Federal security officials determined that the last election was secure, but cyber threats continue to evolve and election doubters have seized upon even simple equipment glitches and operational hiccups — like a printer mishap — to question results.
Open source software projects publish their source code under licenses that allow anyone to review and use it. Typically, volunteers develop and propose code modifications, like bug fixes and new features, to be considered for incorporation into the software.
This transparency into the code could dispel rumors, by showing doubters exactly how the processes work, according to Greg Miller, co-founder and chief operating officer of OSET Institute, an open source election technology research and development nonprofit.
“Generally, in an open source project, more people have access to view the code, which can lead to the discovery of vulnerabilities in the code sooner,” San Francisco stated in a 2018 assessment on the feasibility of the city creating its own open source voting system.
But malicious actors can view the code just like anyone else, and these projects must be ready.
Depending on how the open source projects manage bug reporting, ill-intentioned parties may be able to learn about issues before mitigations are fully implemented, wrote DARPA Information Innovation Office program manager Dr. Sergey Bratus. Malicious actors also could seek to infiltrate the community around the projects or sabotage the code.
Researchers, nonprofits, several counties and others have explored open source election solutions over the past decades. They’ve seen this as a way to introduce new ideas and features not currently available from commercial systems, add transparency and potentially reduce governments’ expenses.
Uptake has been limited, however. For example, Travis County, Texas, completed design of its STAR-Vote project in 2017 but was unable to get a vendor to produce it. Prime III — a university professor-developed accessible voting system released as open source in 2015 — is today only used in one county, despite successful performances in several jurisdictions.
Proprietary software still dominates the market, although some open source projects continue to push forward.
As they do, they’ll need to tackle questions over the best approach to safely launching and maintaining the projects and whether such offerings can gain traction.
Part one of this two-part series looks at the security concerns and practices at play in open source election projects, while part two examines what it may take for government and vendors to adopt the offerings.
THE SECURITY DEBATE
Is open source more — or less — secure?
That is a question the U.S. military research branch, DARPA, is currently trying to answer.
Its SocialCyber program aims to examine threats to open source projects, which may be cyber or social in nature. Bad actors might attempt to insert back doors into the software, use influence campaigns to manipulate the communities that maintain the projects or even take over leadership of those communities, per MIT Review. And open source projects that rely on only a handful of contributors could theoretically collapse if one or two drop out.
“The DoD’s [Department of Defense’s] use of OSS [open source software] saves cost, increases maintainability and attracts developer talent, but also creates an unprecedented attack surface, in which many trusted software parts and paths are exposed to hostile manipulation,” wrote DARPA’s Bratus.
Different governance structures manage different open source communities, and choosing the right one can tamp down on risks of contributor defection or would-be saboteurs.
Many open source election software projects look to avoid relying entirely on the energy and interest of volunteers and emphasize carefully vetting their work.
The City and County of San Francisco
San Francisco has been exploring replacing its electronic voting machines with an open source solution. Its 2018 feasibility assessment weighs various approaches and suggests the city and hired contractors build the initial code. The city would only later look to the open source community for new feature contributions, after a “workable offering gets off the ground” and after the city has fostered a community around the project that has “been proven to be engaged and reliable.”
The city could partner with an existing open source voting group and should hire an open source program manager to “focus on evangelism to grow the community, communication with the community and community structure and operations,” the assessment proposed. A separate professional could focus on considering and incorporating community contributions and creating documentation.
OSET Institute
OSET, too, has paid professionals overseeing its projects, to keep them on track and maintained. The organization also follows a risk management framework based on NIST standards for vetting both contributed code and code being publicly released.
And its work isn’t entirely in the public eye: about a third of the institute’s work is publicly available on GitHub, where anyone can submit contributions for consideration. The rest of the work, however, takes place in a private, “far more controlled” developer environment, Miller told Government Technology.
Would-be contributors must pass a vetting process that includes an FBI background check before they can get involved in any of the projects that could be used for election administration. Tools for activities like checking one’s voting registration status, meanwhile, require less clearance.
That high barrier to entry is unusual for the open source community, but necessary if government is to trust the offerings, Miller said. The organization has encountered threats in the past.
“On more than one occasion, we have had a developer who was making great contributions to the code base turn out to be somebody that the FBI informed us was not an individual that we should be working with,” he said. In one case, a participant was found to be “shuttling information abroad.” In another, the FBI discovered that a paid engineer had misrepresented their location and was accepting payments in a sanctioned country.
“I was brought in to the FBI. And I was shown who the person actually is,” Miller said. “It was jolting.”
Los Angeles County
Los Angeles County built its voting system using open source codebases and is seeking approval to release the system as open source, County Registrar Dean Logan told GovTech.
Should Los Angeles County publish its code, it intends to keep tabs on who engages. Those seeking to view or propose changes to the code would need to submit a “simple online application” form listing details like the person or entity’s name and reason for accessing the code, per the most exact “Preliminary Conditional Implementation Plan.” A team would review the requests, verify the user and make a record of their application information.
Another protective measure against malicious actors: California’s security and certification framework for voting systems “require[s] us, prior to any election, to escrow our code and also to certify a hash version of the software that we're using in the election with the Secretary of State, so they can match it against the code that's in escrow.” Logan said. “There is documentation and transparency to demonstrate that there hasn't been anything malicious introduced into the code since it was certified and tested. And that, while people might have access to view the codebase itself, they don't have access to get in and make changes to the code — at least not to the version of the code that's being used in the active elections.”
