CZYTANIE 3 EN [#40]

Shoes worn by the warriors of the first emperor of China, famously depicted by the Terracotta Army, have recently become the object of scientific research. The replicas made by scientists help build a better picture of what Quin dynasty soldiers may have worn. The way the footwear was worn by ancient soldiers was also of interest. However, the main point the researchers wanted to prove was its utility in battle. The replicas turned out to be surprisingly flexible and slip resistant, which suggests that the real shoes might have aided the ancient Chinese warriors in combat.

1. The main reason for making the replicas of the footwear was to …

As a social worker in the voluntary sector, I appreciated the article “Inside the crisis in children’s social care”. Over the past four years the media has been largely silent on the thankless task performed by local authority social workers during and since the pandemic and the years of austerity. Social work is a vocation for many of us but, as the article states, workers are leaving in droves. We can’t shout about our many accomplishments because of confidentiality restraints. We are only really heard of when there is a catastrophic lack of success which, more often than not, is systemic.

2. The text says that social workers are …

Refugees fleeing the conflict in northern Ethiopia have claimed both sides are committing atrocities against civilians, and described hospitals struggling to cope with casualties. Amnesty International reported that scores, possibly hundreds, of civilians have been massacred in the Tigray region. The risk of the increasingly bloody civil war drawing in other countries in the region rose sharply last weekend after rocket strikes on the airport in the neighbouring Eritrea’s capital, Asmara. Multiple rockets struck the city last Saturday night, diplomats and informed regional observers said, though communication restrictions in Tigray and Eritrea made the reports difficult to verify.

3. According to the text, as a result of rocket attacks on Asmara …

The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate on hold at a range between 5.25% and 5.5%, but said it remained “highly attentive to inflation risks”. New forecasts from the central bank suggest that the American economy is proving to be more robust than expected, pointing to another rate rise before the end of the year.

4. The American economy …

The fact that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak put sweary Gillian Keegan on the naughty step reflects the battered PM’s hardening view that few of his ministers are any good. It’s an opinion widely shared by the British electorate, judging by the opinion polls. Hence promotions for lapdog Grant Shapps and loyal pupil Claire Coutinho, under orders to cause no trouble. One former cabinet member overlooked by Sunak said he feels relieved he does not share collective responsibility for the government’s actions.

5. The main idea of the text is that …

Judged by one measure, America’s new industrial policy is off to a roaring start. Enticed by subsidies, companies are pouring money into semiconductor plants and electric-vehicle factories. With investment in manufacturing facilities running at a record high, President Joe Biden’s claim that the future will again be “made in America” seems more credible than it once did. The next step is less certain. America is building factories, but can it find the workers to operate them? With the jobless rate near a five-decade low, firms are already struggling to find staff. As scores of new factories are built, the gaps will grow.

6. The growth of the US industry may be hampered due to …

In the early 2010s a nightmarish new drug spread across Russia and Eastern Europe. Krokodil, a cheap substitute for heroin cooked up in kitchen laboratories, left users with scaly skin and rotting wounds. Now a similar drug called “tranq dope”, produced in Mexico, has infiltrated America. It is a combination of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, and xylazine, a veterinary tranquiliser. Adding xylazine to an opioid seems to make the high last longer, which attracts more addicts. Between 2019 and 2022, the share of all fentanyl-related overdose deaths where xylazine was present shot up from 3% to 11%. The White House has issued a national plan to fight it.

7. The new drug infiltrating America …

Britain will rejoin the EU’s Horizon programme, the world’s biggest collaborative research scheme, after a two-year Brexit-induced absence. Months of negotiations have yielded a “bespoke new agreement” that includes “improved financial terms of association”, Britain’s government said. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, had been concerned about outsourcing research to the bloc and whether Horizon represented value for money. Such fears did not stand up to scrutiny. British scientists welcomed the deal to rejoin, in part because it will help attract investment and talent from Europe.

8. The text says rejoining the EU’s Horizon programme took the UK months because of …

Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said that Indian agents were behind the killing of a Sikh leader near Vancouver in June. India denied it. Hardeep Nijjar had pushed for a Sikh homeland in India. India says he was a terrorist. Mr Nijjar’s supporters say he was a peaceful activist. Mr Trudeau’s allegation of a fellow democracy assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil has ramifications beyond a souring of relations with India. America’s National Security Council has said it is ‘deeply concerned’, and has urged India to co-operate.

