Category Archives: Insurgency

Time to Sanction the Mexican Government for Violating Public Safety

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In July of 2019: Mexico’s Congress passed an asset forfeiture bill; there were no additional changes to Mexico’s counterterrorism legislation in 2019. The government lacked adequate laws prohibiting material support to terrorists and relied on counterterrorism regimes in other countries to thwart potential threats. Additional reading here.

CARTEL monsters have hung nine bodies from a bridge in a chilling warning to rival gangs amid a bloody Mexico turf war.

A tenth victim was also found on a nearby road by horrified residents in the Zacatecas municipality of Cuauhtémoc on Thursday at around 6am.

Nine bodies were found suspended from a bridge in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc on Thursday

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Nine bodies were found suspended from a bridge in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc on ThursdayCredit: Reuters
Officials believe the gruesome display is related to a dispute between cartels in the area

Officials believe the gruesome display is related to a dispute between cartels in the area Credit: AP

Officials warned the disturbing display was likely to be linked to a savage dispute between ruthless criminal gangs that operate in the area.

The nine bodies were eventually removed from the overpass by police at around 10am local time, as locals went about their day.

According to local media, the majority of the deceased were identified as residents of the small town Cuauhtémoc, which has a population of just 6,660.

“They pay for the sins of others, it is not fair that they do this to us because they pay for the sinners,” one spooked local told TV Azteca Noticias.

Another added: “It’s scary to go out at night. You have to go to sleep early and every night there is noise, motorcycles, screaming, things like that.”

An “intense investigation” was underway, the local government said, although no arrests have yet been made.

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“Operation Lone Star,” is Gov. Greg Abbott’s evolving and expensive plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border using thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guardsmen. The operation, launched in March, was initially billed by Abbott as an effort to “deny Mexican Cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas,” but has since become a sprawling and controversial experiment in the use of state power to secure an international border.

Democrats have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional, and called for a Justice Department investigation. Republicans have praised Abbott for taking a stand and pushing the envelope.

Abbott has not asked the Biden administration for permission because he does not believe he needs it. Indeed, the entire operation has been designed to operate exclusively with state resources and agencies, and within the existing confines of state law. That’s both a strength of Abbott’s approach and, as I saw for myself in Del Rio, Texas, a major weakness.

Abbott’s Border Operation Is A Bureaucratic Morass

It’s a weakness because it severely limits what the operation can achieve. The basic idea is that Texas state troopers and National Guard troops will arrest illegal immigrants, who will in turn be prosecuted for misdemeanor criminal trespass in hopes that such prosecutions will serve as a deterrent. Whatever the merits of this approach to border security, it comes with a host of caveats and constraints.

To begin with, Texas is only arresting single adult men, not women, children, or family units, which means the state is targeting the migrant population most likely to be quickly expelled to Mexico under Title 42, the pandemic public health order that allows federal immigration officials to send migrants back over the border with minimal processing. The migrant men arrested by Texas law enforcement, by contrast, will remain in state custody for weeks or longer, rather than being sent back to Mexico.

Up until last week, migrant men arrested under Operation Lone Star who posted bond would be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would typically expel them under Title 42. But last week ICE told the state it would no longer take custody of these migrants. That means Texas will have to transfer them to U.S. Border Patrol, and as of this writing it remains an open question whether Border Patrol will expel them as they would have under Title 42, had federal agents arrested them, or process them as asylum-seekers.

If the latter, then Operation Lone Star might have the unintended effect of rewarding migrants caught by state authorities: once they’re processed and released by Border Patrol to pursue their asylum claims, migrants have legal status, are allowed to work, and can remain in the United States as their case wends its way through federal immigration courts — a process that can take up to five years.

But even before these problems arise there are strict conditions that have to be met before state authorities can even make an arrest. Migrants can only be arrested on private land where landowners have agreed to press charges, and only on those parcels of land where the Texas National Guard has managed to erect temporary barriers, usually some arrangement of concertina wire that migrants must cut or go over, to ensure the trespass charges will stick.

And before Texas National Guardsmen in particular can arrest anyone, they’re supposed to go through 40 hours of police training (in practice, I’m told that it’s more like a day-long training). Also, the migrants who are arrested have to be transported to state prisons that have been retrofitted to comply with state jail standards, since migrants are being held in pretrial confinement. That in turn means all the corrections officers have to be trained as jailers.

