Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #1145 The Uyghurs and the Destabilization of China, Part 3

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FTR #1145 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment. 

Intro­duc­tion: This pro­gram con­tin­ues dis­cus­sion of the Uyghurs/“Uighurs” and the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na. This ongo­ing effort is one of an array of covert and overt oper­a­tions against Chi­na, which, in turn, set the polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal con­text for the out­break of Covid-19.

Dis­cussed in numer­ous pro­grams, the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) are heav­i­ly over­lapped with var­i­ous fas­cist ele­ments. All of these are present in the his­to­ry of the World Uyghur Con­gress.

  1. The nar­co-fas­cist regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek.
  2. The Grey Wolves, youth wing of the Nation­al Action Par­ty. The group was a key ele­ment of the Turk­ish “Stay Behind” move­ment.
  3. Var­i­ous Islam­ic ter­ror­ist off­shoots of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, includ­ing Al-Qae­da and the Islam­ic State.
  4. The Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations milieu, direct­ly evolved from the Third Reich and the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion.
  5. The Dalai Lama and his SS/Third Reich her­itage.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance, once again, is the deci­sive pres­ence of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out found­ed by William Casey.

Amer­i­can and West­ern media draw on an Amer­i­can regime-change oper­a­tion for much of their coverage–that orga­ni­za­tion is the World Uyghur [“Uighur”] Con­gress and numer­ous sub­sidiary ele­ments.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the WUC milieu is Rushan Abas: ” . . . . Anoth­er influ­en­tial orga­ni­za­tion spun out of the WUC net­work is the Cam­paign for Uyghurs. This group is head­ed by Rushan Abbas, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the UAA. Pro­mot­ed sim­ply as a Uyghur ‘human rights activist’ by West­ern media out­lets includ­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly adver­sar­i­al Democ­ra­cy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a long­time US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary oper­a­tive. Abbas boasts in her bio of her ‘exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with US gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Home­land Secu­ri­ty, Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of State, and var­i­ous US intel­li­gence agen­cies.’ While work­ing for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tor L3 Tech­nolo­gies, Abbas served the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush administration’s so-called war on ter­ror as a ‘con­sul­tant at Guan­tanamo Bay sup­port­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom.’ Abbas ‘also worked as a lin­guist and trans­la­tor for sev­er­al fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing work for the US State Depart­ment in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba and for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer First Lady Lau­ra Bush’. Like so many of her col­leagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia. While Abbas once shared her his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US gov­ern­ment in the open, she has attempt­ed to scrub bio­graph­ic infor­ma­tion from her online pres­ence fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous pub­lic­i­ty appear­ance in Decem­ber 2019. Dur­ing a Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Any­thing’ ques­tion and answer forum, par­tic­i­pants blast­ed Abbas as a ‘CIA asset’ and fre­quent US gov­ern­ment col­lab­o­ra­tor, prompt­ing her attempt to dis­ap­pear her bio from the inter­net. . . .”

The osten­si­bly “peace­ful’ intent of the WUC can be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of the com­ments of for­mer WUC Vice-Pres­i­dent Sey­it Tum­turk: ” . . . . In 2018, Tüm­turk declared that Chi­nese Uyghurs view Turk­ish ‘state requests as orders.’ He then pro­claimed that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turk­ish army and join Turkey’s ille­gal and bru­tal inva­sion of North­ern Syr­ia ‘to fight for God’ – if ordered to do so by Erdo­gan. . . . Short­ly after Tumturk’s com­ments, Uyghur mil­i­tants dressed in Turk­ish mil­i­tary fatigues and on the Turk­ish side of the Syr­i­an bor­der released a video in which they threat­ened to wage war against Chi­na: ‘Lis­ten you dog bas­tards, do you see this? We will tri­umph!’ one fight­er exclaimed. ‘We will kill you all. Lis­ten up Chi­nese civil­ians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warn­ing you. We shall return and we will be vic­to­ri­ous.’ . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the polit­i­cal his­to­ry of William Casey, on whose watch as CIA direc­tor many of the U.S. intel­li­gence fronts involved with the Uyghur desta­bi­liza­tion effort were devel­oped.

Key Aspects of Analy­sis of Casey Include: Casey’s Wall Street legal back­ground and the man­ner in which it dove­tailed with William Dono­van and the OSS (Amer­i­ca’s World War II intel­li­gence ser­vice); Casey’s net­work­ing with Lands­dale and oth­ers involved with the recov­ery of Gold­en Lily loot, in the Philip­pines, in par­tic­u­lar; Casey’s pos­si­ble role as a key imple­menter of the Black Eagle Fund; Casey’s role in set­ting up Cap­i­tal Cities, a com­pa­ny that even­tu­al­ly bought ABC in 1985; Casey’s posi­tion as Cap­i­tal Cities’ largest stock­hold­er, includ­ing in 1985, when he was CIA direc­tor; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Cap­i­tal Cities was an intel­li­gence front; Casey’s key posi­tions in the Nixon Administration–Chairman of the SEC, Under Sec­re­tary of State for Eco­nom­ic Affairs and head of the Export-Import Bank; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Casey was with CIA through­out his post-World War II career; Casey’s friend­ship with both Allen and John Fos­ter Dulles; Casey’s knowl­edge of how to “pri­va­tize” the CIA; Casey’s role as the han­dler of Fer­di­nand Mar­cos and his Gold­en Lily bul­lion; Rea­gan’s sign­ing of Exec­u­tive Order 12333, autho­riz­ing the CIA to enter into pri­vate rela­tion­ships with PMF’s (pri­vate mil­i­tary foun­da­tions) for intel­li­gence pur­pos­es, while per­mit­ting those rela­tion­ships to be kept secret.

1. Dis­cussed in numer­ous pro­grams, the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) are heav­i­ly over­lapped with var­i­ous fas­cist ele­ments. All of these are present in the his­to­ry of the World Uyghur Con­gress.

  1. The nar­co-fas­cist regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek.
  2. The Grey Wolves, youth wing of the Nation­al Action Par­ty. The group was a key ele­ment of the Turk­ish “Stay Behind” move­ment.
  3. Var­i­ous Islam­ic ter­ror­ist off­shoots of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, includ­ing Al-Qae­da and the Islam­ic State.
  4. As seen above, the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations milieu, direct­ly evolved from the Third Reich and the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion.
  5. The Dalai Lama and his SS/Third Reich her­itage.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance, once again, is the deci­sive pres­ence of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out found­ed by William Casey.

Amer­i­can and West­ern media draw on an Amer­i­can regime-change oper­a­tion for much of their coverage–that orga­ni­za­tion is the World Uyghur [“Uighur”] Con­gress and numer­ous sub­sidiary ele­ments.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the WUC milieu is Rushan Abas: ” . . . . Anoth­er influ­en­tial orga­ni­za­tion spun out of the WUC net­work is the Cam­paign for Uyghurs. This group is head­ed by Rushan Abbas, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the UAA. Pro­mot­ed sim­ply as a Uyghur ‘human rights activist’ by West­ern media out­lets includ­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly adver­sar­i­al Democ­ra­cy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a long­time US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary oper­a­tive. Abbas boasts in her bio of her ‘exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with US gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Home­land Secu­ri­ty, Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of State, and var­i­ous US intel­li­gence agen­cies.’ While work­ing for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tor L3 Tech­nolo­gies, Abbas served the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush administration’s so-called war on ter­ror as a ‘con­sul­tant at Guan­tanamo Bay sup­port­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom.’ Abbas ‘also worked as a lin­guist and trans­la­tor for sev­er­al fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing work for the US State Depart­ment in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba and for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer First Lady Lau­ra Bush’. Like so many of her col­leagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia. While Abbas once shared her his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US gov­ern­ment in the open, she has attempt­ed to scrub bio­graph­ic infor­ma­tion from her online pres­ence fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous pub­lic­i­ty appear­ance in Decem­ber 2019. Dur­ing a Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Any­thing’ ques­tion and answer forum, par­tic­i­pants blast­ed Abbas as a ‘CIA asset’ and fre­quent US gov­ern­ment col­lab­o­ra­tor, prompt­ing her attempt to dis­ap­pear her bio from the inter­net. . . .”

The osten­si­bly “peace­ful’ intent of the WUC can be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of the com­ments of for­mer WUC Vice-Pres­i­dent Sey­it Tum­turk: ” . . . . In 2018, Tüm­turk declared that Chi­nese Uyghurs view Turk­ish ‘state requests as orders.’ He then pro­claimed that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turk­ish army and join Turkey’s ille­gal and bru­tal inva­sion of North­ern Syr­ia ‘to fight for God’ – if ordered to do so by Erdo­gan. . . . Short­ly after Tumturk’s com­ments, Uyghur mil­i­tants dressed in Turk­ish mil­i­tary fatigues and on the Turk­ish side of the Syr­i­an bor­der released a video in which they threat­ened to wage war against Chi­na: ‘Lis­ten you dog bas­tards, do you see this? We will tri­umph!’ one fight­er exclaimed. ‘We will kill you all. Lis­ten up Chi­nese civil­ians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warn­ing you. We shall return and we will be vic­to­ri­ous.’ . . .”

“Inside the World Uyghur Con­gress: The US-backed right-wing regime change net­work seek­ing the ‘fall of Chi­na’” by Ajit Singh; The Gray Zone; 03/05/2020

While pos­ing as a grass­roots human rights orga­ni­za­tion, the World Uyghur Con­gress is a US-fund­ed and direct­ed sep­a­ratist net­work that has forged alliances with far-right eth­no-nation­al­ist groups. The goal spelled out by its founders is clear: the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na and regime change in Bei­jing.

In recent years, few sto­ries have gen­er­at­ed as much out­rage in the West as the con­di­tion of Uyghur Mus­lims in Chi­na. Report­ing on the issue is typ­i­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ed through seem­ing­ly spon­ta­neous leaks of infor­ma­tion and expres­sions of resis­tance by Uyghur human rights activists strug­gling to be heard against a tyran­ni­cal Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

True or not, near­ly every­thing that appears in West­ern media accounts of China’s Uyghur Mus­lims is the prod­uct of a care­ful­ly con­ceived media cam­paign gen­er­at­ed by an appa­ra­tus of right-wing, anti-com­mu­nist Uyghur sep­a­ratists fund­ed and trained by the US gov­ern­ment.

A cen­tral gear in Washington’s new Cold War against Chi­na, this net­work has a long his­to­ry of rela­tion­ships with the US nation­al secu­ri­ty state and far-right ultra-nation­al­ists.

At the heart of this move­ment is the World Uyghur Con­gress (WUC), an inter­na­tion­al Uyghur orga­ni­za­tion that claims to be engaged in a “peace­ful, non­vi­o­lent, and demo­c­ra­t­ic” strug­gle for “human rights.” The WUC con­sid­ers China’s north­west­ern Xin­jiang region to be East Turkestan, and sees its Uyghur Mus­lim inhab­i­tants not as Chi­nese cit­i­zens but instead as mem­bers of a pan-Tur­kic nation stretch­ing from Cen­tral Asia to Turkey.

As this inves­ti­ga­tion estab­lish­es, the WUC is not a grass­roots move­ment, but a US gov­ern­ment-backed umbrel­la for sev­er­al Wash­ing­ton-based out­fits that also rely heav­i­ly on US fund­ing and direc­tion. Today, it is the main face and voice of a sep­a­ratist oper­a­tion ded­i­cat­ed to desta­bi­liz­ing the Xin­jiang region of Chi­na and ulti­mate­ly top­pling the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

While seek­ing to orches­trate a col­or rev­o­lu­tion with the aim of regime change in Bei­jing, the WUC and its off­shoots have forged ties with the Grey Wolves, a far-right Turk­ish orga­ni­za­tion that has been active­ly engaged in sec­tar­i­an vio­lence from Syr­ia to East Asia.

None of these links seem to have trou­bled the WUC’s spon­sors in Wash­ing­ton. If any­thing, they have added to the network’s appeal, con­sol­i­dat­ing it as one of the most potent polit­i­cal weapons the US wields in its new Cold War against Chi­na.

The World Uyghur Con­gress, brought to you by the US government’s regime change arm

The WUC pro­motes itself as an “oppo­si­tion move­ment against Chi­nese occu­pa­tion of East Turk­istan [sic]” that “represent[s] the col­lec­tive inter­ests” and is “the sole legit­i­mate orga­ni­za­tion of the Uyghur peo­ple both in East Turk­istan and abroad.”

Head­quar­tered in Munich, Ger­many, the WUC is an inter­na­tion­al umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion with a net­work of 33 affil­i­ates in 18 coun­tries around the world. The WUC and its affil­i­ates — par­tic­u­lar­ly the Uyghur Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Cam­paign for Uyghurs — are cit­ed in near­ly every West­ern media report on China’s Uyghur Mus­lims.

From its incep­tion, the WUC has been backed by the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy (NED). With mil­lions in US tax­pay­er mon­ey, the NED and its sub­sidiaries have backed oppo­si­tion par­ties, “civ­il soci­ety” groups, and media orga­ni­za­tions in coun­tries tar­get­ed by the US for regime change.

Philip Agee, the late CIA whistle­blow­er, described the work of the NED as a more sophis­ti­cat­ed ver­sion of the old-fash­ioned covert oper­a­tions that Lan­g­ley used to engi­neer. “Nowa­days,” Agee explained, “instead of hav­ing the CIA going around behind the scenes and try­ing to manip­u­late the process by insert­ing mon­ey here and giv­ing instruc­tions secret­ly and so forth, they have now a side­kick, which is this Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, NED.”

Agee’s assess­ment was con­firmed by Allen Wein­stein, a for­mer Trot­sky­ist and found­ing mem­ber of the NED. Wein­stein told the Wash­ing­ton Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covert­ly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

When the WUC was found­ed in 2004, the NED’s then-senior Asia pro­gram offi­cer, Louisa Coan Greve, praised the move as a “great accom­plish­ment.”

The NED has pro­vid­ed the WUC with mil­lions of dol­lars in fund­ing, includ­ing $1,284,000 since 2016 alone, and mil­lions of dol­lars in addi­tion­al fund­ing to WUC-affil­i­ate orga­ni­za­tions. The grants are ear­marked for train­ing Uyghur activists and youth in media advo­ca­cy and lob­by­ing “to raise aware­ness of and sup­port for Uyghur human rights,” with a par­tic­u­lar focus on US Con­gress, Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, and the Unit­ed Nations.

In 2018, the NED pro­vid­ed the WUC and its off­shoots with close to $665,000, accord­ing to the for­mer organization’s web­site.Anim3w@rriors2020

The NED has played a direct role in mold­ing the direc­tion and pol­i­tics of the WUC. Besides hon­ey­comb­ing WUC-affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions with NED oper­a­tives like Coan Greve, the NED has spon­sored and orga­nized annu­al “Lead­er­ship Train­ing Sem­i­nars” for the WUC since 2007.

Many lead­ing mem­bers of the WUC have also worked in senior posi­tions for Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­er­ty (RFE/RL). These US gov­ern­ment-run news agen­cies were cre­at­ed by the CIA dur­ing the Cold War to project pro­pa­gan­da into Chi­na and the Sovi­et Union, and to stir up oppo­si­tion to com­mu­nism on these coun­tries’ fron­tiers.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the WUC is tight­ly aligned with Washington’s for­eign pol­i­cy agen­da and hos­tile new Cold War strat­e­gy which seeks to con­tain and impede the rise of Chi­na. The WUC reg­u­lar­ly meets with and lob­bies US and West­ern politi­cians, urg­ing them to iso­late and “increase the pres­sure on Chi­na”; ratch­et up eco­nom­ic sanc­tions; curb ties with Chi­na, and with­draw West­ern com­pa­nies from the region.

The WUC cel­e­brat­ed the pas­sage of The Uighur Act of 2019 by the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, in Decem­ber 2019. The bill, which called on the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to enact sanc­tions against the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, was the lat­est in a string of anti-Chi­na achieve­ments.

This regime change appa­ra­tus has made its strongest impact through the media, pro­vid­ing a con­stant source of self-styled Uyghur dis­si­dents and human rights hor­ror sto­ries to eager West­ern reporters. The expo­sure the WUC and its affil­i­ates receive extends well beyond cor­po­rate media out­lets known for echo­ing Washington’s for­eign pol­i­cy talk­ing points; even osten­si­bly adver­sar­i­al, pro­gres­sive, and left-wing media such as The Inter­cept, Democ­ra­cy Now! and Jacobin Mag­a­zine have pro­vid­ed them with an uncrit­i­cal plat­form.

While adopt­ing the WUC’s nar­ra­tive, these self-styled alter­na­tive out­lets nev­er seem to men­tion the close bonds the orga­ni­za­tion and its off­shoots have forged with the US nation­al secu­ri­ty state and right-wing eth­no-nation­al­ist move­ments abroad. But the rela­tion­ships are no secret. In fact, they appear to be a source of pride for WUC lead­er­ship.

The Far-Right Roots of the Uyghur “Human Rights” Move­ment

Behind its care­ful­ly con­struct­ed human rights brand, the Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment emerged from ele­ments in Xin­jiang which view social­ism as “the ene­my of Islam,” and which sought Washington’s sup­port from the out­set, pre­sent­ing them­selves as eager foot-sol­diers for US hege­mo­ny.

The found­ing father of this sep­a­ratist move­ment was Isa Yusuf Alptekin. His son, Erkin Alptekin, found­ed the WUC and served as the organization’s inau­gur­al pres­i­dent. The senior Alptekin is referred to as “our late leader” by the WUC and cur­rent Pres­i­dent Dolkun Isa.

Born at the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Alptekin was the son of a local gov­ern­ment Xin­jiang offi­cial. He received a large­ly Islam­ic edu­ca­tion as a youth, as his fam­i­ly intend­ed for him to be a reli­gious schol­ar.

Dur­ing the Chi­nese Civ­il War that raged between the nation­al­ists and com­mu­nists from 1945 to ’49, Alptekin served under the nation­al­ist Kuom­intang (KMT) admin­is­tra­tion in Xin­jiang. Through­out this peri­od, the KMT received mas­sive mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic back­ing from the Unit­ed States — includ­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in cash and mil­i­tary hard­ware, along with the deploy­ment of tens of thou­sands of US marines — in an effort to quash the Chi­nese rev­o­lu­tion.

At the same time, accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Lin­da Ben­son, Alptekin “became more active in both the Guo­min­dang [sic] and nation­al lev­el pol­i­tics … and met sev­er­al times with [KMT leader] Chi­ang Kai-shek per­son­al­ly.” For Alptekin and fel­low trav­el­ers advanc­ing Tur­kic nation­al­ism and the region’s even­tu­al inde­pen­dence, “equal­ly impor­tant was the neces­si­ty of pro­tect­ing the land they called East Turkestan from Sovi­et and Chi­nese com­mu­nism, both of which were viewed as real and present dan­gers to Islam­ic peo­ples.”

For the KMT, Uyghur activists like Alptekin made prime can­di­dates for Xinjiang’s provin­cial admin­is­tra­tion. As Ben­son explained, “[t]he essen­tial qual­i­fi­ca­tion for such appointees… was that they be anti-Com­mu­nist and anti-Sovi­et.” In his mem­oirs, Alptekin revealed that he “sought to elim­i­nate all Rus­sians and left­ists in the gov­ern­ment,” and said that “schools were also encour­aged to include reli­gious instruc­tion in their cur­ricu­lum.”

A fer­vent oppo­nent of mis­ce­gena­tion, Alptekin worked to pre­vent inter­mar­riage between Han Chi­nese and Uyghur Mus­lims. Dur­ing his time in gov­ern­ment, reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists “attacked the hous­es of Han Chi­nese who were mar­ried to Moslem [sic] women […] The mob abduct­ed the Moslem wives, and in some cas­es the unfor­tu­nate women were forced to mar­ry old Moslem men.” Though the vio­lence killed numer­ous Han Chi­nese, it pro­ceed­ed with­out any gov­ern­ment response dur­ing Alptekin’s tenure.

As the civ­il war wore on, Alptekin grew frus­trat­ed with the declin­ing pow­er of the nation­al­ists and met with US and British Con­suls in Xin­jiang, beseech­ing the twin pow­ers to deep­en their inter­ven­tion in Chi­na and the region. With the com­ing vic­to­ry of the Chi­nese Rev­o­lu­tion, Alptekin went into exile in 1949.

Alptekin even­tu­al­ly set­tled in Turkey, emerg­ing as the pre-emi­nent leader of the Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment through­out the lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. He set out to enlist inter­na­tion­al sup­port for the cause of East Turkestan inde­pen­dence, court­ing lead­ing US offi­cials and far-right, neo-Ottoman­ist ide­o­logues in Turkey.

The Uyghur sep­a­ratist leader wrote to then-US Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon on sev­er­al occa­sions, plead­ing for him to sup­port East Turkestan sep­a­ratism. In a 1969 mis­sive to the pres­i­dent, Alptekin declared full-throat­ed sup­port for the US war on Viet­nam: “We are hope­ful and pleased that the US, as a fortress of lib­er­ty, is pro­tect­ing cap­tive nations,” he stat­ed. Altep­kin then plead­ed for his “Excel­len­cy” Nixon and the US, “the most immi­nent pro­tec­tor of cap­tive nations”, to sup­port East Turkestan inde­pen­dence.

Alptekin wrote Nixon the fol­low­ing year to warn of the evils of “Red Chi­na.” He brand­ed the coun­try “a great men­ace which the whole world as led by the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is con­fronting. This men­ace is now in the process of evo­lu­tion to engulf the earth. If time is allowed it can upset the bal­ance of the world to dis­ad­van­tage the free nations.”

“The whole world has rea­son to be appre­hen­sive of Red Chi­na,” Alptekin insist­ed to Nixon, “for it is like­ly to be an irre­sistible [sic] threat on earth… Chi­na today is one of the biggest nations in the world where the Marx­ist teach has been imple­ment­ed… Chi­na may prove to be a greater men­ace to all the world, and this men­ace is like­ly to cause a total destruc­tion to the free nations if they are not pru­dent and fore-sight­ed.”

Alptekin advised Nixon to com­bat the “Chi­nese war of world con­quest” by sup­port­ing sep­a­ratist move­ments, name­ly that of East Turkestan nation­al­ists, and by “speed­ing up the process of the dis­mem­ber­ment of the Chi­nese empire.”

Map­ping out a detailed regime change strat­e­gy for Wash­ing­ton, Alptekin urged the US to gen­er­ate sup­port for his cause among the “free world,” set up an aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tute to study “every aspect” of minor­i­ty nation­al­i­ties liv­ing with­in Chi­na, devel­op media pro­pa­gan­da tar­get­ing minor­i­ty nation­al­i­ties by oper­at­ing “a radio net­work beam­ing at these peo­ples in their respec­tive lan­guages”; “devise a plan to secure [the] col­lab­o­ra­tion” of minor­i­ty nation­al­i­ties and “train the chil­dren of the non-Chi­nese exiles abroad.”

In 1970, Alptekin trav­elled to Wash­ing­ton to meet with mem­bers of US Con­gress and address the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Forg­ing bonds with fascis­tic, eth­no-suprema­cist Turk­ish nation­al­ists

While appeal­ing for Washington’s sup­port, Alptekin devel­oped strong ties with the Turk­ish far-right. Their bonds rest­ed on a sol­id foun­da­tion of anti-com­mu­nist zeal and pan-Tur­kic, neo-Ottoman­ist nation­al­ism.

On numer­ous occa­sions, Alptekin met with Alparslan Türkes a fascis­tic, ultra-nation­al­ist who believed ardent­ly in Turk­ish eth­nic supe­ri­or­i­ty over minori­ties like Kurds and Arme­ni­ans, and for whom the erad­i­ca­tion of com­mu­nism among the Tur­kic pop­u­la­tions of Sovi­et Cen­tral Asia and Xin­jiang was “the dream he had most cher­ished”.

Türkes was long-time leader of the far-right Nation­al­ist Action Par­ty (MHP) and its para­mil­i­tary arm, the Grey Wolves. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post, he head­ed a mur­der­ous group of “right-wing ter­ror­ists” who are “blind­ly nation­al­ist, fas­cist or near­ly so, and bent on the exter­mi­na­tion of the Com­mu­nists.” The fascis­tic mil­i­tant group killed numer­ous left-wing activists, stu­dents, Kurds, and noto­ri­ous­ly attempt­ed to assas­si­nate Pope John Paul II.

With mil­i­tary train­ing from the US, Türkes co-found­ed the Turk­ish cell of Oper­a­tion Glad­io, the US and NATO-backed net­work of “stay behind” anti-com­mu­nist para­mil­i­tary groups that car­ried out numer­ous acts of ter­ror and sab­o­tage across Europe.

Alptekin appears to have shared the hate­ful pol­i­tics of Türkes and the Turk­ish far-right, often express­ing anti-Armen­ian views includ­ing denial of the Armen­ian geno­cide and claims that Arme­ni­ans were mur­der­ers of inno­cent Turks.

The Turk­ish right-wing has embraced the East Turkestan sep­a­ratist move­ment with open arms, appeal­ing to them as a key base of polit­i­cal sup­port. “The mar­tyrs of East Turkestan are our mar­tyrs,” stat­ed Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, then may­or of Istan­bul, as he inau­gu­rat­ed a park named in hon­or of Alptekin, fol­low­ing the death of the Uyghur nation­al­ist in 1995.

In recent decades, the Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment has deep­ened its con­nec­tions with Wash­ing­ton and the US nation­al secu­ri­ty state. The WUC and its affil­i­ate orga­ni­za­tions — includ­ing the Uyghur Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Cam­paign for Uyghurs — are made up of indi­vid­u­als with direct ties to the US gov­ern­ment, mil­i­tary, and regime change estab­lish­ment.

Inspired by pro-free mar­ket col­or rev­o­lu­tions spawned by the US gov­ern­ment in the for­mer Sovi­et republics of Cen­tral Asia, the WUC’s regime change net­work has set out a clear goal of desta­bi­liz­ing Chi­na and top­pling its gov­ern­ment.

With vow to destroy Chi­na, WUC lead­ers earn West­ern adu­la­tion and sup­port

In 2004, Erkin Alptekin was named the inau­gur­al pres­i­dent of the WUC. He is the son of the far-right, ultra-nation­al­ist father fig­ure of the Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, whose back­ground is explored lat­er in this arti­cle. From 1971 to 1995, Erkin Alptekin worked for the US gov­ern­ment-fund­ed RFE/RL media net­work.

Speak­ing at the funer­al of his father, in 1995, the junior Alptekin out­lined his anti-com­mu­nist, sep­a­ratist views and artic­u­lat­ed his desire to destroy Chi­na: “Ten years ago no one believed that the USSR would fall apart now you can see that. Many Tur­kic coun­tries have their free­dom now. Today the same sit­u­a­tion applies to Chi­na. We believed in the not too dis­tant future we will see the fall of Chi­na and the inde­pen­dence of East Turkestan.”

The WUC describes Alptekin as “close friend” of the Dalai Lama, the U.S‑backed, CIA-fund­ed fig­ure­head for Tibetan sep­a­ratism. “We are work­ing very close­ly with the Dalai Lama,” Alptekin told The Wash­ing­ton Post in 1999. “He is a very good exam­ple for us.”

In 2006, Erkin Alptekin was suc­ceed­ed as WUC Pres­i­dent by Rebiya Kadeer, a self-described mul­ti-mil­lion­aire real estate and trad­ing entre­pre­neur who prof­it­ed off of China’s eco­nom­ic reforms of the 1980s and claims to have once been the sev­enth wealth­i­est indi­vid­ual in the coun­try. Accord­ing to The New York Times, Kadeer’s “[d]issidence brought the end of her Audi, her three vil­las and her far-flung busi­ness empire”. Kadeer’s hus­band, SIdik Rouzi, worked for US gov­ern­ment media out­lets Voice of Amer­i­ca and Radio Free Asia.

