Quotes of the Day:

"Man needs knowledge in order to survive, and only reason can achieve it; men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason, can exist only as parasites on the thinking of other people."

– Ayn Rand

"If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and defend and elect and defend to be first of all American; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether white Americans or black one or purple or blue or green...If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive. and probably won't."

– William Faulkner

"The hardest part about gaining a new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied , evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once that niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it – once you can honestly say, 'I don't know,' then it becomes possible to get at the truth."

– Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

1. How Computer Warfare Is Becoming Part of the Pentagon’s Arsenal

2. A Winter Lull in the Fighting? Not in the Age of Drone Warfare.

3. Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 2 Million, Study Finds

4.Key Gulf Allies Say They Won’t Aid U.S. in an Iran Strike, Limiting Trump’s Options

5. Never Fight Alone By William H. McRaven

6. Conventional Forces Will Never Embrace Irregular Warfare

7. Trump hails Rubio as diplomatic mentor as secretary of state's power grows

8. Cognitive Warfare Without a Map: Why Current Targeting Logic Fails in a Fast-Moving Information Ecosystem

9. Post-Khamenei Iran: Who’s Who Among Potential Alternatives

10. Clausewitz and the American Center of Gravity: A Look at the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy Together

11. COLUMN: Want Influence? Control the Story

12. Xi’s military purge probably cuts imminent Taiwan war risk. Probably

13. Holding out: Taiwan’s priority preparations in case of Chinese blockade

14. Finding the Signal within the Noise: What Information Warriors Need to Know About Human Pattern Recognition.

15. Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility

16. Key Takeaways from the New National Defense Strategy

17. China’s Economic Statecraft Is Working

18. Making Industrial Strategy Great Again

1. How Computer Warfare Is Becoming Part of the Pentagon’s Arsenal

Summary:

The Pentagon is moving cyber from a stand-alone tool to a combined-arms effect. Recent operations reportedly used cyber to darken parts of Caracas, disrupt radios, and complicate air defense awareness so U.S. forces could maneuver with less detection. The key idea is integration: cyber creates time, confusion, and degraded command and control, then conventional forces exploit the gap. The article also flags institutional change: “Cyber Command 2.0,” new career paths, and deeper technical specialization to retain scarce talent. China’s “Volt Typhoon” threat frames the Asia-Indo-Pacific risk to critical infrastructure.

Comment:  I think we saw the Cyber-SOF-Space tirad at work in Venezuela.

A Team Room Discussion on the SOF-Space-Cyber Triad

By Capt. Michael Lami and Capt. Brett Benedict Special Warfare Journal

https://www.swcs.mil/Special-Warfare-Journal/Article/4357153/a-team-room-discussion-on-the-sof-space-cyber-triad/

How Computer Warfare Is Becoming Part of the Pentagon’s Arsenal

NY Times · Adam Sella · January 27, 2026

By Julian E. Barnes and Adam Sella

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 27, 2026

Updated 2:50 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/pentagon-computer-warfare.html

The military tested a new approach in Venezuela and during strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Listen to this article · 5:54 min Learn more

The United States took power off-line in Caracas, Venezuela, to help military forces capture former President Nicolás Maduro this month.Credit...The New York Times

The United States used cyberweapons in Venezuela to take power offline, turn off radar and disrupt hand-held radios, all to help U.S. military forces slip into the country unnoticed early this month, according to American officials.

It was part of a renewed effort to integrate computer warfare into real-world operations.

The military has often used cyberweapons in discrete operations — like damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges by altering their functioning or taking a Russian troll farm offline — but the Pentagon has been working to find new ways to fuse computer network warfare with the rest of the military arsenal.

The Pentagon tested the approach in Venezuela and during strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year.

In an interview, Katherine E. Sutton, the Pentagon’s top cyberpolicy official, declined to discuss Venezuela or other recent operations, but said the military was focused on how to integrate cybereffects into broader military operations. She said those capabilities had been used alongside traditional military power to “successfully layer multiple effects” on the battlefield.

“The integrated approach represents the future of cyberwarfare,” Ms. Sutton said.

The goal, she said, is to seamlessly weave those capabilities into broader military operations to enable more precise strikes, degrade an adversary’s ability to command its forces and support the U.S. military as it maneuvers on a battlefield.

“Since cyber is inherently a domain of information, we can disrupt the adversary’s decision-making cycle and create windows of opportunity for conventional forces to exploit — for example, degrading an adversary’s command and control and helping achieve an information advantage,” she added.

Ms. Sutton is scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday at a hearing on how to improve the Pentagon’s training of its cyberforces.

Congress is considering whether to create a separate military force for cyberoperations, akin to how the Space Force was carved out from the Air Force during the first Trump administration.

Whether or not a new force is created, Ms. Sutton said, the Pentagon is moving forward with plans to overhaul how U.S. Cyber Command trains and deploys its service members.

While the United States has been honing its cyberabilities, other countries are not far behind. China, in particularly, has shown that its security agencies can penetrate deeply into American computer networks. China’s Volt Typhoon operation aimed to be able to shut down critical infrastructure near military bases to slow an American response to any crisis in the Pacific.

But while China has demonstrated advanced stand-alone capabilities, the United States has proved it is able to use cybereffects at the same time it conducts military operations.

In Venezuela, American officials said, U.S. Cyber Command was able to shut down the transmission towers that allowed the Venezuelan military’s hand-held radios to work, took some radar off-line and turned off the power. Those operations made it far more difficult for the Venezuelan military to identify or engage the American forces who entered the country to seize the president, Nicolás Maduro.

Some critics have questioned how important the cyberweaponry was. Some, citing Venezuelan government statements, have said that the American military struck at least one power station. In addition, Venezuela’s most powerful air defense radar had never been operational.

But current and former American officials say that cyberweapons are the most effective when they are combined with other military and intelligence operations.

“Cyber warfare has evolved at a higher level in warfighting, because it is now being integrated with kinetic warfighting elements in attack plans,” said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who helped lead the Cyberspace Solarium, a congressionally mandated commission. “This is a big deal.”

Ms. Sutton said that when combined with real-world military operations, cybercapabilities can have a greater effect than if they are simply used on their own to target an enemy’s own electronic weapons.

“Historically, a lot of the policy discussions have been about cyberactors against malicious cyberactors,” she said. “When we talk about cyberintegration, we must think about how cyberoperations can achieve strategic effects.”

With private industry offering software engineers and cybersecurity experts well-paying jobs, the military has often had a hard time retaining service members who have cybersecurity expertise.

“The traditional military career models have struggled with the unique needs of generating cyberforces, leading to challenges in recruiting the right people, retaining that top talent and providing the specialized training that we need to be successful going forward,” Ms. Sutton said.

The Pentagon is intent on overhauling the Cyber Command by creating career paths that emphasize “domain mastery” over general expertise. Ms. Sutton said that the department is focusing on how to improve service members’ specialization within fields like cloud computing, industrial control systems and artificial intelligence.

“We need to ensure we have the ability to develop deep experts in critical niche technical fields,” she said.

Ms. Sutton said the Defense Department is already implementing “Cyber Command 2.0.”

Ms. Sutton said the changes were critical “to build agility into our force so we can pivot as needed and stay ahead of emerging techniques as they come out.”

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.

Adam Sella covers breaking news for The Times in Washington.

NY Times · Adam Sella · January 27, 2026

2. A Winter Lull in the Fighting? Not in the Age of Drone Warfare.

Summary:

Winter no longer slows the war in Ukraine because drones set the tempo, not tracked vehicles or frozen ground. Ukrainian units watch men move in snow in real time, then strike within minutes. Russia adapts by pushing small teams on foot or motorcycles, betting they can slip under drone attention. Weather now cuts sharper than seasons. Bare trees, footprints, and colder air boost drone detection, especially thermal. Yet heavy snow, fog, and low clouds can blind drones and open short infiltration windows. Cold also degrades batteries and freezes propellers, forcing improvisation.

Comment: Nearly "all weather" capable?

If drones erase the winter pause, what replaces operational rest and reconstitution for infantry that must “hold the line” without seasonal relief?

Does weather-driven drone blindness favor the attacker’s infiltration, or the defender’s ability to canalize and ambush once the sky clears?

War of attrition? War of maneuver? War of exhaustion?

(All of the above)

A Winter Lull in the Fighting? Not in the Age of Drone Warfare.

NY Times · Oleksandr Chubko · January 26, 2026

By Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko

Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko spent time with two Ukrainian battalions fighting in the eastern Dnipro region.

Jan. 26, 2026

Shifts in tactics and technology in Ukraine mean that the pace of fighting is no longer decided by whether tanks can navigate frozen fields.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/world/europe/ukraine-russia-winter-snow-donetsk-dnipro.html

Ukrainian soldiers building and arming a fiber optic first-person-view, or FPV, drone last summer inside an underground bunker in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

By Cassandra Vinograd and

Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko spent time with two Ukrainian battalions fighting in the eastern Dnipro region.

Jan. 26, 2026

Leer en español

The two Russian soldiers, trudging through an expanse of knee-deep snow, came into view once the sun was up. Separated from his mate by about two car lengths, the first was trying to quicken his pace. But the soldier behind him kept falling over in his attempts to step in the fresh footprints, losing his rifle and getting stuck.

Ukrainian officers were closely watching each step and misstep in real time, a hovering drone transmitting video to a bank of screens in their warm command post. Spotted at 7:09 a.m., the two Russian soldiers were presumed dead 15 minutes later, after a Ukrainian strike.

The episode served as a grim illustration of the evolution of winter warfare in Ukraine.

Earlier in the conflict, which began in February 2022, tanks and other heavy armor dominated the battlefield. While the hulking equipment could move when a deep freeze hardened the ground, fighting slowed overall in the winter, as snow and mud made it more difficult to get around.

Now, as omnipresent drones watch and attack from the skies, heavy armor struggles to move in any season. Tactics have changed: Russia sends small groups of soldiers on motorcycles or on foot to try to infiltrate Ukrainian lines, hoping they are less noticeable to drones.

Ukraine’s military fighting against Russian forces in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2022, the year Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. At that point in the conflict, tanks and other heavy armor dominated the battlefield. Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

For these small groups, the mission is largely the same no matter the time of year. So the fighting mostly keeps the same pace — a plodding one — from season to season.

“Nothing really changes, summer or winter,” said a Ukrainian infantry platoon commander who, according to military protocol, went by his call sign, Salo. “The only difference is the cold.”

With the fighting now dominated by drones, weather variations during the winter have become “exponentially more consequential than in previous years,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst.

Some aspects of winter weather make it easier for troops to advance in the drone age. Some make it harder.

Trees are bare, their leaves no longer providing camouflage. That makes troops more exposed to drones and renders any movement dangerous. Footprints in the snow are easy to spot from above. Lower temperatures make thermal cameras on drones more effective.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

A drone officer one recent afternoon was counting on snowfall in the Dnipro region of eastern Ukraine. While the sky was blue outside his command post, a light snow was falling closer to the front line.

“We can clearly see tracks in the snow, where they lead, and identify positions where the enemy is hiding,” said the officer, who goes by the call sign Shirley.

Any further deterioration in the weather, however, would pose a problem, the officer warned.

“Once the snowfall intensifies, we lose visibility,” he said. “For us, that is the most dangerous time.”

Russian forces use overcast weather, fog and heavy snow as cover for infiltration attempts, according to analysts and soldiers.

“A higher percentage will make it past the front line when the weather’s bad,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.

A Ukrainian soldier in 2024 armed FPV drones in the safety of an abandoned house in the Kharkiv region.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Extreme cold, as Ukraine has been experiencing in recent weeks, can also cut both ways.

Frigid temperatures pose age-old difficulties for soldiers on the front lines, degrading their abilities to move and fight. “These guys are outdoors for days at a time,” Mr. Lee said.

But it is also hard on drones. Low temperatures can degrade battery life. If it is snowing, certain drones can become inoperable. That risks enemy advances.

“Weather and tech are not friends,” a drone sergeant using the call sign Sol acknowledged, saying that snow was affecting his teams “a lot.”

Sitting on a futon in a small apartment, with drones and model cars decorating the walls, he explained how the propellers on some drones were prone to freezing.

To cope, he said, some crews try to warm their drones near gas stoves. Others have tested expensive de-icing sprays. But of all things, he said, rubbing simple meat fat on the propellers has proved most effective, providing a layer of protection.

Sol’s teams fly first-person-view drones, which are piloted through a live video feed. Those drones, along with smaller hobbyist models adapted for the battlefield, are most affected by weather.

When those cannot fly, Ukraine’s military often turns to large bomber drones, known as Vampires. Teams flying those drones had far less work in the summer, said a platoon sergeant with the call sign Black, but “now we fly around the clock.”

Cartoonishly large snowflakes fell around him as he loaded up a truck bearing supplies for his drone pilots on the front line. A few times he stopped to check his watch. Icy roads would force the truck to drive slowly, making it a tempting target for Russian drones.

Down the road about 15 miles toward the front line, Daryna, a medic, sat inside her small field hospital. The beds had electric warmers going, and two stretchers stood ready with silver thermal blankets. But there were no patients that day.

The weather, she said, was partly to blame. Snow was making it tricky to move the wounded off the front line without coming under attack by drones. Fatalities increase, she said, when medical care is delayed.

“A year ago, we were receiving guys wounded two-three hours ago,” said Daryna, who asked that her surname be withheld for her safety. “Now, we’re getting guys who were wounded a week ago.”

Ukrainian soldiers in 2024 flying armed FPV drone missions from a basement bunker of an abandoned house in the Kharkiv region.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Bunkers have also changed. They must be dug deeper because of the threat of drones, which is harder to do when the ground is frozen.

Troops must stay in the bunkers and avoid movement, which “significantly increases the chances of survival,” said Salo, the infantry platoon commander.

He acknowledged that drones do “an enormous amount of work.” But he said that infantry remained critical, and not only because bad weather could ground drones or reduce visibility.

“The human factor still has to be present,” he said, because “infantry holds the line.”

Analysts said it was unclear whether Russia or Ukraine would benefit more from the winter weather. Much depends on the severity of the cold and snow.

“Drone warfare’s weather dependency has created a paradox: Both sides depend on unmanned systems for situational awareness and precision strikes, yet both face constrained operational windows,” said Mr. Gady, the military analyst.

Still, he noted that winter tended to favor defenders, a view echoed by several Ukrainian soldiers interviewed in the Dnipro region.

Russian troops are looking to advance, they say, while Kyiv’s forces must simply stay in place and hold the line, limiting their exposure.

“Winter,” said Black, the platoon sergeant, clapping his hands together for warmth, “just has to be endured and waited out.”

A Ukrainian artillery unit monitoring for drones in October in the Dnipro region.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 27, 2026, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Thanks to Drones, Warfare Doesn’t Take a Season Off

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky

3. Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 2 Million, Study Finds

Summary:

A casualty count nearing two million is not a statistic. It is a slow demolition of families, units, and nations. A CSIS study cited by the article estimates roughly 1.2 million Russian casualties and about 600,000 Ukrainian casualties, with the total possibly reaching two million by spring 2026. Behind “killed, wounded, or missing” sit amputations, brain injury, grief, and the quiet erosion of trust in commanders and institutions. The war also consumes human capital faster than territory, and it turns time into a weapon through repeated rotations, delayed evacuation, and exhaustion.

Comment: What theory of victory justifies exchanging this many lives for gains measured in feet per day? Attrition and exhaustion with very little maneuver.

Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 2 Million, Study Finds

NY Times · Helene Cooper · January 27, 2026

By Helene Cooper

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 27, 2026

Updated 12:54 p.m. ET

The number of deaths, injuries and missing is approaching a grim milestone after nearly four years of fighting.

Listen to this article · 4:51 min Learn more

The funeral of a Ukrainian soldier in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, last year. The latest accounting of casualties came after talks among Russian, Ukrainian and American officials ended on Saturday on a rare positive note.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

The number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded or missing during nearly four years of war is on track to reach two million by this spring, according to a new study, a stunning toll as Russia’s assault on its neighbor grinds on.

The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that nearly 1.2 million Russian troops and close to 600,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded or were missing. That would put the overall casualty figure for both countries combined at almost 1.8 million.

For the entirety of the war, casualty figures have been difficult to ascertain because Russia is believed to routinely undercount its dead and injured, and Ukraine does not disclose official figures. The study relied on American and British government estimates, among other sources.

The figures present a grim accounting of Russia’s anemic progress in Ukraine, with Russian troops proceeding in some places at around 50 to 230 feet a day.

Since January 2024, Russia has seized 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and occupies about 20 percent of the country.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

As frigid winter temperatures have slowed troops on both sides, Russia has made grinding progress through the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine, as troops continue to try to gain full control of the area.

Tactics on both sides have changed. Because of the constant presence of drones overhead, Russia has partially scuttled major heavy armor movements in favor of small groups of soldiers on motorcycles or on foot to try to infiltrate Ukrainian lines, in the hope that they are less noticeable to drones. Ukrainian drone officers, for their part, monitor footsteps and tire tracks in the snow, looking for Russian troops.

The latest accounting of casualties came after talks among Russian, Ukrainian and American officials — the first between all three countries — ended on Saturday on a rare positive note.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that the negotiations had made headway and that Ukraine was ready to hold further meetings. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the talks would resume next week.

The United States and Ukraine have reached an agreement on much of a peace plan that has been revised several times. But whether Russia will agree to any part of the plan remains unclear.

Meanwhile, the death toll continues to climb. The center put the number of Russian troop deaths at close to 325,000 since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022.

“No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities since World War II,” the study said.

There were roughly 415,000 Russian deaths and injuries in 2025 alone, with an average of nearly 35,000 per month. Last week, President Trump said that nearly 26,000 soldiers were dying in Ukraine every month.

The study estimated that 100,000 to 140,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed since the war began.

Russians outnumber Ukrainians on the battlefield almost three to one, and Russia has a larger population from which to replenish its ranks. Ukraine is losing a larger share of its smaller army.

Russia has maintained its troop levels despite the high casualties by carrying out its first draft since World War II and by enlisting prisoners and debtors. It has also paid bonuses to new recruits.

As many as 15,000 North Korean troops have fought alongside the Russians, primarily in Russia’s western Kursk region after Ukraine captured territory there. South Korean intelligence officials and analysts have said that at least hundreds of North Korean troops are believed to have been killed in the war.

The war has also been a drag on Russia’s economy, according to Seth G. Jones, one of the authors of the study. Russia’s war economy is “under mounting strain,” the study said, “with manufacturing declining, slowing growth to 0.6 percent in 2025, and no globally competitive technology firms to help drive long-term productivity.”

The high casualty figures, slow pace of Russia’s territorial gains and economic losses are a clear indication that Russia is diminished, Mr. Jones said.

“Russia’s poor battlefield performance in Ukraine and declining economic productivity indicates that Russia is in serious decline as a major power,” he said in an email. “While Russia still possesses nuclear weapons and a large military, it is no longer a great power in most military, economic, or science and technology categories.”

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin

4. Key Gulf Allies Say They Won’t Aid U.S. in an Iran Strike, Limiting Trump’s Options

Summary:

Allies do not just add legitimacy. They shape geometry. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. publicly say U.S. forces cannot use their airspace or territory for strikes on Iran, and that narrows basing, routes, and escalation control for POTUS. The U.S. can still act with carrier aviation, long range bombers, and cruise missiles, but the plan becomes longer, costlier, and more politically isolated, which also lowers Tehran’s perceived price for defiance. The deeper point is leverage. Coalition access is a weapon system.

Comment: Can we project sufficient sustained combat power without allied support? If partners refuse access at the moment of decision, what does that say about deterrence and about the credibility of U.S. promises and threats? When allies fear retaliation more than they trust U.S. protection, is the real problem operational, or strategic and political?

Key Gulf Allies Say They Won’t Aid U.S. in an Iran Strike, Limiting Trump’s Options

WSJ

Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. say the U.S. can’t use their airspace for a military operation against Tehran

By Michael R. Gordon

Follow, Shelby Holliday

Follow and Alexander Ward

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Updated Jan. 27, 2026 9:01 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/key-gulf-allies-say-they-wont-aid-u-s-in-an-iran-strike-limiting-trumps-options-47e1ce3d

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia Win McNamee/Getty Images

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday ruled out the use of its airspace and territory for a potential U.S. attack on Iran, complicating the Trump administration’s options in response to Tehran’s violent crackdown against Iranian protesters.

The Saudi move follows a similar statement Monday by the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry.

The declarations from the two Gulf states represent a foreign policy setback for the Trump administration as it seeks to ratchet up pressure on Tehran, which has defied Washington’s demand that it halt uranium enrichment and end the suppression of protesters.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, outlined his country’s position while talking by phone with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

A Saudi readout of the Tuesday call said the crown prince had stressed that the kingdom “will not allow its airspace or territory to be used for any military actions against Iran.”

Saudi Arabia is worried about being drawn into a conflict with Iran, which attacked the kingdom’s oil facilities in 2019 during President Trump’s first term in office.

“Both Saudi and the UAE have been targets of attacks by Iran and their proxies. A degraded and less threatening Iranian regime is in their interests, but they worry about regional unrest and Iranian retribution and don’t want to be the tip of the American spear,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A White House spokesperson said Trump “is watching the situation in Iran very seriously and all options are on the table if the regime executes protestors.”

Former high-ranking American military officers said that the Saudi and U.A.E. moves would hamper the Trump administration’s planning for military action, but wouldn’t prevent it if Washington was determined to act.

“From a military perspective, it increases operational complexity and costs for any U.S. action against Iran but won’t stop it,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who played a key role in the 1991 Desert Storm air campaign against Iraq, which the U.S. led from a command post in Saudi Arabia.

Deptula added that the Saudi and U.A.E. statements would also lower “the political cost for Tehran of resisting external pressures.”

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The Trump administration has dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its accompanying warships to the Middle East, including vessels equipped with cruise missiles. It also has several squadrons of F-15E fighters in Jordan.

