Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings.”

– Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

"When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of 'terrorism' and 'extremism.' Be alive to the fatal notions of 'exception' and 'emergency.' Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary."

– Timothy D. Snyder

"Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care."

– Theodore Roosevelt

1. U.S. and Ukraine Try to Break Impasse Over Peace Deal With Russia

2. Opinion | This alliance has become transactional. Here’s how to repair it.

3. Nepal Airport Scandal Taints Belt and Road Image

4. The Coast Guard’s Place in Political Warfare

5. Why Germany Wants a Divorce With China

6. How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?

7. How a Tech-Savvy Officer Finally Cracked the Jan. 6 Pipe-Bombs Case

8. Small Wars in the New Strategic Era: Why the United States Must Prepare for a World of Limited Conflict

9. Fortitude 2.0: Steel & Shadows (Influence)

10. Past the Line of Disorder: Counter-Logistics as a Special Operations Capability

11. Opinion | Guan Heng’s Fate and American Values

12. Japan Has Finally Drawn The Line, And A Trapped Beijing Knows It – Analysis

13. Has Venezuela been ditched by its strongest allies - Russia and China?

14. SOCOM seeks candidates for agentic AI experimentation

15. Special Operations News – Dec 15, 2025

16. On Europe, the Trump administration is out of step with Congress, Americans

17. Chasing True AI Autonomy: From Legacy Mindsets to Battlefield Dominance

18. America’s Drone Delusion – Why the Lessons of Ukraine Don’t Apply to a Conflict With China

19. The Needless Rift Between America and Colombia

20. What Trump’s National Security Strategy Gets Right

21. 5 questions only a veteran would ask the top generals at West Point and the Naval Academy

1. U.S. and Ukraine Try to Break Impasse Over Peace Deal With Russia

Summary:

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held five hours of talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin as Washington pressed for a peace deal with Russia by year end. The White House said progress was made, but Ukrainians and Europeans described difficult sessions and limited U.S. flexibility. Core disputes include U.S. pressure for Ukrainian withdrawals from parts of Donbas still held by Kyiv, and Kyiv’s demand for clear, legally binding security guarantees if Russia violates any deal. The draft plan could constrain Ukraine’s efforts to regain territory, complicate NATO hopes, and reintegrate Russia economically. Talks continue Monday with European leaders involved.

Comment: Are we committed to peace or are we committed to defending Ukraine? Here is what our NSS says about sovereignty. Is it only US sovereignty? I hope we would include Ukrainian sovereignty and their right to defend their territory. To be consistent on sovereignty we should support Ukraine's right to their sovereign territory. We should never support Russia's claim to Ukraine's sovereign territory.

Primacy of Nations – The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American

interests.

Sovereignty and Respect – The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty. This includes preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations, attempts by foreign powers or entities to censor our discourse or curtail our citizens’ free speech rights, lobbying and influence operations that seek to steer our policies or involve us in foreign conflicts, and the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country. TheUnited States will chart our own course in the world and determine our own

destiny, free of outside interference.

U.S. and Ukraine Try to Break Impasse Over Peace Deal With Russia

WSJ

Trump pushes Kyiv to strike quick pact with Moscow but Zelensky wants security guarantees

By Laurence Norman

, Anastasiia Malenko

and Georgi Kantchev

Updated Dec. 14, 2025 4:36 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-and-ukraine-try-to-break-impasse-over-peace-deal-with-russia-7609a95e

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with a watch, greeted U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Berlin on Sunday. Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung/AFP/Getty Images

BERLIN—President Trump’s top envoys held five hours of talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin on Sunday, with Washington hailing progress as the administration steps up pressure on Kyiv to seal a peace deal with Russia by year-end.

The talks between Ukraine and its Western partners have become a tug of war, even without Russia at the table. Washington is pushing for quick decisions, while Zelensky and his European backers contend that significant differences remain that must be resolved.

Talks will continue on Monday and several European leaders plan to join.

Among the key points of contention, Ukraine has balked at Washington’s call to withdraw its forces from a portion of the eastern Donbas region that Kyiv’s forces still hold. European and Ukrainian officials have pushed for clarity on what the U.S. would do if Russia were to break a peace deal and attack Ukraine.

Both issues will be at the heart of the talks in Berlin. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proposed the meetings during a talk European leaders held on Wednesday with Trump.

After Sunday’s talks ended in the late evening, the Trump administration’s Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on X that the two sides held in-depth discussions on the peace plan. “A lot of progress was made, and they will meet again tomorrow morning,” he said.

One person briefed on Sunday’s talks described them as difficult, saying the U.S. side appeared unwilling to compromise on its peace proposal draft.

Trump late last week said he was invited to join the Berlin talks but publicly doubted the trip would be worthwhile. He sent Witkoff and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, after Zelensky indicated flexibility on his negotiating stance, a White House official said.

Over the past few weeks, Witkoff has shuttled between meetings with the Kremlin in Moscow and separate discussions with Kyiv in the U.S. or Europe.

A police officer surveyed the damage following a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Sunday. Stringer/Reuters

Russian officials have said the U.S. peace plan is a good basis for discussion but haven’t said whether they would accept it. Many European officials doubt the Kremlin is looking to wind down the war. They have said that Europe and all North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries face the risk that if Russia prevails in Ukraine, the Kremlin will set its sights on conflict with European neighbors.

Throughout the recent weeks of talks, Russia has bombarded Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. Zelensky said hundreds of thousands of families were without electricity across the country on Sunday morning.

Ukraine on Wednesday sent Washington its response to an earlier U.S. proposal for ending the war, which started almost four years ago with Russia’s invasion. While there is agreement on some points, including a cap of 800,000 troops on Ukraine’s peacetime armed forces, Kyiv has continued to reject the U.S. push for it to surrender territory in the Donetsk region that Ukrainian troops still hold.

The U.S. plan would stipulate that Kyiv agree not to fight to win back swaths of territory it has lost to Russia elsewhere and may entail Washington formally recognizing Moscow’s annexation of parts of Ukraine. It would also further complicate Kyiv’s hopes of eventually joining NATO, while potentially bringing Russia back into the global economy, including through joint U.S.-Russian projects.

Speaking to reporters via WhatsApp ahead of talks on Sunday morning, Zelensky said Kyiv hasn’t received a response yet from Washington on its proposal. He said Ukraine has “done a lot to ensure that all parties can meet together” and lamented that power politics rather than values was driving the peace negotiations.

“Look, today, we are not talking about honesty, but about power,” he said. “Because if we talk about honesty, values and respect for international law, the Russians had to be condemned from the very beginning.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky recorded a video message on his phone in the Kharkiv region on Friday. UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE/AFP/Getty Images

Zelensky also indicated Sunday that he was open to discussing the future of the heavily fortified part of Donetsk that Ukraine still holds. He said the fairest option would be to start talks with Russia based on the current front line—not a forced withdrawal—and said if Ukrainian troops withdraw from the area, Russia should also agree to pull its troops back.

He said the issue “is very sensitive and very heated.” Under Ukrainian law, he said, the president can’t surrender territory and it is for the Ukrainian people to ultimately settle the matter, possibly through a referendum.

One of the key differences between the U.S. and Ukraine is their assessments of the battlefield and how that should influence negotiations. Trump has repeatedly said Ukraine is losing the war.

Multiple senior Trump administration officials assess that Ukraine is losing the war and would lose if the fighting continued, even though Ukrainian soldiers and other European officials believe Ukraine can defend itself for at least another year, especially with increased military and financial support from allies.

Zelensky has appealed to the U.S. not to believe Moscow’s claims about the situation at the front. Underscoring his point, he visited the edge of the besieged city of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region on Friday, a place the Russians claimed to have captured a month ago.

In addition to territory, the Berlin discussions are expected to focus on negotiations on security guarantees for Ukraine, according to European and Ukrainian officials.

Britain, France and other European capitals have drawn up detailed plans of the kinds of help they could provide Ukraine, including a possible reassurance force in the country, and discussed them with U.S. military officials. But Washington has yet to take a political decision on the help it would provide, according to Ukraine and Europe.

Ukraine originally hoped for NATO membership, with its commitment that an attack on one member constitutes an attack on all. Zelensky on Sunday acknowledged that NATO membership appeared blocked and that he was focused on legally binding security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe that would be similar to those codified in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.

Zelensky has said he hopes a U.S. role in fending off a future Russian invasion would be backed by Congress.

On Friday, a French official reiterated the importance of Washington giving Ukraine clarity on its role in security guarantees before Kyiv commits to ceding territory.

Moscow said it would strongly object if proposals developed by Kyiv and Brussels are included in the peace plan, Kremlin foreign-policy adviser Yury Ushakov said Sunday. Russia was likely to object to provisions including a demilitarized zone in the Donetsk area, he said. “There may be some provisions that are completely unacceptable for us, including those related to territorial issues.”

“The issue of territories was actively discussed here in Moscow. The Americans are not only aware of but also understand our position,” Ushakov said.

Ukraine also will never be able to take Crimea back or secure NATO membership, he said.

On Ukraine joining NATO, he said “there is also a one million percent guarantee that it won’t happen.”

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com, Anastasiia Malenko at anastasiia.malenko@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 15, 2025, print edition as 'U.S., Ukraine Try to Break Impasse Over Peace Deal'.

WSJ

2. Opinion | This alliance has become transactional. Here’s how to repair it.

Summary:

The Washington Post argues the transatlantic alliance is shifting from shared values to transactional bargaining, worsened by the White House’s Dec. 4 National Security Strategy criticizing Europe more than authoritarian rivals and by Europe’s overreaction. It urges Atlanticists to avoid treating the United States as equivalent to Putin’s Russia, noting U.S. public and congressional support for NATO and forward forces. The piece says Europe remains geopolitically weak after decades of underinvestment, despite recent defense industrial growth. It warns Washington against inconsistency: demanding European rearmament while complaining about European procurement choices. Both sides should focus on burden sharing, policy coherence, and reforms that strengthen Europe’s capacity and resilience.

Excerpt:

Savvy European leaders need to make use of this moment not to join the anti-American chorus but to goad their societies to accept difficult reforms. Their rallying cry should be patriotism, calling people to a common defense against a threat many already feel in their bones. Love of country is a cause that must be wrested from retrograde populists or else they’re going to take over across the continent. History shows how that ends.

Opinion | This alliance has become transactional. Here’s how to repair it.

Washington Post · Editorial Board

As the transatlantic alliance shifts, Trump’s tough love is no reason to get in bed with China.

December 14, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. ESTYesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/14/europe-transatlantic-alliance-trump-nss/

The Trump administration recently published a strategy document more critical of democratic Europe than America’s authoritarian adversaries, and scorned allies responded by throwing an equally unhelpful fit. Can Atlanticists on both sides of the ocean repair the rift, or will they let a small but vocal minority see through one of the greatest unforced errors in diplomatic history?

The National Security Strategy, published by the White House on Dec. 4, served as a reminder that the values underpinning the post-World War II alliance are not the same values that populist parties espouse in Europe or the United States. That this rift is ripening as Europeans feel increasingly vulnerable to Russia’s depredations heightens anxieties. Yet European leaders would be foolish to overreact to a few paragraphs from a document that tries to pin down President Donald Trump’s amorphous views.

In the Trump era, the transatlantic alliance is becoming increasingly transactional, driven more by mutually beneficial exchange than shared values. Trump exaggerates his frustrations when annoyed, but he has done more to reset the alliance than tear it down. Europeans who treat Trump’s United States as a threat akin to Vladimir Putin’s Russia are simply not serious.

While the document harshly criticizes Europe’s approach to trade and free speech, the rest of Washington and the country at large still see the old continent as a key ally. The National Defense Authorization Act, which advanced through Congress this week, prohibits a reduction of U.S. forces on European soil below 76,000 troops. And a Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute survey shows that 68 percent are in favor of NATO and 62 percent want to see Ukraine win the war.

Yet for all their wealth, and marginal progress over the past four years, Europeans are indeed geopolitically “weak,” as Trump said. For decades, American presidents have politely pleaded with allies to share more of the burden. They agreed but made little real progress on rebuilding their underfunded militaries. Trump’s uncouth style, and a genuine crisis in Europe, led to some improvements but after four years of large-scale war in Ukraine, wealthy Europeans remain laggards.

The world would be a better place if Europe was a real superpower, not just a regulatory one. Alas, too many bureaucrats in Brussels remain more interested in leveling unwarranted fines against U.S. tech giants than making the age-old tradeoffs of guns versus butter.

It will also be foolish for Trump administration officials to overplay their hand. The revival of Europe’s military industrial complex is real. Analyzing satellite maps, the Financial Times found that European defense manufacturers are expanding at a rapid clip, with over 30 million square feet of new facilities having broken ground in the last year. Yet now Trump officials are whining that Europeans aren’t buying enough U.S. weapons.

This kind of inconsistency gives credibility to voices inside Europe that would prefer replacing the American alliance with closer ties to countries like China or even Russia. Trump’s blind spot is believing his fellow populists in Europe would make better allies than the centrist status quo just because they’re skeptical of immigration and trade. Many members of the Alternative for Germany or France’s National Rally are virulently anti-American. Voices inside traditional parties think they have a point.

A hard truth is that much of Europe’s resentment really stems from envy of American greatness. The U.S. assimilates immigrants in ways they cannot while fostering innovation they can only dream about because of its relative economic freedom.

Savvy European leaders need to make use of this moment not to join the anti-American chorus but to goad their societies to accept difficult reforms. Their rallying cry should be patriotism, calling people to a common defense against a threat many already feel in their bones. Love of country is a cause that must be wrested from retrograde populists or else they’re going to take over across the continent. History shows how that ends.

Washington Post · Editorial Board

3. Nepal Airport Scandal Taints Belt and Road Image

Summary:

Nepal’s anti graft agency, the CIAA, has filed a major case at Nepal’s Special Court over alleged corruption in the Pokhara airport project, a Belt and Road flagship financed by China’s Exim Bank. The charge sheet accuses China CAMC Engineering and senior executives, along with Nepali officials and former ministers, of collusion to inflate costs, violate procurement rules, and compromise quality, alleging misuse of 8.36 billion rupees (about $74 million) by raising estimates from $145 million to $216 million. Analysts warn the case will damage BRI credibility, amplify debt and capture narratives, and increase scrutiny of opaque contracting.

Comment: This exposes the true nature of China's One Belt One Road strategy. The tools of our information instrument of national power should be exploiting this in effective themes and messages. We should be using OBOR as an operational template to focus on exposing PRC malign activities in these countries to help them defend their sovereignty. This should be a mission for POTUS' NSC Director of Political Warfare and his interagency joint task force for US political warfare (if we had one).

Nepal Airport Scandal Taints Belt and Road Image

Nepal anti-graft watchdog publicly accuses Chinese state firm, top executives, and former Nepal ministers of corruption

Dec 15, 2025

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/nepal-airport-scandal-taints-belt-road-initiative?utm

By: Toh Han Shih

A multi-million-dollar bribery scandal over Nepal’s Pokhara airport has given ammunition to critics who accuse China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of corruption in the biggest case filed at Nepal’s Special Court in terms of the money involved under a state procurement process. The accusations against a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), China CAMC Engineering, its chairman and another senior executive, have dealt a blow to the reputation of the BRI, China’s megaproject to forge economic links with other nations through infrastructure projects like airports.

“China has been trying to address the international reputational damage by instituting a number of “corruption purges” within BRI projects since mid-2024. They had been making some progress. The Nepal story will undo much of these reputational gains. But the civil society backlash and reputational damage will be significant,” Andre Wheeler, chief executive officer of Asia Pacific Connex, an Australian consultancy, told Asia Sentinel.

A risk consultant said, “Cases like this chip away at the narrative that the BRI is purely a mutual-benefit development tool. Unless addressed transparently, they feed narratives of overpricing, indebtedness and local capture. For many citizens, it will look like proof of what critics have been saying: foreign money plus weak oversight equals big losses. Politically, that’s toxic.”

“This is not just about one firm or one airport. It exposes recurring governance gaps around large, state-backed infrastructure financing that create corruption risk in BRI deals,” added the risk consultant, who declined to be named.

Nepal’s Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) alleged the overpricing in a charge sheet filed at Nepal’s Special Court on December 7. The anti-graft watchdog’s charge sheet alleges officials and CAMC colluded to inflate costs, breach procurement laws and compromise construction quality. The harshly worded charge sheet alleges the group misused 8.36 billion Nepalese rupees (US$74.3 million) by raising the airport’s approved cost estimate from US$145 million to US$215.95 million “with malicious intent.”

CAMC, which is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, built the airport, which was financed by a loan from China’s state-owned Export and Import Bank. CAMC’s controlling shareholder is China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach), an SOE.

The defendants include CAMC and 55 individuals including CAMC chairman Wang Bo and regional general manager Liu Shengcheng as well as five former Nepali ministers, comprising former Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat and four former tourism ministers, namely the late Post Bahadur Bogati, Bhim Prasad Acharya, Deepak Chandra Amatya and Ram Kumar Shrestha.

The CIAA is seeking a US$74.3 million fine from CAMC, Wang and Liu for violating Nepali laws on corruption.

“This case is unusually consequential. It combines large financial recoveries with criminal charges against high-level local politicians and a foreign contractor, signalling a tougher enforcement posture in Nepal. What makes this unusual is the scale and the fact that the anti-graft agency named both ministers and senior executives of a Chinese firm. It’s meant to send a message,” said the risk consultant.

“BRI projects bring money and speed, but where local procurement and audit systems are weak, that combination can be exploited. This case is a text book example,” he added.

“This is certainly not the first time that there has been alleged corruption in BRI projects. Many in South Asia have had similar allegations made,” said Dane Chamorro, head of global risks and intelligence at Control Risks, an international risk consultancy. “The same has occurred in several African states too. BRI projects tend to be large with accompanying large price tags so they are often ripe opportunities for corruption.”

Many big infrastructure projects globally suffer from the same alleged problems because of the large amounts of money at stake, so accusations of corruption are not unique to Chinese overseas investments, Chamorro said.

“The countries where many BRI projects happen are also notorious for corruption, Nepal being just one,” Chamorro pointed out, adding that several big Chinese contractors have had similar allegations of corruption leveled against them, and in some cases legal action as well, but that has not stopped them from continuing to do business overseas.

In Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Nepal ranks 107th. China, despite its 12-year anti-corruption campaign, ranks 76th.

According to a report by AidData, a US research institute, in March 2024, 18 percent of the respondents said Chinese government support of development projects in their countries has made corruption much worse and 33 percent said it has made corruption worse. The survey polled 1,650 respondents around the world.

CAMC did not reply to Asia Sentinel’s questions. To date, the Shenzhen-listed firm has not published any announcement on the corruption accusations against itself. The SOE continues to win overseas projects. On December 5, CAMC and Indonesia’s Otis International signed a contract for a liquefied natural gas project in East Java, Indonesia, CAMC announced on December 8.

“As long as the funds from the Chinese side keeps pumping out, they will continue to be much sought after,” said a Malaysian analyst who declined to be named.

CAMC can still win projects in countries that do not have sound and meaningful corporate governance and accountability systems, said Wheeler. “They will find it increasingly difficult in those developing countries that have has first-hand experience in BRI corruption allegations.”

The risk consultant said, “Companies survive single scandals, but repeated problems or formal blacklisting by lenders could shut doors quickly.”

If China wants to address accusations of corruption in BRI project, it needs to have a lot more transparency in terms of commercial viability of a project, financing and costing projections, employment of locals in senior roles, intellectual property (IP) transfer and protections, Wheeler advised.

Chamorro said, “The best thing the Chinese government could do to combat this alleged behavior would be to insist on an open and public bid and contracting process as too often these BRI projects are done “no bid” and with no information released on the terms of the agreement.”

Local politics

In September, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli resigned amid Nepal’s worst unrest in decades, when Generation Z protestors in the country’s capital Kathmandu, angered by the deaths of 19 anti-corruption protesters, clashed with police and set fire to buildings. Elections in the South Asian nation are scheduled for next March.

Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal recently said the Nepali government is committed to acting against corruption “as per spirit of Gen Z movement,” as it prepares for elections, according to media reports.

“Quite often, the local operating environment is highly politicized and the BRI project is used as a political weapon against opponents. Given the current status of Nepal’s political transition, this could also be a factor in this situation,” Chamorro commented.

Toh Han Shih is a Singaporean writer in Hong Kong and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel

4. The Coast Guard’s Place in Political Warfare

Summary:

China is winning in the South China Sea through political warfare, using maritime militia, coercive fishing fleets, artificial islands, and economic leverage while avoiding open conflict. U.S. navigation patrols are too blunt, invite escalation narratives, and Washington failed to press the 2016 Hague ruling, weakening allied confidence. The article argues for a Coast Guard centered strategy that turns contested waters into governed space through law enforcement missions: fisheries protection, anti piracy, disaster response, and partner training. This reframes U.S. presence as rule enforcement, not saber rattling. Congress should fund and organize a Combined Maritime Forces style framework in the Asia-Indo-Pacific to coordinate allies, blunt coercion, and strengthen regional rule collectively.

Comment: For our adversaries it is political warfare. Politics is war by other means: Mao: "Politics is war without bloodshed and war is politics with bloodshed." We need to get used to it. This is a unique and innovative contribution to US political warfare (if we were to conduct political warfare).

The Coast Guard’s Place in Political Warfare

A U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement crew assigned to Coast Guard Cutter Vigorous (WMEC 627) conducts a small boat training exercise off the coast of Haiti, Oct. 29, 2025. Vigorous' crew deployed to the Coast Guard Southeast District area of responsibility for a 28-day deployment to the Windward Passage in support of Operation Vigilant Sentry. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Eric Rodriguez)

Post published:December 9, 2025

https://soaa.org/coast-guard-political-warfare/

In the critical maritime corridor of the South China Sea (SCS), China aggressively pushes its claims to more than 90 percent of the waters. While America pushes back with freedom of navigation patrols, Beijing is winning by deploying political warfare that skirts just below the threshold of war. The solution isn’t more warships, but turning contested waters into governed space.

For more than a decade, China has succeeded in expanding its influence not through naval battles, but through maritime militia and artificial islands. Its claims clash with many other countries in the region, including American allies like the Philippines. Although a 2016 U.N. tribunal at The Hague declared that China’s claims had no legal basis, this has not stopped China from enforcing its perceived territorial boundaries.

A Maritime “Gray Zone” Strategy

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) easily outclasses any challenger to its SCS claims. Still, the Chinese Communist Party shrewdly understands that it cannot simply take territory with brute military force, because doing so would constitute a clear and open war. Such a war would likely trigger economic sanctions, loss of influence and diplomatic clout, and even military intervention by powerful states like the United States. The West’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine confirms the wisdom of China’s decision to hold back militarily.

Instead, Chinese President Xi Jinping has opted for political warfare over the conventional alternative. This does not mean Chinese conduct has been peaceful. Rather, China has pursued a clever strategy of pressuring neighbors just under the threshold of war.

The first step has been to assert an economic presence through a civilian fishing fleet that functions as a maritime militia, bullying other nations’ fishing ships and even Coast Guard vessels. China has also constructed bases on shoals across the sea to both project force further afield and improve its legal claims by transforming rocks into “islands.” As an added disincentive for escalation, China is the largest trading partner for other claimants and uses economic incentives as carrots to complement the sticks.

America’s Missed Opportunity

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague might say one thing, but it has no enforcement mechanism of its own. While China might not have a valid claim currently, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Making matters worse, U.S. foreign policy squandered an opportunity to support our ally, the Philippines, by declining to energetically enforce the court’s ruling. As a result, others have been unwilling to press their claims legally for fear of Chinese economic retribution and doubts about our willingness to back them up. This skepticism about America’s commitment is one reason U.S. influence in the region has decreased over the past decade.

A New Approach

The U.S. needs to do more than mere freedom of navigation exercises in the SCS. We should match China’s political warfare strategy with one of our own. Using our navy is a blunt approach that gives the CCP political cover to complain about American military escalation and reinforces, rather than replaces, the law of the jungle. Instead, America should turn the SCS into a “governed space” through the velvet glove of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG).

Use of the Coast Guard reframes U.S. presence in the region into one of law enforcement rather than purely selfish national interest. Under the mandate of preventing piracy, preserving fishing stocks, emergency disaster response, and so on, the USCG can help push back the legal and political gray zone that has allowed the CCP to throw its weight around. As a policing force, rather than a solely military organization, the Coast Guard can act without escalating or explicitly curbing Chinese expansion, which limits China’s ability to credibly object.

Building on What Works

Past success stories show this is possible. As part of a Combined Maritime Forces, the USCG and our allies effectively stopped piracy off the Horn of Africa. We already have most of the pieces in place to create such a force in the SCS. The Ocean Maritime Security Initiative, the Southeast Asia Maritime Law Enforcement Initiative, and the Southeast Asia Cooperation and Training exercise are just some of the joint law enforcement initiatives in the Southeast Asian region. Yet for now, these operate in piecemeal fashion and do not have the overall command structure to mount an effective counter to Chinese aggression.

Congress has already started taking steps in this direction by authorizing the expansion of Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiatives. To build on this momentum, Congress should further authorize and allocate funding for another Combined Maritime Forces initiative that will empower our regional allies and partners to stand up to China, and thereby reintroduce both American hard and soft power to the region.

Tags: CoastGuard, MaritimeSecurity, MaritimeStrategy

5. Why Germany Wants a Divorce With China

Summary:

Germany is reassessing its once symbiotic trade relationship with China as Chinese firms outcompete German manufacturers at home and abroad. Berlin is moving from free trade instincts toward economic security and selective protection, including shielding steel, restricting Chinese telecom components, and considering buy European procurement rules. A new National Security Council is focused on supply chain vulnerabilities, especially critical minerals, and the government is preparing a derisking strategy. The shift is driven by collapsing export gains, rising imports, and a record China trade deficit, alongside industrial decline in output and jobs. Cheap Chinese goods diverted from the U.S. market are intensifying pressure, accelerating Germany’s pivot.

Excerpts:

“Europe is still open to Chinese investment, but [policymakers] want Europe actually benefiting in terms of know-how and jobs,” said Noah Barkin, an analyst with Rhodium. The question is whether China will agree to this—and if not, if Europe is willing to close its market to China.

Barkin says he can’t rule out Germany reverting to what he calls its “Shanghai syndrome”—preference for the short-term gains of appeasing China despite the long-term risks. This could happen if Berlin decides it needs a hedge against an unpredictable Trump.

Norbert Röttgen, a conservative lawmaker and foreign-policy expert, spelled out the dilemma. “We need to reduce our dependence on China,” he said. “But if the U.S. lets us down, that will have an impact on how we define our relationship to China.”

Comments: This could be another opportunity for POTUS's NSC Director of Political Warfare and an interagency joint task for political warfare. (if we had one). Political Warfare and economic warfare go hand in hand.

Why Germany Wants a Divorce With China

Some German manufacturers think once-symbiotic partnership has turned into abusive relationship and they want out

WSJ

By Tom Fairless

and Bertrand Benoit

Dec. 14, 2025 11:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/why-germany-wants-a-divorce-with-china-0d59fb81

FRANKFURT—For two decades, Germany and China were an economic couple made in heaven, both benefiting handsomely from booming global trade: Germany supplied the machines China needed to make consumer goods for the rest of the world.

Now China no longer needs Germany—and Germany wants a divorce.

For the first time in decades, German businesses and politicians are questioning the unfettered free trade that turned the country into an industrial powerhouse. Its manufacturers want protection from cheaper, faster and increasingly better Chinese rivals.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said last month that Berlin would protect domestic steelmakers from Chinese competitors. His government has tightened a ban on Chinese components in mobile-data networks and it has signaled support for “buy-European” clauses for public tenders.

