Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be kind of like a library."

– Jorge Juis Borges

"All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together."

– Octavia E. Butler

"People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

On 1 March (anniversary of the 1919 March First Korean Independence Movement) we will be transitioning both the Korean News and Commentary and the National Security News and Commentary newsletters to a new service from the Korea Regional Review and UPI (https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/)

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1. [DECODED] China’s familiar language of provocation

2. F.A.A. Halts All Flights at El Paso Airport for 10 Days

3. How U.S. Special Forces Are Training in an Arctic Warfare Bootcamp

4. The outsize influence of America’s admiral in Asia

5. Experts warn moving Marines away from Okinawa would play into China’s hands

6. The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft

7. Disciplined Autonomy: How AI and sUAS Will Redefine Security, Safety, Emergency Response, and Military Operations

8. The Role of Foreign Fighters in a Taiwan Resistance Scenario

9. U.S. Weighs Seizing Tankers Carrying Iranian Oil to Pressure Tehran

10. Invitation (2/19/26): Turning OSINT Chaos into Strategic Clarity: Countering Malign Chinese Influence | Irregular Warfare Initiative

11. America losing the cognitive war with China

12. The U.S. Military Can't Build A Military Anymore

13. Department of War Finalizes Realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration

14. DOW Restructures Foreign Military Sales, Prioritizes Speed, Efficiency

15. Pentagon Reorganizes Arms Sales System to Speed Weapons to U.S. Allies

16. Cognitive Warfare to Dominate and Redefine Adversary Realities: Implications for U.S. Special Operations Forces

17. Dissidents Are Silenced, and the West Moves On

18. Sweet Nothings: Rutte’s Trump-Whispering Is Counterproductive

19. Best Battalion in the Army

1. [DECODED] China’s familiar language of provocation

Summary:

Rappler reports a public “word war” between the Chinese embassy in Manila and Philippine officials, highlighting the embassy’s unusually combative Facebook posts. Examples include accusing Senator Risa Hontiveros of “instigating anti China sentiments” for political self-interest and telling the Philippines it “should feel fortunate to have a neighbor like China,” while claiming it is merely “responding” to provocations. Rappler and The Nerve argue this language matches long-tracked online influence talking points. They cite a prior report alleging the embassy hired InfinitUs Marketing Solutions in 2023 to run troll campaigns to shift Filipino perceptions, using scripts that cast China as victim and the Philippines as aggravator, including lines tied to November 2024 maritime laws and earlier October 2023 pro-China scripts targeting Japan over Fukushima water.

Excerpt:

What all of this tells us is that the playbook has always been there, it’s just that we’re now seeing the attack lines brazenly coming from the official source. So when the embassy says that it is merely responding to accusations, as it often does on its Facebook page, records indicate otherwise — that the narrative had already been set in motion.

Comment: Cognitive warfare. If the alleged InfinitUs scripting is real, then Beijing is treating Filipino public opinion as a contested space, and elected officials as targets inside that space.

If the narrative was “set in motion” before public disputes, what indicators should policymakers watch for early warning of a coordinated campaign against Philippine decision making?

Note how these tactics are seen in Japan. I am sure research would reveal similar tactics in Korea, Thailand, and Australia among others.

[DECODED] China’s familiar language of provocation

rappler.com · Pauline Macaraeg

Feb 11, 2026 6:00 PM PHT

https://www.rappler.com/voices/newsletters/decoded-china-familiar-language-provocation/?utm

You might have noticed the very public word war between the Chinese embassy in Manila and Philippine officials. The official Facebook page of the Chinese embassy has suddenly become so aggressive in making combative public statements targeting Filipino officials.

In a January 23 post, the embassy accused Senator Risa Hontiveros of “instigating anti China sentiments in the Philippines” and that it was “all for [her] political self interests.” In another post, it said that the Philippines “should feel fortunate to have a neighbor like China,” amid global tensions in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Gaza.

Notice, also, how the embassy often says that it has no choice but to “respond” to provocations.

For those who have tracked online influence operations, however, the language will sound familiar. We at The Nerve have seen similar talking points with the same tone and voice being pushed by troll armies and informal coordinated networks for years.

In a previous report, our head of data Don Kevin Hapal wrote about how the Chinese embassy allegedly hired InfinitUs Marketing Solutions in 2023 to launch an army of trolls and “keyboard warriors” to defend China on social media.

The internal documents showed that among the objectives of InfinitUs’ entire campaign was to “help change the overall negative perception of Filipinos about the Chinese and China” and to “inculcate to Filipinos that China and the Chinese people is a big part of our growing economy and our culture.”

For example, the internal onboarding documents of InfinitUs showed a line from a long list of scripts: “The Philippine government should not have passed these laws because they very well know that it will intensify our conflict with China and other Asian neighbors.” The documents showed that this particular line was implemented back in November 2024, after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the Philippine Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act.

These talking points that position China as a victim of provocation and the Philippines as an aggravator in the region are aligned with the narratives tracked and documented by Rappler and The Nerve in previous studies. In one report, we outlined how Chinese state media used its assets to target Philippine officials by accusing them of “double standards” that are against China and favorable toward the US.

The internal documents also showed that InfinitUs allegedly instructed its army of trolls to spread pro-China commentaries as early as October 2023. This month, the script focused on Japan and its release of treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean, which started in August that year.

“Before you criticize China, please stop contaminating our oceans and waters with toxic, radioactive wastes from Fukushima!” a line from the script read. “You have no right to criticize China when you yourself don’t know right from wrong! You are just a puppet and mouthpiece of America.”

F.A.A. Halts All Flights at El Paso Airport for 10 Days

NY Times · Reyes Mata III · February 11, 2026

No flights would be allowed to or from the airport for 10 days under a flight restriction order that cited unspecified “special security reasons.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/faa-el-paso-flight-restrictions.html

El Paso International Airport on Wednesday morning, a few hours after the flight restriction went into effect.Credit...Reyes Mata III for The New York Times

Reyes Mata III reported from El Paso International Airport.

Feb. 11, 2026Updated 6:10 a.m. ET

The Federal Aviation Administration late Tuesday halted all flights to and from El Paso International Airport for 10 days for “special security reasons,” isolating a major American metropolitan area from air travel.

In a move that appeared to surprise state and local officials, the restriction went into effect at 11:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday and will remain until 11:30 p.m. local time on Feb. 20.

The restriction encompasses a 10-mile area around El Paso, and includes the neighboring community of Santa Teresa, N.M., but does not apply to aircraft flying above 18,000 feet, the F.A.A. notices said. They did not detail the security reasons that prompted the restriction.

The airport issued a travel advisory on social media saying that all flights to and from the airport had been grounded, including commercial, cargo and general aviation. It told travelers to contact their airlines for the latest flight information .

An operator who answered the phone at El Paso International Airport early Wednesday also confirmed that all flights had been halted because of an F.A.A. order.

The airport said in a statement that the restriction had been issued “on short notice” and that it was waiting for additional guidance from the F.A.A. In a notice, the F.A.A. said the federal government “may use deadly force” if an aircraft violating the airspace is determined to pose “an imminent security threat.”

A man who answered the phone Wednesday at the F.A.A.’s special operations support center said he did not know why all flights had been halted and did not expect any update for hours.

When reached by phone early Wednesday, Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio, said he had no idea what was going on. “Sorry, I don’t have some clear answer,” Mr. Castro said. When asked if this was surprising, he simply said, “Yes.”

When asked whether he was aware of the F.A.A. restriction, Texas State Representative Vincent Perez of El Paso said, “I don’t have any information on that.”

“I have never heard of an American airspace being shutdown for 10 days, absent a major emergency,” Mr. Perez added.

The F.A.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shortly before 3 a.m. at the airport in El Paso, yellow gates blocked the elevators and escalators, prohibiting anyone from riding up to the second level, which is where people walk through the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint lines to board flights.

Some travelers said they saw messages on social media indicating the El Paso International Airport had closed, but airlines told them their flights were still scheduled. When people arrived Wednesday, they found the airport shut down. Other travelers said destination airports were unaware of the closure.

Alex Torres, 42, was standing in the American Airlines line on the ground floor of the airport with her 22-year-old son, Noah Velasquez. Ms. Torres was expecting to fly to New York for business and did not discover that flights had been grounded until she arrived at the airport. When Ms. Torres spoke with an American Airlines representative on the phone, she said, the agent had yet to hear the news.

“They didn’t know anything about the airport being closed,” she added.

The airport in El Paso, the 23rd-most populous city in the nation according to the 2020 census, serves a vast swath of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. According to a monthly aviation activity report issued by the airport, about 3.5 million travelers through November 2025 had passed through the airport, which offers nonstop service to major hubs like Los Angeles, Denver, Houston and Atlanta.

The nearest U.S. city is Las Cruces, N.M., about 35 miles away, whose airport is served only by Advanced Air. El Paso is about a four-and-a-half hour drive from Midland-Odessa, Texas, seven hours from San Antonio, nine hours from Dallas and 10 hours from Houston.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.

Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.

See more on: Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.)

3. How U.S. Special Forces Are Training in an Arctic Warfare Bootcamp

Summary:

In northern Sweden near the Arctic Circle, U.S. Special Forces ran a harsh cold-weather boot camp as NATO builds presence in the High North amid concern about Russia. Temperatures hovered near minus 30°F. More than a dozen soldiers were sent home with cold injuries like boils, blisters, and discolored limbs, and one European soldier was hospitalized with possible toe loss. Training stressed survival as the prerequisite to combat. It included diving through a hole in a frozen lake to simulate breaking through ice and camping alone in snow shelters. A Wall Street Journal reporter embedded and trained with the Green Berets while filming under frostbite risk.

Comment: If you want to feel cold (vicariously) see the 13 minute video at the link. Remember our cold weather training lessons. Readiness in the Arctic starts as medical and logistical discipline, because cold casualties can remove combat power faster than an enemy. This training treats the environment as the first fight, and it suggests future conflict planning must budget time and force for survival skills, not just tactics. And I remember this: heat is uncomfortable. Cold is painful. All environments are harsh in their own way. I do think the cold is the harshest of all.

How U.S. Special Forces Are Training in an Arctic Warfare Bootcamp

WSJ

WSJ’s Sune Engel Rasmussen is the first civilian to take part in this grueling training with a unit of American Green Berets

By Sune Engel Rasmussen

and Eve Hartley

Feb. 9, 2026 12:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/how-u-s-special-forces-are-training-in-an-arctic-warfare-bootcamp-374d6cce

WSJ’s Sune Engel Rasmussen joins U.S. Special Forces in a grueling Arctic training camp to understand why subzero survival skills are crucial for the future of war. Photo: Eve Hartley

KALIX, Sweden—Tensions are simmering in the icy Arctic. North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are sending a growing number of soldiers to the High North to help prepare for the threat of a potential Russian invasion. They quickly discover that newcomers need to learn a whole new set of skills to merely survive, let alone fight a war.

Days into a recent training in northern Sweden, more than a dozen soldiers were sent home with cold-weather injuries ranging from boils and blisters to miscolored limbs. One European soldier was hospitalized and risked losing parts of his toes.

In the video above, a Wall Street Journal reporter embedded and trained with a group of U.S. Special Forces as they learned how to operate in the extreme cold.

Near the Arctic Circle, temperatures constantly hovered around minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-34 degrees Celsius). The training involved diving through a hole in a frozen lake to simulate breaking through ice, and camping alone in snow shelters in the woods.

The Journal’s video journalist faced her own hurdles while filming. Touching the camera’s metal body could cause frostbite, forcing her to use a stabilizing cushion to separate the camera from her body at all times. In between shoots, she drank tea made from boiled snow and pine needles, and warmed her feet by a crackling fire.

Sune Engel Rasmussen is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. His reporting focuses on European security, including terrorism, transnational organized crime and the shifting security landscape in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Currently based in London, Sune lived for nearly a decade in Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon. He has covered the Afghan war and the return of the Taliban, Iranian sanctions evasion and the dispute over the country's nuclear program, Israel's war in Gaza in south Lebanon, and was on the ground in Syria in the aftermath of the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

His book about the Afghan war, “Twenty Years: Hope, War and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation,” won a 2025 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book. His reporting on the fall of Kabul in 2021 was part of a package collectively nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Before joining the Journal in 2018, Sune was a correspondent for the Guardian in Afghanistan. He has also written for magazines such as the Economist, GQ, Harper's, National Geographic, Newsweek and Time.

Eve Hartley is a senior video journalist covering international news, tech and enterprise stories. She produces original features and in-depth explainers in The Wall Street Journal’s London bureau.

Her work focuses on visual-led stories that break down complex topics and shed light on the biggest political, social and economic issues facing the world today.