ElectionGuard
DARPA’s Bratus warned that projects’ polices around how bugs are reported could present further risks.
“For OSS projects that take the stance of not publicly distinguishing between exploitable bugs and functional bugs, adversaries may glean critical information before mitigations are completed, and interfere with the mitigations,” Bratus wrote.
Microsoft-sponsored open source software development kit (SDK) ElectionGuard addresses such concerns. The project site asks the community to report only “performance or feature bugs” in public GitHub comments and to follow separate restrictions for reporting discovered security vulnerabilities.
TRANSPARENCY V. RUMORS
Election denialism flourishes when the public doesn’t know what’s going on, said OSET’s Miller. Open source provides transparency to counter such fears.
“The goal of the voting system is not to convince the winner that they've won. The goal of a voting system is to convince the loser and their supporters that they've lost fair and square,” Miller said. Switching from proprietary software to open source is trading “a black box” for “a glass box.”
“As long as you have opacity or obsolescence, you deliver fuel — you deliver oxygen — to the deniers to make the argument that the system can't be trusted,” Miller said.
But open source projects must still be ready in case rumors pop up. For example, they should be prepared to communicate in case a bug discovery gets blown out of proportion, said L.A. County’s Logan.
Bad actors may try to “create a perception of vulnerability, or a perception of a security risk, that may or may not exist,” Logan said. “But once somebody puts that out there, it puts us in a defensive stance, which could create issues of public trust and confidence in the voting system.”
Dana DeBeauvoir is a member of OSET Institute’s board of directors and previously led the creation of STAR-Vote in her former role as Travis County Clerk.
Politicians and the general public at times cast doubt even on third-party audits of election systems. But making a system both open source and auditable can change that dynamic by putting so many eyes on the process that its results are harder to dispute, DeBeauvoir said.
“If it wasn’t your auditor, your friend, doing the audit, then nobody believed you,” DeBeauvoir said. But with open source, “if 1,000 eyes are all seeing the same thing, then it's a little hard to say that there's something wrong with it, or that it's hiding some Trojan problem or that it's inadequate, or incompetent in some way … a reasonable person could not question it.”
INNOVATING SECURITY FEATURES
Miller believes nonprofit open source projects like his OSET Institute are well-positioned to introduce new approaches that reflect updated thinking on cybersecurity and physical security.
For example, his company is preparing to pilot a voting registration database security system. The system tracks changes to voter rolls in a distributed ledger, to provide an immutable record that can be checked against claims of problems, such as duplicate votes and votes by dead people.
Miller said open source groups have greater freedom to invest in exploring new election administration ideas than do commercial vendors, because the latter are too constrained by the need to quickly demonstrate returns on investment and meet other commercial pressures.
“Innovation thrives unbridled, in the absence of restrictive commercial mandates,” Miller said.
Still, financial concerns are inescapable, especially for open source projects that avoid full reliance on volunteers. OSET Institute, for example, needs to raise millions of dollars to enable finishing and certifying its in-the-works open source software framework in time for the 2026 elections, Miller said.
And designing a secure offering is only one piece of the puzzle. Getting it used is a whole other question.
Jurisdictions need to be prepared to obtain and use the open source offerings or vendors need to take up the open source code and provide it to jurisdictions in a ready-to-go way.
Dr. Juan Gilbert is chair of the University of Florida’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department and first developed Prime III in 2003, before releasing it as open source in 2015.
But Gilbert said that the security debate around open source is “irrelevant. You don't even get to that conversation,” he told GovTech.
In his experience, even if the software works well, vendors haven’t been eager to embrace it and, too often, other factors have discouraged jurisdictions directly using the open source offerings.
What challenges can hold back jurisdictions from engaging with open source projects, what are the chances vendors will pick up these offerings and can open source tech still Strengthen the election landscape, even if they don’t get made?
Stay tuned for Part 2.
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The arts industry in Australia breathed a sigh of relief on Monday when the Labor government announced the country’s first national arts and cultural policy in nearly a decade, with Anthony Albanese declaring the arts to be “at the heart of our national life.”
The policy, called Revive, is set to deliver 286 million Australian dollars (about $202 million) over four years to, well, revive Australia’s arts, entertainment, and culture sectors, which some in the industry have described as being on life support after years of cancellations and postponements during the pandemic, and funding cuts by the previous Liberal government.
Not only does the policy inject new money into the fields, it also seems to suggest new directions for how we see the arts as in Australia and what kinds of arts we value and prioritize.
Most of the new funds will go to the Australia Council, the national organization that allocates arts money. The organization will also be rebranded as Creative Australia, and new bodies will be established within it dedicated music, literature, and workplace safety for artists.
The policy promises to prioritize Indigenous arts and culture, with a new Indigenous-led body to be created to advise on funding and investment decisions. In a break from previous approaches, commercial arts forms, like popular music, will also receive funding.
Kath Mainland, the chief executive of the Adelaide Festival, described the policy as a “really brilliant shot in the arm for the arts,” after a few dark pandemic years when she — and likely many others in the sector, she said — had something of an “existential crisis” about the value of the arts within broader society, at a time when artists were often unable to do their jobs.
“For well over a decade there’s been much more dying than living going on for the arts,” Eamon Flack, the director of Belvoir Street Theater in Sydney, said in a statement, adding that the new policy felt like “survival, maybe even the possibility of genuine cultural and artistic thriving.”
