The United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this week performed impressive, albeit pathetic, mental gymnastics. In a press conference, the Pentagon chief called on Russia to be more transparent about troop movements “on the border with Ukraine”. In others words, on Russian soil.

Meanwhile, the absurd hypocrisy sees U.S. and NATO forces brazenly escalating their offensive presence on Russia’s borders, especially in the Black Sea region.

Here’s an Associated Press clip on the Pentagon press conference: “American officials are unsure why Russian President Vladimir Putin is building up military forces near the border with eastern Ukraine but view it as another example of troubling military moves that demand Moscow’s explanation, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday.”

The report quotes Austin as saying: “We’ll continue to call on Russia to act responsibly and be more transparent on the buildup of the forces around on the border of Ukraine… We’re not sure exactly what Mr Putin is up to.”

This dubious talent for mind-bending mental gymnastics and double-think is shared with other members of the Biden administration. Last week, America’s top diplomat Antony Blinken claimed that Russia was about to invade Ukraine yet at the same time the U.S. Secretary of State confessed similar ignorance about what “Putin is up to”.

How is it possible to engage in meaningful dialogue with such vacuous people who are supposed to be government leaders – and leaders too of the self-declared world’s most powerful, most brilliant nation? No undue offense intended, but it would probably be more productive to engage in a dialogue with the bewildering characters from Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot.

Russia has repeatedly dismissed all claims about it threatening Ukraine or any other country with invasion. Moscow also disputes “unreliable” information touted by the Biden administration and Western media of troop buildup near Ukraine on its western flank. Western media reports have relied on dodgy commercial satellite data purporting to show Russian military maneuvers. It is contemptible that senior U.S. government figures are basing grave allegations against Russia on such ropy sources. That in itself speaks volumes about the deterioration in Washington’s diplomatic professionalism and political intelligence.

Secondly, the salient fact being missed in all the hullabaloo is this: Russian troops and equipment are on Russia’s sovereign territory. It is the height of absurdity for U.S. officials to demand that Russia “explain” and be “more transparent” about its own national defenses. That speaks of a hyper-arrogance among American politicians that are deforming their ability to think reasonably.

There is an analogy here with the outcry this week over Russia’s successful missile test against a Soviet-era satellite in orbit. The Biden administration condemned Russia for creating “space junk” and weaponizing space while ignoring the fact that the U.S. previously carried out the same kind of missile strike and, arguably has been trying to weaponize space since the Reagan administration’s “star wars” program during the 1980s.

In any case, the U.S. charges of Russia’s military buildup on its own territory are made all the more ridiculous when we consider the actual increase in NATO forces in Ukraine and the Black Sea region – right on Russia’s western doorstep.

In a major speech this week delivered at the Russian foreign ministry, President Putin noted again how Western powers have continually failed to register Moscow’s national security concerns over the expansion of NATO forces along Russia’s borders. He described this inability for cognition of what should be an obvious grievance as “very peculiar”.

The Kremlin has suggested that the increasing NATO offensive presence near Russia’s borders is not due to stupidity, but rather is aimed at provoking a conflict. Russia is strenuously resisting the danger of an armed confrontation, and yet the provocations continue.

Nearly two weeks ago, William Burns, the head of the CIA made a high-profile visit to Moscow during which he held discussions with senior Kremlin figures, including President Putin. We can safely assume that Burns was told in no uncertain terms that the buildup of U.S. and NATO forces near Russia’s territory is a red line that will presage a response from Russia.

But these red lines continue to be skirted by Washington and its NATO allies.

More perplexing, too, are the moves by the U.S.-backed Kiev regime to escalate the conflict in Ukraine against the ethnic Russian population in the separatist Donbas region. The ultranationalist regime has been waging a low-intensity war against the Donbas since the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The Americans and other NATO powers are increasing weapon supplies and military trainers to the regime, emboldening it to repudiate any peaceful settlement of the eight-year conflict.

Only last month, Pentagon chief Austin was in Kiev where he recklessly endorsed the joining of the NATO bloc by Ukraine. That is in spite of numerous warnings from Moscow that such a move would be an unacceptable destabilization.

The stepped-up war drills by NATO in the Black Sea region are inevitably leading the Kiev regime to resile from legally binding commitments to the Minsk Peace accord of 2015 – brokered by Russia, Germany and France. The release this week of diplomatic communications by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov clearly demonstrates that Germany and France are complicit in turning a blind eye to the Kiev regime’s systematic violation of the Minsk deal.

In this context, Russia is justifiably deeply wary of a confrontation exploding out of the tinderbox conditions in Ukraine and the Black Sea. Given the Russian nation’s tragic history of suffering from past military invasions, it is entirely understandable and indeed vitally prudent that the country’s formidable defenses are on high alert.

It is not for Russia to explain its troops. It is for the United States and its NATO partners to account for their wanton aggression and to desist.

There is something of the theater of absurd in American and European posturing. But it’s far from funny. It’s menacingly deranged.

By Antony LOEWENSTEIN, Peter CRONAU

Australia’s independence from Britain has been contested ground since the nation’s birth in 1901 — the first real test being Australia’s decision to send troops to Europe for Britain’s war with Germany in 1914.

Two bitterly fought referenda to allow military conscription were narrowly defeated — Australia’s contribution to the Great War was to remain a voluntary one.

Move forward to 2021 and the relationship is no less controversial. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new Indo-Pacific military alliance with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in September and awkwardly titled it AUKUS (which as one nave noted, sounds better than USUKA).

In announcing AUKUS, the three leaders loftily claimed to be “guided by our enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order.”

The U.K. in July signaled its re-emergence as a Pacific Ocean force when it announced the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth would lead a fleet of U.K. navy ships to join with the U.S. Navy in leading a flotilla of warships including Australian and Japanese vessels through the South China Sea.

The Australian Defence Department would neither confirm nor deny the precise nature of the maritime exercise. However, on this occasion the fleet kept a wary distance from Chinese-claimed territory.

The U.S. may brandish the world’s most powerful military but it is turning towards its traditional friends as it readies for confrontation, and perhaps conflict, with the rising economic and military powerhouse of China.

The AUKUS treaty saw Australia spectacularly dump its $90 billion contract with France to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, instead announcing a deal to buy U.S. and U.K. technology and build nuclear-powered submarines in Australia.

Although not nuclear armed (yet), the first of the new nuclear submarines will not be ready until as late as 2040. Other elements of the treaty, however, will come into play much sooner. Australia will spend $30 billion on new weaponry, including a suite of long-range missiles for its navy and air force, as well as land-based precision strike missiles, largely sourced or developed in conjunction with the U.K. and U.S.

Britain’s resurgent interest in the Pacific region as a part of its “increased international activism” was announced in March with Johnson stating the strategy will “tilt to the Indo-Pacific, increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world.”

Together with the U.S. “pivot to Asia” outlined by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011, Australia is becoming a focus of a rapid military build-up.

Australia is in a precarious position as the “tilt” and “pivot” of these major powers’ international activism plays out on the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is hoping it is more than a mere “suitable piece of real estate” adrift in the South Pacific.

The world may have got some insight into the true closeness of the new AUKUS relationship when in a September press conference Boris Johnson referred to Scott Morrison as “prime minister Morris” and Biden forgot his name entirely, referring to him instead as “uh, that fella down under.”

Joint Work on New Weapons

In the 1950s and 60s Britain convinced Canberra to allow it to test its prototype nuclear bombs in South Australia. With a nuclear ascendant U.S., Britain was racing to keep a seat at the nuclear table. Australia on the other hand was hoping that helping Britain would ensure them a “nuclear guarantee”.

Described as safe, the bombs’ fallout from the Maralinga and Emu Field tests contaminated livestock and humans, and fallout carried by winds was detected as far away as Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

British disinterest saw a Royal Commission in 1985 that led to Australia embarrassing the U.K. into helping fund an attempted clean-up of the sites, with works ending in 2000.

As well as nuclear weapons testing, the Australian desert lands of the Anangu indigenous peoples have for 60 years also hosted other weapons development projects, rocket firings and missile tests at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex, near Maralinga.

It was only in 1994 that the Anangu received compensation for injury and damages of the nuclear testing.

Both Britain and the U.S. are now working on new generation nuclear-capable hypersonic missile projects in Australia — Britain’s BAE Systems has Project Javelin and the U.S. is developing SCIFiRE with arms manufacturers Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The RAAF Woomera Range has been the site of BAE Systems development work on its Taranis supersonic stealth bomber drone, though the project has stalled, and on the Mantis, a long-endurance drone.

Airbus is also using Australia in developing the Zephyr solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance pseudo-satellite surveillance drone, designed to supply live vision of combat for up to 40 hours from 20 kms high.

It’s been undergoing test flights in the calm air above Wyndham in Western Australia but has suffered several crashes. The U.K. Ministry of Defence is one of the main customers, if not the only customer, for the Zephyr.

While Australia awaits its own fleet of 12 armed Reaper drones, Britain has been making use of RAAF drone pilots embedded with the RAF conducting missions over Iraq and Syria, piloted from the RAF base at Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Australian pilots began training on Reaper drones in 2015 in the U.S. and flew operational missions for the USAF in its war over Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap

However, it is the top secret Pine Gap satellite surveillance base — officially titled “Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap” (JDFPG, but known generally to the 800 staff as “the base”) – that is Australia’s greatest contribution to the Five Eyes alliance that also includes Canada and New Zealand.

Located near Alice Springs, it’s a base for the C.I.A., National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office and collects signals and other data from an array of satellites snooping on military, commercial and private communication systems.

Mirrored with the N.S.A.’s base at  RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, it forms a global surveillance net.

Battlefield intelligence used by the U.S. in its “war on terror” has been gathered and analyzed at Pine Gap for use by the U.S. military including in potentially illegal drone strikes in the Middle East that have killed thousands of civilians.

Gough Whitlam giving a speech during the 1972 election campaign. (National Archives of Australia, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, research by professor Jenny Hocking revealed confidential documents from the Australian National Archive that showed the advance notice that Queen Elizabeth had of the plotting by the governor general. The documents also showed a level of encouragement from senior staff of the Palace in the dismissal of the democratically elected prime minister.Pine Gap first attracted public disquiet in 1975 when the then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam threatened to reveal the names of C.I.A. agents involved. He was controversially dismissed by the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.

At the time of the public and political controversy over Pine Gap, the site hosted just eight satellite dishes. Today, the base is quietly undergoing a new expansion with six new dishes being constructed, bringing the total now to 39.

The new dishes, most likely aimed at detecting missile launches, will boost the U.S.’s planning to fight a nuclear war with China.

Australia is tumbling headlong in accepting the rotational basing of U.S. Marines in Darwin — presently 2,500, soon expected to be 5,000 personnel. South of Darwin, near Katherine, the Tindal RAAF base is undergoing a major upgrade of refueling capability and armaments storage, to allow it to host an expanded range of allied military aircraft, including the U.S.’s long-range B-52 bombers.

Nuclear Proliferation

Australia prides itself on being a member of the “rules-based international order,” however it is cooperating with two nuclear weapons states that are breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Britain has announced it is to increase the number of nuclear warheads it has for its Trident submarines, and together with the U.S. is developing new generation hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere on the globe.

