(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 25, 2022

SILVER SPRING—As someone who has studied and written about Ukraine and Russia on-and-off for some two decades, and with a solid and ample track record of my own work being rather prescient and highly accurate on the war and surrounding issues, I’d like to think my opinion as to who has some of the best accounts to follow would carry some weight.  Here, then, are five people’s accounts that make me often feel humble about my own accomplishments and abilities.  There may be better accounts in Ukrainian or Russian or another language, but, as I admittedly don’t speak any of those, I’m going with my top five in English.

1.) Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S. Army (Ret.): Twitter @MarkHertling

I feel like I follow a lot of different accounts of military experts who offer analysis, but I have found none to offer the consistent level of superb-quality, clear, well-written, big-picture analysis of the war in Ukraine.  He is also often on CNN, with his commentary invariably among the best on the entire network when it comes to Ukraine.  His often long, yet deeply-informative while simple-to-understand threads blow away the competition and offer the most prescient analysis I have seen throughout the war in a snazzy, easily-digestible format.  The man spent 37 years in the U.S. Army, including as Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, including seeing Ukrainian forces up close in Iraq and as they reformed over the years, and also including liaising with Soviet/Russian forces.  He knows the Ukrainian military, he knows the Russian military, he knows Europe, he knows NATO and he knows military equipment, strategy, and tactics, all this clear from his one-of-a-kind threads.  And, compared to other retired military folks, he sounds more like a normal American and is less jargon-heavy than, and not robotic like, many of his peers, making sure to introduce and explain the jargon when he does use it for the rest of us layfolk.  Filled with telling anecdotes from decades of his military career spanning Europe and Iraq that tie into the current conflict in Ukraine, if you only follow one account, follow him.

2.) Trent Telenko: Twitter @TrentTelenko

Trent is a retired U.S. Department of Defense civilian logistics expert, and man, does that expertise show.  The guy can write long-threads on tires, mud, or transport and make them interesting.  Nobody goes into as much detail as he does on the nitty-gritty of the logistics of this war in Ukraine, and if you consume Trent’s threads on these logistical topics, on everything from weapons and training capabilities to truck fleets and targeting, you will walk away with far deeper understandings of these systems and dynamics in a way that will help many other aspects of the war make that much more sense (logistics is tied to literally everything).  Gen. Hertling and some of the other accounts I mention here also go into logistics and delve into it well, but none plow into the minutiae quite as deeply and like Trent, and his is, thus, one of the most unique and must-follow accounts when it comes to this war in Ukraine.  Just learning from his threads on logistics has made me that much more confident in my understandings on a number of logistics-related topics when it comes to this war in Ukraine.  This man should have a damn blue checkmark already, Twitter!! (Full disclosure: Trent has said some nice things about my work on Twitter)

3.) Illia Ponomarenko: Twitter @IAPonomarenko

Illia is a Ukrainian journalist reporting from Ukraine who himself hails from the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east, suffering from war at the instigation of Russia since 2014.  He works for Ukraine’s flagship local English paper, The Kyiv Independent, and his reporting on the war in his Twitter feed is full of humor, but also at times great rage and sorrow over what is happening to his country and his people, yet also pride and the thrill of soundly beating a hated invader on home turf.  His articles for the Independent are well-worth reading (and are sometimes cited by Gen. Hertling), but also amazing are the photos he takes and posts to his twitter thread, demonstrating his clearly amazing access to his fellow countrymen serving on the front lines.  A man with the common touch, Illia is not afraid to personalize and share his own story, but generally keeps the focus on the heroes fighting on the front lines, the victims of Russia’s imperialist ambition, and leaders carrying Ukraine through this nightmare of a war with Russia.  Whether cataloguing quiet moments with troops on the front lines, a rescued cat, Russian war crimes, or Ukrainian victories, his English-language reporting on the ground as a Ukrainian in Ukraine stand out in his own category.  While obviously emotionally tied to the events of the war, his analysis, though often optimistic, is optimistic based on what is actually happening and is generally more sober and less hyperbolic than those of many others who are, quite understandably, not neutral as their Ukraine is ravaged by Russia.  With an excellent combination of heart, head, and humor, Illia is certainly one of the most important accounts to follow on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

4.) Dr. Phillips P. O’Brien: Twitter @PhillipsPOBrien

Taking a bit more of an academic and wonky approach than the general, logistician, and local reporter—he is, after all, a Professor of Strategic Studies at Scotland’s prestigious University of St. Andrews—Professor Phillips P. Obrien is still definitely one of the most important accounts to follow.  He posts more and more often than many other academics, often tweeting about details but then bringing them into the wider picture in a more analytical, academic sense than the other accounts.  Not as specialized on military equipment or logistics, not as on-the-ground as a reporter, Dr. O’Brien nevertheless covers many of the various dimensions of the war well, offering broad commentary on a variety of aspects and tying them together or making them more understandable for the non-professorial class and in easily understandable language.  His measured analysis is also, like the other accounts here, more prescient than that of many others, cutting through the “hot takes” and noise and keeping the big-picture in mind in a way whereby we can follow the war unfolding through him and not lose sight of that big-picture, covering the conflict with knowledge, context, and precision.  Give this man a blue checkmark already!!

5.) Rob Lee: Twitter @RALee85

Rob is PhD student at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London who is also a literal veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and a number of prestigious schools and institutions.  He may not yet have his doctorate, but he has quickly established himself as the premier cataloguer of open-source intelligence in video and photo form of vehicles and equipment in action in Ukraine and of their losses for this whole conflict.  I have yet to find a more comprehensive presentation of all the available photo/video data on this stuff for this conflict, and Rob is careful to cite sourcing and, at times, corroborate geolocation.  You can trust that if Rob posts it, it is often vetted, and he notes when info is not verified.  He is usually just posting and cataloguing this photo and video evidence, but he also does sometimes offer his own analysis and when he does, I’ve found it to be thoughtful and spot on and cutting through some of the confusion or bad takes.  He knows his stuff and you should follow him, and his career will only get more and more interesting.  But if you want to see videos and photos of equipment in action in Ukraine, Rob’s account is the account to follow.

Of course, there are some other great accounts to follow, and it must be said that Ukraine’s official accounts are incredibly well-managed/produced and engage in some grade-A trolling of Russia: so, here’s an Honorable Mention for fun:the official account of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine: Twitter @DefenceU.

Some top Ukrainian officials’ individual accounts are also grade-A trollers of Russia.  And, of course, for inspiration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s account is also a must-follow, but when it comes to really understanding the war and its dynamics, the five accounts I have named are the five to follow in my opinion.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed half-a-million content views on 8/27/22!!

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A Real Context News Special Report also available as a PDF file

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 7, 2021; updated June 15, 2021, to take into account the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels; cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense; see Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; see his related articles: December 24, 2020, The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5; February 17, 2017, Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; and December 7, 2016, The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

SILVER SPRING—Alliances between nations must adapt to retain power over time, and in no area has warfare evolved more in recent years than in cyberwarfare.  Article 5 of NATO’s founding 1949 North Atlantic Treaty mandates that if an “armed attack” is carried out against a member state, all member states (currently thirty, including the most powerful Western nations) “shall” consider that attack and any armed attack on even just one member state “an attack against them all” and “will assist” it, up to and “including the use of armed force.”  As the centerpiece for over seventy years of the West’sPax Americana, global military power, system of alliances and collective defense, and ability to project combined strength anywhere on the planet, NATO must adapt to the present by adding cyberwarfare—including information warfare—to Article 5.

Cyberwarfare As Modern Warfare

An obvious point in favor of including cyberwarfare in Article 5 is that, by far, the most effective, damaging, and destabilizing attacks against NATO countries since 9/11 have been cyberattacks, most carried out by Russia.  The term “information warfare” (“a new face of war,” quoting a RAND Corporation report) refers to a key element of this cyberwarfare and includes the word warfare to indicate these are hardly benign, normal influence operations and are, indeed, the types of operations that have always been part of any serious conventional war in modern times.  Even in the nineteenth-century, von Clausewitz wrote that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

The ever-evolving concept of warfare in our digital age, then, does not have to include shots being fired from guns, and it is naïve to not consider cyberwarfare as simply another form of war in the twenty-first century that uses force in the digital realm to achieve results in some of the same spirit as traditional armies: attack, defense, deception, sabotage, destruction, and to pressure actors to change behavior.  Clausewitz most famously wrote that “war is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” and would have well understood cyberwarfare (sometimes just termed cyberwar) to be war and well within that “other means” category.

The two countries that have led in cyberwarfare are Russia and China, the first (and weaker, but bolder) being NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy (even if unofficially but clearly in a de facto sense), the second (and stronger, more reserved) being America’s clearest top state rival in a holistic sense, as China has engaged and led in much non-weaponized hacking and espionage (admittedly common among major powers), but has not, say, brazenly released stolen information or disinformation in a way timed to significantly interfere with NATO member states’ elections (as Russia has).  And though China has its own sophisticated influence operations, Russia undisputedly has led by far in acts more hostile than espionage (uniquely so among major powers) since its watershed 2007 Estonia cybercampaign (such campaigns might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, the latter a broader, far more common term which can even apply to a single high school student’s cyberattacks against his own school district).

Russia officially views NATO as a “threat,” and since that 2007 Estonia cybercampaign, has become far more aggressive and threatening towards NATO, often playing with internal NATO nationalisms and blanketing NATO nations in cyberattacks, including election interference and bolstering of secessionist campaigns, with notable cybercampaigns being carried out against over twenty NATO member states (leaving aside its campaigns waged against non-NATO states). 

Furthermore, de facto, non-declared wars are the most common type of war in the modern era even if the term “war” is not specifically used.  America, for example, has a long history of undeclared war going all the way back to the Articles of Confederation and the early days of the Washington Administration involving conflict with Native Americans and also the John Adams Administration’s 1798-1800 Quasi-War, then popularly termed “The Undeclared War with France.”  Furthermore, as one scholar notes, “the legal state of war is possible without actual fighting.”

Taking all this into account, then, it is hardly unreasonable to consider Russia and NATO in a state of undeclared cyberwarfare and, therefore, a state of undeclared war.  One of NATO’s flagship publications, NATO Review, even published analysis in 2017 acknowledging that Russia was waging “non-kinetic political war on the West.”

In fact, as I have argued for some time, a truly deep look would expose Putin and his Kremlin conducting a clear de facto war to destroy NATO, the West, the EU, and Western democracy; to fracture trans-Atlantic and European unity and even the unity of individual Western nations; and to foment, fund, and favor the rise of far-right ethno-nationalists and secessionists friendly to Russia and hostile to the U.S. and NATO in NATO countries and elsewhere, all while savaging those in the center and mainstream left not preferred by Putin.  The parties Putin helps usually have much in common with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s banally nationalist United Russia party, which has struck up mixes of formal and informal alliances with several significant European political parties in major NATO states. 

Though there have been military moves by Russia in Ukraine and Georgia—two NATO aspirants—the main weapons in its undeclared war on NATO are not tanks, bombs, or jets; rather, they are bots, trolls, and fake news.

The Nature of Russian Cyberwarfare Confronting NATO 

Through hacking, disinformation, propaganda, and other cyber-methods, Russian campaigns that advance this war have been able to affect political outcomes in numerous NATO countries to suit (or, at least, more suit) Putin’s agenda.  These efforts are coordinated through powerful branches of the Russian government and close Putin allies in and out of the Kremlin, often using thousands of fake accounts to artificially bolster the reach of their lies, which, in turn, are augmented within the target countries by native agents and allies (with unwitting true believers long being dubbed “useful idiots”).  In many NATO countries—including the U.S.—Putin is even popular with far-rightists, no doubt in part because of Russia’s robust information cyberwarfare.

Reigning as the supreme disruptor on social media, Russia spews a “firehose of falsehoods” that has been massively effective, distorting and gaslighting the public discourse so that Russia’s preferred narratives are wildly amplified beyond their natural organic reaches, influencing many millions, thus helping to create an atmosphere where disinformation is sometimes consumed even more than actual news and doubt about even basic truths becomes widespread.

Domestic media outlets can be crucial instruments to this end of Russia’s, not only enthusiastic right-wing media outlets, but also far-left media outlets and figures (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi being two of the most prominent examples); as long as the Russian narratives further their narratives—usually attacking more mainstream and/or moderate parties and figures—these more extreme domestic outlets are often happy to unquestioningly parrot the Russian-projected “information,” and whether it is illegally hacked or not even vetted matters little to them.  The distortions, lies, and unsubstantiated claims then become such a large part of the conversation that mainstream media latches onto this disinformation—sometimes echoing it, other times critiquing it yet still amplifying it—and the Russian narrative itself then becomes mainstream, as I have previously explained in detail.

And once Putin’s favorites are in office in part because of Russian disinformation, they in turn further spout Russian disinformation from the highest levels of the government and even copy Russian tactics (as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa illustrates with the U.S. case).  They also pursue policies favorable to the Kremlin (e.g., weakening anti-Russian sanctions or creating geopolitical power vacuums for Russia to fill) and obstruct investigations into Russia’s cybercampaigns, making it all but impossible to effectively fight back.  Terrifyingly, both America’s 2019 Mueller report and the British Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee’s exceptional Russia report released last year note damning examples of obstruction in their respective governments.

With such additional feedback loops, Russian cyberwarfare is thus a gift that keeps on giving, with domestic news outlets and coopted politicians doing Russia’s dirty work for and alongside it.

The Big One: Targeting America

The revelations of Russia’s devastatingly far-reaching months-long government and corporate espionage hacking, known as the SolarWinds attack, and the Russian cyberattack against the third-party-run e-mail system of America’s main international aid agency, USAID (a multipronged attack that used access to that system to hit some 150 government agencies, think tanks, non-profits, and human rights groups that have been critical of Putin and Russia)—both carried out by the S.V.R., Russia’s equivalent of the C.I.A. and one of the main successor agencies of the notorious Soviet K.G.B.—highlight recently exposed Russian cyberwarfare against the U.S., NATO’s largest pillar.

The same can be said for a recent significant attack on major U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, almost certainly also carried out by the Russian government, and for two recent ransomware attacks—one on the Colonial Pipeline and one on meat plants of JBS, the largest fuel pipeline and meat producer in America, respectively (in the latter, plants in Canada and Australia were also hit).  These ransomware cyberattacks were carried out by DarkSide and REvil, respectively, two criminal hacking groups thought to be based in Russia or former Soviet-dominated states and that are widely understood to have tacit approval and protection from the Kremlin (to put some perspective in an aside here, it should be noted that after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks—the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5—Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. because it gave harbor to al-Qaeda and did not hold the terrorist group to account, refusing to comply with American demands to shut down its camps, hand over its leaders, and arrest the rest of its members).

Much like Russia farms out parts of its aggressive foreign policy to Russian oligarchs, the Russian mafia, and Russian mercenaries in playing a sordid, cynical game of “deniability,” (something I have noted many times before), so too does it work similarly with hackers outside the Russian government.

Prior to the recent discovery of the activities outlined above, Russian cyberwarfare efforts against the U.S. have included clearly and repeatedly promoting unrest and division, pushing both disinformation about the coronavirus and illegitimate conspiracy theories of coordinated massive fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  Before the election, the Russians’ cyberwarfare effort was all-in on attacking the main political rival (Joe Biden) of their preferred top candidate (Donald Trump).

Of course, division and brainwashing in America have hardly been created by Russia, but it is and has been obvious that these efforts are hardly in vain: multiple credible surveys and any casual examination of social media show that vast swaths of the American public—even many in senior leadership—are buying into this disinformation, believing nonsense about both coronavirus (including millions doubting coronavirus vaccines) and the 2020 presidential election.  All this undermines effective public health measures (literally helping kill Americans) and confidence in the very foundations of our electoral democracy.  In addition, all this Russian content and its fallout obviously does not stay confined to America: international populations’ opinions of America and its political system along with their own views on coronavirus and vaccines are being affected, too.

In the words of journalist George Packer, “antisocial media has us all in its grip.”

The new Biden Administration, then, has its greatest initial challenge—the coronavirus—made even worse by this Russian cyberwarfare even while it will face an unprecedented (excepting Lincoln) crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of millions of misinformed (and disinformed) Americans.

Cyberwarfare a Larger Threat Now to NATO than Terrorism

Russian cyberwarfare focused on election interference in the U.S. in 2016—what I called back in December of that year the First Russo-American Cyberwar—has already caused damage to America, its democracy, and its reputation that is hard to exaggerate, with effects not only still being felt by the U.S. but guaranteed to still be felt for some time.  In contrast, physical terrorist attacks in NATO countries since 9/11, while tragic, have still had comparatively limited effects.  Even Russia’s own 2018 Novichok chemical weapon attack on British soil against Russian military intelligence officer turned spy for the UK Sergei Skripal in Salisbury had more symbolic an effect than anything else, dwarfed by the damage from Russian efforts to tip the 2016 Brexit vote in the direction of Leave or the effect of Russia’s campaign to amplify Scottish secessionism (now increasingly likely and sooner rather than later, an outcome that would obviously fracture and devastate a UK already severely weakened by Brexit). 

As I explained in my analysis of the aforementioned excellent British parliamentary committee report on Russia, Britain’s own official self-reflection made it clear that the solid response (and solid effort to bring in allies to take part in this response) to the Salisbury attack needs to be replicated when it comes to other Russian hostile actions, the clear implication being to include Russia’s cyberwarfare, especially political interference.

The same idea can be applied to NATO as a whole, which does have a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence located in Tallinn, Estonia.  Yet even today, one-sixth of NATO—Canada, Luxembourg, Albania, Iceland, and North Macedonia—are not members of this Centre, though, encouragingly, the first two are in the process of joining, new members have recently been added, and non-NATO states Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are “Contributing Participants,” a status available to those outside of NATO; other non-NATO states Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Ireland also intending to join in that capacity.  There are also plans for a new military cyberdefense command center to be fully operational in 2023 at the main NATO military base in Belgium.

Overall, NATO considers “cyber defence…part of NATO’s core task of collective defence” and has since 2014, when the Alliance first explicitly laid out the theoretical possibility of invoking Article 5 in response to a cyberattack (though only “on a case-by-case basis”).  Since then, NATO has “pledge[d] to ensure the Alliance keeps pace with the fast evolving cyber threat landscape and that our nations will be capable of defending themselves in cyberspace as in the air, on land and at sea,” repeatedly reiterating the possibility of Article 5 being invoked in response to a cyberattack, including just this past September.

Update June 15: A communique issued by NATO from its Brussels summit on June 14, 2021, is heralded by some, including the White House, as a “new” cyberdefense policy but actually reiterates already vague and repeatedly articulated positions discussed above, namely, that NATO states “reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” hence, nothing much really new in actual policy and note the use of “reaffirm.”

Falling Short 

Official working papers, conferences, interviews, statements, and raising possibilities on the subject are one thing, but a concrete, clear policy is another, and NATO has nothing of the sort.

The vague idea seems to be that if a cyberattack was “serious” enough, Article 5 would be invoked, but there is no definition of what this threshold would be, and, frankly, this idea seems rather myopic: death by a thousand cuts is still death and has the same effect as decapitation, so tolerating many smaller attacks and sending a clear signal that there will not be a collective Article 5 response to them is simply bad policy.

Consider, too, that Russia would never be able to get away with flying over NATO skies and dropping leaflets of hostile disinformation by the millions onto NATO populations.  It could never get away with doing so once or once in a while, let alone consistently and during sensitive times of pivotal political decisions or unrest in the targeted countries, and yet this is exactly the cyber-equivalent of what Russia is getting away with against NATO’s most significant member states and many of its smaller ones, too.  And while Russia sending in Spetsnaz special forces to steal sensitive information from U.S. bases in Alaska or use physical weapons to sabotage or destroy government computer systems in Lithuania would be viewed automatically as an Article 5-triggering act of war, the same results over and over again from several years of unrelenting cyberwarfare are not, even though this has done more damage to NATO than any Soviet Army did throughout the decades-long Cold War.  This is, in part, because of NATO: the USSR and then Russia did not dare use armed force to attack any NATO state for fear of that explicitly guaranteed Article 5 collective response (even when NATO-member Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria in 2015).

Yet when it comes to cyberwarfare, NATO is practically inviting Russia to attack and get away with it, with the Alliance quite consistently demonstrating its inability and unwillingness under its current framework to respond collectively to Russian cyberaggression.  As noted in the aforementioned UK Russia report, “Russia is not overly concerned about individual reprisal” against its aggressive acts, most certainly including its cyberattacks, with even the U.S. clearly inspiring no fear.

Language can often be tricky, and terms like “war” should never be thrown about lightly.  But with the advent of the internet and the realities of the modern world, NATO cannot become complacent with preventing traditional warfare while failing to adapt to cyberwarfare.  Pretending cyberwarfare is not war and allowing cyberwarfare in real-world practice to be kept out of NATO’s Article 5—leaving individual members states flailing independently and ineffectively against a determined, capable, and organized de facto enemy content to stand down its conventional forces against NATO while unleashing its cyberunits upon it with impunity—has not discouraged Russian cyberwarfare against NATO, it has encouraged it.  Article 5 makes no exception for smaller armed attacks, and any serious collective cybersecurity defense should make no exception for smaller cyberattacks.

An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform

Throughout New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s recent book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends—the indispensable, terrifying, definitive account of the development of cyberwarfare and the mess in which we currently find ourselves: a true must-read for anyone hoping to understand how grave is the danger we are facing at this very moment—a constant theme is that we need paradigm shifts in the way we approach cybersecurity, whether the private sector, government, or individual citizens collectively.  You can tell she was having trouble sleeping while researching and writing her book, and we should be, too.

At several points in her book, Perlroth notes that the U.S. in the past rebuffed attempts to discuss some sort of international cyberwarfare convention or treaty, feeling it was the undisputed champion in the cyberarms race and not wanting to give up that advantage.  That ship has long sailed, and just in the last few years a number of rival and hostile governments have greatly managed to shrink, maybe even close, that gap, and with Western countries far more wired than their main rivals and enemies, they are far more vulnerable—with far more to lose—to cyberwarfare.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently lamented, the threat cyberwarfare poses to the West has “a lot of parallels” to the threat of terrorism after 9/11.  Echoing Wray, former CIA director and secretary of defense for President Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, warned in a recent interview conducted by Perlroth that he fears we will not do what needs to be done before a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” may cripple us.

Perlroth warns at the end of her book’s epilogue that “many will say” that “these…critical assignments of our time” to deter and defend ourselves from cyberwarfare “are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before.  Why can’t we do it again?…We don’t have to wait until the Big One to get going.”

How to Revise Article 5 and the NATO Treaty Overall

Considering that the West’s main advantage over Russia is that people like the West a lot more than Russia—manifesting itself in close diplomatic, military, and economic ties about which Russia can only fantasize—the easiest way for the West to face and counter this dire and worsening cyberthreat from Russia is by leveraging its alliances, and, more than anything else, this means involving NATO and involving it in a big way. 

U.S. President Joe Biden himself penned a recent Washington Post op-ed in advance of his upcoming trip to Europe for a NATO summit and to confront Putin face-to-face, writing: “In Brussels, at the NATO summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Article 5 and to ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.” 

He can do that by proposing to strengthen Article 5 itself.

With Russia’s rampant cyberwarfare only intensifying and its clear pattern as a bad-faith hostile actor, a paradigm shift in the international system for deterring cyberattacks is absolutely necessary.  Since NATO is the premier defensive alliance of the West, formalizing cyberwarfare’s relationship to Article 5 is a necessary leap forward on this much-needed path and the only way forward for NATO to maintain credible collective defense as the twenty-first century progresses. 

To this end, “or cyberattack” must be added after each instance of the words “armed attack” in Article 5 (e.g., “The Parties agree that an armed attack or cyberattack against one or more of them…” [emphasis added]).

As other Treaty articles have (sometimes subsequently) modified the scope of Article 5, I propose the following definitions of cyberattack are added in a new Article 15:

This crucial definition of cyberattack allows more traditional espionage to stay out of discussions of cyberwarfare for collective defensive purposes while making clear the singular degree of the SolarWinds operation or anything like it will not get such a pass.  It also means there will finally be a way to effectively counter and deter the massive weaponized disinformation campaigns conducted by Russia while also protecting citizens, including journalists and cybersecurity staff, who are on the front lines of this war.

While the Alliance is free to decide how it wants to respond when using Article 5, in many of the situations, appropriate coordinated cyberattacks coming from all of NATO’s member states would be the most conceivable and likely response except for far more serious cyberattacks.

