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THE FUTURE OF
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 contents

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arguments features

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019 The End of the 034 In Cyberwar, There Are No Rules

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Fighting General
America’s top brass should abandon
dreams of battlefield glory—and focus on
paperwork instead. by B.A. Friedman
023 A Million
Mistakes a Second
Ultrafast computing is critical to modern
warfare. But it also ensures a lot could go
very wrong, very quickly. by Paul Scharre
026 Food Fight
Why the next big battle may not be fought
over treasure or territory—but for fish.
by Kate Higgins-Bloom
030 The Algorithms
of August
The AI arms race won’t be like previous
CHRISTIAN HAAS
Why the world desperately needs digital Geneva Conventions.
by Tarah Wheeler
042 The Taliban’s Fight for
Hearts and Minds
The militants’ new strategy is to out-govern the
U.S.-backed administration in Kabul—and it’s working.
by Ashley Jackson
050 Why the Military Must Learn
to Love Silicon Valley
The U.S. Defense Department and Big Tech need each other
—but getting along won’t be easy. by Lara Seligman
054 Stretched Thin on Thin Ice
With the Arctic melting and northern coast guards
struggling to keep up, the next disaster is a matter of when,
not if. by Robbie Gramer
060 Hackers for Hire

competitions, and both the United States

and China could be left in the dust. What happens when the best cyberweapons are controlled
by Michael C. Horowitz by the private sector? by Neri Zilber

Cover photo illustration by C.J. BURTON FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 1

contents

insights reviews
007 Words of War 077 Night at the Museum
INFOGRAPHIC | Decrypting nine new military programs that will Brussels’s new European history museum
change the face of battle. by Amy Cheng and Amy Mackinnon could put anyone to sleep.
by Katherine Marsh
010 The Return of the Pentagon’s Yoda
PROFILE | Can Andrew Marshall, the U.S. military’s longtime 080 Germany’s
oracle, still predict the future? by Sharon Weinberger Return of the Repressed
The country’s far-right wants to revive ethnic

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014 Why Growth nationalism. The left must come up with its

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Can’t Be Green own alternative. by Yascha Mounk

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DEBUNKER | New data proves you can
084 Books in Brief

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support capitalism or the environment

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—but it’s hard to do both. by Jason Hickel New releases on the maritime history of

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World War II, the race to build clipper ships, and
016 You Can’t Go Home Again

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refugees from the killing fields of Cambodia.
DECODER | To understand the troubles roiling
096 Point and Nuke

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Sweden, start with the word that used to bind it
together—but no longer does. Remembering the era of portable atomic

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by Andrew Brown bombs. by Jeffrey Lewis

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 h im
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contributors
Kate Higgins-Bloom is a U.S. Coast Guard Lara Seligman covers the U.S. Defense
commander. Her staf tours have included a Department for FOREIGN POLICY. Her reporting
White House fellowship and acting chief on the defense industry and the U.S. military
of staf for legislative afairs at the has taken her around the world, from remote
Department of Homeland Security. She has U.S. Air Force bases in Norway to the control
deployed throughout the Caribbean and Eastern center for the coalition air war against the
Pacific; commanded a cutter on a yearlong Islamic State to the Dubai Airshow—and even to
assignment to the Persian Gulf; and responded the back seat of an F-16. Before joining FP, she
to numerous domestic crises, including was the Pentagon editor for Aviation Week &
Hurricane Katrina. Space Technology.

Yasha Mounk is a lecturer on government Tarah Wheeler is the senior director for data
at Harvard University, a senior fellow in the trust and threat and vulnerability management
political reform program at New America, at Splunk, as well as a cybersecurity policy
and a columnist at Slate. He is also the executive fellow at New America. She is a contributing

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director of the Renewing the Centre team at cybersecurity expert for the Washington

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the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The Post and has spoken and taught widely,
host of The Good Fight podcast, he is the author including at the DEF CON hacking conference,

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most recently of The People vs. Democracy: the Organization for Economic Cooperation

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Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to and Development, and the Federal Trade
Save It. Commission.

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Paul Scharre is a senior fellow and director of Neri Zilber is an independent journalist
the technology and national security program at based in Tel Aviv and an adjunct fellow at the

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the Center for a New American Security and Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He
the author of Army of None: Autonomous has written for FOREIGN POLICY, the New York

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Weapons and the Future of War. From 2008 to Times, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, Foreign
2013, he worked in the Oice of the Secretary of Affairs, and Politico Magazine, among other
Defense on policies for emerging technologies. outlets. Prior to joining the Washington Institute,

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He served in the U.S. Army’s 3rd Ranger he traveled throughout Israel, the West Bank,
Battalion and completed multiple tours in Iraq and Jordan from 2011 to 2013 as a fellow at the

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and Afghanistan. Institute of Current World Afairs.

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4 FALL 2018
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Sh a p in g Pe r sp e c ti ve s o n G l o b a l A f fa i r s

from the editor in chief
a new
A F T E R Y E A R S O F R E F I N E M E N T,
weapon started cutting a swath through
the battlefields of Europe. It was rela-
tively cheap, accurate, easy to use—
and so powerful it could punch through
the best defenses. With the touch of a
trigger, anyone carrying the weapon
o
could render expensive, state-of-the-
s
art combat systems obsolete. The result
a
was widespread carnage and chaos.
Leaders panicked and started calling
M
for some kinds of limits on the terrible
new device. So in 1139 one of the world’s
most powerful international institu-
tions—the Vatican—declared the cross-
bow anathema and “hateful to God.”
You get the point of the story: Anx-
ious discussions about the future of war
and the destabilizing impact of novel
weapons are hardly new. So why would
FOREIGN POLICY wade into the debate
again now? The reason is that this is
one of those moments when technol-
ogy is moving so fast that the old, set-
tled ways of fighting wars are rapidly
being overturned. And nobody knows
what, exactly, will follow.
But we can start by asking the right
questions. That’s what Tarah Wheeler
of Splunk and New America does in “In
Cyberwar, There Are No Rules” (Page
34). Her sweeping overview of the rising
threat of cyber conflicts shows where
the real dangers lie: not in cutting-edge
6 FALL 2018
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technology but in badly maintained
infrastructure that’s so outdated it
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can’t be hardened against even prim-
itive cyberattacks.
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Of course, cutting-edge technologies
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also pose new dangers. In “A Million
Mistakes a Second” (Page 23), Paul
Scharre—a former U.S. Army Ranger who
now works at the Center for a New Amer-
ican Security—looks at the race to build
autonomous weapons systems and warns
that as we cede authority to machines
that can act and react far faster than we
can, we increase the risks that acciden-
tal conflicts could spin out of control.
But artificial intelligence is just one
reason emerging technologies are
hard to constrain (as Pope Innocent
II learned back in the 12th century).
Wheeler points out that countries today
can’t even agree on what, exactly, con-
stitutes an act of cyberwar. Hard as it
is to get governments to behave, pri-
vate actors are even harder to wran-
gle. Yet as the Israeli journalist Neri
Zilber (“Hackers for Hire,” Page 60)
and the University of Pennsylvania’s
Michael C. Horowitz (“The Algorithms
of August,” Page 30) bring up, that’s just
the problem we now face with cyberse-
curity and AI, since both involve general
purpose technologies largely developed
by corporations—with their own pri-
vate agendas.
h im
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The changes, and problems, aren’t
just limited to high-tech. In “Food
Fight” (Page 26), Kate Higgins-Bloom
of the U.S. Coast Guard argues that the
explosive growth of the global middle
class is creating an insatiable demand
for middle-class food—namely pro-
tein—which is why the next great-power
war is likely to be waged not for territory
or treasure but for fish. And FP’s Rob-
bie Gramer travels north to the Arctic,
where disappearing sea ice has opened
up a vast new territory primed for acci-
dents and conflict.
None of this is reason for despair.
Despite how nervous they made medi-
eval princes, crossbows never actually
destroyed the world—and neither has
gunpowder or even nuclear weapons,
for that matter. History shows that we
humans are pretty good at finding ways
to avoid our collective self-destruction,
even if the answer often comes at the
very last minute and after a lot of blood-
shed. We can hope for the same today—
but only if we face the issues head on, as
FP has tried to do with this special issue.
Jonathan Tepperman
 insights

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INFOGRAPHIC

Words of War
Decrypting nine new military
programs that will change the
face of battle. By Amy Cheng
and Amy Mackinnon
IN WAR, AS IN LIFE, TECHNOLOGY IS KING. As the
U.S. military looks to maximize efficiency and
minimize civilian casualties, researchers at the
Defense Department are developing a range
of cutting-edge projects. It’s serious work—
but that doesn’t stop them from having a little
fun with the naming conventions.

Illustrations by REMIE GEOFFROI FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 7

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1. Gremlins
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The U.S. military needs low-
cost, operationally flexible
killer drones. The answer?
Gremlins—unmanned drones
just a few yards in length that
essentially act in swarms. In
combat scenarios, existing
aircraft such as C-130
transport planes would deploy
an army of gremlins to fight
on their behalf and then
position themselves at a safe
distance. Once the shooting
stopped, the transport planes
would retrieve the minidrones;
each gremlin has an expected
lifetime of 20 uses. The
gremlins project was launched
in 2015, and the Defense
Advanced Research Projects
Agency (better known as
DARPA) is currently
testing prototypes.
8 FALL 2018
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2. TALOS
In Greek mythology, Talos was
a giant bronze automaton who
protected the island of Crete.
The U.S. military’s version—the
Tactical Assault Light Operator
Suit—takes its inspiration from
that legend. Also known as the
Iron Man suit, TALOS is body
armor designed to protect
special operations troops from
both bullets and explosions.
It also provides its wearer with
enhanced strength, allowing
him or her to carry greater
weight and climb more flights
of stairs than human legs can
endure. First announced in
2013, the military now plans
to roll out TALOS in 2019.
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3. SLAM-ER
The Standof Land Attack
Missile-Expanded Response,
first introduced in 2000,
is one of the most precise
missiles used by the U.S.
Navy. That’s because it is
equipped with what’s called
man-in-the-loop technology,
which allows a weapons
technician to review data in
real time to help guide the
missile toward its final target.
SLAM-ER is also the first
weapon to feature automatic
target acquisition, which helps
it improve the identification
and location of quarries in
cluttered environments.
4. CHAMP
The Counter-electronics High
Power Microwave Advanced
Missile Project may sound like
science fiction, but it relies
on an old-fashioned concept:
microwave technology.
CHAMP uses electromagnetic
pulses to knock out an
enemy’s electricity grid and
computer systems without
any cost to human life. The
project was slated to launch
in 2016, but it has yet to
be used on the battlefield.
CHAMP could theoretically
disable North Korea’s missile
command and control centers
without using conventional
explosives—though that
action could still trigger a
more conventional retaliation.
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5. JEDI
This Star Wars-inspired
acronym stands for the
Joint Enterprise Defense
Infrastructure. It is
designed to serve as a
cloud computing and
storage hub for sharing
data among intelligence
agencies, allies, and
contractors; when fully
operational, JEDI will allow
the U.S. military to make
faster combat decisions
even when barraged
with information. The
$10 billion contract is
currently open for tenders.
Amazon is reportedly a
front-runner on the bid;
the company is already
working with the CIA,
which shows that it
is capable of the kind
of secure computing
necessary for JEDI.
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6. HAWC
When Mach speed proves
too slow, you need the
Pentagon’s Hypersonic
Air-breathing Weapon
Concept: a project
initiated in 2015 that
travels more than five
times the speed of sound.
A centerpiece of the
HAWC program is what
the military calls boost-
cruise technology, which
uses rockets to accelerate
before switching over to
scramjets—air-breathing
engines designed to
operate at extremely
high speeds. Sucking
in air gives them a big
advantage over traditional
rockets, which carry
their own oxidizers (the
chemicals required for
fuel to burn), limiting their
speed and range.
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8. Project
Maven
7. Project For years, human
Kessel Run analysts have reviewed
A public-private millions of hours of drone
partnership between footage to spot potential
the U.S. Air Force and threats. Project Maven,
Silicon Valley launched launched in April 2017,
in May, Project Kessel deploys sophisticated
Run’s experimentation lab algorithms and high-
teaches troops to code. speed computers to do
One major success: an the same thing much
app that automates the more eiciently. But
planning process for jet the project has proved
refueling—previously a controversial: In April,
labor-intensive task that more than 3,000 Google
involved multiple people employees protested their
and a whiteboard. The company’s involvement
U.S. Air Operations Center in Project Maven, citing
in Qatar recently began concerns that it could be
using the app. Project used in selecting targets
Kessel Run’s Star Wars- for drone strikes. The tech
inspired moniker takes giant will not renew its
its name from a route contract with the Defense
traversed at great speed Department when it
by the Millennium Falcon. expires in March 2019.
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9. LaWS
The Laser Weapon
System emits highly
focused energy to blast
both surface-based and
airborne threats. The
system’s great asset is its
speed: Its beam travels at
the speed of light, which
is up to 50,000 times
faster than a ballistic
missile. Better yet, LaWS
can hone in on the engine
of a ship and disable the
vessel without sinking
it. It’s also remarkably
inexpensive to use: Each
laser blast costs less
than a dollar. LaWS was
tested on the USS Ponce
from 2014 to 2017 and is
expected to be tested next
on the USS Portland. By
2020, Lockheed Martin
has promised to deliver
two more LaWS units—
one bound for the sea, the
other for land.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 9
insights
The Return of the Pentagon’s Yoda
Can Andrew Marshall, the U.S. military’s
longtime oracle, still predict the future?
By Sharon Weinberger
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AT 96 YEARS OLD, ANDREW MARSHALL, still widely
PROFILE touted as a leading U.S. defense intellectual, has
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reached an age where people mostly reflect on
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the past, if they are lucky enough to remember it.
PORTRAITS
Yet the man who helped coin the phrase “revo-
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OF GLOBAL
CHANGEMAKERS lution in military affairs”—the idea that at certain
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moments the introduction of new technology will
a
transform warfare—is still busy thinking about
the future, as his Alexandria, Virginia, apartment
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makes clear: Books on topics ranging from quan-
tum physics to Russian missile defense lie in piles
on nearly every surface, spilling over onto the
couch and lined up against the walls.
It has been three years since Marshall retired
from the U.S. Defense Department, and the famous
cold warrior is not ready, like the proverbial old
soldier, to fade away. He has just recently recov-
ered from a stroke and subsequent surgery, yet
he’s still sharp and focused, and he wants to talk
about one of his favorite subjects: the growing
threat from China.
“I don’t think they’re doing very well,” he said of
the Pentagon’s approach to thinking about warfare.
“In the first place, they’re very late to get focused
on China as a problem.”
Until he retired in 2015, Marshall headed the
Office of Net Assessment, an in-house think tank
for the U.S. defense secretary. For more than
four decades, Marshall sponsored studies, war
games, and formal evaluations of dangers fac-
ing the United States.
These days Marshall continues to capture many
10 FALL 2018
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of the contradictions that characterized his career.
He is a futurist who predicted the fall of the Soviet
Union, as well as the emergence of China as a
world power, and anticipated how technology
would transform modern war. But, according to
critics, he has also ignored the way information
technology—and in particular the mass penetra-
tion of the internet—affects national security. Yet
rather than his influence waning, his views—at
least on China—seem to be gaining currency in
the Trump administration. And Marshall, who
is now starting a private foundation, remains
determined to cement his legacy.
For his devoted acolytes, Marshall falls just short
of an omniscient saint. To critics, Marshall is a
neoconservative favorite who defended President
Ronald Reagan’s quixotic missile defense system,
hyped the threat from China, and won favor with
scholars using the power of the Pentagon’s purse
to fund their studies.
Regardless of how one judges Marshall’s con-
tributions, he represents one of the last of a gen-
eration of defense intellectuals that included, on
one end of the spectrum, the nuclear futurist Her-
man Kahn (who was the best man at Marshall’s
wedding) and, at the other, the Pentagon Papers
leaker Daniel Ellsberg who, before his fall from
official grace, was also among Marshall’s circle of
friends. Over the years, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert
Gates, and Dick Cheney all turned to him regu-
larly for advice.
Marshall got his start in national security at
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Photo by LEXEY SWALL FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 11

insights
the Rand Corp. in 1949, collaborating
with the analysts who defined nuclear
strategy during the Cold War. Later,
impressed with Marshall’s intellect,
Henry Kissinger, then President Rich-
ard Nixon’s national security advisor,
cajoled Marshall into leaving Califor-
nia for Washington to help assess the
Soviets’ military capabilities. By 1973,
Marshall was moved to the Pentagon,
where he became the head of the newly
established Office of Net Assessment.
And there he stayed for 42 years, culti-
vating a group of disciples who called
themselves members of “St. Andrew’s
Prep.” By the 2000s, Marshall, then in
his 80s, had earned the affectionate
nickname Yoda.
Though he remained obscure to the
public during much of his time in the
Pentagon, Marshall achieved near-rock
star status within national security cir-
cles for challenging bedrock assump-
o
tions of the intelligence and defense
communities. One of Marshall’s most
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cited successes was his upending of Cold
s
War assessments of the Soviet Union’s
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economic and military strength: Mar-
shall argued that the CIA overestimated
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the Soviets’ GDP and then underesti-
mated the percentage of GNP the coun-
try spent on its military. The Soviet
economy, he insisted, was much smaller
than believed and its military expen-
ditures a bigger burden on it. He was
right, and the CIA eventually revised
its numbers.
Marshall, who advocated for the anal-
ysis of Soviet decision-making in terms
of organizational behavior, was an even
better master of understanding his own
organization, the Pentagon. His ability to
stay in his job through eight successive
presidential administrations was a tes-
tament to his keen ability to maneuver
within the Defense Department bureau-
cracy and Washington politics. When
President Bill Clinton’s second defense
secretary, William Cohen, tried to exile
Marshall and his office to the National
Defense University in 1997, legions of
Marshall admirers swung into action,
12 FALL 2018
lobbying on Capitol Hill and making
their case in the press. Marshall stayed
put and doubled down on China, which
he had long believed to be a potential
threat to the United States.
Marshall emerged more publicly in
2001, when then-Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld tapped him to help craft a
key strategy document called the Qua-
drennial Defense Review (QDR). But
just before the document was set to be
released, members of al Qaeda—never
a central concern for Marshall or his
office—hijacked four planes, including
one that slammed into the Pentagon.
“Rumsfeld bought this vision [most nota-
bly on China], but 9/11 knocked every-
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thing off course,” said Aaron Friedberg,
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a Marshall protégé who is now a profes-
sor of politics at Princeton University.
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The QDR had been mostly completed
before 9/11; it had to be rejiggered, and
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language on counterterrorism was
quickly inserted. As the wars in Afghani-
stan and Iraq ramped up, the Pentagon’s
attention turned away from China. “But
Andy didn’t get deflected,” Friedberg
said. “The office continued to sponsor
work on the maturing and emerging
challenge from China.” Despite years
of war, Marshall did not show much
interest in counterinsurgency or ter-
rorist groups. The Last Warrior—
a 2015 biography of Marshall written by
Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts,
two of his intellectual progeny—makes
only passing reference to 9/11 and its
aftermath.
For Marshall, Afghanistan, Iraq, and
the fight against terrorism were just dis-
tractions from greater threats posed by
Russia and China. “I think our military
is too busy with the ongoing warfare,”
he told me. “That happened during the
Vietnam War. You couldn’t get people
in our military to pay attention to what
the Russians were doing and what was
happening in terms of their investment
and new approaches in Central Europe.”
Marshall may not have been inter-
ested in counterinsurgency, but he paid
attention to unconventional threats.
Stephen Lukasik, who held senior posi-
tions at Rand and the Defense Depart-
ment, worked on several studies for
Marshall in recent years, including one
that looked at a hypothetical private
company that built and sold nuclear
weapons. Yet even Lukasik, who praised
Marshall for his sharp intellect, said
cybersecurity was always a blind spot
for the Pentagon’s futurist. The idea that
the internet could transform national
m
security challenges—whether through
i
election meddling in the United States
h
or a cyberattack against an industrial
plant—has never been among his main
a
concerns.
h
“Andy knew nothing and knows noth-
ing about computers,” said Lukasik,
whose proposal to study cybersecurity
was dismissed by Marshall’s office.
For those in the Pentagon, includ-
ing Lukasik, who were instrumental in
bringing about the internet age, Mar-
shall’s refusal to consider the implica-
tions of cyberwarfare and the global
penetration of the internet was a rare
moment of myopia for the director of
net assessment.
For Marshall, the importance of infor-
mation technology to national security
isn’t online; it’s on the traditional bat-
tlefield. The Chinese, he believes, are
studying military information oper-
ations to disrupt the enemy’s com-
mand and control capabilities as an
area where they can gain a strategic
advantage over the United States. He
still laments that one of the last war
games he planned to sponsor around
2014—involving China and information
operations—never took place.
But even if the Pentagon, as Marshall
argues, is late to the game, his decades
of hammering away at the China threat
have made their mark in a way that may
ultimately be his most significant leg-
acy. The Trump administration’s new
National Defense Strategy, released in
January, signaled a clear shift away from
counterinsurgency back to great-power
competition of the type Marshall has
long emphasized. The document echoes
a longtime Marshall theme, describing
China as a “strategic competitor using
predatory economics to intimidate its
neighbors” while militarizing the waters
and islands of the South China Sea.
Just acknowledging the threat isn’t
enough for Marshall; he still believes
that the Pentagon needs to do more
to assess China’s military capabilities.
“I would think, with respect to China,
there would be underway an effort
the Office of Net Assessment has been
under pressure to produce studies on
problems of more immediate impor-
tance to the department, according
to Durnan. “The Pentagon has a short
timeframe,” he said.
But Heather Babb, a Pentagon
spokeswoman, disputed the contention
that ONA has become more focused on
the immediate future. “The office con-
tinues, as it has throughout its history,
If the foundation does finally give
Marshall, famously a man of few words,
a forum to express his personal views,
don’t expect those to be translated into
280 characters. The man who helped
define the future of warfare has long
refused to embrace one fundamental
part of the present: personal computers.
Friends have urged him to get an
iPad or Kindle at least, something that
would be useful for a voracious reader

m
much like we had against the Soviet to focus on the long-term, and to draw such as himself, but Marshall has always

i
Union,” he said. “That would involve on this long-term work to help inform demurred. He’s online only indirectly:

h
… as the work in the case of the Soviet leadership today,” she wrote. His former assistant at the Pentagon
Union did, a decade or more to begin The foundation will also be an oppor- drops by several times a week to read

a
to produce really first-rate analyses of tunity for Marshall, who was often his emails to him and send replies.

h
particular warfare areas or theaters.” regarded as something of a cypher, “I don’t go on the internet at all,”

T
Marshall himself, though almost a to speak openly. “This is for Andy to he said. Q

li
centenarian, appears ready to take on vent,” Durnan said. “He never pulled
some of this work himself. Just a few his punches privately, but he couldn’t SHARON WEINBERGER (@weinbergersa) is

A
years after formally retiring, Marshall go out and say how stupid the intelli- the author of The Imagineers of War:
is embarking on the next stage of his gence community is or the Navy’s not The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pen-

d
career: launching an eponymous pri- doing anything. It’ll be fun.” tagon Agency That Changed the World.

o
vate foundation that will continue the
kind of work he did at the Pentagon,

o
sponsoring studies on the future of

s
warfare. “The idea is to try to encour-

a
age more people to think and write
about the major decisions and choices

M
that we’re likely to be faced with over
the next decade or so,” he said of the
foundation, which is set to launch in
September.
First up on the foundation’s list is a
Russia-focused proposal. It harks back
to his office’s Cold War study of Soviet
military theorists who wrote about
future warfare. “I’m interested in hav-
ing someone look at who are the current
set of people [in Russia] who qualify as
military theorists and what are they
writing,” Marshall said.
The idea is to promote the sort of
future-focused studies that are no
longer done much in the Office of Net
Assessment, said Jaymie Durnan of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Lincoln Laboratory. Durnan worked for
Marshall in the Defense Department
and is now collaborating with him on
the foundation.
Since Marshall left the Pentagon,
insights

Why Growth Can’t Be Green

New data proves you can
support capitalism or

im
the environment—but

h
it’s hard to do both.

a
By Jason Hickel

T h
li
WARNINGS ABOUT ECOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN have become ubiqui-

A
tous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including
the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarm-

d
ing stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse

o
of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being
driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying

o
consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere

s
and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists

a
say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse.
Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what GDP from resource use is not possible

M
has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they
argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce
the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while
simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world,
which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms,
the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the
total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.
It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise cata-
strophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence sug-
gests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been
hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.
Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in
on a global scale.
A team of scientists led by the German
researcher Monika Dittrich first raised
doubts in 2012. The group ran a sophis-
ticated computer model that predicted
what would happen to global resource
use if economic growth continued on
its current trajectory, increasing at
DEBUNKER about 2 to 3 percent per year. It found
that human consumption of natural
resources (including fish, livestock, for-
CONVENTIONAL
WISDOM, ests, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels)
UPENDED would rise from 70 billion metric tons
ISTOCK PHOTOS/AHMED AREEF/EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES

Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the conference, the World per year in 2012 to 180 billion metric
Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Devel- tons per year by 2050. For reference,
opment, and the U.N. Environment Program all produced a sustainable level of resource use is
reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of about 50 billion metric tons per year—a
the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. boundary we breached back in 2000.
But the promise of green growth turns out to have been The team then reran the model to
based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. In the see what would happen if every nation
years since the Rio conference, three major empirical stud- on Earth immediately adopted best
ies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: practice in efficient resource use (an
Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of extremely optimistic assumption).