Dur­ing her tenure as WUC Pres­i­dent, Kadeer met with then-US Pres­i­dent George W. Bush on sev­er­al occa­sions. As Bush waged his ille­gal war on Iraq and per­se­cut­ed Mus­lim Amer­i­can lead­er­ship under the aus­pices of his so-called “war on ter­ror,” Kadeer appealed to the US head of state to take up the cause of Uyghur Mus­lims. “I was deeply hon­ored to meet with the Pres­i­dent,” Kadeer stat­ed.. She “expressed grat­i­tude for Pres­i­dent Bush’s demon­strat­ed com­mit­ment to pro­mot­ing free­dom and demo­c­ra­t­ic reform in the PRC.”

At the 2007 Democ­ra­cy & Secu­ri­ty Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence in Prague, Bush praised Kadeer as a human rights defend­er in his address before the gath­er­ing. The con­fer­ence was orga­nized by the Prague Secu­ri­ty Stud­ies Insti­tute, a think tank that aims to advance free-mar­ket soci­eties in post-com­mu­nist states, and the Adel­son Insti­tute for Strate­gic Stud­ies, an Israeli out­fit named for ultra-Zion­ist Repub­li­can casi­no baron Shel­don Adel­son. Con­fer­ence part­ners includ­ed the US gov­ern­ment and NATO.

Kadeer kept close rela­tion­ships with the Dalai Lama and Vaclav Hav­el, the leader of the ‘Vel­vet Rev­o­lu­tion’ which brought down Czechoslovakia’s com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment. Hav­el was a “major pro­po­nent of NATO” and instru­men­tal to the West­ern mil­i­tary alliance’s east­ward expan­sion. Kadeer described Hav­el as “an uncom­pro­mis­ing advo­cate for truth, jus­tice and peace” and point­ed to his polit­i­cal accom­plish­ments as an exam­ple to be emu­lat­ed for Chi­na. “Mr. Havel’s vision for the Czech peo­ple […] speaks to Chi­nese democ­rats today”, wrote Kadeer, fol­low­ing Havel’s death, and “con­tains […] the seeds of a new era for polit­i­cal reform in Chi­na.”

The cur­rent Pres­i­dent of WUC is Dolkun Isa, win­ner of the 2019 Democ­ra­cy Award from the NED. In 2016, Isa received a human rights award from the far-right Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, which was estab­lished by the US gov­ern­ment in 1993. In his accep­tance speech, Isa empha­sized “the Uyghurs’ resis­tance to com­mu­nism” and that “we will not stop our work until we con­sign this destruc­tive ide­ol­o­gy, in the words of Ronald Rea­gan, to ‘the ash heap of his­to­ry.’”

Isa reg­u­lar­ly lob­bies US and West­ern politi­cians to inten­si­fy their new Cold War agen­da by enact­ing eco­nom­ic sanc­tions and curb­ing ties with Chi­na.. Among those he has met with in recent years are Trump admin­is­tra­tion White House offi­cials, right-wing Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz, and the fer­vent­ly anti-Chi­na act­ing Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence, Richard Grenell.

In Novem­ber 2019, Isa attend­ed the Hal­i­fax Inter­na­tion­al Secu­ri­ty Forum, a gath­er­ing con­vened by NATO and the Cana­di­an Depart­ment of Nation­al Defence. There, he met with lead­ing West­ern polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary fig­ures.

In Jan­u­ary 2020, Isa was host­ed at an event orga­nized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a right-wing British Israeli lob­by group. At the event, Isa met with with the ultra-Zion­ist orga­ni­za­tion Bnei Aki­va, whose leader called for the Israeli Army “to take the fore­skins of 300 Pales­tini­ans” amid Israel’s pun­ish­ing 2014 assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Omer Kanat serves as the WUC’s Chair­man of the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee. Kanat helped found the WUC and has been a per­ma­nent fix­ture in its exec­u­tive lead­er­ship. The vet­er­an oper­a­tive has a lengthy his­to­ry of work with the US gov­ern­ment, from serv­ing as senior edi­tor of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Ser­vice from 1999 to 2009 to cov­er­ing the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and inter­view­ing the Dalai Lama for the net­work.

In an inter­view with The Gray­zone edi­tor Max Blu­men­thal at a 2018 NED awards cer­e­mo­ny in the US Capi­tol build­ing, Kanat took cred­it for fur­nish­ing many of the claims about intern­ment camps in Xin­jiang to West­ern media. He con­ced­ed, how­ev­er, that the WUC did not know how the oft-repeat­ed “mil­lions detained” claim was arrived at aside from “West­ern media esti­mates.”

Prepar­ing for a col­or rev­o­lu­tion, WUC off­shoots staff up with nation­al secu­ri­ty state oper­a­tives

Estab­lished in 1998, the Uyghur Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion (UAA) is a Wash­ing­ton D.C.-based affil­i­ate of the WUC. A long time grantee of the NED, the UAA has received mil­lions of dol­lars in fund­ing. Accord­ing to its pub­licly avail­able tax fil­ings, the group works close­ly with the US gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly the US State Depart­ment, Con­gres­sion­al-Exec­u­tive Com­mis­sion on Chi­na (CECC), and US Congress’s Human Rights Com­mis­sion.

“The Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy has been excep­tion­al­ly sup­port­ive of UAA,” stat­ed Nury Turkel, for­mer UAA Pres­i­dent, “pro­vid­ing us with invalu­able guid­ance and assis­tance” along with “essen­tial fund­ing.”

Turkel cred­it­ed the NED with enabling the UAA increase its cred­i­bil­i­ty and expand its influ­ence. Among the top achieve­ments he cit­ed was a meet­ing with the new Kry­gyzs­tan gov­ern­ment “with­in weeks of [the for­mer government’s] fall from pow­er” fol­low­ing the US-engi­neered Tulip “col­or rev­o­lu­tion” which brought a pro-West­ern regime to pow­er.

Speak­ing at the 5th Con­gress of the UAA, in 2006, Turkel con­firmed the regime change agen­da of the UAA, UHRP and broad­er Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment, stat­ing that “as we wit­nessed the ‘Tulip Rev­o­lu­tion’ and the top­pling the for­mer gov­ern­ment of Kyr­gyzs­tan, our hopes were again rein­forced.”

The UAA’s lead­er­ship con­sists of US nation­al secu­ri­ty state oper­a­tors includ­ing employ­ees of the US gov­ern­ment, Radio Free Asia, and mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex.

Kuz­zat Altay, the nephew of Reibya Kadeer, is the cur­rent pres­i­dent of the UAA. Altay is also the founder of the Uyghur Entre­pre­neurs Net­work, which claims to offer Uyghur Amer­i­cans with guid­ance to “start their own busi­ness”.

In 2019, his busi­ness net­work has orga­nized an event in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the FBI, the fed­er­al law enforce­ment agency noto­ri­ous for its sur­veil­lance of Mus­lim Amer­i­cans and ensnar­ing count­less men­tal­ly trou­bled young Mus­lim Amer­i­can men in man­u­fac­tured ter­ror plots.

Past pres­i­dents of UAA include Kadeer; Alim Seytoff, a for­mer Radio Free Asia cor­re­spon­dent and cur­rent Direc­tor of RFA’s Uyghur Ser­vice; and Ilshat Has­san Kok­bore, who has worked at Booz Allen Hamil­ton since 2008.

...

The main project spun out of the UAA and the NED is the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP was found­ed by the UAA in 2004 with the NED as the prin­ci­pal source of fund­ing. The NED grant­ed the UHRP a whop­ping $1,244,698 between 2016 and ’19.

The UHRP is staffed by WUC lead­ers like Omer Kanat and Nury Turkel, along with for­mer US gov­ern­ment offi­cials and senior mem­bers of the NED.

Dr. Elise Ander­son serves as UHRP’s Senior Pro­gram Office for Research and Advo­ca­cy. In 2019, Ander­son served as the Liu Xiaobo Fel­low, occu­py­ing a posi­tion at the Con­gres­sion­al-Exec­u­tive Com­mis­sion on Chi­na named for the far-right Chi­nese dis­si­dent who sup­port­ed colo­nial­ism, US mil­i­tarism and the “West­ern­i­sa­tion” of Chi­na.

Ander­son states that from 2012 to 2016, she was “based out of Ürüm­chi, the region­al cap­i­tal of Xin­jiang,” con­duct­ing research for her doc­tor­ate. The extent of her activ­i­ties in the region are unclear, as Anderson’s CV indi­cates that dur­ing this time she was also work­ing for the US gov­ern­ment as “Ürüm­chi War­den for the US Embassy in Bei­jing, Chi­na, 2014–16.”

Louisa Coan Greve, the for­mer vice pres­i­dent of NED, today serves as UHRP’s Direc­tor of Glob­al Advo­ca­cy. Greve for­mer­ly worked as Vice Pres­i­dent of the NED.

Rushan Abbas, the US nation­al secu­ri­ty state’s favorite “human rights activist”

Anoth­er influ­en­tial orga­ni­za­tion spun out of the WUC net­work is the Cam­paign for Uyghurs. This group is head­ed by Rushan Abbas, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the UAA. Pro­mot­ed sim­ply as a Uyghur “human rights activist” by West­ern media out­lets includ­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly adver­sar­i­al Democ­ra­cy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a long­time US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary oper­a­tive.

Abbas boasts in her bio of her “exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with US gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Home­land Secu­ri­ty, Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of State, and var­i­ous US intel­li­gence agen­cies.”

While work­ing for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tor L3 Tech­nolo­gies, Abbas served the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush administration’s so-called war on ter­ror as a “con­sul­tant at Guan­tanamo Bay sup­port­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom.” Abbas “also worked as a lin­guist and trans­la­tor for sev­er­al fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing work for the US State Depart­ment in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba and for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer First Lady Lau­ra Bush”. Like so many of her col­leagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia.

While Abbas once shared her his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US gov­ern­ment in the open, she has attempt­ed to scrub bio­graph­ic infor­ma­tion from her online pres­ence fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous pub­lic­i­ty appear­ance in Decem­ber 2019. Dur­ing a Reddit’s “Ask Me Any­thing” ques­tion and answer forum, par­tic­i­pants blast­ed Abbas as a “CIA asset” and fre­quent US gov­ern­ment col­lab­o­ra­tor, prompt­ing her attempt to dis­ap­pear her bio from the inter­net.

Besides col­lab­o­rat­ing with the US gov­ern­ment, Abbas’ pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence con­sists of aid­ing the expan­sion of US cap­i­tal­ism in the glob­al south. She boasts work with con­sult­ing firms such as ISI Con­sul­tants which “assists US com­pa­nies to grow their busi­ness in Mid­dle East and African mar­kets.” Abbas claims to have “over 15 years of expe­ri­ence in glob­al busi­ness devel­op­ment, strate­gic busi­ness analy­sis, busi­ness con­sul­tan­cy and gov­ern­ment affairs through­out the Mid­dle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Aus­tralia, North Amer­i­ca and Latin Amer­i­ca.”

Cel­e­brat­ing the Gray Wolves, propos­ing US and Turk­ish mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion

Along with their exten­sive ties to Wash­ing­ton, the WUC and Uyghur sep­a­ratist move­ment has main­tained close con­nec­tions with the Turk­ish far-right.

In 2015, mem­bers of the MHP-affil­i­at­ed Grey Wolves for­mer­ly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Kore­an tourists in Turkey, mis­tak­ing them for Chi­nese cit­i­zens, in protest of the sit­u­a­tion in Xin­jiang.

Turk­ish MHP par­ty leader Devlet Bahçeli defend­ed the attacks. “How are you going to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between Kore­an and Chi­nese?” the right­ist politi­cian ques­tioned. “They both have slant­ed eyes. Does it real­ly mat­ter?” Bahceli’s racist remarks coin­cid­ed with the dis­play of a Grey Wolves ban­ner at party’s Istan­bul head­quar­ters read­ing, “We crave Chi­nese blood.”

The Grey Wolves and Uyghur mil­i­tants were blamed by Thailand’s nation­al police and an IHS-Jane’s ana­lyst of car­ry­ing out a 2015 bomb­ing of a reli­gious shrine in Thai­land that killed 20 peo­ple. The attack was intend­ed as revenge against the Thai government’s deci­sion to repa­tri­ate a group of Uyghur Mus­lims to Chi­na. Bei­jing had claimed the Uyghurs were en route to Turkey, Syr­ia or Iraq to join extrem­ist groups fight­ing in the region such as the al-Qae­da-affil­i­at­ed East Turkestan Islam­ic Move­ment (ETIM), or Turkestan Islam­ic Par­ty (TIP).

Months before the bomb­ing, a group of 200 pro­test­ers wav­ing East Turkestan flags attacked the Thai con­sulate in Istan­bul in response to the Uyghur repa­tri­a­tion. The group was report­ed­ly led by the Grey Wolves and East Turkestan Cul­ture and Sol­i­dar­i­ty Asso­ci­a­tion.. The lat­ter orga­ni­za­tion was head­ed by Sey­it Tüm­turk, who served as WUC Vice Pres­i­dent from 2008 to 2016 and belonged to the organization’s found­ing pan­theon.

The WUC con­tin­ues to pub­lish arti­cles on its web­site that praise and cel­e­brate Alparslan Türkes, the far-right, ultra-nation­al­ist founder of the Grey Wolves and long-time MHP par­ty leader. Its web­site also pro­motes endorse­ments of East Turkestan sep­a­ratism by cur­rent lead­ers of the MHP and Grey Wolves.

While build­ing links with the Turk­ish far-right, lead­ing WUC rep­re­sen­ta­tives have appealed to Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdo­gan to take an inter­ven­tion­ist role in Chi­na akin to Turkey’s actions in Libya and Syr­ia, where it sup­port­ed the regime change efforts of the US, West and an array of extrem­ist proxy groups.

Writ­ing in the Wall Street Jour­nal in 2012, Nury Turkel argued that Turkey can play a lead­ing role in “ral­ly­ing democ­ra­cies” to pres­sure Chi­na on Xin­jiang: “As a long­stand­ing ally of the US and a neigh­bor of Europe, Turkey is unique­ly well-sit­u­at­ed to do this.”

As a first step in this strat­e­gy, Turkel pro­posed that Turkey “should orga­nize a ‘friends of Uighurs’ con­fer­ence with demo­c­ra­t­ic allies – sim­i­lar to the ones orga­nized for Libya and Syr­ia – dis­cussing Ankara’s vision and pol­i­cy objec­tives with respect to the Uighur peo­ple in Chi­na.”

Oth­er lead­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives of WUC have vocal­ly endorsed Turk­ish mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion­ism. The polit­i­cal state­ments of Sey­it Tüm­turk, who served as WUC Vice Pres­i­dent, under­score the extrem­ist and mil­i­tant pol­i­tics behind WUC’s care­ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed image as a “peace­ful and non­vi­o­lent” human rights orga­ni­za­tion.

In 2018, Tüm­turk declared that Chi­nese Uyghurs view Turk­ish “state requests as orders.” He then pro­claimed that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turk­ish army and join Turkey’s ille­gal and bru­tal inva­sion of North­ern Syr­ia “to fight for God” – if ordered to do so by Erdo­gan.

Short­ly after Tumturk’s com­ments, Uyghur mil­i­tants dressed in Turk­ish mil­i­tary fatigues and on the Turk­ish side of the Syr­i­an bor­der released a video in which they threat­ened to wage war against Chi­na:

“Lis­ten you dog bas­tards, do you see this? We will tri­umph!” one fight­er exclaimed. “We will kill you all. Lis­ten up Chi­nese civil­ians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warn­ing you. We shall return and we will be vic­to­ri­ous.”

2. The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the his­to­ry of for­mer CIA direc­tor William Casey, on whose watch many of the intel­li­gence fronts involved with the Uyghur desta­bi­liza­tion effort were found­ed.

Key Aspects of Analy­sis of Casey Include: Casey’s Wall Street legal back­ground and the man­ner in which it dove­tailed with William Dono­van and the OSS (Amer­i­ca’s World War II intel­li­gence ser­vice); Casey’s net­work­ing with Lands­dale and oth­ers involved with the recov­ery of Gold­en Lily loot, in the Philip­pines, in par­tic­u­lar; Casey’s pos­si­ble role as a key imple­menter of the Black Eagle Fund; Casey’s role in set­ting up Cap­i­tal Cities, a com­pa­ny that even­tu­al­ly bought ABC in 1985; Casey’s posi­tion as Cap­i­tal Cities’ largest stock­hold­er, includ­ing in 1985, when he was CIA direc­tor; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Cap­i­tal Cities was an intel­li­gence front; Casey’s key posi­tions in the Nixon Administration–Chairman of the SEC, Under Sec­re­tary of State for Eco­nom­ic Affairs and head of the Export-Import Bank; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Casey was with CIA through­out his post-World War II career; Casey’s friend­ship with both Allen and John Fos­ter Dulles; Casey’s knowl­edge of how to “pri­va­tize” the CIA; Casey’s role as the han­dler of Fer­di­nand Mar­cos and his Gold­en Lily bul­lion; Rea­gan’s sign­ing of Exec­u­tive Order 12333, autho­riz­ing the CIA to enter into pri­vate rela­tion­ships with PMF’s (pri­vate mil­i­tary foun­da­tions) for intel­li­gence pur­pos­es, while per­mit­ting those rela­tion­ships to be kept secret.

Gold Warriors—America’s Secret Recov­ery of Yamashita’s Gold; by Ster­ling Sea­grave and Peg­gy Sea­grave; Ver­so [SC]; Copy­right 2003, 2005 by Ster­ling and Peg­gy Sea­grave; ISBN 1–84467-531–9; pp. 187–188.

. . . . Many CIA agents spent years or even decades under var­i­ous cov­ers, so it was hard to estab­lish beyond any doubt whether they ever left the Agency, or mere­ly went under­ground.

A per­fect exam­ple is William Casey.

Casey was one of the orig­i­nal OSS crowd. After law school, he went to work for an account­ing firm but kept in touch with fel­low lawyer John ‘Pop’ How­ley, who worked for Wild Bill Donovan’s law firm, Dono­van Leisure New­ton & Irvine. When Dono­van became head of OSS, Casey and How­ley joined him. Casey was John Singlaub’s case offi­cer in the war, while Paul Hel­li­well was Singlaub’s direct supe­ri­or. Casey also was a close friend of Allen Dulles and John Fos­ter Dulles, worked with Ray Cline, and became involved with Lans­dale as San­ta Romana’s tor­ture of Major Koji­ma was bear­ing fruit. This put Casey in a posi­tion to know a great deal about the Black Eagle Trust, and one source insists that Casey’s finan­cial skills made him one of the key play­ers, along with Paul Hel­li­well and Edwin Pauley, in imple­ment­ing the Black Eagle Trust under the guid­ance of Robert B. Ander­son and John J. McCloy.

Fol­low­ing the war, Casey and his old friend How­ell found­ed their own Wall Street law firm. But what made Casey real­ly wealthy was his involve­ment with oth­er for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cers in set­ting up the media hold­ing com­pa­ny Cap­i­tal Cities in 1954. Accord­ing to many inves­ti­ga­tors, dur­ing this peri­od the CIA poured mil­lions into set­ting up front com­pa­nies for covert oper­a­tions in broad­cast­ing and pub­lish­ing, and it is alleged that Casey fun­neled some of these funds into Capi­tol Cities to acquire fail­ing media com­pa­nies and turn them around. It is like­ly that Casey nev­er left the Agency, but only moult­ed into one of its finan­cial but­ter­flies. It would not be the first time a senior CIA agent has had a dou­ble career on Wall Street, Allen Dulles being but one of many oth­ers. From 1971–1973, Casey was Nixon’s appointee as chief of the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion, where he worked close­ly with SEC attor­ney Stan­ley Sporkin (lat­er appoint­ed by Casey as CIA gen­er­al coun­sel and involved in the Schlei case.) Casey also served as Nixon’s Under-Sec­re­tary of State for Eco­nom­ic Affairs, and chair­man of the Export-Import Bank. In 1978, Casey found­ed a think tank called the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute that absorbed a num­ber of for­mer CIA offi­cers, and fun­neled mon­ey from con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions to con­ser­v­a­tive authors. When Casey left Cap­i­tal Cities to head the Rea­gan pres­i­den­tial cam­paign and then to become Reagan’s direc­tor of the CIA, he is said to have been its biggest sin­gle stock­hold­er with $7.5‑million in Cap­i­tal Cities stock. He was still its biggest stock­hold­er, and CIA direc­tor, in 1985 when Cap­i­tal Cities bought ABC.

A man who was involved in covert finan­cial oper­a­tions through­out his entire career, Casey had links to all the key play­ers in this book; his DNA is all over the place, from pre-San­ty to post Mar­cos. He was one of the men who dreamed up the pri­va­ti­za­tion of the CIA, and as CIA direc­tor, he showed Rea­gan how to imple­ment it.

One of Reagan’s first acts was to sign Exec­u­tive Order 12333, which autho­rized the CIA and oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies to enter into con­tracts with PMFs, “and need not reveal the spon­sor­ship of such con­tracts or arrange­ments for autho­rized intel­li­gence pur­pos­es.” This put Casey back in har­ness with Cline, Singlaub, Shack­ley, Lans­dale and many oth­ers purged ear­li­er, whole obscur­ing their activ­i­ties, keep­ing them—theoretically at least—in the pri­vate domain. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, Casey per­son­al­ly took over han­dling Pres­i­dent Mar­cos press­ing him to pro­vide black gold for covert pur­pos­es, and final­ly mas­ter­mind­ed the down­fall ad removal of Mar­cos and his bul­lion.

Even­tu­al­ly, Iran-Con­tra revealed the inti­mate bonds between mem­bers of The Enter­prise and unelect­ed offi­cials of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, Pen­ta­gon and CIA. . . .

Discussion

6 comments for “FTR #1145 The Uyghurs and the Destabilization of China, Part 3”

  1. With the news that Pres­i­dent Trump has test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 and is now suf­fer­ing mild symp­toms throw­ing the US pres­i­den­tial race into tumult, it might be a good time to take a moment and con­sid­er the ele­vat­ed chances of some sort of extreme des­per­a­tion play being exe­cut­ed in the near future. And not nec­es­sar­i­ly a des­per­a­tion play by the Trump reelec­tion cam­paign but also any groups that may have had very high hopes for what they could achieve under a Trump pres­i­den­cy see­ing those hopes slip away. High hopes like war. War with Iran is an obvi­ous high hope held by a num­ber of actors in the Mid­dle East. Or Venezeu­la. But per­haps war with Chi­na is the biggest poten­tial prize, espe­cial­ly giv­en the ongo­ing desta­bi­liza­tion cam­paign on top of a glob­al pan­dem­ic that’s being blamed on Chi­na. War with Chi­na is some­thing the Mil­i­tary Indus­tri­al Com­plex has been sali­vat­ing over for years. Lots of planes, ships, even the poten­tial for space-based war­fare. It real­ly is a war­mon­gers dream sce­nario and the best oppor­tu­ni­ty for that to hap­pen (a Trump sec­ond term) may have just expe­ri­enced a near fatal blow. If any inter­ests — for­eign, domes­tic, or a mix of both — had any plans sit­ting in a draw­er some­where for how to pro­voke a major inter­na­tion­al mil­i­tary con­flict between the US a some tar­get coun­try now is the time to put those plans in action. It real­ly is kind of a now or nev­er moment for cer­tain mega-con­flicts.

    So with that in mind, it’s worth tak­ing a look back a fas­ci­nat­ing piece from The Gray Zone put out back in March about the mil­i­taris­tic think-tanks behind a set of reports that were jumped on by the West­ern press as evi­dence of mas­sive gulag-like forced labor camps in the Xin­jiang region of Chi­na tar­get­ing the Uyghur Mus­lim eth­nic minor­i­ty. The reports described what amounts to a mas­sive an gris­ly crime against human­i­ty. A crime against human­i­ty that com­pa­nies across the world are ben­e­fit­ing from because its alleged­ly West­ern firms that are uti­liz­ing this slave labor. It’s the kind of nar­ra­tive that can osten­si­bly unite the world against Chi­na and jus­ti­fy almost any sort of upcom­ing con­flict as a fight for the lib­er­a­tion of a peo­ple under­go­ing what amount to geno­cide. So, of course, it turns out that these reports are based on com­plete garbage and out­right fab­ri­ca­tions and the enti­ties behind them are a com­bi­na­tion of cult apol­o­gist and NATO-fund­ed think-tanks.

    One of the think-tanks, the Aus­tralian Strate­gic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (ASPI), put out a report on March 1 enti­tled, “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-edu­ca­tion,’ forced labour and sur­veil­lance beyond Xin­jiang.” The report is thin on sources and turns out to rely heav­i­ly on anony­mous alle­ga­tions found on a far right blog called Bit­ter Win­ter. The blog is a project of the Cen­ter for Stud­ies on New Reli­gions (CESNUR), an Italy-based group ded­i­cat­ed to fight­ing “anti-cult ter­ror­ism”. Yes, it’s a group ded­i­cat­ed to defend­ing cults. Cults like Aum Shin­rikyo and Falun Gong. CENSUR is found­ed by Vat­i­can schol­ar Mas­si­mo Intro­vi­gne, an indi­vid­ual to deep con­nec­tions to Ital­ian fas­cists and the far right.

    CENSUR isn’t the only reli­gious extrem­ism tie to this sto­ry. The ASPI report was pre­ced­ed by two ear­li­er stud­ies put out by Adri­an Zena, senior fel­low in Chi­na stud­ies at the far right Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion. As we’ll see, Zenz is a far-right fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian who oppos­es homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der equal­i­ty, sup­ports “scrip­tur­al spank­ing” of chil­dren, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na and relies on extreme­ly shod­dy evi­dence and method­olo­gies.

    The sec­ond report recent­ly put out by a mil­i­taris­tic think-tank that mak­ing alle­ga­tions about slave labor camps that got a lot of atten­tion by West­ern gov­ern­ments was put out by the DC-based Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS). Like ASPI, CSIS is exten­sive­ly fund­ed by the US gov­ern­ment and allied gov­ern­ments around the world, along with fund­ing from weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers, petro­le­um inter­ests, and banks. In 2019, CSIS was exposed to have host­ed a secret meet­ing where US and Latin Amer­i­can offi­cials dis­cussed a pos­si­ble mil­i­tary inva­sion of Venezuela. These are the kinds of groups that have been heav­i­ly pro­mot­ing the kind of nar­ra­tive that could be used to jus­ti­fy a major con­flict pred­i­cat­ed on human­i­tar­i­an grounds: mil­i­taris­tic think-tanks, reli­gious zealots, and reli­gious zealot apol­o­gists:

    The Gray Zone

    ‘Forced labor’ sto­ries on Chi­na brought to you by US gov, NATO, arms indus­try to dri­ve Cold War PR blitz

    By Ajit Singh
    March 26, 2020

    A recent surge in sto­ries in the West­ern press accuse Chi­na of imple­ment­ing an oppres­sive pro­gram of “forced labor” against the country’s Uyghur Mus­lim eth­nic minor­i­ty. The titan­ic crime Chi­na is accused of has been called “Xinjiang’s new slav­ery.” This alleged coer­cive sys­tem is said to encom­pass more than 80,000 labor­ers and impli­cate the sup­ply chains of 83 glob­al brands, includ­ing Apple, Ama­zon, Nike, BMW, Gap, Sam­sung, Sony, and Volk­swa­gen.

    Fea­tured in West­ern news out­lets from For­eign Pol­i­cy to the Wash­ing­ton Post to Democ­ra­cy Now!, the reports rely on a series of ques­tion­able stud­ies by pur­port­ed­ly “inde­pen­dent, non­par­ti­san” think tanks and crank experts backed by the West’s mil­i­tary-intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus. Build­ing upon the dubi­ous but end­less­ly repeat­ed claims that Chi­na is detain­ing mil­lions of Uyghurs Mus­lims, these stud­ies argue that “forced labor” is the “next step” in China’s tyran­ni­cal cam­paign against the eth­nic minor­i­ty.