Conclusion: Expanding Article 5 Is Necessary and Overdue

The early twenty-first century’s second decade has been something of a Wild West, with Russia emerging as the biggest beneficiary in terms of cyberwarfare as defined above.  While China has also benefitted in terms of massive espionage and acquisition of Western intellectual property, it is Russia that has used the lawlessness of the cyber domain from a collective security standpoint to engage in the most egregious acts (most recently and most notably with the unprecedented SolarWinds) and ransomware attacks), acts that could easily be defined as hostile acts of war.

The time for lawlessness is over, and, with no statute of limitations on cyberattacks and the just-proposed framework not precluded by the current NATO treaty, NATO would be in its full rights (and is overdue) to invoke Article 5 against Russia now for its cyberwarfare so that Russia’s cyberwarfare will cause Russia far more pain than any damage it inflicts.

This has not been the case, but it must be.

Revising NATO’s Article 5 as suggested herein (leaving aside invocation) will not only clarify the rules for NATO enemies and rivals, but also for the members of a NATO Alliance itself that is in desperate need of clarity and strength on this issue.  It will also make NATO once again an alliance that instills fear in the minds of Russian leaders (as it did with Stalin and subsequent Soviet leadership) who would engage in reckless acts of aggression against NATO or its states, even if “just” through cyberwarfare.

Member states recognizing that they are in a state of war—cyberwar, but still war—with Russia and unambiguously making cyberwarfare a key plank of the Alliance’s main collective defense mechanism is essential, then, to keeping NATO the force for deterring aggression it has been for many decades.

Projecting such strength, both on paper and in practice, will serve as a real-world check against further Russian cyberattacks when inaction and lack of clarity has not, enhancing the security of every NATO member state and perhaps even eventually forcing Russia to a point where productive engagement, not adventuristic brinksmanship, is its chosen priority.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 3, 2020

SILVER SPRING—To call the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the United Kingdom Parliament on Russia long-delayed would be far too charitable, as the report itself and its authors make clear.  We have the long-suppressed report now available to the public, and it is so embarrassing for the UK and its leaders that the motive for suppression may be understandable if not the gall of the effort to carry out said suppression.  The old adage “better late than never” surely applies here, and this report is many welcome things in spirit that present many terrifying things in substance, with lessons applicable often not only to the UK but to America (especially) and other democracies under cyberassault from Russia.

Not All Reports Are Equal

The report acknowledges publicly what we Russia-watchers have known for some time that Putin is a genius at leveraging not only both his country’s strengths and weaknesses to his agenda’s advantage, but those of many other nations, too, as I have noted for years.  Yes, the Mueller report and other U.S. official reports, not to mention multiple books and news reports, have made this clear for years now, but the terse boldness in the relatively short report, which says so much in such a condensed space, is truly remarkable.

It is also fair in many ways to compare this to the Mueller Report, mostly because for each country, we have the most in-depth official document detailing Russian interference.  But the hot-take that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “failed” or that he didn’t go “far-enough” misses the point: as I explained even before his full report was released, Mueller was setting up Congress to be able to take down, impeach, remove, and investigate a sitting president because the Constitution empowers Congress to be able to do this, not the Department of Justice or any Special Counsel.  And while the Senate Intelligence Committee Report did an admirable job of detailing Russian interference, it avoided going into Team Trump’s culpability on accepting, soliciting, and using Russian interference (i.e., collusion, as I noted) leaving that for readers to conclude, much like Mueller.  Democrats rightfully took the obvious unstated conclusions Mueller’s report set up (while Republicans gaslighted the public that the Mueller report was “exoneration” for Trump), yet  the Democrats’ impeachment effort remained focused on a narrow set of issues surrounding an attempt and coverup by President Trump to use powers of the presidency and the U.S. government to extract political favors from Ukraine’s government to damage his main political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, on (as I have noted before) entirely misleading, unsubstantiated, and false premises.  While in content we may compare the Mueller Report and the UK ISC report, then, in purpose and role it would be more apt to compare the ISC report to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report.

The UK’s Parliament’s ISC report has many redactions, but in a manner involving the dropping hints that seems to reveal far deeper indications of what is redacted than many U.S. government reports I have seen, throughout the reader is exposed to subtle hints that give tantalizing, pointed indications of the nature and level of what is redacted in ways that quickly raise eyebrows for those with background and familiarity with the topics being discussed, but would also raise eyebrows for the even the general public.

The report opens with one of the best short summaries of the strengths, weaknesses, intents, and capabilities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin regime.  In fact, as The Economist can be said to be the standard-bearer of the English language in terms of style, with a brevity that carries tremendous weight with each word, so, too, this ISC report is the standard-bearer of the English language for style as far as government reports go.  Even among British reports—admittedly I have not read too many  of those—it would seem to stand out, not to just to non-Brits but also for informed British readers, and it is certainly far better-written, far-more succinct, and far more enjoyable (can one even imagine using this word this about a government report?) a read than any U.S. Government report I have ever read, its pithy smoothness most impressive.

Coming to Grips with That Which Had Not Been Spoken

Just after my own country’s 2016 election, I was one of the first people—particularly as Democrat and a supporter of the Obama Administration—to recognize and come to grips with the fact that the Obama Administration had catastrophically failed in historically unique senses to protect the U.S. from hostile foreign intervention during the 2016 election cycle, the president being a victim of (among other things) a sensibility of wanting to appearing above the electoral fray.

Had President Obama and his people been able to peer into the future, they might have found this damning, astonishing line from the report helpful: “Overall, the issue of defending the UK’s democratic processes and discourse has appeared to be something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organisation recognising itself as having an overall lead.”  For Americans not familiar with British understatement, this translates as “organizationally, no took responsibility, no one led, and no one protected us.”  Immediately after in the report, the redress is clear: “Whilst we understand the nervousness around any suggestion that the intelligence and security Agencies might be involved in democratic processes – certainly a fear that is writ large in other countries – that cannot apply when it comes to the protection of those processes,” later calling such an attitude of “extreme caution”—the report noted MI5 only provided six brief lines to the Committee’s for its inquiry as to whether the UK government had intelligence backing up multiple open-source studies that the Russians had worked to influence the UK’s Brexit vote—“illogical.”

(As a related aside, there is a tantalizing yet spare discussion in Footnote 50 of when “Arron Banks became the biggest donor in British political history when he gave £8m to the Leave.EU campaign,” which provided grounds for the UK’s Electoral Commission to refer its own inquiry on this highly suspicious activity to Britain’s National Crime Agency [NCA].  There are some glaring and telling redactions, and thirteen months after that submission it was announced NCA did not find laws had been broken by Mr. Banks or others referred by the Commission, but the context and redactions suggest serious malign influence from suspect money was involved and that the scandal here is that the UK’s legal system does not criminalize such activity, especially since this is one of the key conclusions of the whole report, along with recommendations to create new laws to make such operations involving foreign bad actors illegal).

Shockingly, later the report notes that “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference,” followed by a mysterious redaction and, following that, a contrast to U.S. efforts to produce such formal assessments and to do so quickly (one of our few favorable contrasts).  But take that in for a minute: no formal written assessment looking at overall Russian election interference in the UK was presented to the ISC over the course of its thorough investigation, which speaks for itself, and there is a clear implication that no such report makes it difficult to assure the public that British democracy was or is safe from major foreign interference operations.

Social (Media) Responsibility

The report’s initial expression of frustration of the lack of engagement of intelligence and security agencies in protecting British democracy is followed by sound criticism, echoed by a great many others, that social media companies have done a shameful job through their lack of regulation of their platforms and allowing the Russian government and other bad, even unwitting, actors—many of them domestic—to hijack their platforms quite easily to create targeted, destabilizing information warfare, even chaos, through a deluge of disinformation (on everything from our elections to the coronavirus and even both at the same time, as I have noted somewhat recently):  “we note that – as with so many other issues currently – it is the social media companies which hold the key and yet are failing to play their part.”

In just a few paragraphs, the report hits the nail on the head with a hammer in terms of core issues of responsibility spread across both government and social media companies.  Another succinct sentence comes after noting that British media during Brexit and other votes was not coopted in ways that the U.S. media has been and, as I have noted, still is, so in the U.S., we can add corporate media (mis)coverage as also bearing a huge amount of responsibility.  The report notes that the government has developed a relationship with social media companies to fight terrorism and that such a relationship should “be brought to bear against the hostile state threat,” and adds, in the report’s typically blunt yet understated (i.e., delightfully British) fashion: “indeed, it is not clear to us why the Government is not already doing this.”

Indeed.

In America, too, government- and social media company-synergy in fighting terrorism can be characterized as a serious effort, but similar combined efforts to fight hostile state action have been pathetic when they even have existed, with far more action being long- and inexcusably-overdue.  In fact, their sheer failure begs for regulation over “cooperation,” both of which there has been next to none.  As former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa has noted, “platforms like Facebook and Twitter have little incentive to help counterintelligence beyond their own goodwill.  But Congress could pass legislation that requires social media companies to cooperate with counterintelligence in the same ways they do with law enforcement.”

The Russian Bear Runs Amok in Britain’s Backyard

The report notes that even before Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election, attempts to encourage a secessionist vote in Scotland’s 2014 independence-from-the-UK referendum may have been “the first post-Soviet Russian interference in a Western democratic process.”

The report also reveals that the UK is awash in both Russians and Russian money: a post-Cold War foreign investor system was introduced in 1994, in part, to draw Russian money in the UK economy, with at least some of the impetus being that the UK’s business standards would rub off on the Russians and Russian companies taking advantage of them.  This failed miserably, as the report notes that today, “what is now clear is that it was in fact counter-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’” and so much so that “Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal.’”

A lot of the massive Russian investment into the UK economy was about “extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment – PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions were all willing beneficiaries of Russian money, contributing to a ‘reputation laundering’ process.”  This money has bought wealthy Russians close to Putin legitimacy and a home in Britain’s elite business and social scenes.  The report is also incredibly blunt that the problem is beyond fixing any time soon: “This level of integration…means that any measures now being taken by the Government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation” and “broad Russian influence in the UK…cannot be untangled.” 

Terrifyingly, UK authorities can only hope to mitigate the problem and do not even hope to neutralize it, a shocking sign of the degree to which Russia has successfully infiltrated and corrupted British business and society.  And all along the way, the report notes that the Russians have had help from a local “industry of enablers – individuals and organisations who manage and lobby for the Russian elite in the UK.  Lawyers, accountants, estate agents and PR professionals have played a role, wittingly or unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.”  The depths of these links are so embarrassing that the report actually redacts the degree to which the UK has been infiltrated by Russians, Russian money, and Russian businesses, a giant liability since Russian businesses are “completely intertwined” with “Russian intelligence.”  But the cooperation of Russian businesses with the Russian government goes far beyond that: the oligarchs who Run Russia’s big businesses often operate hand-in-hand with the Russian government and the Russian mafia (in some ways, the real trinity of branches of the Russian government) to advance Putin’s agenda at home and abroad, so that with many of these people—including Putin himself—it might be hard to distinguish their roles in these three overlapping worlds, as I have noted many times before.

These financial infiltrations have extended to charitable and political organizations, including political parties, and it even seems the report is strongly hinting that members of the House of Lords (the UK’s weakened version of the U.S. Senate) have been compromised, with this classically British quip appearing in the discussion: “It is important that the Code of Conduct for Members of the House of Lords, and the Register of Lords’ interests, including financial interests, provide the necessary transparency and are enforced.”  This is equivalent of a British official screaming “The House of Lords has been infiltrated and there is barely any effort at enforcing the rules.”

If you think this might be exaggeration, consider that right after this report was published, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Tory government, which had opposed releasing this ISC report, named Russian-born British immigrant and dual Russian-British citizen Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.  As a prime example of Russian infiltration into British society, he owns the prominent UK media outlets The Independent and The Evening Standard and is the son of Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy who worked in the UK during the cold war.  The father co-owns his son’s UK papers, and while Alexander additionally owns a Russian newspaper critical of Putin’s domestic actions, the elder Lebedev he has been personally supportive, even lobbied for, Putin’s aggressive foreign policy towards the west, as has the younger Lebedev. 

The report also notes that the UK has no law on the books like America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires agents in America working on behalf of the political (or “quasi-political”) interests of foreign governments to register and disclose their related finance sand activities.  However, since the last election cycle on, the old, outdated FARA has been shown to have been woefully inadequately for its mission in the modern digital age.

What is clear is that in light of all these developments, the authors of the report view “economic crime as a national security issue” that is not nearly prioritized enough, and American lawmakers and officials would do well do to the same.

The report also notes a Buzzfeed investigation into the deaths of fourteen deaths of “Russian business figures and British individuals linked to them,” with the ISC getting evidence on these deaths.  This evidence and any commentary on it is redacted, most likely meaning that effort is ongoing.  Perhaps most troublingly, the report indicates the police involved may be compromised, as the report quotes the UK Parliament’s Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, in an again-characteristically understated British style, that the Buzzfeed piecepresented “considerable concerning evidence [that raises] questions over the robustness of the police investigations.”

Much Room for Improvement

After the discussion of the Buzzfeed report, what follows is an important discussion of resourcing and info-sharing within the government, much of which is redacted, but it is still fascinating to read anyway, though it may be of less interest to non-policy wonk-types.

In reading this report, it is no secret that, as mentioned, Boris Johnson and other Conservative Tory governments have hardly been eager about its compilation or release.  In a remarkable section, the ISC argues for taking responsibility for the “Hostile State Activity” portfolio away from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, right under Boris Johnson as Prime Minister; for the report’s ISC authors, “this appears unusual: the Home Office might seem a more natural home for it;” given the overt politicization of the process surrounding this report, its authors are essentially calling for a depoliticization of these responsibilities by taking them away from the people directly working under and for the Prime Minister and to have them given to a government department (albeit one that still reports through its head to the Prime Minister) that is seen as less political, a department that includes MI5 and the NCA (Americans can think of this as taking something away from a White House task force and entrusting it to one of our cabinet agencies like the Departments of Defense or Justice, something which I have argued needs to be done for pandemics in the future given the Trump Administration’s perhaps-singularly pathetic response to the coronavirus outbreak).

And as noted at the beginning of the report, Putin has an advantage in being able to autocratically combine whatever forces he wants to further his ends as far as political interference.  Thus, the ISC recommends that the mechanisms needed to respond to such Russian efforts should be unified and coordinated in such a way as to make the overall effort more robust, less redundant, and more able to plug any gaps.  Quite tellingly, under a headline “Less talk, more action?,” the ISC report authors feel that, as to the various bodies’ “plethora of plans and strategies…it has taken some time to understand the purposes behind each one and how they interlink: this suggests that the overall strategy framework is not as simple as it might be,” and they concludes these comments with a stinging “time spent strategising is only useful if done efficiently, and without getting in the way of the work itself.”  The U.S. should take a similar approach, with an interagency task force being formed as soon as possible to specifically handle the threat of Russian interference in America’s domestic political affairs, one that compels individual states to coordinate and be involved with it.

In related criticism right after, the report notes that its government Agencies (as opposed to Defence Intelligence) do not seem to have clear or useful performance measurement mechanisms when it comes to their evaluation of their success in fighting Russian political interference in the UK.  In a sharp rebuke of the Agencies’ transparency, the report notes that “We remind the Government that the Justice and Security Act 2013 does not oblige it to withhold information relevant to ongoing operations but merely provides the option of doing so… it is disappointing that in relation to a subject of such public interest this option has been exercised quite so broadly.”  Indeed, some of both the Obama Administration’s and (certainly more of) the Trump Administration’s secrecy on these matters were/are highly questionable, so such a sentiment is more than applicable to the U.S.

Lessons, Problems, and Solutions

In a section detailing why Russia is such a challenging adversary (“All witnesses agreed that Russia is one of the hardest intelligence challenges that there is.”), the ISC report notes that in some of its operations, Russian operatives have been rather clumsy, even seeming to be incompetent.  But the authors note, and I would wholly concur, that “whilst these attacks demonstrate that the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] are not infallible, it would be foolhardy to think that they are any less dangerous because of these mistakes.”  I would make the case further that, while some of the more comical operatives or heavy-handed approaches have led to various Russian efforts being exposed, it is the smoother operators that were not caught (or not caught until much later) and whose attacks and effects are not even known that should be far more troubling.  Indeed, while the uncommonly bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee released a much-redacted report in late July, 2019, revealing that all fifty U.S. states’ election systems were the objects of a Russian infiltration campaign in 2016, earlier assessments had a much smaller number of states affected (in late 2016 and early 2017, only some 21 states were determined by U.S. officials to have been targeted).  This means that, in the words of The New York Times, the Russian “effort [was] more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.”  The Senate report did not include many details on which states were compromised and actually masked the identity of which states were most heavily compromised.  A Democratic dissent added to the Senate report was deeply concerned that “there are currently no mandatory rules that require states to implement even minimum cybersecurity measures. There are not even any voluntary federal standards.”  In other words, we have no serious standards, who knows what we do not know about what we do not know, and who knows if whatever measures have been taken to defend our election systems—differing and spreading among fifty states as they are—are appropriate or will be effective.  We must assume, then, that there are other efforts and other successes on the part of the Russians beyond those of which we have become aware, whether thinking of the UK or U.S.

Because of Russia’s virtually non-existent check-and-balances, the ISC report notes that Putin and his inner circle can make and implement substantive decisions far more quickly than most Western governments in most situations can respond, lamenting that the UK and its allies “have yet found an effective way to respond to the pace of Russian decision-making.”  In a section that is heavily redacted in terms of explanations and specifics, it also notes the West faces a gap with Russia in terms of how it can use new technology to augment its intelligence capabilities, especially in recruiting and implementing human intelligence operatives to carry out operations on the ground.  Russia is also relatively likely to escalate because of the famous Russian paranoia coupled with Putin’s viewing virtually any challenge to him as an effort to delegitimize and overthrow him (as he famously viewed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Russian elections in 2011, a perceived slight he certainly never forgot). 

The UK is also at a disadvantage because it does not have enough people working to recruit personnel to work on countering Russian malign influence, and certain redacted areas of work regarding Russia are not given enough attention, either.  This means that not only are there not enough people working on these issues, but that their areas of focus even when focusing on Russia are also not properly balanced.  A further weakness the report notes is that appropriate countermeasures require more care than the terrorism operations that have been of such focus in recent years because, while those operations seek to destroy and dismantle terrorist organizations, that cannot be an option with Russia.  As in the U.S., there has been something of an irrational reluctance to aggressively and publicly name and shame Russian malign actors, and the ISC would like to see a more aggressive stance taken by the UK.

As in the also case with the U.S., there is vast room for improvement in drafting and passing legislation to counter these Russian threats.  The MI5 chief is quoted as saying that “there are things that compellingly we must investigate, everybody would expect us to address, where there isn’t actually an obvious criminal offence because of the changing shape of the threat and that for me is fundamentally where this doesn’t make sense.”  To paraphrase, there are things the Russians are doing that are known to be bad and harmful but are not illegal, and the laws must be strengthened to include such activity and enable authorities to investigate and prosecute those carrying out these hostile acts, which is very much the situation in the U.S., too.  The same MI5 Director-General also noted that the current framework was “completely out of date” and “makes it very hard these days to deal with some of the situations we are talking about today in the realm of the economic sphere, cyber, things that could be, you know, more to do with influence.”  As happened earlier in the report, the lack of an ability to legally counter foreign agents seeking to “obfuscate” their missions and backers is noted as an obvious area of weakness.

Additionally, despite some recent new options (Unexplained Wealth Orders) to crack down on malign and foreign financing of such activities, the report notes that since so many Russians have had longstanding financial ties and investments in the U.K., they work around this new tool.  Furthermore, because these Russians are so wealthy, they are able to tie up government actions and lawyers in costly, lengthy litigation that the UK government does not have the resources or personnel with which to compete to the degree that the NCA said “we are, bluntly, concerned about the impact on our budget.”  That the UK government is nervous about taking on Russian agents because they have better resources and can outspend and outlast British officials using Britain’s own legal system is an incredibly disturbing revelation.

In discussing sanctions, the report notes that because the Russians merge organized crime and businesses into their government’s influence and interference operations, sanctions meant to stop hostile state actions must be broadened to be able to include not just government officials but also these other actors who are not officially in the government but are still working to further the Russian regime’s agenda.  The world has seen a number of countries adopt so-called Magnitsky legislation to go after government officials who perpetrate human rights abuses in response to a high-profile case involving Russian officials’ murder of a whistleblowing Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, including laws passed in the U.S. and the UK, but clearly, Russian campaigns against the West routinely include Russian businessmen and Russian organized crime, so rethinking sanctions is absolutely necessary.  This is likely one of the most effective ways to combat Russian hostile activity, as even the Magnitsky sanctions have enraged Putin and lobbying against them has been one of his top priorities, even to the point of Russian agents meeting with top Trump campaign officials—including campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—on this issue at the height of the 2016 election, as I noted in a piece that was censored by a Russian government-linked think tank for which I previously wrote (free of any compensation), so sensitive are the Russians about this issue.  Reform in the area of sanctions is surely crucial for the U.S., then, too.

In an obvious suggested move with which few reasonable people would disagree, the ISC report also remarks that election laws in our new, digital era need a major update to cover how the internet is used in campaigns, one that expands the ways in which online and especially targeted advertising and outreach is regulated.  Obviously, this is needed in the U.S., too.

When discussing the issue of working with allies to counter Russian hostile acts, there is an interesting redaction in a section discussing the working relationship with the U.S. (“In responding to the Russian threat, the UK’s long-standing partnership with the US is important…However, there remains a question as to whether ***.”), and while there are many possibilities as far as the redaction, U.S. President Donald Trump’s odd relationship, history, and behavior in relation to Putin and Russia are of major concern for all U.S. allies and it is not without some foundation that one might think this redaction relates to this concern.

Of at least equal, perhaps even more concern, to the UK is, as the report notes, division within Europe over Russia, and France, Austria, and Italy are called out by name, as is Israel as an example outside of Europe.  Far earlier in the report, Footnote 25 is interesting because it references knowledge that France’s Marine Le Pen’s far-right nationalist party is either the subject of UK surveillance or that it has unwittingly produced hard evidence of some sort of quid pro quo involving the promise of cash transfers in exchange for supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  Either way, it strongly suggests that UK intelligence has pretty deep knowledge on the degree to which Russia has infiltrated political parties, figures, and systems in continental Europe and the clear implication is that it is quite bad (infiltration and manipulation about which I have written for years).

One positive development is noted several times in the report: that not only was the UK government’s response to Russia’s attempt to murder a Russian defector, Sergei Skripal, (an attempt that he and his daughter survived but a local woman inadvertently exposed to the chemical weapon did not) on UK soil in Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapons nerve agent, Novichok A234 swift and forceful, but so were a number of the responses of allies countries.  Sadly, this type of response is the exception and not the norm, but demonstrates that such type of coordinated action is possible.

Finally, the ISC report calls out the British government for placing too much effort in good-faith engagement of Russia:

Whilst it is possible that an improved relationship between Russia and the UK may one day reduce the threat to the UK, it is unrealistic to think that that might happen under the current Russian leadership.  It would have to be dependent on Russia ceasing its acts of aggression towards the UK, such as the use of chemical weapons on UK soil.  The UK, as a Western democracy, cannot allow Russia to flout the Rules Based International Order without there being commensurate consequences.  Any public move towards a more allied relationship with Russia at present would severely undermine the strength of the international response to Salisbury, and the UK’s leadership and credibility within this movement.

Such a lens should be applied to Trump’s nonsensical efforts to improve America’s relationship with Russia, as even now, Russia is actively interfering in the U.S. election.  There is only reason to believe that Donald Trump has improved his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, not America’s with Russia.

Conclusion: The U.S. Needs to Take Massive Inspiration from This Exceptional British Report

To conclude, there is a certain level of brilliance that I have not seen in American government reports at work here.  Whereas most American reports are presented as a narrative, usually piece-by-piece and step-by-step, and analysis is usually presented at the end, here, it is presented throughout.  And this makes a big difference when it comes to redactions: with the commentary provided (sometimes itself redacted), we are actually being given hints by the committee as to the nature of the redacted material and the Committee’s views on this material and thus the degree to which we should be worried, and I would say this seems quite deliberate from the tone.  So it is, then, that while this report is much briefer than most American reports, it says so much more per page than its American counterparts.  Where the American equivalents often do not connect the dots on sensitive issues but leave that for the public, the media, and members of Congress, here the authors very much wish to guide the debate, even to the point of raising serious credibility issues of certain actors, pointing fingers, sometimes in the dark or hinting at names and institutions without naming them, other times being more direct but still with characteristic British blunt understatement.  And in this way, the report is so much more damning and valuable as a single document.  A typical American will not read the Mueller report and understand the big-picture in the same way or as deeply without expert commentary and additional analysis as a typical Brit reading this report can take away insight without such interpretative assistance.  As an example, one section header simply reads: “Did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] take its eye off the ball?”  in big, bold lettering, something unimaginable in a U.S. Government report.

