al Shabaab Funded by Minnesota Daycare Operations

Posted on May 15, 2018May 15, 2018 by Denise Simon

al Shabaab has operated as a terror organization in East Africa at least since 2012 and has pledged full allegiance to al Qaeda. The translation for the name, al Shabaab is ‘the youth’ or ‘the youngsters’. That is significant in this case. It operates mostly in Somalia and was known for the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.

So, we have this extensive case in Minnesota and carry on luggage on flights leaving the United States out of Seattle, with millions of dollars inside.

Millions of dollars in welfare fraud from Minnesota could ...

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – For five months, Fox 9 has been investigating what appears to be rampant fraud in a massive state program.

This fraud is suspected of costing Minnesota taxpayers as much as $100 million a year.

The Fox 9 Investigators reporting is based on public records and nearly a dozen government sources who have direct knowledge of what is happening.

These sources have a deep fear, and there is evidence to support their concerns, that some of that public money is ending up in the hands of terrorists.

SUITCASES FILLED WITH MONEY

This story begins at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where mysterious suitcases filled with cash have become a common carry-on.

On the morning of March 15, Fox 9 chased a tip about a man who was leaving the country. Sources said he took a carry-on bag through security that was packed with $1 million in cash. Travelers can do that, as long as they fill out the proper government forms.

Fox 9 learned that these cloak-and-dagger scenarios now happen almost weekly at MSP. The money is usually headed to the Middle East, Dubai and points beyond. Sources said last year alone, more than $100 million in cash left MSP in carry-on luggage.

The national, go-to expert on what is behind these mysterious money transfers is Glen Kerns.

“What we were interested in is where it was going,” Kerns said.

He is a former Seattle police detective who spent 15 years on the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, until his retirement.

“It’s an outright crime, it’s unbelievable,” he said.

Kerns tracked millions of dollars in cash that was leaving on flights from Seattle.

It was coming from Hawalas, businesses used to courier money to countries that have no official banking system.

Some immigrant communities rely on Hawalas to send funds to help impoverished relatives back home.

Kerns discovered some of the money was being funneled to a Hawala in the region of Somalia that is controlled by the al Shabaab terrorist group.

“I talked to a couple of sources who had lived in that region and I said, ‘If money is going to this Hawala do you think it is going to al Shabaab?'” said Kerns. “And he said, ‘Oh definitely, that area is controlled by al Shabaab, and they control the Hawala there.’”

He said when the money arrives, whether it was intended for legitimate purposes or not, al Shabaab or other groups demand a cut.

As Kerns dug deeper, he found that some of the individuals who were sending out tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of remittance payments happened to be on government assistance in this country.

How could they possibly come up with such big bucks to transfer back home?

“We had sources that told us, ‘It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,’” said Kerns.

FOX 9 REPORTED ON THE FRAUD FIVE YEARS AGO

To better understand the connection between daycare fraud and the surge in carry-on cash, you have to look at the history of this crime.

Five years ago the Fox 9 Investigators were first to report that daycare fraud was on the rise in Minnesota, exposing how some businesses were gaming the system to steal millions in government subsidies meant to help low-income families with their childcare expenses.

“It’s a great way to make some money,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said.

In order for the scheme to work, the daycare centers need to sign up low income families that qualify for child care assistance funding.

Surveillance videos from a case prosecuted by Hennepin County show parents checking their kids into a center, only to leave with them a few minutes later. Sometimes, no children would show up.

Either way, the center would bill the state for a full day of childcare.

Video from that same case shows a man handing out envelopes of what are believed to be kickback payments to parents who are in on the fraud.

When asked where the money was going, Freeman said, “I don’t know exactly where it went. But it adds up when you begin to look at how many people were involved.”

FOZIA ALI

One recent federal case points to at least some of the money going overseas.

Fox 9 obtained video of Fozia Ali being sworn in as a member of the city of Hopkins Park Board.

“I will support the constitution of the United States,” she said.

As she was taking her oath of office, she was also under investigation for wire fraud and theft of public money.

“So help me God,” she said during the ceremony.

State and federal agents had already raided Ali’s daycare center in south Minneapolis. The business was suspected of billing the government for more than a million dollars’ worth of bogus childcare services.

“We found records that she was collecting a significant amount of money for a much larger number of children than were actually attending the center,” said Craig Lisher from the FBI. “We are aware that some of the funds went overseas, what she was cashing out, money from the business.”

