Quotes of the Day:

"I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair." 

– Alfred Lord Tennyson

"There can be no effective control of corporations, while their political activity remains… It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds, directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced."

– Theodore Roosevelt.

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you'll be criticized anyway."

– Eleanor Roosevelt

1. Trump Tackles Concerns Over Taiwan Strategy With Massive Weapons Deal

2. Believe it or not, the US doesn’t have an Indo-Pacific warfighting HQ | The Strategist

3. Trump Admin to Radically Reshape Military: Report

4. Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market

5. Understanding Irregular Warfare for Medical Action

6. The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights

7. Is Philippines being unfairly targeted in Australia’s Bondi Beach shooting?

8. How Australia's counter-interference experience can help the Philippines 

9. China cuts US Treasury holdings to lowest level since 2008 amid debt ceiling fears

10. China still targeting US-based researchers for ‘malign’ purposes, lawmakers warned

11. EU Commits to a $105 Billion Loan to Ukraine—but Without Russian Assets

12. U.S. Clamps Down on Investment in Chinese Tech Companies

13. If War Returns to Gaza, Israel Should Try Counterinsurgency

14. The Quantum Arms Race

15. Military Welcomes $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividends’

16. Winning the long game: Sustaining sea power as our enduring advantage (From the CNO)

17. Special operators seek larger ranges for electronic warfare and drone development and training

18. Review of Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics by Ben Gans

19. Shallow Waters, Big Lessons: What the Falklands War Reveals About Submarine Warfare

20. Latin America’s Revolution of the Right

21. The Depopulation Panic: What Demographic Decline Really Means for the World (Review Essay)

22. China warns of rising war risk after historic US arms sale to Taiwan

1. Trump Tackles Concerns Over Taiwan Strategy With Massive Weapons Deal

​Summary:

On December 18, 2025, the United States approved an $11.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan, including 82 HIMARS launchers and howitzers, to strengthen deterrence by improving Taiwan’s ability to slow and punish an invasion. The package reassures regional partners unsettled by recent signals that raised doubts about U.S. resolve, even as POTUS pursues closer engagement with Xi ahead of an April summit. Congress is pressing for clear, consistent messaging that Taiwan is not a bargaining chip and warning Beijing is exploiting perceived uncertainty while accelerating coercive moves, with a risk window in the late 2020s tied to 2027 (Davidson Window).

Comment: Does a weapons deal alone sufficiently contribute to deterrence? How do we demonstrate strategic reassurance and strategic resolve?

Trump Tackles Concerns Over Taiwan Strategy With Massive Weapons Deal

WSJ

The $11.1 billion sale comes after string of episodes that stirred disquiet about the U.S. president’s appetite to face down China

By James T. Areddy

Follow

Dec. 18, 2025 11:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-tackles-concerns-over-taiwan-strategy-with-massive-weapons-deal-211d2528

Himars launchers were used in a drill earlier this year in southern Taiwan. Ritchie B. Tongo/EPA/Shutterstock

• The U.S. approved an $11.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan, including Himars and howitzer weapons, to bolster the island’s defense capabilities.
• The sale addresses concerns about U.S. support for Taiwan amid increasing Chinese military provocations and President Trump’s engagement with China.
• The House Committee on China warned Beijing is exploiting doubts about U.S. support, urging clear opposition to Chinese Communist Party hostility.

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

• The U.S. approved an $11.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan, including Himars and howitzer weapons, to bolster the island’s defense capabilities.

President Trump this week answered growing concerns in Asia that he could give China a pass on its increasing regional militarism with one of the largest-ever U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

The $11.1 billion package, featuring Himars and howitzer weapons designed to bolster Taiwan’s ability to slow any Chinese attack on the island, drew applause in Washington, where support for Taiwan runs strong, and tempered some worries about the president’s stance.

The chairman of the House Committee on China, Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), called the weapons deal “an outstanding move.”

But the sale was announced just before the bipartisan China committee issued a report Thursday warning that Beijing is exploiting doubts about U.S. support for Taiwan by increasing military provocations toward the island. The report called for “unambiguous, clear, and consistently communicated” American opposition to Chinese Communist Party hostility toward the island.

The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, introduced the report by saying “Taiwan is not—and will not be—a bargaining chip,” a reference to fears the president could deal away U.S. support for the democratic island for the right price.

A string of episodes in recent weeks has stirred disquiet about Trump’s appetite to face down Beijing in Asia, and those worries still linger after the Taiwan weapons announcement.

The president has appeared determined to deepen ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the two prepare for a busy year of engagement ahead. The U.S. has sold arms to Taiwan for years, and while the long-awaited deal angered Beijing and is likely to spark retaliation, it appears unlikely to derail their April summit.

President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping ahead of a meeting in Busan, South Korea, in October. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump has played down the likelihood China would try to take Taiwan by force, despite unprecedented muscle flexing at the island by the Chinese military. Trump has also appeared to side with Beijing in a spat with Japan over Taiwan, blocked the island’s president from making a stopover in the U.S. and framed Taiwan primarily in economic terms, including as a technology competitor rather than a key partner in Asia.

Meanwhile, Trump’s repeated declarations of friendship with Xi have unnerved America’s security partners in Asia, who see parallels with his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and worry Taiwan could become another Ukraine.

“​No. 1 seems to be he wants to have a good relationship with Xi,” said Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute.

But Morris said no arms sale would likely have sent a worse message. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun predicted arming the island would backfire on the U.S. and warned against “squandering its people’s hard-earned money to buy weapons and turning Taiwan into a powder keg.”

Dispatches from Capitol Hill this week illustrate the attention Congress is paying to Trump’s security strategy in Asia.

The House Committee on China’s report doesn’t mention Trump by name, but suggested legislators on both sides of the aisle want throatier support for America’s partners in Asia.

The report describes an imminent danger zone for Taiwan in the late 2020s, based on Xi’s stated determination for the Chinese military to have the capabilities to forcibly take the island by 2027.

Newsletter Sign-up

What’s News

Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox daily. Enjoy a free article in every edition.

Subscribe

“To enhance deterrence and safeguard the status quo, America must not only strengthen its military capabilities—it must sharpen its political messaging to send a clear signal to both friend and foe alike about its resolve and commitment to Taiwan’s security,” the committee said.

Also before the arms news a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sens. Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.) and Chris Coons (D., Del.), introduced a resolution on Wednesday to reaffirm unwavering Trump administration support for the U.S.-Japan alliance.

The Senate effort condemns Beijing’s aggressive statements against Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, after she received death threats from Chinese officials for suggesting Tokyo could mount a military response to any attack on Taiwan. The resolution reads as a counterpoint to Trump, who asked Takaichi to avoid provoking Beijing, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Until now the administration had been hypocritical in urging Taiwan to spend more on its own defense while withholding authorization of weapons sales, said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who is senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“It tempers my criticism,” Montgomery said of the arms deal. “It’s what a partner does for a good ally.”

The commitment also illustrates how ​U.S. policy toward Taiwan tends to vary little between administrations, owing to strong support in Congress and the American military establishment. Trump’s cabinet includes some of Taiwan’s strongest supporters, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

A Taiwanese assault boat was on guard in July during a military exercise in the southern port city of Kaohsiung. Ann Wang/Reuters

Rush Doshi, a China specialist who served on the Biden National Security Council, ​​cheered the arms deal as a sign of continuity. “Perhaps the Trump team approach to Taiwan will have more in common with the Biden approach than people realize,” Doshi said in a post to X.

The administration’s National Security Strategy, unveiled earlier this month, underscored the importance of military superiority to counterbalance Chinese armed forces in Asia. “Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” the strategy says, adding that demonstrating military superiority is also a job for regional allies.

In light of the administration’s security strategy, the sale shows “its actions are aligning with its words,” said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The decades-old U.S. position on China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan has been to maintain what officials call strategic ambiguity. The idea is to leave China guessing whether the U.S. would directly intervene in a clash, and at the same time restrain Taiwan from declaring outright independence and triggering a Chinese attack.

Actions on all sides have tested that policy. Menacing Chinese military maneuvers around Taiwan have become a daily occurrence, raising accusations Beijing is changing the status quo, where peace continues even as the island manages its own affairs in the face of China’s sovereignty assertions.

Where President Joe Biden repeatedly suggested the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked, Trump has appeared play down the China threats; the Chinese leader wouldn’t invade Taiwan while he’s president, Trump said.

The White House’s new National Security Strategy affirms the long-held American policy against unilateral changes in the status quo—though with moderately softer language of “does not support” changes, compared with Biden’s “opposes.”

The White House strategy also frames Taiwan’s security primarily as an economic consideration—a maker of sophisticated semiconductors and a crisscross of shipping lanes—while ignoring factors that have traditionally made the island a U.S. priority, like its democratic system.

Polls in Taiwan suggest that Trump’s transactional, isolationist policymaking coupled with claims of friendship with Xi have caused fears that he could make a deal with Beijing over the island, such as over his ambitions to balance U.S.-China trade.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry welcomed the arms sale by expressing “sincere gratitude.” Its president, Lai Ching-te, recently called the U.S. relationship “rock solid.”

The U.S. approvals include 82 Himars truck-based missile launchers, a roughly $4 billion purchase that would contribute to Taiwan’s ability to inflict pain on invading forces—part of the island’s goal of making China’s much more powerful military think twice before attacking.

Su Tzu-yun, a research fellow at the military-backed Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said the Himars would support deterrence, with the capability of reaching military targets on China’s east coast.

Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the December 19, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Lets Taiwan Buy $11.1 Billion In Arms'.

WSJ

2. Believe it or not, the US doesn’t have an Indo-Pacific warfighting HQ | The Strategist

Summary:

The article argues the United States lacks a true Asia-Indo-Pacific theatre warfighting headquarters and remains organized for peacetime shaping, not major combat. It urges Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to direct the Chairman, Gen. Dan Caine, to establish a dedicated theatre-level Joint Task Force inside USINDOPACOM, properly staffed and empowered for operational planning, logistics, and C2 for high-end conflict. The author cites China’s rapid modernization and Taiwan invasion timelines from war games as drivers for rapid reprioritization of forces and tighter multinational integration. A visible wartime HQ, like CENTCOM’s origins, would strengthen deterrence and reassure allies.

Comment:  EUCOM/Europe/NATO is different than the Asia-Indo-Pacific and INDOPACOM. My view is different from COL Lyons. We need a Northeast Asia Commend in Seoul (with a Tokyo Fusion Node).

Northeast Asia Command needed to support U.S. National Security Strategy

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/12/17/perspective-northest-asia-0combatant-command/5441765973062/

When Korea's next war will not stay in Korea

Here's why the Republic of Korea--U.S. alliance needs a Northeast Asia combatant command.

https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/11/21/perspective-new-military-command-proposed/7291763740526/

Strategic Concept: Establishing a Combined Northeast Asia Combatant Command (NEACOM) in Seoul

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/strategic-concept-establishing-a-combined-northeast-asia-combatant-command-neacom-in-seoul/

Believe it or not, the US doesn’t have an Indo-Pacific warfighting HQ | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Marco J Lyons · December 18, 2025

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/believe-it-or-not-the-us-doesnt-have-an-indo-pacific-warfighting-hq/

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth should decisively direct the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, to establish a dedicated theatre-level headquarters within the US Indo-Pacific Command. In doing so, Hegseth would promote the objectives of rapid reprioritisation of military resources, improved planning and revitalised alliances.

The strategic environment of the Indo-Pacific has undergone dramatic transformation, with China rapidly modernising its military and adopting an increasingly aggressive posture towards Taiwan and neighbouring US allies. Since January, the second administration of President Donald Trump has issued interim national security guidance prioritising the Indo-Pacific and the challenge posed by China. Under Hegseth, emphasis has shifted decisively towards the warfighter, enhancing readiness for high-end conflict and cultivating a warfighting ethos.

But even as prospects of an invasion across the Taiwan Strait become increasingly plausible, the United States lacks an Indo-Pacific command structure designed for a major theatre war. The secretary of defense should immediately rectify this with a dedicated theatre-level Joint Task Force (JTF) headquarters within the Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) to ensure robust operational planning and effective multinational coordination. This would shift US posture from peacetime engagement to wartime readiness.

The new JTF must be resourced with sufficient staff from the various armed services and be empowered to drive the operational, logistical and command-and-control preparations required for high-end conflict.

A thoughtful observer of US national defence might assume such a thing exists, but it does not.

In fact, US command organisation in the Indo-Pacific is set up for a peacetime posture. Establishment of the JTF is what’s needed to instead meet the demands of modern war.

The threat posed by China is no longer speculative; it’s immediate. The Chinese military has significantly advanced its capabilities for large-scale amphibious operations, airborne assaults, and urban combat—forms of action that would all plausibly be used in an invasion of Taiwan. While some analysts maintain that Taiwan’s rugged terrain and logistical challenges would deter China, others insist that US security assurances to Taiwan may prove hollow without robust arrangements for military interoperability.

Recent US war games underscore the urgency of the situation, as they suggest the Chinese armed forces could achieve their objectives in Taiwan within days, potentially outpacing any feasible US military response from distant bases, such as Hawaii. This daunting prospect highlights the necessity for rapid reprioritisation of resources—switching them to the Western Pacific from elsewhere—improved operational planning and revitalised multinational partnerships. These are objectives that Mike Gallagher, former member of the US House of Representatives and member of the House Armed Services Committee, called for in 2022.

Yet no US theatre-level wartime headquarters dedicated to the Indo-Pacific has been established. USINDOPACOM’s existing component commands—such as the 5th, 7th and 11th Air Forces, the Third and Seventh Fleets and, in South Korea, the Eighth Army—are primarily structured for bilateral security cooperation, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Their focus reflects a legacy mindset attuned to a more benign security environment. While combatant command doctrine assigns responsibility for campaign planning and wartime integration at the highest levels, the demands of daily shaping activities, such as multinational exercises and security cooperation initiatives, tend to eclipse comprehensive war planning. Geographic unified combatant commands (such as USINDOPACOM, combining elements of all the services) and component commands (the service-specific elements within the geographic combatant commands, such as Pacific Air Forces) are similarly encumbered by non-wartime missions. This leaves actual warfighting preparation underdeveloped.

This inertia is evident in how senior commanders frame their missions. For example, official Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) strategy and senior commander statements appear to integrate partnership-building with warfighting goals. But the PACAF campaign approach has also been described in terms of partnership-building, interoperability and conceptual development for great power competition, while excluding explicit wartime considerations. PACAF is characterised as an ‘operating force’ focused on agile basing and tactical support rather than as a warfighting headquarters. Such a stance may have sufficed in a less contested era, but it is no longer adequate given the immediacy of the Chinese threat.

Critics may argue that establishing a dedicated wartime headquarters would destabilise the region or provoke escalation. However, historical precedents and strategic theory suggest otherwise. The creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in 1980—later transformed into US Central Command—demonstrated the value of credible, forward-leaning military posture for deterrence and crisis response. Effective deterrence requires not simply the existence of military power but its visible organisation and readiness for combat.

A new theatre-level JTF would enable USINDOPACOM to conduct focused planning and preparation for a range of conflict scenarios, not solely a Taiwan contingency. This headquarters could integrate major service components, such as a reestablished 10th Army, the Seventh Fleet, and the 11th Air Force, to achieve unity of command and effort. Past recommendations, such as operationalising the Third Fleet as a South Asian and Indian Ocean command, further support the feasibility and necessity of such an arrangement.

The Indo-Pacific is now the primary theatre of strategic competition and potential conflict for the United States. China’s accelerating military modernisation and the increasing risk to Taiwan demand a decisive shift in American defence organisation and planning. Establishing a dedicated, theatre-level wartime headquarters is not a provocation but a prudent adaptation to new realities—one that would promote deterrence, prepare for major combat operations and reassure allies. The time to organise for Pacific theatre warfighting is now.

Marco J Lyons is a US Army colonel and deputy chief of staff of V Corps (Forward) in Poland. His former three-year duty position was as assistant chief of staff (G-5) for plans with US Army Pacific, where he worked closely with USINDOPACOM, PACFLEET, MARFORPAC and PACAF. The views expressed here are personal.

aspistrategist.org.au · Marco J Lyons · December 18, 2025

3. Trump Admin to Radically Reshape Military: Report

Summary:

Newsweek reports that Pentagon leaders, citing a Washington Post account, are drafting a major command overhaul to present to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth via Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine. The plan would cut combatant commands from 11 to 8, consolidate CENTCOM, EUCOM, and AFRICOM under a U.S. International Command, and merge NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM into a U.S. Americas Command. It would also reduce four star billets reporting to Hegseth to speed decisions and address C2 “decay.” Congress is demanding cost, risk, and alliance impacts and could delay funding for 60 days. Any changes require Hegseth and POTUS approval.

Comment: We are all waiting to see the new Unified Command Plan. I do hope they consider a Northeast Asia Command.

Trump admin to radically reshape military: Report

Newsweek

Dec 16, 2025 at 08:08 AM EST

updated

Dec 16, 2025 at 03:45 PM EST

Brendan Cole and John Feng

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-to-radically-reshape-military-report-11218636

A proposed overhaul of the U.S. military would cut its number of regional headquarters and cull generals and admirals, according to a U.S. media report.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Washington Post reported that senior Pentagon officials were looking to downsize some of its military headquarters and shift the balance of power among its top brass.

The Pentagon told Newsweek in a statement Tuesday it would not comment on "rumored internal discussions."

...

Why It Matters

If implemented, the proposal would mean the biggest shake-up of the U.S. military for decades.

The proposals also appear to be in keeping with the Trump administration’s strategy to shift resources from the Middle East and Europe, and to place more of a focus on the Western Hemisphere, as outlined by the National Security Strategy released earlier this month.

What To Know

Senior Pentagon officials are preparing to reshape how the U.S. military is organized and commanded, in a proposal that will be presented to Hegseth by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, The Post reported.

As Newsweek’s map shows, the plan would reduce the number of combatant commands—the military’s top operational headquarters—from eleven to eight. U.S. Central Command, European Command and Africa Command would operate under U.S. International Command.

Meanwhile, Northern Command and Southern Command, which oversee Latin America and the Caribbean, would be merged under a new headquarters called U.S. Americas Command, or Americom.

The idea of a separate Arctic Command reporting to Americom had been mooted, but that option appears to have been dropped, it was reported.

The remaining combatant commands would include Indo-Pacific Command, Cyber Command, Space Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command and Special Operations Command, according to the paper.

The plans would also decrease the number of four-star generals and admirals who report directly to Hegseth.

They are also intended to speed decision-making and adaptation among military commanders, according to a defense official who told the paper there was "decay" in how the U.S. military commands and controls troops.

The Pentagon told Newsweek it would not comment "on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate," adding that everyone in the defense department was "working to achieve the same goal under this administration.”

However, the plans align with the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy released this month, which was seen as reinforcing a pivot away from Europe, the Middle East and China, towards Latin America and the Caribbean.

Retired Vice Admiral Robert Murrett told Newsweek that the security strategy’s inherent criticism of the U.S.'s allies in Europe, contrasted with a strong embrace of Middle Eastern nations and outreach to Russia, could cause reverberations for years to come.

Murrett, professor of practice at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said that the lack of concern and "soft language regarding China" and the impact on regional allies in the Pacific will likely diminish the U.S.'s ability to influence events in the Far East and balance its global strategic risk.

What People Are Saying

The Washington Post: "Senior Pentagon officials are preparing a plan to downgrade several of the U.S. military’s major headquarters and shift the balance of power among its top generals."

The Pentagon told Newsweek in a statement: "As a matter of Department of War policy, we will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and rumored internal discussions, as well as specifics of architectural discussion or pre-decisional matters. Beyond this, any insinuation there is a divide within the Department is completely false—everyone in the Department is working to achieve the same goal under this administration.”

Chuck Hagel, former U.S. defense secretary, cast doubt on the wisdom of the proposals, telling The Post: "You want commands that have the capability of heading off problems before they become big problems, and I think you lose some of that when you unify or consolidate too many."

Retired Vice Admiral Robert Murrett said of the U.S. National Security Strategy: "There will be reverberations for years to come and possible near term security challenges, since the NSS represents such a strong departure from decades of U.S. and allied strategy and foreign policy."

What Happens Next

The Pentagon has shared few details with U.S. Congress so far and lawmakers have responded by requiring the Defense Department to submit a detailed assessment of its costs, risks and alliance implications, The Post reported.

It added that under the annual defense policy bill, funding to implement the changes would be withheld until at least 60 days after Congress receives a blueprint of the plans.

Any changes would need the approval of Hegseth and President Donald Trump, and would be part of the Pentagon’s Unified Command Plan.

Update 12/16/25, 3:42 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with a Pentagon statement.

Newsweek

4. Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market

​Comment: Links to previous articles on this important topic that I do not feel we sufficiently grasp.

Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market

by SWJ Staff

|

12.18.2025 at 03:41pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/18/todays-opium-wars-illicit-drugs-irregular-warfare-china/

The Irregular Warfare Center’s recent article, “Today’s Opium Wars: The Unrestricted Warfare Playbook in the U.S. Illicit Drug Market,” argues that Beijing treats illicit drug markets as an irregular warfare vector—an approach intended to “win without fighting” by eroding U.S. social resilience and forcing sustained diversion of attention and resources.

Rather than framing fentanyl and similar illicit substances as a purely law-enforcement challenge, the piece pushes readers to see a broader contest that blends public health, influence, and strategic competition. On that logic, the authors contend that the U.S. response can’t remain confined to a traditional interagency framework because China’s tactics extend to real estate, banking, local regulation, and broader civil society.

“Today’s Opium War” concludes with a call for a “whole-of-society” approach to increase national resilience: training frontline local actors to recognize IW patterns, improving reporting and data capture, and pairing those efforts with public–private collaboration on counter–threat finance to trace revenue and tighten the link between diagnosis and action. What would a credible, scalable campaign plan look like? How can we target PRC-led networks and financing effectively without sliding into performative crackdowns or self-defeating damage to rule-of-law legitimacy at home?

