Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?"

– Frederic Bastiat

"Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luukc comes you are ready."

– Ernest Hemingway

"Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks."

– Charlotte Brontë

1. Exclusive | CIA Concluded Regime Loyalists Were Best Placed to Lead Venezuela After Maduro

2. The Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive

3. Maduro’s Capture Deals Heavy Blow to Cuba’s Vaunted Intelligence Service

4. Trump’s Foray Into Venezuela Could Embolden Russia’s and China’s Own Aggression

5. Maduro, making first court appearance, says U.S. ‘kidnapped’ him

6. A Revival of Venezuela’s Oil Industry Poses a Challenge for Canada

7. The 7 Unthinkables: China’s Black Swan Scenarios for 2026

8. Remarks by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at Newport News Shipyard

9. Russia Once Offered U.S. Control of Venezuela for Free Rein in Ukraine

10. In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

11. Thailand’s tilt toward China tests treaty alliance with US

12. China’s ideology chief calls on propaganda officials to focus on the economy

13. China-Japan military tensions: what lies ahead in 2026?

14. Afghanistan’s Post Opium Drug Trade – Another Challenge for Pakistan?

15. How a Perpetual Desire for Innovation and Thinking ‘Outside the Box’ Led William P. Yarborough to Create the Green Berets

16. Containing the Threat of Containerized Missiles

17. Angle of Attack: Apache Attack Helicopters in Unmanned Skies

18. We Grow Strategists Too Late: Why Army Leaders Must Fail Early

19. The Shockwaves of Venezuela: How Maduro’s Capture Could Throw Latin America Into Tumult

20. What the Technology Means for Deterrence and War

21.Irregular Warfare Center Achieves Milestone Growth in FY25, Pivots to Homeland Resilience and the Indo-Pacific in FY26

1. Exclusive | CIA Concluded Regime Loyalists Were Best Placed to Lead Venezuela After Maduro

Summary:

The Wall Street Journal report says a classified CIA assessment concluded that senior Maduro loyalists, especially Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, were best positioned to run a temporary government and keep order after Maduro’s removal. The assessment argued that opposition figures, including María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, would struggle to gain legitimacy and would face pushback from regime aligned security forces, criminal networks, and political rivals. The analysis was briefed to POTUS and reportedly shaped his choice to back Rodríguez instead of Machado after the U.S. operation that captured Maduro and moved him to New York for trial.

Comment: Glad to hear we are heeding the analysis from the CIA. It appears we are trying to avoid the mistakes of Iraq in particular. However, we should know this course of action is also fraught with complications and danger as well. But this is a method for avoiding the Pottery Barn rule of "you break it you buy" and preventing an American occupation. Now we have to see how it plays out.

Exclusive | CIA Concluded Regime Loyalists Were Best Placed to Lead Venezuela After Maduro

WSJ

Trump was briefed on intelligence report that found opposition would struggle to lead a temporary government

By Alexander Ward

, Dustin Volz

and Vera Bergengruen

Updated Jan. 5, 2026 7:30 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-concluded-regime-loyalists-were-best-placed-to-lead-venezuela-after-maduro-24b0be1a

Delcy Rodríguez was cited in an intelligence report as a possible interim ruler who could keep order. Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters

WASHINGTON—A recent classified U.S. intelligence assessment determined top members of Nicolás Maduro’s regime—including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—would be best positioned to lead a temporary government in Caracas and maintain near-term stability if the autocrat lost power, people familiar with the matter said.

The analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency was briefed to President Trump and shared with a small circle of senior administration officials, according to two of the people. It was a factor in Trump’s decision to back Maduro’s vice president instead of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, some of the people said.

The assessment provides insight into Trump’s decision not to support the opposition’s bid for control of Venezuela following the brazen U.S. military operation to capture Maduro last week and bring him to the U.S. for trial. As in his first term, Trump was convinced that near-term stability in Venezuela could be maintained only if Maduro’s replacement had the support of the country’s armed forces and other elites.

Senior Trump administration officials commissioned the CIA to undertake the analytical assessment and debated it during discussions about day-after plans for Venezuela, the people said. The people familiar with the assessment said they were unsure of the precise date it was produced.

The report was briefed to Trump in recent weeks, according to two of the people.

The assessment didn’t describe how Maduro could lose power, or advocate for removing him, but attempted to gauge the domestic situation in Venezuela in the event that he did, people familiar with it said.

The intelligence report, the people said, cited Rodríguez and two other top Venezuelan regime figures as possible interim rulers who could keep order. The people familiar with the assessment didn’t identify the other two officials, but besides Rodríguez, the two most influential power brokers are Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino.

The two hard-liners, who command Venezuela’s police and military, could undo any efforts at a transition, according to former U.S. and Venezuelan officials. Both face U.S. criminal charges similar to those filed against Maduro and are unlikely to cooperate with Washington.

The report concluded that Edmundo González, widely seen as the actual winner of the 2024 election against Maduro, and Machado would struggle to gain legitimacy as leaders while facing resistance from pro-regime security services, drug-trafficking networks and political opponents.

WSJ National Security Reporter Robbie Gramer explains the rationale behind President Trump’s military operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg News

Machado, who closely aligned herself with the Trump administration, has consistently praised his aggressive policy against Maduro. In October, she said Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize she had won and dedicated it to him for his “decisive support of our cause.”

Maduro, extracted to New York City, appeared in court Monday to face federal charges of narco-terrorism. He pleaded not guilty.

Late last year, the CIA cultivated a source within Maduro’s inner circle who provided information on his whereabouts, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The spy agency’s close tracking of Maduro’s location, which leveraged other surveillance elements including stealth drones, allowed the Army’s Delta Force to nab him and his wife during the raid, people familiar with the operation said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior officials briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers Monday afternoon on the administration’s handling of Venezuela.

Latin America analysts have previously cautioned, including during Trump’s first term, that Maduro’s ouster without a capable replacement would likely empower armed military factions, rival politicians and criminal groups within Venezuela as they fought for control, leading to a security crisis in the country.

David Smilde, a professor at Tulane University who focuses on Venezuela, said it was “magical realism” to expect that Machado or another opposition leader could sweep into power. The better course after ousting Maduro, he said, was to compel Rodríguez to initiate a transition of power, but the problem is that it doesn’t appear that “anyone in the U.S. is actively engaging in negotiations.”

“The president and his national-security team are making realistic decisions to finally ensure Venezuela aligns with the interests of the United States, and becomes a better country for the Venezuelan people,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. She declined to comment specifically on the intelligence assessment.

The Trump administration has offered shifting narratives for how it aims to work with Rodríguez, Venezuela’s acting president, who is seen by the U.S. as a pragmatic political operator. Despite initially striking a defiant tone, on Sunday she signaled her willingness to work with the U.S. and has spoken with Rubio.

In a series of television interviews Sunday, Rubio said the U.S. would coerce Rodríguez to act in America’s interests by enforcing a military “quarantine” to intercept sanctioned oil tankers, starving Venezuela of oil revenue. But hours later, Trump affirmed his preference for direct rule without specifying how Washington would dictate terms in Caracas.

“We’re in charge,” he told reporters. “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

Trump’s embrace of Rodríguez and rejection of the Machado-led opposition blindsided Machado’s aides and many of her U.S. supporters on Saturday. Machado “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country” to take over in a democratic transition, Trump said.

Previously, Trump and his top allies had publicly elevated Machado’s opposition movement as the best choice to inherit power in a transition. In a Truth Social post in January, Trump praised Machado for “peacefully expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people.” Rubio—one of her most prominent backers, who has said he has spoken with her “many, many times over the years”—signed a letter nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize. Others close to Trump, including his son, Don Trump Jr., also frequently promoted her as the future of Venezuelan democracy.

But privately, Trump has been wary of backing Venezuela’s opposition after concluding it failed to deliver in his first term, says Juan Cruz, who served as the top White House official handling Latin American policy at the time.

Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company, isolated Maduro diplomatically and sought to spur a rebellion in the military. The effort failed when neither the armed forces nor the broader population rose up, reinforcing Trump’s view that the opposition overpromised and underperformed.

“Trump sees the opposition as losers, as they failed to deliver,” Cruz said. “It’s an opposition that he sees as unimpressive and having come up short, so why would you just turn it over to them?”

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 6, 2026, print edition as 'CIA Report Favored Maduro Loyalists'.

WSJ

2. The Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive

Summary:

Delcy Rodríguez is trying to survive by running a two-level game. She signals readiness to cut deals with Washington on oil output, sanctions relief, and narcotics interdiction, because she believes POTUS values transactional wins more than democratic transition. At home, she must reassure regime hard-liners, the security services, and the patronage networks tied to PdVSA that concessions will not become surrender. That tension pushes mixed messaging: anti-imperialist rhetoric for internal cohesion, pragmatic language for U.S. leverage. The problem is structural: real investor confidence likely requires loosening state control and depoliticizing PdVSA, which threatens insiders who profit from the status quo.

Comment: A wise strategy and perhaps the only one possible that will keep herself and the remainder of the regime in power? Some questions (among many that we all have):

Can she offer enough oil access to satisfy POTUS without triggering a palace coup from Cabello, Padrino, or the security apparatus?

If Washington de-emphasizes democracy, what credible end-state replaces it: managed transition, protectorate-by-blockade, or permanent coercive bargaining?

What would “success” look like one year from now, and how would you measure it: barrels per day, reduced drug flows, fewer political prisoners, or reduced Chinese and Russian leverage?

The Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive

WSJ

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has alternately struck defiant tones and conciliatory notes as she tries to find her footing

By Kejal Vyas

Jan. 6, 2026 5:30 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/the-venezuelan-regimes-new-strategy-appease-trump-to-survive-fceb28df

Delcy Rodríguez was formally sworn in as acting president at the National Assembly in Caracas on Monday. Federico Parra/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Venezuela’s new leader has a narrow path to survival: Appease both the hard-line remnants of Nicolás Maduro’s regime and President Trump at the same time.

Delcy Rodríguez’s dilemma was illustrated in the hours after Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were snatched from their bedroom by U.S. commandos on Saturday. Rodríguez, a true-believer socialist, hit the airwaves with a defiant tone, denouncing an imperialist attack and declaring that her boss remained the nation’s rightful leader.

By the next day, Rodríguez appeared on television leading a cabinet meeting as the acting president and seemed to offer an olive branch to Trump, an archnemesis who has threatened stronger actions unless the regime in Caracas submits.

“We prioritize moving toward balanced and respectful international relations between the United States and Venezuela,” Rodríguez said, “premised on sovereign equality and noninterference.”

Rodríguez’s tone shift highlighted the balance that her shaky interim leadership is testing out as she tries to withstand U.S. pressure while keeping the country’s so-called revolutionary government from dissolving into factional infighting.

A picture of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores was unveiled at the National Assembly on Monday. Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

On the one hand, Rodriguez is hoping to appeal to Trump’s transactional tendencies by granting U.S. firms new deals in Venezuela’s vast oil fields. In doing so, Rodríguez, once Maduro’s top economic adviser, would want to relieve U.S. pressure on the country without having to make deep democratic reforms.

But at the same time, concessions to Washington could threaten stability and the unity between the regime’s main power brokers. For hard-line leftists and self-proclaimed anti-imperialist figures such Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino—who control the nation’s police, army and paramilitary forces—surrender to the U.S. is the ultimate form of treason.

“She’s sandwiched between U.S. firepower and Venezuelan firepower,” said David Smilde, a professor who tracks Venezuelan politics at Tulane University. “She can’t kowtow too much.”

Trump says the U.S. will effectively run Venezuela. That includes maintaining a military encirclement of the Caribbean waters that the country uses to export oil while coaxing what’s left of Maduro’s government to hold together and pave the way for American energy companies to return to the South American country. Pressing for democratic transition in the country—in the past a cornerstone of the U.S.’s policy toward Venezuela—appears to have been put on the back burner, political analysts said.

President Trump speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Trump’s demands are vague beyond wanting more oil production from Venezuela, with American companies at the center of it. U.S. officials have also said they want drug flows through the country to end and they want to cut off help for U.S. adversaries.

If Rodríguez fails to follow through, “she will face a situation probably worse than Maduro,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.

Washington’s gamble on Venezuela is unique compared with the interim governments that the U.S. propped up in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. was engaged in a state-building operation and control was kept with American boots on the ground. “Here, the only precedent is the old 19th-century gunboat diplomacy where you’re telling people you have to do what we want or we’re coming in,” said Smilde. “I have my doubts over how effective this can be.”

Maduro, who the U.S. has accused of narcoterrorism, had tried to negotiate with the White House by dangling the prospect of tantalizing oil deals for American investors but had little luck. Maduro denies the charges and pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court.

Now, it is Rodríguez’s turn to see if she can meet Trump’s business demands. In some ways, she and Trump might be on the same page.

Delcy Rodríguez has worked with Venezuela’s trade partners. Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press

Since becoming vice president in 2018, the 56-year-old has consolidated influence as Maduro’s top interlocutor with the private sector and trade partners. She has long advocated for American oil companies to pump crude in the country and says the only thing keeping them out are the economic sanctions leveled during Trump’s first term that bar companies from working in Venezuela’s energy sector.

One person close to Rodríguez said Trump’s comments are a sign that the U.S. sees her as the most viable replacement to Maduro, one who could keep the country from breaking into conflict. To fulfill Trump’s vision, the U.S. might need to relax some of its economic restrictions on Venezuela as well as the enforcement of its partial oil blockade, a potential boon for the economy and Rodríguez’s leadership prospects, said the person close to her.

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What is the best path forward for Venezuela? Join the conversation below.

Making the oil industry attractive to American investors, however, will require large-scale changes to industry regulations that were drafted during the tenure of Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Chávez gave the state majority control over oil projects, services and distribution. Those laws also must be modified by Venezuela’s National Assembly, the regime-controlled legislative body that the U.S. and its allies deem as illegitimate.

New regulations must loosen terms for private ownership of energy facilities, potentially unsettling members of the regime, especially the armed forces, who under Maduro’s reign received lucrative contracts and deals from state energy company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, oil analysts say.

“They need to depoliticize PdVSA,” said Cesar Mata, an energy consultant who has advised the Venezuelan National Assembly on oil policy. “There’s a lack of credibility and confidence. As much as you may be friends with Trump, there’s a bureaucratic procedure that has to be followed.”

Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez Federico Parra/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

On Monday, Rodriguez was formally sworn in as acting head of state at the National Assembly in Caracas, which is led by her brother Jorge Rodríguez, who has long served as Maduro’s top negotiator with the U.S.

Jorge Rodríguez and other ruling-party loyalists in speeches called for national unity and political compromise. But they also said they would not stray from the socialist principles that have guided them during their more than two decades in power.

“We are the guarantors of the prosperity we must construct for all,” Jorge Rodríguez said before adding that his main priority will be “to bring back my brother, Nicolás Maduro, my president.”

As government honchos gathered at the parliament building, the regime was simultaneously ramping up repression on the streets. A new decree published in the Official Gazette on Monday called on police and security forces to immediately begin searching for and arresting dissidents accused of supporting U.S. intervention.

A member of an armed civilian group guards the entrance to a supermarket in Caracas. Ronald Pena R/EPA/Shutterstock

Checkpoints popped up around Caracas with police and paramilitary forces wearing black balaclavas and stopping motorists and pedestrians before going through their phones. At least 14 journalists and photographers were arrested around the city, according to the national press workers’ union.

For many, it was a sign that while Maduro may be gone, most of his underlings remain in charge for now.

“It’s very confusing what direction the government is trying to take this,” said Carlos Romero, a retired political science professor and author in Caracas. “There’s a side that’s insisting the regime and the revolution will continue, and then there are those who want its demise, something new. We are facing very difficult days ahead.”

Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

WSJ

3. Maduro’s Capture Deals Heavy Blow to Cuba’s Vaunted Intelligence Service

Summary:

Maduro’s capture punctured Havana’s long-cultivated myth of intelligence omnipotence. The reporting frames Cuba’s services as historically adept at protection, penetration, and repression, then contrasts that reputation with a Caracas raid that achieved surprise, seized the principal, and extracted him with no U.S. losses. Cuba’s claim that 32 Cuban officers assigned to Maduro’s detail were killed is meant to signal sacrifice and rally regime legitimacy, but it also advertises a serious breach: an inner-circle vulnerability, weak tactical warning, and poor contingency execution when U.S. forces arrived. If Venezuela’s subsidized oil lifeline frays, Cuba’s internal control model faces a harder test: hungry populations can be managed, but a cash-starved repressive apparatus can splinter.

Comment: Probably not a coincidence. This can be useful in shaping the narrative of Cuban weakness (externally as well as internally). Perhaps any other nation reviign Cuban support will reevaluate their dependence on Cuban intelligence.

If Cuban officers were physically close, why did they fail to detect, disrupt, or impose costs on the assault force?

If Venezuela’s support to Havana declines, what is the most likely near-term failure mode: elite defection, security-service fragmentation, or a slow economic government that forces political concessions?

This may also mean our OPSEC was good and perhaps we are not as penetrated by Cuban intelligence as past counterintelligence operations have exposed. Surely if Cuba had assets in place in the US as we have feared they would have detected this and warned Maduro. But apparently whatever assets they had in place could not gain access to information about the operation, or at least the timing of the operation.

Maduro’s Capture Deals Heavy Blow to Cuba’s Vaunted Intelligence Service

WSJ

Cuba says 32 officers assigned to protect Venezuela’s deposed strongman were killed by U.S. forces, signaling trouble for Havana’s own rulers

By Santiago Pérez

Jan. 5, 2026 10:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/venezuela-cuba-maduro-trump-intelligence-f7b127f4?mod=WSJ_home_mediumtopper_pos_4

Explosions echoed across Caracas on Jan. 3 as the U.S. moved in to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Video Obtained By Reuters/UGC

For decades, Cuban intelligence agents were Cold War stars, dismantling plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, recruiting senior U.S. government officials and protecting heads of state from Angola to Panama.

The capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro—one of the Cuban intelligence services’ most valuable charges—punctured its aura of invincibility. U.S. elite forces descended on Maduro’s compound at around 2 a.m. local time Saturday, grabbing him and his wife before they could escape to a safe room, said Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Cuban government said 32 officers from its Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Interior Ministry, which runs intelligence services, were killed in the line of duty as part of Maduro’s security detail.

“It’s a defeat for Cuba and denotes its weakening, highlighting vulnerabilities in its security procedures,” said María Werlau, author of “Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela,” a book published in 2019.

Relied upon by the Soviet KGB for its extensive informant networks in Latin America and Africa, Cuban expertise to protect allies, detect unrest and suppress dissent became a lucrative export. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s security and intelligence services secured a lifeline from oil-rich Venezuela as Havana inched closer to economic collapse.

“Cuban intelligence services always punched above their weight,” said Cedric Leighton, a military intelligence veteran and retired U.S. Air Force colonel. “In some respects, they are basically old-school trade craft.”

Workers fly the Cuban flag at half-staff outside the U.S. Embassy in Havana, marking the deaths of Cubans killed in the U.S. raid in Venezuela. Ramon Espinosa/AP

But Cuba’s security detail failed to defend Maduro, despite a U.S. armada threatening the Venezuelan leader for months from the Caribbean.

“What’s almost worse is that they couldn’t inflict any damage on the Americans,” said Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister and author of several books about Cuba’s regime. “This means the Cubans weren’t where they needed to be, with the strength they needed to have.”

Such intelligence flaws are also likely to hurt Cuba’s Communist regime at home, particularly if it loses Venezuela’s economic support and subsidized oil shipments amid an unprecedented economic implosion.

“The people can go hungry, but the repressive apparatus must have privileges,” said Enrique Garcia, a former Cuban intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. “If the regime loses all economic capacity, no system can withstand it.”

President Trump told reporters Sunday on board Air Force One that Cuba was ready to fall. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Communist island is in trouble and that one of the biggest problems Venezuelans have is that they must declare independence from Cuba.

“This poor island took over Venezuela,” Rubio said alongside Trump on Saturday.

The interior-ministry building in Havana. mastrascusa/epa/shutterstock

Former intelligence agents and dissidents who monitor Cuba’s security apparatus estimate that some 140 officers were assigned to provide personal security services to Maduro. Dozens of them are thought to have been injured or suffered severe burns in the rain of missiles and shrapnel during the U.S. operation, these people said.

Cuba and Venezuela have disclosed few details about the U.S. military incursion. Vladimir Padrino, the four-star general who has led Venezuela’s military since 2014, said Sunday the U.S. killed a large part of Maduro’s security team.

The weekend raid was precise and represented the first direct, unilateral U.S. military intervention in South America. It required months of work by U.S. intelligence and included at least one informant within the Venezuelan government who helped the U.S. “understand how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets,” said Caine.

No American servicemembers were killed, and no American equipment was lost, Trump said. The U.S. force “maintained the element of surprise” as it descended on Maduro’s compound, Caine said. When U.S. helicopters came under fire, the response was overwhelming, he added.

Cuba’s intelligence and security team in Venezuela was led by senior military-intelligence veterans, including Asdrúbal de la Vega, the Cuban officer closest to Maduro who became his shadow and slept in a room next to the deposed strongman, said Carlos Cabrera Pérez, a Cuban journalist based in Spain who writes about Cuba’s security apparatus. De la Vega’s whereabouts haven’t been disclosed.

Cuba declared two days of national mourning for the officers “who fell confronting terrorists in imperial uniform,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote Sunday on X.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Ramon Espinosa/AP

High-ranking Cuban military-intelligence officers also supervise Venezuela’s vast security apparatus, primarily because infiltrations or defections within military intelligence are rare, said Luis Domínguez, a Cuban who tracks security officers in the Communist island.

“They are the most reliable, they are Raúl Castro’s people.” he said, referring to the younger of the two brothers who led the Cuban revolution, defeated a Central Intelligence Agency-backed invasion force at the Bay of Pigs in the 1960s and ruled communist Cuba for more than six decades. The Castros also provided vital support to then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez during a failed 2002 coup attempt.

For a tiny and impoverished island of about 10 million people, Cuba’s security and intelligence structure is enormous—with about 100,000 officers, said García, the former Cuban intelligence agent.

“They have a presence in workplaces, schools, movie theaters and informants on every street block,” he said. “Fidel Castro’s security detail had 10,000 officers and its own counterintelligence unit.”

A significant wave of demonstrations rocked Cuba in 2021, though the security services were able to crack down on the protesters. yamil lage/AFP/Getty Images

Cuba’s security apparatus has been effective at suffocating unrest in Cuba and Venezuela.

During the protests that rocked Cuba in 2021, the shutdown of web and telephone services made it hard for Cubans to organize across the country. More recently, student protests over price increases of mobile-phone data plans didn’t gain traction because of the fear of repression, as intelligence services surveil college activities. The security apparatus also has the tools to monitor telephone and cyber communications, and its agents are well-known for their ability to conduct house searches without detection.

In Venezuela, Cuban intelligence know-how has been crucial to quell the opposition movement. But on Saturday, it failed to mitigate risks or execute so-called actionable intelligence as the U.S. prepared its incursion on Caracas.

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What does the arrest of Maduro mean for Cuba’s future? Join the conversation below.

“Intelligence is absolutely critical to protect VIPs,” said Leighton, the former U.S. military intelligence officer. Faulty assumptions and ideology can impair judgment.

As a former KGB officer, Russian President Vladimir Putin goes to great lengths to maintain secrecy about his movements, residence details or workspaces. Patterns of life, daily habits and routines, which seem mundane, become critically important to exploit vulnerabilities of heads of state, Leighton said. Such was the case for Maduro.

“If you are really trying to avoid capture, you go to places people don’t know about,” he said. “You wonder why Maduro didn’t go to some nondescript apartment in the middle of Caracas or the countryside.”

Write to Santiago Pérez at santiago.perez@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 6, 2026, print edition as 'U.S. Raid Deals Blow to Cuba’s Intelligence Service'.

WSJ

4. Trump’s Foray Into Venezuela Could Embolden Russia’s and China’s Own Aggression

Summary:

POTUS’s seizure of Nicolás Maduro signals a United States willing to use force for a transactional doctrine: hemispheric dominance, access, and compliance. The piece argues Moscow and Beijing condemn the raid publicly, yet privately may see advantage. Russia can press a familiar bargain: U.S. freedom of action in Latin America in exchange for U.S. restraint in Ukraine. China gains strategic relief if U.S. attention and assets drift from the Asia-Indo-Pacific, and it can cite U.S. rule breaking to blunt criticism of coercion in the South China Sea or against Taiwan. The shock is not only legal, but precedential.

Comment: If we normalize “backyard” intervention, what principle remains to deny Russia and China the same license? Are we signalling that we ceding the Asia-Indo-Pacific, European, Middle East, and African spheres as we seek to dominate the western hemisphere only? Should we be concerned with the potential actions of the CRInK in other regions? Should we anticipate their actions and if we do what actions should we take now to counter or mitigate them? Do we really want to return to a spheres of influence intenational system? Seems like we need this debate in Congress and the public.

Trump’s Foray Into Venezuela Could Embolden Russia’s and China’s Own Aggression

NY Times · Anton Troianovski · January 5, 2026

While both countries were allied with Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. attack could give them justification to use force in other spheres, analysts said.

By Anton Troianovski

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 5, 2026

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/world/europe/trump-venezuela-china-russia.html

President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Kremlin last May. China and Russia both have close ties to Nicolás Maduro.Credit...Pool photo by Evgenia Novozhenina

Jan. 5, 2026, 7:59 p.m. ET

After attacking Venezuela and seizing its head of state, President Trump said on Saturday that the country had been “hosting foreign adversaries” and asserted that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

His remarks appeared to be a broadside against Russia and China, which both built close ties to Nicolás Maduro, the captured Venezuelan leader. But in fact, there was also plenty in Mr. Trump’s words and deeds that Beijing and Moscow could get behind.

Mr. Trump’s stunning assault on Venezuela has ushered in new uncertainty around the globe, with allies and adversaries alike scrambling to reckon with a superpower ready to use force in the service of a transactional, might-makes-right foreign policy.

For the two countries long seen as America’s chief adversaries, Russia and China, that uncertainty is tinged with opportunity, foreign policy analysts said.

“If we have the right to be aggressive in our own backyard,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, “why can’t they?”

Ms. Hill was the senior director for European and Russian affairs at the White House during part of Mr. Trump’s first term. In the spring of 2019, she told a congressional hearing later that year, Russia quietly signaled it was ready cut loose its ally Mr. Maduro in exchange for the United States’ stepping back from Ukraine.

“You want us out of your backyard,” the informal Russian message went, in Ms. Hill’s telling. “We, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.”

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Ms. Hill said she went to Moscow at the time to reject the idea. Russia never confirmed Ms. Hill’s account, but its RIA state news agency reported in April 2019 that her meetings in Moscow “revealed serious, deep contradictions and significant differences” regarding Venezuela.

Now, Russia could well have more luck with such a geopolitical swap, given that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric “shows that everything can be traded,” she said in an interview on Monday.

“It gives them the opportunity to try it again,” she said.

So far, China and Russia have condemned the U.S. attack on Venezuela, but they have not threatened to defend their ally.

At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday, Russia and China demanded the release of Mr. Maduro and his wife, and called for a halt to any further military action by the United States.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said on Sunday that no country could “act as the world’s police,” without mentioning the United States, according to Reuters. Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said “the American global gendarme is attempting to rear its head once again.”

But some in Moscow went so far as to offer hints of praise for Mr. Trump’s attack.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president, told the country’s Tass news agency that Mr. Trump “and his team have been rigidly defending his country’s national interests, both political (with Latin America being the backyard of the United States) and economic (give us your oil and other natural resources).”