In its first meeting in November, Merz’s newly created National Security Council addressed the strategic risks of China’s dominance of several critical minerals. It is now working on diversification measures, according to a German official.

Germany’s estrangement from China has been in the making for some time. Helped by low production costs, a weak yuan and state subsidies, Chinese manufacturers are increasingly leading in sectors that German companies dominated until recently, not only in China but also in other markets, including in Europe.

Its timing, though, has much to do with President Trump. A wave of cheap Chinese goods, from chemicals to car parts, began washing over Europe this year after bouncing off the U.S.’s new tariff wall, economists and business executives say.

As a result, a country that once was a beacon of economic liberalism is itself warming to tariffs, regulatory barriers and other protectionist measures German politicians and executives had long criticized as misguided or, worse, “French.”

“Germany is moving and becoming aware of the imbalances that also affect it,” French President Emmanuel Macron told French daily Les Echos recently after his trip to China. “China is hitting the heart of the European industrial and innovation model.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government has tightened a ban on Chinese components in mobile-data networks. Michael Kappeler/Zuma Press

The fading of Europe’s most influential free-trade voice shows how the global economy is fragmenting in the face of big-power competition between the U.S. and China and a backlash against globalization led by ascending populist forces in the West.

Germany’s pivot has yet to reach all corners of its economy and government. The larger a company’s exposure to China, the harder it is for it to reverse course. Some carmakers and chemicals producers are still investing heavily in the country. German politicians are also watching over their shoulders as allies oscillate between confronting and pacifying China.

The direction of travel is becoming clear, however, originating among businesses, later percolating through the country’s influential lobby organizations and, more recently, government.

The Federation of German Industries fired the opening shot in 2019, when it ditched its China-friendly position in a report to call the country a “systemic competitor.” This year, the VDMA federation of machinery makers—export-oriented business-to-business companies that form the backbone of Germany’s economy—accused China of unfair competition. It has called for antidumping measures and sanctions against Chinese exporters that ignore European legislation.

“We are free-traders, but unfair trade policies cannot be tolerated any more,” said Oliver Richtberg, VDMA’s head of foreign trade. “If China doesn’t play fair, we have to make them.”

The government, in addition to a new economic-security strategy it plans to publish next year, is working on “projects that address the increasing economic, technological and security policy risks in dealing with China,” the German official familiar with the deliberations said.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, speaking this month during his first trip to China, said European companies needed better access to the Chinese market and to resources the country produces.

“The change of tone…is quite remarkable,” said Andreas Fulda, professor of political science at Nottingham University and author of a recent book on Germany and China. “Now we need actual policies to incentivize derisking and reshoring.”

China’s graduation from buyer to maker of investment goods has been meteoric. Between 2019 and 2024, Germany lost its global market-share lead to China for power-generation equipment and machinery, according to data in a coming report from Rhodium, a think tank.

Workers make car seats in a workshop in Hefei, China. Cfoto/Zuma Press

Germany’s lead in chemicals and road vehicles is now paper-thin and it is trailing far behind China in the electrical-equipment market. This year for the first time, Germany imported more capital goods from China than it exported there.

The trend is accelerating: In the second quarter of 2025, imports of manual gearboxes from China rose almost threefold, according to the German Economic Institute think tank. German carmakers have seen their share of the Chinese market drop from half to a third in two years.

Total German exports to China have fallen by a quarter since 2019 while imports rocketed. Germany’s trade deficit in goods and services with China is on track to reach a record 88 billion euros this year, equivalent to around $102 billion, according to German government figures.

This has left deep scars. Germany’s manufacturing output has fallen 14% since peaking in 2017. The industrial sector has shed almost 5% of its jobs since 2019, according to consulting firm Ernst & Young. The auto sector has lost about 13% of positions over the same period.

One company feeling the heat is Herrenknecht. The family-owned business makes and operates some of the most sophisticated tunnel-boring machines in the world. The diggers, up to 62-feet high, are miniature factories that can munch their way through the toughest of rocks while laying pipes, cables and cladding as they go.

When China began its ascendance to world-power status, local authorities turned to Herrenknecht for their biggest infrastructure projects. Now, after a string of acquisitions, Chinese rivals dominate the global market.

“We are under growing competitive pressure, especially from state-subsidized Chinese vendors,” said spokeswoman Anja Heckendorf.

The company is now exploring new markets, such as India, and focusing on larger and more-complex projects. At the same time, it is calling for antidumping probes of Chinese rivals and for a “Europe First” approach to public tenders that would favor local vendors, Heckendorf said.

A Herrenknecht tunnel-boring machine in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Philipp Von Ditfurth/Zuma Press

The pressures are coming to a head in one of Germany’s primary chemical-industry clusters, centered on the East German city of Leipzig.

The former coal-mining region was a cradle of Europe’s chemical industry in the 19th century thanks to big local coal mines, later becoming central to East German industry. The region closed the mines after the reunification of Germany and built a chemicals cluster powered by Russian gas. This year, Chinese chemicals have poured into Europe, growing their share of the market for polyamide 6, a plastic widely used across multiple industries, to 20% from 5% last year, said Vedran Kujundzic, chief commercial officer at DOMO Chemicals, a producer in the town of Leuna with about €1.3 billion in annual sales.

“They are a constant presence,” he said, adding that they offer 20% discounts to European producers on average.

Christof Günther, chief executive of one of Germany’s largest chemical parks, located in Leuna, said businesses are struggling to cope with a surge in Chinese imports.

“We feel that very strongly here,” he said. Businesses in the park can’t earn money and are cutting costs whenever possible, including jobs. “They can only hold out for a certain time.”

Dow Chemical recently said it would close two plants in the region and eliminate over 500 jobs. German chemical giant BASF and other producers have cut thousands of jobs across Germany in recent years while building up in China.

In Leuna, Finnish forestry company UPM is building a €1.3-billion biorefinery on the site of a former BASF plant that will convert hardwood into chemicals. These are more expensive than fossil-fuel based chemicals, said Executive Vice President Harald Dialer, but customers value high-end products in industries such as cosmetics.

Nearby, Stefan Scherer, CEO of Frankfurt-based chemicals producer AMG Lithium, is building a lithium refinery that could eventually supply one-quarter of Europe’s needs. But Scherer said German customers are spooked by higher prices.

This is why innovation alone won’t suffice to preserve Europe’s manufacturing capacity, said Dirk Schumacher, chief economist at Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW.

“We as a country need to decide what we are happy to source from China in the future and what we want to keep producing ourselves,” Schumacher said. “This could involve erecting barriers to protect strategically relevant sectors.”

Businesses at a chemical park in Leuna, Germany, are cutting jobs, its operator said. Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg News

“Europe is still open to Chinese investment, but [policymakers] want Europe actually benefiting in terms of know-how and jobs,” said Noah Barkin, an analyst with Rhodium. The question is whether China will agree to this—and if not, if Europe is willing to close its market to China.

Barkin says he can’t rule out Germany reverting to what he calls its “Shanghai syndrome”—preference for the short-term gains of appeasing China despite the long-term risks. This could happen if Berlin decides it needs a hedge against an unpredictable Trump.

Norbert Röttgen, a conservative lawmaker and foreign-policy expert, spelled out the dilemma. “We need to reduce our dependence on China,” he said. “But if the U.S. lets us down, that will have an impact on how we define our relationship to China.”

Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com and Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com

WSJ

6. How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?

Summary:

The New York Times recounts a covert 1965 CIA operation with Indian support to place a nuclear powered SNAP-19C generator and surveillance gear atop Nanda Devi to intercept Chinese missile telemetry after China’s first atomic test. A blizzard forced a retreat, and the team, ordered to save lives, cached the device at high camp and abandoned it. When climbers returned in 1966, an avalanche had erased the site and the generator was gone. Washington has never acknowledged the mission. Decades later, documents and interviews detail cover stories, diplomatic damage control, and recurring Indian fears that the plutonium could resurface, contaminate headwaters feeding the Ganges, or be misused in a dirty bomb.

Comment: This is a helluva story. This is probably the tip of the iceberg for the creative intelligence operations we have conducted over the years, most of which we will never know. I would have liked to have seen the briefings to get this mission approved. "Sir, I want to put a surveillance system on the roof of the world to surveil China and use a nuclear generator to power the system." But the beauty of covert action is that there are not that many people in the chain of command to have to convince and gain approval!

Unfortunately for this mission there could still be blowback if the snow and ice shift.

How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?

NY Times · December 13, 2025

A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a hush-hush mission the U.S. still won’t talk about.

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles Photographs and videos by Atul LokeDec. 13, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/13/world/asia/cia-nuclear-device-himalayas-nanda-devi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.808.kh3U.-iavx3FwU8gv&smid=url-share

The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.

A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.

Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.

Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.

The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control.

But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout.

From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic.

“Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie.

No response.

“Camp Four, are you there?”

Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static.

“Yes … this … is … Camp … Four.”

“Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said — to save the climbers’ lives.

“Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.

It hasn’t been seen since.

And that was 1965.

Capt. M.S. Kohli with fellow Indian mountaineers at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York.

Captain Kohli’s archive

Buried beneath the rock and ice of the Himalayas, in one of the most remote places on earth, lies a sensational chapter of the Cold War, and it’s not over yet.

What happened to the American nuclear device, which contains Pu-239, an isotope used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and even larger amounts of Pu-238, a highly radioactive fuel?

Nobody knows.

The nuclear device was left at Camp Four and never seen again.

Nanda Devi, surrounded by forbidding peaks, is one of the hardest Himalayan mountains to climb.

The C.I.A. chose it because it overlooks hundreds of miles across the border into China.

But the glaciers atop these mountains feed the Ganges, and the densely populated river basin around it.Ganges River and its tributaries

Local leaders fear that the plutonium from the lost device has slipped into a glacier and could poison people downstream.Populated areas in the Ganges basin

Sources: Pete Takeda, Global Runoff Data Centre, Copernicus Global Human Settlement Layer, Google Earth

After losing it at the top of that mountain 60 years ago, the American government still refuses to acknowledge that anything ever happened.

The whole mission was wrapped in deception from the very beginning. A trove of files just discovered in a garage in Montana show how a celebrated National Geographic photographer built an elaborate cover story for the covert operation — and how the plans completely unraveled on the mountain.

Extensive interviews with the people who carried out the mission and once-secret documents stashed away in American and Indian government archives reveal the extent of the debacle, and the ways American officials at the highest levels, including President Jimmy Carter, tried to cover it up years later.

The documents trace the anxiety spreading in Washington and New Delhi. Back then, just as now, the United States and India had a tricky relationship. They were both worried about China’s growing nuclear capabilities. They were both watching the Soviet Union’s designs on Afghanistan. They both had a precarious Cold War chessboard to manage. And just like today, the two nations, as the world’s two largest democracies, had reasons to partner up but didn’t trust each other.

The lost nuclear device and the dangers it posed could have easily led to a breakdown between them. But the files show Mr. Carter and Morarji Desai, the Indian prime minister at the time, overcoming their mutual suspicions and working together in secret, hoping to make the problem go away.

Only, it didn’t.

The first wave of the scandal broke in the 1970s, and even now, decades later, people in India are demanding answers. Villagers in remote settlements high up in the Himalayas, environmentalists and politicians worry that the nuclear device could slide into an icy stream and dump radioactive material into the headwaters of the Ganges, India’s most sacred river and a lifeline to hundreds of millions.

The banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, India. Some fear the missing device could spread radiation into the river system, which supports hundreds of millions of people.

It’s unclear how hazardous that would be. There’s so much water roaring through these mountain gorges that the sheer volume could dilute any contamination.

But plutonium is highly toxic, with the potential to cause cancer in the liver, lungs and bones. As the glaciers melt, the generator could emerge from the Himalayan ice and sicken anyone who stumbles upon it, especially if it’s damaged.

Scientists say the generator will not explode on its own — for one, there’s no trigger, unlike in a nuclear weapon. But they worry about a sinister scenario in which the plutonium core is found and used for a dirty bomb.

Note: This illustration is based on New York Times interviews with experts familiar with the device and on reference drawings of similar SNAP devices from NASA and Martin Marietta Corporation documents.

Just this past summer, a prominent Indian lawmaker brought up the missing device again, warning on social media that it was potentially dangerous and later saying in an interview: “Why should the people of India pay the price?”

The men who carried the device up the mountain and took an oath of silence decades ago have lived with a gnawing fear ever since they lost it. Many were reaching the end of their lives when The New York Times tracked them down and interviewed them. Some, including Captain Kohli, have recently died.

“I’ll never forget the moment Kohli left it up there,” said Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber on the mission. “I had this flash of intuition we’d lose it.”

“I told him, ‘You’re making a huge mistake,’” he recalled. “‘This is going to go very badly. You have to bring that generator down.’”

Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, who said he had a premonition about losing the nuclear device, at his Colorado home in 2022.

Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Six decades later, at age 92, Mr. McCarthy could barely control the emotion in his voice as he recounted what happened.

“You can’t leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!” he shouted from his living room in Ridgway, Colo. “Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?”

‘Are You Out of Your Mind?’

Before solar technology took off, NASA considered these kinds of generators well suited to keep unattended machines running in the extreme conditions of space.

They work by converting heat from radioactive material into electricity, and NASA credits them with enabling “some of the most challenging and exciting space missions in history.”

Voyager I, the interstellar probe launched more than 45 years ago that is still drifting through the cosmos, some 15 billion miles away, continues to communicate with Earth thanks to these generators. They were developed in the 1950s for the first generation of satellites.

But by the mid-1960s, they entered a new realm: espionage.

In October 1964, China detonated its first atomic bomb. It was a 22-kiloton explosion (bigger than the Nagasaki bomb) in the Xinjiang region, far beyond the Himalayas.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had been so fixated on blocking China from going nuclear that some of his advisers had considered covert strikes. But now, China had beaten him to the punch.

Keeping tabs on China’s nuclear evolution was especially hard because neither the United States nor India had much human intelligence inside the country.

That’s why, according to several people involved, an outlandish plan began to unfold during, of all things, a cocktail party.

Gen. Curtis LeMay was the head of the United States Air Force, a Cold War hawk and one of the architects of America’s nuclear weapons strategy, long remembered for his threat to bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Ages.”

Major General Curtis E. LeMay, a key figure in the U.S. Airforce, was the one who envisioned the secret mission to Nanda Devi.

Getty Images

He was also a trustee at the National Geographic Society. At the party, he was having drinks with Barry Bishop, a photographer for the magazine and an acclaimed mountaineer who had summited Mount Everest.

Over cocktails, Mr. Bishop regaled General LeMay with tales of the dreamy views from the top of Everest and of being able to see for hundreds of miles across the Himalayas deep into Tibet and inner China.

The conversation apparently got the general thinking.

Soon after the party, the C.I.A. summoned Mr. Bishop, according to conversations that Mr. Bishop shared with Captain Kohli and Mr. McCarthy (Mr. Bishop and General LeMay died in the 1990s).

The C.I.A. laid out a bold plan. A group of American alpinists working for the agency would slip into the Himalayas undetected, drag several backpacks stuffed with surveillance equipment up the slopes and install a secret sensor at the top of a mountain to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests.

Mr. Bishop was a logical choice for their secret ringleader. He was a military veteran and a tested climber with an excellent cover. As a National Geographic photographer, he often disappeared for months at a time to far-flung corners of the earth.

Records found in November in Mr. Bishop’s garage in Bozeman, Mont., show that National Geographic granted him a leave of absence to pursue the mission in the Himalayas. The meticulously kept files also chronicle his deepening involvement: studying explosives, receiving intelligence on China’s missile program and mapping out the summit assault. His files included bank statements, phony business cards, photographs, gear lists and menus, down to the chocolate, honey and bacon bars that the climbers would eat.

The mission’s success hinged on two breakthroughs for the spy world: the portable nuclear devices and missile telemetry. By the early 1960s, scientists working for America’s most secret labs had figured out how to catch radio signals from ballistic missiles flying high in the sky.

Naturally, their biggest concern was the Soviet Union, which the spy services had ringed with telemetry stations from Alaska to Iran, according to National Security Agency documents declassified in the past few years. The tactic was working, so the C.I.A. tried to copy and paste the same approach for China.

By putting an unmanned station on top of the Himalayas, the C.I.A. hoped to pluck radio signals from high-altitude missiles launched from China’s Lop Nur testing grounds, nearly a thousand miles away in Xinjiang.

The whole operation rested on keeping the mountaintop equipment running — for a long, long time. And that’s where the portable generator powered by highly radioactive plutonium came into play.

Mr. Bishop couldn’t rig up the equipment himself. Frostbite from Everest had claimed his toes and he couldn’t handle technical climbs anymore. So the agency tasked him with recruiting the best, most trustworthy alpinists he could find. He started with Mr. McCarthy, a spidery rock climber who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1958 hanging off a cliff.

Barry Bishop after conquering Mount Everest in 1963, sitting with his wife, Lila. Mr. Bishop played a key role in covertly organizing the Nanda Devi mission.

Associated Press

Mr. McCarthy said the C.I.A. offered him $1,000 a month and presented the mission as urgent for America’s national security. He was a young lawyer and felt a patriotic pull to participate, he said. (The details he provided have been corroborated by Mr. Bishop’s files, interviews with others involved in the mission, photo records and formerly classified documents from the National Security Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, the State Department and Indian government archives).

The C.I.A. then turned to India for help.

“Maybe two or three people in the entire government knew about this,” explained R.K. Yadav, a former Indian intelligence officer.

The circle may have been small, Mr. Yadav said, but the Indian government’s fear of China going nuclear was intense.

“You see, we had just lost a war to China — no, not just lost, we had been humiliated,” Mr. Yadav said, referring to the brief but intense flare-up along China and India’s border in 1962.

India’s Intelligence Bureau tapped Captain Kohli, a decorated naval officer who had been scaling mountains since he was 7, to head up the Indian side of the mission. Captain Kohli had just made history leading nine Indian climbers to Everest’s summit.

He was immediately struck by the C.I.A.’s arrogance.

“It was nonsense,” Captain Kohli said during extensive interviews with The Times over the past few years. He died in June.

The first plan that the C.I.A. hatched, he recalled, was to put the telemetry station on Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain after Everest and K2.

“I told them whoever is advising the C.I.A. is a stupid man,” Captain Kohli said.

Captain M.S. Kohli at his residence in Nagpur, in Maharashtra, India, in 2023.

Mr. McCarthy had the same reaction.

“I looked at that Kanchenjunga plan and said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” he remembered.

“At that time, Kanchenjunga had only been climbed once,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I told them, ‘You’re never going to get all that equipment up there.’”

Mr. Bishop waved off the concerns.

He made business cards, letterhead and a prospectus, all emblazoned with “Sikkim Scientific Expedition” (named for a kingdom in the Himalayas). He called himself “chairman and leader.”

He announced that the climbers were going up into the mountains to study atmospheric physics and physiological changes at high altitudes. To make it look even more legit, he gathered letters of support from the American Alpine Club, National Geographic and even an assistant to Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps director and President John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law.

Letters of support for Mr. Bishop and his expedition from the American Alpine Club and National Geographic.

Barry Bishop Estate

“It was all cover,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Even so, Mr. McCarthy worried back then that the cover would be blown.

Already, climbers in Colorado were gossiping (correctly) that the expedition had a clandestine purpose. Mr. McCarthy fired off a letter to Mr. Bishop venting about “how this got out so damn quick.”

“Maybe we can put some kind of a stopper in someone’s mouth,” Mr. McCarthy wrote in a letter Mr. Bishop kept in his files.

Mr. Bishop wrote back from the Ashok Hotel in New Delhi, saying “You are right about climbers being supreme gossipers.” But he told his friend not to worry, because his plan had a “multiple-layer cover.”

Still, the Indians rejected the Kanchenjunga idea, saying it was in an “acutely sensitive” military area, according to Mr. Bishop’s files.

Then China detonated a second, even bigger, atomic bomb, injecting a new sense of urgency. It was full steam ahead — but first they had to find a new mountain.

Nanda Devi is ringed by other mountains and known as one of the hardest to climb in the world.

Exhaustion, Nausea and Bitter Cold

Standing 25,645 feet high, Nanda Devi has a mythic, almost terrifying reputation.

It rises from a ring of white-toothed peaks like a forbidden mountain in an adventure book. Just hiking to its base is treacherous. At that point, only a handful of human beings had ever stood on its summit. Hugh Ruttledge, a famous prewar British mountaineer, said Nanda Devi was harder to reach than the North Pole.

But it offered a strategic location: within India and towering above the Chinese border.

The C.I.A. picked it, despite Captain Kohli’s reservations.

“I told them it would be, if not impossible, extremely difficult,” he said. Once again, he said, his concerns were dismissed.

On June 8, 1965, Mr. Bishop sent out a letter on the letterhead of the Mountain Research Group — his new cover.

“Dear Crew,” he wrote to the half-dozen climbers he had assembled. “All systems are go.”

The team flew off to Mount McKinley in Alaska for a quick practice run with the Indian climbers on the mission. The American team members were also taken to a secret government facility in North Carolina to familiarize themselves with explosives, in case they needed to blow holes in Nanda Devi to secure the telemetry station.

And they squeezed in clandestine training in Baltimore at the headquarters of Martin Marietta, the defense contractor that built the portable nuclear device.

According to declassified documents, the generator known as SNAP-19C (SNAP stands for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) was a terrestrial model, unlike the generators designed for America’s space program. Its radioactive fuel capsules were made at Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg, Ohio, and shipped out in July 1965 for unspecified “remote telemetry stations.”

Erecting the surveillance equipment during a test run on Mount McKinley in July 1965.

Captain Kohli’s archive

Mr. McCarthy spent hours practicing with the generator, bending over the machine, he said, gingerly balancing it between his legs, loading and unloading the seven tubular capsules that powered it.

“We were trained to do it fast,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t quite grasp the importance.”

Next stop: New Delhi. In mid-September 1965, the American climbers arrived at Palam Airport under the cloak of secrecy.

The Americans and the top Indian climbers, including Captain Kohli, were flown by helicopter to the foot of Nanda Devi, around 15,000 feet above sea level. As soon as they landed, Mr. McCarthy said, he told everyone to set up their tents and provide themselves with some food and water — immediately.

“I knew that we were going to be all sick as dogs,” he said.

Denied time to acclimate, the climbers got altitude sickness. Everything was being compressed into a very short timeline because late September was a risky time to mount a major Himalayan expedition. Winter and its ferocious storms were just around the corner.

The climbers and a team of Sherpas still faced a climb of more than 10,000 vertical feet, up a chain of camps along a ridgeline that withered to a knife’s edge. Mr. McCarthy remembers being dehydrated and cold, racked by headaches and extreme nausea, but staggering forward.

One source of solace, oddly enough, was the radioactive material. Plutonium 238 has a relatively short half-life, 88 years. It sheds heat. The porters jockeyed with one another to carry the plutonium capsules, Captain Kohli and Mr. McCarthy said.

“The Sherpas loved them,” Mr. McCarthy said. “They put them in their tents. They snuggled up next to them.”

Remembering this, Captain Kohli smiled, at first. “The Sherpas called the device Guru Rinpoche,” the name of a Buddhist saint, “because it was so warm,” he said with a laugh.

The climbing team that the American government flew to Mount McKinley for practice, in 1965.

Captain Kohli’s archive

But sitting in his study at home in the Indian capital, Captain Kohli’s eyebrows knitted with anger. The Sherpas were never told what the heat source was. He said that even the elite climbers were not well informed about the potential risks of carrying, much less sleeping next to, radioactive material.

“At the time,” he said, “we had no idea about the danger.”

‘99 Percent Dead’

Excerpts from a stack of handwritten notes in Mr. Bishop’s files capture the mission collapsing.

Oct. 4: “High winds.” “Tent was lost.”

Oct. 5: “Short of food.”

Oct. 11: “Snows all day.”

Oct. 13: “Very discouraging evening.”

Oct. 14: “Jim tried again to move up but again developed a severe headache.”

Oct. 15: “Almost constant snow.” “Frostbite.” “Coming to a crux.”

At this point, dozens of climbers and porters were manning their positions on the mountain’s southwestern ridge, packs stuffed, plutonium capsules loaded into the generator.

Handwritten notes from Mr. Bishop’s files.

Barry Bishop Estate

But on Oct. 16, as they tried to push for the summit, a blizzard hit. Sonam Wangyal, an Indian intelligence operative who was also an experienced mountain climber and, by all accounts, a very strong one, was huddled near the peak.

“We were 99 percent dead,” Mr. Wangyal remembered. “We had empty stomachs, no water, no food, and we were totally exhausted.”

“The snow was up to our thighs,” he said. “It was falling so hard, we couldn’t see the man next to us, or the ropes.”

Mr. Wangyal, now 83, lives behind the iron door of a small house tucked down a lane in Leh, the capital of India’s high-altitude Ladakh region. Even now, decades later, he was reluctant to say anything, worried that he could be put in jail for breaking his oath of silence.

But his resentment toward Captain Kohli seemed to get the better of him.

“Kohli didn’t know anything, he was sitting at base camp,” Mr. Wangyal grumbled. “If we hadn’t been experienced mountaineers, we would have all died.”

Mr. McCarthy said he had just come down from a carry — meaning, he had just lugged some supplies up to Camp Two — when he saw Captain Kohli standing by a rock at base camp, shouting into a walkie-talkie.

The C.I.A. had told the American climbers to leave all communication to the Indians. “They didn’t want American voices on the radio,” Mr. McCarthy explained. “There was a Chinese division right on the other side of Nanda Devi, for Christ’s sake.”

When he overheard Captain Kohli order the men to abandon the equipment at Camp Four and hurry back to base camp, Mr. McCarthy said he hit the roof.

“You have to bring that generator down!” he recalled shouting.

The two men glared at each other.

Mr. McCarthy never liked the fact that Captain Kohli was in charge. But since the operation was being conducted on Indian soil, he said that he and the other Americans on the mountain, including a C.I.A. officer waiting with him at base camp, were powerless to intervene.

“You’re making a huge mistake!” Mr. McCarthy recalled yelling at Captain Kohli before storming off.

“Every once in a while I get a glimpse of the future,” Mr. McCarthy said. “It’s happened a couple times in my life. It happened then. That generator was key. I could see them losing it. And I was right.”

Mr. McCarthy insists the climbers could have brought it down. “Oh God, yes,” he said. “The damn thing in its pack weighed 50 pounds. The Sherpas could take that.”

Mr. Wangyal disagrees. The conditions at the top were so treacherous, he said, that the trek between the camps, which usually took three hours, required 15 that day.

In a situation like that, he said, “you can’t carry an extra needle.”

Sonam Wangyal, one of the last surviving Indian climbers, photographed at an Indian Mountaineering Foundation conference in New Delhi, in November, said at the end of the mission they were “99 percent dead.”

The Indian climbers pushed the boxes of equipment into a small ice cave at Camp Four. They tied everything down with metal stakes and nylon rope. Then they scurried down as fast as possible. Captain Kohli said that he had maintained constant radio contact with his bosses in the Indian intelligence services and that they backed up all his decisions.

A few days later, the climbing season ended. The recovery mission would have to wait until the weather calmed down — months later, in the spring.

Gone

Captain Kohli and another C.I.A. team waited until May 1966, the next climbing season, to go back for the device.

But when the climbers scaled Nanda Devi and reached Camp Four, they were shocked. The generator wasn’t there. Actually, the whole ledge of ice and rock where the gear had been tied down wasn’t there.

A winter avalanche must have sheared it off, leaving nothing but a few scraps of wire.

