USDA

The Farming Lobby’s Cunning Plan to Fight Climate Change—and Regulation
The American Farm Bureau Federation has recast itself as a climate warrior, pushing for private offset markets relying on the fraught science of soil sequestration.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

TNR
Charlie Mitchell /April 2, 2021

In 1980, the American Farm Bureau Federation, currently the largest agricultural lobbying group and third-largest insurance company in the country, called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be abolished. They’ve sued it regularly ever since. The Farm Bureau lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the United States rule, and cap and trade like they were existential threats. Their policy book and local chapters barely concede the existence of anthropogenic warming.

Now, the group is busy portraying itself as an environment and climate advocate. Two weeks after the November election, the Farm Bureau joined the Environmental Defense Fund and others in a new Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, releasing a slate of “climate policy recommendations.” At the top, “Provide voluntary, incentive-based tools and additional technical assistance for farmers, ranchers and foresters to maximize the sequestration of carbon and the reduction of other greenhouse gas emissions, and increase climate resilience.”

In the past few months, the potential payoff from the Farm Bureau’s new strategy has become clear. Facing an administration eager to rack up climate wins, the Farm Bureau has thrown its weight behind an emerging policy: private markets for carbon offsets, grounded in fraught soil sequestration claims that are quickly being incorporated into corporate “net-zero” pledges.

The agricultural carbon sequestration idea has taken root in the Biden administration. On Monday, Politico reported that the administration now plans to roll out a million-dollar bank plan to help pay farmers to capture carbon sometime this year. But it also reported a telling detail–the Farm Bureau isn’t satisfied with the proposal yet. It wants guarantees that farmers will get paid for soil sequestration without anything else in agricultural business-as-usual changing.

The farm lobby’s climate pivot began in June 2019, in a secret meeting in a sweaty Maryland barn. One hundred groups, Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich later reported, were there, including that “longtime, powerful foe of federal action on climate,” the American Farm Bureau Federation. Evich reported that during the secret summit, “the group coalesced around big ideas like the need to pay farmers to use their land to draw down carbon from the atmosphere.”

A video by the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers lobby, posted to YouTube a few months later, tugged at the heartstrings. “They’re superheroes,” says a woman pictured behind a motel desk, watching a fabricated news report about farmers’ incredible power to sequester greenhouse gases and fight climate change. A crestfallen farmer, who has just put up his farm for sale and is headed for the city with his wife and daughter, overhears her and is inspired to return to his farm, despite the economic pressures, to help save the world. “Let’s go home,” he tells his wife, bursting into their motel room.

Like much conservative messaging, the farm lobby starts with a victimization tale and follows with a redemption story that transforms the fallen patriarch into a hero, putting farmers “in the driver’s seat,” “at the table” as “leaders” of “the solution,” the foot soldiers in the great climate battle. These are the threads that make the cloth of Big Ag’s climate flag-waving, along with a quote from George Washington calling farming the “most noble employment of man.”

It’s a powerful narrative—but it’s also false. While small-scale farmers (especially those of color) undoubtedly have it tough, American agriculture—increasingly consolidated and overwhelmingly white at the managerial level—is virtually exempt from fair labor standards, clean air or water regulations, and property taxes. The government shells out tens of billions per year to keep the richest farmers in business.

Regulation—at least a modicum of accountability—is the only way to begin reducing emissions through agriculture.

Farm Bureau talking points say agriculture is only a small part of the climate problem and that it’s getting more efficient, but farming’s most pollutive elements (factory farms) are expanding and emissions are climbing, with CO2 emissions having increased by over 16 percent and methane by over 14 percent since 1990. So-called solutions like turning manure into energy or feeding cows seaweed to reduce their burps mostly aren’t as effective or simple as they sound, and runaway depletion of topsoil and groundwater is carrying farmland headlong into overlapping crises. Regulation—at least a modicum of accountability—is the only way to begin reducing emissions through agriculture.

But thanks to this savvy post-election political pivot by the farm lobby, regulation doesn’t seem to be on the table.

The “carbon bank” the Biden administration is proposing, under the aegis of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who also helmed the USDA under Obama, would pay farms directly for the carbon their plants take from the air and root into the soil, with the government taking a leading role in providing verification. It’s actually not a bad idea. “A USDA carbon bank would provide a guaranteed price for producers while guaranteeing the environmental integrity of carbon conservation practices,” read a transition white paper by then-incoming USDA leadership.

If Farm Bureau was committed to farmers and emissions reduction, they’d presumably support this policy wholeheartedly. But they’re already backing away from the proposal. “I’ll admit to you, I’m not totally comfortable yet,” Politico reported President Zippy Duvall saying in a House Agriculture committee meeting on climate change. The Farm Bureau office told me by email that the organization still supports the policy, “provided a few conditions are met.”

The first is that the carbon bank “mitigate potential market impacts.” So they’re on board, so long as farming-as-usual doesn’t change. While they didn’t specify what these impacts on the market might be, it’s certainly possible that if the government pays a decent price for carbon and sets the environmental standards high, farmers might choose to plant for carbon in lieu of commodity crops, and this would cut into the sales of agrochemicals and raise livestock feeding prices for the agribusiness giants Farm Bureau represents. They’re also eager that the system not be “overly complicated or burdensome” and want the bank to “establish a floor price for carbon sequestration.”

If the government becomes a big soil carbon buyer, it could also cut into agriculture’s contribution to private offset markets, which Farm Bureau supports fully. But far from guaranteeing environmental integrity, these private markets are already drawing widespread suspicion. Even Bloomberg’s editorial board, citing the difficulty and impermanence of soil carbon drawdown, warned: “The danger is that a carbon-credit system might instead mainly enable airlines, investment funds, energy firms, agribusinesses and other companies to excuse their own greenhouse-gas emissions by purchasing inexpensive and largely meaningless offsets.” These net-zero plans—which hinge on offsets that only select parties like farm and forest owners can supply—are a new and dangerous delay tactic tantamount to denial in the long term, because they don’t actually result in reduced emissions.

A few weeks after Vilsack touted the carbon bank in his Senate confirmation hearing, the FACA unified to issue a sharp warning: “You cannot do climate on the backs of the American farmer,” said one member in a forum convened by USDA. It’s a remarkable response to a policy that is proposing to give farmers money. But it’s consistent with another condition of Farm Bureau’s support, that it not come at any expense of the billions that USDA already distributes to subsidize insurance, inflate the emissions-heavy meat industry, or compensate for trade wars, the pandemic, and anything else that might come up. The sum in 2019 exceeded the total cost of the 2008 auto industry bailout. This is the bottom line in agricultural lobbying: American government should send more money to farmers—just as long as taxpayers don’t ask them to change the fundamentals of a business that is itself a giant emissions and environmental problem.

“USDA believes they have the legal authority” for the carbon bank, Farm Bureau director of congressional affairs Andrew Walmsley told Politico. “I don’t know if they have the political authority. That’s important.” Coming from a lobbying arm with a history of throwing its weight around and suing government agencies, it’s hard not to read that as a threat. Climate advocates lost control of the narrative, though, the second they welcomed Farm Bureau as a good-faith actor. Until they learn that lesson—and a louder chorus demands accountability in agricultural spending—U.S. agricultural policy and U.S. agriculture itself will continue to hurt the climate, not help it.

