Christopher Mims is a technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, which he joined in 2014. Mims received a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology from Emory University.  He has worked as an editor at Scientific American. He writes: “Alongside the physical violence of the Russian assault on Ukraine, a parallel cyberwar is under way that has little, if any, precedent.

The digital battle so far has proceeded in ways cyberwar specialists didn’t expect—and that has many of them concerned about how the technological dimensions of Europe’s worst conflict in decades will play out. In particular, they’re concerned about its potential to spill beyond the borders of the two combatants.

On one side is Russia, a hacking superpower that began its digital assault on Ukraine months before its tanks rolled across the border, but whose efforts have so far been surprisingly limited. On the other side, Ukraine is a relative weakling in cyberspace that has become the first country to fight back against an invader by publicly calling up an international army of vigilante hackers. The country also has hundreds of thousands of tech workers inside and outside the country who are participating in hacks and cyberattacks on targets in Russia, according to Viktor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s government agency responsible for cybersecurity.

Professionals who monitor cyber threats, both for governments and corporations, are concerned that the worst is yet to come, in the of both direct attacks by Russia and collateral damage from attacks by both countries. Those specialists are on high alert because Russia, in particular, has a history of unleashing cyber weapons that wreak havoc far beyond the computers and networks that were their original targets.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied carrying out malicious cyberoperations.

“All of this is unprecedented,” says Jean Schaffer, a chief technology officer at cybersecurity company Corelight who spent more than 30 years working for the U.S. Defense Department, most recently as chief information security officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. “It is not something we have war-planned and mapped out and said: ‘Hey, this is what we think is going to happen.’ ”

For a glimpse of what has specialists worried, consider a piece of malware dubbed HermeticWizard.

Hackers traced to Russia began at least as early as January targeting Ukraine with “wiper” malware, designed to destroy computers by wiping their contents completely, says Ray Canzanese, director of threat research at cybersecurity company Netskope. New versions of such mal-ware have been discovered since then, each more sophisticated and potentially destructive than the last.

HermeticWizard, which researchers detected in the past week, is the most dangerous yet, a piece of software designed to spread another, HermeticWipe, to any other potentially vulnerable computers in a network, Mr. Canzanese says. Previous Russian wipers—there have been at least three targeting Ukraine since January—weren’t paired with additional software to spread them autonomously.

Malware with such “worm” characteristics was behind the devastating NotPetya attack in 2017, the most economically damaging cyberattack in history. Attributed to the Russian state, NotPetya did billions of dollars’ worth of damage to companies like Maersk, FedEx and even Rosneft, the Russian oil company, even though its intended target was Ukraine. “Everyone in cybersecurity is saying they are bracing for the next NotPetya,” he says.

The wiper malware Russia already deployed has targeted computers within Ukraine’s government, and its banks, to erode the country’s capacity to communicate and function, adds Mr. Canzanese. This same malware also struck computers that are part of Ukraine’s border- control systems, according to one security researcher in the region, hampering the processing of refugees leaving the country.

So far, the attacks have affected just a handful of Ukrainian government contractors and financial organizations, and seem intended primarily to demoralize defenders in Ukraine.

Another kind of cyber offensive, a “denial of service” attack in which websites and other services are flooded with spam traffic, has made government and banking websites difficult to access, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation.

All that activity notwithstanding, cybersecurity experts are broadly surprised that Russia’s cyberattacks haven’t up to this point been more effective or devastating.

When Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, and again when it attacked Ukraine in 2014, it launched sophisticated cyberattacks that hijacked and rerouted internet traffic. In the case of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the attacks allowed Russia to take over communications networks.

That hasn’t happened this time in Ukraine, at least as of Friday. “Many of us thought the Russians had pre-positioned themselves inside the networks of a lot of infrastructure to disrupt it long in advance,” says Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at cybersecurity firm Sophos. “But we haven’t really seen that, and it’s been so odd.”

There are many theories about why Russia hasn’t shut down critical infrastructure in this war. It could be that Russia didn’t want to damage systems its leaders thought it would be able to quickly take over in a blitzkrieg. It could also be that Russia tried but that Ukraine learned lessons in the past eight years that allowed it to fortify its systems against damaging intrusion. In any case, the lack of clarity reflects how difficult it is to predict what could come next.

The situation on Ukraine’s side is also volatile. Thousands of Ukrainians are taking part in cyberattacks on Russia, targeting government services, media, transportation, and payments systems, said Mr. Zhora, the Ukrainian cybersecurity official, in the Friday briefing.

A nation-state calling for vigilantes to attack its enemies during an active conflict can lead to unintended consequences, including impacts for innocent targets, says Mr. Wisniewski.

Gangs of cybercriminals, which historically have been tolerated inside Russia in a way they are not allowed to operate in the U.S. and allied nations, have also pledged retaliatory attacks against Ukraine and its allies. But when one such group, the ransomware collective Conti, said it would attack Russia antagonists, it soon had to contend with the leak online of a huge trove of its internal communications and hacking tools.

And so a cyberwar between groups that aren’t officially connected to the combatants continues to volley back and forth.

The longer the conflict in Ukraine drags on, and the more Western firms pull out of Russia, the more opportunity and incentive Russia has to use its most potent cyber weapons against companies and nations, says Rob Gurzeev, who was one of the chief technology officers at Israel’s Unit 8200—roughly the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.

An attack on oil-and-gas companies could have far-reaching impacts in the U.S. and elsewhere. “You worry that they might be holding something like their nuclear- bomb equivalent of a cyberattack, and we just haven’t seen it released yet,” says Ms. Schaffer.

The war in Ukraine has twinned cyberweaponry with tanks and other traditional tools of war in a way we haven’t seen before. The digital attacks started first, and they could well continue even after the shooting stops.

People crowded the Kyiv train station this past week seeking to escape.”

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On a related issue; Angus Berwick is a reporter with The Wall Street Journal in London, covering cryptocurrencies, financial crime, and markets. He joined the Journal in mid-2023 from Reuters, where he worked as an investigative reporter focused on white-collar crime and as a correspondent in Venezuela and Spain. His work has been recognized with a Gerald Loeb Award, two Overseas Press Club awards and an award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

Ben Foldy is an investigative reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s finance section, based in New York City. He often writes about fraud, financial crime, cryptocurrency and corporate malfeasance. —Elaine Yu and Kate Vtorygina contributed to this article. They write:

“A self-described Russian smuggler in China received a request from the manufacturer of the legendary AK-47 rifle. Russia’s largest maker of small arms, Kalashnikov Concern, needed electrical parts for drones that have been among the most effective weapons against Ukrainian armor.

The smuggler, Andrey Zverev, took the late-2022 order to a Hong Kong electronics distributor. The U.S. was trying to cut off such deals, and even sanctions-wary Chinese banks were blocking payments from Russia.

The solution: Zverev used tether, the cryptocurrency, to relay millions of dollars of funds from Kalashnikov to its supplier.

Describing the transaction several months later in messages to a group of Russians, Zverev offered the same service. “We will deliver everything you need to exterminate each other,” he wrote in a Tele-gram chat. Payment was “ideally with crypto, of course.”

Tether has emerged as one of the world’s default black-market payment methods. The digital currency says it is backed one-to-one by the U.S. dollar. But unlike government-issued dollars inside the banking system, authorities have limited ability to trace its use.

The “stablecoin” is the most-traded cryptocurrency, with as much as $120 billion in tether changing hands each day—often about twice as much as bitcoin. Transactions totaled over $10 trillion in 2023, not far off what payment giant Visa said it processed in its most recent financial year.

For Vladimir Putin’s war machine, tether has become indispensable. It helps Russian companies weave around Western sanctions and procure so-called dual-use goods that go into drones and other high-tech equipment. Import-ers working with such goods make transfers in rubles into Russian bank accounts operated by middlemen who convert the rubles into tether and pay out local currency to their foreign suppliers in places like China and the Middle East.

The U.S. Treasury Department has pressed Congress to pass legislation that would grant it the ability to block transactions in dollar-denominated stablecoins like tether. Last week, the department blacklisted a Moscow company that had partnered with a Russian bank under sanctions to provide tether-based payments.

Tether’s privately held issuer, Tether Holdings—registered in the British Virgin Islands—distributes tether to customers in exchange for dollars, which it has mostly invested in U.S. Treasurys. Customers trade tether on virtual public ledgers known as blockchains or via private exchanges, sometimes to purchase other cryptocurrencies or, as in Russia’s case, to pay for goods and services.

Tether Holdings didn’t respond to questions for this article. The company said in December it had begun a voluntary policy to freeze digital wallets used to transfer its tokens that were connected with entities under sanction.

This account of tether’s role in Russian trade is based on interviews with people directly involved, along with thousands of messages on the Telegram chat app exchanged by brokers and importers.

The Journal verified details from Zverev’s account through interviews with his associates and Russian import and tax records. The records showed a supply chain of electronics connecting Zverev’s Hong Kong supplier, Kynix Semiconductor, and Kalashnikov’s main drone subsidiary.

Zverev, 41 years old, confirmed his work in an interview and shared the bill of materials he said Kalashnikov had given him. “Kalashnikov asked me to find some possibilities,” he said. “How to buy parts in China, and how to supply them.”

Zverev saw few prospects in Russia while studying for an economics degree from a state university in the Siberian city of Omsk. After helping manage a Russian company’s supply network, he flew to Shanghai to chase new opportunities.

Zverev built ties with local factories and arranged supply routes to Russia that enabled companies to avoid paying Russian customs duties. “I became a smuggler,” he once told a Telegram group. He helped run bitcoin-mining operations in China, and resold microchips to buyers back in Russia to power their own mining rigs, which solve complex formulas to mint new bit-coin. He was using tether to charge Russian customers.

Zverev preferred tether over traditional banks because it was anonymous, he told customers. The Tether Foundation rarely froze digital wallets because of users moving “dirty money” through them, he wrote.

His preferred tether-trading platform was a Moscow based crypto exchange called Garantex. Launched in 2019, Garantex runs cash exchangers inside Russia and abroad that allow customers to swap rubles for tether and then into foreign currency. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Zverev wrote that readers should protect their savings from the plummeting ruble by buying tether on Garantex. Because Garantex worked almost exclusively with Russian clients, “the evil regulators” in the U.S. and Europe wouldn’t be able to shut it.

Garantex was blacklisted by the U.S. two months later for being a haven for cybercriminals. True to Zverev’s word, its business continued to thrive. A Garantex spokeswoman denied the exchange facilitates criminal activities and said it abides by Russian law.

In April 2023, Sergey Mendeleev, founder of Garantex, convened some of Russia’s most experienced crypto figures in a Telegram group to discuss importers’ problems. He referred queries about their China payments to Zverev. Mendeleev told the group he was launching his own payment firm, Exved, to help importers pay foreign suppliers within hours via tether.

In August, Mendeleev estimated the monthly volume of the entire “shadow trade”—as members called it—at as much as $10 billion. Others working in the trade agreed with this figure, though it couldn’t be confirmed by the Journal. Mendeleev later said Exved handled hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian foreign-trade payments in tether monthly just after starting operations.

He declined to comment. Zverev advertised his services in a separate Telegram group, mentioning: “Kalashnikov Concern is purchasing from China for its drone project, bypassing sanctions through me.”

After the invasion, Zverev had begun orchestrating the transport of electronics to Russia from China under a program introduced to import products Russia needed for the war without the original manufacturers’ consent. Electronics he purchased were loaded onto trucks and dispatched to Russia through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Zverev continued to use Garantex and other intermediary firms, to convert customers’ rubles into tether. He swapped the tether for yuan in Hong Kong, and then wired suppliers the money by a local bank transfer. The Garantex spokeswoman said it operates solely in Russia and has no knowledge about how Russian companies may buy tether abroad.

In December 2022, Zverev said a Kalashnikov subsidiary sent him the bill of materials that the Journal later reviewed. The document lists 248 types of electronic parts. Zverev took the order to Kynix, the Hong Kong distributor, which priced the order at about 70 million yuan, just under $10 million.

For the payment, Zverev said he used tether to “break up the connection” between both companies, making it harder for Western governments to trace the transactions. 

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Another form of “piracy” has emerged from the several international conflicts initiated by the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady is an American editor, and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She has also, been a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board since 2005. She writes predominantly on Latin America and is a co-editor of the Index of Economic Freedom. She is a recipient of the Bastiat Prize, a journalism award given annually by the Reason Foundation. It recognizes journalists whose published works “explain, promote and defend the principles of the free society.” She writes:

“Continued Houthi attacks on global shipping assets in the Red Sea have damaged Middle Eastern economies like Egypt’s. But they also may have increased threats to U.S. national security and international trade in other parts of the world.

Military-intelligence analysts I have spoken to believe that enemies of the West are looking to export the Houthi model of aggression—a kind of 21st-century piracy—to other jurisdictions. These analysts are worried that Guyanese waters could become a prime target. The role of the Houthis will be played by Venezuela.

This is speculative. But it comes from specialists who spend their days tracking the activities of nondemocratic actors out to destabilize the Americas. It isn’t the only explanation for recent shipments of military aid to Venezuela from Russia and Iran, complementing earlier deliveries from those countries and from China. But it’s a logical one and is supported by recent developments. If successful, the strategy would crimp global oil supplies, strengthen the narrative that Washington is impotent, and empower a U.S. adversary close to home.

The socialist wave in Venezuela that the late Hugo Chávez rode to authoritarian-ism has crashed. Dictator Nicolás Maduro is clinging to power through repression. According to polls, if given the chance to vote him out of office, most Venezuelans would take it.

The top choice for a new Venezuelan president is Maria Corina Machado. She’s backed by a coalition of opposition parties and won an opposition primary in October with more than 90% of the vote. She’s the first politician to overcome the problem of fragmentation among the antigovernment electorate, which makes her a giant threat to Mr. Maduro.

Unlike the anti-Chavistas who came before her, she’s a hero to working and poor Venezuelans and especially women. Their families have been torn apart by emigration as hyperinflation, poverty and crime have ballooned under the corrupt police state. This is why the regime has barred her from running in the July 28 election and has arrested members of her team. But Mr. Maduro is also looking for ways to recharge his base. Enter Guyana.

Venezuela’s claim to Guyana’s Essequibo region goes back to when the smaller, English-speaking country was still a British colony. Venezuela never accepted the 1899 ruling of a Paris tribunal that the Essequibo region belongs to Guyana. In the 1966 Geneva Agreement the matter wasn’t resolved but was put aside. As provided for in that agreement, the case is now before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. A ruling is expected this spring.

Venezuelan schoolchildren are raised on the narrative that the Essequibo was stolen from them. Railing against Guyana has long been a winning issue for Venezuelan politicians.

Yet playing the nationalism card in the face of dire unpopularity at home isn’t the only motivation that Mr. Maduro has to try to seize the Essequibo. He wants a piece of the action in the vast oil resources under the sea off the coast of Guyana.

A Venezuelan military operation to take and hold the Essequibo region’s rugged terrain would be challenging. As has been noted by at least one unnamed U.S. national-security official, Mr. Maduro doesn’t seem to have the necessary armaments. Most importantly, such a dramatic undertaking wouldn’t secure his ultimate goal of controlling the waters off Guyana.

On the other hand, a Houthi strategy of sporadically attacking commercial assets could undermine oil exploration and, Mr. Maduro has reason to hope, force a negotiation about rights to the sea.

Maduro military harassment of Guyana dates back to at least 2018. But it spiked in September when Caracas flew Russian Suhkoi jets low across Guyanese airspace. And at the same time, Venezuela began ramping up its political rhetoric and pushing military assets toward the border—including the maritime boundary—with Guyana. Venezuelan ocean-patrol vessels have long breached Guyanese waters, but in recent months they have sailed well into their neighbor’s domain.

Mr. Maduro may be blowing smoke. But the buildup of a working inventory of arms is troubling. In a forthcoming report, the Washington-based Center for a Secure Free Society says that thanks to Iran, Venezuela today has “an extensive range of military hardware.” This includes “swift Zolfaghar patrol boats, alongside a diversified drone fleet” outfitted with rocket launchers and smart bombs. Iran has also sent antiship cruise missiles, which China has supplied in the past.

Two analysts have independently told me that they’ve seen intelligence indicating that Russia recently sent weapons to Venezuela that could be used to hit Guyana or its allies hard if there is any attempt to defend against acts of piracy.

Deterring the use of the Houthi model in the Caribbean won’t be easy. But a first step requires choking off the external sources of weaponry, which the U.S. and its allies can do if they find the political will.”

Next time: U.S. response to omnipresent asymmetric warfare

Caitlin McFall is a Reporter at Fox News Digital covering Politics, U.S. and World news. She writes: “It’s a scenario that has played out many times both on Russian and Western social media platforms.

A video of a soldier, either Ukrainian or Russian, set in a ravaged and often exposed position who is spotted before he even knows he is being tracked. The soldier attempts to run, hide or out-maneuver the relentless robot in the sky.  

Some react in panic, others give in to their seemingly inevitable fate. But even watching from poor-quality video feed, the viewer can see the moment when the hunted man realizes he’s been bested, and there is no escape. 

Drones have not only made modern warfare more dangerous for soldiers on the ground, but have completely changed how military units function on the front lines, particularly in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

“There is 100 percent … an AI-enabled autonomous weapon arms race happening in Ukraine between the Russians and the Ukrainians,” Russia analyst and leader of the Geospatial Intelligence Team for the Institute for the Study of War, George Barros told Fox News Digital. 

“It’s not a question of whether or if it will be implemented, it’s more of a question of when.” There is already evidence that some AI integration has been employed with drones used by both the Ukrainians and the Russians. 

While there has not been credible evidence suggesting that AI has been utilized for strike capabilities, it has been used to acquire battlefield intelligence by identifying different types of adversarial weaponry and machinery.

At the moment, there are ways to defeat drones, including by blasting communication radio frequencies that the remote operator uses to control the drone, explained Barros. But integrating AI technology could enable drones to be pre-programmed to identify and hit certain targets without needing to communicate with an operator. 

Barros said he does not have any insight on whether the Russians or Ukrainians are outpacing the other in the AI race, but he noted that modern warfare is driving AI advancement. “The battlefield requirements demand those sorts of solutions,” Barros said. “And it’s moving a lot faster I think than most people in Washington really realize.”

The war with Russia has raged on for more than two years and while many of the scenes emerging from the battlefields are eerily reminiscent to European wars of the 20^th Century, some technological advances have created modern nightmares for military strategists and soldiers alike.

“Maneuver in modern war is extremely difficult to pull off, and it’s due to the tactical innovation of drones,” Barros said, referring to a military strategy of surprise that is employed to achieve a positional advantage. “And right now, no military theorist has an answer or solution for how to restore maneuver to the battlefield,” he added.

Military analysts are reportedly baffled by how the fundamentals of wartime principles have shifted as previous Russian, U.S. and NATO military doctrines have largely all been invalidated by the realities of drone warfare, explained the expert. 

“Tactical surprise is basically eliminated now, thanks to this super proliferation of these cheap quad-copter drones,” he added. “It’s impossible to find concealment. It’s almost impossible to find cover.”

Barros said that this change in military doctrine is one of the reasons Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed. 

The Russian military was able to successfully employ drone reconnaissance capabilities in tandem with artillery and drone strikes to degrade the Ukrainian forces before they could advance on Russian positions. “When you take our doctrine, our best manifestation of it, and we put it against what the tactical reality is with the lack of this cover and concealment, our battle plans they all fall apart,” Barros said.

“It’s a big problem. It’s a really big problem,” he added. 

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Stephen J. Hadley chairs the Atlantic Council’s international advisory board. He served as White House national security adviser, 2005-09. Matthew Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the U.S. They write about strategic asymmetry: “The war in Ukraine has reached a critical point.

The goal remains for it to emerge as an independent, prosperous country within internationally recognized borders and able to defend itself. That will require accelerating the delivery of advanced weapons and technology and pursuing a new military and diplomatic strategy to defend Ukrainian territory, increase Ukraine’s defense production, enhance its air defenses, and step up attacks against Russia’s supply lines and vulnerable military position in Crimea.

If the Biden administration embraces this approach, it could address congressional reluctance to provide more aid to Ukraine absent a clear strategy.

Ukraine’s 2023 spring counteroffensive was less successful than many had hoped, giving Russian forces time to dig in behind trenches and minefields. New tactics, such as using drones to spot armored vehicles and precision weapons to destroy them, have offered the Russian invaders a defensive advantage.

The West’s willingness to aid Ukraine isn’t guaranteed, especially in the face of gridlock in Washington. The war of attrition favors Russia, given its advantages in industry and manpower [although available, competent manpower is already difficult for Russia to find at home], and Vladimir Putin’s high tolerance for casualties.

To account for these realities, Ukraine and its supporters should pursue an adapted strategy with five major elements.

• First, Ukraine’s military effort should focus more on defense. Kyiv needs to maintain the territory it still controls even as it prepares for counteroffensives. This includes Odesa, which provides access to the Black Sea—vital to Ukraine’s economy, which depends on exporting grain to international markets. Ukrainian forces should establish fortified defensive lines and use advanced sensors and drones to prevent future Russian land grabs.
• Second, Ukraine needs to reduce its dependence on foreign assistance. Ukraine has a robust defense industry that is producing more weapons than before Russia’s 2022 invasion. Kyiv has signed more than 20 agreements with foreign partners for joint maintenance and production of weapons, giving it increased industrial capacity domestically and abroad. The German company Rheinmetall and Turkish firm Baykar plan to build facilities in Ukraine to produce tanks and drones, respectively.

