Quotes of the Day:

“Consider your origins; you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”

– Dante

"A slave is one who cannot speak his thoughts."

– Euripides

"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery, where through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes."

– Aldous Huxley 

1. U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Intelligence for Missile Strikes Deep Inside Russia

2. Trump Signs Order That Could See U.S. Military Defend Qatar

3. Europe’s Emerging Plan: Give Ukraine $200 Billion in Russian Money

4. China’s cyberattacks, electronic espionage subverting U.S. and its allies, report says

5. Risk Makes Deterrence Effective

6. We Don't Need a New Force Design, or National Strategy

7. New poll shows striking change in Americans' views on political violence

8. ‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers

9. IWC Launches Its First Course on Irregular Warfare Approaches for the Homeland

10. ‘Warrior ethos’ mistakes military might for true security − and ignores the wisdom of Eisenhower

11.  Hegseth at Quantico: Directives or Drama?

12. An Inflection Point for Information Operations Officers

13. AI-Driven Disinformation Campaigns on Twitter (X) in the Russia-Ukraine War

14. Information Inoculation: Preparing US Warfighters for Cognitive War

15. Sequencing Over Simultaneity: How to Avert a Two-Front War

16. Manila Recovers Chinese Underwater Drone Operating in Philippine Waters

17. Improvised Genius: Could the United States Match Ukraine’s Scrappy Innovation Culture?

18. The Two-Front Illusion: Why a WWII-Style Mobilization Would Break on Today’s Economy and How to Fix It

19. Quad-ASEAN trade cooperation key to regional economic security

20. The Price of Unpredictability: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility

21. Sudan’s War Is the Shape of Things to Come: Why Mediators Struggle to End a New Kind of Conflict

22. Legal opinions usually aren’t exciting. This one has everyone talking

23. 'In every woman, there is a soldier’ – Yaryna Chornohuz, the brave poet fighting Russia

1. U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Intelligence for Missile Strikes Deep Inside Russia

​Two words.: About time.

A friend and colleague will respond immediately to this article and ask, will this include targeting of the north Korean People's Army that is providing support to Putin's War? Will it include interdicting the north Korean ammunition and weapons supply chain? Or will we allow tyranny of proximity (Seoul to the DMZ) and the fear of a catastrophic response on the Korean peninsula continue to paralyze us?  The answer is that if north Korea wants to play in the big leagues, they are going to have to suffer from big boy rules which means they are fair game because they are a full belligerent in th Putin's War.

U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Intelligence for Missile Strikes Deep Inside Russia

Trump has approved sharing targeting data with Ukrainians as administration weighs sending powerful weapons

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-to-provide-ukraine-with-intelligence-for-missile-strikes-deep-inside-russia-ca7b2276?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Bojan Pancevski

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, Alexander Ward

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 and Lara Seligman

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Oct. 1, 2025 7:00 pm ET

Ukrainian servicemen in the country’s north earlier this year. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Quick Summary

• The U.S. will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.View more

The U.S. will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure, American officials said, as the Trump administration weighs sending Kyiv powerful weapons that could put in range more targets within Russia.

President Trump recently signed off on allowing intelligence agencies and the Pentagon to aid Kyiv with the strikes. U.S. officials are asking North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to provide similar support, these people said. The expanded intelligence-sharing with Kyiv is the latest sign that Trump is deepening support for Ukraine as his efforts to advance peace talks have stalled.

It is the first time, officials say, that the Trump administration will aid Ukrainian strikes with long-range missiles against energy targets deep inside Russian territory.

While the U.S. has long assisted Kyiv’s drone and missile attacks, the intelligence sharing means Ukraine will be better able to hit refineries, pipelines, power stations and other infrastructure far from its borders, with the goal of depriving the Kremlin of revenue and oil to sustain its invasion.

The U.S. is also weighing deliveries of Tomahawks and Barracudas and other American-made ground- and air-launched missiles that have ranges of around 500 miles, other administration officials said. No decision on what to send—if anything—has been made, the officials said.

An image from social media shows smoke rising at an oil refinery in Samara, Russia, this summer. Photo: social media/Reuters

The intelligence, combined with more-powerful weapons, could have a far more potent effect than Ukraine’s previous strikes in Russia, causing greater damage to its energy infrastructure and tying up Russian air defenses. U.S. officials are awaiting written guidance from the White House before sharing the necessary intelligence, one official said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he couldn’t comment on ongoing or active intelligence operations. A spokeswoman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

The administration recently approved the sale to Ukraine of Extended Range Attack Munitions, an air-launched missile that can travel between 150 and 280 miles. Tomahawk cruise missiles, one of the most precise U.S. weapons, have a range of around 1,500 miles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed last week that he asked Trump for Tomahawks. Vice President JD Vance said Sunday on Fox News that the U.S. was considering Ukraine’s request.

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With a 20-foot wingspan and designed to carry a one-ton warhead, the Ukrainian-built “Flamingo” cruise missile can cause serious damage deep inside Russia territory. Here’s what we know about it. Photo: AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

The approval to provide additional intelligence came shortly before Trump vented his frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a social-media post last week announcing that Ukraine could recover all of its seized territory, U.S. officials said. Trump had previously said Ukraine couldn’t win the fight without being able to strike inside Russia.

Ukraine has been carrying out drone attacks inside Russia for years, but the Trump administration has limited its use of the most powerful weapons and the intelligence it shares. The Trump administration stopped new deliveries of Army Tactical Missile Systems, or Atacms, which had initially been sent to Ukraine under the Biden administration.

The Pentagon imposed a review process for each time Ukrainians want to use them. That veto has prevented Kyiv from launching U.S.-supplied Atacms, which have a range of about 190 miles, into Russia since late spring. On at least one occasion, Ukraine sought to use the missiles against a target on Russian territory but its request was rejected.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Trump during a United Nations gathering in September. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Since taking office in January, Trump has sought to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine as a path toward a settlement. His initial approach—offering Putin economic and commercial incentives to halt the invasion—has failed to gain traction with the Russian leader. Negotiations to end the 3½-year war have stalled after a series of meetings between Russian and U.S. leaders.

The president has signaled that he might now be pursuing a different course. Trump has received multiple briefings in recent days on the situation on the battlefield and has been focused on Russia’s lack of territorial gains. His public comments have been critical of Russia’s progress in the war.

“Everyone thought Russia would win this war in three days, but it didn’t work out that way. It was supposed to be just a quick little skirmish. It’s not making Russia look good,” Trump said during a speech to the United Nations last week.

The Kremlin issued a restrained response to reports that America could send powerful new weapons to Ukraine.

A missile being intercepted and smoke rising over Kyiv, Ukraine, in September. Photo: gleb garanich/Reuters

Moscow is carefully analyzing U.S. statements about delivering Tomahawks to Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

“The question remains: Who can launch these missiles, even if they end up on Kyiv regime territory?” Peskov said. “Can only Ukrainians launch them, or will the American military do so? Who is assigning the targeting to these missiles? This requires a very thorough analysis.”

European officials welcomed the move. Germany has invested around $350 million into developing Ukraine’s industrial capacity to manufacture deep-strike capabilities.

Ukraine needs assistance in three key areas of confronting Russian aggression: air defenses, the ability to hold the front line and the ability to strike deep into Russia, said Brig. Gen. Joachim Kaschke, who oversees Germany’s military aid to Ukraine. When the Ukrainian defenders are facing a numerically superior adversary, they have to take the fight beyond the front lines, Kaschke said.

“You have to cut off the supply lines to hold the front line—that is the military logic behind it,” Kaschke said.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How much and what kind of support do you think the U.S. should supply Ukraine? Join the conversation below.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com, Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

2. Trump Signs Order That Could See U.S. Military Defend Qatar

​How will the forthcoming NDS treat this additional priority? How will our resources be apportioned to honor this non-treaty commitment?

Trump Signs Order That Could See U.S. Military Defend Qatar

The president’s executive order extends NATO-like security guarantees to the Middle East monarchy

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-signs-order-that-could-see-u-s-military-defend-qatar-2e865361

By Alexander Ward

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Oct. 1, 2025 6:11 pm ET

The skyline in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Photo: Fatima Shbair/Associated Press

Quick Summary

• President Trump extended NATO-like security promises to Qatar following an Israeli attack on Hamas in Doha.View more

WASHINGTON—President Trump extended NATO-like security promises to Qatar, a reassurance measure that follows Israel’s attack on Hamas in the Gulf country’s capital.

The executive order, which appeared on the White House’s website Wednesday but is dated Monday, strengthens the U.S. commitment to defend Qatar, at least during Trump’s presidency and appeared aimed in part at reassuring Doha of Washington’s backing in the wake of the surprise Israeli airstrikes.

If Qatar is attacked again, the order says, “the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

The administration has taken multiple steps since the Israeli attack to assuage Qatar, home to thousands of U.S. troops stationed at Al Udeid Air Base. But the Trump order falls short of a treaty commitment to come to the country’s defense, such as Article 5 that commits the U.S. to defend other North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.

The U.S. named Qatar a major non-NATO ally in 2022, a designation that allows Doha to acquire advanced American weapons but didn’t come with a mutual-defense clause.

The U.S. extends security guarantees to other countries, including South Korea and Japan, and keeps ambiguous whether it would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion. Saudi Arabia has sought additional guarantees from the U.S. for its security. There were discussions during the Biden administration for a U.S. defense treaty with Riyadh but that hasn’t materialized.

The rationale behind Trump’s decision, analysts say, lies in the president’s attempts to quell tensions between Israel and Qatar and secure a cease-fire in Gaza.

After Israel’s failed September operation to kill senior Hamas political representatives in Doha, Qatar’s capital, Qatar complained about the violation of its sovereignty and temporarily suspended its mediation role between Israel and Hamas. That anger persisted, leading to a dramatic scene Monday where, during a visit to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Qatar’s prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, to apologize.

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WSJ’s Shayndi Raice explains what Israel’s attack on Hamas in Qatar means for the direction of the war and future peace negotiations. Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Trump held the phone in the Oval Office as the two Middle East leaders spoke.

Shortly thereafter, the White House released a 20-point plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas and rebuild Gaza. The proposal, U.S. and Middle East officials said, featured changes requested by Israel and didn’t fully reflect what Washington had previously presented to Qatar and other regional countries. Doha expressed its displeasure with the U.S. for releasing the plan Monday without full support from Qatar.

On Wednesday, the same day the White House unveiled the new executive order to protect Qatar, al-Thani expressed support for the Gaza plan, saying it met the key goals of all nations involved in finalizing the deal.

“Everyone agreed on stopping the war, preventing displacement and the full withdrawal of the Israeli army. These are the three main, pivotal matters,” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera. “And the direct responsible party for managing Gaza are the Palestinian people themselves.”

Trump has made strengthening relations with Gulf monarchies a pillar of his Middle East strategy, showing great affection for Qatar’s leaders during a May visit to the capital. The Qataris have reciprocated, gifting the U.S. a $400 million luxury plane to serve as Air Force One for Trump. The country also has unveiled plans to host a Trump-branded golf resort, and has struck business deals with the Trump family.

But Trump’s affinity for Qatar could threaten his conservative base of support. Some Republicans are skeptical of Doha because of its ties to Iran, while others in the MAGA movement don’t want to further entangle relations between the U.S. and Qatar.

“I don’t want to die for Qatar,” Laura Loomer, a staunch Trump ally, posted on social media after the order’s reveal.

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

3. Europe’s Emerging Plan: Give Ukraine $200 Billion in Russian Money

​Graphic/chart at the link.

Europe’s Emerging Plan: Give Ukraine $200 Billion in Russian Money

The loan—which likely wouldn’t be paid back—represents a creative way to tap Moscow’s frozen assets without legally confiscating them

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europes-emerging-plan-give-ukraine-200-billion-in-russian-money-afea865f

By Laurence Norman

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Oct. 1, 2025 3:38 pm ET

From left, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk and French President Emmanuel Macron met in Copenhagen on Wednesday. Photo: ludovic marin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

• The EU is developing a plan to use approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s benefit without requiring repayment.View more

COPENHAGEN—The European Union struggles to make quick decisions and wield its political weight. But it is a master of legal workarounds and financial wizardry.

Now Brussels is putting those skills into action for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

On Wednesday, EU leaders agreed to keep working on a plan to put hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian cash to use—without Kyiv ever needing to repay a cent. If approved, the proposal would reverse a policy on seized Russian assets that dates to the war’s early days.

For three years, the bloc’s leaders have grappled with how to put roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to use for Ukraine. The EU and its Western partners soon after Russia invaded its smaller neighbor in 2022 locked down the money, which Russia’s central bank had invested in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Roughly two-thirds of the amount was held in Belgium-based Euroclear, a giant financial clearinghouse.

The problem EU officials faced was finding a way to use the money without confiscating it, a move which, though legal, many leaders felt raised too many political and financial risks. Europeans also wanted to avoid saddling Kyiv with an obligation to eventually repay a vast sum.

To immobilize the money, the EU imposed sanctions forbidding Euroclear from repaying Russia, but the bloc wouldn’t go as far as appropriating the assets. 

Debates over how to handle the assets intensified recently, but officials repeatedly recoiled from seizing the money. The EU so far has only siphoned off the interest earned by the Russian assets to help Ukraine—a relatively small step that took months to put in motion.

But the calculus changed due to worsening Russian attacks on Ukraine, reduced U.S. support for Kyiv and new Russian threats to Europe itself.

Legal and political challenges remain, but technocrats at the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, are confident in their financial engineering.

A front line in the Russian-Ukrainian war in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

During an EU summit on Wednesday, leaders discussed the plan, with the idea winning support from bloc heavyweights France and Germany, according to officials involved in the discussion. However Belgium, whose approval is critical because it hosts Euroclear, reiterated concerns about the plan and sought assurances that its financial interests would be protected.

Earlier, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who hosted the summit, told reporters that the bloc sees financial support to Ukraine as critical. “And I think that the idea from the Commission is actually quite a good way forward,” she said. 

The European plan seeks to resolve several problems simultaneously. 

The EU and its allies have demanded that Russia pay reparations to Ukraine for the war’s damage, though they acknowledge that the Kremlin is unlikely to agree to do so. The notion of confiscating the assets created fears that foreign investors would reduce investments in eurozone assets and worries about setting precedents.

The ECB, which oversees the euro, has a direct stake because Euroclear has moved Russian cash reserves to the central bank once the underlying Russian investments it held have come due.

Russia, meanwhile, has warned that it would retaliate if its funds were confiscated.

The EU couldn’t issue debt to fund Ukraine as it has in the past because it likely wouldn’t have won backing from Hungary and Slovakia who have grown hostile to assisting Ukraine. 

With the Trump administration largely cutting off its spending on military aid for Ukraine, the EU and its European partners must foot the bill for Ukraine and military assistance to it. That could easily exceed €70 billion—or $82 billion—based on spending over recent years. By then, support the EU has already approved for Kyiv will be running out and fiscal constraints in many European capitals make leaders wary about asking taxpayers for more.

Enter Europe’s wizards, who cooked up a multistage plan that some might consider worthy of Wall Street.

First, the ECB hands Russia’s reserves to the EU, which officials say stand at roughly €180 billion. The EU gives the money as a “reparations loan” to Ukraine, which Kyiv only repays when Moscow compensates it for war damage.

What if Russia doesn’t pay? Who repays Euroclear to keep its balance sheet intact, and how much? 

Nobody and nothing. 

EU financial mechanism plan for the Ukraine loan

If Russia compensates Ukraine, then repay the loan

The EU, G7 want Russia to pay reparations for the war

EU loans cash reserves to Ukraine (up to $200B)

Ukraine

EU

Russia

Sanctions to be rolled over without backing by all EU27

EU sanction on Russian central bank assets

Hands to EU

Block repayment of Russian assets

ECB

Assets†

Liabilities*

As long as sanctions in place, Euroclear assets equal liabilities

Cash from Russian assets

Euroclear

*Contracts to repay Russian assets to Moscow †EU tailored debt contract to be backed by member state guarantees

Source: staff reports

Ming Li/WSJ

Here’s why: Euroclear’s assets must equal its liabilities. In this case, its liability is the contractual obligation to repay Russia—which it can’t do because of the EU sanctions. If and when the Russian cash is packaged as a loan to Ukraine, the EU would replace it on Euroclear’s books with a financial instrument that officials call a “tailored debt contract with Euroclear at 0% interest,” according to an EU paper reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Officials said the debt contract will essentially be a legal promise—an IOU—from the EU to repay Euroclear if needed. The EU in turn would receive guarantees by member states to fund the money if the EU needed to pay out. The EU debt contract would provide Euroclear with an asset to offset its liability, keeping them matched. As a result, until Russia pays to rebuild Ukraine, no money would actually need to be repaid.

As more EU countries sign IOUs, risk for each declines. But participation wouldn’t be obligatory, so Hungary and Slovakia can’t veto the plan.

Under this plan, Euroclear’s assets and liabilities match—at least as long as sanctions forbid it from repaying Russia. A separate fight with Hungary over extending sanctions is simmering, but EU officials believe they have a workaround.

As long as the sanctions remain, Euroclear has no balance-sheet problem because it is prohibited from paying out its liabilities. The structure could remain as long Russia occupies Ukrainian territory and balks at compensation. 

“The message is clear. Russia has to understand that Ukraine’s partners including its European partners have the will and the means to continue supporting it until a just and lasting peace is achieved,” said European Council President António Costa in a news conference after the meeting.

Officials hope to start giving Ukraine new money early next year, assuming they can overcome remaining political hurdles. The cash will be vital. 

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 2, 2025, print edition as 'EU Aims to Tap Russian Billions for Kyiv Aid'.

4. China’s cyberattacks, electronic espionage subverting U.S. and its allies, report says

​We need to recognize China's strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack China's strategy with our own superior strategy.

China is attacking our alliance because they are strong, powerful and a counter to China's strength. We must recognize the power and importance of our silk web of alliances and China's actions prove that.

Excerpts:

Increasingly successful information operations and global cyber activities are growing in both sophistication and capability through the use of artificial intelligence, a key tool now being used by both Chinese intelligence services and the Chinese Communist Party’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, the report states.

“They are a tool of statecraft, applied systematically with other elements of national power to weaken adversaries’ decision-making ecosystems, constrain their operational flexibility, and pre-condition the outcomes of future geopolitical contests,” the report said.

These sophisticated cyber and information operations ultimately are subverting the United States and its alliances.

“Beijing is targeting the backbone of the U.S. alliance system, recognizing both its enduring strategic importance and its growing vulnerability,” the report said.

China’s cyberattacks, electronic espionage subverting U.S. and its allies, report says

Intelligence contractor report warns urgent efforts needed to counter Beijing drive for global dominance

washingtontimes.com · Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Monday, September 29, 2025

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

China’s aggressive and technically advanced cyberattacks, electronic espionage and information operations are strategic weapons targeting the United States, according to a major study by an intelligence contractor made public Monday.

The United States must urgently confront these operations through modernizing cyber defenses and countering Beijing’s targeting of infrastructure and use of deception and diplomacy in information and influence activities, the report by Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., warns.

Increasingly successful information operations and global cyber activities are growing in both sophistication and capability through the use of artificial intelligence, a key tool now being used by both Chinese intelligence services and the Chinese Communist Party’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, the report states.

“They are a tool of statecraft, applied systematically with other elements of national power to weaken adversaries’ decision-making ecosystems, constrain their operational flexibility, and pre-condition the outcomes of future geopolitical contests,” the report said.

These sophisticated cyber and information operations ultimately are subverting the United States and its alliances.

“Beijing is targeting the backbone of the U.S. alliance system, recognizing both its enduring strategic importance and its growing vulnerability,” the report said.

“PRC operations prioritize embedding technical and political access into decision-making ecosystems, shaping elite discourse, and eroding cohesion from within.”

If left unchallenged, Chinese operations will result in a hollowing out of allied coordination, delaying responses during crises, and producing alliance relations that are slower, more divided and less capable of responding to China’s geopolitical ambitions.

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The 86-page report, “Breaking Through: How to Predict, Prevent, and Prevail over the PRC Cyber Threat,” was made public Monday.

“The People’s Republic of China is using cyber power to reshape the global balance of power — quietly, deliberately, and at scale,” said Nate Beach-Westmoreland, Booz Allen’s head of strategic cyber threat intelligence.

“This isn’t about the damage from isolated intrusions or campaigns. It’s about their collective long-term strategic erosion: degrading U.S. resilience, fracturing alliances and constraining how and where we can act.”

The study urges the United States and its allies to reclaim the initiative and act urgently to expose, contest, and dislodge Chinese cyber advantages before they solidify into “structural dominance.”

Greater efforts are needed to track and identify Chinese operations, expose and dismantle Chinese covert online information networks and harden security domestically and internationally, the report said.

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“The window to act is narrowing. But with deliberate strategy and sustained investment, the U.S. can blunt Beijing’s advances, reclaim operational advantage, and reset the terms of long-term competition,” the report said.

Based on a review of 350 reports of Chinese cyber operations since 2022, the report identified four major factors driving strategic cyberattacks.

“Beijing is weaponizing trusted relations,” the report said, noting Chinese hackers’ ability to compromise secure relations between software platforms and users, vendors and clients and administrators and networks.

“By embedding themselves into these relationships— whether through stolen credentials, hijacked update channels, or vendor compromise—[People’s Republic of China] actors gain scalable, persistent access that bypasses traditional defenses,” the report said.

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A damaging example involved a group of Chinese military hackers who breached Boeing’s computer systems in 2009 and stole 85,000 files, including details of the military’s C-17 transport.

Court documents in the case against one of the hackers included an email sent by the hackers to senior officials in Beijing bragging that the cyber theft cost around $400,000 but provided $40 billion worth of taxpayer-funded research and development used to build hundreds of the PLA’s Y-20 transports, a copy of the C-17 and a strategic power projection tool.

The Booz Allen report said a key example of Chinese cyber power was the operation in late 2024 dubbed Silk Typhoon. A group of state-run hackers used zero-day software vulnerabilities to penetrate multiple U.S. government networks, including the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, through a contractor.

The group used similar tactics to breach networks of U.S. states and local government and information technology companies. The break-ins allowed access to data used by law enforcement probes and government policy related to Beijing’s interests, the report said.

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In recent years, the Chinese intelligence services have begun using artificial intelligence to increase cyber and information attack capabilities.

“AI is turbocharging the scale, tempo, and targeting of PRC cyber and information operations,” the report said.

The advanced computing capability is allowing Beijing to overcome constraints caused by language barriers, improving attack analyses, and allowing its forces to scale up cyber strikes.

“Even in its early stages, AI is changing how the PRC collects intelligence, targets operations, and shapes global narratives, aligning with Beijing’s ‘intelligentized’ warfare doctrine that prioritizes data-driven decision-making and information dominance,” the report said.

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The use of these tools is eroding America’s strategic advantage by providing Chinese intelligence agencies and the military with more effective surveillance, exploitation and influence activities. AI-powered cyberattacks also allow for long-term access with fewer warning signs.

“PRC actors can now act earlier, move faster and hide more effectively,” the report said, speeding up cyber campaigns, reducing defenders’ decision time and complicating the ability to trace the origin of the attacks.

The advantages have made it increasing difficult for the United States and its allies to coordinate responses, act decisively in response and prevent an escalation of crises or conflicts.

China’s military regards AI as central to the use of cognitive warfare and information dominance.

“PLA doctrine describes AI as essential to shaping adversary decision-making, degrading social cohesion, and asserting ‘discourse power’ abroad,” the report said.

Information warfare powered by AI is viewed by the PLA as a major tool for influencing both wartime and peacetime strategic competition. It is also being used to manipulate public perceptions, destabilize adversaries and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to control geopolitical issues.

For example, in late 2024, a Chinese hacker group used ChatGPT to produce anti-U.S. articles in Spanish that were published in mainstream media in Latin America. Open AI said the activity was the first confirmed use of planting AI-generated content in traditional media.

Another new tool used by Beijing is to disguise its state-directed cyberattacks as financially motivated cybercrime. The cybercrimes are in fact espionage, disruption operations and “coercive signaling,” the report said. An example is the Chinese state-run cyber group known as APT41 in a global phishing campaign that used traditional cybercriminal delivery tactics for state-run espionage.

In that case, the group used emails that posed as tax authorities to target aerospace, insurance, chemicals and manufacturing sectors — all key strategic espionage targets.

Authorities in Beijing also have conducted sophisticated deception and denial activities to divert attentions from its cyberattacks, the report said.

Regionally, China is undermining American agility and escalation control in East Asia through cyber operations and information warfare.

Key activities include operations to undermine U.S. support for Taiwan, aggressive activities against U.S. allies in the South China Sea and against Japan.

China is working to expand its influence and shape the regional order on its terms.

“Cyber and information operations are its principal tools, avoiding direct confrontation while enabling access to infrastructure, influence over political ecosystems, access to intellectual property and erosion of adversary cohesion,” the report said.

Chinese cyber and information attacks are seeking to reduce the ability of U.S. aligned nations to respond quickly or cohesively to strategic pressure.

The game plan for Taiwan calls for degrading public resistance to a Chinese takeover and prepositioning tools that will allow for disrupting infrastructure.

For the Philippines and Vietnam, Chinese campaigns involve shaping the behavior of elites on maritime disputes.

Operations against Japan target high-value technology and networks involved in alliance coordination and defense logistics.

“These activities form a deliberate strategy of environmental shaping, designed to exploit peacetime access, strain political alignment and build leverage for use in future regional conflicts,” the report said.

China’s other key method has been to use sophisticated hackers who extensively target what the report called “network edge infrastructure” — network routers, virtual private network appliances and firewalls to gain access to internal networks from the public internet.

These security holes remain exposed and poorly monitored and can provide Chinese hackers with access to credentials, information and communication traffic outside of security monitoring.

“Beijing has emerged as the global leader in zero-day exploitation targeting network edge devices,” the report said.

Beginning in 2021, Chinese hackers sharply stepped up zero day attacks with 85% of the known vulnerabilities exploited involved penetrating firewalls, VPNs and routers.

Attacks include a 2022 operations by three Chinese groups that hit Tibetan organizations and a government department involved in China’s program in the developing world called the Belt and Road Initiative that involved debt negotiations.

In late 2022 and 2023, Chinese hackers used an unknown software vulnerability to compromise over 20,000 computer networks around the world. The victims included governments, international organizations, and defense contractors.

“A national response must match the scale and structure of the threat,” the report concluded. “That means modernizing cyber defenses to prioritize edge access and vendor risk, contesting attribution with speed and credibility, and aligning regional strategies to counter PRC leverage across infrastructure, diplomacy, and influence.”

