Senior Military Fellow John Chu was promoted to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army at Stanford last Friday, a position selectively afforded for distinguished service and leadership. Colleagues and Stanford affiliates attended the afternoon ceremony marking the occasion.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Karl Eikenberry led the proceedings and recognized Chu’s accomplishments in the Army and his tenure as a researcher at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

“We look over the course of John’s life and where he’s been, and it says so much good about him and the strengths of the United States of America,” Eikenberry said.

“As threats have changed, doctrine has changed and our national security has changed, John has continued to adapt. It says a great deal about him, our services and our country that he has been able to steadily make those shifts over the course of his career.”

Chu was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the United States. He attended West Point and later achieved advanced degrees in environmental engineering and national security. Chu has had three tours of duty in Korea and served in Iraq as staff at the highest strategic level, among other posts.

At Stanford, Chu has been studying U.S. policy toward North Korea and strategic deterrence on the Korea Peninsula as a fellow at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center during the current academic year.

The fellowship program, supported by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, provides military officers an opportunity for self-directed study under the tutelage of Stanford scholars. The program started under former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry. Five fellows came to campus this year; their brief bios can be found here.

Chu thanked his wife of eighteen years, Tina, and expressed gratitude to everyone who guided him over the years.

“You are the real heroes – the people I’ve worked with throughout my career,” Chu said, addressing the audience. “It is you that really deserves all the recognition, for I would not be here today without the support of many.”

Chu expects to deploy to Afghanistan as his follow-on assignment.

South Korea must stand with the United States in the event of escalated tensions between China and the United States in the South China Sea, Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin advised at a forum in Seoul on November 19th.

"Flexibility is necessary, but what's more important is…principle," said Shin, emphasizing the importance of South Korea’s alliance with the United States over its strategic partnership with China.

The full article (in English) may be viewed on the Yonhap News website.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he was concerned that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could buy, steal or build a nuclear weapon capable of killing a hundred thousand or more people in a single strike.

And, he said, stopping the flow of oil money to ISIS should be the main, short-term objective of the United States and its allies in the fight against the terrorist organization.

“They have demonstrated their objective is just killing as many Americans as they can, or Europeans as the case may be…and there is no better way of doing that than with nuclear weapons,” Perry said.

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“If they can buy or steal a nuclear bomb, or if they could buy or steal fissile material, they could probably make a bomb – a crude improvised bomb,” he said.

Even a crude nuclear weapon could have an explosive power equivalent to around fifteen thousand tons of TNT – similar to the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima near the end of World War II.

Perry said there was evidence that Al Qaeda had actively tried to get nuclear weapons, and he said it was likely that ISIS was also pursuing its own nuclear strategy.

“The big difference between ISIS and Al Qaeda in that respect is that ISIS has access to huge amounts of resources through the oil that they now control,” Perry said.

“I believe that our primary objective in dealing with ISIS should be to stop that flow of money, stop the trading they’re doing in oil which is giving them the resources.”

U.S. warplanes reportedly destroyed 116 trucks in Eastern Syria on Monday that American officials said were being used to smuggle crude oil.

U.S. fighter jets dropped leaflets before the attack, warning the drivers to abandon their vehicles, according to a report in The New York Times.

The Russian Air Force also claimed its planes had struck around 500 oil tankers that were carrying oil from Syria to Iraq for processing.

Perry said that combating ISIS over the long run was a “hugely difficult problem” for Western powers.

“To really stop ISIS completely it would be a long and brutal and ugly fighting on the ground, which I don’t believe we’re going to want to do again,” he said.

“What we can do however, a more limited objective is stopping the resources they’re getting, stopping their access to this oil money. And that limits quite a bit what they can do…That can be done I think in more of a targeted and effective way, and without having to put armies on the ground to do it.”

The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday that killed 129 people and wounded around 350 more signaled a significant change in strategy for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadist organization that has claimed responsibility.

“It underscores that this threat is real and that ISIS is not going to be content to consolidate its power in Iraq and Syria,” said Joe Felter, a former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces and senior research scholar Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

“They have demonstrated their ability to project power into foreign countries and conduct what I would call an “asymmetric strategic bombing capacity” in the form of these home-grown Western citizens who are willing to strap on suicide vests and blow up targets in support of ISIS directed objectives.