    The Aus­tralian Strate­gic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (ASPI) and Wash­ing­ton, DC-based Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) are the main insti­tu­tions respon­si­ble for the forced labor stud­ies. The reports have also relied heav­i­ly on an evan­gel­i­cal reli­gious fanat­ic billed as the “lead­ing expert” on Xin­jiang, Adri­an Zenz, who has said he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na.

    A close look at the reports churned out by these bod­ies reveal seri­ous bias­es and cred­i­bil­i­ty gaps that West­ern media will­ful­ly ignores in its bid to paint Chi­na as the world’s worst human rights vio­la­tor.

    Both ASPI and CSIS are right-wing, mil­i­taris­tic think tanks fund­ed by US and West­ern gov­ern­ments, mega-cor­po­ra­tions, and an eye-pop­ping array of weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers. As pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed by The Gray­zone, Adri­an Zenz is a far-right fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian whose ques­tion­able but incen­di­ary accu­sa­tions against Chi­na have led to the West­ern press crow­ing him as the lead­ing inter­na­tion­al “expert” on Xin­jiang. Zenz’s most recent claims of “forced labor” were pub­lished by a “jour­nal” found­ed and man­aged by US and NATO mil­i­tary oper­a­tives.

    Main sources in this sto­ry, which is part of a wider Cold War PR blitz:-ASPI, a “think tank” run by Aus­trali­a’s Defense Depart­ment-Adri­an Zenz, a far-right End Timer from the US-backed Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism ‑Uyghur Human Rights Project, a US-fund­ed sep­a­ratist lob­by­ing oper­a­tion https://t.co/ibr5zDvlJ5— Max Blu­men­thal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 8, 2020

    The lat­est alle­ga­tions against Chi­na appear to form part of a PR blitz seek­ing to esca­late Washington’s new Cold War and regime change efforts against Bei­jing.

    Short­ly fol­low­ing the release of these reports, US Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress­man Jim McGov­ern announced that he would be intro­duc­ing a new bill which would ban all US imports from Xin­jiang. McGov­ern is an ardent sup­port­er of the World Uyghur Con­gress (WUC), a US-backed, far-right regime change net­work seek­ing the over­throw of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. He even pre­sent­ed WUC Pres­i­dent Dolkun Isa with the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democracy’s 2019 Democ­ra­cy Award.

    BREAKING: U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive McGov­ern announces Uyghur Forced Labor Pre­ven­tion Act, which would ***BAN ALL IMPORTS FROM XINJIANG*** to the Unit­ed States! Bill to be intro­duced short­ly. pic.twitter.com/8alcyghvSu— Adri­an Zenz (@adrianzenz) March 6, 2020

    On March 9, US law­mak­ers intro­duced the Uyghur Forced Labor Pre­ven­tion Act, co-spon­sored by McGov­ern and Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio, which would effec­tive­ly ban all imports from Xin­jiang. The pro­posed act would cod­i­fy into US law a “rebut­table pre­sump­tion” that “assumes that all goods man­u­fac­tured in Xin­jiang are made with forced labor and there­fore banned […] unless the com­mis­sion­er of U.S. Cus­toms and Bor­der Pro­tec­tion cer­ti­fies oth­er­wise.” The bill also calls for the US Pres­i­dent to impose sanc­tions on “any for­eign per­son” who engages in “forced labor” in Xin­jiang.

    Even puta­tive­ly pro­gres­sive news out­lets have joined the fren­zy, with The Nation and Democ­ra­cy Now! uncrit­i­cal­ly par­rot­ing these stud­ies with no men­tion of their rela­tions to the US and West­ern gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary con­trac­tors. Fur­ther­more, both of these media plat­forms inter­viewed mem­bers of the WUC-affil­i­at­ed Uyghur Human Rights Project, Mustafa Aksu and Nury Turkel respec­tive­ly, to com­ment on this sto­ry ?— again, with no men­tion or con­cern for their exten­sive ties to the US regime-change estab­lish­ment.

    ‘Inde­pen­dent’ Aus­tralian think tank fund­ed by US, NATO, and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers

    The three reports relied upon in the recent “forced labor” media cov­er­age are authored by the Aus­tralian Strate­gic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (ASPI), Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), and Adri­an Zenz. While pre­sent­ed by the West­ern press as impar­tial, expert assess­ments, a clos­er look rais­es seri­ous con­cerns about the bias­es and cred­i­bil­i­ty of these “stud­ies.”

    On March 1, ASPI pub­lished a pol­i­cy brief, titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-edu­ca­tion,’ forced labour and sur­veil­lance beyond Xin­jiang.” The paper trig­gered the renewed round of West­ern media accu­sa­tions against Chi­na.

    While ASPI describes itself as a “an inde­pen­dent, non-par­ti­san think tank” — a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that has been par­rot­ed by the West­ern press — it is, in fact, a right-wing, mil­i­taris­tic out­fit that was found­ed by the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment in 2001 and is fund­ed by the country’s Depart­ment of Defence.

    ASPI is spon­sored by a host of weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Raytheon Aus­tralia, Lock­heed Mar­tin, Northrop Grum­man, MBDA Mis­sile Sys­tems, Saab AB, Thales, and Austalia.

    Iron­i­cal­ly, Australia’s For­eign Influ­ence Trans­paren­cy Scheme — enact­ed by the cen­ter-right Lib­er­al Par­ty to mon­i­tor alleged threat of “Chi­nese polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence” in the coun­try — has revealed ASPI’exten­sive sources of for­eign fund­ing, includ­ing the US State Depart­ment, UK For­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office (FCO), gov­ern­ment of Japan, and NATO.

    ASPI blast­ed for being US lack­ey, pro­mot­ing new Cold War with Chi­na

    A recent pro­file of ASPI in the Aus­tralian Finan­cial Review notes that the orga­ni­za­tion has “been accused of foment­ing anti-Chi­na hys­te­ria, to the alleged ben­e­fit of its bene­fac­tors.” ASPI has been so bel­li­cose it has come in for crit­i­cism from major fig­ures in Aus­tralian for­eign pol­i­cy cir­cles.

    For­mer Aus­tralian For­eign Min­is­ter Bob Carr has slammed ASPI for push­ing a “one-sided, pro-Amer­i­can view of the world”, while the for­mer Aus­tralian ambas­sador to Chi­na Geoff Raby added that ASPI is “the archi­tect of the Chi­na threat the­o­ry in Aus­tralia”.

    Aus­tralian Sen­a­tor Kim Carr of the Labour Par­ty has echoed the crit­i­cism of ASPI, con­demn­ing the think tank for seek­ing to “pro­mote a new cold war with Chi­na” in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US. In a Feb­ru­ary 2020 par­lia­men­tary ses­sion, Carr warned that “[i]n parts of the [Aus­tralian] defence and secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, there are hawks intent on fight­ing a new cold war” with Chi­na, high­light­ing ASPI’s exten­sive fund­ing from the US State Department’s Glob­al Engage­ment Cen­ter, head­ed by for­mer CIA offi­cer and Navy fight­er pilot Lea Gabrielle.

    Carr said ASPI has received near­ly $450,000 in fund­ing from the US State Depart­ment for the 2019 to 2020 finan­cial year. (ASPI claims that the amount is “less than half” of the fig­ure stat­ed by Carr.)

    These crit­i­cisms of ASPI appear to be well found­ed. Since 2012, ASPI has been head­ed by Peter Jen­nings, a for­mer Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defense offi­cial. Jen­nings is an ardent advo­cate of US impe­ri­al­ism who has staunch­ly defend­ed the Iraq War, sup­port­ed regime change in Syr­ia, and point­ed to Ukraine and Iraq to argue that “the West is set­ting the bar for a mil­i­tary response too high.”

    Jen­nings believes that “the rise of Lenin­ist autoc­ra­cies” threat­en Aus­tralia and glob­al peace, apply­ing the label to Chi­na and North Korea, and, baf­fling­ly, Rus­sia and Iran. He is an ardent advo­cate of expand­ing and mak­ing “bul­let­proof” Australia’s mil­i­tary alliance with the US and “let­ting the Bei­jing Bul­ly know this is our neigh­bour­hood”, includ­ing expand­ing joint naval pres­ence in the Indi­an Ocean.

    Jen­nings and ASPI have also pushed for Aus­tralia to join Washington’s glob­al cam­paign to ban Chi­nese tele­com giant Huawei from 5G net­works around the world. Aus­tralia banned China’s Huawei and ZTE from pro­vid­ing the coun­try with 5G tech­nol­o­gy in 2018.

    ASPI’s ‘forced labor’ report relies on spec­u­la­tion and sen­sa­tion­al­ism

    On March 1, ASPI pub­lished a pol­i­cy brief titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-edu­ca­tion,’ forced labour and sur­veil­lance beyond Xin­jiang.” The report was fund­ed by the UK For­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office (FCO), which over­sees Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters (GCHQ) the UK equiv­a­lent to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, and the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vices (SIS) com­mon­ly known as MI6.

    As Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blu­men­thal pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed for The Gray­zone, the FCO backs the Integri­ty Ini­tia­tive, a pro­pa­gan­da mill which smears left-wing fig­ures across the West, includ­ing for­mer UK Labour Par­ty leader Jere­my Cor­byn.

    The lead author of the report is ASPI researcher Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, a Chi­nese-Aus­tralian jour­nal­ist and stand-up come­di­an, who pre­vi­ous­ly stud­ied at the Har­ry S. Tru­man Research Insti­tute in Israel. In her pub­lished work, Xu has defend­ed the far-right Falun Gong cult and char­ac­ter­ized Chi­nese-Aus­tralians who oppose the US-backed, anti-gov­ern­ment protest move­ment in Hong Kong as “brain­washed” pup­pets of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment and vio­lent thugs.

    Open­ing with the high­ly sus­pect claim that Chi­na is detain­ing mil­lions of Uyghur Mus­lims, the ASPI study con­tends that China’s “re-edu­ca­tion cam­paign” is “enter­ing a new phase” in which at least 80,000 Uyghurs “are now being forced to work in fac­to­ries” through a pro­gram trans­fer­ring Uyghur labor­ers to com­pa­nies with­in Xini­jang and to oth­er provinces. The fac­to­ries employ­ing these work­ers are alleged to be part of the sup­ply chain of 83 major cor­po­ra­tions.

    The study con­tends that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has imple­ment­ed the coer­cive pro­gram under the guise of pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion and gen­er­at­ing employ­ment for impov­er­ished sec­tors of the pop­u­la­tion. The authors ignore the fact that China’s pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion efforts are praised by devel­op­ment insti­tu­tions around the world for lift­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple out of pover­ty and pre­sume it to be a pho­ny pre­text.

    While Beijing’s pol­i­cy in Xin­jiang is indis­putably focused on com­bat­ing reli­gious extrem­ism, sep­a­ratism and polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty — the gov­ern­ment open­ly admits to this — the authors’ claims of a dystopi­an forced labor regime seem to rely more on sen­sa­tion­al­ism and spec­u­la­tion than con­crete evi­dence.

    For exam­ple:

    * The authors claim that work­ers are tight­ly con­trolled, with “lit­tle free­dom of move­ment” and “iso­lat­ed from their fam­i­lies.” As evi­dence, they cite a Chi­nese-lan­guage media report which fea­tures a sto­ry about a migrant work­er from Xin­jiang who obtained full-time indus­tri­al employ­ment in the urban province of Shan­dong through the government’s employ­ment pro­gram. The woman describes the chal­lenges of work­ing far away from her fam­i­ly in Xin­jiang but empha­sizes that she has used the pro­gram to earn more income and pay for house­hold ren­o­va­tions and new live­stock back home. What’s more, the woman states that while she ini­tial­ly want­ed work through the pro­gram for only one year, she now wants to work for at least three years giv­en the income it allows her to earn, indi­cat­ing that she is vol­un­tar­i­ly choos­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gram for eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit.
    * Through­out the report, the authors refer to hous­ing pro­vid­ed for migrant work­ers as “seg­re­gat­ed dor­mi­to­ries.” On the one hand, the authors decry the “seg­re­ga­tion” and “iso­la­tion” of the Uyghur work­ers who “speak almost no Man­darin, so com­mu­ni­ca­tion with locals is large­ly non-exis­tent,” but denounce Man­darin lan­guage class­es offered to work­ers as insid­i­ous “polit­i­cal indoc­tri­na­tion.”
    * The authors claim that “work­ers’ ide­ol­o­gy and behav­iour are close­ly mon­i­tored,” cit­ing the exis­tence of a “psy­cho­log­i­cal con­sult­ing” ser­vice.
    * The authors searched for “a vari­ety of key­words relat­ing to Xin­jiang labour trans­fers” on the Chi­nese search engine Baidu and cite the increase in search results over time as indi­cat­ing the increas­ing impor­tance of the pro­gram to the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. This would be akin to ana­lyz­ing US pol­i­cy based on the vol­ume of Google search results.

    Ulti­mate­ly, only two pages and a case study of a sin­gle fac­to­ry are devot­ed to estab­lish­ing the case of “forced labor”, with the vast major­i­ty of the 56-page report focused on con­nect­ing this alleged invol­un­tary pro­gram with the major West­ern cor­po­ra­tions and pres­sur­ing them to dis­en­gage with Chi­na.

    ASPI’s ‘forced labor’ report relies on far-right blog of reli­gious fanat­ics

    The ASPI report presents no orig­i­nal evi­dence from work­ers who have been forced to work in this pro­gram, but cites anony­mous “tes­ti­monies” from an obscure, far-right online blog. Called Bit­ter Win­ter, the blog is a project of the Cen­ter for Stud­ies on New Reli­gions (CESNUR), an Italy-based orga­ni­za­tion that oppos­es what it calls “anti-cult ter­ror­ism”.

    Bit­ter Win­ter and its par­ent orga­ni­za­tion have vig­or­ous­ly defend­ed fanat­i­cal Chi­nese reli­gious move­ments includ­ing Falun Gong and the Church of the Almighty God, or East­ern Light­ning. The lat­ter is a Chi­nese-Chris­t­ian sect which believes that Jesus Christ has been rein­car­nat­ed as a Chi­nese woman cur­rent­ly liv­ing in Queens, New York.

    East­ern Light­ning is noto­ri­ous for mass kid­nap­pings, assaults, and mur­der­ous vio­lence against per­ceived “demons” or non-believ­ers, includ­ing blud­geon­ing a woman to death for refus­ing to give recruiters her phone num­ber in 2014. Dur­ing the 2019 Israeli elec­tions, Buz­zfeed report­ed that Twit­ter sus­pend­ed dozens of Hebrew-lan­guage accounts run by the cult for “ampli­fy­ing polit­i­cal mes­sages for right-wing [Israeli] politi­cians.”

    CESNUR has also tak­en up the cause of the Japan­ese dooms­day cult, Aum Shin­rikyo which was respon­si­ble for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack. CESNUR board mem­ber J. Gor­don Melton was paid by Aum Shin­rikyo to trav­el to Japan to doc­u­ment alleged human rights vio­la­tions against the group.

    CESNUR founder, Mas­si­mo Intro­vi­gne, is the edi­tor-in-chief of Bit­ter Win­ter. Intro­vi­gne is an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious zealot who con­tends that Chris­tians are “the most per­se­cut­ed group in the world” due to abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and hate speech laws which he con­tends supress their reli­gious free­dom.

    Intro­vi­gne con­sid­ers com­mu­nism to be an exis­ten­tial threat to reli­gion, writ­ing that “[n]egotiating with Bei­jing is like the prover­bial sup­ping with the Dev­il.” Intro­vi­gne reg­u­lar­ly appears in videos pro­duced by Church of the Almighty God/Eastern Light­ning advo­cat­ing on their behalf and claim­ing the cult is the vic­tim of “pro­pa­gan­da” and “fake news”.

    Intro­vi­gne has deep roots in the reli­gious far-right, and was a long-time mem­ber and for­mer vice pres­i­dent of the Ital­ian orga­ni­za­tion Allean­za Cat­toli­ca, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the group from 1972 until 2016. Dur­ing his time with the orga­ni­za­tion, Allean­za Cat­toli­ca advo­cat­ed for Chilean mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet to be released fol­low­ing his arrest in the UK; denounced the pro­gres­sive World Social Forum as a “lab­o­ra­to­ry for sub­ver­sion”; and endorsed the North­ern League, a far-right, anti-immi­grant, Islam­o­pho­bic polit­i­cal par­ty, in Ital­ian elec­tions.

    The “direc­tor-in-charge” of Bit­ter Win­ter is Mar­co Respin­ti, a far-right Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive who describes his work as “devot­ed to serve and pro­tect the West­ern her­itage of life, lib­er­ties, and prop­er­ty” and work­ing towards a soci­ety of “lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment, free enter­prise, nat­ur­al fam­i­ly, and tra­di­tion­al moral val­ues.” Respin­ti is a Senior fel­low at the Rus­sell Kirk Cen­ter for Cul­tur­al Renew­al and a found­ing mem­ber of the Cen­ter for Euro­pean Renew­al, two ardent­ly con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions, and edi­tor-in-chief of the anti-gay, anti-choice pub­li­ca­tion Inter­na­tion­al Fam­i­ly News.

    Aus­tralian media sti­fle crit­i­cism of ASPI report, manip­u­late inter­view sub­jects

    As they push for­ward with their anti-Chi­na fren­zy, West­ern media out­lets are not con­cerned with the seri­ous issues relat­ed to the bias­es and cred­i­bil­i­ty of the ASPI report, in fact, they seem intent on sti­fling any crit­i­cism of their nar­ra­tive.

    Short­ly fol­low­ing the release of the report, the state-run Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (ABC) aired a pro­file of lead author, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, as part of their “Aus­tralian Sto­ry” doc­u­men­tary series. Accord­ing to Ye Xue, a Chi­nese-Aus­tralian PhD stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney, who was an inter­vie­wee on the pro­gram, the broad­cast­er pushed him to “praise Vicky’s research on Xin­jiang” and made it clear “that they [did] not need my neg­a­tive com­ments” or to hear that he dis­agreed with Xu.

    I was an inter­vie­wee on @AustralianStory. The inter­view­er sig­naled me that they not need my neg­a­tive com­ments on Vicky Xu, even they are valid and the inter­view­er tried to push me to praise Vicky’s research on Xin­jiang.— Ye Xue (@XueYe90) March 10, 2020

    The silenc­ing of alter­na­tive view­points on Chi­na appears to be part of a larg­er trend with­in Aus­tralian media. Michael, a Chi­nese Mus­lim who lives in Aus­tralia and request­ed anonymi­ty to pro­tect him­self from reprisal by his employ­er, told The Gray­zone that Aus­tralian media out­lets often attempt to manip­u­late Chi­nese-Aus­tralians into echo­ing the offi­cial nar­ra­tive on Chi­na.

    “SBS, a tele­vi­sion net­work fund­ed by the [Aus­tralian] gov­ern­ment called me for an inter­view on Chi­nese Mus­lims in Aus­tralia,” Michael told The Gray­zone. “When I didn’t tell her what she want­ed, she asked me if my fam­i­ly was held hostage, in dan­ger or being coerced.”

    “She want­ed me to con­firm her nar­ra­tive that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment had oper­a­tives fol­low­ing me and were active­ly sup­press­ing me in Aus­tralia,” con­tin­ued Michael. “Any­way, she nev­er called back.”

    “There are more Chi­nese-Aus­tralians who’ve had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences. They seem to cast a wide net and hope to get some­one like Vicky Xu who will just con­firm all their nar­ra­tives.”

    Far-right Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist pub­lish­es ‘forced labor’ report in NATO pub­li­ca­tion

    The ASPI report fol­lowed two ear­li­er stud­ies. The first was authored by Adri­an Zenz, senior fel­low in Chi­na stud­ies at the far-right Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, which was estab­lished by the US gov­ern­ment in 1983.

    As Max Blu­men­thal and I pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed for The Gray­zone, Zenz is a far-right fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian who oppos­es homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der equal­i­ty, sup­ports “scrip­tur­al spank­ing” of chil­dren, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na. Zenz is one of the main sources behind the claim that Chi­na is detain­ing mil­lions of Uyghur Mus­lims, and he has been pro­mot­ed as the “lead­ing expert” on Xin­jiang by West­ern media because of the damn­ing claims he makes against the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

    How­ev­er, a clos­er look at Zenz’s work reveals that he relies on extreme­ly shod­dy evi­dence and method­olo­gies, includ­ing bas­ing his deten­tion esti­mate on a lone media report by an extrem­ist tele­vi­sion net­work that reg­u­lar­ly hosts fanat­i­cal anti-Semi­tes who describe Chi­na as “a nation of sav­ages, worse than the Jews” and call for “armed jihad” against the coun­try.

    In Decem­ber 2019, Zenz pub­lished a new “study” titled “Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Long-Term Scheme of Coer­cive Labor, Pover­ty Alle­vi­a­tion and Social Con­trol in Xin­jiang”, in which he accus­es Chi­na of imple­ment­ing a forced “wage-labor” regime against Uyghurs as the “next step” in Beijing’s “grand scheme” against the eth­nic minor­i­ty. Zenz calls for a “strong response” from the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing the divest­ment of West­ern and oth­er for­eign com­pa­nies from Chi­na.

    How­ev­er, as with his pre­vi­ous work, Zenz’s lat­est report is rid­dled with spec­u­la­tion, sen­sa­tion­al­ism, and inco­her­ence. Zenz begins his arti­cle with the con­tention that this nefar­i­ous, coer­cive pro­gram is “being imple­ment­ed under the […] guise of ‘pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion’” through high­er-income work, only to lat­er admit that the pro­gram, in fact, “achieve[s] nation­al pover­ty reduc­tion goals” and “promote[s] eco­nom­ic growth.”

    Zenz maligns what he calls the Chi­nese government’s aims to ensure “poor house­holds … have at least one per­son in sta­ble employ­ment” and pro­mote full-time, paid employ­ment. He argues that since China’s pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion efforts are “all-encom­pass­ing and involves lit­er­al­ly every sin­gle cit­i­zen” it must nec­es­sar­i­ly be forced because he spec­u­lates that “not every­one will want to be part of this rigid plan.”

    Zenz claims that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment aims to force every Uyghur and eth­nic minor­i­ty adult into slave labor and elim­i­nate tra­di­tion­al rur­al liveli­hoods and cul­ture. To sup­port his incen­di­ary claim, he cites a mun­dane munic­i­pal gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment that calls for achiev­ing pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion goals through voca­tion­al train­ing and employ­ment pro­grams, as well as ini­tia­tives like “envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion pro­grams,” “sub­si­dies in mon­e­tary form or ani­mals” for farm­ers, and “sup­port [for] small-scale self-employ­ment” or small busi­ness­es.

    Zenz’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of of the Chi­nese government’s pro­grams for pub­lic child­care and edu­ca­tion­al ser­vices for the chil­dren of work­ers offers a reveal­ing look at the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic nature of his claims:

    “While the par­ents are being herd­ed into full-time work, their chil­dren are put into full-time (at least full day-time) edu­ca­tion and train­ing set­tings. This includes chil­dren below preschool age (infants and tod­dlers), so that eth­nic minor­i­ty women are being ‘lib­er­at­ed’ and ‘freed’ to engage in full-time wage labor. Notably, both fac­to­ry and edu­ca­tion­al set­tings are essen­tial­ly state-con­trolled envi­ron­ments that facil­i­tate ongo­ing polit­i­cal indoc­tri­na­tion while bar­ring reli­gious prac­tices. As a result, the dis­so­lu­tion of tra­di­tion­al, reli­gious and fam­i­ly life is only a mat­ter of time.”

    Zenz describes full-time employ­ment and child­care ser­vices as “inhibit[ing] inter­gen­er­a­tional cul­tur­al trans­mis­sion” and pro­mot­ing “inter­gen­er­a­tional sep­a­ra­tion and social con­trol over fam­i­ly uni­ty”. Cit­ing a Chi­nese media report in which a moth­er describes how the child­care ser­vices “solved my prob­lem, now there are peo­ple who take care of my chil­dren, I can in peace go to work … very con­ve­nient,” Zenz denounces this as a “shock­ing exam­ple of this ‘lib­er­a­tion’ of women from their chil­dren”.

    Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Zenz’s flim­sy research on “forced labor” has not been pub­lished in a rep­utable aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal, but rather “The Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Risk,” a pub­li­ca­tion head­ed by for­mer NATO and US nation­al secu­ri­ty state oper­a­tives.

    The pub­li­ca­tion was found­ed by Anders Corr, whose bio describes him as “hav­ing worked for sev­er­al con­sul­tan­cies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Booz Allen Hamil­ton, Unit­ed States Army, Unit­ed States Pacif­ic Com­mand (USPACOM), Unit­ed States Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand Pacif­ic (USSOCPAC), Defense Intel­li­gence Agency (DIA), Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA), and the North Amer­i­can Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion (NATO).”

    The edi­tor of the pub­li­ca­tion is Neil Siviter, who “pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a Junior Pro­fes­sion­al Fel­low at the NATO Asso­ci­a­tion of Cana­da,” and “has also held var­i­ous intern­ship posi­tions with the Cana­di­an Gov­ern­ment [and] U.S. Con­sulate Gen­er­al Toron­to.”

    US mil­i­taris­tic think tank recy­cles shod­dy research in ‘forced labor’ report

    The final study accus­ing Chi­na of imple­ment­ing “forced labor” pro­grams against Uyghur Mus­lims was a report by the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) enti­tled, “Con­nect­ing the Dots in Xin­jiang: Forced Labor, Forced Assim­i­la­tion, and West­ern Sup­ply Chains”.

    Like ASPI, CSIS is a mil­i­taris­tic think tank fund­ed by the US gov­ern­ment and a host of mil­i­tary allies includ­ing the UK, Japan, Tai­wan, South Korea, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Cana­da, Aus­tralia, South Korea, Turkey, Ger­many, Italy, and the EU. CSIS also receives sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from a num­ber of weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers, fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tions, and banks.

    In April 2019, Gray­zone edi­tor Max Blu­men­thal exposed a secret meet­ing host­ed by CSIS, where US and Latin Amer­i­can offi­cials dis­cussed a pos­si­ble mil­i­tary inva­sion of Venezuela. That Novem­ber, The Grayzone’s Ben Nor­ton report­ed that CSIS host­ed a US con­gres­sion­al pan­el which out­lined the next phase of Washington’s dirty war against Syr­ia, includ­ing plans to occu­py Syr­i­an oil fields and block recon­struc­tion of the coun­try.

    In its “forced labor” report, CSIS offers lit­tle to no new infor­ma­tion, rely­ing instead on the work of Adri­an Zenz and undis­closed inter­views with anony­mous “detainees who were forced to work.”

    ...

    ————

    “‘Forced labor’ sto­ries on Chi­na brought to you by US gov, NATO, arms indus­try to dri­ve Cold War PR blitz” by Ajit Singh; The Gray Zone; 03/26/2020

    “The Aus­tralian Strate­gic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (ASPI) and Wash­ing­ton, DC-based Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) are the main insti­tu­tions respon­si­ble for the forced labor stud­ies. The reports have also relied heav­i­ly on an evan­gel­i­cal reli­gious fanat­ic billed as the “lead­ing expert” on Xin­jiang, Adri­an Zenz, who has said he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na.

    A pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign that is ulti­mate­ly based on the unhinged ram­blings of a man who claims he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na. It’s not exact­ly a sound foun­da­tion for start­ing a major conflict...unless you hap­pen to share Zen­z’s reli­gious fer­vor. But these are the inter­ests that nonethe­less were wide­ly treat­ed as cred­i­ble. Cred­i­bil­i­ty that’s, in part, derived from the fact that groups like ASPI are heav­i­ly fund­ed by West­ern gov­ern­ments. In the case of the March 1, ASPI report, it was the UK For­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office that fund­ed the report:

    ...
    On March 1, ASPI pub­lished a pol­i­cy brief, titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-edu­ca­tion,’ forced labour and sur­veil­lance beyond Xin­jiang.” The paper trig­gered the renewed round of West­ern media accu­sa­tions against Chi­na.

