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mrslittletall · 4 years

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Title: The Crazy Cat Vicar (Chapter 5) Fandom: Bloodborne Characters: Laurence the first Vicar, Gehrman the First Hunter, Laurence' secretary Florence Word Count: 1.712 AO3-Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20989841/chapters/53947672 Previous chapter: https://mrslittletall.tumblr.com/post/189758597959/title-the-crazy-cat-vicar-chapter-4-fandom

Summary: Laurence picks up a second cat who got hurt. She gets introduced to Mick. He has trouble finding a name.

(Author's note: Like I said, the rest of the chapters will most probably be stand alone pieces about how the different cats made it into Laurence' life and cat shenanigans. They probably won't be super long each and I write them whenever I feel like it, so please be patient with this story. I mostly do it in good fun and for cat lovers like me.)

Laurence looked left and right and then down the hallway, making sure the coast was clear before hurrying down the way to his office, a small fluffy white creature was cradled in his arms. Just as he made it to the door of his office and proceeded to think about how to open it with his passenger, he heard the voice of Florence behind him.

“Vicar, what is it that you have there?”, she said in a booming voice and Laurence turned around, the creature in his arms meowing in protest at the sudden motion.

“It's a, um, cat...”, he said.

“I see that it is a cat. Why have you brought it here?”, Florence said, rubbing her temples while sighing. “You already have a cat here. And you won't know if Mick will like this one. This could be only pain and misery...”

“But... but...”, Laurence said and then presented a part of the cat that Florence hadn't been able to see yet. “I couldn't just leave her out there. Look, she's injured, she has a nasty cut on her paw.”

“Then knock yourself out.”, Florence said, knowing that she couldn't stop Laurence anyway. “But let me come with you, in case Mick is in your office so that I can distract him. Also, you seem to need someone to open the door for you.”

Laurence nodded, blushing a bit, the cat had curled itself into his arms again. The truth was, Laurence had fed this particular cat for quite some time now and he had intended to bring her in soon, but not so soon. Her getting hurt just had sped up the process. In fact, he wanted to tell Florence about it before hand, but he had brought her in even when Florence hadn't approved of it.

Once the door was opened Florence stepped through the door and looked for Mick. The black cat was nowhere to be seen so she waved for Laurence to enter who put the white fluff down on his desk, taking a look at the paw.

“Are you going to do a blood ministration?”, Florence asked, closing the door.

“On such a tiny animal? No.”, Laurence said. “Our blood ministrations are adjusted for humans. I will take care of the wound the old fashioned way. Would you make sure that she stays on the table?”

Florence stepped closer to gently hold the white cloud down as Laurence hurried along his office and pulled out various medical equipments. “Shouldn't you let a veterinarian take a look?”, she asked.

“Since I got Mick I learned about typical illnesses and injuries that cats can get and stocked up on equipment.”, Laurence said. Back in Byrgenwerth his focus had been on medicine, he had intended to become a doctor like his parents and so he had confidence in his own abilities to treat a wound like that.

“First, we should cut the fur around the wound...”, Laurence said, picking up some scissors and going to work, white fur soon was littering the table around the cat's hurt paw, then he picked up on a clean cloth and dipped it into a bowl with water and carefully started to rub the wound, which made the cat flinch and hiss.

“This must hurt...”, Florence said.

“You are doing a great job.”, Laurence said and Florence first thought he meant her but when she saw him pet the cat it was apparent that he had talked to the animal.

“Now let's stitch the wound...”, he picked up a needle and got the suture through the eye of the needle, making Florence question how the Vicar was completely unable to sew a ripped piece of cloth together but didn't had any trouble stitching a wound with quick and calculated movements.

“And now we just need to bandage it with some gauze.”, Laurence said and soon the cat's paw was wrapped into a thick layer of it. Laurence cut off the gauze and fixed the end of it to the rest of the bandage before carefully scooping the cat up and putting it on the floor, where the poor thing stayed for a few minutes, tail curled into herself and ears flat on her head.

“Thanks for your help, Florence.”, Laurence said. “I don't know where she got a cut like this. Maybe someone broke a bottle and left the shards lying around.” His gaze darkened. “We should make sure that people don't let their waste lying around cathedral ward.”

“Shall I put this onto the list of topics for the next meeting?”, Florence asked.

“Yes, please.”, Laurence said and kneeled down to observe the cat. “Hey, what's the matter, beauty? Let me see if you can walk like this.”

“I think she might still be shocked.”, Florence said as she headed for the door. “Give the poor thing some time.”

Florence had a point so Laurence sat himself down on the couch and picked up one of his books. After he had read a few pages he could feel something soft and warm pressing against his legs and as he looked down he saw the white cat. He put his book to the side and gently picked her up, laying her down on his lap, stroking through her long white fur.

“I wonder which name I shall give you...”, he said as the cat curled up in his lap and started to purr.

Laurence went through a few names in his head as his hand practically vanished into the thick fur of the cat. Fluffy was the first one that came to mind but that felt far too obvious. He could do better than that. He tried to think a bit more but all the other names he came up with were cloud or cotton and that also felt too much at the nose. Maybe not something that referenced her fur but her colour? Snowball, Snowflake or Blizzard came to mind, but Laurence had to admit, he hated snow and he didn't want to name a cat after a thing he loathed.

While he was still thinking, the cat door clattered and Mick came in. Laurence froze and stopped stroking the white fluff's fur as the black cat came into his direction with a cheerful meow, but he froze too once he saw the new cat. And the new cat raised her head, confused why the petting had stopped and her eyes widened when she saw Mick.

“Oh fuck, I should have told Florence to keep him in a separate room...”, Laurence murmured, his eyes focused on Mick. Mick was a tiny cat, the white fluff pretty much was a third bigger than him (though that could partially be because of her fur), but Mick also was a little brave one. Or stupid one, depending on the context.

And so it was Mick who began to move first and jumped on the couch. The white fluff reacted rather negatively and gave a warning hiss and Laurence already wanted to get up and separate the two cats when Mick came closer to gave the new cat a friendly sniffling.

Though her ears were still flat on her head, the white fluff sniffed back and soon after this first contact Mick sniffed more at her and intensely at the bandaged paw which must have smelled weird for him. The white cat did let it happen and curled herself back in Laurence' lap once Mick was finished with his inspection.

Laurence continued to stroke the fur of the white fluff and observed Mick who did his patrol through his office before coming back to the couch and letting himself fall down near Laurence, pressed closely against his leg.

“I have two hands, who?”, Laurence said and spent a good time getting both cats to partake into a purring competition until he had to get up and sat the white fluff down with a heavy heart.

As Laurence made himself ready to continue working, he noticed the very obvious very long white cat hair on his clothes. With his preference for the black church set, this was bound to happen. He spend a good time trying to get the cat hair off and made a mental note to ask Florence for help with this particular matter the next time he saw her.