On top of all these requirements, the entire operation depends on the willingness of local county attorneys to prosecute a deluge of misdemeanor criminal trespass cases arising from all these arrests. In Kinney County, which has a population of less than 4,000, the county attorney is a young man named Brent Smith who just took office in January and has never before worked as a prosecutor. He now has about 1,300 cases and counting thanks to Operation Lone Star. (For context, in normal times the Kinney County prosecutor would only take on a couple dozen cases per year.)

By contrast, in neighboring Val Verde County, the local prosecutor, David Martinez, a Democrat, has rejected nearly half the cases that have come through his office from Operation Lone Star. Last month, Martinez told a local news station he rejected the cases either because the migrants in question were seeking asylum or because there was some other problem with the case. (He cited one case in which state troopers re-directed a group of migrants to cross onto private property so they could arrest them for trespassing.)

For all this, out of about 1,500 criminal trespass cases filed since July through Operation Lone Star, only about 3 percent have resulted in convictions, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, which also cited court records showing that of the 170 Operation Lone Star cases resolved as of November 1, about 70 percent were dismissed, declined, or dropped. The remaining cases ended in plea agreements, with most migrants sentenced to time already served.

Meanwhile, all of this is costing Texas hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier this year, Abbott shifted about $250 million in the state budget to launch the operation, and the GOP-led state legislature later approved an additional $3 billion. In Del Rio, you can see these dollars at work all over town: every hotel parking lot is full of Texas state trooper trucks and SUVs. Uniformed National Guardsmen drive around in armored Humvees. Along some stretches of private land  near the Rio Grande, sparkling new chain-link fencing topped by concertina wire stretches out for miles.

Locals seem to appreciate the effort and money being poured into their communities, especially landowners who feel betrayed and abandoned by the Biden administration. One woman told me her family’s ranch has been repeatedly vandalized this year by migrants — trashed, in fact, for the first time in generations. When they called Border Patrol, the answer came back that no one could be spared to come out and investigate. Their advice was, stay away from your ranch, or move. Their message was, incredibly, we can’t protect you.

Indeed, under the direction of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Border Patrol has for the past ten months been overwhelmed with the endless task of processing and releasing migrants as fast as it possibly can, with little time or personnel available for patrolling the border. In Del Rio, I spoke to former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott, who was forced out by the Biden administration in August, and he said agents are demoralized because they’re unable to do their jobs. Instead of intercepting drug and human traffickers or arresting criminals trying to evade detection — the actual job of Border Patrol agents — they’re stuck processing and transporting asylum-seekers.

Scott sees the border as a “national security issue,” but says the Biden administration has a completely different set of priorities. “Unfortunately since January 20, I haven’t seen a single action or even a single conversation while I was still in the chief’s position, to try to slow the flow to actually create a deterrent to illegal entry,” he says. “Every single action has been to basically be more welcoming. How can we process faster? And that’s just going to continue to be an invitation worldwide.”

Is Operation Lone Star Elaborate Political Theater?

Texas, then, really is on its own. Abbott is right that under the circumstances something must be done by the state, but so far his solution seems overly lawyerly and cautious, designed specifically to pass legal muster and win lawsuits rather than create a real deterrent to illegal immigration.

 

A cynic might suspect that Operation Lone Star, for all its complex interagency coordination and mass deployment of manpower and expensive price tag, is in the end mostly political theater. Its purpose might not be to secure the border so much as to secure Abbott’s right flank against a pair of Republican primary challengers, former GOP Texas Chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines, who accuse Abbott of being too soft on the border.

Given the resources at Abbott’s disposal, West and Huffines — along with plenty of Texas conservatives who are frustrated about the ongoing border crisis — arguably have a point. Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who led U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Trump, has argued that border states have a strong constitutional case for securing their own international borders in the face of federal inaction. Cuccinelli and others cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that no state can engage in diplomacy or war without the consent of Congress, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”

The ongoing border crisis, which has seen a record 1.7 million arrests at the southwest border in the last 12 months, constitutes both an invasion and an imminent danger that will not admit delay, the argument goes, and states have a right to act. Not only could border state governors like Abbott invoke emergency powers to return illegal immigrants directly to Mexico, state legislatures could pass laws making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to remain in those states, mostly through strict licensure and screening requirements for sponsors and refugee resettlement organizations.

