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Quotes of the Day:
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
– Marie Curie
“The sane man is neither deceived by others nor by himself.”
–Marcus Aurelius
"I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
– Robert A. Heinlein
1. Hundreds of Hamas Fighters Are Stuck in Tunnels in Israeli-Controlled Gaza
2. US-China war will come down to protecting or destroying Guam
3. The strange paradox of Chinese economic decline
4. What Lithuania Can Teach America About Resilience
5. Taiwan, want to stop the gray-zone? Put your money where your mouth is.
6. SOF News: Competition in the Arctic
7. Xi’s latest moves show corruption is still a big military problem
8. The Hard Part: Why U.S. Army Civil Affairs Are Essential
9. Philippines tests new battle plan for fending off invaders alone
10. More Arrests Are Made in Alleged ISIS ‘Pumpkin’ Terrorist Plot
11. Trump Expresses Reservations Over Strikes in Venezuela to Top Aides
12. How tariffs ate American foreign policy
13. Russian Black Sea Port Halts Fuel Exports After Ukrainian Strike
14. A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age
15. The False Choice at the Heart of Netflix’s Nuclear War Thriller, “A House of Dynamite”
16. Review of “The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine’s Foreign Legion” by Colin Freeman
17. Media, Martyrdom, & Manipulation
18. How War in Taiwan Ends
19. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Manuals
1. Hundreds of Hamas Fighters Are Stuck in Tunnels in Israeli-Controlled Gaza
Summary:
Hundreds of Hamas fighters trapped in tunnels in Israeli-controlled Gaza threaten the cease-fire. Israel rejects safe passage, demanding surrender or elimination; Hamas seeks evacuation. Estimates range 100–300 fighters, implicated in attacks killing three Israeli troops. The U.S. pushes stabilization force and disarmament, but talks stall amid hostages and airstrike fallout.
Comment: I do not think we appreciate both how valuable tunnels are to the enemy or how dangerous they are to those who must clear them. Especially in what is apparently such an extensive tunnel network in Gaza. I guess we did not learn from tunnels of Cu CHi in Vietnam (which were very dangerous and extensive as well - https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/the-problem-of-the-cu-chi-tunnels-in-the-vietnam-war/ ).
Hundreds of Hamas Fighters Are Stuck in Tunnels in Israeli-Controlled Gaza
WSJ
The presence of the militants, who have killed three Israeli troops, is threatening to unravel the cease-fire
By
Dov Lieber
in Tel Aviv and
Summer Said
in Dubai
Updated Nov. 6, 2025 5:43 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hamas-fighters-are-stuck-in-tunnels-in-israeli-controlled-gaza-1ea8a2cd
To secure Gaza, Washington has envisaged the deployment of an international stabilization force. Amir Levy/Getty Images
- Hundreds of Hamas fighters are trapped in tunnels under Israeli-controlled Gaza, posing a threat to the cease-fire.
- Israel and Hamas disagree on the fate of the trapped fighters; Israel wants surrender or elimination, the militant group seeks safe passage.
- The situation complicates the cease-fire’s next phase, which includes an international stabilization force and Hamas disarmament.
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.
- Hundreds of Hamas fighters are trapped in tunnels under Israeli-controlled Gaza, posing a threat to the cease-fire.
A detachment of Israeli engineering troops was demolishing tunnels behind the withdrawal line in Gaza last month when Hamas militants sprang from a hidden shaft, fired an antitank missile toward their excavator and killed two soldiers.
A little over a week earlier, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Israel responded to the deadly encounter with a round of airstrikes on Gaza that killed dozens of people.
The early test of the fragile truce pointed to a bigger problem: Hundreds of armed Hamas fighters are trapped in tunnels under the Israeli-controlled side of Gaza, and willing to take shots at Israel.
The situation is the result of Israeli efforts that began in May to flush out militants and destroy Hamas’s extensive tunnel system where the group has hidden fighters, hostages and weapons throughout the conflict. The strategy was to cut off sections of the underground web from one another. But Israel’s partial withdrawal under the U.S.-brokered cease-fire last month has left militants who remain behind the line trapped underground with no means of escape and dwindling supplies.
Israeli soldiers carry the coffin of a reservist killed in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, during his funeral in Jerusalem last month. Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images
The fighters’ predicament and the possibility of further clashes posed by it constitute one of the biggest threats to the cease-fire. What to do with the besieged militants has become a sticking point in negotiations, Arab officials say. Hamas wants Israel to provide the fighters with safe passage into Hamas-controlled territory.
Israel wants them to surrender or to kill them.
“Israel’s policy in Gaza is clear: the IDF is acting to destroy the tunnels and eliminate Hamas terrorists without any restrictions within the yellow area under our control,” Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X on Wednesday, referring to the Israeli military by its initials.
Washington wants to advance as quickly as possible to the next stage of the cease-fire, which envisages the deployment of an international stabilization force meant to secure Gaza, and the disarmament of Hamas. Both those aspects of the deal remain contentious.
Israeli and Arab officials estimate there are anywhere between 200 to 300 men underground. Hamas told mediators the number is closer to 100. Some may have already died from starvation, Arab officials say, as food supplies have dwindled. Most are stuck in the southernmost city of Rafah, but some are also in parts of central and northern Gaza where Israel also maintains control, Israeli and Arab officials say, including neighborhoods east of Khan Younis, Beit Hanoun and Shuja’iyya.
In total, those fighters have killed three Israeli troops and injured several others, incidents that sparked waves of airstrikes that left over 145 Gazans dead, Palestinian health authorities said, without specifying how many were combatants.
Hamas has said it lost the ability to communicate with the men in March. The militant group said it didn’t order the attacks on Israeli troops. But on Sunday, as talks to free the militants advanced, Hamas said it found a way to communicate with them, according to the Arab officials.
Israeli military officials allege that Hamas has been able to communicate with the trapped fighters all along, as tunnels are equipped with communications systems. While the officials say they don’t believe Hamas ordered the attacks on troops, they say that Hamas had the option to order the men to stand down as Israeli troops approached their positions.
Hamas warned mediators before the cease-fire began that its trapped fighters might prefer to engage with Israeli troops rather than die of hunger or surrender, the Arab officials said.
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Talks to free the trapped Hamas fighters began last week, after the U.S. broached the idea of offering them safe passage, Arab officials said. One proposal was to have them evacuated by the Red Cross. Israel initially agreed but wanted the fighters to give up their weapons and to tie their safe passage to the return of more dead hostages.
A U.S. official declined to comment on whether Washington broached the idea of safe passage for the trapped Hamas fighters but said talks are ongoing for decommissioning Hamas’s weapons and amnesty for its fighters once the group disarms.
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu switched Israel’s position and said the fighters wouldn’t be granted safe passage after an outcry by lawmakers from across the political spectrum who demanded militants involved with attacks on soldiers be either detained or killed.
“For several months, the Israeli military has been encircling and pursuing Hamas terrorists who are hiding in a ‘pocket’ in the Rafah area, terrorists who killed three of our heroic fighters just in the last few days,” wrote Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday on X. “To let them leave safely a moment before Israeli fighters close in on them and eliminate them is a security and moral folly.”
Israel fears that killing the trapped Hamas fighters could lead to Hamas halting the process of returning the deceased hostages remaining in Gaza, said Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser under Netanyahu.
Palestinians looked out from a damaged building following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City last month. Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg News
Because of that, as troops continue to search for the militants, they are seeking to capture the men rather than kill them, said Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli defense official close to the security establishment.
“They are trying to map the underground area,” said Avivi. “If they find exactly where they are they will need to surrender.”
Hamas fighters have rarely surrendered throughout the two-year war, Israeli military officials have said.
The bodies of six hostages remain in Gaza, and Israel alleges Hamas is dragging out the process to buy time to continue reconsolidating power in the enclave under the cover of a cease-fire and without any external forces deployed into the strip. The return of all the hostages remains the primary problem holding back the progression of the cease-fire deal to its next phase.
In the next phase of the cease-fire, the Trump administration hopes to begin supplying temporary housing for displaced Palestinians in areas of Gaza no longer under Hamas control, according to the U.S. official.
There are already hundreds to thousands of militiamen and their families who are opponents of Hamas living in the Israeli-controlled part of the strip, according to different estimates by Israeli military officials, Arab officials and senior commanders of the anti-Hamas militias.
But to attract more Gazans to areas outside of Hamas’s control, the U.S. and its Arab partners say the international stabilization force will first need to replace Israeli forces in those areas.
The establishment of that multinational force is itself facing complications due to disagreements over whether it should be involved with actively disarming Hamas or play a peacekeeping role.
Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 6, 2025, print edition as 'Hundreds of Hamas Fighters Remain Trapped in Tunnels'.
WSJ
2. US-China war will come down to protecting or destroying Guam
Summary:
Guam, a key Indo-Pacific base, is central to U.S. power projection but also a prime target for China and North Korea. To protect it, Washington is building an $8 billion Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (EIAMD) system—combining Aegis, THAAD, SM-3/6, and radar arrays. The 360° shield will defend Guam’s air, naval, and logistics hubs critical for regional contingencies, including Taiwan. Integration challenges remain, but Guam’s fortified role is vital as China’s PLA Rocket Force and North Korea’s strategic missiles threaten U.S. assets. The outcome of any future U.S.- China war could hinge on protecting or destroying Guam.
Comment: Can we realistically and adequately defend Guam? Can we fight without it?
US-China war will come down to protecting or destroying Guam - Asia Times
US readies EIAMD integrated defense shield to block Chinese missile strikes on Guam’s critical power projection assets
asiatimes.com · Julian McBride
https://asiatimes.com/2025/11/us-china-war-will-come-down-to-protecting-or-destroying-guam/
The Pacific island of Guam is one of America’s most strategically important overseas territories, holding some of the US Air Force’s most critical military assets and staging many of its most crucial operations in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
As such, Guam’s strategic positioning and prominence to US force projection make the island a prime target for key Asian adversaries such as China and North Korea. Both Beijing and Pyongyang have recently developed ballistic missile capabilities specifically to be able to reach and penetrate Guam’s defenses.
To shield Guam from these rising threats, Washington has finalized plans for an Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (EIAMD) system to protect the island. By fully converting Guam into a forward-operating base, the Pentagon can use EIAMD to combat rising threats in the Indo-Pacific while continuing to bolster its regional assets.
A shield named EIAMD
The EIAMD is built to serve as a multi-layered air defense system. Plans for better fortifying Guam have been ongoing since at least August 2022, when the US Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) top leadership provided details of upgrades to protect the island’s forward assets.
Under the plan, Guam will be covered by a 360-layered EIAMD, with 16 locations on the island used for various batteries and interceptors. Both the US Army and MDA were awarded the contract to develop and deploy the US$8 billion EIAMD to Guam.
The Aegis, Standard Missile 3 and six missile interceptors (SM-3 & SM-6) will reportedly be incorporated into the system.
Along with various missile interceptors, the Pentagon is considering deploying six radar systems to help track and plot ballistic missile interceptions. According to the Arms Control Association, EIAMD’s implementation will require 400 construction contractors and an additional 2,300 permanent and civilian personnel to operate the system.
Supplementing Aegis within EIAMD, the US Army and MDA plan on including the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), the Typhon Mid-Range Capability System (MRC) and the Enduring Shield Indirect Fire Protection System. Deploying the various systems will help support the lower layers of Guam’s air defenses.
In a May 2023 article, Asia Times noted that Guam would also receive a disaggregated Aegis Ashore system, which could be installed at Anderson Air Force Base. Furthermore, Guam has strategic topography, from which interceptors could be well fired.
Despite the numerous systems that can supplement Guam’s defense, integration will pose many challenges. For example, integrating key sensor fusion across the different domains of each missile defense system will be needed to keep EIAMD in sync.
Guam’s strategic positioning allows for rapid reinforcements if any conflict were to break out in the Indo-Pacific, including over Taiwan, as Guam is situated only a few thousand kilometers away from key allies and American military locations in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia.
Guam’s Anderson Air Force Base is crucial for maintaining US strike packages and capabilities. B1 Lancers and B2 Spirit Bombers are stationed there for critical missions, including US military operations in the Middle East during the spring and summer of 2025. Anderson’s runways are modified to support all aircraft in the US military’s inventory.
At the same time, Guam is the central hub for supplementing US naval fleets such as the Fifth and Seventh in their areas of operations in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, respectively. The Defense Logistics Agency’s regional headquarters is also located in Guam to oversee logistical operations in the Asian Pacific.
The island is also home to Naval Base Guam, along with a Marine Corps base known as Camp Blaz. Currently, 22,000 military personnel, contractors and civilian dependents are located on the island, with stated plans to increase numbers by 50% to 33,000 by fiscal year 2027.
EIAMD vs China
In a potential conflict with China, American wargame planners have calculated that Beijing’s growing ballistic missile arsenal will heavily target Guam.
The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) would likely utilize long-range Dongfeng (DF) ballistic missiles to target military bases in the region, especially those located on Guam. The PLARF would almost certainly fire the Ying-Ji (YJ) 21 hypersonic missile and DF-27 at Guam’s crucial military assets.
For Chinese ally North Korea, its strategic rocket force (KPASF) could deploy the Hwasong-15, the Hwasong-17 and as many as 20 different types of ballistic missiles against US forces in Guam.
The Hwasong-15 and Hwasong-17 are both capable of delivering nuclear weapons and can reach the continental US. US military planners would have time to counter Hwasong-type missiles as they are not perfected to re-enter the atmosphere.
Guam’s EAIMD is thus a much-needed layered air defense system to protect Guam’s critical assets. While China and North Korea’s ballistic missile capabilities are improving, so too are America’s defenses for a potential battle of seismic implications and consequences for the Indo-Pacific.
Julian McBride is a defense analyst and contributing editor at 19FortyFive.
asiatimes.com · Julian McBride
3. The strange paradox of Chinese economic decline
Summary:
China’s economy is shrinking relative to the U.S., with productivity collapsing and growth driven by debt-laden investment. Xi Jinping’s top-down industrial policies have produced technological successes such as dominance in solar, EVs, and AI, but deformed broader economic performance. Overcapacity, deflation, and demographic decline deepen stagnation. Industrial overreach mirrors Japan’s 1990s failures, creating “technological islands” amid macroeconomic decay. Xi’s decision to weaponize rare earths and critical minerals has destroyed global trust in Chinese supply chains. Analysts warn that a weakened yet assertive China, facing economic decline, may act rashly, possibly over Taiwan, during its short window of peak leverage, risking catastrophic miscalculation.
Comment: Will economic decline lead to conflict?
The strange paradox of Chinese economic decline
Productivity has underperformed the US and other advanced economies since Xi Jinping took power
The Telegraph · Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
05 November 2025 7:00am GMT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/05/china-is-closing-the-tech-gap-but-losing-the-economic-war/
By pulling the trigger on rare earths, Xi Jinping has destroyed global trust in
China’s share of the global economy is shrinking for the fourth year in a row. Few are aware of this astonishing development, and even fewer predicted it.
Chinese GDP equaled three-quarters of American GDP in 2021: it has fallen to just two-thirds today, when measured at market exchange rates, the relevant metric for the projection of world power across the full strategic spectrum.
“The era in which China’s share of global output was surging has ended,” says Mark Williams, head of Asia at Capital Economics. The yuan may rise again, but woe betide Chinese deflation if it does.
Productivity growth has collapsed and has even been negative by some measures. It has underperformed the US and other advanced economies since Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and turned away from China’s Great Reopening.
“Economic growth is being powered almost entirely by investment, despite diminishing returns and escalating debt,” says Williams.
The malaise has spread even to Chinese manufacturing, long thought immune. “There is mounting evidence that industrial policy is itself partly to blame,” he says.
Capital Economics says the trend rate of output growth is likely to drop to 2pc this decade. By then the demographic crisis will be deepening. China’s workforce will be 8pc smaller in 2040.
China will not overtake the US to become the world economic hegemon by 2050 on current trend lines.The gap may instead widen slightly, assuming that America overcomes its Maga fever in time to avert economic suicide.
Yet at the same time, China is running away with the electrotech revolution. China owns the global solar industry and it controls every stage of the supply chain for electric vehicles – from mineral mines to battery technology.
DeepSeek AI is nipping at the heels of US rivals in artificial intelligence, seemingly able to do so at a fraction of the energy use and compute power.
Note, however, that DeepSeek is not a validation on Communist Party strategy. It came out of a hedge fund building AI models for algorithmic trading.
“It did not need, nor did it ask for, any external help and leapfrogged many which were already queuing at the industrial policy counter,” said George Magnus from Oxford University’s China Centre.
Many of China’s tech stars – Huawei, JD.com, Tencent and Alibaba – have their origins in Deng Xiaoping’s era of economic liberalism, when the entrepreneurial dynamism of the Chinese people was allowed to flourish.
“These household names are the children of another era,” he said.
Many of China’s tech stars have their origins in Deng Xiaoping’s era of economic liberalism Credit: AFP/DSK
Nevertheless, Xi has launched multiple Manhattan Projects, aiming to leapfrog the West in nuclear fusion, quantum computing, robotics, and across the gamut of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute says China leads research in 37 of 44 critical technologies that it tracks.
China has suddenly emerged as a world player in advanced pharma, developing three times as many novel drugs as the EU. Akeso’s new cancer treatment has upstaged Merck’s Keytruda.