Charlie Mitchell @Charli3Mitchell
Charlie Mitchell is a journalist based in Chicago.

The Meat Industry’s Bestiality Problem
Big Agriculture’s artificial insemination is abusive. Most states have rewritten old laws to absolve it—but some haven’t.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Jan Dutkiewicz

ILLUSTRATION BY SALLY DENG


It isn’t spoken of much, but a significant chunk of the Kansas economy depends on pervasive violations of its anti-bestiality laws. In 2010, the Kansas legislature revised the state’s “criminal sodomy” statute—historically vague laws criminalizing multiple forms of nonprocreative sex—to delete language that criminalized consensual gay sex. But it preserved other itemized crimes in the law, including making “sodomy between a person and an animal” punishable by up to six months in prison, defining the crime to encompass “any penetration of the female sex organ by … any object.” Although it made allowances for “generally recognized health care practices,” it offered no exemption for everyday animal breeding. This makes Kansas an outlier. The overwhelming majority of states that use similar laws to criminalize sex between animals and humans provide precisely such an exemption. With the explosive growth of artificial insemination in the past 30 years, much meat production in the United States depends on forcibly inserting objects into female animals’ genitals.

For decades, the meat industry in America has been running up against the contradictions in how Americans conceptualize animal cruelty. A growing number of Americans claim to care about animal welfare and support animal welfare legislation. But the average American consumes over 200 pounds of flesh and 600 pounds of dairy products each year, most of it sourced from animals raised on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, or fattened on concentrated feedlots. Farmed animals have few meaningful legal protections and are routinely subject to forced confinement, painful practices like castration and tail-docking, and sexually invasive interventions such as artificial insemination. How Americans claim they want to treat animals and how American animals are actually treated are two very different things, and in bestiality laws, these contradictions are laid bare.Bestiality, a highly stigmatized act, lends itself well to loud denunciations but not so much to moral consistency.

Surely when the Kansas legislature voted to prohibit criminal sodomy in 2010, it did not intend to ban artificial insemination. But the letter of Kansas’s law—which would weigh heavily in an actual court case, particularly with a textualist court—is unambiguous. While a specious reading of the “health care” exemption might be stretched to encompass artificial insemination by veterinarians, most artificial insemination is done by low-wage manual laborers. This would make virtually every farm in the state a hotbed of bestiality.

The unsavory reality is that the labyrinthine structure of American bestiality laws derives from a contradiction most consumers would find unpalatable: Many people wish to protect animals from abuse, but the system of industrial meat and dairy production they patronize depends upon practices that would not only horrify them if they were done to dogs and cats but would often be patently illegal. If animal farming had to confront the cruelty of the insemination practices by which its product is created, cheap meat and milk production would be impossible.

Anti-bestiality laws have a long and twisted history. In the colonial period, bestiality was classed with other forms of “unnatural” sex, including homosexual sex, fornication, oral sex, and masturbation, in various “sodomy” and “crimes against nature” statutes whose broad target was any form of nonprocreative sex outside of marriage. Among those acts, bestiality was the most severely punished, and it resulted in at least seven executions. Colonists believed that bestiality was a violation of a divinely established natural order and, thus, they executed not only the human transgressors but also animals, which were seen as conspirators in, rather than victims of, the crime.

But these anti-sodomy laws, written in rather figurative language, were flexible and evolved alongside changing sexual mores. By the mid-nineteenth century, courts turned to sodomy statutes to prosecute cases of sexual assault with male victims (nineteenth-century rape statutes were written to criminalize only sexual assault against women). Not until after World War II, during what historian David Johnson calls “the lavender scare” conflating homosexuality and Communist sympathy, were anti-sodomy laws consistently used to police consensual gay sex.Breeding technicians insert an arm into the cow’s anus to manually flatten the bovine cervix prior to insertion of a “breeding gun.”

When many states in the latter half of the twentieth century repealed sodomy statutes now primarily associated with homophobia, they also—in the process—axed the anti-bestiality laws. Sparked by equal parts horror and embarrassment when sensational cases of interspecies sex could not be prosecuted, state legislatures then moved to recriminalize it. With the assistance of the Humane Society of the United States, 27 states have enacted specific anti-bestiality statutes since 1990. Bestiality remains legal in four states (Wyoming, West Virginia, New Mexico, and Hawaii), while 19 other states have statutes that date to the nineteenth century or even the Colonial period.

These new statutes are distinct from older sodomy statutes in that they define the proscribed acts with precision. They apply the legal definitions for sexual contact found elsewhere in criminal codes to circumstances where one party is an animal, usually (as in Kansas) defining it as any contact between the body, genitals, or wielded object of a human and the genitals of an animal. These statutes also explicitly treat animals as victims worthy of moral consideration, with many explicitly naming the proscribed crime as “animal sexual abuse.”

Cognitive dissonance has haunted these statutes from their inception: Bestiality, a highly stigmatized act, lends itself well to loud denunciations but not so much to moral consistency. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, for instance—infamous for racial profiling accusations, constructing the “Tent City” outdoor jail in the Arizona desert where inmates regularly suffered from heatstroke, and organizing a “posse” to round up undocumented immigrants—played a pivotal role in the passage of Arizona’s 2006 anti-bestiality statute, and zealously enforced it: In 2016, he posted fake Craigslist ads around the country to lure bestialists to Arizona where he could arrest and prosecute them. But Arpaio’s sympathy—unsurprisingly, given that he rarely extended it to humans—was highly selective: He happily scarfed down hamburgers at political meet-and-greets, despite most cattle suffering just as much as the abused dogs and cats for which Arpaio established a no-kill rescue shelter inside an abandoned prison.

As the laws were evolving, so was agriculture. While the meat industry had been dominated by consolidated, high-volume slaughter and processing since the nineteenth century, pro-big-farming government policy and corporate agribusiness-backed regulations accelerated this trend and spread it throughout the farming world in the late twentieth. Consolidation and ever-tightening margins drove the meat industry to discover new efficiencies and untapped profits in the bodies of livestock animals. The industry itself refers to this as “commodity” animal production: Thanks to the sophisticated tools of modern life sciences and genetics, animals themselves are mass-produced to be interchangeable in ways that were unimaginable 50 years ago.

Artificial insemination stands out as a uniquely powerful technology to standardize animal reproduction. It allows farms both to produce homogeneous animals and to standardize the breeding process itself, removing the inconvenience and unpredictability of letting animals breed the old-fashioned way. For example, it allows factory farms to sync the estrous cycles of entire barns of animals, which, in turn, maximizes the efficiency of impregnation, gestation, and birthing. In other words, artificial insemination allows farms to guarantee that animals breed on the market’s clock rather than their own biological one. The global market in livestock semen for artificial insemination also ensures ever-more-sophisticated interventions in animal genetics: Breeders are no longer limited by their own (or neighbor’s) prized studs; they can use semen from animals all around the world. And refrigeration means that particularly valuable animals often continue to stud even long after they have died and been ground into sausage.