The bottom line is, this major UK report gave a succinct, highly-readable, even fun-to-read report that most Brits could go through relatively quickly and feel better informed on a key national security issue, taking away bold understandings on the drastic failings of the UK to protect the integrity of its democracy from Russian interference and able to see where a good chunk of the blame lay even if fingers are pointed in a somewhat indirect, terse, and understated manner.  Conversely, few Americans would be able to make it through the long, extremely detailed, and highly technical U.S. government reports that are actually bipartisan and credible, and whether the Mueller Report or the Senate Intelligence Committee reports, they mostly dance around anything sensitive politically and avoid laying much out directly or even indirectly as far as conclusions that would actually hold those who failed and fail to protect American democracy accountable, especially at the top of the current Trump Administration.  The typical U.S. citizen would be both overwhelmed by so much information and unable to draw appropriate conclusions from many of the complex, detailed segments, if they even managed to read the full reports, which few likely have.

That is not to say that such highly technical reports are not necessary—they certainly are, and are still extremely valuable—but America’s government must take a page from this praise-worthy UK ISC report and find a way not only to improve our defenses against Russian interference, but improve its ability to inform its citizens about threats and have them understand both our failures and the actions that must be taken to address those failures.  Executive summaries as we have done them are not enough, and, despite Americans not being British, we must find a way to produce momentous reports in the manner both the substance and style of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.  That means, too, something of a lesson on the English language from the British, which this report also refreshingly offers.

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Second Episode SPECIAL: my discussion with Major General Paul Eaton. United States Army (Ret.)

PLEASE subscribe at YouTube and share and like the video!!

Music credits: intro: “The Clones,” ending: “Finest Troopers,” both ©Kevin Kiner/Lucasfilm from Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Feel free to donate to support the creation of more content like this or to either of Gen. Eaton’s organizations: Vote Vets or Vet Voice Foundation

Correction:

At about 1:30:13 mark I said “Bush Administration” and I meant to say “Trump Administration”

Sources, references, and further info:

Gen. Eaton’s viral video (over 4.2 million views)

Recent Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg article on Trump’s views of the military and of servicemen and women that spurred Gen. Eaton’s video, in which Trump refers to servicemen and women dying on the field of battle as “losers” and “suckers”

On the America First movement and its ties to Nazi Germany: Smithsonian Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times

Gen. Eaton’s March, 2006, New York Times op-ed criticizing then-Sec. Rumsfeld

Testimony of Gen. Eaton at the hearing where he and I met from September, 2006

On the overall “revolt of the generals” against Rumsfeld: journal article from Parameters: United States Army War College Quarterly, Slate article, and Vanity Fair article

On the issue of “hillbilly armor” and MRAP vehicles and Biden: video of active-duty soldier asking Sec. Rumsfeld why vehicles do not have better armor, The Hill, The New York Times, USA Today,  MRAP procurement case study

On torture, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and standard Army manual interrogation rules: two articles from Just Security, Muck Rock

On Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s ambush and the Trump-Bible photo-op: video of Milley saying his presence in the photo and situation was a “mistake,” CNN, The New Yorker

Policing: my piece on police shootings and my piece on counterinsurgency

Trump manipulation of intelligence/information released to the public: Slate, USA Today, Vox, Politico

My Jordan Times piece on checks and balances and the rule of law in the U.S. system and a related piece of mine

Inspectors general challenging Trump; Vox, NBC News

Gen. H.R. McMaster’s classic Dereliction of Duty

Gen. James Mattis’s letter and resignation: Mattis interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

On betraying the Kurds and Trump’s withdrawal from northern Syria: The New Yorker, The Economist, Rolling Stone, Politico, USA Today, Washington Post

On our relationship today with Vietnam: Council on Foreign Relations, CNN, Harvard Kennedy School

On not allowing Iraqi refugees and Iraqis who helped U.S forces into the U.S.: during Trump Admin NBC News, Obama Admin The New York Times, Bush Admin Slate, and America allowing Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam war: Quartz, Migration Policy Institute

On the rise of China: See Fareed Zakaria’s Foreign Affairs article, Steven Walt’s Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center commentary, and an address by Alison Graham (famous Cuban Missile Crisis analyst) and this Belfer Center site centering on his book/work on this issue

My coronavirus coverage

On TPP U.S.-Asia trade agreement and Trump’s pullout as a gift to China: Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post

On U.S.-Russian joint military exercises in 1994 in which Gen. Eaton took part: UPI

My Trump-Russia coverage, especially of note: my take on the First Russo-American Cyberwar, Putin’s war on the West and Trump as his best weapon, and Russian efforts towards a cyberassault on the 2020 election amid coronavirus

My thoughts on the international order

Transition Integrity Project and coverage in The Washington Post, related Fareed Zakaria Washington Post column and CNN segment

On rebel “Confederate” statues and Lee as far as my alma mater, Washington and Lee University: two articles from The New York Times, The Nation, and Gen. McChrystal changing his mind about Lee: The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and my takes on the true Southern rebel cause in the Civil War

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube) August 27, 2020

Author’s note: I wrote most of this in April and May, originally as part of my much longer coronavirus deep-dive, but held off on publishing this part in the hopes that I could publish it with a major outlet, making some edits and additions in the meantime, but I do not want to wait any longer.  So, if you find value in my policy proposal here, please do share profusely!

Winter Is Coming.

—House words of House Stark, in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones (1996)

SILVER SPRING—These past few months, the United States has more and more resembled a failed state (to borrow George Packer’s phrase and Anne Applebaum’s sentiments as expressed in The Atlantic) in various ways to varying degrees as it has produced one of the least effective coronavirus pandemic responses of any nation on earth, as the below chart makes clear:

I have discussed that chart in my late-May deep-dive, big-picture exploration of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and its implications, one in which I also pointed out both that the coronavirus pandemic poses a number of dire threats that we are simply ill-suited to handle and that this is the situation, in part due to our overall structural, societal, even cultural inability to effectively confront unconventional and asymmetric threats for much of our history.

Yet as Modern War Institute (MWI) nonresident fellow Max Brooks noted in a Foreign Policy piece, we are not helpless against the threats presented by coronavirus.  These threats do not have to mean our defeat, which “the world can stop…  And nobody has to develop a whole new weapons system to do it.  Unlike all other means of war, where new inventions require counterinventions for protection, from bulletproof vests to anti-tank missiles, all we have to do is change our thinking.  All we have to do is see public health as national security” and “strengthen…cooperation with global health networks.”

Along these lines, in a mid-April webcast conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden said “I really think we should be thinking about having a new office, a new Cabinet office, on pandemics in the United States,” and this is what I had been thinking, too, in preceding months while I had been working on this piece and my earlier coronavirus work.

Before the next big biothreat hits us—be it a natural pandemic or one resulting from biowarfare or bioterrorism—I propose the creation of a presidential-Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR), with its Secretary a top-tier official on the National Security Council (NSC) appointed to a ten-year term much like the FBI director to ensure a higher degree of continuity, signal the position’s non-partisan nature, and keep the department less exposed to political ups-and-downs.  If 9/11 saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a major part of our national response, this far deadlier coronavirus pandemic can see the creation of DPPR as a response.

DPPR would be a civilian-led joint civilian-military agency, designed to coordinate a national civilian and military response in the event of a pandemic, something of a mini-Pentagon for pandemics but with a higher proportion of medical and logistics experts than anything else but also with strong legal components to navigate the various local, state, and federal legal structures a pandemic would touch, one that would work closely with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other agencies but still remain independent.

I. The Army Pandemic Corps

Involving the military is essential.  For one thing, because of distinct and clear resourcing, cultural, and structural reasons, the military has a high level of discipline and efficiency relative to civilian agencies, is able to move large numbers of people and equipment with more ease, and can act more swiftly overall.  In contrast, civilian planners and capacities have failed and are still failing spectacularly during this coronavirus pandemic, and a huge portion of America’s coronavirus response has come down to an ad hoc approach, only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about our current pandemic, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  Instead of needing to create an entirely new civilian apparatus that can handle a national pandemic or slapping together disparate agencies not used to working closely together, building upon existing military structures that already have far more capacity than any civilian apparatus makes much more sense.  And, as will be demonstrated below, there are so many other ways that a large military role further enhances both preparedness and response for pandemics.  And yet, the military in its current state would have a tough time taking over pandemic operations, navigating unfamiliar state and local legal jurisdictions.  Expanding the military with a new Army Pandemic Corps, as described below, will address these issues and put DPPR, including the Corps, in a position to be the best possible entity to handle pandemic preparedness and response.

The DPPR’s main logistical deputy would be a new four-star Army general officer, officially a liaison reporting primarily to the Secretary of Defense as part of the Army and the Department of Defense (DOD) in non-pandemic times and but whose main deference and primary reporting line would switch to the Secretary of DPPR in pandemic times.  This logistics-specialized general would command a single new Army corps of pandemic response professionals—military personnel who specialize in logistics, transport, maintenance, medicine, and protective gear—that would be formally commanded by this four-star general as part of the Army and Pentagon command structure during non-pandemic times, during which it would focus on preparation and training.  But when a pandemic is upon us, the corps would be handed along with its four-star general to the command of the DPPR secretary as a temporarily-formal part of that agency.  Keeping the corps under the same four-star general but switching his position from the Pentagon pre-pandemic to the DPPR to deal with a pandemic ensures a proper balance between continuity and flexibility, both of which have been lacking in our current pandemic leadership.  The switch would be relatively smooth, too, since both the commander and the Corps itself will have spent much of the non-pandemic time liaising with all the relevant actors.  This general would need to be approved by both the Defense and DPPR secretaries and would clearly understand his dual roles, specifically when one supersedes the other.

A large portion of the Corps who would be full-time active-duty military and those who would be reservists would not be allowed to have civilian roles as first-responders or needed medical staff elsewhere (as many in the military currently do), thus avoiding the issues of a callup cannibalizing crucial local response staff as would be the case with call-ups of the National Guard, a problem discussed by Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle in an MWI piece.  The U.S. already has a shortage of doctors and nurses, having to import many from foreign countries.  This Army Pandemic Corps could provide generous incentives to make its positions attractive—including paying for the college and advanced degrees of those who want to bindingly commit to serving in the Corps for a certain number of years—thereby serving as an incubator for increasing our overall civilian healthcare workforce, allowing those who eventually leave the Corps to fill important roles in the U.S. healthcare system.  When coronavirus subsides, the new normal will require far more healthcare workers and this Corps is an excellent way to facilitate this growth.

During non-pandemic times, Corps soldiers can supplement existing civilian and non-Corps military teams in emergencies in ways that do not lead to dependence or hamper their ability to be rapidly deployed for a pandemic.  And those with enough experience can help train relevant local and state personnel, too.  Teams of the Corps can also shadow other healthcare workers as well as relevant workers in other fields both in the U.S. and abroad to learn even more.  They can also significantly supplement U.S. foreign aid and assistance to organizations like the United Nations (including the WHO), NATO, and the African Union.  Such work will not only build goodwill among allies and friends, it will also help forge new relationships, improve America’s image abroad, and help America to gain valuable experience from medical and logistical situations that our personnel would not otherwise gain.  Such an approach was taken by the Obama Administration in sending teams from the Army and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—a main agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS)—to West Africa to assist with fighting a major Ebola outbreak there, a rapid, proactive response that helped to prevent a much larger outbreak even as the deadly disease still ended up spreading to ten countries on three continents.

As Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky remarked in a mid-May op-ed extolling the value of international cooperation in the coronavirus era, “in early April, we sent some of our doctors to Italy.  Their work treating patients there has helped us to learn lessons about the spread of the disease that are now informing our own quarantine procedures and in turn, helping to save lives here.”  Just imagine if we had had thousands of members of the Corps ready to deploy in northern Italy when Lombardy was put on lockdown on March 8: not only could we have saved lives there, we would have learned valuable firsthand lessons and deepened our experience with COVID-19 before it slammed the U.S., saving American lives, too.  As it actually played out, Italy had to request assistance from the U.S. rather than the U.S. taking a leading, proactive role.

From such cooperation and experiences at home and abroad, members of the Corps can amass and pass on institutional knowledge that will enhance local, state, national, and international bodies of knowledge.  The Corps can play a leading global role in research, evaluation, and dissemination of findings as well as in running simulations with a variety of actors.  Medical “wargames” should be a major priority along with military wargames, and few institutions would be as well-suited for this as America’s new Army Pandemic Corps.

The Corps would also greatly facilitate civil-military cooperation. In non-pandemic times, the Corps could take input from various relevant bodies at all levels as part of the Army with the Army understanding that the Corp’s mission under Army control is primarily one of learning, bridging, and supplementation.  In times of military pressure, this ensures we have a significant boost to military medical and logistical operations, but, as in the Corps’s supplementary civilian-support operations, without creating dependency so that rapid deployment for pandemic operations is still possible without compromising normal military operations.

Writing for the U.S. Naval Institute, Commander of NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Naples, Italy, U.S. Adm. James Foggo—who has been dealing with COVD-19 in Italy—calls germs the seventh domain of warfare.  In his piece, he notes that “logistics are the sixth domain of warfare, the Achilles heel of any military force.  When fighting pandemics, the logistical capabilities of the force are paramount.”  He also notes that “confronting a pandemic requires an all-hands approach—we must work with our interagency and host-nation partners to leverage mutual strengths to stem the spread of the virus, while offering our support to those in need. Yet we must be mindful of our operational readiness, retaining the ability to respond immediately if challenged in another domain of warfare.”  Some of his top takeaways from his experience as a commander in Italy facing coronavirus are that, to better face biothreats (including pandemics), we must protect our forces, ensure continuity of operations, build and preserve strong relationships with allies and partners, elevate experts, fuse with the other domains of warfare, prioritize humanitarian intervention early, and train and wargame for biothreats intensely and often.  The Army Pandemic Corps, as I have proposed it, would specifically and significantly advance all these priorities and more.

And yet, as Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck point out in an additional MWI article, it has been decades since the U.S. military included large-scale epidemic response in its operations, as was the case in major wars of the past.  Looking at the current state of the military in yet another MWI piece titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor,” U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni noted the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.  The Corps will restore and elevate the past role discussed in the former and keep things in the spirit of the latter by keeping the military in a support role and civilians in the top leadership roles.  The Corps will also very much help advance needed reform within the military by addressing problems that the pandemic has exposed, shortcomings highlighted by Army Reserve Capt. James Long in still another MWI piece discussing “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners.”  While the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed us during this pandemic and the military did not have a clear, robust role to play when it could have made a clear, robust difference, DPPR with a new Army Pandemic Corps at its heart addresses both of these crucial gaps.

II. CDC and FEMA Reorganization

The head of the CDC would simultaneously occupy a deputy secretary position within the DPPR that would function as the main liaison between HHS/CDC and DPPR, but in times of pandemics would, along with the CDC itself, report primarily to DPPR, switching formally from HHS to DPPR much like the general and his Pandemic Corps.  This would ensure that HHS and DPPR have strong coordination both before and during a pandemic and give the appropriate command and departmental emphasis when necessary.  DPPR would also have its own infectious disease intelligence desk, to coordinate with staff at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (a small portion of whom would be transferred to DPPR’s desk upon its creation to jumpstart it), American medical infectious disease teams, the WHO, and global experts to track and identify pandemic threats.  In short, the CDC’s pandemic-related work would carry on as normal but with a boost and different reporting lines during a pandemic.

DDPR would also have lead jurisdiction when it came to related the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, normally under DHS) operations for the duration of the pandemic.  However, unlike the CDC and Pandemic Corps, all of FEMA would not be part of the switch.  Like his CDC and Pandemic Corps counterparts, the FEMA Administrator would during non-pandemic times have a dual liaising role as a deputy secretary of DPPR, but he would stay reporting to DHS both then and during a pandemic.  The Secretary of DPPR during a pandemic would automatically be authorized to take all FEMA personnel working on pandemic operations, automatically being able to allocate a certain portion of all FEMA field personnel and the support staff for those field teams directly to his DPPR, with them reporting directly to his office.  Beyond that specified portion, if the DPPR secretary feels he will need more FEMA resources, that can be worked out by reaching agreement with the head of FEMA or, failing that, the president would mediate and decide.  This ensures that FEMA would have considerable capacity to deal with non-pandemic emergencies even during a pandemic, allowing flexibility and for staffing levels be based on the bigger picture, while still empowering DPPR to lead on pandemic matters.

III. Keeping DPPR from Being Politicized in a Hyperpartisan Era

U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim notes for MWI the failure of communications tactics and strategy, and, without a doubt, politicization of public statements on the pandemic at the highest levels of government—up to and including dangerous disinformation and misinformation on vital health information (and on things as simple as wearing a mask and social distancing)—is a regular feature of this failure in communication.  Thus, in order to prevent politicization of information related to pandemics and preparedness, DPPR must regularly brief—in times of pandemics and in non-pandemic times—not only the White House, but all major intelligence agency heads, top Cabinet officials,  as well as top relevant leadership of both parties in Congress, including of key committees, at regular intervals.  All governors of U.S. States and Territories and their attorneys general would also be briefed along with all nine Supreme Court Justices, the latter in case there would be legal challenges between the Executive and Legislative Branches over DPPR information dissemination, giving the Supreme Court the context to rule quickly on those disputes.  All non-sensitive information will be made publicly available and the DPPR secretary will also brief the media regularly.  If certain information is felt by the White House—specifically the president and a majority of the Principals Committee of the NSC—to need to be kept from the public and maintained as secret because of issues of national security and/or protecting intelligence gathering assets and methods, the highest congressional leadership from both parties must also be briefed in full on these issues of secrecy along with the nine Supreme Court Justices to, as stated before, provide the justices proper context should disputes arise.  Such disputes can be initiated by congressional leaders—the top leader of either party in either the House or Senate would be enough to trigger a formal challenge—and the Supreme Court would exclusively handle and fast-track these disputes to avoid delays during a pandemic.  In short, all three branches have potential major roles in deciding what information is kept from the public and lawmakers overall, helping to keep information from being used or withheld for partisan political purposes.

IV. DPPR: Improving Preparedness and Response at All Levels, Minimizing Politics

At the state and local levels, we have seen vast gulfs in competency from one state to another and within the federal government during this coronavirus response.  By having DPPR preplan and coordinate with Congress, other parts of the federal government, and with states and localities before the next pandemic, our entire society will better prepared.  This way, DPPR insulates the nation from poor leadership at multiple governmental levels.  Relieving governors and mayors of the need to do as much planning as we have seen them have to scramble do on their own (see Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s twenty-two-day odyssey to get coronavirus tests from South Korea and keep them from being confiscated by the Trump Administration) in favor of knowing they can tap into plans, logistics networks, and coordination already well-laid out in advance will then free up local leaders and resources to focus on aspects of disaster management more uniquely suited to their unique capabilities (e.g., supporting local officials, assuring the public), meaning the overall response on the levels most felt by actual citizens will be that much more effective.  And local staff will be better trained and prepared since DPPR personnel will be dedicated liaisons and trainers in non-pandemic times, with those relationships developed from all the DPPR’s non-pandemic period activities paying massive dividends on multiple levels.

Conclusion: A Bold, New Cabinet Department and a Bold Reorganization for an Existential Threat

In the end, DPPR represents what is ideal in times of dire threat: vast, temporarily, and transparently concentrated power allocated in a preplanned way with all relevant actors understanding their roles and responsibilities and having been included in the preplanning.  Ad hoc responses can be great, but they depend greatly on the quality of individual leaders and can fail just as often.  Leadership will always matter, but setting up the DPPR in the manner described above will not only limit the damage poor leadership can do by providing a clear institutional framework that can relieve top leadership of the need to be involved in so many details, it will allow top leaders to focus on calming the people of the nation, international coordination and outreach to other heads of state and major international bodies, and recovery and post-recovery planning while the actual day-to-day disaster management and logistics are left to the professionals best suited to handle them, operations we are seeing have been currently neglected and mismanaged at the top federal levels to disastrous effect.  Instead of arguing and debating different agency plans and different ideas and philosophies for crucial lower-level wonky decisions, instead of having to introduce personnel to each other and form working groups or task forces in an ad hoc manner, which, in this case, has produced confusion more than anything else and failed to deliver adequate results, we can have a clear, singular road map for general operations and overall approaches, a road map that minimizes infighting, confusion, uncertainty, and dependence on individual political leaders’ competence.

While there is certainly possibility for confusion and head-butting with this more complex structure and roles for the Army Pandemic Corps, the CDC, and FEMA, with proper leadership, better coordination and more effective, robust operations should result, especially compared to the current ad hoc, dysfunctional coronavirus response.  Even allowing for new potential issues, the net effect is of these overlapping relationships is still very likely to be forcing a greater level cooperation and coordination than currently exists, as DPPR and especially the Pentagon, CDC, and FEMA—but also HHS, DHS, and DOJ—would need to be intimate partners in planning and executing policy.  In essence, just as DHS became an umbrella agency that involved a reorganization of many agencies after 9/11, DPPR would function both as a permanent planning and coordination agency and specialized, temporary DHS for pandemics to be activated with a higher level of authority and responsibility, from planning and coordination in one state to execution in another.  If this sound superfluous, consider that the United Nations has a whole major office within its Secretariat—the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)—that focuses on running complex humanitarian efforts and maintains many relationships before and after such efforts rather than allow for an ad-hoc response for each humanitarian disaster.

In fact, history shows there is no major reason to ipso facto oppose complex or joint civil and military overlap or commands.  Going back to the ancient Roman Republic, one could argue that one of the main reasons Rome’s (surprisingly) democratic republic—upon which the American Founding Fathers based our own republic—was able to govern its expanding empire so successfully for so long before the rise of the autocratic emperors was its ability to both divide and expand creatively both the wielding and implementation of executive authority (imperium) within its flexible yet strong constitutional framework, especially in its combination of civil and military authority abroad in ways that helped avoid conflict between the two without overwhelming any one officer-holder or office.  Here we would think less of the of rarely utilized office of dictator for the most extreme of emergencies, which essentially suspended the normal constitutional order and invested overwhelming power in one man, and more of the special office of proconsul (pro consule), a special version of the authority of the annually elected top normal office-holders (a pair of consuls, on which the American presidency is based).  Proconsuls could still be given extraordinary powers but over a limited sphere of affairs and for a limited time.  Thus far avoiding the eventual giant excesses of imperium that helped bring down ancient Rome’s republic, America has attempted something in this Roman tradition on notable occasions.  At the dawn of the twentieth century, we have (then-future President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Howard Taft as a civilian governor being given proconsularesque authority by President William McKinley over U.S. civil and military authorities in the newly acquired Philippines after the Spanish-American War.  Yet a certain vagueness, political disputes, McKinley’s assassination, his successor Theodore Roosevelt’s reluctance to be involved, and U.S. military commanders’ resistance to civil control of the military outside the president exercising it himself (and even then…) meant the actual application of this idea was limited, but when it was, the largely benevolent Taft mostly improved the situation in the Philippines in spite of military leaders’ sometimes-tendency to make things worse with harsh overzealousness there.  Other notable American pronconsular moments include Reconstruction after the Civil War and Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II, but there are numerous examples of American variations on the Roman proconsular model over many years up through our recent overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even Gen. Honoré in New Orleans after Katrina (plus, America is hardly alone in utilizing this model).  Examples of different types of American civil-military overlaps involve the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs branch (including its soldiers serving as advisors for United Nations and NATO missions) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which from some of the earliest days of United States history through the present has been and is still massively engaged in civilian projects affecting large portions of the American population.

So the idea of temporarily having a military corps under civilian control should not be thought of as too revolutionary: after all, all American military forces serve under the civilian U.S. President, civilian Secretary of Defense, and some other combination of civilian (deputy) secretaries overseeing the various branches of the armed forces, a principle of civilian control enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.  Also enshrined in the document is the idea of temporary measures to meet extraordinary challenges, such as the suspension of habeas corpus in Article I Section 9, and plenty of modern-era laws have allowed for temporary unorthodox measures, from the 1950 Defense Production Act to far more typical presidential– and state-level disaster declarations, which have seen unprecedented application during this coronavirus pandemic but which are already largely being lifted (though the lifting seems frighteningly premature).

