by Sue Rabbitt Roff

The fall-out from nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the fifties continues as more documents reveal decades of denials and cover-ups, hindering proper compensation for victims. Sue Rabbitt Roff investigates.

The UK detonated at least 12 atomic and hybrid fission-fusion weapons in Australia in the 1950s. Eight were detonated on 31-metre towers, barely 5% of the heights at which the bombs were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nobody claimed then that they didn’t devastate the cities beneath them, killing between 150,000 and 250,000 civilians.

There was at least one ground burst – known to be the dirtiest in terms of fallout because the radioactive debris fell close to ground zero rather than being blown across Australia and out to territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The Brits detonated more than 200 kilotons of radioactive explosives at 100 feet or less, including one that had a yield of 98 kt in 1956.

Australia foolishly accepted a clean-up and compensation payment of £20,000,000 in 1993. Interestingly, this ‘indemnity’ did not cover deaths or injuries that ‘result from nuclear tests or experimental programmes at the Monte Bello Islands in respect of which the cause of action occurred before 27 June 1956.’

The Australian National Archives hold 3.6 metres of ‘Identification cards of persons employed at Maralinga’ through to 1967 – mostly civilians. The Department of Veterans Affairs published a study in 2006 of 10 983 male subjects, of whom 7116 were military participants and 3867 were civilians.

More than 22,000 British scientists, civilians and military personnel participated in the tests.

Members of the armed forces were prevented from suing the Ministry of Defence by the (UK) 1947 Crown Proceedings Act’s Section 10, which granted immunity against tort litigation. Section 10 was repealed in 1987 – but not retrospectively, thereby continuing to disenfranchise the men (virtually no women were sent to the tests) who increasingly realised that their poor health may well have been radiogenic. As did their families.

But the tide may be turning. In July 2024, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) paid a reported £72,000,000 in compensation for hearing loss to 9000 members and veterans of the armed forces in the eight years from 2012 to 2020, with a further 10,000 claimants anticipated. Other armed services personnel in service after 1987 have begun to put their claims for duty of care in court in recent months.  Hundreds of Royal Marines have issued proceedings claiming they were knowingly exposed to asbestos.  UK  military pilots allege that toxic fumes from military helicopters are causing a range of deadly cancers – which the MOD has known for decades.

It’s in this context that UK nuclear veterans have begun to prepare a case suing for the failure of duty of care to themselves and their families before, during and after the nuclear tests in Australia and off Christmas Island.

The re-reading of the archival material could be of considerable significance to Australian nuclear test veterans given that Governor-General William McKell decreed in Air Ministry Order A.652 dated December 1952 that the air forces “raised in the United Kingdom do serve together and act in combination wheresoever,

serving with the naval, military and air forces of His Majesty raised in the Commonwealth of Australia and in the Dominion of New Zealand.

Curiously, it has been overlooked for nearly forty years that in 1988, the House of Lords upheld the right of a nuclear veteran to sue the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) for its failure of duty of care during the conduct of the tests.

There has been a steady flow of Freedom of Information enquiries in the past two years. Whereas in November 2022, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE)  said it had been able to locate only ‘1 blood test for 1 member of the service personnel’ at the 21 tests the UK led or participated in.

However, after a dozen applications for information, the response in April 2024 acknowledged that there is ‘prominent public interest in permitting public authorities to maintain their accountability to publish information in a manner and via a suitable platform ensuring accessibility to the public; … we propose to offer to write to you advising you of how and where the information can be accessed in due course if you should wish us to do so.’