The restraint was striking given the investment in Mr. Maduro’s rule by both China and Russia. Russia sent nuclear-capable bombers to Venezuela as a show of force in 2018 and ratified a “strategic partnership” with Venezuela just last October, looking to the country as a platform for projecting its influence across Latin America. China upgraded its ties to an “all-weather” friendship when Mr. Maduro visited in 2023 and loaned more than $100 billion to the country over the last quarter-century, largely in a bid for access to Venezuelan oil.

But in the last year, the calculus for both Moscow and Beijing in what they stand to gain and lose in taking on the United States has been changing quickly. Both countries are aware that the consequences of antagonizing Mr. Trump can be severe, while the advantages of flattering him appear significant.

“Both Russia and China want to prioritize manipulating Trump to achieve more important interests for themselves,” said Tong Zhao, a specialist on strategic security issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

For President Xi Jinping of China, the priorities appear to include a further relaxation of American export controls and gaining more freedom of action in the South China Sea and beyond. After facing a potentially devastating trade war with the United States early last year, China secured a one-year truce with Mr. Trump in October and gained access to some advanced American computer chips in December. The Chinese leader is now expected to host Mr. Trump in Beijing in April.

Mr. Maduro’s fall comes with silver linings for Beijing, said Ryan Hass, a Brookings Institution scholar who was the China director on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. Having more American military assets devoted to Latin America rather than Asia is beneficial; so is the increase in Venezuelan oil production that Mr. Trump has promised, given that China is the world’s largest importer of fossil fuels.

And then there’s the legitimizing effect for any future actions that violate international law, including against Taiwan.

America under Mr. Trump “has allowed itself to be seen as indistinguishable from China and Russian in its willingness to break rules in the service of its own narrow interests,” Mr. Hass said. “So it removes a degree of pressure on China in that regard.”

For his part, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been silent in the face of Mr. Trump’s seizure of Mr. Maduro, whom he hosted at the Kremlin just last May. The silence is especially striking because of the Russian leader’s anger in the wake of other Western interventions, such as NATO’s strikes in Libya in 2011.

But for Mr. Putin, the goal in staying in Mr. Trump’s good graces is clear: to convince the United States to deliver a Russian victory in Ukraine.

“The Russians probably think that as unhappy as they are with what happened,” said Hanna Notte, an expert on Russian foreign policy, “it is an acceptable price to pay if they come out on top in Ukraine.”

Mr. Putin achieved an end to three years of diplomatic isolation by the United States with his summit with Mr. Trump in Alaska in August. His concrete gains from humoring Mr. Trump have so far been more limited than Mr. Xi’s, with the White House still appearing unwilling to force Ukraine to capitulate to all of the Kremlin’s demands.

Ms. Notte, an analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., pointed out that Mr. Putin has sought to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump even though the United States has become more involved in parts of the former Soviet Union, like the South Caucasus and Central Asia, that the Kremlin considers part of its post-Soviet sphere of influence. And Russian reticence to take on Mr. Trump over Venezuela might also stem from the simple fact that there was little Moscow could have done to stop him.

Even as Mr. Putin stayed out of the spotlight, Mr. Medvedev, one of Russia’s most publicly hawkish officials, gave voice to the Kremlin’s pragmatism.

“Let’s put it bluntly,” he told the Tass news agency, referring to the United States, “now they have no grounds, even formally, to reproach our country.”

Farnaz Fassihi and Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.

Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.

See more on: U.S. Politics, Donald Trump

NY Times · Anton Troianovski · January 5, 2026

5. Maduro, making first court appearance, says U.S. ‘kidnapped’ him

Summary:

Nicolás Maduro’s first Manhattan hearing turned into theater. In jail garb, he called himself Venezuela’s constitutional president and said the United States “kidnapped” him in Caracas on January 3, 2026, before Judge Alvin Hellerstein cut him off and promised fair proceedings. Maduro and Cilia Flores pleaded not guilty to narco terrorism, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons charges, while defense counsel signaled fights over the legality of capture and head of state immunities. In Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president, condemned the raid, and invoked national emergency powers as detentions and checkpoints spread.

Comment: Did we expect him to say anything else? I wonder how his lawyer will be paid since surely Maduro has no access to any funds.

Maduro, making first court appearance, says U.S. ‘kidnapped’ him

Washington Post · Shayna Jacobs

As the deposed Venezuelan president and his wife, Cilia Flores, grapple with the U.S. legal system, his former vice president consolidates power.

Updated

January 5, 2026 at 8:53 p.m. ESTyesterday at 8:53 p.m. EST

By Shayna Jacobs, Tim Craig and Mark Berman

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/01/05/maduro-court-appearance-trial-new-york/

NEW YORK — Deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro made his first court appearance Monday and said he was “kidnapped” by the U.S. government, assailing the Trump administration for capturing him and portraying himself as his country’s rightful leader.

The brief court proceedings in downtown Manhattan offered the first public opportunity for Maduro to speak since he and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized by U.S. forces Saturday in Caracas. The nighttime raid, which followed months of escalating U.S. pressure on Maduro, set off shock waves across the globe, provoked confusion in Venezuela about that nation’s leadership and prompted fears that President Donald Trump could act on threats he has made to other countries, including Cuba, Colombia and Canada.

For Maduro and Flores, Monday’s hearing was the first step in what is likely to be a drawn-out legal process, one that Maduro’s attorney expects will be “voluminous and complicated.”

An indictment unsealed after their capture alleged that Maduro “sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking.” The indictment said Maduro has “remained in power despite losses in recent elections,” and accused him, his wife and others in their inner circle of amassing wealth and power while carrying out “a relentless campaign of cocaine trafficking.”

Maduro faces four counts, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and gun charges. His wife is charged with cocaine importation conspiracy and related weapons charges. Both entered pleas of not guilty.

The hearing, lasting just over 35 minutes, combined the familiar routine of an initial court appearance with the extraordinary sight of Maduro, who only days earlier had been a strongman wielding power over an entire nation, seated at a defense table, clad in jailhouse garb and following instructions from a judge.

Maduro used the hearing to protest his presence in an American courtroom.

“My name is President Nicolás Maduro Moros,” he said, according to interpreters who translated his remarks from Spanish to English in court. “I am president of the Republic of Venezuela. I am here kidnapped since January 3rd, Saturday. I was captured at my home in Caracas, Venezuela.”

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, overseeing the hearing, cut him short.

“There will be a time and a place to go into all of this,” said the 92-year-old jurist, who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998.

Hellerstein pledged that he would work to ensure Maduro and Flores receive “a fair trial and fair proceedings.” The judge also read Maduro his rights, including his right to counsel and to remain silent.

“I did not know of these rights,” Maduro responded, according to the interpreters. “Your honor is informing me of them now.”

As Maduro declared his innocence in New York, his former No. 2 in Venezuela — Delcy Rodríguez, who had been the country’s vice president — was moving to consolidate power there.

Rodríguez, 56, viewed by some U.S. officials and analysts as more pragmatic than Maduro, was officially sworn in Monday as acting president at the National Assembly in Caracas. She initially denounced Maduro’s capture, but on Sunday struck a more conciliatory tone toward the Trump administration, calling for “peaceful coexistence.”

After being sworn in Monday, Rodríguez again rebuked the Trump administration’s actions, portraying Maduro’s capture as an illegitimate act.

“I come with sorrow for the suffering inflicted upon the Venezuelan people by an illegitimate military aggression against our homeland,” she said. “I come with sorrow for the kidnapping of two heroes” held hostage in the United States, she said.

In New York, Maduro also portrayed his arrest as improper, referring to himself during Monday’s hearing as “the constitutional president of my country” and “a decent man.”

As he was being escorted from the courtroom, a self-described former political prisoner in Venezuela began heckling him. The man, who later identified himself as Pedro Rojas, 33, stood and called Maduro an illegitimate president. Maduro could be heard calling himself a prisoner of war in response.

The hearing began more placidly, with Maduro greeting attendees in the courtroom by repeating “Happy New Year” in English multiple times as he was escorted to his seat at the defense table. He and Flores were given headphones to hear translations of the proceedings, and they spoke in Spanish when prompted.

Maduro spent much of the session taking diligent handwritten notes. He initially wrote on a copy of his indictment, remarking at one point that he had seen it for the first time at the courthouse. He later made notations on a yellow legal pad that he asked to take with him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he is being held.

Attorneys for Maduro and Flores consented, for now, to pretrial detention, although they could ask for bail later. Both defendants need medical care in custody, their attorneys said, asking Hellerstein to ensure they would receive proper medical care.

Maduro, 63, has “some health and medical issues that will require attention,” said his lawyer, Barry Pollack. An attorney for Flores, 69, said she was injured during her capture and asked the judge to authorize an X-ray and physical to determine the extent of her injuries, including whether her ribs were fractured or bruised. Bandages could be seen on Flores’s forehead.

Hellerstein directed prosecutors and the defense to arrange for treatment for both defendants.

“Our client is in good spirits,” Flores’s attorney, Mark E. Donnelly, said in a statement. “We look forward to reviewing and challenging the evidence the government has. The first lady is aware that there is a long road ahead and is prepared.”

During a discussion about pretrial scheduling, Pollack said the case would involve “a voluminous and complicated legal process.”

“There are issues here about the legality of his military abduction,” Pollack told Hellerstein. The attorney said legal filings would focus on “privileges and immunities” Maduro is entitled to as head of a sovereign state.

Kyle Wirshba, an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said his office would begin giving evidence to the defense once both parties agree on an order sealing this material from outside observers.

The next hearing is scheduled for March 17.

The raid to capture Maduro, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday involved about 200 U.S. troops, sparked new waves of unease and uncertainty in Venezuela, with residents unsure what would come next.

Much of the leftist power structure that rules Venezuela appeared to be publicly backing Rodríguez, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, widely seen as controlling the military, and Nicolás Maduro Guerra, Maduro’s son and an influential national lawmaker. Guerra is also charged in the indictment but remains in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s national, state and municipal police forces have been ordered to immediately search for and arrest anyone “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America” under a decree that places the country under a “state of external commotion.” The decree, which took effect Saturday but was published in full Monday, grants the government sweeping emergency powers.

There were also reports on social media of new checkpoints set up in the capital by masked members of the military as well as pro-government militias on motorcycles. Venezuela’s National Press Workers Union said at least 14 journalists had been detained.

The Trump administration has offered mixed signals on what top U.S. officials think lies ahead for Venezuela. After Maduro’s capture, Trump announced that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela, saying: “We’ll run it properly. We’ll run it professionally.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, though, has taken a different tack, suggesting in television interviews that the U.S. was “running policy” rather than the country itself.

“This was not an invasion,” he said on NBC. “This was not an extended military operation. This was a very precise operation that involved a couple of hours of action.”

Berman reported from Washington. Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe and María Luisa Paúl in Washington, Ana Herrero in Caracas and Anthony Faiola in Rome contributed to this report.

Washington Post · Shayna Jacobs

6. A Revival of Venezuela’s Oil Industry Poses a Challenge for Canada

Summary:

A U.S.-backed revival of Venezuela’s oil sector could pressure Canada’s oil industry because both countries produce heavy crude that depends on U.S. refineries, especially on the Gulf Coast. When sanctions curtailed Venezuelan imports, those refineries leaned more on Alberta oil sands; renewed Venezuelan flows could gradually displace Canadian barrels and weaken Canadian pricing. Analysts say this risk strengthens the case for export diversification, particularly new pipeline and port capacity from Alberta to British Columbia. Near-term impacts may be muted by U.S. pipeline limits and investor caution about Venezuela, but the strategic vulnerability remains.

Comment: Second, third, and even fourth order effects. I wonder if someone's strategic calculus thinks the Venezuelan operation is useful to pressure Canada.

A Revival of Venezuela’s Oil Industry Poses a Challenge for Canada

The two countries both produce heavy oil, which is difficult to refine, and have relied historically on American refineries to buy it.

By Ian Austen

Reporting from Ottawa

Jan. 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/world/americas/venezuela-oil-industry-canada.html?smid=url-share

A refinery in Punto Fijo, Venezuela, in 2021. Historically Canada and Venezuela were direct competitors in the oil business.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

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The U.S. attack on Venezuela will likely have ripple effects on Canada’s oil industry, which may now have to intensify efforts to diversify beyond the U.S. market, experts said.

President Trump’s plan to revive the oil flow in Venezuela — which involves U.S. companies returning to spend “billions of dollars” to fix infrastructure and then selling large amounts of oil to the rest of the world — is a particular challenge for Canada, which produces the same heavy and difficult-to-refine oil that Venezuela does.

Until 2024, virtually all of Canada’s oil exports, which mostly come from Alberta’s oil sands, headed to the United States. Mr. Trump’s vision to revitalize Venezuela’s energy industry, which faces considerable hurdles, may accelerate moves to wean Canada from its reliance on the United States market, such as a pipeline linking the Pacific Coast of British Columbia to landlocked Alberta.

“The only way, in the long term, to increase our competitiveness and increase our optionality is with pipeline capacity that doesn’t just point to the United States,” said Rory Johnston, the founder of Commodity Context, an oil markets analytics firm in Toronto.

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When the United States largely barred Venezuelan imports through extensive sanctions, refineries along the American Gulf Coast equipped to handle heavy crude turned to Alberta’s oil sands instead. Rory Johnson said that if the United States were to resume importing Venezuelan oil, that may gradually push Canadian oil out of the Gulf Coast refineries.

“Canada’s vulnerable on both the supply and demand side to shocks because of our high rate of dependence on the U.S. market,” said Robert Johnston, the director of energy and natural resources policy at the University of Calgary in Alberta.

Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, signed an agreement conditionally approving the construction of a pipeline from Alberta to a new oil tanker port on the coast of British Columbia. Rory Johnston said that the prospect of expanded imports from Venezuela “increases the argument for” building such a pipeline and port.

Since taking power last year, and in the wake of Mr. Trump’s trade war with most of the world, Mr. Carney has emphasized developing large infrastructure projects to reduce Canada’s trade dependence on the United States.

For now, the United States’ pipeline networks may also help Canadian oil companies by limiting the effects of renewed exports from Venezuela. Most of Canada’s exports, Rory Johnston said, go to refineries in the Midwest that can handle heavy oils. But without billions of dollars in investments, pipeline networks in the United States cannot move large amounts of Venezuelan crude oil north, he said.

Robert Johnston said that there was little apparent interest among major oil companies in making large-scale investments in Venezuela despite Mr. Trump’s wishes. Still, he said, any resumption of substantial shipments to the Gulf Coast from Venezuela would mean lower prices for Canadian oil in the U.S. market.

“It wouldn’t be catastrophic, but it would be unwelcome,” he said.

Since the expansion of a government owned oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast in 2024, Canada has started reducing its almost total dependence on oil exports to the U.S. Of the roughly 4 million barrels of oil a day Canada exports, Rory Johnston estimates that 500,000 to 700,000 barrels now go to Asia and China in particular.

By some estimates, it will take 18 months for Venezuela to start producing 1.5 million barrels a day.

Like many analysts, Rory Johnston said he did not anticipate that China would continue to buy oil from a Venezuelan industry under American control, potentially creating an opening for Canada to offset whatever business it loses on the American Gulf Coast.

“It would be kind of ironic if the U.S. intervention in Venezuela elevated China’s interest in Canada,” Robert Johnston said.

Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com.

7. The 7 Unthinkables: China’s Black Swan Scenarios for 2026

Summary:

Erika Lafrennie argues China’s control-heavy governance model enters 2026 stable on the surface but fragile underneath because information narrowing, hierarchy, and performative confidence create blind spots. It outlines seven “unthinkables,” not forecasts but structural black-swan pathways: a Rocket Force fracture after leaks; a major-province governance failure driven by debt and implementation strain; a Taiwan information campaign backfire that reverses psychological effects; a semiconductor supply-chain shock from new restrictions or sanctions; a senior-level corruption scandal that triggers purges and paralysis; a Belt and Road partner backlash against China’s governance exports; and provincial elite confidence collapse that accelerates surveillance and strain.

Comment: A lot to consider here. And if we anticipate these 7 and think about them then by definition they will not be Black Swans. We should consider ourselves warned.

But there is so much to think about, for example:

If a Rocket Force leak triggers investigations that paralyze command decisions, what compensatory tools would Beijing lean on first in 2026: cyber operations, cognitive pressure, or outward military signaling?

If Taiwan’s civil society publicly exposes a disinformation campaign in real time, does Beijing double down on narrative escalation even as it loses influence?

If provincial leadership confidence is the “core stability metric,” what early indicators would show quiet resistance has begun before Beijing tightens control and accelerates the erosion cycle?

The 7 Unthinkables: China’s Black Swan Scenarios for 2026

How a tightly controlled system creates the conditions for shocks it cannot see coming

Erika Lafrennie

Jan 06, 2026

https://www.xinanigans.com/p/china-risk-2026-black-swan-scenarios?publication_id=5221340&utm

China enters 2026 with a governance model built to manage pressure by absorbing uncertainty and narrowing information flows. Yet the same tools that stabilize the surface create vulnerabilities underneath it. A system that prizes control creates blind spots. A system that performs confidence limits its ability to adjust. A system that relies on hierarchy weakens its capacity to detect early warnings.

Black swans emerge when a system cannot see the risks it generates. This dispatch examines the scenarios Beijing is least prepared to handle. They are not predictions. They are structural possibilities created by China’s own incentive environment.

Each scenario follows the same pattern. A trigger that appears manageable. A rapid chain of internal reactions shaped by information control. A moment when the system’s risk-transfer mechanisms fail. And a set of consequences that reshape the strategic landscape far beyond Beijing’s intention.

Here are seven black swan scenarios that could define China’s 2026.

1. A Sudden Fracture Inside the Rocket Force

China’s Rocket Force sits at the center of Beijing’s deterrence logic and its long-range strike capability. It also carries deep internal pressure. Years of purges, loyalty testing, and forced restructuring reduced space for officer initiative and created an atmosphere of bureaucratic fear.

Trigger

A mid-ranking officer exposes corruption inside a missile brigade or leaks internal readiness failures during an inspection cycle.

Why It Breaks the System

The Rocket Force relies on political discipline more than operational trust. A single crack prompts sweeping investigations that paralyze decision-making and cascade across multiple commands.

What It Means for 2026

Reduced readiness, delayed exercises, and a sudden shift in Beijing’s external posture as it compensates through cyber or cognitive pressure. The world sees a military that looks powerful but behaves defensively.

2. A Governance Failure in a Major Province

Provincial governments carry the weight of implementation. They manage debt, employment, infrastructure, and social stability. They also bear the consequences of political campaigns that limit local autonomy.

Trigger

A major province—Henan, Guangdong, or Sichuan—faces a debt restructuring that forces salary delays, stalled public projects, or supply-chain gridlock.

Why It Breaks the System

The central government cannot acknowledge local weakness without exposing the limits of its own model. Information flow tightens. External signals disappear. The province improvises under pressure.

What It Means for 2026

Beijing steps in late with a centralized rescue package that stabilizes the surface but erodes elite trust internally. Investor confidence weakens and provincial leaders shift into survival mode.

3. A Loss of Control Over Taiwan’s Information Environment

Cognitive pressure has become Beijing’s tool of choice. Yet the more China leans on this approach, the more fragile it becomes. Narrative dominance requires credibility the CCP no longer holds among key Taiwanese demographics.

Trigger

A coordinated disinformation campaign backfires. Youth voters or civil society groups expose the operation in real time.

Why It Breaks the System

Beijing’s narrative strategy depends on shaping inevitability. Once Taiwanese institutions publicly demonstrate resilience, the psychological effect reverses.

What It Means for 2026

China escalates its messaging while losing influence. Taiwan’s confidence rises. Japan and the United States accelerate coordination. Beijing’s reliance on cognitive pressure becomes a liability.

4. A Critical Breach in Semiconductor Supply Chains

China’s leadership treats advanced semiconductor access as the defining variable of national power. Beijing spent 2025 trying to route around US export controls while expanding domestic alternatives. The semiconductor chokepoint remains China’s most vulnerable dependency.

Trigger

A new US restriction cuts off China’s access to critical semiconductor manufacturing equipment, or a key Chinese supplier to global tech companies faces sudden sanctions.

Why It Breaks the System

China’s tech sector depends on global supply chains Beijing cannot fully control. A semiconductor disruption forces immediate choices between economic damage and aggressive retaliation, both of which expose strategic limitations.

What It Means for 2026

Accelerated economic nationalism. Expanded cyber operations targeting semiconductor companies. Increased pressure on Taiwan as Beijing seeks alternative supply routes. The line between commercial and national security ecosystems blurs across the Indo-Pacific.

5. A Major Corruption Scandal at the Central Level

Anti-corruption is the backbone of Xi’s authority structure. It enforces discipline, keeps elites compliant, and signals ideological purity.

Trigger

A scandal involving a senior figure in the State Council or the Central Committee leaks through unofficial channels.

Why It Breaks the System

Central corruption undermines the moral logic of Xi’s governance method. The system relies on fear, but also on the belief that discipline flows downward, not upward.

What It Means for 2026

A rapid campaign of purges across ministries. Policy paralysis while Beijing prioritizes political cleansing over economic management. Heightened risk tolerance in foreign policy as the system redirects attention outward.

6. A Governance Crisis in a Key Belt and Road State

China now relies on governance exports as a form of strategic influence. It embeds advisors, digital surveillance tools, administrative templates, and training programs across the Global South.

Trigger

A political transition or economic collapse in a partner state reveals China’s advisors played a direct role in unpopular governance decisions.

Why It Breaks the System

Beijing depends on the narrative that its governance model is stable, efficient, and replicable. A partner-state backlash challenges this claim and threatens China’s influence network.

What It Means for 2026

China faces a choice between doubling down with support packages or stepping away and risking reputational loss. Either path exposes limits in Beijing’s governance export strategy.

7. A Collapse in Elite Confidence Among Provincial Leadership

China’s political system rests on provincial party secretaries and governors believing in Xi’s method. These officials implement central directives, manage local crises, and maintain the facade of system effectiveness. Their confidence is cultivated through career advancement and ideological reinforcement, but it can erode when performance demands become impossible to meet.

Trigger

A combination of stalled economic performance, impossible growth targets, and internal purges creates a tipping point where provincial leaders begin quiet resistance to central directives.

Why It Breaks the System

Provincial elite confidence is the core stability metric. When it weakens, the system compensates with tighter control and more intrusive oversight, which accelerates the confidence erosion cycle.

What It Means for 2026

Rising internal surveillance. Faster turnover in provincial leadership. Increased pressure on military and security organs. A system that still functions but does so under self-imposed strain.

The Thread That Connects the Unthinkables

Each scenario begins with a manageable trigger. The escalation happens because China’s political system reduces its ability to see risks early, adjust quickly, or communicate clearly across institutions. Black swans in China emerge through structure, not chaos.

Information control slows detection. Hierarchy slows correction. Performance substitutes for adaptation.

This combination creates the structural conditions for strategic surprise.

The scenarios here offer a different value. They are not forecasts. They are diagnostic tools. Each scenario reveals where the system is most rigid, where governance transfers the most risk, and where Beijing’s incentives interact with global pressures.

The job for analysts in 2026 is to map how these vulnerabilities evolve under constraint. When a system limits its ability to see itself clearly, strategic shocks become more likely—not because the triggers are dramatic, but because they were visible all along.

Coming Friday:

In place of China This Week, the 2026 China Risk Framework releases for subscribers. It integrates all five dispatches into a single framework you can carry into the year ahead: cognitive patterns, structural fractures, analytic recalibration, predictive gambits, and the black swan possibilities that frame China’s strategic horizon.

8. Remarks by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at Newport News Shipyard

Summary:

At Newport News Shipyard, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth launched an “Arsenal of Freedom Tour” to rally industrial workers and sailors around “peace through strength” and faster shipbuilding. He tied the administration’s agenda to three pillars: reviving a warrior ethos, rebuilding the force with better equipment and people, and restoring deterrence through visible action. He praised recruiting gains, highlighted submarines and carriers, and promoted a “Golden Fleet” meant to expand maritime capacity and hold sea lanes. He promised acquisition overhaul, ending tolerance for delays, and rewarding contractors who deliver on time, on budget, and invest in workforce and production.

Excerpt:

So no more DEI, no more dudes in dresses, no more distractions. We're done with that shit. It's just standards, accountability, readiness, training, discipline and lethality, back to basics across the department, which is what our warriors really want.

Comment: Why are we giving up the traditional name of Arsenal of Democracy? We cannot have freedom without democracy. Is "rebranding" from our traditional values really necessary or helpful?

If the Department of War equates deterrence with highly publicized raids and maritime expansion, what is the theory of victory for preventing miscalculation in the Asia-Indo-Pacific?

Can an acquisition revolution that punishes delay succeed without changing requirements discipline and congressional incentives that drive churn and cost growth?

Does “peace through strength” become stronger or more fragile if it depends on rhetoric about cultural issues rather than measurable readiness, munitions stocks, and surge shipyard throughput?

Remarks by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at Newport News Shipyard

Jan. 5, 2026

SECRETARY OF WAR PETE HEGSETH: Well, good afternoon. How are we doing? Oh, man, it is great to see this beautiful group and to be here in Newport News and I want to thank all of you for what you do. That's why we're here.

That's why we're launching the Arsenal of Freedom Tour. It's about all of you. Some of you are wearing a uniform. Some of you are not. All of you are wearing hard hats and all of you are contributing to the warfighter.

The kind of urgency that we need is — you understand. The speed and the specificity of the beautiful machines that you create require an expertise and an investment that this administration is prepared to make and make fast.

It's always inspiring to stand amongst patriots who quite literally are building our nation's firepower. I had a chance this morning to swear in some new recruits. We have a historic recruiting surge at the Department of War. Record amounts of Americans want to join our uniform class. Last year was a record of multiple decades.

This year, we're already ahead of last year. Americans are fired up to serve. I also had a chance to go to our next aircraft carrier, the JFK. I don't know if you heard, but our aircraft carriers have been busy recently.

That one will be busy for decades to come, ensuring America is free and safe and powerful. And now here we are at Newport News shipyard, at the USS Oklahoma. And I'm here on behalf of the president, who has from his first day in office operated on a few core principles, at the baseline, pure, unadulterated common sense. First, that a leader's primary duty is to put America and Americans first. Second, that the surest and only real path to peace is through strength.

We're in the strength business. You are in the strength business. And third, that a nation that cannot build things a nation that can't create its own tools or its own defenses or its own future is a nation that is in managed decline. President Donald J. Trump looked at that managed decline, a decline that had been accepted by elites in both parties and he rejected it and we fundamentally reject it. And in doing so, he has unleashed a great American revival, a reawakening of our industrial spirit and our national confidence, a new golden age for America that you are all a part of building.

As his Secretary of War, my mission is to execute President Trump's vision within our armed forces and ignite that revival. The mission has three core components, three pillars upon which we are building our national security. It's actually quite simple. First, we're reviving the warrior ethos inside our fighting force, reminding our warriors and our uniformed military that their sole purpose is to be the most lethal fighting force on the planet.

So no more DEI, no more dudes in dresses, no more distractions. We're done with that shit. It's just standards, accountability, readiness, training, discipline and lethality, back to basics across the department, which is what our warriors really want.

Second, we must and we are rebuilding our military with the best equipment, training and leadership to ensure our warfighters are never in a fair fight. And you've seen historic investments over a trillion in the last budget, you'll see even more and it isn't just in platforms, it is in people. And third, we're reestablishing deterrence that's so absolute and so unquestioned that our enemies will not dare to test us.

You see, under the previous administration, whether it was the debacle of the withdrawal in Afghanistan that cost American lives and smeared our reputation, whether it was the war unleashed in Israel after October 7th by Hamas or the war in Ukraine that never would have started under President Trump, the world started wondering whether America really was strong and whether America really could lead.

Well, that's over now, just ask the Houthis and our ships that now sail freely. Imagine that, under the previous administration, when our ships got shot at, we just said, I guess we have to deal with it. All the way back to Thomas Jefferson, we said, you're not shooting at our ships and if you do, you may not see tomorrow.