China lags in semiconductors but its largest foundry SMIC has cracked 7nm (nanometer) chips, circumventing the US-Dutch embargo on extreme ultraviolet lithography machines by using older kit. Beijing is closing the chip gap.
The paradox is how these two opposed faces of China can coexist.
The answer is that one is a function of the other. Beijing has funnelled vast sums into a top-down industrial policy that promotes ideological and geostrategic objectives, deforming the rest of the economy in all kinds of ways.
The Soviet Union took the same contradiction to further extremes. It could put Yuri Gagarin into orbit on Vostok 1 but could not build a good fridge or stock a grocery shelf.
Japan’s two lost decades are a template of sorts. A spate of books in the late 1980s claimed that Japan’s planning mandarins had found the secret of success, consigning the US to irreversible decline. Those books are hilarious to read today.
“We have seen this story before. Japan was at the technological cutting edge across a range of sectors in the 1980s. Japanese industrial policy was widely believed to have been an important catalyst,“ said Mark Williams.
Instead, the planning regime proved to be a curse. Failing companies were kept alive for political reasons or to protect jobs, blocking the process of Schumpeterian clearance. Subsidies become corrosive.
Japan continued to score technology hits after the economy hit a brick wall. It had half the world’s robots in the mid-1990s. It launched the first hybrid car. It developed lithium-ion batteries, digital cameras and 3G mobile. They did not move the needle on wider diffusion of productivity.
George Magnus argues in a new report for the Council on Geostrategy that China may be spending as much as 7 to 8pc of GDP on industrial policy, outstripping anything like it attempted in history.
That is circa $1.6tn (£1.2tn) a year. Target sectors enjoy subsidies, cheap credit and energy, tax breaks, and the prop of public procurement.
The aim of the Communist Party is to mobilise technological change to overthrow the existing global order, a concept rooted in Marxist doctrine.
The result is systemic overcapacity and deflation, which is prolonging the property bust and increasing the real burden of combined public and private debt, now 292pc of GDP.
Magnus said there are over 150 EV companies fighting bitter price wars and losing money, mostly zombie companies kept afloat longer than they should.
China has paid an exorbitant price for stars such as BYD and CATL, the car and battery giants, or to exhaust itself in conquering half the world market for steel and shipbuilding – provoking a backlash that is finally turning serious. “Technological islands of excellence are no substitute for good macroeconomic governance,” said Magnus.
China may yet recover from its lost economic decade. What is remarkable today is that a weakened China has taken the risk of weaponising its stranglehold over critical minerals, battery components, and mid-grade chips for cars – not just in retaliation against Donald Trump but against the whole democratic world.
The new measures, only partly suspended in the latest US-China truce, encompass all the materials and precursors that go into these technologies. The controls are extraterritorial and ferocious.
Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, is right that China “made a real mistake” by pulling the trigger on rare earths, even if his talk of replacing Chinese supply in 12 to 24 months is implausible bluster. Xi has destroyed global trust in Chinese supply chains of any kind.
It all points to a reverse Thucydides trap. Thucydides said the deep cause of the Peloponnesian War was “the growth of the power of Athens and the fear which this caused in Sparta”.
A cottage industry has arisen evoking this historical parallel to warn that the US might precipitate a war to stop the rise of China. But recent scholarship, including Sparte contre Athènes by French historian Manuel Rodrigues de Oliveira, argue more accurately that Thucydides had the matter backwards.
Sparta had been through a rough patch but was beginning to reassert it lost hegemony in the years before the war. It was an overbearing Athens that saw its brief and tenuous dominance threatened. It was Athens that provoked the war by blockading the ports of the Spartan alliance.
Perhaps the real danger today is that a declining China will exploit its short window of peak leverage to close in on Taiwan before America has fully recovered. That could go horribly wrong.
This article is an extract from The Telegraph’s Economic Intelligence newsletter. Sign up here to get exclusive insight from two of the UK’s leading economic commentators – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner – delivered direct to your inbox every TuesdayMore stories
The Telegraph · Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
4. What Lithuania Can Teach America About Resilience
Summary:
China and other adversaries are exploiting U.S. vulnerabilities across physical, cyber, and informational domains. Lithuania’s “total defense” model offers lessons in resilience. Its Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union with a 17,000-member volunteer corps integrated with the state links citizens to national defense through training, civic education, and crisis response. The authors propose a U.S. Civil Defense Corps under DHS/FEMA to build nationwide resilience and protect critical infrastructure.
Conclusion:
America is not Lithuania, of course. The United States is a superpower blessed by geography with a large and varied population. But adversary threats are not coming to America’s shores. They’re already there. It’s time for US civil defense frameworks to catch up, learn from allies and partners like Lithuania, and shift to a whole-of-society model of total defense.
What Lithuania Can Teach America About Resilience
by Kevin D. Stringer, by Alexander Noyes
|
11.06.2025 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/11/06/lithuania-total-defense-resilience-model/
The American homeland is now a contested battlespace. China and other US adversaries are increasingly targeting US vulnerabilities, directly and indirectly, across the spectrum of conflict, including in the physical, cyber, and informational domains. These threats should be met by a whole-of-society defense based around resilience.
This concept of total defense, well-known in the European context, is relatively unknown in the modern American setting. But frontline practitioners of the approach, such as Lithuania, have much to teach the United States about how to adequately prepare and respond to aggressive adversaries.
Given Lithuania’s geography and adverse historical relations with Russia, it has been developing its total defense system since the early 1990s. Indeed, the achievement of Lithuanian independence in the 1988-1991 period was partially the result of overall societal resistance against Soviet occupation forces. Since then, the country has pursued total defense measures in the military, economic, societal, and cultural domains. With the concept of a citizen obligation in total defense already embedded within the 1992 constitution, the 2000 Law on Armed Defense and Resistance Against Aggression specifically states that defense against aggression is obligatory for both the armed forces and every citizen.
While the country’s overall approach to total defense could be useful in the American context, the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (LRU), in particular, offers a tangible template that America could adapt to its own needs and characteristics. The LRU takes the idea of whole-of-society defense seriously, helping to model the path to broad-based total defense. It contributes to national defense, teaches patriotic education, and promotes national culture in a way that bridges the gap between the civil population and the country’s national security obligations.
Adversary threats are not coming to America’s shores. They’re already there.
The LRU is not a private militia, but a government-sponsored, volunteer state guard formation, led by a small cadre of active-duty military officers, falling under the supervision of the government of Lithuania. Not to be confused with its sister, the Ministry of Defense’s National Guard of Lithuania (National Defense Volunteer Forces), the LRU consists of 17,000 volunteer men and women of all ages and professions.
Founded on June 27, 1919, and re-established with the regaining of Lithuanian independence and the end of Soviet occupation in 1989, the LRU is dedicated to “fostering self-assured, innovative, and motivated citizens of the Republic of Lithuania who are prepared to defend their homeland and assist state institutions in times of crisis.”
While the LRU undertakes tasks assigned by state authorities, it’s a volunteer organization, and members, driven by a deep sense of duty, selflessly dedicate their free time to the defense and strengthening of the Lithuanian homeland. Members participate in one of four general activities: combat formations that receive regular training for integration into the armed forces during time of conflict; commandant units that assist and support the civil protection and rescue system for crises ranging from natural disasters to COVID; specialized units that capitalize upon civilian skills in areas like cyber or drone technology; and educational detachments that work with young people providing citizenship education and a range of life and survival skills.
The latter task is highly significant for building societal resilience, and the LRU has approximately 6,000 Young Riflemen active across Lithuania, which contribute to the Union’s ranks. Additionally, in collaboration with the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, the LRU conducts a mandatory three-day Citizenship and Defense Skills Course for ninth-graders across Lithuania.
In terms of real-world operations, the LRU assisted government authorities during the 2020-2023 coronavirus pandemic. It was also deployed in support of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service during the 2021-2022 border crisis with Belarus, where the latter sponsored illegal migrants into Lithuania as part of its hybrid warfare efforts against NATO.
To help harden the United States against increasing threats, America could build on this innovative approach to civil defense by creating a civil defense corps. Such a civil defense corps would focus primarily on building resilience to protect critical infrastructure, including cybersecurity and the defense industrial base, as well as supercharging the country’s emergency preparedness capabilities. The program would be open to all eligible citizens under age 50, but would be targeted specifically at those ages 18 to 25 for a duration of at least five years.
The enabling legislation for such a corps should place it within the Department of Homeland Security with a formal direct relationship to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In an important difference from the LRU, the US version would be unarmed. While the civil defense corps would consist primarily of part-time volunteers, it would need to incentivize recruits by offering public service with tangible benefits—including credentialing training in civil defense, a reduction in federal income tax during the time served, and paths to full-time government service.
America is not Lithuania, of course. The United States is a superpower blessed by geography with a large and varied population. But adversary threats are not coming to America’s shores. They’re already there. It’s time for US civil defense frameworks to catch up, learn from allies and partners like Lithuania, and shift to a whole-of-society model of total defense.
This will not be a simple or inexpensive undertaking. But the standing up of a civil defense corps would be a welcome step in the right direction.
Tags: homeland security, Hybrid Warfare, Lithuania, Resilience, Societal Resilience, total defense, U.S. National Security
About The Authors
- Kevin D. Stringer
- Kevin D. Stringer, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), is a Lecturer at the University of Northwestern Switzerland and Visiting Associate Professor at the Military Academy of Lithuania. Stringer earned a PhD from the University of Zurich, an MA from Boston University, an MSS from the U.S. Army War College, and a BSc from the U.S. Military Academy.
- View all posts
- Alexander Noyes
- Alexander Noyes is a fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution.
5. Taiwan, want to stop the gray-zone? Put your money where your mouth is.
Summary:
Taiwan’s victory prosecuting a Chinese ship captain who severed an undersea cable shows how law enforcement can counter gray-zone coercion. To deter China’s ambiguous tactics, Taipei must fund its coast guard, surveillance, and legal systems not just buy jets. Persistent patrols, attribution tools, and partnerships can raise costs, expose aggression, and defend sovereignty daily.
Excerpts:
When Taipei is silent, China gets a free ride to shape the narrative. To stop carrying water for China’s media arm, pre-publish incident playbooks. Publish routine, boring updates as a matter of habit, not just during flare-ups. And when you do call out a violation, publish the imagery, tracks, and timestamps, so the denials ring hollow. That won’t stop every lie, but it will shorten their half-life.
None of this reads like a blockbuster budget speech. But that’s exactly why it works. Gray-zone coercion feeds on our tendency to underinvest in the mundane. Constant patrols, better sensors and cable protection technology, a blacklisting notice that sticks, joint coast guard and navy drills that improve tactics, and fighting the false narratives head on are the things that grind a deniable strategy down into mere nuisance.
It is cheaper than rebuilding a deterrent you let atrophy, and far cheaper than a war invited by complacency.
The verdict in the TP3 case didn’t just punish one captain; it telegraphed something more important: this is not a void. There are rules here. There are consequences. If we want fewer gray-zone tests tomorrow, we have to resource the institutions that enforce those rules today… and every day after that.
Put simply: if Taipei is serious about stopping the gray zone, it’s time to fund the people and tools that live in it.
Comment: How to counter China using a superior form of "lawfare?" E.g., actual law enforcement activities.
Taiwan, want to stop the gray-zone? Put your money where your mouth is.
by Jonathan Walberg
|
11.06.2025 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/11/06/taiwan-want-to-stop-the-gray-zone-put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is/
When a Togo-flagged freighter with a Chinese crew severed Taiwan’s TP3 undersea cable this year, Taipei did something unusual: it built a case, prosecuted the captain, and won a prison sentence. Gray-zone activity is supposed to be deniable; a judge’s verdict is not. That ruling should be read as more than a local story about a damaged line: it’s a proof of concept that the right mix of policing, monitoring, and law can raise the costs of below-the-threshold coercion. If Taipei wants less gray-zone harassment, it can’t just call for vigilance — it must pay for it, systematically and for the long haul.
Gray-zone campaigns thrive in ambiguity: actions that are “not quite war” but erosive over time — coast-guard pushes, maritime-militia swarms, “fishing” sorties, sand dredging, cable strikes, and propaganda that muddies facts faster than governments can clarify them. For the PRC, the formula has been clear for years: coordinated pressure by coast guards and “civilian” vessels, layered with disinformation and legal salami-slicing, designed to exhaust and outmaneuver defenders without triggering a treaty response. The near-term effect is friction; the long-term effect is desensitization. Unchallenged encounters raise the informal response threshold inside agencies and cabinets, makes media coverage feel like “old news,” and conditions local communities to treat incursions as background noise. Over time, that drip-drip creates a narrative of normalcy. Maps get redrawn in practice, if not on paper, and it becomes politically harder for Taipei to call out a violation or mobilize partners without sounding alarmist.
That is the point of the strategy: to shift the burden of proof onto Taiwan, sap bandwidth, and narrow the space for timely action. If every incident is “ambiguous,” then every response must clear a higher evidentiary bar, pass more reviews, and compete with other priorities in a finite budget. Meanwhile, administrative precedents stack up: “routine patrols,” “safety inspections,” “fisheries management” that look bureaucratic but function as creeping jurisdiction that China uses to push their agenda. The remedy, therefore, isn’t just more destroyers; it’s more prosecutors, patrol hulls, sensors, and joint law-enforcement mechanisms, to document patterns, attribute intent, impose consequences, and keep the narrative honest.
Start with what the data says about the recent hyped-up gray-zone target: cables. Yes, sabotage gets headlines. But the baseline is noisy: globally, about 150–200 subsea cable faults happen every year, and most are accidental, usually fishing gear or anchors. That noise is exactly why persistent surveillance and attribution tools are needed that can distinguish negligence from intent, and deniability from a pattern. Funding regular patrols, up-to-date detection technology, and identifying China-linked vessels that suspiciously loiter around, is what “putting your money where your mouth is” looks like. It’s not flashy, but it’s how you move from suspicion to evidence — and from press releases to convictions. Meeting each incident head on with a definitive response is essential to raising the cost of meddling with Taiwan, and ultimately, taking the opportunity to do so away from Beijing.
This is why budgets matter. Gray-zone contests, particularly in East and South China Seas, are fought by chronically underfunded agencies: coast guards, harbor masters, communications regulators, and maritime domain awareness networks. Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council is now asking for funds (973 Million USD) to build additional patrol vessels and upgrade maritime surveillance, a recognition that the front line in the Strait doesn’t always wear gray hull numbers. The Coast Guard’s ask is a fraction of the total cost of proposed purchases of American fighter jets and missiles. Taipei must also invest in drones, smart coastal monitoring, and EO/IR night systems. These efforts are not just symbolic; they’re the difference between proactive action and reactive struggles to regain control of the narrative.
The other lever is partnership. In 2021, Washington and Taipei created a Coast Guard Working Group that lets the two sides share information, coordinate training, and quietly cooperate on law-enforcement at sea. That’s the right instrument for a campaign that favors white hulls and paperwork over gun barrels. Formal defense ties grab headlines: coast-guard MOUs and practical partnerships provide the capabilities to solve problems.
Beyond kinetic approaches, raising the economic cost of coercion is paramount. A lot of gray-zone maritime pressure isn’t PLA-Navy; it’s a “shadow fleet” of China-linked or China-controlled vessels using flags of convenience, spoofed AIS data, and problematic insurers to skate past scrutiny. When partnered with insurers and classification societies, blacklisting and targeted port-state controls create a tight enforcement net that is more effective than what a single patrol vessel could provide. Taiwan has already begun naming and tracking suspect hulls; partners should harmonize lists and consequences. Make deceptive practices uninsurable and uninspected, and the economics start to bite. Taken together, these measures change the calculus from a low-cost nuisance to an untenable commercial liability. Further, raising the costs on civilian captains through prosecution will help deter others.
Some will insist that real deterrence lies in bigger sticks, forgoing gray-zone deterrence and focusing on preventing a conventional invasion, by purchasing fighter jets and large ships. The issue with this is that by Taipei’s own admission, the purchase of traditional deterrence weapons isn’t for traditional deterrence, but rather to ‘show the flag’ in the gray zone. Traditional deterrence shouldn’t be neglected, but could Taiwan ever purchase the ‘right number’ of F-35s to deter Xi from invading? Meanwhile, the Coast Guard actively asks for a fraction of the cost, promising fast-acting and lasting results. Further, the costs of building and upgrading the mandatory compliant hangars and facilities for the F-35, plus hiring and training the necessary personnel aren’t factored into the costs. Even in a year when U.S. carriers seldom left the Western Pacific uncovered as crises competed for attention elsewhere, the daily grind in the Strait didn’t pause. That’s the lesson: While building submarines and fighter jets makes you look stronger on military power indexes, having a coast guard that can deter adversaries in real time is what actually makes a difference. Another argument says that publicizing gray-zone incidents only rewards the perpetrators with attention or risks unnecessary panic. The better answer isn’t silence, but selective, disciplined transparency. Not every gray-zone action deserves a press conference, and ‘flooding the zone’ risks desensitizing the public and blurring the signal. The incidents that matter, such as maritime incidents near Kinmen, dangerous harassment of fishermen, cable-lane anchor drops, are the ones where visibility and evidence impose reputational and legal costs.
That means disaggregating and communicating with discipline: publish patrol footage when it shows unsafe or unlawful behavior, release AIS patterns that prove tampering or harassment, and pre-brief allies and industry before going public so they can amplify the message. This isn’t the glamorous part of deterrence, but it’s how you inoculate society against manipulation while making sure the provocations that should cost the adversary actually do.
