Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reasons which today arm you against the present."

– Marcus Aurelius

"Once every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."

– P.W. Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

LIkewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

"The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct."

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

1. Putin's theory of victory by Lawrence Freedman

2. Soldiers should fight with tech as good as they ‘use at home,’ Army secretary demands

3. How the U.S. Army and defense industry will build new generation of counter-drone weaponry

4. Shotgun Defense: Weekly Drone Report

5. How China and the U.S. Are Racing to De-Escalate the Trade War

6. Driscoll goes scorched earth on Army buying inertia

7. Inside the US Army’s new modernization mega-command

8. Trump’s Big Gamble on Tackling the Middle East’s Intractable Problems

9. Eighth Army commander eyes generative AI to inform how he leads

10. Fresh From Middle East Victory, Trump Sets His Sights on Peace in Ukraine

11. Can Shotguns, Spy Planes and Lasers Protect Europe From the Next Drone Incursion?

12. Major Media Outlets Rebuff New Pentagon Press Policy

13. Homeland pivot isn't affecting troops in South Korea, so far: commander

14. Sig Sauer's M7 Rifle For The Army Is Now Lighter After Controversy

15. Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains

16. Russia is in ‘phase zero’ of WW3 as Putin’s tentacles spread across Europe

17. Human-Machine Planning: AI Lessons from the Marine Command and General Staff College

18. ISWAP’s Strategic Resurgence in Nigeria Signals Emerging Trends in Insurgents’ Sophistication and Limited Statehood

19. Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader

20. Foreign Aid Is Mostly Gone. It’s Being Replaced With Something Better.

21. Failure Bias in Air Advisory Missions

1. Putin's theory of victory by Lawrence Freedman

Excerpts:

In his Valdai speech, after describing Russian advances against an army that he presents as backed by NATO, Putin observed:

‘But if we are at war with the entire NATO bloc and are moving in this way, we are ‘advancing, we feel confident, and this is a paper tiger – what is NATO itself then? What is it then?’

This indicates the extent to which Trump’s jibe about Russia being a paper tiger rankled Putin. He wants to be feared and not derided.

Russia is not a paper tiger. The harm it causes is real. It is putting Ukrainian society and its armed forces under intense pressure and causing terrible pain. But Putin has promised more than hurting Ukraine. Assuming he believes what he has been told by his military, he expects the Ukrainian front line to crumble, and Ukrainian society to buckle soon. The country’s continuing resilience frustrates him and its armed forces impose heavy costs on Russia. His confidence that Trump will not help Ukraine turned out to be wrong. While he still hesitates on tougher sanctions and the US is not donating equipment to Ukraine, he is not blocking transfers that have been paid for. Vital intelligence information still reaches Ukraine.

We cannot assume that Putin finds the costs of war unbearable. The economy may be worsening but he has recently budgeted for a continuing war. At the very least he will want to see how Ukraine copes with the winter. This is not just about the impact of the strikes against energy networks. The front-line conditions will also change - with more fog, rain, and low cloud, but also less foliage and more mud, affecting both visibility and movement. Much will depend on how well the two sides adapt to these conditions.

After two years of an intense US intervention in Vietnam a ‘credibility gap’ was noted between the claims made by the Johnson Administration about how well the war was going and the reality on the ground where there appeared to be minimal progress. Putin’s grip on Russia means that few are inclined to question his war policy, but if the breakthrough does not arrive soon then his promises about a coming victory may start to appear as wishful thinking, even to those who want to believe him. Putin still wants to do more than stay in the war. He wants to win it. But if he can’t win it, why is he staying in it?

Putin's theory of victory

https://samf.substack.com/p/putins-theory-of-victory?utm

Lawrence Freedman

Oct 14, 2025

∙ Paid

The war between Russia and Ukraine is more likely to end with a negotiated ceasefire than with a sweeping military victory though neither seems close. Donald Trump’s peace process has petered out but, perhaps flush with the praise he’s getting over Gaza, he might try again.

At any rate both sides discuss their strategy in terms of getting to the best possible position for an eventual negotiation. They tell Trump they appreciate his endeavours and share his desire for an early peace. Their military efforts, they insist, are directed towards this end. Rather than a bloody fight to finish they want their enemy to realise that it is time to make the vital concessions to get a deal.

A Bloomberg article of 20 September described the conclusions Vladimir Putin drew from his meeting with Trump at Anchorage in mid-August:

‘military escalation is the best way to force Ukraine into talks on his terms and that Donald Trump is unlikely to do much to bolster Kyiv’s defences, according to people close to the Kremlin.’

The key element in Putin’s strategy according to this account was to continue targeting ‘Kyiv’s energy network and other infrastructure.’ It also reported that Putin left Alaska convinced that however hard Russia hit Ukraine, ‘Trump has no interest in intervening in the conflict.’

For his part Volodymyr Zelenskyy is working to prove him wrong. He reports conversations with Trump about how to bolster Ukraine, adding ‘There needs to be readiness on the Russian side to engage in real diplomacy—this can be achieved through strength.’ He can claim some success. More American systems are starting to reach Ukraine, albeit paid for by Europe, and Trump is even discussing, though not yet committing to, the provision of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

This is in part a response to those Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy. These have been stepped up since Anchorage, although the new attacks may simply reflect the availability of large numbers of missiles and drones and the nearness of winter. More on this below. Yet when Putin talks about his special military operation he rarely talks about this feature of the Russian campaign. He focuses instead on the battle for territory, and when he does so he exudes confidence in a coming Russian victory. He has yet to give even a hint of concern that the war cannot be prosecuted to a successful conclusion.

The imminence of Ukraine’s defeat has been a constant theme of his comments on the war since 2022. Confidence was particularly high in late 2023 after the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive, when Kyiv’s disarray was compounded by Congress’s refusal to pay for more assistance, and Russia enjoyed significant advantages in both manpower and artillery. One question for later military historians will be to explain why Russia failed to take more advantage of its superior position at this point. It has advanced in the past two years of the war, but compared to Putin’s ambitions, and the huge cost in men and materiel, the gains have been meagre.

So why should he be more optimistic now that victory will come soon? He gave his reasons at a speech at the Valdai Discussion Club at the start of the month, backed by a lot of detail on what is happening at the front lines. This came straight from the senior military leadership, and in particular Commander-in-Chief General Valery Gerasimov. As noted in an earlier post, Gerasimov consistently exaggerates Russia’s position. Many of his specific claims have been challenged not only by Ukrainians but also Russian military bloggers. The exaggerations have consequences. As the Moscow Times puts it:

‘The gap between the Russian military’s upbeat reports and the battlefield reality helps feed into President Vladimir Putin’s conviction that Russia is winning the war, analysts say. That perception, they argue, undercuts any incentive for the Kremlin to engage in serious peace talks.‘

In 2024 the thesis was that Ukraine lacked sufficient weapons; now it is sufficient men. According to Gerasimov and Putin the losses are so severe that the Ukrainian army is on the brink of collapse.

In this post I want to look closely at this claim. The fighting at the front is undoubtedly tough so perhaps there are new grounds for Russian optimism. And if they cannot succeed on land might they push Ukraine to the brink through their remorseless strikes against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure?

Putin’s Theory of Victory

A month before the Valdai speech Putin gave his standard assessment:

‘groups of the Russian Armed Forces are advancing in all directions. They are advancing successfully, at different paces, but virtually in all directions.’

He concentrated on Ukrainian weaknesses - their forces were being moved around to ‘plug holes’ and he noted that Russian military specialists assessed that the Ukrainian Armed Forces ‘are not capable of conducting large-scale offensive operations and are only focused on holding their existing lines.’ In addition, he added, they

‘are increasingly running out of reserves, with combat-ready units staffed at no more than 47–48 percent. The situation for them is already at a most critical point.’

He refrained from making predictions because ‘combat operations remain difficult’ but the message was that time was on Russia’s side.

His Valdai speech on 3 October provided more detail. It had the same optimistic opening - ‘our troops are confidently advancing along practically the entire line of contact.’ After briefly acknowledging that Ukraine now has enough weapons, the lack of which had been a reason for past optimism, he explained that its problem now is manpower. It is losing more men than it can replace.

This asessment is based on an extremely high numbers of claimed casualties - 44,700 in September - while only 18,000 new troops were mobilized and another 14,500 returned from hospitals. He suggested that as many men had deserted in 2025 (150,000) as had been recruited (160,000)

They’re not getting a foothold, they’re not training their personnel, and on top of that, their losses are greater than their ability to replace them on the battlefield. That’s the problem.

Kyiv had no way out of its predicament:

Lowering the conscription age to 21 or 18 won’t solve the problem; we have to understand that. I hope the leaders of the Kyiv regime will come to this understanding, and they’ll finally find the strength to sit down at the negotiating table.

In assessing this, it is important to recognise that the pressure on Ukraine manpower is real. Losses from desertion are reported by Ukraine, and while not the numbers claimed by Putin, they are still embarrassingly high. Yet when it comes to the Ukrainian casualties reported by Putin the number is absurd. The meticulous UALosses project puts the current number since the full-scale invasion at 82,606 dead, and 77,842 missing, though it acknowledges this to be an underestimate. But it also shows a shift from 400-600 killed weekly last year, to between 200 to 250 weekly this year and trending down. This may reflect delays in reporting, but it would not be wholly surprising given the change in the character of the fighting and in Ukraine’s tactics.

These numbers are still painful for Ukraine but nowhere close to Putin’s claims. There is always a tendency for one army to inflate the harm they have inflicted on another, and Russia has consistently exaggerated Ukrainian losses while saying nothing about its own. (In December 2022 Gerasimov was claiming that the Ukrainian army ‘has lost close to one million soldiers killed and wounded.’) When it comes to replenishing losses, Ukrainian figures show a steady 30,000 being mobilized monthly. Not all, however, are fit for duty on the front-lines or prepared to be deployed there.

While the situation may not be as catastrophic as Putin alleges it is not good, and no report from the front line fails to mention insufficient manpower as a serious problem. The prospect therefore is of Ukraine continuing to scramble around to find enough troops. It is unlikely to move to full mobilization, because that is a politically toxic issue. It does need to increase the incentives for people to sign up. This is the Russian model, although the Ukrainians will not take it to the same lengths as Russia has done.

Russian Manpower

Ukrainian forces are helped by the fact that front-line Russian forces are also struggling.

An analysis by the Institute for the Study of War of leaked Russian data, which seems plausible, show 281,550 Russian casualties from January to August 2025. This is broken down into: 86,744 killed, including 1,583 officers: 158,529 wounded, including 6,356 officers; and another 33,996 missing. One feature is one killed for every 1.3 wounded, reflecting both poor medical evacuations, in part because of the hazards of drone strikes, and the poor quality of front-line medical treatment.

The ISW also cited a ‘Russian insider source’ that suggested Russian recruitment at a steady state similar to Ukraine’s of some 31,600 troops a month, with casualties averaging 35,193 per month. Russia has been able to recruit enough people to sustain losses in Ukraine over the last three years. It is also believed to have a strategic reserve. In his Valdai speech Putin claimed that this was the result of patriotism:

Our guys come to us on their own, sign up for the army; they’re essentially volunteers. We don’t conduct any mass mobilization, much less forced mobilization, like the Kyiv regime does.

What he did not mention is that they volunteer for the money, and the amount offered keeps on having to go up. In addition to good pay, to meet their recruitment targets, regions add an enticing lump sum for those signing up. Thus the government of the Tyumen region in Siberia has recently announced that new recruits will get paid a lump sum of 3 million rubles ($36,560), on top of the 400,000 rubles they get from the federal government. Before this increase Tyumen recruits got 1.9 million rubles. The governor of the Voronezh region in southwestern Russia announced that sign-up payment would quadruple to 2.1 million rubles, and the recruits did not even have to be from the region.

Then the monthly salary of $2,500 is twice the national average wage. In addition, families of killed Russian soldiers receive a one-time payment of $158,000. Constantly adding to these incentives is expensive, and leads to labour shortages elsewhere. There are questions about how far into 2026 it is sustainable. Russia also has a problem with desertions. Late last year according to a leaked Defence Ministry documents suggested that by June 2024 up to 50,000 Russian soldiers had fled the army. A recent report shows how court cases against troops are increasing.

There is thus an optimism bias on both sides of the equation. Putin plays down the challenges faced by Russia in meeting in meeting its manpower targets while overstates Ukraine’s. In practice both armies are stressed and adopting tactics that reflect the challenging drone-saturated front-line conditions as well as manpower issues.

Russian advances?

Putin’s argument in his Valdai speech was that Russia’s advantages are already being translated into significant gains.

‘We control approximately... almost 100 percent of the Luhansk region, leaving, I think, 0.13 percent, which the enemy controls. The enemy still controls about 19 percent of the Donetsk region. The Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions account for about 24-25 percent, respectively. And everywhere, Russian troops, I want to emphasize, confidently hold the strategic initiative.’

This is exaggerated. When it comes to Donetsk, where some of the most intensive fighting is currently under away, against the 19% Ukrainian control mentioned here, independent analysis would put it at around 23% or even more.

Putin lists many cities where his forces are making progress, interestingly without mentioning Pokrovsk. This has been the biggest battle of this year and which is still held - albeit under severe pressure - by Ukrainian forces. He does, however, mention Kupiansk in Kharkiv oblast, claiming that two-thirds of the city has been taken and that the ‘centre is already in our hands’ with fighting in the southern part of the city. (In August Gerasimov claimed that already half was under Russian control).

Kupiansk is an important target for Russian forces. It is on relatively high ground and if occupied their logistical problems would be eased for other offensive operations. It is also of political importance, because it was taken by Russia during the February 2022 invasion but then liberated by Ukrainian forces the following September. It has been a priority target for Russia since 2024.

Russian forces made some progress when they moved into the northern outskirts of Kupiansk a few weeks ago and have kept pushing. They are unable to move forward in large units because they are too vulnerable. Instead they rely on small ‘sabotage-reconnaissance groups’ of a few men slipping past the thinly spread Ukrainian defenders, sometimes dressed in civilian clothes or Ukrainian uniforms. If they penetrate deep enough they can report back on Ukrainian positions inside the city and their logistics.

In a recent interview, Commander Yurii Fedorenko of Ukraine’s 429th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment, insisted that, contrary to Putin’s assessment, ‘the enemy does not control any district or quarter of Kupiansk.’ But he made another point relevant to Putin’s claim that the centre is under Russian control:

‘There’s also a political angle. You see videos where Russian forces unfurl a flag in a noteworthy place. They take one photograph with a Mavic drone and then those fighters are destroyed by our forces. But inside Russia, that image is circulated as if they’d taken the town’s central square, which is false: one isolated saboteur who is later neutralized doesn’t mean the enemy holds the city.

This may be the source of Putin’s claim. The Moscow Times report, cited above, quotes an unofficial Russian military Telegram channel, responding to the Defence Ministry’s videos of the flags being raised:

‘This is outright betrayal! Don’t the people at the top understand this is the end for the assault troops, our guys? It’s a one-way mission.’

This is not to argue that the opposite is true, that Ukraine is steadily gaining the upper hand. The Russians are currently pushing hard in all sectors and the fighting is tough. In a critical article about what is going on at the line of contact two Ukrainian journalists, Olga Kirilenko and Evgeny Buderatsky, emphasise manpower shortages. This, they argue, has become even more critical because of the reduced role of ‘heavy equipment operations’.

‘Due to a lack of manpower, many units are unable to hold their positions, effectively repel Russian attacks, adequately rest, and conduct necessary rotations. As a result, commanders on the ground are forced to prioritize areas, leaving other sectors less secure.’

They note how the Russians are exploiting the large gaps, often hundreds of metres, between adjacent positions, by advancing in small tactical groups. To deal with this threat drone operators and mortarmen have to become infantry. At the same time Russian long-range drones require support units to stay further to the rear, complicating logistics support. To this they add some sharp criticisms of delays in completing the transition to a corps structure for the army and the tendency of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky to micro-manage at the front lines rather than leave command decisions to local commanders.

We also need to keep in mind that whatever incompetence shown by the Russian military in the past they make their own adaptions and look for ways to exploit Ukrainian weaknesses. In an important article Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace highlights how the Russian military has become a learning organisation since the failures of 2022 and how it applies the lessons to the war.

‘Moscow has developed fresh ways of using drones to find and kill Ukrainian soldiers and to destroy Ukrainian assets, turning what was once an area of weakness into an area of strength. It has built better missiles and created more rugged and capable armored systems. It is giving junior commanders more freedom to plan. It has become a military that is capable of both evolving during this war and readying itself for future, high-tech conflicts.’

Yet while she describes some impressive achievements, she also notes the gap between what is being learned at headquarters and in defence firms ‘and the bleak experience of frontline soldiers.’ There are problems with front-line medicine (including surging HIV cases), abusive or absent commanders, while ‘small units and detachments cannot seize and hold territory in the way that a large, massed force can.’ This is why the sort of breakthroughs which the Russian military sought and which Putin still expects have not materialised.

Attacks on Infrastructure

As Massicot notes one of Russia’s achievements is that Ukraine has

‘to contend with faster and more numerous Russian drone attacks, resulting in more harm to cities, civilians, and critical infrastructure. Larger numbers of missiles will get through Ukraine’s defenses.

Russian missiles and long-range drones have become more effective, employing more complex tactics to catch out the defenders, and they are being produced in large numbers, helped by Chinese components.

Russia spent the last three winters trying to make life as miserable as possible for the Ukrainian people and they will be trying harder with this coming one. The first campaign began in October 2022. By 2024 it had moved from striking electricity substations to direct attacks on power plants. Now it has moved on to the gas production sites that feed back-up power generators and heating units.

Last winter was survived in part because the weather was relatively mild and the Ukrainians, individually and collectively, developed means to cope. It will be more difficult this year. The campaign against the energy network resumed on 8 September with a strike against a thermal power facility in Kyiv Oblast. The campaign has since picked up pace. Zelenskyy reported on 12 October ‘just this week alone, over 3,100 drones, 92 missiles, and around 1,360 glide bombs have been used against Ukraine.’ Ukrainian air defences are routinely intercepting a respectable 74 % of the incoming weapons, but that still means that a lot get through.

On 3 October Russia struck Naftogaz Group’s gas production facilities. According to Bloomberg News the strikes have wiped out more than half of the country’s domestic natural gas production. Over the past year a lot of resource has gone into repairing damaged facilities, especially thermal power plants. It has improved gas reserves and has stockpiled coal for its thermal plants. To reduce dependence on the big plants it has distributed small-scale gas turbines, solar panels with storage, and mobile diesel units for essential services. Efforts have been made to harden and protect above ground structures though here there is still much to do.

For now the Ukrainians appear to be confident that they have sufficient supplies to last most of the winter, and that they can buy in additional supplies, although they will need to raise money to do this. It is also seeking help to repair the facilities. Olena Lapenko from an energy think tank observes that:

‘The difference between managed power outages and a full-scale humanitarian crisis this winter will depend on how quickly spare parts, backup equipment, and air defence systems and munitions can be delivered.’

Ukraine now must be as innovative in air defences as in drone warfare but here the challenge is greater, and more is needed just to cope with the sheer scale of the Russian attacks. Under the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) scheme Ukraine can use European funds to buy essential American weapons. That means more Patriots and NASAMS systems. So far the scheme appears to be working. In addition neighbours can help. On 11 October while visiting Lviv Polish Foeign Minister Radosław Sikorski promised:

Generators, additional electricity supply, accelerated construction of power transmission lines between Ukraine and Poland, and of course, our liquefied natural gas terminal in Świnoujście – all of this is at your disposal, President Zelensky.

Some of the biggest problems are being faced in those towns and cities close to the front line. It will be some time before the Russian army reaches Sloviansk, if at all, but it is in reach of their drones. The Mayor urged residents to evacuate, less because of the advancing troops, but because of attacks on energy and heating facilities:

‘Especially elderly people and families with children -- it is time to evacuate. At least for the period of the heating season. Because we see that the enemy is targeting the energy system.’

A Paper Tiger?

In his Valdai speech, after describing Russian advances against an army that he presents as backed by NATO, Putin observed:

‘But if we are at war with the entire NATO bloc and are moving in this way, we are ‘advancing, we feel confident, and this is a paper tiger – what is NATO itself then? What is it then?’

This indicates the extent to which Trump’s jibe about Russia being a paper tiger rankled Putin. He wants to be feared and not derided.

Russia is not a paper tiger. The harm it causes is real. It is putting Ukrainian society and its armed forces under intense pressure and causing terrible pain. But Putin has promised more than hurting Ukraine. Assuming he believes what he has been told by his military, he expects the Ukrainian front line to crumble, and Ukrainian society to buckle soon. The country’s continuing resilience frustrates him and its armed forces impose heavy costs on Russia. His confidence that Trump will not help Ukraine turned out to be wrong. While he still hesitates on tougher sanctions and the US is not donating equipment to Ukraine, he is not blocking transfers that have been paid for. Vital intelligence information still reaches Ukraine.

We cannot assume that Putin finds the costs of war unbearable. The economy may be worsening but he has recently budgeted for a continuing war. At the very least he will want to see how Ukraine copes with the winter. This is not just about the impact of the strikes against energy networks. The front-line conditions will also change - with more fog, rain, and low cloud, but also less foliage and more mud, affecting both visibility and movement. Much will depend on how well the two sides adapt to these conditions.

After two years of an intense US intervention in Vietnam a ‘credibility gap’ was noted between the claims made by the Johnson Administration about how well the war was going and the reality on the ground where there appeared to be minimal progress. Putin’s grip on Russia means that few are inclined to question his war policy, but if the breakthrough does not arrive soon then his promises about a coming victory may start to appear as wishful thinking, even to those who want to believe him. Putin still wants to do more than stay in the war. He wants to win it. But if he can’t win it, why is he staying in it?

Recommend Comment is Freed to your readers

Politics, policy analysis, and foreign affairs from Sam and Lawrence Freedman

2. Soldiers should fight with tech as good as they ‘use at home,’ Army secretary demands

AUSA is an impressive conference and gathering. Day one was excellent.