Well, we did that with the Houthis and our ships now sail freely all around the world without being attacked and without being shot at. That's peace through strength. Same with Midnight Hammer, where our B-2s flew 37 hours down and back and were never seen by the Iranians, and dropped 14 precision munitions exactly where they were supposed to drop, obliterating Iran's nuclear capabilities, not to mention the Tomahawks that came off of a beautiful submarine, and delivered that decisive blow as well on one of the nuclear facilities.

Deterrence is back. Not to mention drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, carrying drugs headed to the United States to poison the American people. We're not playing the whole catch and release game anymore. These are foreign terrorist organizations, the al-Qaida of our hemisphere, and we will sink every drug boat headed in our direction, reestablishing deterrence.

Our southern border, which allowed an invasion of people we didn't know who they were under the previous administration, seven months of zero crossings at our border, a country that isn't sovereign is not a country, reestablishing deterrence. And then we saw three nights ago in downtown Caracas in Venezuela, as nearly 200 of our greatest Americans went downtown in Caracas. Seems those Russian air defenses didn't quite work so well, did they?

Downtown Caracas and grabbed an indicted individual wanted by American justice in support of law enforcement without a single American killed, reestablishing deterrence. Because of President Trump's leadership, the world is taking notice. They're noticing American power. They're noticing American strength.

They're noticing American clarity and leadership, and you are at the core of ensuring that happens. Everything we're doing is aimed at those goals and that's why just before Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, I had the privilege of joining President Trump and the Secretary of the Navy for a historic announcement, the creation of the Golden Fleet.

The Golden Fleet is the Navy's investment to revitalize America's maritime industrial base and rapidly build and sustain the fleet and fundamentally change how we do business and maintain military supremacy. This new battle fleet anchored by a new generation of Trump-class battleships is a declaration to the world that our command of the seas is and will remain non-negotiable.

That announcement, along with the incredible vital work being done right here, is a generational commitment to American sea power. This investment in both the visible might of battleships and the stealthy lethality of the submarines built in this very yard is a direct investment in peace through strength.

It's an investment in the future fight, ensuring that America has the tools to win any conflict, anywhere, any time. And as I mentioned, as was mentioned today marks the first stop on a month-long Arsenal of Freedom tour from the War Department. And on this tour, we'll be traveling from the shipyards of the coast to the factories of the heartland to see the work being done by the military and our partners in American manufacturing to usher in a new golden age of peace through strength, a revival of our industrial base, all American-made by the best Americans.

We know that our treasured freedoms are only as secure as our arsenal is strong and nothing is more important than securing that freedom. So I'm here to thank you, the men and women assembled here today and those you represent, who are designing and constructing our weapons of war that my children and yours, my grandchildren and yours, will rely upon to ensure the peace stability and security of the United States.

You are standing shoulder to shoulder with the warfighters of the War Department. Allow me to for a moment to speak plainly about the threats to that freedom. We find ourselves in a world of growing threats, a world the comfortable elites in Washington refused to acknowledge for far too long. For decades, a bipartisan consensus sold this country a dangerous fantasy.

They told us that history was over, that the rise of peer competitors was a relic of the past and that we could afford to trade out our industrial might, our factories, our jobs — foolishness, recklessness, not anymore, not under President Trump.

While we were policing the world nation building and deserts and debating pronouns at the Pentagon, our primary competitors, like the Chinese Communist Party, did something very different. They studied us, they learned from our triumphs and our mistakes and then they started to build as well.

And they've undertaken some of the most rapid, ambitious and breathtaking naval buildup since World War II. While we decommissioned ships, they launched many of them. While some of our shipyards did not meet the demands of our country, they expanded at a rapid pace, but not anymore. While we seek good relations with China and the rest of the world, we are also ready.

President Donald Trump understands that the American people are ready and they deserve a new golden age. We recognize that we are in a new era of great power competition, a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength and we will rise to meet that challenge. That is why we proudly call ourselves the Department of War, not the Department of Defense, not because we seek war, but because we truly understand that in order to ensure peace, you need to be prepared to deter war and if necessary, decisively win it.

Our purpose is not to be reactive but to be dominant, so that no enemy, any enemy will ever attempt to challenge the United States of America. Now this revival is not a matter of speeches or policy papers or think tanks and white papers in Washington DC, this is a matter of action. Across the entire War Department, we are developing new operational concepts. We're deploying cutting-edge technologies at a speed that's not been seen in generations.

And we're making historic multigenerational investments in the capabilities that we will need to dominate the future fight, at a level of urgency that must match the urgency of the moment. Most importantly, we're getting these capabilities in the hands of our warfighters faster than we ever have since World War II.

Under President Trump, we are systemically dismantling the bloated risk-averse and self-serving bureaucracy that has stifled innovation for decades. We're streamlining our requirements and acquisition process, cutting through red tape. This is not the same old reform that is always talked about in Washington, but instead, it's an overhaul.

It's revolutionary. It is a renaissance of American manufacturing. I've made it crystal clear to the entire defense industry, which I didn't come from and I didn't work for, so I don't give a damn who wins. I just want the best. We've been clear, the era of rewarding delays and cost overruns is over. The days of cost plus contracts for programs that are years behind schedule are finished.

We will no longer give longer, larger — we will, excuse me, give longer, larger, more predictable contracts to companies that deliver on time and on budget, companies that invest in their people, that invest in more capability and more capacity, not companies that invest in stock buybacks or CEO salaries or more dividends.

For those who can't adapt, who are too comfortable with the old slow ways of doing business, we wish them well in their other future endeavors, because we will find new partners who will adapt, who will invest, who will take care of their people, who will move at speed and at scale. We will reward that speed, that scale, that innovation and that performance. We're not rewarding process, paperwork or just the C-suite.

This submarine behind me and the many more that will follow it is an embodiment of our commitment to and investment in the security of the American people, but it also represents something more profound. It represents national confidence, confidence in American shipbuilding, confidence in our industrial discipline and confidence in the United States' Navy's ability to deliver the combat power needed in the future fight.

The work you do here every single day is the leading edge of that national restoration. You are proving to the world and more important to — more importantly to ourselves, that it can be done, that history is not over, that we build and that we invest.

The media should take a long look at this vessel, the USS Oklahoma. This Virginia-class submarine is a paragon of American engineering and fighting spirit. It is the apex predator of the undersea domain and the most advanced and lethal submarine ever built. As our president says, and he's right, we're 20 years ahead of anybody else in this domain.

It is a strategic advantage that creates dilemmas on a daily basis for our adversaries all around the globe. It's a silent hunter that can operate with stealth in the most contested, dangerous waters on the planet. It can gather intelligence that no satellite can ever hope to see. That's what reestablishing deterrence looks like, and it's how we keep the peace in a dangerous world.

Let there be no mistake, under President Trump, the United States is serious about the command of our seas and about keeping the world's vital shipping lanes open. A larger, more modern and more lethal fleet from the new battleships of the Golden Fleet to the advanced submarines you build right here, will provide that undeniable deterrent.

It will ensure that America's Navy moves freely and uncontested today, tomorrow and long into the future. But all of the strategies from the Pentagon, all the funding from Congress and all the designs from our brightest engineers are ultimately meaningless without the people on this floor. The welders, the electricians, the pipefitters, the steamfitters, the engineers, the planners, the skilled tradesmen of Huntington Ingalls, you are the engine of the arsenal of freedom, patriots, all of you.

Our warfighters cannot win without you. We are in this fight together shoulder to shoulder. That's why we launched the Arsenal of Freedom Tours to ensure the workers across America understand how committed we are to you and how reliant we are on your ability to deliver.

It's a beautiful codependence, actually. There is an unbreakable line tying the wrench in your hand to the safety and survival of a 22 year old American sailor patrolling the depths of the Pacific. The quality of your work, your unwavering commitment to excellence, your speed, your patriotism itself, you give our warriors the decisive edge.

Yours is a high calling. You are building a shield for our nation, bolt by bolt and weld after weld. In a culture that too often celebrates the shallow, the virtual and the superficial, you are engaged in something real, something tangible, something lasting. Your workmanship is and should be celebrated. There is an inherent dignity involved in crafting useful, powerful and lethal things.

I mean, there's a reason Jesus was a carpenter, not a politician, right? There's something about building, something about building in America. We build better, stronger, more capable and we will build more and faster, because we've done it before and we're going to do it again. And that's why this administration and this department is fighting for you, your way of life and the renaissance of manufacturing in this country.

We're holding your leadership accountable. We're holding your leadership feet to the fire. Their jobs are on the line to ensure that you can deliver what America needs, that your craftsmanship is unleashed, that you are taken care of, that you are paid properly, that your work is done safely, that we can move at speed and at scale.

Because when our workers succeed, our country succeeds and a nation that builds is a nation that wins, and our president is a builder, and that's why we will win. So to all of you here today from the newest apprentice to the most experienced master shipbuilder and to our sailors who work with them, again back to where I started, thank you.

I want you to know that whether you're wearing a uniform, coveralls or a suit, the work you're doing is important. It's patriotic and essential to our nation. It is a noble calling in a world that has forgotten what nobility looks like. You know, I used some words when I spoke after the raid a couple of days ago that feel outdated to some, but they fit perfect for our warfighters, guts, grit, gallantry and glory. May we revive those words. May we live them out. No matter how small the task or how big the task, simple or mundane the task or complex the task, every aspect of what had to come together to make that mission successful was an ingredient to the kind of guts, grit, gallantry and glory that our warriors embody and you contribute to that.

Be proud of what you do here. Be proud of the incredible vessels that you bring to life. They are the guarantees of freedom, the guardians of our peace, a message to the entire world that you should never ever bet against America. And know that we have your back as you move faster on time and on budget, investing in your plants and in your people.

We have a lot left to accomplish on behalf of the warfighters and we look forward to continuing to do it. It's the honor of a lifetime. I serve to serve. My job is to make your job easier. That's why our ear is to the ground everywhere we go, what can we do to make you more useful in how you operate, because together we will rebuild our military.

We will restore our industrial might and secure peace for generations to come. We will build the arsenal of freedom. God bless you, God bless our Navy and God bless our great Republic. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

9. Russia Once Offered U.S. Control of Venezuela for Free Rein in Ukraine

Summary:

The article recalls Fiona Hill’s 2019 congressional testimony that Moscow floated an informal bargain: Washington could have latitude in Venezuela if Russia got a free hand in Ukraine. Hill said she went to Moscow to reject the idea. With Maduro now removed after U.S. intervention, the memory resurfaces because Russia’s response is calibrated. Officially it condemns the operation as illegal, but it prioritizes Ukraine talks and avoids rupturing relations with Washington. Some Russian voices even welcome the precedent of “might makes right,” with Medvedev arguing it weakens U.S. moral standing to criticize Russia.

Comment: If great powers normalize “sphere-for-sphere” bargains, what becomes the enforceable meaning of sovereignty for mid-sized states caught between them? What happens to our silk web of friends, partners, and allies?

Russia Once Offered U.S. Control of Venezuela for Free Rein in Ukraine

NY Times · Neil MacFarquhar · January 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/world/americas/russia-us-venezuela-ukraine.html

The exchange offer was recounted at the time in congressional testimony by Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.

Listen to this article · 2:50 min Learn more

In 2019, Fiona Hill told a Congressional hearing that the Russians “were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine.”Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Jan. 5, 2026Updated 5:53 p.m. ET

Moscow’s mixed reaction to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela has stirred memories of a barter reportedly offered by Russia seven years ago, during another moment of heightened tension between Washington and Caracas.

At the time, Russia signaled that it was willing to allow the United States to act as it pleased in Venezuela, in exchange for Washington giving the Kremlin a free hand in Ukraine, according to Congressional testimony from Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.

The Russians “were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” Ms. Hill told a Congressional hearing in October 2019, more than two years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The proposals were informal, through commentators and newspaper articles, she said, but the gist was that if the United States wanted the freedom to maintain a sphere of influence over neighboring countries, then it ought to agree to Russia doing the same.

“You want us out of your backyard,” said Ms. Hill in summarizing the Russian position. “We, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.”

Ms. Hill said that she went to Moscow in person to reject the idea. The proposal came amid tensions between Caracas and Washington that prompted Moscow to deploy 100 military personnel and new weapons to shore up the rule of President Nicolás Maduro.

Mr. Maduro’s removal marks the latest blow to a regime supported by Moscow, with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria toppled a little over a year ago.

Officially, the Russian foreign ministry condemned the move as a violation of international law. But the main Russian priority is the war in Ukraine, where the Trump administration is trying to negotiate peace. The Kremlin is trying to strike a difficult balance, neither making any major concessions on Ukraine nor alienating the White House.

Some senior Russian officials and commentators have expressed satisfaction that the United States seemed to be ditching international law in exchange for a policy of “might makes right,” an attitude hearkening back to an imperial era, more than a century ago, that both President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have looked on fondly.

“The law of the strongest is clearly stronger than ordinary justice,” Dmitri Medvedev, the formerly liberal president of Russia turned war hawk wrote on social media, while adding in an interview with the official Tass news agency that Washington now has “no grounds, even formally, to reproach our country.”

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.

NY Times · Neil MacFarquhar · January 5, 2026

10. In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

Summary:

Ukraine’s drone war is shifting from pilot-guided strikes to partial autonomy. Jamming and scale pressures push engineers to build systems that can lock onto targets, navigate without GPS, and finish attacks after links drop. The NYT describes Bumblebee, tied to an Eric Schmidt venture, plus Ukrainian firms like NORDA and Sine Engineering that add terminal guidance and swarm coordination. Russia is studying downed drones and warning of their potential. Advocates urge “humans in the loop,” yet some tools already select and pursue targets with limited oversight. The battlefield is becoming a live-fire lab for killer robotics with global spillover risks.

Comment: A very long read. Please go to the website to view this in proper format. This raises so many questions.

If autonomy solves jamming, does it also remove the last meaningful brake on escalation?

When “human in the loop” becomes “human who clicked once,” where does accountability actually sit?

Once this software is cheap, copied, and portable, who keeps it off city streets and out of terror hands?

In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

In the past year, drone warfare in Ukraine has undergone a chilling transformation.

Most drones require a human pilot. But some new Ukrainian drones, once locked on a target, can use A.I. to chase and strike it — with no further human involvement.

This is the story of how the battlefield became the birthplace of a powerful new weapon.

By C.J. Chivers

This story was reported over the course of 18 months and multiple trips to Ukraine.

Published Dec. 31, 2025

Updated Jan. 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drones-war-russia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CVA.CEIw.gSOY2rDt8S4_&smid=url-share

On a warm morning a few months ago, Lipa, a Ukrainian drone pilot, flew a small gray quadcopter over the ravaged fields near Borysivka, a tiny occupied village abutting the Russian border. A surveillance drone had spotted signs that an enemy drone team had moved into abandoned warehouses at the village’s edge. Lipa and his navigator, Bober, intended to kill the team or drive it off.

Another pilot had twice tried hitting the place with standard kamikaze quadcopters, which are susceptible to radio-wave jamming that can disrupt the communication link between pilot and drone, causing weapons to crash. Russian jammers stopped them. Lipa had been assigned the third try but this time with a Bumblebee, an unusual drone provided by a secretive venture led by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google and one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Bober sat beside Lipa as he oriented for an attack run. From high over Borysivka, one of the Bumblebee’s two airborne cameras focused on a particular building’s eastern side. Bober checked the imagery, then a digital map, and agreed: They had found the target. “Locked in,” Lipa said.

With his right hand, Lipa toggled a switch, unleashing the drone from human control. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Bumblebee swept down without further external guidance. As it descended, it lost signal connection with Lipa and Bober. This did not matter: It continued its attack free of their command. Its sensors and software remained focused on the building and adjusted heading and speed independently.

Another drone livestreamed the result: The Bumblebee smacked into an exterior wall and exploded. Whether Russian soldiers were harmed was unclear, but a semiautonomous drone had hit where human-piloted drones missed, rendering the position untenable. “They will change their location now,” Lipa said. (Per Ukrainian security rules, soldiers are referred to by their first name or call sign.)

Throughout 2025 in the war between Russia and Ukraine, in largely unseen and unheralded moments like the warehouse strike in Borysivka, the era of killer robots has begun to take shape on the battlefield. Across the roughly 800-mile front and over the airspace of both nations, drones with newly developed autonomous features are now in daily combat use. By last spring, Bumblebees launched from Ukrainian positions had carried out more than 1,000 combat flights against Russian targets, according to a manufacturer’s pamphlet extolling the weapon’s capabilities. Pilots say they have flown thousands more since.

Bumblebee’s introduction raised immediate alarms in the Kremlin’s military circles, according to two Russian technical intelligence reports. One, based on dissection of a damaged Bumblebee collected along the front, described a mystery drone with chipsets and a motherboard “of the highest quality, matching the level of the world’s leading microelectronics manufacturers.” The report noted the sort of deficiencies expected of a prototype but ended with an ominous forecast: “Despite current limitations,” it declared, “the technology will demonstrate its effectiveness” and its range of uses “will continue to expand.”

That conclusion was prescient but understated, for the simple reason that Bumblebees hardly fly alone. Under the pressures of invasion, Ukraine has become a fast-feedback, live-fire test range in which arms manufacturers, governments, venture capitalists, frontline units and coders and engineers from around the West collaborate to produce weapons that automate parts of the conventional military kill chain. Equipped with onboard proprietary software trained on large data sets, and often run on off-the-shelf microcomputers like Raspberry Pi, drones with autonomous capabilities are now part of the war’s bloody and destructive routine.

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In repeated visits to arms manufacturers, test ranges and frontline units over 18 months, I observed their development firsthand. Functions now performed autonomously include: pilotless takeoff or hovering, geolocation, navigation to areas of attack, as well as target recognition, tracking and pursuit — up to and including terminal strike, the lethal endpoint of the journey. Software designers have also networked multiple drones into a shared app that allows for flight control to be passed between human pilots or for drones to be organized into tightly sequenced attacks — a step toward computer-managed swarms. Weapons with these capabilities are in the hands of ground brigades as well as air defense, intelligence and deep-strike units.

Image

Bumblebee attack drones at a combat testing range outside Kharkiv, Ukraine.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Drones under full human control remain far more abundant than their semiautonomous siblings. They cause most battlefield wounds. But unmanned weapons are crossing into a new frontier. And while no publicly known drone in the war automates all steps of a combat mission into a single weapon, some designers have put sequential steps under the control of artificial intelligence. “Any tactical equation that has a person in it could have A.I.,” said the founder of X-Drone, a Ukrainian company that has trained software for drones to hunt for and identify a stationary target, like an oil-storage tank, and then hit it without a pilot at the controls. (The founder asked that his name be withheld for security reasons.)

The Kremlin’s forces are also adopting A.I.-enhanced weapons, according to examinations of downed Russian drones by Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-investigation firm. With both sides investing, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, said A.I.-powered drones are at the center of a new arms race. Ukraine’s defenders must field them in large numbers quickly, he said, or risk defeat. “We are trying to stimulate development of every stage of autonomy,” he said. “We need to develop and buy more autonomous drones.”

To be sure, the familiar weapons of modern battlefields, all under human control, have caused immeasurable harm to generations of soldiers and civilians. Even weapons celebrated by generals and pundits as astonishingly precise, like GPS-guided missiles or laser-guided bombs, have often struck the wrong places, killing innocents, often without accountability. No golden age is being left behind. Rather, semiautonomous drones compound existing perils and present new threats. Peter Asaro, vice chair of the Stop Killer Robots Campaign and a philosopher and an associate professor at the New School, warned of rising dangers as weapons enter unmapped practical and ethical terrain. “The development of increasing autonomy in drones raises serious questions about human rights and the protection of civilians in armed conflict,” he said. “The capacity to autonomously select targets is a moral line that should not be crossed.”

The concept of a killer robot is vague and prone to hype, invoking T-800 of “The Terminator,” an adaptive mobile killing machine deployed by an artificial superintelligence, Skynet, that perceives humanity as a threat. Nothing close exists in Ukraine. “Everybody thinks, Oh, you are making Skynet,” said a captain responsible for integrating new technology into the 13th Khartia Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, one of the country’s most sophisticated units, in which Lipa and Bober serve. “No, the technology is interesting. But it’s a first step and there are many more steps.”

The captain and other technicians working with A.I.-enhanced weapons said they tend to be brittle, limited in function and less accurate than weapons under skilled human control. Many have a short battery life and brief flight times. Autonomous weapons with sustained endurance, high flexibility and the ability to discern, identify, rank and pursue multiple categories of targets independent of human action have yet to appear, and they would require, the captain said, “a waterfall of money” plus much imagination and time. “It’s like the staircase of the Empire State Building,” he said. “That’s how many steps there are, and we are inside the building but only on the first floor.”

As a safeguard against A.I.-powered weapons slipping the leash, humanitarians and many technologists have long advocated keeping “humans in the loop,” shorthand for preventing weapons from making homicidal decisions alone. By this thinking, a trained human must assess and approve all targets, as Lipa and Bober did, ideally with the power to abort an individual strike and a kill switch to shut an entire system down. Strong guardrails, the argument goes, are necessary for accountability, compliance with laws of armed conflict, legitimacy around military action and, ultimately, for human security.

Schmidt has emphasized the necessity of human oversight. But at the end of a flight, some semiautonomous weapons in Ukraine can already identify targets without human involvement, and many Ukrainian-made systems with human override are inexpensive and could be copied and modified by talented coders anywhere. Some of those designing A.I.-enhanced weapons, who consider their development necessary for Ukraine’s defense, confess to unease about the technology that they themselves conjure to form. “I think we created the monster,” said Nazar Bigun, a young physicist writing terminal-attack software. “And I’m not sure where it’s going to go.”

The Dawn of Autonomous Attack

Bigun’s own journey exemplifies how the duration and particulars of the war incentivized the creation of semiautonomous weapons. When Russia rolled mechanized divisions over Ukraine’s border in 2022, Bigun was leading a team of software engineers at a German tech start-up. In early 2023, he founded a volunteer initiative for the military that eventually manufactured 200 first-person-view (F.P.V.) quadcopters a month. It was a significant contribution to Ukraine’s war effort at a time when low-cost and explosive-laden hobbyist drones, not yet widely recognized as the transformative weapons they are, remained in short supply. His focus might have remained there. But as he and his peers heard from frontline drone pilots, they became concerned about declining success rates of kamikaze drones in the face of defensive adaptations, and they joined the search for solutions.

The problems were many. As more drones took flight, both sides developed physical and electronic countermeasures. Soldiers erected poles and strung mesh to snag drones from the air, and they covered the turrets and hulls of military vehicles with protective netting, grates or welded cages. Among the most frustrating countermeasures were jammers that flooded the operating frequencies used for flight control and video links, generating electronic noise that reduced signal clarity in pilot-to-drone connections. The systems became standard around high-value targets, including command bunkers and artillery positions. They also appeared on expensive mobile equipment, like air-defense systems, multiple-rocket launchers and tanks.

Image

A Ukrainian military vehicle traveling under a web of netting meant to protect against drone attacks near the frontline city Pokrovsk.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

This complex puzzle led to the creation of drones that fly on fiber-optic cables, one solution that has appeared on the battlefield. It also fueled Bigun’s interest in a form of computer-enabled attack, known as last-mile autonomous targeting, in which computer vision and autonomous flight control would guide drones through the final stage of attack without radio-signal inputs from a pilot. Such systems promised another benefit as well: They would increase the efficacy of strikes at longer range and over the radio horizon, when terrain or the Earth’s curvature interfere with a steady radio signal.

In theory, the technical remedy was simple. When pilots anticipated a break in communications, they could pass flight control to an automated substitute — a powerful chipset and extensively trained software — that would complete the mission. With this tech coupled to onboard sensors and a camera, the pilot could lock the mini-aircraft on a target and release the drone to strike alone. The company Bigun co-founded in 2024, NORDA Dynamics, did not manufacture drones, so it set to work creating an aftermarket component to attach to other manufacturers’ weapons. With it, a pilot would still fly the drone from launch until it neared a target. Then the pilot would have the option of autonomous attack.

Learning to Live With A.I.

The Rise of the Swarm

The Ukrainian military’s hard pivot to drone warfare helped save the nation. For almost four years, while fielding the world’s first armed force to reorganize around unmanned weapons, it blunted the ground assaults of Russia’s far larger military. It continues to do so even as the Kremlin replenishes its thinned divisions, drawing from oil-state revenue and a population at least four times the size of Ukraine’s.

But the weapon has a limit. Almost all short-range kamikaze drones — a primary means of stopping advancing Russian soldiers — are flown by individual pilots, one at a time. Each is a vicious aerial acrobat: From airspeeds up to 70 miles an hour, small multicopters can stop, hover, turn and fly off in new directions for minutes on end, traits empowering pilots to find, chase and kill their human victims with chilling efficacy. And yet during sustained Russian attacks, typical frontline conditions can force drone teams to fight slowly. The pace is set by the duration between each drone’s launch and final approach, which at common standoff distances often stretches past 20 minutes. When Russian soldiers infiltrate in large numbers, single-drone strike sequences can feel slow and insufficient. Between sorties, enemies escape.

Given the enduring challenge of massing drone firepower, designers of autonomous combat-drone technology have sought to assemble drones into swarms, the allure of which is obvious to a nation under attack. Even small swarms would allow pilots to concentrate multiple weapons in punishing rapid-fire strikes, stiffening defenses and raising the prospect of overwhelming machine-only attacks.

Not long after Janusz’s terminal-attack flights, technicians from another Ukrainian company, Sine Engineering, gathered near a rural village to train drone pilots on its entrant to the swarm-tech field, called Pasika, the Ukrainian word for apiary. The heart of Pasika’s hardware is its radio modems — small frequency-hopping transceivers that act as beacons for flying drones. In flight, each quadcopter’s altitude and location update several times a second by measuring the differences in arrival times of radio signals from several known positions. Pasika software also provides automated flight control. At its current stage of development, a sole pilot can manage dozens of drones through autonomous launch, navigation and hovering — a pre-attack phase during which massed drones loiter pending instructions.

During a multiday training session for quadcopter teams fresh from frontline duty, Pavlo, a former infantryman who serves as Sine Engineering’s liaison to combat brigades, coached pilots as they practiced. The tech was futuristic but the scene was characteristically rural Ukrainian. The test range, hectares of hayfield and sunflower, was not secured behind fences or watched over by control towers. The students, including pilots from Kraken 1654 Unmanned Systems Regiment of the Third Army Corps and Samosud Team, a drone unit of the 11th National Guard Brigade, worked in casual clothes and colorful T-shirts, eating artisanal pizzas as they tinkered. A small horse stood tethered to a stake beside a wooden cart, chewing grass into a flat circle.

Via an app, the pilots took turns ordering drones to launch and navigate to a point on the map. Unaided by human hand, quadcopters rose in the air and sped off over the countryside to loiter together about a mile away. Tablet screens revealed their progress. A video feed from each quadcopter showed rolling cropland below. The pilots kept their hands off the controls. A rusty tractor puttered past.

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Soldiers attending training with Sine Engineering, a Ukrainian defense-tech company. Sine’s product, Pasika, lets a single operator manage several drones at a time, hitting targets in quick-succession “swarm attacks.”Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

For a final exercise, a pilot with the call sign Kara directed her team to gather two drones autonomously over an opposite field. Another team flew three more. Once the drones reached their loitering point, Kara said, pilots would take control and fly them manually toward targets to practice a massed attack.

Pasika also allows pilots on the app to exchange control of individual drones among themselves. In this way, any pilot could use them to attack across a short distance with brief intervals between strikes. The concept could be extended further. With Pasika or a similar system, quadcopters stockpiled in boxes near a front could be commanded by a sole operator, whether A.I. or human, creating a dense swarm of drones to face ground attacks without delay.

