner mercenary group.

  • Wagner’s leader was filmed recruiting Russian convicts in September, telling them their sentences would be reduced in exchange for six months of combat. “If you arrive in Ukraine and decide it's not for you, we will execute you,” he said.

• An ex-Navy nuclear engineer and his wife are going to prison for trying to sell secrets on submarine nuclear propulsion to a foreign government.

  • On June 26, 2021, “Jonathan Toebbe serviced a dead drop by placing an SD card, which was concealed within half a peanut butter sandwich and contained military-sensitive design elements relating to submarine nuclear reactors…” Fortunately, the ‘foreign government’ operatives were FBI agents.

• Three U.S. citizens were arrested for allegedly sending DoD technical data drawings on aviation, submarine, radar, tank, missiles, infrared, thermal imaging, and fire control systems to China. The Pentagon now must assume Beijing is developing ways to counter such tech. Not great!

• The former Marine pilot arrested in Australia “listed the same Beijing address as a Chinese businessman jailed in the United States for conspiring to hack U.S. defense contractors' computers, documents show.”

  • Daniel Duggan, 54, was arrested on Washington’s behalf and faces extradition to the United States. His lawyer says he is a “proud” Australian citizen and will “vigorously” defend against extradition and the still-unknown charges. Duggan’s arrest comes amid fears of Western pilots being poached to train China’s military.

• North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile roughly 155 miles into the Sea of Japan, its most recent send in 32 days of ballistic and cruise missile launches this year. Last week, Pyongyang fired nearly two dozen missiles in one day amid ongoing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

  • On Nov. 3, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated: “any nuclear attack against the United States or its Allies and partners, including the use of non-strategic nuclear weapons, is unacceptable and will result in the end of the Kim regime.”

  • “Well done, SecDef,” says Kori Schake. “Exactly the right reaction to a nuclear threat: don't make it about the weapon, make it about the attack, draw no distinction between U.S. and allies, and hold the regime not the population at risk in retaliation.”

• China has an estimated 200 stealth J-20 fighters and 240+ J-16 multirole strike aircraft in its inventory. The “conservative” estimate from a Chinese military aviation watcher is based on aircraft markings, with “CB00” indicating the first production batch and “CB01” indicating the next.

  • The J-20, the world’s first non-US stealth fighter, has similarities to Russian and US jets, including the F-22 Raptor. A Chinese businessman admitted to stealing technical data on the Raptor, F-35, and C-17 Globemaster in 2016.

  • Here’s a slow-motion video of the J-20 in flight.

  • Beijing showed off plenty of military hardware this week at the Zhuhai Airshow, with state-run media touting a four-jet formation of J-20s performing “a series of stunts, including quick turns, low-altitude hovering, and vertical climbs to display its outstanding combat capability.”

  • Also on display: an apparent mockup of the hypersonic MD-22 drone, with an advertised speed up to Mach 7.

  • “I can only say, if [American pilots] are not scared, let us meet in the sky,” Wang Wei, PLA Deputy Air Force commander, said in Sept. 2021.

A new report says China’s Army modernization has been “uneven,” but it will likely be “more educated, professionalized, and technically proficient” in the coming years.

• “The issue of whether the PLA can ‘fight and win’ is a major concern for China’s leaders, especially since most members of the PLA have never engaged in combat…” the report says. “Xi has in recent years stressed the importance of improving combat capabilities and readiness, as well as making training less formulaic and more like real combat.” [PDF]

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• Meanwhile, senior officials and aides for Presidents Biden and Xi “have been wrangling over whether the leaders will meet” at the Nov. 15 Group of 20 meeting in Bali.

  • Items on Chinese leader Xi's mind: U.S. strengthening of trade ties with Taiwan, the potential sale of Tomahawk cruise missiles to regional rival Japan, and new US export controls to China on advanced logic and memory chips, integrated circuits, and other dual-use technology that provides a technological edge.

  • Will Biden tell Xi that the United States will defend Taiwan, as he has publicly suggested? “I’m going to have that conversation with him,” Biden says.

  • Xi is convinced that the US and China are heading toward war, an American who knows the Chinese leadership tells David Ignatius, who writes: “The United States should convey that, while competition is inevitable, conflict isn’t.”

  • If that’s the case, someone may want to tell the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, who oversees the nuclear arsenal:

  • "This Ukraine crisis that we're in right now, this is just the warmup," says Navy Adm. Charles A. Richard. "The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested a long time."

  • "As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking," he said on Nov. 3. "It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn't going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are — we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem."

• Israel carried out airstrikes in Syria on Nov. 8 against a convoy of vehicles “suspected of smuggling Iranian weapons” out of Iraq.

• The Indian Army is buying 2,200 drones, including unmanned aircraft to carry out high-altitude and medium-altitude logistics and surveillance.

• Happy birthday to the U.S. Marine Corps, celebrating its founding on November 10, 1775. Semper Fidelis, Marines. Watch the official Corps birthday video but remember: the actual birthday is in July.

• And finally, here are some interesting recent finds:

  • Ukrainian Military Performance and Outlook (CRS, Nov. 3)

  • Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and U.S. Response (CRS, Nov. 8)

  • Online Foreign Influence Snapshot (DHS, August 2022)

  • Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations Wargame After-Action Review (Marine Corps Intelligence Schools, Sept. 2022)

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My portfolio page has more about me and my past work if you're curious. Thanks for reading! —Paul

THE UNCLASSIFIED 2022 National Defense Strategy is out and everyone in the national security world has thoughts on it. It’s a good document that rightly places China as the main threat, some say; others think it’s similar to the last one with new buzzwords. And my favorite, from former Pentagon official Kathleen McInnis: “Every four years, the strategic studies community tackles the NDS and its core concepts with the enthusiasm and vigor of kids taking down a piñata at a birthday party.” After that, she dives into the central tenet of the document known as “integrated deterrence,” which boils down to having the entire federal government speak with one voice to deter America’s rivals.

That’s easier said than done, McInnis writes. “That the U.S. government’s right hand should be able to talk to and work with its left hand is obvious. Yet anyone who has worked in an interagency setting knows exactly how hard it can be to get the government to speak with one voice and act towards a common intention.”

China—the main adversary we face in this “decisive decade,” according to the NDS—doesn’t have the same issue. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently secured his long-term hold on power and can issue orders to Communist Party officials through thousands of “red phones” sitting on their desks.

But the era of the Pentagon claiming its freedom of navigation operations near Chinese shores, reconnaissance flights, and multilateral exercises are merely “‘things we have always done’ is over,” says John Culver, a retired CIA officer with extensive expertise in China, previewing what’s likely to come in response from Beijing:

“This will incentivize Chinese responses, especially with U.S. allies and partners in the region, including pointed exercises by the People’s Liberation Army.”

You can view the full National Defense Strategy here or check out the easily digestible whiteboard version by Marine Lt. Kayla Haas:

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🚨 The Rundown

• Ukraine carried out a “massive” drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, damaging at least one warship. You can see bullets piercing the waves in this remarkable video filmed from one of the drone boats involved in the attack.

  • “It had all the thrill of a daring commando raid, filmed live. But Saturday’s dawn raid on Russia’s Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol was not carried out by elite soldiers, but by 16 drones, nine in the air and seven at sea – prompting questions as to whether the attack represented a revolutionary moment in the history of warfare,” wrote The Guardian.

  • A similar kayak-like craft rigged with a camera and sensors washed ashore in September.

• Ukrainian drone pilots say they typically fly over Russian lines and bring their flight and video data home for analysis by artificial intelligence to spot “Russia’s often well-camouflaged equipment.” Interesting.