The U.S. still could deliver a military blow by using those assets and by drawing on B-2 stealth bombers and other long-range bombers that could fly from the U.S. or be positioned at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.

“I think this could force us to rely more heavily on carrier-based aviation or long-range assets coming from CONUS or bases like Diego Garcia,” said Joseph Votel, a retired Army general, using the acronym for the continental U.S.

“This action puts pressure on other regional states who may be considering support for a U.S. operation,” added Votel, who led U.S. Central Command from 2016 to 2019. “Finally, it means that an operation will have more of a U.S. flavor rather than a robust regional coalition against Iran.”

Trump has nurtured close ties with the Saudi crown prince, who visited the White House in November. At the time, Trump promised to sell advanced F-35 fighters to Saudi Arabia and defended the crown prince against allegations that he orchestrated the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi Arabia confirmed in a defense cooperation agreement that the U.S. was its “primary strategic partner,” and an agreement was announced that provided Riyadh with more access to U.S. artificial-intelligence technologies.

Analysts in Gulf states worry that U.S. military action would be more likely to lead to chaos within Iran than regime change, with consequences that could spill over into the region.

“Yes, Iran has been weakened, and its proxies have been weakened, but they have not disappeared,” said Bader Al-Saif, a Gulf expert and academic at Kuwait University. “We’ve been promoting ourselves as being the stable neighborhood where everyone can come in and invest. No one is going to come in and invest if this becomes the new normal.”

The U.S. would still be able to strike targets in Iran without access to Saudi airspace and bases by sending bombers and other aircraft through Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi air space, launching cruise missile attacks from submarines and using aircraft from the carrier in the Arabian Sea.

But Middle East experts say that toppling the Iranian regime, or even striking it forcefully enough to dissuade it from repressing the protestors, would likely require a military campaign that could last weeks or even months. That would be more challenging without the cooperation of Gulf states.

“We have to remember that the regime is determined not to fall and willing to kill as many people as it needs to to stay in power,” said Kenneth Pollack, vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute and a former CIA analyst. “Overcoming that was always going to be extremely hard with air power alone, and even harder if we are limited to the carrier and what comes from CONUS and Diego Garcia.”

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 28, 2026, print edition as 'Gulf Moves Hurt U.S.’s Iran Plans'.

WSJ

5.  Never Fight Alone

Comment: How can we project power to defend our interests without allied support?

 Never Fight Alone

Anyone who would denigrate the service of our NATO allies clearly never spent a day in uniform.

By William H. McRaven

The Atlantic · William H. McRaven · January 27, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/nato-allies-combat-loyalty/685757/

In 2006, I helped establish the NATO Special Operations Forces Command in Mons, Belgium. It included commandos from more than 19 nations. Over the course of the next two years, we trained and exercised together, drank together, and spent family time together. In doing so, we learned that our common values were much more important than our national differences. We also developed a bond that only men preparing for combat can appreciate.

By 2008, I was back fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, I was blessed to have the British Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS) serving alongside my Rangers, SEALs, and Delta Force operators. The Brits took on one of the toughest missions in our counterterrorism fight: the suicide-bomber network operating in Baghdad. Their work unquestionably saved the lives of American soldiers and our allies. And they paid a high price for standing alongside us. In 2005, British special military units lost 10 personnel when one of their C-130s was shot down outside the city. We mourned their loss as if they were our own.

Isaac Stanley-Becker: The sacrifice of the Danes

In Afghanistan, NATO special-operations soldiers fought with tremendous courage and unwavering loyalty to their American counterparts. That commitment did not come without a cost, either. I stood on the tarmac in Bagram and Kandahar many times paying my final respects to soldiers from the U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, and Germany. Never have I seen such an outpouring of respect and admiration for their contribution to the fight. I also mourned the loss of the first Romanian soldier to have died in combat since World War II—just one of the 27 who fell in Afghanistan.

Many other nations contributed to the NATO mission and lost young men and women because we asked them for their help. We asked them for their help, and most didn’t hesitate. They understood the value of our alliance. They understood the power of being united in a common cause. They believed in NATO and they believed in the United States.

Anyone who would denigrate the service of our NATO allies clearly never spent a day in uniform. These NATO soldiers were as courageous, as heroic, as patriotic, and as loyal as any soldier I ever served with. I, for one, am forever grateful for their service and their sacrifice.

Robert Kagan: America vs. the world

Winston Churchill once said that “there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” If we continue to show disdain for our allies, if we fail to appreciate their contribution to our national security and greater global stability, we may find ourselves fighting alone someday. And trust me, war is never a contest you want to fight alone.

The Atlantic · William H. McRaven · January 27, 2026

6. Conventional Forces Will Never Embrace Irregular Warfare

Excerpt:

The vision of a conventional force fully embracing irregular warfare, where every unit is equally adept at kinetic strikes and population engagement, remains elusive. The cultural, structural, and institutional forces at play within conventional formations create a lasting barrier to such integration. While doctrine will continue to advocate for it, and individual successes will occasionally fuel hope, the reality is that conventional forces will always gravitate back to their core identity. Acknowledging this fundamental incompatibility is not a concession of defeat but a step towards developing more realistic strategies unless or until there is a paradigm shift in the joint force that goes beyond words on paper.

Conventional Forces Will Never Embrace Irregular Warfare

by Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca

01.27.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/27/conventional-forces-will-never-embrace-irregular-warfare/

Two U.S. Marine Corps M1 Abrams tanks patrol the streets of Baghdad, Iraq on April 14th, 2003 

Facts

1. The Irregular Warfare (IW) Annex to the 2020 National Defense Strategy states, “The Department [of Defense/War] must institutionalize irregular warfare as a core competency for both conventional and special operations forces…”
2. The 2025 Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 3000.07 on Irregular Warfare states—among numerous directives to the entire joint force—that the military will:

• Maintain a baseline of military capabilities and personnel and track the capacity and proficiency of the Military Services to meet CCMD [Combatant Command] IW-related requirements in accordance with strategic guidance.
• Attract, develop, manage, employ, and retain enough military personnel with IW expertise.
• Provide developmental opportunities and career paths commensurate with IW professionals’ peers.
• Manage IW military and civilian professionals to maintain long-term institutional knowledge to attract, incentivize, and retain top IW subject matter experts.
• Incorporate the ability to conduct IW into all Military Service force development and design products, in accordance with strategic guidance, joint concepts, and prioritized CCMD requirements.

The author suggests that there is one additional fact: None of the directives above have been implemented as intended; furthermore, they will not be implemented anytime in the foreseeable future.

The Siren Call of Irregular Warfare

The siren call of irregular warfare (IW) has echoed through the corridors of American defense institutions for decades, growing louder with each asymmetric conflict. Doctrine, publications, and policy papers consistently assert that IW is not the sole domain of special operations forces (SOF), but a responsibility for every element of the Department of War. Yet, despite these pleas and strategic imperatives, conventional military forces, by their very nature, remain resistant. The thesis of this article is that this resistance is not a failure of will, but an incompatibility, rooted in the identity, structure, and reward systems of conventional forces. America’s conventional military headquarters and units will never truly embrace irregular warfare the way its proponents envision, and continuing to believe they will be is an exercise in futility. It must be noted—very explicitly—that the argument put forward here is not that the conventional force shouldn’t embrace IW, but rather that they will not embrace it, for several reasons. Furthermore, it is likely that conventional forces would embrace IW if circumstances permitted, but they do not.

The appeal of integrating IW into the conventional force is undeniable on paper. In an era dominated primarily by hybrid threats, proxy wars, and insurgencies rather than state-on-state conflicts, the ability to operate across the spectrum of conflict, from high-intensity combat to nuanced stability operations, seems like a strategic imperative. The argument can be made that if every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian, and coast guard member possessed a basic proficiency in security force assistance, civil affairs, psychological operations, and other related areas, the military would be more adaptable and effective in the complex environments that define modern conflict. This vision, however, clashes head-on with the ingrained culture and operational paradigms of conventional forces.

America’s conventional military headquarters and units will never truly embrace irregular warfare the way its proponents envision, and continuing to believe they will be is an exercise in futility.

At its core, conventional military culture is defined by the pursuit of overwhelming kinetic advantage. Its identity is forged in preparation for state-on-state conflict: the decisive battle, the synchronized maneuver of tanks and artillery, the precision strike from the air, and the carrier battle group’s power projection. This culture values direct action, quantifiable destruction, and hierarchical command-and-control. Metrics of success are tied to tangible outcomes, such as enemy killed in action, terrain secured, and adversary infrastructure destroyed. None of that should change. Our military’s primary role is to fight and win wars through large-scale combat operations.

Irregular warfare, conversely, thrives in ambiguity. It eschews kinetic solutions as often as it embraces them, prioritizing influence, legitimacy, and the art of population-centric engagement. Its metrics are soft and often unquantifiable: shifts in public opinion, the strength of local governance, the willingness of a population to provide intelligence. Adversaries are often indistinguishable from the civilian population, the lines of conflict are blurred, and victory is a prolonged, often generational, endeavor. For a conventional force steeped in the culture of decisive kinetic action, this landscape is not just a different tactical problem; it is an existential challenge to its self-conception. It comes down to using the right forces for the right mission. There are requirements for the selective use of kinetic options in IW. Conventional forces may employ their capabilities selectively and effectively when part of an Irregular Warfare campaign plan, which the US does not have; however, such employment is not the primary mission of the conventional force.

The “System” is Not Built for Irregular Warfare

One of the most significant barriers to the joint force embracing IW is the “specialization trap.” When a dedicated, elite force—like SOF—is explicitly created and celebrated for its prowess in irregular warfare, it inadvertently grants conventional forces implicit permission to offload that responsibility. The existence of the Green Berets, or the Psychological Operations teams, for example, acts as a cultural pressure valve. “That’s their job” becomes the default for the conventional force commander. Why would a tank crew train in tribal engagement protocols when a SOF team is designed for precisely that mission? Why would an infantry platoon leader master the intricacies of local power brokers when there’s a dedicated Civil Affairs unit in the same camp that is focused solely on that problem? This division of labor, while seemingly efficient, actively undermines the widespread integration of IW skills.

Furthermore, the reward system within conventional forces is fundamentally misaligned with the demands of IW. Promotions, commendations, and career progression are overwhelmingly tied to performance in conventional metrics. A commander who excels at large-scale combined arms maneuvers and achieves high readiness scores at the National Training Center will likely advance faster than one who spends years building relationships with local leaders or security forces in Country X, even if the latter might be more strategically impactful in a specific theater. The “soft skills” of IW—strategic patience, building trust, and influence operations—are often viewed as secondary, even peripheral, to the core competencies that define a successful conventional military career. They are rarely the attributes that earn a joint force commander a promotion.

Acknowledging this fundamental incompatibility is not a concession of defeat but a step towards developing more realistic strategies unless or until there is a paradigm shift in the joint force that goes beyond words on paper.

Training is another hurdle. Conventional forces operate on a cycle of preparing for their primary mission: large-scale combat operations. This demands immense resources, time, and dedicated facilities. Integrating meaningful IW training—which often requires language skills, cultural immersion, geographic specialization, and role-playing complex political scenarios—is difficult to pack into an already packed training schedule. When a unit prepares for a hypothetical near-peer conflict, the urgency of mastering tank gunnery or air defense often outweighs the need to practice village stability operations, even if the more likely deployment scenario involves the latter. The “tyranny of the urgent” in conventional joint force training environments prioritizes conventional over irregular. Note that there isn’t such a clear line between the two (conventional and irregular); however, this is unfortunately a common perception and part of the very problem outlined here. This subject is a popular topic of debate and warrants its own discussion.

Bureaucratic inertia and resource allocation within large defense departments also hinder IW integration. Budgets, equipment procurement, and force structure are optimized for conventional warfare. Developing and fielding specialized equipment for IW, establishing robust language and cultural training pipelines for the joint force, or altering career paths to reward IW expertise requires a paradigm shift that clashes with deeply entrenched processes and vested interests. It’s easier to procure a fighter jet or tank than it is to re-engineer the cultural DNA of a land, air, or sea maneuver unit. While individual service members and units may demonstrate incredible adaptability and courage in IW environments, as witnessed in countless instances during the War on Terror, these are often reactive adaptations born of necessity, rather than a proactive embrace of a new way of war. They are performing IW despite their conventional training and culture, not because of it.

Conclusion

The vision of a conventional force fully embracing irregular warfare, where every unit is equally adept at kinetic strikes and population engagement, remains elusive. The cultural, structural, and institutional forces at play within conventional formations create a lasting barrier to such integration. While doctrine will continue to advocate for it, and individual successes will occasionally fuel hope, the reality is that conventional forces will always gravitate back to their core identity. Acknowledging this fundamental incompatibility is not a concession of defeat but a step towards developing more realistic strategies unless or until there is a paradigm shift in the joint force that goes beyond words on paper.

Click the link to check out all of Small Wars Journal’s great content.

Tags: Civil Affairs, Conventional Forces, counterinsurgency, DoDI 3000.07, irregular warfare, Joint Professional Military Education, National Defense Strategy, Psychological Operations, Security Force Assistance, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces (SOF), U.S. Department of Defense

About The Author

• 
  
• Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
• Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations at the Department of Defense’s Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia.

7. Trump hails Rubio as diplomatic mentor as secretary of state's power grows

Summary:

At Davos, POTUS cast Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the tutor who “taught” him diplomacy, and the story is really about leverage inside the system. The article argues Rubio’s clout has risen because he holds an unusual stack of roles at once, giving him daily proximity to decisions and the machinery that turns instinct into policy. It frames Rubio as a channel, not a brake, and suggests this concentration of authority can speed action, sharpen message discipline, and reduce interagency drift, but it also narrows the circle and raises the cost of error when judgment fails.

Comment: Secretary Rubio will be successful when he brings back his once sharp focus on human rights, particularly the human rights in north Korea he once championed so passionately. When he can return that to the agenda he will truly earn the title as the foreign policy whisperer. But when so much statecraft runs through one gatekeeper, does the system gain coherence, or does it lose the friction that prevents strategic self harm?

Trump hails Rubio as diplomatic mentor as secretary of state's power grows

foxnews.com · Diana Stancy Fox News

The secretary of state has emerged as key architect of Trump's foreign policy agenda

By Diana Stancy Fox News

Published January 27, 2026 3:33pm EST

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-hails-rubio-diplomatic-mentor-secretary-states-power-grows

Video

Trump declares US only nation able to secure Greenland in high-stakes Davos speech

President Donald Trump declared from Davos, Switzerland, that the U.S. is the only nation that is in the position to secure Greenland.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Donald Trump credits Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the one for training him to become a diplomat, comments that come as Rubio has increasingly secured more responsibility and influence over the president during the second Trump administration.

Trump described Rubio’s guidance as he described his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and shared an anecdote about how Xi requested that Trump stop referring to COVID-19 virus as the "China virus." According to Trump, Xi requested that the president use a different name – an ask that Trump said he chose to respect.

"I decided to do that because why should we have a problem over that?" Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday.

"You were a true diplomat, huh?" said Børge Brende, the president and CEO of the World Economic Forum.

U.S. President Donald Trump addresses a gathering of global business executives on Jan. 21, 2026, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, amid ongoing diplomatic friction regarding his proposal to acquire Greenland from Denmark. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

MARTIN GURRI: LET'S LOOK AT ALL THE GLOBAL BENEFITS TRUMP REAPED BY GRABBING MADURO

"I became a diplomat for the first time. Well, you know, taught me that? Marco Rubio. He said, ‘Let me teach you about diplomacy,’" Trump said.

Trump has entrusted Rubio with a portfolio of responsibilities, and in addition to leading the State Department, Rubio also is serving as the national security advisor and head of the National Archives for the Trump administration. Rubio is the only person to oversee the White House’s National Security Council and lead the State Department since Henry Kissinger since the Nixon administration.

"He's just really smart, really effective, and he's succeeded at everything he's done," Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon official and current vice president at the Atlantic Council think tank, told Fox News Digital. "He doesn’t see his job as containing Trump. He understands who the boss is and channels those instincts into constructive directions."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing to examine the president's proposed budget request for fiscal year 2026 for the Department of State on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 20, 2025. (Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)

TRUMP BACKS MADURO LOYALIST OVER VENEZUELA OPPOSITION LEADER IN POST-CAPTURE TRANSITION

Rubio, who is the son of Cuban immigrants and previously served as a U.S. Senator representing Florida, has emerged as a key architect steering the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda – gaining even more visibility after the U.S. launched strikes in Venezuela and captured dictator Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3.

Rubio, who historically has espoused more hawkish foreign policy positions, had long supported overthrowing Maduro. The first Trump administration sought to oust the Venezuelan strongman by imposing sanctions on Venezuela and backing opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

In 2019, Rubio predicted Maduro’s fall — even though he was uncertain about the timeline.

"He’s picked a battle he can’t win," Rubio said in an interview with The New York Times about Maduro. "It’s just a matter of time. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take — and whether it will be peaceful or bloody."

WHITE HOUSE SAYS US WILL SHAPE VENEZUELA’S FUTURE AS TRUMP EMBRACES ‘AMERICAN DOMINANCE’

Following Maduro’s capture, Trump announced that the U.S. would "run" Venezuela until a peaceful transition could occur. The move to ouster Maduro has attracted scrutiny, mostly from Democrats, who have called into question the legality of the operation in Venezuela, which was conducted without Congress' approval.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a signing ceremony for a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the State Department on June 27, 2025, in Washington. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)

Even so, Rubio has said that Congressional approval was not required since the operation was not an "invasion."

Trump speculated in Switzerland that Rubio would be remembered as "the best" Secretary of State, and noted that every single member of the Senate voted to confirm Rubio for his post in January 2025.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

"Hey, any guy that gets approved by 100% of the votes – you think of it, he got liberal Democrats and radical right Republicans to approve him," Trump said Wednesday. "He's the only one…At first I wasn't happy about it. I said, ‘Wait a minute, I don't like that.’ And now it turns out that the Democrats probably wish they didn't do that. And Marco has been fantastic."

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and Rubio for comment.

Fox News' Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.

Diana Stancy is a politics reporter with Fox News Digital covering the White House.

foxnews.com · Diana Stancy Fox News

8. Cognitive Warfare Without a Map: Why Current Targeting Logic Fails in a Fast-Moving Information Ecosystem

Summary:

Cognitive warfare today has no stable terrain. Targeting logic still assumes discrete targets, linear effects, and measurable battle damage. In a fast moving information ecosystem, influence flows through networks, identity cues, and algorithmic amplification, so the “target” is often a relationship or a narrative, not a node you can strike. Messages mutate, audiences self sort, and adversaries learn in public, which collapses the old cycle of find, fix, finish, assess. The result is tactical activity that looks busy but fails to shift belief, behavior, or will. Without a map that ties narratives to human incentives, we confuse content removal with strategy.

Excerpts:

The United States does not lack tools or expertise in the cognitive domain. It lacks an operational model aligned with the environment it seeks to influence and the ability to coherently articulate and execute across multiple platforms across the enterprise.

Cognitive warfare unfolds in a rapidly changing and adaptive ecosystem more akin to a murmuration than a battlefield. As long as kinetic targeting logic is retrofitted to this environment, influence efforts will remain late, displaced, or irrelevant.

Success will come from rethinking how we observe, decide, and act in an ecosystem where time, interaction, and adaptation matter more than targets.

Comment: If the center of gravity is public judgment, what would “battle damage assessment” look like when the real effect is delayed, distributed, and partly invisible?

Cognitive Warfare Without a Map: Why Current Targeting Logic Fails in a Fast-Moving Information Ecosystem

by John Wilcox, by Ryan Walters

01.28.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/28/cognitive-warfare-targeting-logic-failure/

A Persistent Conceptual Mismatch

A unit prepares to deploy as a deepfake video begins circulating online, amplified by bot accounts and picked up by mainstream outlets and influencers within hours. As staff officers coordinate a response, lawyers review courses of action, and platforms deliberate content moderation, the narrative mutates, spills across audiences, and triggers legal challenges, partner hesitation, and public pressure. By the time a response is finally authorized, the original claim has already evolved into something new, and the operational conditions it created have hardened. The force did not fail to act; it acted on a timeline measured in days against an adversary iterating in hours.

This contradiction is not a failure of intent or effort. It is a failure of mental models.

Over the past two decades, the Joint Force has increasingly recognized the centrality of the human and information environment in contemporary conflict. Doctrine and strategy emphasize influence, narratives, legitimacy, and perception as decisive factors in competition and war. Yet operational practice reveals a persistent contradiction: cognitive warfare is still planned using conceptual models designed for kinetic operations in the physical domain.

Traditional targeting frameworks assume that relevant elements of the operational environment can be identified, fixed, and acted upon within a discrete decision cycle. Cognitive warfare violates these assumptions. Beliefs, identities, narratives, and social alignments do not remain stationary while staffs deliberate; they evolve continuously in response to internal dynamics and external stimuli. As a result, influence operations frequently address a cognitive reality that no longer exists.

The Information Environment Is Not a Traditional Battlespace

Kinetic environments can be fast and uncertain, but the physical domain imposes friction and observability that are typically slower than the rate of state-change compared to networked information dynamics. The physical battlespace is constrained by geography, physics, and observable movement. Even in high-tempo kinetic operations, targets often remain valid long enough for planning, coordination, and execution to produce intended effects.

The information environment behaves differently in three fundamental ways:

Speed. Information propagates at network speed, amplified by digital platforms, recommender algorithms, and social feedback loops. Empirical research demonstrates that false and emotionally resonant information spreads faster, farther, and more broadly than factual content, often outpacing institutional response mechanisms.

Interconnectedness. Influence diffuses across overlapping social, cultural, and digital networks, where second and third-order effects frequently matter more than initial actions. Networked conflict rewards adaptability and resonance over centralized control.

Adaptability. Individuals and groups continuously adjust beliefs and behaviors in response to perceived signals, including influence attempts themselves. Meaning is socially constructed and reinforced through interaction, not imposed mechanically. Decision-making under such conditions relies on recognition and adaptation rather than linear optimization.