14 FALL 2018 Illustration by JOAN WONG


o
o
s
a
The results improved; resource con-
M
sumption would hit only 93 billion
metric tons by 2050. But that is still a
lot more than we’re consuming today.
Burning through all those resources
could hardly be described as absolute
decoupling or green growth.
In 2016, a second team of scien-
tists tested a different premise: one in
which the world’s nations all agreed
to go above and beyond existing best
practice. In their best-case scenario, the
researchers assumed a tax that would
raise the global price of carbon from $50
to $236 per metric ton and imagined
technological innovations that would
double the efficiency with which we
use resources. The results were almost
exactly the same as in Dittrich’s study.
Under these conditions, if the global
economy kept growing by 3 percent
each year, we’d still hit about 95 billion
metric tons of resource use by 2050.
Bottom line: no absolute decoupling.
Finally, last year the U.N. Environ-
ment Program—once one of the main
cheerleaders of green growth theory—
weighed in on the debate. It tested a
scenario with carbon priced at a whop-
ping $573 per metric ton, slapped on a
resource extraction tax, and assumed
rapid technological innovation spurred
by strong government support. The
result? We hit 132 billion metric tons by
2050. This finding is worse than those
of the two previous studies because the
researchers accounted for the “rebound
effect,” whereby improvements in
resource efficiency drive down prices
and cause demand to rise—thus can-
celing out some of the gains.
T
Study after study shows the same
li
thing. Scientists are beginning to real-
ize that there are physical limits to how
A
efficiently we can use resources. Sure,
we might be able to produce cars and
d
iPhones and skyscrapers more effi-
ciently, but we can’t produce them out
of thin air. We might shift the economy
to services such as education and yoga,
but even universities and workout stu-
dios require material inputs. Once we
reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing
any degree of economic growth drives
resource use back up.
These problems throw the entire con-
cept of green growth into doubt and
necessitate some radical rethinking.
Remember that each of the three studies
used highly optimistic assumptions. We
are nowhere near imposing a global car-
bon tax today, much less one of nearly
$600 per metric ton, and resource effi-
ciency is currently getting worse, not
better. Yet the studies suggest that even
if we do everything right, decoupling
economic growth with resource use will
remain elusive and our environmental
problems will continue to worsen.
Preventing that outcome will require
a whole new paradigm. High taxes and
technological innovation will help, but
they’re not going to be enough. The
only realistic shot humanity has at
averting ecological collapse is to impose
hard caps on resource use, as the econ-
omist Daniel O’Neill recently proposed.
Such caps, enforced by national gov-
ernments or by international treaties,
could ensure that we do not extract
more from the land and the seas than
the Earth can safely regenerate. We
could also ditch GDP as an indicator of
economic success and adopt a more bal-
anced measure like the genuine prog-
ress indicator (GPI), which accounts
for pollution and natural asset deple-
m
tion. Using GPI would help us maximize
i
socially good outcomes while minimiz-
h
ing ecologically bad ones.
But there’s no escaping the obvi-
a
ous conclusion. Ultimately, bringing
h
our civilization back within planetary
boundaries is going to require that we
liberate ourselves from our dependence
on economic growth—starting with rich
nations. This might sound scarier than
it really is. Ending growth doesn’t mean
shutting down economic activity—it
simply means that next year we can’t
produce and consume more than we
are doing this year. It might also mean
shrinking certain sectors that are par-
ticularly damaging to our ecology and
that are unnecessary for human flour-
ishing, such as advertising, commuting,
and single-use products.
But ending growth doesn’t mean
that living standards need to take a
hit. Our planet provides more than
enough for all of us; the problem is that
its resources are not equally distributed.
We can improve people’s lives right now
simply by sharing what we already have
more fairly, rather than plundering the
Earth for more. Maybe this means better
public services. Maybe it means basic
income. Maybe it means a shorter work-
ing week that allows us to scale down
production while still delivering full
employment. Policies such as these—
and countless others—will be crucial to
not only surviving the 21st century but
also flourishing in it. Q
JASON HICKEL (@jasonhickel) is an
anthropologist, author, and a fellow
of the Royal Society of Arts.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 15
insights
d A
o o
a s
M
You Can’t Go Home Again
To understand the troubles roiling
Sweden, start with the word that used
to bind it together—but no longer does.
By Andrew Brown
FEW POLITICAL IDEALS END UP AS OBJECTS OF NOSTALGIA. The ones
that thrive live on the streets and in daily life; the ones that die
do so obscurely. But the Nordiska Museet, the great anthro-
pology museum in Stockholm, houses an exhibition devoted INTERPRETING
to a single word—one that until recently breathed life into THE ESSENTIAL
Sweden and now, in its absence, haunts its national politics.
HELP EXPLAIN
The word is folkhemmet, and the ideal it represents—and the
vacuum left by its disappearance—helps explain the surge
of reactionary populism now shaking the country’s political
order, as well as the continent’s.
Folkhemmet also happens to have no English equivalent.
The literal translation—the people’s home—is clunky, but it
does capture the central concept: home. The exhibition in
16 FALL 2018
h im
h a
li T
Nordiska Museet makes that clear. It
displays an entire reconstructed apart-
ment from the late 1940s, built by the
government for a skilled worker and
his family. To contemporary visitors,
the apartment seems cramped, though
hardly shabby. (The pastel-painted cup-
boards in the kitchen could even be con-
sidered retro chic.) At the time it was
built, however, the home represented
almost unimaginable prosperity for the
DECODER family that lived there: It featured hot
and cold running water, access to a com-
munal laundry, storage space, and a
foundation and exterior walls soundly
WORDS THAT
built out of concrete. Most import-
THE WORLD ant, in terms of the folkhemmet ideal,
the home wasn’t a reward, something
the family had to earn through some
extraordinary act. Rather, it was some-
thing the family was deemed to deserve
for simply participating in the Swedish
community.
Illustration by SUSANNE ENGMAN
 This wasn’t how it started. The word
came from a German term—Volks-
gemeinschaft, or “the people’s com-
munity”—that no one uses any longer
because it became a Nazi slogan. The
right-wing political scientist Rudolf
Kjellen introduced it into Sweden in
the early years of the 20th century,
but the Social Democratic leader Per
Albin Hansson seized and transformed
it into a left-wing political slogan and
program. In a speech in 1928, Hansson
proclaimed: “In a good home, there are
… no favorites and no stepchildren. No
one is looked down on. No one tries to
gain advantage at another’s expense;
the strong do not oppress the weak. …
Applied to society as a whole, this would
require that we break down all the social
and economic barriers that now divide
citizens into the privileged and those left
behind, the rulers and their dependents,
the plunderers and those plundered.”
o
There was always something inade-
quate about the official English trans-
o
lation of folkhemmet that the Social
s
Democratic movement went on to offer:
a
The phrase “welfare state” captures
neither the emotional nor the cultural
M
meaning of the term. It sounds like a
vast impersonal bureaucracy responsible
for regulating one’s life when part of the
vision was for a very personal bureau-
cracy—an extension into the world of
politics of the enforced solidarity that
was already a part of Swedish culture.
For most of its history, Sweden was
a rather authoritarian society. A web
of formality and obligation, codified
only partly by law, kept everyone in
their place and very conscious of their
relative social position. Personal liber-
ties were strictly curtailed. From 1919
to 1955, alcohol was rationed compul-
sorily, with the quantities doled out
varying by age, class, and sex. (Men
were allowed 3 liters a month. Married
women had no ration at all, but unmar-
ried women could, if they were lucky,
get half a liter of spirits every three
months, though only 1 in 10 women
had ration books.) And until 1951, it
was technically illegal to be an atheist
(though one could choose from among
11 officially approved beliefs).
What the Social Democrats did when
introducing folkhemmet in the early
20th century was keep Sweden’s strict
sense of communal order—with the
same sense that everyone, rather than
a single Big Brother, was watching you
all the time—while changing the under-
lying dogma, substituting the authority
of science and the hope of progress for
the authority of God and the hope of
salvation. The result was a new national
sense of solidarity—the terms and con-
ditions of which Swedes were obliged to
accept without question or protest. And
T
most Swedes gladly did, voting to keep
li
the Social Democrats in power, begin-
ning in 1932, for 44 consecutive years.
A
During that time, the Swedish gov-
ernment built universal health care,
d
free higher education, and social-
ized housing. But its clearest expres-
sion of the folkhemmet ideal was the
creation of free universal state child
care. The policy was designed not as
an economic benefit but as a vehicle
for transforming women’s role in soci-
ety. The idea stemmed from the Social
Democratic intellectuals Gunnar and
Alva Myrdal, who in the 1930s argued
that properly egalitarian family poli-
cies would encourage women both to
have multiple children and to go out to
join the workforce. (The Myrdals’ ideal
was that not just child care and educa-
tion but births, too, would be evenly
distributed across society; their hope
was that families of all classes would
have around three children.) The point
wasn’t that the government’s child-
bearing and child care arrangements
were good for women but that they
were good for society as a whole.
Social Democratic governments duly
translated these ideas into policy. By
1975, local authorities were obliged to
provide preschooling for every 6-year-
old. In practice, this applied to much
younger children, too. Before the eco-
nomic crash of the early 1990s, it had
come to seem almost immoral for
women to stay at home and look after
their children. The trend stopped,
though, after unemployment began to
rise. The state turned its attention to
making sure that men took their part in
child care away from work, with a mix-
ture of legal and social pressure ensuring
that paid parental leave was more evenly
shared. These policies, and the associ-
ated cultural norms, have few, if any,
m
counterparts outside of Scandinavia.
i
h
to capture the
a
PERHAPS THE BEST WAY
meaning of folkhemmet would be
h
through a very free translation—some-
thing like “national family.” The thing
about families is not that they are happy
or even that they love one another, as
the films of the Swedish director Ing-
mar Bergman make clear, but that the
members are all stuck with each other.
In the long run, they are going to have
to get on or at least accommodate their
mutual hatreds. That accommodation
precedes any other. Families, in this
sense, are held together by innate cov-
enants—not voluntary contracts. They
are profoundly illiberal institutions.
No one asks to be born into a family,
yet once you’re a member, the others
have to take you in. What Sweden did
was successfully nudge the feeling that
its people belonged together toward a
sense of mutual obligation.
That sense of belonging has by no
means entirely disappeared. Swedish
right-wing politicians have a sense of
duty toward the poor and marginalized
that is difficult to find in British and U.S.
politics. But solidarity has dissipated in
recent years—a fact that many blame
on immigration, especially from Mus-
lim countries. The historical picture,
however, is more complicated.
Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s,
Sweden began accepting labor migrants
chiefly from Finland, though also from
the Balkans. This didn’t produce any
great social problems, perhaps because
the process was agreed on with the
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 17
insights
country’s powerful unions, which did
not feel that their members’ jobs were
threatened by it. Political immigration
first got underway in the 1970s, with
Latin American refugees from the
coup against Augusto Pinochet’s Chile
and other left-wingers. They were fol-
lowed by Kurds and Assyrian Christians
fleeing the Iran-Iraq War. Then came
refugees from the Balkan wars, from
Lebanon, from Somalia and the Horn
of Africa, and finally from Syria.
Many Swedes look at members of
these latter groups and see people who
are an awkward fit with the traditional
national family—not least because they
assume the immigrants have loyalties
that transcend it. Whether that is true,
of course, is impossible to know for cer-
tain. But the mere possibility of diluted
national loyalty among some portion of
the population may have weakened the
unquestioned bond Swedes previously
o
felt between patriotism and socialism
o
s
The vision was for a very personal
a
bureaucracy—an extension into the world
M
of politics of the enforced solidarity that
was already a part of Swedish culture.
that had been implicit in the concept of
folkhemmet from the beginning.
But there were many other factors
working in the same direction. Well
before mass immigration to Sweden
became a phenomenon, and then a
problem, the old model had already
broken up from within. First, there was
the collapse, in the 1970s, of the cul-
ture of deference to authority—a col-
lapse urged on by the Social Democrats
themselves. While the first generation in
power had largely liberated the country
from the fear of poverty, the second gen-
eration, spearheaded by Prime Minister
Olof Palme, seemed at times to want to
liberate people from all the remaining
18 FALL 2018
chains of inequality at once. The Social
Democrats didn’t foresee how this shift
would undermine the authority of its
own political institutions.
Then there was the economic crisis
of the 1980s and 1990s. Folkhemmet
had been conceived in the austerity of
the 1930s and 1940s, but it had grown
to maturity in the great postwar boom,
when it seemed there would be money
for the state to do anything it wanted.
In 1975, the government’s provision of
security for the public began to seem
unaffordable. The country shifted away
from central planning toward a much
more decentralized and less regulated
form of capitalism.
T
That change helped produce a shift
li
in culture. The introduction of com-
mercial television exposed Swedes to
A
glamorous new hierarchies of economic
and social capital. These hierarchies
d
were more enticing than the staid unity
of folkhemmet precisely because they
were less egalitarian. At the same time,
there was huge migration to the cities.
This tended to break down traditional
ties and networks. More subtly, it dimin-
ished opportunities for people to feel,
and to be, important in their own sphere
or community. When there are many
small ponds, each will have its own large
fish; when there is one huge lake, far
fewer fish will count as truly large. It
was no longer enough to be an import-
ant person in a provincial town or a local
factory—and those disappeared, too,
in the great deindustrialization of the
1980s and 1990s.
Almost all of these changes appeared
to be liberalizations at the time, and
most of them were entirely inevitable.
But they all tended to diminish the
sense of belonging and to replace cov-
enants with contracts and confinement
with an insecure freedom. Taxes were
cut, sick pay and unemployment pay
diminished; the state shrank in a wave
of privatizations, including those of the
post office and the railways—both of
which are now the objects of national
shame and fury for their chronic failure
m
to deliver adequate service. When I was
i
last in Stockholm, in May, a prominent
h
journalist for the Dagens Nyheter news-
paper—someone at the very heart of the
a
liberal elite—harangued me about how
h
much those two failures made him feel
his country was lost and had fallen away
from its values. These values had always
included competence, trustworthiness,
and social engineering that worked.
Now not even the trains run on time.
The sense of a country that is no longer
itself extends far more widely than sim-
ple unease about immigration.
The loss among Swedes of a sense
of home, of living in a place where
you have to be taken in even when
you don’t deserve it, haunts Swedish
politics today—and, more broadly,
all European politics. It is one of the
great drivers of xenophobia because it
stresses questions that never arose in
the old days: Who deserves a place in
the family and why? At root, the mourn-
ing for folkhemmet recognizes the loss
of any sense of mutual obligation. It’s
not easy to imagine the policies or the
politicians who could restore such a
sense today. In the meantime, many
Swedes are choosing to heed their own
lost leftist ideals by voting for the far-
right at the ballot box. Unlike most of
the Swedish establishment, the pop-
ulists at least acknowledge that those
ideals have been breached. Q
ANDREW BROWN (@seatrout) is an edito-
rial writer at the Guardian and author
of Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and The
Future That Disappeared, which won
the 2009 Orwell Prize.

li T
d A
o o
a s
M The End of the Fighting General
America’s top brass should abandon
dreams of battlefield glory—and focus on
paperwork instead. By B.A. Friedman
IT’S WIDELY UNDERSTOOD THAT WARFARE EVOLVES with the tech-
nology available to combatants. But it’s often forgotten that
tactical leadership—the art of command in battle—likewise
evolves. For centuries, fighting generals such as Alexander
the Great, Genghis Khan, Hannibal, and Saladin exemplified
tactical leadership, creating great reputations in the process.
Today, however, lieutenants and corporals play the battle-
field roles once held by these famous leaders.
The U.S. military uses the term “strategic corporal” as
Illustrations by MATT CHASE
h im
h a
shorthand to capture the growing bat-
tlefield responsibility held by leaders
of junior rank. That responsibility has
become both immense and increas-
ingly routine. For years now, corporals
and lieutenants as young as 20 years old
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have
regularly made split-second, life-alter-
ing decisions with staggering amounts
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 19
arguments
of firepower at their disposal and have
been expected to do so in accordance
with the national interests, policies, and
strategy of the United States.
This shift has also changed the role
of these troops’ military superiors.
Consider Pickett’s Charge at the Bat-
tle of Gettysburg during the U.S. Civil
War. On July 3, 1863, Confederate Gen.
Robert E. Lee ordered three of his sub-
ordinate generals to execute a direct
attack on Union forces. Lee was steeped
in Napoleonic tactics that emphasized
the advantages of a direct attack. But
given the advances in firepower since
Napoleon’s time, Lee’s plan was obso-
lete in ways he didn’t fully understand;
the charge failed, and the Confederates
suffered a disastrous 6,000 casualties.
The outcome of the battle may well have
been different if the Confederacy’s tac-
tical decisions were made closer to the
front lines.
o
Military disasters on the scale of Pick-
ett’s Charge are an anachronism today,
o
in part because generals no longer
s
enjoy the tactical authority they once
a
did. Today, the decision to attack, and
how, is usually made by lieutenants, ser-
M
geants, corporals, and sometimes even
more junior soldiers, who have quietly
become the military’s most important
battlefield leaders. As for the fighting
general, if he isn’t yet dead, he may be
fatally wounded.
THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCE of armies has
always been forged from the collec-
tive potential of individuals. Prior to
the development of gunpowder, it took
the combined muscle power of thou-
sands of soldiers to muster meaningful
force. Troops fought in mass formations
alongside others with similar weapons:
spearmen with spearmen, archers with
archers, cavalry with cavalry. Each
of these units was obliged to fight in
coordination with others to leverage
their capacity for violence to the full-
est. A single general, or monarch, led
each ancient army, with unchallenged
20 FALL 2018
responsibility for devising tactics and
issuing orders.
With the advent of firepower, how-
ever, individual soldiers suddenly
attained much more destructive poten-
tial. And as that capacity for individual
violence grew, leadership could, and
did, devolve closer to the individual
level. Over time, the general was joined
by subordinate generals, brigadiers,
and an ever more professional officer
corps, including captains and lieuten-
ants. In the early 19th century, Napo-
leon divided his armies into corps that
could maneuver and fight completely
independently, a decision critical to his
unprecedented victories.
T
The development of artillery, and
li
the refinement of rifled firearms, in
the late 19th and early 20th centu-
A
ries allowed division commanders to
assume ever more tactical leadership.
d
In World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisen-
hower typified the trend; he oversaw
the planning of the invasion of France
while allowing specific attacks to be run
by officers as junior as captains. While
large battles still occurred during Viet-
nam, most of the day-to-day combat
was conducted by platoons of around
40 soldiers deployed independently,
with the platoon commander (usually
a lieutenant in his early 20s) making
the tactical decisions.
Today, most of the combat under-
taken by the U.S. military happens at
the squad level, involving just 14 sol-
diers or fewer. Officers have been dis-
placed almost entirely from tactical
leadership, in favor of enlisted service
members—staff noncommissioned offi-
cers (SNCOs) and noncommissioned
officers (NCOs). This trend isn’t nec-
essarily bad. Officers, by virtue of hav-
ing acquired a college degree, typically
have a broader range of knowledge and
skills that allows them to evaluate the
big picture; they also have relatively less
military experience. By contrast, NCOs
(corporals and sergeants) and especially
the more senior SNCOs (staff sergeants
and above) have deep experience in
their roles and are better equipped for
practical, detailed execution.
It is precisely the fact that the U.S.
military has such a highly skilled and
dependable NCO corps that it’s able to
operate so effectively in small units.
This is to its great benefit on the battle-
field. Smaller units move faster and are
more likely to avoid detection by enemy
forces. And if a squad is detected and
neutralized, the loss is less disastrous
m
for the army as a whole.
i
h
AS AUTHORITY MOVES down the military’s
a
chain of command, what happens to
h
those at the top?
Many generals still consider them-
selves warriors above all else and
attempt to micromanage tactical
units in battle. As the analyst Peter W.
Singer has documented, this tempta-
tion is encouraged by communications
technologies that can deliver real-time
access to the battlefield anywhere in the
world. It has never been easier for a gen-
eral to intervene in tactical decisions.
Even as such involvement has got-
ten easier, however, it has also become
more disruptive. No major military is
designed to be led solely by generals. The
U.S. Army is structured to fight in bri-
gades (made up of about 3,000 soldiers,
although the size varies) commanded by
a colonel, while the Marine Corps usually
deploys battalions (around 500 Marines)
commanded by a lieutenant colonel or
colonel. Both services can fight in larger
units, such as divisions (roughly 12,000
troops), should war break out against a
major power. But even if brigades and
larger units do enter combat these days,
smaller units will likely retain battle-
field authority because of the devas-
tating power and pinpoint accuracy
delivered by adversaries’ modern artil-
lery and airstrikes. In the combat zones
of eastern Ukraine today, for instance,
the Ukrainian army’s movements are
typically carried out by units composed
of just a few soldiers. Anything larger
invites crushing artillery strikes.

o d
Meanwhile, Washington’s existing
o
wars are dominated by platoon- and
s
squad-level tactics directed by lieuten-
a
ants, sergeants, and corporals. Effec-
tive tactical leadership by troops of such
M
low rank requires that the chain of com-
mand empower and trust them. Micro-
management undermines that trust.
Higher-ranking officers have plenty
of other work to focus on, including
logistics, intelligence, and the coordi-
nation of tactical actions across multi-
ple units. These are not unimportant
roles; given the large volume of sup-
plies that modern military operations
demand, logistics is a major factor in
maintaining troops’ morale. That’s why,
as generals’ tactical role has declined,
their staffs of intelligence officers, logis-
ticians, and other support personnel
have grown—and an increasing share of
their time is devoted to managing their
teams of direct subordinates.
If the U.S. military wants to stay effec-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
tive, it needs to exploit, rather than
resist, this trend; generals will have to
fully give up their role as tactical com-
manders and embrace their role as com-
T
li
A
bat enablers and policy advisors. During
operations, generals should focus on
providing institutional leadership—that
is, they should think of themselves as
supervisory managers responsible for
coordinating between units and com-
mand and ensuring supplies flow to
their destinations. They should also
redouble their commitment to serving
policymakers. Their advice should be
rooted in their military experience and
expertise—but not limited to it. Civilian
officials making decisions about war
and peace need information filtered
through conceptual lenses such as stra-
tegic theory, international relations, and
other disciplines. A pure tactician can
never offer policymakers the level of
insight and wisdom that they require.
ACKNOWLEDGING THE NEWFOUND ROLE of
generals requires changing how the
U.S. military selects, trains, educates,
and promotes its officers. The failure
to make such changes has already pro-
duced some disastrous outcomes in
recent and ongoing wars. The U.S. mil-
h im
h a
Gen. Dwight
D. Eisenhower
gives orders to
paratroopers
in England
before D-Day
in June 1944.
itary’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan
haven’t primarily been on the level of
tactics but of strategy: the decisions,
more influenced by generals than by any
other military officers, about whether
to enter these wars at all and how to
determine their objectives in the broad-
est sense. Those failures have already
produced tensions along the military’s
chain of command and with the coun-
try’s civilian leadership. In 2007, for
instance, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
wrote a highly influential and controver-
sial article in the Armed Forces Journal
taking the general officer corps to task
for giving poor military advice in Iraq.
The situation has not gotten any better
since then. Officers still exhibit almost
uniform enthusiasm for the intracta-
ble conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq
and frequently base their assessments
on body counts, territory controlled,
and operations completed. A can-do
attitude is admirable when it comes
to tactical leadership, but those met-
rics are more relevant to the individual
battlefield than to the success of com-
plicated and deeply political wars.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 21
arguments
Neither their enthusiasm nor their
preferred tactical metrics offer much
insight to civilian policymakers, espe-
cially in the face of almost two decades
of strategic failure.
Policymakers need and deserve the
kind of military advice that can only
be acquired over a career of studying
foreign policy and the use of military
force, not just being engaged in its exe-
cution. Unfortunately, the U.S. mili-
tary continues to prepare its officers to
become tactical generals. Military edu-
cation focuses on tactical planning, not
strategic or political knowledge. Most
officers receive some basic education in
strategic studies but rarely get to exer-
cise those skills in their day-to-day work
until they become generals.
The military needs to better prepare
its officers to become policy generals.
The education of officers currently
centers on the war colleges and defense
o
universities. Officers typically spend
about one year at these institutions,
o
which generally do a very good job of
s
providing quality education. There is a
a
limit, however, to how much scholarly
knowledge can be absorbed in a single
M
Generals will have to fully give up
their role as tactical commanders and
embrace their role as combat enablers
and policy advisors.
year that is divided between study and
practical military training. That’s why
the military’s existing educational
institutions should remove training
from their curriculums. Doing that
would free up time for academic study
in subjects including international
relations, strategic theory, geopolitics,
and conflict analysis and resolution.
Refocusing military curriculums in
this way would have the added benefit
of steeping officers in the values of
22 FALL 2018
scholarship and liberal education.
Having previously been trained to obey
a strict chain of command, they would
have a greater opportunity to learn
how to respectfully disagree, balance
multiple viewpoints and opinions, and
present complex arguments—critical
skills for any policy general.
The military’s schools will also have
to change their methods for evaluating
students. Today, officers’ performances
at war colleges do not bear on their
future careers; the officer who do just
enough work to get by comes out on the
other side with the same official report
as the officer who works diligently to
learn the material. As a result, most
T
officers think of time at a professional
li
military education institute as time off
or a break from the normal frenetic pace
A
of operations. If officers’ grades at the
war colleges were taken seriously by
d
their superiors, those officers would
have greater incentive to put as much
effort into their academic education as
they do their practical training. Such a
shift would also allow the military’s top
leaders to better decide which officers
are truly qualified to serve as generals.
GENERALS, AND ASPIRING GENERALS, will
resist this. Many prospective officers
in today’s military want to fight, not
to scheme over policy. They have
often held leadership positions prior
to joining the military, whether on
sports teams, in student government,
or other group activities, and the
military has only further encouraged
them to associate leadership above
all with a can-do attitude, bravery
in battle, and professionalism in the
tactical execution of missions. Those
values should not be discounted. As
officers rise in rank, however, the
nature of generalship itself demands
a different form of leadership, one that
privileges persuasion, deliberation,
and reflection.
Even if the officer corps consented
to formalized changes in the train-
ing and job descriptions of generals,
those changes would still require the
m
approval and cooperation of Congress.
i
Military promotions are mostly dic-
h
tated by the 1980 Defense Officer Per-
sonnel Management Act, and officer
a
education is determined by the 1986
h
Goldwater-Nichols Department of
Defense Reorganization Act. Gold-
water-Nichols centralized the mili-
tary advice provided to policymakers
in a single person—the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The world
has changed vastly since these laws
were passed. Congress should mod-
ernize both officer promotions and
officer education by replacing both of
the existing acts with one piece of new
legislation designed to help educate
and promote the kinds of officers that
civilian policymakers actually need.
Robert E. Lee failed at Gettysburg
because he was trained and educated
for a bygone era. Since his time, the best
generals have looked more like Eisen-
hower in 1944. The trend should not be
seen as a threat but as an opportunity.
Getting modern generalship right would
offer a much-needed balm to soothe
civil-military relations, as well as ten-
sions inside the military itself. The most
advanced and far-reaching military in
the world will do little good if led by
generals who would rather fire a rifle
than plan with paperwork. Q
B.A. FRIEDMAN (@BA_Friedman) is a
military analyst and associate editor
at the Strategy Bridge. He is the author
of On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in
Battle and the editor of 21st Century
Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic
Prophecy for the Modern Era.
 risks would be grave: Accidents could
cause conflicts to spiral out of control.
Consider what has already happened
with stock markets, where computers
use algorithms to make decisions so
quickly that microseconds make a dif-
ference of millions of dollars. Such trad-
ing has made brokers huge amounts of
money—but has also produced extreme
flash crashes that can send markets
tumbling in minutes. Regulators have

m
managed these risks by installing circuit

i
breakers that can take a stock offline if

h
the price moves too quickly, but battle-
fields lack these fail-safes. Flash crashes

a
are bad enough; a flash war would be

h
downright disastrous.

li T
HUMANS HAVE ALREADY CEDED CONTROL to

A
machines in certain military domains.
At least 30 countries—with Israel, Rus-

d
sia, and the United States leading the

o
pack—employ human-supervised
autonomous weapons to defend bases,

o
A Million Mistakes a Second vehicles, and ships. These weapons sys-

s
Ultrafast computing is tems, such as the ship-based Aegis com-

a
bat system, can detect incoming rockets
critical to modern warfare. and missiles and, if human supervisors

M
But it also ensures a lot do nothing, respond on their own by fir-
ing to eliminate the threat. Such auto-
could go very wrong, very mated responses allow the systems to

quickly. By Paul Scharre defend against what are known as sat-

MILITARIES AROUND THE GLOBE ARE RACING TO BUILD ever more
autonomous drones, missiles, and cyberweapons. Greater
autonomy allows for faster reactions on the battlefield, an
advantage that is as powerful today as it was 2,500 years ago
when Sun Tzu wrote, “Speed is the essence of war.” Today’s
intelligent machines can react at superhuman speeds. Mod-
ern Chinese military academics have speculated about a
coming “battlefield singularity,” in which the pace of com-
bat eclipses human decision-making.
The consequences of humans ceding effective control over
what happens in war would be profound and the effects poten-
tially catastrophic. While the competitive advantages to be
gained from letting machines run the battlefield are clear, the
uration attacks, in which salvos of mis-
siles or rockets are launched at a target
with such little notice that they could
overwhelm human operators.
For the time being, autonomous
weapons such as these are used purely
to protect human-occupied installa-
tions or vehicles. Humans supervise
the weapons’ operation in real time
and can intervene if necessary. Future
autonomous weapons could lack
these safeguards, however. A num-
ber of advanced militaries—including
those of China, France, Israel, Russia,
the United Kingdom, and the United
States—are currently developing stealth
combat drones intended to penetrate an
adversary’s airspace. Once deep behind
enemy lines, these drones might find

