Daily Archives: July 5, 2017

Russias military capabilities are expanding across Europe, but the top military chief of Western defense pact NATO has said Moscows plans remain ambiguous amid a heavily politicized atmosphere between the two leading forces.

General Petr Pavel, a Czech army officer who holds the position of chairman of NATOs Military Committee, said Monday that Russia was advancing in its nuclear and ballistic capabilities as well as in its capacity to send troops across the region, where Moscow and U.S.-led NATO are competing for influence. The two factions have accused one another of crossing lines both figuratively and literally, by effectively launching an arms race, especially along the increasingly militarized borders of the Baltic States. Amid these dueling accusations, however, Pavel said that NATO could not conclusively consider Russias military buildup in recentyears an act of aggression against NATO and its Western allies.

Related: Russian military uses new war weapon to fight ISIS in Syria

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When it comes to capability, there is no doubt that Russia is developing their capabilities both in conventional and nuclear components, Pavel told Politico. When it comes to exercises, their ability to deploy troops forlong distance and to use them effectively quite far away from their own territory, there are no doubts.

When it comes to intent, its not so clear, because we cannot clearly say that Russia has aggressive intents againstNATO,he added.

Russian servicemen march in the Chechen capital of Grozny, Russia, during the Victory Day military parade, marking the 72nd anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, May 9, 2017. Like NATO, Russia has expanded its military presence in Europe, where some nations accuse Moscow of increasingly aggressive behavior. Said Tsarnayev/Reuters

NATO and Russia have pursued clashing agendas in recent years, especially since Russia annexed theCrimean Peninsula amid political unrest in Ukraine in 2014. Russia argued that the move was necessary to protect the sizable ethnic Russian community, but NATO viewed the action, as well as Moscows support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, as an unacceptable breach of its neighbors sovereignty. The fallout led to the eventual creation of four so-called battle groups in the three Baltic States and Poland, all of which have received extensive personnel and armaments from the U.S., Canada and their European allies.

Russia has also fortified its side of the border, which includes the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. Last year, Moscow moved nuclear-capable missiles along with other military assets to the coastal territory, which lies between Lithuania and Poland. Both sides of the conflict have also separately held a number of drills in the strategic region. Russias latest drill includes China,and anupcoming exercise with Belarus called Zapad, or West, will utilize up to 100,000 troops in a simulated NATO invasion from the Baltics. Defense Secretary James Mattis echoed local allied leaders in calling the massive maneuvers destabilizing.

While Russias moves have been decried by NATO and its regional partners, Pavel maintains that such a military expansion could not alone be considered an act of war. Russia has long argued that its decision to upgrade and increase its arsenal was taken in defense of what it believes to be an aggressive posturing by the U.S., which has deployed military installations on both sides of Russia, including asophisticated global anti-missile system. Despite Russias 5.9 percent increase in military spending, which totaled $69.2 billion last year, NATOs collective $254 billionwithout the U.S. and Canadastill wildly exceeds Moscows budget, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

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Russia Is Expanding Its Military, but NATO Isn't Sure Why - Newsweek

Cybersecurity

The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCD COE)believes a nation state is likely behind the Petya/NotPetya malware attack and is contemplating response options as a former Pentagon official takes over the alliance's tech and cyber office.

The Department of Homeland Security is also issuing warnings to infrastructure providers and operators of industrial control systems that their operations are at risk due to the dissemination of Petya and its variants.

The CCD COE, which is funded by NATO nations but is not part ofNATOs military command or force structure,released a statement on June 30, saying that accurate attribution is difficult to come by, but that cyber criminals were not behind the Petya attack.

"NotPetya was probably launched by a state actor or a non-state actor with support or approval from a state," stated the center, which is based in Tallinn, Estonia. "Other options are unlikely."

The center said that while a cyber operation with effects similar to an armed attack could trigger an Article 5 military response, so far -- despite the significant impact of the NotPetya attack -- there is no evidence of damage akin to a kinetic strike.

"As important government systems have been targeted, then in case the operation is attributed to a state this could count as a violation of sovereignty," said Tom Minrik, a researcher at the center's Law Branch, in the statement. "Consequently, this could be an internationally wrongful act, which might give the targeted states several options to respond with countermeasures."

