The National Interest

Mark Episkopos

Belarus,

Though the commercial wisdom seems dubious at best, the strategic benefits of this deal are much more readily apparent.

Belarus is set to join the growing ranks of S-400 importers, enhancing the Russian missile network’s performance against Ukraine and NATO’s eastern fringes.

During an eight-hour long press conference earlier this month, Belarusian President Lukashenko revealed that Minsk is in an advanced stage of negotiations with the Kremlin to purchase an unspecified number of S-400 “Triumf” missile defense systems.

“We are in a dialogue with Russia in order to get S-400 systems delivered to Belarus. President of Russia Vladimir Putin has been asked to allow us to buy them at a bulk price, on credit,” he said.

“[The] S-300 systems are good and we've learned how to upgrade them and restore them,” Lukashenko added. “However, we have a strong interest in S-400 systems. I am convinced we will get these systems.” The Belarusian military is believed to currently operate as many as one dozen upgraded S-300PS systems. It is unclear if Minsk is seeking the additional S-400 regiments from Russia as a replacement, or a complement, to its active S-300 roster.

Lukashenko’s remarks follow Belarusian air chief Igor Golub's announcement earlier this year that the Belarus military is in pre-contract talks over a potential S-400 procurement deal.

Belarus has lobbied for years to secure an S-400 contract with Russia, but was passed up in favor of more lucrative export deals with China and then Turkey. Belarus has not gotten any richer in recent months, with Lukashenko himself admitting that his military still lacks the budget to purchase the missile systems outright. "This issue was raised before the president of Russia so that the S-400s can be delivered to the Republic of Belarus at a reasonable price on a loan because we do not have such money," he said. The Belarusian President was referring to the $1 billion loan to Minsk, split into two $500 million tranches, that was approved by Moscow in December 2020. Lukashenko appeared to suggest that the loan was conditioned, whether explicitly or implicitly, on Belarus’ procurement of a certain number of S-400 units. He noted that Belarus will purchase the S-400 at “internal Russian prices”—that is, the same price that would have been paid by Russia’s own military.

In sum, the Kremlin is giving Minsk the money to buy its S-400 systems at a subsidized rate reserved for Russia’s domestic forces. Though the commercial wisdom seems dubious at best, the strategic benefits of this deal are much more readily apparent. S-400 systems fielded in westernmost Belarus will give Russian-aligned missile defense forces (Russia and Belarus are a Union State with partially overlapping military infrastructure) coverage over large swathes of southern Poland that are out of range of the S-400 regiments currently stationed in Russia’s Central European enclave of Kaliningrad. By the same token, S-400’s deployed along Belarus’s southern periphery will offer sweeping coverage over the parts of Northern and Western Ukraine that are out of range of the S-400 systems being kept in Russian-annexed Crimea. Proliferating the S-400 to Belarus will help to plug several large holes in Russia’s western missile defense network, enhancing Moscow’s deterrent and offensive capabilities against NATO’s eastern flank as well as Ukraine. 

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

Afghanistan,

After it became clear that the Afghan government was sinking, Biden was faced with a choice: letting it go under, or making an effort to rescue it. He chose the wrong option.

In 2011, in accordance with a Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the George W. Bush administration, President Barack Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq.

At the time, the war’s few remaining advocates pushed for Obama to negotiate an extension to the agreement, allowing U.S. forces to remain for a longer period of time. Obama demurred. A combination of the 2007 “surge” of U.S. troops and the influence of the “Sunni Awakening” movement, in which Iraq’s western tribes came together to oppose the insurgency, had buried the nascent Islamic State of Iraq and restored a period of relative calm. While tensions remained between the Sunni minority and the Shi’a-dominated government, Baghdad maintained essentially unchallenged control over the country’s territory for the first time since the 2003 invasion. For the past seven years, it had been a seemingly inescapable quagmire. With the Status of Forces Agreement, Bush presented Obama with a chance to exit at an opportune time, and Obama took it.

“Iraq is not a perfect place,” Obama admitted during the withdrawal. “It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Over the next two years, the “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” country fell apart. The protests of the Arab Spring weakened the central government; the Shi’a administration of Nouri al-Maliki continued to oppress the country’s Sunnis, extinguishing the Awakening movement; and the sectarian civil war in neighboring Syria gave a second wind to the insurgency, whose surviving leadership formed the core of the better-known Islamic State (ISIL).

In the summer of 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden watched from the Oval Office as the U.S.-equipped Iraqi Army collapsed in the face of ISIL militants that it routinely outnumbered fifteen-to-one. The ensuing carnage, broadcast around the world by the terror group’s social media-savvy zealots, ultimately brought about a return of U.S. troops to the country. Although they are now being withdrawn, there is little doubt that, with the benefit of another decade of training and advice, Iraq’s military is far better equipped to defend itself. The country as a whole is also better off for America’s return; civilian deaths in Iraq today are the lowest they have been since the 2003 invasion.

Obama had a compelling list of reasons to leave Iraq in 2011. The war was highly unpopular in the United States. As the scheduled withdrawal approached, Iraq enjoyed a period of relative stability. Most importantly, the United States was obliged to leave by the bilateral agreement it had signed in 2008. Obama’s decision had its critics, but it was based on optimism, respect for America’s commitments, and hope for Iraq’s independent future.

None of this can be said of Afghanistan, or of Biden’s disastrous April decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the country by September. The war, while not explicitly popular, never engendered the same level of controversy and opposition as America’s invasion of Iraq did. Before Biden’s announcement of the withdrawal, the situation in Afghanistan was actively deteriorating. Unlike in Iraq, where the Maliki government blithely showed Obama the door, the administration of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani actively encouraged Biden to stay. To the extent that the United States had an obligation to leave Afghanistan, it was based on the February 2020 agreement that the Taliban negotiated with the United States—an agreement that the militant group began to openly violate before the ink had dried.

Consequently, Biden’s commitment to withdraw the U.S. from Afghanistan provoked vigorous opposition from experts and commentators in Kabul and Washington. The president’s detractors noted that, while he touted the number strength of the Afghan security forces in his remarks, his administration had been no more successful in addressing the corruption and morale problems that sapped the security forces’ ability to fight than his predecessors had. Some also pointed out the poor timing of the move: the April decision to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan coincided with the beginning of the country’s traditional fighting season, in which hostilities resumed after a winter lull in previous years.

Most damningly, Biden never claimed that Afghanistan was “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant,” and never pretended that the Afghan government was prepared to take on the Taliban alone. The president simply decided that, after twenty years with no end in sight, it was time to leave, despite the concerns of generals and study groups which warned that an immediate U.S. withdrawal could cause the government to fall to the Taliban.

And fall it has. So far, more than eighteen of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provincial capitals, and sixteen of its provinces, have fallen to the group, as have Kabul, the nation’s capital, and Kandahar and Herat, its second- and third-largest cities. The Taliban now controls outright more than two-thirds of the country, including virtually all of the north, south, and west. The Afghan government has essentially ceased to exist; President Ghani has fled the country, and the remaining Afghan security forces are surrendering en masse. To the extent that there are any areas in Afghanistan that the Taliban does not yet control, they consist only of small patches of land in the country’s center and east – and in the absence of the central government, these areas are sure to give up as quickly as the militant group can arrive. It took Iraq two and a half years to collapse. In Afghanistan, the time elapsed from the first provincial capital’s surrender to the fall of Kabul was less than two and a half weeks.

Fundamentally, Biden’s decision to abandon Afghanistan was brought about by exhaustion. The president himself acknowledged that, while the conditions for his withdrawal were not ideal, there would never be a correct time: “‘Not now’—that’s how we got here.” In other words, Biden argued, the U.S. could never win, so the correct course of action was to cut America’s losses and leave post haste.

This frustration is easy to understand. As the War in Afghanistan entered its twentieth year, the U.S. had remarkably little to show for the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars it has poured into the country. Biden’s predecessors in the Oval Office employed a variety of approaches to solving the Afghan government’s problems and defeating the Taliban, and nothing worked. So Biden tried one final idea: pulling out and telling the Afghan government that it was time to sink or swim.

After it became clear that the Afghan government was sinking, however, Biden was faced with a choice: letting it go under, or making an effort to rescue it.

Biden chose the wrong option. The president’s decision to do nothing in the face of the Taliban’s advance, even after the inevitable result of U.S. inaction became clear, was as astonishing as it would have been if President Obama had coldly told Baghdad to fend for itself in the summer of 2014. The Taliban is not ISIL, but they are not altogether different; the restoration of their rule will prove catastrophic, both from a moral standpoint and from a security perspective. Setting aside the worst human implications of a Taliban takeover, the group’s overt and unyielding ties to Al-Qaeda will give the terrorist group an enduring sanctuary from which to plan further attacks against the United States.

Biden made this point in his speech announcing the withdrawal: “Our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.  We did that.  We accomplished that objective.” Now that the Taliban has taken over Afghanistan, America’s accomplishment in this regard is likely to be undone overnight. If it is a near-certainty that America will need to intervene in the future to target Al-Qaeda and roll back the Taliban, it would have been far easier to do so prior to Kabul’s fall, when the Afghan security forces were still largely intact within the city itself, than it will be now that the government has been defeated in detail.

In 2014, as ISIL rampaged through western and central Iraq, Obama dispatched thousands of U.S. troops to Iraq to train and advise the Iraqi Army, which remained cohesive in Baghdad even as it disintegrated elsewhere. Though Biden firmly ruled out such a course in Afghanistan, there were other actions that the administration could have taken to support the Afghan security forces—for instance, resuming and escalating its airstrikes on Taliban targets, which dropped precipitously during the U.S. withdrawal, in order to slow the group’s advance and restore psychological confidence in the country’s defenders.

Now the opportunity has passed. The country belongs to the Taliban, and the near-certain result is disaster. To say nothing of the thousands of reprisal killings that will follow their consolidation of power, and then a return to life as it was in the 1990s—music banned, girls’ schools closed, and public executions in soccer stadiums—the group has little to no experience in actually running a country. If its past misrule was any indication, Taliban officials will ignore their bureaucratic duties, and the country’s economy will enter freefall. More ominously, four-fifths of the Ghani administration’s budget was provided by the United States, which clearly will not underwrite the Taliban in the same way. To fund the difference, the group will likely turn to a traditional source of revenue: poppy cultivation in the country’s south, legitimizing Afghanistan’s transformation into the world’s premier narco-state.

Even as the Taliban solidifies its conquests, some have continued to suggest that the group is unlikely to conquer all of Afghanistan, given its historic hostility towards Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities and the recent advent of regional militias loyal to local warlords rather than the central government. These militias would, in theory, be far less likely to flee from defending their homes than the Afghan security forces would. There has even been discussion of re-forming the historic “Northern Alliance,” the regional coalition in northern Afghanistan that opposed the Taliban from 1996 until 2001.