    While ASPI describes itself as a “an inde­pen­dent, non-par­ti­san think tank” — a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that has been par­rot­ed by the West­ern press — it is, in fact, a right-wing, mil­i­taris­tic out­fit that was found­ed by the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment in 2001 and is fund­ed by the country’s Depart­ment of Defence.

    ASPI is spon­sored by a host of weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Raytheon Aus­tralia, Lock­heed Mar­tin, Northrop Grum­man, MBDA Mis­sile Sys­tems, Saab AB, Thales, and Austalia.

    Iron­i­cal­ly, Australia’s For­eign Influ­ence Trans­paren­cy Scheme — enact­ed by the cen­ter-right Lib­er­al Par­ty to mon­i­tor alleged threat of “Chi­nese polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence” in the coun­try — has revealed ASPI’exten­sive sources of for­eign fund­ing, includ­ing the US State Depart­ment, UK For­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office (FCO), gov­ern­ment of Japan, and NATO.

    ...

    Carr said ASPI has received near­ly $450,000 in fund­ing from the US State Depart­ment for the 2019 to 2020 finan­cial year. (ASPI claims that the amount is “less than half” of the fig­ure stat­ed by Carr.)

    These crit­i­cisms of ASPI appear to be well found­ed. Since 2012, ASPI has been head­ed by Peter Jen­nings, a for­mer Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defense offi­cial. Jen­nings is an ardent advo­cate of US impe­ri­al­ism who has staunch­ly defend­ed the Iraq War, sup­port­ed regime change in Syr­ia, and point­ed to Ukraine and Iraq to argue that “the West is set­ting the bar for a mil­i­tary response too high.”

    ...

    On March 1, ASPI pub­lished a pol­i­cy brief titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-edu­ca­tion,’ forced labour and sur­veil­lance beyond Xin­jiang.” The report was fund­ed by the UK For­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office (FCO), which over­sees Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters (GCHQ) the UK equiv­a­lent to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, and the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vices (SIS) com­mon­ly known as MI6.
    ...

    Then there’s the fact that the ASPI report relied heav­i­ly on anony­mous claims that showed up on the Bit­ter Win­ter blog of Mas­si­mo Intro­vi­gne’s CESNUR:

    ...
    The lead author of the report is ASPI researcher Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, a Chi­nese-Aus­tralian jour­nal­ist and stand-up come­di­an, who pre­vi­ous­ly stud­ied at the Har­ry S. Tru­man Research Insti­tute in Israel. In her pub­lished work, Xu has defend­ed the far-right Falun Gong cult and char­ac­ter­ized Chi­nese-Aus­tralians who oppose the US-backed, anti-gov­ern­ment protest move­ment in Hong Kong as “brain­washed” pup­pets of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment and vio­lent thugs.

    ...

    Ulti­mate­ly, only two pages and a case study of a sin­gle fac­to­ry are devot­ed to estab­lish­ing the case of “forced labor”, with the vast major­i­ty of the 56-page report focused on con­nect­ing this alleged invol­un­tary pro­gram with the major West­ern cor­po­ra­tions and pres­sur­ing them to dis­en­gage with Chi­na.

    ...

    The ASPI report presents no orig­i­nal evi­dence from work­ers who have been forced to work in this pro­gram, but cites anony­mous “tes­ti­monies” from an obscure, far-right online blog. Called Bit­ter Win­ter, the blog is a project of the Cen­ter for Stud­ies on New Reli­gions (CESNUR), an Italy-based orga­ni­za­tion that oppos­es what it calls “anti-cult ter­ror­ism”.

    Bit­ter Win­ter and its par­ent orga­ni­za­tion have vig­or­ous­ly defend­ed fanat­i­cal Chi­nese reli­gious move­ments includ­ing Falun Gong and the Church of the Almighty God, or East­ern Light­ning. The lat­ter is a Chi­nese-Chris­t­ian sect which believes that Jesus Christ has been rein­car­nat­ed as a Chi­nese woman cur­rent­ly liv­ing in Queens, New York.

    ...

    CESNUR founder, Mas­si­mo Intro­vi­gne, is the edi­tor-in-chief of Bit­ter Win­ter. Intro­vi­gne is an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious zealot who con­tends that Chris­tians are “the most per­se­cut­ed group in the world” due to abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and hate speech laws which he con­tends supress their reli­gious free­dom.

    ...

    Intro­vi­gne has deep roots in the reli­gious far-right, and was a long-time mem­ber and for­mer vice pres­i­dent of the Ital­ian orga­ni­za­tion Allean­za Cat­toli­ca, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the group from 1972 until 2016. Dur­ing his time with the orga­ni­za­tion, Allean­za Cat­toli­ca advo­cat­ed for Chilean mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet to be released fol­low­ing his arrest in the UK; denounced the pro­gres­sive World Social Forum as a “lab­o­ra­to­ry for sub­ver­sion”; and endorsed the North­ern League, a far-right, anti-immi­grant, Islam­o­pho­bic polit­i­cal par­ty, in Ital­ian elec­tions.
    ...

    But CENSUR isn’t the only source of reli­gious zealotry involved in putting togeth­er these kinds of reports. The March ASPI report fol­lowed two ear­li­er stud­ies authored by Adri­an Zenz mak­ing sim­i­lar shod­dy claims also based on far right sources:

    ...
    The ASPI report fol­lowed two ear­li­er stud­ies. The first was authored by Adri­an Zenz, senior fel­low in Chi­na stud­ies at the far-right Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, which was estab­lished by the US gov­ern­ment in 1983.

    As Max Blu­men­thal and I pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed for The Gray­zone, Zenz is a far-right fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian who oppos­es homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der equal­i­ty, sup­ports “scrip­tur­al spank­ing” of chil­dren, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mis­sion” against Chi­na. Zenz is one of the main sources behind the claim that Chi­na is detain­ing mil­lions of Uyghur Mus­lims, and he has been pro­mot­ed as the “lead­ing expert” on Xin­jiang by West­ern media because of the damn­ing claims he makes against the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

    How­ev­er, a clos­er look at Zenz’s work reveals that he relies on extreme­ly shod­dy evi­dence and method­olo­gies, includ­ing bas­ing his deten­tion esti­mate on a lone media report by an extrem­ist tele­vi­sion net­work that reg­u­lar­ly hosts fanat­i­cal anti-Semi­tes who describe Chi­na as “a nation of sav­ages, worse than the Jews” and call for “armed jihad” against the coun­try.

    In Decem­ber 2019, Zenz pub­lished a new “study” titled “Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Long-Term Scheme of Coer­cive Labor, Pover­ty Alle­vi­a­tion and Social Con­trol in Xin­jiang”, in which he accus­es Chi­na of imple­ment­ing a forced “wage-labor” regime against Uyghurs as the “next step” in Beijing’s “grand scheme” against the eth­nic minor­i­ty. Zenz calls for a “strong response” from the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing the divest­ment of West­ern and oth­er for­eign com­pa­nies from Chi­na.

    How­ev­er, as with his pre­vi­ous work, Zenz’s lat­est report is rid­dled with spec­u­la­tion, sen­sa­tion­al­ism, and inco­her­ence. Zenz begins his arti­cle with the con­tention that this nefar­i­ous, coer­cive pro­gram is “being imple­ment­ed under the […] guise of ‘pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion’” through high­er-income work, only to lat­er admit that the pro­gram, in fact, “achieve[s] nation­al pover­ty reduc­tion goals” and “promote[s] eco­nom­ic growth.”

    Zenz maligns what he calls the Chi­nese government’s aims to ensure “poor house­holds … have at least one per­son in sta­ble employ­ment” and pro­mote full-time, paid employ­ment. He argues that since China’s pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion efforts are “all-encom­pass­ing and involves lit­er­al­ly every sin­gle cit­i­zen” it must nec­es­sar­i­ly be forced because he spec­u­lates that “not every­one will want to be part of this rigid plan.”

    Zenz claims that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment aims to force every Uyghur and eth­nic minor­i­ty adult into slave labor and elim­i­nate tra­di­tion­al rur­al liveli­hoods and cul­ture. To sup­port his incen­di­ary claim, he cites a mun­dane munic­i­pal gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment that calls for achiev­ing pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion goals through voca­tion­al train­ing and employ­ment pro­grams, as well as ini­tia­tives like “envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion pro­grams,” “sub­si­dies in mon­e­tary form or ani­mals” for farm­ers, and “sup­port [for] small-scale self-employ­ment” or small busi­ness­es.

    ...

    Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Zenz’s flim­sy research on “forced labor” has not been pub­lished in a rep­utable aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal, but rather “The Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Risk,” a pub­li­ca­tion head­ed by for­mer NATO and US nation­al secu­ri­ty state oper­a­tives.
    ...

    Final­ly, there’s the report put out by the CSIS that makes the same basic set of alle­ga­tions as the ASPI report: that a mas­sive forced labor crime against human­i­ty is tak­ing place in Xin­jiang sup­ply­ing prod­ucts to West­ern cor­po­ra­tions. This is the same think-tank that host­ed a secret meet­ing last year to dis­cuss regime change oper­a­tions in Venezuela:

    ...
    The final study accus­ing Chi­na of imple­ment­ing “forced labor” pro­grams against Uyghur Mus­lims was a report by the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS) enti­tled, “Con­nect­ing the Dots in Xin­jiang: Forced Labor, Forced Assim­i­la­tion, and West­ern Sup­ply Chains”.

    Like ASPI, CSIS is a mil­i­taris­tic think tank fund­ed by the US gov­ern­ment and a host of mil­i­tary allies includ­ing the UK, Japan, Tai­wan, South Korea, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Cana­da, Aus­tralia, South Korea, Turkey, Ger­many, Italy, and the EU. CSIS also receives sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing from a num­ber of weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers, fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tions, and banks.

    In April 2019, Gray­zone edi­tor Max Blu­men­thal exposed a secret meet­ing host­ed by CSIS, where US and Latin Amer­i­can offi­cials dis­cussed a pos­si­ble mil­i­tary inva­sion of Venezuela. That Novem­ber, The Grayzone’s Ben Nor­ton report­ed that CSIS host­ed a US con­gres­sion­al pan­el which out­lined the next phase of Washington’s dirty war against Syr­ia, includ­ing plans to occu­py Syr­i­an oil fields and block recon­struc­tion of the coun­try.
    ...

    So as we can see, over the last cou­ple of years we’ve seen a mul­ti­pronged push by West­ern gov­ern­ment-fund­ed mil­i­taris­tic think-tanks to pump out nar­ra­tive of crimes against human­i­ty in Chi­na. And not only are is this pro­pa­gan­da thin­ly sourced based large­ly on anony­mous claims but those anony­mous claims appear to have come from far right reli­gious zealots. This is what it looks like when the MIC ‘finds God’.

    As as, this kind of a pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign is alarm­ing enough. But now that we find our­selves in the extreme­ly ten­u­ous sit­u­a­tion of COVID-pos­i­tive Trump a month before an elec­tion that is look­ing to be a dis­as­ter — a dis­as­ter for Trump and a dis­as­ter for the US’s stand­ing in the world in gen­er­al — these kinds of dis­turb­ing sto­ries about gov­ern­ment-con­nect­ed mil­i­taris­tic think-tanks team­ing up with reli­gious zealots to foment WWIII are the kinds of sto­ries should take on an extra lev­el of rel­e­vance. Sure, it’s not entire­ly clear what exact­ly these groups could do to foment a major con­flict in short order but when we’re talk­ing about groups deeply con­nect­ed to both the far right and mul­ti­ple mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex­es you can be sure they have a dis­turb­ing num­ber of options at their dis­pos­al. And if you’re intent on start­ing some­thing as extreme as WWIII you’re prob­a­bly will­ing to do a lot of extreme things to make that hap­pen too.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 2, 2020, 2:56 pm
  2. Chi­na has found itself in a new diplo­mat­ic spat. With Lithua­nia. Yes, Lithua­nia, a coun­try that most­ly just trades with its EU neigh­bors, has decid­ed to pick a fight with Chi­na. Specif­i­cal­ly, by trolling Chi­na by doing the one thing that is absolute­ly guar­an­teed to trig­ger a response and allow­ing Tai­wan to open its embassy using the title “Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office”, instead of “Taipei Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office”. In response, Chi­na is block­ing exports to Lithua­nia, with the whole thing threat­en­ing to turn into a Chi­na-EU trade dis­pute.

    On one lev­el, the sto­ry has a lot of the­mat­ic echoes to the sto­ry of far right Ukrain­ian groups like the Azov Bat­tal­ion trav­el­ing to Hong Kong to net­work with the anti-Chi­nese pro­tes­tors back in 2019. There’s also his­tor­i­cal res­o­nance with the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nation­s’s role in the UNPO and relat­ed Chi­na-desta­bi­liza­tion efforts of the World Uyghur Con­gress.

    But as we’re going to see, there’s anoth­er dis­turb­ing angle here. Because while get­ting the EU to back it up is cer­tain­ly part of Lithua­ni­a’s plan here, the tar­get audi­ence may actu­al­ly be in DC. It appears that Lithua­nia has adopt­ed a omi­nous­ly dan­ger­ous new strat­e­gy for ensur­ing DC main­tains a keen focus on con­tain­ing Rus­sia with­out get­ting too dis­tract­ed by the new focus on con­tain­ing Chi­na: by open­ly help­ing DC in its Chi­na-bash­ing, Lithua­nia hopes to keep the US focused on Rus­sia. And as we’re going to see, it’s a strat­e­gy that clear­ly has sup­port in DC, with exten­sive bipar­ti­san sup­port for Lithua­ni­a’s spat with Chi­na hav­ing already been expressed by Con­gress. And that’s why this sto­ry about Lithua­ni­a’s deep­en­ing spat with Chi­na isn’t real­ly about Lithua­nia and Chi­na. It’s a sto­ry about Lithua­nia play­ing ball with a pro-Chi­na-con­flict inter­na­tion­al lob­by in DC and the EU, in the hope that this inter­na­tion­al lob­by will return the favor by ensur­ing the con­flict with Rus­sia remains ade­quate­ly stoked:

    Reuters

    Lithua­nia says Chi­nese cus­toms is block­ing its exports

    By Andrius Sytas
    Decem­ber 3, 2021 5:22 AM Updat­ed

    VILNIUS (Reuters) ‑Chi­na has imposed a cus­toms block on Lithuan­ian exports, a Lithuan­ian trade body said on Fri­day, amid a deep­en­ing spat between Bei­jing and Vil­nius about the Baltic state’s deci­sion to allow Tai­wan to open a de fac­to embassy.

    Chi­na down­grad­ed its diplo­mat­ic ties with the Baltic state and sus­pend­ed con­sular ser­vices there after the Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office in Lithua­nia opened on Nov. 18.

    Chi­na views self-ruled Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry with no rights as a state. Oth­er Tai­wanese offices in Europe and the Unit­ed States use the name of the city Taipei, avoid­ing any ref­er­ence to the island itself.

    “I regret this deci­sion by the Chi­nese author­i­ties,” Lithuan­ian Pres­i­dent Gitanas Nause­da told reporters on Fri­day.

    “It is a pity it was tak­en despite Lithua­nia explain­ing quite clear­ly that open­ing of the Tai­wanese rep­re­sen­ta­tion does not clash with the ‘One Chi­na’ prin­ci­ple, which we keep to.”

    He said he had asked Lithuania’s gov­ern­ment to find a way to com­pen­sate busi­ness­es for their loss­es.

    Lithua­nia next week will ask the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion “to get involved and defend Lithuania’s inter­ests”, a For­eign Min­istry spokesper­son told Reuters on Fri­day.

    Ini­tial reports of the move by Chi­nese cus­toms emerged on Thurs­day, said Vid­man­tas Jan­ule­vi­cius, pres­i­dent of the Lithuan­ian Con­fed­er­a­tion of Indus­tri­al­ists, cit­ing three mem­bers of the trade body.

    “Chi­nese cus­toms no longer lists Lithua­nia in its list of ori­gin coun­tries. So cus­toms forms for car­goes from Lithua­nia can­not be filed,” he said.

    The con­fed­er­a­tion, whose mem­bers account for half of Lithuania’s econ­o­my, will ask the gov­ern­ment to file a com­plaint with World Trade Organ­i­sa­tion, to protest over bar­ri­ers to trade, Jan­ule­vi­cius said.

    ...

    A Euro­pean Com­mis­sion spokesper­son said on Fri­day it was in con­tact with Vil­nius and with the EU del­e­ga­tion in Bei­jing to clar­i­fy the sit­u­a­tion.

    “We have been informed that the Lithuan­ian ship­ments are not being cleared through the Chi­nese cus­toms and import appli­ca­tions are being reject­ed,” the spokesper­son told a reg­u­lar brief­ing. The Com­mis­sion declined fur­ther com­ment.

    Lithua­nia, which trades large­ly with Euro­pean Union coun­tries, export­ed 300 mil­lion euros worth of goods to Chi­na in 2020, mak­ing it 22nd largest des­ti­na­tion for exports, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics.

    ———–

    “Lithua­nia says Chi­nese cus­toms is block­ing its exports” by Andrius Sytas; Reuters; 12/03/2021

    “Chi­na down­grad­ed its diplo­mat­ic ties with the Baltic state and sus­pend­ed con­sular ser­vices there after the Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office in Lithua­nia opened on Nov. 18.”

    It’s hard to be sur­prised. Lithua­nia crossed ‘the line’ with Tai­wan, clear­ly as some sort of the­atri­cal show­down. Why did Lithua­nia, a coun­try which large­ly trades with its EU neigh­bors and remains hyper-focused on Rus­sia, pick a fight with Chi­na? What’s going on here?

    ...
    He said he had asked Lithuania’s gov­ern­ment to find a way to com­pen­sate busi­ness­es for their loss­es.

    Lithua­nia next week will ask the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion “to get involved and defend Lithuania’s inter­ests”, a For­eign Min­istry spokesper­son told Reuters on Fri­day.

    ...

    Lithua­nia, which trades large­ly with Euro­pean Union coun­tries, export­ed 300 mil­lion euros worth of goods to Chi­na in 2020, mak­ing it 22nd largest des­ti­na­tion for exports, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics.
    ...

    Well, to get a bet­ter idea of what’s going on, here’s an arti­cle from a month ago about the var­i­ous con­gres­sion­al res­o­lu­tions that were being pro­posed, in a high­ly bipar­ti­san man­ner, in sup­port of Lithua­ni­a’s stance on Chi­na. As we’ll see, this sup­port for Lithua­nia came along with relat­ed mea­sures like a $2 bil­lion in annu­al mil­i­tary financ­ing for Tai­wan, chang­ing export laws to “bet­ter facil­i­tate arms trans­fers to Tai­wan,” and end­ing the strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty about how the US would respond to a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan. It’s the kind of report that makes clear that Lithua­nia did­n’t pick this fight on its own. Get­ting into a spat with Chi­na and hav­ing the US come to Lithua­ni­a’s defense is a big part of the goal:

    South Chi­na Morn­ing Post

    US sen­a­tors intro­duce res­o­lu­tion prais­ing Lithua­nia for strength­en­ing rela­tions with Tai­wan

    * Pro­posed res­o­lu­tion just the lat­est con­gres­sion­al action sup­port­ive of Taipei in its clash­es with Bei­jing
    * Oth­er recent leg­is­la­tion would allow US$2 bil­lion annu­al­ly in mil­i­tary financ­ing for Tai­wan, and cre­ate a joint US-Tai­wan infec­tious dis­eases mon­i­tor­ing cen­tre

    Jacob Fromer in Wash­ing­ton

    Pub­lished: 6:55am, 9 Nov, 2021
    Updat­ed: 10:25pm, 9 Nov, 2021

    In recent days, law­mak­ers in Wash­ing­ton have tak­en new steps to sig­nal their sup­port for Tai­wan, a rare show of uni­ty in an oth­er­wise extreme­ly polarised Con­gress.

    A bipar­ti­san pair of sen­a­tors on Fri­day intro­duced a res­o­lu­tion declar­ing sup­port for the demo­c­ra­t­ic island’s strength­en­ing ties with Lithua­nia, the small Baltic nation that has brushed off Beijing’s anger and embraced Taipei as a like-mind­ed gov­ern­ment star­ing down a pow­er­ful, author­i­tar­i­an Chi­na.

    “This res­o­lu­tion sends a mes­sage that when our friends stand up to Chi­nese malign influ­ence, the Unit­ed States will sup­port them,” said Sen­a­tor James Risch of Ida­ho, the top Repub­li­can on the for­eign affairs com­mit­tee.

    “I applaud the Lithuan­ian gov­ern­ment for refus­ing to allow its for­eign pol­i­cy to be dic­tat­ed by out­side pow­ers, and I ful­ly sup­port all nations in strength­en­ing rela­tions with Tai­wan,” he said.

    Jeanne Sha­heen, the New Hamp­shire Demo­c­rat who chairs the committee’s Europe sub­com­mit­tee, said that “the Unit­ed States stands in sol­i­dar­i­ty with Lithua­nia against China’s abuse” and post­ed the res­o­lu­tion on Twit­ter.

    Chi­na is attempt­ing to spread its malign influ­ence across democ­ra­cies in East­ern Europe, & Lithua­nia is lead­ing the way in stand­ing up to Chi­na’s abuse. I’m proud to lead this bipar­ti­san res­o­lu­tion w/ @SenatorRisch to strength­en U.S. sup­port for Lithua­nia & Tai­wan against Chi­na. pic.twitter.com/3rUJONJ0TW— Sen. Jeanne Sha­heen (@SenatorShaheen) Novem­ber 7, 2021

    In July, Lithua­nia – which, like the US, does not have for­mal diplo­mat­ic rela­tions with Tai­wan – announced it would open Taipei’s de fac­to Lithuan­ian embassy under the name of the “Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office”. Such infor­mal embassies usu­al­ly use the name “Taipei” instead of “Tai­wan”.

    Bei­jing, which claims sov­er­eign­ty over Tai­wan, react­ed furi­ous­ly, recall­ing its ambas­sador to Lithua­nia and mov­ing to stop Chi­nese freight trains from trav­el­ling to the coun­try.

    The res­o­lu­tion, if it pass­es, would be a non­bind­ing expres­sion of sen­a­tors’ sen­ti­ment on the issue.

    It also came just after the intro­duc­tion of sep­a­rate bipar­ti­san Con­gres­sion­al leg­is­la­tion, from Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ro Khan­na, Demo­c­rat of Cal­i­for­nia, and Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton, Repub­li­can of Arkansas, to estab­lish a new joint US-Tai­wan infec­tious dis­eases mon­i­tor­ing cen­tre.

    Khan­na is con­sid­ered one of the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives’ most pro­gres­sive mem­bers and Cot­ton is regard­ed as one of the Senate’s most con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers – a fur­ther sign of Taiwan’s broad sup­port on Capi­tol Hill.

    Tai­wan, which is blocked by Chi­na from for­mal­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in UN bod­ies, includ­ing the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, has received broad praise for its efforts to keep the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic under con­trol with­out the pop­u­la­tion-con­trol mea­sures avail­able to author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments like Chi­na.

    “Beijing’s efforts to exclude Tai­wan from the glob­al health com­mu­ni­ty have had dead­ly con­se­quences,” said Cot­ton. “Our bill will ensure the Unit­ed States has the resources it needs to mon­i­tor health threats emerg­ing in the Indo-Pacif­ic and will allow Tai­wan to share its knowl­edge with the world.”

    Anoth­er bill intro­duced last week by a group of Repub­li­can sen­a­tors – the Tai­wan Deter­rence Act – would let Con­gress to spend US$2 bil­lion annu­al­ly in mil­i­tary financ­ing for Tai­wan.

    It would also update the exist­ing law gov­ern­ing mil­i­tary sales to “bet­ter facil­i­tate arms trans­fers to Tai­wan,” accord­ing to a memo from Risch.

    ...

    The moves on Capi­tol Hill all come as Bei­jing increas­es its pres­sure on Tai­wan and its 23 mil­lion cit­i­zens.

    China’s mil­i­tary has flown hun­dreds of fight­er jets near the island over the last year, and US Pres­i­dent Joe Biden said late last month that the US would come to Taiwan’s defence if it was attacked by Bei­jing.

    The White House lat­er clar­i­fied that its offi­cial pol­i­cy remains one of “strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty” – mean­ing it will not say whether or how it would respond if Chi­na attacked Tai­wan. Some law­mak­ers from both par­ties have also called for an end to strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty.

    ———-

    “US sen­a­tors intro­duce res­o­lu­tion prais­ing Lithua­nia for strength­en­ing rela­tions with Tai­wan” by Jacob Fromer; South Chi­na Morn­ing Post; 11/09/2021

    In July, Lithua­nia – which, like the US, does not have for­mal diplo­mat­ic rela­tions with Tai­wan – announced it would open Taipei’s de fac­to Lithuan­ian embassy under the name of the “Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office”. Such infor­mal embassies usu­al­ly use the name “Taipei” instead of “Tai­wan”.”

    It start­ed back in July, when Lithua­nia announced it would Tai­wan to open its de fac­to Lithuan­ian embassy under the name of the “Tai­wanese Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Office”. So this whole thing has been open­ly build­ing since at least July. Four months lat­er we find unusu­al­ly bipar­ti­san moves by the US mem­bers of con­gress to pass res­o­lu­tions express­ing sup­port for Lithua­ni­a’s fight at the same time they’re push­ing for a much deep­er mil­i­tary entan­gle­ment with Tai­wan and an end to strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty. What Lithua­nia is doing is being done in the con­junc­tion with this US mil­i­tary buildup with Tai­wan:

    ...
    Anoth­er bill intro­duced last week by a group of Repub­li­can sen­a­tors – the Tai­wan Deter­rence Act – would let Con­gress to spend US$2 bil­lion annu­al­ly in mil­i­tary financ­ing for Tai­wan.

    It would also update the exist­ing law gov­ern­ing mil­i­tary sales to “bet­ter facil­i­tate arms trans­fers to Tai­wan,” accord­ing to a memo from Risch.

    ...

    The White House lat­er clar­i­fied that its offi­cial pol­i­cy remains one of “strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty” – mean­ing it will not say whether or how it would respond if Chi­na attacked Tai­wan. Some law­mak­ers from both par­ties have also called for an end to strate­gic ambi­gu­i­ty.
    ...

    But, again, why is Lithua­nia — a coun­try obsessed with the per­ceived threat of Rus­sia — play­ing a kind of proxy role for the US by pick­ing a fight with Chi­na? Well, that brings us to the fol­low­ing fas­ci­nat­ing piece by Lithuan­ian jour­nal­ist Denis Kishinevsky about the game Lithua­nia is play­ing here. A game that appears to cen­ter around the idea that by help­ing DC in its fight against Chi­na, Lithua­nia can cur­ry favor with the US and main­tain a US focus on a con­flict with Rus­sia. Yep. It’s that cyn­i­cal.:

    Carne­gi Moscow Cen­ter

    Why Lit­tle Lithua­nia Is Tak­ing On Mighty Chi­na

    Denis Kishinevsky
    29.11.2021

    Just a few years ago, it would have been hard to imag­ine that one of the most fierce­ly anti-Chi­nese coun­tries in the world would turn out to be lit­tle Lithua­nia, yet in the last year its rela­tion­ship with Chi­na has dete­ri­o­rat­ed more than that of any oth­er coun­try in Europe. Vil­nius has slammed Bei­jing for its treat­ment of the Uyghurs, for its repres­sion of protests in Hong Kong, and for try­ing to use invest­ment in infra­struc­ture to strength­en its influ­ence on the Euro­pean mar­ket. The ten­sion cul­mi­nat­ed this month in Vil­nius allow­ing Tai­wan to open a rep­re­sen­ta­tive office there.

