via Sputnik

Speaking to members of the press on Thursday, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Senior Col. Wu Qian said provocative actions in and near Chinese waters have increased in 2021 and that the US needs to back off.

“Since the current US administration took office, the number of activities conducted by US warships and surveillance aircraft in the sea areas around China has increased by more than 20% and 40% respectively over the same period last year. The US frequently sends ships and aircraft to conduct activities in waters and airspace around China, escalating regional militarization and threatening regional peace and stability,” Wu told reporters.

“China is firmly opposed to that. We urge the US side to strictly restrain its troops on the ground, abide by the ‘Rules of Behaviour for Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters between China and the US’ and ‘International Maritime Collision Prevention Regulations,’ so as to prevent the recurrence of similar dangerous incidents,” he added.

Wu noted in particular that the recent patrol by the US Navy destroyer USS Mustin, which passed just miles from the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning in the Philippine Sea, had “seriously obstructed regular training of the Chinese side and threatened the safety of ships and personnel of both sides.”

Cmdr. Robert J. Briggs and Cmdr. Richard D. Slye monitor surface contacts from the pilothouse of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin.

“It’s of an egregious nature,” Wu added. “The Chinese naval ships on site warned the US ship to leave. The Ministry of National Defense has lodged a solemn representation with the US side in this regard.”

The April 4 incident was accompanied by the release of a photo in which Cmdr. Robert Briggs, commanding officer of the USS Mustin, is seen sitting casually with his legs kicked up as he looks at the Liaoning just a few thousand yards away alongside his executive officer, Cmdr. Richard Slye.

Earlier this month, Biden forwarded a $753 billionnational security budgetrequest for fiscal year 2022, a 1.6% increase over Trump’s budget for fiscal year 2021. The US spends more on its military than the next several competitors combined, including China. However, even that increase wasn’t enough to satisfy hawkish Republicans, who demanded an increase of between 3-5%.

Wu spoke to this on Thursday, saying some in Washington are “getting really paranoid and keep playing up the so-called ‘China threat’ and “China challenge.’ This reflects a mental illness.”

“This kind of behavior will only harm others and itself and lead to a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ China has no intention to threaten or challenge any country. However, if someone insisted on threatening or challenging China, we would have no choice but to fight back.”

Also from: TASS

Washington’s intention of boosting its military budget is caused by a psychological disorder and paranoia plaguing certain members of the Biden administration amid the exaggeration of the alleged “Chinese threat,” Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said Thursday.

“For quite some time, certain representatives of the US administration have been unable to shake themselves loose from maniacal psychosis and delusions of persecution.They’ve become obsessed with speculation over the so-called Chinese threat, and they irrationally exaggerate the topic of ‘the challenge from China’,” he told journalists, commenting on Washington’s announcement of a military budget increase.

“This is the embodiment of some mental disorder, which can only result in harm to others, as well as to themselves, not to mention ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’. China has no intention of threatening other countries or posing any threat to them. However, should anyone threaten or challenge China, we will have no other choice but to respond,” he concluded.

On April 13, Jane’s reported citing the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that Washington plans to request $715 billion for military needs from the Congress. The OMB will reportedly request $753 billion for national defense funding, with the bulk of this sum intended for the Pentagon. Therefore, the US Department of Defense budget will increase by 1.6% compared to fiscal year 2021, from $704 billion.

Source: TASS

by Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

FILE PHOTO: A F-16 fighter jet lands on a highway used as an emergency landing strip during the Han Kuang military exercise in Madou, Tainan, southern Taiwan, April 12, 2011©REUTERS/Nicky Loh

The US military has deteriorated to the point that the only way it could win a simulated war game in which it was called on to defend Taiwan from a ‘Chinese invasion’ force was by inventing capabilities it does not yet possess.

In 2018 and 2019, the US Air Force conducted detailed simulated war games that had its forces square off against those of China. On both occasions, the US was decisively defeated, the first time challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea, and the second time defending Taiwan – which China sees as an integral part of its territory – against a Chinese invasion.

In 2020, the US repeated the Taiwan scenario, and won – but only barely. The difference? In both 2018 and 2019, it played with the resources it had on hand. Last year, it gave itself a host of new technologies and capabilities that are either not in production or aren’t even planned for development. In short, the exercise was as far removed from reality as it could get. The fact is the US can only successfully defend Taiwan from a full-scale Chinese invasion in its dreams.

What the current war games underscored is that, as currently configured, equipped, and deployed, the US Air Force lacks the required combination of lethality and sustainability necessary to wage full-scale conventional conflict against a peer-level foe. The mix of aircraft currently in the US Air Force inventory was unable to ‘compete’ in the war game – even the current model of F-35 was excluded as not being up to the task of fighting and surviving against the Chinese military. Instead, the wargamers completely altered the composition and operational methodology of the US Air Force, providing it with combat aircraft that are either still on the drawing board, or have not even been considered for procurement yet. They also completely altered the ‘layout’ of forces, manufacturing new airfields that do not exist, and connecting them with command-and-control capabilities just as fictional.

There was a time when the notion of US air superiority, if not supremacy, was virtually guaranteed on any battlefield that could be imagined. This was especially true in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the corresponding disintegration of Russian combat power. The US was able to hold onto this edge over the course of the 1990s simply by exploiting the advantages accrued from years of investment made in modern aircraft and combat systems during the Cold War, and the fact no other nation was able and/or willing to invest in their respective military to challenge the US in that arena.

The events of 9/11 proved to be seminal in the decline of American military power. The United States poured its entire national security focus into defeating the forces of ‘global terrorism,’ and engaged itself in the futile act of ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the needs of one combat command – US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for US military interests in the Middle East and Southwest Asia – took priority over all others.

Gone were the days when the US spent billions of dollars preparing to fight a major war in the Pacific, another major war in Europe, and a ‘holding action’ in the Middle East. In the post-9/11 world, the sole focus of the US military became low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. Every aspect of military existence – recruiting, training, organization, equipment, employment, and sustainability – was defined by the needs of CENTCOM in fighting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. If something did not further the CENTCOM mission, it was either discarded or modified so it would.