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

washingtontimes.com · Bill Gertz

5. Risk Makes Deterrence Effective

​Excerpts:

Today’s strategic setting is pushing the Navy toward a bimodal maritime deterrence strategy that integrates deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment in a synchronized effort to prevent overt aggression.8 Sea denial provides the capability to engage an opponent immediately at the geographic locus of aggression—the fight is on when the opponent crosses “red lines” that exist not only rhetorically, but also physically in situ. Sea control, by contrast, increases the credibility of this commitment to deterrence by denial by demonstrating the capability to support friends and allies by keeping lines of communication open in crisis and war. Sea control also holds out the prospect of deterrence by punishment by offering a way to inflict pain on an opponent until unwanted activity is terminated or by creating conventional escalation dominance.

.​..

A bimodal maritime deterrent strategy creates immediate risk and increasingly unpredictable risks over time. By engaging in deterrence by denial, the sea denial force will spark war at the geostrategic location of deterrence failure, which creates inherent uncertainty and risk for the defender and aggressor alike. Meanwhile, the sea control force can be held in reserve to deter an opponent’s effort at horizontal or vertical escalation, or to coerce the opponent “by exerting global pressure, indicating that the conflict will be neither short nor localized.” Most important, the Navy must create risks that cannot be controlled by the opponent. This will require a departure from the service’s normal practice of not leaving anything to chance.

All this suggests the Navy must take development of a maritime deterrent strategy seriously by coming to terms with the requirements for deterrence. This will not be easy. Strategic and operational risk mitigation is an obsolete instinct in this new age of great power competition, but it has been a centerpiece of Navy culture. It must be overcome to create a new maritime deterrent in the western Pacific.

Risk Makes Deterrence Effective

By James J. Wirtz

October 2025 Proceedings Vol. 151/10/1,472

usni.org

The 1980s were the halcyon days of the Maritime Strategy, a time devoid of talk about a “strategy deficit” in the U.S. Navy.1 The Maritime Strategy of the late Cold War is remembered for how it capitalized on the Reagan-era defense buildup, outlining a plan to build a 600-ship Navy, and how it would bring naval power to bear in the event of a land war in Central Europe. Less well remembered is that it was a maritime deterrence strategy, which called for the Navy to launch a coercion/punishment campaign in the event of deterrence failure.

The 1986 Maritime Strategy was a maritime deterrence strategy, which called for the Navy to inflict costs on the Soviet Union should deterrence fail. It was about generating a risk of escalation that the opponent could not control. U.S. Naval Institute Archive

If deterrence failed, the Navy would inflict costs on the Soviet Union by (1) attacking its nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarines to alter the strategic nuclear balance, (2) launching carrier raids against its Kola Peninsula and Baltic and Pacific littorals, and (3) conducting amphibious operations against its Pacific territories.2 Above all, the goal of the Maritime Strategy, in the words of then–Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins, was “to deny the Soviets their kind of war by exerting global pressure, indicating that the conflict will be neither short nor localized.”3 The Maritime Strategy was about generating a risk of escalation the opponent could not control.

The Maritime Strategy sought to coerce the Soviets to abandon war by inflicting pain and demonstrating Moscow could not control the risk inherent in a European land war as the U.S. Navy engaged in horizontal and vertical escalation. Conventional counterforce attacks against Soviet strategic nuclear systems could be considered nuclear hostilities, while Marine landings in the Soviet Far East would raise the specter of tactical, theater, and strategic nuclear war.

Indeed, the Maritime Strategy created a “crystal ball effect”—the operations it envisioned brought to mind how events could spin out of control, leading to full-scale nuclear war.4 Naval officers today might be surprised that the risk generated by the strategy was not inadvertent. Instead, it was an intentional part of its deterrent strategy. Risk, especially risk that cannot be controlled by an aggressor, is what makes deterrence effective.

Nuclear strategy theorist Thomas Schelling’s suggestion that deterrence is a “competition in risk-taking” that relies on “threats that leave something to chance” helped explain the continued relevance of deterrence in a situation of mutual assured destruction (MAD).5 In other words, even though it is incredible to threaten an act tantamount to mutual suicide, Schelling suggested it still is credible to take steps that make such an outcome more likely, forcing the onus on the opponent to deescalate to avoid catastrophe.

The focus on deterrence in MAD, however, led strategists and policy-makers to overlook the relationship between risk and effective deterrence in situations outside MAD. No one wants to trigger a catastrophic war for objectives that are less than existential, and, even then, it is difficult to fathom how eruption of a catastrophic war might be worth the candle when it comes to achieving significant strategic interests. Nevertheless, if carrying out deterrent threats creates the risk of horizontal and vertical escalation, especially if the risk cannot be mitigated by the opponent, deterrence is likely to be robust. If operations, capabilities, innovations, or stratagems are available to the opponent to mitigate or even control risk, then deterrence failure is likely.

Nuclear strategy theorist Thomas Schelling suggested deterrence is a “competition in risk-taking.” In other words, if carrying out deterrent threats creates the risk of escalation, especially if that risk cannot be mitigated by the opponent, deterrence is likely to be robust. Martha Stewart / Harvard Kennedy School

Today’s environment again calls for a maritime deterrent strategy, which must create risk to be effective against aggression. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the Navy has been preoccupied not with deterring war, but with fighting major wars and engagements at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. Freedom of navigation operations, antipiracy patrols, counterdrug operations, counterproliferation intercepts, escort duties, no-fly zones, small precision strikes, missile defense, and air and missile assaults have been fixtures in the Navy’s day-to-day activities. It might not be an exaggeration to say much of the Navy is fully and continually engaged in actual hostilities. As a result, deterrence is a concept that does not seem to correspond to maritime realities for officers today. To them, deterrence might appear, if not incredible, then somewhat far-fetched—a figment of academic imagination.6

It also might appear ill-advised. Although the Navy has been continually engaged in warfighting for decades, its operations usually appear to be circumspect, measured, and precise. It takes steps to minimize collateral damage, avoid harm to third parties, not put personnel or assets in harm’s way unnecessarily, and minimize the risks of escalation by friend and foe alike. This attitude and approach is not an effective deterrent; deterrence is about generating risk.7 It is about undertaking operations that create a perceptible risk of a wider regional, global, and even nuclear war.

Today’s strategic setting is pushing the Navy toward a bimodal maritime deterrence strategy that integrates deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment in a synchronized effort to prevent overt aggression.8 Sea denial provides the capability to engage an opponent immediately at the geographic locus of aggression—the fight is on when the opponent crosses “red lines” that exist not only rhetorically, but also physically in situ. Sea control, by contrast, increases the credibility of this commitment to deterrence by denial by demonstrating the capability to support friends and allies by keeping lines of communication open in crisis and war. Sea control also holds out the prospect of deterrence by punishment by offering a way to inflict pain on an opponent until unwanted activity is terminated or by creating conventional escalation dominance.

A bimodal strategy creates a link between the Navy’s global sea control capabilities and the situation in the western Pacific to offset a potential opponent’s advantage in littoral waters that are within range of its reconnaissance-strike complexes.9

A bimodal maritime deterrent strategy creates immediate risk and increasingly unpredictable risks over time. By engaging in deterrence by denial, the sea denial force will spark war at the geostrategic location of deterrence failure, which creates inherent uncertainty and risk for the defender and aggressor alike. Meanwhile, the sea control force can be held in reserve to deter an opponent’s effort at horizontal or vertical escalation, or to coerce the opponent “by exerting global pressure, indicating that the conflict will be neither short nor localized.” Most important, the Navy must create risks that cannot be controlled by the opponent. This will require a departure from the service’s normal practice of not leaving anything to chance.

All this suggests the Navy must take development of a maritime deterrent strategy seriously by coming to terms with the requirements for deterrence. This will not be easy. Strategic and operational risk mitigation is an obsolete instinct in this new age of great power competition, but it has been a centerpiece of Navy culture. It must be overcome to create a new maritime deterrent in the western Pacific.

1. Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “Getting Serious About Strategy in the South China Sea,” Naval War College Review 781, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 1–21; and James A. Russell et al., “Navy Strategy Development: Strategy in the 21st Century,” FY-N3/N5-0001, Naval Research Program, Naval Postgraduate School (June 2015).

2. Linton D. Brooks, “Naval Power and National Security: The Case for the Maritime Strategy,” International Security 11, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 58–88.

3. ADM James D. Watkins, USN, “The Maritime Strategy,” supplement, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 112, no. 1 (January 1986).

4. James Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and Learning in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989). Critics of the Maritime Strategy were quick to identify how it generated risk. According to John Mearsheimer, “An offensive sea control strategy would seriously threaten one leg of the Soviets’ strategic triad. Whether intended or not, this deterrent posture would have the makings of a strategic ASW campaign and would therefore create risks of inadvertent nuclear escalation.” John J. Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security 11, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 41.

5. Thomas C. Schelling, The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 10 August 1959, released September 2021); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 187–294; and Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 92–125.

6. This paragraph is drawn from James J. Wirtz, “Deterrence 2027: Keeping the Threat at Bay,” CIMSEC, 18 November 2024.

7. Alan Cummings, “Reinvigorate Risk: The United States Needs to Focus on Manipulating Adversary Risk,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 3 (March 2022).

8. Wayne P. Hughes, “A Bi-Modal Force for the National Maritime Strategy,” Naval War College Review 60, no. 2 (Spring 2007).

9. Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Linkage Politics,” in Jon R. Lindsay and Erik Gartzke, eds., Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 292.

usni.org

6. We Don't Need a New Force Design, or National Strategy

​"National understanding"

I like the homeland graphic at the end of the essay. 

Yes, water, air, and space matter (but so does the human domain - it is all interconnected)

Excerpts:

Why do they do that? Because we lack the critical mass of understanding of how being masters of the maritime and aerospace domains underwrite everything else our republic will need in the future to be secure, prosperous, and as a result—be able to support an international order to develop along the lines we will understand as good, and not drift into lawlessness or dystopian systems of autocracy.

We can publish all the strategies and designs we want, but they will be built on sand. For them to really be substantial, they must be built on a firm foundation of a national understanding of what we are, and what we want to be.

The mistakes of the past are in the past, but we do not have to stick to this failed road. It must start at the top. Leaders, in uniform and out, in the maritime community must step forward and tell our story. Educate the American people and their elected representatives. If someone insists on wasting precious time discussing their thoughts on the “Joint Force” — then that person should be invited to pursue excellence elsewhere and not given a public-facing position again.

You have an Executive Branch already on the record wanting a stronger Navy. Even in an Army-heavy national security leadership, the advocates are there. Congress can be sold.

It is time to start upsetting a few people. Flood the zone with hard truths. If you have to, bring a globe with you. Reality is on our side.

We Don't Need a New Force Design, or National Strategy

...we need a national understanding

https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/we-dont-need-a-new-force-design-or

CDR Salamander

Oct 01, 2025

Rumors are floating about that, in the words of Brent Sadler,

The U.S. Navy is reportedly on the cusp of a new force design plan.

OK, then what? Who is ready to hear and act on it? Has the intellectual battlefield been properly prepared?

We’ve seen over the last few decades, both political parties and the parade of SECDEFs, SECNAVs, CNOs, Commandants of the Marine Corps issue this vision, that strategy, this design, but they all seem to exist in their own little world, impacting only on the edges (big exception is the USMC’s Force Design 2030 that is still creating friction, for good reason) —but not quite gripping and pulling the multiple lines of control that impact our national and maritime strategy.

Yes, there are entire sub-sectors of our military industrial complex, think tanks, war colleges, and the satellites of information, opinion, and influence that orbit around them, that need—indeed rely—on these regular releases of the latest view of the future. They need them to argue for their programs, their world view, their organizational priorities, or to just pump out their required word count. They need a ‘Ref. A’ for their think pieces—the newer the better.

I know.

But in the end, how much does that matter? Hard to say, but as we stand today almost a decade and a half after President Obama’s Pacific Pivot with a plurality of the chattering classes in the national security arena breathlessly wondering, ‘What is that Elbridge Colby up to!”, it is clear that we are not wanting for strategy, designs, or punditry extruding from the organs of the DC beltway.

No. What we are missing is a national understanding based on two questions:

1. What are we?
2. What do we want to be?

The first question is the easiest, and the one whose view was warped for decades by external influences like the demands of the Cold War, the 1990s unipolar anomaly, and the misbegotten GWOT decades that, though they have left our field of view, have not our vision has not returned to normal.

It’s there, we just don’t see it and those who should make the argument won’t step up to do it.

What is this ‘National Understanding?’

Simple:

• We are a maritime and aerospace power by geography and comparative advantage.
• We are a republic, not an empire.
• We have no desire for, nor need of, other nations’ land or people. We covet nothing, only desire something we have known from the beginning:

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies. Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. - President George Washington, 1796

Why a maritime and aerospace power? Let’s start with, as we should always, with a trip to the chart room.

This is the geographic reality centuries of blood, toil, tears, and sweat have bequeathed to us. We have not fought a war on our southern border in almost two centuries, and have not fought one on our northern border in over two centuries. We have some of the best neighbors one could have by land.

At sea, we have two oceans. One HUGE, the other quite large. Above us there is the expanse of the universe, access to which we will have the dominant position.

Our greatest global challenger is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the other side of that HUGE ocean, the Pacific. Here is what it looks like from us to them.

That is the U.S. in the upper-right corner, that is the PRC in the upper-left corner. In the middle is the U.S.’s 50th State, Hawaii. Wake Island and Guam further west from there.

Economically, culturally, and militarily—that is the center stage as we approach mid-century. That is where our focus must be…and that is a problem.

As a nation, we don’t understand it yet. Too many of our institutions and the people in them continue to be lost in the inertia of the last century that maintains a world view founded by the Old World; Europe and the Middle East.

That is, literally, the other side of the world. Of concern to the U.S.? Of course. But a primary concern? No.

That is the province of our allies and friends on the Eurasian landmass who are land powers. They are not the prostrate and supine nations after WWII. They are generations past that. Should there be security concerns, we can help them best from the air and sea, and ashore as needed—but we cannot design our national security around their land problems.

An American defense designed around war on the Eurasian landmass, that would be land-heavy and slow to move at distance, will be of limited utility to any conflict in the Pacific, if it could ever get to where it needed to be.

An American defense designed around war in the Pacific, that would be maritime and aerospace-heavy and quick to move on a global basis, would be of critical utility to any war on the Eurasian landmass.

At peace, the balance of U.S. maritime and aerospace forces must be well-capitalized and ready to go at day-1. U.S. land power? What we have as a standing force must be highly mobile, expeditionarily minded, and backed up with robust reserve and National Guard forces that will be able to get up on the readiness step quickly—to respond in any direction the threat comes from.

We really don’t know where the next war will be. We have the global ‘central position’, and we should be designed to take advantage of it. Maneuver forces trapped somewhere without the ability to get where they are needed are little more than sunk cost.

That latter part is why in any design, and this can be handled best in the Naval and Air Force Reserve, there needs to be an overbuilt strategic airlift and sealift that can move that reserve land component to back the expeditionary forces already in the fight next to our land-power allies.

That is it. It does not need to be more complicated than that. Why are we not already at this understanding?

Leadership.

We have not promoted strategic thinkers, in the main. That is not where our incentives and disincentives are. If anything, we disincentivize that skillset as much as we do sustained superior performance at sea or in combat theaters.

No, our self-identified best and brightest are constantly given shortened operational tours so they can get back to ‘important’ DC jobs, Joint requirements, or academic box checking. Pass on those and your promotion opportunities are limited.

In a Darwinian way, those who excel at bureaucracy, acquisitions, getting priorities through POM cycles—as opposed to extensive operational experience that develops the perspective required for strategic thinking—have been rewarded and promoted.

Smart people all, but they are good at what brought them here. The results of the recent decades speak for themselves.

Institutions that we rely on to take what opportunities are available to develop strategic thinking allowed themselves to be distracted by trendy academic socio-political theories, or even worse, Orwellian thought police.

We had senior Navy leaders who when given the opportunity to discuss seapower and the requirements of a sea power, instead regurgitated JPME I & II executive summary talking points that just reinforced the intellectual chaff that it Jointspeak.

If they weren’t doing that, they spent rare personal and institutional capital defending divisive non-military domestic political theory they mistakenly thought they were compelled to spot-weld on to the fleet.

We had some leaders who seemed to get it, but they mostly topped out at INDOPACOM.

For reasons we know all too well, our uniformed maritime leaders simply would not help bring the story to the American people. The civilian appointees, seeming boxed in by the twin moats of 1947 and 1986, were generally mute or in lockstep with the more often than not Army-weighted Pentagon culture. Our institutions? I think we covered that sufficiently in 2022.

We had Bryan McGrath at the start of this decade try to set an example in Maryland, but few followed his exceptional example.

Why has a naturally gifted and born maritime power allowed an Asian land power to build the world’s largest—and growing—navy?

Why has a naturally endowed and traditionally excellent aerospace power allowed momentum in space to decay to let others catch up?

Why can we not seem to develop modern maritime and aerospace systems with any sense of urgency and demonstrations of competence?

Simply, the American people and their elected representatives allow it.

Why do they do that? Because we lack the critical mass of understanding of how being masters of the maritime and aerospace domains underwrite everything else our republic will need in the future to be secure, prosperous, and as a result—be able to support an international order to develop along the lines we will understand as good, and not drift into lawlessness or dystopian systems of autocracy.

We can publish all the strategies and designs we want, but they will be built on sand. For them to really be substantial, they must be built on a firm foundation of a national understanding of what we are, and what we want to be.

The mistakes of the past are in the past, but we do not have to stick to this failed road. It must start at the top. Leaders, in uniform and out, in the maritime community must step forward and tell our story. Educate the American people and their elected representatives. If someone insists on wasting precious time discussing their thoughts on the “Joint Force” — then that person should be invited to pursue excellence elsewhere and not given a public-facing position again.

You have an Executive Branch already on the record wanting a stronger Navy. Even in an Army-heavy national security leadership, the advocates are there. Congress can be sold.

It is time to start upsetting a few people. Flood the zone with hard truths. If you have to, bring a globe with you. Reality is on our side.

UPDATE: Brent Sadler put this out on X earlier today, and I thought it fit well with this post.

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7. New poll shows striking change in Americans' views on political violence

This is certainly troubling. We need a wakeup call. Political violence is not the answer.

Are we creating the "enemy within?" Is the "enemy within" a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will we make political violence a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Let me put it another way: Do we hate fellow Americans more than we fear the Dark Quad of China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea, and how that axis is trying to harm us and our way of life? Who are the real enemies?

But I believe when the members of the Dark Quad reads these statistics they assess that their political warfare strategies are working.

New poll shows striking change in Americans' views on political violence

flip.it · Geoff Bennett · October 1, 2025

A new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll shows that nearly a third of Americans believe that political violence may be necessary to set the country on track. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor who studies polarization and extremism, said the rising support for political violence is translating into real acts and is deeply alarming. Geoff Bennett discussed more with NPR's Domenico Montanaro.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett:

The latest PBS News/NPR Marist poll out today shows that nearly a third of Americans now believe political violence may be necessary to get the country back on track.

That's up from 19 percent just a year-and-a-half ago. It follows a series of high-profile attacks, including the June killing of a Democratic state legislator and her husband in Minnesota, and the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah last month.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies polarization and extremism, says the rising support for political violence is translating into real acts, and the trend is deeply alarming.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University:

It's just a horrific moment to see that people believe, honestly believe that there's no other alternative at this point than to resort to political violence. We have had years now of rising support for political violence and willingness to participate in it.

And now we're seeing actual rising acts of political violence follow on the heels of that. So having this go up even more is a real wake-up call. It should be a real wake-up call.

Geoff Bennett:

The poll also tackles the administration's handling of free speech and a number of other issues.

Joining us now to break it all down is NPR's senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.

Always great to see you.

Domenico Montanaro, Political Editor, NPR:

Great to be with you.

Geoff Bennett:

So what's driving the increase in Americans who now say that violence might be necessary?

Domenico Montanaro:

Well, it's really fascinating because it went up 11 points. It's 30 points now in our poll for people who are saying that they might have to resort to violence to be able to get the country back on track.

It was 19 percent back in April of 2024. What's driving that here? Mostly Democrats. Only 12 percent of Democrats back in April of 2024 said that — said this. Now it's up to 28 percent, a huge jump, really, I mean, statistically very significant. But I will say that Republicans are still higher than Democrats. They're at 31 percent. So they also went up from 28 percent, about the same, but still a slight increase.

Even a quarter of independents are feeling this way now, having gone up seven points as well.

Geoff Bennett:

On the other hand, the poll also shows that most Americans, about 77 percent, say politically motivated violence is a major problem in this country. Another 18 percent agree that it's at least a minor problem.

What does that tell you about the general attitude?

Domenico Montanaro:

Yes, I mean, I think that clearly most people in the country don't think that this is something that should happen. They think that political violence is a major problem. They were split on which people are being more targeted, who they're more afraid are being targeted, public officials or protesters. People were basically split down the middle.

I found fascinating the split by age here. You had people who were under 45 years old who were 20 points more likely than those over 45 years old to say that resorting to violence was necessary. You also saw some splits by race as well, where you had people who are Black and Latino more likely to say that this was necessary potentially than whites.

And I think that it really speaks a lot to people who feel under threat in the country. And people feel under threat across the aisle for different reasons, right, whether they're targeted for hiring practices or feel like they don't have upward mobility or feeling like that the country's not going in the direction they want, in the way conservatives had viewed it before Donald Trump was in office.

In some senses, though, I feel like there's a failure of politics here overall, because, if you feel that politics, which is the only way to really create change in the country, is the way to make that change, then you don't feel this way. But when politics, people feel, has let them down, then you start to see these kinds of openings.

Geoff Bennett:

The poll also touched on how Americans feel about free speech, with the vast majority, 79 percent, feeling the country has gone too far in restricting it. What more should we know?

Domenico Montanaro:

Yes, I mean, I think that's a big thing, right?

Conservatives for a long time had said that they felt like their speech was being restricted on college campuses, online. And now, with everything that we have seen with comedian Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air and now back on the air after pressure from the Trump administration, everybody's got a gripe as far as whether or not they think the federal government is doing a good job or not.

And most people think that the federal government should basically stay out of it. I mean, when you look at the numbers here, only 15 percent say that the government should have a major role in deciding extreme speech; 44 percent say that it should have a minor role. The rest, 41 percent, say it should have no role at all.

Geoff Bennett:

What other takeaways from this poll strike you as interesting?

Domenico Montanaro:

Yes, I mean, there's a lot of fascinating pieces of the poll, I mean, I think, when it comes to speech and violence in particular.

They're somewhat connected, right? Because I think you have people who feel really just that they don't have the opportunity to say what they want to be able to say. A lot of Democrats now feel like speech is being restricted in places where it wasn't previously. And a lot of Republicans have just felt for a long time that they feel that — and Trump ran on this in 2015-2016, against political correctness, right?

And I think you're seeing people have different thoughts and different ideas about what defines what acceptable speech is in this country.

Geoff Bennett:

Domenico Montanaro, our thanks to you, as always.

Domenico Montanaro:

You're welcome.

And you can see the full results of our poll on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.

Listen to this Segment

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Watch the Full Episode

PBS NewsHour from Oct 01, 2025

8. ‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers

Our military must remain non-partisan. That must be non-negotiable.

‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers

The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.

NY Times · Helene Cooper · October 1, 2025

News analysis

The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.

Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

News analysis

The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.

Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Listen to this article · 13:07 min Learn more

By

Reporting from Washington

• Oct. 1, 2025

In the middle of Tuesday’s rambling speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, President Trump told hundreds of the country’s military commanders his latest thinking on where they should next set their sights.

Not Poland, or Romania, or Estonia or Denmark, all NATO allies where Russian drones have in the past month violated airspace in a challenge to the alliance’s borders.

The president chose San Francisco. Chicago. New York. Los Angeles.

“We’re going to straighten that out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Mr. Trump told the generals, admirals and enlisted leaders, referring to what he has described as crime-filled urban hellscapes.

“It’s a war from within,” he said.

In that moment, the president again pitted himself against the wishes of the country’s founding fathers, historians and former military leaders say.

Mr. Trump’s suggestion that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” is in tension with a core principle that the country’s armed services have long sought to preserve — that the military should be nonpartisan.

This principle, with its deep roots in American democratic traditions, is meant to ensure that the standing army initially feared by the country’s founding fathers serves the nation as a whole, and not one political party or leader.

That military was meant to be directed at foreign enemies, not the “enemy from within,” as Mr. Trump said on Tuesday.

‘A Fraught Moment’

Mr. Trump has tried this before.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Joseph Dunford, tried to prevent the president from using the military domestically to further his political agenda.

When Mr. Trump demanded a deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 military troops to fend off what he called a migrant “invasion” at the southwest border, Mr. Mattis responded by sending 6,000 National Guardsmen, and told them to make sure to stick to support roles and to steer clear of migrants.

When Mr. Trump wanted to send the 82nd Airborne onto the country’s streets during social justice protests, Mr. Esper called a news conference to announce his opposition, for which he was eventually fired.

Those men are now gone, and the men Mr. Trump has installed in their place in his second term have either amplified his wishes or bowed to them.

Gone too is the congressional opposition that blocked Mr. Trump during his first term. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and have acquiesced to all of Mr. Trump’s directives and appointments that relate to the American military.

The result: National Guard troops deployed in Washington against the wishes of the city’s elected leaders. Active-duty Marines sent to Los Angeles over the protests of the mayor and governor. Books by writers of color, including Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” banned from the library at the U.S. Naval Academy. A Pentagon leadership that refuses to promote decorated combat soldiers who served under men Mr. Trump dislikes. A plan to use military lawyers, known as JAGs, as immigration judges. And Mr. Trump’s promises to send National Guard troops to more American cities.

National Guard troops in Washington, where they were deployed against the wishes of the city’s elected leaders.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

“We genuinely are at a fraught moment,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

In her upcoming book, “The State and the Soldier,” Ms. Schake argues that after navigating more than two centuries of changing political winds, the American military is being challenged in ways that could redefine it.

Deploying troops inside the country as an arm of law enforcement is not what the founding fathers wanted, military historians say. They feared that the government could use a standing army to suppress dissent and establish tyranny.

Over 250 years, American political and military leaders built what is widely viewed as the world’s most competent fighting force. Its 1.3 million active-duty troops and 765,000 reserve and National Guard troops have answered to civilian leaders, whether Democrat of Republican, saluting whomever the American people elected as president.

But now the military, which has long prized its nonpartisan role in society, has a commander in chief who is not only breaking that tradition, but also targeting domestic, instead of foreign, threats.

“If I was the leader of the Polish military, and we’re getting Russian incursions into NATO territory, and I saw 800 American generals and admirals sitting in an auditorium listening to that speech, well, that would grate,” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, an Iraq war veteran who is retired. “Is the American military serious?”