However, these efforts will almost certainly not succeed. The Taliban’s “northern strategy” has netted it control over many of the northern areas that historically opposed the group in its heyday, and the group has already steamrolled regional warlords that opposed it, notably Afghan strongmen Ismail Khan in Herat and Abdul Rashid Dostum in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban has also evolved beyond its Pashtun roots, expanding its outreach to Afghanistan’s minorities and presenting itself as a religious group rather than an ethnic one. When the group captured border crossings with Tajikistan in June, it consciously and strategically chose to put ethnic Tajik militants at the forefront of its advance. Even if the Taliban never technically gains full control over Afghanistan’s territory, isolated pockets of resistance in peripheral areas will make little difference to its allies’ capacity to cause destruction abroad. The original Northern Alliance could not stop Osama bin Laden. A successor group is even less likely to stop Al-Qaeda’s current leaders.

This issue has not been addressed by the Biden administration, which emptily urged Afghan soldiers to defend their country even as it withdrew its own troops. But Kabul’s soldiers could hardly have been assured that they should fight when the tide was so clearly against them. By engaging in airstrikes or sending in additional troops, even if only as advisers, Biden could have played a role in reversing that perception—but he did not.

Certainly, it must be said that the skeptics of U.S. military involvement have correctly identified clear downsides to a U.S. intervention in the conflict. Returning to the country would have inevitably meant a re-commitment of the United States to its open-ended mission there. This would have involved substantial economic costs for the United States, and it would have resulted in deaths and injuries to U.S. military personnel. These are heavy burdens for any president to shoulder. But these costs, high as they are, must now be weighed against the cost of allowing that country to be taken over by the Taliban and their allies. History shows that jihadist activities in remote countries have a way of not remaining there, but escaping to Paris or to New York.

To contain ISIL’s looming apocalypse, Obama made the unpleasant and costly decision to return a limited force of U.S. troops to Iraq—and Iraq, the Middle East, and ultimately the United States were better off for it. Biden chose not to do the same in Afghanistan, and the consequences will be dire.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

economy, Americas

The decision on booster shots has been complicated by the rapid onset of the Delta variant, which has dramatically increased cases in the United States in the spring and summer of 2021.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, responsible for overseeing the approval of medications and vaccines in the United States, has authorized a third shot of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to select groups of Americans. These “booster shots,” as they are usually referred to, have been supported by the vaccine manufacturers as a way to ensure the immunity they provide through the winter when virus cases have historically increased. 

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s acting commissioner, issued a statement on Thursday claiming that the FDA was “especially cognizant that immunocompromised people are particularly at risk” for the disease’s worst effects.  

“People who are immunocompromised . . . have a reduced ability to fight infections and other diseases, and they are especially vulnerable to infections, including COVID-19,” according to the statement. “The FDA evaluated information on the use of a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Vaccines in these individuals and determined that the administration of third vaccine doses may increase protection in this population.” 

Crucially, the FDA did not approve booster shots for Americans who do not have existing issues with their immune systems, meaning that a mass booster shot campaign is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future—and, for most Americans, it remains unclear if such a campaign would even be necessary. 

The decision on booster shots has been complicated by the rapid onset of the Delta variant, which has dramatically increased cases in the United States in the spring and summer of 2021 and caused the 2020-era lockdowns, many of which were lifted in the spring, to be re-imposed. 

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a seven-day average of 113,000 new coronavirus cases per day for the first week of August, an increase of 24 percent from the previous week. Hospital admissions, according to the data, have increased more than 30 percent. The increases are concentrated in states with lower vaccination rates, most notably including Texas and Florida. 

The overwhelming majority of the new group—97 percent—have not received a single dose of the vaccine, leading booster shot skeptics to argue that the doses could be better used by vaccinating more Americans. The World Health Organization has also discouraged the use of booster shots, arguing that the vaccines should instead be distributed to developing countries with low vaccination rates. The intergovernmental agency has set a target for 10 percent of all countries to be vaccinated by September—a target which now seems unlikely to be met.  

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. 

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

economy, Americas

The fear that Social Security will collapse is vastly overstated.

Social Security is a key government program that has helped millions of seniors in the United States to enjoy their retirement without fear of running out of money. While the benefits, averaging $1,500 per month apiece, cannot assure anyone a comfortable life without supplementary income from a nest egg, they can keep elderly retirees from worrying about the most basic financial concerns, such as access to money for food or rent. 

Unfortunately, there is a problem with Social Security: it is running out of money. 

The cause for this is simple. The Social Security Administration operates a pair of trust funds to pay for the ongoing benefits—one devoted to retirement benefits, the other to disability benefits, both of which the SSA has been tasked with managing. Since 1935, the year that the Social Security Administration was created, the population of the United States has historically been skewed toward the young over the old. Because young people pay into the Social Security trust fund, in the form of Social Security tax revenue, and old people withdraw from it, in the form of benefits, the proportion of young to old determines the long-term financial viability of the trust fund; an abundance of young people contributing taxes increases the size of the trust fund, while an abundance of retired beneficiaries diminishes it. 

Unfortunately, after the Baby Boomer generation—born 1946 through 1964—entered retirement, the trust fund began to lose money each year. At its current rate of depletion, the fund is estimated to run out by 2035. 

The fear that Social Security will collapse is vastly overstated. The U.S. workforce continues to pay Social Security taxes, which means the SSA has a reliable year-by-year inflow of cash that it can use to cover benefits as needed. However, by collecting taxes alone, the SSA will not be able to pay for all existing benefits; if nothing else changes, seniors’ benefits will simply have to be cut by roughly 20 percent to cover the shortfall. 

Social Security reform has long been regarded as a “third rail” of American politics—resulting in lethal consequences for politicians that try to touch it. However, an overnight 20 percent cut in retirees’ Social Security benefits would be absolutely unthinkable. Given Social Security’s massive popularity among Americans, and the vast influence of the program’s foremost defender, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) on Capitol Hill, there is little doubt that a solution will be worked out in advance. This solution will most likely raise Social Security taxes and possibly marginally cut existing or future benefits, although most Americans and the AARP have opposed this. 

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Afghanistan, Asia

The fall of Kabul is just the latest national capital to fall in wartime. There have been other notable examples of capital cities facing far longer prolonged sieges—only to succumb in the end. 

The Afghan capital city of Kabul was on the verge of collapse as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday. Soon after Taliban forces had entered the outskirts of the city, Afghan security forces had turned over Bagram Air Base to the insurgent force. 

Around the world, the swift fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was condemned—and many comparisons were made to the fall of Saigon in 1975. That event marked the end of the Vietnam War and began the start of a formal reunification of Vietnam.  

There were marked contrasts though. The North Vietnamese victory came in part from its sizeable advantage—with some 120,000 troops facing just over 30,000 defenders. In Afghanistan, the security forces had not just the numbers, but also tanks, helicopters and other aircraft. It could be described as the worst defeat of a modern army by a largely untrained and under-equipped force since the Portuguese were driven from Africa in the 1970s.  

However, the fall of Kabul is just the latest national capital to fall in wartime. There have been other notable examples of capital cities facing far longer prolonged sieges—only to succumb in the end. 

Fall of Constantinople 

The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in May 1453 marked the end of the Byzantine Empire, which, at that point, accounted for little more than the city. It wasn’t the first great empire capital to fall—and it wasn’t even the first time the city had been captured or sacked.

However, the conquest of the great city has largely been used to mark the end of the Medieval Period, as its once great walls proved no match in the age of gunpowder. The fall of the city saw the rise of the Ottoman Empire, which took the city as its capital. While the exact number of Ottoman causalities is believed to be heavy, some thirty thousand Byzantine defenders faced slavery. For them, the capture of the city was truly the end of their world. 

Siege of Richmond 

An interesting fact about the American Civil War is that Washington, DC and Richmond are just ninety-five miles apart yet neither side came all that close to seriously threatening the two seats of government until the Richmond-Petersburg campaign began in June 1864. It proved to be a portent of the terrible conflicts to come, as the campaign consisted of nine months of trench warfare as the Union forces under Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assaulted Petersburg unsuccessfully. 

Only after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee abandoned both cities in April 1865, leading to his retreat and eventual surrender, were Union forces finally able to march into victory—taking the capital of the Confederate States of America. 

France’s Downfall and Germany Unification 

The French capital of Paris has endured seven sieges, beginning with a Viking siege in the ninth century. But it was arguably the great siege of 1870–71 that was most devastating for the City of Lights. Lasting from September 19, 1870, until January 28, 1871, the siege began after the defeat and abdication of the French Emperor Napoleon III. While the French attempted to hold out, after four months the city finally surrendered. 

Just before the city finally fell, Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, was proclaimed German Emperor at the Palace of Versailles—setting the stage for another, evenly more deadly war. However, as German forces remained outside the city as the peace terms were being worked out, Parisian workers and members of the National Guard, which had been raised to defend the city, rose up and established the Paris Commune. The radical socialist government was short-lived and was forcibly put down by the French Army of the Third Republic. 

 Battle of Berlin 

The Reich that was to last one thousand years was utterly annihilated in April 1945 as the German capital of Berlin was taken by the Soviet Red Army. The Battle of Berlin was the last major of the offenses of the European theater of World War II. 

To the Nazi faithful it was Götterdämmerung—Twilight of the Gods—come alive. The finally from Richard Wagner’s opera had even been performed in the final concert of the Berlin Philharmonic under the rule of the Third Reich just days before the battle for the capital city began. It was the largest battle on German soil and both sides suffered heavy losses. On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide within days the Reich was no more. Berlin soon became a divided city, only reunified in 1989. The scars of the battle can still be seen today. 

Siege of Sarajevo 

Not every siege in history has ended with the city’s fall. In February 1996, the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was lifted after nearly three years and eleven months—three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and even a year longer than the siege of Leningrad.

It was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare and began when the forces of the Yugoslav People’s Army attacked the city. After Serbian forces were driven back, the city’s heating, electricity and water supplies were restored. Finally, in October of 1995, the Dayton Agreement brought peace to the country. 

Sadly, even if the Taliban quickly take the city, it is unlikely the stability that exists in Sarajevo—or Berlin, Richmond, Paris and Istanbul (formerly Constantinople)—will return soon, if ever. 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. 

Image: Reuters

Mark Episkopos

Submarines,

The Akula II revision was intended to feature further acoustics enhancements that would have made the Akula line quieter than the Los Angeles class, but the effort sputtered

The Akula class of nuclear-powered attack submarines is a formidable and remarkably long-lived showcase of the late Soviet Union’s single minded drive to keep pace with—if not exceed—its Cold War competitor.

Late Cold War Soviet submarines were, by most measures, faster and most durable than their U.S. counterparts. But their performance was crippled by one glaring flaw: suboptimal acoustics. Whatever their deficits in other areas, the U.S. military believed that, in the event of a major maritime conflict, American submarines could detect, target, and neutralize their Soviet counterparts before the latter had a chance to respond. 