Nobody is holding their breath on this. But there are already pivotal archival documents online that include:

• An October 1955 memo stating:  ‘It is quite clear that the responsibility for radiological safety is at all times [emphasis in original] vested in Director, A.W.R.E, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Supply;
• In the same month, the MINISTRY OF SUPPLY London stated that ‘‘The United Kingdom is responsible for radiation safety on the range. During trials this responsibility is exercised by the Director, A.W.R.E., on behalf of the Minister of Supply, and in inter-trial periods by the Commandant, Maralinga.
• On 9th December 1955, an Outward Telegram from the Commonwealth Relations Office informed the  U.K. High Commissioner in Australia:

‘2.In our view United Kingdom (Ministry of Supply and A.W.E.R.E.) U.K.M.O.S.S. [UK Ministry of Supply Staff/ Melbourne] and Range Commandant are one organisation with a task to be done. We consider that [redacted] must receive instructions direct from the United Kingdom and be responsible directly to United Kingdom for all operational requirements, such as technical work at Maralinga and running range to meet United Kingdom requirements, while Australians, through any channels they may arrange, would be responsible for general administration of force in matters of discipline, postings, welfare, leave etc…’

‘4. … we consider that Maralinga is not a joint project in sense that Woomera is but British project carried out on Australian soil with help from Australia in those matters in which Australia is best equipped to help….’

• A memo annotated /56 AIR PLAN OPERATION “BUFFALO” states:

‘2. A permanent atomic weapons proving ground is being created at Maralinga under the auspices of the Ministry of Supply and the Department of Supply, AUSTRALIA’.
Executive Responsibility
8. (a) The Royal Air Force will assume overall executive and administrative responsibility for the Combined Task Force. A senior R.A.F. Officer has been nominated as the Task Force Commander. The Air Task Group which forms part of the Task Force will also be C(sic)ommanded by a Senior R.A. F. Officer.
(b) The scientific aspects of the trials, including Target Response, will be controlled by the Director of Atomic Weapons Research Establishment [AWERE] or his nominee.’

There are many documents that show that radioactive contamination of participants was clearly anticipated by the scientists of AWERE.

For instance, the HMS DIANA was instructed to sail directly in the expected path of the fallout from the Buffalo detonation precisely to record contamination expected to fall on it and its crew. Pilots of the MOSAIC ‘sniffer’ aircraft were not allowed to see the intensity of the cockpit exposure reading so that ‘ the pilot and crew are not confronted with a psychologically embarrassing reading of several thousand ‘r’ per hour when they know that the maximum [permissible] dose is only 25 r.’ The 250 ‘indoctrinees’ were sent into known radioactive areas at Buffalo.

One AWERE memo noted that:

‘They [Australians] would not know that fall-out contamination from close-in area is very different from samples obtained from the cloud, and that only the latter is sufficiently representative to enable quantitative estimates to be made…

’It was proposed to give Australians ‘a little piece of the filters, but that we wait a few days so that some of the short-lived isotopes have decayed a good deal.’

These documents are the tip of the iceberg of evidence that the Australian government of the day was deliberately misled into allowing the British nuclear tests.  But perhaps, seventy or so years later, they are also the tipping point.

Neither the British tests  Scientific Director William Penney, who planned and observed the bombing of Nagasaki, nor the Australian Weapons Tests Safety Committee member Professor Ernest Titterton, who detonated the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo in July 1945, were blind.

But both felt able to turn blind eyes to their duty of care when building and testing Britain’s atomic and hydrogen bombs in the Dominion and  Protectorate territories of the United Kingdom.

It’s time we took the awe out of the AWE.

https://michaelwest.com.au/documents-reveal-failing-australian-nuclear-test-participants/

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Security and State Power / The Prospects for Survival

Noam Chomsky

Truthout, Part I, Part II, March 3, 2014
(adapted from a lecture by Noam Chomsky on February 28, 2014
in Santa Barbara, CA, sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation)

A leading principle of international relations theory is that the state’s highest priority is to ensure security. As Cold War strategist George F. Kennan formulated the standard view, government is created “to assure order and justice internally and to provide for the common defense.”

The proposition seems plausible, almost self-evident, until we look more closely and ask: Security for whom? For the general population? For state power itself? For dominant domestic constituencies?

Depending on what we mean, the credibility of the proposition ranges from negligible to very high.

Security for state power is at the high extreme, as illustrated by the efforts that states exert to protect themselves from the scrutiny of their own populations.

In an interview on German TV, Edward J. Snowden said that his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” by denying the existence of a domestic spying program conducted by the National Security Agency.