The C.I.A. freaked out, Captain Kohli said.

“‘Oh my God, this will be very, very serious,’” he remembered C.I.A. officers’ telling him. “They said: ‘These are plutonium capsules!’”

Had he realized how dangerous it might be, he said, he would never have left the generator behind.

Captain Kohli said he tried his best to find it. He organized another search mission in 1967 and again in 1968. The team used alpha counters to measure for radiation, telescopes to scan the snow, infrared sensors to pick up any heat and mine sweepers to detect metal. They found nothing. They knew the device had to be somewhere on the mountain but couldn’t tell where.

Mr. McCarthy believes it “buried itself in the deepest part of the glacier.”

“That damn thing was very warm,” he said, explaining that it would melt the ice around it and keep sinking.

Despite the loss, the C.I.A. thanked the National Geographic Society for allowing Mr. Bishop to work on the mission, calling his involvement “indispensable.” In a letter found in the archives of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, a National Security Council official expressed “the gratitude of our government” for permitting Mr. Bishop to assist “a unique priority project which concerns the security of the United States.”

Source: Lyndon B. Johnson Library

The C.I.A. kept pushing to set up a mountaintop station to spy on China. It tried other mountains in India, lower and easier to climb.

According to Captain Kohli and the once-secret Indian government documents, a team of climbers finally managed to install a new batch of surveillance equipment, powered by radioactive fuel, on a flat ice shelf on a lower summit, near Nanda Devi, in the spring of 1967.

A nuclear-powered device that was installed by C.I.A. climbers on another mountain near Nanda Devi. It’s the same as the model that is still missing.

Rob Schaller, via Pete Takeda collection

But the Himalayan snows constantly buried it, cutting off signals it might have picked up. Once, when Indian climbers scaled back up to see what was wrong, they were astonished by what they found.

The warm generator had melted straight through the flat ice cap, Captain Kohli said. It sat in a strange cave, like a tomb, several feet under the snow, burrowing itself deeper and deeper into the ice. It was as if the device was hiding itself.

That sputtering telemetry station was shut down in 1968, with the equipment retrieved and sent back to the United States, according to Indian documents. But the C.I.A. still didn’t give up.

Climbers fighting their way up another peak near Nanda Devi.

Captain Kohli’s archive

According to Captain Kohli, who wrote a book about his clandestine work, “Spies in the Himalayas,” the C.I.A. set up a snooping device in 1973 that worked well, picking up signals from a Chinese airborne missile.

But by the mid-1970s, the United States was fielding a growing constellation of spy satellites. The new technology could intercept a whole world of signals from space. A small antenna on a mountaintop now was totally obsolete.

‘Serious and Embarrassing’

The whole mission remained a secret for more than a decade, and it might have stayed that way if not for a relentless young reporter.

Howard Kohn had broken some major stories in the 1970s, including an exposé in Rolling Stone on the death of a nuclear activist, Karen Silkwood. The Silkwood story led him to people on Capitol Hill, who led him to a bulldog of a congressional investigator, who ultimately led him to the mystery on Nanda Devi.

“I was just taken aback at the fact that the C.I.A. knew no bounds,” recalled Mr. Kohn, who started digging into the story in early 1978 for Outside magazine, which was then a little-known offshoot of Rolling Stone.

Howard Kohn, who broke the story in the 1970s about the missing generator, at his home in Takoma Park, Md., in 2022.

Jason Andrew for The New York Times

He said the climbers he spoke to at the time felt bitter about the mission and pointed him in the same direction: to Mr. Bishop.

Mr. Kohn showed up at Mr. Bishop’s home on Millwood Road in Bethesda, Md., the same address he had used for his so-called scientific expeditions. According to Mr. Kohn, Mr. Bishop tried to deny the whole thing but eventually admitted his role and broke down. Mr. Kohn said he begged to be left alone, saying that if it ever got out that he had worked for the C.I.A., his reputation as a National Geographic photographer would be ruined.

Mr. Kohn said Mr. Bishop claimed to have voiced doubts about the mission, but said the C.I.A. warned him: “‘You can’t back out now.’”

“They treated everyone like pawns,” Mr. Kohn said.

After the interview, Mr. Bishop sent telegrams to Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, and William Randolph Hearst III, the newspaper heir who was managing editor of Outside at the time, warning them not to use his name.

“The Nanda Devi Caper” story broke on April 12, 1978, without mentioning Mr. Bishop or the other climbers’ names.

That same day, two Democratic congressmen, John D. Dingell of Michigan and Richard L. Ottinger of New York, wrote to President Carter.

“If the article is in fact accurate,” their letter said, “we strongly urge that this nation take whatever steps may be necessary to resolve this serious and embarrassing situation.”

Source: C.I.A. archives

At a follow-up news conference, the congressmen made another point: The U.S. Navy had searched exhaustively for a pair of SNAP-19B2 generators that disappeared off the Californian coast in 1968 when a weather satellite crashed. The government was so anxious to recover them that the Navy sent half a dozen ships and plumbed the ocean for nearly five months until they were found.

Why, then, had the Americans simply packed up in India, leaving a similar nuclear device lost in the Himalayas?

The White House struggled to respond. A declassified memo to Mr. Carter from Warren Christopher, then acting secretary of state, said that Mr. Kohn’s story was “correct in major respects.” But American officials did not acknowledge that publicly.

Mr. Kohn’s article for Outside Magazine in 1978 was the first public disclosure of the secret mission.

Jason Andrew for The New York Times

“We are taking the standard public position that we do not comment on allegations relating to intelligence activities,” Mr. Christopher informed Mr. Carter.

That phrase is nearly identical to what the State Department recently told The Times when asked about the mission: “As a general practice, we don’t comment on intelligence matters.”

Mr. Christopher predicted that the Indian government would be “particularly concerned with the possible environmental impact” of losing a nuclear device so close to the headwaters of the Ganges.

He was right.

The Secret Cables

“It was an uproar,” said Mr. Yadav, the former Indian intelligence officer.

The Indian climbers had kept their word, he said, and very few Indian officials knew about the mission, even inside India’s spy services.

So when the news hit New Delhi, the nation was blindsided. India’s foreign ministry summoned the American ambassador. Protesters took to the streets, waving signs that said, “C.I.A. is poisoning our waters.’’

Indian lawmakers called for an investigation, demanding to know where the device was, who had approved the mission and why. Opposition leaders harassed the prime minister on the floor of Parliament, accusing him of collaborating with “the notorious C.I.A.”

The Indian government’s report from 1979 on the missing nuclear device. Captain Kohli provided The Times with a copy.

That was a particularly damaging charge. India, after all, was supposed to be the leader of the world’s nonaligned movement, which refused to back either side of the Cold War, Washington or Moscow. Now its government was being exposed for doing the C.I.A.’s bidding on its own soil — and doing it poorly, no less.

The biggest concern was the Ganges. Nanda Devi’s glaciers, formed millions of years ago, feed tributaries of the river, which runs more than 1,500 miles and nourishes a vast, fertile ecosystem where hundreds of millions of people live.

Within days, Mr. Desai, India’s understated prime minister, stood in front of Parliament and assured the nation that there was “no cause for alarm.”

But to be “triply sure,” he said, according to India’s parliamentary archives, he was appointing a committee of experts to investigate the risks posed to “the waters of our sacred river Ganga.”

The United States had urged the Indian government not to admit that the operation happened at all, according to diplomatic traffic in the State Department’s archives. Mr. Desai mostly played along. In his performance before Parliament, he didn’t mention the C.I.A. or cast any blame on the United States.

The American ambassador was relieved. He sent a confidential cable to Washington, praising Mr. Desai for defusing “an increasingly emotional issue” and urging Mr. Carter to slip in a few “words of appreciation” in his next letter to the Indian leader.

Mr. Carter did exactly that. In a secret missive to Mr. Desai, dated May 8, 1978, he wrote, “May I express my admiration and appreciation for the manner in which you handled the Himalayan device problem,” describing it as an “unfortunate matter.”

Mr. Carter had been trying to delicately rebuild relations with India. For years, the United States had been vilified by Indira Gandhi, the prime minister and scion of India’s political dynasty who brought India more into the Soviet orbit. But Indira Gandhi had been recently voted out. Mr. Desai was in. And he was much more open to cooperating with Washington.

A few weeks later, Mr. Desai walked into the White House. A photograph shows him dressed in a crisp blue jacket and the narrow white hat of his generation, sitting in the Oval Office across from a beaming Mr. Carter. A dozen aides squeezed around.

Jimmy Carter with Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India in the Oval office in 1978.

HUM Images/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

The two leaders talked about Cuban troops lingering in Ethiopia and the possibility of the Soviets moving into Afghanistan. They discussed trade and America’s push to make South Asia a nuclear-free zone.

And, of course, they spoke about the missing device. According to a formerly secret document in State Department records, Mr. Carter told Mr. Desai that “he was glad that neither of them had been involved” in the mission, which had happened years before they took office. Even so, they had been thrust together to clean up the mess, and scholars are struck by how well they cooperated.

“This was the kind of thing that you could have made a big deal out of — that the C.I.A. was messing around with plutonium in the Himalayas,” said Gary Bass, a historian at Princeton who reviewed the decades-old secret cables shared by The Times.

Instead, he said, “they both work to hush it up.”

Joseph Nye, the American foreign policy guru who coined the term “soft power,” was in the room when the two leaders met.

Mr. Nye died recently, at age 88, but in an interview with The Times last year, he recalled the meeting vividly. Back then, he was a 41-year-old deputy under secretary specializing in nuclear nonproliferation.

He said that the two leaders didn’t bring up the missing device in the bigger meeting and waited until they were in private to talk about it. “It was a highly classified intelligence issue,” he said, and it would have had “a code word to refer to it.”

The State Department and the C.I.A. maintain their public silence to this day. But the failed mission keeps surfacing in the archives, often in the same anodyne words.

The whole thing is simply chalked up as “the Himalayan Incident” or “the Nanda Devi Affair.”

‘Run!’

On Feb. 7, 2021, a giant wedge of rock broke off from a mountain near Nanda Devi and came crashing down. It unleashed a surge of water, mud, ice and more rock that thundered through the narrow Rishiganga gorge.

Amrita Singh was sprinkling fertilizer on her family’s silkworm farm in a nearby village, Raini, where the houses cling to the hillsides and rows of red beans and wheat cut like steps into the slopes. All of a sudden, other villagers started screaming, trying to get her attention. The landslide was plunging straight toward her.

“Get out of there!” villagers yelled to Ms. Singh. “Run!”

It was too late. Amrita was swept away.

The village of Raini along the route up to Nanda Devi, in 2022.

Weeks later, sniffer dogs found her body. More than 200 other people were killed. Many were workers at a hydropower dam that stretched across the river. The surge of water was so titanic that the dam was swept away as if made of sand.

“It has to be that generator,” Captain Kohli said, blaming the heat it threw off. He conceded that he had no proof but asked, “What else can there be?”

Many villagers living in the string of settlements leading up the trail to Nanda Devi suspected the same thing. Nanda Devi has been closed to climbers for years, but villagers know that a nuclear device that their government doesn’t want to talk about was lost nearby.

“We initially thought that probably this thing exploded,” Dhan Singh Rana, a farmer who wrote environmental articles, told The Times before he died in 2023.

Eventually, he seemed to accept what some scientists said — that global warming contributed to an enormous crack in the glacier, and that’s what ultimately caused the landslide and the flood. But, he said, “even if the device doesn’t explode, it is still out there, and that in itself creates a sense of fear.”

“If people can go to the moon,” he asked, “why can’t they find out what happened to this device?”

Questions haunt the villagers: How dangerous is the missing device? Could it poison the headwaters of one of the world’s largest rivers?

The Indian government tried to dismiss these fears in the 1970s. A committee of experts appointed by Prime Minister Desai said in 1979 that the device was still missing, but that water samples from the area showed no traces of contamination. (It is unclear if anyone has searched for the device since then, and local officials say it has never been found.)

The committee concluded that even in the worst scenarios, like the generator cracking open and the plutonium capsules flying out, the risks of radiation poisoning the water supply were “negligibly small.”

Dhan Singh Rana in Lata village in 2022. “If people can go to the moon,” he asked, “why can’t they find out what happened to this device?”

Scientists today tend to agree, given the vast amounts of water flowing into the Ganges. But they still worry about the risks to local residents. As global warming accelerates and all sorts of forgotten histories surface from the ice — animal fossils, old equipment, even the corpses of long-lost climbers — people in this area could find a strange metal contraption, warm to the touch, lying in the snow at their feet.

Plutonium, if swallowed or breathed in, can cause internal damage and form toxic compounds in a person’s body, said David Hammer, a professor of nuclear energy engineering at Cornell University who reviewed some of the formerly secret scientific documents.

A few hints of the possible dangers are contained in a once-classified report from 1966 on a similar secret device, a SNAP 19-C2. The U.S. Navy placed that one on a remote rock island in the Bering Strait, apparently to spy on Soviet submarines prowling around Alaska.

Anyone attempting to recover it, the 1966 report warned, needs to approach the area from an upwind direction and “be equipped with self-contained breathing apparatus or ultra-filter, full-face respirators.”

In this case, Dr. Hammer believes the biggest danger is a dirty bomb.

He and other nuclear scientists said that if the generator’s capsules ended up in the wrong hands, they could be used to make a weapon that spreads panic by blowing up radioactive matter and spewing radioactive dust.

The missing plutonium, he said, represents “quite a lot of material.”

It is not clear what happened to the Nanda Devi porters who curled up with the capsules, trying to stay warm. Mr. McCarthy said he came down with testicular cancer in 1971. He blames the generator.

“There’s no history of cancer in my family, none, going back generations,” he said. “I have to assume that after loading this goddamn thing, I was exposed.”

“We weren’t that stupid,” he said. “We had asked the engineers about radiation. They lied to us. They told me it was completely shielded. That thing should have weighed 100 pounds if it were completely shielded. It weighed 50.”

The Fears Must Be ‘Put to Rest’

The past is now colliding with India’s future.

Hungry for electricity, India is damming rivers across the Himalayas and widening mountain roads. It’s building high-altitude army outposts along the China border, a contested area where Indian and Chinese troops have fought deadly hand-to-hand brawls.

“A lot of activities are going on in that area,” said Satpal Maharaj, the tourism minister for Uttarakhand, the mountainous state where Nanda Devi sits.

“The radioactive material is right there, inside the snow,” he said. “Once and for all, this device must be excavated and the fears put to rest.”

Nanda Devi, in the background, has been closed to climbers for years.

Mr. Maharaj met with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in 2018 to discuss the problem. Mr. Modi seemed unaware of what had happened in 1965, Mr. Maharaj said, but promised to look into it. Mr. Modi’s office did not respond to repeated requests for information, and a spokesman for India’s Department of Atomic Energy said the agency did not have “any information regarding the missing device.”

The authorities in Uttarakhand have been musing about reopening Nanda Devi to climbers. But a new round of articles in July in the Indian press reminded people of the “aborted secret mission” and the possibility of radioactive contamination.

That month, Nishikant Dubey, a member of Parliament from Mr. Modi’s party, put out a statement on social media questioning whether the missing device was responsible for a string of natural disasters.

In an interview, Mr. Dubey explained that on a recent trip to the Himalayas, he had heard many accounts of landslides, floods and houses collapsing. So, he said, he “started digging.”

He ran across some of the old C.I.A. documents and now believes that the generator is “very dangerous” and that the agency needs to come back and find it.

“Who owns that device should take out that device,” he said.

Mr. Yadav, the former spy, has become even more fixated. He has combed through archives, conducted interviews and joined the small group of people who, like Captain Kohli and Pete Takeda, a well-respected American climber, have written entire books on the mission.

“This is a grave danger, lying there for all humanity,” Mr. Yadav said in Delhi.

“I know what the scientists say,” he said. “But I tell them, ‘I’ll give you Pu-238 in a glass of water and you drink it.’”

He laughed.

“They’re all paper tigers,” he said.

Brent Bishop had wondered for years about his father’s role in the mission. He’s an accomplished climber, too, and when his father was still alive, he asked him about Nanda Devi.

His father acknowledged his involvement, Brent Bishop said, “but didn’t want to talk about it.”

Then, just last month, he was visiting his mother when he found a box of his father’s files on a metal shelf in the garage labeled “smaller expeditions and projects.”

The box held many of the mission’s secrets.

“I’m proud of what he and the team did — or tried to do,” Brent Bishop said. “This group of men had a unique skill set that they were able to use to benefit the country, even if things didn’t go as planned.”

Captain Kohli felt differently.

Captain Kohli at one of his homes said the CIA never listened to his concerns.

As a leader of the daring escapade, he knew more about what happened on that mountain, 60 years ago, than just about anyone.

But in an interview at his home in New Delhi before he died, as a sultry afternoon faded into evening, it was clear that he regretted it.

“I would not have done the mission in the same way,” he said.

“The C.I.A. kept us out of the picture,” he said. “Their plan was foolish, their actions were foolish, whoever advised them was foolish. And we were caught in that.”

His gaze drifted off, past the chest of climbing medals in his hallway and the painting of a Himalayan mountain jutting into a deep blue sky.

“The whole thing,” he said, “is a sad chapter in my life.”

NY Times · December 13, 2025

7. How a Tech-Savvy Officer Finally Cracked the Jan. 6 Pipe-Bombs Case

Summary:

After four years, the FBI solved the Jan. 6, 2021 pipe bombs case by finally decoding a trove of T-Mobile location data that had sat unused because investigators could not interpret it. A tech savvy officer wrote new software to decipher the records, linking a specific phone’s movements to surveillance of the bomber near the DNC and RNC. That led to the arrest of 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. in Northern Virginia. Investigators then matched his financial records to purchases of bomb components at Home Depot. Cole allegedly admitted placing the devices and cited pro-Trump views and election conspiracy beliefs. The breakthrough undercut “inside job” claims once promoted by senior officials.

Excerpts:

With that knowledge in hand, the feds said they were able to fill in the blanks. A search of Cole’s bank account and credit-card records indicated that he made a series of purchases, including at several Home Depot locations in Northern Virginia. The purchases matched the components of the bombs: galvanized pipes, 9-volt battery connectors, a white kitchen-style timer, electrical wire and steel wool, among other things, court records show.

In a four-hour interview with investigators, Cole acknowledged placing the bombs, people familiar with the probe said. He expressed support for Trump and said he had embraced conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s 2020 election loss, the people said. He had thrown out the Air Max sneakers, he said. Cole hasn’t entered a plea, and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

...

After Cole’s arrest, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Bongino about his earlier claims of a massive coverup. Bongino said he was working in a much different capacity when he made them.

“’I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts,” he said. “We are pretty comfortable we have our guy.”

Comment: BZ, FBI. Pretty amazing detective work to connect the dots among mountains of data. I wonder how this will be used to inform future investigative techniques.

How a Tech-Savvy Officer Finally Cracked the Jan. 6 Pipe-Bombs Case

Investigators used powerful tools to obtain mountains of data, but couldn’t decipher some of it until recently

By Sadie Gurman

and C. Ryan Barber

Dec. 14, 2025 12:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/how-a-tech-savvy-officer-finally-cracked-the-jan-6-pipe-bombs-case-e53428b7?mod=hp_lead_pos11

FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino at a press conference in early December. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA Press

Quick Summary

For four years, cellphone data related to the Jan. 6, 2021, pipe-bombs case sat on a digital shelf because investigators couldn’t figure out how to read it.View more

WASHINGTON—When he was a popular conservative podcaster, Dan Bongino claimed he had uncovered the biggest scandal in FBI history: The bureau knew who had placed two pipe bombs near the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but was concealing the evidence because it was an “inside job.”

Bongino learned something far different after becoming the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s No. 2 official this year: Investigators weren’t hiding evidence—they just didn’t realize they had it.

For four years, a tranche of cellphone data provided to the FBI by T-Mobile US sat on a digital shelf because investigators couldn’t figure out how to read it, people familiar with the matter said. The data turned out to be essential to cracking the case, the people said, a breakthrough that happened only recently when a tech-savvy law-enforcement officer wrote a new computer program that finally deciphered the information. That move led to the arrest of 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. at his home in Northern Virginia, where he had been quietly living with his mother and other relatives.

It was a surprising end to a cross-country manhunt that highlighted the possibilities and pitfalls of doing high-tech investigative work in an age in which Americans leave extensive digital trails every day.

Though neither pipe bomb exploded on Jan. 6, the FBI deemed the devices placed at the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican national committees viable, with the capacity to kill or severely injure innocent bystanders. The bureau spared no resources in finding the culprit, using powerful digital tools that produced a sea of information so detailed that it surprised even longtime investigators who were no strangers to complicated manhunts.

Agents studied thousands of pipe purchases at Home Depot stores across the U.S. They analyzed data from Google in an attempt to isolate any individuals who might have searched online for instructions on how to make pipe bombs and for directions to the RNC and DNC. They examined who had paid for parking in the area and explored whether a rented home from Airbnb or Vrbo might have been used as a staging ground in preparation for planting the pipe bombs.

FBI agents outside a home in Northern Virginia earlier this month. Andrew Leyden/Getty Images

Authorities said the leads didn’t produce a suspect but unexpectedly led them to an unrelated concern: a teenager in Georgia whose Home Depot purchases raised alarm. The FBI alerted local police, who found a cache of weapons during a search of the teen’s home in 2021.

Agents also tried a more-traditional approach. A tipster in the southern U.S. recalled overhearing a conversation that seemed to connect a local woman to the pipe bombs. The FBI thought the lead was promising enough to launch an undercover investigation, people familiar with it said, with a covert agent befriending the woman’s significant other to elicit new clues. But the operation was a bust.

Weeks before President Trump took office in January, the FBI shared previously unreleased surveillance footage that showed the suspect wearing a pair of distinctive black and gray Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes on the night he placed the bombs. The effort yielded no fruitful tips.

In his first days as deputy director in March, Bongino ordered a briefing on the bombs and declared solving the case one of his priorities, enlisting the help of new investigators.

Increasingly desperate and under pressure to make progress, supervisors urged agents and analysts to take a new look at what they had, including the data from T-Mobile—reflecting phone locations based on internet usage—that investigators had set aside years earlier.

Once investigators were finally able to read the data, they said it led them to Cole’s phone number because his cellphone’s movements tracked what investigators had seen in surveillance footage.

A T-Mobile spokeswoman declined to comment.

With that knowledge in hand, the feds said they were able to fill in the blanks. A search of Cole’s bank account and credit-card records indicated that he made a series of purchases, including at several Home Depot locations in Northern Virginia. The purchases matched the components of the bombs: galvanized pipes, 9-volt battery connectors, a white kitchen-style timer, electrical wire and steel wool, among other things, court records show.

In a four-hour interview with investigators, Cole acknowledged placing the bombs, people familiar with the probe said. He expressed support for Trump and said he had embraced conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s 2020 election loss, the people said. He had thrown out the Air Max sneakers, he said. Cole hasn’t entered a plea, and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Inside the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors have privately expressed widespread relief that an arrest has finally been made, but also resentment over FBI Director Kash Patel, who has suggested that they didn’t work doggedly on the probe until Trump administration leadership arrived.

The pipe bombs for years spawned conspiracy theories on the right, at times amplified by Patel and Bongino. The breakthrough was one of the most notable accomplishments of their tenure so far, even as it deflated the theories they had encouraged for years.

After Cole’s arrest, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Bongino about his earlier claims of a massive coverup. Bongino said he was working in a much different capacity when he made them.

“’I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts,” he said. “We are pretty comfortable we have our guy.”

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 15, 2025, print edition as 'How the Jan. 6 Pipe-Bombs Case Was Finally Cracked'.

8. Small Wars in the New Strategic Era: Why the United States Must Prepare for a World of Limited Conflict

Summary:

Joe Funderburke argues the 2025 NSS signals restraint, tighter vital interests, and greater burden sharing, but warns restraint often drives rivals to compete below the threshold of war. He predicts more frequent “small wars” marked by gray-zone coercion, proxies, sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation, and incremental territorial pressure, because adversaries probe perceived U.S. limits while avoiding sanctions and escalation. He cites Russia’s hybrid “shadow war” in Europe, Iran-linked maritime disruption in the Red Sea, China’s coercive maritime and legal tactics, and Russian proxy forces in Africa. He urges the NDS to prioritize rapid attribution and decision speed, distributed multi-domain forces, alliance structures for gray-zone defense, and domestic resilience and strategic communication.

Excerpts:

The 2025 National Security Strategy reflects a disciplined and necessary correction in American statecraft. It seeks to restore balance between ends and means, prioritize the homeland and industrial base, and align global commitments with domestic realities. Yet the strategic environment will not sit still in response. Rivals are already positioning themselves to exploit the seams of American restraint, relying on gray-zone campaigns, proxies, and limited conflicts to gain advantage.

The next decade is unlikely to be defined by a single decisive war. Instead, it will almost certainly feature a series of small, fast-moving contests—at sea lanes, in cyber networks, along fragile borders, and within contested information spaces. If the United States wishes to prevent large wars, it must accept the reality of this environment and prepare now to compete, deter, and, when necessary, fight effectively in it.

The task for the NDS is not simply to say “no” to another generation of large-scale interventions. It is to build a strategy, a force, and an alliance system capable of prevailing in the world of limited conflict that strategic restraint inevitably invites.

Comment: I think Joe's analysis is very good and very useful. I would build on this and appoint an NSC director for political warfare and establish an interagency joint task force for political warfare (or something similar) to address the threats that I think he correctly outlines.

Small Wars in the New Strategic Era: Why the United States Must Prepare for a World of Limited Conflict

by Joe Funderburke

12.15.2025 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/15/small-wars-in-the-new-strategic-era/

Abstract

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) signals a deliberate shift toward restraint, hemispheric prioritization, and selective engagement. Yet history shows that when major powers seek to avoid large wars, competitors often exploit gray-zone tactics, proxy campaigns, and limited conflicts to test boundaries. The United States must therefore prepare for an era in which small wars become more frequent, more ambiguous, and more strategically consequential for the balance of power and the credibility of American leadership.

Introduction

The United States is entering a strategic realignment unlike any since the end of the Cold War. The 2025 National Security Strategy tightens the definition of vital interests, reorients national defense toward a revitalized industrial base and homeland protection, and places greater expectations on allies to shoulder regional burdens. By design, it moves the United States away from open-ended expeditionary campaigns and toward a more disciplined, selective posture abroad. The document explicitly frames this shift as a response to domestic demands for restraint, fiscal pressure, and the recognition that the United States cannot and should not police the international system alone.

Days later, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reinforced this direction at the Reagan National Defense Forum, announcing the end of “undefined wars” and promising a new era of clarity in objectives, timelines, and exit strategies in the use of force. His remarks signaled to allies and adversaries alike that Washington intends to be more judicious about when and where it fights—and far more skeptical about long-duration stability operations.

This logic is understandable and, in many respects, overdue. But it is also incomplete. Strategic restraint is never interpreted in a vacuum. Adversaries do not simply read official texts; they infer limits, probe thresholds, and search for opportunities. Throughout the Cold War and the post-9/11 era, whenever Washington narrowed its definition of vital interests or telegraphed fatigue, determined competitors responded not by standing down, but by shifting confrontation into the space below open war. Today, that pattern is manifesting again—only this time with faster technology, more porous information environments, and more globalized economic leverage.

The forthcoming National Defense Strategy (NDS) must therefore start from a hard truth: if the United States intends to avoid major war, it must be prepared for a rising tempo of limited, ambiguous conflicts that challenge its interests without ever quite crossing the threshold of large-scale combat.