Soviet high command caught wind of this vulnerability—in no small part, through the efforts of Soviet spies like John Antony Walker—and set about redressing it with a new line of nuclear attack submarines dubbed the Project 971 Shchuka-B (NATO reporting name Akula), not to be confused with the Soviet Akula-class (NATO reporting name Typhoon) strategic submarines. Displacing at around 8,000 tons and featuring a top speed of roughly thirty-four knots, the Akula attack submarines were built from the steel double hull construction typical of late Soviet submarine design. The baseline Akula class featured four standard 533-mm torpedo tubes and four more 650-mm tubes for a total capacity of forty torpedoes, as well as mines and the RPK family of submarine-launched anti-submarine missiles.

But while its outward construction was hardly revolutionary, the Akula submarines offered a host of forward-looking design measures taken to reduce the vessels’ acoustic signature. With the help of milling machines acquired from a Japanese firm, the Soviet shipbuilding industry designed new, higher-quality propellers that produced significantly less noise than their predecessors. The interior compartments were additionally designed to maximize sound dampening and with a slew of active noise cancellation measures. The results spoke for themselves: within the span of one attack submarine generation, the USSR went from a crippling acoustics disadvantage to being able to trade stealth performance blows with the competing U.S. Los Angeles class.

The Akula class saw three, additional major revisions following its 1985 introduction. The improved Akula I class brought additional noise level reductions and sensor upgrades, as well as two more torpedo tubes. There were seven original Akulas and six more improved Akula I’s— together, these comprise the vast majority of serially-produced Akula submarines.

The Akula II revision was intended to feature further acoustics enhancements that would have made the Akula line quieter than the Los Angeles class, but the effort sputtered in the face of unexpectedly steep production outlays; only one Akula II-revision vessel, the K-157 Vepr, made it into service. The Akula III line, conceived amid the disrepair and budget shortfalls of the Soviet collapse, fared just as poorly with only one serial model, the K-335 Gepard. Four of the original Akulas have been decommissioned, leaving just three. All six improved Akulas are currently in active service or undergoing refits, with one— he Nerpa—leased to India until 2022. Both Vepr and Gepard are currently active in Russia’s Northern Fleet, with the former reportedly set to receive an upgrade to Russia’s new Kalibr cruise missiles.

The Russian Navy intends to phase out its remaining Akula vessels with the new Yasen/Yasen-M class of modern nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines. Nine Yasen submarines are slated to enter service through 2028.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Charlie Gao

F-14 Tomcat,

The F-14 were created to fill a capability gap and exceeded expectations. F-14s are no slouch in a dogfight and can carry more bombs than the newF/A-18A/C Hornet. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Operations in former Yugoslavia and the Gulf showed the need for a heavy strike aircraft in the Navy's arsenal, following the retirement of the A-6 Intruders. Enter the F-14, which picked up the slack until the new F/A-18E/F Super Hornets entered service.

The F-14 Tomcat was designed to defend the U.S. Navy’s fleets from practically every airborne threat. While it packed long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missiles for defense against bombers carrying standoff missiles, it was no slouch in a dogfight either, although early versions were held back by its TF30 engines in that arena.

But for a brief period in the 1990s, the F-14 was used as a strike aircraft. The Navy’s retirement of the A-6 Intruders left a small capability gap until the new F/A-18E/F Super Hornets entered service, and the F-14 could carry more bombs than the new F/A-18A/C Hornet.

Operations in former Yugoslavia and the Gulf showed the need for a heavy strike aircraft in the Navy's arsenal. But how effective could the F-14 be in that role? While Israel used F-15B and Ds for ground strikes in relatively unmodified configurations, the U.S. Air Force spent a lot of effort developing a dedicated strike version of the F-15, the F-15E Strike Eagle. For the F-14, some small subsystems were installed, and the aircraft was sent on its way. Could it compete?

While the F-14 was only used operationally in the strike role by America in the 1990s, the aircraft was designed for it to a limited degree. Grumman showed the prototype carrying bombs, and flight tests were carried out with a rack of 14 Mark 82 bombs.

The F-14D, built with digital computers, expanded on this functionality: integrating more weapons onto the F-14. The F-14D was granted clearance by the Navy to drop bombs in 1992. However, it was the F-14B that would serve as the primary F-14 for ground attack.

The gap between the retirement of the A-6 Intruder in 1997 and the fielding of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet in the 2000s let the Tomcat step up to the plate as a ground attacker. Anticipating the shortfall in capability, a Navy paper in December 1994 urged the acquisition of targeting pods so that Tomcat could fulfill this role.

Lockheed Martin’s LANTIRN pod was selected for this purpose, as it already was a mature system used by the Air Force. Integration was complete by 1996, mating F-14B airframes with the pod to make the “Bombcat.” The system saw its first operational use over Kosovo in 1999.

The Bombcats proved to be rather potent in usage. While some advanced functionality of the pod (e.g., navigation) was not integrated into the F-14, the images sent from the pod were more clearly seen. This was because the pod sent its data to the radar intercept officer's Programmable Tactical Information Display System (PTIDS).

Recommended: What Will the Sixth-Generation Jet Fighter Look Like?

Recommended: Imagine a U.S. Air Force That Never Built the B-52 Bomber

Recommended: Russia's Next Big Military Sale - To Mexico?

Recommended: Would China Really Invade Taiwan?

The PTIDS was a 20x20cm screen with rather high resolution, higher than the displays available in the F-15E. Thus, F-14 weapons officers found it easier to do precision lasing and guidance for bombs than their Air Force counterparts. The F-14 even buddy-lased designated targets with a laser for their fellow naval aviators flying F/A-18s due to the higher resolution and zoom of their LANTIRN pod.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, F-14As equipped with the LANTIRN and PTIDS were some of the first aircraft in theatre. They covered and designated targets for Air Force F-15Es on Iraqi command and control bunkers. The Navy pilots later trained the F-15E crews to conduct the Forward Air Controller (Airborne)—FAC(A) mission.

That being said, the aging F-14A and B airframes had limitations that had to be worked around and limited their usefulness. F-14As couldn’t integrate with the newest JDAM bomb kits, and the F-14B wasn’t even cleared to use it, although it theoretically could.

The F-14D solved most of these issues and could integrate the high-resolution PTIDS, but the Tomcat’s lifespan was cut short in the mid-2000s when DoD cut funding for all Tomcat upgrades in favor of the new F/A-18E/F. Many have lamented this decision, as the Tomcat’s bigger airframe has advantages in the strike and interceptor role (650nm to the F/A-18E/F’s 475nm) as well as others.

In the words of one author, the F-14 was a Cold War plane the Navy didn’t really see a need to keep operating. The lighter Super Hornet provided much of the same capability while being much cheaper in fuel and maintenance costs. As a strike fighter, most of the F-14’s advantages were nullified by later upgrades to the F-15E Strike Eagle, which improved the avionics. The F-15E already possessed a greater bomb load and range, so the F-14D didn’t really provide any advantage there.

However, Iran still probably trains to use their F-14As in a strike role. Recent news suggests that the IRIAF is integrating new air-to-ground weapons on their Tomcat fleet. The “Bombcat” may have retired for the United States, but it soldiers on abroad.

Information was taken from Fighters over the Fleet: Naval Air Defense from Biplanes to the Cold War by Norman Friedman and Black Aces High: The Story of a Modern Fighter Squadron at War by Robert K. Wilcox.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. (This first appeared several years ago.)

Image: Creative Commons "Chantilly VA - Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - Grumman F-14 Tomcat 02" by Daniel Mennerich is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Peter Huessy

Nuclear, Americas

Why a “peace through strength” strategy may not work with Beijing.

The United States strategy of “containment” was put to the test following the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe that gave rise to the Cold War. North Korea or the DPRK under the direction of the Soviet Union invaded the Republic of Korea in June 1950. Ironically, the State Department author of the “containment” strategy—George Kennan—opposed President Harry Truman’s commitment of U.S. troops to the Korean conflict although Truman was implementing the very policy of containment that Kennan had proposed in 1946  when he warned of continued Soviet aggression.  

Two decades later in 1971, President Richard Nixon initiated a policy of détente and peaceful coexistence with the USSR, and then a year later signed an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the USSR to ban missile defenses while agreeing in the SALT I treaty with the Soviets to regulate the expansion of the country’s respective nuclear arsenals. Through three administrations—under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—the U.S. policy was one of seeking growth in trade, investment, and energy with the USSR, under the assumption that the Soviets might be as a result less aggressive in their foreign policy. 

For most of the Cold War, the United States played “on its side of the playing field.” But under President Ronald Reagan the U.S. policy changed to a roll-back strategy, aimed to “win the Cold War” and do so “by taking advantage of every Soviet weakness and U.S. strength.”   

For the decade prior to the 1982 formal change in U.S. policy, the Soviets secured through trade and theft sufficient computer and other high technology advances from the West to close a fourteen-year gap to three years. The Soviets also thought the worldwide correlation of military forces was entirely on their side. At the same time, the Soviets undertook a rhetorical “peace offensive,” including a “nuclear freeze,” aimed at keeping the American Pershing missiles out of Europe, while the Soviets were deploying thousands of their own medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles in Europe and Asia.   

Thus, it was in that context that the Reagan administration adopted a new seven-fold plan: (1) support internal disruptions in the Soviet empire especially in Poland; (2) promote freedom within the third world especially in Soviet client states; (3) dry up sources of Soviet hard currency (estimated at $37 billion annually); (4) overload the Soviet economy with a technology-driven arms race, including strategic nuclear and conventional force modernization and missile defenses; (5) stop the flow of Western technology to the Soviets; (6) raise significantly the cost of the wars the USSR was supporting; and (7) demoralize the Soviet leaders and generate pressure for change. As Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of Britain would later write, “I regarded it as my duty to further Reagan’s bold strategy to win the Cold War which the West has been slowly, but surely losing.”   

The key to this strategy was understanding the Soviets were spending more on their military than official statistics revealed, and on a Soviet gross domestic product (GDP) far less than was assumed to be the case by most Western analysts. Until 1975, the US intelligence community assumed the Soviets were spending 6 percent of their GDP on the military. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), due largely to the efforts of Dr. John Foster, the former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering, raised its estimate to 12 percent but only after repeatedly refusing to change its historically incorrect estimates. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) argued at the time that it was actually close to 30 percent. In fact, as was later revealed with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Soviet economy was actually only one-sixth of the U.S. economy and military spending was fully 33 percent and even as high as 40 percent of its economy—not even close to the revised 12 percent the CIA had newly adopted, up from the paltry 6 percent long assumed to be the case.  

So, as Reagan and his CIA Director Joseph Casey argued, if the Soviets were “terribly vulnerable economically” then it made sense to “play to these vulnerabilities.” And one key to that was to deplete annual Soviet hard currency earnings which at the time (1980) were estimated to be $32 billion.  