But the U.S. lags behind. Washington should foster joint ventures with Ukraine’s defense industry by helping U.S. defense firms mitigate the risks of doing business in a war zone and reducing regulations, including restrictions on technology transfers under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

• Third, the U.S. and others should help Ukraine build an enhanced air-and missile-defense network. Ukraine needs to defend itself from Russia’s brutal air campaign. Western allies should reallocate Patriot batteries from other parts of Europe to Ukraine and cooperate with Kyiv to develop low-tech, low-cost defenses against drones and other battlefield weapons.
• Fourth, Ukraine should target Russian supply lines in eastern Ukraine and western Russia. This would disrupt Russian logistics and complicate Moscow’s effort to consolidate its territorial gains. The U.S. and Europe should let Ukraine use the weapons they supply to target Russian forces in Russia that are attacking Ukraine. The same should apply to Russian supply lines and logistics.
• Fifth, Ukraine should step up the threat to Russia’s vulnerable military position in Crimea. This should include long-range strikes as well as special operations against Russian forces, bases and supply lines. Why the Kerch Bridge to Russia remains standing is a mystery.

To enable these strikes, the U.S. and Western supporters should provide Ukraine longer-range weapons with larger payloads and lift their prohibitions against using these arms for attacks on forces and logistics inside Russian territory.

Germany should immediately provide the Taurus missile, and the U.S. should deliver the 190-mile-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. That wouldn’t meaningfully deplete U.S. stockpiles, as America has a substantial inventory and an active production line and is phasing out the system in favor of the more sophisticated, longer-range Precision Strike Missile.

In addition, Western supporters should provide Ukraine with F-16 aircraft armed with high-speed antiradiation missiles to suppress Russian integrated air and missile defenses and allow Ukrainian missiles to reach their targets.

Crimea may be the most important center of gravity in this war. Mr. Putin can afford to cede villages in the Donbas, but losing the peninsula would be a major blow. It may be the only way to persuade him to wind down the conflict.

We doubt this approach would result in a negotiated peace treaty or even a formal cease-fire agreement. It could nevertheless result in a de facto stalemate with an active but static line of contact between the two militaries and far less combat. This would save lives and give Ukraine breathing space.

Many in Ukraine and the West would object that this would also give Russia breathing space, which it could use to prepare its next effort to subdue and absorb Ukraine. The multiyear defense commitments to Ukraine being developed by the U.S. and other Western countries would reduce this risk.

Ukraine still recalls the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kyiv surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for bilateral U.S. and U.K. security assurances. That failed to deter Russia from invading. Given that unhappy experience, Kyiv can be forgiven for wanting more today— namely, membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO membership is off the table at least until there is a stable line of separation between Ukrainian and Russian forces and reduced conflict. It would have to be clear that incorporation into NATO wouldn’t put the alliance instantly at war with Russia or commit it to any Ukrainian military effort to recover territory occupied by Russia.

But the international community would continue to recognize such territory as Ukrainian under international law. These are sensitive issues, but analogous ones were overcome when West Germany joined NATO in 1955.

In our view, only the prospect of NATO and EU membership would give President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people the assurance that Russia would be deterred from taking over more of Ukraine. It also would furnish the political cover needed to accept an outcome that leaves Russian forces temporarily in possession of Ukrainian territory.

NATO membership for Ukraine must reflect complete consensus within the alliance. Noticeable divisions at Bucharest in 2008 suggested to Mr. Putin that NATO wouldn’t come to Ukraine’s defense, inviting his 2014 invasion.

Supporting Ukraine isn’t an act of philanthropy. If Ukraine and the West falter, Russia may succeed in conquering Ukraine. Mr. Putin wants to restore the Russian empire—a revanchist ambition that may drive him to invade a NATO member. The result would be war with NATO and the U.S., something no one should want.”

What is the asymmetric warfare lesson to be learned from this analysis? Agility! Don’t induce paralysis through analysis.

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Michael Allen was special assistant to President George W. Bush for national security affairs. Connor Pfeifferis executive director of the Forum for American Leadership. They ask: “How can the U.S. simultaneously arm Ukraine in its fight against Russia and deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?

It’s a false choice. A critical look at the weapons that Washington has transferred to Kyiv, what is needed in the Pacific, and when new production might become available reveals that the U.S. has enough resources both to arm Ukraine and to bolster deterrence in Asia.

Ukraine and Taiwan don’t need the same things. There is a large category of U.S. capabilities that are critical in the Pacific and that haven’t been provided to Ukraine. Taiwan is an island. To fight off a Chinese invasion it needs to develop its own undersea platforms and to field sea mines and fast-attack craft.

For U.S. forces involved in a potential defense of Taiwan, the most critical capabilities would include bombers, attack submarines, hypersonic missiles and, especially, long-range antiship missiles. By the same token, many capabilities provided for Ukraine’s ground war, such as armored vehicles, counter-artillery radar, air-to-ground rockets and small arms, aren’t at the top of the list of what Taiwan needs from the U.S. Aid to Taiwan and Ukraine isn’t zero-sum.

Where there is an overlap of preferred military capabilities, some prioritization is in order. The TOW antitank missiles, M1 Abrams tanks, and high-speed antiradiation missiles that Washington has supplied to Kyiv would have some applicability in the Pacific, but they are less critical to Taiwan in the short term. Ukraine, however, needs them right now.

Similarly, weapons like the Harpoon antiship missile will be crucial to Taiwan’s air-sea battle. Taiwan has so far received Harpoons only from U.S. allies. The U.S. should move delivery of Taiwan’s pending Harpoon orders to the front of the line and, in the meantime, make transfers from its own stockpile of missiles slated for demilitarization or deep storage.

The U.S. has a variety of options to support both Ukraine and Taiwan. These include drawing down from U.S. stocks, ramping up production where possible, and making foreign military sales to Taiwan a priority.

Take the portable Javelin and Stinger missile systems, which are important to both Taiwan and Ukraine. The U.S. reportedly has a stockpile of 20,000 to 25,000 Javelins, and production is increasing from 2,100 missiles a year before the war to nearly 4,000 by 2026. Consistent with operational needs for U.S. forces, the Defense Department should transfer significant quantities of stockpiled Javelins to Taiwan.

For the Stinger, which the Army is currently replacing with a new mobile air defense system, reportedly one-third of U.S. stocks have gone to Ukraine. The Defense Department awarded a contract for production of 1,300 Stingers by 2026. At least several hundred stockpiled Stingers should be sent to Taiwan in the near term, given the importance of mobile air defense in the event of an invasion.

The U.S. defense industrial base is already kicking into a higher gear. The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, is a Ukraine mobilization success story. In each quarter of this year, American industry will produce almost as many Himars launchers as the total number provided to Ukraine from U.S. prewar stockpiles.

Production of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rockets has also increased significantly. Like Himars, these weapons are under new multiyear Pentagon contracts. Taiwan’s pending Himars order will be fulfilled by 2026, but that isn’t soon enough. The timeline should be accelerated, even if the Pentagon has to pay other customers to wait.

The Patriot air-defense system is also critical to both Ukraine and Taiwan. Taiwan operates several Patriot batteries as part of its integrated air-defense system, and a U.S.-provided battery in Ukraine has downed Russian missiles targeting civilian infrastructure.

Because of growing demand, industry is increasing production capacity to 12 Patriot systems a year. Taiwan is in the process of upgrading its Patriot batteries and interceptors, and while there are other countries waiting to take delivery of Patriot orders, the U.S. should make sure that Taiwan is at the front of the line.

The long-delayed decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions is a sign of progress, not desperation. The Pentagon is working with industry to significantly increase production of 155mm artillery rounds, from 3,250 shells a month before the war to 40,000 by the end of 2025.

While production ramps up, cluster munitions provide a bridge capability for the Ukrainians to sustain offensive bombardments against Russian ground forces. This Ukraine-driven surge in artillery production will pay dividends for deterrence in the Pacific by bolstering U.S. stocks that can eventually be transferred to Taiwan.

Not only are artillery shells a less applicable munition for what will primarily be an air-sea battle in the Pacific, but Taiwan also has the ability to manufacture them on its own soil.

The twin imperatives of backing Ukraine and bolstering deterrence in Asia are achievable for now. But Ukraine urgently needs more weapons, and the U.S. must act quickly to strengthen deterrence in Asia, even if a Chinese invasion of Taiwan might not come until 2027. A narrow trade-off argument focused on Javelins and Stingers obscures the real problem—the limitations of the U.S. defense industrial base.

Stated plainly, even if the U.S. stopped providing assistance to Ukraine today, the most glaring obstacles to deterrence in the Pacific—from surface ships and submarines to precision-guided munitions—would remain.

The good news is that the war in Ukraine has catalyzed action to revitalize America’s industrial base, which will ultimately put the U.S. in a better position to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Pentagon is investing billions in industrial capacity.

To remain the arsenal of democracy, the U.S. must allocate additional resources, authorize long-term weapons purchases, and reform glacial bureaucracies. Only then can the U.S. sustain its longer-term national security objectives in Asia and Europe.”

Next time: Non-military Asymmetric Warfare

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James Marson is the Ukraine Bureau Chief, for The Wall Street Journal. He has covered Ukraine for 15 years, chronicling its efforts to establish itself as an independent European democracy through a revolution and a war with Russia. He writes: “U.S. officials are warning that Russia could be about to attack Ukraine. For many citizens in this embattled country, even before the invasion of February 24, 2022, the assault had already begun.

Russian forces and their proxies already control portions of Ukraine and frequently skirmish with government forces. The aim of Moscow’s intensifying hybrid campaign, Ukrainian officials said, is to weaken their country and sow panic, potentially provoking discontent and protests of the kind Russia fomented in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to justify its interventions there. U.S. and U.K. officials said last month they uncovered coup plots intended to install a puppet pro-Russian government.

The tactics illustrate how President Vladimir Putin of Russia can maintain pressure on Ukraine without escalating to a shooting war that could provoke sanctions from the West. Ukrainian officials said a destabilization campaign is more likely than a large-scale invasion.

“The No. 1 task for Russia is to undermine us from inside,” Oleksiy Danilov, the top national security adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, said in a recent interview.

Since Russia invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014, it has employed a variety of tactics to try to sap the country’s resources and will to fight. The Kremlin can dial up the level of fighting in Ukraine’s east through the separatists it controls there, killing Ukrainian soldiers and wrecking everyday lives near the front line. An increase in fighting there could provide the Kremlin with a pretext to send its army deeper into Ukraine, as it did in Georgia in 2008.

Russian destabilization efforts since 2014 have had mixed results. Ukrainian support for membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union has grown to more than half the population. Ukraine’s economy hasn’t collapsed, and trade has shifted from Russia to the EU and elsewhere. The Ukrainian government has bolstered cyber defenses and closed TV stations it called propaganda channels.

However, weak points remain, and Russia is probing.

Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe and has a vulnerable economy. The Russian military buildup has led investors to freeze projects and pull money out of the country. The national currency, the hryvnia, has weakened but not seen a full-blown panic.

Russia announced Thursday naval drills in the Black Sea that would close off swaths of water along Ukraine’s south- ern coast, inhibiting traffic to key ports for exports. Ukraine’s foreign ministry complained about the economic consequences of the closures, calling them part of Russia’s “ hybrid warfare.”

“Russia’s economic warfare against Ukraine continues,” the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv wrote on Twitter.

Russia has long limited sea traffic into the Azov Sea via the Kerch Strait, forming what Ukraine has said amounts to a partial blockade of ports including the industrial hub Mariupol.

Ukraine has girded against some of Moscow’s tactics. Kyiv turned off Russian state channels in 2014, saying they were spreading disinformation aimed at fomenting discord. Last year, Mr. Zelensky extended a ban on Russian websites to include social network Vkontakte.

Mr. Zelensky also sanctioned last year the closure of three television channels owned by a close friend of Mr. Putin. The station had lambasted Ukraine’s leadership and promoted closer ties with Russia. Ukrainian officials said it was covertly financed by Moscow and was yet another source of Kremlin disinformation.

“We closed Russian propaganda channels financed by the aggressor country,” said Mr. Danilov, the presidential security adviser. “That isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about the information war Russia was pursuing.”

After the U.K. identified a Ukrainian lawmaker and television channel owner, Yevhen Murayev, as a potential puppet ruler who could be installed by the Russians, Ukrainian protesters demonstrated outside his channel’s offices in Kyiv and called for its closure. Mr. Murayev denied involvement in any such plot.

Some Ukrainians are taking measures beyond protesting. Myroslav Hai, a military veteran and film producer, set up powerful radio equipment near the front line in the eastern Luhansk region to broadcast Army FM, a Ukrainian radio station, with such a strong signal that it replaced a separatist station in Russia-allied territory.

“It’s important to show that someone is doing something small every day,” he said. Kyiv has bolstered its cyber defenses after a string of attacks, including with training at “ hackathons” organized by the EU and NATO.

Cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 temporarily took down power grids in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine and Kyiv, the capital. A mal-recognized ware attack in 2017 affected one in 10 businesses nationwide and was designed to cripple the economy, according to Viktor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection.

A cyberattack last month, which authorities blamed on Russia and its close ally Belarus, defaced several dozen government websites and installed malware. Mr. Zhora said Ukrainian authorities thwarted a graver attack that was aimed at accessing the state register, a data set on companies and entrepreneurs.

Another new tactic, according to Ukrainian authorities, is bomb threats. Ukrainian police said there were nearly 1,000 anonymous messages in January, mostly by email, falsely claiming bomb threats against nearly 10,000 locations.”

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Peter Aitken is a Fox News Digital reporter with a focus on national and global news, observes that AI controlled drone swarms show military might, but the question of who controls the incoming date makes interoperability tricky. 

He writes: “Retired Brig. Gen. Uri Engelhard, an AI and cyber expert, member of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, told Fox News Digital:

“Just like coordination is needed to conduct classic, joint and coalition maneuvers and military operations, similar clear definitions of boundaries, tasks, responsibility and authority are needed to control and de-conflict drone swarms. If planned and conducted properly, the deployment of drone swarms should not be more challenging than other military activities.”

The joint AUKUS – Australia, United Kingdom and U.S. – military drill last week included the deployment of an AI-controlled swarm of drones that detected and tracked military targets “in a real-time representative environment,” according to a British government press release.

The test, conducted in southwest England, included a Challenger 2 tank, Warrior armored vehicle and Viking unmanned ground vehicle. The U.K. Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) said the test helped the three allies reduce duplication efforts and ensure interoperability.

“Accelerating technological advances will deliver the operational advantages necessary to defeat current and future threats across the battlespace,” U.K. Deputy Chief of Defense Staff Lt. Gen. Rob Magowan said in a press release about the trial. 

“We are committed to collaborating with partners to ensure that we achieve this while also promoting the responsible development and deployment of AI,” he added.

The swarm displayed impressive capabilities, and it raised significant questions about control – both the main AI that operates the swarm and the data that the swarm absorbs and disseminates.

“Obviously, he who controls the AI holds an advantage over other participants,” Engelhard said. “But similar to other complex systems, like the Iron Dome, only if all components operate in harmony can the system succeed.”

“No system is void of errors,” he noted. “Using AI will decrease errors. The task of remote controlling a swarm of drones is complex, and in order to minimize errors, a combination of AI and remote control should be employed.”

“The clearest advantage of AI-controlled drone swarms is that if programmed well in advance, the swarm can execute its tasks exceedingly well without the need for remote controlling,” Engelhard said.

The new trial shows the U.S. making great strides in areas that some countries have already explored, including Israel, but also rivals such as China, according to Matt McInnis, a senior fellow for the Institute for the Study of War’s China Program, told Fox News Digital.

“This is one of the areas that … with all the things that I saw that drone swarms could potentially bring to warfare, this type of very fast response to a changing situation during a conflict and being able to process many, many targets quickly is something that I think all major militaries are trying to get a handle on,” McInnis said.

“I think using drones for this intelligence surveillance reconnaissance mission that the August test is looking at is, in many ways, trying to ensure that we are keeping up with where China and Israel and others are going and, frankly, to maintain and hopefully to establish and maintain a leading edge in this capability.”

The focus for AI and drone technology thus far remains purely strategic, with little plans evident to give AI control of weapons or combat vehicles otherwise. The public’s reaction to such a choice became clear with the response to a report last week that the Air Force had run a simulation in which the AI drone allegedly tried to kill its operator and a communications tower because it deemed them as obstacles to fulfilling its goals.

The Air Force had to clarify they did not actually hand over control of a weapon to an AI and no one actually died or was harmed during the test. Instead, the Air Force insisted that the comments had been taken out of context and “were meant to be anecdotal.”

McInnis said the Chinese are aiming to do something along similar lines – in effect speeding up the “targeting cycle,” from observation, targeting, firing and then repeating the cycle. 

“Process in a war can become very quick, and it is something that I think most states are going to try to find ways to do because this is the key to maintaining a decision superiority in warfare,” he said. “It’s certainly where the Chinese are trying to go, what they believe they can achieve [with] this type of decision superiority by bringing in artificial intelligence and machine learning into its entire intelligence and targeting process.”

On the issue of who controls the AI and incoming data remains a chief concern that McInnis worries has escaped serious consideration so far, adding that there will remain “enormous pressure” to find a common operating platform, especially in organizations like NATO.

“My expectation is that, at least for our core allies certainly to press on all of NATO but maybe certain key players like France or Japan … those are all things that I expect we’re going to try to make as interoperable as possible,” he said.”

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Ian Lovett is foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal covering the war in Ukraine. He joined the Journal in 2016 and spent five years covering religion in the United States before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. 

He writes: “From a bunker on the southeastern front, it is easy to hear how Ukraine’s supply of artillery ammunition has dwindled. For every five or six incoming Russian shells, the Ukrainians fire back once or twice.

As the war approaches its third year, Russia is on the offensive, backed by an economy on a war footing. Ukraine, meanwhile, is short on ammunition as additional aid from its main backer, the U.S., remains blocked in Congress.

With artillery shells running low, Ukrainian troops on the front lines are improvising and using explosive drones to try to hold the Russians back.

“We’re increasingly using FPV drones because we have a lack of shells,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation. But, he added, “drones can’t replace artillery completely.”

Ukraine’s growing reliance on FPV, or first-person-view, drones offers a preview of what the war might look like if the flow of Western weapons to Kyiv were severely curtailed.

With additional aid packages from the U.S. and the European Union stalled, Ukrainian forces are running short on ammunition, money and manpower. Many brigades are depleted from the summer counteroffensive, which failed to make a significant breakthrough.

Now, the Ukrainians are trying to make do until more resources arrive. As in the first weeks of the war—before Western weapons flooded into the country—that short-handedness has led to unorthodox tactics to plug holes, such as substituting FPV drones for artillery fire.

The drones can’t fly as far or fast as artillery. They can’t carry as much explosive, or blast through a concrete wall. But at just a few hundred dollars each, the drones cost far less than artillery shells and are much easier to produce.

Both sides have made increasing use of FPV drones over the past six months as they have shown their usefulness on Ukraine’s flat, open fields. They are far more accurate than artillery, allowing the drone pilots to chase down moving vehicles and troops on foot. While artillery usually needs several shots to hit a target, FPV drones hit almost every time.

So far, they are just about holding back Russian advances around Robotyne village to the south of the town of Orikhiv, since some artillery units in the area were sent to other parts of the front.

“They’re putting more and more hopes on us,” said a 33year-old commander of an FPV drone squad, who goes by the call sign Tulayne, meaning “Seal.”

The Wall Street Journal observed Tulayne’s team on a recent mission in the Robotyne area, where Russian forces have been trying to win back the territory Ukraine seized during the counteroffensive. The four-man team brought 20 propeller drones, each about the size of a dinner plate, to a bunker a few miles from the front line.

The engineer attached different kinds of munitions to a few of the drones—one for hitting infantry, another designed to penetrate armored vehicles. Then he ran outside to set up an antenna, with wires running into the bunker to connect to the pilot.

A surveillance team spotted at least a dozen Russians in a network of foxholes not far away. Tulayne, who was acting as pilot, slipped on goggles that let him see what the drone’s camera sees and grabbed a controller. Then the drone whirred into the air.

Tulayne maneuvered toward the entrance to a foxhole, then slammed the drone into it. He and his colleagues watched a live feed from a surveillance drone as smoke rose from the foxhole, waiting for Russians to run out. “They’ll come out,” Tulayne said of the Russians.

The deputy commander told an engineer to get another drone, armed with a different kind of munition, ready to take off and hit them again: “He’s bandaging him,” he surmised. “We need to fly there fast.”

Although the Ukrainians are relying on FPV drones out of necessity, soldiers operating around Robotyne said the devices are transforming the front line. Because large, armored vehicles are valuable, easy-to-spot targets, both sides limited their use on the front line and instead began to rely on vans, or even motorbikes.

But using the FPV drones, the Ukrainians are now hitting even small vehicles, and chasing down soldiers on foot. The result is that the gray zone—between enemy trenches that neither side controls—has grown wider, soldiers in the area said, making it tougher to advance.”

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Andy Kessler is the author of Inside View, a column he writes for The Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they intersect with culture. He won the 2019 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He is the author of several books. He writes: “Reports from Ukraine are filled with stories of Javelin antitank missiles and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles taking out Russian tanks and armored vehicles.

The Biden administration has announced $800 million in defensive weapons for Ukraine, including Javelins, Stinger antiaircraft weapons and Switch-blade drones. More amazing is what Ukraine has also been doing on the cheap. And I don’t mean Molotov cocktails.

Wars are increasingly asymmetric— the lesser-armed side can put up a strong fight. The U.S. learned this in Iraq with insurgent use of improvised explosive devices, basically roadside bombs triggered with cellphones. Similarly, Ukraine has been deploying inexpensive, almost homemade weapons and using technology to its advantage.

The Times of London reports that Ukraine is using $2,000 commercial octocopter drones, modified with thermal imagers and antitank grenades, to find and attack Russian tanks hiding between homes in villages at night. Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka, its aerial reconnaissance team, has 50 squads of drone pilots who need solid internet connections to operate.