Artificial insemination was first developed to improve the productivity of dairy cattle immediately after World War II. Dairy cattle must be continually impregnated to give milk and must be spatially confined to be milked. These logistical details made artificial insemination a good fit for most dairy farms, and farmers could expect to offset its higher capital and labor costs with considerable productivity gains. By 1960, the practice had become the dairy industry standard in the U.S. By the 1970s, it was also increasingly used in turkey production, where it helped farmers manage low fertility rates and the unusual seasonality of demand imposed by Thanksgiving. Pork and beef producers saw little promise in the technology until CAFOs farming—which was pioneered with chicken megafarms as early as the 1950s—began to dominate pork and dairy production starting in the 1980s.The legal distinction between artificial insemination and bestiality was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, it is the product of the lobbying power of large farms.

CAFOs, in which animals—rather than grazing or foraging as naturally inclined—are raised in tightly confined quarters, meant that animal reproduction could be centralized on a smaller number of high-volume breeding farms. Wage-laborers could then cheaply inseminate an endless stream of animals, creating the economies of scale needed to make artificial insemination profitable. By the 1990s, it was making inroads in the pork industry; by 2000, it was employed on 70 percent of farms. Today, it is “near-universal,” and the beef industry is undergoing a similar transformation. Only in broiler chicken production is artificial insemination still relatively rare. Chickens, the most-eaten animal in America, are bred in such massive quantities and have such high fertility that for now the technology has not been seen as cost-effective; but even there, experts speculate that it is only a matter of time before industry consolidation, the cheapness of the technology, and the production gains it enables push the industry past a tipping point. To put it bluntly, artificial insemination is so pervasive in industrial agriculture that, if it were prohibited over concerns for animal welfare, much industrial meat and dairy production would grind to a halt overnight.

The legal distinction between artificial insemination and bestiality was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, it is the product of the lobbying power of large farms.

As state legislatures began proposing anti-bestiality laws in the 1990s, the agriculture lobby repeatedly opposed the bills due largely to concerns they would criminalize artificial insemination. Missouri offered a particularly clear example of the process. In 2000, Sheila Rilenge, executive director of the Missouri Alliance for Animal Abuse Legislation, explained to the state’s legislature that animals needed sexual protection from the state: “There is no consensual sex with an animal.… They are unable to speak out loud about this abuse.” But this argument ran afoul of the state’s agricultural lobby, and the proposed anti-bestiality law Rilenge was testifying for died in committee, where an identical bill had also perished in 1999. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a rancher named Morris Westfall, feared that the law would be used to prosecute veterinarians and farmers who harvested semen from bulls and artificially inseminated cows. Westfall blocked another version of the bill in 2001. The following year, the legislature finally passed a version of the statute that included a blanket exemption for “accepted animal husbandry, farming and ranching practices or generally accepted veterinary medical practices.”

Of the 27 states that have enacted bestiality statutes since 1990, 24 include nearly identical exemptions for animal husbandry. (Kansas, Iowa, and Delaware’s laws do not.) With the exemptions included, agricultural interests in many states have gone from covertly opposing anti-bestiality bills to either staying mum or even lobbying for them—an alleged sign of their commitment to animal welfare. Only in New Hampshire in 2016 did the farming lobby put up Missouri-esque unconditional resistance to anti-bestiality laws, driven by concerns from small, low-volume dairy farmers that they weren’t large enough to qualify for the law’s exception.

Artificial insemination is a clinical and detached term for a practice that involves invasive and sustained bodily contact between humans and animals. Anthropologist Alex Blanchette, who worked in the field as part of his ethnographic study of a massive Midwestern hog farm in the early 2010s, described it in visceral detail: “Our bodies were meant to act as mere weights, imitating the back pressure of a boar’s mounting until the sow’s uterine muscle contractions draw the semen in through a catheter-like spirette attached to a plastic bag.” Pig production textbooks refer to all this extensive human-animal contact unironically as a “courtship.” Novel artificial insemination technology like post-cervical artificial insemination is even more invasive than what Blanchette describes, requiring workers to deposit semen in the uterus through a catheter rod that penetrates past the cervix. For cattle, breeding technicians insert an arm into the cow’s anus to manually flatten the bovine cervix prior to insertion of a “breeding gun.”

Meat and dairy production currently account for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

If modern farms are factories, breeding animals are reproductive machines, micromanaged to maximize their fecundity. The volume and standardization of livestock on modern farms makes artificial insemination profitable, but it can only be profitably managed through ongoing systematic cruelty. After insemination, workers on some farms inject sows with drugs to ensure farrowing occurs at precisely 114 days and within regular working hours. Humans will generally also be present to midwife the ever-larger litters: Intensive selective breeding has pushed sow fertility well beyond what pig bodies can naturally sustain.

Sows on many farms now often farrow more piglets than they have teats, leading to both fatal pregnancies and the pervasive problem of low birth weights and “runts,” animals born too weak and sickly to survive on their own and either killed or nursed back to health by farmworkers. As for the sows, when they do not immediately return to estrus, they are sometimes fed or injected drugs to jump-start their cycles again. After a few cycles of this, when their sexual organs wear out or lose productivity, sows will be killed and their used-up bodies, unfit for full cuts of meat, will be ground up for pepperoni or pet food.

The co-evolution of CAFOs and artificial insemination have made the two difficult to disentangle. Feedlot-style farming is what made the technology cost-effective in the first place. And artificial insemination, in turn, has expanded the production capacities of industrial agriculture; with razor-thin profit margins, farms that resist the technology and other high-production practices are destined for obsolescence. As a result, artificial insemination is increasingly affecting animals’ lives not just directly through unnatural and painful impregnation practices but also by supporting an entire system of inhumane practices.

And the effects aren’t just limited to animals. The litany of harms caused by factory farms, including poisoning local communities with dangerous air pollution, land-clearing and deforestation for feed crops, water contamination, and even meat production’s heavy greenhouse gas emissions are all compounded by the sheer scale of production on megafarms, itself in large part the result of industrialized breeding techniques like artificial insemination. Meat and dairy production currently account for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

Many Americans claim to care about animal welfare but are a bit hazy on the specifics. Some, like Arpaio, may imagine that animal abuse involves a few sadistic bad apples engaging in the sorts of brazen cruelty that animal rights groups often expose through undercover videos. The reality is that conventional animal agriculture is routinely abusive in ways that are perfectly legal.

The U.S. does not have meaningful federal standards for on-farm animal welfare. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 only applies to slaughterhouses and is spottily enforced. As a result, animal welfare is in the hands of states, where the political heft of the meat industry ensures that efforts to reduce animal suffering routinely exempt farms. The meat industry has been strikingly effective at gutting regulations (for instance by lobbying for privatized safety inspections at meat plants) and escaping public scrutiny (through support for so-called “ag-gag” laws that criminalize whistleblowing about animal abuse on farms) in ways that increase profits at the expense of workers, consumers, animals, and the environment.

Taking on the meat and dairy industry is a herculean task. But most other forms of animal abuse, sexual or otherwise, are trivial by comparison. The cruelty of some pet owners decried by dog and cat rescues, for example, is a drop in the ocean compared to the sustained abuse our food system accepts as a given. This is the perverse irony of the Humane Society’s pivotal role in bestiality recriminalization. By pushing for laws that exempt farms, the Humane Society helped to install a legal regime that normalizes and even exhorts practices that it considers intolerable when done to pets. Such laws may be a small victory for pet-lovers and liberal sensibilities, but they harden the cruel boundary between companion animals and livestock ever more.