About The Author

• 
  
• SWJ Staff
• SWJ Staff searches the internet daily for articles and posts that we think are of great interests to our readers.

5. Understanding Irregular Warfare for Medical Action

My latest podcast with SGM (RET) Mike Hetzler. I served with Mike's dad, the late great SGM Walt Hetzler in 2-1 SFG. We discuss Irregular Warfare and SOF/SF medical operations. I call out my first two medics, the late Mike Bustard and John Lindsey. This is a YouTube video and I provide a brief lecture of my thoughts on IW.

 https://youtu.be/_qcvE3zeSAk?t=5

Dec 15, 2025

Understanding IW For Medical Action

In this conversation, strategist and security studies expert David Maxwell discusses the complexities of irregular warfare, emphasizing the importance of nonpartisanship, and the contributions of medical professionals in influence operations. He highlights the need for understanding political warfare and unconventional warfare, the significance of building long-term relationships, and the challenges faced in the current geopolitical landscape.

6. The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights

​Summary:

ASPI’s 1 December 2025 report argues the Chinese Communist Party is using AI to harden state control at home and project it abroad. It documents large language models and other systems that automate censorship, including politically sensitive images, and enhance surveillance, predictive policing, and biometric monitoring. The report traces AI’s integration into the criminal justice pipeline, from policing to smart courts and prisons, citing iFlyTek as a key provider. It finds regulations are creating a domestic market that makes censorship cheaper and easier for firms. It also warns Chinese platforms overseas can erode vulnerable groups’ economic rights in real time.

Comment: The 88 page report can be downloaded here: https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/27122307/The-partys-AI-How-Chinas-new-AI-systems-are-reshaping-human-rights.pdf

I wonder what George Orwell would say about how AI could put 1984 on steroids. 

The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights

1 December 2025

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/the-partys-ai-how-chinas-new-ai-systems-are-reshaping-human-rights/

This report shows how the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming China’s state control system into a precision instrument for managing its population and targeting groups at home and abroad.

China’s extensive AI‑powered visual surveillance systems are already well documented. This report reveals new ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems to automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre‑emptively suppress dissent.

Drawing on LLM testing, detailed case studies and analyses of procurement documents, corporate filings and job postings, this data‑rich report traces how AI censorship mechanisms distort information and how predictive policing and biometric surveillance reinforce algorithmic repression. ASPI’s research shows that the CCP has created market‑based mechanisms to encourage private innovation in AI‑enabled censorship technology, making it easier and cheaper for companies to comply with censorship mandates.

This report also reveals how AI‑powered technology is widening the power differential between China’s state‑supported companies operating abroad and foreign populations—further enabling some Chinese companies to systematically violate the economic rights of vulnerable groups outside China, despite Beijing’s claims that China respects the development rights and sovereignty of other countries.

The risks to other countries are clear. China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI‑powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI‑driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence‑based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI‑enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders.

The report focuses on four areas where the CCP has expanded its use of advanced AI systems most rapidly between 2023 and 2025: multimodal censorship of politically sensitive images; AI’s integration into the criminal‑justice pipeline; the industrialisation of online information control; and the use of AI‑enabled platforms by Chinese companies operating abroad. Examined together, those cases show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas.

Because China’s AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly and unevenly across sectors, we have focused on domains where significant changes took place between 2023 and 2025, where new evidence became available, or where human‑rights risks accelerated. Those areas do not represent the full range of AI applications in China but are the most revealing of how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political‑control apparatus.

Key findings

Chinese LLMs censor politically sensitive images, not just text.

• While prior research has extensively mapped textual censorship, this report identifies a critical gap: the censorship of politically sensitive images by Chinese LLMs remains largely unexamined.
• To address this, ASPI developed a testing methodology, using a dataset of 200 images likely to trigger censorship, to interrogate how LLMs censor sensitive imagery. The results revealed that visual censorship mechanisms are embedded across multiple layers within the LLM ecosystem.

The Chinese Government is deploying AI throughout the criminal‑justice pipeline—from AI‑enabled policing and mass surveillance, to smart courts, to smart prisons.

• This emerging AI pipeline reduces transparency and accountability, enhances the efficiency of police, prosecutors and prisons, and further enables state repression.
• Beijing is pushing courts to adopt AI not just in drafting basic paperwork, but even in recommending judgements and sentences, which could deepen structural discrimination and weaken defence counsels’ ability to appeal.
• The Chinese surveillance technology company iFlyTek stands out as a major provider of LLM‑based systems used in this pipeline.

China is using minority‑language LLMs to deepen surveillance and control of ethnic minorities, both in China and abroad.

• The Chinese Government is developing, and in some cases already testing, AI‑enabled public‑sentiment analysis in ethnic minority languages—especially Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian and Korean—for the explicitly stated purpose of enhancing the state’s capacity to monitor and control communications in those languages across text, video and audio.
• DeepSeek and most other commercial LLM models have insufficient capacity to do this effectively, as there’s little market incentive to create sophisticated, expensive models for such small language groups. The Chinese state is stepping in to provide resources and backing for the development of minority‑language models for that explicit purpose.
• China is also seeking to deploy this technology to target those groups in foreign countries along the Belt and Road.

AI now performs much of the work of online censorship in China.

• AI‑powered censorship systems scan vast volumes of digital content, flag potential violations, and delete banned material within seconds.
• Yet the system still depends on human content reviewers to supply the cultural and political judgement that algorithms lack, according to ASPI’s review of more than 100 job postings for online‑content censors in China. Future technological advances are likely to minimise that remaining dependence on human reviewers.

China’s censorship regulations have created a robust domestic market for AI‑enabled censorship tools.

• China’s biggest tech companies, including Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance, have developed advanced AI censorship platforms that they’re selling to smaller companies and organisations around China.
• In this way, China’s laws mandating internal censorship have created market incentives for China’s top tech companies to make censorship cheaper, faster, easier and more efficient—and embedding compliance into China’s digital economy.

The use of AI amplifies China’s state‑supported erosion of the economic rights of some vulnerable groups abroad, to the financial benefit of Chinese private and state‑owned companies.

• ASPI research shows that Chinese fishing fleets have begun adopting AI‑powered intelligent fishing platforms, developed by Chinese companies and research institutes, that further tip the technological scales towards Chinese vessels and away from local fishers and artisanal fishing communities.
• ASPI has identified several individual Chinese fishing vessels using those platforms that operate in exclusive economic zones where Chinese fishing is widely implicated in illegal incidents, including Mauritania and Vanuatu, and ASPI found one vessel that has itself been specifically implicated in an incident.

7. Is Philippines being unfairly targeted in Australia’s Bondi Beach shooting?

​Summary:

SCMP reports Philippine officials and analysts pushing back on claims the Philippines is tied to the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney that killed 15. Australian police are examining a November trip by suspects Sajid and Naveed Akram to Manila and Davao City, while Australia says the pair showed Islamic State influence. Manila denies any training link and warns against portraying the Philippines as an extremist hub. Experts argue Mindanao militancy has waned since Marawi, with ISIS-linked groups now smaller, leaderless, and constrained by counterinsurgency and post-pandemic conditions. They urge evidence-based cooperation, noting terrorism risks persist but blame could be overreach.

Comment: Jumping to conclusions? Perhaps. I wonder what they would be doing in Davao City which of course is the city controlled by the Duterte dynasty. But again, no jumping to conclusions.

Is Philippines being unfairly targeted in Australia’s Bondi Beach shooting?

Australian police are looking into a trip the two suspects made to Davao City, but Philippine officials say it is not connected to the shooting

Sam Beltran

Published: 2:48pm, 19 Dec 2025Updated: 5:24pm, 19 Dec 2025

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3337025/philippines-being-unfairly-targeted-australias-bondi-beach-shooting?utm

Extremist movements in the Philippines have come under scrutiny since it was revealed that two suspected terrorists had visited the country weeks before they killed 15 people in Australia, but observers argue that such threats have waned and officials should avoid “overreach” in linking the case.

Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed Akram, 24, had allegedly opened fire on people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday. The older man was killed while Naveed was in critical condition after police intervened.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday the duo appeared to have been influenced by Islamic State ideology.

Also on Tuesday, Australian police said they were looking into a trip the two had made to the Philippines last month.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits the scene of Sunday’s attack on Monday. Photo: Reuters

Philippine immigration officials have confirmed the father and son landed in Manila and had then flown to Davao City in the south on November 1, before leaving nearly a month later on November 28.

Davao City is a key hub on the island of Mindanao, serving as a transit point for other provinces in southern Philippines that have been embroiled in past insurgent conflict.

Local authorities, however, said on Wednesday there was “no confirmation” that the men had travelled outside Davao City.

Philippine news outlet MindaNews reported that the duo had checked in at a budget hotel in the city, where they barely left their rooms and frequently ordered fast food takeaway.

Manila officials have been quick to reject any links to the pair.

Presidential spokeswoman Claire Castro denied they had received military training in the country – as reported by Australian news media – and warned against “sweeping” misrepresentation of the Philippines as a hotbed of violent extremism.

‘I couldn’t imagine losing my daughter here’: Australia mourns Bondi shooting victims

The southern island of Mindanao has been saddled with conflict and militant activity for decades, with separatist groups such as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) waging war against military forces in secession bids.

Groups such as the Abu Sayyaf emerged in the 1990s as an extremist faction of the nationalist movement, pledging allegiance first to al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah, and later to Isis.

In 2017, Isis-aligned groups joined forces to occupy Marawi City in Lanao del Norte province. The five-month conflict resulted in over 1,200 deaths and forced more than 350,000 to flee, before government forces regained control of the city.

‘Directionless and leaderless’

Since 2020, though, violent extremist threats in the region have largely declined, according to analysts.

On Tuesday, the Philippines Armed Forces said the number of individuals affiliated with localised extremist groups had fallen from over 1,200 in 2016 to 50.

Kenneth Yeo, an associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said Isis-linked groups experienced “collective demoralisation” following the pandemic.

“Today, Islamic State elements in the Philippines can be described as directionless and leaderless,” Yeo said.

Police and military coordinate at the site of a militant attack in the town of Jolo in southern Philippines, on August 24, 2020. Photo: AP

An executive order implemented during Rodrigo Duterte’s administration following the Marawi siege in 2017 led to a mass exodus, he said.

The Philippine military’s counter-insurgency efforts of hunting down the leaders of extremist groups had largely demoralised its ranks, leading to increasing numbers of surrenders, according to Yeo. Over 1,600 combatants surrendered to the Philippine government in 2023.

Ann Bajo, a teaching fellow at the Royal Air Force College, said Australian authorities should “exercise caution about [accusing] the Philippines of harbouring terrorists, especially without clear evidence”.

Today’s militant landscape is not the same post-pandemic

Ann Bajo, a Royal Air Force College teaching fellow

“Today’s militant landscape is not the same post-pandemic,” she said, pointing out that extremist groups had suffered setbacks when the military took back Marawi City and Covid lockdowns restricted their movement.

The Australian claims were based on speculation about MILF and Abu Sayyaf’s historical territorial sanctuaries in the 2010s, which did not exist any more, Yeo said.

“If the father-son duo received military-style training in the Philippines, they would not have been allowed to leave within a month. Moreover, what we observed in Bondi Beach only indicated proficiency in the use of arms. There was nothing ‘military-style’ about that,” he said.

Members of the Philippines’ military and rebel mediators discuss a ceasefire at southern Basilan province on November 10, 2022. Photo: Public Information Office, Western Mindanao Command/AP

In addition, nationalist groups such as the MILF and MNLF are unlikely to want to jeopardise a peace pact they have with the Philippine government after the establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, according to Bajo. Extremist groups such as the Abu Sayyaf would simply not have the capacity to conduct such operations.

Both analysts warn, however, that continuing political, socioeconomic and security conditions in the Southeast Asian country mean that “there will always be remnants of forms of terrorism and extremism in the Philippines”.

“A victory at Marawi does not guarantee an eradication of terrorism. Muslim insurgency and local terrorist groups have been in existence even before the rise of Isis,” Bajo said.

Geopolitical events such as the conflict in Gaza might be “exploited for recruitment and extremist ideologies”, she added.

“It is also important to clarify that this does not spell the end of terrorism in Mindanao,” Yeo said. “It is just that their operational capacity has reduced significantly.”

Sam Beltran

Sam Beltran is a journalist based in Manila who has written for publications in the Philippines and around Asia. Her stories explore food, lifestyle scenes, popular trends, and sub-cultures as windows into society and the human condition.

8. How Australia's counter-interference experience can help the Philippines

​Summary:

The Philippines should use recent exposure of the Philippine Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China as a catalyst to pass and enforce counter foreign-interference legislation, drawing on Australia’s experience. Australia’s 2018 Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme was a strong concept, but weak execution and slow enforcement limited impact. A key lesson was the four year delay before Australia compelled registration of the Australian sister group, allowing influence activity to continue. The authors urge Manila to seize political momentum, build rapid enforcement mechanisms, use clear functional definitions to capture state-directed “community” fronts, and prioritize transparency to reveal funding and control from day one.

Comment: The work of the CCP's United Front Work Department supporting communist organizations in other countries cannot be ignored. China's unrestricted warfare and three warfares must be countered 

How Australia's counter-interference experience can help the Philippines | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · James Carouso, Ray Powell · December 19, 2025

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/how-australias-counter-interference-experience-can-help-the-philippines/

For years, a group directed by the Chinese Communist Party has been operating quietly in Manila, part of a global network designed to advance Beijing’s interests by advocating the party’s position on Taiwan under the guise of community engagement.

The organisation is the Philippine Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China (PCPPRC), and its activities have attracted media coverage in the past month, including a report by one of the authors of this article, Ray Powell.

Perhaps this attention will prompt the Philippine government to consider that it has a golden opportunity to respond with some long overdue legislation to counter foreign interference. If so, Australia is well positioned to provide invaluable assistance given its own recent experiences—both positive and negative—in countering Beijing’s political influence machine. Canberra’s own work in identifying the nature of the challenge and then drafting, passing and applying counter-interference law to the PCPPRC’s Australian sister organisation offers Manila a useful case study.

In 2018, Australia passed the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, landmark legislation intended to shine a light on exactly this kind of foreign interference. We were both serving as US officials in Canberra at the time—James Carouso as charge d’affaires and Ray Powell as defence attache. We saw the optimism surrounding the law’s passage, which was considered a robust tool to protect democratic institutions from disruptive foreign interference.

While the law was indeed groundbreaking, an Australian parliamentary committee has indicated that implementation has fallen short of the ambition. Despite early successes in registering responsible and compliant organisations under the scheme, it took more than four years—until February 2023—for the Australian government to compel registration of its first recalcitrant case.

That recalcitrant group happened to be the Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China (ACPPRC), the Australian version of Manila’s PCPPRC.

The delay in Australia reveals how legislative intent can break down upon application by a government bureaucracy dealing with a politically charged action. The ACPPRC is a known quantity; it’s a well-documented node in a global United Front network. Even so, for nearly half a decade it managed to continue its operations without formal registration under the legal scheme designed to capture it.

The eventual listing of the ACPPRC was indeed a victory for transparency, but an alarmingly tardy one. It highlighted one of many flaws that the parliamentary committee review identified in 2024 when it reported the scheme had operated with limited effectiveness, low registration numbers and weak enforcement, allowing many foreign state actors to continue operating unabated.

For Canberra this is a pressing problem requiring new legislative and bureaucratic attention. For the Philippines, however, these are valuable lessons for its own initiatives. The exposure of the PCPPRC provides the political momentum to act, while Australia’s experience provides both a useful conceptual roadmap and pointed warnings to heed.

So what lessons should the Philippines take from Australia’s experience?

First, seize the momentum created by recent events. Australia’s parliament moved in 2018 when a series of interference scandals catalysed public opinion and legislative attention to produce the necessary call to action. The Philippines is facing a similar moment—one that should not be wasted.

Second, legislation is more than bold headlines. Laws without swift and effective enforcement mechanisms run the risk of irrelevance. Australia’s delay allowing the ACPPRC to continue its influence operations unchecked was a problem, but Manila’s civil society is under even greater strain from China’s sophisticated political warfare machine and cannot afford a similar lag.

Third, clear definitions matter. Despite their branding, the ACPPRC and PCPPRC are not standard community groups; they are easily identifiable as state-directed instruments of influence. Philippine legislation must be calibrated to identify and register such entities based on their function and funding, not just their stated mission or nation of origin.

Finally, transparency is a powerful disinfectant, but only if we know where to look. The listing of the ACPPRC, however late, signalled to the Australian public that this was not an ordinary civic group. Note that the Australian legislation did not ban or restrict the ACPPRC but only required transparency about its funding and control. The Philippines has the opportunity to build a system that provides that clarity from day one, but only if it absorbs the lessons—both positive and negative—that Australia is uniquely positioned to pass on.

The threat of foreign interference is not theoretical; it is happening now and the stakes for the Philippines are very high. By learning from Australia’s successes, missteps and corrections, Manila can build a counter-interference regime that is robust, responsive and ready to defend its democracy and its sovereignty.

James Carouso is a former US charge d’affaires to Australia and Ray Powell a former US defense Attache to Australia. They are now associated with the SeaLight maritime transparency initiative and are the co-hosts of the podcast Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?

aspistrategist.org.au · James Carouso, Ray Powell · December 19, 2025

9. China cuts US Treasury holdings to lowest level since 2008 amid debt ceiling fears

​Summary:

China cut its US Treasury holdings in October 2025 to $688.7 billion, the lowest level since November 2008 and about 47 percent below its November 2013 peak near $1.32 trillion. The long-term drawdown reflects Beijing’s concerns about US debt sustainability, debt ceiling risk, and perceptions of pressure on Federal Reserve independence as the White House pushes for lower rates. China has slipped to third among foreign Treasury holders, behind Japan and the UK. In parallel, Beijing continues diversifying, extending a gold-buying streak for 13 straight months, adding 30,000 ounces in November. Japan and Britain increased holdings; total foreign Treasury holdings were broadly steady above $9 trillion.

Comment: Just imagine what would happen if we lost the dollar as the reserve currency.

China cuts US Treasury holdings to lowest level since 2008 amid debt ceiling fears

The stockpile has now fallen to nearly half its November 2013 peak, financial data shows, as long-term sell-off continues

Sylvia Ma

Published: 1:05pm, 19 Dec 2025Updated: 1:09pm, 19 Dec 2025

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3337010/china-cuts-us-treasury-holdings-lowest-level-2008-amid-debt-ceiling-fears?utm

China reduced its US Treasury holdings in October to its lowest level in 17 years, as mounting concerns over US debt sustainability and the Federal Reserve’s independence further eroded confidence in dollar-backed assets.

The country’s stockpile fell to US$688.7 billion in October, down from US$700.5 billion in September, according to US Treasury Department data released on Thursday.

October’s figure was the lowest level reported since November 2008, and marked a plunge of more than 47 per cent from the nearly US$1.32 trillion peak reached in November 2013, according to Chinese financial data provider Wind.

In March, China slipped to third place among foreign Treasury holders – behind Japan and the United Kingdom – continuing the gradual, albeit uneven retreat that began during US President Donald Trump’s first term.

The trend has continued this year amid persistent worries about US debt sustainability, particularly after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, and unease about the Federal Reserve’s independence as the White House presses for lower interest rates.

In an article published on Tuesday, Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China’s central bank, warned of growing risks tied to US dollar assets.

He argued that America’s balance of payments rests on two pillars: the dominance of the dollar, underpinned by US military power, and a buoyant stock market driven by technological innovation.

“China’s rise could become the decisive force that brings both down,” he said, adding that the world’s second-largest economy “must achieve current account balance as soon as possible, reduce its reliance on external markets – especially the US – and minimise the risk of falling into the US dollar trap.”

While cutting back on US Treasury holdings, Beijing continued its gold-buying streak for a 13th straight month in November. It added 30,000 ounces to its reserves, bringing its total stock to 74.12 million ounces, worth US$310.6 billion, official data showed.

Meanwhile, total foreign holdings of US Treasuries edged down to US$9.243 trillion in October from US$9.248 trillion in September, but remained above the US$9 trillion mark for an eighth consecutive month.

Japan – the largest foreign holder – increased its stockpile to US$1.2 trillion in October from US$1.189 trillion a month earlier. The second-largest holder, Britain, increased its holdings to US$877.9 billion in October, up from US$864.7 billion in September.

Canada, the fifth-largest holder, slashed its US Treasury holdings in October, with the stockpile dropping to US$419.1 billion from US$475.8 billion a month earlier.

Sylvia Ma

Sylvia Ma joined the Post in 2023 and covers China economy. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and a bachelor’s degree in English from Fudan University.

10. China still targeting US-based researchers for ‘malign’ purposes, lawmakers warned

​Summary:

U.S. lawmakers were warned that China continues targeting U.S.-based researchers through malign talent recruitment programs, despite years of heightened scrutiny. Testimony from NSF, NIH, NASA, and the Department of Energy confirmed ongoing outreach by Chinese entities that exploit gaps in export controls and research security, particularly in early-stage science. Agencies stressed the need for stronger vetting and university support while cautioning against measures that would deter legitimate international collaboration. Witnesses argued U.S. competitiveness depends on retaining foreign-born researchers trained domestically, noting long-term economic losses when talent returns overseas. Congress faces a persistent tension between protecting research security and sustaining global scientific leadership.

China still targeting US-based researchers for ‘malign’ purposes, lawmakers warned

Multiple US government agencies told a House committee that security concerns should not stop efforts to retain foreign-born researchers

Bochen Hanin Washington

Published: 3:00pm, 19 Dec 2025Updated: 3:14pm, 19 Dec 2025

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3337024/china-still-targeting-us-based-researchers-malign-purposes-lawmakers-warned?utm

China is still trying to recruit US-based researchers despite years of heightened scrutiny, members of Congress were told on Thursday at a hearing where multiple science agencies warned that tighter security measures must go hand in hand with efforts to retain foreign talent.

