Category Archives: Energy Agenda

Cyber-attacks surging in Utah

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NSA facility is likely cause….

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah state officials have seen what they describe as a sharp uptick in attempts to hack into state computers in the last two years, and they think it related to the NSA data center south of Salt Lake City.

The increase began in early 2013 as international attention focused on the NSA’s $1.7 billion warehouse to store massive amounts of information gathered secretly from phone calls and emails.

“In the cyber world, that’s a big deal,” Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires told a state legislative committee this week.

While most of the attempts are likely innocuous, cyber experts say it is possible low-level hackers, “hactivists” unhappy with the NSA’s tactics, and some foreign criminal groups might erroneously think the state systems are linked to the NSA.

“Maybe these hackers are thinking: ‘If we can attack state systems, we can get info that NSA isn’t releasing,” said Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s, graduate cybersecurity program.

The state tracks the attempts with an automated system it purchased after a breach of health care information in 2012. The system detects, stops and counts the attempts to get into the computers, Squires said.

With that new equipment in place in January 2013, the state was seeing an average of 50,000 a day with spikes up to 20 million, Squires told The Associated Press. In February 2013, the number rose to an average of 75 million attacks a day, with up to 500 million on some days.

Attacks include direct attacks on websites, emails fishing for passwords, and something called “port scans,” where people probe a computer looking for weak spots.

The NSA didn’t immediately have any comment about the attacks.

Tim Junio, a cybersecurity researcher at Stanford University, said what officials refer to as “attacks” are likely just “noise from low-tech people rather than concerted efforts for meaningful foreign intelligence collection.”

But both Forno and Junio agree the NSA data center could draw the attention of hackers who think they can target state-run utilities that power the center. Being able to disrupt an NSA operation in any way would bring international notoriety to a foreign state or criminal group, Junio said.

State officials acknowledge that part of the increase is driven by an overall rise in hacking across the country. Hackers’ motivations vary, and it was impossible to determine what might be behind the activity in Utah.

Some steal personal information, like customer lists, to commit identity theft. Some take control of email servers to steal messages, send unwanted advertising or disguise the origin of their communications. Some steal corporate or government secrets from email or cloud servers, or use unlocked file servers as digital “dead drops” for their hacking tools, pirated movies, stolen files and more.

For hackers seeking notoriety, the NSA would be a prized target because it employs the world’s best hackers and routinely gives advice about how to keep computers safe from online criminals.

*** How much more do you really need to know?

In the 10 years since the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center first asked experts about the future of cyber attacks in 2004 a lot has happened:
 Some suspect the Russian government of attacking or encouraging organized crime assaults on official websites in the nation of Georgia during military struggles in 2008 that resulted in a Russian invasion of Georgia.
 In 2009-2010, suspicions arose that a sophisticated government-created computer worm called “Stuxnet” was loosed in order to disable Iranian nuclear plant centrifuges that could be used for making weapons-grade enriched uranium. Unnamed sources and speculators argued that the governments of the United States and Israel might have designed and spread the worm.
 The American Defense Department has created a Cyber Command structure that builds Internet-enabled defensive and offensive cyber strategies as an integral part of war planning and war making.
 In May, five Chinese military officials were indicted in Western Pennsylvania for computer hacking, espionage and other offenses that were aimed at six US victims, including nuclear power plants, metals and solar products industries. The indictment comes after several years of revelations that Chinese military and other agents have broken into computers at major US corporations and media companies in a bid to steal trade secrets and learn what stories journalists were working on.
 In October, Russian hackers were purportedly discovered to be exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Windows to spy on NATO, the Ukrainian government, and Western businesses.
 The respected Ponemon Institute reported in September that 43% of firms in the United States had experienced a data breach in the past year. Retail breaches, in particular, had grown in size in virulence in the previous year. One of the most chilling breaches was discovered in July at JPMorgan Chase & Co., compromised. Obama Administration  officials have wondered if the breach was in retaliation by the Putin regime in Russia over events in Ukraine.
 Among the types of exploits of individuals in evidence today are stolen national ID numbers, pilfered passwords and payment information, erased online identities, espionage tools that record all online conversations and keystrokes, and even hacks of driverless cars.
 Days before this report was published, Apple’s iCloud cloud-based data storage system was the target of a so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack in China that was aimed at stealing users’ passwords and spying on their account activities. Some activists and security experts said they suspected the Chinese government had mounted the attack, perhaps because the iPhone 6 had just become available in the country. Others thouThe threat of cyber attacks on government agencies, businesses, non-profits, and individual users is so pervasive and worrisome that this month (October 2014) is National Cyber Security Awareness Month.
To explore the future of cyber attacks we canvassed thousands of experts and Internet builders to share their predictions. We call this a canvassing because it is not a representative, randomized survey. Its findings emerge from an “opt in” invitation to experts, many of whom play active roles in Internet evolution as technology builders, researchers, managers, policymakers, marketers, and analysts. We also invited comments from those who have made insightful predictions to our previous queries about the future of the Internet.