The Soviets also knew that Poland was the linchpin of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet power in Europe. Martial law was imposed on Poland in December 1981, and the labor union Solidarity was outlawed. Reagan, unlike most European leaders, wanted to punish Russia. Roger Robinson, a key figure in the National Security Council, successfully pushed for just such a policy that stopped multiple gas pipelines from Japan and Europe to Russia, halted subsidies to Russian allies, stopped technology transfers and suspended the most favored nation status with Poland. The pipeline measures alone cost the Soviets some $15 billion over two years.    

The administration also put together a secret alliance with Pope John Paul II that sent $8 million a year to Solidarity in the form of copier machines, printing equipment, VCRs and “freedom tapes” to keep the union alive. As a result, some fifteen hundred underground newspapers and twenty-four hundred books and pamphlets were circulated in Poland, lighting the fuse of freedom.    

The National Intelligence Council head Henry Rowen pushed to further strengthen the military challenge to Moscow, predicting the cumulative burden would make the Soviet system implode. The United States doubled its acquisition of military hardware by 1985. The Soviets in 1979 had a three-to-one and two-to-one advantage over NATO in main battle tanks and tactical aircraft. But by 1985, after the Reagan defense build-up, a top Soviet official admitted the new weapons being deployed by the United States and its allies meant that Western Europe could no longer be overrun with Soviet tank armies. Furthermore, Moscow officials believed , the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and missile defense could be 90 percent effective, and that the U.S. counter deployment of Pershing and GLCM theater missiles had effectively checkmated the Soviet original deployment of SS-20 nuclear-armed missiles.   

Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Soviet leader, tried to counter America’s challenge. He increased military spending some 45 percent during his tenure, which was in addition to the nearly 50 percent increase in military spending in five years prior to his becoming general secretary. But the relative standard of living continued to decline in Russia and a budget heavily weighted toward military spending worked against continued promises by the government that living standards would soon improve. Eventually, the Soviets began spending 39 percent of their GDP on defense. 

 So, at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, Gorbachev launched a new diplomatic initiative. If Reagan would put the U.S. SDI program permanently in the laboratory, then the Soviets would dramatically cut their nuclear and conventional military arsenal alongside the United States. Robert McFarlane recently described to a small meeting at the American Foreign Policy Council how Gorbachev tried to persuade Reagan to give up missile defense and fifteen different times Reagan said “No!” Gorbachev then pushed away from the table and as former U.S. Attorney General Meese said, “abandoned the struggle.”   

Complimenting the military challenge was the U.S. push to stop the Soviets from purchasing or stealing high technology and earning the hard currency with which to do so. An infusion of high-technology equipment was determined to be critical for the Russian economy to survive and was at the top of the objectives of the KGB. The Reagan administration prosecuted hundreds of cases where U.S. companies violated export controls using a deal made with the Europeans and ratified in 1984 to further toughen such controls. One National Security Council official also designed a companion program where high technology exports to the Soviets were allowed but where U.S. engineering firms were directed to design defects into the technologies the Russians were stealing.   

An additional strong thread in the carpet of policies designed to weaken the Soviets was to markedly increase the cost of their wars. Soviet bases in Afghanistan came under attack with U.S.-supplied rocket-propelled grenades and rockets. After twenty-four of twenty-seven Soviet planes were shot down in Angola with US Stinger missiles, the Afghan northern alliance received its first shipment of Stingers and seventy-five of two hundred Russian aircraft were subsequently shot down and destroyed. By 1984, the war in Afghanistan cost the Soviets $4 billion annually. 

Next on the list was cutting back on Soviet hard currency and foreign exchange earnings. The United States successfully called into question whether Moscow would stand behind the $30 billion in loans to Eastern Europe. And at the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production from two million to nine million barrels per day in 1985. Subsequently, the price of oil and gas dropped precipitously from $30 to $12 a barrel, costing Moscow upwards of $25 billion annually. As a result, Moscow’s oil friends in Libya, Ira and Iran had less money and could not buy more Russian weapons.   

Warren Norquist put many of these numbers together in a 2001 essay on how the Cold War was won, which was published by the Journal of Global Competitiveness. For example, Russian assistance to client states escalated to nearly $14 billion a year. Replacing lost western technology; fighting more intense wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and Afghanistan, losing oil, gas, and arms sales revenue, all cost Russia an average of $63.7 billion annually between 1986–89, an increase of nearly $40 billion from the costs of $27 billion in 1982. 

Now critics of Reagan’s proposed policies warned Reagan would reignite an arms race and would increase the cost of war. During Reagan’s first press conference, he was asked whether he was going to continue a policy with the USSR of détente and peaceful coexistence even though he had campaigned on ending both policies. Some four decades later, the Soviet empire did collapse due to U.S. and allied policies that challenged Moscow rather than seeking to maintain the status quo. 

What lessons can be drawn for informing current U.S. policy with respect to China? It is markedly true that the U.S. economy is connected to the Chinese economy in a way that greatly exceeds the connection maintained between the United States and Russia in 1981. But the rationale behind détente and peaceful coexistence was not unlike the long-held U.S. policy toward China. Most people assumed that trade, investment and the growth of the Chinese middle class would generate such change in China as to make the country less of an adversary and generally acceptive of the world international liberal order.   

Would a similar “peace through strength” strategy work against China? After all, China like Russia decades ago has some serious challenges: (1) A demographic demolition coming soon with a birth rate of less than one per couple. (2) A hugely overextended Chinese exchequer to the tune of $42 trillion. (3) An emerging elderly population greater in number than the entirety of the U.S. population, and an equal number of people addicted to smoking. (4) Growing industrial pollution and respiratory illness. And (5) an Achilles heel of energy deficiency—China has five times the U.S. population but one-fifth the energy production of the U.S. economy.  

Should the United States seek to partner with China and assume its growing economic and military power is going to follow a “peaceful rise?” Or should it assess the dangers that may be gathering and seriously examine its assumptions, much as it did in 1980 when it debated over whether to continue down the road of détente and peaceful coexistence with the USSR or switch to a policy of “peace through strength.” 

Peter Huessy is the president of Geo-Strategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland. 

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Skunk Works,

Throughout its long history, the mission of the Skunk Works has remained unchanged: "build the world's most experimental aircraft and breakthrough technologies in abject secrecy at a pace impossible to rival." And now it seems this important center of innovation is ready to take on challenges from China, Russia, or any other threat that presents itself. 

Among the notable centers of invention throughout the ages were Leonardo da Vinci's long-forgotten workshop, which was adorned with frescoes painted by the renaissance master, and it even had a secret room for dissecting human cadavers; Thomas Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park, the world's first such research and development facility; and Nikola Tesla's Experimental Station in Colorado Springs.

Today there are countless military R&D facilities of note around the world, yet when it comes to the development of military aviation, nothing quite compares to Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs' (ADP) facility in Palmdale, California. It is more commonly known by its official pseudonym, Skunk Works, taken from the moonshine factory in the long-running comic strip Lil' Abner.

It was at the Skunk Works where some of the most famous U.S. military aircraft were developed, beginning with the P-38 Lightning in 1939, followed by the P-80 Shooting Star in 1943. During the Cold War, the facility played a role in the development of the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, and later the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II.

Throughout its long history, the mission of the Skunk Works has remained unchanged: "build the world's most experimental aircraft and breakthrough technologies in abject secrecy at a pace impossible to rival."

Now, in 2021, the center of innovation seems poised to take on the great power challenges of today and tomorrow. 

Skunk Works in the 21st Century

As the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has put a renewed focus on near-peer adversaries – notably China and Russia – the role of the Skunk Works is again to develop the aircraft to address the threats of the 21st century.

Twenty months after Lockheed Martin officially broke ground for its new advanced manufacturing facility, this month the defense giant unveiled a new "intelligent, flexible factory." It is one of four transformational manufacturing facilities that the defense contracting giant announced would be opening in the United States this year. It is a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified green building.

Guests at last Tuesday's ribbon-cutting event included dignitaries including California republican Rep. Mike Garcia, local Assemblyman Tom Lackey and Dee Dee Myers, senior advisor to Gov. Gavin Newsom and director of the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development.

"For more than 100 years, Lockheed Martin has been proud to call California home," said Jeff Babione, vice president, and general manager, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, via a release. "Our partnership with the state has helped us remain competitive and has positioned us for long-term growth. The technology in our new Palmdale facility lets us go beyond manufacturing optimization to the next digital revolution, driving innovation and preserving California's leadership in the aerospace industry."

The new 215,000 square foot factory will take the Skunk Works into the mid-21st century and beyond. It will also mark a return to manufacturing for Skunk Works, which had years ago transitioned to mostly design work. The new facility has the digital foundations to incorporate smart manufacturing components, whilst embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) and being able to deliver cutting-edge solutions rapidly and affordably to support the United States and its allies.

The building incorporates all three of Lockheed Martin's advanced production priorities: an intelligent factory framework; a technology-enabled advanced manufacturing environment; and a flexible factory construct to support customer priorities with speed and agility while bolstering manufacturing capability in the United States. It will embrace the company's model-based digital engineering methods with advanced technologies including artificial intelligence, augmented reality (AR), and robotics.

Those robots could be assigned to multiple projects and even respond accordingly to the required tasks while being able to communicate to increase efficiency at the facility.

No More Pocket Protectors

Instead of paper and pencils, designers will employ advanced computer tablets to troubleshoot and work through the problems that come in the R&D stage. The facility won't likely just focus on developing the tools to fight a potential war, but could also have a greater emphasis on the efforts to develop the tools to create those weapons.

"Some of the most advanced research these days is surely in manufacturing," explained Jim Purtilo, associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.

"The DoD has cutting edge systems that work well yet are spectacularly complex to manufacture and even more complex to maintain. That complexity translates to cost," Purtilo told The National Interest. "Developing ways to manufacture sustainable versions of these systems without loss of functionality would be a huge force multiplier."

This is where AI and robotics could aid in the manufacturing process.

"Automating what are currently artisanal processes, designing with robust supply chains in mind, narrowing the gap between inspiration and deployment, reducing risks for early adopters - these are all things we'd like in a technology accelerator," added Purtilo.

Material Issues

The cavernous facility was designed to be environmentally controlled to stay within 2.5 degrees of a set temperature, Babione told reporters during the press conference that officially unveiled the facility to the public. That is being done in order to minimize the changes of a material in response to heat or humidity, allowing joints to line up as they were designed to using digital thread methods, Air Force magazine reported.

This is important as modern composites can react to changes in temperature and humidity differently than steel, while aluminum and titanium also can react differently. By maintaining a constant, components can be assembled at the temperature at which they were manufactured and eliminate the need to do drilling in the facility.

The facility's massive air conditioning system will reportedly be powered by a new solar farm that is placed adjacent to the plant. Once completed, the solar farm will consist of some 52,000 solar panels.

Increased Work Force

In addition to what the facility could mean for the DoD in the coming years, the Skunk Works will also be a boon to the local economy. The company has created over 1,500 new jobs for California since 2018.