Snowden elaborated that “The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.”

The same could be justly said by Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and other courageous figures who acted on the same democratic principle.

The government stance is quite different: The public doesn’t have the right to know because security thus is undermined — severely so, as officials assert.

There are several good reasons to be skeptical about such a response. The first is that it’s almost completely predictable: When a government’s act is exposed, the government reflexively pleads security. The predictable response therefore carries little information.

A second reason for skepticism is the nature of the evidence presented. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer writes that “The Obama administration, not surprisingly, initially claimed that the NSA’s spying played a key role in thwarting 54 terrorist plots against the United States, implying it violated the Fourth Amendment for good reason.

“This was a lie, however. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, eventually admitted to Congress that he could claim only one success, and that involved catching a Somali immigrant and three cohorts living in San Diego who had sent $8,500 to a terrorist group in Somalia.”

A similar conclusion was reached by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established by the government to investigate the NSA programs and therefore granted extensive access to classified materials and to security officials.

There is, of course, a sense in which security is threatened by public awareness — namely, security of state power from exposure.

The basic insight was expressed well by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”

In the United States as elsewhere, the architects of power understand that very well. Those who have worked through the huge mass of declassified documents in, for example, the official State Department history “Foreign Relations of the United States,” can hardly fail to notice how frequently it is security of state power from the domestic public that is a prime concern, not national security in any meaningful sense.

Often the attempt to maintain secrecy is motivated by the need to guarantee the security of powerful domestic sectors. One persistent example is the mislabeled “free trade agreements” — mislabeled because they radically violate free trade principles and are substantially not about trade at all, but rather about investor rights.

These instruments are regularly negotiated in secret, like the current Trans-Pacific Partnership — not entirely in secret, of course. They aren’t secret from the hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers who are writing the detailed provisions, with an impact revealed by the few parts that have reached the public through WikiLeaks.

As the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz reasonably concludes, with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office “representing corporate interests,” not those of the public, “The likelihood that what emerges from the coming talks will serve ordinary Americans’ interests is low; the outlook for ordinary citizens in other countries is even bleaker.”

Corporate-sector security is a regular concern of government policies — which is hardly surprising, given their role in formulating the policies in the first place.

In contrast, there is substantial evidence that the security of the domestic population — “national security” as the term is supposed to be understood — is not a high priority for state policy.

For example, President Obama’s drone-driven global assassination program, by far the world’s greatest terrorist campaign, is also a terror-generating campaign. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan until he was relieved of duty, spoke of “insurgent math”: For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.

This concept of “innocent person” tells us how far we’ve progressed in the last 800 years, since the Magna Carta, which established the principle of presumption of innocence that was once thought to be the foundation of Anglo-American law.

Today, the word “guilty” means “targeted for assassination by Obama,” and “innocent” means “not yet accorded that status.”

The Brookings Institution just published “The Thistle and the Drone,” a highly praised anthropological study of tribal societies by Akbar Ahmed, subtitled “How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam.”

This global war pressures repressive central governments to undertake assaults against Washington’s tribal enemies. The war, Ahmed warns, may drive some tribes “to extinction” — with severe costs to the societies themselves, as seen now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. And ultimately to Americans.

Tribal cultures, Ahmed points out, are based on honor and revenge: “Every act of violence in these tribal societies provokes a counterattack: the harder the attacks on the tribesmen, the more vicious and bloody the counterattacks.”

The terror targeting may hit home. In the British journal International Affairs, David Hastings Dunn outlines how increasingly sophisticated drones are a perfect weapon for terrorist groups. Drones are cheap, easily acquired and “possess many qualities which, when combined, make them potentially the ideal means for terrorist attack in the 21st century,” Dunn explains.

Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, referring to his many years of service on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, writes that “Cyber surveillance and meta data collection are part of the continuing reaction to 9/11, with few if any terrorists to show for it and near universal condemnation. The U.S. is widely perceived as waging war against Islam, against Shiites as well as Sunnis, on the ground, with drones, and by proxy in Palestine, from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. Germany and Brazil resent our intrusions, and what have they wrought?”