While the new policy was not “transformative,” said Ben Eltham, a lecturer at Monash University and expert in Australia’s cultural and creative industries, it was refreshing in its rhetorical shift and signaled a reversal of the scapegoating of the arts by the previous Liberal government.
“The arts was seen as easy target to beat up on politically,” he said, calling it “an opportunity to position yourself as anti-elitist and against culture and the arts, and it was thought that would help you to play to the suburbs and people who liked sports and footy.”
The investment in types of art like contemporary music, literature and games suggested “a more contemporary and perhaps a little bit more commercial direction in terms of the orientation of the funding,” Dr. Eltham added.
The way the arts has traditionally been funded in Australia, particularly through the Australia Council, has been criticized for prioritizing large heritage companies and traditional Western art forms, like opera and classical music.
That funding model was based on the idea of supporting “particular organizations that are believed to be necessary to the national cultural infrastructure,” said Jo Caust, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne who researches arts funding in Australia. But she added that the previous approach risked being out of sync in a country like Australia, which has many diverse cultures practicing many different types of art.
For example, she said, opera organizations receive the biggest share of funding from the Australia Council. While the opera is an important cultural institution, she said, “it’s really an art form for the elite in a population.”
Although the hierarchy for funding among different forms of art won’t change significantly under the new approach, Professor Caust said, the prioritization of First Nations art and mentions of inclusivity in the new policy are important steps forward.
Tech’s Biggest Companies Discover Austerity, to the Relief of Investors. After years of expansion and billions in profits, Big Tech is pulling back from its famously lavish spending as a long boom finally ends.
Biden Aims to Deter China With Greater U.S. Military Presence in Philippines. U.S. officials say they are preparing to build up their forces in the event of conflict with China, including over Taiwan, but do not intend to set up permanent bases.
A Proud Ship Turned Into a Giant Recycling Problem. So Brazil Plans to Sink It. The old aircraft carrier, once the navy’s flagship, is packed with asbestos. No country, including Brazil, will let it dock to be dismantled.
Why Do Bears Rub Against Trees? Scientists Offer New Explanations. In experiments, researchers found that ticks avoid the tar of beech trees, which bears seem to have an affinity toward.
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There’s a headline strategy that certain media outlets employ, asking an open-ended question to set up a few obvious thesis points. Some places are just lazy, too, though we certainly won’t name names (or numbers.) This isn’t one of those pieces. That headline above isn’t rhetorical. The PGA Tour‘s policy on social media clips and highlights is baffling to the point of requiring some kind of examination, and even after a deep dive, it’s so hard to fathom that we’d welcome any kind of outside input.
The policy in question refers to their draconian approach to issuing DMCA takedowns for golf highlights and clips. It happened to Awful Announcing on Tuesday, nuking the feed entirely.
That was for an innocuous tweet pointing out something fun during a golf broadcast this weekend – Colt Knost’s great call of Jon Rahm’s birdie putt on Saturday in the party atmosphere of the 16th hole at the Phoenix Open. That’s the pattern, though. And while this column might not exist today if the Tour hadn’t blown up the site account, it’s important to note that it’s not a personal vendetta here. This is a longstanding pattern of behavior that has affected people all across golf and sports media who have been doing free work getting PGA Tour-related content out to the universe.
It’s happened to me personally, too. Memorably once while I highlighted a really fun moment of work from Christina Kim on commentary in 2020.
There are a few levels of complaint here, and we’ll address one first here: it makes our jobs harder. That’s not really something we expect sympathy for, to be clear. And it’s fairly common for some people on Twitter to say things like “Well it’s not your content!” when issues like this happen.
This is true! It isn’t! It’s not our hosting platform, either, and if the PGA Tour wants to crack down on videos being sent out on Twitter, they’re well within their legal right to do so, as are other leagues. That’s not the debate, though; the debate is why? What purpose does this possibly serve?
The PGA Tour has both explicitly and implicitly acknowledged the threat they’re currently facing from LIV Golf, the Saudi-funded organization that has proven to be bumbling and incompetent at nearly every turn.
The ethical high ground and LIV’s own ineptitude have so far combined to protect the PGA Tour, somewhat, but they’ve still lost numerous recognizable names to a rival league and had to adjust their own payout structure on the fly in major ways. That a longstanding top American sporting organization could feel that kind of outside pressure from a Greg Norman-led group scrounging for a CW distribution deal is a major sign of institutional vulnerability. Imagine if whoever had challenged the Tour had done so with less odorous financial backing and real sharks in the c-suite.
The Tour should from any reasonable perspective be viewing social media reach for what it is: free marketing. Certainly not entire broadcasts being pirated, no one is suggesting that. But a fair use highlight clip relevant to a certain site’s audience feels very much like something other leagues would be glad to see shared.
We do a lot of ManningCast clips, for example, and it’s never been an issue because ESPN and the NFL understand that generating social media buzz for an event without having to pay for placement is very much a net positive for them. The PGA Tour takes an opposite approach, which is a wild choice for a sport that is so clearly and thirstily desperate for a younger audience, as evidenced by their partnership with Netflix on the just-released Full Swing.
That conflict in strategy is the sign of a rudderless ship, which should be much, much more concerning to the people in charge at Tour HQ than unaffiliated Twitter accounts providing free signal boosts.
