Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this it would change the earth.”

– William Faulkner

"We fall short of presenting all, or even a goodly part, of the news each day that a citizen would need to intelligently exercise his franchise in this democracy. So as he depends more and more on us, presumably the depth of knowledge of the average man is diminished. This clearly can lead to a disaster in democracy."

- Walter Cronkite

"We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."

- E. B. White

1. How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout

2. Israeli-Palestinian peace isn’t a naive ideal. Here’s why I have cautious hope | Jeremy Ben-Ami

3. Ted Cruz Wants to Make It Easier to Sue the Government for Censorship

4. How the US funded Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran

5. Civilian Tech Is Powering China’s Military

6. Here is What the Secretary of War Should Have Said to His General and Flag Officers

7. Remarks by Colonel Marco J. Lyons at the United States Army War College (US Army and Indo-Pacific Issues and Assumptions)

8. I Was a Hostage in Gaza. This is How I Survived.

9. UK SOF Exercise Chameleon 25-2

10. How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day

11. Opinion | The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

12. Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death

13. Cubans Could Soon Become Russia’s Largest Foreign Fighting Force

14. The limits of Taiwan’s 'silicon shield'

15. Pentagon nominee John Noh hints at Aukus changes, says Taiwan should ‘pay its way’

16. US Congress urged to preserve stability in Indo-Pacific and curb China’s Taiwan game plan

17. America’s Soybean Farmers Are Panicking Over the Loss of Chinese Buyers

18. China halts US soybean imports to hit Trump’s MAGA supporters

19. Is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Just a Talking Shop?

20. The 12 Days of War That Didn’t Ignite the Middle East or the World

21. How to Train Your Dragon: Understanding China’s Growing Web of Combined Military Exercises and Security Relationships

22. How Russia Recovered: What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

23. AUKUS Anxiety: Unmet Expectations Could Fracture the U.S.-Australian Alliance

24. Vol. 38, No. 8: Department of War (WSJ Style guide)

25. The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here

26. America’s Attack on the Enemy Within: Victory for the Dark Quad’s Political Warfare Strategy

1. How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout

Please go to the link to view the data and graphics.

How does Taiwan develop resilience in the face of this threat?

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/chinese-blockade-taiwan-d5b241c7?st=BYq4oG&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout

A Chinese blockade would quickly deplete resources on an island that depends on imported fuel

By James T. Areddy

Follow, Joyu Wang

Follow and Roque Ruiz

Oct. 7, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Quick Summary

Taiwan’s near-total reliance on imported fuel, with 97% of its energy imported by sea, makes it vulnerable to a Chinese blockade.View more

Chinese military exercises around Taiwan have sparked an urgent effort in Taipei and Washington to address a critical vulnerability on the island: It is almost entirely dependent on imported fuel.

Recent Chinese drills showed how China would encircle and strangle Taiwan by blocking its life-sustaining shipping lanes, a strategy with potentially less risk than staging a full-scale invasion, as Beijing pursues its stated goal of gaining control of the self-ruled island, by force if necessary.

The challenge of steeling Taiwan against a blockade starts with energy, in particular the liquefied natural gas used to generate nearly half of Taiwan’s electricity.

Some 97% of Taiwan’s energy is imported by sea. If completely cut off, its LNG inventory would be fully depleted within days, crippling the island’s ability to produce electricity.

Taiwan energy supply by source, 2024

Biomass

1.6%

185

Nuclear

2.8%

317

LNG

29.1%

2,459

Crude oil

42.4%

4,864 TOE

Coal

29.1%

3,334

Solar

1.1%

132

Others

0.4%

Hydro

0.3%

Wind

0.8%

Taiwan electricity generation by source, July 2025

LNG

48.3%

Coal

38.3%

Renewables

11.2%

Others

2.2%

Note: TOE, for ton of oil equivalent, is a metric measure for comparing energy sources.

Source: Taiwan Energy Administration

Taiwan’s government is increasing energy storage and rethinking the island’s energy mix. It is looking anew at nuclear power, just months after it shut down its last reactor.

But Taiwan’s drive for energy self-sufficiency has a long way to go, leaving the island more immediately focused on a U.S. assessment that Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants his military to be ready to seize Taiwan by force by 2027.

Two U.S. senators introduced legislation in September that would support Taiwan’s ability to secure a reliable supply of American LNG, including providing U.S. insurance for shippers to keep deliveries flowing if the island is threatened.

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.) said he co-sponsored the legislation with Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) after participating in a wargame that showed Taiwan running out of LNG within 11 days in a blockade.

“It really highlighted how this could be the Achilles’ heel of Taiwan,” Ricketts said of the wargame, which was run by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD, and the Taipei-based Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, or DSET.

While Taiwan could temporarily resist a Chinese blockade and briefly sustain its output of power, the island would require U.S. intervention to restore electricity over a longer period, according to the results of a series of wargames run by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Projected impact on Taiwan of Chinese blockade

Electricity production*

Natural gas inventory

Coal inventory

Oil inventory

With U.S. assistance to Taiwan

Pre-blockade

100

Week 1

Without U.S. assistance

Pre-blockade

100

Week 1

*Weekly generation

Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies

Any Chinese use of force to subdue Taiwan would quickly test President Trump’s appetite for military intervention against Beijing.

U.S. policy about whether to come to Taiwan’s defense in an invasion is intentionally vague. While an overt Chinese attack would force Washington to act quickly, a more subtle interruption of Taiwan’s seaborne trade, including of fuel, would complicate decision-making in Washington.

For example, Beijing could subject vessels serving Taiwan to inspection by declaring a law-enforcement or health action, allowing Beijing to quietly raise pressure on Taipei. Since a blockade is an act of war against an enemy state, China would call its action something else, such as a quarantine.

A Chinese quarantine would force Taiwan and the U.S. to decide whether to take military action and potentially be accused of starting a war.

“This is the kind of coercion that flies under the threshold of war, but could still bring Taiwan to its knees,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the FDD, who testified Tuesday about the topic on Capitol Hill at a hearing chaired by Ricketts.

In a blockade, Taiwan’s LNG supplies would last under two weeks, while coal would last seven, the CSIS wargames concluded.

“LNG is the real weakness, energy in general, LNG in particular,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser in the Defense and Security Department of CSIS.

Energy supplies would last longer if electricity rationing is imposed, a step that would ripple through Taiwanese manufacturing, including the semiconductor industry, whose shutdown would have a global impact.

Projected decline in factory output if electricity supply falls

80%

60%

40%

20%

LEVEL OF ELECTRICITY SUPPLY

44%

Chip making

Steel

Sharp decline

Consumer goods

Other manufacturing

Uninterrupted

60%

Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies

“The real shock is how quickly a low-grade quarantine can expose those vulnerabilities and force Taiwan’s leaders into politically costly rationing decisions,” said Singleton.

A Taiwan national security official suggested that supplies would last longer than the wargames projected. “Under a blockade, or in a quasi-wartime state, your industry and pretty much everything else would have to slow down,” the official said, citing an internal estimate that wartime would cut the island’s energy consumption by two-thirds.

“If the supply is cut to just one-third of the usual levels, that essentially means most industrial sectors have to go dark,” said Tsaiying Lu, a research fellow on energy security at DSET.

Taiwan’s electricity output is already tight. On a recent day, generating capacity fell to just 4% above peak demand. Electricity provider Taiwan Power blamed routine peacetime hiccups, including an accident at an LNG-fueled power plant and maintenance disruptions at two coal facilities.

A full blockade would also halt the delivery of basic supplies to the island. Taiwan wouldn’t starve: It could feed itself for nine months, albeit on an increasingly basic diet, considering some 70% of food is imported, CSIS concluded.

But industrial output would plummet as imports decline, even if the factories had the power to keep running.

Impact on domestic production as imports decline, by sector

Food

Emergency, health

and safety

Spare parts

Chip making

Farming

(non food)

100

% production

80%

OF PRE-BLOCKADE IMPORTS

Other

manufacturing

Capital goods

Construction

Consumer goods

Steel

100

80%

OF PRE-BLOCKADE IMPORTS

Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies

Nuclear power accounted for as much as 52% of Taiwan’s electricity in the mid-1980s. But a popular campaign driven by safety fears and backed by the current ruling party led to the shutdown of all of the island’s reactors. The last operating plant was taken offline in May.

An August referendum on restarting the reactor, held just three months after it closed, failed to attract a quorum, though the yes votes outweighed the noes.

While the ruling Democratic Progressive Party has long championed an antinuclear platform, President Lai Ching-te, who has made national resilience against China a political rallying cry, said after the vote that Taiwan’s nuclear safety commission would consider how nuclear-power generation could be restored.

Solar and wind power, meanwhile, don’t yet come close to making the island self-sufficient.

“We aim to maximize renewable energy as much as possible, because this will be better for Taiwan’s security,” said Wu Chih-wei, deputy director general of Taiwan’s Energy Administration. “Given how reliant we are on imports, this isn’t something that can change overnight.”

Taiwan aims to use renewable sources for as much as 70% of power generation by 2050, from the current level of under 12%, said Wu.

For now, the focus is how to secure Taiwan’s supplies of LNG.

Major LNG suppliers to Taiwan

Qatar

30%

Australia

40%

Others

20%

U.S.

10%

Source: Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Taiwan’s current reliance on Qatar for 30% of its LNG is seen as a pressure point, according to FDD. China is a much bigger buyer of Qatari gas, adding to Beijing’s potential leverage over the emirate.

Raising imports of American LNG from the current 10% would help, according to analysts at the Atlantic Council, who said that binding the island’s energy security more closely with the U.S. would “reduce the probability of Chinese aggression.”

Taiwan oil group CPC signed a letter of intent this year to buy millions of tons of Alaskan LNG and potentially invest in a pipeline and liquefaction project that would one day allow the state to directly export gas.

U.S. allies Japan and South Korea could also enhance their security by increasing American LNG imports, the Atlantic Council said. Japan has LNG storage capacity that could serve as a crucial backstop in a U.S.-led effort to resupply Taiwan in a blockade.

U.S.-to-Taiwan LNG routes

LNG-receiving terminal

Sea of Japan

(East Sea)

10-15 days

from Alaska

(proposed)

Beijing

JAPAN

Tokyo

S. KOREA

Osaka

CHINA

Shanghai

East China Sea

30 days via

the Panama Canal

Taipei

Pacific Ocean

TAIWAN

Hong Kong

Philippine Sea

South China Sea

VIETNAM

Guam

(U.S.)

Manila

35 days via

the Suez Canal

PHILIPPINES

40 days via the

Cape of Good Hope

Source: International Gas Union

Blockades have a long history in warfare, and for just as long navies have challenged them. But it has been decades since the U.S. Navy has led ship convoys or broken blockades on the scale Taiwan would require.

Ricketts, the U.S. senator, said one goal of his legislation is to sow doubt with China’s leader that his military could defeat Taiwan.

“Every time we put a new wrinkle in what we’re doing for Taiwan, they have to change their planning as well,” he said.

Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com, Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com and Roque Ruiz at roque.ruizgonzalez@wsj.com

2. Israeli-Palestinian peace isn’t a naive ideal. Here’s why I have cautious hope | Jeremy Ben-Ami

Israeli-Palestinian peace isn’t a naive ideal. Here’s why I have cautious hope | Jeremy Ben-Ami

Trump’s personal desire to play the part of peacemaker should not be dismissed – it should be encouraged

The Guardian · Jeremy Ben-Ami · October 7, 2025

Two years after the horrors of 7 October, few names evoke the tragedy more than Kfar Aza, a small, bucolic kibbutz less than two miles from Gaza that came under brutal attack that day.

For years, I visited Kfar Aza with groups of policymakers and American guests on trips designed to help them understand what life on the border meant and what a path toward conflict resolution might entail.

One of our occasional hosts in the town was Ofir Libstein, the head of the regional council – basically the mayor of the area. Ofir firmly believed that Israel’s long-term security depended on a future for his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza as well. He was an activist and a public voice for the idea that stability for his region and constituents depended on achieving peace.

On 7 October 2023, he fought to defend his community and was among the first to die. In all, 62 residents of Kfar Aza were killed that day; 19 were taken hostage, including twin brothers Gali and Ziv Berman, who remain in Gaza to this day.

When I last visited the kibbutz this summer, I met one of Ofir’s close friends, a man my age who survived by clinging to his safe-room door handle for hours while his neighbors were massacred. Despite everything, he told me peace must still be the path forward – that Palestinians in Gaza must be given something to live for. His words, and his refusal to surrender hope, moved me to tears.

Twenty-five years ago, while living in Israel and studying Hebrew, I befriended a classmate named Abed, an optometrist from Gaza City. He invited me to his family’s home for dinner one weekend. Conversation was halting, limited by language, but the message conveyed by all I met was a desire for nothing more than to live normal lives, to raise families, work and coexist.

Over the years, friends, colleagues and I have heard similar stories from Palestinians in Gaza – teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs who remembered the days when there was interconnection between Gaza and Israeli border communities, when small but real human connections were possible.

In Kfar Aza, our hosts used to recall the time when Palestinians in Gaza worked in the kibbutz fields, and Israelis shopped in Gaza on weekends. Those ties are long severed.

The devastation of Kfar Aza – the kibbutz itself and the community – is almost impossible to comprehend. Yet what’s even harder to grasp is that two years later, the war grinds on – hostages still in captivity, Gaza in ruins, Israelis traumatized and extremists on both sides still ascendant.

This moment calls for more than vengeance and endless war. It calls for vision – and courage.

That’s why the proposal put forward last week by Donald Trump – initially embraced by regional partners and conditionally accepted by both Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Hamas representatives – deserves close scrutiny and cautious hope. The broad outlines – a phased ceasefire, international administration of Gaza, Arab recognition of Israel tied to progress toward Palestinian self-governance and ultimately statehood – echo principles that those of us who are serious about conflict resolution have long understood must be part of any viable peace plan.

Skeptics are right to note that the devil is in the details and that implementation will be difficult. The many potential sticking points will include precisely how far Israeli troops will pull back, the mechanics of disarmament and the process of choosing acceptable Palestinian leadership in Gaza – just to name a few.

Both Hamas and the Israeli far right will do everything they can to torpedo the proposal. But the fact that a plan has emerged at all – that leaders are again speaking the language of diplomacy, coexistence and regional cooperation – gives reason for hope. Trump’s personal desire to play the part of peacemaker should not be dismissed; it should be encouraged.

On this day when we remember one of the greatest tragedies in Israel’s history – and mark the beginning of Gaza’s devastation – it’s vital that we recommit to the pursuit of peace.

Peace is not a naive and abstract ideal. It’s pragmatic. It’s the only durable path to security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. The alternative is endless war – one that will claim the next generation’s future as surely as it claimed Ofir Libstein’s and Abed’s dreams.

Kfar Aza will forever be a place of unbearable loss. But for me it remains a reminder of what’s worth fighting for: the belief that peace is not just possible, it’s necessary; the understanding that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined; and the memory that even amid the ruins, there are people on both sides who refuse to give up.

Two years on, the question is whether their leaders are finally ready to listen.

Jeremy Ben-Ami is president of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy advocacy organization.

The Guardian · Jeremy Ben-Ami · October 7, 2025

3. Ted Cruz Wants to Make It Easier to Sue the Government for Censorship

Ted Cruz Wants to Make It Easier to Sue the Government for Censorship

Senator says he hopes the reaction to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension might help his new bill find bipartisan support

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ted-cruz-wants-to-make-it-easier-to-sue-the-government-for-censorship-2fe36bd3

By Amrith Ramkumar

Oct. 8, 2025 5:00 am ET

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) is seeking new protections against government-driven censorship. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Quick Summary

Senator Ted Cruz plans to introduce a bill to protect consumers from government censorship and allow monetary damages in lawsuits.View more

WASHINGTON—Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) is calling for changes to the legal system to better protect consumers from government censorship, a move that comes weeks after he criticized the Trump administration’s push to have late-night host Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air.

Cruz plans to introduce a bill in the coming weeks that would codify protections against government-driven censorship, and make it easier for consumers to win monetary damages in lawsuits, he said in an interview. Cruz, the head of the Senate Commerce Committee, said he also plans to focus on the topic in a series of hearings that are expected to include Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.

Carr, hours before Kimmel’s suspension was announced, had threatened Disney-owned ABC for Kimmel’s comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Censorship is wrong, regardless of who’s doing it,” Cruz said.

Cruz is among the few Republicans challenging the Trump administration’s handling of free-speech issues and other priorities including tariffs and taking equity stakes in companies.

The senator said his efforts had been in the works for months. The committee has been investigating claims that the Biden administration pressured social-media platforms to remove content flagged as disinformation during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The topic took on more urgency after Kimmel was suspended. Many Democrats recently told Cruz they agree with his comments about Carr, momentum the senator hopes will help his bill gain traction after they previously overlooked censorship during the Biden administration, he said.

“Perhaps that poses an opportunity for us to work together in a bipartisan way,” Cruz said.

Winning enough votes in both chambers could still prove difficult. A 2023 bill that passed the House and would have banned federal employees from asking tech platforms to censor protected speech, didn’t get traction in the Senate—in part because of concerns that the bill would make it harder to target potentially harmful content and misinformation.

The Cruz bill would create a new procedure for plaintiffs bringing such cases and introduce new definitions that courts and government agencies would have to follow. It would include exceptions for government investigations and wouldn’t include speech that isn’t protected, such as nonconsensual intimate imagery.

Cruz said he is willing to go on Kimmel’s show to promote the new bill even though he said Kimmel and many other comedians aren’t funny, citing what he said was their obsession with Trump. A recent drop in Kimmel’s ratings before his suspension “means my podcast was kicking Kimmel’s ass every week,” Cruz said.

A spokeswoman for ABC Entertainment didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The two have previously sparred on social media and played a charity basketball game in 2018 after Kimmel compared the senator to a blobfish.

Write to Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com

4. How the US funded Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran

Please go to the link for data and graphics.

This article and the reports appear to not be without bias.

How the US funded Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran

Twin reports from the Costs of War Project find the US has backed Israel with more than $21bn since October 2023.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/10/7/reports-israel-couldnt-wage-wars-on-gaza-lebanon-iran-without-us-support

Al Jazeera English · Justin Salhani

Israel would not have been able to sustain its wars across the Middle East without the United States’s significant financial backing of more than $21bn since October 2023, according to a pair of new reports.

The reports, which were released by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, found that: without US weapons and money, Israel wouldn’t have been able to sustain its genocidal war on Gaza, start a war with Iran, or repeatedly bomb Yemen.

The report’s findings are also backed up by analysts who said Israel’s wars in Gaza and in the wider region could not have continued without US financial and diplomatic support.

“US support for Israel at all levels is indispensable to the prosecution of Israel’s war both in Gaza and across the region,” Omar H Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.

Israel’s war on Gaza alone has killed at least 67,160 people and wounded another 169,679 since October 2023.

Thousands are still believed to be under the Gaza Strip’s ruins, while Israel has killed dozens in strikes on Yemen and killed more than 1,000 people when it attacked Iran in June.

Israel needs US financing for war

Two years ago, 1,139 people died during a Hamas-led attack on Israel, and more than 200 were taken captive.

Israel’s response was to devastate Gaza and to wage a wider war against any group it considered hostile in the region.

It increased raids in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; killed over 4,000 people in Lebanon while eviscerating swaths of villages; invaded and occupied Lebanese and Syrian land; bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus and started a 12-day war with Iran; and traded attacks with Yemen’s Houthis.

But Israel couldn’t have maintained these wars without constant US support, researchers found.

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“Given the scale of current and future spending, it is clear the [Israeli army] could not have done the damage they have done in Gaza or escalated their military activities throughout the region without US financing, weapons, and political support,” read the report – US Military Aid and Arms Transfers to Israel, October 2023–September 2025 – by William D Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Hartung’s report was jointly released by the Costs of War and the Quincy Institute, which describes itself as promoting “ideas that move US foreign policy away from endless war, toward military restraint and diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace”.

Hartung’s findings and a companion report by Linda J Bilmes, an expert on budgeting and public finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, found that the US spent “a total of $31.35 – $33.77 billion and counting” since October 7, 2023 in military aid to Israel and in “US military operations in the region”.

They show how US support for Israel has helped it continue to wage war on multiple fronts for two years, and analysts backed up the reports’ conclusions.

“Israel needs US arms in order to do what it is doing,” Rahman said.

“It has dropped an excessive amount of ordinance on Gaza and elsewhere. It produces certain weapons and technology, but it doesn’t manufacture the bombs, so without the US, it couldn’t drop those bombs.”

Bipartisan support

The US has long been Israel’s most fervent backer. When it comes to US foreign aid, Israel is the largest annual recipient (at around $3.3bn yearly) and the largest cumulative one (more than $150bn until 2022).

Over decades and despite the changing of administrations, US support for Israel was constant.

Hartung’s report specifically mentions that the administrations of both US President Joe Biden and his successor, Donald Trump, committed tens of billions of dollars in arms sales agreements, including services and weapons that will be paid for in the coming years.

“[This] bipartisan support … allowed a serial violator of international law for pretty much its entire existence with the support of the democratic West without being questioned in a significant way in the political and social mainstream,” Rahman said.

However, many Americans have started to move away from the mainstream position on Israel. In recent months, as scholars declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, public perception of Israel in the US has severely degraded.

This drop is also true among American Jews. According to a recent Washington Post poll, four in 10 US Jews believe Israel is committing genocide, while more than 60 percent say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.

US always finds billions to assist Israel

And analysts believe that could have a big impact going forward for anyone in US politics.

“Some former Biden administration officials may hope that they won’t have to deal with this, but they are living in a fantasy world,” Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t think any Democrat can win a primary in 2028 without acknowledging the Biden administration inflicted and helped perpetrate a genocide,” he said.

In addition to US public criticism of Israel’s actions in the Middle East, analysts say figures like the ones shown by the Costs of War Project’s reports may also draw ire from Americans frustrated by where their tax dollars are going.

“Budgets are about priorities, but even though Americans have the thinnest social safety net of any modern country, somehow we always seem to find billions upon billions of dollars to assist Israel in its various wars,” Duss said.

“Anyone who has ever tried to do a household budget can see how absurd it is, but it is also reflective of the broader corruption of American politics.

“It’s not just Israeli interests, it’s also the US industrial complex, who are making money hand over fist, because so much of this aid and assistance is not just arms sales but granting of assistance that’s going to a lot of US companies.”

Al Jazeera English · Justin Salhani

5. Civilian Tech Is Powering China’s Military

Excerpts:

We recently conducted a study on China’s military-civil fusion at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where we both work. Our analysis of thousands of publicly available AI-related contract awards published by the PLA in 2023 and 2024 offers a unique view of the organizations supplying the Chinese military with AI-related capabilities. While some of the top suppliers are state-owned defense conglomerates, the majority are civilian companies and universities developing dual-use technologies.

These findings are a wake-up call. They suggest that China is successfully broadening its defense ecosystem and drawing on a wider network of companies and research institutions to enhance its AI capabilities. Over time, such gains could eventually erode the U.S. military’s technological advantage over the PLA.

...

The window for effectively addressing these threats is narrowing. The PLA’s AI defense industrial base is increasingly diverse, competitive, and technologically sophisticated. To be sure, Beijing faces challenges to successfully embracing commercial tech. State-owned enterprises still dominate China’s defense industrial base, and nontraditional vendors can only bid on certain military contracts.

Moreover, just because the PLA is buying AI-related goods and services from commercial firms does not necessarily mean it is successfully adopting these technologies. And recent purges of senior PLA officers underscore persistent issues within China’s defense sector that threaten to frustrate Beijing’s military modernization ambitions.

But our data leaves little doubt that military-civil fusion is no longer an aspiration in Beijing—it is a reality. Unless the United States adapts its policies to that reality, it may find itself facing a PLA that is not only better armed but also better networked into the engines of civilian innovation.

Civilian Tech Is Powering China’s Military

Beijing’s gains could eventually erode Washington’s battlefield advantage.

By Cole McFaul, a senior research analyst and an Andrew W. Marshall fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and Sam Bresnick, a research fellow and an Andrew W. Marshall fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/07/china-military-civil-fusion-defense-tech-us/Foreign Policy · Cole McFaul

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Military
Science and Technology
China

October 7, 2025, 7:00 AM

China is a dominant player in emerging technologies. It is a renewable energy superpower, controls the global commercial drone market, and has installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. At the same time, it is pouring resources into outcompeting the United States in artificial intelligence.

But Beijing is not only interested in mastering civilian technologies. It also seeks to develop the world’s premier military capabilities by integrating its civilian commercial ecosystem and defense industrial base. This strategy, known as military-civil fusion, draws inspiration from Washington’s ability to leverage commercial innovation for battlefield advantage, in areas such as satellite imagery, microelectronics, and, more recently, AI-enabled decision support systems.

For years, China’s defense sector has been plagued by inefficiency and corruption, leading to questions about whether Beijing could reform its defense industrial base to successfully adopt dual-use emerging technologies critical to fighting future wars. New data, however, reveals that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is reaching beyond this historical base to tap into an emerging class of commercial suppliers to develop advanced capabilities.

We recently conducted a study on China’s military-civil fusion at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where we both work. Our analysis of thousands of publicly available AI-related contract awards published by the PLA in 2023 and 2024 offers a unique view of the organizations supplying the Chinese military with AI-related capabilities. While some of the top suppliers are state-owned defense conglomerates, the majority are civilian companies and universities developing dual-use technologies.

These findings are a wake-up call. They suggest that China is successfully broadening its defense ecosystem and drawing on a wider network of companies and research institutions to enhance its AI capabilities. Over time, such gains could eventually erode the U.S. military’s technological advantage over the PLA.

For decades, China’s defense sector was the near-exclusive preserve of hulking state-owned enterprises. These organizations remain among the top awarded organizations in our dataset. But over the past decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping, concerned about the PLA’s reliance on a small group of state-owned enterprises, has tried to reduce the military’s dependence on them by lowering the barriers for civilian firms to supply the PLA with dual-use technologies.

Our findings suggest that Beijing’s investments in military-civil fusion may be paying dividends. Of the nearly 350 entities that we reviewed, nearly three-quarters were firms with no self-reported state ownership ties. As a group, these companies won more contracts than state-owned enterprises. Most strikingly, they are relatively young: Two-thirds were founded after 2010.

Greater competition within China’s defense sector could help the PLA adopt cutting-edge technologies. For example, iFlytek Digital, which has close ties to iFlytek, a leader in speech recognition and natural language processing, won 20 contracts in two years, including for translation software and AI-enabled decision support systems. PIESAT, a satellite and geospatial analytics company, is delivering combat simulation platforms and automatic target recognition capabilities. And Sichuan Tengden has produced drones that the PLA has deployed on missions near Japan and Taiwan.

Some of these entities are tightly integrated into global value chains, and others have operations in countries allied with the United States. In March, for example, iFlytek announced plans to expand its European business operations and open a new office in Paris. As of 2023, PIESAT claimed subsidiaries in Australia, Denmark, Singapore, and Malaysia, among other countries.

These and other nontraditional vendors are developing technologies that could boost the PLA’s capabilities in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; data fusion and analysis; targeting; and autonomous systems. And they are doing so while also selling goods and services to customers beyond the Chinese military.

The eroding divisions between civilian and military technology also extend to academia. While top PLA-linked research institutions, such as the Seven Sons of National Defense, received a substantial number of contracts in our dataset, so too did some civilian universities. These organizations, many of which have not been traditionally associated with the defense sector, won bids for projects with clear military applications, such as algorithms to control drone swarms.

Large vehicles with cone-shaped missiles atop them roll through a square. A large crowd of soldiers and a military band standing in neatly organized rows are seen in the distance.

China’s Military Is Now Leading

Wednesday’s parade proved the regional military balance has irrevocably changed.
China-military-readiness-war-us-taiwan-Doug-Chayka-illustration

How Primed for War Is China?

Risk signals for a conflict are flashing red.

This blurring poses challenges for U.S. policymakers and universities. Without proactive measures in place, academic collaborations between U.S. and Chinese institutions could inadvertently contribute to China’s military modernization. At the same time, sweeping U.S. restrictions on research partnerships with China, which have already featured in multiple national– and state-level legislative proposals, would be a crude prescription for a complicated problem.