It is NOT Just George Soros

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Soros Clones: 5 Liberal Mega-Donors Nearly as Dangerous as George Soros

From Buffett to Bloomberg, top left-wing supporters give $2.7 billion to push a liberal agenda.

Born: June 21, 1967

Net Worth: $7.6 Billion

Foundation: Omidyar Network Fund, Democracy Fund

Rating: 2 out of 5

Media Outlets: First Look Media, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Responsive Politics, Sunlight Foundation

EBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar took the idea of funding the liberal media one step further when he built a media powerhouse all of his own. He used $250 million of his own money and created the news start-up First Look Media.

Omidyar staffed First Look with career liberal journalists from other outlets, including The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Slate’s Matt Taibbi. Greenwald’s liberal rants now have a prominent place at The Intercept, First Look’s online magazine. That was the only news-oriented part of the website up and running at the time of this report.  

Greenwald was one of two journalists entrusted by Edward Snowden with the leaked NSA documents. (The other, Laura Poitras, also works at The Intercept.) According to the outlet’s own website, The Intercept’s “short-term mission is to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

According to Greenwald, The Intercept launched earlier than originally planned due to an “obligation to the NSA documents to have a place to report them.” Besides reporting on the Snowden documents, The Intercept promised to “move forward with what we believe is essential reporting in the public interest.”

Because of his connection to Snowden, Greenwald’s romantic partner, David Miranda, was temporarily held at London’s Heathrow airport in August 2013 under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act 2000. British authorities confiscated Miranda’s external hard drive containing “58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents,” according to Greenwald’s then-employer The Guardian. Starting in June, 2013, Greenwald wrote a series of articles publicizing material from Snowden’s stolen files.

Omidyar prefers to keep his own politics quiet, but his funding revealed what his words didn’t. Through his foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, he gave more than $213 million to liberal organizations – in addition to the $250 million he spent on First Look.

The liberal groups he funded included George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation (a foundation used to funnel liberal money anonymously to a variety of causes), as well as left-wing journalism groups like the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Responsive Politics.

Another one of Omidyar’s pet projects was promoting the idea of a “post-political” world. At first, the idea of a world without political bickering might sound appealing, but Omidyar’s end goal was to limit political opposition to the majority.

Omidyar himself said as much in the announcement notice for the creation of his latest grantmaking operation, the Democracy Fund. In the January 2013 open letter, Omidyar repeatedly accused the Republican-dominated Congress of being run by “big donors and lobbyists,” as well as being “dominated by the demonization of opponents and deceptive political rhetoric.”

Partial List of Omidyar’s Donations Since 2004:

  • First Look Media: $250,000,000
  • Sunlight Foundation: $20,505,184
  • Center for Public Integrity: $2,150,000
  • Open Society Foundation (London): $677,142
  • Tides Center: $501,000

 

Conclusion

George Soros doesn’t work alone. Despite liberal cries about conservative “dark money,” the left continued to be financed by an intricate network of dozens of millionaires, billionaires and foundations. This report highlighted only a handful of the most prominent members of this group.