Along with the U.K. and U.S., Australia is a holdout from signing or ratifying the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War. This treaty would prohibit Australia from “provision of assistance to any State” conducting activities ranging from producing, possessing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, through to possessing the threat to use nuclear weapons.

The Treaty requirements “to prevent and suppress” prohibited activity “on territory under its jurisdiction or control” would see a range of necessary limitations placed on Australia — including, most importantly, a review of the nuclear war-supporting functions of the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base.

War Crimes in Afghanistan

Australian soldiers on foot patrol in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2008. (ISAF, John Collins, U.S. Navy)

The U.K. and Australia have played a key partnership role since the 9/11 attacks but have dealt with the fallout slightly differently. When the Brereton Report, an Australian-government led investigation into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, released its findings in November 2020 the results were devastating.

A four-year inquiry found that 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian forces in 23 incidents in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The Kabul-based Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty uncovered countless more killings by Australian soldiers that went unmentioned in the Brereton Report.

According to the Australian government, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may potentially hinder ongoing investigations into war crimes though the country is at its most relatively peaceful for decades. It’s hard not to conclude that Australian officials view the Taliban government as a convenient impediment to progressing with any prosecutions.

Nonetheless, the Brereton Report is one of the more comprehensive examinations of any Western army that occupied Afghanistan after October 2001. None of this is to defend the Australian government’s response to the report, which is filled with obfuscation, denial and willful blindness, but it’s still superior to many other comparable nations.

This is despite both Canada and New Zealand having uncovered hard evidence of their own forces committing abuses in Afghanistan and the U.S. escaping scrutiny after pressuring the International Criminal Court for years to only investigate the Taliban and ISIS.

U.S. President Donald Trump granted clemency to U.S. military personnel who killed Afghans. Fox News had encouraged Trump to pardon these men accused of war crimes.

The seriousness of the Brereton Report was reflected in comments by the Afghan-based Independent Human Rights Commission. Its chairperson, Shaharzad Akbar, said that the Australian investigation should push the U.K., U.S. and other occupation forces to examine their role in the death of civilians since 2001.

She particularly stressed that the U.K. “open an independent inquiry to review and investigate the allegation of unlawful killings by U.K. special forces.”

Instead, the British Ministry of Defence said that its “armed forces are held to the highest standards, and the Service Police have carried out extensive and independent investigations into alleged misconduct of U.K. forces in Afghanistan. As of today, none of the historical allegations under Operation Northmoor have led to prosecutions.”

Despite claiming that it was investigating serious allegations of war crimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain failed to find anyone senior worth prosecuting despite mountains of evidence. One soldier was jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old Afghan boy.

Nonetheless, cover-ups and lies were central to Whitehall’s response.

The murder of Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough nor the dogged pursuit by Saiffulah Yar who accused U.K. forces of killing four members of his family in Helmand Province in 2011.

There was important reporting by BBC Panorama and BBC Newsnight though overall the Western media has not covered itself in glory reporting the Afghan war, usually preferring government and military sources to Afghans.

Despite the Chilcot inquiry, with its damning assessment of how former Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed his country into war with Iraq, nobody has been seriously held to account for Britain’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fear remains that Australia, despite the Office of the Special Investigator still investigating human rights breaches in Afghanistan, will follow London’s lead and bury or indefinitely delay any potential war crimes trials.

Elite soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is accused of killing Afghan civilians and is currently suing major Australian media reports for daring to report it. The trial has become a proxy war crimes trial while masquerading as a defamation case. It may be the only such trial in the foreseeable future.

Militarized Immigration Policy

Australia’s Manus Island regional immigration processing facility, 2012. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the militarized immigration policy where Canberra arguably inspires London the most. Australia’s immigration policy is known for its brutal disregard for human rights and sending refugees to remote Pacific Islands for processing. The policy has deep roots in Australia’s settler colonial history.

The so-called Pacific Solution began in 2001 and quickly received bi-partisan support in the Federal Parliament. Forcibly placing vulnerable refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Sri Lanka or elsewhere in overcrowded, hot and dangerous locations was a cruelly effective method of dehumanizing and silencing people, many of whom were escaping wars in countries that Australia was supposedly trying to liberate through occupation.

Despite protests from the European Union and many other liberals around the world, Australia’s refugee policy has become a model for the EU and Britain under the Conservative government.

Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, Dec. 7, 2008. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a right-wing climate denier, set the tone in a 2015 speech when delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London by arguing that Europe should shut its borders completely. “The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.

The U.K. Conservatives listened and agreed. In 2020, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly examined the viability of constructing an asylum seeker detention facility 6,000 kilometers away from Britain, in Ascension Island or St. Helena in the South Atlantic, but eventually decided it was logistically too challenging.

Instead, in 2021 Patel announced that Britain would forcibly push back refugee boats crossing the English Channel, a carbon copy of Australia’s boat turn-back policy which the U.N. estimated in July had resulted in 800 people on 31 boats since 2013 being towed back to potential danger, sinking or death.

In some cases, Australia is credibly accused of covering up actions that led to hundreds of deaths at sea. Australia also stands accused of paying Indonesian people smugglers to keep boats out of Australian waters.

Australia and Britain share a political, ideological and military partnership that transcends partisan bickering. As journalists who have investigated this relationship for years, it’s revealing how little scrutiny is given to it by the establishment media and political elites.

declassifieduk.org

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

So warned Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2020. He was referring to the consequences for East Asia of a conflict between the US and China.

Fast forward to October 2, 2021, about one year later, and the first patch of grass has been stomped on by the U.S. elephant, trudging stealthily about, far from home in the South China Sea.  On that day the nuclear-powered attack submarine, the USS Connecticut, suffered serious damage in an undersea incident which the U.S. Navy ascribed to a collision with an undersea object.

After sustaining damage, the submarine apparently surfaced close to the Paracel Islands which lie only 150 nautical miles from China’s Yulin submarine base in Hainan Province.   The Connecticut is one of only three Seawolf class of submarines, which are assumed to be on spying missions.  But they can be equipped with Intermediate Range (1250-2500 km) Tomahawk cruise missiles which can be armed with nuclear warheads.  It is claimed that they are not so equipped at present because the Navy’s “policy decisions” have “phased out” their nuclear role, according to the hawkish Center For Strategic and International Studies.

When a US nuclear submarine with such capabilities has a collision capable of killing U.S. sailors and spilling radioactive materials in the South China Sea, it should be front page news on every outlet in the U.S.  This has not been the case – far from it.  For example, to this day (October 30), nearly a month after the collision, the New York Times, the closest approximation to a mouthpiece for the American foreign policy elite, has carried no major story on the incident and in fact no story at all so far as I and several daily readers can find.  This news is apparently not fit to print in the Times.  (A notable exception to this conformity and one worth consulting has been Craig Hooper of Forbes.)

A blackout of this kind will come as no surprise to those who have covered the plight of Julian Assange or the US invasion of Syria or the barely hidden hand of the United States in various regime change operations, to cite a few examples

The U.S. media has followed the narrative of the U.S. Navy which waited until October 7 to acknowledge the incident, with the following extraordinarily curt press release (I have edited it with strike-outs and italicized substitutions to make its meaning clear.):

The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN 22) struck an object while submerged on the afternoon of Oct. 2, while operating in international waters in the Indo-Pacific region in the South China Sea near or inside Chinese territorial waters. The safety of the crew remains the Navy’s top priority  The crew is being held incommunicado for an indefinite period. There are no life threatening injuries. This allows the extent of injuries to the crew to be kept secret.  

The submarine remains in a safe and stable condition hidden from public view to conceal the damage and its cause.  USS Connecticut’s nuclear propulsion plant and spaces were not affected and remain fully operationalare in a condition that is being hidden from the public until cosmetic repairs can be done to conceal the damage. The extent of damage to the remainder of the submarine is being assessed is also being concealed. The U.S. Navy has not requested assistance will not allow an independent inspection or investigation. The incident will be investigated cover-up will continue.

Tan Kefei, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense although not so terse, had much the same to say as my edited version above, as reported in China’s Global Times:

“It took the US Navy five days after the accident took place to make a short and unclear statement.  Such an irresponsible approach, cover-up (and) lack of transparency .. can easily lead to misunderstandings and misjudgments. China and the neighboring countries in the South China Sea have to question the truth of the incident and the intentions behind it.

But Tan went further and echoed the sentiment of President Duterte;

“This incident also shows that the recent establishment of a trilateral security partnership between the US, UK and Australia (AUKUS) to carry out nuclear submarine cooperation has brought a huge risk of nuclear proliferation, seriously violated the spirit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, undermined the construction of a nuclear-free zone in Southeast Asia, and brought severe challenges to regional peace and security.

“We believe that the actions of the US will affect the safety of navigation in the South China Sea, arouse serious concerns and unrest among the countries in the region, and pose a serious threat and a major risk to regional peace and stability.”

The crash of the USS Connecticut goes beyond the potential for harmful radioactive leakage into the South China Sea, with potential damage to the surrounding nations including the fishing grounds of importance to the economy.  If the US continues to ramp up confrontation far from its home in the South China Sea, then a zone of conflict could spread to include all of East Asia.  Will this in any way benefit the region?  Does the region want to be turned into the same wreckage that the Middle East and North Africa are now after decades of US crusading for “democracy and liberty” there via bombs, sanctions and regime change operations?  That would be a tragic turn for the world’s most economically dynamic region.  Do the people of the region not realize this?  If not, the USS Connecticut should be a wake-up call.

But the people of the US should also think carefully about what is happening.  Perhaps the foreign policy elite of the US think it can revisit the U.S. strategy in WWII with devastation visited upon Eurasia leaving the US as the only industrial power standing above the wreckage.  Such are the benefits of an island nation.  But in the age of intercontinental weapons, could the US homeland expect to escape unscathed from such a conflict as it did in WWII?  The knot is being tied, as Krushchev wrote to Kennedy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and if it is tied too tightly, then no one will be able to untie it.  The US is tying the knot far from its home this time half way around the world.  It should not tie that knot too tight.

counterpunch.org

By Ann WRIGHT

Evacuations of American citizens from crisis countries is always difficult and dangerous, as the recent evacuation of over 124,000 people from Afghanistan demonstrated.

Twenty five years ago, in late May 1997, I was involved in the evacuation of 2,500 people from a violent coup in the West African country of Sierra Leone.  I’m writing this detailed description of what happened then to provide some context and comparison with the massive evacuation conducted in Afghanistan, during which, on Aug. 26, an ISIS-K suicide bomber at the Abby gate of the Kabul international airport detonated a huge amount of explosives on his body that killed over 170 Afghans and 13 members of the U.S. military.

The subsequent retaliatory U.S. drone strike in Kabul against ISIS-K reminded me of an incident during our 1997 evacuation from Freetown, Sierra Leone, and the violence — potential or actual — that can occur during these military operations.

The Freetown Coup

Child soldiers in Sierra Leone. (Centre International pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme, freshcomp15.blogspot.com)

The RUF had been terrorizing villages in the countryside for several years.  They burned houses, forced children to watch as their parents and siblings were raped and murdered in front of them.  Some kids were forced to hold machetes that were used to kill their own family members. If family members were not killed, they were severely injured by machete chops that cut off hands, arms, legs, ears or noses.  Victims were asked, “Do you want a long sleeve or short sleeve?” And accordingly, RUF terrorists would chop off the arm at the wrist or above the elbow.First, some background on the coup in Freetown: On May 25, 1997, hundreds of members of the brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had come into the capital city under cover of darkness as parts of Sierra Leone’s military decided to join forces to overthrow the elected government.