These characteristics make the information environment fundamentally ill-suited to target-centric planning models. While the joint targeting cycle and air tasking order operate on 96-hour planning horizons, adversaries can weaponize information in 9.6 seconds.

Murmurations as a Model for Cognitive Behavior

A murmuration of starlings provides a useful analogy for understanding cognitive warfare. In a murmuration, no central authority directs the flock. Each bird responds only to the movements of its nearest neighbors, yet complex, coherent, and rapidly shifting collective patterns emerge.

In planning terms, a murmuration model shifts attention from discrete targets to interaction patterns: planners observe how narratives, identities, and behaviors move through networks, measure the speed, direction, and coherence of those movements, and intervene by altering the rules of interaction that shape collective behavior rather than attempting to control individual nodes.

Several features of murmuration behavior are directly relevant to the information environment:

1. There is no decisive node. Removing a single bird does not disrupt the flock. Similarly, influencing a single individual, platform, or account rarely produces decisive cognitive effects.
2. Behavior is emergent rather than commanded. Global patterns arise from local interactions rather than centralized control. Influence emerges from identity alignment, emotional resonance, and narrative coherence, not from top-down messaging alone.
3. Responses to pressure are non-linear. A threat approaching from one direction can cause movement in an entirely different direction. In cognitive warfare, influence efforts often generate backlash, displacement, or unintended amplification.

Cognitive warfare, therefore, presents an ecosystem to be understood, rather than a target system to be dismantled.

Decision Latency and the Illusion of Precision

The most damaging consequence of applying kinetic targeting logic to cognitive warfare is decision latency. Decision latency is generated less by uncertainty than by structure, the separation of approval authority from the units that plan and execute information effects, forcing actions through sequential staffing, legal review, and coordination layers that consume time faster than the cognitive environment remains stable.

Traditional targeting relies on discrete intelligence snapshots, followed by deliberation, approval, and execution, under the assumption that the operational environment remains sufficiently stable. In the information environment, this assumption routinely fails. By the time an influence action is approved and executed, the cognitive state it was designed to address may have shifted significantly.

The result is action that is precise in execution but misaligned in effect. The root of this problem is the temporal execution mismatch.

Design Implication: A Warfighting System Approach

If the core failure in cognitive warfare is indeed temporal mismatch, then the solution is not simply another refinement of targeting methodology. It is a redesign of how the force senses, decides, and acts in the information environment. This is a system problem. Effective competition requires capabilities aligned with decision-makers who possess appropriate authorities, integrated sensors and effectors across echelons, and a continuous battle rhythm that turns observation into action at the speed of relevance.

A fair objection is that traditional targeting has always dealt with uncertainty; the difference here is not uncertainty, but the rate of change. Properly conceived, this approach does not simply automate influence. It compresses the time for sensemaking and adaptation within clearly defined legal and ethical constraints, thereby expediting execution.

By front-loading understanding, desired end-states, and pre-set risk tolerance, we can expedite the execution phase. To make this process function, information must therefore be treated as more than an enabling function, but as a warfighting system designed to operate within an ecosystem’s velocity, with requisite command and staff focus and support. In practical terms, this means defining measurable indicators of cognitive movement (velocity, coherence, saturation, and drift), pre-approving bounded response options tied to those indicators, and instrumenting continuous assessment rather than episodic completion

Cognitive Targeting Versus Ecosystem Velocity

Figure 1 below illustrates how the cognitive environment moves continuously and often faster than traditional decision processes can keep pace with.

Figure 1: Cognitive Targeting Versus Ecosystem Velocity

This Figure Illustrates the dynamics of the cognitive environment, and an optimal means of targeting and operationalization at speed and scale.

The intersecting lines at the top represent individual agents within the information environment. These agents may be individuals, groups, narratives, or social dynamics. Each line shows how those agents evolve over time. While no single agent controls the system, recognizable patterns emerge through local interaction, analogous to a murmuration of birds.

The vertical cross sections A and B represent discrete moments of observation and decision. A traditional targeting process typically observes the environment at one of these moments, develops a plan based on that snapshot, and executes later. By the time execution occurs, the agents have moved, and the underlying cognitive conditions have changed. The resulting action is therefore precise but no longer aligned with reality.

The lower portion of the figure depicts an alternative approach. A synthetic cognitive environment, overseen by human judgment, continuously models how agents and narratives are likely to evolve. This environment informs a machine-assisted decision loop designed to recognize emerging patterns and predefined conditions rather than rely on static snapshots. When those conditions are met, actions are executed immediately through distributed cognitive capabilities such as psychological operations, cyber activities, civil affairs, and other cognitive or information warfare tools.

The key insight is that effectiveness in the cognitive domain depends on both precision and timing. Precision without timeliness is functionally irrelevant.

From Targeting to Cognitive Ecology

Effective competition in the cognitive domain requires a shift from target-centric to ecosystem-based approaches. The objective is to understand the interaction rules shaping collective behavior, including identity alignment, emotional contagion, narrative coherence, social proof, and algorithmic amplification.

Operationally, this implies prioritizing continuous sensing, rapid interpretation, and iterative action enabled by delegated parameters and integrated assessment, rather than episodic, staff-driven targeting cycles. Psychological operations, cyber operations, civil affairs, electronic warfare, space capabilities, narrative intelligence, and traditional intelligence functions as distributed sensors and effectors within a cognitive ecosystem.

Ethical and Strategic Constraints

Accelerated cognitive operations require clear ethical boundaries. If information is treated as a warfighting system, then legitimacy is not a rhetorical concern, but a design requirement built into authorities, oversight, auditing, and separation protections.

Democracies cannot replicate coercive information control practices. Human oversight, legal compliance, and respect for civil liberties are strategic imperatives. These principles must be embedded in system design rather than imposed after the fact.

Potential Solutions

This is not the first time the United States has faced a gap between the character of conflict and the institutions designed to fight it. In the early 1980s, senior leaders concluded that capabilities for influence and psychological operations had atrophied even as competition short of war made perception increasingly consequential. The response was a senior-directed effort to rebuild doctrine, authorities, force structure, education, and interagency coordination, culminating in the initial 1985 and formalized 1990 Psychological Operations Master Plans.

The present moment is comparable, but the terrain is broader. Cognitive and information warfare now shape whether military power can be generated, deployed, and employed at all. Yet responsibility for this terrain remains fragmented across organizations and planning models not designed for a fast-moving, adaptive environment.

What is missing is not just awareness, but coherence.

A modernized “Cognitive Advantage Master Plan” could articulate how the United States should organize, govern, and employ information as a warfighting system in competition and conflict. As with its predecessors, its value would lie less in any single recommendation than in its ability to synchronize a commonly understood, coherent effort across institutions that currently act in parallel.

Absent such an effort, the United States risks continuing to apply slow, narrowly focused, and tactical tools to a problem of speed, strategic coherence, and adaptation.

Conclusion

The United States does not lack tools or expertise in the cognitive domain. It lacks an operational model aligned with the environment it seeks to influence and the ability to coherently articulate and execute across multiple platforms across the enterprise.

Cognitive warfare unfolds in a rapidly changing and adaptive ecosystem more akin to a murmuration than a battlefield. As long as kinetic targeting logic is retrofitted to this environment, influence efforts will remain late, displaced, or irrelevant.

Success will come from rethinking how we observe, decide, and act in an ecosystem where time, interaction, and adaptation matter more than targets.

Check out all of Small Wars Journal’s great content on cognitive warfare.

Tags: Cognitive Advantage, Cognitive Targeting, Cognitive Warfare, Decision Latency, Ecosystem Velocity, influence operations, Information environment, information warfare, Psychological Operations

About The Authors

• 
  
• John Wilcox
• Colonel John Wilcox is an active-duty U.S. Army Civil Affairs (CA) Officer with almost three decades of service, 19 in Special Operations and Civil Affairs. He has served and commanded from Lieutenant to Colonel with 6 years of deployed time in the CENTCOM and INDOPACOM AOR in support of SOF, conventional, Joint, and Army formations. Colonel Wilcox will retire from the Army in July 2026. His views are his own and do not represent The United States Special Operations Command, The United States Army, or the United States Department of War.
• View all posts
• 
  
• Ryan Walters
• Major Ryan Walters is an active-duty U.S. Army Psychological Operations (PO) Officer with operational experience integrating PO, Intelligence, and other Information Capabilities in support of joint, sister service, and Army commanders. He is currently a graduate student at the National Defense University. The views, opinions, and analysis expressed do not represent the position of the U.S. Army or the Department of War.

9. Post-Khamenei Iran: Who’s Who Among Potential Alternatives

Summary:

Iran faces a succession problem with no clean successor. Masoud Kazemzadeh argues the regime could try to stay on its current course until external pressure eases, with figures like Mojtaba Khamenei as a possible heir, or it could harden further under an ultra-hardline cleric such as Mohammad Mehdi Mir-Bagheri backed by the Steadfast Front and parts of the IRGC. It also sketches “salvage” paths inside the system, from Rouhani-style pragmatic concessions to reformist preservation efforts, plus darker contingencies like an IRGC junta. Outside the regime, opposition is large but fragmented, which makes transition outcomes unstable.

Comment: Someone is trying to anticipate and think about what comes next.

Post-Khamenei Iran: Who’s Who Among Potential Alternatives

by Masoud Kazemzadeh

01.28.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/28/post-khamenei-iran-whos-who-among-potential-alternatives/

January 2026 - Iranian protestors block a street in Tehran (MAHSA/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images).

Iran is at a turning point. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 86 years old (born in 1939). The 12-Day War with Israel and the United States in June 2025 was a catastrophic defeat for Khamenei and his regime. The economy has been deteriorating fast in 2025. Rather than changing course, Khamenei’s response has been to rebuild Iran’s missile and nuclear programs as well as rejuvenate it’s proxy groups. Officials and observers in Iran, Israel, and the United States have publicly stated that if Khamenei’s policies continue, another far more devastating war is forthcoming.

The political situation in Iran is volatile and fluid. Khamenei’s policies have come under criticism from figures inside the regime and Iranian citizens opposed to fundamentalism. Iranian society is highly fragmented and polarized. No leaders and no popular movements have succeeded in garnering the support of even a simple majority. In this article, I will discuss alternative scenarios for Iran’s future and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each group and personality that might play a major role in Iran’s politics.

Khamenei Triumphant

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been the Supreme Leader since June 1989. The political system in Iran is called “Velayat Motlagh Faghih” [Absolute Rule of a High-Ranking Shia Cleric]. This system was developed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and is the Shia version of the Sunni variety that was developed by The Muslem Brothers under the leaderships of Hassan Al-Banna and Seyyed Qotb. It is a far-right wing totalitarian politicized interpretation of Islam and argues that the sole legitimate form of government is an Islamist form of government whereby Sharia [Islamic theological law] is the sole or primary basis of government and laws of a country. I use the term “fundamentalist” to refer to this extremist right-wing form of ideology and form of government.

The regime believes that it could continue these policies until either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or American President Donald Trump is out of office.

Khamenei and his hardline supporters believe that the fundamentalist regime is strong enough to survive any potential wars with Israel and the United States. By continuing former policies, they want to increase the regime’s power to respond to any attacks from Israel or the United States, which they believe will deter future attacks. Domestically, the regime has both drastically increased repression and made minor, easily reversible concessions. The regime has drastically increased executions since 2021. Executions went up by 106 percent in 2025 to over 1,920. Since the revolution, Iran has had the highest per capita executions in the world. It has drastically increased arrests of political and civil society activists. Conversely, however, it has relaxed the harsh enforcement of compulsory hijab. It has allowed music and singing in public. It has also made appeals to Iranian nationalism, which the Shia Islamic fundamentalist ideology of the regime has attacked since the revolution. The regime believes that it could continue these policies until either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or American President Donald Trump is out of office. In the long run, another hardline person – such as Khamenei’s son Mojtaba – could become the next Supreme Leader.

Ultra-Hardline Supreme Leader

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel further increased the power of ultra-hardliners in Iran. Until his death on May 19, 2024, it was widely believed that Ebrahim Raisi would become the next Supreme Leader. Until the 12-Day War in June 2025, one of the most likely candidates to succeed Khamenei was Ayatollah Mohammad Mehdi Mir-Bagheri. Ayatollah Mir-Bagher is the clerical leader of the Steadfast Front, the most extreme ultra-hardline faction in the regime. Mir-Bagheri is a powerful member of the Assembly of Experts (the body which the fundamentalist constitution assigns the responsibility to select the Supreme Leader) and a persuasive public speaker. The Steadfast Front is highly organized and possesses enormous influence within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Iranian intelligence organizations. If Khamenei were to die of natural causes or assassinated by Israel, Mir-Bagheri is the most likely person to become the Supreme Leader. Mir-Bagheri advocates war with infidels (e.g., the U.S. and Israel) until they are defeated. According to Mir-Bagheri:

We believe in peace, but lasting peace comes after a lasting war and jihad, and until you leave this lasting jihad behind and eliminate the false front, lasting peace will not be established in the world…. It is naïve and superficial to say: We are also in favor of peace; you must eliminate sedition so that peace can come about… We must go through a long war and there is no room for complacency at all.

Mir-Bagheri also argues that the powers of the President should be further reduced and the powers of the Supreme Leader further increased.

There are major differences between Khamenei and his hardline supporters and Mir-Bagheri and his ultra-hardline supporters. Khamenei did allow reformist, expedient, and chameleon factions of the fundamentalist oligarchy to exist and hold power in the Majles (fundamentalist-only parliament) and the Presidency. Mir-Bagheri and the ultra-hardliners wish to monopolize power in the hands of ultra-hardliners and hard-liners. At a minimum, the ultra-hardliners (Mir-Bagheri and the Steadfast Front) want to deny any political power to other factions. They routinely call for executions of top members of the fundamentalist oligarchy such as Rouhani, Mir-Hussein Moussavi, Mehdi Karrobi, and Khatami, who have criticized Khamenei and his policies.

Mir-Bagheri was born in 1961. If he became Supreme Leader, he might hold that position for decades. Mir-Bagheri is young in comparison to other top leaders in the regime. For example, the Head of the Assembly of Experts Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Movahedi Kermani was born in 1931 and the Head of the Council of Guardians Ayatollah Ahmad Jennati was born in 1927. Factions within the fundamentalist oligarchy who are not ultra-hardline or hardline would strongly oppose Mir-Bagheri. President Pezeshkian told the Majles on November 11, 2025, that during the 12-Day War, his major worry was that if Khamenei was eliminated, then the different factions would attack each other and the regime would collapse; Israel would not even need to invade. Pezeshkian made public the possibility of major bloody war among fundamentalist elites for the position of Supreme Leader.

Salvaging the Fundamentalist Regime Via Fundamentalist Elites

Former President Ayatollah Hassan Rouhani has emerged as the main fundamentalist leader arguing that fundamental changes are necessary if the fundamentalist regime is going to survive. Before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, Khamenei successfully marginalized and isolated Rouhani. After the 12-Day War, Rouhani made several highly effective public speeches arguing that the regime could collapse if the current policies continue and how the regime could survive by pursuing different policies.

Rouhani (born November 12, 1948) is a founding member of the fundamentalist regime. He has consistently been one of the top 20 leaders of the fundamentalist oligarchy since 1979. Rouhani is one of the most articulate members of the fundamentalist oligarchy and one of the least ideological and most pragmatic members of the oligarchy. His primary objective is the continuation of the fundamentalist regime. After October 7, 2023 and before the 12-Day War, Rouhani publicly warned of the threat to the regime if the regime made “one mistake.” After the 12-Day War, his warnings became more ominous. Rouhani advocates major diplomatic concessions to the U.S. as well as major changes in domestic politics. Rouhani argues that he has the diplomatic skills to make deals with the U.S. that could save the fundamentalist regime. Hardliners have increased their attacks on Rouhani in reaction to his calls for change with some calling for his trial and execution.

Fundamentalist Gorbachev

Reformist members of the fundamentalist oligarchy argue that the best way to save the regime is making serious reforms in politics, economy, and foreign policy. The top two such members are Ayatollah Mohammad Khatami (former President) and Ayatollah Hassan Khomeini (the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the regime). They advocate for generally progressive political reforms such as reducing repressive policies, easing restrictions on the press, and allowing all fundamentalist factions to run for various offices. They advocate for economic reforms such as reducing the economic stranglehold of fundamentalist entities and the IRGC who control at least 60 percent of the economy. They advocate major diplomatic concessions to the U.S., Europe, neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as de facto détente with Israel. The reformists believe that the position of the Supreme Leader is too strong to be challenged as long as Khamenei is alive. Before the 12-Day War, this scenario was not realistic. Since the 12-Day War, they sheepishly increased public advocacy for their views. They plead with other powerful members of the oligarchy, arguing that the regime risks being overthrown if the current policies continue. The hardliners argue that the concessions suggested by the reformists would cause the collapse of the fundamentalist regime similar to Gorbachev’s reforms that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Fundamentalist Yeltsin

There are former members of the fundamentalist oligarchy who argue that the fundamentalist experiment is a total failure and that the only possible solution is to transition to democracy. The most prominent members of this group are former prime minister Mir-Hussein Moussavi and former Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh. Members of this group fear that Khamenei’s policies would not only cause the collapse of the regime but also cause the disintegration or destruction of Iran.

IRGC Junta

A military coup by the IRGC is a major possibility. This is particularly likely if Khamenei is assassinated, either by Israel or a figure inside the regime. Leaders of the IRGC are extremely despised by the public; in presidential elections, IRGC generals (e.g., Mohsen Rezaee, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, and Ali Shamkhani) that were allowed to run were defeated in landslides. Despite repeated attempts, no IRGC general has become president. It is not clear whether an IRGC military regime would be more or less bellicose. It is also not clear whether an IRGC regime would be more or less repressive than the current regime.

Opposition to the Fundamentalist Regime

According to GAMAAN, between 16 and 20 percent of Iranians inside Iran support the fundamentalist regime while about 70 to 80 percent of the population opposes the regime.

There are no reliable opinion polls of the Iranian public because the regime is extremely repressive and violent. The people are afraid to share their true opinions with pollsters for the real possibility of arrest, torture, execution, and murder by the regime if they expressed support for changing the regime. One of the few polls that might closely capture the opinion of Iranians is the “Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran” (GAMAAN). Unlike phone calls, GAMAAN uses VPNs and social media platforms to reach a representative sample of the Iranian population and allows safe way for the respondents to provide their answers. According to GAMAAN, between 16 and 20 percent of Iranians inside Iran support the fundamentalist regime while about 70 to 80 percent of the population opposes the regime. If one group or one person represented 70 to 80 percent of the population, then that opposition would have been able to mobilize and organize the population to overthrow the regime. Like the fundamentalist regime, the opposition is also terribly fragmented and polarized. About 26 percent of the population supports a secular democratic republic, the largest group out of those who oppose the regime. The second largest group is the monarchists with about 21 percent. Democratic advocates and monarchists also suffer from internal divisions.

Democratic Republicans

The largest group within the pro-democracy forces is the Iran National Front (INF). The INF was founded in 1949 by Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. The INF has been a coalition of secular social democrats, secular liberal democrats, liberal Islamists, democratic socialists, and liberal nationalists. According to GAMAAN, a little over 10 percent of the population supports the INF. The INF struggles to replace the fundamentalist regime with a secular democratic republic that has a multiparty parliamentary system. The INF is highly active both inside and outside Iran. The inside organization is under the courageous leadership of Dr. Hussein Moussavi. The outside branch is called “INF-Organizations Abroad” (INF-OA). The INF-OA has been highly active under the able leadership of Dr. Homayoun Mehmaneche. The INF-OA has entered into a broad coalition with several other republican groups. The coalition is called “Coalition for a Secular and Democratic Republic in Iran” (CSDRI), called “Hamgami” in Persian, a term for “coalition.” The members of the coalition include the Left Party of Iran (LPI), the Solidarity for Secular Republic in Iran, and United Republicans of Iran. The LPI is the largest leftist party in Iran. After the INF, the Solidarity for Secular Republic and the United Republicans are the largest republican parties in Iran. The democratic republicans advocate a non-violent transition to democracy in Iran.

Not all democratic republicans have joined the Hamgami. If there are free elections in Iran, this group has the highest likelihood of winning such elections. Their social base is the highly educated modern middle class; they are over-represented among university students. For example, in early 2003 a large internet poll of students at the Amir Kabir University (the second most prestigious university in Iran) was conducted by the Daftar Tahkim Vahdat, the official student umbrella group (affiliated with the reformist faction of the regime). The results were posted on the university’s student website until they were ordered to remove it. In the poll, 6 percent of the students supported the hard-liners, 4 percent supported the reformists, 5 percent supported the monarchy, and 85 percent supported the establishment of a democratic and secular republic.

Many civil society activists are democratic republicans. Civil society groups include university students, university professors, lawyers, women’s rights, labor rights, human rights, and physicians.

Monarchists

The Pahlavi monarchy was a right-wing dictatorship put in power by the British. Its founder, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was brought to power by a coup orchestrated by the British in February 1921. Reza Pahlavi established his dynasty in late 1925. Reza Shah Pahlavi moved away from the British and became close to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In August 1941, the British and USSR invaded Iran and replaced Reza Shah with his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

A popular liberal democratic nationalist movement under the leadership of Dr. Mossadegh challenged British colonial control of Iran. Mossadegh’s government was overthrown in a coup organized by the CIA and MI6 in August 1953, re-imposing Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as absolutist king. Between 1953 and 1979, the Shah was a conventional right-wing dictator and puppet of the United States. For example, Iran’s oil that was nationalized by Mossadegh was given to a consortium of major western oil companies (40% American, 40% BP, 14% Royal Dutch Shell, and 6% French company Total). The Shah also sent Iranian troops to Oman to suppress leftist guerrillas and keep the pro-British king in power. When Arab members of OPEC boycotted oil to Israel’s allies in 1973-74, the Shah sent Iran’s oil to Israel, South Africa, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands.