The apparent diversification of China’s AI defense industrial base complicates U.S. efforts to slow the PLA’s modernization through targeted sanctions or export controls. Sanctioning a handful of well-known state-owned enterprises may not have a pronounced impact on China’s military capabilities if the PLA’s supplier ecosystem for critical technologies also consists of hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller firms and research institutions.

Washington now faces a daunting challenge: safeguarding U.S. national security interests while preserving the openness necessary to stay at the cutting edge of technological innovation. Navigating trade-offs will require more than blanket bans on economic and research exchanges.

In order to maintain beneficial linkages with China while mitigating security concerns, the U.S. government should invest in the analytic tools, data, and expertise needed to conduct granular, evidence-based risk assessments to ensure that collaborations with Chinese entities do not unwittingly fuel the PLA’s technological development. Washington should work with U.S. companies and universities to develop best practices for information sharing, due diligence screenings, and export control enforcement.

These initiatives will also require close coordination with allies so that measures to safeguard economic and research security are targeted, enforceable, and durable. Such an approach will help strike the balance between vigilance and openness, ensuring security without isolating the United States from global innovation networks.

The window for effectively addressing these threats is narrowing. The PLA’s AI defense industrial base is increasingly diverse, competitive, and technologically sophisticated. To be sure, Beijing faces challenges to successfully embracing commercial tech. State-owned enterprises still dominate China’s defense industrial base, and nontraditional vendors can only bid on certain military contracts.

Moreover, just because the PLA is buying AI-related goods and services from commercial firms does not necessarily mean it is successfully adopting these technologies. And recent purges of senior PLA officers underscore persistent issues within China’s defense sector that threaten to frustrate Beijing’s military modernization ambitions.

But our data leaves little doubt that military-civil fusion is no longer an aspiration in Beijing—it is a reality. Unless the United States adapts its policies to that reality, it may find itself facing a PLA that is not only better armed but also better networked into the engines of civilian innovation.

Foreign Policy · Cole McFaul

6. Here is What the Secretary of War Should Have Said to His General and Flag Officers

Excerpts:

If warfighting is the Department of War’s focus, Secretary Hegseth should be clear about what kind of warfighting he means. He must explicitly and vigorously promote jointness as the method of warfighting.

Furthermore, if the leaders assembled at Quantico were to be admonished at all, it could have been about service parochialism. Service biases and the competition between services for ownership of mission sets cannot be acceptable. The services must approach warfighting through a joint perspective. By promoting joint warfighting, Secretary Hegseth had an opportunity to speak to his audience at their level by appreciating that these officers and senior enlisted advisors are fully responsible for the planning and conduct of global contingency operations.

Nevertheless, the assembled group of US military leaders certainly got a message. However, it needed to be the kind of message that directly addressed their strategic and operational responsibilities.

Here is What the Secretary of War Should Have Said to His General and Flag Officers

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/08/here-is-what-the-secretary-of-war-should-have-said-to-his-general-and-flag-officers/

by Keith Dickson

10.08.2025 at 06:00am

On October 6, 2025 Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth assembled the senior military leaders and senior enlisted advisors from across the US military at Quantico, Virginia to speak to them about his vision for the department and his expectations of US military personnel.

The Secretary had a good opening (with edits):

“Good morning and welcome to the War Department. . . . From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting, preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit. . . to be strong so that we can prevent war in the first place. . . . [W]e owe our republic a military that will win any war we choose or any war that is thrust upon us. . . .Our warfighters are entitled to be led by the best and most capable leaders.”

What followed, unfortunately, was a pep talk better delivered to Colonels and Captains, not Flag and General officers and Senior Enlisted Advisors, who were crammed cheek-to-jowl in a stuffy auditorium for nearly two hours. What they got was a message intended for the previous two Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs and the appointed DoD civilian leadership of the past eight years.

It’s doubtful that Hegseth’s remarks had much of an effect. The assembled senior military leaders have heard similar talks as they rose through the ranks throughout their careers. Most have even given very similar talks themselves. Everyone in the military—from private to general—knows how to react to such mandatory formations: listen quietly, maintain some level of interest and attention, and wait for the order to be dismissed.

After asserting that warfighters deserve the best and most capable leaders, Hegseth should have addressed the audience as strategic leaders and practitioners of the operational level of war. Here, in my assessment, is what Hegseth should have stated:

“There is no more complex or unforgiving role in war than the ability to employ joint and combined forces at the operational level to achieve decisive and strategic results. I must rely on you leaders to provide me the most well-honed and most imaginative war plans that deliver decisive outcomes. I rely on you to command a joint force, or command a component of the joint force, or support the joint force to dominate the battlefield—air, sea, land, space, cyberspace, and the information sphere. No single component can do this alone; only the joint force is capable of synchronizing and integrating these capabilities effectively. This is our greatest strength—no adversary is remotely capable of conducting joint operations at the level and intensity that we have demonstrated. The commanders who can and must do this are in this room. It is a daunting and humbling task.

Nonetheless, I am worried about our current capability to conduct joint operations necessary to meet the contingencies that challenge our national security. Jointness is not natural; we have voluntarily joined the tribe that suit us best. We wear the symbols of our tribe with pride. All of you demonstrate that pride in the uniforms you wear today. But we must look at joint solutions to our challenges; we must think and practice and act as joint warfighters. This must be our dominant mindset. By thinking and planning as joint warfighters, we enhance our strengths and negate our limitations. It is imperative that the services embrace joint professional military education to provide the force with a continuous supply of joint planners and joint qualified staff. History has proven over the past 20 years that joint qualified officers and non-commissioned officers bring extraordinary value to operational staffs. By making jointness a priority, we become the instrument of power that allows me to give the most realistic and honest advice to the commander-in-chief in a crisis as he weighs the most difficult of decisions.

This is why I am asking President Trump to reinstate the US Joint Forces Command as the representative of the Chairman to provide the Secretary of War with joint solutions to warfighting issues, force management, and future requirements. The Commander of US Joint Forces Command will serve as the honest broker to manage competing or conflicting service requirements and examine resources that best suit war planning requirements. Jointness must be our touchstone. It is the key to future operational war, allowing us to integrate new capabilities and technologies and adapt quickly to new conditions that will define future war.

Because so much rides on your shoulders, I will seek to limit distractions and non-essential requirements that draw your attention away from your warfighting mission. I am looking to you to pass up recommendations to the Service Chiefs and civilian service secretaries to help me reduce unnecessary distractions. War planning and force readiness to execute those plans are the priorities. I want to know what you need and I also want to know what you don’t need.

I am also concerned for your personal well-being. I firmly believe that one reason we stumbled so badly in the aftermath of initially successful operations in Afghanistan and Iraq is that senior leaders and their senior staff officers were too tired to make good decisions. Between September 2001 and May of 2003, JTFs, CJSOTFs, and combatant commands were operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, running 12-to-18 hour shifts. I’m sure most of you in this room at one time or another were part of this meatgrinder. What it did over time was make everyone combat ineffective—as ineffective as if the headquarters was hit with an artillery barrage. Decisions were made that had no bearing on the reality on the ground; we lost our strategic and operational focus and drifted, hoping for the best. All of you, I’m sure, remember having to face the consequences of that drift.

We cannot let that happen again. Future war will be more intense that we can imagine, requiring enormous wells of stamina and resiliency. Every member of the joint force must, therefore, be physically ready for these challenges. Good health and fitness are the hallmarks of an effective fighting force, which will be stressed to the limit in combat and combat support operations. They are also the hallmarks of strategic leaders, who must be at their best and can manage the wear and tear mentally, morally, and physically that comes with the burden of command at the operational level of war. So, I will be looking closely at how you bring the joint force to the standards of fitness and readiness needed to fight the next war. You, yourselves, must set the example by meeting your service’s height and weight requirements and passing the physical fitness test twice a year. It is also a necessary goal that helps you to face the challenges you confront every day. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Harry Shelton, got up early to run every day before work. No fanfare—he just did it as part of his job. He is a good example for all of us to follow.

I will be providing a vision for the joint force that will encompass a warfighting mindset at the operational level and the steps the War Department will need to achieve that vision. I will consult with you and the service chiefs to help identify the essential components of this vision and I will redouble my efforts to give you all that you need to plan and execute the missions assigned to you.

Thank you for your time.”

[The President was not invited to speak, as it was an internal chain of command meeting.]

Conclusion

If warfighting is the Department of War’s focus, Secretary Hegseth should be clear about what kind of warfighting he means. He must explicitly and vigorously promote jointness as the method of warfighting.

Furthermore, if the leaders assembled at Quantico were to be admonished at all, it could have been about service parochialism. Service biases and the competition between services for ownership of mission sets cannot be acceptable. The services must approach warfighting through a joint perspective. By promoting joint warfighting, Secretary Hegseth had an opportunity to speak to his audience at their level by appreciating that these officers and senior enlisted advisors are fully responsible for the planning and conduct of global contingency operations.

Nevertheless, the assembled group of US military leaders certainly got a message. However, it needed to be the kind of message that directly addressed their strategic and operational responsibilities.

About The Author

Keith Dickson
Keith D. Dickson is Professor Emeritus, National Defense University and a retired Special Forces officer.

7. Remarks by Colonel Marco J. Lyons at the United States Army War College (US Army and Indo-Pacific Issues and Assumptions)

Excerpts:

The U.S. Army should advocate for and begin preparations for an Indo-Pacific collective security alliance as recently proposed by Ely Ratner, former ASD-IPSA (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs), in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

The U.S. Army should pick up the mantle of joint force development – particularly as it applies to the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific, with its massive Asian landmass and extensive archipelagos, is easily the most complex warfighting environment in the world. Operations in this region are inescapably joint. The Army has the most to gain by championing full-dimensional joint force development.

Finally, a closer: The ‘return of everything’ – even though the phrase may be inelegant, the idea seems to be enveloping us. In only the last few years, Mara Karlin, who was recently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, in stunning fashion, wrote about the return of total war. A Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Tanisha M. Fazal) only early this year published a piece on the return of conquest. Monica Duffy Toft, of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, also earlier this year described the return of spheres of influence. Vladimir Putin talks about Russia as an ‘imperial’ power.

Admittedly, it is not quite clear yet that we have been thrown back into a world of empires and wars of expansion, but it is clear that U.S. military strategy is more dynamic than at any time since the 1950s. To paraphrase what Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has said: We are in a race for our lives against an incredibly formidable China and should take nothing for granted. I would add that our military strategy – solidly grounded in war with China – should take nothing for granted.

Remarks by Colonel Marco J. Lyons at the United States Army War College School of Strategic Landpower (SSL) National Security Seminar (NSS), Carlisle Barracks

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/08/remarks-by-colonel-marco-j-lyons-at-the-united-states-army-war-college-school-of-strategic-landpower-ssl-national-security-seminar-nss-carlisle-barracks/

by Marco J. Lyons

10.08.2025 at 06:00am

I deeply appreciate General Ron Clark’s leadership and the opportunity he has provided me to share with you some thinking from the United States Army Pacific.

Hello everyone – I would like to thank “Buddy” Frick for the offer and Major General Hill for allowing me to participate today. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. My intent is to highlight some pressing issues surrounding the rivalry with China, beginning with a review of key assumptions and ending with some implications for military strategy.

First, some assumptions before getting into the issues. Great power rivalry sets the stage for the remarks that follow.

Great power is definable for the purposes of military strategic planning based on the global level of international relations, reputation, and influence – the main instruments of national power – and the pursuit of policy preferences. Great power is a mass of existing or latent national strength – combining military, economic, and diplomatic means – which may be equaled but not significantly surpassed by that of any other actor in the international system. Great powers are top-ranking, compelling, and almost always, to a certain extent, threatening.

Rivals are distinct from challengers and spoilers. So, after the end of the Cold War, Russia became a global challenger (recently it may have slipped to a global spoiler) while Iran and the DPRK are regional spoilers – though Pyongyang acts like it aspires to be a regional challenger. China is a great power and is a rival of the United States for the position of global hegemon. The idea of a Sino-American hegemonic war should be reframed as essentially a land conflict – centering on Asia – which is, not to say, an Army conflict.

The interests of great powers are bound to clash, and concerning core interests, great power rivals should not be expected to cooperate. The strategic literature is still too skewed toward cooperation, even though the structure of Sino-American relations no longer suggests such a focus is warranted. All states compete, even friendly ones.

Great power rivals are in conflict, but armed conflict – or war – is not inevitable. Great power rivalry may be managed given an extremely high level of bipartisan American political support for a carefully crafted ‘managed rivalry’ policy agenda – and something similar on the opposing side – and given dedicated bilateral and supporting multilateral diplomatic forums to overwatch security mistrust and regulate economic competition. To paraphrase Graham Allison at the Kennedy School of Government, destiny deals the hands, but individual leaders play the cards.

For military planning purposes, China is an adversary – an adversary is a potential enemy. The United States has not faced an adversary of any great significance since the Soviet Union. This helps explain the disconnects between our conventional thinking about war with China and what actually applies today.

U.S. military strategy in the Indo-Pacific should focus on war, specifically because China is a global rival and a military adversary. A military strategy is a warmaking strategy, to echo the words of Major General (Retired) Brad Gericke, former Army Staff G-3/5, now nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. Military strategy should focus on defeat of the adversary and not on deterrence, which is foremost a policy, understanding that maintaining global hegemony is also a policy requiring military force.

The idea of a ‘strategy of deterrence’ (or of ‘denial’) is, at the national level, entailing all instruments of power. What militarily supports a national policy of deterrence is a military strategy that defeats the adversary. The U.S. government continues to pursue a policy of deterrence. It is the role of the military strategy to lay out how force will support the achievement of policy, including not losing a hegemonic war, especially with deterrent capabilities, concepts, and posture.

Campaigning should be about securing decisive advantage in relation to moving into a great power crisis and armed conflict. There will be peacetime interests, like international trade, democratic reforms, and support of liberal values and human rights, covered by military strategy, but they are not central – they indirectly support security. Essentially, military strategy in terms of an adversarial great power rival should not be derailed by non-warmaking interests.

Second, some key issues for military strategy in the Indo-Pacific in the form of conventional views and the corresponding ‘new school’ of thinking. While still not a full-fledged intellectual movement, I argue that a new consensus is coalescing through the work of Hal Brands, Oriana Mastro, Andrew Krepinevich, Charlie Flynn, and others.

New school thinking forms a large part of the conceptual basis for the classified 2024 USARPAC Theater Army Strategy signed by the Commanding General a year ago (July). This developing new school of military thinking is driven in part by growing recognition that standing views need to be challenged and even overturned. So, in the historical dimension, the land war in the Pacific during World War Two was far more important and substantial than so much published literature would suggest. I can commend everyone who hasn’t already done so to take a look at John McManus’ trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Pacific War.

In the national strategic dimension, after moving steadily from seeing China as a cooperative partner to a strategic competitor to now a great power rival, the disconnects between policy, strategy, and military power in the region are becoming increasingly clear. U.S. military strategic thinking today is straightjacketed by 1990s ideas about military-technological dominance, regional contingencies, force projection, expeditionary warfare, and net-centricity. The new school of military thinking seeks a wholesale reset across these and more.

The conventional thinking presented here dates to the post-1945 international order, when China was poor. It has been shaped by the aftermath of World War Two, the Pacific in Cold War strategy, the post-Cold War environment, and the U.S. policy of engagement with Beijing. So, to be clear, the roots of this conventional thinking run deep.

Now for the issues presented as contrasting conventional and ‘counter-conventional’ views.

The conventional view: The United States is in a ‘competition’ with China. Since 2017, the U.S.-China relationship has been characterized as strategic competition, which still assumes a shared ‘playing field.’ Furthermore, the conventional thinking goes that the risk of armed conflict can be successfully managed through direct engagement and building economic and security integration between China and the West.

Against the conventional view is a ‘new view’: As a great power rival, China is interested in setting the common ‘playing field’ for the world, nothing less. Evidence mounts that Beijing wants a China-centric world order unshackled from Western influence. Since at least 2018, important East Asian scholars like Jennifer Lind have argued that China is quickly on path to become the regional hegemon, which directly threatens a U.S. core interest.

By some accounts, Xi Jinping not only believes that China has already achieved historic levels of power – so-called ‘comprehensive power’ – but that he can use it to change the course of world history in Beijing’s favor. It is “indisputable” that Xi Jinping’s ambition is globe-spanning and includes surpassing the United States, according to Elizabeth Economy, another important China expert.

Next – a second conventional view: Beijing’s initiation of a major war against the United States would be so ‘risky’ that it is very unlikely to happen, based in part on the idea that economic interdependence deters armed conflict. The interconnectedness of the U.S. and Chinese economies through trade and investment creates a strong disincentive for large-scale conventional war, as both nations would suffer immense economic harm. There is long-standing orthodoxy that China will not risk harming the international order that has served it so well.

The new view: Strategic calculations of high politics are not made on economic factors alone. In the words of the Brazilian political scientist, Heni Ozi Cukier, “Economics may explain what can be done, but politics decides what will be done.” Great power rivals risk being caught in a “trade-security spiral” – an idea described by the professor of international affairs, Dale Copeland.

It should be clearer today than at any time since 1991 that fear, honor, and glory still bear on international decision-making. It should also be remembered that the United States does not control all inputs to Beijing’s strategic risk calculus. We should reexamine our approach to risk management in the context of Sino-American rivalry as it actually is.

Conventional view: The United States has superior strategies, operational concepts, and forces, through Operation PATHWAYS, HELLSCAPE, Agile Combat Employment, Marine Littoral Regiments, and future Army Multidomain Commands – for example, to secure overmatch against the PLA. The 2018 NDS mandated accelerated modernization to maintain overmatch against rapidly investing competitors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Second Offset Strategy ensured Joint Force overmatch for more than two decades based on sensor networks, precision strikes, and stealth aircraft.

New view: Advantageous loss exchange ratios do not by themselves indicate operational advantage, and this may be especially true when assessing great power rivals. Winning battles will remain important, but in great power war, the U.S. Joint Force/Combined Forces will need to effectively link tactical actions to objectives to decisive points to lines of operation that progress directly and indirectly to the adversary’s operational and then strategic centers of gravity. This is no less true today than in the days of Henry Lloyd and the Seven Years War.

The United States also still relies on a hub-and-spoke arrangement for allies and partners in the region. This is the least effective for waging war against a peer adversary. The outward expanding spokes dissipate the efforts of a Combined Force operating to achieve the strategic ends of a warmaking Coalition.

Conventional view: A future war in the Indo-Pacific will be short. A Sino-American war will be over in a matter of days or weeks, and, therefore, there will be no role for the Army in major combat operations. Only fast-striking forces from the sea and the air will be relevant.

New view: This conventional view seems to apply a 1990s superpower conception of war – of low cost, low risk, rapid and awe-inspiring attacks at strategic distances – to the current reality of a great power rival and peer adversary. The fit is a poor one indeed.

There is growing awareness over only the last few years of the potential for protracted conflict. When globe-straddling great powers with hegemonic armed forces and sprawling alliances face off, they introduce protraction with their expansive war aims, strategic depth, and large amounts of latent power. While not ‘alliances’ in the Western sense, China may be expected to rely on ‘comprehensive strategic partnerships.’

Conventional view: A future war in the Indo-Pacific will be sharp. The idea of sharp refers to very high levels of intensity and destruction over relatively short periods. Sharp wars are also usually thought of as being particularly decisive. So, we can think of early and massive strikes on air bases, aircraft carriers, and critical infrastructure.

New view: The idea of a sharp war overanalyzes the impact of long ranges, precision, and lethality. Traditional operational problems of maneuver, mass and concentration, and seizing the initiative, remain, and we can see these playing out in limited form in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Some analysts, including James Russell, rightly point out that strike warfare – long-range strikes by aircraft and missiles – has rarely achieved its declared political and strategic aims.

Conventional view: A major war will be geographically confined to a part of the Central Western Pacific. There will be no significant incentives to escalate horizontally. The U.S. national security establishment remains focused on planning for a short, sharp war with China conducted around Taiwan in the first island chain.

New view: More and more, key security partners in the region see a Chinese war against Taiwan as engulfing much more than only the island and immediately surrounding seas. After decades of staying quiet on Taiwan, over the last few years Tokyo has indicated that a Chinese war against Taiwan would be a ‘security emergency’ for Japan and that Taiwan’s security interests are linked to Japan’s. Additionally, Japan has been working with the EU on a security partnership.

A Sino-American war would spread across the Western Pacific and beyond because of the need for ports, movement corridors, and maneuver space on land and in the maritime domain to secure power centers and key populations. In great power war, as operations protract and the overriding need to threaten centers of gravity sets in on both sides, the tendency to geographically spread out will likely grow.

Conventional view: It is sufficient for the United States to plan for a single operation in a single joint operations area, similar to Operation DESERT STORM, rather than the full range of actions, operations, and campaigns.

New view: For the U.S. Joint Force/Combined Forces and the PLA to fully employ – or fully exploit – available forces and capabilities means that both sides will seek multiple operations areas and will almost certainly need to conduct operations over more than one campaign. This is what is expected when great powers are targeting each other’s strategic centers of gravity.

With horizontal escalation, and possibly also vertical escalation, and protraction, the opportunities to launch varied types of operations, including airborne, amphibious, and air assault, will expand. I see no compelling arguments for why these cross-domain operations are obsolete in a great power war.

Conventional view: The United States has the best structures for planning, preparing, and commanding future warfare, given a character of war that includes robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence. Ross Babbage, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has summarized this well: The United States and allies possess substantial government and private sector organizations that are capable of highly networked, combined arms warfare; and when partnered with well-trained military personnel, the resulting forces can dominate most battlefields in conventional operations.

New view: The technological dominance that we unveiled and used so devastatingly against Iraqis, Serbians, the Taliban, and Libyans in the post-Cold War period was – it should be admitted – not seriously challenged. In one sense, as things stand now, the question is not so much whether the foundations of American national strength – economic production, social organization, and democratic governance – are resilient enough to withstand the extreme demands of a major power war, but how fast could the transition to a wartime footing be made.

Next, the new school of military strategic thinking in the Indo-Pacific leads to some key implications.

The U.S. Army must develop a ‘Pacific Force.’ This was resisted by important institutional stakeholders as recently as a year and a half ago, but now appears to have the endorsement of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, General James Mingus, in a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies interview.

The U.S. Army should advocate for and begin preparations for an Indo-Pacific collective security alliance as recently proposed by Ely Ratner, former ASD-IPSA (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs), in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

The U.S. Army should pick up the mantle of joint force development – particularly as it applies to the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific, with its massive Asian landmass and extensive archipelagos, is easily the most complex warfighting environment in the world. Operations in this region are inescapably joint. The Army has the most to gain by championing full-dimensional joint force development.

Finally, a closer: The ‘return of everything’ – even though the phrase may be inelegant, the idea seems to be enveloping us. In only the last few years, Mara Karlin, who was recently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, in stunning fashion, wrote about the return of total war. A Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Tanisha M. Fazal) only early this year published a piece on the return of conquest. Monica Duffy Toft, of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, also earlier this year described the return of spheres of influence. Vladimir Putin talks about Russia as an ‘imperial’ power.

Admittedly, it is not quite clear yet that we have been thrown back into a world of empires and wars of expansion, but it is clear that U.S. military strategy is more dynamic than at any time since the 1950s. To paraphrase what Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has said: We are in a race for our lives against an incredibly formidable China and should take nothing for granted. I would add that our military strategy – solidly grounded in war with China – should take nothing for granted.

Thank you, and I look forward to the discussion.

Tags: Deterrence, Great Power Competition, INDO-PACIFIC, Military strategy, strategic planning, US-China Rivalry

About The Author

Marco J. Lyons
Between July 2022 and July 2025, Colonel Marco J. Lyons (US Army, Infantry) was the Assistant Chief of Staff, Plans for United States Army Pacific (USARPAC). He is a 2021 Harvard Kennedy School National Security Fellow and a 2020 MIT National Security Fellow. He served on the 2021 OSD China Task Force and on the 2016 and 2017 Army Science Board studies of multi-domain operations. He completed Naval Postgraduate School in 2014, where his distinguished thesis examined US nuclear weapons policy, strategy, and force structure.

8. I Was a Hostage in Gaza. This is How I Survived.

Resilience

I Was a Hostage in Gaza. This is How I Survived.

I was dragged barefoot from my home, bound and starved in Gaza, and forced to face the men who worship terrorists. This is how I made it home.

By Eli Sharabi

10.07.25 —

Israel

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-was-a-hostage-in-gaza-this-is-how-i-survived-hamas-israel

thefp.com

On Friday, the war in Gaza shifted: For the first time, Hamas signaled its openness to releasing all Israeli hostages and immediately entering negotiations for a permanent ceasefire. Those negotiations began on Monday in Egypt and are ongoing.

The news came just days before the two-year anniversary of October 7, 2023—the day Hamas massacred more than 1,200 civilians and kidnapped 251.

Among those taken was Eli Sharabi, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, a small community less than three miles from the Gaza Strip. Sharabi, then 51, was dragged barefoot from his home in front of his wife, Lianne, and their two teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel. More than 16 months later, he emerged from Hamas captivity in Gaza—traumatized, and weighing about 95 pounds—only to learn that his wife and daughters had been killed in the initial attack.

Sharabi’s new book, Hostage, is the first memoir by a released Israeli captive. This week, he sat down for an episode of Honestly with Bari Weiss, to recount his abduction, his release, the physical and psychological torment he endured—and his remarkable decision to choose life in the face of death at every turn.

We’re honored to publish the following excerpt from Hostage. Trapped in a Hamas-allied family’s house in the first days after his capture, Sharabi was tied up, humiliated, starved—all while slowly confronting the sheer depths of his captors’ indoctrination. This is a story about the capacity of the human spirit: for unrelenting evil, and for extraordinary faith in the very darkest of times. —The Editors

The vehicle stops in Gaza. The terrorists pull me and Khun, a Thai worker who was taken as well, out of the car. The sun is beating down on us. I’m sweating: It was hot in the car, and I had a heavy blanket over me. The terrorists lead me out of the vehicle, still wrapped in the blanket.

There is a huge commotion around us. I hear a noisy crowd, ecstatic, and suddenly hands start pulling me. I’m being dragged into a sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb. My heart is pounding, my mouth is dry, I can barely breathe. The terrorists try to push the mob back, and after a struggle, they quickly smuggle me into a building.

(via HarperCollins)

Our first stop in the Gaza Strip is a mosque. I realize it because I can see the floor through my blindfold, and I recognize the colorful prayer rugs. The terrorists slam the doors behind us.

It’s quiet for a moment. I can hear my own breathing. Khun sobs next to me. The terrorists take us into a side room, where they remove our blindfolds and order us to strip. With trembling hands, I remove my shirt and pants and strip down to my boxers. They start interrogating me, and I answer in Arabic. The fact that I know Arabic—which I’d learned at home growing up—makes them stressed. They think I might be part of Shin Bet or the Mossad, Israeli counterintelligence agencies.

“What’s your name?” “Eli Sharabi.” “Where are you from?” “Kibbutz Be’eri.” “Are you a soldier?” “No, not a soldier.” “Not a soldier?” “No.”

They look at each other and then at me again. “You’re a soldier,” their commander declares. “I’m not a soldier,” I repeat. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-one.” “You’re younger!” they accuse. “No, no,” I respond. “I swear, I’m 51!”

I can see they don’t believe me. They interrogate Khun too, but he doesn’t speak Arabic, or Hebrew, or even any English. They hit him when he fails to answer, and he cries.

After a few minutes, they blindfold us again and bind our hands behind our backs with tight zip ties. They move us from place to place, from one group of captors to the next. From the terrorists’ chatter, I understand it’s deliberate and coordinated, so the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can’t track them.

After the last stop, it’s a short ride until they pull us out. I feel sand under my bare feet and think: Just not a tunnel, please, God, not a tunnel. At the time, Israel hadn’t realized the extent of Hamas’s tunnel system, but the existence of the tunnels was widely known. I pictured the nightmare of being buried underground. Of being suffocated inside a terrifying warren of tunnels, a bottomless underworld with no light, no air, and no return.

That would come later.