Soldiers should fight with tech as good as they ‘use at home,’ Army secretary demands

Stars and Stripes · Corey Dickstein · October 13, 2025

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll speaks at the opening ceremony of the AUSA convention Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Washington. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON — Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Monday he would not tolerate sending soldiers into a modern conflict with decades-old weapons, using an expletive in a public speech to highlight his distaste for the service’s slow acquisition system.

“No one can predict the next war, but we cannot wait — we cannot f------ wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield,” Driscoll said in his keynote speech Monday at the outset of the annual Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington. “We must act now to enable our soldiers. Our window to change is right now, and we have a plan to do it.”

The Army’s top civilian — an ex-Army officer, Iraq war veteran, lawyer and former venture capitalist — pledged to adopt a Silicon Valley-like approach to weapons and tech development and procurement. Driscoll demanded that Congress and arms developers must allow the Army to quickly adopt new technology in communications, artificial intelligence, drones and robotics outside of the traditional acquisition system that has proven slow and expensive.

The Army has long failed its soldiers, he said during his speech at the Army’s largest soldier development conference and trade convention, where manufacturers show off their latest gear and gadgets from rifles and tiny drones to helicopters and armored vehicles.

Members of the United States Army Band, “Pershing’s Own,” perform during the opening ceremony of the AUSA convention Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Washington. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

Retired Gen. Robert B. Brown, president and CEO of AUSA, speaks during the opening ceremony of the AUSA convention Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Washington. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

Members of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, "The Old Guard,” enter the ballroom during the opening ceremony of the AUSA convention Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Washington. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

Driscoll spent part of Monday listening to small companies pitch their latest technology to Army leaders in a competition dubbed XTechDisrupt for a chance at a potential contract to supply the service their tech.

But there’s also more soldiers can do themselves to improve their battlefield kits, he said.

In some cases, soldiers can develop their own technology, like those in the 101st Airborne Division who have built their own 7-inch drone systems, known as “attritable battlefield enablers.” The tiny drones cost about $750 a piece, can travel about 2 kilometers and reach speeds approaching 90 mph, according to the Army.

“They are modular (and) you can swap components, make software updates, transition between attack, recon or defense,” Driscoll said. “Trained soldiers can assemble it in 20 minutes and then deliver it to the front lines — 100% soldier assembled.”

Soldiers can also solve other costly problems on expensive platforms like UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which manufacturers have long limited how much the service can repair on its own because of intellectual property rights agreements. Driscoll has pushed for Congress to remove such agreements and grant the service “right-to-repair” powers even in its most expensive legacy programs.

Driscoll held up a small black and tan fin for a Black Hawk external fuel tank that soldiers 3D printed for about $3,000. The vendor charges the Army more than $14,000 to replace the part, which he said breaks often.

Another Black Hawk part, a quarter-size screen control knob can be 3D printed by soldiers for about $60, Driscoll said. The manufacturer will not replace the knobs — which Driscoll said break at an Army-wide rate of about four every month — alone but requires the service to replace the entire screen assembly for some $47,000.

“We’re spending around $188,000 every month for what we can solve for $60,” Driscoll said. “Now multiply this across thousands of components, and you see why our $185 billion budget simply doesn’t buy enough combat power, and in some cases, the parts take literally years to arrive for our soldiers.”

Driscoll vowed to “cut red tape” until soldiers have battlefield technology more advanced than they “use at home.”

“When you train you literally step into the same platforms that we fielded 30 to 40 years ago, like the Humvee,” Driscoll said. “You struggle to communicate beyond line of sight, and you wonder why the hell you can’t just use the smartphone in your pocket.

“Before and after work our soldiers live in the real world, but when they’re on duty, our soldiers time travel to the [technology of] the early 2000s at best — or earlier.”

Stars and Stripes · Corey Dickstein · October 13, 2025

3. How the U.S. Army and defense industry will build new generation of counter-drone weaponry

We have to get drone concepts and technology right - or per the late Michael Howard - just not too wrong.

How the U.S. Army and defense industry will build new generation of counter-drone weaponry

By Ben Wolfgang and John T. Seward - The Washington Times - Monday, October 13, 2025

washingtontimes.com · Ben Wolfgang

By and John T. Seward - The Washington Times - Monday, October 13, 2025

The mission is urgent for the Pentagon and its defense industry partners: Build cost-effective tools, lots of them, to counter the increasingly cheap and lethal tactical attack drones wielded by U.S. adversaries abroad or terrorists targeting events at home.

The race to develop and field counter-drone technology is one of the central themes this week at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in downtown Washington. The sprawling convention floor is packed with displays of such capabilities, including electronic warfare, signal jammers, and drone-catching nets that can pluck an enemy unmanned aerial system out of the sky.

One of the key points stressed by officials across the military and defense industry is that the problem will require a host of solutions.

“The wide breadth of this threat requires a no one-size-fits-all approach,” Maj. Gen. David Stewart, director for fires at the headquarters of the Department of the Army, said during a panel discussion at the AUSA conference.

Those counter-drone tools aren’t just necessary on battlefields around the world. They are also crucial for U.S. law enforcement at home.

In December, the sighting of mystery drones over several areas of the East Coast triggered global headlines and widespread national security unease.

During the months since, key lawmakers have sounded the alarm about the threat that small drones could pose to the Super Bowl, the 2026 World Cup, the 2028 Summer Olympics, and other major gatherings on American soil, including political rallies.

Unique challenges are tied to countering the threat. One complication is ensuring no collateral damage on the ground if drones need to be taken down near large crowds.

“What we’re trying to do, at least in the homeland, is identify capabilities that if I shoot a drone down or bring a drone down, it doesn’t cause collateral effects on the ground and harm innocent bystanders,” said Col. Marc Pelini, director of the Air and Missile Defense Cross-Functional Team at the Army’s Transformation and Training Command.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the best of breed capabilities to address the full spectrum of threats,” Col. Pelini said during an AUSA panel discussion Monday on counter-drone capabilities.

The expansion of the counter-drone industry in many ways represents the flip side of the explosion of commercial and military drone proliferation in recent years.

The small unmanned aircraft, often outfitted in makeshift ways with explosives, have had a central role in the Russia-Ukraine war. Defense industry insiders say the pressure to develop new tools to counter those drones is immense.

Special emphasis is being placed on finding cost-effective solutions for more sophisticated swarms of drones.

“Drones are very much a part of warfare today. But it’s not just warfare,” said Tom Konicki, director of business development for defense and space at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. “The threat is real and the threat is now. And it’s just going to get worse.”

“Everybody is having this problem,” Mr. Konicki told The Washington Times’ Threat Status in an exclusive interview on the AUSA conference exhibition floor. “It’s a galvanizing threat that I don’t remember in my lifetime, affecting everybody from law enforcement, airports, military — everybody is affected by this.”

Honeywell at the AUSA convention is displaying its Stationary and Mobile UAS Reveal and Intercept, or SAMURAI, which can be outfitted on a truck or other platform. The layered system includes radars and cameras to track as many as 400 incoming drones.

The system can use electronic warfare to jam drones or scramble their communications. If that doesn’t work, the system can deploy a “drone capture drone” capability, using a friendly drone to fire a net and capture the enemy craft. That approach could prove highly effective if attack drones operate in a crowded space such as a major sporting event.

Lawmakers have expressed interest in ensuring such capabilities are in place before major events, such as the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“The thing that keeps coming up in our discussions that keeps you up at night, that I think is going to be the biggest threat and emerging threat that we have to be ready for, are these drones, these unmanned aerial vehicles, that could cross over into a stadium with an explosive device. And our ability to take that out is very limited right now,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and chair of the House task force on enhancing security for special events.

Mr. McCaul made the comments in an exclusive interview on the Threat Status weekly podcast earlier this year.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is making a major effort to build drones in large numbers. That buildup reflects the growing consensus inside the defense industry that drones are becoming common tools of modern warfare used routinely at the tactical level.

Some defense sector sources have told Threat Status that small drones, in particular, are becoming like ammunition: basic, attritable warfighting equipment that virtually every soldier will soon have in their personal tool kit.

Service members at that tactical level will also need to be able to take out an enemy’s drones, and, in some cases, they won’t be able to rely on the large-scale solutions of the past.

The kinds of tactical drones, many costing a few thousand dollars or even less, that have been used to great effect in the Russia-Ukraine war or even by terrorist outfits such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels are nearly impossible to combat with large, expensive ground-based missiles.

Furthermore, industry sources say the cost-benefit analysis of using a million-dollar missile to shoot down a cheap drone is no longer practical.

It is also not practical to shoot them down using traditional manned aircraft, especially in the coming age of drone swarms, which could include dozens or even hundreds of small craft acting in unison.

Those realities have sparked the race for more counter-drone tools.

The private international defense firm Israel Weapons Industries, for example, offers the ARBEL, a computerized fire control system built to dramatically improve the accuracy and lethality of standard AR-15 rifles when used against drones.

When connected to the rifle, the ARBEL system continuously analyzes the shooter’s micro-movements. It automatically times the release of rounds, firing only when a shot is calculated to do the most damage to a drone.

Honeywell is also working on projects to provide components for laser weapons systems that could be used to take out enemy drones. Such lasers, or directed energy weapons, have moved out of the science fiction realm and soon could be part of a regular anti-drone tool kit for the U.S. and its allies.

• John T. Seward can be reached at jseward@washingtontimes.com.

• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · Ben Wolfgang

4. Shotgun Defense: Weekly Drone Report

Shotgun Defense: Weekly Drone Report

https://sof.news/drones/20251014/

October 14, 2025 SOF News Drones 0

Below the reader will find recent news about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are used in conflicts (Ukraine, Africa, etc.), new developments in drone use, and training by militaries for using drones during combat operations. Curated articles on the topics below are provided:

Featured Topic: Shotguns and Drone Defense
“Nomad” Family of Drones
“Vampire” Counter-Drone Systems
The ‘Widowmaker’
Drones vs. Helicopters
Ukraine’s Sea-Launched Fiber-Optic Drones
New Naval Drone for Ukraine?
Russian Long-Range Fiber-Optic Drone
Fixing Germany’s Drone Problem
Taiwan Anti-Drone Measures
British Anti-Drone Training

Featured Topic

This articles featured topic is about how shotguns have returned to the frontlines in a new role. Shotguns are a key element and last resort for the infantryman in the defeat of first person view attack (FPV) drones.

In an age of artificial intelligence and technological advances in weapons the shotgun has made a revival in modern warfare. The FPV drones are fast, highly maneuverable, and carry enough explosives to disable a tank. When electronic jammers and interceptor drones fail to stop an attack drone then the shotgun may very well be the last hope of survival for the infantryman in the trenches or riding on a vehicle.

The Ukrainians have developed a training program for how shotguns can take out drones. In addition, there now are methods of integrating the shotgun with other components such as drone detector systems and thermal night vision so it becomes more effective in anti-drone engagements.

Shotguns, leveraging their wide spread pattern, can shred drone frames, propellers, or electronics without needing pinpoint accuracy. Shotgun ammunition costs pennies per shot and training can be easily integrated into basic training for the infantryman.

The use of shotguns is “the last line of defense” as they are most effective at close range (0-50 meters optimal, up to 100-120 meters with specialized gear). Shotguns fire a burst of pellets (or shot) that spread into a cone-shaped pattern which increases the probability of a hit against quick and maneuverable attack drones. At 50 meters, a shotgun’s pellets can spread to 1-2 meters wide.

Some shotgun manufacturers have come out with specialized models for drone defense. One example is the Benelli M4 A.I. Drone Guardian 18,5″. Its primary purpose is to serve as a “last resort” weapon against small quadcopter FPV drones or to neutralize small spy drones.

Some of the best training for drone defense using shotguns can be found on the clay pigeon range. Also known as skeet or trap shooting, the clay pigeon can simulate the speed, size, and erratic movements of small quadcopters. The shooter can learn how to lead targets and time shots. This is a low-cost training method that can prepare infantrymen for that ‘last resort’ using a relatively cheap and already existing weapon system – the shotgun. The requirements for the training include a range, shotgun, ammunition, automated clay throwers, dedicated training time, and the “smarts” for leaders to realize they need the training for their soldiers.

U.S. and Drones

“Nomad” Family of Drones. Sikorsky is introducing a new series of drones that need no runways but that have extended ranges. They will be capable of executing a variety of missions including resupply, armed combat, ISR, and combat search and rescue. The “family of systems” will range from a small, 10-foot wingspan vehicle to one with a wingspan of 55 feet. The drones would require a ground crew of two in some cases that can operate off a tablet. “New ‘Nomad’ VTOL Drone Family Could Boost Air Force’s Plans for Agile Ops”, Air and Space Forces, October 6, 2025.

“Vampire” Counter-Drone Systems. The Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment system is being expanded to include specialized variants for maritime, airborne, and electronic warfare operations. The current ground-based system has been deployed to Ukraine. “Entire Family of VAMPIRE Counter-Drone Systems Unveiled”, The War Zone, October 9, 2025.

Medical Field Hospital for the Drone Era. Field hospitals are sometimes targets in a conflict and one firm intends to manufacture one that drone defensive systems built in. “Startup aims to invent battlefield medicine for the drone era”, Defense One, October 12, 2025.

Drones vs. Helicopters. Helicopter air assaults were one way to decisively engaged the enemy in their rear areas. However, small and inexpensive attack drones are proving to be a more effective method to disrupt logistics and command centers at a fraction of the cost and risk. “Do Drones Make Helicopters Obsolete?”, National Interest, September 12, 2025.

Drones and the Ukraine – Russia Conflict

Ukraine’s Sea-Launched Fiber-Optic Drones. The Ukrainians now have the capability to send multiple fiber-optic first person view drones to targets from a sea drone. The fiber-optic connection allows the drones to fly without radio signals, thus defeating electronic jamming. This gives Ukraine the ability to extend out even further from shore to use fiber-optic drones against Black Sea Fleet targets and military targets on Crimea. The FPV drones are carried in weather proof compartments on the sea drone which open up once it is time to launch the FPV attack drone. “Ukraine’s Sea Drones Are Now Launching Unjammable Fiber-Optic Drones“, by David Kirichenko, Forbes, October 6, 2025.

New Naval Drone for Ukraine? A state-owned firm (Ukraine) has signed an agreement with a U.S. firm to jointly develop a “float-and-fly” system capable of operating on both water and in the air. “Ukraine could get revolutionary naval drones”, defence-blog.com, October 12, 2025.

Ukraine – Drone Superpower. “More than three years after Russia launched its all-out invasion, Ukraine has become the world leader in drone warfare. No other country has a comparable depth of experience in building, utilizing and defending against drones. And there is little doubt that when the war ends, Ukraine will find that its knowledge, acquired at such a high material and human cost, will be a new source of momentum for its battered economy.” “Ukraine Has Become Europe’s Drone Superpower”, World Politics Review, October 9, 2025.

Russian Long-Range Fiber-Optic Drone. A city with 100,000 residents in eastern Ukraine located 12 miles from the front lines was hit by a Russian drone. This incident shows that longer ranges can be attained by fiber-optic drones – the ranges keep getting extended as time goes on. The fiber-optic drones can’t be jammed by electronic warfare and they have a clearer video signal than radio-controlled drones. “Russian Fiber-Optic Drones Are Now Reaching Into Ukrainian Cities Deep Behind the Lines”, The War Zone, October 6, 2025.

AI and Drones. Read how artificial intelligence is changing how drone warfare is conducted in the Russia-Ukraine war. “The new AI arms race changing the war in Ukraine”, BBC, October 10, 2025.

Drones Around the World

Fixing Germany’s Drone Problem. The German army is just now equipping its force with armed combat drones – it has plenty of work to do when it comes to defending against enemy drones. “How Germany Plans to Fix Its Drone Problem”, Deutshe Welle, October 2, 2025.

Taiwan Anti-Drone Measures. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense issued a report saying it is training soldiers to shoot down drones and actively looking to procure new anti-drone weapons systems, which comes in response to Chinese drone incursions. “Taiwan says anti-drone measures will be a top priority in defense against China”, AP News, October 9, 2025.

British Drone Training. The Anartes company will be providing training equipment to the British Army. The training program will include 3,000 quadcopters in three size variant. The training package also includes 50 Ground Control Stations and 500 video output screens. The program will give soldiers hands-on experience assembling, maintaining, and flying FPV drones. “British Army awards contract to expand FPV drone training”,UK Defence Journal, October 11, 2025.

**********

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5. How China and the U.S. Are Racing to De-Escalate the Trade War

Can we prevent mutually assured destruction?

How China and the U.S. Are Racing to De-Escalate the Trade War

Beijing is eager to save a Trump-Xi summit; Washington wants to stem losses in the stock market

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-tariffs-us-china-stock-market-e2652d66

By Brian Schwartz

, Lingling Wei

and Gavin Bade

Updated Oct. 13, 2025 11:06 pm ET

Beijing has threatened retaliation if President Trump sticks to his 100% tariff threat. AFP/Getty Images

Quick Summary

President Trump is attempting to de-escalate trade tensions with China publicly while privately maintaining pressure on Beijing.View more

President Trump is trying to publicly de-escalate tensions with China to soothe markets while privately keeping up pressure on Beijing—a difficult balancing act that is being closely watched by Wall Street.

After threatening additional 100% tariffs on Chinese imports starting Nov. 1, Trump in recent days spoke with senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, about sending a message to the world that the U.S. wants to de-escalate trade tensions with China, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump’s 100% tariff threat Friday came after Beijing moved to impose restrictions on the export of rare-earth minerals. The renewed conflict sparked a large U.S. market selloff, during which the president suggested he might not meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump’s desire to de-escalate comes as both nations privately expressed desire to quell tensions, at least for now, in their current trade dispute—the latest in a cycle of flare-up and de-escalation that has been in place since the beginning of Trump’s second term. In this case, the Chinese are eager to save a summit between Trump and Xi expected later this month, while Trump’s team wants to stem losses in the stock market and avoid a public diversion from his Middle East peace deal, which they have groused about being overshadowed by the latest trade flare-up.

Administration officials had been talking for weeks about using a variety of tools to fight back against China if needed, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ideas floated inside the administration have included possibly targeting Chinese stocks on the U.S. stock exchanges by strengthening the audit review process required for those companies. They have also considered executive action to reinforce U.S. infrastructure against Chinese incursions, sanction Chinese firms for being in business for Russia’s oil or further limit the ability of Chinese companies to invest in the U.S.

In the end, Trump, Bessent and other senior advisers agreed last week to give priority to stabilizing global markets, while trying to avoid an immediate escalation with China. The president softened his position on meeting with Xi after initially suggesting the summit was off, and wrote with a more positive tone on Truth Social over the weekend. A Sunday social-media post read in part: “Don’t worry about China! It will all be fine,” and added that the Trump administration wants to help China.

Driscoll goes scorched earth on Army buying inertia

Defense News · Hope Hodge Seck · October 13, 2025

In what may be a first for the staid Association of the U.S Army’s annual meeting in Washington, the Army secretary kicked off the conference with an F-bomb.

Dan Driscoll, who has served as the Army’s civilian leader since February, announced major coming changes to Army purchasing, parts repairs and technological adoption in a heated address that accused construction contractors of corruption and stressed that the lives of soldiers were on the line.

“We cannot f-ing wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield,” Driscoll said. “We must act now to enable our soldiers. Our window to change is right now, and we have a plan to do it. We will set the pace with innovation and we will win with silicon and software, and not with our soldiers’ blood and bodies.”

Driscoll walked out on the stage following an AI-generated video montage of soldiers and Army equipment — a display he said illustrated the technological chasm between legacy technologies and new capabilities that the Army had yet to cross.

“What we face right now, here in 2025, is an inflection point,” he said. “For our Army to meet this moment, every single person, especially those at this conference, must be able to answer yes to one very simple question: Am I focusing my energy and effort so that soldiers are ready to fight and win our nation’s wars? Because every minute we don’t, we place soldiers’ lives at risk. Our actions today decide the very fate of our future Army.”

Among coming changes, he said, is a new system that will combine Army equipment-purchasing entities under a single organization reporting directly to Army leadership and dramatically reduce the 12- to 18-month contracting cycle.

“We are going to completely disrupt the system that has held back the Army for decades and lined the prime [contractors’] pockets for so long,” he said. “We will break down barriers until we measure acquisitions, not in years and billions, but in months and thousands.”

Driscoll castigated the Army for its reliance on outdated equipment, pointing to a photograph showing a soldier born in 2004 working on a computer system fielded in 1995, a decade before his birth.

“Meanwhile, Ukraine is updating its drone software every couple of weeks,” he said. “It is absolutely unconscionable that we would send soldiers to war with 30-year-old, obsolete systems. This is the inflection point where we turn it all around.”

“Unequivocal failures” like the Boeing–Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche helicopter (canceled in 2004), XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer (canceled in 2002) and M10 Booker Light Tank (canceled earlier this year) have contributed to losing the public’s trust and cost billions, he said, while leaving troops without the contemporary gear they need.

“You have been let down,” Driscoll said, in a direct address to the soldiers in attendance. “You have been fighting, deploying, training and preparing for years, and you’ve always had each other’s backs, but unfortunately, your civilian leadership hasn’t always done the same for you.”

Driscoll also brought aircraft parts on to the stage: a fin for a UH-60 Black Hawk’s external fuel tank and a tiny Black Hawk screen control knob. The parts, he said, could be 3D-printed at higher quality for about $3,000 and $60 respectively, but cost $14,000 and $47,000 for full assembly replacements from the manufacturer. That amounted to $180,000 in unnecessary Army spending every month and months of delays, Driscoll said, and underscored the Army’s need to secure the right to repair its own equipment without losing manufacturer support. Driscoll ordered earlier this year that current and future Army contracts include this right.

“This is why your tank, howitzer or vehicle sits in the motor pool and you can’t use it to train for combat. And if the right to repair is bad in garrison, it will be so much worse in contested Indo-Pacific logistics,” he said. With accelerated efforts to field advanced manufacturing capabilities including 3D printing across the Army, he said, “soldiers will be able to download the schematic, manufacture it and install it all in the field.”

