Quotes of the Day:

"I won a nickname, ‘The Great Communicator.' But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content....I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation – from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the ‘Reagan Revolution.' Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense."

– President Ronald Reagan, 1989

"The requisites of good government are that there be a sufficiency of food, enough military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler,"

– Confucius

“No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”

– Mark Twain

1. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Renames Fort Liberty to Fort Roland L. Bragg

2. With US funding freeze, China nonprofits are facing extinction. They need emergency assistance

3. China’s Xi Is Building an Economic Fortress Against U.S. Pressure

4. The New Cold War Mindset

5. The Post-Neoliberal Delusion

6. The Path to American Authoritarianism

7. Trump signs order pausing enforcement of foreign bribery ban

8.  $571 million in VA spending on suicide prevention isn't working, vets groups say

9. In one of the Marines’ most iconic jobs, a stunning pattern of suicide

10. Trump Buries Wilsonian Foreign Policy

11. Pentagon doubles number of news outlets to 'rotate' out from office spaces

12. Hegseth: Pentagon must return to long-term planning against strategic adversaries

13. Philippines issues warning of Chinese debris landing near coast

14. Donald Trump Declares War on the Cartels: His Plan Could Change Everything

15. Keep sight of the forest while looking at the trees (influence)

16. Updating the Practice of Unconventional Warfare: A Blueprint for the Continued Evolution of Special Forces

17. How the US Can Rethink Its Military Strategy for Taiwan

18. Ancient Great Power Conflict: A Roman Counterpoint to Thucydides

19. ‘Burn it down’: Experts urge ditching sluggish Pentagon arms process

20. Trump fires service academy boards that oversee morale, academics

21. Army, Navy remove web pages highlighting women’s military service

22. SOCOM wants new helmet goggle mount and oxygen-generating device

23. With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government's public integrity guardrails

24. A Constitutional Crisis?

25. JD Vance’s latest pronouncement evokes a constitutional crisis

26. Is the gray the new black? Russia's recycled soviet tactics directed against Europe

1. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Renames Fort Liberty to Fort Roland L. Bragg

A worthy American hero.

Release

Immediate Release

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Renames Fort Liberty to Fort Roland L. Bragg

Feb. 10, 2025 |   

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4062245/secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-renames-fort-liberty-to-fort-roland-l-bragg/

While flying aboard a C-17 from Joint Base Andrews to Stuttgart on February 10, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum renaming Fort Liberty in North Carolina to Fort Roland L. Bragg. The new name pays tribute to Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge. This change underscores the installation's legacy of recognizing those who have demonstrated extraordinary service and sacrifice for the nation. 

Attributed to DOD Press Secretary John Ullyot.

2. With US funding freeze, China nonprofits are facing extinction. They need emergency assistance

A view from Australia.

I do not think the DOGE wiz kids have an algorithm to evaluate this kind of analysis.

Excerpts:

Providing funding for China nonprofits operating outside of China is directly aligned with the core interests of democratic nations. We base our security on the idea that democratic systems are the best way to guarantee the long-term stability, prosperity and wellbeing of citizens. Government budgets exist to preserve the democratic systems that make these goals possible; we don’t sacrifice these ideals to shave off a few numbers on a budget.

A key part of China’s agenda is to persuade its own citizens and the world, falsely and through deception and coercion, that democratic systems are not better. Beijing claims its system is the best way to guarantee economic prosperity and stability. It claims its one-party system is a meritocracy.

It is difficult and time-consuming—though not particularly expensive—to do the work that proves Beijing is lying, and that what it offers is smoke and mirrors. Tools that allow us to uncover the flaws of China’s own system and the actual struggles Chinese people face, directly support the goals, security and resilience of democratic governments.

Without the work that China nonprofits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s domestic model of economic and political governance is deeply flawed. If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.

With US funding freeze, China nonprofits are facing extinction. They need emergency assistance | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Bethany Allen · February 6, 2025

An entire ecosystem of vital China-related work is now in crisis. When the Trump administration froze foreign funding and USAID programs last week, dozens of scrappy nonprofits in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States were immediately affected. Staff are losing their jobs; some organisations face imminent closure due to lack of funding; others are paring back their programming.

In many cases, these organisations provide our last window into what is actually happening in China. They do the painstaking and often personally risky work of tracking Chinese media censorship, tallying local protests, uncovering human rights violations, documenting the Uyghur genocide, and supporting what remains of civil society in China. They provide platforms for Chinese people to speak freely; they help keep the dream of democracy in China alive. I’m not listing the names of any specific organisations at this time, because some prefer not to disclose that they receive foreign funding. Beijing believes funding that supports free speech and human rights is interference by ‘hostile foreign forces’.

As China’s President Xi Jinping has squeezed Chinese civil society and expelled journalists, information from inside China has gotten harder and harder to access. The 2017 Chinese foreign NGO law crushed US and other foreign nonprofits based in China. Some moved to Hong Kong or elsewhere. The spending freeze may deal them a death blow.

The research and other work done by these nonprofits is invaluable. It largely isn’t replicated by think tanks, universities, private firms, or journalists. If it disappears, nothing will replace it, and Beijing’s work to crush it will be complete.

As a journalist who covered China for more than 10 years, I took for granted the numerous organisations I could turn to when I needed certain kinds of information. But Donald Trump’s foreign spending freeze has revealed how dependent these organisations are on a single government for their survival—and, by extension, how fragile our sources of information about China really are.

The US must immediately grant emergency waivers to China-focussed nonprofits. If the US is not able to do this, governments around the world that value democracy, human rights and truth must step in and find a way to restore funding to these organisations now. It wouldn’t take much; a few million dollars spread across a handful of donor nations would be enough to preserve the research, expertise and networks these organisations represent.

Regardless of whether the US continues funding this work, this crisis should serve as a wake-up call for democracies everywhere. Funding from a single government should not be the only thing standing between us and an information blackout on Chinese civil society. That is not a model of international democratic resilience.

Providing funding for China nonprofits operating outside of China is directly aligned with the core interests of democratic nations. We base our security on the idea that democratic systems are the best way to guarantee the long-term stability, prosperity and wellbeing of citizens. Government budgets exist to preserve the democratic systems that make these goals possible; we don’t sacrifice these ideals to shave off a few numbers on a budget.

A key part of China’s agenda is to persuade its own citizens and the world, falsely and through deception and coercion, that democratic systems are not better. Beijing claims its system is the best way to guarantee economic prosperity and stability. It claims its one-party system is a meritocracy.

It is difficult and time-consuming—though not particularly expensive—to do the work that proves Beijing is lying, and that what it offers is smoke and mirrors. Tools that allow us to uncover the flaws of China’s own system and the actual struggles Chinese people face, directly support the goals, security and resilience of democratic governments.

Without the work that China nonprofits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s domestic model of economic and political governance is deeply flawed. If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.

Bethany Allen is ASPI’s head of China investigations and analysis.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Bethany Allen · February 6, 2025

3. China’s Xi Is Building an Economic Fortress Against U.S. Pressure

Graphics, data, and charts at the link:  https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-xi-is-building-an-economic-fortress-against-u-s-pressure-53f6292d?st=iyeWDG&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

China’s Xi Is Building an Economic Fortress Against U.S. Pressure

As Trump turns up the heat on Beijing, China is trying to become more technologically self-sufficient, but its efforts have a significant cost

By Brian Spegele

Follow, Jason Douglas

Follow and Yoko Kubota

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Updated Feb. 11, 2025 12:03 am ET

The success of China’s electric-vehicle makers has ignited fears that the country may eclipse the West in some cutting-edge sectors. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A day in China could easily start like this: Roll out of bed and swipe through WeChat messages on your Huawei smartphone. Hop into a BYD electric car and drive to the railroad station, where a high-speed train from a state-run factory whisks you to your destination. Chinese-designed nuclear plants, solar farms and wind turbines power the city’s lights.

China is racing to make itself less reliant on the outside world’s products and technology—part of a yearslong effort by leader Xi Jinping to make China more self-sufficient and impervious to Western pressure as tensions with the U.S. rise. Beijing has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into favored industries, especially in high-end manufacturing, while exhorting business leaders to fall in line with the government’s priorities.

In many ways, the effort is succeeding.    

Instead of relying on foreign firms for robots and medical devices, China is now making more of its own. Chinese-made solar panels are replacing some of the country’s need for imported energy. The success of China’s electric-vehicle makers and artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek has ignited fears that China may even eclipse the West in some cutting-edge sectors. 

Beneath those wins, however, Xi’s industrial policy is hugely expensive, eating up state resources as government revenues are stagnating. One estimate by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies put China’s annual spending on industrial policy at around $250 billion as of 2019.

China is racing to make itself less reliant on the outside world’s products and technology. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Large sums have been wasted on projects that failed, especially in areas such as advanced semiconductors.  

The flood of investment pouring into Chinese factories is also causing problems for China abroad, as it leads to enormous quantities of Chinese goods that are being pushed onto foreign markets at cut-rate prices, exacerbating trade tensions. Western countries have already sought to block advanced chips from flowing to the country, and China’s growing manufacturing dominance in some high-value sectors is set to be a flashpoint in renewed trade frictions as President Trump turns up the heat on Beijing.  

China needs to find new growth levers right now, to offset the drag on its economy from a languishing real-estate sector and a darkening global backdrop for trade. Many economists say China should be building out its threadbare social safety net to drive a durable pickup in consumer spending, rather than throwing more money at its already vast industrial base, racking up more debt with no guarantee on future returns.

But Beijing believes that channeling huge resources into advanced manufacturing and technology will boost national security by making the country less susceptible to Western pressure. If that means some economic problems are neglected or adds to tensions with the West, Chinese leaders are signaling that the risks are worth it.

The cost of China’s effort “has been a lot of burnt capital,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, head of the China Center at research group The Conference Board in Beijing. “Is China going to be able to bear the cost? In the eyes of the Chinese government, they are being forced to bear this cost.”

China’s State Council Information Office didn’t reply to a request for comment.

“Self-reliance in science and technology is the basis of our national strength and prosperity, and necessary for our security,” an anchor with China’s state broadcaster CCTV said this month.

Flying solo

Xi formalized his ambitions to make the country more self-reliant in 2015, when he unveiled an initiative dubbed “Made in China 2025.”

A government document that laid out the program’s goals stressed that the world was on the cusp of a new technological revolution and that China would only succeed by investing in a more advanced manufacturing base.  

While the initiative sought to elevate Chinese manufacturing across the board, it highlighted 10 sectors such as robotics, aerospace and new-energy vehicles as priorities.

It also set explicit goals for raising the domestic content of core components and basic materials. A gusher of state subsidies and other financial support would help China achieve its goals.

U.S. officials criticized the program for aiming to shut out foreign firms, a rift that only worsened after Trump took office in 2017. By 2019, under pressure from the U.S., Beijing was dropping references to “Made in China 2025” from official reports and signaling that it planned to give a bigger role to foreign companies in supplying China.  

Yet as relations with the U.S. further deteriorated, China’s bid at self-sufficiency only intensified. The world was growing more turbulent, the government said in its latest five-year economic plan published in 2021, and “self-reliance” in science and technology was paramount. 

Success stories   

In EVs, one of the 10 sectors identified in “Made in China 2025,” industrial support surged from $15 billion in 2019 to more than $45 billion in 2023, according to estimates by CSIS. More than 100 brands raced into the market. 

As the cars’ quality has improved, they have been thrashing foreign rivals in China and making rapid inroads overseas.

Last year, electric and plug-in hybrid cars accounted for 48% of passenger-car sales in China, up from 41% from a year earlier, or nearly 11 million vehicles, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed. Most of those electric cars were made by Chinese brands, such as BYD and Geely. BYD recently surpassed Volkswagen to become China’s bestselling carmaker, while sales of American automakers such as General Motors, which recently said it would take more than $5 billion in charges linked to its weak China business, have tanked. 

Government investment has transformed Chinese firms into the world’s dominant shipbuilders. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A similar story has emerged in shipbuilding, as the government poured an estimated $132 billion of support into the shipping and shipbuilding sector between 2010 and 2018, according to CSIS. That has made China more self-sufficient and transformed Chinese firms into the world’s dominant shipbuilders, controlling more than half of global production based on merchant tonnage compared with 5% in 1999, Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at CSIS, said last year.

For years, China was a net importer of chemicals, especially from the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., as domestic production wasn’t enough to provide all the plastics, fibers and other chemicals consumed by its growing economy. Since 2021, however, that deficit has flipped to a surplus, as rising domestic production pushes out imports. 

China in 2024 recorded an export surplus of $34 billion in chemicals, compared with a $40 billion deficit in 2020. 

Obstacles ahead

In other ways, however, Xi’s self-sufficiency drive continues to face hurdles. 

In aerospace, China’s C919 jetliner entered commercial service in 2023, a feat celebrated by the government after years of setbacks. But the plane, built by state-owned manufacturer Comac to rival the workhorse passenger jets of Boeing and Airbus, is chock-full of foreign systems and components, including landing gear from Germany and engines from the U.S. and France. 

Beyond technology, a push to boost China’s self-reliance in its food supply is constrained by a lack of arable land and water. In 2024, China imported 105 million tons of soybeans—up 21% since 2019—with a large portion coming from the U.S., while meat imports have risen 55% over the same period.

In semiconductors, Western countries are actively working to make sure China doesn’t catch up soon, which has only reinforced Beijing’s determination for self-reliance. 

Policymakers a decade ago said they wanted 70% of China’s chip demand to be met by domestic production by 2025. By the end of this year, domestic production will supply only around 30% of Chinese chip demand, though that’s up from around 20% in 2024, according to estimates from International Business Strategies, a consultancy. Chip imports last year were close to $400 billion, according to Chinese customs data.

China doesn’t have homegrown technology to produce the most advanced chip-making tools, which are currently made by a handful of suppliers in the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S. American and other export control measures block China from obtaining those most-advanced tools. Without them, fabricating the most-advanced chips has proven very difficult for China.

China doesn’t have homegrown technology to produce the most advanced chip-making tools. Photo: Liesa Johannssen/Bloomberg News

Still, Chinese players have made breakthroughs that surprised U.S. officials. In 2023, Huawei Technologies released the Mate 60 smartphone, which contained an integrated circuit that was a step closer to the technology level of advanced chips in Apple’s iPhones, though industry experts have raised questions about the production yield of these chips and whether Huawei can efficiently mass-produce them. Huawei hasn’t commented on the details of the chip. 

Huawei also succeeded in developing its own operating system after it was restricted from using Google’s Android system.  

The case of AI newcomer DeepSeek provides a counterexample to China’s state-led strategy. Rather than emerging out of a government lab, DeepSeek was built by a Chinese math geek who had founded a hedge fund. Many economists have argued that China could better rev up its economy by easing controls on its private sector, strengthening the country as it competes with the U.S., without many of the downsides of its state-led model. 

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com, Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com and Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

4. The New Cold War Mindset

March or die. Adapt or perish.

Perhaps the DOGE wiz kids should adopt this conclusion. They could ask, how do their DOGE actions support this necessary mindset?

Conclusion:

The world has changed dramatically since the end of the previous Cold War. The pace of technological change has accelerated, and geopolitical tensions have increased with the rise of peer adversary, authoritarian regimes. To thrive in this new era, this new Cold War, government and military leaders, individuals and organizations, must adopt a new mindset, a new Cold War mindset. The changing world order necessitates that leaders focus on outcomes over process, that they become more adaptable and flexible, and challenge and supplement experience with critical thinking. Embracing these ideas, government and military decision makers will see the world as it is, make better quicker decisions, operate more rapidly and achieve better outcomes for national security. Adopting a New Cold War Mindset will allow the U.S. to navigate the complexities and the threats of the 21st century and ensure the light of freedom beats back the looming dark clouds of authoritarianism.  

The New Cold War Mindset

By William McHenry

February 10, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/02/10/the_new_cold_war_mindset_1090216.html

Changing Times = Changing Minds. The New Cold War Mindset

The geopolitical landscape has undergone a seismic shift since the Cold War. The world, once divided into two ideological blocs, has navigated a complex tapestry of alliances and rivalries in the post-Cold War era with the U.S. as the dominant presence. Over the last decade, emerging out of the post-Cold War confusion, like storm clouds rising over the horizon, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have banded together to threaten Western Democracy. However, it’s not just the geopolitical dynamics that have changed since the end of the Cold War; the pace of technological advancement has accelerated exponentially. The new alliance of authoritarian regimes focused on expansion, combined with the rapid evolution of technology necessitates a new mindset and a fundamental shift in how the U.S. Government and Military plan, operate, and acquire effective tools and enablers. Reliance on experience and a process focus mentality must give way to adaptability, agility, and a relentless focus on outcomes if we are to combat emerging threats and protect U.S. interests at home and abroad.  

From Process to Outcomes

In the Cold War and post-Cold War era, government planning, execution and procurement were based on long-term, deliberate processes. Organizations have grown accustomed to meticulous planning, detailed execution, and a focus on adherence to established procedures. This process-oriented approach, while effective in a more stable non-competitive environment, is ill-suited to the high threat, adversarial, and unpredictable world of today. 

In order to protect U.S. interests, the modern world demands that the U.S. Government undertake a radical shift from being process focused to outcome focused. In a world characterized by rapid technological disruption and geopolitical uncertainty, organizations must pivot to become more agile and responsive. They must be able to update assessments quickly, adapt to changing circumstances, and deliver results. This shift requires a mindset that prioritizes the end goal, the outcome, over the means to achieve it. 

To foster an outcomes-oriented culture, organizations must empower their employees to take ownership of their work and make decisions. They must challenge the top down “Well that is the way we have always done it.” Mindset that too often defines modern government bureaucracy. Organizations must also invest in tools and technologies that enable efficient collaboration and rapid decision-making. Additionally, leaders must create a culture of accountability, where individuals are held responsible for delivering results, not just following procedures. 

Adaptability and Flexibility

The ability to adapt and flex to changing circumstances is a critical skill in today’s dynamic world. The pace of technological change is accelerating, and new technologies are constantly emerging. Organizations intent on continuing to follow processes designed for a different time, a different world, will be unable to keep up with these changes and risk falling behind their competitors. 

To thrive in this environment, individuals and organizations must cultivate a mindset of continuous learning and experimentation. They must be willing to embrace new ideas and technologies, even as they might challenge and change the status quo. Additionally, they must be able to pivot quickly when necessary, adjusting their strategies and plans as circumstances change. 

To foster a culture of adaptability and flexibility, organizations must invest in training and development programs that equip team members with the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Leaders must seek out the naysayers and embrace new ideas. They must also create a work environment that encourages creativity and innovation. Finally, leaders must lead by example, demonstrating their own willingness to adapt and change. 

Experience Combined with Critical Thinking

While experience can be invaluable, relying on experience to make decisions often leads to poor results. Experience by its definition comes from personal insights gleaned from the past and thus is not always an accurate guide in decision making when change is the norm not the exception. In a world of rapid change, experience can be a liability if it leads to a rigid and inflexible mindset. To succeed, individuals, teams and organizations must supplement and challenge their experience with critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking allows individuals to question assumptions, challenge conventional wisdom, and identify innovative solutions. It enables them to see the world from different perspectives and to anticipate future trends. By combining experience with critical thinking, individuals and organizations can leverage the wisdom of the past to solve the problems of the future. 

To foster a culture of critical thinking, organizations must encourage open dialogue and debate. There must be a “safe space” where team members can share their ideas without fear of judgment. Additionally, leaders must model critical thinking skills, asking probing questions and challenging assumptions with the intent of making decisions relative to the now, not the past.  

Adapt or Perish

The world has changed dramatically since the end of the previous Cold War. The pace of technological change has accelerated, and geopolitical tensions have increased with the rise of peer adversary, authoritarian regimes. To thrive in this new era, this new Cold War, government and military leaders, individuals and organizations, must adopt a new mindset, a new Cold War mindset. The changing world order necessitates that leaders focus on outcomes over process, that they become more adaptable and flexible, and challenge and supplement experience with critical thinking. Embracing these ideas, government and military decision makers will see the world as it is, make better quicker decisions, operate more rapidly and achieve better outcomes for national security. Adopting a New Cold War Mindset will allow the U.S. to navigate the complexities and the threats of the 21st century and ensure the light of freedom beats back the looming dark clouds of authoritarianism.  

Colonel William “Mac” McHenry (USMCR, ret.) supports the Defense Innovation Unit as the Director’s Senior Advisor and Intelligence Community Lead. He has brought over 30 years of executive experience in strategy development, partner engagement, and operational execution within DOD and the Intelligence Community. 

“The views expressed in the article reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.”

5. The Post-Neoliberal Delusion

Two key points and the final sentence is something we all should keep in mind. Never forget the basics in pursuit of the shiny thing. Blocking and tackling wins the game.

National security concerns now shadow every question regarding trade and technology.

But policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions.

Excerpts:

Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory was in no small part a harsh rebuke to the Biden administration’s economic policy. Proponents of the Build Back Better agenda, in convincing themselves that the hot economy was transformative for workers, appeared oblivious to the genuine concerns of the electorate. Biden’s supporters and policymakers, especially those who have denied the effects of inflation, insisted that voters grossly misunderstood the economy or attributed Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 presidential election solely to a global rejection of incumbents. It is possible that just the portion of inflation caused by global shocks would have been enough to doom any incumbent party’s reelection chances. But adding to that inflation with unnecessary spending, minimizing the suffering it caused, and touting an imaginary boom in infrastructure and manufacturing surely did not help Democrats.

The new economic philosophy that dominated during the Biden years emphasized demand over supply. It considered concerns over budget constraints overstated and placed its faith in predistribution as a way to change the trajectory of the macroeconomy. It promised policies that could simultaneously transform industries, prioritize marginalized groups in procurement and hiring practices, and serve broad social goals. Ultimately, this post-neoliberal ideology and its adherents did not take tradeoffs seriously enough, laboring under an illusion that previous policymakers were too beholden to economic orthodoxy to make real progress for people.

Rather than merely resorting to conventional approaches, however, what the country needs now is a renewal of economic policy thinking. The post-neoliberals were not wrong about the problems they inherited. Largely free labor markets have failed to deliver high levels of employment for prime-age workers in the United States for decades. National security concerns now shadow every question regarding trade and technology. And the transition to green energy will require dramatic action. New ideas about these old problems will never yield successful policies, however, if they dismiss budget constraints, cost-benefit analysis, and tradeoffs. It’s fine to question economic orthodoxy. But policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions.