If we were consistent with our concerns, we would recognize that the most common source of harm to animals, sexual or otherwise, is industrial agriculture. That this system is legal has a lot to do with agricultural interests skewing the law-making process, but it has just as much to do with most Americans choosing to look away from the harms caused by a system in which they participate on a daily basis. We may feel justified in locking up “perverse” animal abusers, but we’re willing to stomach the ones who feed us three meals a day.

TNR December 11, 2020

Gabriel N. Rosenberg @gnrosenberg
Gabriel N. Rosenberg teaches at Duke University and is the Duke Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center.

Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz
Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal and a visiting fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard University.

SEE

1. Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History - Libcom

   libcom.org/library/beasts-burden-antagonism-practical-history

   

   2017-03-26 · Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History An attempt to rethink the separation between animal liberationist and communist politics.

EXCLUSIVE: 

DOCUMENTS REVEAL ERIK PRINCE'S $10 BILLION PLAN TO MAKE WEAPONS AND CREATE A PRIVATE ARMY IN UKRAINE

Photo Illustration By Neil Jamieson for TIME

BY SIMON SHUSTER/KYIV

TIME
JULY 7, 2021 

On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

As the party got seated inside a private karaoke room on the second floor, Igor Novikov, who was then a top adviser to Ukraine’s President, remembers feeling a little nervous. He had done some reading about Blackwater, the private military company Prince had founded in 1997, and he knew about the massacre its troops had perpetrated during the U.S. war in Iraq. Coming face to face that night with the world’s most prominent soldier of fortune, Novikov remembers thinking: “What does this guy want from us?”

It soon became clear that Prince wanted a lot from Ukraine. According to interviews with close associates and confidential documents detailing his ambitions, Prince hoped to hire Ukraine’s combat veterans into a private military company. Prince also wanted a big piece of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, including factories that make engines for fighter jets and helicopters. His full plan, dated June 2020 and obtained exclusively by TIME this spring, includes a “roadmap” for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment.

The audacity of the proposal fit with Prince’s record as a businessman. For nearly a quarter century, the former Navy SEAL has been a pioneer in the private military industry, raising armies in the Middle East and Africa, training commandos at his base in North Carolina and deploying security forces around the world for the State Department and the CIA. Under the Trump Administration, Prince’s family—a powerful clan of right-wing Republican donors from Michigan—saw their influence rise. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education, while Prince himself leveraged contacts in the White House to chase major deals around the world.

The ones he pursued in Ukraine were among the most ambitious of his long career. But with Trump out of office, the Ukrainian government has slowed the process and invited more competition for the assets Prince coveted. “Had it been another four years of Trump, Erik would probably be closing the deal,” says Novikov, one of its lead Ukrainian negotiators.

Erik Prince walks to a closed-door House Intelligence Committee meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 30, 2017.
Aaron P. Bernstein—Bloomberg/Getty Images

This account of Prince’s ambitions in Ukraine is based on interviews with seven sources, including current and former U.S. and Ukrainian officials as well as people who worked directly with Prince to try to realize his aspirations in Ukraine. Those business plans, which have not been previously reported, were confirmed by four of the sources on both sides of the negotiations, all of whom recalled meeting in person with Prince last year to discuss them. The documents describe a series of ventures that would give Prince a pivotal role in Ukraine’s military industry and its ongoing conflict with Russia, which has taken more than 14,000 lives since it began seven years ago.

The documents detail several previously unreported ventures that Prince and his partners wanted the Ukrainian government to approve. One proposal would create a new private military company that would draw personnel from among the veterans of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Another deal would build a new munitions factory in Ukraine, while a third would consolidate Ukraine’s leading aviation and aerospace firms into a consortium that could compete with “the likes of Boeing and Airbus.”

At least one of Prince’s offers to Ukraine appeared to be in line with U.S. geopolitical interests. As the Wall Street Journal first reported in Nov. 2019, Prince has been competing against a Chinese firm to buy a Ukrainian factory called Motor Sich, which produces advanced aircraft engines. China sought those engines to develop its air force. The U.S., concerned about the rapid growth of the Chinese military, has long urged Ukraine not to complete the sale. Prince emerged as the American alternative, offering to save the factory from China’s clutches.

But the Ukrainians had serious concerns about working with Prince, according to three people involved in the negotiations. Prince’s choice of allies in Kyiv—two men with ties to Russia—raised particular alarm. His Ukrainian business partner is Andriy Artemenko, who made headlines in 2017 by offering the Trump Administration a “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine that envisioned ways for the U.S. to lift sanctions against Russia. Another Prince ally in Kyiv was Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator whom the U.S. has accused of being an “active Russian agent.” Both Artemenko and Derkach worked to advance Prince’s business ventures in Ukraine last year.

“We had to wonder: Is this the best sort of partnership we can get from the Americans? This group of shady characters working for a close ally of Trump?” says Novikov, the former aide to Ukraine’s president. “It felt like the worst America had to offer.” Those concerns only heightened when, at a pivotal moment in negotiations, one of Prince’s associates proferred in writing a “participation offer” that Novikov considered an attempted bribe.

As the deals ran into resistance from the government in Ukraine, Prince’s allies faced bigger problems in New York City, where both Artemenko and Derkach are now under criminal investigation. The U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the investigation, which is reportedly focused on whether the two men were involved in a suspected Russian plot to sway the 2020 presidential election.


Prince does not appear to be a focus of that investigation. But Artemenko tells TIME that federal investigators have questioned him about his relationship with Prince. In interviews with TIME in April and May, both Derkach and Artemenko denied wrongdoing and described the investigation as part of a political witch hunt against Trump’s allies. Prince did not respond to numerous requests for comment, including a detailed list of questions about the documents outlining his proposals for Ukraine.

Andriy Artemenko speaks during an interview with Reuters in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 21, 2017.
Valentyn Ogirenko—REUTERS

Among the guests at the Vodka Grill was Prince’s business partner, Artemenko, a tall, clean-shaven lobbyist in his early 50s. Artemenko says he has worked with Prince in the air-cargo industry for at least six years, transporting everything from weapons to vaccines around the world. Born and raised in Kyiv, he now resides mostly in the Washington area. In text messages obtained by TIME, he refers to Prince as “the boss.”

Their relationship began not long after Prince emerged from the Blackwater scandal of 2007. That fall, a group of Prince’s soldiers-for-hire shot up a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 civilians and wounding 20 others. Several of the gunmen were sentenced to decades in U.S. prisons for their roles in the massacre. (Trump pardoned four of them in his final weeks in office.) Prince’s testimony in Congress about the incident drove a national debate about the privatization of war, turning him, at the age of 38, into the defiant face of the modern-day mercenary.

In the wake of those killings, Blackwater lost a $1 billion contract to guard U.S. diplomats and officials in Iraq. But the company rebranded and continued to thrive. The Obama Administration granted major contracts to Prince’s firm to provide security in conflict zones. Prince’s interests expanded well beyond the military sector. He traded oil and minerals in Africa. He assembled a private army for his friend, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He prepared a force in Somalia to combat pirates in the Gulf of Aden. He helped train a hit squad for the CIA. When Trump took office, Prince called on the new Administration to privatize the war effort in Afghanistan, publicly pitching a plan that would let contractors handle many of the U.S. military’s functions.

Over the years, one of Prince’s most reliable lines of business has been wartime logistics: moving people and supplies into areas of conflict. Starting in 2006, the aviation arm of Blackwater air-dropped food and weapons for U.S. troops on the front lines in Afghanistan. “If you need to transport stuff in and out of a war zone, you’re not going to call UPS,” says a person familiar with Prince’s business operations. “His company does that.”

After working as a cargo broker in the 2000s, Artemenko had founded his own transport company in 2010, AirTrans LLC, which frequently flew cargo for Prince’s operation, he tells TIME. In 2015, Artemenko says, AirTrans officially became a part of Prince’s company, Frontier Resource Group.

Around that time, Artemenko says, the partners began discussing a venture in Ukraine’s weapons industry. Russia and Ukraine had been at war since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, leading the one-time allies to stop selling weapons to each other. The hardware Russia needed most were engines for its helicopters and fighter jets, many of which are still produced at Soviet-era plants in eastern Ukraine.

Apart from the potential to earn billions of dollars in profit, Artemenko says he saw these factories as a way to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. “The Russians need the full complex of aviation technology, starting with the engines,” he says. “This is a reason to force them to the negotiating table and make a peace deal. We can say: ‘OK, you need these spare parts, engines and everything else from Ukraine? Fine, but we want a deal for [eastern Ukraine], and then we want an agreement on Crimea.'”

The idea did not get much traction. Ukrainian officials recoiled at the notion of lifting their arms embargo against Russia in the middle of a war. Another one of Artemenko’s peace plans gained notoriety in 2017, when a draft of it reportedly landed on the desk of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser. That plan, like the first, went nowhere.

Around the same time, Prince held a meeting on an island in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian official. The Washington Post reported their aim was to create a “back channel” from the Kremlin to the White House, an allegation both men denied. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report published in April 2019 devoted a few pages to the Seychelles meeting. According to the report, Prince told his Russian interlocutor that he was “looking forward to a new era of cooperation and conflict resolution.”

By the time Prince set his sights on the Ukrainian military industry, the nation’s conflict with Russia had settled into a kind of stalemate, with sporadic shelling and sniper fire along the front lines. Peace talks had stalled, and Ukraine’s government was increasingly desperate for a way out of the impasse.

The Trump Administration did little to help. Trump’s priority in Ukraine was not to make peace; it was to advance his own political fortunes. Amid his campaign for re-election, Trump asked Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Joe Biden, and held up military aid to Ukraine as a means of pressure. The campaign of coercion caused a breakdown in U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

Some advisers to President Volodymyr Zelensky saw Prince as a way to repair the damage. They wanted him to help arrange a meeting with someone in Trump’s inner circle, ideally Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, says Novikov, who was Ukraine’s liaison to the Americans at the time.

Prince was unwilling to make that connection, says a person familiar with his thinking on the matter. “Erik made it very clear that he didn’t have the keys to Trump’s White House, and that he didn’t want to play that game.”

As an alternative, Prince’s team offered to line up an American lobbyist for Ukraine named Joseph Schmitz. A former Blackwater executive, Schmitz had been a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016 and had contacts in the Administration. He was ready to represent Ukraine for a fee of $500,000 plus expenses, according to a proposed lobbying agreement obtained by TIME. (Schmitz did not respond to emails seeking comment.) Ukrainian officials received that agreement early last year from Artemenko’s lobbying firm but did not sign it.

Prince had sought some local assistance of his own. Among the people he met with in Kyiv was Derkach, the Ukrainian member of parliament whom the U.S. later accused of being a Russian agent.

Derkach, who confirmed to TIME that the meeting took place, was well positioned to help Prince understand the terrain. He had worked in Ukraine’s aviation sector after graduating from an elite university for spies in Moscow, the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. In the early 2010s, when Derkach served as an adviser to Ukraine’s prime minister, one of his tasks had been to develop the aviation and machine-building sectors of the nation’s economy.

Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach at a news conference in Kyiv on Oct. 9, 2019.
Gleb Garanich—Reuters

Derkach says he was intrigued by Prince’s vision for these industries. One major advantage Prince brought to the table was his list of contacts in the developing world. He had worked for many years in the Middle East and Africa, dealing with warlords and autocrats who could become new clients for Ukrainian weapons and aircraft. The main flaw in the plan, Derkach says, was the cooperation it required from Ukraine’s local factory bosses and oligarchs, who control much of the military-industrial complex.

“That’s not so much an issue with Erik,” he says. “It’s a problem of corruption in Ukraine, where you have the factory directors who do not want to sign documents and give up power.” Derkach recalled telling Prince: “‘You’ve worked everywhere. But Ukraine is special. It’s very hard to get any traction here. You have to gather a serious team of people who will move the process along.'”

Derkach says he did not join this team, and declines to say whether he was ever paid for the advice he gave Prince. But after their meeting in Kyiv, Derkach began urging Ukrainian authorities to support the deal Prince wanted. In March 2020, he invited Novikov, the presidential adviser, to a meeting to discuss the plans. “Derkach said, ‘We already have everyone on board, and still the deal is stalling,'” Novikov recalls. Derkach wanted to know who in the President’s administration was standing in Prince’s way. “That was the only thing he wanted to discuss with me,” Novikov says.

In the early summer of 2020, Ukraine moved to cement its partnership with Prince, whose intentions had become far more detailed and ambitious. In one message to Ukrainian officials, Artemenko provided Prince’s passport information along with a summary of their agenda for an upcoming trip. In a follow-up message, he noted Prince would be in Kyiv for several days during the week of June 15, 2020, and requested meetings with senior officials in the defense and intelligence agencies, adding cryptically: “There will be no official calls to government officials, as this visit is strictly private and apolitical.”

Arriving in Kyiv on a chartered flight from Minsk, Prince held a meeting that week with Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, according to messages obtained by TIME between the people who arranged Prince’s travels. (Yermak confirmed to TIME that the meeting took place but declined to discuss it in detail.)

Things appeared to move quickly from there. The President’s office put Prince in touch with a law firm in Kyiv that frequently works for the Ukrainian government. The firm prepared a legal framework for completing the deal Prince wanted. The work was complex, especially when it came to acquiring Motor Sich, says the person familiar with Prince’s thinking.

The factory had been privatized in the 1990s, during Ukraine’s chaotic transition to capitalism. In 2016 and 2017, Chinese investors bought up shares in the factory from its private owners, paying an estimated $700 million for control of Motor Sich. They were not expected to give it up without a fight in the courts. So the lawyers had to find legal grounds for Ukraine to take control of the asset before re-selling it to a new investor. Their plan relied on a regulatory snag: Ukraine’s anti-trust agency had not granted approval to the Chinese investment. “It’s this weird situation where the Chinese bought the asset, never received approval for it, and it’s basically standing still,” says the person familiar with Prince’s thinking. That could allow the Ukrainian government to say: “‘We’re going to take control of the asset because it’s basically not being properly managed,’” the person says. “In a nutshell, that’s the argument.”

In the weeks after Prince’s visit, his associates prepared two versions of a detailed business plan and sent them to officials in Zelensky’s office. The first, dated June 23, 2020, stated that the acquisition of Motor Sich would require $50 million to purchase a minority stake, and another $950 million to buy 76% of the factory. The money was meant to come from Windward Capital, an investment vehicle that Prince has reportedly used in the past.

