UPDATE 8/13 12:45 P.M.: South Sudan denied it has discussed taking in Palestinians from Gaza with Israel.
The Associated Press is reporting that Israel is in talks with South Sudan to send Palestinians there, as Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, and talk of it annexing the Gaza Strip, continues.
In an interview with Israeli outlet i24 today, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simultaneously expressed a desire to “allow” Palestinians to leave Gaza but said that, in turn, other countries would have to decide to “open their doors” to them. He did not mention talks with South Sudan during that interview, but said Israel was “talking to several countries” to receive Palestinians.
“Why does Gaza have to be a closed place?...Give them the opportunity to leave! First of all, to leave combat zones. Also to leave the strip if they want, we will allow that…We are not pushing them out either, but we are allowing them to leave,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said that Palestinians would “leave combat zones” by exiting Gaza.
South Sudan sounds like an unlikely place for Palestinian to escape to. The country is experiencing its own food and aid shortages and is recovering from an extended civil war that took place after its independence from Sudan.
To that end, a leader of a South Sudanese civil society group told AP that Palestinians coming to South Sudan could find themselves in renewed danger, due to hostilities caused by “historical issues with Muslims and Arabs” in the region.
“South Sudan should not become a dumping ground for people,” the leader told AP.
Netanyahu’s attempts to relocate Gazans echo Trump administrationtalks back in March with other conflict-struck African countries, including Sudan and Somalia, to take in Palestinians as a means to carry out his plan to turn Gaza to a “Riviera of the Middle East.” For that plan to be successful, Trump officials have said Gazans would need to leave the Gaza Strip, either temporarily or permanently.
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Drones vs. dogma
You could deduce a war going on high overhead last week as the Pentagon hemmed and hawed over how to keep the aerospace edge that it has viewed as its property since World War II. As outside experts warned of the U.S. losing its grip on the sky because it isn’t keeping pace with the drone revolution, Russia was probing NATO’s eastern flank. The alliance bolstered security following at least 19 drone incursions over Poland September 10. “Russia is likely attempting to gauge both Poland’s and NATO’s capabilities and reactions in the hopes of applying lessons learned to future conflict scenarios with the NATO alliance,” the independent Institute for the Study of War said. Gulp.
Despite spending billions on its own drones, the Pentagon is ill-prepared to defend its forces against such enemy aircraft, a report(PDF) from the Center for a New American Security concludes. “After decades of air dominance and a near-monopoly on precision strike, the United States now faces a dramatically different, more hostile world as the proliferation of cheap drones has democratized mass precision fires,” says the report, released the same day Russia poked Poland. “It is likely that in any future conflict, drones will pose an unavoidable threat to American forces,” authors Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell add.
“All too often,” the report says(PDF), “U.S. forces use exquisite precision-guided missiles worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars apiece to destroy cheap drones.” Not gonna work.
Unfortunately, the Defense Department is following its usual path to deal with this latest threat: spending like there’s no tomorrow. Or rather, like it’s still yesterday.
It remains business as usual for the U.S. military: Lockheed, the Department of Defense’s biggest contractor, was publicly salivating over its push to turn its troubled F-35 into a Ferrari. Boeing has been boasting that its yet-to-fly F-47 fighter is likely to fly sooner than anticipated. The Air Force hailed the first flight of Northrop’s second B-21 bomber from its California plant on September 11. And the service is spending $8 billion beefing up Lockheed’s F-22 fighter fleet.
Yet all of these aircraft require humans in the cockpits, with all the range, cost, and safety complications such carbon-based cargo carries. The swarming warnings on what future wars will look like are increasingly drone-centric. A wide-awake Pentagon, not welded to the past, needs to divert more of its spending on yesterday’s weapons to come to grips with tomorrow’s threats.
Throw-weighting good money after bad…
Speaking of spending money on yesterday’s weapons, the Air Force has acknowledged it can keep its fleet of ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in service until 2050. That may be necessary, because the service has run into problems developing the replacement it says it needs.
“The Air Force reported to Congress in 2021 that Minuteman III would reach the end of its service life in 2036,” the Government Accountability Office said in a September 10 report on the ICBM fleet. “Now, facing delays to Sentinel, the Air Force is evaluating options to continue operating Minuteman III through 2050.”