Beyond manufacturing, the facility includes office and break spaces to accommodate more than 450 employees. This project is also the cornerstone of over $400 million in capital investments being made across Lockheed Martin's Palmdale campus to address growth in support of its customers' missions.

It could also be seen as a significant leap forward for the defense contractor as well.

"Lockheed Martin's new Skunk Works' manufacturing facility is intriguing both technologically and from the perspective of corporate branding," said technology industry analyst Charles King of Pund-IT.

"The building incorporates the company's three priorities for advanced production: an intelligent factory framework; technology-enabled advanced manufacturing tools and processes, and flexible factory methodologies designed to quickly and agilely support customer priorities while also bolstering U.S.-based manufacturing capabilities," King told The National Interest. "By utilizing technologies, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality, Lockheed aims to enhance production processes while also improving customer value and satisfaction."

The Old Innovation for a New Lockheed Martin

The new facility in many ways builds on what set the old Lockheed Corporation apart – when it was the company that developed such notable aircraft as the SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Nighthawk, among others.

"The naming choice for the facility suggests that the company is trying to harken back to both its innovative roots and the golden era when it was a trusted source for some of the world's most technologically advanced aerospace, defense, and security products and systems," added King.

"While the original Skunk Works was originally a nickname for the facilities that housed Lockheed's Advanced Development Programs (ADP) and often focused on highly classified U.S. DoD projects, the company now seems to be trying to apply some of that old mojo onto its more mainstream commercial endeavors," King noted. 

In many ways, the new Skunk Works is a smart step forward, and this manufacturing facility could be posed to create the tools that are needed to address future threats.

"When it comes to innovation, building one of some new product creates a novelty; building that product repeatedly, predictably, and economically creates impact," explained Purtilo. "We see this in other domains. Lockheed Martin has much the same leverage in mind as it launches its new Skunk Works."

A National Interest Defense Contributor, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

William Ruger

Afghanistan,

The president is displaying real courage by sticking with a decision that remains prudential given the realities about Afghanistan and the United States.  Biden is showing the requisite realist spine that America needs at this moment.  And for that he should be praised, not damned.   

The government of Afghanistan’s rapid collapse in the face of the Taliban’s advances has been stunning.  But contrary to what critics of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan are saying, it is only the speed of the government’s end that is surprising. 

The writing on the wall has been there for some time: this Afghan government was not going to last in its current form. Twenty years of American blood and treasure had merely created a hollow dependent that had little legitimacy and few willing to fight for it in the long run. 

Fortunately, our national interests and safety don’t require a permanent troop presence in Afghanistan or even a (seemingly) friendly host nation government. Indeed, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations had internalized the likelihood of a Taliban return to power and found it an acceptable option among the range of even worse ones. Certainly, there was a hope that a local balance of power on the battlefield would develop between the Taliban and anti-Taliban forces that would lead to a post-war arrangement different from what has transpired.  But over the past couple of weeks, the question became only how fast and how completely the Afghan government would fail as the Americans completed their military withdrawal.  The answer was with a speed that surprised even the Taliban.    

Nothing about this turn of events is an indictment of the basic decision made by President Joe Biden to withdraw U.S. troops.  The alternatives available to us were worse for the United States, and the White House did the right thing by pulling the plug on America’s longest war. 

Of course, one could have hoped for a less messy evacuation of Americans and our Afghan allies from Kabul. This may have transpired if we would have stuck to the original timeline in the Doha agreement or hadn’t relied on more optimistic estimates about the staying power of the Afghan government. On the other hand, it is easy to Monday morning quarterback the planning for exigencies like what are seeing in Afghanistan, and a smoother operation under different circumstances was by no means guaranteed.

Regardless, the president is displaying real courage by sticking with a decision that remains prudential given the realities about Afghanistan and the United States.  Biden is showing the requisite realist spine that America needs at this moment.  And for that he should be praised, not damned.   

The critics of withdrawal have naturally focused their ire on Biden. They argue that the U.S. could have stayed longer at a low cost, all the while preserving an Afghan government that was already teetering when even more American boots were on the ground. They also place the blame for the collapse we are seeing on withdrawal rather than on the failed two decade-long Afghan nation-building project and its architects. 

This isn’t surprising since many of these critics were those same architects, along with their advisors and supporters outside government.  Indeed, these were often the very people who the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock outed in his Afghanistan Papers series as having had little clue how to find success in Afghanistan and who consistently misled the American people about the state of the war.  Moreover, these critics are committed to propping up another, much grander failed project—the primacist approach to the Greater Middle East and the world more generally.

One example of this is the argument that all the United States had to do was simply continue the status quo in Afghanistan. Namely, we could have avoided the outcome we are seeing if the president had simply kept a small U.S. military force in the country. 

Neoconservative John Podhoretz made this exact argument Sunday, claiming that had “Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued.  Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not be a single fatality since March 2020.” 

This is a prime example of the sophisms masquerading as serious argument in the current debate. The reality is that the Taliban was making progress on the battlefield and slowly gaining valuable territory—even during a period of a record number of air strikes and a “mini-surge” of U.S. forces from 2017 to 2019.  There was no stalemate that could have been maintained ad infinitum with a small force and air power. 

This argument also fails because of the nature of the Afghan government and its fatal flaws. Corruption, enabled by billions of dollars from well-intentioned international donors, remained all encompassing. Afghan elections were wracked by systemic fraud, undermining the legitimacy of elected leaders. The president of Afghanistan did not wield much power outside the capital, essentially reducing the role to the mayor of Kabul. In the end, for many Afghans, the mayor of Kabul wore no clothes and failed to present a viable alternative to the Taliban.

Finally, Podhoretz’s argument assumes that a small U.S. force could have propped up the Afghan government indefinitely, while American casualties could remain at or near zero. Podhoretz fails to mention that the primary reason we have had zero Americans killed in action since March 2020 was because of the Doha agreement with the Taliban that stipulated a full American withdrawal. They had a strong incentive not to attack Americans forces, an incentive that would have been removed had we broken the Doha agreement.  Under Podhoretz’s and others’ proposed strategy for Afghanistan, we would have simply kept sending our sons and daughters to die in support of a strategy that was essentially “lose slowly.”  

This mess in Afghanistan is on the shoulders of those who kept us in this war for so long and who turned a blind eye to the problems inherent in our Afghan project. The way the conflict ultimately played out—especially the surrender of many Afghan cities without a shot being fired—is a testament to the failure of the U.S. and our partners in Afghanistan to build a state with enough legitimacy and capacity to effectively hold the line against the Taliban insurgency. In the face of these unpleasant realities, the arguments for staying should ring more hollow following the Afghan government’s collapse, not less.

Thankfully, Biden—and President Donald Trump before him—recognized these realities and had the fortitude to withdraw our troops from a conflict that was no longer required for our safety. There will be more hot air than usual emanating this summer from the nation’s capital as the foreign policy elites who have been so wrong about everything over the last twenty years wail over the supposed loss of American credibility following our withdrawal from Afghanistan. But just as with Vietnam, the close of this chapter in our history will be viewed decades hence as something that will not be detrimental to America in the long run. Indeed, many will puzzle—as we do about Vietnam—why it took so long for us to realize that. 

Dr. William Ruger is the Vice President of Policy and Research at the Charles Koch Institute. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and was President Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

There could be many reasons why one has yet to receive their child tax credit payment. First and foremost, it is entirely possible that the IRS tried to direct deposit the cash into a closed or inactive bank account. 

The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department on Friday confirmed that the second batch of advance monthly payments from the expanded child tax credits was issued to approximately thirty-six million American families. 

Approved under President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the expanded credits allow eligible parents to net as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. That means a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be paid out on a monthly basis through the end of 2021.   

For millions of hardworking parents out there, the disbursement of the newest payment was indeed welcome news. However, there were still reports of some eligible parents who have yet to see the money land in their bank accounts.

Handy Portals

According to the IRS, concerned individuals have the option to utilize the Child Tax Credit Update Portal to see their monthly payment history. If the payments are indeed pending, then that information should be present on that page. Also, if the payment was said to be already delivered, then make sure to double-check that the home address and banking information, such as the account and routing numbers, are free of mistakes. 

Do take note that the same portal can be used to change how one would like to be paid, such as from paper checks to direct deposit. It offers other handy options, too, such as opting out of receiving the monthly payments so that they could potentially be eligible for a one-time lump sum during tax season next year.

For those people who haven’t filed their federal tax returns yet, know that the Non-filer Sign-up Tool should definitely be the go-to stop to give the IRS the required information so that it can promptly issue the funds.  

Bank Account Active? 

Keep in mind that there could be other reasons why one has yet to receive their child tax credit payment. First, it is entirely possible that the IRS tried to direct deposit the cash into a closed or inactive bank account.  

If the tax agency indeed attempted this, then the deposit will likely be rejected—which would initiate the mailing out of a paper check via the post office to the home address on record. This process could take a couple of weeks in some instances.  

Moreover, be aware that babies born this year will indeed make parents eligible for the credits if an extra step is taken. On the aforementioned Child Tax Credit Update Portal, parents are able to report any newborn throughout the year, and by doing this, the payment should automatically be sent out.  

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters

Richard Douglas

Glock, Americas

Because it’s so lightweight and small, the G44 is an excellent pistol for young shooters just learning how to navigate a handgun.

The Glock G44 is a great learning tool for young shooters. It works almost exactly like the Glock 19, with a few minor changes. If you’re looking for a reliable, accurate semi-automatic pistol fit for anyone young, you might be interested in the G44.

The G44 features the traditional polymer front post and u-notch rear sights that Glock users are familiar with, with slight adjustments for easy attachment to the slide. The rear is adjustable for both windage and elevation, and both sights give you a workable, consistent sight radius. It’s easy to hit the mark from short/medium distances; my average five-shot group from 10 yards was just 1.4”. There’s also an accessory rail if you’d like to add your own optics.

Throughout over 2,000 rounds, I experienced just a couple of failures to eject and one failure to fire. It shot pretty consistently for me overall, but other users have reported some reliability issues. Cleaning your pistol more often may help if you experience any failures or jams.

The G44 features an innovative steel/polymer hybrid slide, which lightens the weight and allows for the use of a stronger recoil spring. It also includes Glock’s Marksman non-fixed barrel, a unique feature on a rimfire pistol that really improves accuracy. There are four different grip adapters included with the pistol, so you can use whichever one fits the size of your hand best

The trigger is pretty much identical to other Glock triggers, which could be good news or bad news depending on how you feel about them. The pull is just around 6 lbs, with the average amount of take-up, and the release is relatively crisp.

The beveled magazine has a 10-round capacity and includes an easy-load tab. The pistol only weighs 30 oz fully loaded (14.6 oz unloaded.), but there’s almost no recoil whatsoever thanks to the double-captured recoil spring. The barrel is 4” long, making the overall length just over 7.25”. Because it’s so lightweight and small, the G44 is an excellent pistol for young shooters just learning how to navigate a handgun.