The media coverage of these liberal donors was inexcusable. It was not the job of the media to promote or applaud partisan efforts, and it was negligent of them to ignore or bury connections between liberal policy initiatives and the liberals who funded them. Journalists were far more apt to cover conservative billionaires and their influence than they were to cover liberal billionaires.

As George Soros retires more and more from the political funding spotlight, liberal bankrollers like Buffett, Bloomberg, Steyer, Omidyar and the younger Soros were vying to take his place. And this report is just the tip of that iceberg. There are dozens of other millionaires, billionaires and political game changers on the left. Several big liberal players were not included in this report, including Rob McKay, the Taco Bell heir and big campaigner for higher minimum wage laws; George Kaiser, the billionaire oil tycoon who invested heavily in Oklahoma politics; Drummond Pike, the creator of the highly influential Tides Foundation.

Methodology

For this Special Report, the MRC’s Business and Media Institute looked at 990 tax returns for foundations and nonprofits associated with Bloomberg, Buffett, Steyer, Omidyar and Soros. These tax returns are available through Guidestar and the Foundation Directory. All net worth amounts come from the Forbes Billionaires List.

To gauge the media coverage of these liberal donors, BMI looked for mentions of their names in Nexis transcripts for the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC from January 2001 to June 2014.

Recommendations for Journalists

The Business and Media Institute has the following recommendations for journalists who are reporting on political organizations, donors and funding.

  • Follow the Money: Liberal billionaires funded a wide range of political organizations and media groups. These groups were then considered authorities by major media outlets, including ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. Instead, reporters should challenge the biases of these groups.
  • Treat Public Figures Equally: Media outlets are quick to report on funding by Charles and David Koch to conservative organizations, but they often completely ignore the wide range of funding by liberal donors. Among them, these five liberal donors are worth more than $109 billion dollars, and they aren’t alone.
  • Dig Into Backgrounds of Both Sides: The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states that journalists should, “Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.” It is incumbent upon journalists to analyze the background and funding sources for groups and individuals on both ends of the political spectrum.

— Mike Ciandella is MRC Business Senior Analyst at the Media Research Center. *** If you are rolling your eyes by now, it gets worse, add in the interference regarding the Ukraine.

Gitmo Detainee Joined ISIS, Dead by Drone

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(CNN)He was a Taliban commander captured by the United States and held at Guantanamo Bay. But he was let go and returned to Afghanistan. Mullah Abdul Rauf went on to become a recruiter for ISIS in Afghanistan.

He was killed in a drone strike Monday, two officials told CNN.

Rauf and five others were killed, four of them Pakistani militants, said Mohammed Jan Rasoulya, the deputy governor of southern Helmand province. A senior Afghan security source confirmed Rauf’s death.

The Washington Post, in a headline last month, called him “the shadowy figure recruiting for the Islamic State in Afghanistan.”

The New York Times called him the “militant commander at the center of the concerns in Helmand Province” but said some local Taliban figures “dismiss claims” that he had established “a significant new Islamic State cell in Helmand Province.”

He was known to many with the name “Khadim” tacked on to the end of his name.

“Until 9/11, the hard-nosed Khadim commanded (Taliban creator) Mullah Omar’s elite mobile reserve force, fighting regime opponents all over Afghanistan,” Newsweek wrote of Rauf in a 2011 list of list of most-wanted insurgents. “Arrested and sent to Guantanamo soon after the Taliban’s collapse, he was released in late 2007, having convinced his jailers that he wanted only to go home and tend his farm. Escaping from house arrest in Kabul, he fled to Pakistan.”

Although the United States does not publicize the names of detainees at Guantanamo, a document posted by WikiLeaks showed that the United States recommended Rauf be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention” as early as 2004.

In a 2011 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations — part of the Armed Services Committee — a lawmaker asked about Rauf and another former detainee.

Ed Mornston, director of the Joint Intelligence Task Force of the Defense Intelligence Agency, responded that “there have been instances where detainees who have been transferred from Gitmo have reengaged and have been in the fight and have impacted the lives of U.S. service members. We do track that. I can’t discuss that much further in this open session, but we do in fact know that that has happened.”