But moving in this general direction of more concentrated civilian authority over biodefense is what some of the most notable experts have already articulated.  A major working group meeting on biodefense that convened in 2014-2015—one that involved many senior former and current government officials from both major political parties as well as numerous experts in various fields—produced a landmark report late in 2015, A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform Needed to Optimize Efforts, and among its top recommendations was to institutionalize, centralize, and prioritize biodefense at the very highest levels of government.  The creation of DPPR as a Cabinet-level agency does just that.

While DPPR’s creation along the lines described would certainly be a shakeup of the existing order and way of doing things, as Army Lt. Col. ML Cavanaugh notes in his MWI piece on coronavirus-era military strategy:

Organizations are loath to try new things, take on new projects, and risk new avenues of approach.  Only when real-world crises confront us do we really and ruthlessly set priorities and change our behavior accordingly.  This is rare.  Very rare.

COVID-19 is already permitting ideas to go forth that might have seemed absurd just months ago.  This is how the unthinkable gives birth to the impossible.

King Abdullah II of Jordan expressed similar sentiment in a late-April op-ed, that

the moments of unity inspired by [major global] events—and the financial crises and natural disasters we’ve also faced over the years—have never lasted long enough to push us to fundamentally rethink the systems we have in place. More often than not, our responses have done little more than plug holes, falling far short of what could be achieved with modern technology.

…Many are optimistic we will simply rebuild after this pandemic. But rebuilding is not enough. We should focus instead on creating something new, something better.

…That means recalibrating our world and its systems.

He could not be more right.  And since his government in Jordan has swiftly enacted far more successful and competent national coronavirus measures than we did (and far earlier)—including robust targeted and random testing—perhaps we should heed his advice even more so.

In the end, we can and should be better prepared for the next pandemic, and there will be one.  Whether or not we will adapt, there is a good chance our enemies will, with the COVID-19 devastation serving as a kind of inspiration we wish did not exist, nor occur to the human mind.  Let our minds take truly inspiring direction from this crisis, inspiration that accepts major and creative top-level reform as urgent and necessary.

Whether coming from nature herself, a foreign enemy government, or terrorists, the next bioassault as powerful as or even worse than the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic will take a nontraditional, unconventional reform of our national biodefense structures and approaches in order for us to be properly prepared to face it.  This Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response exponentially improves the odds that we will be, regardless of who is in the White House.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 11, 2020 (see related articles: August 20, 2020: I Was Wrong about Harris. Why I Changed My Mind and How She Won Me Over and August 8, 2020: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala))

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—In my earlier recent piece comparing the careers of California Senator Kamala Harris and former Obama Administration National Security Advisor and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, I noted that I have been watching and really enjoying ESPN’s The Last Dance (the documentary series about Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls’s championship teams, especially their final championship run).  I noted that there are two main facets as to how a player gets selected for a team and how they perform: the first facet is the stats: the numbers that would be a on a player’s trading card; that is what I looked at in that last piece as far as Harris and Rice.  In this piece, I want to look at some of the intangibles, the second facet: the stuff that you would not get by looking at a trading card, but which speak more to personality and traits that are more about how you operate or fit on a team in ways that numbers cannot display.  And a lot of these intangibles can come across in informed first impressions voters get from seeing each for the first time.

First Impressions

I will begin first by just explaining how I remember being introduced and familiar with both Rice and Harris.

Rice

With Rice, I do not really remember anything specific.  I did not watch or read a lot of news in the 1990s in middle school or high school.  I was super busy in both: lots of activities (music, sports) and taking advanced classes throughout.  I also went to a fairly strict boarding school for high school (shout out to Canterbury), where TV-watching was quite limited (and when we had freedom to watch TV in the common room, it was usually sports and MTV that the other kids had on; I never, ever recall seeing the news on in the dorms.  If I had put the news on, I probably would have been physically driven out of the dorms) and where I was busy enough that I did not get to read the news too often, either.

I still followed politics a bit somehow in high school, but I can say that I have no recollection that I ever heard of or even saw Susan Rice when she was with the Clinton Administration or in the time that followed before she was with the Obama campaign.  I do not have any recollection of becoming aware of her existence during the 2008 election either, though perhaps I saw her on TV or read an article or few that mentioned her.  I do know that I became aware of her as our Ambassador to the United Nations.  I recall nothing specific between the first term and the Benghazi “scandal,” other than a few times she would have been speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN and I am sure I saw her other times in clips of other UN deliberations as well as press conferences, interviews, and in articles.  Each time, I remember seeing her calm, composed, knowledgeable, competent, sharp, and articulate, a solid representation of America to the world and a competent National Security Advisor, one of the only black women in American history to reach such heights in government and on the world stage representing America.  Until recently, I only had a vague—I had never digested her in depth or at length—but strongly positive impression of her, with no complaints that I can recollect; this was, in part, because I researched the Benghazi situation deeply in advance of Clinton’s marathon Congressional testimony of October, 2015, and realized that entire case against Hillary Clinton (and, by default, Susan Rice) in terms of the Benghazi fiasco, was, as I noted at the time, a cynical, disgusting, disingenuous, dishonest, witch hunt-like, purely political attempt to damage Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration before the 2016 election (check out my in-depth article examining this hearing for a dismantling of all the specious, misleading, and/or untruthful arguments put out by Republicans).  The first experience I ever had that really focused on Rice was watching while working out in the fall of 2019 an interview of her by Walter Isaacson for Amanpour and Company on the event of the release of her memoir.  I was incredibly impressed with her, and have since paid more attention to her and her interviews and tweets since her book tour started, and her public interactions have consistently been at a level that keeps impressing me at a very high level.

Harris

When it came to Harris, my introduction to her was very much at a time when I was glued into politics as a freelance reporter who was then focusing much more on American politics than I had previously, and, she was also being built up as a star; for these reasons, I ended up paying way more attention to her when I first came across her than I did with Rice.  I was still living in the Middle East, but had found, most disappointingly and quite sadly, that Trump and the U.S. election cycle giving me much more opportunity and paid way better than covering Syrian refugees, ISIS, Iraq, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I had been closely following the whole Trump-Russia saga, in particular, since July, 2016.  Thus, when there was a highly-anticipated hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee with key figures from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had only weeks earlier appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia, Russian election interference, and any possible collusion between people around Trump with the Russian government or its intermediaries, I was highly interested. 

One of the Democratic senators taking part in the hearing was the newly-elected Kamala Harris from California.  Her win in 2016 was certainly met with some excitement, the second black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the first South-Asian (her father was black and her mother was Indian).

Full disclosure: I grew up near New York, and we East Coasters pay little attention to California politics.  So, I barely paid attention to her in the 2016 campaign, which was an extremely busy time for me when I was trying to cover the primaries and Clinton vs. Trump.  Thus, I was pretty excited about this hearing: in many ways, it would be Harris’s biggest stage yet, her introduction to the national scene, and it was certainly her introduction to me.  I remember hearing a lot of hype about how she could be the next Obama, presidential material, and the future of the party, so I was expecting to be mightily impressed and looking forward to seeing one of our brightest new stars of my left on the national stage in action.

Now, full disclosure: before you read my take on what transpired, you should know I watched the entire hearing live and closely (full video and transcript).  I was deeply interested in all the proceedings and was at least somewhat, sometimes very, familiar with the issues being discussed.  And I have to say that from the very beginning of her allotted time (video beginning with that here) during the hearing, I was shocked at how obnoxious, grating, and disappointing I found her performance to be.  From the very beginning, she was rude and grandstandy, first very briefly to Admiral Mike Rogers, cutting him off after asking him a question so that he asked, respectfully, “Senator, if you could, could I get to respond, please, ma’am?” He then tried to continue but she interrupted him again.  “No, sir. No, no.”

It looked like Harris was going to act like a Big Name prosecutor taking on a Hostile Witness, and almost immediately, she switched to question Rosenstein with the bulk of her time, confirming this impression with him, too.  She constantly interrupted him and cut him off, was rude and hostile, not yelling and haranguing like maniac and staunch Trump apparatchik Jim Jordan might in the House, not even raising her voice to the less-annoying-than-Jim Jordan-level of Republican Ted Cruz in the saucer-cooling Senate, but still clearly determined to stand out, show that she was being “tough,” demonstrate her stern courtroom prosecutorial demeanor, and make a name for herself with a figure like Rosenstein very much in the headlines.  And her whole premise was to act like she was leading an effort to protect Mueller from Trump Administration interference or from even being sacked to protect the president, citing a precedent where a previous Attorney General (AG) overseeing an independent, specially-appointed inquiry had pledged in writing to respect the independence of the investigation.  But in that case, the appointed head of the inquiry was a sitting U.S. Attorney that could be fired by the president, so there was a potential conflict in that he normally reported as a Department of Justice employee to the AG and served at the pleasure of the president.  In this case, Mueller was a retired and private citizen who was not part of the Department of Justice and did not have that conflict or reporting issues and could not be fired by the president and under law could only be fired under special, non-political, non-arbitrary circumstances by the top Department of Justice official overseeing the investigation (Rosenstein, because AG Jeff Sessions had recused himself).   Between that and the regulations of the particular law governing Mueller’s appointment—regulations that that did not apply to the precedent Harris was citing—Harris’s point was moot and so were her attempts to get Rosenstein, in a quite a badgering (do not worry, I apply that term often for male congressman) and hostile manner, to commit to a statement in writing like the one she cited earlier but that did not apply under circumstances that were quite different in relation to Harris’s line of questioning.

Rosenstein was very respectfully trying to explain this to Harris, but Harris repeatedly cut him off and continued to demand a simple answer to a complex question.  Sen. John McCain, who stood up more to Trump and Republican malfeasance and better than any other Republican senator during the Trump Administration, came to the rescue of Rosenstein, asking for Harris to stop interrupting the witness and to let him answer the question.  The Republican Chairman of the Committee, Senator Richard Burr, would join in, stopping Harris after she challenged even Burr him from repeating the same question in a hostile manner and permitting Rosenstein to make the above explanation about why a simple “yes” or “no” did not as answer given the different circumstances.

And by hostile, I mean hostile; again, I watched the entire over two-and-a-half-hours-long hearing, and nobody else acted in any way near the manner of Harris.  Only her’; everyone else—Democrat and Republican alike—was polite to the witnesses, did not repeatedly cut them off, used a respectful, non-badgering tone, and did not feel the need to be adversarial even though they found a great many things to be frustrating and concerning, but Harris adopted this adversarial tone from her very first question to the admiral and continued using it until her time was up.

There are two other reasons why this is incredibly obnoxious: despite pressure from the president to stop Mueller, Rosenstein had defended Mueller’s probe (it was Rosenstein who became alarmed enough at Trump’s behavior that he was the one who decided to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump, and it was also Rosenstein he who chose Mueller) and had given Mueller a lot of freedom, independence, and support.  Rosenstein is far from perfect and has had some problematic aspects of his time as Deputy AG ands since, but at this point he has been very much on the right side by deciding to appoint a special counsel, Mueller, and working to keep the integrity of Mueller’s investigation secure amidst considerable pressure to compromise it by Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media.  The other reason this is incredibly obnoxious is that I am certain Kamala Harris knew the law (she is an accomplished prosecutor and served as California’s Attorney General) and knew that her point was largely moot, not appropriate, and not fair to Rosenstein.  But she was determined to establish herself as a tough newcomer, to get attention, to rise above all her peers during her first major public hearing.  She was trying to trap both the admiral and especially Rosenstein into “gotchya” questions, embarrassing them and pushing them into a seemingly hypocritical trap to make the witness look like he hiding something unnecessarily in the case of the admiral and that he was not willing to stand up for the independence and integrity of the Mueller probe in the case of Rosenstein (which by all accounts up to that point and many beyond, he had).  So Harris knew she did not need to be overly concerned over Rosenstein at that point; she knew her clever attempt to prosecutorally box Rosenstein in like he was a defendant on the witness stand back in California was not getting at the heart of any major issues with the Mueller probe, knew that her actions were designed to generate a soundbite that would hopefully go viral, and knew she was engaging in self-promotion that was a subtle attack on the integrity of both Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers over a moot point, designed to make her look like she was a tough prosecutor who was taking a version of Law and Order to Washington.  In an otherwise cordial hearing, her contentious exchanges would stand out and get her attention in a situation where most junior senators would not behave this way.  You could smell presidential aspirations on her from a mile away.  And if you think I am making this up, this is exactly how Maya Rudolph satirized Harris on Saturday Night Live: always looking to create a media moment that would go viral on the internet, designed to get her attention and often show her as a tough ready-for-primetime prosecutor, regardless of the level of substance behind what she was saying.

Yep, that was my introduction to Harris: a woman clearly of great intellect, substance, and capability that chose to engage in grandstanding devoid of substance, misleading but guaranteed to get headlines.

I was deeply saddened; is this what the internet was doing to us, hollowing out our politics to be mostly hot air?  Was Harris going to use her office to be an effective legislator or focus on promoting herself in the media and on using her office to prepare a presidential run?  Would we be elevating the likes of Bernie Sanders whose “plans” were never in the realm of reality and whose central narratives and premises justifying his campaign were crafted on fantasy, thus pretty much dooming his campaign?  Were capable women of substance going to choose to play for meme and viral moments, hoping to base their campaigns on social media likes and shares?  Were these folks really going to be the future of the Party?

But the next day, it would get even worse, as Harris tried to capitalize on her events from the day before in an even more blatantly cynical attempt to create a viral, slogan-ready moment.  Because she had been interrupted by McCain and Burr—two men, two white men—there was an opportunity to frame their actions as sexist or even racist.  One thing is for certain: Warren’s viral “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment form just a few months earlier—when Republican male Senate colleagues had silenced Warren with a rarely used technicality regarding actions that “impute” fellow senators directly—was very much on Harris’s mind, and she clearly wanted to recreate that, especially the vibe of a woman standing up to powerful men.  It was almost like she could see Warren (whom I have been fairly critical of for various reasons) getting an edge over here for 2020 and she wanted to respond, and while Warren’s moment seemed relatively authentic, this would have a feel of being manufactured.  Harris’s plan was already implemented within two days of the hearing, with Harris was advertising stickers on Facebook with the words “courage not courtesy” you could get on her website—not on her Senate site, but kamalaharris.org (translation: she’s running.  Already.  In June, 2017).

Now, first off, there is a tremendous amount of sexism in the world, in America, in politics, in the Senate.  Of that, there is no doubt among rational, informed people.  And to be fair to Harris, it was smart politics.  Gimmicky as hell?  Cringingly forced and inauthentic?  Sure.  But definitely effective: most voters would not have watched the hearing.  Some—many—will have seen the clips of Harris and taken the image of her she wanted them to; most certainly would not have known much about Rosenstein or the special counsel regulations, and she was betting on that.  She had created her viral moment, though it would pale in impact and reach to Warren’s, and, I suspect, fell far short of what she was hoping, but it certainly got the attention of the media, some outlets of which tried to make it a sequel to Warren’s big moment.

I have watched Harris plenty of times since then, and, at least until the 2020 campaign—another story possibly for another time—most of her performances were much better that what I saw at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.  I would be wrong if I did not admit that this first major impression she made was strong, and that it made me more likely to read calculated political gamesmanship into some of her actions—I would say fairly—but that did not stop me from seeing her as capable, formidable, one of the top rising stars on the left, and a top-tier contender for the 2020 nomination, one of the few I thought that could compete with Biden if he was to run.

Yet still, once of the reasons I love Biden is his authenticity and positioning of substance front and center throughout his career.  As for “courage not courtesy,” just ugh.  I have written about the devolution of our politics for years and it has been happening for years, but once thing that was fairly consistent for some time was that, unlike the more unruly House, the Senate was supposed to be an elevated form of politics less prone to theatrics, more prone to comity, civility, cooperation, and compromise, with less heated rhetoric and more substantive deliberations, more removed from the passions and the whims of the masses.  There is an old, unsubstantiated tradition that Washington told Jefferson that the Senate was like a “saucer” that could allow “our legislation to cool.”  In the words of James Madison in Federalist “No. 62,” the Senate would be less “subject to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining in pursuit of unjust measures” than the House.  But these days, this distinction is decidedly weakened and weakening, and I am not for that.  Today is all about “populists” on both sides smashing tradition and norms and going around institutions and political colleagues “directly to the people,” whatever that means.  Think Bernie Sanders’s mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets as a governing philosophy.  Far worse, think about Trump’s calls on his supporters to take to the streets if things do not go well for him.  Harris’s theatrics were by far nowhere near the worst I have seen in the Senate, not even close to second worst (Hello, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton!), but they were another step in a decline that seriously worried me.  And Harris, clearly, cared little for such tradition if she felt she could blaze a trail for her advancement.

A reasonable case can be made that this is what is needed at this time, that Harris’s calculation is what is needed against the Republican and Trumpian threat.  I thought to myself, Harris might have what it takes to win in the Internet/Twitter age, perhaps even what is needed to take on Trump, and she would have my support against him, but I do not have to like it.  I do not have to like how she treated DAG Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers.  I not have to like the premeditation to stand out tonally in a setting when it just was not at all necessary.  I do not have to like the calculated attempt to prepare sloganeering stickers within days.

But that does not mean I can not like or support Harris.

Rooting for (vice presidential nominee) Harris’s Best Self

As I write this conclusion, news is breaking that Biden has picked Harris.  My preference would definitely have been for Susan Rice.  But I point out these issues I have with Harris (before or after her being picked) not to denigrate her, not to turn people against her.  Harris if anything responds to the atmosphere in the moment.  She could very likely be our next vice president.  She would have my support as VP and should have all our support, has mine as a candidate for VP, and deserves our respect for earning this pick on the part of Biden.

To an extent, some of the concerns I have about Harris are mollified by Biden’s confidence in her in selecting her.  At the same time, I am still publishing this not just because I had written most of it before the pick was announced, but because I hope these concerns I have will be shared by others in a way where we push Harris to be her best self, not the disappointing campaigner we saw in 2019 and much better than the performance I saw in the hearing from 2017 I discussed above.

I have 100% confidence that Harris is more than capable of taking the higher road.  Even though I argued recently that Rice had better experience to be a VP, Harris’s experience is still impressive and contains much substance, much to be proud of, and she is both a safer and probably a better bet politically.  It is a sad testament to our current politics that a woman of color so accomplished and so talented would feel the need to play to internet/meme culture so strongly, though Peter Beinart makes a good case defending her in The Atlantic that, like Obama, as a black trailblazer in politics she has had to play it safer, in that article’s case, with her actions on criminal justice in California, actions which have been heavily criticized.  I hope, now that she has bested all but one man to be the second survivor of the Democratic primaries, that she will feel less pressure, feel more freedom, and feel confident enough in her selection by Biden to run more on substance and less on style and seeking viral moments (not that those do not help, but that is my preference as one of her supporters and one who wants to see our politics reelevated).  I hope that, if Biden wins, she can learn from someone like Susan Rice on foreign and security policy, follow Biden’s lead, be a great governing partner, and set herself up to be an amazing president of her own years down the road. 

And that is in part up to us:  it is no longer the Democratic primaries, and a much more moderate, national crowd is her audience; as her supporters or on-the-fence-voters, it is, in part, up to us to telegraph what we want from her, so lets us demand her very best, not clamor for internet gimmicks and viral videos.  I know that my complaints here were mostly about her style and how she operated, but these “little” things, the way you pursue your goals, the norms you respect and those you break, the tenor and tone you set, set all matter… just look at Trump!

Even as I am writing this conclusion, my emotions changed a bit.  Even as someone who was rooting for Susan Rice, I am happy and pleased with Harris (whom I saw as a much better-qualified candidate than Warren, both for president and vice president), and I am genuinely proud of Harris and of her selection by my candidate Joe Biden and my Democratic Party, the historic first woman of color on a major party ticket.  It is sad because of our insane coronavirus pandemic response that we cannot have a live event with a huge crowd welcoming Kamala Harris on stage with Joe Biden: both deserved that, especially Harris.  But that lost moment is the least of the slights and challenges Harris will face going forward.  I am now rooting for Harris, and confident she can help Biden win and govern.  She is immeasurably better than Vice President Pence and even more so (obviously) than President Donald Trump.

The pressure is on, but I hope and am confident that Senator Kamala Harris will rise to the occasion.  We, the people behind her, can help by pushing to keep substance front and center in a campaign that will contain a historic amount of nonsense from Trump, Republicans, the right-wing media, and the Russians.  But together and, yes, with Kamala Harris’s help, we can ensure that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are sworn in on January 20^th, 2021.

See related previous article: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• See also my proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

—Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002)

Eradication

It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War.

In what has been acknowledged by many to be “the single most important triumph of public health in human history,” on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHO’s governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The disease—terrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other disease—may have wiped out 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more.

This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be “eradicated,” so support for the effort was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication, though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s).

For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globe—braving even natural disasters and civil wars—to find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from nature—the first and last disease thus far to suffer that fate—and there has not been a known case since.

In the words of Richard Preston (author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases), those carrying out the campaign

had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.

At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apart—the United States and the Soviet Union—came together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors.

Eventually, smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: America’s CDC in Atlanta and Russia’s Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as I have discussed elsewhere, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively.

By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last year’s NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Preston’s other aforementioned book), would frequently quip:  “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.” 

Weaponization

As I pointed out in my earlier-referenced related piece, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication had a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed in that earlier article.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute.

At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature.

But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox.

Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie.

We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now “Ken Alibek”) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there, and that team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets’ notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strain—known as India-1 or India-1967—back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. 

The K.G.B had used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain.

We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Government’s generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. 

However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes:

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

2020: A Year of Threat Convergences

If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history.

As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed “From Russia with Love” (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two hearts—one colored in the colors Russia’s flag, one in Italy’s—placed on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  “From Russia with Love” was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

But not all was as advertised.

The highly respected Italian daily La Stampa—one of Italy’s oldest newspapers—did some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that “Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy” and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. 

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story “fake news,” making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministry’s attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective.

The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian “aid” effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text).

Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russia’s main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russia’s stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russia’s RChBD forces.

Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russia’s most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assad’s regime as part of Russia’s overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and claiming that the White Helmets—the brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attacks—were staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority.

It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russia’s military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russia’s unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. 

But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putin’s spear in both the Kremlin’s conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandos—Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces—play important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putin’s point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). 

But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program.

The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.

It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic.

We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal government’s organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russia’s own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate.

In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russia’s disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election.

Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowd’s longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a “gift” of an opportunity for the Kremlin.

America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, “it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it”), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscow’s campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of things—from the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet Union—Russia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting America’s dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans’ fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective.

The same organs of disinformation behind Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as I have noted elsewhere, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americans—who are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theories—are convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that “created” the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits “making” the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused.

These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse.

In the midst of Russia’s coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russia—even as a hostile actor—to deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. 

And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russia’s coronavirus response who “fell” out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such “accidents” or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear.

What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlin’s undisclosed biowarfare program.

Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectors—highly unlikely—it is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measures—new vaccines, medicine—against these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of America’s defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood.

The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related research—to which Russia is a signatory—is a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russia’s invasions of Ukraine’s eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research.

A Collective Responsibility to Do Better

The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels.

But the lowest levels are just as important.

We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformation—whether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly disease—is like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interference—or, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwar—or doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. 

Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape.

In her conclusion to her must-read article “Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russia’s unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States:

Much of the public discussion on Russia’s disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isn’t limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is based—including the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russia’s efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify America’s social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russia’s future attacks. 

She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russia’s disinformation and other techniques of division:

The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades.

As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life:

A model to rebuild social capital in America—and strengthen social trust—can feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russia’s attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russia’s destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term.

In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including:

1. Orwell’s legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad)
2. The singular de Tocqueville’s ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy)
3. Amu Chua’s Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart)
4. Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society)
5. The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy)
6. Schoolhouse Rock (the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans)

Professor Rangappa’s cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy:

1. Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win
2. Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
3. Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it
4. Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy
5. Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America
6. Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward

Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers’ vision for America.

Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue.

If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that “we as individuals must be better and do more,” know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term “national security” the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless.

Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himself—eventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitution—when he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in “No. 55,” to be exact:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

In other words, “We the People” must be worthy enough as a people—enough of us individually so that it is true in a collective sense—or this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well.

Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my soon-to-be-unveiled cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be in relation to the first goal, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one.

Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come…

Aieeeee! —
the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer 
who tells the truth — 
                                     it whirls me, oh, 
the storm comes again, the crashing chords!…

Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you 
and the end you see so clearly. I pity you.

—Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

1.) THE WORLD FAILS ON CORONAVIRUS, LED BY AMERICA

Living systems are not like mechanical systems.  Living systems are never in equilibrium.  They are inherently unstable.  They may seem stable, but they’re not.  Everything is moving and changing.  In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

—John Arnold, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

When asked recently “where” we went “wrong” specifically as far as the coronavirus pandemic but also generally, if there was an “exact moment,” journalist Masha Gessen replied by saying “I think there are many moments.  But certainly, our responses, as a nation, to 9-11 and to the financial crisis of 2008, paved the ground for this, as has our persistent disregard for the climate crisis.”

We must hope that, in the long-run, we do not respond to the coronavirus in incredibly self-destructive ways that echo our responses to 9/11 and the other unconventional, asymmetric threats we failed to properly understand and handle, failures I have outlined before. Depressingly, though, the signs are already dire.

One of the most depressing things about this pandemic is that, as an American who had little faith in our leadership or system to significantly mitigate this looming disaster, I looked to countries with far more competent leadership and more centralized and robust health systems than ours to be beacons in the night of this pandemic, especially for democratic countries to beam in this true trial not just for humanity, but Western democracy, which has been teetering of late.  I saw a few slivers of light for effective coronavirus programs so far—South Korea especially above all but also Israel, Germany, plucky Ireland, and, at least through the present and perhaps still to be, Japan—but, overwhelmingly, I saw darkness where I expected light in Europe from technocratic establishments and national health systems that (mostly) did not have buffoons in charge or the gaping holes of America’s health system that this pandemic has displayed all-too glaringly.  Italy, Spain, and France are obvious disasters, along with the Netherlands and the UK (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, led the way with poor choices both personally and as a leader and found himself hospitalized in an intensive care unit; and just look at this thread delving into differences between the UK and Ireland). Even Sweden seems like it could be an example of bad-practice: like the other mentioned countries, it did not take proper precautions for long after it should have.  Some of these countries are regular fountains of inspiration for Americans who expect more from their government, but these nations failed here along with us to varying degrees.  In the absence of traditional U.S. global-level leadership, then, there essentially was no global leadership. 

Much of the developing world has yet to be hard hit, but there is great potential for the tolls there to be devastating.  The terrible government response in Brazil–exemplified by the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro—seems to be setting up a tidal wave of infections, which were recently likely twelve times higher than officially reported numbers.  In Ecuador, a country with little ability to conduct proper testing to determine the full extent of the virus, the death toll recently seemed to be fifteen times higher than what officials there had been able to determine.  If the coronavirus spreads intensely in Africa, the prospects there are also looking quite grim.  In many poorer nations around the world, social distancing is a privilege and a luxury that for a great many is impossible (not even getting into the situation of earlier-discussed refugees).  And already terrible social and economic conditions in many developing nations are only being made exponentially worse by COVID-19, meaning that hunger is now going to be a much larger problem globally, rising to affect 265 million people after factoring in coronavirus, nearly doubling the pre-pandemic figures.  Other sad realities coronavirus will exponentially inflate include, but are hardly limited to, domestic abuse, human trafficking, and suicide.  The threat to the developing world is only exacerbated by the recent inexcusable, despicable, “incredibly stupid,” and needless U.S. announcement that it will halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a global pandemic, a decision that for many in the world’s poorest nations that sorely lack vital resources amounts to a death sentence if that funding is not replaced soon from elsewhere; as if that was not enough, the Trump Administration is seeking to do long-term damage to the WHO beyond just defunding it.

Despite plenty of poor responses globally, that top national leadership in America seems to have stood out in failing miserably is not in serious dispute for anyone attempting objectivity.  This was even obvious fairly early, before most American were concerned, with top government officials warning the president repeatedly in January and February about the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat and bringing it to the attention of the White House’s National Security Council even earlier.  Others outside the current Administration also sounded the alarm early, including former Vice President Joe Biden—the now-clear Democratic presidential nominee-to-be set to challenge the incumbent president for the White House—who even wrote an op-ed published on January 27 warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and how ill-prepared we were to confront it.  As Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made painfully clear, “putting off the decision to go on the offensive against COVID-19–treating a war of necessity as a war of choice–has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.”  In a pandemic in which timing has perhaps been the most important factor or at least as important as any, our leaders at the top sat passively—even stubbornly—and refused to look at the rising viral tsunami heading in our direction, let alone acknowledge it as the hundred-year plague it was.

Even the military has been seriously affected, one notable example being the Navy having to semi-abandon one of our aircraft carriers in mid-deployment, another being that recruitment has been hampered.

And while books could be and articles already have been written that demonstrate America’s failure clearly even for the most fanatically partisan supporters of the current leadership, here will be shared just this excellent, highly informative, regularly updated chart from The Financial Timesthat shows the U.S. is, literally, the worst at “flattening the curve” (the main format has been changed but there is an interactive version of the below chart here that lets you set up your own comparisons):

That phrase “flattening the curve” (or “bending the curve” as a precursor) was only understood by a handful of people a few months ago but is now well-known coronavirus-era lingo for taking collective action to limit the spread and death-toll of the virus, to lower the height of the curve (bend it) over and then keep it from increasing (flattening it) so that our medical systems can better care for those infected (with bending again all the way down after flattening as the endgame). Clearly, our American curve stands out in the above chart as both the most stridently upward-trending arc and the arc that took the longest to be pulled down relative to other nations grappling with serious coronavirus outbreaks over a similar timeframe.  Case/infection-counts are highly problematic for a variety of reasons, but the deaths statistic is far clearer as to its weight, meaning, and finality, the above chart highlighting quite well that statistic and how well countries are at slowing deaths (even if globally across the board there is a serious problem of unintentional undercounting and underattributing deaths from coronavirus, tracking deaths is still far less ambiguous than tracking overall cases/infections). 

So, relatively speaking, despite massive daily disinformation to the contrary, the U.S seems to have done the worst job of flattening the curve of coronavirus deaths out of countries with significant levels of infection that have experienced fighting coronavirus for a similar amount of time, and this would seem to be the case even for allowing for countries like China (from which this pandemic originated) and Russia, which are virtually certainly deliberately underreporting their coronavirus case numbers and deaths and also allowing for serious questions about developing countries with poor means of tracking the virus, as discussed earlier.  And while the U.S. is hardly the worst in terms of deaths per capita, the above chart shows with the available data that it is still the worst of any country with a major outbreak at slowing the level of death (and preventive measures like lockdowns seem collectively to be a much more important variable than population size or density, anyway).

And the chart just takes into account the deaths we know about; there are “almost certainly” Americans dying from coronavirus not being counted as coronavirus-related deaths because of testing issues, reporting issues, and other shortcomings, with this hardly being the situation only in the U.S. 

In the U.S. in particular, the lack of testing has emerged as one of the premier failings regarding coronavirus, making our sense of how many are truly infected by (and, to a lesser extent, dying from) the virus woefully incomplete and greatly hampering our ability to accurately model the spread of the virus.  And this, in turn, makes it very difficult for leaders to plan ahead beyond the short-term.  Especially because of our lack of testing—one of the most crucial aspects of coronavirus response—we are essentially on a ship at night in heavy fog, trying to see what obstacles lie ahead and how to avoid them but unable to see far in front because of that fog and unable to have any solid sense of when the fog will lift or if or when it will return.  Under those conditions, crashing into an iceberg and sinking is far more likely.  A military counterinsurgency analogy is also apt, as not having enough testing is like trying to neuter an insurgency without having intelligence or enough regular patrols to get a lay of the land before, say, sending a major convoy through enemy territory: with few pieces of intelligence and fewer teams gathering intelligence, the chances the enemy can launch a successful ambush on that convoy when it is sent out are far greater than if you had a much larger number of troops getting much more intelligence on the enemy territory.  Intelligence helps to lift the fog of war, then, while testing helps to lift the fog of pandemics.

Considering a detailed, highly-credibly report from last year ranked America, by relatively far, as the best-prepared nation in the world for a pandemic, the failure in U.S. leadership is even more stunningly spectacular and inexcusable; it is like losing a race in which you started ahead of everyone or if you were, say, someone who inherited millions and were already working in a lucrative field (maybe real estate in Manhattan in the 1980s) and then still managed to go bankrupt six times.

In the words of Max Brooks from an interview from late March:

I think that we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from day one.  I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies.  That is not true at all.  We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  No excuse…The knowledge was out.  We knew.  We did not prepare.  This is on us.

…All of this panic could have been prevented if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do before the crisis became a crisis.  Because the way to stop panic is with knowledge, and if the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that.

A friend of mine, Ellen Adair (an actress who played a top senator’s chief of staff in Homeland in its previous season while that universe’s America was facing nontraditional, asymmetric threats similar to the types we are currently facing from Russia), pointed out a specific article from a few years back that saw all too much of this coming: writing in the summer of 2018 for The Atlantic, Ed Yong terrifyingly accurately predicts not only America’s general unpreparedness for a pandemic, but why this current administration would be particularly ill-suited for handling one (his late March, 2020, predictions for how this will end—made when the U.S. outbreak was starting to really pick up steam and yet was still a fraction as bad as it is now—should also be of interest).  While the entire piece from before COVID-19 even existed feels exceedingly current and sickeningly prescient, I felt particular chills reading these words:

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.  Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed.  And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

…Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever.  A nurse who takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated.  A warehouse where protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines.  A line on a budget.  A vote in Congress.  “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  “You need no weak links.”

Right now, we look bad, and the idea of the U.S. leading the world when it cannot lead itself anymore is indeed going to be problematic for many who used to be comfortable with U.S. leadership or, at least, tacitly accepted it.  That does not mean there will be a new world order overnight, but it sure will be harder for not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions or even billions of people to see the U.S. as a leader after our failures with this virus are literally broadcast every day for global public consumption.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around in America, from governors’ mansions to various media outlets, from our very own American culture to ourselves, from individual institutions to local leaders.  One standout in that last group is the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker telling people during the recent controversially-held dangerous April 7^th elections in his state to go outside and vote after he himself worked to stop both extending absentee voting and delaying the election despite the pandemic, saying this to Wisconsinites this while wearing what seems to be a hospital-quality mask, gloves, and gown set.  Dysfunction and division is not just present at the federal level and between states and the federal government, then, but within states, between governors and mayors or others all throughout the country: in South Dakota, there is even a dispute between the governor and Sioux tribal authorities.

But in dire emergencies like this, the national leaders set the tone for the nation as a whole, with many others farther down the totem pole taking their cues from national leadership, none more so than the top national leader, be it a president, prime minister, or king.  And this is the way it should be.  When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor all the way back in 1941, we did not have dozens of regional, state, city, county, and town war policies operating independently from one another: we had a coordinated national effort, and fighting deadly national and global pandemics should be no different.  In the 1940s, we were able to triumph in our finest national hour even as were caught off-guard.  That clearly has not happened with coronavirus, and our “collective” “national” response can be said to be anything but a single one with unity of purpose.

In stunning displays of hubris and lack of preparation, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 famously sent their armies towards Russia in June, months away from the famed Russian winter, with no winter clothing.  Now we can similarly say that, in 2020, the American President allowed our medical first-line responders to face off against coronavirus without nearly enough proper protective gear despite having weeks and months to take proper action to equip them.

We could have approached this coronavirus threat with the mentality of the Starks in Game of Thrones, whose mantra is “winter is coming”: be prepared, get ready, unite, take this threat very seriously, take nothing for granted.  Instead, (spoilers for the show/books in this sentence) our leaders were more like Queen Cersei Lannister in the final seasons: warned repeatedly and with a zombie-wight coming at her face-to-face, she still did not prioritize dealing with the Army of the Dead and, instead, took the crisis as an opportunity to advance her personal and political interests, to settle scores and amass power for herself.

Wherever blame should or should not be placed, this novel (new) coronavirus has brought the world to its knees.  Socially and economically, a huge portion of global activity has come to screeching halt or, at least, a vastly reduced intensity.  Something this sudden on a global scale is new for humanity, and we have no idea even when this pandemic will really end (other than an increasing understanding that the end will probably not be soon), if it will end, how soon other waves will come or how bad those waves will be (they may be worse).  The virus’s national and overall global spread even seems to be increasing several months into the pandemic, not decreasing.  We do not know how many people will die (today, there will be over 350,000 worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S. for just the recorded COVID-19 deaths), except that earlier rosier predictions are now clearly way off the mark.  People are deeply fearful of a deeply uncertain future and what the world will look like after this virus leaves its initial mark.  Thus, this novel coronavirus is not only engendering a sense of fear throughout the human race, but also terror.

But the true terror is to come.

2.) A FAR MORE WORRISOME FUTURE

The death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook.

—Christopher Hitchens, “Terrorism: Notes toward a definition,” Slate, November 18, 2002

Ultimately, humanity might not end with a bang but with a feeble cough.

—Max Brooks, “The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural,” Foreign Policy, April 20, 2020

Despite the examples listed earlier in my brief biowarfare and bioterrorism survey and other acts not included therein, both biological warfare and bioterrorism have been exceedingly rare in history.

One obvious reason for this is that it is hard to ensure that such weapons only infect the enemy and not also the people attempting to do the infecting and their compatriots (Japanese forces, for example, incurred thousands of casualties from their own bioweapons use in China).  In other words, bioagents are so dangerous that they have mostly been felt to be too dangerous to use, especially on a larger scale.

The idea that is supposed to give us comfort is that, in theory, it is not rational to use such weapons.  Yet the country with the largest bioweapons program in history—the Soviet Union—was regarded as insecure, famously concerned with self-preservation and constrained by rational realpolitik as a result, making it fairly predictable.  Sure, the Soviets did not use these weapons, but they still put smallpox in ICBMS and worked to create disease even worse than Mother Nature has been able to create.

Rather than us being able to trust in some solid proof of human rationality—the concept of which, as an overall rule, is highly debatable at best—then, I feel the non-use of biological weapons (similar to the situation with nuclear weapons after 1945) is less a natural product of human wisdom or design but, instead, is a product of the small-N problem, that dilemma of comparative studies and of politics in general: that there is such a small number of relevant actors with bioweapons capabilities that we cannot draw rock-solid proof from those weapons’ non-use that this is non-use some sort of “natural” outcome.  In short, we have likely just “lucked out” biological (and nuclear) weapons have not been used because only a handful of governments have had serious capabilities and the technology was advanced enough to the degree that it was hard to have anyone other than governments and specialized scientists develop them, and of these small samples, only a handful of those had the will to actually pursue these weapons, with an even far smaller number pursuing their use.

As any basic statistics primer would tell you, though, the more actors that develop such capabilities, the greater the chance that such capabilities will eventually be used, with that probability increasing being a mathematical certainty.

And therein lies one of the major current problems.  For, even before now, technology had advanced in recent years to a degree that has made it far easier for governments, organizations, and individuals to research, produce, and deploy these weapons: the internet has made the information on how to do all that more available than ever before; logistics technology have made the ability to obtain and transport necessary materials easier than ever before; and advances in medical science and technology have opened up bioengineering and made creating biolabs easier, by far, than ever before. 

So that “small-N (number)” reality an ally in perpetuating the non-use of bioweapons, that bulwark that so few people had access or ability when it came to what was needed to operationalize bioweapons, has been dramatically weakened in recent years as the breadth of actors with the ability to research, develop, and deploy bioweapons has grown exponentially in recent years with the latest remarkable advances of human civilization. 

The math, then, has changed: that probability that the small-N problem kept so low is now dramatically higher.

Even putting aside the small-N problem being a more likely explanation for general non-use of bioweapons up through the present than our own supposed rationality—even if we accept, in principle, that it is our rationality that is to be credited for the lack of biowarfare and bioterrorism and could take comfort in that—the future still looks comparatively bleak.  And the reason for that is because, relative to the rest of the modern era, we ae seeing an explosion in those swelling the ranks of apocalyptic-minded groups of religiously-motivated violent extremists.  Indeed, our era has seen a sharp increase in the number of terrorists willing to sacrifice themselves, their people, and countless innocent civilians in pursuit of their apocalyptic goals.   Such terrorists are possessed with end-times-oriented mindsets that are hell-bent on accelerating the arrival of the apocalypse, with ISIS as the flagship movement.

If we add to that equation the possibility of governments using newer science—especially genetic engineering and advanced vaccination programs—to perfect a way to immunize their own militaries and people against a weapon they could then feel safe to deploy against others and therefore confident to weaponize and develop, then the threat of bioweapons being used against America and others is only increasing by yet another factor.  If you think this sounds too much like science fiction, recall how a mass biological test on the part of the U.S. government infected the whole San Francisco metropolitan area in 1950 and how the public never learned about it until 1976.  In other words, if another government wanted to immunize its population against something pretty nasty without drawing attention to that nasty something, there are more than a few ways to immunize people without people even knowing they are being immunized (slipping in with other standard immunizations, perhaps adding into the water or food supply, manufacturing a controlled “outbreak” that would give cover for a mass immunization, etc.), especially for a government motivated enough to carry out and plan years in advance a biological first strike with a deadly bioweapon.

But there are other technological multipliers that have yet to have their potential impact be anywhere near realized that make the future look even less comforting.  Technology has just recently been advancing, and is continuing to advance, rapidly in such a way that it is only going to exponentially increase the number of actors able to carry out biological attacks, and that is even in addition to the exponential increase that has already occurred recently.  And perhaps the foremost reason for this coming exponential growth in potential biothreats and actors is a new genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats—that makes it far easier and cheaper to create bioweapons than ever before.

To put this into perspective, some CRISPR kits were selling for under $150 even in 2017.  A United Nations panel even characterized this CRISPR threat as do-it-yourself bioweapons creation (“DIY biological labs”).  One post from a leading bioresearch and development company that has led on, and sells, CISPR tools and material ended by noting CRISPR’s “usefulness for genome locus-specific recruitment of proteins will likely only be limited by our imagination.”  And if we recall that Dream of Scipio quote from the introduction about how man is worse than beast because beasts are constrained by their lack of imagination but men are not, well, that is where this gets truly terrifying.  Indeed, the alarm has been soundly rung by many an expert on the soon-to-be-clear and present danger of this CRISPR technology’s ability to empower those with the most malevolent of imaginations.  We are, then, being presented with a brave new world of bioterrorism.

Thus, the guardrails—supposed or real—that may have offered protection from the use of bioweapons before are simply not as strong as they used to be.  Even if we accept human rationality as a bulwark, some of the biggest increases in terrorism involve suicide attackers and those embracing apocalyptic theology hoping to bring about a final world-ending confrontation, comforted by an ideology that tells them if they die as martyrs fighting for their cause they will ascend to heaven with a special spot waiting for them, with a degree of terrorists and terrorist groups concerned less with temporal self-preservation than at any other time in the modern era.  And whatever their motives, the modern world has not only already made bioweapons more accessible than ever to them, but will also dramatically expand this greater accessibility with the newest CRISPR technology that will itself spread rapidly.  Thus, we have both terrorists increasingly less worried about doing damage to themselves and a far greater number of actors that will be dabbling in bioweapons.

I had earlier discussed Max Boot’s lesson on technology at the end of his book on guerrilla warfare, Invisible Armies (“technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war”), but I left out the second part of his lesson’s heading, “but that may be changing,” to save it for here.  He does not mean the usefulness of technology on our end, either; he is talking about a change in favor of terrorists:

The role of weapons in this type of war [i.e. unconventional] could grow in the future if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. A small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like Brazil or Egypt.  That is a sobering thought.  It suggests that in the future low-intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the world’s leading powers than it has in the past.  And, as we have seen, the problems of the past were substantial and varied.

And the type of weapons which are seeing the most rapid advancement in technology and ease of access are not chemical or nuclear, but biological.

In fact, as Karl Johnson, one veteran of fighting Ebola outbreaks, mentioned over a quarter-century ago:

It’s only a matter of months—years, at most—before people nail down the genes for virulence and airborne transmission in influenza, Ebola, Lassa, you name it.  And then any crackpot with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and a college biology education under his belt could manufacture bugs that would make Ebola look like a walk around the park.

For Max Brooks, “Johnson’s prediction is right around the corner. With a little dark-web information and some secondhand lab equipment, anyone will soon be able to generate do-it-yourself blights in a basement lab and then release them back into the general population.”

Brooks echoes the earlier sentiments expressed herein that public policy attention given to threats posed by nuclear weapons are overemphasized relative those given to biological weapons.  As Brooks writes in Foreign Policy:

Genetic manipulation is the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced because it allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold. Unlike the hypothetical nuclear terrorist whom we’ve spent untold fortunes preparing for but who can’t act without acquiring precious, rare, and heavily guarded fissile material, the biohacker will be able to harvest germs from anywhere.  And unlike the nuclear terrorist, who gets only one shot at destruction, the biohacker’s bomb can copy itself over and over again.

If we look at the present and the future, then, without a doubt, terrorists and governments that have been and are pursuing the research and development of arsenals of bioweapons will only be doing so under even more favorable conditions to their goals as the future unfolds, including the near-future.  For these biowarrior wannabes, they are seeing what just something superflu/superpneumonia-ish like this coronavirus can do and are thinking of the damage and havoc they can wreak with far worse diseases.  And not only them but those who were on the fence about or reluctant to consider pursuing bioweapons programs will be seriously thinking that now.  Because the logical conclusion anyone contemplating biowarfare would draw from our current pandemic is that if coronavirus can do what it is doing now to America and the world, a deliberate, competent bioattack at a certain level could destroy the world as we know it.  We must realize that, to the degree that we are unsettled and shaken by looking at the state of our nation, our enemies are emboldened and more confident in their ability to do us harm.

Just imagine a brand new virus engineered to kill thirty percent—let alone fifty or seventy-five percent—of victims and that incapacitates most of the rest, one that spreads like wildfire, for which we have no immunity and no cure, which could cripple nations in days (not weeks), wiping out some people in key leadership positions along with millions of others, and incapacitating for days or weeks even those that survive.  Imagine the people unleashing such a disease are religious terrorists with apocalyptic death-wishes (plenty of those) or military officials from a government that has developed a secret immunity that only they and their countrymen have.  Imagine, while we are crippled, our enemy then offers the immunity it to allies or potentially new allies in the moment of crises, allowing it to destroy the nations as we know them that it deems enemies, remaking a world order with our successful enemy at the top.  Even staunch allies of ours would be tempted to fold in the face of a weapon for which the only defense comes with joining the new order. 

Think about the decades to come, in a world far more crowded where living space will literally be an issue, imagine an invasion by troops immune to the virus; with our leaders, government, and society—including the military—largely wiped out or crippled by the disease, how would an effective resistance—military or medical—to a simultaneous military and viral invasion be able to be mounted in the face of an organized enemy largely escaping the effects of such a disease?  And if the enemy offers immunity for a disease for which we have no cure and have no hope of dealing with medically in time in exchange for surrender, if the choice is between surrender and death, what happens to us and America as we know it?  The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors did not plan to use the smallpox virus as a biological weapon to mostly wipe out the mighty armies of the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their societies to their knees with it in the span of a blink of a historical eye, but smallpox obliged anyway, and the Spanish wiped those Empires easily from the face of the earth as a result.  The same devastating effects with the right cocktail of virus can happen today.

One case study shows how a just single person can easily cause over a dozen new coronavirus infections; imagine how few infected people would be required to mass-transmit a far worse virus like the hypothetical engineered one described a few paragraphs above. 

Now consider that out current coronavirus has already weakened and damaged democracy in some places —including in the U.S.—pushed it to the brink in others, and, at least in the case of Hungary, seems to have destroyed it.  And that does not even get to authoritarians and the authoritarian-leaning, for whom the virus has been an excellent excuse to crack down on freedoms.

The simple truth is, we are not prepared even for a naturally occurring pandemic like coronavirus, let alone a worse one than coronavirus, let alone even more so bioagents designed to as a weapon by our human enemies to kill us and crush our society.

How we appear now matters to our enemies, and not only was the U.S. caught off-guard, its overall response has exposed our weaknesses to the world (and hopefully ourselves).  Whether we learn from this experience and patch up our weaknesses before the next major threat—natural or man-made or a sick combination of both—remains to be seen.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means. In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. Thus, as our current coronavirus pandemic has many implications for bioterrorism and biowarfare, so, too, should the below analysis offer much food for thought on biodefense in the coronavirus era.

1.) A Brief History of America in Unconventional, Asymmetric Conflict

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, whether they were white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960s.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

2.) UNDERSTANDING OUR FAILURE AGAINST NONTRADITIONAL THREATS AND HOW THAT RELATES TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often be too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

Conclusion

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.  You can practically substitute “coronavirus” for “Iraq” or “Vietnam” and the same analysis would often apply.