    Var­i­ous expla­na­tions have been put for­ward for this dras­tic turn against Chi­na in Lithuan­ian for­eign pol­i­cy, from a mis­sion to uphold demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues around the world to the desire to keep up with the lat­est trends in Wash­ing­ton. Indeed, both of these moti­va­tions play a role in the Lithuan­ian leadership’s actions. Yet just as impor­tant is Lithuania’s tra­di­tion­al fear of Rus­sia. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, Vil­nius now con­sid­ers crit­i­cism of Bei­jing to be one of the most effec­tive forms of defense against Moscow.

    The first signs of wors­en­ing rela­tions between Lithua­nia and Chi­na appeared in 2019, when the Lithuan­ian Depart­ment of State Secu­ri­ty first named Chi­na in its annu­al report on threats to the coun­try. At around the same time, Pres­i­dent Gitanas Nause­da spoke out against rais­ing Chi­nese invest­ment to devel­op Lithuania’s ports.

    In 2021, the rela­tion­ship took a sharp turn for the worse. In May, Lithua­nia announced it was with­draw­ing from the 17+1 for­mat: a frame­work for China’s coop­er­a­tion with the coun­tries of Cen­tral and East­ern Europe. At the same time, Lithuan­ian mil­i­tary intel­li­gence said that the involve­ment of China’s Huawei com­pa­ny in the devel­op­ment of 5G infra­struc­ture was a threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty.

    In Sep­tem­ber, Lithuania’s Defense Min­istry accused the Chi­nese com­pa­nies Huawei, Xiao­mi, and One­Plus of pos­ing risks to cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. Soon after­wards, Lithua­nia announced its will­ing­ness to become the only coun­try in Europe to host an offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive office for Tai­wan, which Chi­na claims as its own ter­ri­to­ry.

    Oth­er coun­tries in the region, includ­ing Roma­nia, Slo­va­kia, Czechia, and Poland, have also spo­ken about the dan­gers of Chi­nese invest­ment. Some coun­tries have stopped allow­ing the Chi­nese to take part in ten­ders for projects relat­ed to key sec­tors of the econ­o­my, from tele­com to high­way con­struc­tion. But Lithua­nia has gone the fur­thest, unde­terred by the risk of eco­nom­ic loss­es or polit­i­cal pres­sure by the world’s sec­ond-biggest econ­o­my.

    Vil­nius has inspired oth­er West­ern coun­tries and insti­tu­tions to take sim­i­lar mea­sures: the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment has approved a res­o­lu­tion on coop­er­a­tion with Tai­wan, and the EU Par­lia­ment and U.S. Con­gress and State Depart­ment have all praised Lithuania’s ini­tia­tive in this area. The small Baltic repub­lic, whose inter­na­tion­al activ­i­ty was until recent­ly asso­ci­at­ed almost exclu­sive­ly with stand­ing up to Rus­sia, has opened a sec­ond front by enter­ing into a con­fronta­tion with Chi­na.

    Offi­cial­ly, Vil­nius sim­ply wants to pro­tect free­doms and democ­ra­cy across the world, from Min­sk to Taipei. Upon clos­er inspec­tion, how­ev­er, Vil­nius is selec­tive in where it choos­es to uphold its demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues. It appears to be far more con­cerned by the sit­u­a­tion in Belarus, Rus­sia, and now Chi­na than in Turkey, Iran, Azer­bai­jan, Sau­di Ara­bia, and oth­er places.

    Behind the noble rhetoric, a prag­mat­ic cal­cu­la­tion can be dis­cerned. By act­ing as the dri­ving force behind anti-Chi­nese ini­tia­tives, Lithua­nia hopes to focus U.S. atten­tion on the region and pro­cure guar­an­tees that Wash­ing­ton will not scale back its pres­ence in East­ern Europe and the Baltic states. Vil­nius is jump­ing on the band­wag­on of the U.S. fight with Chi­na for glob­al lead­er­ship.

    That’s not to say that the coun­try is act­ing at the direct behest of the White House. It’s more like­ly a kind of part­ner­ship between Lithuan­ian politi­cians and cer­tain influ­ence groups in Wash­ing­ton, which help each oth­er to lob­by for their own inter­ests. A U.S. Sen­ate res­o­lu­tion from Novem­ber 5, for exam­ple, was almost entire­ly devot­ed to sup­port­ing Lithuania’s rela­tion­ship with Tai­wan.

    Vilnius’s main aim in this process is secur­ing U.S. favor in what real­ly mat­ters to it: rela­tions with Rus­sia. It’s no secret that the Joe Biden admin­is­tra­tion has changed pri­or­i­ties. U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy is increas­ing­ly focused on con­tain­ing Chi­na and build­ing up Washington’s mil­i­tary poten­tial in the Indo-Pacif­ic, togeth­er with its allies. Rus­sia is not as inter­est­ing to the Amer­i­cans as it once was. That, at least, is how Lithua­nia under­stands the state of affairs. It is try­ing to cap­ture the chang­ing mood and to be proac­tive.

    Lithuania’s region­al for­eign pol­i­cy has always been bold, which has caused the coun­try to become a hostage of the sin­gle issue of Rus­sia. Now the Lithuan­ian estab­lish­ment is begin­ning to wake up to the need to escape the con­fines of its rep­u­ta­tion, and to enhance the usu­al state­ments about the Russ­ian threat with some­thing more per­ti­nent that will fire Washington’s imag­i­na­tion. Oth­er­wise, U.S. interest—both in the region and in Lithua­nia as an ally—could fall to dan­ger­ous lev­els.

    This approach by Vil­nius is clear­ly not with­out its risks. Until recent­ly, rela­tions between Lithua­nia and Chi­na were good. They began to wors­en after a three-par­ty lib­er­al-con­ser­v­a­tive coali­tion came to pow­er in Octo­ber 2020. In just a few months, the new gov­ern­ment delib­er­ate­ly dis­man­tled every­thing that the pre­vi­ous two left-cen­trist cab­i­nets had worked toward with regard to Chi­na. Those gov­ern­ments had done every­thing they could to encour­age Lithuan­ian busi­ness­es to enter the Chi­nese mar­ket, espe­cial­ly after 2014, when Rus­sia banned imports of many EU food items in response to West­ern sanc­tions.

    Those efforts bore fruit, and in the last decade, Lithuan­ian exports to Chi­na grew almost ten­fold to a val­ue of 316 mil­lion euros. The total trade turnover between the two coun­tries reached 1.5 bil­lion euros (com­pared with just 85 mil­lion euros between Lithua­nia and Tai­wan).

    ...

    Still, for now, nei­ther the eco­nom­ic nor the polit­i­cal risks appear big enough to force Vil­nius to aban­don its anti-Chi­nese pol­i­cy. The course it has embarked upon fits in with the Lithuan­ian leadership’s vision of their country’s role in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. It com­bines the pol­i­tics of val­ues, anti-com­mu­nism, the quest to keep Washington’s atten­tion on the region, and the desire to grow beyond the nar­row niche of Russia’s eter­nal crit­ic. Final­ly, the Unit­ed States is pre­pared to sup­port Lithua­nia in its endeav­ors: the Baltic state could help to nudge old­er EU coun­tries toward more anti-Chi­nese posi­tions, as well as serve as an acid test to see how far Bei­jing is pre­pared to go in response to harsh crit­i­cism and cozy­ing up to Tai­wan.

    ———–

    “Why Lit­tle Lithua­nia Is Tak­ing On Mighty Chi­na” by Denis Kishinevsky; Carne­gia Moscow Cen­ter; 11/29/2021

    “Var­i­ous expla­na­tions have been put for­ward for this dras­tic turn against Chi­na in Lithuan­ian for­eign pol­i­cy, from a mis­sion to uphold demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues around the world to the desire to keep up with the lat­est trends in Wash­ing­ton. Indeed, both of these moti­va­tions play a role in the Lithuan­ian leadership’s actions. Yet just as impor­tant is Lithuania’s tra­di­tion­al fear of Rus­sia. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, Vil­nius now con­sid­ers crit­i­cism of Bei­jing to be one of the most effec­tive forms of defense against Moscow.

    Wel­come to our new short­cut to WWIII: the coun­tries that have been try­ing to drag the US into a war with Rus­sia have decid­ed help­ing the US get into a fight with Chi­na is their best bet for secur­ing that goal:

    ...
    Behind the noble rhetoric, a prag­mat­ic cal­cu­la­tion can be dis­cerned. By act­ing as the dri­ving force behind anti-Chi­nese ini­tia­tives, Lithua­nia hopes to focus U.S. atten­tion on the region and pro­cure guar­an­tees that Wash­ing­ton will not scale back its pres­ence in East­ern Europe and the Baltic states. Vil­nius is jump­ing on the band­wag­on of the U.S. fight with Chi­na for glob­al lead­er­ship.

    That’s not to say that the coun­try is act­ing at the direct behest of the White House. It’s more like­ly a kind of part­ner­ship between Lithuan­ian politi­cians and cer­tain influ­ence groups in Wash­ing­ton, which help each oth­er to lob­by for their own inter­ests. A U.S. Sen­ate res­o­lu­tion from Novem­ber 5, for exam­ple, was almost entire­ly devot­ed to sup­port­ing Lithuania’s rela­tion­ship with Tai­wan.

    ...

    Still, for now, nei­ther the eco­nom­ic nor the polit­i­cal risks appear big enough to force Vil­nius to aban­don its anti-Chi­nese pol­i­cy. The course it has embarked upon fits in with the Lithuan­ian leadership’s vision of their country’s role in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. It com­bines the pol­i­tics of val­ues, anti-com­mu­nism, the quest to keep Washington’s atten­tion on the region, and the desire to grow beyond the nar­row niche of Russia’s eter­nal crit­ic. Final­ly, the Unit­ed States is pre­pared to sup­port Lithua­nia in its endeav­ors: the Baltic state could help to nudge old­er EU coun­tries toward more anti-Chi­nese posi­tions, as well as serve as an acid test to see how far Bei­jing is pre­pared to go in response to harsh crit­i­cism and cozy­ing up to Tai­wan.
    ...

    It all rais­es the grim ques­tion: so is the end goal for a simul­ta­ne­ous war against both Rus­sia and Chi­na? Is that the rea­son­ing tak­ing place with­in Vil­nius? Because, on the one hand, pleas­ing DC by engag­ing in geostrate­gic the­atrics in order to cur­ry DC’s favor does make sense. But when your method for cur­ry­ing that favor involves try­ing to help the US go deep­er into com­mit­ting to a con­flict with Chi­na, does­n’t that work counter to Lithua­ni­a’s inter­ests in see­ing the US go to war with Rus­sia? Because a deep­en­ing of the US com­mit­ment to a con­flict with Chi­na is exact­ly what one should expect to come from all of this. So we have to ask: has it been deter­mined by those gov­ern­ments that view Rus­sia as an exis­ten­tial threat that war with Rus­sia is more like­ly after war with Chi­na has already bro­ken out?

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 6, 2021, 5:07 pm
  3. Threats of a forced US debt default are noth­ing new in US pol­i­tics in recent decades. And yet it’s hard to argue that this time does­n’t feel dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent and a lot more dan­ger­ous in the wake of Fri­day’s report on the upcom­ing chaos that could emerge from the GOP intra-par­ty nego­ti­a­tions over the House Speak­er­ship. Because as Josh Mar­shall describes in the fol­low­ing piece, the plan appears to be for an embrace of the “pri­or­i­ti­za­tion” scheme for par­tial­ly shut­ting down only some gov­ern­ment func­tions while still pay­ing off inter­est on the gov­ern­ment debt. So a gov­ern­ment shut­down with­out a for­mal debt default. Which is basi­cal­ly an attempt to repeat the Tea Par­ty’s 2011 ‘par­tial gov­ern­ment shut­down’ ploy, but take it fur­ther this time.

    Beyond that, as Mar­shall also notes, the plan does­n’t appear to be to cre­ate a cri­sis that will force the Democ­rats into agree­ing to mas­sive spend­ing cuts. No, instead the plan appears to be to cre­ate a gen­uine mas­sive eco­nom­ic cri­sis by even­tu­al­ly hav­ing this game end in a fed­er­al debt default and some­how blam­ing it on the Democ­rats. At least that appears to be what the House GOP is prepar­ing to unleash, seem­ing­ly at the behest of the House Free­dom Cau­cus rad­i­cals who forced these con­ces­sions on McCarthy in exchange for their sup­port of his speak­er­ship.

    Of course, as we also saw, that whole intra-GOP show­down over McCarthy’s speak­er­ship was­n’t just a gam­bit exe­cut­ed by a small group of House GOP hold­outs. It was orches­trat­ed by the Coun­cil and Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP), which more or less runs the House Free­dom Cau­cus via the CNP’s Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI). So when we’re now hear­ing about how the House Free­dom Cau­cus is using its new­found lever­age with McCarthy to set up a debt default lat­er this year, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that any such ploy would­n’t hap­pen with­out the back­ing of the all pow­er­ful CNP net­work. That’s the big sto­ry here: the GOP estab­lish­ment is plan­ning on blow­ing up the econ­o­my. All of the “Free­dom Cau­cus vs the rest of them” stuff is just the­atrics. This is an estab­lish­ment ploy.

    There’s quite a few mas­sive ques­tions raised by the reports of the GOP mega-donor estab­lish­ment seem­ing­ly get­ting ready to blow up the US econ­o­my, but as we’re going to see in the sec­ond arti­cle excerpt below, per­haps the most omi­nous ques­tion raised by it all is the ques­tion of how is the US estab­lish­ment plan­ning on pay­ing for WWIII and the upcom­ing war with Chi­na. Because that war is very much part of the plan too. That was the mes­sage in an inter­view giv­en to the Finan­cial Times by Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al James Bier­man, com­mand­ing gen­er­al of the Third Marine Expe­di­tionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, where he made the usu­al­ly frank com­par­i­son of what the US was cur­rent­ly doing in the Pacif­ic to what the US had already done in Ukraine start­ing in 2014. A process of “set­ting the the­ater” and prepar­ing for war. As Bier­man puts it, the US set the the­ater in Ukraine start­ing in 2014 to great effect today. That process is now being repli­cat­ed in places like Japan and the Philip­pines.

    A pair of unusu­al­ly frank prepa­ra­tions: the GOP’s prepa­ra­tions to blow up the US econ­o­my lat­er this year pair with the US mil­i­tary’s accel­er­at­ing prepa­ra­tions for war with Chi­na soon­er rather than lat­er. It’s quite the con­fla­gra­tion of crises in the works.

    So we have to ask: what will blow­ing up the US econ­o­my in the man­ner the GOP is plan­ning on doing going to do to the US’s trade rela­tions with Chi­na? Don’t for­get that trade with Chi­na is prob­a­bly the biggest fac­tor pre­vent­ing a con­flict at this point. Is war with Chi­na less like­ly or more like­ly if that trade is dis­rupt­ed due to the US refus­ing to pay its debts? Let’s hope we nev­er have to find out.

    Ok, first, here’s Josh Mar­shal­l’s piece that makes clear that the big wor­ry hear isn’t that the GOP is going to suc­ceed in their plot. The plot can’t suc­ceed, which is why the big con­cern should be over what the GOP is plan­ning on hop­ing to gain out of final­ly blow­ing up the US’s finan­cial cred­i­bil­i­ty:

    Talk­ing Points Memo

    House GOP Deter­mined to Strike US

    By Josh Mar­shall
    Jan­u­ary 14, 2023 4:36 p.m.

    We’ve been wait­ing to hear what secret agree­ments now-Speak­er Kevin McCarthy had to make with the Free­dom Cau­cus to become speak­er. Yes­ter­day we learned one key con­di­tion. McCarthy agreed to pur­sue some­thing called “pri­or­i­ti­za­tion” as part of their plan to push debt default lat­er this year. On its face, pri­or­i­ti­za­tion is a scheme by which the U.S. gov­ern­ment will sim­ply stop doing var­i­ous func­tions — food and safe­ty, Med­ic­aid, roads, school lunch­es, air traf­fic con­trol, bor­der secu­ri­ty — to pri­or­i­tize only debt inter­est pay­ments and like­ly Social Secu­ri­ty and the mil­i­tary. In oth­er words, there’s no need to default on the debt, the argu­ment goes. You basi­cal­ly just default on the U.S. gov­ern­ment.

    In addi­tion to the real­i­ty of hav­ing a big chunk of econ­o­my shut down because the U.S. gov­ern­ment stops func­tion­ing, there’s a basic prob­lem with this “plan.” We’ve been through this idea back in 2011. The U.S. gov­ern­ment isn’t equipped tech­no­log­i­cal­ly to pay some bills and not oth­ers on the fly. The U.S. gov­ern­ment makes mil­lions of pay­ments every day. It also prob­a­bly wouldn’t avoid the kind of finan­cial cri­sis that full default would. And final­ly, this would only hap­pen if the Sen­ate passed such a “pri­or­i­ti­za­tion” bill and Pres­i­dent Biden signed it. Obvi­ous­ly those things aren’t going to hap­pen.

    This gets us to the real gist of the mat­ter. The Post calls this an “emer­gency plan for breach­ing the debt lim­it.” But it’s not. It can’t work. It couldn’t pass into law even if it could work. This isn’t actu­al­ly a plan to avoid default. It’s a mes­sag­ing plan aimed at being able to blame the White House for the fed­er­al debt default and the ensu­ing finan­cial cri­sis after it hap­pens. House Repub­li­cans want to be able to say, we offered this pri­or­i­ti­za­tion plan and you reject­ed it so obvi­ous­ly this is on you.

    ...

    ———-

    “House GOP Deter­mined to Strike US” By Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo; 01/14/2023

    “This gets us to the real gist of the mat­ter. The Post calls this an “emer­gency plan for breach­ing the debt lim­it.” But it’s not. It can’t work. It couldn’t pass into law even if it could work. This isn’t actu­al­ly a plan to avoid default. It’s a mes­sag­ing plan aimed at being able to blame the White House for the fed­er­al debt default and the ensu­ing finan­cial cri­sis after it hap­pens. House Repub­li­cans want to be able to say, we offered this pri­or­i­ti­za­tion plan and you reject­ed it so obvi­ous­ly this is on you.”

    It’s hard to avoid agree­ing with these sus­pi­cions. All signs are point­ing towards the House Free­dom Cau­cus hav­ing been grant­ed the pow­er to deter­mine the GOP’s bar­gain­ing posi­tion in the upcom­ing debt ceil­ing nego­ti­a­tions, and that posi­tion is going to be a repeat of the stunt the Tea Par­ty tried to pull in 2011: an attempt to induce a selec­tive default as part of a broad­er demand for mas­sive spend­ing cuts. Demands that remain just as impos­si­ble today as they were in 2011. A selec­tive default isn’t a real pos­si­bil­i­ty.

    But a real default as a con­se­quence of some sort of par­tial default ploy is very much a pos­si­bil­i­ty if things get out of hand. That’s the big dif­fer­ence between now and 2011: And Tea Par­ty did­n’t have the kinds of nego­ti­at­ing pow­ers in 2011 that the Free­dom Cau­cus has today. If they want to blow it up, they can.

    Of course, as we also saw, there’s no way to real­ly sep­a­rate the House Free­dom Cau­cus from the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) and its Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI) umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion that has become a kind of CNP-MAGA polit­i­cal fusion cen­ter. And House Free­dom Cau­cus is, for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, the CNP-MAGA hard core loy­al­ist fac­tion in the House and the Free­dom Cau­cus’s show­down with McCarthy that end­ed up extract­ing all of these pow­ers in the upcom­ing debt ceil­ing nego­ti­a­tions was heav­i­ly backed by the CNP mem­bers. It’s one of the major ele­ments of the per­ma­nent cri­sis sit­u­a­tion unfold­ing in DC: the upcom­ing emer­gen­cies that emerge from Kevin McCarthy’s deal with the Free­dom Cau­cus are endorsed by the ultra-pow­er­ful CNP.

    It’s the kind of sto­ry with impli­ca­tions the are dif­fi­cult to wrap our heads around. The GOP is once again threat­en­ing to blow up the US — and glob­al — econ­o­my and this time they mean busi­ness. The CNP’s busi­ness.

    So when we see pow­er­ful ele­ments of the US polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment set­ting up what could be a major eco­nom­ic cri­sis lat­er this year — the kind of cri­sis that may not resolve itself any time soon and could spi­ral out of con­trol — it’s worth keep­ing in mind the oth­er major glob­al cri­sis being planned in DC these days: WWIII. Or at last war with Chi­na, which is effec­tive­ly WWIII at this point.

    That was more or less how Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al James Bier­man, com­mand­ing gen­er­al of the Third Marine Expe­di­tionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, described what the US was cur­rent­ly plan­ning in the Pacif­ic: a repeat of what the US start­ed in Ukraine in 2014. “Set­ting the the­ater”, as Bier­man put it in com­ments described as “unusu­al­ly frank”.

    That’s all part of the con­text of these reports about the House Free­dom cau­cus get­ting ready to blow up the US econ­o­my: it’s hap­pen­ing at the same time the US is accel­er­at­ing its plans of war with Chi­na. Which is effec­tive­ly plans for WWIII.

    So with the US mil­i­tary cur­rent­ly “set­ting the the­ater” for war in the Pacif­ic, as the con­flict in Ukraine shows no sign of abat­ing, at the same time the CNP is orga­niz­ing an econ­o­my-bust­ing debt default, we have to ask: just how are the US oli­garchs plan­ning on pay­ing for their wars? On the hand hand, WWIII isn’t going to be cheap. But on the oth­er hand, one of the biggest fac­tors pre­vent­ing war with Chi­na is the eco­nom­ic fall­out that was result. How will a US debt default change that cal­cu­lus? Espe­cial­ly if that default some­how ends up dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduc­ing the US’s trade with Chi­na?

    There’s no short­age of major ques­tions raised by the reports of the upcom­ing planned US debt default. Includ­ing the ques­tion of how the CNP and the rest of the oli­garchs who are undoubt­ed­ly sup­port­ive of the US’s show­downs with Rus­sia and Chi­na plan on pay­ing for WWIII:

    Finan­cial Times

    US mil­i­tary deep­ens ties with Japan and Philip­pines to pre­pare for Chi­na threat
    Top Marine Corps gen­er­al James Bier­man out­lines sweep­ing reform to adapt force for pos­si­ble con­flict over Tai­wan

    Kathrin Hille in Oki­nawa Jan­u­ary 8 2023

    The US and Japan­ese armed forces are rapid­ly inte­grat­ing their com­mand struc­ture and scal­ing up com­bined oper­a­tions as Wash­ing­ton and its Asian allies pre­pare for a pos­si­ble con­flict with Chi­na such as a war over Tai­wan, accord­ing to the top Marine Corps gen­er­al in Japan.

    The two mil­i­taries have “seen expo­nen­tial increas­es . . . just over the last year” in their oper­a­tions on the ter­ri­to­ry they would have to defend in case of a war, Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al James Bier­man, com­mand­ing gen­er­al of the Third Marine Expe­di­tionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, told the Finan­cial Times in an inter­view.

    Bier­man said that the US and its allies in Asia were emu­lat­ing the ground­work that had enabled west­ern coun­tries to sup­port Ukraine’s resis­tance to Rus­sia in prepar­ing for sce­nar­ios such as a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan.

    “Why have we achieved the lev­el of suc­cess we’ve achieved in Ukraine? A big part of that has been because after Russ­ian aggres­sion in 2014 and 2015, we earnest­ly got after prepar­ing for future con­flict: train­ing for the Ukraini­ans, pre-posi­tion­ing of sup­plies, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of sites from which we could oper­ate sup­port, sus­tain oper­a­tions.

    “We call that set­ting the the­atre. And we are set­ting the the­atre in Japan, in the Philip­pines, in oth­er loca­tions.”

    Bierman’s unusu­al­ly frank com­par­i­son between the Ukraine war and a poten­tial con­flict with Chi­na comes as Bei­jing has dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased the scale and sophis­ti­ca­tion of its mil­i­tary manoeu­vres near Tai­wan in recent years. Japan and the Philip­pines are also inten­si­fy­ing defence co-oper­a­tion with the US in the face of mount­ing Chi­nese assertive­ness.

    Japan and the US are set to dis­cuss strength­en­ing their alliance at secu­ri­ty talks between the for­eign and defence min­is­ters on Wednes­day and a sum­mit between US pres­i­dent Joe Biden and Japan­ese prime min­is­ter Fumio Kishi­da on Fri­day in Wash­ing­ton. The sum­mit comes as Tokyo embarks on a rad­i­cal secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy shift that will include increas­ing defence spend­ing and deploy­ing mis­siles capa­ble of hit­ting Chi­nese ter­ri­to­ry.

    III MEF is the Marine Corps’ only cri­sis response force per­ma­nent­ly sta­tioned out­side the US. It oper­ates with­in the range of Chi­nese medi­um- and long-range mis­siles, with which Bei­jing seeks to con­strain US oper­a­tional free­dom in the region.

    The unit is at the heart of a sweep­ing reform of the Marine Corps that aims to replace its focus on fight­ing counter-insur­gency in the Mid­dle East with cre­at­ing small units that spe­cialise in oper­at­ing quick­ly and clan­des­tine­ly in the islands and straits of east Asia and the west­ern Pacif­ic to counter Beijing’s “anti-access area denial” strat­e­gy.

    To realise that strat­e­gy, clos­er inte­gra­tion with allies was vital, Bier­man said. In a series of recent exer­cis­es, the Marines for the first time set up bilat­er­al ground tac­ti­cal co-ordi­na­tion cen­tres rather than exchang­ing liaisons with allies’ com­mand points.

    In anoth­er sign of deep­en­ing co-oper­a­tion, spe­cif­ic Japan­ese mil­i­tary units have been des­ig­nat­ed as part of the “stand-in force” along­side III MEF and US Navy and Air Force units.

    Instead of a “round robin” of Japan­ese mil­i­tary units work­ing with US coun­ter­parts, as in the past, a “stand­ing com­mu­ni­ty of inter­est” is emerg­ing of allied units with respon­si­bil­i­ty for oper­a­tional plans, Bier­man added.

    ...

    As part of those prepa­ra­tions, the Philip­pines plan to allow US forces to prepo­si­tion weapons and oth­er sup­plies on five more bases in addi­tion to five where the US has already access.

    ...

    ———–

    “US mil­i­tary deep­ens ties with Japan and Philip­pines to pre­pare for Chi­na threat” by Kathrin Hille; Finan­cial Times; 01/08/2023

    “Bierman’s unusu­al­ly frank com­par­i­son between the Ukraine war and a poten­tial con­flict with Chi­na comes as Bei­jing has dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased the scale and sophis­ti­ca­tion of its mil­i­tary manoeu­vres near Tai­wan in recent years. Japan and the Philip­pines are also inten­si­fy­ing defence co-oper­a­tion with the US in the face of mount­ing Chi­nese assertive­ness.”

    Yeah, “unusu­al­ly frank” is a good way to describe the com­ments by Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al James Bier­man, the com­mand­ing gen­er­al of the Third Marine Expe­di­tionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan. As Bier­man put it, the US is “set­ting the the­ater” in the Pacif­ic, just as the US had start­ed doing in Ukraine start­ing back in 2014. And war plan­ning has tran­si­tioned from the­o­ret­i­cal to active. It’s hap­pen­ing now:

    ...
    Bier­man said that the US and its allies in Asia were emu­lat­ing the ground­work that had enabled west­ern coun­tries to sup­port Ukraine’s resis­tance to Rus­sia in prepar­ing for sce­nar­ios such as a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan.

    “Why have we achieved the lev­el of suc­cess we’ve achieved in Ukraine? A big part of that has been because after Russ­ian aggres­sion in 2014 and 2015, we earnest­ly got after prepar­ing for future con­flict: train­ing for the Ukraini­ans, pre-posi­tion­ing of sup­plies, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of sites from which we could oper­ate sup­port, sus­tain oper­a­tions.

    “We call that set­ting the the­atre. And we are set­ting the the­atre in Japan, in the Philip­pines, in oth­er loca­tions.”

    ...