• North Korea fired “as many as 23 missiles” in a day as tensions rise on the Korean peninsula.

• New aerial photos of China’s manmade islands in the South China Sea show gun emplacements, radar, close-in weapons systems, and military barracks. More than 5,000 Chinese military officers and soldiers are stationed on such islands, which China has developed through “unprecedented dredging and artificial island-building” since 2013.

  • In March, Adm. John Aquilino said at least three of China’s nearly 30 island outposts were fully militarized with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, jamming equipment, and fighter jets.

  • Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly committed to not “militarize” the artificial islands in 2015. The lie detector determined that was a lie.

  • CFR has good background here on the history behind the construction of islands in a region that sees trillions in global trade pass through and has an estimated 11 billion barrels of untapped oil under the surface.

• The Defense Science Board will hold a classified meeting in mid-November to discuss the findings of the 2022 "Summer Study on Technology Superiority.” Announced in July, the objective of the study is to “recommend concepts, capabilities, and strategies that may enhance the military technological advantage” of the United States.

• Over 6,000 soldiers are going through a “crucible” of training in Hawaii until Nov. 10 that will “replicate the conditions” they should expect during combat operations in the Indo-Pacific region, says Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey VanAntwerp.

  • The Army’s 25th Infantry Division, the new 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, and troops from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines will partner up to fight two battalions of the Army’s 196th Infantry Brigade, which will be “running and gunning as if they were a Chinese unit,” according to Defense News, “using small drones, jamming, and other means to get inside the heads of their opponents.”

  • “We will sweat together, bust through gulches together, learn together, fight the enemy together and win together,” said Col. Graham White, commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

• A former Marine pilot who worked in China was arrested by Australian police and will appear in court on Friday.

  • Daniel Edmund Duggan, 54, was apprehended “pursuant to a request from the United States” and faces extradition but the charges remain unknown. The former Marine Harrier pilot moved to Beijing in 2014 and may have trained Chinese pilots.

  • Duggan’s arrest comes weeks after the U.K. Ministry of Defense said dozens of U.K. military pilots were lured with large sums of money to train China’s military.

  • This situation remains murky, but it’s worth noting that Duggan has been out of the military for a while. According to his records, then-Maj. Duggan left the Marine Corps in Sept. 2002 after serving 13 years in uniform.

• The FBI is investigating whether a former CIA officer “broke laws related to foreign lobbying, surveillance and exporting sensitive technologies and tradecraft” to Qatar.

  • Kevin Chalker, who spied on Doha’s rivals to help it land the 2022 World Cup, tried to “set up high-level meetings between Qatari officials and top CIA leaders” and pitched a covert influence operation to “damage the reputations of U.S. officials perceived as Qatar’s enemies,” according to an AP investigation.

• The oldest prisoner held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay has been released to Pakistan. Saifullah Paracha, 75, who was arrested in 2003 and accused of being an al-Qaeda financier, was never charged and was cleared in May as “not a continuing threat.”

  • The U.S. currently holds 35 prisoners in Gitmo; 20 are eligible for transfer pending diplomatic deals with countries to take them in.

• The Air Force is pulling its fleet of permanently stationed F-15 fighters in Okinawa, Japan, and replacing it with a “rotational” force of more advanced jets sent from the States. The U.S. reportedly plans to send fifth-generation F-22 Raptors there for about six months from squadrons in Alaska.

  • The drawdown of F-15s is set to happen over the next two years. Several Republican lawmakers questioned the move, saying it could send “the wrong signal” at a time when China is becoming more aggressive.

• The Marine Corps released a new recruiting commercial focused on “shifting threats.” The one-minute ad begins with Marines carrying out a noncombatant evacuation operation before showing well-equipped grunts seizing an island, countering hostile drones, and using their own drones to target an enemy for a missile strike.

  • This is a recruiting ad, so its primary goal is to convince an 18-year-old high schooler that they should join the Marine Corps. But it’s also a window into how the service sees itself on the future battlefield, offering a good visual depiction of its “Stand In Forces” concept to keep tabs on China’s navy.

• Speaking of China, the U.S. wants to park 6 nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in Australia in a not-so-subtle message to Beijing.

• Meanwhile, China has conducted 20 times as many hypersonic missile tests as the United States, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

  • The 33-page report with background on the development of such weapons—which fly low to evade radar detection while carrying a nuclear warhead toward a target at Mach 5—notes that the Pentagon requested $4.7 billion for hypersonic research in 2023 but hasn’t yet found a favorite.

  • The U.S. has several hypersonic prototypes in the pipeline scheduled to conduct further testing in 2023, including the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) and the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) from the Air Force and DARPA.

• Here’s another extremely useful CRS report: “Emerging Military Technologies: Background and Issues for Congress.”

  • The 41-page report offers a helpful primer on the national security implications of AI, lethal drones, hypersonic weapons, and other technologies developed by the United States, China, and Russia.

  • The good news: we’re working on all kinds of amazing things that will give us the technological edge. The bad news? So is everyone else.

  • “Many emerging technologies exhibit characteristics that could potentially affect the future character of war,” the report says on page 29 of potential implications for warfighting. “For example, developments in technologies such as AI, big data analytics, and lethal autonomous weapons could diminish or remove the need for a human operator. This could, in turn, increase combat efficiency and accelerate the pace of combat—potentially with destabilizing consequences.”

  • Always look up: “…swarms of coordinated, unmanned vehicles could overwhelm defensive systems, providing a greater advantage to the attacker, while directed energy weapons that provide a low-cost means of neutralizing such attacks, could favor the defender. Thus, emerging technologies could shift the offense-defense balance multiple times over the coming decades.”

  • We’re also headed for a world in which drones potentially fly and kill without humans in the loop: “…AI could be paired with quantum computing to produce more powerful methods of machine learning, potentially leading to improvements in image recognition and target identification and enabling more sophisticated autonomous weapons.

• Finally, a couple of recent Freedom of Information Act releases caught my eye:

  • US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Records Concerning Surge in Trademark Filings from China 2019-2021

  • Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Responses to Questions for the Record (QFR) 2016-2018

  • There are many more at Government Attic, a gold mine for thousands of federal documents, emails, and reports released under FOIA. (By the way, I file all of my requests through MuckRock. You can find all the documents I’ve collected here.)

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You’re caught up. I’m also super close to hitting 2,500 subscribers, an awesome milestone considering The Ruck is barely two months old. Thank you for reading! I’m so grateful for your support and appreciate you sharing my work with others. And huge thanks as always to the hundreds of paid Ruck Insiders supporting these dispatches.

See you next week! —Paul

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My portfolio page has more about me and my past work if you’re curious. Thanks for reading! —Paul

WHAT’S DANGEROUS about people dancing in front of a cell phone camera?

The U.S. government has been trying to answer that question for the past two years with TikTok, a wildly addictive app used by many U.S. military service members and an estimated 135 million other Americans.

It’s especially popular with young people, who increasingly use TikTok as a search engine. And a “small but growing share” of American adults say they regularly get their news there.

Owned by the Beijing firm Bytedance, TikTok has been under a U.S. security review since 2020, and President Joe Biden on Sept. 15 ordered “additional national security factors” to be considered.

Hannah Kelley, a research assistant for the technology and national security program at CNAS, says there’s substantial debate among policymakers on the exact nature of the threat (or if there even is one). But “the potential is a really important part of the threat analysis.”