When confronting potentially difficult and long struggles, yes, there is something to be said for optimism and a can-do spirit, but not being straight-up with the American people about the potential costs, pitfalls, and durations of major threats—whether pandemics or insurgencies—sets America up to have little appetite or commitment when things turn out much tougher than advertised and also erodes our government’s overall credibility and our trust in, and willingness to listen to, it.  These combine to set us up for failure and far more painful struggles because we do not set ourselves up with the right approach in the beginning, and, as we know with so much in life, starting off on the wrong foot only makes everything that comes after that much more difficult.  False hope births a false sense of security and only makes us more vulnerable, whether we are talking about our soldiers in Iraq or our citizens being out in public catching coronavirus, unafraid of a spreading pandemic because leaders did not signify the appropriate level of concern people should have by not ordering lockdowns early.

Now, because of early missteps, our experience with COVID-19 is going to look more like the Iraq War than the Gulf War.  Therefore, as we try to overcome this threat, understanding our past missteps and failures against unconventional, asymmetric threats is crucial.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This bring us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

In the end, the novel-coronavirus should be a wakeup call for a number of reasons.  First, we can consider this something of a dry run for how we would handle a deliberate bioattack with even a mildly deadly infectious disease (and know that we failed and do must do much better).  We can also think of this as a wakeup call for the need to prepare far more for biodefense, either a bioterrorist attack or an attack launched with a bioweapon from a hostile state, because it is certain that those considering using bioweapons will take much hope and inspiration from the devastation COVID-19 has visited upon us, and even those on the fence will likely be inspired to dabble more with bioweapons.  Considering the dark history of bioweapons, biowarfare, and bioterrorism even before the coronavirus era, and considering the rapidly advancing technology that makes bioweapons research and development ever more accessible, we cannot continue with our current biodefense postures in a world where coronavirus is clearly a game-changer.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26, 2020

This is a very complex, layered exploration, but patience in taking the time to go through these components to see how they fit together in the end will be rewarded. By looking at the history of biowarfare and bioterrorism, then looking at the history of our own failures at unconventional and asymmetric warfare and the patterns those failures reveal, we lay the groundwork for understanding both why the coronavirus pandemic is very similar to unconventional, asymmetric threats and why America has had such a spectacularly bad response to the coronavirus relative to many other countries. We can then understand how, even more terrifyingly, the coronavirus era has made bioweapons both more attractive to our enemies and more likely to be used by them, all this on top of the development of recent groundbreaking technology destroying so many barriers to making bioweapons and acquiring the material needed to do so. After that, we can understand how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our weaknesses in ways that demonstrate how existentially vulnerable we are to anything worse, be it a natural pandemic or a man-made bioassault. Finally, we can see in the epilogue how all this comes together, including how history, coronavirus, and political warfare during the 2020 election are creating a true test for our democracy, our society, and our citizens, and how not only systemic structural shifts are necessary to protect our people and our democracy from these threats, but cultural and societal ones, too.

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

I.) A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This brings us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

Having looked at the unconventional bioweapons ambitions arrayed against us, it is now time to look at America’s sad overall history with unconventional threats to get a sense of how our performance can inform our response to current and future unconventional threats, including from pandemics and bioweapons.

II.) America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means.  In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. 

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, them whether white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind their asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, seethe U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

III.) Understanding Our Failure Against Nontraditional Threats and How That Relates to the COVID-19 Pandemic

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.

IV.) The World Fails on Coronavirus, Led by America

Living systems are not like mechanical systems.  Living systems are never in equilibrium.  They are inherently unstable.  They may seem stable, but they’re not.  Everything is moving and changing.  In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

—John Arnold, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

When asked recently “where” we went “wrong” specifically as far as the coronavirus pandemic but also generally, if there  was an “exact moment,” journalist Masha Gessen replied by saying “I think there are many moments.  But certainly, our responses, as a nation, to 9-11 and to the financial crisis of 2008, paved the ground for this, as has our persistent disregard for the climate crisis.”

We must hope that, in the long-run, we do not respond to the coronavirus in incredibly self-destructive ways that echo our responses to 9/11 and the other unconventional, asymmetric threats we failed to properly understand and handle as outlined above. Depressingly, though, the signs are already dire.

One of the most depressing things about this pandemic is that, as an American who had little faith in our leadership or system to significantly mitigate this looming disaster, I looked to countries with far more competent leadership and more centralized and robust health systems than ours to be beacons in the night of this pandemic, especially for democratic countries to beam in this true trial not just for humanity, but Western democracy, which has been teetering of late.  I saw a few slivers of light for effective coronavirus programs so far—South Korea especially above all but also Israel, Germany, plucky Ireland, and, at least through the present and perhaps still to be, Japan—but, overwhelmingly, I saw darkness where I expected light in Europe from technocratic establishments and national health systems that (mostly) did not have buffoons in charge or the gaping holes of America’s health system that this pandemic has displayed all-too glaringly.  Italy, Spain, and France are obvious disasters, along with the Netherlands and the UK (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, led the way with poor choices both personally and as a leader and found himself hospitalized in an intensive care unit; and just look at this thread delving into differences between the UK and Ireland). Even Sweden seems like it could be an example of bad-practice: like the other mentioned countries, it did not take proper precautions for long after it should have.  Some of these countries are regular fountains of inspiration for Americans who expect more from their government, but these nations failed here along with us to varying degrees.  In the absence of traditional U.S. global-level leadership, then, there essentially was no global leadership. 

Much of the developing world has yet to be hard hit, but there is great potential for the tolls there to be devastating.  The terrible government response in Brazil–exemplified by the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro—seems to be setting up a tidal wave of infections, which were recently likely twelve times higher than officially reported numbers.  In Ecuador, a country with little ability to conduct proper testing to determine the full extent of the virus, the death toll recently seemed to be fifteen times higher than what officials there had been able to determine.  If the coronavirus spreads intensely in Africa, the prospects there are also looking quite grim.  In many poorer nations around the world, social distancing is a privilege and a luxury that for a great many is impossible (not even getting into the situation of earlier-discussed refugees).  And already terrible social and economic conditions in many developing nations are only being made exponentially worse by COVID-19, meaning that hunger is now going to be a much larger problem globally, rising to affect 265 million people after factoring in coronavirus, nearly doubling the pre-pandemic figures.  Other sad realities coronavirus will exponentially inflate include, but are hardly limited to, domestic abuse, human trafficking, and suicide.  The threat to the developing world is only exacerbated by the recent inexcusable, despicable, “incredibly stupid,” and needless U.S. announcement that it will halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a global pandemic, a decision that for many in the world’s poorest nations that sorely lack vital resources amounts to a death sentence if that funding is not replaced soon from elsewhere; as if that was not enough, the Trump Administration is seeking to do long-term damage to the WHO beyond just defunding it.

Despite plenty of poor responses globally, that top national leadership in America seems to have stood out in failing miserably is not in serious dispute for anyone attempting objectivity.  This was even obvious fairly early, before most American were concerned, with top government officials warning the president repeatedly in January and February about the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat and bringing it to the attention of the White House’s National Security Council even earlier.  Others outside the current Administration also sounded the alarm early, including former Vice President Joe Biden—the now-clear Democratic presidential nominee-to-be set to challenge the incumbent president for the White House—who even wrote an op-ed published on January 27 warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and how ill-prepared we were to confront it.  As Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made painfully clear, “putting off the decision to go on the offensive against COVID-19–treating a war of necessity as a war of choice–has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.”  In a pandemic in which timing has perhaps been the most important factor or at least as important as any, our leaders at the top sat passively—even stubbornly—and refused to look at the rising viral tsunami heading in our direction, let alone acknowledge it as the hundred-year plague it was.

Even the military has been seriously affected, one notable example being the Navy having to semi-abandon one of our aircraft carriers in mid-deployment, another being that recruitment has been hampered.

And while books could be and articles already have been written that demonstrate America’s failure clearly even for the most fanatically partisan supporters of the current leadership, here will be shared just this excellent, highly informative, regularly updated chart from The Financial Timesthat shows the U.S. is, literally, the worst at “flattening the curve” (the main format has been changed but there is an interactive version of the below chart here that lets you set up your own comparisons):

That phrase “flattening the curve” (or “bending the curve” as a precursor) was only understood by a handful of people a few months ago but is now well-known coronavirus-era lingo for taking collective action to limit the spread and death-toll of the virus, to lower the height of the curve (bend it) over and then keep it from increasing (flattening it) so that our medical systems can better care for those infected (with bending again all the way down after flattening as the endgame). Clearly, our American curve stands out in the above chart as both the most stridently upward-trending arc and the arc that took the longest to be pulled down relative to other nations grappling with serious coronavirus outbreaks over a similar timeframe.  Case/infection-counts are highly problematic for a variety of reasons, but the deaths statistic is far clearer as to its weight, meaning, and finality, the above chart highlighting quite well that statistic and how well countries are at slowing deaths (even if globally across the board there is a serious problem of unintentional undercounting and underattributing deaths from coronavirus, tracking deaths is still far less ambiguous than tracking overall cases/infections). 

So, relatively speaking, despite massive daily disinformation to the contrary, the U.S seems to have done the worst job of flattening the curve of coronavirus deaths out of countries with significant levels of infection that have experienced fighting coronavirus for a similar amount of time, and this would seem to be the case even for allowing for countries like China (from which this pandemic originated) and Russia, which are virtually certainly deliberately underreporting their coronavirus case numbers and deaths and also allowing for serious questions about developing countries with poor means of tracking the virus, as discussed earlier.  And while the U.S. is hardly the worst in terms of deaths per capita, the above chart shows with the available data that it is still the worst of any country with a major outbreak at slowing the level of death (and preventive measures like lockdowns seem collectively to be a much more important variable than population size or density, anyway).

And the chart just takes into account the deaths we know about; there are “almost certainly” Americans dying from coronavirus not being counted as coronavirus-related deaths because of testing issues, reporting issues, and other shortcomings, with this hardly being the situation only in the U.S. 

In the U.S. in particular, the lack of testing has emerged as one of the premier failings regarding coronavirus, making our sense of how many are truly infected by (and, to a lesser extent, dying from) the virus woefully incomplete and greatly hampering our ability to accurately model the spread of the virus.  And this, in turn, makes it very difficult for leaders to plan ahead beyond the short-term.  Especially because of our lack of testing—one of the most crucial aspects of coronavirus response—we are essentially on a ship at night in heavy fog, trying to see what obstacles lie ahead and how to avoid them but unable to see far in front because of that fog and unable to have any solid sense of when the fog will lift or if or when it will return.  Under those conditions, crashing into an iceberg and sinking is far more likely.  A military counterinsurgency analogy is also apt, as not having enough testing is like trying to neuter an insurgency without having intelligence or enough regular patrols to get a lay of the land before, say, sending a major convoy through enemy territory: with few pieces of intelligence and fewer teams gathering intelligence, the chances the enemy can launch a successful ambush on that convoy when it is sent out are far greater than if you had a much larger number of troops getting much more intelligence on the enemy territory.  Intelligence helps to lift the fog of war, then, while testing helps to lift the fog of pandemics.

Considering a detailed, highly-credibly report from last year ranked America, by relatively far, as the best-prepared nation in the world for a pandemic, the failure in U.S. leadership is even more stunningly spectacular and inexcusable; it is like losing a race in which you started ahead of everyone or if you were, say, someone who inherited millions and were already working in a lucrative field (maybe real estate in Manhattan in the 1980s) and then still managed to go bankrupt six times.

In the words of Max Brooks from another interview, this one from late March:

I think that we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from day one.  I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies.  That is not true at all.  We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  No excuse…The knowledge was out.  We knew.  We did not prepare.  This is on us.

…All of this panic could have been prevented if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do before the crisis became a crisis.  Because the way to stop panic is with knowledge, and if the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that.

A friend of mine, Ellen Adair (an actress who played a top senator’s chief of staff in Homeland in its previous season while that universe’s America was facing nontraditional, asymmetric threats similar to the types we are currently facing from Russia), pointed out a specific article from a few years back that saw all too much of this coming: writing in the summer of 2018 for The Atlantic, Ed Yong terrifyingly accurately predicts not only America’s general unpreparedness for a pandemic, but why this current administration would be particularly ill-suited for handling one (his late March, 2020, predictions for how this will end—made when the U.S. outbreak was starting to really pick up steam and yet was still a fraction as bad as it is now—should also be of interest).  While the entire piece from before COVID-19 even existed feels exceedingly current and sickeningly prescient, I felt particular chills reading these words:

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.  Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed.  And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

…Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever.  A nurse who takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated.  A warehouse where protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines.  A line on a budget.  A vote in Congress.  “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  “You need no weak links.”

Right now, we look bad, and the idea of the U.S. leading the world when it cannot lead itself anymore is indeed going to be problematic for many who used to be comfortable with U.S. leadership or, at least, tacitly accepted it.  That does not mean there will be a new world order overnight, but it sure will be harder for not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions or even billions of people to see the U.S. as a leader after our failures with this virus are literally broadcast every day for global public consumption.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around in America, from governors’ mansions to various media outlets, from our very own American culture to ourselves, from individual institutions to local leaders.  One standout in that last group is the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker telling people during the recent controversially-held dangerous April 7^th elections in his state to go outside and vote after he himself worked to stop both extending absentee voting and delaying the election despite the pandemic, saying this to Wisconsinites this while wearing what seems to be a hospital-quality mask, gloves, and gown set.  Dysfunction and division is not just present at the federal level and between states and the federal government, then, but within states, between governors and mayors or others all throughout the country: in South Dakota, there is even a dispute between the governor and Sioux tribal authorities.

But in dire emergencies like this, the national leaders set the tone for the nation as a whole, with many others farther down the totem pole taking their cues from national leadership, none more so than the top national leader, be it a president, prime minister, or king.  And this is the way it should be.  When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor all the way back in 1941, we did not have dozens of regional, state, city, county, and town war policies operating independently from one another: we had a coordinated national effort, and fighting deadly national and global pandemics should be no different.  In the 1940s, we were able to triumph in our finest national hour even as were caught off-guard.  That clearly has not happened with coronavirus, and our “collective” “national” response can be said to be anything but a single one with unity of purpose.

In stunning displays of hubris and lack of preparation, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 famously sent their armies towards Russia in June, months away from the famed Russian winter, with no winter clothing.  Now we can similarly say that, in 2020, the American President allowed our medical first-line responders to face off against coronavirus without nearly enough proper protective gear despite having weeks and months to take proper action to equip them.

We could have approached this coronavirus threat with the mentality of the Starks in Game of Thrones, whose mantra is “winter is coming”: be prepared, get ready, unite, take this threat very seriously, take nothing for granted.  Instead, (spoilers for the show/books in this sentence) our leaders were more like Queen Cersei Lannister in the final seasons: warned repeatedly and with a zombie-wight coming at her face-to-face, she still did not prioritize dealing with the Army of the Dead and, instead, took the crisis as an opportunity to advance her personal and political interests, to settle scores and amass power for herself.

Wherever blame should or should not be placed, this novel (new) coronavirus has brought the world to its knees.  Socially and economically, a huge portion of global activity has come to screeching halt or, at least, a vastly reduced intensity.  Something this sudden on a global scale is new for humanity, and we have no idea even when this pandemic will really end (other than an increasing understanding that the end will probably not be soon), if it will end, how soon other waves will come or how bad those waves will be (they may be worse).  The virus’s national and overall global spread even seems to be increasing several months into the pandemic, not decreasing.  We do not know how many people will die (today, there will be over 350,000 worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S. for just the recorded COVID-19 deaths), except that earlier rosier predictions are now clearly way off the mark.  People are deeply fearful of a deeply uncertain future and what the world will look like after this virus leaves its initial mark.  Thus, this novel coronavirus is not only engendering a sense of fear throughout the human race, but also terror.

But the true terror is to come.

V.) A Far More Worrisome Future

The death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook.

—Christopher Hitchens, “Terrorism: Notes toward a definition,” Slate, November 18, 2002

Ultimately, humanity might not end with a bang but with a feeble cough.

—Max Brooks, “The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural,” Foreign Policy, April 20, 2020

Despite the examples listed earlier in our brief biowarfare and bioterrorism survey and other acts not included therein, both biological warfare and bioterrorism have been exceedingly rare in history.

One obvious reason for this is that it is hard to ensure that such weapons only infect the enemy and not also the people attempting to do the infecting and their compatriots (Japanese forces, for example, incurred thousands of casualties from their own bioweapons use in China).  In other words, bioagents are so dangerous that they have mostly been felt to be too dangerous to use, especially on a larger scale.

The idea that is supposed to give us comfort is that, in theory, it is not rational to use such weapons.  Yet the country with the largest bioweapons program in history—the Soviet Union—was regarded as insecure, famously concerned with self-preservation and constrained by rational realpolitik as a result, making it fairly predictable.  Sure, the Soviets did not use these weapons, but they still put smallpox in ICBMS and worked to create disease even worse than Mother Nature has been able to create.

Rather than us being able to trust in some solid proof of human rationality—the concept of which, as an overall rule, is highly debatable at best—then, I feel the non-use of biological weapons (similar to the situation with nuclear weapons after 1945) is less a natural product of human wisdom or design but, instead, is a product of the small-N problem, that dilemma of comparative studies and of politics in general: that there is such a small number of relevant actors with bioweapons capabilities that we cannot draw rock-solid proof from those weapons’ non-use that this is non-use some sort of “natural” outcome.  In short, we have likely just “lucked out” biological (and nuclear) weapons have not been used because only a handful of governments have had serious capabilities and the technology was advanced enough to the degree that it was hard to have anyone other than governments and specialized scientists develop them, and of these small samples, only a handful of those had the will to actually pursue these weapons, with an even far smaller number pursuing their use.

As any basic statistics primer would tell you, though, the more actors that develop such capabilities, the greater the chance that such capabilities will eventually be used, with that probability increasing being a mathematical certainty.

And therein lies one of the major current problems.  For, even before now, technology had advanced in recent years to a degree that has made it far easier for governments, organizations, and individuals to research, produce, and deploy these weapons: the internet has made the information on how to do all that more available than ever before; logistics technology have made the ability to obtain and transport necessary materials easier than ever before; and advances in medical science and technology have opened up bioengineering and made creating biolabs easier, by far, than ever before. 

So that “small-N (number)” reality an ally in perpetuating the non-use of bioweapons, that bulwark that so few people had access or ability when it came to what was needed to operationalize bioweapons, has been dramatically weakened in recent years as the breadth of actors with the ability to research, develop, and deploy bioweapons has grown exponentially in recent years with the latest remarkable advances of human civilization. 

The math, then, has changed: that probability that the small-N problem kept so low is now dramatically higher.

Even putting aside the small-N problem being a more likely explanation for general non-use of bioweapons up through the present than our own supposed rationality—even if we accept, in principle, that it is our rationality that is to be credited for the lack of biowarfare and bioterrorism and could take comfort in that—the future still looks comparatively bleak.  And the reason for that is because, relative to the rest of the modern era, we ae seeing an explosion in those swelling the ranks of apocalyptic-minded groups of religiously-motivated violent extremists.  Indeed, our era has seen a sharp increase in the number of terrorists willing to sacrifice themselves, their people, and countless innocent civilians in pursuit of their apocalyptic goals.   Such terrorists are possessed with end-times-oriented mindsets that are hell-bent on accelerating the arrival of the apocalypse, with ISIS as the flagship movement.

If we add to that equation the possibility of governments using newer science—especially genetic engineering and advanced vaccination programs—to perfect a way to immunize their own militaries and people against a weapon they could then feel safe to deploy against others and therefore confident to weaponize and develop, then the threat of bioweapons being used against America and others is only increasing by yet another factor.  If you think this sounds too much like science fiction, recall how a mass biological test on the part of the U.S. government infected the whole San Francisco metropolitan area in 1950 and how the public never learned about it until 1976.  In other words, if another government wanted to immunize its population against something pretty nasty without drawing attention to that nasty something, there are more than a few ways to immunize people without people even knowing they are being immunized (slipping in with other standard immunizations, perhaps adding into the water or food supply, manufacturing a controlled “outbreak” that would give cover for a mass immunization, etc.), especially for a government motivated enough to carry out and plan years in advance a biological first strike with a deadly bioweapon.

But there are other technological multipliers that have yet to have their potential impact be anywhere near realized that make the future look even less comforting.  Technology has just recently been advancing, and is continuing to advance, rapidly in such a way that it is only going to exponentially increase the number of actors able to carry out biological attacks, and that is even in addition to the exponential increase that has already occurred recently.  And perhaps the foremost reason for this coming exponential growth in potential biothreats and actors is a new genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats—that makes it far easier and cheaper to create bioweapons than ever before.

To put this into perspective, some CRISPR kits were selling for under $150 even in 2017.  A United Nations panel even characterized this CRISPR threat as do-it-yourself bioweapons creation (“DIY biological labs”).  One post from a leading bioresearch and development company that has led on, and sells, CISPR tools and material ended by noting CRISPR’s “usefulness for genome locus-specific recruitment of proteins will likely only be limited by our imagination.”  And if we recall that Dream of Scipio quote from the introduction about how man is worse than beast because beasts are constrained by their lack of imagination but men are not, well, that is where this gets truly terrifying.  Indeed, the alarm has been soundly rung by many an expert on the soon-to-be-clear and present danger of this CRISPR technology’s ability to empower those with the most malevolent of imaginations.  We are, then, being presented with a brave new world of bioterrorism.

Thus, the guardrails—supposed or real—that may have offered protection from the use of bioweapons before are simply not as strong as they used to be.  Even if we accept human rationality as a bulwark, some of the biggest increases in terrorism involve suicide attackers and those embracing apocalyptic theology hoping to bring about a final world-ending confrontation, comforted by an ideology that tells them if they die as martyrs fighting for their cause they will ascend to heaven with a special spot waiting for them, with a degree of terrorists and terrorist groups concerned less with temporal self-preservation than at any other time in the modern era.  And whatever their motives, the modern world has not only already made bioweapons more accessible than ever to them, but will also dramatically expand this greater accessibility with the newest CRISPR technology that will itself spread rapidly.  Thus, we have both terrorists increasingly less worried about doing damage to themselves and a far greater number of actors that will be dabbling in bioweapons.

I had earlier discussed Max Boot’s lesson on technology at the end of his book Invisible Armies (“technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war”), but I left out the second part of his lesson’s heading, “but that may be changing,” to save it for here.  He does not mean the usefulness of technology on our end, either; he is talking about a change in favor of terrorists:

The role of weapons in this type of war [i.e. unconventional] could grow in the future if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. A small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like Brazil or Egypt.  That is a sobering thought.  It suggests that in the future low-intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the world’s leading powers than it has in the past.  And, as we have seen, the problems of the past were substantial and varied.

And the type of weapons which are seeing the most rapid advancement in technology and ease of access are not chemical or nuclear, but biological.

In fact, as Karl Johnson, one veteran of fighting Ebola outbreaks, mentioned over a quarter-century ago:

It’s only a matter of months—years, at most—before people nail down the genes for virulence and airborne transmission in influenza, Ebola, Lassa, you name it.  And then any crackpot with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and a college biology education under his belt could manufacture bugs that would make Ebola look like a walk around the park.

For Max Brooks, “Johnson’s prediction is right around the corner. With a little dark-web information and some secondhand lab equipment, anyone will soon be able to generate do-it-yourself blights in a basement lab and then release them back into the general population.”

Brooks echoes the earlier sentiments expressed herein that public policy attention given to threats posed by nuclear weapons are overemphasized relative those given to biological weapons.  As Brooks writes in Foreign Policy:

Genetic manipulation is the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced because it allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold. Unlike the hypothetical nuclear terrorist whom we’ve spent untold fortunes preparing for but who can’t act without acquiring precious, rare, and heavily guarded fissile material, the biohacker will be able to harvest germs from anywhere.  And unlike the nuclear terrorist, who gets only one shot at destruction, the biohacker’s bomb can copy itself over and over again.

If we look at the present and the future, then, without a doubt, terrorists and governments that have been and are pursuing the research and development of arsenals of bioweapons will only be doing so under even more favorable conditions to their goals as the future unfolds, including the near-future.  For these biowarrior wannabes, they are seeing what just something superflu/superpneumonia-ish like this coronavirus can do and are thinking of the damage and havoc they can wreak with far worse diseases.  And not only them but those who were on the fence about or reluctant to consider pursuing bioweapons programs will be seriously thinking that now.  Because the logical conclusion anyone contemplating biowarfare would draw from our current pandemic is that if coronavirus can do what it is doing now to America and the world, a deliberate, competent bioattack at a certain level could destroy the world as we know it.  We must realize that, to the degree that we are unsettled and shaken by looking at the state of our nation, our enemies are emboldened and more confident in their ability to do us harm.