The Philippines offers a cautionary and useful example. In the South China Sea, Manila’s “below-the-threshold” deterrence through documenting incidents, coordinating with partners, and imposing reputational and legal costs, has made Chinese tactics more visible, but it hasn’t solved the dispute. It has narrowed Beijing’s room to maneuver without blowback. That is what success looks like in the gray zone: not victory parades, but fewer surprises and firmer ground underfoot.
So, what does “put your money where your mouth is” look like in practice?
It looks like funding a persistent presence. More white-hulled patrol craft, crew billets, fuel, and maintenance cost pennies on the dollar when compared to fighter jets and frigates. In a world where information is credibility, and credibility is everything, Taipei needs to invest in attribution, not just awareness. Invest in fusing radar, AIS, EO/IR, satellite, and cable-route sensors into a common picture with evidentiary chain-of-custody. The goal is a prosecutor-ready file, not just a red contact on a screen. That’s how you win cases like the TP3 one and make the next captain think twice.
Deterrence is about raising the cost of non-compliance above the adversary’s pain threshold. Continue tightening domestic statutes on cable and seabed interference; emphasize seizure authorities, stiff fines, and liability that follows beneficial ownership across flags. Then export those tools through MOUs so partners can mirror them, and push for UNCLOS-consistent updates that close boarding and jurisdiction gaps over cable interference in EEZs. Credibly raising the costs of sabotage for ship captains and their crew will make future “accidents” far less attractive. If masters know that dragging an anchor across a cable could cost them their ship, their license, and months in a foreign jail, they will think twice before taking the risk — whether on orders or on their own initiative.
Investing in the Coast Guard gives it the ability to mesh with industry. Cable operators, fishing fleets, and platform owners form essential early-warning networks. Build standing channels for rapid alerts and rehearse joint responses. Industry sits on critical telemetry and repair assets; governments sit on authority. Combine them and you compress timelines from hours to minutes. With time, this creates a cadence of “normal” faults to be used to calibrate a response to avoid exhausting crews chasing noise.
When Taipei is silent, China gets a free ride to shape the narrative. To stop carrying water for China’s media arm, pre-publish incident playbooks. Publish routine, boring updates as a matter of habit, not just during flare-ups. And when you do call out a violation, publish the imagery, tracks, and timestamps, so the denials ring hollow. That won’t stop every lie, but it will shorten their half-life.
None of this reads like a blockbuster budget speech. But that’s exactly why it works. Gray-zone coercion feeds on our tendency to underinvest in the mundane. Constant patrols, better sensors and cable protection technology, a blacklisting notice that sticks, joint coast guard and navy drills that improve tactics, and fighting the false narratives head on are the things that grind a deniable strategy down into mere nuisance.
It is cheaper than rebuilding a deterrent you let atrophy, and far cheaper than a war invited by complacency.
The verdict in the TP3 case didn’t just punish one captain; it telegraphed something more important: this is not a void. There are rules here. There are consequences. If we want fewer gray-zone tests tomorrow, we have to resource the institutions that enforce those rules today… and every day after that.
Put simply: if Taipei is serious about stopping the gray zone, it’s time to fund the people and tools that live in it.
Tags: China-Taiwan, Gray Zone, Martime Sovereignty
About The Author
6. SOF News: Competition in the Arctic
Summary:
The Arctic has become a new front in U.S.–Russia–China strategic competition as melting ice opens vital sea lanes and access to vast oil, gas, and mineral reserves. Russia is militarizing and exploiting resources; China advances its “Polar Silk Road.” The U.S. is rebuilding Arctic capabilities through new strategies, icebreakers, and SOF-led operations.
Competition in the Arctic
November 6, 2025 John Friberg Defense 0
https://sof.news/defense/arctic-competition/
The Arctic region has emerged as a renewed area of strategic competition in recent years between the United States and Russia. In addition, China has also been making its presence known as well. Global warming and climate change has opened up the Arctic sea lanes, exposed minerals for exploitation, and provides access to oil and gas reserves. The Arctic is more than a region with ice and snow. Over 4 million people from eight countries live above the Arctic circle. In addition, it has become a platform for military power projection.
In 2009 the US Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic held 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the world’s natural gas. These valuable resources will be very strategic in the coming decades as the current oil and gas fields become fully exploited. Other minerals exist as well and are exposing themselves as the ice cap melts away.
Ice Melts and Sea Lanes Open Up
The map above (courtesy of the CIA) depicts in purple the sea lanes in the Arctic region. There are two principle routes – one named the Northern Sea Route traversing from the Cape of Scandinavia along the Russian northern coast and finally exiting in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. The second route – named the Northwest Passage – begins in the waters between Canada and Greenland, follows the Canadian northern coast, and exits between the United States (Alaska) and Russia in the Bering Strait.
The Northwest Passage is estimated to be open from 2-3 months per year during the summer while the Northern Sea Route is open about 4-5 months per year. Nations are now taking advantage of the Arctic sea lanes due to the shorter time of voyage when compared to other maritime routes. This is one of the primary reasons for China’s interest in the Arctic region. As global warming continues it is projected that the sea lanes will open up for even longer periods of time. This would be especially true with the assistance of ice breaker ships. Freedom of navigation in the Arctic has become an important issue for nations with a lot of maritime traffic.
Russian and Chinese Cooperation
Russia views the Arctic region as its backyard. As a Eurasian country it feels that it has the authority to gatekeep military, commerical, and scientific passage and activity. Over the past decade Russia has been revitalizing its military infrastructure and enhancing the support provided to its Northern Fleet located along the Kola Peninsula. At the other end of Russia is the port of Vladivostok, home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet. Russia is also stepping up its extraction of resources and building facilities above the Arctic circle for scientific and commericial use. Some of the sites could easily become “dual-use” – of value to military activities.
China views itself as a “near-Arctic” power and casts its role as beneficial to the smaller countries that border the Arctic Circle – ensuring access to more than the countries of United States and Russia. It also is establishing scientific and commercial activities in the Arctic region. China has adopted the “Polar Silk Road” as part of its global Belt and Road Initiative. China is working closely with Russia as well as the Nordic countries in joint Arctic commercial enterprises.
United States Arctic Strategy
The U.S. government has noticed the renewed interest of Russia and China in the Arctic region. It is currently taken steps to “catch up” to the advances that its two near-peer competitors have taken in the “High North”. New polar ice breakers are on order – the U.S. ice breaker fleet is a shadow of the ice breaker fleet that Russia has deployed in the Arctic.
In October 2022 the Biden administration released the National Strategy for the Arctic Region. This document (PDF, 15 pgs) outlines the vision for the U.S. in “four mutually reinforcing pillars spanning both domestic and international issues.”
The U.S. military is giving the Arctic region more attention than it has in the past. In June 2024 the Department of Defense released its 2024 Arctic Strategy. This document (PDF, 28 pgs) is a guide for the DoD for developing “a concerted approach to preserve the Arctic as a stable region in which the U.S. homeland remains secure and vital national interests are guarded.” The DoD also has an office to ensure U.S. strategy and policy protects U.S. interests in the Arctic. The organization is known as the DoD Arctic Strategy and Global Resilience Office.
Image: U.S. Army.
An earlier publication published by the U.S. Army in January 2021 entitled Regaining Arctic Dominance (PDF, 54 pgs) provided direction on how the Army will “man, train, equip, and organize to win in the Arctic”. One of the initiatives outlined in the document is the refocus of the Alaskan-based brigade combat team to the Arctic region. In May 2022 the 11th Airborne Division was reactivated in Alaska.
SOF in the Arctic
The U.S. special operations community has increased its attention and activity level in the Arctic. Much of this engagement is in the form of exercises – whether on U.S soil or in the “High North” of Europe. Special Operations Command North (SOCNORTH) and Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) conduct numerous exercises with joint U.S. units and foreign SOF units.
Image: SOF winter warfare training above the Arctic Circle, Kiruna, Sweden. (Photo from SOCEUR video by SPC Liem Huynh, February 24, 2018).
Recent special operations forces exercises include ARCTIC EDGE 25 and ARCTIC EDGE 24 led by SOCNORTH. An exercise by SOCEUR entitled Adamant Serpent 26 was recently held in Sweden and Norway in conjunction with Norwegian and Swedish SOF units. SOCEUR also, like SOCNORTH, is in the lead with many exercises conducted in the “High North”.
The Way Ahead
The new era of strategic competition has found its way into the Arctic region. Shipping lanes are open much longer, gas and oil fields are now accessible, and military power projection all point to the Arctic as an area of competition between the United States, Russia, and China. The U.S. military must be able to ensure that Russia and China do not interfere with navigation, sovereignty rights, or the ability to project power into the Arctic as well as protect the homeland.
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Maps. Courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
References:
“Arctic Security”, National-Security.info. This resource is a product of SOF News. The webpage links to over 30 news articles and documents concerning Arctic security – many of them SOF related.
https://www.national-security.info/topics/arctic-security.html
About John Friberg
211 Articles
John Friberg is the Editor and Publisher of SOF News. He is a retired Command Chief Warrant Officer (CW5 180A) with 40 years service in the U.S. Army Special Forces with active duty and reserve components. Since retirement from the Army he has worked as a contractor both domestically and overseas.
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7. Xi’s latest moves show corruption is still a big military problem
Summary:
Xi Jinping’s latest military reshuffle underscores persistent corruption and factionalism within China’s armed forces. By promoting Zhang Shengmin, head of the Central Military Commission’s (CMC) Discipline Inspection Commission, to CMC vice chair and expelling nine generals including He Weidong and Miao Hua, Xi is consolidating control and subordinating the military’s political system to its disciplinary arm. This restructuring aims to replace faction-ridden political hierarchies with a supervision-based model ensuring personal loyalty to Xi. However, frequent purges and leadership instability highlight enduring corruption, eroded morale, and declining combat readiness. Xi’s real goal appears to be political control, not military modernization or Taiwan war preparation.
Excerpt:
Meanwhile, from a military capability perspective, elevating a discipline inspection official like Zhang Shengmin to such a high position is rare globally, and suggests that corruption within the Chinese military remains unresolved. Despite multiple purges and institutional reforms, recurring instability in the personnel system raises questions about the real combat readiness and cohesion of China’s armed forces.
Comment: What does it mean for the military when you put the "IG" (inspector general) in charge. Of course America's first "IG"- von Steuban - did a pretty good job of whipping Washington's Army into shape. Probably not a fair comparison or good analogy but I could not resist.
Xi’s latest moves show corruption is still a big military problem | The Strategist
aspistrategist.org.au · 4 Nov 2025 Ying Yu Lin
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/xis-latest-moves-show-corruption-is-still-a-big-military-problem/
The latest personnel changes in the Chinese military show that Xi Jinping is seeking to tighten control by bringing its political apparatus under the authority of its disciplinary arm. The appointments also demonstrate his ongoing efforts to purge factionalism from the military.
The sweeping changes suggest that the Chinese military still struggles with corruption and instability, to the detriment of its combat readiness.
The specific evidence of Xi’s intention to tighten control of the military’s political organisation are his expulsion of its chief and his promotion of a discipline inspection official to the position of vice chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the body that has overall control of the armed forces. The discipline inspection commission of a Chinese government organisation enforces party rules and internal party discipline. This notably extends to catching corrupt officials.
Last month, nine active-duty generals were accused of serious violations and expelled from the party and the military, including CMC vice chairman He Weidong, director of the Political Work Department Miao Hua and commander of the paramiliary People’s Armed Police Wang Chunning. Soon after, during the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee, Zhang Shengmin, secretary of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission, was promoted to the position of CMC vice chair, restoring the dual vice-chairman structure of a political cadre paired with a military officer (Zhang Youxia).
Born in 1958 in Shaanxi Province, Zhang Shengmin served in the Second Artillery (now the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force) before briefly working in the PLA’s General Political Department. In 2016 he became political commissar of the Logistics Support Department, and in 2017 he was appointed secretary of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission, joining the CMC at the 19th Party Congress.
Zhang’s continued presence in the CMC after the 20th Congress is closely linked to his supervisory role in the military. Since the 18th Congress, he has overseen the purge of many senior officers. Beyond corruption and misconduct, this must reflect deep political struggles in the armed forces. Although a military coup is unlikely, factionalism and self-serving networks remain pervasive in the armed forces, and the recent expulsion of the Political Work Department chief Miao Hua is significant.
A second-generation military cadre, Miao Hua served in army units and then as the navy’s political commissar before being appointed director of the Political Work Department at the 19th Party Congress. His failure to advance further suggests political constraints. During the 2015 military reforms, the CMC separated the Discipline Inspection Commission from the General Political Department to prevent political cadres from monopolising personnel appointments, supervision and counter-intelligence. However, the department’s subsequent two directors, including Miao Hua, have fallen from grace, and many of their associates, including recently expelled CMC vice chairman He Weidong, have also been removed. These cases presumably stem largely from factional alliances built on mutual benefit and promotion control.
Serious factionalism with the military’s political system evidently created the opportunity for Zhang Shengmin’s rise. In July, the Ministry of National Defense issued regulations titled ‘On vigorously promoting fine traditions and fully eliminating toxic influences to reshape the image and prestige of political cadres’. The document emphasised political loyalty, integrity, fairness in personnel management and leading by example. Recent sweeping personnel changes are likely to trigger a reshuffle within the military’s political apparatus. With Zhang’s promotion, the disciplinary organisation may now dominate political and personnel management, replacing the monopoly of the Political Work Department.
Xi’s long-standing concern has presumably been that the former General Staff and General Political Departments wielded excessive centralised power. The 2015 reforms reorganised the command structure by separating combat theatres and force-building services and by creating new service branches. The CMC Discipline Inspection Commission was made independent and placed on equal footing with the Political Work Department to prevent unilateral control over appointments. Yet the Political Work Department remained largely unchecked, presumably worsening factionalism. Its leaders, including Miao Hua, retained immense influence over promotions, rivaling the grip that former CMC vice chairman Xu Caihou once held.
This is evidently why Xi has accelerated leadership turnover, particularly within the political work system, promoting Zhang Shengmin—with his experience in military discipline inspection—to the vice chair. The appointment signifies Xi’s intent to dismantle the entrenched political work hierarchy and replace it with a supervision-based structure centered on the disciplinary apparatus, effectively merging political work and discipline enforcement under one authority led by the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission.
Following the Fourth Plenum, Xi’s unshakable control over the military is reaffirmed. Rumors of potential coups appear implausible. The new military leadership’s primary mission is not necessarily to prepare for conflict over Taiwan; instead, it is probably to ensure the full implementation of Xi’s directives.
Looking ahead to the 21st Party Congress in 2027, this new structure will allow Xi to maintain political influence even if he no longer holds formal titles as general secretary, president or CMC chair—because he’ll control the generals who dominate the CMC.
Meanwhile, from a military capability perspective, elevating a discipline inspection official like Zhang Shengmin to such a high position is rare globally, and suggests that corruption within the Chinese military remains unresolved. Despite multiple purges and institutional reforms, recurring instability in the personnel system raises questions about the real combat readiness and cohesion of China’s armed forces.
aspistrategist.org.au · Ying Yu Lin
8. The Hard Part: Why U.S. Army Civil Affairs Are Essential
Summary:
U.S. Army Civil Affairs (CA) forces are vital in the “hard part” of war, e.g., the consolidation of gains after combat ends. They bridge military and civilian efforts, enabling governance, reconstruction, and legitimacy. From Iraq to Gaza, CA units coordinate across agencies, prevent instability, and turn tactical victories into lasting peace through interagency synchronization and local engagement.
Excerpts:
Last week, U.S. Central Command opened a Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Israel, marking the formal establishment of a coordination hub for Gaza assistance just five days after world leaders signed a U.S.-brokered plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas permanently.
...
For all the headlines about combat and peace treaties, it is in this in-between space—when the fighting stops but uncertainty reigns—that the real test begins. This is where U.S. Army Civil Affairs (CA) forces prove their worth to Combatant Commanders.
...
Winning wars is hard, but winning peace is harder. The consolidation of gains is the phase where tactical victories are tested against strategic realities. Without skilled Civil Affairs professionals planning, coordinating, and integrating efforts across the interagency spectrum, those gains can quickly deteriorate and shift back to conflict. At the end of every conflict, we should ask ourselves: What comes next? Because if the answer to that question isn’t clearly planned, the “hard part” has only just begun.
Comment: Do we have the correct balance between active duty and reserve civil affairs forces?
But I really like the question: "What comes next?" I do not think we consider that question often enough or deeply enough.
The Hard Part: Why U.S. Army Civil Affairs Are Essential
By Assad Raza
November 05, 2025
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/11/05/the_hard_part_why_us_army_civil_affairs_are_essential_1145332.html
Last week, U.S. Central Command opened a Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Israel, marking the formal establishment of a coordination hub for Gaza assistance just five days after world leaders signed a U.S.-brokered plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas permanently. This moment illustrates one of the most difficult but least understood phases of military operations: the consolidation of gains—the transition from combat operations to stability operations.
For all the headlines about combat and peace treaties, it is in this in-between space—when the fighting stops but uncertainty reigns—that the real test begins. This is where U.S. Army Civil Affairs (CA) forces prove their worth to Combatant Commanders.