The Post-Neoliberal Delusion

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jason Furman · February 10, 2025

And the Tragedy of Bidenomics

Jason Furman

March/April 2025 Published on February 10, 2025

U.S. President Joe Biden at a manufacturing plant in West Columbia, South Carolina, July 2023 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

JASON FURMAN is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University. He was Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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Although there are many explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, voters’ views of the U.S. economy may have been decisive. In polling shortly before the election, more than 60 percent of voters in swing states agreed with the idea that the economy was on the wrong track, and even higher numbers registered concern about the cost of living. In exit polls, 75 percent of voters agreed that inflation was a “hardship.”

These views may seem surprising given various economic indicators at the time of the election. After all, unemployment was low, inflation had come down, GDP growth was strong, and wages were rising faster than prices. But these figures largely missed the lasting effects that dramatic price increases had on many Americans, which made it harder for them to pay for groceries, pay off credit cards, and buy homes. Not entirely unreasonably, they blamed that squarely on the Biden administration.

Biden arrived in office in 2021 with what he understood as an economic mandate to “Build Back Better.” The United States had not yet fully reopened after nearly a year of restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had suppressed activity in the service sector. Biden set out to restructure the country’s post-pandemic economy based on a muscular new approach to governing. Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.”

Biden’s advisers and some prominent economists proclaimed that the Build Back Better agenda would herald the beginning of a post-neoliberal era in which massive public investment in infrastructure and the domestic economy would better position the country for inclusive growth and the clean energy future. In their view, they were turning the page on the economic policies pursued by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which the Biden team implicitly argued were too focused on free trade, too timid on deficit spending, and too reliant on the welfare state to fix the gaps left as a result. Instead, in order to gain an edge in the competition with China, the United States needed a transformative agenda to revive domestic manufacturing and power the transition to green energy.

But the Biden administration’s post-neoliberal turn, the predicted economic transformations of which prompted comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, fell considerably short of its lofty goals. In some respects, the macroeconomic outcomes have been impressive. The U.S. economy has bounced back much faster than it did after previous recessions, and its post-pandemic performance has also outpaced that of many peer countries in terms of economic growth. But the recovery has been uneven, frustrated by inflation at least partly induced by the administration’s own policies. Inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and government debt were all higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.

Even before inflation doomed Biden’s chances for reelection, it undermined the administration’s goals. Despite efforts to raise the child tax credit and the minimum wage, both were considerably lower in inflation-adjusted terms when Biden left office than when he entered. For all the emphasis he placed on American workers, Biden was the first Democratic president in a century who did not permanently expand the social safety net. And despite signing into law an infrastructure bill that committed over $500 billion to rebuilding everything from bridges to broadband, skyrocketing costs of construction have left the United States building less than it was before the law’s passage.

There have been important successes, especially considering the slim congressional majority with which Biden was forced to operate. Massive legislation that he pushed to address climate change is already reducing emissions and likely will continue to do so even in the face of hostility from the Trump administration. Domestic semiconductor production is being revived. But a hoped-for manufacturing renaissance has not materialized, at least not yet. The proportion of people working in manufacturing has been declining for decades and has not ticked back up, and overall domestic industrial production remains stagnant—in part because the fiscal expansion Biden oversaw led to higher costs, a stronger dollar, and higher interest rates, all of which have created headwinds for the manufacturing sectors that received no special subsidies from the legislation he championed.

The Biden administration failed to seriously reckon with budget constraints and to contend with the effects of “crowding out,” when a surge in public-sector spending causes the private sector to invest less. Both missteps reflected a broader unwillingness to contend with tradeoffs in economic policy and allowed Trump to ride a wave of discontent back into the White House. For Democrats, it would be a mistake to think their loss was due solely to a global backlash against incumbents—or worse, to conclude that American voters had simply been insufficiently appreciative of everything Biden did for them.

Truly building back better will require harnessing the Biden administration’s ambitions for economic transformation without discarding conventional economic considerations of budget constraints, tradeoffs, and cost-benefit analysis—in other words, not giving in to the post-neoliberal delusion.

BIG SPENDERS

Biden entered the Oval Office at an especially uncertain time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccines highly effective at preventing serious illness and death had become available in December 2020 and were being rolled out much more quickly than expected. But for the first few months of 2021, wait times for a jab remained long, and the virus was still wreaking havoc. Cases and deaths surged nationwide; January 2021 was the worst month for mortality of the entire pandemic. Nevertheless, the economy was holding up reasonably well. The unemployment rate was at around six percent and falling, well below its peak of roughly 15 percent earlier in the pandemic and much better than the dire forecasts of economists who had expected double-digit unemployment rates going into 2021. GDP growth remained strong even in the face of social-distancing measures that prevented in-person commerce.

The economy was also awash in pent-up demand from consumers, who had been unable to spend during the pandemic. In 2020, toward the end of the first Trump administration, Congress passed $3.4 trillion in fiscal support; in December, $900 billion was authorized to fund $600 stimulus checks for most American adults. Despite the ravages of the pandemic on public health, many households had never been in better financial shape, with overall debt service payments representing the lowest share of disposable income in decades, delinquencies and defaults remaining low, and record amounts of money sitting in checking accounts across the income spectrum. Economists hoped that as the rollout of vaccines proceeded, so would the economic recovery. In fact, when Biden came to office, the $1.5 trillion of excess savings that Americans had accumulated from the federal largess of 2020 and their suppressed spending was waiting to be unleashed by the reopening—perhaps obviating the macroeconomic need for yet another large stimulus bill. The economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman summed up this view in late 2020. “Once we’ve achieved widespread vaccination, the economy will bounce back,” he wrote. “On average Americans have been saving like crazy, and will emerge from the pandemic with stronger balance sheets than they had before.”

Against these hopeful prognostications by many mainstream economists, however, the incoming Biden administration moved aggressively, proposing a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan even before coming into office. With U.S. GDP three percent below pre-pandemic forecasts as of the fourth quarter of 2020, an additional $650 billion in stimulus—about a third as much—would have been sufficient to fill the hole in the economy.

Biden’s post-neoliberal turn fell short of his lofty goals.

Money was needed for vaccination, testing, and other containment efforts. But the bulk of the spending was earmarked for items that clearly were not needed. Around $900 billion, the single largest provision in the bill, was intended to support households through direct payments and other transfers. But by December 2020, monthly real compensation per capita was only about two percent below its pre-pandemic trend, and the gap was closing rapidly. (It returned to its pre-pandemic trend in April 2021.) Closing this gap would have cost less than $100 billion—far less than the hundreds of billions in stimulus spending that Congress passed. Despite state and local revenue having fully recovered to pre-COVID levels by the end of 2020, state and local governments nevertheless received around $500 billion more in the stimulus package.

There were several reasons for this supersized legislation. Uncertainty about the consequences of the January 2021 COVID surge was partly to blame. The bill was also an overcorrection of the Obama administration’s insufficient stimulus package in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, which contributed to the United States’ painfully slow recovery. In 2021, Biden administration officials failed to update their policies as the economic data turned out to be less dire than expected.

But economic ideas also played an important role. Policymakers decided to run the economy “hot”: that is, to support high demand to jump-start the economy even if it meant risking higher inflation. The Biden administration believed that the surfeit of demand this would produce would benefit a broad group of workers by increasing their bargaining power and, by extension, raising their inflation-adjusted wages. The administration dismissed dissenting voices who expressed skepticism about this approach, such as the economist Larry Summers, who warned that it would lead to high inflation.

The U.S. economy did continue to grow rapidly after the passage of the stimulus. The recovery was much faster than the long and difficult return from the 2008 financial crisis—a difference mostly attributable to the fact that financial crises tend to have persistent negative effects on output, whereas the pandemic produced only a temporary shutdown of the economy with fewer lasting effects. But the recovery began in mid-2020, and real GDP growth was a strong 5.6 percent in the first quarter of 2021, before much, if any, of the American Rescue Plan funds had worked their way through the economy. Most countries experienced quick recoveries after the initial shock of COVID, regardless of whether they passed large stimulus packages. Although Biden’s boosters argued that the economy’s growth was proof of the success of the stimulus (and thus, of the validity of the administration’s ideas), much of that growth can be explained by structural factors that predated the pandemic and the stimulus, including faster productivity growth and favorable demographic changes. Compared with other developed countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States saw a post-pandemic recovery that was about average in terms of real GDP growth versus pre-pandemic forecasts.

PUMPED UP

Ultimately, the administration’s plans to transform the United States would be waylaid by a punishing bout of inflation. Beginning in 2021, the country experienced the most sustained inflation since the early 1980s. The rate of inflation soared from around two percent to a high of nine percent, with the price level—the average price of all goods and services—rising by about 20 percent over four years.

Biden’s defenders argued that the causes were external and not the result of the administration’s policies. The fact that rising inflation in the United States was mirrored in economies around the world was proof, they maintained, that Bidenomics was not to blame. They were partly right. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 dramatically raised energy and food prices, as did supply chain issues rooted in the pandemic. Indeed, the 2022 supply shocks were much worse outside the United States: the price of natural gas peaked at $10 per million BTU in the United States but $100 per million BTU in Europe because of European countries’ greater dependence on Russian energy supplies and the limited global trade in natural gas.

But the fact that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon does not let U.S. macroeconomic policy off the hook any more than the global nature of the Great Depression or the Great Recession exonerated U.S. policymakers then for their mistakes in managing the economy. The war in Ukraine and supply chain disruptions alone cannot explain what happened in the United States, where core inflation, which excludes food and energy, reached a peak of nearly seven percent in mid-2022. This was not simply the result of increases in energy and food prices being passed on to other goods, such as airline tickets. Energy prices do not necessarily lead to large increases in core inflation; when energy prices surged in 2005, core inflation stayed below two percent. Higher prices also proved more durable. By late 2022, oil prices had fallen back to where they were before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, but overall price increases had not reversed, and, in fact, inflation remained elevated.

A woman shopping in a supermarket in Los Angeles, June 2022 Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Supply chains, meanwhile, were less a source of strain than an underappreciated success. Real consumer spending on durable goods in the United States rose nearly 30 percent above pre-COVID levels in 2021, with no equivalent bump in countries that did not provide continued stimulus checks. Global supply chains were mostly able to accommodate the U.S. increase in spending, in part through large increases in imports. U.S. ports processed 19 percent more cargo by volume in 2021 than they did before COVID, an unusually large uptick that was responsible for the lineup of ships at U.S. ports that many apologists incorrectly attributed to supply chain slowdowns. Ports simply could not keep up with American consumers’ increased appetites for spending. These were not supply dislocations but a huge demand shock stemming in part from the Biden administration’s decision to provide another round of stimulus checks.

The increase in support for the economy resulted in a huge increase in nominal GDP, as spending is bound to go up when households have more money. Real GDP could not have gone up much more than it did given the constraints on the productive capacity of the economy. The excess took the form of higher prices. Factors such as consumer tastes and supply chains determined where those price increases showed up in the economy, but they did not drive the overall average price increase. Had it not been for the large infusion of cash and the Federal Reserve’s delayed response to the emergence of inflation (it did not raise interest rates until March 2022), higher goods prices would have led to cutbacks in services and lower price growth without much of an increase in overall inflation. Economists and pundits who claimed that inflation would prove transitory correctly predicted that the price of goods would stop increasing but wrongly expected that would mean an end to inflation. Instead, inflation migrated from goods to services, where it remains elevated to this day.

The Biden administration was not alone in missing the risk of inflation. Some Republican economists also dismissed the idea that the fiscal stimulus would be inflationary, and financial markets suggested that investors believed that inflation would be transitory. Nevertheless, the same technocratic macroeconomic models that recommended, to no avail, a larger fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession of 2009–10 now recommended a much smaller one in the wake of the pandemic. But the administration’s desire to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2008 and its infatuation with the hot economy hypothesis cost the economy dearly.

HARD HAT IN HAND

Biden hoped that a hot economy would benefit workers, especially those with low incomes, through higher employment and faster wage growth. This position found support beyond the left-wing advocacy groups that had long pushed for worker-friendly economic policies: officials at the Federal Reserve and even some right-of-center economists endorsed it, believing that experiences such as the wage boom of the late 1990s were evidence of its efficacy.

Unfortunately, the theory proved unsuccessful in practice. The overheating of the economy coincided with a second round of budget deficit increases—resulting from front-loaded spending tied to the infrastructure act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and climate bills, plus executive actions by Biden, such as student loan relief—that forced the Federal Reserve to dramatically increase interest rates. Although inflation was mostly brought under control by mid-2024, the effects were lasting. As of December 2024, the unemployment rate was roughly four percent, above the three and a half percent before COVID, and inflation remained slightly above target. More important, inflation-adjusted wages have barely increased above pre-pandemic levels, and the entire increase in real wages took place in 2020; on net, real wages have fallen since January 2021.

Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2024, average real wage growth for workers in every income group was slower than it was from 2014 to 2019. Rapid real wage growth, especially for low-income workers, began in 2014, when the unemployment rate was around six percent, but diminished dramatically when the unemployment rate fell below four percent in 2022. That makes it hard to argue that Biden’s policies contributed much to real wage growth. And although by keeping unemployment down, heating the economy did give workers more leverage to demand higher nominal wages, it also gave businesses more leverage to raise prices, undercutting the gains of many ordinary Americans.

Adding to the trouble, the administration’s laser-like focus on the demand side came at the expense of addressing impediments to supply, such as excessive obstacles to permitting processes related to building infrastructure. As a result, infrastructure suffered an even worse fate than real wages. More than half the funds in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dispersed to states through early 2024 went to highway and bridge projects, prompting a spike in highway spending, which rose 36 percent from mid-2019 to mid-2024. But the costs associated with construction, including asphalt, concrete, and labor, increased even more, leaving real infrastructure spending down 17 percent over the same period. In fact, the amount of federal investment in highways during every year of the Biden administration was lower than in any year from 2003 through 2020. Biden’s putative building boom was in reality a building bust.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law did little to address the root causes of the United States’ long-standing infrastructure unaffordability problem—excessive environmental reviews, labyrinthine permitting processes, and laws requiring that workers are paid prevailing wages—and, in some respects, worsened the crisis by adding new requirements. The permitting reform that was supposed to pass in parallel with the climate bill never became law because of Republican recalcitrance and Democratic fears of incurring the wrath of environmentalists. Spending such a huge amount all at once without any steps to increase construction capacity led to even higher cost increases for building materials than was reflected in the overall inflation rate.

INDUSTRIAL DEVOLUTION

In January 2021, Biden declared that one of his administration’s main goals was “rebuilding the backbone of America: manufacturing, unions, and the middle class.” This focus drew on the work of critics of the old economic orthodoxy, who charged that the neoliberal emphasis on free trade without any supports for workers had hollowed out once thriving manufacturing communities and led to discontent with the deindustrialization that fueled Trump’s rise. Biden aimed to revive manufacturing, especially in sectors he viewed as critical for national security and climate progress. He built on Trump’s policies by retaining, reformulating, or expanding restrictions on trade to promote domestic production. He strengthened and more rigorously enforced “Buy America” rules for government procurement, offered subsidies for companies sourcing clean energy domestically, and expanded U.S. production of electric vehicle batteries. The process used by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews bids for foreign investment in U.S. companies, was beefed up, culminating in the administration blocking the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel. The government provided tens of billions of dollars of direct support for manufacturing in an effort to boost private investment.

So far, however, this attempted revival of American manufacturing has achieved little success. Unionization rates fell below ten percent in 2024 for the first time on record. The share of workers in manufacturing has continued to fall at the same rate as it did during the Obama and first Trump presidencies. Manufacturing output has remained flat, as it has since 2014. It is possible that Biden’s policies will start to work after a lag; one hopeful sign is an increase in factory construction, which has more than doubled in the last five years. But other indicators, such as investment in industrial equipment, have not risen, suggesting that manufacturing may continue to stagnate.

The manufacturing revival has run up against the problem of crowding out. By increasing subsidies for semiconductor fabrication and green technology innovation, for example, the government has encouraged their production. But these same policies, coupled with other fiscally expansionary policies, have driven up the prices of materials and equipment, wages for construction and factory workers, interest rates for entrepreneurs hoping to borrow, and the value of the dollar, all of which have made it harder for nonsubsidized manufacturing to prosper.

Industrial policy has its merits, but it did not live up to Biden’s hyperbolic claims that it would usher in a manufacturing renaissance along with millions of well-paying jobs. The CHIPS Act appears to be succeeding in its primary objective of shifting advanced chip production to the United States. And given that the national security benefits of domestic semiconductor production are not priced into markets, crowding out other industries with government subsidies for chip production is worthwhile. But industrial policy has not led to better or cheaper microchips or any net job creation. It has done little to revive manufacturing or create middle-class jobs. In fact, favoring some sectors while crowding out others likely increased the pace at which some companies have added jobs while others have shed them, leading to the very economic winners and losers that post-neoliberal critics complain result from expanded trade.

The administration also kept in place and even expanded tariffs, effectively pursuing foreign policy at the expense of the middle class by keeping the costs of imported goods high. Sometimes it is worth paying a cost for another goal; for example, sanctions on Russia ask Americans to pay a small cost for a worthwhile foreign policy objective. But policymakers should not fool themselves into thinking these policies are win-win, which the Biden administration seemed to do. Biden never did the hard work of explaining to the public, for example, that enforcing further limits on trade with China imposed real costs on Americans but that the national security gain was worth the economic pain.

IT AIN’T EASY BEING GREEN

Biden made climate policy central to his agenda, pushing a program grounded in industrial policy, regulation, and subsidies that proponents reasonably argued was more likely to pass through Congress than the carbon pricing preferred by many economists. But the rationale for this approach went beyond political feasibility; the administration and its defenders argued that a carbon tax could not curb emissions at the scale needed to blunt the effects of climate change and that their suite of policies could both address the climate crisis and create good-paying jobs by shifting the production of green technology to the United States.

Against all odds, the Inflation Reduction Act passed into law in August 2022, with extensive subsidies for renewable energy, electric vehicles, and the domestic production of green technologies. Government estimates have projected that U.S. emissions will be roughly 17 percent lower by 2050 than was forecast before the IRA was passed. Given the political constraints, Biden’s administration could have done little more to fight climate change.

Supporters claimed that the industrial policy approach was the more progressive option, but it delivered large subsidies to corporations, whereas a carbon tax could provide rebates to households. Gross job gains are limited, and to an even greater degree than the CHIPS program, the IRA is likely to benefit certain industries at the expense of others. Shifting the focus of production from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, for example, lends credence to the possibility that the U.S. economy will experience a “green shock” akin to the “China shock” that hit manufacturing sectors two decades ago.

Workers assembling electric vehicles in Normal, Illinois, June 2024 Joel Angel Juarez / Reuters

More important, the IRA will not be any more effective at lowering emissions than the carbon taxes that post-neoliberals have criticized. Estimates vary, but one of the most sophisticated studies of the law, co-authored by two former Biden administration officials, concluded that a carbon tax of $12 a ton would result in about the same emission reductions as the entire IRA.

The IRA’s reliance on corporate subsidies should make it politically resilient. Lobbyists for the oil industry and the Chamber of Commerce have pressured the Trump administration to retain the law’s key provisions even though Trump called for its repeal on the campaign trail. But that reliance on subsidies makes the law harder to scale up—subsidies cannot simply be made 20 times larger to address the full social costs of carbon, most recently estimated by the Biden administration at about $200 per ton. In 2005, the European Union instituted a carbon pricing system starting at around $10 per ton, but it has since risen to a little over $80 as the EU tightened rules to rein in emissions. Biden’s programs are promising, but it’s doubtful they will be able to scale up as the need to restrict emissions becomes more urgent.

Claiming that turning away from traditional economic approaches is the only way to address climate change, as some proponents of the Biden strategy have, will hinder the United States’ ability to transition its economy. Policymakers need every tool in the toolkit to fight climate change—including “neoliberal” ones.

NET BENEFITS

Climate policy was not the only bedrock liberal issue on which the Biden administration valorized its unorthodox approach. Post-neoliberal enthusiasm for industrial policy, as well as stricter antitrust enforcement and labor market regulation—so-called predistribution policies—have blinded progressives to the fact that Biden did little to permanently redistribute income by building a stronger social safety net. The Build Back Better agenda did include the American Jobs Plan for infrastructure and energy and the American Families Plan, which would have provided paid leave for new parents and support for children. The former passed, but the latter did not. Some supporters of Biden, such as his top antitrust official Tim Wu, embraced the view that the policies that passed would transform the economy such that more traditional Democratic social policies would become unnecessary.

All the Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt put their stamp on the social safety net in ways that endure to this day: establishing and expanding Social Security, expanding access to health insurance, providing subsidies for food, and providing housing assistance. Biden expanded premium tax credits for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act through 2025. But two of his priorities—expanding the child tax credit and raising the minimum wage—were set back by inflation. The child tax credit was temporarily expanded in 2021, contributing to a significant reduction in child poverty that year. But Republicans blocked renewal of the expansion; after a year, it returned to its previous value of $2,000 per child, which was never indexed to inflation. As a result, its real value has fallen by 20 percent over the last four years, which amounts to one of the largest real cuts to family support or the social safety net that the country has ever seen—dwarfing much of the legislation passed by previous presidents hostile to these programs. At the same time, Republicans opposed a minimum wage increase, preventing it from winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. So the minimum wage, too, has fallen by 20 percent in real terms and is now effectively meaningless, barely binding in a world in which competition forces almost all employers to pay more than $7.25 an hour.

BACK TO BASICS

Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory was in no small part a harsh rebuke to the Biden administration’s economic policy. Proponents of the Build Back Better agenda, in convincing themselves that the hot economy was transformative for workers, appeared oblivious to the genuine concerns of the electorate. Biden’s supporters and policymakers, especially those who have denied the effects of inflation, insisted that voters grossly misunderstood the economy or attributed Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 presidential election solely to a global rejection of incumbents. It is possible that just the portion of inflation caused by global shocks would have been enough to doom any incumbent party’s reelection chances. But adding to that inflation with unnecessary spending, minimizing the suffering it caused, and touting an imaginary boom in infrastructure and manufacturing surely did not help Democrats.

The new economic philosophy that dominated during the Biden years emphasized demand over supply. It considered concerns over budget constraints overstated and placed its faith in predistribution as a way to change the trajectory of the macroeconomy. It promised policies that could simultaneously transform industries, prioritize marginalized groups in procurement and hiring practices, and serve broad social goals. Ultimately, this post-neoliberal ideology and its adherents did not take tradeoffs seriously enough, laboring under an illusion that previous policymakers were too beholden to economic orthodoxy to make real progress for people.