The US military spent itself in the CENTCOM area of operations – physically, fiscally, morally, and intellectually. Every single principle of war necessary for a military to prevail was sacrificed in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, with the political decision having been made to depart Afghanistan, and a similar decision being brooded regarding Iraq and its corollary conflict, Syria, the US military is a fundamentally broken institution. It lost its ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East and Southwest Asia by not winning. As such, the senior leadership at the helm of the US military has been conditioned to accept defeat as de rigueur; it comes with the territory, a reality explained away by lying – either to yourself, your superiors, or both. Too many successful careers were created on the backs of lies repackaged as truth, of defeats sold as victories, as deficits portrayed as assets.

In many ways, the recently concluded US Air Force war game is a byproduct of this psychosis – an exercise in self-delusion, in which reality is replaced by a fictional world where everything works as planned, even if it does not exist. The US Air Force cannot wage a successful war against China today. Nor can it do so against Russia. Its ability to sustain a successful air campaign against either Iran or North Korea is likewise questionable. This is the kind of reality that would, in a world where facts mattered, cost a lot of senior people their jobs, in uniform and out.

The culpability of this systemic incompetence is so widespread, however, that there can be no serious accounting for what has transpired. Instead, the US Air Force, having been confronted by the reality of its shortcomings, ‘invents’ a victory. In and of itself, this ‘victory’ is meaningless. If China were to invade Taiwan, there is literally nothing short of employing nuclear weapons the US could do to stop it. But by ‘beating’ China using fictional resources, the US Air Force has created a blueprint of procurement that will define its budgetary requests for the next decade.

In doing so, however, the US Air Force is simply repeating the mistakes of the CENTCOM-driven ‘forever war,’ focusing on achieving ‘victory’ in one theater of operations at the exclusion of all others. By building a fictitious ‘model’ military for the purpose of prevailing in a simulated war game in which every advantage was conceded to the United States, the US Air Force is simply continuing the pattern of behavior built around lies, deceit, and self-deception that has guided it, and its senior officers and civilian leadership, for the past two decades. The end result will be that, even if the Air Force gets all the tools and capabilities it claims it needs to win in any ‘defense of Taiwan’ war game (and it will not), the only way it can prevail in any such conflict will be in its dreams.

by Seraphim Hanisch via The Duran

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This is a translation of a piece run by the Russian TASS News Agency. It is not likely that the American press is covering it, so we bring it to you. The attached videos are for the benefit of any viewers that speak Russian or Ukrainian fluently, but, curiously, the “AutoTranslate” feature common to YouTube is not available for this video. Interestingly enough, the video coverage is from Ukrainian sources, and considering the bad blood between Russia and Ukraine, it is curious that both countries seem aligned on this issue.

One wonders why.

The following is the TASS piece:

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BEIJING, April 8. / TASS /. The US government should provide the international community with comprehensive information about the experiments that they are carrying out in the US military biological laboratories in Ukraine and at Fort Detrick. This was announced on Thursday at a regular briefing by the official representative of the PRC Foreign Ministry Zhao Lijian.

“We hope that the respective countries and the United States will take a responsible and open position, begin cooperation with the World Health Organization and invite its experts to carry out scientific research to find the sources of the coronavirus in the United States, as China did earlier. I noticed that Russia is not so long ago questioned the United States about its military and biological activities in Fort Detrick and in Ukraine. Other countries have also expressed similar concerns, “he said. “Take Ukraine, for example. The US has created 16 biological laboratories in Ukraine alone. Why is the US creating so many laboratories around the world, and what does it do there, including in Fort Detrick,” he asked.

An official representative of the PRC Foreign Ministry stressed that the United States is the only country that still blocks the creation of a verification mechanism under the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. “We again call on the United States to take a responsible position and respond to the concerns of the world community, as well as provide comprehensive explanations of what they are doing in these laboratories, as well as respond to requests to create a verification mechanism for such activities,” he said.

The Walter Reed Army Research Institute is located in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It is run by the Pentagon and conducts biomedical research, including infectious diseases.

Source: Global Times

Chinese telecom giant Huawei saw a substantial drop in both smartphone shipments and market share in China market in 2020, following a tough year of US government’s strangle on semiconductors supply, allowing US rival Apple to rise to fill up the void.

Under the US’ relentless assault, Huawei saw a drop in market share in China from 38.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 25.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, the only one of the top five smartphone makers in China whose share declined, an International Data Corp (IDC) report showed on Tuesday.

Industry experts said that Huawei’s rare market share decline reflected the US block on chips that affected the supply chain of the company’s high-end mobile series.

There were 86.4 million smartphones shipped in China in the fourth quarter of 2020, almost flat year-on-year, with Huawei being the only smartphone maker among the top five that did not grow. The others were Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Apple.

Although there could be many reasons for the changes in market share, Ma Jihua, a veteran industry analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the US chip crackdown on the Chinese technology company created a supply chain crisis for Huawei and left space for others, especially high-end mobile producer Apple, to grab more share.

Apple was the only producer that achieved growth in China last year, with smartphone shipments up 10.1 percent, IDC reported.

Apple, which had a 34.7-percent market share growth in the fourth quarter in China, against Huawei’s 34.5 percent, also seized the top spot in the global market with a 23.4-percent share in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Apple released its 2021 fiscal first-quarter results on January 27, with revenue exceeding $100 billion for the first time and net profit of $28.755 billion, up 29 percent year-on-year. China was a particularly strong performer, with revenue from the greater China region at $21.313 billion, up 57 percent year-on-year.

“Apple lost market share to Huawei in 2019, and Huawei’s weakened competitiveness last year left it with only one viable competitor to challenge,” Liang Zhenpeng, senior industry analyst told the Global Times. Apple’s launch of a 5G mobile came later but also helped it to fill a gap as its major market embraced advanced internet connectivity.

However, Apple’s growth pace might be hard to sustain at an equivalent high level this year when other Chinese mobile producers such as Xiaomi and Oppo are also targeting the high-end smartphone market, experts said.