Eve joined the Journal from Yahoo News where she presented a series on climate change and reported from COP26. Before that, she was a freelance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia and the Multimedia Editor at HuffPost U.K.

WSJ

4. The outsize influence of America’s admiral in Asia

Summary:

The Economist argues Admiral Sam Paparo, America’s top commander in the Asia-Indo-Pacific, has become unusually influential. After a Thailand-Cambodia border clash, he made repeated trips to Malaysia to press their military chiefs to stop, helping hold the dispute down until POTUS could attend an October peace deal signing in Malaysia. The article says Paparo must now manage three challenges: reassure anxious Asian partners that America will not abandon allies as POTUS shifts attention elsewhere; keep credibility with POTUS and advisers while resources are pulled to other theaters; and update U.S. war plans as China modernizes, including pushing AI-enabled command tools and efforts on missiles and autonomous systems.

Comment: The admiral embodies Dana Priest's description of CINCs as proconsuls (see her book from 2003 - The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military). Admiral Paparo’s personal diplomacy is being used as a substitute for missing or unsettled civilian signals, and that makes the theater’s reassurance hinge on one uniformed leader.

If the CINC in the Asia-Indo-Pacific becomes the main stabilizer because Washington is distracted, what happens to deterrence and alliance confidence when he rotates out or loses access to POTUS?

The outsize influence of America’s admiral in Asia

The Economist · Feb 5th 2026

Can Sam Paparo keep US strategy on an even keel?

https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/02/05/the-outsize-influence-of-americas-admiral-in-asia

OF THE EIGHT conflicts that Donald Trump imagines he has ended, at first glance the short border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia last July presents the cleanest case. To hear America’s president tell it, Mr Trump called the leaders of the two countries and threatened astronomical tariffs unless their guns fell silent. Soon, it is claimed, they did.

But the conflict was only the latest episode in a century-old grudge between the neighbours, and it continually risked flaring up again. So Admiral Sam Paparo made multiple visits to Malaysia on his blue-and-white Air Force jet. There he met the Thai and Cambodian military chiefs to tell them to knock it off. The intervention by the top American officer in Asia was key to smothering the dispute until Mr Trump could fly to Malaysia in October to preside over the signing of a peace deal.

Admiral Paparo’s quiet diplomacy is one way he is trying to show his usefulness to Mr Trump. Keeping the confidence of the president and others in the MAGA world will be essential if the career fighter-pilot is to address one of America’s much bigger problems: trying to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In this, he has been a driving force behind the American armed forces’ efforts in recent years.

The chiefs of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Honolulu, are weighty figures in any administration. The admiral in charge (and it is always an admiral, reflecting the navy’s expansive role in this part of the world) is responsible for military operations across half the Earth’s surface and a dozen time zones—from Bollywood to Hollywood, as one of the admiral’s predecessors was fond of saying. Admiral Paparo has become unusually prominent and influential in Asia. That is partly due to the court politics around Mr Trump, which keep other top officials close to the president in Washington. Now the admiral must navigate three big challenges.

The first is to try to reassure worried friends in Asia that America will not abandon its commitments to allies, even as Mr Trump switches his focus to Venezuela and Greenland, contemplates a grand bargain with China and routinely expresses his contempt for many of his NATO allies in Europe. Admiral Paparo’s previous commands in the region mean that he has old friendships with many military chiefs. That counts all the more at a time when the White House is recalling and cutting short the tours of most ambassadors appointed by Joe Biden. He offers a rare instance of consistency.

The second challenge is to keep onside a wayward president and his advisers, especially the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. Even in normal administrations the Indo-Pacific commander can find it hard, compared with America’s generals in Europe and the Middle East, to get the resources he wants. That risk was heightened after the Trump administration put the Americas ahead of Asia in its national defence strategy. The command’s resources risk being plundered for other contingencies. Its carriers and air-defence batteries often get dispatched to the Middle East; the focus on the western hemisphere makes the problem worse. But Admiral Paparo’s political nous has helped him limit the damage.

The biggest challenge the admiral faces is to make sure America’s war plans do not fall out of date as China’s armed forces rapidly modernise and technological changes cancel out some of America’s advantages. Admiral Paparo is unusually focused, compared with other American commanders, on making his command an AI-enabled one, experimenting with tools that speed up decision-making in a conflict and help ensure things like fuel and bullets quickly get to where they are needed. Other programmes focus on catching up with China on long-range missiles and autonomous weapons.

At a conference put on in January by the Pacific Forum, a think-tank in Honolulu, the admiral played host to several hundred officers, bureaucrats, defence eggheads, tech execs and representatives of allies. Over two days in windowless conference rooms just by Waikiki Beach, they held intensive discussions on how to win a war against “the adversary”, universally understood to mean China. The discussion was cerebral but no-nonsense. “He goes to sleep every night thinking about winning or losing the next great war,” says an admiring fellow admiral. “He has wargamed it more than anyone else.” With luck his wargames won’t be needed.■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “America’s admiral in Asia”

5. Experts warn moving Marines away from Okinawa would play into China’s hands

Summary:

Task & Purpose reports Atlantic Council experts warn that relocating Marines from Okinawa to Guam, Hawaii, and other locations under the long-standing U.S.-Japan Defense Policy Review Initiative would weaken U.S. ability to counter China in a First Island Chain fight. The plan would move about 9,000 Marines off Okinawa while about 10,000 remain. The authors argue Okinawa-based Marine Littoral forces and III MEF are built to operate from dispersed bases inside Chinese missile range, delay advances, and hold ships at risk, buying time for reinforcements. They note Guam is about 1,500 miles away and could take three days by ship. Marine Corps leadership has voiced similar concerns, though the Corps says it will implement the agreement unless it changes.

Comment: Ahh... the tyranny of distance - the fundamental challenge in the Asia-Indo-Pacific. As a former Marine friend of mine reminded me, that ship has already sailed. A large number of our Marines are moving to Guam and I do not think we can or will undo that decision.

The core warning is that distance equals lost time, and in a Taiwan contingency, lost time becomes operational failure.

If deterrence in the Asia-Indo-Pacific depends on stand-in forces inside the First Island Chain, why accept a posture plan that deliberately shifts rapid-response Marines farther from the crisis theater?

But perhaps this is an opportunity to move the Army to Okinawa. Perhaps we should replicate the 7th Infantry Division there. They did land on Okinawa in World War II so they have some history there (though I think that will pose some information warfare challenges if we highlighted their WWII service). Or maybe we could station the 8th US Army there. They are after all known as the Pacific Victors. (Note that these last comments are only half tongue in cheek - I too think it is a mistake to move the Marines from Okinawa).

Experts warn moving Marines away from Okinawa would play into China’s hands

taskandpurpose.com · Jeff Schogol

Relocating Marines from Okinawa would remove vital U.S. forces from the region at a time when China is doubling down on its claim on Taiwan, scholars said.

Jeff Schogol

Published Feb 9, 2026 12:52 PM EST

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-okinawa-china-2026/

Nearly two decades ago the United States and Japan signed an initiative to reduce the number of Marines in Okinawa. Now experts with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C. warn that moving Marines to Guam and elsewhere in the Pacific from the Japanese island would undermine the military’s ability to counter an attack from China.

Under the the US-Japan Defense Policy Review Initiative, or DPRI, the United States has agreed to move about 9,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, Hawaii, and other locations in the Pacific, while about 10,000 Marines would remain in Okinawa.

But the Atlantic Council experts argued in a recent article that the strategic situation in the Indo-Pacific region has changed drastically over the past two decades, and the Marines based on Okinawa would play a vital role if China and the United States went to war.

“They could delay enemy advances and buy time for US reinforcements as key elements of the stand-in force by holding combatant ships and maneuver elements at risk as the rest of the US military moves into place,” according to the Feb. 3 article, written by Marine Lt. Col. Caleb Eames and Amy Cowley.

Eames is the 2025-2026 Senior Marine Corps Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Cowley is an assistant director for the Forward Defense program of the think tank’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Both wrote that the III Marine Expeditionary Force and its Littoral Regiments are designed to operate from remote bases within the range of Chinese missiles. Units such as the 12th Littoral Combat Team, which is currently based on Okinawa, are also able to strike back, with anti-ship missile batteries that are capable of hitting targets up to 115 miles away.

Okinawa is part of the “First Island Chain,” which refers to a strategically important set of island nations in the western Pacific that includes Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Should a war break out in this region, the Chinese military would face Marine littoral forces stationed at bases in Okinawa, according to the article.

“Unfortunately, if fully implemented, the DPRI would give Chinese military planners exactly what they want—a removal of US forces from the locations where they would be most essential in a First Island Chain conflict,” the article says.

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The United States military has been building up its infrastructure on Guam, with new bases and missile defense elements. But, the Atlantic Council authors noted that Guam is about 1,500 miles from Okinawa, and it would take U.S. forces three days to cross that distance by ship — without having to deal with enemy attacks.

Relocating Marines from Okinawa would move “critical rapid-response forces” out of the region at a time when China describes reunifying with Taiwan as a “core interest,” they wrote. In fact, having a ready force that close to China is “the exact intent of having a Stand-In Force,” they wrote.

Eames and Cowley argued that it is time for the United States and Japan to negotiate their earlier agreement by providing Okinawans with economic incentives to support keeping a large Marine Corps presence on the island.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith voiced similar concerns last year, when he told reporters that the agreement to move Marines from Okinawa to Guam would put them far away from where they are most needed.

“Frankly, Guam puts us going the wrong way,” Smith told reporters at a Jan. 15, 2025 Defense Writers Group Breakfast in Washington, D.C. “Guam puts us on the other side of the International Date Line, but it puts us a long way from the crisis theater, from the priority theater.”

Smith added that he was not sure that the move to Guam was in the United States’ best national security interests, but the Marine Corps would comply with the agreement “unless, and until, it changes.”

For now, the agreement is still in effect.

“The United States Marine Corps maintains a steadfast commitment to honoring our nation’s obligations in the defense of Japan,” Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Steven J. Keenan said in a statement to Task & Purpose on Monday. “The Marine Corps is continuing to implement the realignment of U.S. forces in accordance with the DPRI Program of Record.”

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Jeff Schogol

Senior Pentagon Reporter

Jeff Schogol is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for nearly 20 years. Email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com or direct message @JSchogol73030 on Twitter.

taskandpurpose.com · Jeff Schogol

6. The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft

Summary:

Simon Shuster reports Ukraine is building low-cost, high-tech air defense under pressure from relentless Russian drone and missile strikes and limited Western supply. He describes a compact Ukrainian laser prototype, “Sunray,” that can burn down a drone quickly and is being built in roughly two years for a few million dollars, with a planned sale price in the hundreds of thousands. Ukraine is also developing a bootstrapped “Iron Dome” concept using tools like 3-D-printed interceptor drones, rocket clones, and armed ground robots. A newly appointed air-defense commander, Pavlo Yelizarov, is tasked with integrating domestic systems and improving efficiency, since expensive foreign missiles are being used against cheap drones.

Comment: Game changer? Ukraine is turning battlefield scarcity into a rapid innovation cycle, and the cost exchange ratio is becoming as decisive as range or accuracy.

The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft

The Atlantic · Simon Shuster · February 10, 2026

Russian strikes have forced Ukraine to build high-tech air defense on the cheap.

By Simon Shuster

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/ukraine-drones-lasers-iron-dome/685944/

If you’ve never seen a laser shoot an aircraft out of the sky, the experience can be unsettling. The weapon fits comfortably into the trunk of a car. It makes no noise and emits no light, not even the glowing red beam that’s so familiar from the movies. When a team of Ukrainian soldiers and engineers took me to see their prototype the other day, it seemed easy to use. Almost too easy.

The operator set up the laser cannon on the roof of his pickup truck in the middle of an empty field. It resembles a hobbyist’s telescope with some cameras affixed to the sides. For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky. The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, “Fire!” Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc.

The Ukrainian model, known as the Sunray, is not the world’s first laser weapon system. The U.S. Navy has one called Helios, which Lockheed Martin developed as part of a $150 million contract signed in 2018. Four years later, the first Helios laser was installed on a U.S. destroyer to defend against enemy drones. The creators of the Sunray, whose existence has not been previously reported, told me they built their laser in about two years for a few million dollars, and they expect to sell it for a few hundred thousand dollars.

Pavlo Yelizarov, the newly appointed commander of Ukraine’s air-defense forces, sees this price differential as a result of the war with Russia. “Many American companies are driven by money,” he told me last month at his office in Kyiv. “For them, it’s a job. They do it. They get paid. We have another component at play: the need to survive. That’s why we are moving faster.”