The RUF kidnapped many of the children, forced them to take drugs and to become soldiers.  Many kids carried/dragged rifles as tall as they were. Drugs were taken orally or rubbed into open cuts with gunpowder added “to increase” the effectiveness of the drugs.  This method was a form of poisoning that had further negative mental consequences for the children.

After the fall of the coup government a year later, these mental issues had to be addressed by the organizations that tried to deprogram the brigade of child soldiers who were taken from the RUF.

Sierra Leonean boy in Connaught Hospital in Freetown in April 1997. His hands were chopped off by the RUF rebels. (Ann Wright)

Despite the U.S. government spending almost $9 billion on drug eradication in the 19 years since 2002, poppy production increased each year of the U.S. occupation. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium with annual exports of between $1.5 and $3 billion, according to the 2018 report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Diplomatic Effort

During the coup in Sierra Leone, I was the acting head of the U.S. embassy as our ambassador had just left for a well-deserved vacation in the U.S.  As chargé d’affaires, I was responsible for getting our small team coordinated to keep Washington informed of events and to protect our embassy personnel and U.S. citizens to the extent possible.

Our diplomatic security officer kept me abreast of what he was hearing from local police. Our consular and administrative officers kept track of American citizens, friends and contacts in the Sierra Leonean community.  Our local staff were key to understanding the breadth of the coup as they were in touch with friends and family members throughout the capital city and in the provinces.

Two days after the coup began, I participated in attempt to persuade the military head of the  Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), who was the public face of the coup, into backing down. I joined British High Commissioner Peter Penfold and Berhanu Dinka, head of the United Nations mission in Sierra Leone.

We held one meeting outside the home of the British high commissioner. We had with us the 13-person U.S. Special Forces team that had been conducting a small unit training program with one battalion of the Sierra Leonean military.  (Neither the U.S. military team nor the British nor Nigerian military teams that had come into the country to provide various aspects of military training were involved in the coup.)

We told the coup makers that the international community was not going to recognize the coup and that, with the agreement of the elected government, we could assist the coup makers in brokering a deal for an amnesty if they would back down.  A similar strategy had been successful during a previous coup in Sierra Leone, during which a senior coup-maker agreed to college education outside the country.

In our meeting, I also told the coup makers that a very large U.S. Navy ship was a few miles off the coast and that we would be flying evacuees to the ship.  The U.S. military also had fighter jets and armed helicopters that would be used to deter any effort to stop the evacuation.

We also said that we expected the AFRC to allow the passage of evacuees onto the peninsula where we were conducting the evacuation from a hotel that had a helicopter pad and was used by commercial helicopter service to cross a five-mile-wide river to an international airport.  The entrance onto the peninsula was one of two choke point that the AFRC could control.

But our attempt failed. After our meeting, Washington and London decided we should stop meeting with the AFRC delegation as intelligence sources were indicating that we might become high-level kidnapping targets of the AFRC/RUF coup makers.

Starting to Evacuate

Helicopters with evacuees from Freeport, Sierra Leone, arriving on USS Kearsarge, 1997. (U.S. Navy) 

Amid the violence of the coup — with RUF hooligans beating up, raping and killing in Freetown and city police and loyal elements of the Sierra Leonean military unable to stop them — the U.S. State Department and the foreign ministers of many countries decided to evacuate their citizens and diplomatic missions.

On the first day of the evacuation several thousand people arrived on the property of the evacuation hotel. There were American citizens, government officials, members of the international community and thousands of Sierra Leonean citizens who feared the horrific reputation of the RUF for their atrocities.  The U.S. government’s West African service of the Voice of America and BBC radio had been broadcasting the evacuation location for two days.

That first day was reasonably orderly with time to process over 900 passengers. They signed paperwork that included passport numbers, addresses in Sierra Leone and their destinations. The paperwork also included a statement saying they would reimburse the U.S. government for the costs of their passage to the de-embarkation evacuation site, which turned out to be the neighboring country of Guinea.

Fifty passengers, wearing helmets as they boarded, were put on each helicopter taking them out to the U.S. Navy ship USS Kearsarge.

Family waiting for evacuation in Sierra Leone, 1997. (Ann Wright)

We knew there were several U.S. citizens who decided not to leave, including the manager of the hotel from which we were conducting the evacuation and members of several diplomatic missions who said they would remain open and ride out the coup, which was the third in the previous five years.After evacuating all the U.S. citizens, diplomats, former government officials and U.S. diplomatic and local staff who had arrived at the hotel — over 900 from a crowd of several thousand — I was on the last helicopter to leave the hotel.

After we got those 900 persons aboard, the USS Kearsarge left Sierra Leonean waters and headed on the overnight voyage to Conakry, Guinea.

Evacuees from Sierra Leone inside USS Kearsarge in 1997. (Ann Wright)

As we were beginning that movement, I got a call from the State Department in Washington saying that several U.S. citizens had arrived at the hotel after arduous and risky trips from the countryside after our last helicopter had flown out.

The State Department and Defense Department had decided that the USS Kearsarge would return to Freetown to pick up more evacuees, including young Sierra Leonean children from an orphanage operated by a U.S. citizen.  We were told that all those who wanted to be evacuated were already at the hotel.

The captain of the USS Kearsarge and I discussed the capacity of the ship to handle more evacuees and the number of helicopter flights that we needed to offload sufficient people to Conakry, Guinea, to make room for the next group of evacuees.  We kept steaming toward Conakry to get the helicopters within range and began sending helicopters filled with evacuees into Conakry.  Then we turned and headed back to Freetown.

The orphans had arrived at the evacuation hotel with their U.S. citizen sponsor and several staff.  The orphans had no birth certificates, no identification other than the names they were called as the sponsor said there was no time to collect any paperwork.

I was very uneasy about taking them to another country, especially since several of them appeared to be sick and might have a difficult time with the stress and lack of medical care for days upon arriving in Guinea, but the assistant secretary of consular affairs personally assured me that the U.S. government would work with the government of Guinea to let the orphans in without documentation.

On that second day of the evacuation, we quickly processed and flew more than 300 people out to the USS Kearsarge. In addition to the orphans, these were U.S. citizens and specific local government officials who felt their lives were in danger and had been able to get through the AFRC/RUF checkpoints.

For each day of the evacuation, I, along with security protection, went into the large crowd outside the perimeter of the hotel and looked for any remaining U.S. citizens.

As we left a second time, I spoke again with the U.S. citizen manager of the hotel, some members of the international community and Nigerian military who were at the hotel.  They all said they were comfortable remaining in Sierra Leone.

As with the first day of the evacuation, we could not take thousands of Sierra Leoneans also hoping to leave.

With our new passengers, the USS Kearsarge turned and again began the trip to Guinea.  Several of the baby orphans had to have medical intervention on the trip as well as later in Guinea.

Then, during the late evening, the hotel manager called the State Department operations center and said that the AFRC military had flown its helicopter gunship to the hotel and was firing into the hotel.

Part of the hotel was on fire and several persons, including a British soldier and several Nigerian soldiers, had been wounded by gun fire from coup ground forces who were coming onto the hotel grounds.  On behalf of over 300 people in the basement of the hotel, he requested evacuation.

We immediately began helicoptering passengers to Conakry to make room for the next group of evacuees as we turned the ship back to Sierra Leone.  During the night, the Marine contingent on the ship made plans for how we would handle the evacuation which we anticipated could be under gunfire.

U.S. Marines in Freetown, Sierra Leone, setting up a site perimeter on Day 3 of the evacuation. (Ann Wright)

We arrived offshore Freetown at dawn. From a helicopter above the USS Kearsarge, I watched as several huge hovercraft with giant rooster tails of water streaming behind them headed toward the beach near the hotel.  The hovercraft drove up onto the beach, Marines disembarked with weapons and quickly constructed a large secure perimeter with concertina wire surrounding the road that paralleled the beach.

I was helicoptered in very quickly to decide who would be evacuated. I was the only U.S. diplomat remaining on the ship. Before Washington told us to go back to Freetown, I had sent the rest of the diplomatic staff to Conakry to help with the evacuation processing there.

Once the beach area was secure, we told persons inside the hotel to come in single file to an opening created in the concertina wire.  We hoped the AFRC/RUF forces would not shoot them as they left the hotel. I personally checked the documents of each person very quickly and passed them on to the Marines who were putting people onto helicopters.

Now there was no time for helmets, life jackets or flight manifests.  And no space for luggage.  We instructed everyone to take their travel documents and medicines out of their luggage and leave everything else behind. Travel bags began piling up on the beach, as well as cars that had been driven by the few remaining members of the diplomatic corps in Freetown who had seen the helicopters coming back and decided it was time to leave after the AFRC attack on the hotel.

Immediate Decision Making

The author at the evacuation site on the final day, during the processing of 1,200 evacuees in four hours. (Ann Wright)

At one point, the lieutenant colonel Marine ground coordinator and his radioman came over to me and said he might have to suspend the flights. “Our air cap of fighter aircraft have spotted a group at the military headquarters walking toward the gunship that had fired on the hotel,” he told me. “We want your agreement that if the pilot gets into the helicopter, we will ‘disable’ the aircraft as the AFRC may have decided to stop the evacuation by firing on us.”

We had to make a decision that would protect those wanting to be evacuated as well as those who were conducting the evacuation operation.

In Kabul, by comparison, the U.S. military had to try to prevent another suicide bombing after the one on Aug. 26. There are reports that some Afghans may have been killed as U.S. soldiers fired their weapons in the immediate aftermath of the massive explosion that day.

Of critical importance in both cases was the location where possible military action would take place to ensure the protection of the evacuation.

In Sierra Leone we used military rockets fired from manned aircraft onto a military base at a helicopter with no civilians around.

That situation was in stark contrast to the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, firing at a car reportedly filled with explosives and headed toward the Kabul airport to conduct another suicide mission while moving along a road filled with civilians.

As we know now, the car that was fired on from the drone was not on the road but had driven into a family compound.  The car was surrounded by 10 people, including seven children, who should have been visible to the drone pilot and intelligence specialists who were remotely watching through the camera on the drone in real time in several U.S. military bases: in the Central Command Headquarters (Forward) in Qatar; Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida; the Pentagon and perhaps even from the White House.

Ten people were killed in the explosion, including three men who had worked for international organizations and seven children.

The U.S. military initially claimed that the car was destroyed in a secondary explosion that occurred after the intended, explosives-laden target car was hit by rockets from the drone.  The U.S. military has suggested that the driver of the car may have been an ISIS supporter although members of the family strongly dispute that allegation.

We know from our work challenging the U.S. assassin drone program from 2001 onward in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and other countries, that many civilians who had no link with any terrorist group have been killed by these drones — people gathered for weddings, funerals, helping survivors of drone attacks or just going about daily life in their home compounds.