*** But what else needs to be known about Afghanistan…..

Report: Afghan police-Taliban ties being investigated

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s national spy service is investigating the police force in Kunduz, a northern province that has fallen prey to criminal gangs, The New York Times reported Sunday.

So far at least 32 police officers have come under suspicion, a member of Parliament from Kunduz, Abdul Wadud Paiman, and other officials told the Times. Of those, more than a dozen police officers have been arrested, including several senior commanders, a spokesman for the governor, Wasi Basil, said. Others have been fired or suspended.

Mullah Mujahid, a Taliban commander in Kunduz province, was arrested last month. Under interrogation, the Times wrote, Mujahid began describing how police officers helped Taliban fighters, sometimes selling them ammunition, other times tipping them off to impending police operations, and began naming names, Paiman said.

The number of officers involved makes it one of the most significant corruption investigations within the national police force in years, the Times wrote. Although the police force in Afghanistan has a reputation for corruption, charges are rare.

                                       

Security in the province, which shares a border with Tajikistan, has worsened in recent years. By some estimates, Kunduz has about 3,000 armed militiamen, the paper reported.

By late last year, with most foreign troops departed, the Taliban effectively controlled two of the districts in Kunduz. President Ashraf Ghani has declared Kunduz a priority and appointed a new governor and security officials for the province. The army sent in troop reinforcements from a neighboring province.

It is not entirely clear why the most recent arrest of Mujahid, in mid-January, turned out so differently from his previous arrests, Paiman is reported as saying.

Mujahid, who is 30 years old and whose actual name is Anwar ul Haq, remains in custody, Paiman said, telling the Times, “Mullah Mujahid confessed in the interrogation and named who helped them from within the police.”

For the moment, it is not entirely clear whether investigators believe Mujahid’s allegations are credible. But the accusations against the officers go beyond selling ammunition, a not uncommon form of corruption, officials said.

Some have been accused of “sending information to the militants so that the Taliban could plan their attacks or ambushes,” Basil told the Times.

HSBC Web of Corruption Includes Familiar Names

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British bank HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA.L) admitted on Sunday failings by its Swiss subsidiary, in response to media reports it helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets.

“We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures,” HSBC said on Sunday after news outlets including French newspaper Le Monde and Britain’s The Guardian published allegations about its Swiss private bank.

The Guardian, along with other news outlets, cited documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) via Le Monde.

HSBC said that its Swiss arm had not been fully integrated into HSBC after its purchase in 1999, allowing “significantly lower” standards of compliance and due diligence to persist.

The Guardian alleged in its report that the files showed HSBC’s Swiss bank routinely allowed clients to withdraw “bricks” of cash, often in foreign currencies which were of little use in Switzerland, marketed schemes which were likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes and colluded with some to conceal undeclared accounts from domestic tax authorities.

HSBC said the Swiss private banking industry, long known for its secrecy, operated differently in the past and this may have resulted in HSBC having had “a number of clients that may not have been fully compliant with their applicable tax obligations.”

 

HSBC’s clients linked to dictators, arms dealers and tax dodgers

Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

The leaked files, based on the inner workings of HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm, relate to accounts holding more than $100 billion. They provide a rare glimpse inside the super-secret Swiss banking system — one the public has never seen before.

The documents, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) via the French newspaper Le Monde, show the bank’s dealings with clients engaged in a spectrum of illegal behavior, especially in hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from tax authorities. They also show private records of famed soccer and tennis players, cyclists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, royalty, politicians, corporate executives and old-wealth families.

These disclosures shine a light on the intersection of international crime and legitimate business, and they dramatically expand what’s known about potentially illegal or unethical behavior in recent years at HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks.

How the offshore banking industry shelters money and hides secrets has enormous implications for societies across the globe. Academics conservatively estimate that $7.6 trillion is held in overseas tax havens, costing government treasuries at least $200 billion a year.

In many instances the records do describe questionable behavior, such as bankers advising clients on how to take a range of measures to avoid paying taxes in their home countries — and customers telling bankers that their accounts are not declared to their governments.

