Of course now the question comes up about FAKE Texas DL’s but at least Texas is not one of the 13 States that allow ILLEGALS to obtain a Drivers License.
By now every State that wants to stand up to this flood of Illegal Immigration must do it themselves, it is obvious the Federal Swamp could care less.
Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!
Oceans of ink and terabytes of electronic musings have been expended on the subject of hybrid warfare. The classic formulation is a non-state actor with appurtenances of state power and, in many cases, support from traditional nation states. Of particular concern to defense planners and intelligence experts was the ability of these non-state actors to acquire and employ advanced military systems such as anti-tank guided missiles, artillery rockets and man-portable anti-aircraft missiles. Insurgents and terrorists would employ advanced systems to increase their lethal capabilities without changing either their strategies or organizations. The concept of hybrid warfare was soon expanded to the realm of strategy.
As explained by Frank Hoffman, perhaps the best scholar on the subject:
The most distinctive change in the character of modern war is the blurred or blended nature of combat. We do not face a widening number of distinct challenges but their convergence into hybrid wars.
These hybrid wars blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare. In such conflicts, future adversaries (states, state-sponsored groups, or self-funded actors) will exploit access to modern military capabilities . . .
Prior to 2014, hybrid warfare was generally believed to be a strategy of the weak, groups or nations lacking the military means, financial resources, territorial base or organizational skills to fully exploit modern military means. The Russian invasion of Crimea and the initiation of a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine stunned Western strategists, generally, and the community of hybrid warfare theorists, in particular. Here was a major power relying largely on a mix of special forces, proxy forces, limited numbers of traditional military units (often in disguise) and a very sophisticated campaign of political subversion, economic attack, cyber warfare and information operations to conduct a campaign of territorial conquest while reducing the risk of escalation to conventional inter-state conflict.
This led some observers to propose the idea of multi-vector hybrid warfare and of political and information operations intended to undermine target states either to support more kinetic operations or even to obviate the need for physical coercion as somehow a new concept in inter-state conflict. Others drew a close correlation between actions by the current Russian government and the history of Soviet political and propaganda operations during the Cold War.
More recently, a number of authors have brought a measure of historical perspective and dispassionate analysis to the issue. While the means available to Russia are somewhat different, notably access to the world’s banking system, the presence of Moscow-supported news outlets in Western capitals, the ability to conduct cyber attacks on critical networks, as these authors and others point out, the use of all national sources of power to influence the behavior of adversaries and prepare the battlespace for possible kinetic conflict is as old as the organized state.
While it is true that many states have practiced some forms of hybrid warfare, not all have done so successfully and few have been able to implement it as an integrated strategy. We have seen examples of this recently when repeated attempts by this White House to forge an alliance with so-called moderate Syrian rebels against either Assad or ISIS foundered over concerns for the rebel groups’ political bona fides. Government efforts to develop information operations against Islamic violent extremists have foundered over concerns about not being allowed to engage in propaganda, e.g., to lie.
In reality, only a few nations and non-state actors have demonstrated a real proficiency at conducting hybrid warfare. What distinguishes the masters of the art of hybrid warfare from the average practitioners is that they learned these skills in their struggles for domestic power. The tools for hybrid warfare – deception, infiltration, corruption, the use of cover organizations, paramilitary forces, the creation of new domestic security entities and conventional military capabilities – were all used first to seize and consolidate domestic power.
Today, Russia is the ultimate hybrid threat. I describe it as such not merely because it has developed a panoply of official and un-official tools with which to pursue its strategic objectives but because it is the quintessential hybrid actor. Hybrid actors are generally defined as non-state entities able to employ both traditional and non-traditional elements of power and, in many cases, support from traditional nation states. Russia is unique insofar as it is controlled by a cabal that has many of the characteristics of non-state groups that have acquired hybrid capabilities and developed strategies based on their use. Moreover, many of the tools and techniques employed by the Kremlin in the pursuit of its external strategy are the same as it has employed to maintain and even increase its domestic controls. It is hardly surprising that the Russian ruling circle, the Vertikal, with its core of former and current secret police officers and close engagement with criminal elements in the pursuit of pecuniary interests, has been able to employ with such effect bribery, blackmail, hacking, intimidation and outright murder in its domestic and foreign operations.