After helping to reopen the U.S. embassy in Kabul in December 2001, I have watched the unfolding events of the evacuation of over 124,000 people from the Kabul airport and have known, in general terms, some of the behind-the-scenes decisions that had to be made very quickly by diplomats and military people from many countries to get their citizens and Afghan colleagues out.

In 1997 we ended up evacuating over 1,200 people in four hours in the last day of the three-day evacuation.  At the time, it was the largest evacuation since the U.S. withdrawal from Saigon.

We too were faced with a relatively sudden change of circumstances that one could classify as an “intelligence failure.”

We knew that the RUF was taking over more villages in the rural areas and we wondered why the Sierra Leonean military was not responding better to prevent RUF movements. We did not have specific information about elements within the military joining forces with the rebel group.

In Afghanistan, it was very apparent that the Taliban was taking more and more provinces with little resistance from the Afghan military and national police and that Taliban forces were going to be in the Kabul area long before the three-to-six-month prediction of U.S. intelligence agencies.

The decision to withdraw the remaining 2,500 U.S. military prior to dramatically increasing the number of American citizens and special immigrant visa holders and friends of the U.S. was a mistake.

A mistake, like the mistake of thinking military action in Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda was the way to deal with terrorist actions. Also like the mistake of thinking that 20 years of occupation of a country was in either U.S. or Afghan national interest. This, after all, is a country whose indigenous forces have, over time, defeated other militarized empires for the past 500 years.

This was a lesson that was known but not respected by the U.S. politicians who heeded the corporations that are their campaign contributors and who know that war is profitable. Based on that lesson, they support wars instead of diplomacy to resolve political issues.

These same mistaken leaders are now trying to convince the American public that China and Russia must be dealt with as they increase dramatically the numerous of dangerous military naval, air and land war maneuvers that could lead to a worldwide nuclear catastrophe. We must continue to challenge these mistaken political leaders of our country and demand an end to the war mentality.

consortiumnews.com

By Ann WRIGHT

Each week the Pacific is getting even more crowded with military ships, submarines and aircraft from countries in the region and from outside.  NATO countries — United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands — are sending military vessels and aircraft.

The Russian navy conducted military maneuvers off Hawai’i.

The U.S. is on the verge of creating a permanent Pacific naval task force as a part of its aggressive response to China’s naval presence in the Pacific.  The largest land exercise in Asia and the Pacific is taking place in Australia with 17,000 U.S. and Australian military.

In March, President Joe Biden directed the Pentagon to establish a China Task Force to examine China-related policies and processes and give its recommendations to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The creation of a Pacific Naval Task Force would allow the secretary of defense to provide more of the Pentagon’s budget for challenging China’s presence in the Pacific.  The Pacific task force would also include NATO allies such as Britain and France, that have already sent their warships into the Pacific, as well as Japan and Australia.

At the recent NATO meeting in Brussels, most leaders agreed with Biden’s confrontational stance with China, declaring that Beijing is undermining global order and is  a security challenge.  A similar NATO naval task force, the Standing Naval Forces Atlantic,  composed of six-to-10 ships, destroyers, frigates and support vessels from multiple NATO nations, has operated for decades in Atlantic waters.

NATO ministers in Brussels in March. (Estonian Foreign Ministry, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Russian War Practice Near Hawaii

It’s not only China that is causing the U.S. concerns in the Pacific. A U.S. missile defense test was delayed at the missile test facility on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in May due to the presence of a Russian surveillance ship 13 miles off the island, at the edge of U.S. territorial waters.

The Kareliya, a Russian Navy Vishnya-class auxiliary general intelligence, or AGI, ship is based in the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok and is one of seven AGIs specializing in signals intelligence. For several weeks it sailed off the coast of Kauai, 100 miles from the massive U.S. naval facility at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA), in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, conducted on Kauai what it called Flight Test Aegis Weapon System 31 to demonstrate the capability of a ballistic missile defense (BMD)-configured Aegis ship to detect, track, engage and intercept a medium-range ballistic missile target with a salvo of two Standard Missile-6 Dual II (BMD-initialized) missiles.

To the chagrin of the MDA, with the Russian signals ship as a witness, the May 29 missile test eventually was carried out with ship-fired missiles but they failed to intercept a medium-range ballistic missile target.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor made this statement at the time, saying it was

“aware of the Russian vessel operating in international waters in the vicinity of Hawai’i, and will continue to track it through the duration of its time here. Through maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships and joint capabilities, we can closely monitor all vessels in the Indo-Pacific area of operations.”

A few days later, U.S. Air Force F-22 jets made two sudden flights out of Hawai’i with the Indo-Pacific Command eventually acknowledging that “several Russian ships and aircraft” were 200 miles to the west of the Hawaiian Islands and the F-22s had been sent out to keep watch on them.

The “several ships and aircraft” turned out to be the largest Russian naval maneuvers in the Pacific since the end of the Cold War. As reported by the Honolulu Star Advertiser on June 23, prior to the meeting of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Joe Biden in Geneva on June 16, the Russian Ministry of Defense publicized the Russian naval maneuvers off Hawai’i as a naval and air exercise that practiced “destroying the aircraft carrier strike group of the mock enemy” and delivering a simulated strike with cruise missiles against “critically important” military infrastructure. The Russian press release described the military exercise as two detachments of ships, operating about 2,500 miles southeast of the Kuril Islands, that detected, countered and delivered missile strikes against an aircraft carrier strike group.

The missile strike practice was conducted by the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, the missile cruiser Varyag, the frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov and multiple corvettes.  Twenty surface warships, including a submarine and support vessels, were involved in the exercise with 20 aircraft, including long-range antisubmarine aircraft Tu-142M3, anti-submarine aircraft Il-38, high-altitude fighter-interceptors MiG31BM, deck anti-submarine and search-and-rescue helicopters Ka-27.

Russian missile cruiser Varyag in 2016. (Vadim Savitsky/Russian Defense Ministry’s Press Office/TASS)

The deployment of Russian “Bear” bombers as part of the exercise twice resulted in missile-armed Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 fighters scrambling to possibly intercept the turboprop planes — which headed in the direction of Hawaii but never came close, according to U.S. officials. No U.S. intercepts of the Russian aircraft were made.

The two long-range Tu-142MZ anti-submarine aircraft that provided support to the exercise had flown from Kamchatka Peninsula, spending more than 14 hours in the air and covering about 10,000 kilometers during the exercise, according to the news report.

Rounding out the air component of the Russian exercise were six Il-38 and Il-38N anti-submarine aircraft that searched for and tracked submarines of the “mock enemy.” The anti-submarine aircraft were escorted by MiG-31BM high-altitude interceptor fighters of the Pacific Fleet with refueling capability provided by II-78 aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces.

An open-source satellite view of the Russian flotilla was taken on June 19 when it was 35 nautical miles (40 statute miles) south of Honolulu and was being escorted by three U.S. Navy destroyers and a Coast Guard cutter.

A spokesman for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith in Honolulu said on June 21 that the Russian vessels operated in international waters throughout the exercise and at the closest point, some Russian ships operated approximately 20 to 30 nautical miles (23 to 34 statute miles) off the coast of Hawaii and that they were tracked very closely by U.S. forces.

US & Russian Vessels Around Hawaii

Making for a crowded area around Hawai’i, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group based in San Diego was operating off the east side of the Hawaiian Islands at the same time the Russian fleet was off the west side of the islands.  The Carl Vinson, the flagship of the carrier strike group, conducted exercises with Carrier Air Wing 2, Destroyer Squadron 1, the guided-missile destroyers USS O’Kane, USS Howard, USS Chafee, USS Dewey and USS Michael Murphy. The Chafee and Michael Murphy are based at Pearl Harbor.

French Air Force Arrives

On Sunday, June 27, in their first visit to Hawai’i, the French government sent 170 Air and Space Force personnel, three Rafale fighter aircraft, two A330 Phenix refueling tankers and two A400M Atlas transports to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu for training with Hawai’i-based U.S. F-22 fighters, C-17 cargo aircraft and KC-135 refuelers. The French squadron will depart Hawai’i on July 5 for Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for more training with U.S. military units.  U.S. Pacific Air Force command emailed that “It is imperative that the U.S. accelerates change in synchronization with allies like France to ensure we are ready for the next fight.”

The British Are Coming Too

HMS Queen Elizabeth, left, with two escort vessels, off the coast of Scotland in 2017. (Ministry of Defence)

Besides the French military aircraft arriving in the Pacific, the new British  65,000-ton aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and its carrier group is heading for the Pacific in what is called the “most important peacetime deployment in a generation” for the United Kingdom.

British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on April 26 that “even as the Pacific’s importance to our future economy continues to rise — so the challenges to the freedom of navigation in that region continue to grow. Our trade with Asia depends on the shipping that sails through a range of Indo-Pacific choke points, yet they are increasingly at risk.”

HMS Queen Elizabeth, the centerpiece of Britain’s Royal Navy, departed the U.K. in May for a world voyage including stops in 40 nations and steaming through the South China Sea.  Defense Minister Wallace said that while China is “increasingly assertive, we are not going to the other side of the world to be provocative. We will sail through the South China Sea. We will be confident, but not confrontational.”

Adding to the numbers of naval vessels in the crowded South China Sea will be the nine escort vessels of  HMS Queen Elizabeth: destroyers HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, anti-submarine frigates HMS Kent and HMS Richmond, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s RFA Fort Victoria and RFA Tidespring, Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen and U.S. Navy destroyer USS The Sullivans.

US & the ‘International Rules-Based Order’

The State Department said the United States, which has maintained what it calls the “international rules-based order” in the Pacific since the end of World War II, is “committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific in which all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty and able to pursue economic growth consistent with international law and principles of fair competition.”  In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote in its strategy document that the Indo- Pacific region is the single most consequential region for America’s future.

Indo-Pacific biogeographic region. (Wikimedia Commons)

Admiral Phil Davidson said on April 30 when he relinquished leadership of the massive U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, “Make no mistake, the Communist Party of China seeks to supplant the idea of a free and open international order with a new order — one with Chinese characteristics — where Chinese national power is more important than international law.”

Davidson added that strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific “is not between two nations, it is a contest between liberty — the fundamental idea behind a free and open Indo-Pacific — and authoritarianism, the absence of liberty.”

China Responds

On May 27, at a China Ministry of National Defense press conference, Senior Colonel Tan Kefei said America keeps “stepping up military deployments in the Asian Pacific region, frequently conducts close-in reconnaissance against China, and even deliberately initiates dangerous circumstances between Chinese and U.S. military aircraft and vessels.”

He added that a strategy emphasizing military presence and military competition “will only heighten regional tensions and undermine world peace and stability.  No strategy should instigate countries to establish selective and exclusive military alliances, or to create a ‘New Cold War’ of confrontational blocs.” In relation to Taiwan, Tan said, “there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an integral part of China,” and that currently China-Australia relations “face serious difficulties.”

G7 & Quad Support Status Quo on Taiwan 

The Group of Seven, or G7 —made up of leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States —said on June 13 that, “We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” adding that “we remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.”

Three months earlier, on March 12, the first leaders’ meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad” — the United States, Japan, Australia and India — issued a statement saying they are:

“united in a shared vision for the free and open Indo-Pacific…We support the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values and territorial integrity.”