When asked if he had any idea of what it was going for he said, “I can’t say.” When pressed if he can’t say or doesn’t know he responded, “I can’t say.”

Investigators analyzed Ali’s cell phone to track her activities.

She took a two-month trip from Minnesota to Dubai and then Kenya, staying at times in $800 a night hotel rooms.

She used an app on her phone to bill the state of Minnesota for childcare services while she was out of the country.

Ali pled guilty to the daycare fraud and in March started serving time in a federal prison. She declined Fox 9’s request for an interview.

10 DAYCARES UNDER ACTIVE INVESTIGATION

“We believe that there’s a scope of fraud out there that we really need to get our arms around and ensure that those dollars are going to kids that really need them,” Acting Commissioner for the Department of Human Services Chuck Johnson said.

He told the Fox 9 Investigators his agency has 10 daycares currently under active investigation for fraud.

Fox 9 has learned dozens more are considered suspicious.

Search warrants obtained by the Fox 9 Investigators show each one of the suspect centers has received several million dollars in childcare assistance funds.

According to public records and government sources, most are owned by Somali immigrants.

When asked if the Department of Human Services has any evidence to suggest this looks like organized crime, Johnson responded, “There’s a common pattern in how a lot of these are carried out, but beyond that, not something that I would directly categorize as organized crime.”

Sources in the Somali community told Fox 9 it is an open secret that starting a daycare center is a license to make money.

The fraud is so widespread they said, that people buy shares of daycare businesses to get a cut of the huge public subsidies that are pouring in.

Government insiders believe this scam is costing the state at least a hundred million dollars a year, half of all child care subsidies.

“I don’t think half sounds credible,” Johnson said. “I certainly think that some of the schemes that we’re seeing and certainly the ones that we’ve brought forward already for prosecution involve millions of dollars. I mean this is not a small scale that we’re looking at.”

TRACKING THE MONEY?

Minnesota started aggressively going after daycare fraud in 2014. Back then, it was easier to track the flow of money.

The state would pay a daycare’s bill and within hours of the money showing up in the business’s bank account, funds were being wired to the United Arab Emirates.

Those wire transfers stopped after a few centers were busted.

Which brings us back to those mysterious suitcases at Minneapolis-St. Paul International.

In 2015, investigators documented $14 million in carry on cash. By 2016, it had mushroomed to $84 million. Then last year, $100 million.

A trend all too familiar to former terrorism investigator Glen Kerns.

Fox 9 asked him how likely it is that some of the money is going towards terrorism?

“I say absolutely, our sources tell us that. Good sources, from the community leaders,” he said. “My personal opinion is we need a nationwide task force to clamp down on this type of fraud.”

This crime is spreading. Sources tell Fox 9 fraudsters in other states are now using the Minnesota playbook to rip off millions of public dollars meant to help kids.

*** Where was the FBI, the Minnesota governor, DHS?

(KMSP) – A government whistleblower said he warned upper management at the Department of Human Services about massive daycare fraud more than a year ago.

Emails obtained by the Fox 9 Investigators show the Minnesota government agency was told millions of stolen tax dollars were going overseas and likely a portion of the money was being skimmed by terrorism organizations.

Scott Stillman spent eight years managing the state’s digital forensics lab, meaning he mined data from computers and smart phones.

“I have never seen anything like this level or scope in my 27-year career as an investigator,” he told Fox 9.

When the state started going after daycare centers suspected of fraud, Stillman was directly involved in the investigations.

Some of the businesses were gaming the system to steal millions in government subsidies meant to help low-income families with their childcare expenses.

In many of the cases, parents would check in their children at a daycare, only to leave a few minutes later with the kids and sometimes no children would show up at the center. However, it would still bill the state for a full day of childcare.

Stillman was so alarmed by what he found that in March of 2017 he fired off a series of emails to his supervisors at DHS.

“We are working on and overwhelmed by a significant amount of fraud cases involving organized crime, defrauding hundreds of millions of dollars annually in taxpayer monies,” he wrote.

Stillman read from one of the emails he wrote which the Fox 9 Investigators obtained through a public records request.

DHS took two months before it turned over the emails, and much of what it provided was redacted.

“They were not easy to write,” he said. “But I felt I had an obligation because I think there’s a strong possibility this money is being used against innocent civilians and against our military.”