The Return of Competition Below the Threshold of War

Strategic restraint creates incentives for competitors to seek advantage in what is often called the “gray zone”—the murky space between peace and overt armed conflict. States and non-state actors are increasingly using cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, economic coercion, covert action, and paramilitary operations to shape the environment without triggering traditional thresholds for war. Recent analysis has described this trend as a “shadow war” in which sabotage, cyber intrusions, and covert violence are stitched together into a long-duration campaign of pressure against Western societies and infrastructure.

Russia, China, Iran, and their partners are not improvising; they are adapting well-understood strategic theory. Classical deterrence holds that nuclear-armed powers will seek relative advantage by competing just below the level of open war. The strategic logic is simple: if major escalation is too risky, then small, deniable, and incremental moves become more attractive. When Washington advertises its reluctance to fight large wars, it invites adversaries to test what they can get away with short of that line.

Regional Expressions of Limited Conflict and Hybrid Pressure

Europe: Sabotage, Cyber Pressure, and “Shadow War”

In Europe, Russia is conducting a sustained campaign of hybrid operations designed to pressure Western governments, erode cohesion, and probe defenses without triggering NATO’s collective defense clause. European security services have uncovered plots targeting logistics hubs, rail lines, and other critical infrastructure, often using proxy operatives recruited and paid online.

These activities are part of a wider “shadow war” that includes sabotaging undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic region, testing responses to maritime incidents, and probing the resilience of energy and data networks. In response, NATO and the EU have launched specialized coordination cells and maritime missions to monitor vulnerable infrastructure, and several states have begun detaining suspected operatives and imposing targeted sanctions.

The pattern is familiar. During the early Cold War, Soviet services used covert action, political warfare, and subversion to reshape European politics without provoking direct war with the United States. Today’s Russian campaign follows the same logic, but with modern tools and a sharper focus on infrastructure, information, and energy.

Middle East and the Red Sea: Proxies, Missiles, and Maritime Disruption

In the Middle East, Iran and its aligned groups have long relied on proxies, missile arsenals, and cyber tools to apply pressure while maintaining plausible deniability. The war in Yemen and the broader Red Sea crisis have illustrated how relatively low-cost systems—drones, cruise missiles, anti-ship weapons—can disrupt global trade routes without a formal declaration of war. Since late 2023, Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have forced shipping companies to reroute vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, raised insurance and freight costs, and demonstrated how regional actors can hold global trade at risk.

These actions operate in a space that is neither piracy nor conventional war. They are calibrated to signal solidarity with broader regional causes, impose costs on Western and regional adversaries, and test how far they can push without triggering a decisive response. Even when multinational coalitions form to protect shipping and conduct strikes against launch sites, the attackers often maintain enough deniability and dispersion to continue harassment at a sustainable level.

Indo-Pacific: China’s Gray-Zone Pressure on Maritime Frontiers

In the Indo-Pacific, China is pursuing its own form of gray-zone coercion. Rather than risking an immediate, full-scale confrontation, Beijing combines coast guard operations, maritime militia deployments, air incursions, cyber intrusions, and legal warfare to reshape facts on the ground (and at sea) over time. Studies of China’s maritime behavior document how its forces sustain near-daily presence around disputed reefs and shoals, harass fishing and energy activities of neighbors, and employ ramming, water-cannoning, and blocking maneuvers to intimidate Philippine and other regional vessels without crossing into major combat.

These tactics mirror “salami-slicing” strategies: each individual incident may seem too small to warrant escalation, but the cumulative effect is a profound shift in control and perception. The same logic applies in the cyber domain, where Chinese actors mount persistent campaigns of espionage, data theft, and disruptive activity against regional governments and sectors tied to maritime disputes.

Africa and the Western Hemisphere: Proxies, Mercenaries, and Economic Leverage

Across Africa’s Sahel region, Russia has expanded influence through quasi-private military companies such as Wagner and its successor formations. These groups bolster embattled regimes, gain access to resources, and undertake brutal counterinsurgency operations under the guise of partnership. In practice, they deepen instability, enable coups, and displace Western and regional initiatives without triggering a clear, conventional confrontation with the United States or NATO.

In Latin America and the broader Western Hemisphere, both Russia and China are using information operations, economic deals, infrastructure investments, and security partnerships to gain footholds near the United States. These engagements are often framed as benign development or commercial projects, but they carry clear strategic implications—from access to ports and telecommunications infrastructure to political leverage in multilateral forums.

Why Strategic Restraint Produces More Small Wars

The central paradox of the new strategic era is that a United States determined to avoid major war is likely to face more frequent small ones. History suggests that when a dominant power tightens its definition of vital interests, competitors respond by identifying “edges” where they can act aggressively without crossing the line that would trigger full-scale retaliation.

During the early Cold War, Washington’s determination to avoid direct war with the Soviet Union did not produce a peaceful status quo; instead, it generated a series of limited conflicts—Korea, Vietnam, proxy wars in the Middle East and Africa, and covert struggles in Latin America. Each was calibrated to test how far aggression could go without provoking nuclear escalation. Strategic restraint at the top of the escalation ladder pushed competition downward, into smaller but still deadly confrontations.

Today, the 2025 NSS and accompanying rhetoric of restraint risk creating similar dynamics. Adversaries will likely conclude that Washington will fight only when core treaty obligations or homeland defense are at stake. That perception makes gray-zone campaigns, sabotage, disinformation, proxies, and limited territorial grabs more—not less—attractive. For rivals, the “sweet spot” lies in operations that hurt American interests and allies, but fall just short of the threshold that would make a major war politically inevitable.

Implications for the National Defense Strategy

If the NSS establishes the broad logic of restraint, the NDS must translate that logic into a strategy for managing a world of limited conflict. Four implications stand out.

Attribution and Decision Speed as Core Deterrent Functions

Hybrid aggression thrives on ambiguity and delay. Adversaries count on Western leaders needing time to investigate, debate, and build consensus before acting. The United States must therefore treat rapid attribution and decision-making as central deterrent functions, not afterthoughts. Investments in fused intelligence, persistent sensing, and analytic tools should enable policymakers to quickly determine who is responsible for cyberattacks, sabotage, or covert violence and link those findings to pre-agreed response options with allies.

Recent recommendations from European and transatlantic analysts stress that resilience alone is not enough; credible responses must impose costs that outweigh the perceived benefits of hybrid action.

Forces Designed for Distributed, Multi-Domain, Short-Notice Operations

The U.S. military must be able to operate effectively in crisis periods that are short, ambiguous, and politically constrained. That means fielding forces that are:

Smaller and more distributed,
Able to deploy quickly into contested environments,
Equipped with unmanned systems, cyber tools, and precision fires, and
Integrated across land, sea, air, cyber, and space from the tactical to the strategic level.

Ongoing conflicts—from Ukraine’s use of drones and long-range strikes against Russian forces and shipping to coalition naval operations countering threats in the Red Sea—already demonstrate how rapidly evolving technologies and tactics can reshape the character of limited war.

The NDS will need to prioritize experimentation, joint force design, and concepts that prepare U.S. and allied forces to respond to multiple, simultaneous gray-zone and limited conflicts rather than a single, large conventional campaign.

Alliances and Partners as a System for Gray-Zone Defense

Alliances remain the United States’ greatest strategic advantage, but they are not yet optimized for gray-zone competition. Many current structures and processes are designed for Article 5-type contingencies or large-scale combat operations, not for sabotage, cyber pressure, information warfare, or maritime harassment.

The NDS should encourage allies to:

Align red lines and thresholds for response to hybrid attacks,
Share intelligence and legal tools for pursuing perpetrators across borders,
Coordinate sanctions, cyber countermeasures, and law-enforcement actions, and
Develop joint doctrines for countering gray-zone campaigns in key theaters, from the Baltic and Black Seas to the South China Sea and Red Sea.

Progress is emerging, from NATO’s undersea infrastructure coordination efforts to new maritime coalitions in the Red Sea and increased security cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners facing Chinese coercion. But these initiatives remain uneven and often reactive; the NDS should elevate them to core lines of effort.

Domestic Political Resilience and Strategic Communication

Finally, limited conflicts are not just contests of firepower; they are contests of narrative, legitimacy, and endurance. Adversaries aim their gray-zone campaigns at domestic vulnerabilities—polarization, disinformation, economic inequality, and fatigue with foreign engagement. A strategy for small wars must therefore include measures to:

Strengthen public understanding of why limited conflicts matter,
Protect democratic institutions and elections from foreign interference, and
Prepare the American people for a long, uneven competition marked by sporadic crises rather than a single decisive clash.

Without this political foundation, even the best-designed military posture may prove insufficient. Strategic patience and societal resilience are as important as ships, aircraft, or cyber tools.

Conclusion

The 2025 National Security Strategy reflects a disciplined and necessary correction in American statecraft. It seeks to restore balance between ends and means, prioritize the homeland and industrial base, and align global commitments with domestic realities. Yet the strategic environment will not sit still in response. Rivals are already positioning themselves to exploit the seams of American restraint, relying on gray-zone campaigns, proxies, and limited conflicts to gain advantage.

The next decade is unlikely to be defined by a single decisive war. Instead, it will almost certainly feature a series of small, fast-moving contests—at sea lanes, in cyber networks, along fragile borders, and within contested information spaces. If the United States wishes to prevent large wars, it must accept the reality of this environment and prepare now to compete, deter, and, when necessary, fight effectively in it.

The task for the NDS is not simply to say “no” to another generation of large-scale interventions. It is to build a strategy, a force, and an alliance system capable of prevailing in the world of limited conflict that strategic restraint inevitably invites.

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Tags: grand strategy, National Defense Strategy, National Security Strategy, small wars, strategy

About The Author

Joe Funderburke
Dr. Joe Funderburke is a national security and government affairs consultant, retired Army Colonel, and former Director of Strategic Planning for the National Security Council during the Biden Administration. He has also served as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a senior strategist within both the Pentagon and Congress. Dr. Funderburke teaches graduate-level courses on strategy, policy, leadership, and military operations at Georgetown University and Syracuse University. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

9. Fortitude 2.0: Steel & Shadows (Influence)

Summary:

Hall and Iadonisi argue the United States treats information as a supporting tool, while China and Russia make it the main effort across diplomacy, military, and economics. They cite Unrestricted Warfare and Russia’s Ukraine methods to show narratives, cyber, and psychological pressure shape conditions before combat. They propose reviving WWII style synchronization of “steel and shadows,” using FORTITUDE and OSS morale operations as the model where deception fixed enemy forces and enabled decisive action. A modern “Fortitude 2.0” would fuse AI sensing, cyber disruption, influencer and media shaping, and partner nation narratives with visible military posture and diplomatic alternatives to gain decision advantage without escalation. They call for permanent joint cells, authorities, and resourcing that elevate Information to parity in DIME.

Comment: When are we going to learn to lead with influence? Some comments:

•What is the major difference in the views of conflict, strategy, and campaigning between China, Russia, Iran, nK, AQ, and ISIS and the US?

–The psychological takes precedence and may or may not be supported with the kinetic

–Politics is war by other means

–For the US kinetic is first and the psychological is second

–War is politics by other means

–Easier to get permission to put a hellfire on the forehead of terrorist than to get permission to put an idea between his ears

•Bonaparte: In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one

•In the 21st Century the psychological is to the kinetic as ten is to one

•The US has to learn to put the psychological first

–Can a federal democratic republic “do strategy” this way

–Or is it only autocratic, totalitarian dictatorships that can “do strategy” this way?

•An American Way of Political Warfare: A Proposal https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE300/PE304/RAND_PE304.pdf

Fortitude 2.0: Steel & Shadows

by Scott Hall, by Jon Iadonist

12.15.2025 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/15/fortitude-2-0-steel-shadows/

What’s Old Is New Again: synchronizing deception and information advantage as a strategic discipline.

The New War Problem

The United States faces a strategic paradox. Our rivals—China and Russia—treat the I in the DIME (diplomatic, information, military, economic instruments of national power) as the main effort, not a backdrop. Beijing’s Unrestricted Warfare makes information—psychological, media, cyber, and financial—central to statecraft. Moscow fused visible force with invisible narratives in Crimea and Ukraine, proving that information can set conditions before the first shot and shape perceptions long after. Washington, by contrast, still treats information advantage as a tactical enabler—supporting fires for diplomacy, military power, and economics—rather than a strategic discipline in its own right.

Strategist Joshua Rovner is right to warn against techno-optimism: cyber, space, and information don’t overturn the logic of strategy. But that caution shouldn’t excuse complacency. The problem isn’t that these domains are revolutionary; it’s that we’ve fallen behind in synchronizing them at the national level. Our predecessors knew how to integrate the full DIME, with information leading and amplifying the rest. What the United States needs now isn’t novelty. It’s recovery—and a deliberate elevation of the “I” to parity with the other instruments of power.

The problem isn’t that these domains are revolutionary; it’s that we’ve fallen behind in synchronizing them at the national level.

The Old War Solution: Steel and Shadows in WWII

June 6, 1944: Allied steel crashed onto Normandy’s beaches, 5,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft, 156,000 troops. But the decisive blow had been struck weeks earlier, invisibly, when German Field Marshal Rommel kept his Panzer divisions 200 miles away at Pas de Calais, paralyzed by phantom armies that existed only in Allied deception plans. Steel delivered victory. Shadows made it possible. The Allies elevated deception from tactical trickery to strategic art. Operations BODYGUARD and FORTITUDE didn’t just confuse German intelligence; they fixed entire army groups in the wrong theater.

Operation POINTBLANK bombing campaigns reinforced false narratives about the timing and location of the invasion. The Ghost Army deployed dummy tanks and fake radio traffic, creating the illusion of strength where none existed, but only because real divisions were massing elsewhere. These weren’t separate operations. They were synchronized disciplines, planned and executed as a unified strategy. But deception went deeper than dummy divisions. See the fictionalized World War II vignette below:

The rain had eased to a sprinkle, and the pub felt almost cheerful, lamps warm on brass taps, a crackle from the stove, wet coats steaming into something like comfort. He chose a table near the heat and front entrance to let the enamel pin catch the light: a split heart, tidy script, Liga Einsamer Kriegsfrauen.

Two young German corporals noticed. “Your girl joined the club?” one called, grinning. He played it easily. “It’s a charity. You see the pins everywhere in Munich, shopgirls, tram conductors.” The room loosened. At the bar, a sergeant rolled his eyes. “Charity. My cousin says they meet on Thursdays and dance on Saturdays.” He set a leaflet on the table, cheap paper, smudged type, a ladies’ calendar full of breezy notices. “From home,” he said. The sergeant took it despite himself.

Talk drifted and gathered. An infantryman said his sister was “keeping busy.” Someone mentioned the baker’s assistant’s new pin. “Keep it,” he told the sergeant, who was already palming the page. “There’s a list of…meetings. My girl swears by them.” The word landed and stayed.

Outside, he checked his watch, two streets to the rendezvous, a dead drop under the tram bench. He struck a match, cupped the flame, and lit a cigarette; the first drag steadied the hand that had passed the leaflet. The pin vanished into his pocket; the smile did, too. Inside, the chatter had turned thoughtful, names compared, dates counted, postcards parsed for hints. The room didn’t know it, but a message had been delivered and propagated.

He walked on through the damp air, smoke trailing behind him, three fresh leaflets and a cover story that still held. No radio burst, no gunshot, just rumor seeded over beer and warmth. A successful operation, hidden in plain sight, carried on a laugh, a leaflet, and a pin.

Scenes like the vignette above occurred frequently in the pub scene of German society during the war. However, this particular scene was part of an elaborate Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operation concocted by Corporal Barbara Lauwers. She learned early that a whisper could move armies. In the humid Rome summer of 1944, Corporal Lauwers, multilingual, quick-witted, and newly folded into the OSS Morale Operations Branch, sat under a blackout lamp, turning POW gossip into weapons sharper than steel.

Corporal Lauwers’ brief: make the enemy doubt, hesitate, and lay down their arms. Lauwers didn’t just edit leaflets; she invented worlds entirely, reshaping public opinion on two crucial fronts: Warfront and Homefront. One of her creations, the mythical “League of Lonely War Women,” taunted front-line Germans with the idea that sweethearts back home had moved on. Thousands of copies rolled off Rome presses; even a stateside newspaper swallowed the ruse, reporting the club as real. Every scrap of the shadow campaign was designed to feel plausibly shabby, cheap paper, smudged ink, so no one would suspect Allied presses. The point wasn’t beautiful; it was believability, a rumor launched into the ranks aimed at degrading the will to fight.

The genius of the Allied strategy wasn’t choosing between steel or shadows; it was both. Synchronized in intent, yet decentralized in execution. Visible power (naval bombardment, airborne drops, armored thrusts) amplified deception (ghost armies, forged propaganda, psychological operations). Steel made shadows credible. Shadows made steel plausible. Together, they achieved what neither could alone: Cognitive Advantage.

The New War Solution: Fortitude 2.0 with Modern Synchronization

What would FORTITUDE look like today, enhanced by AI, cyber capabilities, and real-time information operations? Consider an Indo-Pacific vignette in 2027:

The People’s Republic of China began leveraging infrastructure projects across the South Pacific, quietly converting ‘development ports’ into potential dual-use logistics hubs. For Beijing, these were steppingstones for strategic reach; for local governments, they appeared as promises of prosperity. Operators embedded across the region sensed shifts in the operational information environment, unusual shipping manifests, local complaints about land seizures, and rising social media chatter over debt concerns. AI-enabled pattern detection, a technology Barbara Lauwers never had, confirmed exploitation in real time.

Within days, an information advantage cell orchestrated a synchronized shadow campaign: Local influencers and journalists amplified grassroots grievances about PRC contracts. Human intelligence (HUMINT) teams activated graffiti crews to start shaping the neighborhood by referencing new labor unions. Cyber teams disrupted shell companies posing as local firms, a modern evolution of Operation CORNFLAKES‘ mail infiltration. Regional media outlets received discreet leaks that exposed exploitative loan terms. Civil society partners seeded narratives of sovereignty and resilience, reframing Beijing’s ‘gifts’ as Trojan horses, the same psychological warfare Lauwers practiced, now amplified through social media and digital networks.

These shadows set the stage for visible power. Allied naval task forces conducted overt exercises near contested ports, signaling credible deterrence, the modern equivalent of massing real divisions, while ghost armies deceived and influenced local port workers into labor contracting discussions. Aerial patrols mapped sea lanes in plain view. Diplomatic envoys announced transparent aid packages and alternative financing, offering host-nation leaders a viable counterweight to Beijing. Allied logistics units staged visible stockpiles of humanitarian assistance, reinforcing the narrative of partnership without coercion. The Allied response demonstrated that the old discipline, synchronized steel and shadows, remains decisive when enhanced with modern capabilities.

Together, steel and shadows achieved what neither could alone. Beijing was forced to divert naval assets and political capital to stabilize its faltering initiative, while local leaders pivoted toward allied alternatives. The technology and tradecraft were new: AI sensing, cyber disruption, and real-time social media amplification. The discipline hadn’t changed since WWII Germany– it was still synchronized deception and visible power, planned and executed as a unified strategy.

As in 1944, when German divisions were pinned down in Calais by FORTITUDE and Nazi confidence was undermined by Operations CORNFLAKES and SAUERKRAUT, this vignette describes how the adversary miscalculated. The coalition secured decision advantage without escalation. The lesson: we don’t need to invent new warfare. We need to recover old disciplines and synchronize them with modern information forces.

Call to Action: Re-Institutionalization

The United States has traded strategic dominance for tactical firefighting because we forgot what the Allies knew instinctively: the “I” in DIME—information—is a strategic discipline, not garnish. Our adversaries haven’t forgotten. China’s Unrestricted Warfare simply codifies what Operations BODYGUARD, FORTITUDE, and CORNFLAKES proved: possessing the cognitive advantage at the strategic level steers campaigns more decisively than any single tactical blow.

We need to recover old disciplines and synchronize them with modern information forces.

The path forward isn’t novelty—it’s re-institutionalization of Information as a co-equal in the DIME construct. The United States military should:

Stand up permanent joint cells at the combatant commands for synchronized non-lethal effects (NLE) and non-kinetic actions (NKA), resourced to plan steel and shadows as one strategy—not stovepipes.
Elevate Information to parity with Diplomacy, Military, and Economic tools in planning, resourcing, and authorities, with clear campaign-level objectives.
Integrate modern tech with commercial marketing talent—AI, cyber, real-time information ops—to achieve the synchronization our predecessors managed with radios, printing presses, and dummy tanks.

The Allies won by synchronizing steel and shadows. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have internalized that lesson. The question isn’t whether synchronized deception and information advantage work—history says they do. The question is whether the United States will restore the “I” in DIME before it surrenders another generation of strategic advantage.

What’s old is new again. It’s time to remember.

Tags: cyber, deception, decision advantage, Future of War, future operating environment, Information environment, information operations, information warfare, integration, military deception

About The Authors

Scott Hall
Scott Hall is a U.S. Army Major and Information Operations officer serving as Chief of the Influence Branch at U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER). A career Armor officer and IO planner, he has held key leadership positions at the platoon, company, squadron, and division levels, as well as strategic and operational assignments with U.S. Army Europe, NATO, and ARCYBER. His work focuses on advancing strategic information advantage, integrating non-lethal and non-kinetic activities, and enabling multi-domain operations. He has been published in the Cavalry and Armor Journal, has appeared on The Cognitive Crucible podcast, and has presented at the Information Professionals Association’s INFOPAC conference.
View all posts
Jon Iadonist
Dr. Jon Iadonisi is an entrepreneur with experience founding and scaling defense technology and global commercial marketing companies. Prior to his entrepreneurial journey, he has combat service as a Navy SEAL and at CIA operating these mission sets. His writings reflect his personal opinions.

10. Past the Line of Disorder: Counter-Logistics as a Special Operations Capability

Summary:

Dylan Nigh argues the joint force needs to formalize “counter-logistics” (c-LOG), defined as analyzing enemy support systems and supply chains to degrade, destroy, or exploit them. He notes logistics targeting has deep precedent from ancient raiding through WWII sabotage, OSS and SOE Jedburgh teams, and operations like Jaywick, and he points to Ukraine as a modern proof of impact. The gap, he says, is doctrine and institutional focus on planning and target development, not just execution. He recommends integrating c-LOG into doctrine, research, and experimentation, and creating dedicated cross-functional teams, ideally in ARSOF, combining logistics, intelligence, PSYOP, civil affairs, engineers, and cyber, partnered with Special Forces for access and placement.

Excerpts:

Three recommendations can be offered. First, doctrine and further research must drive efforts toward planning and experimentation. Waves of military ink have already been spilled discussing the importance of preparing support systems and personnel for the next conflict. The Army alone has put immense emphasis on the development of support equipment and tactics for performing logistics in a contested environment. Efforts like the Contested Logistics-Cross Functional Team and Project Convergence are already making notable progress since their creation. Additionally, emerging logistical technology is being experimented on within CASCOM, the Battle Lab, and the Sustainment Capability Development Integration Directorate (SCDID). Placing an emphasis on c-LOG efforts during commiserate planning and experimentation could have outsized effects in the next conflict.

Secondly, a robust effort must be made toward creating integrated teams dedicated to analyzing and applying c-LOG in contingency plans (CONPLAN) and operations. The sensitive nature of these operations and the suite of capabilities needed to plan them make Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) an ideal home for such teams. A proposed model for c-LOG operations teams would center on logistics personnel with experience in non-standard logistics and intel personnel proficient in targeting. The spokes around this hub would include Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Soldiers to handle the information operations (IO) and military deception (MILDEC) aspects, Civil Affairs (CA) to analyze civil considerations, engineers to advise on infrastructure and demolition, and Cyber to incorporate emerging technologies. Integration with Special Forces (SF) teams would allow for the execution of c-LOG plans and solve the persistent issue of access and placement (A&P).

Finally, it is up to individuals and units at the lowest level to push for the change this article is advocating for. While strategic level change is needed in the long term, innovation in the realm of logistical targeting and predatory logistics has always taken place in the tactical realm. Let this be a call to those in this realm to study the logistics of nations like China and Russia, to integrate preplanned interdiction into their field training, and to advocate to their leadership for investment into c-LOG. Those whose lives will depend on it most must call for support for this concept, despite its lack of convenience, popularity, or palatability. Though it might not “brief well”, it is time to push the enemy past the line of disorder.

Past the Line of Disorder: Counter-Logistics as a Special Operations Capability

by Dylan Nigh

12.15.2025 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/15/counter-logistics/

The line between disorder and order lies in logistics”-Sun Tzu

There exists an open secret in the military and policy circles that effectiveness alone does not determine the success of new ideas. While concepts like precision sustainment and predictive logistics have deservedly found their way into doctrine, this was not purely by merit. The truth is that such ideas “brief well” within communities already primed to support them. Who wouldn’t want all the support they need without having to ask for it? Furthermore, the rise of the information age has turned military thinkers and commanders onto any concept with ties to AI, cyber, or big data. Aside from the convenience and popularity associated with ideas, one must also consider their palatability. Put plainly, some ideas are simply too hard for leaders to swallow upon first inspection, and they suffer for it accordingly.

One such idea has gone under several aliases within military doctrine and research articles but has failed to stick long-term. Counter-logistics (c-LOG) can ostensibly be defined as the analysis of enemy support systems and supply chains for the purpose of degradation, destruction, or exploitation. This article will argue for the incorporation of c-LOG into the planning and experimentation of units across the joint force from the tactical level and up, with a particular emphasis on special operations forces (SOF). The historical precedence will be covered, the gap in current capabilities will be identified, and recommendations will be presented and deliberated.

Historical Precedence

While c-LOG, as this article aims to conceptualize it, remains an untested concept, analogs have existed since before the start of organized warfare. Raiding parties since pre-history have primarily targeted other forces or peoples for access to their supplies or stockpiled goods. The Assyrians created dedicated units to recon for horses across the empire and neighboring lands to “acquire” for their army’s chariot force. Ancient Greeks set about disrupting Persian supply lines in the Peloponnesian War, and Hannibal frequently sought to destroy Roman depots during the Second Punic War. Much later, similar tactics would be used by guerrilla forces in the Peninsular War to disorient Napoleon’s forces in Spain by disrupting their lines of communication and supply.

The number of such analogs increased dramatically during the previous century, with the two world wars serving as the pinnacle of such tactics. The First World War saw German agents causing explosions across the U.S. at strategic locations like Black Tom Island, just south of Manhattan. These attacks were meticulously planned, well-executed, and covert in nature. Yet, they were ultimately outdone in both scope and scale by the events of the Second World War. Multiple nations organized agencies and units specifically tasked with exploiting strategic logistical targets. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Special Operations Executive (SOE) established Jedburgh Teams to disrupt Nazi German supply lines and depots across occupied France and beyond. Such units ran training programs for partisans in occupied nations, which taught them to identify key targets and execute isolated attacks. Finally, individual operations proved to have outsized effects, such as the SOE’s Operation Jaywick, wherein agents disguised as Malay fishermen managed to sink 30,000 tons of Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbor.

Gap Identification

The current gap in capabilities in regard to c-LOG has much to do with the split between planning and execution. The records of all the previously shared historical analogs focus almost entirely on strategic sabotage. There is no discussion of the planning process that led to the identification of targets or of the considerations made before operations began. With recent successes in Ukraine, the efficacy of targeting enemy logistics is clear; planning efforts must be given equal attention. Some have recently argued for the collaboration of intelligence and logistics personnel to focus on this problem set, but even this may not be enough. The modern age calls for a far more robust system of collaboration to identify enemy support targets and execute effective attacks.

