| | | | Why Team Trump Isn't Ready for a Crisis: Lute | | The Trump administration's national security team isn't ready to cope with a crisis, writes Douglas Lute in Politico Magazine. The main reason? It isn't even in place yet.
"Incredibly, nearly half a year in, there are still only a very few political appointees in Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon below the deputy secretary level, fewer than 10 percent of those required," writes Lute, the U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2013 to 2017.
"We pay a heavy price for the ongoing extended transition. Without the team in place and procedures set, decision-making becomes ad hoc and unpredictable, leading to mistakes and poor execution."
"While we undergo this too-slow transition, the world continues to spin. Without our national security team and process in place, we are living on borrowed time before we confront a significant national security crisis that overnight becomes our first priority. Opponents deliberately will test us, friends will move on in their own interests, natural disasters will happen. No one will wait for us to get our act together."
| | Al Qaeda and ISIS: Set to Bury the Hatchet? | | ISIS is unlikely to survive much longer in its current form, and its loose web of international alliances won't be able to compensate for its territorial losses in Iraq and Syria, argues Ali Soufan in the New York Times. "Unfortunately, that is far from the end of the matter."
"The impending destruction of the caliphate raises another dangerous possibility: reconciliation between the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. The dispute between the two groups has always been both ideological and personal. Ideologically, the Islamic State claims to represent the reborn caliphate, and therefore demands the allegiance of all Muslims -- fealty that Al Qaeda refuses to offer. Once there is no caliphate, this ideological dispute will fall away."
| | Cyber Nightmare Coming True in Ukraine | | | For the past three years, Ukraine has been undergoing "a sustained cyberassault unlike any the world has ever seen," writes Andy Greenberg for Wired. And successive December attacks suggest that hackers have moved beyond the digital realm to threaten the physical world.
"On separate occasions, invisible saboteurs have turned off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. Each blackout lasted a matter of hours, only as long as it took for scrambling engineers to manually switch the power on again. But as proofs of concept, the attacks set a new precedent: In Russia's shadow, the decades-old nightmare of hackers stopping the gears of modern society has become a reality," Greenberg writes.
"A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations' most basic functions. 'You can't really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn't been an attack,' says Kenneth Geers, a NATO ambassador who focuses on cybersecurity." | | Why Great Power Conflict is Edging Closer: French | | The U.S. battle against ISIS is looking increasingly like an invasion, making direct conflict with Bashar al-Assad's forces more likely -- and increasing the likelihood that the major powers will clash, argues David French in National Review.
"The key warring parties increasingly face a stark choice -- agree to a de facto partition of the country or inch toward a great power conflict," French writes. "It works like this: As American-allied forces and Assad's regime steadily defeat and degrade their enemies, their zones of control expand, thus expanding the potential for direct conflict. As American forces advance with their local allies, they also increase their chances of direct encounters with Assad's forces. In response, Assad is testing America's commitment to defend not just our own troops but also (and this is quite important) our allies as well." - Trump should tread where Obama didn't dare. The United States is reaping what the Obama administration sowed in Syria by leaving space for Russia to intervene. The Trump administration will need to demonstrate that it is more willing to push back against Moscow as all sides jostle for position for when Raqqa falls, the Wall Street Journal editorializes.
"As a candidate, Mr. Trump supported 'safe zones' for refugees and opposition forces. But he's also shown no interest in a larger strategic goal than defeating ISIS. Now is the time for thinking through such a strategy because Syria, Russia and Iran know what they want," the Wall Street Journal says.
"Mr. Assad wants to reassert control over all of Syria, not a country divided into Alawite, Sunni and Kurdish parts. Iran wants a Shiite arc of influence from Tehran to Beirut. Mr. Putin will settle for a Mediterranean port and a demonstration that Russia can be trusted to stand by its allies, while America is unreliable. None of this is in the U.S. national interest."
| | Iran Should Get Used to Blowback: Vatanka | | The attack this month by militants on two high-profile targets in Iran should be a reminder to Tehran of the "dangers of blowback" from the country's various Arab world interventions, argues Alex Vatanka in Foreign Policy. "Without some kind of introspection, Iran will likely remain in the line of fire of Sunni jihadis for a long time to come."
"For years, Iranian officials have justified their intervention in the Arab world with the mantra, 'We have to fight them in Iraq and Syria so we don't have to fight them at home.' Now that the Islamic State has exposed the futility of that strategy, Tehran has a choice: It can reassess its military adventurism or double down on its policy of so-called forward-defense and take the fight to its enemies."
| | America: Supercomputer Heavyweight No More? | | America has slipped out of the top three in the supercomputer speed rankings for the first time in two decades – and that could have implications for research tied to anything from climate modeling to drug discovery, writes Jamie Condliffe for MIT Technology Review.
The fastest computer, TaihuLight, is housed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, with another computer from China and one based in Switzerland taking up second and third place, respectively.
"This is the first time since 1996 that America hasn't held one of the top three spots. It indicates that, while it certainly has significant supercomputing resources, it can't tackle its biggest problems at anywhere near the speeds enjoyed by researchers in China." | | | | | | |
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