The Bridge Between War and Peace
The U.S. military has long recognized that tactical victories mean little if not followed by sustained peace and stability. Consolidation of gains is about converting temporary success into enduring outcomes that support U.S. strategic interests and local legitimacy. It’s the “hard part” because it requires more than tanks and tactics—it requires governance, coordination, and trust-building across diverse actors: host-nation authorities, international organizations, and civilian populations.
Civil Affairs units specialize in these types of activities. They are trained and equipped to plan, coordinate, and execute civil-military operations that link the Department of War with interagency, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations. Their mission is not to run governments, but to help set the conditions by bridging the gap between security and governance.
Throughout history, Civil Affairs Soldiers have provided critical connective tissue at every level of war. At the tactical level, Civil Affairs Teams augmented the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, ensuring that U.S. and coalition efforts in infrastructure and governance were aligned with local needs. In Haiti, following the 2010 earthquake, Civil Affairs helped establish the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC)—renamed the Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Cell (HACC)—to synchronize efforts with the United Nations’ humanitarian cluster system. And in Syria, during Operation Inherent Resolve, Civil Affairs supported stabilization efforts in post-ISIS territories by coordinating governance and essential services across interagency and international partners.
These examples highlight an enduring truth: Civil Affairs is a strategic asset for the long game of establishing peace post-conflict.
Beyond the Battlefield
Post-conflict activities are complex and politically sensitive. They typically begin under military leadership and gradually transition toward civilian leadership as security improves. In these transitions, Civil Affairs plays a central role in managing complexity and preventing a relapse into conflict.
Military doctrine outlines that transitions at the conclusion of major operations require deliberate coordination among the interagency community, NGOs, IGOs, and host-nation governments. Without deliberate coordination, these tactical successes can quickly deteriorate. Civil Affairs planners help ensure that handoffs between military and civilian authorities are smooth, responsibilities are clear, and progress is measurable.
A successful transition depends on metrics of effectiveness, such as reduced mortality rates, restored critical infrastructure, or the return of displaced civilians. These indicators are essential benchmarks to measure stability in post-conflict areas. Civil Affairs units can help define and track these metrics, assess local conditions, and advise commanders when conditions are set for transition or when continued military support is needed.
At the strategic level, Civil Affairs also assists Geographic Combatant Commands (GCCs) and Joint Task Forces (JTFs) in creating interorganizational cooperation mechanisms, which some military planners call “interagency synchronization.” They facilitate communication between actors who often speak different institutional languages and operate under different mandates.
The Art of Transition
The consolidation of gains requires recognizing that post-conflict transitions are dynamic and complex. They often overlap with other activities, such as security operations, during humanitarian relief. Or supporting governance reforms while persistent threats from small pockets of opposing forces. Civil Affairs Soldiers can navigate this gray zone with cultural fluency and professional agility.
Civil Affairs also understands that legitimacy is the foundation of stability. For example, ensuring fair distribution of aid, supporting transparent local elections, or advising on rule-of-law initiatives. They can also help civilian organizations clarify roles, establish mechanisms of accountability, and manage expectations within the local population.
It’s also worth noting that transition does not always mean withdrawal. Sometimes U.S. forces must shift from one mission set to another, from combat operations to advisory support in stability operations. Civil Affairs can assist with continuity across these phases and sustain momentum toward long-term stability.
The Strategic Imperative
As global security environments grow more complex, the importance of Civil Affairs will only increase. Competition below the level of armed conflict, fragile states, hybrid threats, and great-power rivalries all require nuanced engagement with civilian populations and institutions. The military alone cannot secure peace; it must be enabled by effective civil-military coordination.
In this sense, the CMCC established in Israel is more than a coordination node; it’s an indicator of how seriously the U.S. takes its role in post-conflict stabilization. Civil Affairs are the quiet professionals who help make these coordinations possible. They help ensure that U.S. objectives are not only achieved but sustained in the months and years after the fighting ends.
Conclusion: Winning the Peace
Winning wars is hard, but winning peace is harder. The consolidation of gains is the phase where tactical victories are tested against strategic realities. Without skilled Civil Affairs professionals planning, coordinating, and integrating efforts across the interagency spectrum, those gains can quickly deteriorate and shift back to conflict. At the end of every conflict, we should ask ourselves: What comes next? Because if the answer to that question isn’t clearly planned, the “hard part” has only just begun.
Assad Raza is an assistant professor in global leadership and U.S. Army veteran with multiple deployments across the Middle East. Follow him on X @AssadRaza12 and on LinkedIn.
9. Philippines tests new battle plan for fending off invaders alone
Summary:
The Philippines is testing a new “unilateral defense plan,” Bantay Kalayaan, to prepare for defending against invasion without immediate allied aid. The AJEX DAGIT-PA drills simulate air, sea, and land battles, cyber warfare, and island defense amid rising China tensions. A new AFP Strategic Command leads the exercise, testing readiness and operational limits.
Comment: The Philippines is demonstrating alliance "burden owning." it is taking responsibility for its own defense. Is it feasible, acceptable, and suitable (the FAS test) to "go it alone?" Perhaps not but demonstrating the willingness to "own the burden" is more likely going to engender alliance support and mutual defense..
Philippines tests new battle plan for fending off invaders alone
Defense News · Leilani Chavez
https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/11/05/philippines-tests-new-battle-plan-for-fending-off-invaders-alone/
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine military will test a new defense plan to be spearheaded by a new command, as officials here game out what it would take to repel invaders without immediate help from allies.
The exercises take place amid heightened security concerns over China’s aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea and regional developments involving Taiwan.
“We are looking at all possible scenarios and we are incorporating those into the exercises, so we are prepared for any eventuality,” Philippine military Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. told reporters during the launch of the exercise on Nov. 4.
The annual military drill, known as the Armed Forces of the Philippines Joint Exercise Dagat-Langit-Lupa (AJEX DAGIT-PA), will include training on integrated air and missile defense operations, defending gas and oil platforms, land defense, and amphibious exercises aimed at retaking islands, airfields and seaports.
Officials told Defense News that planners and strategists have studied hundreds of conflict scenarios, including potential missile attacks, and crafted the training program to assess troop response and spot defense gaps.
Like previous editions, the exercises will be conducted in the country’s northern and western borders.
A segment will be held in Thitu Island or Pag-asa Island, a Philippine-controlled territory in the South China Sea that is home to around 400 Filipinos. Experts and military officials have identified Thitu as a likely initial target in an invasion.
The country’s armed forces, dubbed AFP, have conducted special operations and civilian defense training there. The agenda for this year includes naval surface fire support drills, but the military declined to confirm if these will accompany amphibious landing exercises.
Unlike previous iterations, this year’s edition will engage fewer troops with only 2,000 compared to last year’s 3,000. Instead, the military reserve forces, the Philippine Coast Guard, and the Philippine National Police will participate to complement end strength, Brawner said.
The agenda will also include training on cyber, electronic, and space-related warfare.
“These are not just simulations,” Brawner said. “The exercises are strategic rehearsals for real-world contingencies, validating our concepts of operations … we will also test out the new unilateral defense plan,” he added.
Since 2023, the Philippine military has officially shifted to external defense and last year released a Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept (CADC) to guide its defense doctrine.
Details of the strategy remain sparse, however, and it’s uncertain how the military would operationalize this concept given its limited resources and capabilities.
The AFP revealed a shift toward a new “unilateral defense plan” called Bantay Kalayaan late last year to implement the defensive concept, which was tested under the previous AJEX DAGIT-PA training program.
The current module builds on lessons learned from last year, officials said, as it includes a more streamlined command-and-control unit solely for territorial defense – a significant move to reflect the expanding defense focus.
The AFP established its Strategic Command in late October, the lead participating unit in the ongoing exercise. The unit will be responsible for areas outside the purview of joint command units. This includes exclusive economic zones, occupied territories in the South China Sea, and the aerial domain.
Gen. Brawner suggested the AFP Strategic Command may become the principal commanding unit of the fighting forces in wartime.
“The battle staff in the GHQ (General Headquarters) cannot transform into a full-blown battle staff to fight the war,” Brawner said. “That is why I was convinced that we have to organize an AFP Strategic Command … and we rushed toward establishing it so they could be the main participant in this exercise,” he said.
While the Philippines has joined hundreds of joint military drills with allies, the internal military exercise is crucial in beefing up the country’s defense, as Filipino troops will be “fighting the war by ourselves in the first part,” Brawner said.
Brawner explained that, should war break out, the armed forces must hold out for at least a month before possible reinforcements from allies.
“This exercise is crucial so we can see the limit of our defense architecture. If war breaks out, we will be the first to defend ourselves,” Brawner said, adding that despite the scenario, the Philippines is “also expecting help from our ally under our mutual defense treaty.”
About Leilani Chavez
Leilani Chavez is an Asia correspondent for Defense News. Her reporting expertise is in East Asian politics, development projects, environmental issues and security.
10. More Arrests Are Made in Alleged ISIS ‘Pumpkin’ Terrorist Plot
Summary:
Two New Jersey men, Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel and Milo Sedarat, were charged in an alleged ISIS plot to attack LGBTQ bars on Halloween. Jimenez-Guzel was arrested at Newark Airport en route to Turkey/Syria; Sedarat in Montclair for interstate threat transmissions. Linked arrests in Michigan, Washington, and the U.K.; investigators cite weapons, ISIS pledges, and Signal chats.
Comment: To paraphrase the former USSOCOM Commander, General Bryan Fenton, America may have forgotten about terrorism but terrorism has not forgotten about us.
More Arrests Are Made in Alleged ISIS ‘Pumpkin’ Terrorist Plot
WSJ
Two New Jersey men are charged in connection with an alleged plan to attack LGBTQ bars on Halloween
By Jack Morphet
Follow, James Fanelli
Follow and Alyssa Lukpat
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Updated Nov. 5, 2025 8:59 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/more-arrests-are-made-in-alleged-isis-pumpkin-terrorist-plot-6fe5e4d6
Alina Habba, acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. Mark Schiefelbein/AP
- Two men in New Jersey were charged in an alleged ISIS terrorist plot targeting LGBTQ bars on Halloween.
- One of the men was arrested at the Newark, N.J., airport on his way to board a flight to Turkey, according to a law-enforcement official.
- The other man was arrested at his home in Montclair, N.J., on charges of transmitting threats to interstate and foreign commerce.
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.
- Two men in New Jersey were charged in an alleged ISIS terrorist plot targeting LGBTQ bars on Halloween.
Two men in New Jersey have been charged as part of an ISIS terrorist plot against LGBTQ bars on Halloween, according to Alina Habba, acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
The arrests were part of a Federal Bureau of Investigation and New York City Police Department probe that apprehended two other suspects, one in Washington state and the other in the U.K., according to a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
The New Jersey suspects were identified as Milo Sedarat and Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel. The latter was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport on his way to board a flight to Turkey, the official said. He planned to go from Turkey to Syria to fight alongside ISIS members, according to the official and Habba.
Jimenez-Guzel pledged himself to ISIS, posed for photos in front of the ISIS flag and was planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, according to Habba.
Sedarat, 21 years old, was arrested at his home in Montclair, N.J., on charges of transmitting threats to interstate and foreign commerce. The complaint against Sedarat involves alleged antisemitic messages advocating violence and preparation for an attack, including images and purchases of a knife and sword collection and tactical gear, according to Habba.
Lawyers for Sedarat and Jimenez-Guzel couldn’t immediately be identified. The NYPD Intelligence Bureau contributed to uncovering the alleged plan.
All of the suspects were part of a Signal chat of 15 individuals who talked about supporting ISIS and going to fight with it, the law-enforcement official said.
Earlier this year, Jimenez-Guzel allegedly visited individuals in Michigan whom he met online. Those people were later arrested in an alleged Halloween weekend plot in Michigan. Jimenez-Guzel was aware of what the alleged Halloween plotters were planning, the law-enforcement official said.
Members of an FBI task force searched a Michigan home last week. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
Authorities last week arrested three U.S. citizens in Michigan. Mohmed Ali, Majed Mahmoud and Ayob Nasser allegedly acquired AR-15-style rifles, practiced shooting at gun ranges and scouted gay bars in preparation for a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS, according to a criminal complaint.
In messages, Ali, Mahmoud and Nasser allegedly planned to carry out the attack on Halloween, referring to the attack as “pumpkin,” court documents show.
When federal agents raided the men’s homes, they found a cache of weapons including rifles, shotguns, 1,600 rounds of ammunition and flash suppressors, the FBI said.
The FBI said the men wanted to mimic the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people across the city in a single night.
After Jimenez-Guzel’s arrest, investigators found ISIS videos, photos of dead Israeli soldiers and threats against a student at a high school on his devices, according to the law-enforcement official.
On Oct. 30, Jimenez-Guzel purchased a flight to Turkey scheduled for Nov. 17. After the arrests in the Halloween plot, he moved his flight up to Nov. 5, the official said.
Write to Jack Morphet at jack.morphet@wsj.com, James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com and Alyssa Lukpat at alyssa.lukpat@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ
11. Trump Expresses Reservations Over Strikes in Venezuela to Top Aides
Summary:
President Trump has expressed doubts about launching strikes to oust Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, fearing attacks might not force him to step down. Despite a U.S. military buildup and ongoing counternarcotics strikes on drug boats, the strategy remains unsettled, ranging from tougher sanctions and added regional forces to airstrikes or covert action. DOJ is exploring legal grounds to target Maduro. Washington is coordinating with Venezuela’s opposition; some officials favor concessions over regime change. Congress is divided on the likelihood of military action. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group is deploying to the Caribbean, providing options while no timeline for decisions exists.
Comment: As any POTUS would do. The most difficult and consequential division of a presidency is to not only to order military strikes but to make the decision to go to war (even if, and perhaps especially if, Congress avoids its responsibility to declare war). But the question is are we going to execute a regime change operation in Venezuela? Legal and moral issues aside(though those are critically important and I am in no way discounting them), we must ask the question before the decision is made: "what comes next?"
Trump Expresses Reservations Over Strikes in Venezuela to Top Aides
WSJ
Administration is still deciding whether to push Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power or extract concessions from him
By Alexander Ward
Follow, Robbie Gramer
Follow and Lara Seligman
Follow
Updated Nov. 5, 2025 8:20 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-expresses-reservations-over-strikes-in-venezuela-to-top-aides-0bf17d5c
On the flight deck of the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, last week. U.S. Navy
WASHINGTON—President Trump has recently expressed reservations to top aides about launching military action to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, fearing that strikes might not compel the autocrat to step down, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.
The debate underscores that the administration’s Venezuela strategy remains in flux, despite a buildup of military forces in the region and public threats by Trump to launch attacks.
What began as a counternarcotics campaign with airstrikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels has transitioned into the most muscular U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean in decades—one now squarely aimed at pressuring, and potentially ousting, Maduro.
But even basic questions, such as whether the goal is to remove Maduro or compel him into concessions, remain undecided, the officials said.
Trump continues to query aides about military options, the officials noted, leading some to suggest the president might eventually order an attack. The options presented to him range from intensifying economic pressure to military action inside Venezuela, including possibly against military and government facilities.
For now, officials say Trump is content with slowly building up U.S. forces in the region and continuing to strike boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific. The latest such attack occurred Tuesday when the U.S. military destroyed a vessel in the Eastern Pacific, killing two alleged drug traffickers.
“We’re blowing them up, linked to the Maduro regime in Venezuela and others,” Trump said Wednesday during a speech in Miami.
There is no timeline for a decision on whether to step up the campaign, officials said. Trump remains wary about getting directly involved in Venezuela after a first-term attempt to oust Maduro by supporting his opposition failed, former officials involved in that effort said. He also has longstanding apprehensions about using the military for possible regime change.
“The president has said he would continue to strike narcoterrorists trafficking illicit narcotics—anything else is speculation and should be treated as such,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.
Trump has been presented with three broad options to increase pressure on Maduro, the officials said.
The Pentagon is moving some of its most advanced units and weapons closer to Venezuela as tensions run high between President Trump and Nicolás Maduro. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday maps the buildup in the Caribbean. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao
They include stepping up economic pressure on Venezuela with sanctions and increased tariffs on countries that buy its oil; supporting Venezuela’s opposition while adding more U.S. military assets in the region to raise pressure on Maduro; and finally a campaign of airstrikes or covert operations aimed at government and military facilities and personnel. The options were previously reported by the New York Times.
The Justice Department is working on a legal justification allowing Trump to target the Venezuelan leader as part of a military operation, the officials added. Justice Department officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has branded Maduro a “narco-terrorist,” accusing him of heading a trafficking network that is conspiring to “flood the United States with cocaine.” The U.S. in August issued a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Maduro for narcotrafficking.
The steps taken already by the U.S. to persuade him that he can’t remain in power could prompt some members of the country’s security elite to turn on Maduro and oust him first, U.S. officials say.
The administration has been in touch with the Venezuelan opposition, current and former officials said.
“Maduro has to understand that the hours are running out,” Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said Wednesday, speaking remotely to a Miami business forum that Trump was also attending. “If he accepts a transition, it will move forward orderly and faster—but it will take place regardless of whatever Maduro does.”
Some U.S. officials say there is no need to force out Maduro as long as he agrees to curb drug trafficking, give the U.S. more access to Venezuela’s oil reserves and promises to hold fair elections.
Sen. Jim Risch (R, Idaho), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview that Maduro has conspired with drug cartels designated by the U.S. as terrorists, “and is going to be subject to the same fate.”