A Tradition Rises

The Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law, generally bars active-duty forces from providing domestic law enforcement.

Essentially, it holds that the military should be pointed outward and not inward.

But its origins were less laudable. Congress passed the act to placate white supremacists in the South who didn’t want the military blocking state and local Jim Crow-era segregation laws.

The period after the Civil War was hugely tumultuous. The American government won the Civil War, but in many ways it lost the years that followed to white supremacists, who stripped Black Americans in the Southern states of their newfound rights.

National Guard troops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Southern states didn’t want federal troops coming in to protect Black people. Weary of the battle, and in an effort to appease the those states, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act.

Cleareyed Realists

The framers of the American Constitution were students of history, heavily shaped by the English Civil War, in which King Charles I asserted the divine right of kings, tried to rule without Parliament, and used his army against his own people.

The framers also were heavily influenced by the British military’s occupation of the colonies.

They were cleareyed about what they considered the biggest potential danger: that a standing army could be turned against the people it was supposed to protect.

But they were also realists and acknowledged the need for a military to defend the country.

“The continual necessity for his services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers. “The military state becomes elevated above the civil.”

America got its army, but the constitutional framers gave Congress, not the president, the power to raise and fund it. And they gave the Senate, through the “advice and consent” clause, the power to approve or reject the people appointed by the president to lead the military.

The founding fathers “took great pains to try and divide power, and to give so much of it to Congress,” said Carrie A. Lee, the former chair of the department of national security and strategy at the Army War College.

The framers, she and other historians said, sought to balance power between the two branches for a less partisan approach.

They may not have anticipated a Congress that would not use the power given to it.

To be sure, American history is full of examples of presidents using the military for domestic purposes.

President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1957, when he sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., where state National Guard troops were keeping nine Black students from entering school under the orders of the segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus.

Members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division outside Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the troops to protect nine Black students who were attending the previously all-white school.Credit...Associated Press

National Guard troops protecting civil rights activists during a march in Selma, Ala., in 1965. The troops were ordered there by President Lyndon B. Johnson.Credit...Associated Press

President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized National Guard troops in Alabama in 1965 to protect civil rights activists marching for voting rights after state and local police attacked previous marchers with billy clubs and tear gas.

In both cases, the presidents used the deployments to enforce the law. For Mr. Eisenhower, it was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. For Mr. Johnson, it was the Civil Rights Act, which legally ended segregation in public accommodations, employment and federally funded programs, and was the forerunner to the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress a few months later.

Mr. Trump argues that the National Guard is needed to help federal forces crack down on crime.

But those earlier instances were during periods of intense civil difficulty and danger — specific crises that precipitated the deployment of troops.

By contrast, Mr. Trump is ordering National Guard troops to cities that are not experiencing widespread civil disturbance, said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who has studied the military for decades.

“Since there is not the generalized breakdown in civil order, or a global crisis, that makes a nonpartisan case harder to make, and we’re left with the partisan interpretation,” he said. “And that is toxic for military professionalism because they do not want to be deployed in narrow partisan missions.”

A Defining Crisis

A crisis came just after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was a moment that led to what became a fundamental military norm: While you are in service you do not serve a political party, you serve the law of the land.

In Congress, Lincoln’s Republican Party sought to expand basic rights to the former slaves.

Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, requiring each state to pass the 14th Amendment. This was a direct message to still-rebellious Southern states that they would be considered only “military districts” unless they gave former slaves citizenship status.

But President Andrew Johnson, who was hostile toward former slaves and in favor of more lenient policies toward the Southern states, vetoed the act.

Congress overrode his veto.

Johnson worried that Ulysses S. Grant — the country’s most senior general, a man who was credited with winning the Civil War — would side with Congress. Grant was wildly more popular than Johnson.

Johnson tried to send him on a diplomatic mission to Mexico. In a testy cabinet meeting, Grant refused to go, arguing that as a military officer, he carried out only military orders from the president.

Johnson asked the attorney general for a ruling on the constitutionality of Grant’s refusing a direct order. The attorney general supported Grant’s position.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. Grant refused an order by President Andrew Johnson to go to Mexico on a diplomatic mission, saying that he only carried out military orders.Credit...Mathew Brady, via Library of Congress

With Johnson and Congress on a collision course, Grant was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering impeaching Johnson.

At its heart, this was a crisis over constitutional power, and Grant sided with Congress.

“When forced, he made the most democratic choice on the most fundamental issue, which is that, in peacetime, it is the Congress’s authority that is supreme in matters of military policy,” Ms. Schake said in an interview.

For his part, Grant also worried that Johnson was becoming authoritarian, writing that “we are fast approaching the point where he will want to declare the body (Congress) illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary.”

The significance of Grant’s break with Johnson lies in his interpretation of the limits on presidential authority over the military: While you are in service you do not serve a political party, you serve the law of the land.

Military policy and norms evolved from Grant’s example. The military discourages political rallies in front of troops, and those on active duty are urged to avoid partisan politics. Political affiliation is not supposed to be a factor in the vetting of senior officers.

Many military leaders say one big reason the American public regards its military so highly is that troops are usually not seen as advancing political agendas.

Using the military in partisan domestic matters “detracts from much-needed focus on 21st century warfighting challenges,” said Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired deputy judge advocate general in the military. “China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and others aren’t going to be deterred by battalions of immigration judges or troops who are occupied by immigration duties on city streets instead of the harsh environs of the National Training Center preparing to fight a peer competitor in high-intensity combat.”

At the gathering on Tuesday, Mr. Trump looked into the crowd of military commanders and spoke about his vision for the future.

“You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there,” Mr. Trump said.

“With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom.”

Top military officials listening to President Trump’s speech in Quantico, Va., on Tuesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

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

See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Department of Defense, Donald Trump

NY Times · Helene Cooper · October 1, 2025

9. IWC Launches Its First Course on Irregular Warfare Approaches for the Homeland

​The Department of War's Irregular Warfare Center read the tea leaves on the forthcoming NDS and is shifting to the homeland. Do we want to conduct irregular warfare in the homeland?

Excerpts:

IW110 capitalizes on the IWC educational successes with the introductory IW101 course and advanced IW201 course, which have gained over 2,600 enrollments. This latest IWC course is specifically designed for Homeland Defense and Homeland Security professionals in the Department of War and interagency partners at the Federal, State and local levels. However, as an unclassified resource, it is also open to anyone interested in understanding how irregular warfare approaches can be employed to better protect our citizens and critical infrastructure.

This course helps realize the intent of the 2020 National Defense Strategy IW Annex to institutionalize and operationalize IW as a core competency for the U.S. military, as well as fulfill the Irregular Warfare Center's (IWC) Congressionally mandated mission in Title 10 §345 "to serve as a central mechanism for developing the irregular warfare knowledge of the Department of War and advancing the understanding of irregular warfare concepts and doctrine" and "coordinating and aligning Department education curricula, standards, and objectives related to irregular warfare."

IWC Launches Its First Course on Irregular Warfare Approaches for the Homeland

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/549811/iwc-launches-its-first-course-irregular-warfare-approaches-homeland

dvidshub.net

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES

09.22.2025

Courtesy Story

Irregular Warfare Center

ARLINGTON, VA — The Department of War Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) announced the launch of its newest online course, Irregular Warfare (IW) 110: IW Approaches for Homeland Security and Defense, available now to homeland defense and homeland security professionals as of September 22, 2025.

According to national security experts, the U.S. homeland is under persistent unconventional attack in the ‘gray zone’ short of war from both threat nations like China as well as non-state actors such as transnational criminal organizations (TCO) and foreign terrorist organizations (FTO).

IW110 is a four-hour long self-paced virtual course about how the homeland can be better secured and how to defend the U.S. homeland using approaches such as countering threat networks, counter threat finance, and military counterterrorism techniques. Additionally, IW-110 explains how IW concepts like total /comprehensive defense, and countering hybrid threats can offer effective practices to establish a whole-of-society defense posture to increase resiliency against U.S. adversary activities in this gray zone.

The course is built with interactive courseware that integrates text, graphics, video and other media to enhance learning and encourage participants engagement. The course focuses on three objectives including Describe the current Homeland Security and Homeland Defense environment, identify irregular threats to the U.S. homeland from state and non-state actors, and examine the application of IW approaches/activities domestically to counter diverse threats to the homeland. The course includes five core sections and concludes with a final exam that must be passed to receive a completion certificate.

IW110 capitalizes on the IWC educational successes with the introductory IW101 course and advanced IW201 course, which have gained over 2,600 enrollments. This latest IWC course is specifically designed for Homeland Defense and Homeland Security professionals in the Department of War and interagency partners at the Federal, State and local levels. However, as an unclassified resource, it is also open to anyone interested in understanding how irregular warfare approaches can be employed to better protect our citizens and critical infrastructure.

This course helps realize the intent of the 2020 National Defense Strategy IW Annex to institutionalize and operationalize IW as a core competency for the U.S. military, as well as fulfill the Irregular Warfare Center's (IWC) Congressionally mandated mission in Title 10 §345 "to serve as a central mechanism for developing the irregular warfare knowledge of the Department of War and advancing the understanding of irregular warfare concepts and doctrine" and "coordinating and aligning Department education curricula, standards, and objectives related to irregular warfare."

Irregular Warfare 110 is hosted in two virtual offerings including the Center for Homeland Defense and Security self-study courses website. Registration and access information are available on our website https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/education/irregular-warfare-110/

For more news and information about the IWC follow us on social media and subscribe to our DVIDS feed at:

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/irregularwarfarecenter/?viewAsMember=true

X (former Twitter) https://x.com/IrregularWarCtr

10. ‘Warrior ethos’ mistakes military might for true security − and ignores the wisdom of Eisenhower

Others might argue this:

“It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.” — Miyamoto Musashi​

Excerpts:

Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense into the Department of War signals a shift toward framing U.S. power primarily in terms of military force. Such a framing emphasizes the use of violence as the principal means of solving problems and equates hostility and aggression with leadership.

Yet historical experience shows that military dominance alone has not translated into strategic success. That’s the mindset that lost the U.S. endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed in interventions in Libya and Syria – conflicts that altogether cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while leaving the country less secure and eroding its international legitimacy.

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower said, can compel the proper balance between military power and peaceful goals.

The very title of my and my co-author’s book comes from the Gospel of Matthew – Chapter 26, verse 52 – that “to live by the sword is to die by the sword.” Throughout modern history, true security has come from diplomacy, international law, economic development and investments in health care and education. Not from an imaginary “warrior ethos.”

America, I would argue, doesn’t need a Department of War. It needs leaders who understand, as Eisenhower did, that living by the sword will doom us all in the end. Real security comes from the quiet power that builds legitimacy and lasting peace. The U.S. can choose again to embody those strengths, to lead not by fear but by example.

‘Warrior ethos’ mistakes military might for true security − and ignores the wisdom of Eisenhower

Author

1. Monica Duffy Toft
2. Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Disclosure statement

Monica Duffy Toft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

theconversation.com · Monica Duffy Toft

Hundreds of generals and admirals converged on Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 30, 2025, after being summoned from across the globe by their boss, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, for a session that, as expected, covered what Hegseth often describes as the “warrior ethos.”

Listening quietly, they heard Hegseth promise to make the military “stronger, tougher, faster, fiercer and more powerful than it has ever been before,” and declare that he would fix “decades of decay” in the military.

President Donald Trump spoke for more than an hour in a political speech that derided presidents who came before him. He asserted that “political correctness” would be banished from the military.

The meeting came soon after Trump’s Sept. 5 executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” With that change, Trump reverted the department to a name not used since the 1940s.

The change represents far more than rebranding – it signals an escalation in the administration’s embrace of a militaristic mindset that, as long ago as 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, and that the nation’s founders deliberately aimed to constrain.

The timing of this name change feels particularly notable when considered alongside recent reporting revealing secret U.S. military operations. In 2019, a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs crept ashore in North Korea on a mission to plant a listening device during high-stakes nuclear talks. The risks were enormous: Discovery could have sparked a hostage crisis or even war with a nuclear-armed foe.

That such an operation was approved by Trump in his first term at all exemplifies an increasingly reckless militarism that has defined American foreign policy for decades. That militarism is the very subject of my book, “Dying by the Sword.”

Further, the name change was announced just days after Trump authorized a U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat that the administration claimed was carrying drug-laden cargo and linked to the Tren de Aragua cartel. The strike killed 11 people. The administration justified the killings by labeling them “narcoterrorists.”

The U.S. has beefed up military exercises in Puerto Rico during a campaign in the Southern Caribbean against boats suspected of transporting illegal drugs. Miguel J. Rodríguez Carrillo/Getty Images

Abandoning restraint – deliberately

The Department of War existed from 1789 until 1947, when Congress passed the National Security Act reorganizing the armed services into the National Military Establishment. Just two years later, lawmakers amended the act, renaming the institution the Department of Defense.

Officials disliked the “NME” acronym – which sounded uncomfortably like “enemy” – but the change was not only about appearances.

In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. leaders wanted to emphasize a defensive rather than aggressive military posture as they entered the Cold War, a decades-long standoff between the United States and Soviet Union defined by a nuclear arms race, ideological rivalry and proxy wars short of direct great-power conflict.

The new emphasis also dovetailed with the new U.S. grand strategy in foreign affairs – diplomat George F. Kennan’s containment strategy, which aimed to prevent the expansion of Soviet power and communist ideology around the world.

Kennan’s approach narrowly survived a push to a more aggressive “rollback” strategy of the Soviet Union from its occupation and oppression of central and eastern Europe. It evolved instead into a long game: a team effort to keep the adversary from expanding to enslave other peoples, leading to the adversary’s collapse and disintegration without risking World War III.

On the ground, this meant fewer preparations for war and more emphasis on allies and intelligence, and foreign aid and trade, along with the projection of defensive strength. The hope was that shaping the environment rather than launching attacks would cause Moscow’s influence to wither. To make this strategy viable, the U.S. military itself had to be reorganized.

In a 1949 address before Congress, President Harry S. Truman described the reorganization sparked by the 1947 legislation as a “unification” of the armed forces that would bring efficiency and coordination.

But a deeper purpose was philosophical: to project America’s military power as defensive and protective, and for Truman, strengthening civilian oversight.

The wisdom of this restraint is clearest in Eisenhower’s farewell address of January 1961.

In less than 10 minutes, the former five-star general who had commanded Allied forces to victory in World War II cautioned Americans against the rise of a “military-industrial complex.” He acknowledged that the nation’s “arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,” but warned that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Creating new enemies, destabilizing regions

The risky North Korean team mission by the Navy SEALs illustrates how America’s militaristic approach often produces the very dangers it aspires to deter.

Rather than enhancing diplomacy, the operation risked derailing talks and escalating conflict. This is the central argument of my book: America’s now-reflexive reliance on armed force doesn’t make America great again or more secure. It makes the country less secure, by creating new enemies, destabilizing regions and diverting resources from the true foundations of security.

It also makes the U.S less admired and respected. The State Department budget continues to be dwarfed by the Department of War’s budget, with the former never reaching more than 5.5% of the latter. And the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, once the leading arm of U.S. soft power as quiet purveyor development aid around the world, is now shuttered.

Today’s Pentagon budget exceeds anything Eisenhower could have imagined.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech, delivered on Jan. 17, 1961, in which he warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex.”

Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense into the Department of War signals a shift toward framing U.S. power primarily in terms of military force. Such a framing emphasizes the use of violence as the principal means of solving problems and equates hostility and aggression with leadership.

Yet historical experience shows that military dominance alone has not translated into strategic success. That’s the mindset that lost the U.S. endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed in interventions in Libya and Syria – conflicts that altogether cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while leaving the country less secure and eroding its international legitimacy.

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower said, can compel the proper balance between military power and peaceful goals.

The very title of my and my co-author’s book comes from the Gospel of Matthew – Chapter 26, verse 52 – that “to live by the sword is to die by the sword.” Throughout modern history, true security has come from diplomacy, international law, economic development and investments in health care and education. Not from an imaginary “warrior ethos.”

America, I would argue, doesn’t need a Department of War. It needs leaders who understand, as Eisenhower did, that living by the sword will doom us all in the end. Real security comes from the quiet power that builds legitimacy and lasting peace. The U.S. can choose again to embody those strengths, to lead not by fear but by example.

This story has been updated to reflect the Pentagon meeting in Quantico, Virginia.

theconversation.com · Monica Duffy Toft

11. Hegseth at Quantico: Directives or Drama?

I think September 30th will be remembered as an inflection point for the US military.

I think this is an objective critique: substance versus presentation.

However, Mark failed to include north Korea. :-) . Do not forget the Dark Quad (CRInK)

The Old and Bold

Hegseth at Quantico

Directives or Drama?

https://vaberet.substack.com/p/hegseth-at-quantico?utm

The Old and Bold

Oct 01, 2025

I was in a discussion with some of my comrades and contemporaries shortly after the Secretary of Defense (I refuse to use “Secretary of War” until someone makes that official) gave his speech at Quantico. I am going to decouple SecDef’s speech from President Trump’s speech as I think they offer two very different messages and potential outcomes. This paper focuses only on SecDef’s speech and its implications.

I somewhat flippantly said in my conversation with these barrel-chested freedom fighters that, “Haircuts, beards, and PT tests seem a bit below the SecDef’s pay grade.” I was rightly taken to task by these guys who said, “We’ve seen standards slip and standards are set at the top. This needed to be face-to-face to get the message across.” However, I still believe that this meeting was more about theater than substance. Many of the messages were solid. However, if you don’t trust your leadership to listen to you on a secure VTC from their warfighting headquarters…well, you have more serious problems than the length of your hair.

Setting the Stage at Quantico

So on September 30th, Hegseth stood in front of America’s generals and admirals at Quantico and delivered a speech he clearly wanted remembered as a “reset.” He rolled out ten “directives” designed to restore discipline, cut bureaucracy, and re-center the force on lethality. The message? Trim your hair, shave your beard, toughen the standards, stop worrying about EO complaints, and let commanders lead without fear. It was blunt, delivered with flourish, and heavy on the warrior ethos.

For those of us who wore the uniform, a lot of what he said strikes a chord. Nobody misses mandatory online training modules. Nobody wants commanders paralyzed by frivolous complaints. Standards do matter, and when they slip, the culture slides with them. But beneath the hard talk was a curious silence—the kind of silence that matters more than the words.

The Missing Adversary

What jumped out most was not what Hegseth said, but what he didn’t. Not once did he meaningfully address the three pacing threats facing the United States: China, Russia, and Iran. The elephant in the room was left to graze in peace.

That omission is glaring. If you are going to gather every four-star and three-star in the country, shouldn’t you be talking about how to deter a Chinese move on Taiwan, how to reinforce NATO against Russia, or how to prevent Iran from reaching breakout capability? Desert Storm anecdotes may fire up a crowd, but Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran are not Saddam’s army. Missing that chance was not just a rhetorical oversight; it was a wasted opportunity to orient the entire leadership corps on the challenges that matter most.

Warrior Ethos vs. the Gray Zone

Hegseth’s emphasis on “warrior ethos” is fine as far as it goes. A disciplined force with high standards will always be more cohesive and effective. But when he invoked Desert Storm as a golden age, he missed the point. Desert Storm was a conventional, high-end war where overwhelming American technology and firepower crushed a second-rate army in weeks.

That is not the war we’re going to fight next. The real contests are unfolding in the gray zone—irregular warfare, multidomain competition, information operations, proxy fights, economic coercion. The Chinese aren’t going to roll tanks across the Fulda Gap. They’re going to use cyber, lawfare, maritime militias, economic leverage, and influence campaigns to bend the environment in their favor. The Russians have already mastered this blend in Ukraine, using irregular formations, drones, disinformation, and cyber as much as tanks and artillery.

If we think high-and-tight haircuts and the male push-up standard will prepare us for that fight, we are kidding ourselves. Warrior ethos matters, but ethos without adaptability is nostalgia. Desert Storm’s army would be poorly suited to today’s battlefields, yet Hegseth seemed intent on resurrecting it.

History gives us a warning here: in the 1960s, Robert McNamara convinced himself that wars could be reduced to quantifiable systems analysis. Metrics replaced strategy, and America found itself bogged down in Vietnam. In the 2000s, Donald Rumsfeld’s “transformation” rhetoric focused on a lighter, more agile force—great on PowerPoint, less great in the streets of Baghdad where IEDs shredded Humvees. Both men mistook form for substance. Hegseth’s speech risks falling into the same trap.

“Focus on the Little Things”

Another dangerous undertone in the speech was the suggestion that if senior leaders just get the small stuff right—fitness tests, grooming standards, beard bans—the big things will take care of themselves. That kind of message undervalues senior leadership and oversimplifies the problems we face. Generals and admirals are not squad leaders. Their job is to think about logistics in a war with China, contested deployments to Europe, resilience in space and cyber, and the integration of allies and partners into coalition operations.

Telling flag officers to fixate on the little things might sound like accountability, but it is short-sighted. It risks distracting strategic leaders from the real questions: Are we postured in the Pacific correctly? Can we sustain the fight against a peer adversary? Do we have the industrial base to absorb attrition in a long war? Those questions will not be answered by beard length or the number of sit-ups in a PT test.

Eisenhower didn’t win in Europe by worrying about how many push-ups his generals could do. He won by mastering the flow of men and materiel across the Atlantic. Strategy, not surface-level discipline, is what counts at the highest levels.

Purges by Another Name

The most troubling note was the hint at a review of senior officer records to identify who “just followed orders” on DEI programs and who “embraced them.” That sounds like a loyalty test, and it’s a lousy way to build a professional officer corps. Obedience to civilian authority is the foundation of military professionalism. Officers carried out lawful directives, whether they liked them or not, because that’s what the system demands.

To now suggest that some should be punished for doing their jobs too well, or too faithfully, is corrosive. It politicizes the military, incentivizes partisanship, and turns promotion boards into ideological tribunals. If every administration digs into files to find out who saluted hardest on the last set of policies, we will hollow out the very apolitical ethos that keeps the military stable.

Again, history offers a cautionary tale. The Soviet Union’s purges of senior officers in the 1930s left the Red Army brittle and leaderless just as Hitler’s Wehrmacht was gearing up for war. No, Hegseth is not Stalin. But any system that evaluates officers on ideological enthusiasm rather than professional competence is walking down a dangerous road.

Directives or Theater?

Here’s the real irony—some of Hegseth’s reforms actually make sense. Streamlining the EO process, reforming the IG so it can’t be weaponized, cutting down on mandatory busywork training—these would make life better for commanders and troops alike. But those ideas were buried under the more theatrical headlines: male-only combat standards, grooming rules, DEI purges. The applause lines drowned out the policy substance.

And that’s the core problem: instead of laying out a coherent strategy for great-power competition, Hegseth gave us a culture war rally. It may earn him points on television, but it does little to prepare the force for China in the Pacific, Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East.

Conclusion: The Questions Still Unasked

The ten directives will change the daily rhythm of the force. Soldiers will shave closer, run harder, and probably spend less time on PowerPoints. That’s not bad. But none of it answers the bigger questions about how we man, train, and equip the military for the wars of tomorrow.

The generals and admirals at Quantico did not need a lecture about lethality. They know it matters. What they needed was a plan—how to posture forces in the Indo-Pacific, how to sustain a protracted conflict in Europe, how to harden against cyber and space disruption. Instead, they got a performance heavy on symbolism, light on strategy.

Culture wars may energize an audience. They may even polish the image of the military in the public eye. But culture wars don’t deter China, they don’t hold the line in Ukraine, and they don’t stop Iran’s centrifuges from spinning. History teaches us that when leaders mistake style for substance, the military pays the price—in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in every war where illusions of control collided with reality. If we don’t learn that lesson, we’ll repeat it.

That said, I’ll give Hegseth this: standing in front of his generals and admirals and delivering the message face-to-face, “mano a mano,” does make it more powerful. Leadership presence matters, and sometimes the act of showing up and looking your subordinates in the eye can carry more weight than anything written in a memo or said over VTC. Standards, discipline, and ethos are not trivial. The SecDef wanted to draw a line in the sand, and he did.

But here’s the counterpoint. Hegseth is still a political appointee with far less operational experience than the men and women he was lecturing. That’s not a disqualifier—it’s the nature of civilian control of the military. But it does mean he has to be careful about how he uses moments like this. A real interactive strategy session—one that invited these senior leaders into the conversation about emerging global challenges—would have been far more powerful than a show about haircuts and push-ups. Theatrics may grab headlines, but substance changes history.

By choosing theater over dialogue, Hegseth squandered an opportunity to galvanize his senior leadership around the real threats we face: China’s gray-zone maneuvers in the Pacific, Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine and probing of NATO, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. His presence made the moment strong. His message made it small. And in an era when the United States faces competitors who are playing a long, ruthless game, we cannot afford to confuse appearances for strategy.

Postscript: The Silence That Spoke Loudest

By sidestepping the pacing threats of China, Russia, and Iran, the SecDef left a vacuum. The President immediately filled it, framing the danger not as Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran, but as “the threat from within.” He drove the point home by leaning heavily on the oath to defend against enemies “foreign and domestic”—with the emphasis, again and again, on domestic.

That is a dangerous connection. When the Secretary of Defense avoids naming our adversaries abroad and the Commander-in-Chief defines the battlefield as inside our own borders, the warrior’s focus shifts from deterring real enemies to policing political ones. It’s not strategy—it’s a warning flare. And if we don’t call it out now, we may wake up one day to find the world’s most powerful military turned inward at precisely the moment its strength is most needed abroad.

12. An Inflection Point for Information Operations Officers

​When will we learn to lead with influence?

And we should remember that all warfare is cognitive but not all warfare is kinetic.

Excerpts:

The problem facing the Army’s IO community is not whether it should support lethal combat power—it already does. Nor whether MILDEC deserves status as a distinct full-time specialty—it should. The problem lies deeper: an entrenched belief that IO officers exist chiefly to serve lethal operations. This orthodoxy reflects the historical pattern of aligning innovation with firepower and relegating information, ironically, to secondary status in the very battles it is meant to shape. This has produced several consequences. First, it left IO officers uncertain of their value to the commander and staff. Second, it rendered the information domain abstract—vague in definition and vulnerable to varied interpretations—resulting in confusion over its precise role in warfare. Finally, the effectiveness of IO was frequently perceived as a derivative, valued mainly for its utility in enabling or supporting lethal operations, rather than as a capability with intrinsic operational merit. Fundamentally, it generated a false certainty of prioritizing non-lethal operations when it was not.