When the internet was cut in Syria in 2013, enterprising techies set up point-to-point Wi-Fi connections to bring internet access from across the border in Turkey. You can do this with Pringles potato-chip cans and $50 off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers. Ukraine may be spared this ad hoc setup as Elon Musk and his firm Star-link have donated thousands of satellite internet-access terminals to Ukraine, including to the Aerorozvidka squads, which come with warnings to camouflage the antennas. They typically cost $499 each and $99 a month for service.

Ukraine also effectively jammed Russia’s long-in-the-tooth wireless military-communication technology, which apparently uses a single-frequency channel to operate. Former Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus told CNN that Russians were then forced to use cellphones to communicate until Ukraine blocked the +7 country code for Russia and eventually took down 3G services that Russia uses for secure connections.

Russian soldiers were forced to steal Ukrainian cellphones to communicate with one another. That’s no way to fight a war.

Ukraine also has taken advantage of crowd-sourcing. The Journal told the story of Russian tanks that would fire on the city of Voznesensk and then back up a few hundred yards to avoid return fire. Civilians and Territorial Defense volunteers would then message the tanks’ new coordinates via the Viber social-messaging app.

The propaganda war is also being fought on the cheap, from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Zoom call with the U.S. Congress to Ukraine’s work spreading news inside Russia. The Russians have blocked Facebook and Twitter, independent media has been shut down, and on Russian television no one is allowed to say “invasion” or “war.”

But no country can completely filter and firewall real news. The Telegram and Whats-App messaging apps encrypt their communications. Ukraine has begun using facial recognition to identify killed and captured Russian soldiers, even contacting their families, and posting their photos on Telegram channels. For a time, Twitter was using a service to disguise its origin and restore service to Russian users.

Most surprisingly, after much hype and many warnings, Russian cyberwarfare has been deemed fairly ineffective. Hours before the invasion, someone, presumably the Russians, launched a Trojan. Killdisk attack, disk-wiping malware that hit Ukrainian government and financial system computers and took down Parliament’s website.

Cyberattack tracking firm Netscout  called the attack “modest.” A Ukrainian newspaper then released a [doxing] file with details on 120,000 Russian soldiers, including names, addresses, phone, and passport numbers. Where the information came from is unknown.

But we have a hint. Ukraine is filled with smart coders, and the government set up an “IT Army of Ukraine” Telegram channel to coordinate digital attacks on Russian military digital systems. As many as 400,000 have volunteered so far. An officer of the Ukraine State Service of Special Communications said they were engaged in “cyber-resistance.” This digital flash mob has taken down Russian websites, though I doubt we will ever fully know the damage it may have inflicted.

This is definitely a social-network-influenced conflict. In the fog of war, stories, and disinformation swirl. Most are impossible to verify. I’ve heard of foreign volunteers swarming to Ukraine who then post photos on Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram strip GPS location coordinates from smart-phone photos, but they allow these volunteers to tag nearby locations, potentially giving away refugees’ hiding places. These could be targeted by Russian missiles and may have been the reason the Mariupol theater was destroyed.

New technology for use in commerce often emerges after the smoke of battle clears. World War I produced tanks, field radios and improved airplanes. World War II brought radar, penicillin, nuclear power, synthetic rubber, Jeeps and even duct tape. What we are seeing in Ukraine is the asymmetric power of pervasive inexpensive commercial technology, especially citizen-empowering social networks, and crowdsourcing. So far these tools have been altering the war’s outcome. Welcome to 21^st Century warfare.”

It cannot be ignored, that each of these uses of emerging Internet capabilities is applicable to any domestic security issue where non-state actors are exploiting conditions on the ground to undermine existing order—much like what exists at the U.S. Southern border and in the several States adversely impacted by the illegal migrant invasion of America. Ukrainian militia forces are thwarting the same circumstances that State Militia forces in America are also encountering every day.”

Next time: How allies can learn to help.

Daniel Michaels is Brussels Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He was previously German Business Editor, also overseeing coverage of the European Central Bank. For 15 years before that, he was the Journal’s Aerospace & Aviation Editor for Europe. He writes: “

The fusion of inexpensive, high-tech weapons and low-tech brute force that Palestinian militant group Hamas used to attack Israel on Oct. 7 echoed tactics used on the battlefields of Ukraine that could transform the future of warfare.

Hamas blasted holes in border fencing using explosives and at least one commandeered construction vehicle. But before smashing its way into Israeli territory, Hamas used pinpoint drone attacks in an effort to blind sophisticated surveillance systems and cripple local military command- and-control capabilities.

Israel has spent years and billions of dollars building border barriers, monitored by guard towers bristling with electronic sensors and weaponry. These automated sentries can identify and shoot at land and air threats, including helicopters and large drones, people familiar with the systhe tems said.

Hamas boasted in videos posted on social media that it used small and relatively slow commercially available drones, modified to carry explosives, to knock out Israel’s security systems.

The strikes, using off-the-shelf equipment, are similar to those by Ukrainian forces who use improvised drone-bombers to hit Russian troops. The inexpensive makeshift weaponry has defeated advanced air-defense systems and destroyed costly tanks and other equipment.

Ukraine’s hybrid devices built on developments in other conflicts. Most of those fights involved what strategists call asymmetric warfare, where one side has much greater firepower than the other.

Islamic State is widely considered to have been the first group to drop explosives from commercial drones in a conflict, in Syria around 2016. The innovation, which evolved from improvised explosive devices used on the ground, was soon replicated by other non-state actors, from antigovernment rebels in Myanmar and the Philippines to Mexican drug cartels.

“With each conflict you see iterations of the technology,” said Mike Monnik, chief executive of DroneSec, an advisory firm specialized in drone-threat intelligence.

The war in Ukraine has also seen commercial and consumer technologies mix with traditional military explosives. Ukrainian troops, and more recently Russian forces, have used off-the-shelf drones to improve the targeting of decades-old artillery. Drones have dropped grenades and other weapons on trenches, depots and even individual soldiers. Hamas used drones to drop grenades on Israel’s observation towers and remotely operated machine guns.

The attack is an embarrassment for Israel, which has led world in developing sophisticated drones and anti-drone technologies. The ability of Hamas to hit towers that were designed to defend against airborne incursions is likely to be a focus of extensive analysis in Israel, the U.S. and among other allies.

The attack also drives home the difficulty of defending against such strikes. Most existing air-defense systems are designed to spot large, fast and higher-altitude threats approaching from far away. Small commercial drones like the quadcopters used by Hamas can hug the ground until near a target, have a radar signature too small for detection by most existing arrays, and can pop up at distances too short for sensors to spot them.

Responding to small, inexpensive drones is vexing for large militaries because defending against them requires expensive new equipment.

Today, drone production and modification is too widespread for militaries to effectively target. Knowledge of how to create lethal drones is shared in online tutorials, and components are easily smuggled because many have multiple uses or don’t resemble weapons parts.”

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Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine. He writes:

“[Two years] into Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, two things seem clear.

• First, the war matters. After 15 years of failed Western responses to Russian aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, another failure to contain and deter Russia would have catastrophic consequences around the world.
• Second, current American strategy is not working well. Ukrainians are fighting bravely. We can and should hope for Ukrainian breakthroughs that transform the military situation and break Russian morale, but hope is not a plan.

Absent decisive military victories for Ukraine, the conflict is developing into a war of attrition, and given current American strategy that kind of war favors Russia. Moscow has more people, more resources and more territory than Ukraine. Worse, Ukrainian forces can make progress only by attacking prepared Russian defenses. If you are in a war of attrition but you have to keep hurling your forces at well-entrenched, well-defended enemy positions, you will burn through your reserves faster than your opponent.

Ukraine has another vulnerability. It depends on Western aid, and Western public opinion is fickle. The need to produce dramatic results to keep Western support from flagging may have forced Ukraine into launching the counteroffensive before its forces were ready.

Meanwhile, like LBJ agonizing over target selection in North Vietnam, President Biden frets over every weapons shipment to Ukraine, worried that sending too many arms of the wrong kind will trigger Russian escalation and risk a nuclear holocaust. He dribbles out enough support to keep Ukraine in the field but stops short of providing the kind of assistance that Kyiv really needs.

This may feel rational and even statesmanlike to the president, but it is a hard sell in American politics. If Russia is so evil and threatening that we must help Ukraine, why aren’t we doing enough to help Ukraine win? If Americans conclude that Mr. Biden’s Ukraine strategy will produce what political scientist Max Abrahms calls a forever war with a side order of nation building, support for Mr. Biden’s war policy is likely to collapse well before Russia throws in the towel.

The answer is not to walk away from Ukraine, but to fight Mr. Putin in smarter and politically more sustainable ways. Mr. Putin must pay, and be seen to pay, for his attack on Ukraine, and to do that the U.S. needs a whole-of-government campaign against Russian interests and assets around the world.

Fortunately, we operate in a target- rich environment, and there are lots of ways that Team Biden can bring the cost of war home to the Kremlin.

We could work with Turkey and neighboring states to make Mr. Putin’s presence in Syria ruinously expensive while bringing him diminishing returns. Forcing Mr. Putin to devote more resources to Syria while reducing its usefulness to him weakens him in Ukraine and at home.

The U.S. can apply pressure in other places, such as Russia’s illegal enclave in Moldova. Belarus is a de facto co-belligerent participating in Russia’s war. Our goal should be to force Mr. Putin to devote scarce resources to keeping his satellite afloat.

The U.S. can also target Mr. Putin’s Latin American allies. The Biden administration needs to move past the leftist shibboleths of the 20th century and develop a concerted approach toward pushing Russia out of the Western hemisphere.

Mr. Putin’s networks of cronies, allies and agents extend well beyond Russia. These people need to learn that collaboration with rogue states is a poor career choice. President Biden should instruct the intelligence community to work with the Treasury Department and prosecutors around the world to expose the shady deals, tax evasion, bribery and other bad behavior that holds Mr. Putin’s global network in place. Some prominent careers may collapse in disgrace. That would be a good thing. Working with allies, the full power of American intelligence should be devoted to the detection and systematic deconstruction of Mr. Putin’s international assets.

Despite the disappointing performance of our sanctions so far, the Russian economy remains an important vulnerability for the Kremlin. As analyst Edward Luttwak points out, we can accelerate the degradation of Russia’s economy by focusing on critical components that Russia badly needs but can’t easily make or source. The Russian gas industry, for instance, depends on a range of cold-weather equipment that is made in the West.

There are other things we can do. We can help Ukraine develop a powerful arms industry and defense establishment that pose a permanent obstacle to Russian ambitions in the region. We can go pedal-to-the-metal on energy production of all kinds to cut global prices and Mr. Putin’s revenues without alienating countries like India. We can advance a multinational effort to ensure that the world’s uranium market won’t depend on Russia. We can develop military technologies and weapons systems that Russia cannot hope to match, just as Ronald Reagan did with his missile defense program in the 1980s.

If this is a war of attrition, the U.S. and its partners are well-placed to win. We just need to make up our minds and roll up our sleeves.”

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Yaroslav Trofimov is a Ukrainian-born[1] Italian author and journalist who serves as chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Previously he wrote a weekly column on the Greater Middle East, “Middle East Crossroads,”[2] in The Wall Street Journal. He has been a foreign correspondent for the publication since 1999, covering the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Prior to 2015 he was The Wall Street Journal‘s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Wearing video goggles, a Ukrainian trooper crouched on the top floor of a gutted high-rise and piloted a small drone into the nearby Russian-occupied city of Bakhmut. With a swoosh, the first-person-view drone—which cost about $300 to assemble—sped after a target of opportunity, blowing up a pickup truck full of Russian troops.

“Before we started flying here, the Russians had so much movement that there were traffic jams in Bakhmut,” said the pilot, a member of the Special Operations Center “A” of the Security Service of Ukraine. “Now, all the roads in Bakhmut are empty.”

With thousands of Ukrainian and Russian drones in the air along the front line, from cheap Quadro-copters to long-range winged aircraft that can fly hundreds of miles and stay on target for hours, the very nature of war has transformed.

The drones are just one element of change. New integrated battle-management systems that provide imaging and locations in real time all the way down to the platoon and squad levels—in Ukraine’s case, via the Starlink satellite network— have made targeting near instantaneous.

“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military-intelligence service. “Surprises have become very difficult to achieve.”

The technological revolution triggered by the Ukraine war is calling into question the feasibility of some of the basic concepts of American military doctrine.

Combined-arms maneuvers using large groups of armored vehicles and tanks to make rapid breakthroughs—something Washington and its allies had expected the Ukrainian offensive this summer to achieve—might no longer be possible in principle, some soldiers here said. The inevitable implication, according to Ukrainian commanders, is that the conflict won’t end soon.

“The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq— that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now,” said retired U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Bradley Crawford, an Iraq war veteran who is now training Ukrainian forces near Bakhmut in a private capacity.

And, in a potential conflict with a lesser power, the U.S.’s overall military edge might also not be as decisive as previously thought. “It’s a question of cost,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “If you can destroy an expensive, heavy system for something that costs much, much less, then actually the power differential between the two countries doesn’t matter as much.”

For instance, each FPV drone, a type of weapon that entered widespread use this summer, costs a fraction of a regular 155mm artillery shell, which is worth some $3,000, let alone main battle tanks priced at millions of dollars.

Yet the drones now have the precision and speed to catch up with any moving armored vehicle and, if piloted expertly, can disable even the most modern tanks and howitzers. Their cheapness also means that they can be used against any target of opportunity, including cars and small groups of soldiers, emptying out the roads within several miles of the front line.

Center “A” is one of many Ukrainian forces operating FPV drones. Since June 1, the center’s FPV crews in eastern and southern Ukraine have hit 113 Russian tanks, 111 fighting vehicles and 68 artillery systems, causing nearly 700 Russian casualties, according to the unit.

During a few hours one recent morning in Chasiv Yar, Center “A” operators used FPV drones armed with World War II-vintage antitank bombs to destroy, in addition to the pickup truck, two parked Russian military vehicles. They also flew a drone into the window of a Bakhmut high-rise after spotting Russian soldiers— likely also drone operators— moving the curtains. A separate observation drone recorded the resulting explosions.

The Russians, too, have formidable— and fast-improving— drone capabilities. Minutes after the Center “A” team tried to establish a position in the Chasiv Yar high-rise, it was spotted by a Russian drone and the building was targeted by mortar fire. The Ukrainian troopers quickly ran from the building and then filtered back in groups of two, at long intervals.

While drones have played an outsize role in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, both the sheer number of unmanned aircraft and their effectiveness have increased significantly, with Moscow quickly catching up and sometimes surpassing Ukraine’s capabilities. New types of drones are reaching the battlefield—including naval drones Ukraine has used to damage Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Many drones that were effective months earlier have become outdated fast and need to be re-engineered to defeat enemy jamming, commanders said.

“Nothing stands firm,” said the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, Vice Adm. Oleksiy Neizhpapa, in an interview. “War is the time when technology develops. Every operation is different, and if you repeat it the same way, it would make no sense because the enemy already has an antidote.”

The latest time any side made a rapid breakthrough on the ground was the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions in September and October 2022. At the time, the Ukrainians took advantage of undermanned and under-fortified Russian positions.

The Ukrainian advance in Kherson last November was the result of Himars missile strikes disrupting Russian logistics to such a point that the Russians chose to withdraw. Since last fall, however, Russia has mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops, plugging gaps in defense and laying out extensive minefields and fortifications. Crucially, it has also saturated the front line with drones.

As Ukraine kicked off its counteroffensive, every time its forces gathered more than a few tanks and infantry fighting vehicles together, their columns were quickly spotted by ubiquitous Russian drones and then targeted by a combination of artillery, missiles fired from choppers and swarms of drones.

The Russian military faced the same fate when it gathered a large tank force of its own in an attempt to push into the city of Vuhledar in January, and in subsequent smaller attempts at armored offensives. Noticed by Ukrainians from the air, these columns were also swiftly destroyed.

After initial heavy losses of Western-supplied tanks and fighting vehicles, Ukrainian troops have switched to operating in small groups that are ferried toward the front line using armored personnel carriers, and then attempt to advance one tree line after another.

Continuing to move forward, the Ukrainians seized several villages on the southern front in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, and, in recent days, broke through Russian lines south of Bakhmut to take the villages of Andriivka and Klishchiivka. During the Russian offensive between November and May, Moscow scored no notable gains except for Bakhmut.

The bloody war fought by Ukraine is the kind of conflict the U.S. military hasn’t experienced since Korea in the 1950s. Modern Western military training and defense procurement have been shaped by decades of counterinsurgency operations against much weaker opponents in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. That has led to a focus on costly and sophisticated weapons systems that don’t survive long in a full-scale conflict with a comparable adversary.

“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity. If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” said Taras Chmut, director of Come Back Alive, a foundation that raises money to provide Ukrainian units with drones, vehicles and weapons.

The corollary, he said, is that the focus should be on providing front-line troops with a larger quantity of cheaper, simpler systems. That is a historical lesson that harks back to World War II, when the Soviet T-34 and American-built Sherman tanks were significantly inferior to German Tigers and Panthers but could be mass-produced, fielded in much greater numbers and more easily repaired in the field.

Western military planners are taking notice. “We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, the head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”

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Eric Schmidtwas CEO of Google, 2001-11, and executive chairman of Google and its successor, Alphabet Inc., 2011-17. He is the chairman of the Special Competitive Studies Project and a co-author of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future. He writes: “My most recent trip to Ukraine revealed a burgeoning military reality: The future of war will be dictated and waged by drones.

Amid a front line covering 600 miles, the Ukrainian counteroffensive faces a formidable Russian force, as it tries to break through to the Azov Sea and stop the Russian overland supply line to Crimea. Between the two armies, there are at least 3 miles of heavily mined territory followed by rows of concrete antitank obstacles, with artillery pieces hidden in nearby forests. The Russian military has amassed so much artillery and ammunition that it can afford to fire 50,000 rounds a day—an order of magnitude more than Ukraine.

Traditional military doctrine suggests that an advancing force should have air superiority and a 3-to-1 advantage in soldiers to make steady progress against a dug-in opponent. Ukrainians have neither. That they’ve succeeded anyway is owing to their ability to adopt and adapt new technologies such as drones.

Drones extend the Ukrainian infantry’s limited reach. Reconnaissance drones keep soldiers safe, constantly monitoring Russian attacks and providing feedback to correct artillery targeting. During the daytime, they fly over enemy lines to identify targets; at night, they return with payloads.

Unfortunately, Russia has picked up these tactics, too. Behind the initial minefields and trenches blocking Kyiv’s advance, there’s a more heavily defended line. If courageous Ukrainians make it there, Russian soldiers will send in drones and artillery. All the while Russia’s army— which excels at jamming and GPS spoofing—is working to take out Ukrainian drones. A May report from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies estimated that Ukraine was losing as many as 10,000 a month even before the start of the counter-offensive.

Yet Ukraine has continually out-innovated the enemy. Its latest drone models can prevent jamming, operate without GPS guidance and drop guided bombs on moving targets. Ukrainian command centers use personal computers and open-source software to classify targets and execute operations.

Ukraine has also pioneered a more effective model of decentralized military operations that makes its tech use varied and quickly evolving. In the war’s early stages, Ukraine’s government put the new Digital Ministry in charge of drone procurement but left important decision making to smaller units. While the ministry sets standards and purchases drones, the brigades are empowered to choose and operate them. Ten programmers can change the way thousands of soldiers operate. One brigade I visited independently designed its own multilayered visual planning system, which coordinates units’ actions.

To win this war, Ukraine needs to rethink 100 years of traditional military tactics focused on trenches, mortars and artillery. But the innovations it and Russia make will carry on far beyond this particular conflict.

Perhaps the most important is the kamikaze drone. Deployed in volume, this first-person-view drone—invented for the sport of drone racing— is cheaper than a mortar round and more accurate than artillery fire. Kamikaze drones cost around $400 and can carry up to 3 pounds of explosives. In the hands of a skilled operator with several months of training, these drones fly so fast they are nearly impossible to shoot down.

Costly materiel, such as combat aircraft that are vulnerable to missile attacks, will be replaced by cheaper drones—operating on land, sea and air. In the future, like murmurations of starlings, ruthless swarms of AI-empowered kamikaze drones will track mobile targets and algorithmically collaborate to strike past an enemy’s electronic countermeasures. Naval drones will take the same concepts into the sea, converging like a shoal of small torpedoes at the waterline of targeted ships. Land-based drones will clear obstacles, demine fields and eventually act as remote machine guns and other weapons.

As I departed Ukraine, what stuck with me were the rolling fields along the Dnipro River, with cinnabar-colored flowers covering the gentle landscape. In the 1930s, Stalin enforced the Holodomor, the forced starvation of about four million Ukrainians in the middle of the breadbasket of Europe. The industry of the tractors cultivating fields only miles from the front line was a powerful reminder of how human civilization can withstand unbelievable hardship—and emerge stronger.

The war in Ukraine shows us the best and worst humanity can offer, from the ruthlessness of the invasion to the bravery of the defenders. It’s also a stark warning of the future wars to come. Just as drones can be deployed to protect soldiers, they can be used to hunt civilians.

The world needs to learn and innovate from the lessons of this emerging form of fighting to be ready to deter and prevent such conflict from ever happening again.”

Next time: The Era of Drone Swarms Begins

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the forthcomingbook Goodbye Globalization. She writes: “The Houthis’ attacks on merchant vessels have made the Red Sea unsafe for shipping. But the militia’s actions are only some of the many infractions of maritime rules worldwide. China harasses vessels and builds artificial islands, Iran targets shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and unknown actors sabotage sea-based infrastructure. The global maritime order, which underpins our prosperity, is in peril. Rule-abiding governments can save it.