    And with Gen­er­al Bier­man lead­ing the marine forces in Japan, recall that report from back in 2020 about how the US was in the mid­dle of turn­ing the Marines into a new kind of ship killer force in the Pacif­ic. So when we read about how the Marines are cre­at­ing small units that spe­cial­ize in oper­at­ing quick­ly and clan­des­tine­ly in the islands and straits of east Asia and the west­ern Pacif­ic, it’s pre­sum­ably refer­ring to that same ini­tia­tive:

    ...
    Japan and the US are set to dis­cuss strength­en­ing their alliance at secu­ri­ty talks between the for­eign and defence min­is­ters on Wednes­day and a sum­mit between US pres­i­dent Joe Biden and Japan­ese prime min­is­ter Fumio Kishi­da on Fri­day in Wash­ing­ton. The sum­mit comes as Tokyo embarks on a rad­i­cal secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy shift that will include increas­ing defence spend­ing and deploy­ing mis­siles capa­ble of hit­ting Chi­nese ter­ri­to­ry.

    III MEF is the Marine Corps’ only cri­sis response force per­ma­nent­ly sta­tioned out­side the US. It oper­ates with­in the range of Chi­nese medi­um- and long-range mis­siles, with which Bei­jing seeks to con­strain US oper­a­tional free­dom in the region.

    The unit is at the heart of a sweep­ing reform of the Marine Corps that aims to replace its focus on fight­ing counter-insur­gency in the Mid­dle East with cre­at­ing small units that spe­cialise in oper­at­ing quick­ly and clan­des­tine­ly in the islands and straits of east Asia and the west­ern Pacif­ic to counter Beijing’s “anti-access area denial” strat­e­gy.

    To realise that strat­e­gy, clos­er inte­gra­tion with allies was vital, Bier­man said. In a series of recent exer­cis­es, the Marines for the first time set up bilat­er­al ground tac­ti­cal co-ordi­na­tion cen­tres rather than exchang­ing liaisons with allies’ com­mand points.
    ...

    And the­ater is indeed being set. Prepa­ra­tions for war are accel­er­at­ing. At this point all we need is the wrong kind of spark. Or the wrong kind of major self-inflict­ed eco­nom­ic explo­sion, as the case may be.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 14, 2023, 5:28 pm
  4. The Chi­nese spy Bal­loon’s reign of ter­ror across the skies of North Amer­i­ca has come to a mer­ci­ful end fol­low­ing Sun­day’s shoot­down by the US mil­i­tary. So with the US and Chi­na still locked into a game of mutu­al fin­ger-point­ing over the bal­loon’s fiery end, here’s a Moon of Alaba­ma post with a rather salient data point to keep in mind as this sto­ry plays out: the whole thing was like­ly caused by the Polar Vor­tex.

    Yep, it turns out the bal­loon’s sur­pris­ing sud­den turn south that sent it on its quixot­ic adven­ture across the North Amer­i­can skies coin­cid­ed with a sud­den and unex­pect­ed emer­gence of a new polar vor­tex gen­er­at­ing strong south­ward winds. In oth­er words, this was­n’t part of some sort Chi­nese attempt at sky-trolling. It was a prod­uct the kind of nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na. A nat­ur­al weath­er phe­nom­e­na that’s becom­ing unnat­u­ral­ly com­mon in the era of cli­mate change.

    That nat­ur­al weath­er phe­nom­e­na is one part of the sto­ry. But, of course, there’s the oth­er side of the sto­ry: the ‘every­body play­ing dumb about the bal­loon’ part of the sto­ry. A col­lec­tive act of play­ing dumb that man­aged to blow up the bal­loon inci­dent into the kind of diplo­mat­ic fias­co that ulti­mate­ly derailed the planned talks between the US and Chi­na:

    Moon of Alaba­ma

    NYT Plants False Claims Over Chi­na’s Bal­loon Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

    Post­ed by b on Feb­ru­ary 6, 2023 at 12:26 UTC

    The New York Times car­ries a weird ‘news analy­sis’ by its some­what neo­conned White House and nation­al secu­ri­ty cor­re­spon­dent David Sanger about the recent Chi­nese weath­er bal­lon inci­dent. Sanger asserts that Chi­na has failed to com­mu­ni­cate on the issue:

    [B]eyond the made-for-cable-news spec­ta­cle, the entire inci­dent also speaks vol­umes about how lit­tle Wash­ing­ton and Bei­jing com­mu­ni­cate, almost 22 years after the col­li­sion of an Amer­i­can spy plane and a Chi­nese fight­er about 70 miles off the coast of Hainan Island led both sides to vow that they would improve their cri­sis man­age­ment.
    ...
    This was hard­ly a life-threat­en­ing cri­sis. But the fact that Chi­nese offi­cials, real­iz­ing that the bal­loon had been spot­ted, did not call to work out a way to deal with it was reveal­ing.

    That kind of prob­lem was sup­posed to be resolved after the 2001 col­li­sion of an EP‑3 spy plane and a Chi­nese fight­er that brought down both planes. For days after that inci­dent, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush could not get Chi­nese lead­ers on the phone. Efforts by the sec­re­tary of state at the time, Gen. Col­in Pow­ell, also failed. “It made you won­der what might hap­pen in a deep­er cri­sis,” Gen­er­al Pow­ell said lat­er.

    After­ward, hot­lines were set up, and promis­es made about bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Clear­ly, those failed. When the bal­loon was shot down, Chi­na issued a state­ment say­ing “for the Unit­ed States to insist on using armed forces is clear­ly an exces­sive reac­tion.”

    One won­ders how Sanger can assert a lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion when the Chi­nese side insists with evi­dence that it in fact com­mu­ni­cat­ed a lot . As the Glob­al Times writes:

    The Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry expressed strong dis­sat­is­fac­tion and protest­ed against the US’ use of force to shoot down a Chi­nese civil­ian unmanned air­ship, urg­ing the US to prop­er­ly han­dle the inci­dent.

    The Chi­nese side has ver­i­fied the sit­u­a­tion and com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the US side mul­ti­ple times, say­ing the unin­tend­ed entry of the air­ship into US air­space was due to force majeure and the inci­dent was total­ly an acci­dent, the min­istry said.

    The Chi­nese for­eign min­istry asserts sim­i­lar:

    Chi­na strong­ly dis­ap­proves of and protests against the US attack on a civil­ian unmanned air­ship by force. The Chi­nese side has, after ver­i­fi­ca­tion, repeat­ed­ly informed the US side of the civil­ian nature of the air­ship and con­veyed that its entry into the US due to force majeure was total­ly unex­pect­ed. The Chi­nese side has clear­ly asked the US side to prop­er­ly han­dle the mat­ter in a calm, pro­fes­sion­al and restrained man­ner.

    So Chi­na in fact had com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the U.S. and dis­cussed the issue.

    Its claim that the bal­lon went unex­pect­ed­ly off course is by the way com­plete­ly cor­rect. The U.S. had long tracked the bal­lon over Alas­ka and Cana­da and was equal­ly sur­prised when it sud­den­ly turned south:

    Anoth­er U.S. offi­cial said intel­li­gence agen­cies began track­ing the bal­loon sev­er­al days ago, not long after it had left Chi­na and began its con­trolled drift toward the Aleut­ian Islands of Alas­ka. The offi­cial said Amer­i­can track­ers con­tin­ued to mon­i­tor the bal­loon as it pro­gressed through Cana­da toward the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, and were sur­prised when it crossed over into Amer­i­can air­space.

    The cause of the sur­pris­ing turn last week was a polar vor­tex over Cana­da that also brought a cold snap to the north-east:

    We know the feel­ing when win­ter digs its heels in, and we get end­less days below sea­son­al. When this hap­pens, the jet stream becomes high­ly ampli­fied with block­ing mech­a­nisms to trap the cold.

    We often look to Green­land for strong block­ing, but that wasn’t the case. The lobe of the stratos­pher­ic polar vor­tex was free to swing read­i­ly across East­ern Cana­da but then made a swift exit. A ridge of high pres­sure filled in behind, caus­ing tem­per­a­tures to rise as fast as they fell.

    [see image]

    Such unusu­al weath­er pat­terns hap­pen every once a while but are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict:

    The one cer­tain­ty this win­ter is a stretched polar vor­tex (PV) that favors a cold pat­tern east of the Rock­ies in North Amer­i­ca. Anoth­er stretched PV is hap­pen­ing this week, with the cold arriv­ing this week­end in the North­east­ern US. But oth­er­wise, the more last­ing impact will be wide­spread cold to Cana­da and the Cen­tral and West­ern US. But much uncer­tain­ty sur­rounds this event and sub­se­quent events so my best advice con­tin­ues to be “the trend is your friend”.

    The bal­loon was on an east­er­ly course over north­west Cana­da when it was hit by excep­tion­al winds blow­ing south.

    [see image]

    That it was only last week’s freak weath­er event that pushed the bal­loon across the U.S. makes it unlike­ly that it was intend­ed to spy on U.S. prop­er.

    Chi­na also said that it fired the man respon­si­ble for the inci­dent though that claim is prob­a­bly not ful­ly believ­able:

    Chi­nese state media on Sat­ur­day announced that the head of the country’s weath­er ser­vice was relieved of his duty, in a move seen by some ana­lysts as an attempt to shore up Beijing’s posi­tion that the high-alti­tude bal­loon was of civil­ian nature main­ly for mete­o­ro­log­i­cal pur­pos­es.

    Zhuang Guo­tai was the head of Chi­na Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Admin­is­tra­tion until Fri­day, but his depar­ture from that post was not unex­pect­ed. In late Jan­u­ary, Zhuang was elect­ed the head of the west­ern Gan­su province’s People’s Polit­i­cal Con­sul­ta­tive Com­mit­tee, the provin­cial polit­i­cal advi­so­ry body.

    The whole inci­dent clear­ly hap­pened by acci­dent and was blown up by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es:

    How­ev­er, a day ear­li­er, on Fri­day, the White House abrupt­ly announced the post­pone­ment of a major two-day vis­it to Bei­jing by Sec­re­tary of State Antony Blinken (dur­ing which he was expect­ed to meet Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping.)

    Biden took these extreme steps despite China’s plea that this was “entire­ly an unex­pect­ed sit­u­a­tion caused by force majeure and the facts are very clear” and Bei­jing, in fact, even expressed “regret” (which is tan­ta­mount to an amende hon­or­able, as the French would say.)

    Fur­ther­more, there was even a con­ver­sa­tion on Fri­day between Blinken and Wang Yi, direc­tor of the Office of the For­eign Affairs Com­mis­sion of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Chi­na Cen­tral Com­mit­tee. Beijing’s read­out not­ed that the two top offi­cials “com­mu­ni­cat­ed with each oth­er on how to deal with a chance occur­rence in a calm and pro­fes­sion­al man­ner.”

    The ini­tial Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry press releas­es (here and here) were in a man­i­fest­ly con­cil­ia­to­ry spir­it. But Blinken chose to do some grand­stand­ing and took a tough pos­tur­ing call­ing it “an irre­spon­si­ble act and a clear vio­la­tion of US sov­er­eign­ty and inter­na­tion­al law that under­mined the pur­pose” of his forth­com­ing trip to Bei­jing.

    The pur­pose of Blinken’s planned Chi­na trip was to look for some way to split the Chi­na-Rus­sia axis. But a recent vis­it by the deputy of the Chi­nese for­eign min­is­ter to Rus­sia had already shown that any such attempts would fail:

    Evi­dent­ly, the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion realised that one main objec­tive of Blinken’s trip to Bei­jing — ie., to weak­en the Sino-Russ­ian axis — was going to be a non-starter. The US’ sus­tained efforts to turn the Ukraine con­flict as a tool to sab­o­tage Chi­na-Rus­sia rela­tions have failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly. The eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary ties between Bei­jing and Moscow are only grow­ing stronger. Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s expect­ed vis­it to Rus­sia in spring her­alds the steady upward tra­jec­to­ry of in the “no lim­its” part­ner­ship.

    ...

    ————

    “NYT Plants False Claims Over Chi­na’s Bal­loon Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” by b; Moon of Alaba­ma; 02/06/2023

    “That it was only last week’s freak weath­er event that pushed the bal­loon across the U.S. makes it unlike­ly that it was intend­ed to spy on U.S. prop­er.”

    Chi­na was deploy­ing the ‘ol Polar Vor­tex ‘lost bal­loon’ cov­er sto­ry to excuse its dia­bol­i­cal spy bal­loon. At least that’s the kind of sce­nario one would have to accept if we’re to look at the avail­able facts and con­clude that Chi­na inten­tion­al­ly sent its bal­loon on a jour­ney across North Amer­i­ca. Because there’s no deny­ing that the bal­loon’s sur­prise move south across Cana­da coin­cid­ed with a sur­prise polar vor­tex deliv­ery a pow­er­ful south­ward winds. It’s not a mys­tery. Or a plot. It’s weath­er and physics, with some cli­mate change thrown into the mix:

    ...
    Its claim that the bal­lon went unex­pect­ed­ly off course is by the way com­plete­ly cor­rect. The U.S. had long tracked the bal­lon over Alas­ka and Cana­da and was equal­ly sur­prised when it sud­den­ly turned south:

    Anoth­er U.S. offi­cial said intel­li­gence agen­cies began track­ing the bal­loon sev­er­al days ago, not long after it had left Chi­na and began its con­trolled drift toward the Aleut­ian Islands of Alas­ka. The offi­cial said Amer­i­can track­ers con­tin­ued to mon­i­tor the bal­loon as it pro­gressed through Cana­da toward the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, and were sur­prised when it crossed over into Amer­i­can air­space.

    The cause of the sur­pris­ing turn last week was a polar vor­tex over Cana­da that also brought a cold snap to the north-east:

    We know the feel­ing when win­ter digs its heels in, and we get end­less days below sea­son­al. When this hap­pens, the jet stream becomes high­ly ampli­fied with block­ing mech­a­nisms to trap the cold.

    We often look to Green­land for strong block­ing, but that wasn’t the case. The lobe of the stratos­pher­ic polar vor­tex was free to swing read­i­ly across East­ern Cana­da but then made a swift exit. A ridge of high pres­sure filled in behind, caus­ing tem­per­a­tures to rise as fast as they fell.

    [see image]

    Such unusu­al weath­er pat­terns hap­pen every once a while but are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict:

    The one cer­tain­ty this win­ter is a stretched polar vor­tex (PV) that favors a cold pat­tern east of the Rock­ies in North Amer­i­ca. Anoth­er stretched PV is hap­pen­ing this week, with the cold arriv­ing this week­end in the North­east­ern US. But oth­er­wise, the more last­ing impact will be wide­spread cold to Cana­da and the Cen­tral and West­ern US. But much uncer­tain­ty sur­rounds this event and sub­se­quent events so my best advice con­tin­ues to be “the trend is your friend”.

    The bal­loon was on an east­er­ly course over north­west Cana­da when it was hit by excep­tion­al winds blow­ing south.

    [see image]
    ...

    We’ll see what, if any, longer-term dam­age this sto­ry has on US-Chi­nese rela­tions. On the one hand, it does­n’t sound like the prospects of any mean­ing­ful break­throughs from those talks were like­ly any­way. But there’s still no deny­ing that this is become an excuse to ramp up ten­sions. And for those with an eye on spark­ing a war between the US and Chi­na, keep­ing those ten­sions ramped up for as long as pos­si­ble is all part of that plan. The geopo­lit­i­cal pres­sure cook­er isn’t just still pres­sur­ized, but even more pres­sure than before. And yet, this obvi­ous­ly was­n’t part of a plan. You can’t plan on a polar vor­tex.

    But you can plan on cre­at­ing and sus­tain­ing geopo­lit­i­cal pres­sure cook­er sce­nar­ios. The kind of long-term plan that includes tak­ing strate­gic oppor­tu­ni­ties to keep that pres­sure up when those oppor­tu­ni­ties present them­selves. Espe­cial­ly when it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for every­one to col­lec­tive­ly play dumb togeth­er. Because there’s noth­ing quite like the pow­er of every­one play­ing dumb togeth­er. Easy to orga­nize with a high chance of suc­cess. It’s a no-brain­er.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 6, 2023, 4:40 pm
  5. LOL! We got an update on the Chi­nese ‘spy bal­loon’. It’s more or less the kind of ‘update’ we should expect at this point: The Pen­ta­gon is final­ly acknowl­edg­ing that the bal­loon was like­ly blown wild­ly off its intend­ed course due to the polar vor­tex.

    And yet, as we’re going to see, Pen­ta­gon sources remain adamant that the bal­loon was indeed a ‘spy bal­loon’ built for the pur­pose of but­tress­ing Chi­na’s sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties. Beyond that, these source also insist that the bal­loon was indeed launched for the pur­pose of spy­ing on US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, like­ly in the Pacif­ic.

    Oh, and it turns out these sources con­tin­ue to sug­gest that the bal­loon was still being remote­ly pilot­ed by the PLA to direct it over sen­si­tive US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions in the US. Yep. The sources point to the solar-pow­ered pro­pellers and a rud­der to sug­gest that the PLA was oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly tak­ing advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion to direct the bal­loon over sen­si­tive nuclear facil­i­ties in Mon­tana.

    That’s the update: yes, it was the polar vor­tex that blew the bal­loon off course in the first place, but it was still def­i­nite­ly a spy bal­loon tar­get­ing US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions! The nar­ra­tive we’re hear­ing about the bal­loon is some­how simul­ta­ne­ous­ly get­ting more ground­ed and yet even more full of hot air:

    Moon of Alaba­ma

    After Ten Days Of Pan­icky Hype The Weath­er Bal­loon Non­sense Is Final­ly Buried

    Post­ed by b
    on Feb­ru­ary 15, 2023 at 12:05 UTC

    Since Feb­ru­ary 4 I have dis­missed the ‘Chi­nese weath­er bal­loon’ pan­ic:

    The para­noid style applies to inter­nal U.S. pol­i­tics as well as to for­eign poli­cies against this or that favorite ene­my of that time.

    It makes the sto­ry below, which oth­er­wise is just laugh­able, some­what dan­ger­ous.

    Furor Over Chi­nese Spy Bal­loon Leads to a Diplo­mat­ic Cri­sis
    The Pen­ta­gon called the object, which has flown from Mon­tana to Kansas, an “intel­li­gence gath­er­ing” bal­loon. Bei­jing said it was used main­ly for weath­er research and had strayed off course.

    As some 80+% of all Pen­ta­gon intel­li­gence comes from open sources the ‘intel­li­gence gath­er­ing’ state­ment may well include a weath­er research sys­tem. Weath­er research and weath­er pre­dic­tion are impor­tant for all kinds of mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. But they are also impor­tant for many civ­il oper­a­tions from agri­cul­ture, food avail­abil­i­ty pre­dic­tion to drainage plan­ning in cities.

    I point­ed out that this was by far not the first Chi­nese weath­er bal­loon that drift­ed in unex­pect­ed direc­tions. That is nor­mal. The winds at the lev­el where such bal­loons fly are very strong. There is no real way to con­trol their flight path.

    It soon became obvi­ous that the bal­loon which was drift­ing over Alas­ka only crossed into the low­er Unit­ed States because a strong low pres­sure area over west Cana­da pushed it south­ward. Still, the media kept hyp­ing the issue until the air force took the bal­loon down. Things got even worse when the air force in the after­math start­ed to shot down harm­less small research bal­loons.

    * Feb 4 — Blinken’s Trav­el Can­cel­ing Adds To Chi­na Hate
    * Feb 6 — NYT Plants False Claims Over Chi­na’s Bal­loon Com­mu­ni­ca­tion
    * Feb 8 — Chi­na Rejects “Shoot First, Talk Lat­er” Atti­tude
    * Feb 11 — Air­force Spent Mil­lions To Shot Down A Failed U.S. Weath­er Bal­loon — Biden Is Hap­py It Did So

    Only now is the whole hype dying down helped by sud­den expla­na­tions of the obvi­ous.

    U.S. tracked Chi­na spy bal­loon from launch on Hainan Island along unusu­al pathWash­ing­ton Post

    By the time a Chi­nese spy bal­loon crossed into Amer­i­can air­space late last month, U.S. mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence agen­cies had been track­ing it for near­ly a week, watch­ing as it lift­ed off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.
    ...
    The bal­loon float­ed over Alaska’s Aleut­ian Islands thou­sands of miles away from Guam, then drift­ed over Cana­da, where it encoun­tered strong winds that appear to have pushed the bal­loon south into the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, the offi­cials said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe sen­si­tive intel­li­gence. A U.S. fight­er jet shot the bal­loon down off the coast of South Car­oli­na on Feb. 4, a week after it crossed over Alas­ka.

    Yes, that is exact­ly, as I point­ed out, what the low pres­sure area over west Cana­da did.

    [see image]

    Mean­while, the White House on Tues­day said that three oth­er objects shot down over North Amer­i­ca in the last week may have posed no nation­al secu­ri­ty threat, strik­ing per­haps the clear­est dis­tinc­tion yet between those fly­ing anom­alies and the sus­pect­ed spy bal­loon. John Kir­by, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s coor­di­na­tor for strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions, told reporters that the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty “will not dis­miss as a pos­si­bil­i­ty” that the three craft instead belonged to a com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tion or research enti­ty and were there­fore “benign.”

    Oh well, you don’t say so ...

    The Chi­nese had explained that their big weath­er bal­loon drift­ed towards North Amer­i­ca only after unex­pect­ed strong ‘west­er­lies’ had pushed it off the expect­ed course. The U.S. is now admit­ted that they were right.

    Around Jan. 24, when the bal­loon would have been rough­ly about 1,000 miles south of Japan, mod­el sim­u­la­tions show it began to gain speed and rapid­ly veer north. This would have been in response to a strong cold front that had unleashed excep­tion­al­ly frigid air over north­ern Chi­na, the Kore­an Penin­su­la and Japan.

    Ordi­nar­i­ly, atmos­pher­ic steer­ing motions would have kept the bal­loon on much more of a west to east course, his­tor­i­cal weath­er data shows. How­ev­er, the intense cold front forced the jet stream and high alti­tude steer­ing cur­rents to dip south and may have scooped the bal­loon north­ward.

    Two cold fronts, one over north Chi­na and one over west Cana­da deter­mined the course of the big bal­loon.

    This also dis­miss­es the laugh­able Pen­ta­gon claims that the bal­loon had pro­pellers and a rud­der and was there­by steer­able. There is noth­ing that solar dri­ven pro­pellers can do when a huge object like a 200 feet high bal­lon is drift­ing in 200 mph jet­stream winds. The whole idea was obvi­ous­ly bonkers. The only way to some­what steer a bal­loon is by rais­ing or low­er­ing its alti­tude until one finds an air cur­rent that blows it in the wished for direc­tion. While this will work at an alti­tude of a few hun­dred feet there is no real chance to do that in the upper atmos­phere.

    The three small­er weath­er or research bal­loons were only found drift­ing along after the air force turned down the fil­ters of its radars. But those fil­ters are there for good rea­sons. A lot of clut­ter, like a flock of birds, would oth­er­wise come up as alarm.

    The U.S. Nation­al Weath­er Ser­vice says that it alone launch­es 75,000 bal­loons per year. It would be a ridicu­lous waste to send up fight­er planes when­ev­er such a bal­loon goes up.

    The larg­er Chi­nese weath­er bal­loon was also like­ly a legit one. Such big­ger bal­loons are build to cross oceans and to mea­sure the upper atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions over long dis­tances. That it was blown off course, twice, by unusu­al weath­er is a rea­son­able expla­na­tion.

    ...

    ———-

    “After Ten Days Of Pan­icky Hype The Weath­er Bal­loon Non­sense Is Final­ly Buried” by b; Moon of Alaba­ma; 02/15/2023

    “Two cold fronts, one over north Chi­na and one over west Cana­da deter­mined the course of the big bal­loon.”

    And there was have it. The admis­sion that should have been forth­com­ing all along. Basic weath­er and physics — in the form of two cold fronts — steered the bal­loon. That’s now admit­ted. And yet, that has­n’t stopped the charges that the Chi­nese were direct­ing the bal­loon. Yep. The bal­loon was blown out of con­trol by the strong winds. But also still con­trolled with pro­pellers and a rud­der:

    ...
    This also dis­miss­es the laugh­able Pen­ta­gon claims that the bal­loon had pro­pellers and a rud­der and was there­by steer­able. There is noth­ing that solar dri­ven pro­pellers can do when a huge object like a 200 feet high bal­lon is drift­ing in 200 mph jet­stream winds. The whole idea was obvi­ous­ly bonkers. The only way to some­what steer a bal­loon is by rais­ing or low­er­ing its alti­tude until one finds an air cur­rent that blows it in the wished for direc­tion. While this will work at an alti­tude of a few hun­dred feet there is no real chance to do that in the upper atmos­phere.
    ...

    And that brings us to the larg­er set of ongo­ing alle­ga­tions com­ing from the Pen­ta­gon. Like the con­tin­ued insis­tence that, yes, this was a spy bal­loon launched with the inten­tion of spy­ing on US mil­i­tary facil­i­ties. But those intend­ed tar­get­ed facil­i­ties were like­ly over the Pacif­ic, like instal­la­tions in Guam or Hawaii.

    Also, regard­ing the rud­der and the lim­it­ed abil­i­ty steer, the Pen­ta­gon still asserts that it was no coin­ci­dence the ‘spy bal­loon’ end­ed up over sen­si­tive nuclear facil­i­ties in Mon­tana. The Chi­nese were still oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly steer­ing the bal­loon over those facil­i­ties, even if they could­n’t entire­ly con­trol its path. And, in gen­er­al, we’re still hear­ing from ana­lysts who have con­clud­ed that this bal­loon was def­i­nite­ly intend­ed as a kind of low-tech sup­ple­ment to Chi­na’s spy satel­lites.

    And that’s the full update we got on the Pen­tagon’s evolv­ing nar­ra­tive about the bal­loon. Yes, the Pen­ta­gon is now acknowl­edg­ing that the bal­loon like­ly drift­ed wild­ly off course due to the pow­er­ful polar vor­tex winds, but it was still a ‘spy bal­loon’ launched for the pur­pose of spy­ing on US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions and it was still being remote­ly con­trolled by the PLA:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    U.S. tracked Chi­na spy bal­loon from launch on Hainan Island along unusu­al path

    The large Chi­nese sur­veil­lance device that flew across Alas­ka and the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States may have been divert­ed on an errant path caused by atyp­i­cal weath­er con­di­tions

    By Ellen Nakashima, Shane Har­ris and Jason Samenow

    Updat­ed Feb­ru­ary 14, 2023 at 8:41 p.m. EST|Published Feb­ru­ary 14, 2023 at 5:34 p.m. EST

    By the time a Chi­nese spy bal­loon crossed into Amer­i­can air­space late last month, U.S. mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence agen­cies had been track­ing it for near­ly a week, watch­ing as it lift­ed off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.

    U.S. mon­i­tors watched as the bal­loon set­tled into a flight path that would appear to have tak­en it over the U.S. ter­ri­to­ry of Guam. But some­where along that east­er­ly route, the craft took an unex­pect­ed north­ern turn, accord­ing to sev­er­al U.S. offi­cials, who said that ana­lysts are now exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Chi­na didn’t intend to pen­e­trate the Amer­i­can heart­land with its air­borne sur­veil­lance device.

    The bal­loon float­ed over Alaska’s Aleut­ian Islands thou­sands of miles away from Guam, then drift­ed over Cana­da, where it encoun­tered strong winds that appear to have pushed the bal­loon south into the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, the offi­cials said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe sen­si­tive intel­li­gence. A U.S. fight­er jet shot the bal­loon down off the coast of South Car­oli­na on Feb. 4, a week after it crossed over Alas­ka.

    This new account sug­gests that the ensu­ing inter­na­tion­al cri­sis that has ratch­eted up ten­sions between Wash­ing­ton and Bei­jing may have been at least part­ly the result of a mis­take.