At this point, we are in an enclosed building. I can smell cooking and laundry. This must be a house. The terrorists lead us into a room and seat us on a bed. They remove our zip ties, but then return with thick ropes a minute later and tie us up again, even tighter. They bind our hands behind our backs again and tie our legs. The ropes are so tight, they brand my flesh.

My entire body convulses with pain. All I can think is Hands. Shoulders. Legs. God almighty! Hands! Shoulders! Legs! Up to this point, I’ve been consumed by fear, by pure survival. But once it starts to sink in what’s happening, the pain—the real, physical pain—takes over.

The terrorists who brought us here leave. An older man, who must be the father of the house, keeps watch over us. Through my blindfold, which keeps slipping a little, my eyes begin to adjust to the room they’ve put us in. It’s an ordinary children’s bedroom. There’s a small bed, two mattresses on the floor for us, a dresser, and a desk with shelves. There are two large windows draped with burlap, branded with the letters UNRWA, standing for United Nations Relief and Works Agency—the UN agency ostensibly dedicated to providing humanitarian support to Palestinians, but whose employees have been accused of widespread ties to Hamas.

Eli Sharabi in New York City on October 5, 2025. (Adrienne Grunwald for The Free Press)

The fabric is secured to the windows but doesn’t block the light. I think about my wife, Lianne, and the girls. About Yahel’s bedroom. The gunshots inside. The room we were all snatched from. I keep closing my eyes and seeing Lianne standing frozen in front of the wardrobe, terrified, unsure what to do. “Don’t freak out,” I told her.

In the late afternoon of the first day, Israel’s air strikes begin. This doesn’t surprise me. It’s been clear since the morning that something unheard of is going on. I knew that the mighty Israeli army would wake up, eventually.

But the Israeli air strikes are not the only terrifying sound. So are Hamas’s rockets. I can hear them being fired right next to us, and it dawns on me that the launchers must be nearby—maybe inside the houses, maybe in the yard. We hear the rockets as they are being fired. When the sound is faint, I know they’re short-range—those that fall in the communities along the Gaza border. But when the noise is loud, I know they’re long-range rockets—and I worry for everyone they’re headed toward.

Outside, the muezzin’s call curls through the air. There are unfamiliar sounds: dogs barking, muffled voices of the family downstairs, and air strikes near and far. Now and then I slip into something I can’t quite name: a fainting spell? A snooze? It’s unbearably hot, and when I lie on my side, the blindfold slips over my nose and mouth, and I feel like I’m suffocating. I call out to my captors in panic, and they adjust the blindfold. Next to me, Khun never stops crying.

My heart is pounding. My heart is aching with worry. With homesickness. With fear. And my body? My body is screaming: Help!

After three days in captivity—days spent blindfolded, hungry, in excruciating pain—two men enter our room. They remove our blindfolds and untie the ropes. I breathe a sigh of relief and feel my shoulders breathing with me. They look young, around 30. One is shorter, a bit stocky, calm. The other, with a prominent scar across his face, is taller and more sullen. The stocky one is called Sa’id; the sullen one is Sa’ad. Later, in the tunnels, we call Sa’id “the Mask,” and the sullen one “the Cleaner.” They dress my wounds from the tight ropes, and then chain both Khun and me with iron shackles on our legs. They leave our hands free. And no more blindfolds.

They’re both uneasy. From what I overhear, I understand they’re afraid of Israeli military ingenuity. They think maybe the IDF planted a chip or some tracker in me to monitor them. Like the terrorists at the mosque, they are surprised by my Arabic.

Slowly, I start to learn about them. The Cleaner is the more religious and radical of the pair. He keeps repeating that there is no place for Jews in this land, and that the hostages will only be freed if all the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are released. Some years ago, I learn, he was severely injured in an Israeli air strike, leaving him with a scar—and rage.

The Mask is more relaxed, with a bashful smile, and he likes sweet drinks. When the father goes to the store, the Mask asks him to bring back a Coke or Sprite. I learn that they have families, wives, children.

The Mask is a talker. He asks me the same questions over and over again, like he’s trying to trip me up, to see if I’ll answer differently the second or third time. I agree with him when I have to, nodding when he accuses the IDF of bombing hospitals or killing babies. “That’s terrible,” I say. “War is terrible.”

The Mask gives me mini lectures about how they see the world. This land is theirs. All of it. I should go back to Morocco or Yemen, where my grandparents came from. This land isn’t mine. There will be no peace as long as we, the Jews, are on their land.

After a few days, they bring us a bucket of cold water and soap and ask us to strip and wash. Then they demand we shave all our body hair: not just head and beard, but also pubic hair.

My heart is pounding. My heart is aching with worry. With homesickness. With fear. And my body? My body is screaming: Help!

I stand naked in front of the Mask, the Cleaner, and the father, and I shave my bare body with a razor. Outside, I hear the sounds of the city: passing cars, the rumble of distant air strikes, children playing in a nearby yard, women talking. And there I am, stark naked, standing in front of three pairs of prying eyes. My private parts exposed. Ordered to remove every hair from my body. My hand trembles as I hold the razor. I peel myself in front of them. I empty myself before them. I humiliate myself under their gaze.

On day five in captivity, a man we haven’t seen before arrives. He’s very tall, at least 6′3″, fair-haired, fair-skinned, with blue eyes and a camera in hand. He looks German but speaks fluent Arabic with the Cleaner and the Mask. With us, he speaks flawless English. He explains that he’s going to film us.

I know this playbook from Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force officer who went missing in action over Lebanon in 1986 and was photographed in captivity, and Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier abducted into Gaza in 2006, who was filmed as proof of life. This is what it means to be a hostage in terrorist captivity now: Your image is used as psychological warfare. Shalit came back alive. Arad did not.

They begin setting up for the shoot. I’m instructed to state my name, where I’m from, who my parents are, and what I do for a living. I’m told to speak to the Israeli government, to stop the fighting and get me out.

I read the words they dictated, but in my mind, I’m speaking to Lianne and the girls. I imagine them watching me, looking into my eyes. I need them to understand: I’m alive. I’m okay. After the shoot, the German tries to reassure us. Give it a few days, and there’ll be a deal, a prisoner exchange, and you’ll go home, he says. He packs up his equipment and leaves.

That deal doesn’t happen. And over the following days and weeks, the mutual suspicion and distance between myself and my captors narrows. I don’t identify with them. I don’t pity them. I’m not confused about who they are or what they really want. But it’s a natural, human dynamic that’s hard to resist. The better I know and understand them, the better I can express my needs, make requests, read the room.

Eli Sharabi in New York City on October 5, 2025. (Adrienne Grunwald for The Free Press)

Sometimes I feel like I am talking to people who are living 20 years in the past. One day, the Mask and the Cleaner tell me excitedly about a movie they just watched, gushing about how amazing and special it was.

“What’s it called?” I ask. “Titanic!” “Titanic? With Leonardo DiCaprio?” I stare at them. What year are you living in?

The Mask tells me he likes to dance with his wife, but because of Hamas’s religious regime, they can’t. I ask him if he wants to live differently; whether he dreams of quiet, of a life where he could go to the beach with his kids and enjoy a normal day. He doesn’t answer, but I see his eyes glimmer.

Neither one knows any Israelis. They don’t believe me when I say that not everyone in Israel just wants to kill them all the time. But the nonstop bombings only reinforce their thinking. “Bibi’s crazy,” they say. “He wants to kill us all! Why won’t he stop?”

They get their information from Al Jazeera, from Israeli television, and especially from Abu Obaida, the spokesman of Hamas’s military wing. Abu Obaida is like a god to them. A king. The font of all knowledge. Their preacher. Whenever he goes on air, they stand to attention, glued to the television or radio, hypnotized. They can’t believe I don’t know who he is. I tell them I’ve heard of Yahya Sinwar, I’ve heard of Ismail Haniyeh. . . but Abu Obaida? Nope, never. “Impossible,” they insist.

The days are long. I am often left alone with my thoughts. I listen to the chaotic noise outside, terrified by the encroaching air strikes, startled by the sound of missiles being launched nearby, sparking cheers of jubilation in the neighborhood. The endless stretches of time give me room to think, to yearn. I keep thinking about Lianne and the girls. I imagine our sweet moments together: Shabbat and holiday meals, trips, family celebrations.

I think a lot about coming home. I fantasize about it. I imagine telling Lianne, That’s it, let’s get out of here. Come on, Lianne, let’s take our girls to live somewhere different, somewhere quiet. But I refuse to let myself sink into longing. I refuse to let myself drown in pain.

I am surviving. I am a hostage. In the heart of Gaza. A stranger in a strange land. In the home of a Hamas-supporting family. And I’m getting out of here. I have to.

I’m coming home.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

thefp.com

9. UK SOF Exercise Chameleon 25-2

UK SOF Exercise Chameleon 25-2

https://sof.news/exercises/chameleon-25-2/

October 8, 2025 Pat Carty Exercises 0

By Pat Carty.

It is that time of the year when the United Kingdom’s elite special operations community has wrapped up the second of its premier bi-annual exercises – Chameleon 25-2. This high-stake training exercise, unites personnel from the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and the restructured United Kingdom Commando Force (UKCF), formerly 3 Commando Brigade, which underwent a comprehensive rebranding and organizational overhaul in 2024. Then, to bolster NATO Special Force commitments, June 2025 saw the formal integration of 40, 42, and 45 Commando into the UKCF structure, enhancing its rapid-response capabilities.

Chameleon serves as a critical venue for the UK’s Special Forces, honing its skills across land, sea, and air, day or night and in scenarios ranging from straightforward insertions to intricate, multi-phased operations. Regrettably, as an independent journalist, I am no longer granted official access to UK Special Force activities, unlike my engagements with our NATO SF allies, who value my on-site presence and post-exercise articles, written with the utmost operational security in mind. That said, public-domain tracking and open-source intelligence, allows me to shadow these UK SOF exercises closely, sometimes even anticipating their tactics and movements. While far from ideal, this approach also underscores how potential “interested parties” might monitor UK special operations from afar.

Spanning 25 August to 23 September 2025, Chameleon 25-2 based its ground operations at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire, now hosting 11 Squadron, a joint RAF-Qatar training unit, operating Hawk Mk167 two-seat jets, alongside numerous other ground elements like 34 Squadron, RAF Regiment.

On StartEx, it was very notable that neither of the usual Chameleon SF support vessels; SD Victoria or SD Northern River (civilian-contracted from Serco Marine Services) were to be seen. However, HMS Duncan (D37), a Type 45 air-defence destroyer, which had departed from Royal Navy Portsmouth, was heading towards the North Sea via the English Channel. But more about Duncan later.

In the South of England, two A-400 “Atlas” transport aircraft departed from RAF Brize Norton, and were heading to RAF Leeming, which was being utilised as Exercise HQ. But, unlike prior Chameleons, there was no Short 360 twin-engine aircraft present, normally used for initial static-line or High-Altitude High-Opening (HAHO) parachute sorties. Despite that, Two CH-47 Chinooks from 7 Squadron (Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing, RAF Odiham; callsigns “Lifter 1 and 2”, touched down at Leeming mid-morning, to be joined later by two Beechcraft Shadow R1s from 14 Squadron (RAF Waddington; “Snake 57” and “Serpent 48”). These Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, are equipped with advanced sensors, satcom, and defensive suites, providing real-time overwatch for ground teams in contact with an enemy.

An RAF C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft, also from Brize Norton, then arrived overhead Leeming, and commenced a “High Altitude High Opening” (HAHO) para drop from 12,000 feet (FL120), then landed. One of two A-400s, which by then had arrived earlier, departed for Uppsala in Sweden, returning later that afternoon. The other A-400 then departed on another round-trip to Lemming via Uppsala. Then the C-17 also followed to Uppsala, remaining overnight. Finally, dusk saw a third Chinook (Lifter 3) arrive, completing the exercise rotary assets.

The following morning, the C-17 pushed boundaries with a HAHO from FL180 near Uppsala. That was followed by an evening drop from FL100, before returning to Leeming. For a change, a Shadow R1 then departed north on a navigation exercise over Scotland, while the remaining A-400 headed to Sweden yet again.

I am sad to say these routine Swedish return sorties began to blur my interest in Chameleon. However, HMS Duncan’s arrival off England’s North Sea coast, transferring PAX to/from Scarborough (a mere 60-mile drive from Leeming) refocused my interest.

Back at Leeming, SF troops started fast-roping serials from a Chinook. A second Chinook then headed to Duncan (top photo) which by then had moored off Bridlington. Overhead, a Shadow R1 orbited at FL180 on an ISR tasking. Sometime later, A-400 “Ronin 31” executed sea drops near the destroyer, which extended into evening hours, and whilst the Chinooks skimmed the waves, deploying and recovering Military Inflatable Boats (MIBs) and personnel via their rear ramps.

Photo: HLS beach flare (PC)

The following day, six MIBs launched from SD Northern River, which had replaced Duncan overnight. They headed for Bridlington’s sun-soaked beach, packed with late summer holiday families. An orange flare was then fired from the beach by two SOF members dressed in civies (above photo) which confused the adjacent sunbathers. Then, two Chinooks thundered in to land on the beach, whilst the MIBs came ashore. The MIBs were then loaded into the Chinooks, along with their crews. Then both were transported back to Leeming. This left the watching holiday makers confused, but delighted, as they had just watched and photographed a masterclass in urban-proximate ops (photo below).

Photo: SOF personnel load their MIBs into CH-47 “Lifter 2”. (PC)

Chameleon continued with almost daily A-400/C-17 return sorties to Uppsala and Visby in Sweden, at least three of these sorties resulting in HAHO drops. Other Leeming departure sorties included return flights to Bournemouth’s civilian airport, the closest airport to the SBS HQ in Poole, and Cardiff airport, the closest airport to the SAS HQ in Herefordshire, and the Special Forces Support Group HQ at St Athan in Wales. There were also a few more para drops over Leeming, and one onto Everleigh DZ on the Salisbury Plain Training Area (SPTA). Nevertheless, the paradrops which interested me more were those into Bridlington Bay, located in the North Sea. However, and for me it was a Chameleon first – I saw no MIBs being dropped alongside their troops!

Whilst I accept that during the exercise there had to be some necessary flights, which included thirty-two Shadow R1 ISR sorties within Sweden, and maybe A-400 or C-17 sorties to perform “covert insertion” sorties, or “Combat SAR” sorties, where the SF troops deployed behind enemy lines, to recover simulated downed aircrew, and I also accept there were other SF exercises taking place in nearby Norway and Finland, including “Southern Griffin 25”. But to make a total of some eighty-nine, yes eighty-nine return flights from Leeming to Uppsala and Visby in Sweden, many just containing a handful of troops, plus at times two Polaris MRZR4 Light Strike Vehicles (LSV) – small, open-top, four-wheel-drive dune buggy-style vehicles, designed for high-speed reconnaissance, hit-and-run raids, and special operations over rugged terrain (photo below) it seemed way over the top to me to say the least.

Photo: A400 “Ronin 71” unloads its Polaris MRZR4 LSVs. (PC)

With Chameleon 25-2 now concluded, I just hope the troops involved again benefited from their training and evaluation. Plus of course enjoyed the various exercise scenarios. If so, that may have justified the expense of each and every one of those eighty-nine flights to and from Sweden. But I stress, may. Nevertheless, and as I said previously, this write-up may also give you an insight’ into how other “interested parties” can follow such activities from far away. Either way, Chameleon 25-2 was yet another opportunity for me to monitor UK SOF, which I look forward to doing again during Chameleon 26-1.

*********

Author: Pat Carty is a NATO accredited journalist who covers military news, events, operations, and exercises; including special operations forces. He is a contributor to SOF News as well as several other military defense publications.

Top image: CH-47 “Lifter 1” out bound from HMS Duncan during UK SOF Exercise Chameleon 25-2. (PC)

10. How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day

Fascinating data. Worth reviewing and understanding. Anyone concerned with messaging, influence, strategic communications, PSYOP, etc., should take note of this.

This gift link should work. Please go to the link to view the interactive web site and all the graphs and data.

https://wapo.st/4obueib

How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day

More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2025/tiktok-addiction-algorithm-scrolling-mental-health/

By Caitlin Gilbert, Richard Sima, Leslie Shapiro, Aaron Steckelberg and Clara Ence Morse

October 7, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Jon Freilich, a 51-year-old operations manager in California, described his TikTok behavior as an addiction.

“I’ve never smoked or used drugs, so I don’t know what chemical addiction feels like, but I feel like I’m addicted to TikTok,” said Freilich, whose daily watch time on the app increased by more than 50 percent last year. “There are times when I know I should stop scrolling and get work done or go to sleep, but it’s so hard to stop, knowing the next swipe might bring me to a truly interesting video.”

That’s how TikTok draws people in, with an algorithm that serves up an endless stream of hyper-personalized content to users such as Freilich.

But TikTok is massive, fragmented and opaque: Millions of Americans — a third of U.S. adults — are pulled into a nearly infinite variety of niche corners by a recommendation system that we don’t know much about, making it difficult to understand how the constant scroll affects real people.

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, share little about how the app keeps users coming back. Journalists and researchers have utilized bot accounts to simulate how the recommendation system is tied to watch time and have conducted self-reported user surveys. But none of these approaches captures real human behavior.

So The Washington Post, through an unprecedented partnership with our readers, collected TikTok watch histories from 1,100 users. We created a database of roughly 15 million videos served up to them in a six-month period last year. Our analyses showed just how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to swipe more and watch more on its platform.

11. Opinion | The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

Excerpts:

The last lesson is a hopeful one. On Oct. 7, 2023, Israel absorbed the most horrific mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet the people of Israel live. Americans should take heed of Israel’s solidarity and successes against Hezbollah, other Iranian proxies, and Iran itself in the past two years.

Israel’s often bitter party politics can make American political divisions look small and American public discourse look tame. But beneath the vituperative political debate—and despite the condemnations from the progressive “international community”—lies deep social solidarity. On Oct. 7, that solidarity became clear as Israeli citizens of all political persuasions poured money, time and effort into defense, medical care and education. Business leaders traded boardrooms for farm fields to replace missing workers. Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze rallied together. That solidarity carried Israelis through the war’s early days and beyond, as Israel has scored blows against the Iran-led terror axis that many observers dismissed as impossible.

Deterrence, not economic incentives, may yet prevent America’s day of trial. But regardless of our choices, that day may still come on our watch. When it arrives, will we put aside politics, identity and grievances to stand shoulder to shoulder?

Opinion | The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-oct-7-warning-for-the-u-s-on-china-5a60023a

WSJ

Israel got complacent, thinking war would never come. Are we doing the same with Taiwan?

Mike Gallagher

Oct. 7, 2025 5:37 pm ET

Soldiers participate in military exercises in Tainan, Taiwan, July 14. Photo: ann wang/Reuters

Hamas’s shock troops poured across Israel’s border two years ago, kidnapping, raping and killing civilian men, women and children. Israel’s bitter experience offers lessons America should learn before our own moment of reckoning.

The most important is that the hypothetical war can actually happen. Even if we’re intellectually prepared, there’s a risk that years of relative peace has lulled us into a false sense of security. The Israeli defense establishment never truly believed Hamas would launch a full-scale invasion. They viewed Gaza as a chronic but manageable problem—one for diplomats and intelligence officers, distant from the daily concerns of citizens. Israeli politicians and generals also spoke of open conflict with the Iran-led Islamist axis much like their American counterparts speak of China and a Taiwan crisis—the pacing threat and the most likely test, yes, but ultimately a question for tomorrow. Then tomorrow came.

Are we falling into the same trap with China? Beijing is signaling that it is preparing for war, as Hamas did before Oct. 7, 2023. China has said it wants the ability to take Taiwan by force by 2027. It is building nuclear-capable missiles that can reach anywhere on the globe and is modernizing its military. It is stockpiling raw materials. As former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger points out, it is opening new recruitment centers and surging its military spending in what Chinese Communist Party leadership calls “preparations for war” with the U.S.

The Communist Party isn’t Hamas. But Israelis watched from Tel Aviv as Hamas expanded its rocket arsenal and tested border defenses in plain sight. Likewise, America and our partners are watching from Washington, Tokyo and Taipei as China builds an invasion fleet and tests air defenses. What more evidence do we need that Beijing is preparing for conflict? And if we assume that the war might come on our watch, what should we be doing differently?

A second lesson: Economic logic will never trump ideological fanaticism. Israel tried to tame Hamas with financial incentives, facilitating Qatari cash transfers, issuing work permits for thousands of Gaza laborers, and even supplying free electricity knowing that it powered Hamas’s terror tunnels. But a more comfortable Hamas didn’t moderate. Nothing deterred the terror group from its fundamentalist goals, even as Hamas siphoned billions meant for civilians—including U.S. Agency for International Development funds—for its own purposes. On day one of the war, Hamas torched the border crossings that Israel had built to facilitate trade and employment.

Hamas’s behavior fits a pattern. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un would rather starve his people than surrender his nuclear arms. Iran’s ruling mullahs will spend billions and sacrifice their economy to maintain their regional terror apparatus. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and doubled down on global revolution even while benefiting from the detente era’s liberalized trade.

Yet many Americans (whether naive or financially motivated) still believe we can pacify Beijing through market access. As my Palantir colleague Shyam Sankar points out, China doesn’t need to divert civilian aid to put this access to military use. The dual-purpose nature of the industrial base means that the American consumer funds the Chinese war fighter. Only our choice of bribe is different: industrial trade deficits, advanced semiconductors, and the transfer of capital and intellectual property. Funding your rival doesn’t make him your partner; it makes him a more powerful adversary.

Third, if we don’t enforce red lines, we open the door to the unthinkable. As an Israeli friend once explained, when you print a red line on a home printer and look closely, it is just a series of pink lines. Hamas treated Israel’s boundaries as pink lines, to be tested with a few rockets here, “demonstrations” at the border fence there, sporadic terrorist attacks elsewhere.

Over time, Israelis almost came to do the same. They called rocket fire on border towns “drizzles.” When Hezbollah pitched tents inside Israeli territory, officials dismissed the move as a technicality, somehow less than a full-scale breach of the border. Israelis told themselves a story about how each provocation didn’t erode deterrence. Looking through a microscope, they lost sight of the big picture.

The U.S. can’t afford to adopt the same mindset. China is testing ill-defined limits via provocations in the South China Sea, cyberattacks and even economic coercion. Russian fighter jets and drones are testing the boundaries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, engaging in gray-zone warfare in Estonia, Poland, Romania and perhaps Denmark.

The failure to respond decisively is the geopolitical equivalent of runaway deficit spending. It mortgages the future, buying a false calm today at the cost of greater risk tomorrow. The British learned this lesson with appeasement before World War II, and Israel relearned it at a horrifying cost on Oct. 7. Cold War leaders knew this truth, risking war to keep Europe safe and free behind a bright red line in Berlin. Our safety and freedom depend on our leaders having the same steely determination today.

The last lesson is a hopeful one. On Oct. 7, 2023, Israel absorbed the most horrific mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet the people of Israel live. Americans should take heed of Israel’s solidarity and successes against Hezbollah, other Iranian proxies, and Iran itself in the past two years.

Israel’s often bitter party politics can make American political divisions look small and American public discourse look tame. But beneath the vituperative political debate—and despite the condemnations from the progressive “international community”—lies deep social solidarity. On Oct. 7, that solidarity became clear as Israeli citizens of all political persuasions poured money, time and effort into defense, medical care and education. Business leaders traded boardrooms for farm fields to replace missing workers. Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze rallied together. That solidarity carried Israelis through the war’s early days and beyond, as Israel has scored blows against the Iran-led terror axis that many observers dismissed as impossible.

Deterrence, not economic incentives, may yet prevent America’s day of trial. But regardless of our choices, that day may still come on our watch. When it arrives, will we put aside politics, identity and grievances to stand shoulder to shoulder?

Mr. Gallagher, a Journal contributor, is head of defense for Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. He represented Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District (2017-24) and was chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Review & Outlook: After summoning hundreds of U.S. Generals to Quantico, VA, the U.S. Defense Secretary announced ten directives focusing on combat readiness—but where are the weapons?

Appeared in the October 8, 2025, print edition as 'The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China'.

12. Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death

Extreme censorship?

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death

By WILL STEWART

Published: 04:13 EDT, 6 October 2025 | Updated: 04:52 EDT, 6 October 2025

Daily Mail · WILL STEWART

Russian police are investigating the death of the latest prominent figure to fall to his death from a window.

The secretive head of Pravda publishing house, Vyacheslav Leontyev, 87, plunged 70ft from his home in western Moscow.

He was in charge of the famous Soviet newspaper Pravda - or Truth - the main organ of the ruling Communist Party, and continued in the role long after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Leontyev was seen as knowledgeable about the secret fortune of the party.

The veteran publisher died on Saturday evening and police are probing whether it was an accident, suicide or foul play.

Exiled journalist Andrey Malgin posted on the 'strange death', saying: 'The window falls continue….

'Leontyev, fell from a window. He was found near his home on Molodogvardeyskaya Street, where he lived.'

Suggesting he could have been secretly wealthy, Malgin - who knew him - wrote: 'He gave the impression of a sort of underground millionaire….

Vyacheslav Leontyev died on Saturday evening and police are probing whether it was an accident, suicide or foul play

Secretive Pravda publishing house director Vyacheslav Leontyev, 87, plunged 70ft to his death in Moscow, the latest prominent Russian to die after falling from a tower block. Here pictured - Pravda publishing house

Pravda newspaper in the Soviet era

'He knew a lot about the "Party’s money" — the Pravda publishing house was the most profitable enterprise in the business empire of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee.'

Unconfirmed reports said Leontyev had been having health problems.

Russia has suffered a spate of deaths of leading managers of major companies during and immediately before the war in Ukraine.

Last month former St Petersburg transport boss Alexander Fedotov’s body was found outside the five-star Skypoint Luxe - former Sheraton - hotel at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo international airport.

He had been staying on a business trip in a room on a 'high floor' in the hotel, according to reports.

A criminal investigation is underway with reports saying no suicide note was found.

He was linked to Vladimir Putin’s transport minister Roman Starovoit, 53, whose death in July - officially designated as suicide hours after Putin fired him - remains highly suspicious amid claims he had been 'tortured' before being 'murdered'.

Among dozens of deaths seen as suspicions are Lukoil tycoon Ravil Maganov, 67, who fell from a window of Moscow’s elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin clinic, in September 2022.

Pravda newspaper in the Soviet era

He was replaced by Vladimir Nekrasov - who died aged 66 of “acute heart failure” in October 2023.

Both Maganov and Nekrasov had opposed Putin’s war.

The following month, Russian senator and war backer, Vladimir Lebedev, with close Lukoil links, died suddenly in an unexplained “terrible tragedy” aged 60.

In March, 2024, Lukoil vice-president Vitaly Robertus, 53, was found hanged in his office toilet.

Separately, Pavel Antov, 65, a Russian sausage tycoon and politician, fell from a hotel window in India in December 2022.

Marina Yankina, 58, a defence official in charge of war money, died in February 2023 after falling 160ft to her death in St Petersburg.

Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev, 64, died after falling from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024.

He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his cronies.

In July this year, Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, fell to his death from the elite tower block where he lived on Moscow’s Rublevskoye Highway

Daily Mail · WILL STEWART

13. Cubans Could Soon Become Russia’s Largest Foreign Fighting Force

Excerpts:

According to Ukrainian officials, as many as 25,000 Cubans could soon be fighting for Russia, overtaking North Koreans as the largest contingent of foreign troops on the battlefield. “It is beneficial for Putin’s regime to attract Cuban mercenaries,” said Andriy Yusov of Ukraine’s military intelligence in evidence shared with members of the U.S. Congress on Sept. 19. “If a foreigner dies, there are no social payouts and no responsibility; there are no relatives inside Russia who are unhappy with the war; and of course, fewer dead Russians.”

British intelligence estimates that Russia has suffered over one million casualties, forcing the Kremlin to recruit or coerce foreigners from Africa, Latin America and Central Asia to fill the gaps.

Cubans Could Soon Become Russia’s Largest Foreign Fighting Force

ByDavid Kirichenko,Contributor. David Kirichenko is a journalist focusing on war and technology.