But Risch, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, added that he has seen no indication of the U.S. preparing military actions against Venezuela. “The president could change his mind, of course, because he is becoming very impatient and very unhappy with Maduro.”
Some senior Democrats think it is unlikely Trump will actually take military action.
“The press is far more convinced that the United States is going to attack Venezuela in some way than the administration actually is,” Rep. Jim Himes (D., Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an appearance Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I continue to be pretty bearish on the notion that we’re going to get militarily involved in Latin America.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, has played a major role in crafting Trump’s strategy and military campaign against drug boats, officials and State Department aides said. He briefed lawmakers on the plan Wednesday afternoon.
Last week, Trump publicly warned about possible attacks inside Venezuela. “The land is going to be next,” he told reporters, suggesting strikes directly within the country.
But he has toned down his comments since. Asked Friday by reporters if he was considering bombing military targets in Venezuela, Trump flatly said “No.” He then told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday that he doubted the U.S. would go to war with Venezuela. But asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he answered: “I would say, ‘Yeah.’ I think so, yeah.”
Maduro has accused Washington of trying to topple him, calling the military campaign “regime change through military threat.” Yet in a letter to Trump after the initial strikes in September, Maduro promised to produce data showing his country doesn’t traffic drugs. Last month, Trump said Maduro was willing to give “everything” to ease tensions, adding “he doesn’t want to f—around with the United States.”
Trump has switched course on military action before. He initially sought a deal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, giving Tehran up to two weeks before he would authorize strikes. But within hours, B-2 bombers destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, an operation Trump touts as a major success.
The Pentagon announced Oct. 24 that Trump had ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford and its carrier strike group to the Caribbean, where it will join eight naval warships already in the region. The arrival of the Ford and its accompanying warships will give the U.S. additional firepower in the event Trump decides to order airstrikes, using jet fighters and long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The carrier spent the past 12 days making its way across the Mediterranean, a much slower pace than anticipated. It is likely the ship is moving slowly to complete additional training, including flight operations, to prepare for the Caribbean deployment, experts said. It is also due to undergo routine maintenance before entering a potential war zone, according to two U.S. officials.
“When they deployed, they probably didn’t prepare for this scenario, this operation in the Caribbean,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “I think this is probably the need for them to make sure that they are proficient at the kinds of actions they would need to do in the Caribbean.”
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 6, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Expresses Reservations Over Military Action in Venezuela'.
WSJ
12. How tariffs ate American foreign policy
Summary:
President Trump’s sweeping use of tariffs, beyond trade protection, to coerce allies and adversaries has redefined U.S. foreign policy. Tariffs now substitute for sanctions, shaping diplomacy with economic pressure at domestic cost. As the Supreme Court reviews his emergency tariff powers, questions grow about executive overreach and the global backlash against “tariff diplomacy.”
Excerpts:
It sometimes seems as if there’s hardly a problem in the world that Trump doesn’t think can be solved with more tariffs.
...
“When you’re using import tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare, you’re attempting to weaponize what is a relative weakness of the US economy,” said Eddie Fishman
Comment: Does weaponizing tariffs against allies risk eroding long-term U.S. economic and diplomatic influence more than it deters adversaries? If the Supreme Court curtails Trump’s emergency tariff powers, how might future presidents pursue economic statecraft without overstepping constitutional limits? What specifically are the financial, political, and economic implications for the US is the Supreme Court rules against the tariffs? What will POTUS do if the Supreme Court rules against tariffs?
How tariffs ate American foreign policy
Vox · Joshua Keating · November 5, 2025
https://www.vox.com/politics/467530/trump-tariff-foreign-policy-supreme-court
The Supreme Court might take away Trump’s international weapon of first resort.
President Donald Trump has described the ongoing Supreme Court case over the legality of his use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on more than 100 countries as a matter of “literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.” Certainly the case, in which oral arguments were heard at the Court on Wednesday, has profound implications for executive power and, as my colleague Ian Millhiser explained earlier this week, will be a key indicator of the court’s willingness to rein in the administration.
Based on the hostile questions from the conservative justices on Wednesday, the court appears likely to rule against Trump — a potentially serious blow to the administration, and not only its economic policies.
Trump is a self-described “tariff man,” and tariffs are rivaled perhaps only by mass deportations as the signature policy of his second term. Trump loves tariffs in large part for their traditional function: protecting US industries from foreign competition and raising government revenue, and is unpersuaded by the arguments of most economists that US consumers will ultimately bear the costs of these measures.
But less noticed is the degree to which tariffs have also become the centerpiece of Trump’s foreign and security policy. It sometimes seems as if there’s hardly a problem in the world that Trump doesn’t think can be solved with more tariffs.
Just this week, for instance, the Financial Times reported that US officials have been waging a campaign of intimidation to block a new treaty on shipping emissions, threatening new tariffs against countries that support the agreement.
Trump has used tariffs to address broad geopolitical challenges, including levying them against countries like India that buy the oil Russia uses to fund its war in Ukraine. And he has used them for his personal grievances, like threatening a 50 percent tariff on Brazil over the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.
Trump has also used tariff threats to assert dominance over smaller countries, like Colombia, which attracted his ire in the first weeks of his term by refusing to accept deportation flights on military planes. And he has used them against some of America’s largest trading partners, like the tariffs he slapped on China, Mexico, and Canada over their alleged failure to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US.
Tariffs have even been part of Trump’s quest for a Nobel Peace Prize: Cambodia and Thailand were told they could not negotiate a tariff relief deal until they pulled back from a deadly border dispute.
In some respects, Trump is not acting out of character here. The political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have coined the term “weaponized interdependence” to describe how powerful states like the US have leveraged their position within the global economy to accomplish strategic goals.
The difference is that previous administrations more typically used sanctions — legal measures to prevent economic transactions with certain countries or entities — rather than tariffs: duties imposed on traded goods as they cross borders.
“Using tariffs for the purposes that they have been used by this administration is frankly weird,” Farrell told me. “It doesn’t make very much sense.”
The US overreliance on sanctions — about a third of the countries in the world are under some form of American sanctions — has its own drawbacks. But their advantage is that, at least in principle, the costs to the sanctioner are minimal. By relying on tariffs, the Trump administration is forcing US importers and consumers to bear at least some of the costs for punishing adversaries.
Much of American economic statecraft in recent years has operated under the same principle: to take advantage of the “chokepoints” in the global economy that are controlled by the United States. For instance, most international transactions are carried out in dollars, which gives the US enormous leverage to cut targets off from the global financial system. Many countries desperately want advanced semiconductors, a sector America and its allies happen to dominate.
Trump, on the other hand, is essentially using America’s status as a destination for countries’ exports as an economic weapon. This is the source of some leverage, but it’s not exactly a chokepoint. The US accounts for 25 percent of global GDP, but only 13 percent of imports. So Trump can make countries feel pain in the short run, but in the long run, he’s going to encourage them to find new customers. “When you’re using import tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare, you’re attempting to weaponize what is a relative weakness of the US economy,” said Eddie Fishman, a Columbia University professor who helped craft US sanctions policy as a State Department staffer in the Obama administration.
The nature of tariffs also limits the targets on which they can be used. Tariffs won’t do much good against Russia, for instance. Trade between the US and Russia is almost nonexistent. And a country like China has the capacity to retaliate, as it has demonstrated with its restrictions on rare earths exports. All of this means that the tariff weapon tends to be more effective when wielded against US allies rather than adversaries.
So why is Trump doing this? The president did use sanctions aggressively in his first term, and has in some circumstances in his second, but he also seems to dislike them as a tool and has expressed concern that they undermine global confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency. Ever a political child of the 1980s, Trump’s views may also be shaped by how the US wielded tariffs against Japan during that country’s economic boom.
He also appears to believe that tariffs are simply beneficial to the US economy anyway, so he might just see their geopolitical advantage as an added bonus. (Trump officials sometimes appear confused about the difference between the two economic tools. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, for instance, described the Russian oil-related tariffs on India as “sanctions,” which caused an uproar in New Delhi.)
Trump’s tariff diplomacy has racked up a few wins, but they have tended to be against smaller countries like Colombia and Thailand or to have only extracted relatively minor concessions, like the measures that Canada and Mexico have announced on fentanyl. India does appear to be finally curbing its purchases of Russian oil, though the sanctions the US also announced on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil may have more to do with that.
The tariffs’ longer-term consequences are less certain. The IMF has warned that tariffs are likely to be a drag on global growth. Countries also now have a greater incentive to diversify away from the US market for their exports.
Fishman also worries that “it will be hard to remove the tariffs for future US administrations, even if doing so is wise from an economic standpoint, because we’re increasingly dependent on tariff revenue to fund the government.” This has been shown most acutely in recent days by the White House dipping into tariff revenue to fund programs during the government shutdown.
Wednesday’s Supreme Court session suggests the Trump administration may need to rethink its strategy. White House officials say they are devising legal strategies to continue imposing tariffs without the emergency powers that are being challenged in this case. Given how many uses they have found for this tool, it seems unlikely they will part with it without a fight.
Vox · Joshua Keating · November 5, 2025
13. Russian Black Sea Port Halts Fuel Exports After Ukrainian Strike
Summary:
Ukraine’s Nov. 2 drone strike damaged infrastructure at Russia’s Tuapse Black Sea port, suspending fuel exports and halting Rosneft’s 240,000-bpd refinery. Tankers left berths; planned November export increases stalled. Kyiv predicts lasting shipping fallout, such as higher insurance, refueling disruptions, while Moscow accuses escalation. The refinery supplies China, Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey among buyers.
Comment: Is this the path to Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat?
Russian Black Sea Port Halts Fuel Exports After Ukrainian Strike - The Moscow Times
The Moscow Times · The Moscow Times · November 5, 2025
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/11/05/russian-black-sea-port-halts-fuel-exports-after-ukraine-strike-a91053
Fuel exports from the Russian Black Sea port of Tuapse have been suspended, and its local oil refinery has stopped processing crude after a Ukrainian drone strike damaged infrastructure, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Before being attacked on Sunday, the port had reportedly been expected to increase fuel exports in November.
But shipping data reviewed by the news agency showed tankers moved off their berths and anchored offshore as of Wednesday.
Three tankers had reportedly been docked for loadings of naphtha, diesel and fuel oil on the day of the Nov. 2 attack.
The Rosneft-controlled refinery halted processing on Monday due to port damage, Reuters cited two industry sources as saying.
The refinery, with a processing capacity of 240,000 barrels of oil per day, mainly supplies markets like China, Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey.
On the day of the attack, Ukrainian Navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk predicted long-term consequences for Russia’s shipping industry, noting that the strike would not only damage key technological infrastructure but also affect refueling companies, raise insurance premiums, and discourage many from using the ports.
Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of escalating attacks on energy facilities. Kyiv counters that fuel infrastructure directly supports the Russian military and remains a legitimate target.
Rosneft and Russia’s federal port authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Read more about: Oil , Black Sea , Drones
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The Moscow Times · The Moscow Times · November 5, 2025
14. A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age
Summary:
The United States and allies are urged to adopt a coordinated, verifiable transition to post-quantum cryptography before quantum computers render current encryption obsolete. Drawing on Bletchley’s wartime integration of science, engineering, and alliance management, the proposal centers on two tracks: a domestic “Ultra at Home” plan with measurable cryptographic migration milestones, and an allied “Codebook Abroad” compact to standardize and certify global quantum-secure systems. Together, these measures aim to prevent a “quantum splinternet,” promote democratic governance of emerging technology, and ensure secure, interoperable cryptography across defense, commerce, and communications.
Excerpts:
Bletchley Park was more than a place — it was a method.
...
The greatest strategic risk ahead is a ‘quantum splinternet’ — a fragmented digital landscape of incompatible national encryption stacks.
Comment: "Splinternet" is a new word for me. I love the analogy to Bletchley Park. But I did not get to quantum and now we must think about post quantum? (apologies for the attempt at humor)
Seriously, can democratic nations realistically coordinate post-quantum standards fast enough to outpace authoritarian competitors? How can governments ensure transparency and public trust while integrating export controls, security mandates, and private-sector innovation in the quantum transition?
A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age
warontherocks.com · November 6, 2025
Mauritz Kop
November 6, 2025
https://warontherocks.com/2025/11/a-bletchley-park-for-the-quantum-age/
Bletchley Park was more than a place — it was a method.
During World War II, the United Kingdom combined science, engineering, operations, and alliance management into a unified codebreaking system that cracked the Enigma Machine and changed the course of history. Today, we need a modern Bletchley-style effort to manage the post-quantum cryptography transition. This “Bletchley method” rests on three pillars: tight feedback loops between science, engineering, and operations; disciplined alliance organization; and continuous testing and verification.
The urgency is technical: Once fault-tolerant, cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers exist, Shor’s algorithm will break today’s public-key cryptography by efficiently factoring large integers and computing discrete logarithms. Grover’s algorithm provides a quadratic speedup for brute-force key search — effectively halving symmetric-key security. Consequently, the world’s core cryptographic infrastructure should be comprehensively transitioned, not just patched.
The United States and its allies should apply the Bletchley model by linking timely, verifiable domestic execution of post-quantum cryptography with an allied, standards-based certification compact. Applied defensively, it means post-quantum cryptography by default and certified interoperability — a coalition campaign for secure post-quantum adoption. Together, these measures would deliver interoperable and auditable post-quantum cryptography at scale — soon enough to neutralize the harvest-now, decrypt-later threat. Washington can earn credibility to lead internationally by executing at home first.
The approach should be operationalized in two tracks: a time-bound domestic implementation plan and a deployable certification compact abroad.
BECOME A MEMBER
Track One: Ultra at Home
The Bletchley method worked because discovery quickly flowed into doctrine and deployment. This track mirrors that flow. Historically, Bletchley Park’s output — decrypted intelligence — was codenamed “Operation Ultra.” This intelligence was the verifiable, actionable product of the entire science and engineering effort. America’s “Ultra at Home” should do the same, drawing on quantum information science to turn post-quantum cryptography standards like Federal Information Processing Standards 203, 204, and 205 into a deployed, operational reality. The Office of Management and Budget’s Memorandum 23-02 already sets preparatory obligations in inventory, planning, and budgeting. As a next step, the Office of Management and Budget, agency chief information officers, and senior agency officials for privacy should now turn guidance into scheduled, measurable migration milestones that demonstrate execution. To accelerate discovery and interoperability, agencies should adopt and contribute to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence project on migrating to post-quantum cryptography. This advances cryptographic agility through two workstreams — cryptographic discovery (system inventory) and interoperability testing of standardized post-quantum algorithms.
U.S. domestic execution should proceed through six concrete actions.
First, set dated adoption milestones and publish them. Every cabinet department and critical-infrastructure regulator should set quarterly targets for deploying the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s new algorithms across Transport Layer Security, Internet Protocol Security and virtual private networks, code-signing, payments, and device firmware. Progress should be reported publicly. As a baseline, agencies should report the share of external Transport Layer Security handshakes using approved post-quantum cryptography or hybrids; the share of code-signing for firmware and operating systems using lattice-based digital signatures and stateless hash-based digital signatures; and the share of deployed, Federal Information Processing Standard 140-3-validated modules with post-quantum cryptography enabled. The Internet Engineering Task Force is already standardizing hybrid post-quantum key exchange and authentication through the Terminology for Post-Quantum Traditional Hybrid Schemes, the Transport Layer Security Working Group, and the Post-Quantum Use in Protocols Working Group. The National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget should direct agencies to align to those profiles to avoid one-off implementations.
Second, procure only what’s validated and automate conformance. The General Services Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, and agency chief acquisition officers should condition federal purchases on Federal Information Processing Standard 140-3-validated modules and the National Institute of Standards and Technology should use the Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program to automate algorithm testing at scale. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget should publish a government-wide cryptography bill of materials from automated discovery tools, consistent with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Strategy for Migrating to Automated Post-Quantum Cryptography Discovery and Inventory Tools.
Third, test what is deployed, not what vendors promise. The Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Defense should expand the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative and related programs (for example Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing) into a federal test-and-evaluation network that exercises post-quantum cryptography in real stacks — OpenSSL library with the Open Quantum Safe provider, Domain Name System, email, and mobile — using open, reproducible benchmarks. Program managers and contracting officers should require vendors to clear these bars to sell into federal and military systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation, working with Department of Energy national laboratories, should fund and maintain reference implementations, building on the Open Quantum Safe “liboqs” library and the PQClean repository.
Fourth, harden the pipeline where quantum meets physics. Export controls are not a detour from post-quantum cryptography — they are leverage. A coalition that controls chokepoints in dilution refrigeration, single-photon detection, cryo-electronics, and quantum-grade photonics sets the de facto terms for global deployment and verification of quantum-secure systems. The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade, and the United Kingdom’s Export Control Joint Unit should pair the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security’s interim controls on quantum computing items with the European Union’s updated dual-use framework and the Department of Energy, the European Investment Bank, and allied innovation agencies should invest to ensure joint capacity meets secure demand.
Fifth, be pragmatic about tool choice. Adopt post-quantum cryptography everywhere, but pilot Quantum Key Distribution only in narrowly justified niches with standards-based assurance (for example European Telecommunications Standards Institute Quantum-Safe Cryptography) and independent evaluation. The National Security Agency’s posture for national security systems prioritizes post-quantum cryptography over quantum key distribution. The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre and Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security’s Technical Guideline 02102 express similar cautions. Civilian departments and independent regulators should follow this posture to prevent a fractured baseline.