Multiplying a sole soldier’s combat power in these ways made sense to Kara, whose brother, husband and husband’s twin brother all rose to resist the Russian invasion. Ukraine grants humanitarian discharges to siblings of service members killed in action, and when her brother-in-law was killed, her husband transferred to the reserve. Upon his return home, Kara enlisted and became a drone pilot. Her call sign means retribution.

Pavlo, too, had his motivations. In summer 2022, he was almost killed by conventional military incompetence when his commander gathered more than 300 soldiers in buildings in Apostolove, a city north of Crimea. Dense public garrisoning offers rich targets for long-range weapons, which arrived as a barrage of S-300 missiles. Pavlo was inside a middle school when the first missile exploded in the yard. He huddled with others under a stairwell. The next missile hit the school squarely, leaving him pinned under rubble as yet another roared in and exploded. At least four peers in the stairwell died. Pavlo suffered burns on his head, torso and arms. After convalescing, he trained as a drone pilot and began flying reconnaissance missions behind Russian lines. Experience told him Ukraine needed high-tech solutions to secure its future. “It woke something in me,” he said, of nearly dying because of an old-school infantry commander’s lazy mistake. “An instinct for survival on a more sophisticated level.”

Can A.I. Replace GPS?

In late 2023, Brian Streem, the founder of a niche drone-cinematography business, was meeting with a Latvian company about putting a visual navigation system on long-range drones when one of his hosts suggested he bring his ideas to Ukraine. Deep-strike drones, essentially slow-flying cruise missiles that can travel hundreds of miles, require precise navigation to move through foreign airspace for hours, and to follow zigzag routes that change altitude frequently to evade air defenses. Ukraine had high hopes for its growing deep-strike arsenal to target Russian fuel and arms depots. But Russia had shut down GPS over the front and its western territory. Vaunted GPS-reliant systems were failing. The Latvian company thought Streem had a solution.

Streem was new to the arms business, and his journey had been anything but direct. A native of Bayside, Queens, he graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2010 and started producing independent films and commercials. His work indulged a fascination for difficult photographic challenges, which led him to drones and the creation of a company, Aerobo, that shot aerial footage for music videos and Hollywood productions, including “A Quiet Place,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “True Detective.”

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Brian Streem, the founder of Vermeer, a company that develops visual positioning systems (V.P.S.) that enable drones to navigate without GPS assistance.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Aerobo’s services were in demand. Streem might easily have settled in, but he found working in Hollywood to be stressful and sometimes stultifying. Every shoot had to be both technically perfect and aesthetically pleasing, even beautiful. “If you think military drone missions are hard,” he says, “try making Steven Spielberg happy.” Moreover, the available tech, though expensive, felt janky and resistant to graceful use. Quadcopters were just beginning to enter markets, and the larger drones Aerobo flew required at least two people — a pilot controlling the airframe and an operator moving a camera system on a gimbal, “in this kind of dance,” Streem said. Frustrated with the equipment and unsure how to scale up his business, he shuttered Aerobo in 2018, renamed the company Vermeer and started developing software to make drone cinematography more intuitive.

Revenue dried up. In 2019, feeling desperate, he attended an investor speed-dating seminar in Buffalo and sat across from Warren Katz, an entrepreneur who directed a U.S. Air Force start-up accelerator that funded military tech. Streem explained what he was working on. Katz suggested that the Air Force “would be very interested in what you’re doing.” Streem was astonished. He was not a weapons designer; one of his last professional collaborations was a music video by the rapper Cardi B. “If you’re coming to me for help,” he said, “we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Well,” Katz said, “you might be surprised.”

Katz urged him to apply to a program for start-ups of Air Force interest. Streem hastily filled out forms. A month later, Vermeer was selected. Streem moved to Boston, began meeting officials from the Pentagon and was at once startled and pulled in. “I realized, OK, I don’t know much about A.I.,” he said. “But as I am talking to these people, I’m kind of thinking to myself, I don’t think they know much about A.I., either.”

Streem is amiable, persistent and energized by a seemingly instinctual inclination for sales. When Covid closed offices, he retreated to a lakeside cabin and created an internet-scraping tool that yielded the email addresses of more than 50,000 military officers. From social isolation, Streem started writing them to discuss what they saw as the military’s most pressing technical challenges. Answers clustered around reliance on GPS. Entire arsenals of American military equipment, he heard, depended on a satellite navigation system that a sophisticated enemy could disable. The more he learned, the more his ideas clicked into place: I may know how to solve these people’s problems, he thought.

His idea was straightforward. He would program autopilot software to process visual information from multiple cameras, compare it with onboard three-dimensional terrain maps, then triangulate to fix a weapon’s location. Called a visual positioning system, or V.P.S., the software could be loaded onto any number of flying platforms, equipping them to navigate over terrain with no satellite link at all. It could not be jammed or spoofed, because it would neither emit nor receive a signal.

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V.P.S. units designed by Vermeer sitting in storage. The system uses cameras to analyze an environment and match it to 3-D maps, determining precise locations even when satellite signals are jammed or unavailable.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

In early 2024, Streem rode a train from Warsaw to Kyiv and messaged Ukrainian officials on LinkedIn, introducing himself and his work. Soon he was invited to the Cabinet of Ministers building, where he made his way past the sandbagged entrance, attended an impromptu birthday party for a government employee and was led into a room with an official who wanted to put Vermeer’s modules on deep-strike drones. The building’s power was out. The office was dark. Ukraine was short on money, soldiers and time. The official did not mince words. “He essentially had a big map of Russia and Ukraine behind him, and immediately he started telling me about targets we’re going to hit,” Streem said.

Streem had talked his way into Ukraine’s war. Over the next year, he met drone manufacturers around the country, tested prototypes on various drones and released the VPS-212, a roughly one-pound box with two cameras and a minicomputer. Assembled in an office beside a bagel shop in Brooklyn, the module can fix its location at speeds up to 218 m.p.h. — not fast enough for a proper cruise missile, but sufficient for most deep-strike drones. By summer 2025, Vermeer’s technicians were helping soldiers attach them to drones flown by several units that attack strategic targets in Russia. For security reasons, Vermeer does not publicly discuss specific strikes, but Streem and a Vermeer employee in Ukraine said V.P.S. modules had guided drones to verified hits.

With these results, Vermeer emerged as a winner in the scrum for contracts and funding, raising $12 million in a recent round that included the venture capital firm Draper Associates. In 2025, it attracted renewed attention from the Pentagon, which proposed attaching Vermeer’s V.P.S. to new fleets of deep-strike drones of its own. The U.S. Air Force also contracted the company to develop a similar system that would mount atop drones to look skyward and navigate celestially, like an A.I.-enabled sextant for precision flight above clouds or over water.

By then, Streem was immersed in his new line of work. Late in 2025, he sent me a tongue-in-cheek text about his passage from filmmaker to manufacturer of self-navigating camera modules that steer high-explosive payloads into Russia. “Stream reclined in his chair, vapor from his vape pen curling lazily between his fingers, as if the war beyond the walls were a distant rumor rather than the air he breathed,” the text read. The prose, he said, had been generated by A.I. It misspelled his name.

The Great Convergence

Few people could be as conversant in the promises and the perils of A.I.-enhanced weapons as Eric Schmidt, who served as chairman of the U.S. Defense Innovation Board from 2016 to 2020 and led the bipartisan National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2018 to 2021. Since working with Ukraine, he has been mostly tight-lipped about his wartime ventures, which have operated under multiple names, including White Stork, Project Eagle and Swift Beat. Through a public-relations firm, he declined to respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. But in a talk at Stanford in 2024 he called himself “a licensed arms dealer.” And by that fall, his operation had hired former Ukrainian soldiers to meet with active drone teams near Kyiv and train them on semiautonomous weapons to take to the front.

Ukrainian units vary widely in quality, and Schmidt’s team appears to have chosen carefully. Those collaborating with his operation are among Ukraine’s best managed, with reputations for innovation, battlefield savvy and sustained success against much larger Russian forces. Among them are the Khartia Brigade, which formed in 2022 to defend Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and grew into a disciplined, tech-centric battlefield force. With an extensive fleet of aerial and ground drones, modern command posts and an ethos of data-driven decision-making, Khartia operates from hiding in the city and countryside. Its officers track Russian actions with networked ground cameras and sensors on the battlefield and reconnaissance drones in the air. The raw information is run through software producing outputs that resemble, its analysts say, “Moneyball” goes to war.

“We collect a lot of statistics and data,” said Col. Daniel Kitone, the brigade commander. “In conditions where resources are limited, we are providing for efficiency, and sometimes statistics give interesting answers that drive operations.” Rapid processing of multiple forms of surveillance data, the brigade’s officers say, can illuminate patterns, like recurring times when Russian troops resupply positions. They then use these insights to synchronize strike-drone flights with anticipated Russian movement, hoping to catch targets in the open.

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Khartia Brigade soldiers on shift in an underground command center in northeastern Ukraine.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Bumblebee’s combat trials began with multiple brigades last winter. One test pilot, who flew the drone near Kupiansk in December 2024, said his team put the new quadcopters through progressively harder tests against Russian positions and vehicles, with the manufacturer’s engineers on call for technical assistance. “During this whole time, the product constantly improved,” the pilot said. “We constantly provided the developers with feedback: what works, what really does not work, which features are useful and which are not.” As with most A.I. products, more data can lead to smarter software. During Bumblebee’s quiet rollout, mission data from combat flights was logged and analyzed, several pilots said. Developers then pushed software updates to brigades that drone teams could download remotely.

One early attack hit the entrance to a root cellar where Russian soldiers sheltered. As Bumblebees evolved, pilots flew them further distances and against moving targets. In January 2025, an autonomous Bumblebee attack stopped a Russian logistics truck as it drove behind enemy lines, the test pilot said. In April, after more updates, Bumblebees flew autonomously against a Russian armored vehicle driving with a jammer. The vehicle was so covered with anti-drone protective measures that it resembled a porcupine. It absorbed the first strike and kept moving. A second Bumblebee hit immobilized it. This amounted to a milestone: A vehicle with all the protective steps Russia could muster had been removed from action.

Bumblebee’s entrance to the war had been shrouded in secrecy. But with strikes like that the hush could not last. Russia took note. Its soldiers outside Kupiansk and Kharkiv, where early Bumblebee sorties occurred, reported that these strange new drones seemed impervious to interference: They flew smoothly through jamming and kept racking up hits. The only sure way to stop them was to shoot them down.

Two days after the strike on the armored vehicle, the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, a Russian drone-manufacturing business outside Moscow, issued findings from its analysis of a downed Bumblebee recovered near the front. It nicknamed the quadcopter Marsianin, Russian for “Martian,” based on the assumption that the prototypes descended from NASA’s Ingenuity program, which developed a small autonomous helicopter that flew on Mars. The report’s author declared that Ukraine had fielded an A.I.-enhanced drone capable of “operating in total radio silence” while flying complex routes and maneuvers “completely independent of navigation systems” — or even a human pilot.

The following month, the Novorossiya Assistance Coordination Center, a Russian ultranationalist organization that provides training and equipment to Russian soldiers, published a second analysis, a 49-page report loaded with warnings. Through open-source sleuthing, its author had found a photo of a Bumblebee posted by a Reddit user who in late 2024 obtained a broken specimen from garbage discarded at a Michigan National Guard facility. With that evidence, the author, Aleksandr Lyubimov, who organizes combat-drone exhibitions in Russia, echoed the first analyst’s suspicion that the Bumblebee had some connection to the United States. He noted that it “poses a serious threat” and asserted, accurately, that “its current use does not yet reveal its full capabilities and is most likely of a combat testing nature.” Nonetheless, he added, “there are no effective countermeasures against it, and none are expected in the near future.”

The Bumblebee’s resistance to jamming, according to a sales pamphlet in limited circulation in Ukraine, was tied in part to “redundant comms,” radio-wave frequency hopping and navigation by visual inertial odometry — technical solutions to signal jamming. But what made the weapon remarkable was not any one autonomous feature. It was the convergence of several.

According to the pamphlet, which claimed an “over 70-percent direct-hit rate via autonomous terminal guidance,” Schmidt’s quadcopters are also capable of autonomous target recognition. By overlaying bright green squares on items of interest appearing in video feeds, pilots said, Bumblebee’s software highlights potential targets, including foot soldiers, bunkers, vehicles and other aerial drones, often before human pilots can spot them. The combination of features, they said, result in an autonomous attack capability more robust and reliable than others available to date.

Bumblebees can also be controlled over the internet, which Lipa did in the strike in Borysivka. This keeps pilots away from the front, and from many weapons that might counterattack. In theory, as long as a Bumblebee’s ground station maintains a stable Wi-Fi or broadband connection, a pilot can operate it from almost anywhere — a capability demonstrated this past summer when Schmidt visited Kyiv and observed a Khartia team flying a Bumblebee released by a ground crew outside Kharkiv. According to a review of footage and people familiar with the mission, the drone passed over the lines and hit a four-wheel-drive Russian military van, known as a bukhanka — from roughly 300 miles away.

A Billionaire’s Growing Fleet

The Bumblebee is not a one-off project. It’s part of an experimental pack. Schmidt’s operation has also supplied Ukrainian units with a medium-range fixed-wing strike drone with a two-meter wingspan, marketed under the name Hornet, according to another sales pamphlet from early 2025. Like Bumblebee, it has A.I.-powered target recognition and terminal-attack guidance, along with jam-resistant communication and navigation systems. The pamphlet advertised an 11-pound payload, a cruise speed of 62 m.p.h. and range exceeding 90 miles. “Our A.I.-powered platform processes battlefield data in real time, adapting to changing conditions without human intervention,” the pamphlet says. “Neutralize more targets at a fraction of legacy system costs. Deploy at scale to achieve overwhelming force multiplication against sophisticated threats.” The pamphlet claimed a “future monthly production” of more than 6,000 units.

Schmidt has also become an ally in Ukraine’s defense against Shaheds, the Iranian-designed long-range drones that pummel Ukrainian cities almost nightly. In July 2025, he appeared with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce a strategic partnership to provide Ukraine with A.I.-powered drones, with an emphasis on an interceptor system known as Merops. Ukraine was developing its own human-piloted anti-Shahed drones, and had some early successes. But Schmidt’s weapons, Ukrainian officials said, were more effective. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, showed videos of them striking Shaheds at high speed. Merops had a hit rate as high as 95 percent, he said. (After its combat trials in Ukraine, Merops is now being deployed on NATO’s eastern flank.)

Ukrainian pilots and officers say Schmidt’s products have shown more promise than most, though reviews for Bumblebee have not been universally glowing. The weapon has no night cameras, limiting flights to daytime. Lyubimov, the Russian technical analyst, described the drone as inadequately weather resistant. “The design exhibits many ‘childhood flaws,’” he wrote. But Schmidt’s technicians are available on the Signal app and responsive to suggestions, said Serhii, a Bumblebee combat pilot and Khartia’s chief technical consultant. The first Bumblebees were difficult to operate, but through cycles of feedback and updates they became better. “In the beginning it didn’t fly without a professional pilot,” he said. “Now it can fly with a newbie.” Serhii said he had tested 15 semiautonomous terminal-attack drones from different manufacturers, and Bumblebee was the best. A new generation of Bumblebees is in the works, he added, with a stronger airframe and night optics.

Hardware upgrades would be welcome. But the captain who integrates new tech into Khartia’s operations said hardware was not the secret ingredient behind Bumblebee’s performance. It is the firmware and the flight software, BeeQGroundControl, that separates the drone from others. “Eric Schmidt made a very innovative drone,” he said, adding that Bumblebee is one of the only drones in Ukraine that “is ready out of the box.” Teams simply add an explosive charge and begin work.

In one coordinated kamikaze attack, Serhii said, three Bumblebees and a standard F.P.V. drone destroyed a 152-millimeter howitzer inside Russia that was protected under a bunker roofed with logs. The first Bumblebee dove into camouflage netting and set it afire; the second breached the roof. Then the standard F.P.V. plunged inside and the final Bumblebee hovered overhead and scattered 10 small anti-personnel land mines around the site. The strikes were timed two minutes or less apart. Khartia has repeated the tactic. “There have been many similar attacks,” Serhii said.

Bumblebees are so valuable, he added, that teams flying them are assigned only to important missions — principally hunts behind Russian lines for artillery and logistics vehicles, and to carry relay transmitters that extend other drones’ ranges. Other units deliver packets of blood to bunkers that medics use to stabilize wounded soldiers awaiting evacuation, an officer supervising strike-drone teams said.

For all the ways that Bumblebees have brought together multiple autonomous features, Schmidt’s engineers, Ukrainians said, have not programmed weapons for full autonomy. Like NORDA Dynamics’s Underdog, Bumblebees require a human to designate targets before attack. “My opinion is that we need to leave the final judgment to the human being,” one Bumblebee test pilot said. Schmidt has agreed. “There’s always this worry about the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ situation, where you have an automatic weapon which makes the decision on its own,” he said in a televised 2024 appearance. “That would be terrible.”

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A soldier known by the call sign Lipa (left) from Ukraine’s Khartia Brigade, updating the software on Bumblebee attack drones.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

In “Dr. Strangelove,” the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie, a Soviet doomsday device detects a rogue American attack and automatically launches a nuclear response, effectively exterminating humankind. Schmidt’s caution aligns with Pentagon policy, which embraces keeping “humans in the loop,” at least in an aspirational spirit. Its 2023 guidance for autonomy in weapons systems, known as Directive 3000.09, requires “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” and senior-level official review of all autonomous systems in development or to be deployed. But the directive offers no clarity about what, exactly, constitutes “appropriate levels of human judgment.”

Further, no global consensus or convention exists for these ideas or other forms of design constraint. The arms race is afoot without mutually accepted guardrails. Schmidt has prefaced his support for keeping people in the loop by pointing out that “Russia and China do not have this doctrine,” suggesting that weapons that kill outside of human supervision could find their way to the battlefield no matter anyone’s positions or desires.

At the Edge of Total Autonomy

The compete-or-die paradigm has brought semiautonomous weapons into new territory fast. X-Drone, for example, merges multiple forms of autonomous tech onto long-range drones. Its software helps navigate the weapons to a distant area, like a seaport, then uses computer vision to identify and attack specific targets — warships, fuel-storage tanks, parked aircraft. “You fly 500 kilometers and you miss a target by a little bit, and your mission is wasted,” the company’s founder said. “Now we train on an oil tank and it hits.”

Drones with X-Drone’s software have also hit trains carrying fuel and expensive Russian air-defense radar systems, clearing routes for more drones to follow, according to the founder. Andrii, a pilot of medium-range strike drones, said he flew more than 100 A.I.-enhanced missions in 2025 with the company’s software. His work involved flying to areas where reconnaissance flights detected a valuable target, then passing control to the software for terminal attack. On a sortie this fall, he said, the drone struck a mobile air-defense system.

By late 2025, the founder said, X-Drone had provided Ukrainian units with more than 30,000 A.I.-enhanced weapons. The company is experimenting with more complex capabilities, including loading facial recognition technology into drones that could identify then kill specific people, and coupling flight-control and navigation software with large language models, or L.L.M.s, “so the drone becomes an agent,” he said. “You can literally speak to the drone, like: ‘Fly to right, 100 meters. What do we see? Do you see a window? Fly inside the window.’”

Using armed quadcopters to peer into windows or enter structures is not new. The practice is common in shattered neighborhoods at the front. Videos posted on Telegram by Ukrainian units show piloted quadcopters performing exactly such feats, slipping into occupied buildings to kill Russian soldiers within. Adding a role for A.I. on such flights could allow this particular form of violence to expand.

With A.I.-enhanced weapons, the ethical distinction between two broadly different types of strike — a drone selecting a large inanimate object for attack and a drone autonomously hunting human beings — is large. But the technical difference is smaller, and X-Drone has already crept from the inanimate to the human. X-Drone has developed A.I.-enhanced quadcopters that, its founder says, can attack Russian soldiers with or without a human in the loop. He said the software allows remote human pilots to abort auto-selected attacks. But when communications fail, human control can become impossible. In those cases, he said, the drones could hunt alone. Whether this is occurring yet is not clear.

As semiautonomous weapons train to pursue people, Asaro, of the Stop Killer Robots Campaign, warned that entering this uncharted moral frontier was deeply worrisome, because computer programs applying rules to patterns of sensor data should not determine people’s fates. “These things are going to decide who lives and who dies without any sort of access to morality,” he said, and were the essence of digital dehumanization. “They are amoral. Machines cannot fathom the distinction between inanimate objects and people.” Ukrainians involved often agree. But whether fighting in brigades or coding in company offices, as members of a population unwillingly greased in blood, they speak of ample motivation to continue their work, and of little time for regret.

X-Drone’s founder had not intended to become an arms manufacturer; it is a role he neither sought nor foresaw. Born in Soviet Russia, he worked a long career in the United States and was arranging tech deals in Kyiv when the Kremlin’s forces invaded in 2022. A physicist by training, he joined a neighborhood defense unit, which gave him a rifle. When the Russian vanguard breached the capital near his home, he turned out to meet it, then recorded videos of the bloodied bodies of soldiers his group killed. Over a meal in Kyiv in 2025, he showed one of the videos almost incredulously. “All of my career I worked in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street,” he said, “and one day I am shooting Russians near my house?”

Now the front was only a few hours’ drive away, and Russia’s missiles and long-range drones could kill anyone in Ukraine in their sleep on any night. He nodded toward a peaceful daytime street scene. “It feels normal, but it’s just not,” he said. “This is an illusion of normality.”

Wars can push everyday people to extreme positions, which for a physicist can take the form of pragmatic epiphany: With Ukraine’s defenses slowly yielding ground, and defeat meaning a return to life under Moscow’s boot, developing A.I.-enhanced drones was logical, obvious and necessary. Western militaries were far behind, he said, and Ukraine’s resistance was buying them time. Its innovations might save them, too. “Drones with A.I. are the big game-changer,” he said. “The whole military infrastructure previously is obsolete.”

‘They Should Have Stopped the War Early On’

On the range where Pavlo trained pilots on Sine Engineering’s tech, one student, Yurii, who commands an F.P.V. platoon in a frontline brigade, brushed aside philosophical discussion. He had participated in some of the war’s most prominent battles, including the incursion in 2024 into Kursk. When the full invasion began, he was a medical doctor in Western Europe. Now he killed Russian soldiers, a career deviation he insisted contained no breach of his Hippocratic oath. While practicing medicine, he prescribed antibiotics to kill microbes to save patients and stop contagions’ spread. Strikes on Russian soldiers, he offered, amounted to a similar public service. “Now we are killing bugs, too,” he said. “They’re just larger bugs.”

A front-row participant in Ukraine’s adoption of drone warfare, Yurii had seen his share of new weapons. In his view, A.I.-powered drones were inevitable. “Any large-scale war, it delivers demons,” he said. “It unleashes something powerful and it accelerates developments which otherwise would have taken decades.” World War I saw rollouts of combat aviation, tanks and artillery, alongside widespread use of chlorine, phosgene and sulfur mustard. World War II ended after the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. “Who knows what this war is going to unleash,” Yurii said. “If the international community is concerned about this, then they should have stopped the war early on.”

Weapons as transformative as the combat drones proliferating in Ukraine are historically uncommon. They enforce tectonic shifts in military tactics, budgets, doctrines and cultures. Organizations that adapt to the new capabilities and dangers can thrive; those that do not suffer battlefield humiliations and miseries for their rank and file. The rapid evolution of drones, now accelerating through integration with autonomy, is a moment potentially analogous to the rise of the machine gun during the Russo-Japanese War.

That new weapon’s power was demonstrated during the 1904 siege of Port Arthur. Tsarist forces were thick with peasants and drunkards. Japan’s imperial ranks were motivated and well trained. But when they attacked fortified Russian positions in massed infantry assaults, they rushed into machine guns, previously unseen in state-on-state conventional war, that shattered their lines with sweeping bursts of fire. Western military attachés were present to observe events that darkened dirt red. And yet most nations failed to take notice. European armies, oblivious to what machine guns would mean for their soldiers’ fates, continued to feed cavalry horses and to preach the glories of the open-ground charge. A decade later, hapless generals poured away young lives on the Western Front, out of step with the technology of their time.

The state of Western military readiness today galvanizes Deborah Fairlamb, a founding partner of Green Flag Ventures, a Delaware-registered venture capital fund investing in Ukrainian defense-tech start-ups. Even before autonomous drones appeared, she said, the extraordinary proliferation of unmanned weapons outran nations’ defensive abilities. “Most people in the West do not understand what is happening here,” she said, and the gap could mean stinging defeat and enormous loss of life.

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The military section at Cemetery No. 18 in Kharkiv, one of many burial grounds for Ukrainian soldiers killed in its war with Russia.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Fairlamb lives in Kyiv. Her alarm sounded after American veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq visited Ukraine to prospect for business or fight as volunteers. They entered a war in which new tech has caused almost unfathomable carnage. Russia and Ukraine have suffered well over a million combined casualties in less than four years, with most wounds caused by drones. “They come back from the front, like, shaken,” she said, and they share a refrain: “My team would not last for 48 hours out there.” With A.I.-enhanced drones joining the action, Fairlamb described the need to boost A.I.-arms development as no less than existential, prompting her to approach embassies and arms manufacturers with urgency. “It really and truly is about making people understand how dramatically different this technology is,” she said. “And how unbelievably unprepared the United States is.”

For Schmidt, multiple motivations appear to overlap. At Stanford in 2024, he said he entered drone manufacturing after seeing Russian tanks destroy apartments with elderly women and children inside. His entrance to the war earned him genuine gratitude from Ukrainians, whether they fly Bumblebees or are at decreased risk every time a Merops interceptor hits a Shahed. With a year-plus of combat shock-testing of its products, his operation is also well positioned for potential profits as nations reassess and update their arsenals in light of lessons learned from Ukraine.

He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare.

This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”

Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.

Thailand’s tilt toward China tests treaty alliance with US

Defense News · Military Times Staff · January 5, 2026

https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2026/01/05/thailands-tilt-toward-china-tests-treaty-alliance-with-us/

BANGKOK — On paper, the U.S. security alliance with Thailand is one of the strongest in Asia, dating back seven decades and backed up by military exercises each year with thousands of troops from both countries and many others.

Thailand’s drift toward China over the past decade, though, is turning the alliance into more of a paper tiger, some analysts say, with military and strategic consequences for the United States across the region.

“Thailand’s increasing ties to China accelerates the trend of the U.S. losing strategic influence in Southeast Asia,” Emma Chanlett-Avery, director of political-security affairs at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington, told Military Times.

“Despite Thailand’s status as a treaty ally of the U.S., Bangkok’s center of gravity has long been leaning toward the PRC,” she said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

Bending toward Beijing

In 1833, Thailand, then Siam, became the first country in Asia to sign a treaty of amity and commerce with the United States, setting up diplomatic and economic ties. Over a century later, as the Cold War was heating up, Thailand was one of only three Asian countries brought into the Manila Pact of 1954 with the United States; it declared that an attack on any member was a threat to all.

Thailand went on to become a key staging ground for U.S. operations during the Vietnam War and was named a major non-NATO ally of the United States in 2003.

Since 1982, Thailand has also been co-hosting the annual Cobra Gold exercises with the United States. Chanlett-Avery called them the largest multilateral military exercises in the world.

However, she and others say Thailand has been leaning ever closer to China, its main trading partner, for some time.

Historically, the United States has been the largest arms supplier to Thailand. But after a 2014 military coup that toppled Thailand’s democratically elected government, Washington pulled back sharply, leaving Beijing to step in.

According to Australia’s Lowy Institute, China sold Thailand nearly $400 million worth of arms between 2016 and 2022, about twice as much as the United States. The Chinese hardware ran the gamut from surface-to-air missiles to radars and tanks. Thailand is also working with China on delivery of its first submarine.