The next few days the white fluff and Mick became friends and cuddled with each other, making Laurence' heart mealt when he saw it and her paw started to heal. She seemed to like to climb on Laurence' shoulders and just lay down there, letting herself carry wherever he went. It felt as adorable as it looked like and he could see people smiling at him whenever he carried her around. The only problem he had with the cat, he still hadn't found a name for her.

Now it must have been five days since he had adopted the white fluff and Laurence was walking down the church corridors while she was lying on his shoulders once again, her tail twitching occasionally when he ran into Gehrman, who stared at him and then said: “Laurence, what's that?”

“It's a cat.”, Laurence said, dumbfounded that his friend couldn't see the obvious.

“I know it is a cat! What I want to know is which cat! This clearly isn't Mick!”, Gehrman shouted.

“Oh.”, Laurence said. “I found her a few days ago. She was injured, so I took her in.” He removed her from his shoulders to present the hurt paw at Gehrman. “See, her paw had a nasty cut and needed stitches. I should be able to get the suture out in two days.”

The white fluff meowed in disdain of having been removed from Laurence' shoulders and being presented to the stranger, who simply stared at her with sparkling eyes.

“She's beautiful.”, he said. “Beautiful just like Maria. Take good care of her.”

And without any further ado, Gehrman had rounded the corner without another word. Laurence looked at the cat and held her a bit higher, looking at her face. “Hm.. Mary.”, he said. “I will call you Mary.” (Author's note: The lying on the shoulders I took directly from my own cat, Clara, who always climbs on my husband's shoulders to let herself carry around. She tries with me too but my shoulders are small and so it is more a staggering around while her claws are boring into my skin... ouch!) Next chapter: https://mrslittletall.tumblr.com/post/614300380283699200/title-the-crazy-cat-vicar-chapter-6

#bloodborne #fanfiction #laurence the first vicar #gehrman the first hunter #cats #littlewritesstuff

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xxstyleart · 5 years

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Chapter 18; Siege and Storm

Heyyooooo, so I’ve adapted a few parts in a particular scene of chapter 18 with Mal, Alina and the Darkling! I’ve been trying to read fanfics and it’s inspired to write my own so here ya go!! *Disclaimer: I’ve adapted the existing scene with a few things I envisioned. Most of the content is original to Leigh. I’ve simply added a few different elements into the scene and developed it the way I thought would create a deeper scene. Also, my content will be written in between double asterisks. Anything outside of that was written by Leigh. & the ‘[...]’ indicate there are additional lines from the book I’ve not included in my post but that I’ve skipped in order to make this post more fluid and concise with my adaptations. Hope that made sense. Enjoy!!!!

(Art credit: nanfe1789)

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He nodded, scuffed the toe of his boot along the floor. “I miss you,” he said quietly. Soft words but they sent a painful, welcome tremor through me. Had part of me doubted it? He’d been gone so often.

I touched his hand. “I miss you too.” [...] He let out a long breath. “Saints, I hate this place.” I blinked, startled by the vehemence in his voice. “You do?” “I hate the parties. I hate the people. I hate everything about it.” “I thought... you seemed... not happy exactly, but--” “I don’t belong here, Alina. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.” That I didn’t believe. Mal fits in everywhere. “Nikolai says everyone adores you.”

“They’re amused by me,” Mal said. “That’s not the same thing.” He turned my hand over, tracing the scar that ran the length of my palm. “Do you know I actually miss being on the run? Even that filthy little boarding house in Cofton and working in the warehouse. At least then I felt like I was doing something, not just wasting time and gathering gossip.”

I shifted uncomfortably, feeling suddenly defensive. “You take every chance you get to be away. You don’t have to accept every invitation.”

He stared at me. “I stay away to protect you, Alina.” “From what?” I asked incredulously. He stood up, pacing restlessly across the room. “What do you think people asked me on the royal hunt? The first thing? They wanted to know about me and you.” He turned on me, and when he spoke his voice was cruel, mocking “Is it true that you’re tumbling the Sun Summoner? [...] I stay away to put distance between us, to stop the rumors. I probably shouldn’t even be in here now.”

I circled my knees with my arms, drawing them more tightly to my chest. My cheeks were burning. “Why didn’t you say something?” **Quiet anger rumbled in my chest. How could he not know what was in my heart? How did he not understand that I could not give a care as to what anyone else had to say? I needed him and that’s all that mattered, not what others were speculating about my--sex life.**

“What could I say? And when? I barely see you anymore.” “I thought you wanted to go.” “I wanted you to ask me to stay.”

My throat felt tight. I opened my mouth, ready to tell him that he wasn’t being fair, that I couldn’t have known. But was that the truth? Maybe I had really believe Mal was happier away from the Little Palace. Or maybe I’d just told myself that because it was easier with him gone, because it meant one less person watching and wanting something from me. **Another burden I wouldn’t have to bear. Another disappointment I would avoid. So then, why was there such an aching in my chest as he stood there, staring at me expectantly? What more did he want? Was I not enough? Was I too much?**

He raised his hands as if to plead his case, then dropped them helplessly. “I feel you slipping away from me, and I don’t know how to stop it.”

**His eyes bore into mine with a deep sadness I hadn’t let myself look at for too long these past few weeks. It stung. Maybe because he was right. Maybe because I feared all of this would become too much for him and he’d decide to finally leave for good. Maybe because it was easier to let go first rather than to be left behind like crumbs on a table... Or maybe because it reminded me of the sadness that was growing in my own heart every time he left, because despite his previous declaration in wanting to protect me, I’d felt him slipping away and I hadn’t known what to do about it.** Tears pricked my eyes. “We’ll find a way,” I said. “We’ll make more time--”

“It’s not just that. Ever since you put on that second amplifier, you’ve been different.” My hand strayed to the fetter. “When you split the dome, the way you talk about the firebird... I heard you speaking to Zoya the other day. She was scared, Alina. And you liked it.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, my anger rising. It felt so much better than the guilt or shame. **Times have changed. I’ve changed. I'm not the weak little orphan from Keramzin anymore. I may not be strong, but I am more now. Different. I had to be because of this power, because of all the people depending on it. Why couldn’t he see that?** “So what? You have no idea what she’s like, what this place has been like for me. The fear, the responsibility--”

“I know that. I know and I can see the toll it’s taking. But you chose this. You have a purpose. I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore.” [...]

**The rage boiled inside, heat rose to my cheeks and ears. “Coward,” I spat as viciously as I could. Surprise swims in his eyes as he registers my verbal attack. Despite the outburst, a door inside me slams shuts. “I chose nothing.” I say coldly. He stiffens at my change of tone. “I did not choose to be born with this power. I did not choose to wage this war. I did not choose to go after the stag,” I twisted the knife.