Largest Land-War Maneuvers in Region

The largest land war practice in the region, the U.S.-Australian war maneuvers Talisman Sabre 2021 began in June in Australia.  Scaled down from 30,000 due to Covid, over 17,000 military personnel from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand and the U.K. will conduct war maneuvers including combined Special Forces operations, parachute drops, amphibious (marine) landings, land-force maneuvers, urban and air operations and the coordinated firing of live ammunition from late June until mid-August.  France, India and Indonesia will participate as observer nations. The U.S.-Australian hypersonic  weapon, capable of flying at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), may be tested during Talisman Sabre 2021 at the Australian rocket range near the town of Woomer, South Australia.

In one month alone, this June, the U.S. IndoPacific Command military forces participated in over 35 war maneuvers with other countries.  Read more about the war preparations with these countries here.

consortiumnews.com

Cancel culture is a common, almost viral, term in political and social discourse these days. Basically, somebody expresses views considered to be outrageous or vile or racist or otherwise insensitive and inappropriate. In response, that person is “canceled,” perhaps losing a job or otherwise sidelined and silenced. In being deplatformed by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, for instance, this country’s previous president has, it could be argued, been canceled — at least by polite society. More than a few might add, good riddance.

Cancel culture is all around us, with a single glaring exception: the U.S. military. No matter how poorly a major weapons system performs, no matter how much it goes over budget, no matter how long it takes to field, it almost never gets canceled. As a corollary to this, no matter how poorly a general performs in one of our twenty-first-century wars, no matter his lack of victories or failure to achieve mission objectives, he almost never gets cashiered, demoted, or even criticized. A similar thing could be said of America’s twenty-first-century wars themselves. They are disasters that simply never get canceled. They just go on and on and on.

Is it any surprise, then, that a system which seems to eternally reward failure consistently produces it as well? After all, if cancel culture should apply anywhere, it would be to faulty multibillion-dollar weapons systems and more than a few generals, who instead either get booted upstairs to staff positions or retire comfortably onto the boards of directors of major weapons companies.

Let’s take a closer look at several major weapons systems that are begging to be canceled — and a rare case of one that finally was.

* The F-35 stealth fighter: I’ve written extensively on the F-35 over the years. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the plane was at one point seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget. Nonetheless, the U.S. military persisted and it is now nearing full production at a projected total cost of $1.7 trillion by the year 2070. Even so, nagging problems persist, including engine difficulties and serious maintenance deficiencies. Even more troubling: the plane often can’t be cleared for flying if lightning is anywhere in the area, which is deeply ironic, given that it’s called the Lightning II. Let’s hope that there are no thunderstorms in the next war.

* The Boeing KC-46 tanker: A tanker is basically a flying gas station, air-to-air refueling being something the Air Force mastered half a century ago. Never underestimate the military’s ability to produce new problems while pursuing more advanced technology, however. Doing away with old-fashioned windows and an actual airman as a “boom operator” in the refueling loop (as in a legacy tanker like the KC-135), the KC-46 uses a largely automated refueling system via video. Attractive in theory, that system has yet to work reliably in practice. (Maybe, it will, however, by the year 2024, the Air Force now says.) And what good is a tanker that isn’t assured of actually transferring fuel in mid-air and turns out to be compromised as well by its own fuel leaks? The Air Force is now speaking of “repurposing” its new generation of tankers for missions other than refueling. That’s like me saying that I’m repurposing my boat as an anchor since it happened to spring a leak and sink to the bottom of the lake.

* And speaking of boats, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Navy has had serious problems of its own with its most recent Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers. That service started building carriers in the 1920s, so one might imagine that, by now, the brass had gained some mastery of the process of updating them and building new ones. But never underestimate the allure of cramming unproven and expensive technologies for “next generation” success on board such vessels. Include among them, when it comes to the Ford-class carriers, elevators for raising munitions that notoriously don’t operate well and a catapult system for launching planes from the deck (known as the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System or EMALS) that’s constantly breaking down. As you might imagine, not much can happen on an aircraft carrier when you can’t load munitions or launch planes effectively. Each new Ford-class carrier costs in the neighborhood of $14 billion, yet despite all that money, it simply “isn’t very good at actually being a carrier,” as an article in Popular Mechanics magazine bluntly put it recently. Think of it as the KC-46 of the seas.

* And speaking of failing ships, let’s not forget the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), which have earned the nickname “little crappy ships.” A serious propulsion design flaw may end up turning them into “floating garbage piles,” defense journalist Jared Keller recently concluded. The Navy bought 10 of them for roughly half a billion dollars each, with future orders currently on hold. Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor, the same one responsible for the wildly profligate (and profitable) F-35.

* Grimly for the Navy, problems were so severe with its Zumwalt-class of stealth destroyers that the program was actually canceled after only three ships had been built. (The Navy initially planned to build 32 of them.) Critiqued as a vessel in search of a mission, the Zumwalt-class was also bedeviled by problems with its radar and main armament. In total, the Navy spent $22 billion on a failed “next generation” concept whose cancelation offers us that utter rarity of our moment: a weapon so visibly terrible that even the military-industrial complex couldn’t continue to justify it.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has gone on record as rejecting the idea of integrating exotic, largely untried and untested technologies into new ship designs (known in the biz as “concurrent development”). Godspeed, admiral!

Much like the troubled F-35 and the Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt’s spiraling costs were due in part to the Pentagon’s fixation on integrating just such “leading-edge” technologies into designs that themselves were in flux. (Not for nothing do military wags refer to them as bleeding edge technologies.) Such wildly ambitious concurrent development, rather than saving time and money, tends to waste plenty of both, leading to ultra-expensive less-than-fully effective weapons like the Zumwalt, the original version of which had a particularly inglorious breakdown while passing through (or rather not passing through) the Panama Canal in November 2016.

Given such expensive failures, you might be forgiven for wondering whether, in the twenty-first century, while fighting never-ending disastrous wars across significant parts of the planet, America’s military isn’t also actively working to disarm itself. Seriously, if we’re truly talking about weapons that are vital to national defense, failure shouldn’t be an option, but far too often it is.

With this dubious record, one might imagine the next class of Navy vessel could very well be named for Philip Francis Queeg, the disturbed and incompetent ship captain of novelist Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. It’s also quite possible that the Pentagon’s next advanced fighter jet will fulfill former Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine’s estimate from the 1980s that, by the year 2054, the entire Pentagon budget would be needed to buy one — and only one – combat aircraft. Perhaps a Death Star for America’s new Space Force?

Is It Even Possible to Cancel a Major Weapons System Like the F-35?

The Navy’s Zumwalt-class of destroyers was such a disaster that the program was indeed canceled a mere $22 billion along the line, but what about a program like the F-35? Is it even possible to cancel such a behemoth of a weapons system?

That question was put to me by Christian Sorensen, author of Understanding the War Industry, who like me is a member of the Eisenhower Media Network. Overpriced and underperforming weapons, Sorensen noted, are a feature of, rather than some sort of bug in, the military-industrial complex as future profits for giant weapons companies drive design and fielding decisions, not capability, efficiency, or even need. He’s right, of course. There may even be a perverse incentive within the system to build flawed weapons, since there’s so much money to be made in troubleshooting and “fixing” those flaws. Meanwhile, the F-35, like America’s leading financial institutions in the 2007-2009 Great Recession, is treated as if it were too big to fail. And perhaps it is.

Jobs, profits, influence, and foreign trade are all involved here, so much so that mediocre (or worse) performance is judged acceptable, if only to keep the money flowing and the production lines rolling. And as it happens, the Air Force really has no obvious alternative to the F-35. During the 1950s and 1960s, the aerospace industry used to build a wealth of models: the “century series” of fighters, from the F-100 through the F106. (The notorious F-111 was an early version of the F-35.) The Air Force could also tap Navy designs like for the F-4 Phantom. Now, it’s essentially the F-35 or bust.

In its obvious desperation, that service is turning to older designs like the F-15 Eagle (circa 1970) and the F-117 Stealth Fighter (circa 1980) to bridge the gap created by delays and cost overruns in the F-35 program. Five decades after its initial flight, it’s something of a miracle that the F-15 is still being produced — and, of course, an obvious indictment of the soaring costs and inadequate performance of its replacements.

The exorbitant pricing of the F-35, as well as the F-22 Raptor, has recently even driven top Air Force officials to propose the creation of an entirely new “low cost” fighter. Irony of ironies, once upon a time in another universe, the F-35 was supposed to be the low-cost replacement for “fourth-generation” F-15s and F-16s. Last month, current Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles “CQ” Brown exhibited the usual convoluted and nonsensical logic of the military-industrial complex when he discussed that new dream fighter:

“If we have the capability to do something even more capable [than the F-16] for cheaper and faster, why not? Let’s not just buy off the shelf, let’s actually take a look at something else out there that we can build.”

In other words, why buy already-proven and much-improved variants of the F-16 when you could design and build an entirely new plane from scratch, supposedly in a “cheaper” and “faster” manner? Of course, given that new fighters now take roughly two decades to design and field, that’s an obvious fantasy from the start. If my old service — I’m a retired Air Force officer — wants fast and cheap, it should simply go with the tried-and-true F-16. Yet an entirely new plane is so much more attractive to a service under the spell of the giant weapons makers, even as the F-35 continues to be produced under its old, now demonstrably false, mantra of cheaper-and-better.

As Christian Sorensen summed up our present situation to me: “If an exorbitant under-performing platform like the F-35 can’t be canceled, then what are we doing? How do we ever expect to bring home the troops [garrisoning the globe] if we can’t even end one awful weapons platform or address the underlying systemic issues that cause such a platform to be created?”

Of course, an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” like the one that President Dwight D. Eisenhower described in his 1961 farewell address to the nation (in which he first warned of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” gaining “unwarranted influence”) would work to cancel wasteful, unnecessary weapons systems like the F-35. But what if the forces in place in American society act to keep that very citizenry apathetic and ignorant instead?

Call me jaded, but I can’t see the F-35 being canceled outright, even though it hasn’t technically yet reached the stage of full production. Likely enough, however, such a cancellation would only happen in the wake of major cuts to the defense budget that forced the services to make hard choices. But such cuts clearly aren’t on the agenda of a Congress that continues to fund record Pentagon budgets in a bipartisan fashion; a Congress that, unchecked as it is by us citizens, simply won’t force the Pentagon to make tough choices.

And here’s one more factor to consider as to why cancel culture is never applied to Pentagon weaponry: Americans generally love weaponry. We embrace weapons, celebrate them, pose with them. To cancel them, we’d have to cancel a version of ourselves that revels in high-tech mayhem. To cancel them, we’d have to cancel a made-in-America mindset that equates such weaponry — the stealthier and sexier the better — with safety and security, and that sees destruction overseas as serving democracy at home.

America’s military-industrial complex will undoubtedly keep building the fanciest, most expensive weaponry known to humanity, even if the end products are quite often ineffective and unsound. Yet as scores of billions of dollars are thrown away on such weapons systems, America’s roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure continue to crumble. How about it, America? Why not cancel those weapons and build back better at home?

tomdispatch.com

– George Orwell

NATO contemplates Kaliningrad: “We think through those plans all the time, and… if that would ever come to fruition, we’d be ready to execute.” It would be “a multi-domain, very timely and effective capability”. “The best Polish military units, numbering 30,000 soldiers, should take part in the quick offensive“. Multi-domain, best Polish; in the imaginations of the strategists of Laputa, the Russians passively await the blow. But now we must leave the empyrean realms of pure thought and float down to earth; there we find that “The largest headquarters military exercises Winter 2020 in Poland ended with the complete defeat of Polish troops: on the fifth day of the virtual conflict, the enemy reached the banks of the Vistula and surrounded Warsaw“.