Indeed, considerable ink has been spilled on the potential uses of TikTok that sound terrifying alongside evidence-backed issues raised about the app over the years: In 2019, TikTok ordered moderators to censor videos that Beijing didn’t like. In 2020, it collected unique identifiers on millions of users for more than a year to track online behavior without their consent—and in apparent violation of Google policies. In 2021, it began to automatically gather biometric data. And this year, an independent researcher found code allowing TikTok to log keystrokes, while others found that moderators failed to catch 90% of ads “featuring false and misleading messages about elections” on its platform.

“I think everything feels so drawn out and thorny because it’s high stakes for all involved,” Kelley said of the yearslong U.S. review, adding that whatever the Biden administration decides will likely be “a precedent-setting moment on tackling a new suite of emerging vulnerabilities.” As she and others have pointed out, digital privacy, data rights, and security issues require thinking beyond a single app.

In response to critics, TikTok has made changes and insisted that its U.S. data is walled off from China. But audio leaked in June from 80 internal TikTok meetings showed it was clearly not.

A TikTok Trust and Safety team member said during a Sept. 2021 meeting, “everything is seen in China,” according to the leaked audio. And that same month, a TikTok director said a Beijing-based engineer was a “master admin” who “has access to everything.”

I find it difficult to trust any social media company, especially one with a Chinese government official on its board. As TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew confirmed to lawmakers in June (under U.S. employee oversight, he claimed), “employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data.”

And really, that’s what we’re talking about here: Not dance videos but data, a massive amount of it, is being sucked up by a Chinese app that the Pentagon is clearly worried about for obvious reasons: the U.S. military has killed people based on data.

“By itself, I don't think that the TikTok app on people's devices is a significant threat,” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker, “but the potential for Chinese data collection across the platform is a larger concern, especially when combined with other data already acquired by Chinese state actors.”

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🚨 The Rundown

• The Justice Department accused seven Chinese men and women of conducting surveillance for Beijing and intimidating a Chinese national living in the United States.

  • “The victims in this case sought to flee an authoritarian government, leaving behind their lives and family, for a better life here. That same government sent agents to the United States to harass, threaten, and forcibly return them to the People's Republic of China. The actions we allege are illegal, and the FBI will not allow adversaries to break laws designed to protect our nation and our freedom,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Michael Driscoll.

  • It’s a recent example of Beijing's threats to the Chinese diaspora worldwide, but it’s not the only one.

  • In Norway this week, Dutch reporters uncovered evidence of Chinese police operating illegally in the Netherlands.

  • "He asked me to go back to China to solve my problems. He also told me to think about my parents,” says Wang Jingyu, a dissident who claimed he was contacted by a Chinese police station in Rotterdam.

  • As Human Rights Watch reported in 2021, Chinese pro-democracy students going to school in Australia said it “weighed heavily” on their minds the thought of “authorities punishing or interrogating their parents back home,” leading to self-censorship.

• Meanwhile, two Chinese intelligence officers allegedly tried to steal documents related to the prosecution of Huawei by paying bribes to a U.S. government employee. The employee, working as a double agent for the FBI, was paid tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin and gave the spies fake documents outlining prosecution strategy, witnesses, and confidential evidence.

• Australia and Japan are teaming up to counter China with a landmark security cooperation deal to strengthen military ties and share intelligence. “Together, we are accelerating each other’s efforts to realize a stable, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

  • Here’s the full joint agreement.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin recently toured a training base for new soldiers and handled gear “few soldiers are actually” getting. While the video makes for useful propaganda at home, Russian soldiers have been spotted in Ukraine with Soviet-era helmets and body armor.

  • Meanwhile, some conscripts are forced to buy their own military equipment and uniforms, while others are issued rusty rifles.

• Ukraine continues its battle for Kherson, an important southern city that, if recaptured, would deal Putin a major blow and allow Kyiv to cut off the freshwater supply to Crimea.

  • “Russian forces continued to establish fallback positions near the Dnipro River on Oct. 25,” reads the latest assessment by the Institute for the Study of War. “The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are preparing defensive positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River and are mining the coastline near Hornostaivka, about 40km northeast of Nova Kakhovka.”

  • “The Ukrainian General Staff added that Russian forces are leaving small passages for a potential retreat and are attempting to repair destroyed pontoon crossings. Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian military command has not decided on the fate of Kherson City, given the ongoing situation in Kherson Oblast. Other milbloggers argued that Russian forces will be unable to hold Kherson City and that the Russian government can prevent a ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ by fully withdrawing to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River.”

• Russia accused the West of supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons that are ending up on the black market. It’s worth noting that Moscow is one of Ukraine’s main weapons suppliers (sorry, I can’t help myself).

  • So far, Russia is down 1,400+ tanks, 600+ armored fighting vehicles, 1,600+ infantry fighting vehicles, 250+ armored personnel carriers, and hundreds of command posts and communications stations, according to Oryx, which has been tracking equipment losses since February via photo and video evidence.

• The White House says Russian pilots are flying Iranian-made ‘suicide drones’ from Crimea with training provided by a “small number” of Iranians. “We are concerned that Russia may also seek to acquire advanced conventional weapons from Iran such as surface-to-surface missiles that will almost certainly be used to support the war against Ukraine,” says NSC spokesman John Kirby.

• Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has posthumously promoted fallen Navy SEAL Brian Bourgeois to captain. The former SEAL Team 8 commander died on Dec. 7, 2021, during a fast rope training exercise in Virginia Beach.

  • “An early release of the rope” and communication issues between aircrew and ground forces led to his death, Navy Times reported, noting that an official investigation is complete and undergoing final review.

  • Bourgeois, known by his teammates as “Booj,” left behind a wife and five children whom he “never missed an opportunity to talk about,” according to his obituary.

• Access to cheap, easy-to-use drones has “almost democratized use of the air and aerial surveillance” in war, says Maj. Gen. James Martin, commander of the UK’s Warfighting Division.

  • “We don’t assume we have control of air space anymore. We don’t assume we have air superiority or supremacy as we have done in the Middle East.”

  • “We now assume that we will have limited windows of opportunities to do what we want to do. That’s the difference between fighting a peer adversary vs fighting a counter-insurgency.”

  • “In Iraq and Afghanistan, we didn’t have to worry about this stuff because our opponents didn’t have the ability to do anything about it; he now does.”

• An Afghan couple says a Marine major abducted their baby in a case that has attracted the attention of the Justice Department, Pentagon, and State Department. AP reports:

The baby had been rescued two years earlier from the rubble of a U.S. military raid that killed her parents and five siblings. After months in a U.S. military hospital, she had gone to live with her cousin and his wife, this newlywed couple. Now, the family was bound for the United States for further medical treatment, with the aid of U.S. Marine Corps attorney Joshua Mast.

When the exhausted Afghans arrived at the airport in Washington, D.C., in late August 2021, Mast pulled them out of the international arrivals line and led them to an inspecting officer, according to a lawsuit they filed last month. They were surprised when Mast presented an Afghan passport for the child, the couple said. But it was the last name printed on the document that stopped them cold: Mast.

They didn’t know it, but they would soon lose their baby.

• It’s a long, complicated, wild story worth reading. Check it out here.

You’re all caught up. Huge thanks to the hundreds of paid Ruck Insiders backing the work that goes into these dispatches each week. I’m so grateful for your support.

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See you next week! —Paul

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My last dispatch on Elon Musk’s command over Ukrainian military operations was a bit longer than usual and required shortening The Rundown. And so, as promised, here’s an extra special dispatch exclusively for paid subscribers with the rest of the roundup. There has been so much going on and I don’t want you to miss anything.

I’ll be back with you on Thursday morning with a complete dispatch. Lucky number 13 in fact. If you’re new here, make sure you’re subscribed before then. And thank you for reading and supporting my work.