In recent months, President Volodymyr Zelensky has prioritized the push to deploy Ukraine’s own air defenses as the United States and Europe have failed to provide enough of them. A lot of U.S. weapons are being diverted to the Middle East, where the U.S. needs them for both a possible strike on Iran and defense against retaliatory strikes from Iranian drones and rockets. The Europeans, for their part, are loath to give Ukraine any more of the weapons they might one day need to guard their own people from Russian drones.

The Ukrainian response has been a race to build a bootstrapped version of the Iron Dome, Israel’s short-range air-defense system, which is thought to be the most effective in the world. (Lockheed Martin is now at work on a comparable system for the United States, which President Trump has dubbed the “Golden Dome.”) But the task of shooting projectiles out of the sky—or, as ballistic-missile defense is often described, “hitting a bullet with a bullet”—has bedeviled engineers at least since the invention of ballistic missiles during World War II. Even in the case of Israel, which has nearly 30 times less territory than Ukraine, the construction of an effective air-defense shield took about four years. A single battery of Iron Dome interceptors cost as much as $100 million in 2012.

Ukraine’s arms manufacturers have tried for several years to get the same results on a far tighter budget, and a handful of them took me to see their inventions last week. These include a 3-D-printed interceptor drone, a carbon-fiber clone of Russia’s best air-defense rocket, wheeled robots armed with chain-gun turrets, and more exotic weapons like the Sunray. Taken together, the trajectory of their development suggests that Ukraine may soon be able to neutralize one of the biggest threats to its security: the swarms of Russian drones that continue to terrorize its civilians and destroy its infrastructure.

“The anti-drone dome is not about the future,” Ukraine’s new defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said last month. “It’s about survival today.”

When Yelizarov was put in charge of building Ukraine’s dome, the appointment received high marks in both political and military circles. But his résumé does not make him an obvious fit for the job. Like Zelensky, he spent much of his career in the TV industry, serving as the lead producer of one of Ukraine’s most popular political talk shows. At the start of the Russian invasion in 2022, he dropped that job and began to develop combat drones with some of his friends, pooling their savings to buy components and assembling them inside Yelizarov’s old TV studio.

Their drones’ initial sorties over the battlefield were promising enough to attract the attention of the U.S. government, which sent truckloads of equipment and C-4 explosives to help Yelizarov develop his fleet. The spearfishing enthusiast soon took on a nom de guerre: Lazar, in honor of the biblical Lazarus, and he founded a drone unit known as Lasar’s Group, now part of the Ukrainian National Guard. According to official estimates, drone strikes conducted by Lasar’s Group have destroyed more than $13 billion in Russian military equipment, a kill rate that got Yelizarov promoted in 2023 to the rank of colonel.

Read: The real trouble with America’s flip-flop on Ukrainian weapons

Last year, as U.S.-mediated peace talks raised the prospect of a cease-fire, a lot of drone makers in Ukraine began looking for ways to sell their products to foreign clients, and Yelizarov encouraged them. “While the market is hot,” he said, “we want foreign companies to buy stakes in Ukrainian ones and start developing products together.” Such joint ventures could allow Ukraine to produce more of its weapons elsewhere in Europe, ensuring stability of supply if factories inside Ukraine get bombed.

A few months ago, a barrage of Russian drones destroyed the main facility that produces drones for Lasar’s Group, incinerating about $35 million in equipment, Yelizarov said, including a large stockpile of weapons. (The target and damage from the attack have not been previously revealed.) Similar strikes laid waste throughout the winter to the Ukrainian power grid and heating system as temperatures dropped far below freezing.

Still, when he got the offer last month to lead the defense against such attacks, Yelizarov’s first instinct was to turn it down. The timeline seemed unrealistic. Zelensky wanted the new air-defense shield to be up and running by summer. Yelizarov said that Fedorov, the new defense minister, appealed to his pride: “He told me: ‘Look, we can spend a long time watching the football game and criticizing the players on the field. But I’m offering you a chance to get in the game and show what you can do.’”

That task has been daunting, and Yelizarov already looked worse for wear when we met during his second week on the job. He had just returned that day from a meeting with Zelensky, who grilled the new commander about the intricacies of “sky protection.” In his new role as the deputy head of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yelizarov will need to assess the variety of air-defense systems coming out of the domestic weapons industry, organize the best ones under a unified command, and develop ways to choose the most appropriate one to shoot down an incoming threat.

The key to success, he said, would be efficiency. Too often, Ukraine has been forced to launch scarce and expensive foreign missiles to shoot down cheap Russian drones such as the Shaheds, some of which run on lawnmower engines. “Sure, you can use a Bentley to haul potatoes,” Yelizarov said. “But it’s probably not the smartest way to do that job.”

One solution to the problem of efficiency has emerged from a company called Skyfall. It was founded in 2022, during the early months of the invasion, by a young electrical engineer who prefers not to publicize his name for security reasons. His most popular invention is a bomber drone called the Vampire, which proved to be such a menace on the battlefield that the Russians nicknamed it Baba Yaga—“the Wicked Witch.”

In December, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in show, a war reporter for the Kremlin’s main propaganda channel asked why the military had failed to develop its own version of this weapon after nearly four years of war. “We are completely lacking large hexacopters like the Baba Yaga, which the Ukrainian armed forces actively use,” the reporter said. Putin, scribbling on a notepad, admitted to the “shortage” of such technology, and promised that his defense ministry is working on it.

Read: What Putin thinks of Trump’s peace talks

For the team at Skyfall, the exchange served as a vindication, demonstrating Ukraine’s ability to out-engineer the Russians in one of the most crucial weapons in this war. Last spring, when I first toured Skyfall’s factory in Kyiv, its engineers were working on ways to shoot down Shaheds, but its drones could not yet go fast enough to catch them mid-flight. By the time I visited again last week, Skyfall had developed a much faster interceptor, tested it, and put it into mass production. “The problem with supply is solved,” the founder told me during the tour. “We can make as many as the military needs.”

Officially known as P1-Sun, the weapon resembles a large thermos, and has four rotors and about 500 grams of C-4 at its base. The phallic design led its developers, mostly young geeks and gamers, to nickname it Pisun, which means “dick” in Ukrainian. (Some of Skyfall’s competitors refer to it with a note of jealousy as “the dildo drone.”)

Inside the factory, the smell of molten plastic hit me in the face as we entered “the farm,” where row upon row of 3-D printers churned out hundreds of fuselages for the P1-Sun. The drones have already been used to blast more than 1,000 targets out of the sky, including more than 700 Shaheds, according to the company’s estimates. By the end of this year, advances in the P1-Sun’s communication software will allow the Ukrainian armed forces to position the units around the country, ready to launch from a distance whenever radar detects an incoming fleet of attack drones overhead.

The weapons have attracted plenty of interest from foreign clients, and Skyfall recently presented it at arms fairs in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. “The drone industry in Ukraine today is the biggest industry for investors,” Zelensky told students on Friday at the Kyiv Aviation Institute. This year, he said, Ukraine will open 10 “export centers” in Germany, the Baltic states, and other parts of Europe, expanding the market to many of the approximately 450 companies that produce drones in Ukraine today.

None of them has yet made any real technological breakthroughs. But they have learned to mass-produce weapons of brutal efficiency with the cheapest techniques and components available. For some of the players in this business, the advances have felt dangerously fast. “We have opened a Pandora’s box that terrifies me,” the founder of Skyfall said. The P1-Sun costs a little more than $1,000 and can reach heights of more than 30,000 feet. “Imagine if it hangs up there in the path of a civilian airliner,” the founder said. “Nobody would even know who did it.”

As the war enters its fifth year, Ukraine sees no alternative to unleashing these weapons into the world. Its reliance on Western hardware has left Ukrainians unprotected. Among the main priorities for the new air-defense system will be to secure troops and supply lines in the war zone, and to defend people living closest to the front. In the southern cities of Kherson and Nikopol, for instance, Russian drone units have begun to use pedestrians for target practice, hunting them on the streets in what Ukrainians call a “human safari.”

Read: Ukraine’s latest attacks showcase its desperation

Both cities sit directly on the front line, across the Dnipro River from large formations of Russian troops. During my most recent visit to the area, in 2024, the then-mayor of Nikopol, Yevhen Yevtushenko, told me that its residents usually run errands on rainy days, because enemy drones tend to hunt in fair weather. “Our best means of shooting them down is with these missiles we’ve been getting from abroad,” Yevtushenko said, citing the German launcher known as the IRIS-T. “That’s a problem, because nobody is going to use those expensive rockets to shoot down a little drone.”

The dilemma seemed insurmountable at the time. But Ukrainian technology has caught up faster than either of us had expected. None of the weapons would be capable of shooting down Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles, which only the U.S.-made Patriot batteries have proved capable of reliably defeating. But when it comes to the cruder drones and rockets that Russia flings at Ukrainian cities every day, the many tinkerers of Ukraine seem much closer to a solution than they were just a year ago. “It can be done, and it needs to be done,” Yelizarov said at the end of our interview. “Because we don’t have any other choice.”

The night after he took up his new job, the Russians launched another wave of drones and cruise missiles at Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, cutting off power and heat in the capital during one of the winter’s coldest nights. The following morning, Yelizarov saw a post on social media demanding to know why the new head of air defenses had not stopped the barrage. “I’d been on the job for less than a day, and already I was being called a failure,” he said with a smile. “I understand. People want results now. They want them yesterday.”

The Atlantic · Simon Shuster · February 10, 2026

Summary:

Bill Edwards argues mature AI is not independent agency but bounded execution of human intent, and that autonomy in small unmanned aircraft systems should be earned through disciplined governance. He proposes a maturity continuum: Understand, Investigate, Decide, Normalize, Continuously Refine, and Mature. Early stages keep AI in perception and decision support, warning against automation illusion and automation bias. As systems move toward action, he stresses guardrails, auditability, and explicit escalation authority. Once autonomy becomes routine, he warns against complacency and model drift, calling for governed learning loops with validation and red teaming. By 2035, he forecasts persistent AI-managed drone ecosystems across security, safety, emergency response, and military operations, with humans shifting from operators to commanders of intent. His conclusion: you can delegate authority, not responsibility.

Excerpts:

Looking ahead, the greatest policy failure would be assuming that autonomy equals independence. Mature AI systems are not free-thinking actors; they are bounded executors of human intent. It must be stressed that in counter-UAS and security domains, humans must remain accountable—not because machines are incapable, but because responsibility cannot be automated. It’s the old saying: “You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.”

If we get this right, the payoff is enormous: safer skies, faster emergency response, more resilient security, and military operations defined by decision advantage rather than mass. If we get it wrong, we risk fragile systems operating at speeds humans can no longer meaningfully control.

The future of sUAS and AI will not be defined by technology alone. It will be defined by how patiently we mature it, how rigorously we govern it, and how honestly we acknowledge where we are today.

We are not late.

We are early.

Comment: Graphics at the link. Bill Edwards frames AI-enabled sUAS as a command-and-control design problem, meaning the real contest is "governance," accountability, and decision rights, not sensors.

If by 2035 humans mainly set intent while AI runs routine action, what specific rule set today prevents speed from outrunning responsibility when the first high-visibility failure occurs?

We have a lot of work to do.

Disciplined Autonomy: How AI and sUAS Will Redefine Security, Safety, Emergency Response, and Military Operations

by Bill Edwards

02.11.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/11/disciplined-autonomy/

Mature AI systems are not free-thinking actors; they are bounded executors of human intent. Let’s face it, AI is only beginning to take shape, and there is a need for a different lens on the maturing technology. This is especially concerning for drones, also known as Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS), used by operators and professionals in the Department of War and the private sector, including those involved in security, safety, and emergency preparedness. The following ideas and concepts are based on how decision-making takes shape in an AI and autonomous world. The framing of human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, and human-out-of-the-loop will take on a whole new perspective based on these ideas, a framework that supports proactive action in a governed ecosystem. In the debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems, one statement is far more accurate than the rhetoric suggests: we remain at the very beginning of AI maturity. The capabilities of machine learning and data fusion are impressive; the capabilities of autonomous decision-making remain nascent in serious operational contexts. Nowhere is this truth clearer than in the evolution of sUAS. The growing presence of sUAS across civilian, public safety, and military domains demands not only technical advancements but also a disciplined progression of trust, governance, and accountability. Without a mature framework for how AI earns operational authority, organizations risk catastrophe at scale. The concepts outlined in this framework fall under each of the following categories—”Understand, Investigate, Decide, Normalize, Continuously Refine, and Mature”—and act as a lens for professionals in security, safety, emergency management, and military operations to view maturing AI, autonomy, and the future differently than traditionally posited. It illustrates why AI in sUAS must be governed as a command-and-control problem, why autonomy should be earned deliberately, and why technology cannot substitute for responsible authority. Understanding how to transform raw capabilities into responsible autonomy requires operational experience. This framework helps to shape thought and approach and emphasizes that drones present evolving threats to public safety, critical infrastructure, transportation, sensitive sites, military installations, and mass gathering venues that professionals must understand and anticipate rather than fear.