“They’re able to launch attacks with centralized planning and decentralized execution in a way that makes anticipating and interdicting them very difficult.”

French President François Hollande said that the attacks were “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”

CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw said the Paris attacks represented “a shift in strategy” for ISIS with the group “taking a more Al Qaeda-like stance and striking Western countries.”

However, she emphasized that the carefully planned nature of the coordinated strikes, where multiple teams carried out simultaneous attacks in three locations across downtown Paris, indicated that this new strategy had been secretly underway for some time.

“These attacks were planned a long time ago,” said Crenshaw, whose Mapping Militants Project includes more information on groups like ISIS.

“You shouldn’t think they’re reacting to very recent circumstances…It’s not like we bombed them one day and the next day they planned these attacks.”

Apocalyptic visions

ISIS has long advocated a plan of provoking the West into a larger confrontation that would lead to an apocalyptic victory for Islam, according to Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.

“There’s a lot of method to this madness,” Milani said.

“If you read their literature, they have always talked about creating this sort of mayhem.”

ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, which is available online in Arabic and English, is named after a village in Syria with important symbolism for jihadists.

“They claim that the prophet has predicted that if you can get the West to come and fight the Muslims at Dabiq, then Islam will conquer the world,” Milani said.

Unlike France’s earlier battles against extremists in Algeria, it cannot rely on a proxy state to take the fight to the terrorists, according to Crenshaw.

“When terrorism in France has its origins in Algeria, France could rely on the Algerian state to crack down on these groups,” she said.

“Now you’ve got a situation where the planners are in a country where you don’t have a reliable state to go in and get them for you and wrap up their networks.”

With French warplanes already bombing targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Felter warned against the limits of air power in the fight against ISIS.

“There’s a risk that as we ramp up the bombing campaign and increase civilian casualties, this does play into the narrative of these extremists,” he said.

“It’s a very difficult targeting process. ISIS has occupied urban areas full of non-combatants and civilians…It’s the ultimate human shield.”

Felter acknowledged that increasing the number of US ground forces sent to interdict ISIS in Iraq and Syria may ultimately be necessary, but also that this increased presence, if not managed carefully, could backfire.

“At some level, they want to bring Western military forces to occupy these lands, because that will help turn popular opinion against the West and aid in their propaganda and recruitment,” he said.

The fight against ISIS is not limited to the territories it claims in the Middle East. It must be a global effort and include increased international cooperation and information sharing across intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies around the world, Felter said.

ISIS wants to drive a wedge between Europeans and the growing Muslim communities in their countries, so recruiting French citizens to participate in the Paris attacks served a dual purpose, Milani said.

“Using French citizens helps them with logistics, but it also helps them in terms of their strategy in that it makes it difficult for Muslims to live in a non-caliphate context,” he said.

Failed states problem

In the wake of the attacks, European nations are working to create legislation that would toughen criminal penalties for citizens who travel abroad to fight with designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS, or strip them of their citizenship, according to CISAC affiliate Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service.

Individuals who are seen as inciting people to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the jihad could also face tougher sanctions, she said.

The emergence of ISIS and its nihilistic theology is a symptom of broader underlying problems in the Middle East, which is grappling with failed and failing states across North Africa and in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Milani.

“ISIS is the most militant and brutal manifestation of something deeper that’s going wrong,” he said.

“I honestly have never seen the Middle East as perilously close to complete chaos as it is now… [and] I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”

Resources & links

Get more background on the Islamic State and its leaders from Martha Crenshaw’s Mapping Militants Project

Is There a Sunni Solution to ISIS? – The Atlantic | By Lisa Blaydes & Martha Crenshaw

Airstrikes Can Only Do So Much to Combat ISIS – New York Times | By Joe Felter

The Super Smart Way to Dismantle ISIS – The National Interest | By Eli Berman, Joe Felter & Jacob Shapiro

The Rise of ISIS and the Changing Landscape of the Middle East – Commonwealth Club of California | Abbas Milani

In a recent piece with Stanford News, FSI Senior Fellow Kathryn Stoner remarks on recent Russian military interventions in the Syrian conflict, suggesting that this re-engagement with the Middle East is a signal to Western powers of Putin's aim to become a global power. To read more, please click here.