He cited other “disruptive” initiatives on display at the show, including a “Shark Tank”-like program to apply venture capital to Army tech initiatives, campus-style dining facilities and adoption of 3D-printed concrete structures to cut construction costs.

Driscoll served in the Army from 2007 to 2011 as an officer, earning a Ranger tab and deploying to Iraq. Having moved from there to the law field and then investment banking and venture capital, including a stint as the chief operating officer of Flex Capital, Driscoll said he could “say unequivocally that the Silicon Valley approach is absolutely ideal for the Army.”

“We will train our system to move fast,” he said. “And soon, Ukraine won’t be the only Silicon Valley of warfare.”

7. Inside the US Army’s new modernization mega-command

As an aside at AUSA yesterday, I attended the Harding Project's CSA Article Award Winners hosted by General Hodne. It was appropriately hosted by him as every one of the articles was relevant to the Army's future. I reflected on the articles and the authors' responses to Kyle Atwell's questions and I thought the best Army "think tank" is well ... the Army - the range of authors, from brilliant NCOs to a former Battalion Commander with a PhD who wrote a cutting edge "moneyball" article with his battalion master gunner and two platoon leaders on how to use data to improve gunnery made me think that the future of our Army is in great hands. With all due respect to the FFRDCs and think tanks that are conducting Army related research, the real intellectual capital for the development of our future Army is in the Army, not outside of it. And if any FFRDC and think tank is not relying on that intellectual capital then its research is suspect.

Inside the US Army’s new modernization mega-command

Defense News · Jen Judson · October 13, 2025

AUSTIN, Texas — Austin has long attracted high-tech startups and innovators, bringing the U.S. Army to the Texas capital seven years ago with the promise of a community that would carry the service’s ambitious modernization push.

The Army created a new four-star outfit – Futures Command – in the late summer of 2018, right in the city center, empowered with a mandate to quickly develop new requirements for modern capabilities.

Seven years later, Austin’s vibes have grown even more future-forward. Cowboy-booted pedestrians side-step robots lumbering along sidewalks delivering takeout food while driverless taxis blend into regular traffic and robotic-armed baristas serve up lattes at the airport.

And as Austin’s high-tech evolution continues, so does the Army’s.

The service announced earlier this year that it would combine the new Army Futures Command with the 52-year-old Training and Doctrine Command, effectively doing away with two four-star-led organizations to create a brand new one.

The decision came as a surprise. After all, AFC hadn’t even made it a whole decade.

The last time a four-star command had been deactivated – the Continental Army Command – was 52 years ago, which triggered the creation of TRADOC and U.S. Army Forces Command.

On Oct. 2, on the second day into a government shutdown, the Army cased the colors of TRADOC and of AFC, with its anvil insignia meant to signify its mission to forge the future, and unfurled the colors of the Transformation and Training Command, or T2COM, to a sparser crowd than expected.

Army leaders have chosen a sword as the insignia for T2COM, with command personnel already sporting the new shoulder patch at the activation ceremony.

“Just for the record, T2COM is a good decision. This is a good decision for the Army,” Gen. James Rainey, the outgoing AFC commander who will retire on Oct. 31, said at the event.

“There is no organization more responsible for the Army of Desert Storm, the Army of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the Army we now have, than Training and Doctrine Command,” he said.

As for Futures Command, Rainey described its creation as “one of the boldest and best decisions” the Army ever made.

“You’d think it’s the most un-Army thing ever to stand up a four-star headquarters in a tech hub, but AFC has proven that you can be flat, fast, disruptive and you can punch way above your weight,” he added. “So the chief’s decision, the secretary’s decision, to take those two organizations and put them together, it’s not about efficiencies as much as opportunities.”

The seven-year itch

AFC was established during President Donald Trump’s first administration under then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whom President Trump has since sought to disgrace.

Milley proposed the four-star command he dubbed Army Futures Command as a new way forward, breaking free of the bureaucracy and organizational silos that had hampered the service’s previous major modernization efforts.

Working with other top service officials, Milley shifted billions of dollars into modernization programs including the top priority — long-range, precision fires — and based the new command in Austin, Texas, an area known for its innovative, technology-focused workforce.

Soldiers take part in a human-machine integration demonstration at Fort Irwin, California, March 2024. (Spc. Samarion Hicks/U.S. Army)

AFC was formed to focus on requirements development within the modernization process. Prior to its formation, the requirements development process played out within TRADOC, where it competed for attention alongside training, recruitment and professional military education.

The more focused organization was built to enable the Army to move faster.

The command received attention and gained traction as it opened its headquarters in a University of Texas building downtown. Across the street, it opened the Army Applications Laboratory based at the Capital Factory, a hub that helps entrepreneurs meet investors and has since connected startups with Army decision makers.

Over a two-year period, it pushed more successful programs into reality than the Army had done in the previous four years, Milley told Defense News in an interview in 2022.

Although some of those efforts were already in development, the command has touted it was able to push programs through development and into soldiers’ hands faster than previously planned.

The command also created Project Convergence, an enormous experimentation effort that continues year-round with culminating events to tie new capabilities together across mission sets.

AFC also established the Software Factory, which has been developing software-based applications for the force internally, giving soldiers the opportunity to become coders, helping to solve operational problems.

But other large and ambitious programs were canceled over the course of seven years, including plans to build a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and an Extended-Range Artillery Cannon.

During the first Trump Administration, AFC was given unprecedented authority to move forward with programs, but when Christine Wormuth became Army secretary in May 2021, she quickly identified some ambiguity in the direction given to the command and the service’s acquisition office about their roles and responsibilities.

Wormuth also moved to centralize investment authority at Army headquarters. Some critics said the move basically gutted the entire intention of AFC.

At the same time, the Army struggled to find a commander to replace AFC’s first leader, Gen. Mike Murray, who retired in 2021. With no one in the top job, Lt. Gen. James Richardson, Murray’s deputy, served as an acting commander for nearly a year.

The personnel optics of a stand-in boss seemed to cast doubt on the future of AFC itself.

Rainey took over in the fall of 2022, and while remaining focused on the many modernization priorities already in development, he said he was looking deeper into the future. He emphasized the work the Army would need to do to figure out how humans and machines would fight together on the battlefield now and in the future.

Rainey famously coined the quote-du-jour to describe the role robots would play: “We will never again trade blood for first contact.”

Working with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who took the service’s helm in the fall 2023, the command centered its focus around developing an entirely new command-and-control architecture leveraging the tech industry.

The command helped the Army take leaps in fielding advanced technology by putting new capabilities into operational formations, bypassing the usual cumbersome development, testing and acquisition processes.

The chief dubbed this effort “transformation in contact.”

“In seven years, this team helped our Army gain ground in next-generation combat vehicles, long-range precision fires, future vertical lift, soldier lethality, air-and-missile defense, and our number one priority, the network,” George said in a speech broadcast from the Pentagon during the ceremony here.

“You helped our Army drive rapid change through our transformation in contact rotations. You helped build capacity in our formations across every warfighting function and you pushed the entire enterprise to field next-generation command-and-control to a division in record time and I know that is going to transform the Army,” George added.

From ‘vision to victory’

The newly established T2COM, whose new motto is “From Vision to Victory” is now the largest command in the Army.

“The world isn’t slowing down and neither will we,” George said. T2COM “will help our Army change how we operate. As we all know, transformation is not just about product innovation, it’s about process innovation. By reducing headquarters and streamlining authorities and responsibilities, T2COM will help us cut out redundancy, reverse stagnation and push talent and leaders into our fighting formations.”

The new command will help ensure “our training and education is modern and world class, whether at our combat training centers, centers of excellence, Army university or home station training and T2COM will help us get state-of-the-art tech into soldiers’ hands quickly, putting tacticians with technicians, so that we are making interactive, substantive and continuous change,” George added.

Gen. Gary Brito (center), then the commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, visits Fort Irwin. (Sgt. Maxwell Bass/U.S. Army)

Its first commander is Gen. David Hodne, who has held a variety of roles at both TRADOC and AFC in his career, most recently serving as the leader of AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center.

AFC placed a bet on proximity to innovation when it set up shop among startups and venture capitalists instead of within a traditional base. Now, T2COM is charged with doubling down on that idea, fusing its future-looking modernization effort with the institution that trains every soldier who will use those technologies.

T2COM’s headquarters will remain in Austin and the Army is looking at how it will bring more personnel into the locations in the area it now has.

“I think we’ll get more people into the footprint, but we have, definitely, the capacity to do it,” T2COM chief of staff, Maj. Gen. John Cushing, said. In addition to the downtown location, AFC has also established space in Round Rock, Texas.

Three subordinate three-star commands are also established as part of T2COM.

AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center based at Fort Eustis, Virginia, will become Futures and Concepts Command. TRADOC’s Combined Arms Center, which sets doctrine, the intellectual building blocks for the service’s flavor of combat, will become the Combined Arms Command, remaining at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Army Recruiting Command will remain at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

AFC creations like the Army Applications Laboratory and the Software Factory are here to stay. The lab will remain in its home at the Capital Factory in Austin, and the Army is working through where it will make the most sense to locate the Software Factory, according to Cushing.

The new command should not be seen as the closure of two commands and the creation of a new one, or an organizational shuffle, Hodne emphasized at its activation ceremony.

“It’s a reset,” he said. “It’s the deliberate blending of two proud traditions into something new, purpose-built for the challenges that we as an Army face today.”

The Army has, for the first time, “unified the functions of force design, force development and force generation,” Hodne said.

“Technology alone never transformed war. The tank, the airplane, the drone – none changed battlefields by themselves. They required new tactics, new concepts and new organizations to integrate them into coherent warfighting systems. Where militaries failed to align these elements, they failed on the battlefield,” he added.

Hodne stressed the need to move rapidly, pointing to the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East that pose evolving challenges like one-way attack drones, remote maritime systems and advanced battlefield networks.

“The question is whether our institutions can adapt fast enough to keep pace with these changes. T2COM is the Army’s answer,” he said.

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

8. Trump’s Big Gamble on Tackling the Middle East’s Intractable Problems

The hard work begins. But "the journey of a thousand miles" - Phase one was just a first (but small) step.

Excerpts:

Already cracks are showing in the second stage of Trump’s peace plan. His second stop Monday was Egypt for a summit of nearly two dozen countries to show support for the plan.

Representatives from across Europe and the Middle East were there. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t been asked to attend. Trump helped secure an invitation, but the Israeli leader ultimately turned it down, citing the Simchat Torah holiday that began Monday night.

A number of Middle East countries had balked at his presence, people familiar with the matter said. Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip has made it difficult politically to appear with Netanyahu, and the past year’s actions have left Arab states wary of the power of Israel’s military and intelligence services—and the country’s willingness to use it.

...

The conference ended with Trump and the leaders of Turkey, Egypt and Qatar signing a vague peace pledge, according to a draft of the document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Asked how things were going, one delegate sent back a clip from a famous Egyptian soap opera that showed a hapless boss pointlessly opening and closing the lids and drawers of his desk.

Yet the war in Gaza and the string of related conflicts it set off over the past two years have reset the calculus for an elusive Middle East peace in important ways, fueling Trump’s current push.

Israel defanged Iran and its most powerful militia allies, Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, removing major threats. The massive civilian toll of the war put domestic pressure on Arab governments to rein in Hamas. Gulf states, typically small monarchies focused on growing their economies, were alarmed when their security bubble was pierced by an Israeli missile attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar. And the Assad regime fell in Syria, opening the door to a new beginning in the heart of the Middle East.

Those developments have made realignments possible. First, though, the Trump administration will need to complete the complex task of ending the war in Gaza.

“It is a beginning to the end,” Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to Washington during the Biden administration, said of the release of Hamas’s last living hostages. “Now comes the hard

Trump’s Big Gamble on Tackling the Middle East’s Intractable Problems

After Gaza cease-fire, president aims for broader peace in a region transformed by two years of fighting

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-middle-east-peace-plan-fc13d83e?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Andrew Dowell

Oct. 13, 2025 9:00 pm ET

President Trump wants to quickly pivot from a Gaza cease-fire to the thornier problem of a broader peace in the Middle East, betting that two years of war transformed the region so much that decades-old animosities can be set aside.

It is a gamble that—much like the unorthodox diplomacy Trump used to secure the release of the hostages held by Hamas—flouts traditional thinking about the intractable problems at the heart of the region’s problems, and it risks inflaming tensions between Israel, Palestinians and the broader Muslim world.

On Monday in Israel, the president presented a sprawling vision for ending the modern era of violence that has gripped the Middle East for nearly a century. Trump broached an offer of peace with Iran, a country the U.S. bombed this year; urged a wider circle of countries to undertake diplomatic relations with Israel; and called for a region free of militancy and extremism.

“This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump said in remarks to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, shortly after the hostages were released.

Onlookers waved Israeli flags as a helicopter carried released hostages on Monday. amir cohen/Reuters

That sort of talk has often led to frustration or worse. The Middle East is a graveyard for ambitious plans. The neoconservatives of George W. Bush’s administration had hoped to spread democracy by overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. They ended up spreading a devastating insurgency that took years to put down.

President Joe Biden’s plan to secure an end to the war in Gaza and leverage that to create progress toward a Palestinian state and an expansion of Arab diplomatic ties with Israel never got off the ground.

Even the relatively targeted 1993 Oslo Accords, which aimed to chart a course to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, ultimately fell apart amid pressure from extremists on both sides.

Already cracks are showing in the second stage of Trump’s peace plan. His second stop Monday was Egypt for a summit of nearly two dozen countries to show support for the plan.

Representatives from across Europe and the Middle East were there. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t been asked to attend. Trump helped secure an invitation, but the Israeli leader ultimately turned it down, citing the Simchat Torah holiday that began Monday night.

A number of Middle East countries had balked at his presence, people familiar with the matter said. Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip has made it difficult politically to appear with Netanyahu, and the past year’s actions have left Arab states wary of the power of Israel’s military and intelligence services—and the country’s willingness to use it.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, President Trump and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani pose at the summit in Egypt. Suzanne Plunkett/Zuma Press

The conference ended with Trump and the leaders of Turkey, Egypt and Qatar signing a vague peace pledge, according to a draft of the document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Asked how things were going, one delegate sent back a clip from a famous Egyptian soap opera that showed a hapless boss pointlessly opening and closing the lids and drawers of his desk.

Yet the war in Gaza and the string of related conflicts it set off over the past two years have reset the calculus for an elusive Middle East peace in important ways, fueling Trump’s current push.

Israel defanged Iran and its most powerful militia allies, Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, removing major threats. The massive civilian toll of the war put domestic pressure on Arab governments to rein in Hamas. Gulf states, typically small monarchies focused on growing their economies, were alarmed when their security bubble was pierced by an Israeli missile attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar. And the Assad regime fell in Syria, opening the door to a new beginning in the heart of the Middle East.

Those developments have made realignments possible. First, though, the Trump administration will need to complete the complex task of ending the war in Gaza.

“It is a beginning to the end,” Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to Washington during the Biden administration, said of the release of Hamas’s last living hostages. “Now comes the hard work.”

Hezbollah supporters hold up cards reading ‘Save Gaza’ during a ceremony in Beirut on Sunday. Bilal Hussein/Associated Press

Few specifics

Trump’s plan to end the war calls for ending Hamas control, installing a new, apolitical Palestinian administration and bringing in an Arab-led multinational force to provide security.

Already, Hamas has rebuffed demands to disarm. It sent fighters back into the streets, where they have engaged in a series of deadly clashes with rival local militias and prominent Palestinian clans. Arab forces aren’t likely to wade into that messy situation, particularly without the cover of progress toward a Palestinian state, which isn’t on the table.

Talks on the specifics of implementing the plan haven’t even begun, said Arab diplomats, who described the process as declaring success, then leaving the negotiating teams to work out the details.

Oren said it would require a great deal of U.S. diplomacy and demand a lot of Trump’s time to overcome the challenges ahead. Analysts are worried a president who often jumps from issue to issue could lose interest before the job is finished. Before he left Israel, Trump was already telling special envoy Steve Witkoff it was time to give attention to a nuclear deal with Iran, but not before settling the war in Ukraine.

“He has to be prepared to ride this through to the end,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If he doesn’t, this is going to drift, and you will end up with a Gaza that looks more like Oct. 6, whether Hamas is involved or not,” referring to the day before the start of the present war in 2023.

Buses carrying freed Palestinian prisoners drive past destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip after their release from Israeli jails. Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press

Palestinian militants stood guard as hostages held in Gaza were handed over to the Red Cross. ramadan abed/Reuters

But Trump’s ability to secure the release of the rest of the hostages still alive in Gaza and bring a cease-fire to the enclave was a major diplomatic accomplishment that showed how tides are shifting in the region. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, all of which have ties to Hamas, contributed to pressuring the group into accepting a deal with no assurances the war would end.

“There’s a lot of fatigue around the issue of Palestine,” said Tahani Mustafa, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign relations. “Regional states were the ones to also demand Hamas’s disarmament, simply because they also have an interest in making sure that things are quiet in the occupied territories.”

Trump managed to bring together the world’s most powerful Arab and Muslim countries to express support for his broader peace plan along with Israel. All of those countries have reservations about the plan, but Trump, by consistently preaching optimism, has effectively dared them to raise them publicly and object to the plan. None have.

At the Knesset, Trump gently admonished Israel for pushing things too far over the past year, as global concerns grew about the human toll of continuing the war.

“The world is big, and it’s strong,” Trump said he told Israeli negotiators. “Ultimately, the world wins.” Israel, he said, “has won all that they can by force of arms.”

An Israeli soldier stood on a military vehicle near the Israel-Gaza border on Sunday. ammar awad/Reuters

‘Embracing this moment’

In Israel, Trump and his peace plan are broadly popular, reflecting a desire to move past war. Israelis went through two years of strain on its armed forces, which are largely made up of civilian reservists who left jobs and families behind. The economy buckled but didn’t break under the stress.

Of the 251 hostages taken, 166 came back alive. For the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was killed in the tunnels under Gaza more than a year ago, the emotions of the day were especially complex.

“I’m embracing this moment of goodness where people want to see freedom,” said Hersh’s father, Jon Polin. “We’ve suffered a tremendous loss. So many in the region have suffered tremendous losses. They want to see a cessation of hostilities.”

Mistrust between the two sides persists. Many Israelis are still angry that the hostages were taken and about how they were treated.

Jewish people celebrated in Jerusalem. Laurence Geai/MYOP for WSJ

Yellow ribbons and photos at ‘Hostages Square’ in Tel Aviv. hannah mckay/Reuters

Mohammad Hadieh, a lawyer and mediator practicing in Palestinian courts, said Palestinians are happy that a difficult chapter in Gaza’s war is finally over. But they also fear that this could be the beginning of a more brutal and chaotic reality for Gazans, as well as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, if Israel feels a freer hand to crack down.

The question is whether ordinary Israelis will keep pressure on the Netanyahu government to end the war now that the hostages have been released, he said.

“How will the Israeli public deal with, feel and think about Gaza?” Hadieh said. “This is the big question. Are they really people of peace or people of war?”

9. Eighth Army commander eyes generative AI to inform how he leads

Important insights.

But, as an aisde, one simple thing I would do for combined operations is to create a program where I can write my email in English and it will be translated to my Korean counterpart in Korean and then they can write back in Korean and I will receive the message in English (and this must be available on all systems, classified/collateral). And of course the same should be true of Word documents and Powerpoint presentations. We are still manually translating between languages and this is a huge time consumer.

As an aside, last year I co-authored a couple of articles with a friend from north Korea. He does not speak English and I do not speak enough Korean. But we emailed our drafts back and forth after translating them through Chat GPT. The translations were probably about 95% accurate and they just required some tweaking in each language. We did not use a human translator at all for our collaboration.

The Real Reason North Korea Is Threatening War

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/real-reason-north-korea-threatening-war-209331

Kim Jong-un’s Fears Could Be Exploited

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/kim-jong-uns-fears-could-be-exploited-211224

Korean should be a priority testing ground for this capability but it is needed for all languages that are used by our combined partners and allies.

Eighth Army commander eyes generative AI to inform how he leads

Maj. Gen. Taylor briefed a small group of reporters about his team’s near-term priorities at AUSA on Monday.

https://defensescoop.com/2025/10/13/eighth-army-commander-eyes-generative-ai-to-inform-how-he-leads/?utm

Brandi Vincent

October 13, 2025

Listen to this article

4:07

Learn more.

flip.it · Brandi Vincent · October 13, 2025

U.S. Army forces in South Korea are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence across their low- and high-stakes operations, according to Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor.

And as the new acting commander of Eighth Army, Taylor is personally leaning on existing and emerging AI capabilities to help influence and shape how he operates as a leader.

“I’ve become — Chat and I are really close lately,” Taylor told DefenseScoop on Monday, using the trendy terminology to prompt generative AI chatbots (“Hey, Chat”) that’s taken off in popular culture recently.

During a roundtable at the annual AUSA conference, Taylor briefed a small group of reporters about his team’s near-term priorities and how technology is improving their decision-making processes and readiness pursuits.

“As we talk about protection, drone use, counter-drones and counter-UAS, medical modernization, aviation modernization, we have something going on in almost every domain of modernization in Korea, right? AI is one thing that, as a commander, it’s been very, very interesting for me. Obviously, I’ve been in the Army for a long time, right? And so I was in the Army before computers,” Taylor said.

On AI applications that make specific sense for South Korea, which is very close geographically to China, he said the field army he commands is “regularly using” AI for predictive analysis to look at sustainment. He’s also keen to see use cases expand for intelligence purposes.

“Just being able to write our weekly reports and things, in the intelligence world, to actually then help us predict things — I think that is the biggest thing that really I’m excited about — it’s that modernization piece,” Taylor told DefenseScoop.

Generative AI marks one of the most buzzy, cutting-edge branches of the technology in the current era.

Broadly, generative AI involves disruptive but still-maturing models that can process huge volumes of data and perform increasingly “intelligent” tasks — like recognizing speech or producing human-like media and code based on people-generated prompts. These capabilities are pushing the boundaries of what existing AI and machine learning can achieve.