Just imagine a brand new virus engineered to kill thirty percent—let alone fifty or seventy-five percent—of victims and that incapacitates most of the rest, one that spreads like wildfire, for which we have no immunity and no cure, which could cripple nations in days (not weeks), wiping out some people in key leadership positions along with millions of others, and incapacitating for days or weeks even those that survive.  Imagine the people unleashing such a disease are religious terrorists with apocalyptic death-wishes (plenty of those) or military officials from a government that has developed a secret immunity that only they and their countrymen have.  Imagine, while we are crippled, our enemy then offers the immunity it to allies or potentially new allies in the moment of crises, allowing it to destroy the nations as we know them that it deems enemies, remaking a world order with our successful enemy at the top.  Even staunch allies of ours would be tempted to fold in the face of a weapon for which the only defense comes with joining the new order. 

Think about the decades to come, in a world far more crowded where living space will literally be an issue, imagine an invasion by troops immune to the virus; with our leaders, government, and society—including the military—largely wiped out or crippled by the disease, how would an effective resistance—military or medical—to a simultaneous military and viral invasion be able to be mounted in the face of an organized enemy largely escaping the effects of such a disease?  And if the enemy offers immunity for a disease for which we have no cure and have no hope of dealing with medically in time in exchange for surrender, if the choice is between surrender and death, what happens to us and America as we know it?  The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors did not plan to use the smallpox virus as a biological weapon to mostly wipe out the mighty armies of the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their societies to their knees with it in the span of a blink of a historical eye, but smallpox obliged anyway, and the Spanish wiped those Empires easily from the face of the earth as a result.  The same devastating effects with the right cocktail of virus can happen today.

One case study shows how a just single person can easily cause over a dozen new coronavirus infections; imagine how few infected people would be required to mass-transmit a far worse virus like the hypothetical engineered one described a few paragraphs above. 

Now consider that out current coronavirus has already weakened and damaged democracy in some places —including in the U.S.—pushed it to the brink in others, and, at least in the case of Hungary, seems to have destroyed it.  And that does not even get to authoritarians and the authoritarian-leaning, for whom the virus has been an excellent excuse to crack down on freedoms.

The simple truth is, we are not prepared even for a naturally occurring pandemic like coronavirus, let alone a worse one than coronavirus, let alone even more so bioagents designed to as a weapon by our human enemies to kill us and crush our society.

How we appear now matters to our enemies, and not only was the U.S. caught off-guard, its overall response has exposed our weaknesses to the world (and hopefully ourselves).

VI.) The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

—George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State/Underlying Conditions,” The Atlantic, June 2020 issue preview

I met fellow American Coco Tang years ago in Amman, Jordan, while she was on a Fulbright.  When not working as a consultant, she moonlights as a medic in some of the world’s worst hotspots.  Her postings have found her supporting as a medic both Iraqi Special Forces during the battle of Mosul against ISIS and OSCE patrols in Eastern Ukraine, working in refugee camps in Syria and Bangladesh, working in a clinic in Afghanistan, treating vulnerable women in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, assessing local health in Ethiopia, and working in Sierra Leone as part of the Ebola response there.  She goes to some of the most dangerous places in the world to offer medical support, often in extreme humanitarian and medical emergencies.

And now she finds herself offering medical support in New York City during a pandemic, deployed by a medical company to the front lines in the war against COVID-19 here at home.

“When I worked in Iraq or Syria, there was an expectation of austerity. When you work in NYC, the austerity feels surreal.  Experiencing it in a place like NYC reminds me that COVID, in a lot of ways, is a great equalizer.”

That is what makes bioweapons as a weapon of war or terrorism so terrifying to powerful countries like America: it reduces the conventional operational planes in a way that is so unconventional and asymmetric that its extreme asymmetry rips the powerful far from their accustomed, advantaged positions.  

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just recently remarked that the U.S. coronavirus response makes it look like “like a third-world country.”  Tang has experienced a similar feeling in New York: “People expect pandemics to be a third-world problem. People expect problems like PPE [personal protective equipment] shortages to be a third-world problem.”  And, yet, here she was, grappling with serious equipment shortages during a pandemic here the U.S., and not in Appalachia, but in New York City, in Manhattan.  “COVID exposes that we aren’t any better than those countries we always look down on.  That at the end of the day, America is just a homeless person wearing fancy clothes.”

Tang was not even being asked about bioweapons when she made that statement, but she still nailed one of the central issues in biowarfare and unconventional warfare and how COVID-19 relates to it.  As mentioned earlier, Max Boot wrote that “all guerrilla and terrorist tactics…are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.”  Bioweapons just do this on a deeper, more frightening scale, and coronavirus is showing us that natural pandemics can have the same effect.  In many ways, our current pandemic is a preview of a major bioweapons attack, and it has exposed us as woefully unprepared, with our government having been shown to be unable to protect us, thought of by many to be the primary role of government.  It could have, but it did not.  Americans’ faith in institutions has already been crumbling for some time, and now that level of faith will be even lower.

Feeling the need to explain why she was writing her article in March for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum made her case in stark terms that reflected Tang’s imagery:

I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism.  This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

…The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.

George Packer also wrote for The Atlantic, echoing Tang, Applebaum, and Stiglitz in a pieced titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” with the lead “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”  Packer does not hold back as he opens his article’s body:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.  Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.  We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.  It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective.  The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

…With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter.

Explaining how we got to this state, Packer writes that “all the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.”  Not only are we losing this war, this war is forcing us to see our national ugliness by relentlessly shining a spotlight onto it and forcing us to look nonstop.  Packer, again, puts it eloquently: “If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half.  Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

In periods of pestilence, there is a tendency for those fault lines to be racial, ethnic, and religious, with those types of hatreds being only too eagerly released and minority groups being blamed for the outbreaks.

Just to name one foreign example for today, in Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi’s India, anti-Islamic bigotry is becoming mixed up in the country’s response to coronavirus.

If we go back in time, ignorant and/or covetous Christians in fourteenth-century Europe blamed Jews for the Black Death and massacred many thousands of them across the continent, destroying whole communities and ethnically cleansing Jews from entire regions (just in Mainz alone, over 6,000 Jews perished from a plague-inspired pogrom in 1349).  If we fast-forward to today, Jews are also being blamed in very anti-Semitic fashion by a range of extremists around the world (including in America) for unleashing coronavirus as some sort of organized plot, bringing down “God’s” vengeance in the form of the virus, or of profiting off the pandemic (or a combination of these); billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros is even frequently accused of creating the virus.

In the U.S., Asian-Americans and Asians are also being attacked—including physically—and blamed for the virus “because” of the virus’s Chinese origin, with anti-Asian hate crimes very much on the rise, yet the federal government is not being proactive in pushing back against this hate, with problematic language coming from the White House itself only adding fuel to the fire.

There is also the persistent racism and pervasive inequality that long-plagued American society, with socioeconomic status, harsher living and working conditions, and unequal access to quality healthcare experienced disproportionately by certain groups of people contributing to their having chronic health issues that make the virus more serious and more deadly for them than for members of more advantaged communities.  Inequality also makes it far harder for some disadvantaged groups to take appropriate actions to protect themselves; in the words of Charles Blow writing for The New York Times, “Staying at home is a privilege.  Social distancing is a privilege.  The people who can’t must make terrible choices: Stay home and risk starvation or go to work and risk contagion.”  Problems of race, ethnicity, and class are only made worse by coronavirus.

In particular, the inequalities that have long been inflicted upon African-Americans have been resulting in incredibly disproportionately high deaths and serious infections from COVID-19 for African-Americans.  Just in Chicago, by the end of the first week of April, African-Americans had accounted for seventy percent of COVID-19 deaths even though they just made up thirty percent of the population.  And Chicago is hardly alone, with major disparities for black Americans in terms of coronavirus being the norm across the country.

Other groups in America are also suffering disproportionately from this pandemic.  Long-neglected Native Americans are also particularly vulnerable and experiencing extremely high rates of coronavirus problems.  Latinos are also quite disproportionately affected by COVID-19.  And lower-income people of all backgrounds have relatively borne the brunt of not only the virus itself, but also the massive economic harm inflicted by the pandemic.

As Brooks noted in that mid-March interview, “All of these terrible, terrible trends that we’ve been sowing for so long are coming back to haunt us right at this minute.”

Our unending, longstanding American divisions—politically partisan and otherwise—are only intensified by this unconventional, asymmetric pandemic, much like the unconventional, asymmetric threats from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars and Russian election interference aggravated existing American societal fault lines.  The virus, rather than showing our ability to unite, is instead exposing—even more than recent politics—our capacity for coming apart.  For Packer,

the virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines.  The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human.  But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.

Then there is the black hole where our coordinated national response should have been.

The most extreme example of this has manifested itself in a disturbing, unprecedented, and stunning situation that just unfolded in Maryland, exemplifying a breakdown in the constitutional order and national fabric not seen since the era of desegregation.  This stunning incident hints at China’s twentieth-century warlord era, when the Qing Dynasty’s central government broke down and basically melted away in so many places to such levels that China de facto became a relatively large number of separate states run by warlords who had to step up and provide leadership in the void left by the Qing.  They also had to contend with the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists as everyone fought each other, with the Japanese Imperial Army and WWII eventually merging into the conflicts; dysfunction and chaos reigned (and incidentally, remember, this situation would eventually see the most extensive use of bioweapons in the history of warfare).  To return to the American present, in the absence of timely or coherent support from the federal government, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and his wife, Maryland First Lady Yumi Hogan—of Korean descent—negotiated with South Korea to obtain 500,000 coronavirus tests.  The process took twenty-two days and the tests were flown over from South Korea, with the Korea Air passenger plane—which would normally have landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC—being diverted to Baltimore-Washington International airport in Maryland, the first time that airline has ever flown to that the airport.  This was done purposefully to prevent the seizure of the tests by the federal government, which had earlier seized three million protective masks ordered by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker for his state, among other seizures from governors taking matters into their own hands because of the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to directly supply the states with necessary quantities of emergency supplies.  It is remarkable that states that had asked for federal aid, had their requests denied or unfulfilled, then followed the Administration’s advice to procure their own supplies then saw federal authorities seize those very supplies.  It is also worth noting that both Govs. Hogan and Baker are Republicans along with Trump, not to say that should make a difference but to point out how even fellow Republicans are unable to work with the current Administration.  Also out fear of the tests being seized at the airport, Hogan had “a large contingent” of Maryland National Guard troops and State Police sent to secure the tests and transport them to “an undisclosed location” that is purposely being kept secret from the federal government. Those tests are still being guarded by Maryland National Guard and State Police at that location to protect them from possible federal seizure, with Hogan saying the cargo “was like Fort Knox to us” since the tests were “going to save the lives of thousands of our citizens” and noting the earlier federal seizures of supplies ordered by other states.

In effect, Maryland’s sitting governor—in the same political party as the president—ran a clandestine operation to prevent life-saving equipment Maryland taxpayers had bought and paid for from falling into the clutches of the Trump Administration after that administration had failed to provide Maryland with requested aid and those coronavirus tests are still being guarded at a secret location by security forces under the command of the governor. 

In case this is not clear, that is a total breakdown of the relationship between Maryland and the federal government, with Maryland essentially rebelling against the Trump Administration’s potential designs and actual authority.  Gov. Hogan essentially became a de facto rogue governor—much like warlords in China after the Qing dynasty disintegrated and left a power vacuum of chaos in its wake—when it came to securing and protecting coronavirus tests for Marylanders.  One can only hope this is the first and last example of anything like this happening during the pandemic, but that hope is not carried with any certainty.

To add to Maryland’s woes, the state just canceled a $12.5 million order for other important emergency equipment—1.5 million protective masks and 110 ventilators—from a brand-new firm founded by two Republican political operatives.  The company was drastically overcharging for the masks and the items were supposed to ship by mid-April, but there is no indication they have shipped, and despite repeated requests from Maryland on the order status, no information on the shipping has been provided, prompting the cancellation at a time when Maryland is seeing a surge in cases and deaths.

Yes, right now, we are seeing states, the private sector, and the Executive Branch beg for, haggle, and tussle over urgently-needed PPE and other lifesaving supplies.  In other words, too much is being left to chance, the market, the whims of suppliers, and the relative means of various states even in the middle of a pandemic, with the private sector playing a mighty role, one that involves price and bidding wars.  The result of this top-down-driven logistical nightmare is that vital medical supplies and equipment are in short supply in too many places in America fighting this pandemic.  People, both patients and healthcare workers, are getting sick and dying after being in situations where they did not have what they should have had.

Even if the vaunted Defense Production Act—a Korean War-era law greatly empowering the government to direct industry in times of emergency—had been robustly and properly executed (and it still has not), a tremendous amount of the logistics would still have come down to an ad hoc approach.  And the ad hoc approach is only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about this current crisis, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  At the same time, the military does not have any recent experience managing national operations across most or all U.S. states at once (or operating withing domestic local, state, and federal legal systems) and much of the military’s operations would have to be also handled in an ad hoc way, with dozens of senior officers having to liaise with dozens of governors and far more local officials to coordinate efforts in addition to private-sector entities; they would rely heavily on their civilian counterparts, most of whom would have little or no training or understanding of how to respond to such a situation or work with military officials; one hopes coronavirus will swiftly bring about a filling-in of these gaps in expertise).  Writing for MWI, Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle notes that National Guard troops have been deployed as part of coronavirus responses in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, yet the existing frameworks for Guard deployments to be robust parts of these local responses are far from ideal in this unprecedented situation.  Specifically, federalizing Guard units would be highly problematic since so many Guard personnel are much-needed local first-responders in their civilian roles.

Without proper supplies allocated, distribution networks and equipment, and the personnel to run and move under the direction of the government, as noted, individual states are having to compete in bidding wars and fights over supplies with each other, businesses, the federal government, and even foreign countries just to get desperately needed life-saving supplies.  In what Gen. Honoré called a supply chain situation that he has “never heard…before in my life [that]… look[s] like they have let the literal wolf inside the henhouse,” states are being bypassed for direct aid by the federal government for corporations to then sell to states and, overall, there is little to no oversight, no singular body distributing supplies nationally based on objective needs-based criteria (by mid-April, Montana, with few cases, was getting over $300,000 in federal aid per case, while New York, the epicenter of coronavirus in America, was just getting $12,000 per case). 

There is even at least the appearance that federal disbursement and non-disbursement is happening as a form of political favoritism, as quid pro quos.  On top of all this, the federal government’s own stockpile was nearly empty as of early April apart from federally-confiscated supplies bought and paid for (and needed) by private hospitals and state and local authorities, activity we delved into earlier with the shocking case from Maryland.  Together these factors are just further amplifying senses of desperation, helplessness, and violation of trust. 

Adding to those panicked feelings are how the White House has handled communications: as U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim writes also for MWI, all this is further exacerbated “by public communications that has been haphazard, to say the least,” and in visible ways for all to see that undermine America’s standing in the world and encourage our authoritarian adversaries.  Our own officials have even concluded that Russian intelligence is even “likely” using the pandemic to gain information on U.S. logistical weaknesses.

Sadly, we have seen with the federal response and in other responses that political leaders are free to ignore or contradict the advice of medical and intelligence experts, and suppress or remove truth-tellers from important positions, thus, simply having expert advisors does not cut it; to some degree, both voting populations and politicians will have to take seriously the need for familiarity with pandemic response; voters should be choosing those with a demonstrated and committed deference both to experts and to self-learning and voters must then hold those leaders accountable; if they do not, they will be rewarding non-seriousness with high office, encouraging other politicians to follow suit.  These are, after all, the basics of democracy, and if voters do not reward competence, seriousness, and expertise, a great many of them will, to some degree, reap what they so after failing in their role as citizens.  In this time of pandemic, for Masha Gessen, “it’s very important to continue to notice the ways in which our government is failing us, even if those ways have become familiar and exhausting.”  The hope is that this pandemic will teach voters to take their votes more seriously, as George Packer recognizes: “We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.”

Brooks agrees that, ultimately, we as citizens in a democracy are the ones who are responsible:

Everything that goes wrong in China with this virus is directly laid at the feet of Xi Jinping.  He has all the power, so he has all the responsibility.  Every death is on his hands.

But, by the same token, we are responsible for our own deaths in this country.  If we don’t like our leaders—well, then, look in the mirror; we put them there. We voted for them.  If we don’t like the way the CDC is handling this virus, well, who voted to defund the CDC?  Who didn’t listen to the cries of health professionals saying, “Wait a minute, they’re defunding the CDC!”?  We didn’t listen.  We were like, “Oh, my god.  Friends is on Netflix.  I have bingeing to do!  I have things!  There’s an app where I can put bunny ears on myself and send it out!”

In a dictatorship like China, you can blame the top.  In a democracy, in a republic, we have to blame [who we see in] the mirror.

But the main national election is still a while away as the pandemic rages.  Given the systemic failures, just allowing the military to take over the response is tempting—whether now or in the future—and while that carries with it its own issues, it is clear the current civilian structures do not have the capacity to handle this type of threat, except maybe if our leaders are extraordinary, and most of the time, that is not the quality of leadership we empower.

At the same time, coronavirus is exposing the military’s own shortcomings within itself, with Army Reserve Capt. James Long noting in another MWI piece that “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners,” is further adding to the damage being done by the virus.  And, while Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck noted in an additional MWI article that, in past major wars, large-scale epidemic response was an important part of U.S. military operations, that has not been the case for decades.  Thus, though the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed in the current crisis, we cannot expect the current military to be a replacement.  This sentiment is echoed in yet another MWI piece penned by U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor.” For him, the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.

In another piece, I will release my proposal to reform the government to put us in a far better position to deal with biodefense: the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR).  But for now, we will simply leave this section with a recognition of how woefully inadequate the current structure of the government is to deal with these type of threats and how dependent the it is on having exceptional leadership that is able to quickly make all the right decisions on an ad hoc basis, an overall unlikely outcome.

VII.) Epilogue: Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

—Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002)

Eradication

It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War.

In what has been acknowledged by many to be “the single most important triumph of public health in human history,” on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHO’s governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The disease—terrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other disease—may have wiped 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more.

This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be “eradicated,” so support for the efforts was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication , though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s).

For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globe—braving even natural disasters and civil wars—to find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from nature—the first and last disease thus far to suffer that fate—and there has not been a known case since.

In the words of Richard Preston, those carrying out the campaign

had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.

At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apart—the United States and the Soviet Union—came together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors.

Eventually , smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: America’s CDC in Atlanta and Russia’s Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as discussed, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top  government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively.

By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last year’s NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Preston’s book), would frequently quip:  “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.” 

Weaponization

As mentioned earlier, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication has a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed earlier.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute.

At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature.

But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox.

Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie.

We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now “Ken Alibek”) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there.  That team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets’ notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strain—known as India-1 or India-1967—back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. 

The K.G.B has used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain.

We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Government’s generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. 

However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes:

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

2020: A Year of Threat Convergences

If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history.

As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed “From Russia with Love” (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two hearts—one colored in the colors Russia’s flag, one in Italy’s—placed on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  “From Russia with Love” was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

But not all was as advertised.

The highly respected Italian daily La Stampa—one of Italy’s oldest newspapers—did some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that “Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy” and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. 

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story “fake news,” making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministry’s attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective.

The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian “aid” effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text).

Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russia’s main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russia’s stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russia’s RChBD forces.

Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russia’s most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assad’s regime as part of Russia’s overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and that the White Helmets—the brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attacks—were staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority.

It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russia’s military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russia’s unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. 

But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putin’s spear in both the Kremlin’s conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandos—Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces—play important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putin’s point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). 

But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program.

The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.

It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic.

We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal government’s organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russia’s own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate.

In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russia’s disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election.

Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowd’s longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a “gift” of an opportunity for the Kremlin.

America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, “it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it”), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscow’s campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of things—from the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet Union—Russia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting America’s dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans’ fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective.

The same organs of disinformation behind Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as noted earlier, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americans—who are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theories—are convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that “created” the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits “making” the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused.

These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse.

In the midst of Russia’s coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russia—even as a hostile actor—to deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. 

And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russia’s coronavirus response who “fell” out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such “accidents” or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear.

What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlin’s undisclosed biowarfare program.

Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectors—highly unlikely—it is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measures—new vaccines, medicine—against these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of America’s defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood.

The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related research—to which Russia is a signatory—is a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russia’s invasions of Ukraine’s eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research.

A Collective Responsibility to Do Better

The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels.

But the lowest levels are just as important.

We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformation—whether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly disease—is like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interference—or, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwar—or doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. 

Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape.

In her conclusion to her must-read article “Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russia’s unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States:

Much of the public discussion on Russia’s disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isn’t limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is based—including the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russia’s efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify America’s social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russia’s future attacks. 

She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russia’s disinformation and other techniques of division:

The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades.

As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life:

A model to rebuild social capital in America—and strengthen social trust—can feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russia’s attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russia’s destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term.

In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including:

1. Orwell’s legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad)
2. The singular de Tocqueville’s ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy)
3. Amu Chua’s Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart)
4. Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society)
5. The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy)
6. Schoolhouse Rock(the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans)

Professor Rangappa’s cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy:

1. Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win
2. Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
3. Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it
4. Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy
5. Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America
6. Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward

Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers’ vision for America.

Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue.

If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that “we as individuals must be better and do more,” know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term “national security” the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless.

Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himself—eventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitution—when he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in “No. 55,” to be exact:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

In other words, “We the People” must be worthy enough as a people—enough of us individually so that it is true in a collective sense—or this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well.

Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one.

Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come…

Aieeeee! —
the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer 
who tells the truth — 
                                     it whirls me, oh, 
the storm comes again, the crashing chords!…

Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you 
and the end you see so clearly. I pity you.

—Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation

Correction appended: Gen. Russel Honoré’s name was previously misspelled.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006. He is currently in no way professionally affiliated with the Biden 2020 campaign, nor is receiving any compensation from it nor the Democratic Party nor any related super-PACs, campaigns, or other political groups involved in the 2020 nominating contests and elections.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

This article is also available to be read as five separate articles:

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) March 25, 2019 (Updated April 20, 2019)

James Berglie/Alamy

April 20, 2019 Update: The Mueller report very much confirms my analysis presented herein, and Russia still looms menacingly large. As I had accurately surmised well before the report was released, Mueller has handed the baton to Congress and voters: what happens now?

AMMAN — After a nearly-two-year investigation that has been the focus of Washington like nothing since the Watergate scandal, the long-awaited report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has arrived (at least at the desk of Trump’s newly confirmed Attorney General, William Barr).  Two days after its submission by Mueller to him, Barr has presented a summary of his own crafting to key congressional leaders that has been made public.

What’s Missing Is Just As Important As What’s Included

There will be (even already are) attempts to spin, distort, and flat-out misrepresent the summary and, eventually, whatever else of “the report” is made public.

In Deputy (and then Acting) Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017, letter creating Mueller’s Special Counsel probe, the main lines of investigation that Rosenstein authorized Mueller to pursue were “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”  Yet in both his Friday letter confirming receipt of Mueller’s report and in his Sunday summary of Mueller’s report sent to senior relevant congressional leaders, Barr noted the scope of Mueller’s report to be focused on “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, noting in the latter that the title of Mueller’s submission was “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.”  Specifically, Barr’s letter quotes the Special Counsel’s report that its “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

What has been little noted, however, is how wide of a gap there is between how Muller chose to frame his final report and the and how Rosenstein initially framed the scope: if we limit discussion to Team Trump’s having “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” this can leave out 1.) less formal intermediary channels that are a hallmark of Kremlin operations (e.g., see Konstantin Kilimnick and Oleg Deripaska) and 2.) any other issues—sanctions, Ukraine, NATO, the EU, political strategy, etc.—that did not specifically involve election interference.

This is a pretty big deal.  And it needs to sink in.