Yikes! The Minuteman III was first deployed in 1970, when the U.S. military was waist deep in the big muddy of Vietnam. If deployed until 2050, they will have been standing guard for 80 years — four times longer than the war in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon largely blames the delays — and an eyewatering 81% hike in the missile fleet’s price tag, to $140.9 billion — on the service’s pie-in-the-dirt scheme to reuse much of the current ICBMs’ ground-based infrastructure for the new missiles.
But as the current ICBM fleet ages, and its replacement grows ever more costly, there is another option. The land-based ICBM force is the least-valuable leg of the nation’s nuclear triad, which also includes submarine-launched missiles and bombers. It is beyond ripe for amputation.
But old habits die hard. The Pentagon is addicted to the Sentinel, bolstered by lawmakers whose states are home to the ICBM fields and the missile makers. So, count on this nuclear madness continuing until we’re broke, reduced to ashes, or both.
Another flubbed Air Force procurement
The Air Force Academy’s strikingly modern Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, doesn’t have much in common with the service’s drones and missiles. Except that its cost, like theirs, is rising faster than a 4th of July firework.
The Air Force shut down the 1962 chapel, largely to fix its leaky aluminum roof and the resulting water damage, in 2019. It planned on spending $158 million and wrapping up the job in 2022. It built a “cocoon” around the 14-story structure so weather wouldn’t slow down the effort. But there were supposedly unanticipated problems — like asbestos — that recently have driven its cost to $335 million and its completion to 2028. That’s a 112% cost increase and a six-year delay.
It’s a too-typical S.N.A.F.U. — Situation Normal: Air Force Unknowns — that’s encoded in the service’s DNA. It mirrors the kind of wishful-thinking woes the Air Force is having with its Sentinel ICBM program cited above. (“Let’s reuse the missile silos!” “What asbestos?”). These are basic building-block oversights that wouldn’t be tolerated in the real, non-military world. That’s why it’s taking twice as long to plug the leaks in the chapel’s roof as it did to rebuild the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris following its devastating 2019 fire. And why has the cost of the chapel’s repairs doubled? “The high costs have been driven by the complex design of the building,” Mary Shinn of the Colorado Springs Gazette reported last year.
Bingo! Pretty much like everything else the Air Force designs and builds.
President Donald Trump’s advertised $175 billion “Golden Dome” missile shield will likely cost about $3.6 trillion if it is going to be as robust as Trump promises, defense-budget guru Todd Harrison of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote in a September 12 analysis.
The Pentagon has hired a contractor to begin work on bettering its biggest bunker buster following their use against buried Iranian nuclear sites in June, Greg Hadley reported September 8 at Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Following Trump’s deployment of troops to U.S. cities, the number of Americans missing work for National Guard duty has reached a 19-year high, the Washington Post’s Abha Bhattarai reported September 7.
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Top image credit: 3rd SFG Soldiers on the range with Republic of Mali Armed Forces during a training exercise. Fort Bragg, NC. 8/4/2009 US Army Special Operations Command
The Trump administration is reportedly increasing its intelligence sharing and military support to military-ruled Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — all as part of a transactional framework aimed at boosting American access to critical minerals while also contesting Russian and Chinese influence in Africa. The administration’s approach may well find a receptive audience in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey, as well as within hawkish elements of the national security bureaucracy back in Washington. Yet the enhanced support is unlikely to make a meaningful difference in combating insurgencies in the troubled Sahel region.
The central Sahelian countries have been troubled by jihadist activity since the 2000s, and a rebellion in northern Mali in 2012 provided jihadists an even greater role in the region. Intensive French counterterrorism operations from 2013 to 2022 initially knocked jihadists back. Yet from 2015 onwards, insurgency spread from northern Mali into central zones of that country and into Burkina Faso and Niger, eventually spilling over into Benin, Togo, and Cote d’Ivoire as well (although Cote d’Ivoire has achieved some tenuous success in blunting jihadists’ momentum there).
As insecurity intensified in the region, the Sahel’s civilian leaders appeared flummoxed, while national militaries responded with heavy-handed yet inconsistent operations that inflamed, rather than undermined, jihadist mobilization. Mounting insecurity and citizens’ widespread disappointment with their civilian leaders resulted in a string of coups from 2020 to 2023.
The military regimes that took power stressed a message of national sovereignty and empowerment, which involved expelling French forces, challenging the terms of multinational firms’ resource extraction, and escalating the military campaigns against jihadists. The “sovereigntist” message has electrified many citizens in the Sahel and beyond, giving the military regimes significant popular appeal, but its application in counterinsurgency has been a disaster: violence has risen, and Mali and Burkina Faso in particular have progressively lost control of their national territory. A set of coordinated attacks in western Mali on July 1 underscored the expansion and intensification of jihadist violence across most of that country.