The G44 retails for around $430. There are better .22 plinking pistols available for the price, but this one will really be useful if you want to learn more about shooting Glock pistols. It’s great for camping and varmint hunting, but can also be used for defensive purposes in a pinch. As a bonus, it fits most G19 holsters if you’d like to learn how to concealed carry.

Richard Douglas writes on firearms, defense, and security issues. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, 1945, Daily Caller, and other publications.

Image: Reuters.

Christopher Cottle

China, Asia-Pacific

Attempts by China to expand its influence are not new, but the past three years have shown a doubling of its efforts. More nations are aligning with China at an increasing rate.

The next great military threat to the United States could be brewing on a chain of islands that’s so small it doesn't appear on most world maps.

Most people have never heard of islands like Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. That could be because the United States has ignored the South Pacific for too long, and its neglect is pushing the inhabitants towards China. 

Sitting directly west of the International Date Line, Kiribati’s islands are the first to welcome the sunrise of each new day. They are minuscule—with a total land area of just over 313 square miles—but the chain covers an area of the ocean approximately the size of Russia, spanning as far east as Fiji, and as far west as Hawaii. The few who can spot Kiribati on a map are probably aware of the role the islands served in World War II: the Battle of Tarawa, what combatant Dick Hannah called in the title of his book on the topic Tarawa, Toughest Battle in Marine Corps History. The battle took place on an island that covers less than 31 square kilometers, and whose highest point is only 4 meters above sea level. Yet the battle was crucial for inching closer within striking distance of Japan. Between 1941-1942, the world did not notice as Japan began to occupy and expand its power in the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, many in the world today have yet to notice as China continually expands its influence in the South Pacific. The United States needs to counter this trend before it's too late.

In fact, it may already be too late. On September 19, 2019, Kiribati allied with Beijing, ending its long relationship with Taiwan. The pivot was so sudden that even Teburoro Tito, Kiribati’s ambassador to the United Nations, was not aware of the situation. He was in the office of the secretary-general arguing for Taiwanese representation when he received the news. It came as quite a shock to Tito, as the former Kiribati president has always been a strong advocate for Taiwan.

In 1941, war was being waged with bullets and tanks. Today it is fought with checkbooks and diplomacy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not content with its current geographic situation. China is exerting its influence on its neighbors through loans and influence. Why so suddenly? China is hemmed into the region by Japan and South Korea to the east, India to the west, Russia in the north, and farther south Australia and New Zealand. China has been motivated to become more involved in Southeast Asia because of its geopolitical outlook and, more recently, beyond to the Pacific. 

And China’s strategy in Southeast Asia and the Pacific has been quite effective. Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, and Indonesia have begun to align with Beijing despite local protests. In 2020, China entered into the Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership, with the notable absence of India who pulled out of the agreement in the final hour. Making China the biggest economy in the trade deal will give them more leverage in future negotiations. Most recently, China has been backing the military coup in Myanmar that overthrew its democratically elected government in favor of a pro-China general. Most recently, China awarded the military government $6 million in aid. In exchange for one less Taiwanese ally, the CCP paid Kiribati $60 million for two airplanes and boats. But it’s more than a Taiwanese ally; Tito expressed concern regarding Chinese military bases in his county. The United States should also be concerned as Kiribati lies just 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. And Kiribati is not the only island China is trying to win over. The Solomon Islands, which changed allegiances to Beijing four days before Kiribati, has had government leaders accused of taking bribes.

Not only has the United States lost influence during the Trump administration, but it actually appears to be getting worse. The Pacific Islands Forum of 2021, a time for the nations to meet with Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United States, ended in a total disaster. When it came time to elect the forum's new secretary-general, which typically rotates regions, Australia, New Zealand, and France upended the vote, instead backing Polynesian Candidate, Henry Puna. Micronesia’s five nations felt so disrespected that they left the meeting and pulled their membership from the forum. The increasing isolation of these nations will only push them further towards China. In an already tumultuous year for fiscal debt, coupled with the failure of the Pacific Island Forum, Beijing is in a position to capitalize on the chaos.

The United States decided to start taking the region seriously, sending Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Palau, as well as an agreement for the island to host a U.S. base in 2020. Under the Biden administration, the United States hopes to leverage China’s peculiar geographic situation with allies and like-minded nations to curtail China’s behavior. Certainly, the United States does have many allies around China, however, direct contact with China has not been productive. The U.S.-China Summit did not advance discourse but resulted in both sides throwing insults at each other. In 2018, Australia committed to working more in the region to push back against China but its behavior at the Pacific Island Forum proved otherwise.

Attempts by China to expand its influence are not new, but the past three years have shown a doubling of its efforts. More nations are aligning with China at an increasing rate. China successfully filled the void of much-needed funding and loans that were not provided by Western powers. This is not the first time Kiribati has been offered money in exchange for strategic islands; in 2017 the Russian Monarchist Party offered to buy three islands for $350 million, but Kiribati rejected the offer. After seeing great success, it is safe to project that China will continue to advance into the Pacific. The United States is entering the game at halftime, but it’s not too late to pull out a win. Increasing aid and loans in the region is a start, but what these islands really need are solutions to their most pressing problems of climate change, public health, and, of course, Chinese political interference. The United States shouldn’t just be the number one investor in the region, it needs to become the leader in solutions before it’s too late.

Toph Cottle studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the University of London SOAS. He lived in Kiribati for three months.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

Coronavirus, Asia

Moon Jae-in wants to combat the coronavirus threat alongside Kim Jong-un.

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began, North Korean officials have claimed that its citizens have not been infected by the virus. But at the same time, the nation has taken mitigation members, sometimes stringent ones. Meanwhile, North Korea is facing a known starvation crisis. 

Recently published analysis indicates that North Korea does not have a coronavirus mitigation strategy, with Pratik Jakhar of BBC Monitoring noting in an op-ed published by Foreign Policy that Kim Jong-un’s regime appears in no hurry to vaccinate its population. 

“News of countries vaccinating their people or life returning to normal is rarely, if ever, transmitted within North Korea, perhaps over fears that it might trigger resentment against the regime for its failure to secure shots,” Jakhar wrote in his op-ed. “In contrast, the propaganda apparatus has been unusually quick to report on cases rising abroad and the spread of COVID-19 variants.”

Now, there’s a new report that South Korea is offering to cooperate with North Korea on cooperation. 

According to NK News, South Korean president Moon Jae-in has made another pitch to cooperate with the North on coronavirus mitigation. The pitch from Moon came in his speech on the occasion of the seventy-sixth anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan. It involves inviting North Korea into the Northeast Asia Cooperation Initiative for Infectious Disease Control and Public Health. That initiative currently consists of South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Mongolia, and the United States. 

Per NK News, the objectives of the Cooperation Initiative include “information sharing, shared stockpiling of medical supplies and joint training of COVID-19 response personnel.” 

Moon formally proposed the initiative last year. 

“The Initiative proposed by President Moon Jae-in in his keynote speech at the UN General Assembly in September is a regional cooperation initiative aimed at strengthening joint response capacity among regional countries that are geographically close to each other and carrying out robust people-to-people and material exchanges, in response to transboundary health security crises including COVID-19 and the emergence of other new infectious diseases,” according to a South Korean government document from last December. 

“It is clear that the COVID-19 threat is not temporary, which makes [the initiative] even more important,” Moon said in the speech. Moon had proposed welcoming North Korea into the initiative back in March. 

Moon, who is set to leave office next May, also called for reunification between the two Koreas. 

“For us, division is the greatest obstacle to our growth and prosperity and a tenacious barrier that obstructs permanent peace,” Moon said in the speech. “We can also remove this barrier.” 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver. 

Image: Reuters

Rupert Stone

Pakistan, Afghanistan,

Maybe the United States could have had better luck strong-arming Islamabad in the early years of the Afghan war, when the Taliban was still heavily dependent on Pakistani sanctuary, financial largesse, and military advice. But that ship sailed long ago.

As the Taliban rampaged through Afghanistan last week, seizing one provincial capital after another, irate Afghans took to Twitter to protest Pakistan’s support for the militant group. Spearheaded by Canada’s former ambassador in Kabul, Chris Alexander, the hashtag #SanctionPakistan became a rallying point for those exasperated with Islamabad’s role in Afghanistan’s collapse.

Such demands are not new. U.S. politicians, including current Afghanistan special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, have in the past proposed designating Islamabad as a state sponsor of terrorism. And they may grow even louder now that the Taliban has toppled the Afghan government and looks set to resurrect its emirate. The group’s rejection of liberal democracy and alliance with Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations could trigger new calls for Pakistan to cut ties.

But sanctions will likely fail. No manner of economic pain would coerce Islamabad into ending its relationship with the Taliban. And, even if it did, the militant group has become increasingly self-sufficient and independent of Pakistani tutelage, a process culminating in the recent seizure of power in Kabul. The Taliban’s entry into government will limit Islamabad’s influence even more.

Sanctions are a prominent but not especially effective tool of U.S. foreign policy. Economic penalties have not driven the Venezuelan or Syrian leaders from power, they have not expelled Russia from Ukraine, and they have not forced North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal. Nor did President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran translate into meaningful Iranian concessions.

Sanctions have proven to be particularly useless in Pakistan’s case. The United States penalized Islamabad repeatedly for its development of nuclear weapons but failed to stop the testing of a Pakistani bomb in 1998. Since 9/11, periodic suspensions of military assistance, most recently by Trump in 2018, have not dented Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and other militant organizations.

#SanctionPakistan has not specified what sanctions it would like to see: sweeping measures against Pakistani institutions, or more targeted instruments against nefarious intelligence officers? Too narrow, and the sanctions would have little impact; too harsh, and they could capsize Pakistan’s fragile economy and unleash a storm of unintended consequences, ranging from civil unrest to militant violence.

Sanctions are at their most effective when they are multilateral, but China—Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”—may well veto any measures at the UN Security Council. The United States would therefore have to go it alone, perhaps with the European Union in tow. Again, these aren’t subtleties that #SanctionPakisatan seems keen to consider. The campaign is more an outburst of rage than a rational attempt to change Pakistan’s behavior.

In any case, past experience shows that Islamabad won’t budge on issues deemed critical to its national security. As Robert Hathaway writes in The Leverage Paradox, “There is little in the historical record to support the contention that Pakistan can be bludgeoned into taking steps it believes dangerous to its security.”

The development of a Pakistani nuclear deterrent was seen as essential to warding off its arch-enemy, India. Supporting the Taliban was deemed necessary to minimize Indian influence in Afghanistan and prevent encirclement by New Delhi. This explains why sanctions have so far failed to alter Pakistan’s policies, and would likely fail again.

Moreover, Pakistan has in the past managed to cushion the impact of sanctions by relying on other countries. For example, when the United States sanctioned Pakistan after its 1965 war with India, it turned to Beijing for weapons. When U.S. military aid was cut after the annus horribilis of U.S.-Pakistan relations in 2011, which saw the Bin Laden raid among other episodes, Islamabad reached out to Russia and deepened ties with China.