A significant number of Americans reportedly use genAI chatbots every day to inform or enhance a wide range of personal and professional tasks. While each of the U.S. military services’ rules for the technology vary, they broadly emphasize data security, output verification, and the use of approved, government-developed tools over public-facing models.

Taylor noted he’s keen to use the technology to inform his leadership approaches.

“One of the things that recently I’ve been personally working on with my soldiers is decision-making — individual decision-making. And how [we make decisions] in our own individual life, when we make decisions, it’s important. So, that’s something I’ve been asking and trying to build models to help all of us,” Taylor noted. “Especially, [on] how do I make decisions, personal decisions, right — that affect not only me, but my organization and overall readiness?”

He’s leading the Eighth Army in Korea at a time of growing regional complexities involving North Korea, China, and Russia. When asked about the contemporary threats that “keep him up at night,” Taylor told reporters that he is focused on ensuring his team is ready — regardless of the danger that surfaces.

“It always comes back to, do I have the capabilities? Do I have the training? Do I have the wherewithal to understand this? And my answer is, ‘Yes, we do,’ right? I understand what our threats are, what they are, and how to train. And so when I think about your specific question, what I know is, in my organization, in the Army, I am ready for those threats. I am ready. I’m prepared. I have the right equipment, I have the right training, I have the right awareness of threats throughout the Indo-Pacific region,” Taylor said.

Written by Brandi Vincent

Brandi Vincent is DefenseScoop’s Pentagon correspondent. She reports on disruptive technologies and associated policies impacting Defense Department and military personnel. Prior to joining SNG, she produced a documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network. Brandi grew up in Louisiana and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. She was named Best New Journalist at the 2024 Defence Media Awards.

flip.it · Brandi Vincent · October 13, 2025

10. Fresh From Middle East Victory, Trump Sets His Sights on Peace in Ukraine

See Sir Lawrence Freedman's essay:

Putin's theory of victory

https://samf.substack.com/p/putins-theory-of-victory?utm

Excerpts;

“It was pressure that caused Hamas to come to the negotiating table, and we have not had similar pressure on Russia yet,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who was Trump’s Ukraine envoy during his first term.

Ukraine is also pushing Trump to provide it with Tomahawk cruise missiles. One of the most precise missiles in the U.S. arsenal, Tomahawks have a range of around 1,500 miles, which would allow Kyiv to strike targets in Moscow with far more force than its long-range drones are able to deliver. The Trump administration recently agreed to provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure.

Trump said he was open to the idea of sending Kyiv more long-range missiles but hasn’t yet committed. “I might talk to him,” Trump said of Putin as he flew to the Middle East on Sunday night. “I might say, look, if this war is not settled I’m going to send them Tomahawks.”

Even as Russia’s military founders in a relative stalemate on the drone-laden front lines of eastern Ukraine, it remains a significant military superpower.

Fresh From Middle East Victory, Trump Sets His Sights on Peace in Ukraine

Pressure on Hamas worked for Gaza, but ahead of Zelensky’s visit to the White House, Trump has yet to fully ramp up pressure on Russia

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-ukraine-russia-israel-hamas-peace-deal-19456632

By Robbie Gramer

and Ian Lovett

Oct. 13, 2025 4:33 pm ET

President Trump boarding Air Force One on Monday. Evan Vucci/AP

Quick Summary

President Trump brokered a hostage release and cease-fire in Gaza, leading Europeans to hope he can apply similar diplomatic success to the Russia-Ukraine war.View more

President Trump scored a major foreign-policy win in Gaza by brokering the release of hostages from captivity and securing an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Now Europeans are hoping Trump can repeat the success with another knotty foreign-policy problem.

Trump will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday, according to officials familiar with the plans, on the heels of his diplomatic victory tour in the Middle East. At his stops in Israel and Egypt, Trump referenced the continuing war between Russia and Ukraine, underscoring how, as he touted his achievements on one major conflict, he has still set his sights on resolving another.

The two wars are vastly different. In the 2022 Russian invasion and Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, respectively, Ukraine and Israel both faced unprovoked attacks that triggered the wars. But in the Middle East, Israel proved itself to be the dominant regional military force, while in Europe, it is Russia that remains a major global power with a sizable nuclear arsenal.

Senior U.S. and European officials caution that neither Russia nor Ukraine will change their war strategies over Trump’s initial success in the Middle East. They also point out that a longer-term deal to bring lasting peace to Gaza is far from certain.

But they still hope the U.S. president can seize on the momentum of the diplomatic victory—and draw the right lessons to revive efforts to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin back to the negotiating table.

“This gives Trump enormous leverage to solve other major conflicts,” said Fred Fleitz, who was a senior National Security Council official during the first term. “He’s now proven himself as an effective arbiter and peacemaker.”

Trump joined other world leaders at a summit in Egypt. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Zelensky himself waded in on Monday. “Putin can be forced into peace—just like any other terrorist. Even Hamas is now preparing to release hostages. If that is possible, then Putin can also be forced to restore peace,” he said in a social-media post.

If Trump can draw any lesson from the Israel-Hamas deal to apply to the Ukraine war, senior European officials said, it boils down to one word: Pressure.

After Israel’s airstrike on Hamas operatives in Doha, Trump pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept his 20-point peace plan and compelled him to publicly apologize to Qatar’s leader. Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, meanwhile, increased pressure on Hamas by threatening to cut diplomatic avenues to the group and strip it of its diplomatic cover if it didn’t accept the proposed peace plan. This was all while Israel continued a renewed military assault on Gaza despite mounting international backlash over its conduct of the war that has left over 67,000 Palestinians dead, according to the local health ministry. The figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Trump hasn’t yet brought the same pressure to bear on Putin. Ukraine and its allies in Europe are hoping that will change now that Trump has seen the fruits of his success as a dealmaker in the Middle East—and as his impatience with Russia mounts, following months of failed negotiations.

A White House official said the president has long expressed his desire to see an end to the war in Ukraine, adding that Putin has repeatedly rejected generous proposals toward peace that would have benefited Russia. The White House remains optimistic that it will be able to get both sides to stop what the official described as senseless killing in the conflict.

Trump has slapped steep tariffs on India, a major Russian trading partner, but so far hasn’t issued any major new sanctions or secondary sanctions on Russia. European officials said increasing financial penalties on Russia is crucial at this stage in the war, when its economy is on the brink of crisis but also transitioning to a full-scale wartime economy.

Trump also has yet to target Moscow’s so-called “shadow fleet” of illicit oil tankers it uses to try to bypass price caps on Russian oil to generate more revenue for its war machine.

St. Sophia Cathedral in central Kyiv. Trump has said he is open to the idea of sending Ukraine more long-range missiles but hasn’t yet committed. Efrem Lukatsky/AP

“It was pressure that caused Hamas to come to the negotiating table, and we have not had similar pressure on Russia yet,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who was Trump’s Ukraine envoy during his first term.

Ukraine is also pushing Trump to provide it with Tomahawk cruise missiles. One of the most precise missiles in the U.S. arsenal, Tomahawks have a range of around 1,500 miles, which would allow Kyiv to strike targets in Moscow with far more force than its long-range drones are able to deliver. The Trump administration recently agreed to provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure.

Trump said he was open to the idea of sending Kyiv more long-range missiles but hasn’t yet committed. “I might talk to him,” Trump said of Putin as he flew to the Middle East on Sunday night. “I might say, look, if this war is not settled I’m going to send them Tomahawks.”

Even as Russia’s military founders in a relative stalemate on the drone-laden front lines of eastern Ukraine, it remains a significant military superpower.

Trump Signs Cease-Fire Deal Between Israel and Hamas at Egypt Summit

Play video: Trump Signs Cease-Fire Deal Between Israel and Hamas at Egypt Summit

President Trump signed a document recognizing the cease-fire and hostage-release between Israel and Hamas. He was alongside the leaders of Egypt, Turkey and Qatar. Photo: Suzanne Plunkett/Press Pool

Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based defense analyst, said the Kremlin’s military might means there is a limit on the leverage Trump can use to bring Russia to the negotiating table.

“The fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal will always be a factor in any pressure campaign,” Gady said. “The United States has not really shown any desire to trigger any escalatory dynamics.”

More likely, Gady said, is that Trump could negotiate a cease-fire agreement directly with Putin, and then try to strong-arm Zelensky into signing it—a possibility that European leaders have feared and tried to prevent.

“This scenario would reflect Trump’s history of high-profile, unilateral diplomacy and his willingness to pressure Zelensky toward agreements not fully aligned with European and Ukrainian objectives,” Gady said.

Another complicating factor in the Russia-Ukraine war that Trump didn’t have to navigate in his Middle East peace drive is China, which has emerged as Russia’s major economic and political lifeline. The U.S. maintains close ties with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey—the Middle Eastern powers that helped get the Gaza peace plan over the finish line by turning the screws on Hamas. The same can’t be said for China, the U.S.’s arch geopolitical rival and a world superpower in its own right.

Trump threatened China with new 100% tariffs on Friday in a row over Beijing’s export controls on critical minerals, but may still meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month despite the flare-up in tensions. “Lines of communication have reopened, so we’ll see where it goes,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox Business Network on Monday. “I believe that meeting will still be on.”

Current and former officials said that Russia’s increasing reliance on China means Beijing could play a productive role in bringing Putin to any peace deal—if Trump can convince it to play ball, that is.

“If we come to a point where China feels that it’s in its interest for Russia to end the war, and they tell Russia that, that would be significant,” said Volker. “Unfortunately we are not there.

Write to Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 14, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Sets Sights on Peace in Ukraine'.

11. Can Shotguns, Spy Planes and Lasers Protect Europe From the Next Drone Incursion?

Can Shotguns, Spy Planes and Lasers Protect Europe From the Next Drone Incursion?

Suspected Russian drone appearances across Europe have forced states to look for novel ways to protect their airspace

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nato-drone-defense-plans-0accac42

A house in Wyryki damaged after NATO-member warplanes shot down several Russian drones over Poland.

By Sune Engel Rasmussen

, Thomas Grove

and Karolina Jeznach | Photographs by Simona Supino for WSJ

Oct. 13, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Quick Summary

European countries are bolstering defenses against drone incursions, with Sweden investing $370 million in counter-drone systems.View more

WYRYKI, Poland—After suspected Russian drones violated NATO airspace in recent weeks, closing airports and rattling citizens, European militaries and governments find themselves in a new era of conflict with an urgent need to bolster their defenses.

Allied countries are caught between having to develop long-term solutions to address Russia’s continuing hybrid threats, and a more immediate need to help civilians prepare for the next potential wave of drones. The solutions span from multilayered air-defense systems to civilian target practice against drones.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is racing to adopt new technologies that can spot drones from afar and take them out without wasting expensive weaponry. It is also weighing how to confront incursions by unmanned vehicles when the culprit, and their intentions, can’t be determined.

Drones in recent weeks forced airport closures in Denmark and circled above the country’s most crucial air force base. The aircraft disappeared before authorities could intercept them, leaving Danish authorities without evidence of who sent them. In Poland, NATO warplanes shot down several Russian drones last month.

Poland and Denmark rank among Ukraine’s staunchest wartime allies and are now looking to Kyiv for support. Poland is in contact with Ukraine to discuss how to respond to drone threats, and Danish defense companies have firsthand knowledge from the war-torn country of the rapidly changing drone technology in play there.

Other allies are responding, too. The German cabinet last week agreed on a draft law authorizing police to shoot down drones posing an immediate threat. Sweden on Friday announced that it would invest about $370 million in new counter-drone systems, including weapons to down unmanned aircraft, drone interceptors and jamming sensors.

A landscape view in Wyryki. Residents gather outside the library where a first-aid class is organized.

Two British surveillance aircraft flew a 12-hour mission on Thursday along the Russian border, supported by U.S. and NATO forces, prompted by the recent incursions.

Defending Europe against drones involves several steps: detecting and identifying the unmanned vehicles, deciding whether to neutralize them, and exerting pressure away from the skies to deter enemies from launching them.

Detection

The drone incursions have prompted European officials to speed up the construction of a so-called drone wall on NATO’s eastern flank, using new technology such as acoustic detection and lasers. Those plans, combining six NATO countries, were put into motion last year but haven’t found funding from the European Union.

“The drone wall was decided months ago; what we are worried about is the lack of understanding of urgency among our allies,” said Marko Mihkelson, head of Estonia’s parliamentary foreign-policy committee.

Some experts say the idea of a wall gives a misguided impression of how to stop drones. For Western European countries, drone prevention also happens further from NATO’s eastern borders. Denmark said the drones that circled its airspace recently were launched from the vicinity of the country, not from afar.

“A drone wall is perhaps best understood as a defense on the border with Russia, but it is just as important to have a similar defense in depth,” said Hans-Christian Mathiesen, vice president of defense programs at Sky-Watch, a Danish maker of a type of fixed-wing combat drone used in Ukraine. “As long as we have as open societies as we do, there are endless ways to bring in drones.”

Since the recent drone incidents, the Danish armed forces have installed Doppler radars by at least two of the overflown sites, Copenhagen Airport and an air base in Skrydstrup that is home to most of the country’s F-16 and F-35 jet fighters. The radars, produced by Danish engineering company Weibel, are similar to ones the company installed at Charles de Gaulle Airport for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

A mobile radar installation near the village of Dragør, Denmark. steven knap/epa/shutterstock

Drones over civilian areas present governments with a conundrum of how to respond. Airport disruptions, for instance, generally fall under the jurisdiction of homeland security authorities or interior ministries, but can require the protection of militaries. This potentially slows down supply of crucial defense material.

“If we are to supply solutions, who do we send them to, who has the budgets, who are the decision makers?” said Peter Røpke, Weibel’s chief executive officer.

Efficient drone detection relies on sifting through vast amounts of information from air and ship traffic, and responding to a drone threat within seconds rather than hours. That requires multiple types of sensors, including radars, electro-optical and infrared cameras and artificial intelligence, combined in one system, said Jesper Bøhnke, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Danish-based radar maker Terma Group.

“It requires an unbelievably complex combination of systems interacting completely seamlessly,” he said.

Interception

Once a drone is detected, the decision of whether to down it involves an assessment of risk and cost. A crashed drone can cause damage and casualties on the ground. Targeting it with missiles can quickly deplete precious arsenals if drone incursions become routine.

One solution: shotguns. The Danish armed forces last month received a large order of shotguns after expediting an existing order, and rushed to train instructors from the navy, air force and army to hit drones with them.

Swedish aerospace and defense giant Saab in August introduced its first-ever missile dedicated specifically to down drones. With a range of 3 miles, the Nimbrix missile has a warhead that can detonate in the air to target swarms of drones at a relatively low cost.

Earlier this year, Saab also introduced a modular counter-drone system that integrates a mobile radar with a remote weapons station, which is equipped with machine guns, and electronic-warfare components.

Mannequins used for CPR training. Instructors give a demonstration on CPR.

Working with the Swedish armed forces, Saab produced the system in three months, aiming for a quick, Silicon Valley-style innovation to meet the rapidly changing demands, said Petter Bedoire, Saab’s chief technology officer. “Instead of setting a very high bar,” said Bedoire, “we said, if we want it fast, what can we get?”

The company hopes to fully integrate the Loke system across NATO wartime units by the end of the year.

Alternative pressure

Pressuring Russia on other fronts could be its own deterrent. That, however, requires tangible evidence of Russian responsibility, something that isn’t always clear, given the clandestine nature of drone attacks, said Andreas Graae, head of research at the Institute for Military Technology at the Royal Danish Defence College. He cautioned that engaging Russia in hybrid warfare could escalate the conflict.

“Generally, Russia has systems that offer much better protection against hybrid attacks than we do,” Graae said.

Regardless, last week, the Danish government said it would intensify environmental inspections of ships at Skagen Red, one of Scandinavia’s busiest anchorages at the northern tip of Denmark. The inspections will target older ships, particularly those belonging to Russia’s clandestine network of vessels known as the shadow fleet, transporting sanctioned oil through Danish waters.

“We have to put a stop to Putin’s war machine. That goes for the Russian shadow fleet as well,” said Morten Bødskov, Danish minister for industry, business and financial affairs. “We will use all tools at our disposal.”

As politicians and militaries deliberate and procure equipment, citizens are rattled. On Poland’s eastern border where the first drones crossed into allied airspace, residents are working out on their own how to respond to the next threat.

Ewa Jablonska organizes first-aid classes for the community.

In Wyryki, where a house was destroyed recently after a jet fighter tried to down one of Russia’s low-cost Gerbera drones, Ewa Jablonska, a police-dog trainer, has seen the turnout for her first-aid classes jump. A physical-education teacher is instructing pupils in how to respond to drones, and the village mayor has started weekend skeet-shooting classes.

“Anyone who is skilled at that would be able to shoot down a drone,” said Wyryki County Mayor Bernard Blaszczuk. Soldiers with battlefield experience say drones are harder to hit than birds.

Formerly in the border guard service, Blaszczuk sent a letter to the Ministry of Defense offering for the armed forces to use a school as a base. He has also applied for EU funding to build bomb shelters after residents of three villages recently voted to build them using budget funds.

“We all want peace, but sometimes you get attacked, and then you need to be able to defend your people,” he said.

At the first-aid training session, nearly 30 residents learned to perform first aid in preparation for the next time drones showed up.

One participant was Joanna Lesniewska-Gulwell, mayor of neighboring village Horostyta-Kolonia. “There is no initiative from the government, so we organize ourselves,” she said.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

12. Major Media Outlets Rebuff New Pentagon Press Policy

Long live the First Amendment. I do not think you have to be a Constitutional law expert to recognize that this undermines not only the Constitution but fundamental American values. We should remember our oath.

Interestingly Newsmax is not signing on (though One America News is).

Excerpts:

New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Richard Stevenson said Friday that the policy “threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.” The Journal said it remains “concerned with the Pentagon’s new press rules and requirements, and our reporters will not be signing them in their current form.”

The Washington Post, CNN, the Atlantic, HuffPost and Newsmax also said they wouldn’t sign the policy.

One America News Network said Monday its staff had signed on, “after thorough review of the revised press policy by our attorney,” with the word “revised” underlined and bolded.

Major Media Outlets Rebuff New Pentagon Press Policy

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Journal and CNN are among outlets that have said they won’t sign a new Defense Department policy

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/major-media-outlets-rebuff-new-pentagon-press-policy-6c6b05c7?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

By Melissa Korn

and Alexandra Bruell

Updated Oct. 13, 2025 8:23 pm ET

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, shown with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine in June, has taken a combative stance toward the press. Kashif Basharat/Department of Defense/ZUMA Press

Quick Summary

Major media outlets, including the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, refuse to sign a new Pentagon policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.View more

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.

Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

For decades, reporters wearing identification badges had broadly unfettered access to nonclassified areas of the Pentagon, able to walk the hallways of the sprawling building and visit officials’ offices. The agency limited where they could go without escorts earlier this year.

Members of the press have until Tuesday to sign the new policy, which states that military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

Asking agency personnel to “commit criminal acts” by disclosing unauthorized information isn’t protected under the First Amendment, the policy says.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

President Trump speaking with reporters in the Oval Office. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a waving-goodbye emoji on X Monday afternoon as he shared statements from the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Washington Post saying they wouldn’t sign the new policy.

The Trump administration has upended longstanding precedents for press access this year, taking control of the seating arrangement for the White House briefing room from the White House Correspondents’ Association and adding spots for “new media” outlets such as podcasters. The White House also has barred some news organizations, including the Associated Press and the Journal, from attending certain events.

The Defense Department earlier this year also removed dedicated Pentagon office space for some outlets, including the New York Times, NBC News, the Hill and CNN, giving the spots instead to the New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, HuffPost News and others, in what they called a new rotation program.

Hegseth, who shared sensitive military information in unsecured group chats on Signal earlier this year, has accused multiple people of leaking classified information during his tenure. Hegseth has taken a combative stance toward the press, saying outlets misrepresented the Trump administration’s work.

The Defense Department issued a memo last month stating that Pentagon reporters would need to sign a document that many media outlets interpreted as requiring agreement not to disclose classified or other sensitive information without prior authorization.

News organizations balked, saying the policy was a violation of the First Amendment and an attempt to limit press coverage.

The Pentagon building in Arlington, Va. CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

The guidelines were revised in subsequent weeks, after conversations with the Pentagon Press Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and representatives from individual news organizations. But many newsrooms said the changes didn’t go far enough in protecting their ability to report.

The Pentagon Press Association said Monday that the policy “gags Pentagon employees and threatens retaliation against reporters who seek out information that has not been preapproved for release.” It said neither the White House, State Department, nor other agencies require reporters to sign such policies to gain access to their buildings.

The organization, which represents more than 100 journalists from trade publications, newspapers, wire services and TV broadcast outlets, hasn’t made a recommendation to its members on whether or not to sign.

“The policy does not ask for them to agree, just to acknowledge that they understand what our policy is,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Monday. He said media outlets had “decided to move the goal post and refuse to sign the policy.”

He posted on X last week that access to the building “is a privilege, not a right and the Department is not only legally permitted, but morally obligated to impose reasonable regulations on the exercise of that privilege.”

Journalists aren’t required to clear stories with the agency and “retain robust access to our public affairs offices, the briefing room, and the ability to ask questions, which we continue to answer thoroughly,” he wrote.

Publishers and broadcasters that don’t sign the policy will lose regular press access to its headquarters building. They have until 5 p.m. Wednesday to turn in their existing press badges and clear out their workspaces at the building, though there is an opportunity to seek an extension.

New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Richard Stevenson said Friday that the policy “threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.” The Journal said it remains “concerned with the Pentagon’s new press rules and requirements, and our reporters will not be signing them in their current form.”

The Washington Post, CNN, the Atlantic, HuffPost and Newsmax also said they wouldn’t sign the policy.

One America News Network said Monday its staff had signed on, “after thorough review of the revised press policy by our attorney,” with the word “revised” underlined and bolded.

Write to Melissa Korn at Melissa.Korn@wsj.com and Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 14, 2025, print edition as 'Big News Outlets Won’t Agree to New Pentagon Media Policy'.