Some commentators blame a supposed “security vacuum” for the instability that has mounted under the juntas’ watch. Yet the departure of French troops (and the suspension of various forms of cooperation with Washington, such as the Nigerien junta’s decision to expel American troops) is, at most, one factor among many in explaining rising violence. Neither French operations nor American assistance halted the expansion of jihadist insurgencies in the late 2010s, and the patronizing and distorting effects of Western security assistance helped create the conditions that led to the coups – and to the anti-Western tenor of the juntas.
Meanwhile, even as Paris and Washington (under Biden) decried the Sahelian juntas’ (and particularly the Malian regime’s) embrace of Russian assistance, Russian counterterrorism deployments merely took the logic of the “War on Terror” to its brutal conclusion, as Russian and Malian patrols terrorized civilians in the name of restoring security. All of the Sahel’s would-be external security providers offer more or less the same hollow promise – namely, each external partner promises that it has the most sophisticated recipe for killing jihadists. All have failed. The Trump administration can even mimic Russia by promising security assistance without the kind of preachy rhetoric around human rights, development, and “good governance” that the Biden administration used and that French President Emmanual Macron also indulged in. But “taking the gloves off,” as Russia’s actions have shown, only exacerbates civilian suffering while delivering just as much failure as the French and American version of the Sahelian “War on Terror” did.
Outside powers’ record of failure in the Sahel suggests that the Trump administration’s offers of intelligence and security assistance likewise mean little. Intelligence sharing might help locate top jihadist leaders, for example — but the French killed several dozens of senior operatives without unraveling the insurgency, and the Malian junta has repeatedly trumpeted its kills and captures of jihadist commanders. Intelligence sharing cannot fundamentally address the problem of an insurgency with a mass base of young fighters drawn from both urban and rural communities, able to paralyze key transport arteries, strike military outposts, impose economic blockades on important towns, and ambush both national militaries and foreign “trainers” in remote locations (such as Tinzaouaten, Mali, as the Russians learned in 2024; and Tongo-Tongo, Niger, as the Americans learned in 2017).
Nor is the problem of security one that comes down to either hardware, training, or even money — the Sahelian insurgencies have deep social roots, the region’s militaries (and paramilitaries) are riven with internal problems, and the skeletal states of the Sahel are ill-equipped to restore effective governance no matter whether it is civilians or generals who are in charge.
The kind of transaction that Trump administration officials have in mind may also fizzle out. Security for minerals sounds straightforward enough but ill-fits the sovereigntist mood in the region, where regimes and many citizens are eager to have more, rather than less, control over extraction and profits. As firms such as Canada’s Barrick are discovering in Mali, meanwhile, the juntas are formidable opponents, willing to detain staff, poach senior employees, and demand more taxes.
While Trump officials may hope to pry open new opportunities for American firms, those same firms would be bold, if not outright reckless, to rush into a fast-moving and risky environment. The politics of resource extraction also blur into the murky world of intra-junta rivalries and tensions, and any minister or government interlocutor who promises something ultimately serves only at the pleasure of the military ruler(s).
Finally, it is striking how little changes in Washington’s thinking about security in Africa. If the Trump administration is less concerned with human rights than were the Biden or Obama administrations, fundamental dynamics nevertheless remain the same — particularly the idea that intelligence and security assistance are transformative levers for transforming conditions on the ground and/or for securing other policy goals, whether geopolitical influence or critical minerals.
Even amid Trump’s personalistic and ad hoc policymaking style, meanwhile, the renewed outreach to the Sahel is likely good news for bureaucracies such as U.S. Africa Command, which risked being set adrift (or even downgraded) under Trump. In resuming cooperation without seriously reflecting on past failures, the administration and the bureaucracy may simply fall back into old patterns of security cooperation that fit governments’ wants without addressing ordinary people’s needs.
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Top image credit: miss.cabul and noamgalai via shutterstock.com
In a significant and long-overdue shift, the European Commission has finally moved to recalibrate its relationship with Israel. Its proposed package of measures — sanctioning extremist Israeli ministers and violent settlers and suspending valuable trade concessions — marks the most substantive attempt by the EU to impose consequences for the Netanyahu government’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who once stood accused of a pronounced pro-Israeli bias, now states unequivocally that “the horrific events taking place in Gaza on a daily basis must stop.” Her declaration that the EU remains an “unwavering champion of the two-state solution” being “undermined by the Israeli government’s recent settlement actions” is a stark admission that Brussels can no longer ignore the chasm between its stated principles and its enabling actions.