Sanctions could not only backfire by driving Islamabad further into the arms of U.S. adversaries—no small thing given the size of Pakistan’s army and nuclear arsenal—they could also intensify the very problem they are supposed to prevent: support for militant proxies. A state reeling from sanctions has a greater incentive to use terrorist groups as tools of foreign policy, as they are less expensive than conventional military forces.

When Pakistan was under U.S. sanctions in the 1990s, it backed an array of militant outfits, including the Taliban, Lashkar-e Taiba, and other groups. Besides, Washington is unlikely to be receptive to #SanctionPakistan now. It has become increasingly reliant on Pakistan in its dealings with the Taliban and will likely depend on Islamabad even more as a diplomatic intermediary now that the insurgents have seized power.

Indeed, sanctions could undermine U.S. policy goals in the region. Pakistan would likely block American access to its territory in retaliation for such measures. That would prevent the United States from conducting “over the horizon” counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan, as there is no alternative to Pakistani airspace (Iran is obviously out of the question). So, if a major terrorist threat developed in Afghanistan, the United States would be powerless to stop it.

Even if sanctions had compelled Islamabad to cut off support for the Taliban insurgency, it would have made little difference to the militants’ fortunes. As the group seized more and more of Afghanistan, it no longer needed sanctuary in Pakistan, especially with U.S. airpower withdrawing and with it the threat of targeted airstrikes. And now that it is entering government, the movement doesn’t need to hide in Pakistan at all.

The Taliban was also financially self-sufficient long before its seizure of power. It has diversified its revenue streams to include not just narcotics but also mining and transit trade, along with taxes levied on local people and money from customs posts. It didn’t need Pakistani guns, either, given the amount of gear it seized from government weapons caches and the assistance of other states, such as Iran.

True, there have recently been reports of Taliban recruitment and training in Pakistan, and of wounded fighters receiving treatment in Pakistani hospitals.

But the Taliban has deliberately tried to reduce its dependence on Pakistan over the years. It established its political commission in Doha for that very reason. It also strengthened its ties to Iran, apparently opening an office in Tehran and receiving military advice from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). There have also been reports of Russia arming and funding the militant group.

Islamabad has repeatedly struggled to influence Taliban decision-making. The government of former President Pervez Musharraf tried and failed to pressure the Taliban regime at Washington’s behest. After much arm-twisting, Pakistan forced the Taliban to the negotiating table in 2015, but couldn’t deliver any concrete results. A more recent attempt to cajole the group into attending a conference in Istanbul flopped.

The Taliban have come to resent Pakistan for its meddling. Multiple Taliban have reportedly been arrested and abused in Pakistani custody, hardly a recipe for a cordial relationship.

#SanctionPakistan would, therefore, have failed to halt the Taliban’s takeover and will not achieve anything going forward. Maybe the United States could have had better luck strong-arming Islamabad in the early years of the Afghan war when the Taliban was still heavily dependent on Pakistani support. But that ship sailed long ago. With the Taliban now in power, it no longer needs the patronage of Big Daddy in Rawalpindi.

Rupert Stone is a freelance journalist working on issues related to South Asia and the Middle East. He has written for various publications, including Newsweek, VICE News, Al Jazeera, and The Independent.

Image: Reuters.

John Cicchitti

Lawfare,

If the Biden administration truly wants to harden American critical infrastructure against attack, it will include protecting U.S. legal institutions in its strategy.

The Biden administration is prioritizing the protection of critical U.S. infrastructure, but its plans are missing one big target for adversaries: the American legal system. Repressive, adversarial state actors are using the United States’ legal system to advance their nefarious causes. Efforts to secure America’s cyberspace, its physical infrastructure, its energy network, and its election processes are welcome developments but will be for naught if U.S. leaders fail to protect the foundations of democracy. If the Biden administration truly wants to harden American critical infrastructure against attack, it will include protecting U.S. legal institutions in its strategy.

Moscow is the world’s leading practitioner of so-called grey area operations, which include cyber-attacks, information operations, economic coercion, the use of surrogates and criminal organizations, and leveraging membership in international organizations. Among these, Russian intelligence operatives have meddled in or attempted to meddle in U.S. and European elections. Hackers from Russia also recently disrupted a significant chunk of America’s energy sector by strangling the Colonial Pipeline and holding it for ransom.

U.S. leaders have prioritized preventing these attacks on American infrastructure. The Department of Defense, for instance, has secured much of its network using verification programs like Comply to Connect, while critical infrastructure is using technology like Binary Armor to harden systems.

Beyond its underhanded actions, Russia has committed overt acts of aggression, including invading countries, conducting political assassinations, and exerting economic pressure on Eastern Europe. Moscow’s rising encroachments are driving its neighbors to reinforce their militaries, such as Poland’s planned purchases of the M1 Abrams tank and the F-35 fighter jet. 

Russia has added lawfare to its bag of grey area tricks. Moscow has resorted to manipulating international legal processes to achieve repressive ends. For example, it takes advantage of Interpol’s Red Notice system to pursue dissidents and opponents of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime. A Red Notice is the equivalent of an arrest warrant, requesting that Interpol members’ domestic law enforcement detain and extradite the target to the notice issuer. Russia is the most prolific user of these notices, accounting for almost forty percent of Red Notices, despite having less than two percent of the world’s population.

These Red Notices endanger targets by bestowing a veneer of legitimacy on cross-border repression. In perhaps the most famous example, Russian law enforcement produced a Red Notice to intimidate American-British human rights activist Bill Browder, whose work to expose government corruption in Russia put him at the top of the Putin regime’s hit list. In another instance, Moscow used fake reports of Red Notices to embarrass politicians in Moldova who supported orienting the country toward Europe rather than Russia.

This abuse of Red Notices has unfortunately spread to the United States. In some instances, it has led to U.S. law enforcement acting as an arm of the Putin regime. Complying with what appeared as a legitimate law enforcement request, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Russian dissident Gregory Duralev in response to a Red Notice issued through Interpol. Moscow charged Duralev with fraud after he wrote a thesis on political corruption in Russia and issued a Red Notice. This was enough to produce an arrest and detention, even though the notice was “nearly incomprehensible.” Duralev’s case is now tied up in U.S. courts as he attempts to avoid extradition and deportation back to the country that is persecuting him.

Even more troubling, Russian agents are using the U.S. court system itself to hunt dissidents. These efforts often appear as innocuous legal maneuvers. One example is Moscow’s pursuit of Sergey Leontiev, a prominent supporter of Russian democratic activist Alexei Navalny. Leontiev escaped the Russian government by fleeing to the United States, but Moscow forced his business into bankruptcy and initiated proceedings against the entity. The Russian government then brought its dispute to an American court, asking a judge to force Leontiev to turn over documents in the case. This fishing expedition into Leontiev’s businesses is a clear attempt to silence Putin’s critics. The Russians pursuing Leontiev in court are Putin cronies, some of whom were sanctioned under the U.S. Magnitsky Act, a law designed to punish human rights abusers.

The judge ruled in favor of the Russian government and ordered Leontiev to submit to discovery despite the fact that these documents would end up in the hands of Magnitsky Act-sanctioned individuals. Comity among international judicial systems was among the main reasons the judge supported the Russian action, even though it’s unlikely a Russian court would ever return the favor. Instead, the judge’s ruling has allowed Moscow to manipulate American legal mechanisms to spy on and harass Putin’s opponents.

Unfortunately, U.S. legal institutions have naively failed to recognize these dangers. The Department of Justice (DOJ) celebrated a 2017 settlement with Prevezon Holdings, a corrupt Russian firm, for $5.9 million—even though the underlying offense was a $230 million fraud scheme involving the Russian government. Such a small penalty will not deter Russia’s export of corruption.

Subsequent developments illustrate Russia’s nefarious use of lawfare in the Prevezon case. In 2019 the DOJ announced perjury charges against Prevezon’s lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya. The charging documents detail Veselnitskaya’s efforts to launder Russian disinformation into an American courtroom to exonerate Prevezon. Veselnitskaya presented a dubious Russian investigation into the Prevezon claims as exculpatory evidence. However, she declined to inform the court that she herself had worked with Russian officials to draft the documents. In essence, Russian officials were trying to use American courts to launder their corrupt investigation into a legitimate legal victory. 

This laundering of shady Russian legal claims into American courts is a disturbing pattern the federal government must address. Continuing to allow Russian kleptocrats to infiltrate America’s legal infrastructure would turn our system of laws into a tool of repression. Like U.S. and Eastern European efforts to protect against Russian attacks in other sectors, the West must add the U.S. legal system to its security priorities. It must train DOJ personnel and American jurists in the characteristic features of Russian lawfare. Failing to do so would leave America’s democracy undefended against Russia’s number one export: corruption.

John Cicchitti is a program manager at the Lexington Institute. He is also a law student at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Image: Reuters

Richard Douglas

Guns,

Designed to be durable and easy to use, the short action is paired up with a barrel that has been cryogenically treated for stress relief.

There are plenty of excellent choices if you are looking for a long-range precision rifle. However, if you want the best top-shelf precision rifle, Rock River Arms has quite a contender for the title. The RBG-1S, released in 2019, is a magnificent long-range rifle that I’ve recently had the pleasure to test and evaluate.

One of the luxuries that you’ll get for the $4,500 price tag is the ability to customize your rifle from the factory, as well as in the field. The RBG Series includes the .308 and 7.62 bolt gun or the 6.5 Creedmoor. The 1:8 twist stainless steel barrel has three options for length at 20, 22, or 24”. My .308 has a 24” barrel and an overall length of 43.5”. All in, this rig weighs about eleven pounds empty without its accessories. After you decide how much rifle you want, there are three color options (black, tan, and green) on the table to choose from as well.

Some other features that stand out on the RBG-1S include a well-placed short top-Picatinny rail with counterpart lower rail. Neither rail is very long, but they are both all I need or expect on a big precision hunter. My best optics are well-mounted and secure atop the RBG-1S. An oversized bolt handle is very generously sized and operates the 3-lug bolt system with smooth-as-silk motion.

With an ideal blend in the action, stock, and barrel, Rock River Arms has done a marvelous job with the RBG’s design to set me up for optimum Sub-MOA accuracy. Designed to be durable and easy to use, the short action is paired up with a barrel that has been cryogenically treated for stress relief. The operation of the controlled round feed is tailored to me, with an incredibly versatile chassis. A comfortable straight pistol grip leads the way. The fully adjustable stock and comb ensure I can make whatever adjustments are needed to fit me perfectly. A Remington-style safety is within easy reach and the bottom feed box mag can be swapped out with any AICS mag. The clean trigger is snappy and feels lighter than its actual weight, which was an enjoyable discovery on my long range.