Oct 07, 2025, 01:09pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkirichenko/2025/10/07/cubans-could-soon-become-russias-largest-foreign-fighting-force/

Forbes · David Kirichenko · October 7, 2025

TOPSHOT - Russian Foreign Ministry building is seen behind a social advertisement billboard showing Z letters - a tactical insignia of Russian troops in Ukraine and reading "Victory is being Forged in Fire" in central Moscow on October 13, 2022. Five Russians drafted to fight in Ukraine, as part of the "partial" mobilization ordered in September, died after joining the army, authorities said, as similar announcements have multiplied in recent days. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Russia is increasingly outsourcing its war in Ukraine. To offset record losses and dwindling recruitment, Moscow is importing manpower from abroad. What began as a regional invasion has turned into a multinational proxy campaign of authoritarianism against Ukraine.

According to Ukrainian officials, as many as 25,000 Cubans could soon be fighting for Russia, overtaking North Koreans as the largest contingent of foreign troops on the battlefield. “It is beneficial for Putin’s regime to attract Cuban mercenaries,” said Andriy Yusov of Ukraine’s military intelligence in evidence shared with members of the U.S. Congress on Sept. 19. “If a foreigner dies, there are no social payouts and no responsibility; there are no relatives inside Russia who are unhappy with the war; and of course, fewer dead Russians.”

British intelligence estimates that Russia has suffered over one million casualties, forcing the Kremlin to recruit or coerce foreigners from Africa, Latin America and Central Asia to fill the gaps.

The Lure and Deception Behind the Cuban Deployment

For many Cubans, the appeal is financial. With promised salaries of around $2,000 per month, far higher than wages at home, thousands have reportedly signed contracts that place them on the front lines. Others say they were duped with offers of construction jobs in Russia, only to find themselves sent to the trenches.

Cristina Lopez-Gottardi, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told me in an interview that Cuba is in a severe economic and energy crisis. She noted the average monthly wage on the island is roughly $20, while recruits are reportedly being offered about $2,000 a month to fight for Russia, a sum astronomical by local standards. “The economics alone make this a powerful draw,” she said.

MORE FOR YOU

A man carries collected garbage on a street in Havana on July 21, 2025. Poverty levels have increased sharply as the Caribbean country reckons with its worst economic crisis in three decades, marked by shortages of food, medicine and fuel and daily power blackouts. Cuba's Minister of Labor and Social Security, Marta Elena Feito, resigned on July 21, 2025, after stating that there are no "beggars" on the island, but rather people "disguised as beggars". (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP) (Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Havana has denied direct involvement, but analysts say the scale of recruitment would be impossible without tacit approval from Cuban authorities. An unclassified Oct. 2 State Department cable seen by Reuters instructed U.S. missions to press allies to oppose the annual U.N. resolution on Cuba, citing Washington’s assessment that 1,000–5,000 Cubans may be fighting in Ukraine.

Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told me in August that Cuba’s deployment is about politics, not necessity. “The North Korean and Cuban deployments are political gestures, not signs of Russian shortages,” she said. “Russia has recruited around 20,000 Cubans; more than 1,000 are already fighting in Ukraine, and we’ve killed about 40. We literally have their passports as proof. It’s about showing they have reliable partners.”

She added that Russia’s reliance on authoritarian allies is part of a broader divide reshaping global politics. “The world is increasingly split between democratic nations and authoritarian regimes – Russia, Iran, and North Korea among them,” Ustinova said. “If Russia needs 10,000 extra troops, its partners send them. North Koreans haven’t gained much; they’re mostly being used as expendable infantry.”

Cuba’s motivations, meanwhile, are both economic and ideological. “Cuban soldiers are paid exceedingly well,” Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University, told me. “If they die, their widows will be rich. If they live, they’ll be rich heroes. Either way, much-needed money is brought into Cuba, and the regime can take credit.”

He noted that Havana may also be seeking to enhance its revolutionary credentials and “poke Washington in the eye” by openly aligning with Moscow. “It’s a symbolic gesture that plays well at home,” Motyl said.

At the same time, Russia’s dependence on such partnerships reflects a more fundamental weakness. “Sourcing soldiers from places like Cuba, North Korea, and across Africa and Central Asia is a sign of weakness – possibly even desperation,” Motyl noted. “Putin sees that Russians are increasingly unwilling to die for nothing, so he lets foreigners fight and die in their place.”

By July 2025, foreigners made up 49% of captured Russian fighters, up from 1% in 2022. Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, told me in an interview, “Without foreign recruitment, Moscow would likely be unable to sustain offensive operations.”

Russia’s reliance on foreign fighters now extends far beyond its traditional allies. A Bloomberg investigation from June 2024 revealed that the Kremlin has coerced thousands of African students and migrant workers into joining the army, threatening them with deportation if they refused. Using tactics pioneered by the Wagner Group, officials have pressured young Africans and Central Asians to fight in Ukraine, often under false pretenses, with many suffering catastrophic losses on the front lines.

TOPSHOT - In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un (L) during their meeting at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region on September 13, 2023. Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un both arrived at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East, Russian news agencies reported on September 13, ahead of planned talks that could lead to a weapons deal. (Photo by Mikhail METZEL / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MIKHAIL METZEL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

POOL/AFP via Getty Images

An investigation from The Telegraph from June 2025 uncovered an even darker side. Desperate Africans were lured to Russia with fake job offers – including positions in “shampoo factories” – only to be detained on arrival and forced into the army. Dozens of captured recruits from Cameroon, Senegal, and Zimbabwe described being promised factory or kitchen work, only to be sent to the front lines after a week of training.

Even as Russia relies on North Korea for manpower, Pyongyang has turned the war into a propaganda tool to cement loyalty at home and signal strength abroad. According to DW, state media in North Korea recently aired a documentary showing soldiers fighting – and dying – in Ukraine, portraying their deaths as “heroic sacrifices.” The program highlighted two young soldiers who detonated grenades to avoid capture, hailing them as martyrs.

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov warned that the experience North Korean troops are gaining in Ukraine is transforming their army. “There are currently only three countries in the world with experience fighting a modern war on a long front line using nearly all conventional means – Ukraine, Russia, and North Korea,” Budanov told The Japan Times in August.

An Axis of Authoritarian Support

This reliance on foreign fighters goes beyond manpower. It underscores a growing military axis linking Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and now Cuba – regimes trading weapons, technology, and battlefield experience.

Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told me, “North Korea and Iran also benefit from their engagement with Russia through technology transfers. It’s likely that North Korea is receiving assistance to advance its nuclear program, particularly in submarine-launched nuclear missiles.”

Ukraine’s defense analysts warn that this partnership is not just transactional. It is transforming the battlefield into a shared classroom for authoritarian militaries. Volodymyr Dubovyk, a professor at Odesa Mechnikov National University, told me, “With Ukraine having its own personnel issues, this ups the pressure.” He notes that the North Koreans are proactive as “they believe they’re defending their own country against imperialists. For Russia, this external supply of capable fighters is invaluable.”

Learning From the War

But the greatest danger may not be the number of foreign fighters, it’s what they’re learning.

For Bill Cole, founder and CEO of the Peace Through Strength Institute, the danger extends far beyond Ukraine. “Putin has no shortage of manpower, he just conscripted another 130,000 men,” Cole told me in an interview. “What’s really happening is that Russia’s partners want a piece of the action. North Koreans, Cubans, and Chinese are on the ground not only to fight for Russia but to gain experience in modern warfare, especially drones.”

He added that each foreign unit is effectively a rotating military academy. “Every foreign unit that rotates through Ukraine is learning how to fight in the world’s first large-scale drone war,” Cole said. “That’s the danger. It’s not just Russia’s power, it’s the fact that its partners are gaining battlefield skills they can export to other conflicts across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.”

For the Kremlin, sourcing Cuban and North Korean soldiers is a convenient way to wage war while minimizing domestic backlash. For its partners, it’s an unprecedented opportunity to study and export the tactics of modern drone and electronic warfare.

Forbes · David Kirichenko · October 7, 2025

14. The limits of Taiwan’s 'silicon shield'

Should we be listening to Mr. Luttnick for strategic and military assessments? Or is the author misunderstanding or misinterpreting his statements?

Excerpts:

Finally, Washington is gravitating toward the belief that Taiwan is militarily indefensible, which means US forces would not intervene to oppose a PRC attack, Shield or no shield. Perhaps the most significant part of Lutnick’s statement about Taiwan was this:

It’s 80 miles from Mainland China. And the Chinese have said, “We’re gonna take Taiwan” – like they’re not even shy about it.

Lutnick was echoing a similar statement made by his boss Trump:

It’s 68 miles away from China. . . . they could just bombard it. They don’t even need to – I mean, they can literally just send shells.

In both cases, the implication is that defense is futile if the PRC decides to force annexation.

Lutnick went on to argue, “if you have 95 percent [of the world’s chip-making capacity], how am I going to get it to protect you?” He seems to mean that if China attacks Taiwan and cuts the supply of chips to the US, the American armed forces will not be able to intervene to defend Taiwan. But this doesn’t make sense.

US weapons systems do indeed rely heavily on Taiwan-sourced semiconductors. An F-35 takes 18 months to build; a Tomahawk cruise missile, two years; and a destroyer, five years. An interruption of the chips supply would affect US capacity to field new equipment months or years later, but would not prevent the US military from intervening to stop a PRC invasion attempt.

US creeping toward abandonment?

It sounds, therefore, like Lutnick is making a disingenuous argument, which reinforces the suspicion the US may not be serious about intervening.

The talk of mitigating the damage caused by a possible PRC takeover of Taiwan comes amidst other indications that the US might be creeping toward abandonment. The White House’s current pursuit of a bilateral trade deal with China raises the real possibility that the US might bargain away its support for Taipei. Trump has already reportedly withheld a $400 million package of military assistance for Taiwan in an attempt to get a better deal with Beijing.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Beijing is trying to entice Washington to change its official stance from “not supporting” Taiwan independence to “opposing” Taiwan independence. That might seem like a small change. Recall that President George W. Bush was paraphrased as saying “I’m not a nuance guy. `Do not support.’ `Oppose.’ It’s the same to me.”

Xi, however, surely appreciates the nuance.

The limits of Taiwan’s 'silicon shield' - Asia Times

There are reasons to suspect the United States may not be serious about intervening if the PLA attacks

asiatimes.com · Denny Roy · October 6, 2025

US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick brought new attention to Taiwan’s “silicon shield” in a September 28 interview, during which he said Taiwan should move half of its world-leading semiconductor manufacturing capability to the United States.

Taiwan produces 60% of the world’s semiconductors and 90 of the most advanced chips – not to mention that the industry accounts for 15%of Taiwan’s GDP.

Taiwan Vice-Premier Cheng Li-chiun, who led Taiwan’s trade talks with Washington, on October 1 dismissed Lutnick’s idea, saying, “Our negotiating team has never made any commitment to a 50-50 split on chips … nor would we agree to such conditions.”

Cheng’s response reflects the belief of Taiwan’s people that global reliance on Taiwan-made chips helps protect the island from a Chinese military assault. That notion has some merit, but it also has limits.

The term “silicon shield” is attributed to a 2000 article by Journalist Craig Addison, who argued that the US would militarily defend Taiwan to “protect its supply of information technology products from Chinese aggression,” just as the US military intervened to expel invading Iraqi forces from controlling oil supplies in Kuwait in 1991.

The updated version of the theory is that China won’t attack Taiwan because this would interrupt the supply of semiconductors upon which China’s economy depends. China gets about one-third of its semiconductors from Taiwan.

Furthermore, as Addison argued, the reliance of other countries on semiconductors from Taiwan increases the likelihood they would oppose (in the US case, militarily intervene against) China’s attack.

Accordingly, moving chip production out of Taiwan would make Taiwan less secure by weakening China’s disincentive to attack.

The full story, however, raises doubts about the efficacy of the shield.

To begin with, there is an opposite counter-theory: Taiwan’s semiconductor production may give Beijing an additional and decisive incentive to forcibly annex Taiwan, which the Chinese government already wants to do. China may decide it needs to ensure China’s access to advanced chips, or cut off the supply of chips to the US, or both.

According to this theory, the race between China and the US to achieve artificial general intelligence – the condition in which AI equals or exceeds human intelligence in most fields of endeavor – could force China’s hand even if there is no other compelling political, economic or military reason for Beijing to attack.

Even if the shield works now, what about in the medium-term? Taiwan may not be able to sustain its dominance of global semiconductor manufacturing given that the Chinese, American, Japanese and South Korean governments are heavily investing in their own indigenous semiconductor industries, partly to escape the vulnerability of over-reliance on a supplier that is under threat of military attack. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, for example, provided almost $53 billion to expand America’s indigenous chip industry.

Taiwan is seeing a decline in the availability of qualified engineers who produce chips. On top of a shrinking general population, smaller percentages of Taiwan college students are choosing to major in STEM fields. Some also take overseas jobs that offer higher pay and more favorable work-life balance. Moreover, climate change is worsening chronic water shortages in Taiwan. Chip manufacture requires heavy water usage.

Perhaps most importantly, it is doubtful that Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry will be the decisive factor in Beijing’s deliberations over whether or not to attack Taiwan. Xi Jinping or any other Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary would pull the trigger if convinced that Taiwan were so decisively moving toward permanent political separation from China that he would lose his mandate to rule, and that war seemed the only available recourse.

China will not take on the huge risks and losses of a Taiwan Strait war over an economic or technological issue.

During the early 1980s, many observers argued that the Chinese government would renew Britain’s lease over the New Territories because Hong Kong under British administration was a money-maker for China. But Beijing took Hong Kong back anyway in 1997, and then dismantled Hong Kong’s civil liberties starting in 2020. Although these actions threatened Hong Kong’s economic profitability, they were consistent with the more importanr objective of preserving regime security – in this case, by demonstrating that the CCP government could reassert full control over a formerly lost territory.

Another example was the 1989 crackdown on protestors in and near Tiananmen Square while international media looked on. The government was willing to suffer global reputational damage and economic sanctions in order to send the message to the Chinese public that Beijing does not tolerate people power.

The silicon shield issue pulls on the threads of three larger conditions that frame Taiwan’s security situation.

Taiwan’s domestic politics

The first involves Taiwan’s domestic politics. Although both of Taiwan’s main political parties oppose transferring half of the island’s semiconductor production to US soil, they disagree more generally over to how manage semiconductor production as a strategic asset

That disagreement is a manifestation of their fundamentally different approaches to Taiwan’s grand strategy: peace with China through partial integration versus eschewing China to maximize linkages with friendly countries.

Members of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) have criticized the Democratic Progress Party (DPP) government at every step of the ongoing drama involving US-Taiwan trade – blaming the DPP for US President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Taiwan, calling for retaliatory tariffs against the US and saying that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) should suspend its investments in the US.

In 2020, in Taiwan’s response to previous US demands, TSMC built semiconductor production facilities in Phoenix, Arizona. KMT politicians said that the DPP had “caved in to pressure from the US government” and that “TSMC will surely become USMC.”

Phoenix celebrates TSMC’s big investment. Photo: LocalToday

In March, TSMC pledged to invest an additional $100 billion to further expand its production in the US. After that announcement, Former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou accused the ruling government of “selling TSMC” as a “protection fee” to Washington.

PRC propaganda has joined the fray to criticize the DPP and promote the messages of yi Mei (doubting America) and the inevitability of unification. “Now is the time for the island to abandon illusions that it could court the US by investing in the US,” said one Chinese “expert” quoted in Global Times. “The only choice [for Taiwan] is to integrate with the chipmaking ecosystem of the mainland.”

Another Global Times article said “experts have slammed the DPP authorities for their near-complete pandering to the United States, and … forfeiting the island’s benefits.”

The current Washington administration

Second, Taiwan’s centrality in semiconductor production may not be enough reason for the US to intervene militarily.

Previous US governments considered Taiwan worth defending as a linchpin of US strategic leadership in Asia. Forcible absorption of Taiwan into the PRC would expand China’s territory, economic capacity and ability to project power. US allies and friends in the region would be at risk of Chinese domination, and neutral governments would be more likely to align with Beijing.

While many members of Congress still hold this view, it is not clear that the current White House does. Trump seems to believe the US need not be the pre-eminent strategic power in the Asia-Pacific, but rather can achieve American security and prosperity through hemisphere-based economic leverage rather than by influencing foreign affairs via the forward deployment of US military forces.

As for Taiwan specifically, based on his public statements Trump does not regard it as a US strategic asset. Rather, he criticizes Taiwan for “stealing” America’s semiconductor business and free-riding on US military protection. (Both accusations are unfair. US companies chose to leave most chip production to countries such as Taiwan that could do it more efficiently. There is no official US commitment to defend Taiwan, and Taipei pays for the weapons it gets from the US.)

If Taiwan is a strategic asset for other reasons, its importance as a supplier of semiconductors is additive. If not, chip supply becomes an isolated problem for US leaders, the solution of which may not involve defending Taiwan from forcible PRC annexation. Republican Party presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy gave voice to this idea in August 2023, when he suggested America should abandon Taiwan once it was no longer useful as a chip factory. Lutnick’s proposal was a milder rendering of this idea. Both versions have the indirect goal of undermining the silicon shield.

Is Taiwan militarily indefensible?

Finally, Washington is gravitating toward the belief that Taiwan is militarily indefensible, which means US forces would not intervene to oppose a PRC attack, Shield or no shield. Perhaps the most significant part of Lutnick’s statement about Taiwan was this:

It’s 80 miles from Mainland China. And the Chinese have said, “We’re gonna take Taiwan” – like they’re not even shy about it.

Lutnick and Trump. Photo: The White House

Lutnick was echoing a similar statement made by his boss Trump:

It’s 68 miles away from China. . . . they could just bombard it. They don’t even need to – I mean, they can literally just send shells.

In both cases, the implication is that defense is futile if the PRC decides to force annexation.

Lutnick went on to argue, “if you have 95 percent [of the world’s chip-making capacity], how am I going to get it to protect you?” He seems to mean that if China attacks Taiwan and cuts the supply of chips to the US, the American armed forces will not be able to intervene to defend Taiwan. But this doesn’t make sense.

US weapons systems do indeed rely heavily on Taiwan-sourced semiconductors. An F-35 takes 18 months to build; a Tomahawk cruise missile, two years; and a destroyer, five years. An interruption of the chips supply would affect US capacity to field new equipment months or years later, but would not prevent the US military from intervening to stop a PRC invasion attempt.

US creeping toward abandonment?

It sounds, therefore, like Lutnick is making a disingenuous argument, which reinforces the suspicion the US may not be serious about intervening.

The talk of mitigating the damage caused by a possible PRC takeover of Taiwan comes amidst other indications that the US might be creeping toward abandonment. The White House’s current pursuit of a bilateral trade deal with China raises the real possibility that the US might bargain away its support for Taipei. Trump has already reportedly withheld a $400 million package of military assistance for Taiwan in an attempt to get a better deal with Beijing.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Beijing is trying to entice Washington to change its official stance from “not supporting” Taiwan independence to “opposing” Taiwan independence. That might seem like a small change. Recall that President George W. Bush was paraphrased as saying “I’m not a nuance guy. `Do not support.’ `Oppose.’ It’s the same to me.”

Xi, however, surely appreciates the nuance.

“Not supporting” is consistent with the more basic US policy of respecting Taiwan’s right to choose its own political relationship with China, as reflected in numerous statements by US officials. By contrast, opposing independence denies Taiwan freedom of choice.

Rather than saving Taiwan to protect the chip supply, Elbridge Colby, now under secretary of defense for policy, said in 2023 that if China takes Taiwan the US should destroy TSMC facilities in Taiwan so China could not have the chips. That would make the shield worse than ineffective.

For now, the silicon shield disincentivizes a Taiwan Strait war. But as a small country threatened by a much larger close neighbor, and with the resolve of its protector perhaps weakening, Taiwan remains fundamentally insecure.

Denny Roy is a senior fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu.

asiatimes.com · Denny Roy · October 6, 2025

15. Pentagon nominee John Noh hints at Aukus changes, says Taiwan should ‘pay its way’

His hearing did not make any US news reports (yet), only SCMP, Taiwan News, *and NK News for his comments about ROK weapons useful for deterring China).

US-China relations

China Military

Pentagon nominee John Noh hints at Aukus changes, says Taiwan should ‘pay its way’

US pick for Indo-Pacific security role tells senators that he strongly supports President Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ foreign policy

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3328234/pentagon-nominee-john-noh-hints-aukus-changes-says-taiwan-should-pay-its-way?utm_

Seong Hyeon Choi

Published: 4:59pm, 8 Oct 2025

The Aukus defence technology-sharing pact between the US, Britain and Australia could be made more “sustainable”, according to the Donald Trump administration’s pick as its next assistant defence secretary for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs.

At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, John Noh, currently deputy assistant defence secretary for East Asia, also said he “strongly” believed that Taiwan needed to “do its part and pay” by increasing its spending on defence against possible attack from Beijing.

Noh told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that there could be opportunities for Washington, London and Canberra to modify Pillar I of the Aukus arrangement before the current review’s completion, expected this autumn.

“The department is conducting a review of Aukus to make sure it is fully aligned with President Trump’s ‘America first’ foreign policy … It is a brass-tack, common sense look at the realities facing Aukus, including the state of our submarine industrial base,” he said.

“There are things that I believe are common sense things that we can do to strengthen Aukus, to strengthen Pillar I to ensure that it is more sustainable.”

The minilateral pact is widely perceived as intended to increase the US and its allies’ capabilities in containing China’s increasing naval power. Beijing describes Aukus as a threat to regional stability.

Signed in 2021 during Joe Biden’s presidency, Aukus is divided into two pillars, with Canberra buying at least three US-made Virginia-class submarines in Pillar I, followed by the creation of an Aukus class of nuclear-powered submarines for Britain and Australia.

Pillar II revolves around the co-development of new technologies among the three nations and, potentially, bringing in other partners such as Japan, South Korea, Canada and New Zealand.

However, the US agreement to sell the Virginia-class submarines prompted concerns about American shipbuilding capacity, with an industry that is already struggling to meet its own navy’s demand.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns during the hearing about the continuing review of Aukus, initiated in July by US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby.

Committee chairman Roger Wicker, a Republican, said the review came as a “distressing surprise to our steadfast ally Australia”.

“I’m disappointed with some of the decisions the department has made with respect to our allies in Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan. A few of these choices have left me scratching my head,” Wicker said.

In Tuesday’s hearing, the senators also expressed concerns about the policy of providing arms to Taiwan. The Washington Post reported last month that Trump had paused US$400 million in military aid to the island.

Beijing sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has never ruled out the use of force to bring it under mainland Chinese control. The US, like most nations, does not recognise Taiwan as an independent state but is opposed to any forcible change to the status quo and is committed to providing arms for its defence.

“A number of us are concerned that [the department] may be using the Ukraine playbook with Taiwan by taking defence items procured with presidential drawdown authority [PDA] and returning them to the defence stockpile,” Wicker said.

“This would be contrary to Congressional intent and would require Taiwan to purchase these items that have already been authorised as PDA.”

Xi’s National Day speech warns against Taiwan independence

Noh responded that, while he was the “biggest advocate” for making sure the US had all the resources to strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, he “strongly believes [Taiwan needs to] do its part and to pay,” by increasing its spending to defend itself from Beijing.

“It was President Trump who said that Taiwan – which is an island that faces an existential threat from the People’s Liberation Army, from the Chinese military – that Taiwan should spend upwards of 10 per cent of its GDP on defence. I strongly support that,” Noh said.

“We need to make sure that our allies and partners in the region are doing more, spending more and doing their part,” he added.

In his written answers to the committee’s policy questions submitted in advance, Noh expressed his support for Trump’s policy of pressuring allies to invest more in defence, arguing that Asia-Pacific countries needed to take more responsibility.

According to media reporting in July, Colby demanded that Japan and Australia clarify what role they would play if Washington and Beijing were to engage militarily over Taiwan.

He has also repeatedly argued that the 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea must be used to contain the threat posed by China’s military, leaving Seoul to defend itself against Pyongyang.

The US does not have enough resources to defend against China and North Korea simultaneously, in Colby’s view.

Seong Hyeon Choi

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

16. US Congress urged to preserve stability in Indo-Pacific and curb China’s Taiwan game plan

Excerpts:

Witnesses testified that Beijing has effectively employed a stealth grey zone strategy over decades to wear down its neighbours, grab territory when opportunities arise – as seen in nearly 90 per cent of the South China Sea that China now claims – and keep provocations below levels that would elicit a US military response.

“Ultimately, Communist China would rather act as a python, solely squeezing countries that resist, rather than acting as a cobra and striking quickly,” said committee chairman Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska.

Chris Coons, a senator from Delaware and the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, said the former Joe Biden administration employed many effective tools to counter China that have since been degraded under President Donald Trump’s administration. This drew little pushback from Republican members.

These include strong support for US allies and partners, rather than slapping wholesale tariffs on them; supporting the Voice of America rather than defunding it to counter Chinese propaganda efforts; cutting USAID and other development budgets; and withholding scheduled weapons sales, cancelling dialogues and denying presidential visits for Taiwan.

US-China relations

US Diplomacy

US Congress urged to preserve stability in Indo-Pacific and curb China’s Taiwan game plan

Delegates maintain Beijing’s grey-zone campaign against Taiwan is a deliberate strategy designed to erode confidence, and it must fail to deliver any political concessions

https://www.scmp.com/news/us/diplomacy/article/3328169/congress-urged-preserve-stability-indo-pacific-and-curb-chinas-taiwan-game-plan?utm

Mark Magnierin New York

Published: 7:17am, 8 Oct 2025Updated: 8:06am, 8 Oct 2025

China is systematically exploiting US weaknesses and inconsistencies to expand its reach in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, but it also faces its own energy, diplomatic and economic vulnerabilities that Washington needs to better exploit, witnesses testified before Congress on Tuesday.

The hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy saw unusual bipartisan unanimity in a deeply divided Washington on the need to better support East Asian allies and partners.

“We need to be much more strategic,” said Craig Singleton, senior fellow with the non-partisan Foundation for Defence of Democracies. “It doesn’t mean regime change. It doesn’t mean we’re going to take actions that undermine the livelihood of the Chinese people. But there are very clear things we can do to push back.”

China is exposed politically, diplomatically, in the information space, with trade finance and economics, he added.

Chinese ships collide during clash with Philippine coastguard in contested South China Sea

“Beijing interprets vulnerabilities, not only in Taiwan’s defences, but also in US and allied responses, as validation of its approach to date – sustained coercion below the threshold of war,” added Singleton, a former US diplomat.

Witnesses testified that Beijing has effectively employed a stealth grey zone strategy over decades to wear down its neighbours, grab territory when opportunities arise – as seen in nearly 90 per cent of the South China Sea that China now claims – and keep provocations below levels that would elicit a US military response.

“Ultimately, Communist China would rather act as a python, solely squeezing countries that resist, rather than acting as a cobra and striking quickly,” said committee chairman Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska.

Chris Coons, a senator from Delaware and the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, said the former Joe Biden administration employed many effective tools to counter China that have since been degraded under President Donald Trump’s administration. This drew little pushback from Republican members.

These include strong support for US allies and partners, rather than slapping wholesale tariffs on them; supporting the Voice of America rather than defunding it to counter Chinese propaganda efforts; cutting USAID and other development budgets; and withholding scheduled weapons sales, cancelling dialogues and denying presidential visits for Taiwan.

The self-governing island’s energy situation makes it particularly vulnerable to a Chinese embargo, analysts said, with reserves of some 10 days of liquefied natural gas and 42 days of coal.

Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.

“If we continue to dole out concessions to China and look the other way as they change facts on the ground, we may well lose the fight of this century,” Coons said, adding that a primary challenge is to deter the Chinese President from launching an attack on Taiwan. “How do we make Xi Jinping’s morning ritual, ‘not today, not this week, not this month’?”

Chris Coons is a senator from Delaware and the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy. Photo: Getty Images

Witnesses said the US has enormous resources, alliances and clout. But its infighting, impatience, policy turnarounds and outdated structure undercut its effectiveness. “China’s grey-zone success exploits gaps in our national security bureaucracy designed as it was against historical conventional threats,” said Raymond Powell, executive director of the SeaLight Foundation, a California-based civic group. “Our window to act is not just closing, it’s vanishing.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To effectively counter China’s decades-long patient and consistent strategy, Washington should take several steps, witnesses said. These include pushing back more effectively with civil-military sanctions, trade tactics and information to counter Chinese narratives.