While the United States still holds more — and more sophisticated — military exercises with Thailand than does China, China has been catching up, according to the Lowy Institute.

Chanlett-Avery said Thailand’s growing military ties with China mean the United States can no longer count on the access it once could for its own military.

“With the intensified strategic competition between the U.S. and China, Thailand has leaned heavily toward Beijing, solidifying the U.S. conviction that Thailand would not allow U.S. access to its bases in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Straits,” she said.

A risk of decoupling

Zach Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the two allies are now at high risk of a “decoupling,” where they would no longer see their interests as well aligned.

He said that could lead to even fewer U.S. arms deals with Thailand, cutbacks in joint-training exercises, and less access to Thai bases including U-Tapao, a naval airfield on the Gulf of Thailand.

“What’s so critical about U-Tapao is the U.S. just doesn’t have a lot of operating locations in the Southeast Asian region, and so … the logistical aspects of maintaining a global military presence are quite challenging,” Cooper told Military Times.

While the United States could probably count on other countries in the region, he added, such as Singapore, Thailand is farther north than most of them.

“That has some benefits from a logistical perspective, especially as the U.S. is transitioning, say, between the Middle East and Asia or trying to operate a little bit farther north in Southeast Asia,” he said.

In a 2024 report on the missiles arms race in the Asia-Pacific, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Thailand’s tilt toward China hobbles U.S. missile basing options as well.

The IISS report says Thailand “would be highly unlikely to approve the deployment of U.S. missiles” for countering what it calls the growing ballistic- and cruise-missile threat from both China and North Korea.

Cooper said Bangkok’s tilt may also restrain Washington’s defense cooperation with Thailand by limiting the military intelligence and technology it is willing to share and sell.

“It’s really going to make American intelligence officials a bit nervous that so many Thai leaders see their interests as more aligned with China going forward than with the United States. So, in that context, I think it would be hard to have the degree of confidence necessary to really share some of those more sensitive details,” he said.

There could be cases, he added, where the U.S. may be reluctant to hold some military exercises with Thailand in range of Chinese radars for fear of giving away certain U.S. capabilities.

Cooper said Thailand’s foiled bid for U.S. F-35 jets is a case in point.

In 2023, the United States denied Thailand’s request to buy up to eight of the Lockheed Martin F-35s, one of the world’s most advanced fighter aircraft. At the time, a Thai air force official told local media that Thailand’s relationship with China probably played a part.

Losing interest and influence

As Thailand has been turning toward China, though, the analysts say the United States has also been turning away from Southeast Asia, the mainland especially.

When the United States announced its “Pivot to Asia” in 2011, Cooper said, South and Southeast Asia loomed large in its strategic plans. But the focus is now shifting more to the east, he said, especially to the so-called first island chain, which roughly skirts China’s seaboard from Japan to Taiwan and on to the Philippines.

Cooper said the shift is reflected in the U.S. government’s latest National Security Strategy, which lays out each new administration’s security priorities.

“It’s a much more limited set of objectives, in my view, and one in which mainland Southeast Asia just plays a smaller role than I think it used to in U.S. thinking,” he said.

“And I think where this is leading is not a complete pullback but a sort of partial pullback from parts of South and Southeast Asia.”

Chanlett-Avery said Washington is elevating “minilateral” and trilateral security pacts with Australia, India, Japan and South Korea, for example, that mostly leave Southeast Asia out, the Philippines being the main exception.

The United States has been ramping up military ties with the sprawling archipelago to counter China’s increasingly aggressive forays into the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

But that still leaves its leverage not only in Thailand, but the region, on the wane, Chanlett-Avery added.

“With security concerns taking center stage, combined with the dismantlement of USAID, the two allies have grown apart,” she said. “The unfortunate byproduct of this dynamic is that U.S. influence has tanked, not only in Thailand but in Southeast Asia more broadly.”

12. China’s ideology chief calls on propaganda officials to focus on the economy

Summary:

China’s top ideology official Cai Qi told a national meeting of publicity chiefs to make the economy the center of propaganda work as the new five-year plan begins through 2030. He urged cadres to guide public opinion, manage expectations, tighten cyberspace control, and project a “truthful, three-dimensional” China story abroad and globally while reinforcing Party leadership and anti-corruption messaging firmly. Propaganda chief Li Shulei echoed the need to raise ideological and political work capacity, expand arts and reading, and build an independent Chinese philosophy and social science system. The article notes prior silencing of pessimistic economists amid a confidence crisis.

Comment: If Beijing treats “confidence” as an operational requirement, what narrative intelligence indicators would reveal when economic messaging is stabilizing expectations versus masking stress that will later break hard? What is the internal resistance potential in China? Can ideological indoctrination and control counter resistance? Can China "guide" public opinion?

China’s ideology chief calls on propaganda officials to focus on the economy

Cai Qi – who is responsible for ideology, culture and internet regulation – tells cadres to make ‘good start’ to the next five-year plan

Phoebe Zhangin Shenzhen

Published: 3:00pm, 6 Jan 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3338882/chinas-ideology-chief-calls-propaganda-officials-focus-economy?utm

China’s ideology chief has again called on propaganda officials to focus on the economy, as the country grapples with a slowdown, high unemployment and weak consumer demand.

Cai Qi, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, told a national meeting of publicity department heads in Beijing on Monday that “a good start should be set” for the next five-year plan, state news agency Xinhua reported.

The country’s new blueprint for social and economic development has officially begun and runs until 2030.

“We need to do our job well in media and communication, with a particular focus on the economy,” said Cai, who is responsible for ideology, culture and internet regulation.

“[We need to] respond to public sentiment and guide public opinion, as well as strengthen mainstream ideology that is self-confident, self-reliant and united,” he added.

Cai also called for tighter management of cyberspace and more efforts to communicate with the world and “tell China’s stories in a truthful, three-dimensional, comprehensive way”.

He said more emphasis was needed on upholding the Communist Party’s overall leadership and advancing the fight against corruption.

Li Shulei, head of the Central Committee’s Publicity Department, called for arts and culture to be fostered. Photo: Xinhua

Li Shulei, who heads the Publicity Department of the party’s Central Committee, told cadres at the meeting that they needed to “improve the ability and level of conducting ideological and political work”.

In addition, Li called for arts and culture to be fostered and for cultural heritage to be preserved. And he said it was important to promote the habit of reading nationwide and to develop “a Chinese system of philosophy and social sciences with independent thinking”.

It was not the first time Cai has directed propaganda officials to focus on the economy. During their annual meeting last year, he urged cadres to “adhere to the correct orientation of public opinion, strengthen economic promotion and management of expectations, improve the ability to respond to public opinion, and create a united and progressive mainstream public opinion”.

The previous year he urged propaganda chiefs to “sing loudly about China’s bright economic prospects”.

That remark followed a call by President Xi Jinping in December 2023 for officials to promote a more positive image of the economy and its outlook.

At the end of 2024, Beijing silenced some experts who were critical of China’s economic performance. Economist Ren Zeping had his social media account banned in December that year after a post in which he quoted an ancient Chinese emperor apologising to people facing livelihood difficulties.

Around the same time, two other outspoken economists, Gao Shanwen and Fu Peng, were also silenced after they made pessimistic comments about the economic outlook.

Many economists in China agree that part of the problem is a “crisis of confidence”.

Justin Lin Yifu, dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University and a former chief economist at the World Bank, said in a March 2024 speech that the lack of an “accurate understanding of the economic downturn in China and its causal relationships can lead to a pessimistic view”.

His view was that economic growth could be maintained if there was an understanding that the pressure mainly stemmed from weak external demand, and if measures and reforms were introduced to encourage entrepreneurs.

In New Year’s speech, Xi urges growth and vows ‘unstoppable’ Taiwan reunification

China’s finance ministry has said this year’s priorities would be building a robust domestic market through “vigorously boosting consumption” and “actively expanding effective investment”.

“Our country’s domestic market holds huge potential,” Finance Minister Lan Foan told a two day annual work conference last week, according to Xinhua.

Phoebe Zhang

Phoebe Zhang is a senior reporter with the South China Morning Post. She has a master's degree in journalism. She likes to write human-interest stories and has written many about people living on the fringes of society. She believes there's no story or person that's too sm

13. China-Japan military tensions: what lies ahead in 2026?

Summary:

The article argues China-Japan military friction will likely persist in 2026 as Washington pushes allies to harden first island chain defenses focused on Taiwan. Japan’s record budgets, counterstrike missiles, Tomahawk integration, and new bilateral command structures deepen operational integration with US forces, but they also sharpen Beijing’s perception that Tokyo is crossing a red line tied to Taiwan. Analysts expect China to respond less by matching platforms and more through gray-zone pressure, cyber operations, and economic coercion, raising the risk of miscalculation around the Senkakus and the East China Sea while still stopping short of steps that could trigger treaty obligations.

Comment: If China can punish Japan economically and digitally without provoking a treaty-triggering military incident, does the US alliance system in the Asia-Indo-Pacific deter conflict or merely shift competition into domains where alliance commitments are least explicit?

China-Japan military tensions: what lies ahead in 2026?

Analysts hold out little hope that security pressures will ease, given US insistence that regional allies boost first island chain defences

Seong Hyeon Choi

Published: 9:00am, 6 Jan 2026Updated: 11:31am, 6 Jan 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3338769/china-japan-military-tensions-what-lies-ahead-2026?utm

As the new year unfolds, China finds itself grappling with strategic pressures fuelled by two US treaty allies at its doorstep – Japan and South Korea. In the first of a two-part series, Seong Hyeon Choi looks at how historically fraught China-Japan ties might fare as Tokyo bolsters its military posture with record budgets and advanced weaponry.

China and Japan have never fully resolved the decades-old grudges of their wartime history and territorial disputes, but it was near the end of 2025 – the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia – that military tensions seemed to stir in ways rarely seen for years.

The Donald Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released in December, included a pledge to deter conflict in the first island chain with the focus on the Taiwan Strait.

The series of islands and archipelagos along the eastern edge of continental Asia, stretching from Japan through the Philippines, is part of a US containment strategy to restrict Chinese military access to the Pacific Ocean.

The security document stressed that the United States “must urge” allies such as Japan and South Korea to increase their share of the defence burden to “deter adversaries and protect the first island chain”.

Also in December, a Pentagon report warned that the Chinese military build-up was leaving the US “vulnerable”, adding to the pressure on Washington’s Indo-Pacific allies to boost defence spending and driving the region towards a tense crossroads between China and its neighbours.

Analysts say regional pressure is likely to intensify as China’s military activities persist and Japan bolsters its long-range counterstrike missiles as part of collective defence in the first island chain.

Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo have spiralled since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested in November that Japan could take military action in the event of an attack on Taiwan.

Her remarks prompted strong protests as well as economic and diplomatic retaliation from Beijing, which sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary.

Most countries, including the US and its treaty ally Japan, do not recognise self-governed Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any forcible change to the status quo and is legally bound to supply Taipei with weapons for defence.

The row escalated militarily when Tokyo said that Chinese J-15 fighters in international airspace near Japan’s Okinawa islands had locked fire-control radar on Japanese F-15 jets – a dangerous step towards weapon targeting. Beijing in turn accused Tokyo of harassing its forces during normal military exercises and training.

China reveals radio communications heard before mid-air stand-off with Japanese fighters

Dennis Wilder, a professor at Georgetown University and a former CIA official, said a “certain amount of underlying tension” between China and Japan would persist as long as Takaichi remained in office.

“Both sides have reasons to tone down the spat, particularly because of the economic dimensions of the relationship,” he said. “But she is unlikely to take steps to reassure Beijing on the military front because Japan is committed to countering the growing Chinese threat.”

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, also said tensions “look set to persist” but did not rule out de-escalation.

However, both sides would be most likely to “entrench their respective positions while seeking an off-ramp”, he said.

“We would have to see whether Takaichi gets to meet Trump in early 2026 before his planned summit with [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping], and there could be a turning point in this. But until then, we will expect Beijing to keep up with the rhetoric against Takaichi,” Koh said.

“Given the ramping up of tensions over the radar-lock incident, both governments are likely to be mindful of provoking an armed provocation. So they’ll keep tensions confined to rhetorical and military posturing.”

Why have Takaichi’s Taiwan comments sent China-Japan ties into a tailspin?

The China-Japan spat has paralleled rising military tensions near the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, prompting Tokyo to abandon its decades-long disarmament policy.

In late November, the Japanese cabinet approved a supplementary budget proposal that included 1.1 trillion yen (US$7.1 billion) in additional defence spending, taking the total to 11 trillion yen – or more than 2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Tokyo has barred its defence spending from exceeding 1 per cent of GDP since the end of World War II.

The approval followed the defence ministry’s budget request in August for around US$60 billion in the next financial year, prioritising long-range missiles and naval procurement programmes seen as significant to deterring People’s Liberation Army advancement in the first island chain.

Japanese anti-ship missiles could potentially deny the PLA Navy’s advance across the first island chain and impede access to the eastern flank of Taiwan, deemed essential to any attack on the island.

Numerically, the PLA Navy has the largest fleet in the world, which it continues to modernise with the “goal of achieving sea superiority during a conflict over Taiwan”, according to the December Pentagon report.

The report noted that China maintained a “large reserve” of operationally ready ships that enabled it to “expand its persistent patrol presence and surge forces during crises and war”.

After the November inauguration of the Fujian, its third aircraft carrier, the PLA Navy was likely to increase its fleet of carriers to nine by 2035, it said.

These developments would enhance its blue water capabilities, potentially driving increased military activities across the first island chain.

Such a manoeuvre would require the Chinese naval fleet to penetrate the waters between Japan’s southwestern islands, which host US troops as well as future Japanese anti-ship missile bases.

Koh said that Japan’s record-breaking defence budgets would not result in any let-up in the PLA’s military activities.

“It doesn’t mean deterrence fails, but beyond the military build-up, much of what we see persisting so far has been peacetime military activities, including what most would call grey-zone actions,” he said, referring to non-military activities aimed at undermining adversaries’ defences without triggering a full-scale war.

“If deterrence holds, we assume also that Beijing will remain conscious of the US-Japan security alliance and be wary of accidentally provoking the invocation of the treaty obligations, given consistent signalling by Washington.”

Liselotte Odgaard, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, noted that the Japanese defence ministry flagged the increasing PLA build-up as a justification for the spending boost.

Japan’s military build-up was “real and accelerating” and coastal and fleet stand-off missiles would “raise the cost of Chinese naval advancement and strengthen deterrence”, especially when integrated with US and partner forces, she said.

She said there was “potential for accidental skirmishes” in hotspots such as the Diaoyu Islands, disputed East China Sea islands controlled as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, “if confrontations escalate further”.

“The current diplomatic crisis is likely to redefine Japan-China relations permanently because Japan’s willingness to participate in a military conflict if Taiwan faces a survival-threatening situation is a red line for China,” she said.

“Japan under Takaichi appears committed to maintaining a firmer stance aligned with the US, likely deepening military cooperation and bolstering deterrence.”

China’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, enters service

Tokyo plans to deploy Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles at Camp Kengun in Kumamoto prefecture, on the western coast of Kyushu Island. With a range of 1,000km (621 miles), mainland China and North Korea would be well within reach of the upgraded anti-ship missile, which recently completed a test launch in the US.

In September, Tokyo said its Kongo-class Aegis destroyer JS Chokai was heading to the US for a year-long deployment that would include modifications and training to operate Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range of around 1,600km, by September 2026.

Japan signed a contract for 400 of the long-range missiles in January 2024, with plans to make all eight of its Aegis destroyers Tomahawk-capable, as well as two Aegis system-equipped vessel destroyers currently under construction.

Retired US Navy officer John Bradford, a Japan Foundation fellow at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, said Japanese “counterstrike” forces were intended to “destroy Chinese weapons systems before those weapons can attack Japan”.

Tokyo also had some of the “world’s best naval systems”, such as its destroyers and submarines, which would be “critical” to containing a PLA Navy force in a combat situation, he added.

“Regardless of how the recent spat plays out, Japan is set to increase its defence capabilities. The capacity development areas to watch will be medium and long-range weapons, unmanned systems and – most important – munitions stockpiles.”

Stephen Nagy, from the International Christian University in Tokyo, said Japan’s focus on anti-ship missiles and extended-range strike capabilities “fundamentally alters” the strategic calculus by threatening China’s naval assets before they leave port.

“But the real deterrent effect depends on demonstrating the political will to use them,” said Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies.

“China will respond asymmetrically through cyber operations, supply chain weaponisation and intensified pressure on Japanese companies in China rather than matching capabilities directly, as they recognise Japan’s technological advantages in precision systems.”

Tokyo’s increased missile deployment has been opposed by Beijing, especially near the East China Sea. In November, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the deployment of Japanese missiles near Taiwan was a “deliberate move that breeds regional tensions and stokes military confrontation”.

Mao was responding to Japanese Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi’s remarks the same month, which outlined Tokyo’s plans to deploy medium-range surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni Island, around 100km from Taiwan.

Wilder at Georgetown University said that while Japan’s weapons acquisitions were important, of greater significance was the greater coordination and integration of Japanese and US warfighting capabilities.

“The new wartime command established in Tokyo, and its US equivalent, will be a big step in the development of serious Japanese defence capabilities,” he said, adding that Tokyo appeared to be more dedicated to deterring Beijing’s pressure than previously.

Odgaard said that the security pressure on China would “intensify across multiple axes, not only in the Taiwan Strait”, but also in the East China Sea, South China Sea and Korean waters.

She said the combination of allied missile networks, undersea enhancements and US strategic signalling would force China to “allocate more resources to defence and deterrence, raising the risk of friction and miscalculation”.

“China is likely to respond with expanded naval deployments, such as dual-carrier operations and more submarines; hypersonic and anti-ship ballistic missile exercises to stress US and allied surface forces,” Odgaard said.

“But these moves will not change the fact that China faces more capable, networked adversaries in 2026 than previously.”

Seong Hyeon Choi

Seong Hyeon joined the SCMP in 2022. He is from South Korea and graduated with a bachelor of journalism and master of international and public affairs from the University of Hong Kong. He worked as a research intern for Korea Chair at US foreign policy think tank Center for

14. Afghanistan’s Post Opium Drug Trade – Another Challenge for Pakistan?

Summary:

Afghanistan’s opium ban cut cultivation sharply in 2022, but production rebounded as farmers and traffickers adapted. Meanwhile methamphetamine, enabled by abundant ephedra and small-scale labs, expanded and proved harder to suppress. Pakistan faces rising addiction, maritime smuggling, and tighter links between narcotics finance, arms trafficking, and militant networks.

Excerpt:

While the Yarmouk operation is a success story for the maritime forces in Pakistan, Afghanistan’s illicit drug trade is a major cause of concern. Unless the drug economy of Afghanistan keeps on thriving unchecked under the Taliban rule, the meth and militancy will inevitably spill across the waters of the world. It would be a grave mistake to consider Afghanistan illicit drug trade as a peripheral issue. Instead, it is a hub of instability in the whole of South and Central Asia, a nexus which connects economic desperation, militant financing, and transnational organized crime into one, explosive equation.

Afghanistan’s Post Opium Drug Trade – Another Challenge for Pakistan?

by Annie Shabbir

01.06.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/06/afghanistans-post-opium-drug-trade/

The Pakistan Navy ship Yarmook seized two dhow sailing boats in the Arabian Sea on 27 October, carrying for about 2.5 tons of crystal methamphetamine, also known as Ice, and 50 kg of cocaine. It was one of the largest drug seizures in maritime history, with the haul estimated to be valued at a staggering 972 million dollars. Besides the sheer magnitude of these numbers, there is an underlying reality that is more disturbing: a booming regional drug economy that is becoming increasingly rooted in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has long been the center of the international drug trade. Its drug economy generates billions of dollars every year which are then used to fuel terrorism, transnational organized crime and cross border militancy. Afghanistan was producing about 80-90% of the world’s opium, making it the largest producer globally before 2022. Over time, Afghanistan’s southern and eastern regions, long known as hotbeds of militancy and centers of opium cultivation, have also emerged as significant producers of methamphetamine. The ephedra plant is used for meth production and is found in abundance in the Afghan mountains. As per a UNODC report a surge in methamphetamine trafficking has been noted in recent years from Afghanistan to neighboring countries.

Taliban announced a stringent ban on opium cultivation in April 2022, whose effectiveness was even confirmed by the UN who reported a 95% decrease in opium cultivation. This resulted in opium prices skyrocketing internationally. However, this had an inverse impact as the ban started losing its effectiveness due to pressure from drug traffickers and impoverished farmers. Opium cultivation increased by 19% in 2024 according to UNODC, negating the impact of the ban.

At the same time, the discovery of the wild-growing plant and heroin’s high price in the international market lead to the surge in the production of meth. The rise in drug seizures across neighboring countries points to the growing scale of Afghanistan’s illicit meth economy, as traffickers operating from its territory increasingly channel these drugs into regional markets. This post-opium drug economy seems to be more resilient to the Taliban’s drug ban. Cultivation of opium is extensive, requires planned growth periods and large stretches of land. Whereas, meth can be produced in rudimentary laboratories and transported with ease and without detection. This ease makes it an ideal commodity for trade and making quick profits.

Interestingly, the Taliban drug policy presents an actual paradox: despite persistent assertion of ban, the involvement of Afghanistan in the global drug market is increasing. What seems to be taking roots is the post-opium economy which thrives on synthetic drugs, global smuggling networks and a regulatory vacuum.

Pakistan: Between Smuggling and Regional Spillover

The emerging Afghan’s Post opium drug economy is not only a border-management issue for Pakistan but also a direct threat to its national security. The criminal cartels used in the trafficking of drugs are often linked to arms smuggling of weapons, money laundering and funding of militant activities.

The availability of meth in Pakistan is already spurring an addiction epidemic in the country, especially among the youth. But more than that it has far-reaching geopolitical implications in addition to the social impact. The porous Pak-Afghanistan border has already been used for the illegal movements of the people and goods but the drug seizures by Pakistan Navy indicates Pak-Afghan border being used to smuggle drugs through Arabian sea to lucrative East African, European and Middle eastern markets. It is also a kind of transnational security crisis emerging from a country that remains diplomatically isolated but globally consequential.

Furthmore, the intersection between narcotics and terrorism are getting more blurred. The financial pipelines that sustain militant outfits such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) overlap with drug trafficking routes and informal trade networks that stretch from Kandahar to Karachi and onward to the Gulf. As a result, each kilogram of smuggled methamphetamine or heroin in these routes creates a cycle of destabilisation that jeopardizes the internal security of not only Pakistan but also regional peace.

The Taliban’s Contradiction

The way the Taliban has dealt with the drug business can best be described as pragmatic opportunism and not an actual ideological pledge (Prohibition of drugs under Islamic law). Under its first regime (1996-2001), the group tactfully shifted between prohibition and taxation, adjusting its policy to the changing political demands. In the recent situation, as Afghanistan’s economy has taken a free fall and foreign reserves have been frozen, synthetic drugs like meth have become an important source of revenue for Aghanistan’s illicit economy.

The Taliban regime’s inability or unwillingness indicates that its governance model is based on targeted enforcement. They are generating much needed revenue through tolerating or taxing the drug production and trafficking while maintaining international deniability. This does not appear to be a failure of control but rather a calculated economic policy, which is supported by illegal cash flows.

While the Yarmouk operation is a success story for the maritime forces in Pakistan, Afghanistan’s illicit drug trade is a major cause of concern. Unless the drug economy of Afghanistan keeps on thriving unchecked under the Taliban rule, the meth and militancy will inevitably spill across the waters of the world. It would be a grave mistake to consider Afghanistan illicit drug trade as a peripheral issue. Instead, it is a hub of instability in the whole of South and Central Asia, a nexus which connects economic desperation, militant financing, and transnational organized crime into one, explosive equation.

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Tags: Afghanistan and Pakistan, Drug Economy, Drug Trade, Middle East

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Annie Shabbir

15. How a Perpetual Desire for Innovation and Thinking ‘Outside the Box’ Led William P. Yarborough to Create the Green Berets

Summary:

Lt. Gen. William P. Yarborough helped create the modern Green Beret by pairing imagination with discipline. In the early airborne force, he solved practical problems with design, shaping badges, uniforms, boots, and equipment that turned theory into combat capability and esprit. In World War II he planned and led combat jumps, then proved at Anzio that high standards and adaptive thinking belong together. Cold War duty in Vienna and Cambodia sharpened his political and advisory craft. As head of the Special Warfare Center, he secured the green beret’s authorization, expanded language and unconventional warfare training, and anchored a distinct identity.

Excerpt:

As SWC commander, he also reshaped training. He expanded the curriculum to include military assistance, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, and mandatory foreign-language instruction. Just as important, he fostered an environment where intellectual curiosity and creative problem-solving were expected. His vision was clear: Special Forces needed to be thinkers as much as fighters.

Comment: A great American. May we all outthink as well as outfight our enemies. The essence of unconventional warfare is solving, or contributing to solving, complex political-military problems while creating dilemmas for our enemies. It is also good to note his Korea connection.

How a Perpetual Desire for Innovation and Thinking ‘Outside the Box’ Led William P. Yarborough to Create the Green Berets

By Mr. Gary Wilkins, 1st Special Forces CommandJanuary 5, 2026

https://www.army.mil/article/289866/how_a_perpetual_desire_for_innovation_and_thinking_outside_the_box_led_william_p_yarborough_to_create_the_green_berets

In the rigid world of military tradition, true innovators are rare. Even rarer are leaders who respect tradition yet willingly break with convention when the mission demands it. Lieutenant General William Pelham Yarborough was one of those men—a visionary whose creativity, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to challenge orthodoxy when circumstances required, helped define the identity of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces. Remembered today as the ‘Father of the Modern Green Berets,’ Yarborough’s legacy extends far beyond a title; it lives on in the culture, symbols, and mindset of America’s most unconventional soldiers.

A Mind Built for Innovation

Born in 1912 to a military family in Seattle and raised largely in Georgia, Yarborough entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point during a period when doctrine and hierarchy ruled Army thinking. Commissioned in 1936 as an infantry officer, he began his career overseas in the Philippines. From the outset, his assignments revealed a pattern that would define his professional life: identify a difficult problem, ignore unnecessary convention, and design a practical solution.

That pattern became unmistakable after his transfer to Fort Benning in 1940. As a test officer with the 29th Infantry Regiment—and soon after as an acting captain commanding Company C, 501st Airborne Battalion—Yarborough found himself in the embryonic world of U.S. airborne forces. There, he applied both artistic sensibility and engineering logic to the challenges of a new form of warfare. He designed the Army’s metal parachutist qualification badge (which he later patented), the M42 “jump” uniform, specialized jump boots, and a range of air-droppable equipment containers. These were not cosmetic contributions; they were functional innovations that helped turn airborne theory into combat reality complete with an Esprit de corps.

Unit photograph, Company C, 501st Airborne Battalion, Fort Benning, GA, 1940. Captain Yarborough (the Company Commander) is sitting in the front row, second from the right. Photo by Gary Wilkins, 1st SFC PAO..

Capt. Yarborough boards a C-39 troop transport aircraft. Photo by The Army Historical Foundation.

Leadership Under Fire

During World War II, Yarborough’s unconventional mind was paired with combat leadership. In 1942. While serving in England as an airborne advisor for Operation Torch, he helped plan the first U.S. combat parachute operation, which landed American paratroopers (himself included) in French North Africa. The following year, as commander of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion at Anzio, he demonstrated that creativity did not come at the expense of discipline. Under fire, he demanded high standards, proving that unconventional thinking and strict professionalism were not mutually exclusive.