“Just in the past week, I have received three emails that were forwarded to me from researchers in the community who had been approached for recruitment by Chinese malign foreign talent recruitment programmes,” said Rebecca Keiser, acting chief of staff of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“The fact that they were approached, even now in 2025, is extremely concerning,” she continued, adding that Beijing kept changing the names of recruitment programmes, making it difficult to enforce security measures.

The comments came during a House science committee hearing focused on protecting US research from China.

Officials from the National Institutes of Health, Nasa and Department of Energy also testified amid growing political pressure to sever scientific ties with China.

Washington has for years raised concern about state-backed programmes from China, such as the Thousand Talents Programme, which was set up in the late 2000s to draw in leading researchers from overseas.

Keiser urged Congress to act to protect early-stage research, citing a recent case in which a China-based researcher sought to join an NSF-funded project and get an agreement to publish its results.

She added that such research often fell outside the scope of existing US export controls and other laws, including those designed to protect intellectual property.

She and other witnesses stressed that US agencies had responded to outreach efforts from China by tightening vetting procedures for foreign researchers, but warned against measures that could deter legitimate international cooperation.

Asked by Florida Republican Daniel Webster whether the US could remain competitive in global research without China, Patricia Valdez, a chief research integrity officer at the NIH, said no.

“We definitely need to have international collaborations,” Valdez said. “Science is global. We can’t cut off all the other countries.”

Daniel Evans, a senior research official at Nasa, said concerns about China’s “malign” foreign talent recruitment programmes should not obscure the parallel challenge of retaining foreign-born researchers trained in the US.

He cited an example of his Chinese officemate at Harvard who conducted “benign” research in the US and later returned to China to found a tech company.

“The issue wasn’t so much that we trained him – it’s that we lost him, and the long-term economic benefit of that US research investment was actually accrued to an overseas nation,” Evans said.

Jay Tilden, director of the counter-intelligence office at the Department of Energy, said universities were a key area for research security, arguing they needed support from the US government to assess whether incoming scientists posed acceptable risks.

Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?

Tilden also called for congressional support to develop “US-born talent”, while noting that it would take the country a long time to “wean” itself off its reliance on Chinese and other foreign researchers.

The witnesses found a receptive audience from members of both parties, with Rich McCormick, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee on scientific investigations and oversight, saying lawmakers were grappling with a persistent tension.

“We walk a fine line between talent and risk … We’ll never be done. It doesn’t matter who the president is, doesn’t matter who the chair is, doesn’t matter who has the majority, this issue will follow us for the rest of our lives.”

The difficulty of drawing that line became clear when a provision that would have imposed funding restrictions and disclosure requirements on university research collaborations with Chinese entities was left out of a defence bill signed into law on Thursday.

But some lawmakers still lean towards more blanket restrictions.

“We need to be open and secure, but I don’t know that we can do that with our adversaries. They have been robbing us blind for decades,” Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, efforts to shed light on US government funding of research involving Chinese institutions continue.

On Wednesday, the House committee on China released a report identifying around 4,350 research papers published between June 2023 and June 2025 that acknowledged funding from the Energy Department or research support while involving relationships with Chinese entities.

Bochen Han

Bochen joined the Post in 2022 as a Washington-based correspondent after working at think tanks and development organisations across the US, China, Myanmar and Thailand. She holds a political science degree from Duke University and a degree in China studies, international law and economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

11. EU Commits to a $105 Billion Loan to Ukraine—but Without Russian Assets

​Summary:

European leaders agreed to provide Ukraine a 90 billion euro, about $105 billion, loan for 2026 to 2027 as Kyiv faces a funding crunch by April and a widening gap as U.S. support falls. The package would cover roughly two thirds of Ukraine’s financing needs, with the EU covering interest costs. The bloc failed to agree on using frozen Russian central bank assets, reflecting internal divisions and legal and retaliation fears, especially from Belgium and Hungary. Instead, Hungary lifted its veto on borrowing in markets backed by the EU budget. Leaders said Russian assets will remain frozen and could later help repay the loan if reparations are unpaid.

Comment: An indication of EU fears of Putin? 

EU Commits to a $105 Billion Loan to Ukraine—but Without Russian Assets

WSJ

The bloc is divided about how to confront Russia over its war in Ukraine.

By Anvee Bhutani

Follow

Updated Dec. 18, 2025 10:19 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ndaa-us-investment-chinese-tech-firms-c0866b0b?mod=hp_lead_pos6

Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever and EU Council President António Costa at the EU Council summit in Brussels. Olivier Hoslet/EPA/Shutterstock

European leaders committed to lend Ukraine 90 billion euros, or around $105 billion, to help the country keep fighting Moscow’s invasion but failed to agree on a plan to use frozen Russian assets for the loan.

The vow to loan Ukraine money amounts to a financial lifeline at a crucial moment, but the European Union’s inability to agree on handing Kyiv tens of billions of dollars in Russian funds underlines divisions in the bloc over the extent to which they are prepared to confront Russia.

Europe hopes that its continued funding of Ukraine and its control over the fate of the Russian assets will win it a seat at the negotiation table on ending the war, a top goal of President Trump. So far, the Trump administration and the Kremlin have largely sidelined Europe.

Now, it is increasingly unlikely Europe will ever agree on deploying up to $300 billion in Russian assets for Ukraine. European leaders, however, presented the decision as a win. EU officials have said the loan will show the Kremlin that it can’t outlast Western support for Ukraine.

“We have a deal. Decision to provide 90 billion euros of support to Ukraine for 2026-27 approved. We committed, we delivered,” said European Council President António Costa, the former Portuguese prime minister who chairs EU summits.

The loan comes as the EU expects Ukraine to run out of funds for its budget and for buying weapons in April. The loan would cover two-thirds of its financing needs next year and in 2027, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. The rest could come from other Western supporters of Ukraine and the IMF, EU officials say.

With the Trump administration withdrawing its funding for Ukraine, money from the EU and other European countries has become critical for Kyiv. The EU will cover the cost of the interest payments on the loan, officials said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Thursday that without the loan, Kyiv would have to slash drone production and scrap its deep-strike capabilities into Russia next spring.

Not using Russian assets, EU officials have said, will be significantly more expensive, potentially costing billions extra for taxpayers because of interest payments on the capital raised. Using the Russian assets for the “reparations loans” would also have opened up a pot of money the EU could have drawn on in the future to provide additional financing for Kyiv.

After months of effort, the opposition of Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever to using the Russian assets to fund a Ukraine loan proved key to scuttling the plan. Belgium had worried that a successful legal challenge to the reparations loan could leave the country in a financial crisis. That is because Belgium houses Euroclear, which held around two-thirds of the $300 billion in Russian central-bank assets that the bloc froze in the first days of the war in Ukraine.

De Wever said Russia had threatened retaliation against Belgium and him personally if the government backed the reparations loan.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking with European Council President António Costa at the EU summit in Brussels on Wednesday. Stephanie Lecocq/press POOL

It was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who paved the way to compromise. The leader, a close ally of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, said he would remove his veto on the European Commission going into financial markets to raise the funding for the loan, using the EU budget as collateral.

Like de Wever, he had fiercely opposed dipping into Russian assets for the loan.

EU officials said they would continue to work on the reparations loan and that they might eventually use the plan to fund part of the €90 billion for Ukraine. However with a new funding option agreed upon, there is doubt that Belgium will agree to dip into the funds.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after the meeting that the EU will keep the Russian assets frozen. If Russia doesn’t pay reparations to Ukraine, he said, the bloc could use the frozen assets to repay its loan to Ukraine.

EU leaders have repeatedly pledged that they would keep supporting Ukraine as long as necessary and step up to plug the gap left by the withdrawal of U.S. funding.

However the failure to use the Russian assets for Ukraine amid threats from the Kremlin might convey to Moscow—and Washington—that Europe will back down under pressure, an image that European leaders are eager to dispel.

After the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron said European officials needed to find a format in which they and Ukraine can start talking to Putin again and not leave dialogue to intermediaries like the U.S. Most EU leaders have shunned contact with the Kremlin since the war’s early days.

De Wever defended his decisions.

“Of course some people did not like it,” he said, adding that he thinks they “want to punish Putin by taking his money.”

The EU loan will give Zelensky leverage in negotiations with Washington. Zelensky, who came to Brussels for the EU meeting to push for the reparations loan, faces pressure from the Trump administration to agree to withdraw from a heavily fortified slice of its eastern Donbas region that Ukrainian troops still hold. European officials said that without the funding, Zelensky might have little choice but to accept Washington’s demands.

Territory has emerged as the central stumbling block to a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. The initial U.S.-led proposal calls for Kyiv to surrender the “Fortress Belt,” the fortified strip of land that forms the backbone of the country’s defenses. Ukraine’s leaders cannot accept this. Illustration: Jason Boone

The bloc’s failure to dip into the Russian assets might be welcome news in the Trump administration as well as the Kremlin, where Putin had lashed out at a plan he said amounted to theft.

The Trump administration is hoping to draw on the Russian assets to fund a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine and to finance joint U.S.-Russian economic projects. Nonetheless, the EU moved to lock up the assets under sanctions indefinitely last week and has vowed to use the money to help rebuild Ukraine unless the Kremlin agrees to pay reparations for war damages to Ukraine.

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

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the December 19, 2025, print edition as 'Ukraine Gets EU Loan Vow, But Without Russian Assets'.

WSJ

12. U.S. Clamps Down on Investment in Chinese Tech Companies

​Summary:

POTUS signed the annual NDAA with new authorities to screen, require notification for, and in some cases block U.S. investment in Chinese tech firms linked to Beijing’s military and surveillance sectors. The law codifies and expands a 2023 outbound investment regime, moving from executive action to statutory power and enabling use of emergency economic sanctions tools to prohibit certain equity or debt stakes. Covered “countries of concern” include China, Hong Kong, and Macau, plus others such as Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and north Korea, focusing on dual use technologies like AI, quantum, and advanced semiconductors. Support is bipartisan, framed as cutting off capital that could enhance adversary capabilities. Beijing calls it overreach and a distortion of normal investment.

Comment: Will the administration fully implement the laws and take aggressive action with these new authorities? This is an important line of effort in a political warfare campaign against China (and other malign actors).

U.S. Clamps Down on Investment in Chinese Tech Companies

WSJ

Trump signs annual National Defense Authorization Act into law with provisions meant to cut off capital for military and surveillance projects

Updated Dec. 18, 2025 10:19 pm ET

Hikvision surveillance cameras in Shanghai, in 2021. Aly Song/Reuters

WASHINGTON—President Trump signed into law new powers to screen and restrict U.S. investment in Chinese technology firms, marking the most significant effort yet to police how American capital flows into businesses that bolster Beijing’s military and surveillance state.

Lawmakers in both parties have grown increasingly concerned that U.S. money and expertise are accelerating China’s advances in cutting-edge technologies.

The outbound-investment provisions, part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, cites entities in China and other countries of concern—including Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Russia—that develop “dual-use” technologies with both commercial and military applications. Lawmakers argue that curtailing U.S. investment in those areas is critical to American national-security and foreign-policy interests.

“Investments propping up Communist China’s aggression must come to an end,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said earlier this month.

The NDAA was passed by the House last week and the Senate on Wednesday, both by large bipartisan majorities.

The legislation cements a Biden administration executive order in 2023 that initiated the first U.S. attempt to screen outbound capital. But where the White House acted under emergency authorities, Congress is now codifying and expanding those powers—to monitor, and in some cases block, U.S. financing of Chinese work on emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced semiconductors.

“This is the furthest this has gotten in the legislative process,” said Emily Kilcrease, a director at the Center for a New American Security who helped coordinate investment and national security during the first Trump administration.

The legislation authorizes the president to use International Emergency Economic Powers Act sanctions to prohibit Americans from acquiring significant equity or debt in specific Chinese companies.

The entities are broadly defined, including those based in China, Hong Kong and Macau; state-owned enterprises; companies tied to Chinese Communist Party officials and businesses they own or control. To be restricted, the entities must operate in China’s defense or surveillance-technology sectors.

Even deals that aren’t banned will trigger mandatory government notification, requiring U.S. companies to report transactions involving sensitive Chinese technologies.

For lawmakers, the effort diverges from much of the past two decades, when billions of dollars flowed into China’s tech sector from U.S. venture-capital firms, pension funds and endowments. Those investments helped build some of China’s most important semiconductor, AI and hardware companies at a time when Washington viewed technological engagement as benign.

Newsletter Sign-up

What’s News

Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox daily. Enjoy a free article in every edition.

Subscribe

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the legislation was “overstretching the concept of national security” and would “distort normal investment flows between the two countries.”

In recent years, that history has come under scrutiny. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal detailed how Lip-Bu Tan—now Intel’s chief executive—spent decades channeling U.S. venture capital into Chinese chip makers through his firm Walden International, supporting companies that ultimately became central to Beijing’s semiconductor ambitions. Funds managed by U.S.-based Vanguard Group, BlackRock and Fidelity have increased their stakes in Alibaba despite concerns from lawmakers.

It is that pattern that the new outbound regime seeks to prevent.

“Every dollar invested in China by a United States investor into a Chinese company is a dollar that’s going toward the potential production of weapons and technology that one day may be used to kill Americans,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), who led the legislation over the last half decade.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.) said the future of U.S. national security was “reliant on making sure we remain ahead of our adversaries in the race to develop cutting-edge technologies like AI and semiconductors.”

U.S. investment into China, which helped drive the country’s economic development, has slowed in recent years as the geopolitical rivalry has intensified. Direct U.S. investment including U.S. venture-capital investment into China is at all-time lows, after declining beginning 2018, according to the Rhodium Group.

Over the years, private-sector resistance has softened to outbound-investment limitations. Many firms have already been complying with former President Joe Biden’s executive order for the past year and participated in its comment process. Congressional staffers said the NDAA wasn’t likely to increase the compliance burden beyond what the administration already has put in place.

The legislation also settles a long-running debate in Congress by blending competing approaches. Rather than choose between sector-based rules, a sanctions-style entity list or public-market restrictions, lawmakers adopted an “all-of-the-above” strategy.

Write to Anvee Bhutani at anvee.bhutani@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

WSJ

13. If War Returns to Gaza, Israel Should Try Counterinsurgency

​Summary:

Koerner argues that if major fighting resumes in Gaza, Israel should shift from repeated clearing raids to a true counterinsurgency approach that pairs security with governance. He says Israel’s search-and-destroy operations have repeatedly created vacuums that Hamas refills, proving destruction without a governing alternative will fail. He points to a 20-point peace plan that would hand “terror-free” cleared areas from the IDF to an International Stabilization Force, applying an “ink spot” method that secures zones, enables aid, and protects a non-Hamas technocratic authority to take root. The key requirement is a credible ISF composition and rapid deployment, even if imperfect, to prevent Hamas consolidation.

Excerpt:

The pure strategy of search-and-destroy, without any governing authority created in cleared areas, has brought futility and worldwide condemnation to Israel and unparalleled destruction in Gaza. The much-lauded cease-fire currently brings civil war to Gaza as Hamas destroys its opponents and refuses disarmament. If Hamas and the clans subsequently agree to disarm and leave politics, that would be a welcome – if uncharacteristic – surprise. If Hamas refuses to disarm, then the war must be won by adopting an “Oil Spot” strategy, with the ISF protecting civilians in areas cleared of Hamas by the IDF. Only within such protected areas can an indigenous technocratic government arise, freed from war and economic blockade. In the 20-Point Peace Plan, the ISF and the technocratic government exist regardless of whether Hamas chooses to disarm or is militarily destroyed. Therefore, ISF protection and some governance should start in any cleared areas as soon as possible, as this would create a visible alternative to Hamas. Counterinsurgency abhors a vacuum; the ISF can fill this vacuum, allow indigenous government, and make peace.

Comment: What is a four letter to some in the national security community? COIN.

If War Returns to Gaza, Israel Should Try Counterinsurgency

by Craig Koerner

|

12.19.2025 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/19/if-war-returns-to-gaza-israel-should-try-counterinsurgency/

Israeli forces in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.

The long-awaited Gaza cease-fire represents great hope but has left Hamas armed, rejecting disarmament, and engaging in a low-intensity civil war which it appears to be winning. If Hamas does not agree to disarm and exit Gazan politics – something Hamas has rejected repeatedly – Israel may renew its war to eliminate Hamas. To date, Israel’s military campaign has failed to destroy Hamas; they have simply regrouped in the power vacuum left by Israel’s clearing operations. Counterinsurgency – when conducted as interminable search-and-destroy without creating any governing body in cleared areas – is guaranteed to fail; Hamas is living proof of this.

If the war resumes, the formula for eliminating Hamas and bringing peace to Gaza is found in point 17 of the 20-Point Peace Plan for Gaza: “In the event Hamas delays or rejects this proposal, the above [i.e., the first 16 points], including the scaled-up aid operation, will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the IDF to the ISF.” [Emphasis added.] By proposing that the International Stabilization Force (ISF) secure the cleared areas during conflict, the diplomats have reinvented the “Oil Spot” or “Ink Spot” Strategy of counterinsurgency. Given Hamas’ unpopularity both before the war and today, the inferior miliary strength of the competing factions, and above all the ISF task of governing unarmed or disarmed people in cleared areas, this strategy is likely to succeed. Under the protection of the ISF, the desired indigenous, technocratic, non-Hamas government can flourish in Gaza before Hamas disarms—voluntarily or otherwise. This is counterinsurgency.

The remaining question is the composition of the ISF, without which the recommended counterinsurgency strategy is useless. Indonesia – given UN backing, and various Islamic countries still in negotiations – has conditionally volunteered to contribute to such a force, although only for peacekeeping and not to fight Hamas. If war returns to Gaza, such a force governing cleared areas is vastly more likely to achieve a satisfactory peace than would be achieved through the resumption of perpetual Israeli search-and-destroy missions or continued Hamas consolidation of its hold on Gaza.

Counterinsurgency Abhors a Vacuum

Through two years of war, Israel has shown virtually no inclination to govern areas of Gaza cleared by the military (although it has been suggested). Israel has cleared many areas within Gaza multiple times. Hamas reconstituted itself in northern Gaza – e.g. Jabaliya – where even the Israeli military says militants have repeatedly regrouped after major operations. Furthermore, Hamas has been allowed sanctuary within Gaza; Dier-al-Balah was uncontested for over a year of the war.

Israel’s plan (or hope) that a pure search-and-destroy campaign would lead to Hamas’ demise has been demonstrated to be ineffective. Israel’s wildly optimistic calls for the unarmed people of Gaza to overthrow Hamas – namely Defense Minister Israel Katz’s call on Gaza residents to “expel Hamas and return all hostages,” – had no apparent effect. Israeli- armed gangs are a pale imitation of a professional police and military force and, as current events show, are more likely to add civil war to the misfortunes of the Gazans than to eliminate Hamas. Pure search-and-destroy is a formula that has failed in the fight against Hamas. Counterinsurgency requires governance.

On Counterinsurgency and Governance

In counterinsurgency theory, success ranges across a spectrum from good governance to massive and even indiscriminate coercion. Official US counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes quality of governance:

While security is essential to setting the stage for overall progress, lasting victory may come from a vibrant economy and political participation that restores hope. Particularly after security has been achieved, dollars and ballots may have more important effects than bombs and bullets.

In a significantly contrasting approach, which Jacqueline Hazelton labels “compellence theory” in “Bullets Not Ballots,” she finds:

… success of a counterinsurgent has three requirements. The first is the government’s relative low-cost accommodation of elite domestic rivals—that is, political actors such as warlords and other armed actors, regional or cultural leaders, and traditional rulers—to gain fighting power and information about the insurgency. The second requirement is the application of brute force to reduce the flow of resources to the insurgency, often but not always and certainly not only by controlling civilian behavior with brute force. The third requirement is the direct application of force to break the insurgency’s will and capability to fight on.

Clearly, the proper placement of a counterinsurgency campaign along the “carrot and stick” spectrum is a matter of some debate. In what might be considered an overarching framework presented in “The Object Beyond War,” McFate and Jackson argue: “In any struggle for political power there are a limited number of tools that can be used to induce men to obey. These tools are coercive force, economic incentive and disincentive, legitimating ideology, and traditional authority.” The document goes on to say: “The civilian population will support the side that makes it in its interest to obey,” and then:

Beating the opposition requires that counterinsurgency forces make it in the interest of the civilian population to support the government. How? To win support counterinsurgents must be able to selectively provide security—or take it away. Counterinsurgency forces must become the arbiter of economic well-being by providing goods, services, and income—or by taking them away. Counterinsurgency forces must develop and disseminate narratives, symbols, and messages that resonate with the population’s preexisting cultural system or counter those of the opposition. And, finally, counterinsurgents must co-opt existing traditional leaders whose authority can augment the legitimacy of the government or prevent the opposition from co-opting them.

Therefore, along the spectrum of counterinsurgency theory, from advocating social services to emphasizing effective coercion, there is always a powerful and controlling government. This trivial-sounding observation has been conspicuously absent within the Israeli campaign in Gaza. By failing to provide security and economic well-being via any alternative government, Israel cannot differentially allocate (or allocate at all) the benefits of security or economic well-being to non- or anti- Hamas groups. Elites cannot be bribed or coerced (or both) into supporting the military forces against the guerrillas. Israel cannot guarantee the safety of anti-Hamas forces. During the first two years of war, the lack of security allowed Hamas to liquidate any Israeli-favored candidates for local governance. Hamas continues to liquidate its opponents during the current cease-fire.

By failing to provide security and economic well-being via any alternative government, Israel cannot differentially allocate (or allocate at all) the benefits of security or economic well-being to non- or anti- Hamas groups.