The problem of underrepresentation persists today, as open-source articles and doctrine fail to cover the benefits of logistics targeting, preplanned interdiction (tactical sabotage), and related concepts. Without the tipping of this first domino, planning and experimentation remain far less likely. Tactical-level units can research historical cases and attempt to apply lessons learned, but large-scale change is needed and most often happens at the strategic level.

The Army and joint force are in need of doctrine, funding, and dedicated units aimed at the identification, degradation, destruction, and exploitation of enemy support assets. Predatory logistics can bolster a system already spread too thin in large-scale combat operations (LSCO), and lessons learned from enemy logistical analysis can be utilized to strengthen friendly support networks. Interdiction is too circumstantial, strategic sabotage is too limited, and logistical targeting is only a half-measure; now is the time to pursue counter-logistics with an eye on the future fight.

Recommendations

Three recommendations can be offered. First, doctrine and further research must drive efforts toward planning and experimentation. Waves of military ink have already been spilled discussing the importance of preparing support systems and personnel for the next conflict. The Army alone has put immense emphasis on the development of support equipment and tactics for performing logistics in a contested environment. Efforts like the Contested Logistics-Cross Functional Team and Project Convergence are already making notable progress since their creation. Additionally, emerging logistical technology is being experimented on within CASCOM, the Battle Lab, and the Sustainment Capability Development Integration Directorate (SCDID). Placing an emphasis on c-LOG efforts during commiserate planning and experimentation could have outsized effects in the next conflict.

Secondly, a robust effort must be made toward creating integrated teams dedicated to analyzing and applying c-LOG in contingency plans (CONPLAN) and operations. The sensitive nature of these operations and the suite of capabilities needed to plan them make Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) an ideal home for such teams. A proposed model for c-LOG operations teams would center on logistics personnel with experience in non-standard logistics and intel personnel proficient in targeting. The spokes around this hub would include Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Soldiers to handle the information operations (IO) and military deception (MILDEC) aspects, Civil Affairs (CA) to analyze civil considerations, engineers to advise on infrastructure and demolition, and Cyber to incorporate emerging technologies. Integration with Special Forces (SF) teams would allow for the execution of c-LOG plans and solve the persistent issue of access and placement (A&P).

Figure 1. Proposed c-LOG Cross-Functional Team Model. The structure is noted, but individual manning is left ambiguous.

Finally, it is up to individuals and units at the lowest level to push for the change this article is advocating for. While strategic level change is needed in the long term, innovation in the realm of logistical targeting and predatory logistics has always taken place in the tactical realm. Let this be a call to those in this realm to study the logistics of nations like China and Russia, to integrate preplanned interdiction into their field training, and to advocate to their leadership for investment into c-LOG. Those whose lives will depend on it most must call for support for this concept, despite its lack of convenience, popularity, or palatability. Though it might not “brief well”, it is time to push the enemy past the line of disorder.

The views expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect the official position of Small Wars Journal, the 528th SB (SO) (A), the United States Army, or the United States Government.

Tags: ARSOF, Counter-Logistics (c-LOG), intelligence, Special Operations Forces (SOF)

About The Author

Dylan Nigh
Cpt. Dylan Nigh is a Logistics Officer within Army Special Operations currently serving in the 528th Sustainment Brigade (Special Operations) (Airborne). He holds graduate degrees in history and international relations and writes frequently for sources covering national defense.

11. Opinion | Guan Heng’s Fate and American Values

Summary:

Guan Heng’s asylum case is a test of whether the United States still protects people who risk their lives to expose repression. It says Guan, a 38-year-old Chinese national, gathered and released evidence of Xinjiang detention camps after traveling there to photograph sites linked to Uyghur abuses, then fled China through Hong Kong and Latin America and entered the United States irregularly. He applied for asylum in October 2021, received a work permit, and lived quietly until ICE arrested him during an August raid aimed at other occupants, citing illegal entry and disregarding his pending claim, according to supporters. The piece warns deportation would likely mean harsh imprisonment in China and would signal abandonment of American values.

Comments: When did values become a bad thing? Can't we reconcile and synthesize interests and values? Beware the second and third order effects if we abandon American values.

Opinion | Guan Heng’s Fate and American Values

WSJ

The U.S. may deport the man who helped expose the Chinese Communist horrors in Xinjiang.

By The Editorial Board

Dec. 14, 2025 5:12 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/guan-hengs-fate-and-american-values-4862429a

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) New York City Field Office at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York. sarah yenesel/epa/shutterstock/Shutterstock

An asylum hearing in upstate New York on Monday will determine the fate of Guan Heng. The decision will also speak volumes about whether America still protects those who speak up for freedom at great risk to themselves.

Guan Heng is a 38-year-old Chinese immigrant who fled the People’s Republic after he gathered evidence of human-rights abuses against the ethnic Uyghur population in Xinjiang province. Following satellite coordinates he downloaded from Western sources, he traveled across Xinjiang to investigate the re-education camps and detention sites that China says don’t exist.

His story is an astonishing credit to Guan Heng’s desire to live in freedom, as recounted in an article by Lu Jingwei in Human Rights in China on Substack on which this editorial is based. As a young man in Henan province, Guan Heng found a way to evade Chinese internet censors and access foreign news. He was fascinated in particular by satellite photos of alleged concentration camps in Xinjiang, and he decided to see for himself.

It’s hard to imagine a riskier trek, but he managed to pull it off, traveling through cities and towns with a telephoto lens. He returned home but knew that if he disclosed the photos online from inside China, he would be discovered and arrested.

He decided to leave China—through Hong Kong, traveling first to Ecuador, then the Bahamas, where he bought a boat and sailed without sailing experience toward Florida. On the coast he abandoned the boat, made his way into the U.S. and released his photos that went viral on the internet and validated what the satellite photos had highlighted.

According to Mr. Lu, Guan Heng sought asylum in New York on Oct. 25, 2021, received a work permit, and began to make a living as an Uber driver in New York City, among other jobs. He settled in a town near Albany this spring and shared a house with a Chinese couple, quietly making a living.

Then heroism became tragedy. Guan Heng’s supporters say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the house in August looking for the couple. They arrested Guan Heng when he acknowledged that he had entered the country illegally. Mr. Lu reports that ICE didn’t recognize Guan Heng’s work permit and pursuit of asylum because he entered the U.S. illegally. He has since spent months in detention, most recently in the Broome County Correctional Facility.

It’s hard to imagine a stronger case for asylum. The Chinese government has attacked Guan Heng relentlessly since he was identified as the source of the Xinjiang photos. His relatives in China have been harassed and threatened. If he is deported to China, Guan Heng is sure to be arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, if not tortured.

Is this the message the land of the free wants to send the world? That if you risk your life to expose human-rights abuses, and then risk it again to make it to America, the home of the brave will serve as the police force for the Chinese Communist Party?

It’s hard to believe, but then you never know in this era of mass deportation that has disrupted lives and broken up so many law-abiding families. Let’s hope that Mr. Guan is granted asylum to live freely in his adopted country that was once, and must continue to be, a beacon for liberty.

Free Expression: Pete Hegseth might have gone too far in applying the lesson of ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai.’

Appeared in the December 15, 2025, print edition as 'Guan Heng’s Fate and American Values'.

WSJ

12. Japan Has Finally Drawn The Line, And A Trapped Beijing Knows It – Analysis

Summary:

The analysis argues Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae ended Tokyo’s ambiguity by stating Japan’s security and survival are inseparable from Taiwan’s fate. Because Yonaguni is about 110 km from Taiwan and U.S. bases in Japan are central to any U.S. response, Beijing would likely target Japan in a Taiwan war, making Japanese involvement unavoidable. Public clarity, the author says, traps China by shifting the narrative and pressuring Washington’s strategic ambiguity. Beijing responds with psychological warfare and risky military signaling, but Japan’s advanced defenses, F-35s, maritime power, and extended U.S. nuclear deterrence give credible deterrence across the Asia-Indo-Pacific in coming years ahead.

Comment: So many "flashpoints" in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region: Taiwan, South China Sea, West Philippine Sea, Japan's islands and homeland, the Yellow/West Sea and the Korean peninsula. The only way to protect US interests in the region and around the world is through the strength of the silk web of us allies, partners, and friends.

But Prime Minister Takaichi is demonstrating how to stand up to China. Strength and resolve.

Japan Has Finally Drawn The Line, And A Trapped Beijing Knows It – Analysis

eurasiareview.com · Collins Chong Yew Keat · December 14, 2025

https://www.eurasiareview.com/14122025-japan-has-finally-drawn-the-line-and-a-trapped-beijing-knows-it-analysis/?utm

The recent Sino-Japan tension over Taiwan and Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s comments on defending Taiwan reflects the underlying power tension that has always been prevalent, but so far managed by conventional norms. The buck stops with Takaichi. She did what no Japanese leader had ever had the guts to do, to publicly state that: Japan’s own security and national survival are inseparable from the fate of Taiwan.

In saying so, she simply stated a strategic truth that has long been whispered and understood but rarely acknowledged publicly in Tokyo, Washington, or even Taipei, for fear of upsetting the apple cart and in changing the norms of unspoken rules. For Japan, the Taiwan question is not a distant geopolitical chess play or an indirect player. It is a direct, critical and immediate national security threat.

Any potential future Chinese attack on Taiwan would inevitably affect Japan’s own security and survival, and pull Japan into the conflict. This is not political rhetoric, but a hard military reality. Already, for the past years, the Chinese blockades and encirclements of Taiwan have already affected Japan in economic, trade and sovereignty concerns, and any full blown invasion in the future will create a direct threat to Japan. It lies on the fact that a Chinese strike on Taiwan will not stop at the strait, either early on or midway. If China were to carry out a full strike on Taiwan, the inevitable preemptive deterrent moves by Washington will see equally fast responses by Beijing, and Japan is a natural target high in the list for deterrent and preemptive strikes.

Japan’s closest island to Taiwan, the Yonaguni Island is barely 110 km away. This means that a blockade around Taiwan is literally a blockade and threat against Japan’s own maritime rights. Taiwan will not be the sole victim if China were to invade it by force, Japan is at the direct crosspath. U.S. forces stationed across Japan are essential to any American response and efficacy of thwarting the lethality of Beijing’s first strikes on Taiwan. Beijing knows this.

China’s military doctrine therefore has prioritised the Japan equation, where any successful force on Taiwan will need the neutralisation of the Japanese military involvement and in targeting the American bases in Japan. Hence, in all situations, Japan will indefinitely be roped into the war, and this has long been a realistic truth few dare to voice out publicly. In come Takaichi.

A Strategic First Punch That Cornered Beijing

Takaichi’s statement was both strategically calibrated and an effective maneuver in trapping Beijing. By publicly declaring Japan’s likely response to a Taiwan contingency, she has forced Beijing into a tight spot.

Any aggressive counter reaction will make China look like the provocateur, as evident in the new radar lock on Japanese aircrafts near Okinawa. The move also exposed the fragility of China’s narrative. Beijing prefers ambiguity to remain in place, while Takaichi has removed the ambiguity and replaced it with a firm and clear direction.

Takaichi’s move has also pushed Washington toward clarity and an additional pressure to put in more support and to review its own strategic ambiguity concept on Taiwan. This has been used for decades to deter both Taiwan and China, and the new position and readiness of Takaichi created further pressure on Washington to accept that ambiguity is no longer effective in an era where Chinese missiles can reach Tokyo in minutes.

Public support in Japan has been growing for Japan to take a more assertive and unapologetic stance. This reflects a growing national realisation that silence invites danger, while clarity deters it.

Going forward, both sides will not stand down. Takaichi will not be apologetic in defending the truth and the interests of Japan, while Beijing will need to respond with strength to appease domestic anger and nationalistic sentiments. Despite this, Beijing has everything to lose while Tokyo has everything to gain, now that Beijing is forced to play to Takaichi’s brilliant early control over the power stakes in the region.

Even without nuclear weapons, Japan’s military posture is not symbolic,but a powerful one. The Self Defence Force has in its arsenal one of the world’s most advanced anti-missile architectures, a rapidly expanding fleet of F-35 fighters, world-class maritime patrol capabilities,and the ability to strike at long range in the coming years.

Japan will not be a secondary player in this region, it will be a frontline actor with significant deterrent capacity. Despite not having nuclear weapons now, Washington is strongly at the forefront and committed to extended nuclear deterrence to protect Japan. All these are enough to strike fear in Beijing’s calculations: conventionally strong, technologically unmatched, and backed by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. This gives Tokyo a greater advantage of having credible deterrence without needing its own nuclear arsenal.

Beijing’s Psychological Warfare

Understanding its own vulnerabilities, Beijing hit hard early on the narrative, painting Japan as the “dangerous” one, the “provocative” one, and the “unpredictable” actor, a classic psychological warfare initiated. However, regional players were not bought over, and understood the practical truth to the entire regional power equation.

The truth remains that if Taiwan falls, Japan’s security architecture and deterrence go along the same line. The First Island Chain will break down, and Beijing will gain a new opening northward toward Okinawa and Kyushu.

Takaichi recognised this and voiced what regional strategists have long understood,that Japan has no choice but to act despite inviting Beijing’s displeasures.

It is both a symbol of clarity and deterrence, and for the first time in years, it is Japan and not China that is shaping the narrative of the future security stakes in Asia.

By increasing hard power deterrence, the safe bets are always assured. By announcing plans to deploy medium-range surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni Island, Tokyo can monitor airspace around the Taiwan Strait and create frontline deterrence on any hostile forces coming from the direction of Taiwan, forming the first line of defence.

The skies over Yonaguni will be the first to be penetrated by Chinese airpower and missiles in the first phase of a conflict, aimed at neutralising U.S. bases in Okinawa. Placing Type-03 Chu-SAM and related monitoring systems there strengthens Japan’s ability to intercept early attacks and deny China uncontested airspace in the opening moments of a crisis. This seals the gap where otherwise, Japan’s entire southwestern flank remains exposed.

This deployment therefore remains a brilliant strategic move, in raising the cost of Chinese military adventurism, preserving Japan’s territorial integrity, and a reassuring message to the region. Japan’s role as a deterrent is the single biggest factor,where analyses and war games consistently show that without Japan’s support, defending Taiwan becomes increasingly difficult.

Without access to bases in Japan, U.S. fighter aircrafts’ capacity is curtailed. In most simulated invasion scenarios, a U.S.-Taiwan-Japan coalition prevailed against China, but Japan’s involvement was the key difference between victory and defeat. Beijing is well aware of this, and this partly explains its kinetic and forceful responses to Takaichi’s posture and statement.

Without Japan’s airfields, the U.S.’ ability to surge its fighter and attack jets will be hampered, allowing China’s missile and airpower to target solely on Taiwan and U.S. assets at sea.

If Japan stays out, China stands a higher chance of eventually conquering Taiwan, even if Taiwan is resisting hard.

eurasiareview.com · Collins Chong Yew Keat · December 14, 2025

13. Has Venezuela been ditched by its strongest allies - Russia and China?

Summary:

The BBC reports that Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is receiving mostly symbolic backing from Russia and China as the United States increases military pressure in the Caribbean, seizes a sanctioned tanker, and strikes suspected trafficking targets. Analysts say Moscow is consumed by the Ukraine war and sanctions, and it will avoid actions that invite more penalties. Beijing is prioritizing stability with POTUS, protecting trade talks, and recovering prior loans rather than extending new support. Venezuela’s economic collapse and degraded oil sector reduce its value as a partner. Experts also cite weak domestic legitimacy and credible fraud allegations from the July 2024 election, making both patrons reluctant to bet on Maduro’s survival.

Comment: We should be using the tools of our information instrument of national power to exploit this.

Has Venezuela been ditched by its strongest allies - Russia and China?

BBC

As Trump targets Venezuela, its allies Russia and China show little signs of support

Norberto Paredes

Getty Images

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro could be forgiven for wondering who his true friends are.

Once rock solid, his reliance on his two main allies - China and Russia - now appears increasingly uncertain.

For years, both countries supported Venezuela's socialist-led government politically, financially and militarily - a relationship that began under former President Hugo Chávez, Maduro's mentor and predecessor.

But experts say that backing now seems to be largely symbolic, with statements being given in support rather than concrete military or financial aid.

This shift comes as the US has deployed air and naval forces - including a nuclear-powered submarine, spy planes and 15,000 troops - to the Caribbean.

The US has conducted strikes on boats in the region that it alleges are smuggling drugs, killing more than 80 people, and in recent days, it seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.

The Trump administration has said the military build-up and strikes are targeting drug trafficking, and the tanker had been sanctioned. But many experts - and Maduro himself - believe Washington's real goal is regime change.

So at the Venezuelan president's hour of greatest need, what has changed?

Why is Trump threatening Venezuela's Maduro?

US seizes oil tanker off Venezuela as Caracas condemns 'act of piracy'

Prof Fernando Reyes Matta, director of the Centre for China Studies at Andrés Bello University in Chile, argues that Venezuela has become a far lower priority for both Beijing and Moscow, especially since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

"There is no reason today for either Russia or China to go all-in defending Venezuela given their other problems, such as Russia and its war in Ukraine, and China trying to coexist internationally with President Trump," he says.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has poured enormous resources into the conflict, straining both its finances and its military. It has also faced sweeping Western sanctions.

This leaves fewer resources for allies that previously benefited from Kremlin support, says Prof Vladimir Rouvinski, the director of the Laboratory of Politics and International Relations (PoInt) at Icesi University in Colombia.

Syria and Iran, Moscow's long-standing allies in the Middle East, have faced a similar fate in recent times.

"Russia will [not] risk receiving more sanctions than it already has, [and] China will not risk getting more tariffs imposed on it for defending Maduro," Prof Rouvinski explains.

Maduro reportedly asked China and Russia for military assistance at the end of October, according to The Washington Post.

The Kremlin's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said "we support Venezuela, as it supports us", while urging the Trump administration to avoid escalating the crisis, Russian media reported.

And in the wake of the American seizure of the oil tanker, the Kremlin said Putin had called Maduro to affirm his support.

But so far, Moscow has not provided any material assistance.

Getty Images

Putin and Maduro met in Moscow in May 2025. Russia has provided Venezuela with military support for years

Like Moscow, Beijing has shown no sign it would militarily defend Venezuela, instead condemning what it calls "external interference" and urging restraint.

Experts say China defending Maduro could jeopardise recent diplomatic gains between Beijing and Washington, while offering little beyond ideological alignment.

US–China relations have been particularly tense since Trump imposed tariffs on multiple countries. But a meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea in late October - described as positive by both sides - opened the door to new agreements and lower tariffs on certain products.

According to experts, Venezuela's economic collapse and the deterioration of its oil industry have further discouraged Chinese support. Beijing has reduced new lending in recent years and is now focused mainly on recovering past loans.

"I think China is willing to negotiate with any government that eventually replaces Maduro, and believes that supporting Maduro too strongly now could bring negative consequences when the regime falls," says Prof Rouvinski.

Getty Images

Venezuela has purchased hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Chinese military equipment since 2005

Prof Reyes Matta does not think "either of the two countries is willing to support a regime that has so little internal backing".

"Moreover, both Russia and China know that the last presidential election had very evident fraudulent characteristics."

The July 2024 election was marred by serious allegations of fraud. The National Electoral Council (CNE), dominated by government allies, proclaimed Maduro the winner but provided no detailed results, unlike in previous elections.

The opposition - led by this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado - released electoral records suggesting the opposition candidate Edmundo González won.

"This time, Maduro is completely alone," says Prof Rouvinski, who believes Maduro's time is "running out".

"Russia and China may continue criticising US intervention, but they are not willing to go any further. The support he had in the past is no longer there in real terms, beyond certain rhetorical statements."

Additional reporting by BBC Global Journalism

14. SOCOM seeks candidates for agentic AI experimentation

Summary:

SOCOM is preparing an April 2026 experimentation event at Avon Park Air Force Range, Florida, and is soliciting vendors to demo “agentic AI” capabilities for special operations. The RFI says SOCOM wants AI agents that can reason, adapt, and autonomously make decisions with limited human input, using multimodal data (text, audio, visual) and integrating into existing SOF software architectures through modular workflows. Potential uses include mission planning and execution, intelligence collection and analysis, decision support, cybersecurity, and software development. SOCOM also wants work on agentic protocols, orchestration, human machine teaming, low size, weight, and power compute solutions, evaluation metrics, and collaborative autonomous systems, while warning online learning may be restricted for kinetic fires. RFI responses are due Jan. 12.

Comment: My thoughts on Agentic warfare are here:

Agentic Warfare, Yes – But the Future of War Will Always Be Human

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/agentic-warfare-yes-but-the-future-of-war-will-always-be-human/

SOCOM seeks candidates for agentic AI experimentation

defensescoop.com · Jon Harper · December 12, 2025

The experimentation event is slated for April at Avon Park Air Force Range in Florida.

Jon Harper

https://defensescoop.com/2025/12/12/socom-agentic-ai-sof-special-operations-forces/?utm

U.S. Special Operations Command is gearing up to experiment with agentic artificial intelligence capabilities, and it’s now soliciting information from industry and other organizations that want to demo their technologies.

SOCOM will host an experimentation event in April at Avon Park Air Force Range in Florida to identify and assess emerging tech and give participants the opportunity to gain insight and feedback from special operations forces, according to an RFI released Friday.

“SOF requires Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies that can collaborate to perform tactical or operational tasks, create and support workflows that can be modularly integrated into existing SOF software architectures,” officials wrote.

The command noted that it’s looking for tools that can reason, adapt to their environments, and make their own decisions with human-like agency — not systems that perform automated behaviors based on pre-programmed or predefined rules, instructions, or algorithms.

“Agentic AI-based capability refers to a class of AI agents that can perceive and interact with multiple modalities, such as visual, auditory, and textual inputs and automatically respond to conditions, autonomously make decisions, and perform complex tasks independently, without human intervention or with limited human intervention. Agentic AI-based systems utilize a multimodal framework to interpret a broader context, enhancing interactions by combining various data types. For instance, multimodal AI agents can parse language, recognize tone, and interpret visual data simultaneously, leading to more accurate and context-aware responses. This approach is crucial for improving human-machine interaction and adapting to diverse environments to facilitate a more fluid and responsive engagement with digital systems,” per the RFI.

“However, in some cases (e.g., kinetic fires) online learning is not allowed since it may lead to undesired behavior,” officials noted.

SOCOM has identified a slew of potential applications for agentic AI within the commando community, including software development and integration, cybersecurity and business intelligence, decision support, intelligence gathering and analysis, mission planning, mission execution and mission control.

The technology areas the command wants to explore at the evaluation event next spring include agentic protocols; agentic workflows or orchestration; human-machine teaming; knowledge representation for AI: low size, weight, and power-compute (SWaP-C) solutions; AI agent frameworks; metrics and AI accuracy assessment; optimization for tactical and low-SWaP-C resources; and collaborative autonomous systems.

Responses to the RFI are due Jan. 12.

Written by Jon Harper

Jon Harper is Editor-in-Chief of DefenseScoop. He leads an award-winning team of journalists in providing breaking news and in-depth analysis on military technology and the ways in which it is shaping how the Defense Department operates and modernizes. You can also follow him on X: @Jon_Harper_

defensescoop.com · Jon Harper · December 12, 2025

15. Special Operations News – Dec 15, 2025

Special Operations News – Dec 15, 2025

December 15, 2025 SOF News Update 0

https://sof.news/update/20251215/

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: A Soldier assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) pins of the coveted Special Forces Tab on a newly graduated Green Beret following assignment to 3rd SFG(A) during the 3rd SFG(A) tabbing ceremony on Fort Bragg, N.C., Dec. 10, 2025. The Special Forces Tab is awarded to U.S. Army Soldiers who successfully complete the Special Forces Qualification Course, a physically and mentally demanding course that train Soldiers on the basics of unconventional warfare. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Edgar Martinez)

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SOF News

Navy Wins! In a very close contest the Naval Academy’s Midshipmen won over the Army’s West Point ‘Black Knights’ football team with the score of 17 to 16 on Saturday afternoon, December 13, 2025. Navy’s record is now at 10-2 while Army’s record is at 6-6.

SOF and the Golden Dome. Special Operations global capabilities have the potential to enable early warning and flexible deterrent options when it comes to dealing with hypersonic and cruise missile threats. A new Space Force element located at United States Special Operations Command that was created in 2025 can assist SOF in bolstering resilience from cyber and electromagnetic attacks. “Golden Dome: A Special Operations Forces Overview”, JSOU Press, November 17, 2025.

Legalize Psychedelics? There are a few SOF-focused veterans organizations promoting the need to speed therapeutic access to psychedelics to help veterans struggling with deep trauma, depression, and alcoholism. Matthew Buckley, a former Navy pilot and the president of the No Fallen Heroes Foundation recently took part in a panel discussion at Harvard University about the therapeutic need vs. safety questions of psychedelics. “Time to Legalize Psychedelics?”, The Harvard Gazette, December 5, 2025.

SOF Helicopters of the Vietnam War. Stavros Atlamazoglou writes about how the helicopter not only revolutionized warfare but how special operations units, to include MACV-SOG, used the aircraft for infil and exfil on missions in the 1960s. “The Special Operations Helicopters of the Vietnam War”, SANDBOXX, December 12, 2025.

Report on Osprey Aircraft. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds some safety concerns and provides some recommendations to mitigate the risks. GAO-26-107285, December 8, 2025. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107285

A Quiet Maritime Interdiction. Some special operations that take place on the high seas make it to the ‘front page’ of the news. And then some incidents are barely mentioned. A recent ship boarding operations is one of the quiet ones. “US Special Operations Forces Board a China-to-Iran Ship in the Indian Ocean”, SOFREP, December 14, 2024.

SOF History

On December 20, 1989, more than 3,600 Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) soldiers participated in Operation Just Cause (Panama). Parachute assaults were conducted onto Panamanian airfields. Read more at USASOC History Office: https://arsof-history.org/arsof_in_panama/index.html

On December 13, 2003, Iraq President Saddam Hussein was captured hiding in a hole at a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq. Task Force 121, a joint special operations team, conducted the operation. The TF was assisted by elements of the 4th ID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Saddam_Hussein

National Security and Commentary

Spc. Sarah Beckstrom – RIP. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, a military police officer assigned to the 863rd Military Police Company, West Virginia Army National Guard, was laid to rest with full military honors during a ceremony at the West Virginia National Cemetery in Grafton, West Virginia, Dec. 9. “West Virginia Guardsman Laid to Rest”, Department of Defense, December 11, 2025.

Slashing Jobs at VA. The Veterans Affairs department may soon have to do without 35,000 health care positions – including doctors and nurses. The department has already lost 30,000 positions this year. These additional cuts will likely add more pressure to an already stretched health care system for America’s veterans. The cuts will mean longer wait times for veterans who need to schedule appointments to receive health care. “VA plans to abruptly eliminate tens of thousands of health care jobs”, The Washington Post, December 13, 2025.

Crisis of U.S. Diplomatic Corps. Global leadership relies on a professional and experienced diplomatic workforce. However, just as global threats are intensifying America’s soft power is eroding. The American Foreign Service Association conducted a survey of its active-duty membership and over 2,000 diplomats responded. 98% report poor morale, 86% say changes in the workplace have affected their ability to advance U.S. diplomatic priorities, and nearly 1 in 3 are considering leaving the diplomatic service. Read the results in a report entitled “At the Breaking Point: The State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025”, American Foreign Service Association, December 3, 2025, PDF, 16 pgs.