“We . . . are determined to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks,” 14 countries, led by the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan, warned the Houthis on Jan. 3. The Houthis made clear what they thought of this red line by continuing their attacks. Though vessels in the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian staved off Houthi boats and drones heading for merchant vessels, their presence remained well short of direct retaliation against the Houthis. The Houthis’ “aerial and seaborne drones have truly tipped the balance away from those with mighty fleets,” retired Rear Adm. David Manero, a former U.S. defense attaché to Russia, said. Freddy Furulund, an executive with Norwegian maritime insurer DNK, said, “These states and groupings target an area where we’re vulnerable. It’s a clever approach, but it’s still illegal.”

Soon after the warning, Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said any country involved in Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea would see its vessels targeted. Unsurprisingly, shipping lines are diverting their vessels from the area. In late December, merchant traffic in the Red Sea was down by nearly one-fifth from the same period in 2022, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. On Jan. 11, the U.S. and the U.K., supported by four allies, decided that the Houthis’ violation of maritime rules couldn’t continue. They launched strikes against Houthi-held parts of Yemen. (The strike coalition of six is down from Prosperity Guardian’s more than 20, itself a low number.)

The Houthis, whom the U.S. is putting back on its terrorist list, aren’t the only ones flouting maritime rules. In the 2010s China built islands in South China Sea waters that officially belong to other countries. When an international tribunal ruled against China, Beijing ignored the judgment. For the past decade, China’s maritime militia has been harassing vessels from other countries.

Off the coast of the Philippines, Chinese vessels are bumping Philippine supply vessels and using water cannons against them. In the Taiwan Strait last year, China initiated a flotilla to inspect shipping—on both the Chinese and Taiwanese sides of the internationally recognized median line. Unidentified actors have blown up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and sabotaged two undersea cables and another pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

Over the past three years, Iran has attacked some two dozen merchant vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. And since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the so-called dark fleet of merchant vessels that have obscure owners and skirt maritime rules has grown to about 1,400 ships worldwide. If they cause accidents, other countries and vessels are on the hook. “The recent attacks on global sea routes are yet another assault on the taken-for-granted global commons which underpins international trade,” said George Robertson, a former secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Western efforts to preserve the global maritime order aren’t succeeding. The U.S. Navy has conducted freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, dispatched a force to the Strait of Hormuz, and assembled the ambitious Prosperity Guardian. Nothing seems to work.

If maritime activities can be attacked at any time or place, the global economy will stumble. “Houthi-style tech and tactics are creating uncertainty at a bargain price,” Adm. Manero said. The U.S.led strikes in Yemen are a show of force but haven’t halted the chaos. Days after the first strikes, the Houthis attacked a U.S.-owned cargo ship and an American destroyer.

It’s regrettable that so few countries have joined Prosperity Guardian or the smaller U.S.-led group in the Red Sea. Keeping the world’s oceans safe will continue to depend largely on the U.S. and U.K. Other nations can help by providing vessels, personnel, and intelligence. Think of it as the maritime equivalent of a neighborhood watch.”

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Jenny Li has contributed to The Epoch Times since 2010. She has reported on Chinese politics, economics, human rights issues, and U.S.-China relations. Ms. Li has extensively interviewed Chinese scholars, economists, lawyers, and rights activists in China and overseas. Cathy Yin-Garton is a contributor to The Epoch Times with a focus on China- related topics. They write:

“In a recent uptick in global tensions, Houthi armed forces have launched attacks on passing ships in the Red Sea, causing disruptions to global supply chains. Experts suggest that this may be another strategic move by Iran, following their alleged instigation of the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Simultaneously, there are claims that China seeks to divert U.S. attention from the Pacific by backing conflict in the Middle East, with evidence suggesting that the origin of the missiles used in the Red Sea attacks points to China.

A fifth round of U.S. strikes targeting Iran-backed Houthi armed forces in Yemen occurred on Jan. 24, the BBC reported. This marked the latest action against the Iran-backed Houthi armed forces, who are also fighting Yemen’s internationally backed government for local control.

The United States and its allies have launched a significant operation involving more than 100 precision-guided missiles that hit more than 60 targets across 28 Houthi-controlled locations. Targets included the Houthi armed forces’ assets, such as command and control nodes, ammunition depots, warehouses, launch systems, production facilities, and anti-aircraft radar systems.

The operation was in response to the Houthis’ repeated attacks on ships in the Red Sea since November 2023, posing threats to key trade and energy transport routes globally. President Joe Biden emphasized that the strikes, supported by U.S. allies, aim to address the “outrageous behavior” of the Houthis.

Carl Schuster, former director of operations at the Hawaii Joint Intelligence Center, believes the operation was significant and aims to diminish the Houthis’ ability to launch further strikes. However, he acknowledged that it may not prevent future attacks entirely. Mr. Schuster stated that the U.S. attacks inflicted significant losses on the Houthi armed forces, potentially damaging their ability to control territory in the Yemeni civil war.

As a result, the Houthi forces may consider ceasing their disturbances in the Red Sea. However, Mr. Schuster expressed concern that Iran might instigate the Houthi forces to continue harassing international ships transiting past Yemen. She notes that Iran’s motivation could be to exert pressure on Europe and the United States to influence Israel into ceasing its attacks on Hamas in Gaza.

The disturbance in the Red Sea poses a threat to major commercial shipping routes, impacting the flow of supplies and cargo between Asia and Europe, as well as U.S. ports. Mr. Schuster views this as Iran leveraging an “economic lever” against Europe and the United States. Additionally, she speculates that Iran plans various activities in the Red Sea to showcase its strength and power while signaling its interests.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas launched a sudden attack on Israel, involving more than 3,000 rockets in the first four hours and 2,500 armed terrorists breaching Israel’s defenses. The attack resulted in the tragic loss of 1,200 civilian lives and marked the most severe violation of Israel’s borders since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Insider claims published in The Wall Street Journal described collaboration between Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and Hamas in planning the invasion, with meetings held in Beirut involving representatives of four Iranian-supported radical organizations. These organizations included Hamas in Gaza as well as Shiite radical groups and political factions in Lebanon, such as Hezbollah.

Fabian Hinz, a researcher at the London based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in a post on social media platform X late last month that Houthi armed forces possess two formidable anti-ship ballistic missiles, namely “Asef” and “Tankil,” with potential modifications based on existing Iranian designs.

Shedding light on the origins of these missiles, internet news magazine Newsweek reported that Chinese military blogger “Krolliov” traced them back to China’s Red Flag 2A surface-to-air missiles, exported to Iran during the 1980s Iran–Iraq War, and the B610 and B611 missiles developed by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. Chinese military blogger Zhang Bin claimed on TikTok that the Houthi armed forces have become the “first organization to use Chinese missile technology to attack ships.”

As early as 2013, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Farragut and the Yemeni coast guard discovered Chinese weapons on rebel ships in Yemen. The arsenal included C-4 explosives, electronic circuits, small caliber ammunition, laser rangefinders, artillery, and shells convertible into roadside bombs, the Popular Mechanics website reported.

U.S. and Yemeni officials also discovered 10 crates containing shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, the website reported. These boxes had Chinese templates, indicating that the missiles came from the state-owned China Precision Machinery Import-Export Corp. The images of these missiles show that they are “Vanguard 1-M” surface-to-air missiles aligned with the types used by the Chinese military.

Such alleged arms support from China extends beyond Yemen, with indications that its support extends to rebel forces in Syria. Photos released by a Syrian rebel group showcase members carrying Chinese FN- 6 missiles, another variant of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

Mr. Schuster suggested that the CCP is strategically exploiting “opportunities that have arisen” to weaken the United States by supporting violent extremist groups such as Hamas in the Middle East. She claims that Beijing supports Hamas with funds, weapons, and ammunition, potentially expecting actions favorable to its interests.

Notably, after Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel, the CCP refrained from condemning the terrorist acts. Instead, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi criticized Israel’s retaliatory actions, alleging they exceeded the scope of self-defense. Amid the turmoil in the Red Sea, the CCP is taking the same stance.

Mr. Schuster points out that the technology used by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and rebel forces in Yemen, including drones and anti-ship ballistic missiles, have their roots in Chinese designs. “China sold drone designs to Iran many years ago and assisted them in developing their Iranian version,” he said. “In addition, the Houthi armed forces are using anti-ship ballistic missiles developed by Iran. They are using technology from China.”

He suggests that the CCP’s indirect support to those attacking U.S. interests in the Middle East diverts attention and resources away from Asia. The fact that many ships transiting the Red Sea display the flag of the People’s Republic of China to avoid attacks from the Houthis points to covert ties between the two.

Recent signals from five ships declared, “Everyone onboard is Chinese,” as they sailed the Red Sea further fueled suspicions. All five ships were safe from attack.

The United Nations Security Council has approved a resolution “strongly condemning” multiple attacks by the Houthi armed forces along the coast of Yemen, disrupting global trade. However, the CCP, along with Russia, Algeria, and Mozambique, abstained from voting”.

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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes: “Here’s the contradiction of current U.S. Iran policy in a nutshell: While the Pentagon deploys a Thaad missile-defense system to the Middle East to protect U.S. bases from the volley of missiles fired by Iranian proxies, the Biden Administration has let the international embargo on Iran’s missile program lapse.

Oct. 18, 2023 was Transition Day under the Iran nuclear deal, and with it passed the U.N. missile and drone sanctions. Iran’s terrorist proxies and foreign clients such as Vladimir Putin send their regards.

A core problem with the 2015 nuclear talks negotiated by the Obama Administration was that key restrictions were deliberately allowed to sunset, at which point Iranian activities would be stamped legal. The arms embargo was allowed to expire in October 2020; missile and drone limits followed. The Obama [ideology] at the time was that the nuclear deal would cause Iran to moderate its malign behavior to fit the Western timetable, but that has never happened.

President Obama assured Americans that he could trigger so-called snapback sanctions in response to Iranian noncompliance. With the help of the U.K., France or Germany, the Biden Administration could have done that to avoid the sunset and reimpose sanctions. Over the summer these nations decided not to do so. The goal was to avoid an escalation that might disrupt U.S. diplomacy with Iran.

Instead, the U.S. and its allies have imposed their own missile sanctions—a poor substitute. Since European sanctions aren’t enforced extraterritorially, the entire global enforcement burden now falls on America. Yet U.S. export-control agencies are understaffed and the Biden Administration is declining to enforce oil sanctions. It isn’t credible.

The costs of a ineffective deterrent are real, even if Iran was never honoring the rules. Iran will now obtain equipment for its drone and missile programs more easily. Expect its missile production to expand and do more damage in the hands of Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as well as Russia in its war on Ukraine. New markets will also open up in Venezuela, Belarus and beyond.

It’s hardly a secret that Russia and Iran have been flouting the drone embargo. But the two states have thus far avoided trade in ballistic missiles. This latest demonstration of Western irresolution will encourage Iran to accelerate its missile testing and transfers, which could include supplementing the short-range ballistic missiles Russia has been using in Ukraine.

If the embargoes have long been halfhearted, the snapback mechanism was an intentional ruse. It was a token provision to help President Obama and the Europeans reassure their domestic audiences.

Nuclear, drone and missile violations stood no chance of triggering snapback, so long as the Obama and Biden Administrations could claim that talks were continuing and Iranian behavior might somehow change. The Biden policy has been to bribe Tehran, releasing frozen Iranian assets to buy peace and cooperation. See Israel for how that has worked.

What new catastrophe would cause President Biden to rethink his Iran policy? That’s the broader question given that every escalation by Tehran seems to earn Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei another reprieve. The forbearance— none dare call it appeasement— makes a larger war even more likely. The U. S. better send more missile defenses to the region.”

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Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. is a retired U.S. Marine general, served as commander of U.S. Central Command, 2019-22. He is executive director of the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida and author of The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century.” He writes:

“Four years ago, at the direction of President Donald Trump, forces under my command struck and killed Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. He was arriving there to coordinate attacks on our embassy and coalition targets across the region. Our successful strike threw Tehran’s plan into disarray.

The Iranian response— a barrage of missiles against Al Asad air base in western Iraq—was largely a punch that landed against air. The attack was designed to kill Americans, but commanders on the ground ensured there were no fatalities. I don’t minimize the injuries our forces absorbed in that attack, but it could have been much worse. The Iranians subsequently backed down.

Here is the lesson: The Iranians’ strategic decision-making is rational. Its leaders understand the threat of violence and its application. It takes will and capability to establish and maintain deterrence. We were able to reset deterrence as a result of this violent couplet. The Iranians have always feared our capabilities, but before January 2020, they doubted our will. The bombing of the memorial ceremony for Soleimani in Iran on Wednesday that killed dozens of civilians isn’t an example of deterrence but likely internal factions struggling for power.

After exchanging fire with the U.S. four years ago, Iran continued to pursue its long-term trifecta of strategic objectives: preserving the theocratic regime in Tehran, destroying Israel, and ejecting the U.S. from the Middle East. The mullahs’ actions, however, were muted and hidden behind proxies, from the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza and Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. The Iranians remembered the result of a straightforward confrontation with the U.S.

Regrettably, the U.S. hasn’t remembered this lesson and the importance of matching demonstrable will with our capabilities. Even before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Iranian forces were launching missile and drone strikes on our bases across the region, acting through proxies that gave them a measure of deniability. Our response has consistently been tentative, overly signaled and unfocused.

Iranian leaders work with Lenin’s dictum that “ you probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” Tehran and its proxies are pressing their attacks because they haven’t confronted steel. The ability to stop such probing generally depends on a swift and violent counterattack. Delaying and equivocating usually means the response needed to re-establish deterrence has to be much larger than it would have been if it had been applied in a timely manner.

As a military officer, I have observed such hesitancy and lack of strategic clarity across several presidential administrations. In 2019, an early and sharp response to Iranian provocation might have ended the escalatory spiral well before the U.S. had to strike Solei-mani and accept the possibility of theater war.

There is another issue at stake. If avoiding escalation is the highest U.S. priority, then it is only logical to withdraw our forces from the region. That would ensure attacks on our bases don’t continue but ultimately endanger the future of the Mideast. Language that describes avoiding escalation as our highest priority is, therefore, inaccurate and dangerous. It sends an unhelpful signal to our adversaries as well as our friends and allies.

A case in point is Houthi activity in and around the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. In the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy of the U.S. we emphasize the importance of free passage through such global choke points. Protecting this principle, and our strategic priority, is more important than avoiding escalation. Taking strong action against the Houthis isn’t likely to lead to theaterwide escalation. Iran is waging a hidden-hand war from Yemen because it is cheap and because there are few consequences for Tehran.

A forceful response against the Houthis, designed to make them feel the pain of continuing their irresponsible behavior, wouldn’t ineluctably lead to a large-scale Iranian response. Pursuing this approach is especially consequential: The Chinese are watching to see how we respond to a threat involving a narrow strait.

Unfortunately, it is the U.S. that is being deterred, not Iran and its proxies. To reset deterrence, we must apply violence that Tehran understands. Paradoxically, if done earlier, this violence could have been of a far smaller and more measured scale. Indecision has placed us in this position. There is a way forward but it requires the U.S. to set aside the fear of escalation and act according to the priorities of our strategic documents and concepts. Iranians understand steel. They also understand mush. It is time to choose.”

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Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine. He writes:

“As the Biden administration offered the mullahs in Tehran a $6 billion ransom for five American citizens, it was also offering Iran’s archrival Saudi Arabia unprecedented defense commitments and cooperation on a civilian nuclear program to help persuade Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel.

Inquiring minds want to know: Why is Joe Biden working so hard to do favors for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? And why is he shoveling cash to the mullahs while working to empower their enemies?

These are good questions. Brokering a Saudi-Israeli peace deal will be expensive. It will cost in the region, where both Israel and Saudi Arabia will look to extract as many concessions and sweeteners as possible before giving Washington what it wants, and it will be expensive at home. The human-rights activists who dominate much of the Democratic Party’s foreign- policy apparatus will scream bloody murder if Mr. Biden embraces Bibi and MBS. Isolationists in both parties will ask why the Biden administration is deepening American security commitments in the Middle East instead of continuing to withdraw.

Two perceptions seem to be driving the new Biden approach.

• First, while continuing diplomatic outreach to Iran demonstrates that Team Biden hasn’t given up on reaching some kind of understanding with Tehran, for now at least it is accepting that the mullahs don’t want to play ball.
• Second, the administration appears to have a new appreciation of the importance of the Middle East, and therefore of leading powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel, for American global strategy.

Being the primary security and economic partner of the countries that dominate the world’s most important oil reserves still matters. America’s position in the Middle East gives us leverage over China’s energy supplies. It can ensure that the Middle East sovereign wealth funds prefer our tech and industrial sectors over those of our rivals. It can maintain the profitable defense relationships that help keep American arms makers ahead in a competitive arena.

This was all as true in January 2021 as it is today, but after 2½ years in office the administration now seems to get it. Team Biden now appears to understand that diplomatic relations and deepening formal security ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia could be the foundation of a new regional security architecture that secures criticalAmerican interests while reducing the long-term need for American military presence in the region. Getting the Saudis and the Israelis to “yes” will be difficult, but success would be transformational.

The biggest problem with the new approach is a familiar one: Iran. The mullahs will inevitably see a U.S.-backed regional security system aligning Israel and Saudi Arabia as a direct threat to their drive for regional hegemony. Iran has the capacity to cause a crisis in the Middle East any time it likes. It can accelerate the production of enriched uranium. It can attack shipping in the Gulf. It can order its proxies to launch missiles or stage terror attacks.

Team Biden seems to be hunting for a mix of carrots and sticks that will keep Iran quiet as the U.S. collaborates with the regime’s most bitter foes to build a powerful regional security architecture. Pallets of cash here, Marines on foreign-flagged tankers there. Can the U.S. pacify Iran while reassuring allies? We shall see.

There will be other problems, also familiar. Getting to yes will require the cooperation of two leaders who have little respect for Team Biden. Biden-era policy toward Saudi Arabia, pivoting awkwardly from icy contempt to oaths of undying affection, is a series of what my students would call “big yikes”—cringe-inducing rookie mistakes. And the chemistry between Mr. Netanyahu and the Democratic foreign- policy leaders of the Obama-Biden era has never been good.

Then there are the Palestinians. Although decades of Saudi and broader Arab frustration with Palestinian political incompetence have substantially reduced their influence in the region, the Palestinians haven’t fallen off the map. Saudi public opinion, and the government’s self-respect, will not permit Riyadh to reach agreements with Israel that set the Palestinians entirely off to one side.

With most of the Israeli cabinet dead-set against any concessions, and the Palestinian leadership at a low ebb of authority and legitimacy among its people, addressing this problem could be even more difficult than usual.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration’s embrace of the Trump-era vision of Middle East regional security based on Arab-Israeli reconciliation with American support has opened the door to new and perhaps more creative diplomacy in a region that is critical to the global balance of power and world peace. That is a very good thing.”

Elliot Kaufman is The Wall Street Journal’s letters editor. He writes: ‘“I’m driving south to the Gaza corridor, the place Hamas invaded on Saturday,’ Yonah Jeremy Bob says in our first phone conversation. ‘But it’s a straight drive, so let’s talk.’

Mr. Bob is an expert on the Israeli shadow war with Iran, the subject of his new book, Target Tehran, and he

covers the Israeli intelligence agencies and military for the Jerusalem Post. He’s busy tracking down answers to the questions every Israeli wants answered: How could this have happened? What’s the plan? Who will pay?

Even after the corpses of Israeli civilians had been cleared, “it’s some sort of nightmare,” Mr. Bob says when we catch up later on Wednesday. “What I saw was once a living, happy place, and it has been utterly destroyed.”

Israeli intelligence misjudged Hamas. “In the worst case,” Mr. Bob says, the expectation was that “Hamas might be able to take over one village that’s really small for three hours” and kill 20 people. “There was no scenario where anybody talked about 22 villages, a whole area of the country, 1,200 Israelis killed, including 800 to 900 civilians. That wasn’t conceivable.”

Saturday’s shock gave way to rage, “and then rage crystallized into a very steely determination,” Mr. Bob says. “It’s the thing Israel’s enemies never fully understand.

They think of Israel as a weak Western state, where people care about their looks and money and all the things that will make them flee rather than fight.” Hamas often scoffs that “the Jews love life.” But that’s why they fight for it.

“Hamas was playing the long game,” Mr. Bob says. “Probably after the 2021 war”—in which Israel delivered it a beating—“Hamas diagnosed everything we did and took notes and started to plan.” When Israel next fought in Gaza, with Islamic Jihad, Hamas stayed out. Then, having lulled Israel, it executed a devastating plan.

“They fire 2,000 rockets in one day. They’d never fired that many rockets at once,” Mr. Bob says. But it was all a diversion. While Israel focused on the unprecedented barrage, Hamas deployed men on “motorized hang gliders, which were not even on our radar [as a threat], and dropped makeshift bombs on our lookouts. So, when they start sending people to the border fence, we’re blind.

They attack the big border crossings first, so we send reinforcements there, which means we leave the other spots open. We don’t realize that our lookouts are dead or blown up because we’re thinking about the rockets and they’re attacking everywhere at once.”

Each stage of the attack prepared the next, and each involved something new. “In terms of military strategy, they schooled us.” It wasn’t unreasonable for Israelis to think they had deterred Hamas, Mr. Bob says. “But you need to plan for every eventuality.”

That was the lesson of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which has become an Israeli metonym for military disaster. But Mr. Bob notes that war had a second half. “By the end, Israel had in some ways an even greater tactical triumph than in ’67. It retook the Sinai, which became the basis of the peace agreement with Egypt.”

He sees a similar two-part story here. “Hamas took its best shot and it won big on the first day,” he says. “But it really doesn’t have anything else. It isn’t going to accomplish anything else close to what it has already done. From here on, it’s going to be Israel demolishing them.”

Israel has issued one of its largest military call-ups ever, 360,000 reservists. Its comprehensive bombing campaign and siege tactics are laying the groundwork for a counter-invasion to destroy Hamas. “They decided that they need to get rid of the people who are running Hamas, and most of their military force, and most of their weaponry.” Mr. Bob says.