13. Homeland pivot isn't affecting troops in South Korea, so far: commander

I think we are a little confused. I think the Homeland pivot refers to the forthcoming NDS/NWS that will prioritize homeland defense. The commander is obviously responding to a question about the government shutdown.

Homeland pivot isn't affecting troops in South Korea, so far: commander

Soldiers are “being fed,” “still training” amid government shutdown, 8th Army commander says.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/10/pivot-homeland-so-far-not-affecting-troops-south-korea-commander-says/408777/?oref=d1-featured-river-top&utm

By Meghann Myers

Staff Reporter

October 13, 2025 02:29 PM ET

The Pentagon’s latest strategic documents knock the Indo-Pacific off its perch as the Defense Department’s priority theater, but that guidance has so far not reduced funding or training opportunities for soldiers stationed in South Korea, the head of 8th Army told reporters Monday at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

And the command is keeping soldiers fed and trained during the government shutdown, which was set to cut off troops’ pay on Wednesday. President Donald Trump on Saturday said he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use “all available funds” to send Oct. 15 paychecks to service members.

“They’re being fed this morning. They’re still training,” Lt. Gen. Hank Taylor said of troops under his command, but noted his civilian workforce has been furloughed.

In the longer term, it remains to be seen how the National Defense Strategy’s shift to the Western Hemisphere will impact funding in the Indo-Pacific. While China is now the Pentagon’s second priority, U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula are more specialized to training with Republic of Korea forces to deter North Korea.

The Trump administration had considered shifting 4,500 troops from the peninsula to Guam, the Wall Street Journal reported in May.

‘The homeland is in the Pacific’

China, China, Chi—wait, what? Air Force mulls next steps amid homeland focus

But for now, Taylor said, he’s not feeling any marked changes in resources or prioritization.

“I have everything I need, when I think about live-fire training, live-flight training, maneuver training, driving our vehicles, instructors, all those things,” he said. “Nothing that I've had to change any of my readiness here.”

And while the Pentagon is pushing Asian allies to spend more on their own defense, that hasn’t been coupled with any American withdrawal from the region.

“We are ready. We are modernizing, right? We have capabilities forward in the Indo-Pacific region,” Taylor said.

Help us report on the future of national security. Contact Meghann Myers: mmyers@defenseone.com, meghannmyers.55 on Signal.

14. Sig Sauer's M7 Rifle For The Army Is Now Lighter After Controversy

Photos at the link. It looks like a good looking weapon to me.

Sig Sauer's M7 Rifle For The Army Is Now Lighter After Controversy

Excessive weight was among the lengthy criticisms of the M7 that an Army captain put forward earlier this year, prompting widespread attention.

Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman

Published Oct 13, 2025 4:04 PM EDT

114

twz.com · Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman

The TWZ Newsletter

Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.

Sig Sauer says it has been able to trim the weight of the Army’s new 6.8x51mm M7 service rifle by nearly a pound, or just over 10 percent, in response to feedback from servicemembers. The M7’s weight compared to the gun it is set to replace, the 5.56x45mm M4A1, was among the criticisms that an Army captain very publicly leveled against the gun earlier this year. Sig had subsequently issued a vehement rebuttal, but acknowledged that the design was still evolving.

Jason St. John, senior director of strategic products for the Defense Strategies Group at Sig Sauer, gave an update on the M7 rifle, as well as the companion 6.8x51mm M250 machine gun, to TWZ‘s Howard Altman on the show floor at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual symposium today. Sig Sauer has also been working on a shorter and lighter carbine variation of the M7 for the Army. Sig Sauer did show the lightened “product-improved” M7, also known as the PIE M7, at the biennial Defense and Security Equipment International (DSEI) exhibition in London earlier this year, but does not appear to have had the carbine on display at that event.

The new lightened M7, at rear, and the carbine version, in front, on display at the 2025 Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) symposium. Howard Altman

The M7 and M250 (previously designated the XM7 and XM250), together with the associated family of 6.8x51mm rounds and the computerized XM157 optic, form the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) ‘system.’ The service selected Sig Sauer as the winner of its NGSW competition in 2022 and now plans to replace a substantial portion of its M4A1s and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons (SAW) with M7s and M250s, respectively. Sig is also supplying the ammunition, but the XM157s are being procured separately from Vortex Optics.

The M250 machine gun, at top, and the M7 rifle, at bottom. Sig Sauer

“So, we’re talking about the Army’s and our continued teaming effort to improve the M7 and the M250, based on our recommendations, and their suggestions, and feedback from the field,” Sig Sauer’s St. John said.

“There’s basically two combined efforts going on within the M7,” he continued. “We have a carbine version, and then we have a lighten, improved version of the M7. And so when you look at the standard M7 that’s been issued to the troops, the overall weight of the firearm was 8.3 pounds. Now, the improved M7 is 7.6 pounds, and the carbine version weighs 7.3 pounds. So we’re getting closer and closer to [a] rifle weight system similar to the M4.”

The PIE M7 also has a 13.5-inch barrel, while the one on the carbine version is 10 inches long. A standard M4A1 with its 14.5-inch barrel, as well as just a sling and a loaded magazine, weighs in at 7.62 pounds, according to the Army. It is important to note that optics and other accessories add appreciable weight to both the M7 and M4A1. The XM157 optic is notably larger and heavier than the ones the Army typically issues for use on M4A1s.

A member of the 101st Airborne Division trains with an M7 rifle fitted with an XM157 optic. US Army

A US Army soldier fires an M4A1 carbine. US Army

In terms of how the PIE M7 was lightened, “there’s the upper receiver, we’ve redesigned and taken some weight out of it. We’ve lessened the barrel profile slightly to get some weight out of it,” according to Sig’s St. John. “We’ve done some lightening efforts within the operating system, as well as remove the folding stock hinge. By removing that hinge, we save some weight.”

The original M7 featured a stock that was both adjustable in length and could be folded to one side. The M4A1’s stock is only adjustable in length.

“What we just found is really that the Army and the soldiers have fed back … [that] they’d rather have the weight savings than the folding stock,” St. John added. “They aren’t using the folding stock enough to justify that additional weight.”

The video in the Tweet below shows a placard with additional details about the PIE M7 and the carbine version at around 0:41 in the runtime.

As one of the @USArmy’s premier Air Assault units, I saw firsthand how the @101stAASLTDIV is leading the charge to make Transformation in Contact a reality. From air assault missions to next-gen weapons, UAS integration, and robust tactics, they’re setting the pace for a faster,… pic.twitter.com/vS96zYFhj7

— Secretary of the Army (@SecArmy) September 24, 2025

A screen grab showing the placard with details about the PIE M7 and carbine version from the video above. US Army capture

Sig Sauer has also made important changes to the M250’s design based on discussions with the Army and feedback from soldiers.

“You’re going to see, instead of having a removable front handguard, now you have a hinged captured handguard, so it stays on the weapon system – rotates forward and away,” St. John explained. “The feed tray cover is extended with the big rail, so that now I have more adjustability for the optics that I put on there, and eye relief to the individual soldiers, and now I can move my optic further back or forward depending on what’s wanted.”

“I’ve got improved bipods. I’ve got [an] improved gas valve,” he continued, also highlighting improvements to how the M250 can be fitted to a tripod and how ammunition is carried on the gun. “Basically the feedback from everyone is, what can we do to improve this weapon system, make it more easy [sic] to use, and more robust and reliable.”

A US Army soldier fires an M250 during cold-weather testing. US Army

Work has also been done to improve the common sound suppressor for the M7 and M250.

“We’ve also redesigned our suppressor to make it shorter,” per St. John. “We’ve added a titanium heat shield on it that does two-fold [things].”

The heat shield helps reduce the chance of contact burns as the suppressor heats up during use. It also reduces thermal bloom, which could make it easier for enemies to spot friendly forces from their heat signature. St. John cautioned that no one should be rushing to grab the suppressor, especially with bare hands, after sustained use, even with the new heat shield.

When it comes to the M7, St. John said that the Army is now in the process of deciding how to proceed in fielding the PIE and/or carbine versions.

“You could see there’s probably a couple of decision points. Do they stick with the standard length M7 that’s been lightened by 0.7 pounds? Or do they and or do they move to the carbine completely?” he said. “Do they keep the carbine for specialty troops and still issue the M7, or do they take the carbine and utilize that as the new rifle across the board? So they’re trying to make those decisions.”

Another soldier seen in training with an M7 rifle. US Army

St. John pointed out that the Army had gone through a similar evolution in thinking in the decades that followed the fielding of the A1 variant of the M16 in the 1960s. The service adopted a succession of full-size rifle versions before transitioning to the shorter and lighter M4A1 as its standard service weapon.

That the Army is looking at lighter variations of the M7 at all is significant. The weight of the rifle was among the criticisms that Army Capt. Braden Trent had highlighted in an unclassified report he wrote while he was a student at the Expeditionary Warfare School, which is part of the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Trent also called attention to the comparative size and weight of the 5.56x45mm and 6.8x51mm rounds, as well as the shorter barrel on the M7 compared to the M4A1. Trent’s findings, which raised safety concerns about the rifle and cited other issues that called its operational utility into question, came to more widespread attention after he presented them at the annual Modern Day Marine conference earlier this year.

There is one particular “major fault in the XM7, and that’s the UBL … or universal basic load. It’s a metric that can be applied to almost any weapon system, and it essentially means the amount of magazines and associated ammunition that a system uses and is expected to be carried into battle,” Trent said at Modern Day Marine. “So the XM7 [and] the M4A1 actually have the same number of magazines in their UBL seven, but remember, we’re talking about that capacity difference. The total round count a soldier carries into battle with the XM7 is 140 rounds compared to the 210 rounds of the M4A1. Now again, a 70-round difference may not seem significant, but to the soldier in the fight, it absolutely is a difference. Not to mention that every magazine added to the XM7, each 20-round loaded magazine adds another 1.25 pounds to the soldier’s load, meaning that if troops equipped with the XM7 tried to match their old UBLs [in terms of round count], they’re going to have even more weight being carried.”

“The final thing I’d like to mention is the Chief of Army Infantry’s stated goal of a 55-pound total soldier load,” he added. “If we just take the XM7 and its seven UBL magazine load, we’re almost at half that weight, and that’s before the soldier is put on body armor, water, a rucksack, or anything else that they’ll need in the fight.”

A US Army soldier reloads an M7 rifle. US Army

The Army’s position has been that the M7 and its new cartridge offer improved accuracy, range, and terminal effectiveness that are worth the added bulk. Concerns about soldiers being outranged, as well as improvements in adversary body armor, were key drivers behind the NGSW program. Trent’s report also calls this into question based on data he collected regarding expected infantry combat engagement distances.

Sig Sauer had also provided a lengthy rebuttal to the technical issues that Trent raised. You can read more about all of this in TWZ‘s in-depth report on the ensuing controversy following his presentation.

“I think that soldiers and citizens should want Sig Sauer, the U.S. [Army] program office to continue that practice of continually evolving and developing and improving their soldiers’ weapons systems. And I think we anticipate that we’re going to undergo those improvement processes for the next 25 to 30 years,” the company’s St. John had told TWZ at the time. “There’s going to be improvements in manufacturing [and] materials processes. The soldiers on the ground and the U.S. Army are going to dictate different operational requirements and standards for the weapons systems, and we’re going to have to react to those modifications that are going to optimize that weapon system as that evolves through time and history.”

“It should be no surprise, in my opinion, that specifically in the infancy of a weapons program that there’s a very aggressive improvement effort to ensure that the Army and the soldiers get the weapon system that they deserve,” he added.

From what we know now, the Army’s plans for the M7 are already evolving significantly, with criticisms about the rifle’s weight, in particular, having been taken to heart.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Joseph Trevithick

Deputy Editor

Joseph has been a member of The War Zone team since early 2017. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor at War Is Boring, and his byline has appeared in other publications, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense Journal, Reuters, We Are the Mighty, and Task & Purpose.

Howard Altman

Senior Staff Writer

Howard is a Senior Staff Writer for The War Zone, and a former Senior Managing Editor for Military Times. Prior to this, he covered military affairs for the Tampa Bay Times as a Senior Writer. Howard’s work has appeared in various publications including Yahoo News, RealClearDefense, and Air Force Times.

News & Features

twz.com · Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman

15. Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains

Football is a game of inches. I did not know that war is an endeavor of microscopic gans (or losses)

Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains

Politico · Veronika Melkozerova · October 13, 2025

https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-lost-more-soldiers-ukraine-2025-alone/?utm

Both Ukraine and Russia are finding it difficult to recruit new soldiers.

Ukraine's numbers are lower because it has largely been on the defense, while attackers tend to suffer higher casualties. | Jose Colon/Anadolu via Getty Images

October 13, 2025 4:10 am CET

KYIV — Russia lost 281,550 soldiers in Ukraine in the first eight months of this year, according to a document that Ukrainian intelligence says contained leaked Russian data.

The list, published Oct. 6, shows an astonishing level of losses for minimal battlefield gains. It says that 86,744 Russians were killed, 33,966 are missing, 158,529 were wounded and 2,311 were captured.

Russian media website Mediazona was skeptical about some of the numbers. Together with the BBC, it is conducting a project of identifying Russians killed in action since the war started, and so far has named more than 134,000. The difficulty in naming lost soldiers means the numbers will be lower than a broad estimate of casualties.

Mediazona thought that the more than 5,000 Russians killed on the front line along the Dnieper River was too high, but the Ukrainian military said some Russian forces from the that region were redeployed to eastern Ukraine, which has seen some of the bloodiest fighting so far this year.

International open intelligence group Frontelligence Insight told POLITICO the leaked document appears to be fairly accurate and corresponds to the group’s own estimates.

“The figures we had at that time closely align with those in the document, suggesting the published number falls within the expected range," it said.

Other online intelligence groups studying the war concur.

The statistics highlight the wasteful way the Kremlin is fighting the war and the impact of the drone warfare that Ukrainian forces are conducting against the Russians.

"Due to the lack of a normal system of evacuating the wounded from the battlefield, there are only 1.3 wounded soldiers per one dead. This signals a low level of survival of the wounded, who are poorly trained in tactical medicine and are usually abandoned without help after injury," says the report. It was prepared by the Ukrainian military intelligence hotline called “I want to live,” aimed at Russian troops willing to surrender, and accompanies the Russian data.

In other wars, the ratio of killed to wounded is closer to 1-to-3, underlining that Russia is not rescuing its soldiers.

Overall, Russian losses are estimated at over 1 million dead, wounded and missing since the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian General Staff has reported. It calculates that Russia loses about 1,000 soldiers a day.

In February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimated that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war and 390,000 were wounded.

Ukraine's numbers are lower because it has largely been on the defense, while attackers tend to suffer higher casualties. Ukraine has also made more of an effort to rescue and treat its wounded soldiers.

“Regarding losses ... Russian casualties are three times greater than ours,” Zelenskyy said during a meeting with journalists in August.

Russia inches forward

Those vast numbers of dead and wounded soldiers are the result of Russia continuing to press forward on multiple points of the front line. That strategy has succeeded in stretching Ukrainian forces thin.

“This year, the front line has increased by about 200 kilometers. In addition, we still have 2,400 kilometers where there are no combat operations, but we must also keep our troops there,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's top army commander, told journalists in Kyiv at the end of September.

“As for the general situation on the front, it remains difficult. The enemy continues to advance on the main directions, in particular Pokrovsk and Dobropillia directions. In other directions, the situation is characterized by low-intensity combat operations. In general, the situation is under our control,” Syrskyi said.

In a bid to boost numbers, recruitment ads have flooded Ukrainian streets, media and even sent as messages to people's mobile phones.

Russia is also facing its own troubles. Some regions pay recruits a sign-up bonus of as much as 2.5 million rubles (€26,000), but reports on the death rate and awful conditions are filtering through to Russia, making recruitment difficult.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, estimated that Russia is signing up an average of 31,600 soldiers a month, but is suffering an average of 35,193 casualties per month.

"Russian forces appear able and willing to sustain these casualty rates despite achieving limited tactical advances," ISW concluded.

Hunting for new recruits

Russia’s rising recruitment efforts in Africa and the Middle East also suggest it’s finding it harder to sign up new soldiers at home. Frontelligence Insight has obtained several thousand records with personal details of African and Middle Eastern citizens fighting for Russia in Ukraine, and has seen a significant uptick in activity.

“For example, one dataset of 1,045 sign-up records shows that between 2023 and 2024, 394 people from Africa and the Middle East signed contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense, while in just the first half of 2025, 651 contracts were recorded — nearly double the previous pace,” Frontelligence Insight said.

Russian efforts to recruit abroad have focused on economically disadvantaged countries. Recruits are often lured with promises of life-changing money, sometimes equivalent to nearly a decade of average local wages, as well as assurances (often fraudulent) of noncombat roles such as cooks, the group said.

Overall, Frontelligence Insight analytics see a major trend across the Russian army: rising sign-up bonuses, expanded recruitment from those held in pretrial detention and growing pressure on conscripts to sign contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry and be sent into Ukraine.

“All of this suggests that Russia is struggling to sustain recruitment via traditional monetary methods. If this trend continues, the Kremlin will face a choice between resorting to drastic measures such as broader mobilization or confronting the same manpower shortages that have been a problem for Ukraine’s military for the past two years,” the analysts said.

Once in Ukraine, those Russian troops face deadly conditions. Ukrainian drones hunt individual soldiers, artillery and rockets hit supply lines and using armored vehicles is now rare because the risks of being hit are so high. Soldiers used in "meat wave" assaults report staggering casualties.

"In June 2025, our team assessed that Russia was losing roughly 8,400–10,500 personnel per month as killed in action," said Frontelligence Insight.

Politico · Veronika Melkozerova · October 13, 2025

16. Russia is in ‘phase zero’ of WW3 as Putin’s tentacles spread across Europe

Hyperbole? Perhaps.

But I hate Phase Zero. We are in a perpetual Phase "Zero" of any future conflict.

Photos and video at the link.

Russia is in ‘phase zero’ of WW3 as Putin’s tentacles spread across Europe

Analysts say the writing is on the wall and Russia may strike sooner than expected

Juliana Cruz Lima, Foreign News Reporter
Published: 11:28, 13 Oct 2025Updated: 14:55, 13 Oct 2025
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36986458/putin-russia-phase-zero-war-nato-west/?utm

The Sun · Juliana Cruz Lima, Foreign News Reporter · October 13, 2025

VLADIMIR Putin's shadow war on the West is already under way as the Kremlin has entered what military experts call "Phase Zero".

It means Vlad is layering his ominous groundwork for a future conflict with Nato, as his tentacles spread across Europe through espionage, sabotage, drones, and unmarked troops.

Russia is in 'Phase Zero' of a shadow war with the West, experts have saidCredit: AP

Putin been resorting to espionage, sabotage, drones, and unmarked troops to set the stage for a potential conflict with NatoCredit: Shutterstock Editorial

The chilling warning comes from the respected Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which says Moscow is now in the "informational and psychological condition-setting phase" of a potential showdown with the Alliance.

Analysts say the writing is on the wall and Russia may strike sooner than expected.

According to Eastern European outlet Nexta, the Kremlin is already gaining significant experience in modern warfare.

It could also launch new aggression without waiting for its army to fully recover from the war in Ukraine — a sign Moscow may strike sooner than Western intelligence expects.

The Kremlin is adapting, building reserves, refining tactics and learning from the bloodbath in Ukraine.

Former Nato planner and Army intelligence officer Philip Ingram previously told The Sun: "It's almost certain the Russians are probing to see what a political reaction and a security reaction would be to these drone incursions.

"Putin wants to find any cracks that he can then exploit in the future, and then look at the military reaction, see whether Nato is actually in a position to defend itself."

The Iron Curtain never really fell. It’s shifting east and west at once — through drones, hackers, cyberwarriors and “little green men.”

Nato may not yet be at war, but “Phase Zero” has already begun.

‘Little green men’

In a flashback to Crimea 2014, Estonia, Nato's most vulnerable member - shut down a section of its border on October 10.

The closure came after armed men in unmarked uniforms appeared on the roadside near the “Saatse Boot,” a strange kilometre-long stretch where an Estonian road briefly cuts through Russian territory.

Estonian officials confirmed the seven unidentified Russian were "definitely not border guards" and warned they posed a "threat".

A border guard source said: “We saw extremely large units with intense activity.

Why Tomahawks for Ukraine is Putin’s biggest dilemma

“These are definitely not border guards. For us, it clearly created a threat.”

Another insider said: “At first, they moved along the roadside, but at some point they simply lined up across the road.

“That created a dangerous situation for us, and we had to make a decision immediately to close the highway passing through the Saatse Boot.”

Authorities acted to “prevent escalation”, fearing Putin could use the location to stage provocations against civilians.

Officials said: “Closing the Saatse Saapa crossing is necessary to ensure the safety of Estonian people and prevent possible incidents.”

The incident — the first sighting of Putin’s notorious “little green men” near a NATO frontier in this campaign, according to ISW — follows Russian airspace violations over Estonia on September 7 and 19.

Britain, which has 900 troops stationed just 113 miles from the flashpoint, scrambled two RAF planes for a 12-hour Nato patrol near Russian airspace.

Defence Minister John Healey declared at the time: “Not only does this provide valuable intelligence to boost the operational awareness of our Armed Forces, but sends a powerful message of Nato unity to Putin and our adversaries.”

NATO state Estonia dramatically closed a section of its border with Russia at Saatse SaapaCredit: East2West

It came after a sudden surge of unidentified 'armed groups' were spotted close to the frontierCredit: East2West

Putin's hybrid war

The border scare is only one front in Putin’s creeping offensive.

In the last two weeks, Europe has been hit by a wave of hybrid attacks — mysterious drone flights over military bases, fighter jet incursions into Nato skies, coordinated sabotage and crippling cyberstrikes.

Airports in Denmark, Poland, and Romania have faced repeated drone incursions, while Copenhagen airport was forced to shut down twice in one day.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned: “Over recent days, Denmark has been the victim of hybrid attacks,” adding that “there is one main country that poses a threat to Europe’s security, and it is Russia.”