It can also help Taiwan build up its energy resiliency with strategic reserves and hardened oil terminals, pipelines and refineries; reassure and better support allies and partners, particularly Japan, Australia, Taiwan and the Philippines, with a more muscular presence and better contingency planning.

“How do we make the whole greater than the sum of the parts?” said Ely Ratner, principal with the Marathon Initiative civic group.

“Whether we like it or not, today, we are not prepared to fight as a collective with our allies and partners,” the former Defence Department official said. “We do not have the command and control we need. We do not have the plans we need. We do not have the force posture we need.”

Other effective US strategies to counter China, witnesses said, included forging an all-of-society strategy; becoming more active and less reactive; and learning from Manila’s effective “assertive transparency” approach that publicises aggressive Chinese grey zone confrontations in real-time.

“The systematic exposure, documentation and release of information about grey-zone tactics pulls back the curtain on China’s opacity and deniability,” said Powell, a former military intelligence official. “In short, I think we should light up the grey zone.”

Mark Magnier

Before joining the Post in Washington, Mark worked in China, India and Japan for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times and was a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow. He’s covered economic, social and political issues throughout Asia and conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and

17. America’s Soybean Farmers Are Panicking Over the Loss of Chinese Buyers

America’s Soybean Farmers Are Panicking Over the Loss of Chinese Buyers

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/us-soybean-farmers-china-market-8749c5a2?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Patrick Thomas

Oct. 7, 2025 7:30 pm ET

WSJ

China hasn’t booked any U.S. soybean purchases in months; farmers warn of ‘bloodbath’

Oct. 7, 2025 7:30 pm ET

U.S. soybean farmers are facing financial strain. Photo: Michael Conroy/AP

U.S. soybean farmers face financial strain owing to China’s reduced purchases.
U.S. farmers are seeking new markets to help reduce their reliance on China.

An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

U.S. soybean farmers face financial strain owing to China’s reduced purchases.

American soybean farmers are in panic mode as they harvest what is expected to be a bumper crop without their biggest customer: China.

“We’ll see the bottom drop out if we don’t get a deal with China soon,” said Ron Kindred, who farms 1,700 acres of corn and soybeans in central Illinois. “There doesn’t seem to be any urgency on China’s side, and more urgency coming from the farm community in the U.S.”

Kindred is about halfway through harvesting this year’s soybean crop. He has a contract to sell about 40% of his harvest, but the other 60% is a gamble. Prices in his area are already dropping, he said.

Rising costs for equipment and fertilizer, and a glut of corn and soybeans, were already squeezing farmers’ balance sheets. Congress in December passed a $10 billion bailout for farmers. The Trump administration is considering allocating $10 billion to $14 billion more to farmers to help mitigate fallout from this year’s trade battles, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

President Trump said at the White House on Monday that he was “going to do some farm stuff this week” to help growers cope with the loss of exports to China.

Trump is expected to meet later this week with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to make a final determination of where the money for a farmer bailout should come from, according to a White House official. The president and his team are considering the use of tariff revenue to fund much of the aid.

An Agriculture Department spokesman said the president is using all tools available to ensure farmers have what they need to continue their farming operations.

China accounted for more than half of the $24.5 billion of American soybean exports last year. Photo: Ben Brewer/Bloomberg News

China hasn’t booked any U.S. soybean purchases in months, making the oilseed a potent weapon in Beijing’s trade fight with Washington. From January through August of this year, Chinese buyers purchased just over 200 million bushels of U.S. soybeans, compared with almost 1 billion bushels over the same period last year.

China accounted for more than half of the $24.5 billion of American soybean exports last year. Most of the soybeans China imports are for animal feed. Over the past few years, the country has increasingly turned to South America, buying beans grown in Brazil and Argentina.

Seeking ways to reduce U.S. farmers’ reliance on China, Kindred has traveled to Vietnam and the Philippines to try to persuade their livestock farmers to buy more American soybeans. “We can’t replace that market overnight,” he said. “But we’ve got some success stories in recent years.”

The next two largest buyers of American soybeans—the European Union and Mexico—account for about $5 billion in combined annual sales. Countries such as Vietnam, Egypt and Bangladesh have increased their purchases of U.S. soybeans in recent years, but it isn’t enough.

Across the Mississippi River from Kindred, an Iowa soybean grower, Morey Hill, has traveled to Cambodia several times this year, and as recently as last week.

During his most recent visit, Hill spoke to a roomful of importers and local farmers about the techniques American farmers use to help produce 4 billion bushels of soybeans annually. He has traveled in a bus packed with U.S. farmers down narrow roads into rural Cambodia, where the landscape is dotted with half-acre ponds used for fish farming.

Hill explained how local producers can raise better-quality, fatter fish by switching to protein-packed American soybean meal as feed, rather than using the traditional, cheaper “fish meal,” composed of ground-up smaller fish.

In November, Hill plans to travel to Morocco to pitch local chicken farmers on American soybeans for poultry feed.

Soybean acreage in the U.S. increased from 1995 to 2024. Photo: Ben Brewer/Bloomberg News

Hill, like thousands of other U.S. farmers, started growing more soybeans about three decades ago, switching from hay. Genetically engineered Roundup Ready soybeans, coupled with surging demand from China, enticed thousands of farmers like him to increase their soybean output. Soybean acreage in the U.S. grew nearly 40% from 1995 to 2024, according to Agriculture Department data.

This fall, Hill plans to keep his recently harvested soybean crop in storage rather than selling it.

“There’s no incentive to sell right now,” he said. If a deal with China isn’t reached soon, Hill said, the soybean market “might be a bloodbath.”

Robb Ewoldt, an Iowa farmer, at the beginning of this year traveled to Rome, where he spoke with a large Tunisian poultry producer. The company wanted to know if it could reliably count on buying U.S. soybeans each year or if farmers would transition to another crop, shrinking the supply and potentially raising prices.

Countries such as Tunisia are base hits, not a home run like China, Ewoldt said. Creating new markets helps over time, but if U.S. growers can’t sell their beans soon, Ewoldt worries about getting enough cash to finance his farm.

“Our operation takes almost a million dollars of cash for a year,” he said. “You’re hoping you’ve got about $1.3 million to cover debt costs and have something to live on.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think President Trump’s trade policies will ultimately help or hurt U.S. farmers? Join the conversation below.

Farming’s recent economics are bad enough that some are already calling it quits. Dean Buchholz, a corn and soybean farmer in DeKalb County, Ill., said his fertilizer costs are up 20% to 30% from last year. Because of rising costs, low crop prices and some health concerns, this will be his last year farming, he said. He plans to rent out his land next year.

“I always thought I would farm till they threw dirt on top of me,” Buchholz said. “I can’t make it work to where it would be practical to keep going without me spending a boatload of money and keep putting myself into more debt.”

Write to Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com

18. China halts US soybean imports to hit Trump’s MAGA supporters

China halts US soybean imports to hit Trump’s MAGA supporters - Asia Times

Chinese pundits say Trump must make compromises in trade talks or US soybeans will be left to rot in storage

asiatimes.com · Jeff Pao · October 6, 2025

China has halted its purchases of soybeans from the United States in recent months, a move seen as a calculated effort to pressure the Trump administration amid intensifying trade tensions.

Beijing’s suspension marks a sharp decline in the US-China agricultural trade relationships and has rattled the heart of America’s farming community. The freeze comes as both sides prepare for a potential meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month. As of now, the Trump-Xi meeting plans have not been finalized.

“The soybean farmers of our country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying,” Trump said in a social media post on October 1. “We’ve made so much money on tariffs that we are going to take a small portion of that and help our farmers.”

For decades, the soybean trade has been a cornerstone of Sino-US agricultural cooperation. As part of its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, China removed import quotas and imposed a uniform 3% tariff, resulting in a surge in US soybean imports.

In 2017, China imported 32.58 million tons of US soybeans, but the volume fell to 16.64 million tons in 2018 due to the Trump administration’s trade war, according to China Customs. Imports later stabilized at around 20 million tons per year until the 2022 pandemic disrupted supplies and pushed China to diversify its sourcing to Brazil and Argentina.

Last year, the US shipped 985 million bushels of soybeans to China, accounting for 51% of the country’s total soybean exports. By contrast, from January to August 2025, exports of US soybeans to China fell to just 218 million bushels with no deliveries recorded in June, July and August.

Brazil, the world’s largest producer, is expected to harvest 169 million metric tons in the 2024/25 crop year, accounting for approximately 40% of global output. The US crop of 119 million tonnes accounts for 28%, meaning the two countries together supply 68% of the world’s soybeans.

A columnist writing under the pseudonym “Old Farmer” for Guancha.cn offered a stark critique of the trade standoff.

“American soybean farmers have become the sacrificial victims of their own domestic political struggle,” he writes. “The so-called tariff war carries limited economic meaning but endless political significance, reflecting the deep ideological rift dividing the US.”

“From a pragmatic perspective, the US should be the last country to turn inward as it has long benefited from its ability to issue currency and import affordable goods from around the world. These imports sustain its welfare system, ease social tensions and disguise the fragmented nature of its politics.”

He says that as multinational companies that benefited from the globalization trend failed to improve the US people’s livelihood, it’s normal that US society has become extremely divided.

However, the writer notes that the loss of soybean farmers will hardly shake Trump’s core support, as it is merely a necessary cost of pursuing the “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” dream.

“Soybean farmers are mainly concentrated in states like Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota, which are all strongholds of Trump’s MAGA movement,” says Wang Chong, director of the Center for American Studies at Zhejiang International Studies University.

“There’s no doubt that China’s halt of soybean imports has deeply affected the livelihoods of these farmers,” he says. “Many growers and distributors have already expressed strong dissatisfaction with the White House.”

He says China can use soybean imports as a bargaining chip in its trade talks with the US, seeking concessions such as easing restrictions on chip export controls or opening the US market to Chinese electric vehicles and other high-tech goods.

US-China trade standoff

On April 2, Trump announced a sweeping plan to impose reciprocal tariffs on all countries, warning that any nation retaliating against the US would face even heavier duties. As tensions intensified, Washington levied tariffs of up to 145% on Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to respond with its own 125% tariffs on American goods.

Although both sides agreed on May 12 to ease the confrontation, Chinese goods continue to face tariffs ranging from 30% to 50% in the US, while US exporters only have to pay a 10% tariff to ship their goods to China. Both sides then focused on other trade issues, such as rare earths and semiconductors.

The current trade truce is set to expire on November 10 if negotiations between the two sides fail to progress. Meanwhile, Beijing has ordered its importers not to purchase any soybeans from the US since May.

“Tariff war and trade war serve no one’s interest. The two sides need to address relevant issues through consultation based on equality, respect, and mutual benefit,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said in a regular media briefing on September 23.”

“If the US wants China to resume soybean purchases, the only way is to return to the negotiating table,” says a Zhejiang-based columnist writing under the pen name Linglingniang. “That must be based on equality, respect, and mutual benefit.”

“Remove all those messy tariffs and restrictions first, let bilateral trade return to normal, and only then can we talk about soybeans again,” he says. “Trump is running out of time. China’s purchase orders have already been scheduled through November. If he delays any longer, the American harvest season will end, and those mountains of soybeans could be left to rot in storage.”

In the Northern Hemisphere, planting typically occurs from May to July, with harvesting taking place from September to November.

According to guidance from Iowa State University, soybeans can be stored safely for up to one year if their moisture content is maintained at 13% or lower, and for more extended periods at 12% or lower.

Some observers say soybeans’ long shelf life may help mitigate the immediate impact of China’s import freeze. With proper storage, US farmers can hold their crops for years without significant losses, selling to other markets when opportunities arise while also benefiting from federal subsidy programs.

Bailout package

In response to mounting pressure from rural constituencies, the Trump administration is reportedly preparing a $10 billion bailout package to support farmers who have been hit hardest by China’s soybean import halt.

The plan will draw from tariff revenues and the US Department of Agriculture’s funds to offset losses in export markets.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the media that it’s unfortunate the Chinese leadership has decided to use the American soybean farmers as a hostage or pawn in the trade negotiations.

The halt in China’s purchases of US soybeans has hurt the United States’ total exports to China, which fell 16.8% in the three months between June and August 2025 from the same period last year. The figure decreased only by 7.4% year-over-year in the first five months of this year.

Read: China’s cargo ban gives new meaning to BHP’s ‘Broken Hill’ origin

Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3

asiatimes.com · Jeff Pao · October 6, 2025

19. Is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Just a Talking Shop?

Conclusion:

Based on its current membership and articulation of missions, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization represents a vision for an alternative global order, as well as governance values and structures. With China and Russia as its co-leaders and an expanding base within the developing world, the organization’s growing prominence underlines a distinct challenge to the existing international order among those states that aspire to play by a different set of rules and norms. While the bloc may not be able to create many concrete deliverables, the shared grievances toward the West, and especially the United States, among its members, as well as the amplification of their voices and positions through active campaigning, present a different set of challenges that are no less problematic.

(My assessment is that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan)."

Is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Just a Talking Shop?

Yun Sun

October 8, 2025

warontherocks.com · October 8, 2025

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization convened for its 25th summit in Tianjin on Sept. 1, the largest gathering of leaders in the organization’s history. More than 20 state leaders and heads of 10 international organizations attended the summit, including an unprecedented four-day visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the participation by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which was not expected until the recent cooling of U.S.-Indian relations. The summit passed a number of documents and cooperative mechanisms, including a development strategy for the next decade and starting the process to create a development bank. Leaders from all member states except India attended the Sept. 3 military parade, making up one-third of the 26 heads of state who observed the Chinese show of force to the world.

Despite its high-profile events, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is often challenged within the policy community as a nothingburger. Popular assessments have focused on the organization being “ineffective,” “irrelevant,” and “a talking shop.” Judging from concrete cooperation mechanisms and deliverables, the organization’s strategic depth and utilities appear limited. However, from China’s perspective, the grouping serves two distinct strategic goals: Russia management and the presentation of an alternative international security order. Indeed, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s true value for China so far has not been the new multilateral cooperation it can create, but in Russian damage prevention and challenging the existing West-dominated narrative on international affairs.

BECOME A MEMBER

How It Started…

The precursor of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the earlier grouping of “Shanghai Five,” was established in 1996 with a specific goal to settle the border disputes among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan after the collaspe of the Soviet Union. In 2001, the grouping incorporated Uzbekistan and formally established the current organization. Although the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017, Iran in 2023, and Belarus in 2024, the geographical focus has remained on Central Asia. As reiterated in the Tianjin Declaration, “Central Asia is the core region of SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization] and the organization supports the efforts by Central Asian countries to maintain their and regional peace, security and stability.”

In the beginning, the organization focused on “regional security challenges,” namely the issues of border demarcation and disarmament among the member states. Substantive cooperation has been primarily limited to counterterrorism. China settled its border demarcation with Kazakhstan in 2002, with Russia in 2005, with Kyrgyzstan in 2009, and with Tajikistan in 2011. Counter-terrorism cooperation within the grouping is particularly salient for China as Beijing sees itself as the victim of the spillover effect of Islamic fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism prevalent in Central Asia. The “Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure” coordinates the political, diplomatic, military, informational, and judicial aspects of this cooperation among the members.

…How It’s Going

If effectiveness and concrete cooperation mechanisms are the criteria, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s scope and achievements are limited as a regional organization. So far, the grouping has two formal institutions: a Secretariat in Beijing and the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure based in Uzbekistan. Through the years, the organization has passed a series of multilateral cooperation documents on countering arms trafficking, terrorism, narcotics, illegal immigration, and other transnational crimes. The highlight of such security cooperation is in regular joint counterterrorism military exercises held among the member states.

Despite the limited scope of substantive cooperation, the organization takes pride in symbolic and joint positions on mutual trust, good neighborly relations, and regional peace and stability. The members claim to share aspirations on international politics and have used the organization as a platform to articulate their collective views. As such, the bloc has focused on alignment of foreign policies and the promotion of such positions, while joint actions are less obvious.

While the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has focused on security and political alignment as core tasks, economic cooperation has lagged far behind. It created an interbank consortium to provide financial and banking services for investment projects among its member states. However, for the past 20 years, the consortium’s significance has been unclear. China proposed to establish a Shanghai Cooperation Organization Development Bank more than a decade ago, but only this year was the organization able to start the political process toward the bank’s establishment, attesting to the intricacy of the decision. Financial institutions, such as a development bank, are important due to regional underdevelopment and scarce financial institutions in Central Asia. Given China’s financial resources and the outsized influence such resources would afford China, the establishment of such a bank will presumably broaden the avenue for a more expansive, even dominant role for China to play in the region. In private conversations, many Chinese specialists have attributed the lack of economic cooperation within the organization to Russia’s rejection of Chinese influence in its backyard.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a regional bloc plays a relatively minor role in China’s economy, despite the diplomatic and political alignment. The total trade volume between China and the other member states was $512.4 billion in 2024, about 8 percent of China’s global total, falling behind China’s trade with the European Union ($785 billion), the United States ($688 billion), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ($982 billion). Half of China’s trade with Shanghai Cooperation Organization members is with Russia. The Chinese government has tried to beef up the number by including China’s trade with 2 observer states (Mongolia and Afghanistan) and 14 dialogue partners (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Myanmar), bringing the total to $890 billion. But that only brings the percentage to 14.4 percent of China’s global trade.

Another sign of the bloc’s limited effectiveness is the lack of a role in the domestic stability of its member states. In the organization’s 2015 development strategy, one of the top priorities for the next decade was to “maintain regional security and handle security threats and challenges faced by member states, including the prevention and elimination of emergencies.” However, the reality is far less gratifying. During the internal turmoil in Kazakhstan in January 2022, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure offered assistance to the Kazakh government. However, it was the Collective Security Treaty Organization that dispatched peacekeepers to Kazakhstan instead, pointing to a potentially competitive relationship between the two organizations as the leading regional security architecture.

A Russia-Management Tool…

While policy observers have dismissed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a key and effective international organization, the value of the grouping for China goes far beyond merely a façade of regional alignment and solidarity. This is an angle Western observers tend to neglect and dismiss. But for Chinese specialists, the central value of the organization for China has been a regional security architecture to manage Russian reactions to Chinese engagement in the region. According to this narrative, China and Europe indeed face the same security problem: how to manage Russia as an aggressive and insecure neighbor, both bilaterally and, as important, through a multilateral structure.

In the Chinese view, China and Europe have developed entirely different strategies on how to enhance security and mitigate Russian aggressiveness. For them, Russia’s war on Ukraine is essentially the manifestation of the unresolved conflict over the regional security architecture in Europe. China sees Europe as having opted for a conventional military alliance, NATO, and the introduction of the United States as an external security guarantor in a collective defense arrangement. The result, however, is the exclusion of Russia as an opponent/adversary of Europe and the division of Europe into two opposite camps. That is why China sees the expansion of NATO as the product of Europe’s pursuit of security, which has exacerbated the security anxiety of Russia and eventually led to the war in Ukraine.

China sees itself as having taken a different path on Russia. Having lost three million square kilometers of territory to the Russian Empire, and having lived under the Soviet nuclear threat for a good portion of the Cold War, Beijing’s fundamental lesson from the past four centuries is not to make itself an enemy of an aggressive, impulsive, insecure, and militarily capable Russia. This is reflected not only in Chinese accommodation, cooperation, and alignment of interests on the bilateral level, such as in tolerance of and financial support for Russia’s war on Ukraine. Furthermore, it is also manifested in using the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a mechanism to reassure Russia of China’s regional footprint. The hope is that by including Russia in China’s primary regional engagement tool and offering Russia de facto veto power over Chinese initiatives such as the organization’s development bank, China would not trigger Russia’s exclusion anxiety and its destructive behavior. In the words of a senior Chinese Russia specialist in a track-two dialogue with European interlocutors, “had China tried to exclude Russia in its own backyard and poach Russia’s traditional partners, Russia will immediately turn its turret to target Beijing.”

The effectiveness of this approach, from China’s perspective, lies in the lack of Russian pushback against growing Chinese influence in the region. This also suggests that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not prioritize effectiveness in advancing regional integration or cooperation. Rather, it is primarily designed to incorporate and manage Russian reactions. This captures how China understands the usefulness of the organization as a Russia-management instrument. Even if the grouping has only limited substantive cooperation and focuses on symbolic statements and alignment of positions, it serves China’s purpose well when it is viewed through the lens of a management strategy on Russia.

The Chinese comparison between NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization obviously misses fundamental differences between Europe and Central Asia, even if they share a similar Russia challenge. The two regions had entirely different historical relations with Russia, as Russia has traditionally played a much more dominant role in Central Asia than in Western or Central Europe. All five present-day Central Asian countries were absorbed into the Soviet Union, and three of them have remained in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Europe is also significantly more prosperous, militarily capable, and politically cohesive than Central Asia, which enables Europe to pursue a more advanced regional security agenda. But from Beijing’s crude and superficial estimation, Europe’s regional security architecture has missed the opportunity to better manage the Russia problem.

…And a Challenge To The Western-Led International Order

In recent years, and especially at the Tianjin summit, the Chinese narrative about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has increasingly shifted toward framing the bloc as representative of a new model of global governance and an alternative international order. It is no coincidence that a global governance initiative was introduced at Tianjin. The initiative advocates for the broader representation of developing countries, the central role of the United Nations, and multilateralism in world affairs. The global governance initiative aligns with General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative, proclaiming that security must be common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable. This essentially calls for accommodating the security interests of the likes of Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

For those who dismiss the grouping as a nothingburger, this is the most important aspect they have missed: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has not been and is unlikely to be an effective regional security organization modeled after NATO. In Eurasia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization plays a bigger role in this regard. Rather, as argued above, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is primarily a Russia-management instrument for China. But the value of a regional organization not only manifests through the new and concrete deliverables it can create, but also the impact — whether constructive or destructive — it has over an existing regional security architecture and the broader global order. In other words, the significance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not just about what it can or cannot produce, but also what it can undermine.

Based on its current membership and articulation of missions, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization represents a vision for an alternative global order, as well as governance values and structures. With China and Russia as its co-leaders and an expanding base within the developing world, the organization’s growing prominence underlines a distinct challenge to the existing international order among those states that aspire to play by a different set of rules and norms. While the bloc may not be able to create many concrete deliverables, the shared grievances toward the West, and especially the United States, among its members, as well as the amplification of their voices and positions through active campaigning, present a different set of challenges that are no less problematic.

BECOME A MEMBER

Yun Sun is the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · October 8, 2025

20. The 12 Days of War That Didn’t Ignite the Middle East or the World

Excerpts:

In fact, as I concluded my preliminary assessment of the 12-Day War that ended with a fragile ceasefire, this war may presage the next. Ever since then, the conflict has relocated to below the radar of our attention, with a large number of explosions occurring at military-related locations in Iran, which its authorities have routinely attributed to gas leaks, while an educated guess would rather suggest it was Israel. And now, over two months after the end of the war, top Iranian figures publicly acknowledge that they view another Israeli attack as imminent.

To deter this looming threat, Iran’s military commanders have started to threaten a far harsher reaction than last time. This is based on their — not entirely misleading — belief that the ceasefire was the result of Iranian missiles being able to penetrate Israel’s air defenses. In other words, will Tehran engage in ruthless retaliation that would enflame the entire Middle East, also targeting U.S. military bases via its embattled proxies? Will such a scenario be precipitated by Tehran’s fear of regime decapitation? After all, in June, its top security and political figures all assembled in a Supreme National Security Council meeting and only escaped extermination by Israeli bombs by a whisker. How far will these existential concerns about regime survival that could encourage severe retaliation à la “offense is the best defense” be offset with the kind of reluctance witnessed during the 12-Day War? In brief, an expanded and full-fledged military conflagration will depend on Tehran’s ability to restore defensive and offensive capabilities, regional authority, and to keep its military and political command intact in times of war. At the same time, Iran and Israel are respectively trying to fortify their air defenses and capabilities in preparation for the next round of military confrontation.

In other words, from those war assumptions, the one about the Middle East going up in flames may come closer to reality than last time, but it will very much depend on Iranian risk-taking and missile penetration of its Israeli and potentially U.S. enemies. While this contingency of a coming war reaching a new level of escalation certainly exists, powerful structural counterbalancing forces binding Iranian retaliation to regime-survival concerns are likely to remain.

The 12 Days of War That Didn’t Ignite the Middle East or the World

Ali Fathollah-Nejad

October 8, 2025

warontherocks.com · October 8, 2025

For decades, predictions about a war with Iran carried an air of inevitability: Analysts warned a conflict would close the ranks of the Iranian military and political elite, unite the Iranian people behind the regime, unleash the vengeance Tehran foretold, set the Middle East ablaze, sending oil prices to the roof, and even ignite a world war.

And yet, literally none of this happened.

Instead, the 12-Day War pitting Israel, and later the United States, against Iran exposed just how brittle those assumptions were. The fighting remained narrowly contained, and Tehran’s vaunted “Axis of Resistance” stood idle. The regime emerged more fractured than fortified and, despite its best efforts, the people of Iran did not rally around it. Indeed, public anger at years of misrule reemerged as soon as the fighting stopped. Tehran did not leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, did not close the Strait of Hormuz, and did not strike U.S. bases across the region. Its partners in Moscow and Beijing stayed on the sidelines, and even Hizballah refused to enter the fight.

Rather than confirming the inevitabilities so often invoked in Western capitals, the confrontation exposed the limits of Iran’s power, the fragility of its partnerships, and the deep gulf separating state and society in Iran. This does not mean, however, that this is what will happen again should Israel and America choose to attack once more.

Whether the next round spirals out of control will hinge on Iran’s ability to rebuild military capacity and its willingness to take risks, especially with missile strikes against Israel or U.S. forces. At the same time, structural constraints tied to regime survival — Tehran’s reluctance to provoke a war it cannot win — will continue to limit how far it goes. The 12-Day War has unearthed a number of misguided assumptions that have long been dominant regarding likely ramifications from a war against Iran – domestically, regionally, and globally.

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Iranian Elite Cohesion?

It has long been assumed that a war would close the ranks of Iran’s military and political elite, in the effort to ward off foreign pressure, and thereby prolong the regime’s lifeline. Although no apparent rifts occurred among Tehran’s power elite, there were hidden fissures among an establishment adamant to portray rock-solid unity and closed ranks. For instance, during Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hiding in a bunker during the war, some potential successors brought themselves into position, while others reportedly tested the muddied waters for a soft coup on the back of the decapitation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ top command. In the meantime, the war has not appeased — or closed the ranks — of intra-elite rivalry. After the war, disagreements over the best way to ensure regime survival during these times of foreign military threats — e.g. on the issue of Tehran’s red line of enriching uranium — have added another layer to this.

All this shows how the war has made elite cohesion more fragile instead of mending fissures. However, more importantly, Israel’s attack was predicated upon a vast intelligence penetration of Iran, especially the highest echelon of its power elite. This dimension alone reveals that elite cohesion in Iran is akin to a house of cards, with immense distrust reigning among Tehran’s political, military, and intelligence establishment. This acute fear over being surrounded by Israeli agents was also the reason why Khamenei fled to a bunker during Israel’s assault, while cutting most communication even with the rest of the ruling elite.

And more recently in mid-August, in an unprecedented manner, Khamenei did not attend the top Shiite mourning ceremony of Arbaeen in his office’s Hosseiniyeh (Shiite mourning hall). His renewed disappearance occurred just days after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, in response to an assassination list of Israeli top figures released by a Telegram channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had threatened him personally: “I suggest to the Iranian dictator Khamenei that when he leaves the bunker, he occasionally look up at the sky and listen carefully to every buzz.”

Rallying-‘Round-the-Flag Effect?

In contrast to Israeli suggestions, Iranians have largely opposed foreign aggression and did not — for various reasons — embark upon bringing down the regime in the fog of war. They have expressed their patriotism but not necessarily pro-regime nationalism or sentiments that would have amounted to a conventionally conceived rallying-‘round-the-flag effect — i.e. one that would have stabilized the regime through newfound public support.

