Bad Idea: Privatized Cyber Security | U.S. Military Not Ready to Confront China | The Discreet Charm of Nuclear Power, and ore

Mexican Cartels Are Embracing Aerial Drones and They Are Spreading  (Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan, War on the Rocks)
Aerial drones, once the domain of states alone, have become standard features of the arsenals of terrorists, insurgents, and guerrillas. These actors find the flexibility of aerial drones appealing. But they are not the only ones: As we discuss in our new book Criminal Drone Evolution, criminal and cartel uses of small weaponized drones are increasingly in the news.

U.S. and China Must Heed Kissinger’s Stark Warnings  (Edward Luce, Financial Times)

·  “As the diplomat who did most to capitalize on the Cold War Sino-Soviet split, Henry Kissinger is dismissed by some as a China apologist. Yet his alarm at the risks of what is rapidly turning into a second cold war should be taken very seriously.”

·  “Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that whoever led in artificial intelligence would dominate the world. Kissinger, who, with Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, is co-author of a new book, ‘The Age of AI,’ says we have not yet begun to grasp the impact it is having on future warfare and geopolitical stability.”

·  “We do not know enough about AI on either side even to determine if China is ahead, or what it could do if it were. [Kissinger] likened today to the period before the first world war in which Britain and Germany were so ill-informed about each other’s aims that a seemingly unrelated incident  … triggered what at the time was the bloodiest war in history.”

·  “‘We need to learn about these AI capabilities while simultaneously understanding that they produce a level of uncertainty in the world within which permanent peace is very difficult to sustain — probably impossible,” Kissinger said … ‘The US and China are not close to understanding the potency of each other’s AI — and there are no plans to start a formal dialogue,’ he says. The scope for confusion and escalation is thus greater than during most of the cold war.”

·  “‘With nuclear weapons it was possible to conceive of principles of deterrence in which there was some symmetry between the damage on each side,’ he said. ‘If an unrestrained [US-China] arms race goes from nuclear to AI, the dangers of dramatic escalation would be very great.’”

Report—Havana Syndrome: American Officials under Attack  (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School)

·  “In September 2021, the CIA recalled its Vienna station chief reportedly over his response to a series of ‘anomalous health incidents’ experienced by over two dozen personnel. These incidents mark the latest entry in a series of mysterious afflictions more commonly referred to as ‘Havana Syndrome.’ Since 2016, over 200 U.S. diplomats, intelligence officials and their family members across the globe have reported similar experiences of severe headaches, vertigo and … cognitive difficulties while in their homes or hotel rooms on assignments. The effects can persist for years, leading to early retirement, impacting quality of life and harming close-knit communities that represent Washington abroad and provide America’s first line of defense.”

·  “The initial U.S. government response to Havana Syndrome lacked coordination across agencies and left many victims without adequate medical care. Senior officials questioned whether the symptoms were the result of deliberate attacks but did little to investigate other explanations even as the frequency of incidents increased. Some suggested the victims were simply experiencing mass hysteria. The Biden administration and CIA Director William Burns have redoubled their efforts to uncover the cause of Havana Syndrome and provide care to affected officials, but the U.S. government’s policy response options remain limited by the nature of an opaque threat with no definitive attribution. How the White House and partners in Congress identify and respond to these aggressive actions will have policy implications in the years ahead.”

·  “Washington must protect and care for its diplomats, intelligence officials and their families. More broadly, the U.S. must consider how it can deter and defend against asymmetric warfare without definitive evidence. Doing so will require renewing focus on traditional intelligence tradecraft to uncover threats, improving defensive detection and mitigation measures and developing novel policy strategies to protect America’s intelligence officers and diplomats serving abroad. Failure to address these attacks will impair U.S. diplomatic and intelligence activities, challenge strategic warning capabilities and hinder crisis response.”

The Mystery of ‘Havana Syndrome’ (Serge Schmemann, New York Times)

·  “The 200 or so U.S. officials who have reported neurological symptoms … deserve every effort by the government to get to the bottom of their problem. The trouble is that Havana syndrome has become so deeply enmeshed in the contentious politics of our time that agreement on an objective cause may prove all but impossible.”

·  “Despite the absence of any conclusive evidence about what causes it, or any reason it would appear in locations as diverse as India, Colombia, Vietnam, Austria, China, Serbia and Russia, or even a concrete number of officials afflicted, powerful lobbies have concluded that the symptoms are the work of a hostile power, and that this points to Russia. (For the record, Russia and Cuba both deny any role.)”

·  “A top State Department official brought back from retirement to coordinate a response to the illness was released after only six months, presumably in part because she would not rule out a mass psychogenic illness.”

·  “The C.I.A. station chief in Vienna, a hotbed of espionage, was removed in September, purportedly because he did not take the incidents seriously enough.”

·  “In September, Congress unanimously passed the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act, which will provide financial support to sufferers… Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is a son of Cuban exiles and was one of the authors of the bill, dismissed some of those skeptical of the theory that the symptoms were caused by directed-energy attacks as ‘influence agents.’”

·  “The skeptics, however, include many serious scientists, such as Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who wrote in Foreign Policy that no proponent of the directed-energy theory has outlined how such a weapon would work and that any nation has developed one.”

·  “That does not mean there is no mystery weapon. … But the potential ramifications of such a conclusion … demand dispassionate and objective investigation, not speculative bombast.”

The United States Can Shape China’s Collapse  (Robert L. Wilkie, National Interest)
But it must recognize that containing China is a global task.

The U.S. Military Isn’t Ready to Confront China  (Richard Aboulafia, Foreign Policy)
Two decades of counterinsurgency didn’t do it any favors.

The Discreet Charm of Nuclear Power  (Economist)
It makes fighting climate change a lot easier.