The real measure of AI maturity is not performance benchmarks or hardware specifications, but whether organizations know what AI is doing, how it is doing it, and how authority and accountability flow when systems act autonomously under pressure.

The Need for a Disciplined Maturity Framework

Small unmanned aerial systems have transitioned from niche tools to strategic infrastructure within a remarkably short time. Their proliferation was built not in laboratories, but in global markets: consumer drones purchased off the shelf, adapted for industrial inspection, agriculture, media production, and then, in conflict zones. They were adapted once again for military, reconnaissance, and even direct strike roles. Evidence from recent operations underscores this shift. It is documented how commercial and military drones have fundamentally reshaped the modern conflict environment, enabling missions ranging from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to coordinated indirect fire support and multi-domain integration.

What this example illustrates is that drone capability often arises rapidly, evolving in its use cases before doctrine, governance, or training can be written around it. It should also be noted that organizations too often rush to adopt technological solutions without fully understanding their strategic effects or operational failure modes.

This pattern of technology outpacing governance carries significant risk. In security contexts, unsupervised autonomy can compromise civil liberties or public safety. In emergency response, it can misallocate critical resources at moments when human judgment is paramount. In military operations, premature delegation of decisions to AI systems without clear intent or accountability can lead to escalation or unintended consequences. Addressing these challenges requires a framework for maturity that treats AI capability not as an end in itself but as a progression of earned trust.

Figure 1: “Understand, Investigate, Decide, Normalize, Continuously Refine, and Mature” continuum.

Understanding “Understand”

The first stage of maturity is “Understand”, where AI’s role is purely perceptual. At this phase, AI systems ingest data, analyze sensor inputs, and present an interpreted representation of the environment to human operators. In sUAS, this includes visual recognition, airspace awareness, and sensor fusion across modalities such as imagery, radar, and radio frequency signatures.

Detection does not equal comprehension. Seeing a pattern does not mean understanding its operational significance. Many organizations assume that because AI can label an object or identify an anomaly, it therefore “understands” its implications. In professional circles, this error is sometimes referred to as the automation illusion—the faulty assumption that machine classification equals meaningful judgment.

When training security and emergency professionals, there needs to be an emphasis that awareness must be anchored in context before it can inform decisions. Training courses teach participants to integrate AI perception with risk scoring, legal constraints, and operational posture before allowing automated actions. For example, in emergency management, a drone’s ability to identify a heat signature is valuable, but without contextual analysis—what the heat source represents, how it affects human responders, and whether other hazards are present—means the information is incomplete.

Investigate: Adding Context and Caution

Once a system can detect, it must contextualize. “Investigation” is the phase where AI begins to correlate patterns, contrast scenarios, and provide risk assessments to operators. Here, AI bridges the gap between raw data and operational meaning, but still within a decision support role. The system may indicate that a detected anomaly matches a known threat pattern, or that environmental conditions suggest elevated risk, but the authority to act remains human. This phase is where systems move from being tools to being advisors. Mismanaged, this transition creates expectations that the system “knows best.” Professionals in this space should start to sense and begin to see that the alarm bells are being repeatedly sounded, and that organizations too often prematurely outsource interpretation to algorithms without sufficient vetting of assumptions or error modes. In homeland security applications and critical infrastructure protection, there needs to be an emphasis on investigating not just raw sensor data, but broader patterns of behavior—what modes of employment make sense, how adversaries might adapt, and what legal and ethical constraints govern autonomous interpretation.

Investigation is where trust is built incrementally. AI can flag patterns humans might miss, but this phase must be accompanied by rigorous validation, red teaming, and procedural checks. Without these safeguards, false positives or misinterpreted cues can lead to wasted resources, misdirected emergency response, or erroneous security escalations.

Decide: Guardrails Before Authority

The third phase, “Decide”, is the first inflection point in autonomy. In this stage, AI begins to recommend or execute actions within tightly defined operational constraints, whether that is route adjustments for drone flights, prioritization of threats, or tactical recommendations for first responders. Regardless of implementation style, the key characteristic is actionable authority. Many organizations are tempted to accelerate this phase, believing that operational speed justifies earlier delegation. This is precisely where most incidents of automation failure occur. Automation bias—the tendency to defer to machine recommendations—becomes most dangerous here, because humans may cease to question AI outputs, even when conditions exceed design assumptions. It boundaries. It is essential to stress that systems may provide tactical recommendations, but humans must retain escalation authority and understand the limitations of machine decision-making. This principle applies across security, emergency, and military operations, ensuring that decision authority is transparent, auditable, and bounded by human intent.

Normalize: Routine Autonomy Comes of Age

When autonomous decision-making becomes routine, the system enters “Normalize”. Here, AI operates within standard operating procedures (SOPs) and established protocols. Examples include autonomous patrols, Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) missions, and prescribed reconnaissance flows.

Normalization brings efficiency, but also risk. Once autonomous behavior is routine, organizations often assume competence by default. Technologies that “usually work” can mask failure modes that are rare but consequential. Standardization without governance is complacency, highlighting the need for integrated risk management frameworks. Normalized AI transforms organizational workflows. Security teams plan around autonomous patrol cycles, emergency managers build incident flows expecting drones to arrive first, and military commanders incorporate autonomous reconnaissance into timelines. While this represents progress, it also embeds AI into decision loops where human oversight may be minimized if not deliberately structured.

Continuously Refine: Learning With Boundaries

Once autonomy is routine, the next stage is “Continuous Refinement”. Conditions evolve, adversaries adapt, environmental dynamics shift, and missions change. Continuous refinement incorporates feedback loops, retraining, policy updates, and procedural adjustments. Governance is critical. Learning systems, if unconstrained, can drift into behaviors misaligned with organizational intent. Advocating for governed learning loops, integrating red teaming, ethical reviews, and cross-domain analysis to maintain alignment with human objectives is the next logical step.

In emergency response, refinement optimizes mission effectiveness, such as determining the most effective flight routes or sensor combinations to yield the most actionable information. In security and military domains, refinement can accelerate detection and decision cycles—but only when constrained by clear rules of accountability.

Mature: Disciplined Autonomy Under Human Intent

The final stage, “Mature”, is not independence, but disciplined execution within well-defined human intent. Mature systems operate predictably, audibly, and transparently under human-defined constraints. In mature deployments, humans define strategic objectives, constraints, escalation authorities, and ethical limits. AI executes repetitive, time-critical, or dangerous tasks within these boundaries. Decision authority is delegated in a controlled fashion, with mechanisms for accountability and oversight.

Highlighting that mature counter-UAS systems must integrate into broader risk management frameworks encompassing people, processes, policy, and technology is an important step in the maturity of security programs, which are often focused on physical and cyber aspects. This leaves out the critical new wave of sUAS capability that has completely upended how we should think about comprehensive program approaches. Lessons from Ukraine demonstrate that immature adoption can lead to unpredictable outcomes, whereas mature deployments rely on structured integration with command cycles and explicit intent.

Implications Across Domains

This maturity framework has distinct implications for multiple professional domains:

Security Professionals: AI perception and investigation can enhance threat awareness, but normalization must be coupled with accountability to protect civil liberties while accounting for the fact that legacy security program development is dead.
Safety Stakeholders: Autonomy enables predictive conflict avoidance but requires audit trails, inter-agency governance, and regulatory oversight.
Emergency Management: Drones can compress response timelines, but the authority to prioritize resources must remain governed by ethical and legal frameworks.
Military Professionals: sUAS support decision superiority, yet early delegation of authority can risk escalation or misapplication of force or misdirected outcomes. Essentially, leveraging AI to understand and act on a Commander’s intent would be a monumental leap forward.

Across all domains, the principle is clear: autonomy does not replace responsibility. Humans remain accountable legally, ethically, and strategically while operationalizing AI and autonomy in a manner that supports success in security and military operations.

The Future

AI Maturity by 2035 (Using Your Model):

Phase2035 RealityUnderstandFully automated, continuous sensingInvestigateAI performs contextual threat & risk analysis.DecideAI executes most tactical decisions.NormalizeAutonomous drone operations are routine.Continuously RefineSystems adapt faster than humans canMatureHumans define intent; AI executes

Humans move from operators → supervisors → commanders of intent.

By 2035, security across public spaces, critical infrastructure, borders, and high-value sites will operate as an AI-managed, drone-enabled, persistent system in which humans intervene only when something falls outside the norm. Continuous low-altitude patrol drones will provide uninterrupted visibility, feeding data into AI engines that correlate signals from RF sensors, cameras, cyber systems, and ground detectors. Threats will be classified and prioritized before a human ever receives an alert. Security will shift from a reactive posture to a preventative one, with always-on sensing, pattern‑of‑life analysis, autonomous dispatch, and self-updating threat models becoming routine. Human oversight will focus on approving policy rather than directing individual actions.

In the realm of safety—whether in aviation, public spaces, or dense urban environments—oversight will become algorithmic first and human second. Low‑altitude airspace will be deconflicted by AI, no-fly zones will be enforced automatically, and accidents will be predicted and avoided before people even perceive the risk. Cities will come to expect autonomous airspace management, nascently referred to as unmanned traffic management (UTM), as a baseline function, much like network traffic routing today. Safety will evolve from a rule-based discipline to one grounded in statistical prediction and continuous adaptation.

Emergency response will undergo an equally profound transformation. The first minutes of any fire, EMS, disaster, or search‑and‑rescue event will be orchestrated by AI and led by drones. Upon a 911 call, drones will launch automatically, building real-time situational maps that identify heat signatures, structural damage, and potential victims. Resources will be dispatched before human responders arrive, compressing response times from minutes to seconds. Over time, each incident will refine the system, enabling AI to coordinate multi-agency responses with increasing precision.

Military operations will experience a decisive shift as small drones become expendable, autonomous, and central to tactical and strategic outcomes. Swarms will conduct ISR, electronic warfare, deception, and logistics simultaneously, while human control moves toward defining mission intent rather than manipulating individual platforms. AI will interpret enemy behavior and adapt tactics in real time, making drone loss an expected and inconsequential part of operations. Warfare will pivot from platform superiority to superiority in decision speed, with commanders managing objectives rather than machines. In general, AI should be a realistic tool. Platforms that are simple to use, can be repaired quickly, and decrease the pressure on the operator to fix complex issues are needed. Operators of these systems need to remain in control while being capable of conducting mission after mission without much intervention. It is here where the human remains in the loop as technology matures and takes us to the next phase of true human-out-of-loop capability with a decreased load on the operator. Simply stated, repeatability is a major goal.

Across all sectors, several cross-domain effects will define the new landscape. Authority will invert as humans stop approving every action and instead set the intent and constraints within which AI operates. Scale will expand without proportional manpower, enabling a single human to oversee dozens or even hundreds of drones. Regulation will trail capability, with laws adapting only after autonomous operations become normalized. Counter‑UAS will evolve into an AI‑versus‑AI contest in which detection, tracking, and mitigation occur too quickly for human reaction times to matter.

These advances carry strategic risks if implemented poorly. Over-trust in immature AI, weak policy definitions, opaque decision processes, and public backlash after high-visibility incidents could undermine progress. True maturity will depend not on the speed of adoption, but on governance—clear rules, transparent systems, and disciplined oversight, that is, human-on-the-loop.

A decade from now, drones will not feel revolutionary; they will feel inevitable. The defining change will not be the aircraft themselves or the sensors they carry, but the shift in who makes decisions and how quickly those decisions occur.

Conclusion

This evolution can be captured by simply stating: maturity is earned, not declared. In ten years, drones will not feel revolutionary. They will feel embedded. They will be part of the background infrastructure of security, safety, emergency response, and military operations. The real transformation will not be what drones can see or how far they can fly, but who is trusted to decide—and at what speed. This is why it is critical to recognize a simple truth: we are still at the very beginning of AI. Similarly, we are early in the evolution of AI and autonomous systems for sUAS. These capabilities will continue to expand, but authority, trust, and accountability will determine whether these systems augment our decision cycles or undermine them. This framework of “Understand, Investigate, Decide, Normalize, Continuously Refine, and Mature” charts a path grounded in operational realism. It emphasizes deliberate progression, governance, and institutional trust by combining operational expertise with governance-oriented guidance. The framework demonstrates that the future of AI and sUAS is defined not by the sophistication of sensors or algorithms, but by how responsible organizations govern the authority they grant these systems to have.

Looking ahead, the greatest policy failure would be assuming that autonomy equals independence. Mature AI systems are not free-thinking actors; they are bounded executors of human intent. It must be stressed that in counter-UAS and security domains, humans must remain accountable—not because machines are incapable, but because responsibility cannot be automated. It’s the old saying: “You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.”