These steps are important. They signal a breaking point with an Israeli government that has dismissed, with increasing contempt, the concerns of its European partners. The proposed tariffs, reinstating Most Favored Nation rates on €5.8 billion of Israeli exports, are not merely symbolic; they are a tangible economic pressure designed to get Jerusalem’s attention. The targeted sanctions against ministers responsible for inflammatory rhetoric and policies add a necessary layer of personal accountability.
Yet, for all its heft, this package suffers from critical flaws: it is horribly late, it remains dangerously incomplete, and it is a crisis, to a large degree, of Europe’s own making.
First, the delay. For almost two years since Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza leading to the killing of more than 60,000 people the world has watched the devastating conflict unfold. The EU, “the biggest donor of humanitarian aid,” has been forced to react to a catastrophe its own trade and political support helped underwrite. This response, only now materializing after immense public and diplomatic pressure, feels less like proactive statecraft and more like a belated attempt to catch up to reality — and to the moral courage already shown by several of its own member states.
Second, and most glaringly, the package omits the most logical and legally sound measure: a full ban on trade with Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. This is a profound failure of principle and policy. The settlements are universally recognized under international law as illegal. They are the very engine of the occupation that von der Leyen now claims is undermining the two-state solution.
While the Commission hesitates, what the Brussels-based head of the European Middle East Project Martin Konecny calls “a domino effect” is taking hold at the national level. The Dutch government has just announced it will ban imports from Israeli settlements, becoming the fifth EU member state to do so, following recent and decisive moves by Ireland, Slovenia, Belgium, and Spain. This growing coalition underscores both the moral imperative and the political feasibility of such a measure that the Commission continues to avoid.
Furthermore, this is not merely a political choice; it is a legal obligation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its landmark opinion last year, made clear that all states are required to cease trade and support that facilitates Israel’s illegal settlement regime. As a matter of EU law, a union-wide ban could — and should — be implemented by a qualified majority vote as a necessary trade measure to uphold fundamental legal principles. The continued failure to do so renders the EU complicit in perpetuating the very system it now claims to oppose.
Third, the Commission’s entire approach suffers from a crippling legal and moral loophole: its proposed measures are framed purely through a humanitarian lens, deliberately sidestepping the EU’s explicit legal obligations to prevent genocide. By focusing solely on suspending parts of the Association Agreement, the proposal ignores the most direct form of complicity — the continued flow of arms from member states to Israel.
These lethal transfers, which fall outside the Agreement’s scope, are the subject of Nicaragua’s landmark case against Germany at the ICJ, which argues that providing weapons to a state plausibly committing genocide is a violation of the Genocide Convention. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany alone accounted for 30% of Israel’s major arms imports in 2019-2023. Berlin continued licensing the arms exports after the outbreak of war in 2023. The Commission’s failure to even address, let alone propose to halt, this pipeline of weapons from the member states while invoking “horrific events” reveals a strategic timidity that undermines the very rule of law it claims to defend.
Finally, this moment represents a catastrophic failure of foresight by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has successfully alienated what was arguably the most pro-Israel European Commission in history. By embracing extremist coalition partners, accelerating settlement expansion, and ignoring repeated warnings on Gaza, his government has forced the hand of a European establishment that was desperate to avoid this confrontation.
The shortsighted pursuit of maximalist goals has now triggered a tangible reaction from Israel’s largest trading partner. The government’s response — a threat of retaliation rather than introspection — proves the point. “Steps against Israel will be answered accordingly, and we hope we will not be required to take them,” declared Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, revealing a stance that treats the EU not as a partner but as an adversary. This combative rhetoric towards its foremost trading partner underscores how Netanyahu’s policies have isolated Israel, proving that even steadfast allies have their limits.
The Commission’s measures are a necessary start, a first step toward aligning EU action with its rhetoric. But true leadership requires more. Until Brussels finds the courage to comprehensively end its economic and military entanglement — by banning settlement trade outright and compelling a halt to member states’ arms sales — its statements will continue to ring underwhelming. The time for half-measures is over. If the EU wishes to be seen as an “unwavering champion” of anything beyond its own convenience, its actions must finally match its words and, crucially, its legal duties.
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