Moscow has just told us (in the guise of a “suggestion” from two scientists) what it would do while NATO was polishing its multi-domains. Andrei Martyanov summarises it. Russia knows that US/NATO attacks start with a heavy air bombardment. And very effective it is too. Against Iraq or Libya which had poorly-coordinated, poorly-maintained, obsolete air defence systems. Or against Afghanistan which had none at all. Went well until the Serbs sent the F-117 into premature obsolescence. But Russia has excellent air defences. But more to the point, which is what our two professors are talking about, it has a host of highly effective missiles, many of them hypersonic and it knows where to aim them.

In order to disrupt the bombardment and frustrate ground-based operations, the analysts say, Russia should launch a colossal counter or pre-emptive strike to wipe out enemy hardware. This could be achieved, they argue, with the combined use of drones, missiles, cyber warfare and new weaponry, destroying Western equipment before it can even get airborne.

As soon as Moscow decided that a real war was inevitable, there would be a rain of hypersonic missiles which would swiftly overwhelm NATO’s mediocre air defences and destroy airfields, aircraft hangars, ammunition dumps, logistics and C3I facilities. And the Defence Minister has just ordered more of them. The “Suwalki Corridor” would be the quietest place in Europe. Russians, through their brutal experience, know Orwell is correct: war is about destruction and killing.

In the West, however, other matters predominate. An American Rear Admiral heads a group to “have a deeper inclusion and diversity conversation in our Navy“; it will “acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every Sailor in the Navy“. The German Army is far ahead as are many Western militaries. “America is stronger around the world when it is inclusive“. “Diversity, inclusion and respect are at the heart of the British Army’s values and ethos“. Diversity makes the Canadian Armed Forces stronger. NATO has “mainstreamed” “gender balance and diversity“.

Is transgenderism a “mental disorder” with very high suicide risk as at least one credentialed psychiatrist says, or is it a perfectly normal position on a flexible spectrum as many other credentialed psychiatrists say? Whatever, let’s try it out in the military and see what happens. Women have gradually moved to full combat roles in the US military. And, no matter how one might want to play with the meaning of the word “stronger”, men are physically stronger than women. And the infantry have to carry heavy loads: one of the more famous efforts was the Royal Marines’ “yomp” in the Falklands – 90 kilometres, three days, average load 36 kilograms. It is said that modern soldiers in the British Army are loaded down with even more. Perhaps weight itself should be made gender-neutral: “The Army Combat Fitness Test, ordered gender-neutral three years ago, is under evaluation by the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command“.

Western militaries are lab rats for the latest woke diktats. But there are consequences: “Overall, 11 percent of female service personnel scheduled to ship out were not able to in the previous year because of a pregnancy.” “Research suggests that veterans who identify as members of marginalized populations (e.g., women and racial/ethnic minority groups) carry far greater risk for developing PTSD.” “Sexual violence remains pervasive. In 2018, 20,500 service members were sexually assaulted or raped including 13,000 women and 7,500 men. The rate of sexual assault and rape jumped by almost 40% from 2016 to 2018, and for women veterans, the rate increased by over 50% to the highest level since 2006.” Meditate on the corrosive effect on morale and trust of this: “Of women who reported a penetrative sexual assault, 59% were assaulted by someone with a higher rank than them, and 24% were assaulted by someone in their chain of command.” At some point, the US military will no longer have the levels of trust, cohesion, morale and readiness that distinguish a real fighting force from a parade army.

Lots of money spent, little to show for it. Weapons seem to have been designed to produce cost over-runs, not victories. The US Navy’s latest aircraft carrier, long over due and over budget still has “problems getting jets off the deck and issues with the landing systems“; problems indeed for an aircraft carrier. “[T]he F-35 currently has 871 software and hardware ‘deficiencies’.” The years-long and stunningly expensive super destroyer program has fizzled out: three built without the weapon they were originally designed around. Brand-new military equipment unuseable in Germany. Engine troubles in the UK’s new warships. AEGIS ships that don’t know where they are: HNoMS Helge Ingstad, USS Lake Champlain, USS John McCain, USS Fitzgerald; or maybe it’s only bad seamanship. German aircraft not ready. USAF bombers ageing out. Cost over-runs in Germany. USAF training ranges inadequate. A third of the RAF’s fighters unfit to fly. F-35 not very ready. Crumbling skin on F-22. NATO air defence is inadequate (video this). “Only five of the U.S. Army’s 15 armored brigade combat teams are maintained at full readiness levels“. Where is the money going? Into woke projects like tanks with solar power? (Bit of a heat signature, but more money can be squandered fixing that.)

The experience of fighting “forever wars” – two decades of bombing and shooting from safe distances, kicking in doors and hoping there are no IEDs on patrols – have sapped preparation for a real war against first-class enemies. The truth is that Western militaries have been fighting – unsuccessfully – against minor enemies. They strike from secure bases confident in air supremacy and assured communications. (Can the Russians spoof GPS signals? What will that do to all the systems relying on GPS?) NATO is not winning against determined poorly-armed enemies; what makes it think it’s ready for determined well-armed enemies? And who wants to join a losing army? No wonder only one British infantry battalion is fully staffed.

The “forever wars” have enormous morale effects. In 2019 the US Army asked “how has serving impacted you?” and got back a host of answers about suicide and PTSD. The US military now publishes an annual suicide report: about 700 members and family a year. But, it says, deployment doesn’t increase the risk; no, that comes afterwards: over 6000 US veterans commit suicide every year. There are similar results in allied forces: German and British. Not surprising really: wars that last for generations without visible success are bad for morale: “For Afghanistan, 58 percent of veterans said that fight was not worthwhile“. NATO has already spent twice as long in Afghanistan as the USSR did and there isn’t anything to suggest it will be leaving: despite the agreement to be out by 1 May 2021, “no decision”. Meanwhile, NATO wants more troops in Iraq. Can’t end them, can’t win them. But NATO keeps looking for more: add China to the list.

Given skilful diplomacy and policies that didn’t threaten neighbours these things wouldn’t matter very much. Your inclusive and intersectional army would give good parades and your air force noisy flypasts, your navy could glisten at the dock. But the USA and NATO are not such: they believe they should be everywhere, interfere everywhere and enforce everywhere.

NATO is committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes. If diplomatic efforts fail, it has the military power to undertake crisis-management operations… in cooperation with other countries and international organisations.

Has NATO ever solved any dispute, anywhere, any time with anything but bombs and threats? Certainly not since the USSR went down: bombs in the Balkans (22 years), Afghanistan (20 years), Iraq (19 years), Syria (9 years), Libya destroyed, run out of Somalia. Its principal member has 800 military bases in 70 countries. Here is the famous meme that Russia must want war because it puts its country close to our bases. (Not just a meme, actually, NATO complains about “provocative military activities near NATO’s borders“; or, as others might say, “inside Russia”.) Iran, a country that last attacked somebody in 1795, also. The British Navy joins the US Navy in “freedom of navigation” cruises in the South China Sea. Both navies would suffer from shortages in a real war. Maybe better to stay at home and let Beijing worry about freedom of navigation to and from China. Not content with the fact that the USA has no competent icebreakers, Washington is contemplating FON cruises in the Russian Arctic. The US regularly flies B-52s near countries it wants to overawe – “sending a message” they call it. Some message – 31 were lost in Vietnam. Or was it 34? At any event, given that it’s spent years thinking about what to do if the USAF comes, it’s unlikely that Tehran sees two B-52s as anything other than a derisory provocation.

Some US generals get it – World War II loss rates. Maybe even most generals get it, but they’re not making the decisions. People who call it “the greatest military in the history of the world” (Obama) “best trained, best equipped, and strongest military the world has ever known” (Hillary Clinton) with the “greatest weapons” (Trump) part of “the most powerful military alliance ever assembled“, “America’s forward operating base for democracy” do. And, just as if the last twenty years had not been a record of overextended failures, here’s a cheerleader calling for more of the same: A Superpower, Like It or Not.

NATO isn’t a paper tiger, it’s a paper pussycat. Lab rats in the latest woke experiment; bad morale and fading cohesion; low readiness levels; exhausted by forever wars; expensive weapons that don’t work; pawns in the fantasies of belligerent braggarts: that’s a recipe for catastrophe.

NATO would be severely defeated in a war with Russia or China and probably with Iran. If it can’t secure Afghanistan or Iraq after two decades, if it takes 226 days to overthrow Qaddafi, 79 days in Kosovo, what makes it think it can casually provoke countries that know they’re on the hit list and have been preparing for two decades? Do the Polish players in Winter 2020 still think it will be “timely and effective“?

On August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe. Although the actual weapons load of those giant bombers was kept secret, each of them is capable of carrying eight AGM-86B nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) in its bomb bay. Those six planes, in other words, could have been carrying 48 city-busting thermonuclear warheads. (The B-52H can also carry 12 ALCMs on external pylons, but none were visible on this occasion.) With such a load alone, in other words, those six planes possessed the capacity to incinerate much of western Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The B-52 Stratofortress is no ordinary warplane. First flown in 1952, it was designed with a single purpose in mind: to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and drop dozens of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Some models were later modified to deliver tons of conventional bombs on targets in North Vietnam and other hostile states, but the remaining B-52s are still largely configured for intercontinental nuclear strikes. With only 44 of them now thought to be in active service at any time, those six dispatched to the edge of Russian territory represented a significant commitment of American nuclear war-making capability.

What in god’s name were they doing there? According to American officials, they were intended to demonstrate this country’s ability to project overwhelming power anywhere on the planet at any time and so remind our NATO allies of Washington’s commitment to their defense. “Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” commented General Jeff Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. “Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies… and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios.”

While Harrigian didn’t spell out just what scenarios he had in mind, the bombers’ European operations suggest that their role involved brandishing a nuclear “stick” in support of an increasingly hostile stance toward Russia. During their sojourn in Europe, for example, two of them flew over the Baltic Sea close to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania that houses several key military installations. That September 25th foray coincided with a U.S. troop buildup in Lithuania about 65 miles from election-embattled Belarus, a Russian neighbor.

Since August 9th, when strongman Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a presidential election widely considered fraudulent by his people and much of the international community, Belarus has experienced recurring anti-government protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country might intervene there if the situation “gets out of control,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has implicitly warned of U.S. intervention if Russia interferes. “We stand by our long-term commitment to support Belarus’ sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as the aspiration of the Belarusian people to choose their leader and to choose their own path, free from external intervention,” he insisted on August 20th. The flight of those B-52s near Belarus can, then, be reasonably interpreted as adding a nuclear dimension to Pompeo’s threat.

In another bomber deployment with no less worrisome implications, on September 4th, three B-52s, accompanied by Ukrainian fighter planes, flew over the Black Sea near the coast of Russian-held Crimea. Like other B-52 sorties near its airspace, that foray prompted the rapid scrambling of Russian interceptor aircraft, which often fly threateningly close to American planes.