Diplomacy, Discipline, and the Cold War

After the war, Yarborough’s adaptability placed him in another complex environment: Allied-occupied Vienna. From 1945 through the mid-1950s, he served as Allied provost marshal, working daily with British, French, and Soviet forces. In this tense Cold War setting, he helped establish the famous four-power “International Patrol,” a mission that required restraint, cultural awareness, and constant negotiation—skills that later became hallmarks of Special Forces operations. His later assignment as deputy chief of the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group in Cambodia further expanded his understanding of unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense.

The “International Patrol” later became informally known as “four men in a jeep,” a phrase that echoed the wartime Hollywood film Four Jills in a Jeep. One of the film’s stars, Martha Raye, would later become one of the most devoted and visible supporters of U.S. Army Special Forces. The connection is an interesting historical footnote: a reminder that Yarborough’s work in Vienna operated not only at the tactical and diplomatic level, but also within a broader cultural context that would later intersect with the Special Forces community in unexpected ways.

Colonel Yarborough serving as the Allied military Provost Martial in post-war occupied Vienna. Photo by The Army Historical Foundation

Forging the Green Beret Identity

Yarborough’s most enduring impact came in the early 1960s when he was appointed commander of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center. At the time, Special Forces existed, but their identity—and institutional acceptance—remained fragile. Yarborough understood that elite units require both rigorous training and a unifying symbol. In 1961, he took a calculated risk by arranging for Special Forces soldiers to wear their green berets during a presidential review at Fort Bragg, despite the headgear lacking official authorization.

President John F. Kennedy, who himself held considerable interest in unconventional warfare, noticed immediately. When he asked Yarborough about the berets, the general seized the moment to explain. The result was a White House directive authorizing the green beret as the exclusive headgear of U.S. Army Special Forces. With that decision, Yarborough gave the force not just a uniform item, but an identity—one that signaled independence of thought, adaptability, and quiet professionalism.

Brigadier General Yarborough, wearing his green beret, in a discussion with President Kennedy during the president’s inspection of Special Forces personnel while visiting Fort Bragg in 1961. Photo by The Army Historical Foundation

As SWC commander, he also reshaped training. He expanded the curriculum to include military assistance, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, and mandatory foreign-language instruction. Just as important, he fostered an environment where intellectual curiosity and creative problem-solving were expected. His vision was clear: Special Forces needed to be thinkers as much as fighters.

Senior Command and Global Perspective

In the latter stages of his career, Yarborough served in some of the Army’s most demanding senior roles. He represented the United Nations Command as chief negotiator at Panmunjom, dealing directly with Chinese and North Korean counterparts. As a lieutenant general, he commanded I Corps in Korea and later served as chief of staff and deputy commander in chief of U.S. Army Pacific. Across these assignments, his unconventional mindset remained intact, even extending to personal gear—such as his modified Air Force N-3B parka, altered to meet his own practical standards rather than rigid regulation.

Close up view. Captain Yarborough first row, second from right, Photo by Gary Wilkins, 1st SFC PAO.

A Legacy Etched in Steel

Yarborough’s influence did not end with his retirement. Beginning in 2002, graduates of the Special Forces Qualification Course were awarded the serial-numbered “Yarborough Knife,” a tangible link between new Green Berets and the man who forged their professional identity. Though later cost constraints severely limited its distribution, the knife remains one of the most powerful symbols of excellence and heritage within the Special Forces community.

LTG Yarborough's personal customized USAF N3B winter parka, worn during his command of I Corps in the Republic of Korea. Photo by Gary Wilkins, 1st SFC PAO.

Conclusion: The New Breed of Soldier

Lieutenant General William P. Yarborough did more than design equipment or authorize a beret. He shaped a culture. He believed in a “new breed of man”—one who could think independently, adapt quickly, and succeed in the world’s most ambiguous and dangerous environments. Today’s Green Berets, operating across cultures and conflicts, continue to embody that vision. In their mindset, methods, and symbols, the legacy of Yarborough’s unconventional genius endures.

16. Containing the Threat of Containerized Missiles

Summary:

China’s containerized missile launchers exploit commercial shipping to forward-deploy precision strike without obvious military signatures, collapsing the seam between civilian trade and combat power in any Taiwan contingency. The article argues the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard cannot board and inspect more than a sliver of regional maritime traffic, and that contractors can add capacity but cannot legally compel compliance. The proposed answer is a hybrid maritime interdiction force: contractor-owned platforms providing presence and mobility, with government boarding teams exercising lawful authority under pre-negotiated boarding frameworks, plus intelligence-driven queuing to manage scale and deception.

Excerpts:

No single institution can solve the containerized-missile problem — not the Navy, the Coast Guard, the intelligence community, or contractors. But if each institution contributes what it is uniquely suited to provide, the United States can create an interdiction architecture that is legally sound, operationally flexible, and strategically scalable.

In the Indo-Pacific, geography, shipping volume, and Chinese strategy all favor the side that can blend military assets into civilian patterns. The United States cannot match China ship-for-ship in commercial traffic, nor can traditional force structures solve the problem. It should instead build a force designed for the world as it is: one in which maritime threats are dispersed, ambiguous, and deliberately embedded in global commerce.

Most importantly, a hybrid interdiction force provides a way to impose cost on the Chinese Communist Party, counter the maritime militia, and neutralize covert missile deployments without overextending the U.S. Navy at the moment it is needed most. The Indo-Pacific is too large, the threat too blended, and the stakes too high for any single institution to handle alone. A hybrid force of government authority riding atop contractor-provided mass and intelligence-driven prioritization is not a luxury. It is the best near-term solution that matches the scale and complexity of the challenge.

Comment: If Beijing uses commercial hulls as launch platforms, when do U.S. rules of engagement treat “merchant” ships as combatants? How do we build a legal and allied inspection architecture fast enough to matter before the first salvo?

Containing the Threat of Containerized Missiles

warontherocks.com · January 6, 2026

Zane Tremmel

January 6, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/containing-the-threat-of-containerized-missiles/

In any war over Taiwan, American commanders will face a problem that barely existed a decade ago: China can hide lethal military systems inside standard commercial shipping containers. These “containerized” missile launchers are modern renditions of an old U.S. Navy concept first marketed in the Russian Club-K and are now reportedly fielded in Chinese variants. They ride on the decks of merchant ships, blend into global commerce, and give Beijing the ability to forward-deploy precision weapons without visibly deploying a single warship.

For U.S. planners, the threat is not hypothetical. It is a feature of modern conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Tens of thousands of container ships, feeder vessels, and mixed-use cargo hulls transport trillions of dollars in trade throughout the first island chain and South China Sea each year. Even if U.S. intelligence could flag a fraction of them as suspicious, which is a major challenge, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard lack the physical capacity to board and inspect more than a tiny percentage. As noted in these pages, a future Indo-Pacific conflict will blur longstanding distinctions between civilian and military vessels at sea, particularly when commercial vessels are used to support combat operations. Containerized missile systems are an example of how these emerging “rules of war” translate into operational dilemmas long before the first shot is fired.

These missile systems are a threat to the most powerful and expensive assets the United States operates and put thousands of sailors at risk, and yet today, there is little capability to meaningfully combat them. The U.S. military does not have the capacity and, as such, it will likely fall back on its tried-and-true method of fixing shortfalls: contractors. While this may provide some respite, the issue of legality quickly arises when discussing boarding operations. The lack of U.S. military capacity and the legal constraints on contractors point toward a hybrid maritime interdiction force as the most feasible near-term solution. Government boarding teams deployed from contractor-owned, contractor-operated vessels and aircraft, cued by U.S. intelligence, and backed by a pre-negotiated legal framework, allow for rapid boardings in a crisis.

This hybrid model is not merely workable, but a scalable, near-term solution that can operate in the gray zone, persist through escalation, and survive the transition to open conflict.

BECOME A MEMBER

Too Many Ships, Too Much Ocean

Tens of thousands of commercial vessels move annually through the waters surrounding Taiwan, whether transiting the Taiwan Strait, the Luzon Strait, the Miyako Strait, or the wider South China Sea. Even the most conservative maritime traffic estimates of singular straits show volumes that the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard could never meaningfully inspect at scale. Even if the United States committed every available Coast Guard cutter, every operational Littoral Combat Ship, every destroyer within reach, and every allied frigate willing to assist, the number of ships capable of launching, recovering, and supporting boarding teams would still be a rounding error against the traffic volume. That all of this could occur against the backdrop of a rapidly degrading security environment only underscores how unrealistic it is to imagine traditional naval forces sustaining a large-scale inspection campaign.

Boarding a vessel is not a trivial task. Even cooperative inspections take hours. Intrusive searches can consume half a day if containers are to be opened, sampled, and resealed. Boarding teams require insertion platforms, small boats, aviation support, translation assistance, evidence handling, and force protection. While capable, Coast Guard capacity in the Indo-Pacific is limited. The Navy’s surface combatants, meanwhile, are assigned to missions such as carrier escorts, missile defense, and anti-submarine patrols. This takes clear priority over lengthy inspection evolutions. A destroyer cannot spend hours tied to the side of a merchant hull while Chinese aircraft, submarines, and land-based missile batteries shape the battlespace. Even on interdicted vessels, teams would focus on top-deck or anomalous containers. Opening hundreds of boxes is impossible under threat and unnecessary given the physical requirements of containerized launchers.

The idea that either service could meaningfully inspect Indo-Pacific shipping while preparing for high-end conflict is simply unrealistic. The resources do not exist and building them from scratch would take decades the United States does not have.

What Contractors Can and Cannot Do

Contracting firms can provide both capability and capacity to this fight, but they cannot do everything. Contractors can operate ships, fly aircraft, and provide logistics and subject-matter expertise. They can shadow suspect vessels or transport U.S. boarding teams to and from targets. They can even act as prize-crew mariners for detained vessels. But they cannot compel a ship to stop. They cannot order a vessel to be inspected. They cannot conduct non-consensual boarding. They cannot seize a container, divert a hull, or employ force on the high seas in a law-enforcement capacity.

In short, they can handle mobility, but not authority. They can supply presence, but not coercion. Any system that imagines contractors conducting forcible inspections is illegal under international law and would collapse the moment a vessel resisted.

The hybrid approach solves this by making contractors the backbone of the mission while keeping all coercive authority in government hands. It is a clean division of labor: Contractors provide the platforms and logistics while U.S. boarding teams provide the law enforcement and military authority.

Build the Legal Architecture Now

The United States cannot board foreign vessels at will. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, forcible boarding in peacetime is allowed only under very narrow conditions: flag-state consent, master’s consent, statelessness, piracy, unauthorized broadcasting, or imminently justified self-defense. Containerized missile systems do not fall under any of those categories. If Washington wants the ability to inspect vessels in a crisis before open conflict begins, it needs to assemble a legal framework in advance.

Fortunately, that framework has precedents. U.S. counter-drug operations in the Caribbean and Pacific rely on pre-negotiated boarding agreements with local nations. The Proliferation Security Initiative uses political commitments that allow rapid consent to maritime interdiction operations involving Weapons of Mass Destruction-linked cargo. Commercial carriers often agree to inspection regimes under customs programs. Similar constructs, crafted now in peacetime, could give U.S. boarding teams the ability to conduct cooperative or consensual inspections on a large share of commercial vessels in the Indo-Pacific.

That said, the political difficulty should not be understated. Most states are cautious about arrangements that could be portrayed as siding openly with Washington during a Taiwan crisis, especially those in the Western Pacific or closely tied economically to China through maritime trade. Negotiating advanced authorities will require sustained diplomatic investment, quiet reassurance, and careful perception management. These arrangements should be framed in a similar light as the Proliferation Security Initiative, combatting the proliferation of catastrophic weapons in addition to an infringement of sovereignty, as the weapons would almost certainly be loaded without knowledge or consent of the carrier. These agreements are possible, but they are not simple.

Not all carriers will cooperate. COSCO Shipping, China’s state-owned shipping giant, will not consent to U.S. boardings. More importantly, in a crisis involving Taiwan, China would never grant flag-state authorization for U.S. interdiction of its merchant fleet. Nor would Beijing allow any relevant United Nations Security Council resolution to pass. COSCO vessels, therefore, would be un-boardable prior to open hostilities. They can be shadowed, monitored, or tracked, but not forcibly inspected. COSCO is both the carrier most likely to be used for containerized missile employment in a Taiwan scenario and the carrier least accessible to U.S. law enforcement. Future Indo-Pacific wars are likely to collapse peacetime and wartime legal regimes far faster than planners expect, leaving commanders with fewer off-ramps once merchant vessels are reclassified as hostile.

Once conflict begins, the legal environment changes. As experts note, the law of armed conflict permits civilian vessels to lose protected status if they make an effective contribution to hostilities — a shift that dramatically raises escalation risk. The hybrid interdiction model seeks to reduce that legal and operational ambiguity before merchant hulls are treated as lawful military targets. Merchant vessels participating in hostilities, or reasonably suspected of doing so, can be interdicted, seized, or attacked under the law of naval warfare. In that moment, COSCO ships would immediately move to the top of the U.S. Navy’s priority list. But that transition only reinforces the need to have a hybrid force already trained, chartered, and deployed before the first shots are fired.

How a Hybrid Boarding Force Would Operate

In practical terms, a hybrid force would look familiar to anyone who has spent time around maritime interdiction operations. Contractor-owned, contractor-operated ships would patrol throughout the South China Sea and first island chain, loitering in key lanes. They would shadow suspect vessels, serve as mother ships for boarding teams, and operate from small ports and anchorages the U.S. Navy does not routinely use, extending the reach of the interdiction force into areas that would otherwise go uncovered. They would offer the endurance and deck space to sustain operations that the Navy cannot spare. These contractor-operated platforms would not be immune from risk, but they could complicate Beijing’s escalation calculus: Contractor-operated vessels are far less attractive targets than U.S. surface combatants and would sit well below high-value naval assets on any strike list.

Placing contractors in contested spaces does introduce risk that can be mitigated by tightly constraining contractor roles and operating patterns. Contractor-owned and operated platforms would function under government tasking with clear mission profiles and predictable behavior, reducing opportunities for miscalculation. Harassment short of armed attack, a common Chinese tactic, would be managed through escalation control by government forces, rather than unilateral action by contractor crews.

U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement detachments and U.S. Navy visit, board, search, and seizure teams would rotate among these contracted platforms. When Navy or Coast Guard intelligence flags a high-priority vessel, a contractor ship, not a destroyer, would maneuver to intercept. The boarding team would transfer by small boat or helicopter, conduct the inspection, and make any legal determinations or seizures. If a vessel needed to be diverted to port, a prize crew of civilian mariners could take control, allowing the government boarding team to return to the mission almost immediately. All of this depends on a fused intelligence picture built from U.S. and allied sources, commercial satellites, automatic identification system analytics, and supply-chain data to shrink the search space before a team ever launches. This is easier said than done.

Successful queuing of this hybrid force is perhaps the greatest challenge to solve. China is an extremely capable threat with ample ability to conduct multilayered deception operations to obfuscate containerized missiles. It is likely that many would be embarked weeks or months ahead of conflict. Boarding teams will be operating from imperfect assessments and there will be inspections that yield no results. This reality only reinforces the need for a rapidly scalable force capable of absorbing false positives and conducting repeated, selective inspections over time.

A hybrid system preserves military authority, scales rapidly, uses commercial platforms to expand maritime presence, and keeps the Navy focused on the missions it will be expected to perform in conflict.

Beyond Missiles: Imposing Costs and Countering the Maritime Militia

Containerized missiles and drone swarms are the most dramatic version of the threat, but a hybrid interdiction architecture is useful beyond the missile problem. China’s maritime strategy relies heavily on the ability to weave commercial traffic, state-owned enterprises, and the maritime militia into a single, flexible ecosystem. That ecosystem operates across legal categories, which is precisely why it is so difficult for Washington to respond.

A hybrid presence force could impose friction at multiple points. Even limited, legally justified inspections or diversions of Chinese-linked commercial traffic create operational and economic costs for Beijing. Merchant vessels dependent on predictable schedules and port calls cannot easily absorb delays. Diversions disrupt supply chains and complicate China’s gray-zone strategy. If crisis escalates to conflict, the ability to rapidly seize COSCO vessels gives policymakers an additional means to impose non-kinetic cost while also mitigating the threat of COSCO-carried containerized missiles.

The maritime militia presents a similar challenge. These are not harmless fishermen. Many operate as scouting vessels, harassment assets, and paramilitary auxiliaries. They switch identities as needed. They answer to state direction when it suits Beijing and disavow it when caught. A hybrid approach gives the United States a scalable way to monitor, document, inspect, and — when necessary — detain militia vessels operating under civilian cover, again without tying down destroyers or escalating into a naval confrontation.

Alternate Solutions

Purely contractor solutions are inviable due to legality issues and all-military solutions are capable but lack capacity. Marine expeditionary units, with their maritime raid force consisting primarily of reconnaissance marines, and their air combat element could provide some additional capacity to U.S. Coast Guard and Navy teams. However, the vessels that these units embark on are highly susceptible to Chinese anti-ship missiles, necessitating support from surface combatants, which pulls vital capabilities from the primary fight. Marine expeditionary units could go ashore and operate from areas like the western Philippines or Singapore, but they would lose considerable flexibility. A better solution is to employ the maritime raid force and some marine aircraft with contractor support throughout the Western Pacific, preserving flexibility and maximizing coverage.

Another possible solution is to hold certain high-priority vessels at risk using armed long endurance drones, but this ties down limited assets and intelligence is unlikely to reach the level of confidence required for such a tasking. Aside from actively holding a vessel at risk, the United States does not have the capability to respond prior to a missile launch once receiving indications and warnings due to the rapid launch window.

The most practical solution is to board suspected vessels prior to launch using a capable, high-capacity hybrid force that has the flexibility to respond from competition to conflict.

A System That Should Be Built Before the Crisis

A hybrid maritime interdiction force cannot be improvised after a missile launches or a blockade forms around Taiwan. Washington should negotiate legal authorities in advance, charter and equip contractor platforms, train boarding teams alongside the vessels they will actually operate from, and certify prize crews before a crisis begins. The intelligence community should rehearse its processes in advance to ensure that threat prioritization is automated rather than ad hoc.

No single institution can solve the containerized-missile problem — not the Navy, the Coast Guard, the intelligence community, or contractors. But if each institution contributes what it is uniquely suited to provide, the United States can create an interdiction architecture that is legally sound, operationally flexible, and strategically scalable.

In the Indo-Pacific, geography, shipping volume, and Chinese strategy all favor the side that can blend military assets into civilian patterns. The United States cannot match China ship-for-ship in commercial traffic, nor can traditional force structures solve the problem. It should instead build a force designed for the world as it is: one in which maritime threats are dispersed, ambiguous, and deliberately embedded in global commerce.

Most importantly, a hybrid interdiction force provides a way to impose cost on the Chinese Communist Party, counter the maritime militia, and neutralize covert missile deployments without overextending the U.S. Navy at the moment it is needed most. The Indo-Pacific is too large, the threat too blended, and the stakes too high for any single institution to handle alone. A hybrid force of government authority riding atop contractor-provided mass and intelligence-driven prioritization is not a luxury. It is the best near-term solution that matches the scale and complexity of the challenge.

BECOME A MEMBER

Zane Tremmel is an intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He previously served as a target planner in the Joint Integrated Fires and Effects Center at the U.S. Pacific Fleet and a target intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific.

The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Defense Department, or the U.S. government.

**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: Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · January 6, 2026

17. Angle of Attack: Apache Attack Helicopters in Unmanned Skies

Summary:

U.S. Army aviation nears an identity break as unmanned systems crowd the air-ground littoral. Hannah Lamb argues the AH-64E Apache still matters, but only if it evolves through longer-range precision munitions, survivability upgrades, and cockpit integration that makes manned-unmanned teaming seamless. Ukraine and Israel show helicopters can still fight, yet dense air defenses and cheap drones punish legacy tactics. The Army is cutting Apache formations while still upgrading the platform, so the risk is a hurried divestment that creates an exploitable gap. Until drones match human judgment and payload, Apaches with launched effects stay relevant in skies.

Comment: Perhaps our Korean allies should read this as they lament the deactivation of an Apache unit in Korea.

Angle of Attack: Apache Attack Helicopters in Unmanned Skies

irregularwarfare.org · Hannah Lamb · January 6, 2026

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/angle-of-attack-apache-attack-helicopters-in-unmanned-skies/

United States Army Aviation, at a crossroads of equipment and identity as aerial warfare increasingly emphasizes unmanned systems, faces a difficult reckoning akin to a historical quote by General (Ret.) Eric Shinseki, “if you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” To maintain utility in modernizing skies, attack helicopters are under pressure to evolve their critical role or quickly risk obsolescence. Witnessing the ongoing use of helicopters in Ukraine and Israel, global military leaders’ observations polarize future defense acquisitions, with some nations deciding to instead invest in unmanned technologies and others, such as Poland, deepening their commitment to modernizing their attack helicopter fleets.

As the largest operator of attack helicopters globally, the U.S. Army is forced to face this strategic debate over the future relevance of manned attack helicopters. As a result, the Army is at an inflection point for its fleet of AH-64 Apache helicopters: the Army’s recent restructuring guidance cut 50 percent of AH-64 formations within each divisional combat aviation brigade, and with corresponding reductions in pilot billets. Simultaneously, these changes prioritize the increased integration of drone swarms and other unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Despite these shifts, the Army continues to invest in upgraded variants of the Apache, signaling some level of ongoing commitment to the platform.

Any comprehensive analysis of military systems begs several foundational questions: What is the mission of the current platform? Does that mission retain operational relevance within contemporary and evolving operational environments? Can operators innovate existing resources to enhance relevance across the spectrum of conflict? If not, what are the alternative systems capable of performing the mission more effectively or efficiently? In evaluating the future of attack aviation, it is imperative to consider the enduring utility of current assets through the lens of cost-efficiency, operational capability, and survivability. Candid and honest analysis is essential if rotary-wing attack aviation is to evolve and remain lethal, survivable, and relevant on the future battlefield.

The Evolution of Attack Aviation

The origins of dedicated attack aviation trace back to the introduction of the AH-1 Cobra in 1967, during the Vietnam War. Although the Cobra proved effective in low-intensity conflicts, its limited survivability in the high-intensity environments envisioned for AirLand Battle during the 1990s led to the development of the AH-64A Apache.

Distinct from operational-level platforms employed by the U.S. Air Force, Army attack helicopters serve as tactical assets designed for direct integration with ground maneuver forces. According to Army doctrine, the attack mission serves to destroy, dislocate, disintegrate, or isolate enemy formations. After the Army divested the OH-58D Kiowa scout helicopters in the 2010s, the Apache also filled the role of aerial reconnaissance until the advent of unmanned systems that increasingly subsumed the mission.

While originally designed for deep attack, the Apache became part of the joint air attack team that was integral to AirLand Battle doctrine at the end of the Cold War. During the Global War on Terror, the Apache adapted to the counterinsurgency environments of Iraq and Afghanistan, excelling as a direct fires and armed overwatch platform. Looking forward, the return of high intensity conventional combat appears to realign with the Apache’s original design philosophy. Yet, the complexity of modern, contested airspace in conflicts of all intensities renders the mission far more demanding than in past eras, and thus the weapon system and the tactical employment of that weapon system must continue to evolve if it is to remain relevant.

Today’s Attack Platform: The AH-64E Apache

First engineered as a Cold War tank-destroyer, the AH-64 Apache has proven its versatility across a range of conflict environments, including Operations Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and Enduring Freedom. Armed with a 30mm chain gun, 2.75-inch rockets, and a suite of radar- and laser-guided missiles, the Apache is capable of conducting both direct and indirect fire missions, either in close proximity with, or separate from ground forces. When equipped with its fire control radar, it can detect, track, and engage targets with minimal exposure to enemy fire. It is entirely integrated into the Army’s multi-domain operations concept which enables real-time data exchange with ground forces, friendly air assets, and other Apaches via internal internet protocols.

The current version of the Apache, the AH-64E, is also capable of manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T), providing the ability to operate alongside and control unmanned aerial platforms. As part of the Army’s Launched Effects (LE) experimentation, future Apaches will integrate with a variety of ground and air-launched unmanned systems to improve and expand ground commanders’ abilities to see, track, and strike enemy formations. The recent certification of the Spike Non-Line of Sight long range precision munitions (LRPM) will extend future Apaches’ lethality and increase the system’s survivability on the future battlefield. More importantly, the LRPM program provides a launchpad for development of extended range autonomous and remotely piloted small unmanned aerial systems.

The Development of Modern Unmanned Systems

In parallel with upgrades to the AH-64Es, the Army is also investing billions of dollars into the research, development, and acquisition of unmanned aerial systems for every echelon. Empowered by the recent Executive Order “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” the Army is actively collaborating with nearly 300 industry partners across the aerospace and technology industries to bring forth new systems and capabilities.

Army UAS strategy seeks to increase the capability of unmanned systems in the “air-ground littoral”—the airspace within a few thousand feet above the battlefield—where rotary wing assets traditionally operate. The Army intends to have UASs of varying sizes, capabilities, and endurance at each echelon, ranging from soldier-borne sensors at the squad level to LE and endurance UASs at the division and corps levels. Across the spectrum of UASs, nearly all designs include electro-optical and infrared sensors, with added specialties of electronic warfare, retransmission of communications, strike capabilities, and more. Some smaller systems are intended to be attritable, while others are to be repeatedly launched and recovered.

The desired end state of the proliferation of unmanned systems is to provide soldiers and formations with flexible capabilities, with the option for artificial intelligence-driven autonomous breaching and reconnaissance or pilot-controlled missions. Payload attachments and software will be standardized across the industry, while low-level commanders retain agency for the selection and testing of UAS they feel fit for their formations.

By increasing the availability and utilization of unmanned aerial systems, ground force commanders are able to extend their reach beyond the footprint of their formations. Doing so, however, complicates both physical airspace and the distinction in mission of manned systems.

Competing Capabilities

An understanding of the designed mission and capabilities of both manned and unmanned systems is critical to the analysis of the potential future of the Apache. In return to some of the critical lines of questioning: how might UASs and attack helicopters complement each other?

The original mission of the Apache was deep attack and armed reconnaissance. These missions will still be relevant in the operational environments of tomorrow, but how these missions are executed will be different. The question then becomes how Army attack aviation should evolve to retain its relevance. Whether drones can do these missions better, and if not better, cheaper with acceptable compromises, remains to be battlefield-tested in the types of future conflicts the United States anticipates.

The AH-64E Apache, as with any manned system, garners its advantage through human situational awareness and decision-making. While not an autonomous operator, an Apache crew can act independently through disciplined initiative well beyond the range of radio communications with a tactical operations center. In its present state, the Apache’s weapons payload is larger than most UASs’; however, far more limited in range, while on-board electro-optical and infrared sensing capabilities are comparable between the two.

Unmanned systems hold many of their advantages in the obvious: they do not put a pilot at risk, nor are they burdened by the demands of high training costs and crew rest, or the risk of deadly human error in the cockpit. Smaller or higher-altitude systems are potentially less detectable and lack the consequences of loss of life if interdicted. The procurement and sustainment of the Apache requires immense resources, while drones can be produced across a spectrum of price points, ranging from inexpensive tactical systems to advanced platforms in smaller numbers. Loiter time can stretch to over a week, while a helicopter is limited to single-digit hours of fuel.

At its core, UAS equipment provides a critical resource to commanders: information. The Army realized the value in pairing drones and helicopters for this purpose years prior to the Ukrainian conflict with developments in MUM-T. While historically an underutilized capability due to the cumbersome nature of the technology and lack of interoperability, pairing unmanned systems with attack helicopters is the future of the Apache.