Danish intelligence chief Finn Borch was blunt: “The risk of Russian sabotage in Denmark is high.”

Last week, a massive ransomware attack paralysed Heathrow, Brussels and Berlin airports, forcing airlines back to pen-and-paper check-ins.

Security expert Anthony Glees told The Sun: “Without doubt, the Russians are behind these attacks… Putin’s strategic planners have demonstrated they can attack our cyberspace with impunity and at will.”

Putin’s warplanes are also pushing boundaries.

A Russian MIG-31 fighter jet with a Kinzhal missileCredit: AP

Footage showed a drone flying close to the Copenhagen airport

Travellers wait at Brussels airport after a cyberattack disrupted operations over the weekend

Three Russian MiG-31 jets armed with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles violated Estonian airspace last week, loitering for nearly 12 minutes before being repelled by NATO F-35s.

Poland reported 19 separate airspace violations in two weeks and a low flyover near a critical oil and gas platform.

US President Donald Trump responded with a stark warning: Nato “shouldn’t hesitate” to shoot down Russian jets next time.

European diplomats have privately told Moscow that further incursions “will be met with full force.”

Russia’s ambassador to France, Alexey Meshkov, issued a chilling threat in return: “There are many NATO planes that violate Russian airspace… They are not shot down afterwards.”

He denied any Russian involvement in the drone swarms, claiming: “Russia doesn’t do that, play with anyone. It’s not really our thing.”

Ukraine strikes back

While Russia escalates its hybrid war, Ukraine is hitting back hard.

Backed by vital US intelligence, Kyiv’s long-range drone campaign has targeted Russia’s oil refineries, striking 16 of 38 facilities and triggering fuel shortages and soaring prices.

One US official told the Financial Times that Ukraine chooses the targets while Washington provides intelligence on vulnerabilities — a collaboration that has transformed Kyiv’s ability to evade Russian air defences.

And Washington may soon go further.

Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky held back-to-back calls on Sunday discussing possible US sales of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine — a move the Kremlin fears could tilt the battlefield.

Moscow is scrambling to dissuade Washington, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov warning the missile is a “serious weapon” even as he insisted it “will not change the battlefield situation.”

Putin is scrambling to contain the fallout, signing a decree to pump billions into subsidies to stabilise the domestic fuel market — a sign, analysts say, of how effective Ukraine’s strikes have been.

What are Little Green Men?

THE term “little green men” was coined during Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea to describe armed troops in unmarked uniforms who appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

They are usually heavily armed, disciplined and denying any link to Moscow.

The Kremlin initially claimed they were “local self-defence forces,” but they were later confirmed to be Russian special forces.

Their hallmark is plausible deniability: by stripping away insignia, Russia muddies responsibility and sows confusion, making it harder for Nato or the international community to respond.

Today, sightings of such shadowy figures on Nato's frontier — like those seen on Estonia’s border — are seen as a chilling warning sign that Putin may be preparing new acts of aggression under the cover of ambiguity.

The Sun · Juliana Cruz Lima, Foreign News Reporter · October 13, 2025

17. Human-Machine Planning: AI Lessons from the Marine Command and General Staff College

Excerpts:

Conclusion

At the Marine Command and Staff College, successful employment of the AI tool was never measured by whether students developed flawless plans. It was measured by whether they wrestled with a new tool, made mistakes, and began to see what generative AI might add to the art of planning. The most important discovery was not about the limits of the technology, but about the limits of the team. Simply handing a planning group access to a model produced flashes of insight, but those insights faded unless the group itself was reorganized to take advantage of them.

That reorganization requires more than enthusiasm. It requires writing prompt templates into the early stages of planning, training students not just to “try the tool” but to build skill and confidence with it, and carving out deliberate checkpoints where AI is required to test assumptions and sharpen ideas. These adjustments sound small, but together they signal a shift: The operational planning team is no longer a static structure but a malleable system, one that can be re-engineered for an age of human-machine collaboration.

The lesson is clear: AI on its own does not transform planning — it transforms teams who are willing to change how they work. Leaders who want more than experiments ought to be prepared to redesign their planning groups so that human judgment and machine-generated insight reinforce one another. Otherwise, generative AI will remain a curiosity at the margins of doctrine. But with deliberate restructuring, teams can take advantage of the insights AI offers.

Human-Machine Planning: AI Lessons from the Marine Command and General Staff College

Joseph O. Chapa and Sofia Cantu

October 14, 2025

warontherocks.com · October 14, 2025

Generative AI is here, but we don’t quite know what to do with it. Across both industry and the military, enthusiasm has outpaced results. Companies report rising rates of abandoned AI projects, while defense organizations often repeat the mantra of decision advantage without offering clear pathways for implementation. The problem is rarely technical. Instead, success depends on whether institutions are willing to adapt their structures and processes to make new tools work.

The U.S. military’s joint planning process is a prime example. The joint planning process is the U.S. military’s doctrinal approach to developing logical solutions to complex problems. Operational planning teams were designed before the widespread adoption of generative AI, and without deliberate adjustments they risk relegating powerful tools to the margins. Recent experiments at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, where students integrated a large language model into multiple planning exercises, shed light on how these tools can shape mission analysis, team collaboration, and subject-matter expertise.

To explain this, first we describe how students actually used generative AI in planning, and where the tools made the greatest impact. Second, we draw out lessons on when AI supports creative thinking and when it is sidelined by group dynamics or expertise. Finally, we offer practical recommendations for restructuring operational planning teams: redesigning workflows, drafting prompt templates, building training pipelines, and integrating checkpoints that ensure AI is more than an optional add-on. To get the most out of generative AI, the operational planning team itself should change.

In its 2024–2025 academic year, the Marine Command and Staff College conducted five planning exercises. Throughout four of those planning exercises, a small number of students were given access to a model-agnostic large language model tool. This tool gave students experience employing large language models in operational planning and it gave the school the ability to investigate how best to incorporate AI into the curriculum. In this paper, we (one faculty member and one graduate) provide the lessons we learned in response to both of these questions: How should students incorporate the tool into planning? How should the faculty incorporate AI into the planning curriculum?

Broadly, through self-reporting via surveys and through the vendor’s ability to observe usage rates, we determined that planning team members were far more likely to use the tool early in the joint planning process and especially during the mission analysis step. Additionally, even though we saw a decrease in usage rates later in the planning process, for those who did use the tool in later steps, they self-reported higher quality answers to their prompts. This suggests, perhaps, that a self-selecting subset of the group persisted in using the tool, and through that persistence, obtained better results.

BECOME A MEMBER

Lessons Learned

An operational planning team is a temporary group of officers and staff brought together to solve a specific planning problem. They are usually formed during the joint planning process and include members from different functional areas (operations, intelligence, logistics, communications, and others) so that all perspectives are represented. Their job is to analyze the mission, develop courses of action, compare options, and produce recommendations for the commander. In plain terms: they are ad hoc planning groups that pull expertise from across a staff to design and refine a plan for a particular operation. The fundamental insight under which each of the specific lessons nests is unsurprising, but important: If you want to maximize AI performance in your operational planning team, you’re going to need to restructure your operational planning team.

Lesson 1: Large Language Model Value Is Most Obvious During Divergent Thinking

In the field of creativity, convergent and divergent thinking represent two different means of developing ideas. This distinction is captured in the Marine Corps’ planning publications and the Joint Officer Handbook: Divergent thinking develops new insights and ideas, while convergent thinking aims at arranging those ideas into coherent categories.

The iterative process of employing divergent thinking to broaden the scope of possible solutions, then convergent thinking to derive a solution, takes place throughout the planning process. But divergent thinking is most clearly identifiable in the mission analysis step of the joint planning process before the operational planning team organizes those new ideas and insights into logical groups (especially in course of action development and analysis).

At Marine Command and Staff College, we found that students were more likely to use the large language model tool during the mission analysis phase — which corresponds to divergent thinking — than during the later steps of the joint planning process.

This finding is closely linked with the second. We will introduce the second lesson learned and then provide a recommendation that equally applies to Lessons 1 and 2.

Lesson 2: Large Language Model Value Is Obvious Outside a Member’s Subject Matter Expertise

Large language model failures are well-known and well-documented. Students at Marine Command and Staff were well aware that large language models have epistemic limits and that they hallucinate. One outcome of this latent knowledge is that students were more likely to use the tool when operating outside their area of expertise.

In one instance, an Army artillery officer told us that when, for the purposes of the exercise, he was placed in a billet outside his artillery area of expertise — say, as a sustainment or information planner — he was much more eager to use the tool. He expected that the tool would be able to provide him basic knowledge from that unfamiliar career field better than it would be able to provide him more advanced knowledge from within his own field.

In the planning exercises earlier in the academic year, students were assigned to small operational planning teams and, as a result, were often asked to fill a billet that did not align with their military specialty. In the largest and final planning scenario of the academic year, the planning staffs were much larger, allowing many students to be assigned within their area of professional expertise. In these cases, the perceived need to consult generative AI for technical clarification or external insights was low. When students did consult the tool, the outputs were often seen as redundant rather than complementary.

This observation conforms with insights from outside the military: large language models perform better at general knowledge tasks than they do at domain-specific knowledge tasks. An expert is less likely to gain novel insights at the expert level than a user is likely to get at the novice level.

This was not a failure of the tools but a reflection of how to frame and encourage AI adoption.

This phenomenon underscores a key insight: AI adoption requires leaders to define specific use cases where the tool offers clear advantages, whether by accelerating consensus-building, expanding the range of planning options, or revealing overlooked historical parallels.

In response to Lessons 1 and 2, we recommend designing workflows within the operational planning team that either require or encourage team members to compare their analysis to AI-generated recommendations during all phases of the planning process. Operational planning team leads should consider developing in advance draft prompt templates team members might use to evaluate their own work. Without structured prompts, even the most advanced tools will be underused.

Lesson 3: Enthusiasm Without Experience Is Not Enough

During the exercise, many participants were eager to explore what generative AI could offer. However, with limited prior experience with the specific tool, and with generative AI more generally, most struggled to create meaningful outputs. Enthusiasm quickly gave way to frustration when the pathway from prompt to useful product was unclear.

The relationship between limitations in AI talent and ineffective implementation is a well-known problem in industry. Initial curiosity should be matched by progressive training, mentorship, and clear examples of success. Otherwise, the momentum of early adoption stalls. Successful AI integration in industry often depends less on technical capacity than on sustained workforce development and trust-building. In other words, merely procuring the tool and providing access to team members is not enough to enable success.

In response to lesson 3, we recommend pairing AI tools with structured onboarding, scenario-based training, and peer coaching to build confidence and competence. Over time, these supports can transition from prescriptive checklists to more organic use.

In the absence of AI expertise within the organization, leaders should consider devoting resources to upskilling a small percentage of the team so those AI-capable team members can conduct the onboarding, scenario-based training, and peer coaching required for success.

Lesson 4: Small Group Dynamics Shape Behavior

One important finding was that small group collaboration often displaced the need to use generative AI tools. Students naturally turned to one another to resolve questions, debate options, and refine products. This tendency reinforces the principle that AI should be integrated into the fabric of collaborative work, not layered on top as an optional enhancement.

In innovation terms, this is an example of the structure innovation that often must accompany the product performance innovation — structure innovation refers to how you “how you organize and align your talent and assets.” In the absence of such integration of talent and tools, human relationships and established processes will dominate attempts to introduce new technological capabilities.

Develop planning templates and facilitation guides that require teams to incorporate AI outputs at designated checkpoints, such as initial mission analysis, course of action comparison, and risk assessment, ensuring the model becomes integrated with the team, rather than a mere curiosity.

Conclusion

At the Marine Command and Staff College, successful employment of the AI tool was never measured by whether students developed flawless plans. It was measured by whether they wrestled with a new tool, made mistakes, and began to see what generative AI might add to the art of planning. The most important discovery was not about the limits of the technology, but about the limits of the team. Simply handing a planning group access to a model produced flashes of insight, but those insights faded unless the group itself was reorganized to take advantage of them.

That reorganization requires more than enthusiasm. It requires writing prompt templates into the early stages of planning, training students not just to “try the tool” but to build skill and confidence with it, and carving out deliberate checkpoints where AI is required to test assumptions and sharpen ideas. These adjustments sound small, but together they signal a shift: The operational planning team is no longer a static structure but a malleable system, one that can be re-engineered for an age of human-machine collaboration.

The lesson is clear: AI on its own does not transform planning — it transforms teams who are willing to change how they work. Leaders who want more than experiments ought to be prepared to redesign their planning groups so that human judgment and machine-generated insight reinforce one another. Otherwise, generative AI will remain a curiosity at the margins of doctrine. But with deliberate restructuring, teams can take advantage of the insights AI offers.

BECOME A MEMBER

Joseph O. Chapa is a U.S. Air Force officer who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford. He’s published several times in War on the Rocks as well in other outlets such as the New York Times. His book, Is Remote Warfare Moral? was published with PublicAffairs (an imprint of Hachette) in 2022. He also publishes a weekly newsletter on philosophy and technology.

Sofia Cantu is a U.S. Army officer and air defender with experience in tactical air defense operations and staff planning. She holds a Master of military studies from the Marine Corps University, where her thesis analyzed AI-enabled decision support systems, workforce integration, and ethical considerations in Army modernization efforts.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of 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: Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Wetzel via U.S. Marines

warontherocks.com · October 14, 2025

18. ISWAP’s Strategic Resurgence in Nigeria Signals Emerging Trends in Insurgents’ Sophistication and Limited Statehood

Excerpt:

The challenges in curbing ISWAP, and other insurgents and terrorist networks in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin region are multiple and enormously complex. Regardless, the Nigerian military, in the wake of recent sporadic attacks on military bases in June 2025, commenced the reorganization of the theater. The reorganization effort includes, among others, postings of new commanders, the rotation of troops, sanctions on complacent commanders, and injection of new equipment. Furthermore, the military, in an effort to boast operational and tactical advantage, commenced the prioritization of offensive operations in the theater, initiation of counter drone training, intensified the hunt for all equipment carted away, and operationalized the joint defense doctrine, which is commendable. But, without the needed commitment and operationalization of the whole-of-society approach embedded in good governance and sustainable human security, ISWAP may continue its campaign of terror unabated. The country needs to reemphasize its strategic line of sight, recognizing that the national CTCOIN operation is not only for the security forces, but a war that all Nigerians must fight, led by a patriotic and uncompromising political will of the government.

ISWAP’s Strategic Resurgence in Nigeria Signals Emerging Trends in Insurgents’ Sophistication and Limited Statehood

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/14/iswaps-strategic-resurgence-in-nigeria-signals-emerging-trends-in-insurgents-sophistication-and-limited-statehood/

by Augustine Aboh

10.14.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

The security situation in northeastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin significantly deteriorated in the first half of 2025. This is primarily owed to the renewed strategic vigor of the dreadful Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a splinter of the infamous Boko Haram terrorist network, and a Salafi-jihadist militant group and administrative division of the Islamic State. For over a decade now, the northeastern region of Nigeria, and by extension, the Lake Chad Basin, has been the epicenter of transnational terrorism, resulting in thousands of fatalities, the destruction of millions of dollars’ worth of property and livelihood, and the displacement of millions of people now experiencing unimaginable human insecurities in the region.

Unlike Boko Haram, ISWAP’s emergence in 2015 signaled a frightening new dimension in the operations, scale, and sustainability of terrorism in the region, anchored on an ingenuine but sophisticated insurgent governance model. This governance model was built on two operational pillars of strategic violence and the provision of social services to local communities. That is, the group, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index report, “focuses on targeting state and military assets while attempting to win local support by providing limited services, such as distributing food and protecting the local population.”

ISWAP’s rise to strategic dominance in the terror landscape in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin Region has been occasioned by an intractable increase in both terror attacks and fatalities recorded. For instance, a Global Terrorism Index report has it that 2020 witnessed the first massive peak in the activity of the group with a recorded 482 deaths, while it recorded 288 deaths in 2023, and what seemed to have been a decline in 2024 with 40 recorded attacks resulting in 158 deaths. But this seeming reduction in incidents and fatalities didn’t last long. The resurgence of ISWAP in the first half of 2025 has led to over 300 attacks on military formations, critical national infrastructure, humanitarian facilities, and communities, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

However, the decade-long ambition for a viable counterterrorism and counterinsurgency (CTCOIN) strategy by the Nigerian state and the regional Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) has, at least, become seemingly impotent in combating the escalating surge of ISWAP insurgency since the beginning of 2025. These failures have become more pronounced, as evidenced by significant coordinated attacks on military bases and strategic infrastructure across the northeastern region, including victories in Buni Gari, Marte, Wulgo, Wajiroko, Sabon Gari, and 10 other locations. What, then, accounts for ISWAP’s recent strategic vigor?

I argue in this article that ISWAP’s operational robustness and confidence suggest two broad categories of factors that recalibrate the complex resurgence of the existential terror threat in the region. These include the evolving level of ISWAP tactical sophistication and adaptability, as well as the multiplex systemic dysfunction of the CTCOIN strategy and the prevailing geopolitical dilemmas in the Sahel region.

Figure 1: Attacks and deaths by ISWAP, 2017-2024

Source: IEP; Global Terrorism Index 2025

Evolving ISWAP Tactical Sophistication and Adaptability

1. ISWAP Governance Model

ISWAP’s recent tactical offensives on military bases and critical infrastructure across the region, most of which went unchallenged, recorded several equipment losses and deaths of persons, including soldiers. But to grasp the context of these operational successes, we must first understand ISWAP’s strategic philosophy and governance model, which constitutes the reason for its split from the disproportionately violent and ideologically ultra-charged Boko Haram network in 2015. ISWAP operates as a pseudo-state (a form of ISIS’s ambition of insurgent-to-state transformation) in its area of operation, with clearly defined strategic objectives: acquiring territories and ensuring sustainable control over them.

Against this backdrop, therefore, the group’s first tactical move was to gain control and social legitimacy from the local population, exploiting tactics that engineer rural radicalism. To begin with, ISWAP, led by its leader, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, launched a large-scale offensive on Boko Haram in the quest for strategic dominance. This led to the death of Boko Haram’s infamous leader, Abubakar Shekau. While this tactical operation seemed to have gained new strongholds and combatants for ISWAP, it was, on the other hand, misconstrued by the state to mean the intra-network decimation of national and regional security advantages. Furthermore, unlike Boko Haram, which engages in indiscriminate violence against the local population, ISWAP has deployed strategic violence, mostly on state targets, while negotiating “fragile” peace deals with local communities, filling governance gaps by providing food, health services, and implementing its own jihadist-based education system. The group also encourages farmers and fishermen to return to their businesses after paying protection taxes, called jizya, within its area of operation. Ironically, reports indicate that the group earns approximately $191 million annually from jizya and other illicit economies, which is 10 times higher than the Borno State Government’s annual internal revenue earnings for the 2024 fiscal year.

2. ISWAP “Terrology”: Sophistication and Adaptation in Technology-Enabled Terrorism

ISWAP has demonstrated its evolution in strategy, acquisitions, and skills, integrating terror into an era of rapid technological innovation. The group has become more sophisticated and highly adaptable to modern warfare capabilities. Like a pseudo-state, which it portrays itself as, the group has demonstrated an incredible ability to acquire and utilize emerging satellite technologies, weaponized drones, artificial intelligence-enabled financial platforms for fundraising, and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED). Without a doubt, the application of these technologies in its recent offensive attacks on military bases in the region reveals a frightening new dimension. This signals the possibilities of extreme lethality, adaptability, and resilience of the insurgent group. With these emerging technologies at its disposal, the group’s strategic capability in intelligence gathering, sabotage operations, and strategic offensive can be extensively catastrophic and rarely deterred.

Furthermore, ISWAP’s digital capability in strategic narrative warfare, radicalization, and online extremism, through digital platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, TikTok livestreams, and the use of electronic device hacking, presents a dangerous posture for the vast young population in the digital age. Sadly, this comes on the heels of a Nigerian State that is not just nascent in technology adaptation in military transformation, but which is significantly limited in the capacity to enforce algorithm governance of terrorist and extremist digital content.

3. Influx of Critical Foreign Fighters

Indeed, another factor that has profoundly strengthened ISWAP in its recent strategic offensive, reshaping its battlefield dynamics, has been the influx of foreign fighters. Reports indicate that there has been an influx of foreign jihadists, primarily from Arab countries, into the ranks of ISWAP, including combatants and expert tactical instructors. Malik Samuel, a researcher at Good Governance Africa-Nigeria, suggests that, undoubtedly, “the formal arrival and publicized participation of Arab foreign fighters may represent a deliberate attempt to internationalize the conflict, extending its reach beyond the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel.” The implication of this strategic shift by ISWAP signals a well-calibrated move in transforming itself into a central pillar of the Islamic State’s global strategy in Africa. Therefore, there is no doubt that the combination of these internal group dynamics has significantly contributed to the sharp rise in terrorism and insurgency incidents over the first half of 2025, with an overall recorded number of attacks at 341, of which ISWAP accounts for 300.

Figure 2: Monthly incidents of terrorism and insurgency in Nigeria, January – July 2025

Source: Partners for Peace – Peace Map 2025

Complex Systemic Dysfunction of CTCOIN and Geopolitical Dilemmas

1. Limited Statehood

We can argue that ISWAP’s internal strategic reorganization and sophistication have accounted for a substantial battlefield advantage over state forces in recent months, but this doesn’t present a complete picture of the insurgents’ strategic leverage. Like most insurgencies that fester on the wings of state fragility, ISWAP’s recent campaign of terror aimed at demoralizing and degrading state forces and critical national security infrastructure underscores the broader challenge of systemic dysfunction and limited statehood. Despite Nigeria’s efforts in the last 25 years of its return to democracy to consolidate its democratic principles and good governance, the country has remain profoundly lacking in the capacity to provide substantial and sustainable public service. It also lacks the capacity to ensure human rights and rule of law, address group grievances and demographic pressures, and protect the vast majority of its citizens or territory or gain extensive state legitimacy. This lack of state capacity, also known as limited statehood, is evident in the country’s ranking of 15th out of 178 countries, with a fragility score of 96.6 in the Fund for Peace’s 2024 Fragile States Index. Hence, ISWAP is exploiting the multiplex dynamics of the socio-political, economic, demographic, and institutional challenges bedeviling Nigeria for strategic leverage to advance the campaign of terror in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin.