Rather than merely resorting to conventional approaches, however, what the country needs now is a renewal of economic policy thinking. The post-neoliberals were not wrong about the problems they inherited. Largely free labor markets have failed to deliver high levels of employment for prime-age workers in the United States for decades. National security concerns now shadow every question regarding trade and technology. And the transition to green energy will require dramatic action. New ideas about these old problems will never yield successful policies, however, if they dismiss budget constraints, cost-benefit analysis, and tradeoffs. It’s fine to question economic orthodoxy. But policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions.

JASON FURMAN is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University. He was Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jason Furman · February 10, 2025

6. The Path to American Authoritarianism

I doubt this will get an objective read by either extreme political faction.

Remember Scalia: "I attack ideas, not people."

Excerpts:

America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.

Trump will be vulnerable. The administration’s limited public support and inevitable mistakes will create opportunities for democratic forces—in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box.

But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling. Worn down by harassment and threats, many of Trump’s critics will be tempted to retreat to the sidelines. Such a retreat would be perilous. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root.

The Path to American Authoritarianism

Foreign Affairs · by More by Steven Levitsky · February 11, 2025

What Comes After Democratic Breakdown

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way

February 11, 2025

Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco

STEVEN LEVITSKY is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow for Democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

LUCAN A. WAY is Distinguished Professor of Democracy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

They are the authors of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War.

• More by Lucan A. Way

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Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.

The timing of this mood shift could not be worse, for democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term.

Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.

The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.

THE WEAPONIZED STATE

The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens.

But much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.

This is why all established democracies have elaborate sets of laws, rules, and norms to prevent the state’s weaponization. These include independent judiciaries, central banks, and election authorities and civil services with employment protections. In the United States, the 1883 Pendleton Act created a professionalized civil service in which hiring is based on merit. Federal workers are barred from participating in political campaigns and cannot be fired or demoted for political reasons. The vast majority of the over two million federal employees have long enjoyed civil service protection. At the start of Trump’s second term, only about 4,000 of these were political appointees.

America is heading toward competitive authoritarian rule, not single-party dictatorship.

The United States has also developed an extensive set of rules and norms to prevent the politicization of key state institutions. These include the Senate’s confirmation of presidential appointees, lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, tenure security for the chair of the Federal Reserve, ten-year terms for FBI directors, and five-year terms for IRS directors. The armed forces are protected from politicization by what the legal scholar Zachary Price describes as “an unusually thick overlay of statutes” governing the appointment, promotion, and removal of military officers. Although the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS remained somewhat politicized through the 1970s, a series of post-Watergate reforms effectively ended partisan weaponization of these institutions.

Professional civil servants often play a critical role in resisting government efforts to weaponize state agencies. They have served as democracy’s frontline of defense in recent years in Brazil, India, Israel, Mexico, and Poland, as well as in the United States during the first Trump administration. For this reason, one of the first moves undertaken by elected autocrats such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has been to purge professional civil servants from public agencies responsible for things such as investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing, regulating the media and the economy, and overseeing elections—and replace them with loyalists. After Orban became prime minister in 2010, his government stripped public employees of key civil service protections, fired thousands, and replaced them with loyal members of the ruling Fidesz party. Likewise, Poland’s Law and Justice party weakened civil service laws by doing away with the competitive hiring process and filling the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military with partisan allies.

Trump and his allies have similar plans. For one, Trump has revived his first-term effort to weaken the civil service by reinstating Schedule F, an executive order that allows the president to exempt tens of thousands of government employees from civil service protections in jobs deemed to be “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” If implemented, the decree will transform tens of thousands of civil servants into “at will” employees who can easily be replaced with political allies. The number of partisan appointees, already higher in the U.S. government than in most established democracies, could increase more than tenfold. The Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups have spent millions of dollars recruiting and vetting an army of up to 54,000 loyalists to fill government positions. These changes could have a broader chilling effect across the government, discouraging public officials from questioning the president. Finally, Trump’s declaration that he would fire the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and the director of the IRS, Danny Werfel, before the end of their terms led both to resign, paving the way for their replacement by loyalists with little experience in their respective agencies.

Once key agencies such as the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS have been packed with loyalists, governments can harness them for three antidemocratic ends: investigating and prosecuting rivals, co-opting civil society, and shielding allies from prosecution.

SHOCK AND LAW

The most visible means of weaponizing the state is through targeted prosecution. Virtually all elected autocratic governments deploy justice ministries, public prosecutors’ offices, and tax and intelligence agencies to investigate and prosecute rival politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, business leaders, universities, and other critics. In traditional dictatorships, critics are often charged with crimes such as sedition, treason, or plotting insurrection, but contemporary autocrats tend to prosecute critics for more mundane offenses, such as corruption, tax evasion, defamation, and even minor violations of arcane rules. If investigators look hard enough, they can usually find petty infractions such as unreported income on tax returns or noncompliance with rarely enforced regulations.

Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to prosecute his rivals, including former Republican Representative Liz Cheney and other lawmakers who served on the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In December 2024, House Republicans called for an FBI investigation into Cheney. The first Trump administration’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department were largely thwarted from within, so this time, Trump sought appointees who shared his goal of pursuing perceived enemies. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has declared that Trump’s “prosecutors will be prosecuted,” and his choice for FBI director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly called for the prosecution of Trump’s rivals. In 2023, Patel even published a book featuring an “enemies list” of public officials to be targeted.

Because the Trump administration will not control the courts, most targets of selective prosecution will not end up in prison. But the government need not jail its critics to inflict harm on them. Targets of investigation will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers, their lives will be disrupted, their professional careers will be sidetracked, and their reputations will be damaged. At a minimum, they and their families will suffer months or years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

Trump’s efforts to use government agencies to harass his perceived adversaries will not be limited to the Justice Department and the FBI. A variety of other departments and agencies can be deployed against critics. Autocratic governments, for example, routinely use tax authorities to target opponents for politically motivated investigations. In Turkey, the Erdogan government gutted the Dogan Yayin media group, whose newspapers and TV networks were reporting on government corruption, by charging it with tax evasion and imposing a crippling $2.5 billion fine that forced the Dogan family to sell its media empire to government cronies. Erdogan also used tax audits to pressure the Koc Group, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, to abandon its support for opposition parties.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s swearing-in ceremony, Washington, February 2025 Kent Nishimura / Reuters

The Trump administration could similarly deploy the tax authorities against critics. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations all politicized the IRS before the 1970s Watergate scandal led to reforms. An influx of political appointees would weaken those safeguards, potentially leaving Democratic donors in the cross hairs. Because all individual campaign donations are publicly disclosed, it would be easy for the Trump administration to identify and target those donors; indeed, fear of such targeting could deter individuals from contributing to opposition politicians in the first place.

Tax-exempt status may also be politicized. As president, Richard Nixon worked to deny or delay tax-exempt status for organizations and think tanks he viewed as politically hostile. Under Trump, such efforts could be facilitated by antiterrorism legislation passed in November 2024 by the House of Representatives that empowers the Treasury Department to withdraw tax-exempt status from any organization it suspects of supporting terrorism without having to disclose evidence to justify such an act. Because “support for terrorism” can be defined very broadly, Trump could, in the words of Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett, “use it as a sword against those he views as his political enemies.”

The Trump administration will almost certainly deploy the Department of Education against universities, which as centers of opposition activism are frequent targets of competitive authoritarian governments’ ire. The Department of Education hands out billions of dollars in federal funding for universities, oversees the agencies responsible for college accreditation, and enforces compliance with Title VI and Title IX, laws that prohibit educational institutions from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, or sex. These capacities have rarely been politicized in the past, but Republican leaders have called for their deployment against elite schools.

Elected autocrats also routinely use defamation suits and other forms of legal action to silence their critics in the media. In Ecuador in 2011, for example, President Rafael Correa won a $40 million lawsuit against a columnist and three executives at a leading newspaper for publishing an editorial calling him a “dictator.” Although public figures rarely win such suits in the United States, Trump has made ample use of a variety of legal actions to wear down media outlets, targeting ABC News, CBS News, The Des Moines Register, and Simon & Schuster. His strategy has already borne fruit. In December 2024, ABC made the shocking decision to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump, paying him $15 million to avoid a trial in which it probably would have prevailed. The owners of CBS are also reportedly considering settling a lawsuit by Trump, showing how spurious legal actions can prove politically effective.

The administration need not directly target all its critics to silence most dissent. Launching a few high-profile attacks may serve as an effective deterrent. A legal action against Cheney would be closely watched by other politicians; a suit against The New York Times or Harvard would have a chilling effect on dozens of other media outlets or universities.

HONEY TRAP

A weaponized state is not merely a tool to punish opponents. It can also be used to build support. Governments in competitive authoritarian regimes routinely use economic policy and regulatory decisions to reward politically friendly individuals, firms, and organizations. Business leaders, media companies, universities, and other organizations have as much to gain as they have to lose from government antitrust decisions, the issuing of permits and licenses, the awarding of government contracts and concessions, the waiving of regulations or tariffs, and the conferral of tax-exempt status. If they believe that these decisions are made on political rather than technical grounds, they have a strong incentive to align themselves with incumbents.

The potential for co-optation is clearest in the business sector. Major American companies have much at stake in the U.S. government’s antitrust, tariff, and regulatory decisions and in the awarding of government contracts. (In 2023, the federal government spent more than $750 billion, or nearly three percent of the United States’ GDP, on awarding contracts.) For aspiring autocrats, policy and regulatory decisions can serve as powerful carrots and sticks to attract business support. This kind of patrimonial logic helped autocrats in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey secure private-sector cooperation. If Trump sends credible signals that he will behave in a similar manner, the political consequences will be far-reaching. If business leaders become convinced that it is more profitable to avoid financing opposition candidates or investing in independent media, they will change their behavior.

Indeed, their behavior has already begun to change. In what the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg termed “the Great Capitulation,” powerful CEOs who had once criticized Trump’s authoritarian behavior are now rushing to meet with him, praise him, and give him money. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Toyota each gave $1 million to fund Trump’s inauguration, more than double their previous inaugural donations. In early January, Meta announced it was abandoning its fact-checking operations—a move that Trump bragged “probably” resulted from his threats to take legal action against Meta’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg. Trump himself has recognized that in his first term, “everyone was fighting me,” but now “everybody wants to be my friend.”

A similar pattern is emerging in the media sector. Nearly all major U.S. media outlets—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The Washington Post—are owned and operated by larger parent corporations. Although Trump cannot carry out his threat to withhold licenses from national television networks because they are not licensed nationally, he can pressure media outlets by pressuring their corporate owners. The Washington Post, for instance, is controlled by Jeff Bezos, whose largest company, Amazon, competes for major federal contracts. Likewise, the owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, sells medical products subject to review by the Food and Drug Administration. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, both men overruled their papers’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris.

PROTECTION RACKET

Finally, a weaponized state can serve as a legal shield to protect government officials or allies who engage in antidemocratic behavior. A loyalist Justice Department, for example, could turn a blind eye to acts of pro-Trump political violence, such as attacks on or threats against journalists, election officials, protesters, or opposition politicians and activists. It could also decline to investigate Trump supporters for efforts to intimidate voters or even manipulate the results of elections.

This has happened before in the United States. During and after Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and other armed white supremacist groups with ties to the Democratic Party waged violent terror campaigns across the South, assassinating Black and Republican politicians, burning Black homes, businesses, and churches, committing election fraud, and threatening, beating, and killing Black citizens who attempted to vote. This wave of terror, which helped establish nearly a century of single-party rule across the South, was made possible by the collusion of state and local law enforcement authorities, who routinely turned a blind eye to the violence and systematically failed to hold its perpetrators accountable.

The United States experienced a marked rise in far-right violence during the first Trump administration. Threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold. These threats had consequences: according to Republican Senator Mitt Romney, fear of Trump supporters’ violence dissuaded some Republican senators from voting for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack.

By most measures, political violence subsided after January 2021, in part because hundreds of participants in the January 6 attack were convicted and imprisoned. But Trump’s pardon of nearly all the January 6 insurrectionists on returning to office has sent a message that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under his administration. Such signals encourage violent extremism, which means that during Trump’s second term, critics of the government and independent journalists will almost certainly face more frequent threats and even outright attacks.

Governments need not jail their critics to silence dissent.

None of this would be entirely new for the United States. Presidents have weaponized government agencies before. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover deployed the agency as a political weapon for the six presidents he served. The Nixon administration wielded the Justice Department and other agencies against perceived enemies. But the contemporary period differs in important ways. For one, global democratic standards have risen considerably. By any contemporary measure, the United States was considerably less democratic in the 1950s than it is today. A return to mid-twentieth-century practices would, by itself, constitute significant democratic backsliding.

More important, the coming weaponization of government will likely go well beyond mid-twentieth-century practices. Fifty years ago, both major U.S. parties were internally heterogeneous, relatively moderate, and broadly committed to democratic rules of the game. Today, these parties are far more polarized, and a radicalized Republican Party has abandoned its long-standing commitment to basic democratic rules, including accepting electoral defeat and unambiguously rejecting violence.

Moreover, much of the Republican Party now embraces the idea that America’s institutions—from the federal bureaucracy and public schools to the media and private universities—have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies. Authoritarian movements commonly embrace the notion that their country’s institutions have been subverted by enemies; autocratic leaders including Erdogan, Orban, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro routinely push such claims. Such a worldview tends to justify—even motivate—the kind of purging and packing that Trump promises. Whereas Nixon worked surreptitiously to weaponize the state and faced Republican opposition when that behavior came to light, today’s GOP now openly encourages such abuses. Weaponization of the state has become Republican strategy. The party that once embraced President Ronald Reagan’s campaign dictum that the government was the problem now enthusiastically embraces the government as a political weapon.

Using executive power in this way is what Republicans learned from Orban. Orban taught a generation of conservatives that the state should not be dismantled but rather wielded in pursuit of right-wing causes and against opponents. This is why tiny Hungary has become a model for so many Trump supporters. Weaponizing the state is not some new feature of conservative philosophy—it is an age-old feature of authoritarianism.

NATURAL IMMUNITY?

The Trump administration may derail democracy, but it is unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule. The United States possesses several potential sources of resilience. For one, American institutions are stronger than those in Hungary, Turkey, and other countries with competitive authoritarian regimes. An independent judiciary, federalism, bicameralism, and midterm elections—all absent in Hungary, for instance—will likely limit the scope of Trump’s authoritarianism.

Trump is also weaker politically than many successful elected autocrats. Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support: Bukele, Chávez, Fujimori, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin all boasted approval ratings above 80 percent when they launched authoritarian power grabs. Such overwhelming public support helps leaders secure the legislative supermajorities or landslide plebiscite victories needed to impose reforms that entrench autocratic rule. It also helps deter challenges from intraparty rivals, judges, and even much of the opposition.

Less popular leaders, by contrast, face greater resistance from legislatures, courts, civil society, and even their own allies. Their power grabs are thus more likely to fail. Peruvian President Pedro Castillo and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol each had approval ratings below 30 percent when they attempted to seize extraconstitutional power, and both failed. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s approval rating was well below 50 percent when he tried to orchestrate a coup to overturn his country’s 2022 presidential election. He, too, was defeated and forced out of office.

The U.S. Constitution alone cannot save American democracy.

Trump’s approval rating never surpassed 50 percent during his first term, and a combination of incompetence, overreach, unpopular policies, and partisan polarization will likely limit his support during his second. An elected autocrat with a 45 percent approval rating is dangerous, but less dangerous than one with 80 percent support.

Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey.

CHINKS IN THE ARMOR

But even a modest tilting of the playing field could cripple American democracy. Democracies require robust opposition, and robust oppositions must be able to draw on a large and replenishable pool of politicians, activists, lawyers, experts, donors, and journalists.

A weaponized state imperils such opposition. Although Trump’s critics won’t be jailed, exiled, or banned from politics, the heightened cost of public opposition will lead many of them to retreat to the political sidelines. In the face of FBI investigations, tax audits, congressional hearings, lawsuits, online harassment, or the prospect of losing business opportunities, many people who would normally oppose the government may conclude that it simply is not worth the risk or effort.

This process of self-sidelining may not attract much public attention, but it can be highly consequential. Facing looming investigations, promising politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—leave public life. CEOs seeking government contracts, tariff waivers, or favorable antitrust rulings stop contributing to Democratic candidates, funding civil rights or democracy initiatives, and investing in independent media. News outlets whose owners worry about lawsuits or government harassment rein in their investigative teams and their most aggressive reporters. Editors engage in self-censorship, softening headlines and opting not to run stories critical of the government. And university leaders fearing government investigations, funding cuts, or punitive endowment taxes crack down on campus protest, remove or demote outspoken professors, and remain silent in the face of growing authoritarianism.

Weaponized states create a difficult collective action problem for establishment elites who, in theory, would prefer democracy to competitive authoritarianism. The politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents who modify their behavior in the face of authoritarian threats are acting rationally, doing what they deem best for their organizations by protecting shareholders or avoiding debilitating lawsuits, tariffs, or taxes. But such acts of self-preservation have a collective cost. As individual actors retreat to the sidelines or censor themselves, societal opposition weakens. The media environment grows less critical. And pressure on the authoritarian government diminishes.

The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.

HOLD THE LINE

America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.

Trump will be vulnerable. The administration’s limited public support and inevitable mistakes will create opportunities for democratic forces—in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box.

But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling. Worn down by harassment and threats, many of Trump’s critics will be tempted to retreat to the sidelines. Such a retreat would be perilous. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root.

STEVEN LEVITSKY is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow for Democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

LUCAN A. WAY is Distinguished Professor of Democracy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

They are the authors of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Steven Levitsky · February 11, 2025

7. Trump signs order pausing enforcement of foreign bribery ban

Rule of law.

Rules based international order.

Adversaries do not follow rules so why does US business have to?

Published Mon, Feb 10 20251:07 PM ESTUpdated Mon, Feb 10 20257:35 PM EST

Eamon Javers

@EamonJavers

Dan Mangan

@_DanMangan

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Key Points

• President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to pause enforcing a nearly half-century-old law that prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.
• 
  
• The pause is being implemented to avoid putting U.S. businesses at an economic disadvantage to foreign competitors.
• 
  
• Trump is directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to prepare new guidelines for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement.

CNBC · by Eamon Javers,Dan Mangan · February 10, 2025

watch now

VIDEO2:0202:02

Pres. Trump signs executive order pausing enforcement of U.S. law banning foreign bribes

Fast Money

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to pause enforcing a nearly half-century-old law that prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.

"It sounds good, but it hurts the country," Trump said of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as he signed the order at the White House.

"Many, many deals are unable to be made because nobody wants to do business, because they don't want to feel like every time they pick up the phone, they're going to jail," Trump said, referring to U.S. anti-corruption efforts.

A White House official told CNBC, "A pause in enforcement to better understand how to streamline the FCPA to make sure it's in line with economic interests and national security."

The pause in criminal prosecutions under the FCPA is being implemented to avoid putting U.S. businesses at an economic disadvantage to foreign competitors.

The FCPA's intent is in part to prevent American firms from fueling rampant public corruption that undermines the rule of law in many parts of the world. Over time, the FCPA's rules have grown into bedrock principles of how American businesses operate overseas.

The FCPA became law in 1977, barring all Americans and certain foreign issuers of securities from paying bribes to foreign officials. The law was amended in 1998 to apply to foreign firms and people who caused such bribes to take place within the United States.

The broadly written law applies not only to direct bribes that are paid, but also to bribes that are offered or planned or authorized by a company's management.

The FCPA's definition of the types of actions by foreign officials that would trigger the law is also expansive.

Individuals and corporations can be prosecuted under the FCPA.

Violators of the FCPA face a maximum possible criminal sentence of 15 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000, or three times the monetary equivalent of the thing of value demanded by a foreign official.

The DOJ in 2024 announced enforcement actions in 24 cases related to alleged violations of the FCPA.

There were 17 such enforcement actions announced in 2023.

CNBC · by Eamon Javers,Dan Mangan · February 10, 2025

8. $571 million in VA spending on suicide prevention isn't working, vets groups say

This has to be one of the most difficult problems we face. Can it be solved? Can sicude be prevented? Or at least significantly reduced?

But we must try.

It will be interesting to read DOGE's analysis of these programs. I am sure they will provide us with the data.

$571 million in VA spending on suicide prevention isn't working, vets groups say

Veteran advocates are asking for accountability on how the Department of Veterans Affairs uses its $571 million suicide prevention budget, and whether those efforts are working.

Patty Nieberg, Jeff Schogol

Posted 13 Hours Ago

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg, Jeff Schogol

Veteran advocates are calling on recently confirmed Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to investigate why the millions of dollars that the agency spends each year to prevent suicides has yet to significantly curtail the number of veterans who take their own lives.

The VA received an estimated $571 million for suicide prevention efforts in Fiscal Year 2024, which ran from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, and it requested even more money for this fiscal year, according to the VA’s latest budget request.

In a press release, Grunt Style Foundation, a veteran advocacy group, pressed Collins to look at how the VA’s suicide prevention funds are being used.

“We’re looking at 156,000 of our brothers and sisters that have taken their lives over the last 20 years,” Tim Jensen, president of Grunt Style Foundation, told Task & Purpose “That is just frankly unacceptable.”

The foundation has partnered with Veterans of Foreign Wars on looking at different ways to prevent veteran suicide, such as promoting alternative treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health issues that veterans face, said VFW spokesman Robert Couture. Both organizations also seek to reduce the stigma that veterans face when they seek mental help.

“We want to be really intentional about that, and we want to be more action-oriented in this partnership,” Couture told Task & Purpose on Monday. “We have these very clear objectives that we’re looking to focus on. It’s really to develop joint campaigns to educate veterans, their families, and the public about the importance of mental health and available support services.”

The VFW is the largest and oldest combat veterans service organization. The group along with the VFW Auxiliary have more than 1.4 million members. Grunt Style Foundation launched in 2021 and focuses on mental health, food security, and military transition and sustainment issues for troops, veterans, and their families.

The Grunt Style Foundation is spearheading the call for the VA secretary to investigate veterans suicide prevention efforts, Couture said.

“It’s about, really: Hey, what is the VA doing with the money and are they doing what’s smart and what’s best for veterans and not just continuing to throw money at a problem,” Couture told Task & Purpose. “What’s the results? That’s what they’re taking the lead on.”

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Officials from the two organizations are scheduled to attend the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs annual hearing with Veteran Service Organizations at the end of February where they testify on issues impacting the veteran community.

Some of the topics that Grunt Style Foundation officials hope to address in front of Congress are issues that they have long advocated for, such as the overmedication of veterans by the VA and the lack of data around alternative therapies like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and veteran-centric community events like hiking for mental health treatment.

Suicide was the second-leading cause of death for veterans younger than 45 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the VA’s annual suicide prevention report, issued in December.