According to Stillman, he alerted a number of people in DHS including the Commissioner’s Chief of Staff with the following message: “Significant amount of these defrauded dollars are being sent overseas to countries and organizations connected to entities known to fund terrorists and terrorism.”

At a Monday press briefing, the governor told Fox 9 his office was not told about the warnings.

Sources tell the Fox 9 Investigators people within the governor’s office were told about the concerns a couple of years ago.

“My chief of staff, current and previous staff, from what I’m told, did not get any information alleging there was that kind of theft,” Dayton said.

The state currently has 10 daycare centers under investigation for fraudulent billing of childcare services.

Each of the suspect centers has received several millions of dollars in government subsidies.

According to public records and government sources, Somali immigrants own most of the daycare centers.

Fox 9 asked the Department of Human Services about the emails Stillman sent in 2017 and more specifically who, in the chain of command, was aware of them and when.

DHS responded with a statement: “The Deputy Commissioner, communications and legal staff learned there may be emails on this subject when Fox 9 made its data request in March. The then-chief compliance officer was informed at the time the emails were originally sent.”

“I would like to have an independent federal investigation of the handling of DHS programs, specifically daycares and the Medicaid fraud program by Homeland Security of the Department of Justice.”

Stillman is no longer with the state. He resigned from his position in March after 10 years on the job.

President Trump and ZTE

Posted on May 15, 2018May 15, 2018 by Denise Simon

There has to be an explanation for President Trump’s interest in saving jobs at ZTE.

In Concession, Trump Will Help China's ZTE 'Get Back Into ... photo

Could it be part of a trade issue with China to ensure China continues pressure on North Korea? Could it be to keep American intellectual property protected in some obscure plot where China continues to steal intelligence to eventually control all 5G?

The 2019 NDAA includes a provision to prohibit ZTE and Huawei use in the United States.

Reuters: “I hope the administration does not move forward on this supposed deal I keep reading about,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said. Bilateral talks between the world’s two biggest economies resume in Washington this week.

The Wall Street Journal has reported Beijing would back away from threats to slap tariffs on U.S. farm goods in exchange for easing the ban on selling components to ZTE.

“They are basically conducting an all-out assault to steal what we’ve already developed and use it as the baseline for their development so they can supplant us as the leader in the most important technologies of the 21st century,” Rubio said at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Asia policy.

Trump had taken to Twitter on Sunday with a pledge to help the company, which has suspended its main operations, because the penalties had cost too many jobs in China. It was a departure for a president who often touts “America First” policies.

The Commerce Department in April found ZTE had violated a 2017 settlement created after the company violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and banned U.S. companies from providing exports to ZTE for seven years.

U.S. companies are estimated to provide 25 percent to 30 percent of components used in ZTE’s equipment, which includes smartphones and gear to build telecommunications networks.

The suggestion outraged members of Congress who have been pressing for more restrictions on ZTE. Some U.S. lawmakers have alleged equipment made by ZTE and other Chinese companies could pose a cyber security threat.

“Who makes unilateral concessions on the eve of talks after you’ve spent all this time trying to say, correctly in my view, that the Chinese have ripped off our technology?” Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade policy, told Reuters.

Wyden, who is also on the Intelligence Committee, was one of 32 Senate Democrats who signed a letter on Tuesday accusing Trump of putting China’s interests ahead of U.S. jobs and national security.

The company has denied wrongdoing.

Republican Representative Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday he did not expect lawmakers would seek to remove a ban on ZTE technology from a must-pass annual defense policy bill making its way through Congress.

“I confess I don’t fully understand the administration’s take on this at this point,” Thornberry said. “It is not a question to me of economics, it is a question of security.”

Consider:

Axios: President Trump’s desire to help save ZTE could set the tone for the treatment of another Chinese telecom company that’s under investigation for sanctions violations, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

The backdrop:

ZTE has been found guilty of breaking U.S. law three times, including violating sanctions by selling equipment with American parts to Iran and North Korea.
The Pentagon has banned the sale of ZTE and Huawei phones at retail stores on military bases, citing concerns that the companies are using their devices to spy on military personnel.
ZTE and Huawei are both key players in China’s race to dominate 5G and the future of mobile communication. The Chinese Communist Party is painting U.S. moves against the Chinese phone makers as efforts to knock China out of the 5G race.

Between the lines: “Ross had a color wheel of approaches [on ZTE] ranging from a handslap to breaking them as a company,” says Chris Johnson, a former CIA China analyst who’s now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Chinese might have stomached a slap on the wrist, but by banning American companies from selling parts to ZTE, Ross served up a punishment harsh enough to halt operations. China in turn made ZTE a top trade priority and used its massive leverage to potentially sway the president.