A helicopter assembly shop of JSC Motor Sich, Zaporizhzhia, southeastern Ukraine on May 18, 2021.
Dmytro Smoliyenko— Getty Images

Another business plan for Ukraine’s military industry, dated June 29, 2020, provided new details and incentives for the government to participate. It described a planned takeover of Antonov, the state-owned airplane manufacturer, by replacing its CEO with an executive from Artemenko’s company. The proposal also called for an “ultimatum” to be issued to the Chinese investors in Motor Sich, who would be forced to either accept an “immediate sale” or face the “loss of value,” the plan stated. “If Chinese remain uncooperative,” the Ukrainian government should take over the factory and transfer control to new investors, the document says.

Another element of the business plan described a partnership between Ukraine’s main intelligence service and Lancaster 6, a private military company that has previously been involved with Prince’s deals in Africa and the Middle East. This partnership, which required approval from Ukraine’s parliament, would build a “state-of-the-art training center” and a “specialized services enterprise”—industry jargon for a private military operation—that would be involved in Ukraine’s “strategic planning, logistics, risk management, security forces training and consulting concerning security risks,” according to the plan. (The head of Lancaster 6, a longtime Prince associate named Christiaan Durrant, told TIME he was not aware of any such documents and asked for a copy; after being sent one, he stopped responding.)

Three of the projects described in the documents also include a “participation offer,” or a cut of the yearly profits. The participation offers listed in the document would be worth a total of around $35 million per year if the plan were to be executed. (The documents do not make clear who would get this money or why.) Novikov, who negotiated with Prince and studied the plan closely while serving as a presidential adviser, says he understood this as a proposal for kickbacks to government officials. “It looked like a bribe,” he says.

Paul Pelletier, a former U.S. federal prosecutor, agreed that the reference to “participation offers” looks suspicious. It would be likely to cause “alarm bells,” he says, at the Justice Department, where Pelletier served for years as a senior official overseeing foreign bribery cases. “On its face, the terms suggest some sort of kickback payments to government contracting officials—a definite no-no,” says Pelletier, who reviewed the document at TIME’s request. “No money or offers of money can flow to government officials, period.”

Artemenko insists that he and Prince never acted corruptly in their dealings, in Ukraine or elsewhere. “We never paid a bribe at the table,” he tells TIME. “We don’t want to do anything wrong. Only the transparent and legal way.” (Asked directly about the purpose of the participation offers, Artemenko’s lawyer, Anthony Capozzolo, declined to comment.)

Prince’s lawyer, Matthew Schwartz, did not respond to a detailed list of questions from TIME, including specific questions about the participation offers and the allegation that they referred to kickbacks.

As Trump’s chances in the presidential race began to look less certain in the fall of 2020, so did the prospects for Prince and his contacts in Ukraine.

In September, the U.S. imposed sanctions against Derkach, accusing him of being an “active Russian agent” involved in a plot to help Trump win a second term. About a month later, four FBI agents showed up at Artemenko’s home in the Washington area, Artemenko recalls. They wanted to know about his work in Ukraine, and his relationships with Prince, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others. “They asked me about my relationship with Erik, how we met, where we met,” Artemenko says. “Normal questions.”

Meanwhile, the dilemma with Motor Sich has only gotten more complex. The Chinese investors in the factory filed a $3.5 billion claim in December 2020 at an international court of arbitration, claiming that Ukraine’s decision to block the sale was illegal. The Ukrainian government responded by imposing sanctions against the Chinese investors, one of whom called the move “an abuse of state power and the suppression of normal business activity.”

Under the Biden Administration, the U.S. does not seem likely to throw its weight behind Prince’s projects in Ukraine. “The U.S. has not been very pro-Erik,” says the person familiar with his thinking. In a statement to TIME, a State Department spokesperson said the U.S. supports Ukraine’s efforts to block the sale of Motor Sich to the Chinese firm, but avoided taking a position on who should own the factory or saying anything about Prince.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to the President of Ukraine in Kyiv on Dec. 4, 2019.
Paolo Verzone—VU for TIME

That leaves the status of Prince’s plans for Ukraine unclear. Yermak, the presidential chief of staff, says the government intends to nationalize Motor Sich and keep it under state control. Private investors, including Prince and his partners, would be welcome to bid on a stake in the factory through a competitive tender, Yermak told TIME in an interview in April. “We are interested in working with all our partners,” he says. “We are interested in there being fairness.”

At that time, Prince’s business partner said the two were still interested in bidding for the factory. “We are ready to show the money and explain the plan,” Artemenko says.

With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Madeline Roache

As fake updates target victims, Kaseya allegedly knew of exploited vulnerability in April

BY DUNCAN RILEY
UPDATED 23:09 EDT / JULY 07 2021

SECURITY

Users of software from Kaseya Ltd. are being targeted with fake updates following an attack by the REvil ransomware group, as it was revealed today that the company was allegedly informed of a vulnerability exploited in a ransomware attack by REvil in April.

Detected by researchers at Malwarebytes Labs, the campaign targets potential victims with spam that pushes Cobalt Strike payloads disguised as Kaseya VSA security updates.

Cobalt Strike is penetration testing software with legitimate uses but can also be used by bad actors to attack a company. As noted in November, when the source code for software allegedly leaked, in the hands of hackers the software can be used to identify security issues that can be exploited.

The “malspam” campaign involves an email with a message asking victims to install an update from Microsoft Corp. to protect against ransomware. Attached to the email is a file labeled called SecurityUpdates.exe and the email also includes a link pretending to be a security update from Microsoft to patch Kaseya vulnerabilities. The attachment subsequently installs Cobalt Strike.

While victims are being targeted with fake security updates, the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure has disclosed that it discovered one of the vulnerabilities exploited by REvil in early April and informed Kaseya at the time.

“After some deliberation, we decided that informing the vendor and awaiting the delivery of a patch was the right thing to do,” Frank Breedijk from DIVD explained in a blog post. “We hypothesized that, in the wrong hands, these vulnerabilities could lead to the compromise of large numbers of computers managed by Kaseya VSA.”

Breedijk added that Kaseya’s response to the disclosure had been “on point and timely, unlike other vendors,” and that the company released two patches to address the identified vulnerabilities.” Clearly, it didn’t address them all, however, with Breedijk adding that “we later learned that one of the two vulnerabilities used in the attack was one we previously disclosed to Kaseya VSA.”

Kaseya has yet to comment on the claim. If true and Kaseya failed to act, whether intentionally or by accident, it does raise the issue that the company could potentially face legal liability issues, potentially given the theft of data involved in the attack.

As of its latest updates today, Kaseya is still struggling with the aftermath of the REvil attack. The company has published a runbook of the changes that should be made to the on-premises environment so that customers can prepare for a patch release.

The news comes a day after the White House vowed to take action against Russia if the Kaseya REvil attack was proved to be linked to the country. REvil is a known Russian ransomware gang with a long history, although it’s not known to be directly linked to the Russian government.
Image: Malwarebytes/Kaseya

Palestinian conflict: A unique resistance

Dr Farooq Hasnat & Dr Zamurrad Awan
THE NATION, PAKISTAN
July 08, 2021

Although the Palestinian conflict has by now become the oldest conflict, i.e., apart from Kashmir, its various dimensions emerging in new accretions continue to present a challenge for regional as well as international security. This is a typical feature of chronic conflicts where no serious efforts are made to resolve the very basics of the contention. The wishful desire of both the Israeli and Indian extreme right leadership that somehow the resistance would disappear has further created complications and aggravated the agony of the people as well as presents a new trial, nearly on a daily basis. It is a well known reality that if the fundamentals of the basic issue are not resolved on an equitable footing, it generates a variety of more lethal dimensions. This is exactly what we witnessed in recent months in the land of Palestine—an old conflict but with a diverse resistance, not seen before.