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🚨 The Rundown

• The Mary Ferrell Foundation has sued the Biden administration “for failing to implement the 1992 JFK Records Act.” The law signed by President Bill Clinton ordered the public release of 16,000 government records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  • The Trump administration was required by law to release the documents on Oct. 26, 2017, but cited national security reasons and kicked the can to Biden.

  • Biden issued a memo on Oct. 22 arguing that in light of the pandemic the government needed more time to engage with other agencies to determine any “identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

  • “What are they hiding?” asks Robert Kennedy Jr., the son and namesake of JFK’s brother, in a story speculating on what the archive will eventually show.

  • Most intriguing theory: CIA contacts with assassin Lee Harvey Oswald “while Kennedy was still alive, which the CIA has repeatedly covered up,” according to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer and senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center.

• The Marine Corps’ indefinite ban on “water operations involving surf zone transit” for its Amphibious Combat Vehicle continues. The service says the suspension will remain in effect until “additional testing data can be collected and analyzed” following an ACV rolling over in the surf at Camp Pendleton, California, on Oct. 13.

• Also, an extensive independent study of Marine Corps basic training has recommended that recruits be trained by both male and female drill instructors. The Corps is the only service to separate trainees by gender at the platoon level, but it’s required by law to “fully integrate” its boot camps, starting with Marine Corps Recruit Depot, S.C., in 2025.

  • Officials say they need more money and manpower to make it happen. A decision hasn’t yet been made but it’s worth mentioning the Corps’ history of opposing gender integration.

• Dozens of British military pilots have been lured with large sums of money to help train China’s military. It’s unclear exactly what they are doing, but a western pilot with valuable techniques, tactics, and procedures in their head costs Beijing roughly $250,000.

  • “When former UK military pilots provide training to the People’s Liberation Army of China it clearly erodes the UK’s defense advantage. We are taking immediate steps to deter and penalize this activity,” said the UK Ministry of Defense, noting it was conducting a review and warning of potential prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

  • A South African flying school linked to their recruitment claims it has been in contact with the MoD for “many years” and said none of the trainers possessed classified or operationally sensitive information.

  • That may be true, but just sharing insight into how western military pilots think or operate their jets can be dangerous. “If they know how western planes react, then they can react,” an Air Force officer tells me.

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THE UKRAINIAN MILITARY IS RELIANT ON STARLINK internet provided by SpaceX. In other words, the world’s richest man has the power to screw up the operations of Europe’s second-largest army at any moment.

How we got to the supremely weird place of Elon Musk controlling Ukraine’s battlefield communications from half a world away is an interesting story.

It goes something like this: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, dispatching armed “little green men” from its military to the country’s east without identifying insignia while repeatedly lying to the world about it. Those Russian troops helped shoot down a civilian airliner carrying 298 people and fueled an astroturfed uprising that killed tens of thousands more. By 2015, Russia had illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula. Two intern…

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It’s not. Defending the island democracy of 23 million in Taiwan is certainly on the mind of national security leaders today, but if another war truly were on the horizon, various economic and military factors would indicate Beijing planned to attack across the roughly 100-mile-wide strait. Yet we’re not currently seeing those signs—good news, obviously—despite worrying stories on how “Taiwan’s citizen warriors prepare to confront looming threat from China” and “The persistent threat of China invading Taiwan.”

So, what are the indicators and how do we know what they are? Thank retired CIA analyst John Culver for answering both questions in this sober and insightful analysis. The 35-year intel veteran notes the warning signs of a full-scale invasion or naval blockade to cut off western support and concludes that if “China decides to fight a war of choice over Taiwan, strategic surprise would be a casualty of the sheer scale of the undertaking.”

The war in Ukraine has shown how modern war requires vast stocks of bombs, missiles, and bullets—which in turn require raw materials, manufacturing capacity, and long production timelines. So China “would have already started surging production” of rockets, ballistic and cruise missiles, and other items “at least a year before D-Day,” according to Culver. Such a surge would be difficult to hide from both western intelligence and civilian analysts armed with excellent commercial satellite imagery.

Beijing’s preparations for war “almost certainly would not be subtle, at least to the U.S. intelligence community,” says Culver, “and probably not to Taiwan and other Western observers.” So here are other things to watch for before any shots are fired in anger…

1 to 2 years out:

• China “would take visible steps to insulate its economy, military, and key industries from disruptions and sanctions.”

• Internally and externally, Beijing would ramp up propaganda against the west and would prepare its citizens “psychologically for the costs of war”—tens of thousands of deaths in combat, financial pain, and civilian deaths from a U.S.-Taiwan response.

• “Six or twelve months before a prospective invasion, China probably would implement a [People’s Liberation Army]-wide stop loss, halting demobilizations of enlisted personnel and officers, just as it did in 2007 when it ratcheted up pressure as Taiwan prepared to hold elections.”

• There are also several economic indicators, per this CSIS analysis:

  • A freeze on foreign financial assets in China

  • Travel restrictions placed on high-priority workers and Chinese elites

  • Sales of U.S. bonds and rapid repatriation of Chinese assets from abroad

  • Stockpiling of emergency supplies and medicine

3 to 6 months out:

• At this point, the PLA “would also halt most regular training and perform maintenance on virtually all major equipment,” Culver writes. “It would expand the capacity of the Navy and Air Force to rearm, resupply, and repair ships, submarines, and aircraft away from military facilities that the United States or Taiwan would likely bomb, including naval bases and military airfields near the Taiwan Strait. The PLA Navy would replace electric batteries on its non-nuclear submarines and intensify training in loading missiles, torpedoes, and ammunition on all vessels.”

• In the areas opposite Taiwan's coast in China’s Eastern and Southern Theater Command, the PLA would set up field hospitals near embarkation points and airfields and take other “steps rarely seen in mere exercises.”

• “There likely would be public blood drives. Mobile command posts would depart garrisons and move to hidden locations. Units responsible for managing petroleum, oil, and lubricants would deploy with field pipeline convoys to support vehicle preparation at civilian ports being used to load transport ships embarking on an invasion.”

• Additionally, “provincial military-civilization mobilization committees would commandeer commercial ships, roll-on/roll-off vehicle transport ships, large car ferries, aircraft, trains, trucks—everything relevant to a war effort, for preparation prior to conflict, and then throughout.”

• Military forces would be placed on alert. Across the PLA, leave would be canceled, and many would be recalled or restricted to their bases and ships. Civilian flights around the country would be disrupted. Even with Chinese censorship and its great firewall, it’s hard to imagine these activities not leaking out or being spotted by western observers.

• And an “enormous” number of China’s 1.4 billion-strong population would be mobilized, “including reservists to guard key civilian infrastructure, be prepared to repair U.S. bomb damage, and prevent riots and sabotage.”

SO THERE IS TIME, and war is, fortunately, not inevitable. Even top U.S. military officials differ on whether Beijing ever makes good on threats to take Taiwan by force. In the end, Chinese President Xi Jinping weighs a strategic calculus—is trying to seize Taiwan worth the cost? The western response, then, is to deter war by making that potential cost so unbearable that Xi always answers a resounding “no.”

That deterrent begins to take shape in several recent news reports. From The New York Times on Oct. 5, U.S. Aims to Turn Taiwan Into Giant Weapons Depot:

WASHINGTON — American officials are intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan after studying recent naval and air force exercises by the Chinese military around the island, according to current and former officials.

The exercises showed that China would probably blockade the island as a prelude to any attempted invasion, and Taiwan would have to hold out on its own until the United States or other nations intervened, if they decided to do that, the current and former officials say.