If we get this right, the payoff is enormous: safer skies, faster emergency response, more resilient security, and military operations defined by decision advantage rather than mass. If we get it wrong, we risk fragile systems operating at speeds humans can no longer meaningfully control.

The future of sUAS and AI will not be defined by technology alone. It will be defined by how patiently we mature it, how rigorously we govern it, and how honestly we acknowledge where we are today.

We are not late.

We are early.

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, drones, Future of AI

About The Author

Bill Edwards
Bill Edwards is the Director of Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) Operations and Training at ENSCO, after retiring from the military in 2018. Edwards has more than 35 years of expertise in operational and technical security, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, surveillance, and counter-surveillance.
Before coming to ENSCO, he founded and operated Phoenix 6 Consulting, a customized security services firm. He also led Thornton Tomasetti’s security consulting group as a principal from 2018 to 2022. Recently, he led Building Intelligence’s directorate as President of the Federal and Public Safety to promote federal awareness of the firm’s trusted access management software. Edwards served as the Director of Intelligence for Theater Special Operations Command-North (USSOCOM), a position requiring extensive collaboration across the U.S. government security enterprise. He designed a cohesive counter-terrorism network with the U.S. Department of Defense, law enforcement, and inter-agency partners known as the“Blue Network,” while simultaneously building connections and networks abroad to support U.S. Homeland Security needs. Edwards has extensive experience in homeland security, homeland defense, and C-UAS security, safety, and emergency preparedness.
Find all his work at: William “Bill” Edwards CPP, PSP, PCI, CPD | LinkedIn.

8. The Role of Foreign Fighters in a Taiwan Resistance Scenario

Comment: It is good to see the Irregular Warfare Institute and Small Wars Journal partnership flourish so we can see articles multiple times. We are not competitors but complement the work of each in this important national security space.

The Role of Foreign Fighters in a Taiwan Resistance Scenario

by Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca

02.11.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/11/the-role-of-foreign-fighters/

Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of the Irregular Warfare Initiative as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on January 29, 2026 and is available here.

“Taiwanese veterans who fought in Ukraine’s International Legion against Russia have returned with a stark warning: Taiwan is not ready for war with China.”

While diplomatic efforts and military deterrence strategies dominate headlines on Taiwan, a less explored area is the potential role of foreign fighters should an invasion occur. Drawing parallels from conflicts like the ongoing war in Ukraine, where thousands of international volunteers have joined the fight on both sides of the battlefield, this article explores what may happen in a Taiwan occupation scenario. Foreign fighters, motivated by ideology, adventure, money, solidarity, or other reasons, could play an important role in a protracted war. Maximizing the effectiveness of any resistance movement, Taiwan might consider inviting volunteers, facilitating their infiltration, integrating them into the resistance, and deploying them in operations designed to bleed the PLA. This scenario is grounded in Taiwan’s “porcupine strategy,” which emphasizes asymmetric warfare to make an invasion prohibitively costly.

This article does not imply that the occupation of Taiwan is a foregone conclusion should Xi Jinping choose to invade. It is instead simply a matter of responsible national security planning and whole-of-society preparation to be ready for conceivable contingencies. The author anticipates an effective coalition response that will repel an illegal PLA invasion attempt. Should an occupation occur, however, the importance of having a plan in place is imperative. As the war in Ukraine has shown, the integration of foreign fighters should be considered.

Potential Scenario

Imagine the year 2028. The PRC has reached a predetermined threshold of military preparation. After months of blockade and international campaigning to gain support and mitigate opposition, the PLA launches a full-scale assault on Taiwan. Despite resistance from the Republic of China (ROC) Armed Forces and other assistance from allies and partners, the PLA’s numbers and advanced weaponry secure key beachheads. Taipei eventually falls, and the island is declared “reunified” under Beijing’s control. Occupation, however, does not equate to pacification. Taiwan’s rugged terrain, mountains covering two-thirds of the island, and urban sprawl provide ideal cover for insurgents. Inspired by Afghanistan’s mujahideen or Vietnam’s Viet Cong, a decentralized resistance emerges, comprising former soldiers, civilians, and hidden stockpiles of weapons.

Taiwan’s pre-invasion preparations under the “porcupine strategy” lay the groundwork for what comes next. This doctrine focuses on a large number of small things: portable anti-ship missiles such as the indigenous Hsiung Feng (Brave Wind) series, drones, man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), and coastal mines. These tools are designed to inflict maximum attrition on invaders. Post-occupation, the strategy evolves into full-spectrum guerrilla warfare, targeting PLA supply lines, command centers, and infrastructure. Foreign fighters, with diverse skills and external perspectives, could amplify this effort, turning a domestic uprising into an internationally backed insurgency against the PLA.

If Ukraine is an indicator of what comes next, the number of foreign volunteers wanting to assist Taiwan and fight the PLA is in the thousands. In 2022, approximately 20,000 foreigners applied for Ukraine’s International Legion. Motivations for foreigners to travel to Taiwan may vary: Western veterans seeking purpose, ethnic Taiwanese diaspora returning home, pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong, or even adventurers from other conflict zones. But how would Taiwan, under occupation, orchestrate the involvement of these foreigners?

Clandestine Calls to Arms

In the immediate aftermath of the occupation, Taiwan’s government-in-exile would open the door to recruitment. Drawing on Ukraine’s playbook, in which President Zelenskyy issued a global call for volunteers on February 27, 2022, Taiwan could broadcast worldwide appeals for assistance. Commercial social media apps, encrypted chat platforms, and dark web forums would host coded messages, urging volunteers to join the resistance.

Taiwan’s invitation process would likely cover a diverse spectrum of people, places, and things. First, official channels: Taiwanese diplomatic missions and other representative offices located in allied countries could serve as recruitment hubs. Volunteers might apply through secure online portals modeled after Ukraine’s joinuarmy.org, providing personal details, military experience, and motivations. Background checks, conducted via allied intelligence, would identify would-be CCP infiltrators, a lesson from Ukraine, where Russian spies attempted to sabotage the International Legion.

Second, informal networks: Taiwan’s global diaspora, numbering around two million, would act as conduits. Organizations like the World Taiwanese Congress could organize fundraisers and training camps in neutral countries. Social media influencers and exiled politicians might post viral videos highlighting PLA atrocities, echoing how Ukrainian drone footage galvanized global support.

Third, allied governments could facilitate indirect recruitment. Supportive nations might provide visas and logistical support without overt involvement, as NATO countries did by funneling volunteers to Ukraine. Incentives might include citizenship promises for survivors, financial stipends from crowdfunding, or even symbolic honors.

Risks abound in this line of effort. Beijing would likely label volunteers as terrorists or international criminals, justifying crackdowns and intimidation. Host nations might face diplomatic and economic reprisals. Despite this, the psychological boost, demonstrating Taiwan is not alone, could undermine the PLA at the ground level and the CCP on the international stage.

Infiltration

Once invited, foreign fighters face the daunting task of infiltrating an occupied island under PLA lockdown. Taiwan’s geography, 160 kilometers from China, surrounded by water, severely complicates infiltration. Ukraine has approximately 2600 kilometers of land borders with friendly nations, allowing foreign fighters to enter the battlespace quite easily. For Taiwan, geography presents a significant – if not the most critical – obstacle to foreign fighter infiltration. The situation, however, does offer opportunities for covert insertion.

Primary infiltration routes would mirror historical smuggling paths. Sea infiltration via small boats or submarines from the Philippines or Japan could be orchestrated by resistance cells using encrypted communications established prior to invasion. Volunteers might rendezvous in international waters with Taiwanese fishing fleets, which double as partisan vessels, reminiscent of how Ukrainian partisans operated across the Black Sea. Emerging technologies, such as autonomous drones, could ferry fighters ashore under the cover of night.

Air drop represents another option for foreign fighter infiltration. Allied special operations forces might use military free-fall or non-standard aviation methods to insert teams into mountainous interiors. Drawing from WWII’s Jedburgh teams, where Allied commandos parachuted into occupied France, volunteers could land in pre-designated drop zones signaled by resistance cells.

Overland routes through China are riskier but feasible for Mandarin speakers posing as tourists or workers. While it may sound like the making of a Hollywood movie, all options should be considered. Forged documents may enable crossing the Strait by ferry or fishing vessels. Cyber tools, such as hacked PLA surveillance systems, might create blind spots in the blockade.

AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and PLAN patrols present challenges. To counter this, resistance elements would need to employ countermeasures like electronic jamming, decoys, and human intelligence from sympathetic locals. Prior training in escape and evasion would be crucial. In Ukraine, volunteers crossed borders legally before heading to the front lines. In Taiwan, geography demands greater stealth. Infiltration success rates would be significantly lower than in Ukraine. Upon arrival, fighters would link up with resistance cells using pre-established procedures. Safehouses in rural villages or urban centers would provide initial shelter, medical checks, orientation, and onward integration for those who pass muster.

Integration

Integration into the resistance movement requires careful orchestration to maximize effectiveness while minimizing friction and compromise. Taiwan’s resistance, decentralized into cells, would absorb foreigners based on skills and trust levels. Language barriers, with most volunteers lacking Mandarin, necessitate interpreters. Crash courses in language are helpful but usually insufficient. A training program lasting weeks would cover guerrilla basics: improvised explosives, drone operations, and hit-and-run tactics, adapted from Taiwan’s All-Out Defense Mobilization plan. Foreign fighters might have varying degrees of proficiency in unconventional warfare, but they would need to adapt their skills to Taiwan’s unique language, terrain, culture, and operational environment.

Similar to Ukraine, foreigners might form dedicated battalions for cohesion or disperse into mixed units. Veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan could lead squads, teaching urban warfare, while support-oriented volunteers from Silicon Valley, for example, could assist with cyber operations.

Cultural integration is important and often overlooked. Resistance leaders would pair foreigners with local fighters to build bonds, sharing meals, drinks, and stories to foster unity. Psychological support addresses trauma, with chaplains or counselors available. The command structure remains Taiwanese-led to maintain sovereignty, but foreign input on strategy, such as Western drone tactics or Space-Cyber-SOF integration, enhances combat effectiveness. Logistically, arming fighters is a challenge and will rely on cached weapons or airdrops, with foreigners bringing their own gear if possible.

Foreigner Roles in the Resistance

Once integrated, foreign fighters engage in a range of operations to erode enemy control. Combat roles would include activities from ambushes on PLA convoys using anti-tank missiles to snipers and IED teams targeting dismounted patrols. Foreign drone operators could launch swarms against airfields, disrupting reinforcements.

Volunteers with linguistic skills and appropriate demographics infiltrate PLA areas to gather data on troop movements. Sabotage missions, blowing bridges or hacking power grids, aim to isolate garrisons. Cyber experts might launch DDoS attacks on Beijing’s command networks from hidden servers.

Not everyone in the resistance is a frontline guerrilla fighter. Foreigners with media and strategic messaging skills would document atrocities via body cams, uploading to global media to sustain international awareness and support. Medics provide care in field hospitals, while logisticians manage covert supply chains.

There will be challenges. Ukraine faced issues with unruly volunteers and extremists. Taiwan might impose strict codes of conduct and find ways to expel violators. In addition, resistance sometimes takes months, but more often years. The dangers are acute. Capture for any resistance member, Taiwanese or foreigner, likely means torture or execution under Beijing’s anti-separatist laws. Ethical dilemmas will arise: Civilian casualties from operations involving foreigners could alienate locals.

Conclusion

The possibility of integrating foreign fighters into Taiwan’s military is not entirely hypothetical. Taiwanese politicians, military leaders, and scholars have already discussed the introduction of foreigners into the armed forces. While there would be a surge of volunteers to Taiwan after an invasion, it is advisable to develop plans for integrating them before the first PLA shot is fired. But recruiting foreigners into the conventional military and preparing them for the unconventional nature of resistance operations are not the same thing. Resistance operations involve a highly specialized skill set, as discussed briefly above.

As with any other national security undertaking, it is always preferable to plan, train, organize, and equip for resistance before invasion and occupation. Preparing for resistance during peacetime in Taiwan is admittedly a politically sensitive subject. Such things take resources away from what the population may deem more immediate needs today, instead of a fight that may or may not arrive tomorrow. Furthermore, resistance itself implies that some aspects of deterrence and defense may fail, concepts that may be alarming or uncomfortable to accept.

Taiwanese veterans who fought in Ukraine’s International Legion against Russia have returned with a stark warning: Taiwan is not ready for war with China. While the challenges of building resistance capability and integrating foreign fighters are real, the greater risk lies in failing to prepare. Organizing an insurgency and incorporating international volunteers after a kinetic military conflict has been initiated is exponentially more difficult than building capabilities during peacetime.