The post What’s the point of the PGA Tour social media policy? appeared first on Awful Announcing.
Pope Francis has consistently supported a change to the Church's approach towards LGBTQ people.
Vatican Media/CNA
Pope Francis’ call for the decriminalisation of homosexuality is another step in his pontificate’s reframing of the Church’s pastoral approach to gay and lesbian Catholics.
Francis is the first Pope officially to support the repeal of laws that persecute LGBTQ people, and wants bishops in countries where homosexuality is illegal to do the same.
The timing of his remarks is significant given they were made in an interview with Associated Press released less than a week before the 86-year-old Pope travels to Africa, a continent where anti-gay laws are common.
According to Human Rights Watch, at least 67 countries criminalise consensual same-sex relations, most of them in Africa and the Middle East.
Some bishops in these countries have supported anti-gay laws, while others have spoken out against them.
Francis now wants a consistent approach saying Church leaders need a “process of conversion” and to remember the “tenderness” God has for each person.
While the Pope was clear about decriminalisation, his remarks in the interview about homosexuality being a sin have been misinterpreted in certain parts of the English-speaking world.
As sometimes happens when Francis speaks or gives interviews when talking about homosexuality, Pope imagines a dialogue.
“Being homosexual is not a crime. It is not a crime,” he says. “Yes, but it is a sin. Well, first let us distinguish sin from crime. But it is also a sin the lack of charity with the neighbour, and how are you doing [on that one]?”
Some have suggested that the Pope is saying that being homosexual is sinful.
However, Fr James Alison, a theologian and fluent Spanish speaker, says the line “but it is a sin” is placed by the Pope in the mouth of an imagined objector.
In the interview, which was conducted in Spanish, Francis also says that homosexuality is part of the “human condition” and that “God loves us as we are.”
Fr Alison, known for his work on LGBTQ questions, describes the claim that the Pope has called homosexuality a sin as “false” and one which would contradict the official Church teaching that the homosexual inclination is not in itself a sin.
In 2019, Fr Alison explained how he had received a phone call from the Pope giving him the go-ahead to continue with his work, despite the priest and author facing attempts to have him laicised.
What Francis’ comments once again show is the slow, yet steady, shift taking place inside the Church on LGBTQ Catholics, something which was kick-started almost ten years ago when Francis said, “Who am I to judge?”
His appeal for decriminalisation shows the Pope is not simply uttering nice words about gay people but is ready to use his moral authority to insist they receive legal protections.
The Church teaches that same-sex sexual activity is sinful. Francis has not changed teaching in this regard nor signalled that he will.
In 2021 he signed off on a Vatican ruling forbidding same-sex blessings (although he later distanced himself from the language in the document).
But it is significant that when the Pope talked about whether homosexual behaviour is a sin, he stressed that it is also a sin to lack charity to your neighbour.
In other words: stop singling out gay people.
Furthermore, the Pope’s statement of fact that homosexuality is part of the “human condition” could also open the door to a revision of the Church’s catechism where the homosexual “inclination” is described as “objectively disordered”.
Some have suggested that this could be changed to “differently ordered” to make it clear that same-sex orientation is not in itself sinful, while German Cardinal Reinhard Marx says the wording of the catechism in this area is “not set in stone” and could be changed.
The bigger question is whether the “sociological-scientific foundation” on which Church teaching is based on is still correct, as Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich has remarked.
While Francis has not formally shifted official Church teaching on homosexuality, he has changed the conversation and the approach.
The Jesuit Pope has placed emphasis on the section of the catechism, which states that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity and that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided”.
He has pledged his support for same-sex civil unions, effectively overturning a 2003 Vatican document which said it was “necessary to oppose legal recognition of homosexual unions”, and has moved away from the harsh and condemnatory language used by the Vatican in the past.
Francis has also given his backing to Sister Jeannine Gramick, one of the founders of New Ways Ministry, a US-based support group for LGBTQ Catholics, and has praised Fr James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, for his ministry to gay people.
Fr Martin has experienced a torrent of unpleasant comments on social media, including death threats, for his work in this area.
When it comes to LGBTQ Catholics, the temptation is to exclude or reject, but Francis is showing this is the very opposite of what it means to be Catholic, which by definition means universal and all-embracing.
Throughout his almost ten-year pontificate, the Pope has sought to root his approach to gay people in both the nature of God and the words of Jesus.
CTCF is a critical protein known to play various roles in key biological processes such as transcription. Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital used a next-generation protein degradation technology to study CTCF. Their work revealed the superiority of the approach in addition to providing functional insights into how CTCF regulates transcription. The study, published today in Genome Biology,paves the way for more clear, nuanced studies of CTCF.
Transcription is an essential biological process where DNA is copied into RNA. The process is the first required step in a cell to take the instructions housed in DNA and ultimately translate that code into the amino acid or polypeptide building blocks that become active proteins. Dysregulated transcription plays a role in many types of pediatric cancer. Finding ways to modify or target aspects of the transcriptional machinery is a novel frontier in the search for vulnerabilities that can be exploited therapeutically.
While the biology of CTCF has been extensively studied, how the different domains (parts) of CTCF function in relation to transcription regulation remains unclear.