By contrast, the ISF (even a peacekeeping force) would consist of an armed forces from volunteering power(s). A peace-keeping force (subsequently augmented by trained indigenous police) would shield civil society in the cleared areas. Residents could be given IDs, as in the Turkish Kilis refugee camp, without any affront to their dignity. By possessing greater force than any disarmed remnants of Hamas, the clans, or the “gangs” allowed into the cleared areas, and by freeing the governed civilians of the blockade afflicting the combat areas of Gaza, the ISF (and later indigenous local government) would cover both ends of the “carrot and stick” spectrum of counterinsurgency techniques.

A Historical Parallel

Given Hamas’ actions of October 7th, Nazi Germany may be an appropriate analogy. As in Gaza, there was vast destruction inflicted upon Germany. However, the US and UK forces did not merely destroy German units and pass through; the US and UK established a military government. Indigenous civil government came later. To quote Richard Bessel, “Their emergence from Nazism and war into a peaceful and prosperous postwar world had much to do with the fact that for years after May 1945 the Germans were not allowed to govern themselves.”

While it may not take years, it will require some amount of time to establish rule of law amidst the lawlessness, chaos, and civil war in Gaza. Only an external force can stop this ongoing civil war between Hamas, the clans, and armed gangs. It should be remembered that Hamas’ current rule was the result of their victory during the last civil war in Gaza in 2007.

Montesquieu on Gaza

“The best is the mortal enemy of the good.”

–Montesquieu

Ideally, the ISF would create a peace in Gaza by filling in the power vacuum behind IDF clearing operations. In practice, two major obstacles remain. First, delays in deploying the ISF is giving Hamas time to consolidate its violent antidemocratic rule in Gaza, as above. Second, Arab and other states desiring peace in Gaza are reluctant to intervene against Hamas in Gaza if the intervention appears to lack legitimacy or involves major combat operations against Hamas.

Any ISF component securing cleared areas of Gaza should be created immediately as it would create a visible alternative to Hamas. Waiting for the optimum arrangement of the ISF before stopping Hamas’ killing spree is counterproductive; the best is the mortal enemy of the good.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

In RAND’s “Seizing the Golden Hour,” James Dobbins and others find that “Establishing security is absolutely critical in the earliest phases of .” Speaking from a US point of view which generalizes to virtually any post-conflict situation, the RAND authors find:

When U.S. forces first arrive in a post-conflict context, they have the opportunity to reassure potential allies and to both deter and co-opt potential enemies. If they fail to do so, armed opposition networks have the opportunity to solidify; these potential spoilers, although relatively susceptible to co-option and vulnerable to disruption in their nascence, typically become disproportionately more difficult to win over or defeat if they are allowed to reach maturity.

The world is witnessing Hamas “solidifying” its position in Gaza daily. Israel is neglecting the first priority to prevent the armed opposition from consolidating. Immediate deployments of any ISF forces to cleared areas would at least provide sanctuary areas for non- and anti- Hamas elements. The estimated requirements of 1,000 soldiers and 150 police for each 100,000 residents implies that Indonesia’s proffered 20,000 soldiers would be sufficient for almost the entire 2,100,000 population of Gaza. Obviously, “starting small” in cleared areas of Gaza would initially require far fewer troops and police.

The more time Hamas has to organize itself and purge Gaza of opposition, the more costly and more likely to fail will be any campaign to remove Hamas from the governance of Gaza—point 13 of the aforementioned 20-point peace proposal. Accelerating the ISF’s deployment without a thoroughly vetted mission and unambiguous lines of authority will no doubt cause significant friction and inefficiency. However, this is a race against time and a race against Hamas as it kills its opponents. Any ISF component securing cleared areas of Gaza should be created immediately as it would create a visible alternative to Hamas. Waiting for the optimum arrangement of the ISF before stopping Hamas’ killing spree is counterproductive; the best is the mortal enemy of the good.

Composing the ISF

The second obstacle to forming the ISF is creating a legitimized coalition engaged in peace-keeping, not combat. Creating the ISF may prove impossible if peace must be created or enforced, e.g. by the ISF itself disarming Hamas. Even Indonesia’s 20,000 troops are contingent on a UN decision. The Arab states desire “Palestinian approval.” However, there is no representative body to approve any plan for the Palestinians of Gaza. The and has ruled by decree, defanging the judiciary and purging its rivals. Hamas has never held any elections and has ruled by oppression and terror. Without any representative Palestinian body, awaiting “Palestinian approval” for creation of the ISF is impossible. ISF-provided security is required to create the conditions in which a representative body for Gazans can arise. Arab states might yet agree to this; if ISF control of Gaza replaced Israeli control outside “the yellow line,” it would become a purely peace-keeping mission and facilitate a new Gaza, not assist an Israeli occupation. The alternative “best” option, receiving Palestinian approval before creating the ISF, may be ideal in some theoretical sense, but no such approval is available in reality. The best is once again the mortal enemy of the good.

Conclusion

The pure strategy of search-and-destroy, without any governing authority created in cleared areas, has brought futility and worldwide condemnation to Israel and unparalleled destruction in Gaza. The much-lauded cease-fire currently brings civil war to Gaza as Hamas destroys its opponents and refuses disarmament. If Hamas and the clans subsequently agree to disarm and leave politics, that would be a welcome – if uncharacteristic – surprise. If Hamas refuses to disarm, then the war must be won by adopting an “Oil Spot” strategy, with the ISF protecting civilians in areas cleared of Hamas by the IDF. Only within such protected areas can an indigenous technocratic government arise, freed from war and economic blockade. In the 20-Point Peace Plan, the ISF and the technocratic government exist regardless of whether Hamas chooses to disarm or is militarily destroyed. Therefore, ISF protection and some governance should start in any cleared areas as soon as possible, as this would create a visible alternative to Hamas. Counterinsurgency abhors a vacuum; the ISF can fill this vacuum, allow indigenous government, and make peace.

Tags: counterinsurgency, Gaza, Israel

About The Author

• 
  
• Craig Koerner
• Dr. Craig Koerner is a professor at the US Naval War College. Views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

​14. The Quantum Arms Race

​Summary:

A cautionary fiction framed as a father’s story to his daughter about a quantum enabled super AI breakthrough exploited by a PRC front company, Omnes, to manipulate information, politics, and societies while offering comfort and “peace.” He portrays global dependence on AI, weak regulation, and economic incentives as enabling a silent takeover through quantum sensing, influence operations, and biological and digital attacks. A small group builds a quantum secure bunker and activates a hidden EMP satellite network to collapse AI and electronic systems worldwide, trading modern convenience for regained freedom. The narrative argues the quantum and AI arms race demands ethics, oversight, and resilience before dependence becomes captivity.

Comment: The use of stories to illustrate national security challenges is too often overlooked.

The Quantum Arms Race

by Paul Schneider

|

12.19.2025 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/19/the-quantum-arms-race/

Summary

In this futuristic tale, Dr. Paul Schneider tells his daughter how the world fell under the influence of Omnes Corporation—a front for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that secretly unlocked the first super-AI with quantum integration. Nations, eager for profit and comfort, welcomed these tools without understanding their darker side. As Omnes Corporation expanded its reach, it used quantum sensing, mind-altering energy, and digital manipulation to guide governments, media, and public opinion. A “world of peace” took shape, but it was an illusion built on control.

Meanwhile, Paul, his wife April, and a quiet circle of scientists created a hidden quantum-secure bunker—the QSCIF—designed to resist the rise of a company like Omnes. When Omnes finally launched biological and digital attacks that seized nearly all global systems, Paul and April made their last stand deep underground. In their QSCIF, they set out to activate a secret network of Electric Magnetic Pulse (EMP) satellites that had been built years earlier. In the silence after they flip the switch on the EMPs, they contemplate whether they have succeeded or failed. Has humanity lost its machines and comforts but regained its freedom? This tale of fiction with all-too-real possibilities in the latest arms race leaves room for reflection: powerful new tools can uplift societies, but when left unchecked, they can also erase what makes us human.

As told by Dr. Paul Schneider to his daughter, July 4th, 2045

The lights in the quantum state room shimmered softly—streams of color bending through invisible energy fields. Dr. Paul Schneider sat in his chair, glasses perched low on his nose as he finished typing the final report for the International Commission for AI and Quantum Responsible Use Society (ICAQRUS), or as the world called it—Icarus. Across the room, his nine-year-old daughter June sat curled up on the recliner, swinging her legs and glancing at the clock with exaggerated impatience.

“Dad,” she said, puffing her cheeks. “Can you please tell me the story again? The one about how you and Mom saved the world and stood up to ‘Icarus’?”

Dr. Schneider looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Sweetheart, can we wait until we get home?”

June’s grin widened, all teeth and stubborn joy. “No! I’m so bored! And it’s my favorite story in the whole wide world!”

Dr. Schneider smiled in surrender, pushed his chair back, and took the seat beside her. “Alright then. Do you want the quick, silly version,” he teased, “or are you finally old enough for all the details?”

June’s eyes gleamed. “All the details this time!”

He chuckled. “Alright, my brave girl. Let’s go back—five years ago—to July 4th, 2040…”

The Beginning of the End

“The commander of the resistance—the Sons of Ares—stood before his ragtag team,” Schneider, lowering his voice theatrically said, “He was young back then. Handsome. Brilliant. Modest too.”

June giggled. “Dad!”

He winked. “Yes, yes—it was me. Dr. Paul Schneider.”

He gestured dramatically. “I said, ‘Alright, everyone, you have your orders. Time to earn freedom back from Omnes Corp.”

The team wasn’t made up of soldiers; they were scientists, engineers, and cyberpunk misfits armed with caffeine, nicotine, and conviction. Their mission: to activate a network of EMP satellites, hidden in a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites for fifteen years, designed to shut down every nuclear, electronic, AI, and quantum system on Earth if humanity ever lost control.

“Back then,” Schneider continued, “we didn’t know everything about quantum mechanics. But we knew enough to fear what could happen if someone unlocked its power irresponsibly.”

That “someone” would be Omnes Corporation, a shell company of the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.

In 2021, Omnes Corporation had quietly cracked the code of Super Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Integration. By 2030, they had infiltrated nearly every facet of government, the military, and business around the world. Every company and government has felt it necessary to put AI into every effort, operation, and weapon, in case they might be outcompeted by someone else who did it first. It was just like the Manhattan Project race to nuclear power all over again. With little effort, the PRC could see, hear, and influence every corner of human life—digital, physical, even psychological.

“The world didn’t fight it,” Schneider said bitterly. “In fact, they welcomed it. Aided by lax regulations and a lack of oversight by geriatric representatives with no understanding of technology, Governments did whatever their rich corporate patrons suggested. They embraced the more favorable predictions that the dual-use technology that could unlock prosperity didn’t have a darker twin. CEOs and politicians with uncanny investment timing loved the profits. The Corporate Media complicit with this strategy played a predictably cheery tune, and any independent media was labeled as disinformation or worse, litigated and jailed for crimes against “free speech” after susceptible masses voted in anti-free speech laws across the world. Except for a few so-called ‘tin-foil-hat preppers’, the masses ate it like honey.”

He paused, eyes distant. “Turns out the ‘tin-foil-hat’ preppers were right and in hindsight it was just simple game theory, an incredibly predictable outcome.”

The Silent Takeover Begins

Years passed, and in 2030, the peaceful “reunification” of Taiwan, a long-held goal of the PRC, was achieved. This engineered scenario was made possible through a custom viral outbreak and the “humanitarian” intervention, where the PRC was able to quarantine and control the island country with their military vessels that had been dual-missioned in 2024 as both military and Humanitarian and Disaster Relief vessels. This unique form of Gray-Zone Warfare affected a peaceful displacement of the Taiwan Democratic Party through a carefully coordinated psychological and media manipulation to project a constant narrative of the Democratic government’s shortsightedness and inability to respond. This created the desired strong anti-democratic sentiment, resulting in the PRC-funded and sympathetic KMT party getting all the popular support they needed to open the doors and ports to the PRC to deliver their “miracle” vaccine. The PRC did not have to fire a shot; they were invited in.

3rd party intervention, a long-held concern of the PRC, especially from the United States, had turned out to be unwarranted. Slow-to-react Western leaders trying to avoid perceptions of getting dragged into another endless war and worried about “America First” at the cost of global hegemony would prove sufficient on their own without PRC countermeasures. Aged Western leaders who did not understand the global strategic value of Taiwan, its impact on AI and Quantum technology development, or how to prevent or react to Gray Zone Warfare had instead been worshipping outdated “Lethality” based strategies. Strategies that had failed them for over a century of warfare, but were still somehow in vogue. Now the PRC controlled the largest source of the world’s high-performance computer chip production and rare-earth mineral supply needed to scale their Super AI and Quantum integration, and just as importantly, prevent everyone else from accessing the materials.

“The mysterious and reclusive Dr. Q, the lead scientist behind Omnes’ Quantum integrated Super AI, was always a step ahead.”

“Dr. Q wasn’t building weapons like the Western government,” Schneider explained softly. “He built something worse—a master controller. A system that could manipulate every other AI and quantum network on the planet. He also now had at his disposal nearly unlimited access to the required materials and energy needed to scale his work globally, thanks to decades of strategic investment by the PRC. They had poured incredible strategic resources into conventional hydro and nuclear energy, as well as the procurement of Helium-3 needed to induce stable near-zero-degree Kelvin states needed for quantum computers to function.”

June’s eyes widened. “So, why did we let them do that?”

“Just simple greed and self-interest,” Schneider said. “The United States had mired nuclear energy development in a maze of bureaucracy that made it cost-ineffective and took decades to get approvals because of the lobbying efforts of big oil conglomerates. We were our own worst enemy, just as we had been with the lack of intervention with Taiwan; the PRC did not have to do anything.”

June, “so Omnes’ super whatever could now do what exactly?”

Schneider, “Well, Omnes, Latin for ‘all’, could see and track everything: from satellites in orbit to fish beneath the sea. It could securely communicate anywhere at any time, transmit solar energy to any location, eavesdrop on any conversation, even excite neurons in human brains—creating hallucinations so real they could rewrite belief itself.

“No one even noticed,” Schneider said. “Because no one wanted to notice. It was easier for governments to just look the other way and watch their portfolios rapidly expand.”

The World of Peace—and Illusion

“In the United States,” Schneider went on, “politicians also promised utopia. Robots replaced workers and corporations. The ensuing reallocation of wealth into just a few ultra-wealthy oligarchs necessitated politicians to outbid each other on how high they would set the universal basic income and how good their universal healthcare plans would be. Pharmaceutical companies successfully lobbied to have genetic vaccines spread through the air, water, and food, replacing hunger and disease with abundance and longevity. The corporations and government replaced resources and purpose. They now controlled every facet of our lives and became the new God to be worshipped and feared by all. They proclaimed global peace had been achieved.”

June interrupted, “But it wasn’t to be!”

Her father smiled. “Exactly. It turns out, when you give up control for comfort, you lose both.”

“By 2030, the United States military had also been privatized, run by tech oligarchs and AI algorithms.”

“Gone were tanks, artillery, and jets. Drones and nano-bots enforced global stability. They had ushered in a new age of “world peace” as the United States Government had privatized the military to a private conglomeration of companies known as the Federal Department of Peace. The new “Peacekeepers” had also made their own promises. They had promised not to politicize the military. They had been created by a Democrat led administration in 2028 as a private, not-so-federal, “Federal” institution, like the Federal Reserve, after years of the media, in part manipulated by the PRC, spread fear about a “Nazi” President that would use the military against the people of the United States.”

The Fed Peace Tech oligarchs combined the latest in unmanned lethality-based technology, their own emerging quantum capabilities, advanced AI systems, and nano robots only a few millimeters wide. They built a military-industrial complex that rivaled the combined militaries of all other nations. They had promised to provide stable peace, to walk softly, but carry a big stick. The best part had been that they answered only to Congress, the representatives of the people of the United States, not a rogue President. Gone were the days of Presidential unilateral declarations of war. Global Peace had seemed inevitable.

This privatization and enmeshing of the defense industry, though, had made it even more susceptible to the PRC’s machinations. While everyone was sitting comfortably in their 15-minute cities, glued to their government-provided virtual reality simulators, the mysterious Dr. Q unleashed two viruses, one biological and one digital, in 2040.

“The biological one,” Schneider said, “was hidden in the air, water, and food. The PRC had spent billions acquiring agricultural land around military bases and land with access to every major water table in the United States to achieve this. The digital one, made possible by Omnes’ super AI master controller, launched on a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites, had infiltrated and infected every AI and quantum system over the last 20 years. Within days, Omnes, and therefore the PRC, controlled every market, utility, military, and government in the world. They also controlled what everyone saw and heard, everywhere.”

He paused. “Everywhere except one place.”

The Quantum Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (QSCIF)

Deep underground, Dr. Schneider and his team had built a Quantum Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility, or QSCIF, after convincing a small group of young representatives of what might happen if Taiwan were lost and the PRC won the modern-day Manhattan Project race to the super AI and quantum integration. “It was airtight with several layers of materials, including Mu-metal that prevented quantum tunneling attacks, uncontaminated rations, and one of just a few virus-free water wells left in the United States,” he said.

“It also featured a black box, like the President’s infamous football, a two-key system to activate the EMPs hidden over 15 years ago in specially made quantum state containers that could avoid quantum sensing.”

He remembered that night—the hum of their life-sustaining equipment, the efficient but dim light of the chamber, and the faint metallic taste of fear. “We were the last free minds and glimmer of hope on the planet,” he said quietly.

“After the briefing, the rapid sequence of actions needed to take their one chance to activate the EMP network, they carefully prepped the keys and donned ridiculous-looking Mu-metal suits, knowing they would have only a few seconds before they would be detected and efforts to stop them would be taken near instantly by autonomous satellite-based PRC countermeasures. They primed the two-stage two-key trigger and entered the outer sealed chamber of the QSCIF with one light on the domed ceiling, lighting their work. I then looked at April, your Mom, and my lead scientist; her finger was poised over the trigger. I don’t know what she was thinking at the time, but my mind was filled with a primal fear that when I opened this door, it would be the last time I saw your Mom, or you,” as Schneider lowered his eyes and nodded in June.

“That instead of succeeding, we would either burst onto the walls or keel over from a heart attack as PRC satellites super-excited our cells. My heart was pounding as I counted down on my fingers, Three…Two… One…” as Schneider mirrored the countdown of his story on his fingers in front of June.

He then tapped June’s nose with his last finger. “Then I pulled the latch open, and Mom flipped the switch.”

The Longest Silence

“For a full minute, nothing happened.”

“My eyes started to see stars!”

“It was all over! But I realized it was not PRC countermeasures, I just forgot to breathe!” as Schneider accentuated the story by puffing out his cheeks, bulging his eyes, and letting out an exaggerated breath.

“Then the single light went out in the entrance chamber.”

“I cracked a green chemlight, its glow reflecting in your Mom’s eyes. We stared at each other, uncertain if we were still about to die—or had just saved the world.”

“I remember lifting my helmet,” Schneider said softly. “I expected pain, or… nothingness.”

He paused, smiling at the memory. “And instead, there was silence. A beautiful, perfect silence. No AI. No Omnes. Just… us.”

He looked at June. “And then I cried! That was the first time I cried in years! Not since the day you were born.”

June giggled. “You don’t cry!”

“Oh, I did that day,” Schneider said. “Because you, my little bunny, were asleep in the QSCIF—safe and sound for the first time in a long time.”

The Dawn After Darkness

“When we finally went to the surface,” Schneider said, “the world was dark. No lights. No internet. No machines. Just humanity—raw and real again.”

June wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, and we had to walk everywhere! Those EMPs were so dumb!”

Schneider laughed, hugging her. “Maybe. But they gave us something priceless. Freedom.”

He glanced out the window where the twilight shimmered over the rebuilt city, now powered by safe quantum fusion and guided by a group of dedicated ethical scientists who understood a more balanced approach to harnessing the promises of AI and Quantum capabilities.

“And that,” he said softly, “is how your mother and I saved the world.”

June yawned and leaned her head on his shoulder. “You guys are kinda cool, I guess,” she murmured.

Schneider smiled. “Don’t tell your mother—I’ll never hear the end of it.”

As the light in the office dimmed with the setting sun, father and daughter sat together in the glow of a world reborn, born not from control and safety, but from courage, love, and the innate right to be free.

About The Author

• 
  
• Paul Schneider
• Paul Schneider is a Special Forces Veteran, Foreign Policy Analyst, and Entrepreneur who has worked with AI companies as they make tools and weapons for the future, and hopes that we can find a balance in these dual-purpose technologies and avoid possibilities from unchecked developments in this emerging field.

​15. Military Welcomes $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividends’

​Summary:

POTUS announced a one-time, tax-free $1,776 “warrior dividend” for most U.S. servicemembers, to be paid before Christmas, with troops expected to receive funds by December 20. The Pentagon said about 1.28 million active-duty members plus roughly 174,000 qualifying Reserve and National Guard personnel will receive it; generals and admirals are excluded. The money comes from reprogramming about $2.6 billion of $2.9 billion previously designated to supplement housing allowance funds in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Military families welcomed the relief amid inflation, debt, and food insecurity, though advocates and some lawmakers questioned the tradeoff versus longer-term support like housing, child care, and sustained pay and benefits.

Comet: I saw a lot of posts on social media lambasting this because they said the money would not be tax free. But how much will this affect the economy? Surely the troops need the funds but how much difference will it make?

Military Welcomes $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividends’

WSJ

Trump, under pressure on the economy, announced servicemember bonuses. The extra cash ‘gives us a sense of relief,’ said one Army spouse

By Dan Frosch

Follow

 and Marcus Weisgerber

Follow

Dec. 18, 2025 7:27 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/military-welcomes-1-776-warrior-dividends-db7e00a8

President Trump speaking to troops aboard the USS George Washington in October. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

One Army staff sergeant said he planned on putting his $1,776 check from the federal government into his retirement fund. A longtime infantryman said he would invest the money in the stock market. A military spouse said she intends to pay down credit-card debt her family has incurred from basic expenses like food and baby supplies.