IO, CYBER, Intel, IW

SOF-Cyber-Space Triad. Special operations forces are now a player in the space and cyber worlds. The integration of Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) into the SOF-Space-Cyber Triad will extend the operational reach, survivability, and decision-making agility of forward deployed SOF teams. A key task, however, is to take advantage of technology without diminishing the core activities of the ARSOF mission. Two Special Forces officers provide their perspective in “A Team Room Discussion on the SOF-Space-Cyber Triad”, Special Warfare Journal, December 11, 2025.

New Army Intel General. Lieutenant General Michelle A. Schmidt has been promoted and assigned as the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2. She was confirmed for promotion by the U.S. Senate on 30 October 2025. She is a career intelligence officer with extensive experience in both conventional and special operations. She has served on command or staff assignments with Resolute Support Mission, DIA, 82nd Airborne Division, Delta Force, JSOC, and other organizations.

New Cdr of the NGA. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has a new director, one who has over three decades of intelligence experience. She is expected to accelerate the NGA’s modernization – especially in the analytics and artificial intelligence fields. Read more about the new director in “LTG Michele Bredenkamp: Modernizing the NGA for Lethality?”, Grey Dynamics, December 12, 2025.

Strategic Competition

SCS, USCG, and Political Warfare. China is aggressively consolidating its position in the critical maritime corridor of the South China Sea (SCS). It is using its maritime militia, fishing fleets, and artificial islands to turn the area into a contested area in an attempt to expand its territorial boundaries. While the U.S. Navy has a presence in the region, it is a military solution to a political warfare problem. A more appropriate response might be the deployment of U.S. Coast Guard assets as a maritime strategy. Read more in “The Coast Guard’s Place in Political Warfare”, Special Operations Association of America, December 9, 2025.

IW and Russia’s Shadow Fleet. Andrew Rolander writes on how Russia operates with near impunity using its shadow fleet to exploit loopholes in maritime legal frameworks. The Russian government can conduct nefarious activities but shield itself from any diplomatic, legal, or military response. “Irregular Warfare at Sea: How Russia’s Shadow Fleet Undermines Maritime Security”, Small Wars Journal, December 11, 2025.

China, Operational Art, and Wargaming. Military planners have gotten away from practicing and applying operational art in a large scale war. The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) side-tracked the U.S. military for over two decades in how it conducts land warfare. The emergence of China as the chief strategic competitor on the world scene and its aggressive moves in the Indo-Pacific has the U.S. focused once more on strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of warfare. The area that needs work is the space between strategic and tactical aspects of warfare – called operational art. Recent wargaming has exposed a weakness in operational planning. Read more in “Decline of Operational Art: The Story of a Strategic China Wargame”, by Marco Lyons, War on the Rocks, December 12, 2025.

Ukraine Conflict

February 2022 – Will the Russians Invade? Many observers said no and downplayed the risk of a Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Read more in “Why Many Underestimated Russia’s Invasion Risk”, War on the Rocks, December 8, 2025.

Russia’s Cognitive Warfare Effort. The advances in Ukraine by the Russians in 2025 have been minimal – gaining less than one percent of Ukrainian territory. This has come at an enormous cost to the Russians – both in personnel and equipment. What the Russians have failed to achieve on the battlefield they wish to win at the negotiation table. One of the biggest Russian goals is to get the Ukrainians to cede territory through a peace agreement that the Russians can’t win through combat on the ground. To do this, they are relying on influence operations to convince the United States and the international community that the war is hopeless for the Ukrainians and that Ukraine is looking at an ultimate defeat if the war continues.

Stopping Russian Aggression. Appeasement with Russia is not working. The solution, according to Oleksandr Sukhobrus – a native of Kyiv and former diplomat, is for the West to back Ukraine’s resistance with sustained military and economic support. “A Letter from Ukraine – How to Stop Russian Aggression: or appeasement or resistance?”, Small Wars Journal, December 12, 2025.

References:
Interactive Map. Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by the Institute for the Study of War and Critical Threats. On storymaps.arcgis.com See also https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html
U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine, Congressional Research Service, CRSIF12040, periodically updated, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12040
Ukraine Conflict, National Security Info. https://www.national-security.info/ukraine-conflict.html

SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.

Asia

Taiwan’s IC. The intelligence community is made up with eleven intelligence bodies with defense, law enforcement, immigration, and border protection mission areas. There are three main organizations and several small ones. Taiwan’s IC has evolved over the past decades into a professional set of organizations. Learn more in “Taiwan’s Intelligence Community: NSB, MJIB, MIB Leading the Way”, by Mauro Esgueva, Grey Dynamics, December 11, 2025.

Terror Attack in Australia. At least 16 people were killed in what is being described as a terrorist attack conducted by two assailants. One of the attackers was killed and the second is in critical condition. Another 40 people are reported to be injured – two of them police officers. The mass shooting took place at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday evening, December 14, 2025, during a Jewish Hanukkah event. The two attackers used rifles during the assault, one was disarmed by a bystander. There is speculation that there was a third gunman. Two of the shooters have been identified as father and son, the son is hospitalized.

Western Hemisphere

Troubles in Haiti. The situation in Haiti is going from bad to worse. The criminal gangs have been running amok and the government is unable to quell the violence. The international community been trying to assist but thus far has been unable to restore stability to the country. Florida International University has published a report that details the dire situation in Haiti and presents some recommendations on the way forward. Read A Strategic Opening: Fighting Haiti’s Criminal Insurgency, Florida International University, November 24, 2025, PDF, 40 pages.

U.S. Shadow War with Venezuelan Cartels. As of mid-December 2025 there have been at least 22 kinetic strikes that have killed more than 80 drug smugglers in the waters around Venezuela. U.S. special operations forces have been involved in some of these attacks. Should a conflict with Venezuela occur U.S. SOF will be playing an important role. “America’s Shadow War with Venezuelan Cartels”, Special Operations Association of America, December 11, 2025.

CSAR Assets Arrive in Caribbean. Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) aircraft and personnel have recently deployed to the Caribbean Sea region. The HH-60W helicopters and HC-130J planes along with refueling aerial tankers are used by combat rescue crews. The Southern Spear mission may soon be morphing into something more serious that is aimed at Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. These CSAR assets are in addition to numerous other types of aircraft already moved into the area in recent months. “Combat Rescue Aircraft, Tankers Arrive in Caribbean as U.S. Military Buildup Accelerates”, The War Zone, December 11, 2025.

Africa

ARSOF and IW in the Sahel. A Civil Affairs officer, Juan Quiroz, examines the current state of conflict in the Sahel region of Africa and provides his recommendations for the way forward. Among these is for ARSOF to focus more on the provision of essential services and less on physical security against terrorist or criminal threats. “Misconceptions about Irregular Warfare Have Wasted U.S. Influence in the Sahel”, Special Warfare, December 2025.

A Path for US CT in Sahel. Jordyn Abrams presents her ideas on how the United States should move forward to keep the jihadist movement in the Sahel region of Africa at bay. “Approaching the War on Terror in the Sahel”, Small Wars Journal, December 8, 2025.

RSF Advances in Sudan. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have seized Heglig – home to Sudan’s largest oil field and a main processing hub for South Sudan’s oil exports. This is a major military, economic, and political setback for the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Heglig (Google Maps) is located in the southern part of Sudan just above the South Sudan border. This is also a blow to South Sudan as 90% of its economy is based on shipping oil through Sudan to ports in the Red Sea. There are ongoing negotiations to keep the oil pipeline that South Sudan relies on open.

Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Secrets of the Cold War. Michelle Ainsworth reviews two books that reveal the behind the scenes happenings of the Cold War. “Decoding Espionage: Newly Declassified Documents Reveal the Secret Intelligence War”, Skeptic, December 11, 2025.

Video – ISTC Alpine Sniper Course 2025. Green Berets with U.S. Special Operations Command Europe and special operations forces from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Georgia, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom participate in the Alpine Sniper Course at the International Training Center in Hochfilzen, Austria, Sept. 20, 2025. The ISTC’s Alpine Sniper course is a two-week sniper training course designed to teach and train NATO Allies and partner nations the necessary skills to operate in an austere environment. Video by Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC), DVIDS, September 19, 2025.

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/989563/istc-alpine-sniper-course-2025

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16. On Europe, the Trump administration is out of step with Congress, Americans

Summary:

The 2025 National Security Strategy’s tone on Europe and Russia diverges sharply from Congress and U.S. public opinion. The authors say the NSS downplays Russia, criticizes Europe and NATO, and echo Moscow-friendly narratives about NATO expansion, prompting European backlash while the Kremlin welcomed the document’s framing. They contrast this with the intelligence community’s 2025 threat assessment, which labels Russia an enduring danger, and with polling from the Reagan National Defense Survey showing strong U.S. support for NATO and Ukraine. They note the bipartisan NDAA reinforces this stance by sustaining Ukraine assistance, restricting pauses in intelligence support, requiring reporting on Russian capabilities and hybrid warfare, and aiming to prevent further reductions in U.S. posture and leadership in Europe.

On Europe, the Trump administration is out of step with Congress, Americans

defenseone.com

Most recognize Russia as an antagonist that must be opposed—with force, if necessary.

By Cameron McMillan and Bradley Bowman

December 12, 2025

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/12/europe-trump-administration-out-step-congress-americans/410146/?utm

The Trump administration sent shockwaves across the Atlantic last week with its new National Security Strategy. The strategy’s dismissal of the threat from Russia and harsh criticisms of Europe and NATO led the German chancellor to describe elements of the strategy as “unacceptable,” and to call for Europe to become “much more independent of the United States in security policy.” Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the strategy was “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision—never a good sign.

Thankfully, bipartisan majorities of Americans and their representatives in Congress remain clear-eyed about the threat from Moscow and believe supporting NATO and Ukraine serves American interests.

Consider the contrasting views on Russia, NATO, and Ukraine.

To its credit, the new NSS acknowledges that Europe remains strategically “vital to the United States” and that “Transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity.” Yet unlike the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy of 2017, which said Russia was seeking to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests,” the new one fails even to identify Russia as a U.S. adversary. Worse still, the strategy says that the leading problems facing Europe are cultural issues and “civilizational erasure”; the continent’s adversarial relations with Russia, it says, are largely the fault of NATO’s expansion and Europe’s “lack of self-confidence.”

Those are talking points Putin loves. They also seem dissonant with the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, which described Russia as an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence, and global interests” that is one of several countries “challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions.”

Putin doesn’t like NATO expansion because he knows that when a country joins the alliance, it becomes more costly to bully, coerce, or invade. NATO is not an offensive threat to Russia; Moscow long left its borders with alliance members relatively free of fortifications. Putin resents democracies that arm themselves to thwart his imperial ambitions. Predators prefer vulnerable prey.

To be clear, the biggest problem facing European security is Putin’s war of naked aggression and imperial conquest.

In a famous 1983 speech on the Soviet Union to the National Association of Evangelicals, Ronald Reagan warned against labeling both sides in the Cold War “equally at fault,” cautioned against ignoring “the facts of history and the aggressive impulses” of Moscow, and called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”

Thankfully, like Reagan, most Americans see Moscow clearly. The latest 2025 Reagan National Defense Survey, released this month, found that 79 percent of Americans view Russia as an “enemy,” while 70 percent of respondents said they distrust Russia to honor any peace agreement with Ukraine. That is smart given Moscow’s history.

The realistic views of Americans regarding Russia are reflected in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act negotiated by bipartisan leaders of the Senate and House armed services committees and passed on Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation would require detailed reports on Russian military capabilities, hybrid warfare, and cooperation with other U.S. adversaries, as well as on American deterrence and military force posture in Eastern Europe.

It is worth remembering that in June, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told Congress, that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea “are pursuing unprecedented levels of cooperation” to threaten U.S. interests around the world.

The contrast between the administration and the American public and Congress is also evident when it comes to Ukraine. The administration has resisted imposing sufficient consequences on Putin for the war he started, pursued at times a “peace at any cost” approach, and placed more pressure on Kyiv than Moscow. At times, it has stood reality on its head, insisting that the invaded democracy provoked the authoritarian invader.

By contrast, the Reagan survey found that 62 percent of Americans want Ukraine to prevail over Russia, and 64 percent support sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine. Sixty-nine percent of respondents went so far as to say they support an Article 5-style collective security guarantee for Ukraine, while roughly three-quarters support a European-led security force backed by U.S. airpower.

Reflecting this American support for Ukraine, the NDAA would extend and authorize more funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. It also requires the Defense Department to notify Congress within 48 hours of any pause, restriction, or termination of intelligence support to Ukraine, which the administration temporarily cut off last spring. The NDAA also extends the prohibition on the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Ukrainian territory, which the administration has considered.

Similarly, differences can be seen when it comes to NATO. Whereas the first Trump administration’s NSS identified Russia’s desire to “weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe,” the 2025 NSS does that all on its own by describing the viability of NATO as “an open question.” To make matters worse, the administration has added damaging action to this damaging rhetoric, reducing U.S. military force posture in Eastern Europe and reportedly planning to cut security assistance funding for frontline NATO states. Unsurprisingly, this weakening of American deterrence in Europe has been paired with Russian incursions into NATO airspace.

Yet again, the NDAA demonstrates that Congress remains committed to the NATO alliance. The legislation authorizes continued U.S. security assistance funding in Eastern Europe and seeks to block the administration from further reducing the U.S. military force posture in Europe and to maintain American military leadership of NATO.

That also reflects the thinking of Americans. The Reagan survey found that 68 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of NATO, while 76 percent said they would support a U.S. military response if a NATO ally were attacked. Likewise, 59 percent opposed withdrawing from NATO, while an additional 18 percent opposed withdrawal after learning about increased defense-spending commitments from allies.

Good strategies and sound policy start with an objective assessment of interests and the leading and most likely threats to those interests. If the administration cannot even name Russia as the instigator of the largest war in Europe since World War II and the leading threat to security and stability in Europe, that does not bode well for the protection of American interests there.

The Trump administration would be wise to listen to the American public and Congress and reconsider its approach to American interests in Europe. That would include coordinating with NATO allies for more European orders of American-made weapons for Ukraine through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List program, restarting direct U.S. military aid to Kyiv, imposing stronger sanctions on the Kremlin, and halting any further cuts to U.S. military force posture and security assistance in Eastern Europe.

But these steps are only likely if the Trump administration rediscovers some of Ronald Reagan’s ability to distinguish friend from foe.

Cameron McMillan is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Military and Political Power, where Bradley Bowman is senior director. Bradley also served on the advisory board for the 2025 Reagan National Defense Survey.

defenseone.com · Cameron McMillan

17. Chasing True AI Autonomy: From Legacy Mindsets to Battlefield Dominance

Summary:

Western militaries misuse “autonomy,” fielding systems that rely on GPS, data links, and human control. The author calls for true AI autonomy: onboard perception, decision, and action in contested, degraded, and denied environments. He draws on Ukraine: electronic warfare that spoofs GPS, shortages of drone pilots, and robots for resupply and casualty evacuation. He says these dynamics will matter in an Asia-Indo-Pacific fight. Progress is slowed by scarce datasets, limited real test ranges, friction, and brittle architectures. His fix is shared data, modular upgradeable designs, open collaboration, and procurement incentives for credible autonomy.

Excerpts:

True AI autonomy is not just a tactical advantage — it’s a force multiplier across logistics, homeland security, and strategic deterrence. Moreover, while these autonomy initiatives may appear highly capital-intensive, the returns on investment would extend far beyond defense alone. Breakthroughs in autonomous systems could benefit homeland security and even the broader economy, which is rapidly automating and robotizing countless operations and processes. Indeed, investing in true AI autonomy for defense could deliver a massive boost to the economy — much like how the space industry’s investments of the 1960s to 1980s spurred widespread innovation and growth, contributing an estimated 2.2 percent increase to long-run U.S. GDP.

However, unlocking the full potential of AI autonomy requires more than simply throwing dollars at defense primes. Deliberate infrastructure investments are needed: shared datasets, national test ranges, interoperability standards, and open access for qualified civilian players. Lowering ecosystem barriers doesn’t just cut costs — it expands the base of innovators able to contribute. The recent procurement reforms and signals from the Trump administration offer reasons for optimism, but they should be followed by sustained action and, critically, by placing experienced industry and field-savvy professionals inside key decision-making chains.

Chasing True AI Autonomy: From Legacy Mindsets to Battlefield Dominance

warontherocks.com December 15, 2025

Vitaliy Goncharuk

December 15, 2025

https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/chasing-true-ai-autonomy-from-legacy-mindsets-to-battlefield-dominance/

Western militaries are still arguing over what “autonomy” means while Russia and China are already building machines that don’t need GPS, data links, or even instructions.

And unless the United States rewrites its understanding of autonomy, it will keep fielding systems that look modern on paper but collapse the moment the battlefield cuts the cord. The United States and its allies should abandon legacy concepts of “autonomy” and rapidly transition toward true AI autonomy — systems capable of independently perceiving, deciding, and acting in contested environments where GPS, external data, and human supervision cannot be relied on. Without this shift, Western militaries risk falling behind Russia and China, who are already fielding increasingly autonomous systems geared for electronic-warfare-intensive environments.

True AI autonomy needs to be defined and distinguished from today’s often-misleading marketing language that conflates remote control with intelligent independence. Recent developments in the Russo-Ukrainian War, namely in electronic warfare, manpower shortages, and the growing role of robotics in logistics and casualty evacuation, show why genuine autonomy is now strategically indispensable. Yet, there exist ecosystem barriers preventing rapid adoption, including data scarcity, insufficient testing infrastructure, limited open-source collaboration, regulatory obstacles, and brittle system architectures. There is an urgent need for architectural principles and long-term technology roadmaps to build systems that can evolve on 18–24-month cycles rather than decades.

U.S. and allied defense leaders should take certain steps toward achieving true AI autonomy, including creating shared datasets and national test ranges, demanding modular upgradeable architectures, opening pathways for civilian innovators, and establishing clear procurement signals that reward genuine autonomy rather than incremental pseudo-autonomous features.

BECOME A MEMBER

What Is True AI Autonomy, and What Is Not?

The defense technology arena today is awash in terminology — “unmanned systems,” “autonomous systems,” “robotics,” “AI-enabled,” and so on — which often muddles understanding.

Decision-makers can easily get the wrong impression. For instance, an “unmanned” aerial system might conjure images of a drone flying itself like the Terminator’s hunter-killer — when in reality it’s nothing more than a remotely piloted aircraft with a human crew guiding it through every step of the mission.

Let’s cut through the jargon. I will use a strict, no-compromise definition of true AI autonomy and avoid euphemisms like “unmanned” that mask the actual level of human control.

True AI autonomy defined here is a set of technologies inside a missile, drone, or robot (sensors and AI algorithms on board) that allow the system to carry out an entire mission on its own, without human instructions or reliance on external data sources, under the specific conditions where doing so gives a significant advantage over the enemy. In other words, an autonomous weapon or vehicle can perceive, decide, and act by itself, in real time, to accomplish a task that would normally require human guidance or GPS or remote sensors.

A true AI autonomy mission could be lethal (e.g. destroy a target), informational (e.g. conduct reconnaissance), or logistical (e.g. deliver supplies). In the next few years, we might expect that humans will still define the mission goals for these systems. For example, a commander tasks a drone to scout a certain area or a loitering munition to hunt for air defense radars in a defined zone.

But within five years, we should aspire to systems that can determine their own missions based on an understanding of the battlefield context. That might mean an unmanned submersible recognizing an enemy ship is nearby and choosing to shadow it, or a surveillance drone noticing an opportunity to jam the enemy’s communications and seizing the chance automatically.

Crucially, true autonomy cannot depend on external connectivity. If your “AI” drone needs a remote operator tele-operating it, or it requires a constant feed from GPS satellites or a distant radar to find targets, then it is not truly autonomous. It’s just a remote-controlled system with some fancy features.

By this strict definition, a lot of things marketed as “autonomous” today simply don’t qualify. And that is exactly the point – the defense community should not use such terminology.

Why AI Autonomy Is Crucial for Defense

Skeptics argue that AI-autonomous military systems won’t be effective in certain scenarios. For example, critics claim an AI-guided drone won’t work over the Pacific due to a lack of terrain features for navigation, or that autonomy fails in difficult conditions like twilight, fog, or heavy rain.

On the surface, a potential Indo-Pacific conflict — a vast maritime theater — might seem to favor traditional crewed platforms and long-range missiles over autonomous drones or robots. However, such arguments overlook several crucial factors, such as electronic warfare and GPS jamming threats, a shortage of human operators, and autonomy in logistics and casualty evacuation, etc.

Electronic Warfare and GPS Jamming Threats

Modern electronic warfare has exposed the vulnerability of weapons that rely on external signals like GPS. In Ukraine, Russian forces have used extensive jamming to disable or spoof GPS guidance, drastically reducing the effectiveness of Western precision munitions. This threat is not confined to Ukraine’s frontlines — it is proliferating worldwide. Portable jamming devices are becoming accessible to non-state actors, hobbyists, and terrorists. For instance, off-the-shelf or homemade gadgets that disrupt GPS signals can be acquired for a few dozen dollars. It is not hard to imagine a well-funded group using jammers to disable police bomb-disposal robots or crash surveillance drones. As autonomy expert Michael Horowitz observed, the war in Ukraine has “demonstrated the utility of AI-enabled weapons and their necessity” in environments where enemy electronic warfare can easily disrupt remotely piloted systems. In other words, if you can’t count on a stable data-link or GPS signal, the only option is to give the machine enough onboard intelligence to fend for itself.

Shortage of Human Operators

AI autonomy also addresses a very human constraint: the limited supply of skilled operators. Western allies have provided Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of drones – from small quadcopters to loitering munitions – but converting that influx into battlefield advantage requires large numbers of trained pilots. This has proven to be a significant bottleneck. A member of Ukraine’s National Guard drone unit (“Typhoon” unit) noted that there is a serious shortage of drone pilots, and training a new pilot from scratch to a basic level takes at least three months. Even once trained, human operators can only fly so many missions before fatigue or risk aversion becomes a factor. True autonomy offers a way to alleviate this bottleneck. Intelligent autonomous systems can allow one human to supervise multiple drones at once, or can carry out routine tasks without direct human control. Reducing the manpower burden is not just about efficiency — it could be decisive in a protracted war where both human and machine resources are strained.

Autonomy in Logistics and Casualty Evacuation

One of the most underappreciated benefits of AI autonomy lies in battlefield logistics and medical evacuation. In Ukraine, robotic ground vehicles are already starting to transform frontline resupply and casualty retrieval. Nearly 47 percent of Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle missions to date have involved delivering supplies or evacuating wounded soldiers. These robots can venture into areas where any manned vehicle (or even a helicopter) would be immediately targeted by the enemy, thus getting critical aid to the injured faster and improving the chances of survival. However, current ground vehicles in Ukraine remain mostly tele-operated and have clear vulnerabilities. Units avoid operating these robots in daylight because the machines are easily spotted and destroyed by enemy first-person-view attack drones. Worst of all, if a remote-controlled evacuation ground vehicle loses its radio link or GPS signal, it can grind to a halt, potentially leaving a wounded soldier stranded in the line of fire. This is precisely where AI-driven autonomy can be a lifesaver. Similarly, autonomous supply convoys could press forward to isolated outposts without GPS, using onboard sensors and pre-loaded maps to find their way.

All these factors suggest that pursuing AI autonomy in defense is not a luxury or a niche endeavor, but a strategic imperative. The challenges to deploying reliable autonomous systems are multifaceted — spanning technical hurdles, organizational inertia, and ethical considerations — but the potential payoff is game-changing across the spectrum of military operations. Indeed, U.S. defense planners are preparing for conflict scenarios — such as in the Indo-Pacific — where communications may be heavily contested or denied, and they view autonomous weapon systems as increasingly critical under those conditions.

Challenges in the Ecosystem

If true AI autonomy is so critical, why haven’t the United States and its allies fielded it en masse yet? It’s not for lack of technological know-how — as mentioned, the pieces of the puzzle are largely known to experts. The reasons are largely ecosystem and institutional hurdles. The good news is these hurdles can be overcome with the right policies and investments. The bad news is that, so far, progress has been slow. Some of the major challenges include the following factors.

Data Scarcity and Silos

Modern AI, especially the machine-learning-based kind, feeds on data. Yet in the defense autonomy realm, there is a lack of high-quality, shareable datasets for training and validating AI models (e.g., image datasets of military targets, terrain data for navigation, simulation data from combat scenarios). Each new company ends up reinventing the wheel — collecting its own data or paying for access — which is time-consuming and costly. A more efficient approach would be to create large open or government-provided datasets (e.g., curated sensor data for different environments) that everyone can use as a baseline. The absence of this kind of data infrastructure is holding back progress.

Testing Ranges and Competitions

For companies developing autonomous navigation, the ability to conduct frequent real-world tests is essential. Ukrainian startups can do this today, refining their systems weekly and rapidly integrating battlefield feedback. U.S. companies, by contrast, have no such opportunities. They face limited access to realistic environments, heavy administrative requirements, and strict limits on how often live trials can be conducted.

A significant increase in new testing facilities and autonomy-focused competitions would dramatically expand opportunities for experimentation and remove one of the key barriers to innovation in autonomous navigation.

Limited Open-Source Collaboration

A thriving open-source ecosystem is a key driver in fields like software and AI at large (think of Linux or TensorFlow). In defense autonomy, however, much development is siloed in classified or proprietary projects. There’s a natural need for secrecy in some areas, but many building blocks of autonomy (navigation algorithms, perception AI, etc.) wouldn’t reveal sensitive capabilities if shared. Encouraging open-source frameworks and libraries for autonomous systems (with appropriate security vetting) would prevent each player from having to start from scratch. It would also allow the broader tech community — including academics and startups — to contribute more easily to defense-relevant autonomy problems.

Regulatory and Airspace Restrictions

Until recently, stringent regulations such as Federal Aviation Administration rules made it hard to test and deploy autonomous drones domestically. The Trump administration has started to simplify some of these rules — for instance, moving toward allowing more beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone operations — but red tape remains a significant obstacle. Companies developing autonomous vehicles or drones often struggle to get permission for live trials, stunting innovation. On the military side, safety bureaucracy can similarly slow down field experimentation with autonomy. Policymakers need to establish regulatory frameworks that enable rapid testing and iteration without compromising safety.

The United States and its allies currently lack the supportive infrastructure to make developing autonomous systems as rapid and cost-effective as it could be. The Pentagon and allied defense ministries should invest in things like common datasets, open testbeds, and collaborative platforms – these are force multipliers that lower the barrier to entry for new innovators and reduce duplication of effort.

Smart Architecture Is Key

A striking feature of the drone and robotics revolution is its breakneck pace. The hardware and software state-of-the-art is leaping ahead on roughly 18–24-month cycles. A drone or AI algorithm that was cutting-edge in 2020 might be halfway to obsolete in 2023. This rapid evolution will continue for the foreseeable future and is likely to accelerate as more AI is integrated. For militaries used to procurement cycles measured in decades, this poses a serious dilemma. No military can afford to replace its entire inventory with new models every two years. So how do we stay technologically competitive without going broke or logistically insane?

The answer is smart, modular architectures. The U.S. defense industry should design autonomous systems (and really, all military systems) with upgradeability in mind from day one. This means using open standards and modular designs so sensors, computing hardware, and algorithms can be swapped out or upgraded in the field or at a maintenance depot, without junking the whole platform.

Another issue is the lack of public long-term roadmaps for autonomy. In the Cold War, the United States kept a close eye on Soviet capabilities and had clear technology roadmaps (many classified, of course) for where air combat or air defense was headed 10–15 years out. In autonomy, because it spans military and civilian tech and much is happening in the private sector, there’s less coherent forecasting. This makes it harder for engineers and architects to anticipate what threats or environments their systems will face a decade from now.