This persistent approach has produced a contradiction that the IO community has inherited and cannot seem to escape. It may be framed as a single pointed question: What unique skills do IO officers possess—skills not found among experienced officers in other information organizations, such as cyber, military information support to operations, space, and electronic warfare—that justify the millions of dollars invested to sustain the profession? From brigade to division to theater to joint, information chiefs have consistently come from other information MOSs or FAs who have nonetheless executed information activities of extraordinary complexity in both war and peace. The result is a harsh reality: the distinctiveness of IO officers continues to fade. While every other Army information organization has a clearly defined principal task and purpose in doctrine—and still manages to perform S&I functions—IO remains doctrinally ambiguous, undermining its perceived value and institutional relevance. The solution is long overdue: IO officers should assume their rightful role as MILDEC officers. This is the IO community’s subtle yet critical inflection point.

An Inflection Point for Information Operations Officers

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/02/an-inflection-point-for-information-operations-officers/

by Peter Wilcox

|

10.02.2025 at 06:00am

In the 1990s, Andrew Grove introduced the phrase strategic inflection point to describe a decisive juncture in an organization’s life, when subtle yet cumulative shifts in the environment converge that demand transformation. Institutions must either adapt to these emerging realities or risk drifting toward irrelevance. The most capable of leaders accept the risks required to guide the organization toward renewal, while those who resist change often preside over stagnation and decline. Grove’s concept finds parallel in Carl von Clausewitz’s coup d’œil—that intuitive “glance” which cuts through the fog of war. For Clausewitz, “resolution, presence of mind, and the lessons of history” were indispensable for any commander striving for clarity amid the most difficult circumstances. Likewise, institutions at inflection points require this type of discernment.

The Problem

Today, the Army’s information dominance community stands at a strategic inflection point—a moment demanding a reexamination of how it defines the role for Information Operations (IO) officers. Since Field Manual 100-6’s publication in 1996, each doctrinal revision—including Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-13, Information—has cast IO officers chiefly as “synchronizers” and “integrators” (S&I) of information capabilities and organizations, subordinated to the lethal arc of combat power while neglecting the non-lethal. The result, even after five iterations, is a doctrine still groping for coherence. As U.S. Army Colonel Sarah White observes:

The service has cycled and recycled through numerous attempts at doctrinal codification, and yet it seems to be in much the same place in 2023 [and I would argue 2025] as it was in the early 1990s: aware that the information revolution means something for warfare, yet unsure of what that something is, what it should be called, and what is the appropriate doctrinal response.

This essay contends that the Army should reconceive IO officers primarily as a unit’s chief military deception officer (CMDO)—responsible for deception at the core, while secondarily supporting lethal operations. Such a shift would restore military deception (MILDEC) to its rightful place as a significant combat power enabler in large-scale, joint, and multi-domain operations. It would also bring much-needed clarity as to what exactly the task and purpose of Army IO officers are.

Combat Power and Information’s Perceived Role in Warfare

For most of human history, warfare took place on battlefields defined by geography. With adequate intelligence, commanders could fix the enemy’s position, gauge his strength, and, by uniting speed, mobility, and firepower, bring him to decisive defeat. Strength was measured in “combat power” – “the total means of destructive, constructive, and informational capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a given time” to impose its will on the enemy. However, upon close examination, the Army’s present conception, though expedient, flattens the term’s historical depth. It implies that non-lethal effects developed alongside lethal ones and held equal weight—an assumption belied by history. Figure 1 is a more apt description of how the Army has historically viewed the role of information. Information appears not as a core element but as a supporting function subordinated to lethal operations, stripped of its independent strategic role.

Figure 1: ADP 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, July, 2019.

This conceptual lineage reaches back to the late 1960s, when Army leaders, enthralled by the promise of emerging information technologies, advanced the vision of an “electronic battlefield.” General Westmoreland, for instance, foresaw that advanced networks and communication sensors could secure U.S. forces a decisive edge, neutralizing adversaries without dependence on conventional fixed-target methods. He articulated this vision in these terms:

On the battlefield of the future…enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of datalinks, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation and automated fire-control. With first-round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition physically will be less important.

Moreover, he continued by stating that, “I see battlefields or combat areas that are under 24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types,” and “I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower.”

Westmoreland’s observations epitomize the Army’s prevailing mindset: information technologies are conceived chiefly as instruments to extend lethal effects within the physical domain—a narrow perspective that still casts its shadow over contemporary doctrinal thought. The Army’s AirLand Battle (ALB) doctrine of the 1980s extended Westmoreland’s vision, asserting that information and sensor technologies could yield “timely information about deep enemy” formations to enable “wide-ranging surveillance, target acquisition,” and battlefield awareness. Seeking to offset the Soviet Union’s numerical conventional force superiority through technological advantage, the Army embraced ALB as a novel form of warfare—one that harnessed information technology as a decisive instrument of operational power.

The Army’s shift from using information technologies merely to augment lethality toward creating dedicated information units first took shape in the Force XXI initiative of 1994—a formative recognition of information as an operational domain. Its Experimental Force (EXFOR), 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Hood, tested digitized systems at the National Training Center, demonstrating how integrated networks and advanced communications could deliver real-time intelligence and sharpen command, control, and lethality. Drawing upon ALB principles, Force XXI sought to dominate the information environment by harnessing “the power of information and technology” and integrating “unprecedented battle command capabilities,” thereby creating a force “more lethal, more mobile, and more survivable.”

After Force XXI, the Army created the Land Information Warfare Activity and later the 1st Information Operations Command, its premier land-based IO unit. Since the mid-1990s, IO officers have served on headquarters staff at every echelon—brigade, division, corps, and even joint forces. Throughout, the Army has tended to regard information technologies, organizations, and its practitioners not as independent instruments of influence, but as auxiliaries to lethal combat power. This mindset has shaped subsequent doctrine, culminating in ADP 3-13 Information, which, though invoking “information advantages” as central to multidomain operations, remains anchored primarily to support lethal operations.

Combat Power: Lethal and Non-Lethal Arcs

These claims require a deeper grasp of the primary components of combat power. In concrete terms, combat power evolved along two fundamental arcs: the lethal, rooted in the physical domain, and the non-lethal, grounded in the informational and cognitive domains.

Figure 2: Elements of Lethal and Non-Lethal Combat Power

These two arcs are not antithetical but mutually integrative, evolving and interacting at varying rates and degrees. Though they represent distinct poles of development, they remain bound together by a constellation of Army military occupational specialties (MOS) and functional areas (FA), each designed to generate or sustain combat power for the commander.

The lethal arc of combat power, first to evolve, centers on the exploitation of force in the physical domain: movement and maneuver, fires, protection, sustainment, intelligence—all directed by sound leadership. Paradoxically, although indispensable, its evolution has long relied on information technologies and, later, information organizations.

The non-lethal arc of combat power emerged later, centered on information technologies and organizations: information operations, cyber and electronic warfare, military information support operations, civil affairs, public affairs, and space. These seek to communicate, influence, and generate cognitive effects by informational means. The key takeaway – in no small part due to the information revolution of the late 20th century – is that these information organizations gave birth to the latent potential that is inherent in the Army’s existing information MOSs and FAs, which is that their primary effects are most profoundly displayed in the non-lethal domain rather than its lethal counterpart.

Bearing the above in mind, the belief that combat power is solely lethal is no longer tenable. It is an outdated paradigm entrenched in the Army’s doctrinal culture. The non-lethal arc of combat power has matured to the point that it no longer needs to subordinate itself to lethal operations. Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and sensing, and information organizations have reshaped war’s character independent of the lethal arc. As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General (Ret.) Mark Milley observed:

As these information technologies mature and their military applications become clearer, the impacts have the potential to revolutionize battlefields, unlike anything since the integration of machine guns, tanks, and aviation, which began the era of combined arms warfare.

To be sure, wars cannot be waged exclusively by non-lethal means. Yet it is equally misguided to relegate them to mere auxiliaries for lethal operations. And while today’s conception of combat power rightly includes information, it remains framed by assumptions dating back to the late 1930s, when the term first entered Army doctrine. Then, as now, information was viewed less as an independent force of strategic consequence than as a subsidiary, valued only for its utility to lethal operations. Such conceptual inertia blinds the Army to warfare’s shifting character—one increasingly defined not by destruction, but by influence, perception, and cognitive dominance.

The Army must regard non-lethal capabilities as an equal and complementary partner to the lethal arc of combat power. This requires acknowledging the distinct role of information MOSs and FAs, whose effects lie chiefly in the informational and cognitive domains. Breaking entrenched habits means institutionalizing non-lethal operations in training, exercises, and doctrine. For IO officers, it demands a reorientation: to serve as the synchronizing hub—principally for MILDEC—while integrating, for example, with maneuver as required. Without such a shift, IO officers will remain undervalued, condemned to repeat what is rather than advance what ought to be.

What is Military Deception in Reality?

Military deception (MILDEC) is the deliberate persuasion of an adversary to accept false information. Its purpose is to mislead hostile decision-makers—military, paramilitary, or irregular—into actions, or inaction, that serve friendly aims. At heart, it is the art of embedding convincing fiction within the enemy’s reality. MILDEC may distort the enemy’s perception through ambiguity, drain its resources, expose positions or capabilities, feign intentions, or orchestrate behaviors that advance operational design. Rooted in strategy, practiced in secrecy, and executed for effect, MILDEC is the calculated manipulation of perception in service of decisive information advantages.

The significance of MILDEC in warfare is undisputedly rich. From the earliest chronicles of war, deception has stood as a constant companion to victory—at times the decisive stroke that delivered success, at others the silent partner that enabled it. Examples abound, but the following stand out as particularly notable.

• 1943- Operation Mincemeat: The British employed deception operations to disguise the Allied Forces ‘ invasions of Sicily.
• 1944- Operation Fortitude South: Allied forces crafted an extensive deception operation designed to convince Germany that the invasion would occur at Pas de Calais, while the actual assault was planned for Normandy.
• 1968- Tet Offensive: North Vietnam employed deception to convince U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to expect limited rural attacks, while concealing their broader plans to conduct nationwide urban military operations.
• 1990- Desert Storm “Left Hook”: Coalition forces employed deception to fix the attention of senior Iraqi generals and Saddam Hussein on the Marine Corps amphibious assault unfolding along Kuwait’s borders, while simultaneously concealing their main conventional ground offensive. This main effort ultimately swept westward through the desert, outflanking Saddam’s army.
• 2023- Hamas deceived Israel by projecting a reluctance for direct conflict, cultivating an image of a war-weary adversary, all while secretly preparing for a large-scale assault.
• 2024- Israel executed deception against Hezbollah’s leaders using rigged pagers and walkie-talkies with explosives disguised as communication devices.
• 2025- Operation “Spider Web”: Ukraine infiltrated more than 100 drones deep into Russian territory to destroy their numerous nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

These examples yield several reflections on the nature of deception common to successful cases. First, deception targets adversarial decision-maker(s). As Walter Jajko, a statesman and military strategist, observed: “the decisive battlespace is the adversarial decisionmaker’s mind”. For example, Fortitude South’s primary target, Hitler; Operation Desert Storm, Hussein, and senior military commanders; October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Israeli Senior commanders, and potentially the Prime Minister himself. MILDEC, therefore, seeks to manipulate awareness, understanding, judgment, or perception to advance the commander’s objective. The goal of MILDEC is to influence the enemy decision-makers’ six inches of gray matter—compelling them to act, or refrain, in ways that align with friendly operational design. Second, because deception is psychological, information advantage activities that neglect the enemy’s mind rarely yield decisive victory. Just as maneuver forces are employed against enemy formations, so too must the commander employ his CMDO to target the adversary’s mind. Who today in the Army commits themselves full-time to mastering this art? Very few.

Recommendations for the IO Community

Start with the obvious: no branch or functional area is better suited to study, train, and execute MILDEC than IO officers. If the Army insists IO officers are in the business of “influence,” it should admit that, in military terms, influence chiefly means deception. While ADP 3-13, Information, acknowledges that every action exerts some form of “influence,” this broad logic dilutes the IO officer’s purpose, stretching the role of information to the point of absurdity. IO officers require focus, and that focus should be MILDEC.

Second, history offers ample evidence that MILDEC should not be reduced to a mere Army additional skill identifier. MILDEC is a discipline demanding mastery of how people think—their habits, weaknesses, predispositions. It is a science of the mind. It requires full-time specialists trained not only in modern tools of deception but also grounded in theory, history, and practice. Here, IO officers should find purpose. Yet too often, they are stretched across civil affairs, cyber, space, psychological operations, and other information domains already manned with subject-matter experts. The result is one of redundancy, confusion, and dilution of effort. Meanwhile, MILDEC languishes without a dedicated training pipeline or sufficient resources.

Third, IO practitioners’ enduring reliance on S&I to support lethal operations reveals something more fundamental: they are a natural fit for MILDEC. MILDEC thrives on coordination—across domains, disciplines, and organizations. IO officers accustomed to S&I influence activities in support of lethal operations are ideal for this task.

Fourth, it is time to discard the imprecise title “IO officer” and replace it with what it should have been all along: “deception officer.” Since the term entered the Army’s lexicon in the early 1990s, the Army has wrestled with its meaning. The term lacks precision and is devoid of any real, meaningful specifics. Like a chameleon, the term has come to assume a purpose and function that has meant everything and nothing– defined not by consensus, but by what units believed the function of IO officers to be. Deception, by contrast, is plainspoken, with a lineage as old as war itself. To call an officer a “deception officer” is to define his purpose clearly on a unit’s staff—a clarity long overdue.

Fifth, the Army must undertake a comprehensive review across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy to assess CMDO requirements of multi-domain operations above brigade level. This analysis must tackle today’s chaotic information ecosystem, the corrosive impact of social media on readiness, unclear legal authorities for employing deception, and the necessity for partnering with academia and industry on emerging capabilities. Amid pervasive misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, full-time MILDEC practitioners are essential to mission success.

Sixth, the IO schoolhouse must overhaul its curriculum—elevating MILDEC and operations security as the profession’s core pillars. Deception officers should also train in special technical operations, special access programs, and the legal authorities that govern them. The schoolhouse should further propose to the Command and General Staff College an intensive information-centric planning course, modeled after the School of Advanced Military Studies (or SAMS), to cultivate rigorous thinking. Information professionals, such as public affairs, psychological operations, cyber, and electronic warfare, would benefit from a systematic study of operational art in applying information power to combat power. Their education should finally reflect that imperative.

Finally, non-lethal boards and bureaus should focus chiefly on supporting deception. Their primary duty must be the orchestration of MILDEC plans, with maneuver support secondary. This is neither a slight to lethal combat power nor an effort to elevate the non-lethal above it. Rather, it reflects a shift in modern war: generating combat power now spans the informational as much as the physical. In doing so, it not only adapts but maximizes the reach and effectiveness of its informational arsenal, leveraging organizations built to influence.

Conclusion

The problem facing the Army’s IO community is not whether it should support lethal combat power—it already does. Nor whether MILDEC deserves status as a distinct full-time specialty—it should. The problem lies deeper: an entrenched belief that IO officers exist chiefly to serve lethal operations. This orthodoxy reflects the historical pattern of aligning innovation with firepower and relegating information, ironically, to secondary status in the very battles it is meant to shape. This has produced several consequences. First, it left IO officers uncertain of their value to the commander and staff. Second, it rendered the information domain abstract—vague in definition and vulnerable to varied interpretations—resulting in confusion over its precise role in warfare. Finally, the effectiveness of IO was frequently perceived as a derivative, valued mainly for its utility in enabling or supporting lethal operations, rather than as a capability with intrinsic operational merit. Fundamentally, it generated a false certainty of prioritizing non-lethal operations when it was not.

This persistent approach has produced a contradiction that the IO community has inherited and cannot seem to escape. It may be framed as a single pointed question: What unique skills do IO officers possess—skills not found among experienced officers in other information organizations, such as cyber, military information support to operations, space, and electronic warfare—that justify the millions of dollars invested to sustain the profession? From brigade to division to theater to joint, information chiefs have consistently come from other information MOSs or FAs who have nonetheless executed information activities of extraordinary complexity in both war and peace. The result is a harsh reality: the distinctiveness of IO officers continues to fade. While every other Army information organization has a clearly defined principal task and purpose in doctrine—and still manages to perform S&I functions—IO remains doctrinally ambiguous, undermining its perceived value and institutional relevance. The solution is long overdue: IO officers should assume their rightful role as MILDEC officers. This is the IO community’s subtle yet critical inflection point.

(Disclaimer: This article presents a distilled version of a broader forthcoming study, “An Inflection Point for Information Operations Officers,” currently under review with the Journal of Information Warfare. The original manuscript was composed during the author’s tenure as an Army Fellow at the RAND Corporation, 2024–2025. It is offered in tribute to the FORSCOM G-39 team (2021–2023), whose incisive dialogue and critical engagement shaped much of the thinking herein. The views and interpretations expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.)

Tags: Influence, military deception, Misinformation, strategic inflection

About The Author

• 
  
• Peter Wilcox
• LTC Pete Wilcox is the Army’s IO Chair in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). 

13. AI-Driven Disinformation Campaigns on Twitter (X) in the Russia-Ukraine War

E​xcertp:

Twitter (X) served extensively for spreading disinformation throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict to show how information warfare is becoming more sophisticated. Modern AI systems have extensively boosted the production and diffusion of false content, specifically identified for target audiences, allowing them to define public opinions regarding the ongoing conflict. Twitter (X) provides a case study of how social media platforms can become tools for weaponization in modern times through mechanisms ranging from false narrative automation by AI bots to orchestrating disinformation operations that confirm existing biases.

AI-Driven Disinformation Campaigns on Twitter (X) in the Russia-Ukraine War

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/02/ai-driven-disinformation/

by Tayyaba Rehan

|

10.02.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract

In the Russia-Ukraine war, sectors like the digital and psychological ones were added to the conflict, and AI-driven fake news on Twitter (X) played a major part. Propaganda was disseminated to large numbers by operatives who used automated tools powered by artificial intelligence. They applied data mining and AI techniques to read through large data sets, find out what people felt about certain situations, and then send messages that mattered to specific groups. People were exposed to AI-created content, which included articles, images, and deepfakes, all aimed at copying the look of trustworthy sources, tricking users, and harming what people think about Ukraine’s leadership and help from the West.

Introduction

The Russia-Ukraine conflict, which reached its peak in February 2022, has fought a massive struggle of information dissemination in addition to its existing military hostilities. Current media organizations work to provide reports about the situation, but people turn primarily to Twitter (X) platforms to share news and opinions with disinformation. Twitter (X)’s network features, including instant posting and tagging patterns, enable users to distribute content widely, thus creating an effective means of influencing public opinion. Artificial intelligence (AI) stands as an essential tool for people who wish to control and shape information during this particular time. Artificial intelligence enables the production and dissemination of false information on Twitter (X), which produces major changes in how audiences think about the conflict. The analysis of disinformation campaign mechanisms on Twitter (X) enables people to understand the effects these techniques have on their perceptions and perspectives. During the Russia-Ukraine war, Twitter (X) and AI have enabled multiple disinformation methods that altered global public perception and war narrative formation. AI bots, together with AI-backed accounts, generate artificial propaganda that opposes alternate perspectives and advocates opposing viewpoints.

The level of complexity with which AI handles disinformation campaigns on Twitter (X) continues to advance. It utilizes machine learning algorithms to evaluate big datasets from the platform, which helps them detect patterns and user attitudes alongside population statistics. AI analytics produce targeted disinformation programs that speak directly to various audiences through content that appeals to them. Comprehensively detailed messages take advantage of people’s existing viewpoints, therefore becoming more convincing in their delivery and difficult to detect AI-generated content.

The Role of Twitter (X) in Information Warfare 

Twitter (X) functions as a major platform for delivering news from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, to presents live information worldwide to its users. Through its message-sharing system, Twitter (X) allows people to transmit brief updates together with their opinions and situational analyses rapidly. Fast sharing of information creates opportunities to transmit fake information because of Twitter (X)’s real-time transmission capabilities. Twitter (X) has been structured to promote shareable content through its features that include hashtags along with retweet capabilities, enabling fast dissemination to many users. Information exchanged at fast speeds on Twitter (X) enables people to mistake unverified details as authentic, which results in misinterpretations of ground realities.

Twitter (X) turned into a leading source of news updates after the conflict began, as both official accounts and common users transmitted real-time developments through their posts. The hashtags #UkraineUnderAttack and #RussiaTerroristState gained wide usage to mobilize international support and political focus on Ukraine. The genuine expressions of solidarity, as well as accurate news reporting, were accompanied by fabricated hashtags. The pro-Russian accounts invented #FakeNewsUkraine to attack the Ukrainian narrative with massive hashtags per minute, and Twitter (X) users quickly reacted to instantaneous information, thus becoming more likely to accept information they saw as facts, even if they were untrue. The accumulation of deceptive narratives caused noticeable changes in public understanding of the conflict, which subsequently guided both international reactions and public discussions about the matter.

Automated Bots and AI-generated content on Twitter (X)

AI-based automated bots deployed through Twitter (X) disinformation campaigns represent the most widespread AI implementation for spreading misinformation. These bots use programmed AI systems that produce content rapidly while attempting to imitate human dialogue behavior. Artificial intelligence bots operate in an automated style to both post tweets and retweets from other profiles while they initiate social interactions with users to build fake natural dialogue, duplicating human tone. AI systems produce fake human-shaped texts quickly, which introduces false information into the public discussion. Twitter (X) proved the existence of Russian disinformation through its removal of thousands of fraudulent accounts that disseminated fabricated information using bots. Researchers at the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Sciences analyzed 5,203,764 Twitter (X) posts, including tweets, retweets, quote tweets, and replies that carried hashtags #StandWithPutin, #StandWithRussia, #SupportRussia, #StandWithUkraine, #StandWithZelenskyy, and #SupportUkraine from 23 February through 8 March 2022. Research revealed that AI bot accounts comprised 60 to 80 percent of the total tweets bearing the studied hashtags during this specific timeframe.

A recent study discovered that about 1,000 fake American AI bots had generated accounts to spread pro-Russian propaganda, which targeted Ukrainian backlash and shaped geopolitical stories to benefit Ukrainian interests by polluting public opinion.

The extent of automation is worth mentioning, as highlighted by the Washington Post, where researchers examined 1.3 million accounts that regularly tweeted about Russian politics, underscoring that 45% or 585,000 of these accounts were bots, also known as “political bots”. Thousands of social media bots and fake AI-supported accounts spread false information about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, severely affecting public opinion during the conflict. The bot networks employ artificial intelligence to behave similarly to real people so they can connect with users as they distribute state-approved Russian self-defense messages. A recent study discovered that about 1,000 fake American AI bots had generated accounts to spread pro-Russian propaganda, which targeted Ukrainian backlash and shaped geopolitical stories to benefit Ukrainian interests by polluting public opinion.

Deepfakes serve as a main method in the Russia-Ukraine war to distribute misinformation through the Twitter (X) social media platform. Artificial intelligence systems create fake videos and audio files that alter real-world public figures, such that their images, as well as recorded statements present false information that quickly captures widespread attention. In March 2022, the release of a deepfake video depicted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy supposedly asking his troops to lay down their weapons and surrender. Even though the video proved to be fake, it received thousands of retweets on Twitter (X) before people discovered its fraud. According to research from the Digital Forensic Research Lab, deepfakes and other misinformation about the conflict spread to more than 70 million Twitter (X) users during the first few weeks of the Russian invasion. A manipulated video falsely showing Putin making a declared martial law statement successfully spread through Twitter (X),using hashtags including #PutinSurrender to deceive people about his actions. Deepfakes are distributed at an alarming rate because they create significant problems for readers trying to spot factual information, since manipulated media warps true events and can shape how people think about reality.

These artificial intelligence bots use algorithms to identify trends, along with generating messages that represent prevailing public sentiments. The bots leverage this ability to expand messages that represent Russian military ventures as suitable reactions to outside dangers. During 2024, the Pravda network released around three and a half million inaccurate AI-produced articles because they wanted to test AI chatbots and confuse their responses. Artificial intelligence bots produced fake tweets that presented false statements about the Ukrainian military committing violent actions toward civilians so Russia could legitimize its military actions under humanitarian pretenses. A study showed that elite Twitter (X)bots spread Russian falsified information successfully through their platforms with a success rate of approximately 33%.

Although Twitter (X) is officially blocked in Russia, the platform continues to host accounts and users that are backed by AI Twitter (X)bots, which are strategically employed to counter Ukrainian narratives and promote pro-Russian viewpoints. The artificial intelligence-based bots operate to spread Russian-supporting content as a method to generate trends that back up Kremlin positions. The bots enhance Russian control of Twitter (X) through their continuous production of pro-Russian content and counteraction of opposing viewpoints, thus determining how people perceive the Ukrainian conflict. These AI bots execute three elements: post pro-Russia tweets that link to active trends and hashtags, follow users to enhance certain messaging, and create the impression of backing for Russian activity. The coordinated campaign works to discredit Ukrainian perspectives between nations as it leverages AI technology to transform modern information warfare between countries.

The false tweets generated by AI bots and large language models (LLM) generated false public consensus about narratives, including the widespread defense justification for Russian actions and the narrative about sovereignty protection. Automated bots succeed in manipulation by producing substantial content quantity rapidly. Users who received the same message from different accounts three times were inclined to believe these narratives were true. The misinformation spread by these bots altered public opinion, thus creating wrong perceptions about the conflict while promoting Russian propaganda.

Viral Hashtag Manipulation

Through the use of #StopUkrainianAggression, pro-Russian accounts wanted to change the public’s perspective by making Russia appear defensive. Several untrue viral tweet contents spread quickly because they contained frequently used hashtags, making them accessible to a wider listener base. A generating campaign alleging Ukrainian military attacks against civilians would gain rapid spread across social media, employing strategic AI-created hashtag promotion. The hashtag mechanism formed a propagation pattern that allowed false information to spread rapidly throughout different groups of audience members. AI bots use automated content creation to support hashtag propagation and distribute disinformation across trending topics. Due to their data-oriented algorithms, AI bots execute their work, which enables them to spread false information regardless of the truth. These bots maintain pro-Russian content creation alongside user interaction to build artificial consensus about fake messages until it becomes hard for users to identify authentic information from fake content. The discussions about Ukraine’s conflict evolved through misinformed content that spread through popular hashtag trending topics. The artificial intelligence algorithms significantly contributed to this misinformation spread by causing bots to interact with the hashtag, thus producing a continuous stream of false content that deepened its acceptance in public discussion. Research showed how millions of people received messages through the #UkrainianNazis hashtag, and one specific post became viral within only a few hours after being posted. By controlling hashtags, these operators disrupted public discussions, so information accuracy became nearly impossible to find since the noise drowned out all else. The false narratives reached wide public visibility, which altered how people viewed the conflict and how they understood both parties.