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 23
arguments
their communications jammed, so
they’re being designed to ensure they
can continue to operate on their own.
Most countries have not explained
how their drones will operate under
such circumstances and what rules of
engagement they will follow. Coun-
tries could require their drones to get
human authorization before launching
any attacks. Doing so would allow the
drones to bomb preapproved fixed tar-
gets but would require them to report
back and get permission before attack-
ing any newly discovered quarries. Such
an approach sounds good in theory, but
the problem is that these days many
high-priority targets, such as air defense
systems and ballistic missile launchers,
are highly mobile. This mobility will
increasingly tempt military planners to
delegate lethal decision-making author-
ity to machines, since doing so could
give them an edge in reaction time.
o
No battlefield is static, and the ability
to rapidly react to a dynamic environ-
o
ment is critical to mission success—
s
whether in the air, on the ground, or in
a
cyberspace. Air combat strategists call
this the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide,
M
and Act) loop in dogfighting. In the
OODA loop paradigm of combat, pilots
win dogfights not simply because they
enjoy the best hardware but because
they assess and react to their situations
faster than their opponents, although
better sensors and maneuverability
might help shorten reaction times.
Since machines can react faster than
humans, automation will offer tremen-
dous advantages in this competition.
That means that the same competitive
pressures that led to the creation of sys-
tems such as the Aegis could soon be
introduced on a wider scale.
A military that fully integrated its
autonomous systems could always stay
one step ahead of its enemy in com-
bat and present a constantly shifting
threat. As Gen. Paul Selva, the vice
chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee in July 2017, “It is very com-
24 FALL 2018
pelling when one looks at the capabil-
ities that artificial intelligence can
bring to the speed and accuracy of
command and control and the capa-
bilities that advanced robotics might
bring to a complex battlespace, partic-
ularly machine-to-machine interaction
in space and cyberspace, where speed
is of the essence.”
Yet speed is not an unadulterated
good. Forces that react to the enemy
so quickly that their own commander
does not understand what is happening
could risk a breakdown in command and
control, a problem that military lead-
ers have struggled with for millennia.
Today, email and chat messaging have
T
replaced horses and flags, but the fun-
li
damental problem persists. Militaries
counter this inherent friction between
A
orders from above and the reality on the
ground with a concept known as com-
d
mander’s intent: succinct goal-oriented
statements issued to subordinates that
explain the desired goal of a particular
mission, and thus ensure that they stick
to the general plan, but also allow them
the flexibility to adapt to events on the
ground. Such statements prevent forces
from becoming too predictable and give
subordinates the freedom to overcome
obstacles in novel ways.
The problem is that automated sys-
tems—at least those using current tech-
nology—tend to be brittle. Machines are
good at handling routine tasks under
predictable circumstances, such as fly-
ing a commercial airliner. But automa-
tion can sometimes fail dramatically in
new situations, which is a major rea-
son why self-driving cars, which must
contend with extremely dynamic and
uncontrolled environments, have
proved so much harder to develop than
self-flying planes.
Learning systems, which focus on a
set of rules for processing and incor-
porating data into behavior instead of
strict mandates, exhibit more flexibil-
ity but are still limited by the quality of
information. Machine learning can fail
if the real world proves different from
training models—a major problem in
the military context, where adversar-
ies are unlikely to offer easy access to
their tactics and hardware. Human
intelligence is robust and adaptable
in ways that machine intelligence is
not—yet. The most effective militaries
will thus be those that find ways to suc-
cessfully marry human and machine
intelligence into joint cognitive sys-
tems—an approach that defense ana-
m
lysts call centaur warfighting.
i
h
in deci-
a
DESPITE HUMANS’ ADVANTAGES
sion-making, an arms race in speed may
h
slowly push humans out of the OODA
loop. Militaries are unlikely to know-
ingly field weapons they cannot con-
trol, but war is a hazardous environment
and requires balancing competing risks.
Faced with the choice of falling behind
an adversary or deploying a new and
not yet fully tested weapon, militaries
are likely to do what they must to keep
pace with their enemies.
As mentioned above, automated
stock trading provides a useful win-
dow into the perils of this dynamic. In
2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Aver-
age lost nearly 10 percent of its value
in just minutes. The cause? A sudden
shift in market prices driven in part by
automated trading, or what’s come to
be known as a flash crash.
In the last decade, financial markets
have started to suffer such crashes, or
at least miniature versions of them,
on a regular basis. The circuit break-
ers installed by regulators to pull a
stock offline can’t prevent incidents
from occurring, but they can stop flash
crashes from spiraling out of control.
Circuit breakers are still regularly
tripped, though, and on Aug. 24, 2015,
more than 1,200 of them went off across
multiple exchanges after China sud-
denly devalued the yuan.
In competitive environments such
as stock markets and battlefields, unex-
pected interactions between algorithms
are natural. The causes of the 2010 flash
crash are still disputed. In all likelihood,
there were a range of causes, includ-
ing an automated sell algorithm inter-
acting with extreme market volatility,
exacerbated by high-frequency trading
and deliberate spoofing of trading algo-
rithms. To prevent the military equiva-
lent of such crises, in which autonomous
weapons become trapped in a cascade
of escalating engagements, countries
will have to balance advantages in speed
with the risk of accidents. Yet growing
competition will make that balancing
act ever more difficult. In 2016, Robert
Work, then-U.S. deputy defense secre-
tary, colorfully summed up the problem
this way: “If our competitors go to Termi-
nators, and it turns out the Terminators
are able to make decisions faster, even
if they’re bad, how would we respond?”
Again, stock markets show how
important it is that countries answer
this question in the right way. In 2012,
o
an algorithm-based trading accident
nearly bankrupted the high-frequency
o
trading firm Knight Capital Group. A
s
glitch in a routine software update
a
caused the firm’s computers to start
executing a lightning-fast series of erro-
M
neous trades, worth $2.6 million a sec-
ond. By the time the company reined
in its runaway algorithm, its machines
had executed 4 million trades with a
net loss of $460 million—more than
the company’s entire assets. To give a
sense of scale: In 1994, it took more than
two years of deception for the rogue
trader Nick Leeson to bankrupt Barings
Bank. In what came to be known as the
Knightmare on Wall Street, a machine
managed to inflict the same damage
Forces that react to the enemy so quickly
that their own commander does not
understand what is happening could
risk a breakdown in command and
control, a problem that military leaders
have struggled with for millennia.
in 45 minutes. In that case, of course,
although a company was destroyed, no
lives were lost. A runaway autonomous
weapon would be far more dangerous.
Real-world accidents with existing
highly automated weapons point to
these dangers. During the initial inva-
sion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army’s
Patriot air defense system accidentally
shot down two friendly aircraft, killing
three allied service members. The first
fratricide was due to a confluence of
factors: a known flaw that caused the
radar to mischaracterize a descend-
ing plane as a missile, outdated equip-
ment, and human error.
The second blue-on-blue incident
T
was due to a situation that had never
li
arisen before. In the hectic march to
Baghdad, Patriot operators deployed
A
their radars in a nonstandard config-
uration likely resulting in electromag-
d
netic interference between the radars
that caused a “ghost track”—a signal on
the radars of a missile that wasn’t there.
The missile battery was in automatic
mode and fired on the ghost track, and
no one overruled it. A U.S. Navy F-18
fighter jet just happened to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Both
incidents were flukes caused by unique
circumstances—but also statistically
inevitable ones. Coalition aircraft flew
41,000 sorties in the initial phases of the
Iraq War, and with more than 60 allied
Patriot batteries in the area, there were
millions of possible interactions, seri-
ously raising the risk for even low-prob-
ability accidents.
Richard Danzig, a former U.S. sec-
retary of the Navy, has argued that
bureaucracies actually systematically
underestimate the risk of accidents
posed by their own weapons. It’s also
a problem that it’s nearly impossible to
fully test a system’s actual performance
outside of war. In the Iraq invasion,
these accidents had tragic conse-
quences but did not alter the course
of the war. Accidents with fully auton-
omous weapons where humans can-
not intervene could have much worse
m
results, causing large-scale fratricide,
i
civilian casualties, or even unintended
h
attacks on adversaries.
a
h
ATTEMPTS AT ARMS CONTROL GO BACK to
antiquity, from the Bible’s prohibition
on wanton environmental destruction
in Deuteronomy to the Indian Laws of
Manu that forbade barbed, poisoned,
or concealed weapons. In the inter-
vening centuries, some efforts to ban
or regulate certain weapons have suc-
ceeded, such as chemical or biological
weapons, blinding lasers, land mines,
cluster munitions, using the environ-
ment as a weapon, placing weapons
in space, or certain delivery mech-
anisms or deployment postures of
nuclear weapons. Many other attempts
at arms control have failed, from the
papal decrees denouncing the use of
the crossbow in the Middle Ages to
20th-century attempts to ban aerial
attacks on cities, regulate submarine
warfare, or eliminate nuclear weapons.
The United Nations began a series of
meetings in 2014 to discuss the perils
of autonomous weapons. But so far the
progress has been far slower than the
pace of technological advances.
Despite that lack of success, a grow-
ing number of voices have begun call-
ing for a ban on autonomous weapons.
Since 2013, 76 nongovernmental organi-
zations across 32 countries have joined a
global Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
To date, nearly 4,000 artificial intelli-
gence and robotics researchers have
signed an open letter calling for a ban.
More than 25 national governments have
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 25
arguments

said they endorse a ban, although none

of them are major military powers or
robotics developers. But such measures
only tend to succeed when the weap-
ons in question are of marginal value,
are widely seen as especially horrific
or destabilizing, are possessed by only
a few actors, are clearly distinguished
from other weapons, and can be easily
inspected to verify disarmament. None
of these conditions applies to autono-

m
mous weapons.

i
Even if all countries agreed on the

h
need to restrain this class of arms, the
fear of what others might be doing and

a
the inability to verify disarmament

h
could still spark an arms race. Less

T
ambitious regulations could fare bet-

li
ter, such as a narrow ban on anti-per-
sonnel autonomous weapons, a set of

A
rules for interactions between auton-
omous weapons, or a broad principle

d
of human involvement in lethal force.

o
While such modest efforts might mit-
igate some risks, however, they would

o
leave countries free to develop many

s
types of autonomous weapons that
Food Fight

a
could still lead to widespread harm.
Humanity stands at the threshold of a Why the next big battle may

M
new era in war, in which machines will
make life-or-death decisions at speeds
not be fought over treasure
too fast for human comprehension. The or territory—but for fish.
risks of such a world are real and pro-
found. Autonomous weapons could lead
By Kate Higgins-Bloom
to accidental death and destruction at
catastrophic scales in an instant. The
unrestrained pursuit of fully autono-
mous weapons could lead to a future
where humans cede control over what
happens on the battlefield, but the criti- HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS DEPENDED ON THE SEA. For as long as there
cal decisions about how this technology have been fishermen, there have been conflicts over fish. And
is used still rest in human hands. Q though it may seem anachronistic, the odds that a squabble
over fishing rights could turn into a major armed conflict are
PAUL SCHARRE (@paul_scharre) is the rising. The return of great-power competition has actually
author of Army of None: Autonomous increased the likelihood of a war over fish. The past 17 years
Weapons and the Future of War. of the fight against terrorism, and Washington’s renewed
A former U.S. Army Ranger who focus on developing high-end capabilities to prepare for
served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is great-power conflict, have led to a lack of preparation for a
currently a senior fellow and director low-end, seemingly mundane but increasingly likely source
of the technology and national security of conflict in the world: food.
program at the Center for a New As incomes rise around the world, so too does the demand
American Security. for food—especially protein. The United Nations currently

26 FALL 2018

o
o
s
estimates that between mid-2017 and
a
2050, the number of humans on Earth
will rise by 29 percent, from 7.6 billion
M
to 9.8 billion. Most of that population
growth will occur in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America—areas where millions
of people have recently risen from deep
poverty to the middle class. Part of a
middle-class lifestyle is a middle-class
diet, which includes far more protein
than poor people consume. As a result
of that shift, the global demand for pro-
tein will outpace population growth,
increasing between 32 and 78 percent,
according to some estimates. Meeting
that demand could require an addi-
tional 62 to 159 million metric tons of
protein per year. To maintain political
support at home, leaders must ensure
access to the high-quality food that is
part of a middle-class lifestyle.
The supply of both wild and farmed
fish will not keep up. The current
annual global catch of seafood is 94
million metric tons. And all around
the world, the wild populations of both
migratory fish, such as tuna, and less
mobile species, such as flounder, are
being overfished. Scarcity has already
forced Chinese fishing fleets further
and further afield in search of their
catch. Serious international efforts to
manage the world’s wild fisheries are
underway, but this work is stymied by
widespread illegal, unreported, and
unregulated (or IUU) fishing. Today,
such harvests comprise somewhere
from 20 to 50 percent of the global
catch and inflict economic, social, and
environmental damage on some of the
world’s most vulnerable populations
as fisheries collapse from overfishing
and poor and rural fishing communi-
T
ties wrestle with the subsequent loss
li
of income and, eventually, their social
fabric. The classic example of this is
A
fishermen in Central America turn-
ing to drug cartels for employment or
d
poaching from closed fisheries, feed-
ing the cycle of violence and environ-
mental damage.
The political leaders of rising powers
will feel enormous pressure to secure
the resources their citizens demand—
even if it means violating international
norms and rules. This pressure could
sow the seeds of potential conflict
in two distinct ways. The first is that
some states will overplay their hand
when using fishing fleets and fisheries
enforcement to exert influence in con-
tested waters. The second is that illegal
fishing, driven by exploding domes-
tic demand and collapsing supply, will
be met with increasingly aggressive
enforcement by America or its allies—
which could quickly escalate and spill
over into actual conflict.
The political leaderships of rising
powers will feel enormous pressure
to secure the resources their citizens
demand—even if it means violating
international norms and rules.
THE 1982 UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION on
the Law of the Sea, commonly referred
to as UNCLOS, is the foundational docu-
ment for all maritime territorial claims;
more than 150 countries, but not the
United States, have already ratified the
treaty. According to UNCLOS, a state
can exclusively claim any resource,
including fish, within 200 nautical
miles of the base lines of the habitable
landmasses it controls. Such areas are
m
called exclusive economic zones (EEZs).
i
Each state is responsible for manag-
h
ing its own fisheries within its EEZ. But
beyond these exclusive zones, regu-
a
lation of fishing and activity on the
h
high seas is managed by more than 20
international and regional bodies, with
widely varied mandates and resources.
Enforcement is carried out by a patch-
work of agencies and coalitions around
the world, ad hoc partnerships, and
bilateral agreements among nations.
If that arrangement sounds ripe for
dispute, it is.
There are dozens of contested mari-
time claims around the world, includ-
ing one between Canada and the
United States over two small islands
off the coast of New Brunswick. Cur-
rently, the most consequential of
these contested waters are the South
and East China seas, where China has
made outsized claims—accompanied
by naval patrols and an island-building
campaign. Beijing hopes to legitimate
its territorial claims by establishing
and expanding its physical presence
in these areas. Fishing vessels repre-
sent an ideal way to create that pres-
ence—without provoking a military
response—since they are notionally
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 27
arguments
nongovernmental and thus give their
country of origin some plausible deni-
ability. They are also cheap compared
with military vessels and are more
mobile and scalable than fixed struc-
tures such as oil platforms (let alone
man-made islands).
For years, China has subsidized and
provided armed escorts for forays by
its fishing fleet into its neighbors’ EEZs
and assertively enforced Chinese law
on non-Chinese fishermen operating
in contested waters. Since the 1990s,
China has unilaterally declared large
swaths of the South China Sea closed
to fishermen for months at a time. This
closure is enforced by armed China
Coast Guard vessels, which have been
involved in a series of violent confron-
tations with foreign fishermen. This
heavy-handed approach would be
relatively unremarkable if the closed
o
o
s
The United States must reinforce its
a
commitment to the international
M
rules-based order that has governed
the maritime domain for decades.
area was actually recognized Chinese
territory. In this case, however, China
is acting in international water or in
the EEZs of other countries. The situ-
ation is roughly analogous to the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service using deadly
force to stop Canadian deer hunters
from shooting a doe out of season in
Vancouver.
China Coast Guard and People’s Lib-
eration Army (PLA) Navy vessels also
appear to have stepped up escorts of Chi-
nese-flagged fishing fleets as they ven-
ture into fishing grounds, particularly
those around a set of contested islands in
the East China Sea known as the Senkaku
in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. The
Japan Coast Guard has responded by
increasing its own presence in the area.
28 FALL 2018
Should a China Coast Guard or PLA Navy
vessel fire on a Japan Coast Guard ship,
supposedly in defense of a Chinese fish-
ing fleet, the Japanese would likely retal-
iate, and both sides could easily escalate.
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS that fish can trig-
ger war. Crackdowns on illegal and
unregulated fishing already routinely
threaten to spiral into violence.
China currently consumes a third
of the global fish catch. Officials there
have made it clear that they believe
that meeting the expectations of their
increasingly affluent population is key
to preserving political stability—and
T
thus is a core national security interest.
li
But despite participating in the inter-
national bodies dedicated to improving
A
fisheries regulation and maritime gov-
ernance, such as the World Trade Orga-
d
nization (WTO) and the International
Maritime Organization (IMO), the envi-
ronmental advocacy group Greenpeace
estimates that China has the world’s
largest distant-water fishing fleet, with
more than 2,500 vessels, and has been
accused of industrial-scale IUU fishing
in waters as far away as those off the
coast of Senegal and Argentina, where
China cannot even pretend to have ter-
ritorial claims.
Cases that involve sincerely held
fishing rights also risk triggering vio-
lent conflicts. Consider a hypotheti-
cal—but plausible—example in which
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro
trades his country’s fishing rights to
China, as other impoverished countries
have done, to cover part of Venezue-
la’s $60 billion in outstanding debts.
China would then have legal claim to
Venezuelan waters, some of which
could be contested given Venezuela’s
history of border disputes with Guy-
ana and Colombia. If Beijing continues
to expand the practice of escorting its
fishing fleet with armed China Coast
Guard vessels, the chances for a vio-
lent exchange would continue to rise—
as would the risk of the United States
m
becoming involved.
i
Future resource scarcity could
h
also trigger a fish-related conflict.
If global fish stocks collapse around
a
2050, as current trends suggest they
h
will, national governments are going
to feel intense pressure to ensure a reg-
ular food supply for their populations.
This pressure could lead more powerful
countries to try to grab the resources of
smaller or vulnerable neighbors.
Russia and the United States might
also be tempted to establish claims
against one another in the waters that
separate Alaska and Siberia. The U.S.
Coast Guard has conducted patrols in
the Bering Sea since 1867, the year of
the Alaska Purchase. (In 1990, U.S. Sec-
retary of State James Baker and Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze
signed an agreement to establish a
maritime boundary line between the
USSR and the United States. The U.S.
Senate ratified the agreement, but nei-
ther the leaders of the collapsing Soviet
Union nor their Russian successors
followed suit.) As pressure on fisheries
increases, Russian leaders may decide
that it is time to challenge the de facto
border outright. The opening of the
Arctic, combined with Russia’s signifi-
cantly larger Arctic-capable fleet and
infrastructure, would enable Moscow
to mount a credible challenge to U.S.
control of one of its richest fisheries.
Fish farming
THE NEWS ISN’T ALL GRIM.
has exploded from producing 5 million
metric tons in 1981 to 63 million
metric tons in 2011. Even though

o
o
a s
naysayers point out that fish farms
M
are highly vulnerable to the spread of
diseases, and environmental advocacy
organizations are worried about their
ecological impact, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization predicts that
by 2030, farmed fish will make up more
than 60 percent of seafood bound for
homes and restaurants. Meanwhile,
in 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama
established an interagency task force to
combat IUU fishing, co-chaired by the
secretaries of commerce and state, with
the participation of 14 federal agencies.
The task force not only survived the
change in administration, but it also
released a comprehensive action plan
in December 2017. Meanwhile, China,
perhaps recognizing the potential for
international pushback, has included
STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
language in its 13th Five-Year Plan that
indicates a willingness to consider
fisheries reform.
These measures will help, but they’re
li T
A
d
not enough. Governments around the
world must take further steps to pre-
vent a fish war. First and foremost, the
United States must reinforce its com-
mitment to the international rules-
based order that has governed the
maritime domain for decades. It should
do so by vigorously upholding rulings
by the IMO, agitating for increased
transparency and accountability for
states that license merchant ships at
the WTO, challenging excessive mar-
itime claims around the world, and
finally ratifying UNCLOS. To follow
through on these commitments, the
United States and its partners should
also strengthen their own coast guard
forces, continue to build partner capac-
ity across the Indo-Pacific, and invest
in science, data collection, and infor-
mation sharing.
Doing all of the above wouldn’t be
cheap. But the investment would be
worth it. The U.S. fishing industry is a
h im
h a
A damaged
Vietnamese fishing
boat, which was
reportedly rammed
and sunk by a
Chinese ship in the
South China Sea, at
a Da Nang shipyard
on June 2, 2014.
powerful economic engine in need of
defense, which generates $208 billion
in annual sales and employs 1.6 million
people. And the costs saved by avoiding
a war over fish would be even higher.
Unfortunately, President Donald
Trump’s June executive order on ocean
policy did not seem to take such con-
cerns into account when it reset U.S.
priorities away from conservation and
focused on security on the high seas.
One cannot exist without the other.
A crowded and hungry world means
that battles over resources are a real pos-
sibility. The initial skirmishes will occur
between relatively small ships within
eyeshot of each other. But however
modest their beginnings, the world’s
coming conflicts over fish have the
potential to escalate into protracted,
resource-draining disputes. Q
KATE HIGGINSBLOOM is a commander in
the U.S. Coast Guard.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 29
arguments
The Algorithms of August
The AI arms race won’t be
like previous competitions,
and both the United States
T
and China could be left in the
li
dust. By Michael C. Horowitz
d A
o o
s
AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ARMS RACE IS COMING. It is unlikely to
a
play out in the way that the mainstream media suggest, how-
ever: as a faceoff between the United States and China. That’s
M
because AI differs from the technologies, such as nuclear
weapons and battleships, that have been the subject of arms
races in the past. After all, AI is software—not hardware.
Because AI is a general purpose technology—more like the
combustion engine or electricity than a weapon—the com-
petition to develop it will be broad, and the line between its
civilian and military uses will be blurry. There will not be
one exclusively military AI arms race. There will instead be
many AI arms races, as countries (and, sometimes, violent
nonstate actors) develop new algorithms or apply private
sector algorithms to help them accomplish particular tasks.
In North America, the private sector invested some $15
billion to $23 billion in AI in 2016, according to a McKinsey
Global Institute report. That’s more than 10 times what the
U.S. government spent on unclassified AI programs that
same year. The largest share came from companies such as
Google and Microsoft, as well as a number of smaller private
firms, not from government-funded defense research. This
reverses the dynamic from the Cold War, when government
investments led to private sector innovation and produced
technologies such as GPS and the internet.
China says it already holds more than 20 percent of pat-
ents in the field and plans to build its AI sector to be worth
30 FALL 2018
m
h i
a
h
$150 billion by 2030. But while Beijing
and Washington are the current leaders
in this race, they are not the only com-
petitors. Countries around the world
with advanced technology sectors,
from Canada to France to Singapore,
also have the potential to make great
strides in AI (or build on lower-level
advances made by others). While this
diffusion means that many more coun-
tries will have a stake in the regulation
of AI, it also means that many more
governments will have incentives to
go it on their own.
UNLIKE THE DEVELOPMENT of a stealth
bomber, which has only military appli-
cations, basic AI research has both mil-
itary and civilian uses, which makes it
much harder to keep research secret
and thereby sustain a large first-mover
advantage. The dual-use character of
many developments in AI creates an
incentive to promote their release
and spread to the general public. That

o
o
s
means companies can co-opt advances
a
made by market leaders—especially
lower-level advances that do not require
M
significant computing hardware.
Most military applications of AI
will be a far cry from the killer robots
depicted in Hollywood films. For exam-
ple, computer-run algorithms could aid
militaries in better designing recruiting
campaigns, more effectively training
personnel, cutting labor costs through
better logistical planning and opera-
tions, and improving surveillance. Or
consider image recognition algorithms,
which have a range of applications—
from tailoring ads in the commercial
sector to monitoring disputed territory.
The race to develop such applications
will be crowded for several reasons. For
developed countries that have plenty of
capital to invest but face challenges in
recruiting and retaining talented per-
sonnel for their armed forces, as well
as autocracies that do not trust their
populations, there will be an especially
strong incentive to leverage AI for their
T
li
A
d
militaries. Doing so will allow them to
replace personnel with automation
whenever possible.
This new competitive landscape will
benefit middle powers such as Austra-
lia, France, Japan, and Sweden. These
countries will have greater capacity to
compete in the development of AI than
they did in the creation of the complex
military platforms used today, such as
precision-guided missiles and nuclear-
powered submarines. Advanced econo-
mies around the world are already work-
ing hard to help their private companies
develop AI capabilities. In 2017, Canada
committed to investing $94 million to
attract and cultivate AI talent over the
next five years—an annual investment
equivalent to some 10 percent of Cana-
da’s entire defense research and devel-
opment budget in 2015, according to
the Organization for Economic Coop-
eration and Development. Meanwhile,
the European Commission approved an
investment of $1.8 billion by 2020—a 70
percent increase.
h im
The reason these countries are invest-
a
ing far more in both commercial and
h
military AI than they generally do in
military research and development is
because AI has such great economic
potential. Seemingly commercial AI
capabilities can, in some cases, be par-
layed into economic investments in the
defense sector.
As long as the standard for air warfare
is a fifth-generation fighter jet, and as
long as aircraft carriers remain critical
to projecting naval power, there will be
a relatively small number of countries
able to manufacture cutting-edge weap-
ons platforms. But with AI, the barriers
to entry are lower, meaning that mid-
dle powers could leverage algorithms to
enhance their training, planning, and,
eventually, their weapons systems. That
means AI could offer more countries
the ability to compete in more arenas
alongside the heavy hitters.
GIVEN AI’S MANY POTENTIAL MILITARY USES,
policymakers need to rethink the idea
of an AI arms race and what it will mean
for international politics.
The fundamental dilemma facing
most attempts at arms control is that the
more useful a technology is at providing
armies with an edge, the harder it is to
effectively regulate. There is, after all,
no arms control agreement that mean-
ingfully restricts countries from devel-
oping tanks, submarines, or fighter jets.
Effective agreements tend to restrict the
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 31
arguments
use of less important weapons that don’t
decide wars—such as landmines and
blinding lasers—or ones that have rarely
been used, such as nuclear weapons.
Military history suggests that those
applications of AI with the greatest rel-
evance for fighting and winning wars
will also be the hardest to regulate,
since states will have an interest in
investing in them.
Countries with advanced AI com-
panies will be able to leverage those
businesses to provide them with some
military capabilities, either through
adapting commercial technology or by
offering financial incentives for talented
researchers to focus on defense applica-
tions of AI. In these areas, the competi-
tion will be fierce because many actors
could develop similar algorithms.
Some AI applications, such as opera-
tional planning for a complex battlefield
or algorithms designed to coordinate
o
swarms of planes or boats trying to
attack an enemy target, may appeal
o
exclusively to militaries (though even
s
swarms have nonmilitary applications,
a
including firefighting).
M
Unlike the development of a stealth
bomber, which has only military
applications, basic AI research has both
military and civilian uses, which makes
it much harder to keep research secret.
But even though there are clear
military applications, AI cannot be
compared to nuclear or biological weap-
ons or even military mainstays such as
tanks. AI is not itself a weapon. Just as
there was not an arms control regime
for combustion engines or electricity,
it’s hard to imagine an effective regime
for containing the coming AI arms race.
Mitigating the military risks involved
should therefore focus on specific
potential uses of AI, rather than the
32 FALL 2018
broad technology category. For exam-
ple, the Convention on Certain Con-
ventional Weapons, which focuses on
weapons systems with the potential to
cause excessive or indiscriminate injury,
is convening discussions in Geneva with
countries around the world about lethal
autonomous weapons systems. It is crit-
ical, however, not to let the specter of
killer robots obscure the broader ways
AI could reshape militaries, just as the
general purpose technologies of previ-
ous centuries did.
Rapid technological advances that
outpace the ability of governments to
administer them, fear of falling behind
other countries, and uncertainty about
T
the range of what is possible magnify the
li
challenge of effectively regulating AI.
Moreover, given the potential for eco-
A
nomic investments in AI to spill over into
potential military applications, many
d
countries beyond the United States,
China, and Russia may balk at regula-
tory approaches that limit their ability
to develop more effective defense forces.
Still, governments can create norms
and practices surrounding the use of AI
both inside and outside of militaries.
Setting standards for AI reliability is
one possibility, just like international
standard setting in other arenas, such as
Wi-Fi. Focusing on AI safety is a prom-
ising avenue to help ensure that, what-
ever forms of AI a defense team chooses
to adopt, those applications work as
intended.
Predicting how AI will impact the
future of warfare is difficult; it means
assessing technologies that are still
mostly immature. Much could change in
just a few years. If a decade from now cur-
rent predictions about the military uses
of AI turn out to have been more fiction
than fact, one reason might be because
militaries failed to design algorithms that
were robust and secure enough to with-
stand efforts by sophisticated adversar-
ies to deceive and distort them.
It’s also possible, though unlikely,
that AI will propel emerging powers
m
and smaller countries to the forefront
i
of defense innovation while leaving old
h
superpowers behind. Washington’s cur-
rent focus on U.S.-Chinese competition
a
in AI misses an even more important
h
trend. There is a risk that the United
States, like many leading powers in the
past, could take an excessively cautious
approach to the adoption of AI capabil-
ities because it currently feels secure in
its conventional military superiority.
That could prove to be a dangerous
form of complacency, especially if rela-
tions between the United States and
many of its current allies and partners
continue to fray over time. Faced with
a less reliable United States, shunned
NATO partners would, for example,
have even more incentives to invest
in alternatives, such as experimenting
more with how AI can bolster their capa-
bilities in a world without clear super-
power leadership.
If these countries decide to strike out
on their own, while China and Russia
continue to invest in capabilities with
the explicit goal of disrupting U.S. mil-
itary superiority, and parts of the U.S.
tech industry remain reluctant to work
with the Defense Department, the U.S.
military could even find itself in a posi-
tion it has not faced for more than 75
years: playing catch-up when it comes
to deploying cutting-edge technology
on the battlefield. Q
MICHAEL C. HOROWITZ (@mchorowitz)
is a professor of political science and
author of The Diffusion of Military
Power: Causes and Consequences for
International Politics.
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Data Strategy in Defense