The statement argues that NotPetya was more targeted than the WannaCry attack that used the same primary vulnerability -- EternalBlue, which was allegedly stolen from the National Security Agency and leaked in April 2017.

The center said that NotPetya was carried out by a different entity than the WannaCry ransomware attack, and that Petya's ransomware aspect was a cover for a more targeted operation, such as "causing economic losses, sowing chaos, or perhaps testing attack capabilities or showing own power."

"Malware analysissupports the theory that main purpose of the malware was to be destructive because key used for encrypting the hard disk was discarded," the NATO CCD COE stated.

In the wake of the Petya attacks that plagued banks, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team warned U.S. infrastructure providers the attack could presage something more ominous.

ICS-CERT's Petya alert, posted on June 30 and updated July 3, warned that the malware had a variant that could be aimed at damaging networks and might not be seeking money. Petya, said the alert, has been known by ICS-CERT as a possible attack vector since 2016.

The new "Nyetya" variant, said a crosslink on CERT's page by Cisco's Talos Intelligence blog, was written by someone looking only to wipe data from disks and not restore it, even if ransom is paid.

"Talos believes that the actors behind Nyetya did not [intend] for the boot sector or the ten sectors that are wiped to be restorable," said the blog. "Thus, Nyetya is intended to be destructive rather than as a tool for financial gain."

Nyetya, said the ICS-CERT, is a new addition to the Petya malware, which keyed on a supply chain attack on a Ukrainian tax preparation software MEDoc.

Ukrainian police seized additional M.E. Doc servers after detecting new suspicious activity as the firm was preparing to release another update. Given the number of cyber attacks against Ukraine that have been attributed to Russia in recent years, officials in Ukraine are accusing Russia of launching this latest attack.

The ongoing investigations into Petya come as Kevin Scheid is taking the reins at NATO's Communications and Information Agency -- which is similar in nature and responsibility to the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency.

Scheid's lengthy resume includes stints at OMB and the CIA, and as DOD's deputy comptroller and acting deputy chief management officer. From 2009-2013 he served as NATO's deputy general manager and director of acquisition of NATO NCI.

Scheid said in an interview with NATO public affairs that his first steps will be a series of deep dives into "areas of finance and the customer-funded regime, personnel management and the contract issues and how that is progressing, in acquisition, as well as the management of the organization."

Scheid served as deputy comptroller at the Pentagon while the U.S. was spending some $700 billion a year on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he will now be looking to squeeze the most he can out of NCI's one-billion Euro budget.

NATO is planning to spend three billion Euros on network modernization, mobility, authentication, cloud and weapon-systems software programs and upgrades in the next two years.

"The NATO Nations are careful with the money they invest in these projects, so every Euro is important," he said. "I think it's one of the big challenges in this job."

Note: This article was corrected on July 5 to make clear that theNATOCooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence is not part of NATO proper.

About the Authors

Sean Carberry is an FCW staff writer covering defense, cybersecurity and intelligence. Prior to joining FCW, he was Kabul Correspondent for NPR, and also served as an international producer for NPR covering the war in Libya and the Arab Spring. He has reported from more than two-dozen countries including Iraq, Yemen, DRC, and South Sudan. In addition to numerous public radio programs, he has reported for Reuters, PBS NewsHour, The Diplomat, and The Atlantic.

Carberry earned a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and has a B.A. in Urban Studies from Lehigh University.

Mark Rockwell is a staff writer at FCW.

Before joining FCW, Rockwell was Washington correspondent for Government Security News, where he covered all aspects of homeland security from IT to detection dogs and border security. Over the last 25 years in Washington as a reporter, editor and correspondent, he has covered an increasingly wide array of high-tech issues for publications like Communications Week, Internet Week, Fiber Optics News, tele.com magazine and Wireless Week.

Rockwell received a Jesse H. Neal Award for his work covering telecommunications issues, and is a graduate of James Madison University.

Click here for previous articles by Rockwell. Contact him at mrockwell@fcw.com or follow him on Twitter at @MRockwell4.

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NATO cyber center, DHS probe Petya attack - FCW.com

WARSAW U.S. President Donald Trump meets eastern NATO allies in Warsaw on Thursday amid expectations he will reaffirm Washington's commitment to counter threats from Russia after unnerving them in May by failing to endorse the principle of collective defense.