Highlights from ICIJ’s investigation:

The reporters found the names of current and former politicians from Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kenya, Romania, India, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Paraguay, Djibouti, Senegal, the Philippines and Algeria, among others. They found several people on the current U.S. sanctions list, such as Selim Alguadis, a Turkish businessman alleged to have supplied sophisticated electrical goods to Libya’s secret nuclear weapons project, and Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of the main targets of sanctions imposed on Russian individuals and businesses in response to the annexation of Crimea and the crisis in eastern Ukraine.

The files reflect a spectrum of royalty, from King Mohammed VI of Morocco to the Crown prince of Bahrain, Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, to Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, the beloved cousin of Queen Elizabeth II of England, to dozens of members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family. Many were partial or full beneficial owners of accounts. The role of the King of Morocco was not specified.

Business figures and political donors from the U.S. include the billionaire owner of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie chain, Les Wexner, who in 2012 donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; the Israeli diamond-dealing Steinmetz family, and the financier and philanthropist S. Donald Sussman, whose account predated his marriage to Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine.

A representative for Sussman said the account was not his, adding that he had made a passive investment in a technology venture fund. The representative said it was this fund that had the account, the existence of which he learned for the first time when questioned by ICIJ. “Mr. Sussman’s investments were minority interests,” the spokesman said, “and he had no involvement in the funds’ management, investment decisions, or other activities.”

An analysis of the files by ICIJ shows that many individuals linked to accounts took extra precautions to protect their identities, even though HSBC staff repeatedly assured customers they were already bound by tight Swiss banking secrecy.

Clinton Foundation Donors

The files show Richard Caring, a major donor to British politics, transferring $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit set up by the former U.S. President Bill Clinton with the stated mission to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.”

The donation to the Clinton Foundation was requested in December 2005. The previous month, Caring funded a champagne and caviar extravaganza at Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Russia, flying in 450 guests to be entertained by Sir Elton John and Tina Turner and addressed by Bill Clinton. The event raised more than £11 million for a children’s charity.

A number of other prominent donors to the Clinton Foundation appear in the files, including the Canadian businessman Frank Giustra and German motor racing superstar Michael Schumacher, a seven-time Formula One champion. A representative of Schumacher, who is listed as a beneficial owner of an account closed in 2002, told ICIJ that he is a long-term resident of Switzerland.

A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation told The Guardian it “has strong donor integrity and transparency practices that go well beyond what is required of U.S. charities, including the full disclosure of all of our donors.”

Links to Al Qaeda?

HSBC’s clients’ links to Al Qaeda were first publicly raised in the July 2012 U.S. Senate report, which cited an alleged internal Al Qaeda list of financial benefactors. The Senate report said the list came to light after a search of the Bosnian offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a Saudi-based nonprofit organization that the U.S. Treasury Department has designated as a terrorist organization.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, referred to the handwritten list of the 20 names as the “Golden Chain.”

From the moment the names on the Golden Chain list were made public in news reports in the spring of 2003, the Senate subcommittee stated that HSBC should have been “on notice” and aware these powerful business figures were high risk clients.

Though the significance of the Golden Chain list has since been questioned, the ICIJ found what appear to be three Golden Chain names with HSBC Swiss accounts that existed after that date.

Read the full story on ICIJ.org and explore the data.

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Merkel, Obama and Putin

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Exactly why is Angela Merkel of German visiting the White House today? Putin is in Cairo today expanding his influence or is he? There is a real split on arming Ukraine, on a military solution or giving diplomacy more time with regard to getting Putin out of Ukraine. There have been numerous cease-fire agreements, each have collapsed, such that 5400 people in Ukraine are dead. What about Greece? There is also the question of what Putin is doing with Cyprus.

Cyprus has denied Russian media reports that it is ready to lease two military bases to Russia.

“There is no question of Russian air or naval military bases on the soil of Cyprus,” said Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides.

Earlier, Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades would make the offer on an official visit to Moscow on 25 February.

Cyprus is in the EU but not in Nato.

The leasing deal would concern an air base near Paphos and a naval base at Limassol, according to Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Russia can already use the bases temporarily.

But Mr Kasoulides dismissed the leasing claim, saying “there has never been any request from Russia about this”, the Cyprus News Agency CNA reported.