There was an average of 17.6 veteran suicide deaths per day in 2022, compared to 16.5 suicides per day in 2001, the report states. The highest was in 2018, when an average of 18.4 veterans died by suicide each day.

A total of 6,407 veterans took their own lives in 2022, three more than in 2021, the report says. Of the suicide deaths in 2022, 6,136 were male veterans, an increase of 83 deaths over the previous year; and 271 were female veterans, 80 less than in 2021.

“The number continues to rise despite all of the actions, efforts and money and resources being put towards these things,” Jensen said. “At this point, I think it is just responsible for any member of this community to ask the pertinent question: where is this money going?”

“VA is dedicated to reducing Veteran suicide rates, but we can’t do it alone,” the VA’s suicide prevention website says. “Because roughly half of all Veterans in the United States don’t receive services or benefits from VA, we collaborate with partners and communities nationwide to reach Veterans where they are.”

The VA offers veterans a variety of services for those contemplating suicide including the Veterans Crisis Line, and the VA can cover the cost of health care for certain veterans at risk of harming themselves.

Overall, the average number of daily suicide deaths for all American adults, including veterans, rose from 81 per day in 2001 to 131.2 per day in 2022, the latest VA report on suicide prevention says.

If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, the Lifeline network is available 24/7 across the United States. Reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988 and you’ll be connected to trained counselors.

The latest on Task & Purpose

• The ‘gig line’ is back in the Air Force even if you didn’t know it ever left
• This new Army special ops fitness center is decked out like a pro sports gym
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taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg, Jeff Schogol

9. In one of the Marines’ most iconic jobs, a stunning pattern of suicide

I did not expect to read this. But upon reflection Drill Sergeants/Drill Instructors must be a very stressful life.

In one of the Marines’ most iconic jobs, a stunning pattern of suicidehttps://wapo.st/40QnVXbhttps://wapo.st/40QnVXb

Today at 6:00 a.m. EST

18 min

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By Kelsey Baker and Drew F. Lawrence

BEAUFORT, S.C. — Tatiana Sowell held her youngest child as she stood amid the rows of white headstones and stately mossy oaks. Her husband, Logan, was buried in this national cemetery nearly four years ago after taking his life and ending what his widow describes as a ruinous tenure in one of the U.S. military’s most iconic jobs: Marine drill instructor. He was 33.

Nearby, her other children spotted a coin, regarded within the armed forces as a symbol of respect, resting atop his grave. Perhaps, she thought, it was left there by someone who worked with him molding new Marines at Parris Island, just south of here.

Sowell, her gaze wistful, reflected on the times she had driven Logan to work. “It was just quiet,” she recalled. “Peaceful.”

Logan Sowell’s suicide in July 2021 is one of at least seven in the past five years involving the Marine Corps’ stable of drill instructors, according to military casualty reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In 2023, three occurred at Parris Island within less than three months.

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This article was produced in partnership with Military.com, an independent news organization that covers the military community.

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A study completed by the Marine Corps in 2019 found that during the previous decade, 29 drill instructors either ended their lives or openly acknowledged they had contemplated doing so — an aberration the study’s authors characterized as startlingly high compared with the occurrence of suicidal ideation among Marines who had never held that job. Rates of addiction and divorce among drill instructors also were higher, researchers found.

Critics and relatives of those who died accuse the Marine Corps of fostering an environment that contributed to their deaths. They describe routine 90-hour-plus workweeks, sleep deprivation and an always-on culture that frequently caused the job’s requisite intensity to seep into their personal lives, igniting disputes with loved ones. Others detailed bouts of depression or alcohol dependency.

They make Marines. The job’s demands can be deadly for some.

1:32

A joint investigation by The Washington Post and Military.com has found that at least seven drill instructors died by suicide in the past five years. (Video: Joy Sung/The Washington Post)

While the adrenaline-fueled assignment has always been high-stress, the 2016 death of 20-year-old Raheel Siddiqui, a Muslim recruit who was found by investigators to have suffered vicious abuse while at Parris Island, led the institution to sharpen its oversight of the men and women who indoctrinate newcomers. There is uncompromising accountability now, which has made the hardships long associated with being a drill instructor dangerously unbearable for some, observers say. They note, too, that the Marine Corps lacks adequate services for those who are struggling and need help, and tacitly condones a culture that stigmatizes those who seek it.

Siddiqui’s death generated acute scrutiny of the Marines’ approach to entry-level training, and the service responded with a heavy hand — prosecuting some drill instructors and making clear that all infractions, real or perceived, would be subject to a commanding general’s review with the possibility of severe disciplinary action.

“We put a drastic expectation on them to act perfect,” said a Marine officer who has supervised dozens of drill instructors. This top-down pressure can render them “terrified of their careers ending,” he explained. “It causes this stress that trickles into their home life.”

An independent investigation conducted by the Marine Corps inspector general supports that assessment. Concluded in November 2023, the inquiry found “a climate that fosters ‘surviving’ [instead of] ‘thriving’” and a perception among staff that drill instructors’ welfare “is of low priority” to leadership. Investigators reported hearing from several people involved with training of recruits who observed personnel “‘walking on eggshells,’ ‘on pins and needles,’ and generally ‘afraid for their careers.’”

Then-Sgt. Logan Sowell, during his first tour as a Marine Corp drill instructor, does some last-minute preparation with his recruits before their practical application test on Oct. 18, 2013, at Parris Island. Sowell returned to Parris Island to train drill instructors as a gunnery sergeant in 2020. (Lance Cpl. MaryAnn Hill/Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island)

One former drill instructor said the experience left him and his family shattered, adding, “I experienced a really, really dark side of myself.”

This account of the mental health crisis afflicting Marine Corps drill instructors is based on more than 30 interviews with service members, their families and their superiors. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their struggles or to avoid retribution for criticizing the service.

In response to questions from The Washington Post and Military.com, the Marine Corps acknowledged that its drill instructors have “one of the most demanding roles” within the service and portrayed the findings of this investigation as part of an enduring epidemic affecting the entire Defense Department.

“Suicide rates are shaped by various factors and we as a service are constantly looking for strategies … that could have the most impact at reducing suicide in the military,” said Maj. Hector Infante, a spokesman for the Marines. He pointed to “a myriad of mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual wellness resources” available to all drill instructors, along with their families, and said that “leaders at all levels encourage them to utilize these resources.”

Infante did not address the institutional impact of Siddiqui’s death or how changes implemented as a result have affected drill instructors; nor did he comment on the circumstances surrounding the suicides addressed in this report.

The Marine Corps operates two recruit training depots, or boot camps. Most recruits who enlist west of the Mississippi River complete the 13-week program in San Diego. Those who join in the eastern United States filter through Parris Island. In the past year, the Marines have brought in more than 30,000 enlistees, most not long out of high school.

The task of turning them into warfighters falls to roughly 1,300 drill instructors, who over a three-month cycle might work 120 hours some weeks, former personnel say. In teams of three or four, they supervise platoons of 60 to 80 recruits around-the-clock, typically waking for work at 2:30 a.m. and rotating overnight responsibility. In a standard two- or three-year tour, drill instructors might do as many as nine cycles.

Newly promoted Gunnery Sgt. Logan Sowell stands for a photo with his wife, Tatiana, and children, from left, Brooklynn, Julian, Jayden and Jackson, at the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina. (Courtesy of Tatiana Sowell)

Tatiana Sowell at her sister's home in Agoura Hills, California, in October. Her husband, Gunnery Sgt. Lowell Sowell, died by suicide in July 2021. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)

They are a national symbol of discipline, intimidating and seemingly indefatigable, and many who spoke with The Post and Military.com characterized the assignment as the most rewarding of their careers. But for some, the drill instructor’s imposing persona belies a far darker reality, one marred by debilitating stress, exhaustion and, in the most dire circumstances, a hopelessness difficult to overcome.

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One evening in May 2021, Tatiana Sowell, then 36, recorded an angry encounter with her husband after hiding his car keys to keep him from driving drunk. Logan had been drinking more than ever, she said, recalling her fear that he might hurt her or someone else.

As their baby cries on the recording, Logan is heard yelling, his voice hoarse. “I don’t give a f---,” he says, challenging his wife to report him to a superior at the depot. “ … All I’m gonna do after that is blow my goddamned brains out.”

She never made the call. Weeks later, Logan was dead.

In recounting her husband’s downward spiral, she said he became overwhelmed by the pressure to be perfect at work and the guilt he felt being apart from their family. “That’s not the person he wanted to be,” she said.

Recruits with Echo Company, 2nd Recruit Training Battalion, are introduced to their drill instructors, including Staff Sgt. Courtland Bates Wind, at Parris Island on March 13, 2023. (Lance Cpl. Bradley Williams/Marine Corp Recruit Depot, Parris Island)

‘Unrealistic expectations’

The Marine Corps, Infante said, invests “a great deal of effort” to ensure that drill instructors are “not only physically but also psychologically prepared for the rigors” of their assignment. He cited a screening that all prospective drill instructors do before they are cleared to attend the service’s 11-week preparatory school, where a formal psychiatric evaluation is performed. Personnel are “continuously supervised by their command leadership teams and peer group for possible warning signs … and, if issues arise, are given the opportunity to seek assistance,” he said.

While the Pentagon has worked to expand mental health services throughout the military, it has run headlong into a nationwide shortage of qualified providers. There are eight for boot camp personnel in San Diego and 15 at Parris Island, Infante said.

Former drill instructors acknowledged the screening they received before starting to work with recruits, but said that such help is needed most after the job begins — and that too often it’s difficult to obtain a timely appointment without declaring a full-blown crisis.

The job’s unspoken expectations also can have a chilling effect on any impulse to seek care, they said, describing a prevailing reluctance to be away from work — for mental health reasons or even a family event — for fear of leaving teammates shorthanded.

And then there is the sense of having an image to uphold.

Marine Corps portraits of drill instructors who died by suicide. Clockwise from top left are Staff Sgt. Courtland Bates Wind, Cpl. Angel Acosta III, Gunnery Sgt. Logan Sowell and Sgt. Yliana Hernandez. (Defense Department)

Marine Corps tradition discourages drill instructors from showing emotion, other than intense acuity or anger, while around recruits. They are meant to be models of peak physical fitness — and always in character. Most recruits, in turn, revere their drill instructors, seeing them as “perfect, just immaculate, like gods or goddesses,” said one Marine who spent three years at Parris Island. But there are “a lot of unrealistic expectations” from leaders and peers alike, she added.

Another former drill instructor recalled struggling while going through a divorce, and feeling shunned and ashamed by colleagues after he vocalized that he might need help. “Nobody wanted to talk to me,” he said. “ … It’s like you’re the plague.”

By his third boot camp cycle, the slightest aggravation could trigger an eruption — and that intense anger was hard to turn off at home, he said. An unwashed dish left in the sink or a child’s candy wrapper on the floor could send him into a rage, he explained. He turned to alcohol to cope, he said, telling himself, “Let me just have a drink, just to calm myself down so that I don’t overreact when I might talk to my children.”

It was in his fifth cycle that he began to experience suicidal thoughts, he said. At the same time he sought mental health care, however, he was mistrustful of the personnel in charge of scheduling appointments and declined to disclose the extent of his distress. They told him to come back in two weeks, he said, because so many recruits were ahead of him awaiting care.

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Days later, he confided in a superior, who placed a call on behalf of the drill instructor, an intervention he now considers lifesaving. That got him on a priority list for treatment, which continued regularly through the end of his assignment more than a year later, he said.

Reflecting on the experience, he said that he’s unsure what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten help, and that the process of seeking and obtaining care must be improved if the Marine Corps is serious about ensuring that those who need help can access it. If a drill instructor visits mental health services, he contends, it’s almost certainly no trivial matter. “They’ve got family stuff, serious depression,” he said. “It’s something serious.”

Raheel Siddiqui, a 20-year-old Muslim recruit, was found by investigators to have suffered vicious abuse while at Parris Island. He died in 2016 after jumping off a stairwell in an attempt to escape a drill instructor. (Family photo)

Former staffers at the recruit depots say the job’s unique stress can be traced in part to the fallout from Siddiqui’s death, a criminal case that exposed the propensity among some drill instructors to physically abuse recruits. Siddiqui, a Pakistani American from Michigan, died at Parris Island on March 18, 2016, after trying to escape his drill instructor by jumping 40 feet off a stairwell.

In pursuing accountability, the Marine Corps accused 15 drill instructors of violating military criminal codes. One, Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Felix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. During his trial, former recruits testified that they were singled out by their drill instructors because of their Muslim faith, alleging instances of being hog-tied and verbally abused — and, in one case, of being ordered into a clothes dryer that instructors then turned on.

Demands for institutional change quickly followed, and the ensuing crackdown has endured. In 2019, The Post reported on a raft of additional hazing cases that resulted in drill instructors facing disciplinary action. Last year, another was sentenced to six months for mistreating subordinates.

Savannah Giesler holds her son, Legend, in October at their home in Conroe, Texas. On the wall and mantel are pictures and other mementos commemorating the life of her fiancé, Angel Acosta III. (Danielle Villasana for The Washington Post)

Three suicides in three months

At Blackstone’s Cafe in downtown Beaufort, there is a memorial to Angel Acosta III, who was 25 when he died by suicide. He was the kind of person who would help a friend move furniture day or night, and check in on people going through tough times, said Alison Senna, a manager at the restaurant who hired Acosta part time after leaders at Parris Island removed him from the drill field for disciplinary reasons. “These billets … it’s a lot of stress,” Senna said.

Savannah Giesler, Acosta’s fiancée, said he was sidelined for failing to report a “fight club” among recruits. His command investigated him, demoted him and cut his pay, paralyzing him with anxiety about whether he would be able to cover his bills and provide for a baby the couple had on the way, she said.

The year before he died, local authorities responded to a domestic dispute at the couple’s apartment and notified officials at Parris Island that Acosta was struggling with alcohol, according to a copy of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office investigation into his death. Acosta told law enforcement then that he would get help, the report says. The investigation does not indicate whether base officials intervened after they were made aware of the situation.

Angel Acosta III, then a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, is pictured with his fiancée, Savannah Giesler, in South Carolina. Giesler said Acosta was demoted and saw his pay cut after failing to report a "fight club" among his recruits. (Courtesy of Savannah Giesler)

By the time their baby was born in August 2023, Acosta was owed a $15,000 reenlistment bonus that, for reasons that remain unclear, hadn’t been processed, the sheriff’s investigators learned. On Sept. 19, 2023, Acosta contacted his unit to ask about the money, according to the sheriff’s report, which includes transcriptions of numerous text exchanges found on his phone.

In one, sent hours before he died, Acosta alluded to his struggles since he was removed from drill instructor duty, telling a friend: “I’m f------ close to just ending s--- man. Ever since I f----- up my career I done just hit rock bottom.”

The baby, Acosta’s only child, was just a month old when Acosta died after a night of heavy drinking and what an account in the sheriff’s report indicates was a heated argument with Giesler.

Last fall, after The Post and Military.com made inquiries to the Marine Corps seeking clarity on the status of Acosta’s reenlistment bonus, Giesler said she received an unexpected deposit of $15,000 from the federal government.

Savannah Giesler, who had been engaged to Angel Acosta III and is the mother of his son, sits in her home in Conroe, Texas, in October. (Danielle Villasana for The Washington Post)

Several former drill instructors, backed up by the Marine officers who supervise them, described similar struggles with alcohol and significant problems sleeping, even after they had completed their assignment and moved on to other jobs. There are well-established links between an extreme lack of sleep and the risk of suicide, said Matthew Nock, a Harvard psychology professor who has studied such patterns in the military.

“If you’re really stressed, and you’re not able to really address the stress, and from [lack of] sleep you’re feeling really disinhibited — that can be a problematic combination,” Nock said. “And if this is happening for an extended period of time, I can see one wanting to escape from that kind of situation, if there’s not an end in sight to it.”

The Marine Corps, Infante said, has instituted rules aimed at promoting “sustainable sleep health.” An internal memorandum obtained by The Post and Military.com indicates that in the summer of 2023, leaders at Parris Island and San Diego prohibited drill instructors from working more than 90 hours a week without a waiver from their command. It’s unclear how the policy is being enforced and whether it is benefiting personnel.

In some cases, survivors said, their loved ones entered the assignment with existing challenges that steadily worsened as they navigated the job’s unique pressures and stressors.

Katelyn Kleffman, whose husband, Courtland Bates Wind, died by suicide in July 2023, said he had a history of depression and over time came to live in fear of being kicked out of the Corps — whether for misconduct, allowing a recruit to die, or seeking time off for mental health and receiving a bad prognosis.

The body of Staff Sgt. Courtland Bates Wind is escorted home by Staff Sgt. Mark Gulotta and honored by the Delta Air Lines Honor Guard on July 18, 2023. (Courtesy of Katelyn Kleffman)

Katelyn Kleffman holds a folded flag outside her home in Perris, California. She says her husband, Staff Sgt. Courtland Bates Wind, had a history of depression and lived in fear of being kicked out of the Marine Corps. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)

His challenges were compounded by the death of a recruit, 19-year-old Dalton Beals, and the attempted suicide of at least one other, Kleffman said. Initially, Beals’s death was blamed on hyperthermia arising from the arduous final test recruits must complete. A second autopsy said it was related to a preexisting heart condition. One of Bates Wind’s colleagues, Staff Sgt. Steven Smiley, was tried on charges including negligent homicide. Smiley, who had maintained his innocence, was acquitted in June 2023. Bates Wind died weeks later at the age of 27.

“People, in general, have problems in their personal lives,” Kleffman said. “But when you have the drill instructor job, it amplifies those problems because of how long you’re away from home, how tired you are.”

Kleffman has retained an attorney, Shiraz Khan, to explore the possibility of litigation against the federal government. In an interview, Khan faulted what he said is a culture that stigmatizes drill instructors who seek mental health care, effectively discouraging them from doing so. “A lot of these … families,” he added, “could have avoided the pain that they’re dealing with now.”

Khan also represents the family of Yliana Hernandez, whose parents, Leon and Raquel, described her as a rising star with all the traits of a stellar Marine. Hernandez had been meritoriously promoted and was eager for the challenge of training recruits, they said, though she soon found herself disagreeing with the way her platoon operated. She seemed particularly distraught by some of her colleagues’ view that boot camp could serve as a funnel rather than a sieve to remove poor performers, her parents recalled.

Hernandez’s parents encouraged her to ask for help amid the growing stress and exhaustion they saw in their daughter. “And she would say, ‘No, that’s not how it works. We can’t say nothing,’” her mother recalled. “ … People don’t listen.”

Sgt. Yliana Hernandez, seen here after her ceremony for meritorious promotion, was eager to train recruits. (Leon Hernandez)

She served two cycles as a drill instructor before being temporarily reassigned as a recruit swim instructor, said a colleague still on active duty. The job was intended to be a break, but it isolated Hernandez from her closest co-workers amid a difficult divorce, her colleague said. Her family and friends saw a swift change in the vibrant young woman the Marine Corps itself once spotlighted in a video on resilience.

“That spark,” the colleague said, “was gone.”

Hernandez knew she needed help but refused to seek mental health care on base, her parents said, because she was loath to visit a facility where recruits she had trained would see her. She worried that exhibiting such vulnerability would burst the veneer of toughness she had shown them on the drill field. Her phone calls to other providers advertised on base went unreturned, they said.

Acosta’s death on Sept. 20, 2023, may have been a breaking point. The two were friends, and she was shocked by his death, her parents said.

Hernandez was found dead in her apartment two days later. She was 25.

“She was the best of the best,” her father said, recalling his daughter’s drive to succeed. “But you still gonna have issues no matter what. And they didn’t provide the help that she needed.”

About this story

This article was produced in partnership with Military.com, an independent news organization that covers the military community.

Kelsey Baker, a Marine Corps veteran, is a Military and Defense Reporting Fellow at Business Insider. Previously, she was The Washington Post’s Military Veterans in Journalism Fellow. Drew F. Lawrence, an Army veteran, covers the Marine Corps for Military.com.

Story editing by Andrew deGrandpre, Zachary Fryer-Biggs and Travis Tritten. Photo editing by Max Becherer. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba, Martha Murdock and Katy O’Hara. Video by Joy Sung. Design editing by Madison Walls.

10.Trump Buries Wilsonian Foreign Policy

I think a fundamental question for the US comes down to how to compete with China and maintain US national security and US national prosperity? Does traditional international relations theory sufficiently inform us on how to do that? What works (or will work) in practice in the 21st Century?

​Excerpts:

In Wilson’s world, the preservation of state sovereignty was essential for free trade. In Mr. Trump’s world, it’s unreasonable to let major ports on both sides of the Panama Canal—which was built by the U.S.—be controlled by Chinese companies. U.S. intervention in the canal may compromise Panama’s sovereignty and impede trade, but the risks of Chinese influence in such a crucial waterway are far greater.

Wilson saw self-rule as the way to uplift nations and humanity as a whole. But it’s absurd for today’s U.S. to relinquish Greenland’s shipping routes, mineral resources and strategic benefits simply because the territory has enjoyed effective self-government for more than four decades. This is particularly true amid Russian and Chinese attempts to make economic and military encroachments on the island.

Wilson was right when he demanded in his 1918 speech that all armed forces withdraw from Belgium and honor the country’s sovereignty after years of devastating trench warfare. But Gaza isn’t Belgium. Gaza’s “sovereignty” was exploited by Hamas to perpetrate a massacre against Israelis, and Mr. Trump is right to try to abrogate its freedom to do so again.

As a child, I vacationed at a hotel on one of Gaza’s breathtaking beaches, which are unmatched in beauty throughout the Middle East. There’s no reason why, in the name of Wilsonian idealism, those beaches should host Iranian-funded terrorist squads rather than cocktails at sunset.

Trump Buries Wilsonian Foreign Policy

The old rules of inviolable state borders don’t apply in a world of trade wars and terrorist regimes.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-buries-wilsonian-foreign-policy-world-order-nations-borders-history-d8cdfb87?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

By Amit Segal

Feb. 10, 2025 11:41 am ET

Woodrow Wilson addressing Congress, 1918. Photo: Bettmann Archive

President Trump is working to undo the domestic policies of Joe Biden. In foreign policy Mr. Trump is undoing the work of Woodrow Wilson.

The general understanding after World War I was that violations of national sovereignty and borders constituted the key threat to global peace. Addressing a joint session of Congress in January 1918, Wilson called for a “general association of nations” that would afford “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” This was the League of Nations. It aimed to forestall conflict by making states sacred and their borders inviolable.