Finally, wire “Replicator” to be quantum-ready. The Department of Defense’s Replicator aims to field swarms of attritable autonomous systems at speed. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the service acquisition executives should bake post-quantum cryptography into command and control, telemetry, software-update pipelines, and supply-chain provenance now — so systems deployed in 2025 are not silently broken in 2030. This requires a public-private partnership at the program level and reciprocity with trusted suppliers. Program executive offices, prime contractors, and frontier-tech firms should co-design secure communications, cryptographic agility, and model-assurance practices to prepare for future threats. It is better to build resilience now than retrofit under fire.
Track Two: Allied Codebook Abroad
The second track focuses on building interoperable cryptographic standards to prevent a quantum-era splintering of the internet. Today’s internet functions smoothly because cryptographic standards interoperate across borders and systems. The greatest strategic risk ahead is a “quantum splinternet” — a fragmented digital landscape of incompatible national encryption stacks, some based on proprietary or opaque technologies. Such fragmentation would weaken the open web, disrupt NATO interoperability, and undermine global finance.
To avoid this, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan should make post-quantum cryptography the default for all public-facing services, maintain transparent migration dashboards, and align on standards-first certification. This cooperative approach reflects the spirit of the Bletchley Declaration and reinforces shared trans-Atlantic cybersecurity priorities.
To make this a reality, I propose six measures to establish international guardrails and operating capacity.
Trans-Atlantic Post-Quantum Cryptography Profile
The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the European Commission (with the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, and Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) should issue a joint profile. This would bind to the Internet Engineering Task Force’s work on key-encapsulation mechanisms for Transport Layer Security 1.3 and the Limited Additional Mechanisms for Public Key Infrastructure (X.509) and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions working group’s hybrid-certificate work, and to the Post-Quantum Use in Protocols working group’s readiness efforts across Transport Layer Security, X.509, Quick User Datagram Protocol Internet Connections, Secure Shell, and Domain Name System Security Extensions.
Mutual Recognition of Conformance
The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the E.U. Agency for Cybersecurity should build a bridge between the Cryptographic Module Validation Program and the European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme on Common Criteria so vendors can clear one set of tests for allied markets. One test, many markets.
Conformance Laboratories Network
The United States (the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Commerce) and the European Commission, in coordination with the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, should fund a distributed set of accredited laboratories that run the same open test suites on reference implementations and real stacks. This should be anchored in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography project.
Capacity-Building With Conditionality
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, Export-Import Bank, and their E.U., U.K., and Japanese counterparts should tie development finance, export credit, and cyber capacity-building to certified post-quantum cryptography deployments and crypto-agility plans in partner states.
Crypto-Failure Clearinghouse
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the E.U. Agency for Cybersecurity, and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre — working with the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams and U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team — should create a mechanism similar to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures for cross-border cryptographic failures (e.g., bad parameterization, downgrade paths, and certificate-ecosystem issues) with coordinated disclosure and rapid patch dissemination.
International Quantum Agency
The G7 governments should set up an opt-in, non-treaty certification club anchored in U.S. export controls, procurement preferences, and targeted industrial subsidies, rather than a formal treaty body. Modeled narrowly on safeguards functions — audit against agreed quantum-security baselines, certify test methods and reference artifacts, and coordinate incident investigations — participation buys credibility and market access, while non-participation signals risk. This approach fits a sovereignty-first, transactional toolkit: access to U.S. and allied procurement and markets for those who certify, and reduced access for those who do not.
These six proposals constitute an operating compact. That agreement should be supported by three enabling measures.
Use Innovation Alliances to Scale Dual-Use Solutions
NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic should make quantum security an annual theme in its competitions. This includes incorporating secure communications, resilient timing, and post-quantum-ready edge devices, with test-center access and procurement pathways baked in.
Tie the Physical to the Algorithmic
A comprehensive quantum-security strategy links algorithms and the hardware substrate. While post-quantum cryptography is algorithmic, long-term viability depends on secure elements, true random number generators, hardware security modules, cryogenics, photonics, and timing. The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, the European Commission’s DG TRADE, and the United Kingdom’s Export Control Joint Unit should harmonize export controls on quantum computing items, thus enabling hardware to prevent standard-setting from being held hostage by hardware chokepoints. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Program Office, and European funding bodies should fund allied capacity. Recent U.S. and E.U. actions provide the legal scaffolding for coordinated lists and licensing.
Democratic Sovereignty as a Strategic Asset
The free world’s advantage is not secret sauce. It is ethical, values-aligned quantum governance — the ability to organize complex systems under democratic oversight, publish standards that others adopt, and verify what matters. A “Qubits for Peace” compact built on open standards, certification, and responsible export policy channels competition into safer lanes — preserving scientific exchange while defending the core. That is the Bletchley method for a quantum century.
What the United States Should Do Next
Washington should move from simple guidance to verifiable outcomes. The White House should appoint a post-quantum cryptography transition lead and publish a quarterly dashboard, a step that creates visible accountability and enforces dated milestones for code-signing, Transport Layer Security, and firmware. This should be paired with federal procurement power. By conditioning all federal purchases on validated cryptography (such as Federal Information Processing Standard 140-3 modules implementing the new standards) and machine-readable cryptography bills of materials, the government can drive immediate vendor convergence and ensure only validated post-quantum cryptography ships into federal systems. To de-risk this migration, the government should stand up a federal test-and-evaluation network, open to state, local, and critical-infrastructure pilots, demonstrating that new systems are based on measured performance, not just vendor promises. This domestic execution should also prove resilience, mandating annual “crypto-agility” drills across civilian agencies and defense platforms to ensure key management and update pathways are in place before a crisis.
Internationally, creating a trans-Atlantic post-quantum cryptography profile with mutual recognition between the U.S. Cryptographic Module Validation Program and the European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme on Common Criteria, backed by a funded laboratories network, would create a “one test, many markets” dynamic that accelerates allied convergence. Finally, integrating post-quantum cryptography requirements into export-control policy, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Department of Energy funding, and Department of Defense programs like Replicator aligns all instruments of national power, ensuring that supply-chain security, funding, and controls reinforce secure deployment.
Together, these steps replace ad-hoc migration with a verifiable, interoperable baseline: Validated crypto ships by default; progress is captured in live service telemetry; allies run the same test suites; and funding, procurement, and controls pull in the same direction.
BECOME A MEMBER
Mauritz Kop is the founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and serves as guest professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. His work spans quantum, AI, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and national security, with publications in leading university presses and top science journals. He advises U.S. and European policymakers on responsible quantum strategy.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Laboratoire QCMX Quantum Circuits and Matter lab via Wikimedia Commons
warontherocks.com · November 6, 2025
15. The False Choice at the Heart of Netflix’s Nuclear War Thriller, “A House of Dynamite”
Summary:
Joshua A. Schwartz argues Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite frames a false nuclear dilemma: immediate all-out retaliation versus “surrender.” In a single-strike scenario (e.g., Chicago), the U.S. retains robust second-strike capability; time pressure to “use-it-or-lose-it” applies only to massive or decapitating attacks. An optimal response is to absorb, attribute, remain on high alert, and retaliate later if warranted—avoiding reckless escalation. While the film effectively depicts missile-defense limits, human costs, and time stress, it ignores basic deterrence logic and risks misleading audiences. Cyber-C2 concerns are noted, but a follow-on large strike after mobilization is unlikely.
Excerpt:
Although we do not find out in the film what decision the president makes, the choice presented to him was a false one. A House of Dynamite delivers all the tension of nuclear war—just none of the understanding that might stop it. The illogic of the decision-making process in this case could be realistic given the intense time pressure and stakes of the scenario, which might fluster even the calmest and most sophisticated leaders. As the president notes, “This is insanity, okay?” However, if a real president and national security team is faced with the reality of choosing how to respond to a limited nuclear attack, then they should reject the film’s framing of the decision. Instead, they should realize that America’s second-strike capabilities mean slowing down is an option. Punishment can be imposed and deterrence restored at a later time. If America was to face its worst day in history, then it would be imperative to avoid compounding the pain by taking actions that would lead to Armageddon.
Comment: How can policymakers counter Hollywood-driven misconceptions that encourage rash nuclear decision-making under false time pressure? Should they even attempt to counter them? Or can they embrace them (or perhaps their Information War experts) and use such films to good effect? Rather than simply counter - acknowledge the entertainment value and then professionally point out the realities while using the film to empathize what we must do to better prepare America's defenses. The decision making process alone is worthy of debate and discussion AND education about what the real decision making process is like. And in actuality this essay is using the film in a positive way to stimulate critical thinking. My final point is that we should not be defensive about these films. They are entertainment. But we should find a way to derive positive benefits from them when possible. Or we can contemplate our navels and complain about how Hollywood makes movies that are not accurate.
The False Choice at the Heart of Netflix’s Nuclear War Thriller, “A House of Dynamite” - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · Joshua A. Schwartz · November 6, 2025
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-false-choice-at-the-heart-of-netflixs-nuclear-war-thriller-a-house-of-dynamite/
In Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, a nuclear missile streaks toward Chicago. The president has minutes to decide whether to respond by launching America’s own nuclear weapons. It’s gripping cinema—and terrible nuclear strategy.
No threat looms larger over humanity than nuclear war. Educating the public and policymakers about this issue is therefore of vast importance, and movies and television shows can play a constructive role in this regard. The Day After was watched by over one hundred million Americans, including President Ronald Reagan, who cited the film as a motivating factor for signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union. WarGames highlighted the vulnerability of nuclear command and control to computer hacking, leading to real policy changes. Dr. Strangelove vividly illustrated the absurdity of nuclear conflict, and is considered by the American Film Institute as one of the best movies of all time. As a result, it has been referenced by both policymakers and advocacy groups to make the case against nuclear weapons.
Against this backdrop, A House of Dynamite held real promise. Indeed, there is much to commend it for. The film accurately portrays the unreliability of current-generation missile defense systems and, consequently, the vulnerability of the United States to nuclear attack. It also vividly highlights the human costs of nuclear war, as the central characters have loved ones who they desperately break the rules to try and save.
Unfortunately, it has a key flaw that holds it back from entering the pantheon of classic nuclear films. Like Bigelow’s previous military-oriented movies—Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker—A House of Dynamite is tension-filled and keeps viewers on the edge of their seat. In particular, it realistically depicts the intense time pressure policymakers would face in the case of a nuclear attack against the United States. It would take just fifteen to thirty minutes after a nuclear attack was launched for a missile to reach its target. This time pressure frames the key question of the movie—how the president should respond to an incoming nuclear attack against Chicago. But the film’s core dilemma is a false one and disregards basic facts about America’s nuclear arsenal. Most notably, it ignores that the United States could easily (even if incredibly painfully) absorb an incoming nuclear strike—especially a single missile attack against a city like Chicago—and still retain an ability to retaliate with its own nuclear weapons.
The Worst Choice a President Would Have to Make
In the film, after the United States government detects an incoming nuclear missile from an unknown country, identifies its target as Chicago, and fails to intercept it, the president must decide what to do next. “Your orders, Mr. President,” ask General Brady, who is in charge of the United States Strategic Command.
There are two primary options presented to the commander-in-chief. The first, advocated predominantly by key military officials, is to launch an all-out nuclear attack against America’s adversaries. The goal of such an attack would be damage limitation. As Lieutenant Commander Reeves—carrier of the nuclear football—advises the president, “We can hit their command centers, silos, and bombers while they’re still on the ground, eliminating their ability to take further action against us.” In other words, destroy the enemy’s nuclear weapons before they can launch more against the United States.
However, given the likelihood of nuclear retaliation, the deputy national security advisor, Jake Baerington, accurately frames this option as “suicide.” Instead, he proposes the United States “hold back” and not retaliate, even if that constitutes “surrender.” Lieutenant Commander Reeves counters by arguing, “If we do nothing, the bad guys see they can get away with it.” General Brady adds derisively, “We can all certainly say a prayer and rely on the goodwill of our adversaries to keep us safe.”
Whatever course he believes is optimal, the president is strongly pressured by General Brady to decide quickly given the imminent detonation over Chicago: “Mr. President . . . slowing down is one luxury we just don’t have.”
How Presidents Should Think About Time Pressure in Nuclear Scenarios
Both the time pressure placed on the president and the recommendation by key military officials to conduct an all-out nuclear counterstrike are nonsensical. There are two circumstances under which there would be significant time pressure to respond to an incoming nuclear attack on the continental United States. The first is when an enemy launches a large-scale nuclear assault that threatens to degrade America’s ability to retaliate with its own nuclear weapons. In such a scenario, there may be a real use-it-or-lose-it dynamic at play. The second is if an enemy attempts to decapitate the government (i.e., kill its top decision-makers), thereby undermining its nuclear command and control and threatening its ability to authorize retaliation.
Neither condition applies in the film. A single nuclear-armed missile striking Chicago would not inhibit Washington’s ability to retaliate since there are no publicly known nuclear weapons located in Chicago, and even if they were, the United States retains hundreds of nuclear weapons in other locations. Indeed, the film explicitly makes clear that nuclear-armed submarines, aircraft, and land bases located far from Chicago have been put on high alert to launch their weapons at a moment’s notice if a second stage of the attack materializes. The destruction of Chicago would also not threaten to decapitate the United States’ nuclear command and control, as neither the president nor key military personnel were located in Chicago and at risk of being killed.
Given these dynamics, combined with the fact that the United States did not even know who to retaliate against, the advice to launch an immediate and overwhelming counterstrike was not just unwise and arguably unrealistic—it was reckless. Doing so would almost certainly guarantee a significant nuclear response that would lead to much more devastation than the destruction of Chicago. Failure to do so would also not mean having to “say a prayer and rely on the goodwill of our adversaries to keep us safe.” Because Washington retains a second-strike capability—a key fact not discussed by the film at all despite being a basic and central concept of nuclear strategy—other countries would still risk mutually assured destruction if they were to launch a larger-scale, follow-on nuclear attack.
The film does raise the possibility of a cyberattack that could theoretically inhibit the United States’ ability to detect a second, larger nuclear attack and order retaliation. Cyber vulnerability in nuclear command-and-control systems—real or perceived—could rationally produce use-it-or-lose-it dynamics. But, if the decision-makers in the film thought logically about the situation, then they should have concluded that a massive follow-on attack was unlikely to materialize. It would not make sense for an adversary to start small and then go bigger, as the United States had already mobilized its nuclear forces and activated its emergency contingencies in response to the single missile launch against Chicago. This made a second attempt less likely to succeed in terms of destroying America’s nuclear weapons on the ground before they could be launched, or decapitating its leadership to prevent a retaliatory launch order from being given. If an adversary planned to completely obliterate America, it would have—or at least should have—started with a much larger attack.
While General Bradley and Lieutenant General Reeves’ argument thus makes little sense, and stereotypes the military as being unreasonably hawkish, the way the deputy national security advisor (and president) frame the alternative is also highly misleading. Holding back in the moment is neither “surrender” nor (in the president’s words) “let[ting] whoever did this get away with it.” The most logical decision would be to stay on high alert, absorb the nuclear attack against Chicago, ascertain who carried it out and for what reason, and then retaliate at a later time to punish the aggressor and deter or prevent future attacks from taking place. And if this was just the beginning of a larger-scale nuclear attack, as General Brady worried, the United States would still retain the option to respond with its own nuclear strikes at a later time.
Although we do not find out in the film what decision the president makes, the choice presented to him was a false one. A House of Dynamite delivers all the tension of nuclear war—just none of the understanding that might stop it. The illogic of the decision-making process in this case could be realistic given the intense time pressure and stakes of the scenario, which might fluster even the calmest and most sophisticated leaders. As the president notes, “This is insanity, okay?” However, if a real president and national security team is faced with the reality of choosing how to respond to a limited nuclear attack, then they should reject the film’s framing of the decision. Instead, they should realize that America’s second-strike capabilities mean slowing down is an option. Punishment can be imposed and deterrence restored at a later time. If America was to face its worst day in history, then it would be imperative to avoid compounding the pain by taking actions that would lead to Armageddon.
Joshua A. Schwartz is an assistant professor of international relations and emerging technology at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology. He has written widely on topics related to nuclear weapons and film, including in The Washington Post, Lawfare, and International Security. You can follow his work on X @JoshuaASchwartz or via his website.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Michael A. Richmond, US Air Force
mwi.westpoint.edu · Joshua A. Schwartz · November 6, 2025
16. Review of “The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine’s Foreign Legion” by Colin Freeman
Summary:
The book chronicles Ukraine’s foreign volunteers, men driven by ideology, adventure, or redemption, who fought Russia despite poor vetting, coordination, and structure. Freeman argues Ukraine’s failure to organize a cohesive, trained foreign legion squandered potential strategic impact. The book offers tactical insight, cultural nuance, and lessons for future irregular warfare planning.