Targeted Disinformation Campaigns to gain public support

Many of the AI tools operated by Russian operatives analyzed the listener groups that reacted best to specific informational messages during the conflict. The Russian strategists engineered propaganda through campaigns to depict Western Ukraine’s backing as a violation of Russia’s regional control area. Twitter (X) messages that were specifically tailored presented alleged cases of Ukrainian governmental corruption while spreading the claims that Western countries are backing a “failed” state. Russian operatives during the Russia-Ukraine war implemented artificial intelligence for creating targeted disinformation, which used enhanced propaganda through precise audience targeting capabilities. The campaigns used machine learning algorithms to analyze user data, which helped propagandists deliver messages specific to their target groups’ political and demographic characteristics. Artificial intelligence bots spread propaganda by increasing message efficacy, so false information seemed to have broad support from the public. Deepfake videos alongside media further added credibility to fabricated narratives.

Public opinion has seen a considerable transformation because of deliberately crafted misinformation. The campaigns achieved their objectives by targeting specific audiences, strengthening pre-existing beliefs, and making false information more convincing to counter. These refined strategies helped to increase societal polarization because people started creating self-contained information bubbles that eliminated dissenting opinions. These narratives grew more pervasive in worldwide dialogue, which made diplomatic solutions more challenging for the crisis.

Conclusion

Twitter (X) served extensively for spreading disinformation throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict to show how information warfare is becoming more sophisticated. Modern AI systems have extensively boosted the production and diffusion of false content, specifically identified for target audiences, allowing them to define public opinions regarding the ongoing conflict. Twitter (X) provides a case study of how social media platforms can become tools for weaponization in modern times through mechanisms ranging from false narrative automation by AI bots to orchestrating disinformation operations that confirm existing biases.

Tags: AI, Deep fakes, Disinformation, Russia-Ukraine, Twitter (x) Bots

About The Author

• 
  
• Tayyaba Rehan
• Tayyaba Rehan is a student of the National Defence University, Islamabad, Pakistan. She is currently pursuing her degree in Defence and Strategic Studies. She has worked with multiple governmental and non-governmental organizations. Her numerous articles have been published on national and international platforms. Her area of interest includes national security, terrorism, and peacekeeping.

14. Information Inoculation: Preparing US Warfighters for Cognitive War

Again, when will we learn to lead with influence?

And again, we should remember that all warfare is cognitive but not all warfare is kinetic.

Excerpts:

Conclusion

The modern information environment presents evolving challenges to US national security as foreign adversaries use advanced cognitive strategies. Information inoculation theory, which is based on scientific research, provides a framework for building resistance to such mental tactics and for fighting misinformation and disinformation. Research shows that exposure to weakened counterarguments and their refutations beforehand can boost resistance to cognitive influence, and meta-analyses support the broader applicability of these findings across various contexts.

Within the US military, current programs in critical thinking, media literacy, and psychological resilience establish an initial but incomplete foundation. A specific vulnerability exists among recruits because foundational training does not consistently include comprehensive instruction in identifying and resisting foreign influence campaigns. The rapid development and spread of adversarial information techniques emphasize the need for more proactive measures.

This model incorporates an information inoculation approach into US military recruit training. By implementing this strategy at the entry level, it leverages the existing training environment to develop basic cognitive defenses. The core principles emphasize technique-based inoculation, interactive learning methods, continuous reinforcement, and peer-based debriefing. This approach aims to foster critical thinking skills that are durable and widely applicable. Integrating this curriculum into both initial and ongoing military education efforts will strengthen individual and collective cognitive resilience, ultimately enhancing the nation’s capacity to counter cognitive threats within the broader scope of national security.

Information Inoculation: Preparing US Warfighters for Cognitive War

Robert “Jake” Bebber

hudson.org · Thomas J. Duesterberg

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Sophisticated non-kinetic threats, such as Chinese cognitive domain operations (CDO) and Russian active measures operations, define the contemporary global security landscape and pose significant challenges to national security policymakers in the United States. These adversarial capabilities transcend traditional military engagement, targeting the cognitive processes, beliefs, and unit cohesion of an opponent to achieve military objectives, often as a precursor to the onset of hostilities. By targeting the brain itself, adversaries can potentially alter US service members’ decision-making or behavior, having a detrimental impact on their will to fight. Current understanding of brain sciences, the ubiquity of surveillance technology and big data, and algorithm-based evolving business and marketing models that condition human behavior are converging to shape global power competition in ways that may undermine the efficacy of assumptions about American power. As a result, foreign adversaries could subject the American population to a persistent state of cognitive manipulation and control. To prepare service members for this rapidly evolving environment, the Department of War (DoW), needs to adopt strategies to build critical thinking and individual resistance to persuasive cognitive attacks. This paper proposes a military training program that begins in recruit training and continues as part of regular professional military education based on information inoculation theory, a critical-thinking strategy analogous to medical immunization.

Background

During the Korean War, American social psychologist William McGuire expressed concerns about reports that Communist forces were brainwashing American service members. He suggested that because Americans lacked mental defenses against sophisticated ideological attacks, they would be more susceptible to persuasion. To counter these psychological tactics, McGuire argued for a form of cognitive inoculation that would work much like a vaccine. Conceptually, one may trace information inoculation back to Aristotle’s refutational enthymemes, the idea of preempting an argument beforehand to make one’s case. Just as a body builds resistance to viruses through previous exposure, beliefs can be made resistant to persuasive threats through pre-exposure to weakened forms of persuasion. “Cognitive vaccines” expose individuals to weakened counterarguments or manipulation strategies, prompting them to generate their own supporting arguments. Psychological inoculation can offer broad protection, especially when supplemented with “booster shots” over time, to develop a form of herd immunity.

Today’s information environment provides nearly unlimited vectors for foreign malign entities to direct cognitive manipulation campaigns at the American population, and especially US military service members. Current understanding of brain functions and their relationship to behavior modification has advanced considerably since the early 2000s. Techno-authoritarian powers like China and Russia are devoting considerable resources to the development of neuroweapons and synthetic biology with the desired effect of manipulating cognitive and emotional states. They are leveraging these improved capabilities in support of intelligence collection and advanced cognitive influence operations. And they are combining them with strategic control over physical information architecture, online networks, and social media applications such as TikTok, WeChat, and Telegram (along with potential economic leverage over American social media and technology companies, such as X, Meta, and Alphabet).

Early scholarship on information inoculation focused on theoretical advancement. In the 1990s, organizations introduced practical applications related specifically to health promotion. Studies demonstrated success in campaigns to prevent smoking, reduce alcohol and marijuana use, and promote safe sex practices; some findings suggested “umbrella protection” for related health concerns.

Related experimental studies continue to support the efficacy of information inoculation, also known as pre-bunking. They emphasize that typical techniques, such as fact-checking and debunking, have a limited impact on the susceptibility of individuals to cognitive manipulation. Evidence has shown that various pre-bunking techniques are far more effective. One online experiment compared the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against the more traditional “false tag” interventions in protecting against misinformation on social media. The study used real-life misinformation posts in a social media simulation, measured engagement, and found that both interventions reduced engagement with misinformation, but inoculation proved more effective. It concluded that inoculation’s immunity was robust to variations in individuals’ cognitive reflection, suggesting it is generally more effective than false tags. However, a combination of interventions may be necessary due to heterogeneity in inoculation’s effect.

Another study explored how psychological inoculation can reduce susceptibility to misinformation in large rational-agent networks, moving beyond individual-level effects to consider dynamic online systems. Using an agent-based model, the study found that the efficacy of inoculation is time-sensitive. It emphasized the importance of front-loading interventions by targeting critical thresholds of network users before their beliefs solidify into echo chambers. It also suggested that harnessing tipping-point dynamics can lead to herd immunity effects and that inoculation processes do not necessarily increase false-positive rejections of truthful information. These findings validated inoculation’s robustness for countering misinformation in networked environments.

Finally, one social experiment used five short videos to expose people to common manipulation techniques (emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks). Through seven preregistered studies, including a large-scale YouTube field experiment, they found that these videos significantly improved manipulation technique recognition, boosted confidence, enhanced discernment of trustworthy content, and improved sharing decisions. The results demonstrated the intervention’s robustness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in real-world settings, although its limitations included the unassessed long-term efficacy.

Why Are Service Members Vulnerable to Cognitive Manipulation Campaigns?

Humans are susceptible to cognitive manipulation for a variety of reasons. The human brain is a complex organ that has contributed to the survival and development of our species. However, it is not structured to be completely rational or to thoroughly evaluate every piece of information in the environment. Instead, humans have evolved to rely on a complex interplay of heuristics, emotional responses, and social cues. This leaves us vulnerable to actors leveraging our cognitive biases, emotion-driven responses, and social influence. We receive no education or training on manipulation techniques such as gaslighting and logical fallacies. Studies also confirm that humans are generally poor at detecting lies, even blatant ones.

Military recruits can be particularly vulnerable to cognitive manipulation by foreign powers. The majority of recruits are still young adults, typically in a transition phase from late adolescence. During this growth period, they are subject to rapid psychological and social development. Initial military training is designed to be both physically and psychologically demanding while isolating recruits from their usual support networks. This creates a fertile ground for new narratives and ideologies to take root. Some recruits have preexisting vulnerabilities, such as anxiety, depression, or personality traits, that initial screening does not detect, making them even more vulnerable to manipulation.

Of course, most recruits (and young adults, for that matter) have grown up in an information environment that is rapidly evolving. They typically own or use information technology devices that are connected to the information environment, such as cars, watches, or even eyewear. They consume information from a wide variety of sources, including online networks and social media. This makes them ideal targets for exploitation and manipulation by foreign actors.

Improving Cognitive Resilience in Recruit Training

Modern war is taxing physically, emotionally, and cognitively. The DoW and all service components recognize that the ability to critically assess, interpret, and use information is a mission-essential skill that is central to victory and the lethality of all military service members regardless of job functions. The services have initiated some training programs in critical thinking, information literacy, psychological resilience, and counter-influence training. However, they have usually restricted this training to certain job roles or offered it as a train-the-trainer course rather than making it a part of general military education. Significant gaps remain, which leave uniformed service members especially vulnerable. Overall, there is a lack of universal, mandatory information literacy training. Although general military education highlights critical thinking, some educators may not have received sufficient training to teach it or to evaluate students’ progress. There is limited training for recruits on foreign influence operations, and no training on how to resist malign influence operations. Much of the current training is reactive instead of proactive. There is no comprehensive, preemptive inoculation approach for the general force.

This report proposes a model for an information inoculation training program for military recruits and recommends making it part of the subsequent annual required Professional Military Education (PME). Beginning in recruit training provides a foundational impact alongside physical readiness and psychological resilience. Recruits are a captive audience for two to three months of recruit training, depending on the service. Implementing information inoculation early in a service member’s career is critical to building long-term cognitive resilience. It aligns well with established programs like the US Navy’s Culture of Excellence and the US Army’s Master Resilience Training and Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness. This targeted approach addresses the gaps identified in universal information literacy and explicit counter-cognitive manipulation training for the Joint Force.

Introducing inoculation at the recruit training stage enhances cognitive resilience across the military, turning it into a strategic advantage. Training recruits this way creates a shared defense against cognitive warfare and boosts operational effectiveness. By addressing potential anchoring bias early, the approach helps prevent misinformation from taking root—a much tougher challenge once an enemy has established false narratives.

Design Principles

An information inoculation campaign that the DoW introduces into recruit training should adhere to a robust set of design principles, drawing from proven best practices in inoculation theory and grounding them in adult learning:

• Technique-based inoculation focuses on teaching recruits to identify common manipulation techniques rather than specific ones in narratives.
• Active engagement and gamified learning have consistently proven to be more effective in enhancing the ability to spot manipulation and conferring resistance.
• Threat and refutational preemption are core components of learning modules that introduce threats (forewarning of impending persuasive attacks) and refutational preemption (presenting weakened examples of manipulative arguments alongside clear refutations). The arguments will be designed to prompt recruits’ responses while remaining easily refutable.
• A focus on intellectual humility guides recruits to recognize the inherent fallibility of their own intuitions. This is central to promoting an open-minded approach to information consumption.
• Booster nudges and post-inoculation talks prolong protective effects and promote reinforcement mechanisms.
• Scenario-based learning is a proven, effective way to allow recruits to practice discernment skills in high-stakes, ambiguous contexts that mirror real-world operational challenges.
• Alignment with adult learning principles emphasizes the relevance of training and its application to military duties.

Integration into Recruit Training and Professional Military Education

The DoW will need to integrate the information inoculation curriculum into existing recruit training phases using current structures and schedules. This gradual approach enhances learning and retention, as cognitive defenses require ongoing development. Each service can adjust the proposed phases to meet its specific training needs.

Phase 1: Reception and Initial Awareness (Week 0–1)

Objective: To introduce the fundamental concept of cognitive warfare and highlight personal relevance and the threat that misinformation poses.

Content:

• This phase will start with a high-impact briefing on the modern information environment, explaining the nature of foreign influence operations (such as those from Russia, China, and Iran) and showing their common tactics, including social media, deepfakes, and generative artificial intelligence. It will explicitly warn recruits beforehand, serving as the threat component of inoculation, by indicating that opponents will likely challenge their beliefs and perceptions. It will also emphasize the importance of critical thinking for effective decision-making in a military context.
• Methodology: Short, engaging presentations, compelling video vignettes illustrating real-world examples of information attacks, and initial facilitated group discussions to foster immediate engagement and understanding.

Phase 2: Foundational Inoculation (Weeks 2–5, integrated into existing resilience / mental toughness modules)

Objective: To develop a core understanding of common manipulation techniques and cultivate basic refutational skills.

Content:

• Module 1—Understanding the Information Environment: A deeper examination of different kinds of misinformation and disinformation, the motivations behind foreign actors, and the overall idea of cognitive warfare.
• Module 2—Inoculation Fundamentals (Pre-bunking): A detailed explanation of the threat and refutational preemption mechanisms. This will involve exposure to weakened examples of manipulative arguments, followed by guided refutation exercises (passive refutation).
• Module 3—Technique-Based Resilience (DEPICT Framework): Focused training on identifying and analyzing common manipulation techniques (Discrediting opponents, Emotional language use, increasing intergroup Polarization, Impersonating people, Conspiracy promotion, and Trolling).
• Methodology: Interactive workshops, short gamified modules (e.g., adaptations of the Bad News game tailored for military scenarios), and facilitated small group discussions that integrate directly into existing modules focusing on building resilience and mental toughness.

Phase 3: Application and Reinforcement (Weeks 6–10 / Follow-On School Training)

Objective: To apply inoculation skills in simulated high-stress scenarios and reinforce learning through continuous boosters.

Content:

• Module 4—Critical Thinking and Media Literacy Application: Practical exercises centered on source evaluation, recognizing inherent biases, and verifying information from multiple perspectives. Training will also include cognitive reflection techniques and strategies to promote intellectual humility.
• Module 5—Reinforcement and Real-World Application: Integration of brief, personalized booster nudges into daily training routines (e.g., pause-before-sharing prompts). Recruits will have brief, structured post-inoculation talk sessions to debrief on information attacks they encountered. Scenario-based exercises simulating real information threats will be part of field training, including live-fire and force-on-force drills.
• Methodology: Ongoing gamified learning, small group problem-solving exercises, and realistic combat simulations with embedded information challenges. Certified trainers or designated instructors will facilitate regular debriefings, leveraging the military’s team-oriented and debriefing culture.

Phase 4: Sustainment and Advanced Training (Post-Recruit Training)

Objective: To ensure the long-term durability of inoculation effects and facilitate continuous adaptation to evolving threats.

Content:

• Integration of information inoculation principles into PME at all levels.
• Regular booster modules and refresher training, potentially via online platforms or unit-level sessions.
• Advanced training for noncommissioned officers and officers focusing on identifying and countering complex malign influence operations.
• Methodology: Online interactive modules, advanced simulations, and guided discussions to foster a continuous learning environment.

There are key ethical and policy considerations for an information inoculation training program, starting with the need to foster discernment rather than impose belief. The training should emphasize recognition of common manipulation techniques, such as the DEPICT framework. It should be educational, nonjudgmental, and non-accusatory while clearly stating its purpose and avoiding craftiness or fear tactics. Recruits and service members should remember that the First Amendment protects a significant amount of false speech and limits government control over social media and personal communication. Inoculation is a free-speech-compatible approach that emphasizes skill-building only.

The proposed integration into recruit training and military education aims to enhance learning and retention by advancing from basic awareness to more complex skills, similar to physical fitness. By incorporating post-inoculation talk and scenario-based learning within team settings, it strengthens cognitive defenses through existing military practices, making the training both effective and enduring.

Conclusion

The modern information environment presents evolving challenges to US national security as foreign adversaries use advanced cognitive strategies. Information inoculation theory, which is based on scientific research, provides a framework for building resistance to such mental tactics and for fighting misinformation and disinformation. Research shows that exposure to weakened counterarguments and their refutations beforehand can boost resistance to cognitive influence, and meta-analyses support the broader applicability of these findings across various contexts.

Within the US military, current programs in critical thinking, media literacy, and psychological resilience establish an initial but incomplete foundation. A specific vulnerability exists among recruits because foundational training does not consistently include comprehensive instruction in identifying and resisting foreign influence campaigns. The rapid development and spread of adversarial information techniques emphasize the need for more proactive measures.

This model incorporates an information inoculation approach into US military recruit training. By implementing this strategy at the entry level, it leverages the existing training environment to develop basic cognitive defenses. The core principles emphasize technique-based inoculation, interactive learning methods, continuous reinforcement, and peer-based debriefing. This approach aims to foster critical thinking skills that are durable and widely applicable. Integrating this curriculum into both initial and ongoing military education efforts will strengthen individual and collective cognitive resilience, ultimately enhancing the nation’s capacity to counter cognitive threats within the broader scope of national security.

hudson.org · Thomas J. Duesterberg

15. Sequencing Over Simultaneity: How to Avert a Two-Front War

What the.....?

I am sure glad we don't have to worry at all about north Korea in this mess.

​Sigh....

excerpts:

With Iran neutered, European security improving, Ukraine holding the line, and Russia weakened, the United States has a rare opportunity to debilitate the Russian threat in the near-term while revitalizing Europe’s security architecture to deter Russia over the long-term, so America may finally concentrate its resources and attention on countering its great rival this century: China.

If the United States uses these next four years better than its adversaries, it will upend the strategic landscape. It will transform the Western alliance from protectorate to partnership. It will multiply America’s reach through increased allied capacity and burden-sharing. And it will prevent America from having to choose between defending Europe and the Pacific.

Sequencing Over Simultaneity: How to Avert a Two-Front War

Nick Danby

October 2, 2025

warontherocks.com · October 2, 2025

America’s crippling strikes against Iran’s nuclear program in June have created a narrow window to avoid a strategic nightmare: namely, fighting China, Russia, and Iran all at once.

With Iran neutralized, strategic logic demands that the United States turn its sights on Russia next. But the Alaska summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin complicated that course. Putin has exploited the diplomatic opening to intensify Russian attacks on Ukraine, without the prospect of more stringent U.S. sanctions or negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

To stop Russia from further weaponizing the peace process and slowly pushing its advantage in Ukraine, the United States should use the next two years to systematically weaken Russia primarily through diplomatic measures while accelerating European defense autonomy — enabling America to finally pivot toward China before it faces an unwinnable two-front war.

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Win Some, Lose None

The Alaska summit left many questions unanswered, particularly regarding Trump’s shifting positions on a land-for-peace deal. It was the subsequent Washington summit with European leaders where Trump slightly clarified U.S. policy toward Ukraine and avoided the worst fears of skeptics. He did not blame Ukraine for the war, cut security assistance, or foist a pro-Russia deal on Kyiv. Instead, he reiterated his quest for peace and endorsed a European-led security guarantee for Ukraine while pushing Europe to assume more defense burdens.

In its quest to put Europe’s “defense house in order,” the Trump administration seeks to usher in a strategic rebalance that prompts European partners to assume most of the continent’s security responsibilities and meet the challenges of a deteriorating regional security situation without direct U.S. assistance. Both objectives are important as the United States looks to the Indo-Pacific region with growing alarm.

This approach reflects strategic necessity. America faces three adversaries: Iran, the persistent destabilizer, determined to develop nuclear weapons; Russia, the acute threat, invading Ukraine and threatening NATO; and China, the pacing challenge, attempting to topple America’s international leadership.

These competing threats spotlight America’s “strategic simultaneity” problem: How do you deter and, if necessary, defeat China and Russia simultaneously without exhausting your nation’s resources, power, and attention? You don’t. Instead, you sequence the threats.

Great powers from Byzantium to Venice to Habsburg Austria to Edwardian Britain have all survived by mastering the art of sequencing. This stratagem, as strategist Wess Mitchell elucidated, entails concentrating forces and focus against one opponent’s disruptive potential before turning to deter or defeat another more capable opponent. Israel recently demonstrated this approach, methodically dismantling Iran’s “axis of resistance” one proxy at a time — first Hamas, next Hizballah, then Iran itself (with America’s help) — rather than fighting simultaneous wars across multiple fronts against many enemies.

America has a comparable opportunity with its own unique set of challengers, but the window is closing.

Iran Down, Two to Go

Following Israeli and U.S. strikes in June, Iran’s nuclear program is “severely damaged,” set back by up to two years. For the first time in decades, America can shift its primary focus from the Middle East. Sequencing logic demands weakening one remaining competitor before risking an unwinnable two-front war. But which competitor?

Russia is the obvious choice. Moscow is weaker and moved first by invading Ukraine; it should be punished first. Continued degradation of Russian military power through support to Ukraine would likely deter — or at least force a rethink of — future aggressive gambits from Moscow or Beijing. Conversely, should Russia emerge from the war in Ukraine with territorial gains and a pro-Kremlin puppet government in Kyiv, the value of aggression would be validated everywhere.

The Sequencing Imperative

Since 2022, U.S. strategy has sought to punish Russia by backing Ukraine. But as Russia gradually masses enough manpower and munitions to bend the war of attrition to its favor, Ukraine cannot keep resisting Russia without solving its own manpower, materiel, and strategic and operational constraints. As Trump acknowledged in late August, Ukraine “has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense.”

America’s constraints compound this challenge. Munitions transfers to Ukraine and Israel without corresponding defense industrial overhauls have dangerously lowered U.S. stockpiles. Due to material constraints on America’s power, it ought to prioritize the Russian threat first through military and diplomatic levers. Near-term economic and diplomatic pressure can provide almost immediate relief, while a major upheaval in European security responsibilities and capabilities unfolds over the medium- and long-term.

Washington only has, perhaps, four years to implement the right sequencing. Years one and two should focus on helping Ukraine forestall Russian gains through continued intelligence support and military training, loosening the “review mechanism” that restricts Ukraine’s offensive long-range strikes into Russia, establishing European defense production foundations, and imposing systematic costs on Russia’s financial industry and energy trade, the two leading enablers of Moscow’s war effort. Enough pressure could degrade Russia’s wartime economy by 2027, when experts suggest Moscow may no longer be capable of sustaining the war in Ukraine.

Years three and four should fast-track European defense autonomy, freeing America to redirect its focus and forces to looming Indo-Pacific challenges. Through it all, Ukraine and Europe could receive selective transfers of munitions or advanced weaponry (when available and necessary), contingent on Europe assuming greater security responsibilities and making tangible investments in America’s defense industrial base.

While Europe may need up to ten years to achieve full defense autonomy, this phased approach ensures the transition begins and Russian military power degrades before other American threat alarm clocks start going off as early as 2027 (i.e., China’s planned military capability to invade Taiwan or Iran’s nuclear program restart). In either contingency, European countries will be better postured to deter or defend against Russian aggression, if necessary, for years, if necessary, alone.

Thus, America’s inescapable strategic constraints demand sequencing within sequencing: Western diplomatic pressure today; European defense autonomy tomorrow.

Sequencing, Part 1: Cutting Russian Lifelines

Despite a steady slew of sanctions imposed on Russia since 2022, loopholes still allow Russia to continue funding its war against Ukraine. To close these gaps, the United States and Europe should target Russia’s two war-funding pillars: its financial industry and energy trade. European leaders have long wanted Trump to impose more punitive measures against Russia, yet they also fuel Russia’s war machine, undercutting their own rhetoric. In recent weeks, Trump has pressed Europeans to live up to their own demands of America by halting oil purchases, purchasing U.S. weaponry, leveraging frozen assets, and strengthening sanctions. He is right to do so. In 2024 alone, E.U. countries purchased $27 billion worth of Russian energy. Major economies like France, Germany, and Italy still resist full cutoffs, while the European Union eschews secondary sanctions and remains skittish about using frozen Russian assets.

Start by sanctioning all Russian banks and their foreign subsidiaries. America should cooperate with the European Union, non-E.U. NATO members, and Japan to ban all transactions with Russian financial institutions (with very short-term exemptions for European countries winding down Russian energy purchases), and Washington should work with allied capitals to use the $330 billion in frozen Russian assets — not just the assets’ interest — to fund Ukrainian security, including European defense aid to Ukraine.

Next, the West should choke the flow of Russian energy. Last year, oil and gas accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s government revenues, even as Russia rerouted its trade at discounted prices ($60 per barrel) to hungry importers like China and India. Meanwhile, major holdouts Hungary and Slovakia continue importing Russian oil and gas, undermining broader Western pressure.

The European Union’s stated goal of ending Russian energy dependence by 2027 is insufficient for effective sequencing. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s more ambitious goal to end Russian gas imports by 2026 gets closer to the mark, though phasing out both oil and gas imports by summer 2026 would better serve strategic objectives. Anytime earlier would face stiff headwinds. Hungary and Slovakia lack adequate infrastructure for importing alternative sources after centering decades of energy policy around Russian imports.

Through summer 2026, however, the European Union can accelerate these transitions by increasing the holdout countries’ access to existing European liquified natural gas terminals and pipeline capacity, expediting approval for alternative energy infrastructure projects, financing pipeline investments, and offering a blend of financial incentives and strategic pressure to pressure the holdouts to import elsewhere. This blend could include the European Union prioritizing green transition funding (NextGenerationEU) disbursements for countries that demonstrate concrete moves toward Russian energy independence, while linking Cohesion Funding allocations to energy diversification timelines.

In July, the European Union set a new price cap on Russia’s oil exports: 15 percent lower than the average market price. The Trump administration should agree to the new price cap, persuade remaining allies and partners to accept it, and introduce a plan to tighten the price cap quarterly. It should expand “secondary sanctions” on companies facilitating the Russian oil trade and expand sanctioning of Russian shadow fleet tankers to match E.U. and British lists, which are nearly double the size of America’s and effective in stifling Russia’s energy trade.