A mix of hurt, desperation and fear contorts his face. I know he remembers. It was his idea to go after the stag--to get it before the Darkling could so I could be used against the Darkling in time, just as everyone here was planning on doing. He shakes his head in denial.** [...] “You came here for Ravka. For the firebird. To lead the Second Army.” He tapped the sun over his heart. “I came here for you. You’re my flag. You’re my nation. But that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Do you realize this is the first time we’ve really been alone in weeks?” **Brief shock overcame me.**

The knowledge of that settled over us. The room seemed unnaturally quiet. Mal took a single tentative step toward me. Then he closed the space between us in two long strides. One hand slid around my waist, the other cupped my face. Gently, he tilted my mouth up to his. “Come back to me,” he said softly. **The tenderness in his voice pulled at my heart and thaws it. The door that slammed shut creaked open just a bit. This. This was what I yearned for--what I’ve been missing. Him. His love, his affection. No pride and no barriers to stand in our way. My body relaxed in response.** He drew me to him, but as his lips met mine, something flickered in the corner of my eye.

The Darkling was standing behind Mal. I stiffened. Mal pulled back. “What?” he said. “Nothing. I just...” I trailed off **as fear choked me. I didn’t know what to say.** The Darkling was still there. “Tell him you see me when he takes you in his arms,” **he taunts. His voice was too raw. Too real. It shattered me.** I squeezed my eyes shut. Mal dropped his hands and stepped away from me, his fingers curling into fists. “I guess that’s all I needed to know.” **Panic rose in my chest.** “Mal--” “You should have stopped me. All that time I was standing there, going on like a fool. If you didn’t want me, you should have just said so.” “Don’t feel too bad, tracker,” said the Darkling. **Each word sounded like shattering glass and it was hard for me to not cringe anymore than I already had.** “All men can be made fools.” “That’s not it--” I protested. “Is it Nikolai?” “What? No!” “Another otazt’sya, Alina?” the Darkling mocked. Mal shook his head in disgust. “I let him push me away. The meetings, the council sessions, the dinners. I let him edge me out. Just waiting, hoping that you’d miss me enough to tell them all to go to hell.” I swallowed, trying to block out the vision of the Darkling’s cold smile. **He knows. He knows I won’t say anything more. I’ll let Mal believe this lie rather than tell him what I truly see. He knows I’m too afraid to face that truth.**

[...] “Mal--” **Faltering before I truly begin. He’s slipping. I need to say something. Anything. But what? What can I say to make him stay? Pain strikes me as I realized there wasn’t a better option than nothing.** [...] “I don’t want to hear about [...] Ravka or the amplifiers or any of it.” He slashed his hand through the air. “I’m done.” He turned on his heel and strode toward the door.

“Wait!” I rushed after him and reached for his arm. **Desperation clung to me. I wanted to feel the warmth of his skin on mine. I hoped for it to drive away this coldness I felt inside.**

He turned around so fast, I almost careened into him. “Don’t, Alina.”

**My heart broke. He was already pushing me away. I can see that the distance was much more than the few inches between us.** “You don’t understand--” I said, **faltering again. How could I put it into words he wouldn’t judge me for? How could I think of him so often after all that he’s done? Why do I keep seeing the Darkling? Mal would be disgusted of me.**

“You flinched. Tell me you didn’t.” “It wasn’t because of you!” **I just wished he’d believe me.** Mal laughed harshly. “I know you haven’t had much experience. But I’ve kissed enough girls to know what that means. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.” The words hit me like a slap. He slammed the door behind him.

I stood there, staring at the closed doors. I reached out and touched the bone handle. **I know you haven’t had much experience. But I’ve kissed enough girls to know what that means. His words ring in my head, cutting through me like a double-edged knife.** You can fix this, I told myself. You can make this right. But I just stood there, frozen. [..] I bite down hard on my lip to silence the sob that shook my chest. That’s good, I thought as the tears spilled over. That way the servants won’t hear. An ache had started between my ribs, a hard, bright shard of pain that lodged beneath my sternum, pressing tight against my heart.

**I turned and leaned against the door, gasping for breath while trying not to let the sobs erupt. I see him fully now, standing exactly where he was behind Mal, just before the bed. The moonlight shone against his tall silhouette and illuminated his broad shoulders, his strong arms. I can see his perfect face, a smile no longer on his lips. He had the mercy to not look smug. Instead, his face was stony and cold but there was something dark swirling in his eyes that I couldn’t make out. I pinned him in place with a look, offering nothing but anger, hatred, and resentment.

I brought my hands to my face, my fingers curling and slightly tugging at my roots. Angrily, I spoke, my voice becoming louder with each question. “Why do I keep seeing you? Why are you here? Why must you torture me like this?” I’m nearly begging him for answers. My hands slashed the air between us, frustrated. “Must you make me drive him away?” I can read his face clearly now. The problem with wanting is that it makes you weak.

He thaws and looks at me disgustingly lovingly. His eyes were soft as he wrapped his hands around one of mine then laid it over his heart. The other caressed my cheek. Gently, he answers,“Yes, I do because you must realize that in this world, there is only you and I. There is no one else like us: powerful. Your power is growing every day. As much as you love him, he could never love you without fearing you first. And as much as you want him to be there for you--to understand you, he simply can’t. He is otazt’sya. None of them will ever know you the way I do. None will understand the hunger for more power or the delight we feel when we use it. There is no one who will not fear you or judge you. Only I can understand you. Only I will not fear or judge you for what you are. You are Alina Starkov, my equal. We were made opposites, but are halves to the other. We were meant to be together.”

I try to yank my hand back from his chest, but I am frozen. I try again, but to no avail. His words shake me to my core. Knowingly, he says nothing and silently urges me on. How? How was he able to read me so well? How did he know so much about how I felt? Of all people, how could he know what I was going through when he wasn’t even here with me? Or real? Shame and resentment filled me. We wage a silent battle, looking into each other’s eyes, acutely aware of the other. We stayed like that for a long time, so long, my body relaxed and grew used to his presence.

I finally break the silence.“...Why won’t you just let me be?” My voice broke. He was only a figment of my mind playing tricks on me. He wasn’t real... so why did he look so real? Why did this feel so real? He was an itch that I couldn’t soothe. I keep scratching to try and ease the itching but it only makes things worse and now I’m bleeding.

“If I did that, you’d be alone.” His words felt like a bucket of cold water washing over me. Loneliness? Wasn’t that his fear? You don’t understand, my words to Mal echoed again. I’d meant he didn’t understand that I’d actually flinched from him because of the Darkling, not because I didn’t want him but had I meant something else too? Was what the Darkling was saying true? With this new found power of mine, was loneliness my fear now as well? My blood turned cold at that truth. Yes, it was... ‘Sankt Alina’, they’d whispered during prayers. They’d praised the Sun Summoner without cease but I saw the look in their eyes. Admiration was there on the surface but it was fear that had driven them--fear of me... of my power. I saw the way servants never stood too closely, the way they flinched at my every move. I saw the way peers did their best to dance around me with their words. People claimed to worship the Saint but I saw their pity. No one wants this kind of responsibility or this raw hunger for power in any life.