“Apple, as an important high-end mobile producer, will see unprecedented competition from a few Chinese brands,” said Ma.

Liu Bo, vice president of OPPO, gave a speech on Monday in which the company set higher targets for its growth in 2021, including the comprehensive upgrade of the company’s channels and partnership, media reports said.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s difficulties may be only temporary.

“Once Chinese 5-nanometer chips can be produced, the whole market will change,” said Ma, noting that he expected such chips could be out at the end of this year.

——————————————————————————————-

Source: Caixin Global

The bad news keeps coming for sanction-hobbled Huawei.

IDC has just released its latest quarterly smartphone results and they show that the embattled telecom giant’s smartphone sales plunged by nearly half — or 42.4 per cent to be exact — in last year’s fourth quarter from a year earlier.

That makes Huawei the world’s fifth biggest brand for the period, a far cry from just two quarters earlier when it was at the top of the heap.

Huawei has been dogged by US sanctions for nearly two years now, as Washington aims to limit the company’s role in the worldwide development of state-of-the-art 5G smartphones and networking equipment.

First, the US banned American companies from selling components and software to Huawei. And last year it turned up the pressure by leaning on some of Huawei’s key non-American suppliers to abandon the company as well.

That has left Huawei with a limited supply of chips and other key components that have hurt its ability to make smartphones, forcing it to rely on stockpiles built up before the sanctions took effect.

Meantime, Huawei’s pain has been Apple and Xiaomi’s gain. The iPhone maker’s smartphone shipments surged 22.2 per cent year on year in the quarter, enough to lift it past Samsung for the smartphone crown, as it shipped 90.1 million iPhones — a record for a single vendor in a single quarter. And Xiaomi’s shipments rose by an even stronger 32 per cent, giving it 11.2 per cent of the global smartphone market.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter.

FILE PHOTO: US Army soldiers © REUTERS/Bryan Woolston

• When it comes to closing the gap that exists in civil-military relations in the US that contribute to the militarization of its foreign policy, the onus falls on American citizens, and not the US military, to accomplish this task.

A pair of recent articles have raised the question as to whether America is well-served by the all-volunteer military that has existed since the end of the Vietnam War. Rajan Menon, a political scientist from the City College of New York, writes in Foreign Policy that the forever wars currently waged by the US continue because they place too little burden on the public and politicians. In the same vein, Dennis Laich, a retired US Army major general with more than 35 years of service, writesin The Military Times that “America has been involved in endless wars for 20 years. And today, 330 million Americans lay claim to rights, liberties, and security that not a single one of them is obligated to protect and defend. The all-volunteer force has granted all Americans an exemption from this obligation.”

While I understand the sentiment behind these words, I strongly disagree with the underlying assumption. The US military does not protect the rights and liberties of the average American citizen. These rights and liberties are fought for and defended within the context of the daily lives of Americans inside our borders. The military does not guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, or any other of the myriad of rights and privileges that have come to define the United States as a collective. In fact, the military, with few exceptions, has no roll in the domestic affairs of the American people. The task of defending American rights and privileges is the exclusive purview of the American civilian, who must do so daily lest these rights diminish and fade away.

What the military does provide is a barrier of external security which safeguards America and American interests abroad from foreign enemies. It is an important job, but it does not equate to protecting and defending the rights, liberties, and security I demand as an American citizen. Indeed, while the military (like every other public servant) takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, it is that very document which bars military involvement in the civil affairs of the nation. Thankfully, it appears that the current US military leadership shares this point of view. Let the military fight Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; I’ll take care of defending my rights on the home front, thank you very much.

A bigger issue confronted by both Rajan Menon and Dennis Laich is what Laich calls the “civil-military gap” that contributes to the militarization of US foreign policy and the lack of public accountability on the part of US presidents and members of Congress who, because of the existence of an all-volunteer military, no longer have to worry, as Menon puts it, about “mass demonstrations or electoral backlashes” which result in their being given “greater freedom to continue war for years.”

Rajan Menon and Dennis Laich both point out that what Menon calls “the uneven burden of protecting the United States” has created a military that is largely drawn from economically disenfranchised elements of American society and funded by borrowing trillions of dollars as opposed to directly passing the cost of the military and the wars it wages directly on to the American people. They both note that the combination of a ready pool of lower-class recruits and the debt-driven funding of the military places “virtually no demands on the public” and, as such, creates no impetus for the public therefore to hold their elected officials responsible for the endless wars America has been engaged in since the end of the Cold War.

Military’s job is to prevail on battlefield – not to pick the location of this battlefield

I would counter that the best solution to this problem is a better understanding of basic civics on the part of the American people, and not lowering the quality of the US military by diluting its professionalism with ill-trained conscripts. If you want to change foreign policy, that change is best accomplished on the front end, where the cost is measured in terms of air miles flown by diplomats engaged in the art of diplomacy, and not on the back end, where the price is measured in the lives of servicemembers sacrificed because of a lack of training. Teaching Americans to be better global citizens is a far more effective way to alter our foreign policy than making our military anything less than dominant in the field of battle.

The military’s job is to prevail on the battlefield. It does not get to pick the location of this battlefield, or the enemy that will be confronted there – that is the responsibility of the civilian leadership the American people elect to represent them in national office. These elected officials – not the military – make the policy that the military is called upon to implement. And since the military’s sole purpose is to win the battles it is tasked to fight, then I would argue that any measure undertaken to rectify the domestic political problem manifested in the so-called “civil-military gap” that dilutes the lethality and efficiency of the US military is a self-defeating proposition. This includes the kind of conscript military favored by both Laich and Menon.

