The top U.S. military officer is warning of a growing arms race in the western Pacific, as nations become increasingly concerned about China’s military buildup in the region following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“There’s a really an underreported arms race going on in the western Pacific right now. These countries are arming themselves up, and they very much, with very few exceptions, want the United States there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. 

Australia this month unveiled a $200 billion plan for nuclear-powered submarines. Japan has also increased its offensive capabilities and doubled its defense investments, all while announcing new deployments of U.S. troops on Japan’s southern islands that will bring with them mobile anti-ship missiles meant to counter any first strike from Beijing.   

Meanwhile, Beijing has asserted its desire to control access to the South China Sea and bring Taiwan under its control, by force if necessary. Milley said China was “trying to become the regional hegemon,” disadvantaging other countries like the Philippines as part of that effort. 

“That’s why the secretary traveled to the Philippines. That’s why we’re looking at access basing and oversight. That’s why we’re looking at a re-posturing in the western Pacific. It is a design there to be forward deployed in order to deter armed conflict with a great power, great power being China in this case,” Milley said. 

In February, the Philippines designated four additional bases for U.S. forces to operate in. The announcement marked a sharp turn back toward the United States, after former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte had distanced himself from Washington. 

“Two years ago, we were about to get kicked out of the Philippines,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. 

The U.S. has continued to expand its military partnerships with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and others in hopes of keeping international waterways open and building what officials, including Milley, have called a “strategic advantage over China.” 

But Republican lawmakers Tuesday sharply criticized the Pentagon’s proposed budget as inadequate, especially in the Pacific region. 

“For the third year in a row, President [Joe] Biden has sent to Congress a budget request that cuts military spending amid a more dangerous and complex threat environment,” said the committee’s ranking member, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi. 

“This year’s budget is the last one that funds capabilities that are likely to be fielded before 2027. That’s the year by which [Chinese President] Xi Jinping says he wants the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take Taiwan. That makes our work here very urgent,” he warned. 

Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska questioned the budget cuts at a time that Milley and Austin agreed was the most dangerous since World War II.  

“This current budget shrinks the Army, shrinks the Navy, shrinks the Marine Corps. Doesn’t that embolden … Xi Jinping and Putin, not deter them?” asked Sullivan. 

Milley said the budget represents “essentially a one-war strategy” that focuses resources on the Navy and the Air Force, the two military branches the Pentagon says are most needed in a potential fight with China.  

He said the Navy would indeed decrease its hull numbers in the short term in order to shed some ships that are “costing way more money just to repair than worthwhile,” but would submit a shipbuilding plan with the number of ships increasing “in the not too distant future.” 

Iran 

Following the deadly attack at a coalition base in Syria by Iranian-backed forces last week, Austin told senators that Iran or its proxies have carried out 83 attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East since President Biden took office in 2021. 

The United States has retaliated by launching four major strikes against the attackers.  

The Iranian attack on Thursday killed a U.S. military contractor and wounded five soldiers and another contractor. The U.S. fired back with “precision” strikes against facilities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the area, which the secretary confirmed had “people,” presumably militants, inside during the attack. 

But Iranian proxies were not deterred, launching another attack on U.S. forces hours later that injured a U.S. citizen. The U.S. has “not yet” responded to that attack, according to Austin. 

“What kind of signal do we think this sends to Iran when they can attack us 83 times since Joe Biden has become president, and we only respond to four? Maybe it’s because they know that until, that we will not retaliate until they kill an American, which emboldened them to keep launching these attacks which kill Americans,” Senator Tom Cotton said during the hearing. 

The United States has about 900 troops in eastern Syria to help Syrian Kurdish forces prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State terror group. 

Ukraine 

Austin repeated the U.S. vow to “support Ukraine’s defense for as long as it takes,” praising Ukraine’s fighters for having the upper hand against the Russians and “depleting their inventory of armored vehicles in a way that no one would have ever imagined.” 

But the top Pentagon leaders were blunt in their pushback against calls to provide F-16 fighter jets and MQ-9 drones to Ukrainian forces. 

Austin said F-16s are a capability that would take about 18 months to provide.

“That won’t help them in this current fight,” he said. 

Chairman Milley, when asked about whether Ukraine should receive MQ-9 drones, responded, “It’s not survivable. It’s big and slow. It’s going to get nailed by the Russian air defense systems.” 
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The United States on Tuesday imposed new sanctions against six people, including two cousins of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, for their role in the production or export of captagon, a dangerous amphetamine, a Treasury Department statement said. 