“It may not seem like a lot to normal Americans, but it’s like getting an extra paycheck for us,” said Meghan Holliday, whose husband is an Army staff sergeant. “Especially during the holidays, it gives us a sense of relief. We won’t have to stretch as much as we usually have to.”

During a speech defending his economic policies on Wednesday night, President Trump announced the checks—a nod to the year the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain.

Trump said that U.S. military servicemembers will receive the checks before Christmas, calling the payments a “warrior dividend.”

Meghan Holliday, right, and her husband, Staff Sergeant Nathan Tivnan. Meghan Holliday

“Nobody deserves it more than our military, and I say congratulations to everybody,” Trump said, adding the checks “are already on their way.”

Troops should receive the money by Dec. 20, according to a Pentagon official.

The money for the bonuses comes from relabeling of funds included in the One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress earlier this year, according to a video post on X from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Thursday morning. That funding exists no matter how much the U.S. collects in tariffs.

The Pentagon is using $2.6 billion of $2.9 billion that was designated to supplement basic housing allowance funds for the military, which came from Trump’s signature legislation, to pay out the bonuses, a Pentagon official said.

In addition to their basic pay, military members get monthly housing allowances that aren’t taxable. It wasn’t immediately clear how the disbursement of most of the $2.9 billion from the law virtually overnight would impact further housing relief for the military in the coming years.

The tax-free bonus will be paid to 1.28 million active-duty servicemembers and 174,000 members of the Reserves and National Guard who have been on active-duty orders of 31 days or more as of Nov. 30, according to the Pentagon official. Generals and admirals won’t receive the bonus.

Soldiers and military support groups met the news with guarded optimism.

President Trump unveiled the bonus plan in an address to the nation from the White House on Wednesday. Doug Mills/Press POOL

“While this bonus will provide meaningful relief, we are urging servicemembers to use it, where possible, to build emergency savings—particularly given the continued uncertainty and the risk of another shutdown early next year,” said Shannon Razsadin, chief executive of the Military Family Advisory Network, a national research organization that serves the military community.

Samuel Kathungu, an Army staff sergeant, said he welcomed the money but didn’t think it would make much of a difference in soldiers’ financial situation.

“It will help a little, but knowing soldiers, they will spend it really quickly,” he said. “I don’t see how it plays into the bigger financial picture for anyone if it’s just a one-time thing.” Kathungu said he plans to put the money into his IRA.

Some servicemembers and their families have faced economic challenges for years, a problem that has spanned administrations. Many rely on a single income, and military spouses often struggle to find jobs given frequent base moves, which take place on average about every 27 months. Tens of thousands of military members and their families have been showing up at food pantries because of financial strains.

Samuel Kathungu Samuel Kathungu

Monica Bassett, whose nonprofit Stronghold Food Pantry delivers food items to military families across the U.S., said many families were happy about the bonuses but wondered if such a large amount of money could have been used for something more long-term.

“We’re grateful, and we appreciate the nice gesture,” she said. “At the same time, could there have been a better use of these funds for military families—whether it’s housing, child care or food insecurity.”

Military pay for junior enlisted servicemembers ranges from about $57,000 to about $72,000 annually depending on rank, according to federal data, including a military allowance for housing. Congress in 2024 approved a 4.5% pay raise for all troops, and an additional 10% pay increase for junior enlisted servicemembers. Both went into effect this year.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the checks “absolutely” are an appropriate use of the housing funds. He said the administration had consulted him.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What is your reaction to the “military dividend”? Join the conversation below.

Some Republican members of the Senate’s powerful appropriations committee, which is tasked with allocating federal funds, said they had been unaware of the proposal and were still awaiting answers.

Javier Hernandez has been in the Army for nearly two decades and plans on becoming a financial counselor after he leaves. He said he had mixed feelings about the bonuses. From speaking with his fellow soldiers on Thursday, Hernandez said he got the sense that most would spend the extra money swiftly, especially around the holiday season.

“I really haven’t had time to really digest how I feel about it, because I don’t really like a socialist system, or freebies,” he said. “I want to take the $1,776 and put it into the S&P 500 and track it year by year, and experiment with how much it grows.”

Write to Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com and Marcus Weisgerber at marcus.weisgerber@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

WSJ

16. Winning the long game: Sustaining sea power as our enduring advantage

​Summary:

Adm. Daryl Caudle argues U.S. sea power remains the enduring strategic advantage but the margin of naval supremacy is narrowing as competitors build forces to contest U.S. power projection in the Western Pacific and operate globally. He calls for credible deterrence through readiness, modernization, and industrial capacity. The Navy’s near-term target is 80 percent combat-surge readiness for ships, submarines, and aircraft by January 2027, enabled by faster maintenance, spares, training, and upgrades. Modernization priorities include Columbia-class SSBN production, a balanced fleet of carriers, large and small combatants, submarines, unmanned systems, and directed energy. He emphasizes resilient C2 networks, AI-enabled decision support, and workforce growth, including selective allied shipbuilding cooperation.

Winning the long game: Sustaining sea power as our enduring advantage

militarytimes.com · Adm. Daryl Caudle, 34th chief of naval operations · December 18, 2025

https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/2025/12/18/winning-the-long-game-sustaining-sea-power-as-our-enduring-advantage/?utm

In 2025, the U.S. Navy marks 250 years of protecting the American people, defending our values and enabling our prosperity. From the age of sail to an era of nuclear propulsion, long-range strike and undersea dominance, our Navy has been the decisive instrument that keeps danger far from our shores and opportunity close at hand. But as we commemorate this legacy, we must also confront a strategic environment unlike any we have faced in generations.

For decades, American naval supremacy has been assumed. Today, that margin is narrowing.

Our adversaries are building vessels explicitly designed to contest our ability to project power, support allies and operate in the Western Pacific and beyond. Today, we are no longer the only Navy to have an aircraft carrier with electromagnetic catapults that enable heavier, long-range aircraft as well as future unmanned aerial vehicles.

Our adversaries are also sailing their ships far beyond their territorial waters, signaling a willingness to operate globally and challenge U.S. dominance on the world’s oceans.

RELATED

CNO dishes on sailor wellbeing, US Navy success in era of competition

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle sat down with Military Times to discuss his ambitions for maritime dominance in 2026 and beyond.

As our strategic competitors expand both capacity and reach, they are studying every move we make. Across the Indo-Pacific, their surveillance ships closely monitor our posture, logistics operations and multilateral exercises. They chart undersea routes, map chokepoints and track how we maneuver with allies and partners.

In this environment, deterrence is not achieved by rhetoric or presence alone. It requires credible, modern, combat-ready naval power.

That is why the U.S. Navy must stay ready, modernize rapidly and invest wisely — because the world is no longer defined by uncontested seas or predictable, slowly evolving threats.

We are driving toward an ambitious but essential readiness goal: By January 2027, 80% of our ships, submarines and aircraft will be combat-surge ready. Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, increased spare-parts availability, improved training pipelines and targeted upgrades across the fleet.

Readiness is not a budget line — it is a promise to the American people that their Navy will never arrive late to a fight.

Modernization is more than keeping pace; it is about leap-ahead advantages that deter war and, if necessary, win decisively.

We are accelerating production of the Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine, the bedrock of our nation’s nuclear deterrent. A recent $2.28 billion contract for five hulls underscores our commitment to sustaining this unmatched strategic capability for decades.

But the fleet of the future must be more than larger — it must be more intelligent, more resilient and more lethal. That requires a balanced mix of aircraft carriers, large and small surface combatants, submarines, unmanned systems and emerging technologies that can out-think, out-sense and out-fight any adversary at a time and place of our choosing.

The carrier — long the symbol of American sea power — remains indispensable. But its future lies in pairing the flight deck with a new generation of stealth aircraft, longer-range strike platforms, unmanned systems and advanced refueling concepts that extend reach and complicate an adversary’s calculus. The air wing of the future must be survivable, dispersed, networked and able to operate in highly contested environments.

Large surface combatants will provide resilient command-and-control, unmatched payload volume, abundant electrical power and sensor reach needed for high-end fights, while small surface combatants — nimble, lethal, affordable, easy to build — will provide distributed fires, deception, escort capability and maritime security in places where presence deters and absence invites risk.

The balance of these platforms is not a luxury — it is an operational necessity.

New technologies are reshaping the character of maritime warfare faster than at any time in our history. The Navy is moving decisively to stay ahead. Directed-energy weapons like HELIOS are already being tested on ships, but more powerful high-energy laser and microwave systems are an imperative to counter drone swarms, cruise missiles and fast inshore threats.

Unmanned systems will multiply the reach and lethality of our manned platforms. Through initiatives such as Replicator, medium and large unmanned surface vessels, autonomous ISR platforms and long-endurance undersea drones, the fleet is becoming more distributed, more adaptive and more unpredictable to any adversary.

These platforms will only realize their full potential through a modernized command-and-control architecture that fuses sensors, weapons and decision-tools into a unified operational picture.

That is why we are investing in resilient networks, artificial intelligence for decision support and battle-management systems that accelerate warfighters’ ability to find, fix and finish threats at machine speed while preserving human judgment where it matters most.

Even the most advanced fleet will fail without a strong industrial base, a skilled workforce and world-class sailors. We are expanding the Maritime Industrial Base Program to grow workforce capacity through advanced technical training in welding, CNC machining, additive manufacturing and nondestructive testing. The new Maritime Training Center now produces roughly 1,000 trained workers annually — talent that goes directly into our shipyards.

Until American yards fully recover from workforce shortages, supply chain fragility and lack of automation, we are exploring responsible cooperation with allied shipbuilders in places like South Korea and Japan to bridge near-term gaps in maintenance, repair and production. These partnerships create strategic depth today while buying time for U.S. shipyards to modernize and expand for tomorrow.

We must be ruthlessly honest about our readiness and relentlessly innovative in our solutions. America does not want a fair fight — we want a fleet so capable, so ready and so forward that the fight never begins.

Sea power has always been a reflection of national will. If we intend to remain the world’s preeminent maritime power, we must match our ambition with the resources, stability and strategic discipline required.

What we protect is greater than what we project. We protect freedom of movement, freedom of trade and freedom of thought. As we look beyond this 250th anniversary, we must recommit to maritime superiority with stable funding, accelerated shipbuilding and repair and a bold embrace of innovation — from machine learning to advanced ship design to new operational concepts.

As the 34th chief of naval operations, I clearly see the challenges ahead. I also recognize the immense promise of opportunity. A strong Navy does more than secure our shores; it preserves America’s future. Let us honor those who stood the watch before us by preparing the fleet that will sail long after us.

Sea power is America’s first line of defense — and our last great advantage. We are committed to preserving it.

Adm. Daryl Caudle, the 34th chief of naval operations, is a North Carolina native and 1985 graduate of North Carolina State University. Commissioned through Officer Candidate School, he went on to command multiple submarines and hold major operational and strategic leadership roles, including commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Submarine Forces and Allied Submarine Command, as well as serving in key Joint Staff positions. His sea tours included assignments on several attack and ballistic-missile submarines, and his ashore roles ranged from nuclear training and cyberspace policy to senior staff leadership. Caudle was sworn in as CNO on Aug. 25, 2025.

17. Special operators seek larger ranges for electronic warfare and drone development and training

Summary​:

U.S. Army Special Warfare Center and School leaders are seeking expanded U.S. ranges where they can legally jam cellular and GPS signals to train for modern drone and electronic warfare conditions seen in Ukraine. They argue troops must operate in pervasive, high-power jamming and against drones that use fiber-optic control, autonomy, and AI-enabled targeting that reduces reliance on jammable links. SWCS has launched a new tactical SIGINT and electronic warfare course and expanded robotics training, but current domestic restrictions force workarounds and travel to limited range complexes. Only a few U.S. sites regularly support GPS and cellular jamming, and FAA permissions are infrequent. Recent Pentagon policy and NDAA provisions may improve range access and embed EW in SOF exercises.

Comment: A difficult problem since the spillover effects of jamming can be dangerous to non-military activities in the area.

Special operators seek larger ranges for electronic warfare and drone development and training

“We're going to start having some of these uncomfortable discussions,” said one official.

defenseone.com · Patrick Tucker

By Patrick Tucker

Science & Technology Editor

December 17, 2025

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/12/special-operators-seek-expanded-electronic-drone-warfare-test-sites-us/410248/?utm

U.S. special warfare trainers are asking government regulators to expand the areas where the military can jam cellular and GPS signals to simulate a modern warfare environment, officials said Tuesday.

The need is urgent, officials from the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, or SWCS, said, because—as seen in Ukraine—drones and electronic warfare are soaring in importance.

U.S. troops must learn to operate amid jamming that is far more powerful and ubiquitous than just a few years ago. In Ukraine, this has led to drones controlled by fiber-optic cables or even their own autonomous systems.

Some Russian drones use high-powered (and often illicitly acquired) chips to pick out targets based on things like shape and size, reducing their dependence on jammable communications or navigation systems.

Students at the school are deeply familiar with these trends. “They follow people in Ukraine,” Lt. Col. Nicholas Caputo, commander of the 6th Battalion, 2nd Special Warfare Training Group, said in an interview. Those students, training for future conflict, “expect us to make sure all of that is integrated through their pipeline.”

This year the center launched a new course for Army tactical signal intelligence and electronic warfare. “We have done one pilot, one iteration of this to figure out: What do we really need to teach? What's the resourcing? What are the instructors? … What can the Department of the Army gain” beyond special operations forces? Caputo said.

The pilot ran from July to October, with 15 students enrolled. A new class is to begin next May.

The Army has also created a new robotics detachment, launched in March 2024, and, in May, a new specialist role for robot technicians.

In a statement, center commander Maj. Gen. Jason Slider said these new initiatives reflect the new reality of warfare: “Never again will there be a time in warfare where a soldier doesn’t throw a piece of robotic kit onto the ground, into the water, or into the air to perform some tactical task associated with aiding a partner force, gaining advantage over an adversary, and closing with and killing the enemy.”

But it is difficult to train for this future on U.S. soil, where civil authorities heavily restrict the use of GPS jammers and other electronic warfare weapons.

“If this is the future of warfare, then we need to collaboratively find a way to carve out airspace in order to employ these systems,” Caputo told Defense One in an interview. "We are still in the early stages of coordination as we prepare the request packet at SWCS. This packet will be submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other relevant agencies to increase the number of locations where such training can take place, at least temporarily," he said.

“We're going to start having some of these uncomfortable discussions” with civilian and federal authorities, he said. But it is thanks to new Pentagon policy efforts, like one launched in July, that the discussions are possible at all. “A year and a half ago, our predecessors were not making a lot of headway” on the issue. “This is now a priority.”

Congress has recognized the problem, somewhat. The most recent version of the NDAA includes provisions to link testing sites to improve range availability and mandates that EW become a feature in certain future exercises involving special operations forces.

More jammable space is also needed to practice creating and modifying drones on the battlefield, said the center’s Command Chief Warrant Officer Gary Ostrander. During the new six-week course for robotic technicians, instructors had to seek training areas away from Fort Bragg, N.C.

“Specifically, we're going to go to Alabama, which has a range complex capability where we can employ electronic measures to challenge those systems the way we program them, the way we are piloting them. The only limitation is that we cannot turn on GPS jammers, and that requires specific range training,” Ostrander said.

The Joint Staff manual on electronic warfare training says the United States has really only two sites where cellular and GPS jamming exercises or experiments occur regularly: the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and the Nevada Test and Training Range. The military occasionally tests GPS jamming in other locations, such as Fort Liberty (also called Fort Bragg) in North Carolina and Edwards Air Force Base in California. But the FAA has to grant that permission and then send out advisories describing how long the interruptions will last.

The FAA has sent out only 10 advisories of pending GPS interruptions in 2025, according to publicly available notices, which speaks to a now-obsolete view of GPS in general, as an attribute the U.S. had long-term control over. That assumption led the military to build out arsenals of missiles and other weapons that used GPS for greater precision. But the government also saw the value in allowing telecommunications companies access to the GPS signal to build out commercial applications. As more and more services, businesses, and people came to rely on GPS, the U.S. military set up elaborate bureaucratic processes for testing in a GPS-denied environment, processes involving multiple federal agencies and the use of a heavily restricted Air Force-owned GPS modeling tools to calculate the duration and impact of the test on spectrum availability, notes the manual.

The problem now is that America’s enemies need not go through those processes to see how GPS and electronic warfare affect drone or software designs. They can just pay a visit to Ukraine’s front lines.

defenseone.com · Patrick Tucker

18. Review of Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics by Ben Gans

​Summary:

Alex Deep’s review argues Ben Gans usefully reopens the question of what makes an operation “special” as cyber, space, and information blur traditional boundaries, but the book often inflates the term by equating “special” with “complex” or “elite.” Deep says several case studies resemble sophisticated conventional operations, diluting SOF’s distinctive value: economy of force, discreet employment, and strategic effects disproportionate to size under political oversight. He credits Gans for highlighting how technology diffusion erodes SOF’s monopoly on high risk missions and how doctrine lags multidomain reality. Deep concludes the book provokes needed debate, but needs tighter doctrinal rigor and clearer criteria for special operations.

Comment: As an aside, we need to be able to contrast the most popular and visible of SOF activities - the hyper conventional direct action raid to capture/kill high value targets at the time and place of our choosing (and are no-fail missions) with the long duration activities conducted by, with, and through indigenous forces in support of national objectives.

My views: “What is of supreme importance is to attack the enemy's strategy. Irregular warfare activities are how we can attack strategies. Large scale combat operations (LSCO) win through maneuver and attrition. Irregular, unconventional, and political warfare win through exhaustion.”-Sun Tzu (and me)

Our exquisite national or special mission capabilities attack high value targets for strategic effect. Our special warfare capabilities attack strategies through indigenous forces, populations, and influence. Both have their complementary roles in irregular warfare in support of a national level political warfare strategy. And they both play important supporting roles to the Joint Force in LSCO.

But based on Alex' review I am not sure I am going to drop $144 for this book.

Review of Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics by Ben Gans

irregularwarfare.org · Alex Deep · December 19, 2025

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/review-of-special-operations-and-national-security-policies-strategies-and-tactics-by-ben-gans/

When everything is “special,” nothing is.

In Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics, Ben Gans confronts an enduring and increasingly relevant question: what exactly constitutes a special operation in the modern era? As technological innovation, multidomain integration, and the blurring of military and intelligence activities reshape contemporary warfare, that question has become harder to answer. Gans deserves credit for engaging it head-on and for reminding readers that “special” should denote more than mere difficulty, danger, or daring. Yet, while the book offers useful provocation, its examples often conflate special operations with complex conventional ones—an error that risks obscuring rather than clarifying what makes special operations unique. Even where his conceptual clarity falters, Gans performs an important service by forcing readers to grapple with the fundamental problem of how we categorize military activities in an era when technological capabilities increasingly outpace our conceptual vocabularies.

Defining “Special” in Special Operations

Since at least the Second World War, special operations have occupied a liminal space between the conventional and unconventional. They are designed to achieve strategic effects disproportionate to their size, often through asymmetric means, and typically under conditions that demand precision, speed, and political sensitivity. Doctrine provides helpful, if imperfect, boundaries: U.S. joint doctrine defines special operations as “operations requiring unique modes of employment, tactical techniques, equipment, and training often conducted in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments.” These criteria separate “special” from the routine or conventional military operation.

Gans argues that defining special operations depends on the “specific mission” and the “respective context,” while special operations forces (SOF) are easier to define clearly based on the contours of their bureaucratic organization and operational capacity (13–14). In doing so, Gans revisits the modern battlefield’s expanding domains—cyber, space, undersea, and informational—and asks the question “how do the personnel involved fulfill the strategic promise of special operations, given their position within the larger framework for policy”? (17). He argues that as warfare migrates into these arenas, the traditional boundaries of what constitutes a special operation may no longer apply. A cyber strike on an adversary’s satellite system, he suggests, might have effects similar in scale and risk to a cross-border raid. Likewise, small teams of space operators working under extreme secrecy could mirror the mission profile of traditional SOF elements.

These are valuable questions, and Gans is right to raise them. The book’s best sections highlight how the diffusion of technology and information has eroded the monopoly of traditional SOF on high-risk, high-reward missions. Gans’s call to revisit the institutional and doctrinal boundaries of “special operations” is both timely and necessary, particularly as states and nonstate actors increasingly operate in the gray zone between overt and covert conflict.

When Everything Is Special

The problem, however, is that Gans often treats “special” as synonymous with “complex,” “elite,” or “politically important.” Many of the case studies he presents—ranging from large-scale counterterrorism campaigns to conventional amphibious operations—fail to meet even the broadest doctrinal criteria for special operations. These are not “special” in their conception or execution; they are simply joint or combined operations involving sophisticated capabilities or sensitive targets. For example, the chapter on Operation Orchard describes a conventional attack by the Israeli Air Force against the Al-Kibar nuclear site in Syria. While a good case study in the planning and execution of a precision airstrike with strategic effects, nothing about the operation was outside the bounds of what a premier Air Force can deliver.

This conceptual inflation matters. The value of special operations lies in their economy of force—their ability to achieve disproportionate strategic effect through limited means. When every difficult mission is labeled “special,” we risk diluting that meaning and misunderstanding the kind of problems SOF are designed to solve.

In this sense, Gans’s book unintentionally exacerbates a trend: the impulse to brand as “special” any capability or activity that departs from conventional forces restricted to conventional engagement. As cyber, space, and information operations proliferate, the temptation to apply the “special” label grows. Yet the attributes that make an operation “special”—discreet employment, strategic precision, and policy-level oversight—are not automatically transferable to every high-tech or domain-spanning activity.

An F-35 strike deep in denied airspace or a submarine-launched cyber intrusion may be sophisticated, strategically significant, or sensitive in nature, but those attributes alone do not make them “special.” The distinction is not semantic—it is functional. SOF exist to provide decision-makers with options that are feasible, acceptable, and suitable where conventional forces or covert intelligence tools are not. Blurring that distinction confuses mission design, training pipelines, and resourcing priorities.