One of the most valuable ways to study a protein is to degrade, or remove, it from a model system. In the protein's absence, researchers can study the functional changes that occur, providing insight into how the protein influences a cell. One system for degrading proteins is the auxin-inducible degron 1 (AID1) system. However, this system has limitations when investigating the function of CTCF, such as the high dosage dependency of auxin, which causes cellular toxicity that muddles results.
Scientists at St. Jude applied the second-generation system, auxin-inducible degron 2 (AID2) to CTCF (the system was developed by Masato Kanemaki, Ph.D., at the National Institute of Genetics). This system is superior for loss-of-function studies, overcoming the limitations of the AID1 system and eliminating the off-target effects seen with previous approaches.
"We've cracked open the understanding of the impact of CTCF using a degradation model, the AID2 system," said co-corresponding author Chunliang Li, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Tumor Cell Biology. "Using this system, we identified the rules that govern CTCF-dependent transcription regulation."
"When the CTCF protein is gone, we and others have observed that very few genes transcriptionally change," Li said. "We know when we remove most of the CTCF protein in cells, the impact on transcription is minimal. So, the disconnect between the depletion of protein and transcription must be following a mechanism. We identified part of the mechanism. The protein not only relies on binding to the DNA through the recognition of the CTCF DNA binding motif, but also relies on certain domains to bind to specific sequences flanking the motif. For a subset of genes, transcription is regulated only when CTCF binds to these specific sequences."
"Swapping system" sheds light on the role of zinc finger domains
The researchers combined the AID2 system with leading-edge techniques such as SLAM-seq and sgRNA screening to study how the degradation of CTCF alters transcription.
"With degradation we can create a very clean background, and then introduce a mutant. This switch happens very fast, so we call it a fast-swapping system," Li said. "This is the first time a clean and fast-swapping system has been used to study individual mutants of CTCF."
Through their work the scientists identified the zinc finger (ZF) domain as the region within CTCF with the most functional relevance, including ZF1 and ZF10. Removing ZF1 and ZF10 from the model system revealed genomic regions that independently require these ZFs for binding DNA and regulating transcription.
"CTCF itself is a multifunctional protein," said co-first author Judith Hyle, St. Jude Department of Tumor Cell Biology. "It has various roles in a cell from chromatin architecture maintenance to transcription regulation, either as an activator or repressor of transcription. Our interest is how CTCF is involved in transcriptional regulation, and with this new system we were able to degrade CTCF much more rapidly, and home in on the specific targets of CTCF. We were able to assign some function to these peripheral zinc fingers that have not been well understood, showing that certain regions within the genome required or were dependent upon these zinc finger bindings for transcriptional regulation. That was the first time that had been seen or confirmed in a cellular system."
An open door for further research
The superior system allowed the researchers to introduce mutations that could be tracked through their model. Scientists then conducted functional studies to understand the consequences of such mutations regarding CTCF binding and transcriptional regulation.
Of the new approach, co-first author Mohamed Nadhir Djekidel, Ph.D., St. Jude Center for Applied Bioinformatics, said "because you can get clean data about the mutants when endogenous protein is degraded, you can actually infer the gene regulatory network, and that opens the door for different downstream analysis to understand how regulation works."
The study demonstrates the superiority of the AID2 system for degrading proteins and showcases the importance of studying CTCF in a clear system. This is important verification for other researchers in the field of transcriptional regulation research. The work also revealed new avenues for research on this key protein.
Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN —
The war in Ukraine is at a stalemate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not changing. General David Petraeus predicts the war will look different this year with significant offensives likely staged by the two sides. Overall, the war continues to demonstrate basic weaknesses in Russia’s military, which was once thought to be one of the most capable in the world.
Petraeus has spent decades studying warfare and practicing its application. He was the US and coalition commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and later served as director of the CIA. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton with a dissertation on the Vietnam War and the lessons the American military took from it. Petraeus is also the co-author, with British historian Andrew Roberts, of the forthcoming book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.”
As we approach the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, I asked Petraeus to reflect on the larger lessons of the war.
He says the Russians have lost many battles because of multiple failures of their military culture, doctrine, organizational structures, training and equipping. While Petraeus says this is in many ways the first open-source war, other aspects are being fought with Cold War tactics and weapons – albeit with upgraded capabilities, drones and precision munitions.
Petraeus, who criticized the Biden administration’s withdrawal of Afghanistan, strikes a different tone on Ukraine. He says the President’s team has done a very impressive job of leading NATO and the West to counter the Russian invasion, though there have been times he would have liked to have seen decisions to provide certain weapons systems (such as western tanks and longer-range precision munitions) made sooner than they were.
The enormous US and western support of Ukraine means, Petraeus observes, that while the Russians may be preparing to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into Ukraine in a new offensive, they will face off in the coming months with better-trained and better-organized Ukrainian soldiers armed with American longer-range missiles, armored vehicles and a tremendous amount of ammunition. And Petraeus says his money is still on the Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, as Petraeus notes, though Russian President Vladimir Putin set out to Make Russia Great Again with his invasion of Ukraine, he has, instead, achieved exactly that with the NATO alliance.
We conducted the interview over email.
Bergen: Who’s winning the war?
Petraeus: It is not Russia. Russia has, after all, lost the Battles of Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv; failed to take the rest of Ukraine’s southern coast (not even getting through Mykolaiv, much less to the major port at Odesa).
It has lost what it had gained in Kharkiv province. And it has had to withdraw its only forces west of the Dnipro River in Kherson province because the Ukrainians made the vital bridge connections to those forces impassable, took out the headquarters and logistics sites supporting those forces, and isolated them from the rest of the Russian elements east of the river.