The answer is that they have wrought a growing terror threat as well as international isolation.

The drone assassination campaigns are one device by which state policy knowingly endangers security. The same is true of murderous special-forces operations. And of the invasion of Iraq, which sharply increased terror in the West, confirming the predictions of British and American intelligence.

These acts of aggression were, again, a matter of little concern to planners, who are guided by altogether different concepts of security. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high for state authorities — a topic for discussion in the next column.

*

The previous article explored how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power — all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities.

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the “Evil Empire” speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars,” which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon — a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise “almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike,” according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies .

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia’s early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re alive to talk about the incident.

Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” by Eric Schlosser.

It’s hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

The government’s regular, easy acceptance of threats to survival is almost too extraordinary to capture in words.

In 1995, well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which is in charge of nuclear weapons, published a study, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.”

A central conclusion is that the U.S. must maintain the right of a nuclear first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.”

Thus nuclear weapons are always used, just as you use a gun if you aim it but don’t fire when robbing a store — a point that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has repeatedly stressed.

Stratcom goes on to advise that “planners should not be too rational about determining … what an adversary values,” all of which must be targeted. “[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. . That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.”

It is “beneficial [for …our strategic posture] that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control'” — and thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack.

Not much in this document pertains to the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate the nuclear-weapon scourge from the earth. What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc’s famous 1898 couplet about the Maxim gun:

Whatever happens we have got,
The Atom Bomb and they have not.

Plans for the future are hardly promising. In December the Congressional Budget Office reported that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will cost $355 billion over the next decade. In January the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies estimated that the U.S. would spend $1 trillion on the nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years.

And of course the United States is not alone in the arms race. As Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far. The longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.

In the case of nuclear weapons, at least we know in principle how to overcome the threat of apocalypse: Eliminate them.

But another dire peril casts its shadow over any contemplation of the future — environmental disaster. It’s not clear that there even is an escape, though the longer we delay, the more severe the threat becomes — and not in the distant future. The commitment of governments to the security of their populations is therefore clearly exhibited by how they address this issue.

Today the United States is crowing about “100 years of energy independence” as the country becomes “the Saudi Arabia of the next century” — very likely the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

One might even take a speech of President Obama’s two years ago in the oil town of Cushing, Okla., to be an eloquent death-knell for the species.

He proclaimed with pride, to ample applause, that “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

The applause also reveals something about government commitment to security. Industry profits are sure to be secured as “producing more oil and gas here at home” will continue to be “a critical part” of energy strategy, as the president promised.

The corporate sector is carrying out major propaganda campaigns to convince the public that climate change, if happening at all, does not result from human activity. These efforts are aimed at overcoming the excessive rationality of the public, which continues to be concerned about the threats that scientists overwhelmingly regard as near-certain and ominous.

To put it bluntly, in the moral calculus of today’s capitalism, a bigger bonus tomorrow outweighs the fate of one’s grandchildren.

What are the prospects for survival then? They are not bright. But the achievements of those who have struggled for centuries for greater freedom and justice leave a legacy that can be taken up and carried forward — and must be, and soon, if hopes for decent survival are to be sustained. And nothing can tell us more eloquently what kind of creatures we are.

https://chomsky.info/20140303/

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"Cognitive Warfare" has become a new form of confrontation between states, and a new security threat. With new technological means, it sets agendas and spreads disinformation, to change people's perceptions and thus alter their self-identity.

Launching cognitive warfare against China is an important means for Western anti-China forces to attack and discredit the country.

Some politicians and media outlets have publicly smeared China's image by propagating false narratives in an attempt to incite and provoke dissatisfaction with China among people in certain countries. These means all serve the US strategy to contain China's rise and maintain its hegemony. The Global Times is publishing a series of articles to reveal the intrigues of the US and its allies' China-targeted cognitive warfare and expose its lies and vicious intentions.