“Alone...” I whispered. “Is that what we are?” As soon as I let the words out, I felt it: alone. It kicked me in the gut and nearly choked the air from my lungs. Tears well in my eyes again and spilled over without cease. My body gives way to the weight in my heart and I sink to the floor. The harsh reality that no one would ever understand drowns me. The fear courses through like an unforgiving tsunami. Breathing became difficult. No one could ever understand me. No one except the Darkling.**

I didn’t hear the Darkling move; I only knew when he was beside me. His long fingers brushed the hair back from my neck and rested on the collar. When he kissed my cheek, his lips were cold, **and I welcomed it, begrudgingly. We were alone, together.**

#grisha #grisha trilogy #the grisha trilogy #grishaverse #the darkling #thedarkling #alina #alina starkov #alinastarkov #mal #siegeandstorm #siege and storm #nanfe1789 #pangieeyang #grishafanfic #fanfic #siegeandstormfanfic #grisha fanfic #grisha trilogy fanfic

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Thanks to Arwa Damon and her team on the ground in Iraq and as the 'Fog Of War' begins to lift in 🇮🇶 Iraq, we are beginning to see the real danger our U.S. 🇺🇸 troops and our Iraqi partners were truly in. PRAISE BE TO GOD none were injured, maimed, or killed. Trump and his minions need to realize that their decisions have real life effects and going to war with Iran 🇮🇷 is a losing proposition for all sides. DIPLOMACY IS THE ONLY ANSWER TO SOLVING THE SITUATION WITH THE LEADERSHIP OF IRAN.

US troops sheltered in Saddam-era bunkers during Iran missile attack (VIDEO)

By Tamara Qiblawi, Arwa Damon and Brice Laine | Updated 4 hours ago Jan 13, 2020 | CNN | Posted Jan 13, 2020 |

Al-Asad air base, Iraq (CNN) - Akeem Ferguson was in a bunker when his team received the bone-chilling radio transmission: Six Iranian ballistic missiles were headed in their direction.

The concrete slab they had taken cover under offered little protection from projectiles that US troops in Iraq were being attacked with.

"I held on to my gun and put my head down and I tried to find a happy place, so I started singing to my daughters in my head," said the six-foot tall US Staff Sergeant. "And I just waited. I hoped that whatever happened, that it was quick."

"I was 100% ready to die," he added.

Ferguson survived unscathed along with other US troops and civilian contractors on Iraq's al-Assad base, after a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles on the morning of January 8.

The strike was the widest scale attack on a base housing US troops in decades. Troops said the absence of casualties was nothing short of a "miracle."

American troops stationed at the base are helping to counter ISIS and train Iraqi security forces. No Iraqi troops were hurt in the attack.

A closer look at the site reveals a base vulnerable to this type of assault.

Personnel received advance warning of the strike several hours before it took place, enabling them to take cover. Still they lacked the surface-to-air defenses to fend off a ballistic missile assault -- US military did not build structures on the base, one of the oldest and largest in Iraq, to protect against an attack of this kind. They were at the mercy of the downpour of missiles.

Near the airfield, shards of metal crack underfoot as two military personnel take measurements of the gaping crater left behind by one of the missiles. It is around 2 meters deep and roughly 3 meters in diameter -- a burned copy of "Beauty and the Beast" teeters on the edge of the hole. A flip-flop, an Uno card, and a military jacket stick out from the charred wreckage left in the wake of the missile.

This was a housing unit for drone pilots and operators on the base. They evacuated the unit before the strike. Incidentally, the they had nicknamed the living quarters "chaos."

Like most of the US section of the base, they had already been on lockdown at bunkers for over two hours when the first missiles landed.

The strike was an Iranian response to the US drone attack, ordered by US President Donald Trump, that killed Iran's most powerful general, Qasem Soleimani, less than a week before.

After days of anticipation, Tehran's zero-casualty retaliation came as a relief to many. At al-Asad camp, troops could rest easy after days of heightened alert. For countries across the region, it marked a welcome climbdown after the killing of Soleimani raised the specter of region-wide war.

Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military's side.

Roughly one-third of the base is controlled by the US. The Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators' housing unit.

CNN journalists were the first to be granted access to the base after the Iranian attack.

ADVANCE WARNING

The first warning came from secret intelligence signals in the evening before the attack. By 11 p.m. on January 7, most of the US troops at al-Asad were sent to bunkers, and a few had been flown out, according to commanders at the base.

Only essential personnel, such as tower guards and drone pilots, would remain unsheltered. They were protecting against a ground assault which base commanders expected would follow the missile attack.

Ground forces never came, and troops would only re-emerge from their shelters at the break of dawn. The strike had ended just before 4 a.m.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi has said he was told by Iran, at around midnight, to expect airstrikes inside his country. An Arab diplomat who CNN spoke to said that the Iraqis passed on information about the strikes to the US.

But the US had already received reporting about a ballistic missile attack by the time the Iraqis could notify them, according to al-Asad's Lieutenant Colonel Tim Garland.

The first missiles fell at 1:34 a.m. They were followed by three more volleys, spaced out by more than 15 minutes each. The attack lasted over two hours. Troops on the base described it as a time fraught with suspense, fear and feelings of defenselessness.

"You can defend against (paramilitary forces), but you can't defend against this," said Captain Patrick Livingstone, US Air Force Security Forces Commander on the base, referring to previous rocket attacks by armed groups. "Right now, this base is not designed to defend against missiles."

Ill-equipped to defend against ballistic missiles

As the expected attacks drew nearer, most troops filed into dusty, pyramid-like structures peppered throughout the base. These bunkers were built during the rule of deposed President Saddam Hussein.

The thick, slanting walls were constructed decades previous to deflect blasts from Iran. Baghdad had a bloody eight-year war with Tehran (1980-1988) which ended with a stalemate. It was a time when the new Islamic Republic was beginning to demonstrate its military prowess.

US troops said that they were unsure whether the Saddam-era shelters would withstand the ballistic missiles. But they were more sturdy than US bunkers, made to protect against rockets and mortars.

Relatively light-weight rockets and mortars are typically used by ISIS, jihadi extremists and Shia paramilitary in Iraq, who for years have had US troops in their crosshairs. But Iranian ballistic missiles have a far longer range and carry a far bigger payload of explosives -- estimated to be at least half a ton each.

Footsteps echo in a narrow passageway leading into the Saddam-era bunker. The walls are double-layered -- large holes in the interior reveal the coppery outer wall embedded with fans. Two spacious living areas are filled with folding beds, mattresses, stretchers and lockers. On the night of the attack, one of the rooms doubled as a makeshift bathroom, with cut up plastic water bottles serving as urinals.

Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman was one of the US team leaders who corralled troops into such a bunker. After about an hour and a half of being in the shelter, she had doubts.

"I was sitting in a bunker and I was like man, maybe I made the wrong decision [to come down here]," said Coleman.

"About 10 minutes, after I said that to myself, it went boom boom boom boom boom and I said well there's my answer."

"The whole ground shook. It was very loud," she said. "You could feel the blast wave in here. We knew they were close."

She said the doors appeared to bend like waves with every hit that reverberated through the shelter. None of the bunkers on the base were impacted.

Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Ferguson was in a US-made bunker -- a crammed space held together by slabs of five-inch concrete fortified by sandbags. He watched the attack unfold through cracks between the adjacent walls.

"There's a little hole on the side of the shelter and we saw a flash of orange light," said Ferguson. "After that we figured that every time we see a flash it's just a couple of seconds before it's going to hit.

"It was Flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. We didn't know when it was going to stop. We sat there and waited for it to end."

After the first volley, several went out to look for casualties. When the second volley hit nearly 15 minutes later, some were caught in the open.

Staff Sergeant Ferguson said he was worried about comrades who were trapped outside. "After the second volley was over, I was worried about them being at the gate. So I left and went and grabbed them, brought them back to the shelter with us, and then we waited..." he said.

At the time of the expected ground assault, Ferguson had emerged from his bunker to face off with whatever came next. He described peering into the darkness over their gunsights, worn out by the shock of the missiles. But the attack never came.

"We were so tired. It was the worst adrenaline rush ever," said Ferguson.

When troops had all emerged from the bunkers, many went to work, repairing the damage. They described feeling a mixture of relief and shell-shocked. "It was 'normalish' afterwards," said Coleman. "But we were all looking each other in the eye as if to say 'are you ok?'"

Several troops CNN spoke to said the event had shifted their view of warcraft: the US military is rarely on the receiving end of sophisticated weaponry, despite launching the most advanced attacks in the world.

"You looked around at each other and you think: Where are we going to run? How are you going to get away from that?" said Ferguson.

"I don't wish anyone to have that level of fear," he said. "No one in the world should ever have to feel something like that."

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Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity

More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.

By Dave Philipps and Tim ARANGO |Published Jan. 10, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve, too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once they are a little older.

“Hey, if that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Sergeant Comes, who wore a dagger-shaped patch on his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.

Enlisting, he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits, never worried about being laid off, and earned enough that his wife could stay home to raise their children.

“Show me a better deal for the common person,” he said.

Soldiers like him are increasingly making the United States military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.

More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.

For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.

“A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”

To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.

With the goal of recruiting about 68,000 soldiers in 2020, the Army is now trying to broaden its appeal beyond traditional recruitment pools. New marketing plays up future careers in medicine and tech, as well as generous tuition benefits for a generation crushed by student debt. The messaging often notes that most Army jobs are not in combat fields.

But for now, rates of military service remain far from equal in the United States, and the gap may continue to widen because a driving decision to enlist is whether a young person knows anyone who served in the military. In communities where veterans are plentiful, teachers, coaches, mothers, uncles and other mentors often steer youths toward military service. In communities where veterans are scarce, influential adults are more wary.

That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer.

Top Counties for Army Recruitment(SEE MAP ON WEBSITE)

Each map shows the 500 counties with the highest recruitment rates in a given year as a percentage of population, excluding counties with fewer than five recruits.

The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.

“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.

That distinction has created glaring disparities across the country. In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments.

This was not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.

Today, students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads attend the fourth-grade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework.

Many schools encourage students to take the military’s aptitude exam, the ASVAB, in the way students nationwide are pushed to take the SAT.

That exposure during school is one of the strongest predictors of enlistment rates, according to a 2018 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

In Colorado Springs, the high schools with the highest number of military families are also the biggest producers of recruits, Sergeant Comes said, adding that parents aware of the military’s camaraderie, stability and generous health, education and retirement benefits often march their children into his office and encourage them to join.

“We just tell them our story: ‘This is where I was, one of six kids living in a trailer. This is where I am today.’ Good pay check. Great benefits,” he said, adding that even in good economic times, it is an easy sell. His recruiting station made its goals handily this month.

His biggest challenge is finding recruits before they are scooped up by recruiters from the Air Force, Navy and Marines, who work the same fertile neighborhoods.

The situation is markedly different in regions where few people traditionally join.

In Los Angeles, a region defined by liberal politics where many families are suspicious of the military, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester, but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with students. Access is “very minimal,” said Lt. Col. Tameka Wilson, the commander of the Los Angeles Recruiting Battalion.

Predictably, enlistment rates are low.

In 2019 the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning cities like Los Angeles.

As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy visited officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District in December to push for greater access.

“He was doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students and students of poverty,” she said. And therefore they are less likely to push enlistment.

Recognizing it cannot sustain recruitment numbers by relying only on the South and military communities, the Army has tried to broaden its appeal. Slick ads on social media offer less of the guns-and-grunts messaging of decades past. Instead they play up college benefits and career training in medical and tech fields.

Even within one state there are striking differences in how communities view military service. Colorado Springs produced 29 times as many enlistments in 2019 as nearby Boulder, a liberal university town.

“I grew up in Boulder, and the military appealed to me but it was just not in the culture, or my family,” said Brett Dollar, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “The conversation was not ‘What do you want to do after high school?’ but ‘Which college are you going to go to?’”

She attended Middlebury College in Vermont before becoming a police officer in Fort Collins and, eventually, a law enforcement dog handler.

This fall, at age 32, she decided to enlist in the Army, drawn by the chance to work with dogs in security, bomb-sniffing and rescue missions around the world. She ships to basic training in about a week.

“I’d always had an itch to serve in the military and be useful,” she said. “I think it took me being on my own for a while to realize it was a possibility.”

She said she was going into the work knowing she could soon end up deployed to a combat zone.

“The Army is ultimately a war-fighting organization — you go in knowing that,” she said. “I guess I really didn’t see that as a downside. It’s a core value of mine to try to be of service.”

______

Dave Philipps reported from Colorado Springs and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.

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A New Nuclear Era Is Coming

We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran.

By Uri Friedman | Published Jan 9, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 12, 2020 |

Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Deadly chaos in Iran. A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State. Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war. The fallout from the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious.

But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time: the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state, at the very moment when the world appears on the cusp of a more perilous nuclear age. It’s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad’s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general, but also the last hope of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before he’d even said “good morning” during an address to the nation yesterday, Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.

When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more (though not yet all) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement, in a move made after Soleimani’s death but planned beforehand, I recalled something Richard Burt, the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history, told me back in 2018. He noted that in the ’80s, when he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union, people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict. That’s no longer the case, he warned.