Review of “The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine’s Foreign Legion” by Colin Freeman
irregularwarfare.org · Christopher Booth
https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/review-of-the-mad-and-the-brave-the-untold-story-of-ukraines-foreign-legion-by-colin-freeman/
In “The Mad and the Brave: The Untold Story of Ukraine’s Foreign Legion,” Colin Freeman offers a powerful series of snapshots from the tactical perspective of men who volunteered to fight on behalf of Ukraine as foreign fighters. Freeman, an accomplished war correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, offers an engaging account for irregular warfare specialists and general readers alike. An overarching takeaway from the book as described in Freeman’s sketches, is how Ukraine’s failure to anticipate the need for a foreign legion, and a plan to vet and evaluate, train, and deploy these foreign volunteers in cohesive units has ensured that they have never had greater than a tactical and localized impact on the battlefield. This foundational flaw also led to missed opportunities for achieving strategic impact. A larger, well-organized legion (a regiment, series of regiments, or even a division) could have boosted Ukrainian morale while ensuring European and American skin in the game, potentially rallying stronger public support from those populations. For example, the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War helped shift many in the United States to focus on the fascist threat in Europe. Strategists considering the potential use of auxiliary fighters in Taiwan, the Baltics, or elsewhere should take these lessons to heart if they want to capitalize on the manpower opportunities provided by volunteers to an honorable cause.
Profiles of the Foreign Volunteers
Freeman’s book consists of a series of vignettes based on interviews and arranged chronologically for the first three years of the war. Over this timeframe, Freeman’s interviewees —primarily British and Americans (and often veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq)—express concern with the difficulty of the modern battlefield and sometimes disappear from the book as they are captured, injured, killed, or punted off to parts unknown. Their experiences range from those who quickly lost their appetite for combat, others who fought for a while before heading home (with some returning again), and several who have been engaged throughout. The skill levels, military background, and motivations for fighting the Russian invaders range widely. Some joined because they felt out of place in the civilian world; others sought to fight in what they saw as a morally righteous crusade; some had unresolved questions they needed to resolve, such as feeling they had failed to live up to their self-imposed expectations in earlier combat or wanting to test themselves battling an advanced enemy in the conventional fight they had previously trained for, rather than the counter-insurgencies many had found themselves in. Quite a few mystically believed somehow that the trenches and the black soil of Ukraine could help them self-medicate their PTSD.
Missteps and Structural Failures
Freeman’s book illustrates that many of the flaws in the Foreign Legion were baked in from the start, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for volunteers three days after the February 2022 Russian invasion. Perhaps because many military and foreign policy experts doubted that the government in Kyiv would last more than two weeks, little thought went towards vetting, training, and deploying the foreign volunteers who streamed into Ukraine. Many were, in Freeman’s description, “screamers,” war tourists, wannabes, never-weres, steroid-addled mercenaries, ex-cons or those on the lam, who were combined with a fair number of quality troops – former NCOs and officers from legitimate light infantry and special operations units including the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Special Forces, British Paras, and other legendary British Regiments. This absence of planning quickly had visible impact in the first weeks of the war: on March 13, 2022, the Kremlin launched an airstrike and hammered the Yavoriv training site where International Legion volunteers had congregated in a holding pattern as the Ukrainian military tried to fit them into the expanding force structure.
As the war continued past the initial shock of the invasion, it became evident that the lack of preparation for how to screen, train, and employ both foreign volunteers and Ukrainian forces had additional negative ramifications. The failure to properly triage new recruits at the outset led to men in the ranks who had no business being in a warzone as they endangered themselves and others through incompetence; this left many Ukrainian units and citizens skeptical of Western volunteers, unlike the experience of many Ukrainians who could choose to join a specific unit.
Misallocated resources led to a waste of talent and human capital. Poor performance by some volunteers created a lack of trust between foreign fighters and several Ukrainian units; likewise, Soviet-style leadership methods and a lack of modern tactics undermined the faith of some of the volunteers Freeman interviewed, who questioned decisions made by their Ukrainian commanders. While accounts differ, it appears that more than 200 foreigners have been wounded or killed fighting for Ukraine since 2022. Trauma has caused many to return home – including those who were poorly suited from the start, as well as talented volunteers who felt the inadequate operational security and lack of defensive preparations (such as bunkers), motivated them to exit the battlefield, rather than remaining and being needlessly endangered.
Historical Parallels and Strategic Implications
The term “foreign fighters” in modern parlance often conjures images of jihadists who jump at the opportunity to join a holy war, whether by enlisting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Chechen zealots, or the militant Islamists who fought throughout Afghanistan and Central Asia. The volunteers of Ukraine’s foreign legion harkened back to an earlier and more idealistic cohort, particularly those (like George Orwell) who flocked to the International Brigades who fought for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. The foreign cadre who joined the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to fight ISIS in Syria was a ready model for Ukraine in its search for manpower. In fact, many of the first volunteers had also previously fought with the YPG. These included British participants who left for Ukraine despite the UK government’s prior detention and prosecution of those who had fought in Syria.
Understanding how to leverage the motivations for joining a just cause could provide valuable insight for governments in Taiwan, the Baltics, or other beleaguered states facing threats from larger adversaries. A savvy social media appeal for volunteers to counter a ruthless adversary worked well from the outset for Ukraine and similarly could again in other circumstances leveraging the social connections established by veterans of the YPG, Ukraine, or recent military service. A comparable dynamic was visible in Israel following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, when any Israeli reservists who had refused to report for service or protested the Netanyahu government over proposed changes to the judicial system quickly returned from abroad or ended their protests to respond to public appeals for support; including some who had aged-out of the requirement for duty.
Broader Lessons
Over time, most volunteers have joined piecemeal small units of Westerners who fight together or work in concert with larger Ukrainian units. These pick-up teams typically operate at the squad or platoon level in size. Freeman suggests that, had Kyiv helped stand-up freestanding international battalions or brigades, there may have been better unit cohesion as well as greater impact on the FLOT where these larger units could be deployed. While small, ad hoc groups of foreign volunteers (often modeled after YPG fighters) proved effective against irregular forces such as ISIS (particularly when backed by coalition aircraft, advisors, special operators, indirect fires, and Iraqi military, police, and Iranian-supported Shi’a militias), this approach has been far less successful against Russian troops, who have benefited from Chinese support, Iranian Shahed drones, and North Korean troops, missiles, and artillery.
As always, the language barrier was consequential with too few legionnaires speaking Ukrainian and too few translators to help fill in the gap. Problems with pay, supplies, kit, and equipment are also frequently described – though, Ukrainian troops often deal with the same issues, which are exacerbated by drone-warfare and Russian attacks on supply-lines. Freeman suggests that the number of volunteers are at best an estimate and probably undercounted given how support for the war in Ukraine has become politized in the US, and even some in the UK. Many thus have kept their service a secret from all but their families and refrained from sharing their experience with the larger community. An additional cause for reduced publicity is the active cohort of pro-Russian trolls who regularly attack and harass the families of foreign fighters online.
Most volunteers interviewed for the book lacked any familiarity with Ukrainian history, culture, or language and thus bumbled headlong into sizable cultural obstacles; thus, their stories reflect a sense of what the war is like on the ground from their particular western viewpoint. Freeman has not written the definitive account of the Foreign Legion; that dispassionate historical account will likely have to wait for the war to end and will require a review of Russian and Ukrainian primary source documents. Instead, he offers a visceral and immediate book that provides some sense of the larger shape of the war through the foxhole-level viewpoint of those who shared their stories with him. It is always propulsive and given his eye for detail combined with a conversational writing style that captures the personalities of the individual volunteers, keeps the reader engaged.
In capturing foreign fighters’ perspectives and weaving them together, Freeman has succeeded in creating one of the first impressionistic tapestries of the Western volunteers’ perspective. From their stories, readers can take away broader lessons in the successes and possibly larger failures in the establishment of a foreign legion for Ukraine. As a result, his book is recommended reading for professionals, scholars, and casual readers alike.
Christopher D. Booth is co-director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s Maritime Program. He has more than two decades of experience in national security and international relations, first serving on active duty as an Army armor and cavalry officer. He is a Distinguished Graduate of Command and Staff College–Marine Corps University and graduated from Vanderbilt University Law School and the College of William and Mary.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Main Image: Generated by DALL-E, OpenAI
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17. Media, Martyrdom, & Manipulation
Summary:
The author analyzes how Kosovo Liberation Army propagandists used spectacle, martyrdom, and Western media bias to turn local insurgency into an international humanitarian cause. By provoking Serbian overreactions and amplifying civilian suffering, the KLA shaped a David-versus-Goliath narrative that won Western sympathy, legitimized NATO intervention, and demonstrated how perception management can rival battlefield success in modern irregular warfare.
Comment: Worthy of review by Information Warfare practitioners.
Media, Martyrdom, & Manipulation
irregularwarfare.org · Jacob S. Feinstein
On November 28, 1997, in a small village in Kosovo, three armed men interrupted the funeral of a schoolteacher to proclaim the revolution of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against Serbian authority. Roaring applause conveyed the crowd’s understanding that the age of nonviolent reform was over, while international press outlets reported cautiously on the fiery development in Yugoslavia. Years of shadowy planning by Albanian nationalists was bursting into action.
KLA Announces Revolution
The KLA’s revolutionary proclamation was a combination of theatrical flair and strategic timing. KLA insurgents had struggled for years to gain popularity over their pacifist counterpart, the League for a Democratic Kosovo (LDK), whom the KLA believed were ineffective for securing meaningful Albanian rights under oppressive Serbian authority. By 1997, after years of fruitless LDK reform efforts, the KLA capitalized on mounting public frustration, using the funeral as a boiling point to stage a dramatic challenge to the LDK’s pacifist approach, draw global media attention, and rally Albanians under its banner.
This account of the KLA’s dramatic emergence illustrates how propagandists can exploit psychological advantage at pivotal moments to craft enduring narratives with lasting political impact. The following article uses the Kosovo conflict as a case study to demonstrate how media, martyrdom, and war can be manipulated to shape perception and power alike.
Historical Background
The 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict was part of the larger 1991-2001 Yugoslav wars, which were sparked by ethnic conflict and exacerbated by economic and political instability. Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia’s secessions from Yugoslavia throughout 1991-1992 sparked several multi-front civil wars between the Yugoslav States, wherein most nations fought to retain their historic borders and sometimes to annex “foreign-held” lands inhabited by same-kin. Kosovo primarily avoided the 1991-1995 fray because, as a province of Serbia rather than an independent state, it lacked conventional forces, political autonomy, and historical precedent for nation-state independence.
However, tensions in Kosovo remained. Although Kosovo was officially Serbian territory, ethnic Albanians comprised approximately 80% of its two million residents, while Serbs numbered roughly 10%. Kosovo was therefore an Albanian majority-minority region within greater Serbia, meaning Albanians lacked adequate national representation despite their local majority. Lingual, cultural, and religious divides contributed to hostilities, but were secondary to more tribal/ethnic notions of “us versus them.”
Beginning in 1989, pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova and his League for a Democratic Kosovo (LDK) used nonviolent protests to petition for greater Albanian rights within Serbian Kosovo. Rugova’s movement enjoyed widespread Albanian support but largely failed to achieve meaningful reform given Serbia’s preoccupation with fighting other Yugoslav States. LDK leaders instead expected significant reform following the inevitable post-Yugoslav war negotiations.
Around the same time, more radical Albanians viewed peace talks as insufficient for achieving true self-determination. For some, negotiations even ran counter to visions of a Greater Albania including Kosovo and surrounding Albanian-inhabited regions. However, these revolutionaries were limited in weapons and lacked popular support compared to the LDK. To overcome these constraints, an asymmetric strategy was needed to provoke tension and capture media attention.
Generating media attention and gaining Western support hinged upon the exploitation of liberal Western ideals. Generally speaking, contemporary liberal Western thought is widely held to obligate the State, as the arbiter of power, to use its power responsibly to ensure peace, diplomacy, and coexistence. Serbian oppression of Albanians, therefore, was widely condemned by Western society, providing violent Albanian resistance a degree of legitimacy in Western eyes. Each Albanian death could be framed as a direct result of Serbian oppression, meaning that KLA attacks and martyrdom only amplified international sympathy. For Western media and audiences, a detailed history of the Albanian-Serbian conflict was unnecessary; what mattered was the immediate perception that Serbia was oppressing Albanians, and that Albanians were dying as a consequence of Serbian oppression. Whether or not the KLA fully understood this, sensationalizing the conflict was more pivotal to their success as an insurgency than any battlefield-underdog victory.
Recognizing this, KLA attacks against Serbian targets began in 1992. While these sporadic ambushes rarely inflicted more than a few casualties, the headlines these attacks generated were the true objective. Newspapers read of bloodshed, martyrs, and a swelling tide of revolution. And once the LDK failed to achieve peaceful reform during the 1995 Dayton Accords, which sought to resolve the many Yugoslav conflicts, many Kosovar Albanians shifted towards revolutionary KLA ideology as a final resort for independence.
Martyrdom and Media
March 5, 1998 marked a turning point in the KLA’s international narrative when Adem Jashari became one of the first Albanian martyrs to achieve global attention. Three days before, Jashari participated in a KLA ambush that killed four and wounded two Serbian police officers. Jashari fled with his band to his nearby hometown of Prekaz, a known KLA stronghold, where they fortified in his family compound—with no less than 50 Jashari family members present. Seeking to make an example of Jashari, Serbian police deployed Yugoslav Army tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and mortars around the town. Neither Jashari’s band nor his unarmed civilian family responded to surrender commands from Serbian police. Serbian forces understood the potential for collateral damage. Nonetheless, Serbian forces used mortars before nightfall, crashing the roof of the main house and killing several civilians. After a three-day siege, Jashari, his two comrades, and all 50-odd family members were dead, save one niece who reported she “…was threatened [by Serbian police] with a knife to say her uncle killed everyone who wanted to surrender.”
Jashari Compound Memorial
Such a wholesale massacre of civilians was the exact Serbian blunder the KLA needed to propagandize and elicit international sympathy on a macro scale. Serbia’s abrasive conduct made them appear reckless, wanton, and entirely indifferent to civilian life. Such indiscriminate killing was pragmatically unacceptable to the West. These inexcusable actions both popularized KLA ideology as well as set an international perspective that, regardless of Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, the local Albanian population deserved independence from the yoke of Serbian abuse.
Western media began to view the conflict in a plain dichotomy of strong versus weak, an injustice of Goliath over David, and thus it was the West’s moral and humanitarian imperative to intervene. Western leaders similarly acknowledged the Albanian plight but were frustrated over the KLA’s duplicitous tactics aimed at goading America into protectorate intervention. As then-United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright aptly noted:
“…There did not appear to be much Jeffersonian thinking within the KLA. Often indiscriminate in their attacks, they seemed intent on provoking a massive Serb response so that international intervention would be unavoidable.”
A later massacre by Serbian forces in January 1999 in Račak followed a similar storyline. After another KLA ambush on police, Serbian forces surrounded Račak. International reporters found a few scattered rifles and 45 corpses in the village center–mostly men, some women, and a 12-year-old child. Serbian officials claimed each was a KLA insurgent and cleaned the site before international investigators could arrive.
Račak marked the final straw for the West. Serbian aggression in Kosovo was not only perceived as wrong in itself, but damaging to the tenuous peace in adjacent countries, which Dayton had resolved. Western powers again compelled peace and reform negotiations between Serbian and Albanian delegates, including the KLA and Rugova. Albanian diplomats demanded an independence referendum while Serbia demanded the KLA’s disarmament …all while America demanded Serbia provide NATO military access throughout Yugoslavia for peacekeeping purposes. No middle ground was possible. Importantly, however, the KLA understood that their Western support hinged upon their perceived willingness to compromise; and so, in spite of the American-led negotiations being counter to the KLA’s own interests, they signed the disarmament accords. This political maneuver was necessary to maintain international favor while losing nothing and gaining everything; Serbia either had to concede independence or face open war. When Serbia predictably refused the accords and launched a new counterinsurgency offensive in Kosovo, NATO intervened on March 23, 1999, until Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic capitulated on June 11, 1999.
Quantifying Media Attention – Who and What Mattered?
Media outlets shape the public’s understanding of a conflict. In order to legitimize their struggle, gain Western support, and transform their relatively inconsequential conflict into an international rallying cry for humanitarian idealism and anti-authoritarianism, the KLA had to engage in basic guerrilla warfare that frustrated Serbian authorities into rash responses. In contrast, Rugova’s diplomatic approach never made it out of the parliaments.
Recent empirical data collection and analyses conducted by the author (see below) revealed that Western media, specifically the US-based Washington Post and the British-based Reuters, reported upon KLA-related terrorism considerably less than issues concerning the suffering of Albanian civilians. For brevity, this section will only refer to data from Reuters given its greater sample size and the similarity of the two outlets’ perspectives.
Reuters narratives describing “Oppression” and “Terrorism” dominated the early months of the conflict, i.e., pre-June 1998 (Table 1). As Serbian counterinsurgency operations dramatically intensified in June 1998, there was a marked increase in media content regarding “Humanitarian/Refugee” concerns. Media focus upon the escalating violence and ethnic expulsions further transformed media coverage from a sympathetic “David” dynamic into a tangible humanitarian issue in which Western audiences felt compelled to intervene.
Table 1: Relative Frequency of Issue “X” and “Kosovo,” Mar. 1998 – Aug. 1999
Notably, unlike Bosnia, the media rarely referred to Kosovo in terms of “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” or “Massacre/Mass Killing” except for Račak in January 1999. References to terrorism (which occasionally referred to Serbian acts of State/paramilitary terrorism) similarly declined while references toward Albanian oppression and humanitarianism increased, highlighting an overall media favoritism toward the plight of the Albanians. Additional qualitative analyses further revealed that most articles rarely discussed “why” events happened, focusing largely on developments and casualty figures.
