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Stevenson’s army, January 20-23

Charlie has been back a few days, but I’ve been down for the count, so here is a massive catchup edition:

January 23:

The ever-valuable D Brief has this: Norway’s military chief said around 180,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured in Ukraine so far. “Russian losses are beginning to approach around 180,000 dead or wounded soldiers,” and “Ukrainian losses are probably over 100,000 dead or wounded,” Defense Minister Eirik Kristoffersen told TV2 on Sunday. He also said an estimated 30,000 civilians have been killed in the war so far, though he didn’t elaborate on how he arrived at any of his numbers.

[This is interesting because the two subjects NOT covered by the western media are Ukrainian casualties and operational restrictions imposed by NATO couontries.]

– We talked in class about George Santos. New York magazine claims to list all of his lies.

– The pending appointment of Jeff Zients to be WH chief of staff resurrected this story about how he failed to create a Department of Trade. As we’ll discuss in class, congressional committees weren’t happy with either the plan or the reorganization power Zients proposed because it weakened their jurisdiction.

-The Economist often has clever headlines. Politico wins the prize this week for: Who Shot the Serif?

January 22:

Happy Year of the Rabbit!

As I read the accumulated papers, I see these items of special interest:

– Congress and the administration are heading to a fight over arms to Turkey.

– Rifts are emerging in NATO over Ukraine aid.

– NYT has background on Taiwan’s “ambassador”

– Paul Kane laments the retirement of Senate “work horses” and includes data on diminished voting on amendments [because of the filled “amendment tree”]

– Ezra Klein analyzes disconnects in the GOP and interviews an author who says GOP politicians have been dominated by conservative media.

– NYT explains how US got $31 trillion debt.

January 20:

I see that a lot has been happening during my travels. The big news on Ukraine is the dispute between US & Germany over tanks. A good catch-up piece is today’s D Brief, a newsletter worth reading regularly.

WaPo also has good background on Ukraine planning. The CIA Director has also been meeting in Kyiv.   WSJ has good info on weapons issues.

The Inspectors General for DOD, State & AID have a combined report on US assistance to Ukraine.

On China & Taiwan, WOTR had a good explanation of the delivery delays in US arms for Taipei. It turns out that National Guard units have been training Taiwanese.  And WSJ says China’s brick & road initiative is faltering.

Good news for Congress: NYT says lawmakers changed the rules that in effect give them a $34,000 pay boost which they never would have voted for directly.

More good news at State: Sec. Blinken has ordered a shift from Times New Roman fonts for official documents to Calibri.   When I worked on the Policy Planning Staff I failed to persuade Under Secretary Pickering to take advantage of the retiring of the Wang Computers and allow overseas cables to be written with upper and lower case letters instead of the required [by the former technology] ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME.

Also January 20:

Many of you know that I favor a return to Regular Order in Congress, the way the armed services committees do the NDAA, with vigorous oversight, a bill open to many amendments, and a compromise process that allows the ill to be signed into law — for 62 years now. But both Democratic and Republican leaders have opposed those open rules. Speaker McCarthy now wants to bring them back. Here’s what happened last time.

Harlan Ullman, the original proponent of shock and awe tactics, now calls for a major revision of US defense strategy.

Fletcher’s Dan Drezner puts his economic statecraft syllabus in his Substack column. I like his work and will review this for things I should be assigning.

The Partnership for Public Service has a guidebook for new officials that has a lot of good ideas on how to be an effective bureaucrat.  I probably should make it required reading.

On Politico a sometime historian compares FDR’s help to Britain before Pearl Harbor to the West’s help to Ukraine today. Good background, but I’d note that FDR was constrained by US public and congressional opinion, not by a fear of provoking war with Hitler. Biden is limited by concerns about Russia reactions.

Two European analysts see conflicts of interest in writers about nuclear weapons policy.

A new CSIS report says we should be thinking seriously about letting South Korea get nukes.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here, with occasional videos of my choice. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).