There is no doubt that short-term conscripts are more than capable of handling many of the individual tasks associated with military service, especially the more menial ones normally affiliated with front-line combat service. This, however, does not mean that they do these tasks well, or are capable of repeating successful outcomes over time. This comes with the kind of repetition that takes place over time – the kind of time a two- or three-year period of conscripted service does not provide when it comes to learning the profession of arms.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the bestselling book, ‘Outliers’, has asserted that it takes about 10,000 hours of intense, prolonged, and concentrated practice before one can become exceptionally successful in a given field. Gladwell based his theory on the work of Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist perhaps best known for postulating that anyone could rise to the top of his or her chosen field through a combination of the proper training and will. Ericsson wasn’t sold on Gladwell’s 10,000 hour figure – he noted that in the field of classical music the best performers have put in some 25,000 hours of practice – deliberate, dedicated time spent solely on improving one’s skill.

‘I spent six years training how to defeat Russians’

One is the byproduct of his/her own experience, and as such their opinions are shaped by bias associated with these experiences. I enlisted in the US Army in 1979 as a volunteer. Five years later, having graduated from college and officer candidate school, I was commissioned in the US Marine Corps. I learned one of my first lessons in professionalism from a tactics instructor at the Basic School, a six-month finishing school for Marine lieutenants before they are shipped off to the real world of the Fleet Marine Force. We were driving on I-95, between Washington, DC and Quantico, through the kind of rolling, wooded hills that comprise the Northern Virginia landscape. The instructor, a captain, casually asked me what I saw when I looked at the scenery.

“It’s nice,” I said.

“You’re dead,” he replied. As went on to explain, I should never look at terrain from a civilian point of view. I should be examining fields of fire, routes of advance, defilade, enfilade, cover, concealment and the best places to plot pre-registered fires. If these weren’t the first things I thought of when I looked at the surrounding terrain, then I probably needed to choose a new line of work, because otherwise I’d be getting myself and the Marines I was privileged to lead killed. This way of thinking, the captain said, does not happen on its own, but rather is conditioned over hours of repetitive practice, until it becomes second nature to do these evaluations. Family vacations were never the same after that, but he was right – even today I look at terrain with a military eye as a matter of habit.

Terrain appreciation is but one of dozens of critical skills that a professional warrior must ingrain into his or her being as second nature. It requires a mindset totally dedicated to the military profession, something a conscript military, by definition, does not – and cannot – have.

I entered the military in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the US military establishment was making the difficult yet necessary transition from the conscript force that was so scarred by the Vietnam experience, to a professional military capable of prevailing on the battlefields of Europe against the Soviet Army.

I spent six years training how to defeat the Russians, including two-and-a-half years at 29 Palms, California, home of the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center. There, I spent countless hours perfecting the art of combined arms combat in a maneuver war environment. By the time I rotated out of 29 Palms, I had accumulated more than 10,000 hours of intense, highly focused training. I was an expert in my field (the provision of combat intelligence to a general support field artillery battalion). After three more years, accumulating thousands of more hours of training, I was given the opportunity to test my skills in an actual war – the 1991 Gulf War.

I was not alone. The 700,000-plus servicemembers who deployed to the Middle East in 1990-1991 to liberate Kuwait from Iraq were all “volunteers.” But they were also all professionals who, like me, had accumulated untold hours of focused training on doing their respective job. Very few of those deployed had been to war before – they, like me, were untested.

The result speaks for itself – the US-led coalition handily defeated a larger force of combat-hardened Iraqi conscripts, largely on the capability and professionalism of the all-volunteer force that existed at that time. It was not even close. I emerged from that experience convinced that the military force the US had assembled in the deserts of the Middle East could defeat any other military force in the world – bar none. The main reason why I believed so was that we had become that which Gladwell and Ericsson theorized about – experts whose expertise was drawn from years of dedicated, focused training on the art of war.

No conscript force would ever be able to match the professionalism of the US military circa 1990-91. And while I am no longer in the military, I would suspect that, if anything, the technological complexities of modern war have increased exponentially, making for even more intense training requirements so that this new technology could be seamlessly folded into existing doctrine, tactics, operations, and strategies. The bottom line is that the fundamentals of lethality, sustainability and survivability that govern if a military formation will survive on the battlefield are enhanced significantly with the kind of focused, long-term training a professional military can offer.

A conscript military will not, in and of itself, alter the current focus of US foreign policy objectives, which often lead to armed conflict. That will require a fundamental rethinking on the part of the American people about how we interact with the rest of the world. But it will increase the likelihood of defeat on the field of battle by the US military. If America were to revert to a conscript military, we would lose the edge that a professional military provides, with the difference quantifiable in terms of body bags coming home.

by Liu zhen Source: South China Morning Post

“China also learned from the Gulf War that the US had established its dominance and hegemony through military might. The US could beat you whenever they want to”

Monday marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, when American-led coalition forces invaded Iraq. The Gulf War sparked 30 years of chaos and turmoil in the once powerful Middle Eastern country but also served as a rude awakening for China’s military leaders.

With the technology and firepower on show during the conflict – precision bombing, satellite guidance, missile interception, air-to-surface strike to eliminate tanks, electronic warfare, one-way transparency on the battlefield, stealth bombers – the Gulf War was a “psychological nuclear attack” on China, observers say.

The event helped to kick start China’s military modernisation and led to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) narrowing the gap with the US military so much that it is now considered a “strategic threat”.

Desert Storm, which lasted six weeks, marked the dawn of a warfare revolution, showed the backwardness of the PLA at that time and sparked anxiety regarding national security,experts say.

“It showed China how a war should be fought and forced the Chinese military to skip the mechanised stage and jump straight to develop information technologies,” said Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military expert.

“From military theories to the building of the army, to the weapons and equipment, to the relevant technologies, we realised it was all decades behind the Americans.”

Antony Wong Tong, a Macau-based military analyst, said old PLA doctrines like “People’s war” were proven outdated by the Gulf War, and showed that after June 4, 1989 – the date of the bloody massacre in Tiananmen Square – China had once again become an imaginary enemy of the US, which made the problem more imminent for Beijing.

“Since the 1990s the PLA has thoroughly switched to the path of professionalisation and modernisation,” he said.

The year 1991 saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the military and political pressure on China dramatically increased. Aware of its own vulnerability and weakness, China adopted a “keeping a low profile and biding time” approach to diplomacy, while putting all of its effort into development.