All of these things, and much else besides, lie far outside the scope of what Abbott is doing in Texas. There is no question at this point that Operation Lone Star, whatever its merits, will not significantly change the situation along the Rio Grande. The border crisis created by the Biden administration is here to stay — a new normal along the southwest border for as long as the White House desires it.

What could change that? Texas could. Abbott could. He has already demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize and deploy thousands of Texas law enforcement and military personnel, along with every manner of vehicles, barriers, and transports. Nothing like Operation Lone Star has ever been undertaken, yet it is too little, too late — too pinched and small-minded a response to a rolling crisis that now appears to be permanent.

Abbott could wield these tools to press the constitutional question about what border states can do when the federal government leaves them to their own devices. If he doesn’t, he might find the people of Texas are ready to listen to someone who will. source

Details of the Parole Status of Illegals in the Biden Administration

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Primer: The Biden Administration is legislating ignoring Congress.

What is Parole? 

 

FNC:

EXCLUSIVE: At least 160,000 illegal immigrants have been released into the U.S., often with little to no supervision, by the Biden administration since March – including a broad use of limited parole authorities to make more than 30,000 eligible for work permits since August, Border Patrol documents obtained by Fox News show.

The documents give a partial snapshot into how the Biden administration has been releasing enormous numbers of migrants into the U.S., often with little to no oversight, supervision or immediate risk of deportation.

Since March 20, at least 94,570 illegal immigrants have been released into the U.S. with Notices to Report. Those who receive such a notice are only required to check in with an ICE office when they get to their final destination – which could be anywhere across the country. Those who check in are not deported or detained as their immigration proceedings move forward.

Meanwhile, since Aug 6th, the administration has released roughly 32,000 immigrants into the U.S. via parole – which gives migrants a form of legal status and the ability to apply for work permits.

Federal law says parole authority is to be used on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian purposes” and “significant public benefit.” Typically only a handful of parole cases are granted by officials, but the Biden administration has been using it more broadly, including in its parole of tens of thousands of Afghans into the United States as part of Operation Allies Welcome.

Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who served under President Biden, reviewed the documents and told Fox News that he believes the administration is abusing its parole authority.

“By law and regulation a parole shall only be granted on a case by case basis and only for significant humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. Neither of these appear to apply to the current situation,” he said, adding that the number of paroles brings into question the review and approval process.

“As a field chief, I don’t believe I ever approved more than 5 or 10 paroles in a year,” he said. “When I did, I ensured that the alien was monitored continuously and was detained or removed as soon as the circumstances allowed.”

The documents also show that since Aug 6, the administration has released an additional 40,000 illegal immigrants on their own recognizance. The documents also show that on one single day in Del Rio sector, 128 single adult illegal immigrants were released into the U.S. without ATD – which typically includes tracking by an ankle monitor or phone.

Texas braces for the arrival of 60,000 migrants at the borderVideo

A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official told Fox that mechanisms like paroling, the use of NTRs and enrolling migrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) “provides mechanisms to require family units released from CBP custody to report to ICE within a specified time.”

The official also cited figures that show that between 2014 and 2020, 81% of those released into the U.S. did report in for their immigration proceedings.

The agency has not released its numbers for September, but in both July and August there were more than 200,000 migrant encounters, marking some of the highest numbers in two decades. Since then, migrants have kept coming in large numbers. According to the documents, Rio Grande Valley encountered 5,900 migrants in one week, while Del Rio encountered more than 2,900 in the same period.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has repeatedly claimed that the border is not open, reportedly warned officials of a worst case scenario of up to 400,000 encounters if Title 42 public health protections were ended.

Republicans have blamed the Biden administration’s rapid rollback of Trump-era border protections for the ongoing crisis at the border. The administration however has focused on an explanation emphasizing “root causes” like poverty, corruption and violence in Central America.

“The downturn in economies, the attendant rise in violence, the downturn in economies made more acute by reason of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the suppression of any humanitarian relief over the past number of years, and the pent-up thirst for relief among many different populations,” Mayorkas told Yahoo News this week. “I think an accumulation of factors contributes to the rise in migration that we’ve seen.”