Since mid-1990s, most Iranian groups gradually become less authoritarian and more democratic with the notable exception of the monarchist movement. The monarchists transformed from a relatively mild right-wing authoritarians to extremist fascist. This is not to say that all Iranian monarchists are fascist; some are constitutional monarchists. However, fascist factions among the monarchists completely dominate the monarchist movement and marginalize the mild authoritarians. In earlier periods, the monarchist slogan was “Today, Only Unity.” In the past several years, one of their slogans are: “Death to Three Corrupts: Clerics, Mojahedin, and Leftists; Long Live the King.” In the earlier period, the monarchists used to say that SAVAK (Persian acronym for Organization for Intelligence and Security of the Country) – the Shah’s dreaded secret police – had made mistakes. In the past few years, monarchists parade with portraits of Parviz Sabety, the Head of SAVAK’s office for Domestic Affairs. Sabety is responsible for the horrendous torture of dissidents (including university students) and murder of political prisoners. In their official meetings, monarchists hoist SAVAK’s flag.

The monarchist strategy has been to viciously attack anyone who is a democratic republican so that they could impose Reza Pahlavi as the sole leader.

Monarchists refuse to apologize for their grotesque repression, including extreme torture (e.g., of non-violent pro-democracy activists – namely university students – for merely reading books), bombing the homes and offices of INF leaders, and beating INF leaders (merely for writing a polite letter asking the Shah to respect the Constitution and allow free elections). Monarchists blame the current situation in Iran for all those who resisted the Shah’s dictatorship.

Reza Pahlavi and the monarchists were supported by the CIA in the 1980s. Today, the main overt support is from the Israeli government (particularly the Netanyahu government) and pro-Israeli groups in the United States. The Israeli government also covertly supports Reza Pahlavi and the monarchists. In an investigative report, entitled “The Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran”, prominent liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the Netanyahu government paid a private group to create a massive internet campaign supporting Reza Pahlavi and attacking his rivals (e.g., democratic republicans). With the help of AI, this covert operation created about 800 fake bots and spread propaganda and fake news in support of Reza Pahlavi on a daily basis on social media. These fake accounts use vicious attacks on democratic republicans, human rights activists, and anyone who is not monarchist. They advocate far-right views and their attacks are terribly vulgar and crass. It is believed that the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia’s government also covertly support Reza Pahlavi and the monarchists. For example, it is widely believed that the U.S. government (Pentagon) funded the satellite television Manoto, an extremist monarchist television. Manoto TV’s funding ended in 2023 during the presidency of Joe Biden.

According to GAMAAN, Reza Pahlavi’s peak popularity was in 2022-2023 when his public approval rate reached about 39 percent. By mid-2024, about 21 percent supported the monarchy and about 31 percent supported Reza Pahlavi. Furthermore, about 20 percent of the population does not hold strong views about a monarchy or republic. As the monarchists began to openly and brazenly attack non-monarchists, a popular pro-democracy reaction emerged that strongly condemned the monarchists. Rather than criticize and condemn the violent fascistic actions and behaviors of the monarchists, Reza Pahlavi remained either silent or supportive of his followers.

The turning point was perhaps the events of December 12, 2025, in Mashhad (the second largest city in Iran. Dr. Khosrow Alikurdi – human rights lawyer and democratic republican – died in his office under mysterious circumstances. The regime claimed he died of a heart attack then confiscated 16 security cameras in his office and refused to share the videos with the family. Alikurdi was a democratic republican activist affiliated with the INF, defending many political prisoners including those affiliated with the monarchy, the PMOI (People’ Mojahedin Organization of Iran), and leftists. For the commemoration of his death, a large number of people and activists came to Mashhad to pay their respects. Dr. Javad Alikurdi, Khosrow’s brother and a lawyer – hosted the commemoration of about 1,000 people. He invited Narges Mohammadi, a 2024 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Sepideh Gholiyan, progressive journalist and labor and human rights activist, to speak at the commemoration. Ms. Mohammadi has been viciously attacked by the monarchists since her award because she is not a monarchist and supports Dr. Mossadegh. Narges Mohammadi climbed up to the back of a pickup truck to address the people when a small crowd disrupted the gathering, shouting monarchist slogans including “Death to Three Corrupts: Clerics, PMOI, and Leftists.” The monarchists threw stones at Ms. Mohammadi and bloodied her right eye. Monarchists ignored the pleas of Javad Alikurdi and continued to disrupt the commemoration. The coercive apparatuses then came in and arrested around 50 pro-democracy and human rights activists. Surprisingly, the monarchists who were shouting slogans and throwing stones were not among those arrested. Although there is a long history of monarchists (and fundamentalists) violently attacking the meetings of other groups (e.g., liberals, human rights activists, progressives, women’s rights), the democratic republicans were cautious with their reaction. However, Reza Pahlavi publicly thanked the monarchist crowd for shouting slogans in his support. Monarchist spokespersons on television strongly supported the actions of the monarchist crowd and condemned Ms. Mohammadi for refusing to bow down and submit to the monarchists and declare Reza Pahlavi as her leader. On December 25, about 1,000 prominent pro-democracy activists and celebrities signed a letter of supporting Ms. Mohammadi and Ms. Gholiyan, condemning the vicious attack on them.

The monarchist strategy has been to viciously attack anyone who is a democratic republican so that they could impose Reza Pahlavi as the sole leader. Monarchists use character assassinations on media and online as well as physical attacks on other opposition figures. Monarchists have posted photos of the leaders of INF, Narges Mohammadi, Sepideh Gholiyan, Ms. Shirin Ebadi (2003 Nobel Peace Laureate), and Nasrin Sotoudeh (Iran’s foremost human rights lawyer and herself political prisoner for the crime of defending political prisoners) online with attacks and insults.

Before December 12, 2025, conflicts occurred inside Iran between the fundamentalist regime and various opposition groups. Outside Iran, there have been relatively minor conflicts between monarchists and other opposition groups (e.g., pro-democracy, leftists, PMOI, ethnic parties). After December 12, the biggest fights have been between monarchists and pro-democracy forces. Initially, many democratic republicans, assumed that regime intelligence entities might have been behind the December 12 event. However, the monarchists and Reza Pahlavi treat the event as a major monarchist victory over the democratic republican forces inside Iran. The monarchists have further escalated the fight since then. On December 24, 2025, BBC Persian featured a documentary on Taraneh Alidoosti, a famous actress who publicly supported the mass protests in 2022-2023 and was jailed by the regime. Hardline fundamentalists began attacking Ms. Alidoosti. A large number of Iranians showed their support for Ms. Alidoosti and expressed their appreciations for her support of the struggles against the fundamentalist regime. The monarchists began a vicious campaign of attacking Ms. Alidoosti for not being a monarchist. The monarchist strategy appears to have evolved from attacking pro-democracy and human rights activists to attacking even celebrities who are not monarchists.

The monarchists claim that they constitute between 80 and 90 percent of the population and thus viciously attack anyone who is not a monarchist. The monarchist strategy to impose Reza Pahalvi’s leadership is based on the assumption that: (1) over 80 percent of the population supports the monarchists; and (2) the Iranian people would be intimidated into silence by vicious verbal and physical attacks. The reactions of the pro-democracy forces and others have been to stand up to the monarchists and fight back, to which the monarchists have reacted strongly. The monarchists and Reza Pahlavi badly miscalculated. If they retreat, they look bad and weak. If they escalate, they look even more fascist and out of touch with the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people.

The PMOI

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) was founded in 1965 as a far-left guerrilla group that opposed the Shah’s regime. It grew tremendously after the 1979 revolution. In the early 1980s, it abandoned its left-wing ideology and became fully concentrated on overthrowing the fundamentalist regime at any cost. Initially, it allied with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Jordan’s King Hussein. Then, it became close to the United States and Israel. The PMOI has enormous funds of unknown origins, is highly organized, and has a highly sophisticated lobby in Washington. It has gained public support from both Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Among its Republican supporters are Mike Pompeo, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, and John Bolton. GAMAAN’s poll usually finds that their support in Iran is about 1 percent. However, I estimate that the popularity of PMOI is between 1 and 5 percent. They could not win any elections. However, they are able to hold rallies outside Iran.

Ethnic Parties

According to GAMAAN, a very small percentage of the population supports ethnic parties. However, we observe that in ethnic minority (e.g., Kurds, Baluchis, Turkoman, and Azari) areas there are higher levels of resistance to the fundamentalist regime. Under certain circumstances, ethnic parties could support secessionist movements. Nevertheless, the ethnic minorities in Iran do not appear to be strong enough to overthrow the regime. If they can form a coalition with national parties, then they could play a role in the overthrow of the regime.

Far-Left Parties

There are about a dozen far-left parties in Iran. They do not pose any challenge to the regime. If they form a coalition with democratic republicans, they could play a role. The far-left parties are extremely hostile to both the fundamentalist and monarchists.

Policy Ramifications

If the United States, Israel, pro-Israel groups in the U.S., and Saudi Arabia wish to use the monarchists as a nuisance to bother the fundamentalist regime, then their investments make sense. But if they wish for regime change in Iran then their support for Reza Pahlavi and the monarchist has been a terrible mistake.

Various domestic and foreign players could determine whether the regime would survive or collapse. The IRI has been able to sell about 2 million barrels of oil a day. About 91 percent of this oil was purchased by Chinese entities. If China would stop purchase of oil from Iran, that would drastically increase the likelihood of regime collapse. Russia prefers to see the fundamentalist regime in power and present a nuisance to the U.S. and Europe. Russia, however, does not want to see war between the IRI and Israel or the United States. Both Russia and China know that the Iranian population is highly pro-West and pro-American; therefore, any democratic elections would result in a government highly critical of Russia and China. Europeans greatly fear instability and civil war in Iran because of the possibility of mass refugees and terrorism.

If the United States, Israel, pro-Israel groups in the U.S., and Saudi Arabia wish to use the monarchists as a nuisance to bother the fundamentalist regime, then their investments make sense. But if they wish for regime change in Iran then their support for Reza Pahlavi and the monarchist has been a terrible mistake.

No group or person enjoys the support of a simple majority in Iran. But all the groups have second choices, and all the groups absolutely (and violently) oppose a particular group. Most major groups have a second choice if they themselves cannot come to power; no major group considers the monarchists as their second choice whereas all the major groups in Iran consider the democratic republicans to be their second choice. In other words, the fundamentalists believe that if they are going to be overthrown, they would prefer to be replaced by the democratic forces rather than by any other group. The same is true for the monarchists. If it is certain that the monarchists could not come to power, they would prefer a democratic republic to other systems like fundamentalism or communism. The same is true for the PMOI, the far-left communists, and ethnic minority parties. In other words, all groups strongly oppose the return of the monarchy dictatorship. Therefore, no major party from any group has made any actual alliance with the monarchists.

In late December 2025, many democratic and progressive intellectuals (e.g., Kambiz Ghafouri, Dr. Mehrdad Darvishpour) began publicly calling on all pro-democracy, republican, leftist, PMOI, and ethnic parties to make a broad-based anti-fascist coalition to oppose the two fascist threats of the fundamentalist regime and monarchists. Such a call is without precedent in Iran’s recent history. The leftists, ethnic parties, and the PMOI do not have any realistic chance of coming to power. However, they do have enough support to mount a prolonged armed struggle against the monarchists. The Pahlavi monarchy has a history of violent repression of these groups. Moreover, in their slogans, the monarchists call for death of these activists. There is no doubt that if the fundamentalist regime were overthrown, all oppositions groups would mount an armed struggle against the monarchists. An attempt to install the monarchists will result in a prolonged civil war in Iran.

What this means is that the only group that could establish a stable democracy in Iran is the democratic republicans. As of this writing, the Trump administration has wisely kept its distance from Reza Pahlavi and the monarchists. Also wisely, the U.S. State Department has repeatedly condemned the repression of Narges Mohammadi. The best policy for the U.S., Israel, and Europe is demanding secession of violence against the Iranian people by the fundamentalist regime as well as support for free and democratic elections in Iran. The world should put pressure on China to stop all oil purchases from the Islamic Republic.

Conclusion

If the U.S. and Israel wish to see the fundamentalist regime overthrown, they should stop all support to anti-democratic forces such as Ayatollah Rouhani and Reza Pahlavi.

The temptation to support Ayatollah Rouhani to get rid of Khamenei and keep the fundamentalist regime in power while drastically changing the regime’s policies is great. The Iranian people obviously want better economic situation, but they also want freedom, democracy, human rights, and social justice. Since 1890s, large swaths of the Iranian people have been struggling for freedom and democracy. They achieved these ideals in the 1905 Constitutional Revolution and during the pro-democracy movement of the 1949-1953 period. The democratic forces were defeated by the anti-democratic forces in 1925, 1953, and 1979. Today, Iran stands at another historical juncture.

The support given to Reza Pahlavi and the monarchists have had the opposite of their intended effect. It has weakened and divided opposition to the fundamentalist regime. In other words, the outside assistance to Reza Pahlavi has had the actual effect of slowing the movement against the fundamentalist regime. The biggest beneficiary of such support to the monarchists is the fundamentalist regime. If the U.S. and Israel wish to see the fundamentalist regime overthrown, they should stop all support to anti-democratic forces such as Ayatollah Rouhani and Reza Pahlavi.

Tags: ali khamenei, ayatollah rouhani, fundamentalism, GAMAAN, Hamgami, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), mir-bagheri, PMOI, reza pahlavi

About The Author

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• Masoud Kazemzadeh
• Masoud Kazemzadeh is Associate Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He received his B.A. in International Relations from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of five books including Mass Protests in Iran: From Resistance to Overthrow (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023, 2024). He enjoys playing tennis and soccer.
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10. Clausewitz and the American Center of Gravity: A Look at the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy Together

Comment: My assessment of the NSS and NDS through the eyes of Clausewitz.

Clausewitz and the American Center of Gravity: A Look at the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy Together

by David Maxwell

01.28.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/28/clausewitz-american-center-of-gravity/

Carl von Clausewitz wrote about centers of gravity in an era of monarchies, armies, and capitals, yet his insight remains unsettlingly current. Power, he argued, does not rest everywhere at once. It concentrates. It binds. And when it fractures, the state weakens from within. His warning was blunt. The blow must be directed against those elements that hold a system together. When applied to the United States in the contemporary global geostrategic environment, this insight forces a hard reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy. Not as bureaucratic texts, but as signals of where American power truly resides, and where it is most exposed.

The center of gravity is real, and it is vulnerable. The question facing American strategy is whether it will defend that center deliberately or continue to assume it will hold on its own.

The question is not whether the United States faces threats. The NSS and NDS assume that as a given. The harder question is whether these strategies correctly identify America’s own center of gravity, and whether they protect it or unintentionally place it at risk.

Clausewitz’s Lens

In Chapter 4 (“Ends in War More Precisely Defined – Overthrow of the Enemy,”) of Book Eight of Clausewitz’s On War, Clausewitz wrote:

In countries subject to domestic strife, the center of gravity is generally the capital. In small countries that rely on large ones, it is usually the army of their protector. Among alliances, it lies in the community of interest, and in popular uprisings it lies in the persons of the principal leaders and in public opinion. The blow must be directed against these things.

Clausewitz offered a taxonomy. In states riven by domestic strife, the center of gravity lies in the capital and the cohesion of political authority. In alliances, it lies in the community of interest. In popular uprisings, it lies in leaders and public opinion. Each category is relational. Centers of gravity are not abstract assets. They are living bonds of legitimacy, trust, and shared purpose.

For the United States, none of these categories applies neatly in isolation. America is not a small country reliant on a protector. It is not a fragile state in the classic sense. Yet it is an alliance leader whose power depends on others believing that its commitments endure. It is also a republic whose strength rests on public consent at home. Clausewitz would likely see America’s center of gravity as composite but not diffuse. It lies in the alignment between political legitimacy at home, alliance cohesion abroad, and the credibility of American leadership to act.

The NSS and NDS both gesture toward this reality, but they do so unevenly.

The 2025 National Security Strategy

The 2025 NSS frames competition as systemic and enduring. It emphasizes democratic resilience, economic security, and alliance leadership across the Asia-Indo-Pacific and beyond. Its tone is political in the Clausewitzian sense. It understands that legitimacy, narrative, and shared purpose matter as much as material power.

From a center of gravity perspective, the NSS implicitly identifies domestic cohesion and alliance unity as decisive. As the following passages highlight, the NSS treats American leadership as inseparable from the health of democratic institutions, prosperity, and from the trust of allies:

“President Trump is building alliances and strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific that will be the bedrock of security and prosperity long into the future.” (NSS 2025 p. 19)

“American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy…” (NSS 2025, p.26)

This aligns closely with Clausewitz’s assertion that among alliances, the center of gravity lies in the community of interest. The NSS assumes that this community can be sustained through consultation, shared values, and predictable, strong leadership.

Yet there is a vulnerability here. The NSS places enormous weight on consensus, process, and normative appeal. Clausewitz would ask whether this emphasis strengthens the bond or masks its erosion. Community of interest is not declared. It is felt. When allies hedge, when partners doubt American staying power, the center of gravity shifts. The NSS acknowledges this risk but tends to treat it as a messaging problem rather than a structural one.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy

The 2026 NDS is more austere. It prioritizes homeland defense, military readiness, and the capacity to deter high-end conflict. It accepts that resources are finite and that trade-offs are unavoidable. In doing so, it implicitly narrows the definition of what must be defended first.

Through Clausewitz’s lens, this shift is profound. By elevating homeland defense above forward posture and alliance reassurance, the NDS risks signaling a relocation of the center of gravity inward. Not toward the capital in a revolutionary sense, but toward domestic political tolerance for risk and cost. The strategy appears shaped by an assumption that public opinion is brittle, that prolonged commitments abroad strain legitimacy at home.

Clausewitz warned that in popular uprisings, the center of gravity lies in leaders and public opinion. For the United States, public opinion is not merely a constraint. It is a strategic object. Adversaries understand this. They do not need to defeat American forces in battle if they can erode the will to sustain alliances and commitments. The NDS recognizes this threat implicitly through its focus on resilience and homeland defense, but it does not fully reconcile this with the need to preserve alliance cohesion as a center of gravity in its own right.

Alignment or Tension?

Taken together, the NSS and NDS reveal a strategic tension. The NSS treats alliance cohesion and democratic legitimacy as the core of American power. The NDS treats military capacity and domestic defense as the foundation upon which everything else rests. Clausewitz would insist that these are not separate centers of gravity. They are interconnected. A blow against one reverberates through the others.

If allies perceive that the United States is retrenching, the community of interest weakens. If domestic audiences perceive that alliances impose endless costs without clear purpose, public opinion turns inward. In both cases, the center of gravity shifts toward fragmentation. The adversary need not strike the capital or defeat the army. It need only exploit the seams between strategy documents, between political narrative and military posture.

Counterarguments and Risks

One could argue that the NDS is simply realistic. That without credible military power, alliance commitments are hollow. Clausewitz himself insisted that war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will. From this view, prioritizing readiness and homeland defense protects the ultimate guarantor of alliance credibility.

This argument has merit. A weak army undermines even the strongest community of interest. Yet Clausewitz also warned against mistaking means for ends. Military power supports political purpose. It does not replace it. If the defense strategy signals that alliances are conditional or secondary, it risks undermining the very political cohesion it seeks to defend.

Another counterargument is that domestic cohesion must come first. A divided polity cannot sustain global leadership. This too is true. But Clausewitz would ask a harder question. Is domestic cohesion strengthened by retrenchment, or by a clear articulation of why alliances matter to the American people? If public opinion is treated only as a limitation, rather than as a center of gravity to be cultivated, it becomes a vulnerability.

The Strategic Implication

From a Clausewitzian perspective, the greatest danger for the United States is not external aggression but internal misalignment. The NSS and NDS each grasp part of the center of gravity, but neither fully integrates them. The community of interest among allies, the legitimacy of leadership at home, and the credibility of military power abroad must reinforce one another. If they drift apart, the center of gravity fractures.

Adversaries operating in the gray zone understand this. They target narratives, elections, alliance debates, and burden-sharing disputes. They aim not at American tanks or ships, but at American confidence in itself and in its partners. Clausewitz would recognize this as indirect strategy aimed squarely at the center of gravity.

Questions Worth Asking

If the center of gravity lies in the community of interest, how does the United States measure whether that community is strengthening or eroding beyond formal statements and summits?

If public opinion is a strategic object, not merely a constraint, what obligations do national strategies have to educate and mobilize the American people rather than simply manage risk?

And if the NSS and NDS reflect different assumptions about where American power ultimately resides, which one would Clausewitz say an adversary is most likely to test first?

These are not academic questions. They go to the heart of whether American strategy aligns with its own sources of strength, or whether it leaves its center of gravity exposed to a patient and perceptive opponent.

Conclusion: Protecting the Center That Holds

Clausewitz reminds us that wars are decided not by the accumulation of strength alone, but by striking what binds a political system together. For the United States, that binding force is neither the capital in isolation nor the military as an instrument apart from politics. It is the alignment of public legitimacy, alliance cohesion, and credible power. When these reinforce one another, American influence endures. When they diverge, even unmatched military capacity cannot compensate for strategic fracture.

Read together, the 2025 NSS and the 2026 NDS expose a risk not of weakness, but of incoherence. One speaks the language of community of interest and democratic leadership. The other signals caution, prioritization, and inward defense. Clausewitz would warn that adversaries do not need to defeat both. They need only drive a wedge between them. Each doubt seeded among allies, each erosion of public confidence at home, shifts the center of gravity away from cohesion and toward fragmentation.

The strategic task, then, is not to choose between domestic resilience and global leadership, but to fuse them. American strategy must treat public opinion as a source of strength to be cultivated, not a constraint to be managed, and alliances as living political compacts, not optional force multipliers. If the United States fails to do this, others will apply the blow for us, quietly and persistently, against the very bonds that hold the system together.

Clausewitz offers no comfort here, only clarity. The center of gravity is real, and it is vulnerable. The question facing American strategy is whether it will defend that center deliberately or continue to assume it will hold on its own.