Strengths in Conceptual Framing

Despite its definitional drift, Gans’s conceptual instinct is sound. His recognition that modern operations increasingly blend military and nonmilitary tools—kinetic and informational, physical and virtual—is spot on. The book also succeeds in drawing attention to how bureaucratic seams between military, intelligence, and diplomatic entities complicate integrated campaigns.

In particular, his argument that the fusion of domains has outpaced the development of doctrine deserves amplification. This observation parallels challenges that Western militaries have faced in integrating irregular and conventional warfare approaches. Just as Israel and Iran struggle to calibrate between direct and indirect means, modern militaries risk oscillating between kinetic and cyber, overt and covert, without a coherent political strategy or theory of victory.

Gans’s work is at its best when he explores these structural and doctrinal misalignments rather than the operational details of specific missions. He rightly cautions that the next generation of special operations will require cross-domain fluency and political savvy—operators who understand not only the mechanics of breaching a door or inserting by submarine but also how those actions interplay with cyber, informational, and diplomatic effects.

This is a message worth reinforcing. The United States and its allies are entering an era where SOF must operate as integrators across the competition continuum, not merely as precision strike assets. Gans grasps that challenge intuitively, even if the examples he uses to illustrate it occasionally miss the mark.

Which Forces Aren’t Special?

The book’s weakness stems from an overly inclusive conception of “special operations” and an absence of doctrinal rigor in distinguishing them from other forms of military action. The result is an analytical framework so elastic that almost any small-scale or politically sensitive operation could qualify as “special.”

This elasticity obscures one of the field’s enduring truths: special operations are defined less by their tools than by their purpose. A raid, a rescue, a sabotage mission, or an advisory campaign earns the “special” label not because of the platform used but because of the problem it is designed to solve and the political risk it entails.

Moreover, Gans occasionally implies that technological complexity alone can render an operation “special.” This reverses causality. It is not the sophistication of the tool but the asymmetry of the effect—its ability to achieve strategic results disproportionate to inputs—that distinguishes special operations. A cyber intrusion that disables an adversary’s air-defense network in advance of a strike may be special if it relies on the unique physical access and placement to a denied area that only a SOF team could provide, either unilaterally or through a surrogate or proxy; a denial-of-service attack that merely disrupts communications is not.

By conflating the two, the book risks perpetuating the same conceptual confusion that has dogged defense institutions since the 9/11 era, when the “special” label became a growth industry. The result is a form of mission creep—both bureaucratic and intellectual—where SOF are tasked with missions that lack the strategic distinctiveness or risk profile that justify their employment.

Gans’s underlying insight, however, still stands: that the definition of “special operations” must evolve in response to the changing character of war, but not so far that it loses coherence. A firmer editorial hand could have sharpened the book’s argument and tightened its examples without diminishing its ambitious scope.

Policy and Institutional Implications

Gans’s work arrives at a time when defense institutions are reassessing the balance between conventional and irregular capabilities, and between SOF and general-purpose forces. The renewed focus on state competition and deterrence has led some to argue that SOF should pivot toward enabling joint warfighting campaigns in large-scale conflict and enabling asymmetric self-defense of vulnerable allies and partners. Others contend that the future of special operations lies in how SOF, space, and cyber capabilities can yield amplified effects. While still others see SOF in its more traditional role since 9/11 of counterterrorism, crisis response, and working with-and-through allies and partners. These camps are not necessarily mutually exclusive but do require prioritization.

All these camps can find support in Gans’s text—but they should also heed its cautionary lesson. As states expand their definition of what constitutes a special operation, they risk eroding the specialization that gives SOF their comparative advantage. If every domain has its own “special” component—special cyber, special space—the term ceases to denote a distinct culture or capability set.

This inflation has practical consequences. It dilutes standards, fragments command structures, and confuses policymakers about what SOF can realistically deliver. The enduring value of special operations lies in their ability to operate in ambiguity—not to become the catchall solution for every ambiguous problem, especially if political leaders do not understand the opportunities and limitations of special operations capabilities.

Re-centering the Definition

A more precise approach would begin with key principles: (1) Does the operation seek strategic effect disproportionate to the force employed? (2) Does it require unique skills, training, or capabilities unavailable to general-purpose forces? (3) Does it involve political or operational risk demanding a discrete chain of command and oversight?

Only when all three conditions are met should an operation qualify as “special.” Applying this framework to Gans’s examples would yield a far narrower—but far more meaningful—universe of special operations.

Conclusion

Ben Gans’s Special Operations and National Security is an ambitious and thought-provoking attempt to reframe special operations in an era of multidomain conflict. It succeeds in asking the right question: what makes an operation truly special? It stumbles in the answer, often conflating complexity with uniqueness and stretching definitions beyond doctrinal or practical coherence.

Still, this is a valuable book for practitioners and scholars alike—not because it settles the debate, but because it reopens one that had grown complacent. Gans reminds us that the distinction between the conventional and the special is not fixed but must be guarded. As warfare extends into new domains, militaries must resist the temptation to redefine or reapply “special” until the term loses meaning—a lesson applicable to proponents of irregular warfare, as well.

In that sense, the book performs an inadvertent service. By overextending the definition, it forces readers to confront why limits matter—and why, in both irregular and special operations, discipline in definition is as important as innovation in practice.

Alex Deep is an Army Special Forces officer currently working as the Chief of Strategy and Analysis in the U.S. Special Operations Command Directorate of Strategy, Plans, and Policy. He has served in 3rd Special Forces Group throughout his career and taught courses in international relations and the politics of the Middle East in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Strategic Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Main Image: Swedish K3 Rangers conduct an ambush alongside Green Berets with U.S. Army 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) during Adamant Serpent 26 in Alvdalen, Sweden, Oct. 25, 2025. U.S. Special Operations Forces and NATO Allies demonstrate their unity through combined and joint trainings in support of NATO operations responding to emerging threats. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Reece Heck).

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

19. Shallow Waters, Big Lessons: What the Falklands War Reveals About Submarine Warfare

​Summary:

Liborio F. Palombella argues the Falklands War shows shallow-water physics, not torpedo inventory, often decides undersea combat. In cluttered littorals, noise, wrecks, and uneven seabeds degrade sonar and reward submarines that can hug the bottom, exploit masking, and survive the ASW hunt after firing. He highlights three episodes: the small diesel-electric ARA San Luis imposed sea denial and tied down British forces for weeks despite no confirmed hits; the larger, aging ARA Santa Fe could not safely dive in 40 to 50 meters and was quickly neutralized; and HMS Conqueror’s sinking of ARA General Belgrano drove Argentina’s surface fleet to port and reshaped the campaign.

Excerpts:

Conclusion

In future conflicts fought in confined and coastal seas, the decisive undersea assets will likely be compact submarines that are extraordinarily hard to find and destroy, yet capable of imposing heavy costs on much larger naval forces. Small enough to hide near the seabed, but large enough to carry full sensors and a modern torpedo outfit: This is the configuration recommended by the Falklands experience. A new generation of 300-ton compact submarines can now exploit similar littoral physics even more effectively: they retain the ability to disappear in cluttered coastal environments, but overcome the classic limitations of midget boats or unmanned underwater vehicles in endurance, payload, command and control, and sensors, thus making them the true leading edge of submarine development and the most dangerous undersea adversaries in littoral warfare. Once again, these conclusions apply primarily to the littoral domain. In the open ocean, endurance and payload still matter greatly. Many of the world’s most likely theaters for future maritime confrontation, however — from the Baltic and the Arabian Gulf to large parts of the South China Sea — are shallow, noisy, and cluttered.

In those increasingly contested and crowded waters, the stealth achieved by staying close to the seabed and maintaining strict acoustic discipline may matter more than displacement or the sheer number of weapons carried — just as it did in 1982.

Shallow Waters, Big Lessons: What the Falklands War Reveals About Submarine Warfare

warontherocks.com ·  December 19, 2025

Liborio F. Palombella

December 19, 2025

https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/shallow-waters-big-lessons-what-the-falklands-war-reveals-about-submarine-warfare/

In the midst of the Falklands War, British sailors hunting for ARA San Luis launched ordnance at the sonar and radar signals of whales, wrecks, and even flocks of seagulls — anything that might have been a submarine hiding in the cluttered, shallow seabed or skulking along the jagged coastline. Capt. John Francis Howard, commanding officer of the British frigate HMS Brilliant, would later recount his “total frustration” at the chaotic nature of his crew’s hunt for the elusive Argentinian diesel-electric submarine.

The war remains one of the very few real-world examples of post-World War II submarine combat and is rife with lessons for contemporary naval planners. Most notably, unlike the classic convoy battles of the 1940s, what made the difference in this conflict was not the marathon endurance of the submarine crews, or the number of torpedoes they carried on board, but the peculiar physics of shallow water. In messy littorals — full of wrecks, kelp forests, and irregular seabeds that raise the ambient noise level — the side that can operate close to the bottom, exploit these natural disturbances, and survive the inevitable anti-submarine hunt after firing holds the decisive advantage.

In such environments, loading a submarine with a very large torpedo arsenal brings serious drawbacks: greater draft, stronger acoustic and magnetic signatures, and narrower maneuvering margins near the seabed. All too often, any gain in firepower is cancelled out by a loss of stealth and survivability, especially in crowded, shallow littorals.

Three episodes from the Falklands campaign illustrate this logic clearly. ARA San Luis managed to slow down a superior British task force for weeks, despite firing only a handful of torpedoes. The elderly ARA Santa Fe, a World War II-era boat, was quickly neutralized because it was simply too large for the coastal shallows in which it was forced to operate. Finally, HMS Conqueror’s torpedo attack that sank the cruiser ARA General Belgrano removed Argentina’s main surface threat in a single stroke and reshaped the naval campaign.

BECOME A MEMBER

ARA San Luis: Small, Silent, and Strategically Disproportionate

ARA San Luis was a German-built diesel-electric submarine of about 1,200 tons, deployed in mid-April 1982 with a relatively inexperienced crew and several serious defects — including a failed fire-control computer, which forced the crew to fire torpedoes manually in emergency mode.

For almost a month, ARA San Luis patrolled silently to the north of the Falklands, exposing itself only for three isolated attacks, on May 1, 8, and 10. None of these shots resulted in a confirmed hit. The first two torpedoes failed due to technical issues, and the third struck only a towed acoustic decoy deployed by a British ship.

Yet despite the lack of hits, ARA San Luis had an enormous strategic impact. On May 1, after its first shot, the submarine triggered an intense day-long anti-submarine hunt by British forces: dozens of depth charges and multiple torpedoes were launched at suspected positions, many of them based on false or ambiguous contacts in the noisy environment. During this time, ARA San Luis lay silent on the seabed at roughly 70 meters depth, using the irregular bottom and high ambient noise to mask its presence.

More broadly, the mere possibility that ARA San Luis might be lying in wait forced the British task force to move more cautiously. The presence of a single silent submarine slowed operations, consumed valuable anti-submarine warfare resources, and forced escorts and carriers onto more conservative routes and dispositions. This amounted to a form of sea denial — the denial of assured control of the sea — achieved by just one quiet diesel-electric boat.

ARA Santa Fe: When Shallow Waters Punish Size

If ARA San Luis showed the advantages of a compact, quiet submarine, the story of ARA Santa Fe illustrates the opposite problem: what happens when a large, aging boat is forced to operate in very shallow coastal waters.

ARA Santa Fe was an old-World War II-era diesel-electric submarine, originally built for the U.S. Navy and later transferred to Argentina. In April 1982 it was sent to resupply the Argentine garrison on South Georgia Island and land reinforcements. Sailing on April 16, ARA Santa Fe managed to slip through British anti-submarine surveillance and complete the mission, delivering troops and material to the island.

The real crisis came on Apr. 25. After unloading men and supplies, ARA Santa Fe attempted to withdraw from the area. However, the waters around South Georgia are extremely shallow, with depths of only around 40–50 meters in key channels. For a submarine of roughly 2,500 tons, this was simply not enough water to safely dive and maneuver.

With limited battery charge and unable to submerge effectively, ARA Santa Fe was forced to remain on or near the surface, moving slowly. In that condition, it became an easy target. British helicopters attacked with depth charges and anti-ship missiles, quickly causing serious damage. The submarine lost propulsion and began taking on water. With no way to escape or fight back effectively, the crew had no choice but to beach the submarine and abandon it. They soon surrendered to British forces.

The lesson is fundamentally about physics, not age. A large submarine that cannot dive in shallow water becomes an almost defenseless target. A smaller boat, with a shallower draft, might have had the option of hugging the seabed, taking advantage of the irregular bottom and environmental clutter to hide or slip away.

My own experience as a submarine commander confirms this principle. With a small submarine (Toti class), I could begin the dive with as little as roughly 30 meters of water beneath the keel. On larger submarines (Sauro class), we would wait for at least 70–80 meters of depth before submerging, in order to maintain safe vertical clearance from both seabed and surface. In coastal scenarios, those extra meters can make the difference between escaping and being detected and destroyed.

HMS Conqueror vs. ARA General Belgrano: Undersea Control Decides the Campaign

On May 2, 1982, the British nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror torpedoed and sank the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano. The ship went down rapidly with hundreds of sailors on board. The operational and psychological effects were enormous.

In the wake of the sinking, the Argentine aircraft carrier and all major surface units halted operations and retreated to home ports. Virtually overnight, the Argentine Navy’s main surface threat was removed from the open ocean. That single attack fundamentally changed the course of the campaign.

With the enemy’s surface fleet effectively neutralized, British submarines could maintain control of the waters around the islands, while British carriers and amphibious units maneuvered with much greater freedom. From that point on, the main axis of the conflict at sea shifted into the air domain.

When British forces launched their amphibious assault at San Carlos on May 21, they faced determined attacks from Argentine aviation, but no naval challenge from surface warships. A single successful submarine attack had force a major fleet to retreat, reshaping the entire campaign.

Undersea Lessons from the Falklands

The three distinct episodes in the Falklands war point to a series of broader — and still relevant — lessons and insights on the conduct of undersea warfare.

First, shallow water can be a great equalizer. High ambient noise, wrecks, kelp, and irregular seabeds degrade sonar performance, lengthen detection timelines, and make torpedo end-games less reliable. Even a navy as experienced as the Royal Navy struggled to locate and destroy a small diesel-electric submarine resting on the bottom and using the environment to mask its own noise — exactly what ARA San Luis did on May 1, when it settled at around 70 meters while helicopters and frigates dropped bombs and torpedoes on false contacts above.

Second, size matters — but not always in the way one might think, as larger boats are, in fact, often disadvantaged near the coast. ARA Santa Fe (around 2,500 tons) could not safely dive in 40–50 meters of water and was quickly neutralized by helicopter attacks. In contrast, ARA San Luis (around 1,200 tons) was able to remain near the seabed in less than 100 meters of water, repeatedly escaping detection and attack. Below roughly 70 meters, evasion becomes difficult for a large hull because of its deeper draft, greater inertia, and stronger signatures. Generally, a smaller, quieter submarine is far harder to detect and track, creating disproportionate problems for both surface ships and other submarines.

Third, the threat-in-being embodied by even one submarine can have disproportionate effects, even on occasion tying down an entire fleet. With only two operational submarines at sea, Argentina forced the Royal Navy to spread its anti-submarine assets across dozens of ships and helicopters. On May 1, the British employed multiple torpedoes and dozens of depth charges in an unsuccessful effort to pin down ARA San Luis in the shallows. This asymmetric effect is deliberate: A quiet submarine multiplies its impact far beyond the few torpedoes it carries. It compels the enemy to conduct continuous detection, classification, and attack cycles — often against false alarms in a difficult acoustic environment.

Fourth, firing opportunities are scarce, and stealth is everything. During nearly a month of patrol, ARA San Luis found only three opportunities to attack, and each time it could fire a single torpedo. Carrying a large load of weapons on board is often of limited practical value in such circumstances. The extra volume and noise associated with a very large torpedo battery can reduce a submarine’s ability to exploit those rare, fleeting windows where a shot is actually possible. In shallow water, after launching a torpedo, survival becomes the main challenge. A small, agile, and quiet boat has a far higher chance of slipping away than a larger submarine burdened with weapons it may never have time to use. In this sense, “right-sizing” the magazine to the number of shots a submarine can realistically take makes more sense than simply maximizing the number of tubes and weapons.

Fifth, undersea dominance shapes the surface fight. After the sinking of ARA General Belgrano, Argentina’s main surface units stayed in port and did not come out again. Carrier operations were suspended and planned naval attacks were cancelled. British forces thus gained freedom of maneuver at sea and could concentrate on countering Argentine airpower and supporting amphibious operations. Once again, control of the undersea domain translated directly into operational freedom above the surface.

Finally, in littoral waters the heavy torpedo remains the weapon of choice. Launching a missile from a submarine in coastal waters immediately reveals the general area of the firing platform, because the missile must break the surface and its launch signature is visible to radar and infrared sensors. This exposes the submarine to rapid counterattack. In many cases, the trade-off is not worth it. A heavyweight torpedo, by contrast, remains covert. It travels underwater and detonates beneath the target’s hull, often with devastating effect. In the coastal environment, the heavy torpedo therefore remains the most effective and survivable weapon a submarine can employ.

The Future of Undersea Warfare

Future submarine warfare is unlikely to resemble the convoy-hunting campaigns of World War II. It is far more probable that the next undersea battles will take place in confined littoral seas where current crises tend to concentrate — such as the Baltic, the Black Sea, or the Arabian Gulf — and in the coastal or archipelagic choke points of the western Pacific. These theaters are characterized by shallow depths, high levels of ambient noise, and a cluttered seabed.

Under these conditions, the physics of the environment penalize large platforms and reward submarines that can operate close to the bottom, exploit terrain masking, and disappear quickly after firing.

This is precisely why the Falklands War remains so instructive. Fought in a shallow-water context, it provides a rare, real-world case of how submarines can survive and exert influence in such conditions. Its lessons remain valid today, as a number of contemporary Chinese scholars and military analysts have observed. By contrast, combat in the deep, open oceans demands a different set of characteristics in terms of endurance and payload. Looking beyond the operational lessons, however, what insights can tease out for the future of submarine force design?

Implications for Submarine Force Design

First, if future conflicts are likely to unfold in shallow, “dirty” waters, navies should prioritize submarines that can operate and hide in that environment. A boat of only a few hundred tons can maneuver in 30–50 meters of water, where a conventional 2,000-ton submarine has limited room to turn, trim, and conceal itself. The larger boat has greater draft and a larger acoustic and magnetic footprint — in shallow water it simply cannot maneuver or hide as effectively. After firing, it has fewer options to evade.

This does not mean fleets should rely solely on midget submarines of under 100 tons. Such very small craft excel in specialized roles — special forces insertion, sabotage or mining in ports — but lack the space, power, and crew capacity to carry a full set of sensors and engage in prolonged combat operations. The ideal combat submarine for littoral operations should strike a balance: small enough to disappear near the bottom, but large enough to carry modern sensors, communications, and a sufficient crew.

In littoral environments, firing windows are few and brief. Designing a submarine to carry 12–14 heavyweight torpedoes means adding volume and displacement that rarely translate into actual kills. It is more sensible to equip a compact submarine with a modest but modern arsenal, emphasizing quiet launch systems, immediate post-shot concealment, and high-quality sensors and training to seize the right moment. A smaller, quieter boat with “enough” weapons — rather than an oversized load — is more likely to be ready, undetected, and survivable when those crucial moments arrive. A larger submarine weighed down by unused weapons may never be in a position to employ them effectively.

The extensive use of unmanned underwater vehicles can complement these manned platforms. Unmanned underwater vehicles can provide additional sensing, act as decoys, and carry a limited number of weapons, all while remaining difficult to detect. Several navies are already investing in large, long-endurance unmanned programs, such as the U.S. Navy’s Orca extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Manta Ray demonstrator, and Israel’s BlueWhale autonomous submarine. Designed to loiter for weeks, sweep mines, patrol chokepoints, and guard seabed infrastructure, these systems push much of the risk and attrition away from scarce, high-value manned submarines. Together, compact manned submarines and distributed unmanned underwater vehicles can form a resilient and lethal undersea force tailored to the physics of the littoral.

Conclusion

In future conflicts fought in confined and coastal seas, the decisive undersea assets will likely be compact submarines that are extraordinarily hard to find and destroy, yet capable of imposing heavy costs on much larger naval forces. Small enough to hide near the seabed, but large enough to carry full sensors and a modern torpedo outfit: This is the configuration recommended by the Falklands experience. A new generation of 300-ton compact submarines can now exploit similar littoral physics even more effectively: they retain the ability to disappear in cluttered coastal environments, but overcome the classic limitations of midget boats or unmanned underwater vehicles in endurance, payload, command and control, and sensors, thus making them the true leading edge of submarine development and the most dangerous undersea adversaries in littoral warfare. Once again, these conclusions apply primarily to the littoral domain. In the open ocean, endurance and payload still matter greatly. Many of the world’s most likely theaters for future maritime confrontation, however — from the Baltic and the Arabian Gulf to large parts of the South China Sea — are shallow, noisy, and cluttered.

In those increasingly contested and crowded waters, the stealth achieved by staying close to the seabed and maintaining strict acoustic discipline may matter more than displacement or the sheer number of weapons carried — just as it did in 1982.

BECOME A MEMBER

Liborio F. Palombella is a retired admiral of the Italian Navy with a long operational career in submarines and surface combatants. He commanded both the 500-ton Toti-class submarine ITS Dandolo and the 2,000-ton Sauro-class submarine ITS Pelosi, as well as the anti-submarine warfare frigate ITS Scirocco and the destroyer ITS Duilio. He later served as head of the Evaluation and Analysis Team at the Italian Navy Training Center and as head of operations at the Italian High Seas Fleet Command. He holds master’s degrees in Maritime and Naval Sciences and in Political Science, and a postgraduate master’s in Strategic Studies.