Meanwhile, European diplomats began drawing new borders throughout the globe. In the Middle East they established Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. Mirroring Wilson, they spoke of self-determination in Africa, though decolonization didn’t truly begin until after World War II. In Europe, borders were redrawn to divide empires into nation-states.

Mr. Trump is rejecting that vision. According to him, the primary danger to global peace isn’t the infringement of state sovereignty but the actions of authoritarian terrorist regimes. Borders drawn in the 20th century haven’t provided security or self-determination; they’ve led to armed conflict. Syria has devolved into a brutal multiethnic dictatorship. Jordan’s majority-Palestinian population is ruled by an authoritarian monarchy with Bedouin roots. Gaza started as a territory under Egyptian control and turned into a vicious terrorist state. The Panama Canal has become a Chinese outpost.

Those shocked by Mr. Trump’s seemingly imperialist threats to take over Greenland, intervene in Panama, unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico and build American hotels in Gaza are using 20th-century principles to interpret 21st-century policy. Mr. Trump recognizes that the old rules don’t apply in a world of trade wars and terrorist organizations. What he proposes isn’t imperialism but a new line of Western defense against insidious forces.

Wilson believed that when authoritarian countries are given self-determination, democracy can emerge. George W. Bush and Barack Obama clung to this doctrine, advocating democratic elections in the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Egypt. Instead, fundamentalist Islam rose, endangering the region. Thousands paid with their lives. Where would you rather live, “democratic” Gaza or authoritarian Dubai?

In Wilson’s world, the preservation of state sovereignty was essential for free trade. In Mr. Trump’s world, it’s unreasonable to let major ports on both sides of the Panama Canal—which was built by the U.S.—be controlled by Chinese companies. U.S. intervention in the canal may compromise Panama’s sovereignty and impede trade, but the risks of Chinese influence in such a crucial waterway are far greater.

Wilson saw self-rule as the way to uplift nations and humanity as a whole. But it’s absurd for today’s U.S. to relinquish Greenland’s shipping routes, mineral resources and strategic benefits simply because the territory has enjoyed effective self-government for more than four decades. This is particularly true amid Russian and Chinese attempts to make economic and military encroachments on the island.

Wilson was right when he demanded in his 1918 speech that all armed forces withdraw from Belgium and honor the country’s sovereignty after years of devastating trench warfare. But Gaza isn’t Belgium. Gaza’s “sovereignty” was exploited by Hamas to perpetrate a massacre against Israelis, and Mr. Trump is right to try to abrogate its freedom to do so again.

As a child, I vacationed at a hotel on one of Gaza’s breathtaking beaches, which are unmatched in beauty throughout the Middle East. There’s no reason why, in the name of Wilsonian idealism, those beaches should host Iranian-funded terrorist squads rather than cocktails at sunset.

Mr. Segal is chief political commentator on Israel’s Channel 12 News and author of “The Story of Israeli Politics.”

WSJ Opinion: Trump Challenges the Rules-Based World Order

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Global View: The power that a rising and expanding America would inevitably acquire will be seen in Beijing and Moscow—and not only there—as a threat. Photo: Ju Peng/Alexander Kazakov/Associated Press/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Appeared in the February 11, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Buries Wilsonian Foreign Policy'.

11. Pentagon doubles number of news outlets to 'rotate' out from office spaces

Is the Fourth Estate under attack? Or isn't it a good thing to broaden Pentagon media access to new organizations? Or is there an appearance of favoritism when you consider the organizations that are being singled out on both sides?​ Does choosing favorites (if that is what is happening) ultimately undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the organization that is doing the choosing?

We have to ask ourselves how strongly we value our 1st Amendment freedoms? Do we believe in the principles of the free press with the sacred responsibility to inform the public and hold our government accountable even when it exposes government warts and things members of the government do not want to have exposed? I personally side with the free press.

Or is DOGE a better organization to hold the government accountable than the free press? Are DOGE and the Fourth Estate in competition to follow the money and hold the government accountable?

Perhaps questions with no good answers.

Pentagon doubles number of news outlets to 'rotate' out from office spaces

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-doubles-number-news-outlets-rotate-out-office-spaces-2025-02-08/

By Kanishka Singh

February 9, 20257:21 PM ESTUpdated 2 days ago

The Pentagon building is seen in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. October 9, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) - (This Feb. 7 story has been refiled to correct the byline)

The U.S. Defense Department on Friday doubled the number of news organizations that must vacate their Pentagon office spaces to be replaced by other media outlets under a new "annual media rotation program."

The department said in a memo it was adding CNN, the Washington Post, the Hill and the War Zone to the outlets that must give up their dedicated space. Those organizations did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the first round, the Defense Department said a week ago the New York Times, NBC News, Politico and the National Public Radio had to vacate their dedicated workspaces at the Pentagon.

Incoming media outlets include the New York Post, Breitbart, the Washington Examiner, the Free Press, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, the Huffington Post and One America News Network, most of whom are seen as conservative or favoring Republican President Donald Trump, who took office on January 20.

Outgoing outlets will remain members of the Pentagon Press Corps, the memo said, adding that the rotation expressed a desire to make room for other media outlets.

More than two dozen news organizations operate out of the Pentagon, including Reuters, reporting on the daily activities of the U.S. military.

The Pentagon Press Association, which represents journalists who cover the Defense Department, said it was "shocked and deeply disappointed by the Defense Department's decision to double the number of news organizations it is removing in two weeks from their dedicated workspaces in the Pentagon from four to eight."

Reuters correspondent Phil Stewart is a member of the association's four-member board of directors.

Get weekly news and analysis on U.S. politics and how it matters to the world with the Reuters Politics U.S. newsletter. Sign up here.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

12. Hegseth: Pentagon must return to long-term planning against strategic adversaries

​I like the sentiment. I think DOD must take the long view in strategic planning. But can the SECDEF discipline the system and protect the services from outside influence and distraction to conduct effective long term strategic planning and ensure continuity of planning while still being able to react to crises?

But I don't think this is simply a numbers and money issue (e.g., number of generals, number of headquarters, number of troops, and size of the budget). I do not think effective long term planning cannot be judged by an algorithm today. By definition we are not going to see the effects of long term planning until ... well, ...the long term comes. This is why it is so important for our military leaders to have coup d'oiel. 

Excerpts:

However, Hegseth acknowledged that he does not expect big increases in defense budgets to fund those capabilities while simultaneously sustaining current programs. Instead, he said, his office will look across the department—particularly at the leadership structure—to find, “systems, hierarchies, layers that we can review,” to cut red tape and costs.

“We're looking at the headquarters level. We're looking at the highest levels…We won World War II with seven four-star generals. Today, we have 44. Do they directly contribute to war fighting success? Maybe they do. I don't know. But it's worth reviewing to make sure they do. So we're looking at all options.”

Probably the largest obstacle to the sort of large-scale reform Hegseth described is Congress, previous Defense Department officials and others have told Defense One. So the challenge will be convincing law makers to approach their jobs of budgeting and oversight differently.

Hegseth: Pentagon must return to long-term planning against strategic adversaries

In a Pentagon town hall, new defense secretary vowed to make longer-term plans, deploy tech faster, and have fewer flag officers and smaller staffs.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth holds a town hall meeting for Department of Defense personnel at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 2025. U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Madelyn Keech

By Patrick Tucker

Science & Technology Editor

February 9, 2025 07:28 PM ET

• Pentagon
• Defense Department
• Strategy

Autocracies like China and Russia have at least one advantage the United States does not, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday in a Pentagon town hall: They can make plans far into the future to change the global balance of power in their favor.

It’s time for the United States, and particularly the Defense Department, to do the same, he said.

“They have the convenience of planning without…the pesky people problem of voting and ballots. They can plan 15, 20 years and then drive that plan without consequence to their own population, which does have strategic advantages,” he said of China and Russia. “I think you're going to see a defense strategy coming out of our office that tries to look that far down the line…and rapidly field and look at systems that are not about congressional districts or budget line items.”

The Defense Department has undertaken long-term strategic planning before. During the Cold War, U.S. defense strategy was shaped by long-term planning documents like NSC 68, a top-secret 1950 report presented to President Harry S. Truman, and Project Solarium, a 1953 strategic exercise aimed at evaluating and formulating U.S. policies to counter the Soviet Union. These efforts, often spanning 10 to 20 years, provided the foundation for key policies such as the "New Look" doctrine, which emphasized nuclear deterrence through projects like the hydrogen bomb, and sustained investment in U.S. alliances to counter Soviet influence across the globe. The thinking was big-picture, and the time horizon was long.

Today, the Pentagon’s strategic planning process looks very different. The backbone of modern defense resource allocation is the Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, part of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process. Instead of a multi-decade grand strategy, the POM operates on a rolling five-year window, aligning budgets with the National Defense Strategy and shifting priorities to match emerging threats. The National Defense Strategy, which often refers to longer-term time horizons and goals, generally is updated every four years.

Of course, one big obstacle to defense planning that spans decades is the pace of progress in information technology, which touches all other areas of weapons development, and the global online information ecosystem that can cause sudden political destabilization.

Hegseth said longer-term planning does not mean a return to the Cold War practice of pursuing massive, elaborate weapons that take billions of dollars and many years to deploy. He offered Ukraine as an example of technology democratization: powerful capabilities becoming cheaper and easier to access. “We're learning a lot [from Ukraine] about what low-cost systems like UAVs can do to high-cost systems that we have invested a great deal in. And the question is, do you keep investing in those or not?”

That line of thinking is not new. Under former President Joe Biden, the Defense Department launched initiatives like Replicator, designed to rapidly field highly autonomous, low-cost drones. But funding—$1 billion for Replicator over two years—was miniscule in comparison to the money allocated to big, slow moving programs of record, sustainment, and other budget items.

Rather than break from the previous administration, Hegseth said, he will put much greater emphasis on precisely those areas and engines of rapid change, via more support for offices like the Defense Innovation Unit “and others,” that focus on “experimentally, rapidly fielding new technologies and then finding a way to make sure they're funded so that they can be scaled and tested, even in real time out with combatant commands, as opposed to an 18-month testing process to move things.”

However, Hegseth acknowledged that he does not expect big increases in defense budgets to fund those capabilities while simultaneously sustaining current programs. Instead, he said, his office will look across the department—particularly at the leadership structure—to find, “systems, hierarchies, layers that we can review,” to cut red tape and costs.

“We're looking at the headquarters level. We're looking at the highest levels…We won World War II with seven four-star generals. Today, we have 44. Do they directly contribute to war fighting success? Maybe they do. I don't know. But it's worth reviewing to make sure they do. So we're looking at all options.”

Probably the largest obstacle to the sort of large-scale reform Hegseth described is Congress, previous Defense Department officials and others have told Defense One. So the challenge will be convincing law makers to approach their jobs of budgeting and oversight differently.

13. Philippines issues warning of Chinese debris landing near coast

​Let us not forget the words of the Philippine Ambassador to the US:

 “The West Philippine Sea, not Taiwan, is the real flashpoint for an armed conflict,”

 – Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez

February 28, 2024

Philippines issues warning of Chinese debris landing near coast

Air closure notice on missile or rocket launch issued for Feb. 11

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Monday, February 10, 2025

China’s military is set to launch a rocket or missile that could land close to the coast of the Philippines, a U.S. ally that in recent months has been engaged in a tense military standoff with Beijing.

The Philippines government issued a notice Jan. 24 warning air traffic that China is expected to fire a “missile, gun or rocket” on Feb. 11, one that could produce unburned debris in three areas, including one zone in the Sulu Sea close to southern Philippines. The notice posted on the website of the International Civil Aviation Organization stated that debris from the launch could land as close as 70 miles west of Zamboanga airport.

The Philippines Office of Civil Defense announced two days later that the scheduled flight of a new Chinese space launch had been postponed until February. It identified the rocket as the Long March 8A. The office warned Filipinos not to touch any debris they encountered from the test as potentially toxic.

The notice posted on the website of the International Civil Aviation Organization stated that debris from the launch may land about 70 miles west of Zamboanga airport.

China’s People’s Liberation Army is in charge of all Chinese space and missile launches and thus its rocket firings are closely watched by U.S. intelligence agencies. A Pentagon surveillance aircraft crashed not far from the air closure test location on Thursday, killing a U.S. Marine and three defense contractors, the Indo-Pacific Command announced.

Geographical coordinates contained in the notice to airmen showed three potential landing locations.

The launch warning was first reported by Duan Dang, a Vietnamese blogger who monitors China’s South China Sea activities.

“The NOTAM issued by the Philippines raises doubts about the true nature of the launch, particularly regarding its designated impact zone in the Sulu Sea,” he stated on X.

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Richard Fisher, a China military affairs expert, confirmed that the initial launch of the Long March 8A had been set for late January, but was rescheduled for Feb. 11.

The payload for the launch has not been identified by the Chinese government. However, an earlier variant of the launcher was used to orbit groups of satellites for surveillance and communications.

The three splashdown locations contained in the notice to airmen straddle the Philippines island province of Palawan, with a possible third stage impacting in the Sulu Sea, a Philippines waterway, at a time of heightened Chinese coercion against the Philippines, Mr. Fisher said.

“China regularly uses space launch vehicle stage splash-downs near Taiwan to accentuate its military coercive campaign against the island democracy,” he said.“In a similar vein, this latest Long March-8A mission represents an escalation in Chinese threats against Manila.”

Pressure campaign

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Beijing’s aggressiveness against the Philippines throughout last year included hundreds of Chinese coast guard and navy ship patrols against multiple disputed islands and shoals in the South China Sea.

The Philippines government also arrested a group of Chinese spies suspected of gathering intelligence on Palawan. The five suspected Chinese agents were charged last month with spying on Philippine navy and coast guard facilities, ports and ships on Palawan near the South China Sea.

Mr. Fisher said the activities included monitoring Ulugan Bay, an area he said is a likely location for any future Chinese amphibious invasion.

“A Chinese threat to Palawan is real, as the People’s Liberation Army requires control of Palawan in order to secure control over the South China Sea or West Philippine Sea, which China seeks in order to secure its nuclear missile submarine and strategic lunar and deep space launching bases on Hainan Island,” he said.

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U.S. and Philippine Marines hold regular military exercises to practice defending Palawan, and Manila recently increased U.S. access to bases in the province.

“The planned Feb. 11 Long March-8A launch is a reminder that other PLA missiles can directly target U.S.-Philippine forces on Palawan,” Mr. Fisher said.

The stepped-up military coercion against Manila appears to reflect Beijing’s anger over the grounded Philippine navy ship Sierra Madre, which is being used as the basis for Filipino sovereignty claims on the Second Thomas Shoal. China has been harassing resupply vessels en route to the Sierra Madre and wants the grounded ship removed.

China also is angered by the Philippines’ decision to host U.S. Typhon medium-range missiles in the northern Philippines. The Philippines government announced in January that the missiles that were initially deployed temporarily will remain in the country.

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The Typhon can fire long-range Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles that can hit targets throughout southern China. The system also can fire SM-6 anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles with ranges of up to 165 miles.

“For over 15 years U.S. military treaty ally the Philippines has been subject to blatant campaign of Chinese military coercion, and like the Chinese coercive campaign against Taiwan, coercion could escalate to military strikes at any time as the PLA now has commanding military superiority,” said Mr. Fisher, an analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

To deter any Chinese attack on the Philippines, he said, the Trump administration should immediately transfer F-16 jet fighters and precision-guided Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, to the country.

The Long March 8A “is specifically developed to meet the launch requirements of large-scale constellation networks in medium-Earth and low-Earth orbits (LEO), according to chief designer Song Zhengyu,” NASASpaceFlight.com reported, noting that it was developed by China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a company identified by the Pentagon as a Chinese military company.

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CALT is said to be developing China’s fractional orbital bombardment system, a unique, Earth-orbiting nuclear missile first tested in 2021.

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

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

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

14. Donald Trump Declares War on the Cartels: His Plan Could Change Everything

​I am reminded of an anecdote. When I was teaching at the National War College (my last assignment in the Army) we were conducting a seminar on US-Mexico relations and we wanted to conduct a simulation as part of the course. So we spoke with the simulation experts about developing a scenario. One of the scenario developers asked us how we wanted to incorporate FM 3-34, the Counterinsurgency manual, into the simulation. I asked why he thought we would want to do that in a high level international relations simulation. He replied by asking, isn't COIN now the basis for all US military strategy? I guess I really was ready to retire at that point.

But I digress.

Excerpts:

We suggest there are five actionable steps that that align with President Trump’s desire to beat the cartels:

First: Define the desired end-state and a strategy to achieve it. How are we going to win? What constitutes winning?

Second: Win the war at home. 

Third: Make China pay the price for supporting fentanyl manufacturers.

Fourth: Attack cartels as business enterprises.

Fifth: Drugs are a public health crisis.

Winning the drug war is tough and these actions will raise controversy. The President understands the gravity of the challenge. We urge him to take off the gloves in stopping the flow of drugs to save Americans from the scourge of fentanyl and other dangerous substances.

Donald Trump Declares War on the Cartels: His Plan Could Change Everything

19fortyfive.com · by James Farwell and Jahara Matisek · February 10, 2025

President Donald Trump is putting teeth into his pledge to take on the Mexican drug cartels. His new Executive Order redefines the war on drugs as a national security imperative and opens up new avenues to combat narcoterrorism.

He recognizes that drug trafficking constitutes a clear and present danger to the American Homeland.

Designating cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” enables military intelligence collection and helps freeze cartel assets, while tougher criminal penalties facilitate a proactive approach to winning the drug war once and for all.

Fentanyl and other drugs killed nearly a hundred thousand Americans last year. Mexican drug cartels operate in all fifty states and 1,286 cities. The Trump administration’s strategy goes beyond mere designation. A new homeland security task force will spearhead related actions within the U.S., while the new Secretary of Defense will determine how to use the military on American soil.

The reclassification acknowledges an uncomfortable truth: The fentanyl crisis represents a sophisticated form of irregular warfare targeting American society, with cartels serving as proxies in a broader strategic campaign coordinated by China.

Missing in past drug war efforts has been an actionable strategy to win with a defined end-state. Decades of whack-a-mole tactics against specific fentanyl manufacturers, drug kingpins, and traffickers, has done little to stop the flow of drugs into America. Winning requires rising above flashy Sicario tactics to big ideas that create strategic effects.

How Donald Trump Can Take on the Cartels

We suggest there are five actionable steps that that align with President Trump’s desire to beat the cartels:

First: Define the desired end-state and a strategy to achieve it. How are we going to win? What constitutes winning?

Second: Win the war at home. The President’s mindset recognizes that the United States needs urgent, tough-minded action to choke off demand. The strategy must include educating users, especially our youth, through credible social media outlets to stop using and tough, no-nonsense measures against drug dealers.

Third: Make China pay the price for supporting fentanyl manufacturers.

Persuasion hasn’t worked and won’t. What the Chinese understand is comparing cost to benefit. The President’s threat to impose stiff tariffs on China unless it cracked down on fentanyl will gain the attention of China’s leadership. There may be some economic collateral consequences, but if the goal is to induce China to clamp down Fentanyl, the President’s brass-knuckled approach is smart.

Why is drastic action required? President Xi Jinping promised President Joe Biden that China would crackdown at home. The promise proved hollow. Fentanyl manufacturing is financially lucrative operation across China.

Doug Livermore, an expert on the cartels, observes that China’s support for fentanyl manufacturers is part of a hybrid warfare campaign to harm the United States. Along with the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, he points out that in supplying carters with precursor drugs to make fentanyl, the Chinese are transforming the cartels from regional trafficking organizations into “sophisticated transnational threats that serve Beijing’s strategic interests.” China is blending criminal and political activity to undermine the social fabric of America. That’s unacceptable.

Fourth: Attack cartels as business enterprises. Cartels spend huge amounts on trafficking, and to recruit, house, cloth, feed, transport, and for security. Cartels also diversify their business activities from different drugs, farming, and mining.

Seizing their assets through Title 50 covert action would strike a meaningful blow. Otherwise, if special operations are needed, the DEA has 23 elite Special Response Teams across America that could be deployed highly effectively south of the border.

We’ve long advocated this strategy. The Washington Post reported in 2013 that the CIA also embraced it, but the risk averse Obama administration turned them down. But it’s the right move; it’s a lot of money.

Journalist Nicholas Shaxon contends the cartels are hiding trillions in offshore accounts. Trump’s designation allows the U.S. intelligence community to identify these assets. Seizing these would hammer their ability to function as an enterprise.

U.S. Army Sgt. Benjamin Rodgers, assigned to Bravo Troop, Regimental Engineer Squadron, 2d Cavalry Regiment, provides security during Exercise Allied Spirit V at the 7th Army Training Command’s Hohenfels Training Area, Germany, Oct. 4, 2016. Exercise Allied Spirit includes about 2,520 participants from eight NATO nations, and exercises tactical interoperability and tests secure communications within Alliance members and partner nations. (U.S. Army photo by Visual Information Specialist Gertrud Zach)

Fifth: Drugs are a public health crisis. The administration’s push pushing for a nationwide rollout of funds for community health centers and mobile treatment units, and telemedicine solutions for rural and undeserved communities, makes sense.

Winning the drug war is tough and these actions will raise controversy. The President understands the gravity of the challenge. We urge him to take off the gloves in stopping the flow of drugs to save Americans from the scourge of fentanyl and other dangerous substances.

About the Authors:

James Farwell, J.D., is a senior fellow at the Sympodium—Institute of Strategic Studies and has advised U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Strategic Command. His books include Information Warfare (Marine Corp U. Press, 2020) and Persuasion and Power (Georgetown U. Press, 2011)

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, Ph.D., (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the U.S. Naval War College, and a fellow at the Defense Analyses and Research Corporation, European Resilience Initiative Center, and the Payne Institute for Public Policy. He has published two books and over one hundred articles on strategy, warfare, and homeland defense.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Naval War College, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

19fortyfive.com · by James Farwell and Jahara Matisek · February 10, 2025

​

15. Keep sight of the forest while looking at the trees (influence)

Matt Armstrong identifies something interesting here.

Perhaps we should be following Project 2025 rather than DOGE. 

Excerpt:

The likely attack on USAGM and the ongoing attack on the US Agency for International Development do not adhere to the Project 2025 handbook, and they go against Trump’s mercantilist and interventionist foreign policy.

​I do think Project 2025's critique of USAGM is somewhat off base. I am not sure anyone associated with Project 2025 has really done a deep dive on USAGM reporting or talked to any of the journalists there. I am sure it is easy to come to that conclusion by looking at "gotcha" media sound bites but you really need to examine the reporting in detail to draw an objective conclusion. I see them exposing adversary propaganda and talking points, not parroting them. It is too bad that all the media analysis organizations (e,.g, All Sides for one) who produce those nice charts showing the political orientation distribution of media outlets do not include VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. in their analysis. 

USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy— not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points.

28Gift a subscription

Keep sight of the forest while looking at the trees

Details matter, so does the big picture

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/keep-sight-of-the-forest-while-looking?r=7i07&utm

Matt Armstrong

Feb 10, 2025

In my last two posts, I shared a possible organizational future for the US Agency for Global Media and its networks, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. In the second, I called out the ignorance of the comments from co-President Elon Musk’s and Ric Grenell.1 Both focused on the agency and its components rather than how it might fit into whatever is this administration’s approach to foreign policy and national security.

I’ll keep it short because I have something far more important to do—my dissertation—but I want to get this out there.

The likely attack on USAGM and the ongoing attack on the US Agency for International Development do not adhere to the Project 2025 handbook, and they go against Trump’s mercantilist and interventionist foreign policy.

The introduction to the USAGM section has this (p235):

The mission is noble, but the execution is lacking. To fulfill its mission, USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy— not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points.

The section on USAID opens with this accurate assessment (p253):

In alignment with U.S. national security interests, the agency promotes American prosperity through initiatives that expand markets for U.S. exports; encourage innovation; create a level playing field for U.S. businesses; and support more stable, resilient, and democratic societies that are less likely to act against American interests and more likely to respect family, life, and religious liberty.

We see co-president Musk’s policy choices at work with the attacks on USAID and likely attacks on USAGM, not Trump’s. It’s not that Trump has a coherent plan, but he did announce people to take positions in USAGM. Musk’s business interests don’t include the US farmers USAID buys from or the people abroad benefiting from USAID’s primary projects (which ultimately benefit the US). Musk is more likely to side with the forces that create the conditions for USAID to step in.2 The same is true for USAGM.

The attacks also go against the longstanding and current interests of many House and Senate Republicans. At the very least, both agencies help deny or mitigate China’s aggressive foreign policy that works against US interests, including, as far as we’ve seen, Trump’s.3

To wrap this up, I’m aware that my comments about USAGM, which I know, and USAID, which I interacted with but don’t know well at all, are effectively inconsequential because this administration has no strategy or concept of a strategy or basic principles either for reorganizing government or conducting foreign policy. It does not care about the rule of law, and the Republican majority in the House and Senate are okay with that. Put plainly, they lack the foresight and intellectual curiosity to see the value of USAGM and USAID to US foreign policy and national security. The funny thing is, for all its abhorrent positions, ahistorical takes, and sophomoric thoughts, Project 2025’s text on these agencies did get.

The administration, both Musk’s and Trump’s (and whatever other faction is likely to surface), don’t care about our ability to influence people and policies abroad in support of our foreign policy and national security because their experience is public opinion is easily manipulated. Their role models abroad are the autocrats in Russia, China, Hungary, and North Korea (not not in Iran) who attempt to manage what their people are allowed to know and discuss.

What happens next?

I have no idea. We must consider the forest as we discuss the trees. In the case of USAGM and USAID, the forest is being indiscriminately burned down (not cut down, as that would imply forethought to reuse the resources). Many, like you, dear reader, already lament this because you understand yesterday and past tomorrow. The administration will also regret their decisions. Eventually. When they do, they will pin blame elsewhere.

By the way, how does any of this help the price of eggs? How’s the Ukraine war going? Where is the concept of a plan for healthcare? Are the government subsidies paid to Musk’s companies also affected? Are you not entertained?

That’s it for now.

1

A friend suggested prime minister is a better title for Musk. A prime minister suggests a separate parliamentary approval, which we have since the Republican majorities in the House and Senate acquiesce to his activities, which are variously unlawful to awful while shrouded in secrecy and disinformation. I prefer co-president because a) it is more relatable to the US public, and b) it properly suggests Musk is conducting presidential – and extra-presidential – duties alongside Trump. (Let’s set aside that “alongside” implies Trump understands and is fully aware of what Musk is doing, his public comments notwithstanding.)

2

In the end, people voted for the face-eating leopards. On social media, it’s interesting to see people complain about “the government” suddenly halting this program or the other their business and livelihood relied on. In the instances I’m referring to, the person apparently cannot, or is too ignorant, to state that the Trump administration is putting them in jeopardy by the haphazard cuts, or that the programs were part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or some other Biden-passed legislation.

3

The African Broadcasting Networks idea revealed in the last post is fundamentally about denying Chinese adverse activities across Africa. This reminds me of a program the Department of the Interior ran to mitigate Chinese activities in Africa. DoI sent and helped train game wardens across Africa. How is this relevant? Because China pays criminal gangs to slaughter protected wildlife to provide powders, body parts, and trinkets from animal body parts to Chinese markets. Suffice it to say, these gangs aren’t law-abiding organizations. They severely disrupt society with their criminal activities.

16. Updating the Practice of Unconventional Warfare: A Blueprint for the Continued Evolution of Special Forces

​Most people seem to view unconventional warfare as an anachronism and that pursuing it only involves some romantic notions of times past with the OSS in the Europe or the Guerrillas in the Philippines in World War II. But to those who would make such arguments I would challenge them and ask, have you really studied unconventional warfare to determine the contributions it can make (if correctly employed with the right forces and capabilities in the right situations) in the 21st Century? I believe UW is the most important mission in SOF. It is the most pure mission in SOF that encompasses all aspects of the true nature of SOF. Although it is not appropriate for all or even many situations "UW -thinking" should inform all SOF activities. It embraces and encompasses the two SOF trinities:

The Two Special Operations Trinities

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2021/01/06/two-special-operations-trinities/

1) Irregular warfare , unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare

2) The comparative advantage of SOF: influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations.

What is more pure and relevant than "activities to enable an insurgency or resistance movement or coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power?" I think everyone focuses on "overthrow" and neglects the concept of how support to indigenous forces and populations can coerce or disrupt authoritarian governments to support US national security objectives.

An Unconventional Warfare Mindset: The Philosophy of Special Forces Must be Sustained

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2023/05/29/unconventional-warfare-mindset-philosophy-special-forces-must-be-sustained/

Congress Has Embraced Unconventional Warfare: Will the US Military and The Rest of the US Government?

https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/congress-has-embraced-unconventional-warfare-will-the-us-military-and-the-rest-of-the-us-go

Unconventional Warfare Does Not Belong to Special Forces

https://warontherocks.com/2013/08/unconventional-warfare-does-not-belong-to-special-forces/

The Need to Understand and Conduct UW by Octavian Manea

https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-need-to-understand-and-conduct-uw

Former DCIA Gates summed it up best:

“Unconventional Warfare (UW) … remains uniquely Special Forces'. It is the soul of Special Forces: the willingness to accept its isolation and hardships defines the Special Forces Soldier. Its training is both the keystone and standard of Special Forces Training: it has long been an article of faith, confirmed in over forty years of worldwide operations, that "If you can do the UW missions, you can do all others." The objective of UW and Special Forces' dedication to it is expressed in Special Forces' motto: De Oppresso Liber (to free the oppressed). 

– Robert M. Gates, Remarks at dedication of OSS Memorial, 12 June 1992

Updating the Practice of Unconventional Warfare: A Blueprint for the Continued Evolution of Special Forces

sofrep.com · by Curtis L. Fox · February 10, 2025

3 hours ago

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A Soldier takes cover behind a tree during an unconventional warfare training exercise. (DVIDS)

U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) is weighing visions for how the Special Forces Regiment will evolve to be ready for the next conflict.

The U.S. Army is in the midst of the worst recruiting crisis in modern history. Plagued by the public’s frustrations with two decades of involvement in two separate wars, a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, controversial culture-war changes to military policy, a dearth of healthy militarily-fit young people graduating from American high schools, and an increasingly tight employment market, the U.S. Army has catastrophically fallen short of recruiting goals for the last three years. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George have decided to close 32,000 personnel billets over the next 5 years. This will ensure that none of the Army’s 12 divisions are hollow due to chronic under-manning. Recruiting challenges appear to be a feature rather than a bug of Americans desire to serve in the Army. Closures will include 3,000 billets from USASOC.

Since the War on Terror began in 2001, mother USSOCOM has grown by a full 58.4%. USASOC, the largest component under USSOCOM, added 10,000 bodies to its ranks (37.4% growth). USASOC also shifted an enormous number of Reserve component billets to Active Duty. In 2001, 41% of USASOC’s personnel billets were in the Reserve component. By 2022, USASOC’s Reserve component had dwindled to a mere 12%, while Active Duty forces had increased from approximately 15,000 to over 31,000.

During the War on Terror growth spurt, Civil Affairs and Psyops (PO) grew by 1,000 billets. These non-kinetic units proved to be the secret sauce for counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, USASOC’s “trigger-pullers” grew by 12,000 billets during the same period, and it is now the “trigger-pullers” that the USASOC is attempting to preserve. The Ranger Regiment, Army Special Operations Aviation, Special Forces, and special mission units are unlikely to see significant cuts. Instead, the PO will lose a headquarters, and most of the Special Forces Groups (brigade-level commands) will lose a plethora of enablers and support specialists.

US Air Force Staff Sgt. Najwan Alobaidi (right), 33rd Cyberspace Operations Squadron, Client System Supervisor, stands with his US Army unit on the westside of Baghdad, Iraq, April 2008. (DVIDS)

USASOC planners have to be pragmatic in making cuts. While CA and PO have clearly proven their value over the last 20 years, there are hardly enough Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alphas (SFOD-As) to cover a third of the available missions. Making further cuts to Green Beret billets would not just be extraordinarily difficult, but would likely force USASOC to reduce its annual mission portfolio.

The U.S. Army is in the midst of the worst recruiting crisis in modern history. Plagued by the public’s frustrations with two decades of involvement in two separate wars, a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, controversial culture-war changes to military policy, a dearth of healthy militarily-fit young people graduating from American high schools, and an increasingly tight employment market, the U.S. Army has catastrophically fallen short of recruiting goals for the last three years. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George have decided to close 32,000 personnel billets over the next 5 years. This will ensure that none of the Army’s 12 divisions are hollow due to chronic under-manning. Recruiting challenges appear to be a feature rather than a bug of American’s desire to serve in the Army. Closures will include 3,000 billets from USASOC.

Since the War on Terror began in 2001, mother USSOCOM has grown by a full 58.4%. USASOC, the largest component under USSOCOM, added 10,000 bodies to its ranks (37.4% growth). USASOC also shifted an enormous number of Reserve component billets to Active Duty. In 2001, 41% of USASOC’s personnel billets were in the Reserve component. By 2022, USASOC’s Reserve component had dwindled to a mere 12%, while Active Duty forces had increased from approximately 15,000 to over 31,000.

During the War on Terror growth spurt, Civil Affairs and Psyops (PO) grew by 1,000 billets. These non-kinetic units proved to be the secret sauce for counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, USASOC’s “trigger-pullers” grew by 12,000 billets during the same period, and it is now the “trigger-pullers” that the USASOC is attempting to preserve. The Ranger Regiment, Army Special Operations Aviation, Special Forces, and special mission units are unlikely to see significant cuts. Instead, the PO will lose a headquarters, and most of the Special Forces Groups (brigade-level commands) will lose a plethora of enablers and support specialists.

US Air Force Staff Sgt. Najwan Alobaidi (right), 33rd Cyberspace Operations Squadron, Client System Supervisor, stands with his US Army unit on the westside of Baghdad, Iraq, April 2008. (DVIDS)

USASOC planners have to be pragmatic in making cuts. While CA and PO have clearly proven their value over the last 20 years, there are hardly enough Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alphas (SFOD-As) to cover a third of the available missions. Making further cuts to Green Beret billets would not just be extraordinarily difficult, but would likely force USASOC to reduce its annual mission portfolio.

However, this may be a golden opportunity to reimagine how the Special Forces Regiment is trained, structured, and employed.

What Does Special Forces Actually Do in the Name of Unconventional Warfare?

Army Special Forces are the Unconventional Warfare (UW) experts of the United States Department of Defense, and UW remains their primary focus. UW is defined by the U.S. Army as “those activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow an occupying power or government by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary or guerrilla force in a denied area.”

On paper, the Green Berets now perform several subordinate missions in service of this master mission, including Foreign Internal Defense, Direct Action, Special Reconnaissance, Counter-Insurgency, Special Reconnaissance, Counterterrorism, Information Operations, Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Security Force Assistance.

Army Special Forces rarely conduct what can be considered a true Unconventional Warfare Campaign (following the doctrines in which they train in). A recent example was the deployment of two SFOD-As to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. These teams from 5th Special Forces Group were tasked with coordinating and leading factions of the Northern Alliance in capturing Mazar-i-Sharif, the transit hub that controls all movement in northern Afghanistan.

However, despite rarely practicing UW doctrine in its purest form, Special Forces has always tactically worked through partner forces to achieve strategic effects.

Special Forces traces a proud lineage back, not merely to the legendary Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Special Operations branch and Operational Group Command branch. Major Robert Rogers raised a company of “Rangers” in New Hampshire, training them in innovative light infantry tactics, reconnaissance, and basic special operations.

Though founded in 1952, the Special Forces Regiment made its name in Vietnam. The entire 5th Special Forces Group deployed together to Vietnam, establishing its Group HQ at Nha Trang and making the war a part of day-to-day life in the Group. Green Berets became renowned for leading Montagnards, Nungs, and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops on long-range patrols deep into hostile territory.

A Green Beret evaluates a Michigan National Guard Soldiers fire an M4 rifle during a training exercise at Camp McGregor, New Mexico March 27, 2020. (DVIDS)

Green Berets also contributed the backbone of tactical personnel in the famed Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group (MACV SOG). This joint military and CIA command conducted covert operations throughout the Vietnam War, including famed reconnaissance missions into Laos and Cambodia. Under MAC-V SOG, Green Berets mapped out and disrupted the Viet Cong’s logistics and supply along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

In addition to covert reconnaissance missions, Green Berets were also tasked with the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program was tasked with destroying the Viet Cong’s support infrastructure and hierarchy of command in South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam). Phoenix operatives conducted snatch-and-grab missions against Viet Cong officers, facilitators, and financiers. Green Berets trained what became known as Provisional Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), elite Vietnamese fire teams, and led them as force multipliers on these missions. After the war, the Viet Cong admitted that the only thing that their commanders truly feared was the Phoenix Program.

The Green Berets have also conducted remarkably successful irregular warfare operations (FID, COIN, Counter-Narcotics, and Security Force Assistance) to counter advancing insurgencies, Islamo-Fascism, and narco-terrorism across the world, to name a few: El Salvador from 1981 to 1991, Colombia from 2002 to 2016, and the Philippines from 2001 to 2015.

The Special Forces Regiment has also always understood Operational Preparation of the Environment (OPE) and Advanced Force Operations as implied tasks within the domains of Unconventional Warfare and Special Reconnaissance. The legendary Berlin Detachment A company (the line teams were known simply as Det As) of the Cold War conducted OPE in Berlin in preparation for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Under the descriptor of “urban Unconventional Warfare”, the Det As trained with elite German units, conducted special reconnaissance taskings, and established resistance networks. In the event of war, these networks would activate and support the Det As in sabotage and subversion taskings.

Within the Counterterrorism mission Special Forces also has an implied Hostage Rescue mandate. The Berlin Det As built the first Hostage Rescue capability in the U.S. Armed Forces, qualifying with elite units like the German GSG-9 and British SAS. 5th Special Forces Group stood up project Blue Light. Hostage Rescue skillsets are now maintained in the CIF (commander’s in-extremis force) company of each Special Forces Group.

—

Stay tuned for next Monday’s continuation of “Practice of Unconventional Warfare” – you won’t want to miss it!

As someone who’s seen what happens when the truth is distorted, I know how unfair it feels when those who’ve sacrificed the most lose their voice. At SOFREP, our veteran journalists, who once fought for freedom, now fight to bring you unfiltered, real-world intel. But without your support, we risk losing this vital source of truth. By subscribing, you’re not just leveling the playing field—you’re standing with those who’ve already given so much, ensuring they continue to serve by delivering stories that matter. Every subscription means we can hire more veterans and keep their hard-earned knowledge in the fight. Don’t let their voices be silenced. Please consider subscribing now.

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Brandon Webb former Navy SEAL, Bestselling Author and Editor-in-Chief

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About Curtis L. Fox View All Posts

About Curtis L. Fox

View All Posts

Curtis L. Fox is the author of the recently published book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict. Curtis studied Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. Despite being accepted to the VT graduate engineering program, Curtis chose to enlist in the Army, where he learned to speak Russian and won his Green Beret. After completing his time in service, Curtis studied at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, earning a Master’s of Business Administration with a focus in financial services. He now works as a program manager in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

sofrep.com · by Curtis L. Fox · February 10, 2025

17. How the US Can Rethink Its Military Strategy for Taiwan

It is good to see the photos from the Taiwan Resident Detachment from 1st Special Forces Group at the link. https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/us-military-strategy-taiwan-counter-china/ (even if the author does not address the relevant history of the organization)

How the US Can Rethink Its Military Strategy for Taiwan

To Beat China’s Navy to the Punch, Defend Forward in Taiwan

irregularwarfare.org · by Brian Kerg · February 11, 2025

The US cannot keep pace with cannot keep pace with China’s exponential growth in naval power. Ship for ship, the People’s Liberation Army Navy the US Navy, and this disparity will only grow with time. This makes conventional naval power an unreliable means by which the US could deter or combat Chinese maritime aggression. The most dangerous instance of such potential aggression is an attempt by China to seize control of Taiwan and the hostilities that would likely ensue between the US and China as a result.

Holding fast to an infeasible strategic approach is folly. A course correction is required and must use means available to the US today that can reliably deter China from launching a cross-strait attack against its democratic neighbor and preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific.

To deter China from invading Taiwan, the US must deploy and maintain a military force to bolster Taiwan with combat power sufficient to foil Chinese invasion plans. While this may seem highly escalatory, such a move would not cross actual Chinese red lines. Political acts that appear to support Taiwanese independence do yield volatile and aggressive Chinese reactions. In contrast, reports of US forces on Taiwan have resulted in no similarly aggressive response from China to date.

This asymmetric approach would undercut China’s naval strength, obviating China’s increasing ability to outclass US naval power. In this way, the US can leverage current and developing capabilities to provide a feasible strategy for the defense of Taiwan.

A Conventional Strategy to Deter Chinese Aggression is a Losing Proposition

The United States is losing the maritime competition with the People’s Republic of China—and it’s not postured to win it. With Chinese shipbuilding capacity and its expanding defense budget significantly outpacing that of the US, the People’s Liberation Army Navy now outnumbers the US in warfighting naval platforms with an ever-growing differential.

In contrast, US shipbuilding efforts have barely moved in a strategic direction favorable to the US military. The Secretary of the Navy under the Biden administration made herculean efforts to address the systemic obstacles plaguing the US shipbuilding industry, yet these problems still remain unresolved. It is likely that, absent the urgency of military duress, the problems will remain due to inertia. In the meantime, China will establish clear naval dominance within its adjacent seas, most notably the First Island Chain.

These problems converge on the most salient flashpoint between China and the US—a potential war initiated by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Bringing Taiwan under Chinese rule—by any means—remains a principal national security objective of China. Xi Jinping ordered his army to be militarily capable of achieving this goal by 2027. While there are some doubts that China will be ready on schedule, it continues to march towards that state of readiness.

The US remains on track to fall further behind, in relative and absolute terms. Recent wargames that explored a US-China war over Taiwan have had mixed results, but these games used models featuring a more balanced ratio of US naval forces relative to Chinese naval forces, a ratio now obviated by China’s most recent leap in naval power.

Moreover, the growing Chinese naval advantage makes China’s maritime reach more global in nature. This will only increase China’s ability to prevent the US from projecting and sustaining combat forces across the Pacific, forcing US naval forces into decisive battle areas across the First Island Chain and around Taiwan. This disrupts the US maritime strategy of projecting conventional power into theaters through command and control of the sea lines of communication throughout the operational areas. If the US continues to employ this principal theory of warfare, the US is increasingly likely to lose the opening phases of any such conflict with China.

A conventional US military strategy applied to this problem is a path to defeat. While China likely desires to take Taiwan through non-military means and avoid a direct conflict with the US, China will exploit its relative military advantage to accelerate gray zone operations and a salami slicing strategy that will deteriorate the US as a reliable security guarantor for its regional allies, while accelerating its pressure campaign against Taiwan. Without a new approach, China’s ability to compel Taiwan to bend its knee to Beijing becomes stronger, even if a war never occurs.

The Hybrid Threat of a Chinese Cross-Strait Invasion

If the US goal of preventing a military seizure Taiwan is infeasible given current ways and means, the US must choose a different strategy. While a conventional approach of naval power projection is untenable for the desired end, an unconventional approach offers more hope.

Rather than waiting until hostilities have begun to project force into theater using a naval force that may be at a quantitative disadvantage, the US should position combat credible forces ‘left of bang’ before hostilities make such projection infeasible. A US military force deployed persistently to Taiwan, with combat power sufficient to cripple any attempted Chinese invasion, would give the US a more reliable means of preventing China from seizing Taiwan militarily.

This course of action is founded on core principles of naval operations. For the defense of Taiwan, one principle stands out among others: “The seat of purpose is on the land.” Fleet engagements are not fought for their own accord nor solely for the security of the seas, but are intimately tied to objectives and operations on land. In this case, Taiwan would not merely be the location of land-based tactical engagements, but also the political and strategic object over which the belligerents will be fighting.

In a cross-strait invasion, China would execute naval operations with an amphibious assault, then stabilization and expansion of lodgments, and finally the reinforcement and combat sustainment to defeat Taiwan ground forces. The US and Taiwan would conduct military operations to prevent the projection of Chinese forces across the Taiwan Strait and, failing that, isolate and destroy those forces that make it ashore. Should such a war become protracted and involve a meaningful establishment of Chinese presence Taiwan, naval operations would support the liberation of Taiwan.

Irregular Forces and Asymmetric Deterrence Against China

This US force must be able to, in coordination with Taiwan’s military, blunt a Chinese invasion to the extent that an amphibious invasion would fail or delay long enough until US forces can fight across the Pacific and reinforce the sovereignty of Taiwan.

These forces must deploy counter-landing capabilities and any effects optimized to destroy Chinese surface and amphibious vessels, especially those that could embark and lift the amphibious combined-arms brigades of the People’s Liberation Army. This would include employment of anti-ship missiles, suicide drones, rapidly deployable naval mines, and other enablers that could turn the Taiwan Strait into a hellscape of destruction.