Finally, Ukraine should be allowed to strike the energy infrastructure that sustains Russia’s war effort. The Pentagon should loosen restrictions on cheap, replaceable, and long-range weapons systems like the new Extended Range Attack Munition and Army Tactical Missile System, so Ukraine can target Russian oil refineries and key energy nodes. While Trump has already authorized Ukraine to receive 3,550 Extended Range Attack Munitions — with the first 10 to be delivered by October 2025 and the first batch of 840 to be delivered by October 2026 — delivery will have little impact unless the Pentagon lifts recent restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range U.S. and European weapons systems, particularly for energy infrastructure strikes. To maintain escalation control, the Pentagon could still restrict long-range strikes against purely military targets.

These steps would cut off Russia’s financial oxygen and accelerate the disintegration of its unsustainable war economy, weakening Moscow before it can regroup and press the advantage in Ukraine or elsewhere.

Sequencing, Part 2: The European Defense Buildup

The Russo-Ukrainian War has catalyzed Europe’s defense buildup. Germany, now the world’s fourth-largest military spender, exempted defense and security spending from constitutional debt rules, enabling billions of euros in defense investments and signaling its commitment to assuming a greater part of the European defense burden.

The defense surge has spread continent-wide. NATO allies pledged five percent of GDP for security and defense by 2035. The European Union allocated €150 billion for joint defense procurement. Results are promising: Europe’s annual ammunition production capacity is projected to reach two million rounds annually by the end of 2025, a sixfold increase from prewar levels. Europe’s leaders increasingly understand that peace requires strength. As German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius explained in August, Europe can only “talk about peace and détente [with Russia] on equal terms … [only] from a position of strength … from eye level.”

To make Europe “eye level” with Russia, the United States should collaborate in three areas.

First, establish a clear division of labor, where European allies manage most conventional capabilities while America provides “backstop” support in its areas of comparative advantage. European powers like the United Kingdom and France would forward-deploy “reassurance forces” near Ukraine, ready for deployment to western Ukraine during a ceasefire or escalation, where they would learn from Ukrainian forces and also provide rear echelon support. European partners would take a greater role in managing NATO–affiliated air and naval operations and patrols against Russian gray zone activities. Meanwhile, the United States would provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance overwatch, logistics and transport, nuclear deterrence, and stand-in forces. If done right, by 2027, the Europeans should handle day-to-day conventional deterrence and defense while America plays a specialized supporting role.

Second, accelerate defense industrial cooperation to transform European partners from consumers to producers capable of fighting without U.S. military equipment. This requires co-financing industrial capacity, breaking supply bottlenecks, and overcoming workforce shortfalls from years of “managed decline.” It also means sharing critical defense and dual-use technologies — such as 155mm artillery shells, long-range precision missiles, and air defense missiles — by extending AUKUS-style export control exemptions to key allies. Germany, France, and the Netherlands come to mind, particularly for established military equipment. Finally, integrate the “patchwork of national [defense] industries” into a cohesive, standardized European defense industrial base.

Third, surge in-theater munitions production through multi-year block-buy contracts from allied governments. European capitals should create or expand war reserve stockpiles to replenish munitions inventories, sending a sustained demand signal to industry. Pacific allies could join European procurement consortia, reducing costs and dependence on overstretched U.S. production capacity.

These steps won’t yield full European defense autonomy overnight, but they will fortify Europe’s ability to deter Russia so America can properly pivot to the Pacific.

Calculated Risks

This sequencing strategy carries risk, particularly the cost of reduced American attention in the Pacific before the critical 2027 “Davidson Window.” Although China hands, like Ely Ratner, acknowledge that China will struggle to execute a “short, sharp invasion” by 2027, Beijing continues building capabilities necessary for invading Taiwan, and could accelerate its timeline if it sees America focused on Europe before pivoting to the Pacific.

Pacific allies are already uneasy about America’s future commitment to the region. Australia and Japan have resisted U.S. pressure to spend more, with Japan scrapping ministerial meetings. Multiple allies have raised concerns about American disengagement from Asia and discussed strategic futures less dependent on America. Sequencing could deepen these fractures, giving China openings to exploit through economic and trade leverage. Yet, forcing Pacific allies to step up might also strengthen allied capabilities if they prepare to act more independently.

Sequencing also constrains U.S. diplomatic bandwidth. Intensive focus on European sanctions coordination and defense industrial cooperation reduces capacity for Asia-Pacific coalition-building and providing the military training and financing necessary to strengthen Pacific allies.

Iran’s nuclear recovery timeline poses another complication. While U.S. strikes likely set back Iran’s program by up to two years, some independent nuclear experts assess six months to one year for reconstitution. If Iran achieves a breakout nuclear capability while Russia remains militarily strong, sequencing fails by creating the three-front strategic nightmare it sought to avoid.

These counterarguments, however, strengthen the case for rapid execution rather than abandoning sequencing altogether. The above risks are real, but the alternative — waiting until China and Russia simultaneously prod the United States to war — remains more perilous. Sequencing would largely preserve U.S. munitions levels and buy time to prepare America for a Pacific fight while diplomatically punishing Russia and shoring up European deterrence. Choosing to sequence, however, requires acknowledging that the timeline for sequencing is narrower than desired, with smaller margins for error than historical precedents recommend.

Seizing the Strategic Window

With Iran neutered, European security improving, Ukraine holding the line, and Russia weakened, the United States has a rare opportunity to debilitate the Russian threat in the near-term while revitalizing Europe’s security architecture to deter Russia over the long-term, so America may finally concentrate its resources and attention on countering its great rival this century: China.

If the United States uses these next four years better than its adversaries, it will upend the strategic landscape. It will transform the Western alliance from protectorate to partnership. It will multiply America’s reach through increased allied capacity and burden-sharing. And it will prevent America from having to choose between defending Europe and the Pacific.

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Nick Danby is a research associate at the Marathon Initiative and a U.S. Navy intelligence reserve officer. He served five years on active duty, completing tours in the Indo-Pacific and at the Pentagon, and later worked as a national security fellow in the U.S. Senate. He is currently a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing an MPhil in Politics at the University of Cambridge.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · October 2, 2025

16. Manila Recovers Chinese Underwater Drone Operating in Philippine Waters

​Anyone surprised?

Manila Recovers Chinese Underwater Drone Operating in Philippine Waters

https://news.usni.org/2025/10/01/manila-recovers-chinese-underwater-drone-operating-in-philippine-waters?utm

Aaron-Matthew Lariosa

October 1, 2025 12:41 PM

Filipino fishermen discovered the 12-foot-long drone Sept. 28, 2025, and turned it over to a Philippine Coast Guard station on Linapacan. Philippine Coast Guard photo

The Philippine Coast Guard confiscated a Chinese-made autonomous underwater vessel operating within the country’s waters in the South China Sea over the weekend, marking the latest seizure of Beijing’s subsurface drones by Manila in recent years.

Filipino fishermen discovered the 12-foot-long drone Sunday and turned it over to a Philippine Coast Guard station on Linapacan. An agency press release highlighted the Chinese markings on the drone and its similarity with previously recovered vessels from other parts of the Philippines.

The agency’s preliminary investigation claimed that the drone was equipped with a conductivity, temperature and depth sensor for oceanographic survey operations. Manila has recovered at least five Chinese-origin drones between July 2022 and December 2024, according to Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela.

“Recovered units have shown capabilities for autonomous data processing, storage and satellite transmission, with one case revealing encrypted communications to mainland China during operations,” reads the release.

Two of these vessels were nabbed within Philippine archipelagic waters off Misamis Oriental and Masbate. The other two were found in the Luzon Strait, a strategic waterway separating the first and second island chains that has seen increased Philippine, Chinese and American military activities amid concerns of a potential Taiwan contingency spillover. In April, the Philippine Navy presented the recovered drones and claimed that they were likely sent by China to map out the country’s waters, potentially for military purposes.

“We commend the quick action of the local fishermen for reporting this find. This incident highlights the need for continued community awareness and a whole-of-nation approach to deter unauthorized activities in our waters,” Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Ronnie Gavan stated in the release.

Beijing’s naval deployments to the South China Sea within the Philippines western exclusive economic zone has seen numerous survey ships dispatched to the disputed waters, of which China claims as its own under the 10-dash line. Last month, a specialized drone mothership was spotted surveying Scarborough Shoal. Chinese research vessels have also been spotted operating in Manila’s northern and eastern exclusive economic zones.

Aside from unmanned incursions, Philippine intelligence agencies exposed early this year alleged Chinese surveillance activities around military facilities across the country. A group of Chinese nationals were arrested in Subic Bay on espionage charges after they reportedly collected photos and arrival dates of American warships visiting the strategic port.

Rocio Gatdula, a Washington-based defense economist analyst, told USNI News that the recent drone recovery demonstrated China’s ability to “compromise the situational awareness of the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines] and potentially facilitate future incursions.”

“China’s objectives may include mapping the Philippines’ underwater topography to support submarine and naval operations, gathering intelligence for military, navigational and resource purposes, and reinforcing territorial claims through surveillance and presence to advance its “historical rights” narrative, particularly around Palawan and key sea lanes,” Gatdula said.

Gatdula also stated that allies such as the U.S. could aid the Philippines by providing advanced maritime sensors and enhanced training on the detection of underwater drones.

“Additionally, investing in technical support for forensic analysis of recovered drones would support Manila’s ability to counter incursions, improve early warning systems and reinforce deterrence against persistent Chinese maritime aggressions,” Gatdula said.

​17. Improvised Genius: Could the United States Match Ukraine’s Scrappy Innovation Culture?

​Conclusion:

The future of warfare will look less like a Pentagon PowerPoint deck and more like the inside of that dingy building I visited in Ukraine—3D printers humming, code scrolling, and young engineers cobbling together survival with zip ties, caffeine, and ingenuity. In short, the future belongs not to the military-industrial complex, but to smart and dedicated people free to improvise where they need to.

Improvised Genius: Could the United States Match Ukraine’s Scrappy Innovation Culture? - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Paul Schwennesen · October 2, 2025

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Four years into its war of survival, Ukraine continues to do what most observers assumed impossible: hold off a vastly numerically and militarily superior Russian war machine. The sheer surprise is what makes the Ukrainian joke funny—that Russia went from the second most powerful army in the world to the second most powerful army in Ukraine.

The reflexive explanation for this turn of events (at least in Washington and Brussels) is Western aid. In the initial days of the invasion this was certainly true, and Western aid is still an important component in the mix. But to spend any time on the ground in Ukraine is to see something very different at work: What sustains the fight is not Lockheed contracts or Pentagon planning cycles—it is Ukraine’s messy, decentralized, almost anarchic culture of grassroots innovation.

I walked into a hub of this innovation culture recently: a Soviet-era blockhouse in a provincial Ukrainian town. Inside, it had been gutted and jammed with 3D printers, laptops, soldering irons, disassembled drones, and software consoles. Engineers in their twenties crowd around improvised workstations, debating code fixes and wiring up prototypes. To outside eyes it would look like a hacker convention with bad lighting and worse furniture. In fact, it was just one of many of ad hoc laboratories scattered across Ukraine, each pumping out battlefield-ready inventions faster than a Pentagon task force can schedule its first joint interagency planning meeting.

Dispersal is part of Ukraine’s secret sauce. Instead of concentrating research in gleaming, vulnerable facilities, Ukrainians cultivate it in the overlooked corners of civilian life—an abandoned classroom here, a defunct hotel there. Russian reconnaissance can’t distinguish these facilities from the background clutter—when innovation is spread across these small hubs, there is no single target to cripple. Not exactly rocket science, but a lesson we might take better note of.

Equally important is what these hubs are not: They are not strictly beholden to the Ministry of Defense and they don’t wait for approval signatures or procurement chains. If a frontline unit messages back (usually through a personal connection) that it needs sturdier fin mounts for dropped munitions, an engineer hacks out a prototype that same day. Failures are shrugged off; successes are copied instantly. A $500 drone iteration can be built, tested, lost, and rebuilt in less time than it takes a Western contractor to file a compliance report.

The US model, it will come as no shock, is vast, centralized, and slow by comparison. Programs that swallow billions and take decades are, I fear, designed as much to keep appropriators happy as to win wars. The F-35, which is no doubt a damn cool machine, is now entering its fourth decade of design rollout, and has rung up billions upon billions in development costs. It still struggles with basic readiness, and by the time it reaches full maturity, the battlefield may look nothing like what its designers imagined. Meanwhile, Ukrainian coders armed with open-source software and Telegram chats are pushing out effective AI first-person-view drone targeting systems in a matter of weeks that could, very realistically, wipe squadrons of F-35s off the ramp.

Yes, I’m aware it’s easy to be a critic, and I don’t mean to be unfair. The procurement system for exquisite American weapons systems is impressive and employs a great deal of remarkable talent. Yet the same could be said of the Russian procurement system. It would be foolish to give up our entire military-industrial apparatus, but if we trivialize the enormity of the small, cheap, autonomous, attritable revolution, we do so at our peril.

As an acquisitions program manager years ago, I remember the Air Force presenting Boeing with a million dollars to study which prime contractor would do the avionics upgrade to the E-3 AWACS. A million dollars later (chump change, by the way), Boeing determined that Boeing was probably best suited to take on the half-a-billion-dollar program. A million dollars in Ukraine right now could potentially be mobilized to take out another 10 percent of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Ukraine’s success relies on a culture of evolutionary iteration. The most striking innovations are generally jury-rigged modifications of existing tech—rarely is something developed from the ground up. For example, defused Russian mines are refashioned into custom drone payloads. Loitering munitions are cobbled together from scavenged casings and 3D-printed shells. It’s dangerous, improvised, and yet astonishingly effective. By dispersing munitions production and tech deployment down to the unit level, Ukraine has made it almost impossible for Russia to decapitate its supply chain with single strikes.

All of their comparative success rests on digital fluency. Ukraine’s young engineers grew up in a country that built its economy on IT outsourcing. GitLab repositories and encrypted chats are natural extensions of their workspaces. The result is a military-industrial culture that behaves less like Raytheon and more like a hacker collective—and the stakes are measured not in stock price but in survival.

The contrast with the West should be humbling. For all its vaunted resources, the American defense establishment has become a lumbering cartel—part bureaucracy, part corporate welfare program—incapable of moving at the pace of actual conflict. The lesson from Ukraine is that freedom, dispersal, and entrepreneurial improvisation can out-innovate trillion-dollar procurement cycles. Yes, nothing concentrates national attention like an existential threat, and no doubt Yankee ingenuity would blossom if and when such a scenario unfolded for the United States. But it would be the better part of hubris to believe that technical advantage is ours by right.

The future of warfare will look less like a Pentagon PowerPoint deck and more like the inside of that dingy building I visited in Ukraine—3D printers humming, code scrolling, and young engineers cobbling together survival with zip ties, caffeine, and ingenuity. In short, the future belongs not to the military-industrial complex, but to smart and dedicated people free to improvise where they need to.

Dr. Paul Schwennesen is director of Global Strategy Decisions Group and a defense analyst for Geopolitical Intelligence Services. He recently returned from an eighth mission to the Ukrainian front lines. He was awarded the Verhkhovna Rada medal by Ukraine’s parliament for “Merit to the Ukrainian People,” and coordinates ongoing training and equipment programs there.

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

Image credit: armyinform.com.ua

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Paul Schwennesen · October 2, 2025

18. The Two-Front Illusion: Why a WWII-Style Mobilization Would Break on Today’s Economy and How to Fix It

​Conclusion:

A two-front war is a possibility, not a certainty. The choice is whether to meet it with nostalgia for a mobilization model that no longer exists, or to rebuild the architecture that made it possible: mapped supply chains, redundant tooling, trained labor, pre-licensed plants, secure mineral and semiconductor access, insulated wartime finance, and rehearsed transport corridors. If those foundations exist before the crisis, the “impossible” becomes merely expensive. Without them, the arsenal of democracy will be a museum piece—remembered but unavailable when most needed.

The Two-Front Illusion

By Carlo J.V. Caro

October 02, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/10/02/the_two-front_illusion_1138440.html

Why a WWII-Style Mobilization Would Break on Today’s Economy and How to Fix It

Consider the nightmare scenario U.S. war planners acknowledge privately but rarely air in public: a simultaneous great-power war in Europe and Asia. In 1942, the United States confronted precisely such a configuration and sustained concurrent campaigns across the European, Mediterranean, and Pacific theaters. That precedent has hardened into a comforting assumption—that America could simply scale to the same challenge again. But the mobilization capacity of the early 1940s was not a reflex of national will; it was the product of an industrial structure, legal regime, and logistical architecture that no longer exist. Absent pre-war reconstruction of critical enablers, a modern two-front mobilization would be slower, more brittle, and vulnerable to collapse under attrition before decisive effects could be generated.

The 1940s economy was vertically integrated with a dense domestic machine-tool base. Foundries, heat-treaters, precision grinders, and tool-and-die shops sat near final assembly plants—from Detroit’s auto factories to the shipyards of the Delaware and San Francisco Bays. The War Production Board’s Controlled Materials Plan allocated steel, copper, and aluminum across programs with uniform specifications that pared duplication. An M4 Sherman’s engine block could be cast, milled, honed, and assembled within a single regional corridor linked by rail to an ordnance depot.

By contrast, the 2025 defense-industrial supply graph is transnational, multi-tiered, and opaque even to the Pentagon. A modern anti-ship missile seeker may pull indium phosphide wafers from Japan, cryocooled infrared detectors from France, and firmware compiled in Taiwan. The Defense Production Act cannot compel delivery from nodes the government cannot see; illuminating today’s chains often requires months of forensic mapping through layers of primes, subcontractors, and commercial-off-the-shelf integration.

Platforms themselves are far more intricate. In WWII, design-to-production cycles were measured in months, and changeovers could be achieved by retooling jigs, fixtures, and dies. Ford’s Willow Run went from breaking ground to producing a B-24 roughly every hour—about one every 63 minutes by March 1944—in just over two years. Today, an F-35 contains hundreds of thousands of parts, integrates ~8 million lines of onboard code, and draws on suppliers in well over a dozen countries. A mid-production configuration change can trigger months of systems-integration testing, cybersecurity validation, and airworthiness re-certification. This coupling—hardware to software, prime to subcontractor, design to regulator—turns wartime reconfiguration from weeks into fiscal years.

Constraints absent in the 1940s now bite early. Wartime authorities once pooled or overrode patents so blueprints could flow to any qualified plant; today, sensitive designs are entwined with proprietary software, export controls, and classified protections. Even under DPA Title III, extracting proprietary radar algorithms or seeker code requires legal negotiation, foreign-disclosure approvals, and cyber-secure handling. Precision metallurgy compounds this: a modern turbine blade must meet extreme tolerances, survive >1,000°C without creep, and be produced in single-crystal alloys—processes limited to a handful of facilities optimized for narrow lines and unable to change over quickly without re-qualification. Technical IP, certification, and process metallurgy are now binding mobilization constraints.

Redundancy has eroded. In WWII, multiple cities produced artillery fuzes or machine tools; if one plant was bombed, others absorbed the load. Today, solid-rocket-motor capacity is concentrated in a few sites and firms—Northrop Grumman’s Promontory, Utah complex and Aerojet Rocketdyne (now L3Harris) expanding in Camden, Arkansas—leaving output exposed to single-point failures even if “the work” is split across locations. The U.S. also relies on a single primary beryllium producer (Materion), with refining and metal work centered in Utah and Ohio—an esoteric dependency that touches optics, sensors, and aerospace structures.

Finance has shifted too. In the 1940s, the Fed pegged Treasury yields and war bonds funneled household savings into government debt—overt financial repression. Today’s issuance lands in liberalized, globally intermediated markets where demand is deep but not administratively captive, so large emergency borrowing echoes through rates and exchange channels rather than being absorbed by a guaranteed peg.

Secrecy has inverted. In the 1940s, industrial espionage required physical penetration; aerial reconnaissance was rare and costly. Today, foreign intelligence services and commercial analysts track contract awards, scrape supplier data, and monitor plant expansions via ubiquitous commercial satellites, detecting mobilization nodes months before they reach output. Simultaneously, electrified, automated manufacturing is entwined with critical minerals—cobalt, nickel, lithium—whose mining and especially refining are concentrated abroad, with China and Indonesia playing outsized roles. A maritime shock or embargo that tightens these flows ripples into factory uptime long before the first ship of finished goods sails.

History shows how decisive bottlenecks can be. German armaments output under Speer more than doubled between 1942 and 1944 despite bombing, but mobility unraveled once the oil campaign strangled fuel and transport late in 1944; the 1943 Schweinfurt ball-bearing raids caused disruption that Germany mitigated via dispersal and substitution. Imperial Japan sustained aircraft production into late 1944 but could not replace trained pilots or secure enough high-octane fuel after U.S. submarines shattered its tanker fleet. NATO planners, fearing a Warsaw Pact offensive that would outrun Europe’s industry, prepositioned POMCUS stocks to bridge the gap between U.S. mobilization and sustained reinforcement. The lesson is stable: strong bases still fail when fuel, transport, or single-source components are interdicted faster than they can be rebuilt.

A modern two-front war would multiply these risks. A European campaign would consume artillery at Ukraine-style rates—tens of thousands of rounds per month—plus short- and medium-range air-defense interceptors and combat-engineering assets. An Indo-Pacific war would demand LRASMs, Mk 48 torpedoes, AIM-120-class missiles, and aerial refueling sorties on a scale not seen since Vietnam, while sustaining contested logistics across 6,000 nautical miles. Both theaters would compete for upstream choke points: nitrocellulose and other energetics, RDX/HMX capacity, solid-rocket-motor casings and propellant, seeker optics, and “legacy” rad-hard chips. Many are multi-year problems: nitrocellulose is tied to specialized linters and acid plants (Radford remains the primary U.S. NC supplier), and rad-hard microelectronics require protected domestic lines that take time to reconstitute or expand.

The mobilization clock is unforgiving. In the first six months, the United States could expand output only by cannibalizing existing lines and allied stockpiles, stripping non-deploying units for spares, and diverting commercial shipping and aviation. Maintenance standards would loosen to keep partially serviceable systems in use, and production would focus on “good enough” munitions like JDAM kits and GMLRS rockets, rationing more complex systems. From six to twenty-four months, added energetics lines and artillery-shell capacity could come online, pushing 155mm toward ~100,000 shells per month by late 2025—an annualized rate near 1.2 million if sustained—still far below WWII’s tens of millions per year by 1944. Workforce shortages in critical trades would persist, as certification pipelines for nuclear welders, energetics chemists, and NDT inspectors cannot be safely compressed. Only after roughly two to five years would new shipyard capacity, chemical energetics complexes, and microelectronics fabs produce meaningful surpluses—by which point objectives may already be constrained by industrial shortfall.

The answer is not a budgetary surge alone but a rebuilt industrial architecture that compresses the lag between demand and first replacement systems in theater. Maintain a continuously updated, classified bill-of-materials map for every critical munition down to third-tier suppliers; create a national reserve of 5-axis mills, autoclaves, winding machines, and dies in climate-controlled depots and exercise them quarterly; keep mothballed “dark factories” for rocket motors, energetics, and seekers at low idle with retained crews; establish a credentialed civilian reserve manufacturing corps for critical trades; secure trailing-edge semiconductor capacity domestically and with allies via pre-purchased wafers and mask sets; and treat ports, railheads, and merchant crews as weapons systems with pre-allocated wartime slots and trained reserves. Build parallel energetics plants in multiple regions to eliminate single-site dependency, and use alliance-based mirrored tooling so a missile built in the United States can be built without redesign in Japan, Poland, or Australia.

These measures are not glamorous, but they spell the difference between sustaining combat power across two theaters and watching one front collapse for lack of materiel. The currency of industrial war is time: replacing what is lost before momentum reverses. In 1942, geography and scale bought the United States that time. In the 21st century, adversaries will aim to win by severing long-lead bottlenecks before they can be restored. A mobilization plan that treats the home front as a contested battlespace—subject to cyber penetration, financial disruption, and targeted interdiction—is strategic realism.

A two-front war is a possibility, not a certainty. The choice is whether to meet it with nostalgia for a mobilization model that no longer exists, or to rebuild the architecture that made it possible: mapped supply chains, redundant tooling, trained labor, pre-licensed plants, secure mineral and semiconductor access, insulated wartime finance, and rehearsed transport corridors. If those foundations exist before the crisis, the “impossible” becomes merely expensive. Without them, the arsenal of democracy will be a museum piece—remembered but unavailable when most needed.

Carlo J.V. Caro is a strategic analyst trained in international security at Columbia University. He previously served as Vice President of a real estate and sustainability firm, overseeing blockchain-enabled investment systems, green housing finance, and cross-regional procurements across Asia and Latin America.  

19. Quad-ASEAN trade cooperation key to regional economic security

​JAAI: Japan-ASEAN-Australia-India Economic Corridor 

​Excerpts:

The US can play just as consequential a role in promoting the establishment of the Japan-ASEAN-Australia-India Economic Corridor (JAAI) as another beautiful trade route from Japan to Indonesia to India.

...

The time for JAAI as a vehicle for greater economic engagement, prosperity and security across the Indo-Pacific is now. The next Quad Leaders’ Summit, which could be held as early as November in New Delhi, would provide a timely venue for its launch among the four participating nations. If confirmed, the Indian hosts should consider inviting select additional signatories for the JAAI signing with an option for more nations to join later on. In addition to the Quad four, JAAI would be stronger if it included South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, PNG and New Zealand as initial signatories.

JAAI, with the IMEC, represents bottom-up, self-interest-driven regional initiatives to connect the economies of the Indo-Pacific with the Mediterranean-Atlantic in the post-globalisation era. Both JAAI and the IMEC collectively offer a pragmatic approach to optimising connections between free and open economies, societies and spaces, while providing a formidable counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Quad nations have a historic opportunity in JAAI to give shape to their regional rhetoric for a free and open Indo-Pacific. Japan, India and Australia should lead the way with the US’s full support. US and Quad interests in the Indo-Pacific necessitate pragmatic collective action. JAAI represents such an action. The time to act is now.

Quad-ASEAN trade cooperation key to regional economic security | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Kaush Arha · October 2, 2025

Japan, India and Australia’s converging interests would be fortified by a Japan-ASEAN-Australia-India economic corridor championed by the United States.

Japan and India—the world’s fourth- and fifth-largest economies, respectively—are determinedly deepening their bilateral partnership amid Chinese mercantilism and US President Donald Trump’s tariff turbulence. The prime ministers of Japan and India, at the 15th Japan-India Annual Summit in Tokyo this August, hailed their Special Strategic and Global Partnership while articulating a ‘joint vision for the next decade’. The two nations can best realise this vision by bookending an economic corridor from Japan to India through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Australia, advancing both Quad and Indo-Pacific economic prosperity and security.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed that Japan–India relations were entering a ‘golden chapter’. The two nations inked more than 170 memorandums of cooperation at the summit, strengthening coordination across a stunning range of areas including economic security, energy, semiconductors, AI, infrastructure, logistics, tech, health, entertainment, space, defence and the Quad. It’s time to enshrine the golden chapter by catalysing the renaissance of India’s historic Golden Road of trade, technology and culture, extending from Southeast Asia to Japan and Korea.