That said, the battle lines since the withdrawal of the forces west of the Dnipro last fall have been fairly static, although Russian forces have made grinding, incremental and very costly gains in villages around Bakhmut in southeast Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are having to commit additional forces to defend the areas under pressure.
So, the situation is essentially a stalemate at present, albeit with Russia making costly attacks in several areas, and with both sides building up forces for offensive operations expected in the late winter (likely the Russians) and spring/summer (the Ukrainians).
The side that generates the most capable, well-trained and well-equipped forces by then will make the most significant gains. And my bet is on Ukraine in that regard.
Bergen: What are the lessons of the Ukraine War for the future of warfare?
Petraeus: I think we should recognize that, with a few exceptions, Ukraine is not the future of warfare. In large measure, it is what we would have seen had the Cold War turned hot in the mid-1980s – with largely Cold War weapons systems (albeit with some modernization).
We are, however, seeing some glimpses and hints of what the future of warfare might look like. We see the Ukrainian use of drones (of only modest range and capability) as aerial observers identifying Russian headquarters and other targets for the precision munitions the US has provided (which will double in range from 70-80 kilometers to 150 kilometers when the just announced US precision munitions arrive in Ukraine).
We see the impact of sophisticated, western-provided fire-and-forget shoulder-launched anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. We have seen the impact of select use of medium-range anti-ship missiles. And we have seen use of offensive cyber capabilities, though not with enormous success, by the Russians.
Perhaps most notably, of course, we see a war taking place, for the first time, in a context that includes the widespread presence of smart phones, internet connectivity, and social media and other internet sites.
But, again, these are just hints of what the future of war between advanced powers would be. In such a conflict, the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems would be incomparably more capable; precision munitions would have vastly greater range, speed and explosive power.
And there would incomparably greater numbers of vastly more capable unmanned systems (some remotely piloted, others operating according to algorithms) in every domain – not just in the air, but also at sea, sub-sea, on the ground, in outer space, and in cyberspace, and operating in swarms, not just individually!
And every intelligence and strike capability will be integrated and connected by advanced command, control, communications and computer systems.
I recall an adage back in the Cold War days that stated, “If it can be seen, it can be hit; if it can be hit, it can be killed.” In truth, we didn’t have the surveillance assets, precision munitions and other capabilities needed to truly “operationalize” that adage in those days. In the future, however, just about everything – certainly every platform, base and headquarters – will be seen and thus be susceptible to being hit and destroyed (unless there are substantial defenses and hardening of those assets).
Imagining all this underscores, of course, that we must take innumerable actions to transform our forces and systems. We must deter future conflict by ensuring that there are no questions about our capabilities or our willingness to employ them – and also by doing everything possible to ensure that competition among great powers does not turn into conflict among them.
Bergen: Several years back, some people were calling NATO obsolete. Is it?
Petraeus: This question gets at one of the ironies of the situation. Putin set out to “Make Russia Great Again.” However, what he has done is make NATO great again – with two very capable, historically neutral powers (Finland and Sweden) seeking NATO membership; with substantially increased defense spending by NATO members, most notably Germany; with augmentation of NATO forces in the Baltic states and eastern Europe; and with the greatest unity among NATO members since the end of the Cold War.
Thanks to Putin, the description of NATO as suffering from “brain death” by French President Macron in late 2019 has turned out to be more than a bit premature.
Bergen: Is the Russian military’s performance in Ukraine surprising to you?
Petraeus: Not completely. In an interview with The Atlantic published shortly before the Russian invasion, I explained the considerable difficulties I expected Russia would encounter and noted that an invasion force of some 190,000 was much less than what likely would be required, especially if the Ukrainians proved to be as determined as I thought they would be (and they have been even more so).
Beyond that, though, even I didn’t foresee how miserably the Russians would perform.
Bergen: Is Russia failing because of failures of intelligence? Failures of its conscripts? Failures of Russian military culture? All the above?
Petraeus: All of the above and more. The list is long, including poor campaign design; wholly inadequate training (what were they doing for all those months they were deployed on the northern, eastern, and southern borders of Ukraine?); poor command, control, and communications; inadequate discipline (and a culture that condones war crimes and abuse of local populations); poor equipment (exemplified by turrets blowing off of tanks when fires ignite in them); insufficient logistic capabilities; inability to achieve combined arms effects (to employ all ground and air capabilities effectively together); inadequate organizational architecture; lack of a professional noncommissioned officer corps; a top-down command system that does not promote initiative at lower levels and pervasive corruption that undermines every aspect of their military – and the supporting military-industrial complex.
Bergen: So, do we not have to worry about Russia as a “great power” anymore?
Petraeus: Not at all. Russia still has enormous military capacity and is certainly still a nuclear superpower, as well as a country with enormous energy, mineral and agricultural blessings. It also has a population (about 145 million) that is nearly double that of the next largest European countries (Germany and Turkey, each just more than 80 million).
And it is still led by a kleptocratic dictator who embraces innumerable grievances and extreme revanchist views that severely undermine his decision-making.
Bergen: You know the observation sometimes attributed to Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Russia has a far bigger population than Ukraine: Will that make a critical difference to the Ukraine war over the long term?