Notably, this would include those drones and munitions under development by the Replicator initiative. This would allow the force, likely small and unconventional in composition, to have effects exponentially greater than the sum of their parts, exacerbating the dangers of inherently risky amphibious operations.

These forces would not only focus on directly applying kinetic effects, but also on sensors allowing them to detect and transfer custody of targets to joint, allied, and partnered forces for prosecution.

Finally, this command should prioritize irregular warfare in its concept of employment to empower Taiwan as the lead military effort in its territorial defense and to capitalize on core competencies of irregular warfare across the phases of a Chinese invasion scenario.

This irregular approach could complicate the potential progression of a cross-strait attack with templated layers. The first layer would include small teams employing the sensors and munitions of the Replicator project, supporting Taiwanese counter-landing forces, with the intent of destroying Chinese amphibious forces crossing the strait. At the shoreline, US irregular forces would employ shallow-water mines and demolitions at ports, piers, beachheads, and other avenues of approach to sabotage a Chinese breakout. In the event of a Chinese breakout, such irregular forces could destroy key intersections in road networks to create bottlenecks, stymieing Chinese mobility. If China breaks out of a lodgment and pushes into Taiwan’s interior, irregular forces would employ the entire gamut of unconventional warfare, guerrilla warfare, civil affairs operations, psychological operations, and provide critical reports to a US higher headquarters in a denied environment, simultaneously coordinating and maintaining a protracted campaign against China until conventional US forces project power across the Pacific and support Taiwan once more.

The Strategic Value of US Special Operations Forces in Taiwan: Deterrence, Integration, and Escalation Management

Placing US forces in Taiwan offers a value proposition that cannot be achieved by merely giving these same capabilities to Taiwanese defense forces.

First, these forces could employ premier American weapon systems and most closely guarded capabilities to provide a strategic force multiplier and deterrent effect. While foreign military sales or transfer of equipment to Taiwan improve their domestic capabilities, they are restrained by legal limitations that keep the best materiel in US hands.

Similarly, US forces could deploy with commercial off the shelf equipment that cannot be fielded to Taiwan due to business limitations, such as Taiwan’s inability to secure Starlink terminals after negotiations collapsed.

Having a US force on station enables immediate immersion and connectivity with US kill-webs and networks, facilitating coordination that could otherwise not be achieved due to integration challenges between US and foreign sensor networks and communications systems.

The presence of US troops communicates to Taiwan that the US has skin in the game. This will reinforce morale, a willingness to fight, and mitigate capitulation in the shock of an attack or from the effects of Chinese narrative warfare, cognitive warfare and coercive pressure.

GREEN BERETS IN TAIWAN — March 26, 1972. A U.S. Green Beret presents a banner with the words “One Family, Force and People” to Taiwanese troops following a bilateral disaster relief exercise.

The physical presence of US troops in any state’s territory remains the most consistently reliable and significant contributor to deterring Chinese aggression. China must acknowledge that an attack on Taiwan is also an attack on US forces. This will transfer the escalation risk from the US, which it would assume if it came to Taiwan’s defense after hostilities began, back to China, which must account for escalation before it chooses to start a war of aggression.

Finally, it is critical that Chinese red lines are not misinterpreted. A compelling objection to the placement of a US military command in Taiwan is that it would be wildly escalatory, convincing China that it must attack. But this assumption does not accord with the facts. The reported operation of US military forces on Taiwan did not trip a Chinese red line nor precipitate an invasion. Credible overtures of Chinese military intervention are elicited, rather, by political acts that appear to acknowledge Taiwanese independence from China.

A US Military Command in Taiwan Can Sidestep Chinese Naval Dominance

China has surpassed the US in naval power. Under current conditions, it will expand that gap between US and Chinese naval capabilities, maintaining naval dominance in and around Taiwan. This makes a conventional strategy of attempting to deter and defeat a Chinese cross-strait attack on Taiwan principally through reactive application of US naval power infeasible. Aiming to do so after such an attack exacerbates the operational challenges to the US, making it highly unlikely the US could come out on top in the early stages of such a conflict.

Instead, the US can employ capabilities available now and deploy them to Taiwan today: a US military joint task force with combat power credible enough to foil Chinese invasion plans. With special operation capabilities nested within this force, it would offer substantial advantages that cannot be gained by merely provisioning materiel to Taiwanese defense forces. On the other hand, it offers the most proven deterrent effect, US forces stationed on foreign soil. While political recognition of Taiwan remains a red line for China, prior reports of US forces in Taiwan did not spark reaction from China. This option presents little risk of escalation, while asymmetrically bypassing China’s naval advantage. The placement of a US military command in Taiwan will deter a Chinese military attack on the island nation, stabilizing the region and securing US interests today.

Brian Kerg is a Non-Resident Fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also a 2025 Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a 501(c)3 partnered with Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions or opinions of the US Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US government.

Image credit: U.S. Taiwan Defense Command Blog, ‘Special Forces in Taiwan’ (February 2012).

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18. Ancient Great Power Conflict: A Roman Counterpoint to Thucydides

​I still believe in fear, honor, and interest as Thucydides taught us. :-) 

But the importance of this essay (among others) is that we can still learn from and apply history to modern strategic problems. 

Ancient Great Power Conflict: A Roman Counterpoint to Thucydides

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/11/ancient-great-power-conflict-a-roman-counterpoint-to-thucydides/

by Ian Bertram

|

02.11.2025 at 06:00am

The change in Presidential administrations will likely include an update to U.S. policies concerning China. There will likely be a renewed interest in Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap,” which claims that the ancient historian’s explanation of the Peloponnesian War uncovered a permanent feature of great power rivalry: the likelihood that leading powers and rising challengers will go to war. Many scholars and policymakers share that fear, joining Allison in worrying that war between the U.S. and China may be inevitable in the near future. However, aspects of another ancient rivalry question that pessimism. The 2nd century rivalry between Rome and Parthia shows that war between great powers is often a choice, and that modern leaders can and should consider the impact of their decisions before choosing conflict. It would be wise for President Trump’s security team to explore more than just Athens and Sparta when they look to the past for possible solutions to modern problems.

Rome’s Rival

Rome and Parthia challenged each other for centuries. On the surface, their rivalry appears to be a poor case for refuting the Thucydides Trap, since open warfare between the two empires happened more than once. However, the fact that the two empires existed for hundreds of years while sharing a border, and that there were significant periods of time where the two were not at war, demonstrates that many factors shape the prospects for war between major powers.

A key period of peace between the two states existed during the rule of Emperor Hadrian. He had an accomplished military record before rising to power, and was not unwilling to commit Roman troops to combat. However, the man that classic British historian Edward Gibbon described as prudent and moderate in his governance was more interested in consolidating his Empire than expanding it. This was a departure from many of his predecessors, and was generally welcomed by the Roman public.

Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan fought a major war from AD 114-117 that succeeded in wrestling significant new territory away from their eastern neighbor the Parthian Empire. The result of his conquest was the addition of three new provinces, east of the Euphrates River, to the Roman Empire. However, rebellions at home and the significant need for garrison troops in the new territory had stretched the vaunted Roman military thin. One of Hadrian’s first acts upon Trajan’s death was to relinquish control of the new territories, and re-establish the former boundary on the Euphrates. He also arranged for a now-dispossessed client king to receive control over different lands. These were the acts of a leader preferring stability over conflict.

Throughout his reign Hadrian traveled the Empire, and along the way, oversaw or commissioned the development of physical barriers along borders. Wooden forts with palisades, ditches, and walls were all constructed under his orders to delineate Roman territory and support his consolidation efforts. His best-known project was the wall across modern England that still bears his name. In AD 124 he traveled to the Roman-Parthian border and personally met with his Parthian counterpart King Chosroes. Although the specific details are lost, historical events show they negotiated a continued peace between the Empires. He returned to the Eastern Roman provinces in AD 129 and may have had a repeat summit with Parthian Leaders. The goal was again to sustain a lasting peace. Towards that end, Hadrian even authorized the release of Chosroes’s daughter from her capture and imprisonment by Trajan.

Trump and Xi both have choices, just as Hadrian and Chosroes did. Neither may choose to step back from potential conflict, particularly from their positions on Taiwan, but the choice to do so exists.

After Hadrian’s death in AD 138, his successor Antoninus Pius continued to choose diplomacy over war with Parthia, keeping Hadrian’s agreements in place. Even as the two great powers eyed each other warily and jostled for military advantage, rulers on both sides chose years of negotiations over war. The peace held until AD 163, when Pius’ successor, Marcus Aurelius, invaded over a disagreement over the disposition of Armenia. Yet Hadrian’s choices had resulted in 46 years of peace between the two powers, despite the relative “rise” of Parthia after Trajan’s retreat. The two states avoided the “Thucydides Trap” through negotiation and deliberate choices to avoid conflict.

Avoiding Thucydides’ Trap

If one believes that great powers are motivated to fight, then the reign of Hadrian should have continued the conflicts of Trajan. Yet, Hadrian made difficult choices that avoided war with Parthia for an entire generation; forty-six years is a considerable period for stable international relations of any era. Leaders are replaced and new issues arise, as inevitable shifts in relative power reshape assessments of dangers and opportunities. Even an autocrat will have to adapt to a changing world over that stretch of time, and continuously make decisions to continue or alter the state’s international relations. Hadrian chose repeatedly to secure the Roman Empire by taking steps to avoid war with his greatest rival.

War occurred between the two empires again in AD 163, suggesting again that this is a less than perfect analogy for the U.S. and China. One could also arguably set aside the Rome and Parthia example because the two also did not face such modern issues as the instantaneous gathering and analysis of information, or the speed and reach of air and space-based assets. Nor did those ancient rivals have to deal with the quandaries attending to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. However, one could play “what if” with any ancient analogy, at the cost of failing to draw valuable lessons from the past.

There are important similarities between the choices faced by ancient and modern leaders. Trump and Xi both have choices, just as Hadrian and Chosroes did. Neither may choose to step back from potential conflict, particularly from their positions on Taiwan, but the choice to do so exists. It would be helpful if the policy community could move past preoccupation with the “Thucydides Trap” and realize that a range of options exists for peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and China. Hadrian had a vast array of competing interests as Trump and Xi will. He chose the peace and stability of the Roman Empire over the previous path of conquest and expansion. He faced pushback, particularly from the Roman elites, yet held to the course that avoided war. His descendants eventually chose otherwise, reflecting the inevitability of change in international arrangements. Yet this does not change he chose not to act based on the supposition that shifts in the balance of power made another Parthian war inevitable. He had choices, and chose peace. U.S. and Chinese leadership can and hopefully will choose to do the same.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Tags: Great Power Competition, Roman Empire, Thucydides Trap, U.S. foreign policy

About The Author

• 
  
• Ian Bertram
• Ian Bertram is a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force currently serving as an Instructor with the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the Air Force Academy. He has an MA in International Security from the Josef Korbel School at the University of Denver, and an MA in Military History from Norwich University. He has published articles with The National Interest, The Strategy Bridge, Air and Space Power Journal blog, and others. He is an instructor pilot and Advanced Air Advisor, and has led missions around the world to build partner capability and capacity.

19. ‘Burn it down’: Experts urge ditching sluggish Pentagon arms process

​Remember the old adage when "the TPFDD is the plan?"

Recall when Rumsfeld demanded all plans to have the same 6 phases and that all plans had to look alike?

How do we balance the science AND the art of planning?  

‘Burn it down’: Experts urge ditching sluggish Pentagon arms process

Defense News · by Stephen Losey · February 10, 2025

The Pentagon’s requirements process for weapons development is a bureaucratic morass that stymies true innovation and must be scrapped entirely and replaced, two prominent defense experts argue in a new Hudson Institute paper.

The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, or JCIDS, is meant to help the Pentagon figure out what capabilities the military needs and confirm whether an acquisition program will fill those needs.

But in a report released Monday, titled “Required to Fail”, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy Bill Greenwalt and Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dan Patt argue JCIDS has failed to produce the promised results and — after at least 10 failed attempts at reform — is beyond salvaging.

“JCIDS has failed too completely, too systematically, to be rescued by another committee’s review or a fresh coat of bureaucratic paint,” Greenwalt and Patt said in the report. “The DOD needs to burn it down to its smoldering foundations and let it vanish into history.”

Instead, Greenwalt and Patt said, the Pentagon should replace JCIDS with a new system that focuses on experimentation and prototyping, direct input from combatant commanders and service members and a small, strategic reserve of joint funds at the senior level to bankroll promising new technologies that could help troops across multiple services.

Established in 2003, JCIDS formalized the Pentagon’s requirements processes, which began to be established in 1991.

JCIDS was intended to ensure every new system or capability the Pentagon brought on could serve the broader joint force and not just a single service, the Hudson Institute said. It was also intended to give combatant commanders more of a voice in the development process, ensure new systems would be interoperable with other systems, encourage innovation, and ensure new systems help the military implement its strategies.

Those have turned out to be “broken promises,” Greenwalt and Patt said. Instead, they said, JCIDS has held back military progress — at times, taking more than two years to validate a requirement while adversaries proceed much more swiftly — left potential innovations tied up in bureaucratic red tape and prioritized “paper shuffling” over actually figuring out what would be the most combat-effective system.

JCIDS is “a burdensome layer of ceremony, divorced from the real decisions that shape our future military edge,” Greenwalt and Patt said.

The new system they envision replacing JCIDS would be inspired by past moments where the military moved quickly to meet emergency needs — such as the rapid acquisition process to create counter-improvised explosive device capabilities that took place during the height of the Iraq War, particularly the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle that helped protect many troops.

The new process would create a Joint Operational Acceleration Pathway that would focus on urgent warfighting challenges — or “operational imperatives” — highlighted by combatant commands.

It would also create a fund called the Joint Acceleration Reserve, which could help services pay for promising ideas when an experiment shows that capability might be useful in the field, they said.

And the new pathway would have a streamlined organization focused on executing projects known as the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity. This activity would work alongside combatant commands and try to leverage promising technology from both industry and government’s research and development arms.

About Stephen Losey

Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.

20. Trump fires service academy boards that oversee morale, academics

​To what end? What purpose does this firing serve?

Trump fires service academy boards that oversee morale, academics

militarytimes.com · by Nikki Wentling · February 10, 2025

President Donald Trump said Monday he fired the boards of visitors at four U.S. service academies, claiming they had been “infiltrated by woke leftist ideologies.”

Trump ordered the immediate dismissal of board members at the Military Academy in West Point, New York; the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

“We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards,” Trump wrote on his social network platform, Truth Social. “We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

The boards of visitors are made up of lawmakers and presidential appointees who traditionally meet several times a year to provide nonbinding advice on issues like curriculum, student morale, academic methods and the needs of the institutions, such as equipment and funding.

Trump did not immediately name replacements to the boards.

Trump’s dismissal of the board members follows a similar action former President Joe Biden took after his inauguration in 2021. At the time, the White House asked for the resignation of 18 members of the advisory boards at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies who were appointed by Trump during his first term.

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Biden boots Trump appointees from military academy advisory boards

The non-partisan board is meant to provide outside advice to school leaders on a host of personnel and academic issues.

Trump’s supporters criticized Biden’s decision at the time, saying it was a dangerous politicization of non-partisan boards. Biden’s administration argued they were concerned about the qualifications of the appointees. They included former White House press secretary and Navy officer Sean Spicer, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Kellyanne Conway, a former senior counselor to Trump, among others.

Prior to Biden’s decision, non-lawmaker members of the boards typically served out their three-year terms, even across presidential administrations. Several members appointed by former President Barack Obama at the end of his term served several years into the Trump administration.

The boards consist of six members appointed by the president, three appointed by the vice president and four appointed by the House speaker, as well as one designated by the Senate Armed Services Committee and one designated by the House Armed Services Committee.

Among the most recent appointees on the Military Academy board were former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the first enlisted combat veteran to lead the Defense Department, and retired Lt. Gen. Nadja West, a former Army surgeon general who was the service’s first Black woman to be made a three-star and the highest-ranking woman to graduate from West Point.

Jack McCain, a reserve naval aviator and the son of Navy veteran and longtime lawmaker John McCain, served on the Naval Academy board, as did retired Adm. Michelle Howard, who was the first Black woman to command a combatant ship and the Navy’s first female four-star.

Retired Vice Adm. Peter Neffenger, the former vice commandant of the Coast Guard and a former leader of the Transportation Security Administration, sat on the Coast Guard Academy’s board. Former Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning was part of the board at the Air Force Academy. Fanning became the first openly gay leader of any military branch in 2015.

About Nikki Wentling

Nikki Wentling is a senior editor at Military Times. She's reported on veterans and military communities for nearly a decade and has also covered technology, politics, health care and crime. Her work has earned multiple honors from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors and others.

21. Army, Navy remove web pages highlighting women’s military service

​Again, to what end?

What purpose does this really serve?

Army, Navy remove web pages highlighting women’s military service

militarytimes.com · by Claire Barrett · February 10, 2025

In an effort to align with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that terminated diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives across the federal government, the Army and Navy have taken down web pages that highlight the history and myriad contributions of female soldiers and sailors.

While webpages on the history of female service remains intact on the U.S. Army Reserve website, the Army’s link to its “Women in Army History” page has been taken down as of Monday and leads readers directly back to its homepage.

Similarly, last week, a page devoted to women’s service in the U.S. Navy, as well as a page entitled “Navy Women of Courage and Intelligence,” was removed by the Navy History and Heritage Command, replaced by a “page not found” message.

“We are working to fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,” Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Ivester, a spokesman for the command, told Military Times.

In regards to the Navy History and Heritage Command website, the process of revising and reuploading the sub-landing pages regarding diversity, women and Black service members is ongoing but, according to Lt. Cmdr. Lauren Chatmas, a Navy spokesperson, will eventually all be back online, in accordance with Trump’s directives.

“Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) is in the process of reviewing and updating their online content to ensure compliance with directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President,” Chatmas told Military Times. “As this alignment systematically occurs, content will be available in the Heritage section of NHHC’s website. The Navy is executing and implementing the directives with professionalism, efficiency, and in full alignment with national security objectives.”

Elsewhere across Navy websites, some pages remain intact, including a “Women in the Navy” landing page.

Last Tuesday, the web page for the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Gregg-Adams in Hopewell, Virginia — the only museum in the world dedicated to “preserving and sharing the history of the contributions of women to the Army” — was removed, showing an error message. Since Friday afternoon, however, the webpage has since been restored, and the museum is operating at its normal hours.

Other government entities, such as the National Park Service, Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian, have so far eschewed removing their history landing pages regarding women in uniform.

On Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order deeming that “influential institutions, including the Federal Government … have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”

The order left many of the branches scrambling to halt DEI programming, with the Air Force pulling a basic military training course on Jan. 23 that included videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, before reinstating it after initial outcry.

On the eve of Black History Month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared “Identity Months” dead at the Defense Department and “that DoD Components and Military Departments will not use official resources, to include man-hours, to host celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months, including National African American/Black History Month, Women’s History Month … Pride Month” among others.

About Claire Barrett

Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.

22. SOCOM wants new helmet goggle mount and oxygen-generating device

SOCOM wants new helmet goggle mount and oxygen-generating device

militarytimes.com · by Todd South · February 10, 2025

U.S. Special Operations Command is looking for a new aviation goggle mount and a way to get portable oxygen to troops in need.

Two recent postings under the U.S. Special Operations Command small business innovation research program seek solutions for those two issues among special operations forces.

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The new rifle can be converted to three different calibers.

SOCOM wants a helmet mount that will work across various aviator helmets with “various night vision goggle systems,” including the AN/AVS-6 and Wide Field of View Aviation Goggles. The mount must also work within the Aviation Night Vision Imaging System mount currently used by special operations forces, according to the listing.

The portable oxygen device must not only hold oxygen but also generate it. The purpose, according to the posting, is to “improve oxygen therapy at point-of-need in an austere, pre-hospital environment.”

Operators need a rugged, compact instrument that can provide oxygen “as far-forward as possible” to cut down on the use of oxygen cylinders, according to the posting.

The Pentagon has focused in recent years on improving the delivery of medical aid in remote and austere locations across the services. Decades of ready medical services during the Global War on Terror allowed for rapid response to medical emergencies and theater evacuations for advanced medical care.

Most war game projects are showing higher casualties and less access to medical care in future conflict than in previous combat operations.

SOFWERX, a platform that conducts research and development for SOCOM, plans to hold a virtual Q&A session on the two initiatives on Feb. 18, according to the listing.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

​23. With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government's public integrity guardrails

​So many questions to ask about this.

With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government's public integrity guardrails

By  ERIC TUCKER, MICHELLE L. PRICE and ZEKE MILLER

Updated 9:24 PM EST, February 10, 2025

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 10, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the first three weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.

In a span of hours on Monday, word came that he had forced out leaders of offices responsible for government ethics and whistleblower complaints. And in a boon to corporations, he ordered a pause to enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business. All of that came on top of the earlier late-night purge of more than a dozen inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse at government agencies.

It’s all being done with a stop-me-if-you-dare defiance by a president who the first time around felt hemmed in by watchdogs, lawyers and judges tasked with affirming good government and fair play. Now, he seems determined to break those constraints once and for all in a historically unprecedented flex of executive power.

“It’s the most corrupt start that we’ve ever seen in the history of the American presidency,” said Norm Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic who was a legal adviser to Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment.

“The end goal is to avoid accountability this time,” said Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer. “Not just being protected by his party and counting on the public to move on when scandals or problems emerge, but this time by actually removing many of the key figures whose job it is to oversee” his administration.

Zelizer added: “It’s a much bolder assertion than in his first term, and if successful and if all these figures are removed, you’ll have a combination of an executive branch lacking independent voices that will keep their eye on the ball and then a congressional majority that at least thus far isn’t really going to cause problems for him.”

Picking up where he left off

To some degree, Trump’s early actions reflect a continuation of the path he blazed in his first term, when he dismissed multiple key inspectors general — including those leading the Defense Department and intelligence community — and fired an FBI director and an attorney general amid a Justice Department investigation into his ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

This time, though, his administration has moved much more swiftly in reprisal against those he feels previously wronged him — or still could.

His Justice Department last month fired more than a dozen prosecutors involved in investigations into his hoarding of classified documents and his efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election, both of which resulted in since-abandoned indictments after he left office. It’s also demanded a list of all agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, with Trump saying Friday that he intends to quickly and “surgically” fire some of them.

The actions reflect the administration’s intent to keep a tight grip on the Justice Department and even purge it of investigators seen as insufficiently loyal, even though career civil servants are typically not replaced by new presidents. Trump’s actions are in keeping with the dramatic dismissal on his first Friday night in office of nearly 20 inspectors general in a broad cross-section of government agencies, all in seeming violation of a law requiring that Congress be given 30-day advance notice of such firings.