It said the trade in captagon was estimated to be a billion-dollar enterprise and that the sanctions highlighted the role of Lebanese drug traffickers and the Assad family dominance of captagon trafficking, which helped fund the Syrian government. 

“Syria has become a global leader in the production of highly addictive captagon, much of which is trafficked through Lebanon,” said Andrea Gacki, director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. 

“With our allies, we will hold accountable those who support Bashar al-Assad’s regime with illicit drug revenue and other financial means that enable the regime’s continued repression of the Syrian people,” she said.  

Assad’s government denies involvement in drugmaking and smuggling and says it is stepping up its campaign to curb the lucrative trade. 

Among those hit with sanctions were Samer Kamal al-Assad, a cousin of the Syrian president who the Treasury said oversees key captagon production facilities in Latakia, Syria; and Wassim Badi al-Assad, another cousin whom the Treasury accused of supporting the Syrian military and of having been a key figure in the regional drug trafficking network. 

Also sanctioned were Khalid Qaddour, who the Treasury said was a Syrian businessman and close associate of Bashar al-Assad’s brother, the head of the army’s Fourth Division. A former commander of the rebel Free Syrian Army was also sanctioned. 

The Treasury further targeted Lebanese affiliates, some with ties to Lebanon’s heavily armed Hezbollah group, a close ally of Assad in his more than decade-old conflict with opposition and rebel forces. 

Among them were Noah Zaitar and Hassan Daqqou. Zaitar faces dozens of arrest warrants in Lebanon but remains on the loose, according to a security source.  

Zaitar put out a written statement saying he was “not surprised” by the sanctions and that he considered them a “badge of honor.” He criticized U.S. authorities for their “lies and defamation” but did not directly deny the allegations.  

Hassan Daqqou was sentenced in 2021 to seven years in prison in Lebanon on charges of captagon trafficking, according to the same security source.  

Tuesday’s action froze any U.S. assets of those targeted and generally barred Americans from dealing with them. Those that engage in certain transactions with them also risk being hit with sanctions. 

Regional officials say the Iranian-backed Hezbollah as well as Syrian armed groups linked to the Damascus government are behind the surging trade of captagon, smuggled either through Jordan to the south or Lebanon to the west.  

Hezbollah denies the accusations.  

There is a thriving market for captagon in the Persian Gulf, and U.N. and Western anti-narcotics officials say Syria, shattered by a decade of civil war, has become the region’s main production site for a multibillion-dollar drug trade that also exports to Europe. 
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Electricity generated from renewables surpassed coal in the United States for the first time in 2022, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced Monday.

Renewables also surpassed nuclear generation in 2022, after first doing so last year.

Growth in wind and solar significantly drove the increase in renewable energy and contributed 14% of the electricity produced domestically in 2022. Hydropower contributed 6%, and biomass and geothermal sources generated less than 1%.

“I’m happy to see we’ve crossed that threshold, but that is only a step in what has to be a very rapid and much cheaper journey,” said Stephen Porder, a professor of ecology and assistant provost for sustainability at Brown University.

California produced 26% of the national utility-scale solar electricity followed by Texas with 16% and North Carolina with 8%.

The most wind generation occurred in Texas, which accounted for 26% of the U.S. total followed by Iowa (10%) and Oklahoma (9%).

“This booming growth is driven largely by economics,” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. “Over the past decade, the levelized cost of wind energy declined by 70%, while the levelized cost of solar power has declined by an even more impressive 90%.

“Renewable energy is now the most affordable source of new electricity in much of the country,” he added.

The Energy Information Administration projected that the wind share of the U.S. electricity generation mix will increase from 11% to 12% from 2022 to 2023 and that solar will grow from 4% to 5% during the period. The natural gas share is expected to remain at 39% from 2022 to 2023, and coal is projected to decline from 20% last year to 17% this year.

“Wind and solar are going to be the backbone of the growth in renewables, but whether or not they can provide 100% of the U.S. electricity without backup is something that engineers are debating,” said Porder, of Brown University.

Many decisions lie ahead, he said, as the proportion of renewables that supply the energy grid increases.