In the 17th installment of the series, the Global Times revealed how the US military-industrial complex orchestrates cognitive warfare campaigns against China to incite the Philippines to confront China, how the US government has transitioned from the forefront to the background to exert influence on the Philippines, and what tactics have been used in these cognitive wars.

From manipulating public opinion through hyping the South China Sea issue to launching smear campaign against Chinese vaccines in the Philippines, the US military-industrial complex has been exposed for persistently instigating the Philippines behind the scenes to fabricate biased or false narratives and foment public misunderstanding regarding China.

Experts warned that this strategy risks pushing the Philippines toward greater conflict and jeopardizes its own interests.

What lobbying groups are behind these cognitive warfare efforts against China? What ties do they have to the US Department of Defense, the US government, and the Philippine military? And ultimately, what tactics do they employ in their coordinated cognitive warfare assault? This investigative report aims to unravel these dirty tricks.

Military Forces Disguised as Think Tanks

In the process of supporting the Philippines in provoking disputes with China over the South China Sea, there is a non-negligible American think tank behind the scenes, known as Project Myoushu at Stanford University, which focuses on South China Sea security issues.

The project became well-known to the public due to a notorious smear campaign against the China Coast Guard (CCG) in February 2023. Project Myoushu claimed that China had harassed the Philippines Coast Guard (PCG) vessel by citing a so-called source. Subsequently, the PCG asserted that a Chinese ship had directed a laser at the PCG, while then US State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, further fanned the flames by stating that the US stands with its ally in the face of alleged laser incidents. The Chinese Foreign Ministry later clarified the facts, saying that the CCG's on-site operations are professional and res trained, and the claim made by the Philippines has no basis in fact.

Taking its name from an "inspired move" in the ancient Chinese game Go, Project Myoushu was established in 2022. Ray Powell, who served in the US Air Force and currently leads Project Myoushu at Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, is an active figure in the narrative campaign against China on the South China Sea issue.

Reports show that Powell had served 35 years in the US Air Force, including a posting in the Philippines. After retiring in November 2021, Powell joined Stanford University as a research fellow.

In July 2023, Ray Powell visited with then Vice Admiral Alberto Carlos of Western Command to discuss "how to leverage emerging technologies to help improve maritime domain awareness and illuminate gray-zone activities in the West Philippine Sea," according to SeaLight's website, an organization at Stanford University that Powell led.

The term "gray zone activity" has been used by some officials and scholars in the US to discredit China's policies and legal actions in the South China Sea. They use this term to accuse China of employing non-military means to "change the status quo" or "create tension."

"This is a blatant inversion of reality. In fact, labeling China with various cognitive tags regarding the South China Sea issue is itself a manifestation of the US' use of the 'gray zone' strategy," said Ding Duo, deputy director of the Institute of Maritime Law and Policy at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies.

Powell has also given interviews to US-funded media sources to support the Philippines or levy groundless accusations against China over the South China Sea issue.

In addition to Powell and Project Myoushu, another think tank with military ties has been found to openly intervene in the South China Sea issue.

According to an article in the US Naval Institute's magazine Proceedings, the US Naval Institute initiated the Maritime Counterinsurgency (COIN) Project in July 2022, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The project is specifically aimed at China's activities in the South China Sea, as it has claimed that "China is working below the threshold of armed conflict to subjugate the large civilian maritime population of Southeast Asia [...] who depend on access to the South China Sea for their daily livelihoods."

The initial concept of Maritime COIN has sparked intense discussion in the US and its partners since 2019. Several high-ranking US military officers, including Admiral John Aquilino, Vice Admiral William Merz, and Rear Admiral Fred Kacher, have been influenced by this concept.

According to the US Naval Institute, the Maritime COIN has published 19 articles from July 2022 to April 2024, and many of the authors have US military backgrounds. A retired Philippine rear admiral is also among them.

US arms firms also have stakes in the South China Sea issue. According to the arms transfers database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US has transferred many pieces of military equipment including aircrafts, ships, missiles, armored vehicles, and engines to the Philippines over the last 10 years.