Report two: Taiwanese microchip mogul Robert Tsao is bankrolling a training program for a civilian militia to defend against a Chinese invasion. The program right now is small yet backed by a $30 million pledge. “We need to train three million people in three years,” Tsao said. Years of training and arms stockpiling helped Ukraine defend against Russia during the war’s opening. And western weapons shipments have helped Kyiv shift the balance in its favor.

Three: Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said Monday that China’s threat of armed confrontation “is absolutely not an option for our two sides.” She added: “Only by respecting the commitment of the Taiwanese people to our sovereignty, democracy, and freedom can there be a foundation for resuming constructive interaction across the Taiwan Strait.” China predictably responded by saying Taiwan was not independent and didn’t have a president. But Tsai comes out ahead by bringing the rhetoric down—while suggesting that Beijing’s continued saber-rattling and military incursions near Taiwan’s shores will only result in even more western support rather than capitulation.

“We have an abiding interest in maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, which is critical to regional and global security and prosperity and a matter of international concern and attention,” The White House says in its new National Security Strategy released on Wednesday. “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side, and do not support Taiwan independence…And we will uphold our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act to support Taiwan’s self-defense and to maintain our capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion against Taiwan.”

🚨 The Rundown

• The Group of Seven (G7) nations demanded Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its troops and military equipment from Ukraine” on Tuesday, including Crimea and all of Moscow’s illegally “annexed” regions.

  • The statement from western governments came after Russia carried out days of state-sanctioned war crimes in Ukraine, firing hundreds of missiles and drones at civilian targets. One missile “hit a playground in downtown Kyiv and another struck a university,” the AP reported. Hundreds were injured, and at least a dozen people were killed.

  • 500+ potential war crimes have been documented in Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, according to a joint AP/FRONTLINE tracker.

  • Even China has publicly called on Russia to take it down a notch. “We have noted the relevant reports,” said a Foreign Ministry official when asked Monday about bombings across Ukraine. “We also hope that the situation can de-escalate as quickly as possible.”

  • Top U.S. and European leaders met in Brussels, Belgium to hash out a 10-year plan to make Ukraine “fully interoperable” with NATO. After meeting with representatives of ~50 countries comprising the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters:

  • All countries must “chip in and help them rebuild and sustain an integrated missile defense system,” said Milley, explaining that it requires planning, system deployment, training, and linking with Kyiv’s command and control. “It’s quite complicated from a technical standpoint,” but “it is achievable.”

  • “The systems will be provided as fast as we can physically get them there,” Austin replied to a Ukrainian journalist who said he was “anxious” about his family at home.

  • “I know that you’re concerned about your family, and certainly that’s understandable. We’re going to do everything we can to help Ukraine get what they need to protect the Ukrainian people.”

• Germany has delivered Ukraine the first of four Iris-T air defense systems. The mobile surface-to-air missile system provides 360-degree protection against “aircraft, helicopters, drones and other missiles,” according to the manufacturer.

• The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit is back home after seven months in the Baltics, Mediterranean Sea, and Arctic region. “All of this was done with the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine War, which added an additional sense of importance to our work,” said Col. Paul Merida, MEU commander. “Much of which was done alongside our NATO allies and other key regional partners.”

• The Department of Homeland Security will screen passengers from Uganda for Ebola. A federal notice says that anyone present in the African country 21 days before U.S. entry should expect “enhanced public health measures” upon arrival. One death and 54 confirmed cases of the deadly virus have been recorded in Uganda.

• The West Point Board of Visitors will hold its annual meeting on Oct. 22. The board “provides independent advice and recommendations” to the President of the United States on academy “morale, discipline, curriculum” and other matters.

• The Army plans to deliver its Next Generation Squad Weapon to ground combat soldiers in 2023. The long-awaited successor to the M4 rifle and M249 squad automatic weapon will be known to soldiers as the M5 rifle and M250 automatic rifle.

  • The Sig Sauer-made M5 is a bit heavier than the M4 familiar to grunts, but it fires more lethal 6.8mm rounds (rather than 5.56mm), giving soldiers more stopping power and greater range.

  • “These weapon systems will give soldiers significant capability improvements in accuracy, range, signature management, and lethality,” the Army says on its acquisition website, which has additional specs.

• The Pentagon is measuring the “estimated prevalence of exposure to extremist activity in the military” for the first time in its latest survey of equal opportunity in the ranks.

  • "No one knows exactly how many extremists are in the U.S. military, but it takes only one to wreak havoc within the ranks,” I wrote last year at Task & Purpose, documenting several dozen cases of active-duty service members influenced by hate. The Pentagon didn’t answer my questions at the time, but DoD officials publicly said they had no data on troops found to be promoting views of Nazis, white nationalists, and other extremist groups.

• A top U.K. spy chief has warned of Chinese technology exports carrying “hidden” national security threats that can be used to track individuals. "I think it's really important from a very early age that we understand that there is no free good here,” said Sir Jeremy Fleming, chief of the GCHQ. “When we are using these services we are exchanging our data for that and if it's proportionate and we're happy with the way that data is safeguarded then that's great.”

  • “Mortgaging the future by buying into the Chinese vision for technology may be attractive to some in the short term…” he said, but “[w]e need to offer alternative solutions that are practical, that are affordable, and that are backed by international funding or market investment. If we don’t, in the longer term, the hidden costs of China’s cheap technology solutions will become very obvious.”

• The latest update on important Chinese Army and Navy developments is out from the CNA think tank. The PLA Update takes note of China’s recent participation in Russia’s Vostok 2022 exercise and the June launch of its third aircraft carrier, CNS Fujian.

• Air Force researchers have translated this Chinese text on port landing operations, which may be handy for U.S. planners exploring Taiwan's defense options.

• A new paper on the “potential for arms control for military applications of AI” has been published at the Center for a New American Security.

• The US and UK Navies wrapped a one-day exercise testing unmanned systems and AI “to enhance maritime monitoring” in the Arabian Gulf on Oct. 7. Exercise Phantom Scope saw 3 Saildrone Explorer drone vessels sailing alongside manned American and British ships off the coast of Bahrain.

  • The Navy wants more unmanned ships to keep an eye on the Gulf—which is vital to the U.S. and other nations. The goal? 100 drone ships by summer 2023, says Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, 5th Fleet commander.

• Marine Col. Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman in Space on Oct. 5. Mann, of the Wailaki Tribe, is an accomplished astronaut and Marine fighter pilot serving alongside other NASA Crew-5 members on a five-month mission to the International Space Station.

  • “Today marks another major milestone for the Marine Corps as we recognize the contributions of Col. Mann—a proven warfighter with several dozen combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan—and now the first female Marine to be a NASA mission commander,” said Gen. David Berger, Marine Commandant.

• China is preparing to launch a “third and final module” to its Tiangong space station. The Mengtian module is fueled and ready to launch later this month to the station, which is in low Earth orbit and roughly a quarter of the ISS's size.

• Anduril now has loitering munition capability for two of its drones, giving military clients a “flexible and adaptable” seeker or warhead to slap on its 600M and 700M Altius models. They are tube-launched from aircraft or ground, fly autonomously, and range 275+ miles.

  • Here’s a 40-second demo video.

• The Navy reprimanded three officers and altered SEAL training following an investigation into the death of sailor Kyle Mullen in February. Two captains and an unnamed medical officer were issued non-punitive letters of caution after the investigation concluded that Mullen died “in the line of duty,” although they were not directly blamed for the 24-year-old’s death.

• The Pentagon is building a new registry of injuries from “anomalous health incidents” aka “Havana Syndrome.” The registry will collect data on U.S. government employee demographics, treatment, and circumstances of developing the mysterious illness, which first surfaced in Cuba in 2016 and has sickened hundreds worldwide. Many cases remain unexplained despite a years-long probe.