r vision learning program bility are frustrating
to improve intelligence Congress that sees a a
processing exploitation potential opportunity
and Department in activitie for the
dissemination in support s such as securing domestic
of today’s warfighters,
and others like it are elections. Ongoing discussio
catalyzing a shift to thinking n among DoD and
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managers within the responsibility at home
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top technology talent, l tool
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of working for DoD than major security concern
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es such as Google, Apple,
Facebook. or the Department has
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to change how it operates level of threat posed
in level of response needed and the
order to encourage sharing in cyberattacks. Data
within the Department. is now
That “new world order” secured in government
will mean overcoming enclaves, which it had
technological hurdles been previously, and not
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that it

foreignpolicy.com/
can be shared among operations against cyberatt
disparate government acks in addition to
breaking down silos systems, playing defense. Though
within the Department losing data from an outside
historically compart that have attack is one worry, an
mentalized informat infiltration that results
cultivating a new culture ion and modified data without in
around data engagem leaving a trace could
ent more insidious. be even
with someone to lead
it.
• Increased focus on • Options for improvin
data is also forcing DoD g the Department’s ability

datastrategydefense
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FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 35
 WHY THE WORLD DESPERATELY
NEEDS DIGITAL GENEVA CONVENTIONS.
STORY BY TARAH WHEELER
In 1984, a s cience fic-
tion movie starring an up-
1 and-coming Austrian-Amer-
ican actor took the box office
by storm. A cybernetic organ-
ism is sent back in time to
A
seek out and kill the mother
of a great war hero to prevent his subsequent birth.
d
The cyborg scans a phone book page and begins
o
methodically killing all women named Sarah Con-
nor in the Los Angeles area, starting at the top
o
of the list.
s
If The Terminator were set in today’s world,
a
the movie would have ended after four and a half
minutes. The correct Sarah Connor would have
M
been identified with nothing but a last name and
a zip code—information leaked last year in the
massive Equifax data breach. The war against the
machines would have been over before it started,
and no one would have ever noticed. The most
frightening thing about cyberwarfare is just how
specifically targeted it can be: An enemy can leap
national boundaries to strike at a single person, a
class of people, or a geographic area.
Nor would a cyborg be necessary today. Accord-
ing to U.S. census data, there are currently 87 peo-
ple in the United States named Sarah Connor.
Many of them probably drive cellular-enabled
cars that run outdated firmware, use public unen-
crypted Wi-Fi, and visit doctors who keep unse-
cured health care records about patient allergies
and current medications on computers running
the infamously outdated and vulnerable Windows
XP operating system.
These days, warfare is conducted on land, by sea,
in the air, across space, and now in the fifth bat-
tleground: cyberspace. Yet so far, the U.S. govern-
ment has fumbled on cybersecurity, outsourcing
36 FALL 2018
| ILLUSTR ATIONS BY KYLE HILTON
h im
much of that area of conflict to the private sector
a
in accordance with the Trump administration’s
h
most recent National Security Strategy—leaving
T
the country exposed to foreign attack. (For another
li
perspective on the privatization of cybersecurity,
see “Hackers for Hire,” Page 60).
Those third parties operate under exactly the
same incentives as any pharmaceutical company.
If a company’s service is the treatment of symp-
toms, preventive medicine is a threat to its busi-
ness model. Meanwhile, pundits, policymakers,
and publishers take as gospel what they’re told by
so-called cybersecurity experts who have more
social media followers than relevant credentials
in the field, which is how hysterical “The Hackers
Are Coming for Us” editorials find their way into
otherwise respectable publications.
Increased fear, uncertainty, and doubt surround-
ing cybersecurity have led to a world where we
cannot tell what has and hasn’t happened. The
nature of cyberwarfare is that it is asymmetric. Sin-
gle combatants can find and exploit small holes in
the massive defenses of countries and country-sized
companies. It won’t be cutting-edge cyberattacks
that cause the much-feared cyber-Pearl Harbor
in the United States or elsewhere. Instead, it will
likely be mundane strikes against industrial con-
trol systems, transportation networks, and health
care providers—because their infrastructure is
out of date, poorly maintained, ill-understood,
and often unpatchable. Worse will be the invisible
manipulation of public opinion and election out-
comes using digital tools such as targeted adver-
tising and deep fakes—recordings and videos that
can realistically be made via artificial intelligence
to sound like any world leader.
The great challenge for military and cybersecu-
rity professionals is that incoming attacks are not

li T
d A
o o
predictable, and current strategies for prevention
s
tend to share the flawed assumption that the rules
a
of conventional war extend to cyberspace as well.
Cyberwarfare does have rules, but they’re not the
M
ones we’re used to—and a sense of fair play isn’t
one of them. Moreover, these rules are not intuitive
to generals versed in fighting conventional wars.
That’s a problem because cyberwar won’t be
waged with the informed participation of much
of the U.S. technology sector, as the recent revolts
at Google over AI contracts with the U.S. Defense
Department and at Microsoft over office software
contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement demonstrate. That leaves only gov-
ernments and properly incentivized multinational
corporations to set the rules. Neither has yet pro-
vided a workable and operational definition of what
constitutes a globally recognized act of war—a vital
first step in seeking to prevent such transgressions.
The closest that the U.S. mil-
itary has come to such a defi-
2 nition is to say that “acts of
significant consequence”
would be examined on a
case-by-case basis and could
h im
h a
require congressional evaluation. But given how
quickly a cyberattack could disable critical infra-
structure, expecting Congress to react in time to
answer effectively is unrealistic.
In a world where partisan politics have been
weaponized, a smart misinformation campaign
by a foreign state that targeted only one political
party might even be welcomed by other parties so
long as there was plausible deniability—and with
cyberattacks, attribution is rarely certain.
There is also a serious risk of collateral damage
in cyberoperations. Most militaries understand
that they are responsible not only for targeting
strikes so that they hit valid targets but also for
civilian casualties caused by their actions. Though
significant collateral damage assessment occurs
prior to the United States authorizing cyberopera-
tions, there is no international agreement requir-
ing other powers to take the same care.
A major cyberattack against the United States in
2014 was a clear example of how civilians can bear
the brunt of such operations. Almost all cyberse-
curity experts and the FBI believe that the Sony
Pictures hack that year originated in North Korea.
A hostile country hit a U.S. civilian target with the
intention of destabilizing a major corporation, and
it succeeded. Sony’s estimated cleanup costs were
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 37
more than $100 million. The conventional warfare
equivalent might look like the physical destruction
of a Texas oil field or an Appalachian coal mine. If
such a valuable civilian resource had been inten-
tionally destroyed by a foreign adversary, it would
be considered an act of war.
In the near future, attacks like the Sony hack will
not be exceptional. There are countless vulnerabil-
ities that could result in mass casualties, and there
are no agreed norms or rules to define or punish
such crimes. Consider the following examples.
Once a week, a European aircraft manufacturer
cleans all plane cockpits of Android malware. Pilots
can pass malware to the plane from their smart-
phones when they plug them in, which the plane
(while theoretically unaffected by phone-only mal-
ware) then passes it on to the next pilot with a smart-
phone. Planes are already covered in viruses, both
li
virtual and microbial. In such a vulnerable environ-
ment, even an unsophisticated hack could wreak
A
havoc. A text message sent to the phone of every
in-air pilot giving them a national security warn-
d
ing or rerouting their planes could lead to emer-
o
gency landings and widespread confusion, with
more sophisticated attacks potentially leading to
o
far more serious consequences.
s
Aviation is not the only vulnerable sector. The
a
U.S. health care system is full of medical devices
running ancient firmware or operating systems
M
that simply cannot be patched or hardened against
commonly known network intrusions. Small hos-
pitals often cannot afford to replace their medical
equipment on a regular schedule, and device pro-
viders may deprioritize or block security patches
or upgrades in order to sell updated devices in the
next round of production.
That’s a problem in an era when many surgi-
cal procedures are assisted by robots, which hos-
pitals struggle to keep secure. The medical device
industry focuses more on performance and patient
health outcomes than on keeping a cyberadversary
at bay. A cyberattack on hospitals using robotic
surgical devices could cause them to malfunction
while in use, resulting in fatal injuries. If a country
or terrorist group decided to take out a sitting U.S.
senator undergoing robotically assisted surgery
and then covered its tracks, the perpetrator’s iden-
tity would be hard to pinpoint, and there would
be no clear U.S. legal precedent for classifying the
hacking of hospital equipment as an assassination
or an act of war. Nor do there appear to be clear
protocols for retaliation.
38 FALL 2018
There are less direct potential vectors of attack,
too. Recently, a cold storage facility for embryos in
Cleveland failed to notice that a remotely acces-
sible alarm on its holding tanks had been turned
off, leading to the loss of more than 4,000 frozen
eggs and embryos. Many operators of industrial
control systems never bother to change all their
default passwords or security credentials, which
can leave them vulnerable to ransomware attacks,
and even fewer health care officials are likely to
assume that someone might deliberately shut off
m
sensors that monitor the viability of future human
i
life. It is difficult to determine whether the Cleve-
h
land eggs and embryos were lost due to a simple
maintenance failure or deliberate tampering—but
a
as techniques such as the freezing of eggs become
h
more common in wealthy nations, such a simple
T
attack could wipe out thousands of future citizens.
There is no functional dif-
ference between a foreign
3
soldier taking an ax to refrig-
erant tanks to destroy 4,000
eggs and embryos and that
same soldier using a key-
board to remotely shut down
the facility’s temperature maintenance protocols
from 6,000 miles away. The two acts are equally
heinous on a moral level. The uncertainty in attri-
bution and the lack of an easily identified villain
may make the latter seem the province of science
fiction. But it is not.
Cyberattacks—some egregious, some mun-
dane—are happening now, quietly and unnoticed
by the public. Much of the confusion and fear over
cybersecurity comes from the distorted publicity
surrounding a few outlying events. While cyber-
security experts can’t have perfect certainty over
attribution or even the existence of some attacks,
we can understand the larger security landscape,
in which cybersecurity is merely a banal and pre-
dictable component of national infrastructure. The
risk of cyberattacks is knowable, probabilistically.
Technology and cyberspace are changing faster
than countries can legislate internally and nego-
tiate externally. Part of the problem with defining
and evaluating acts of cyberwarfare against the
United States is that U.S. law is unclear and unset-
tled when it comes to defining what constitutes an
illegal cyberact as opposed to normal computer
activity by information security researchers.

li
A
d
o
o
s
a
The legal status of most information security
research in the United States therefore remains
M
unclear, as it is governed by the poorly drafted
and arbitrarily enforced 1986 Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act (CFAA)—a piece of legislation that was
roundly derided by tech experts on its inception
and has only grown more unpopular since. The law
creates unnecessary fear that simple and useful
information security research methods could be
maliciously prosecuted.
These methods include network scanning using
tools such as Nmap (a computer network discov-
ery and mapping tool) or Shodan (a search engine
for devices on the internet of things) to find unse-
cured points of access to systems. Such scanning
does not constitute the exploitation of computer
or network vulnerabilities; a real-world equiva-
lent would be walking down a street and noting
broken windows, open doors, and missing fence
planks without actually trespassing on someone
else’s property. One of the fastest fixes for the dis-
mal state of federal cybersecurity expertise would
be to overturn the CFAA and reward cybersecurity
researchers engaged in preventive research instead
of tying their hands with fears of breaking the law.
Yet at present the U.S. government ham-handedly
discourages many information security research-
ers from entering what should be a noble service.
This dynamic has left the U.S. government with
critical shortfalls in top-level information security
experts. The United States simply lacks a viable
legislative plan for hardening its infrastructure
against cyberattacks and developing much-needed
cybertalent. Any strong defense against cyberat-
tacks should follow the same principles used for
basic U.S. infrastructure design: strategists plan,
m
technicians execute, and experts examine. For
i
example, the interstate highway system in the
h
United States, authorized in 1956 to enable rapid
military transport of troops and supplies, also had
a
much broader civilian benefits.
h
Now, through neglect, roads in the United States
T
are riddled with potholes, widening cracks, and
crumbling asphalt; thousands of deaths on U.S.
highways per year are related to poor road condi-
tions. Yet potholes are the most boring problem
imaginable for a policymaker. By contrast, when-
ever a bridge collapses, it grabs headlines—even
though a comparatively small number of people
per year die from bridge catastrophes. Incident
response is appealing; it lets policymakers show
their leadership chops in front of cameras, smoke,
and sirens. The drudgery of repairing underlying
problems and preventing the disasters in the first
place takes a back seat. This is dull but essential
policy work, and the same goes for technology
infrastructure. If cyberwork isn’t boring, we’re
doing it wrong.
Cybersecurity should be akin to a routine vac-
cine, a line item in the infrastructure budget like
highway maintenance. Basic cybersecurity mea-
sures—such as upgrades to encryption, testing the
capability of recovery in the event of data loss, and
routine audits for appropriate user access—should
be built into every organizational budget. When
incidents happen—and they will happen as surely
as bridges collapse—they should be examined
by competent auditors and incident responders
with regulatory authority, just as major incidents
involving airlines are handled by the National
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
At present, however, the United States lacks an
NTSB for cybersecurity. Due to the government’s
lack of expertise, it is overly reliant on large com-
panies such as EY, PwC, and Deloitte to handle
this work. If the U.S. government isn’t capable of
running a post-mortem on major cyberevents,
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 39
citizens should be asking why—instead of letting
lawmakers hand the work to contractors. Respond-
ing to major cyberattacks requires battalions of
highly trained government analysts, not armies
of accountants and attorneys.
Yet the White House, under President Donald
Trump, has failed to fill or has outright eliminated
almost every major cybersecurity position. There
are a few brilliant holdouts bravely providing solid
advice on information security and best practices.
(The government agency 18F and the United States
Digital Service are both doing valuable work but
receive far smaller budgets than they deserve.)
But cybertalent is draining faster than it is being
replaced at the highest levels.
Cyberdefense isn’t magic. It’s plumbing and
wiring and pothole repair. It’s dull, hard, and end-
less. The work is more maintenance crew than
li
Navy SEAL Team 6. It’s best suited for people who
have a burning desire to keep people safe without
A
any real need for glory beyond the joy of solving
the next puzzle.
d
The challenge for policymakers is the same as it
o
ever was: Improving lowest-common denominator
infrastructure in cybersecurity makes for the most
o
effective defense against ill-intentioned adver-
s
saries. Yet politicians have been slow to respond
a
since there’s little pork in password policies, and
forcing everyone to improve their encryption takes
M
a distant second place to kissing babies on the
campaign trail.
When devastating attacks
happen on U.S. soil, people
4 use metonyms to describe
them. No one has to describe
the specifics of Pearl Harbor
or 9/11; we already know what
they signify. When the cyber-
attack that lives in infamy happens, it will be so
horrifying that there won’t be a ready compar-
ison. It won’t be the cyber-Pearl Harbor. It will
have its own name.
Until that point, however, these attacks will
remain nameless. People are frightened of what
they can see and understand, not what they cannot
imagine and do not comprehend, and, as a result,
it’s easy to ignore the twice-removed effects of a
quiet but deadly cyberattack. Given that it took
more than a decade and a half to successfully pros-
ecute war criminals from the Yugoslav wars of the
40 FALL 2018
m
i
mid-1990s even with overwhelming photographic
h
evidence and personal testimony, it’s not surpris-
ing that the international community has a hard
a
time agreeing on what constitutes a cyberattack
h
deserving of reprisal—especially when countries
T
can’t even settle on a definition for themselves.
The first step to improving cyberdefense would
be to determine what does, in fact, constitute a
cyberattack by a foreign power as opposed to a
mere prank or industrial espionage. Then offi-
cials and legislators need to decide what consti-
tutes an act of justifiable self-defense during and
after such an attack.
To date, there have been few attempts to cre-
ate such global norms. In 2013, a group of experts
on digital law convened in Tallinn, Estonia, and
wrote the Tallinn Manual, the closest thing to dig-
ital Geneva Conventions the world currently has.
(In 2017, it was updated to the Tallinn Manual 2.0.)
It defined the characteristics of a cyberattack,
including targeting and disabling critical infra-
structure, hitting health care facilities, destroying
transportation corridors or vehicles containing
people, and attempts to penetrate the computer
networks of opposing military forces. The origi-
nal manual was less clear about disinformation
campaigns and hacking elections but did deem
interference in a foreign country’s elections a vio-
lation of state sovereignty if it included an attempt
at regime change.
In the run-up to the 2017 German parliamentary
elections, a string of cyberattacks led to fears of
Russian meddling, but according to the Charter of
the United Nations, unless armed force has been
brought to bear within the borders of a country,
no internationally recognized act of aggression
has occurred. This definition of war is hopelessly
out of date.
Similarly, cyberattacks in the Netherlands in
2017 and 2018 resulted in the denial of government
funding and vital services to citizens, but because
conventional battlefield weapons weren’t used,
the U.N. Charter’s provisions weren’t violated.
Countries are beginning to coalesce around the
idea that some forms of active countermeasures
are justified in self-defense, if not in actual recip-
rocation, under international law.
Reaching an international consensus on
what triggers a country’s right to self-defense in
cyberspace requires a coherent, common under-
standing on where to draw the line between nefar-
ious economic or intelligence activities and true
cyberattacks.
One model could take shape if Russian inter-
ference in foreign elections is proved beyond any
reasonable doubt. Drawing a chain of evidence
between Russian state-sponsored election med-
dling via a cyberattack and actual election out-
li
comes could lead to a global consensus on what
constitutes extralegal military activity in cyber-
A
space. It’s already clear that elections in multiple
countries have been meddled with, and no militar-
d
ies have visibly responded. In the U.S. case, former
o
President Barack Obama responded by declaring a
month before he left office that the United States
o
would respond at a time and place of its choosing.
s
But his successor has not visibly followed through
a
on that threat, at least in cyberspace.
No definition of a cyber-related war crime can
M
be effective without international legitimacy. If
a group of experts actually did convene to create
binding digital Geneva Conventions, it’s unclear
from what source it would derive its authority.
NATO sponsored the Tallinn conference, but the
Tallinn Manual is nonbinding and was not an
official NATO publication. Moreover, the alliance
itself is currently on shaky ground, and there’s no
guarantee that the United States would abide by
any agreement.
In the absence of a binding global accord, the
world will remain vulnerable to a motley mix of
hackers, warriors, intelligence operatives, crimi-
nals, and angry teenagers—none of whom can be
distinguished from behind three proxy servers. It
would be nearly impossible to identify perpetra-
tors with 100 percent confidence if they take even
rudimentary steps to cover their digital tracks
after cyberattacks.
Were disaster to strike Southern California
tomorrow, scientific tests and forensic analysis
would allow us to tell whether it was an earth-
quake or a bomb—even if both events could
destroy approximately the same amount of prop-
erty. Yet it would be very easy to confuse a distrib-
uted denial of service attack on a U.S. government
website launched for fun by a few juvenile hack-
ers in St. Petersburg with an attack launched by
the Russian military to deliberately deny U.S. citi-
zens the ability to register to vote or collect entitle-
ments. Cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns
are equally problematic to attribute and to punish.
Despite the consensus among experts and intelli-
gence services that Russia tampered with the 2016
m
U.S. presidential election, it is proving extremely
i
difficult to gain nonpartisan consensus that Rus-
h
sian-targeted advertising purchases on social media
constitute hostile acts by a foreign power.
a
The challenge today is the rapid speed at which
h
cyberspace morphs and evolves. It is changing
T
faster than international summits can be con-
vened, making obsolete any deal that takes longer
than a week or two to negotiate. Even if one coun-
try can come to an internal agreement on what
constitutes a cyberattack from one private party
to another, there’s no guarantee that two coun-
tries could do the same. But they will have to try.
Habits tend to become tradition. That’s how the
1648 Peace of Westphalia, intellectually inspired by
Hugo Grotius, came to define the modern nation-
state and govern international relations. Grotius,
a Dutch lawyer and the father of just-war theory,
defined the first series of rules by which an anarchic
international order could begin to structure itself.
After 370 years, the concept of the modern state
seems largely set in stone and has been repeatedly
reinforced by its use as a framework for relations.
The international community needs new hab-
its for a new era. Leaders must follow NATO’s ten-
tative footsteps in Tallinn and convene digital
Geneva Conventions that produce a few deep,
well-enforced rules surrounding the conduct of
war in cyberspace. Cyberwar is the continuation of
kinetic war by plausibly deniable means. Without
a global consensus on what constitutes cyberwar,
the world will be left in an anarchic state governed
by contradictory laws and norms and vulnerable
to the possibility of a devastating war launched
by a few anonymous keystrokes. Q
TARAH WHEELER (@tarah) is an information
security researcher and political scientist. She is a
New America cybersecurity policy fellow and
senior director of data trust and threat and
vulnerability management at Splunk.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 41
 h im
h a
li T
d A
o o
a s
M

42 FALL 2018
 THE
TALIBAN’S
im
FIGHT FOR
a h
h
HEARTS
l T
i
AND MINDS
d A
o o
The militants’ new strategy is

a s
to out-govern the U.S.-backed
administration in Kabul—and it’s working.

M
STORY BY ASHLEY JACKSON
PHOTOS BY ANDREW QUILTY

IN MANY WAYS CHARKH SEEMS like a typical rural Afghan district.

The scene on the
main road of Nawa-i-
Barakzai district center
in Helmand province,
Afghanistan, on Aug. 2.
The Taliban held the area
from October 2016 to
July 2017.
With little development or industry to speak of, its popula-
tion of 48,000 ekes out a living mostly from farming. Pov-
erty is common; those who can find better jobs elsewhere
leave and send money back to support their families. But a
closer look at Charkh reveals a divergence from what one may
expect of an average Afghan district. Administrators there
are widely seen as fair and honest, making them outliers in a
country consistently ranked among the world’s most corrupt.
Locals say there is remarkably little crime. Disputes among
neighbors or families are rare, and when they arise, the dis-
trict governor or judge quickly settles them. A health offi-
cial regularly monitors clinics to make sure that doctors and
nurses are present and that medicines are stocked. Across the

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 43

o o
district’s schools, government teachers
s
actually show up, and student atten-
a
dance is high—an anomaly in a state
system where absenteeism is rife.
M
On paper, Charkh’s surprising suc-
cess could be interpreted as evidence
of how the U.S.-backed administration
of President Ashraf Ghani has finally
extended a semblance of good gover-
nance beyond the capital of Kabul. But
in fact the Afghan government deserves
no credit for Charkh; the district is cur-
rently governed by the Taliban. The de
facto local authorities, from the mayor
to the town’s only judge, come from the
Taliban’s ranks, and ordinary bureau-
crats, such as teachers and health offi-
cials, have been vetted and selected by
the insurgency—even though Kabul still
pays their salaries.
Despite the near doubling of U.S. troop
levels and a spike in airstrikes over the
past year, the Taliban retain significant
influence in vast swaths of rural Afghan-
istan and are working assiduously to
out-govern Ghani’s internationally rec-
ognized National Unity Government.
44 FALL 2018
li T
d A
The idea that the Taliban are now striv-
ing to provide good governance might
strain credulity, given the draconian
cruelty of their rule from 1996 to 2001.
During those years, they banned women
from school and work and executed
young lovers in sports stadiums. Since
the group’s overthrow in 2001, its brutal
attacks have killed tens of thousands of
Afghans. As recently as 2009, the Tali-
ban were still killing teachers, burning
schools, and attacking aid workers.
Today, however, the Taliban are seek-
ing to present themselves as a legitimate
political movement able to administer
services and govern the country. As U.S.
and Afghan forces pull back to protect
major cities—as part of Washington’s
new strategy—the Taliban are filling
the vacuum. They are no longer just a
shadowy insurgency; they are a govern-
ment in waiting.
TO UNDERSTAND THE TALIBAN’S PUZZLING
TURNAROUND, one has to return to 2014.
The withdrawal of tens of thousands
h im
h a
of international troops that year pre-
sented the group’s leaders with both
risks and opportunities. They had,
after all, faced similar circumstances
before: In 1996, during the height of the
civil war, they’d taken advantage of the
virtual absence of any form of central
authority to sweep to power. But this
time, the Taliban leadership realized
that instead of attacking government
schools and aid projects, it could gain
much more by co-opting them. In doing
so, it could take credit for providing ser-
vices and win over the local population.
What began with a gradual
recognition that unbridled violence
would hurt the Taliban’s battle
for popular support grew into a
sophisticated governance structure,
including the management of schools,
clinics, courts, tax collection, and
more. Local Taliban members began
to strike unofficial cease-fires with
Afghan soldiers to de-escalate the
conflict. Government soldiers would
man checkpoints until the evening,
after which the Taliban would assume

o o
those positions until dawn. This shift
s
in Taliban strategy created a relatively
a
peaceful—if uneasy—coexistence
between the insurgency and the
M
government in areas that had previously
been among the country’s most volatile.
“They were cruel before, but now they
are trying to show a different face,” said
a former Taliban commander in the
northern province of Kunduz. “They
have to show they can do everything the
government can—but better.”
Taliban fighters and officials credit
Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour
for this transformation. Mansour nim-
bly led the movement through a series
of pivotal moments: the so-called surge
that began in late 2009, when Wash-
ington sent in 33,000 more troops to
turn around the failing war effort; Mul-
lah Mohammad Omar’s death in 2013,
which Mansour, as his deputy, strategi-
cally concealed for two years; the 2014
drawdown; and the resignation of sev-
eral key deputies once Mansour for-
mally assumed the role of emir—the
Taliban’s leader—in 2015.
li T
A
d
“Mansour totally changed our think-
ing: about governing, about peace,
about everything,” one Taliban offi-
cial in the southern province of Hel-
mand said. Mansour transformed the
Taliban from a scrappy insurgency to
a shadow state. He consolidated the
military and financial wings of the Tal-
iban, attempting to move away from a
system of patronage to one focused on
building institutions. Mansour created a
Taliban commission to investigate civil-
ian casualties. He appointed Tajiks and
Uzbeks to the Taliban’s rahbari shura,
or leadership council, broadening the
movement beyond its Pashtun base.
Mansour was preparing the move-
ment for life after war. Rather than seek-
ing outright victory, he was positioning
the Taliban for a power-sharing deal.
Mansour was a staunch advocate for
the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar
in 2013, cautiously steering the group
toward a greater openness to talks.
In May 2016, the United States killed
Mansour in a drone strike, but his vision
lives on. Its primary advantage is the
h im
h a
Students in the
courtyard and in class at
a school in Shin Kalay, a
village in Helmand’s Nad
Ali district, on May 14.
way it allows the Taliban to spread their
influence without incurring the high
body counts and low morale that result
from pitched battles. When the Tali-
ban have tried to seize district centers
and major cities—including the north-
ern city of Kunduz in 2015 and 2016—
they have been swiftly pushed back by
airstrikes and internationally backed
ground offensives. So while they con-
tinue to periodically attack cities, as
they did this past spring in the west-
ern province of Farah and in August
in the eastern province of Ghazni, the
Taliban now devote fewer resources to
these operations and use them more to
embarrass the Kabul government than
to capture territory.
The Taliban’s new focus is on extend-
ing their control in a more subtle way. By
relying on coercion and their reputation
for providing fair (if harsh) justice, they
have gained new footholds in village
after village. As their influence grows
in a given town, the Taliban gradually
impose their rules on civilian life and
recruit a force of civil servants—ranging
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 45