Petraeus: It could if Putin mobilized all of Russia successfully. However, to date, the mobilizations have been partial, as Putin seems to fear how the country might respond to total mobilization. In fact, reportedly, more Russian men left the country than reported to the mobilization stations in response to the latest partial call-up of reserves.
Nonetheless, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 new recruits and mobilized reservists are being sent to the frontlines, with up to 100,000-150,000 more on the way. And that is not trivial – because quantity does, indeed, matter.
This is how Ukrainians are training to use Leopard 2 tanks
Bergen: But is Napoleon correct in this case: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one” – and Ukrainian morale seems to be higher.
Petraeus: That is a huge factor. Ukrainians sees the ongoing conflict as their War of Independence, and they have responded accordingly. President Volodomyr Zelensky has been positively Churchillian in rallying all Ukrainians to the service of their country as it fights for its national survival.
Thus, Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, while it is not clear that the same is true of many of the Russian soldiers, a disproportionate number of whom are from ethnic and sectarian minorities in the Russian Federation.
Moreover, Ukraine has, to date, done a better job than Russia of recruiting, training, equipping, organizing and employing additional forces – enabled by the extraordinary support provided by the US (more than $26 billion in arms, ammunition, and other security assistance since the beginning of the latest invasion) and other NATO and western countries. And I think we will see further evidence of this when Ukraine launches its counter-offensive in the spring or summer.
Bergen: What technologies have proven key to Ukrainian successes in this war? Several newish technologies seem to have proven important: Elon Musk’s Starlink mobile satellite systems kept communications open for the Ukrainians after the Russians had partially destroyed the phone system and jammed it. US-supplied HIMARS precision rockets have decimated Russian targets. Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology used by some US police departments, has enabled the Ukrainians to identify Russian soldiers on the battlefield. TB2 Turkish armed drones have proven devastating to Russian targets and cheap commercial drones have helped the Ukrainians find targets.
Petraeus: All of those technologies have proven very important, and the Ukrainians have demonstrated enormous skill in adapting various technologies and commercial applications to enable intelligence gathering, targeting and other military tasks.
In fact, the Ukrainians have also shown exceptional abilities to “McGyver” solutions for a variety of problems – whether adapting Western missiles for use on MiG-29 fighter aircraft, repairing battle-damaged armored vehicles left on the battlefield by the Russians (remember the Ukrainians’ “tractor army”), or jamming Russian communications.
And the Ukrainians also have demonstrated a very impressive ability to learn how to employ new weapons systems and vehicles much more rapidly than anyone anticipated, as they want to master new capabilities as quickly as is possible and get back to the fight.
Bergen: How would you grade the Biden administration’s approach to the Ukraine war?
Petraeus: I think the Biden Administration has led NATO and the rest of the western world very impressively in responding to the Russian invasion – providing enormous quantities of arms, ammunition, and other material and economic assistance. And also guiding the effort to impose economic, financial and personal sanctions and export controls on Russia. (And I offer this, noting that I am not a member of a political party and was very critical of the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and the way the withdrawal was conducted.)
To be sure, there have been times when I have felt that we should have decided to provide various capabilities (e.g., HIMARS, longer-range precision munitions, tanks, etc.) sooner than we have.
However, having sat around the Situation Room table in the West Wing of the White House, I know that it is far easier to second-guess from the outside than it is to make tough calls in office. But there are some additional capabilities (advanced drones, even longer-range precision munitions, fighter aircraft, and additional air defense and counter-drone capabilities) that I would like to see us provide sooner rather than later.
Eventually, for example, Ukraine is going to have to transition from eastern bloc aircraft (e.g., MiG-29s) to western ones (e.g., F-16s). There just aren’t any more MiGs to provide to them, and they reportedly have more pilots than aircraft at this point.
So, we might as well begin the process of transition, noting that it will take a number of months, regardless, to train pilots and maintenance personnel. All that said, again, I think the Administration has done a very impressive job and proven to be the indispensable nation in this particular situation – with important ramifications for other situations around the world.
Bergen: How would you grade Putin in this campaign? Has he got anything right?
Petraeus: Putin has earned a failing grade to date. Let’s recall that the first and most important task of a strategic leader is to “get the big ideas right” – that is, to get the overall strategy and fundamental decisions right. Putin clearly has failed abysmally in that task, resulting in a war that has made him and his country a pariah, set back the Russian economy by a decade or more (losing many of Russia’s best and brightest, and prompting over 1,200 western companies to leave Russia or reduce operations there), done catastrophic damage to the Russian military and its reputation and put his legacy in serious jeopardy.
That said, we should not underestimate Putin. He still believes that Russia can “out-suffer” the Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans in the same way that Russians out-suffered Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s Nazis. And the US and our NATO and western allies and partners need to do all that we can, as quickly as we can, to enable Ukraine and prove Putin wrong.
Bergen: The quasi-private Wagner Group is the force that Putin sends into the meat grinder of the toughest battles. Any thoughts on using mercenaries, many of whom are convicts, as a tactic?
Petraeus: What Russia has done with what are, in essence, mercenaries, as you note, is somewhat innovative – but also essentially inhumane, as it entails throwing soldiers (many of them former convicts) into battle as cannon fodder, and with little, if any, concern for their survival.
These are not the tactics or practices that, at the end of the day, foster development of well-trained, disciplined, capable, and cohesive units that have trust in their leaders and soldiers on their left and right.