Why it matters: China could use Trump’s apparent pivot on ZTE as a stepping stone to free Huawei. Or the ZTE case could be a lesson for the U.S. in negotiating with China.

How the ZTE deal could fare:

“The U.S. and China are closing in on a deal that would give China’s ZTE Corp. a reprieve from potentially crippling U.S. sanctions in exchange for Beijing removing tariffs on billions of dollars of U.S. agricultural products, said people in both countries briefed on the deal,” the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei and Bob Davis report.
Steven Mnuchin is leading the U.S. in negotiating a deal that puts the brakes on actions against ZTE in exchange for China buying down its trade surplus, reports Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
China’s trade negotiator, Liu He, is in DC today. Axios contributor Bill Bishop hears that Liu will arrive “with an open checkbook to buy down the deficit but that progress on anything structural will be much harder.”

The bottom line: Taking the toughest possible approach to China might not be the smartest when the Asian power is stronger than ever and prepared to fight back.

Trump Kim Talks now in Jeopardy, Developing

Posted on May 15, 2018May 15, 2018 by Denise Simon

The United States and South Korea do military drills often and Kim Jung Un was well aware of those planned stating the drills were a rehearsal for an invasion. Further, North Korea has canceled talks with South Korea. The Kim regime is making yet another demand stating the United States must be careful about deliberations and the summit itself due to the ‘ruckus’ over the drills.

This all comes from the conclusion of the meeting that North Korea has with China.

Meanwhile:

Sperimentazione allertamento test nucleare ...

That nuclear test site that North Korea has declared inoperable and where media has been invited to see the dismantling of the site and tunnels may not be the only site and no one is speaking of other sites but should be. Why? Well Iran refuses to declared PMD (possible military dimension) sites that are part of the nuclear development plan. Since Iran and North Korea have long collaborated on nuclear programs, it stands to reason North Korea has other sites as well.

***

Ahead of the April 27 inter-Korean summit, NGA published a separate assessment that North Korea had started dismantling significant components and structures associated with nuclear test observation at Punggye-ri.

Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site by JamesMartinCNS on Sketchfab

The North’s decision not only came before Kim Jong-un’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at Panmunjom, but also before the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit meeting, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.

Satellite imagery published by 38 North on Monday, May 14, provides open source corroboration of significant changes near the northern, western, and southern portals leading into the underground tunnel network that composes the Punggye-ri test site.

North Korea watchers Jeffrey Lewis and Dave Schmerler of the Monterey Institute of International Studies have also observed the dismantling of structures around the Punggye-ri test site. Lewis and his team created a 3D model offering an impression of the horizontal tunnel network at the Punggye-ri test site.

North Korea’s work to dismantle structures at the test site comes ahead of its announced intention to invite journalists and experts from China, Russia, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom to observe the site’s dismantlement between May 23 and May 25.

A report published over the weekend by the country’s outward-facing state media, the Korean Central News Agency, said that the event would be to “ensure transparency of discontinuance of the nuclear test (sic).” U.S. President Donald Trump called Kim’s move a “very smart and gracious gesture” in a tweet.

The same report specified the process for the site’s disabling, which would include the collapsing of tunnels — presumably with explosives — and the removal of observation and research facilities. U.S. intelligence assessments suggest that much of the latter work will have been completed prior to the arrival of foreign observers.

The DIA and NGA assessments leave open the possibility that North Korea’s planned modifications to the test site next week could significantly extend the period of time necessary to restore Punggye-ri to a usable state.

Following Kim’s announcement that the Punggye-ri site will be shut down, international observers, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s (CTBTO) executive secretary, Lassina Zerbo, welcomed the announcement. Kim has not specified whether the CTBTO will be invited to verify the closure of the nuclear test site.

North Korea is the only country known to have conducted full-yield tests of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Kim Jong-un has not expressed an interest in signing the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, which has yet to enter into force.

With six nuclear tests, North Korea likely has a useful set of data that it can use to continue refining its nuclear weapons designs. The U.S. intelligence community has, with consensus, determined as of mid-2017 that North Korea is capable of mounting compact nuclear weapons atop its larger ballistic missiles, including its intercontinental-range ballistic missiles that threaten the continental United States.