“No one is focusing on the fact that the existing framework for nuclear control and constraints is unraveling” and giving way to “unrestrained nuclear competition,” Burt observed. What we’re witnessing, he argued, is not some sort of creative destruction, in which an outdated Cold War framework is being discarded in favor of a more modern one. It’s “just destruction.”

Indeed, we’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant. The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.

Consider what has transpired in the past year alone:

A newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program: Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months.

An emerging North Korean nuclear-weapons power: The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries.

The specter of other countries going nuclear: Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.”

Emboldened nuclear states in South Asia: Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.

The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control: Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces.

The outbreak of great-power competition: The collapse of the INF Treaty coincides with heightened rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, threatening to accelerate their budding nuclear-arms race. They’re already investing heavily in modernizing their nuclear arsenals and in new technologies such as hypersonic glide vehicles, which evade missile defenses; cyberweapons against command-and-control systems; and artificial intelligence to incorporate into those systems. Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war hacks away at the economic interdependence that has helped deter conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.

Read: Inside the collapse of Trump’s Korea policy

These dismal circumstances follow substantial advances in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the ’60s, the decade in which the most new nuclear states emerged (France, China, and, unofficially, Israel), John F. Kennedy predicted that there would be “15 or 20” nuclear powers by 1975. Today there are nine, a rate of about one to two entrants into the nuclear club per decade, with the latest being North Korea in 2006. The nuclear-security scholar Jim Walsh has noted that three-fourths of countries that were once interested in developing nuclear weapons ultimately chose not to do so, and that since the ’90s, more states have given up nuclear weapons than acquired them.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)

Most of the reductions in these weapons, however, occurred in the ’90s, and the pace of cuts has slowed ever since. We now live in a period when the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons, a 75-year-old technology, are much lower than they once were. It’s also a time when, as James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College once explained to me, there are more nuclear-weapons states “of different shapes and sizes … [and] different trajectories,” making the “geometry” of nuclear deterrence “far more complex and harder to manage” than during the comparatively symmetrical Cold War.

Add to that the fading memory of the Cold War and fiercer competition among the great powers, and it’s no surprise that the guardrails on the world’s most destructive weapons are disappearing.

The past year may be remembered “as the turning point from an era of relative calm” to “the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age,” Miller and Narang wrote last month in Foreign Affairs. The consequences could be “catastrophic.”

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The Race for Big Ideas Is On

The United States faces genuinely new global challenges—but tries to understand them using outmoded theories from a bygone era.

By Amy Zegart, Contributing writer | Published January 13, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 13, 2020 |

In the past two weeks, escalating hostilities brought the United States to the brink of yet another conflict in the Middle East—this time with Iran. But such a conflict might not look much like the others that American forces have fought in the 21st century.

Tank-on-tank warfare this isn’t. While crises are inherently unpredictable, Iran’s decision on Tuesday to lob missiles at bases housing American troops in Iraq might well be the last of its conventional retaliation for the American air strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani. Future hostilities are more likely to occur in cyberspace, not in physical space.

The Soleimani strike is a harbinger in other ways. Historically, targeted killing has been rare as an instrument of war because it has been so difficult technically. The last time the United States killed a major military leader of a foreign power was in World War II, when American forces shot down an airplane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. These killings are unlikely to be so rare in the future. Because drones allow constant surveillance and can strike precise targets, states may credibly threaten so-called decapitation attacks in ways that nobody imagined possible short of all-out nuclear war.

When battlegrounds are growing invisible and leaders can be killed by airplanes without pilots, it’s fair to say that conflict is not what it used to be. The rise of cyberaggression, information warfare, autonomous weapons, and other technologies all require a thorough reevaluation of the coming era, what geopolitics will look like, and the kinds of capabilities that will give nations a strategic advantage against their competitors. Yet the United States still lacks the sort of dominant explanatory framework that can guide American policy regardless of who the president is.

It’s not for lack of trying. Many people have been grappling with how to strengthen America’s national security in an uncertain era. The far-flung outposts of these efforts range from conference rooms on Capitol Hill and offices in suburban-Virginia strip malls to hotel ballrooms and slick boardrooms in Silicon Valley. There are new Pentagon units to harness technological innovation and bipartisan national commissions on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. (I am an expert adviser for the AI commission.) There are intelligence studies to identify baseline trends and megatrends driving the future of international-security challenges, and think-tank reports and academic workshops on the future of just about everything.

All of these initiatives are seeking to look beyond the anxieties of today to understand the threats of tomorrow. And nearly all of them start with two insights: The first is that we face a “hinge of history” moment. Emerging technologies are poised to transform societies, economies, and politics in dramatic and unprecedented ways. The second is that we need better ideas to make sense of this new world so that American interests and values can prevail.

When one of the big ideas involves calling for more big ideas, you know it’s tough out there. The technological race is challenging, but it is likely to be the easy part. It’s the ideas race—who best understands the levers and opportunities presented by technological disruption and shifts in the world’s political geography—that will determine geopolitical winners and losers. Some strategic insights provide competitive advantage; Russia recognized well before the United States did, for instance, that the rise of social media magnified the impact of information warfare.

Other strategic insights, if widely shared, become invaluable guides to democratic policy making and cooperation, enabling like-minded states to thwart repression and aggression of authoritarian regimes. How are military strategists and average American voters alike supposed to understand the world now confronting them—and decide which conflicts to undertake and how?

In unsettled moments like the current one, the cost of a conceptual mistake is high. At the end of World War II, the U.S. found itself locked in confrontation with the Soviet Union, a former ally that sought to export its own revolutionary ideology, communist economic system, and repressive governance around the world. American strategists built a foreign policy for the next half century around the strategy of containment developed by George Kennan in his famous 1947 “X” article. A career diplomat and Russia expert, Kennan believed that winning the superpower conflict required, above all, patience. The United States, he argued, should use every element of national power—including economics, diplomacy, and military force—to contain the spread of communism. Eventually, he predicted, the Soviet Union would collapse from its own weaknesses. Every president from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush pursued containment in various ways. Not every policy worked, and some, like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, failed disastrously. But Kennan was fundamentally right, and his ideas provided the North Star for Republican and Democratic presidents alike.

But when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, policy makers were suddenly left without a conceptual blueprint for navigating global politics. In the place of containment, a gauzy optimism took hold. Major threats were considered passé: The end of history had arrived, and democracy had won. Declaring a “peace dividend,” policy makers slashed defense spending and cut the CIA’s workforce by 25 percent, hollowing out a generation just as a terrorist threat was emerging. In the post–Cold War decade, the United States focused its foreign policy on nation building, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief. The Pentagon even created a new acronym for its operations: MOOTW, or “Military Operations Other Than War.” Nothing says strategic drift like focusing America’s warfighters on jobs other than the one they were hired and trained to do.