Manila is also planning to procure a US-made Typhon mid-range capability missile system, according to Armed Forces of the Philippines chief General Romeo Brawner Jr, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported on August 29.

Observers said that US weapon makers are eager to see tensions in the South China Sea rise, so that they can sell more of their products to make profits.

Sophisticated Network Built on Cognitive Warfare Players

The influence of the US military-industrial complex extends beyond the South China Sea issue, bleeding into other areas as well.

In June, Reuters published an investigative report revealing that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US military secretly launched a campaign to counter what it saw as China's growing influence in the Philippines. At the time, the Philippines had one of the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia.

Citing three former US military officials, a Reuters report referenced the operation as having been pushed by then US Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, who was reportedly a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations as a tool in the global geopolitical competition.

The Pentagon's audit concluded that the military's primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, a US-based global aerospace and defense company, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, according to a person with direct knowledge of the review, Reuters reported.

Why did the US launch such a cognitive war against Chinese vaccines? Reuters provides an answer: To counter what it perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines. At the time, the Philippines had received vaccine aid from China, while US-produced vaccines had not yet been introduced in the Philippines.

These highly similar tactics lead to a suspicion of a connection between the narrative campaigns over the South China Sea and Chinese vaccines. Following the clues, the Global Times discovered that the key figures behind both operations are intricately linked.

The Global Times found that Braga, one of the initiators of the vaccine campaign, once visited the Hoover Institution in February 2020, engaging fellows in a roundtable discussion about the threats his command faced in the region. One of the fellows he met with is research fellow Joseph Felter.

The ties between the two individuals go far beyond this. Felter once served in the US Army Special Forces, while Braga was quickly reassigned to command the US Army Special Operations Command in mid-2021 after the launch of the vaccine campaign against China.

Joe Felter, as the former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, is familiar with the situation in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines. He served as the principal advisor to senior US Department of Defense leadership for all policy matters pertaining to the development and implementation of defense strategies and plans for the region. Felter's resume shows that he has also been a military attaché in the Philippines.

Moreover, he also co-founded the defense company BMNT, which has close ties to the Pentagon and US military giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, according to the company's official website. Felter's role as a bridge between the US military and the Philippines has since become clear.

Felter is the director of Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. This indicates that Powell, while working on Project Myoushu, is required to report to Felter as the head of the center.

The intricate connections between Powell, Braga, and Felter, along with their profound military backgrounds, make the player network picture behind two typical cognitive wars against China much clearer.

A Significant Shift in Strategy

The connections also highlighted a significant shift in the US' strategy: The military-industrial complex has begun to play an active role in the cognitive war against China.

"The US military-industrial complex is often involved in many global conflicts. Driven by its own interests, it benefits from escalating regional tensions," Chen Xiangmiao, director of the World Navy Research Center at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, told the Global Times.

By creating instability in the region, the complex aims to stimulate demand from countries around the South China Sea, thereby fulfilling its economic interests, he noted.

The military-industrial complex seeks to leverage these initiatives to encourage the US Congress to approve larger budgets and to push the US Department of Defense to procure more weapons, Chen said.

China urges win-win cooperation as US sees zero-sum game

The People’s Republic of China continues to seek mutually beneficial partnerships with the United States and the rest of the world but US leaders are committed to seeing the Asian country’s rise as a challenge to its… pic.twitter.com/SGnDFBvEQ7

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 24, 2024

The interests of the military-industrial complex are clearly driving the US strategy of cognitive warfare against China, Chen noted.

The expert further stated it is clear to see that the US government has shifted from a front-stage role to a behind-the-scenes one. This can help avoid direct involvement in controversies that may provoke public resentment or skepticism, as well as prevent "factual conflicts" with China.

Meanwhile, by packaging think tanks as neutral and objective "academic authorities," the US can better exert global public opinion pressure, according to Chen. 

"This strategy may push the Philippines to escalate tensions in the region, ultimately jeopardizing its own interests. The Philippines is by no means the winner of the cognitive war," he stressed.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202409/1320215.shtml

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