At a moment when tensions were mounting between the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebel areas in the eastern part of the country, the deployment of those bombers off Crimea was widely viewed as yet another nuclear-tinged threat to Moscow. As Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), tweeted, “Extraordinary decision to send a nuclear bomber so close to contested and tense areas. This is a real in-your-face statement.”

And provocative as they were, those were hardly the only forays by U.S. nuclear bombers in recent months. B-52s also ventured near Russian air space in the Arctic and within range of Russian forces in Syria. Meanwhile other B-52s, as well as nuclear-capable B-1 and B-2 bombers, have flown similar missions near Chinese positions in the South China Sea and the waters around the disputed island of Taiwan. Never since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 have so many U.S. nuclear bombers been engaged in “show-of-force” operations of this sort.

“Demonstrating Resolve” and Coercing Adversaries

States have long engaged in military operations to intimidate other powers. Once upon a distant time, this would have been called “gunboat diplomacy” and naval vessels would have been the instruments of choice for such missions. The arrival of nuclear arms made such operations far more dangerous. This didn’t, however, stop the U.S. from using weaponry of this sort as tools of intimidation throughout the Cold War. In time, however, even nuclear strategists began condemning acts of “nuclear coercion,” arguing that such weaponry was inappropriate for any purpose other than “deterrence” — that is, using the threat of “massive retaliation” to prevent another country from attacking you. In fact, a deterrence-only posture eventually became Washington’s official policy, even if the temptation to employ nukes as political cudgels never entirely disappeared from its strategic thinking.

At a more hopeful time, President Barack Obama sought to downsize this country’s nuclear arsenal and prevent the use of such weapons for anything beyond deterrence (although his administration also commenced an expensive “modernization” of that arsenal). In his widely applauded Nobel Peace Prize speech of April 5, 2009, Obama swore to “put an end to Cold War thinking” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” Unfortunately, Donald Trump has sought to move the dial in the opposite direction, including increasing the use of nukes as coercive instruments.

The president’s deep desire to bolster the role of nuclear weapons in national security was first spelled out in his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review of February 2018. In addition to calling for the accelerated modernization of the nuclear arsenal, it also endorsed the use of such weapons to demonstrate American “resolve” — in other words, a willingness to go to the nuclear brink over political differences. A large and diverse arsenal was desirable, the document noted, to “demonstrate resolve through the positioning of forces, messaging, and flexible response options.” Nuclear bombers were said to be especially useful for such a purpose: “Flights abroad,” it stated, “display U.S. capabilities and resolve, providing effective signaling for deterrence and assurance, including in times of tension.”

Ever since, the Trump administration has been deploying the country’s nuclear bomber fleet of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s with increasing frequency to “display U.S. capabilities and resolve,” particularly with respect to Russia and China.

The supersonic B-1B Lancer, developed in the 1970s, was originally meant to replace the B-52 as the nation’s premier long-range nuclear bomber. After the Cold War ended, however, it was converted to carry conventional munitions and is no longer officially designated as a nuclear delivery system — though it could be reconfigured for this purpose at any time. The B-2 Spirit, with its distinctive flying-wing design, was the first U.S. bomber built with “stealth” capabilities (meant to avoid detection by enemy radar systems) and is configured to carry both nuclear and conventional weaponry. For the past year or so, those two planes plus the long-lived B-52 have been used on an almost weekly basis as the radioactive “stick” of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

Nuclear Forays in the Arctic and the Russian Far East

When flying to Europe in August, those six B-52s from North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base took a roundabout route north of Greenland (which President Trump had unsuccessfully offered to purchase in 2019). They finally descended over the Barents Sea within easy missile-firing range of Russia’s vast naval complex at Murmansk, the home for most of its ballistic missile submarines. For Hans Kristensen of FAS, that was another obvious and “pointed message at Russia.”

Strategically speaking, Washington had largely ignored the Arctic until a combination of factors — global warming, accelerated oil and gas drilling in the region, and increased Russian and Chinese military activities there — sparked growing interest. As global temperatures have risen, the Arctic ice cap has been melting at an ever-faster pace, allowing energy firms to exploit the region’s extensive hydrocarbon resources. This, in turn, has led to feverish efforts by the region’s littoral states, led by Russia, to lay claim to such resources and build up their military capabilities there.

In light of these developments, the Trump administration, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has called for an expansion of this country’s Arctic military forces. In a speech delivered at the Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland, in May 2019, Pompeo warned of Russia’s growing military stance in the region and pledged a strong American response to it. “Under President Trump,” he declared. “We are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area.”

In line with this, the Pentagon has deployed U.S. warships to the Arctic on a regular basis, while engaging in ever more elaborate military exercises there. These have included Cold Response 2020, conducted this spring in Norway’s far north within a few hundred miles of those key Russian bases at Murmansk. For the most part, however, the administration has relied on nuclear-bomber forays to demonstrate its opposition to an increasing Russian role there. In November 2019, for example, three B-52s, accompanied by Norwegian F-16 fighter jets, approached the Russian naval complex at Murmansk, a move meant to demonstrate the Pentagon’s capacity to launch nuclear-armed missiles at one of that country’s most critical military installations.

If the majority of such nuclear forays have occurred near Norway’s far north, the Pentagon has not neglected Russia’s far eastern territory, home of its Pacific Fleet, either. In an unusually brazen maneuver, this May a B-1B bomber flew over the Sea of Okhotsk, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by Russian territory on three sides (Siberia to the north, Sakhalin Island to the west, and the Kamchatka Peninsula to the east).

As if to add insult to injury, the Air Force dispatched two B-52H bombers over the Sea of Okhotsk in June — another first for an aircraft of that type. Needless to say, incursions in such a militarily sensitive area led to the rapid scrambling of Russian fighter aircraft.

The South China Sea and Taiwan

A similar, equally provocative pattern can be observed in the East and South China Seas. Even as President Trump has sought, largely unsuccessfully, to negotiate a trade deal with Beijing, his administration has become increasingly antagonistic towards the Chinese leadership. On July 23rd, Secretary of State Pompeo delivered a particularly hostile speech in the presidential library of Richard Nixon, the very commander-in-chief who first reopened relations with communist China. Pompeo called on American allies to suspend normal relations with Beijing and, like Washington, treat it as a hostile power, much the way the Soviet Union was viewed during the Cold War.

While administration rhetoric amped up, the Department of Defense has been bolstering its capacity to engage and defeat Beijing in any future conflict. In its 2018 National Defense Strategy, as the U.S. military’s “forever wars” dragged on, the Pentagon suddenly labeled China and Russia the two greatest threats to American security. More recently, it singled out China alone as the overarching menace to American national security. “In this era of great-power competition,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared this September, “the Department of Defense has prioritized China, then Russia, as our top strategic competitors.”

The Pentagon’s efforts have largely been focused on the South China Sea, where China has established a network of small military installations on artificial islands created by dredging sand from the sea-bottom near some of the reefs and atolls it claims. American leaders have never accepted the legitimacy of this island-building project and have repeatedly called upon Beijing to dismantle the bases. Such efforts have, however, largely fallen on deaf ears and it’s now evident that the Pentagon is considering military means to eliminate the island threat.

In early July, the U.S. Navy conducted its most elaborate maneuvers to date in those waters, deploying two aircraft carriers there — the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan — plus an escort fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. While there, the two carriers launched hundreds of combat planes in simulated attacks on military bases on the islands the Chinese had essentially built.

At the same time, paratroopers from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division were flown from their home base in Alaska to the Pacific island of Guam in what was clearly meant as a simulated air assault on a (presumably Chinese) military installation. And just to make sure the leadership in Beijing understood that, in any actual encounter with U.S. forces, Chinese resistance would be countered by the maximum level of force deemed necessary, the Pentagon also flew a B-52 bomber over those carriers as they engaged in their provocative maneuvers.

And that was hardly the first visit of a nuclear bomber to the South China Sea. The Pentagon has, in fact, been deploying such planes there on a regular basis since the beginning of 2020. In April, for example, the Air Force dispatched two B-1B Lancers on a 32-hour round-trip from their home at Ellsworth Air Force Base, North Dakota, to that sea and back as a demonstration of its ability to project power even in the midst of the pandemic President Trump likes to call “the Chinese plague.”

Meanwhile, tensions have grown over the status of the island of Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway part of the country. Beijing has been pressuring its leaders to foreswear any moves toward independence, while the Trump administration tacitly endorses just such a future by doing the previously unimaginable — notably, by sending high-level officials, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar among them, on visits to the island and by promising deliveries of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has upped its military presence in that part of the Pacific, too. The Navy has repeatedly dispatched missile-armed destroyers on “freedom of navigation” missions through the Taiwan Strait, while other U.S. warships have conducted elaborate military exercises in nearby waters.

Needless to say, such provocative steps have alarmed Beijing, which has responded by increasing the incursions of its military aircraft into airspace claimed by Taiwan. To make sure that Beijing fully appreciates the depth of American “resolve” to resist any attempt to seize Taiwan by force, the Pentagon has accompanied its other military moves around the island with — you guessed it — flights of B-52 bombers.

Playing with Fire

And where will all this end? As the U.S. sends nuclear-capable bombers on increasingly provocative flights ever closer to Russian and Chinese territory, the danger of an accident or mishap is bound to grow. Sooner or later, a fighter plane from one of those countries is going to get too close to an American bomber and a deadly incident will occur. And what will happen if a nuclear bomber, armed with advanced missiles and electronics (even conceivably nuclear weapons), is in some fashion downed? Count on one thing: in Donald Trump’s America the calls for devastating retaliation will be intense and a major conflagration cannot be ruled out.

Bluntly put, dispatching nuclear-capable B-52s on simulated bombing runs against Chinese and Russian military installations is simply nuts. Yes, it must scare the bejesus out of Chinese and Russian officials, but it will also prompt them to distrust any future peaceful overtures from American diplomats while further bolstering their own military power and defenses. Eventually, we will all find ourselves in an ever more dangerous and insecure world with the risk of Armageddon lurking just around the corner.

tomdispatch.com

On August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe. Although the actual weapons load of those giant bombers was kept secret, each of them is capable of carrying eight AGM-86B nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) in its bomb bay. Those six planes, in other words, could have been carrying 48 city-busting thermonuclear warheads. (The B-52H can also carry 12 ALCMs on external pylons, but none were visible on this occasion.) With such a load alone, in other words, those six planes possessed the capacity to incinerate much of western Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The B-52 Stratofortress is no ordinary warplane. First flown in 1952, it was designed with a single purpose in mind: to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and drop dozens of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Some models were later modified to deliver tons of conventional bombs on targets in North Vietnam and other hostile states, but the remaining B-52s are still largely configured for intercontinental nuclear strikes. With only 44 of them now thought to be in active service at any time, those six dispatched to the edge of Russian territory represented a significant commitment of American nuclear war-making capability.

What in god’s name were they doing there? According to American officials, they were intended to demonstrate this country’s ability to project overwhelming power anywhere on the planet at any time and so remind our NATO allies of Washington’s commitment to their defense. “Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” commented General Jeff Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. “Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies… and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios.”