Lethality in Partnership: The Pairing of Manned and Unmanned Systems

In a future contested environment, where the enemy has farther reach and stronger air defenses, range and survivability of any aerial platform is paramount. For the Apache to maintain relevance, continued investment into MUM-T capability, LRPM, cockpit updates, and aircraft survivability equipment is critical. Recent testing demonstrates the capability of the Apache to counter UASs with existing weapons systems, guided by onboard electro-optical and radar sensors. Adding purpose-built air-to-air weapons systems to target both drones and other manned aircraft would increase overall utility and survivability—a capability currently fielded by Ukrainian helicopter units. As it has throughout its lifespan, the Apache’s mission and technology must continue to evolve to address the changing character of conflict—especially in the asymmetric realm of irregular warfare, where adversaries can field “poor men’s air forces” and challenge conventional air forces’ traditional dominance of the battlespace.

The enduring utility of attack helicopters is found in their ability to evolve. The development and testing of launched effects technology is the future: instead of replacing the Apache, UASs are able to enhance its role on the battlefield. Launched Effects, which involves deploying drones off of manned platforms, is capable of extending the reach of target acquisition and identification, reducing the workload of pilots and providing out-front detection in a modernized version of MUM-T. Drones act as forward reconnaissance for manned attack, improving pilot survivability while also maintaining the payload capability and combat power of the Apache.

In contrast with fully-autonomous UAS platforms, maintaining the “human-in-the-loop” with launched effects preserves aircrew situational awareness while taking advantage of the range, low-cost, and sensing capabilities of drones. Combined with long-range munitions, the marriage of manned and unmanned systems provides unparalleled flexibility to the ground force commander. Critically, it allows for the sustained execution of the attack mission in a disparate fashion across the spectrum of conflict—from high-end combat against peer competitors to irregular warfare scenarios, all the while maintaining the capability of mission command far from a command post.

The future development of attack helicopter systems mandates both an open architecture for industry partners and a focus on levels of interoperability. Many of the shortcomings of legacy MUM-T systems resulted from their complexity of integration into the Apache cockpit and mission software. For UAS technology to provide the situational awareness it promises, it must work seamlessly to share targeting, threat, and mission data without adding workload to the pilot or ground observer.

The Writing on the Wall

As the proponent of unmanned aerial systems, the Army Aviation Center is able to control much of the policy and acquisitions processes that integrate drones into formations across the force. However, the branch must consequently foot much of the bill: in the FY2026 Defense Budget Overview, the justification of slashing all Air Cavalry Squadrons across the Army (and all Army Reserve rotorcraft) is to “reallocate these savings toward a more effective mix of next-generation rotary and unmanned platforms” with no mention of manned attack. In contrast with other Army and Air Force airframes, no new AH-64E Apaches are listed for purchase in FY26, signaling a shift from procurement to sustainment of the current fleet.

The danger of treating defense capabilities as a zero-sum game—letting current capabilities atrophy to fund others—is that it will inevitably leave an exploitable gap. Given a fixed budget, the Department of War must simultaneously innovate without deteriorating readiness. The reality of Large Scale Combat Operations and reported statistics from Ukraine present dangerously attractive “shiny objects” to distract decision-makers. The unintended consequence is potential knee-jerk reactions that prematurely divest missions or systems rather than exploring innovative concepts to repurpose proven investments and adapt to the future operating environment. Until there is a complete replacement for the capabilities of manned aviation—its range, disciplined initiative, and payloads—current and future Apaches still belong in the sky.

While the current fad of a UAS arms race is attractive, completely divesting the Apache fleet prior to UASs becoming attack aviation’s complete technological successor will prove to be a dangerous overcorrection by policymakers—especially because predictions of future conflicts are seldom accurate. The AH-64E is a proven entity in combined arms combat across the spectrum of conflict and has demonstrated its ability to adapt to the ever-changing character of warfare for over four decades in ways that drones might never do. Until unmanned platforms or combined manned-unmanned systems are capable of matching the effects of traveling hundreds of nautical miles without communications, analyzing and developing an engagement area, and carrying out an attack mission while following appropriate rules of engagement, the Apache still has a prominent and necessary place on the Army’s multi-domain operations team.

Hannah Lamb is an active duty Army Aviation officer and AH-64E pilot. She is a graduate of the United States Military Academy where she studied Civil Engineering and Counterterrorism. Her previous work includes projects on the implementation of special operations in the Ukrainian conflict and the impacts of U.S. infrastructure reconstruction policy on the radicalization of terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Main Image: An AH-64E Apache helicopter from the United States Army Aviation Center of Excellence completes a flyover of the NCAA Beach Volleyball National Championship on May 5th, 2024 (U.S. Army Photo by 2nd Lt. Hannah Lamb).

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

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irregularwarfare.org · Hannah Lamb · January 6, 2026

18. We Grow Strategists Too Late: Why Army Leaders Must Fail Early

Summary:

Matthew Revels argues the Army grows strategists too late, waiting until senior service college after officers have absorbed tactical habits and institutional biases that narrow strategic imagination. He calls for broad strategic competence, not rare genius, built early through a common core curriculum across commissioning sources. West Point should serve as an experimentation hub, pairing strategy theory with educational wargaming so young leaders can practice building and testing strategies against thinking adversaries. Games provide controlled failure, reduce ethnocentrism through role play, and create a strategic apprenticeship that continues through an officer’s career. The aim is leaders comfortable with risk, adaptation, and iteration before mistakes carry wartime costs.

Comment: My thoughts are at this essay:

Thoughts on Professional Military Education: After 9-11, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the Era of Fiscal Austerity

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2012/01/01/thoughts-professional-military-education-after-9-11-iraq-and-afghanistan-era-fiscal/

I think the foundation of PME at every level should be a core curriculum built around these 5 subjects:

Military History

Military Theory

Military Geography

Operational Art

Strategy

We should be exposing our officers to these subjects with the appropriate focus for their level of experience. But we should not be waiting until senior service college to expose our officers to strategic.

We Grow Strategists Too Late: Why Army Leaders Must Fail Early - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Matthew Revels · January 6, 2026

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/we-grow-strategists-too-late-why-army-leaders-must-fail-early/

Despite a robust architecture of strategic documents, planning processes, and professional staff, the US Army and its strategic leadership have struggled to consistently develop and implement a strategy aligned with the threats it faces. Many explanations exist for this persistent shortcoming, but one critical factor is often overlooked: the Army attempts to develop strategists far too late in an officer’s career. Most officers do not receive formal instruction in strategy development until attending a senior service college—long after they have internalized tactical habits, service-specific norms, and cognitive biases that constrain strategic thought. By delaying strategic education until the later stages of an officer’s career, the Army forfeits the opportunity to cultivate adaptive thinkers capable of pursuing innovative, asymmetric solutions to its most complex challenges.

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have written extensively about the value of strategic education and wargaming within the US military. So why is it pertinent to raise this issue once again? The answer lies in America’s increasingly precarious strategic position. As the international order progressively features competition among at least two great powers, a growing cohort of middle powers exerts greater regional influence, complicating the military balance of power. In this changing system, the United States’ adversaries appear to be increasingly capable of challenging the American military’s regional dominance. In addition to their individual capabilities, the burgeoning “axis of autocracy” threatens coordinated action to overwhelm the dispersed capabilities of the United States and its allies. With this backdrop in mind, the Army needs to develop senior leaders with genuine strategic expertise, which can only be developed through continuous education and experience.

Succeeding in this complex and competitive world requires a new type of strategist: one that is imaginative, unconventional, and risk acceptant. The kinds of qualities one can only obtain through a career of strategic learning, constant competition, and, most importantly, failure. Fostering strategic expertise within the officer corps requires a paradigm shift in how the Army approaches professional military education. Currently, only a small cohort receives this foundational understanding as part of the Defense and Strategic Studies program’s curriculum at the United States Military Academy, which will soon be succeeded by the War Studies major. As global competition intensifies, the Army must move beyond isolated programs and establish a common core strategy curriculum—enabled by educational wargaming—across commissioning sources to develop leaders capable of operating at the strategic level. Focusing on strategy implementation through wargaming provides cadets with a unique experience largely missing from current military education: the chance for young leaders to experience strategic failure, challenge their own ethnocentric assumptions, and bridge the experiential gap through practice.

The Problem with Teaching Strategy Too Late

The US Army should not aim to create strategic geniuses, a feat that many enlightened minds would say is impossible. Instead, it should seek to establish a broad base of strategic competence. As the late Colin Gray argued convincingly, strategic competence is necessary at all levels of command because, whether we know it or not, all military officers interact with or implement strategy.

Today’s junior officers routinely operate at the intersection of tactical action and strategic consequence. The Army’s forward posture—deploying small formations to strategically significant locations as tripwire forces or reassurance missions—places young leaders in roles with outsized political and strategic impact. Yet these officers often lack formal strategic education. While intermediate-level education introduces operational art as a “bridge” between tactics and strategy, it rarely teaches officers how strategies are formulated, implemented, or assessed. By emphasizing downstream execution before upstream understanding, the Army builds a bridge to nowhere.

In addition to establishing a broad base of strategic competence within the force, the Army needs to routinely assess officers’ ability to assume the role of strategic leader. Officer evaluation reports assess the tactical competence and potential of leaders, but they fail to evaluate whether leaders display strategic acumen. It is difficult for fellow officers to recognize these qualities when they lack the education to do so.

As a result, the Army often selects future strategic leaders primarily based on tactical excellence, hoping that strategic aptitude will emerge later. While tactical competence is essential, it is not a reliable proxy for strategic judgment. The experience of Afghanistan illustrates the danger of this approach: successive leaders displayed varying degrees of strategic effectiveness without institutional continuity or deliberate development. The United States was fortunate that these failures occurred in a conflict that did not threaten its existential security. In a future peer conflict, the margin for learning on contact may not exist.

Developing Strategists: From Theory to Wargaming

Educating strategic leaders requires innovating the military education system to include strategic competence. Before the US Army commits to the wholesale adoption of a new education pathway, it should task one of its subunits to experiment with the changes. When looking to innovate junior leader education, the Army should look to the United States Military Academy as its premier leadership experimentation unit. The task at West Point should be twofold: (1) establish a common core course that teaches strategic theory and development and (2) establish a robust wargaming program to enable cadets to gain knowledge through experiential learning.

West Point already has a model for shaping and developing the curriculum for such a program, so the challenge lies in making it required course material for all cadets. The Defense and Strategic Studies and War Studies majors allow a small cohort of cadets to specialize in the subject, but the majority of cadets are rarely exposed to the subject. West Point can draw valuable lessons from the Air Force Academy, which requires cadets to complete core courses in air, joint, space, and cyber strategy. Rather than mirroring domain-specific approaches, West Point should adopt the underlying principle: early exposure to strategic theory and decision-making as a foundational professional competency.

Next, cadets should learn and experience the strategy development and implementation process in their final years at the academy. A course focused on this will require young leaders to engage in the intellectual exercise of developing a strategy to achieve specific objectives. Though complex and laborious, cadets can begin to experience the difficulty of developing their own strategies for a given scenario, using planning tools to simplify the process. Junior leader development should not end with creating a strategy. To truly understand the complexity that planners, commanders, and policymakers must contend with, cadets must experience the difficulty of competing against a thinking adversary, one seeking to counter them at every turn. Only one tool allows us to test and assess strategy in such a synthetic environment with the ability to replicate on a large scale—wargames.

Many prominent military leaders and scholars have long argued for the utility of wargaming to help educate officers, assess their selection for command, and enable them to compete against a thinking adversary. When many think of wargames, they think of complex, scenario-specific games that help planners determine if their forces are properly postured to win a conflict. The analysis occurs after the game, when planners assess and dissect the elements of human decision-making that happened during the game. Narrowly focusing on these games, often classified as analytical, misses their broader applications for learning and assessment.

Wargames include two additional categories: experiential and educational. Both types of games can serve the broader interest of enabling the Army to instruct and assess its leaders over the long term. Educational and experiential games provide the Army with a tool to reinforce core concepts and offer leaders experiences they cannot replicate. Since cadets are just beginning to acquire their strategic competence, West Point should rely on educational games to reinforce key lessons and prioritize games that are fair, not balanced, to replicate the realities of the strategic environment. By leveraging experimentation at West Point, the Army can develop and refine a common core strategy and wargaming curriculum, scale it across all commissioning sources, and deliberately build strategic competence in follow-on professional military education throughout officers’ careers.

In addition to changes in strategic education, the Army should prioritize continuous assessments of its burgeoning leaders through experiential games. Game difficulty should build over time as the leader becomes more experienced and knowledgeable in the subject matter. Initial games should rely on rigid rule structures and clear instructions to guide young strategists, transitioning over time to more open-ended games that require greater subject-matter expertise. An example of games that provide more fluidity for players are Matrix Games. These games enable players to maximize their creativity while relying on a mix of stochastic adjudication and structured dialogue. By beginning with games that guide the strategic leader’s actions and then transitioning to those that require greater expertise, the Army can address long-standing issues within the force and prepare leaders for strategic positions.

Why Wargaming Matters

If early strategy education provides the foundation, wargaming provides the mechanism through which that education becomes experiential and enduring. Educating Army leaders in strategic theory and having them compete in wargames will not, by itself, solve the United States’ dearth of strategic genius. Still, it provides key elements currently missing from the Army’s leader development experience. Finding the right balance between tactical, operational, and strategic education will help build a basic level of competence within the force. But wargaming is the critical ingredient in preparing leaders for strategic roles. The benefits of games extend beyond their use as an analytical tool to the elimination of risk-avoidant behaviors that turn strategy development into a procedural process. Through games, strategists can learn to fail, adopt the views and objectives of different strategic actors, and assimilate into a long-term strategic apprenticeship.

Failure

Failure is a critical component of learning. Unfortunately, by the time strategists can practice their craft, they are already in positions where failure can result in loss of life or have detrimental effects on US national security. When placed in these positions for the first time, many strategists are inherently conservative in their thinking, undermining their willingness to accept risk and increasing the likelihood that they find solace in familiar solutions. Wargames offer us an opportunity to break this norm, allowing future commanders to fail repeatedly in their pursuit of finding solutions to complex problems. In an era when the US military no longer relies on overmatch, leaders must pursue asymmetric approaches that entail accepting risk. Wargames allow future commanders to fail, observe how a thinking adversary adapts, and reflect on the consequences of their decisions. Introducing this experience early enables officers to internalize risk, uncertainty, and adaptation before failure carries real-world costs.

Ethnocentrism

Wargames also confront a persistent flaw in US strategic thinking: ethnocentrism. By forcing players to assume the roles of adversaries, allies, and partners, wargames disrupt mirror-imaging and require strategists to pursue objectives at the United States’ expense. Competitive incentives reinforce perspective taking, making bias reduction a natural byproduct of play rather than a rhetorical aspiration.

Strategic Apprenticeship

Critics often argue that Army officers struggle to think strategically compared to their Air Force and Navy counterparts. This gap is not a matter of intellect but of institutional incentives. The Air Force and Navy operate in domains that require constant interaction with national-level decision-makers, reinforcing strategic engagement. The Army’s structure, branch competition, and emphasis on tactical readiness create fewer natural feedback loops for sustained strategic practice.

Once again, wargames offer a novel solution to the Army’s strategic expertise problem. The nature of the Air Force’s and Navy’s domains, along with their organizational structures, create feedback loops that promote strategic thinking. To develop the Army’s expertise, it must think of strategy education and wargaming as an apprenticeship that culminates in being chosen for positions that influence strategy creation. The Army and the nation expect the service’s leaders to be experts in the application of violence to achieve the United States’ policy objectives, but those in the positions to implement strategy assume their roles with limited practice. Through this strategic apprenticeship, the Army’s senior leaders can develop the necessary expertise to guide US military strategy effectively. The development of expertise requires repeated, challenging practice with effective feedback. Waiting to introduce strategy and wargaming until officers’ intermediate-level education fails to provide them with the necessary practice to develop expertise. Beginning the pattern of strategic iteration, feedback, and reflection early in an officer’s career can close the expertise gap in the Army’s current educational system.

Strategy education and wargaming will not produce the next Napoleon, nor should that be the goal. What they can produce is a force with broad strategic competence, reduced bias, and leaders accustomed to learning through failure. Preparing future strategic leaders must begin early and continue deliberately across an officer’s career. The rapid ascent of Dwight D. Eisenhower should both provide comfort and serve as a cautionary example for the US Army. Despite having no prior combat or formal strategic experience before the war, Eisenhower advanced from lieutenant colonel to four-star general in just two years, culminating in his appointment as supreme allied commander. Though he was successful, there were many blunders along the way that could have hindered strategic success in a different campaign that featured American power fighting an adversary of equal or greater industrial power. Given the changing global power dynamics and industrial capacities, the Army can no longer wait to develop strategic leaders while in contact with its adversaries. Instead, the Army should use West Point as its experimentation and proving ground to develop and refine a common core strategy and wargaming curriculum. Once validated, the Army should implement this curriculum across all commissioning sources and integrate educational wargaming as a developmental assessment tool throughout officers’ careers, treating early strategic failure as an institutional investment rather than a liability. Only through repeated learning and wargames can we hope to develop the expertise necessary to outwit our adversaries and win when crisis comes.

Matthew Revels is an Army strategist who serves as the Modern War Institute’s plans officer and as a senior instructor at the United States Military Academy. He currently teaches courses on military innovation and forecasting and gaming in decision-making.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Chad Kotce, US Air Force

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Matthew Revels · January 6, 2026

19. The Shockwaves of Venezuela: How Maduro’s Capture Could Throw Latin America Into Tumult

Summary:

Will Freeman argues Maduro’s capture may yield only muted, transactional change at first, because POTUS appears focused on oil access, deportations, and sidelining rivals more than democratic restoration. A Delcy Rodriguez interim arrangement could preserve the regime’s machinery while offering Washington energy and migration concessions, yet internal power struggles with hardliners could still trigger instability and a second strike. Regional effects may concentrate on Cuba’s fuel dependence and Colombia’s volatile politics, while other governments hedge quietly to avoid retaliation. Over time, coercive precedent may accelerate Latin American diversification toward China and Europe, eroding U.S. influence and legitimacy.

Excerpts:

This silence indicates that much of the Western Hemisphere is, for now, Washington’s domain. For years, analysts have watched China make inroads in the region and argued that U.S. influence was slipping. But Maduro’s seizure suggests that past administrations—out of caution, respect for law and norms, and sometimes neglect—simply didn’t exercise the substantial leverage that Washington has long possessed.

It is uncertain, however, whether Trump’s intervention in Venezuela will become a testament to American power or expose its limits, and eventually contribute to its erosion. Many countries are already responding to Trump’s punitive use of tariffs by hurrying to strengthen diplomatic and trade ties with Asia and Europe. Some states, including Brazil and Colombia, are experimenting with building closer defense and tech ties, respectively, with China. Maduro’s extraction may accelerate these trends. Trump could also lose interest in Washington’s so-called near abroad, moving on to other items on his international agenda. The administration’s recently issued National Security Strategy puts the Western Hemisphere above every other region, and Maduro’s capture and the massive U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean suggests that this ambition is not simply rhetoric. But this reallocation of assets may or may not endure. Outside of Rubio, few officials in the Trump administration seem personally invested in an “Americas First” foreign policy that goes beyond more regional security cooperation and increased deportations.

What Trump does next in Venezuela and the Caribbean will thus be very telling. His interventions will test just how far U.S. power to shape hemispheric affairs reaches.

Comment: How does the United States secure energy and migration objectives without normalizing a “might makes right” model that drives partners to seek counterweights and invites chronic escalation risk in the hemisphere?

The Shockwaves of Venezuela

Foreign Affairs · More by Will Freeman · January 6, 2026

How Maduro’s Capture Could Throw Latin America Into Tumult

Will Freeman

January 6, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/shockwaves-venezuela

A portrait of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at a demonstration in Caracas, January 2026 Leonardo Fernandez Viloria / Reuters

WILL FREEMAN is Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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On January 3, U.S. forces did something many observers thought impossible: they quickly captured and arrested Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s wily, seemingly coup-proof autocrat. For years, Maduro had proven himself an expert in authoritarian survival—crushing at least nine military mutinies and outlasting American economic pressure. But early Saturday morning, he fell practically without a fight. Delta Force helicopters took limited fire as they flew low over Caracas rooftops to Maduro’s bunker, where U.S. troops stormed inside, grabbed him and his wife, and whisked them to an aircraft carrier. Hours later, both were behind bars in New York, facing drug and weapons charges. No American lives were lost, although at least 80 Cubans and Venezuelans, including some civilians, were killed. The whole operation looked so easy that many analysts have reasonably wondered whether regime insiders abetted Maduro’s extraction, in effect staging a palace coup by proxy. At the same time, the operation was a dramatic display of Trump’s willingness to cast aside what’s left of the so-called rules based international order and use military force to assert U.S. dominance over the Western Hemisphere.

In the days since, Venezuelans living abroad have celebrated ecstatically. But the country itself has remained quiet. Most people seem to recognize that it’s possible little has really changed. Trump, after all, has left Maduro’s regime largely intact, recognizing Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, as interim president before she had even publicly accepted the position herself. The question is whether the shifts will remain relatively modest, or if Maduro’s extraction presages bigger changes within both Venezuela and the region.

There is a wide range of possibilities. Maduro’s removal might facilitate Venezuela’s transition to democracy, tank Cuba’s regime, and advance Trump’s bid to assert U.S. hemispheric dominance. Alternatively, a reshuffled Maduro regime might simply accept more deportees from the United States and give Washington control over its oil reserves, but otherwise change little. The regional shock waves could be limited. In fact, the inability to fundamentally change Venezuela might end up revealing the limits of American power.

But the eventual outcomes will probably fall somewhere in between these two extremes. In the short-term, the consequences for Venezuela will likely be muted, as Trump tries to work with the reconfigured regime to secure his top objective: access to oil. Other Latin American governments might retaliate with words, but most will avoid responding with deeds so as not to incur Trump’s anger. As time goes on, however, the situation may become more fraught. Trump might attack Venezuela again, especially if Rodriguez is unwilling or, constrained by other regime figures, unable to comply with his directives. Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba will likely decrease, weakening (although not necessarily collapsing) the island’s already flagging regime. Colombia could face American intervention, given that its left-wing president—unlike most of its neighbors—seems eager to fight with Trump, and that Trump welcomes this dispute. And critically, Latin American countries, especially the larger, more geographically distant ones, may try to further diversify their economic and security relationships to reduce their exposure to an assertive and demanding Washington. Trump’s attack, in other words, could advance or set back his hemispheric dream.

PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

To figure out how Venezuela and the region might change, analysts should first pay attention to the breadth of the Trump administration’s demands of Venezuela’s reshuffled leadership. That will require looking less at the orders and aspirations Trump lists off the cuff in public, which are bound to vary, and more at the reports and leaks about what he and his team are privately pressing Caracas to deliver.

One possibility is that these demands will be narrow: opening up Venezuela’s oil reserves to long-term U.S. control and investment, sidelining certain geopolitical rivals, including Iran and Cuba, and getting Caracas to accept an increased number of deportees. Trump alluded to such a scenario in his January 3 press conference, when the president stressed the importance of Venezuela’s oil and evinced little interest in the restoration of its democracy. In fact, Trump barely mentioned Venezuela’s opposition; when he did, it was only to say that the opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize-recipient, Maria Corina Machado, was insufficiently “respected” to run the country. By contrast, Trump suggested Rodriguez, a longtime loyalist to Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, could make her country “great again.” Trump also said that a group of administration officials would “run” Venezuela, although the administration later declared that he meant Washington would run it indirectly by threatening the Maduro regime’s remaining leaders into complying with American demands.

Such a limited U.S. agenda might satisfy many members of Trump’s team, including Vice President JD Vance, top policy adviser Stephen Miller, and others skeptical of nation-building projects and more focused on domestic priorities. Trump might also perceive this path as the most doable and least unpopular with Americans, only a third of whom said they supported the use of military force to remove Maduro in a January 5 poll. One congressional staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me, “We just saw a trade deal with a change of leaders.”

But other Trump allies have signaled they will press for harder, more ambitious shifts: namely, an eventual end to Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialist regime and a return to democracy, likely through negotiations. Such figures include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and important Republicans in Congress. Although Trump seems less interested in democracy, Rubio clearly has his and other administration officials’ ears on matters related to Latin America, and may be able to convince them that a democratic transition will serve their interests. Republican lawmakers, for their part, might persuade Trump that pursuing only narrow, oil- and migration-centric goals will hurt the party electorally. That could especially prove true among Latino voters in Florida eager for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba, many of which already feel betrayed by the harsher-than-expected implementation of Trump’s deportation policies. (Miami just elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years.)

The Latin American regime under the greatest immediate pressure may not be Venezuela’s.

Trump’s decisions will also depend on what choices Venezuelan officials make next. If they defy the White House by refusing to hand over oil rights or to reduce ties with Cuba, Washington might again attack the country, as Trump has repeatedly stated. But cooperation seems the likelier path. Rodriguez, in particular, has a reputation for pragmatism. She may have condemned Washington’s attacks, but such statements could reflect a need to appease regime hardliners and would-be rivals, like Minister for Interior, Justice, and Peace Diosdado Cabello. They could also be designed to distract from suspicions she helped turn Maduro in. Either way, they should not be taken at face value. According to reporting by the Miami Herald, last year, Rodriguez and her politically influential brother, who was just re-appointed as head of the National Assembly, put forward a plan to U.S. officials in which she would replace Maduro and work with the United States, in exchange for keeping his system in place. (Rubio, according to the report, blocked the deal.) Rodriguez is also less committed to Cuba than Maduro, which news outlets suggest is the result of her frustration with Cuba’s failure to reliably pay Venezuela for its oil shipments. At least some Trump administration officials told the New York Times off the record they think they can work with her. In fact, if she or other regime officials did secretly collude with the United States to turn over Maduro—as seems possible—then cooperation with Washington may already be underway.

Trump has another incentive to keep his demands of Rodriguez narrow: if he does, she is more likely to agree to them. Most U.S. officials probably do not want to attack Caracas again. It is a move which, rather than compelling obedience, could easily sow chaos. A narrow deal—support for Rodriguez in exchange for more oil and less aid to Havana—is thus the path of least resistance for both sides.

Of course, for Venezuela to cooperate with either narrow or broad demands, someone has to be in control of the country. Right now, that remains the Rodriguez siblings. But they face powerful potential challengers—most notably Cabello, who wields influence over Venezuela’s armed paramilitaries, or colectivos, as well as over the country’s national police and parts of its intelligence apparatus. He may want to stop Caracas from cooperating with the White House, which views him with great suspicion. (Cabello was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for drug trafficking, alongside Maduro.) If Cabello cannot get Rodriguez to follow his requests, he could try to either depose her or to make the country ungovernable. In that case, much would depend on what the head of Venezuela’s armed forces, Vladimir Padrino López—the regime’s third power center—opts to do. As of now, it is impossible to say who he might side with, or whether he could keep the military unified if infighting seriously intensifies.

POWER PROBLEMS

If Rodriguez works with Trump and maintains control of her country, then the Latin American regime under the greatest immediate pressure may not actually be Venezuela’s. Instead, it could be Cuba’s. The island is dependent on Venezuelan assistance, and it was in dire straits even before Trump had Maduro captured. The Cuban economy is in tatters. Tourism, its primary industry, has shrunk to at least half pre-pandemic levels with no signs of rebounding. Crime and disease are on the rise as law enforcement and hospitals break down, thanks to insufficient financing. The island’s government has withstood enormous pressure before. But it is facing its greatest-ever crisis.