Read the Remainder at National Interest
Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election.
Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes, because that’s what just happened.
On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things,thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.
But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.
“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.
Here’s the timeline: On June 14, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network. One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015.
Cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. “We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg,” they wrote in their report on the group. Other U.S. officials have said that the group looks like it has sponsorship from the Russian government due in large part to the level of sophistication behind the group’s attacks.
Read the Remainder at Defense One
An attempted coup in Turkey last week shocked and surprised many across the world. But coups and attempted coups have long been an all-too-familiar occurrence around the world.
How many exactly? Well, at the time of writing, there have been around 475 coup attempts since 1950.
That’s according to a dataset compiled by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, two assistant professors who work in the political science departments of the University of Central Florida and the University of Kentucky respectively.
WorldViews reached out to Powell to ask him some questions about what the definition of a coup is, why a coup happens and what trends we’re seeing in coups. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
WorldViews: How do we define a coup in this dataset? What did it mean that Turkey’s 1997 “postmodern” coup wasn’t included, for example?
Jonathan Powell: We define coups as “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”
We don’t code the 1997 “coup” because we can’t definitively say the action was actually illegal. Omer Aslan of Bilkent University has written about the event in depth. Even including recent evidence that has come to light, he concludes the military ultimately relied on legal procedures to undermine Erbakan.
[Ed note: In 1997, generals used pressure behind the scene to force the Islamist government of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from power. The coup is often described as “postmodern” in Turkey as no military force was actually used.]
WV: There are some pretty big variations on the number of coups in different countries. Do you have any theories for what makes a country more likely to have a coup?
JP: The primary reason for large variation is that once a country has a coup, it very often experiences more. For example, coups are now a bit of a rarity, but in the last decade or so, Mauritania, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea Bissau, Thailand and Madagascar have all had multiple attempts (I could easily be forgetting others).
So the question becomes why did they have the first one? Coups also generally occur in disproportionately poor countries that suffer from other forms of political instability (such as protests and/or civil war). In recent years, there seems to be an increasing proportion of coups in new democracies, especially those that seem to already be backsliding toward authoritarianism. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the government is a crucial indicator.
Read the Remainder at Washington Post
By most accounts, America’s efforts to covertly train and supply moderate rebels in Syria aren’t going so well. Apart from the obvious (Assad is still firmly entrenched in power and continuing to receive ever-growing external support),The New York Times recently reported that some arms provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Saudi Arabia haven’t quite reached their intended targets. According to the report, some individuals in Jordan’s intelligence bureau — ostensibly partnering to funnel weapons to Assad’s opponents — stole weapons destined for U.S.-backed rebels and instead sold them on the black market.
This is not the first time an American-led covert operation has gone awry, and it certainly won’t be the last. Consider Operation Cyclone, the covert U.S. arms pipeline to the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. Long held up as a success story in Cold War proxy warfare, the mujahideen – supported by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia – fell on each other after the Soviets retreated, creating an environment where al Qaeda could later thrive. This White House is certainly no stranger to these lessons of history. During early debates on Syria policy, Obama commissioned a study on the CIA’s track record in covert aid that concluded such efforts seldom work.
What, then, is the rationale for U.S. policy in Syria? Why has the White House continued to draw on the tool of covert military aid despite its shoddy track record? Rather than praise or condemn the Obama administration’s approach, our goal is to shed light on some of the considerations that have driven what’s going on and why by drawing on ourown research on past covert aid programs. Our findings suggest that escalation dynamics and unique reputational concerns help to explain why the Obama White House finds itself stuck with a covert military aid program of questionable efficacy and impact.
Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks
