O Mar Negro já não é mais um lago russo? - Lino Camprubí, Universidad de Sevilla (H-Diplo)

O melhor ensaio que já encontrei sobre o afundamento do barco de guerra russo Moskva no Mar Negro 

H-Diplo Essay 434- Commentary Series on Putin’s War: “The Black Sea: No Longer a Russian Lake?”

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 434

30 April 2022

Commentary Series on Putin’s War:  

“The Black Sea: No Longer a Russian Lake?”

https://hdiplo.org/to/E434

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by Lino Camprubí, Universidad de Sevilla

On the night of April 13, 2022, Ukrainian forces announced that two of their missiles had hit the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea. On the next day, Russian officials acknowledged that their heavily armed ship had sunk. 

To this day, information on the attack, the rescue operation, and exact number of casualties is scarce and contested.^[1] It is beyond doubt, however, that the use of NATO-gathered intelligence by Ukrainian defenders has shaken Russia’s strategic position vis-à-vis Western powers both on land and in water. Russian warships began to operate further away from the coast immediately following the sinking of the Moskva. 

What this incident tells us about the future of the Black Sea’s maritime regime is still too soon to fathom. But it does say a lot about how long-term transformations of that regime might inform general tendencies in the redistribution of naval power in the wider Mediterranean region. 

“A Russian Lake”

Besides the Moskva incident, naval forces seem to have been relatively minor players in the Russian-Ukrainian. Cities, tanks, and military ambushes have occupied most media attention. Most key developments so far have occurred inland. The sinking of the Moskva would appear to have more symbolic significance than strategic one. 

Nevertheless, a look at Moskva’s activities before its sinking shows that this view can be deceptive.^[2] On February 24^th, the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine was launched, the ship led an assault to take Zmiinyi Island, also known as Serpent Island. Famously, when one of the island’s Ukrainian guards was asked to surrender, he responded in a recorded audio: “Russian warship, go f**k yourself.” 

The strategic importance of this small garrison in Western Ukraine lies in its position off the coast of Romania (and Moldavia, which only has access to the Black Sea through the international port of Giurgiulesti).^[3] The island dominates the shipping routes from Odessa to the Bosporus and Istanbul and, from there through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles Straits, to the Mediterranean Sea. 

After taking over the island, the Moskva kept a regular pattern (which could help explain its vulnerability to enemy fire), patrolling in the triangle from Serpent Island to Sebastopol (its port base in Crimea, to the East) and closer to the coast near Odessa (the ship was likely hit about 80 miles off Odesa).^[4] The ship’s role was the coordination and aerial defense of the Russian Black Sea fleet, whose mission was in turn to harass Ukraine from its southern flank. 

For Russia, controlling this space from the early days of the war has been key in blocking Ukrainian exports, and thus halting a major source of revenue for the Ukrainian economy and defense effort. This blockade was completed with the virtual closure of the Sea of Azov, home of the important exporting port of Mariupol. 

The blockade and the Azov closure had already started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Russian military ships retained any non-Russian commercial vessel trying to cross from Azov to the Black Sea. Moreover, in 2015 Russia started building a bridge connecting the Crimean Peninsula to Russia through the Kerch Strait.^[5] This enabled land transport to the peninsula, which was isolated to the north. But it was also built at the relatively low height of 30 meters in order to restrict the passage of tankers and container ships, thus incapacitating much of Mariupol’s commerce. 

Ukrainian maritime exports ceased from the war’s onset. The appearance of several floating mines in different parts of the Black Sea, for which Russia and Ukraine blame each other, has contributed to the halt.^[6] This blockade is widely recognized as one of the factors behind the current high prices of steel and energy, but also of wheat, corn, and fertilizers. The effects that this might have in those countries which depend on Ukraine’s and Russia’s grains to a staggering degree is still to be seen. For instance, Ukraine supplies 85 % Egypt’s imported wheat, and 80% of Tunisia’s.^[7]

The commercial blockade has of course its military counterpart. Led by the Moskva, the Russian squadron patrolling the Black Sea successfully kept the meager Ukrainian fleet anchored in port. Moreover, while Russia has kept amphibious warfare (including landings) to a minimum, the threat that its ships near the coast will engage in an assault has forced the Ukrainian army to deploy forces in areas where no actual fighting is taking place. 

The Russian fleet has effectively denied access to any other serious naval contender in the region. During January and February 2022, Russia positioned up to 16 vessels in the Black Sea, including four or five submarines.^[8] By contrast, Turkey is currently the only country within the NATO alliance with warships in the region. 

Russian dominance of the Black Sea has for centuries been a central part of the Russian naval doctrine. And Sebastopol and the Crimea peninsula at large have been the key to fulfilling this doctrine.^[9] In 2014, Russia justified taking over the peninsula on the grounds of it being a historically vital Russian maritime base–other reasons of course include Russian irredentism and the discovery of offshore gas fields in Crimean territorial waters. 

After 2014, Russia’s Navy became ever more present. In 2015 Chinese warships joined Russian vessels in a week of naval drills in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In a 2016 plea to NATO allies to intervene, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan complained that the Black Sea had “nearly become a Russian lake.”^[10] While his relationship with Putin has improved considerably since then, Turkish naval exercises and offshore gas prospections show an effort to regain importance in the region. Paradoxically, the historical Russo-Turkish conflicts on the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits played a crucial role in ensuring Russian dominance.  

War, Law, and Turkish Control over the Straits

Commerce between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea a used to be a Turkish prerogative. From about 1453 to about 1774, the Ottoman Empire vetoed the transit of foreign vessels. The victories of Tsar Peter I and Empress Catherine II (both dubbed ‘the Great’) forced Ottoman rulers to permit Russian and other foreign vessels to pass freely as well as to access Ottoman ports. But whenever British, French, or German rulers wished to restrict Russian expansionism, they invoked “the ancient rule of the Ottoman empire” to promote the closure of the Straits to Russian ships.^[11]

This could easily backfire. In World War I, the German-Ottoman alliance led to the closure of the Straits to foreign vessels. To break the ban, a combined British and French fleet attempted to take Istanbul in 1915. After failing to do so, they launched an amphibious attack on the Gallipoli peninsula in the aim of seizing the Dardanelles. After eight months of costly warfare, in early 1916 Ottomans declared victory–which famously cost Winston Churchill his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. The Straits remained locked.^[12] The economic effects this had in Russian trade were among the factors behind the 1917 revolution.

Gallipoli is arguably the first campaign in which submarines played a major role. The allies used a total of twenty-two of them to harass Turkish cargo and combat ships in the Sea of Marmara, sinking between 180 and 211 Ottoman vessels. German U-boots were active in the Western Mediterranean, but Allied anti-submarine forces prevented them from approaching the Dardanelles. Allied dominance of the underwater space relied on the topography of the sea bottom, with steep slopes allowing submarine capitaines to dive deep quickly and resurface to attack. While the Allies failed to taking Gallipoli, their submarines forced the Ottomans to rely on slower and more expensive land transport. This additional effort diverted troops from the Russian front, which in turn enabled the Russian army to take hold of much of the Eastern Black Sea coast.^[13] The deep third dimension of naval warfare was thus inaugurated.

After the war, the Ottoman empire crumbled. But the threat of underwater warfare and the disputes around the Dardanelles remained. In 1923 the newly established Turkish Republic negotiated new terms for the Dardanelles in the Lausanne Peace Treaty, which were then revised in the 1936 “Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits” that was signed at Montreux. 

The Montreux Convention balanced the principle of freedom of the seas with Turkish security, regulating passage in a way that ensured that commerce would not be interrupted in times of peace or war, while recognizing Turkish defense concerns. For instance, special provisions for submarines prohibited passage to any submerged vessel from a non-Black Sea state and forced submarines to always cross individually, “by day and on the surface,” reflected anxieties about the vulnerability of Istanbul to an underwater assault.^[14]

The Convention also regulated passage of military vessels both in times of peace and in times of war. All warships were required to notify Turkey their intention of crossing the straits well in advance, and warships from non-riparian states could cross into the Black Sea for a maximum of 21 days and in limited numbers. In times of war, moreover, Turkey could deny access to warships from belligerent countries, except in case of vessels based in Black Sea ports. In the case of a war in which Turkey was directly involved as a combatant, the decision was left to Turkish leaders. 

Human access and knowledge of the underwater world greatly expanded in the years around the Montreux Convention. The interwar period saw a proliferation of acoustic technologies for submarine navigation and detection, profiles of currents and ocean bottom charts, and a re-evaluation of the potentialities of warfare and economic exploitation below the surface.^[15]Submarines dominated some of the key developments of World War II. And, once the war was over, offshore oil exploration led to the territorialization the sea: an expansion of territorial waters initiated by the United States through the Truman Declaration in 1945 and soon followed by unilateral sovereignty claims as well as bilateral and international treatises.^[16]

The most ambitious of these agreements is the UN Conference of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was signed in 1983 and is still in force. While it took a decade of strong-headed negotiations to reach an agreement regarding the straits’ regime, UNCLOS preserved the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits as an exception.^[17] They are still regulated by the Montreux Convention. This gives Black Sea coastal states, including particularly Russia, privileges of access that no other strait regulation grants.

The urgency of restricting some of these privileges explains why it was so crucial that Turkey recognized the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “war,” something that Ukrainian ambassador to Ankara requested from day one of the Russian invasion.^[18]While Turkey waited until February 27th to take the step, it enabled its officials to announce that the strait was closed to Ukrainian and Russian vessels (excepting those already based in the Black Sea). 

“No Longer an American Lake”: The Russian Presence in the Eastern Mediterranean

Moskva’s sister ships, RFS Marshal Ustinov of the Northern Fleet and RFS Varyag of the Pacific Fleet, are as of April 2022 in the Eastern Mediterranean. They won’t be able to take the role of Russian Black Sea flagships until the war is over or Turkey grants them special permits. They are not alone. Coinciding with the January and February 2022 pile-up of ships in the Black Sea, large numbers of Russian vessels were allocated to the Eastern Mediterranean and ordered to stay there. With the launching of the invasion, 16 Russian warships, including two submarines, simultaneously sailed in formation towards the Syrian port of Tartus, home to Russia’s only overseas military base.^[19] They were clearly making a point about their ability to deter any kind of direct NATO naval involvement in the Black Sea. 

The base of Tartus is crucial in sustaining Russian naval power in the Mediterranean. It also played an important role in Russian involvement in the war of Syria. One of the most significant operations initiated from that base was the launching of Kalibr cruise missile against ISIS from two submarines in 2017. There is evidence that the four Kilo Class submarines that are present in the Black Sea are armed with Kalibr missiles and have likely been using them against targets in Ukraine.^[20]

The origins of the Tartus base go back to 1971. At the time, the Soviet Union welcomed bases in the region in order to counter the limitations on its Mediterranean presence as imposed by Montreux restrictions (particularly limitations on submarine transit and the need to announce any military crossing 8 days in advance). In 1958 a Soviet-Albanian agreement included a submarine base in Valona, which was closed in 1961 on Albania’s initiative. In 1968 a Soviet-Egyptian agreement meant in practice the establishment of a Soviet naval base in Alexandria, but the Egyptians started restricting access in 1972 and terminated the agreement in 1976. Other agreements permitted limited Soviet use of naval facilities in Libya and Algeria. However small its size, Tartus is the closest the Russians came to having to a permanent presence in the Mediterranean.^[21]

Russian interest in securing maritime bases in the Mediterranean Sea was based on the need to support the 5^th Squadron, which had created in 1967 in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War to counter the US 6^th Fleet, which until then had ensured American naval hegemony in the region. From July 1967 to December 1968, about seventy-five Soviet submarines entered the Mediterranean.^[22] As US Admiral Horacio Rivero put it, the Mediterranean was “no longer an American lake.”^[23]

The following years saw constant competition between both navies for dominance in the region. Warships coming in and out the Strait of Gibraltar linked Eastern Mediterranean developments to the larger North Atlantic theatre, where submarines patrolling with nuclear weapons enforced mutual deterrence. As my team and I are currently exploring, the unprecedented concentration of submarines in the Cold War Mediterranean did much to the scientific and strategic configuration of the Sea, leading to entanglements that still shape our geopolitical and environmental understandings of the region.^[24]

The Depth of History

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation abandoned any grand scheme regarding the Atlantic. The Russian Navy was slowly retooled with regional interests in mind.^[25] In the Mediterranean region, these included operations in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Black Sea. 

On April 22, 2022, the Russian ship Kommuna appeared to be headed towards what is believed to be the site of the Moskva wreck.^[26] While it has not been confirmed that its mission is to search for the remains of the sunken ship, this ignited rumors that the wreck may hide nuclear weapons. Since they would lie at only about 50 m of depth, the Russian Navy would be eager to retrieve them.  

Regardless of whether this news is finally confirmed, the Kommuna serves as an example of the significance of history to the current war in Ukraine. The ship entered service in 1913. It served under the Romanovs, saw the rise of the Bolsheviks, survived two world wars and the Cold War, and witnessed the decay and rise of the navy of the Russian Federation. A floating hangar with an open belly, it was designed to retrieve sunken submarines. While current submarines are too big for it to sallow, the Kommuna today carries and deploys mini submarines which can then look for sunken ships or broken cables. History resurfaces from marine depths. 

 

Lino Camprubí is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the Universidad de Sevilla and PI of the ERC-CoG DEEPMED. He received his PhD in History from UCLA and he has researched and worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the Autonomous University o Barcelona, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University (IMèRA, Marseille), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). He is the author of Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014), co-editor of Technology and Globalization: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave Economic Series, 2018), and author of “No longer an American Lake’: Depth and Geopolitics in the Mediterranean”, Diplomatic History, 44, 3 (2020): 428-446.

Notes

[1] Navy Lookout, “Russian Cruiser Moskva Sunk in the Black Sea – Assessing the Implications,” Navy Lookout, 15 April 2022, https://www.navylookout.com/russian-cruiser-moskva-sunk-in-the-black-sea-assessing-the-implications/.

[2] Navy Lookout, “Situation Report: The Naval Aspects of the war in Ukraine,” Navy Lookout, 25 February 2022, https://www.navylookout.com/situation-report-the-naval-aspects-of-the-war-in-ukraine/.

[3] For a political map of the region: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Relief_map_of_the_Black_Sea.svg.

[4] H. I. Sutton, “Russia’s Most Powerful Warship In The Black Sea is Operating in a Pattern,” Naval News (07 Apr. 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/04/russias-most-powerful-warship-in-the-black-sea-is-operating-in-a-pattern/.

[5] Andrew Wilson, “Strait to war? Russia and Ukraine Clash in the Sea of Azov,” European Council of Foreign Relations, 2 October 2018.

[6] Tayfun Ozberk, “Opinion: Is there a Serious Sea Mine Threat in the Black Sea?” Naval News (27 March, 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/opinion-is-there-a-serious-sea-mine-threat-in-the-black-sea/.

[7] Amr Hamzawy, Karim Sadjadpour,  Aaron David Miller,  Frederic Wehrey,  Zaha Hassan,  Yasmine Farouk, Kheder Khaddour, Sarah Yerkes, Alper Coşkun, Maha Yahya, and Marwan Muasher, “What the Russian War in Ukraine Means for the Middle East,” Carneige Endowment for International Peace, 24 March 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/24/what-russian-war-in-ukraine-means-for-middle-east-pub-86711.

[8] H. I. Sutton, “Massive Russian Navy Armada Moves into Place off Ukraine,” Naval News (21 Feb. 2022): https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/02/massive-russian-navy-armada-moves-into-place-off-ukraine/.

[9] Mungo Melvin, Sevastopol’s Wars: Crimea from Potemkin to Putin (Oxford: Osprey, 2017); Rasmus Nilsson, “Russian Policy Concerning the Black Sea Fleet and its Being Based in Ukraine, 2008-2010,” Europe-Asia Studies 65:4 (2013): 1154-1170.

[10] Andrew Wilks, “Turkey steps up Black Sea naval activity as war rages in Ukraine,” Al-Monitor (21 April 2022): https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/04/turkey-steps-black-sea-naval-activity-war-rages-ukraine. 

[11] Nilufer Oral, “The 1936 Montreux Convention,” in Heather A. Conley (ed.), History Lessons for the Arctic (New York: Rowman & Littlefield/CSIS, 2016): 24-37. 

[12] Christopher M. Bell. Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[13] Evren Mercan, “The Impact of Allied Submarine Operations on Ottoman Decision-Making during the Gallipoli Campaign,” Journal of Maritime Research 19:1 (2017): 63-75. 

[14] 1936 Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits. Adopted in Montreux, Switzerland, on 20 July 1936: art. 12. 

[15] Lino Camprubí and Alexandra Hui, “Testing the Underwater Ear: Hearing, Standardizing, and Classifying Marine Sounds from World War I to the Cold War,” in Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, Testing Hearing. The Making of Modern Aurality(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 301-325.

[16] Sam Robinson, “Scientific Imaginaries and Science Diplomacy: The Case of Ocean Exploitation,” Centaurus 63 (2021): 150-170.

[17] James K Sebenius, Negotiating the Law of the Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

[18] Justin Katz, “Why Turkey calling it “war” in Ukraine matters for the Black Sea,” Breaking Defense, 27 February 2022, https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/why-turkey-calling-it-war-in-ukraine-matters-for-the-black-sea/.

[19] H. I. Sutton, “Unusual Russian Navy Concentration seen in Eastern Mediterranean,” Naval News (24 February 2022):  https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/02/unusual-russian-navy-concentration-seen-in-eastern-mediterranean/.

[20] H. I. Sutton, “Russian Submarines Launching Kalibr Cruise Missiles at Ukraine,” Cover Shores (21 April 2022): http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Submarines-Launching-Missiles-Ukraine.html.

[21] Gordon H. McCormick, “The Soviet Presence in the Mediterranean,” The Rand Corporation, paper-7388 (October 1987).

[22] Aleksandr B. Shirokorad, Chernomorskii Flot V trekh Woinakh i trekh Revolutsiakh (Moscow, 2007).

[23] Lino Camprubí, “No longer an American Lake’: Depth and Geopolitics in the Mediterranean,” Diplomatic History 44:3 (2020): 428-446. 

[24] The work is generously funded by an ERC-Consolidator Grant. Lino Camprubí, DEEPMED (Discovering the Deep Mediterranean Environment: A History of Science and Strategy, 1860-2020): https://www.academia.edu/49122878/B1_ERC_CoG_DEEPMED_Discovering_the_Deep_Mediterranean_Environment_A_History_of_Science_and_Strategy_1860_2020_

[25] Anna Davis, The 2015 Maritime Doctrine of the Russian Federation (US Naval War College, RMSI Research 3, 2015); Dmitry Gorenburg, “Russia’s Naval Capabilities in the Mediterranean,” Marshall Center Security Insight 35, July 2019.

[26] H. I. Sutton, “Russia Deploys Unusual 110-Year-Old Ship to Investigate Moskva Wreck,” Cover Shores (22 April 2022): http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Navy-Moskva-Cruiser-Wreck.html.

The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History - Mark Stout (H-Diplo)

H-Diplo Essay 224- A Response to Micah Zenko. “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 224
1 May 2020

A Response to Micah Zenko.  “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”  Foreign Policy (25 March 2020).

https://hdiplo.org/to/E224
Review Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by Mark Stout, Johns Hopkins University

On March 25, Foreign Policy published an article by Micah Zenko entitled “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”  While the main text of Zenko’s argument is well-considered, it is now clear that he somewhat overstated the case and he was not well served by the title of the piece.  Nevertheless, the article gives us a useful opportunity to consider the problem of intelligence warning in the era of President Donald Trump and the potential implications of the coronavirus pandemic for U.S. intelligence.

According to Zenko, “the Trump administration has…failed, both in taking seriously the specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted threat.”  The result, he writes, is that “the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people.” 

The explanation for this failure, Zenko argues, consists of three points.  Taken together, they paint a stark picture.  First, Trump anchors very firmly on beliefs.  In this connection, Zenko notes that “leaders are unusually hubristic and overconfident; for many, the fact that they have risen to elevated levels of power is evidence of their inherent wisdom.” Second, Trump’s judgments are “highly transmissible,” capable of “infecting the thinking and behavior of nearly every official or advisor who comes in contact with the initial carrier.”  Third, “the poor judgments…contaminate all the policymaking arms of the federal government with almost no resistance or even reasonable questioning.”  In fact, Zenko observes, “even historically nonpartisan national security or intelligence leadership positions have been filled by people who are ideologically aligned with the White House, rather than endowed with the experience or expertise needed to push back” when the President has ill-conceived ideas.  He concludes, “Thus, an initial incorrect assumption or statement by Trump cascades into day-to-day policy implementation.” 

This is a sensible article burdened with an unfortunate title which the author may not have written.  The subtitle gives a much better summary of the contents: “It’s more glaring than Pearl Harbor and 9/11—and it’s all the fault of Donald Trump’s leadership.”  So, what does the article tell us about warning and intelligence-policy relations generally and in the Trump administration? This essay considers the three steps in Zenko’s chain and then offers some thoughts about the situation through the lens of subsequent developments and intelligence studies.

First, while President Trump seems to anchor particularly strongly on his beliefs, this is a difference of degree, not kind, with his predecessors.  Indeed, intelligence officers often believe that senior leaders are irrationally confident and convinced of their own correctness.  As Robert Jervis has observed, this is not necessarily dysfunctional: “A national leader who had no more confidence than an objective reading of the evidence would permit probably would do little or would be worn down by mental anguish after each decision.”^[1]

Second, Zenko’s claim that Trump’s judgments are “highly transmissible,” capable of “infecting the thinking and behavior of nearly every official or advisor who comes in contact with the initial carrier,” seems appealing on its face.  William Kristol seems to agree and he extends Zenko’s claim to the Republican Party broadly.^[2]   However, Zenko’s words “nearly every” are meaningful; there are clearly counterexamples to the broad claim.  As of this writing, the most famous is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been quite willing to disagree publicly with the President.  More recently, the Surgeon General suggested—albeit rather gingerly—that Americans should not take disinfectants internally, despite President Trump’s suggestion to that effect.^[3]  We know little about the beliefs of the intelligence community’s leadership with regard to Covid-19.  However, it seems unlikely that all the IC officials who were exposed to the President during the relevant period were “infected” with his nonchalance about the virus.  While the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell, who took up that post on February 20, was probably chosen in large part because of his personal loyalty to the president, his two predecessors, DNI Dan Coats and Acting DNI Joseph Maguire, both publicly said things that the President disapproved of.  Furthermore, briefers of the President’s Daily Brief are expected to be willing to speak truth to power, an attribute which is foundational in the intelligence community and there is no evidence that the Trump’s briefers have been any different in this regard.

Third, Zenko’s argument that “the poor judgments…contaminate all the policymaking arms of the federal government with almost no resistance or even reasonable questioning” is probably too strong.  In recent days, stories have hit the press portraying the National Security Council staff and Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, as being fully on top of the situation and unsuccessfully urging action on those above them.^[4]  And where did these officials get their information about the looming danger?  In large part from the intelligence community where largely anonymous collectors and analysts are still free to do their work as normal.

Clearly the United States was surprised by the Covid-19 pandemic.  The US government was insufficiently prepared for such a contingency, President Trump and at least some of his senior subordinates waited until mid-March to really take the problem seriously, and the administration’s responses have been faltering even after they started doing so.  The result is that the epidemic is ravaging the United States much worse than it might otherwise have done. This surprise happened despite the fact that the National Center for Medical Intelligence was reportedly aware of the issue as early as November 2019 and early intelligence analyses of it were written in December.^[5] The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly had an article on the coronavirus in the President’s Daily Brief on January 3, 2020, numerous intelligence products followed, and, probably more importantly, the medical community was also sounding the alarm.^[6]

The intelligence literature is of some help to us in understanding the situation.  Some of the literature on surprise talks about the important role of cognitive biases held by analysts or leaders in a surprised country.^[7]  Zenko discusses one such bias—the President’s anchoring—and others were doubtless at play.  Beyond that, however, the literature on surprise largely deals with nation-states or sometimes non-state actors trying to surprise a target state—usually with a military attack—by concealing the truth and creating alternative explanations for what the target can perceive. To some degree, this fits the current situation.  China did endeavor to conceal the fact of and then the extent of the Covid-19 and subsequently has disseminated disinformation about its source.^[8] However, it seems unlikely that China was intending, per se, for the United States to be surprised and to suffer a devastating pandemic. Rather, the Chinese bureaucracy was probably protecting itself from the country’s senior leadership by concealing the magnitude of the initial problem and the senior leadership was trying to protect the image of the country through measures both defensive (denial) and offensive (disinformation). 