Today’s conceptual struggle is harder because the threats are more numerous, complex, varied, uncertain, and dynamic; because all of them are being supercharged by technological advances that will work in ways no one can fully fathom; and because two of the most widely discussed concepts so far have been force fits from a bygone era.

The notion of a new Cold War with China is all the rage. It’s a term that provides a strange sort of comfort—like seeing a long-ago friend at your college reunion—and yet no great insight. The U.S.-Soviet Cold War was driven primarily by ideology. The current competition with China is driven primarily by economics. And while the Cold War split the world into two opposing camps with almost no trade or meaningful contact between them, the key feature of today’s Sino-American rivalry isn’t division by an iron curtain but entanglement across global capital markets and supply chains.

Deterrence is another Cold War oldie-but-goodie. It sounds tough and smart, even though, in many circumstances, nobody is really sure how it could ever work. It has become a hazy, ill-formed shorthand policy that consists of “stopping bad guys from doing bad things without actually going to war, somehow.” Russian information warfare and election interference? Let’s get some deterrence for that. Iran? Maximum-pressure deterrence. Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people? Deterrence with clear red lines. China’s militarization of space? Cross-domain deterrence.

Deterrence isn’t a useless idea. But it’s not magic fairy dust, either. History shows that deterrence has only been useful under very specific conditions. In the Cold War, mutually assured destruction was very good at preventing one outcome: total nuclear war that could kill hundreds of millions of people. But nuclear deterrence did not prevent the Soviets’ other bad behavior, including invading Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. The key Cold War takeaway isn’t that policy makers should use deterrence more. It’s that some things are not deterrable, no matter how much we wish them to be.

For all the talk of deterring cyberattacks, for example, the reality is that successful deterrence requires three conditions that are rarely all met in cyberspace: knowing the identity of the adversary, making clear what behavior you will not tolerate, and showing the punishment you could inflict if a Rubicon is crossed. But cyberattacks are frequently anonymous. No one knows who the bad guys are, at least not easily, so miscreants of all types can act with little fear of punishment. And there’s a reason no country conducts public cyberweapons tests or showcases its algorithms in military parades: Once a cyberweapon is revealed, it’s much easier for an adversary to take steps that render it useless, turn it against you, or both.

Using familiar ideas like the Cold War to understand new challenges is always tempting and sometimes deadly. Analogies and familiar concepts say, “Hey, it’s not so bad. We’ve been here before. Let’s consult the winning playbook.” But in a genuinely new moment, the old playbook won’t win, and policy makers won’t know it until it’s too late.

In today’s genuinely new moment, the biggest conceptual challenge is the profundity of paradox: Seemingly opposite foreign-policy dynamics exist at the same time.

Today, for instance, geography has never been more important—and less important. Sure, geography has always mattered. The Portuguese built an empire by claiming colonial territories along the maritime route Vasco da Gama discovered to reach India. But questions of who controls the physical landscape, and who lives in it, are now shaping global events in unpredictable ways and on an unprecedented scale. According to the UN, more than 70 million people were forced from their homes last year, the highest number on record. Of those, 25 million had to flee their home country, driven by violence or persecution. Separatist movements are stirring from northern Spain to the South Pacific, part of a secessionist trend that has intensified over the past century.

Meanwhile, global climate change is transforming the landscape itself. Australia is on fire, with flames already ravaging an area the size of West Virginia and choking millions of residents miles away with extreme air pollution. Experts predict that global warming will make massive fires more frequent in more places. Scientists also estimate that rising seas could threaten up to 340 million people living in low-lying coastal areas worldwide. All of these trends, along with old-fashioned territorial aggression (Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea), are searing reminders that physical spaces and borders drawn across them still matter as much as they ever have.

At the same time, the virtual world has never been more global and seamless, with individuals and groups able to connect, transact, cooperate, and even wage wars across immense distances online. The percentage of the global population that is online has more than tripled since 2000. There is now Wi-Fi on Mount Everest, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, promises to use balloons to bring the Internet to remote parts of Kenya. Facebook in 2019 drew 2.4 billion active monthly users—that’s a billion more people than the entire population of China. All of this connectivity makes it possible for Russian operatives to reach deep inside American communities and spread disinformation, influence what we believe, and tear us apart. Cyber capabilities also reportedly enabled Americans to sabotage North Korean rocket tests from thousands of miles away. Artificial intelligence is compressing time and distance—making it possible for information analysis and military decisions to move at machine speed. Even the borders between war and peace, combatant and civilian, are becoming increasingly blurred in cyberspace. In the old days, military mobilization took months and involved large logistics operations with heavy equipment that was hard to hide. In cyberspace, mobilization is literally at your fingertips.

In a related paradox, the United States is simultaneously the most powerful country in cyberspace and the most vulnerable country in cyberspace. This, too, is new. In the military’s traditional domains—air, land, and sea—countries with more capabilities were typically more powerful. Want to know who will “own the skies” in a conflict? The answer is easy: the side with better aircraft and air defenses. The Pentagon likes to talk about domain “dominance” because the term used to mean something. But it doesn’t in cyberspace. In the virtual world, power and vulnerability are inextricably linked.

As my Stanford cyber colleague Herb Lin has noted, connectivity is an important measure of strength and influence. From enterprise computing to industrial-control systems to the Fitbits on our wrists and video doorbells in our homes, information-technology-based systems are crucial for exploiting information to achieve greater efficiency, coordination, communication, and commerce.

But greater connectivity inescapably leads to greater vulnerability. The internet puts bad guys in distant locales just milliseconds away from the front door of a nation’s important information systems, such as those at power plants and major corporations. And as Lin notes, the more sophisticated our computer systems are, the more insecure they inevitably become. Increasing the functionality of any system increases the complexity of its design and implementation—and complexity is widely recognized as the enemy of security. “The reason is simple,” he told me. “A more complex system will inevitably have more security flaws that an adversary can exploit, and the adversary can take as long as is necessary to find them.”

Beyond recognizing the fact that seemingly paradoxical dynamics can exist at the same time—that digital technology multiplies America’s power and weaknesses; that physical geography is irrelevant and more laden with peril than ever—I don’t have a unified working theory for global affairs. That one has yet to develop is not surprising. But the effort is essential.

Containment and deterrence were bold and counterintuitive ideas when they were first formulated. Theorists of the mid-20th century, such as Kennan and Thomas Schelling, who articulated the theory of deterrence, started with one essential advantage: The atom bomb made it viscerally, horrifically clear just how much the coming world would be different from the past. It also drove home the point that the go-to ideas of yesteryear would not be up to the task of guiding American foreign policy in a new age. That point is no less urgent now.