• “There’s just no answer,” a House Intelligence Committee member briefed on the investigation told CNN. “They’ve done an immense amount of work, literally spreadsheeting every catastrophic set of symptoms down to the headache and there’s just nothing. None.”

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You can also find me on Instagram and LinkedIn. Here’s more about me and my past work. Thanks for reading! —Paul

Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national, was convicted of espionage last month in Chicago, Illinois. A Justice Department news release touting the verdict revealed that the 31-year-old had worked for years on behalf of China before joining the U.S. Army Reserve in 2016. He faces up to 15 years in prison at sentencing in January 2023.

It certainly won’t end Chinese spying in the United States. But this and a related case have revealed fascinating details on the practice—including the personal diaries, texts, and a never-before-seen document from the Chinese spymaster Ji dealt with. And when reading through evidence revealed in court filings, we can get a sense of Beijing’s recruiting process.

Read more

It was March 26, 2006, and American Green Berets and their Iraqi partners had just fought insurgents from the Mahdi Army, a brutal death squad in Iraq.

After a brief gun battle, they cleared the target compound and tallied the score: A dozen or so enemy dead, a similar number of detainees to interrogate, a weapons cache found and destroyed, and one hostage rescued. Mission complete.

The special operators had finished a typical no-knock raid and were headed home. But they weren’t prepared for what came next: After leaving, someone went to the compound, removed the weapons, and rearranged the insurgents’ bodies to make it seem like they were murdered during prayer.

“They then took pictures, uploaded them to the web, and issued a press release explaining that U.S. soldiers had entered a mosque and killed men peacefully at prayer,” the Government Accountability Office said in a new report to Congress demonstrating how disinformation can threaten national security and have real-world impact.

“Literally they had their story, their propaganda, out on the wires before the assault force was back at the compound…” Col. Kenneth Tovo, the group commander, recalled to an Army War College researcher in 2009. “That’s how brilliant [this was. It] really surprised us that first time.”

Back then, photos of empty bullet casings on a blood-stained floor the insurgents claimed as a mosque appeared on the AP wire. The story was picked up in American and Arab news media, outraging Iraqis and fueling violent protests and suicide bombings in the ensuing days.

“As a result of this disinformation activity, this special operations unit was not allowed to conduct any military operations for 30 days while the Army conducted an internal investigation,” the GAO wrote.

In other words, a team of elite soldiers was bested on the battlefield not by bullets but by information. “…essentially neutralized for a month by those same forces using a cell phone camera,” the War College researcher concluded.

Fortunately, U.S. soldiers had helmet cameras documenting the raid, which showed the insurgent propaganda was bogus. But the incident convinced at least one Army officer to never again go out without considering visual documentation of a mission.

I HAD NEVER HEARD this story before reading the report. But it sounded familiar, having personally felt the power of flawed reporting a year prior: I was a U.S. Marine in May 2005 when all hell broke loose in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, after Newsweek reported that Guantanamo guards flushed Qurans down the toilet. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter as we braced for an attack on our base that, fortunately, never came. The retraction and apology came too late for Afghans killed during violent protests.

Things have gotten worse in the years since. And today’s information environment “poses new and complex challenges for national security” according to the GAO report, which is based on surveys of numerous Pentagon and intelligence officials, DARPA, and all the military services.

7 takeaways:

1. “Russian media regularly skews, twists, and misrepresents information to Latin American audiences on DOD activities, missions, intentions, and motivations to increase negative perceptions of DOD among foreign audiences,” according to U.S. Southern Command officials.

   • They also say that servicemembers’ “exposure to adversary propaganda and disinformation can influence DOD perceptions and decision-making.”

2. China conducts several information ops that “threaten Air Force missions and operations,” Air Force officials said. “China maintains a worldwide information collection program to advance its weapons development programs and national influence/disinformation activities.”

   • China was targeting “critical Air Force information by conducting sophisticated computer network intrusion and data exfiltration operations against the Air Force and its industry partners.”

   • (The Senate Intel Committee recently warned that U.S. spy agency efforts to stop China from stealing secrets are hampered by an unclear mission, miscommunication, and lack of funding for the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.)

3. Local Pacific military officials “are less inclined to speak negatively about strategic competitors or confront malign influence in the same manner as the United States,” U.S. Pacific Command officials reported (China is unnamed as the strategic competitor in question, but that’s who they’re talking about!). “The command added that this is particularly the case when in matters such as maritime presence and freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea.”

   • Also of note: “Violent extremist organizations are using the narrative of the Taliban’s victory over the U.S. in Afghanistan to influence extremists in the Philippines and Indo-Pacific region.”

4. Here at home as reported by U.S. Northern Command, “China has exfiltrated plans for fighter jet aircraft from a DOD contractor’s system,” and a February cyber alert “noted that Russian state-sponsored cyber actors had exfiltrated DOD information from cleared defense contractors.”

5. “The alert noted that this incident granted the actors significant insight into U.S. weapons platforms development and deployment timelines, plans for communications infrastructure, and specific technologies employed by the U.S. government and military.”

   • The command also claimed that foreign terrorists target “sympathetic U.S. service members on social media, attempting to convince them to commit an active-shooter scenario at a U.S. military installation to atone for perceived atrocities committed by the U.S.”

6. And something no one worried about in 2006 but hey, times change: “Deepfakes could also lead audiences to disregard legitimate evidence of wrongdoing and, more generally, undermine public trust in audiovisual content.” We haven’t even scratched the surface of how these incredibly realistic videos will likely be used to manipulate audiences in the future.

7. Meanwhile, the Office of the Secretary of Defense “stated that training for its personnel and leadership related to the information environment and IT systems are limited.” Cool.

   👉🏻 The full GAO report is here

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🚨 The Rundown

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered automatic increases to housing allowances for troops living in areas where rent has gone sky-high. The “basic needs allowance” pay bump hits in October and varies by location.

  • “This is also personal for me,” Austin wrote in a Sept. 22 memo. “I have seen firsthand how much our military families sacrifice to keep our force strong, healthy, and ready to defend this exceptional nation. In the face of challenges and frustrations, our families show incredible resilience.”

• 📣 Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan gave a rousing speech to airmen on the risks of the U.S. losing to China. “Your kids grow up subservient to a rules-based order that benefits only one country if we lose this…” he said on Sept. 21. “There is no access to the global commons. There is no ‘free and open.’ There is no rules-based order. So the stakes are incredibly high.”

• More:

  • “The pile of our nation’s enemy dead, the pile that is the biggest, is in front of the United States Air Force.”

  • “Lethality matters most. When you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” (The last two were laugh lines.)

  • “It’s important that we surround ourselves with a winning lexicon: Destroy, dominate, kill, defend, secure, win, unfair win, lopsided win. Those terms matter.”

  • “We are not ready to fight and win inside the first island chain, but we will be in a year. Well sir, that’s a lot to do in a short time.’ Yeah, no shit.”

• The U.S. and Israel finished exercise Digital Shield in the Gulf of Aqaba on Sept. 22, which used “unmanned systems and artificial intelligence in support of vessel boarding,” the Navy said. The Coast Guard and the Navy’s nascent Task Force 59 of several dozen sailors worked alongside Israeli soldiers and naval officers to practice seizing ships under the watchful eye of a Saildrone Explorer and T-38 Devil Ray unmanned surface vessel.