This presents challenges for engineers and policymakers, Porder said, because existing energy grids were built to deliver power from a consistent source. Renewables such as solar and wind generate power intermittently. So battery storage, long-distance transmission and other steps will be needed to help address these challenges, he said.

The EIA report found the country remains heavily reliant on the burning of climate-changing fossil fuels. Coal-fired generation was 20% of the electric sector in 2022, a decline from 23% in 2021. Natural gas was the largest source of electricity in the U.S. in 2022, generating 39% last year compared to 37% in 2021.

“When you look at the data, natural gas has been a major driver for lowering greenhouse gas emissions from electricity because it’s been largely replacing coal-fired power plants,” said Melissa Lott, director of research for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

“Moving forward, you can’t have emissions continuing to go up, you need to bring them down quickly,” she added.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) influenced the amount of renewable energy projects that went online in 2022, Lott said, and it’s expected to have a “tremendous” impact on accelerating clean energy projects.
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The U.S. government will restrict its use of commercial spyware tools that have been used to surveil human rights activists, journalists and dissidents around the world, under an executive order issued Monday by President Joe Biden. 

The order responds to growing U.S. and global concerns about programs that can capture text messages and other cellphone data. Some programs — so-called “zero-click” exploits — can infect a phone without the user clicking on a malicious link. 

Governments around the world — including the U.S. — are known to collect large amounts of data for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, including communications from their own citizens. The proliferation of commercial spyware has made powerful tools newly available to smaller countries, but also created what researchers and human-rights activists warn are opportunities for abuse and repression. 

The White House released the executive order in advance of its second summit for democracy this week. The order “demonstrates the United States’ leadership in, and commitment to, advancing technology for democracy, including by countering the misuse of commercial spyware and other surveillance technology,” the White House said in a statement. 

Biden’s order, billed as a prohibition on using commercial spyware “that poses risks to national security,” allows for some exceptions. 

The order will require the head of any U.S. agency using commercial programs to certify that the program doesn’t pose a significant counterintelligence or other security risk, a senior administration official said. 

Among the factors that will be used to determine the level of security risk is if a foreign actor has used the program to monitor U.S. citizens without legal authorization or surveil human rights activists and other dissidents. 

“It is intended to be a high bar but also includes remedial steps that can be taken … in which a company may argue that their tool has not been misused,” said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under White House ground rules. 

The White House will not publish a list of banned programs as part of the executive order, the official said. 

John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who has long studied spyware, credited the Biden administration for trying to set new global standards for the industry. 

“Most spyware companies see selling to the U.S. as their eventual exit path,” Scott-Railton said. “The issue is the U.S. until now hasn’t really wielded its purchasing power to push the industry to do better.” 

Congress last year required U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate foreign use of spyware and gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the power to ban any agency from using commercial programs. 

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a committee hearing last year that commercial spyware posed a “very serious threat to our democracy and to democracies around the world.” He said Monday the new order should be followed by other democracies taking steps against spyware. 

“It’s a very powerful statement and a good tool, but alone it won’t do the trick,” he said. 

Perhaps the best-known example of spyware, the Pegasus software from Israel’s NSO Group, was used to target more than 1,000 people across 50 countries, according to security researchers and a July 2021 global media investigation, citing a list of more than 50,000 cellphone numbers. The U.S. has already placed export limits on NSO Group, restricting the company’s access to U.S. components and technology. 

Officials would not say if U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies currently use any commercial spyware. The FBI last year confirmed it had purchased NSO Group’s Pegasus tool “for product testing and evaluation only,” and not for operational purposes or to support any investigation. 

White House officials said Monday they believe 50 devices used by U.S. government employees, across 10 countries, had been compromised or targeted by commercial spyware. 

Despite NSO’s assertions that the program is supposed to be used to counter terrorism and crime, researchers found the numbers of more than 180 journalists, 600 politicians and government officials, and 85 human rights activists. 

Pegasus use was most commonly linked to Mexico and countries in the Middle East. Amnesty International has alleged Pegasus was installed on the phone of Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée just four days before the journalist was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. NSO has denied the allegation that its software was used in connection with Khashoggi’s murder. 

The family of Paul Rusesabagina, credited with saving more than 1,200 lives during the Rwandan genocide, a story depicted in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” has also alleged it was targeted by spyware. Rusesabagina was lured back to Rwanda under false pretenses and jailed on terrorism charges before his release last week. Rwanda has denied using commercial spyware. 
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