In the aftershock of the Gulf War, then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin began to promote the idea that the PLA should focus on building “modern regional warfare capabilities under hi-tech conditions”, “complete the dual historical tasks of mechanisation and informationisation” and “achieve the modernisation of the army by leaps forward”, according to Tang Zhichao, who specialises in Middle East studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

According to Hong Kong-based military commentator Song Zhongping, China used the hi-tech American weapons it had seen in the war – like precision missiles, missile defence systems and stealth warplanes – as a guidebook for its development. Tactics like joint operations between different forces and the organisation and technologies needed to realise them were also given great attention.

Retired PLA major general Jin Yinan spoke of the impact the war had had in his memoir.

“At one point, we translated a lot of the US military’s operational regulations and military reports, and began to build the army by copying their models and standards.”

Under Jiang, the PLA slashed 700,000 troops in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping cut a further 300,000 and initiated massive restructuring and a reform of the command chain.

The military’s budget started rising fast in 1999 with double-digit growth for more than a decade, in line with the soaring Chinese economy. By 2019, China’s annual defence spending was the second-biggest in the world, reaching US$176 billion, compared to America’s US$732 billion. Beijing allocated a budget of US$178.6 billion for 2020.

The Chinese army last year announced the completion of the mechanisation of its Ground Force. But even before then the PLA was ahead of the US in some areas, like shipbuilding, land-based conventional missiles and integrated air defence systems, according to the Pentagon’s 2020 “China Military Power Report”.

The PLA Navy is the world’s second largest after the US by total displacement. It has about 350 ships and submarines, including more than 130 major surface combatants. The US Navy has 293 ships. Moreover, most of China’s best ships were built after 2010 so feature the latest equipment and technologies.

By comparison, in 1991, the PLA Navy was a near-shore defence force whose largest ship was a 3,600-tonne destroyer Type 051.

The PLA Air Force is now the third-largest in the world, with more than 2,500 aircraft and about 2,000 combat aircraft, most of which are third- and fourth-generation warplanes, comparable to Western air forces. China is only the second country in the world to have developed a fifth-generation stealth fighter, the J-20.

In 1991, the best planes in the PLA Air Force were the J-7 – developed from a 1950s’s MiG-21 – and the domestically developed J-8, both of which were second-generation.The US aircraft involved in the Gulf War were mostly fourth-generation F15s, F-16s and F/A-18s, while the military decided Lockheed Martin’s prototype Y-22 would become the world’s first fifth-generation stealth fighter – the F-22.

The PLA Rocket Force has more than 1,250 ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500km (310 miles) to 5,500km, which the US almost did not have due to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Rocket Force has greatly upgraded and expanded its nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile inventory in the past 30 years and now leads the world in the deployment of hypersonic glide missiles with its DF-17.

“Chinese equipment may not be as good as the Americans in certain specifications, but at least it is of the same generation of development. There is no longer the generational gap there was in the 1990s,” Ni said.

The Gulf War played a very important role in stimulating the progress of China’s military modernisation, Tang said.

Although China’s state television did not broadcast live reports on Desert Storm, it was still closely watched.

“Like myself, the prediction of most military personnel in China at the beginning of the war was that the United States would repeat the Soviet Union’s failure in Afghanistan,”said Liu Dingping, an officer with the PLA Second Artillery Command (now the Rocket Force) wrote in a newspaper article at the time. “But … we were wrong.”

The US-led coalition flew more than 100,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 tonnes of bombs, which stripped Iraq of its defences. The fact it took the coalition just 42 days – including just 100 hours on the ground – to wipe out what was at the time the world’s fourth-largest army was telling, experts say.

“If it was us being attacked by the Americans at that time, the result might not have been any better,” said Ni, who was a 36-year-old military history researcher in 1991.

Many of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s soldiers were veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and as well as Chinese weapons – Type 69 tanks, Type 63 armoured personnel carriers and J-7 fighters – were armed with advanced Soviet T-72 tanks and MiG-25, MiG-29 fighters.

But the US had the world’s first operational stealth warplane – the F-117, and fourth-generation fighters, the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18, as the backbone of its air campaign. Moreover, the squadrons of reconnaissance, surveillance, electronic-warfare, aerial refuelling tanker aircraft were total strangers to the Chinese.

Wong said the PLA had never imagined that the coalition would be able to win with almost nothing but air power.

“It was as shocking as a psychological atomic bomb on the Chinese military, who still believed in Soviet-style tactics from the 1960s and 1970s,” he said.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the conflict reminded the Chinese of the rule of the jungle: “fall behind and you will be beaten”.

“China also learned from the Gulf War that the US had established its dominance and hegemony through military might. The US could beat you whenever they want to,” he said.

The PLA at that time also realised it had fallen behind its number one imaginary enemy – Taiwan – in terms of advanced technology and weaponry. The Taiwanese independence movement had been growing since then, and especially after the Strait Crises in 1995 and 1996, when the PLA stepped back when two US aircraft carrier strike groups intervened, Song said.

“So given the constant accumulation of external and internal demands, coupled with the model effect of the Gulf War, the PLA were deeply aware of the importance of strengthening its ability and improving its readiness for war,” he said.

by Thierry Meyssan
The Iranian President, Sheik Hassan Rohaini, is a longstanding partner of Israel. He intends to restore Iran to the role of “regional gendarme” that it had during the Pahlavi dynasty.

A very strong antagonism opposes the government of Sheikh Hassan Rohani to the Revolutionary Guards. The latter are not placed under his orders, but depend directly on the Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

President Rohani’s project: capitalism and regional imperialism

Sheikh Rohani is a member of the Shiite clergy, like Ayatollah Khamenei, but not the Revolutionary Guards, who are soldiers.

The Guardians of the Revolution are followers of Imam Rouhollah Khomeiny. They intend to export his anti-imperialist revolution and liberate the world from the Anglo-Saxon empire (USA + UK + Israel) from which their country has suffered so much. They have no connection with the regular Iranian army, which depends on the President of the Islamic Republic and intends only to defend the country.