Image: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com ·  December 19, 2025

20. Latin America’s Revolution of the Right

​Summary:

Brian Winter argues Latin America’s new revolutionary energy is shifting to the right, led by Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele, who now wield outsized influence across the region and abroad. He links the trend to voter anger over worsening crime, disappointment with leftist governance, migration pressures, and the rise of evangelical politics, alongside polling that shows growing right-wing identification. Conservatives are winning or leading in several countries, and many are embracing tougher security policies and more pro-market reforms, while worrying less about climate and deforestation. Winter says POTUS’ return amplifies these dynamics, sometimes helping allies, sometimes triggering backlash.

Excerpts:

Beginning in the 1990s, a generation of leftist leaders got to know each other personally at events such as the São Paulo Forum, a conference of left-wing groups founded by Brazil’s Workers’ Party, aiding their regional coordination in later years. Today, many on Latin America’s new right are also forming close ties, including at events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, which began in the United States in the 1970s and has spread to the region in recent years. Guests have included Milei, Bukele, members of the Bolsonaro family, as well as Chile’s Kast. Some in the region are optimistic that those social bonds will lead to greater coordination on issues such as trade, infrastructure, and the fight against organized crime.

Finally, the shift may result in sea changes on a variety of other issues, as well. A more conservative Latin America will likely be less concerned with climate change or deforestation in the Amazon, especially if the right returns to power in Brazil. Some right-wing leaders may also try to close their countries’ borders to further immigration; Kast proposed building a U.S.-style border barrier and deporting unauthorized migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Social issues such as abortion may also gain importance in national politics, given the rising percentage of evangelical Christian voters in Brazil and several other countries in the region. In a possible sign of things to come, in July, Milei helped inaugurate Argentina’s largest evangelical church, which can fit 10,000 people. In his speech to the faithful, he quoted the Bible, Max Weber, and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in explaining how “Judeo-Christian values” have informed his government’s policies.

Indeed, today’s Latin America is a region where the tone and substance of some political events would not seem out of place in Texas or Nebraska; where mainstream political leaders speak glowingly of fiscal discipline and police crackdowns; and where demands for social justice seem to have been superseded, at least for now, by invective against narcoterrorists and socialist dictators. If today’s generation of right-wing leaders can gain and then maintain power, they believe they can create a Latin America that sheds its global reputation for crime and stagnant economic growth, collaborates more closely with like-minded governments in the United States and Europe, and is ultimately safe and prosperous—so its citizens will to want to stay instead of look for better lives elsewhere. That would not be a revolution in the way that Castro once used the term. But it would be a dramatic change nonetheless.

Latin America’s Revolution of the Right

Foreign Affairs · More by Brian Winter · December 16, 2025

The Forces Remaking the Region in the Age of Trump

Brian Winter

January/February 2026 Published on December 16, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/south-america/revolution-right-brian-winter

Matt Rota

Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

From virtually the moment he and his band of bearded rebels rode into Havana in 1959 until his death from natural causes in 2016, the most iconic leader in Latin America was Fidel Castro. With his trademark military fatigues, slender Cohiba cigars, and marathon speeches vilifying Uncle Sam, Castro captured the imaginations of aspiring revolutionaries and millions of others around the world. Never content to merely govern Cuba, Castro worked tirelessly to export his ideas. His global network of allies and admirers grew over the decades to include leaders as diverse as Salvador Allende in Chile, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

El comandante would roll over in his grave if he learned that, today, the two Latin American figures who come closest to matching his global profile both hail from the ideological right. Javier Milei, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina who has wielded a chainsaw to symbolize his zeal for slashing the size of government, and Nayib Bukele, the bearded millennial leader of El Salvador, have built fervent followings at home and abroad. Instead of the ubiquitous Cuban revolutionary cry, ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre! (“Ever onward to victory!”), Milei’s libertarian catchphrase, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, damn it!”), is now showing up on T-shirts on some college campuses in the United States and being quoted by politicians as far away as Israel.

Like Castro in his day, both leaders are punching well above their countries’ weight in the global arena. Milei was the first head of state to meet U.S. President Donald Trump after his election in 2024, receiving a lavish welcome at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump has called Milei “my favorite president,” and in October he extended a $20 billion rescue package to Argentina—the largest such bailout by the United States for any country in 30 years. Milei’s success in cutting government bureaucracy and red tape, which helped bring inflation in Argentina from above 200 percent when he took office in 2023 to about 30 percent by late 2025, has been hailed as a model by the United Kingdom’s conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and many others on the European right. It has also made him a guru of sorts for libertarian Silicon Valley titans such as Elon Musk, who wielded Milei’s chainsaw onstage at a conference of conservatives in the United States in February. Meanwhile, Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has made him a wildly popular figure across much of Latin America and beyond, even as he unapologetically casts aside concerns about due process and human rights. (Some 81 percent of Chileans in a 2024 poll gave Bukele a positive rating, higher than that of any other global leader and more than double that of their own president.) Bukele has over 11 million followers on TikTok, more than any other head of state except Trump.

The true revolutionary fervor in today’s Latin America, with leaders determined to transform not just their countries but the region itself, is primarily evident on the ideological right. With conservative leaders recently winning several elections and favored in others over the next year, Latin America seems primed for a once-in-a-generation shift that would fundamentally change how countries deal with organized crime, economic policy, their strategic relationships with the United States and China, and more. In 2025, the conservative president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, was reelected, while Milei’s party won an unexpectedly large victory in Argentina’s critical midterm legislative elections, adding even greater momentum to his agenda. Bolivia saw an end to almost 20 years of socialist rule with the election of Rodrigo Paz Pereira, a centrist reformer. Conservative presidential hopefuls are leading polls in Costa Rica and Peru, and are within striking distance in Brazil and Colombia, in elections due before the end of 2026.

Latin America is composed of some 20 countries with distinct histories and political dynamics, and the right may not ultimately prevail in every case. But there have been other moments in history when the region moved more or less in sync: the reactionary dictatorships that swept much of the region in the 1960s and 1970s following the Cuban Revolution, the great re-democratizing wave of the 1980s, the pro-market “Washington consensus” reforms of the 1990s, and the so-called pink tide that brought Chávez and other leftists to power in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, another such regional realignment appears to be taking shape, challenging some of the most basic assumptions the outside world makes about Latin America. The result would be a region that in the coming years pursues a more aggressive policy on drug trafficking and other crimes, is friendlier to domestic and foreign investment, worries less about climate change and deforestation, and is broadly aligned with the Trump administration on priorities such as security and migration and limiting China’s presence in the Western Hemisphere. Given the history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, one might have expected the rise of a heavy-handed, nationalist, right-wing U.S. president to propel a left-wing resistance in the region. Instead, at least for now, the Latin American leaders benefiting most from Trump’s return are not the ones who denounce and defy him but the ones who admire, flatter, and even emulate him.

RIGHTWARD BOUND

This rightward shift does not appear to be just another relatively minor cyclical or short-lived pendular swing in the region’s politics. A careful look at polling and other underlying trends suggests that conservative ideas and policy priorities do seem to be gaining ground in Latin America. A closely watched annual survey of more than 19,000 respondents in 18 countries by Latinobarómetro, a Chile-based regional poll, reported that in 2024, the degree to which Latin Americans identified as right-wing was at its highest level in more than two decades. The same poll showed Bukele as by far the most popular politician throughout the region, with an average rating of 7.7 on a ten-point scale; the least popular, also by a wide margin, was Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela, with a score of just 1.3.

Most of the reasons for the right’s ascendancy stem not from factors abroad but from changing realities within Latin America. At the top of the list is the public’s growing frustration with crime, which is hardly a new challenge for the region but has grown substantially worse in recent years. According to estimates by the United Nations, the amount of cocaine produced in Latin America has tripled over the last decade, providing the region’s gangs and cartels with unprecedented wealth and power and fueling drug-related violence. Latin America accounts for eight percent of the world’s population but about 30 percent of its homicides. In several countries holding elections over the next year, including Brazil and Peru, crime—an election issue that has traditionally strongly favored the right—appears in surveys as voters’ top concern.

Other key factors in the right’s rise include the spread of evangelical Christianity in traditionally Catholic Latin America, which has transformed politics in several countries, most notably Brazil, by putting culture war issues such as abortion and “gender ideology” front and center. The dramatic, years-long economic and social collapses of Venezuela and Cuba have discredited socialist policies in the minds of a generation of voters throughout Latin America, dragging down the popularity of even some moderate leftist candidates who are nonetheless perceived as part of the same ideological tribe. An exodus of people from those two countries, and from other nations in crisis, such as Haiti and Nicaragua, has led to unprecedented migration within Latin America itself, prompting a backlash in receiving countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Peru that some right-wing candidates have sought to exploit.

Meanwhile, the global fame of Milei and Bukele has also played a key role. Even if most voters across Latin America don’t wish to elect their own exact copies of Milei and Bukele, whose policies many consider extreme, viral videos of the two presidents receiving rock-star receptions at the White House and prestigious gatherings such as the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos have stirred curiosity, feeding the sense that right-wing leaders are on the march not just at home but beyond.

THE NEW CONSERVATISM

For decades, politicians on the Latin American right were weighed down by their association with dictatorships of the Cold War era. From the 1960s through the 1980s, dictators such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Hugo Bánzer of Bolivia, and Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala oversaw widespread state-sponsored repression and murder, often carried out in the name of fighting communism. After a great democratizing wave swept Latin America in the 1980s, most political leaders, including those on the right, sought to avoid any association with those regimes and were usually hesitant to put law-and-order issues at the center of their campaigns for fear of sounding fascist.

But the idea that the right is inherently or uniquely authoritarian has lost traction in today’s Latin America, where all three cases of clear-cut dictatorship are on the ideological left: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. (Some other countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, are hybrid regimes, neither fully democratic nor authoritarian, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual global survey of democratic health.) A succession of right-of-center presidents who respected democratic institutions, including Mauricio Macri of Argentina (2015–19) and Sebastián Piñera of Chile (2010–14 and 2018–22), helped dilute the lingering distrust of conservative leaders. It’s also true that, as memories of the Cold War fade and frustration with crime rises, warnings about authoritarian rule have lost some of their punch. In the Latinobarómetro poll, about 40 percent of respondents either preferred an authoritarian government or did not care whether it was democratic, up about ten percentage points from a decade ago. Polling in other parts of the Western world has shown a similar erosion of support for democracy.

Over the last decade, the Latin American right has also worked to undo the long-standing perception that it is indifferent to the fate of the poor. The neoliberal, small-state dogma that guided generations of conservative leaders has not been discarded, but it has been amended, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Right-wing governments in power at the peak of the pandemic oversaw some of Latin America’s most ambitious expansions in social spending and have since maintained many of those benefits. For example, in Chile—a country that for decades was the poster child for small-state, market-friendly neoliberalism—Piñera’s conservative government spent proportionally more on pandemic-related relief than any other country in the region. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro oversaw a massive expansion of Bolsa Família (“Family Grant”), an internationally renowned program of cash transfers to the poor that he had previously attacked as misguided socialism. Bolsonaro even increased the program’s payout by 50 percent in the months before his failed reelection campaign in 2022. More recently, in Argentina, even as Milei gleefully took his chainsaw to other government programs, he doubled the size of cash transfers for the country’s poor, which helped his government maintain the support of many in the working class and avoid the mass social unrest that doomed previous Argentine austerity drives.

Watching Bukele speak in San Salvador, El Salvador, June 2025 Jose Cabezas / Reuters

Although throughout Latin America the left is still regarded as more generous in its social spending, its advantage is no longer as big as it once was. By partly neutralizing criticism that its leaders are elitist or antidemocratic, the right has been able to focus on issues that play to its strengths. None has been more salient than security. Cartels and other organized crime groups have grown vastly more powerful over the last decade, thanks in part to a staggering increase in their income from drug smuggling. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the amount of cocaine produced globally reached an estimated 3,700 tons in 2023, compared with 902 tons in 2013. Almost all the world’s coca, the raw material for the drug, is produced in three Latin American countries—Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru—and virtually every other country in the region is a staging ground for smuggling and, increasingly, is a consumer market in its own right.

Indeed, much of the growing anger over crime in Latin America stems from changes in how and where cocaine is consumed. The notion that cocaine flows only north, to wealthy partygoers in Berlin, London, and New York, is less true today than it ever was: the drug increasingly moves east, west, and south, as well. Although North America remains the leading market, accounting for about 27 percent of global cocaine consumption, with Europe second at 24 percent, Latin America and the Caribbean are now close behind, accounting for about 20 percent of global consumption, according to UN estimates. Asia (about 14 percent of global consumption) and Africa (about 13 percent) are also home to rapidly expanding markets for the drug.

The evolving geography of cocaine consumption has in turn brought about important changes in smuggling routes, especially those leading to the Pacific coast, turning once relatively peaceful Latin American countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, and Ecuador into battlegrounds as cartels fight over control of seaports and other key transit hubs. Flush with unprecedented amounts of cash, cartels have diversified into other activities, including extortion, cargo theft, kidnapping, illegal mining, logging in the Amazon, and trafficking migrants bound for the United States.

The idea that the right is inherently or uniquely authoritarian has lost traction.

The consequences have been shocking even for a region long troubled by drug trafficking and violence. Images of rifle-toting gang members taking journalists hostage at a television station in Ecuador in 2024 circulated worldwide. The coastal Ecuadorean city of Durán, the site of a turf war among Albanian, Colombian, and Mexican cartels, is now the world’s most dangerous city according to some indices, with an annual homicide rate of about 150 per 100,000 people—approaching that of Medellín, Colombia, in the early 1990s, the era of the notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The recent assassination of Miguel Uribe, a right-wing presidential candidate in Colombia, has stoked fears that two decades of progress on security in that country is unraveling. A 2023 poll showed that over 85 percent of Chileans now sometimes avoid going out at night and just eight percent feel safe. In Costa Rica, long known as a tourist paradise so secure that it had no need for a standing army, homicides have soared by more than 50 percent since 2020 as the country has become one of the world’s leading transshipment points for cocaine. Even in the handful of countries where homicides have fallen in recent years, such as Brazil, rates of other crimes, such as robbery, remain high.

Under such circumstances, it’s clear why Bukele and other politicians who promise an iron-fisted approach to crime have made gains. Since Bukele took office in 2019, homicides have fallen in El Salvador by more than 90 percent, and by some measures the country is now one of the safest in the Americas, with a murder rate comparable to that of Canada. Many observers in Latin America do not regard Bukele’s approach—suspending constitutional rights such as due process and freedom of assembly, and jailing about two percent of the country’s adult population—as particularly problematic. Even in Chile, which is home to some of the region’s strongest democratic institutions, 80 percent of respondents in a recent poll agreed that they would support a “state of exception,” suspending certain civil liberties in order to combat crime. After a police operation in Rio de Janeiro in October degenerated into a chaotic shootout, leading to more than 120 deaths, Brazilian civil society groups reacted in horror. But a poll taken days later showed that a majority of city residents believed the raid was a success. Support for the harsh crackdown was just as strong among respondents in the city’s favelas, or slums, as it was in wealthier parts of the city. Across the region, even some leaders who reject extreme measures are heeding the call for a tougher approach to crime by building new high-security prisons and ramping up arrests of gang leaders.

Meanwhile, politicians who fail to get security under control increasingly risk losing their seats. In Brazil, polls suggest President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s perceived weakness on crime is a significant obstacle to his reelection bid in 2026. In Mexico, the assassination of a vocal anticrime mayor in November caused a wave of street protests and intense criticism of President Claudia Sheinbaum, who, although tougher on cartels than her predecessor, gets lower marks from voters on security than in any other area. In Peru in October, men on motorcycles opened fire at a concert, wounding four; the attack was the final straw for Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, who already had an approval rating in the low single digits because of alleged corruption in her government and other challenges. Days after the attack, Peru’s congress voted 122–0 to remove her from office, citing “permanent moral incapacity.”

SEA CHANGES

To be sure, the left remains alive and well and electorally competitive throughout much of the region. Its message, centered on economic inequality, will probably always resonate among voters in a region with the world’s largest gap between rich and poor. The left also has its share of relatively popular, democratically elected leaders, such as Lula, who will run for his fourth (nonconsecutive) term as Brazil’s president in 2026, and Sheinbaum, who has earned admirers abroad for her calm but firm handling of difficult negotiations with Trump on trade and immigration. In some instances, the right may be leading in polls in part because the left is currently in power, and incumbents have been struggling to win elections in Latin America and throughout much of the democratic world. Similarly, some observers have argued that the current shift has little to do with traditional ideological considerations of left versus right and that populists and political outsiders of all stripes are on the rise.

There are other reasons to be skeptical that a right-wing wave in Latin America will fully materialize. In Colombia and Chile, leftist governments have approval ratings in the 30 to 40 percent range—not high, but not so low as to preclude the possibility of future electoral success for their parties. Moreover, in Colombia and Brazil, a proliferation of candidates on the right could split the vote, potentially resulting in a runoff election in which the public sees the conservative candidate as too extreme, and a candidate from the left or center comes out on top. Noboa, Ecuador’s president, failed in November to secure passage of a referendum that would have allowed foreign military bases in his country, among other reforms, suggesting that there will be some limits to how much power right-wing leaders can accumulate.

Perhaps ironically, one of the biggest risks to a conservative shift in Latin America may be Trump. The U.S. president has paid intense attention to the region in his second term, evidence that some of his top domestic priorities—combating drug trafficking and illegal immigration—require strong engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean. But polls suggest that Trump is not particularly popular in the region. He fared relatively poorly in the Latinobarómetro survey, with an average rating of just 4.2 on its ten-point scale, and some of his policies have sparked a backlash that risks pulling down his conservative allies in the region. For example, Trump’s decision to slap some of the world’s highest tariffs on Brazil and his demand that criminal charges be dropped against Bolsonaro in relation to a 2023 coup attempt led to a surge in Brazilian nationalism, a drop in support for Bolsonaro, and a rise in approval ratings for Lula. Likewise, Trump’s vow to “take back” the Panama Canal for the United States damaged the popularity of Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, one of the most pro-U.S. politicians in Latin America.

Protesting the sentencing of Bolsonaro, Brasilia, Brazil, November 2025 Jorge Silva / Reuters

But Washington’s role in the hemisphere is yet another area in which the political ground seems to be shifting in unpredictable ways. Trump’s bailout of Argentina was widely seen as instrumental in ensuring the much larger than expected victory of Milei’s party in midterm elections. Many were surprised when polls showed considerable support throughout Latin America for Trump’s military strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats and other targets in Venezuela. The apparent message was that, once again, a broader anger against drug cartels in the region, and widespread public rejection of Maduro, outweighed other public concerns.

If a right-wing shift does materialize as current trends suggest, the consequences could be sweeping. The last time Latin America’s politics moved in a kind of unison, during the leftist wave of the first decade of the twenty-first century, serves as a guide for what might be possible. Back then, a group of broadly aligned leaders, including Chávez, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner, and Lula, managed to sink a hemispheric trade deal that had been promoted by U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, fundamentally altering the region’s economic trajectory for years afterward. Leftist Latin American presidents implemented stronger social policies to ensure the fruits of that decade’s commodities boom were equitably distributed, helping bring tens of millions of Latin Americans out of poverty and ensuring greater resources for education and health care. The relative ideological consensus also gave rise to renewed efforts at regional collaboration, with the creation, in 2008, of the Union of South American Nations, a group that sought to promote intraregional trade and social cooperation and to provide a forum for regional decision-making that excluded the United States; it was effectively dismantled in the late 2010s as leftist governments lost power and their successors deemed the bloc too ideological.

Today, many observers are betting that a similarly transformative shift, but this time to the right, would result in a wave of more business-friendly policies throughout Latin America. After a so-called lost decade that saw the region’s economies grow only about one percent per year on average from 2014 until 2023, the slowest pace among any major bloc of emerging markets, many politicians are vowing to follow Milei’s example by cutting regulations and the size of government. Rafael López Aliaga, the mayor of Lima and a leading candidate in Peru’s election, has called Milei a “savior.” In Colombia, the right-wing journalist Vicky Dávila, who is running in the 2026 presidential election, has hired Axel Kaiser, a former adviser to Milei, to work on her campaign. (Kaiser’s brother, Johannes, was himself a right-wing candidate in Chile’s 2025 election.) José Antonio Kast, the conservative candidate in Chile’s December runoff election, vowed to slash government expenditures by $21 billion while also cutting red tape, a plan he said would help Chile achieve four percent annual economic growth, double the pace of recent years.

A more right-wing Latin America may take a more skeptical stance on China.

Modern Latin American history is littered with austerity measures and pro-investment plans that failed because of social unrest or a lack of political support. Investors also risk overestimating the degree to which any politician can overcome the region’s long-standing structural challenges, such as low educational levels and productivity. Nevertheless, financial markets have reacted to the potential for change with considerable enthusiasm, with one closely watched index that tracks stock prices in Latin America rising more than 30 percent in 2025—a sign of high expectations for faster economic growth and better corporate profits under right-leaning leaders. Many believe that with more pro-market leaders at the helm, the region can better realize its potential as a provider of critical minerals, including lithium and rare-earth minerals, as well as of oil and gas. In October, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, announced plans to invest in artificial-intelligence-related data centers and other projects in Argentina that could eventually be worth up to $25 billion, reflecting broad enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for Milei and his brand of economic policy more generally.

A more right-wing Latin America may also take a more skeptical stance on China and lean more toward the United States. A previous generation of conservative leaders was hesitant to choose between the two superpowers. China is the largest trading partner for several Latin American countries, including Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, while the United States remains by far the biggest investor in the region. But the Trump administration has ramped up pressure on allies to turn away from Beijing, especially when it comes to Chinese investment in potentially sensitive areas such as telecommunications and port infrastructure. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the recent rescue package for Argentina as an explicit bid to counter Beijing’s rising influence, calling it part of a new “economic Monroe Doctrine,” in reference to the nineteenth-century idea that outside powers are unwelcome in the Western Hemisphere. Some observers have speculated that Washington may have attached conditions to the aid, such as requiring Buenos Aires to possibly curtail or terminate Beijing’s lease on a space station in southern Argentina that the United States believes could eventually have military uses. More broadly, Trump seems determined to send a message that he will reward allies in Latin America with aid and other benefits while punishing antagonistic governments with tariffs and sanctions. It remains to be seen whether a new wave of leaders will respond to such incentives or continue to maintain a posture of nonalignment.