Khan Akha, right, sweeps a classroom in the main building of Khalaj High School in
o
Nawa-i-Barakzai on May 13. Though the government now controls the area, sandbag
o
fortifications still line the roof of the school from fighting in 2016 and 2017, shown above.
a s
from electricity bill collectors to health
inspectors—to enforce them. The level of
M
their presence varies from place to place,
but even in cities ostensibly under gov-
ernment control, such as Kunduz and
Lashkar Gah, the Taliban now tax busi-
nesses and adjudicate disputes.
U N L I K E T H E I S L A M I C S TAT E ,
which
attempted to create new parallel infra-
structure in the territory it seized, the
Taliban prefer to co-opt existing gov-
ernment services and aid projects. In an
October 2017 interview via WhatsApp,
the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Muja-
hid explained the seeming contradiction
involved in working with a state his orga-
nization was simultaneously fighting:
“This is about meeting people’s needs.
It’s not a part of the war.”
But it is, of course. The Taliban have
realized that there’s no need to attack
symbols of the state if you can instead
capture their resources and redi-
46 FALL 2018
li T
d A
rect them to your aims. This process
has been made much easier by most
Afghans’ frustration with the wide-
spread corruption that has crippled
public services and made finding work
so difficult. An estimated 80 percent of
state teachers must pay bribes to get
their positions, according to an audit
Kabul released late last year. “The gov-
ernment could do nothing in the past
10 years,” said Jamal, a former teacher
at the boys high school in Charkh’s dis-
trict center. “The Taliban solved our
problems right away.”
Jamal, whose name has been changed
for his protection, was just a teenager
when the insurgency came to his village
in Logar province around 2007 and
he fled to escape the fighting. But he
struggled to find a job elsewhere, and
he decided to return after his family
assured him that security had improved
since the Taliban had taken control.
His old school principal recommended
him to the group, which checked out his
h im
h a
background. Once they were satisfied
that he was not a spy for the government,
local Taliban officials indicated their
approval to village elders acting as
intermediaries between the Taliban
and government officials. The elders
informed Education Ministry officials,
who then appointed him to his post.
Though Jamal worked in a state
school and the Education Ministry
paid his salary, Taliban officials were
in charge of his work and his environ-
ment. Taliban-appointed monitors, usu-
ally village elders or mullahs, take staff
attendance and instruct school officials
to dock the pay of absent teachers. They
occasionally remove what they deem to
be objectionable content from the cur-
riculum—such as a culture textbook
showing photographs of female police—
and replace it with religious texts.
A similar system exists in clinics and
hospitals, where Taliban-appointed
monitors appear at random to ensure
that doctors are present and to inspect

o
o
s
a
medicine stocks. “My Taliban counter-
part called me and said, ‘You have to
M
have one extra surgeon in this district
and an X-ray machine,’” said Farhad, a
public health official in Logar’s provin-
cial capital of Pul-e-Alam, whose name
has also been changed. When asked how
he felt about such demands, Farhad was
matter-of-fact, saying, “They give orders,
and we have to obey. We may not like
their way of doing things, but at least
we can say that it is much less corrupt.”
Officials in Kabul are reluctant to pub-
licly acknowledge or discuss ground-
level negotiations with the Taliban, and
they often reiterate their obligation to
provide services to Afghans—regardless
of what side of the conflict they might
be on. “People living under the control
of the Taliban are not necessarily Tali-
ban themselves,” said Wahid Majrooh,
a spokesman for the Ministry of Public
Health. “The Ministry of Public Health
is committed to providing health ser-
vices to all Afghans.” While the minis-
T
li
A
d
try has no official policy on whether or
how its employees should deal with the
Taliban, he said that in “specific cases
where health workers face challenges
from insurgents, they solve the issue
through community elders.”
NO ONE CAN SAY FOR SURE how much of the
country the Taliban administer. Esti-
mates of territorial control are hotly dis-
puted. Operation Resolute Support, the
NATO-led training and support mis-
sion, estimates that the insurgency
influences or controls 14 percent of the
country’s districts while the govern-
ment controls 56 percent and the rest
is contested. In contrast, a BBC study
released in January estimated that the
Taliban were “openly active” in 70 per-
cent of the country’s districts.
Terms such as influence and “openly
active” are difficult to visualize. The
Taliban’s strategy defies zero-sum
notions of control. An accurate map
of Taliban influence would show most
major district centers and cities encir-
cled. An hour’s drive in any direction
from Kabul will put you in Taliban ter-
ritory. There may not be a Taliban flag
flying, but everyone knows who is in
charge. The Taliban make and enforce
the rules; they collect taxes and decide
how much of a presence the govern-
ment can retain.
During the troop surge, international
m
forces focused on an ink spot strategy:
i
establishing control in district centers
h
and aiming to win Afghan hearts and
minds by providing aid and services.
a
Government influence would then
h
spread outward to connect to other
state-controlled areas. The hope was
that if the government could connect
enough of these areas, it would amass
enough support to turn the tide against
the Taliban. With the drawdown of
international forces, the opposite
has happened: The ink spots have
gotten smaller and less connected.
The United States has abandoned
counterinsurgency, while the Taliban
are now using good governance to win
civilian support.
The Taliban officials I have spoken
to recently claim not to be seeking out-
right victory but a peace deal, and their
method of governance seems to sup-
port this claim. Helmand province in
southwestern Afghanistan offers the
best example of how this process works.
The Afghan government now estimates
that the Taliban control 85 percent of
Helmand, and locals refer to the north-
ern town of Musa Qala as the Taliban’s
capital. As elsewhere, Taliban rule
relies on cooperation with the Afghan
government.
During a visit to the provincial cap-
ital of Lashkar Gah, Hayatullah Hayat,
the former governor of Helmand, dis-
played a binder full of letters from Tal-
iban officials, many requesting the
government to provide clinics and devel-
opment projects. When asked why he
entertained requests from an insurgency
that his government was at war with,
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 47
 As U.S. and Afghan forces
pull back to protect major
cities, the Taliban are filling
the vacuum. They are no longer
just a shadowy insurgency—
they are a government in waiting.
Hayat dismissed the Taliban’s staying
power. “They can control these areas
o
through violence, but they cannot provide
real government. They have no capacity
o
and no vision,” he said. “Afghans know
s
it is really the government providing
a
these things.”
Cooperation is uniquely bureau-
M
cratized in Helmand. Last February,
representatives from the Taliban’s
education commission and the gov-
ernment’s provincial department of
education signed a 10-point memo-
randum of understanding outlining
their respective responsibilities for pro-
viding education. Group pictures from
the signing surfaced on Twitter, with
black-turbaned Taliban members, their
faces partially covered, sitting cross-
legged alongside their government
counterparts.
The agreement stated that all schools
are government property but that it is
the Taliban’s responsibility to protect
the schools and their staff. Both sides
pledged to work together to reopen
the schools that had closed due to the
fighting in previous years. According
to Daud Shah Sharafi, the central
government’s provincial director of
education, 33 schools, or more than
48 FALL 2018
T
li
A
a fifth of those that had been closed,
d
have reopened since the agreement
was signed.
Sharafi defended the agreement,
which the Afghan security services crit-
icized bitterly. “Of course the Taliban
are using this agreement as propaganda
to show how weak the government is,”
he said. “But is it better for children to
be in school or for there to be no school
and nothing for them to do but join
the Taliban?”
Local Taliban members had a differ-
ent take. “People criticized the Taliban
for being ineffective in the 1990s, but
we never had this kind of aid money
when we were in government,” a Tali-
ban finance official said. “Look at what
we could do with all of this international
support if you put us in charge.”
To many, the idea of the Taliban
being back in charge is a terrifying pros-
pect. The Taliban have shifted some
policy positions, but many old rules
have been reinstated. While the Tali-
ban now say they do not oppose girls’
education or women working in certain
sectors, the reality is that in areas the
group controls, girls do not go to school
past puberty and women cannot leave
the house without a male chaperone.
Men must grow their beards, eschew
modern dress for shalwar kameez,
and attend mosque. Smartphones and
televisions are officially banned, and
although the rule is often flouted, get-
ting caught results in a beating. Those
convicted of spying for the government
are executed. Many citizens live in con-
m
stant fear. Afghans who can afford to
i
do so leave for nearby cities where the
h
government’s laws still hold sway. Yet
even there they are not safe, as count-
a
less Taliban attacks in cities across the
h
country illustrate.
To what degree are the Taliban
winning public support? The answer
is not clear-cut. Certainly some Afghans
in rural areas provide active support
to the insurgency; the movement
heavily relies on civilians for food and
shelter. Most Afghans are just tired of
war, disillusioned and disgusted by
the unending brutality committed by
all sides. They don’t see the current
government or Taliban as an ideal
option, but decades of upheaval and
chaos have taught them that their
preferences matter very little to the
outcome. “We surrender to whoever is
there. When the mujahideen came, we
surrendered. When the [Hamid] Karzai
government came, we surrendered. If
the Taliban come, we surrender,” said
another teacher from Logar. “This is
how we survive.”
IN AUGUST 2017, U.S. President Donald
Trump announced a new strategy for
Afghanistan, pledging “to fight and to
win.” The strategy was heavy on air power
and light on diplomacy and ultimately ill-
suited to combat an insurgency so deeply
intertwined with the population. Civilian
casualties from airstrikes hit an all-time
high in 2017. The United States dropped
more bombs that year—with 14,000
troops on the ground—than it did in 2012
with almost 100,000 troops. Airstrikes

o o
s
a
M
were rarely followed up with attempts
to establish government control,
leaving most Afghans wondering what
the point was.
Attempts at reforming the govern-
ment, which would address the very
causes of discontent that give the Tal-
iban leverage, have foundered and are
now only a marginal part of U.S. strat-
egy. As a recent report from the U.S. spe-
cial inspector general for Afghanistan
reconstruction underscored, stabiliza-
tion had largely failed and the United
States “greatly overestimated its ability
to build and reform government institu-
tions.” The National Unity Government
remains a fragile coalition nearly para-
lyzed by corruption and infighting. The
only recent positive press the govern-
ment has received was for orchestrating
a three-day cease-fire with the Taliban
over the Eid al-Fitr holiday in June.
li T
d A
In July, reports emerged that the
Trump administration had abandoned
its hopes of turning the tide of the war.
The United States is now urging Afghan
forces to further retreat from rural areas
and instead focus their limited resources
on protecting urban centers. The mission
to build Afghan security forces has fal-
tered, with the inspector general’s office
reporting that force size has shrunk
by about 5 percent over the past year.
There are also signs that Washington is
open to bilateral political talks directly
with the Taliban, one of the insurgent
group’s long-standing demands. In late
July, Taliban officials claim to have met
with Alice Wells, the White House’s most
senior diplomat for South and Central
Asia, which the State Department nei-
ther confirmed nor denied.
Direct talks are the only way to end
America’s longest war, but it will be a
h im
h a
Members of the Afghan National
Security Forces drink tea at dusk at
the governor’s headquarters in
Nawa-i-Barakzai on Aug. 2. Above, one
of them poses with a bandoleer of bullets.
long and tenuous process. Confidence-
building measures, such as the Eid
cease-fire, are important, but much
more must be done, from creating a
mechanism for formal talks to jump-
starting the local peacebuilding
initiatives that will build a foundation
for a sustainable political settlement.
Difficult questions remain, however,
about the future of Afghanistan,
particularly when it comes to
democratic governance and human
rights. While diplomats and pundits
debate what a power-sharing deal with
the Taliban might look like, a hybrid
government is already taking over large
parts of the country. Q
ASHLEY JACKSON (@a_a_ jackson) is a
research associate at the Overseas
Development Institute and a Ph.D.
candidate at King’s College London.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 49
 h im
h a
li T
d A
o o
a s
M
W H Y T HE

MILITARY
MU S T L E A R N T O L O V E

SILICON VALLEY
50 FALL 2018
 h im
h a
li T
STORY BY LARA SELIGMAN

A
ILLUSTR ATION BY MENGXIN LI

o d
o
PEOPLE WHO FORM THEIR IDEAS about the U.S. military based

s
on Hollywood movies might get the impression that cut-

a
ting-edge technology is standard in the fighting forces. In
fact, the opposite is true. At nuclear sites around the country,

M
technicians still use floppy disks. Only this summer is the
U.S. Navy expected to upgrade from Windows XP, an operat-
ing system long since scrubbed from home computers. The
new F-35 stealth fighter jet, touted as the most sophisticated
in the world, was first conceived of in the 1990s.
So when the Defense Department announced last year
that it wanted to partner with Silicon Valley to build a mas-
sive cloud storage unit where it could securely warehouse
and categorize the secret data it collects from intelligence
agencies and the military, some experts scoffed. Companies
such as Amazon and Google are defined by an ethos of agil-
ity and innovation. The Pentagon, by contrast, is known to
THE U.S. DEFENSE be clunky and risk averse. Just getting a contract through
DEPARTMENT the department’s famously byzantine procurement process
would require a kind of bureaucratic wrangling that a Jeff
AND BIG TECH NEED Bezos or a Tim Cook would find abhorrent.
EACH OTHER Yet the Defense Department’s effort to advance the cloud
project is making slow progress. The grueling process has
BUT GET TING ALONG revealed all the ways in which the two sides in the partnership
WON’T BE EASY. are fundamentally incompatible. But it has also forced the

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 51
Pentagon to confront a sobering truth:
If it hopes to maintain U.S. military
dominance, it must make such partner-
ships work. The imperative is bound up
with the way technological innovation
has shifted over the past few decades
from government-funded labs around
the country to commercial companies.
It’s also tied to some broader changes in
the world, including the rise of China
as a great power.
The fact that the U.S. government pio-
neered many of the great technological
breakthroughs of the 20th century has
become common knowledge. The inter-
net began decades ago as a computer
networking project in the offices of the
Advanced Research Projects Agency—
essentially a Defense Department incu-
o
bator. The satellite navigation systems
that now feature on most smartphones
o
were hatched in the same place.
s
But starting in the 1990s, as military
a
budgets declined and investment in
tech companies soared, the private sec-
M
tor gained a huge advantage in innova-
tion. Most tech firms have focused on
producing consumer goods. But some
of the technology they’ve developed, if
applied to the military, could transform
the way war is waged.
U.S. Defense Secretary James Mat-
tis, for one, appears to be well aware
of this fact (though his service on the
board of the failed tech company Ther-
anos didn’t exactly burnish his creden-
tials in Silicon Valley). The Pentagon’s
latest National Defense Strategy iden-
tifies eight technologies the military
wants to leverage for its own advan-
tage, including advanced computing,
big data analytics, artificial intelligence,
and robotics. “Success does not go to the
country that develops a new technology
first but rather to the one that better
integrates it and more swiftly adapts
its way of fighting,” Mattis said when
the strategy was unveiled in January.
52 FALL 2018
What stood out about his list was the
fact that the commercial sector is largely
driving six of the eight technologies on
it, according to Robert Work, who served
as the deputy defense secretary until
last year. Work was one of the Penta-
gon’s main proponents of partnerships
with the commercial sector. More than
most of his colleagues, he understood
the challenges of bridging the culture
gap between the two sides.
To try to do so, three years ago Work
helped set up the Defense Innovation
T
Unit Experimental, or DIUx, a kind of
li
Pentagon outpost in Silicon Valley that
was meant to serve as a liaison between
A
the Defense Department and the tech
world. (In August, DIUx shortened its
d
name to DIU, on the grounds that it
was no longer experimental.) Though
it scored some successes early on—the
Pentagon expanded the program to Bos-
ton and Austin—it has started to lose
steam since the departure of its man-
aging director, Raj Shah, this year. Still,
Work believes that the Pentagon has
already learned some valuable lessons
from the experience.
Last year, when he was still in office,
Work launched Project Maven, one of
the Pentagon’s deepest forays to date
into the high-tech realm. The pro-
gram makes use of AI to analyze huge
amounts of drone data—a painstak-
ing process traditionally handled by
humans. Project Maven aims to even-
tually replace and improve on much of
that work, identifying threats, track-
ing enemy movements, and detecting
anomalies that the human eye may
overlook. “I remain convinced that we
need to do much more, and move much
faster, across DoD to take advantage
of recent and future advances in these
critical areas,” Work wrote in an April
2017 memo.
Project Maven is already operating
in at least five secret locations in the
Middle East and Africa. But it has hit
some snags. This April, more than 3,000
employees at Google signed a letter pro-
testing the company’s involvement in
the project on the grounds that “Google
should not be in the business of war.”
The company responded by vowing not
m
to renew the partnership when it expires
i
next year. Still, the Pentagon’s invest-
h
ment in AI and Project Maven contin-
ues as other tech companies find these
a
lucrative contracts hard to resist.
h
Building on Maven’s success would
require the Defense Department to con-
solidate its data, including the informa-
tion it gets from surveillance drones and
from the military intelligence commu-
nity, and label it in a machine-readable
format. To that end, in July the Penta-
gon launched an enormous tender for
a cloud storage contract, code-named
JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infra-
structure). In both the Pentagon and
Silicon Valley, JEDI’s success—or fail-
ure—is being watched as a test case for
whether the two cultures can cooperate.
Should it succeed, the program will
offer significant advantages for both the
government and the commercial sector.
The contract is estimated to be worth
$10 billion, making it a huge prize for
even the biggest firms. The company
that wins JEDI, a two-year contract
with an option for more work there-
after, would also get a leg up in secur-
ing other Pentagon deals—including
filling the department’s further needs
for cloud storage. As for the Defense
Department, the project would allow for
faster and deeper analysis of its intelli-
gence data. “The road to AI begins with
a lot of banal, boring steps that sound
like putting in a telephone system and
archiving and databasing, but that is the
work we have to do,” said Will Roper, the
U.S. Air Force’s top acquisition official
and formerly head of the Pentagon’s
secretive Strategic Capabilities Office.
 UNLIKE WASHINGTON,
AUTHORITARIAN POWERS
HAVE AN EASY TIME WORKING
WITH LOCAL TECH FIRMS:
THEY SIMPLY TELL THEM
WHAT TO DO.
h im
h a
Critical as it is, the initiative has been
T
bogged down by the Defense Depart-
i
ment’s antiquated acquisition system.
l
It took officials until late July to release
A
the final request for proposals, and it’s
not clear when the contract will be
d
awarded. During a May 31 press con-
o
ference, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana
White declined to commit to a timeline.
o
“We are working on it, but it’s import-
s
ant that we don’t rush toward failure,”
a
she said. “We also want to take in all of
the different stakeholders and consider
M
how we move best forward.”
The Pentagon wants to avoid a situ-
ation where one or more of the bidders
protests the results of the contracting
process, which is one reason it’s mov-
ing carefully—and slowly. Most analysts
assume that Amazon is the front-run-
ner—in part because it is among the
world’s largest cloud services provid-
ers and already works with the U.S. intel-
ligence community on other projects.
But a coalition of tech companies from
Microsoft to Red Hat is reportedly coor-
dinating efforts to keep the JEDI contract
from going exclusively to Amazon. Goo-
gle was considering making a bid as well,
though the decision to pull out of Project
Maven may complicate the issue. “Ama-
zon sort of feels like the Lebron James of
this field,” said Daniel Goure, the senior
vice president of the Lexington Institute,
a public policy think tank that focuses
on security-related issues.
The tender process was supposed
to be the easy part. Once the
Pentagon chooses a contractor for
JEDI, the winner will have to meet
the government’s many regulatory
requirements, particularly in the area
of cybersecurity. Frank Kendall, the
Pentagon’s top acquisition official until
2017, said the commercial world does
not fully understand these obscure
demands. “I would just urge a bit
of caution,” he said. “I think people
rushing headlong into embracing some
of these commercial firms—they need
to be a little more careful.”
As a cautionary example, Kendall
pointed to the intelligence communi-
ty’s effort to migrate to the commercial
cloud. Since 2014, the CIA and the 16
other U.S. intelligence agencies have
been working to shift top-secret and
classified information onto Amazon’s
cloud. Though some CIA officials tout
the move as transformational, Kendall
said implementation has been “slower
than expected” due to cybersecurity
concerns and the Pentagon’s stringent
regulatory process.
To be sure, whenever the Pentagon
contracts with outside companies,
the process tends to be painstaking
and time-consuming. The production
of the F-35, Lockheed Martin’s latest
fighter jet, underscores that point.
Originally planned to be deployed
starting in 2010, the stealth fighter
suffered years of delays, cost overruns,
and technical challenges. The Air Force
only declared the aircraft ready for
deployment in 2016.
Given the rapid technological
advances being made by potential
U.S. adversaries, particularly China,
however, the U.S. military can’t afford
similar delays in JEDI and other high-
tech partnerships. Today, three of the
world’s five most valuable tech start-
ups are Chinese, and companies such
as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei
are narrowing the research and devel-
opment spending gap with their U.S.
competitors, according to the Council
on Foreign Relations. Unlike Washing-
ton, moreover, authoritarian powers
have an easy time working with local
tech firms: They simply tell them what
to do. That’s one of the reasons that Eric
Schmidt, the former chairman of Alpha-
bet (Google’s parent company) and the
chairman of the Defense Innovation
Board, recently warned that China was
poised to surpass the United States in
the AI race by 2025.
“We are now in a big technological
competition with great powers,” Work
said. “We cannot assume that our tech-
nological superiority is a given. We are
going to have to fight for it.” Q
LARA SELIGMAN (@laraseligman) cov-
ers the U.S. Defense Department for
FOREIGN POLICY.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 53
 STRE TCHED THIN

THIN ICE
ON

h im
h a
li T
d A
o o
a s
M With the Arctic melting and northern
coast guards struggling to keep up,
the next disaster is a matter of when, not if.

54 FALL 2018
 h im
h a
li T
d A
o o
a s
M

A cruise ship near the

harbor of Ilulissat of the
west coast of Greenland,
north of the Arctic Circle,
in August 2012.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 55
STORY BY ROBBIE GRAMER

Kyrre Einarsen peered over the

ship’s bridge into the gray waters
of an Arctic fjord. Flanking the

im
vessel were the jagged, treeless

a h
peaks that define the islands of

T h
his ship was the vastliand
Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago

A
deep in the Arctic Circle. Ahead of

o d
“You don’t see the differences from

All that wasomissing

year to year,” said Thomas Nilsen, the

s
editor of the Barents Observer, an inde-

empty Greenland Sea.

was theaice.
pendent news outlet based in Kirkenes,
a remote Norwegian town that’s near

M
Einarsen, a lieutenant commander with the Norwegian
Coast Guard, and his small crew were on a three-week patrol
around the region, nearly 600 miles north of mainland Nor-
way’s northernmost tip. It was May. Even five or six years ago,
Einarsen said, the jords around Svalbard were iced over at
that time of year. “You couldn’t go into this jord without ice-
breaking capacity,” he said. This May, there wasn’t a chunk
of ice to be seen, even as levels of snowfall rose. “That is not
normal in an Arctic condition,” he said in a thick Norwe-
gian accent.
The winter of 2018 brought new record lows in the extent
of sea ice in the Arctic. On one day in February—a month
when temperatures in the Arctic were around 20 degrees
Celsius above normal—the amount of sea ice in the Arctic
was nearly 500,000 square miles less than the historic aver-
age, according to the Norwegian Polar Institute, a Norwe-
gian government research body that monitors the region.
the northernmost tip of the European
continent. “But 2013 … was the first time
that we really started to ask questions
about what is going on.”
Nilsen, who has lived in Kirkenes for
15 years, said the changes are getting
more dramatic, from melting sea ice
to warmer, wetter weather. In July,
the Barents region of northwestern
Russia and northern Norway, Finland,
and Sweden also experienced a wave
of wildfires amid an unprecedented
heat wave.
Beyond the coast, Einarsen patrols
the seas around Svalbard on a three-
week rotation from his Norwegian Coast
Guard ship, the Harstad. Despite the
warming temperatures, this stretch of
ocean is still one of the most unforgiv-
ing and remote waterways on Earth.
The Harstad is one of only 13 ships in
the Norwegian Coast Guard, all charged
with patrolling and securing the coun-

56 FALL 2018

o
try’s territorial waters, an expanse equal
o
to seven times the landmass of Norway
s
itself and roughly equivalent in size to
a
the Mediterranean Sea. During its tour,
the Harstad is the first line of defense
M
for any oil spills, at-sea accidents, or
search and rescue operations around
Svalbard. It’s also the last: Given the
remote location, the Harstad is the only
Norwegian Coast Guard vessel for hun-
dreds of miles around.
The coast guard’s mandate used
to be less daunting. The harsh Arctic
environment long meant only the
hardiest fishermen and bravest
explorers dared to steer a boat this far
north. But in recent years, the top of
the world has seen a massive boom
in human activity as the Arctic has
warmed. Sea ice that once blocked
almost all navigation is rapidly melting
year after year. As the ice recedes, it is
being replaced by oil tankers, maritime
traders, cruise ships, and fishermen—
some of whom aren’t operating
Arctic-worthy vessels. The world’s
northernmost coast guards now need
to patrol huge swaths of water they
T
li
d A
rarely worried about before, and they
are scrambling to keep up with demand.
The Norwegian Coast Guard has only
350 people in its force. Even larger
and better-resourced coast guards are
straining to cope with Arctic operations.
The 88,000-strong U.S. Coast Guard is
looking to build a fleet of six icebreakers
in the next decade. Right now, it has
only one active icebreaker in the Arctic
region, and that one is more than
40 years old and requires constant
maintenance.
Senior coast guard officials across
littoral Arctic states worry that the
next big maritime disaster is a matter
of when, not if. That terrifies even the
hardiest of sailors. Search and rescue
operations are always tricky, but in the
Arctic, where the difference between
life and death after taking a plunge
in icy waters can be counted in
minutes, they are exponentially more
harrowing.
And rescue operations may become
more common in the future. Thanks in
part to the melting of the sea, between
2000 and 2016 the number of visitors
h im
a
Norwegian Coast Guard
h
officers aboard the Svalbard
of the coast of Norway’s
Svalbard archipelago in
August 2011.
to Norway from cruise ships shot up
from 200,000 to 700,000. Einarsen
noted that tourist traffic on ships near
Svalbard alone has increased tenfold
in recent years, from small daily trips
launched from Longyearbyen, the larg-
est town on Svalbard, to cruise ships
venturing up from the south. According
to the Association of Arctic Expedition
Cruise Operators (AECO), a self-regu-
lating international association con-
cerned with the environmental and
safety habits of its members operat-
ing in the north, 26 new polar cruise
ships are set to launch in the next three
years, and the number of passengers
on AECO-affiliated ships is expected to
increase by nearly 45 percent in three
years, from 26,296 passengers in 2017
to 38,000 passengers in 2020.
Fishing—Norway’s second-largest
industry after the oil and gas sector—
is also booming thanks to southern fish
stocks migrating north as oceans warm.
The Norwegian Coast Guard struggles
to keep up with it all, particularly when
it comes to combating illegal fishing.
“We have to prioritize,” Einarsen said.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 57
 September 1986 September 1996
ARC ARC
TIC TIC
ALASKA CI ALASKA CI
USA R USA R

C
LE

LE
CANADA CANADA
RUSSIA RUSSIA
ARCTIC
The Arctic’s OCEAN
Ice Age Problem
For four decades, Arctic ice
GREENLAND NORWAY GREENLAND NORWAY
has been slipping away at
a dramatic clip. Of course,
there’s some melt every
0 400 mi
summer, but not all ice is

im
created equal. It used to be
that ice that had been around September 2006 September 2016

h
for more than five years was ARC
TIC
ARC
TIC

a
ALASKA CI ALASKA CI
much slower to melt. These USA R USA R

h
C

C
maps show the decline of ice

LE

LE
T
aged 5 and up in September
when ice extent is at its

li
CANADA CANADA
minimum. Older Arctic ice RUSSIA RUSSIA

A
should be thicker and thus
less likely to melt during

d
the warm summer months.
Younger ice breaks up more

o
GREENLAND GREENLAND
NORWAY NORWAY
easily and allows more heat to

o
escape from the ocean to the

s
atmosphere, leading to higher

a
ocean temperatures during
the summer.—RG SEA ICE AGE (years) 1 2 3 4 5+

M
“We have to say: ‘We won’t do that for you
today. Maybe we can do it next week.’”
Einarsen isn’t the only one who’s wor-
ried. Coast guards across the north have
begun frantically pushing their gov-
ernments for more resources, more
ships, and more training missions in
the Arctic.
It helps that all of the countries in
the region face the same problems—
even the United States, which patrols
the waters around Alaska. “There’s an
ocean where there used to be ice,” said
Adm. Charles Ray, the vice comman-
dant of the U.S. Coast Guard and its
senior-most expert on the Arctic after
nearly four decades of service. “Human
activity has therefore increased.”
Ray described the challenges the
world’s largest and most advanced
coast guard faces when protecting
Alaska’s northernmost territory—
known as the North Slope—where oil
sits under permafrost and intrepid
tourist companies and explorers alike
eye their next adventures. Even in
the summer months, the weather can
complicate operations. “What would
be called a hurricane in the lower
48 is called ‘Tuesday’ in Alaska,”
he said.
The distances also make missions
incredibly complicated. “The closest
Coast Guard station to the area of the
North Slope is Kodiak, Alaska,” Ray
explained. “As the crow flies, that’s 800
miles away … over 10,000-foot moun-
tain ranges. As the helicopter flies, it’s
more like 1,300 miles. As the ship sails,
it’s more like 1,500 miles.”
Ray said the number of search and
rescue operations in the Arctic region
has gone up 200 percent in recent years,
though it is still manageable. “We’re not
talking thousands. We’re talking dozens
of cases,” he said.
Asked if they were prepared to
avert the next Titanic or respond to
the next Exxon Valdez oil spill, both
Norwegian and U.S. officials offered
similar answers: They’re under-
resourced, understaffed, and doing the
best they can. “What we do,” said Ray,
“is manage risk.”