    Mean­while, the White House on Tues­day said that three oth­er objects shot down over North Amer­i­ca in the last week may have posed no nation­al secu­ri­ty threat, strik­ing per­haps the clear­est dis­tinc­tion yet between those fly­ing anom­alies and the sus­pect­ed spy bal­loon. John Kir­by, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s coor­di­na­tor for strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions, told reporters that the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty “will not dis­miss as a pos­si­bil­i­ty” that the three craft instead belonged to a com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tion or research enti­ty and were there­fore “benign.”

    The People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army (PLA) has sent spy bal­loons over Guam before, as well as Hawaii, to mon­i­tor U.S. mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, offi­cials have said. But the days-long fly­over of the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States was nov­el, and it sparked con­fu­sion inside the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment as diplo­mats scram­bled to dis­sem­i­nate a cov­er sto­ry that the bal­loon had been blown off course while it was col­lect­ing innocu­ous mete­o­ro­log­i­cal data, U.S. offi­cials said.

    The furor caught Bei­jing on its back foot. Ini­tial­ly it expressed “regrets” over what it insist­ed was a way­ward weath­er bal­loon. Then it shift­ed to crit­i­ciz­ing Wash­ing­ton for what it said was over­re­act­ing, and this week it accused the Unit­ed States of send­ing 10 spy bal­loons over Chi­na. The White House has strong­ly denied the claim as false. “We are not fly­ing sur­veil­lance bal­loons over Chi­na. I’m not aware of any oth­er craft that we’re fly­ing over — into Chi­nese air­space,” Kir­by said Mon­day.

    U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary agen­cies tracked the bal­loon as it launched from Hainan Island. Intel­li­gence ana­lysts are unsure whether the appar­ent devi­a­tion was inten­tion­al or acci­den­tal, but are con­fi­dent it was intend­ed for sur­veil­lance, most like­ly over U.S. mil­i­tary instal­la­tions in the Pacif­ic. Either way the incur­sion into U.S. air­space was a major mis­step by the PLA, prompt­ing a polit­i­cal and diplo­mat­ic furor and deep­er scruti­ny by the Unit­ed States and its allies of Beijing’s aer­i­al espi­onage capa­bil­i­ties.

    Its cross­ing into U.S. air­space was a vio­la­tion of sov­er­eign­ty and its hov­er­ing over sen­si­tive nuclear sites in Mon­tana was no acci­dent, offi­cials said, rais­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that even if the bal­loon were inad­ver­tent­ly blown over the U.S. main­land, Bei­jing appar­ent­ly decid­ed to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ty to try to gath­er intel­li­gence.

    The inci­dent was just the lat­est indi­ca­tion of how pur­pose­ful­ly Chi­na is going about expand­ing its sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties — from advanced satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy to bal­loons, offi­cials said.

    The bal­loon fleet is a part of a much broad­er air sur­veil­lance effort that includes sophis­ti­cat­ed satel­lite sys­tems and into which the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has poured what ana­lysts say are bil­lions of dol­lars of invest­ment over the years.

    “This was a dis­crete pro­gram — part of a larg­er set of pro­grams that are about gain­ing greater clar­i­ty about mil­i­tary facil­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and in a vari­ety of oth­er coun­tries,” said one senior U.S. offi­cial. It appears to be meant to “aug­ment the satel­lite sys­tems.”

    The bal­loon was launched from the ground, part of a pro­gram run in part by the PLA air force, and it may have been tak­en off course by strong high-alti­tude winds, offi­cials said. It was part­ly direct­ed by air cur­rents and part­ly pilot­ed remote­ly, they said. With pro­pellers and a rud­der, it has the capa­bil­i­ty to be maneu­vered.

    After the bal­loon launched, com­put­er mod­el­ing con­duct­ed by The Wash­ing­ton Post indi­cates steer­ing cur­rents would have pushed it due east over the Pacif­ic Ocean, prob­a­bly pass­ing between the Philip­pines and Tai­wan.

    Around Jan. 24, when the bal­loon would have been rough­ly about 1,000 miles south of Japan, mod­el sim­u­la­tions show it began to gain speed and rapid­ly veer north. This would have been in response to a strong cold front that had unleashed excep­tion­al­ly frigid air over north­ern Chi­na, the Kore­an Penin­su­la and Japan.

    Ordi­nar­i­ly, atmos­pher­ic steer­ing motions would have kept the bal­loon on much more of a west to east course, his­tor­i­cal weath­er data shows. How­ev­er, the intense cold front forced the jet stream and high alti­tude steer­ing cur­rents to dip south and may have scooped the bal­loon north­ward.

    The air­ship entered U.S. air­space off Alas­ka on Jan. 28, cross­ing Cana­da and reen­ter­ing the Unit­ed States over Ida­ho on Jan. 31, one day before it was spot­ted over Mon­tana by civil­ians, prompt­ing a ground stop­page at the air­port in Billings, as U.S. offi­cials con­sid­ered shoot­ing it down.

    When offi­cials deter­mined they could not mit­i­gate the risk to peo­ple on the ground, they decid­ed to wait until they could shoot it down over water.

    Ana­lysts are still await­ing the retrieval of the balloon’s pay­load, which offi­cials esti­mat­ed to be the size of three school bus­es, but “it doesn’t look like it’s a dra­mat­ic new capa­bil­i­ty,” said a sec­ond U.S. offi­cial. “It looks like it’s more col­lec­tion — every­body always wants more.”

    ...

    ———-

    “U.S. tracked Chi­na spy bal­loon from launch on Hainan Island along unusu­al path” By Ellen Nakashima, Shane Har­ris and Jason Samenow; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 02/14/2023

    “U.S. mon­i­tors watched as the bal­loon set­tled into a flight path that would appear to have tak­en it over the U.S. ter­ri­to­ry of Guam. But some­where along that east­er­ly route, the craft took an unex­pect­ed north­ern turn, accord­ing to sev­er­al U.S. offi­cials, who said that ana­lysts are now exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Chi­na didn’t intend to pen­e­trate the Amer­i­can heart­land with its air­borne sur­veil­lance device.

    US ana­lysts are “now exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty” that Chi­na didn’t intend to “pen­e­trate the Amer­i­can heart­land with its air­borne sur­veil­lance device.” It’s not a par­tic­u­lar­ly huge change in the nar­ra­tive. Instead, we’re told that offi­cials are open to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it was “at least part­ly the result of a mis­take”. So, like, Chi­na did intend on spy­ing on the US using this “spy bal­loon” — pos­si­bly US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions in the Pacif­ic — but some­how it all got out of con­trol. That’s the new nar­ra­tive:

    ...
    The bal­loon float­ed over Alaska’s Aleut­ian Islands thou­sands of miles away from Guam, then drift­ed over Cana­da, where it encoun­tered strong winds that appear to have pushed the bal­loon south into the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, the offi­cials said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe sen­si­tive intel­li­gence. A U.S. fight­er jet shot the bal­loon down off the coast of South Car­oli­na on Feb. 4, a week after it crossed over Alas­ka.

    This new account sug­gests that the ensu­ing inter­na­tion­al cri­sis that has ratch­eted up ten­sions between Wash­ing­ton and Bei­jing may have been at least part­ly the result of a mis­take.

    ...

    The People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army (PLA) has sent spy bal­loons over Guam before, as well as Hawaii, to mon­i­tor U.S. mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, offi­cials have said. But the days-long fly­over of the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States was nov­el, and it sparked con­fu­sion inside the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment as diplo­mats scram­bled to dis­sem­i­nate a cov­er sto­ry that the bal­loon had been blown off course while it was col­lect­ing innocu­ous mete­o­ro­log­i­cal data, U.S. offi­cials said.

    ...

    U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary agen­cies tracked the bal­loon as it launched from Hainan Island. Intel­li­gence ana­lysts are unsure whether the appar­ent devi­a­tion was inten­tion­al or acci­den­tal, but are con­fi­dent it was intend­ed for sur­veil­lance, most like­ly over U.S. mil­i­tary instal­la­tions in the Pacif­ic. Either way the incur­sion into U.S. air­space was a major mis­step by the PLA, prompt­ing a polit­i­cal and diplo­mat­ic furor and deep­er scruti­ny by the Unit­ed States and its allies of Beijing’s aer­i­al espi­onage capa­bil­i­ties.

    ...

    After the bal­loon launched, com­put­er mod­el­ing con­duct­ed by The Wash­ing­ton Post indi­cates steer­ing cur­rents would have pushed it due east over the Pacif­ic Ocean, prob­a­bly pass­ing between the Philip­pines and Tai­wan.

    Around Jan. 24, when the bal­loon would have been rough­ly about 1,000 miles south of Japan, mod­el sim­u­la­tions show it began to gain speed and rapid­ly veer north. This would have been in response to a strong cold front that had unleashed excep­tion­al­ly frigid air over north­ern Chi­na, the Kore­an Penin­su­la and Japan.

    Ordi­nar­i­ly, atmos­pher­ic steer­ing motions would have kept the bal­loon on much more of a west to east course, his­tor­i­cal weath­er data shows. How­ev­er, the intense cold front forced the jet stream and high alti­tude steer­ing cur­rents to dip south and may have scooped the bal­loon north­ward.
    ...

    And then we get to this rather remark­able point of spec­u­la­tion: while the bal­loon was fly­ing wild­ly off course due to the strong winds, it was still also being oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly direct­ed by the Chi­nese to maneu­ver it over sen­si­tive nuclear sites on the US main­land because the bal­loon was def­i­nite­ly “part of a larg­er set of pro­grams that are about gain­ing greater clar­i­ty about mil­i­tary facil­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and in a vari­ety of oth­er coun­tries”:

    ...
    Its cross­ing into U.S. air­space was a vio­la­tion of sov­er­eign­ty and its hov­er­ing over sen­si­tive nuclear sites in Mon­tana was no acci­dent, offi­cials said, rais­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that even if the bal­loon were inad­ver­tent­ly blown over the U.S. main­land, Bei­jing appar­ent­ly decid­ed to seize the oppor­tu­ni­ty to try to gath­er intel­li­gence.

    ...

    The bal­loon fleet is a part of a much broad­er air sur­veil­lance effort that includes sophis­ti­cat­ed satel­lite sys­tems and into which the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has poured what ana­lysts say are bil­lions of dol­lars of invest­ment over the years.

    “This was a dis­crete pro­gram — part of a larg­er set of pro­grams that are about gain­ing greater clar­i­ty about mil­i­tary facil­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and in a vari­ety of oth­er coun­tries,” said one senior U.S. offi­cial. It appears to be meant to “aug­ment the satel­lite sys­tems.”

    The bal­loon was launched from the ground, part of a pro­gram run in part by the PLA air force, and it may have been tak­en off course by strong high-alti­tude winds, offi­cials said. It was part­ly direct­ed by air cur­rents and part­ly pilot­ed remote­ly, they said. With pro­pellers and a rud­der, it has the capa­bil­i­ty to be maneu­vered.
    ...

    Sure, the bal­loon was fly­ing out of con­trol due to the polar vor­tex. But it was def­i­nite­ly a spy bal­loon tar­get­ing US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions under the remote direc­tion of the PLA! Of that we can remain con­fi­dent. An increas­ing­ly faith-based con­fi­dence. Bad faith, as the case may be.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 15, 2023, 4:25 pm
  6. Of all the dis­turb­ing aspects of the US’s involve­ment in the con­flict in cur­rent, among the most trou­bling is the man­ner in which the response to that con­flict is being seem­ing­ly used to accel­er­ate what appears to be a mil­i­tary build up in antic­i­pa­tion for a war with Chi­na. And that brings us to the fol­low­ing pair of arti­cles about what looks to be the new phase in the prepa­ra­tions for war with Chi­na: the hyper­son­ic mis­sile race and a new indus­tri­al defense pol­i­cy designed to dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand the US’s mis­sile-man­u­fac­tur­ing capa­bil­i­ties for years to come.

    As the fol­low­ing Vox arti­cle describes, the hyper­son­ic mis­sile race is already well under­way, with coun­tries around the world already devel­op­ing their own hyper­son­ic mis­sile pro­grams. Chi­na even test­ed a nuclear-capa­ble hyper­son­ic mis­sile back in 2021, lead­ing to some US offi­cials argu­ing that the US is already behind Chi­na in this are­na. An are­na for which there are no exist­ing inter­na­tion­al treaties reg­u­lat­ing the devel­op­ment and use of hyper­son­ic mis­sile tech­nolo­gies. That’s a big part of the con­text here: hyper­son­ic mis­siles rep­re­sent a poten­tial game-chang­ing bat­tle­field tech­nol­o­gy and there are no lim­its in place on its devel­op­ment. It’s a very seri­ous race.

    But as the Vox arti­cle also notes, there’s one major caveat to this arms race: hyper­son­ic mis­siles are incred­i­bly expen­sive. In oth­er words, there’s a lim­it to the role they can play in any major con­flict com­pared to tra­di­tion­al muni­tions. And that brings us to the sec­ond arti­cle excerpt below of a report in the New York Times describ­ing a dra­mat­ic shift in US defense spend­ing poli­cies. A shift that rep­re­sents an effec­tive rever­sal of much of the post-Cold War ‘peace div­i­dend’ that brought about a ‘just-in-time’ sup­ply-chain mod­el along with a dra­mat­ic defense indus­try con­sol­i­da­tion of the man­u­fac­tur­ers of mis­siles and vital mis­sile parts. As part of the new pol­i­cy, the Depart­ment of Defense as been empow­ered by Con­gress to issue large mul­ti-year con­tracts with sup­pli­ers with promis­es of future prof­its large enough to encour­age those sup­pli­ers to expand their man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ties. That’s the plan: show­er the mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try with so much mon­ey that the indus­try will have to grow to max­i­mize those future prof­its. A plan that appears to envi­sion a much larg­er mis­sile sup­ply for the US in a mat­ter of a few years. It’s an aggres­sive plan.

    Ok, first, here’s the Vox piece describ­ing the unfold­ing hyper­son­ic arms race. A hyper­son­ic race that could obvi­ous­ly play a deci­sive role in the upcom­ing plans for wag­ing WWIII with Chi­na, hence the rush:

    Vox

    America’s hyper­son­ic arms race with Chi­na, explained

    With­out treaties to rein in their use, a dan­ger­ous esca­la­tion between coun­tries becomes much more like­ly.

    By Ellen Ioanes
    Mar 25, 2023, 4:15pm EDT

    The US Depart­ment of Defense is pour­ing mon­ey into hyper­son­ic weapons after years of defense offi­cials’ warn­ings that Chi­na is gain­ing supe­ri­or­i­ty in that are­na. But a 21st-cen­tu­ry arms race is a major risk, espe­cial­ly with­out a full pic­ture of Chi­nese weapons devel­op­ment and amid the increas­ing­ly poor rela­tion­ship between the two nations.

    Hyper­son­ic weapons, or vehi­cles and mis­siles that trav­el faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, aren’t new; the US has been devel­op­ing and test­ing these weapons since the 1950s. But there’s been rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle US invest­ment in these sys­tems in recent decades, while Chi­na and Rus­sia have devel­oped their hyper­son­ics pro­grams. Rus­sia even used six of its hyper­son­ic Kinzhal mis­siles in Ukraine ear­li­er this month, the largest num­ber the coun­try has deployed in one strike dur­ing the war. Oth­er coun­tries includ­ing Aus­tralia, Iran, both North and South Korea, Brazil, Ger­many, Israel, India, and Japan are devel­op­ing hyper­son­ic pro­grams. How­ev­er, the increase in fund­ing and tem­po of the US pro­gram comes as rela­tions between the US and Chi­na are the worst they’ve been in decades.

    The Depart­ment of Defense’s pro­posed bud­get for Army and Air Force hyper­son­ics devel­op­ment and req­ui­si­tion for the years 2023 through 2027 sits at $15 bil­lion, accord­ing to a Jan­u­ary report from the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office. That fig­ure doesn’t include the Navy’s hyper­son­ics devel­op­ment pro­gram, which in Feb­ru­ary announced a $1.1 bil­lion con­tract with the defense man­u­fac­tur­er Lock­heed Mar­tin to add a hyper­son­ic sys­tem to Zumwalt-class destroy­ers.

    Defense offi­cials have argued for years that the US is “behind” Chi­na in its hyper­son­ic weapons devel­op­ment, and that may be true. Chi­na field­ed a test in 2021 of a hyper­son­ic, nuclear-capa­ble weapon which at the time took many in the defense com­mu­ni­ty by sur­prise and showed astound­ing devel­op­ment in China’s hyper­son­ics capa­bil­i­ties.

    “Once, Amer­i­can tech­no­log­i­cal pre­dom­i­nance was regard­ed as all but unas­sail­able, and Chi­na tend­ed to be dis­missed as a copy­cat that was unlike­ly to close the gap,” Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fel­low with the Tech­nol­o­gy and Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pro­gram at the Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty, told Vox in an email. “Today, recog­ni­tion of China’s poten­tial to lead in new fron­tiers and strate­gic tech­nolo­gies is height­en­ing the urgency behind US efforts and pro­grams on sev­er­al fronts.”

    Wor­ry­ing­ly, there are no mul­ti­lat­er­al or bilat­er­al treaties regard­ing the use of hyper­son­ic weapons — a sit­u­a­tion which, as the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis demon­strat­ed in Octo­ber 1962, can lead to glob­al pan­ic or even cat­a­stro­phe. And there’s no cur­rent indi­ca­tion that any such treaty or agree­ment is on the table, giv­en that the major play­ers in the hyper­son­ic space are on the outs with lit­tle desire to nego­ti­ate on much of any­thing, much less a bur­geon­ing bat­tle­field threat.

    Still, that hasn’t stopped US defense offi­cials, leg­is­la­tors, and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers from push­ing ahead with lob­by­ing for hyper­son­ic tech­nol­o­gy — and as of now, the gov­ern­ment is ready to pour mon­ey into the project.

    Hyper­son­ic weapons are pricey, but they do have some advan­tages

    The US mil­i­tary began work­ing on hyper­son­ic sys­tems back in the 1960s, most­ly look­ing at hyper­son­ic flight capa­bil­i­ties for car­ry­ing peo­ple, not nec­es­sar­i­ly just weapons. But in the 1980s, that began to change, as Pop­u­lar Sci­ence report­ed last year. That’s when the Air Force test­ed the Maneu­ver­ing Reen­try Vehi­cle (MaRV), show­ing that mis­siles going at Mach 5 or faster as they re-entered Earth’s atmos­phere could be maneu­vered to hit a tar­get. The US start­ed pur­su­ing hyper­son­ic weapons devel­op­ment in earnest in the ear­ly 2000s, as part of its con­ven­tion­al prompt glob­al strike pro­gram.

    There are two main hyper­son­ic weapons sys­tem con­cepts — the glide vehi­cle and air-breath­ing mis­sile — that the US is devel­op­ing. While the weapons sys­tems them­selves are con­ven­tion­al, or non-nuclear, Chi­na is devel­op­ing nuclear-capa­ble mis­siles, as the 2021 tests showed.

    “Chi­na has been seek­ing ways to counter US mis­sile defense sys­tems for decades; China’s always felt that US mis­sile defense sys­tems under­mine China’s nuclear deter­rence,” Lyle Mor­ris, a senior fel­low for for­eign pol­i­cy and nation­al secu­ri­ty at Asia Soci­ety Pol­i­cy Institute’s Cen­ter for Chi­na Analy­sis, told Vox in an inter­view. Start­ing in the ear­ly 2000s, Chi­na ramped up its hyper­son­ics devel­op­ment in response to the dis­so­lu­tion of the Anti-Bal­lis­tic Mis­sile treaty, orig­i­nal­ly signed by the US and the Sovi­et Union. With anti-bal­lis­tic sys­tems devel­op­ment now unfet­tered, Chi­na felt the need for a dif­fer­ent kind of deter­rent.

    Glide-type weapons, which Chi­na has test­ed, are launched from a bal­lis­tic mis­sile, Tim­o­thy Heath, a senior inter­na­tion­al defense researcher at the RAND Cor­po­ra­tion, explained. “The way their sys­tem works is you launch a bal­lis­tic mis­sile with this hyper­son­ic glid­er sit­ting on top of it. At a cer­tain point, the glid­er sep­a­rates from the bal­lis­tic mis­sile and goes on this hyper­son­ic tra­jec­to­ry, which is in the atmos­phere, unlike a bal­lis­tic mis­sile, and trav­els at hyper­spon­ic speeds, maneu­vers, and strikes its tar­get pri­mar­i­ly using iner­tia from the launch.”

    Accord­ing to Heath, Chi­na says they’re ready to deploy their hyper­son­ic weapons, which is “a step or two beyond where the US pro­gram is right now, we are still in the test­ing phase of hyper­son­ic mis­siles, so the Chi­nese do appear to have made faster progress than the US.” China’s bal­lis­tic mis­sile pro­gram is also high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed; giv­en that, and the US’ con­cur­rent under­in­vest­ment in bal­lis­tic mis­siles, it’s not sur­pris­ing that Chi­na was able to out­pace the US in devel­op­ing these weapons.

    Where hyper­son­ic weapons real­ly dif­fer from bal­lis­tic weapons isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly their speed, but their maneu­ver­abil­i­ty in flight and their abil­i­ty to evade mis­sile detec­tion and defense sys­tems evade detec­tion. One of the US’ most advanced mis­sile defense sys­tems, the Patri­ot is also used in 17 oth­er coun­tries. They evade detec­tion dur­ing parts of their jour­ney by exit­ing or near­ly exit­ing the earth’s atmos­phere and by shift­ing their course dur­ing flight.

    “In the near term, hyper­son­ic weapons sys­tems are expect­ed to have the poten­tial to over­come even the most sophis­ti­cat­ed air and mis­sile defense sys­tems,” Kania told Vox.

    There are seri­ous con­se­quences to a new arms race

    Giv­en China’s suc­cess­ful hyper­son­ics test­ing and the com­bat­ive mood between Bei­jing and Wash­ing­ton, it’s rea­son­able to be con­cerned about the accel­er­a­tion in both weapons devel­op­ment and hos­tile rhetoric. But in real­i­ty, there are sev­er­al road­blocks to the wide­spread use of these weapons in bat­tle, giv­en how expen­sive they are — about $15 mil­lion to $18 mil­lion per mis­sile, accord­ing to the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office — and the real­i­ty of the bat­tle­field, where basics like artillery are much more use­ful.

    ...

    Part of the con­cern about China’s hyper­son­ics pro­gram in par­tic­u­lar is the idea that the US is being caught flat-foot­ed, and that look­ing any­thing less than absolute­ly dom­i­nant is a prob­lem for US defense. That con­cern was par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in 2021, after China’s suc­cess­ful hyper­son­ic mis­sile tests. Gen. Mark Mil­ley, the chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to the tests as a pre­cur­sor to China’s “Sput­nik moment,” com­par­ing the Sovi­et Union’s launch of the first arti­fi­cial Earth-orbit­ing satel­lite in 1957.

    If there were a con­flict between the US and Chi­na or anoth­er adver­sary with hyper­son­ic weapons, Heath said, hyper­son­ics wouldn’t be the decid­ing fac­tor “giv­en that the US has such an advan­tage in oth­er mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies like stealth air­craft, long-range bombers, air­craft car­ri­ers, sub­marines — all of these con­ven­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties that allow the US to deploy forces far from the US and fight and dom­i­nate their adver­saries with­out the need for long-range mis­siles.”

    Still, as the US pours mon­ey into hyper­son­ics, and oth­er nations devel­op their capa­bil­i­ties, it’s crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to find a way to agree on how these weapons should be used in bat­tle. That’s not like­ly to hap­pen, Mor­ris said, until there’s a major esca­la­to­ry event — China’s mil­i­tary and the US defense appa­ra­tus are in a par­tic­u­lar­ly touchy phase, and that lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion increas­es the risk of mis­un­der­stand­ing and mis­cal­cu­la­tion.

    Fur­ther­more, most major weapons agree­ments have been between the US and Rus­sia or the Sovi­et Union; since Rus­sia pulled out of the New START, the last remain­ing major nuclear arms con­trol treaty, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of any kind of agree­ment to lim­it defense tech­nolo­gies is prob­a­bly a pipe dream.

    ———-

    “America’s hyper­son­ic arms race with Chi­na, explained” By Ellen Ioanes; Vox; 03/25/2023

    “Hyper­son­ic weapons, or vehi­cles and mis­siles that trav­el faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, aren’t new; the US has been devel­op­ing and test­ing these weapons since the 1950s. But there’s been rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle US invest­ment in these sys­tems in recent decades, while Chi­na and Rus­sia have devel­oped their hyper­son­ics pro­grams. Rus­sia even used six of its hyper­son­ic Kinzhal mis­siles in Ukraine ear­li­er this month, the largest num­ber the coun­try has deployed in one strike dur­ing the war. Oth­er coun­tries includ­ing Aus­tralia, Iran, both North and South Korea, Brazil, Ger­many, Israel, India, and Japan are devel­op­ing hyper­son­ic pro­grams. How­ev­er, the increase in fund­ing and tem­po of the US pro­gram comes as rela­tions between the US and Chi­na are the worst they’ve been in decades.

    It’s a glob­al hyper­son­ic race. A research bonan­za. A bonan­za not coin­ci­den­tal­ly Tak­ing place dur­ing a mul­ti-decade low in the rela­tions between the US, Russ­ian, and Chi­na. And it’s a bonan­za with no treaty avail­able to reign it in. A new era of war mil­i­tary pow­ers are rac­ing to make a real­i­ty. The kind of real­i­ty that could end up mak­ing a num­ber of exist­ing defen­sive sys­tems large­ly moot, which is obvi­ous­ly a high­ly desta­bi­liz­ing sit­u­a­tion. That’s part of the omi­nous­ness of the hyper­son­ic mis­sile race: It’s a race to be the first nation to utter­ly desta­bi­lize mod­ern war­fare:

    ...
    Defense offi­cials have argued for years that the US is “behind” Chi­na in its hyper­son­ic weapons devel­op­ment, and that may be true. Chi­na field­ed a test in 2021 of a hyper­son­ic, nuclear-capa­ble weapon which at the time took many in the defense com­mu­ni­ty by sur­prise and showed astound­ing devel­op­ment in China’s hyper­son­ics capa­bil­i­ties.

    “Once, Amer­i­can tech­no­log­i­cal pre­dom­i­nance was regard­ed as all but unas­sail­able, and Chi­na tend­ed to be dis­missed as a copy­cat that was unlike­ly to close the gap,” Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fel­low with the Tech­nol­o­gy and Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pro­gram at the Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty, told Vox in an email. “Today, recog­ni­tion of China’s poten­tial to lead in new fron­tiers and strate­gic tech­nolo­gies is height­en­ing the urgency behind US efforts and pro­grams on sev­er­al fronts.”

    Wor­ry­ing­ly, there are no mul­ti­lat­er­al or bilat­er­al treaties regard­ing the use of hyper­son­ic weapons — a sit­u­a­tion which, as the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis demon­strat­ed in Octo­ber 1962, can lead to glob­al pan­ic or even cat­a­stro­phe. And there’s no cur­rent indi­ca­tion that any such treaty or agree­ment is on the table, giv­en that the major play­ers in the hyper­son­ic space are on the outs with lit­tle desire to nego­ti­ate on much of any­thing, much less a bur­geon­ing bat­tle­field threat.

    Still, that hasn’t stopped US defense offi­cials, leg­is­la­tors, and weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers from push­ing ahead with lob­by­ing for hyper­son­ic tech­nol­o­gy — and as of now, the gov­ern­ment is ready to pour mon­ey into the project.

    ...

    If there were a con­flict between the US and Chi­na or anoth­er adver­sary with hyper­son­ic weapons, Heath said, hyper­son­ics wouldn’t be the decid­ing fac­tor “giv­en that the US has such an advan­tage in oth­er mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies like stealth air­craft, long-range bombers, air­craft car­ri­ers, sub­marines — all of these con­ven­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties that allow the US to deploy forces far from the US and fight and dom­i­nate their adver­saries with­out the need for long-range mis­siles.”