En route to a potentially fractious G20 summit in Germany, Trump will take part in a gathering of leaders from central Europe, Baltic states and the Balkans, an event convened by Poland and Croatia to boost regional trade and infrastructure.

The White House has said Trump will use the stopover in Warsaw to showcase his commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which he once called "obsolete", a likely effort to patch up relations after the tense alliance summit in May.

Poland's conservative and euroskeptic government, which shares views with Trump on issues such climate change, migration and coal mining, has hailed the U.S. president's visit as a recognition of its role as a leading voice in central Europe.

The west Europeans, critical of Poland's democratic record, will be watchful as to whether Trump, who will give a major policy speech on a Warsaw square, may encourage its government in its defiance of Brussels.

Some west European governments are worried over a deepening divide between east and west within the European Union and some diplomats see Thursday's regional summit as a Polish bid to carve out influence outside EU structures.

Poland also wants to buy liquefied natural gas from U.S. companies to counterbalance Russian gas supplies in the region.

"We are simply an important country in this part of the world," Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview with the PAP news agency.

"We are among the biggest countries in Europe, we are a leader of central Europe, and President Trump ... understands this."

Like other countries close to the NATO frontline with Russia, Poland will be eager to hear Trump embrace the alliance principle that an attack against one member represents an attack against all of them.

Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past, flustered allies at his first NATO summit when he dropped a mention of the mutual defense principle, known as Article 5, which is the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic partnership.

"The White House sees opportunities to fix the problem that they created in Brussels where it looked like there was a big trans-Atlantic divide," said Julie Smith, who was a national security adviser to former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

"If he has a very warm welcome in Poland ... that could help push back on the narrative that he's not developing strong partnerships with our closest allies," Smith, now with the Center for a New American Security in Washington, told Reuters.

(Writing by Justyna Pawlak; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

CAIRO/LONDON Four Arab states refrained on Wednesday from slapping further sanctions on Qatar but voiced disappointment at its "negative" response to their demands and said their boycott of the tiny Gulf nation would continue.

TOKYO At least 10 people were missing, including a child, and 400,000 were forced from their homes after record rains battered southwestern Japan for a second day on Thursday, sending rivers surging over their banks, a government official and media said.

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NATO allies look for reassurance from Trump in Warsaw - Reuters

The accomplished and insightful British general Hasting Ismay is remembered today largely because of his famous assessment of NATO, offered when he was the alliances first secretary general. The purpose of the new treaty organization founded in 1952, Ismay asserted, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

Ismay formulated that aphorism at the height of a new Cold War. The Soviet Red Army threatened to overrun Western Europe all the way to the English Channel. And few knew who or what exactly could stop it.

A traditionally isolationist United States was still debatingits proper role after once again intervening on the winning side in a distant catastrophic European war only to see its most powerful ally of WWII, Joseph Stalins Soviet Union, become the victorious democracies most dangerous post-war foe.

A divided Germany had become the new trip wire of the free world against a continental and monolithic nuclear Soviet Union and its bloc.

Nonetheless, note carefully what Ismay did not say.

He did not refer to keeping the Soviet Union out of the Western alliance (which the Soviets had once desired to join, a request that Ismay compared to inviting a burglar onto the police force).

Ismay did not cite the need to ensure that Nazi Germany never returned.

He did not insist that the inclusion of Great Britain was essential to NATOs tripartite mission.

Why?

Ismay, a favorite of Churchills and a military adviser to British governments, had a remarkable sense of history namely that constants such as historical memory, geography, and national character always transcend the politics of the day.

Russians from the days of the czars have wanted to extend their western influence into Europe. Russia was often a threat, given its large population and territory and rich natural resources and it was also more autocratic and more volatile than many of its vulnerable European neighbors.

If alive today, Ismay might remind us that were there not a Vladimir Putin posing a threat to NATOs vulnerable Eastern European members, he might have to be invented.

Ismay instinctively sensed that what made the Soviet Union dangerous in the mid 1950s was not just Stalinism and the Communist system per se, or even its possession of nuclear weapons, but rather the resources of Russia and its historical tendency to embrace anti-democratic absolutism, whether left or right.

With that same insight, Ismay understood that a Europe caught between Germany and Russia would always need a powerful outside ally, one with resources and manpower well beyond those of Great Britain. Further, he accepted that Americans, protected by two oceans, 3,000 miles distant from Europe, and nursed on warnings about pernicious entangling alliances from their Founding Fathers, would always experience periods of nostalgia when it longed to return to its republican America-first roots.