9. Justin Trudeau …

Around 80 personnel from 4th Regiment, Royal Artillery deployed to Northumberland while a similar number of Royal Lancers travelled to County Durham to deal with the aftermath of Storm Arwen, following the request of the civil authorities. Units based in Scotland went to the Grampian region. Personnel visited more than 4,000 homes in total, providing humanitarian and welfare support where needed. “It was pretty cold so it must have been tough for people,” said Maj David Hicketts. Before the storm hit around 850 Servicemen and women had also helped carry out the vaccine programme across Scotland and England, providing support to the NHS.

10. We learn from the text that …

Front-line medical personnel will soon have a lifesaving product in their toolkit to help treat seriously injured soldiers. Defence chiefs have confirmed that a £4.9 million project to produce dried plasma – which helps blood to clot – will cut the time it takes to treat severe trauma. There are also hopes that the so-called Blood Far Forward initiative could have knock-on benefits for civilian ambulance crews on the home front. Consultant anaesthetist Lt Col Oli Bartels pointed out that plasma must be frozen to keep it in optimal condition – meaning that it has to be stowed in cold stores en route to operations. But the new product could be kept at room temperature for easy transportation and a home production line would make it more available.

11. It is hoped that the Blood Far Forward initiative …

Police launched an operation to protect current and former customers of telecom company Optus from identity crime and financial fraud. The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, confirmed Optus would pay to replace passports exposed in the leak of 9.8 million customer records. The 10,200 customers whose records were posted online should cancel their drivers’ licences and passports, the federal government said. An alleged attacker who sought a A$1m ransom from Optus posted 10,200 records online before withdrawing the threat.

12. Company Optus …

The British Army can now transit through Europe more easily thanks to an initiative led by the Netherlands government. The UK has joined the EU’s military mobility project, which cuts red tape for personnel and equipment to travel through member states by road, rail or air. British Defence Minister Ben Wallace said the move was crucial for greater security and closer working between the EU and UK. ‘Russia’s war against Ukraine has further demonstrated that being able to move troops and military kit swiftly across Europe is essential,’ EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, added.

13. The Dutch government led work on the project aiming at ...

The future of war

Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them. They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security. Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American Civil War to study battles like Gettysburg. The tank duels of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 accelerated the shift of America’s army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the one that thumped Iraq in 1991. That campaign, in turn, led China’s leaders to rebuild the People’s Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today.

The war in Ukraine, the largest in Europe since 1945, will shape the understanding of combat for decades. It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict will be limited to counterinsurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption. You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict. Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect – and start to prepare.

Ukraine’s war holds three big lessons. The first is that the battlefield is becoming more transparent. Forget binoculars or maps; think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks like the mobile signal of a Russian general or a camouflaged tank. This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, and used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision. This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will rely on reconnaissance. The priorities will be to detect the enemy before they spot you; to blind their sensors, whether drones or satellites; and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber-attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal and deception. Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.

Even in the age of high technology, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans, and millions of machines and munitions. Casualties in Ukraine have been severe: the ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body-count soaring. To adapt, troops have dug trenches worthy of Verdun and Passchendaele. The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering: Russia has fired 10m shells in a year, and Ukraine loses 10,000 drones per month.

Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical “mass” is met and maintained. General Mark Milley, America’s senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 20-30 years’ time: think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks. Yet in this decade, armies need to be able to fight. That means replenishing stockpiles, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture equipment at far greater scale and making reserves of manpower bigger. NATO countries will have to face it.

The third lesson is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct. The West’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home. In Ukraine civilians have been sucked into the war as victims but also as participants: a provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app. And apart from the old defence industry giants, numerous civilian private firms have proved crucial. Ukraine’s battlefield software is hosted on big tech’s cloud servers abroad; Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms. A network of allies has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions against Russia.

For liberal western societies the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine, and from the vast cost and effort of modernising their armed forces. Yet such a conflict, between large industrialised economies, may not be a one-off event. An autocratic Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China’s rising military clout is a destabilising factor in Asia, and global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely. Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do.