He said President Anastasiades was referring to “the renewal of a military co-operation agreement with Russia consisting of maintenance of military equipment sold to Cyprus years ago, as well as the purchase of spare parts according to existing contracts”.

He added that “as regards the offering of facilities, these are of a purely non-military humanitarian nature, such as the evacuation of Russian civilians from the Middle East if the need arises”.

Russian warships can already use the Limassol base for refuelling and the Andreas Papandreou air base for humanitarian missions.

Commander of US Army in Europe Sees Russia Mobilizing for War  ‘I believe the Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen in five or six years —not that they’re going to start a war in five or six years, but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five or six years.”

So says Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe….

“Strong Europe!” reads a sign on one of the walls. Next to it is the U.S. Army Europe insignia, a burning sword set against a blue shield. The two signs represent the strategic framework the three-star general has introduced—building on America’s decades-long role on the Continent—since taking command last year of the 30,000 or so U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe.

The U.S. military presence in Europe is more vital at this moment than it has been in many years. American engagement is essential if the West is to deter a revanchist Russia that has set out to “redraw the boundaries of Europe,” Gen. Hodges says with a native Floridian’s drawl….

The Russians have “got some forces in Transnistria,” he says of the state that broke away from Moldova in the 1990s. “They’ve got forces in Georgia. And I think they view China as their existential threat, so they’ve got a lot of capacity out there.” The Russian military is thus already somewhat stretched, and Moscow had to carve out from existing units the battalion task groups currently arrayed near eastern Ukraine. Yet “they are clearly on a path to develop, to increase, their capacity,” Gen. Hodges says. Add to this expansion that “they’ve got very good equipment, extremely good communications equipment, their [electronic-warfare] capability, T-80 tanks.” How long will it take for Russia to reach its desired military strength? “I think within another two or three years they will have that capacity,” he says….

Then there is the Kremlin’s sheer aggressiveness, not least on the nuclear front. The Pentagon last year announced that it is removing missiles from 50 of America’s underground silos, converting B-52 long-range bombers to conventional use and disabling 56 submarine-based nuclear-launch tubes—all well ahead of the 2018 New Start treaty deadline. Moscow, by contrast, has been simulating nuclear strikes on Western capitals as part of annual exercises.

Gen. Hodges won’t comment on the U.S. strategic-force posture in Europe other than to say he is “confident in that process.” But he adds that the fact that the Russians rehearse nuclear-strike scenarios “shows that they’re not worried about conveying a stark message like that. You know, frankly, you hear this often from many people in the West, ‘Oh, we don’t want to provoke the Russians.’ I think concern about provoking the Russians is probably misplaced. You can’t provoke them. They’re already on a path to do what they want to do….

“I’ve never been bashful about telling allies, ‘Hey, you have a responsibility here, too. You all agreed to spend 2% of your GDP on defense. Right now only four countries are doing it.'”

Yet the failure of many of European leaders to live up to their defense commitments “doesn’t change our interest,” Gen. Hodges says. “And the U.S. economic link to Europe, to the EU, dwarfs any other economic link in the world, anywhere in the Pacific, China, India, you name it. So if for no other reason it’s in our interest that Europe be stable, that people make money so they can buy U.S. products. . . .

We provide capability assurance here by being present here.”

Gen. Hodges says there is also a huge payoff in U.S. security from U.S.-European cooperation. The main lesson of the post-9/11 wars is that “we are not going to do anything by ourselves militarily,” he notes. The U.S. “needs the capacity that other countries can bring.” These benefits come “from a relatively small investment—I mean, U.S. Army Europe is 2% of the Army’s budget and about 5% of the Army’s manpower. . . . You can’t sit back in Virginia, Texas or Oregon and build relationships with people here.” He quotes his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Donald Campbell: “You can’t surge trust.”

Nor can the U.S. project national power world-wide, as it has since the end of World War II, with an overstretched Army. “There are 10 division headquarters in the Army,” he says. “Nine of them are committed right now. I’ve never seen that. I don’t think at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan you had nine out of 10 division headquarters committed against some requirement.” That leaves little in reserve if another conflict breaks out.