Ultimately, the success of any resistance depends on sustained global support, internal cohesion, and careful management to avoid nuclear escalation. A credible, prolonged resistance—one bolstered by capable fighters—may itself deter Beijing from attempting invasion. Deterrence remains the primary objective, but prudent preparation for the worst-case scenario is essential. Regardless of when foreign fighters are introduced, they can lend legitimacy and combat effectiveness to the fight.

Check out all of Small Wars Journal’s great content, to include our series of IWI republications.

Tags: Army SOF, China, foreign fighters, irregular warfare, IW, resistance, SOF, Special Operations, Taiwan, Unconventional Warfare, US

About The Author

Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD, is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations with the Department of War. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). Lumpy can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia

9. U.S. Weighs Seizing Tankers Carrying Iranian Oil to Pressure Tehran

Summary:

U.S. officials are considering seizing tankers carrying Iranian oil to pressure Tehran to accept restrictions on its nuclear program, but they have hesitated over likely retaliation and higher oil prices. The approach borrows from a two-month-old U.S. effort targeting a “shadow fleet” moving sanctioned Venezuelan oil, and it could expand that strategy beyond the Caribbean. Iran could respond by seizing other tankers or mining the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint carrying up to about 25% of global petroleum flows. Treasury has sanctioned more than 20 Iran-linked tankers this year, creating potential seizure targets, but boardings would require escorts and a destination to store the crude. POTUS said he may send a second carrier if talks fail.

Comment: This is coercion by disruption, but the article implies the real constraint is escalation risk in Hormuz, not legal authority to seize sanctioned hulls. If the United States cannot tolerate a price spike or tanker retaliation, how credible is tanker seizure as leverage against Tehran’s enrichment red lines?

U.S. Weighs Seizing Tankers Carrying Iranian Oil to Pressure Tehran

WSJ

But using a strategy the White House directed at Venezuela is seen as likely to spark retaliation by Tehran and a surge in oil prices

By Shelby Holliday

, Costas Paris

and Jared Malsin

Updated Feb. 11, 2026 5:33 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-weighs-seizing-tankers-carrying-iranian-oil-to-pressure-tehran-f79555bd

The U.S. seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker earlier this month in the North Atlantic. Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

Trump administration officials have discussed whether to seize additional tankers involved in transporting Iranian oil but have held off, concerned about Tehran’s near-certain retaliation and the impact on global oil markets, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. has seized several ships that have carried Iranian oil as part of its two-month-old blockade of sanctioned tankers serving Venezuela. The tankers, which make up the so-called shadow fleet, help transport illicit oil from numerous sanctioned countries to China and other buyers.

A move by the U.S. to block other sanctioned ships from loading oil in Iran would squeeze Tehran’s main source of revenue, expanding the aggressive strategy the White House put in place in December in the Caribbean.

President Trump said Wednesday he may send a second aircraft carrier to the region if the talks fail, he told Axios.

But the option of stopping tankers, one of several the White House has been debating to coerce Tehran to reach a deal restricting its nuclear program, faces many obstacles, some of the officials said.

Iran is likely to respond to a stepped-up U.S. crackdown by seizing tankers carrying oil from U.S. allies in the region or even by mining the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow exit from the Persian Gulf through which as much as 25% of the world’s petroleum supply passes. Either move is likely to drive up oil prices sharply, risking a political firestorm for the White House.

More than 20 ships that transport Iranian oil have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department this year, making them possible seizure targets, officials say.

If the U.S. did board one of the sanctioned vessels, it would have to divert personnel and possibly other ships to escort the tanker either to the U.S. or some other location willing to store the Iranian crude, officials said.

Tehran carried out a bloody crackdown last month on demonstrations that erupted across the country over its collapsing currency and worsening economic conditions.

Trump, who promised to come to the protesters’ aid, has ordered a major buildup of U.S. forces in the region and is ramping up pressure on Iran after opening negotiations. Iran has expressed willingness to discuss its nuclear program but has refused to end enrichment of uranium, a key U.S. demand, and to discuss its missile program or support for regional militias in the talks.

The U.S. this week warned commercial vessels about Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz. Nicolas Economou/Reuters

Asked to comment on the possibility that the U.S. would board Iran-linked tankers, a White House official said Trump prefers diplomacy but that he has multiple options at his disposal if the talks collapse.

U.S. strikes on Iranian territory could damage the regime but potentially leave it intact, and Tehran has pledged to bomb U.S. bases if attacked. Targeting tankers, by contrast, could further weaken the regime by worsening its economic isolation.

The network of shadow fleet tankers conceals their role in transporting oil from Iran, Russia and other sanctioned countries. There are about 1,000 such vessels in the network, according to some shipping analysts. If the ships are falsely flagged or flagged to a country that disowns them, the tankers can be subject to U.S. jurisdiction while in international waters.

The Treasury Department said last week it was sanctioning 14 more ships registered in countries such as Barbados, Cameroon and Panama for transporting Iranian petroleum in violation of sanctions, along with shipping companies in multiple countries that it said managed the vessels. Not all of the vessels are in the waters near Iran, according to ship tracking companies like Lloyds List Intelligence.

The sanctions aim to stem the flow of revenue to the regime and lay the legal groundwork for potential seizures. The U.S. imposed similar sanctions on Iran-linked vessels in

January.

“You could just sit outside in the Arabian Sea and then start with one tanker and then see what happens,” said Erik Meyersson, a chief emerging markets strategist at the Swedish bank SEB.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which is sailing off the coast of Oman near the Persian Gulf, could serve as a base of operations for boardings. The five guided-missile destroyers in the region could also be used to block or influence the movement of oil tankers.

The U.S. also has a Coast Guard presence in Bahrain, across from Iran in the Persian Gulf. The Coast Guard, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has law-enforcement authority to enforce U.S. sanctions against trading Iranian oil and would likely be used to lead any tanker boardings, legal analysts said.

WSJ’s Shelby Holliday explains the massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East as President Trump amps up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Iran has taken over or attacked commercial vessels in past confrontations with the U.S., including during the “tanker war” of the 1980s. Hundreds of ships were attacked at the time.

A closure of the strait by Iran would likely prompt a U.S. military response, though reopening the waterway if it was mined by Iran could take time, analysts said.

“Blocking the strait isn’t in anyone’s interest, including Iran’s. But if they feel that they’re cornered, they’ll do it. And they have the logistics to do it,” said Bader Al-Saif, an academic at Kuwait University. The rest of the Gulf countries would face major challenges exporting oil, he said.

“It’s not Venezuela. I think he knows this,” Al-Saif said of Trump.

Last week, an Iranian drone and two Iranian boats from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approached a U.S.-flagged tanker that was transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. Central Command. The U.S. sent a warship and aircraft to escort the ship to a port in Bahrain.

So far, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz hasn’t been significantly affected, according to shipping data firm Kpler. However on Monday, the U.S. Transportation Department warned commercial vessels about Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman. Vessels “have long been at risk of being hailed, queried, boarded, detained, or seized by Iranian forces,” it said, advising ships to coordinate with the U.S. military.

In Venezuela, the U.S. has limited its seizures to vessels that are sanctioned or engaging in deceptive tactics, stopping short of imposing a full blockade, which is considered an act of war.

U.S. forces have chased some of those ships around the world to board them and send a message that the U.S. won’t tolerate illicit activity. The U.S. seized a tanker in the Indian Ocean on Monday that had fled Venezuela after the U.S. captured its former leader Nicolás Maduro. So far no tankers have been seized in the heavily-traveled sea lanes near Iran as part of that campaign.

In January, crude loadings from Venezuela fell to about half of normal levels, according to Kpler. The only ships that are loading crude at Venezuela’s ports are tankers bound for the U.S. and those taking oil to Venezuelan refineries, the company said.

China is Iran’s biggest oil client with an armada of shadow fleet vessels moving oil to independent refiners at discounts of around $10 a barrel below market rates. Iranian supplies have become more prominent to China, which used to get discounted oil from Venezuela.

Appeared in the February 11, 2026, print edition as 'U.S. Weighs Seizing Tankers Carrying Iranian Oil'.

Shelby Holliday is a senior video producer, correspondent and YouTube host for The Wall Street Journal, based in New York City. She primarily writes and produces pieces about geopolitical issues, from superpower showdowns and military conflicts to supply chain snarls and natural resource struggles. Her work also involves contributing to the Journal's investigations and covering U.S. politics and elections alongside the broader newsroom.

In 2019, Shelby was part of the Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Prior to joining the Journal, she was a correspondent for Bloomberg TV and an anchor for the CBS-partnered Channel One News. Her reporting has taken her to Myanmar, China, Rwanda, Kenya, Guantanamo Bay, Guam, Mexico, the Philippines and beyond.

Costas Paris is a senior reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering global shipping, trade and supply chains, based in New York. A 20-year veteran with Dow Jones, Costas worked in Thailand as Asia’s features editor, in Singapore as Southeast Asia bureau chief and in London and Athens covering the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

He previously worked for Reuters, covering the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Costas won a William R. Clabby award in 2011 for breaking news on Singapore and the Greek debt crisis, the Seahorse Freight Association award in 2022 for his coverage of global supply chains, and the Loeb award in 2023 for an investigation on how Russia stole and exported Ukrainian grain.

Jared Malsin is a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Istanbul, covering Turkey, Syria and the wider region.

During more than a decade of working as a foreign journalist, Jared’s work has often focused on the struggle over democracy and authoritarianism across the region and the world. He lived for about five years in Cairo reporting and writing on the long aftermath of Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 military coup.

Jared joined the Journal in 2018 as a correspondent based in Cairo covering North Africa. Since moving back to Istanbul in 2021, he has covered political and economic crises in Turkey and the ongoing civil war in Syria. He has contributed to the Journal’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine including as a reporter on the ground in the country during the war.

In a previous job as Middle East bureau chief for Time Magazine, Jared reported from the front lines of wars in Iraq and Syria and covered the 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey. During his career he has also reported from places including Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

As a freelance journalist Jared has also written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale University and a master’s in journalism and Near Eastern studies from New York University. He has also dedicated years to the study of the Arabic language.

WSJ

10. Invitation (2/19/26): Turning OSINT Chaos into Strategic Clarity: Countering Malign Chinese Influence | Irregular Warfare Initiative

Comment: My three key points that I will expound on:

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

2. A basic counter to China's information and cognitive warfare strategies is RUEA:

Recognize China's strategy

Understand China's strategy

EXPOSE China's strategy

Attack China's strategy

3. We must aggressively employ our own form of political warfare, to include cognitive warfare, to complete and win in the

Invitation (2/19/26): Turning OSINT Chaos into Strategic Clarity: Countering Malign Chinese Influence | Irregular Warfare Initiative

by SWJ Staff

02.10.2026 at 06:48pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/10/invitation-2-19-26-turning-osint-chaos-into-strategic-clarity-irregular-warfare-initiative/

An Invitation from our friends at the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI):

“Please join the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI) and CACI DarkBlue for Turning OSINT Chaos into Strategic Clarity: Countering Malign Chinese Influence on Thursday, February 19, in Reston, VA.

This half-day convening will bring together senior irregular warfare practitioners from government, the intelligence community, and the private sector to examine CCP influence methods and practical ways to use open-source intelligence (OSINT) to illuminate networks and support decision-making.

The program will feature opening remarks from Lt. Gen. Michael Nagata (Ret.), U.S. Army, a keynote conversation on trends in Chinese influence with Brig. Gen. Kipling V. Kahler (Ret.), and a panel discussion on using OSINT to illuminate networks moderated by HON Michael Sulmeyer, with panelists Claire Moravec, Col. Dave Maxwell (Ret.), and Hamlet Yousef.

The event will also include an interactive exercise and OSINT case work focused on translating open-source signals into actionable insight.

Irregular Warfare Initiative is a public 501(c)(3) powered by a global network of volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between practitioners, scholars, and policymakers. Help us expand this work and sustain independent research and dialogue—make a contribution today.”

Tags: CACI DarkBlue, Chinese communist party, Claire Moravec, David Maxwell, Foreign malign influence, Hamlet Yousef, Influence, Irregular Warfare Initiative, Michael Nagata, Michael Sulmeyer, open source intelligence, OSINT, SWJ Events

About The Author

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

11. America losing the cognitive war with China

Summary:

Edward Haugland argues the United States is losing a “cognitive war” with China because leaders lack clear definitions, preparation, and tools. He cites a Senate Armed Services Committee note that China pursues “informatized” and “intelligentized” warfare with cognitive-domain emphasis, and that U.S. definitional ambiguity drives strategic confusion. He says it is a cross-functional fight that should not be defined mainly by the Defense Department. He frames cognitive war as an ideological struggle and claims it has few limits, spanning influence operations, United Front activity, alleged illegal PRC-linked facilities, IP theft, social-media targeting, rare earth leverage, and infiltration. He calls for a new whole-of-nation security foundation across public and private sectors.