Sheikh Rohani was a member of parliament during the long war that Iraq declared on behalf of the United States. He put pressure on Washington to obtain the release of US hostages in Lebanon in exchange for US weapons. He was later contacted by Israel to powerfully arm his country. It was he who brought his mentor, the Speaker of Parliament, Hodjatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, into the game. Together, they organised the Iran-Contra arms traffic which brought misfortune to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries and fortune to the already very rich Rafsanjani.

Much later, he was chosen by Ayatollah Khamenei to succeed President Ahmadinejad in a new secret negotiation with the United States in Oman. During this election campaign, he presented himself as a supporter of nascent financial capitalism and declared that Iran should stop funding foreign revolutionaries, even if they were Shiite like the Lebanese Hezbollah. In doing so, he was giving pledges to the US and Israel.

Once elected, he immediately negotiated with Washington, in accordance with the instructions of the guide, Ayatollah Khamenei. His ambition was to regain the role of “regional policeman” that the Anglo-Saxon empire had attributed to Shah Reza Pahlevi (then to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then again to Saudi Arabia). As this objective is in total contradiction with the legacy of Imam Khomeini, the two states presented these negotiations as aiming to put an end to the Iranian nuclear programme. They involved the other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany in meetings in Geneva which soon led to a nuclear agreement (2013). China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and Russia were not surprised because they all knew that Iran had abandoned all research into weapons of mass destruction since 1988. A year’s break was then used to continue bilateral negotiations between Tehran and Washington. It was during this period that Hassan Rohani discreetly withdrew his ambassador and credits from Syria. Only the Guardians of the Revolution remained there in the face of NATO and the jihadists. Finally, the agreement that had been negotiated with the 5+1 was signed in public, on July 14, 2015, in Vienna.

In passing, Sheikh Rohani negotiated an agreement with Austria to export Iranian gas to Europe to the detriment of Russia. But this agreement could never be concretised.

It was only during his second presidential election campaign, in 2017, that Hassan Rohani revealed his project: to re-establish the Savafid empire. He still acted cautiously since he had it revealed by a publication of his think-tank, but continued to express himself using the rhetoric of Imam Khomeini. The Safavid empire was built around the Shiite religion. Greater Iran” would include Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan, under the authority of the leader of the Revolution.

The consequences of President Rohani’s project

This text was immediately translated into Arabic by Anis Naccache. It shook up the wider Middle East. Indeed, while Azerbaijan is almost unanimously Shiite, the other designated states are not.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been deeply divided between its Secretary General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who defended a Lebanese nationalist line, and his deputy, Sheikh Naïm Qassem, who on the contrary loudly applauded Sheikh Rohani.
In Syria, where the Shiites are in the minority, President Bashar el-Assad (himself Shiite, but profoundly secular) held back his anger and pretended to ignore everything.
In Iraq, where the Shiites are in the majority, but initially nationalists, most of them – including Moqtada el-Sadr – have turned to Sunni Saudi Arabia.
In Iran, General Qassem Soleimani of the Revolutionary Guards became the main rival of President Rohani.
In Azerbaijan, a country which is both Shiite and Turkish-speaking, the ruling class turned to Turkey, with which it finally launched the war against Armenia.

It was in this context that President Donald Trump broke the 5+1 agreement (JCPoA) on nuclear power. Contrary to the West European reading of events, it was not a question for him of destroying the “peaceful” work of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, but of opposing the regional reorganisation implied by the Rohani project: the Levant for Iran and the Caucasus for Turkey. The White House’s only criterion was to prevent new wars requiring the deployment of US troops.

The all-too-visible gap between the lifestyle of the families of the Rohani government members and that of the population caused huge riots at the end of 2017. Former President Ahmadinejad became involved in these riots against both him and now against the leader as well. The repression was terrible. There were a large number of deaths, perhaps a thousand, and former members of the Ahmadinejad cabinet were tried in secret and sentenced to heavy prison terms for unknown reasons.

Wanting to show that Washington would no longer play Sunni against Shiite or Arab against Persian, President Trump ordered the successive assassinations of the two main military leaders of each side: the Sunni Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Daesh and the Shiite General Qassem Soleimani of the Al-Quds Force.

In doing so, he demonstrated that the United States is still the sole master of the region. He unwittingly favoured Sheikh Rohani’s camp in Iran. The latter spared no effort to denounce “the Great Satan” and accused the head of the Iraqi secret service, Mustafa al-Kazimi, of being an accomplice of the Americans. However, when the latter was appointed Prime Minister in Baghdad a few weeks later, President Rohani was one of the first to congratulate him and congratulate himself.

Sheikh Rohani’s Israeli friends then had General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a nuclear scientist and companion of General Soleimani, assassinated. The Khomeinist tendency was decapitated.

President Rohani and Israel

President Rohani is ready to abandon Azerbaijan to Turkey if it is given the Levant. He can count on the help of Israel which, contrary to a widespread idea in the West, far from being an enemy, is a long-standing partner.

It is he who was the first Israeli contact in the Iran-Contra affair, as we have already noted.

It is also he who manages half of the Eilat-Askhelon pipeline and its two terminals, indispensable to the Israeli economy. At the end of 2017, the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Knesset repressed any publication on this subject with a sentence of 15 years in prison.

He is still the one who periodically receives Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Iddo, a discreet playwright who divides his life between the United States, Israel and Iran, three countries where he has permanent residence.

Sheikh Rohani now hopes that he will be able to carry out his project if Joe Biden is inducted as President of the United States. It will not be necessary to re-establish the bogus nuclear agreement, but just to let Tehran once again become the “policeman of the region”.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

“It has become generally accepted in foreign policy circles that the US and China are competing in a ‘superpower marathon’ that could last a century. However, the most acute part of the competition will last no more than a decade,” says the magazine Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. “… The moment of maximum danger will come in a few years.” [. . .]

“If China swallows Taiwan,” writes Foreign Affairs, “it will gain access to world-class technology and acquire an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ projecting military power to the western Pacific, plus the ability to blockade Japan and the Philippines… Taiwan is the axis of power in east Asia: controlled by Taipei, the island is a fortress against Chinese aggression”. [. . .]