In the same report to the Workers’ Party of Korea’s 7th Central Committee where Kim first acknowledged that Punggye-ri’s mission had come to an end, that North Korean leader, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that North Korea had conducted sub-critical nuclear weapons testing.

North Korea has not made any concessions on its sub-critical testing program, which will likely continue at its Nuclear Weapons Institute. Continued sub-critical testing would allow North Korea to maintain its existing weapons and refine their performance.

RCD: With the location and date of the forthcoming summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong‑un now fixed, speculation has turned to what sort of agreement might be achievable. US National Security Advisor John Bolton recently suggested that the ‘Libyan model’ of nuclear disarmament—from 2003–2004—might offer a framework that could be applied to North Korea in 2018.

The suggestion received what might kindly be called a mixed reception, not least because the North Koreans believe that Muammar al-Qaddafi was a fool to abandon his nuclear program. Still, I’d like to explore the Libyan case here because it offers one of the few examples of ‘denuclearisation’ that we have.

True, the two cases are markedly dissimilar: Libya, unlike North Korea, had made relatively little progress towards nuclear weapons when its leadership took the strategic decision to abandon the program. The Libyans had no nuclear weapons. Yes, they had a small number of centrifuges—some still in their original packing—and a quantity of uranium hexafluoride (the feedstock for a centrifuge enrichment cascade).

More ominously, they had a nuclear weapon design, apparently obtained from the A.Q. Khan network—although some Libyans claimed that the design was a ‘bonus’ intended as a reward for their other purchases.

But when US officials appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 2004 to talk about the disarmament effort, senators were at least as interested in the detailed picture of the nuclear black market that the Libyan program revealed as they were in the program itself. While a raft of fascinating material about the program had suddenly spilled forth, it was the procurement trail, stretching from Libya to Pakistan and Malaysia, that the committee chairman, Senator Richard Lugar, referred to as ‘the treasure trove’.

While North Korea’s current indigenous capabilities are far stronger than Libya’s were 15 years ago, one suspects there would be similar interest in Washington today about Pyongyang’s proliferation links.

Further, there are some aspects of the Libyan model that the current US administration might want to replicate in any deal with North Korea. Two of those aspects concern access and relocation. US and British experts were given extraordinary access to the Libyan weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. See the statements made in 2004 by Paula DeSutter, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, to two congressional committees (here and here) and, separately, in an interview with Arms Control Today:

The Libyans said, ‘We are no longer going to have a nuclear weapons program.’ They invited the United States and the United Kingdom in. They gave the United States and the United Kingdom access to all facilities that we requested to see. They were willing to permit any tests that we wanted to conduct. They were willing to have their centrifuge program removed … They have been very forthcoming.

In the chemical weapons area, we assisted them in drafting their declaration to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. They had the OPCW technical secretariat come in. On one occasion they said, ‘You know, we really hadn’t told the others that came before, but there are some other munitions we need to show you.’ They took us to a facility that we almost certainly would not have been able to identify independently and showed us the unfilled munitions there. That is transparency. That is the kind of access that we are given when a country has made a strategic commitment. They volunteer information.

Some sources suggest that the procedure was not quite as straightforward as that passage of text implies. William Tobey, for example, argues that Libyan commitment and transparency varied on a day-to-day basis, at least in the early months. (See Tobey’s five-part series in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5, and his 2017 assessment of intelligence and policy cooperation in the Libyan disarmament case.)

It was because of that variability that the Americans wanted to relocate key parts of the WMD program quickly. The most proliferation-sensitive parts of the program—equipment and documents—were airlifted to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The nuclear weapon design documents, revealed to the Americans on 20 January, were flown out of the country two days later.

During the night of 25–26 January 2004, an American C-17, its insignia painted over, landed at an air base near Tripoli, loaded its cargo—including advanced centrifuge rotors, five Scud‑C missile guidance sets and two tons of uranium hexafluoride—and took off again. Later, in March 2004, another 1,000 tons of materials and equipment were loaded aboard a US ship, the Industrial Challenger, its insignia again painted over, and taken to America.

Is that what President Trump is going to propose to Kim Jong‑un? Media sources say that the US has asked North Korea to ‘discard’ the data from its nuclear weapon development program and allow its nuclear scientists to emigrate. Of course, the manner—and direction—in which that data might be discarded is a non-trivial issue.