Again, if the movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House had not existed, it would have to have been manufactured. Todays Americans are peeved about rich European members shorting NATO of their mandatory contributions. They do not appreciate often dependent European nations ankle-biting the U.S. as a supposedly illiberal imperial power, when that power has long subsidized the defense needs of the shaky European Union socialist experiment.

Ismay apparently sensed that an engaged America would always be a hard sell, especially in the new nuclear age, given that, for less cosmopolitan Americans far from the eastern seaboard, Europe seems a distant perennial headache. For them, it might appear much easier to write off Europe as hopelessly fractious and thus not deserving of yet another bailout requiring American blood and treasure. If the U.S. came late into both World War I and II, it was because of the same sort of weariness with European internecine quarreling, albeit now in a milder form, that we currently see fracturing the EU.

Lastly in his triad of advice, Ismay referred generically to Germany without specifying a contemporary friendly and allied West Germany, juxtaposed to the Soviet-inspired, Communist, and hostile East Germany. Again, the EastWest German fault line existed in Ismays time; yet he reduced all those unique differences of his age into a generic Germany down.

Ismay wrote an engaging wartime memoir from which we can extract much of his thought and experience, so we need not put words into his mouth. But nonetheless, insightful men of his generation did not necessarily look at the rise of National Socialism as entirely a historical aberration, or, in contrast, as a generic murderous ideology that just as easily might have captured the hearts and minds of Frenchmen or British subjects. That historical angst is why both Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev were apprehensive about the idea of German unification in 1989.

Ismay apparently remembered the Franco-Prussian war of 187071, and the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. He concluded that the common denominator was Germanys strong desire to recover from its historical hurt in predictable bouts of aggression and national chauvinism and backed by considerable skill and power.

In Ismays time, such aggression was different from lesser Fascist movements in Italy and Spain, largely because of the central geographic position of a unified young German nation-state, its sizable population, its national wealth, and what we reluctantly in todays politically correct landscape might call German character. That stereotype originates from the time of Caesar and Tacitus: the ability of the German people to create economic, military, and cultural influence well beyond what one might expect from the actual size of even an impressive German population or geography. And such dynamism is often expressed by eyeing neighbors spiritual or concrete territory.

Once again, if there were not Angela Merkels increasingly defiant Germany, it too would have to be created. Some in the United States were troubled that Angela Merkel, from a beer hall in Munich no less, recently lashed out at the United States and promised that Germany might just have to navigate between the U.S. and Russia quite a thought from a Germany once saved largely by the United States from its own carnivorousness and later likely Communist servitude.

Of course, what is disconcerting today about Germany is not the rise of totalitarian or nationalist movements, at least not as we usually use those terms. Indeed, in most respects, post-war Germany has been a model democracy. But there is a common denominator in Germanys most recent controversies, with disturbing historical roots that might further amplify the logic of Ismays prescient Germany down. Germany might be pursuing a Eurocentric agenda, it might proudly declare itself an open-borders host for millions of impoverished immigrants, it might be at the vanguard of green energy, but it is doing all that in ways of Lord Ismays Germany of old.

The central bank of Germany de facto controls European finances. It uses the euro as a weaker currency than would otherwise be true of the Deutsche Mark to conduct a mercantile export economy, providing credit to weaker European economies to buy Germans goods that they otherwise could ill afford. The impoverished southern Mediterranean economies are essentially in hock now to Germany, and Germany apparently can neither be paid back its original loans nor write off the debts. In other words, German won all the chips of the European Union poker game and it no longer need play with its broke rivals.

No one quite knows the strange driving force behind Angela Merkels demand that the European Union open its borders to millions of mostly young men from the war-torn Middle East and the chaotic lands of North Africa. Cynics might suggest that a shrinking Germany wants young, cheap manual laborers. Post-war guilt may play a role as Germanys cure for its past becomes nearly as obsessive as the behavior that led to the disease in the first place.

German postmodern multiculturalism encourages a nave acceptance of millions of unassimilated Middle Eastern Muslims, and it demands the same from neighbors without Germanys resources. A largely atheistic or agnostic Germany also has few religious worries about Islamic immigrants, given that secular affluence and leisure long ago proved far more deleterious to German Christianity than did radical Islam.