“U.S. strategic alliances, meanwhile, might still exist on paper, but most would be dead letters. Washington might retain only two sets of regular partners. The first would include Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom. These countries are strategically arrayed across the globe, and their militaries and intelligence agencies are already integrated with Washington’s. All but Japan boast growing working-age populations, unlike most other U.S. allies, and thus have the potential tax bases to contribute to U.S. missions. The second group would consist of places such as the Baltic states, the Gulf Arab monarchies, and Taiwan, which share borders with or sit in close proximity to U.S. adversaries. The United States would continue to arm these partners but would no longer plan to defend them. Instead, Washington would essentially use them as buffers to check Chinese, Iranian, and Russian expansion without direct U.S. intervention.

Outside of those partnerships, all of Washington’s alliances and relationships—including NATO and its connections with longtime allies such as South Korea—would be negotiable. The United States would no longer woo countries to participate in multilateral alliances. Instead, other countries would have to bargain on a bilateral basis for U.S. protection and market access. Countries with little to offer would have to find new partners or fend for themselves.” [. . .]

by Scott Ritter

From Syria to Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, this new method of military offense has been brutally effective. We are witnessing a revolution in the history of warfare, one that is causing panic, particularly in Europe.

In an analysis written for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow, argues that the extensive (and successful) use of military drones by Azerbaijan in its recent conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh holds “distinct lessons for how well Europe can defend itself.”

Gressel warns that Europe would be doing itself a disservice if it simply dismissed the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting as “a minor war between poor countries.” In this, Gressel is correct – the military defeat inflicted on Armenia by Azerbaijan was not a fluke, but rather a manifestation of the perfection of the art of drone warfare by Baku’s major ally in the fighting, Turkey. Gressel’s conclusion – that “most of the [European Union’s] armies… would do as miserably as the Armenian Army” when faced by such a threat – is spot on.

What happened to the Armenian Army in its short but brutal 44-day war with Azerbaijan goes beyond simply losing a war. It was more about the way Armenia lost and, more specifically, how it lost. What happened over the skies of Nagorno-Karabakh – where Azerbaijan employed a host of Turkish- and Israeli-made drones not only to surveil and target Armenian positions, but shape and dominate the battlefield throughout – can be likened to a revolution in military affairs. One akin to the arrival of tanks, mechanised armoured vehicles, and aircraft in the early 20th century, that eventually led to the demise of horse-mounted cavalry.

It’s not that the Armenian soldiers were not brave, or well-trained and equipped – they were. It was that they were fighting a kind of war which had been overtaken by technology, where no matter how resolute and courageous they were in the face of the enemy, the outcome was preordained – their inevitable death, and the destruction of their equipment; some 2,425 Armenian soldiers lost their lives in the fighting, and 185 T-72 tanks, 90 armored fighting vehicles, 182 artillery pieces, 73 multiple rocket launchers, and 26 surface-to-air missile systems were destroyed.

A new kind of warfare

What happened to Armenia was not an isolated moment in military history, but rather the culmination of a new kind of warfare, centered on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones). Azerbaijan’s major ally in the war against Armenia – Turkey – has been perfecting the art of drone warfare for years, with extensive experience in full-scale modern conflict gained in recent fighting in Syria (February-March 2020) and Libya (May-June 2020.)

Over the course of the past decade, Turkey has taken advantage of arms embargoes imposed by America and others which restricted Ankara’s access to the kind of front-line drones used by the US around the world, to instead build from scratch an indigenous drone-manufacturing base. While Turkey has developed several drones in various configurations, two have stood out in particular – the Anka-S and Bayraktar.

While the popular term for the kind of drone-centric combat carried out by Turkey is “drone swarm,” the reality is that modern drone warfare, when conducted on a large scale, is a deliberate, highly coordinated process which integrates electronic warfare, reconnaissance and surveillance, and weapons delivery. Turkey’s drone war over Syria was managed from the Turkish Second Army Command Tactical Command Center, located some 400km away from the fighting in the city of Malatya in Turkey’s Hatay Province.

It was here that the Turkish drone operators sat, and where they oversaw the operation of an integrated electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) warfare capability designed to jam Syrian and Russia air-defense radars and collect signals of military value (such as cell phone conversations) which were used to target specific locations.

For every $1 in losses suffered by Turkey, Syria lost approximately $5

The major systems used by Turkey in this role are the KORAL jamming system and a specially configured Anka-S drone operating as an airborne intelligence collection platform. The Anka-S also operated as an airborne command and control system, relaying targeting intelligence to orbiting Bayraktar UAVs, which would then acquire the target visually before firing highly precise onboard air-to-surface rockets, destroying the target. When conducted in isolation, an integrated drone strike such as those carried out by Turkey can be deadly effective; when conducted simultaneously with four or more systems in action, each of which is capable of targeting multiple locations, the results are devastating and, from the perspective of those on the receiving end, might be likened to a deadly “swarm.”

The fighting in Syria illustrated another important factor regarding drone warfare – the disparity of costs between the drone and the military assets it can destroy. Turkish Bayraktar and Anka-S UAV’s cost approximately $2.5 million each. Over the course of fighting in Syria’s Idlib province, Turkey lost between six and eight UAVs, for a total replacement cost of around $20 million.

In the first night of fighting in Syria, Turkey claims (and Russia does not dispute) that it destroyed large numbers of heavy equipment belonging to the Syrian Army, including 23 tanks and 23 artillery pieces. Overall, Turkish drones are credited with killing 34 Syrian tanks and 36 artillery systems, along with a significant amount of other combat equipment. If one uses the average cost of a Russian-made tank at around $1.2 million, and an artillery system at around $500,000, the total damage done by Turkey’s drones amounts to some $57.3 million (and this number does not include the other considerable material losses suffered by the Syrian military, which in total could easily match or exceed that number.) From a cost perspective alone, for every $1 in losses suffered by Turkey, the Syrians lost approximately $5.