Japan pledged to invest 10 trillion yen (US$68 billion) in India over the next five years. Furthermore, Japanese and Indian business leaders pledged to facilitate India’s future accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The two nations also launched the India-Japan Cooperation Initiative for Sustainable Economic Development in Africa. India is set to welcome Japan’s famed bullet trains (shinkansen), and automobile manufacturer Suzuki just launched its battery electric vehicle production in Gujarat.

Australia is the leading energy and minerals source for both Japan and India. Its agriculture, energy and mining resources are renowned worldwide. Australia’s INPEX’s Ichthys liquefied natural gas project, one of Japan’s largest overseas direct investments, delivers reliable energy to Japan and beyond. Australia, particularly through the Northern Territory and Western Australia, offers an optimal Indo-Pacific location to serve as the processing hub for rare earth elements and select critical minerals, thereby establishing competitive and resilient alternative supply chains that reduce dependence on China. Conversely, Australia is keen to diversify its markets for mineral, energy and agricultural exports away from over-reliance on China. An economic corridor involving Japan, ASEAN, India and the US would offer a fitting alternative.

The US, preoccupied with sorting its trade relations with friends and foes alike, has yet to put forward a positive Indo-Pacific economic agenda. While professing China as its main adversary and the Indo-Pacific as its primary theatre of concern, the US finds itself occupied with Ukraine and Middle East matters. However, it has a ready and tested remedy to right the oversight. The US was indispensable in the launch of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), celebrated by Trump during Modi’s state visit early this year as ‘one of the greatest trade routes in all of history’ with collective investments in ports, railways, and submarine cables from India to Italy. The US can play just as consequential a role in promoting the establishment of the Japan-ASEAN-Australia-India Economic Corridor (JAAI) as another beautiful trade route from Japan to Indonesia to India.

The Quad nations’ worthy individual and collective economic initiatives need a regional manifestation of impact, imagination and inspiration. Japan’s and India’s burgeoning bilateral partnership and regional coordination; Australia’s critical need to develop and diversify its natural resources markets; ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific; and the US’s positive economic engagement in Indo-Pacific would be magnified to an impact far greater than their many parts through the launch of the JAAI. The JAAI would be a natural, equal partner to the IMEC, launched by India, the US, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, Italy, Germany and France at the G20 Summit in Delhi in 2023.

The IMEC’s stated purpose is to revitalise Indo-Mediterranean trade and commerce through a network of ports, railways, and sea lanes, and additionally construct an overland transit route across the Gulf Peninsula to buttress the ports and maritime traffic. However, the IMEC at its core represents converging interests—economic and strategic—binding together Europe, India, the Middle East and the US. It offers an organising framework for enhanced coordination across diverse strands of Indo-Mediterranean economic engagement including the Abraham Accords, EU Global Gateway, Italy’s Mattei Plan, Gulf nations’ need for economic diversity, and in-the-works EU-India free trade agreement. Analogous conditions and motivations exist to deepen the economic security partnership between Japan, India, Australia, the US and the region in between.

JAAI offers the most demonstrable and promising project to boost economic security across the free and open Indo-Pacific and act as an organising framework for a myriad of complementary concerns, motivations and initiatives. Japan has been a leader in economic security among the G7 and the Quad, and it is keen to put its principles into practice in its region. The US and Japan are among the top five foreign investors in the ASEAN region and are keen to optimise their investments more effectively. The US is the leading security provider across the region, but it is currently lacking a commensurate economic security strategy.

The Quad nations—Australia, India, Japan, and the US—have, for the most part, entered into or are negotiating bilateral economic or trade agreements among themselves, but have yet to find a robust regional application to counter China’s accelerated economic encroachment. All four repeatedly reaffirm ASEAN centrality for a free and open Indo-Pacific but have yet to announce a demonstrable project to put it in motion. ASEAN nations, in their own Indo-Pacific Outlook, call for greater connectivity across the region. India has ambitious plans to construct road and rail networks across Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Australia is most keen to diversify away from the near Chinese monopsony of its minerals wealth.

JAAI’s fundamental purpose would be to revitalise historic trade, commerce, and cultural flows between India and Japan, and the ASEAN region, respectively. In his recent book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, historian William Dalrymple provides a vivid account of India’s extensive and profound economic and cultural influence across the present ASEAN region for thousands of years.

Specifically, JAAI should pursue three reinforcing lines of effort. First, it can substantially augment Quad commerce among itself and with ASEAN through a network of ports, railways and sea lanes, while additionally constructing an overland transit route across the Irrawaddy and Mekong watersheds from India to Vietnam to complement ports and maritime traffic. Second, it can accommodate special provisions for incorporating Pacific island economies into the JAAI mainstream. Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, as founding signatories of JAAI, could lead this effort. Third, collective action is needed to ensure maritime security along the JAAI, with agreed-upon operational modalities to address extreme weather events, piracy, illegal fishing and other impediments to freedom of navigation.

JAAI would enjoy a few comparative advantages over the IMEC when it comes to collective action. The Quad grouping offers a standing platform to buoy JAAI implementation. And JAAI offers an effective framework to cohere Quad’s regional economic strategies and deliver on its major priorities, including economic security with an emphasis on resilient supply lines for processed critical minerals, energy security, tech security, maritime security and humanitarian assistance.

The Quad nations could jointly establish an ad hoc development finance facility in coordination with the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank to mitigate financial risks in strategic infrastructure investments. The Indo-Pacific Business Forum, launched during the first Trump administration and continued through former US president Joe Biden’s tenure, offers an appropriate venue for industry coordination in support of JAAI implementation.

Analogous to the IMEC, submarine digital cables backed by expanding cloud and satellite technologies—which are ushering in a new age of digital economy and telecommunications—present the most promising avenues to demonstrate early achievements under JAAI. The US and Australia, acting in consonance, can deliver energy security agreements to many of the potential JAAI member states. The Quad, South Korea and Taiwan’s coordinated off-take agreements and associated financing in developing critical minerals industries in Australia should be a high JAAI priority. Under JAAI, equal prominence should be devoted to energy, digital and tourism accessibility for the Pacific island economies.

JAAI magnifies synergies between India’s domestic and regional development goals. Economic development and improved connectivity of India’s hilly northeastern region are critical to the Modi government’s domestic agenda and planned overland transit routes to Vietnam. The Japan-India infrastructure partnership, bolstered by joint ventures in modernising India’s national trade and transit corridors and the development of India’s northeastern regions, is well-positioned to lead the way in connecting India’s northeast to Vietnam through overland, modern commercial thoroughfares.

The time for JAAI as a vehicle for greater economic engagement, prosperity and security across the Indo-Pacific is now. The next Quad Leaders’ Summit, which could be held as early as November in New Delhi, would provide a timely venue for its launch among the four participating nations. If confirmed, the Indian hosts should consider inviting select additional signatories for the JAAI signing with an option for more nations to join later on. In addition to the Quad four, JAAI would be stronger if it included South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, PNG and New Zealand as initial signatories.

JAAI, with the IMEC, represents bottom-up, self-interest-driven regional initiatives to connect the economies of the Indo-Pacific with the Mediterranean-Atlantic in the post-globalisation era. Both JAAI and the IMEC collectively offer a pragmatic approach to optimising connections between free and open economies, societies and spaces, while providing a formidable counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Quad nations have a historic opportunity in JAAI to give shape to their regional rhetoric for a free and open Indo-Pacific. Japan, India and Australia should lead the way with the US’s full support. US and Quad interests in the Indo-Pacific necessitate pragmatic collective action. JAAI represents such an action. The time to act is now.

This article was originally published in The National Interest.

aspistrategist.org.au · Kaush Arha · October 2, 2025

20. The Price of Unpredictability: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility

​Excerpts:

Many American politicians, including some Republicans, have warned about the long-term consequences of Trump’s chaotic global decisions. Even if he is succeeded in office by a close political ally, the next U.S. president might try to act in a more predictable manner (particularly if they are even tempered). But reestablishing American credibility will be easier said than done. A country’s reputation extends beyond its present leader: when Trump repeatedly breaks promises or abruptly shifts course, it deepens skepticism not only about him but also about the reliability of American institutions altogether. And once credibility is lost, it is hard to recover. The next U.S. president, no matter their approach, will inherit allies who flatter but also hedge, adversaries who test and wait, and a system in which the United States’ word simply carries less weight than it once did.

Washington, in other words, will have fewer friends. For many U.S. partners, hedging will become a necessity as flattery loses its effect and direct confrontation becomes too costly. Meanwhile, Washington might acquire new adversaries, as countries spurned by Trump seek defense partnerships with American competitors. Deterrence will grow more costly, as U.S. officials contend with a growing number of threats. And Washington will have to spend more to reassure the allies it still has.

The United States might find itself with fewer close allies even without Trump, as the international system becomes increasingly multipolar. But the current president’s unpredictability is likely hastening this process. Trump may leave office convinced that his unpredictability made Washington stronger and that Americans will benefit from the resulting configurations of power and transactional deals. He may think that, that by rejecting the need for credibility, he freed the United States from constraints that tied the hands of previous presidents. But history is likely to show otherwise: that Trump replaced credibility with volatility, leaving behind a United States that is less trusted.

The Price of Unpredictability

Foreign Affairs · More by Keren Yarhi-Milo · October 2, 2025

How Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility

Keren Yarhi-Milo

October 2, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump speaking at the White House, Washington, D.C., September 2025 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

KEREN YARHI-MILO is Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations. She is the coeditor, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, of Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-Making.

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For decades, U.S. foreign policy has depended on credibility: the belief that Washington would honor its commitments and that its past behavior signaled its future conduct. The United States, for instance, was able to develop a large network of allies because its partners trusted that, if attacked, Washington would defend them. It could strike free trade deals with countries around the world and negotiate peace agreements because, generally speaking, it was seen as an honest broker. That is not to say the United States has never surprised, or that it never reneged on a promise. But for most of its modern history, it has been a trustworthy actor.

But unlike any U.S. president before him, Donald Trump has abandoned all efforts to make Washington reliable or consistent. His predecessors had also, at times, made decisions that undermined American credibility. But Trump’s lack of consistency is of an entirely different magnitude—and appears to be part of a deliberate strategy. He proposes deals before backing down. He promises to end wars before expanding them. He berates U.S. allies and embraces adversaries. With Trump, the only pattern is the lack of one.

Trump’s theory of the case is simple. By keeping friends and foes off balance, the president believes he can secure quick wins, like modest increases in European defense spending. Trump also thinks that unpredictability affords him greater wiggle room in international affairs by ensuring that allies and adversaries are always second-guessing his next course of action. Finally, Trump thinks that he can frighten and thus deter opponents by appearing unhinged—an idea that political scientists call madman theory. As Trump once boasted, Chinese President Xi Jinping would never risk a blockade of Taiwan while he is president because Xi “knows I’m fucking crazy.”

As some analysts have pointed out, Trump’s approach has delivered a few temporary international victories. But in the long term, Trump’s approach to global politics is not likely to strengthen the country. Other states will work to flatter Washington for a time, in hopes of avoiding U.S. penalties. But eventually, governments will look to protect themselves by aligning with other countries. The United States’ list of adversaries will, accordingly, grow. Its alliances will weaken. Washington, in other words, could find itself ever more isolated—and without any clear path to reestablishing its reputation.

GOOD NAME

American presidents have consistently argued that, to protect U.S. power, Washington’s commitments need to be credible. U.S. President Harry Truman, for instance, decided to intervene on the Korean peninsula in order to check Soviet expansionism. “I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act, it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead,” he later said, by way of explanation. President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam largely out of fear that retreat would signal Washington wasn’t serious about containing communism. President George W. Bush justified the 2007 surge in Iraq on the grounds that withdrawal would undermine U.S. credibility; Barack Obama kept U.S. forces in the country for similar reasons. And when Obama hesitated to enforce his self-proclaimed “redline” against chemical weapons use in Syria, he was pilloried by his critics for emboldening the United States’ enemies. (He later told a journalist that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you're willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”) After the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden was also criticized for undermining Washington’s reputations for reliability, resolve, and competence.

What effect these leaders’ decisions actually had on American credibility is unclear. The causal relationship between a state’s decisions and the way those decisions are perceived is complex and fuzzy. The Dartmouth political scientist Daryl Press, for instance, has argued that states look to present interests and capabilities, rather than past behavior, to measure resolve. Others, including Pennsylvania State University professor Roseanne McManus, have shown that leaders’ reputations for resolve actually only matter under certain conditions during crises. And research that I have done with University of Pennsylvania professor Alex Weisiger shows that countries that have backed down in the past are twice as likely to be challenged in the future. Other research of mine demonstrates that credibility is shaped as much by perceptions of consistency and reputations for resolve, built up over time, as it is by the costly signals that leaders attempt to send and how they are received by adversaries. Leaders, in other words, think back to their past interactions with adversaries in estimating intentions just as much as they take into account the actions those adversaries are taking during a particular crisis.

But when it comes to Trump, these findings are almost beside the point. Whatever it is that scholarship says a government needs to do to establish credibility, Trump is doing the reverse. The president has openly questioned the most sacrosanct of U.S. defense guarantees—NATO’s Article Five commitment to collective defense—by declaring that if allies do not “pay up,” they cannot expect protection. He has pulled the United States out of multilateral agreements, such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, without regard for reputational costs. He even reneged on the U.S.-Mexican-Canadian trade deal, which he negotiated and signed during his first term. And he has flipped back and forth between criticizing and praising Russian President Vladimir Putin—one of Washington’s most determined adversaries—with no clear trigger. His recent meeting with Putin in Alaska was a case in point. It was organized hastily and meant to burnish Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker, but he got nothing concrete in return from his Russian counterpart. Most observers say the American president was played.

Trump may be aware of what his behavior is doing to American credibility, or the consequences may elude him. But either way, the reputational costs for consistency and reliability clearly do not affect his decisions. The president does not want to be credible so much as he wants to gain the psychological upper hand to score quick victories. If that requires disregarding long-standing American commitments, so be it. He wants maximum flexibility: the ability to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to, in order to get his way.

AGENT OF CHAOS

Trump’s unpredictability is clearly intentional. The president relishes in being chaotic and understands that his threatening behavior helps achieve certain aims, like his trade deals. “We have to be unpredictable,” Trump said when first running for president in 2016. “I don’t want them to know what I’m thinking.”

But that does not mean the president’s behavior is always attached to a strategy. Instead, it is often the byproduct of mood swings—a version of what the scholar Todd Hall calls “emotional diplomacy.” Fear, anger, disappointment, and revenge are now common drivers of American statecraft. It is a fact many countries have discovered the hard way. During his first term, for instance, Trump praised Canada’s then prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and struck a trade agreement with Ottawa. During his second, he accused the country of not doing enough to curb the flow of fentanyl and other narcotics and then hit it with a suite of tariffs. Likewise, Trump repeatedly celebrated his warm relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during term one, only to turn on New Delhi after it denied that Washington helped stop its May conflict with Pakistan. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, has moved in seemingly the opposite direction. At first, Zelensky incensed Trump by correcting him in a White House meeting, prompting Washington to temporarily suspend aid to Kyiv. But then Zelensky made nice, and last month, Trump declared that he supported Ukraine’s quest to take back all its land from Russia—something he previously declared unachievable.

For foreign leaders, keeping up with Trump’s shifting moods and whims is nearly impossible. But there are a few different strategies they can deploy to try to win the president over, or at least to limit the carnage. The first is flattery—feeding into Trump’s grandiose self-image. This technique has been particularly popular among Washington’s closest partners. In addition to Zelensky, for instance, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte called the U.S. leader a “pragmatic peacemaker” after his August meeting in the White House, almost certainly in an attempt to prevent the president from abandoning the alliance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, praised Trump’s “decisive leadership” while successfully pressing him to join Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But even neutral countries have sought to play to Trump’s arrogance. Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir, for example, nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize in an effort to split the United States from India.

Fear, anger, disappointment, and revenge are now common drivers of American statecraft.

Flattery, however, quickly loses its value as more leaders deploy it. If every country flatters Trump, after all, none of them gain leverage. And for countries that have grown angry at being bullied, praising Trump is sometimes too unpalatable to countenance. As a result, some governments have adopted the opposite approach—confrontation. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, has responded with defiance as Trump tariffs his country and sanctions its judges for convicting former President Jair Bolsonaro over his plot to steal an election. Modi has taken an aggressive line toward Trump, as well. But although these measures can help improve leaders’ popularity at home, they rarely cause Trump to back off, which can then cause domestic backlash of its own. Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter had a confrontational phone call with Trump after Washington hit her country with massive tariffs, but when Trump didn’t budge, she was accused by her domestic opponents of mishandling relations.

There is a middle approach between flattery and confrontation: hedging. It involves being flexible and cozying up to multiple major powers, including some U.S. adversaries. Many Latin American countries, for example, are trading and cooperating more with Asia and Europe in the wake of Trump’s election while still working with Washington. Gulf monarchies flatter Trump even as they deepen ties with China. French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Europe to pursue a course of “strategic autonomy” that weans his country and the continent off their dependence on both China and the United States.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Uncertain of how to respond to Trump’s volatility, much of the world flatters Trump one day, confronts him the next, and then hedges the day after. But ultimately, none of these tactics have delivered more than temporary success. Trump continues to shift his approach to the world almost minute by minute, depending on how he feels.

AT WHAT COST

To his credit, Trump has scored some legitimate achievements by being unpredictable. Consider, for example, his bombing of Iran, which set back the country’s nuclear ambitions. When asked whether he would strike Iran after Israel began its bombing campaign, he deliberately waffled. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said. “I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” The result was uncertainty in Israel and Iran about how they should position themselves. His decision to ultimately intervene militarily was driven by his desire to get rid of perceptions he was weak and backed down when confronted, as well as by his urge to be seen as a winner. By demonstrating to other countries his willingness to flip quickly and turn on them, Trump may have thus bolstered American deterrence.

His handling of allied defense budgets could also be considered a victory. For decades, American leaders have pushed for the rest of NATO to up its military spending but never challenged Article 5. European countries thus felt relatively little pressure to act. By casting doubt on collective defense, however, Trump was able to inject some urgency, and at the 2025 Hague summit, European allies pledged to raise their defense spending to a remarkable five percent of GDP. The U.S.-European tariff standoff followed a similar script. Under threat of escalating tariffs, Brussels made trade concessions to Washington over this past summer that were once deemed unthinkable, including an agreement to purchase $750 billion worth of U.S. energy. In response, Trump declared victory. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, praised his “decisive leadership.”

But it is unclear to what extent these victories will be lasting. Trump, for example, may have coaxed more defense spending out of Europe, but at the cost of making NATO more fragile. Even though NATO members are spending more on their own security, the alliance’s strength relies primarily on its collective defense guarantees, which Trump has now weakened. After all, if the mighty United States itself will not respond militarily when a NATO ally is attacked, then the alliance will be weaker even if European countries increase their defense budgets. Trump’s tariffs on the continent tell a similar story: Washington may have extracted its economic concessions, but Europe is now increasing its economic and political autonomy. As a result, the United States will soon have less sway with the continent. In fact, it will have less sway over the whole world. As American credibility deteriorates, it may become harder for Washington to negotiate or facilitate peace deals—as it often does—which will result in a more volatile international system.

Washington will have fewer friends.

Many American politicians, including some Republicans, have warned about the long-term consequences of Trump’s chaotic global decisions. Even if he is succeeded in office by a close political ally, the next U.S. president might try to act in a more predictable manner (particularly if they are even tempered). But reestablishing American credibility will be easier said than done. A country’s reputation extends beyond its present leader: when Trump repeatedly breaks promises or abruptly shifts course, it deepens skepticism not only about him but also about the reliability of American institutions altogether. And once credibility is lost, it is hard to recover. The next U.S. president, no matter their approach, will inherit allies who flatter but also hedge, adversaries who test and wait, and a system in which the United States’ word simply carries less weight than it once did.

Washington, in other words, will have fewer friends. For many U.S. partners, hedging will become a necessity as flattery loses its effect and direct confrontation becomes too costly. Meanwhile, Washington might acquire new adversaries, as countries spurned by Trump seek defense partnerships with American competitors. Deterrence will grow more costly, as U.S. officials contend with a growing number of threats. And Washington will have to spend more to reassure the allies it still has.

The United States might find itself with fewer close allies even without Trump, as the international system becomes increasingly multipolar. But the current president’s unpredictability is likely hastening this process. Trump may leave office convinced that his unpredictability made Washington stronger and that Americans will benefit from the resulting configurations of power and transactional deals. He may think that, that by rejecting the need for credibility, he freed the United States from constraints that tied the hands of previous presidents. But history is likely to show otherwise: that Trump replaced credibility with volatility, leaving behind a United States that is less trusted.

Foreign Affairs · More by Keren Yarhi-Milo · October 2, 2025

21. Sudan’s War Is the Shape of Things to Come: Why Mediators Struggle to End a New Kind of Conflict

​Excerpts:

The discourse about an emerging multipolar world often assumes that its main flash points will arise from competition between great powers—China and Russia, as well as the United States. The Sudanese case shows how unmanageable conflicts may emerge outside these countries’ core spheres of influence. In the Horn, numerous rising regional middle powers with different but overlapping interests and leverage are increasingly outmuscling China and Russia, whose interventions in the region are still limited.

In August, the RSF swore in its own parallel, Darfur-based Sudanese government. This move deepened the de facto partitioning of the country into two separate zones of administration, creating fresh barriers to any attempt to piece Sudan back together. The United States will still be indispensable to efforts to reverse such a de facto partition, not least because it remains the lone superpower interested in doing so.

Sudan’s disaster could become a bitter but valuable lesson on overreach for regional powers, prompting them to learn how to manage their competition, ideally without relying so heavily on the United States as a middleman. But the prospect of playing a smaller role must not be an excuse for the United States to walk away. Some in Washington argue that because influencing peacemaking in the Horn is harder than it used to be, the U.S. government should pull way back. But that will only encourage even more instability. Washington will need to learn to adapt and contribute to mediation processes in which it is one of various players, not the decider. Otherwise, catastrophic wars like Sudan’s could multiply.

Sudan’s War Is the Shape of Things to Come

Foreign Affairs · More by Alan Boswell · October 2, 2025

Why Mediators Struggle to End a New Kind of Conflict

Alan Boswell

October 2, 2025

Unexploded ordnance in Khartoum, Sudan, April 2025 El Tayeb Siddig / Reuters

ALAN BOSWELL is Horn of Africa Director at the International Crisis Group and host of The Horn podcast.

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On September 12, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States announced a joint road map for ending Sudan’s devastating two-and-a-half-year civil war. The announcement, on its own terms, was a breakthrough. Soon after its outbreak in Khartoum in April 2023, the conflict entangled a variety of regional actors. Egypt and a number of other nearby states have supported General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the government now based in Port Sudan; the UAE—and, increasingly, other countries that depend on Abu Dhabi, such as Chad—has backed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who had been Burhan’s deputy in Sudan’s previous military junta.

The sponsors of the plan, known collectively as the Quad, are thus Arab powers that have a great deal of sway in Sudan (including Saudi Arabia, which has mostly sought to remain neutral) and the United States. Brokering such an agreement among these outside countries had long proved elusive, and it took months of high-level U.S.-led negotiations to reach agreement on a joint road map. The plan called for a three-month humanitarian truce between the two warring factions. This would be followed by a permanent cease-fire and a political process led by the Sudanese to choose a new civilian-led government.

After years of vicious fighting, hope surged that there might finally be a way to end a catastrophe that has killed up to 150,000, displaced a quarter of the country’s population of 50 million, and left innumerable Sudanese without essential services. Yet the plan already appears to be stalling. The fighting in Sudan has continued to rage, and the SAF has publicly rejected the proposal. Bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into closer alignment was a necessary first step, but a chasm still separates the warring sides. It also remains unclear whether the new U.S. administration is prepared for the difficult long-term engagement that would be needed to bring the plan to fruition.

Indeed, amid a wider U.S. retreat from the region and the rise of ambitious middle powers nearby, the larger story is that the United States no longer possesses the clout it once had to underwrite mediation processes in many parts of Africa, necessitating unwieldy formats such as the Quad. Among outside actors, Washington had by far the greatest influence over the Horn of Africa in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Although it overreached badly in some of its interventions, it gave peacemaking a center of gravity.

But over the past 15 years, the United States’ influence has diminished. At the same time, rising regional powers have spotted commercial and diplomatic openings and attempted to pull the Horn of Africa much closer, politically and economically, to the Middle East. This has won the region some needed investment, and some of these powers have proved agile mediators. But the Gulf’s sponsorship of warring parties has, on the whole, made conflicts much harder to resolve.

In this sense, the war in Sudan has become a harbinger of what more wars could look like in the future: messy and seemingly insoluble, drawing in ever more rival outside powers, each with its own irreconcilable interests. Once they start, these kinds of wars are very difficult to end, because no single actor has the authority to convene all the players or corral the other outside powers. They can be extremely destructive, given the advanced weaponry outsiders can now pour in. And the very competitive dynamic that inflames these conflicts in the first place often dooms them to continue as different countries back competing frameworks or jostle for the right to play peacemaker. Peace deals that do cross the finish line rarely accomplish more than to freeze a fractured status quo.

ANCHOR POINT

The Horn of Africa has long been vulnerable to the influence of broad geopolitical shifts. During the Cold War, the Horn was an epicenter of proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union; as the Cold War drew to a close, the region experienced political convulsions: regime change in Ethiopia, state collapse in Somalia, and civil wars in Sudan. But although the post–Cold War era started with a shock, it stabilized somewhat as the United States became the dominant source of outside influence. Using plentiful sticks and carrots as well as diplomatic muscle at the regional level, Washington came to play an outsize role in attempting to stabilize the volatile Horn.

Its record was very checkered: in the years since the United States greenlighted a 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, an Islamist insurgency has taken over swaths of the country. Beginning in the 1990s in Sudan, the United States helped back a southern-based insurgency to put pressure on the Islamist government in Khartoum, resulting in South Sudan’s secession. The new nation quickly slipped into civil war, and northern Sudan struggled economically. More generally, the United States’ liberalizing agenda did little to bolster weak states’ governance.