Chinese ‘military’ Aircraft landed in Bagram Airbase

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The Pentagon knows for sure and is not talking or doing any reporting. We have advanced technology to see the activity at Bagram including GeoSpatial systems. Anyone asking the right questions? Not so far but read on.

Ah, but the Taliban denies this story…of course they do as does the Chinese Foreign Minister.

Chinese ‘military’ aircraft landed in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, said the Daily Mail on Sunday.

The UK newspaper’s report was based on its own sources, noting that power was restored in the airbase the US left in July.

 

The Daily Mail said unconfirmed reports suggest that the Chinese forces are the ones who “occupied the former US stronghold.”

The Daily Mail also noted that many military aircraft had been seen taking off and landing in the airbase, as images and videos circulating on social media show its floodlights in the distance amid reports of flights.

China, a country bordering Afghanistan, accused the United States of “leaving chaos” behind in Afghanistan after withdrawing from the country. This comes especially after scenes of civilians attempting to escape through the Kabul airport as the US was evacuating its nationals and embassy staff went viral.

A Chinese government spokesperson later declared that China was ready to enhance cooperation with Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country.

In July, ahead of the US withdrawal, a Taliban delegation met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and the Taliban pledged that Afghan territories would not be used to undermine the security of other countries. In return, China offered economic support and investments to rebuild the country torn by the 20-year US-NATO war on it.

***

The Taliban has already begun talking up plans for cooperation with Beijing.

A Taliban spokesman told an Italian newspaper that Afghanistan’s new rulers will rely primarily on financing from China as it seeks to head off a looming humanitarian crisis and begin reconstruction.

‘China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us, because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country,’ Zabihullah Mujahid told La Repubblica in an interview.

He also praised the New Silk Road – part of the Belt and Road Initiative that China is using to open up trade routes – and said Beijing investment could help reopen copper mines.

A report suggests China’s deployment might not be coming for another two years and it would not involve them taking over the base, merely sending personnel at the Taliban’s invite.

China likely achieve its latest ambitions for Bagram through help from Pakistan, Sun says, adding, ‘I am sure they would like to cut out the middleman,’ she added. ‘If the Taliban requests Chinese assistance, I think China will be inclined to send human support. Most likely, they will frame it as technical support or logistic support.’ source

***

In late September –

Chinese Delegation Visits Bagram Airbase: As soon as America is out of Afghanistan, Pakistan and China are showing their interest in almost every matter related to this country. A few days before the announcement of the interim government of the Taliban, Faiz Hameed, the chief of Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, arrived in Kabul. Now the news has come that the Chinese delegation has visited the Bagram airbase last week. This airbase was Afghanistan’s largest military base for the US during the war that lasted for two decades. It is also considered strategically very important.

According to a media report, this Chinese delegation included senior intelligence and military officials (Chinese Delegation at Bagram Airbase). It is not yet clear why they visited the airbase, but they are believed to have come here allegedly “to gather evidence and data against the US”. According to sources, it seems that China is developing a ‘facility’ here in collaboration with Taliban and Pakistan to keep an eye on Uyghur Muslims living in its Xinjiang province.

Chinese officials who came through Pakistan

The report quoted sources as saying that the most interesting thing during this period was that instead of landing at Kabul airport, Chinese officials came here via Pakistan. The arrival of Chinese officials to Bagram airbase is also a matter of concern for India (China Bagram Airfield). The report quoted senior government sources as saying, “We are confirming the news of the arrival of the Chinese group here. This is very serious… If they establish a base here with Pakistan, they will encourage terrorist activities and create instability in the region.

Earlier this month, Pakistan ISI Chief Faiz Hameed met the intelligence chiefs of Russia, China, Iran and Tajikistan. During this, Hameed informed them about the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the changes that took place there. Hameed allegedly spewed a lot of venom against India as well (Taliban Afghanistan Government). At the same time, in the internal government formed by the Taliban with the Haqqani network, terrorists have been placed in high positions. This government was announced about three days after Hameed’s visit. Talking about China, it is the first country that has established diplomatic contacts with Afghanistan after the occupation of Taliban.