And emigration would, of course, be a humane solution to an intractable problem: that even after the weapons are gone and the data has been discarded, the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles will still exist in the minds of North Korea’s scientists. I don’t imagine, though, that Washington wants those scientists heading to the Middle East. Russia and China might be acceptable destinations. People say that Tennessee is nice this time of year.

As was the case with the Libyan deal, the US is also arguing that this is an opportunity for North Korea to abandon not merely its nuclear program, but all of its WMD. Still, nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles seem likely to be the core of any deal.

On ballistic missiles, a key US objective in 2003–2004 was to ensure that Libya’s missile program was compliant with the thresholds set out in the Missile Technology Control Regime—namely, that its missiles were limited in their range to a maximum of 300 kilometres and in their payload to a maximum of 500 kilograms.

In short, the Libyan model sets high standards in relation to the exposure of proliferation linkages; provision of access to sites, personnel and materials; relocation of key items; and acceptance of international standards on WMD. Can an agreement with Pyongyang meet those standards? Frankly, it seems unlikely.

The Libyan model, after all, had one driver that might not be equally compelling in the North Korean case: the strategic commitment by the leadership to put aside WMD. Because of that commitment, the model unfolded quickly and the verification hurdles proved surmountable.

A similar level of strategic commitment on Kim Jong‑un’s part is what the Americans are hoping to find in Singapore on 12 June. The Trump administration is certainly signallingthat this is their desired approach.

U.S. Applies New Iran Sanctions, Hardly Enough

Posted on May 15, 2018May 15, 2018 by Denise Simon

We are still at war in the Middle East where Iran with proxies is the real and virtual enemy. The United States uses proxies as well, yet the United States near term and long range strategy remains fleeting.

The talks that continue between Iran and Europe on the JCPOA should include Iran’s war operation in the Middle East.

photo

Going forward for the United States:

Implications and Future Research

The unwillingness of the United States and its GCC partners to use their vast conventional military superiority has shifted the balance of power in the region from the conventional to the unconventional realm. Iran then relies on its willingness to assume more risk and its ability to better influence proxies than its adversaries, to achieve favorable foreign policy outcomes despite the opposition of the United States and its Arab allies. The use of proxy groups fundamentally decreases the physical cost a state incurs due to conflict. However, when the soldiers of a state die advising and assisting these proxies, it is more difficult to justify domestically, because using proxies signals that the objectives are not important enough to warrant decisive intervention. Therefore, states are most successful when they use proxies not as a cost-reduction mechanism alone but because proxies

are better able to achieve the desired end than conventional military forces. If the United States is unwilling to risk additional battle deaths or domestic political repercussions to prevent Iran from projecting power across the Middle East, then it must instead apply cost-imposing strategies.

Increasing the effectiveness of special operations forces from allied Arab states through intelligence sharing, kinetic strikes, training, and attached American advisors, while encouraging deployments of these elements to areas where Iranian advisors and IRGC units operate, would increase the human cost of Iranian activities. In addition to targeting Iran’s primary efforts in Iraq and Syria, these partnered operations should also confront peripheral Iranian efforts throughout the Gulf, including Yemen, in order to exploit the weakness of Iranian popular support for its presence therein. By working through Arab partners, the United States can apply the indigenous force necessary to confront Iranian proxies, while increasing the likelihood that Arab states achieve a confluence of shared ideology and objectives with their proxies, which eludes the United States

as a separate actor. Saudi and Emirati support to Yemeni military units recapturing the port of Aden and the Bab al-Mandab Strait serve as good examples of the type of effort the United States should expand.

In addition to combating Iranian proxy groups directly, targeting the ground, air, and sea logistical routes that the IRGC Quds Force uses to supply its proxies would affect Iran’s ability to support its efforts in the region. As long as Iran continues to rely on a domestically based force projection model, its network is vulnerable to air strikes, raids, and sabotage. An expanded network of friendly proxies partnered with US and allied

-Arab advisors would be ideally suited to facilitating this type of targeting.

Complete text, context and summary is found here.

The author is: Maj. Alex Deep is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is a Special Forces officer with ten years of service and multiple deployments to Afghanistan in conventional and special operations task forces. He served as a rifle platoon leader and company executive officer in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team prior to completing Special Forces Assessment and Selection and subsequently the Special Forces Qualification Course. He then served as a Special Forces detachment commander and battalion assistant operations officer in 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne). He currently teaches SS307: Introduction to International Relations. Deep holds a Bachelor of Science in American Politics and Arabic from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.