The Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military power is out. It has a number of interesting things in it. media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/20… It deals extensively with the corruption purges in the Chinese armed forces—at least 15 high ranking officers or industry execs removed July-Dec 2023—concluding that this "may have disrupted its [PLA] progress toward stated 2027 modernization goals" media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/20…

Senior US admin official says Assad wouldn't have been toppled absent US support for Ukr & Israel. No "serious" outreach from Assad to USG. US urged Iraq to "stay out of it". And: "future here will be written by Syrians. We are not coming up with a blueprint from Washington" Asked if USG is in contact with HTS, the US official says: " it's safe to say there's contact with with all Syrian groups". Says HTS is a "broad kaleidoscope" and US has to be "smart" in dealing with it, "mindful and pragmatic about about the realities on the ground."

Punchy intro to CDS Xmas lecture at RUSI from @MTSavill: “last month's announcement of cuts… is emblematic of a dept. that is struggling to reconcile people and money with existing commitments at a very time when the threats that we face are growing in scale and complexity” Radakin warns North Korean deployments could become a larger flow: “This year's most extraordinary moment was the deployment of thousands of North Korean soldiers on the border of Ukraine and the possibility of tens of of thousands more to follow” as part of DPRK-Russia pact

Reading the just released “War and Peace” by General Sir Richard Barrons, who is currently co-writing the UK’s strategic defence review. Barrons on serving in Bosnia. “The experience of working in a broken, rundown, deeply factionalised and occasionally bizarre environment was pretty faithfully replicated by my stints in the Ministry of Defence in London”

An instructive podcast, published six days ago, with Pete Hegseth, Trump's nominee for the secretary of defence position. A few takeaways:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/143… Hegseth: "I would probably talk a lot about the military industrial complex... the companies that influence the way we procure weapons and way we fight. Well, there's the veterans industrial complex too...allow the private market to provide for vets ... the VA hates that."

“JPMorgan Chase, a bank, has estimated that a tariff hike half the size of the one Mr Trump is advocating would knock a third to half a percentage point off gdp growth in its first year and increase inflation by 1.5-2 percentage points.” economist.com/briefing/2024/… “Mass deportations of the magnitude that Mr Trump has proposed are also unlikely to happen. The federal government simply would not have the capacity to hunt down and deport millions of people unless Mr Trump were to enlist the armed forces or deputise…law enforcement”

This is a very good discussion with @liscovich, providing a clear picture of what the drone war in Ukraine currently looks like (rather than how it looked a year ago). A few points that stood out to me:

https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1848694786141655158

1. We're on to the third generation of First Person View (FPV) drones. "The overall trend has been toward using larger [air]frames that can carry more payload [with] frequency shifting." Bigger antennae—30W v 2W—to strengthen signal and counter impact of Russian jamming.

Big statement by Canadian police. “An extraordinary situation is compelling us to speak about what we have discovered in our multiple ongoing investigations into the involvement of agents of the Government of India in serious criminal activity in Canada” rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2024/r… “there has been well over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life which have led to the conduct of Duty to Warn by law enforcement with members of the South Asian community, and specifically members of the pro-Khalistan movement” rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2024/r…

"despite these achievements, Ukraine’s troops and their commanders are growing concerned over manpower problems, particularly the quality of new recruits and the speed at which they are injured or killed in combat." "ft.com/content/b93961… Grim & will have a knock-on effect on mobilisation and will to fight. "The [Ukrainian] commanders estimated that 50 to 70 per cent of new infantry troops were killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation." ft.com/content/b93961…

Listening to Richard Moore & Bill Burns at Kenwood House.

https://twitter.com/chiefmi6/status/1832371619345334681

Burns: “we have no better foreign partner in the world than SIS”

I wrote this week on the latest skirmishing in the crypto wars. End-to-end encryption has conquered the world. Governments continue to push back in defence of lawful intercept. But the debate around technical solutions has changed little in years.
economist.com/international/… A few sources for this piece. In 2018 & 2021 a pair of GCHQ officials proposed various solutions for reconciling gov't interception with end-to-end encryption. The first piece proposed that govts could be added secretly to particular communications:
lawfaremedia.org/article/princi…