But as Aaron MacLean writes in Mosaic, “Were the IDF simply to withdraw after a maximal campaign, the last surviving member of the Qassam Brigades will, as it were, grab a bloody Hamas flag, wave it for the cameras, and declare victory.” Gaza would still be fertile soil for terrorists.

That why’s regime change is on the table, too. Israelis used to worry that it might cost 1,000 soldiers to topple Hamas, and that ISIS could fill the vacuum. But by letting Hamas reign, Mr. Bob says, “We’ve now lost 1,200 people,” and Hamas is no better than ISIS. “So nobody has a hesitancy.”

That doesn’t mean Israelis want to govern Gaza themselves. “I still think Israel feels that it would be more trouble, that more soldiers would die over a long period of time, and it would rather hand Gaza back to somebody else,” Mr. Bob says.

But to whom? “The Palestinian Authority was routed there in the past. Why wouldn’t that happen again? If multinational forces in Lebanon and the Sinai have shown that they’re incapable of protecting Israeli interests, why would this time be any different?”

Israel could turn to a hybrid solution, with autonomy for the Palestinian Authority, helped by a multinational group, and the Israeli military in some way involved to prevent a Hamas comeback. “That is utter speculation on my part,” Mr. Bob says. “No matter how hard you push it, officials right now are not hinting what their plans are for afterward. I think it’s because they haven’t decided.”

Perhaps unsure how to win the peace, Israel is focusing on total victory in the field. “Hezbollah is the strategic threat,” Mr. Bob says, and a second front in the north would spell trouble. “Israel would win, but it would look different.”

He says Israeli intelligence believes Hezbollah could fire 6,000 to 8,000 rockets a day early in a conflict, several times Hamas’s capability. “If you’re shooting down 90% of 2,000 rockets versus 90% of 6,000 or 8,000, it makes a huge difference. And probably the intercept rate drops to 80% because of the volume.” No Israeli leader would welcome that conflict, Mr. Bob says, even if it could generate a more decisive victory over the Iranian proxy network.

Hezbollah has fired on Israel and started cross-border skirmishes in the past week—“small things,” he says. Israel has so far declined to escalate. “It’ll kill whoever shot at it,” and maybe the people around it, but that’s it. “Clearly, Israel doesn’t want to be distracted by another fight.”

But the enemy has a say. Does Hezbollah want to fight? Mr. Bob thinks not. If it had been waiting “for the right moment to strike, it missed its chance” by holding back in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, Mr. Bob says. Instead, “Hezbollah has been as careful as Israel. It wants to be seen as having gotten on the playing field and drawn blood, . . . not being cowardly and staying out.

But unless something changes since Saturday it has basically been cowardly and stayed out.” Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, “ has a lot to lose,” Mr. Bob says. “He basically controls a real country. I mean, Lebanon’s a mess, but he has real power. It isn’t Gaza.”

Mr. Bob acknowledges that the situation is fluid, and new orders could always come down from Tehran. Ultimately, that’s the point. Israelis may need to think big right now. “Israel will beat Hamas, but there’s still going to be the larger problem of Iran,” a revolutionary theocratic regime devoted to Israel’s destruction.

The Obama and Biden administrations have assumed that the right combination of incentives can moderate Iran’s ambitions. Surely, given a choice between prosperity and hardship, between fellowship and enmity, Iran would do the reasonable thing. It can be hard for Americans, who also love life, to understand a regime that chooses multigenerational sacrifice to make its dream of annihilating Israel come true.

“Iran is aggressively pushing Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah— anybody it can—to fight Israel, to make trouble with Israel, to destroy Israel. It’s giving funding, logistics and training for that purpose,” Mr. Bob says. Even if “nobody has been willing to go on the record and say, ‘Iran gave the order on this day,’ everybody would say that Iran’s fingerprints are on the idea of it, which would happen at some point.” But perhaps the ayatollahs should have been careful what they wished for.

“On Saturday, I think the Iranians are feeling great,” Mr. Bob says. “But when they see how much damage Israel is going to do to Hamas in response, and proxies that they’ve invested so much in are going to lose most or all of their power, they’re going to say, ‘This wasn’t worth it. These Israelis don’t turn the other cheek.’ ” Not only proxies will feel the pain.

“The Mossad’s abilities within Iran are astounding,” Mr. Bob says, referring to the Israeli intelligence agency. He points to “multiple instances when Israel went into Iran, kidnapped top Iranian officials, interrogated them within Iran, put the videos out, and then left the country without anybody knowing.” Mr. Bob’s years of “working to penetrate to top Mossad sources, all of the chiefs, and a lot of other people” lead him to conclude: “If the Mossad wants to go after someone in Iran, it can.”

Asked what Israel needs from the U.S. now, Mr. Bob rattles off four answers. First, “give Israel bunker-buster bombs.” Second, “declare that the U.S. won’t pressure Israel to prematurely halt its counter-invasion,” even as civilian casualties inevitably follow. Third, “shoot down one Hezbollah or Hamas rocket to show that the U.S. is willing to lean into this, and the naval movements aren’t for show.” Fourth, “move up delivery of the KC- 46 refueling planes.”

It’s a plan of action whose meaning would be clear to Tehran. The bunker buster is a “dream weapon” for any potential strike on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

Since Iran knows these bombs and KC- 46 planes would “transform what Israel might be willing to risk,” he says, their transfer would make it think twice about ordering Hezbollah into the war. “Do I really want my proxy to do X, Y or Z, which could lead to an overreaction?” he imagines Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asking. “The spectrum of those ‘overreactions’ that Israel could offer would be much greater. And that could affect Iran’s calculations in every zone.”

One effect would be to deter a sprint to a nuclear breakout, which some fear Iran will try while Israel is distracted. Iran “could get to the 90% weaponized uranium enrichment level in either days or a week and a half,” Mr. Bob says.

President Biden has been weak on Iran, but his support for Israel after Hamas’s invasion has been steadfast. Ophir Falk, a foreign-policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, praises Mr. Biden’s remarks Tuesday on the subject: “We’re cynical and everything, but it was one of the most moving speeches that I’ve ever heard.”

Israelis know all too well, however, how fickle the world’s sympathies can be. Half the point of the state of Israel is to free the Jews from dependence on those sympathies. “There was shock when people saw the pictures,” Mr. Bob says, “ but that lasts for only so long.” Israel’s assault on Gaza will lead to “new pictures on the Palestinian side” and moral equivocation from the West. That’s when Israel needs the U.S. to stand firm, because no one else will.

Mr. Falk says, “I truly hope, and I actually expect, that the civilized world will support us not only when we’re the victims, but also when we’re the victors here.” Victory might also save the prospects for a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. “In this neighborhood, the strong survive,” Mr. Falk says. “The main reason that prior peace agreements were reached was because we’re strong.”

But if the peace plan goes by the boards, too bad. As Mr. Bob puts it, “This isn’t the Jew of the ghetto for 2,000 years. This is the modern Israeli army, which will do what it needs to do to defend the state.” Israeli society may be “richer and a little more spoiled now than it once was,” no longer the Jewish Sparta of the early days. “But underneath, there’s a determination that should not be underestimated. That’s what I’ve seen the past few days. You’re going to see more of that.”

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Mr. Kaufman continues. “Now, when the issue of the “day after” Hamas is on the lips of U.S. leaders, it is taken for granted that the Palestinian Authority is unfit to take over in its present configuration. Mr. Netanyahu says that he won’t allow Gaza to go from “Hamas-stan” to “Fatah-stan,” and the Biden administration has become willing to meet him halfway.

Mr. Blinken calls for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority. U.S. officials are quoted looking for “new blood.” If the administration tries to hoist one of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah colleagues as the man to run Gaza, expect a clip from Memri’s archive, 11,000-strong, to alter the debate.

“The others are extremists too,” Mr. Stalinsky says. “They’re totally antisemitic and often supportive of jihad.”

That isn’t even the main problem, Mr. Carmon argues. “The PA as a body is corrupt to its toes. No one respects them,” he says. “Abbas says, ‘I won’t come to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank,’ and that’s a good line. But Fatah won’t come anyway because they would be slaughtered.” Hamas, their fellow Palestinians, would kill them.

Memri’s work also looks at America, where Mr. Stalinsky says, “something has changed.” Speaking in Arabic, many American Muslim radicals are “openly supportive of Hamas and the Oct. 7 attack. They’re bolder about it now.”

Most of Memri’s American translations are of imams and scholars who are obscure to the larger public. But one that shook the White House was of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which styles itself a mainstream, well-connected Muslim advocacy group. Mr. Awad was caught celebrating the Oct. 7 attack as an act of Gazan liberation and “self-defense.” President Biden had to remove CAIR as a partner in the White House’s Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

“Awad wasn’t expecting that anyone would be paying attention to his video outside the intended audience,” Mr. Stalinksy says. He was speaking at a convention of American Muslims for Palestine, an organizer of anti-Israel rallies across America with its own record of extremism. Nobody objected to Mr. Awad’s remarks until Memri exposed them two weeks later.

The video revealed how the anti-Israel movement talks to itself. But lately it isn’t so subtle, with pro-Hamas protests in U.S. streets.

“There is an element of trying to intimidate the Jewish community,” Mr. Stalinsky observes, “going to kosher restaurants, community centers, Hanukkah celebrations, harassing Jewish students.” Efforts to disrupt Thanksgiving and Christ-mas celebrations, and to block roads, bridges and tunnels, also suggest a new willingness to push around the American majority.

All of this is escalating with a backdrop of rising danger from terrorist groups, Mr. Stalinsky says. “Hamas has all of a sudden become the king of the jihadis around the world,” who are energized and looking to “jump on the bandwagon,” he says. “We’ve monitored it since the beginning of jihadis going online, and there have never been so many open threats to the U.S.—explicit threats.”

Mr. Stalinsky worries we’re at the start of another cycle: “People pay attention, then they don’t want to pay attention, and then they have to pay attention” when something terrible happens. “Because it always comes back to the Middle East.”

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Jack Devineis a former acting CIA deputy director of operations and president of the Arkin Group, a New York-based international intelligence and investigative company. He is author of Spymasters’ Prism.

Hamas’s attack on Israel should be a wake-up call to U.S. intelligence services. That a terrorist attack of this magnitude—with seismic implications for global security— came as a surprise to many in Washington shows that we need to reassess our own operations sharply to ensure that America has a comprehensive threat picture that can provide early warnings and prevent national- security tragedies.

The Israelis will no doubt examine this lapse thoroughly. Several possible reasons come to mind for why Israel and its allies, including the U.S., failed to report on the exact nature, timing and scale of the attack.

Disinformation could have played a role in diluting Israeli intelligence. Hamas has years of experience with Israel’s intelligence methods and strategic priorities, giving the terrorists the know-how to feed Israeli operatives false information. Over the past two years, Israel had seemingly developed a working relationship with Hamas on issues like humanitarian- aid deliveries and work permits for Gaza residents. That would have given Hamas operatives opportunities to communicate regularly with Israelis and perhaps gain the Israelis’ trust by sharing accurate information on other threats from Gaza—lending credibility to Hamas’s deceptions about its own plans.

Yet with a terrorist operation of this scope, there had to be countervailing information available. Hamas planned and trained for the attack for at least several months and reportedly had input from outside supporters, especially Iran. It’s hard to imagine that not a single intelligence source warned of the coming onslaught among hundreds of Hamas members and their supporters both inside and outside Gaza.

This then also looks to have been a failure of politicians’ and intelligence officials’ analysis. Conventional wisdom might have led them astray. During my tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency, assumptions that became so-called conventional wisdom were the root of analytical failures more often than not. The Israelis’ working relationship with Hamas might have led to an incorrect belief that the threat from Gaza was under control. That belief could have led Israel to undervalue or misread intelligence suggesting that Hamas was planning, or even capable of, such an attack.

Some media reports have already posited that the Israelis received foreign intelligence warnings about the potential attack but dismissed them because of a “failure of imagination.”

But a well-placed spy makes imagination unnecessary. Washington in particular should ask why our spies didn’t surface the threat to the extent that it couldn’t be ignored. The answer is likely one that has sobering ramifications for American intelligence, too.

The reality is that human-intelligence collection—in other words, the recruitment and use of spies—has stagnated. The U.S. and its allies have ramped up resources for technological intelligence solutions such as signals intelligence and digital surveillance, leaving spy networks underfunded. The total number of field operatives who handle spies today for the U.S., its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and Israel is less than the number of sailors who staff a single aircraft carrier. And the players who compete in the Super Bowl get paid more a year than all the spies worldwide combined.

Expanding the size and funding of the U.S. human-intelligence program is the first step, but we also need to adapt our methodology. Unprecedented high-tech counterintelligence capabilities like drone and electronic surveillance, biometric identification and artificial intelligence make it virtually impossible for American officials to go undetected abroad. There’s an urgent need for a much larger number of spy masters who can work with natural, unofficial cover in real businesses doing legitimate work. Washington can’t rely only on a handful of high-level sources but should recruit at multiple levels and cast a much wider net. Sources who can organically rise through the ranks will eventually have access to more sensitive and valuable information.

Our tactical programs could also do with some changes. The departure from Afghanistan and Iraq makes U.S. kinetic targeting programs, which were essential when we had a presence on the ground, far less relevant. The staff and resources devoted to these programs should be refocused on collecting strategic information on how our adversaries’ leaders are making key operational decisions.

The U.S. needs to take a fresh look at longstanding threats that might have slipped to the bottom of our national- security priorities and reinvigorate its intelligence programs. We can’t be caught unaware again.”

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Benjamin Netanyahuserved as Israel’s prime minister, 1996-99 and 2009-21. He is leader of the opposition Likud Party and author of Bibi: My Story. He writes:

“The world is in crisis. The war in Ukraine could swirl out of control with ominous global consequences. In Iran, the ayatollahs are rushing to build a nuclear arsenal while suppressing domestic dissent over the regime’s brutality. Terrorism and wanton violence abound from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Yemen and Syria.

The arc of history may bend toward peace and justice, but it can easily go off in dangerous directions.

Some policy makers contend that the way to keep it on course is through soft power. The superiority of democratic values and culture, they contend, will overcome the forces of violence and aggression. But such thinking doesn’t withstand historical scrutiny. If evil forces have overwhelming military and economic might, they can and will defeat our best intentions. Even Abraham Lincoln needed a decisive victory in America’s bloodiest war before the better angels of human nature could prevail.

The key to peace and human progress is the combination of soft and hard power. I have devoted most of my life to ensuring that my country, the Jewish state of Israel, has enough power to defend itself, protect its values and secure its future. For this purpose I advanced the concept known as the “Iron Triangle of Peace,” which set out to maximize Israel’s prosperity through a combination of economic, military and diplomatic power.

This necessitated a transformation of Israel’s semi-socialist economy into a free-market one. As finance minister (2003-05) and prime minister (1996-99 and 2009-21), I led a free-market revolution, which unshackled Israel’s economy and turned it into a global powerhouse of innovation and enterprise. Over the past two decades, our nation’s companies made technological advances in such areas as medicine, agriculture and water. Israel’s gross domestic output per capita, which long trailed those of Western democracies, now exceeds that of Britain, France, Japan and Germany.

As Israel’s economic and technological power have developed, so too have its military capabilities. The Israeli military today is equipped not only with fighter jets, tanks, submarines and drones, but also with superb intelligence and cyber capabilities, which have saved the lives of countless Israeli citizens and visitors. The combination has resulted in greater diplomatic strength, as more countries have sought to benefit from our success.

Far from being a pariah state, Israel now has robust diplomatic relations with more than 160 countries. I helped bring about these diplomatic fruits and was the first Israeli prime minister to visit countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, as well as Australia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and many African nations. During my tenure, we forged ties with the Baltic states and the Visegrad countries of Eastern Europe—in addition to developing a pact with Greece and Cyprus to extract gas from our seabed, which we’ve begun to use to supply Europe.

But the Iron Triangle of Peace produced its most dramatic breakthrough in our own neighborhood: the Middle East. For 25 years we were told that peace with Arab nations would come only if we first resolved our conflict with the Palestinians. To many Israelis, that presented an insurmountable obstacle, given that the Palestinians have long demonstrated they want a state instead of—not next to—Israel. There had to be another way. The path to peace, in my estimation, wouldn’t go through the Palestinians but around them. And that is exactly what has happened.

My government’s approach has been made possible by a profound change in thinking among many Arab leaders, who now view Israel not as an enemy but as an indispensable ally against a belligerent Tehran. Many of these leaders took note of my opposition to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which showered the Iranian regime with international approval and billions of dollars to fund its aggression and terror. Shortly after I addressed a joint session of Congress on this topic in March 2015, several Arab leaders secretly requested to meet with me. These meetings ultimately foreshadowed the Abraham Accords, the September 2020 agreement orchestrated by the Trump administration that normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

The results have been remarkable. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis now regularly fly over the skies of Saudi Arabia to the U. A.E. and Bahrain. Sudan is no longer a way station for Iranian arms transported through the Nile Valley. Israeli and Gulf entrepreneurs are busy forming joint ventures with multimillion- dollar investments. A joint railway project among Israel, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia will connect the region once the kingdom joins the accords, which I believe will happen within a few years. If the policies of peace through strength persist, we may soon be able to envision an end to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.

I have been privileged to live a life of purpose, one in which I’ve helped bring my vision of peace through strength for Israel into being. For three millennia, the Jewish people have never given up on our dream to live freely and prosperously in our ancient homeland, the land of Zion. Having restored our independence, we won’t let anyone bring an end to this miracle.”

Next time: Biden’s has a plan for the Middle East?

Ron E. Hassneris a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes: “When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel).

Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.

An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.

A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

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Peggy Noonan is an award winning columnist, author and former speech writer for Ronald Reagan. She writes: “At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain.

But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!

But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 “trutherism”—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.

In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least 1,200 people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.

A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval- Shani, a 58-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.”

Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”

“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.

The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.

A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”

The gallant gents of Hamas were filming their own war crimes.

Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”

Reuters on Dec. 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In the New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”

If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.

Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.

All of this makes more remarkable the exchange between Dana Bash of CNN and Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Jayapal on why she wasn’t condemning what had been done to women on 10/7. Ms. Jayapal was evasive, tried to redirect, said rape is “ horrific” but “ happens in war situations.”

“However,” she said, “I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of Oct. 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.

Why is it important? Because it happened. Because it reveals something about the essential nature of Hamas and reflects its ultimate political goals. Progressives admiringly quote Maya Angelou’s advice that when people show you who they are, believe them. Oct. 7 was Hamas showing you who they are. Believe them.”

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Jared Malsin is a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Istanbul, covering Turkey, Syria and the wider region, and Fatima AbdulKarim is a journalist based in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the central West Bank, that serves as the de facto administrative capital of the Palestinians. They write:

“Hamas has called for Palestinians to confront Israel at the Al Aqsa Mosque on Friday, when the arrival of large numbers of worshipers presents a test for Israeli authorities aiming to sustain a fragile peace at the site over Ramadan as war rages in Gaza.

In recent years, the Islamic holy month has been an occasion for violent confrontations among Palestinians, Israeli authorities and Jewish worshipers at the compound in East Jerusalem, considered the holiest site in Judaism, and one of Islam’s holiest. Jerusalem is holding its breath.

“The situation is dire in Jerusalem and this Ramadan we are not feeling any of its spirit, neither in celebrations nor in worship, because the occupation has turned the city into a military zone,” said Maha Yaish, a tourism operator who lives in East Jerusalem, referring to the Israeli security presence. Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in February called for Palestinians to march on Al Aqsa at the start of Ramadan, which began on Sunday. The march didn’t materialize.

On Thursday, Hamas issued another demand for action. “We call upon our people in Jerusalem, the West Bank, the interior, and the occupied lands to mobilize and confront the occupation’s schemes against the blessed Al Aqsa Mosque,” Hamas said. “Protecting Jerusalem is among the utmost duties, especially as we are in the month of Jihad and victories.”

Al Aqsa has been largely calm, following brief scuffles between Israeli police and Palestinians on Sunday. Palestinian leaders said Israeli police have in recent days managed to facilitate entry by Palestinians, after restricting access since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

“Last night, there were no restrictions for East Jerusalemites and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” said Mustafa Abu Sway, an Islamic scholar at Al Aqsa Mosque, on Thursday. In the past, as many as 250,000 worshipers have converged on the site on Fridays during Ramadan, he said.

As for the risk of violence, he said, “The worshipers are not interested in anything like that. So far, so good.”

Israeli police said Palestinians were entering the complex after enhanced security checks. Israel says it often faces attacks by Palestinians during Ramadan, including the pelting of Jewish worshipers with stones or shooting fireworks.

The religious importance of the compound, which is known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, means even small disputes over access have the potential to erupt into conflict.

“Add to that, the backdrop of carnage in Gaza. That creates a very, very volatile mix. If there’s any single event alone, that could possibly trigger a regional war,” said Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem based Israeli civil rights lawyer and onetime adviser to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

A visit to the site in 2000 by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then a right-wing opposition leader, was one of the triggers of the second Palestinian intifada, which resulted in years of fighting with Israeli forces. In 2021, Hamas fired rockets into Israel following confrontations at the site between Palestinian worshipers and police, sparking an 11-day war in Gaza.

Some Palestinians described Ramadan this year as a time for resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel has expanded its security operations across the West Bank, following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that led to the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

“What does the world expect from people who are having to live with such brutality?” said Adham Manasra, a 39year-old accountant and father of three in Ramallah. “Of course the natural reaction is to revolt, but not because anyone is calling them to. It’s a reaction to the daily humiliation.” 

Since Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states (primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) from 5 to 10 June 1967, Israeli authorities have allowed a delicate status quo to remain in place in which a Muslim religious authority under the Jordanian government administers the Al Aqsa site, but Israeli police control its entrances. Jews are forbidden to pray on the site, although in recent years more have done so without repercussions.