Comment: One of the organizations working on this is the National Center for Narrative Intelligence (NCNI). Mr Haugland is exactly right that we need a whole of nation effort.

His core charge is structural: America keeps assigning an industrial-age, mostly kinetic system to a domain that is political, social, and economic by design.

By asserting “no limits” and widening the battlefield to domestic politics, he is arguing for a permanent mobilization mindset, not a discrete campaign.

If definitional ambiguity is the blocker, who should own the definition, and what single test would prove it is operational, not rhetorical?

If China’s advantage comes from integrating civilian and military influence, what U.S. capability or authority is missing most: intelligence fusion, regulation, public-private action, or political will?

If you treat the domain as boundless, how do you prevent “cognitive war” from becoming a catch-all label that justifies everything and therefore guides nothing?

America losing the cognitive war with China

washingtontimes.com · Edward Haugland

- Monday, February 9, 2026

Beijing exploits ideology, academia, technology and chaos inside the U.S.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/feb/9/america-losing-cognitive-war-china/

OPINION:

We are losing the ongoing cognitive war with China — badly.

Beijing’s power, influence and reach have expanded exponentially over the past five decades. It has outmaneuvered us on multiple fronts (economic, political, military, social, etc.). Unfortunately, this fact remains true despite multiple warnings over a decade. But why?

The recent discovery of a second illegal bioweapons lab in California with ties to China, some three years after the first, gives us a clue.

A first step to winning this war is to acknowledge that our national security leaders remain unaware, unprepared and unarmed to fight it. It is ill-defined by many analysts and functional experts who wrongly link the definition of cognitive war to a specific function, when, in fact, it crosses any and all functions. This lack of clarity is captured in the Senate Armed Services Committee report for fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The committee notes that the People’s Republic of China, for example, is actively engaged in developing what it terms ‘informatized warfare’ and ‘intelligentized warfare’ with a strong emphasis on cognitive domain operations, involving the integration of information warfare across military and civilian sectors and viewing information as a critical domain for achieving strategic advantage in great power competition. … The committee believes this definitional ambiguity contributes to a lack of strategic clarity.”

I agree, but why are we asking the Defense Department, which offers primarily kinetic solutions, to define a war in the cognitive domain? The paradigm of cognitive war blows up preconceived industrial age cultures and structures as we try to put a square peg into a round hole.

I define cognitive war primarily as an ideological war between tyranny and freedom, control and independence, and subjugation and democracy. It’s one fought primarily in the cognitive domain using strategies that apply various ways (e.g., ideology, religion, issues) and means (e.g., academic, economic, agriculture, social, military, etc.) to influence.

In its most basic form, it is a war between good and evil. Cognitive war can and does include irregular warfare and kinetics.

In simple terms, there are no limits, boundaries or rules in conducting cognitive warfare. The only unifying factor is the impact on “influencing the cognitive domain” (our will, mental capacity, cognitive ability and capabilities to act). Until we figure this out, we will continue to lose to China.

There are multiple examples of how badly we are losing this war. In the U.S. today, there are illegal Chinese Communist Party police stations. We see their “United Front” operations influencing our mayors, governors, business owners and students. It is estimated that China steals $225 billion to $600 billion a year in intellectual property.

China has used TikTok and other social media to conduct surveillance, targeting and disinformation campaigns. It controls the majority of rare earth minerals and produces the majority of critical antibiotics. It has infiltrated spies into varied federal, state and local governments.

Each year, the U.S. has approximately 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese national students. During the Biden administration, an estimated 100,000 military-age illegals/men entered our country. How many other SIM card infrastructure attack platforms, such as the one discovered in New York City, or illegal bioweapons labs exist?

China has introduced invasive plant species and stolen agricultural secrets. The list is endless and non-kinetic.

Since 1999, China has used unrestricted warfare tactics and techniques to continually outmaneuver us across multiple fronts globally and on American soil.

The current National Security Strategy is a step in the right direction. To start winning this war, we must understand that there are no limits to the means we must apply. The Defense Department is not the right lead; no one department is. We must forge a new foundation for national security that aligns expertise, authorities, capabilities and capacities across all national functional areas, public and private, to support defense and drive proactive offensive operations.

We must also remember that the cognitive war is both global and domestic. In America, the radical left is also successfully conducting and winning this war. Until our leaders understand this war and overhaul our national security factory floor, it will get much worse.

• Edward Haugland is the author of “The Cognitive War” and a leading national expert in this field. He is an award-winning CIA analyst and retired Defense Department intelligence executive, as well as a U.S. Air Force veteran, with more than four decades of service in national security across multiple executive branch departments and agencies.

washingtontimes.com · Edward Haugland

12. The U.S. Military Can't Build A Military Anymore

Summary:

Kris Osborn argues U.S. defense acquisition is stuck in a “perfection trap” where programs aim for revolutionary, multi-mission leaps and then suffer delays, cost growth, and compromised capability. He cites the Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt destroyer as cases where ambitious modularity, stealth, and novel systems created fragility and integration risk, leaving gaps when key elements proved impractical or unaffordable. He adds that risk-averse bureaucracy, layers of oversight, and requirements locked in years early slow adaptation as threats evolve. A consolidated industrial base and dependence on fast-cycle commercial electronics worsen obsolescence. Osborn argues dominance through 2040 requires treating platforms as evolving, software-driven systems that can iterate rapidly.

Excerpts:

The U.S. military’s difficulty in building new gear is not simply a failure of engineering or foresight.

It is the result of a system designed for an earlier era—one during which threats evolved slowly, budgets grew predictably, and technological leaps could be planned decades in advance.

Today’s battlefield rewards adaptability, iteration, and speed, but U.S. acquisition has historically been too averse to risk-taking and too afraid of the kind of short-term failure that can result.

Until that tension is resolved, the pattern may continue.

Comment: Provocative, clickbait headline perhaps. But I think our services are working hard to overcome our legacy processes and to take calculated risks. I know the Army is. Let's support them.

The U.S. Military Can't Build A Military Anymore

19fortyfive.com · ByKris Osborn

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/02/the-u-s-military-cant-build-a-military-anymore/

Summary and Key Points: The U.S. defense acquisition system is currently suffering from a “perfection trap,” where the desire for revolutionary leaps forward leads to catastrophic program delays and failures.

-Notable examples like the LCS and the Zumwalt-class destroyer illustrate how modularity and stealth, when forced into a single platform, can create fragility rather than flexibility.

Zumwalt-Class Destroyer U.S. Navy. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-Beyond engineering hurdles, a consolidated industrial base and a risk-averse bureaucracy have slowed development to a crawl.

-To maintain dominance through 2040, the military must shift from treating hardware as static objects to viewing them as evolving, software-driven systems capable of rapid iteration.

The “Perfection Trap”: Why the U.S. Military’s Best Gear Keeps Failing in 2026

Across almost every U.S. military service, new equipment takes too long to develop, costs far more than expected, and often enters service with compromised capabilities or trade-offs.

Recent examples of this pattern include the Army’s M10 Booker light tank, the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, and the Zumwalt-class destroyer.

The M10 Booker displayed at it’s dedication ceremony at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md., April 18, 2024. As part of the dedication of the M10 Booker Combat Vehicle in their name, Pvt. Booker, a Medal of Honor recipient, and infantryman, assigned to the 133rd Infantry Regiment, 34th Infantry Division, during World War II, and Staff Sgt. Stevon A. Booker, a Distinguished Service Cross recipient, and tank crewman, assigned to Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, will be recognized and honored for their ultimate sacrifice, heroism and commitment to service and the country, represented by family members during the ceremony. (U.S. Army photo by Christopher Kaufmann).

M10 Booker is part of a static display while a live segment for FOX and Friends is being filmed at Fort Liberty, N.C., May, 21, 2024. The M10 Booker Combat Vehicle is named after two American service members: Pvt. Robert D. Booker, who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for actions in World War II, and Staff Sgt. Stevon A. Booker, who posthumously received the Distinguished Service Cross for actions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their stories and actions articulate the Army’s need for the M10 Booker Combat Vehicle, an infantry assault vehicle that will provide protection and lethality to destroy threats like the ones that took the lives of these two Soldiers. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Jacob Bradford)

There have also been challenges with upgrades such as the M1 Abrams SEP v4 and the fully cancelled Future Combat Systems program. These struggles are not isolated failures, but rather characteristic of problems that plague large platform acquisitions for the Pentagon.

The modern battlefield is indeed changing quickly—but that alone does not explain the difficulty. A mix of risk aversion, bureaucratic complexity, industrial base fragility, and unrealistic expectations have doomed or delayed too many programs.

It is also difficult to rapidly integrate next-generation technologies or innovations into a mass-producable platform.

Technological ambition can generate developmental challenges, a dynamic that held back the development of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-79). One of the core issues is that U.S. military programs are often expected to do too much at once. New platforms are rarely designed to fill a narrow role.

Instead, they are asked to be revolutionary leaps forward, replacing multiple systems while anticipating threats years into the future.

What Happened to LCS & Zumwalt

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a classic example. The LCS was intended to be fast, modular, affordable, and adaptable to missions ranging from mine warfare to anti-submarine combat. In practice, it struggled to do any of these well.

Littoral Combat Ship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Modular mission packages proved difficult to swap quickly, survivability was questioned, and costs ballooned. The desire for flexibility ended up producing fragility.

The same logic affected the Zumwalt-class destroyer, which attempted to combine stealth, land-attack dominance, advanced power systems, and a revolutionary gun system. When the ammunition for those guns became unaffordable, the ship was left without a primary mission.

The technology worked in isolation, but the integration of too many novel systems magnified risk.

The U.S. defense acquisition system is designed to avoid failure, but it can unintentionally generate failed efforts. Layers of oversight, requirements reviews, congressional mandates, and inter-service compromises slow development to a crawl.

Zumwalt-Class U.S. Navy Destroyer. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Programs are locked into specifications years before they enter production, even as technology and threats evolve.

Industrial Base

Another underappreciated factor is the erosion of the U.S. defense industrial base. During the Cold War, the U.S. maintained multiple competing manufacturers for tanks, ships, aircraft, and subsystems. Today, consolidation has left only a handful of prime contractors in each sector.

At the same time, modern military systems depend on commercial electronics, which evolve on civilian timelines that do not align with decades-long military programs. By the time hardware is certified for military use, it may already be obsolete or discontinued in the civilian market.

Pace of Threat

The problem is not that tanks, ships, or aircraft are suddenly irrelevant.

It is that warfare is becoming more transparent, networked, and lethal. It is driven by drones, sensors, electronic warfare, and long-range precision weapons. Survivability now depends as much on software, data fusion, and integration as on armor or firepower.

A U.S. Army M1 Abrams, assigned to 4th Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, fully emerges from the tank firing point to engage the simulated enemy at Novo Selo Training Area, Bulgaria, March 5, 2025. 1st Armored Division, a rotational force supporting V Corps, conducts training with engineers and tank operators in the European Theatre to maintain readiness and instill fundamental Soldier skills that are vital in maintaining lethality. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Kyle Kimble)

Traditional acquisition programs struggle with this reality because they treat platforms as static objects rather than evolving systems.

The M1 Abrams tank remains lethal, but integrating active protection systems, networking, and electronic warfare capabilities is more challenging than upgrading armor or guns. Software updates move faster than hardware procurement, yet acquisition rules are built around physical platforms.

Time to Take Risks

The U.S. military’s difficulty in building new gear is not simply a failure of engineering or foresight.

It is the result of a system designed for an earlier era—one during which threats evolved slowly, budgets grew predictably, and technological leaps could be planned decades in advance.

Today’s battlefield rewards adaptability, iteration, and speed, but U.S. acquisition has historically been too averse to risk-taking and too afraid of the kind of short-term failure that can result.

Until that tension is resolved, the pattern may continue.

About the Author: Kris Osborn

Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

19fortyfive.com · ByKris Osborn

13. Department of War Finalizes Realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration

Comment: Assessment? A positive step forward? Will this improve our bureaucracy?

My question is will this provide better support the campaign plans of the Geographic Combatant Commands? What will be the impact on our silk web of friends, partners, and allies and warfighting: both irregular warfare and large scale combat operations? That is one way to assess the efficacy of this action.

Or are we merely rearranging deck chairs to continue to have our self licking ice cream cones? (a harsh comment I know).

Department of State?