The fact remains, though, that the United States was not really surprised by China; it was surprised by a mindless virus.  Even if China had been forthcoming, the United States Government would have been surprised because responding to pandemics—let alone getting ahead of them—requires top-level leadership but such matters were not of particular interest to the Trump administration until it was too late. Ben Rhodes notes that this is not only the fault of the Trump administration, referring to a “multi-decade assault on the role of government in American life [that] led to a Trump administration that disregards expertise and disdains career civil servants.”^[9]

In such a circumstance, Richard Betts’s ideas about “enemies of intelligence”—those things which cause intelligence to fail—seem more applicable to understanding the Covid-19 situation.  Betts identifies three categories of such enemies.  One he calls “inherent enemies.”  These are a grab-bag of problems including the limits on human cognition and a great many dilemmas that are built into the business of intelligence such as tradeoffs between accuracy and timeliness, and between “the needs to keep secrets from outside enemies” while sharing “information widely to integrate our own knowledge.”^[10]  These do not seem especially applicable to the situation at hand.

However, Betts’s other two categories of “enemies of intelligence” seem potentially relevant.  One of these he calls “outside enemies.”  These are adversaries who “want to conceal or misrepresent their intention, capabilities, or vulnerabilities.”^[11]  Here Betts essentially incorporates surprise attack theory, deception theory, and others by reference.  Clearly, China’s efforts to conceal and dissemble about the Covid-19 situation fit here. 

The final category consists of what Betts calls “innocent enemies” because “they threaten intelligence unintentionally.”  These include “professionals alleged to have fallen down on the job,” dysfunctions and inefficiencies resulting from bureaucrats protecting their turf, and “the politicians…who deliberately try to constrain intelligence operations that conflict with other values.” ^[12]  Again there is some apparent congruence with the facts of the present case.  The emerging reporting indicates that the Administration clearly made some bad decisions and, as Zenko maintains, was more interested in pursuing the President’s overall agenda (which did not encompass the possibility of a pandemic) and validating the President’s belief that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu and would miraculously disappear.  The other priorities were probably the imperative of supporting the President’s position and a desire not to harm the economy. The pursuit of these priorities, then, hindered the intelligence community’s ability to carry out its warning function.  All of this happened, of course, within an environment of disdain for expert opinion at senior levels of the government.

In American intelligence theology, warning has occurred when the policymakers to be warned understand the warning.  They need not be convinced.  Zenko repeats the possibly apocryphal story about Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger telling an intelligence officer after something bad happened, “you warned me, but you didn’t convince me.”  From an intelligence officer’s perspective, this is an absolution. Policymakers, of course, can be forgiven for seeing the matter differently. Both have reasonable claims but at some point, the intelligence officers must be let off the hook. A leader who is impervious to logic or reason, who is unable to strategize, or who believes that other things are more important than what he or she has been warned about must, ultimately, take responsibility for that fact. And, in any event, taxpayers pay leaders to lead and to make hard decisions in the face of incomplete information and conflicting priorities. If intelligence personnel were to be responsible for making those hard decisions…well, they would be the president.