In the months prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 Suez Canal Crisis position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite casus belli. In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels. He subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel^[35] and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF personnel.

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities, launching its war effort Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt’s military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy.

Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered an evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula; by the sixth day of the conflict, Israel had occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula. 

Jordan, which had entered into a defense pact with Egypt just a week before the war began, did not take on an all-out offensive role against Israel. However, the Jordanians did launch attacks against Israeli forces to slow Israel’s advance. On the fifth day, Syria joined the war by shelling Israeli positions in the north.

Egypt and Jordan agreed to a ceasefire on 8 June, and Syria on 9 June, and it was signed with Israel on 11 June.

This year, Israeli military authorities imposed restrictions on Palestinians from the West Bank from entering Jerusalem for prayers, allowing only men over 55, women over 50 and children under 10 to enter. The restrictions are similar to those imposed in the past.

“Ramadan is sacred to Muslims; its sanctity will be upheld this year, as it is every year,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said.

Palestinians streamed to Al Aqsa this week to enjoy moments of prayer and quiet conversation. At night, the sound of tarawih, Ramadan prayers in which worshipers read long sections of the Quran, could be heard drifting over the walls of the old city.

“We’re standing watch over Al Aqsa,” said Samira Eghbariya, 59, who traveled to Jerusalem from Umm al-Fahm, a town in northern Israel. She said Israeli police questioned her on her way into the compound.

Nearby, Umm Mahmoud, 51, stood in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock, collecting donations for her family in Gaza. On her phone, she swiped through photos of killed and injured relatives, a flipbook of bloody and bandaged faces. As she stood there, her daughter called from Gaza. “We just want to sleep in peace,” the daughter said.”

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes: ““I just want to remind the world, Palestinian mothers love their children just as much as any other mother in the world,” Jordan’s Queen Rania said on CNN last week. “For them to have to go through this is just unbelievable.

And equally, I think that people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and disappointed by the world’s reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding. In the last couple of weeks we have seen, you know, a glaring double standard. . . . Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family, at gunpoint, but it’s OK to shell them to death?”

Suddenly the talk of Israeli grandmothers and babies being butchered by Hamas has given way to reports of Palestinian children killed by the Israel Defense Forces. And so Queen Rania asks: Aren’t Palestinian lives as precious as Israeli ones?

Of course they are. But to focus on death counts alone— without looking to how and why people were killed—is to reduce this war to a grim PR battle of photos and numbers.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said this war has entered its second stage. He was talking about Israel, but it applies equally to Hamas. The barbarism of Oct. 7 was only the first stage of the Hamas war plan. The second stage was to force an Israeli response in Gaza that Hamas knew would mean the killing of innocent Palestinians—which boosts the terrorist group’s propaganda.

Whether the IDF is taking the right steps to minimize the loss of Palestinian civilian lives can be argued. But nothing Hamas does is to protect the Palestinian people. Look at how Hamas prevented Palestinians from leaving northern Gaza in accord with Israeli warnings.

Hamas has built a sophisticated tunnel network to protect its members from Israeli bombs and missiles. Has anyone seen a comparable network of shelters to safeguard the Palestinians Hamas claims to be fighting for? Hamas locates its ammunition caches and command centers in these tunnels beneath schools, hospitals and mosques, so that any Israeli fire necessarily will mean more civilian casualties.

The disturbing truth about Hamas’s second stage is this: Palestinian deaths are more useful to Hamas even than Israeli deaths.

Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the author of “Just and Unjust Wars.” He is a self-described social democrat. He is no fan of Mr. Netanyahu.

In an article for the New Republic, Mr. Walzer makes clear that like Queen Rania, he holds Palestinian life precious—and he believes that the IDF has an obligation to act to protect Palestinians, even if it means greater risk for Israeli soldiers. But Mr. Walzer recognizes something Queen Rania doesn’t: “A just victory requires the defeat of Hamas.”

Mr. Walzer considers the creation of a viable Palestinian state part of a just victory. Agree with him or not—I believe Palestinians need the possibility of a decent life more than a state—he is saying that any just resolution requires the destruction of Hamas first.

This becomes easier to understand once the essence of a terrorist is recognized: a war criminal who rejects any limit, including deliberately targeting civilians. This differs from the IDF, which kills civilians as a consequence of its effort to get at Hamas. In just-war teaching this is known as double effect.

It’s a fine distinction that represents a fundamental moral divide. Tel Aviv University historian Martin Kramer, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that the argument that there’s no difference between the killing of civilians by Hamas and those by the IDF has a precedent in the so-called Dresden defense.

This was the argument advanced by commanders of paramilitary Nazi death squads, who claimed that what they did up close and on the ground was no different morally from what Allied bombers did from thousands of feet in the air. The Nuremberg judges vehemently disagreed, pointing out that the actions differ “ both in fact and in law.” The innocent people killed by Allied bombs were incidental to the military objective. To the Nazis, killing innocent people was the objective.

That’s what makes Hamas members war criminals. On Oct. 7, they executed a plan to target, attack and murder innocent Israelis. Now that they have the Israeli counterattack they counted on, they are trying to use the Palestinian dead to claim victimhood. It isn’t just Queen Rania, either: We hear the same argument at the United Nations, in Congress and on elite American college campuses.

Yes, Palestinian mothers love their children no less than anyone else. But with horrible images from Israel and Gaza now filling our TV screens, moral judgment begins with making the obvious distinctions, not erasing them.”

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Daniel Henninger is an American commentator. He serves as the deputy editorial page director of The Wall Street Journal, and is a Fox News contributor. He writes: “The election that a strong majority of Americans say they don’t want looks likely to happen. As this avalanche of unreality hurtles down the mountain, let me ask: What about the Houthi vote?

With the American presidency being contested primarily over the moral fitness of one man and the mental fitness of another, can anyone be surprised that the Houthis, a Yemeni Shiite tribe, concluded this was the moment to attack global shipping in the Red Sea?

A substantial percentage of seaborne shipping, notably oil, travels up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. In response to the Houthi attacks, the U.S. has carried out counterattacks against Houthi sites in Yemen, the latest on Tuesday. Oil giant Shell has halted shipments through the Red Sea, and the world’s major shippers are rerouting around Southern Africa at great cost, which consumers will bear.

Given the sequence of events from Hamas’s act of war on Israel Oct. 7 to the Houthis’ offensive against the Red Sea shipping lanes, it is now clear that Iran decided the moment was right to stretch the U.S.’s strained military capacity to the limit, or even breaking point.

Prior to the Israeli-Hamas war, the national-security debate in the U.S. and among its Republican presidential candidates was whether we could simultaneously confront China and support Ukraine against Russia. If you were an adversary looking at a U.S. uncertain about its global leadership, what would you do? Answer: Up the ante. Pile more pressure onto the world’s self-doubting superpower. That is what Iran has done.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about the stated intention of China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to displace the dominant political value system of the U.S. and its democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appears to have concluded it was time to make the threat explicit. The Houthi assaults on a choke point of global shipping and the principle of freedom of navigation is a direct attack on the U.S.-led world order. So what is the U.S. going to do about it? Or about the threats that preceded Oct. 7?

The Israel-Hamas war pushed Ukraine’s war with Russia off the front pages, but not in Europe. The German newspaper Bild reported this week that according to classified documents from the German Defense Ministry, that country is preparing for a Russian mobilization beyond Ukraine toward the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also in recent days, Sweden’s defense minister and top military commander both said Swedes should prepare for such a possibility.

Recently, Taiwan’s brave people, living in the shadow of communist China, voted to elect a president committed to the island’s independence. The question now becomes whether current shortfalls in U.S. defense manufacturing will make it difficult to fill Taiwan’s $19 billion order for military weaponry to defend itself against China. And of course shipping lanes in the South China Sea—the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia—are already under pressure from China.

Meanwhile, the southern U.S. border sits as an open wound, bleeding migrants and fentanyl into the mainland from all over the world.

It isn’t an overstatement to say that the U.S. today needs leadership and vision on the order of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan. We are past the point of pretending that the current scope and pace of global disorder doesn’t require a financial commitment to rebuilding the U.S. defense-industrial base. We need a president who will make that case to the American people. The prospects aren’t promising.

The political pressure on Mr. Biden from his party’s left goes far to explain why his national- security team has been behind the curve on every important strategic decision. That won’t improve, especially with John Kerry, architect of the Obama-Iran nuclear deal, joining the Biden campaign. Anti-Israel demonstrations in New York and Washington have taken on an Antifa-like atmosphere of impending violence.

Republicans, meanwhile, are again flirting with an isolationist temptation that has become untenable since October. The Iowa caucuses signaled Republicans’ belief in Donald Trump as their national leader. But listen closely to him and other than extending the border wall and tariffs, it isn’t clear what Mr. Trump would do beyond saying, as he did Monday evening, that “I get along great” with China’s Mr. Xi and Russia’s Mr. Putin. Hopefully that doesn’t mean resolving Ukraine in 24 hours with another Yalta agreement.

America’s politics is rife with sentiment, and perhaps today sentiment is all one needs to win a nomination for the U.S. presidency. The Houthis have voted early on calling America’s bluff “

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What an Asymmetric Victory Would Look Like. 

Andrew Thornebrooke is an American journalist focusing on issues of defense, foreign affairs, and national security. He holds an MA in military history from Norwich University, the nation’s oldest private military college. His writing appears in numerous outlets including The Epoch Times. He writes: “A war between great powers would leave all Americans vulnerable to psychological and cyber warfare.

“A future conflict between great powers would likely put the U.S. homeland at risk, either through kinetic or non-kinetic means, including psychological and cyber warfare, according to the nation’s most senior enlisted officer.

This means that the stakes of the next war will be much higher than those the United States faced during the Global War on Terror, said Ramón Colón-López, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (SEAC).

“The nature of the enemy that we can potentially face in the near future is different than what we’ve become accustomed to fighting over 20 years,” SEAC Colón-López said during an Aug. 1 talk with the Air and Space Forces Association.

“Counterinsurgency is much different than dealing with a foe that has nuclear powers. The stakes are higher.”

SEAC Colón-López said that in the event of war between great powers— such as between the United States and China or Russia—all Americans would be considered “outside the wire” or in danger of being targeted by other means.

To that end, he said, securing U.S. citizens—particularly the family of service members who might be targeted— ought to be of top priority when making strategic decisions that could escalate to conflict. “Everyone, including our families, are outside the wire,” SEAC Colón-López said. “We need to take that into the calculations when it comes to escalation, when it comes to the use of power.

“We’re not only fighting an enemy. We have to deal with the repercussions of what happens with their counter actions and how that is going to affect our families and our people back in the homeland. That is the main concern I have when it comes to strategic power competition.”

SEAC Colón-López also said that the U.S. military would have to do more to encourage the resiliency of its human component in an era defined by increasing technological advances.

While the military is increasingly pursuing advanced technologies, he said, it would need to double down on efforts to prepare its service members for the day when those advanced systems fail. “We need to strike a balance somewhere in there, between intellect and courage, to be able to make sure that we have the best people on the battlefield,” SEAC Colón-López said.

“We know that technology is a double-edged sword. It can basically help us a lot when it comes to our advantages on the battlefield, but what happens when that gets shut off and we have to rely on the flesh and bone to be able to go ahead and take that decisive action to be able to continue to take the fight to the enemy?”

Similarly, SEAC Colón-López said that the military ought to work more with the government to craft a broad approach to combating misinformation and disinformation, which he believes could be used to undermine the confidence of service members’ families in the military and its mission.

He said that disinformation “is a hypersonic weapon of mass destruction,” capable of eroding confidence in the United States and its military, which requires a “whole of nation supporting mechanism” to counter.

“If [families are] not fully willing to assent to our responsibilities, or service members, or if they think that the institution [of the military] is rotten for whatever reason, then we’ll lose that support.”

SEAC Colón-López’s comments come as the U.S. and Chinese militaries both seek to increase their reliance on cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, throwing into question what role human beings will play in future wars.

China’s communist regime is investing heavily in a broad array of new technologies. While AI is foremost among them, the regime is also investing in developing capabilities related to autonomous robotics and hypersonics.

At the heart of the effort is the regime’s goal of “intelligentization,” a transformation of warfare through the mass integration of AI, automation, and big data.

Such programs essentially point toward one end: restructuring the Chinese military into an increasingly centralized cadre of officers who direct swarms of AI-enabled autonomous systems to do the actual fighting.

Likewise, the United States is pursuing the fielding of robotic systems en masse. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said earlier in the year that he hopes to bring together emergent capabilities such as robotics, AI, cyber and space platforms, and precision munitions into a cohesive new doctrine of war.

To that end, the Pentagon is experimenting with new unmanned aerial, ground, and undersea vehicles and seeking to exploit the pervasiveness of nonmilitary smart technologies, from watches to fitness trackers.

Gen. Milley said he believes that the world’s most powerful armies will be predominantly robotic within the next decade, and he means for the United States to be the first to reach that goal. “Over the next 10 to 15 years, you’ll see large portions of advanced countries’ militaries become robotic,” he said during a March 31 talk with Defense One.

“I would submit that the country, the nation-state, that takes those technologies and adapts them most effectively and optimizes them for military operations, that country is probably going to have a decisive advantage at the beginning of the next conflict.”

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Daniel Dassow is a journalist who reports on trending and business news for the Knoxville News Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK – TENNESSEE. He writes: “As advanced machines take on more human tasks, from writing essays and screenplays to driving cars and manning military drones, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville TN, has created a new center that will provide objective research into the threats and opportunities around national security posed by artificial intelligence.

The Center for AI Security Research, or CAISER, is a partnership with the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security that will initially focus on four national security areas where ORNL has particular strength, the lab said in a press release: Cybersecurity, where AI is used to protect U.S. government and industry data from outside attack Biometrics, where AI can recognize faces and fingerprints Geospatial intelligence, where AI can quickly analyze images of war zones and climate change Nuclear nonproliferation, where AI can detect nuclear weapons and materials

In each area, AI can be used for good or for bad. While it can keep an online system secure using facial recognition, AI is increasingly used to generate copycat images and videos called ‘deepfakes’ that are difficult to distinguish from real content. AI systems can also be vulnerable to attacks and inconsistencies.

‘We are at a crossroads. AI tools and AI-based technologies are inherently vulnerable and exploitable, which can lead to unforeseen consequences,’ said Edmon Begoli, founding director of CAISER and ORNL’s Advanced Intelligent Systems section head. ‘We’re defining a new field of AI security research and committing to intensive research and development of mitigating strategies and solutions against emerging AI risks.’

CAISER is the lab’s first dedicated research center to analyze security risks posed by AI, though it extends ORNL’s longtime research project on Artificial Intelligence for Science and National Security. Here’s how the center will address some of the nation’s most pressing security questions and make ORNL a national center of AI research as the lab celebrates 80 years:

ORNL will partner with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of Homeland Security on AI research at CAISER, and expects to collaborate with more industry and national security partners. The center will produce research reports and develop methods of testing AI tools and products.

Dmitri Kusnezov, DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology and a renowned theoretical physicist, said Homeland Security had a ‘special partnership’ with the Department of Energy’s national labs, of which ORNL is the largest.

‘I think a lot about the challenges of our current era, as well as those that lie ahead in the uncharted territory of AI technologies and the very real threats that we’re working steadfast to understand and mitigate,’ Kusnezov said. ‘CAISER will play a critical role in helping us understand this future and addressing the looming threats together.’

In the announcement, the lab noted several key vulnerabilities of AI systems to consider. U.S. adversaries can destroy AI models, for instance, by injecting ‘poisonous’ data that changes a system’s output and can corrupt the way a machine learns. Research has also indicated that AI systems behind self-driving cars and taxis can be thrown off by something as simple as black tape on a stop sign, the lab said.

The promises of AI are as big as its perils and range from consumer goods to top secret government data, so CAISER will prepare educational programming for the public, lawmakers and military personnel, who the center aims to make more confident about which AI systems are trustworthy.

‘Artificial Intelligence promises to do many wonderful things for nearly every aspect of society,’ said Col. Fred Garcia, director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate. ‘CAISER gives hope that while the world rushes full force into AI implementation, they can rest assured that vulnerabilities are being studied and that the back door is being guarded.’

CAISER is part of the lab’s National Security Sciences Directorate, and the center’s team currently includes 10 researchers, according to its webpage. Several team members are specialists in machine learning, a type of AI that trains algorithms with data so that machines used in everything from manufacturing to voice assistants like Siri and Alexa get better at their jobs as they work.

ORNL’s history goes back to 1943, when the Graphite Reactor site, known then as X-10, first demonstrated that plutonium could be extracted from uranium in a chain reaction. That discovery was critical to the success of the Manhattan Project.

Eighty years later, the lab says it is taking ‘a logical step’ in its history by extending its national security focus into the sometimes frightening rise of AI.

‘We’re very proud of the laboratory’s legacy of scientific discovery in nuclear energy, biological sciences, high-performance computing, materials research and artificial intelligence,’ said Moe Khaleel, associated laboratory director for National Security Sciences at ORNL. ‘CAISER will approach the AI challenge in the same way, developing capabilities to scientifically observe, analyze and evaluate AI models in support of national needs.’”

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Richard Whittle is the author of “Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. He writes that the Hamas attack in Israel showed the power and danger of drones, but federal law makes it difficult for law enforcement agencies to respond to potential threats.

“As the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas showed, terrorists are learning to use drones in increasingly creative ways—and that’s bad news for the U.S. homeland. Hamas employed camera-equipped quadcopters, the kind flown by hobbyists, to scout and map Israeli defenses. Then it strapped light munitions onto such drones and used them to knock out sensors and automated machine guns along Israel’s border with Gaza. These tactics paved the way for the killing and kidnapping spree by gunmen that left more than 1,200 people dead and 240 taken hostage.

Today, virtually anyone can buy their own air force for a few hundred dollars, using drones or parts bought online or in a hobby shop. Yet federal law bars most law enforcement agencies from effectively defending against such flying machines within U.S. borders, leaving Americans shockingly vulnerable to attack.

“Right now we don’t have the legal authorities to properly defend our country, and we’ve known about it for years,” said retired Maj. Gen. James Poss, formerly one of the Air Force’s most senior intelligence officers. “It’s almost like we’re waiting for our next Pearl Harbor to happen, but our plan is to call a lawyer about what to do next instead of fighting back.”

Technologies exist for tracking unmanned aircraft using electromagnetic or acoustic signals. And a variety of anti-drone weapons can knock targets out of the sky using explosives, lasers, high-energy microwaves or launchable nets. But without a special exemption or a federal court order, law enforcement agencies are generally prohibited from targeting drones. Even intercepting a drone’s radio signal can violate the federal Wiretap Act. More aggressive tactics to “mitigate” drones, such as taking over their radio controls or shooting them down, are only permitted by federal agencies with special exemptions to defend military bases and sensitive sites, such as the White House and nuclear facilities.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) zealously protects the right of any aircraft to use public airspace, and a drone flying 2 inches off the ground qualifies. A federal interagency advisory warns that interfering with a suspicious drone may violate the Aircraft Sabotage Act, the Aircraft Piracy Act or other aviation laws. “All of the protections follow, no matter how big it is or how little it is,” said Daniel Delgado, a 22-year FBI veteran who worked on defenses against drones and weapons of mass destruction. A drone “that the kids are buying online has the same protections as the latest Boeing 787,” Delgado says.

Small, off-the-shelf drones are just one category of what experts refer to as unmanned aerial systems, or UAS. The U.S. military divides aircraft with no pilot on board into five categories, according to maximum takeoff weight, operating altitude and top speed. Groups 1 and 2 correspond to the FAA definition of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, which weigh between 0.55 and 55 pounds. These are the drones that most hobbyists fly and that commercial users like Amazon and Walmart are using experimentally to deliver everything from household goods to medicine to pizza.

More advanced types of UAS include the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, operated by military personnel via satellite. Large drones like the Reaper are easy for most militaries to spot on radar and knock out of the sky, but small drones are difficult to see and devilishly hard to shoot down. On radar they may look like birds, if they show up at all. But even if a drone can be detected, that doesn’t reveal who is flying it, or their intent.

Last Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that since Oct. 7, a “veritable rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations” have called for attacks against Americans and U.S. allies. No group appears likely to flood heavily armed fighters across the U.S. border, as Hamas did in Israel. But “there is no limitation to human invention,” Delgado said. “Everybody thinks it’s going to be cool to get your Oreos delivered by a drone, but has anybody ever thought about what else an unmanned system can do?”

His nightmare scenarios include terrorists rigging drones to fire guns or drop hand grenades at a crowded event like the Boston Marathon, or using crop-spraying drones to douse a football stadium with chemicals, causing a mass panic. “There are commercially sold flame-throwing drones,” Delgado noted.

Mexican cartels are already using drones to smuggle drugs and weapons across the U.S. border and contraband into prisons, and Islamic State terrorists used jerry-built drones in Iraq as long ago as 2016. But today’s hobby drones—a market dominated by the Chinese company Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies Ltd.—are far more sophisticated and easier to operate. The war in Ukraine has been called the “first drone war,” with both sides using thousands of unmanned aircraft. Drone enthusiasts have flocked to Ukraine to build small kamikaze drones that can fly grenades or mortar rounds into Russian troops and tanks. With First Person View (FPV) technology, an onboard mini-camera lets the operator fly the drone as if along for the ride.

The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department can provide counter-UAS security with temporary exemptions from federal restrictions for events whose organizers apply. But while thousands of exemptions are requested each year, only a few dozen are granted. Similarly, regulations bar flying small drones above 400 feet or into “controlled airspace,” such as near airports, but the FAA lacks the resources to do more than count the hundreds of violations that take place every month. Airline pilots frequently report dangerously close calls with hobby drones, whose operators are rarely identified.