2. Lack of CTCOIN Coordination and Rivalry

Although Nigeria’s 2016 National Counterterrorism Strategy (NACTEST) envisions a robust strategic insight into the nation’s efforts, built on multi-stakeholder and intelligence-led CTCOIN operations, it has recorded limited operational and tactical successes. These failures have exposed the state’s vulnerabilities to exploitation by insurgents in a profoundly significant manner. One major reason is attributed to poor coordination of the CTCOIN strategy. The blurry strategic line of sight among the nation’s CTCOIN forces and security agencies undermines the potency of interoperability needed for effective counterterrorism operations.

The decade-long experience of Nigeria’s CTCOIN operations has revealed significant missteps occasioned by inter-agency rivalries, inadequate intelligence sharing, a lack of equipment, and epileptic CTCOIN strategies. For instance, the failures of the “super camp” strategy have created an opportunity for ISWAP to establish strategic dominance in rural areas, thereby gaining necessary social legitimacy. Force offensive or clearance operations have also been highly epileptic and frailly episodic. The lack of capability to ensure sustained offensive operations has instead made the country’s CTCOIN campaign more defensive. Arguably, most offensive operations carried out by the security forces in recent times have signaled an act of political expediency rather than a well-calibrated, sustainable counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (CTCVE) agenda. Sadly, beyond the security agencies’ dilemma, the other core component of the NACTEST, which includes policing, civil agencies, and community engagement, has been underutilized either through sheer negligence or sabotage. The challenges persist due to stakeholders’ inability to fulfill their roles. Such challenges include border security, a multitude of out-of-school children in the northeast, high poverty levels, an inability to contain violent ideology, and the inability of the judicial system to prosecute captured ISWAP members. All these factors intersect to give ISWAP the strategic advantage they have enjoyed in recent months.

3. Complacency and Corruption in CTCOIN Operations

In recent times, we have also witnessed a high rate and propensity of complacency and corruption in CTCOIN operations. There have been incidents of shift in loyalty, criminal sabotage, and outright theft of equipment by belligerent soldiers. For instance, in May 2025, the Nigerian Military reported that troops of Operation Hadin Kai (OPHK)’s covert unit – Operation Snowball, achieved significant results in apprehending complacent and corrupt officers. Operation Snowball, which is an internal operational framework within the larger CTCOIN’s OPHK designed to ensure accountability in the frontline, was launched in August 2024 to target ammunition racketeering in the theatre. Consequently, over an extensive period in multiple operations across 11 states including Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Ebonyi, Lagos, Plateau, Kaduna amongst others, the operation was able to record the arrest of 18 serving soldiers and 15 police officers for allegedly selling arms to terrorist and other criminal elements.

This obnoxious twist only compounds the decade-long criminal economy that has continued to undermine the nation’s CTCOIN efforts. The lack of accountability among sector commanders has also led to the demoralization of the fighting force, resulting in desertion, as well as challenges in recruitment and retention. On the one hand, the numerous incidents of lack of capacity and criminal sabotage have led to a total loss of confidence and trust among local communities, who are often exploited and taken advantage of. This scenario has made ISWAP push a detrimental narrative as a credible and just alternative to a corrupt Nigerian State.

4. Limited State Capacity in Emerging Warfare Technologies

Furthermore, amid these systemic shortfalls lies the challenge of limited institutional capability to contain the acquisition and use of digital technologies in irregular warfare. Principally, while the state has improved its capacity in drone technology, much is yet to be done to achieve substantial results in utilizing counter-drone technologies or the deployment of artificial intelligence-enabled and machine learning platforms to ensure effective algorithm governance of terrorist and extremist digital content.

5. Geopolitical Dilemma in the Sahel

Lastly, ISWAP has exploited the geopolitical dilemma in the Sahel region occasioned by the Niger coup. The wave of coups in the Sahelian region, especially that of Niger in 2023, has created a significant void in the strategic intelligence gap and deleterious fragmentation of the Lake Chad Basin regional CTCOIN architecture—the MNJTF. Consequently, political and diplomatic tensions, loss of trust, and coordination in the region have emboldened ISWAP and exacerbated the spate of wanton terrorism witnessed in recent months in the region.

Concluding Remarks

The challenges in curbing ISWAP, and other insurgents and terrorist networks in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin region are multiple and enormously complex. Regardless, the Nigerian military, in the wake of recent sporadic attacks on military bases in June 2025, commenced the reorganization of the theater. The reorganization effort includes, among others, postings of new commanders, the rotation of troops, sanctions on complacent commanders, and injection of new equipment. Furthermore, the military, in an effort to boast operational and tactical advantage, commenced the prioritization of offensive operations in the theater, initiation of counter drone training, intensified the hunt for all equipment carted away, and operationalized the joint defense doctrine, which is commendable. But, without the needed commitment and operationalization of the whole-of-society approach embedded in good governance and sustainable human security, ISWAP may continue its campaign of terror unabated. The country needs to reemphasize its strategic line of sight, recognizing that the national CTCOIN operation is not only for the security forces, but a war that all Nigerians must fight, led by a patriotic and uncompromising political will of the government.

Tags: Boko Haram, COIN, Fragile States, insurgency, ISWAP, Limited Statehood, Nigeria, Sophistication, terrorism

About The Author

Augustine Aboh
Augustine B. Aboh is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Global Governance and Human Security at the University of Massachusetts Boston, currently conducting his doctoral research on insurgents’ strategic leverage in Nigeria. He holds a dual Master of Arts in Global Governance and Human Security from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Terrorism, International Crime and Global Security from Coventry University, United Kingdom, and a B.SC in Political Science from the University of Calabar, Nigeria. Before joining the UMass Boston doctoral program, he worked as a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Calabar - Nigeria, and has participated in the review and validation of some Nigeria National Security Policies and Bills, such as the Small Arms and Light Weapons control bill, and national cybersecurity policy and strategy 2021 amongst others. With research interest in counterterrorism, national and human security, defense and strategic studies, gender, organized crime etc., he is a published author in referred international peer-reviewed journals. He has contributed policy pieces to public opinion platforms, including The Conversation US and The Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics, UK. Augustine currently serves as a steering committee member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Atrocities Prevention Lab, providing strategic leadership in research and interventions on the use of spatial technologies in the global conflict early warning ecosystem.

19. Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader

I missed thi when it came out in August (though I am not a regular reader of Harvard Business Review).

Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader

by Angus Fletcher

https://hbr.org/2025/08/lessons-from-u-s-army-special-ops-on-becoming-a-leader

August 19, 2025

Elizabeth Fraser/DVIDS

Summary.

In today’s volatile and uncertain world, leadership skills have become more crucial than ever, yet many organizations struggle to train their managers to lead effectively. But experiential learning and failure-based training, as practiced by U.S. Army Special Operations, can transform managers into leaders who excel in high-pressure situations. By focusing on initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, and strategic vision, the Special Ops curriculum offers a unique and effective approach to leadership development that can be adapted to various industries and organizational contexts. This method has shown remarkable success in both military and business settings, making it a valuable resource for companies looking to cultivate strong leaders in times of uncertainty.

Leading through volatility is now the most in-demand skill at U.S. companies (topping AI fluency), according to dozens of senior human resources executives I polled recently at Fortune 100 companies from an array of industries, including healthcare, sales, finance, food service, manufacturing, tech, and biotech. The demand has been driven by recent spikes in global uncertainty, technological disruption, and economic instability.

But in this unpredictable new world, organizations are falling short at training people how to lead. The $50 billion executive education sector—as Warren Bennis first pointed out in his 1961 HBR article “A Revisionist Theory of Leadership”—has tended to conflate leadership with management. As a result, executive education is good at helping people improve management skills such as accounting, active listening, and data-driven decision making. Yet it hasn’t developed a comparably rich curriculum for cultivating initiative, strategic vision, and the other skills needed to lead in volatility.

There is one organization, however, that has spent more than seven decades creating exactly that curriculum. The U.S. Army Special Operations has taught tens of thousands of soldiers who excel at managerial tasks (such as maintaining standards and optimizing operations) to successfully take on leadership tasks (such as seizing opportunities and launching innovations). It has done so by creating training pipelines, centered at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, in North Carolina, that guide recruits through rigorously assessed experiential-learning exercises.

Those exercises have never been incorporated into business school or private education coursework—partly because they’re secret, but also because they’re extremely specialized, relying on tasks and environments particular to elite combat units. Over the past four years, however, my lab at Ohio State has worked with the Army to convert its Special Ops curriculum into a general method of leadership training that has been transferred into the Medical Corps, the Corps of Engineers, Logistics, Military Intelligence, and other Army sectors. And with the help of Army Special Operators, my lab has also translated the method into business settings, transitioning managers into leaders at companies of all sizes in a variety of industries.

In this article, I’ll describe how you can develop leadership like Special Ops. First, I’ll explain what distinguishes the Special Ops curriculum from traditional executive education: namely, experiential exercises that coach the brain to learn from failure. Next, I’ll share what Special Ops has identified as the four main reasons for leadership failure—and how to correct them. Finally, I’ll lay out a “Simulated Failure” exercise for scaling Special Ops training across your organization, equipping every manager to lead in volatility.

How Special Ops Trains Leadership

According to internal Army assessments, recruits who completed Special Ops training between 2005 and 2020 had a leadership success rate of more than 90%. That success was measured on multiple scales, including:

Integrity
Mental agility
Sound judgment
Innovation
Leads by example
Develops others
Gets results (defined as “developing and executing plans while providing direction, guidance, and clear priorities towards mission accomplishment”)

Why was the training so effective? Special Ops lacked a satisfactory theory—and seeking one, they contacted my lab in 2021. During the next three years we worked closely with the Army, guided by, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Gaines (Special Operations Command), Lieutenant Colonel Christopher J. Haviley (JFK Special Warfare Center and School), Sergeant Major Matt Jackson (Special Operations), and Dr. Brittany Loney (Special Operations).

Together, we determined that Army Special Ops curriculum differs from current business leadership training in two key ways: technique and focus.

Technique

Special Ops training goes beyond classroom reflections on case studies and conceptual frameworks. Instead, it provides controlled exercises in failure that give students the experience of learning from simulated failures based on stressful real-world leadership situations, such as:

The sudden loss of critical resources or infrastructure
Fresh information that fundamentally contradicts prior datapoints
Major transitions in senior personnel
The abrupt failure of long-established procedures or strategies
Aggressively innovative competitors
Compelling new ideas that may be transformational opportunities or dangerous boondoggles.

These situations are collectively defined by an Army coinage that is also common in the business world: VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).

Focus

Special Ops doesn’t equate leadership with influence. Influence is the capacity to organize and direct the behavior of others, making it the foundation of what business schools and consultancies refer to as transformational leadership (along with other styles of leadership).

Special Ops has found, however, that leadership requires mental skills that precede influence. “Influence is a management task,” one operator told me. “Before you can exert influence, or perform any other management task that organizes a team to do something, a leader needs to figure out what something the team should do.”

The fundamental characteristic of a leader is, in short, the ability to respond to new situations with new plans. New plans don’t have a formula, of course; that’s why they’re new. But when a leadership failure occurs, it’s typically for one of four reasons.

The Four Reasons for Leadership Failure—and How to Address Them

As Special Ops has learned from years of leading in VUCA, new plans are launched by initiative, sustained by emotional confidence, multiplied by imagination, and focused by strategic vision. If leadership breaks down, the root cause is thus usually a failure in one of these four processes.

Within business settings, failures of initiative and emotional confidence are more prevalent in managers who are new to leadership tasks; failures of imagination and strategic vision are more prevalent in managers on the cusp of being promoted to an executive level.

Here’s how to diagnose and fix these failures.

1. Failure of Initiative

Special Ops Name: The Fear Box
Diagnostic Indicators: Blank mind, freezing, submissiveness, helplessness
Root Cause: A leader has no plan for dealing with a situation

VUCA causes stress, which activates the brain’s threat response, aka fight-or-flight, triggering fear. Fear evolved because the brain has learned, from millions of years of grappling with volatility, that planning must accelerate to match the rate of change. If you can’t spin up your planning fast enough, fear therefore intercedes to provide its own plan, which is typically either to escape the situation or to copy what people around you are doing, solving the problem of no plan by borrowing a plan from others. This is why fear makes us vulnerable to outside influence.

Solution 1: Make a “hasty plan.” In combat, Special Operators exit fear by making a hasty plan, which is the quickest first step they can take toward a target. That first step gets the brain’s planning mechanisms moving, gathering impetus to meet the pace of events.

You can practice this in a business setting by using a quiet moment to write down a concrete near-term goal, like communicating better to your team, or reaching out to new clients. The next time you hit VUCA at work, ask yourself: Given this unexpected situation, what simple action can I still take to advance my goal? Take that action immediately. Once you have your brain engaged in active planning, shift focus onto the situation itself, engaging leadership skills such as imagination and strategic vision (discussed later in this article).

Solution 2: Choose your own advisor. Start by identifying a leader you respect and research how they handled a challenging leadership situation. For example, you could read their memoirs or interview them in person.

When you encounter challenges in your own life, ask yourself: What would that leader do? This process shifts your brain’s attention from its personal stress onto an outside possibility, encouraging mental motion.

In VUCA, if you can’t imagine what your chosen leader would do, call on a nearby colleague to give you advice. Even though the advice is theirs, the choice of whom to call is yours, so this technique is a quick way for you to get your planning motor going. Remember: You don’t have to take the person’s advice—your purpose in soliciting it is to kick your own planning into drive, leaving fear behind. So, if the advice prompts you to think of a different plan, go in your own direction.

Key Takeaway: Initiative gets you out of the Fear Box by providing what fear wants—a plan.

2. Failure of Emotional Confidence

Special Ops Name: Flashback Quit
Diagnostic Indicators: Hesitation, self-doubt, unproductive anxiety, shame
Root Cause: A leader has a plan—but lacks confidence to try it

Hesitation is a learned behavior. It’s triggered by memories of failure (or perceived failure) that suffuse the brain with shame. Shame makes you think: I am useless. And when past shame surfaces in the present, it makes you think: Here we go again. I am going to mess this up, just like I did before.

Shame isn’t inherently bad; it evolved to prompt us to learn from our missteps. But shame is so psychologically powerful that it can be counterproductive in VUCA, especially for young leaders.

Solution 1: Emotion reset. To brace your confidence against unexpected shocks, recall an occasion when you responded effectively to an instance of volatility or uncertainty. Prime the memory in your brain by writing down everything you remember about the event, vividly visualizing each detail, including every step of your response plan. This process outfits your brain with a positive flashback to counter negative flashbacks you might experience during a leadership challenge.

When you encounter VUCA, before you do anything else, take a moment to recall your positive memory, activating confidence in your brain. This technique is used by Special Operators during combat. In trials run by my lab on corporate managers, it produced substantially less hesitation during leadership challenges.

Solution 2: Eat your demons. Review your past for moments of failure that prompt strong feelings of shame. Assign each moment to one of two buckets:

Room for personal improvement. Shame goes in this bucket if you reflect on the moment and think, I could have done better. Make a plan for what you should have done instead and commit to executing it next time.
Other people judged wrong. Shame goes in this bucket if you realize that other people wrongly criticized you for an appropriate action. Fffirm yourself for doing what was right, reminding yourself that leaders walk independent from the crowd.

By proactively reviewing these moments, you’ll reduce the likelihood that they’ll resurface during your next leadership challenge. You’ll also gain strength from shame, turning it from hindrance into sustenance.

Key Takeaway: The brain believes its memories of success because it has lived them, so by strengthening those memories in advance, you equip yourself with the emotional confidence to overcome Flashback Quit.

3. Failure of Imagination

Special Ops Name: Captain Rightman
Diagnostic Indicators: Anger, irritation, impatience, evading responsibility
Root Cause: A leader has a plan—but only one plan

Anger is fear’s partner. In the brain’s threat response, it is the fight. Fight isn’t bad; leaders benefit from hanging tough in VUCA. Anger, however, is almost always a sign of a leadership failure.

When the brain has only one plan, anger thinks, I need to push this plan forward with everything I’ve got, because my only other option is fear. Unless you happen to be in a life-and-death emergency with zero seconds to spare, anger is the wrong approach.

Your other option is to take a moment to create a second plan. A second plan gives you operational flexibility, ensuring that if your first plan breaks, you can maintain initiative. This calms your brain, allowing you to act assertively without shouting, bullying, or burning out your team.

Solution 1: Develop the planner, not the plan. The purpose of planning isn’t to develop a plan. It’s to develop the planner. No plan, regardless how brilliant or evidence-based, survives contact with reality—but a good planner can always exploit the future’s unexpected twists.

Become that planner by proactively planning and replanning: Create detailed plans for potential futures, make contingency plans for currently optimal operations, and devise counterfactual plans for past initiatives that could have worked better.

If you ever grow emotionally attached to a plan, remember that whenever new crises or opportunities appear, good leaders throw out the plans they’ve made, knowing that the real purpose of making those plans was prepare the brain to create better plans now.

Solution 2: Go beyond probabilities into possibilities. Probabilities are events that can be statistically quantified because they’ve occurred multiple times before. Possibilities are events that could happen but never have. When the brain focuses on probabilities, it starts to believe that there’s one best plan; when the brain focuses on possibilities, it perceives that there can be many viable paths to success.

To shift yourself into thinking in possibilities, imagine the mainstreaming of a near-future technology—stem-cell therapies that can reverse aging, perhaps, or highways that can wirelessly charge electric vehicles while driving. This disrupts your priors, encouraging you to exit probability.

Then ask yourself: What initiatives could my organization launch to take advantage of this tech revolution? After you’ve used sci fi to open up your mind to fresh possibilities, you’ll be primed to mull more immediate questions: What never-before events could occur at work today? Tomorrow? Next week?

Key Takeaway: By increasing possible plans, imagination eliminates the inflexibility that produces Captain Rightman’s anger, frustration, and intolerance.

4. Failure of Strategic Vision

Special Ops Name: The Headless General
Diagnostic Indicators: Disorganization, contradictory directives, excessive attention to minor details, self-pity.
Root Cause: A leader has multiple plans—yet lacks a global objective.

Disorganization occurs when you’re better at tactics than at strategy—in other words, when you’re a creative problem-solver but haven’t developed the ability to prioritize a single long-term goal.

Lacking that goal, your attention wanders in response to short-term challenges and opportunities. You issue contradictory directives. You troubleshoot reactively rather than leading with drive. You become so focused on what’s happening now that you start believing that you’re necessary for everything, falling into megalomania, micromanagement, and self-pity.

Solution 1: Target victory. List all the successes you want your organization to achieve over the next five years. Then identify a single ambitious goal that, if you hit it, will enable you to achieve most (even all) of those successes. That goal is your definition of victory.

Victory is bold and specific—a precise target that is hard but possible to attain. When leaders fail to define victory, it’s usually because their target is either bold but not specific (Double profits in four years) or specific but not bold (Update product X).

A defined victory, by contrast, is bold and specific: Develop the first tumor-agnostic cancer drug (Merck); build a personal computer that actually feels personal (Apple); put a man on the moon (NASA). Keep victory top of mind whenever you encounter VUCA, and you can fully engage tactical creativity without losing strategic direction.

Solution 2: Distinguish familiar stress from new stress. When projects hitch or fall behind schedule, stress increases, prompting leaders to leap into action. But this leap can be an overreaction that introduces confusion into operations, adding to the problem instead of alleviating it.

To avoid overreaction, analyze your stress, determining whether it’s familiar or new. Familiar stress is caused by problems that have occurred before; new stress by problems that haven’t. New stress can only be resolved by new plans, which are your responsibility as a leader; familiar stress can be resolved by employing the solution that worked last time, which is what managers are there for. So only get involved when stress is new. If the stress is familiar, ignore the problem and trust your managers to handle it, keeping your focus on your organization’s long-term strategy.

Key Takeaway: By providing a bold but specific target that focuses planning during VUCA, strategic vision preempts the chaotic meddling of the Headless General.

Develop a Leadership Readiness Program

Once you know the four reasons for leadership failure, you can learn more effectively from experience, you can review your past leadership missteps to remedy their root causes, and you can adapt faster when VUCA interrupts existing plans.

And your own personal development is just the beginning. Like Special Ops, you can scale the training, providing it to managers across your organization. That’s because you don’t need to sit around waiting for VUCA to strike. You can simulate failure in a learning environment, averting real-life calamities and proactively creating leaders, by developing what Special Ops calls a leadership readiness program. Here’s how:

Recruit cadre.

Cadre are members of your organization who have two years or more of experience in senior leadership roles (the equivalent of VP level or above), have been involved in at least one successful major initiative, and have weathered at least one serious crisis. It’s the cadre’s job to plan and execute the training, and to counsel and assess the students.

They can be retired—in fact, recently retired leaders often make the best cadre. You must have at least two cadre in any training, so that students can be provided with at least two perspectives. A good ratio of cadre to students is 1:5.

Create a catalogue of training scenarios.

Convene cadre to write down every serious leadership crisis or opportunity that they have experienced or witnessed. This might involve any number of situations: a failed initiative; a major merger; a disruptive competitor; new regulations; big market shifts; systemic supply chain problems; a promising new product or service; the loss of a major client; the departure of a key leader; conflict between essential personnel; a budgetary surplus; a fatal accident; discovery of internal fraud; a longshot research possibility; a PR disaster.

After your cadre have compiled a list of past scenarios, have them imagine a list of potential near-future scenarios your organization might realistically face. Each scenario (past and near-future) should be short enough to be presented on a single 3×5 notecard or PowerPoint slide. It doesn’t need to contain all the information about the situation. In fact, it’s better if it contains very little information, since leadership situations are murky and change fast. Specific details can be provided (or improvised) by cadre during training.