Tags: Clausewitz center of gravity, Foreign Policy, National Defense Strategy analysis, National Security Strategy analysis, NDS, NSS, U.S. foreign policy, U.S. grand strategy

About The Author

• 
  
• David Maxwell
• David Maxwell is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia Pacific region (primarily Korea, Japan, and the Philippines) as a practitioner, specializing in Northeast Asian Security Affairs and irregular, unconventional, and political warfare. He is the Vice President of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. He commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines during the war on terrorism and is the former J5 and Chief of Staff of the Special Operations Command Korea, and G3 of the US Army Special Operations Command. Following retirement, he was the Associate Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a member of the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society, on the board of advisers of Spirit of America, and is a contributing editor to Small Wars Journal.

11. COLUMN: Want Influence? Control the Story

Summary:

Ajit Maan argues that national security now hinges on narrative competence, because modern influence operations aim at perception and decision, not just platforms or messages. She draws a hard distinction between “story” as persuasion and “narrative” as a deeper cultural structure that becomes identity, often below conscious awareness. Using Aristotle’s frame, she suggests narrative can express a kind of truth about meaning and context that facts alone do not supply, so contesting influence requires understanding an adversary’s inherited “meaning map.” If we treat narrative as propaganda, we miss the cognitive substrate and keep reinventing doctrine.

COLUMN: Want Influence? Control the Story

National Security Requires Narrative Competence

By

Ajit Maan

January 27, 2026

https://www.hstoday.us/featured/column-want-influence-control-the-story/

The new Director of Cognitive Advantage is tasked with winning the battle for influence, perception, and decision-making, “in an era where foes don’t need tanks or missiles to shape the world, they just need a meme and bot farm.” There is, of course, nothing new about influence in warfare. The ancients had quite a lot to say on the topic. The subtitle of a recent article takes a look “Inside America’s New Cognitive War and how the US is Getting Inside the Minds of Our Adversaries.” 

In order to get inside the minds of our adversaries, it is imperative to understand their cultural narratives and the conscious stories that reflect those less-than-conscious narratives. But what I mean by “narrative” is not that of common usage. As a philosopher, with specialization in Narrative Identity Theory, I use the word narrative is similar to the way Aristotle meant the concept of Poetics. That understanding and usage is different from the commonly understood usage of narratives: as interchangeable with story, or as propaganda, or in opposition to truth.  

Rather, narrative is to poetics as journalism is to history. 

Aristotle said that there is a sense in which poetry has higher truth value than history. What he meant was poetry addresses the nature of its subject while history addresses particular events, for example, poetry speaks to the nature of War with a capital W while history addresses the specifics of a particular conflict, complete with dates, places, and specific people.  

It follows that disagreements over a historical account can result in accusations of inaccuracy, but the same accusation cannot be made about poetry (and narrative).  

A poem may not touch the heart. It may not resonate. But it cannot be accused of being wrong.  

To say that a poem is false is to misunderstand the nature of the beast.  

From the perspective of Cognitive Advantage, there are at least two broad problems with accepting the definition of narrative in the manner of common usage. One problem is that we lose our intellectual history and continue to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel. The second problem is that our influence operations will ignore the unconscious aspects of cognition and the cultural influences that impact it. 

One cannot know oneself, nor one’s adversaries, if one doesn’t comprehend the effects of unconscious cultural assumptions on identity, behavior, and decision processes.  

I define narrative as a cultural product that becomes internalized by individuals within the culture, as identity. More specifically, narrative is a cultural product that simultaneously demonstrates and shapes the way we understand the meaning of our context and our place within it (identity). Cultural narrative is internalized by individuals socialized within that narrative space as personal and social identity.

The way a culture has historically understood the meaning of its environment and its place within it is the narrative space into which individuals are socialized, without consent and without alternative (with few exceptions). A very large part of human narrative inheritance is unconscious and shows up as assumption.   

The way our culture has socialized us to process incoming information will determine which incoming information will be cognitively categorized as alarming, or alternatively, as so unimportant as to be dismissed (not consciously received), depending upon the meaning map one has inherited from one’s culture.  

Aristotle, and Plato before him, addressed the national security risks associated with what is being called cognitive warfare, what I call more foundationally, Narrative Warfare, but they were more aware than we are of the unconscious (what they thought of as irrational) part of it. Plato was alarmed at how even the untrained could influence what is unconscious.  

We want more than just to “get inside the minds of our adversaries.” We want to influence their minds, so we need to pay attention to their narrative influence on the cognitive process. It will be less than conscious, but not for those looking in from the outside.  

The definitional distinction between narrative as used in common parlance and the way professionals tasked with any kind of warfare should define it is not just an academic distinction. Our ability to “get inside the minds of our adversaries” will require a deeper understanding of narrative.     

Ajit Maan

Ajit Maan, Ph.D., is an internationally-recognized security and defense analyst and narrative strategist. In the 1990s she developed the groundbreaking theory of internarrative identity, a road map for resilient identity created out of personal and cultural conflict. Her work has had far-reaching implications for conflict resolution and community engagement in hostile environments. Dr. Maan’s work is frequently referenced in academic literature and it has been the subject of international as well as multi-disciplinary scholarship including the multi-authored scholarly monograph, Representations of Internarrative Identity. Her work is also used as instructional material within defense and security institutions worldwide.

Dr. Maan’s research and her books, such as Counter-Terrorism: Narrative Strategies, Soft Power on Hard Problems (edited with Amar Cheema), and Narrative Warfare, focus on deconstructing dominant and coercive narratives. Her work demonstrates how certain narrative structures lend themselves to manipulation and how the weaknesses of those structures can be exploited. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, Real Clear Defense, Small Wars Journal, The Strategy Bridge, Intelligence and Defense Norway, Indian Military Review, Indian Defense Review, and Homeland Security Today, as well as other intelligence and security publications.

As founder and CEO of Narrative Strategies, Dr. Maan leads a coalition of scholars and military professionals who are working to end extremism through narrative analysis and international dialogue. In addition to her work with Narrative Strategies, Dr. Maan shares her research with others through her various roles in academia. She is affiliate faculty with the Center for Narrative Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, which, in collaboration with the U.S. Army's Irregular Warfare Group, is developing a project designed to amplify the voices of Iraqi and Syrian refugees. She is also a professor of global security at Arizona State University.

12. Xi’s military purge probably cuts imminent Taiwan war risk. Probably

Summary:

Xi Jinping’s latest purge of senior PLA leaders likely lowers the odds of a deliberate near term move on Taiwan because purges signal doubt, not confidence. Attrill and Wilford argue Xi is trading short term readiness for tighter personal control, after China’s defense ministry announced investigations into CMC vice chair Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff chief Liu Zhenli. Leadership churn, fear of blame, and disrupted reporting can slow procurement and joint planning, which matters most for complex operations like a blockade or invasion. But they warn coercive activity could still intensify, raising accident risk. 

Comment: But Sun Tzu said, "Never assume your enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Xi’s military purge probably cuts imminent Taiwan war risk. Probably | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Nathan Attrill, Andrew Wilford · January 27, 2026

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/xis-military-purge-probably-cuts-imminent-taiwan-war-risk-probably/

Xi Jinping’s latest purge of top military officers probably reduces the chance of China taking imminent, deliberate military action to seize Taiwan. But many interpretations of the event are possible, and some imply an increased risk of war, perhaps accidental.

The Ministry of National Defence on 24 January announced investigations into Central Military Commission (CMC) vice-chair Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff Department chief Liu Zhenli for ‘vile influence on the Party, the state and the military’. The move follows earlier removals and investigations that have steadily hollowed out senior military ranks, leaving the CMC so depleted it is now too small to justify a WeChat group chat.

Whether this makes a high-risk invasion attempt or blockade against Taiwan more or less likely depends mainly on whether Xi is correcting capability deficits or clearing political obstacles to force.

China’s military top command since the 20th Party Congress in 2022.

Purges at this level usually signal doubt, not confidence. Removing senior commanders and corrupt procurement networks suggests Xi believes internal reporting is unreliable, readiness overstated and critical systems compromised—or that the military is failing to meet the high performance benchmarks he has set. These include a goal, revealed by the United States, for the military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

The purge highlights a clear trade-off: Xi is prioritising personal control over an institution that has historically maintained its own powerbase. While rational from a regime-security perspective, it imposes short-term costs on an organisation that depends on stable leadership, trusted reporting and cohesive planning.

The removal of an erstwhile ally, Zhang, also marks a break from recent practice, reinforcing Xi’s drive for total command authority while disrupting informal networks across the force.

When the current CMC was appointed in 2022, it had seven members. Now only Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin remain in effective office, making this the smallest CMC in the post-Mao era.

Beyond the CMC itself, the purge has swept widely: two defence ministers were removed in 2023 and 2024, at least eight senior generals were expelled in a single wave in late 2025, and several service, theatre, and procurement leaders have been sidelined in the past three years. Taken together, this represents a systemic hollowing-out of China’s professional military leadership.

Why the purge could make action less likely

There are several pathways by which the ongoing purge and specifically the latest two removals reduce the likelihood of Beijing choosing large-scale military action in the near term.

Capability confidence. If Xi is purging because corruption has undermined readiness or reliability, his benefit-cost calculation for use of any military action must be lower than it would otherwise be. An attempt at seizing Taiwan would be a systems test under fire, and a leader who doubts the integrity of reporting or equipment is unlikely to risk a campaign where failure would be strategically catastrophic.

Organisational friction. Anti-corruption campaigns absorb the attention of senior leaders, slow procurement and encourage institutional caution. While China’s military can sustain pressure operations around Taiwan in these circumstances, leadership churn degrades the planning and coordination that’s needed for a complex joint campaign, and especially when mistakes risk being recast as political disloyalty.

Command risk aversion. When leaders fall, subordinates learn to avoid responsibility. That instinct is corrosive to warfighting capacity and, until corrected, suppresses appetite for high-risk, irreversible decisions. Exacerbating this trend is the delicate balance between commanders and political commissars, which can cause operational bottlenecks.

Time and politics. The 2027 milestone is a capability target, not an invasion deadline. By exposing internal dysfunction, the purge makes it less likely that Beijing would choose that year for a discretionary war. It points to unresolved doubts about readiness.

Why it could make action more likely

Reasons for thinking the purge increases war risk are not so strong but cannot be ignored.

Command streamlining. A particularly concerning interpretation is that the purge is preparation, not a cause for hesitation.

A leader contemplating escalation needs a chain of command that executes orders without hesitation or internal bargaining. Removing senior figures, particularly those with independent networks, can tighten political obedience and central control, streamlining decision-making at the expense of increased operational risk.

Coercive proof-of-life. After leadership upheaval, Beijing has incentives to demonstrate that the military remains capable. This may take the form of more assertive military coercive activity around Taiwan, including larger drills and denser air and maritime operations. This increases the risk of action by normalising higher-tempo operations, and raising the probability that routine coercion spills into escalation through miscalculation or incident.

Over-compliance below the top. The ongoing purge suggests that Xi is not encouraging autonomous risk-taking but rather enforcing strict adherence to his strategic guidance, penalising commanders who exercise independent judgement or build personal power bases. This may prompt ambitious officers to execute authorised pressure campaigns around Taiwan more visibly, more frequently or with less tactical restraint. The risk of incidents or miscalculation in the crowded operating environment of the Taiwan Strait would rise, even as ultimate decision-making remains firmly under Xi’s control.

Conclusion

Overall, the purge is best understood as a correction to increase Xi’s confidence in and control over the military, not as a prelude to imminent war, and as a political manoeuvre to dismantle power bases within the armed forces that are outside his own networks. Reflecting doubts about readiness, the move is likely to reduce the probability of a deliberate, large-scale operation against Taiwan in the near term—say, in the next two or three years.

The purge does not signal de-escalation. It may increase the risk of sharper coercive pressure short of invasion, and it reinforces the point that 2027 is not a fixed invasion deadline. Xi will act on his own assessment of confidence and control.

State of the Strait is available here. Governments and organisations can contact [email protected] to discuss co-funding this project and gaining access to the entire State of the Strait database.

aspistrategist.org.au · Nathan Attrill, Andrew Wilford · January 27, 2026

13. Holding out: Taiwan’s priority preparations in case of Chinese blockade

Summary:

Taiwan’s blockade problem is time, not terrain. Axe argues that unlike Ukraine, Taiwan cannot trade space for time, cannot rely on overland resupply, and depends on imports for food and energy, so a Chinese sea and air blockade could squeeze ammunition, fuel, electricity, and willpower on a fast clock. He says Taipei’s priorities should be stockpiling essentials while expanding domestic production, keeping and expanding nuclear power while decentralizing the grid, building a serious blockade-running concept, and preparing the public psychologically for hardship. Wargames he cites suggest food could run short in weeks and gas in months under sustained interdiction.

Comment: We might expect a war of maneuver and attrition but Taiwan has to defend against a war of exhaustion that will come rapidly without sufficient supplies and in particular, food. This will be food security at the extreme.

Holding out: Taiwan’s priority preparations in case of Chinese blockade | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · David Axe · January 27, 2026

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/holding-out-taiwans-priority-preparations-in-case-of-chinese-blockade/

Taiwan isn’t Ukraine. Russia’s victim has withstood almost four years of war, but it has advantages in perseverance that Taiwan lacks.

Taiwan needs its own ways of holding out against China, particularly against a Chinese blockade. Addressing this issue is becoming urgent as President Donald Trump shows an alarming lack of enthusiasm for preserving the island’s independence.

Among Taiwan’s priorities are stocking supplies and preparing its people psychologically for hardship.

To understand Taiwan’s challenges, first consider the differences between its circumstances and Ukraine’s.

Ukraine has borders with seven other countries, through some of which it can get overland supply. But Taiwan is an island.

Ukraine has an area of 600,000 square kilometres; in combat, it can trade space for time. Taiwan’s is just 36,000 square kilometres; it has little space to trade.

Ukraine grew more than enough of its own food before the Russian invasion. Even in peacetime, Taiwan needs imports.

And Ukraine is receiving strong material support from the United States and European countries to the west. But Trump told The New York Times on 8 January that what China did with Taiwan was ‘up to’ President Xi Jinping, though he added that he’d be ‘very unhappy’ with a change in the status quo.

Taiwan should be prepared to fight alone or with only limited help from Japan and Australia and possibly the Philippines.

Even if Taiwan can defeat an immediate amphibious assault, an island that cannot quickly produce large quantities of munitions and, most importantly, cannot feed itself or independently power its electricity grid is at the mercy of a rapidly ticking clock. It could lose its independence as Chinese forces blockaded it by sea and air, slowly but inexorably starving it of ammunition, food, fuel and willpower.

The longer it can hold out, the greater its chances of eventually getting help from external forces, maybe including a US showing renewed interest. A Chinese attack on Taiwan would have immediate and horrific consequences for countless Taiwanese, but it might take time for the scale and severity of those consequences to register around the world.

To improve Taiwan’s chances, the government of President Lai Ching-te should prioritise:

—Doubling down on efforts to stock ammunition, food, fuel, spare parts for the power grid, and supplies for other essential services, all while building up domestic production capacity to reduce dependence on imports;

—Reversing a policy to phase out nuclear electricity generation and instead expand nuclear power while decentralising the grid with even more sources of renewable generation;

—Crafting a strategy for widespread blockade running; and

—Commencing a publicity campaign to steel everyday Taiwanese against the hardships that a Chinese blockade would bring.

None of these efforts will be easy or cheap, as I’ll detail in later articles in this series. But all are probably needed for Taiwan’s survival in a largely solo defensive campaign. And no, there’s no real-world example to show the Taiwanese the way forward. With all due respect to the Ukrainian people, their own war effort is so much easier than what the Taiwanese would have to achieve if they mostly fought alone.

Shared land borders with allies alone greatly improve Ukraine’s chances, whereas Taiwan’s utter reliance on sea trade may be one of its greatest vulnerabilities. Indeed, Beijing may well forgo trying a risky amphibious assault and instead simply blockade the island to force it to submit.

To understand how a Chinese blockade might play out, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last year ran a series of realistic war games. In some scenarios, Chinese forces interdicted ships sailing towards Taiwan but didn’t sink them—skirting the threshold of violence that might compel Taiwan’s allies, in particular the US and Japan, to intervene.

In those scenarios, Chinese sailors seized more than 400 Taiwan-bound merchant ships—and Taiwan began running out of food in two weeks and natural gas in 10 weeks. On the brink of collapse, ‘Taiwan would have to either make concessions to China sufficient to get China to cease its [merchant-ship] boarding campaign, escalate by using military force against Chinese forces in the exclusion zone or get the United States to intervene on its behalf,’ the think tank concluded.

Stocking and aggressive blockade running could delay the collapse. But another issue is that the will of the Taiwanese people must last at least as long as their inventories of supplies.

History has proved that a resilient population can endure a long siege, albeit at great cost. But that resilience isn’t automatic.

When Nazi Germany tried to bomb Britain into submission in 1940, the ‘defeatist message fell on deaf ears’ among millions of everyday Britons, according to Tim Luckhurst of Durham University. Yet British pluck wasn’t the only reason. Government, business and media actively suppressed defeatist expression.

The good news for Taiwan is that ordinary Taiwanese may be just as deaf as wartime Britons to any assertion that defeat is inevitable. Recent polling indicates that two-thirds of Taiwanese would be willing to fight to defend their country. And the Ministry of National Defense (MND) in Taipei correctly sees this will to resist as a vital resource.

When the ministry released its annual national defence report in October, analysts were pleased with the report’s focus on the psychological aspect of national defence. The report ‘features an overarching emphasis on resistance,’ noted the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a Washington think tank. ‘Specifically, it describes how the MND is preparing Taiwan as a nation and the Taiwanese as a people to resist.’

Defiance can buy time. By holding out, Ukraine has been able to adapt and fight on amid evolving technology, changing Russian strategy and seismic shifts in the domestic politics of the countries that should be Ukraine’s closest allies.

Taiwan would certainly have much less time. It’s hard to imagine it holding out for four years. But maximal preparation on all fronts—military, logistical and psychological—could decide whether it has enough time.

aspistrategist.org.au · David Axe · January 27, 2026

14. Finding the Signal within the Noise: What Information Warriors Need to Know About Human Pattern Recognition.

Summary:

Human pattern recognition is the battlefield. Wilbur argues that influence campaigns win when they exploit the brain’s drive to complete patterns under uncertainty, so repetition and familiar moral frames can feel true even when evidence is thin. He uses Russia’s “neo-Nazi Ukraine” framing as an example: it activated deep cultural memory and then scaled through bot driven repetition, echoing RAND’s “firehose of falsehood” logic. He distinguishes machine detection of external signals from human interpretation of meaning, and he maps micro, meso, macro patterns that escalate from emotion to identity to ideology.

Excerpt:

Information warfare is ultimately a contest over pattern control. Every actor in the information space competes to define what feels coherent, familiar, and true. Pattern theory shows that belief does not begin with facts but with recognizable structures of memory, emotion, and story. The most effective operations build authority, maintain invariance, and increase density until their message feels inevitable. Defenders must therefore think in patterns, not posts. Understanding how micro-patterns anchor emotion, how meso-patterns build identity, and how macro-patterns organize ideology allows analysts to see the architecture behind persuasion. The advantage goes to the side that can read these systems first, disrupt their rhythm, and replace them with coherent alternatives that align truth with emotional and cultural meaning. In the cognitive domain, mastery of patterns is mastery of perception—and perception decides every war.

Comment: Pattern control. Perhaps he controls the data AND the pattern dominates.

Finding the Signal within the Noise: What Information Warriors Need to Know About Human Pattern Recognition.

irregularwarfare.org · Douglas Wilbur · January 28, 2026

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/finding-the-signal-within-the-noise-what-information-warriors-need-to-know-about-human-pattern-recognition/

Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of Small Wars Journal as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 12.18.2025 and is available here.

In 2022, Russian state media launched a coordinated narrative campaign portraying Ukraine’s government as “neo-Nazi” and its citizens as victims of Western manipulation. The “neo-Nazi” narrative worked unusually well because it activated deep cultural memories from Russia’s World War II mythology, where defeating fascism is central to national identity. This signal’s Russia tried to construct was simple but powerful: Russia is morally righteous, Ukraine is inherently dangerous, and military action is not just justified but necessary. Within days, thousands of automated social-media accounts began repeating the same story frame across Telegram, VKontakte, Twitter, and YouTube. The repetition created a sense of coherence that transcended evidence. Users were not persuaded by facts. They were reassured by familiar patterns, heroes, villains, and moral redemption, that felt intuitively true. Analysts at RAND later described this “firehose of falsehood” approach as a system that overwhelms critical thinking through volume and repetition rather than logic. These operations succeed because they weaponize the way human beings naturally seek order in chaos. Cognitive research shows that when people face missing or confusing information, the brain automatically fills in the blanks to create a complete picture. If part of an image, story, or message is unclear, the mind supplies the missing detail from memory or expectation to make it feel whole. This process reduces uncertainty and creates a sense of order, even when the available data are incomplete or misleading. This bias toward pattern completion makes intuitive judgments feel accurate even when they are wrong. When adversaries shape those patterns, they shape belief.

Information warriors often equate pattern recognition with algorithmic detection, how machines identify recurring data sequences. Yet meaning itself is patterned. Humans interpret the world through nested and evolving configurations of memory, emotion, and story. Propaganda can exploit these interpretive patterns by mirroring cultural myths and moral schemas, turning recognition into persuasion. Understanding this patterned battlespace is now central to information warfare. Machines can detect repeated hashtags, posting cycles, or network clusters, but only humans can interpret what those patterns mean, whether a spike in activity signals fear, outrage, solidarity, or coordinated manipulation.

What is a Pattern?