FBI Director Wray has warned before of terrorists plotting to use drones as improvised explosive devices. Yet the agency currently has just a tiny staff assigned to the problem of unmanned aerial systems. “I actually do lose sleep over the fact that the FBI only has three agents doing counter-UAS to protect the entire United States,” said retired general Poss. Those who find that fear melodramatic should ask themselves whether they ever expected al Qaeda to fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon”

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Matthew Hennesseyis The Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial features editor. He writes: “It’s the name of the place that’s left me with an angry and unsettled feeling: Tower 22. Not a base or a camp, not even an outpost. Just a tower in the desert. News reports make it sound like an exposed jumble of sandbags, chicken wire and shipping containers tucked into a triangle of Jordanian bandit country between Syria and Iraq.

Those who died at Tower 22 never had a chance to defend themselves. They were likely sleeping when the drone attack happened, beat tired after a long day’s work in the sun. Perhaps they dreamed of their homes and families in Georgia, where it gets hot, but not as hot as it does in the desert.

President Biden told the world to expect a swift response. “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq,” he said in a statement. “We will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”

A week ticked by. In a surprise move, Kataib Hezbollah, the militia presumed responsible, pre-emptively surrendered, announcing meekly that it would no longer attack Americans. Pinky promise. In an even

more surprising move, the Biden administration then telegraphed its punch, leaking to the press that the U.S. military had identified some targets that it would soon strike.

In the most surprising development, Politico reported Thursday night that U.S. intelligence officials now believe Tehran doesn’t actually exert all that much influence over groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Hamas. As Humphrey Bogart might say, it appears we were misinformed.

Why all the pussyfooting? The Biden administration, like the Obama administration, is a little too willing to let Iranian- funded militias and proxies kill Americans. Only when the home-front chirping grows too loud to ignore does the White House summon the will to retaliate. But before the bombs fall, the mullahs always get a courtesy call: Clear out boys, the Yanks are coming.

U.S. airstrikes over the weekend hit mostly evacuated Iranian and militia positions in eastern Syria and Iraq. It was a fireworks show. The actual Iranians had already scurried to safety. How many millions of dollars’ worth of munitions did we just detonate to get the president out of a tough news cycle?

It would be dispiriting, to say the least, if the Biden administration were willing to sacrifice some number of American soldiers during an election year because a wider war with Iran polls poorly. But the pussyfooting is so habitual that I often wonder if something more sinister is going on. What do the Iranians have on these guys?

In any Western movie, there’s a scene when the hero realizes he’s outnumbered and alone. Nobody’s coming to his rescue. That’s what America’s fighting men and women must be feeling these days. Our Red Sea sailors and Tower 22 soldiers could once have been called sitting ducks. Today we can call them drone bait.

This beef between the U.S. and Iran is now nearly half a century old. It’s time to settle it. If we aren’t going to do that, we should get our people the hell out of the desert. Send them back to their homes and families, where they belong.”

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Charlotte Cuthbertson, a senior reporter with The Epoch Times who primarily covers border security and the opioid crisis. She writes: “Mexican cartels are officially terrorist organizations in Texas, according to a designation applied by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a 2023 executive order.

“Fentanyl is a clandestine killer. And Texans are victimized by Mexican cartels that produce and import it. So cartels are terrorists. And it’s time that we started treating them that way,” Abbott said during a press conference in Midland, Texas.

He specifically named the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartels as terrorist organizations, but added “ any similarly situated Mexican drug cartels who may be identified in subsequent proclamations.”

The two he named are the primary sources of fentanyl drug trafficking in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is often pressed into counterfeit pills and sold as Adderall, Percocet, or other common prescription pills.

“Unfortunately, most who die from fentanyl didn’t even know that they were taking it. They were poisoned unwittingly by a counterfeit pill that appeared to be some type of real medication,” Abbott said.

He said the new terrorist designation will target the cartels “for enhanced apprehension, prosecution, and disruption, while heightening awareness of their deadly activities for our citizens and the international community.”

He has directed the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to go after Texas-based gangs that work with the cartels in their drug and human smuggling operations.

DPS is also to increase its interdictions on contraband going south across the border into Mexico—most often money and firearms, Abbott said. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) applauded Abbott’s move, saying Congress should follow suit.

“Americans and migrants are suffering and dying at the hands of violent drug cartels in Mexico. Cartels are terrorist organizations and the U.S government should treat them as such; there are no more valid excuses for allowing them to commit further atrocities,” he said. In the past two congressional legislative sessions, Roy has introduced a bill that seeks to designate two cartels as terrorist organizations.

The bill directs the State Department to designate the Reynosa/Los Metros faction of the Gulf cartel and the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas as foreign terrorist organizations. It also requires the State Department to produce a report on those cartels, as well as any others that meet the criteria. The bill has the support of 46 cosponsors, all Republicans.

The State Department currently lists 68 entities as foreign terrorist organizations, with the oldest designation given in 1997 to Sri Lanka’s Shining Path and one of the newest being for Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army on Dec. 1, 2021.

The State Department says terrorist designations “play a critical role in our fight against terrorism and are an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business.”

In response to a request for comment on Abbott’s action or if it’s considering similar actions against Mexican cartels, a State Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email, “We don’t discuss deliberations or potential deliberations regarding our designations process.”

Along with his executive order, Abbott sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris requesting they classify Mexican drug cartels operating in Texas as terrorist organizations.

“The cartels’ destruction reaches far beyond our state line,” Abbott wrote. “Cartel assets could then be frozen, weakening the financial support of trafficking activities. In addition, federal investigators and prosecutors could aggressively pursue the enhanced criminal sentences that apply to drug traffickers who fund foreign terrorist organizations.”

Abbott said that during the next state legislative session, he plans to work on reclassifying fentanyl overdoses as fentanyl poisonings and elevating the penalty for fentanyl dealing to murder if someone dies. He said more teenagers are selling candy-colored pills at school that are killing children.

“The truth of the matter is, the cartels could care less whether or not the people, or the drugs they’re trafficking, kill people,” he said. “This is extraordinarily dangerous, and could be a weapon of mass destruction imposed by Mexican drug cartels.”

Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd, who monitors 16 cartel sites in his Texas county, said Abbott’s designation “highlights the dire situation that we’re in and the seriousness of the organizations that we’re up against.”

He said although he doesn’t think it will directly impact his criminal investigations or the prosecutorial side of the criminal justice system at the local level, it will have an impact at sentencing.

“The fact that he’s declaring them terrorists will be a beneficial when it comes time for sentencing … because that designation is something that holds a lot of weight with your average citizen [juror]—it brings them to the understanding of the totality of what’s going on with these organizations as they operate within the state of Texas,” Boyd told The Epoch Times.

Brent Smith, the attorney for Kinney County, which shares 16 miles of border with Mexico, said he fully supports Abbott’s terrorist designation. “The cartels have no regard for human life and have brought death and destruction into Texas and are responsible for the poisoning of thousands of Americans,” Smith said.

Kinney County was the first Texas county to declare a disaster over the border crisis in April 2021, and again the first to declare an invasion in July. “The impact of this designation is difficult to determine until we see what kind of teeth are actually in it. However, I think it’s a necessary step to justify declaring an invasion on the southern border,” Smith said.

Kinney County is one of more than 30 Texas counties that have formally declared support for, and urge Abbott to, declare the border crisis an “invasion” and invoke his constitutional authority to use the National Guard to “repel” it.

During a press conference on the matter, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested Abbott’s move to designate the cartels was a political one for reelection purposes. Abbott is running for a third term as governor against Democrat nominee Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke.

“It remains to be seen if he is entitled to make such a declaration or if it’s related to the federal government. But, there will be elections in November and they always use immigration with electoral purposes. And that’s why they make these policies,” Obrador said.

“If the man wants to be reelected, he should consider that there are many Mexicans, many Hispanics, in Texas and in all the U.S. And it’s not accepted when migrants are mistreated, in any state of the American union.” Obrador has been criticized for allowing the cartels to transform Mexico into a narco-state with his “hugs not bullets” approach.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation said in a press release that the cooperation between Mexico and the U.S. governments to combat cartel activity has “neared rock-bottom under [Obrador], who has paid public respects to cartel-kingpin family in his official capacity.”

Next time: Mind Warfare

Here’s another real life job for State Militias.

Douglas Eckenrod of Prescott, AZ recently announced his candidacy for Yavapai County sheriff. Eckenrod retired in 2021 as the deputy director of the California Department of Corrections Rehabilitation (CDCR) Division of Adult Parole Operations.

He served as chair of the Weapons and Safety Committee, oversaw Peace Officer Academy Operations, and graduated from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Leadership Academy. Eckenrod also is a nationally recognized subject-matter expert in criminal justice. He is a frequent columnist on matters of crime and law enforcement for The Epoch Times. He writes:

“I was born in October 1968 in an Army hospital at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. My father had just completed the Army Officer Candidate School and was preparing for likely deployment to Vietnam as an infantry officer.

I mention this because I have long had reason to be interested in all things associated with the Vietnam conflict, including the reasoning for our nation’s significant investment in money, material, and most importantly, blood to stop the spread of communism.

One of the principal drivers of our nation’s position on communist expansion in Southeast Asia was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1954, he gave a speech that was the first to reference the “Domino Theory.” The Domino Theory postulated that one of the core tenets of communism was world expansion, and that any nation that borders a communist state would be undermined, attacked, and ultimately find itself succumbing to communist control.

Without China’s direct intervention and support of Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnam, it’s likely that much of Southeast Asia would have stayed communist free. After the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, U.S. foreign policy began the long walk toward physical involvement in Vietnam.

Right now, you’re asking, “What the heck does this have to do with Arizona?”

Let me tell you. As a political refugee who spent his entire adult life supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of California, watching the extreme violent left throw away the sacrifices and achievements of the past, I can tell you that their leadership is actively exporting a new variant of Marxism to its neighboring states. California’s leadership is behaving like a nation-state, and it has begun to undermine the sovereignty of its neighbor by providing aid, comfort, and tangible monetary support for a growing but vocal minority of leftists in Arizona’s capital.

The leftist special operations in Phoenix have created a stronghold for California to export and expand the “California variant” of neo-Marxism deeper into the nation. Look at where the majority of monetary donations came from for Katie Hobbs’s gubernatorial campaign. According to Ms. Hobbs’s own campaign finance report, the campaign received more money from out of state than from within.

Quite a bizarre fact, unless you look at Arizona as being the next defense line against California’s political influence. The governor of California supported Ms. Hobbs, California Democratic PACs funneled money directly to Arizona PACs supporting Ms. Hobbs, and everyone’s favorite Bond villain—the Soros family— donated directly to the campaign.

Combine the influx of non-Arizona funds with the sudden uptick of ballot problems in Maricopa County, close your eyes, and you get a new Arizona Territorial Governor. Why do I say, “Territorial Governor”? Because Ms. Hobbs reports to her real boss in Sacramento, California, and not to the people of Arizona. Ms. Hobbs has adopted the California method of using grant funds to silence potential detractors.

Here’s the scheme: Target potential critics of woke policies in law enforcement and the educational system by exploiting every bureaucrat’s Achilles’ heel, which is their budgetary problems resulting from the never-ending desire to expand their empire. That’s how California Democrats turned Republicans into neutered RINOs—they bought them with taxpayer funds.

Yes, leftist Democrats went all in to defeat Kari Lake. Their plan to wield influence depended on a governor whom they could control. Ms. Lake represents a resurgence in law and order, transparency, and a border. Ms. Lake’s border plan was comprehensive and grounded in the idea that you stop crime at the border, not thousands of miles inside the nation. Fentanyl and human trafficking across Arizona and California represent the lion’s share of illicit for-profit border activity, and the left has their fingerprints on this very fragile power block. Remember, Arizona is only one successful ballot count away from bringing folks back into the governor’s office who take their commitment to the Constitution seriously.

In the tradition of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ms. Hobbs immediately disintegrated the border strike force and moved its $17 million funding stream directly to woke educational investments. Step two was the creation of a $41 million human trafficking grant pool. The money is ostensibly earmarked to support local law enforcement agencies across the state in efforts to tackle challenges driven by the “border crisis.”

The reality is that many county law enforcement agencies have found themselves behind the budgetary eight ball because of mismanagement of their existing budgets. This is exactly the play that Gov. Jerry Brown and Mr. Newsom ran in California as they peppered the state with misleading anti-law-and-order bills. They subsidized California sheriffs into silence in exchange for millions of dollars of grant money. Their silence was interpreted as support by the general public.

There are 15 county sheriffs in the state of Arizona, and all belong to the Arizona Sheriff’s Association. This body is our last line of defense in getting the truth out about the cut-and-paste practices of the Hobbs administration. They need to prepare their agencies to be “sanction-proof” if they want to be able to speak the truth to those in Washington and Phoenix. Acceptance of federal and state funds in exchange for a conciliatory, or even supportive tone, could mean that Arizona is the next domino to fall.

Taken as a whole, these activities by political operators in and for California can logically be considered a form of providing aid and comfort to enemies of democratic-republicanism in Arizona as they work to undermine State institutions in preparation for inducing Arizona officials and their supporters to rise up in an insurrection against the established laws, orders, rules, regulations, customs and traditions of the vast majority of Arizonans.

Such activities as ballot-harvesting and ballot-counting irregularities are early manifestations of California’s desire to turn Arizona into a similar Marxist-socialist State.

I certainly am NOT advocating the use of the State Militia, under the authority of the Governor and/or Arizona’s county sheriffs, as an armed force AGAINST the California interlopers but, as in any theater of asymmetric-warfare, the judicious use of intelligence gathering, using tried-and-true tactics as well as new tools provided by the technological revolution—like crowd-sourced actionable intelligence, license plate readers, etc.—can allow Arizona officials to get ahead of the insidious agents of California’s Democrat Party and disrupt and expose their efforts for what they are—an existential threat to the freedoms of all Arizonans, and eventually all Americans.”

Another concept is to establish a State-style “FISA” Court (State Intelligence Surveillance Act—SISA) to expedite warrants in support of actionable intelligence in secure proceedings followed by secure analysis of evidence by the Court to determine if Arizona Bureau of Investigation action is warranted.

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Charlotte Cuthbertson, a senior reporter with The Epoch Times who primarily covers border security and the opioid crisis, writes: “Arizona and other border states have the constitutional right to defend themselves from the current “invasion” at the southern border, according to a Feb. 7 legal opinion published by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.

“The on-the-ground violence and lawlessness at Arizona’s border caused by cartels and gangs is extensive, well-documented, and persistent. It can satisfy the definition of ‘actually invaded’ and ‘invasion’ under the U.S. Constitution,” the opinion reads. “The federal government is failing to fulfill its duty under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to defend the States from invasion. The State Self-Defense Clause exists precisely for situations such as the present, to ensure that States are not left helpless.”

As commander-in-chief for Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey has the power to “engage in defensive actions within its own territory at or near its border,” according to Brnovich. The governor has the power to use the National Guard and Militia forces.

Much of Arizona’s border terrain is remote, inadequately fenced, and unpatrolled. It’s rife with drug and human smuggling, and thousands of unknown and unvetted illegal aliens evade law enforcement every month. The State has experienced a colossal increase in Border Patrol apprehensions in the past year. In 2020, agents apprehended almost 91,000 illegal aliens entering Arizona. In 2021, that number jumped to almost 399,000. In mid-December 2021, law enforcement authorities seized a record 1.7 million fentanyl pills in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Border Patrol agents are so busy processing large groups of illegal aliens that, in Arizona’s Yuma sector, only four agents are available to patrol a 150-mile section of the border. “That 150 miles of border normally takes about 75 to 90 agents— we had four agents out there,” Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said at an unofficial House hearing at FreedomWorks in Washington.

The city of Yuma declared an emergency on Dec. 9, 2021, after unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens began pouring across the border from Mexico around the unfinished border wall. Some of them got tired of waiting by the border fence to be picked up by Border Patrol, so they walked into the city.

In early December 2021, when the latest influx started, the 911 dispatch center was tied up for hours with calls from illegal aliens asking for transport, food, and clothing, Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot told The Epoch Times. About 300 illegal immigrants were arriving at the hospital every day, he said—not for medical assistance— but to request transport and supplies. Others wandered around looking for the Border Patrol station.

Brnovich’s opinion centers around the definitions of “actually invaded” and “invasion” and whether the federal government has abdicated its duty to protect. Brnovich said the Biden administration has taken “unprecedented actions … to destroy operational control of the border.”

He listed examples such as the rescission of the Migrant Protection Protocols, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being released into the United States with court dates scheduled years down the road. He also mentioned the halt of border wall construction, the closure of Border Patrol highway checkpoints, and the narrowing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers’ ability to execute the law. House Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-AZ) who submitted the initial request for a formal legal opinion, said he’s happy with Brnovich’s “groundbreaking” opinion and now wants Ducey to utilize the state’s powers “to end the invasion and secure our border.”

“You would normally expect an invasion would mean a nation- state invasion. But there is long-standing precedent that an invasion can be more than just a nation-state invasion,” Hoffman told 550 KFYI, “We shouldn’t be the welcome wagon. For these folks that are coming across the border illegally, we should be picking them up and throwing them back across the border, sending them back where they came from.”

In Cochise County, Sheriff Mark Dannels deals with illegal aliens that are evading law enforcement. His county sits in southeastern Arizona and shares 83 miles of remote desert land with Mexico. Dannels said his office currently tracks between 900 and 1,000 smuggling vehicles in the county every month—a massive increase that began escalating at the start of President Joe Biden’s tenure.

Drivers are being paid about $1,000 per illegal alien that they smuggle—usually to Phoenix, which is used as a hub to travel to other cities throughout the United States. “It’s like the cartel Uber. They just stage in public places all along the roadways waiting to get called up to go pick them up,” Dannels said. Recently, the Sinaloa Cartel put a hit out on two of Dannels’s top border guys.

“We had real good information … from a federal agency that said there were two guys that were going to cross and they were going to kill one of us,” Cochise County Detective Jake Kartchner told The Epoch Times. “We never knew which one of us it was.” He said a breakdown in communication between the sheriff’s office and federal agencies allowed the men to evade authorities.

Local border ranchers such as John Ladd are bracing for the worst, as hundreds of illegal aliens traverse their land. “We’ve got a gun at every door in the house,” Ladd told The Epoch Times recently.”

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Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative journalist, and a regular contributor to  The Epoch Times. He writes: “The state of Ohio told the Supreme Court that a federal labor relations law doesn’t

apply to the labor practices of State Militias.

The issue before the high court was whether the federal Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which gives the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) power to govern the labor practices of federal agencies, regulates the labor practices used by state Militias.

The Biden administration takes the position that federal law bestows collective bargaining rights on state Militia employees.

The case is Ohio Adjutant General’s Department v. Federal Labor Relations Authority, court file 21-1454.

The petitioners in the case are the Ohio National Guard, the Ohio Adjutant General, and the Ohio Adjutant General’s Department. The respondents are the FLRA and the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO Local 3970.

The case arose after labor negotiations between the Ohio National Guard and the American Federation of Government Employees broke down. There had been a collective bargaining agreement covering the Guard’s technicians in 2011 but when the pact ran out in 2014, the two sides couldn’t reach a new agreement, according to a Courthouse News Service summary.

The Guard nonetheless moved forward under the 2011 terms but in 2019, changed its policy and decided not to follow the lapsed agreement. The Guard also stopped deducting union dues from its technicians’ paychecks. The union cried foul.

The Ohio adjutant general asked an administrative law judge to look at the case and the judge found that the Guard had treated employees unfairly, ordering the entity to follow the provisions of the 2011 agreement. The FLRA agreed with the judge.

Ohio Solicitor Benjamin Flowers told the justices during oral arguments that a lower court got the case wrong.

“The 6th Circuit and the Federal Labor Relations Authority held that Adjutants General and state guards, when they employ technicians, are federal agencies to which the Authority may issue orders,” he said.

“That is wrong. The Reform Act defines agencies to include executive departments, government corporations, and independent establishments. Adjutants General and state Guards are none of these things. They’re neither among nor part of the 15 cabinet-level agencies that qualify as executive departments. They’re not government corporations because they’re not corporations. And they’re not independent establishments because they’re not part of the executive branch.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back against Flowers. “Surely, you’re not saying we can decide whatever we want regardless of Congress’ intent,” the high court’s newest justice said.

In light of the federal law, Ohio’s argument “does not make sense,” Justice Elena Kagan told Flowers.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested national security could be at stake in the case. “Military matters are left to the executive [branch] and we should be doing very little to interfere in that process,” she said.

Justice Clarence Thomas questioned U.S. Department of Justice attorney Nicole Reaves.

“There’s always delegations from the head of agencies to subparts, but those delegees are not converted to agencies. They may be agents for a limited purpose. They may have limited authority that’s delegated from the top. But they’re not converted to an agency. And I think that’s the leap that I’m having some difficulty with.”

Union attorney Andres M. Grajales argued that the law is clear.

“Ultimately, this is a policy disagreement that Ohio can take to Congress, but Congress, as it stands today, understood the matter to be settled. They understood Adjutant General[s] and the state National Guards to be covered,” he said, referencing a previous court precedent.”

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Perhaps no failure of leadership or abuse of power has been as prolonged or punishing to the vital internal interests of the United States than that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the investigating arm of the Department of Justice, which has effectively castrated any State efforts to ensure their own domestic tranquility.

Virtually all opposition to the empowering of a robust State Militia to deal with the chaos resulting from the failure of the federal government to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the neutering of the Constitutions of the several States, has come from the federal judiciary and their acolytes in the progressive, liberal wing of the Democrat Party.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes; “In ignoring the latest Special Counsel John Durham indictment, most of the media and official Washington are ignoring the elephant between its written lines: the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mr. Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the government’s handling of the Russia collusion mess, levels a single criminal charge against Michael Sussmann, then a lawyer for the Democrat-linked firm Perkins Coie. In delivering to the FBI fanciful evidence of Trump-Russia collusion a few weeks before the 2016 election, Mr. Sussmann is alleged to have lied to the FBI’s chief lawyer, James Baker, claiming he was acting on his own behalf and not as a paid agent of the Clinton campaign.