Bergen: What are the lessons of Ukraine for the Chinese if they were to stage an invasion of Taiwan, which would not be over a neighboring land border but over a 100-mile body of water? Does the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea navy, reshape how the Chinese might think about this question?
Petraeus: As a general observation, I think the developments in Ukraine have to be a cautionary tale for any country around the world contemplating a very challenging military operation – especially if that country’s forces have not engaged in major (or any) combat operations in many decades.
And especially if the target of such an operation has a population willing to fight fiercely for its survival and be supported by major powers – not just militarily but with substantial economic, financial, and personal sanctions and export controls.
Bergen: Putin has hinted at using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine: Is that plausible? What would/should the US response be were that to happen?
Petraeus: It is certainly possible that Putin could order Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Peter, and we should be concerned about that possibility. However, that would be an incredibly bad decision on his part, as use of such weapons would result in Russia being in a worse situation than it was before their use, rather than a better situation.
And it is critical that the leaders of the US and other western nations – and of China and India, as well – convey clearly and repeatedly to Putin that the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons for Russia would, indeed, be “catastrophic,” to quote US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Bergen: Is this the first truly open-source war? The war in Ukraine is being fought in part on social media by Zelensky; commercial overhead satellites capture Russian battle groups moving around in real-time, and the social media accounts of Russian mercenaries in the Wagner Group document what they are doing.
Petraeus: Yes, I believe it is. This is the first war in which smartphones and social media have been so widely available and also so widely employed. The result is unprecedented transparency and an extraordinary amount of information available – all through so-called “open sources.”
Bergen: What does Putin want?
Petraeus: In the long term, Putin still wants to deny Ukraine its sovereignty and make it part of the Russian Federation. In Putin’s grievance-filled, revisionist version of history, Ukraine does not have a right to exist as an independent country.
That said, in the short term, having failed to take control of Kyiv and replace President Zelensky with a pro-Russian figure, Putin is seeking to expand the area of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces. Particularly in the southeastern part of Russia, and to solidify Russian control over the provinces that connect Russia with Crimea in the so-called land bridge, so that Russia does not have to rely solely on the Kerch Strait Bridge for connection with Crimea.
Bergen: Does Putin have a plan? Or is he just improvising?
Petraeus: Well, Putin recently made General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, the commander of the war in Ukraine, presumably to ensure that the Russian Military and Ministry of Defense are doing all that they can to generate additional forces for the battlefield in Ukraine. And Russia has been seeking additional arms, ammunition, and weapons systems from other countries – such as Iran and North Korea – to make up for the shortfalls in production of Russia’s military industries that are constrained by export controls.
Beyond that, it appears that Russia is massing replacement soldiers and additional units to launch an offensive to take the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the southeast, that they do not control – while also establishing defensive positions in depth in other areas that they control in the south.
That said, there does not seem to be a particularly innovative new plan, given the limitations of the professional capabilities of the Russian forces and their demonstrated inability to generate “combined arms effect” – to integrate the actions of tanks with infantry, artillery/mortars, engineers, explosive ordnance disposal, electronic warfare, fixed and rotary wing close air support, air defenses, effective command and control, drones, etc.
In the absence of that, we will likely see more of what we have seen in the past – Russian commanders throwing recently mobilized, inadequately trained, and poorly equipped soldiers into tough fights. And supported by massive artillery and rocket fires (assuming they can maintain the supply of artillery rounds and rockets), to achieve grinding, costly, incremental gains – with, perhaps, an occasional limited breakthrough.
And all of this will be happening while we await the Ukrainian offensive that will be launched in the spring or summer, with much better trained, better equipped and more capable Ukrainian forces.
Bergen: How will the next stage of the war be different from the first year?
Petraeus: There will be several new features this year, most significantly the additional capabilities on the Ukrainian side: Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; longer-range and larger precision munitions for the US-provided HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket systems) that will enable precise strikes out to 150 kilometers (twice the range of the current precision munition); additional air defense systems of various types; augmented air defenses and additional wheeled armored vehicles, as well as enormous quantities of additional ammunition of all types.
Beyond that, I believe we will see Ukrainian forces that are much more capable than the Russians at achieving the kind of combined arms effects that I described earlier and that thus enable much more effective offensive operations and can unhinge some of the Russian defenses. We may not see all this, however, until the spring or even summer, given the amount of time required for Ukrainian forces to receive and train on the new western tanks and other systems.
Meanwhile, in addition to the Russian offensive I mentioned earlier, I fear we will also see additional Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure with Russian missiles and rockets, as well as with Iranian-provided drones – which underscores the importance of doing all that we can to further constrain the Russian arms industries and also those of Iran.
Bergen: In 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq War, you famously asked a rhetorical question: “Tell me how this ends?” For the war in Ukraine: How does this end?
Petraeus: I think it ends in a negotiated resolution, when Putin recognizes that the war is unsustainable on both the battlefield (where Russia has in the first year likely taken many times the losses that the USSR took in nearly a decade in Afghanistan) and on the home front (which has been heavily impacted by economic, financial, economic, and personal sanctions and export controls).
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Also when Ukraine reaches the limits of its ability to withstand missile and drone strikes, getting a Marshall-like plan (developed by the US and G7) to help rebuild the country, and gaining an ironclad security guarantee (either NATO membership or, if that is not possible, a US-led coalition guarantee).
A security guarantee will be critical to enabling the success of the reconstruction effort and attracting outside investment.