The goal is not to hand students a logically designed puzzle with an elegant optimum solution. It is to elicit psychological stress, giving students the opportunity to generate new plans under pressure. This means that there should never be one right answer to a scenario. Instead, every scenario should provide students with the experience of doing what leaders do: Inventing and testing possible plans in ongoing uncertainty and volatility.

Examples of effective training scenarios include:

You’ve just lost your biggest client to your biggest competitor, reducing annual revenue by 10%. What’s your next move?
Your division is projected to double its profits over the next three years. What do you do with the additional capital?
Due to a recent acquisition, 10% of your senior managers now have fewer than three direct reports. What do you do about your organizational structure?
Legacy sales are holding steady but no one is buying your new product line. What’s your strategy?

You should have 20 of these kinds of scenarios to run the program, but more is always better, because a large catalogue of varied scenarios increases the experience of VUCA. Each time the program is repeated, take the opportunity to expand and refresh the catalogue with new scenarios.

Enroll students.

Invite managers across your organization to enroll as students in a leadership-readiness program. The invitation should be inclusive, because leaders can come from all ranks and any sector. Enrollment must be voluntary, because the first step in becoming a leader is to choose to take the step. If you notice that parts of your organization are underrepresented or that a manager with leadership potential is not volunteering, ask a cadre member to encourage participation.

Run a Simulated Failure Exercise

Now that you’ve got students, cadre, and a catalogue of training exercises, you’re ready to simulate failure.

In the center of a midsize room, preferably without windows, place a table. At the table, seat two to five cadre. (More cadre are better, if you have them.) Behind the cadre, convene a seated audience. The audience does not need to be large but it should be emotionally significant to the students. It might contain members of their peer group, respected senior members of the organization, previous graduates of the leadership-readiness program, or even personal friends and family. The audience’s main purpose is to increase the psychological pressure on the student. (Its minor purpose is to provide an outside perspective on the training, so that cadre can get feedback on their own performance.) If possible, add ambient distractors, such as screens tuned to different newsfeeds.

Invite a student to enter the room. Have them face the cadre. Inform the student that they can choose to end the exercise at any time, without stigma. Tell them that leaders all experience failure, which is honored here as an opportunity to develop strength and wisdom.

Present the student with a training scenario. To provide verisimilitude and emotional grip, the scenario should be tailored on the spot by cadre to the student’s specific experience and organizational role. For example, cadre could tailor the scenario: “You have just lost [specific member of your team] to [specific competitor].” Or: “You have just discovered that [specific product] has been downloaded twice as many times as projected, doubling revenue.”

Once the student has been presented with the scenario, invite them to propose a plan. Then have the cadre challenge it. Cadre should not challenge the plan by presenting hypothetical objections. Instead, cadre should directly inform the student: Your plan has resulted in [this negative outcome]. For example, if a student proposes using a budget surplus to hire more salesforce, cadre could inform the student that the new hires did not increase sales enough to cover the salary expenditure. Cadre should be specific about the negative outcome. For example, if the student says, “I would then eliminate the new sales positions,” cadre could say, “That created a crisis of confidence in the remaining sales team, and your top two salespeople [X and Y] resigned.”

The purpose of the cadre’s challenges is to diagnose how the student responds to pressurized open-ended situations. Effective leadership is indicated by the ability to respond promptly to all challenges with new and potentially viable plans, demonstrating that the student possesses the four leadership skills discussed above: initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, and strategic vision. If a student displays effective leadership during the first scenario, provide them with another scenario. If the student succeeds again, provide them with a third.

If cadre challenge the student with multiple specific negative outcomes, and if the three scenarios are materially distinct, the student will usually experience a failure. However, in the event that the student succeeds at three scenarios, congratulate them on displaying effective leadership. When this occurs, the student should be provided a leadership opportunity within your organization, whether in an existing role or on a startup project.

If, instead, the student displays helplessness, hesitation, irritation, disorganization, or one of the other diagnostic indicators of leadership failure (see “The Four Reasons” above), stop the exercise immediately. Congratulate the student on pushing themselves to failure. Then ask the student to go to another room and perform a “hot wash” in which they write down everything they can remember about the exercise, including the scenario, the cadre’s challenges, and their own responses.

The following day, have the student meet with cadre to review the hot wash. The review’s purpose is to pinpoint the root cause of the leadership failure, helping the student identify which leadership skill—initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, or strategic vision—they should develop next.

To protect student wellbeing, this exercise contains multiple safeguards: the voluntary nature of participation, the emphasis on failure as a good, the multiple cadre to check each other, the audience there to monitor the cadre. But as an additional measure, an experienced HR professional can be on hand to reject unreasonable cadre challenges and to interrupt the exercise promptly if students display helplessness or shame.

To ensure that training is student-centered, cadre should remember: although the exercise’s immediate purpose is to challenge students, its ultimate purpose is to create leaders. When a student produces a plan that contradicts what cadre would have done, cadre should resist the urge to criticize or correct the student. Instead, cadre should disinterestedly consider whether the plan is feasible. If it is, cadre should congratulate the student for doing something smart that they wouldn’t have done. This technique fosters leaders, because leadership is, at root, acting intelligently—and independently.

Next Steps

Leadership skills are strengthened through practice. That practice can take place during simulated failure exercises. (Two exercises a year is an effective tempo for most organizations.) But it can also be organic to the workday. To engage in workday practice, managers should monitor themselves for anger, shame, and the other diagnostic indicators of leadership failure—then employ a recommended Special Ops solution (like “Make a Hasty Plan” or “Target Victory”).

If managers struggle with stress during training, here’s a Special Ops tip: Have gratitude for crisis, chaos, broken plans, nasty surprises, missed objectives, unreasonable expectations, team conflict, friendly fire, and the other progeny of volatility. They’re providing an opportunity to lead, handing you the chance to create a better future. This mental shift inhibits rumination, exasperation, resentment, and other counterproductive psychological responses to stress.

The stress-enriched training of Special Ops might seem unsuitable for executive education. But real-life business is saturated with powerful stressors, and there’s no more effective way to prepare the brain than through simulated failures punctuated with supportive coaching. In a world where VUCA is inevitable, better to learn its psychological pressures via structured exercises than to be suddenly forced to sink or swim on the job.

Volatility and uncertainty can strike at any moment without warning. To prepare themselves for that moment, aspiring leaders must develop the initiative, emotional confidence, imagination, and strategic vision to create new plans. These leadership skills are all best cultivated via experiential training.

Experiential training is irregular, nonlinear, and unpredictable, which can make it feel chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. But that’s the point. Experiential training prepares the brain for VUCA by itself being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—in controlled doses that enable intentional skill building.

Because experiential training cannot be smoothly automated by instructors or mastered in advance by students, it requires more patience, openness, and faith than managerial coursework. But it works—at scale. The training described in this article has been added to the core curriculum of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, which annually trains more than 1000 mid-career officers. According to Richard McConnell, a professor of tactics charged with evaluating the training, two hours of training yielded on average a 10% improvement in leadership skills. Equivalent or higher ROIs have been reported by Fortune 500 companies that have deployed the training on populations of 100 or more managers. Many of these companies now use the training annual leadership programs for senior managers, and one Fortune 50 has made it available to its entire mid-level management team.

Leadership and management are complementary skills: Once you create the future, you want to guide others to join you. That’s a job that a century’s worth of management theory can help you with. In VUCA, however, that job comes second. To adapt a Special Ops adage: Managers can exploit the peace, but only if leaders have first won the war.

Angus Fletcher is a professor and the director of the Fisher College of Business Leadership Initiative at Ohio State University. His newest book is Primal Intelligence (2025).

20. Foreign Aid Is Mostly Gone. It’s Being Replaced With Something Better.

Excerpts:

A new poll by the Rockefeller Foundation of more than 36,000 people in 34 countries gives reason to think that’s possible. Though only slight majorities trust long-running international institutions such as the U.N., support for their sort of work — like international collaboration in feeding the hungry and preventing disease — is above 90 percent. The reason? Support for global cooperation is deeply linked not to a system but to results — up to 75 percent would support initiatives if they proved to be effective.

As needs increase around the world, that poll shows that Americans and many others still want to advance human dignity. We just want to do it well. These leaders are showing us how, and the world should help them.

Foreign Aid Is Mostly Gone. It’s Being Replaced With Something Better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/opinion/aid-cuts-new-model.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tU8.qxIc.7d3w1xXOr-I9&smid=url-share

NY Times · Rajiv J. Shah · October 13, 2025

Guest Essay

Developing countries have started taking greater responsibility for their own welfare, leveraging private investment to create economic opportunity.

Oct. 13, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...María Medem

Listen to this article · 7:39 min TLearn more

Dr. Shah is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the author of “Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens.”

Over the past year, wealthy countries around the world have undermined a decades-old consensus that human dignity is universal and that nations have a responsibility to further it. The shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development, which I led for five years, is just one piece of a broader, tragic retreat from a system of foreign aid that helped cure the sick, feed the hungry and empower the poor.

Countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany, have slashed billions in assistance. Research published by The Lancet estimates that more than 14 million people could die as a result of American aid cuts alone — 4.5 million of them children younger than 5. This is a moral failure that will make the whole world less safe, less secure and less prosperous.

Amid the tragedy, it is tempting to defend what we know. Fortunately, leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere are building something new. They are taking ownership of their countries’ own development, figuring out ways to leverage new technology and, most important, encouraging private investment — long the single biggest challenge for development projects. Their initiatives are modeling a way to lift up the vulnerable that will be more sustainable in the 21st century.

Eighty or so years ago, powerful nations came together around the concept of universal dignity, codifying that idea into institutions like the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Bank. This system helped usher in an era of extraordinary progress: transforming AIDS into a manageable condition, saving millions of children from dying of preventable causes and helping to cut hunger in low-income countries by more than 60 percent from 1970 to 2015. It also benefited donor countries by fighting diseases like Ebola abroad to protect lives at home and turning poorer countries into trade partners that created jobs.

Yet while the system did enormous good, it also faltered as the world changed. That model was funded and thus directed by wealthy countries and centralized in large institutions. Over time, donor support and public support for international institutions proved inadequate, yet aid projects remained dependent on them. The work also increased as overlapping yet siloed initiatives proliferated in large part because the best way to find funding was rallying excitement about each new idea.

In recent years, the African country of Malawi received about 55 percent of its health funding from an estimated 166 external sources. To keep the money flowing in, Malawi had to write up at least 50 different “strategic plans” to secure financing.

Recipient governments and domestic resources were also often bypassed by donor nations and NGOs. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change created new challenges for which the system was unprepared. The data make that clear: Ten years after the United Nations member states committed to comprehensive goals on human well-being, including ending extreme poverty and malnutrition, only about 18 percent of the targets are on track.

As that system was defunded over the past year, a new way to advance human dignity has been revealed in initiatives across the world. It is increasingly led by developing countries, not donors. It prioritizes underlying issues, like electricity access, that improve economic growth and life in many ways rather than just one. It leverages new technology: A.I. chatbots that teach farmers new methods, battery storage systems to enable use of clean energy, and drug therapies that reduce the number of dosages as they increase the length of coverage. This model uses philanthropic capital to get started, entices private investments and commits countries themselves to long-term investment.

In January, I joined more than two dozen African heads of state who came together in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to commit to connecting 300 million people on the continent to electricity by 2030. This effort exemplifies the new model: It’s driven by African countries’ own commitments to reform and to provide the electricity essential to modern jobs, health, education and nutrition. This is possible because of new technologies, such as localized grids that create electricity and internet connectivity for remote communities. Above all, this effort is focused on making commercial investment less risky, thereby mobilizing private-sector capital to drive sustainability.

Last month, about 80 nations spanning sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Western Europe and Latin America met in Brazil to advance one of the most effective ways to save kids from hunger: school meals. About 466 million children benefit from school meal programs. These meals also improve students’ learning and attendance (particularly girls) while creating jobs for local cooks and food suppliers and generating predictable demand for local farmers.

One dollar invested in school meals can yield up to $35 in economic returns. In recognition of this remarkable potential, global funding for school meals doubled from 2020 to 2024 — with 99 percent coming from national budgets. When a country provides its own safety net, it creates a bulwark against droughts, climate stress and other shocks that otherwise cause famine.

And last month, as world leaders gathered in New York at the United Nations, African heads of state, including Ghana’s president, John Mahama, met to commit to redesigning their health systems to be less dependent on external aid. By necessity, Mr. Mahama and other leaders are committing to paying for more of it themselves and attracting more private investment. Combine this political will with new technology — integrated data systems, A.I. support to help community health workers identify patterns and treatments, and long-lasting new drugs, such as the H.I.V. treatment lenacapavir — and the possibilities are significant.

Of course, this model faces challenges. Leaders have to want to do the right thing and stay on guard against corruption and inefficiency. Amid rash budget cuts, the field of global development has lost valuable expertise. And these nations are trying to take on more responsibility even as many face crippling debt crises. To help these countries make this modern model succeed, donors should forgive debt and target available — and even expanded — aid accordingly.

A new poll by the Rockefeller Foundation of more than 36,000 people in 34 countries gives reason to think that’s possible. Though only slight majorities trust long-running international institutions such as the U.N., support for their sort of work — like international collaboration in feeding the hungry and preventing disease — is above 90 percent. The reason? Support for global cooperation is deeply linked not to a system but to results — up to 75 percent would support initiatives if they proved to be effective.

As needs increase around the world, that poll shows that Americans and many others still want to advance human dignity. We just want to do it well. These leaders are showing us how, and the world should help them.

Rajiv J. Shah is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the author of “Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens.”

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NY Times · Rajiv J. Shah · October 13, 2025

21. Failure Bias in Air Advisory Missions

Conclusion:

Failure bias has prevented the U.S. Air Force from identifying the factors that distinguish successful advisory missions from unsuccessful ones. It has also disregarded the lethality of partner-led, U.S.-supported successes that advanced American national interests in strategically important regions. At the same time, direct conventional interventions have escaped scrutiny and accountability by scapegoating marginalized advising efforts. Far from mere generosity, air advisory missions have enhanced partners’ effectiveness and lethality while protecting the lives of American servicemembers. It is time to recognize these quiet successes and invest in a prevention strategy that works.

Failure Bias in Air Advisory Missions

irregularwarfare.org · Jordan · October 14, 2025

The Air Force recently announced plans to shutter its mobility support advisory squadrons and divest other international training capabilities, following Air Force Special Operations Command’s deactivation of its advisory squadrons in 2022. Officials say they are redirecting resources from “nonlethal programs” toward new weapons systems. Yet this decision reflects a limited understanding of how lethal air advisory missions have been and can be to America’s enemies—and how investment in such capabilities could advance the administration’s goal of rebalancing defense burden-sharing among America’s allies and partners. It also continues a long-standing pattern of failure bias by Air Force decision-makers: judging advisory operations by a few high-profile defeats while ignoring many quiet successes. Divesting air advisory capabilities thus overlooks their historical effectiveness and potential to advance U.S. strategic objectives, while repeating the mistake of failure bias that has shaped Air Force decision-making since Vietnam.

Vietnam and the Turn Against Advising

Increased skepticism toward air advisory missions after America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan echoes a similar reaction following Vietnam. Amid mounting public war weariness, Congress passed the 1971 Foreign Assistance Act, declaring: “Our Vietnam experience teaches that the first fatal step toward direct involvement comes with the furnishing of United States advisers to the military and related forces of another country.” After the fall of Saigon in 1975, critics questioned why South Vietnam’s air force—built with U.S. equipment and training into the fourth largest in the world—failed to stop the communist offensive. In response, the Air Force closed nearly 90 percent of its special operations squadrons, retaining only a few gunships, mobility aircraft, and helicopters, and eliminating advisors altogether.

Quiet Successes: Advisory Wins in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand

The conclusion that advisory missions were ineffective and inevitably led to direct U.S. involvement ignored substantial evidence to the contrary. Across Southeast Asia, several quiet successes stood in sharp contrast to the dramatic failure of the Second Indochina War. The Philippine Air Force helped Manila defeat the communist Huk rebels in the early 1950s. In 1958, the Nationalist Chinese air force prevailed over its Communist adversary in the Taiwan Strait. The Royal Thai Air Force helped contain a virulent insurgency from 1965 to 1984. In each case, American equipment and air advisors played a decisive role in securing partner military victories, ensuring the survival of allied governments, and advancing U.S. strategic objectives by stemming the tide of communist expansion in the Indo-Pacific.

The successes in Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines went largely unnoticed in Washington and among the American public because they required no large-scale U.S. intervention. As Sun Tzu observed, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” From America’s perspective, this was exactly what happened: allied forces did the fighting while the United States remained on the sidelines, safeguarding American lives and reducing the risk that direct U.S. involvement would escalate local conflicts into regional or even global wars.

The temptation to intervene directly in all three cases weighed heavily on American leaders. In 1950, a joint State and Defense Department analysis recommended sending a reinforced division of U.S. combat troops to the Philippines. Maj Gen Leland Hobbs, chief of the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group (JUSMAG), counseled against it, saying:

“Such a force is not required for the defense of U.S. bases, and that U.S. troops should not be used to fight Filipinos. The Huks must be defeated by Filipino troops, not by U.S. troops in this sovereign country.”

During the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, Chief of Naval Operations ADM Arleigh Burke advised President Eisenhower that keeping Taiwan out of Communist hands would require nuclear strikes on Chinese airfields. Eisenhower rejected this advice, relying instead on the Nationalists to hold the line with American logistical, training, and advisory support—avoiding a potentially catastrophic escalation. In Thailand, Ambassador Graham Martin similarly argued against deploying U.S. combat forces. Citing the military’s mishandling of South Vietnam, he limited America’s role to training, advising, and equipping Thai forces.

From Dependence to Durability: Contrasting Advisory Outcomes Abroad

It is difficult to quantify a negative, to estimate the cost of a war never fought. This mirrors the “prevention versus treatment” bias in healthcare. People recognize that prevention is more effective and cost-efficient, yet they often value the treatment of acute problems more. In other words, Americans often prefer outcomes that are easily measured, even if they are worse, over those they intuitively know are effective but harder to quantify.

While the Taiwan, Thailand, and Philippine examples demonstrate successful air advisory missions, it is problematic to even characterize the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan as primarily advisory operations. Few Americans deployed to Vietnam in the late 1960s would have called it anything other than an American war, and most deployed to Afghanistan would not have seen it as primarily a local effort—especially in terms of airpower. Advisory efforts during these two large U.S. interventions did not aim to build self-sufficient partner air forces. Instead, they produced American auxiliaries entirely dependent on U.S. equipment, logistics, tactics, and funding. The Air Force postponed planning for the South Vietnamese air force’s self-sufficiency until 1973. By then, U.S. forces had withdrawn, and Congress began cutting aid programs. With funding dwindling, the South Vietnamese could not maintain their aircraft and ran out of munitions. Much of the world’s fourth-largest air force sat impotent on the ground as North Vietnamese forces surged across the border.

Similarly, the United States built an Afghan Air Force in its own image, equipping it with advanced aircraft and precision weapons and training the Afghan Army to rely on overwhelming airpower. However, U.S. advisors never expected it to become self-sufficient. “CLS (contract logistics support) for life” became a mantra early on, and contractors were hired to maintain aircraft. Like South Vietnam, the Afghan Air Force never became self-sufficient in its local context, and by 2014, Congress began limiting sustainment funding. Amid Taliban gains following the American withdrawal, the Afghan Air Force ran out of precision munitions, contractors withdrew, and the Afghans could not repair or arm the remaining aircraft. An army dependent on precision close air support rapidly collapsed when that support disappeared.

By contrast, the United States built the air forces of Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines with long-term self-sufficiency as an explicit goal. Advisors devoted as much—or more—effort to developing support functions as to building tactical capabilities. At every step, they considered what the allied military, society, and economy could sustain. As a result, all three air forces became durable institutions that continue to operate today.

In fact, the Philippine Air Force proved to be one of the quiet victories of the Global War on Terrorism. When the Abu Sayyaf Group pledged allegiance to al Qaeda and increased attacks on U.S. and Philippine interests, it threatened to escalate a longstanding low-level insurgency in the southern Philippines into an international jihad. Yet Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines barely registered with the American public because it avoided direct U.S. intervention, instead enabling Filipinos to fight their own battles. As a personal example, I deployed to the Philippines in 2013 to fill a gap in the Philippine Air Force’s tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. By the time I returned as a combat aviation advisor several years later, I had the opportunity to work with the Filipinos’ own ISR and light attack platforms. Over time, they had leveraged U.S. support to build sustainable capabilities, and counterterrorism operations never escalated beyond a local conflict. For the United States, this approach not only proved operationally effective and cost-sustainable, but it also built relationships over time that generated long-term institutional influence.

Conclusion: Overcoming Failure Bias

Failure bias has prevented the U.S. Air Force from identifying the factors that distinguish successful advisory missions from unsuccessful ones. It has also disregarded the lethality of partner-led, U.S.-supported successes that advanced American national interests in strategically important regions. At the same time, direct conventional interventions have escaped scrutiny and accountability by scapegoating marginalized advising efforts. Far from mere generosity, air advisory missions have enhanced partners’ effectiveness and lethality while protecting the lives of American servicemembers. It is time to recognize these quiet successes and invest in a prevention strategy that works.

is an assistant professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a senior advisor to IWI’s Air & Space team. He served as a U-28A instructor pilot, Combat Aviation Advisor, and Adaptive Precision Strike evaluator pilot in Air Force Special Operations Command, flying 236 combat missions and 125 combat support missions in support of Operations Inherent Resolve, Freedom Sentinel, Enduring Freedom, Enduring Freedom-Philippines, and Damiyan. The opinions presented in this article are his own and do not represent the official positions of the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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.

Main Image: A U.S. Air Force munitions specialist supervises a Nationalist Chinese technician mounting an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile on an F-86F jet during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, 1958. This marked history’s first combat use of guided air-to-air missiles, the culmination of a years-long U.S. Air Force and Navy training and advisory effort. (Courtesy of the National Archives)

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irregularwarfare.org · Jordan · October 14, 2025

22.

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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