At the moment, we know only the barest outlines of what the intelligence community concluded, what it told the policy community, to whom those warnings were given, and how.  Also, much remains to be learned about how the policy deliberations unfolded inside the Administration.  Sooner or later, however, the pandemic will have sufficiently abated that the time will come to gather data, derive lessons learned and probably take remedial or even punitive action.  The Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Representative Adam Schiff, already has his staff considering the possibility of a 9/11 Commission-style investigation into what happened and the HPSCI is reviewing the intelligence record on the pandemic.^[13]  Such a commission would have to grapple with the fact that U.S. intelligence is only imperfectly organized and situated to deal with natural events which can only partially be influenced by human agency.  Nevertheless, Calder Walton suggests that one useful step might be to revive a version of the late Cold War’s Active Measure’s Working Group to counter the efforts of actors such as China.  He also predicts that “pandemic intelligence will become a central part of future U.S. national security.”^[14]  He may be right but one wonders about the implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Rhodes goes farther, predicting that the greatest future threats to the United States will not be terrorism but “climate change, pandemics, the risks posed by emerging technologies, and the spread of a blend of nationalist authoritarianism and Chinese-style totalitarianism that could transform the way human beings live in every country.”  He argues that meeting these challenges will require “Americans…to rethink the current orientation of our own government and society, and move past our post-9/11 mindset” with a concomitant reorganization of the country’s spending priorities.^[15]

9/11 occasioned the most sweeping reforms to the United States intelligence community and substantial changes to other parts of the national security apparatus, many of them inspired by the work of the 9/11 Commission.  The stage seems set for another reorientation.  We can only hope that the reforms that will follow on the present surprise will be well-considered.  However, we can predict that like the tangible results of the 9/11 Commission, they will be controversial for years to come.

Mark Stout is a senior lecturer with Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs for which he heads the M.A. in Global Security Studies program.  He is also a former intelligence officer.

Notes

[1] Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 166.

[2] William Kristol, “Trump Has Broken the Republican Party—and Conservatism—for Good,” The Bulwark, April 2, 2020, https://thebulwark.com/trump-has-broken-the-republican-party-and-conservatism-for-good/.

[3] Deb Riechmann and Aamer Madhani, “Don’t Inject Disinfectant: Blunt Pushback on Trump Musing,” NBC New York, April 24, 2020, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/lysol-maker-please-dont-ingest-or-inject-our-product-to-treat-coronavirus/2388212/

[4] Maggie Haberman, “Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic,” New York Times, April 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/navarro-warning-trump-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare. Josh Rogin, “The National Security Council Sounded Early Alarms about the Coronavirus,” Washington Post, March 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/30/national-security-council-sounded-early-alarms-about-coronavirus/. Daniel Lippman and Meredith McGraw, “Inside the National Security Council, a Rising Sense of Dread,” Politico, April 2, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/nsc-coronavirus-white-house-162530.

[5] Ken Dilanian, Robert Windrem and Courtney Kube “U.S. spy agencies collected raw intelligence hinting at public health crisis in Wuhan, China, in November,” NBC News, April 9, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-spy-agencies-collected-raw-intel-hinting-public-health-n1180646.

[6] Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, “The U.S. Was Beset by Denial and Dysfunction as the Coronavirus Raged,” Washington Post, April 4, 2020,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true. Julian E. Barnes, “C.I.A. Hunts for Authentic Virus Totals in China, Dismissing Government Tallies,” The New York Times, updated to April 7, 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavirus-china.html.  Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, “President’s Intelligence Briefing Book Repeatedly Cited Virus Threat,” Washington Post, April 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html.

[7] The literature on surprise is extensive but following items are excellent beginnings.  James Wirtz, Understanding Intelligence Failure: Warning, Response, and Deterrence (New York: Routledge, 2017), “Introduction,” 1-23. Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Erik J. Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2013).  Robert M. Clark and William Mitchell, Deception: Counterdeception and Counterintelligence (Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2019) is also helpful.

[8] Barnes, “C.I.A. Hunts.”

[9] Ben Rhodes, “The 9/11 Era is Over,” The Atlantic, 6 April 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/its-not-september-12-anymore/609502/.

[10] Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 12-13.

[11] Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 9.

[12] Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 9.

[13] David Ignatius, “The U.S. Needs to Know What Went Wrong,” Washington Post, 31 March 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-the-pandemic-subsides-the-us-must-learn-from-its-mistakes/2020/03/31/99a37368-7387-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html.

[14] Calder Walton, “Spies Are Fighting a Shadow War Against the Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, 3 April 2020,  https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/03/coronavirus-pandemic-intelligence-china-russia/.

[15] Rhodes, “The 9/11 Era is Over.”