The founders of the Europe-based Zionist movement, supported by the British, in particular, in the late 19th century argued that they desire to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, arguing that thousands of years ago, this region was the land of Prophet Moses. The Zionists based their arguments primarily on religious injunctions of Judaism and called it a “Holy Land”. If we examine even these premises of the Zionist movement little ground holds for that “rationale”. Three of the Ten Commandments of Prophet Moses were: (1) Thou shalt not murder; (2) Thou shalt not steal; (3) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house. Ever since their existence in 1948, the state of Israel has flouted these Commandments and thus have lost the rationale of establishing a state on religious grounds, that being the only reason on which they lay their justification for a Jewish state.

A glaring example of Israeli “violation” against the Commandments of Prophet Moses came on May 10 of this year, which happened to be the holy night of Ramadan 27. The Zionist war machine pounced upon the praying defenseless Palestinians, men, women and children, at Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets.

When the Palestinians responded with homemade benign rockets from besieged Gaza strip, the Zionist regime mercilessly bombarded, day and night with the sophisticated US-made bombs—killing 220 Palestinians, including about 63 children. The origin of this particular Israeli manslaughter came after the Israeli colonial force evicted 6 Palestinian families from their ancestral homes of Sheikh Jarrah (located in East Jerusalem). Their stolen houses were to be given to the migrant Jewish families from Europe.

Although Israel’s illegal settlement of Palestine (land theft) has been going on since 1948, the recent aggression is Israel’s fourth major audacity in the last five years. The European and American conspiracy to resettle European Jews in Palestine since World War II has led to the illegal eviction of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. Between 2008 and 2021, 5,734 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict so far, including 22 percent children and 10 percent women. In comparison, only 251 Israelis have died. By forcing them to flee, they have also deprived the Palestinians of basic amenities, including education, health and livelihood opportunities, by restricting them to overcrowded ghettos. Today Israel remains the only example of the worst kind of apartheid colonial entity, where the subjects are treated worse than insets. Not only that, there are countless obstacles and checkpoints, making it a humiliating and painful experience for the Palestinian families, even if they have to visit relatives or require medical treatment in a nearby village. In the West Bank alone, there are 700 barriers and 140 checkpoints. In other words, the worst kind of Palestinian Holocaust is enforced

Although,as noted earlier, Israel has a long history of brutality against the Palestinians, its recent cruelty is unparalleled in the way social media has now exposed it. That is why solidarity with the unarmed Palestinians has become an international campaign. Expressing solidarity has become a universal campaign. Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia, i.e., non-Arab Muslim countries have openly condemned Israeli aggression, calling it Israeli war crimes. Apart from that, some important political figures in the United States Congress raised their voices against the recent brutal Israeli terrorist act.

Although Israel has declared a ceasefire under international pressure, it remains to be seen how the issue can be resolved. The recent shade of outburst provides us with at least three dimensions. First, after a long delay, the Palestinians of the West Bank joined hands with those of the Gaza Strip. Second, the Palestinians have sent a strong message that Al Quds is the red line and the Zionist occupying force must not cross it. Third, the defenceless Palestinians have demonstrated that even without an air cover against the most sophisticated American supplied war machine, they will resist with whatever meagre defence they have. Fourth, the support to the suffering and besieged Palestinians came through the ever-growing Social Media, overshadowing the powerful pro-Israel Western media which is highly biased and on all accounts, justifies the gross atrocities of the Zionist apartheid colonial regime and its barbaric actions. And the most important message coming from the land of Palestine is that its inhabitants would continue their struggle till they are decolonised. History provides us with similar examples in the war of independence of Algeria and South Africa.

Israel’s Drone Swarm Over Gaza Should Worry Everyone

It’s time global leaders set new rules for these future weapons already being using to kill.


A drone views of the ruins of buildings in Gaza city that was levelled by an Israeli air strike during the recent military conflict between Israel and Palestinian ruled by Hamas on June 11, 2021. 

MAJDI FATHI/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES


BY ZAK KALLENBORN
JULY 7, 2021 
DEFENSEONE.COM


In a world first, Israel used a true drone swarm in combat during the conflict in May with Hamas in Gaza. It was a significant new benchmark in drone technology, and it should be a wakeup call for the United States and its allies to mitigate the risk these weapons create for national defense and global stability.

Israel’s use of them is just the beginning. Reporting does not suggest the Israeli Defense Forces deployed any particularly sophisticated capability. It seems a small number of drones manufactured by Elbit Systems coordinated searches, but they were used in coordination with mortars and ground-based missiles to strike “dozens” of targets miles away from the border, reportedly. The drones helped expose enemy hiding spots, relayed information back to an app, which processed the data along with other intelligence information. Future swarms will not be so simple.

Often the phrase “drone swarm” means multiple drones being used at once. But in a true drone swarm, the drones communicate and collaborate, making collective decisions about where to go and what to do. In a militarized drone swarm, instead of 10 or 100 distinct drones, the swarm forms a single, integrated weapon system guided by some form of artificial intelligence.

So, drone swarms are here, and we should be worried. But how best to reduce the risk these weapons pose?

The United States should lead the global community in a new conversation to discuss and debate whether new norms or international treaties are needed specifically to govern and limit the use of drone swarms. Current proposals to ban autonomous weapons outright would cover autonomous drone swarms; however, such a treaty would not likely cover the drone swarm Israel used. Despite some media reports to the contrary, there is no indication the swarm made autonomous decisions on who to kill (whether a small, human-controlled swarm like this should be banned is a different issue). And it’s unlikely the great powers will agree to a broad prohibition autonomous weapons. Narrow restrictions on high-risk autonomous weapons like anti-personnel drone swarms may have more appeal, particularly if they create asymmetric effects that threaten, but not help, great powers.

Related articles


The Pentagon Wants AI-Driven Drone Swarms for Search and Rescue Ops

The U.S. Military’s Drone Swarm Strategy Just Passed a Key Test

Pentagon Wants More Money for Lasers To Defend Against Missiles, Drone Swarms

Global militaries should expand work to develop, test, and share counter-swarm technology. Effective counter-drone systems need to be low cost, quick recharging, and able to hit multiple targets at once. Such systems should be deployed around high-risk target areas, like airports, critical infrastructure, and heads of state. As the threat is fundamentally international, states should also provide their cutting-edge counter-swarm capabilities to partners and allies who are at risk.

Keeping drone swarms from the hands of terrorists will require a separate effort. States may adopt measures akin to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 on preventing terrorist acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons that apply to drone swarms (or just expand UNSCR 1540). Local, national, and international law enforcement agencies should also search for indicators of terrorists seeking drone swarm capabilities, such as large drone purchases and known extremist work to develop or modify drone control systems.