According to pattern theory, a pattern is a recurring configuration of relationships among elements, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, or symbolic, that allows humans to interpret, predict, and attribute meaning to experience. Patterns exist outside the mind in the recurring structures of the world itself. They appear in how social networks organize influence, how economies fluctuate, how military units coordinate, and how communication flows across platforms. On social media, for example, a few influencers drive most of the traffic while thousands of smaller accounts echo their content. This power-law structure repeats across almost every platform. More importantly, patterns exist within the mind, where they serve as the internal frameworks that give meaning to experience. Pattern theory holds that humans interpret the world by matching new information to familiar mental structures built from memory, emotion, and prior understanding. The mind is constantly sorting, comparing and simplifying incoming signals, turning raw data into recognizable forms that feel coherent. When a message matches a story someone already believes or a symbol they already trust, it feels true without being verified. These inner patterns give strength to outer messages. Information persuades only when it connects to the ways people already understand the world. For example, an external pattern such as a repeated claim that “outsiders are threatening the nation” only becomes convincing if it matches an internal pattern. Like a long-held fear of foreign betrayal or a cultural story about past invasions. When the external message fits the internal memory, it feels true even without evidence. Information persuades only when it connects to the ways people already understand the world.

Pattern theory holds that a pattern is built on three basic ideas: regularity, form, and order. Regularity means things happen in repeating ways that can be tracked or predicted. In the information space, regularity shows up as posting schedules, meme cycles, or spikes in coordinated messages before key events like elections or protests. These repeating actions are not random; they create rhythm and tempo in communication. Analysts who notice them can spot influence operations early, even before the content itself is recognized as propaganda. Form and order describe how those regular actions take shape and connect. Form is the perceived structure or configuration of a thing. For example slogans, hashtags, or video styles that make an information campaign recognizable by giving it a shape. Order is how the a perceivable thing is arranged and sequenced, which can create effect a desired effect. It decides what message leads, what symbols repeat, and how emotional cues are layered to hold attention. Order determines what messages lead, which symbols repeat, and how emotional triggers are layered to guide attention. In practice, form gives repetition a shape, and order gives that shape direction. When all three elements work together, they build coherence and trust in a narrative. When order breaks down, messages lose clarity and audiences drift. Understanding this relationship helps information warriors see how meaning is structured, repeated, and reinforced across the information battlespace.

False Positives and False Negatives

Human’s experience false positive errors in patterns recognition with a concept knows as pareidolia. People seeing meaningful shapes or patterns in their minds but which do not exist in external reality. During the Syrian civil war, social media users repeatedly claimed to see hidden symbols in satellite images and cloud formations. For instance, the outline of religious icons, flags, or faces, interpreting them as divine signs favoring one side. A similar problem occurs at the state and botnet level. During the 2016 U.S. election cycle, several Russian-linked bot networks misread unrelated spikes in online chatter as emerging “grassroots movements” and amplified them aggressively, assuming they were organic flashpoints. In reality, many of these spikes came from automated spam or unrelated viral entertainment content. This false-positive pattern detection created an operational vulnerability: botnets exposed themselves by over-engaging with irrelevant material, making their coordination patterns easier for researchers to detect and remove. Misinterpreting noise as signal can therefore weaken the very operations designed to manipulate public perception. This bias reflects an exploitable heuristic of predictively matching sensory input to familiar forms, even with limited data. Humans also experience the opposite error, a false negative, when they fail to recognize patterns that actually exist. In information warfare, this occurs when analysts overlook coordinated behavior or repeating narrative structures because they appear fragmented or coincidental. Missing these real patterns can delay detection of influence campaigns or coordinated inauthentic activity.

Human Memory and Pattern Recognition

Pattern theory holds that patterns arise from the aggregation of memory. Every time people process new information, they compare it with similar experiences stored in memory. The brain keeps not only facts but the relationships between events, emotions, and outcomes, essentially the pattern itself. Emotion plays a central role in this process because emotional arousal strengthens memory encoding and retrieval, making emotionally charged patterns more vivid and durable. These remembered connections create shortcuts for understanding: a phrase, color, or symbol can instantly recall an entire story. Memory patterns can become the bridge between past and present. When propaganda reuses familiar cues, old wartime songs, national heroes, or historical grievances, it awakens emotional memory. The message feels authentic because it matches what the audience already remembers as meaningful. This gives adversaries a major operational advantage because messages tied to emotional memory bypass analytic scrutiny, spread faster through shared identity groups, and are far more resistant to later correction.

Memory also shapes how patterns persist and spread. Once people internalize a narrative pattern, a story that explains who is right, who is wrong, and why, it becomes the mental template through which new information is judged. Every future event is compared against that stored storyline. Details that fit the narrative are remembered and reinforced; those that contradict it are dismissed or forgotten. This selective recall keeps the pattern stable and emotionally satisfying. Propaganda relies on this mechanism, because repeating stories that align with existing memory structures—such as betrayal by outsiders, national rebirth, or heroic sacrifice—make old emotions feel current again. The result is continuity. Memory anchors propaganda in familiar experiences—old victories, past betrayals, or shared suffering—while narrative carries those emotions forward through new events. A speech recalling a fallen hero, a holiday celebrating survival, or a meme repeating a national grievance all keep the past emotionally active. Together they form a self-sustaining cycle each retelling reinforces the feeling and shapes how new information is judged. Remembered emotion guides interpretation, and new stories refresh the memory, creating a self-sustaining cycle that keeps belief in motion.

Emotion and memory do more than preserve patterns, they guide attention to which patterns are seen at all. Prior emotional experience shapes what the brain treats as significant, drawing focus to cues linked with past reward or threat.

A familiar image of a flag, a wounded child, or a defiant leader captures attention faster and holds it longer than neutral information. Once attention locks onto an emotionally charged signal, it receives deeper cognitive processing, increasing the chance it will be stored as long-term memory. Empirical evidence shows that emotional arousal strengthens both attention and memory consolidation, allowing emotional signals to exert stronger influence than their factual content alone. Over time, attention becomes patterned. People keep noticing the same emotional cues, which strengthen the mental links that shape how they see new information. In digital warfare, this reflex is exploited by pairing strong emotions with key messages so they are more likely to be seen, believed, and remembered.

Micro, Meso and Macro Patterns

Patterns develop across three interconnected levels, micro, meso, and macro, that build on one another. Each level adds structure and stability to the one beneath it. Micro-patterns are the smallest building blocks of meaning. They form inside individual cognition through repeated associations between ideas, emotions, and images. Each person develops micro-patterns that shape how they interpret new information. For instance, linking authority with control, religion with morality, or the flag with loyalty. However, micro-patterns are usually fleeting and often fail to be transformed into a memory. In the information domain, micro-patterns appear as reflexive reactions: anger at a perceived insult to one’s group, sympathy for an image of suffering civilians, or trust in a message that uses a familiar tone or accent. These reactions are fast, emotional, and largely automatic. They explain why a single tweet, meme, or photo can instantly feel “right” to one person and “false” to another.

Meso-patterns emerge when many people share and reinforce the same micro-patterns, creating collective habits of interpretation. Thus, meso-patterns are more likely to be stored in human memory if a person recognizes it as such. They are visible in networks, hashtags, and discourse communities that organize around common moral cues or narratives. For example, during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, hashtags #DenazifyUkraine and #SaveDonbasPeople synchronized individual outrage into a shared sense of mission. Coordinated images of liberation, brotherhood, and victimhood formed a recognizable structure that unified audiences who never met. Macro-patterns operate above this layer and are stored in the memory because people cognitively elaborate on them. They are also shared with other people, allowing one to externalize them from one’s individual thought to collectively shared ideas. They are the overarching ideological and civilizational frameworks—such as Russia’s “defense of the motherland” or China’s “community of shared destiny”—that connect many meso-patterns into a single worldview. Together, these three levels are arrayed along a continuum of development: micro-patterns drive emotion, meso-patterns organize identity, and macro-patterns shape perception of truth and legitimacy.

Together, these levels form an escalation pathway that adversaries can intentionally drive. Micro-patterns create fast emotional reactions that prime audiences. Meso-patterns turn those reactions into shared identity and group alignment. Macro-patterns elevate the shared identity into a full ideological frame that organizes how people interpret events, choose sides, and justify action. Adversaries often push patterns up this scale on purpose: they seed emotional triggers at the micro-level, amplify them through networks to form meso-level clusters, and then attach those clusters to a larger civilizational or moral narrative. Strategically, each level serves a different function, micro-patterns shape feeling, meso-patterns shape belonging, and macro-patterns shape belief. Understanding how these layers escalate helps analysts see where a campaign currently sits, what it aims to become, and where it is most vulnerable to disruption.

Sharing Patterns

People share meaning, intentionally or unintentionally, by projecting their internal patterns into the external world through communication. Each time someone encounters a signal that feels familiar, like a story frame, slogan, or image, it becomes a pattern instance. People recognize these signals as being related to an existing memory pattern. When people recreate or imitate these signals in a way that evokes a response from others, they produce pattern expressions. Intentional performances of a known structure, such as repeating a meme, slogan, or narrative format. Pattern representations go a step further: they are crafted messages designed to communicate the underlying structure and meaning of a pattern itself. They help others see more than the surface symbol by revealing its emotional or moral meaning. Creating clear pattern expressions takes careful thought and an understanding of how the audience will interpret them. A protest chant, recruitment video, or state documentary works this way. In information warfare, these repeated forms spread shared emotions and moral themes across audiences, turning individual recognition into collective belief.

Pattern Systems and their Language

When many pattern expressions and representations start to interact, they form larger structures of meaning. Over time, these individual signals organize into pattern systems, which are a collection of networked and related pattern representations that belong to a single domain that follow shared rules and recognizable styles. This marks the shift from spontaneous expression to organized communication. What starts as people repeating familiar symbols grows into a structured language that shapes belief and directs action. Understanding this evolution from single pattern to system helps explain how isolated messages turn into sustained information campaigns. For example, military communication, religious rhetoric, and online activism each use their own pattern systems.

Pattern language has two main parts: grammar and syntax. Grammar defines the rules for combining pattern representations; what belongs, what conflicts, and what sequence creates coherence. Syntax defines the idiomatic or stylistic ways patterns are used and combined to fit the domain’s norms. The language must be coherent and standardized so that its messages are clear, repeatable, and mutually reinforcing The first is structure, which creates a description of the pattern. Second is application, which explains how the pattern creates a solution to a particular problem. Next are the establishment of relationships between pattern elements. Authority is the principle that establishes which patterns are recognized as valid within a pattern system. Invariance defines what remains constant within a pattern system, even as its surface details change. Finally density refers to the concentration and interconnection of patterns within a system. Together, these principles ensure that every message within the system connects to a larger order of meaning. Thus, a pattern language gives users a consistent way to express meaning so that others inside the system can instantly recognize and respond to it.

Summing Up through an Example

Taken together, these concepts show how a full information operation is built from the ground up. A campaign begins with micro-patterns. Emotional hooks are built from memory cues designed for a specific target audience. These micro-patterns appear as videos, images, or slogans that trigger familiar feelings. Operators then create pattern expressions and representations that repeat the same structure for others to see. Repetition creates regularity, posting schedules, meme cycles, and predictable rhythms. They shape form through visual style and order by deciding which messages lead and which repeat, so everything fits together. These pieces combine into a pattern system guided by a shared pattern language, its grammar, style, and tone. Employing the principles of authority, invariance, and density makes the pattern credible and stable. The system runs on memory and emotion: emotional cues make messages stick, attention focuses on them, and narrative memory filters new information through the old story.

A concrete example makes this plain. In the 2022 Russian narrative campaign, operators seeded short video clips and images (pattern instances) that echoed as micropatterns of older stories about threats against Russia. They created regularity by amplifying those messages on a predictable cycle across hubs and botnets. They used consistent visual templates and slogans (form) and scripted a sequence creating shock, grievance, call to unity (order). Hashtags and influencer scripts produced meso-level clusters of sharing and identity formation. State media and allied influencers created macro patterns by tying these clusters into a broader civilizational frame such as the defense of homeland and Russian citizen’s moral duty that stayed invariant even as imagery changed. The system displayed density: history, religion, victim narratives, and military symbolism cross-linked to support the same conclusion. This creates a feedback loop with the earlier principles, regularity, form, and order, because the same clues that reveal a pattern system at the start also help analysts track how it evolves and anticipate its next move. Conclusion By identifying these patterned signals before the narrative fully matures, analysts gain the ability to disrupt or redirect the operation, demonstrating why mastery of pattern recognition is essential for modern information warfare.

Information warfare is ultimately a contest over pattern control. Every actor in the information space competes to define what feels coherent, familiar, and true. Pattern theory shows that belief does not begin with facts but with recognizable structures of memory, emotion, and story. The most effective operations build authority, maintain invariance, and increase density until their message feels inevitable. Defenders must therefore think in patterns, not posts. Understanding how micro-patterns anchor emotion, how meso-patterns build identity, and how macro-patterns organize ideology allows analysts to see the architecture behind persuasion. The advantage goes to the side that can read these systems first, disrupt their rhythm, and replace them with coherent alternatives that align truth with emotional and cultural meaning. In the cognitive domain, mastery of patterns is mastery of perception—and perception decides every war.

Douglas S. Wilbur, Ph.D. is a former US Army information operations officer with four deployments. After the military, he earned his Ph.D. in strategic communication from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His research specialty is in propaganda and information warfare.

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15. Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility

Summary:

Urban warfare is not an alibi. Andrew Milburn argues that dense terrain, embedded fighters, and imperfect intelligence are real conditions, but they do not determine civilian outcomes by themselves. Outcomes hinge on institutional choice: how broadly “military value” is defined, how intelligence uncertainty is handled, and whose risk is prioritized. In Gaza, he contends uncertainty often widened permission to strike instead of tightening restraint, and risk was shifted from Israeli forces onto civilians. He presses readers to judge process, not rhetoric, using the core tests of distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions, especially when civilians cannot leave and “safe zones” are not truly safe.

Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War: Civilian Harm, Risk, and Responsibility

warontherocks.com  · January 28, 2026

Andy Milburn

January 28, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/gaza-and-the-conduct-of-urban-war-civilian-harm-risk-and-responsibility/

Urban warfare is often invoked as an alibi: dense terrain, an embedded enemy, human shields, imperfect intelligence. These conditions are real but they do not, on their own, explain outcomes. Every modern military that has fought in cities has faced uncertainty, civilian presence, and adversaries who exploit it. What distinguishes campaigns is not whether these problems exist, but how commanders choose to respond to them, whose risk is prioritized, and what forms of harm are treated as acceptable.

The war in Gaza has produced civilian death on a scale that cannot be explained by inevitability alone. More than 73,000 people — over 71,000 Palestinians and nearly 2,000 Israelis — have been killed in a battlespace smaller than Philadelphia.

This outcome was not the unavoidable result of fighting Hamas in dense urban terrain. It was the product of institutional choices about how force was applied under uncertainty. Israeli targeting practices consistently defined military value broadly, treated intelligence gaps permissively, and shifted risk away from Israeli forces and onto civilians. Those choices shaped humanitarian outcomes and now threaten Israel’s strategic position.

Having commanded U.S. forces in urban combat, I have seen how narrow the margin can be between military necessity and civilian catastrophe. Uncertainty does not disappear in war, but it should tighten restraint rather than license destruction. In Gaza, uncertainty repeatedly functioned in the opposite direction. The result was not just tragic harm, but a pattern of civilian death that reflects how decisions were made, what standards were enforced, and what consequences commanders expected to face.

Numbers alone cannot settle questions of responsibility. To understand whether civilian harm in Gaza was lawful, avoidable, or excessive, we must examine process rather than intent, and institutional practice rather than rhetoric. That requires asking not whether the Israeli military possessed modern targeting tools, but how it used these under pressure, how it handled intelligence uncertainty, and how it allocated risk when civilians could not be separated from the battlefield.

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What the Numbers Show

Despite methodological differences, independent U.N. reporting, human rights investigations, and peer-reviewed demographic studies all point to the same conclusion: The majority of those killed in Gaza have been civilians. By even the most conservative estimates, assuming that all adult males were combatants, civilians still account for roughly two-thirds of reported deaths.

In early 2025, The Lancet estimated that recorded civilian trauma deaths had been undercounted by roughly 40 percent and that most indirect deaths were absent from official tallies, placing total Palestinian deaths plausibly above 100,000.

Other independent analyses, including Israeli intelligence reporting cited by international media and the Washington Institute indicate that civilians likely comprise more than 80 percent of this higher figure.

But numbers alone cannot resolve whether harm was unavoidable. That question requires a shift from outcomes to process — how force was applied, and under what constraints.

When Civilian Harm Is Lawful

The central issue, therefore, is whether the Israeli military took all measures that could reasonably be expected to reduce civilian harm while pursuing military objectives. International humanitarian law provides a benchmark. Its core principles of distinction and proportionality require attacks to be directed at legitimate military objectives and prohibit civilian harm that would be excessive in relation to anticipated military advantage.

“Excessive,” however, is not a mathematical threshold. It is a contextual judgment shaped by the value of the target, the quality of intelligence, the means employed, and the feasible alternatives available to commanders. Uncertainty is inherent to war. It does not bar action, but it should shape how and when force is applied — tightening constraints as doubt increases, rather than serving as a rationale for shifting risk onto civilians.

Nowhere to Go

Whether legal standards can function in practice depends first on whether a military makes all reasonable efforts to remove civilians from harm’s way.

Gaza’s pre-war density — more than 8,000 people per square kilometer — was compounded by evacuation orders that pushed much of the population into a shrinking fraction of the territory. In al-Mawasi, aid agencies reported densities exceeding 34,000 people per square kilometer, with minimal infrastructure.

At the same time, Gaza was effectively sealed. Civilians could be displaced internally but were rarely permitted to leave. U.N. officials repeatedly warned that there was “no safe place in Gaza,” as bombardment followed people from one designated zone to another.

Other militaries have faced similar dilemmas. In Fallujah and Mosul, U.S. and coalition forces made sustained efforts to enable civilian evacuation.

Israel had the technical and operational capacity to establish internationally monitored safe zones early in the campaign. Evacuation corridors could also have been stabilized through clearly announced and monitored movement windows. None of this would have ended Gaza’s suffering, but it could have reduced the number of civilians trapped between evacuation orders and violence.

Instead, evacuation orders compressed civilians into areas that were subjected to repeated strikes. Using the resulting population density to explain civilian deaths, rather than to require greater restraint, misstates the operational problem.

How Militaries Exercise Restraint

When civilians cannot be fully separated from the battlefield, protection ultimately turns on how force is applied.

The U.S. military follows a formal collateral damage estimate process. A strike may proceed only if projected civilian harm remains below an authorized threshold. If not, commanders are to modify or abandon the attack.

I saw this process firsthand. In Iraq, where I commanded an infantry battalion, strikes were frequently canceled when civilians were detected, even when insurgents were present. Later, while commanding a special operations task force during the Mosul campaign, I approved hundreds of strikes. If there was any indication civilians might be present — such as ambiguous figures on a drone feed or voices on intercepted communications — the strike was delayed.

That restraint was not absolute. It was balanced against the mission and our obligation to protect Iraqi security forces as they battled to retake territory held by the Islamic State. Still, when civilian risk outweighed the tactical value of a strike, protection of the population took precedence over killing the enemy.

This expectation carried real consequences: Strikes that caused avoidable civilian harm or revealed breakdowns in targeting discipline routinely triggered investigations, loss of strike authority, and career-ending reprimands.

Looks Like Restraint

This comparison lies at the core of one of the most common defenses of Israel’s conduct of the war: the claim that the Israeli military employs a U.S.-style targeting process and should therefore be judged by comparable standards. John Spencer, a U.S. Army veteran and scholar of urban warfare, has perhaps been the most prominent voice forcefully asserting that Israel has taken unprecedented measures to avoid civilian harm. He points to formal targeting cells, the use of precision-guided munitions, and extensive warning and evacuation measures as evidence.

Spencer’s argument reflects a broad tendency to treat the existence of process as proof of restraint while discouraging scrutiny of how those tools are actually used. The decisive question is not whether such systems exist, but how they function under pressure. And it is here that a different picture emerges.

For years, Breaking the Silence — a nonprofit composed of current and former Israeli soldiers — has collected testimony indicating that target development often rests on fragmentary or outdated intelligence, broad and permissive definitions of “military infrastructure,” and limited real-time updating of civilian patterns of life. Soldiers describe entire residential apartment blocks being designated as legitimate targets on thin leads rather than the confirmed presence of a military objective.

These accounts are not the sole basis for this assessment. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, I have interviewed over 50 Israeli officers who served in Gaza, including combat commanders, intelligence officers, and personnel directly involved in strike nomination and execution. While these interviews were conducted independently and are not publicly attributable, they consistently echoed the same patterns described by Breaking the Silence: permissive target definitions, heavy reliance on inference rather than confirmation, and little effort to update civilian presence once a target had been approved. Israeli intelligence officers have acknowledged that a building may be designated as an ammunition depot without knowing whether it actually contains weapons — or nothing at all. When the military value of a target is speculative, proportionality calculations become fragile by definition.

Taken together, these practices reflect more than permissive risk tolerance. They amount to a breakdown in the application of distinction and proportionality as those principles are normally understood and enforced in modern Western militaries.

Spencer argues that outside observers “cannot say” whether a smaller munition could have achieved the same effect and therefore are not qualified to make judgments about proportionality. But this misses the point. Commanders inevitably operate with assumptions. The issue is whether those assumptions are grounded in current, corroborated intelligence or outdated target assessments that fail to account for change.

That distinction matters. In my own experience approving strikes in urban combat, uncertainty about civilian harm did not license action. It slowed it. Questionable intelligence, an outdated pattern of life, and an unclear feed were not minor concerns. They were reasons to delay or abandon the strike altogether. Uncertainty is unavoidable. Treating uncertainty as a reason to accept civilian harm is a choice.

Spencer also points to Israel’s use of precision-guided munitions as evidence of exceptional care. But precision in delivery does not equate to precision in targeting. A weapon can strike exactly where intended and still produce excessive civilian harm if the target was defined too broadly, the intelligence was stale, or civilian presence was inadequately assessed.

The same is true of warning measures such as roof knocking, which Spencer and others portray as humanitarian innovations. But the evidence we have from Israeli sources, not just outside advocates, challenges that characterization. Soldiers describe the practice as ineffective and often dangerous. In practice, roof knocking relies on the use of explosives as a warning mechanism. From personal experience under artillery and air attack, I can say plainly that distinguishing between a munition intended to warn and one intended to kill is neither intuitive nor reliable.