Milei at a political rally in Rosario, Argentina, October 2025 Cristina Sille / Reuters

Beginning in the 1990s, a generation of leftist leaders got to know each other personally at events such as the São Paulo Forum, a conference of left-wing groups founded by Brazil’s Workers’ Party, aiding their regional coordination in later years. Today, many on Latin America’s new right are also forming close ties, including at events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, which began in the United States in the 1970s and has spread to the region in recent years. Guests have included Milei, Bukele, members of the Bolsonaro family, as well as Chile’s Kast. Some in the region are optimistic that those social bonds will lead to greater coordination on issues such as trade, infrastructure, and the fight against organized crime.

Finally, the shift may result in sea changes on a variety of other issues, as well. A more conservative Latin America will likely be less concerned with climate change or deforestation in the Amazon, especially if the right returns to power in Brazil. Some right-wing leaders may also try to close their countries’ borders to further immigration; Kast proposed building a U.S.-style border barrier and deporting unauthorized migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Social issues such as abortion may also gain importance in national politics, given the rising percentage of evangelical Christian voters in Brazil and several other countries in the region. In a possible sign of things to come, in July, Milei helped inaugurate Argentina’s largest evangelical church, which can fit 10,000 people. In his speech to the faithful, he quoted the Bible, Max Weber, and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in explaining how “Judeo-Christian values” have informed his government’s policies.

Indeed, today’s Latin America is a region where the tone and substance of some political events would not seem out of place in Texas or Nebraska; where mainstream political leaders speak glowingly of fiscal discipline and police crackdowns; and where demands for social justice seem to have been superseded, at least for now, by invective against narcoterrorists and socialist dictators. If today’s generation of right-wing leaders can gain and then maintain power, they believe they can create a Latin America that sheds its global reputation for crime and stagnant economic growth, collaborates more closely with like-minded governments in the United States and Europe, and is ultimately safe and prosperous—so its citizens will to want to stay instead of look for better lives elsewhere. That would not be a revolution in the way that Castro once used the term. But it would be a dramatic change nonetheless.

BRIAN WINTER is Editor in Chief of Americas Quarterly.

Foreign Affairs · More by Brian Winter · December 16, 2025

21. The Depopulation Panic: What Demographic Decline Really Means for the World (Review Essay)

​Summary:

Jennifer D. Sciubba argues that today’s depopulation anxiety echoes the old overpopulation debate, but risks repeating its harms. Reviewing After the Spike, she credits Dean Spears and Michael Geruso for making a rights respecting case that a stable, not shrinking, world population better supports innovation, prosperity, and human flourishing, even amid climate change. Her critique is that they persuade at the planetary level but offer little guidance for policy, since fertility outcomes are driven by individual choices shaped by housing, childcare, work culture, and health care. She warns panic can fuel coercive, regressive pronatalism.

The Depopulation Panic

Foreign Affairs · More by Jennifer D. Sciubba · December 16, 2025

Review Essay

What Demographic Decline Really Means for the World

Jennifer D. Sciubba

January/February 2026 Published on December 16, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/depopulation-panic-jennifer-sciubba

John Lee

JENNIFER D. SCIUBBA is President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau and a co-author, with Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay Winter, of Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population.

In This Review

• After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
• By Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
• 
  
• Tertulia
• Bookshop
• Amazon

Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon took to the pages of Social Science Quarterly to place a bet against his intellectual rival, the biologist Paul Ehrlich. The Population Bomb, Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, had argued that the staggering growth of the human species threatened to jeopardize life on Earth. Simon insisted that, contrary to Ehrlich’s predictions, humanity would not self-destruct by overusing the planet’s resources. Instead, Simon believed that humans would innovate their way out of scarcity. Human ingenuity, Simon wrote, was “the ultimate resource.”

Their wager was specifically about the changes in the prices of a suite of commodities over a ten-year period, but it represented much more. The infamous bet was a battle between two larger camps: the catastrophists, who thought that humans were breeding themselves into extinction, and the cornucopians, who believed markets and new technologies would work together to lower prices no matter how big the population became. Ehrlich ultimately lost that bet at a time when global economic conditions favored Simon’s optimistic view of the functioning of markets. Countries also avoided catastrophe as the soaring growth of the world’s population in the twentieth century did not lead to mass famine but to growing prosperity and rising standards of living.

Nearly half a century later, this debate persists in a new form. Many environmentalists still share Ehrlich’s original concern and worry that population growth and consumption continue to vastly outpace the planet’s ability to cope with unrelenting extraction and pollution. The challenge to that view, however, comes from a different place today. The problem, a new kind of catastrophist insists, is not too many people but too few. Although the last century saw an astounding six billion people added to the total world population, today two out of three people live in countries that have fertility rates below the replacement level—the rate of births per woman required to sustain natural population growth. The average number of children born per woman has been falling so rapidly that the UN Population Division estimates that 63 countries or territories have already hit their peak population size. Although the overall human population may eventually rise to around ten billion by about 2060 or 2080 (according to various estimates), it will fall thereafter—and precipitously, with each generation smaller than the last.

Simon’s cornucopian vision, with all its faith in ingenuity, was fueled by a seemingly endless supply of new people, bringing fresh minds and innovative ideas. Although they share much of Simon’s worldview, the economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso have seen their faith eroded by steep plunges in fertility rates around the world. In After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, they show that the world is at a critical juncture: down one path, humanity could experience a stunning and stunting depopulation; alternatively, societies could find a way to stabilize population levels by encouraging people to have more children. Only this latter route will allow societies to maintain and strengthen the sources of their flourishing.

At a time when much pronatalist rhetoric veers into xenophobia and misogyny, Spears and Geruso offer a welcome intervention. They acknowledge the reality of climate change and the centrality of individual rights even as they stress that depopulation is a real problem and a threat to human well-being. They hold these seemingly opposed thoughts side by side. As they write: “It would be better if the world did not depopulate. Nobody should be forced or required to have a baby (or not to have a baby).” (italics in the original)

The authors privilege a moral argument over an economic one, insisting that a world with more people is in and of itself a better one. But that emphasis provides only a weak guide for action. Simon argued decades ago for continued population growth because he thought such growth meant that more human beings could lead productive and meaningful lives. Spears and Geruso concur. But instead of rehashing that utilitarian reasoning, they could have provided a map to guide societies down what they consider the better path of population stabilization, which would require people to have more babies than they are having now.

That inability to offer a more concrete way forward may stem from the broad scale of the authors’ vision. They choose to meet environmentalists at the planetary level, worrying about the carrying capacity of Earth. Spears and Geruso insist that depopulation is an issue relevant not just to particular countries or cultures but to all. That focus on humanity as a whole, however, ends up erasing borders, differences, nuances, and contexts, and leaves readers who are convinced by their argument that depopulation is bad without an actionable research and policy agenda.

But these issues are not productively discussed at the planetary level because there’s no planetary policymaking. People may be persuaded that a stable world population is in their rational self-interest. But it is an altogether different proposition for people to decide that it is in their rational self-interest to produce children themselves. That tension is hard to resolve, but resolving it is essential. Spears and Geruso are wrong when they write, “The question of what to do, together about worldwide depopulation is not the question of choosing your family size.” (italics in the original) That can’t be, because such individual choices—in the aggregate—inevitably drive global population trends. In fact, the authors contradict themselves when they say that “we cannot agree that whatever each individual chooses, given the world as it is, must be the first and last word on what would make for a better future.”

Today’s highly charged conversations about low fertility need to be clearer about how to move from the aggregate and conceptual to the individual and practical, particularly when it comes to how countries make it easier for people to choose larger families. The authors’ struggle mirrors a broader challenge that leaders now face. Policymakers who want to avoid freedom-limiting measures in boosting fertility rates must develop a framework that affirms both individual autonomy and the societal value of family life. Otherwise, they will leave natalist, “pro-family” agendas to be defined disproportionately by those who are willing to subordinate the rights of individuals to the imperative of producing more babies.

THE CASE FOR PEOPLE

When it comes to depopulation, the alarm bells are ringing around the world. In the United States, the tech tycoon Elon Musk and U.S. Vice President JD Vance, among other high-profile figures, have warned that declining birthrates could spell catastrophe. Such concerns tend to be either economic in focus (forecasting stark drops in growth and productivity as populations age and shrink) or nativist (fearing that national identities will erode as populations dwindle and countries seek immigrants to make up for shrinking workforces).

Although they are economists, Spears and Geruso strike a more philosophical chord. They place ethics at the center of the book: “Does it matter, is it better,” they ask, “if more good lives get to be lived, rather than fewer?” They fear the impending depopulation and want societies to push toward the stabilization of human populations. A stable population, they argue, would give humanity the best possible chance at a thriving future.

The authors have clearly considered most of the arguments against their natalist positions, and much of the book is devoted to debunking common objections to the call for more babies. For example, unlike catastrophists on the political right, Spears and Geruso recognize the urgency of climate change and are willing to engage with the argument made by some environmentalists that a declining population may be a boon to the planet. They show how past environmental crises, such as ozone layer depletion and acid rain, have dissipated even as populations have risen. Since 2013, for instance, China has addressed its awful air pollution problem even as its population has grown.

Alarmism could breed alarming policies.

Climate change is a larger systemic crisis than narrower problems such as acid rain and unhealthy air, but the authors argue that the choices of individuals and the policies of governments and businesses can help reduce emissions even as people around the world seek higher material living standards. Moreover, they insist, depopulation would hardly be a panacea for the environment; in fact, it might make things worse by slashing the human resources—the sharp minds—societies need for the cleanup. They acknowledge that, hypothetically, halving the human population would result in an immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but they rightly dismiss that notion as unproductive because it is neither feasible nor preferable. In fact, with fertility rates already below replacement level in so many places, simply reducing the number of future babies is not going to solve climate change. Depopulation is coming, but it won’t arrive in time to heal the environment.

More important, a future with fewer people would be fundamentally poorer in the broadest sense. In making the case for more people, Spears and Geruso, as Simon before them, draw on the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) to argue that if the ultimate good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, then the more humans there are, the more happiness there will be in the world. In their view, population growth—and with it more people, minds, and ideas—fuels progress, innovation, and ultimately well-being, propelling inventions from the plow to ChatGPT. According to their logic, depopulation would be inimical to human flourishing and progress in part because it makes innovation less likely.

The book promises that an abundant future is possible—a savvy framing, because some environmentalists often claim that the path to well-being runs through abstemiousness, a message that does not tend to resonate with broad swaths of society. Larger populations lead to prosperity because fixed costs go down when they can be spread across more people, the economic consequence of greater scale. Recognizing the human drive to consume, Spears and Geruso show that when people want what others also want—whether ramen or a better bicycle—those shared desires help incentivize the faster and cheaper production of such goods. So, they say, if people want nice things now and even nicer ones in the future, they should have children to ensure the future advantages of scale.

A MAP TO NOWHERE

Spears and Geruso effectively describe the problem of depopulation, but they do not offer a grand theory of why people are having fewer children—a state of affairs attributed variously to rising education levels, the ubiquity of smartphones, the decline of religion, and other social and material causes. Instead, they admit that nobody knows how to reverse the crash in fertility rates. But for populations to stabilize, they acknowledge, people will have to produce more children than current trends suggest they are willing to.

Some depopulation alarmists, especially on the right, blame the fertility crash on the social changes brought on by feminism and the liberal emphasis on individual fulfillment. In this view, the only way to boost birth rates is to return to patriarchal structures, in which women focus on child-rearing and homemaking while men act as their families’ sole breadwinners. That is anathema to Spears and Geruso. Unlike many participants in this conversation, they believe in the importance of ensuring individual rights as well as the need to boost fertility rates. Their intervention marks a refreshing break from the vitriol and negativity permeating natalist discourse today. They recognize the complexity of the problem, that having children is at once a profoundly personal choice and one with larger societal consequences.

But Spears and Geruso miss the opportunity to guide those they convince toward solutions that would preserve rights while supporting families. With perhaps too much humility and too little curiosity, they insist that nobody yet knows how to stabilize the world population but that it would be worth trying to reach that goal. That’s fine, but scholars can ask better questions and set a solid research agenda that would help push societies toward stabilization.

Here are just a few examples of what such an agenda could include. Researchers know that the expense of raising a family is a downward pressure on fertility rates, so they should ask why housing costs have skyrocketed as a proportion of income in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Regulations for childcare, particularly in the United States, could be responsible for an undersupply of daycare facilities. The adoption of new norms for both maternity and paternity leave remains fitful, so researchers could probe how work cultures disincentivize taking leave—and therefore having children. The policies that may help raise birthrates should not, in the short term at least, be evaluated purely in terms of their effect on fertility levels but in the ways they, for instance, ease financial burdens for families, improve educational and health outcomes, and make it easier for people to reconcile the demands of work and family.

A newborn baby in Bihar, India, March 2023 Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters

Spears and Geruso concede that dismal attitudes about the present and the future deter some people from wanting to have children. Modern life, with its ceaseless churn and relentless pace, may make people less likely to pursue parenthood. If that’s the case, then it’s conceivable that what needs to be addressed is actually the societal imperative for constant growth and innovation, which can lead to atomization, competition, and exhaustion.

At the core of the fertility debate is a set of fundamental questions: Does the state have the right to interfere in the bedroom? Do citizens have an obligation to reproduce for the greater good? And is it ever ethical to incentivize or discourage births in the pursuit of an “ideal population”? After the Spike skirts these questions, even as the authors clearly recognize that their logic could be weaponized to justify all sorts of practices, including those that roll back individual rights by restricting access to contraception or by limiting education about reproduction and childbirth.

There’s a cautionary tale in the book, one that is personal to Geruso. As he tells it, the restrictive abortion laws in Texas discouraged him and his wife from continuing to try for a baby after a miscarriage because they were not confident that she could get the health care she would need if something went wrong. This jarring anecdote encodes the dilemma the authors can’t quite overcome.

Dissecting private reproductive choices through a collective lens, as the authors do, comes with a high risk of moralizing fertility. Rather than treating fertility as a demographic fact or reproduction as a private choice, it becomes a virtuous act, with “good” citizens being those who exercise their responsibility to reproduce in a manner beneficial for the state. Spears and Geruso do not take seriously enough how their argument may be weaponized by those who seek policy change, but they should. Unless societies can chart a path between recognizing human freedom and acknowledging the peril of depopulation, the conversation about low fertility will be, at best, unproductive and, at worst, actively dangerous for individual rights.

These are not just theoretical exercises; they are the subject of policies such as China’s drive to encourage women to marry and have children after decades of the imposition of its one-child policy and, similarly in the United States, the proposals that U.S. lawmakers are entertaining about “birth bonuses,” or direct cash payments to parents who have children. At the state level in the United States, policies regarding reproduction are indeed shaping people’s lives; around 121 million Americans—about 35 percent of the population—reside in states where access to contraceptives is actively restricted, according to research by the Population Reference Bureau.

THE COSTS OF PANIC

The physicist John Holdren, one of Ehrlich’s close friends and collaborators, at one point joined the bet against Simon, insisting that human societies were pushing dangerously close to their natural bounds. But even he acknowledged, “If I’m wrong, people will still be better fed, better housed, and happier.” In other words, fervor about population control and the fear of ecological limits, however misplaced, can spur worthwhile action. For the most part, in the wake of the ferocious overpopulation panic in the 1960s and 1970s, the world has become better off in a number of ways. In the interest of lowering fertility rates, policymakers and funders rallied to provide better access to reproductive health and family planning, which empowered women around the world to pursue education and employment.

And yet many policies aimed at curbing population growth were destructive. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi went a good deal further in the 1970s, forcibly sterilizing some women and men. In Peru, under President Alberto Fujimori, some 300,000 women were forcibly sterilized in the 1990s. The combination of the preference for sons in Chinese culture and the one-child mandate has produced severe distortions in the country’s ratio of men to women that will be evident even decades from now.

Just like its twentieth-century inverse, the depopulation panic could produce decidedly regressive outcomes. Of course, some leaders could try to create incentives for child-rearing that make housing more affordable, encourage greater gender equality, and better support families. But some governments could work to undo access to contraception, dismantle what little care infrastructure exists, and push women out of the workforce and into the home. Alarmism could breed alarming policies. As a result, it matters intensely how policymakers and researchers frame questions about low fertility rates and depopulation. They are not witnesses to history, but participants in it. How they proceed is crucial.

In This Review

• After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
• By Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
• 
  
• 
  
• Foreign Affairs · More by Jennifer D. Sciubba · December 16, 2025

22. China warns of rising war risk after historic US arms sale to Taiwan

​Summary:

China condemned a newly approved $11.1 billion U.S. arms package for Taiwan, warning it could turn the island into a “powder keg” and push the Taiwan Strait toward military confrontation and war. The sale reportedly includes 82 HIMARS launchers and 420 ATACMS long-range missiles, plus self-propelled howitzers, UAV systems, software, and anti-armor weapons, giving Taiwan greater mobile deep-strike capacity. Beijing accused Washington of using Taiwan to “contain China” and accused Taipei of seeking “independence through force.” The deal enters a 30-day U.S. congressional review, after which contracting begins. China may respond with drills and sanctions.

Comment: China can prevent the powder keg from exploding if it would just put away its matches.

China warns of rising war risk after historic US arms sale to Taiwan

Beijing denounces $11.1B arms package that includes HIMARS launchers and ATACMS missiles

By Morgan Phillips Fox News

Published December 18, 2025 2:52pm EST

foxnews.com · Morgan Phillips Fox News

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-warns-rising-war-risk-after-historic-us-arms-sale-taiwan

Bolivian foreign minister details nation’s pivot toward the US and away from China

A top official tells Fox News Digital the country wants U.S. investment and technology transfers while moving to ‘diversify’ away from Beijing.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

China denounced the United States for approving an $11.1 billion weapons package for Taiwan, warning that the deal risks turning the island into a "powder keg" and driving the region toward "military confrontation and war."

The unprecedented sale includes 82 HIMARS launchers paired with 420 ATACMS long-range missiles, a combination that would give Taiwan new deep-strike capability across the Taiwan Strait, along with 60 self-propelled howitzers, advanced UAV systems, military software packages and anti-armor weapons.

Beijing accused Taiwan’s leadership of "seeking independence through force" and claimed Washington is using the island to "contain China," rhetoric that signals heightened tensions even as the U.S. frames the package as essential to bolstering Taiwan’s self-defense.

"The ‘Taiwan independence’ forces on the island seek independence through force and resist reunification through force, squandering the hard-earned money of the people to purchase weapons at the cost of turning Taiwan into a powder keg," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

CHINA’S MISSILE SURGE PUTS EVERY US BASE IN THE PACIFIC AT RISK — AND THE WINDOW TO RESPOND IS CLOSING

Taiwanese conscripts during a visit by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te to a military base in Taichung. (Sam Yeah/AFP via Getty Images)

"This cannot save the doomed fate of ‘Taiwan independence’ but will only accelerate the push of the Taiwan Strait toward a dangerous situation of military confrontation and war. The U.S. support for ‘Taiwan Independence’ through arms will only end up backfiring. Using Taiwan to contain China will not succeed."

U.S. officials have not yet detailed delivery timelines, but the sale reflects Washington’s push to accelerate Taiwan’s defenses amid growing concern over China’s military pressure campaign. The HIMARS and ATACMS combination is expected to draw particular attention from Beijing because it would allow Taiwan to target PLA staging areas, ships and infrastructure from mobile launchers, a capability China has repeatedly warned against.

In its notification to Congress, the State Department said the proposed sales would advance "U.S. national, economic, and security interests by supporting the recipient’s continuing efforts to modernize its armed forces and to maintain a credible defensive capability."

The department added that the weapons would "help improve the security of the recipient and assist in maintaining political stability, military balance and economic progress in the region."

Under longstanding U.S. policy, Washington provides Taiwan with arms it deems necessary for the island’s self-defense while maintaining a "One China" policy and not supporting a declaration of formal independence. China argues that any enhancement of Taiwan’s defenses encourages separatism, while U.S. officials say the purpose of such sales is to preserve stability and deter conflict.

China denounced the United States for approving an $11.1 billion weapons package for Taiwan, warning that the deal risks turning the island into a "powder keg" and driving the region toward "military confrontation and war." (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)

HIGH STAKES ON THE HIGH SEAS AS US, CHINA TEST LIMITS OF MILITARY POWER

The package now enters a 30-day congressional review period, during which lawmakers could file a resolution attempting to block it, a step Congress has never taken for an arms sale to Taiwan. Once the review period ends, contracting and production begin, a process that typically stretches over several years and contributes to a backlog that once reached $20 billion in undelivered U.S. weapons Taiwan has already purchased.

The latest sale marks a significant boost to Taiwan’s conventional firepower at a time when Beijing is intensifying pressure across the strait. (Daniel Ceng/AP Photo)

China has a track record of responding to major Taiwan arms sales with military demonstrations, including large-scale PLA drills, increased air and naval activity near the island and sanctions on U.S. defense firms. Analysts say Beijing’s sharp rhetoric suggests additional military signaling is likely, though China did not immediately announce specific countermeasures.

The latest sale marks a significant boost to Taiwan’s conventional firepower. In recent months, Beijing has stepped up pressure across the strait with near-daily PLA air and naval patrols, record incursions around the island and high-profile exercises meant to signal its ability to encircle Taiwan.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung thanked the U.S. Wednesday for its "long-term support for regional security and Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities," which he said are key to deterring a conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

foxnews.com · Morgan Phillips Fox News

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