Germany saw Brexit as an intolerable affront to its own leadership. Apparently the British voter saw the increasingly non-democratic trajectory of the European Union as a future challenge to its own independence. If southern Europeans are becoming serfs to Germany, and Eastern Europeans its clients, and Western Europeans anxious subordinates, then the British across the channel thought they had to get out while the getting was good.

Recent Pew international polls reveal that Germany of all the countries of the European Union is by far the most anti-American, with scarcely 52 percent expressing a positive appraisal of the United States well before Donald Trump ran for office. Media polls show that the German press ran the most negative appraisals of Trump of all global news (98 percent of all coverage was critical). A fair summary of current German views of the United States would be not much different from the stereotypes of the 1930s: undisciplined, prone to wild swings in policy, a bastardized and commercialized culture of poorly informed and highly indebted consumers.

Ismays generation welcomed the re-creation of Germany as a positive democratic force both in the soon-to-be-created European Common Market and the nascent NATO alliance. But it did not discard Ismays idea of Germany down. Instead, there was a wink-and-nod acceptance that a divided Germany was a safe Germany. NATO and the common Soviet threat would encourage ties of solidarity. And just in case they did not, weaker and smaller traditional rivals, France and Great Britain, would possess nuclear weapons and stronger and far larger Germany would not.

What would Ismay say of his current tripartite formula?

He would warn about what happens when NATO withers on the vine: Russian is a bit in, America is somewhat out, and Germany more up than down as Ismay feared when he helped offer the remedy of NATO at its creation.

READ MORE: The Price of American First How Trump Should Reform NATO Its Long Past Time for Our NATO Allies to Meet Their Defense-Spending Commitments

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books.

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NATO Russians Out, Americans In, Germans Down: Updated ... - National Review

U.S. Army soldiers move an armored Stryker vehicle into position during live-fire training. Carlo Angerer / NBC News

Reliant on American support and fearful of Russian influence, European leaders will be closely watching

"The stakes are pretty high for Europe in terms of how that meeting turns out," said Susi Dennison, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "For Europe, how the personal meeting goes between these two is going to be pretty crucial."

European leaders are also unsure whose word actually represents U.S. policy, according to Matthew Harries, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British research institute.

Establishment figures in his team, such as Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, have been far more clear than their boss in supporting NATO's allies across the pond.

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In May, after Trump failed to endorse Article 5 during a speech at NATO's headquarters in Brussels, McMaster, told journalists later that "of course" the president backed the principle of collective defense.

One r

"Nobody's entirely sure who speaks for the U.S. and whether what the president says is official policy, which is very unusual," said Matthew Harries, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British research institute.

"European leaders are perfectly happy with Mattis but their problem is with Trump," Harries added. "Does the president speak for the U.S. or does the defense secretary? If it's Mattis then Europe will be happy. If it's Trump then they won't."

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US Troops Reassure Allies in Poland Ahead of Trump's G-20 Visit - NBCNews.com

43.6% of those polled by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center believe that the NATO is a safeguard for Ukraine.

This is evidenced by the results of the poll published on the site of the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Thus, 26.2% of respondents consider the alliance to be neither a safeguard nor a threat, while 14.6% of respondents consider it to be a threat, and 15.6% are undecided.

At the same time, 48.1% of respondents would vote for Ukraine's accession to NATO, 33.4% would vote against accession, and 18.6% said they did not know how they would vote if such a referendum was held.

The respondents were asked to give reasons for their preference.

85.6% of the NATO supporters believe that accession will provide security guarantees to the country, 33.1% provide an opportunity to strengthen and modernize the Ukrainian army, 25.1% increase the prestige of Ukraine at the international arena, 20.6% contribute to the development of Ukraine as a democratic state, 18.1% be a step on the path of Ukraine towards the EU.

44.4% of NATO opponents responded that accession could drag Ukraine into NATO military operations, 26.6% said Ukraine should in principle be a non-aligned state. 25.7% of NATO opponents stated the accession requires significant additional funds, 24.9% claimed NATO is an aggressive imperialist bloc.

2,018 respondents aged 18 and older were interviewed in all the regions of Ukraine except Crimea and the occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk regions on June 9-13.

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Poll: About half of Ukrainians support accession to NATO - Ukrinform. Ukraine and world news