Warnings that do not reliably remove civilians from danger do not meaningfully mitigate harm. In a battlespace where electricity, cellular networks, and internet access have been deliberately degraded, claims about phone calls, text messages, and warning strikes ring hollow. In that context, warnings function less as protection than as justification for proceeding with a strike.

Custody Lost

Civilian movement in urban warfare is fluid. A building that appears empty on a morning drone feed may shelter families by noon. In Gaza, repeated evacuation orders intensified this volatility, while Israeli targeting often relied on intelligence that was days or even weeks old. The resulting collateral-damage estimates could be technically precise while remaining disconnected from realities on the ground.

Here, too, there is divergence between Israeli and U.S. practice. Over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military came to emphasize the “unblinking eye”: the requirement to maintain continuous observation of a target from nomination through the moment of strike.

In Gaza’s sealed and densely populated battlespace, loss of custody was a predictable source of error. The April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike illustrates this gap. Coordination existed, markings were clear, yet custody was lost — and seven aid workers were killed.

I have seen both sides of this equation. As a commander, I approved strikes under the pressure of imperfect intelligence, aware that a single decision could save friendly forces or kill civilians. Later, as the head of a humanitarian nonprofit delivering aid on the front lines in Ukraine, I encountered the same problem from the opposite side of the coordination boundary. Humanitarian movement depends on disciplined procedures and continuous tracking.

Taken together, these points of contrast with U.S. practice undercut the claim that Israeli targeting should be evaluated as functionally equivalent. While the Israeli military possesses many of the same tools, it has not adopted the same institutional culture of restraint that emerged from U.S. experience. Israeli practice accepts a higher risk to civilians as normal.

This helps explain why the Israeli military routinely conducts strikes that American commanders would almost certainly have rejected. The destruction of entire residential towers to eliminate a single militant apartment, the bombing of multi-family homes where civilians were likely present, the routine use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound munitions in dense urban blocks — these are not aberrations. They reflect a calculus that accepts predictable civilian death on a scale that U.S. doctrine would not permit.

In comparable U.S. operations, strikes conducted with stale intelligence, loss of custody, or predictable civilian presence would have triggered legal review, command intervention, and curtailment of strike authority. They would not have been treated as unfortunate outcomes of a difficult fight, but as indicators of command failure requiring correction.

Limits to the “Human Shields” Argument

Defenders of Israel’s conduct frequently point to Hamas’ use of civilians as shields, arguing that civilian casualties in Gaza are an unavoidable consequence of enemy tactics rather than Israeli operational choices. Spencer advances this claim in categorical terms, asserting that the sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas and that Israeli precautions fully discharge legal and moral obligations.

Armed groups in Gaza do operate from within civilian areas, exploit protected infrastructure, and seek to constrain Israeli freedom of action through civilian presence. But international humanitarian law distinguishes between fighters operating among civilians — a common feature of urban insurgency — and the deliberate use of civilians as shields.

The available evidence provides little support. A detailed analysis by the Middle East Institute documents how Israeli officials frequently invoke “human shields” as a generalized justification for civilian casualties while rarely providing case-specific evidence demonstrating that civilians were intentionally coerced, positioned, or prevented from leaving for the purpose of shielding military objectives at the time of attack. By conflating proximity with coercion, Spencer’s argument lowers the threshold for acceptable civilian harm. By his calculus, individual strikes need not be examined — they are absolved in advance.

In Mosul, the Islamic State employed tactics closely resembling (and in some cases exceeding) those attributed to Hamas, including embedding within civilian areas, use of protected sites, and coercive control over civilian movement. Yet civilian-to-combatant ratios in those battles were significantly lower than those observed in Gaza. If estimates of civilians killed by the Islamic State and not coalition forces are used instead, the contrast is even sharper.

This does not absolve Hamas of responsibility for endangering civilians. But international law does not permit attacking forces to treat enforced civilian presence as an exculpatory condition rather than a constraint. When civilian harm occurs at scale and with demographic consistency, the decisive variable is not simply whether fighters embedded among civilians, but how the attacking force chose to respond. And as comedian Bill Burr has observed in criticizing the “human shield” defense, if you want to beat up your neighbor but he is holding a baby, you do not try to punch him through the child.

Spencer’s argument and others of this kind have been widely cited in Israeli media and official commentary to assert that responsibility for Gaza’s civilian death toll lies solely with Hamas. But these claims do not withstand scrutiny. Informed judgments about legality and restraint turn on how targeting decisions were made, the quality of intelligence available, the choice of weapon, and the degree of error commanders were willing to accept. In Gaza, these decisions consistently shifted risk onto the civilian population.

Institutional Culture and the Allocation of Risk

So, why did the Israeli military repeatedly accept levels of uncertainty and civilian risk that American commanders would not? One plausible explanation lies in how Palestinian civilian life was assigned value.

In my own experience approving strikes in urban combat, ethical decision-making was shaped less by written rules than by the signals sent from senior leaders. I was repeatedly reminded that we fight with the values we represent. We do not adopt those of our enemy.

In Gaza, senior-level rhetoric and policy decisions signaled a markedly different environment. In leaked recordings, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva — then head of Israeli military intelligence — stated that for every person killed on Oct. 7, “50 Palestinians must die,” adding that “it doesn’t matter now if they are children.” He described mass Palestinian deaths as “necessary” to send a deterrent message.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration of a “complete siege” on Gaza — cutting food, electricity, fuel, and water — was accompanied by explicitly dehumanizing language. Announcing the policy on Oct. 9, Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “an entire nation out there is responsible” further blurs the institutional line between civilian and combatant.

Such statements do not determine individual targeting decisions, but they shape the environment in which those decisions are made: how civilian life is valued, how much civilian harm is expected to be scrutinized, and how much is implicitly excused.

Investigative reporting on Israeli targeting practices indicates a permissive posture toward civilian risk, including reliance on automated target generation and acceptance of high civilian-casualty thresholds. The Israeli military disputes aspects of this reporting, and it should be treated with appropriate caution. But the credible possibility that such thresholds were considered acceptable is a better explanation of civilian casualty figures than Spencer’s argument of unprecedented restraint.

Taken together, these factors help explain why risk normally borne by commanders was instead shifted onto civilians.

Conclusion

Civilians are not killed at scale because urban warfare makes restraint impossible. They are killed when the protection of civilian life is not treated as a governing requirement of how force is applied.

In every war, commanders must accept risk. The decisive question is who bears it. In Gaza, risk was routinely transferred from Israeli forces onto civilians. The resulting toll is therefore not an unavoidable consequence of dense urban combat, but the product of deliberate decisions about how force was used and whose lives were endangered.

That distinction matters because civilian harm at this scale is not only a humanitarian or legal concern. It is a strategic liability, straining alliances and fueling the dynamics of recruitment, radicalization, and insurgent regeneration observed repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Urban warfare cannot be made clean, and civilian harm cannot be eliminated. But civilian protection ought to function as a real operational constraint. Other militaries learned — often painfully — that when uncertainty defaults to force, the long-term costs are severe. Israel now faces a choice: to treat Gaza as an exceptional case, or as a warning about how civilian harm undermines both military effectiveness and long-term security.

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Andy Milburn is a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and former infantry and special operations officer. He fought in Fallujah, led an infantry battalion in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and commanded a special operations task force during the campaign to retake Mosul from the Islamic State. He later led a humanitarian organization operating on the front lines in Ukraine. He is author of When the Tempest Gathers: A Marine Special Operations Commander at War.

Image: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com ·  · January 28, 2026

16. Key Takeaways from the New National Defense Strategy

Summary:

The four takeaways converge on a strategy heavy on tone and priorities, lighter on operational detail. Magsamen calls the 2026 NDS highly political and warns allies and adversaries may read it as a “spheres of influence” signal, with real consequences for deterrence and hedging. Treviño highlights a Western Hemisphere focus, naming Greenland and the Arctic, the Panama Canal, and the “Gulf of America,” plus “narco-terrorists” as a key threat, implying an offshore posture toward South America. Hoffman likes the four lines of effort but flags omissions and opportunity costs, especially around Golden Dome and unconventional warfare. Logan reads burden shifting as the core claim and argues it should mean real troop reductions in Europe.

Comment: The smart people weigh in. Key point from one from smartest people I know:

It shortchanges unconventional warfare capabilities.

Key Takeaways from the New National Defense Strategy

Kelly Magsamen, Joshua Treviño, Frank Hoffman, and Justin Logan

January 27, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/key-takeaways-from-the-new-national-defense-strategy/

On Friday, Jan. 23, the U.S. Department of Defense released its new National Defense Strategy, which describes how the department will implement its responsibilities under the National Security Strategy. We asked four experts for their key takeaways.

Read more below.

Kelly Magsamen

Former U.S. Department of Defense Chief of Staff

The 2026 National Defense Strategy is a highly political document that spends more time criticizing its predecessors than providing an analytically rigorous theory of the case. While it is a major departure from prior strategies, there are some consistencies, such as the importance of defending the homeland, ally burden sharing, and a strong defense-industrial base. Unfortunately, I expect that many of our allies and adversaries will interpret the document’s tone and even some of its language as a “spheres of influence” approach — with all the attendant implications for deterrence and hedging behavior.

The forthcoming National Military Strategy and Department of Defense budget proposals will provide better insight into how this strategy will be translated into actual adjustments in force structure, posture, and key procurement decisions. And the Trump team will likely face the same familiar friction points and geopolitical realities of its predecessors on implementation.

Joshua Treviño

Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute

Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation

Within the Western Hemisphere, the National Defense Strategy is a document that affirms what the preceding National Security Strategy set forth: that the Americas are the central focus of U.S. defense and activity. The National Defense Strategy names “key terrain” within the hemisphere — including Greenland and the Arctic, the Panama Canal, and the “Gulf of America” — as fundamental to U.S. security. Furthermore, the strategy names “narco-terrorists” as a key threat, which in turn suggests continued U.S. attention toward the known estados de narco in the hemisphere, including but not limited to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and elements of the Colombian state.

As important as what is in the document is what is not — notably extensive, on-the-ground involvement within the South American continent. Underrecognized in policy circles is the strategic desirability of limiting U.S. engagement on the South American continent to an offshore approach, mostly based upon maritime power projection and modeled upon the traditional British approach to the continent of Europe. The National Defense Strategy gets all this right.

Frank Hoffman

Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks

Retired Defense Analyst Who Served in Several Senior Executive Appointments in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Navy

The new National Defense Strategy offers clear priorities for the Pentagon, laid out along four lines of effort: defend the homeland, deter China in the Indo-Pacific, increase burden sharing with allies, and strengthen the defense-industrial base.

These lines are comprehensive and roughly match my own proposed priorities. However, the strategy sheds no light on the details of Golden Dome, which has significant opportunity costs for the other three lines of effort. It is candid about the challenge that China poses but does not mention Taiwan. It does not justify the dubious battleships of the Golden Fleet. It shortchanges unconventional warfare capabilities.

The inclusion of the industrial base is noteworthy. The document promises to “reinvest in U.S. defense production, building out capacity, empowering innovators, adopting new advances in technology, like AI.” This suggests the Pentagon has re-learned insights about defense mobilization and the true source of U.S. competitive strength. There is no mention of the lessons from Ukraine in terms of decentralized authority and adaptation, but the Pentagon clearly intends to build tomorrow’s Arsenal of Democracy rather than yesterday’s.

A good strategy contains a persuasive justification for the resources needed to implement it. The Pentagon needs a sizeable increase in its budget. The new strategy outlines the right priorities, but it remains unclear if it can persuade Congress to provide the resources to realize its ambitions.

Justin Logan

Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute

The impact of U.S. strategy documents is limited, because presidents can and do ignore them. President Donald Trump’s pronouncement that he wants a 50 percent increase in military spending is not discernible in the National Defense Strategy’s logic, for example.

That said, this strategy emphasizes burden shifting, retrenchment, and solvency. On Europe, in particular, the document points out that European states’ economic size and demographics “strongly position [them] to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense, with critical but more limited US support.”

“More limited US support” should include U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe. There is no reason to maintain the Biden administration’s 2022 levels of U.S. troops on the continent. Thus far, administration officials have shown little willingness to follow through on burden shifting, preferring to congratulate themselves on European commitments to spend more in the future. The president likely could steamroll congressional opposition to burden shifting if he wants to. The question is whether he wants to.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: Shannon Knott via DVIDS

17. China’s Economic Statecraft Is Working

Summary:

Audrye Wong argues China’s economic statecraft is working because Washington’s tariff-first posture, aid cuts, and renegotiation pressure make Beijing look like the steadier partner. China is sharpening sticks through more formal export controls, especially on rare earths, while keeping ambiguity for off-ramps and deniability. It also dangles carrots via a rebranded Belt and Road and UN-linked development initiatives that embed partners in Chinese supply chains, from telecom to EV minerals. Pushback grows over cheap imports and labor abuses, yet Beijing only needs leverage, not loyalty, to buy silence and weaken coalitions against China. That is Beijing’s goal, and it looks attainable.

Excerpts:

Many countries still need access to the U.S. economy and want an American security presence, as their efforts to strike deals on tariffs with the Trump administration make clear. Most governments are not tilting wholesale toward China. Plenty remain wary of China’s escalating coercion, its political and military aggressiveness, and the danger of getting caught between Washington and Beijing. But those concerns are dulled by the U.S. government’s own coercive tactics.

What China has done best is drive wedges between and within countries, undermining U.S.-led coalitions in the process. In Southeast Asia, China has cultivated ties with Cambodia, which now acts as Beijing’s proxy to undermine regional responses to Chinese encroachments on disputed islands and other features in the South China Sea. In Europe, Hungary—the recipient of 44 percent of Chinese foreign direct investment in the EU in 2023—has vetoed EU statements critical of China, endorsed Beijing’s peace plan for Ukraine, and established a security partnership with China. Beijing’s economic relationships do not amount to a Chinese-led bloc. But the lure of its market and capital could be enough—and in some cases already has been enough—to buy silence on issues that China cares about, including territorial disputes or human rights violations in Xinjiang. It may even be enough to dampen the world’s response to an invasion of Taiwan. After all, China’s willingness to use both its carrots and its sticks incentivizes other countries to avoid confrontation and leave Beijing to pursue its interests with relative impunity—while the United States increasingly struggles to rally the world to push back.

China’s Economic Statecraft Is Working

Foreign Affairs · More by Audrye Wong · January 28, 2026

Why Beijing Can Succeed Even With an Imperfect Strategy

Audrye Wong

January 28, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-economic-statecraft-working

At the Itajai port in Santa Catarina, Brazil, May 2025 Anderson Cohelo / Reuters

AUDRYE WONG is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of the forthcoming book Subversion and Seduction: China’s Economic Statecraft.

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With the second Trump administration has come a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign economic policy. Washington is imposing tariffs on partners and rivals alike, slashing foreign aid, aggressively renegotiating trade deals, and rejecting multilateral diplomacy. The United States, in other words, is acting like a bully. And as countries around the world grow more wary of dealing with the United States, they are turning more and more to its main economic rival, China. That trade is one of several factors contributing to China’s rise in exports in 2025—which resulted in a trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion, a 20 percent increase.

Washington’s policies have, in fact, been a double boon for Beijing. Not only have China’s economic offerings become more attractive to partners looking for an alternative to working with the United States but U.S. pressure tactics have also made it more permissible for China to coerce others. Beijing’s increasing use of export controls and its flooding of foreign markets with cheap goods still generate unease in many of the countries with which it wants to do business. Yet its record of economic statecraft does not have to be perfect to succeed. China is honing its approach to the trade war with the United States while using multilateral deals, development projects, and strategic financing of key sectors to secure other countries’ place in Chinese supply chains. It may never pull most of these countries fully into its orbit. But using its economic carrots and sticks may give Beijing enough leverage to advance an important goal: minimize global opposition to China’s domestic and foreign policies.

FINE TUNING

For much of the last two decades, Beijing generally imposed sanctions in an informal, ad hoc manner. It avoided issuing public threats and often denied state involvement in or underlying political motivations for coercive economic measures, which included trade restrictions disguised as technical enforcement and food safety regulations, or boycotts ostensibly driven by nationalistic Chinese consumers. But over the past few years, China has been refining its approach. It has been developing new legal frameworks and using more sophisticated formal sanctions to defend its economic and security interests, borrowing tactics the United States and its partners have employed for years. Beijing has not shied away from escalation, either. In October, for instance, China announced additional rare-earth export controls that require foreign companies to obtain Chinese government approval before exporting products and equipment containing even minuscule amounts of Chinese-origin rare earths. The restrictions bore a striking resemblance to U.S. semiconductor controls and the foreign direct product rule, which extends U.S. export restrictions to any product made abroad with American technology. China has placed restrictions on rare-earth elements before, but the new ones are the most expansive yet, targeting entire global supply chains and tightening Beijing’s chokehold on a sector Chinese mining, refining, and manufacturing companies already dominate.

The use of export controls does not represent a wholesale change in China’s coercive strategy. These sanctions are still relatively limited in scope—Beijing deploys them primarily in reaction to Washington’s own tariffs and export controls or to punish other countries for supporting Taiwan. And the sanctions retain “Chinese characteristics”: Beijing often builds in ambiguity and flexibility to muddy perceptions of its intent and allow an off-ramp for de-escalation, as it did by tightening and loosening its rare-earth export controls over the last several months, generating uncertainty as well as an eagerness among targeted countries to try to negotiate sanctions removal. Nor has China let go of its habit of denying state involvement in coercive practices. After Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in November that Japan could respond militarily to Chinese use of force in Taiwan, Beijing issued travel advisories for Chinese citizens traveling to Japan, ostensibly because of safety concerns, and reinstated a ban on Japanese seafood imports, citing contamination.

In addition to sharpening some of its sticks—particularly those it uses against the United States and its close partners—China is dangling more carrots, renewing a charm offensive aimed at much of the rest of the world. In doing so, it is seizing an opportunity handed to it by the Trump administration: as the United States takes a nakedly self-interested approach to economic engagement, prioritizing investment in extractive sectors while axing development and humanitarian projects, China is attempting to present itself as a supportive, cooperative global player.

During UN General Assembly meetings in September, for instance, Chinese Premier Li Qiang gave yet another speech touting the Global Development Initiative, introduced in 2021. Li tied the GDI to a variety of Chinese-led funding programs and cooperative efforts to expand the adoption of artificial intelligence and increase access to clean energy, especially in the global South. Beijing has described the GDI as a means to achieve the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and embedded the project within the UN itself, giving it greater international legitimacy and visibility—and extending that legitimacy to many of China’s overseas economic activities, including its “small yet beautiful” digital and green infrastructure projects. This new emphasis on smaller-scale, collaborative ventures is part of Beijing’s effort over the last several years to rebrand and recalibrate the Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious global infrastructure program that China launched more than a decade ago, after facing pushback in partner countries over corruption and overpriced projects.

In addition to sharpening some of its sticks, China is dangling more carrots.

China’s economic might makes its offerings hard for other countries to resist. Particularly in strategic sectors such as electric vehicles (EVs) and critical minerals, Chinese companies, often aided by state subsidies and vertically integrated domestic supply chains, have outcompeted foreign ones, giving them dominant footholds abroad. Huawei, for example, has become the provider of choice for telecommunications infrastructure in many developing countries. Foreign governments themselves court readily available Chinese investment and financing, too, as a means to realize domestic economic ambitions and move up the value chain. Thailand, long a regional leader in auto manufacturing, started offering subsidies and tax breaks in 2022 to attract Chinese electric vehicle makers, recently securing over $1 billion in investment from BYD and Changan Automobile for two new factories. With this increasing competition from Chinese firms, in 2024 and 2025 Japanese car producers shut down four factories that had long operated in Thailand.

The result of China’s increasing outreach over the last couple of decades is that many countries have become even more deeply embedded in Chinese-led supply chains. They are locked into working with China, even if they might have been receptive to other options. Indonesia, for example, professes openness to all investors, but the reality is that China dominates the country’s nickel mining and processing. (Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel, which is used in electric vehicle batteries.) This dominance is no accident. In response to a series of Indonesian policies to promote value-added domestic processing, including a 2009 mining law requiring foreign divestment to ensure majority domestic ownership of mining ventures, as well as a 2020 ban on nickel ore exports, U.S., Australian, European, and Japanese mining companies sold their assets and scrapped factory plans. Chinese companies, meanwhile, made major investments in Indonesia’s nickel industry, including building industrial parks and smelting facilities. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, Indonesia has become one of the top recipients of Chinese investment in the last few years. Even though Indonesia’s citizens have bristled at the working conditions in and environmental damage from Chinese facilities, they have no viable alternative: China’s presence there is already too large. The extent of its presence, moreover, ensures that China will remain a dominant player in related industries as Indonesia seeks to move up the value chain in EV battery production.

Cozy state-business relations can further entrench China’s clout. Many Indonesian elites, including some of those making key foreign and economic policy decisions, have financial stakes in the country’s mining and processing sectors and therefore reap personal gain from investment in those industries. Indonesian leaders therefore exhibit a degree of political deference toward Beijing, despite the country’s deep strain of anti-Chinese sentiment. Whereas Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has championed Palestinian statehood and spoken up about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, it (along with several other Muslim-majority countries) voted against discussing China’s abuses of the Muslim Uyghurs at the UN Human Rights Council in 2022. Indonesian businesses have continued to deepen trade ties with Xinjiang, including through cooperation with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-owned paramilitary organization sanctioned by the United States, EU, and Canada for its alleged role in human rights abuses.