The most immediate risk for Cuba’s rulers is energy. The island relies heavily on imported fuel, much of it sourced from Venezuela, to power its electrical grid, which is teetering on the brink of failure. Over 40 percent of the country goes without energy during peak hours. Some provinces have power for just two to four hours a day. If Washington now cuts Cuba off from almost all Venezuelan oil—the U.S. naval blockade having already stopped some shipments—the grid could collapse. Havana will surely look to other countries to step in, but it is unlikely to find many suppliers. Mexico sends some oil currently, but less than in previous years. With Trump repeatedly threatening to attack Mexican territory, its officials are unlikely to increase supplies now. Brazil doesn’t seem inclined to replace Venezuela either, since leftist President Lula da Silva, who is running for re-election next year, knows doing so would undermine his newly improved relationship with Trump and potentially invite election meddling. Russia, strained by its invasion of Ukraine, and China are also unlikely to fill the vacuum.

If Havana, usually protected from prolonged blackouts, plunges into darkness, the regime could face mass protests as large or larger than those of July 2021. (The 2021 demonstrations, the first of their scale in decades, showed the depth and breadth of public anger.) Such protests might prove tough to contain, especially if they played out in dense Havana neighborhoods. Cuba’s security forces frequently engage in brutal methods of smothering unrest—detention, torture, threats. But they rarely shoot and kill dozens of protestors. It is unclear what would happen if that changed, and whether protests might cascade.

Trump has threatened to use direct military force against Colombia.

Still, it’s entirely possible the regime could survive even this dire situation. The Cuban military has immense stakes in the government’s survival, given that it controls much of the economy through a web of companies that would vanish after a political transition. And it seems no one on the island is in a position to challenge the armed forces. Like with Maduro, deposing Cuba’s communist regime might require a U.S. military operation—a maneuver that neither Trump nor the American public seemingly has much appetite for. The president, for example, recently stated he believes the Cuban regime will fall on its own, without direct U.S. involvement.

Trump has, however, threatened to use direct military force against Colombia. He has said the country is “run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States, and he's not going to be doing it for very long.” Colombian President Gustavo Petro, unlike Venezuela’s and Cuba’s leaders, was democratically elected. He is a leftist ideologically opposed to Trump and who was at times friendly with Maduro. Yet Petro is not changing his behavior. To the contrary, he has relished the confrontation, both because it gives him a much-sought international pedestal and because he thinks it will help his political successor. Colombia’s presidential election is just months away, and Petro’s preferred candidate, Iván Cepeda, is likely to face scrutiny over the current government’s unmet policy promises. Petro is eager to shift the conversation away from domestic challenges, and squaring off against Trump serves that purpose.

There are reasons to doubt that Trump will make good on his threats against Bogota. Washington seems to expect that a conservative president will win in May. The United States also relies on Colombia, its main Latin American security partner, to help with much of its regional counternarcotics efforts, even if current U.S.-Colombian tensions have obstructed them. But Trump is unpredictable, and if Petro continues to forthrightly respond to U.S. actions in Venezuela, Trump could intervene forcefully in some way.

AMERICAS FIRST?

Beyond Cuba, Colombia, and of course Venezuela, Maduro’s removal may have more limited near-term consequences. Lula criticized Washington’s strikes, but his government quickly recognized Rodriguez as interim president and made no real effort to defend Maduro. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, another leftist and occasional Maduro apologist, likewise has other priorities: navigating upcoming trade renegotiations and avoiding U.S. military strikes on Mexican soil against drug cartels. Mexico’s dependence on trade with the United States sharply limits her room for maneuver.

This silence indicates that much of the Western Hemisphere is, for now, Washington’s domain. For years, analysts have watched China make inroads in the region and argued that U.S. influence was slipping. But Maduro’s seizure suggests that past administrations—out of caution, respect for law and norms, and sometimes neglect—simply didn’t exercise the substantial leverage that Washington has long possessed.

It is uncertain, however, whether Trump’s intervention in Venezuela will become a testament to American power or expose its limits, and eventually contribute to its erosion. Many countries are already responding to Trump’s punitive use of tariffs by hurrying to strengthen diplomatic and trade ties with Asia and Europe. Some states, including Brazil and Colombia, are experimenting with building closer defense and tech ties, respectively, with China. Maduro’s extraction may accelerate these trends. Trump could also lose interest in Washington’s so-called near abroad, moving on to other items on his international agenda. The administration’s recently issued National Security Strategy puts the Western Hemisphere above every other region, and Maduro’s capture and the massive U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean suggests that this ambition is not simply rhetoric. But this reallocation of assets may or may not endure. Outside of Rubio, few officials in the Trump administration seem personally invested in an “Americas First” foreign policy that goes beyond more regional security cooperation and increased deportations.

What Trump does next in Venezuela and the Caribbean will thus be very telling. His interventions will test just how far U.S. power to shape hemispheric affairs reaches.

Foreign Affairs · More by Will Freeman · January 6, 2026

20. The Fog of AI: What the Technology Means for Deterrence and War

Summary:

The authors argue that artificial intelligence both strengthens and destabilizes deterrence. AI sharpens intelligence, accelerates decisions, and clarifies signals of capability and resolve, yet it also opens new attack surfaces. Adversaries can poison training data, corrupt analytic pipelines, and weaponize AI-driven influence operations to distort leaders’ perceptions and erode domestic resolve. In democracies, where public support underwrites credibility, cognitive warfare aimed at opinion and elite judgment can paralyze decision-making and invite escalation. Deterrence in the AI age therefore hinges less on raw capability than on protecting the integrity of the information environment on which leaders rely.

Excerpts:

Even a powerful country such as the United States may have difficulty signaling its deterrent credibility if it becomes exposed to advanced AI-enabled information warfare. For policymakers and citizens alike, the challenge will be figuring out how to harness the benefits of AI while preventing its weaponization. Strategies for countering this new threat must be developed as rapidly as the technologies underpinning it.

Meeting this challenge will require governments and researchers taking steps to harden analytic systems against model poisoning and actively counter AI-enabled influence operations whenever they are detected. To combat the work of firms such as GoLaxy, for instance, the United States and its allies must be able to rapidly detect and disrupt synthetic networks with tools that are capable of identifying and neutralizing AI-driven personas before they take hold. Education campaigns about synthetic media and how it can be identified can also strengthen public awareness of the threat. Democratic governments, social media and AI platforms, and interdisciplinary researchers should work together to develop such solutions.

At the strategic level, the United States should invest in technologies that can quickly detect synthetic messages. The government, academia, and the private sector should design new decision-making safeguards and data-filtering systems that can withstand corrupted inputs, while working with U.S. allies to expose and punish perpetrators of large-scale information campaigns. Additionally, this alliance should programmatically test new models to root out deficiencies—including the kind of data poisoning that may not be obvious in day-to-day use—and do so with rigorous transparency, to allow for peer review. Resilient safeguards and diligent testing are necessary to ensure that AI systems can reliably perform in moments of extraordinary stress or crisis.

In the AI era, deterrence can no longer rest on capabilities and resolve. It will require leaders, defense strategists, and other decision-makers to be able to preserve the reliability of their information environment—even amid widespread digital distortion.

Comment: This is cognitive warfare. How can the United States deter aggression when adversaries can invisibly manipulate the AI systems that shape its assessments of resolve and risk?

What investments and norms are required to signal credible deterrence while assuming that the information domain itself is contested and untrustworthy?

The Fog of AI

Foreign Affairs · More by Brett V. Benson · January 6, 2026

Brett V. Benson and Brett J. Goldstein

What the Technology Means for Deterrence and War

January 6, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/fog-ai

A U.S. soldier carrying part of an AI-powered counterdrone system, Nowa Deba, Poland, November 2025 Kacper Pempel / Reuters

BRETT V. BENSON is Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University.

BRETT J. GOLDSTEIN is Special Adviser to the Chancellor on National Security and Strategic Initiatives and a Research Professor in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University.

More by Brett J. Goldstein

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming indispensable to national security decision-making. Militaries around the world already depend on AI models to sift through satellite imagery, assess adversaries’ capabilities, and generate recommendations for when, where, and how force should be deployed. As these systems advance, they promise to reshape how states respond to threats. But advanced AI platforms also threaten to undermine deterrence, which has long provided the overall basis for U.S. security strategy.

Effective deterrence depends on a country being credibly able and willing to impose unacceptable harm on an adversary. AI strengthens some of the foundations of that credibility. Better intelligence, faster assessments, and more consistent decision-making can reinforce deterrence by more clearly communicating to adversaries a country’s defense capabilities as well as its apparent resolve to use them. Yet adversaries can also exploit AI to undermine these goals: they can poison the training data of models on which countries rely, thereby altering their output, or launch AI-enabled influence operations to sway the behavior of key officials. In a high-stakes crisis, such manipulation could limit a state’s ability to maintain credible deterrence and distort or even paralyze its leaders’ decision-making.

Consider a crisis scenario in which China has placed sweeping economic sanctions on Taiwan and launched large-scale military drills around the island. U.S. defense officials turn to AI-powered systems to help formulate the U.S. response—unaware that Chinese information operations have already corrupted these systems by poisoning their training data and core inputs. As a result, the models overstate China’s actual capabilities and understate U.S. readiness, producing a skewed assessment that ultimately discourages U.S. mobilization. At the same time, Chinese influence campaigns, boosted by sudden floods of AI-driven fake content across platforms such as Facebook and TikTok, suppress the U.S. public’s support of intervention. Unable to interpret their intelligence and gauge public sentiment accurately, U.S. leaders may then conclude that decisive action is too risky.

China, sensing opportunity, now launches a full blockade of Taiwan and commences drone strikes. It also saturates the island with deepfakes of U.S. officials expressing their willingness to concede Taiwan, fabricated polls showing collapsing U.S. support, and rumors of U.S. abandonment. In this scenario, credible signals from the United States showing that it was inclined to respond might have deterred China from escalating—and might well have been pursued if U.S. officials had not been dissuaded by poisoned AI systems and distorted public sentiment. Instead of strengthening deterrence, AI has undermined U.S. credibility and opened the door to Chinese aggression.

As AI systems become increasingly central to leaders’ decision-making, they could give information warfare a potent new role in coercion and conflict. To bolster deterrence in the AI age, then, policymakers, defense planners, and intelligence agencies must reckon with the ways in which AI models can be weaponized and ensure that digital defenses against these threats are keeping pace. The outcome of future crises may depend on it.

DETERRENCE IN THE AI AGE

For deterrence to work, an adversary must believe that a defender is both capable of imposing serious costs and resolved to do so if challenged. Some elements of military power are visible, but others—such as certain weapons capabilities, readiness levels, and mobilization capacities—are harder to gauge from the outside. Resolve is even more opaque: only the leaders of a country typically know precisely how willing they are to wage war. Deterrence, therefore, hinges on how effectively a country can credibly signal both its capabilities and its willingness to act.

Costly military actions, such as repositioning forces or raising readiness levels, demonstrate credibility because they require time, resources, and political risk. After a Pakistani militant group launched an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, for example, India amassed troops along its border with Pakistan, and by credibly signaling both its ability and determination to act, it deterred further strikes on its soil. The domestic political pressures inherent in democracies can also bolster credibility. Leaders of democracies must answer to their citizens, and making threats only to later back down can result in political backlash. In 1982, for instance, after Argentina seized the Falkland Islands, strong public pressure in the United Kingdom reinforced Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s determination to act, lending additional credibility to the United Kingdom’s threat of military response. Such accountability generally gives a democratic state’s deterrent threats more weight than those of autocratic states. Speed is also a factor: a deterrent state’s threats are more credible when it is seen to be able to act swiftly and automatically against a threat.

On the surface, artificial intelligence appears well suited to strengthen deterrence. By processing vast amounts of data, AI can provide better intelligence, clarify signals, and accelerate leaders’ decisions by producing faster and more comprehensive analyses. In the war in Ukraine, AI tools allow the Ukrainian military to scan satellite and drone images to identify Russian troop and equipment movements, missile sites, and supply routes; pull and aggregate data from radar, sound, and radio signals; and sift rapidly through training manuals, intelligence reports, or other materials to create a more complete picture of Russian force strength. For defense planners, such information allows a clearer assessment of their military capabilities relative to those of an adversary.

AI can also reinforce deterrence by ensuring that each side’s actions are clearly communicated to the other. Since states frequently have incentives to bluff, they may struggle to demonstrate that they are truly prepared to follow through on their threats. By contrast, AI-enabled tools can ensure that when a country takes costly actions to signal its resolve, those actions are communicated quickly, clearly, and consistently. The adversary’s own AI systems can then efficiently interpret these signals, lessening the risk of misperception. For instance, by tracking domestic public opinion in real time, AI tools can help a democratic country demonstrate that it is prepared to act by showing that its threatened response is backed by real political support. Adversaries can then use their own AI tools to affirm that this support is genuine. Using AI to spot patterns and anomalies that humans might miss—such as sudden changes in troop movements, financial flows, or cyberactivity—can give leaders a clearer read on an adversary’s intentions.

Because an aggressor can exploit even slight delays in a target country’s response—to seize territory or otherwise advance its aims—deterrence works best when the latter is able to persuade the aggressor that it will respond quickly enough to deny it any such time advantage. AI helps reinforce this perception by enabling defenders to detect challenges earlier and respond faster. Improving leaders’ long-term planning can strengthen and maintain credibility in longer crises, too. By running large numbers of “what if” scenarios—using data on force, geography, supply lines, and alliances—AI can provide leaders a clearer picture of how a conflict might unfold and help them maintain consistent strategies as conditions evolve.

STRENGTH AND FRAGILITY

The same AI technologies that strengthen deterrence can also make it vulnerable to exploitation. Rather than helping a country credibly convey what it knows about itself, AI systems, if they are manipulated, can instead leave leaders unsure of their own capabilities and resolve. Adversaries could use AI to distort public opinion or poison the very AI systems on which a country’s leaders depend. By deploying these twin tactics—AI-enabled influence operations and AI model poisoning—an adversary could reshape a country’s information environment in ways that directly affect its deterrence. In the worst case, such confusion could cause a country’s deterrence to fail, even when its underlying capabilities and resolve are strong.

An adversary could also use influence operations to target a country’s public as well as influential figures shaping that country’s national debate, including decision-makers in government. Recent advances in data science and generative AI have made influence operations far more potent across three linked areas: target identification, persona creation, and individually tailored content. Previously, adversaries seeking to deploy targeted propaganda could only group people into clusters based on similar attributes. With modern AI, however, they can automate this process using data science to target individuals at a massive level.

With these tools, AI can predict targets’ susceptibility to specific narratives or to fake social media profiles that are designed to attract their attention. Whereas bots were once clumsy and easily spotted, generative AI can today make so-called synthetic personas that appear authentic and escape ready detection. These fake profiles can be developed over time to become indistinguishable from real users—featuring realistic posting habits, interests, and language quirks. Moreover, fake accounts can now be created and operated at an enormous scale, making them harder to detect. Such developments allow these personas to spread synthetic content into targeted communities. Seeded across multiple social media platforms, they can steer debate and inflame divisions. To weaken public resolve in the United States, for instance, such fake personas may spread claims that the U.S. military is overstretched, that allies free-ride on American security, or that particular international causes are not worth fighting for. Amplifying messages across many platforms can make false information feel true, or at least create sufficient confusion to undermine public consensus around an issue.

AI systems could give information warfare a potent new role in coercion and conflict.

Using thousands of unique fake accounts, AI tools may soon be able to deliver individually tailored content in real time across an entire population. This is cognitive warfare, and the implications for deterrence are clear. Because much of a democracy’s deterrent credibility is tied to domestic political pressures, operations that manipulate public sentiment can weaken that state’s signals of resolve. AI manipulations might make a country’s domestic audience less inclined to support a strong military response to an act of foreign aggression—especially one against an ally—and thus distort polling data and other supposedly empirical signals from the public to which democratic leaders pay attention. This can leave such leaders unsure of how much support they truly have and how much backlash they might face if they yield. Such uncertainty can cause hesitation, weaken leaders’ resolve, and cloud their decision-making—all of which can make a state’s deterrent threats appear less convincing.

State-aligned groups are already exploring ways to undermine information security through AI-enabled influence operations. One example is GoLaxy, a Chinese company that uses generative AI tools and vast open-source data sets to build detailed psychological profiles of surveilled individuals and deploy, on a large scale, synthetic personas that mimic authentic users. The company’s campaigns often entail gathering detailed information on influential figures, using that information to produce messages that are likely to persuade targeted audiences, and then sending those messages from carefully crafted social media personas. By achieving an acute level of precision and amplifying misleading narratives across multiple platforms, such operations can sow confusion, corrode public discourse, and weaken the domestic base that makes deterrent signals credible abroad. GoLaxy’s alignment with Chinese state priorities and its ties to state-linked research institutes and superconducting firms make it a sophisticated propaganda engine.

Documents we analyzed at the Vanderbilt University Institute of National Security show that GoLaxy has already carried out operations in Hong Kong and Taiwan and has been assembling dossiers on members of the U.S. Congress as well as public figures around the world. Open-source intelligence allows adversaries to build comprehensive dossiers on politicians, military leaders, and soldiers for strategic purposes. Precisely targeted persona operations can then use that information. To score tactical wins, for instance, adversaries could target soldiers with deepfake messages containing false impressions of battlefield conditions or circumstances at home—and including accurate personal details about those soldiers’ lives could make the fabrications seem realistic enough to distract their attention or disrupt unit cohesion. In the political sphere, adversaries could blend real photographs of politicians with cloned voices or faces. Even if they are never released, the threat of their exposure could dampen targets’ rhetoric, stall legislative procedures, or weaken leaders’ resolve. And from a strategic standpoint, hostile parties could simulate authorities giving false orders to stand down or divert to alternative communication channels, which could open a window for an adversary to gain ground. The result is a cognitive fog of war.

POISONING THE WELL

Another pathway that adversaries can take to create uncertainty for defenders is model poisoning: the strategic manipulation of the AI systems on which governments rely for intelligence and decision-making support. By corrupting these systems’ training data or compromising their analytical pipelines, adversaries can distort a defender’s understanding of its relative strength and of the urgency of the threat. A system that displays an underestimation of an adversary’s powers can encourage unwarranted confidence in a defender; one that exaggerates the nature of the threat can induce hesitation. Either way, the effective manipulation of such AI systems could do more than simply complicate a defender’s crisis management—it could weaken the credibility of its deterrent signals and thus create dangerous risks.

Essentially, model poisoning works by manipulating a model’s data pipeline so that it overlooks important information and absorbs false inputs. This, in turn, can push the system toward misleading or degraded assessments. One method is by planting false information in the data sets that an AI system ingests to learn. Appearing harmless to human reviewers, this hidden information can nonetheless weaken or bias a model’s reasoning capabilities—for example, by tricking it into flagging certain types of malware as benign so that an adversary might sneak behind an AI-driven firewall. Although no instances of such an approach have yet been recorded, current AI research has demonstrated that existing data sets are vulnerable to this type of data-poisoning attack. What was once theoretical is now possible in practice.

Models can also be poisoned by creating corrupted webpages. An AI system is constantly performing live searches of the Internet for new information; these sites could inject hidden instructions to it and thus skew the model’s assessment. If the filters that screen incoming data are weak, even a small number of corrupted sites can induce inaccurate responses.

An especially stealthy form of information warfare, model poisoning allows adversaries to distort a defender’s understandings about capabilities and resolve—its own and those of others—by changing the very workings of the tools they use for clarity. In a crisis, poisoning could encourage a leader to hesitate or—worse—miscalculate, weakening deterrence and opening the door to escalation.

GETTING OUT IN FRONT

The advent of AI systems was expected to strengthen deterrence by sending clearer signals to adversaries about a defender’s capabilities and resolve. But the rising use of information warfare driven by those same systems threatens to do the opposite. Even in its early stages, this new type of information warfare has shown that AI technologies can influence how information is interpreted, introduce uncertainty into judgment processes, and distort the data that underpins decision-making. These threats will only become more potent as AI develops further.

Even a powerful country such as the United States may have difficulty signaling its deterrent credibility if it becomes exposed to advanced AI-enabled information warfare. For policymakers and citizens alike, the challenge will be figuring out how to harness the benefits of AI while preventing its weaponization. Strategies for countering this new threat must be developed as rapidly as the technologies underpinning it.

Meeting this challenge will require governments and researchers taking steps to harden analytic systems against model poisoning and actively counter AI-enabled influence operations whenever they are detected. To combat the work of firms such as GoLaxy, for instance, the United States and its allies must be able to rapidly detect and disrupt synthetic networks with tools that are capable of identifying and neutralizing AI-driven personas before they take hold. Education campaigns about synthetic media and how it can be identified can also strengthen public awareness of the threat. Democratic governments, social media and AI platforms, and interdisciplinary researchers should work together to develop such solutions.

At the strategic level, the United States should invest in technologies that can quickly detect synthetic messages. The government, academia, and the private sector should design new decision-making safeguards and data-filtering systems that can withstand corrupted inputs, while working with U.S. allies to expose and punish perpetrators of large-scale information campaigns. Additionally, this alliance should programmatically test new models to root out deficiencies—including the kind of data poisoning that may not be obvious in day-to-day use—and do so with rigorous transparency, to allow for peer review. Resilient safeguards and diligent testing are necessary to ensure that AI systems can reliably perform in moments of extraordinary stress or crisis.

In the AI era, deterrence can no longer rest on capabilities and resolve. It will require leaders, defense strategists, and other decision-makers to be able to preserve the reliability of their information environment—even amid widespread digital distortion.

Foreign Affairs · More by Brett V. Benson · January 6, 2026

21. Irregular Warfare Center Achieves Milestone Growth in FY25, Pivots to Homeland Resilience and the Indo-Pacific in FY26

Summary:

The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) reported major FY25 growth and set a FY26 agenda that shifts from mainly force-wide education to a broader emphasis on homeland resilience and the Asia-Indo-Pacific. Its digital footprint expanded sharply, led by IW 101 with more than 2,300 enrollments and a new requirement for SOF students at CGSC, plus new offerings like IW 110 for homeland-focused personnel and partners and IW 201 with contemporary case studies. The IWC also advanced research and discourse through PRISM’s relaunch, a university colloquium, and global symposia. FY26 priorities include working groups on maritime and rail security, critical infrastructure, an annual homeland defense symposium, and expanded partner activities in East Asia focused on malign influence and transnational threats.

Irregular Warfare Center Achieves Milestone Growth in FY25, Pivots to Homeland Resilience and the Indo-Pacific in FY26

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES

01.01.2026

Story by Pedro Rodriguez

Irregular Warfare Center

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/555642/irregular-warfare-center-achieves-milestone-growth-fy25-pivots-homeland-resilience-and-indo-pacific-fy26

ARLINGTON, VA—The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) has concluded an exceptionally productive year dedicated to advancing the understanding and application of Irregular Warfare (IW) across the defense community and its global network of partners. The IWC has cemented its role as the central hub for innovation and synchronized effort in irregular warfare, focusing its efforts on refining educational standards, providing expert subject matter input to the Joint Staff, and fostering meaningful collaboration across sectors and borders.

The Center’s digital education footprint expanded dramatically throughout the year, making foundational and advanced IW knowledge more accessible than ever before. The flagship course, IW 101, saw phenomenal success with over 2,300 enrollments and is now a mandatory prerequisite for all special operations force’s students attending the Army Command and General Staff College. Building on this success, the IWC successfully deployed the self-paced IW 110: Approaches for Homeland Security and Defense Course for DoW personnel and international partners, pivoting essential IW knowledge to professionals focused on the homeland.

IW 201 began making waves by offering sophisticated comparative analysis and timely case studies, including China’s gray zone strategy and Russia’s use of IW in Crimea. Specialized training programs, including the Transformational Irregular Warfare Leaders Thought Courses (TILT-C) and the IW Analysts Course for the Army’s 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), were conducted globally, actively synchronizing cutting-edge IW content across diverse units.

“The success of this past year is a testament to our commitment to institutionalizing Irregular Warfare knowledge. By dramatically expanding our digital catalog from over 2,300 enrollments in the now-mandatory IW 101, to deploying the more advanced IW 201 with timely case studies on gray zone strategy, we are not just educating, we are actively synchronizing and professionalizing the IW community,” said IWC Director Dr. Dennis Walters. This ensures that every practitioner, from our newest students to our senior analysts, is equipped with the shared, cutting-edge expertise required to face tomorrow’s complex challenges across the joint force and with our global partners.”

Beyond the classroom, the IWC served as a catalyst for critical IW research and strategic discourse. It successfully hosted its third annual University Research Colloquium, which brought together junior scholars and senior practitioners to strengthen the vital bridge between academia and the operational community.

The Center relaunched PRISM: The Journal of Complex Operations, which continues to serve as the leading scholarly journal for irregular warfare. Strategically, the IWC engaged in complex analyses ranging from examining China’s maritime gray zone operations to supporting the development of actionable foresight products, such as the Taiwan Occupation Foresight Workshop. Collaboration also grew significantly, with the annual symposium on Total Defense bringing together over 300 experts from across five continents.

On the global stage, the IWC provided leadership to international bodies, including the European Hybrid Center of Excellence, and enhanced NATO Integrated Deterrence by embedding critical IW insights into scenario development alongside more than 20 allied nations. The Center also successfully co-hosted the Intelligence Support to Irregular Warfare Symposiums and saw its digital reach expand, growing its social media presence. Its “Spotlight” newsletter continued to succeed with a subscriber base of over 10,700 and increasing.

Looking ahead to Fiscal Year 2026, the IWC has announced a dynamic slate of upcoming events designed to tackle the most pressing IW challenges and strengthen collective resilience. The second quarter will feature the pivotal Maritime & Rail Transportation Working Group, a cross-sector forum dedicated to identifying vulnerabilities, mapping critical gaps, and developing integrated, actionable solutions to counter gray-zone activities, insider threats, and sophisticated cyber-attacks across U.S. ports and global shipping.

The Annual IWC Symposium, the Center’s premier annual event, is scheduled to take center stage in June 2026 and will shift its focus to the foundational topic of Homeland Defense, featuring a powerful keynote and targeted panels for practitioners, allies, interagency, industry, and academia.

The third quarter of 2026 will also include a dedicated Critical Infrastructure Working Group, a crucial forum dedicated to identifying and mitigating IW threats targeting the systems and networks that keep the nation running. Building on a prior year’s success, the IWC will co-host the next IW Intelligence Symposium with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USD(I&S)) in the third quarter, which will provide a detailed, global examination of adversary capabilities and the complex convergence of threats, including how transnational criminal organizations and state-sponsored criminality are leveraged in the gray zone.

Capitalizing off the success of past colloquiums, in the fourth quarter. The colloquium brought together junior and senior scholars, as well as practitioners, to discuss a range of topics related to modern irregular warfare.

In the Indo Pacific, the IWC is focusing on strengthening regional alliances to counter malign influence. In the spring of 2026, the IWC will host several events with partners and allies, focusing on Foreign Interference and Malign Influence and a strategic communications course. Leveraging the IWC’s functional area networks (FANs) to empower allied forces in countering disinformation. The Center will expand its footprint to East Asia in the third quarter of FY26, collaborating with the Joint Interagency Task Force West and the Drug Enforcement Agency. This joint training will provide international border officials with the tools to identify irregular threats and transnational criminal networks, a critical security step as the U.S. and partner nations explore the opening of new direct air routes.

The Center will also continue its virtual “Lunch & Learn” Lecture series with timely topics such as Chinese Cognitive Warfare, Building Societal Resilience Against Hybrid Threats, Mapping the BRICS+ Cryptocurrency Ecosystem, and Measuring Impact of Messaging. The IWC remains committed to ensuring U.S. irregular warfare priorities are integrated into multinational planning as it works to secure the future.

“Looking ahead to FY26, our focus is crystal clear: to strengthen our nation’s resilience against the most complex irregular threats. From safeguarding our essential supply chains at the Maritime & Rail Transportation Working Group to dedicating our premier annual Symposium to Homeland Defense, the IWC is driving the hard work that matters,” said Walters. “We will continue to serve as the vital coordinating body, bringing together the best minds from defense, interagency, industry, and our allies, to collectively stay ahead of the curve and secure our future.”

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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