While Harrigian didn’t spell out just what scenarios he had in mind, the bombers’ European operations suggest that their role involved brandishing a nuclear “stick” in support of an increasingly hostile stance toward Russia. During their sojourn in Europe, for example, two of them flew over the Baltic Sea close to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania that houses several key military installations. That September 25th foray coincided with a U.S. troop buildup in Lithuania about 65 miles from election-embattled Belarus, a Russian neighbor.

Since August 9th, when strongman Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a presidential election widely considered fraudulent by his people and much of the international community, Belarus has experienced recurring anti-government protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country might intervene there if the situation “gets out of control,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has implicitly warned of U.S. intervention if Russia interferes. “We stand by our long-term commitment to support Belarus’ sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as the aspiration of the Belarusian people to choose their leader and to choose their own path, free from external intervention,” he insisted on August 20th. The flight of those B-52s near Belarus can, then, be reasonably interpreted as adding a nuclear dimension to Pompeo’s threat.

In another bomber deployment with no less worrisome implications, on September 4th, three B-52s, accompanied by Ukrainian fighter planes, flew over the Black Sea near the coast of Russian-held Crimea. Like other B-52 sorties near its airspace, that foray prompted the rapid scrambling of Russian interceptor aircraft, which often fly threateningly close to American planes.

At a moment when tensions were mounting between the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebel areas in the eastern part of the country, the deployment of those bombers off Crimea was widely viewed as yet another nuclear-tinged threat to Moscow. As Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), tweeted, “Extraordinary decision to send a nuclear bomber so close to contested and tense areas. This is a real in-your-face statement.”

And provocative as they were, those were hardly the only forays by U.S. nuclear bombers in recent months. B-52s also ventured near Russian air space in the Arctic and within range of Russian forces in Syria. Meanwhile other B-52s, as well as nuclear-capable B-1 and B-2 bombers, have flown similar missions near Chinese positions in the South China Sea and the waters around the disputed island of Taiwan. Never since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 have so many U.S. nuclear bombers been engaged in “show-of-force” operations of this sort.

“Demonstrating Resolve” and Coercing Adversaries

States have long engaged in military operations to intimidate other powers. Once upon a distant time, this would have been called “gunboat diplomacy” and naval vessels would have been the instruments of choice for such missions. The arrival of nuclear arms made such operations far more dangerous. This didn’t, however, stop the U.S. from using weaponry of this sort as tools of intimidation throughout the Cold War. In time, however, even nuclear strategists began condemning acts of “nuclear coercion,” arguing that such weaponry was inappropriate for any purpose other than “deterrence” — that is, using the threat of “massive retaliation” to prevent another country from attacking you. In fact, a deterrence-only posture eventually became Washington’s official policy, even if the temptation to employ nukes as political cudgels never entirely disappeared from its strategic thinking.

At a more hopeful time, President Barack Obama sought to downsize this country’s nuclear arsenal and prevent the use of such weapons for anything beyond deterrence (although his administration also commenced an expensive “modernization” of that arsenal). In his widely applauded Nobel Peace Prize speech of April 5, 2009, Obama swore to “put an end to Cold War thinking” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” Unfortunately, Donald Trump has sought to move the dial in the opposite direction, including increasing the use of nukes as coercive instruments.

The president’s deep desire to bolster the role of nuclear weapons in national security was first spelled out in his administration’s Nuclear Posture Reviewof February 2018. In addition to calling for the accelerated modernization of the nuclear arsenal, it also endorsed the use of such weapons to demonstrate American “resolve” — in other words, a willingness to go to the nuclear brink over political differences. A large and diverse arsenal was desirable, the document noted, to “demonstrate resolve through the positioning of forces, messaging, and flexible response options.” Nuclear bombers were said to be especially useful for such a purpose: “Flights abroad,” it stated, “display U.S. capabilities and resolve, providing effective signaling for deterrence and assurance, including in times of tension.”

Ever since, the Trump administration has been deploying the country’s nuclear bomber fleet of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s with increasing frequency to “display U.S. capabilities and resolve,” particularly with respect to Russia and China.

The supersonic B-1B Lancer, developed in the 1970s, was originally meant to replace the B-52 as the nation’s premier long-range nuclear bomber. After the Cold War ended, however, it was converted to carry conventional munitions and is no longer officially designated as a nuclear delivery system — though it could be reconfigured for this purpose at any time. The B-2 Spirit, with its distinctive flying-wing design, was the first U.S. bomber built with “stealth” capabilities (meant to avoid detection by enemy radar systems) and is configured to carry both nuclear and conventional weaponry. For the past year or so, those two planes plus the long-lived B-52 have been used on an almost weekly basis as the radioactive “stick” of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

Nuclear Forays in the Arctic and the Russian Far East

When flying to Europe in August, those six B-52s from North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base took a roundabout route north of Greenland (which President Trump had unsuccessfully offered to purchase in 2019). They finally descended over the Barents Sea within easy missile-firing range of Russia’s vast naval complex at Murmansk, the home for most of its ballistic missile submarines. For Hans Kristensen of FAS, that was another obvious and “pointed message at Russia.”

Strategically speaking, Washington had largely ignored the Arctic until a combination of factors — global warming, accelerated oil and gas drilling in the region, and increased Russian and Chinese military activities there — sparked growing interest. As global temperatures have risen, the Arctic ice cap has been melting at an ever-faster pace, allowing energy firms to exploit the region’s extensive hydrocarbon resources. This, in turn, has led to feverish efforts by the region’s littoral states, led by Russia, to lay claim to such resources and build up their military capabilities there.

In light of these developments, the Trump administration, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has called for an expansion of this country’s Arctic military forces. In a speech delivered at the Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland, in May 2019, Pompeo warned of Russia’s growing military stance in the region and pledged a strong American response to it. “Under President Trump,” he declared. “We are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area.”

In line with this, the Pentagon has deployed U.S. warships to the Arctic on a regular basis, while engaging in ever more elaborate military exercises there. These have included Cold Response 2020, conducted this spring in Norway’s far north within a few hundred miles of those key Russian bases at Murmansk. For the most part, however, the administration has relied on nuclear-bomber forays to demonstrate its opposition to an increasing Russian role there. In November 2019, for example, three B-52s, accompanied by Norwegian F-16 fighter jets, approached the Russian naval complex at Murmansk, a move meant to demonstrate the Pentagon’s capacity to launch nuclear-armed missiles at one of that country’s most critical military installations.

If the majority of such nuclear forays have occurred near Norway’s far north, the Pentagon has not neglected Russia’s far eastern territory, home of its Pacific Fleet, either. In an unusually brazen maneuver, this May a B-1B bomber flew over the Sea of Okhotsk, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by Russian territory on three sides (Siberia to the north, Sakhalin Island to the west, and the Kamchatka Peninsula to the east).

As if to add insult to injury, the Air Force dispatched two B-52H bombers over the Sea of Okhotsk in June — another first for an aircraft of that type. Needless to say, incursions in such a militarily sensitive area led to the rapid scrambling of Russian fighter aircraft.

The South China Sea and Taiwan

A similar, equally provocative pattern can be observed in the East and South China Seas. Even as President Trump has sought, largely unsuccessfully, to negotiate a trade deal with Beijing, his administration has become increasingly antagonistic towards the Chinese leadership. On July 23rd, Secretary of State Pompeo delivered a particularly hostile speech in the presidential library of Richard Nixon, the very commander-in-chief who first reopened relations with communist China. Pompeo called on American allies to suspend normal relations with Beijing and, like Washington, treat it as a hostile power, much the way the Soviet Union was viewed during the Cold War.

While administration rhetoric amped up, the Department of Defense has been bolstering its capacity to engage and defeat Beijing in any future conflict. In its 2018 National Defense Strategy, as the U.S. military’s “forever wars” dragged on, the Pentagon suddenly labeled China and Russia the two greatest threats to American security. More recently, it singled out China alone as the overarching menace to American national security. “In this era of great-power competition,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared this September, “the Department of Defense has prioritized China, then Russia, as our top strategic competitors.”

The Pentagon’s efforts have largely been focused on the South China Sea, where China has established a network of small military installations on artificial islands created by dredging sand from the sea-bottom near some of the reefs and atolls it claims. American leaders have never accepted the legitimacy of this island-building project and have repeatedly called upon Beijing to dismantle the bases. Such efforts have, however, largely fallen on deaf ears and it’s now evident that the Pentagon is considering military means to eliminate the island threat.

In early July, the U.S. Navy conducted its most elaborate maneuvers to date in those waters, deploying two aircraft carriers there — the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan — plus an escort fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. While there, the two carriers launched hundreds of combat planes in simulated attacks on military bases on the islands the Chinese had essentially built.

At the same time, paratroopers from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division were flown from their home base in Alaska to the Pacific island of Guam in what was clearly meant as a simulated air assault on a (presumably Chinese) military installation. And just to make sure the leadership in Beijing understood that, in any actual encounter with U.S. forces, Chinese resistance would be countered by the maximum level of force deemed necessary, the Pentagon also flew a B-52 bomber over those carriers as they engaged in their provocative maneuvers.

And that was hardly the first visit of a nuclear bomber to the South China Sea. The Pentagon has, in fact, been deploying such planes there on a regular basis since the beginning of 2020. In April, for example, the Air Force dispatched two B-1B Lancers on a 32-hour round-trip from their home at Ellsworth Air Force Base, North Dakota, to that sea and back as a demonstration of its ability to project power even in the midst of the pandemic President Trump likes to call “the Chinese plague.”

Meanwhile, tensions have grown over the status of the island of Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway part of the country. Beijing has been pressuring its leaders to foreswear any moves toward independence, while the Trump administration tacitly endorses just such a future by doing the previously unimaginable — notably, by sending high-level officials, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar among them, on visits to the island and by promising deliveries of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has upped its military presence in that part of the Pacific, too. The Navy has repeatedly dispatched missile-armed destroyers on “freedom of navigation” missions through the Taiwan Strait, while other U.S. warships have conducted elaborate military exercises in nearby waters.

Needless to say, such provocative steps have alarmed Beijing, which has responded by increasing the incursions of its military aircraft into airspace claimed by Taiwan. To make sure that Beijing fully appreciates the depth of American “resolve” to resist any attempt to seize Taiwan by force, the Pentagon has accompanied its other military moves around the island with — you guessed it — flights of B-52 bombers.

Playing with Fire

And where will all this end? As the U.S. sends nuclear-capable bombers on increasingly provocative flights ever closer to Russian and Chinese territory, the danger of an accident or mishap is bound to grow. Sooner or later, a fighter plane from one of those countries is going to get too close to an American bomber and a deadly incident will occur. And what will happen if a nuclear bomber, armed with advanced missiles and electronics (even conceivably nuclear weapons), is in some fashion downed? Count on one thing: in Donald Trump’s America the calls for devastating retaliation will be intense and a major conflagration cannot be ruled out.

Bluntly put, dispatching nuclear-capable B-52s on simulated bombing runs against Chinese and Russian military installations is simply nuts. Yes, it must scare the bejesus out of Chinese and Russian officials, but it will also prompt them to distrust any future peaceful overtures from American diplomats while further bolstering their own military power and defenses. Eventually, we will all find ourselves in an ever more dangerous and insecure world with the risk of Armageddon lurking just around the corner.

TomDispatch via counterpunch.org