• ☢️ The National Nuclear Security Administration and its contractors “have not fully implemented six foundational cybersecurity risk practices,” according to a new GAO report on Nuclear Weapons Cybersecurity. Fortunately, most cyber issues don’t appear in IT systems dealing with nukes—though the NNSA hasn’t developed a strategy for countering such hazards and “likely constrains…awareness of and responses to such threats.” Please get on that.

• The Marine Corps allowed its Amphibious Combat Vehicle back into the water on Sept. 22 after a two-month safety review. The Corps paused all waterborne operations on July 21 after heavy surf disabled two ACVs at Camp Pendleton, California (No Marines were hurt).

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles to chair a new Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion on Sept. 23. The 20-member committee of former senior military enlisted, officers, and civilian experts is tasked with helping the Pentagon on “matters and policies relating to improving racial/ethnic diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity within the DoD.”

  • After I broke this news on Twitter, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got big mad. Anyway, remember when Cruz attacked an American soldier using Russian propaganda and never apologized for it? It still bugs me.

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• The Pentagon has a big update out on its major weapons systems’ cost, schedule, and status. 81 DoD reports show where things stand on various military hardware, including KC-46A tanker aircraft modernization, Littoral Combat Ship, Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and more. [Full List]

• The Marine Corps Inspector General is assessing the “overall command climate” of the Corps’ aviation community. Marine aviators and flight students should have received an email with a link to the survey, which concludes on Oct. 21. 🤔

• Edward Snowden is 🇷🇺 Russian. On Sept. 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to the former U.S. intelligence contractor, who in 2013 fled the United States for Hong Kong with a huge cache of top secret documents—which he had not fully read—and later emerged as the source of leaked documents stolen from the National Security Agency. He also exposed legitimate NSA hacking in China and blew intel targeting Al Qaeda in Mosul, tainting what he called “whistleblowing.”

• Speaking of top secret documents, former President Donald Trump thinks he can declassify documents with his mind. 🤯

• The U.S. has been reportedly sending private messages to Russian leadership for several months warning of “grave consequences” if they use nuclear weapons.

• Meanwhile, Putin is “himself giving directions directly to generals in the field,” according to a CNN report citing two sources familiar with western intelligence. Russian officers have complained in intercepted communications about decision-making and military strategy from the micromanager in Moscow.

• The U.S. Strategic Command’s advisory group will meet privately on Oct. 19-20 to talk “scientific, technical, intelligence, and policy-related issues” during the “development of the Nation’s strategic war plans,” according to a federal notice. The agenda includes a nuclear stockpile assessment, “dual near-peer threat assessment and integrated deterrence,” and StratCom’s ties to the intelligence community.

• Vlad’s nuclear threats aren’t stopping the U.S. and Europe from arming and training Kyiv. Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive has been stunning and bolstered hopes that Moscow would ultimately lose, but as Mick Ryan notes, hope is not a plan for western militaries in a supporting role.

• Russian men drafted into military service reportedly get only “15 days of training before potentially being deployed to Russia’s stumbling war effort in Ukraine.” Two weeks is enough time to learn basic infantry tactics and how to fire a weapon—but don’t expect much from conscripts facing people defending their homes (U.S. soldiers go through 24+ weeks of training to be qualified grunts).

• Two U.S. military veterans were among hundreds freed last week in a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine. Moscow released 215 Ukrainians in exchange for 55 Russian soldiers and Victor Medvedchuk, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• The CIA’s model of Ayman al-Zawahari’s safe house is now on display in Langley. The agency's model to brief President Joe Biden on the operation—which ended in the al Qaeda leader’s demise in Kabul—is in a museum closed to the public, though you can see photos here. (FYI: The NSA has a museum that is open to everyone).

• Raytheon won a $985 million contract on Sept. 22 to develop a hypersonic attack cruise missile (HACM) for the Air Force by 2027. The HACM will be an air-launched standoff weapon, meaning that a pilot can launch a missile at targets deep inside enemy territory while safely flying beyond their air defenses. And since a hypersonic flies five times the speed of sound on an unpredictable flight path, it’s practically unstoppable.

  • The U.S. military has been trying to build hypersonics for years despite funding and technological hurdles. But development has gotten a big shot in the arm lately due to similar efforts by Russia and China. “A hypersonic arms race is accelerating,” Science warned in 2020.

• The U.S. Maritime Administration is looking to identify “oceangoing vessels that may be both useful and available to the Department of Defense for deploying U.S. military equipment (such as tanks and other tracked and wheeled vehicles) and the full range of supplies (including petroleum products and fuel) necessary to sustain a force in a foreign theater of operations.” I asked twice, but Pentagon officials were unable to say what this was about before my deadline.

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That’s been the hypothetical D-Day for a while, thanks to Navy Adm. Phil Davidson, who told the Senate last year that China’s ambitions are accelerating and “the threat is manifest during this decade” of a potential Taiwan play. “In fact, in the next six years.”

Add CIA Deputy Director David Cohen as another voice: He says Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military “to have the capability to take control of Taiwan by force by 2027,” CNN reported, though Langley still thinks Xi wants to “get control through nonmilitary means.”

President Joe Biden has said four times now that the United States will defend Taiwan from attack—Chinese protests and “strategic ambiguity” be damned—so the question now is what is being done to deter it?

It’s unclear whether China will invade Taiwan in 2027, 2049, or ever. But the U.S. undoubtedly prefers the status quo. An autonomous Taiwan and free-flowing Taiwan Strait are better for global stability.

Nevertheless, military planners must prepare for crises anyway. And while five years seems distant, U.S. weapons being used now to defend Ukraine are needed to bolster Taiwan—but US stockpiles have dwindled and will take years to rebuild.

Unlike Ukraine—with porous borders ripe for foreign weapons shipments and aid—Taiwan will be “very hard to arm” during a conflict, says Blake Herzinger, a Pacific security expert. The island sits about 100 miles east of China and is within range of its missiles—along with U.S. forces that would presumably respond from Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

“Self-propelled artillery and mobile cruise missile launchers are the types of equipment Taiwan should prioritize but has yet to incorporate into its defense forces,” Herzinger wrote recently in Foreign Policy.

Taiwan also needs a “large number of small things,” says retired Adm. Lee Hsi-min, former chief of the Taiwan General Staff from 2017 to 2019 and planner of the island’s defense. These things include intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems and counter-ISR; small precision weapons that can be concealed from missile attack; anti-air weapons to keep aircraft at bay; and other munitions that can inflict massive pain on invaders close to shore.

“If we want to survive, and if we want to successfully defend ourselves, we must change,” Lee said in July. “This is a matter of life and death.”

There are, of course, acute diplomatic issues at play. Helping Taiwan angers Beijing. And if Taipei claims independence, full-scale invasion is virtually assured. But there is another prospect U.S. planners are starting to worry about: a blockade or “quarantine” by China that would complicate a response.

“They have a very large navy, and if they want to bully and put ships around Taiwan, they very much can do that,” says Navy Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, U.S. 7th Fleet commander. “Clearly if they do something that’s non-kinetic, which, you know, a blockade is less kinetic.”

According to a recent Rand study, China “would likely see quarantine" as a lower-risk option, explaining a block of shipping to Taiwan “as nothing more than an attempt to regulate trade as opposed to invasion and occupation.” But a Cuban Missile Crisis-style quarantine should not be viewed as low risk.

“The United States and its allies should view the possibility of a quarantine of Taiwan by the [People’s Republic of China] as a highly destabilizing course of action that could become dangerous very quickly,” the study says.

How it goes from there, according to Rand:

“Taiwan would be affected quickly, with the asymmetry between Taiwan and the PRC making Taiwan’s ability to function economically precarious. The United States would face a requirement to move forces close to the contested area, increasing vulnerability. Taiwan’s status as a supplier of components and high-technology items might in fact increase the world’s incentives to urge rapid resolution, while at the same time creating incentives for the PRC to seek domination over key industries. This would likely not be a slow-moving conflict but a rapidly escalating crisis.”