Already you might be rolling your eyes. Mr. Durham provides ample reason in his own indictment for why the FBI would have known exactly whom Mr. Sussmann was working for. If Mr. Sussmann didn’t lie at the time, Mr. Baker may have lied since about what transpired between him and Mr. Sussmann.

Either way, we are free to suspect the FBI would have found it useful to be protected from inconvenient knowledge about the Clinton campaign’s role. The same FBI then was busy ignoring the political antecedents of the Steele dossier, also financed by Mr. Sussmann’s law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign, information that the FBI would shortly withhold from a surveillance court in pursuit of a warrant to spy on Trump pilot fish Carter Page.

Mr. Durham, in describing the Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with Mr. Baker, suggests that a properly informed FBI might have thought twice before opening an investigation into Mr. Sussmann’s phony story about the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. This is a way also of saying the FBI might have found it harder to proceed without the political deniability that Mr. Sussmann’s alleged statement provided.

At this late date, none of this can be consumed without recognizing that the FBI was already hip-deep in the 2016 election. It began a few weeks earlier with Director James Comey’s insubordinate, improper (according to the Justice Department’s own inspector general) intervention in the Hillary email case. We learned much later that Mr. Comey justified this unprecedented action by referring to secret Russian “intelligence” that his FBI colleagues considered a red herring and possible Russian disinformation. Your eyes should really be rolling now.

Mr. Comey thereupon created the preposterous jam for himself when new information surfaced in the Hillary case, which led him to reopen the case shortly before Election Day and likely tipped the race to Mr. Trump. Of course, the “new information” turned out to be a nothingburger. Worse, the information had been sitting unnoticed in the FBI’s hands for weeks.

These antic actions, along with the subsequent FBI leak-fest aimed at undermining the president it just helped to elect, might be written off as a singular consequence of Mr. Comey’s overweened sense of importance.

But this doesn’t explain the FBI’s top counterintelligence deputy, Peter Strzok, engaging in compromising political banter on an FBI network while playing a central role in the FBI’s most politically sensitive investigations. It doesn’t explain FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s criminal act of falsifying agency submissions to the surveillance court.

Ask yourself: In what way, in anyone’s memory, has the FBI covered itself in glory? [The JFK, Waco, and Ruby Ridge assassinations? Connecting the dots before 9/11?] The Larry Nassar case, in which it failed to pursue a serial abuser of female teenage gymnasts? The Noor Salman case, in which it trumped up a failed prosecution of the innocent and abused wife of the Orlando nightclub shooter? The Hatfill case, in which it attempted to railroad an innocent scientist over the 2001 anthrax attacks?

Ironically, Hollywood is now the FBI’s biggest devotee because the agency’s screwups are fodder for its best movies. The FBI’s role in the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton was the subject of “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Its persecution of an innocent security guard in the Atlanta Olympics bombing was the theme of “Richard Jewell.” Its cosseting of the criminal psychopath Whitey Bulger was a central pillar of the Johnny Depp film “Black Mass.”

The FBI’s last extended run of good publicity, aimed at helping live down the smell of J. Edgar Hoover, came more than 50 years ago thanks to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his weekly show on ABC, “The F.B.I.,” which went off the air in 1974.

By now, after its performance in the 2016 election, the evidence might seem conclusive that the agency is a failed experiment, however able and dedicated many of its agents.

Its culture at the top seems incapable of using the powers entrusted to it with discretion and good judgment or at least without reliable expectation of embarrassment. The agency should be scrapped and something new built to replace it. One possibility is a national investigative corps that would be more directly answerable to the 93 U.S. attorneys who are charged with enforcing federal law in the 50 states.”

Next time: China: A Real and Present Danger

The most obvious issue that State Militias can address is the uncontrolled illegal migration across America’s Southern border—beyond the efforts by several State governors to stem the tide by sending State National Guard troops to the Texas border with Mexico. Including the States’ National Guard Reserve troops would increase this effort dramatically.

A primary tool for State Militias to preempt nefarious actions by terrorists, extremists, agitators, insurrectionists, invaders, and rebels, in the cause of preserving, protecting, and defending the federal and State Constitutions and the institutions that support them, is the receipt, analysis, development, and investigation, if appropriate, of crowd-sourced, actionable intelligence—whether audio, video, or first-hand reporting provided in real-time by American citizens in the course of their daily lives, that they believe to be of a suspicious or threatening nature with respect to their domestic tranquility and the pursuit of their happiness.

This would be accomplished through the use of secure cellphone applications linking vetted members of the community with local State Militia intelligence exploitation offices under the aegis of appropriate executive branch State regulatory bodies.

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Andy Kessler is an American businessman, investor, and author. He writes the “Inside View” column for The Wall Street Journal opinion page. He has worked for about 20 years as a research analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He writes: “Are you ready for a good story about the internet, one that doesn’t mention Twitter’s reality- censoring cesspool of snark or twerking TikTokers? About the internet’s power to connect all of us instantly? I sure am.

I recently had a Zoom call with Elizabeth Smart—yes, that Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 was abducted as a 14year-old and held for nine months in Utah, a harrowing experience for her and her family. I once lost a son at Disneyland for three minutes and went out of my mind.

Ms. Smart not only is an advocate for missing children but is doing something about it. She told me 600,000 children go missing in the U.S. every year and that 98% of missing children are located within a few days. She noted that “after 48 hours, the chances of being found are almost zero, but obviously not zero in my case.”

Ms. Smart had good things to say about the Amber alerts posted on highway signs and blasted to cellphones, but pointed to their shortcomings. There is an age limit, and law enforcement needs a reasonable belief of imminent danger, so it is used rarely. Something else is needed.

She connected with an Oregon-based tech company to help design and promote its Q5id Guardian app, which makes use of crowdsourcing. When a child is missing, the app sends out localized alerts to a network of volunteers, all verified to avoid potential predators on the system. “Remember,” she said, “I was found by everyday people paying attention, not law enforcement.”

The Guardian app launched in November. I asked Ms. Smart what makes her think it can be scaled to an effective size. “I believe in the goodness of people.” Amazing given her experience.

That goodness does exist.

Wikipedia was enabled by digital crowd-sourcing in 2001, but real-time volunteer networks started gaining traction in March 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing never showed up. The last radar contact was over the South China Sea. CNN had blanket coverage for what seemed like months. Soon eight million volunteers from around the globe began poring over satellite images covering 130,000 square miles of ocean on their computers. They never found it, but the effort was astounding.

A few years back, I met Israeli entrepreneur Eli Beer. As a youth, he volunteered as an emergency medical worker and watched a child choke to death before an ambulance stuck in traffic showed up, even though a doctor lived in the same building as the child. So he created United Hatzalah, a crowd of volunteers who respond to emergencies, often on bikes or “ambucycles” loaded with medical equipment to avoid traffic.

There are more than 6,200 volunteers in Israel who can respond within 90 seconds to medical emergencies and terrorist attacks in their neighborhoods. This augments, not replaces, ambulances. Since 1989 they have helped 5.5 million people. It is expanding around the world, including in Ukraine. Think of Israel on October 7, 2023.

More crowdsourcing: After the Golden State Killer was identified in 2018 using DNA evidence to narrow down his family tree, amateur DNA sleuths began doing the tedious work of digging through genealogies. The DNA Doe Project enables volunteers to scour GEDmatch, the free genealogy service this column has written about. These volunteers try to identify “John and Jane Does,” often cold cases of missing people or crime victims. In April 2018, they helped identify a murder victim known as the “Buckskin Girl” and have since identified more than 60 others.

I was once pitched an app that would warn users about sketchy neighborhoods in various cities. It combined police reports and crowd-sourced inputs to warn the app’s users, mostly single women, where to avoid walking. It never got off the ground because many early reviews called it racist. Sad state of affairs.

You may have heard the recent hullabaloo over the machine-learning-enabled service ChatGPT from OpenAI. You ask it a question and it can offer an answer in rather eloquent prose. This is because it scans billions of pages of prose written by humans; think of it as “nonvoluntary crowd-sourcing”. Very cool.

Strangely, the answers are often erroneous. Eloquent, but wrong—maybe in need of another crowd-sourced human effort to correct them. I worry these AI apps will soon be trained with the output of other AI apps—garbage in, garbage out—proving the value of real humans again.

For Ms. Smart and the Guardian app, I suggested that what she really needs is access to a broader technology platform to get emergency information out when needed. Google, Apple and others know where we are. I doubt they would agree to 600,000 alerts every year, but we need something more than rare, centralized Amber alerts. Let’s hope this works. Great things happen when you believe in the goodness of people.”

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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board cautions: “A fascinating experiment explains why both pros and amateurs probably should save their money.

In 1973, psychologist Paul Slovic gathered eight talented handicappers to guess the outcome of 40 actual horse races in four rounds. The names of the jockeys and steeds were hidden, but the handicappers could ask for five pieces of information from a set list of 88. They were also asked to say how confident they felt.

The handicappers did well, reaching 17% accuracy compared with 10% if they had guessed blindly. Their confidence was almost exactly right too, at 19%. In the next three rounds they could ask for 10, 20 and finally 40 bits of information and their level of conviction rose steadily, reaching 34%. But their accuracy? It stayed at 17%.

At a real horse track, though, or in the stock market, detailed knowledge emboldens people to make riskier bets. Reports making confident predictions filled with complicated calculations or claiming inside knowledge can override the common sense of pros and amateurs alike.

In October 2001, with suspicions swirling, five Goldman Sachs analysts wrote an 11-page report calling Enron “still the best of the best” after they had extensive conversations with top management: “our confidence level is high.” The stock rallied by as much as 8% over the next two trading sessions. Enron was an energy-trading and utility company based in Houston, Texas, which perpetrated one of the biggest accounting frauds in history. Enron’s executives employed accounting practices that falsely inflated the company’s revenues and, for a time, made it the seventh-largest corporation in the United States. Once the fraud came to light, the company quickly unraveled, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—America’s largest-ever bankruptcy, in December 2001.

When millions of young investors opened their first brokerage accounts during the pandemic’s first year, many took cues from “finfluencers” who spoke their language or peers using pseudonyms. Social-media site Reddit has a forum with more than half a million members following a single company, AMC Entertainment Holdings. The problem with crowd-sourcing research on social media is that people mainly find evidence that supports their existing thesis. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

“Ideally, you find a tribe that’s encouraging you to look at the other side,” says Rishi Khanna, chief executive of StockTwits, one of the earliest and largest investing- focused social networks, with around seven million users. He says the bias is overwhelmingly bullish. Official Wall Street is hardly more balanced. A report by FactSet last April showed that, of 10,821 analyst ratings on stocks in the S& P 500, fewer than 6% were sell recommendations.

Bad takes abound, but legitimately valuable knowledge can overwhelm users too. Leigh Drogen founded a firm called Estimize that queries pros and amateurs on things like earnings estimates. Its polls are more accurate than the consensus of stock analysts, but not always. He says that snapping up every bit of data and expecting it to work consistently often tripped up his clients.

“Paying attention to five things in a highly efficient, systematic way will always beat paying attention to 50 in an undisciplined way,” he says.”

State Militia analysists must be schooled in how and what to enter into the system, and then verify inputs through direct feedback, Internet-based open-source intelligence (OSINT), or other ancillary sources such as security cameras, police reports, militia surveillance, and the like.

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Andrew Thornebrooke is an American journalist covering issues related to defense, foreign policy, and national security. He currently serves as the national security correspondent for The Epoch Times. He
holds a MA in military history from Norwich University, the nation’s oldest private military college.

He writes: “China’s communist regime is investing in new ways to exploit open-source intelligence (OSINT) to undermine the United States and gain military advantage, according to a new report.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single- party state, is contracting new research and analysis services to compile actionable intelligence from publicly available sources throughout the world, the report states.

The report, published this month by threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, claims that the CCP’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is increasingly benefiting from a growing apparatus of organizations designed to siphon off U.S. and allied intelligence for its own purposes.

“A growing ecosystem of private companies, state-owned enterprises, state-run research organizations, and universities is supporting the PLA’s push to leverage open-source intelligence (OSINT) by providing research services, platforms, and data,” the report says.

“The PLA very likely uses this data to support decision-making and better understand potential foreign adversaries in preparation for future conflicts.”

The report profiles five private Chinese OSINT providers that serve the PLA, and also offers original analysis of PLA documents, Chinese academic articles, and collections of Chinese OSINT-procurement records from 2019 to 2023.

CCP-controlled China has built up a “paranoid and secretive system” that doesn’t release information about its internal concepts and decision making, the report says, but relies on exploiting other nations’ intelligence to enhance its own understanding of U.S. and allied military capabilities.

“PLA entities pursue OSINT on foreign military capabilities, facilities, doctrine, decision-making, weapons, equipment, science and technology, exercises, training, intelligence, and deployments,” the report says.

“PLA entities also seek OSINT on geopolitical trends, foreign think tanks, foreign defense industry companies, general science and technology developments, and other nonmilitary topics.”

Among the more notable examples of this, as highlighted by the report, is a 2020 paper published by personnel in the regime’s Central Military Commission, China’s highest defense body. Entities from governments to social media platforms to individuals must practice caution online, knowing that the CCP is compiling any and all information it can, the report says.

That document claims that recent technological developments have facilitated continuous, automated intelligence collection from internet sources abroad, including from governments, militaries, scientific publications, and universities.

Moreover, the authors of that document claim that such intelligence improves CCP operational capabilities and supports command decision making, the report says.

“They argue that this internet-based OSINT is an effective source of information on operational forces, equipment construction, operational capabilities, military exercises, battlefield environments, and other topics.”

Another example dating back to 2019, examines how researchers at a university linked to the CCP’s domestic intelligence agency promoted the integration of OSINT contributions from across

the government, military, intelligence agencies, and universities.

Entities Urged to Be Cautious Online The CCP’s work to more effectively exploit openly available intelligence from all over the world comes at a time when the regime is facing increased fallout from its more illicit spying efforts.

While the regime’s use of a spy balloon to target U.S. nuclear sites or its widespread campaign of transnational repression against ethnic Chinese living abroad may raise alarm, the systematic collection of publicly available information is more likely to fly under the radar.

To that end, the report says that Chinese state-owned nuclear agencies, shipbuilders, military, and service academies are likely expanding their OSINT collection capabilities.

Such capabilities include web crawlers, data mining and machine learning tools, and the automated mass collection of text, image, audio, and visual materials from internet users across the globe, particularly in countries tough on the regime.

“PLA entities are interested in OSINT related to specific targets, subjects, and issues in countries like the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, South Korea, the United Kingdom (UK), France, Germany, India, and Russia,” the report says.

“The PLA almost certainly views OSINT as an increasingly valuable source of military intelligence that can support decision-making and necessitates the use of new collection, processing, and analysis technologies, which the PLA and China’s defense industry are actively developing.”

Thus, while the regime is working to seal off its intelligence from the rest of the world, the report warns that the United States and other open societies will likely lose military advantage in the OSINT domain.

“This OSINT almost certainly provides the PLA insight into foreign military capabilities, facilities, doctrine, decision-making, weapons, equipment, science and technology, exercises, training, intelligence, and deployments, providing a clear intelligence advantage.”

“Given that China is very unlikely to open up its information environment, and that Western countries are very unlikely to close off their information environments, the PLA will very likely maintain its advantage over Western militaries in OSINT.”

Because democratic societies are unlikely to wall off information from the rest of the world, the report says, entities from governments to social media platforms to individuals must practice caution online, knowing that the CCP is compiling any and all information it can.

“Governments, militaries, research organizations, companies, news media organizations, social media platforms, and individuals should be aware that China’s military and defense industry are using new technologies to collect, process, and analyze massive amounts of their publicly- available data for intelligence purposes, and should consider taking steps to mitigate these intelligence collection efforts.”

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Here’s another real life job for State Militias.

Douglas Eckenrod of Prescott, AZ recently announced his candidacy for Yavapai County sheriff. Eckenrod retired in 2021 as the deputy director of the California Department of Corrections Rehabilitation (CDCR) Division of Adult Parole Operations.

He served as chair of the Weapons and Safety Committee, oversaw Peace Officer Academy Operations, and graduated from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Leadership Academy. Eckenrod also is a nationally recognized subject-matter expert in criminal justice. He is a frequent columnist on matters of crime and law enforcement for The Epoch Times. He writes:

“I was born in October 1968 in an Army hospital at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. My father had just completed the Army Officer Candidate School and was preparing for likely deployment to Vietnam as an infantry officer.

I mention this because I have long had reason to be interested in all things associated with the Vietnam conflict, including the reasoning for our nation’s significant investment in money, material, and most importantly, blood to stop the spread of communism.

One of the principal drivers of our nation’s position on communist expansion in Southeast Asia was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1954, he gave a speech that was the first to reference the “Domino Theory.” The Domino Theory postulated that one of the core tenets of communism was world expansion, and that any nation that borders a communist state would be undermined, attacked, and ultimately find itself succumbing to communist control.

Without China’s direct intervention and support of Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnam, it’s likely that much of Southeast Asia would have stayed communist free. After the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, U.S. foreign policy began the long walk toward physical involvement in Vietnam.

Right now, you’re asking, “What the heck does this have to do with Arizona?”

Let me tell you. As a political refugee who spent his entire adult life supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of California, watching the extreme violent left throw away the sacrifices and achievements of the past, I can tell you that their leadership is actively exporting a new variant of Marxism to its neighboring states. California’s leadership is behaving like a nation-state, and it has begun to undermine the sovereignty of its neighbor by providing aid, comfort, and tangible monetary support for a growing but vocal minority of leftists in Arizona’s capital.

The leftist special operations in Phoenix have created a stronghold for California to export and expand the “California variant” of neo-Marxism deeper into the nation. Look at where the majority of monetary donations came from for Katie Hobbs’s gubernatorial campaign. According to Ms. Hobbs’s own campaign finance report, the campaign received more money from out of state than from within.

Quite a bizarre fact, unless you look at Arizona as being the next defense line against California’s political influence. The governor of California supported Ms. Hobbs, California Democratic PACs funneled money directly to Arizona PACs supporting Ms. Hobbs, and everyone’s favorite Bond villain—the Soros family— donated directly to the campaign.

Combine the influx of non-Arizona funds with the sudden uptick of ballot problems in Maricopa County, close your eyes, and you get a new Arizona Territorial Governor. Why do I say, “Territorial Governor”? Because Ms. Hobbs reports to her real boss in Sacramento, California, and not to the people of Arizona. Ms. Hobbs has adopted the California method of using grant funds to silence potential detractors.

Here’s the scheme: Target potential critics of woke policies in law enforcement and the educational system by exploiting every bureaucrat’s Achilles’ heel, which is their budgetary problems resulting from the never-ending desire to expand their empire. That’s how California Democrats turned Republicans into neutered RINOs—they bought them with taxpayer funds.

Yes, leftist Democrats went all in to defeat Kari Lake. Their plan to wield influence depended on a governor whom they could control. Ms. Lake represents a resurgence in law and order, transparency, and a border. Ms. Lake’s border plan was comprehensive and grounded in the idea that you stop crime at the border, not thousands of miles inside the nation. Fentanyl and human trafficking across Arizona and California represent the lion’s share of illicit for-profit border activity, and the left has their fingerprints on this very fragile power block. Remember, Arizona is only one successful ballot count away from bringing folks back into the governor’s office who take their commitment to the Constitution seriously.

In the tradition of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ms. Hobbs immediately disintegrated the border strike force and moved its $17 million funding stream directly to woke educational investments. Step two was the creation of a $41 million human trafficking grant pool. The money is ostensibly earmarked to support local law enforcement agencies across the state in efforts to tackle challenges driven by the “border crisis.”

The reality is that many county law enforcement agencies have found themselves behind the budgetary eight ball because of mismanagement of their existing budgets. This is exactly the play that Gov. Jerry Brown and Mr. Newsom ran in California as they peppered the state with misleading anti-law-and-order bills. They subsidized California sheriffs into silence in exchange for millions of dollars of grant money. Their silence was interpreted as support by the general public.

There are 15 county sheriffs in the state of Arizona, and all belong to the Arizona Sheriff’s Association. This body is our last line of defense in getting the truth out about the cut-and-paste practices of the Hobbs administration. They need to prepare their agencies to be “sanction-proof” if they want to be able to speak the truth to those in Washington and Phoenix. Acceptance of federal and state funds in exchange for a conciliatory, or even supportive tone, could mean that Arizona is the next domino to fall.

Taken as a whole, these activities by political operators in and for California can logically be considered a form of providing aid and comfort to enemies of democratic-republicanism in Arizona as they work to undermine State institutions in preparation for inducing Arizona officials and their supporters to rise up in an insurrection against the established laws, orders, rules, regulations, customs and traditions of the vast majority of Arizonans.

Such activities as ballot-harvesting and ballot-counting irregularities are early manifestations of California’s desire to turn Arizona into a similar Marxist-socialist State.

I certainly am NOT advocating the use of the State Militia, under the authority of the Governor and/or Arizona’s county sheriffs, as an armed force AGAINST the California interlopers but, as in any theater of asymmetric-warfare, the judicious use of intelligence gathering, using tried-and-true tactics as well as new tools provided by the technological revolution—like crowd-sourced actionable intelligence, license plate readers, etc.—can allow Arizona officials to get ahead of the insidious agents of California’s Democrat Party and disrupt and expose their efforts for what they are—an existential threat to the freedoms of all Arizonans, and eventually all Americans.”

Another concept is to establish a State-style “FISA” Court (State Intelligence Surveillance Act—SISA) to expedite warrants in support of actionable intelligence in secure proceedings followed by secure analysis of evidence by the Court to determine if Arizona Bureau of Investigation action is warranted.

Next time: More State Militia discussiom