While the Iranian regime has been trying to abuse this patriotic sentiment during and since the end of the war, it is unlikely to benefit from it even in the mid-term. Public disenchantment with the authorities’ incompetent governance has already reemerged, as a water and electricity-shortage crisis has gripped Iranians’ daily life this past summer. More generally, Iran’s systemic political, socioeconomic, ecological, and gender-based crises are unlikely to allow the immense gap between state and society to close anytime soon, short of radical political and economic transformation. This overall situation will continue to place regime stability on a fragile footing, while authoritarian rule may be sustained by the lack of an organized opposition.

The Middle East in Flames?

A war, it has been argued, would open the gate for a geographically boundless and protracted regional and even global conflagration. Instead, despite the U.S. entry on the 10th day, we have seen a war limited to Israel and Iran. In fact, Tehran’s regional network — the Axis of Resistance — was not activated. While the latter was significantly weakened by Israel in 2024, Lebanese Hizballah — the longtime crown jewel of the axis — even publicly proclaimed to not enter the war between its archenemy Israel and its Iranian patron, even after the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. Even Yemen’s Houthis — the remaining disruptive member of the axis — did not escalate its missile attacks on Israel during the war. And Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite militias did not target U.S. bases in their country. Those regional allies’ reluctance to enter the fray has been a combined result of their historic weakening since 2024 and, in the cases of Lebanon and Iraq, the mounting pressures these pro-Iranian forces face domestically to abandon their role as Tehran’s proxies. Also, neither of those two groups had the appetite to provoke a destructive Israeli and/or U.S. military retaliation against them by supporting Iran. In this context, it has also been argued that war would cost the lives of a high number of American soldiers and also cause oil prices to skyrocket. Neither, in fact, happened, as Washington evacuated personnel from the Middle East and oil prices remained relatively stable.

In fact, the timing of Israel’s assault was barely surprising in retrospect. After all, in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas operation against Israel, Iran’s notorious Axis of Resistance had unraveled, if not collapsed: Hizballah, Iran’s once-powerful iron fist at Israel’s doorstop, had been eviscerated in September 2024, Hamas militarily debilitated during Israel’s relentless bombings of the Gaza Strip, the Assad regime in Syria — Iran’s land route toward arming Hizballah — had collapsed like a house of cards in December 2024, and Yemen’s Houthis had just endured another weeks-long bombing campaign by Washington. As such, Tehran’s regional muscles were largely crippled if not amputated. With Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s “Octopus Doctrine” reached its erstwhile peak: After cutting off Tehran’s main regional limbs, the way to the “head of the octopus” was cleared. In other words, with the Axis of Resistance having become a shadow of its former self, escalation via proxies was simply not in the cards for Tehran.

To prevent a nuclear-armed Iran in the long term, to destroy its expansive ballistic missile infrastructure, and to “improve Israel’s strategic balance” (according to an unnamed senior military official), Israel thus used a window of opportunity. The latter had resulted from Iran’s historic regional weakness, its diplomatic preoccupation with Washington (after all, Israel’s attack occurred just ahead of the sixth round of U.S.-Iranian negotiations), concomitant military unpreparedness, with even leading Iranian military figures belittling if not ridiculing any chance of renewed Israeli aggression just days before it actually occurred, as well as a politico-diplomatic cover using and abusing the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “damning report” on Iran’s nuclear program.

Yet, at the outset of the war, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-affiliated daily Javan tried to mask those regional weaknesses as untapped capacities, instead highlighting Tehran’s ability to inflict great damage on Israel without full-scale engagement. In fact, Iran’s missile salvos on Israel had led to more harm than in the April and October 2024 direct military confrontations between the two. Launching over 500 ballistic missiles and around 1,100 drones, Iran’s retaliation killed 31, injured over 3,000, and displaced over 13,000.

World War III?

Moreover, pundits and even scholars have long warned that a war on Iran would ultimately pit the West against a powerful, ironclad alliance consisting of Iran, Russia, and China, effectively kicking off an Armageddon-like World War III. Yet, neither Moscow nor Beijing entered the war on Iran’s side against Israel and later the United States. Nor did they provide any military or even meaningful diplomatic support to Tehran to either arm it to defend itself or to shield it against further pressure, such as deterring a U.S. entry into the war. Instead of the much-feared Iranian-Russo-Chinese “axis of autocrats” flexing its combined military muscles, it was the Israeli-U.S. partnership that proved decisive against Iran.

Neither Moscow nor Beijing would benefit strategically from directly entering a war on Iran’s side against the United States and Israel. Their respective relations with Washington are key, while ties with Tehran have often served as leverage in that context. In other words, Iran is one important pawn on the chessboard of their global rivalry with Washington. As such, their ties with Tehran are mostly opportunistic. They both exploit Iran’s geopolitical isolation resulting from its enmity with the West and are therefore willing to sustain it rather than see Tehran mending its ties with Washington.

Against this backdrop, Russia and China have forged wide-ranging yet non-transparent long-term agreements with Iran. Given the power asymmetry separating Iran from both countries, one can assume that with these pacts the Iranian regime has sold out Iranian national resources and interests. In return, Tehran expected both to act as an outside guarantor of its regime’s survival. Now, given their passivity in the 12-Day War, Iran’s political elite has become even more disillusioned with its much-lauded “Look to the East” policy, which has clearly failed. Additionally, a nuclear-armed Iran would reduce the power imbalance that systemically favors Moscow and Beijing over Tehran. Conversely, a destroyed Iranian nuclear program could revitalize Russia’s struggling nuclear industry. And last but not least, as if military passivity was not enough, Tehran speculates that Moscow has covertly colluded with Israel in its aggression against Iran, revealing sensitive details about the Russian-supplied Iranian air defense systems.

Between Rhetoric and Reality

Against this backdrop, Iran’s response was largely limited to Israel. In fact, not only did Tehran not implement its oft-issued threat to unleash its regional axis. It also did not opt to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz that links the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean, as this would have pushed the United States into the war even earlier, while constituting a strategic own goal undermining Iran’s own oil exports and the confidence of its Asian clients, especially China, as well as alienate those Gulf Cooperation Council states reliant on the strait for their oil and gas exports as Tehran needed them diplomatically to help bring about an end to the war. Neither were all U.S. military bases in Iran’s vicinity targeted, nor were American soldiers killed. Instead, Iran attacked U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar following prior warning, i.e. in a symbolic rather than militarily decisive way.

The Roots of Wrong Predictions

In fact, this set of misguided assumptions were based upon some long-held analytic inaccuracies. First, these have been in place regarding the nature of state-society relations in Iran and that of Iran’s ruling system. In fact, the depth and extent of disillusionment and even detestation many Iranians have developed vis-à-vis their rulers has been vastly underestimated. Moreover, many pundits do not distinguish between Iranian regime security interests on one hand and national security interests on the other. In reality regime policies are dictated by narrow elite interests often violating the national interest, i.e. the political, economic, and security interest of the bulk of the Iranian populace. As case in point, Tehran’s diplomatic red lines of rejecting considerable limitations of its nuclear and missile programs as well as its support for the so-called “Axis of Resistance” all constitute the regime’s sources of power. Such intransigeance is less about securing the nation’s legitimate security concern, as continuously claimed by Iranian officials, but is instead inviting costly political, economic and military pressures against the country. Second, Tehran’s military retaliation has been subject to its regime survival concerns. As such, Tehran cannot afford to provoke Washington to join Tel Aviv in a prolonged all-out war against itself. Third, the nature of the relationship between Iran on one hand and Russia and China on the other has often been falsely characterized as a robust alliance, by some even a NATO-style one. In reality, both Moscow and Beijing have consistently acted as opportunistic actors, abusing Tehran’s geopolitical isolation and hence weakness, and are therefore rather precarious partners.

In other words, many Western-based Iran experts’ core assumptions about the impacts of a war with Iran have turned out to be imprecise. Rather than being a result of sober analysis, these claims have been embedded in a longer continuity of misassumptions underpinning Iran-related analysis — with many of them rhyming with the dominant narratives emerging from regime circles.

The Next War

As we have seen, the analytic fallacies have been striking. Recognizing them will help better assess risks and scenarios of a renewed military conflict. Yet, needless to say, wars cannot be neatly predicted analytically; they are inherently subject to unexpected events, including miscalculations by the warring parties.

In fact, as I concluded my preliminary assessment of the 12-Day War that ended with a fragile ceasefire, this war may presage the next. Ever since then, the conflict has relocated to below the radar of our attention, with a large number of explosions occurring at military-related locations in Iran, which its authorities have routinely attributed to gas leaks, while an educated guess would rather suggest it was Israel. And now, over two months after the end of the war, top Iranian figures publicly acknowledge that they view another Israeli attack as imminent.

To deter this looming threat, Iran’s military commanders have started to threaten a far harsher reaction than last time. This is based on their — not entirely misleading — belief that the ceasefire was the result of Iranian missiles being able to penetrate Israel’s air defenses. In other words, will Tehran engage in ruthless retaliation that would enflame the entire Middle East, also targeting U.S. military bases via its embattled proxies? Will such a scenario be precipitated by Tehran’s fear of regime decapitation? After all, in June, its top security and political figures all assembled in a Supreme National Security Council meeting and only escaped extermination by Israeli bombs by a whisker. How far will these existential concerns about regime survival that could encourage severe retaliation à la “offense is the best defense” be offset with the kind of reluctance witnessed during the 12-Day War? In brief, an expanded and full-fledged military conflagration will depend on Tehran’s ability to restore defensive and offensive capabilities, regional authority, and to keep its military and political command intact in times of war. At the same time, Iran and Israel are respectively trying to fortify their air defenses and capabilities in preparation for the next round of military confrontation.

In other words, from those war assumptions, the one about the Middle East going up in flames may come closer to reality than last time, but it will very much depend on Iranian risk-taking and missile penetration of its Israeli and potentially U.S. enemies. While this contingency of a coming war reaching a new level of escalation certainly exists, powerful structural counterbalancing forces binding Iranian retaliation to regime-survival concerns are likely to remain.

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Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Ph.D., is an Iranian-born and Berlin-based political scientist and analyst. He is director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order and teaches Middle East security at the Hertie School in Berlin.

Image: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · October 8, 2025

21. How to Train Your Dragon: Understanding China’s Growing Web of Combined Military Exercises and Security Relationships

See data and charts at the link.

Excerpts:

The United States must avoid retrenchment and sustain combined training and exercise programs with international partners, especially strategically important nations such as India and Thailand. Exercises should emphasize interoperability, rapid crisis response, and practical operational value, demonstrating to partners that US engagement provides tangible benefits compared to Chinese alternatives. In addition, exercises should not occur in isolation but be paired with diplomatic initiatives, economic incentives, and selective arms transfers to reinforce US influence across multiple domains. This approach signals a comprehensive and coherent strategy, highlighting reliability, long-term commitment, and multilateral cooperation.

If significant qualitative improvements in PLA capabilities are observed, the United States should scale up exercises and deployments in relevant regions to deny China uncontested influence. This includes close coordination with NATO and key regional allies to ensure that responses are unified, credible, and proportionate. A proactive posture would enable the United States to shape regional dynamics, reassure partners, and deter potential aggressive moves. For example, recent reports indicate Russia is training Chinese airborne forces. If these efforts continue to the point of demonstration during a combined exercise, the United States and its allies could answer by forward-deploying air defense units and executing their own exercises that specifically focus on intercepting hostile airlift, signaling that the capability would not go uncontested.

Ultimately, Chinese combined exercises matter less for their absolute numbers than for their trajectory. The SCO provides China with a ready-made platform to build habits of cooperation, normalize PLA deployments abroad, and strengthen an illiberal security network. For US forces, the challenge is twofold: careful monitoring to distinguish signaling from meaningful integration, and sustained partnership building from Southeast to Central Asia. With proactive engagement, the United States can ensure that China’s expanding military diplomacy does not credibly threaten US national security interests abroad.

How to Train Your Dragon: Understanding China’s Growing Web of Combined Military Exercises and Security Relationships - Modern War Institute

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/how-to-train-your-dragon-understanding-chinas-growing-web-of-combined-military-exercises-and-security-relationships/

mwi.westpoint.edu · Jane Kaufmann · October 8, 2025

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On July 24, 2024, US F-16 and F-35 pilots scrambled to intercept a combined formation of two Chinese H-6K and two Russian Tu-95MS bombers as they entered the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone—a first-of-its-kind combined operation for Beijing and Moscow. For Washington, the message was clear: China’s military diplomacy is no longer confined to its backyard. This was not an isolated stunt, but the product of years of steadily growing international military cooperation cultivated through the execution of combined exercises with foreign forces.

Over the last eight years, Beijing has more than doubled its participation in such exercises, concentrating on partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and select Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states. While China still trails the United States in the scale and sophistication of its drills, the trajectory of its exercise growth suggests a long-term strategy to expand influence and challenge US dominance in Eurasia. Future growth in Chinese bilateral and multilateral exercises could significantly impact US interests. For example, deployment of Chinese military units to Iran for combined air defense exercises would have profound strategic impacts in the US Central Command area of responsibility. The United States must closely monitor these trends and posture accordingly to ensure that emerging patterns of Chinese foreign military cooperation do not translate into unchallenged strategic advantage.

China’s Expanding Exercise Profile

To analyze China’s expanding foreign military engagement, we extended a 2021 joint military exercise dataset compiled by Jordan Bernhardt to cover US and Chinese exercises from 2017 through 2024. Using the Department of Defense Freedom of Information Act library, LexisNexis, and official US and Chinese government press releases, the dataset extension captures 1,279 exercises involving 187 countries. The results underscore how rapidly Beijing has embraced combined exercises as a tool of influence, with much of this expansion concentrated within the SCO.

China’s growth in economic and military power has been mirrored by increased participation in international exercises. In the early 2000s, China participated in only one or two exercises per year. That figure rose to an average of 9.5 annually by 2009–2016, per Bernhardt’s dataset. Since 2017, the pace has more than doubled to 19.3 per year, an especially impressive increase considering the lull in international exercises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The trajectory is unmistakable: China is deliberately normalizing its military presence abroad.

Figure 1: Total Chinese Combined Exercises, 2001–2024 (figures to the left of the dashed line are from Bernhardt’s 2021 dataset, while figures to the right are from data compiled by the authors)

While China has made gains in the raw number of exercises its forces participate in, the scope of countries that they integrate with is still relatively limited compared to the breadth of partners the United States works with. Table 1 shows the top ten most frequent participants of exercises with China between 2017 and 2024. Russia is China’s most frequent exercise partner with sixty-three combined exercises conducted during this period. China’s two other most populous SCO partners, Pakistan and India, follow in second and third place, with Thailand occupying fourth.

Table 1: China Top 10 Exercise Partners (all exercises, 2017–2024)

Interestingly, China participated in twenty-four exercises with the United States, enough to tie for fourth among China’s overall exercise partners. Considering the strategic rivalry between these two states, this is very unexpected. There are two explanations: historical US integration efforts and participation in non-combat-oriented exercises.

In the 2010s, Washington invited Beijing into marquee multilateral events like Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) and Cobra Gold. China participated in RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016 before being disinvited in response to security concerns and Chinese militarization of South China Sea islands, but continued to join Cobra Gold through 2024, albeit with its participation confined to humanitarian aid and disaster relief roles. Beyond that, many shared events were multinational peacekeeping or survival training exercises, such as Mongolia’s Khaan Quest or Australia’s Kowari. Naval gatherings like Indonesia’s Komodo further padded the count without requiring true tactical integration.

China and the United States have a mutual interest in safeguarding information regarding military capabilities and tactics, techniques, and procedures from each other; despite combined exercise participation, the limited scope of these exercises demonstrates that neither country is interested in true military integration. Between 2017 and 2024, the United States conducted 1,143 exercises, underscoring its pervasive role in international military engagement. China’s relatively high exercise count with the United States says more about America’s hegemonic presence in global exercises than about China-US cooperation.

Why Combined Exercises Matter for China

Combined exercises are foundational to the establishment of effective security cooperation between states. They represent a distinct and strong form of alignment because they require the sharing of tactics, techniques, and procedures—creating a shared level of trust that is deeper than arms sales alone. Frequent exercises enhance interoperability, normalize deployments abroad, and foster habits of cooperation. For the United States, these serve as one of the bedrocks of its alliance system. For China, growing exercise participation signals its intent to develop a similar, if narrower, network of security partnerships.

SCO Partnerships: The Core of Chinese Engagement

Excluding US-linked drills reveals the extent of the SCO’s dominance within China’s exercise portfolio. Nearly half (68 of 154) of China’s combined exercises involved SCO partners. In addition, SCO members make up seven of China’s top ten exercise partners.

Table 2: China Top 10 Exercise Partners (combined exercises not involving the United States, 2017–2024)

, the SCO originated as a forum to settle cross-border disputes between its original partners: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It has since added India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus, and its member states now account for over 42 percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of global GDP. It has also expanded its policy purview to cover a wide range of economic and security cooperation initiatives. The SCO’s recent growth has alarmed Western observers about its potential as an illiberal rival to the US-led order. That concern sharpened at the September 2025 Tianjin Summit, where SCO members agreed to institutionalize cooperation with the establishment of a new development bank and called for a new system of global governance. Against this backdrop, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has steadily expanded its combined exercises with SCO partners, using them as a proving ground for power projection.

Russia stands apart as China’s most important partner in combined military activity with fifty-two exercises during this period, including thirty-two bilateral drills. Most of these demonstrated power projection capabilities, such as the annual Joint Sea series of integrated naval exercises, which have ranged from the Western Pacific to the Baltic Sea. Since 2019, China and Russia have also conducted nine strategic aerial patrols, pairing bombers and support aircraft on routes that often pass near key US allies like Japan and South Korea. The eighth patrol, in July 2024, went further by piercing the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone over the Bering Sea, representing a significant posture escalation.

Pakistan’s second-place ranking is unsurprising given its status as the largest importer of Chinese arms. In its recent skirmishes with India, Pakistan has served as a proving ground for combat employment of modern Chinese weapons, including the J-10C fighter aircraft and PL-15 air-to-air missile. Its performance in these conflicts was likely enhanced by its participation in the Shaheen series of bilateral air combat exercises conducted with the PLA Air Force since 2011. Unlike Russia, however, Pakistan continues to maintain security ties with the United States and has executed several bilateral military engagements with US forces as well.

Similarly, India engages in exercises with both the United States and China. Its strategic alignment remains complex and has been a focal point of US foreign policy efforts. Notably, between 2017 and 2024, India participated in four times as many exclusive exercises with the United States as with China, including high-end warfighting exercises such as Red Flag – Alaska, RIMPAC, and Pitch Black. However, this relationship remains fluid and closer cooperation between New Delhi and Beijing is possible as SCO institutions continue to mature.

Despite having relatively small militaries, the original Central Asian members of the SCO remain some of China’s most prominent exercise partners. PLA forces conducted some of their first international exercises in these countries and continue to prioritize integration with them, primarily in SCO counterterrorism drills such as the Peace Mission series of exercises.

The only two SCO countries outside of China’s top ten are Iran and Belarus. This is largely due to these countries joining the SCO very recently—2023 for Iran and 2024 for Belarus. Nonetheless, each country participated in six non-US combined exercises with China between 2017 and 2024, tying them at thirteenth among Chinese exercise partners. Of note, Iran has participated in a series of annual trilateral naval exercises with China and Russia since 2019. With their recent addition to the SCO, it is likely that combined exercise participation levels between China, Iran, and Belarus will grow significantly.

Overall, the data shows that China is prioritizing engagement with its SCO partners to train its military in deployed settings and to serve as a foundation for executing power projection operations beyond its borders.

ASEAN Engagement: Competing for Influence in Southeast Asia

All three of the non-SCO countries in China’s top ten exercise partners are in Southeast Asia, a clear signal of China’s regional aims. Table 3 details each ASEAN country’s exclusive combined exercises with the two superpowers between 2017 and 2024. The most strategically significant exercise partner is Thailand, where closer military ties with China threaten a long-standing US partnership. The Cobra Gold series, hosted annually by the United States and Thailand, is the largest joint and combined exercise in the region dating back to 1982. This capstone-level exercise features warfighting integration across conventional and special operations capabilities. Chinese military presence in Thailand caused US military officials to warn Cobra Gold participants to expect Chinese agents to be filming and listening to all exercise activities as early as 2017. Deepening Chinese-Thai military cooperation casts doubt on the US-Thai relationship and provides an ideal venue for Chinese intelligence to exploit US tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Although exercises with Vietnam have increased, they are primarily combined border patrols and disaster relief exercises. These bilateral events are focused on preventing escalation along the border, not external power projection or warfighting integration. Increases in engagement in Cambodia and Laos are also concerning for US interests. Although both countries have limited military capabilities, sustained PLA involvement could expand China’s ability to counter US partners in the region.

For now, Chinese military activities with ASEAN states remain modest and trail behind those of the United States. However, closer cooperation between China and Thailand should give US planners pause. At what point does Chinese integration threaten US core objectives with military outreach, or signal diverging alignment to the point that the stability of US-Thai relations is threatened? An uptick in arms exports, talks of Chinese foreign basing opportunities, or storage of war reserve materiel in the region would also be concerning for US interests. Although the SCO appears to be China’s main focus for expansion of military partnerships, continued engagement throughout ASEAN may help illuminate China’s regional ambitions and the appetite of local players to engage.

Table 3: ASEAN Combined Exercises (2017–2024)

Limited in Scope—So Far

Despite steady growth, China’s combined exercises remain limited in scope compared those of to the United States. China’s 154 exercises conducted with 45 countries pale in comparison to the US total of 1,143 exercises conducted with 181 partners between 2017 and 2024. Compared to US alliances and partnerships, PLA activities emphasize presence and signaling over true interoperability. Most exercises involve limited force packages, basic coordination, and scripted scenarios. Even with Russia, coordination has yet to reach the level of integrated command structures or combined operations typical of US exercises with its primary allies.

The greater significance lies in trajectory. By conducting regular exercises, China normalizes PLA deployments abroad, familiarizes itself with diverse operational environments, and develops habits of cooperation with foreign militaries. These trends lay the foundation for deeper collaboration should Beijing choose to pursue it.

How Should the US Government Respond?

China’s rapid expansion of combined military exercises since 2017 illustrates a deliberate effort to strengthen its security partnerships, particularly within the SCO. While China’s total number of exercises still lags behind that of the United States, the geographic and political concentration of its activities highlights Beijing’s strategic intent: building durable security relationships within the SCO and deepening relationships with strategically valuable ASEAN neighbors.

For now, most exercises remain limited in scope, often emphasizing counterterrorism or symbolic displays of cooperation rather than deep integration of tactics, techniques, and procedures. Even high-profile drills with Russia, including combined bomber patrols near US and allied airspace, appear more focused on signaling than on operational interoperability. However, increasing military outreach points to potential future concerns.

US security leaders should track not just the number but also the scope of Chinese exercises. This requires attention to changes in force composition, technological sophistication, and operational integration. It is critical to avoid overreacting when exercises remain small or symbolic. However, persistent, higher-end drills should trigger a reassessment of US posture and readiness. Significant PLA integration in future Russo-Belarussian Zapad exercises, for instance, would be an early indicator of a more assertive power projection posture. Another example would be the sale of advanced air defense systems to Iran, paired with combined exercises to optimize their employment. Careful, disciplined monitoring would ensure that the United States can respond proportionally and maintain credibility without overcommitting to minor provocations.

The United States must avoid retrenchment and sustain combined training and exercise programs with international partners, especially strategically important nations such as India and Thailand. Exercises should emphasize interoperability, rapid crisis response, and practical operational value, demonstrating to partners that US engagement provides tangible benefits compared to Chinese alternatives. In addition, exercises should not occur in isolation but be paired with diplomatic initiatives, economic incentives, and selective arms transfers to reinforce US influence across multiple domains. This approach signals a comprehensive and coherent strategy, highlighting reliability, long-term commitment, and multilateral cooperation.

If significant qualitative improvements in PLA capabilities are observed, the United States should scale up exercises and deployments in relevant regions to deny China uncontested influence. This includes close coordination with NATO and key regional allies to ensure that responses are unified, credible, and proportionate. A proactive posture would enable the United States to shape regional dynamics, reassure partners, and deter potential aggressive moves. For example, recent reports indicate Russia is training Chinese airborne forces. If these efforts continue to the point of demonstration during a combined exercise, the United States and its allies could answer by forward-deploying air defense units and executing their own exercises that specifically focus on intercepting hostile airlift, signaling that the capability would not go uncontested.

Ultimately, Chinese combined exercises matter less for their absolute numbers than for their trajectory. The SCO provides China with a ready-made platform to build habits of cooperation, normalize PLA deployments abroad, and strengthen an illiberal security network. For US forces, the challenge is twofold: careful monitoring to distinguish signaling from meaningful integration, and sustained partnership building from Southeast to Central Asia. With proactive engagement, the United States can ensure that China’s expanding military diplomacy does not credibly threaten US national security interests abroad.

Major Jane Kaufmann is an AC-130J weapons system officer with three combat deployments to Afghanistan. She recently graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in political science as a CSAF Scholar.

Lieutenant Commander Chris Pagenkopf is an F-35C pilot and TOPGUN graduate with multiple deployments in the Indo-Pacific and Mediterranean. He currently serves as a Fleet Scholar attending Stanford University in the master’s in international policy program.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the Department of the Air Force and Department of the Navy.

Image credit: kremlin.ru, via Wikimedia Commons

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Jane Kaufmann · October 8, 2025

22. How Russia Recovered: What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

Excerpts:

At the start of the invasion in 2022, the Russian military misjudged Ukraine’s capabilities and will to fight. Moscow’s equipment was not always up to the task, and some systems failed outright. Its soldiers were not trained for their assigned missions (or even told that they would be going to war, for that matter). Its command chain struggled to function.

But observers of the Russian military can no longer anchor its views to that period. In the years since, it has become a learning organization, and ongoing adaptations on the frontlines are only a piece of its educational activity. Moscow is acquiring and analyzing combat experience and disseminating the lessons it has learned throughout its force and defense ecosystem. It is systemically trying to capture and institutionalize its wartime experience and prepare for a postwar reform period. It realizes that the future character of warfare is changing, so the military must change, as well.

Russian leaders will face obstacles to their ambitions even after this conflict ends. International sanctions, for instance, will be a major impediment to their progress (provided those sanctions last). The Russian military’s ability to improve, after all, will depend on sustained financing, access to critical minerals, and the ability to produce top-of-the-line equipment—all things that sanctions make difficult. The Russian military will also require leadership support and the input of enough experienced veterans for planned reforms to take effect. And no matter what happens, Russia will be constrained by its traditional personnel weaknesses—poor discipline, for example—and an expensive procurement program that will sap its resources.

Moscow also worries that the United States and Europe will study its war and develop countermeasures to Russia’s newest capabilities and tactics. NATO must prove these fears to be justified. To match Russian capabilities and catch up in key areas like drone warfare, the United States and Europe must accelerate their analysis of the invasion of Ukraine and then adapt, including through the procurement of more UAVs and by adopting other innovations. Although several organizations in NATO countries are devoted to gathering lessons from the war, progress is uneven and siloed. These bodies’ efforts have not yet comprehensively altered their countries’ procurement plans, training regimens, or operational concepts.

To avoid falling behind, the United States and Europe need to start paying better attention—especially since Moscow is passing its knowledge along to its autocratic partners. But that means they must see the Russian military for what it is: flawed, but resilient in its own way. Its structural problems are very real and would be particularly acute in the event of a conflict with NATO. Yet its learning process is relentless. The Russian armed forces will further modify tactics, introduce new weapons, and expand as they begin a decadelong reconstitution effort. Experts are fond of saying that armies shape war. But war shapes armies, as well.

How Russia Recovered

Foreign Affairs · More by Dara Massicot · October 8, 2025

What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

Dara Massicot

November/December 2025 Published on October 8, 2025

Illustration by Vartika Sharma; Photo Sources: Reuters, Getty Images.

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The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been one of upset expectations and wild swings in performance. At the start of the war, most of NATO saw Russia as an unstoppable behemoth, poised to quickly defeat Ukraine. Instead, Russia’s forces were halted in their tracks and pushed back. Then, outside observers decided the Russian military was rotten, perhaps one counterattack away from collapse. That also proved incorrect—Ukrainian offensives failed, and Moscow resumed its slow advance. Now, plenty of people look beyond Russia to understand the state of the battlefield, blaming Kyiv’s troubles on insufficient external backing instead.