BUMPS AHEAD

China’s path to greater economic influence is not clear of obstacles. Many countries are still concerned about an influx of low-cost Chinese goods into their markets, a problem that began in the mid-2010s but has worsened as U.S. tariffs push China to direct goods formerly destined for the United States elsewhere, contributing to its record trade surplus last year. Beijing is hoping that a high volume of exports—which run the gamut from textiles to small consumer parcels to electric vehicles—will revive its slowing economy and make up for low domestic consumption. But for countries seeking to build up their own manufacturing capabilities, these cheap Chinese goods threaten to crowd out nascent industries. Governments around the world may be eager for Chinese trade and investment, but they do not want to just import Chinese products. Many have enacted policies to protect domestic industries and prioritize investment that supports local manufacturing, creates jobs, and generates value-added growth.

In Brazil, for example, Chinese electric and hybrid vehicle sales have surged in the last few years. Imports jumped by almost 100,000 vehicles between 2023 and 2024, when total imports numbered 138,000; Chinese automakers accounted for 89 percent of EVs sold in Brazil in the first half of 2024. Unsurprisingly, domestic and legacy carmakers have pushed back by commissioning an antidumping study and lobbying the Brazilian government to remove tariff breaks for Chinese companies. In response, the Brazilian government has progressively increased tariffs on imported EVs since 2024. Yet in October, the Chinese firm BYD opened a $1 billion factory—its largest facility outside Asia—in Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia, on the site of a shuttered Ford plant, no less. Other Chinese automakers are ramping up assembly in Brazil, too.

Such investments face scrutiny over whether they truly create high-value growth, since parts are still sourced from China, and over legal violations. The newly opened BYD factory in Bahia, for instance, was the subject of a major controversy in Brazil. Construction was halted in late 2024 after Brazilian inspectors found its Chinese laborers working in a “degrading” environment, and Brazilian prosecutors are now suing BYD for creating “slavery-like” work conditions. Reactions on the ground matter to the success of Chinese investments and economic projects. If Chinese companies are receptive to addressing local concerns, China will have an easier time expanding its economic footprint in Brazil and elsewhere. And it will be able to keep many countries looped into Chinese supply chains—even if Washington is pushing those same countries to join global production chains that exclude Chinese companies and suppliers. Of course, U.S. pressure will still work sometimes. Mexico, which is China’s biggest auto buyer but whose economy overall is more intertwined with the United States’ economy than with China’s, turned down BYD plans to build a factory and slapped a 50 percent tariff on Chinese cars, which came into effect this month, as part of a policy to strengthen domestic manufacturing.

Yet in other cases, Trump’s tariffs have enabled China to make inroads with U.S. partners—sometimes by playing them off one another. When Canada followed the United States in imposing a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs, Beijing slapped retaliatory tariffs on Canadian canola oil and turned to Australian suppliers, which had been locked out of the Chinese market since 2020 over ostensible health violations. Canada responded with high-level outreach to China, a notable turnaround after several years of strained diplomatic relations. The Canadian prime minister suggested that punishing U.S. tariffs were part of the motivation. During his January visit to Beijing, China agreed to lower its tariffs on Canadian canola products, and Canada agreed to allow Chinese EV imports. Continued bullying tactics from Washington are only likely to push Canada and other countries closer to Beijing. They certainly undermine any U.S. attempt to coordinate with allies to counter China’s influence. It took sustained U.S. pressure to get partners on board with semiconductor export controls and to convince countries such as the United Kingdom to exclude the Chinese company Huawei from 5G networks. Erratic policies will make such American entreaties less persuasive.

GOOD ENOUGH

For now, China is happily capitalizing on the opening the United States has created to expand its economic reach. As U.S. tariffs make Beijing look like a more reliable trade partner than Washington, China is pursuing new deals: in October, it signed an upgrade to a free trade agreement with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that is designed to expand cooperation in digital infrastructure, green development, and supply chain connectivity. And as global favorability of the United States declines—a 2025 Economist poll that covered 32 countries showed that preferences for the United States as the world’s leading power fell from 59 percent to 46 percent since the previous year, while preference for China rose to 33 percent, an 11 percent increase (including roughly 20 percent increases in Brazil, Canada, and Indonesia)—fears of Chinese coercion are likely to recede and eagerness to accept China’s offerings to increase. It helps, too, that far more than the United States, China has been adept at combining economic statecraft with propaganda and public diplomacy. Beijing quickly claims credit for successful investments, often dispatching an ambassador to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony or write op-eds in local newspapers—making economic ties with China appear indispensable.

Many countries still need access to the U.S. economy and want an American security presence, as their efforts to strike deals on tariffs with the Trump administration make clear. Most governments are not tilting wholesale toward China. Plenty remain wary of China’s escalating coercion, its political and military aggressiveness, and the danger of getting caught between Washington and Beijing. But those concerns are dulled by the U.S. government’s own coercive tactics.

What China has done best is drive wedges between and within countries, undermining U.S.-led coalitions in the process. In Southeast Asia, China has cultivated ties with Cambodia, which now acts as Beijing’s proxy to undermine regional responses to Chinese encroachments on disputed islands and other features in the South China Sea. In Europe, Hungary—the recipient of 44 percent of Chinese foreign direct investment in the EU in 2023—has vetoed EU statements critical of China, endorsed Beijing’s peace plan for Ukraine, and established a security partnership with China. Beijing’s economic relationships do not amount to a Chinese-led bloc. But the lure of its market and capital could be enough—and in some cases already has been enough—to buy silence on issues that China cares about, including territorial disputes or human rights violations in Xinjiang. It may even be enough to dampen the world’s response to an invasion of Taiwan. After all, China’s willingness to use both its carrots and its sticks incentivizes other countries to avoid confrontation and leave Beijing to pursue its interests with relative impunity—while the United States increasingly struggles to rally the world to push back.

Foreign Affairs · More by Audrye Wong · January 28, 2026

18. Making Industrial Strategy Great Again

Summary:

Mazzucato argues the United States has always practiced Hamiltonian industrial policy while preaching Jeffersonian minimalism. Government took the early risk on the internet, smartphones, and pharma, but the rewards were privatized and institutions to demand public value were allowed to atrophy. Biden revived industrial policy with CHIPS, clean energy, and infrastructure, yet many households did not feel gains in prices, wages, or affordability. She says Trump is repeating the worst pattern: retroactive equity grabs and tariff leverage without mission discipline, labor conditions, or reinvestment requirements, while simultaneously cutting the innovation bureaucracy that makes strategy work. Industrial policy succeeds only when public risk yields public reward.

Excerpts:

The task now is not to abandon industrial strategy, but to make it work for the American public. Some conditions, such as pricing caps on drugs developed with NIH funding, would help families afford publicly funded innovations. Profit-sharing arrangements, such as equity stakes, royalties, and licensing fees, can capture returns that the government can reinvest. Restrictions on share buybacks can keep public support from being diverted into shareholder payouts, encouraging firms to reinvest in productive capacity and capabilities. And wage requirements can ensure that public money delivers for workers.

The real divide in Washington is no longer between Jeffersonian rhetoric and Hamiltonian practice. It is between an entrepreneurial state that builds capabilities and creates public value and a state that dispenses subsidies, rewards private investors and politically connected interests at the expense of taxpayers, and weakens the very institutions on which long-term prosperity depends. The mark of a “good deal” is not a headline-grabbing equity stake or a new tariff. It is whether public tools are being used to build productive capacity and economic resilience, and whether public support is tied to outcomes that matter for working households.

Announcing an investment is not the same as delivering prosperity. For industrial strategy to work, U.S. policymakers must align finance, procurement, regulation, and innovation with concrete public goals. And then they must craft policies with enforceable terms that lead to better wages, affordability, and returns that can be reinvested in future innovations—ensuring that when the government invests, the public shares in the upside.

Making Industrial Strategy Great Again

Foreign Affairs · More by Mariana Mazzucato · January 28, 2026

It Has Worked for America Before, but Trump’s Approach Is All Wrong

Mariana Mazzucato

January 28, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/making-industrial-strategy-great-again

A steel factory in Blytheville, Arkansas, March 2025 Karen Pulfer / Reuters

MARIANA MAZZUCATO is a Professor at University College London, founding director of the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and the author of Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.

For decades, many U.S policymakers have talked like Thomas Jefferson while acting like Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson, the United States’ first secretary of state and third president, championed limited government; Hamilton, its first treasury secretary, argued for active state support of emerging industries. The political rhetoric in Washington, extolling free markets and minimal state intervention, has been Jefferson’s. The reality has been Hamilton’s: the government invested in projects that drove U.S. competitiveness and innovation. Examples abound. Beginning in 1958, the Department of Defense funded the research that led to the Internet, and other public agencies were the source of all the technology now found in smartphones, including GPS, touchscreens, and Apple’s Siri. Investments by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), totaling hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, created entire pharmaceutical industries.

This dynamic is what I documented in my 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, and later in a 2015 Foreign Affairs article, “The Innovative State.” The federal government was willing to take risks that private capital would not and was patient enough to fund decades-long research. It was far-sighted enough to build markets at the forefront of innovation. The government understood that only patient, long-term public capital could absorb the uncertainty of transformational research; private investors, beholden to quarterly returns, systematically underinvest in precisely the breakthroughs that drive sustained growth.

For much of the last four decades, mainstream economic commentary largely ignored the key stabilizing role the state played. Successive administrations and policymakers in both parties dismissed the tools of industrial policy as economically inefficient or politically suspect, even as government-led innovation never went away. The result was an economy in which the state remained central to value creation, but the gains were too easily privatized. The institutions that were meant to set direction, design public-private contracts, and monitor performance were allowed to weaken. No mutual bargain materialized that compelled firms receiving public support to reinvest share returns and deliver affordable access. The public funded the risks but secured neither equity returns nor affordable access to the innovations their taxes created. Instead, private investors captured the rewards.

Now, industrial policy has returned to center stage. President Joe Biden first broke the industrial policy taboo with a series of legislative measures designed to catalyze private investment in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. But his administration expanded productive capacity without ensuring that the gains reached working people more broadly, and this failure to translate government investment into shared prosperity contributed to President Donald Trump’s victory in 2024.

The Trump administration, too, has embraced industrial policy, but is pursuing it in all the wrong ways. Instead of organizing policy around missions—explicit public goals that define the problem to be solved and the outcomes to be delivered—and then aligning the state’s tools to get there, it has treated industrial policy as a set of sector deals to be cut and announced. It has stripped away conditions on government support for private industry that could ensure the socialization of rewards. The government has taken a ten percent stake in the semiconductor manufacturer Intel for $5.7 billion in CHIPS Act funding; a 15 percent stake in the rare-earth mining and processing company MP Materials for a $400 million investment; a five percent stake in Lithium Americas, the company developing the Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada, through loan restructuring; and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, granting the government permanent veto power over headquarters relocation and production offshoring. But it is using these unprecedented equity stakes not to steer strategy or secure public value but to extract value retroactively.

Industrial policy will fail, economically and politically, unless it is organized around clear missions to create public value. Direction and discipline are necessary to guide investment, innovation, regulation, and procurement toward outcomes that people can see in their lives. And delivering on a mission requires capable institutions with the expertise to design contracts, coordinate across departments, and learn from results. It requires enforceable conditions on government support to ensure that the firms receiving that support reinvest rather than extract, offer better wages and training rather than race to the bottom, and produce affordable goods and services rather than engage in monopoly pricing. When the state socializes risks through public funding, the public must share in the rewards.

A SENSE OF MISSION

It took 400,000 people to get the United States to the moon in 1969, most of them working in the private sector. Government set the direction by articulating a clear mission and designing procurement contracts that catalyzed innovation. The state acted as a market shaper, an investor taking risks that private capital avoids, exercising patience through long development cycles, and strategically creating demand. The result wasn’t just the Apollo moon landing, but also GPS, touchscreens, baby formula, home insulation, and camera phones—all private-sector innovations that have benefited the public.

Although market intervention became less popular in subsequent decades, U.S. government–led innovation never went away. Since 2018, for example, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has invested over $2 billion through its “AI Next” campaign, which greatly advanced the architecture and techniques underlying today’s AI systems. And the DARPA model has been emulated by the Departments of Energy and Health, among others.

Such programs did not fully deliver for the American people, who never received rewards commensurate with the risky investments they subsidized. Consider the Obama administration’s Department of Energy loan program. The solar energy company Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee and went bankrupt. Tesla, then the electric car company Tesla Motors, received a $465 million loan and repaid it in 2013, nine years early. Between disbursement and repayment, Tesla’s share price rose from $17 to $93. Had the government taken equity when Tesla succeeded, those returns would have covered Solyndra’s loss several times over and funded subsequent investments in clean energy innovation and infrastructure. But the administration made no such demand. It ignored the portfolio logic any smart investor would recognize: some bets fail, but returns from the winners fund the next round.

Biden’s industrial policy delivered more tangible outcomes, including significant private investments in manufacturing. With the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, strategic government investment in semiconductor supply chains, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing generated over $200 billion in private investment and created more than 80,000 jobs. Projects and employment were spread across communities nationwide, including many districts that do not usually attract federal industrial policy spending and have long been left out of the gains from high-tech growth.

When the state socializes risks through public funding, the public must share in the rewards.

In 2022, the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, and the expectation of substantial federal manufacturing incentives to rebuild domestic semiconductor capacity, incentivized the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to make a $40 billion investment in Arizona—the largest foreign direct investment in U.S. history. Biden also maintained Trump’s first-term tariffs and increased rates on foreign-made electric vehicles, semiconductors, and solar cells, explicitly linking protections to manufacturing investments. This was industrial policy on a scale not seen since the postwar industrial mobilization, when the federal government used large-scale procurement, planning, and public investment to expand productive capacity and build strategic industries at speed.

Crucially, Biden’s approach also raised a question that earlier iterations of industrial policy left untouched: what’s in it for the American people? What gains, beyond benefiting from the innovation, will they feel right away? In the CHIPS contracting process, for example, the Commerce Department embedded clauses aimed at curbing financial extraction, limiting the diversion of public support into share repurchases and other shareholder payouts, and securing public benefit, including commitments related to labor standards, apprenticeships, and childcare for construction workers, alongside mechanisms for upside sharing, whereby companies are required to share windfall profits with taxpayers, and clawbacks, which allow the government to reclaim grants if businesses fail to meet commitments.

The Biden administration tacitly acknowledged that public finance should not be a no-strings transfer from the American people to private companies. It can and must be a tool to shape larger outcomes, ensuring that firms receiving public support reinvest in productive capacity and capabilities, raise standards for workers, and deliver innovations that translate into affordability and resilience for households.

And yet Biden’s experiment also showed why industrial policy cannot be judged by investment announcements alone. The approach had critical limitations. The administration’s manufacturing-focused policy did not recognize how jobs were distributed among different sectors. Semiconductor plants are hugely capital-intensive, but automation means manufacturing will never again be the labor-absorbing sector it once was. TSMC’s $40 billion Arizona facilities will create only 6,000 jobs. A strategy focused on making physical things gives inadequate attention to the sectors in which most Americans work, including retail, health care, education, and care work.

More consequentially, expanding production is not the same as distributing prosperity. The CHIPS Act concerns semiconductor capacity, not whether Americans can afford electronics. The Inflation Reduction Act subsidizes clean energy production, not household electricity bills. The NIH invests some $40 billion annually in research that yields medicines and biotech advances, yet Americans cannot afford the drugs whose development they funded. Democrats lost in 2024 in part because the American people had not felt the benefits of industrial policy. Families faced inflation in groceries, housing, and health care, and the connection between wealth creation and lived prosperity remained weak.

THE EXTRACTIVE MODEL

Trump is now deploying industrial policy instruments such as equity stakes, tariffs, and conditional investments, but without the strategic coherence or the institutional capacity that makes such tools effective. Equity stakes can ensure public returns from public investment. Tariffs can protect nascent sectors. Conditional support can steer corporate behavior toward public purpose. In Trump’s hands, however, these instruments are deployed less as part of a national economic strategy and more as vehicles for leverage and power projection.

Consider Intel. The government secured a ten percent stake in the company not because it had helped create Intel—the company was founded in 1968 and benefited from decades of DARPA contracts and procurement—but by converting CHIPS Act grants Intel had already been promised into equity stakes. Worse, the $5.7 billion government investment comes with nonvoting shares: the government must vote in line with Intel’s board recommendations, eliminating any meaningful oversight or strategic direction. The investment prevents Intel from spinning off its unprofitable chip manufacturing business. This is retroactive value extraction from a company the state helped build. Instead of funding the next generation of innovation, the government is simply using ownership to extract rents while constraining the company’s corporate strategy.

More troubling is what the renegotiation stripped away. Under the Trump administration’s revised terms, Intel’s voluntary five-year commitment to forgo share buybacks was discharged, as were labor standards requiring union cooperation, $150 million in apprenticeship commitments, and childcare provisions for construction workers. The upside sharing provisions were eliminated, as were the clawback provisions. As Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, the supported fabrication plants “don’t even have to be constructed in America.” What remains is extraction, with little for workers, communities, or the public purse.

This pattern extends beyond Intel. Trump has called the CHIPS Act “a horrible, horrible thing” and urged Congress to “get rid of it.” His administration plans to cut 497 jobs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which oversees implementation of the CHIPS Act. Yet he simultaneously seeks equity stakes in the very companies the law funds—privatizing gains in the short term, while dismantling the institutional capacity that enabled American innovation in the first place. The logic is extraction without creation: taking stakes in companies built by decades of public investment while defunding the agencies that will build the next generation of innovators.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaking at an event in Taipei, Taiwan, May 2025 Ann Wang / Reuters

Equity stakes also create opportunities for market manipulation, since government announcements can move prices dramatically. When news broke that the government planned to take a stake in Lithium Americas, shares surged 95 percent in a single day. Meanwhile, the workers whose labor and taxes underwrote the original public investments received nothing.

Tariffs follow the same logic. Rather than being tied to a coherent plan for building domestic capacity, they function as bargaining chips in bilateral negotiations. They often target goods the United States cannot readily produce at home, raising costs without creating capability. The Consumer Technology Association has estimated that smartphones would cost an additional $213 per device under Trump’s proposed tariffs on China. Coffee prices reached a record $8.41 per pound in July, a 33 percent increase from the previous year, before exemptions were made for goods that, as Trump acknowledged, “cannot be produced domestically.” Tariffs on pharmaceuticals would land on supply chains already under strain, raising prices or reducing availability. Factory employment in the United States has dropped by over 40,000 jobs since April—the opposite of what tariffs are ostensibly meant to achieve.

Most destructively, the administration has gutted the very agencies responsible for the United States’ technological leadership. Trump is going after research labs, universities, and the institutional infrastructure of American innovation. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—the Department of Energy’s flagship lab for renewable energy and energy efficiency research, development, and deployment—workforce reductions have been driven by proposed funding rollbacks, putting roughly one-third of its staff at risk of termination. Separately, the administration has moved to terminate 321 awards supporting 223 energy projects, canceling over $7 billion in funding across multiple Department of Energy offices.

This dismantling of American innovation is not limited to the civilian sphere. Even as Trump calls for record increases in overall defense spending, the Defense Department’s science and technology funding—the research-oriented accounts that fund basic and applied research—faces a proposed ten percent cut, from $21.3 billion to $19.2 billion.

Trump’s actions illustrate a distinct model: industrial policy instruments used without a clear public purpose, outside any framework that aligns investment with measurable outcomes. They are deployed without binding terms that require firms receiving public support to reinvest, improve standards for workers, expand affordable access, and share returns when projects succeed. This is not an entrepreneurial state shaping markets toward shared prosperity. It is a state that claims upside benefits from and leverage over publicly supported companies for the benefit of private investors and politically connected interests, after taxpayers have borne the risks.

DELIVERING PROSPERITY

The measures Trump has enacted will not create the strong, well-resourced public systems required to drive innovation that produces broad prosperity. Industrial policy instruments can be powerful, but only when they are embedded in capable institutions and used to solve problems rather than merely reward those with privileged access.

If industrial policy is to deliver for the American people, the Trump administration must demand discipline from CHIPS Act recipients. If the president aims to secure a good deal for taxpayers, then the current approach—in which the state is taking passive equity stakes with no voting rights, no conditions, and no reinvestment requirements—will not suffice.

Trump speaks to the grievances of the working class. Industrial policy can deliver for those voters, but only if contracts require that public investment translates into better wages and more affordable essentials, not just higher stock prices. Placing conditions on government support is not adding bureaucratic red tape. It is the mechanism by which public value is created.

The task now is not to abandon industrial strategy, but to make it work for the American public.

An effective industrial strategy must create wealth through public investment guided by modern-day moonshots, missions that set clear public goals defined by the problem to be solved and the outcomes to be delivered. That could mean building a resilient clean energy system that lowers bills, securing affordable medicines from publicly funded biomedical innovation, or renewing essential infrastructure so that basic services are reliable and accessible. It is not about making profits higher in a particular sector, but about using the state’s levers, finance, procurement, regulation, and standards, to catalyze innovation and steer it toward outcomes that people can see and feel.

The task now is not to abandon industrial strategy, but to make it work for the American public. Some conditions, such as pricing caps on drugs developed with NIH funding, would help families afford publicly funded innovations. Profit-sharing arrangements, such as equity stakes, royalties, and licensing fees, can capture returns that the government can reinvest. Restrictions on share buybacks can keep public support from being diverted into shareholder payouts, encouraging firms to reinvest in productive capacity and capabilities. And wage requirements can ensure that public money delivers for workers.

The real divide in Washington is no longer between Jeffersonian rhetoric and Hamiltonian practice. It is between an entrepreneurial state that builds capabilities and creates public value and a state that dispenses subsidies, rewards private investors and politically connected interests at the expense of taxpayers, and weakens the very institutions on which long-term prosperity depends. The mark of a “good deal” is not a headline-grabbing equity stake or a new tariff. It is whether public tools are being used to build productive capacity and economic resilience, and whether public support is tied to outcomes that matter for working households.

Announcing an investment is not the same as delivering prosperity. For industrial strategy to work, U.S. policymakers must align finance, procurement, regulation, and innovation with concrete public goals. And then they must craft policies with enforceable terms that lead to better wages, affordability, and returns that can be reinvested in future innovations—ensuring that when the government invests, the public shares in the upside.

Foreign Affairs · More by Mariana Mazzucato · January 28, 2026

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com