Another notable observation from the data is the media’s fixation on the KLA over Rugova’s pacifist approach. In March, Reuters wrote 826 total articles on Kosovo and explicitly named the KLA 185 times compared to Rugova’s 100. By January 1999, the KLA-Rugova ratio widened to 88% to 12%, and by March 1999, 94.1% to 5.9%, demonstrating Rugova’s waning significance in the global narrative (Tables 2-3). Martyrdom and humanitarian issues were simply more interesting than peaceful reform—at least under Milosevic’s regime.
Table 2: Relative media presence of KLA vs. Rugova, Mar. 1998 – Aug. 1999
Table 3: Article distribution for “Kosovo,” Mar. 1998 – Aug. 1999
Taken together, the KLA’s strategy of low-intensity guerrilla warfare was remarkably effective at directing international sympathy towards Albanians over Serbian oppression. Serbian retaliations created widely visible political and humanitarian crises that Western audiences deemed morally unacceptable. Media narratives of Serbian brutality not only laid the foundation for NATO intervention, but further provided a demonstrable need to declare Kosovo independent from Serbia–a tenuous situation with an uncertain future.
Conclusion
The analysis above demonstrates how propaganda can shape Western media and public opinion to advance political and military objectives. Martyrdom, especially when civilian casualties are publicized, carries immense moral weight and evokes powerful emotional responses that can prompt sanctions or even military intervention. Albanian insurgents in Kosovo exploited this dynamic, provoking Milosevic into disproportionate retaliation and crafting a David-versus-Goliath narrative that guided Western perception, generated sympathy, and ultimately compelled intervention. Media coverage, focused on humanitarian crises rather than the nuances of diplomacy, amplified their impact, showing that narrative construction can be as decisive as battlefield operations. For modern militaries, policymakers, and peacekeepers, Kosovo underscores a critical lesson: managing optics and perception is integral to strategic success, as the interplay between actions and public narrative can shape conflict trajectories, foreign responses, and the broader political environment.
Acknowledgements & Author Bio:
The author sincerely thanks Professor Robert Burrell of the University of South Florida (Global & National Security Institute) and Professor Chris Mason of the Army War College for their mentorship and comments upon this manuscript. The author also thanks Professors Baki Tezcan and Magdalena Wojcieszak at the University of California, Davis, for their advising and mentorship during his original undergraduate thesis.
Jacob Feinstein is a graduate student in the Security Studies program at Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service. During his undergraduate studies at UC Davis, he wrote an honors dissertation on the history of the Kosovo conflict and how media and propaganda influences Western military decision-making.
Cover Image: OpenAI. Funeral Procession for Adem Jashari of Kosovo with News Cameras Watching. AI-generated image. ChatGPT (GPT-5). 2025. https://chat.openai.com/
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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18. How War in Taiwan Ends
Summary:
Zack Cooper argues that even if the United States and Taiwan successfully deny a Chinese invasion, the war may not end easily. Chinese leaders, unwilling to accept failure, could prolong conflict through blockades or attrition, betting they can outlast U.S. resolve. Therefore, deterrence must combine denial, i.e., preventing invasion, with punishment by credibly threatening escalation to raise China’s costs. Yet this strategy faces the “Goldilocks paradox”: punishment must be severe enough to compel Beijing to stop fighting but not so extreme that it triggers nuclear escalation. Cooper warns that Washington must prepare not only to repel aggression but to end wars decisively.
Excerpts:
A strategy of denial is only step one; the threat of punishment will be the United States’ ultimate trump card.
...
Therefore, the biggest challenge for the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy is not whether it allocates resources to a strategy of denial but how it integrates denial and punishment into a holistic deterrence framework. Rebuffing an initial attack on Taiwan is necessary but not sufficient. Without a plan for terminating a war, Washington would risk repeating the pattern of U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan that many Trump officials critiqued: winning the first battle but losing the war. If the United States is to deter China, it will have to persuade Chinese leaders that Washington has a strategy not only for the early stages of a conflict but also for the end stage of a war.
Comment: Some critical questions we must consider: How can the U.S. integrate denial and punishment strategies without provoking uncontrollable escalation with China? Could domestic political divisions or war fatigue undermine America’s ability to sustain a long Taiwan conflict? What credible endgame strategies could persuade Beijing to cease hostilities without humiliating Xi Jinping or destabilizing the Chinese regime? I am sure the USD(P) and planners at the Pentagon and INDOPACOM are considering these (while informing the NSC and POTUS). The bottom line is credible deterrence requires the capability and will to fight and win (terminate?); therefore we must develop and sustain that capability. So the pesky question remains in a different context, if deterrence fails, "what comes next?"
How War in Taiwan Ends
Foreign Affairs · More by Zack Cooper · November 6, 2025
If Deterrence Fails, Could America Thwart China?
November 6, 2025
Taiwanese soldiers exiting an underground military tunnel in Kinmen, Taiwan, October 2025 Ann Wang / Reuters
ZACK COOPER is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University. He is the author of Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries.
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In recent years, many in Washington have focused on deterring China from invading Taiwan. Before taking office earlier this year, Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, asserted that Taiwan should be “laser focusing on implementing a denial defense against invasion.” Indeed, an array of small, inexpensive weapon systems holds great promise for repelling a Chinese amphibious landing. The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy is therefore correct to embrace a strategy of denial for stopping an invasion of Taiwan.
But rebuffing an invasion might not end the war. Joel Wuthnow, an expert on the Chinese military, has warned, “There is no scenario in which China, following an unsuccessful invasion, accepts responsibility, acknowledges that military solutions are impractical, or pivots to a fundamentally different set of political objectives toward Taiwan.” In the wake of a failed invasion, Chinese leader Xi Jinping (or his successor) would be unlikely to simply pack up and go home. Instead, Chinese leaders might reason that they have less to lose by continuing the fight.
This is why the political scientist Michael Beckley has argued that “war over Taiwan likely would become protracted, as nearly all great power wars have since the Industrial Revolution.” World War II ended only when Allied forces captured Germany’s capital and the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Japan. Neither option seems advisable in the context of a U.S.-Chinese war; Washington needs to find other ways to end it. And so, in the years to come, the United States must prepare two forces: one to stop a Chinese invasion and another to end the conflict. Preventing a war from starting in the first place will rely to some extent on the innovative forms of deterrence by denial on which the Trump administration and others have focused. But denial capabilities on their own will not be enough. Ending a war that churns on even after a failed invasion will also require old-fashioned power projection.
IN DENIAL
In the twentieth century, the United States perfected the art of projecting power around the globe. A combination of forward bases and aircraft carriers allowed U.S. forces to operate worldwide. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. military’s dominance also meant that one set of forces could employ two distinct forms of deterrence simultaneously: denial and punishment.
Consider the role of U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. At the time, China was staging military exercises and testing missiles in the waters around Taiwan. As tensions rose, Washington maneuvered two carriers near the island. Those strike groups practiced deterrence by denial by threatening to physically repel an attack. But they also performed deterrence through punishment by threatening severe consequences if Beijing went through with it, since carrier-based aircraft could strike ships heading toward China and even targets on the Chinese mainland.
In the last few years, however, the United States has begun tailoring its forces—and those of its allies and partners—for more specific missions. Forward bases and aircraft carriers are expensive to build and maintain, yet still vulnerable to ballistic missiles and other asymmetric systems. Pentagon officials are therefore pushing to acquire more “attritable” systems, which are relatively cheap to produce and designed to be expendable, for use by small units operating within the expanding area that China threatens. As David Berger, the former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, explained at a defense industry conference in 2021, the United States must “get comfortable with throwaway things.”
Ending a war over Taiwan will require old-fashioned power projection.
But attritable systems are of limited use against China’s day-to-day coercive operations in the air and sea around Taiwan. Last year, Taiwan detected 5,105 Chinese sorties into its airspace. Defending against these aircraft requires expensive jets rather than low-flying drones. In the maritime context, responding to Chinese naval incursions in the waters around Taiwan will require vessels that can monitor those activities and challenge Chinese forces if necessary.
Even after open conflict begins, denial is still only a partial answer. U.S. mines and missiles can sink Chinese vessels, killing thousands of troops in the process, but Chinese leaders might still seek at least a partial victory. The People’s Liberation Army could attempt to seize Taiwan’s outlying islands or conduct a maritime blockade while its military arsenal makes the waters around Taiwan a no man’s land. “There is no path to U.S. victory that does not include the long blockade,” the former intelligence officer Lonnie Henley has argued.
That is why the United States must be able to convince China that it will face unacceptable costs if it continues fighting in the wake of an unsuccessful invasion. A strategy of denial is only step one; the threat of punishment will be the United States’ ultimate trump card.
CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP
The war in Ukraine illustrates the difficulty of terminating a conflict even after an initial invasion has bogged down. With small and cheap systems such as drones and mines, Ukraine was able to deny Russia a swift victory but has failed to impose costs high enough to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop fighting. Russia has suffered terrible losses in the war, but Putin appears to have calculated that the costs of continuing are lower than the costs of admitting defeat.
Russia’s example serves as a warning about China’s likely behavior. Ideally, the prospect of a failed invasion of Taiwan would deter China, but Chinese leaders might perceive several incentives for protracting a war following an initial loss. First, China’s industrial capacity far outstrips that of the United States, so it could recapitalize its forces more rapidly. Over the last three decades, China has undergone a massive military buildup. The Office of Naval Intelligence has assessed that China has over 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. armed forces face significant munitions shortages, with some experts predicting that American stockpiles would be expended after just weeks, or even days, of a conflict with China.
Beijing might believe it can outlast Washington and Taipei in terms of other supplies, as well. Getting provisions across land into Ukraine has proved challenging; delivering even basic necessities over water to Taiwan amid a conflict with China would be an order of magnitude more difficult. Taiwan is a relatively small island with limited food and energy stockpiles. Conversely, Beijing’s rapid expansion of wind, solar, and nuclear power would help insulate it against a U.S. energy blockade.
Beijing believes it could win a contest of wills over Taiwan.
A conflict over Taiwan could eventually become a contest of wills—which Beijing believes it could win. Chinese officials have described Taiwan as “the very core of China’s core interests.” U.S. President Donald Trump’s take is decidedly different: “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s 68 miles away from China. I just think we have to be smart . . . it’s a very, very difficult thing.” The American people support Taiwan, but many do not want a direct conflict with China: when asked in 2024 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about their commitment to defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, the majority of Americans surveyed either opposed such a policy or were unsure.
A Chinese failure in a conflict over Taiwan could also threaten Xi or his successor’s hold on power and undermine the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi would want to avoid an admission of failure and thus might order the Chinese military to keep waging an unsuccessful war. Without the prospect of punishment, the CCP might decide that failure poses a greater risk than continuing the conflict.
For all these reasons, Chinese leaders might prefer to keep fighting even after an initial defeat. To bring the conflict to a close, the United States would need to credibly threaten punishment. Colby and other Trump administration officials clearly recognize this; he co-authored a 2022 report advocating “selective punishment operations” and “cost-imposition to favorably manage escalation and seek to terminate a war with China.” These operations could include an embargo or the seizure of Chinese assets held abroad. But Beijing has been insulating itself against political and economic pressure, so military escalation might well be required, including strikes on critical infrastructure and parts of China’s defense-industrial base. These moves would raise the costs for China of continuing a conflict, but they also present a strategic dilemma.
THE GOLDILOCKS PARADOX
A number of factors would complicate any threat of punishment. First is what researchers at the RAND Corporation have termed the “Goldilocks challenge”: threats of punishment must be high enough to persuade Beijing to end a conflict in which it is deeply invested but low enough to avoid provoking unacceptable escalation, such as nuclear use. Finding this middle ground would not be an easy task.
It will therefore be important to try to keep an initial fight over Taiwan limited in order to provide Chinese leaders a pathway for deescalation. Chinese leaders might back down after claiming to have taught Taiwan a lesson or taken some contested territory. Yet China’s own messaging before a conflict could set a higher bar: Chinese leaders might demonize Taiwan and the United States to rally public support, while trumpeting the PLA’s military superiority and China’s great rejuvenation. An invasion of Taiwan might start with Beijing metaphorically burning its ships so there would be no turning back.
In the aftermath of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, politicians in Washington, Taipei, and elsewhere might themselves raise the stakes. They could seek to use Beijing’s moment of weakness to constrain China’s ambitions, formalize Taiwan’s independence, or undermine the CCP’s hold on power. There would be a fine line between “too hot” and “too cold” policies, and the tradeoffs would become more difficult as the war grew longer, bloodier, and more destructive.
A second challenge is that U.S. “horizontal escalation”—widening the scope of the conflict—may not be as effective today as it once might have been. Devoting more funding to denial capabilities risks cannibalizing resources for military platforms more capable of threatening punishment, such as stealthy bombers and submarines armed with cruise missiles. And although American strategists have discussed the possibility of a blockade to prevent China from importing energy supplies, the country’s nuclear power plants and renewable energy sources now account for a third of its energy production, so that Beijing is less vulnerable to an energy blockade. Cutting China’s fossil fuel imports would hurt over time, but Taiwan would be in a far more dire position.
Therefore, the biggest challenge for the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy is not whether it allocates resources to a strategy of denial but how it integrates denial and punishment into a holistic deterrence framework. Rebuffing an initial attack on Taiwan is necessary but not sufficient. Without a plan for terminating a war, Washington would risk repeating the pattern of U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan that many Trump officials critiqued: winning the first battle but losing the war. If the United States is to deter China, it will have to persuade Chinese leaders that Washington has a strategy not only for the early stages of a conflict but also for the end stage of a war.
Foreign Affairs · More by Zack Cooper · November 6, 2025
19. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Manuals
Comment: A reference for anyone who in intersted in revolution, resistance, insurgency, special operations, and intelliegnce. Depsite the caveat at the end, they remain relavent at least as historical instructional materials. We can still learn a lot from the OSS.
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Manuals
theresistancehub.com
https://theresistancehub.com/office-of-strategic-services-oss-manuals/
The OSS—the WWII precursor to the CIA and modern U.S. Special Operations—produced field manuals for sabotage, morale operations, and irregular warfare. These documents show how the U.S. organized clandestine activities in occupied Europe and Asia, and they illuminate the origins of today’s irregular warfare concepts. We present verified, declassified copies for historical study and academic context.
De-Classified OSS Manuals
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
This manual, published by the OSS during World War II, outlines practical methods for ordinary citizens to disrupt enemy operations using simple, low-risk acts. It emphasizes small-scale actions, such as wasting time, spreading confusion, and minor physical sabotage, that could cumulatively degrade enemy efficiency. Written for distribution in occupied territories, it demonstrates how even untrained individuals could contribute to resistance efforts. Today, it is studied as both a historical artifact and a primer on low-end disruptive tactics.
Download PDF
Morale Operations Field Manual
The Morale Operations manual guided OSS officers in psychological and propaganda campaigns designed to weaken enemy confidence. It provides detailed techniques for rumor-spreading, black propaganda, and other covert methods of undermining morale behind enemy lines. Unlike physical sabotage, its focus was on psychological impact, targeting perceptions, loyalties, and fears. It remains a foundational reference in the study of psychological operations and information warfare.
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Special Operations Field Manual
This OSS manual served as a comprehensive guide for training and conducting irregular warfare operations during World War II. It covers planning, organization, guerrilla tactics, demolitions, and coordination with resistance movements. The field manual reflects the OSS’s role as the forerunner of modern U.S. special operations forces, blending doctrine with practical fieldcraft. Today, it offers valuable insight into the evolution of unconventional warfare doctrine.
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OSS Organization and Functions
This manual provides an overview of the Office of Strategic Services’ internal structure, outlining the roles, responsibilities, and coordination of its various branches during World War II. It details how intelligence, research, and operations were organized to support the Allied war effort through centralized planning and field execution. The text captures the OSS’s evolution into a unified wartime intelligence organization, precursor to the modern CIA, and remains a key reference for understanding the origins of U.S. covert and special operations.
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Maritime Unit Field Manual
This manual documents the doctrine and methods of the OSS Maritime Unit, the forerunner of today’s naval special operations. It covers coastal infiltration, swimmer delivery systems, demolition techniques, and specialized maritime sabotage operations. Designed for operatives working behind enemy lines, it emphasizes stealth, adaptability, and innovative use of equipment in maritime environments. The manual reflects the OSS’s pioneering role in combining irregular warfare with naval tactics to enable unconventional operations from the sea.
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Operational Groups Field Manual
This field manual outlines the organization, training, and mission of the OSS Operational Groups—elite, uniformed units conducting guerrilla warfare in occupied Europe. It provides guidance on small-unit tactics, coordination with resistance forces, demolitions, and intelligence integration. The document captures the OSS’s shift from clandestine support to direct action, illustrating how Operational Groups became precursors to modern U.S. Army Special Forces and established many of the principles of unconventional warfare still studied today .
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The manuals contained on this page are presented strictly as historical documents. They were created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and are today part of the public domain, available through the CIA FOIA reading room and other archival sources. Their inclusion here is for educational and research purposes only, to highlight the evolution of irregular warfare thought. They are not intended as instructional guides for operational use. Readers should understand them in their proper historical and academic context. Though some classification markings may still be visible, all documents have been cleared for unlimited public release.
theresistancehub.com
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
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