What many policymakers and strategists have missed is the extent to which Moscow has learned from its failures and adapted its strategy and approach to war, in Ukraine and beyond. Beginning in 2022, Russia launched a systematic effort to examine its combat experience, draw lessons from it, and share those lessons across its armed forces. By early 2023, Moscow had quietly constructed a complex ecosystem of learning that includes the defense manufacturing base, universities, and soldiers up and down the chain of command. Today, the military is institutionalizing its knowledge, realigning its defense manufacturers and research organizations to support wartime needs, and pairing tech startups with state resources.

The result has been new tactics on the battlefield—codified in training programs and combat manuals—and better weapons. Moscow has developed fresh ways of using drones to find and kill Ukrainian soldiers and to destroy Ukrainian assets, turning what was once an area of weakness into an area of strength. It has built better missiles and created more rugged and capable armored systems. It is giving junior commanders more freedom to plan. It has become a military that is capable of both evolving during this war and readying itself for future, high-tech conflicts.

Because of these changes, Ukraine is likely to face even greater destruction in the months ahead. It will have to contend with faster and more numerous Russian drone attacks, resulting in more harm to cities, civilians, and critical infrastructure. Larger numbers of missiles will get through Ukraine’s defenses. The ten miles leading up to the frontlines, already very hazardous, will become even more dangerous and difficult to cross. These changes may not produce any dramatic breakthroughs for Russia, thanks to Ukraine’s defenses and extensive drone and artillery attacks. But they do mean Moscow can keep trading its soldiers’ lives for slow gains in the Donbas while hoping that NATO tires of the conflict.

Some American and European officials are, indeed, losing interest in Ukraine. But the same Russian adaptations that threaten Ukraine should be of concern to policymakers elsewhere. The Russian military will emerge from its invasion with extensive experience and a distinct vision of the future of combat, and it is sharing its experience with China, Iran, and North Korea. It has laid the groundwork for a more intense period of learning and reconstitution after the war ends. Russia will remain constrained by bad discipline and will struggle to produce the most sophisticated equipment. But it will be as ready for the new way of war as any other state, constraints on its resources notwithstanding. If they do not want to fall behind, Washington and European capitals must therefore start learning from the war in Ukraine, not turning away. Rather than dismiss it, they need to study Russia’s studying—and then start making their own changes.

THE LEARNING-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The Russian military has been forced to adapt to its circumstances since the early days of its invasion. To survive fierce Ukrainian counterattacks, Russian units grafted protective armor onto vehicles, learned new styles of camouflage, and adopted small-unit assault tactics, among many other adaptations. Russian soldiers also shared advice informally through social networks, closed social media channels, and self-published advice manuals. This type of informal, person-to-person or unit-to-unit learning is an important first stage of wartime adaptation. But unless the larger military organization captures these lessons, they are often lost over time, not passed to those who need them, and not spread across the force.

The second stage of learning includes institutionalizing those changes, such as by revising training programs, procurement plans, and operational concepts. After that, militaries must engage in predictive learning about the future of warfare and recognize the need for reforms or transformational change. The militaries that learn best follow five steps: acquire combat experience, analyze it, propose recommendations, disseminate the recommendations and lessons throughout the force, and, finally, implement them.

As it became clear that the war would drag on, Russia started fulfilling most of these criteria. What began as ad hoc battlefield adaptation evolved into a systematic effort to take its battlefield experience, study it, and share it across the military to improve performance. In 2022, for example, the military ordered dedicated staff officers and researchers to frontline military command posts so they could observe the war as closely as possible and seek to understand troop performance. The researchers then reviewed the results of battles, combed through commander logs, and interviewed personnel to generate analytic reports. After additional evaluation, these “lessons learned” reports (as military experts call them) were shared with the wartime headquarters in Rostov, the general staff in Moscow, service branch headquarters, military academies, defense firms, and the military research community.

Ukraine is likely to face even greater destruction in the months ahead.

The armed forces then adjusted in accordance. Aided by Moscow’s September 2022 mobilization order and a surging defense budget, the Russian military reorganized its command structure and modified its tactics and force posture in Ukraine. Moscow changed its logistics system to make it more survivable. It introduced new technologies or new ways of using old technology to improve both its precision targeting and its electronic warfare capabilities. These interim adaptations helped Russia stabilize its frontlines and withstand Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.

Since then, Russia’s learning ecosystem has become even more extensive. In Moscow, the Russian military has over 20 commissions devoted to implementing recommendations based on information it receives from the frontlines and from Russian researchers. The military has been busy disseminating lessons learned to the force by summarizing them in bulletins, holding themed workshops, and hosting conferences to troubleshoot problems and share knowledge. Russia’s Southern Military District repeatedly gathers soldiers and commanders from the air force, ground forces, electronic warfare forces, and the defense industry to teach them how to better detect, suppress, and destroy the enemy’s uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which were essential to Ukraine’s early military success. At a 2023 conference hosted by Russia’s artillery academy, soldiers and experts came together to revise artillery tactics and integrate drones into artillery strikes. In just three years, Russia has made over 450 interim modifications to combat manuals. Military leaders emphasize that these handbooks are likely to be completely overhauled after the war ends.

GEARING UP

During the invasion’s first year, Ukraine received some help from an unexpected source: Russia’s own military equipment. For seemingly months on end, Russia’s gear repeatedly malfunctioned because of sloppy maintenance, manufacturing defects, and design flaws. Consider Moscow’s electronic warfare equipment: a snap inspection of hundreds of Russian electronic warfare systems found defects in 30 percent of them. The most common flaw was the poor quality of electronic subcomponents, specifically circuits. According to the Russian military’s flagship publication, Military Thought, a whopping 60 to 70 percent of Russia’s electronic warfare failures from 2022 to 2024 were caused by equipment malfunctions of various types. Only 30 to 40 percent of failures were caused by Ukrainian military fire.

At times, Russia has struggled to fix its equipment problems. During the first year of the war, the defense industry’s slow responsiveness, disconnection from soldiers, and outdated regulations impeded innovation efforts. But eventually, the country’s defense manufacturers were instructed to improve production, increase the repair rate, and generally speed innovation. And thanks to government support, they did. The Ministry of Defense relaxed regulations to shorten research and development timelines. It held meetings with the defense manufacturing base to ensure it received and digested feedback from frontline units and made changes. Defense companies, meanwhile, sent industry specialists into occupied Ukraine to fix equipment, study its performance, and report back, just as they did in Syria when Russia was defending Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And starting in early 2023, the Kremlin created programs to integrate civilian universities and research centers into national defense efforts. It improved military and civilian engineer collaboration at test sites and training ranges to test prototypes before sending them into combat.

The Russian government also launched initiatives to help the country’s defense startups in the hope of promoting innovation. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, for instance, worked to connect startups with the state-owned companies that dominate the sector and are resistant to newcomers. It worked: now, startups have taken their place alongside Russia’s largest defense contractors in arms shows and sell their products to the military. These changes have allowed Russia to start closing the technological edge that Kyiv enjoyed in the war’s early years. Russian manufacturers are producing new and modified systems better suited for conditions in Ukraine. The Russian military, in turn, has learned how to use them. Perhaps most famously, the Ministry of Defense set up Rubikon, the country’s elite drone research and operations unit, which experiments with different types of tactics that now inform how other UAV units are instructed.

Moscow has made less flashy but equally essential improvements, as well. Defense companies have upgraded armor and other defenses on many classes of vehicles and equipped others with stronger engines, better vision scopes, and improved jamming systems. The country has increased the lethality of its glide bombs and increased production of modified Shahed drones and a variety of other types of UAVs. And the defense sector is addressing manufacturing defects and improving maintenance protocols for Russian electronic warfare systems.

These upgrades help explain why Ukrainians have encountered more trouble in the last year and a half. In 2022 and 2023, Kyiv could target Russian command centers, stockpiles, and supply lines with relative ease; today, Russia’s electronic countermeasures and adjusted missile defenses make such attacks more difficult. Russian drone and missile strikes are also becoming larger and more complex. At a minimum, this means Ukraine’s partners will need to supply it with more air defenses and invest more in the country’s electronic warfare systems. Ukraine is also developing a long-range missile, as it looks to destroy Russian weapons at their source.

WRITTEN IN BLOOD

Russian learning extends to another important domain: training. The country’s military instructors are thoroughly reviewing combat experiences and integrating the lessons they learned into training programs. To make sure these programs are both relevant and realistic, Russia rotates troops between the battlefield and training ranges, much as it has sent defense manufacturers to the front. When in-person visits are not possible, the military sets up secure videoconferences between frontline units, academies, and training centers. Some disabled veterans have become full-time instructors.

Russia has made several teaching changes as a result of its combat experience in Ukraine. It has made its simulators more realistic and has modified its instruction of tactical first aid. It has started teaching troops how to drive military vehicles through a complicated drone battlefield, as well as how to carry out a small assault within a larger drone and armored assault—both critical tasks in a war where the frontlines are under constant surveillance by Kyiv. (Given that Ukraine can see most of what Russia is doing on the battlefield, small, discrete assault teams are needed to overwhelm Kyiv’s defensive positions.) For the first time, Russian instructors are using drones to monitor soldiers’ training so they can better evaluate and discuss the units’ successes and failures afterward.

Russia has also made several changes to its training course for junior officers to better prepare them for operational tasks. These changes do not constitute a total overhaul; Moscow’s main wartime adjustment is adding a two-month supplemental training session to help lieutenants improve their skills in marksmanship and artillery, reconnaissance, topography, navigation, drone use, and tactical medicine. Instructors are also focusing on teaching junior officers how to command small units, given the importance of small infantry assaults on the battlefield. Some junior officers are even being taught what NATO states call mission planning, in which they are given an objective that they and their staffs must figure out how to achieve on their own rather than following centralized commands. This is a major shift for the traditionally top-down Russian military, one inspired by the successes some Russian units have scored against Kyiv.

Yet despite the attention senior leaders have given to fixing them, Russia’s training programs remain uneven. Instruction for Ukrainian-bound volunteers is now rightfully focused on teaching soldiers to fight in small assault teams on drone-saturated battlefields. But the training remains too short, so troops are still arriving ill-suited for their combat tasks. Although the instructional program for fresh conscripts has also been modified since 2022 to reflect combat experience, it has yet to be fully overhauled. Some district training centers are still teaching outdated information or otherwise not keeping pace with rapid battlefield adaptation, Russian officials report. The military has resorted to snap inspections to ensure that new training directives are being adopted.

THE LIMITS OF LEARNING

Russian training may remain a work in progress, and fierce Ukrainian resistance continues to prevent the Kremlin from achieving its main objectives. Yet Moscow’s changes are undoubtedly disheartening for Ukrainians. Since the war began, Kyiv has held its own against Moscow in large part because of its innovation advantage, which is now eroding. The Ukrainians have long acknowledged they cannot defeat the Russian military on numbers alone.

But fortunately for Kyiv, Russia can do only so much to match Ukraine’s qualitative edge. For starters, the Russian military’s learning process has a critical flaw—one that explains the divide between the vibrant learning underway among the headquarters staff, researchers, and some defense firms back home and the bleak experience of frontline soldiers. Although the Russian military shows strength in acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating combat experience, it has struggled to implement its recommendations—and, relatedly, to ensure that its guidance is being followed. Officials have recommended, for example, that the country’s quality control system be overhauled in response to the many breakdowns and errors, but the country has yet to do so. Similarly, the study of combat medicine and combat traumatology in Russia has advanced considerably since 2022. Yet the number of frontline soldiers contracting HIV infections is surging, at least in part because field hospitals reuse syringes and have poor sanitation practices during mass casualty events.

Then there are the areas in which Moscow is still struggling to learn at all—such as discipline and professionalism, long-neglected areas of combat power. As a result, the quality of Russia’s frontline personnel is still wildly variable. Some units have competent commanders, but others have leaders who are abusive or absent. Neighboring units fail to coordinate, which results in excess casualties during rotations or maneuvers. Units struggle to cohere when they are regenerated (as they often are; Russia’s military continues to suffer enormous losses). Some personnel experience violence and neglect in their own units. Others may receive draconian punishments for infractions, such as being tied to trees or left in open-air pits.

A Russian soldier learning to fly a drone, Rostov region, Russia, October 2024 Sergey Pivovarov / Reuters

Although they have not prevented combat forces from conducting most of their assigned tasks, these problems are certainly part of the reason Russia continues to underperform relative to its material and manpower advantages. Russian military psychologists have sounded the alarm, arguing that their country’s current efforts to assess soldiers’ psychological states and identify triggers of so-called deviant behavior (desertion, surrender, violence, or loss of combat effectiveness) are outdated. But the military apparatus itself has not internalized this message, choosing instead to focus on endurance and the execution of orders by any means necessary.

At least for now, challenges related to the nature of the war itself are also exceedingly difficult to resolve, even after they have been identified. The Russian command, for instance, is well aware that the Ukrainian battlefield is extensively monitored by drones and that it is thus nearly impossible to mass large numbers of forces for an armored assault without coming under attack. In military journals, strategists bluntly admit that Russia’s traditional formations have ceased “to serve as the main condition for achieving success.” The military has adapted by moving away from using large armored formations, increasingly embracing the small assault teams that are now central to military training. Russian officials have also added new drone units, assault detachments, and reconnaissance detachments to help overcome prepared Ukrainian defenses. Although these changes complicate Ukrainian countermeasures and occasionally lead to tactical Russian breakthroughs, they come with extremely high casualties, and these small units and detachments cannot seize and hold territory in the way that a large, massed force can. Nonetheless, the Kremlin demands that the war grind on in this manner.

Finally, Moscow’s track record on postwar learning is not particularly inspiring. After the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Russian war to help the Assad regime, the country’s military failed to learn or forgot its combat experience because acquired knowledge was not disseminated beyond the small groups that fought. The Russian armed forces also failed to implement critical lessons in the 1990s and early 2000s, when financial and leadership support for postwar reforms collapsed.

Russia realizes that warfare is changing, so its military must change, as well.

Yet none of these factors are present in the Russia of today. In fact, many of the learning processes now underway resemble those Moscow underwent after World War II. Given its current architecture, finances, and leadership, the Russian military appears poised for a comprehensive and intense learning period after the war in Ukraine ends. Officials are already discussing an extensive review of Russian operational concepts, military theory and strategy, combat regulations, and long-term procurement choices from now until the mid-2030s. Russian officials have stated that overcoming threats to large-scale armored assaults is a top research priority and that they are planning to alter the military’s force design and operational concepts to account for this challenge. From now on, the Russian military will likely create more UAVs and other uncrewed systems, which will supplement Moscow’s military power relative to NATO.

Russian leaders will further integrate UAVs, robots, and other autonomous systems across the force. In the military’s view, these technologies are the future of combat: Russian military experts have written that uncrewed systems will become the most important weapons of the twenty-first century. The world they envision will soon have swarms of autonomous drones that can overwhelm adversaries’ defenses, microdrones that are difficult to identify or stop, and drones that mimic birds, bugs, or other wildlife. The Russian military has been observing the Ukrainian military’s use of combat robots and is preparing to invest more in this area to help with tasks such as sentry duty, logistics, mining and demining, and undersea surveillance.

Russian military theorists and leaders also see artificial intelligence as essential to modern combat. The speed at which the technology can process growing amounts of digital information will allow commanders to make faster decisions. Moscow’s strategists fear that if Russian commanders do not have top-notch AI tools, they will be overwhelmed by adversaries that possess them. As a result, Russian experts are considering how to field AI decision-making systems and AI-enabled weapons by the early 2030s. The military is exploring how to use artificial intelligence in hypersonic missiles, air defense systems, and drones to improve performance. It is also thinking through how AI could speed the execution of analytic tasks and automate commands. Although this area is a national priority, investment in AI remains relatively modest, limiting Russia’s capabilities in the near term.

ADAPT OR PERISH

At the start of the invasion in 2022, the Russian military misjudged Ukraine’s capabilities and will to fight. Moscow’s equipment was not always up to the task, and some systems failed outright. Its soldiers were not trained for their assigned missions (or even told that they would be going to war, for that matter). Its command chain struggled to function.

But observers of the Russian military can no longer anchor its views to that period. In the years since, it has become a learning organization, and ongoing adaptations on the frontlines are only a piece of its educational activity. Moscow is acquiring and analyzing combat experience and disseminating the lessons it has learned throughout its force and defense ecosystem. It is systemically trying to capture and institutionalize its wartime experience and prepare for a postwar reform period. It realizes that the future character of warfare is changing, so the military must change, as well.

Russian leaders will face obstacles to their ambitions even after this conflict ends. International sanctions, for instance, will be a major impediment to their progress (provided those sanctions last). The Russian military’s ability to improve, after all, will depend on sustained financing, access to critical minerals, and the ability to produce top-of-the-line equipment—all things that sanctions make difficult. The Russian military will also require leadership support and the input of enough experienced veterans for planned reforms to take effect. And no matter what happens, Russia will be constrained by its traditional personnel weaknesses—poor discipline, for example—and an expensive procurement program that will sap its resources.

Moscow also worries that the United States and Europe will study its war and develop countermeasures to Russia’s newest capabilities and tactics. NATO must prove these fears to be justified. To match Russian capabilities and catch up in key areas like drone warfare, the United States and Europe must accelerate their analysis of the invasion of Ukraine and then adapt, including through the procurement of more UAVs and by adopting other innovations. Although several organizations in NATO countries are devoted to gathering lessons from the war, progress is uneven and siloed. These bodies’ efforts have not yet comprehensively altered their countries’ procurement plans, training regimens, or operational concepts.

To avoid falling behind, the United States and Europe need to start paying better attention—especially since Moscow is passing its knowledge along to its autocratic partners. But that means they must see the Russian military for what it is: flawed, but resilient in its own way. Its structural problems are very real and would be particularly acute in the event of a conflict with NATO. Yet its learning process is relentless. The Russian armed forces will further modify tactics, introduce new weapons, and expand as they begin a decadelong reconstitution effort. Experts are fond of saying that armies shape war. But war shapes armies, as well.

Foreign Affairs · More by Dara Massicot · October 8, 2025

23. AUKUS Anxiety: Unmet Expectations Could Fracture the U.S.-Australian Alliance

A sad and troubling conclusion.

Conclusion:

What Australian security elites want is the old American ally, the one to which they so often appealed as the guarantor of the rules-based order. And they want, more than anything else, ironclad guarantees that the transfer of the Virginia-class submarines will take place and that the United States will not retreat from Asia. They worry, however, that Australia’s much-prized access in Washington is slipping as Trump prioritizes great-power politics. For now, Australia is experiencing this loss as a trauma. The only way forward may be to accept that the United States today is simply not the ally Canberra is used to.

AUKUS Anxiety

Foreign Affairs · More by James Curran · October 8, 2025

Unmet Expectations Could Fracture the U.S.-Australian Alliance

James Curran

October 8, 2025

A U.S. submarine off the western coast of Australia, March 2025 Colin Murty / Reuters

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University. From 2023 to 2025, he was International Editor of the Australian Financial Review, where he remains a columnist. He was previously an Intelligence Analyst at Australia’s Office of National Assessments (now the Office of National Intelligence).

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Australia, like many U.S. allies, is struggling to deal with President Donald Trump. At issue is the country’s national security. Although China is by far Australia’s most important trade partner, it is also the country that Australia’s national security establishment perceives as its greatest threat. Australia’s fear of China is more than a century old and runs deep through every defense strategy that Australia has developed since the signing of the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) in 1951 and the resolution of its postwar relationship with Japan later that decade. The same fear drives Australia to keep the United States close today, even as tensions rise over the Trump administration’s economic and defense policies.

The glue now holding Australia and the United States together is AUKUS, a security arrangement that also includes the United Kingdom, formed in 2021. Parts of the agreement—including cooperation in quantum computing; artificial intelligence; cyber-, hypersonic, and undersea technology; and more—are moving ahead more or less as planned. But a key component of AUKUS could be in serious trouble. Australia is supposed to begin receiving a small fleet of nuclear-powered submarines from the United States in 2032, and then the three countries are supposed to jointly design and produce a new class of submarine. Practical and strategic concerns, however, have put the submarine purchase and the design project in jeopardy; in June, the Pentagon commissioned a review to determine whether the entire AUKUS arrangement is in line with Trump’s “America first” agenda. Its findings are expected later this October, coinciding with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington for his first substantive meeting with Trump.

At stake is more than the fate of a handful of submarines. AUKUS has become emblematic of the U.S.-Australian alliance as a whole, and it is now at risk of being weighed down by unfulfilled expectations on both sides. Whereas Australia wants constant reassurance from the U.S. administration that the agreement is moving ahead as planned, the United States wants firm pledges that any submarines it transfers to Australia will participate in a potential conflict with China. Neither country may be able to offer the other the confidence it seeks. Even if they choose to honor their original agreement, the uncertainty about the future of AUKUS has revealed a larger discrepancy between U.S. and Australian security strategies that the two allies will have to contend with in the years ahead.

Off The Fence

At its core, the AUKUS agreement is about nuclear-powered submarines. Although successive Australian governments have been reluctant to spell out publicly the strategic rationale for their acquisition, it is undoubtedly to enable Australia to assist the United States in any military contingency involving China in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. Australia’s current fleet of six diesel-powered submarines is aging and needs to be replaced soon; nuclear-powered submarines are faster and can conduct operations of longer duration. As part of the AUKUS deal, the United States committed to transfer three to five Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia by 2032, as long as Washington determines that their sale does not degrade U.S. undersea capabilities and that it remains in the American national interest. Australia has already contributed close to $2 billion to the U.S. submarine industrial production line to help speed construction. In addition, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed to jointly design a new class of submarine, the SSN-AUKUS. For reasons never adequately explained, this vessel will be more than 25 percent larger in size than the Virginia-class submarine and will require more crew. The first is to be built in the United Kingdom, with subsequent production moving to Australia.

Since its announcement in September 2021, AUKUS has taken on a larger meaning than a mere submarine deal. It has become the prism through which Australians think and talk about the relationship with the United States. As Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said in late 2023, when the U.S. Congress authorized key provisions of the agreement, AUKUS “will transform our ability to effectively deter, innovate, and operate together.” The agreement was a public relations coup when it was first signed, showcasing strong American support at a time of deep tension between Australia and China. In 2020, Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government had openly challenged Beijing’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy and called for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. In response, China slapped sweeping trade restrictions on Australia. Unbowed, Australia styled itself as the “tip of the spear” as it condemned China’s assertive behavior in Asia and pushed back against Beijing’s economic coercion.

After coming into office in May 2022, Albanese dramatically improved Australia’s relations with China, abandoning his predecessor’s megaphone diplomacy and emphasizing stability and, more recently, “constructive engagement” with Beijing. Yet he has still plowed ahead with AUKUS, worried that any sign of slipping support for the deal will be interpreted by political opponents as weakness on national security and a sign that his Labor Party cannot manage the U.S. alliance. His government’s endorsement can often seem tepid, however. Albanese himself tends to talk more about the local employment opportunities of AUKUS than about the strategic benefits, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong barely mentions the deal in public and is known to oppose it in private.

Washington, meanwhile, typically sees Australia’s close economic relations with China as reason to doubt its commitment to the alliance with the United States. This is particularly the case under Labor governments, as the party has a long history of opposing U.S. security policies, from the installation of American intelligence facilities in Australia in the early 1960s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In June 2022, a few months into its term, the Albanese government sought to assuage Washington’s concern by secretly dispatching a special envoy to the White House to reassure the Biden administration of Australia’s steadfastness. It worked. President Joe Biden’s Asia policy chief, Kurt Campbell, told European officials privately in late 2022 that AUKUS had been about “getting Australia off the fence.” With the deal signed, he said, “we have them locked in now for the next 40 years.” But officials in the Trump administration are not so convinced, interpreting Albanese’s attempts to patch up relations with China as disregard for the security challenges that Beijing poses.

Sticking Points

Consistent with its approach to other allies in Asia and Europe, the Trump administration is now pushing Australia, in public and in private, to do more. U.S. officials want Canberra to increase its defense spending—speaking in Singapore earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for Australia to raise spending from around 2.0 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP—and to openly commit its forces to help defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

At the same time that Washington increases its demands from Canberra, Australian officials have been informed that the United States may ultimately renege on the promises it made to its ally in the AUKUS deal. The sticking point is whether the U.S. industrial base can produce nuclear-powered submarines quickly enough to transfer some to Australia. Currently, the United States produces a new submarine every ten months; it needs to produce one every five to six months to keep its own fleet intact while also selling vessels to Australia. U.S. law does not require the president to approve the transfer of Virginia-class submarines to Canberra until the end of 2031, well after the end of Trump’s term. But Washington may act much sooner. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who is leading the Pentagon’s AUKUS review, has been openly skeptical of the agreement because of the critical role that submarines play in the United States’ own military plans in Asia. Speaking at the British think tank Policy Exchange last year, he asked, “Why are we giving away this crown jewel asset when we most need it?”

Concerns are also mounting in Australia. Canberra worries about the United States’ reliability as a security partner, fearing that Australia may be left with no submarine capability at all if AUKUS fails. Prominent critics of the agreement, including former Prime Ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull, along with various former submarine commanders and experts, have also raised practical concerns, including questions about Australian industry’s capacity to assume responsibility for building a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines by the early 2040s and, in the meantime, about whether a naval port under construction in Western Australia will be ready to host British and American nuclear-powered submarines when they are due to arrive on a military rotation in 2027. And according to recent opinion polling, public approval for AUKUS is wobbly: a Lowy Institute survey this year found that only around half of Australians think the deal will make Australia safer, and a Guardian Essential poll revealed that 60 percent of Australians think it unlikely that United States will ever deliver Virginia-class submarines.

Australia is increasingly uneasy about the cost of the deal, too, which is expected to be around $240 billion (and probably more) over the life of the agreement, through the late 2040s. Already, AUKUS is cannibalizing the budgets of Australia’s conventional forces as the government prioritizes funding for submarine production in the United States and the United Kingdom. So far, Albanese has been adamant that his government will raise Australian defense spending only to roughly 2.3 percent of GDP by 2032, an increase of less than half a percentage point, which will not be nearly enough to cover the additional expense of AUKUS. For at least the next several years, therefore, the Australian military could be unprepared to respond to any potential conflict. Indeed, it could do little more than what is has traditionally done: send a small deployment to operate alongside U.S. forces.

Stay Or Go?

The Trump administration could well choose to keep AUKUS intact for now, leaving the decision about selling the Virginia-class submarines to the next president. It could determine that Australia has paid into the U.S. industrial base sufficiently and that the benefits of access to joint intelligence and military facilities across Australia are valuable enough to allow the deal to proceed. Washington could conceivably prefer to lose a few submarines—sending them to Australia rather than reserving them for American use in a fight with China over Taiwan, for instance—rather than upset Canberra, which the United States needs on board if it is to use Australia as a base for U.S. force projection in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Preserving the terms of AUKUS, however, would not resolve Australia’s problems. The submarines may not arrive by 2032, a failure that would cast an ominous cloud over U.S.-Australian relations, feeding doubts about whether the Trump administration and its successors remain committed to keeping a firm military footprint in Asia. And even a prompt delivery of the vessels in the early 2030s would likely come with conditions that some of the submarines remain under U.S. command, since the United States will want to be able to use those vessels in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. Canberra would, in effect, be paying an eye-watering cost to provide auxiliary forces for the U.S. Navy, not gaining sovereign defense capabilities that it can command as it wishes. Such an outcome would make AUKUS seem like an immense strategic blunder: Australia would have spent years backing (and funding) the United States without receiving what it expected from the deal.

If Washington instead concludes that the enormous challenges it faces in expanding its own submarine fleet prevent it from honoring the promised transfer to Australia, the consequences could be just as dire. Australia’s faith in the United States’ reliability as an ally, already rocked by Trump, would be shaken even more, and the tremors would be felt in Manila, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo, too. Other forms of military cooperation with the United States may continue, including rotations of U.S. and British submarines at the base in Western Australia (assuming it is completed more or less on schedule), but the dark shadow cast over the relationship may lead to resentment toward the growing U.S. military presence in the country, which includes the stationing of B-52 bombers in northern Australia. And after wasting billions of dollars, Canberra could end up with shattered hopes of a defense industrial boom from production of a new class of submarines and no domestic submarine capability at all. Australia’s existing fleet of submarines is aging and requires costly, time-consuming refits to extend its service; only one of six vessels is currently operational. Replacing them will be no easier. Submarine suppliers are few, and Canberra has already burned its bridges with one of them—the French firm that Australia publicly dumped before AUKUS was announced. The possibility of Australia’s invasion by a hostile power remains remote, of course. But with no genuine submarine capability, long-standing national anxieties about the country’s geopolitical vulnerability—paranoia about China in particular—will likely intensify.