58 FALL 2018 Maps by 5W INFOGRAPHICS

 That risk is growing. In 2016 and 2017,
the Crystal Serenity, a luxury cruise
ship, sailed from Alaska to New York
through the treacherous Northwest
Passage above Canada. The trip was
advertised with much fanfare as the
first, and most intimate, monthlong
voyage to pass through this once iced-
over route. The problem was that the
Crystal Serenity was the same type of
vessel that sails out of Miami, Ray said,
with no hardened hull or other features
that could help prevent catastrophe if
it hit an iceberg.
According to Ray, the Crystal
Serenity did a great job communi-
cating its route and taking extensive
safety precautions—including sail-
ing with an escort ship—during its
Arctic crossing. But some native Alas-
A
kan communities and environmen-
tal activist groups, such as Friends of
d
the Earth, criticized the ship’s plan,
o
citing the potential environmental
impact of releasing human waste and
o
fuel into the oceans, while others high-
s
lighted the astronomical cost that would
a
have been borne by the Canadian Coast
even though Norway has suspended its
military cooperation with Russia. “We’re
business as usual with the Russians in
the Coast Guard,” Einarsen said.
Three years ago, eight northern
countries—Canada, Denmark, Finland,
Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and
the United States—created the Arctic
Coast Guard Forum, a new international
body to coordinate efforts and promote
joint responses to emergencies.
Personal relationships are essential.
“For our guys to be able to call the Finns,
the Swedes, or the Russians [and] say,
‘Hey, we’ve got this situation’ … is
a
super important,” said Ray, the U.S.
h
Coast Guard vice commandant. “This
T
sounds fairly elementary in today’s
li
information age. But the information
age hasn’t quite made it to the Arctic.”
The forum has helped coast guards
communicate with each other, as well
as with private shipping industries, and


set up joint training exercises, explained
Tomi Kivenjuuri, the commander of the
Finnish Border Guard.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard is
pushing Congress to allot $750 million
to build a new heavy icebreaker, which
could be completed as soon as 2023.
And Norway’s Coast Guard is expect-
ing to receive three more large ships,
including one as soon as 2020, to replace
aging 1980s-era vessels.
m
But the new ships probably won’t
i
meet the needs of the warming region.
h
And in the meantime, the Harstad
and other coast guard ships are all the
Arctic has. Q
ROBBIE GRAMER (@RobbieGramer) is
a staff writer for FOREIGN POLICY.
His trip on the Harstad was spon-
sored by the Norwegian Defense
Ministry and the Atlantic Council,
a Washington-based think tank.


Guard if it had had to intervene. Mean-


M
while, more and more cruise ships are
now heading north, despite the fact that 
they do not meet so-called polar code
safety standards—which include special-

 
 
ized training and ice removal equipment. !
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for such cruise ships, said Nilsen, the
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unmapped—until recently it was locked
 
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in ice. “Many captains [on cruise ship 
 
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tic waters,” he said.     

 
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To hedge against the worst, coast 
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guards across the Northern Hemi- 
 
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and oil spills.  
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litical tensions. The Norwegian Coast
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60 FALL 2018
HACKERS
FOR HIRE
h im
h a
li T
A
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE BEST CYBERWEAPONS
ARE CONTROLLED BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR?

o d
so
STORY BY NERI ZILBER

a
ILLUSTR ATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY

M
THE FIRST TEXT MESSAGE SHOWED UP on Ahmed Mansoor’s phone
at 9:38 on a sweltering August morning in 2016. “New secrets
about torture of Emiratis in state prisons,” it read, some-
what cryptically, in Arabic. A hyperlink followed the words.
Something about the number and the message, and a similar
one he received the next day, seemed off to Mansoor, a well-
known human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates.
He resisted the impulse to click on the links.
Instead, Mansoor sent the notes to Citizen Lab, a research
institute based at the University of Toronto specializing in
human rights and internet security. Working backward,
researchers there identified the hyperlinks as part of a sophis-
ticated spyware program built specifically to target Mansoor.
Had he clicked on the links, the program would have turned
his phone into a “digital spy in his pocket,” Citizen Lab later
wrote in a report—tracking his movements, monitoring his
messages, and taking control of his camera and microphone.
But the big revelation in the report wasn’t so much the tech-
nology itself; intelligence agencies in advanced countries have
developed and deployed spyware around the world. What stood
out was that Citizen Lab had traced the program to a private

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 61

firm: the mysterious Israeli NSO Group.
(The name is formed from the first ini-
tials of the company’s three founders.)
Somehow, this relatively small company
had managed to find a vulnerability in
iPhones, considered to be among the
world’s most secure cellular devices, and
had developed a program to exploit it—a
hugely expensive and time-consum-
ing process. “We are not aware of any
previous instance of an iPhone remote
jailbreak used in the wild as part of a tar-
geted attack campaign,” the Citizen Lab
researchers wrote in their report.
Israel is a world leader in private
cybertechnology, with at least 300 firms
covering everything from banking secu-
rity to critical infrastructure defense.
But while most of these firms aim to
protect companies from cyberattacks,
a few of them have taken advantage of
the thin line between defensive and
offensive cybercapabilities to provide
o
clients with more sinister services. In
the case of Mansoor, the UAE is believed
o
to have deployed NSO tools to conduct
s
surveillance on the country’s most
a
famous dissident. (He is now serving
a 10-year prison sentence for publish-
M
ing “false information” on his social
media accounts.) “[T]hese companies
apply techniques as sophisticated, or
perhaps sometimes more sophisticated,
than U.S. intelligence agencies,” Sasha
Romanosky, a policy researcher at the
Rand Corp., wrote last year.
The privatization of this offensive
capability is still in its infancy. But it
raises broad concerns about the pro-
liferation of some very powerful tools
and the way governments are losing the
monopoly over their use. (For another
perspective on the privatization of
cybersecurity, read Tarah Wheeler’s
story on Page 34.) When state actors
employ cyberweapons, there is at least
the prospect of regulation and account-
ability. But when private companies
are involved, things get more compli-
cated. Israel offers a good test case.
It produces a steady supply of highly
skilled cyberoperators who learn the
62 FALL 2018
craft during their military service in
one of the country’s elite signals intel-
ligence units—Unit 8200 is the best
known among them—and then go on to
work in the private sector. Nadav Zafrir,
a retired brigadier general and former
commander of Unit 8200, said even sol-
diers who spend their service defending
Israel from cyberattacks end up know-
ing something about how to attack the
other side. “In order to mitigate the gap
between defense and offense, you have
to have an attacker’s mindset,” he said.
THE MANSOOR CASE was not an isolated
one. Up to 175 people have been tar-
T
geted by the NSO Group’s spyware since
li
2016, according to Citizen Lab, including
human rights workers and dissidents.
A
Other Israeli firms offer similar prod-
ucts. “There’s no way around it: In order
d
to provide network defense, you need to
map vulnerabilities,” said Nimrod Koz-
lovski, an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv
University and a lawyer specializing in
cybersecurity. “It’s built from [Israel’s]
deep knowledge of these weaknesses
and attack methods. We’re deeply famil-
iar with what targets look like.”
Take the most famous of these
alleged targets: Iran’s uranium enrich-
ment facility at Natanz, where Unit
8200, in collaboration with the U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA), report-
edly carried out an attack in 2009-2010.
They were apparently able to introduce
a computer virus—called Stuxnet—into
the facility despite it having an air gap
in place, meaning that the facility was
physically disconnected from the wider
internet. The virus targeted the operat-
ing system for Natanz’s uranium centri-
fuges, causing them to speed up wildly
and break; the monitoring system was
also apparently hacked so that the dam-
age, when it happened, initially went
unnoticed by the Iranians.
It’s probably no coincidence that
many Israeli cyberdefense firms mar-
ket products aimed at forestalling
Stuxnet-style attacks on critical infra-
WHEN STATE
ACTORS EMPLOY
CYBERWEAPONS,
THERE IS AT LEAST
THE PROSPECT OF
REGULATION AND
ACCOUNTABILITY. BUT
WHEN PRIVATE
COMPANIES ARE
m
i
INVOLVED, THINGS GET
h
MORE COMPLICATED.
a
h
structure. These firms include Aperio
Systems, which is headed by a former
intelligence officer named Liran Tanc-
man. Aperio, in fact, has a product that
detects data manipulation—a “truth
machine,” as Tancman puts it—in sen-
sor readings at industrial plants.
Stuxnet is name-checked repeatedly
by experts in the field and with good
reason: It was a highly successful
cyberattack against a state actor that
caused real physical damage. Yet
Stuxnet may already be outdated as
an analytical touchstone. As Gabriel
Avner, an Israel-based digital security
consultant, said, “A decade in tech is
an eternity.” These days, the attack
surface is growing, said Zafrir, the
former Unit 8200 commander who now
runs Team8, a combination venture
capital fund, incubator, and ideas lab.
The development that worries him and
other experts most is the proliferation
of the internet of things.
“Everything is becoming a com-
puter—your phone, your fridge, your
microwave, your car,” said Bruce
Schneier, an expert on cyber-related
issues at Harvard University. The
problem is that the internet, which
came of age in the 1970s and 1980s,
was never designed with security in
mind. So everyone is now scrambling
to play catch-up, patching holes in
both information systems (e.g., soft-
ware programs) and operating systems
(e.g., physical industrial plants) that
are outdated, poorly written, or sim-
ply insecure. “Attacks always get faster,
easier, and better,” added Schneier, the
author of Click Here to Kill Everybody:
Security and Survival in a Hyper-con-
nected World.
Does this mean we’re all doomed?
The short answer is no—at least,
probably not. Thus far, apart from
Stuxnet, the most successful reported
instances of a cyberattack causing
widespread physical damage have
taken place in Ukraine and Estonia.
Although these attacks—against power
grids, financial institutions, and gov-
ernment ministries—caused real harm,
they were nevertheless identified and
o
rectified relatively quickly. None of
the doomsday scenarios that experts
o
and pundits like to warn about—such
s
as hackers seizing control of a nuclear
a
weapon or a commercial airliner or mal-
ware causing Wall Street to collapse—
M
has materialized.
Part of the explanation is that
“state-sponsored hackers will always
have more resources,” Tancman said.
“The question is how far ahead of the
[nonstate actors] you’re running. A
‘cyber-nuke weapon’ today won’t be
relevant in a year or two. The issue is the
pace of development between attackers
and defenders. Always keep running.”
IF PART OF THE DANGER comes from the
blurriness of the line that separates
cyberdefense and cyberoffense, another
part comes from the almost nonexis-
tent distinction between the private
and public spheres online.
In July, for example, Israeli authori-
ties announced multiple indictments
against a former employee of NSO Group,
alleging that he had stolen sensitive pro-
prietary code on his way out of the firm.
But the unnamed employee was also
charged with attempting to undermine
national security: He had apparently
tried to sell the information for $50 mil-
lion in cryptocurrency to a foreign buyer
on the darknet, the vast anonymous hin-
T
terland of the internet inaccessible by
li
regular search engines.
This incident, quickly detected by
A
the firm, is just one case among many
that shows how intimately the pri-
d
vate and public spheres are linked in
cyberwarfare. Capabilities that were
once the sole province of governments
frequently find their way into private—
often criminal—hands.
The Stuxnet virus code is now pub-
licly available. In 2013, a cyberweapon
developed by the NSA that exploited
vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows
was stolen by hackers—possibly Rus-
sian—and posted online; in May 2017,
other hackers—possibly North Korean—
then used the tool to launch a worldwide
ransomware attack. The attack, called
WannaCry, is believed to have infected
200,000 computers in more than 150
countries, including major parts of the
British National Health Service, before
it was rolled back. In a separate 2013
case, Mandiant, a private U.S. cyberse-
curity firm, proved that hackers affiliated
with the Chinese military were target-
ing U.S. corporations and government
agencies. And in 2015, Unit 8200 report-
edly hacked into Kaspersky Lab, a global
leader in anti-virus software, and dis-
covered that the private company had
been acting as a back door for Russian
intelligence into its clients, including
two dozen U.S. government agencies.
“In the physical world of warfare,
what is public has always been clear:
tanks, Iron Dome [missile defense sys-
tems], F-16s,” said Rami Ben Efraim,
a retired Israeli brigadier general and
the founder of BlueOcean Technolo-
gies, an offensive cybersecurity firm. “In
cyber today, it’s complicated.” Critical
infrastructure, such as power utilities
or water treatment plants, may be pri-
vately owned, as is often the case in the
m
United States, but would cause national
i
damage if its systems crashed. Mobiliza-
h
tion messages for Israeli reserve forces
in wartime go through privately held
a
telecom networks. And the internet of
h
things—which has connected so many
of our consumer products—has also cre-
ated massive vulnerabilities.
“If you want to take down a plane, if
you want to ground air power, you don’t
go through the front door, the cockpit,”
said Ben Efraim, a former fighter pilot.
“You go after the airport. … You go after
the logistics systems. You go after the
iPads the pilots take home.” There are
no “stand-alone entities anymore—
everything is part of a network,” Ben
Efraim added. As Lithuania’s vice min-
ister of defense, Edvinas Kerza, told me
last fall in the capital of Vilnius, alluding
to Russia’s actions against other former
Soviet states: “The attacks come from
within—banks down, government not
responsive, general instability. … ‘It’s
fine to set up a border,’ they say. ‘We’ll
come from the inside.’”
Israel, for one, has chosen to com-
bat the problem on a statewide level by
linking the public and private spheres,
sometimes literally. The country’s
cyberhub in the southern city of Beer-
sheba is home not just to the Israeli
military’s new technology campus but
also to a high-tech corporate park, Ben-
Gurion University of the Negev’s cyber-
research center, and the Israel National
Cyber Directorate, which reports
directly to the prime minister’s office.
“There’s a bridge between them—phys-
ically,” Avner, the security consultant,
said by way of emphasis.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 63
 In a world where Israel’s vaunted
internal security agency, the Shin Bet,
recently launched a private start-up
accelerator, such private-public collab-
oration will only grow. Indeed, it must
if it is to keep up with rapid develop-
ments in areas such as artificial intel-
ligence, machine learning, and other
breakthroughs in computational power.
Cyberwar has not only blurred the
lines between offense and defense; it
has also blurred the notion of sover-
eign property when it comes to tech-
nological development—namely what,
exactly, constitutes an Israeli (or U.S. or
Chinese) company. The internet has
eclipsed borders, and cyberwarfare is no
exception. As Harvard’s Schneier put it,
the “chips are made in X, assembled in
o
Y, and the software is written all over the
world by 125 different nationals.” Such
o
fluidity is especially common in Israel,
s
where deep-pocketed foreign firms have
a
established research and development
outposts and bought up local start-ups.
M
While the international nature of com-
puter technology confers many bene-
fits, it also makes it hard to ascertain
the origin of a cyberattack. That lack of
attribution then makes it harder for gov-
ernments to respond, and the lack of a
threat of reprisal makes deterrence dif-
ficult, if not impossible. “That is why
cyberweapons have emerged as such
effective tools for states of all sizes: a way
to disrupt and exercise power or influ-
ence without starting a shooting war,”
David Sanger wrote in a New York Times
article adapted from his book The Per-
fect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in
the Cyber Age.
While the private sector may be able
to pay its people more, drawing talent—
and technological prowess—away from
public service, the government still holds
one trump card: the law. Which brings us
back to the NSO Group and Mansoor, the
Emirati dissident. In order to legally sell
64 FALL 2018
the offensive cyberweapon used to target
him, NSO would have needed permission
from Israel’s weapons export regulator,
which sits in the Defense Ministry. In this
way at least, cyberweapons are as tightly
regulated as other weapons systems sold
by the Israelis to foreign governments.
And the clients are solely governments.
“Selling such systems to nongovern-
ments, like a company or oligarch, is
completely illegal,” said Yuval Sasson, a
partner specializing in defense exports at
Meitar, one of Israel’s leading law firms.
T
“Just like with a drone or assault rifle, the
li
regulator looks at the end user: the iden-
tity of the government and what it does.
A
Functionality is a central test.” In the
case of the UAE and Mansoor, some offi-
d
cials within the regulator’s office coun-
seled against selling such a system to an
Arab state, according to the Israeli daily
Yedioth Ahronoth. It reported that the
cyberweapon the regulators ultimately
approved was weaker than the one pro-
posed by NSO and said some officials
in the Defense Ministry opposed the
deal because the technology was being
sold to an Arab country. “It’s a scandal
that they gave a permit like this,” the
newspaper quoted a senior official at
the ministry as saying.
NSO, for its part, said in a statement
that it complies with all relevant laws and
that it “does not operate the software for
its clients, it just develops it.” That is a
disingenuous distinction, perhaps, but
it offers another example of the offense-
defense and private-public conundrums:
The same private cybertools deployed
against perceived enemies of the state,
such as journalists and dissidents, can
be, and are, used to interdict narcos and
terrorists as well. Indeed, in 2016 the FBI
hired a separate Israeli firm, Cellebrite,
to break into the iPhone of one of the
terrorists involved in the 2015 San Ber-
nardino, California, attack with a dif-
ferent cybertool (after Apple refused).
Cellebrite reportedly sells its products
in more than 100 countries.
While some critics blame Israel for
rogue behavior, the country is no out-
lier; there are few saints in the global
weapons trade, even among Western
democracies. It is in the interest of
m
Israeli firms to comply with the law,
i
avoid abuses, and prevent technology
h
from falling into the wrong hands. As
Avner put it, “There’s a lot of money to
a
be made, and they can do it legally. Why
h
be in the shadows?”
The upshot is that NSO wasn’t oper-
ating in the shadows. The Israeli gov-
ernment approved the sale by a private
company of an advanced cyberweapon
to an Arab government with which it has
intelligence and security exchanges. That
decision was symbolic of how technol-
ogy, warfare, and politics have changed
dramatically in just a few short years.
Espionage, information operations, and
military attacks have been with us for-
ever; so have private actors selling weap-
ons all around the world (including, in
recent decades, many former Israeli mili-
tary personnel). The difference now is the
reach and speed of these new cybertools
and their easy proliferation. A “cyberarms
race of historic but hidden proportions
has taken off,” according to Sanger—and
the race is global. The potential downside
is obvious: an arms race with no rules or
norms and with no clear front lines. But
there is no going back.
“We need to be humble. We’re only
starting to understand it,” Ben Efraim
said. “But it’s a real revolution. A hun-
dred years ago, there was no air element
to warfare. Now it’s a critical component
of any military.”
“Cyber is bigger than even that,” he
said. “Today, you open your eyes in the
morning—you’re in it.” Q
NERI ZILBER (@NeriZilber) is a journalist
based in Tel Aviv.
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The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies is Boston University’s newest school.
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MA in Comparative and Regional Studies; MS in Development Management; MA in Ethics, Peace, and admissions
Human Rights; MA in Global Environmental Policy; MA in Global Governance, Politics, and Security;
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 h im
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The “Founding Fathers” exhibit
highlights key architects of
European integration.

Night at EVEN BEFORE U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP LANDED in Brussels in

mid-July to trash-talk NATO allies, it was clear that the Euro-

the Museum pean Union was in crisis. In Germany, a weakened Angela

Merkel was forced to either tighten migration policy or lose her

Brussels’s new coalition (she chose the former); in Italy, Matteo Salvini, the
DOMINIQUE HOMMEL/EUROPEAN UNION 2018  EP

leader of the ascendant right-wing Lega party, railed against

European history his country remaining in the eurozone; Hungary and Poland

museum could put were continuing their creep toward authoritarian rule; and
Britain was struggling to figure out Brexit. The opening in
anyone to sleep. May 2017 of a new museum in Brussels devoted to promot-

By Katherine ing Europe might have served to bolster the flagging union.
Yet all it has managed to do is generate more controversy.
Marsh The House of European History, which was created by
the European Parliament, was roundly criticized even

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 77
before its doors opened for just about
everything: The Platform of European
Memory and Conscience, a multina-
tional nongovernmental organization
that raises awareness about totalitar-
ianism in 20th-century Europe, said
the museum was too soft on commu-
nism; Piotr Glinski, the Polish minis-
ter of culture and national heritage,
accused it of presenting Poland, France,
and Ukraine as “complicit in the Holo-
caust”; Ukrainian scholars complained
that curators failed to use the term
“Holodomor” for the Ukrainian famine;
British tabloids slammed both its price
tag, some $60 million, and the designers’
choice to highlight a Norwegian paper
clip design but not the discovery of pen-
icillin by a Scottish researcher. Branding
it a “museum of dumbed-down ideol-
ogy,” the Polish historian Andrzej Nowak
said it was so boring that it appeared
to put visiting schoolchildren to sleep.
o
I visited the museum in May to see
whether such criticism had merit. I dis-
o
covered that in its attempt to be, as its
s
founding charter describes it, a “place
a
in which the European idea comes
alive,” the museum almost entirely
M
ignores what actually breathes life into
that idea: Europeans themselves. In its
desperation to appear inclusive and
sidestep historical controversies, the
House of European History veers away
from the individual stories and emo-
tional urgency on which continued
European unity depends.
Liveliness may have been sacrificed
the moment the European Parliament
chose a former dental institute to house
the museum. The interior still had the
sterile, institutional aesthetic of a place
you would go for a painful but neces-
sary procedure. The moment I cleared
the metal detector, a staff member ush-
ered me upstairs, where I was handed
my very own tablet and earpiece. The
museum has made much of its state-
of-the-art teaching tool, which allows
visitors to choose from among 24 lan-
guages in which to learn about Europe’s
common identity. But the tablet’s com-
78 FALL 2018
plicated introduction to its own use—
which ran a whopping three minutes
and 32 seconds—seemed likely to only
unify museumgoers in impatience.
I emerged from the sleek glass eleva-
tor to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, which has been adopted
as the European anthem. The compli-
cated tablet was now my only guide
since, in the name of linguistic equal-
ity, there was barely any signage. One
of the first sections of the permanent
exhibition focused on the French Rev-
olution. According to the tablet, after
1789, “some visionary Europeans hoped
for the unity of the continent beyond
national allegiances.” The curators’
T
ideological bent was clear: to emphasize
li
the historical struggle between nation-
alism, with its militaristic and authori-
A
tarian impulses, and continental unity,
which is peaceful and democratic.
d
The museum sets the wars of the 20th
century neatly into this framework: It
puts a heavy load of blame for World
War I, for example, on Slavic nation-
alism. (For extra emphasis, the pistol
used by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo
Princip to assassinate Archduke Franz
Ferdinand of Austria is given a place of
prominence in its own glass case.) The
aggression of the great powers and their
alliances are downplayed.
The museum’s handling of World War
II has come under particular condem-
nation. British critics have complained
that this section of the museum min-
imizes the role of Winston Churchill
and other Brits and that the U.S. role in
the war is hardly mentioned. But since
Anglo-Americans so often take credit
for winning the war while disregard-
ing the immense suffering and sacrifice
that took place in occupied countries
and on the Eastern Front, this twist
seemed refreshing. Polish critics for
their part have claimed that Germans
are presented “without indicating their
role as aggressors and perpetrators.”
This charge seemed unfounded; care-
fully placed footage of Nazi propaganda
rallies left no illusions about fault. But
the museum does present World War II
as a battle between two authoritarian
regimes, Stalinism and Nazism, rather
than as a German war of aggression.
Throughout the exhibit, the plights of
victims were largely missing. The mish-
mash of objects in the cases offered only
glimpses of human suffering—a pair of
woven shoes caked with mud, a few Star
of David patches—but there was nary
a personality or individual narrative to
m
engage with. Ideology, again and again,
i
trumped humanism. While it’s tempt-
h
ing to interpret this oversight as Ger-
man revisionism (especially since the
a
museum was the brainchild of Hans-
h
Gert Pöttering, a German politician),
it seems more likely that the cura-
tors were simply keen to highlight the
evils of nationalism and totalitarianism
without riling Europeans up over who
exactly did what to whom. Still, there’s
something wrong when Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Stalin come off as the most com-
pelling characters in the room.
The postwar period, which continued
on the next floor, offered the European
version of the politics of personality in
the form of a collection of busts of the
EU’s founding fathers. But the museum’s
failure to portray the human horrors of
World War II made the founding of the
European Union seem more like a con-
venient economic and diplomatic devel-
opment rather than a radical attempt to
avoid a repeat disaster for future gen-
erations. Below each bust appeared
an object meant to bring the found-
ing father to life. Yet it was hard to get
excited about the wine jug that appre-
ciative vintners gave to former Luxem-
bourg Prime Minister Joseph Bech, an
architect of European unity, in 1953.
More compelling was the section
devoted to the rise of Europe’s welfare
state. When I reached this point, I had
been following a group of young Ger-
mans who alternated between tapping
their tablets and wandering around
glassy-eyed, but they suddenly grew
animated when they encountered the
Zastava 750 parked in this exhibit.