    Still, as the US pours mon­ey into hyper­son­ics, and oth­er nations devel­op their capa­bil­i­ties, it’s crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to find a way to agree on how these weapons should be used in bat­tle. That’s not like­ly to hap­pen, Mor­ris said, until there’s a major esca­la­to­ry event — China’s mil­i­tary and the US defense appa­ra­tus are in a par­tic­u­lar­ly touchy phase, and that lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion increas­es the risk of mis­un­der­stand­ing and mis­cal­cu­la­tion.

    Fur­ther­more, most major weapons agree­ments have been between the US and Rus­sia or the Sovi­et Union; since Rus­sia pulled out of the New START, the last remain­ing major nuclear arms con­trol treaty, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of any kind of agree­ment to lim­it defense tech­nolo­gies is prob­a­bly a pipe dream.
    ...

    But in the midst of all these warn­ings about the impend­ing hyper­son­ic future of war, we get the fol­low­ing caveat: hyper­son­ic weapons are incred­i­bly expen­sive, cost­ing mil­lions of dol­lars per mis­sile:

    ...
    Giv­en China’s suc­cess­ful hyper­son­ics test­ing and the com­bat­ive mood between Bei­jing and Wash­ing­ton, it’s rea­son­able to be con­cerned about the accel­er­a­tion in both weapons devel­op­ment and hos­tile rhetoric. But in real­i­ty, there are sev­er­al road­blocks to the wide­spread use of these weapons in bat­tle, giv­en how expen­sive they are — about $15 mil­lion to $18 mil­lion per mis­sile, accord­ing to the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office — and the real­i­ty of the bat­tle­field, where basics like artillery are much more use­ful.
    ...

    So is the high cost of hyper­son­ic weapons real­ly going to be as big an obsta­cle as some pre­dict? Not if the US Con­gress has any­thing to say about it. At least that’s the mes­sage deliv­ered in the fol­low­ing NY Times arti­cle describ­ing a whole new indus­tri­al pol­i­cy com­ing out of DC that appears to be designed specif­i­cal­ly to ensure the US has robust sup­plies of mis­siles, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles, well into the future. An indus­tri­al pol­i­cy cen­tered around giv­ing mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ers large mul­ti-year con­tracts that will promise high­er prof­its in the future and encour­age them to invest in even great man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ties. In oth­er words, the US is plan­ning on buy­ing so many mis­siles over the medi­um term and show­er­ing mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ers in so much prof­it that they won’t be able to resist invest­ing in new fac­to­ries. Which sure sounds like a plan for as many hyper­son­ic mis­siles that mon­ey can buy as soon as pos­si­ble:

    The New York Times

    From Rock­ets to Ball Bear­ings, Pen­ta­gon Strug­gles to Feed War Machine

    The flow of arms to Ukraine has exposed a wor­ri­some lack of pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty in the Unit­ed States that has its roots in the end of the Cold War.

    By Eric Lip­ton
    March 24, 2023

    WASHINGTON — The Navy admi­ral had a blunt mes­sage for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tors build­ing pre­ci­sion-guid­ed mis­siles for his war­ships, sub­marines and planes at a moment when the Unit­ed States is dis­patch­ing arms to Ukraine and prepar­ing for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­flict with Chi­na.

    “Look at me. I am not for­giv­ing the fact you’re not deliv­er­ing the ord­nance we need. OK?” Adm. Daryl Cau­dle, who is in charge of deliv­er­ing weapons to most of the Navy’s East Coast-based fleet, warned con­trac­tors dur­ing an indus­try gath­er­ing in Jan­u­ary. “We’re talk­ing about war-fight­ing, nation­al secu­ri­ty, and going against a com­peti­tor here and a poten­tial adver­sary that is like noth­ing we’ve ever seen. And we can’t dil­ly­dal­ly around with these deliv­er­ies.”

    His open frus­tra­tion reflects a prob­lem that has become wor­ry­ing­ly appar­ent as the Pen­ta­gon dis­patch­es its own stocks of weapons to help Ukraine hold off Rus­sia and Wash­ing­ton war­i­ly watch­es for signs that Chi­na might pro­voke a new con­flict by invad­ing Tai­wan: The Unit­ed States lacks the capac­i­ty to pro­duce the arms that the nation and its allies need at a time of height­ened super­pow­er ten­sions.

    Indus­try con­sol­i­da­tion, deplet­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing lines and sup­ply chain issues have com­bined to con­strain the pro­duc­tion of basic ammu­ni­tion like artillery shells while also prompt­ing con­cern about build­ing ade­quate reserves of more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapons includ­ing mis­siles, air defense sys­tems and counter-artillery radar.

    ...

    Pro­cure­ment bud­gets are grow­ing. The mil­i­tary is offer­ing sup­pli­ers mul­ti­year con­tracts to encour­age com­pa­nies to invest more in their man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty and is dis­patch­ing teams to help solve sup­ply bot­tle­necks. More gen­er­al­ly, the Pen­ta­gon is aban­don­ing some of the cost-cut­ting changes embraced after the end of the Cold War, includ­ing cor­po­rate-style just-in-time deliv­ery sys­tems and a dri­ve to shrink the indus­try.

    “We are buy­ing to the lim­its of the indus­tri­al base even as we are expand­ing those lim­its,” Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Kath­leen Hicks said this month at a brief­ing on the Biden administration’s 2024 bud­get plan.

    But those changes are like­ly to take time to have an effect, leav­ing the mil­i­tary watch­ing its stocks of some key weapons dwin­dle.

    In the first 10 months after Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine, prompt­ing Wash­ing­ton to approve $33 bil­lion in mil­i­tary aid so far, the Unit­ed States sent Ukraine so many Stinger mis­siles from its own stocks that it would take 13 years’ worth of pro­duc­tion at recent capac­i­ty lev­els to replace them. It has sent so many Javelin mis­siles that it would take five years at last year’s rates to replace them, accord­ing to Raytheon, the com­pa­ny that helps make the mis­sile sys­tems.

    If a large-scale war broke out with Chi­na, with­in about one week the Unit­ed States would run out of so-called long-range anti-ship mis­siles, a vital weapon in any engage­ment with Chi­na, accord­ing to a series of war-game exer­cis­es con­duct­ed by the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies, a Wash­ing­ton-based think tank.

    The short­com­ings in the nation’s defense indus­tri­al base are vivid­ly illus­trat­ed by the short­age of sol­id rock­et motors need­ed to pow­er a broad range of pre­ci­sion mis­sile sys­tems, like the ship-launched SM‑6 mis­siles made by Raytheon.

    It was the short­age of SM‑6 mis­siles in par­tic­u­lar that had Admi­ral Cau­dle fum­ing; they are used to defend ships against ene­my air­craft, unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles and cruise mis­siles.

    There are only two con­trac­tors today that build large num­bers of rock­et motors for mis­sile sys­tems used by the Air Force, the Navy, the Army and the Marines, down from six in 1995.

    A recent fire dis­rupt­ed the assem­bly line at one of the two remain­ing sup­pli­ers, Aero­jet Rock­et­dyne, caus­ing fur­ther delays in deliv­er­ing the SM‑6 and oth­er pre­ci­sion mis­sile sys­tems, even as Pen­ta­gon orders for thou­sands of new mis­siles pile up.

    “Rock­et motors, a bane of my exis­tence, con­tin­ued to be a prob­lem,” Gre­go­ry Hayes, Raytheon’s chief exec­u­tive, told Wall Street ana­lysts last month. He said the short­age would affect the company’s abil­i­ty to deliv­er new mis­siles on time and was a prob­lem unlike­ly to be solved “until prob­a­bly the mid­dle of ’24.”

    Aero­jet is build­ing motors for old­er sys­tems such as Javelin anti-armor mis­siles and Stinger anti­air­craft mis­siles, of which over 10,000 have already been sent to Ukraine. It is also build­ing new rock­ets need­ed to pow­er so-called hyper­son­ic mis­siles that can trav­el much faster, as well as the rock­ets for a new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear weapons for the Unit­ed States and even the rock­et for a new NASA space­ship soon head­ed to the moon.

    The result is bil­lions of dol­lars in back­logged orders at the com­pa­ny — and frus­tra­tion at the Pen­ta­gon about the pace of deliv­ery.

    ...

    Oth­er short­ages slow­ing pro­duc­tion include sim­ple items such as ball bear­ings, a key com­po­nent of cer­tain mis­sile guid­ance sys­tems, and steel cast­ings, used in mak­ing engines.

    There is also only one com­pa­ny, Williams Inter­na­tion­al, that builds tur­bo­fan engines for most cruise mis­siles, accord­ing to Seth G. Jones, a for­mer Defense Depart­ment offi­cial now at the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies, weapons that would be vital for any war with Chi­na giv­en their long range.

    The cur­rent prob­lems have their roots in the after­math of the Cold War’s end, when a dri­ve for the “peace div­i­dend” led to cuts in weapons pro­cure­ment and con­sol­i­da­tion of the indus­try.

    In 1993, Nor­man Augus­tine, then the chief exec­u­tive of Mar­tin Mari­et­ta, one of the largest of the mil­i­tary con­trac­tors, received an invi­ta­tion to a din­ner with Defense Sec­re­tary Les Aspin, who was help­ing Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton fig­ure out how to shrink mil­i­tary spend­ing.

    When he arrived, more than a dozen oth­er chief exec­u­tives from major con­trac­tors were there for a gath­er­ing that would become known as “The Last Sup­per.” The mes­sage deliv­ered to the indus­try by Mr. Aspin was that many of the com­pa­nies need­ed to dis­ap­pear, by merg­ing or going out of busi­ness.

    “The cost would be enor­mous of main­tain­ing the half-full fac­to­ries, fac­to­ry assem­bly lines,” Mr. Augus­tine, now 87, said in an inter­view at a cof­fee shop near his Mary­land home, recall­ing the mes­sage shared with the exec­u­tives. “The gov­ern­ment was not going to tell us who the sur­vivors would be — we were going to have to fig­ure that out.”

    Mr. Augus­tine still has a copy of a detailed “Last Sup­per” chart bro­ken down by weapons sys­tems that he typed up after the din­ner. The total num­ber of ship­yards and tac­ti­cal mis­sile mak­ers would each be cut to four from eight, while the num­ber of rock­et-motor man­u­fac­tur­ers would be reduced to two from five.

    Soon enough, Mar­tin Mari­et­ta acquired GE Aero­space and Gen­er­al Dynam­ics’ Space Sys­tems, and then merged with Cal­i­for­nia-based Lock­heed Cor­po­ra­tion to form what is now known as Lock­heed Mar­tin.

    “The con­clu­sion they made — to get rid of most of the head­quar­ters and the C.E.O.s and get the peo­ple left in the busi­ness oper­at­ing at 100 per­cent, I think that was the right con­clu­sion at the time,” Mr. Augus­tine said. “But it had long-term con­se­quences. The chal­lenge we face today was one of our own cre­ation.”

    Since the end of the Cold War, the Unit­ed States — from the per­spec­tive of demands on its indus­tri­al base — has faced either short, high-inten­si­ty fights, like the first Per­sian Gulf war in 1990–91 and peri­ods of the Iraq war start­ing in 2003, or pro­longed but low­er-inten­si­ty con­flicts like the decades-long war in Afghanistan, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion mil­i­tary schol­ar.

    But even these engage­ments, far dif­fer­ent in scale from poten­tial con­fronta­tions with oth­er major pow­ers, exposed the emerg­ing risks: By 2016, the Unit­ed States ran short of pre­ci­sion mis­siles after a series of fights in Afghanistan then Iraq, Libya and final­ly Syr­ia.

    The Pen­ta­gon briefly ramped up pro­duc­tion to rebuild mis­sile sup­plies, but it was a tem­po­rary move, said William A. LaPlante, the under sec­re­tary of defense who over­sees acqui­si­tion. Defense Depart­ment lead­ers, and law­mak­ers who set the bud­get, would often turn to mis­sile pro­grams to cut spend­ing totals.

    Prod­ded by mil­i­tary indus­try lob­by­ists — and the hun­dreds of retired high-rank­ing mil­i­tary offi­cers they have hired to their sales and mar­ket­ing teams — the gov­ern­ment has instead most­ly focused on buy­ing new ships, planes and oth­er extreme­ly high-priced pieces of equip­ment, where the major con­trac­tors make most of their mon­ey.

    Lob­by­ists have also pushed Con­gress to hold on to old­er ships and planes that even the Defense Depart­ment says have lim­it­ed mil­i­tary val­ue but which burn large amounts of mon­ey to equip and staff.

    But the low­er-priced items — like the mis­siles and oth­er muni­tions — became an easy way to cut bud­gets to keep up spend­ing on the big-tick­et items.

    ...

    That habit has also extend­ed to Euro­pean allies such as Poland, which has com­mit­ted to buy­ing F‑35 fight­er jets, which cost about $80 mil­lion apiece, but not enough mis­siles to use them for more than about two weeks in a war, said Mr. Hayes, the chief exec­u­tive of Raytheon, whose Pratt & Whit­ney divi­sion builds engines for the fight­er.

    ...

    The Pen­ta­gon is now work­ing to jet­ti­son an approach built around a Wal­mart-style just-in-time phi­los­o­phy of keep­ing inven­to­ry low and instead focus­ing more on pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty, Mr. LaPlante said in an inter­view.

    The Biden White House this month pro­posed a 51 per­cent increase in the bud­get to buy mis­siles and muni­tions com­pared with 2022, reach­ing a total of $30.6 bil­lion.

    And that is just the start. The White House’s pro­posed bud­get just for Air Force mis­sile pro­cure­ment is set to jump to near­ly $13 bil­lion by 2028 from $2.2 bil­lion in 2021. (Con­gress is just begin­ning to con­sid­er the administration’s pro­pos­als and those from both par­ties on Capi­tol Hill.)

    Major con­trac­tors like Lock­heed Mar­tin, with the sup­port of the Pen­ta­gon, are look­ing across the Unit­ed States to bring on new sup­pli­ers for mis­sile pro­grams. The Defense Depart­ment is also send­ing in teams to help them elim­i­nate bot­tle­necks, includ­ing turn­ing to allies from around the world to find par­tic­u­lar parts in short sup­ply that are hold­ing back assem­bly lines.

    Last year, Lock­heed could pro­duce 7,500 of the artillery rock­ets that Ukrain­ian troops have fired to great effect from HIMARS launch­ers. This year, that num­ber will jump to 10,000. But that is still far less than the Pen­ta­gon needs, even just to resup­ply Ukraine, and it is one of more than a dozen rock­et and mis­sile sys­tems that con­trac­tors are now rush­ing to expand.

    The surge in spend­ing is like­ly to trans­late in the long run into increased prof­its at mil­i­tary con­trac­tors. But in the short term sev­er­al of them, like Lock­heed, con­tin­ue to strug­gle to hire work­ers and elim­i­nate short­ages of key com­po­nents need­ed to meet the Pentagon’s demand.

    Lock­heed expects its rev­enues to remain flat this year, even as the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment push­es up spend­ing.

    Build­ing up the addi­tion­al need­ed capac­i­ty is like­ly to take sev­er­al years.

    “Any time you see an analy­sis that says, hey, we might not be pre­pared to achieve our strate­gic objec­tives, that’s con­cern­ing,” Frank A. St. John, the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer at Lock­heed Mar­tin, the nation’s largest mil­i­tary con­trac­tor, said in an inter­view. “We are on a path to address that need.”

    Con­gress in Decem­ber gave the Pen­ta­gon new pow­er to award mil­i­tary con­trac­tors mul­ti­year con­tracts to buy mis­sile sys­tems, pro­vid­ing finan­cial com­mit­ments that allow them to hire more sub­con­trac­tors or expand fac­to­ries so they can build more mis­siles, know­ing that there are prof­its to be made.

    “It will give indus­try the real con­fir­ma­tion that they’re going to be in it for years to come,” Mr. LaPlante said. “That’s a big, big cul­ture change.”

    The Pen­ta­gon last year also cre­at­ed a team assigned to work with con­trac­tors to iden­ti­fy labor and sup­ply chain short­ages — and then gave out more than $2 bil­lion in fund­ing to quick­ly help resolve them.

    That team start­ed with a focus on resup­ply­ing weapons sent to Ukraine, Mr. LaPlante said, but it has now been set up as a more per­ma­nent unit inside the Pen­ta­gon to help the Defense Depart­ment make an “over­all shift away from the just-in-time mind-set.”

    In a rever­sal of post-Cold War pol­i­cy, antitrust reg­u­la­tors have also increased scruti­ny of con­tin­ued mil­i­tary indus­try con­sol­i­da­tion, with the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion for exam­ple mov­ing last year to block a $4.4 bil­lion plan by Lock­heed Mar­tin to buy Aero­jet Rock­et­dyne.

    “We can­not afford to allow fur­ther con­cen­tra­tion in mar­kets crit­i­cal to our nation­al secu­ri­ty and defense,” Hol­ly Vedo­va, the direc­tor of the trade commission’s Bureau of Com­pe­ti­tion, said ear­ly last year, after the agency sued to block the deal.

    Anoth­er major defense com­pa­ny, L3 Har­ris Tech­nolo­gies, which is the nation’s sixth largest, has moved to buy Aero­jet, a deal that is still not com­plet­ed. But con­trac­tors are also look­ing for new options to expand the abil­i­ty to build rock­et engines, with Lock­heed ask­ing for bids from a vari­ety of poten­tial new sup­pli­ers.

    Aero­jet has moved recent­ly to expand its own rock­et-engine plants in Arkansas and Alaba­ma, where the com­pa­ny makes rock­et motors for the SM‑6 that the Navy is wait­ing for, as well as the PAC‑3 mis­sile, which Tai­wan is wait­ing for as a defense against any incom­ing mis­sile threats.

    “D.O.D. lead­ers have sig­naled a crit­i­cal need to replen­ish exist­ing stock­piles,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment, “as well as a need to invest sig­nif­i­cant­ly to address over­all muni­tions inven­to­ry.”

    The Air Force has start­ed to change the way it buys mis­sile sys­tems in part to expand the num­ber of com­pa­nies that man­u­fac­ture key items like rock­et engines, said Andrew Hunter, an assis­tant sec­re­tary at the Air Force in charge of acqui­si­tions.

    “It’s almost incon­ceiv­able that a sin­gle sup­pli­er is going to have the kind of capac­i­ty you’re going to need, if that con­flict becomes extend­ed,” he said after being asked about the rock­et-engine short­age.

    Pres­i­dent Biden has also turned to the Defense Pro­duc­tion Act — used dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to speed up the man­u­fac­tur­ing of res­pi­ra­tors and vac­cines — to move ahead with new mis­sile pro­grams faster, includ­ing a num­ber of hyper­son­ic weapons being devel­oped for the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.

    All the moves have been need­ed because the Unit­ed States under­es­ti­mat­ed the threats it now faces — or failed to pre­pare ade­quate­ly, Pen­ta­gon offi­cials acknowl­edged.

    “No one antic­i­pat­ed the pro­longed high-vol­ume con­flict we are see­ing in Ukraine, or that we might see against a strate­gic com­peti­tor in the future,” Mr. LaPlante said this month, refer­ring to Chi­na.

    A surge in requests for weapons sales by the Unit­ed States from allies in Europe and Asia will also help by cre­at­ing more demand that can sup­port domes­tic pro­duc­tion lines.

    For Tai­wan alone, there is a $19 bil­lion back­log of orders for Amer­i­can-made weapons — large chunks of it for Stinger mis­siles with rock­et engines built by Aero­jet that are already in short sup­ply.

    The Pen­ta­gon is also work­ing with cer­tain U.S. allies to cre­ate more part­ner­ships, like a $1.2 bil­lion con­tract award­ed last year fund­ing a joint project between Raytheon and the Nor­we­gian defense firm Kongs­berg to build a sur­face-to-air mis­sile sys­tem called NASAMS that is being sent to Ukraine.

    Ms. Hicks, the deputy defense sec­re­tary, said the goal is not nec­es­sar­i­ly to pre­pare to fight a war with Chi­na — it is to deter one from break­ing out.

    “Still, we must have the com­bat cred­i­bil­i­ty to win if we must fight,” she said.

    ———-

    “From Rock­ets to Ball Bear­ings, Pen­ta­gon Strug­gles to Feed War Machine” By Eric Lip­ton; The New York Times; 03/24/2023

    “Pro­cure­ment bud­gets are grow­ing. The mil­i­tary is offer­ing sup­pli­ers mul­ti­year con­tracts to encour­age com­pa­nies to invest more in their man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty and is dis­patch­ing teams to help solve sup­ply bot­tle­necks. More gen­er­al­ly, the Pen­ta­gon is aban­don­ing some of the cost-cut­ting changes embraced after the end of the Cold War, includ­ing cor­po­rate-style just-in-time deliv­ery sys­tems and a dri­ve to shrink the indus­try.”

    Yes, you read that cor­rect­ly: the Pen­ta­gon is aban­don­ing its post-Cold War cost-cut­ting just-in-time sup­ply chain mod­els in favor of new mod­el. A mod­el designed to encour­age the medi­um-term expan­sion of the US’s mis­sile-pro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ties by encour­ag­ing an over­all growth in the mis­sile-man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try. And that indus­tri­al growth strat­e­gy is appar­ent­ly going to large­ly be han­dled via the award­ing of large mul­ti-year high­ly lucra­tive con­tracts. It’s a new par­a­digm that was intro­duced to resup­ply arms sent to Ukraine but has been sub­se­quent­ly adopt­ed as a per­ma­nent new pol­i­cy:

    ...
    The Pen­ta­gon is now work­ing to jet­ti­son an approach built around a Wal­mart-style just-in-time phi­los­o­phy of keep­ing inven­to­ry low and instead focus­ing more on pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty, Mr. LaPlante said in an inter­view.

    The Biden White House this month pro­posed a 51 per­cent increase in the bud­get to buy mis­siles and muni­tions com­pared with 2022, reach­ing a total of $30.6 bil­lion.

    And that is just the start. The White House’s pro­posed bud­get just for Air Force mis­sile pro­cure­ment is set to jump to near­ly $13 bil­lion by 2028 from $2.2 bil­lion in 2021. (Con­gress is just begin­ning to con­sid­er the administration’s pro­pos­als and those from both par­ties on Capi­tol Hill.)

    Major con­trac­tors like Lock­heed Mar­tin, with the sup­port of the Pen­ta­gon, are look­ing across the Unit­ed States to bring on new sup­pli­ers for mis­sile pro­grams. The Defense Depart­ment is also send­ing in teams to help them elim­i­nate bot­tle­necks, includ­ing turn­ing to allies from around the world to find par­tic­u­lar parts in short sup­ply that are hold­ing back assem­bly lines.

    Last year, Lock­heed could pro­duce 7,500 of the artillery rock­ets that Ukrain­ian troops have fired to great effect from HIMARS launch­ers. This year, that num­ber will jump to 10,000. But that is still far less than the Pen­ta­gon needs, even just to resup­ply Ukraine, and it is one of more than a dozen rock­et and mis­sile sys­tems that con­trac­tors are now rush­ing to expand.

    The surge in spend­ing is like­ly to trans­late in the long run into increased prof­its at mil­i­tary con­trac­tors. But in the short term sev­er­al of them, like Lock­heed, con­tin­ue to strug­gle to hire work­ers and elim­i­nate short­ages of key com­po­nents need­ed to meet the Pentagon’s demand.

    Lock­heed expects its rev­enues to remain flat this year, even as the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment push­es up spend­ing.

    ...

    Con­gress in Decem­ber gave the Pen­ta­gon new pow­er to award mil­i­tary con­trac­tors mul­ti­year con­tracts to buy mis­sile sys­tems, pro­vid­ing finan­cial com­mit­ments that allow them to hire more sub­con­trac­tors or expand fac­to­ries so they can build more mis­siles, know­ing that there are prof­its to be made.

    “It will give indus­try the real con­fir­ma­tion that they’re going to be in it for years to come,” Mr. LaPlante said. “That’s a big, big cul­ture change.”

    The Pen­ta­gon last year also cre­at­ed a team assigned to work with con­trac­tors to iden­ti­fy labor and sup­ply chain short­ages — and then gave out more than $2 bil­lion in fund­ing to quick­ly help resolve them.

    That team start­ed with a focus on resup­ply­ing weapons sent to Ukraine, Mr. LaPlante said, but it has now been set up as a more per­ma­nent unit inside the Pen­ta­gon to help the Defense Depart­ment make an “over­all shift away from the just-in-time mind-set.”
    ...

    Also note that when you read that Lock­heed expects its rev­enues to “remain flat this year”, that’s flat at record lev­els of orders.

    Also note the oth­er part of the offi­cial strat­e­gy for expand­ing the US’s mis­sile man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty: actu­al­ly address­ing the antitrust issues cre­at­ing by the post-Cold War pol­i­cy of indus­try con­sol­i­da­tion. So at the same time the US is issu­ing con­tracts intend­ed to encour­age man­u­fac­tur­ers to expand their man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty, reg­u­la­tors are increas­ing­ly will­ing to block fur­ther con­sol­i­da­tion. At least in the­o­ry. It’s going to be very inter­est­ing to how real this anti-trust zeal ends up being in the end:

    ...
    In a rever­sal of post-Cold War pol­i­cy, antitrust reg­u­la­tors have also increased scruti­ny of con­tin­ued mil­i­tary indus­try con­sol­i­da­tion, with the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion for exam­ple mov­ing last year to block a $4.4 bil­lion plan by Lock­heed Mar­tin to buy Aero­jet Rock­et­dyne.

    “We can­not afford to allow fur­ther con­cen­tra­tion in mar­kets crit­i­cal to our nation­al secu­ri­ty and defense,” Hol­ly Vedo­va, the direc­tor of the trade commission’s Bureau of Com­pe­ti­tion, said ear­ly last year, after the agency sued to block the deal.

    Anoth­er major defense com­pa­ny, L3 Har­ris Tech­nolo­gies, which is the nation’s sixth largest, has moved to buy Aero­jet, a deal that is still not com­plet­ed. But con­trac­tors are also look­ing for new options to expand the abil­i­ty to build rock­et engines, with Lock­heed ask­ing for bids from a vari­ety of poten­tial new sup­pli­ers.
    ...

    Final­ly, just note the incred­i­ble num­ber of Stringer mis­siles that are being sent to both Ukraine and Tai­wan: over 10,000 Stingers have already been sent to Ukraine, with many more to fol­low:

    ...
    Aero­jet is build­ing motors for old­er sys­tems such as Javelin anti-armor mis­siles and Stinger anti­air­craft mis­siles, of which over 10,000 have already been sent to Ukraine. It is also build­ing new rock­ets need­ed to pow­er so-called hyper­son­ic mis­siles that can trav­el much faster, as well as the rock­ets for a new gen­er­a­tion of nuclear weapons for the Unit­ed States and even the rock­et for a new NASA space­ship soon head­ed to the moon.

    The result is bil­lions of dol­lars in back­logged orders at the com­pa­ny — and frus­tra­tion at the Pen­ta­gon about the pace of deliv­ery.

    ...

    A surge in requests for weapons sales by the Unit­ed States from allies in Europe and Asia will also help by cre­at­ing more demand that can sup­port domes­tic pro­duc­tion lines.

    For Tai­wan alone, there is a $19 bil­lion back­log of orders for Amer­i­can-made weapons — large chunks of it for Stinger mis­siles with rock­et engines built by Aero­jet that are already in short sup­ply.
    ...

    That’s quite a few Stingers get­ting sent to a bat­tle­field filled with Nazis and, increas­ing­ly, jihadists too. How many thou­sands of Stinger mis­siles can you send into a bat­tle­field like that before one of them falls into the wrong hands? 10,000? 20,000? Build­ing insane num­bers of mis­siles has con­se­quences. ‘Win­ning WWIII’ is mere­ly the offi­cial hoped-for con­se­quence tech­ni­cal­ly guid­ing this defense pol­i­cy. There are oth­er con­se­quences. The kind of expen­sive con­se­quences we appear intent on dis­cov­er­ing soon­er rather than lat­er, no mat­ter the cost.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 3, 2023, 4:38 pm

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