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risingbricsam · 7 years

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The 'Great Dismantler' - Can A Liberal Order Be Rebuilt after the 'Age of Trump'

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It has become clear where Trump’s policies are taking us – or as clear as one can be when it comes to interpreting Trump policy. Trump is breaking the structures and policy frameworks of America’s existing domestic and foreign policies. The question is less whether he can accomplish some measure of this, then what will it take future US leaders, assuming they are willing, to rebuild the institutions and policies that have been constructed over the past seven decades. As Tom Friedman of the NYT recently declared:

Moreover, when you break big systems, which, albeit imperfectly, have stabilized regions, environments or industries for decades, it can be very difficult to restore them.

The litany of destruction by this President is now all too familiar. In his first day in office after his inaugurated, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He now appears to be targeting for destruction the NAFTA before the rather hapless Mexican and Canadian leaders. And the South Korea-US free trade agreement appears to be next for the chopping bloc, notwithstanding the need it would seem to maintain close alliance support in the face of the North Korea’s nuclear and missile ambitions and US efforts to force DPRK denuclearization.

On June 1st, Trump announced the U.S. would withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord though that formally requires four years. The roll call goes on from formal withdrawal from UNESCO to lukewarm security support for NATO, to apparent contention over leaders’ communiques at recent G7 meeting in Italy to the G20 Hamburg statement. My colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations, Stewart Patrick has described in a post in RealClear World titled in part the ‘self-defeating sovereignty obsession’ of Donald Trump, the aggressive, and I would suggest, his ill-considered policy making approach:

Trump sees the world differently, more cynically. The imperative is to screw over the other guy before he does the same to you. His diplomacy contains no idealism, no appeals to better angels of our nature. It is all about power, without purpose.

As Patrick suggests the approach may be what is done in in the real estate world but it is far from the general approach of officials and leaders in global politics.

It falls short when it comes to the global agenda. There is no unilateral or bilateral solution to transnational terrorism, global financial instability, pandemic disease, international crime, or nuclear proliferation.

In no way does he appear – or act – in ways that appear even remotely akin to his immediate predecessors, Democratic or Republican. Maybe NYT columnist David Brooks has captured best Trump’s day-to-day actions:

He was not elected to be a legislative president. He never showed any real interest in policy during the campaign. He was elected to be a cultural president. He was elected to shred the dominant American culture and to give voice to those who felt voiceless in that culture. He’s doing that every day. … Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites. He doesn’t have to build a new culture, or even attract a majority. He just has to tear down the old one.

From the US as leader of the liberal international order the U.S. increasingly appears a rogue of the same. As Richard Gowan suggests in World Politics Review:

Trump may not realize that he is laying the groundwork for a major breakdown of the international system. Little steps like affirming America’s detachment from UNESCO are hardly world-altering in their own right. But Trump is weakening the international order nonetheless, and neither he nor the U.S. foreign policy machinery as a whole may be able to navigate the turmoil that results from the president’s retreat from leadership.

It is not hard to see that Tom’s story of global governance – beyond the immediate global financial crisis of 20008 – is a narrative of growing disarray in global governance and the rising tensions brought on by the return of geopolitical frictions. And sitting here in the hyperventilation of the Korean crisis – with rhetorical blow after blow from Kim Jong-un and then from his rhetorical equal – the President of the United States, Donald Trump – Tom may be on to something.

Now some observers suggest that pattern of decline and the loss of leadership, while it may have accelerated with the presidency of Donald Trump, actually has been apparent for some time. Christopher Layne, and others, have been attracted by the consequences of a rising power, most evidently China:

Writing in the Financial Times, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that London’s AIIB decision and its aftermath “may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.”

Summers was both right and wrong. The U.S. role as the hegemonic power in international politics and economics indeed is being challenged. But this did not start when Britain and the others decided to sign-up with the AIIB. America has been slowly, almost imperceptibly, losing its grip on global leadership for some time, and the Great Recession merely accelerated that process. China’s successful launch of the AIIB and its OBOR offspring merely accentuates that process. … Thus while OBOR and the AIIB don’t get the same attention from U.S. grand strategists as does China’s military buildup, they are equally important in signaling the ongoing power transition between the United States and China in East Asia. (Christopher Layne The American Conservative “Is the United States in Decline? August 8, 2017)

But the degree of dismantling is far beyond previous behavior. It is not just that US power has declined, and other centers of power have emerged in a growing multilateralism – this is active destruction of the liberal international order. And while it is unquestionable that that geopolitical tensions have increased and China, in particular has grown powerful, both militarily and economically, and as Xi JInping has remarked at his opening speech to the 19th Party Congress – the unveiling of a ‘strong power’ or a ‘great power’. Yet in the international system, China remains, at least for now, a follower and not yet a leader. The realists are determined to see Chinese and Russian actions, combined with Trump’s erratic leadership, as the end of the liberal international order and the emergence, or a return if you like, of a great power ‘spheres of influence’ world order. Let’s hope not.

Philip Stephens of the FT possibly has described America’s current leadership role best in his review of a recent book by two American historians examining ‘America First’:

The postwar international order — the framework of rules, alliances and institutions that, in broad terms, has kept the peace since 1945 — will not be so readily rescued from Trump’s foreign policy. The liberal internationalism that has defined the west has been rooted both in American power and in a shared commitment to freedom, democracy and the rule of law. This president disdains at once US global leadership and the essential values that have underwritten it. … To identify shards of consistency, however, is not to imbue Trump’s approach with logic or wisdom. Less than a year into his presidency, he now looks out at a world in which America’s standing has never been lower. By disdaining alliances he has weakened the US. By courting Putin he has damaged US interests. Washington is seen by friends and enemies alike as unpredictable and untrustworthy. Trump can rail against globalism but he cannot undo the reality that America’s security and prosperity is intimately tied to the international order he disparages.

The last sentence is particularly pertinent. The global governance system is built on a highly interdependent world – economic and political, both for good and for ill. In the face of active dismantling by the Great Dismantler’ what can be done? We start with patience, I’m afraid. It is evident that the President is instinctive and transactional in his dealings, so the best, possibly the only approach, is to remain committed to the liberal international order principles built around open markets, rule of law and a commitment to a process of democratization for all. It gets the ‘blood to flow’ when one contemplates the notion of rising up defending one’s sovereign rights and walking away from the table. But that won’t work, whether its the NAFTA table, the NATO table, the G20 leaders table, or any other table. Leaders will be called on to continue act in concert with, or more likely, without Trump. They need to keep the ship steaming forward, if at a much slower pace.

And meanwhile all leaders, certainly in the established countries, but not just here, need to attend to their national economies. The income inequality and wealth inequality gaps must be reduced or the politics of Trump, or the particular country equivalent, will only grow and the dismantling will not stop.

Image Credit: learningenglish.voanews.com

The ‘Great Dismantler’ – Can A Liberal Order Be Rebuilt after the ‘Age of Trump’ was originally published on Rising BRICSAM

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