Still, the United States’ relative hegemony and consistent engagement helped shore up basic interstate stability and centralize peacemaking efforts. Although border disputes between Horn states festered, few local leaders risked the censure that would come with efforts to outright annex neighboring territory. When border wars or major civil wars broke out, the United States steered attempts toward diplomatic resolutions, often by backing multilateral efforts. U.S. officials, for instance, threw their support behind the Algiers agreement (crafted by the UN and the Organization of African Unity) that Ethiopia and Eritrea signed in 2000. The crisis in Darfur in the early years of the twentieth century drew the attention both of U.S. leaders and the American public, and Washington pressured Sudanese negotiators to accept the 2005 Kenyan-led peace process that ended Sudan’s previous civil war and closely coordinated with the African Union’s oversight of the partition of Sudan and South Sudan. In 2012, U.S. pressure was key in stopping a short-lived invasion of Sudan by South Sudan, which risked becoming a new interstate war.

European countries largely followed the United States’ lead in Sudan, and regional powers mostly did not challenge U.S.-backed diplomatic processes. When a proposed multilateral peace effort did not have U.S. backing (such as the African Union’s 2011 attempt to mediate in Libya before the fall of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime), it rarely gained traction.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

But in the past decade, the United States’ ability to shape the international approach to Sudan has steadily declined. As the United States repeatedly tried to turn its focus toward China and remained intractably entangled in Middle Eastern disputes, the stability of the Horn slid down Washington’s priority list—a “nice to have,” but not essential. U.S. President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Princeton Lyman, ran a large office with more than 20 staff members, including some detailed from the Defense and Treasury Departments, and reported directly to the White House—a far cry from the resources afforded to more recent U.S. special envoys to the region, who lack teams and report to the State Department’s Africa bureau.

And where the United States mostly saw problems and headaches to solve, some regional middle powers saw fresh opportunities. The United States had sent foreign aid managed by its own bureaucracies, but the Gulf powers and Turkey began to offer the Horn direct investment. In 2006, the Emirates-based logistics giant Dubai Ports World won a 30-year contract to operate Djibouti’s main port, launching a wider effort by Abu Dhabi to control ports across eastern Africa. Its infrastructure investments then expanded inland to include mineral deals, energy projects, and trade corridors in a variety of countries. Turkey, for its part, also put resources into new commercial and security partnerships across the Horn of Africa, especially in countries with territory that had once been linked to the Ottoman Empire.

A scramble for influence in the Horn intensified following the 2011 Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia and the UAE blamed Qatar and Turkey for backing the popular uprising. Each country’s effort to diminish Qatar’s power involved trying to box it out of the Horn and pressure states in that region to choose sides. They also ramped up their commercial investments. According to an April 2024 World Economic Forum memo, over the past decade, the UAE has poured $59 billion into Africa, making it the continent’s fourth largest foreign direct investor (nearly catching up with China, the EU, and the United States), while Saudi Arabia has invested $26 billion; many of these investments are concentrated in the Horn. And as Gulf powers began to question the longevity of U.S. security commitments in the Middle East, some worked to more intentionally build influence across the Red Sea that could protect their interests.

A feedback loop emerged. Waning U.S. engagement with the Horn and other parts of Africa widened the space for middle powers’ own interventions, and middle powers’ growing influence then diminished the United States’ return on its diplomatic investments, hastening its strategic retreat. These middle powers infused foreign direct investment into the Horn and sometimes sought to help resolve conflicts. Qatar, for instance, recently helped mediate a de-escalation between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and last year, Turkey calmed tensions between Ethiopia and Somalia. But inevitably, different efforts also competed or sometimes worked at cross-purposes, driving instability.

CENTER SPREAD

Sudan has become the epicenter of this middle-power contest. Its rich agricultural land along the Nile and its strategic location at the juncture of the African and Arab worlds—connecting central Africa to the Red Sea and eastern Africa—make it hugely important to nearby powers’ economies and security. In 2018, the disastrous three-decade reign of Sudan’s Islamist dictator, Omar al-Bashir, ran out of steam when a revolt begun by Sudanese youth ousted him. A fledgling civilian government was established, which Washington had every interest in helping succeed.

This was a historic chance for Sudan. After Burhan and Hemedti, the military leaders, imposed a junta in the wake of Bashir’s downfall, the United States as well as some European and African countries made some effort to back the civilian leaders and protesters in the street. They helped broker a power-sharing deal between the junta and civilian politicians that included an eventual transition to full civilian rule.

But the region’s changing power dynamic favored the generals, who had close ties with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And the United States (as well as Europe) failed to seize the moment to back Sudan’s civilian transition: for instance, Washington failed to lift its Bashir-era financial restrictions on Khartoum until December 2020, weakening the civilian administration in its infancy. In 2021, Burhan and Hemedti ousted the short-lived transitional government in a coup.

After war broke out two years later between Burhan’s SAF and Hemedti’s RSF, Egypt immediately increased its public and covert support for the SAF. And the SAF won new support, including from Turkey (which, like the UAE, seeks to control a Red Sea port in Sudan), as well as Algeria, Iran, and Qatar. These countries all recognized Burhan’s regime as Sudan’s legitimate government.

Children displaced by Sudan's civil war, Cairo, July 2025 Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

The UAE continues to deny that it is arming and funding the RSF. But African, Arab, U.S., and European officials widely believe that the UAE is behind the massive logistical operation that has kept the RSF supplied. The group’s main supply route currently runs through Libyan territory controlled by the powerful general and politician Khalifa Haftar, a close UAE ally. Although the UAE has numerous interests in Sudan (including gold), it is easy to overstate the degree to which its involvement in the conflict constitutes a resource grab. Its efforts appear driven by a much broader desire to project power through economic might, including across northern, central, and eastern Africa—and an apparent refusal to create a precedent by abandoning a bellicose proxy. The UAE has also publicly taken issue with Burhan’s tactical wartime alliance with former Bashir officials, given Abu Dhabi’s aversion to Islamist ideology.

Officially, Saudi Arabia has remained neutral in the Sudanese conflict. But it has boosted its diplomatic and economic support to the SAF, including by closely advising its leadership and arguing its case in international forums. Eastern Sudan sits just across the Red Sea from Jeddah, Mecca, and many huge development projects further north on Saudi Arabia’s coast. Riyadh fears that if the Sudanese state collapses entirely, its adversaries could gain a foothold there and instability could spill into the Red Sea, driving insecurity, trafficking, and extremism and reducing its ability to capitalize on the Saudi coast’s potential as a logistics and tourism hub. It also worries about further spillover into Egypt, a key ally.

This tangle of outside influence reflects a continent-wide trend. In a 2024 report, the Peace Research Institute Oslo found that over the previous decade, the number of conflicts in Africa had doubled and that “civil conflicts have become increasingly internationalized.” The report went on: “One or more third-party governments are involved in the conflict through contributing or deploying combat personnel in support of the objective of either side.”

WAR WITHOUT PEACE

Even as it has expanded, the conflict is polarizing the region into two main blocs, pro-SAF and pro-RSF. Eritrea is now providing direct support to the SAF, while Djibouti provides rhetorical support. In May, Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh, in a rare media interview, accused the UAE of destabilizing the region. Eritrea’s reclusive president, Isaias Afwerki, followed suit. Meanwhile, Chad, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, eastern Libya, parts of Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda—all of which have key financial or security relationships with the UAE—are friendly with the RSF, although some (such as Ethiopia and South Sudan) have attempted to maintain neutrality.

This loose arrangement of blocs, however, does not make the conflict simpler to resolve. The tangle of regional interests has not only aggravated the war, enabling both the RSF and the SAF to continue fighting despite defeats, but has also rendered peacemaking all but impossible. The conflict could not be nipped in the bud because various powers competed to play mediator. And mediation efforts have lacked a center of gravity. In the first six months after the conflict broke out, U.S. and Saudi officials teamed up to try to broker peace between the RSF and the SAF. This process sidelined Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and two rounds of talks in Jeddah made little progress.

Heads of state from Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya almost succeeded in getting Burhan and Hemedti to sit down face to face in December 2023. But without the backing of key Arab countries, that initiative failed, as did a mediation effort by Egypt and the UAE in early 2024. An August 2024 U.S. effort to organize peace talks in Switzerland fizzled out after the SAF, facing insufficient collective pressure from its Arab allies to attend, refused to show up.

The second Trump administration has shifted tack and tried to focus on getting Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE aligned on how the war should end. This effort began in June and has been spearheaded by Massad Boulos, the U.S. special adviser for Africa and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law. But even after the mid-September announcement that an agreement had been reached, Burhan distanced himself from the proposal and the RSF ramped up its military offensives.

Peacemaking has not only become more complex in Sudan; it has also necessarily become less ambitious. The greater the number of interests that require accommodation, the smaller the area of overlap between all of their demands. Comprehensive peace deals (such as the 2005 agreement that ended Sudan’s prior civil war) have been replaced by cease-fires that do little more than freeze a status quo, because that is all that everyone can agree on.

TEAM OF RIVALS?

As peacemaking—and even the achievement of a cease-fire—struggles in Sudan, its devastating war continues to escalate. Newer and larger weapons are still pouring into the country, including advanced drones and counterdrone technologies. In May, for instance, after the SAF recaptured Khartoum, the RSF launched long-range drone strikes on Port Sudan, which sits just across the Red Sea from Jeddah—a dramatic expansion of the war’s ambit. The war has already collapsed Khartoum and expelled its professional, educated, and creative classes into the diaspora. No outside power alone has the sway to force the belligerents to the table. Even if an effort by the Trump administration to mediate makes more headway, it will rely on regional powers’ decision to choose peace over war.

And the war’s relentless trajectory suggests that regional competition could jump across Sudan’s borders. Ethiopia and Eritrea have maintained a fragile peace since a war between the two countries ended in 2000, but tension between them is steadily rising, provoking fears that a new interstate war will break out. A new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea could prove even more deadly than Sudan’s conflict and could easily merge with the war in Sudan, given the region’s existing polarization: Djibouti, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would likely side with Eritrea, while the UAE is Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s most important foreign ally.

No outside power alone has the sway to force Sudan’s belligerents to the table.

The discourse about an emerging multipolar world often assumes that its main flash points will arise from competition between great powers—China and Russia, as well as the United States. The Sudanese case shows how unmanageable conflicts may emerge outside these countries’ core spheres of influence. In the Horn, numerous rising regional middle powers with different but overlapping interests and leverage are increasingly outmuscling China and Russia, whose interventions in the region are still limited.

In August, the RSF swore in its own parallel, Darfur-based Sudanese government. This move deepened the de facto partitioning of the country into two separate zones of administration, creating fresh barriers to any attempt to piece Sudan back together. The United States will still be indispensable to efforts to reverse such a de facto partition, not least because it remains the lone superpower interested in doing so.

Sudan’s disaster could become a bitter but valuable lesson on overreach for regional powers, prompting them to learn how to manage their competition, ideally without relying so heavily on the United States as a middleman. But the prospect of playing a smaller role must not be an excuse for the United States to walk away. Some in Washington argue that because influencing peacemaking in the Horn is harder than it used to be, the U.S. government should pull way back. But that will only encourage even more instability. Washington will need to learn to adapt and contribute to mediation processes in which it is one of various players, not the decider. Otherwise, catastrophic wars like Sudan’s could multiply.

Foreign Affairs · More by Alan Boswell · October 2, 2025

22. Legal opinions usually aren’t exciting. This one has everyone talking

Let’s discuss the First Amendment. I may try to read this entire 161 page opinion. 

Legal opinions usually aren’t exciting. This one has everyone talking | CNN Politics

flip.it · Katelyn Polantz · October 1, 2025

Not since the years before the Civil War had a trial-level federal judge signed off on an opinion simply as “Judge of the United States.”

But Senior Judge William Young, a nearly 50-year veteran trial-level judge in Massachusetts, decided the time is now, and then some.

In a book-length opinion on Tuesday, Young ruled that the Trump administration can’t deny First Amendment protections to non-citizens, such as pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, or retaliate against them because of their positions. The opinion rules against the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and executive orders, and harshly critiques President Donald Trump’s approach to using his power.

Yet Young chose to include in his legal writing an unusual set of rhetorical flourishes.

“I don’t think I’ve seen an opinion like this from a district court in a very long time,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal district judge, told CNN on Tuesday.

Related article

US District Judge William Young poses for a picture at the court in Boston, Massachusetts, in this undated handout image.

US District Court For The District Of Massachusetts/Reuters

‘Full-throated assault on the First Amendment’: Judge rips into Trump over attempts to deport pro-Palestinian academics

Inside the 161-page document published by the court, Young includes: direct remarks to a pro-Trump correspondence; footnotes citing major figures of world and American history; personal quotes—nearly all of which are unusual to have in a court decision, at any level.

“It’s a sign of the times that a federal judge would write an opinion like this,” Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and Georgetown Law professor, said on Tuesday. “Judge Young is committing to writing what so many of us are thinking.”

In addition to his unique signature, Young included an anonymous, threatening note atop the opinion that he received this summer, plus his response to that postcard now.

In a set of large, bolded print on the first page of the opinion before even its formal header, Young makes public a photocopy of a postcard he received in his judicial chambers in June.

The handwriting, chillingly, says “Trump has pardons and tanks … what do you have?”

His response to the postcard-sender sits just below, in what looks to be Young’s typewriter font:

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States – you and me – have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case – “

This page from Judge William G. Young’s opinion rebuking the Trump administration’s chilling of political speech, released on September 30, 2025, shows a copy of a postcard sent to Young, and his response.

US District Court of Massachusetts

His full opinion then follows.

After signing the opinion, Young returns to address his postcard-writer, inviting the person to visit his courthouse in Boston. “I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for writing. It shows you care. You should.”

Young’s opinion and structure quickly caught the attention of people across the legal community and the federal bench on Tuesday.

“Judges are free to use their opinions to comment on the law and larger issues, as long as the focus of the opinion is right,” said Fogel, who now directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley Law. “Legal opinions are not usually that exciting. He was trying to say, this is really important.”

Fogel called some of the choices Young made to structure the opinion “colorful,” and indicative of frustration many district-level judges are feeling this year, in the Trump administration and with many emergency rulings coming from the Supreme Court above them.

Young has critiqued the Trump administration’s governance before, at length, and has also made waves within the federal judiciary. He previously called the administration’s halting of public health grants racial discrimination, and apologized in court after Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote about lower courts not following prior Supreme Court orders.

“He’s a deeply principled person, and he takes the role of being a federal judge very seriously,” Fogel added.

Did he go too far?

Some in the legal community say Young shouldn’t have gone so much above the normal form for writing an opinion.

“Judicial opinions are supposed to be civics lessons. They’re not supposed to announce they’re civics lessons,” Vladeck said. Young’s approach could potentially weaken the opinion’s ability to withstand appeals, which are likely, Vladeck said, and exacerbate the tension between district-level judges with both the president and the Supreme Court.

“Maybe it has cathartic value, but from the perspective of our legal system, it’s not healthy,” Vladeck said.

In a statement to CNN, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the judge had stoked “the embers of hatred” by his ruling.

“Less than a week after a terrorist attack at an ICE facility in Dallas, a craven Judge is smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement,” McLaughlin said. “Our federal law enforcement officers face a 1000% increase in assaults against them, unprecedented online doxing of our agents and their families, and they’re being stalked and pummeled by rocks and Molotov cocktails.”

Related article

Kenneth Fowler/CNN

How the Roberts Court became the Trump Court

Even Young himself seems to acknowledge, within the opinion, how abnormal times call for the abnormal measures he’s decided to take.

“In the golden age of our democracy, this opinion might end here,” he wrote, only halfway through his broadside of the Trump administration. “After all, the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.”

Yet following his opinion, Young adds, “nothing will happen. The Department of Justice represents the President, and Congress is occupied with other weighty matters. Nor will there be any meaningful public outcry,” before turning to make his case that the exercise of free speech must continue, protected from a government that wants to chill it.

US District Judge William Young poses for a picture at the court in Boston, Massachusetts, in this undated handout image.

US District Court For The District Of Massachusetts/Reuters

flip.it · Katelyn Polantz · October 1, 2025

23. 'In every woman, there is a soldier’ – Yaryna Chornohuz, the brave poet fighting Russia

​Powerful.

'In every woman, there is a soldier’ – Yaryna Chornohuz, the brave poet fighting Russia

https://kyivindependent.com/in-every-woman-there-is-a-soldier-yaryna-chornohuz-the-brave-poet-fighting-russia/

by Daria Shulzhenko

October 1, 2025 6:43 PM

10 min read

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in The Kyiv Independent's first-ever print edition, titled "The Power Within." You can order a copy in our e-store.

If there were four women named Yaryna Chornohuz, they would all be 30 years old, all born in Kyiv, yet each would follow a different path.

One of them would be a combat medic on the front line, risking her life to liberate Ukraine from Russian aggression.

Another would write poetry, weaving the beauty of the Ukrainian language into captivating verses.

The third would be a mother to a beautiful girl, and the fourth would be a civic activist tirelessly rallying for a better Ukraine.

But there is only one Yaryna Chornohuz — and she is all of them and much more.

As a combat medic in the 140th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion of the Ukrainian Marine Corps, Chornohuz, who goes by her callsign “Yara,” has endured numerous fierce battles, helping to save the lives of her fellow soldiers and civilians caught in front-line zones.

Beyond the battlefield, Chornohuz is a celebrated author. With her words, she gives voice to the pain and hopes for her country's future. She also breaks stereotypes about women in the army, standing strong shoulder to shoulder with her male brothers in arms for nearly four years.

"In every woman, there is a soldier, destined to face the darkness alone," Chornohuz writes in one of her poems.

Her fight

“The front devours my heart and my comrades.

It consumes all my words.”

It started with Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech.

"That day, our commander was watching it, and when Putin finally finished his pathos-laden address, the commander said: 'Something is about to happen now’," Chornohuz recalls the morning of Feb. 24, 2022.

At that time, her unit was stationed near Siverskodonetsk, in Luhansk Oblast. "Immediately, from across the river, they (Russian troops) started shelling us with Grad rocket launchers. We hadn’t heard any Grads since 2017."

It was after joining the military in 2020, that Chornohuz started to believe that Russia would eventually invade. To prepare for the worst, she decided to undergo challenging military training as part of the Marine Corps.

But the intensity of the fighting that began when Russia launched its full-scale invasion was unlike anything they could have imagined, even for experienced soldiers, she says.

"We were never prepared to face an enemy force four times larger than ours. We were always trained with the expectation that we'd be fighting with roughly equal forces," she says.

Their first "big battle" with Russian troops Chornohuz took part in was in early March 2022 as Russian forces attempted to seize the village of Zachativka in Donetsk Oblast.

There, Chornohuz faced one of the "most difficult" experiences as a combat medic as she tried to save the life of a 10-year-old boy hiding from Russian attacks in a basement. She recalls the boy "becoming pale and almost dying" before her eyes.

"He had shrapnel in his chest," Chornohuz recalls. "His skin around the wound began to close up fast, and it took us a while to figure out where the wound had come from," she says, adding a short but crucial line, "He survived."

Chornohuz took part in several extremely high-risk operations. She was among those defending the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway — a critical supply route for Ukrainian forces.

"Losses, injuries, and especially the deaths of those you've served and fought alongside for a long time — these are things no one can ever truly be prepared for."

Yaryna Chornoguz, military servicemember and a poet, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 14, 2024. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi / The Kyiv Independent)

She also crossed the Siverskyi Donets River to help liberate the Serebrianskyi Forest, a strategic area heavily fought over by Russian troops, and was part of one of the first units to enter the newly liberated town of Yampil in Donetsk Oblast.

The risky Ukrainian operation near Krynky, a village on the occupied eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast, was also on her list. As a combat medic, Chornohuz didn't cross the river herself; instead, she treated those returning from highly dangerous missions.

"I was in the village opposite to Krynky, where we treated the wounded; we were stationed in a house without a basement with glide bombs hitting nearby," she recalls. "But we sat there because someone had to receive (the injured) and evacuate them to the hospital."

Ukrainian marines first crossed the river and gained a foothold on the Russian-occupied side in October 2023, with fierce fighting for the village lasting for months. The operation, however, didn't yield territorial gains and placed a heavy strain on Ukrainian forces since, due to the nature of the fighting in Krynky, it was tough to retrieve soldiers who were injured and the bodies of those killed.

Chornohuz refrained from sharing further details of the operation, adding that "there were times when, for as long as seven days, we couldn't bring the group back from the other side."

As she describes her experience on the battlefield, Chornohuz often shifts the focus from herself to her fellow soldiers, describing them as driven and courageous fighters. Sorrow fills her eyes and resonates in her voice when she speaks of those who have been killed.

"Losses, injuries, and especially the deaths of those you've served and fought alongside for a long time — these are things no one can ever truly be prepared for."

"They say the dead are mourned after the war is over, but our war will end with the lives of us all," Chornohuz writes in her poem titled "Left Behind in Occupation."

Her activism

“Voice, do not fall silent.

My people, come on,

start speaking.”

For Chornohuz, the fight to preserve Ukrainian identity began well before the full-scale war.

She spoke Ukrainian from an early age, growing up in a family of Ukrainian writers and bandura players — a traditional Ukrainian musical instrument. Despite a predominantly Russian-speaking environment shaped by centuries of Russian influence in Ukraine, she and her family's stance on their native language and culture remained unwavering.

"I constantly had to answer the question, 'Why do you speak Ukrainian?' — both from children and adults," Chornohuz recalls her school years in Kyiv in the early 2000s.

"Growing up in the Ukrainian discourse and culture, I saw how it was something targeted for destruction."

Fighting for it was not optional for Chornohuz. It was a must. Despite being pregnant, she actively participated in the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution — one of the most pivotal events in Ukraine's modern history — standing strong in Kyiv's downtown even when the riot police, Berkut, violently beat and shot protestors.

The EuroMaidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, was a wave of mass protests and civil unrest in Ukraine from November 21, 2013, to February 22, 2014. (Getty Images / The Kyiv Independent)

"The first lesson (of the revolution) is that you should never underestimate the Ukrainian people," Chornohuz recalls. "The second was faith," she adds.

"Even when the circumstances are completely against you, faith remains the key element that can change everything."

That same faith helped her overcome the challenges and tragedies that followed.

Though the birth of her baby daughter, Orysia, kept Chornohuz from joining the Armed Forces in 2014, when Russia initially invaded Ukraine, she joined the fight five years later. Chornohuz joined Hospitallers, a volunteer medical battalion, and embarked on her first deployment in eastern Ukraine as a volunteer.

But it was one death — the kind of loss that shatters everything inside — that pushed Chornohuz to sign a contract with the military.

Her loss

“I've experienced with you

the only true wedding — a funeral.”

Somewhere in the trenches of the war-torn Donetsk Oblast, Chornohuz met and fell in love with a young Ukrainian soldier, Mykola Sorochuk, who went by the callsign "Krasnyi."

Although their time together was brief, their relationship made a lasting impact on her life.

She speaks about him with a voice that carries grief, pain, and love.

"He would say: ‘It's better for a son to visit his father's grave after we've reclaimed all our territories than to visit his father in a psychiatric ward, where he'd end up after enduring a drawn-out war of attrition,’ like the one we had then,” referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s east with the use of proxy forces in 2014.

While Ukraine made many attempts to negotiate ceasefires with Russia, with President Volodymyr Zelensky intensifying these efforts after taking office in 2019, Kremlin-backed forces repeatedly violated these agreements between 2014 and February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

Amid one of those "ceasefires," a sniper shot and killed Sorochuk in Donetsk Oblast. He was only 22 years old, preparing to go on short leave to see Chornohuz.

Mykola Sorochuk and Yaryna Chornoguz in an undated photo. Mykola was killed by a Russian sniper near Talakivka, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, on Jan. 22, 2020. (Yaryna Chornoguz / Facebook)

"His death was a devastating blow for me. I came to terms with the harsh truth: We are at war, and our best people are being killed. Yet everyone remains silent," Chornohuz says.

The pain she felt with his sudden death prompted her to organize a three-month-long rally near the President's Office in Kyiv, named the "Spring on Granite." She calls it a "requiem-protest," a "memorial for the unnoticed losses," and her "desperate plea to change the policy of neglect toward the war."

At the time, many in Ukraine and abroad overlooked the war in the east, treating it as a distant conflict rather than the first stage of a much larger catastrophe.

"I understood that Russia would take advantage of this, that they had conditioned us to this rhythm — that the best of us were sitting in the trenches, being killed, but no one sees it."

All that pain and frustration was transformed into her military service. But it also echoed in her poetry.

We asked 5 young Ukrainians why they chose to go to war against Russia

Her words

“If you and I remain alive”

Chornohuz devoted her first collection of poems published in 2020, "How the War Circle Bends," to Sorochuk.

She wrote it when she was only stepping on her military path, "exploring a more humanitarian, symbolic, and historical spectrum."

Through her painfully honest verses, Chornohuz makes her readers feel her grief, as well as her love.

"All my actions are an address to you.

I carry you within me.

I catch your voice in the voices

of distant relatives.

You survived the last autumn

and the middle of winter,

at the zero line."

Her second publication, the 2023 collection “Dasein: The Defense of Presence,” features powerful front-line poetry that "reflects on the problems you encounter on the front lines or the truths you encounter there."

It was devoted to her grandfather, Ukrainian writer Oleh Chornohuz, as well as Ukraine's fallen soldiers.

Chornohuz calls it a "poetic diary" of her experiences during the full-scale war. She recalls occasionally drafting some thoughts while in the trenches and finishing them as complete verses upon returning from combat missions.

"I often recall a poem, 'Those who are destined to die in battle,'" she says. "There is a line that I wrote, 'The eyes of those who are destined to die in battle are always clearer than others.'"

"This is the line I constantly think of when I hear about wartime losses or of my fellow soldiers who have been killed."

Yaryna Chornoguz, writer and military servicemember, during a performance in the basement of the Drama Theatre of Kherson, Ukraine, on Nov. 7, 2023. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi / The Kyiv Independent)

With her words, Chornohuz also helps civilians see and understand the war from the soldier's perspective.

"War creates a deep divide between civilians and soldiers, and poetry, as a genre, has become very unifying. It builds bridges between different experiences and creates a space for trust," she says.

In March, Chornohuz was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for her latest book. She also has two military awards, a medal for "Military Service" and one for "For Saving Lives."

Chornohuz says it might take a while for Ukraine to win, reclaiming its full territories within the borders of 1991.

Until then, she is ready to continue her fight "as long as it takes."

“In every woman, there is a soldier…” she writes.

Ukrainian author-turned-soldier takes aim at Westerners’ ‘abstract pacifism’

UkraineRussiaWarpoetryFemale SoldiersCombat medicsHuman storyDaria Shulzhenko

Reporter

Daria Shulzhenko is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent. She has been a lifestyle reporter at the Kyiv Post until November 2021. She graduated from Kyiv International University with a bachelor’s in linguistics, specializing in translation from English and German languages. She has previously worked as a freelance writer and researcher.Read more

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