Turkey was able to take the lessons learned from the fighting in Idlib province and apply them to a different theater of war, in Libya, in May 2020. There, Turkey had sided with the beleaguered forces of the Government of National Accord (GNA), which was mounting what amounted to a last stand around the Libyan capital of Tripoli. The GNA was facing off against the forces of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), based out of Benghazi, which had launched a major offensive designed to capture the capital, eliminate the GNA, and take control of all of Libya.

How to capture half a country

The LNA was supported by the several foreign powers, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia (via Wagner Group, a private military contractor.) Turkey’s intervention placed a heavy emphasis on the integrated drone warfare it had perfected in Syria. In Libya, the results were even more lop-sided, with the Turkish-backed GNA able to drive the LNA forces back, capturing nearly half of Libya in the process.

Both the LNA and Turkish-backed GNA made extensive use of combat drones, but only Turkey brought with it an integrated approach to drone warfare. Observers have grown accustomed to the concept of individual US drones operating freely over places such as Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, delivering precision strikes against terrorist targets. However, as Iran demonstrated this past May, drones are vulnerable to modern air-defense systems, and US drone tactics would not work over contested airspace.

Likewise, the LNA, which made extensive use of Chinese-made combat drones flown by UAE pilots, enjoyed great success until Turkey intervened. Its electronic warfare and integrated air-defense capabilities then made LNA drone operations impossible to conduct, and the inability of the LNA to field an effective defense against the Turkish drone operations resulted in the tide of battle rapidly shifting on the ground. If anything, the cost differential between the Turkish-backed GNA and the LNA was greater than the $1-to-$5 advantage enjoyed by Turkey in Syria.

The big players – the US, Russia & China – are playing catch-up

By the time Turkey began cooperating with Azerbaijan against Armenia in September 2020, Turkish drone warfare had reached its zenith, and the outcome in Nagorno-Karabakh was all but assured. One of the main lessons drawn from the Turkish drone experiences in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh is that these conflicts were not fought against so-called “poor countries.”

Rather, the Turks were facing off against well-equipped and well-trained forces operating equipment which closely parallels that found in most small- and medium-sized European countries. Indeed, in all three conflicts, Turkey was facing off against some of the best anti-aircraft missile defenses produced by Russia. The reality is that most nations, if confronted by a Turkish “drone swarm,” would not fare well.

And the multiple deployment of drones is only going to expand. The US Army is currently working on what it calls the “Armed, Fully-Autonomous Drone Swarm,” or AFADS. When employed, AFADS will – autonomously, without human intervention – locate, identify, and attack targets using what is known as a “Cluster Unmanned Airborne System Smart Munition,” which will dispense a swarm of small drones that fan out over the battlefield to locate and destroy targets.

China has likewise tested a system that deploys up to 200 “suicide drones”designed to saturate a battlespace and destroy targets by flying into them. And this past September, the Russian military integrated “drone-swarm”capabilities for the first time in a large-scale military exercise.

The face of modern warfare has been forever altered, and those nations that are not prepared or equipped to fight in a battlefield where drone technology is fully incorporated in every aspect of the fight can expect outcomes similar to that of Armenia: severe losses of men and equipment, defeat, humiliation and the likely loss of their territory. This is the reality of modern warfare which, as Gustav Gressel notes, should make any nation not fully vested in drone technology “think – and worry.”

By Dan Cohen

Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray.

He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America’s reputation. While Donald Trump called to make America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again.

Among the president-elect’s pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush administration.

Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will task ending them to the most neoconservative elements of the Democratic party and ideologues of permanent war.

Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden’s thousands-strong foreign policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war going back to the Clinton administration.

In the Trump era, they’ve cashed in, founding Westexec Advisors – a corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to government.

Flournoy is Biden’s leading pick for secretary of defense and Blinken is expected to be national security advisor.

Biden’s foxes guard the henhouse

Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.

Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military’s doctrine of permanent war – what it called “full spectrum dominance.”

Flournoy called for “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD’s, Flournoy remarked that “In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary’s [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States.”

Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate foreign relations committee chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.

As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled “Progressive Internationalism” that called for a “smarter and better” style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that “Democrats will maintain the world’s most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world.”

With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the sidelines.

In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to “increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.”

In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.

Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the “brains” of the Pentagon.

She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.

Flournoy wrote that “unmanned systems hold great promise” – a reference to the CIA’s drone assassination program.

This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and corporate news media.

Architects of America’s Hybrid wars

Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key architect of Obama’s disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the tide against the Taliban.

Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into the future.

Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal.

That’s the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in Biden’s own words, he’ll “bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan” implying some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a presence.

In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.

Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.

Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they waged an extensive propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi’s soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.

All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias to overthrow the government.

Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims “hysteria.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.

Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi’s forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war.

Tony Blinken, then Obama’s deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change in Libya. He became Obama’s point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called “moderate rebels” that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn’t anything like the other wars the U.S. had waging for more than a decade.

Despite Blinken’s promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is facing famine,

Largely thanks to the policy of using “wheat to apply pressure” – a recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken’s CNAS think tank.

When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted.

While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d’etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.

At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for economic pressure.

Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.

Trump obliged.

The Third Offset

While the U.S. fuelled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.

The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia, seeking to ensure that the U.S. could win a war against China in Asia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones, hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.

The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken’s at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation.

In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy called “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration”.

She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon’s priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia.

While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea. Not only a blatant war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.

At the same time, Biden has announced he’ll take an even more aggressive and confrontational stance against Russia, a position Flournoy shares.

As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast.

The end of forever wars?

So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public doesn’t even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.

In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and parcel of the Pentagon’s shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power competition.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that “Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities” and the U.S. will “consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”

As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he’ll end U.S. support, but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations. However, Trump’s withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.

In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.

His Venezuela policy will be almost identical to Trump’s – sanctions and regime change.

In Central America, Biden has proposed a 4 billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects that create even more destabilization and send vulnerable masses fleeing north to the United States.

Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global supremacy, escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of humanity. That’s what Joe Biden calls “decency” and “normalcy.”

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News

Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News