The old Yugoslav supermini had been
retrofitted as a one-car exhibit on Euro-
pean prosperity; you could even sit
inside and watch color footage of the
type of winding mountain road James
Bond always seems to drive along (with
a gorgeous continental woman). This
o
exhibit was supposed to be one of the
few interactive ones in the museum,
o
but the tablet docking station that was
s
presumably intended to unlock some
a
new activity wasn’t working.
The fact that the designers gave a
M
Yugoslav car the honor of demonstrating
the great European vacation suggests
that critics might have a point about the
museum going soft on communism. But
it’s also possible that naysayers never
made it to the next floor, which detailed
the democratic uprisings that led to the
fall of communist regimes in Eastern
Europe and the collapse of the Berlin
Wall. By this point, I, too, was eager to
reach contemporary Europe. This sec-
tion included an exhibit on EU institu-
tions that someone probably conceived
of as interactive because it involved a
DOMINIQUE HOMMEL/EUROPEAN UNION 2018  EP
wall studded with giant slide-out pegs
displaying civics textbook-style expla-
nations of what each of the institutions
did. (A couple, fittingly, got stuck half-
way and needed a good yank.)
But like the midcentury rooms before
it, modern Europe was haphazard in its
curation: It included a collection of EU
license plates, a Rem Koolhaas instal-
A Yugoslav Zastava
750, a supermini-turned
interactive exhibit.
lation involving 80,000 pages of EU
T
law, and a short film on the European
li
Union. Ever diplomatic, the film’s nar-
rator noted some of the union’s chal-
A
lenges, with a glancing conversation of
border policy and the 2008 debt crisis,
d
but offered up immediate rejoinders to
its own discussion: Who can worry about
such concerns when enjoying the bene-
fits of free-roaming mobile phone con-
tracts, cheap flights, and inexpensive
Polish plumbers? (The museum didn’t
make this last point explicitly, but it did
highlight the free movement of labor.)
In the museum’s everything-but-the-
kitchen-sink style, it even gave cursory
acknowledgment to Brexit and the ongo-
ing European refugee crisis.
By this time, I’d given up on my tablet
out of sheer weariness, and I wasn’t the
only one. For a museum whose stated
purpose is, in the words of European
Parliament President Antonio Tajani,
to “become a place of debate,” forc-
ing visitors to stare at a screen seems
counterproductive. This problem must
have occurred to someone else besides
me because the sixth and final floor of
the exhibition was mostly empty space
devoted to eliciting visitors’ opinions.
Museumgoers were encouraged to write
their thoughts on European identity and
values on a piece of paper and to tape
their answers to a wall. This turned out
to be the most effective and affecting
part of the entire museum. The mes-
sages were far from united, in both lan-
guage and sentiment, but they hinted at
real lives shaped by Europe’s policies.
“I am a Syrian refugee, but I love Bel-
gium,” read one in French.
“Europe is failing miserably with
respect to immigration. … Greece and
Italy have been bearing the grunt [sic]
of it and its [sic] leading to dangerous
sentiment,” read another in English.
The House of European History was
m
most engaging when it allowed indi-
i
vidual voices to define Europe and
h
its many tensions of identity, instead
of using technology and pedagogy to
a
blend away difference in the interest
h
of uncomplicated unity. But I under-
stood the challenge that proponents of
the European Union are facing. Nativ-
ism and nationalism pack emotional
power that trans-European unity can
hardly compete with, even in the face
of socio-economic self-interest.
But of course, part of the problem with
the House of European History is that
what truly unites 21st-century Europe-
ans isn’t particularly sexy or even all
that dramatic; it’s a firm belief in a social
security net, in a good work-life balance,
in regular vacations in your plucky lit-
tle car. It’s not the politics of personal-
ity but the dry wheels of bureaucracy
that make a secure life, free from the
violence and horror of war, possible.
The European Parliament might have
done better investing the $60 million
in a restaurant like Kokuban, which sits
across the street from the museum on
Jean Rey Square. There, on a warm May
afternoon, was a more compelling dis-
play of European unity than any of the
exhibits on the other side of the road.
People sat chatting in more than a dozen
languages, eating Japanese food, and,
because it’s still Europe after all, smok-
ing—all in companionable peace. Q
KATHERINE MARSH (@MarshKatherine),
a former resident of Brussels, is the
author of Nowhere Boy, a young adult
novel set in Europe during the refugee
crisis. 
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 79
 Germany’s Return of the Repressed
The country’s far-right wants to revive
ethnic nationalism. The left must come
up with its own alternative.
By Yascha Mounk
T h
A li
WHEN I ARRIVED AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY in the early 2000s,
students from different parts of Europe flocked to national
d
clubs for a taste of home and an opportunity to speak their
o
native tongues. Most of the events these clubs organized
took the form of benign clichés: The Italian Society hosted
o
pasta nights, and the French Society served up artsy mov-
s
ies with a side of wine and cheese. Only one nationality was
a
conspicuously absent. Instead of founding their own club,
students who, like me, had grown up in Germany flocked to
M
the European Union Society.
The European Union Society was not an exclusively
German affair. It included a few students from countries
too small to sustain their own social life at the university,
as well as the odd Brit or Spaniard who aspired to a career
in Brussels. But no matter how hard we pretended, it was
clear to all that this was a German Society dressed up in the
colors of the EU flag. “I guess it’s a little strange that nearly
all of the officers of the club are German,” an acquaintance of
mine once said. “But things are just so much more efficient
that way.”
My experience with the European Union Society offers a
glimpse into a sensibility of which few outside Germany are
fully conscious: the dogged determination of many Germans
to distance themselves from overtly patriotic sentiment. In
the wake of World War II, Germany’s elites associated any
form of nationalism with the Nazis. As they worked to create
a new identity for their country, they consistently abjured
most displays of patriotism.
These same elites have now been caught off guard by the
recent resurgence of more sinister expressions of German
nationalism. Last year, the far-right Alternative for Germany
(known by its German acronym, AfD) established itself as
80 FALL 2018
m
i
a h
a major player in the political system,
entering the Bundestag, Germany’s par-
liament, and taking second place in sev-
eral polls. A big source of the party’s
appeal lies in its adamant opposition
to the way the country memorializes
the Holocaust and avoids aggressive
displays of Vaterlandsliebe, or national-
ism. As the AfD urges in one of its most
popular slogans, Germans should finally
find Mut zu Deutschland—roughly, “the
courage to stand by Germany.”
S ome G erman thinker s have
responded by simply digging in their
heels: The party’s rise, they argue, offers
yet more evidence that nationalism is
but a gateway drug to extremism. Other
thinkers, meanwhile, have responded
to the changes of the past years by tak-
ing on a new role as the intellectual face
of far-right ethnonationalism. Writers
such as Botho Strauss and Peter Sloter-
dijk now openly flirt with the irreden-
tist thought that has always festered on
the margins of German intellectual life.
Summing up the country’s increas-
ingly polarized debate about patriotism
in a recent book—which amounts to an
extended, though lively, literary essay—
the German novelist Thea Dorn offers
a pithy description of the two domi-
nant camps:
Illustrations by KOTRYNA ZUKAUSKAITE

o o
a s
“From the depths, dim voices call
M
us to battle: ‘Take back our people and
country,’ they exhort. From the heights,
a choir drunk on worries instructs us
to stay away from the people and the
country so that all humans can finally
become brothers—and sisters, of
course.”
The aim of Deutsch, nicht dumpf
(Knaus Verlag, 336 pp., $27.85)—in
English, “German, Not Dim”—is to
provide a third option. Germans, Dorn
argues, can embrace a robust form of
patriotism without running the risk of
emboldening the far-right. In fact, doing
so might just be the country’s best hope
to defang the growing appeal of extrem-
ism. Even as Germans should continue
to reject the first verse of their national
anthem, which places the fatherland
“above all else” and has forever become
associated with the Nazis, they should
proudly intone its third one (as Dorn
herself does at the book’s end):
li T
d A
Unity and rights and freedom
for the German fatherland.
Let us strive for it together,
brotherly with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
are the basis of good fortune.
Flower in the light of this good
fortune,
flower German fatherland.
DEBATES ABOUT NATIONALISM can help-
fully be split into two parallel questions.
The most obvious concerns the extent
to which nationalism is desirable in a
modern liberal democracy. The other—
equally important but frequently over-
looked—concerns nationalism’s object:
If it is just fine to be proud to be German,
as Dorn argues, what exactly is it that
Germans should be proud of?
Germany’s far-right offers a decep-
tively simple answer: According to the
AfD and its fellow travelers, a true Ger-
h im
h a
man is somebody descended from a
particular Volk, or people, and German
nationalists should primarily care about
the well-being of their extended kinship
group. The problem with this approach
is twofold. First, it is unclear why one
should have a greater allegiance to a
specific set of people just because they
are descended from the same ethnic
stock. Second, it is unclear how ethnic
nationalism can be reconciled with a
lived reality in which immigrants and
minorities play a very large role, in the
absence of much more drastic actions
than those for which far-right populists
openly advocate. If a true German must
be descended from a particular ethnic
stock, immigrants will either have to be
thrown out of the country or relegated
to the status of second-class citizens.
Deeply aware of the pitfalls of ethnic
nationalism, those German leftists who
concede the need for patriotism at all
usually offer a diametrically opposed
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 81
account of its currency. According to the
public intellectual Jürgen Habermas,
for example, Germans should embrace
a form of constitutional patriotism—
instead of attaching significance to a
morally neutral fact such as ethnicity,
he argues, true patriots should celebrate
the laws and norms that bind them into
a shared, liberal polity.
While that notion may be much more
appealing on theoretical grounds, it
suffers from two shortcomings that
render it impractical. First, the consti-
tutions and norms of modern liberal
states don’t differ from each other suf-
ficiently to provide a basis for the kind
of attachment that underwrites patri-
otism. Second, most citizens know far
too little about their specific constitu-
tions for them to serve as the objects of
It’s the combination of cultural
o
ingredients, some high and some
o
s
low, some silly and some magnificent,
a
that marks the difference between
M
New York and Los Angeles—or that
between France and Germany.
popular devotion. Constitutional patrio-
tism might offer a neat way for political
philosophers to reconcile their concerns
about the dark side of nationalism with
their surreptitious love for their native
lands. But it is unlikely to hold its own
in an all-out political battle with the
ethnonationalism of the right.
Dorn enters this debate by charting a
new path that circumnavigates the exist-
ing camps. Rather than taking the object
of patriotism to be either something as
immutable as ethnicity or something
as abstract as the Grundgesetz—Ger-
many’s constitution—she focuses her
attention on culture, both high and low.
What defines Germany, she argues, are
both the great cultural treasures of the
82 FALL 2018
past and the mundane habits of the pres-
ent day. Her patriotism, she avows, is
animated both by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, the country’s most famous poet,
and by Fack ju Göhte, a popular—and
rather lowbrow—comic movie trilogy
set at a high school.
As Dorn chronicles, many leftists
in the country argue that it would be
impossible to build a healthy patrio-
tism around pride in German culture
because there’s nothing essentially dis-
tinct about it: While educated Germans,
for example, like to define themselves as
a Volk der Dichter und Denker—a people
of poets and thinkers—the French have
also produced their fair share of writers
T
and philosophers. But this, she points
li
out, is too demanding a conception of
what makes cultures distinct:
A
d
“Nothing is more foreign to me than
wanting to separate different cultures
from each other with walls. I’m just
trying to show that we can meaning-
fully identify them even if we cannot
hermetically seal them. Despite their
porousness and plasticity, they are not
arbitrary.”
As former British Prime Minister
John Major found out when he waxed
poetic about “warm beer” and “invinci-
ble green suburbs,” anybody who seeks
to define a culture by drawing attention
to specific objects is liable to be mocked.
But while it will always sound absurd to
define France by the baguette (or New
York by the bagel), Dorn is right that
the totality of a city’s or a nation’s cul-
ture nevertheless adds up to something
meaningful: It’s the combination of cul-
tural ingredients, some high and some
low, some silly and some magnificent,
that marks the difference between New
York and Los Angeles—or that between
France and Germany.
EVEN IF ALL HER COMPATRIOTS followed
Dorn’s lead in investing their patriotic
m
energy into an open-minded interpre-
i
tation of German culture, an important
h
set of questions would remain: To what
degree would true belonging in German
a
society depend on active participation
h
in this culture? And what should hap-
pen to people who don’t embrace it?
As Dorn mentions, Germany’s
attempts to foster this debate have
mostly been fruitless, in part because
its stakes have never been clear. Would
what Germans have come to call a Leit-
kultur, or guiding culture, require immi-
grants to adhere to the basic rules of
society—in which case it is a mislead-
ingly controversial way to put a rather
obvious point? Or would it ask immi-
grants to listen to Bach rather than
Jay-Z and eat schnitzel rather than
döner kebab—in which case it is a
misleadingly anodyne way to describe
a very far-reaching call for cultural
homogeneity?
To answer these questions, Dorn care-
fully distinguishes among three differ-
ent issues that might be in question.
First, she argues that the state should
obviously take all necessary measures
to ensure that people who live within its
territory respect its basic laws, includ-
ing ones protecting the practices of sex-
ual, religious, and ethnic minorities.
Second, she argues that individual cit-
izens should be free to decide on their
own what food they cook or what music
they listen to, without those choices
having any bearing on which nation
they can be said to belong to. And third,
she acknowledges that there is a lot at
stake for every society, and certainly for
Germany, in what sort of consensus is

reached about the vast cultural space
between statutory law and citizens’ din-
ner tables: things such as being willing
o
to shake a compatriot’s hand or accept-
ing a child’s sexual orientation.
o
While Dorn recognizes that it would
s
be wrong for the state to enforce those
a
latter kinds of norms, she believes that
it is entirely appropriate for civil soci-
M
ety to create strong incentives for com-
pliance with them. While Germany
should reject the idea of a guiding cul-
ture, ordinary citizens should not hes-
itate to insist in their daily interactions
on this more universal set of norms,
which she dubs a Leitzivilität, or guid-
ing civilization.
Dorn’s prose has an unfortunate ten-
dency to meander. She seems to feel
the need to cite, often at great length,
every thinker who has previously writ-
ten something about a related topic, and
her book features frustratingly frequent
passages in which she baits the very
members of the cultural left she most
needs to convince for her mission to
succeed. Yet the basic argument of her
book is convincing.
As I’ve previously argued in my own
book The People vs. Democracy, the right
way to domesticate nationalism is not
to fight it root and branch but rather
T
li
A
to put its energy to more inclusive use.
To accomplish this fiendishly difficult
d
task, we need to assure citizens of all
backgrounds—native as well as immi-
grant, majority as well as minority—that
they can continue to indulge in the cul-
tural practices that are closest to their
hearts. And to manage the conflicts that
will inevitably arise without descend-
ing into civic strife, we need to make it
amply evident that society can punish
those who violate its most basic rules. It
is indeed possible to construct a smart,
inclusive, even cosmopolitan version of
German patriotism. And if that is true of
Germany, it should be true of just about
any other country in the world as well.
IN THE YEARS SINCE I was at Cambridge,
German students have abandoned the
European Union Society, now called
the European Society, en masse. Its cur-
rent committee appears to comprise
an Italian, a Spaniard, a few Dutch
people, and—in what is, no doubt, an
unintended side effect of Brexit—a sur-
prising number of Brits.
Meanwhile, the university now boasts
a thriving German Society, with a pre-
dominantly German steering commit-
tee that presumably runs with great
efficiency. Dorn would, I imagine, be
pleased by its activities. In the past aca-
demic year, it has held serious literary
readings and high-minded political dis-
cussions. But the big event of the year is
an annual Oktoberfest. For about $50 a
head, celebrants get to enjoy a “Jäger-
meister reception” and a variety of
“German specialities directly imported
from Bavaria.” The dress code stipulates
“Lederhosen and Dirndl” are “strongly
m
encouraged.”
i
Learning about this “immensely
h
successful tradition,” as the society
describes it, did, I must admit, fill me
a
with a certain degree of longing for
h
the studiedly anti-patriotic Germany
I grew up with. The tradition in ques-
tion, I noted grumpily, is completely
invented—it didn’t even exist when
I was at Cambridge 15 years ago! But
when I looked at photos from the event,
my resistance rapidly dwindled. Every-
one seemed to be having a good time.
And what could better encapsulate
inclusive patriotism than the Asian and
Middle Eastern students trying to accli-
mate to the traditional German clothes
they had faithfully donned?
Clearly the idea of Germany’s cul-
ture propagated by the students who
run the Cambridge University Ger-
man Society includes a number of cli-
chés—as indeed does Dorn’s defense
of cultural nationalism. But the same is
true of the Italian pasta nights and the
French movie showings I remember so
fondly from my days as an undergradu-
ate. While it will always be easy for intel-
lectuals to gripe about nationalism, it
would be silly either to embrace or to
condemn all forms of it on theoretical
grounds. Instead of trying to vanquish
nationalism altogether, those of us who
believe in a liberal, multiethnic democ-
racy would do well to shape its nature
as best we can. Q
YASCHA MOUNK (@Yascha_Mounk) is the
author of The People vs. Democracy:
Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and
How to Save It.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 83
BOOKS IN BRIEF

m
World War II at Sea:

i
A Global History

h
CRAIG L. SYMONDS, the preeminent U.S. naval histo-

a
rian, usually writes excruciatingly tight. He dubbed

h
two of his recent works a “concise history” and a

T
“very short introduction” to the U.S. Navy. Both

li
could be read in an afternoon. That fact makes his
latest book, World War II at Sea, a sprawling—but

A
very worthwhile—departure.
Symonds, who taught at the U.S. Naval Acad-

d
emy and currently teaches at the U.S. Naval War

o
College, set out to fill a gap in the literature by
charting the entire maritime course of history’s

o
greatest conflict. Plenty of door-stopping naval

s
histories have already been published, such as

a
Samuel Eliot Morison’s 15-volume chronicle of
the U.S. Navy in World War II, and thousands of

M
more narrowly focused naval histories of the same
period have also been written. But until now, no
single volume covered the entire war at sea, in all
theaters, with a focus on every major navy.
That’s just what Symonds provides, with rivet-
ing chapters on German U-boats and pocket battle-
ships, Italian and British duels in the Mediterranean
Sea, Japanese dreams of imperial grandeur, and, of
course, the relentless U.S. naval counteroffensive
across the globe. While plenty of readers will be
familiar with parts of the tale, from the stunning
reversal in Japan’s fortunes at the Battle of Midway
to the endless Allied struggle to find enough ship-
ping to carry on a three-front war, Symonds suc-
ceeds at weaving each part into a coherent whole.
That naval-only focus makes for a history of
World War II that pays only glancing attention to
A destroyer picks up the crew of the USS Yorktown after
the aircraft carrier was damaged by Japanese bombs and
torpedoes during the Battle of Midway in June 1942.
crushing materiel predominance. But victory was
ultimately cobbled together in Allied shipyards,
which turned out unbelievable quantities of aircraft
World War II carriers, submarines, destroyers, supply and cargo
at Sea: A Global
History vessels, and landing craft of all shapes and sizes—
CRAIG L. SYMONDS, thousands of merchant and naval ships in total.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY Those unprecedented armadas, which conducted
PRESS, 792 PP., the biggest naval operations in history, allowed
$34.95, MAY 2018
successive amphibious assaults on Axis positions,
from North Africa to Sicily to Italy to France, plus a
simultaneous thrust across the Pacific all the way to
the Japanese home islands, in just a few short years.
After some early successes, neither Germany nor
CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Germany’s blitzkrieg attacks and the Soviet Union’s
years of heroic defense during the biggest land
war of all time. But such omissions are, in many
ways, precisely Symonds’s point. The Allies won
the war for several reasons: British resilience early
on, Soviet sacrifices throughout, and, of course,
Japan could attempt anything remotely similar.
“[I]t was supremacy at sea,” Symonds concludes,
“that eventually proved decisive.” Q
KEITH JOHNSON (@KFJ_FP) is FOREIGN POLICY’s
global geoeconomics correspondent.

84 FALL 2018
Barons of the Sea: And
Their Race to Build the
World’s Fastest Clipper Ship
FOR A BRIEF MOMENT in the middle of the 19th cen-
tury, U.S. clipper ships were the most revolutionary
machines in the world. Sleek, fast, dangerous to
sail, and expensive to operate, the record-setting
giants were the glorious culmination of thousands
of years of nautical evolution.
These unconventional vessels and their hard-driv-
ing captains transformed Western trade with China,
helped open California during the gold rush, and
made the fortunes of some of America’s mightiest
merchant clans. Then, just as suddenly as they burst
onto history’s stage, steamships, railroads, and the
telegraph elbowed them into obsolescence.
Steven Ujifusa’s Barons of the Sea tells the story
A
of the men who built the clippers, the men who
bought them, and the men (and women) who sailed
d
them in breakneck races around the world.
o
It’s a tale packed with colorful characters, such
as the New England and New York merchants who
o
made a mint selling opium to China and raced for
s
home with their holds stuffed full of valuable tea.
a
At the heart of the narrative is Warren Delano, who
used extreme clippers to make several successive
M
fortunes in China. (His grandson Franklin would
later keep a handmade model of one of the family’s
clippers near his desk in the Oval Office.) Another of
Ujifusa’s heroes is Donald McKay, one of the most
daring ship designers in U.S. history, who churned
out the biggest and fastest sailing ships ever made.
Ujifusa paints on a broad canvas, which is one
of the book’s strengths. From the early days of the
China trade to the dismal ethics of large-scale drug
running and the First Opium War to the technical
challenges shipwrights overcame in building the
extreme clippers, Barons of the Sea is many his-
tories in one. But that wide scope is also one of
the book’s drawbacks: It describes so many trad-
ers and builders and captains and ships that the
narrative veers out of focus at times.
Those are small quibbles, however. Ujifusa has
produced a carefully researched, lovingly writ-
ten tribute to a now-vanished breed of ships and
people, an entertaining chronicle of a few heady
years when vision, speed, and daring helped the
United States begin to establish its leading role on
the world stage.—KJ
Exiled: From the Killing
Fields of Cambodia to
California and Back
THE 1980 REFUGEE ACT ENABLED more than 150,000
Cambodians to escape the killing fields of the
Khmer Rouge and find sanctuary in the United
States. With famine and war ravaging Cambo-
dia, their new home was a place of relative safety.
m
But safety didn’t equal security. Most of the ref-
i
ugees found themselves resettled in impov-
h
erished inner-city neighborhoods across the
country, where they were often surrounded by
a
drugs, gangs, and violence, offering few oppor-
h
tunities for educational or social advancement
T
inside the law. The older generation had little
li
grasp of English, let alone American society, and
Barons of was ill-prepared to help its children navigate a
the Sea: And new world.
Their Race
to Build the In the mid-1990s, U.S. immigration policy
World’s Fastest lurched to the right with the passage of the
Clipper Ship
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
STEVEN UJIFUSA, Responsibility Act, which made deportation
SIMON  SCHUSTER,
possible for a wide range of offenses. Hundreds
448 PP., $29.99,
JULY 2018 of Cambodians who came to the United States
as children were forced to leave under these
increasingly stringent standards. Few of the
deportees had any memory of Cambodia or their
native tongue.
In Exiled, Katya Cengel presents in unsparing
detail the lives of four Cambodian families facing
the deportation of loved ones. At the center of the
story is San, a woman in her 70s, and her daughter
Exiled: From Sithy, who, after being jailed for drug possession,
the Killing Fields
of Cambodia confronts—with a mixture of trepidation, prag-
to California matism, delusion, and humor—the prospect of
and Back being forcibly removed from the American life
KATYA CENGEL, she has made.
POTOMAC BOOKS,
344 PP., $34.95, Cengel’s book focuses entirely on the experi-
SEPTEMBER 2018 ences of the Cambodian-American community,
but it speaks more broadly to the current debate
over the wider immigration crisis. Like Sithy, many
of the migrants from Central America facing depor-
tation from the United States today have little or
no memory of the place to which they are return-
ing. They face a terrifying future, alone, without
a real home or country. Q
MARTIN DE BOURMONT (@MBourmont) is an editorial
fellow at FOREIGN POLICY.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 85
BUSINESS FEATURE

The New
Ukraine

h im
h a
li T
A
Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko meets with U.S. President Donald Trump during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, September 21, 2017.

d
Photo: Oice of the President of Ukraine

o
“Our Main Focus Is the Improvement of

s o
the Investment Climate in Ukraine”

M a
Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko is leading the nation through remarkable political and economic
change, with a focus on attracting investment to unlock the full potential of continental Europe’s largest
country

When Ukrainian President Petro Poros-
henko was elected in 2014, the challenges
that lay ahead were vast. Russia had just
invaded Crimea and pro-Russian groups
were attempting to overtake the region of
Donbass. At the same time, Poroshenko’s
mandate was to not only completely shift
the country’s foreign policy toward the
West but also to save the economy and
transform the post-Soviet state into a
modern liberal democracy.
Four years on, and progress has been re-
markable. hrough a slew of reforms and
strategic alliances with Western nations
and international bodies, Ukraine has
seen both a return to economic growth
and has restored national security.
“When I was elected, any American
or NATO oicer was prohibited even to
enter our Ministry of Defense. Today, we
have the most efective level of coopera-
tion, which can be demonstrated by the
fact that Ukraine’s army is now oicially
among the 30 most eicient in the world,”
said Poroshenko.
On the economic front, legislative
changes have worked to open the coun-
try up to investment, cut red tape, boost
transparency, strengthen the rule of law
and begin a major privatization process.
“Our economy has
prevailed and even
strengthened”
PETRO POROSHENKO, PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE
“Our economy has prevailed and even
strengthened despite the attacks,” said
Poroshenko. In the irst quarter of 2018,
GDP grew by 3.1 percent, the country has
shot up 61 places in the World Bank’s Ease
of Doing Business rankings since 2013,
and international companies like GE,
Bunge and Cargill have begun to make
massive investments in Ukraine.
Underpinning many of Poroshenko’s
economic and political moves lies a deep
conviction in the importance of remov-
ing barriers to international trade. Since
2014, Ukraine has established a Deep
and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with
the EU, signed a free trade agreement
with Canada and is in the inal steps of
negotiating FTAs with Israel and Turkey.
In 2013, Russia’s share of Ukraine’s total
economic turnover was 30 percent, but
today that has dropped down to 9 percent
and the EU now represents 40 percent,
according to the president.
Several further reforms are also
planned for the next year, with a focus
on attracting the investment that both
relects and encourages the country’s
healthy development. “Our main focus
is the improvement of the investment
climate,” explained Poroshenko.

1 UKRAINE
 REFORMS
Belarus
UKRAINE
Romania
Black
Sea
Building the
New Ukraine
With a profusion of reforms
transforming nearly every aspect
of the country, Ukraine is laying
the foundations to become a bea-
con of democracy and economic
prosperity
When Ukraine declared independence
from the Soviet Union in 1991, a wave
of optimism swept much of the na-
tion. However, the transition from the
“old system” into a modern, prosper-
ous nation was slow and incomplete,
dragging down the country’s economic
growth and democratic development.
s
By 2014, the country was fed up,
a
and tens of thousands of people
poured into the Maidan Nezalezhnos-
M
ti, or Independence Square, to protest
the government’s focus on Russia and
general lack of economic progress. he
protests resulted in the appointment
of a new government with a massive
task ahead of it – to reform nearly
every aspect of the country.
“It was a revolution against klep-
tocracy, and it was the revolution of
the middle class. It was for democra-
cy,” said Dmytro Shymkiv, secretary
of the National Reforms Council, who
was inspired to move into govern-
ment from the business community
after the revolution.
So, the new administration began
the herculean task of modernizing
Ukraine. So far, the changes already
made include military, pension and
health care reform, the elimination
of more than 600 business regula-
tions, decentralization and signiicant
19/F. CHINA EVERGRANDE CENTRE,
38 GLOUCESTER ROAD,
WANCHAI, HK
CERVANTES 34,
BAJO EXT DCHA
WWW.THE-REPORT.COM 28014, MADRID, SPAIN
Russia
reforms in the energy and inancial
sectors to attract investment. With
a new law on privatization recently
passed, the country has also begun
to sell of many of its 3,500 state-
T
owned enterprises.
li
A
Ukraine has instituted more
reforms over the last four
d
years than it had since its
independence in 1991
o
o
PETRO POROSHENKO,
PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE
To ight corruption, the court
system has been cleaned up with
new anti-corruption infrastructure
and legislation, and an anti-cor-
ruption court is expected to come
into efect this year. Likewise, an
award-winning digital public pro-
curement system called ProZorro
has been introduced to ensure
transparency, as has an online VAT
refund system that eliminates the
arbitrary arrangement that was
previously the norm.
“Americans can understand how
complicated and diicult this can be
thinking of their own health care
reforms,” said Poroshenko. “I’m
very proud to say that according
to the independent estimations of
organizations like the World Bank
and the IMF, Ukraine has institut-
ed more reforms over the last four
years than it had since its indepen-
dence in 1991.”
PUBLISHING DIRECTOR BARBARA CZARTORYSKA
EDITOR ALYSSA MCMURTRY
WORDS ALYSSA MCMURTRY, JONATHAN MEANY,
ELEANOR WRAGG
COPY EDITOR ALYSSA MCMURTRY
PROJECT MANAGER CARLOS ROBLEDO
GRAPHIC DESIGN JUAN CORTAZAR
PROJECT ASSISTANT CYNTHIA JUMOKE
Sponsored report
interview
VOLODYMYR GROYSMAN,
PRIME MINISTER OF UKRAINE
h im
Elected in 2016, Ukraine’s youngest-ever prime
a
minister is working overtime to deliver the country’s
ambitious reform agenda
h
What are your current priorities?
In 2019, Ukraine will have parliamentary elections
and our number-one priority is to keep up the pace of
our eforts in order to secure accelerated economic
growth, and we must keep moving forward with our
reforms, a prerequisite to continue to receive interna-
tional support. I would like Ukraine to be a reliable and
strong partner for the United States and other demo-
cratic allies. We need to be a country that respects hu-
man rights and one with a fair and just courts system,
and this is exactly the direction we are moving in.
What have been some of the government’s accom-
plishments during these years?
Our agenda was to build up a new Ukrainian state, and
I’m proud to say we have managed to renew stability
and macroeconomic growth. This is a time for firsts –
the first time in history we have had a roads fund; with
our international part-
ners, we have created
“Ukraine will the first energy-eicien-
become one of cy fund; the first fund
the strongest to support startups; the
economies in first agency to support
exports; the first oice
Europe, and of investment support;
those who come and the first council on
to invest here industry development.
first will be the We have also started
most successful” the largest-scale reform
of public service in the
history of Ukraine.
How would you describe Ukraine today?
Ukraine is a modern, 21st-century country with huge
opportunities that haven’t been capitalized on to
their full extent. The opportunities are impressive
compared to other countries on the continent. From
a medium- and long-term perspective, Ukraine will
become one of the strongest economies in Europe,
and those who come to invest here first will be the
most successful.
UKRAINE.THE-REPORT.COM 2
 INVESTMENT AND FINANCE Sponsored report

Q&A
KYRYLO SHEVCHENKO,
A Country Primed
CHAIRMAN OF UKRGASBANK
for Big Investment
Ukraine’s economy is on the rise and ofers a tremendous amount of
unique investment opportunities in sectors ranging from IT to agriculture

INVESTOR’S SNAPSHOT
Doing Business Finance GDP Growth

Ministry of Economic Development and Trade

Ease of Doing
Business rating S&P Rating
#76
Ukrgasbank, a state-owned bank World Bank
3.5%

m
and one of the largest financial in- B-/B

i
2018 FORECAST
with stable outlook
stitutions in Ukraine, is a success #112 April 2018

h
story, not just nationally but within
2014 2018 2.5%

a
Europe. Partnering with powerful
$2.3 billion 9% 2017

#24
institutions such as the World Human Capital Index

h
The Global Human
Bank and IFC, it has become a Capital Report 2017 FDI (2017) Inflation (2018)
leader in SME finance and the first

T
World Economic Forum National Bank of Ukraine National Bank of Ukraine

UkraineInvest
green bank in the region Key investment sectors

li
What can Ukrgasbank offer poten- Innovation Technologies Agribusiness Energy Manufacturing Infrastructure

A
tial investors?
As a bank, we are number one in

d
the green energy space. We serve After a precipitous drop in GDP during powerhouse, and its 40 million hectares of
as gate-openers to this market for 2014-2015, Ukraine’s economy has steadily farmland ofer vast opportunities for agribusi-

o
investors. One of our main activities returned to health, posting growth of 2.5 ness. Likewise, it boasts a growing knowledge

o
is risk mitigation. This specialization percent last year. And besides improving the economy, with a $3.5 billion IT outsourcing
business climate and inancial stability, the industry. “Our two main assets are brains and

s
is our competitive advantage in
comparison to other banks. Every government’s unfaltering commitment to grains. We have a tremendously well-educated,

a
second megawatt of renewable reforms has seen it qualify for four tranches competitive workforce,” said Bilak.
energy that is installed in Ukraine of a $17.5 billion program from the Interna-

M
is financed by Ukrgasbank. Ninety
percent of projects in Ukraine in
“Every second megawatt
of renewable energy that
is installed in Ukraine is
financed by Ukrgasbank”
renewables, energy eiciency
and environmental protection go
through our bank.
tional Monetary Fund (IMF) to help stabilize “Investors
the country’s macroeconomic situation. acknowledged
“his government’s goal is to be the most Ukraine’s
business-friendly in the history of indepen- achievements
dent Ukraine,” said Daniel Bilak, director in deregulation,
of UkraineInvest, the country’s investment eliminating
promotion agency. bureaucracy and
judicial reform”
In 2017, the country brought in $2.3 billion
in foreign direct investment, up from a low YULIYA KOVALIV, HEAD OF
of $410 million in 2014, and oicials believe OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL
that igure is set to increase. A 2017 Interna- INVESTMENT COUNCIL

tional Investor survey of 214 of the top hedge

What opportunities exist for inves-
tors in green energy?
The investment potential of Ukraine
in energy eiciency, renewables
and emission reductions is estimat-
ed to be $70 billion in the next 15
years. According to an agreement
between Ukraine and the EU,
the share of renewable energy in
final consumption in Ukraine must
reach 11 percent by 2020. We’re
currently at 1.2 percent. We’ve
done several projects with munic-
ipalities and would be interested
in involving partners, particularly
related to bringing in energy-ei-
cient equipment.
3 UKRAINE
fund managers in Europe, the Middle East
and Africa found Ukraine to be the num-
ber-one priority for potential investments.
“Smart, contrarian investors in Ukraine
today are attracted by its talented people,
solid growth trajectory and substantial antic-
ipated returns on investments,” said Lenna
Koszarny, founding partner and CEO at the
Horizon Capital equity fund.
Improving transparency has been a key fo-
cus in boosting investor sentiment and privat-
ization has created a slew of unique opportuni-
ties, with foreign companies placing winning
bids across sectors from energy to infrastruc-
ture to retail. Yet, it is not just in public works
where opportunities lie. Ukraine is an energy
he newly-established National Invest-
ment Council, an advisory body that pro-
vides a platform for direct dialogue between
international investors and government
bodies, will play a key role in ensuring in-
vestors are aware of what Ukraine ofers. Its
irst meeting was co-chaired by the president
of the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Development in May 2018.
“he council members acknowledged
Ukraine’s achievements, mainly in the ields
of deregulation, eliminating bureaucracy
and judicial reform,” said Yuliya Kovaliv, the
council’s head of oice. “We also received
commitments from many members to sig-
niicantly enlarge their investments.”