Read Carefully: Mueller As a Beginning, Not an End

Again, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report hardly concludes that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, just that no one “conspired or knowingly coordinated” with Russia to the end of election interference, and Barr noted that Mueller’s team even explicitly noted that, when it came to obstruction of justice, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Some important things to note here: as has been oft-repeated, Mueller’s only main public obligation as far as issuing reports is limited to whether or not it recommends criminal charges against the president or senior officials beyond those people it has already charged.  The burden of proof for these charges would have to be backed by evidence supporting conclusions of provable criminal guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and when it comes to conspiring with foreign powers to interfere with U.S. elections, Barr’s letter notes that if any American “joined the Russian conspiracies to influence the election,” such actions “would be a federal crime.”   But when it comes to collusion on other issues—sanctions, Ukraine, NATO, etc.—in and of themselves, such actions would at best most likely be a crime under the Logan Act, an obscure 1799 U.S. law that prohibits those not delegated by the U.S. government to run foreign policy to engage in making foreign policy; only one charge from 1803 ever materialized under the Act, and that charge was never brought to trial.  In other words, trying to establish criminal wrongdoing with evidence that leaves no reasonable doubt by going down this path is a far shakier, more challenging task.  And it seems a path that Mueller, at least as far as his report recommending criminal charges or not recommending them, has decided to avoid traveling, which is not the same thing as finding those questions not worth asking.

This actually seems to be sound strategy on the part of Mueller: going down that path in terms of criminal prosecution would be going down lengthy rabbit holes in which the likelihood of finding actionable evidence that could convict U.S. persons under U.S. law was likely going to be minimal and the investigation would have gone beyond two years into three or more, creating even more buildup for what would probably be a similarly inconclusive payoff.  And as things stand now, Mueller has clearly farmed out and laid the groundwork for other federal, state-level, and international law enforcement to take up the banner on a whole host of issues related to Trump and/or Russia.

But the point is that Mueller seems to have decided to limit the scope of his massive investigation in ways that make it impossible for anyone to claim that his report proves there was no active collusion.  And by conspicuously limiting the scope in this way, he is all but handing the baton to others rather seeing his investigation as the end to all relevant lines of inquiry.  Mueller, unlike former FBI Director Comey, seems to understand the sensitive political environment in which he operates: for a single powerful investigation to take down a legally elected president is no small matter and partisanship has only increased exponentially since the Nixon era.  With this approach, Mueller has helped shield the Department of Justice from further politicization and delegitimization and ensured that these serious issues surrounding Trump and Russia will be less about him, Mueller, as one star prosecutor and more about the federal, state/local, and congressional machinery that must also be a part of reigning in both Trump and Putin and holding them accountable.  It is doubtful that the Barr summary will be the end of what comes out about Mueller’s report, and that doesn’t even get to the Special Counsel’s counterintelligence investigation, which can still be fertile ground going forward.  As former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa has repeatedly pointed out, the Special Counsel’s counterintelligence investigation would be far more sweeping than the criminal investigations with which we are far more familiar, but no less important even if much less transparent, as much of the material would be extremely sensitive and since the Special Counsel statue does not call for any public report on its findings like it does with the criminal investigation.

Not the Worst Outcome for Trump, But No Reason to Celebrate

The idea that Mueller was somehow going to find a smoking gun of Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government or remove Trump from office was always the stuff of anti-Trump pipe dreams.  That Trump’s people would celebrate this is just another sign of the plummeting of the proverbial bar to unrecognizable depths.  Mueller and his people may not have found evidence to the degree of quelling reasonable doubt that Team Trump “conspired or knowingly coordinated” with Russia on election interference in 2016, but any reading of Barr’s report or the Mueller report that claims this means there was no collusion with Russia at all is flat-out wrong.  As I have noted before, the idea of collusion is so much broader and deeper than prosecutable criminal offenses and the public conversation about collusion has been ridiculously myopic to not make this a major theme, but perhaps with the Mueller report now having been filed, the opportunity to take the understanding of collusion beyond criminal wrongdoing may never be better.

There are still many questions that need answers, and those questions and answers should give Trump and Putin and their supporters serious pause as America moves beyond Mueller to decide our collective future, not least of that being our role in the world, our relationship with Russia, and how we will protect our own elections, as well as freedom democracy around the world, in the face of a concerted onslaught by Putin’s Kremlin, about which our government agencies and investigators have no reasonable doubt, including the Department of Justice and, as noted in the Barr summary, the Special Counsel.

See related article: Crime Too Narrow As Main Lens to View Putin’s Masterpiece of Collusion

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Author’s note: I sat on this piece for over five months, pitching to many outlets, hoping each new revelation that obviously backs up my framing of these issues would increase its chances of publication, but it seems editors at major media outlets are not terribly interested in self-reflection and discussions about how media coverage of Trump-Russia could and should be far better for the American people.  Well, now I have my own website not subject to the capricious corporate whims of LinkedIn or the myopia of the mainstream media’s editorial class.  I proudly present my first Real Context News exclusive publication!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), January 28, 2019; slight update November 28, 2021

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

AMMAN — Once again, more pieces of the puzzle fall into place.  Besides the latest circus around a particular arrest and ensuing indictment, recently, there is also the revelation that U.S. President Donald Trump “concealed” from his own “senior officials” the “details of his face-to-face encounters” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Another set of pieces tells us that early in Trump’s presidency, the FBI investigated whether or not he was knowingly and treasonously working for Russia.  Other apparent accidental (or “accidental”?) reveals show that two senior Trump campaign aides—including Donald Trump’s then Campaign Chairman—were passing on sensitive internal information at the height of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign season to a Kremlin-connected figure (one with deep, longstanding Russian intelligence ties that are almost certainly still active) all while Russia was engaged in cyberwarfare and election interference.  On top of all of this, Senate Republicans acted to help relieve sanctions on a major Putin oligarch ally mired in questions of 2016 collusion and ties to the Russian mafia, despite bipartisan outrage.

And these big pieces are all from just the past few days and weeks.

But even in just the waning days of 2018, we had learned about lies peddled by members of Team Trump designed to deny or minimize relationships between themselves and Team Putin, including and concerning the notorious WikiLeaks and relevant meetings from London to Quito to Prague*[see note at end], additional parts of a growing volcanic mountain of evidence that something nefarious is afoot and that there is little distinction between the web of Team Trump’s political ties with Russia and Team Trump’s business ties with Russia and, at times, between the aims and playbook of the Kremlin and the White House (and before that, Trump’s presidential campaign).

The names even only recently involved—Trump and his older children (Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric), Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Julian Assange, Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilimnik, Boris Birshtein, Felix Sater, Carter Page, Oleg Deripaska, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Denis and Petr Katsyv, Yevgeny Prigozhin and others—are not new, and have generally been popping up in media reports related to the Trump-Russia saga for the past few years.

But, as usual, the bigger puzzle picture of that erupting mountain tying them all together remains elusive to so many Americans, including most major news outlets: the word “collusion” is constantly bandied about, usually followed by an existential question mark, presented as an uncertain possibility that can, as of yet, have no answer.

Missing the point

This is because the discussion about Team Trump, Team Putin, the 2016 election, what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and “collusion”—within both the political and media establishments—is woefully inadequate and misses the big-picture by a mile.  It would be a little like standing inside the Sistine Chapel, looking at the ceiling, and trying to describe the actions of a few figures in one corner of Michelangelo’s masterpiece and thinking that that substitutes for a comprehensive examination of the entire ceiling: the overall meaning, the different layers, and the larger picture are all simply missed even if insight is achieved on those specific figures discussed.

Few have attempted to present this larger picture, and even fewer have done this well.

Journalists Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti, Craig Unger (with support from researcher Olga Lautman), David Corn, Michael Isikoff, and James Henry, along with the filmmakers behind the documentary of Jack Bryan, Marley Clements, and Laura DuBois titled Active Measures and the analyst Malcolm Nance, seem to be the only mainstream or wider-reach folks to have succeeded.  Also worthy of mention is Mark MacKinnon’s recent exploration of Boris Birshtein, which does a lot to reinforce the clarity of deep incrimination around important figures in this drama who have inexcusably escaped media scrutiny of MacKinnon’s intensity as the Trump-Russia story has unfolded.  Along with Nance, James, and Unger, I, too, was one of the earliest to present this bigger picture to a wider audience in deep-dive, context-rich pieces, many months (some even well over a year) before the Shane-Mazzetti The New York Times breakthrough piece from this last September that in many important ways (though hardly all) was a retread of our earlier work and that often came to very similar conclusions.

As usual, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s actions and filings can assure us that he is far ahead of the more narrow larger mainstream public discussion.  Unfortunately, going all the way back to July 2016, myopia has reigned and the big-picture narrative has not received the attention it deserves, let alone penetrated the day-to-day conversation. 

Russia only returned as a major issue after the election, often mainly as a result of various clumsy personnel moves by the Trump White House and ill-considered statements and tweets by Trump himself.  Since then, when coverage focused on Russian-related developments, it presented the latest details with minimal context, jumping among various figures from Putin’s Sistine Chapel without describing the painting as a whole.

Throughout, there was plenty of information already publicly available to present a much larger, deeper narrative, but that was deemed “too complex” or unnewsworthy because there is not a shiny new piece of information dangling up front to be an exclusive piece of reporting, as if analysis for its own sake devoid of a new tidbit is worthless.  Pieces of the puzzle keep coming out in the news, but the public is denied explanations of how these pieces and especially sections fit together.

Collusion?  Or Collusion!

Thus, even now, there is a tremendous focus on the idea of “collusion:” maybe some of the people around the president were working for the Russians in one way or another, but the President’s defenders point out that a.) there is no evidence Trump himself was part of this collusion and b.) collusion itself “is not a crime.”  These points have been made repeatedly, often, and for some time, and are wonderfully emblematic of the “missing the whole point” theme.

What is known is that people acting in line with and/or on behalf of Russia’s and Putin’s interests found themselves in important positions around Donald Trump over the past few decades, that these people were paid many millions by the Kremlin and its allies, that these and other people close to Trump often had strong ties to figures in the Russian government and/or Russian mafia (those two often being the same thing, as noted earlier), and that these people had many simultaneous cross-cutting relationships that have received far too little attention from the media and politicians.

The natural conclusion from all of this taken together is that attempts by those with deep Russian ties to engage Trump have not been random or haphazard, but, rather, fit into a pattern and a network whose goals were and are rather obvious: to harm Clinton and the Democrats, bolster Trump and the Republicans, and weaken the U.S., the West, and their shared alliances and institutions, all in line with years of publicly stated Russian intentions. 

That we now have a Trump Administration that repeatedly advances Russian interests and harms the West should be of no surprise to anyone.

So, yes, of course there was an organized Russian plot.

Also obvious is the fact that the Republican Party—the American political party famous for generations for being so hard on Russia—has, in a manner of just a few years, basically been co-opted by the Kremlin to play defense for it against exposing the network and operation from which Republicans, Trump, and Russia benefitted with exceptions in the Republican congressional delegation being few and far between and often retiring.  The rest block and obstruct here, whitewash there, refuse to subpoena here, outright distort and misrepresent there.  Both the Republican Party (officials and media allies) and the White House exert intense effort to malign and undermine the Russia investigators and investigations, and one is generally at a loss if quotes from most congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration on one side and quotes from Putin, Russian bots/trolls, and/or the Russian Foreign Ministry on the other are mixed up to tell which statements were said by the Russians and which by Republicans.

All this taken together creates a major definitional example of collusion that was obvious and was so long before the latest round of revelations.

Whether any kind of smoking gun ever emerges—some sort of specific crime that can be pinned on Trump—is irrelevant to this larger truth, and this larger truth has been largely ignored.  As former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa has pointed out repeatedly, Mueller is wearing two hats: one (more formally) of a criminal investigator and one (less formally) of a counterintelligence investigator; the pursuits while wearing the second do not necessarily have to reveal any crimes but are not any less important, yet because of regulations applying to the Special Counsel, we may only hear about Mueller’s criminal (non-)findings, if that.  In the end, the public focus on possible criminal aspects has largely ignored the outlines of the broader plot—one of undeniable collusion—that a counterintelligence investigation would certainly include.

There is so much more that should be part of the discussion even now but still is not, and it is long overdue that this failure be rectified to include regular discussion of the entirety of Putin’s Sistine Chapel-like masterpiece.

*The Prague meeting detail is one of a number of items since discredited or still unverified from what is called the Steele dossier; taking this one item out of this does nothing to change the obvious wider picture illustrated in this article and is quite symbolic of how even if the specifics of everything in the Steele dossier are not considered, how little an effect that has on the glaring picture of collusion that is so clear and obvious from all the other verified information we do have and exposes how hollow are the attempts to discredit the Mueller probe and federal investigations into Team Trump’s connections to Russia. — Novermber 28, 2021

© 2019-2021 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See my related piece on the Mueller report/Barr memo here: Barr Summary and Mueller Report Do Not Mean Trump Russia Is a Hoax. Far From It.

I’m no Michelangelo, but see my other related article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 28, 2017

by Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 26th, 2018

California State University, Fullerton

Support Brian and his work by donating here

AMMAN — In the Age of Twitter, a deep myopia seems to have set in among far too many editors and journalists. While the need to be competitive in a chaotic and challenging media business environment is certainly understandable, what is unforgivable is the lack respect and effort accorded to analysis for analysis’s sake.

The major media outlets often excel at providing up-to-the-minute coverage of details of big stories as they unfold. The race is on to see who can provide a new detail, and that new detail becomes the new headline, only to be eclipsed by another detail which becomes another headline. For stories that last a few cycles, this is not too bad because it is fairly easy to connect the dots even without news outlets providing analysis. Something like a sex scandal or a response to an outrageous statement or even, sadly, a mass shooting nearly always all follow predictable patterns of development and, therefore, coverage.

When dealing with incredibly complicated stories with many moving parts, however, it is necessary to take time off from the search for that new detail and take a step back to provide context and analysis to the public, free from the focus on adding new details (even if there are a few), giving the public an article that simply pauses time to say, this is what has already been reported, this is why it matters, and how much each previously-reported detail matters and fits with the other details.

Except this basically does not happen: the race for new details never stops and it becomes impossible for the general public to take stock of the bigger picture and to weight the importance of each detail; this is what matters most, in the end, but it is what gets the least attention from major media outlets, whether in print, on television, or, especially, on social media. So many new stories pop up that there is little focus or deep-diving into major stories that merit such attention, as the focus is on the newest shiny object that is part of the larger story but not the story as a whole. 

As a result, there so many big-headline new details, coming out faster and furiouser in the Trump era than ever before, that the people are simply overwhelmed. Since the race to get that new detail never stops in a competitive environment, resources—time, money, reporters—are not assigned or given time to really present the bigger picture or give stories proper depth, and, in fact, a number of individuals working for major outlets I have personally contacted seem trapped in a mentality of “If there’s not a big new specific reveal, it’s not news!”

This all contributes to an increasingly-present mentality spread throughout major media outlets and their staff that overhypes any new tidbit of information at the expense of being able to place it in its proper context. It is hard to find a story that demonstrates this troubling dynamic more than the Clinton e-mail story, as experts from the indispensable Nate Silver to those at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center have demonstrated. And, even worse, there has been very little of an honest effort at having public reflection on this, even as the media hypocritically focuses on the damage that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica did during the election.

But if the Clinton e-mail story is an example of how the media can oversensationalize details to make something minor and moderately embarrassing into a game changer, never putting it in its proper context, the Trump-Russia story is something of a flip-side of that coin: a story so complex and that takes so much time to contextualize for easily distracted consumers that outlets do a good job of keeping up to date with the breaking details but almost never give proper consideration to a bigger picture. There is almost no effort to see, anticipates, or reflect on where existing evidence will lead Mueller down the road; at best, the usually only look forward and/or backward one or two steps.

“This is good analysis,” some would say. “It’s avoiding speculation.”

Since when has solid, reasonable big-picture analysis become “speculation?” 

The CIA has desk analysts whose entire job is to put together the details collected in the field by others, to put together intelligence reports on everything from Putin’s intentions to North Korea’s nuclear program to how Cuba might transition from communism to how a two-state solution might look for Israel and Palestine. Sometimes intelligence can be wrong, but that does not make reasonable intelligence analysis “speculation.” 

Of course, they value raw intelligence at the CIA, the equivalent of journalistic scoops. But no one goes to a top general or the president or a cabinet secretary with a whole lot of scoops, one after the other, with no attempt to weight them and an opposite attempt to hype them simply because they are the latest pieces of information. The field operative might overhype the information he provides because he is personally, emotionally attached to it: it is his information he succeeded in providing, so he wants to justify his work and efforts. This is natural, and it is why field operatives are not the people who usually brief senior officials; rather, the desk analysts see what the field operative cannot see: they see the big picture and are able to put all those incoming reports together to create a portrait of the big-picture that is elusive to field personnel. It is the desk analysts or senior CIA staff using desk analysts’ reports who are the ones who generally brief senior officials, then.   

Especially today, many excellent reporters are tasked with being the equivalents of both the field operative and the desk analyst, and the quality of both products suffer: journalists today keep reporting new facts in narrative way that is often highly speculative, overhyping the new information reported in analysis that does not go very deep and serves to further justify the importance of material that is not going through a serious weighting process. These trends even reinforce each other in a destructive feedback loop. 

For a great example of this, just look at the The New York Times’s front-page stories today vs. those of 15 years ago. I say this as one who finds the Times to be the best paper we have, so the criticism is meant constructively, but all the same, far too many journalists and editors look at reporting new information as the be-all-and-end-all and sneer disdainfully at pure analysis. 

Remember—and miss—the Times’ Week in Review section? It was retired mid-2011 and replaced with the Sunday Review, which was sold as something that would preserve analytical content while providing more exposure for opinion writers. A quick look at the section now shows it to be almost entirely composed of opinion pieces, and it is hard to find any hard analysis content.

I can remember when opinion, reporting, and analysis pieces were clearly delineated. But today? A huge problem for The Times is a problem that is industry-wide: opinion, analysis, and reporting are melding together in ways that should be raising alarms among not only journalistic ethicists but all of us. The Times’s current dynamic duo of Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush (both with tabloid backgrounds) are perfect poster children for this trend, one that they admittedly did not create but one to which they are contributing as much as anyone within the mainstream press (let us be clear that Fox News is not part of this crowd, as its model is the very reason it cannot be considered mainstream in the traditional sense, despite its popularity). One can look at Haberman’s and Thrush’s coverage of, say, Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump, and it doesn’t take long to see that within the reporting of the facts, controversial and speculative assertions are made in a matter-of-fact manner in between actual facts that do not actually back up those assertions. They and many others are basically mixing in their opinions and passing them off as analysis.

It might seem like a moot point, but the difference is actually crucial: in analysis, an expert on a subject expresses his professional opinion as to what the assembled facts mean, and either avoids venturing past where the facts create a high probability such a venture is very likely correct or explicitly states when venturing past fact-based conclusions is occurring. What compounds the problems surrounding this in some of these examples from today is that the writing of people like Thrush and Haberman mix in excellent reporting, solid analysis, poor analysis that is actually closer to opinion, and clear opinion throughout individual pieces all couched in the same newsy-tone and style. Less discerning readers (let us be honest: that would be most people) might easily confuse one type of writing for the other in such pieces and this now enters the territory of a dangerous, subtle bias that is hardly as obvious and easy to spot as Fox News-like bias.

The traditional divisions between opinion, analysis, and news also served to bolster accuracy. 

When a reporter is just reporting the facts and leaves analysis to others who specialize in that, it is relatively hard for the subject of the report to get angry at the reporter getting the information directly from the subject himself; rather, the subject’s ire will more often be directed at opinion writers or analysts who might interpret the facts gathered by the reporter in an unfavorable light. This is healthy in that the reporter can preserve access to the subject and not worry so much about the tone of his own coverage potentially limiting his access to the subject or even ending that access altogether, since tone is easy to keep fairly neutral when just reporting facts and leaving analysis to others. But when the reporter collecting the facts starts to mix analysis and opinion into stories, relationships can becomes potentially much rockier, and the reporter may soften her tone or criticism of the subject to better be able to preserve access to that subject. This creates another destructive feedback loop: the reporter keeps covering the subject more generously than the subject deserves and this means the subject keeps giving special access to that reporter because that reporter generates relatively more favorable (or at least less critical) coverage, while those being harder on the subject in a more accurate way find their access being reduced or find they are even iced out. 

This is how journalism compromises and destroys itself, and given Trump’s über-sensitive per, über-vindictive, and über-punitive personality, it is more of a problem with this presidency than any presidency in recent memory.

I would say it would be unfair to be singling out these two and the Times except they are star trendsetters on a national stage, and that makes them even more powerful and accountable for wielding that power responsibly. I am not here to specifically dissect their work, which I feel does an excellent enough job of clearly backing up my characterizations without me engaging in a guided tour; my point is to note two prominent examples at America’s premier newspaper of a disease that is destroying the walls throughout the industry between reporting, opinion, and analysis that are supposed to be the foundational structures of journalism. And to be fair to Haberman and Thrush, it so really more so the editors’ responsibility to stop them from writing like that. Instead, editors are rewarding it and elevating such reporters to their star slots à la the Times.

Perhaps nothing is more illustrative than that last point as to why we got the type of woefully inadequate media coverage across the board from the major outlets during the 2016 election cycle, as Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has pointed out quite masterfully. For reporters to dismiss solid analysis as “speculation” would be like analysts dismissing news reports as a mere string of factoids, and both attitudes are wrong. It would be absurd for CIA field operatives to deride the work of desk analysts, and it is absurd that so many journalists minimize the value of analysis. But while analysts are consciously in debt to those getting the primary information they are analyzing, the reporters getting the info often do to not return the respect to analysts (“armchair reporters,” they may say).

One particularly excellent reporter even went as far as to tell me the whole reason the U.S. is in this mess of having such a dysfunctional society (media, government, & president) today is that too many people writing the news are not out there getting new information for themselves. I found this to be incredibly odd considering the opposite is, in fact, the truth and is also a much better explanation for why “we’re in this mess.”

In our current era, so many journalists are out there chasing new pieces of information that they are basically throwing puzzle pieces in the public’s face; the pieces hit people and fall to the ground in clumps, often unrelated to each other. At best people start putting a few pieces—maybe even a section—together, but before there is ever a chance to actually put the puzzle together, or even a majority of it, the whole press corps is back, flinging their individual pieces or a few pieces joined together back in people’s faces, and the whole process repeats, until people are buried by small clumps of pieces that turn into mountains of confusion, ones that obstruct the larger picture since it is not being assembled, and the continuous piling of new chunks prevents this from ever happening.

*****

Much like the intelligence community separates and values intelligence gathering and desk analysis as two separate yet inextricably linked processes, each held in high accord and given proper resourcing to function and produce its independent products, knowing that the latter has nothing without the former but that the latter is really the end product formed from multiple instances of the former, it is time for newsrooms—reporters, editors, managers, and funders—to realize that analysis for its own sake, not forced to be just background for the latest developments, is an integral and crucial part of the whole concept of news and of making sure the public is properly informed. 

It is the lack and a strong analytical core in today’s media landscape that explains why coverage of Clinton and Trump failed so miserably to provide a sensible, accurate sense of who they were and what they stood for to the public, but instead presented something of Picassos of each. And it is also this lack of strong analytical core that the Russians found so easy to fill with their information warfare, with which it twisted and warped the mainstream media to unwittingly do its very bidding.

Since Russia won what I call the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, countries like France and Germany faced the same threat but handled it with far more mature media and public responses that gave pause for analysis and context to be emphasized, reducing the effects of Russian (dis/mis)information warfare. 

If America is going to be serious about confronting Russia’s information warfare in the future, there will surely need to be a robust government response, one far tougher than anything either Obama did or Trump is doing. 

But just as importantly, America’s fourth estate needs to be conscious of efforts to twist and weaponize it, to first acknowledge to itself and then come clean publicly about its responsibility in letting itself be weaponized by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, and to have a clear plan to avoid the mistakes of 2016 going forward. Perhaps most terrifying for those who truly understand how well Russia played our system in 2016 is that neither the government nor the news media seem to be taking even the most modest and basic steps to be better prepared for this information warfare.

A great starting point for the media would be to realize that its role vis-à-vis the public is much the same as the intelligence community is for the government’s decision-makers: not one of throwing a bunch of pieces of information at people, but one of collating the pieces, putting the puzzle together into a faithful representation of what rigorous analysts indicates it (very likely) is, and presenting that picture to the public, caveats and all. Even worse, most outlets do not even have staff that would be the equivalent of CIA desk analysts. Even now most outlets and reporters bristle at constructive criticism of their work, with the spats between Nate Silver and Maggie Haberman being quite telling. As long as the news media continues to overemphasize collection while dismissing analysis as somehow not being journalism or just being mere “speculation,” it will be impossible for it to fulfill this necessary role as a bulwark of a free and democratic society; rather, it will play into Putin’s hands all too easily (again).

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!