Uneasy Allies

Whether AUKUS succeeds or not, the debate about its future has revealed a fundamental disconnect between Australia and the United States. Washington has long assumed, but left unsaid, that Australia would join the United States in a potential war with China over Taiwan by providing bases for intelligence gathering and by conducting other military activities. That assumption has become explicit: last year, the Republican chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, referred to Australia as “the central base of the Indo-Pacific to counter the China threat.” Yet even as AUKUS deepens Australia’s defense integration with the United States, neither major political party in Australia nor the country’s broader foreign policy community has confirmed in such stark terms that the alliance with Washington requires a firm commitment to participate directly in a war with China.

Australian officials do have an interest in Taiwan’s future, to be sure. Beyond concern about Taiwan itself, Australia does not want China further emboldened to assert itself all over East Asia and Southeast Asia. Yet Australia has a strong interest in avoiding war, too, given that any conflict could entail severe economic disruption because of the country’s dependence on the China market.

What Australian security elites want is the old American ally, the one to which they so often appealed as the guarantor of the rules-based order. And they want, more than anything else, ironclad guarantees that the transfer of the Virginia-class submarines will take place and that the United States will not retreat from Asia. They worry, however, that Australia’s much-prized access in Washington is slipping as Trump prioritizes great-power politics. For now, Australia is experiencing this loss as a trauma. The only way forward may be to accept that the United States today is simply not the ally Canberra is used to.

Foreign Affairs · More by James Curran · October 8, 2025

24. Vol. 38, No. 8: Department of War (WSJ Style guide)

Excerpt:

The WSJ stylebook has now come to peace with the issue: Because the “War” name, by the government’s own admission, is a secondary name and not official—only Congress could make it that—we will still use Defense Department as the default. But articles will certainly acknowledge the rebrand as pertinent. (Journal reporters have a lot of experience in rebrandings by companies, so they know how to acknowledge legal names and brand names deftly.) And as alw

Vol. 38, No. 8: Department of War

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/vol-38-no-8-department-of-war-b4d189c1

Oct. 7, 2025 7:54 pm ET

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(8 min)

‘War Department‘ used to be a common phrase in Wall Street Journal headlines—like these from 1913 to 1942. Photo: WSJ; Joshua Roberts/Reuters

A label battle

Is it the Defense Department or the Department of War?

Some readers grew defensive, so to speak, when a recent Wall Street Journal article failed to mention that the Defense Department is now rebranded with a secondary moniker from the past—the Department of War—according to a Trump executive order. The Journal had, in fact, mentioned Department of War in some previous articles after the president signed the order, but not all.

The WSJ stylebook has now come to peace with the issue: Because the “War” name, by the government’s own admission, is a secondary name and not official—only Congress could make it that—we will still use Defense Department as the default. But articles will certainly acknowledge the rebrand as pertinent. (Journal reporters have a lot of experience in rebrandings by companies, so they know how to acknowledge legal names and brand names deftly.) And as always, the Pentagon also remains an acceptable second reference.

This entry has been added to the WSJ stylebook:

Defense Department/Department of War

We refer to the Defense Department and defense secretary (which is uppercase directly before a name), and acknowledge as pertinent the Trump administration’s revival of Department of War/Secretary of War as a secondary name. (The War label isn’t official unless Congress approves it.) The acknowledgment need be used only once in a given article. For example: …the company said it has a contract with the Department of War, referring to the unofficial name that the Pentagon has revived for the Defense Department.

The whole thing sent us to the Journal archives, where Department of War used to turn up hundreds of times—because it was the official name from 1789 through the end of World War II.

Looking at all those old “War” headlines and articles reminded us that in Journal style, our references could be to the War Department, as we do with other U.S. federal departments (Education Department, not Department of Education, and of course Defense Department, not Department of Defense). In the old Journal clips, first references in articles sometimes referred to the Department of War, but the headlines and second references in articles would shorten it to War Department. These days, we would likewise stick with just the latter in all uses, should the revived “War” name become official or otherwise be used exclusively.

‘A bunch of…’

A recent article reported that a bunch of AI-savvy 20-somethings are making $1 million a year.

That’s certainly how we talk in real life, but a reader made a valid point that a bunch doesn’t tell us just how large a group we’re talking about. It’s a breezy throwaway word, like the empty word countless (“there are countless instances of…”). As always, we should cite facts and figures to support our story angles, and be specific.

‘Gonna’

Speaking of casual words: After a feature headline used gonna to mean going to, a reader chided us for losing our class. We don’t want to hamstring headline writers, but the stylebook has had an entry on the subject for some time. We don’t ban “gonna” entirely, but there has to be a good reason for it—perhaps in quoting a child in a feature or an adult in a situation in which everyone would likely say it that way. “I’m gonna pass out!” the marathoner screamed.

In the case of the recent headline, “going to” would have read just as well, and that should be the default for any headline or article. See quotations in the news in the stylebook.

Rulings & reminders

Uppercase God when referring to a single deity. So that means God willing, as well as “Oh, my God.” But not gods willing, if someone ever uses that version of the phrase. The stylebook entry on God, Lord, gods and goddesses now includes more examples to make it all clearer.
And while we’re at it, be sure to uppercase Bible when referring to Scriptures. (The stylebook’s creator, Paul Martin, cheekily pointed out an exception, in the Bible entry: “Lowercase bible as a nonreligious term: The stylebook is our bible.”)
Photo captions take single quotes. An actor from ‘Home Alone.’
“Transgender ideology” is often used as a pejorative. We don’t use the phrase in our own voice, but we can quote others who might do so, often in a political sense.
Atacms, not all caps, in our style, since it is pronounceable (attack-’ems). It stands for Army Tactical Missile System.
Ampal, not all-caps AMPAL, for the aluminum-powder producer.
Yelloh Village is a campsite chain. The company brands itself as Yelloh! Village but we go without exclamation points in company names.
With all the USA 250 coverage the Journal is putting out, note that the Revolution is uppercase when using the shorthand for the American Revolution.
Amazon.com, not just Amazon, is still the legal name of the company and the stock. So use the full name in most cases on first reference.
Continue to watch it with “times more.” We continue to run corrections for the ambiguous math of saying something is, say, four times more (or four times bigger), when in fact it is four times as much as. Example: Twelve is four times as much as three, but only three times bigger. See the stylebook entry for times smaller/times more.
Is “school choice” a political label to avoid? As a movement, it’s descriptive. There certainly is a school-choice movement. But for specific situations, avoid the general term when possible in favor of what we’re talking about: charter schools, magnets, vouchers, homeschooling, private schools, etc.

Heads above the rest

“Vacations for the Nerd in You,” by Larry Rout.
“Very Cold War: Brutal Arctic Conditions Are Testing U.S. and Allied Forces,” by Dan Michaels.
“Great Dane! This Villa Is Denmark’s Priciest Home,” by Dave Bamundo.

Quiz (find the flubs)

Lanza said the staff in this White House wants to follow what Trump says, not try and change him.
Leaving behind the few other visitors, I clamored up a trail to the highest Venetian battlement.
Trump also said that departmental stationary would be changed.
Both justice and revenge, Bacon recognized, involve our punishing those whom we believe have wronged us.
UBI [universal basic income] is one of the AI boom’s hottest acronyms.

Answers

To try to not and.
Clamber is the spelling for a climb; clamor is a noise. She clambered up the hill and heard a clamor from people below.
Stationery, that is. The classic reminder for this is that the stationery spelling, which applies for writing paper, has an “e” like in envelope. Stationary is standing still.
Those who we believe have wronged us. We all sometimes reach for a whom, trying to be safe, when who is correct. One trick is to realize that an attribution like “we believe” can be ignored in making the who/whom choice. So, we wouldn’t write: those whom have wronged us.
Not an acronym (which is pronounced as a single word, such as Unicef). Instead, we can refer to UBI, as we do for SEC or NCAA, as either an initialism or simply an abbreviation.

Send questions or comments to William Power at william.power@wsj.com.

ISSN 1054-7041

25. The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here

Conclusion:

Military officers are human beings, not Vulcans or robots. Even the most virtuous young officer may tremble at the idea of refusing a direct order—especially one from the president of the United States. Others may be tempted to abandon their oath, either by ideology or a misplaced sense of obedience, and they should recall Hyten’s warning from 2017: “If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.” Most American military personnel, however, need no reminder of their constitutional duty. But they do need some reassurance that they have support from their chain of command to resist illegal orders. And the rest of us, whether we’re elected officials or ordinary citizens, should do everything we can to let our fellow Americans in uniform know that if they risk their careers and even their freedom to protect the Constitution, we will stand with them.

The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here

The leaders of the U.S. military may soon face a terrible decision.

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic · Tom Nichols · October 7, 2025

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

To capture a democratic nation, authoritarians must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military. President Donald Trump and his circle of would-be autocrats have made rapid progress toward seizing these institutions and detaching them from the Constitution and rule of law. The intelligence community has effectively been muzzled, and the nation’s top lawyers and cops are being purged and replaced with loyalist hacks.

Only the military remains outside Trump’s grip. Despite the firing of several top officers—and Trump’s threat to fire more—the U.S. armed forces are still led by generals and admirals whose oath is to the Constitution, not the commander in chief. But for how long?

Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army. In his first term, Trump regularly violated the sacred American tradition of the military’s political neutrality, but people around him—including retired and active-duty generals such as James Mattis, John Kelly, and Mark Milley—restrained some of his worst impulses. Now no one is left to stop him: The president learned from his first-term struggles and this time has surrounded himself with a Cabinet of sycophants and ideologues rather than advisers, especially those at the Pentagon. He has declared war on Chicago; called Portland, Oregon, a “war zone”; and referred to his political opponents as “the enemy from within.” Trump clearly wants to use military power to exert more control over the American people, and soon, top U.S.-military commanders may have to decide whether they will refuse such orders from the commander in chief. The greatest crisis of American civil-military relations in modern history is now under way.

I write these words with great trepidation. When I was a professor at the Naval War College, I gave lectures to American military officers about the sturdiness of civil-military relations in the United States, a remarkable historical achievement that has allowed the most powerful military in the world to serve democracy without being a threat to it. I so revered this system that I went to Moscow just before the fall of the U.S.S.R. and told an audience of Soviet military officers that they should look to the American military as a model for how to disentangle themselves from the Communist Party and Kremlin politics. I regularly reminded both my military students and civilian audiences that they had good reason to have faith in American institutions and the constitutional loyalty of U.S. civilian and military leaders.

This new and dangerous moment has arrived for many reasons, including Trump’s antics in front of young soldiers and sailors, through which he has succeeded in pulling many of them into displays of partisan behavior that are both an insult to American civil-military traditions and a violation of military regulations. Senior military leaders should have stepped in to prevent Trump from turning addresses at Fort Bragg and Naval Station Norfolk into political rallies; the silence of the Army and Navy secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and some top generals and admirals is appalling. To their credit, those same officers listened impassively as Trump and Hegseth subjected them to political rants during a meeting at Quantico last week. But young enlisted people and their immediate superiors take their cues from the top, and one day of decorum from the high command cannot reverse Trump’s influence on the rank and file.

Trump’s rhetoric in his speeches to the military has been awful—he has ridiculed former commanders in chief, castigated sitting elected officials, and told the members of America’s armed forces that other Americans are their enemies. But his actions are worse. In deploying troops to American cities, he has set up a confrontation in which military commanders may soon have to choose between obeying the president and obeying the law. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut—a conservative Trump appointee—wrote last week when she blocked Trump’s attempt to send troops to Portland. The White House aide Stephen Miller likely foreshadowed Trump’s next moves, including possibly ignoring such rulings, when he lashed out at Immergut’s decision. Miller, a man who hates being called a fascist, made the fascistic accusation that a “large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is being “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”

Trump’s attempt to militarize America’s cities is still being tested in court. But he has already issued other orders that are likely illegal. The president has determined—on his own—that he can go to war against “narco-terrorists,” and he has furthermore decided that he can order the military to blow up these suspected drug runners at will. Several boats have been destroyed and many people have been killed, but neither American law nor international law (including agreements signed by the United States) allow the president to declare a fugazy drug war and then direct the summary execution of people who are not in actual hostilities with the United States and who pose no imminent threat to American lives.

The Pentagon keeps fulfilling these orders, but reports are already surfacing that some military commanders are trying to figure out if they face legal exposure for acting as Trump’s personal hit squad. Their questions are likely more difficult to answer since Trump and Hegseth fired the top military lawyers who would have helped field such queries.

Trump, of course, doesn’t care all that much about Venezuelan speedboats or costumed pranksters in Portland. He cares about power, which is why he is determined to flex military muscle on the streets of American cities. As opposition grows and his popularity falls, Trump may be tempted to issue orders to the military that will be aimed at suppressing dissent, or disrupting elections, or detaining political figures; he has already floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, which could enable such actions. He may even become desperate enough to launch a foreign war—as he seems to be trying to do right now with Venezuela. If more of these orders come, how should the leaders of America’s armed forces respond?

Back in 2017, Air Force General John Hyten, then the head of the U.S. Strategic Command (which controls the American nuclear arsenal), was asked what he would do if a president gave him an illegal order. His answer now sounds quaint:

He’ll tell me what to do, and if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I’m gonna say, “Mr. President, that’s illegal.” And guess what he’s going to do? He’s gonna say, “What would be legal?” And we’ll come up with options of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.

Unfortunately, it is that complicated, especially now that the president has been blessed by the Supreme Court with monarchical immunity. Nothing would prevent Trump from saying: Forget the lawyers. Do it. I’ll cover you. (After all, he’s already said that to his faithful rally goers, and he put that promise into action when he pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists.) Even if one officer declines an illegal order, Trump can just keep firing people until he gets to another officer who is enough of a coward, or opportunist, or true MAGA believer, to carry out the order. The officer who finally says yes after the others say no would bring shame upon the U.S. armed forces, endanger U.S. citizens, and undermine the Constitution, but eventually, Trump will find that person.

This is why America’s senior military officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, must approach Trump now and make clear to him that they will not obey illegal orders to act against American citizens or disrupt the American political process. (They should not bother talking to Hegseth, who has no real political agency and would most likely do whatever he is told to do by the White House.) Congress, so far, has been useless in restraining Trump: The Democrats are too timid, and the Republicans are too compromised. Only by standing together can the senior military officials warn Trump away from leading America into a full-blown civil-military confrontation.

Military officers are human beings, not Vulcans or robots. Even the most virtuous young officer may tremble at the idea of refusing a direct order—especially one from the president of the United States. Others may be tempted to abandon their oath, either by ideology or a misplaced sense of obedience, and they should recall Hyten’s warning from 2017: “If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.” Most American military personnel, however, need no reminder of their constitutional duty. But they do need some reassurance that they have support from their chain of command to resist illegal orders. And the rest of us, whether we’re elected officials or ordinary citizens, should do everything we can to let our fellow Americans in uniform know that if they risk their careers and even their freedom to protect the Constitution, we will stand with them.

The Atlantic · Tom Nichols · October 7, 2025

26. America’s Attack on the Enemy Within: Victory for the Dark Quad’s Political Warfare Strategy

America’s Attack on the Enemy Within: Victory for the Dark Quad’s Political Warfare Strategy

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/08/americas-attack-on-the-enemy/

by David Maxwell

10.08.2025 at 06:00am

President Trump’s 30 September 2025 call to “deploy the military to American cities to fight the enemy within,” together with the Department of War’s institutional steps to teach irregular-warfare methods for homeland application, hands a strategic and symbolic, victory to our authoritarian adversaries. The rising public tolerance for political violence, captured in a new PBS NewsHour / NPR / Marist poll, demonstrates a dangerous domestic trajectory: if Americans convince themselves that violence may be necessary to “set the country on track,” they may be producing the very “enemy within” that political leaders claim to fear. By normalizing domestic militarization and securitization of political conflict, the United States risks validating the “Dark Quad’s” playbook and accelerating the inward turn adversaries hope to cause. This paper offers an alternative path that defends the republic without surrendering democratic and American norms.

The Twin Developments: Rhetoric and Institutional Change

On 30 September 2025, along with the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, President Trump addressed an unprecedented assembly of senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico and framed part of the national threat as an “enemy within.” Trump advocated that the military use U.S. cities as a “training ground.” While this could be interpreted as hyperbole, reporting and transcript excerpts make clear that the speech urged a closer marriage of domestic security and military resources. This message, when issued from the White House podium, lowers political and bureaucratic barriers that previously separated homeland governance from combat operations. Almost concurrently, the Department of War’s Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) launched a course titled Irregular Warfare Approaches for the Homeland, designed to teach counter-threat-network, counter-threat-finance, and other irregular-warfare practices oriented toward the domestic context. The IWC describes the course as a practical, self-paced curriculum intended to help homeland security professionals and military personnel understand and counter hybrid threats on U.S. soil. The combination of presidential rhetoric and institutional education is consequential: public political signaling can alter norms and expectations, while institutional training converts rhetoric into doctrine and habit.

The PBS poll: A Wake-up Call and Validation for Adversaries

On October 1, 2025 PBS NewsHour (reporting on a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll) found that nearly a third of Americans now say political violence may be necessary to “get the country back on track,” up substantially from 19 percent in April 2024. The poll’s authors and experts warn that rising acceptance of political violence is translating into actual attacks, a trend made more alarming by recent high-profile killings by the extreme left and extreme right. These results should be a wakeup call. Political violence is not the answer. Is the political divide in the U.S. and the heated rhetoric from the extreme left and right creating the “enemy within?” Is the rhetoric of “enemy within” a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will we normalize political violence? These are questions that leaders, the press, and citizens must urgently ask because the data makes the answers urgent. When a substantial minority of the population moves from grievance to toleration of violence, the probability of violent escalation, and the likelihood that political elites will exploit such fear, increases. That creates a fertile environment for adversaries’ political warfare strategies to bear fruit.

Why the “Dark Quad” – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – Benefits

The authoritarian quartet, or axis, labeled here as the “Dark Quad” is doctrinally and operationally invested in political warfare. In China, the CCP’s Three Warfares (psychological, legal, and media warfare) and the broader Unrestricted Warfare concept emphasize non-kinetic means to shape adversary perceptions and political will. Russia’s “new generation” warfare doctrines emphasize inner decay, information dominance, and proxy and hybrid operations designed to exacerbate political cleavages. Iran and North Korea have long practiced low-footprint, partner-based forms of political and unconventional warfare to coerce and influence. Each of these actors seeks to convert social division within democratic societies into strategic advantage. Unrestricted Warfare and axis doctrine make the objective explicit: exploit an opponent’s political plurality and legal constraints to achieve strategic goals without conventional battle.

This is not abstract theory, it is the playbook the “Dark Quad” applies daily through disinformation, influence operations, and proxy networks.

Congress Recognized Unconventional Warfare Risk in 2016

Congress in the FY-2016 NDAA directed the then-Secretary of Defense to develop a strategy to counter unconventional warfare threats. Sec. 1097 required the Department of Defense to articulate activities that constitute unconventional warfare, clarify DoD roles for indication and warning, and recommend improvements in authorities and interagency coordination. That congressional mandate reflects a sober judgment: unconventional threats are real and the U.S. must prepare. But Congress also implied the need for careful role definition and civil-military boundaries; the statute’s logic expects a whole-of-government solution, not militarization of ordinary politics.

If only the then-Department of Defense had executed Congress’ intent and developed a strategy to counter the “Dark Quad’s” unconventional warfare.

Does Normalization of Domestic Militarization Become Self-fulfilling?

Political leaders and the public should ask” “Do we hate fellow Americans more than we fear the Dark Quad? Who are the real enemies?” These questions highlight the central moral and political crisis we face. The risk is that political and security elites will treat fellow citizens as enemies until they behave like enemies. This is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy: labeling a group as a security threat invites surveillance, exclusion, and coercion. These measures produce resentment, radicalization, and, in some cases, violent reaction, which then validates the original label. Adversaries read and harvest these dynamics. The PBS poll is not only evidence of a domestic trend; it is a strategic datapoint adversaries will cite and amplify. When foreign propagandists observe that a high proportion of Americans say violence may be necessary, they interpret it as confirmation that their political warfare investments are working.

Certainly, Americans have grievances. That is a fundamental political condition. Political leaders must sufficiently address grievances or face rejection on election day. However, what we see in America today are not political grievances requiring compromise to reduce. We see exaggerated grievances. We see those grievances magnified by our adversaries through social media in very effective ways that cause Americans to blame those with different political beliefs for the perceived ills of the nation. In short, we see “exaggerated grievances communicated well,” the effect of which is to create wide political divisions among Americans. This is the essence of irregular, unconventional, political, revolutionary, and insurgent warfare. Our actions are creating success for our enemies.

Defensive Alternatives that Avoid Yielding Strategic Advantage

There are four fundamental steps that political leaders and citizens alike must appreciate. First, we must recognize that the threat is external and that our adversaries are executing a political warfare strategy against us. Second, we must understand that the threat strategy is to exploit normal political grievances by exaggerating them to subvert the American political structure and society writ large. Third, we must expose these strategies to inoculate the American public against them and render them neutered. Finally, we must attack the strategies of the “Dark Quad” with a superior political warfare strategy much as we did during the Cold War.

While critics will say the Cold War strategies and activities are an anachronism, the best evidence on their effectiveness comes from China’s Xinhua Institute. It recently publish a report entitled, “Colonization of the Mind—The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare.” Although it is written to criticize past U.S. efforts, in reality it is describing how effective US activities have been and these are actually a threat to China in the cognitive or human domain.

Here are specific actions to respond to unconventional threats without conceding victory to the “Dark Quad”:

Preserve civilian primacy and legal limits. Reaffirm and, if necessary, tighten Posse Comitatus boundaries. Make it explicit that the U.S. military does not, and will not, serve as an instrument of partisan political control. Any support to domestic authorities must be narrowly authorized, temporary, and under civilian oversight. Congress’s Sec. 1097 should be implemented through a civil-centered, interagency structure.
Treat law enforcement as the lead with DoD only in support. Maintain law enforcement responsibility for domestic crime and political violence, using DoD capabilities only for technical support (forensics, logistics, cyber capabilities) under strict legal and oversight frameworks.
Invest in civic resilience and strategic communications. Counter political warfare narratives with credible, accurate and truthful nonpartisan information campaigns, support local civic institutions, and fund media-literacy programs. Build rapid, transparent rebuttal capacity that does not censor speech but rather inoculates communities against disinformation.
Reform training and doctrine. Keep IWC and related education but reorient their content toward legal constraints, civil-military relations, and resilience rather than any perception of “combatting citizens.” Courses must explicitly teach the strategic costs of domestic militarization and how adversary political warfare exploits it. Develop an American way of political warfare.
Public transparency and de-escalatory political leadership. Political leaders should speak out against political violence, disavow punitive militarized rhetoric, and demonstrate a commitment to democratic contestation. Politicians must ask and answer the central question publicly: who are the real enemies?

All Americans must understand that calling fellow Americans the enemy or participating in political violence against fellow Americans or the U.S. government and its institutions is exactly the effect the “Dark Quad” is trying to achieve. Anyone who does so is complicit in the enemy’s political warfare strategy either wittingly or at the least as a “useful idiot.”

Conclusion: A Strategic and Moral Imperative

The PBS poll is a clarion call. Rising public tolerance for political violence, coupled with political leaders’ calls to use military force at home and the institutionalization of irregular-warfare concepts for the homeland, does more than raise alarms; it delivers a strategic gift to authoritarian adversaries. The “enemy within” frame may rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy if policymakers, military leaders, and institutions fail to draw a bright line between defending the homeland and waging war on fellow citizens.

We must respond vigorously to foreign political warfare threats, but we must do so on terms that preserve the character of our federal democratic republic. Doing otherwise will hand the “Dark Quad” a victory earned not by their missiles or money, but by our own erosion of the democratic norms and institutions that make American power legitimate and durable.

Although the Trump administration has not published a new National Security Strategy, we should hope that one paragraph from the 2017 strategy will be reprised. All Americans across the political spectrum should rally around these words and focus on our external enemies versus our internal political divisions:

A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation.

About The Author

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout

A Chinese blockade would quickly deplete resources on an island that depends on imported fuel

Quick Summary

Israeli-Palestinian peace isn’t a naive ideal. Here’s why I have cautious hope | Jeremy Ben-Ami

Ted Cruz Wants to Make It Easier to Sue the Government for Censorship

Senator says he hopes the reaction to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension might help his new bill find bipartisan support

Quick Summary

How the US funded Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran

Israel needs US financing for war

Bipartisan support

US always finds billions to assist Israel

Civilian Tech Is Powering China’s Military

Beijing’s gains could eventually erode Washington’s battlefield advantage.

Read More

China’s Military Is Now Leading

How Primed for War Is China?

Excerpts:

Here is What the Secretary of War Should Have Said to His General and Flag Officers

Conclusion

About The Author

Remarks by Colonel Marco J. Lyons at the United States Army War College School of Strategic Landpower (SSL) National Security Seminar (NSS), Carlisle Barracks

About The Author

I Was a Hostage in Gaza. This is How I Survived.

UK SOF Exercise Chameleon 25-2

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How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day

Opinion | The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

Israel got complacent, thinking war would never come. Are we doing the same with Taiwan?

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death

Cubans Could Soon Become Russia’s Largest Foreign Fighting Force

The Lure and Deception Behind the Cuban Deployment

An Axis of Authoritarian Support

Learning From the War

The limits of Taiwan’s 'silicon shield' - Asia Times

Pentagon nominee John Noh hints at Aukus changes, says Taiwan should ‘pay its way’

US pick for Indo-Pacific security role tells senators that he strongly supports President Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ foreign policy

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3328234/pentagon-nominee-john-noh-hints-aukus-changes-says-taiwan-should-pay-its-way?utm_

US Congress urged to preserve stability in Indo-Pacific and curb China’s Taiwan game plan

Delegates maintain Beijing’s grey-zone campaign against Taiwan is a deliberate strategy designed to erode confidence, and it must fail to deliver any political concessions

https://www.scmp.com/news/us/diplomacy/article/3328169/congress-urged-preserve-stability-indo-pacific-and-curb-chinas-taiwan-game-plan?utm

America’s Soybean Farmers Are Panicking Over the Loss of Chinese Buyers

China hasn’t booked any U.S. soybean purchases in months; farmers warn of ‘bloodbath’

China halts US soybean imports to hit Trump’s MAGA supporters - Asia Times

Is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Just a Talking Shop?

The 12 Days of War That Didn’t Ignite the Middle East or the World

How to Train Your Dragon: Understanding China’s Growing Web of Combined Military Exercises and Security Relationships - Modern War Institute

How Russia Recovered

What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

Dara Massicot

THE LEARNING-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

GEARING UP

WRITTEN IN BLOOD

THE LIMITS OF LEARNING

ADAPT OR PERISH

AUKUS Anxiety

Unmet Expectations Could Fracture the U.S.-Australian Alliance

James Curran

Off The Fence

Sticking Points

Stay Or Go?

Uneasy Allies

Vol. 38, No. 8: Department of War

A label battle

‘A bunch of…’

‘Gonna’

Rulings & reminders

Heads above the rest

Quiz (find the flubs)

Answers

The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here

America’s Attack on the Enemy Within: Victory for the Dark Quad’s Political Warfare Strategy

The Twin Developments: Rhetoric and Institutional Change

The PBS poll: A Wake-up Call and Validation for Adversaries

Why the “Dark Quad” – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – Benefits

Congress Recognized Unconventional Warfare Risk in 2016

Does Normalization of Domestic Militarization Become Self-fulfilling?

Defensive Alternatives that Avoid Yielding Strategic Advantage

Conclusion: A Strategic and Moral Imperative

About The Author