Useful Details/Laws about the Migrant Chaos at the Southern Border

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As a primer:

America’s Founders were concerned about invasion. It was mentioned it four times in the Constitution, though the term was never explicitly defined.

Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 15: The Congress shall have the Power (to) provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2: The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Article I, Section 10, Paragraph 3: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article IV, Section 4, Paragraph 1: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestics Violence.

So, as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Mayorkas admits at least 13,000 Haitians were admitted into the United States to clear Del Rio, no one can deny this is an invasion. Further, that number only refers to those under that bridge in Del Rio, it does not include the 1.2 million that already passed into the United States or the unknown number of ‘gotaways’. Miles and miles of other parts of the Southern border goes unprotected or managed due to the overwhelming volume.

In June of 2021, Congressman Jody Arrington (R-TX) introduced legislation that further explains the lawlessness that Congress must address.

H.J.Res.50 – Recognizing that Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution explicitly reserves to the States the sovereign power to repel an invasion and defend their citizenry from the overwhelming and “imminent danger” posed by paramilitary, narco-terrorist cartels who have seized control of our southern border.

Read the proposed legislation here. 

Of course under Speaker Nancy Pelosi there will be no movement to this legislation or others in the pipeline.

Even more crazy is the fact that the Haitians were already given residency status in several countries in Latin America going back to as far as 2010, directly after the earthquake.

After the earthquake of 2010, thousands of Haitians began migration to the country, in hopes of finding a new life. According to Atlanta Blackstar, the United Nations reported “an unprecedented number of people displaced from their homes—one in 113 people in the world—migration and asylum has once again come under the spotlight.”

In 2015, the Brazilian government granted residency to almost 44, 000 Haitians. source

Haitians Flee To Brazil To Escape Getty Images

In part from an NBC affiliate: Most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil but were not seeking the same from Mexico, according to Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, Marcelo Ebrard. “What they are asking for is to be allowed to pass freely through Mexico to the United States,” Ebrard said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a stark warning during a news conference Monday. “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” he said. The DHS says some who are being released are given legal documents summoning them to a court date.

“Individuals who are not immediately repatriated are either placed in Alternatives to Detention, detained in an ICE facility, or released with a legal document (either a Notice to Appear in court or a notice to report to an ICE office for further immigration processing),” DHS spokesman Eduardo Maia Silva told Sinclair Broadcast Group in an emailed statement. (this obviously has turned out to be a lie)

 

 

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“The reason Haitian migrants discard their Chilean and Brazilian ID cards over here on the Mex side is to obscure from asylum reviewers that they were already safely and prosperously situated for years and years before coming for the American upgrades,” explained Bensman.

Fox News journalist Bill Melugin also published photographs of documents discarded by the migrants, and among the findings, he discovered that some of them had already been processed by the United States.

 

It should be recalled that according to the Daily Mail, a recent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) does not have the resources to assess the health of migrants entering its custody and relies on public health systems in surrounding cities to do so.

“Without stronger COVID-19 prevention measures in place, DHS is putting its workforce, support staff, communities, and migrants at greater risk of contracting the virus,” wrote the DHS Office of Inspector General. source

Now back to that pesky Constitution…right? Not for anyone part of the Biden administration.

$64 Million to Afghanistan Per Biden Admin but Add in $1.2 Billion

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The Taliban is swimming in significant assets, with more to come. and China is delighted.he ultimate winner of two decades of war in Afghanistan is likely China. Secretary of State Antony Blinkin confirmed that if the Taliban behaves, the $64 million will be authorized. Further, there is the matter of nations around the world and the pledges they have made in ’emergency funds’ for Afghanistan.

At the first high-level conference on Afghanistan since the Taliban took power a month ago, Western governments, big traditional donors and others announced pledges that went beyond the $606 million that the United Nations was seeking to cover costs through the end of the year for protecting Afghans from looming humanitarian disaster.

U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths announced at the close of the ministerial meeting that more than $1.2 billion in humanitarian and development aid had been pledged. He said this included the $606 million sought in a “flash appeal” but also a regional response to the Afghan crisis that U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi spoke about after arriving in Kabul on a previously unannounced visit.

He wrote on Twitter that he would assess humanitarian needs and the situation of 3.5 million displaced Afghans, including over 500,000 displaced this year alone.