In recent years, the threat of drone swarms has grown alongside their increasing sophistication. In 2016, the Department of Defense launched 103 Perdix drones out of three F/A-18 Super Hornets. The drones operated using a “collective brain,” gathering into various formations, flying across a test battlefield, and reforming into new configurations. Notably, the system was designed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If drone swarms are simple enough students can make them, conflict zones across the world can expect to see them soon. In the past year, China, France, India, Spain, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom have all unveiled or tested new drone swarm programs.

Global proliferation of drone swarms creates risks of instability. In the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict last year, Azeri use of drones contributed significantly to a rapid Armenian surrender (other factors no doubt helped too). A swarm amplifies such effects with more drones, using more complex tactics that can overwhelm existing defenses. It’s a concern the U.S. military has studied for a decade already. A 2012 study by the Naval Postgraduate School simulated eight drones attacking a U.S. Navy destroyer, finding four drones would hit the ship. Terrorists may also see great appeal in drone swarms as a more accessible air force to overcome ground-based defenses, and carry out attacks on critical infrastructure and VIPs.

Drone swarms create risks akin to traditional weapons of mass destruction. As drone swarms scale into super-swarms of 1,000 or even up to a million drones, no human could plausibly have meaningful control. That’s a problem, autonomous weapons can only make limited judgments on the civilian or military nature of their targets. The difference of a single pixel can change a stealth bomber into a dog. Errors may mean dead civilians or friendly soldiers, and accidental conflict escalation.

The reality is that virtually no current counter-drone systems are designed for counter-swarm operations. Current detections systems cannot necessarily accommodate multiple drones. They could overwhelm interdiction systems, which contain limited or slow-to-shoot interceptors. And the drone swarm may simply be too spread out. Of course, new counter-drone systems like the Air Force’s microwave-based THOR system, low cost per shot defenses like lasers, and counter-swarm swarms may eventually prove effective. While these defenses may protect great powers, smaller states and civilians are likely to be more vulnerable.

The increased autonomy of a drone swarm allows states to use many more drones at once. Human cognition limits simultaneous drone operation, because it is difficult to monitor operations of many drones, ensure they do not collide, and still achieve mission objectives. But the military is working to overcome human limitations. In one 2008 study, a single operator could handle only four drones without significant losses to mission effectiveness. By 2018, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, confirmed a human could control an entire drone swarm telepathically, using a single microchip implanted in their brain.

The military value of drone swarms stems from enabling complexity and flexibility. Current swarms use typically small, homogenous drones. Future swarms may be of different sizes, equipped with an array of different interchangeable sensors, weapons, and other payloads. That enables combined armed tactics, where drones strike with multiple weapons from multiple angles: one may spray bullets, while another sprays a chemical weapons agent. Swarms may also have adaptive properties such as self-healing, where the swarm modifies itself to accommodate the loss of some members, or self-destruction, to complete one-way missions. Drone swarms will also likely be increasingly integrated into some form of drone mothership (and perhaps integrated into an even larger mothership in a “turducken of lethality.”)

Drone swarms are not science fiction. The technology is here, and spreading fast.

Zachary Kallenborn is a national / homeland security consultant, specializing in unmanned systems, drone swarms, homeland security, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and WMD terrorism.

Israel again tears down contested Palestinian hamlet in Jordan Valley

Courts have ruled that Khirbet Humsa, thrice demolished by authorities in recent months, was built illegally in an Israeli military firing zone

By AARON BOXERMAN

7 July 2021, 

YNET ISRAEL SOURCE

Palestinians and Israeli soldiers in Humsa al-Fouqa on Thursday, February 4, 2021 (Credit: WAFA/Suleiman Abu Srur)

Dozens of Palestinians saw their tents demolished again in the Jordan Valley on Wednesday morning as Israeli authorities took apart the small hamlet of Khirbet Humsa for at least the third time since November.

The hamlet is a collection of tents and pens for sheep, and most of the Palestinians living there are herders and belong to the same extended families.

Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians said it destroyed structures that had been erected illegally on an Israeli military live-fire zone. Khirbet Humsa is one of 38 Bedouin communities on land the Israeli military has designated for training, according to the United Nations


“The [enforcement action] included the confiscation and demolition of tents that were once again illegally erected by Palestinian residents who invaded the firing range in the Jordan Valley in 2012,” the liaison, known by its acronym COGAT, said in a statement.

Palestinian residents see the demolitions as part of an attempt to remove their presence from the Jordan Valley. They also claim their presence predates 2012, going back decades.

At least 60 Palestinians live in the now-dismantled cluster of structures, according to residents.

“They give the settlers everything, but they won’t even allow us to stay here,” seethed Yasir Abu al-Kabbash, a local herder whose tent was confiscated.

Palestinian Bedouins rebuild a fence for an animal pen after Israeli troops demolished tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The Jordan Valley is in Area C, under Israeli security and civilian control, according to the 1995 Oslo Accords. According to the agreements, Israel is responsible for planning and construction in the area.

Palestinians in Area C often clash with Israeli authorities over what Israel deems to be illegal construction. Israel asserts that Palestinians violate the law and engage in construction in illegal areas. Palestinians argue that Israel does not issue them enough permits or legalize existing villages, which they say amounts to an attempt to expunge their presence in the region.

Israel declared the area to be a live-fire zone in 1972, according to court filings. Humsa’s Bedouin residents appealed to the Israeli High Court to cancel their campsite’s impending demolition. In 2019, the court rejected the petition and ruled the herders had no right to stay in the area.

Israeli authorities have argued in court cases contesting firing zones that military training areas are designated with an eye to professional considerations, such as a locale’s unique topographic features.

Rights groups, however, allege that in some cases, areas have been declared firing zones as a means to cement Israeli control. Around 18 percent of the West Bank has been declared a live-fire zone, including some 30% of Area C, according to the UN.

According to a document discussed by the High Court last year, then-settlements minister Ariel Sharon explicitly told a 1981 committee meeting on West Bank settlement that the military would declare some areas to be training zones so as to check “the spread of Arab hill-villagers.”

“There are places which we have an interest in declaring to be live-fire zones, so as to ensure that they remain in our hands,” Sharon, who went on to become prime minister two decades later, told the committee.

Dror Etkes, who directs the left-wing Kerem Navot nonprofit, said that firing zones are occasionally redrawn to fit the needs of Jewish settlements. He pointed out that the town of Hemdat, which lies in a small pocket of legal land deep in the same firing zone as Humsa, has seen the training grounds redrawn so as to allow the town to spread further.

“You have [Jewish] settler outposts that are deep in firing zones and no one touches them. There are even cases, such as in Mitzpeh Kramim, where the army has stated it’s willing to change the dimensions of the firing zone to fit the settlement,” Etkes charged in a February phone call.

In this Feb. 3, 2021, file, photo, Palestinian Bedouin watch Israeli troops demolish tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

A Defense Ministry official said on condition of anonymity that “official Israeli representatives” had offered the residents a nearby location in which to live, although they did not specify where.

“Despite repeated offers and attempts, the residents rejected all offers made to evacuate from the firing range and move to the alternative location offered to them,” the Defense Ministry official said.

Abu al-Kabbash claimed the land in question was quite far away, near the West Bank city of Nablus, on land that belonged to other Palestinian families.

“Would it be right for you to steal someone else’s car to give to me as a present?” Abu al-Kabbash said. “We’re not leaving this place.”