A CNAS tabletop exercise. "This study finds that a hypothetical, protracted U.S.-PRC conflict creates conditions under which nonstrategic nuclear weapons use is both appealing to the PRC and difficult to manage for the United States" cnas.org/publications/r… "once nuclear escalation in the Indo-Pacific occurs, reciprocal tactical nuclear exchanges may continue, but not necessarily lead to general nuclear war." cnas.org/publications/r…

“Russia has trained its navy to target sites deep inside Europe with nuclear-capable missiles in a potential conflict with Nato, according to secret files…Maps of targets as far-flung as the west coast of France and Barrow-in-Furness” on.ft.com/4fzYtM2 ‘The document notes the navy’s “high manoeuvrability” allows it to conduct “sudden & pre-emptive blows” and “massive missile strikes . . . from various directions”. It adds that nuclear weapons are “as a rule” designated for use “in combination with other means of destruction”..’

Kommersant reports from Kursk. General sense being chaos & abandonment by Moscow. “I want to understand where our state is at all? Where is the administration? I wish they could talk to us. We don't know anything at all… there's no one.” kommersant.ru/doc/6890223 “Why wasn't there a fucking evacuation? Everyone ran away as best they could - under fire, under kamikaze drones! Why did they lie on TV to the last? They said that the situation was stable” kommersant.ru/doc/6890223?fr…

Struck by the fact that we can barely work out with confidence which Ukrainian brigades & what proportion of them are properly in in Kursk, let alone if anything is in reserve & what precisely is happening. OSINT can be absolutely magical, and sometimes incredibly limiting. And so beware wild evidence free speculation however enjoyable it feels.

“The son of immigrants.” For these people, we’ll never really be British.

A couple of other lines in that which stand out. Goodwin cites: “The creeping sense of lawlessness.”
Reality: “Crime in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level on record…Incidents of violent crime have dropped by 28% in the year to June 2023.” bbc.co.uk/news/uk-671619…

🧵 While I am going through notes, there is also a good discussion here between @StaciePettyjohn & @NarangVipin, the US' Secretary of Defense for Space Policy (and an MIT professor). Some interesting bits on nuclear policy/strategy incl. NATO nuclear posture.

https://twitter.com/StaciePettyjohn/status/1816472227052765564

Narang says scenario "flipped" from cold war, where NATO planned nuclear first use. "NATO is the conventionally superior [one]. And so the muscle memory we have from the Cold War is not actually not as applicable...the central challenge is how do we deter Ru first employment "

Important from @DanWBlack. "Mounting evidence" from early 2023 on "indicates that multiple Russian cyber units have shifted their sights away from strategic civilian targets toward soldiers’ computers & mobiles endpoints" for "tactical military objectives" rusi.org/explore-our-re… "This change in operational focus has been cross-cutting, with Russian military intelligence (GRU) and the domestic security service (FSB) – long renowned for rivalry and mistrust – unifying their earlier disjointed cyber efforts" rusi.org/explore-our-re…

A thread on the new RUSI report on tactical lessons from the IDF in Gaza principally in Gaza City in 2024. ("Hamas commanders were not accessible for interview", they note)

(PDF of report)rusi.org/explore-our-re…
static.rusi.org/tactical-lesso… On Oct 7, RUSI notes that although Hamas combat groups "had been instructed to train and equip for the assault and capture of Israeli villages & IDF outposts for some time, these small-scale exercises by individual Hamas units had become somewhat routine." static.rusi.org/tactical-lesso…

Cable security, Norway style. 'He and his brother, who’s a year younger, have never seen anyone suspicious, but if anyone did try to break in, they’re prepared: “We’d shoot them,” he deadpans, “with harpoons.”' bloomberg.com/features/2024-… "Last year the Norwegian military released videos showing Russian nuclear attack subs patrolling off Norway’s coast and following the routes of undersea gas pipelines and telecommunications cables." bloomberg.com/features/2024-…

In the Cold War there was a lot of prep for wartime sabotage, incl KGB plans for assassination of pol & mil figures, and attacks on industrial sites. But don’t think there was ever a covert post-war campaign in Europe, outside what wd become Sov bloc, on scale we are seeing now? On the history of GRU & KGB preparation for *wartime* sabotage, much of which was revealed by the defections of Oleg Lyalin in 1971 & Vladimir Rezun in 1978.
intelligencestudiesreview.blog/2024/05/04/bac…