Everything about Rock River’s top-shelf precision shooter shines bright with quality. From out-of-the-box feel to the practical on-range performance, this is an heirloom rifle if I’ve ever seen one. Named quite simply, the RBG-1S stands for Rock Bolt Gun, 1st generation short action. That tells me that Rock River has every intention to continue to improve on this impressive rig. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Richard Douglas writes on firearms, defense, and security issues. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, 1945, Daily Caller, and other publications.

Image: YouTube

Trevor Filseth

Coronavirus,

Because the vaccination gives one a 99.999 percent chance of survival against the Delta variant, anyone who receives a vaccine should be relatively assured that they are safe.

Around the United States, many jurisdictions that lifted their coronavirus lockdowns in the spring, following an initially successful vaccination drive, have now re-implemented them. The main cause of this has been the surge in cases from COVID-19’s “Delta variant,” a new strain of the virus that is more transmissible than the original.

While new infections and deaths are still significantly lower than they were during the winter, they have trended steadily upward over the summer—and some of them, albeit far fewer per capita, have been “breakthrough infections,” cases from Americans who had previously been inoculated from the virus.

Around 165 million people, or just more than half of the U.S. population, are now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. For this reason, there is understandable concern about the potential for breakthrough infections to affect them.

Scientists have argued that the vaccines continue to be effective, and the fact that breakthrough infections occur in a small minority of those who have been vaccinated highlights how effective the inoculations are in a more broad sense.

The data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights this point. Per the information that the agency has collected, 7,101 people in the United States who have received both doses of the vaccine were later hospitalized for the disease, and of that group, 1,507 later died of the disease.

According to this data, a person who has been vaccinated has a 0.005 percent chance of being hospitalized for the disease and a 0.001 percent chance of dying from it.

This is not to say that only 0.005 percent of people who receive both shots are likely to contract COVID-19 later. The vaccines were billed as being ninety to ninety-five percent effective against the virus, meaning that, on average, one or two out of every twenty people will develop an infection later. However, because the vaccine’s immunity protects against the worst symptoms of the virus, these cases often go unreported. A person is unlikely to take a COVID test unless they are already feeling ill, which many people affected by mild cases do not.

Still, because the vaccination gives one a 99.999 percent chance of survival against the Delta variant, anyone who receives a vaccine should be relatively assured that they are safe.

It is important to note that some of the CDC’s data is outdated, and comes from the months before the Delta variant was as widespread as it is today. However, current statistics still overwhelmingly show that vaccinated Americans are far safer than unvaccinated ones. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey, published in July, found that ninety-five percent of COVID-19 hospital patients in eighteen reporting states were unvaccinated people. Comparatively, vaccinated Americans have little to fear.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuter

Prakhar Sharma

Afghanistan, Asia

If the United States doesn’t urgently provide material and symbolic support to the Afghan people and ensure that the Taliban exercises moderation in its governance, the ambition of a democratic Afghanistan may be forgotten forever.

The new Afghanistan is dying. A dream was conceived in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: to enable the development of a progressive, pluralistic, democratic Afghanistan, liberated from the draconian Taliban regime and its regressive legacies. That dream of a new Afghanistan is now lamentably truncated as the Taliban took over Kabul, buoyed by their success in several other provinces, and enabled by the Biden administration’s indifference. If the United States doesn’t urgently provide material and symbolic support to the Afghan people and ensure that the Taliban exercises moderation in its governance, the ambition of a democratic Afghanistan may be forgotten forever. It will be a shame for the United States—the boldest champion of democratic development in the world. It will also be a setback for democracy aspirants and offer exactly the kind of reassurance that America’s competitors—Russia and China—are seeking.

For the last twenty years, the vision of a new Afghanistan that would democratically represent the aspirations of its largely young population, negotiate its internal strife, and become a meaningful stakeholder in regional development inspired millions of young Afghans. After experiencing unceasing death, destruction, and despair brought by the Soviet invasion, civil war, and by the Taliban regime, Afghans longed for peace and stability and a political order that would be representative of their collective aspirations. That dream was mercilessly compromised, first by a desperate deal between the United States and the Taliban that would relegate the Afghan state to the role of a spectator in its own future, and then by a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, leaving the Afghan forces vulnerable to the Taliban.

Scores of Afghans have been perishing daily, mostly in the hands of the Taliban—a Pashtun-dominated armed group that was ousted from power in 2001 and is now back in Kabul after a twenty-year-long war. Members of the Afghan government and its armed forces; private organizations; civilians, activists, and artists; schoolteachers and students; men, women, and children—No one in Afghanistan is spared the humiliation of living in a context where daily survival from violence is now an unstated accomplishment.

Many would argue that the Afghan state is fundamentally flawed, corrupt, deeply unstable, predatory, and ineffectual. The incompetence of the Afghan state, they would contend, fueled support for the Taliban. They are right. The Afghan state is unable to communicate its moral authority to most Afghans, and it is hapless against the inflating expectations of the population. But many of its imperfections are hard to separate from U.S. policies in Afghanistan. It was irresponsible for the United States to encourage and incentivize deal-making over formal institution building for twenty years and then blame Afghan culture for not being ripe for democratic development. Or to create a winner-takes-all electoral system and then pin the electoral chaos on Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Or fight proxy wars by empowering warlords and delegitimizing the very government it supported. Or build Afghan national security forces in a way that would have them rely heavily on American equipment, and then decide to withdraw without a plan to sustain those arrangements. So, while we rightly point to the dysfunctions of the Afghan state, we should also take a moment to reflect on the U.S. role in systematically enabling those dysfunctions.

Rebuilding a country after war is a formidable task. History offers few examples that would inspire the confidence of state-builders. No one would argue that Afghanistan was an easy engagement. The state’s architecture had to be resurrected in 2002 after two decades (now four decades) of violent conflict. Scores of development agencies were rallied to provide services to the population while the new Afghan state was being incarnated. Western and Eastern diplomats were engaged to legitimize and enable the aspirations of the new Afghanistan. Efforts in the last twenty years created a flawed state, but it was also one that enabled millions to pursue education, embrace media and technology, connect with the rest of the world, and express themselves. Those gains are now likely to be compromised with the Taliban in power.

As news of death and destruction from Afghanistan appear with alarming ferocity on our social media feeds, there is a temptation to fall for the false comfort of easy characterizations such as victory and failure—terms that may be useful to strategists but are not meaningful to millions of Afghans who are braving violence, fear, and anxiety every day. Now is the time to prioritize targeted humanitarian assistance and lend support to democracy aspirants in Afghanistan. This can range from championing democratic aspirations at the grassroots level, holding the Taliban accountable for its governance, ensuring the Afghan minorities and women continue to live freely and independently, and maintaining diplomatic and cultural links between the two countries.

The Taliban’s recent successes mean more than the pain it inflicts on innocent communities. For the first time in over a generation, we, the members of the international community, are witnessing the dismantling of the very state in Afghanistan that we enabled. We are also, simultaneously, witnessing the development of the new Taliban emirate. The Biden administration’s indifference to this reality is unbecoming of a superpower. It also betrays America’s moral commitment to its allies and its responsibility to protect Afghans whose lives are now held hostage by the Taliban’s theocratic absolutism.

Most of these Afghans—young Afghans armed with the ambition of a secular society—have dared to dream of a new Afghanistan that would overcome the legacies of their dark history, correct the mistakes of their previous generations, and embrace western ideals. These are the green shoots of optimism in an otherwise bleak context. America must not give up on them.

Prakhar Sharma is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Maxwell School, Syracuse University. He is writing his dissertation on nation-building in Afghanistan. He has studied Afghanistan since 2006 and lived in the country for four years between 2006 and 2016.

Image: Reuters.

Ryan Nabil

Artificial Intelligence,

As the EU falls behind China and the United States in technological innovation, the continent needs more technological innovation and investment. By imposing these costly requirements, the EU risks a brain drain of its smartest entrepreneurs and innovative businesses. 

The European Union is now considering what could become the world’s first comprehensive legislation on artificial intelligence (AI). The aim is to promote European leadership in emerging technology. The proposed regulation seeks to limit government involvement in surveillance, but it actually threatens innovation in several ways. American policymakers should pay attention to avoid making a similar mistake. 

The EU’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) would classify AI activities into different categories according to their perceived level of risk. For example, it would ban some intrusive AI-enabled government activities—such as social credit scoring systems and biometric surveillance—that pose high risks to individual privacy and limit AI usage in law enforcement facial recognition systems. These are a step in the right direction. 

But the EIA’s proposed regulation also poses significant challenges to innovative European businesses. First, it adopts an overly vague and expansive definition of AI, which would potentially allow regulators to impose costly requirements on a wide variety of businesses. For example, the EU’s definition of AI includes software that employs machine learning approaches “using a wide variety of methods.” According to the Commission, software using “statistical approaches” and “Bayesian estimation”—a common field of statistics—could become subject to regulation as artificial intelligence. That is especially a problem because as many as three-fourths of all EU businesses might use AI by 2030. 

Companies would need to undergo expensive compliance requirements if they offer products in high-risk activities such as biometric identification. But the EU’s proposed definition of high-risk activities is so broad that it would classify use of AI in a wide range of sectors—including “education, finance/insurance, health, IT, technical/scientific activities, social work, and critical infrastructure”—as potentially high-risk activities. Together, these sectors account for thirty-five percent of the EU’s combined GDP. According to one estimate, the proposed legislation could reduce AI investment in Europe by twenty percent and cost the EU economy €31 billion ($36.4 billion) over the next five years. 

Take education, for example. An AI-enabled English proficiency test recently developed by the language-learning app Duolingo would be subject to regulation under the EU’s high-risk category simply because it uses an algorithm to evaluate “participants in tests commonly required for admission to educational institutions.” 

The AIA will particularly hobble innovation by startups and small businesses. According to EU estimates, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME)—defined as businesses with up to fifty employees or €10 million ($11.74 million) in turnover—that offer a single high-risk AI product could be subject to total compliance cost burden of up to €400,000 ($469,000). Given that the average SME has a profit margin of ten percent, the AIA is expected to reduce SME profits by forty percent for such products. In face of such an increased compliance burden, many European businesses might simply turn away from innovating in many sectors.

Even worse, the most innovative European businesses can simply move somewhere else, like London and Silicon Valley, with a friendlier regulatory environment. If so, the proposed act will have the opposite effect of what the EU needs. As the EU falls behind China and the United States in technological innovation, the continent needs more technological innovation and investment. By imposing these costly requirements, the EU risks a brain drain of its smartest entrepreneurs and innovative businesses. 

The EU’s recent efforts at developing AI legislation have important lessons for American policymakers. America’s hands-off approach to technology regulation has been more innovative than Brussels’ top-down one. While the United States has yet to enact federal AI legislation, individual states and ultimately Congress could pass laws related to privacy and artificial intelligence. In that case, they should avoid the EU’s overly restrictive definition of AI and the burdensome regulations it entails. 

Ryan Nabil is a Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C, and Fox International Fellow at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris.

Image: Reuters