Stability
Becomes
New Normal
As a result of far-reaching reforms
initiated by the National Bank of
Ukraine which saw the removal of
over half of the country’s banks
from the market, Ukraine’s inan-
cial sector is in much-improved
shape. he 2016 nationalization of
Privatbank, the country’s largest
commercial bank, after a stress
test revealed capital shortages,
was lauded by IMF head Christine
Lagarde as an important step in
its eforts to safeguard inancial
stability. Now, with the clean-up
almost complete, conidence in the
system is returning.
“he steps we’ve taken have con-
tributed to increased proitability
and public trust in the banking sys-
tem,” said Yakiv Smolii, governor of
the National Bank of Ukraine. “he
banks that are currently operating
have shown a proit of 8 billion
hryvnias ($300 million) for the
s o
Why Sharp Investors
a
Are Flocking to
Ukraine
M
As investor confidence in
Ukraine continues to improve,
venture capital and private
equity funds are eyeing the
country as an opportunity to
unlock a considerable amount
of value
For asset management firm
Horizon Capital, Ukraine makes
good business sense. “We
view Ukraine as a ground-floor
opportunity. The country’s
progress over these past four
years has been truly impres-
sive and far exceeds what had
been achieved previously since
Ukraine’s independence,” said
Lenna Koszarny, Horizon Capi-
tal’s founding partner and CEO.
Founded in 2005, Horizon
Capital has its roots in the
Western NIS Enterprise Fund,
which was launched in 1994.
Horizon has over $800 million in
assets under management and
Sponsored report
Leonid Andronov | Shutterstock
Accelerating eco-
nomic growth is
impossible without
an effective bank-
ing sector
OKSANA MARKAROVA,
ACTING MINISTER OF
FINANCE
Aerial view of Khreshchatyk, European Square and Ukrainian House in the city
center of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
m
irst quarter of 2018, and credit and well underway, the focus now is
i
The steps deposit portfolios are increasing.” on maintaining stability, and the
h
we’ve taken As a result of the PrivatBank central bank is targeting low and
nationalization, state-owned banks stable inlation, banking system
a
have contrib-
uted to in- now make up over half of the sector, transparency and better credit
h
creased prof- which the government seeks to availability in order to drive inan-
itability and address through privatization plans. cial strength. “When our reforms
T
public trust in “Our priority is to accelerate eco- are implemented, the banks will be
li
the banking
system nomic growth, which is impossible able to withstand any crisis at each
without an efective banking sector. moment of their existence,” said
A
YAKIV SMOLII, By 2022, PrivatBank will be ready Smolii. “Ukraine’s capital adequacy
GOVERNOR, for the exit of the state from the con- ratio currently exceeds 18 percent,
d
NATIONAL BANK
OF UKRAINE
trol of its stock,” said acting inance which means that our current bank-
minister Oksana Markarova. ing sector status is more stable than
o
With the structural overhaul foreseen by the standards applied.”
We view Ukraine as a
ground-floor opportunity
LENNA KOSZARNY, FOUNDING
PARTNER & CEO, HORIZON CAPITAL Partnering with
visionary founders to
has invested over $570 million
in Ukraine and the near region build a New Ukraine
in more than 140 companies,
Horizon Capital is the leading private equity firm in Ukraine
unlocking an estimated $1.8
managing over $750 million and backed by 40+ institutions
billion in capital. Already one of
Ukraine’s most active investors, it
We provide growth equity to fast-growing, export-oriented
recently announced a decision to companies in IT, light manufacturing and food & agriculture
invest an additional $100-$200
million over the coming years. Find out more at:
“For us, the most compelling
investments are export-oriented
companies founded and led by
visionary entrepreneurs in sec- www.horizoncapital.com.ua
tors with strong, sustainable cost
advantages,” said Koszarny.
UKRAINE.THE-REPORT.COM 4
 LAW
New Privatization Law in Ukraine
Opens Door to Investment
As the structural transformation of the Ukrainian economy gathers
pace, the latest initiative by the government, which calls for fast
and transparent privatization of state-owned firms, is set to bring
more outside players to the market
In March this year, Ukraine’s
long-awaited new privat-
ization law came into force,
revolutionizing the country’s
outdated approach to the sale
of state property. For inves-
tors, this opens up a raft of ac-
quisition opportunities across
multiple sectors, and local law
firm AEQUO, which recently
held a conference for foreign
firms entitled “Turning Tides:
M&A in Ukraine,” is working
to help international investors
navigate what’s on ofer.
“American companies,
in our experience,
require an extra level of
care in their legal and
s
regulatory support on
the ground”
a
DENIS LYSENKO, MANAGING
M
PARTNER, AEQUO
Created amid Ukraine’s
2014 revolution, AEQUO
has quickly risen to become
one of the country’s most
trusted and innovative law
firms. Representing major
American clients and trusted
by international institutions,
the company boasts one of
Ukraine’s leading indus-
try-focused multidisciplinary
legal teams.
“American companies are
uniquely entrepreneurial and,
in our experience, require
an extra level of care in their
legal and regulatory support
on the ground in Ukraine to
fully comply with rigorous U.S.
laws and business ethics prin-
ciples, while enjoying the ben-
efits of an emerging economy
market,” said Denis Lysenko,
managing partner of AEQUO.
“This care, we are very happy
to provide.”
5 UKRAINE
Q&A
DENIS LYSENKO, MANAGING
PARTNER, AEQUO
DTEK
What are the opportunities for
A
foreign investors in Ukraine’s
wave of privatization?
d
Privatizations of large-scale
assets are expected to include
o
major industrial targets, such as
o
Centrenergo, Odessa Port Plant,
and a number of regional elec-
tricity distribution companies.
Other targets include Turboat-
om and the President Hotel in
Kiev. Importantly, the privat-
ization authority now has more
flexibility to further discount sale
prices for auctioned assets.
In 2018, AEQUO was named
Ukraine’s most innovative law
firm, and has been ranked
among the world’s best arbi-
tration firms by The Legal 500.
What gives AEQUO its edge?
AEQUO has a blend of domestic
and cross-border projects
expertise, local industry insights
and international connections,
sophisticated legal technology
and a high-caliber team of law-
yers. Our regulatory expertise
is relied upon by the World
Bank, the European Commis-
sion and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Develop-
ment. Our dispute resolution
team succeeds in the most
complicated of cases. AEQUO is
bold enough to lead not only in
business transactions but also
in wider sectoral initiatives.
ENERGY Sponsored report
A Fresh Vision
for Ukraine’s
Energy Sector
m
i
In January, DTEK and GE signed a contract to add 26 new wind turbines
to Ukraine’s power grid.
h
a
As Ukraine’s government works to shape a new future for the coun-
try’s energy sector, so too do its businesses. Leading energy firm
h
DTEK is committing significant resources to improve sustainability,
eiciency and environmental performance
T
li
Established in 2005, DTEK is one Q&A
of Ukraine’s flagship energy firms MAXIM TIMCHENKO, CEO, DTEK
and has quite literally fueled
the country’s growth as the
operator of its deepest gas-pro-
ducing wells and controller
of 25 percent of its electricity
generation capacity. Its CEO,
Maxim Timchenko, has now set a
new vision for the company, and
by extension, Ukraine’s energy
sector at large, for a future based What is your outlook for the
on digitalization, decentralization energy sector in Ukraine?
and decarbonization. The energy sector in Ukraine is
the most underdeveloped and
promising market in Central
The energy sector in Europe; there are huge require-
Ukraine is the most ments for investment and huge
underdeveloped and
promising market in opportunities. We are a top
Central Europe country in terms of gas reserves,
and we have 100 years’ worth of
MAXIM TIMCHENKO, CEO, DTEK coal deposits which can be used
in an environmentally-friendly
DTEK is no stranger to leading way with new technologies. With
change. At the World Econom- a good regulatory environment
ic Forum in 2012, it joined 20 and stable political situation,
of the world’s largest energy we will have foreign investment
companies in developing a set of and technology, and Ukraine will
principles outlining cooperation increase its energy security.
between the energy industry
and society. Today, the company
has become the country’s main
investor in renewables and the
largest wind power producer,
partnering with GE Renewable
Energy to bring in state-of-the-
art turbines, and thus driving the
beginnings of a green energy
DTEK
revolution in Ukraine.
 INFRASTRUCTURE
he Road
Ahead
With wide-ranging
reform and investment
plans, Ukraine is
bringing in foreign
investors to overhaul its
infrastructure sector
Spanning the main trans-European
corridors, Ukraine unites Eastern
and Western Europe, the Baltic
States with the Black Sea region,
and the Trans-Caspian Transit
Corridor connects it with the Chi-
nese Belt and Road Initiative. But
a combination of mismanagement
during Soviet rule and periods of
economic instability have meant
that the country’s infrastructure is
holding it back.
Now the Ministry of Infra-
structure has laid out a National
Transport Strategy for 2030, which
calls for a minimum of $50 billion
in investment while creating a pub-
lic-private partnerships (PPP) oice
s
to attract foreign irms.
M a
FOCUS ON ONUR
Ukraine’s
Construction Sector
Beneits from New
Government Approach
ONUR Group is a Turkish com-
pany that focuses on infrastruc-
ture construction throughout
Eastern Europe and the Middle
East. The company started in
Ukraine in 2004 and rose to
public prominence thanks to the
successful completion of a key
Odessa highway project. Trusted
internationally, the multinational
company went on to carry out
road projects in the Lviv region
that were financed by the Euro-
pean Bank for Reconstruction
and Development and subse-
quently worked to upgrade the
Kiev-Chop highway to European
standards.
As the government puts more
impetus on construction projects
throughout the country, ONUR
The Kiev-Chop highway, which has been upgraded to European standards, connects Ukraine with Western Europe.
Forthcoming infrastructure reforms
1Approval of new
2 Port tariffs and
legislation to liberalization of
facilitate PPPs ports services
SOURCE: NATIONAL INVESTMENT COUNCIL OF UKRAINE
he initiative is bearing fruit: last
February, U.S. irm GE signed a $1
billion deal to modernize the coun-
try’s railway system, switching out
old Soviet-built locomotives for new
machinery to increase the speed
A
and reliability of goods exports.
“For us, the most crucial thing is
d
transparency. I love foreign compa-
nies entering the country – I want
o
them to change Ukraine,” said Volo-
o
dymyr Omelyan, Ukraine’s minister
of infrastructure.
It’s not just railways that are being
has seen an uptick of activity and
is working alongside internation-
al partners such as the World
Bank to improve infrastructure
around the country. Comple-
mentary to its construction work,
ONUR has also made several oth-
er investments in limestone and
sand quarries. Also, as a compa-
ny always seeking to capitalize
on opportunities, over the past
two years it has begun to invest
in Ukraine’s booming agricultural
sector. Currently, it holds 5,000
hectares of agricultural land,
concentrating on grains, but the
company hopes to soon double
or triple its landholdings and in-
vest in grain silos and elevators.
ONUR
ONUR machinery park.
ONUR
3 Modernization
4 Legal framework
m
of the national governing river
i
railway company transportation
h
a
upgraded. A massive $11.4 billion
h
has been earmarked for upgrades In the last 2
to roads, with half of that coming
T
years we have
from the state budget. “In the last constructed
li
2 years we have constructed more more than
than 3,000km of roads, which is 3,000km of
unprecedented,” said Omelyan. roads, which
And with the entry of low-cost is unprece-
dented
airline Ryanair this year and the
expected arrival of multinational
VOLODYMYR
container seaport operator Hutchi- OMELYAN,
son Ports, Ukraine is increasingly MINISTER OF
INFRASTRUCTURE
unlocking its potential to become a
global connectivity hub.
that in a few years, construction-
will be the biggest sector in the
country.
To what extent is this leading
to greater competition in the
Q&A sector?
EMRE KARAAHMETOGLU, HEAD OF Thanks to the reforms and the
DELEGATION, GENERAL COORDINATOR, strong economic performance
ONUR GROUP of the country, things are going
How has the shift in govern- well in Ukraine and other foreign
ment since 2014 affected the companies are interested in the
construction sector? country. For us, competition
We are starting to see that means quality; new companies
construction is growing as the entering the market will increase
government focuses on allocat- the level of the entire sector.
ing more funds for construction Yet, as we have been here for
projects. Since the Maidan a long time, we have a strong
revolution, government policy
has changed to make everything
“We believe that in a few
better, including opening up the years, construction will be
market for business investment. the biggest sector in the
The ProZorro procurement sys- country”
tem, which is totally transparent,
has also made the tender system competitive advantage because
more open for all companies. We we know all of the industrial
see Ukraine’s size and location sectors, the suppliers, and the
as a big opportunity and believe climate conditions.
UKRAINE.THE-REPORT.COM 6
 AGRIBUSINESS
Unearthing Ukraine’s
Agricultural Potential
As the world’s population increases, UkrLandFarming, Ukraine’s largest agricultural holding compa-
ny, is set to gain economic and political clout by playing an increasingly important role in global food
security
UkrLandFarming produces a wide range of products including grain, corn, eggs, sugar and livestock.
a s
Known as the “breadbasket of Eu-
M
rope,” Ukraine is endowed with the
fertile “black soil” that has helped to
make the country one of the world’s
most important producers and ex-
porters of agricultural products.
Scientiically known as cherno-
zem, this soil is one of the most
fertile in the world and makes up
around 58 percent of Ukraine’s total
arable land, which is equal in size to
around 30 percent of Europe’s total
arable land area.
“Ukraine is like Brazil was 20
years ago, but it happens to be
situated in the heart of Europe,” ex-
plained Oleg Bakhmatyuk, chairman
and CEO of UkrLandFarming, the
nation’s largest vertically integrated
agricultural holding company. “his
is what gives Ukraine clout because
it has a dominant position in selling
foodstufs to important markets
such as the Middle East and North
Africa and Asia.”
UkrLandFarming, founded in
2007, produces a wide range of
products including grain, corn,
eggs, sugar and livestock. It has
7 UKRAINE
h a
li T
A
d
o
o
“Ukraine is like earned a wealth of experience in
Brazil was 20 grain growing, storage and trans-
years ago, but portation, operating a network of
it happens to grain elevators with a total storage
be situated in
the heart of capacity of 2.5 million tons. Fo-
Europe” cused on the global market, it sells
to international players including
OLEG BAKHMATYUK, Bunge, Cargill and Glencore.
CHAIRMAN AND CEO,
UKRLANDFARMING
“What attracts the likes of Bunge
PLC to us is our scale and our volume,”
Bakhmatyuk said. “he concept of
the company is to show of to the rest
of the world what Ukraine can be.”
With its abundance of fertile land
and water resources, a favorable
By the numbers: climate for large-scale agriculture,
UkrLandFarming a highly qualiied and low-cost
workforce, and a government
2.5 million tons working towards the liberalization
grain storage capacity of the agriculture industry, Ukraine’s
570 ha agribusiness sector has the potential
land with black soil to grow exponentially. Bakhmatyuk
estimates that around $20 billion
$658 million worth of investment is still needed
revenue (2017)
in Ukraine to unlock the country’s
$2.128 billion full agricultural potential.
assets
“We need a player who can
Source: UkrLandFarming combine our potential with their i-
nancial clout. he world is inevita-
Sponsored report
h im
UkrLandFarming
This is an opportunity
for anyone to come
in with technology
and money to grow
this sector
OLEG BAKHMATYUK,
CHAIRMAN AND CEO,
UKRLANDFARMING PLC
bly going to develop a food deicit,
and this is an opportunity for
anyone to come in with technolo-
gy and money to grow this sector,”
he said.
Agriculture is already the third
largest sector of the Ukraine
economy, contributing around 10-
12 percent of GDP and employing
17 percent of the workforce. Food
exports have almost doubled in the
past seven years, reaching $17.8
billion in 2017. Grains followed by
fats and oils make up the largest
share of exports. Ukraine is the
world’s number-one exporter of
sunlower oil, the second largest
exporter of grains, and the fourth
largest exporter of barley and corn.
“Recall in the ‘80s during the
irst oil crisis in the Middle East.
Oil had been just a commodity, but
it then soared in value, not only
in price but in global importance
and inluence. his is today hap-
pening in the food market,” said
Bakhmatyuk. “It is not only about
beneiting economically, it is also
about beneiting politically.”
 Sponsored report

UKRAINE’S AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS IN THE WORLD COMPANY FEATURE

Main exports (2017)
he Ukrainian Agribusiness
$1.03bn $2.5bn With a Global Appetite
Meat & animal Other (inc. sugar,
products tobacco, vegetables)

$1.05bn Total
Food industry
remnants & waste $17.8bn
$6.5bn
Grains

$2.06bn
Oilseeds
$4.6bn
Fats & oils

MHP
SOURCES: UKRAINIAN AGRIBUSINESS CLUB (UCAB), UKSTAT

im
Export dynamics of agricultural products by destination The MHP headquarters in Kiev.

h
$17.9bn
$17bn

a
$16.7bn $17.8bn MHP has seen exponential of its vast fertile land but also
$14.5bn $15.3bn
growth in the last two decades, because of a wide open market

h
32%
36%
41%
skyrocketing from a 10-person – in 1998, the country imported
45% operation in 1998 into the lead- 99 percent of its chicken meat.

T
47% 48%
28% ing poultry company in Ukraine

li
26%
29%
28% 27% 32%
19% 15% The backbone of MHP has

A
15% always been a sound business
14% 16% 14.3%
20% 21% 15% 10% 8% 7.6% model. Having carefully studied

d
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 poultry companies around the
world, its founder and CEO,

o
ASIA EU-28 AFRICA CIS
Yuriy Kosyuk, saw an opportu-

o
Industry point of view nity to build a globally compet-

s
itive protein company from the
ground up.
Taking Efficiency

a
“We eliminated the problems
in Agribusiness to the Next Level our competitors have and built

M
“We are currently
developing an AI system
in the company alongside
Microsoft”
YURIY KOSYUK, FOUNDER
AND CEO, MHP
MHP IS UKRAINE’S LARGEST
POULTRY PRODUCER
What has been your approach
to investment in Ukraine?
Compared to our main competi-
tors, we have invested a
fortune. We have put billions
into the construction of facilities
and creating a new business
landscape in Ukraine, which is
why we are so profitable.
a company that was smart and Ukraine is the best place
in the world for this kind
eicient. We have a competitive
of production
How do you view doing busi- edge because we control every-
ness in the country? thing,” said Kosyuk. YURIY KOSYUK, FOUNDER & CEO, MHP
There is a lot of potential Vertical integration is the key
because the landscape is still to the success of the company,
quite empty. We work in a lot which in 2017 exported 220,983 “Ukraine is the best place in the
of countries all over the world, tons of chicken meat to 63 world for this kind of production,
and I am completely confident countries and employed nearly better than Brazil and the United
that Ukraine is the best country 28,000 people. Through man- States,” said Kosyuk.
in the world in which to do aging every step from growing Now, the company is working to
business. Our appetite is to be the grains for feed, to incubating achieve its targets of becoming
a leader in the world, based in eggs, processing some of the a major player in the industry.
Ukraine. highest quality organic chicken This year alone, it plans on
products on the market and even investing $250 million to expand
Are you open to international using manure for biogas, the its business, and within the next
partnerships? company has one of the lowest 7-10 years, it aims to produce 1
There are many opportunities. production costs in the industry. million tons of chicken protein
We could do business together Starting the business in Ukraine annually – approximately 1/13 of
in areas from green energy up was also ideal, not only because the total global production.
to very complicated agricultural
products. There are also
opportunities in technology:
we are currently developing
an AI system in the company
alongside Microsoft, whereby
our company will be a pilot for
the rest of the world. www.mhp.ua

UKRAINE.THE-REPORT.COM 8
 Sponsored report

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9 UKRAINE
STAND UP

m
FOR US ALL

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Clinical trials bring us closer to the day when

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all cancer patients can become survivors.

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Clinical trials are an essential path to progress and the
brightest torch researchers have to light their way to better

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Speak with your doctor and visit
StandUpToCancer.org/ClinicalTrials

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to learn more.

Sonequa Martin-Green, SU2C Ambassador

Photo Credit: Matt Sayles
Stand Up To Cancer is a division of the Entertainment Industry Foundation,
a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
artifact
Point and Nuke
Remembering the era of
portable atomic bombs.
By Jeffrey Lewis
T
li
A
WHEN DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER TOOK THE OATH OF OFFICE as the 34th
president of the United States in 1953, the total U.S. nuclear
d
stockpile was approaching 1,000. When Ike left, eight years
o
later, that number had grown to around 20,000—with further
increases programmed in. Those weapons included one of the
o
strangest creations of the Cold War: an atomic bazooka, put-
s
ting nuclear destruction in the hands of as few as two soldiers.
a
For the U.S. military planners of the 1950s, nuclear weap-
ons were not merely strategic assets to deter conflict but
M
munitions ready for use in the event of hostilities. Eisen-
hower looked to nuclear weapons as a cheaper alternative
to conventional troops at a time when U.S. forces were dan-
gerously, and expensively, overstretched.
Soon after taking office, for example, the Eisenhower
administration decided it would use nuclear weapons
in Korea if armistice negotiations broke down. Officials
announced in 1954 that the United States might respond to
conventional aggression anywhere with massive nuclear
retaliation. The Eisenhower administration even attempted,
in 1957, to reorganize the U.S. Army to better survive on a
nuclear battlefield.
Eisenhower put it plainly in his memoirs: “My feeling was
then, and still remains, that it would be impossible for the
United States to maintain the military commitments which
it now sustains around the world (without turning into a gar-
rison state) did we not possess atomic weapons and the will
to use them when necessary.”
This emphasis on practical nuclear warfighting gave birth
to the Davy Crockett—a tripod-mounted recoilless gun for
firing a nuclear projectile over a distance of a few miles. It
was the Army’s first portable nuclear weapons system.
Although the Army had already deployed nuclear artillery
96 FALL 2018
systems, by the late 1950s U.S. generals
wanted a battlefield system that combat
units could use against Soviet troops at
close range. The initial Davy Crockett—
named after the 19th-century pioneer
and subject of a hit Disney miniseries in
1954—could be hand-carried and fired
from its tripod by two or three soldiers.
Another version could be mounted on
a jeep or an armored personnel carrier
and fired by two people.
m
The warhead for the Davy Crockett,
i
the W54, measured 11 inches in diame-
h
ter. (One piece of nuclear artillery used
an even smaller shell, just 6 inches.) Since
a
the Davy Crockett was meant for close-
h
range use, the explosive power of the war-
head was limited to 20 tons and 10 tons
on a low setting—a fraction of the explo-
sive power of the Hiroshima and Naga-
saki devices but enough for the blast to
kill advancing Soviet or Chinese troops.
Giving Gomer Pyle a nuclear bazooka
seems absurd today but only thanks
to our modern sensibilities about the
horror of nuclear war. At the time, West
Germany’s defense minister, Franz
Josef Strauss, wanted to equip his own
country’s forces with the Davy Crock-
ett. And this idea pales compared with
other strange ideas from the period,
such as nuking the moon to see what
would happen—as proposed in the U.S.
Air Force’s Project A119.
Over time, of course, the col-
lective view of nuclear warfare
changed. John F. Kennedy
and Nikita Khrushchev
stood eyeball to eye-
ball over Cuba, terri-
fying the world. The
notion that nuclear
weapons were like
any other munition has become as dated
as the tail fins on a 1957 Chevrolet.
Ike’s vision of an affordable nuclear
boost on the battlefield sat uncomfort-
ably with most people—particularly
those being defended by battlefield
nuclear weapons. Many of them, par-
ticularly in Europe, began to feel strongly
that the nuclear weapons put there to
 ready to blow bridges and collapse

m
mountain paths to stop invading Soviet

i
forces. When Colin Powell, then-chair-

h
man of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
floated the idea of retiring tactical

a
nuclear weapons in 1991, all four service

h
chiefs opposed him, as did Defense Sec-

T
retary Dick Cheney. Powell thought the

li
weapons were “trouble-prone, expen-
sive to modernize, and irrelevant in the
This Davy Crockett

A
will be displayed in present world of highly accurate con-
the National Museum ventional weapons.” Months later, after

d
of the United the August 1991 coup attempt against
States Army, under

o
construction at Fort Mikhail Gorbachev and the looming
collapse of the Soviet Union, President

o
Belvoir, Virginia.
George H.W. Bush decided to largely—

s
but not entirely—eliminate the U.S.

a
stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons.
Today, tactical nuclear weapons are

M
defend them were, in fact, as great a
threat as the Soviet Union. Hence, the
oft-repeated observation that the United
States was willing to defend NATO down
“to the last German,” which wryly cap-
tured the growing sense that a nuclear
defense was no defense at all. In the
late 1960s, the Army began to remove
the Davy Crockett from service. Tests
in the Nevada desert had revealed that
the weapons system was just too inaccu-
rate to be useful on a battlefield.
Even so, smaller nuclear weapons
U.S. ARMY PHOTO.
back in the news in the United States.
President Donald Trump’s Nuclear Pos-
ture Review has called for the develop-
ment of two new nuclear systems with
a battlefield role. Trump—a throwback
to the 1950s in so many ways and who
probably watched the Davy Crockett
miniseries as a kid—has expressed the
same enthusiasm as Eisenhower did
about expanding the number and type
of nuclear weapons. “We must mod-
ernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal,
hopefully never having to use it,” Trump
said during his 2018 State of the Union
address, “but making it so strong and
so powerful that it will deter any acts
of aggression.”
Nobody tell him about the nuclear
bazooka. Q

remained part of the U.S. arsenal. The JEFFREY LEWIS (@ArmsControlWonk)

W54 design lived on through the 1980s is the author of The 2020 Commission
as a backpack-sized nuclear landmine, Report, a novel on nuclear war.

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