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🚨 Open Sources

Contextualized intel, analysis, quotes, reports, docs, and original national security reporting you need on your radar:

• 🇷🇺 Russian President Vladimir Putin has escalated his war in Ukraine, ordering the immediate mobilization of 300,000 military reservists and again threatening the West with nukes. “This is not a bluff,” Putin said in a televised address, begging the question: What were all the previous nuclear threats, then?

  • Notably, the move “leaves discretion” to Russia’s military, says Pavel Chikov, a longtime human rights advocate in Russia. “The Ministry of Defense will form quotas for mobilization for each region of Russia. Governors will be responsible for their implementation.” This ostensibly lets Moscow pull cannon fodder from certain regions to conceal the full extent of mobilization—a closely-held state secret.

  • Putin’s speech is “an admission that his invasion is failing…” says UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace. “No amount of threats and propaganda can hide the fact that Ukraine is winning this war, the international community are united, and Russia is becoming a global pariah.”

  • Here’s what Russians in both pro- and anti-war camps are saying, though some in the anti-war camp are heading to the airport in droves.

  • Meanwhile, the founder of Russian mercenary group Wagner is recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine for pardons while admitting “this is a hard war, not even close to the likes of Chechnya.” Inspiring.

• 🇨🇳 The Chinese-owned TikTok app that’s wildly popular with U.S. military service members (and 1 billion+ others) is under greater scrutiny.

  • Aside from hosting Ukraine war footage and viral dance videos, TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party and a June revelation that U.S. user data “has been repeatedly accessed from China” has worried regulators, as evidenced by heated Senate questioning of TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas.

  • TikTok has pushed back on its Chinese government ties and pledged more transparency, but that arguably doesn’t matter. China has a law on the books allowing the state to “commission” individuals and organizations “to carry out” intelligence work. And when Beijing’s spies come knocking, according to the law,

    they “may ask relevant institutions, organizations and citizens to provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.”

  • The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been conducting a security review of the app since 2020. President Biden ordered “additional national security factors” for CFIUS security reviews on Sept. 15. Tech journalist Casey Newton suspects a potential TikTok sale “sooner or later” to avoid a ban.

  • Meanwhile, tech competition with China is sure to persist, but a “grim future” awaits the U.S. if it loses to China in chip development, 5G connectivity, and artificial intelligence, according to a special U.S. government-backed study. [PDF]

  • “If that world happens, it’s going to be very bleak for democracy…” says Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary and advisor on the study. “China’s sphere of influence will grow as its technological platforms proliferate throughout the world, and they will be able to establish surveillance on a global scale. So that’s what losing looks like.”

  • Drone tech is also worth keeping an eye on, as noted in The Ruck earlier this month. Drones are proliferating and are altering warfare. They’ll also impact far more, with nearly 5,000 drone patents being granted in the last year. Nearly 70% are Chinese-owned.

• 🇺🇸 U.S. troops in northeast Syria were attacked on Sept. 18 with three 107mm rockets. A fourth rocket and launcher were found at the launch site 5 kilometers away, according to U.S. Central Command.

• The Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military will begin polling tens of thousands of troops as officials continue to evaluate and implement 80+ recommendations made by the commission in July.

• The Pentagon ordered a “sweeping audit” of how the military conducts psychological operations online amid concerns about the trolling of America’s enemies in cyberspace.

• ⚓️ The trial of a Navy sailor accused of setting ablaze the USS Bonhomme Richard has begun in San Diego, California. Ryan Sawyer Mays is charged with the July 2020 fire that sent the $1.2 billion warship to the scrapyard. A Navy judge urged against taking Mays to trial due to lack of evidence. Prosecutors will likely rest on Friday, a Navy official told The Ruck.

• The retirement of a former general of Fort Benning, Georgia, has been put on “pause” as the Army investigates alleged social media misconduct. Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe has been reassigned as a “special assistant” and is no longer in the retirement process. Donahoe did not respond to questions from The Ruck.

• The USS Ronald Reagan visits Busan, South Korea, on Friday, marking the first visit of a U.S. aircraft carrier to the country since 2018.

  • The ship is in port for military drills to check North Korea, which has vexed 16 Congresses and six presidents, according to the tally in a new CRS update. According to CRS, Pyongyang “has ignored attempts” by the Biden administration and others to resume dialogue since nuclear talks collapsed in 2019. [PDF]

• The guided-missile destroyer USS Zumwalt left Guam after a port call on Sept. 19 and is now under the command of the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Pacific.

• 🦠 Iranian hackers allegedly broke into “hundreds” of U.S., Israeli, and U.K. small businesses, government agencies, nonprofits, and the critical infrastructure sector, a Justice Department indictment says.

  • Speaking of Iran, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, had reportedly “fallen gravely ill” and was under observation by a team of doctors on Sept. 13. Yet the 83-year-old appeared healthy and spoke for nearly an hour Wednesday, according to Reuters.

  • Khamanei did not mention deadly protests sweeping the country after a 22-year-old woman arrested in Tehran for wearing “unsuitable attire” died in police custody.

• Who’s the woman standing next to Kim Jong-un? Curious western analysts want to know the “new character” in Kim’s inner circle who has appeared publicly several times in recent months.

  • “She has typically been seen carrying a handbag, possibly containing items the North Korean leader needs on call at all times such as his phone, cigarettes or medicine,” NK News reported.

• A new Journal of Advanced Military Studies has been published by Marine Corps University. The 249-page collection has various U.S. military officials and national security practitioners discussing topics such as Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry and Grey Wars: A Contemporary History of U.S. Special Operations. [PDF]

• The new documentary Escape from Kabul is on HBO with never-before-seen footage and interviews with U.S. Marines, Taliban fighters, and Afghans about the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. [YouTube Trailer]

  • Also, The Anthrax Attacks: In The Shadow of 9/11 is now on Netflix and worth a look.

• 🚀 The Space Force unveiled its official song to mixed reviews.

  • “I would advise Space Force to continue using the Sousa march until something comes naturally. Forcing a tradition never works,” retired Marine Maj. Brian Dix, director laureate of the U.S. Marine Corps Drum & Bugle Corps, opined to The Ruck.

  • “The melody isn’t catchy and the lyrics don’t make sense…” he added. “The song is about as entertaining as day-old pastry. Semper Bleh.” Harsh!

• 🇮🇳 Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh says U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “has given permission to transfer a big technology to India and said if it has to be manufactured, we will do it in India,” according to an Indian media report. Pentagon officials declined to say what this ‘big’ technology was when asked by The Ruck.

  • The U.S. readout of the defense chiefs’ Sept. 14 discussion said that both would talk later this year about strengthening military ties, and “Secretary Austin and Minister Singh highlighted their commitment to strengthening defense technology and industrial cooperation to support India’s rise as an industry leader and regional security provider.”

• Finally, a national security “feel good” story: Meet Lt. Col. Michael “Snooki” O’Brien and Lt. Col. Courtney “Britney” O’Brien, a husband and wife team of Marine pilots who recently took command of their own squadrons in the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing on the same day in Miramar, California. It’s unclear how their call signs came about, but Snooki’s fighter jets and Britney’s aerial refuelers have been covering the skies since Sept. 9.

That’s all for this week in The Ruck! Hope I made sense of another busy week in the national security world. I’d love your feedback; just hit reply to email me directly and let me know if this dispatch was good, bad, or ugly.

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Thanks for reading,

Paul Szoldra