Officials at the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, have expressed concerns that more Afghans could take refuge into neighboring Pakistan and Iran, which both already have large numbers of Afghans who fled their country during the past decades of war. sourceTaliban seen with SCAR rifle commonly carried by American ...

GovExe: The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war. Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.

To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the bespoke and relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields. These purpose-built items aren’t nearly as invincible to penetration as even your own phone.

“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy…it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” to attack them.

Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan.

Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane an adversary with time and will could pick those apart one by one.

“You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and it’s a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time” until he obtained actual copies of the gear, Lospinoso said. “It is the playground for them to develop attacks against similar items.”

Georgianna Shea, who spent five years at MITRE helping the Pentagon research and test new technologies,  said the loss of key equipment to the Taliban “exposes everything we do in the U.S., DOD: our plans of action, how we configure things, how we protect things. It allows them unlimited time and access to go through and find vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of.”

“It’s not just a Humvee. It’s not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. It’s a Humvee that’s full of radios, technologies, crypto systems, things we don’t want our adversaries getting a hold of,” said Shea, now chief technologist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Transformative Innovation Lab.

Of particular concern are the electronic countermeasures gear, or ECMs, used to detect improvised explosive devices.

“Imagine the research and development effort that went into develop those ECM devices that were designed to counter IEDs,” said Peter Christensen, a former director of the U.S. Army’s National Cyber Range. “Now, our adversaries have them. They’re going to have the software and the hardware that goes with that system. But also develop capabilities to defeat or mitigate the effectiveness of those ECM devices.”

Gear that has been “demilitarized” or “rendered inoperable,” as U.S. officials described the planes and vehicles left behind, can still reveal secrets, Shea said.

“In some cases, this equipment was fielded with the assumption we would have gates and guards to protect it. When it was developed, no one thought the Chinese would have it in their cyber lab, dissecting it, pulling it apart.”

Once an attacker has physical control of a device, little can stop her from discovering its vulnerabilities—and there are always vulnerabilities, Shea said.

Under current acquisition practices, most new defense gear is not tested for vulnerabilities until late in the design process. Testers often receive far too little time to test comprehensively. Sometimes they get just two weeks, she said, and yet “they always find something. Always.”

“Regardless of the previous testing that’s been done on compliance, they always find something: always… “They’re very backlogged and don’t have an unending amount of resources,” she said. So you have to schedule development with these testers. There’s not enough resources to test it to the depth and breadth that it should be to understand all of the vulnerabilities.”

Plans to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities “were often inconsistent or inadequate,” Christensen said.

Lospinoso, who spent years conducting such tests for the Army, still performs penetration testing for the U.S. military as a contractor. He says a smart hacker can usually find useful vulnerabilities  in hardware “within hours.”

When such a network attack disables a radio or a truck, troops are generally not trained to do anything about it. They may not even realize that they have been attacked, and may chalk up problems to age or maintenance problems.

“Every time we run an attack against a system, knocked out a subcomponent or have some really devastating effect that could cause loss of an asset—every time, the operator in the cockpit says, ‘We do not have operating procedures for what you just did,’” Lospinoso said.

Little of this is new. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office highlighted many of these concerns in a blistering report.

More than just insight into network vulnerabilities, the abandoned vehicles and gear will help China understand how U.S. forces work with partner militaries, said N. MacDonnell Ulsch, the CEO and chief analyst of Phylax Analytics.

“If you were to take all of the technology that was currently deployed in Afghanistan by the [United States] and you made an assessment of that, you have a point in time and a point in place reference of what the status quo is; what technology is being used, how much it costs, what’s it capable of doing and you realize it’s going to a developing nation,” Ulsch said.

China can use the knowledge to develop their weapons and tactics, but also to give their arms-export sales team an edge, he said. The Taliban have highlighted their nascent partnership with China as perhaps their most important foreign diplomatic effort. China, meanwhile, has already begun giving millions in aid to the new regime.

Whatever vulnerabilities China does discover will likely imperil U.S. troops for years to come, Lospinoso said.

“There is a zero percent chance we will go back and re-engineer” all of the various systems with serious cyber vulnerabilities, he said. “We are stuck with billions and billions in weapon systems that have fundamental flaws.”