Department of Defense procurement leaders should therefore ensure equivalent flexibility in autonomous drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and missiles. If these systems are built correctly, they can continuously evolve via module swaps and software updates, rather than requiring wholesale replacement. This is not only cost-effective but also strategically vital. It means adversaries can’t win simply by deploying a new jammer or trick, because friendly systems will be updated to counter it within months, not decades.

The Next Generation of AI Autonomy

Looking more than five years ahead, what will “AI autonomy” mean in practical terms? It’s not just today’s drones made a little bit better. We are talking about qualitative changes in capability that will redefine warfare, where there probably won’t be any meaningful difference between rockets, drones, and ground vehicles. Based on current trends, here are some key aspects of next-generation autonomy:

Mission Autonomy and Self-Directed Goals

Future autonomous systems won’t just execute missions — they will help define them. Instead of waiting for detailed human orders, a drone or robot team will interpret a commander’s intent and plan the best way to achieve it. For example, an autonomous surveillance network might on its own decide which areas to scout based on shifting enemy movements, without needing explicit tasking for each drone. This requires AI that understands context and priorities, doing some of the operational thinking that only humans do today.

New Sensor Integration

Next-generation autonomous platforms will be augmented with novel sensors beyond today’s cameras and radars. Think of hyperspectral imagers to detect chemical signatures or quantum magnetometers for GPS-free navigation. Many micro-sensors might feed data into an AI “brain” on the fly. The result is multi-modal sensor fusion far superior to today’s – autonomous systems that perceive the environment in wavelengths and details humans cannot, all processed in real time to inform their actions.

High-Speed, High-G Maneuvers

Autonomous weapons will operate at extreme speeds and accelerations, pushing physics and AI control to new limits. We could see AI-guided missiles and drones maneuvering at speed regimes no human pilot could endure or react to in time. Autonomy unlocks performance previously unthinkable for crewed systems. These platforms will blur the line between munition and aircraft, exploiting speeds and agility only machines can handle.

Counter-Robot Warfare

In future high-tech conflicts, the battlefield will include weapons designed not to target people, but to eliminate machines — an inherently more complex task. This will lead to the development of specialized hunter-killer drones, missiles, and early-warning systems built to detect and track unmanned aerial and ground platforms. We’re already seeing this shift in Ukraine, where compact interceptor drones are being used to hunt down and destroy enemy drones mid-flight. Looking forward, munitions will be tailored to neutralize small, inexpensive autonomous systems with greater efficiency and lower cost. Counter-robot warfare is emerging as its own distinct activity, demanding purpose-built detection and strike tools to stay ahead of adversaries that rely on unmanned technologies.

Next-Level Sensor Fusion and Networking

Tomorrow’s autonomous forces will operate as meshed networks, sharing data and decisions in real time across air, land, sea, and space. Each unit — whether drone, unmanned ground vehicle, or underwater vehicle — will act as a node in a larger intelligent web. This network won’t just share raw sensor data but will fuse insights, enabling cooperative decision-making. For example, a ground sensor might detect movement and automatically cue a drone to investigate or strike, with no human in the loop. Swarms will coordinate target allocation among themselves, and unmanned submarines could triangulate enemy contacts collaboratively.

These networks will also support dynamic environmental understanding. Instead of relying on stale or manually updated maps, autonomous platforms will constantly scan, map, and redistribute updated battlefield layouts. If a bridge is destroyed, a new obstacle appears, or terrain shifts, the network will propagate that change in seconds — giving all units an up-to-date common operating picture. This kind of distributed autonomy is far too complex for manual coordination. Only real-time AI orchestration can make such responsiveness possible.

The coming wave of AI autonomy is about autonomous systems that are smarter, faster, more coordinated, and more self-reliant than anything fielded to date. It’s a paradigm shift from tools that assist humans, to agents that actively pursue campaign objectives alongside humans. The side that masters and deploys them first will hold a significant warfighting advantage.

Engineering the Future of Dominance

Russia and China aren’t theorizing about future autonomy — they’re actively building it. Their top engineering minds are already iterating toward battlefield-ready AI autonomy, and they’re doing so using components and architectures that are commercially available today. The technologies required to gain a decisive edge — onboard sensing, real-time mapping, swarm coordination — already exist. The only question is who will scale and deploy them first.

In this race, the strategic direction of the Department of Defense is paramount. The defense tech ecosystem orients itself around what the department demands. If procurement signals remain vague or rooted in yesterday’s paradigms — unmanned but not truly autonomous, GPS-dependent, network-reliant — vendors will continue optimizing for incremental upgrades, not breakthroughs. But if the Pentagon defines autonomy clearly and demands capabilities that survive contested, degraded, and denied environments, industry will respond in kind. They always do.

True AI autonomy is not just a tactical advantage — it’s a force multiplier across logistics, homeland security, and strategic deterrence. Moreover, while these autonomy initiatives may appear highly capital-intensive, the returns on investment would extend far beyond defense alone. Breakthroughs in autonomous systems could benefit homeland security and even the broader economy, which is rapidly automating and robotizing countless operations and processes. Indeed, investing in true AI autonomy for defense could deliver a massive boost to the economy — much like how the space industry’s investments of the 1960s to 1980s spurred widespread innovation and growth, contributing an estimated 2.2 percent increase to long-run U.S. GDP.

However, unlocking the full potential of AI autonomy requires more than simply throwing dollars at defense primes. Deliberate infrastructure investments are needed: shared datasets, national test ranges, interoperability standards, and open access for qualified civilian players. Lowering ecosystem barriers doesn’t just cut costs — it expands the base of innovators able to contribute. The recent procurement reforms and signals from the Trump administration offer reasons for optimism, but they should be followed by sustained action and, critically, by placing experienced industry and field-savvy professionals inside key decision-making chains.

BECOME A MEMBER

Vitaliy Goncharuk is an American entrepreneur of Ukrainian origin, specializing in autonomous navigation and AI. He is the CEO of A19Lab, a company developing autonomous systems for drones and robots. In 2022, his previous company, Augmented Pixels, which focused on AI autonomy, was acquired by Qualcomm. From 2019 to 2023, Vitaliy chaired Ukraine’s AI Committee.

**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: Midjourney

warontherocks.com December 15, 2025

18. America’s Drone Delusion – Why the Lessons of Ukraine Don’t Apply to a Conflict With China

Summary:

Justin Bronk argues Washington is drawing the wrong lesson from Ukraine’s drone war. He accepts that cheap quadcopters and one way attack drones have reshaped infantry combat and exposed U.S. shortfalls in counter drone defenses, but says an Asia-Indo-Pacific fight with China would be decided mainly in the air and at sea across vast distances. The core U.S. problem is range, tankers, missiles, ships, and battle management, not battlefield swarms. He warns “drone dominance” rhetoric can divert money from high end air and maritime power, where China is building mass and quality in fighters, missiles, and large ships. He calls for urgent investment in missiles, aircraft, submarines, and airborne sensing.

Excerpts:

The uncomfortable fact is that there are no easy answers to the challenge posed by China’s growing air, maritime, and missile capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. To an overwhelming degree, the U.S. military relies on its air force and navy to credibly deter Chinese military aggression against Taiwan or elsewhere. There is no way to change the entire joint force to a fundamentally different structure in time to face the threat in the coming years. Trying to replicate Ukraine’s emphasis on drones at a vast scale will not solve the problem. American military and political decision-makers should focus instead on fixing the increasingly large gaps in existing conventional air and maritime forces. To do this, Washington has few alternatives to urgent, heavy investment in far greater production capacity and rapid procurement of existing long-range air-to-air, surface-to-air, and air-to-surface missiles, as well as F-35, F-47, and B-21 combat aircraft and nuclear attack submarines.

Dealing with these critical shortfalls will require either major budget increases—unlikely in the current environment—or major cuts elsewhere in the joint force structure. But unless the United States can maintain air and maritime superiority over key contested areas, it will find that the rest of its military force structure will struggle to produce relevant combat power against China in any Indo-Pacific clash. Millions of battlefield quadcopters and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones have not enabled Russia to defeat Ukraine, or vice versa. Even if the Pentagon acquires similar capabilities, they will not change its rapidly degrading balance of power with China in the Indo-Pacific, no matter how good swarms of AI-enabled drones might look on PowerPoint slides.

America’s Drone Delusion

Foreign Affairs · More by Justin Bronk · December 15, 2025

Why the Lessons of Ukraine Don’t Apply to a Conflict With China

Justin Bronk

JUSTIN BRONK is Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute.

December 15, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-drone-delusion

A U.S. soldier preparing a drone for a flight exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, January 2025 Sgt. Chandler Coats / Reuters

JUSTIN BRONK is Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology at Royal United Services Institute.

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After nearly four years of fighting, few aspects of Russia’s war in Ukraine have gained as much attention among Western militaries as the rapid expansion of drone warfare. Since 2023, both sides have deployed millions of cheap quadcopter-type drones across the battlefield. In some parts of the front, these small drones now account for up to 70 percent of battlefield casualties. Meanwhile, Russia is using thousands of Geran-2 and Geran-3 propellor-powered one-way attack drones in almost nightly long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine has been using a wide array of its own one-way attack drones for regular strikes on Russian bases, factories, and energy infrastructure.

Watching these developments, many Western defense strategists have made urgent calls to shift military priorities. In June, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to accelerate drone production. Since then, the U.S. Department of Defense has made several policy changes to facilitate the rapid integration of low-cost drones into the U.S. arsenal, and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for the United States to establish “drone dominance.” In the private sector, meanwhile, software and AI companies that have bet heavily on developing uncrewed military technologies, such as Anduril, Palantir, and Shield AI, are racing to win lucrative new defense contracts. It is certainly the case that small uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) have fundamentally changed the way that infantry combat is fought, and that the U.S. Army and other parts of the force are behind on these capabilities—and, more concerningly, on counter-UAS technologies—compared to Russian or Chinese forces.

But the assumption that large-scale acquisition of AI-enabled drones will strengthen U.S. defenses against China is misguided. For one thing, lessons from the war in Ukraine—an attritional, inconclusive struggle between two fundamentally land-centric armed forces—often do not apply directly to other kinds of conflicts. The realities of Beijing’s military arsenal and the likely nature of any potential confrontation in the Indo-Pacific mean that such a conflict would be decided by very different factors. Despite having the largest and most advanced drone industry in the world, China has actually been prioritizing crewed military hardware. Each year, the People’s Liberation Army receives eye-watering numbers of modern and highly capable combat aircraft, large warships, and cutting-edge ground-based, maritime, and air-launched missile systems. If the United States focuses too heavily on drone development and acquisition, it risks losing its slim remaining edge over the PLA in the high-end air force and navy capabilities that would dominate any Indo-Pacific conflict.

WHY DRONES DOMINATE THE DONBAS

Over the past few years, military analysts and defense industry executives alike have focused on the lessons that Western militaries should supposedly take from Ukraine’s remarkable defense against Russia. One result of this interest has been an oversaturation of new defense products and technologies that are being marketed to Western militaries as “transformational,” based on vaguely described combat use in Ukraine. In fact, many such systems, especially Western-made drones from tech startup firms, have proved ineffective or even failed outright on the battlefield in the face of omnipresent Russian (and Ukrainian) electronic warfare and hard environmental conditions.

A larger problem, however, is that the war in Ukraine features many characteristics that would not apply to U.S. and Chinese forces in an Indo-Pacific context. Russia’s ongoing ground invasion of Ukraine has resulted in sparsely manned frontlines stretching more than 600 miles from Kharkiv Oblast in the north to Kherson in the south. Neither side has achieved air superiority, making airpower far less significant than in other modern conflicts. Since both Russian and Ukrainian armored formations and other elite units suffered catastrophic losses in the early phases of the war, neither side has been able to conduct large-scale combined arms maneuver warfare since mid-2023. As a result, both armies have had to rely heavily on small infantry units with attached tank, artillery, and drone support to make probing attacks through minefields against fixed defensive lines. Progress is grindingly slow and costly in both directions.

Under these conditions, short-range, lightweight, cheap, and mass-produced quadcopter-type drones have proved highly effective. Especially as conventional artillery and long-range rocket artillery ammunition and launchers have become increasingly scarce, both sides have used cheap drones to inflict attrition and suppress the enemy’s resupply and tactical movements within six to 12 miles of the frontlines. By 2024, frontline combat had indeed come to be dominated by ever greater numbers of drones and the constant development of new technologies such as fiber-optic drones and AI-assisted terminal imaging guidance. Counter-drone defenses such as netting, electronic jamming, and specialized shotgun and cannon ammunition types have likewise become critical and continue to evolve rapidly. However, many active counter-drone defense systems are overstretched in Ukraine due to the widely dispersed nature of forces on the frontlines and constant attrition.

Even so, the expansion of drone warfare is arguably not what has prevented Ukrainian forces from holding key positions against Russian forces in 2024 and 2025. Instead, it is the hundreds of heavy glide bombs that Russia is delivering by Su-34 fighter bombers against the frontlines each week. These 500kg–3000kg glide bombs can demolish even deep, hardened fighting positions and kill dug-in troops far more effectively than small drones, and Ukraine still lacks an effective way to intercept the launch aircraft that release the bombs from more than 40 miles behind the frontlines. Drones inflict the majority of day-to-day attrition against infantry and vehicles on the move in and around the frontlines, but concentrated glide bomb attacks pose a much greater threat to dug-in troops. Relentless Russian glide bomb strikes on key positions have been particularly difficult for Ukrainian troops fighting to hold heavily fortified strategic locations, such as the hilltop city of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk Oblast.

THE PACIFIC DIFFERENCE

In sharp contrast to the operational conditions in Ukraine, any likely conflict between U.S. forces and China’s People’s Liberation Army would unfold predominantly in the air and at sea, with combat between land forces likely limited to key islands such as Taiwan or the Senkakus (known in China as the Diaoyus). In this context, success for the United States would depend on the ability to rapidly and repeatedly bring decisive airborne and maritime firepower to bear at those key points at critical moments. This would mean projecting power across thousands of miles of ocean against numerous highly advanced Chinese missile, air, and maritime threats. Such operations would require highly trained personnel manning advanced fighter aircraft, bombers, and warships conducting mutually supporting actions in carefully synchronized joint operations. In other words, the conflict would involve very different kinds of forces and equipment from what either Ukraine or Russia is using in the current war.

In an Indo-Pacific conflict, drones would likely still play a significant role in land and amphibious operations. Taiwan, for example, could greatly benefit from being able to deploy hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of small drones to repel a PLA landing force on its beaches. It would also be essential for Taiwanese forces to have counter-drone capabilities that could sustainably intercept and jam PLA one-way attack drones and surveillance drones flying from the mainland or from ships off the beaches. Yet such uncrewed systems would be useless to the U.S. Air Force and Navy in their efforts to assist with air cover and, ultimately, maritime support, which would require projecting power from Guam or other distant U.S. bases.

Distances are punishing in the Indo-Pacific. The greatest shortcoming of the current generation of “exquisite” American fighter aircraft—the F-22, F-35, and F/A-18E/F—against growing Chinese threats is not that they are expensive and comparatively few. It is their comparatively limited range. With combat radii of between 350 and 600 hundred miles, they require aerial refueling tankers to reach contested areas from viable bases, which in conflict would have to fly dangerously close to Chinese missile and fighter threats. Small drones cannot solve this problem. Even the longest-range fiber-optic-cable-equipped first-person view drones in common use in Ukraine are limited to around 15 miles, and most small FPVs have significantly shorter ranges than that. In other words, the one weapons system that has made combat in Ukraine significantly different from that of previous state-on-state wars would be largely irrelevant in the critical early phases of a conflict between Chinese and American forces.

The United States has a shrinking and increasingly aging conventional force structure.

Even if small drones could be delivered rapidly across the required ranges, none of the varieties currently in use in Ukraine by either side could effectively defend U.S. forces against Chinese attacks. Beijing already operates thousands of high-end ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles that would be used to strike U.S. forward bases, aircraft carriers, tanker aircraft, and other key large assets. To counter such threats, the U.S. military would unavoidably have to rely on multimillion-dollar missile defense systems such as the Patriot PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, SM-6, and SM-3. Intercepting hundreds of increasingly capable Chinese combat aircraft will, likewise, require large quantities of advanced air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-260 JATM and the AIM-174B, as well as the AIM-120D AMRAAM. These will be needed in large quantities regardless of whether they are launched by crewed fighters or, potentially, in the future by AI-enabled uncrewed systems. Small drones simply cannot intercept combat aircraft operating at high altitudes and speeds.

Moreover, the many types of uncrewed systems that would potentially be far more useful in the Indo-Pacific will entail large costs of their own. For example, stealthy Collaborative Combat Aircraft—automated or AI-enabled uncrewed combat aircraft intended to accompany and support traditional fighters—are expected to cost as much as $20 million to $30 million apiece. The less ambitious designs that are intended to be little more than forward sensors and weapon-launching “trucks” will still cost many millions of dollars. There may well be significant benefits to their development and adoption, but they cannot be “swarmed” or expended en masse on a regular basis given their cost.

Operating these systems will also require large numbers of human maintainers, armorers, logisticians, force protection personnel, and other specialists to prepare them for flight, recover them after use, maintain them, and move them to launch locations in theater—personnel who will have to be reassigned from other activities. CCAs also will not fundamentally change the U.S. military’s position relative to the PLA, since China is developing similar systems.

Simpler, one-way attack, decoy, or stand-in jamming-type drones can be somewhat cheaper to produce and could still perform vital roles within a complex joint strike package. But even these drones will likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to have the required range and performance. AI-enabled swarming behaviors in flight may increase the effectiveness of such drones or missiles in various tactical situations, but the data links and processing power required will further increase unit cost, and thus quantities will remain limited. Weapons that serve much the same purposes—smart stand-off attack, decoys, and stand-in jammers—have already existed for decades in the form of cruise missiles and decoys such as the ADM-160 MALD-X. The issue is not that these existing tools are unable to perform the required roles; it is that the United States does not have enough of them.

COMBAT MASS CONUNDRUM

For the United States, it is unavoidably clear that a significant peer conflict will require very different resourcing than the overseas interventions and counterinsurgency operations that it has conducted in recent decades. In any confrontation with China, the U.S. military would need vast stockpiles of ammunition, spare parts, medical supplies, and other logistical necessities. Washington currently has significant shortfalls of key long-range strike, antiship, and interceptor missiles, and most of its allies lack them to a greater degree still. The United States also has a shrinking and increasingly aging conventional force structure thanks to more than a decade of deferred air force and navy modernization during the global war on terrorism. The sheer cost of bringing back “combat mass” with conventional high-end military systems has driven an almost frantic search by many defense analysts and policy makers for a way to get AI-enabled technology, including drones, to deliver “cheap mass.”

The PLA, by contrast, increasingly has both mass and quality. Strikingly, despite having by far the world’s largest and most advanced drone-manufacturing industrial base, China’s major military focus is on acquiring more crewed combat aircraft, large warships, and advanced missile systems. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is on course to have a fleet of around 1,000 J-20s—China’s primary fifth-generation stealth fighter—by 2030. China is also currently building many hundreds of advanced antiship and long-range surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles, and tens of advanced destroyers and cruisers per year. Especially in the air-to-air and surface-to-air missile domain, many of these Chinese systems are starting to exceed the performance of their U.S. equivalents in some key areas. Almost all of this production is going to the PLA rather than to export customers like Pakistan, and much of it would likely be brought to bear in any Chinese attempt to capture Taiwan, as well as any other conflict involving Beijing in the East or South China Seas.

By comparison, while Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighters are being built at a slightly higher rate than China’s J-20A and J-20S, only some of that production is being purchased by the U.S. military. The U.S. Air Force purchased just 48 F-35As in 2025 and plans to purchase fewer than this in each of the remaining years of the current decade. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are acquiring other variants of the fighter, but most of the balance of Lockheed Martin’s current output is destined for U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. The next generation F-47 fighter, which is expected to cost more than $300 million apiece, is not scheduled to enter U.S. Air Force service until the early 2030s as a production standard combat asset. An equivalent next-generation program for the U.S. Navy, called F/A-XX, will come even later still, assuming the program goes ahead. By that point, however, the next-generation Chinese J-36, J-XDS, and J-50 equivalents, all of which are already in flight testing, will likely also be in service. They may be marginally less capable than the F-47 on a per-aircraft basis but they will likely be produced faster and in greater numbers.

There are no easy answers to the challenge posed by China’s growing military capabilities.

Another area in which Chinese high-end capabilities are already outstripping the United States is in airborne long-range early warning and command system (AWACS) aircraft. These aircraft are huge force multipliers, as they provide air forces and joint forces with long-range, wide-area radar coverage for early warning, battlespace management, and targeting. The PLA already has roughly 60 modern AWACS, all equipped with the latest active electronically scanned array-type radars and advanced data link and satellite communications capabilities to act as network nodes. More are being produced each year.

By contrast, the U.S. Air Force has only 16 serviceable AWACS, and these are the nearly obsolete and badly worn-out E-3G Sentry. The plan to acquire the Boeing E-7A Wedgetail to replace this rapidly shrinking fleet was cancelled by Hegseth in June 2025, citing concerns over cost overruns, delays, and operational vulnerability. Congress included $400 million to continue the program in the bipartisan bill to end the U.S. government shutdown in November, but even if the program does survive it may be downsized and still faces significant delays. That means that the United States will face an airborne sensor and airborne networking and battle management node gap with China for at least a decade. Both nations are pursuing advanced space-based sensor and networking capabilities, but these are not yet ready to replace AWACS coverage.

The uncomfortable fact is that there are no easy answers to the challenge posed by China’s growing air, maritime, and missile capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. To an overwhelming degree, the U.S. military relies on its air force and navy to credibly deter Chinese military aggression against Taiwan or elsewhere. There is no way to change the entire joint force to a fundamentally different structure in time to face the threat in the coming years. Trying to replicate Ukraine’s emphasis on drones at a vast scale will not solve the problem. American military and political decision-makers should focus instead on fixing the increasingly large gaps in existing conventional air and maritime forces. To do this, Washington has few alternatives to urgent, heavy investment in far greater production capacity and rapid procurement of existing long-range air-to-air, surface-to-air, and air-to-surface missiles, as well as F-35, F-47, and B-21 combat aircraft and nuclear attack submarines.

Dealing with these critical shortfalls will require either major budget increases—unlikely in the current environment—or major cuts elsewhere in the joint force structure. But unless the United States can maintain air and maritime superiority over key contested areas, it will find that the rest of its military force structure will struggle to produce relevant combat power against China in any Indo-Pacific clash. Millions of battlefield quadcopters and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones have not enabled Russia to defeat Ukraine, or vice versa. Even if the Pentagon acquires similar capabilities, they will not change its rapidly degrading balance of power with China in the Indo-Pacific, no matter how good swarms of AI-enabled drones might look on PowerPoint slides.

Foreign Affairs · More by Justin Bronk · December 15, 2025

19. The Needless Rift Between America and Colombia

Summary:

Kevin Whitaker argues the U.S. and Colombia have slid into a self inflicted crisis that neither side can afford. He traces the rupture to early 2025 deportation brinkmanship, then escalating rhetoric, visa revocations, sanctions, and U.S. “decertification” over counternarcotics. He warns Petro’s security approach, leadership purges, halted eradication, and reduced operations have driven record coca cultivation, expanded armed group control, and weakened the intelligence and mobility backbone built under Plan Colombia. A rupture would cut extraditions and joint investigations, worsen rural insecurity and displacement, and reduce U.S. leverage against transnational crime while opening space for China’s influence. He sees a reset only after Colombia’s 2026 election.

Excerpt:

Of course, any attempt at improving relations must take into account the unique nature of the Trump administration. The next Colombian administration would be unwise to advocate for a mere return to the status quo ante, which Trump clearly views as having benefited Colombia more than the United States. Rather, it should focus on the critical interests that Trump has identified in the region—drugs, migration, Venezuela, and Chinese influence—and determine how best to collaborate with the United States in one or more of those areas. As the successes of Plan Colombia demonstrate, a fruitful partnership between Bogotá and Washington is not just possible but desirable as well.

The Needless Rift Between America and Colombia

Foreign Affairs · More by Kevin Whitaker · December 15, 2025

How to Rescue Washington’s Most Important Partnership in Latin America

Kevin Whitaker

KEVIN WHITAKER is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 2014 to 2019.

December 15, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/colombia/needless-rift-between-america-and-colombia

Colombian President Gustavo Petro speaking to reporters in Bogotá, October 2025 Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

KEVIN WHITAKER is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 2014 to 2019.

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On January 26, days after U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, Colombian President Gustavo Petro provoked his country’s most significant bilateral crisis with Washington in over 30 years by refusing to accept Colombian deportees from the United States. The Trump administration immediately retaliated with 25 percent tariffs on imports from Colombia, a ban on Colombian government officials’ entering the United States, and a slowdown in inspections of incoming Colombian cargo and visitors. Colombia capitulated within hours, and the crisis was resolved. But the confrontation set the tone for relations going forward.

In the months since, the two countries have careened from crisis to crisis. Petro’s outspoken condemnation of U.S. policies irritated Washington, as did his failure to distance himself from China and Venezuela, two U.S. adversaries. Petro repeatedly denounced U.S. military strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, going so far as to call Trump a war criminal and urging American troops to disobey his orders. In response, the U.S. State Department revoked the American visas of Petro and members of his inner circle and applied sanctions against other Colombian officials, freezing their assets in the United States and denying them access to the U.S. banking system.

Separately, Petro’s failure to control crime and narcotics production within Colombia, an enforcement effort that had been at the heart of the traditional bilateral relationship, merited and received a sharp response from Washington. In September, the United States “decertified” Colombia—that is, found that it had not met its international counternarcotic obligations—for the first time in nearly 30 years. The following month, Trump called Petro an “illegal drug dealer” and announced an end to all U.S. aid to Colombia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later hedged, suggesting that U.S. support for some security activities might continue. (In 2024, the United States provided Colombia with nearly $590 million, according to the U.S. State Department.)

After decades of successful cooperation on fighting drug trafficking and transnational crime, relations between Colombia and the United States are at a historic nadir and precipitously getting worse. “I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “They have cocaine manufacturing plants, OK, and then they sell us their cocaine. . . . Anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack.” Responding on social media, Petro invited Trump to come to Colombia to observe the destruction of cocaine laboratories, which he said happens at a rate of one every 40 minutes. He added, “Do not threaten our sovereignty, because you will awaken the jaguar.” Petro has also warned against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, calling any such operation an “aggression against Latin America.” Speaking to reporters a week later, Trump doubled down on his threat to move on Colombia, singling out Petro: “He better wise up—or he’ll be next.”

It is now possible that the U.S.-Colombian relationship could collapse entirely, bringing an end to the array of political, diplomatic, law enforcement, military, and judicial cooperation developed over the last four decades. For Colombia, a definitive break would dramatically worsen security, especially in rural areas, and enable armed groups to extend their reach in neighboring countries and potentially foment instability on Colombia’s borders. The United States, having lost a key partner in the region, would see its ability to confront transnational crime curtailed. A rupture is an outcome neither side should want—but under the current administrations in Bogotá and Washington, it may be difficult to avoid.

AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS

Cooperation on security and law enforcement between the United States and Colombia began in the 1980s at the height of what came to be known as the Escobar era, a time when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel were smuggling upward of 80 tons of cocaine into the United States each month while terrorizing the Colombian people. By the late 1990s, a Marxist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC), used profits from the cocaine trade to create a 14,000-member army that represented an existential threat to the Colombian state. In response, the Clinton administration established Plan Colombia, a multifaceted assistance program to confront drug trafficking, defeat the insurgency, and restore the effectiveness of the government.