The latest moves came Monday, when the recently fired head of the Office of Special Counsel, which processes whistleblower complaints and handles the Hatch Act that prohibits federal employees from partisan activities on the job, sued over his dismissal days earlier. Trump separately fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics.

He named as acting head of the watchdog agencies Doug Collins, a loyal ally and former Republican congressman from Georgia who was recently confirmed as secretary of veteran affairs. But late Monday, a federal judge in Washington ordered the fired OSC head, Hampton Dellinger, to be reinstated while a court fight continues over his removal.

Trump’s administration on Monday also moved to wipe away two high-profile public integrity cases of elected officials. Trump pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted on political corruption charges that included seeking to sell an appointment to then-President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat.

Hours later, Trump’s Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was accused of accepting bribes of free or discounted travel and illegal campaign contributions.

“I think Trump has sent an unmistakable message that corruption is welcome in his new administration,” said Eisen, who now works with State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit watchdog group that says it fights “election sabotage and autocracy,” and has been filing lawsuits against Trump’s administration.

Trump has portrayed the cases the same way he labeled his own investigations: as politically motivated witch hunts.

Loosening rules related to business

Trump, who in 2016 campaigned on a pledge to rid Washington of corruption with his “drain the swamp” refrain, has also taken aim at ethics and watchdog rules when it comes to business.

On Monday, he paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents U.S. companies from paying bribes to foreign government officials to win business, until new Attorney General Pam Bondi can design new guidance.

The White House said the action was needed because American companies “are prohibited from engaging in practices common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field.”

“It sounds good on paper but in practicality it’s a disaster,” Trump said at the White House.

On his first day in office last month, Trump signed an executive order that rescinded one issued by former President Joe Biden that had prohibited executive branch employees from accepting major gifts from lobbyists and bans people jumping from lobbying jobs to executive branch jobs, or the reverse, for two years. The bans were aimed at curbing the “revolving door” in Washington, where incoming government workers could bring a minefield of ethical conflicts and later find lucrative lobbying jobs.

The move came as Trump returned to power with fresh overlaps between his personal and business interests, including his launch of a new cryptocurrency token.

His family business, the Trump Organization, meanwhile, adopted a voluntary agreement that bars it from making deals with foreign governments but not with private companies abroad, a significant change from the company’s ethics pact in the first term.

The Trump Organization has in recent months struck deals for hotels and golf resorts in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Government ethics experts have raised concerns that the president’s personal financial interests in the deals could influence the way he conducts foreign policy.

___

Price reported from New York.

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 10, 2025

24. A Constitutional Crisis?

​A sensational overreaction?

One thing I can say is that we cannot study and discuss, and try to understand our Constitution enough.

You either support and defend the Constitution or ...

A Constitutional Crisis?

We’re covering an imbalance of power in the government.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/briefing/a-constitutional-crisis.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

• Share full article
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Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By German Lopez

Feb. 7, 2025

You’re reading The Morning newsletter.  Make sense of the day’s news and ideas. David Leonhardt and Times journalists guide you through what’s happening — and why it matters. Get it sent to your inbox.

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.

In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next.

What went wrong

The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”

Image

Congress ratifying the presidential election result on Jan. 6, 2025.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan.

Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate.

How this ends

This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king.

Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say.

Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration.

Expert ratings of U.S. democracy

On a scale of 0-100

A chart shows expert ratings of U.S. democracy on a scale of zero to 100 at various points from February 2017 to February 2025. At the start of the first Trump term, experts rated U.S. democracy at around a 68 out of 100. At the start of the second Trump term, the rating has dropped to 55 out of 100.

80

60

Trump

Biden

Trump

40

20

2017

2019

2021

2023

2025

Source: Bright Line WatchBy The New York Times

The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account.

Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze.

“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”

​25. JD Vance’s latest pronouncement evokes a constitutional crisis

​

Does the VP really think judicial review is not necessary and important to the function of our Republic or are his comments taken out of context and sensationalized? 

I often chuckle when people say we are not a democracy but a republic. But the foundation of our republic is separation of powers and checks and balances and judicial review is the important check on the other two branches of government.

(and yes we are a democracy and a republic)

JD Vance’s latest pronouncement evokes a constitutional crisis

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/10/vance-trump-judges-authority/

As a lawyer, the vice president should know better about judicial review.

February 10, 2025 at 4:47 p.m. ESTYesterday at 4:47 p.m. EST

5 min

1663

Vice President JD Vance speaks in D.C. on Jan. 23. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Anyone who doubts that President Donald Trump wants to rule like a strongman should pay attention to the chilling pronouncement made by Vice President JD Vance on Sunday: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

Acting in its constitutional role, the federal judiciary has slowed the blitzkrieg launched by Trump and his field marshal, billionaire Elon Musk, against the federal government and the law. One of the latest roadblocks was erected in the early hours of Saturday morning when U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ordered that Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service vandals be locked out of the Treasury Department’s vital payment systems, which are full of sensitive data.

Engelmayer’s emergency order is temporary, pending a court hearing on Feb. 14. The volatile Musk, predictably, raged on his social media platform X that Engelmayer was “a corrupt judge protecting corruption” and “needs to be impeached NOW!” But Vance’s post on X, though calmer in tone, was far more menacing — because it fundamentally challenges the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.

I need to quote Vance in full: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

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There are two possibilities here. Vance might just be blowing off steam. Or he might be presaging an attempt by the administration to take the unthinkable step of defying federal court orders, which would create an existential constitutional crisis.

Federal judges have temporarily blocked several of Trump’s sweeping executive orders and stalled Musk’s pillaging of some federal agencies, pending further judicial consideration. The president has been stopped from unilaterally ending birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment; freezing up to $3 trillion in domestic spending that was authorized by Congress, to which the Constitution gives the power of the purse; purging the U.S. Agency for International Development and immediately putting its 2,200 employees on leave; imposing an impossibly tight deadline for a questionable “deferred resignation” offer to most civilian federal workers; and enacting other radical measures.

These rulings have been made by judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents — including by Trump himself during his first term. They are fulfilling their duty according to the Constitution and the landmark-of-all-landmarks Supreme Court ruling Marbury v. Madison, which in 1803 established the principle of judicial review.

When a federal judge issues a ruling the president does not like, the president can appeal to a higher court. Ultimately, the dispute might reach the Supreme Court, which makes a decision by which all parties, including the president, must then abide.

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Vance, who is a graduate of Yale Law School, obviously knows all of this. He also knows that the examples he cites are specious. No, federal judges do not review a general’s battle plans — but five civilian judges do sit as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which has appellate jurisdiction for the military court system. No, federal judges do not usurp the attorney general’s discretion — but Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, did rule that former attorney general Merrick Garland acted improperly when he appointed Jack Smith to prosecute the classified documents case against Trump.

It is safe to say that every president has been frustrated by some decision made by some federal judge. If Trump is more exasperated than most — “No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision. It’s a disgrace,” he said of Engelmayer’s ruling — that is because he is claiming a vast and un-American expansion of executive power.

The Founders expected each branch of government to defend its prerogatives. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate have shown no willingness to challenge Trump as he ignores laws and withholds expenditures mandated by Congress. The judiciary, by contrast, is doing its job.

But judges have no way to enforce their decisions. Implicit in Vance’s words is a threat to simply ignore rulings about matters the administration believes judges “aren’t allowed to control.”

Amid his vice-presidential duties, Vance somehow finds the time to fight culture-war battles on X, often hurling juvenile insults. For example, he responded to a critique from Rory Stewart, a British academic and former cabinet secretary who has taught at Harvard University and is now a professor at Yale, by posting that Stewart “has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” In another spat, Vance told Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) to “grow up” and called him “whiny.”

Actually, Vance’s post about disobeying judicial review is the very definition of “whiny.” But it also sounds like a grave threat to the absolute, inviolable principle that a president is not a king.

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By Eugene Robinson

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.follow on X@Eugene_Robinson

26. Is the gray the new black? Russia's recycled soviet tactics directed against Europe

​What is old is new again?

Excerpts:

It is challenging to imagine moving beyond these scenarios to an optimistic one. Hybrid warfare, characterised by tactics like cyberattacks, disinformation, and economic pressure, is likely to remain a key element of Russia’s strategic doctrine, regardless of the outcome of the ongoing war. Even if diplomatic efforts lead to a ceasefire and a peace framework addressing the security concerns of both Ukraine and Russia, the deep division and mistrust between Russia and the West are likely to persist.

This conflict is not isolated to the war in Ukraine; it is part of a broader, long-standing campaign by Putin. It reflects his vision of Russia as a counterweight to Western dominance, aiming to regain influence over former Soviet states and undermine NATO’s unity. There is currently no indication of a regime change or political shift that would suggest a change in tactics.

As hybrid warfare tactics become an integral part of Russian strategy, this crisis could catalyse greater cohesion among the EU and other Western countries, for instance with the UK, strengthening defence and security collaboration. In particular, Europe’s renewed focus on energy independence from Russia would enhance its resilience against further aggression. European nations will likely bolster their defences against hybrid threats, improving cybersecurity and countering disinformation.

Is the gray the new black? Russia's recycled soviet tactics directed against Europe -

by Manuela Previtera

 10 Febbraio 202510 Febbraio 2025 22 mins read

iari.site · by Manuela Previtera · February 10, 2025

Russian-linked sabotage, cyberattacks, spy ships, and damaged cables are making headlines, but nothing is new. Russia has revived tactics from the Soviet era and has created a grey zone to threaten Europe.

On October 7, 2024, the head of MI5 sounded a grave warning about potential acts of aggression from Russia. He indicated that the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, is “on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets“. This warning follows similar alerts from other Western intelligence agencies regarding the growing threat of Russian hybrid warfare tactics since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022.

As the war enters its third year, the concern over Russia’s activities has heightened, with reports of “arson, sabotage, and increasingly reckless actions“. The level of concern within Western security circles has reached a point where it has become the main focus of security policy. For example, MI5 has had to “pare back” its counter-terrorism efforts to better prepare for state-sponsored actions from Russia and other rogue states.

The framework described is not new and did not originate with the war in Ukraine. While these tactics have been put into action due to Europe’s leading role in supporting Ukraine, their roots can be traced back to the Soviet era. As support for Ukraine looms large in Putin’s imagination, these strategies have resurfaced over the last decade, especially following the events in Ukraine in 2014. This Russian approach has been further examined in recent analyses, which highlight the utilization of modern tools and methods.

Russian hybrid warfare: an “old wine in the new bottles” of 21st century

The threats identified by Western security services fall under the category of hybrid threats, which have been increasingly discussed for a while in Western military doctrine. The concept of “hybrid warfare” was formulated by Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman in 2005 as a conceptual bridge between conventional and unconventional warfare. It encompasses a wide range of traditional military power, irregular tactics, terrorist activities, and criminal disorder. Since 2014 the term has become associated with Russian military strategy, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the initial actions in Eastern Ukraine, where it used an innovative approach which blended military and non-military tactics.

Yet, one year before the events in Ukraine, in 2013, Russian General Valery Gerasimov, in an article published in the Russian Military-Industrial Courier, commented that in the twenty-first century, the distinction between war and peace has become increasingly blurred. Conflicts are no longer formally declared and often follow unfamiliar patterns. His statement foreshadowed Russia’s strategy in Ukraine, where it effectively combined conventional military tactics, unconventional methods, and non-military means using covert special forces alongside non-state actors, as well as disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and energy blackmail.

This would come to be known in the Western mainstream opinion as the “Gerasimov doctrine”, invoking a term originally coined by Mark Galeotti who later disavowed this notion, admitting he had been searching for a snappy title and that no actual doctrine existed. Rather than a new approach to warfare, he argued that the strategies employed by Russia are entrenched in longstanding practices familiar to Cold War strategies and even to earlier forms of organised conflict.

In reality, the concept can more accurately be described as an operational framework within the broader Primakov Doctrine, which has shaped Russia’s foreign policy for over two decades, focusing on opposition to a unipolar world order dominated by the United States. Accordingly, the Gerasimov doctrine is more of a Western myth than a formal, comprehensive new Russian strategic concept; it can be seen as “old wine in new bottles“, representing a modern evolution of Cold War-era tactics.

While the term hybrid warfare[1] and its associated theories emerged in the 2000s, the concept itself is as old as warfare, with asymmetric tactics becoming more prominent in recent years as nations use this approach to exhaust and undermine their rivals. Tactics such as cyberattacks, disinformation, and sabotage blur the lines between conflict and peace and allow aggressors to operate in the “grey zone”, making it difficult for targets to identify and respond effectively. Russia’s use of unmarked soldiers, or “little green men”, during the 2014 Crimea annexation exemplifies this approach.

The Kremlin’s strategy also seeks to exploit social and political divisions within a society, undermining the relationship between the government and its people while instilling chaos in the community. Although destabilizing state-society relations is not a new tactic, modern hybrid warfare utilizes a diverse range of actors beyond just soldiers and spies. This includes cyber trolls, media, and investors, all amplifying the disruptive effects in today’s interconnected world.

Striking vital infrastructure: low-cost actions to plunge Europe into chaos

The past decade in Europe has been marked by a troubling series of physical sabotages that reflect these hybrid tactics. This pattern can be traced back to 2014 and has aimed to weaken European support for Ukraine, particularly in light of the war in Donbas and the ongoing conflict that began in 2022. For example, in 2014, explosions occurred at the Vrbětice ammunition depot in the Czech Republic. These explosions were later linked to Russian agents who attempted to sabotage supplies intended for Ukraine during the early stages of its war with separatist forces in Donbas.

The sabotage campaign has continued up to the present day. In the last two years, there has been a significant increase in arson attacks, including fires at DHL warehouses in Birmingham and Leipzig, a Diehl Metal plant in Berlin, and even at an IKEA warehouse in Lithuania. Investigations and suspicions point to Russian intelligence as the prime suspect behind these attacks, believed to be state-sponsored operations aimed at destabilizing Europe and curbing support for Ukraine.

European officials have increasingly acknowledged the growing threat of Russian sabotage operations targeting critical infrastructure across Europe. In October 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described crucial infrastructure as “the new frontier of warfare”, a sentiment echoed in November by EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, who warned of Russia’s deliberate targeting of vital assets like hospitals, power plants, and water supplies.

In recent months, the vulnerability of European infrastructure has become increasingly evident. Energy infrastructure and subsea communications networks are among the most critical areas of concern for European security, especially as Russia is reckoned to target these systems as part of its hybrid warfare tactics.

Nearly two years ago, MIVD director Jan Swillens highlighted this issue, noting that Russia has a keen interest in sabotaging energy infrastructure, with underwater cables being key targets. These cables not only transport electricity but also carry more than 95% of global internet traffic, making them essential for international commerce and national security, as they play a crucial role in military and intelligence operations.

Concerns about Moscow’s increasing underwater activities as potential avenues for attacks have been prominent in Western military and political discussions for several years. Such attacks could disrupt economic activities and government communications, potentially plunging nations into chaos as highlighted by UK concerns in 2017 and recent incidents involving essential communication cables in Germany and France. Whether through physical sabotage using civilian vessels and underwater explosives or cyber-attacks on cable management systems, these events highlight Russia’s ongoing attempts to destabilise Europe through low-cost, high-impact actions aimed at vital infrastructure.

This threat extends beyond assaults on communication networks and includes efforts to target government entities and other critical infrastructure. The digital revolution, characterized by increasing dependence on the internet, has transformed cyber threat opportunities significantly, as evidenced by numerous cyberattacks associated with Russia over the past decade. Various institutions in the health, government, and private sectors across different countries have been attacked.

The dangers identified by Johansson regarding Russia’s cyber activities, which extend beyond governmental entities, have been manifested in acts such as the 2024 attack on NHS hospitals in London. This attack, carried out by the Russian cybercriminal group Qilin, disrupted IT systems, leading to delays and cancellations of medical procedures. Evidence suggests that the cybercriminal gangs behind these attacks are likely backed by the Russian state, given the many relationships between their members and Russian intelligence officials.

Disinformation warfare: a modern revival of the most infamous soviet active measure

As previously mentioned, these kinds of operations are not new. Long before Putin’s current strategies, the Soviet Union had developed an extensive array of covert operations, notably through the practice of active measures(aktivnye meropriyatiya in Russian). These techniques gained widespread attention thanks to Soviet defectors like KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin. He famously smuggled out thousands of documents that revealed the extensive scope of Soviet espionage and sabotage activities that had started as early as the 1920s.

Among the most infamous covert operations were the KGB’s disinformation campaigns, such as the notorious Operation Denver in the 1980s. This operation falsely propagated the idea that AIDS was a U.S. biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

KGB, Information Nr. 2955 [to Bulgarian State Security], 7 September 1985. A page from a KGB cable sent to Warsaw Pact foreign intelligence agencies , detailing “Operation Denver” – an elaborate disinformation campaign aimed at falsely linking AIDS to a U.S. biological weapon. Source: CDDAABCSSISBNA-R

Therefore, the disinformation strategy, so closely associated with Russia today, has its deep roots in the Soviet era. As the Western contends with Russian disinformation in recent years, many journalists have traced these tactics back to the Cold War, when the KGB refined its use of fake documents and elaborate plots to sway public opinion. Terms like fake news and post-truth may seem like modern concepts but, as noted by Mark Hollingsworth, the KGB was pioneering in its efforts to create a “climate of chaos, fear, and pervasive uncertainty”, leading to a breakdown of trust and a constant redefinition of truth.

One Soviet method known as “vranyo” – a uniquely Russian term for a specific type of deceptive or exaggerated lie – exemplifies this approach. Vranyo was not merely about misrepresentation; it involved fabricating elaborate falsehoods that, when repeated enough, became indistinguishable from reality. Through such measures, the Soviets aimed to destabilize their enemies. In many ways, these techniques have evolved into the (dis)information warfare tactics used by modern Russia, which still thrives on creating confusion and distrust through both covert and overt means.

Unfortunately, now more than ever, a famous remark is pertinent: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on“. This captures the essence of disinformation in the digital age which has been notably embraced by Russia. Russia has long demonstrated its mastery of information warfare, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, its focus has shifted toward manipulating foreign target audiences[2]. Contrary to the belief that Soviet-era disinformation ended with the dissolution of the USSR, Vladimir Putin’s return to power – first as head of the FSB and later as president – marked a revival of the KGB’s disinformation apparatus. With the digital revolution, the rise of global networks, and the overwhelming flow of information, the opportunities for influence and manipulation have grown exponentially.

Russian disinformation tactics follow a well-established, methodical approach: exploiting divisions within target societies, creating bold, outrageous lies to generate maximum impact, and spreading those lies through digital platforms. Whether during the 2016 U.S. presidential election or elections in European countries, Russia’s information warfare has been a tool for undermining trust, sowing division, and advancing its geopolitical goals. Using a combination of hacking, selective dissemination of stolen information, and social media manipulation, Russian operatives have sought to influence public opinion and destabilise political processes at a minimal cost. This strategy of disruption and deception, often leveraging deeply ingrained societal divisions, remains a key element of Russia’s broader geopolitical tactics.

A grey scenario in a grey zone

Looking back at the history of the Soviet Union and its longstanding efforts to undermine the West, it becomes clear that Russia’s current tactics are deeply rooted in a tradition of asymmetric strategies and reflect a permanent wartime mentality designed to destabilise and weaken adversaries without engaging in direct, conventional warfare. With the high costs of a kinetic conflict that it cannot realistically win, Russia sees these operations are a necessary response to perceived Western encroachment and has turned to hybrid warfare as its primary strategy for achieving geopolitical objectives.

In this context, Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics, including damaging military and humanitarian supply lines, and attacking energy infrastructure, are designed to impose heavy costs on these countries for their support. As Europe deepens its support for Ukraine, Russia escalates its hybrid warfare tactics, focusing on cyber attacks and sabotage. This escalating conflict could result in long-term geopolitical realignments, forcing nations to reevaluate their security partnerships and international strategies.

In a worst-case scenario, if the situation continues to deteriorate and hybrid operations against member states escalate to the level of an armed attack, the NATO alliance could potentially consider the invocation of Article 5 of the NATO treaty, as it was affirmed by allied leaders at NATO summit in July 2024, leading to open military engagement. The geopolitical landscape would shift dramatically, potentially sparking a new Cold War-like environment, with countries forced to choose sides and a resurgence of global militarization.

Under a U.S. administration led by Donald Trump, maintaining unity within the NATO alliance could prove challenging, leaving Europe vulnerable and isolated in its stance against Russia without US support. Trump might favour a solution that benefits the U.S. at the expense of European stability and security. However, due to his unpredictable nature and the presence of hawks in his administration, he could also adopt a tougher stance against Russia, as indicated by his recent comments regarding new potential sanctions.

Even without full escalation, an intermediate scenario remains a grim prospect, marked by a protracted and unresolved conflict that brings immense challenges. Over time, European countries should adapt by enhancing their defences, improving cybersecurity, and increasing intelligence-sharing to counter Russia’s tactics. However, this ongoing environment of hybrid warfare, economic strain, and political uncertainty leads to a sustained period of tension with no clear resolution in sight.

It is challenging to imagine moving beyond these scenarios to an optimistic one. Hybrid warfare, characterised by tactics like cyberattacks, disinformation, and economic pressure, is likely to remain a key element of Russia’s strategic doctrine, regardless of the outcome of the ongoing war. Even if diplomatic efforts lead to a ceasefire and a peace framework addressing the security concerns of both Ukraine and Russia, the deep division and mistrust between Russia and the West are likely to persist.

This conflict is not isolated to the war in Ukraine; it is part of a broader, long-standing campaign by Putin. It reflects his vision of Russia as a counterweight to Western dominance, aiming to regain influence over former Soviet states and undermine NATO’s unity. There is currently no indication of a regime change or political shift that would suggest a change in tactics.

As hybrid warfare tactics become an integral part of Russian strategy, this crisis could catalyse greater cohesion among the EU and other Western countries, for instance with the UK, strengthening defence and security collaboration. In particular, Europe’s renewed focus on energy independence from Russia would enhance its resilience against further aggression. European nations will likely bolster their defences against hybrid threats, improving cybersecurity and countering disinformation.

[1] In Russian military strategy, there is a distinct concept known as “next-generation war”, which resembles Western hybrid warfare. The term for hybrid warfare in Russian (gibridnaya voyna) is primarily a direct translation from English and is mainly used to refer to Western destabilization operations aimed at Russia.

[2] Elonheimo, Tuukka. “Comprehensive Security Approach in Response to Russian Hybrid Warfare.” Strategic Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2021), 119. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48618299.

iari.site · by Manuela Previtera · February 10, 2025

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