For the next decade and a half, the United States invested substantial resources to keep Colombia, a liberal democracy, from becoming a failed state. At first, most of the support went to the security forces. The United States trained Colombian troops and has supplied nearly $6 billion in military and police support since 2000, including training and modern helicopters and other equipment. This assistance gave Colombian security forces the strength and mobility required to take on the armed rebels. Over time, this military pressure forced the FARC to relocate to ever more remote areas.

Law enforcement cooperation was another pillar of Plan Colombia. Colombian and U.S. investigators worked jointly, developing confidential sources and using legal wiretaps and other tools to bring the leaders of drug trafficking organizations to justice. The judicial efforts yielded impressive results: since 2002, more than 2,000 Colombian nationals have been extradited to the United States for prosecution, yielding a conviction rate of over 95 percent.

All told, U.S. assistance to Colombia under Plan Colombia amounted to around $14 billion, which included humanitarian and development assistance. Deploying resources that were orders of magnitude smaller than U.S. investments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States appeared to have achieved durable, positive results. In 2012, Colombia’s security and legal entities were so respected and effective that the United States created and funded a multiyear effort, the U.S.-Colombia Action Plan on Regional Security Cooperation, through which Colombian police officers and prosecutors trained Central American counterparts.

By the end of 2015, the year Plan Colombia officially expired, every security indicator had moved in the right direction. Murders, kidnappings, and extortion were down. Coca acreage, which reached a low in 2009, was on the rise but under control. The following year, the Colombian government negotiated and signed a peace accord with the FARC, ending what was then one of the world’s longest insurgencies, and the Obama administration launched Peace Colombia, a new aid program focused on helping Colombia consolidate its hard-won gains in security. In 2022, the Biden administration even designated Colombia a “major non-NATO ally,” a clear signal of the excellence of the Colombian security establishment.

SECURITY SPIRAL

Over the last three years, however, Colombia’s security forces have become significantly less effective than at any time since the beginning of Plan Colombia, as 40 percent of army generals and over half of police generals have been forced to retire or simply fired by the Petro administration. Petro seemed to be seeking to put his stamp on the security forces, ensuring that senior leaders were on board with his new approach on security. The size of the exodus of top officers meant that some of those who replaced the generals lacked the background and contacts to plan, coordinate, and execute effective counterdrug and counterterrorism operations as successfully as previous military leadership. The national Police Intelligence Directorate has been particularly affected; DIPOL was among the most capable partners in the United States’ efforts against criminal groups in the region. Many of the directorate’s former senior officers had extensive experience working with U.S. counterparts, so their departure leaves a gap in the bilateral relationship and marks a significant loss of institutional knowledge in combating crime and narcotics trafficking.

To make matters worse, on Petro’s instruction, the Colombian military has largely discontinued operations in the most conflict-ridden areas. Since taking office in 2022 to fulfill a four-year term, Petro has implemented his so-called Paz Total (Total Peace) effort, designed to reach political accords with every criminal group in the country. Rather than continue aggressive anticrime efforts while negotiating, Petro halted most military actions against criminal groups and ceased the eradication of coca crops. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, these policies drove up coca cultivation to a record 625,000 acres as of 2023, a record high at the time. Meanwhile, armed groups have greatly expanded their reach, and some have pulled back from negotiations with the government.

The end of U.S. assistance would worsen an already deteriorated security situation. U.S. intelligence support has long underpinned critical Colombian military operations. In 2024, the U.S. Embassy provided over $60 million to the army and police to support the helicopter operations that enable Bogotá to move these forces around the country; it also sent five additional helicopters to the Colombian police. Without U.S. intelligence and U.S. funding, Colombia’s army and police will lose much of their agility and their capacity to find and confront illegal armed groups, including the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Gaitanista Self-Defense Force of Colombia (also known as the Clan del Golfo), and several factions of FARC dissidents.

In response, these groups will seek to expand into new territory in pursuit of greater profits from drug production and trafficking, illegal mining, migrant smuggling, extortion, and other crime. At the height of Plan Colombia, in the early 2010s, armed groups had been confined to less than 20 percent of Colombian municipalities; according to the independent state Ombudsman’s Office, illegal armed groups now operate in three of every four Colombian municipalities and have de facto control of a third of all municipalities. Those numbers are likely to rise as criminal enterprises grow more ambitious. And wherever they are present, particularly in rural areas, legal enterprises in Colombia’s palm, rice, banana, cut-flower, and coffee industries are susceptible to extortion.

Another likely consequence is increased competition among criminal groups for territory. The productive areas and transport routes controlled by one group will always be attractive to others. Such disputes are invariably settled with violence, often resulting in significant dislocation of civilian populations. In the past, an effective government security presence could deter such violence, but Colombian forces are increasingly less able to execute this basic function. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, more than seven million Colombians are internally displaced because of previous waves of violence. That figure could soon grow.

Relations between Colombia and the United States are at a historic nadir.

Another predictable outcome is a resurgence of paramilitarism. In the 1980s and 1990s, so-called self-defense groups were organized by local populations and wealthy landowners to protect life and property from illegal armed groups when the government could not. The most prominent such group, the far-right United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), claimed to have been established to defend the public. Although that may have been the case, over time the AUC became a brutal criminal organization responsible for some of the worst massacres and forced displacements in Colombian history. Should paramilitary groups now form in response to the deteriorating security situation, there would be justifiable concerns that history may repeat itself.

Finally, the atrophying of the Colombian security forces’ capabilities, exacerbated by the end of U.S. material and intelligence assistance, will permit illegal armed groups to extend their reach not only in Colombia but beyond as well, to neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador, where FARC dissidents and the ELN have long maintained a presence. A broadened criminal presence in Venezuela and Ecuador will surely represent a threat to stability in those countries, with knock-on effects such as a surge in emigration, with many people trying to flee to the United States.

Increased immigration is not the only consequence of a U.S.-Colombian rupture that would be felt by the United States. The loss of Colombia’s security and intelligence partnership risks damaging Washington’s capabilities to combat transnational crime, such as the smuggling of narcotics and human trafficking, and to stem the growth of far-flung criminal organizations that increasingly operate in the region, such as the Italian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, and Albanian gangs. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Justice in particular count on Colombian partners’ insights, confidential informants, and wiretaps to track criminal groups and identify their current and emerging leaders. Even with help from Colombia, staying ahead of these evolving and fiercely competitive groups is difficult. Without Colombian partnership, the United States’ crime-fighting capabilities in the region will be severely compromised.

Discontinuing bilateral cooperation would also end extraditions to the United States. U.S. law enforcement relies on extraditions of Colombian criminals to dismantle criminal organizations that are active within the United States and uses the information they provide in plea agreements to advance investigations. Without these processes, U.S. investigators and prosecutors will be partially blinded. And the U.S. military will find its knowledge curtailed when it comes to modern guerrilla warfare: Colombian army and marine units have pioneered new methods for planning and executing complex operations in a highly challenging environment and have advanced the U.S. military’s understanding in these areas. An end to cooperation will mean losing access to the Colombians’ expertise.

A collapse of the bilateral relationship could have global consequences, too. Colombia was a strong post–Cold War example of successful U.S. assistance to an ally in need. A definitive break between the two countries would discredit the United States as a reliable partner—and China would seek to benefit. Although Beijing largely ignored Colombia in the past, it has of late increased its engagement with the country, opening its markets to Colombian products and executing major infrastructure projects, such as the ongoing construction of the $4 billion Bogotá metro system. As part of its soft-power strategy in the region, Beijing has over the past several years invited hundreds of Colombian government officials, business leaders, academics, journalists, and artists to visit China. If the United States further retrenches from Colombia, Beijing will seek to deepen its influence. Chinese leaders will be able to argue, credibly, that the U.S. model of friendship and assistance proved unworkable in Colombia, heretofore Washington’s closest friend and ally in South America. And other countries hedging between Washington and Beijing will take note.

PROSPECTS FOR RAPPROCHEMENT

There will be no rapprochement between the Petro and Trump administrations. Conflicting ideologies and worldviews have created an unbridgeable gulf of mistrust and animus. Worse, it seems that both administrations welcome this state of affairs. Petro revels in his role as an outspoken Trump critic and believes that he gains politically from it. Meanwhile, Trump continues to attack Petro over policy disagreements on narcotics, security, migration, and other issues.

The good news is that the 2026 Colombian presidential elections represent an opportunity for a reset. Colombian presidents serve a single four-year term, and all of the candidates to succeed Petro from the center and right have stated their intention to repair the bilateral relationship, strengthen law enforcement and security cooperation, and support a democratic transition in Venezuela. On the left, the Petro-allied senator Iván Cepeda is now leading the polls. Although Cepeda has criticized specific U.S. policies, especially the strikes on alleged drug vessels, as a legislator he has been responsive to citizens’ concerns over Colombia’s unraveling security situation. If he is elected president in May, he may well learn from his predecessor’s mistakes and reorient Colombia toward a more productive relationship with the United States.

Additionally, a large number of powerful stakeholders are invested in rapprochement. The former presidents Álvaro Uribe, Juan Manuel Santos, and Iván Duque have all spoken of the need to repair the relationship. And the U.S. legislative leaders most focused on Colombia, such as Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida and Gregory Meeks of New York in the House and Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Ruben Gallego of Arizona in the Senate, will likely welcome a more stable and cooperative relationship with a new Colombian president. Economic leaders, especially in the American Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of Entrepreneurs of Colombia, have made clear their interest in mending ties between the two countries. Local governments can help, too: the talented mayors of major Colombian cities are now reaching out to contacts in the Colombian and U.S. legislatures, executive branches, and news media to emphasize their support for a reset. Finally, American companies with investments or substantial business in Colombia, especially in the agricultural and energy sectors, have reason to support a more collaborative and predictable bilateral relationship.

Of course, any attempt at improving relations must take into account the unique nature of the Trump administration. The next Colombian administration would be unwise to advocate for a mere return to the status quo ante, which Trump clearly views as having benefited Colombia more than the United States. Rather, it should focus on the critical interests that Trump has identified in the region—drugs, migration, Venezuela, and Chinese influence—and determine how best to collaborate with the United States in one or more of those areas. As the successes of Plan Colombia demonstrate, a fruitful partnership between Bogotá and Washington is not just possible but desirable as well.

Foreign Affairs · More by Kevin Whitaker · December 15, 2025

20. What Trump’s National Security Strategy Gets Right

Summary:

Rebeccah Heinrichs argues the 2025 National Security Strategy reads harsher toward friends than foes, but is not a retreat. She faults it for downplaying the China Russia Iran north Korea bloc and for publicly scolding Europe in ways that help adversaries and complicate allied politics. She warns the document nods toward far right movements that resist rearmament and indulge Moscow, while POTUS pursues a Russia “reset” she views as misguided. Still, she sees continuity in core interests across regions, including the Western Hemisphere and the Asia-Indo-Pacific, support for the Quad and AUKUS, and a desire for a stronger Europe. Congress, she notes, is backstopping deployments and deterrence.

Excerpts:

For all its flaws, then, the new strategy does not set back U.S. efforts to deter authoritarian powers. It suggests that policymakers in the United States and allied countries should keep advancing their partnerships. They can seize on the strategy’s declarations, for instance, to promote traditional rearmament, pointing to the document’s praise for European defense commitments and its promise that the United States “stands ready” to convene and support those efforts.

The strategy also provides space for nuclear rearmament by calling for Washington to restore strategic nuclear stability with Moscow. American officials appear to be doing just that. Shortly after the release of the strategy, Hegseth said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum that nuclear deterrence is the “foundation of our national defense” and reiterated the department’s commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal. Hegseth also acknowledged that the United States faces “two other major nuclear armed powers.” This statement is important and necessary, as it demonstrates that Washington will continue its role in maintaining the global nuclear peace even as Beijing and Moscow invest heavily in nuclear weapons to undergird their imperialistic aims.

Congress, meanwhile, is pushing to maintain Washington’s forward troop deployments. Its just-released National Defense Authorization Act features provisions limiting troop reductions in Europe and South Korea. (The inclusion of the latter country is important and helps make up for the fact that North Korea receives no mention in the strategy document.) The House and Senate leadership understand how foolish it would be to withdraw American forces from allied countries while Russia refuses to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine and is conducting hybrid operations in Europe, and as other authoritarian states meddle in their U.S.-aligned neighbors. Congress should ensure that Americans understand the nature and the scope of this authoritarian menace, too. Representatives should, for instance, explain to their constituents that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are a bloc, and that this bloc is confrontational and capable of inflicting substantial damage on the United States, American interests, and Washington’s partners.

Allies should not simply hope for a more conciliatory American president and hold off on making difficult but overdue decisions. They should get busy making themselves stronger—and therefore more valuable to the United States in the fight to stave off authoritarianism. As Trump’s new strategy makes clear, the U.S. government expects its allies to take on more of the military burden in defense of our shared interests. But despite its blunt criticisms of American partners, the new strategy does not write them off. And, ultimately, it reaffirms Washington’s many global commitments and the need for the United States to play a leading role in the world.

Comment: We must oppose the CRInK even if the NSS does not specifically state that. They are attacking our sovereignty and are much more a threat than the international organizations we whine about. And the key to protecting US interests at home and abroad is our overseas forward military presence. We must sustain and improve that presence.

What Trump’s National Security Strategy Gets Right

Foreign Affairs · More by Rebeccah Heinrichs · December 15, 2025

Despite the Bombastic Rhetoric, America Isn’t Retreating

Rebeccah Heinrichs

REBECCAH HEINRICHS is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at Hudson Institute. She served as a commissioner on the most recent bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission.

December 15, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/what-trumps-national-security-strategy-gets-right

U.S. President Donald Trump at a roundtable in Washington, D.C., December 2025 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

REBECCAH HEINRICHS is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at Hudson Institute. She served as a commissioner on the most recent bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission.

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The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is, in many ways, unlike any in U.S. history. Most strategy documents of this kind articulate the threats that the United States’ adversaries pose to Washington and its allies, and they explain how officials can respond to these challenges. But this one seems kinder to the United States’ foes than to its friends. It rebukes Europe in an astonishingly blunt fashion, arguing that some of the continent’s domestic policies are damaging democracy and risking “civilizational erasure.” It says remarkably little, by contrast, about the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. As a result, the response to the NSS among Washington’s traditional foreign policy elite has been overwhelmingly angry—and panicked.

But anxious analysts should take a breath. Dig a little deeper, and the new document, almost certainly written by many hands, is more complex than it appears at first glance. In fact, it reflects more continuity with the last several strategies than its most attention-grabbing passages suggest. The strategy does not call for the United States to abandon Europe or its other traditional allies. It does not open the door to Chinese expansionism. And it does not indicate that Washington is preparing to withdraw from much of the world. Quite the contrary: it suggests that the United States still has globe-spanning shared interests with its historical allies, and that the country is planning to expand its geographical interests.

U.S. allies, in particular, should focus on the dimensions of the strategy that pertain to vital American interests. The document, for example, makes clear that Washington can and should increase military collaboration with its partners. The strategy also suggests that officials can boost and adapt Washington’s extended nuclear deterrent. And it provides reasons for strengthening allied conventional defenses and maintaining the United States’ forward military deployments. Washington’s friends and partners should use the new strategy as a reason to keep doing much of what they already are doing or plan to do—but with a renewed sense of urgency.

HALF BAD

The new strategy may not be the catastrophe that its critics suggest. But there’s no whitewashing its flaws. For starters, it pointedly neglects to name and describe the primary threat that the United States and its allies face: the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy made it clear that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests” and described “the dictatorships of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran” as “determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.” But even though this bloc of states has expanded its military capabilities and heightened its collaboration in the intervening years, the 2025 strategy does not describe them or the risk that they pose to American security. One of the countries, North Korea, isn’t even mentioned.

Instead, the document trains most of its ire on Europe. The continent’s governments, it declares, are eroding free speech, strangling economic growth, and letting in unvetted foreigners who do not assimilate. These claims are largely accurate, but putting them in the report only offers ammunition to Washington and Europe’s common adversaries—and makes it harder for Europe to address the problems. Many politicians in Europe strongly agree with Trump’s criticisms and have been fighting hard to get their countries to change course. But as one European diplomat told me, the strategy’s harsh condemnations could harm such politicians’ electoral fortunes. Instead of publicly rebuking Europe, the Trump administration would have been better off raising these concerns in private, as one does when dealing with struggling friends.

The strategy is also incoherent when it discusses Trump’s preferred political movements inside Europe. It seems set on bolstering what the document calls “those European forces that openly embrace their national character and history”—a not-so-veiled reference to far-right parties such as the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, Reform UK, and Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland. But these parties advocate for polices at odds with other Trump goals, such as European rearmament, even if they agree with some Republicans on cultural matters. If the AfD had its way, Germany would close its borders to migrants, but it would remain defenseless against rising revanchist powers. Worst of all, the AfD supports the appeasement of Russia. Many members of the AfD even align with Russia, advocating for resumption of trade, opposing efforts to end Germany’s dependency on Russian oil, and are hostile to NATO.

Unfortunately, Trump seeks a “reset” with Russia that echoes the failed one attempted by progressive President Barack Obama in 2009. He has focused on creating incentives for Russia to end its war against Ukraine rather than on increasing pressure and bolstering deterrence. The document calls for stabilizing ties with Russia and declares that Washington “finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war” in Ukraine. It then says that “a large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.” But this argument is incorrect. When Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and were in office, Europe was far more divided on how to treat Moscow than it is now, and it was far less supportive of investing in hard power to deter Russian aggression. Today, Europeans are broadly supportive of rearming and taking on a bigger share of NATO’s defense. They view Russia as a clear and acute threat and agree that they must stop Russian aggression through military strength and by ending their dependency on Russian energy.

If U.S. officials are really interested in the views of unrepresented citizens, they should instead look at their own. According to the December 2025 Reagan National Defense Survey, a majority of Americans from both political parties support Ukraine over Russia. The number who support sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine has climbed from 55 percent to 64 percent since last year. Support for NATO has also surged to 68 percent from 62 percent.

STICKING AROUND

But criticism of Europe and skepticism toward Ukraine are only two parts of the new strategy. Elsewhere, the document is much more in keeping with earlier articulations of American foreign policy. Despite loud calls from the American far right to abandon commitments abroad, for example, the new document rightly asserts that U.S. interests span the planet. According to the document, Washington’s “core” interests are in the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and “all crucial sea lanes.” The so-called pivot to Asia pushed by Obama and current Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby remains elusive. In fact, the United States is not only maintaining Asia, Europe, and the Middle East as regions of core interest but also adding the Americas, which U.S. officials spent decades neglecting. This is not the strategy of a retrenching United States.

The strategy makes it especially clear that the United States won’t cede ground to China—a fact that should come as a relief to many observers. In the run-up to the document’s publication, NBC News reported that White House aides were worried that Chinese leader Xi Jinping might persuade Trump to formally declare that Washington “opposes” Taiwanese independence. But the document maintains Washington’s long-standing policy of keeping its commitment to the island ambiguous, stating that the United States “does not support unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.” Before the document came out, analysts also worried that Washington would pull back from the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the U.S. led-security framework featuring Australia, India, and Japan. Yet the new strategy reaffirms Washington’s commitment to the group and to a free and open Indo-Pacific in general. Meanwhile, just days after the document was released, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with security officials in Australia and the United Kingdom to bolster the three countries’ commitment to the AUKUS pact. In doing so, he dealt a setback to so-called restrainers in the United States who want to abandon AUKUS, through which Washington plans to supply nuclear submarines to Australia.

And despite the critiques of some current European governments, the new strategy makes it emphatically clear that the United States wants Europe to be strong. The document lauds the commitments from NATO allies to boost defense spending, and it declares that “Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States.” It says that “transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity” and that “European sectors from manufacturing to technology to energy remain among the world’s most robust.” It notes that Europe “is home to cutting-edge scientific research and world-leading cultural institutions.” And it says that Washington cannot “afford to write Europe off,” as doing so “would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.”

Allies should not simply hope for a more conciliatory American president.

For all its flaws, then, the new strategy does not set back U.S. efforts to deter authoritarian powers. It suggests that policymakers in the United States and allied countries should keep advancing their partnerships. They can seize on the strategy’s declarations, for instance, to promote traditional rearmament, pointing to the document’s praise for European defense commitments and its promise that the United States “stands ready” to convene and support those efforts.

The strategy also provides space for nuclear rearmament by calling for Washington to restore strategic nuclear stability with Moscow. American officials appear to be doing just that. Shortly after the release of the strategy, Hegseth said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum that nuclear deterrence is the “foundation of our national defense” and reiterated the department’s commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal. Hegseth also acknowledged that the United States faces “two other major nuclear armed powers.” This statement is important and necessary, as it demonstrates that Washington will continue its role in maintaining the global nuclear peace even as Beijing and Moscow invest heavily in nuclear weapons to undergird their imperialistic aims.

Congress, meanwhile, is pushing to maintain Washington’s forward troop deployments. Its just-released National Defense Authorization Act features provisions limiting troop reductions in Europe and South Korea. (The inclusion of the latter country is important and helps make up for the fact that North Korea receives no mention in the strategy document.) The House and Senate leadership understand how foolish it would be to withdraw American forces from allied countries while Russia refuses to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine and is conducting hybrid operations in Europe, and as other authoritarian states meddle in their U.S.-aligned neighbors. Congress should ensure that Americans understand the nature and the scope of this authoritarian menace, too. Representatives should, for instance, explain to their constituents that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are a bloc, and that this bloc is confrontational and capable of inflicting substantial damage on the United States, American interests, and Washington’s partners.

Allies should not simply hope for a more conciliatory American president and hold off on making difficult but overdue decisions. They should get busy making themselves stronger—and therefore more valuable to the United States in the fight to stave off authoritarianism. As Trump’s new strategy makes clear, the U.S. government expects its allies to take on more of the military burden in defense of our shared interests. But despite its blunt criticisms of American partners, the new strategy does not write them off. And, ultimately, it reaffirms Washington’s many global commitments and the need for the United States to play a leading role in the world.

Foreign Affairs · More by Rebeccah Heinrichs · December 15, 2025

21. 5 questions only a veteran would ask the top generals at West Point and the Naval Academy

Summary:

Task & Purpose interviewed West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland and Naval Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte with five veteran-style questions ahead of the 2025 Army–Navy game. Gilland recalled his coldest experience at the National Training Center in 1991, admitted a grenade-throwing “no-go” during Expert Infantry Badge testing, and praised modern pizza and taco MREs while condemning old dehydrated patties. Borgschulte cited snow and hail in Afghanistan as his coldest moment, highlighted a Navy Guinness World Record mass push-up event that included Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, chose turkey and gravy as his favorite MRE, and said chili mac is overrated. Navy won 17–16.

Comment: What a game.

1 – What’s the coldest you’ve ever been?

2 – What’s a time where everyone did push-ups because of you?

3 – Where is your happy place when times get tough?

4 – Best and worst MRE?

5 – Dumbest no-go you’ve ever had?

5 questions only a veteran would ask the top generals at West Point and the Naval Academy

taskandpurpose.com · Matt White

Task & Purpose grilled Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland and Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte about MREs, no-gos and their mental happy places ahead of the Army-Navy game.

Matt White

Published Dec 14, 2025 8:00 AM EST

Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland is the Superintendent of West Point, and has led troops in some of the Army’s most elite combat units, including the 1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne divisions, the 75th Ranger Regiment and Delta Force.

Somehow he did all that while being bad at throwing grenades.

As a young soldier, he told Task & Purpose, he somehow screwed up the grenade-throwing station during testing for the Expert Infantry Badge.

That was one of the answers we got out of Gilland, and the opposing general on the other side of the Army-Navy game, when we asked both commanding officers our “5 Questions Only A Veteran Would Ask” before the 2025 contest in Baltimore.

Along with West Point’s Gilland, we talked to Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, the first Marine officer to hold the position of Superintendent at the Naval Academy. He is also one of the few to actually play in the Army-Navy football game, as a linebacker for the midshipmen from 1987 to 1990 before a career as a Marine attack helicopter pilot.

The Navy Midshipmen won this year’s match up, pulling out a narrow victory in the fourth quarter, to finish 17-16. But before the game we hit both officers with our “5 questions only a veteran would ask” before the 2025 game.

You can check out the video to find out the coldest the two have ever been in the field and which MRE they can’t stand (for one of them, it’s an oldie but goodie).

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5 questions only a veteran would ask Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland, the superintendent of West Point

1 – What’s the coldest you’ve ever been?

The coldest I’ve been would have been in November-December of 1991 at the National Training Center, on my Bradley as a 2nd lieutenant. And it was a combination of snow and rain that just became ice and then frigid. And you know what, you can’t get away from it inside of a Bradley.

2 – What’s a time where everyone did push-ups because of you?

Well heck, that was probably the other day at West Point. When I was a new cadet in cadet basic training, in 1986, Rocky III had just come out. You remember Ivan Drago? They made me have this really horrible Russian accent and run around to the upper class and tell them that “I will break you.” So all of my teammates are doing push-ups because new cadet Gilland is putting ‘em in that position as I’m getting developed, I will say, in other places.

3 – Where is your happy place when times get tough?

Watching college football on a Saturday night. That’s what I would say is a mental happy spot.

4 – Best and worst MRE?

I think the pizza and the taco now are pretty dang good. But I will tell you, the beef, or dehydrated beef or pork patty from the 1980s and ‘90s, horrible! Because you can’t hydrate them. And if you try to eat it dehydrated you’re going to break a tooth.

5 – Dumbest no-go you’ve ever had?

Oh shoot, hand grenades! Absolutely! I couldn’t throw a dang hand grenade to — well, I could throw it to save my life, but I couldn’t throw it to get it in that dang ring for the [Expert Infantry Badge] and that the first couple of times.

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5 questions only a veteran would ask Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, superintendent of the Naval Academy

1 – What’s the coldest you’ve ever been?

Oh downrange, very cold. Believe it not, it snows in Afghanistan. If you get into the highest mountains, it’s snowing. So hailstorms in Afghanistan, probably the coldest that I have been.

2 – What’s a time where everyone did push-ups because of you?

Well recently, we were really proud, and this is a great one. We at Navy now hold the Guinness Book of World Records for doing the most push-ups, the most people together, at the same time. And we did it when we were playing Air Force, before the Air Force game. This was all coordinated, over 3000 midshipmen and others doing pushups with us. We also had [Secretary of Defense] Hegseth with us, doing push-ups right alongside me.

3 – Where is your happy place when times get tough?

The mental happy place? Often times had those when you’re cold, hungry and wet. You just think back of your days here, when you’re in a kind of softer place, getting that good motivating wearing out by a coach or something like that. So, it gets easier because you’ve gone through the gauntlet and crucible here at Navy.

4 – Best and worst MRE?

Well just because we just about had Thanksgiving recently, turkey and gravy! That’s an old school one, we pulled that one back.

Chili mac, I’m not a chili mac fan. That’s a popular one, but I’m not a chili mac guy.

5 – Dumbest no-go you’ve ever had?

Wearing stars I have to really watch what I say. The one I’m thinking of I probably can’t say. We’ll just leave it at that!

Check out another interview we got at the Army-Navy game, 5 questions only a veteran would ask Green Beret and former NFL player Nate Boyer.

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Matt White

Senior Editor

Matt White is a senior editor at Task & Purpose. He was a pararescueman in the Air Force and the Alaska Air National Guard for eight years and has more than a decade of experience in daily and magazine journalism.

taskandpurpose.com · Matt White

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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