Release

Immediate Release

Department of War Finalizes Realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration

Feb. 10, 2026 |

https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4402680/department-of-war-finalizes-realignment-of-the-defense-security-cooperation-age/

The Department of War (DoW) today announced the realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) and the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) to the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment (USW(A&S)). This significant transformation, directed by the Secretary of War, unifies critical acquisition, sustainment, industrial base policy, security cooperation, defense sales, and arms transfer functions under a single organization to improve efficiency, enhance the U.S. industrial base, and enable greater burden-sharing with our allies and partners.

"The President has laid out a clear vision for aggressive promotion of U.S. defense sales through his groundbreaking America First Arms Transfer Strategy," said USW(A&S) Michael Duffey. "This realignment will increase and accelerate the delivery of lethal weapons and advanced capabilities to our allies and partners, empowering them to shoulder a greater share of their self-defense. By unifying our arms transfer enterprise with our acquisition system, we will move with the purpose and speed required to strengthen our alliances and ensure the United States remains the partner of choice in global arms sales."

The realignment establishes a clear and unambiguous line of authority, creating a single enterprise to oversee the execution of defense sales from initial acquisition to final production and delivery. The structural reform is also a key component of the Department's broader effort to improve the speed and accountability of the arms transfer enterprise.

By aligning DSCA and DTSA with the Department's acquisition, industrial base, and technology security functions under USW(A&S), the DoW will integrate technology security considerations earlier in the acquisition life cycle, enhance forecasting of global demand to better meet the defense needs of the United States and our partners, and facilitate the delivery of warfighting capability at the speed of relevance while protecting the U.S. technological edge.

The realignment directly supports the National Defense Strategy and the President's commitment to revitalizing the defense industrial base, including through Executive Action to improve arms transfers. The move will unlock strategic opportunities to leverage allied and partner investments, contributing to the creation of American jobs and ensuring the readiness and security of our Warfighters, allies, and partners.

14. DOW Restructures Foreign Military Sales, Prioritizes Speed, Efficiency

Comment: Will this process answer to the National Security and Defense strategies and the GCC campaign plans?

If we get speed and efficacy what do we do about quality and cost?

And what about the Department of State?

DOW Restructures Foreign Military Sales, Prioritizes Speed, Efficiency

Feb. 10, 2026 | By C. Todd Lopez, Pentagon News |

https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4402026/dow-restructures-foreign-military-sales-prioritizes-speed-efficiency/

In a video posted on social media today, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the War Department moved two agencies critical to getting American-made combat gear into the hands of allied and partner nations under the War Department's Office of Acquisition and Sustainment.

"On Nov. 7, we laid out the Department of War's vision for strengthening the defense sales enterprise," Hegseth said. "Today, we're turning that vision into decisive action."

Both the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration are part of how the United States helps partners and allies get access to American-made weapons and equipment. They will now fall under the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment, led by Michael P. Duffey, according to the memorandum.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, for instance, is largely responsible for facilitating the sale of U.S. weapons to partners and allies. However, the agency is also responsible for developing and planning the long-term partnerships and training opportunities that accompany those sales. The Defense Technology Security Administration is responsible for identifying and mitigating any risks associated with transferring technology to partners and allies.

By moving both agencies under the department's Office of Acquisition and Sustainment, Hegseth aims to make weapons sales to allies and partners faster and more efficient, as well as help revitalize America's defense industrial base.

"This executive order is our mandate: leverage America's record-breaking defense sales to revitalize our industrial base and support our partners," Hegseth said. "On nearly every overseas trip that I take, the demand is clear, every single time; our allies want to buy the world's most lethal weapons: American weapons."

The realignment, Duffey said, has created a single coherent defense sales enterprise within the department, one that moves at the speed of war, but with the purpose of deterring aggression.

"Coupled with this new executive order, we're now positioned to leverage the total aggregated global demand for U.S. weapons to grow our nation's industrial might, while maintaining the American warfighters' technological edge," he added.

Duffey noted that the changes will unlock foreign investment, power production lines, fuel investments in new American manufacturing plants and create thousands of new jobs in the U.S.

"When we promise to provide American military capabilities, we must deliver," Hegseth said. "Thanks to President [Donald J.] Trump's leadership, these efforts are game changers for the way we do business with our allies and partners around the globe: more and better weapons delivered faster for our warfighters and our allies."

News Release: Department of War Finalizes Realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration

Video: DOW Leaders Discuss America First Arms Transfer

15. Pentagon Reorganizes Arms Sales System to Speed Weapons to U.S. Allies

Summary:

STL.News reports the Pentagon has reorganized its foreign arms sales system to reduce delays and speed delivery of weapons to allies. The change places the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration under the same leadership chain as weapons production and sustainment. The stated aim is a single end-to-end pipeline that aligns approvals, production planning, delivery timelines, and technology protection. Officials say the old process suffered from fragmented authority, duplicate reviews, and late-stage objections that stalled approved deals. Under the new structure, technology-security concerns are meant to be identified earlier, limiting last-minute delays while keeping safeguards for sensitive systems. The article links the timing to surging demand, constrained production lines, replenishing U.S. stockpiles, and a push to treat arms sales as a core strategic tool.

Comment: This is the first analysis I have found on the new DOW policies on FMS, reorganization of DSCA, etc.

The Pentagon is trading process redundancy for centralized accountability, betting that fewer handoffs will cut cycle time without loosening control of sensitive technology.

Integrating sales into production and sustainment implies a shift from “case-by-case diplomacy”(diplomacy ... and where is State?) toward industrial-scale campaign planning, where allied deliveries compete directly with U.S. stockpile priorities.

If arms sales now sit inside the production and sustainment chain, how will the Pentagon adjudicate conflicts between urgent allied deliveries and U.S. readiness replenishment when capacity is fixed? (the Ukraine dilemma)

Pentagon Reorganizes Arms Sales System to Speed Weapons to U.S. Allies

stl.news · Smith

Washington — February 10, 2026

https://www.stl.news/pentagon-reorganizes-arms-sales-system-to-speed-weapons-u-s-allies/

Contents

The Pentagon has restructured how the U.S. sells weapons to foreign allies to reduce delays and speed deliveries.

The move consolidates arms sales, production planning, and technology security under a single leadership chain.

Officials say the change is designed to expedite the movement of approved weapons while maintaining control over sensitive technology.

A Major Pentagon Change With Global Impact

(STL.News) The Department of War has finalized a major internal reorganization aimed at addressing one of the most criticized aspects of U.S. defense policy: slow and complex arms sales to allies.

Two offices that play central roles in foreign weapons transfers—the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the Defense Technology Security Administration—have been placed under the same leadership responsible for weapons production and sustainment.

In simple terms, the Pentagon is trying to move weapons from approval to delivery more quickly without compromising security.

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Why the Pentagon Changed Course

For years, U.S. allies have complained that buying American weapons takes too long—even after deals are approved. Orders often stall due to overlapping reviews, late-stage objections, and unclear chains of authority inside the Pentagon.

The new structure is designed to fix that by:

Eliminating duplicate approval layers
Making one office accountable from start to finish
Aligning arms sales with how weapons are actually built and delivered

Officials say the old system was fragmented. The new one is intended to function as a single pipeline.

What This Means in Everyday Terms

Under the reorganization, decisions about weapons sales, production timelines, and technology protection now move through the same command structure.

That change is expected to:

Identify security issues earlier instead of later in the process
Reduce last-minute delays after contracts are signed
Give allies clearer delivery timelines
Allow U.S. manufacturers to plan production more efficiently

For countries relying on U.S. equipment during active conflicts, timing can be as critical as the weapons themselves.

Why This Is Happening Now

Global demand for U.S. weapons has surged amid ongoing conflicts, rising geopolitical tensions, and renewed defense commitments among U.S. partners.

At the same time, the United States is:

Replenishing its own military stockpiles
Expanding defense manufacturing capacity
Pressuring allies to increase burden-sharing
Managing limited production lines

The Pentagon says arms sales can no longer operate as a side process—they must be integrated into overall defense planning.

Faster Arms Sales, Tighter Oversight

While the goal is speed, Pentagon officials emphasize that technology safeguards remain intact. Sensitive systems, advanced weapons, and classified capabilities will still undergo review—but earlier in the process, not at the end.

That shift is meant to prevent deals from stalling after months or years of negotiation.

By resolving security concerns up front, officials say approved weapons can move into production and delivery with fewer interruptions.

Why U.S. Taxpayers Should Care

Although foreign arms sales involve international partners, they directly affect U.S. defense spending and industrial planning.

Better coordination can mean:

More predictable manufacturing contracts
Fewer costly delays and redesigns
Stronger domestic defense supply chains
Improved accountability over large-scale weapons programs

Pentagon leaders argue that an efficient system benefits both national security and the U.S. economy.

A Broader Shift in Defense Strategy

This reorganization reflects a broader shift within the Pentagon: treating arms sales as a core strategic tool rather than a bureaucratic afterthought.

By tying sales, production, and security reviews together, the U.S. is signaling that supplying allies quickly is now considered essential to deterrence and global stability.

What Happens Next

The restructuring is already complete, meaning future arms deals will move through the new system immediately.

If the changes work as intended, allies should see faster delivery timelines and fewer surprises after approvals. If not, pressure will likely build for further reforms.

Either way, the Pentagon has now placed its arms sales process under a brighter spotlight—where speed, accountability, and security will be tested together.

Additional General News stories published on STL.News:

© 2026 – St. Louis Media, LLC d.b.a. STL.News. All Rights Reserved. Content may not be republished or redistributed without express written approval. Portions or all of our content may have been created with the assistance of AI tools, such as Gemini or ChatGPT, and are reviewed by our human editorial team. For the latest news, head to STL.News.

stl.news · Smith

16. Cognitive Warfare to Dominate and Redefine Adversary Realities: Implications for U.S. Special Operations Forces

Comment: Although this report is from 2025, I do not think it garnered sufficient attention.

Cognitive Warfare to Dominate and Redefine Adversary Realities: Implications for U.S. Special Operations Forces

by SWJ Staff

02.11.2026 at 12:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/11/cognitive-warfare-to-dominate-and-redefine-adversary-realities-implications-for-u-s-special-operations-forces/

Cognitive Warfare to Dominate and Redefine Adversary Realities: Implications for U.S. Special Operations Forces is authored by Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD and published by JSOU Press.

“The battlefield of the future is the human mind, and the very concepts of reality and truth are the target. Cognitive warfare goes far beyond traditional psychological operations; this new form of conflict combines cyber tools, psychological sciences, and neurosciences to alter perceptions and influence decision-making. In this occasional paper, Dr. Jeremiah Lumbaca argues that the U.S. is not yet prepared to face its adversaries using cognitive warfare tactics and proposes a way SOF can evolve to win in this new domain of conflict.”

Below is a brief overview of Dr. Lumpy’s JSOU Report:

Cognitive warfare directly targets the processes of perception, judgment, and belief formation within individuals and groups. This form of conflict utilizes the intersection of cyber tools, psychological sciences, and neurosciences to achieve political or military objectives by altering enemy cognitive processes. The primary aim is the generation of cognitive effects rather than simple information dissemination. This includes the deployment of cognitive contagions, ideologically charged constructs designed to spread virally across digital networks to embed specific patterns of thinking. Over time, these operations can lead to epistemic closure. This is a state where a target population rejects new information that contradicts an engineered narrative.

Technological advancements in artificial intelligence and social media algorithms serve as the primary enablers for these operations. AI facilitates micro-targeting and the creation of hyper-realistic disinformation, such as deepfakes, while social media platforms prioritize engagement over accuracy. The report highlights that adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party and Iran already utilize these methods to erode internal cohesion and decision-making processes in contested regions. For U.S. Special Operations Forces, this environment necessitates a shift in organizational structure and training. Dr. Lumpy recommends the establishment of multi-disciplinary cognitive warfare cells at all echelons to include data scientists and behavioral psychologists. Furthermore, the piece advocates for the development of cognitive resilience programs and the use of AI-driven cognitive firewalls to preserve the mental sovereignty of personnel operating in manipulated information environments.

Tags: Civil Affairs, Cognitive Advantage, Cognitive Domain, cognitive resilience, Cognitive Warfare, Cyber warfare, cybernetics, Human Domain, Hybrid Warfare, influence operations, information warfare, Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca, Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), JSOU Press, narrative, narrative warfare, neuro-warfare, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Psychological Warfare, psychology, Special Operations Forces (SOF), unconventional warfare (UW), Unrestricted Warfare, weaponized narratives

About The Author

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

17. Dissidents Are Silenced, and the West Moves On

Summary:

Bret Stephens recounts meeting Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai and argues his case shows how the West has abandoned dissidents as a public cause. Stephens reviews Lai’s life story, his role in founding the pro-democracy Apple Daily, and Beijing’s progressive dismantling of Hong Kong freedoms after the “one country, two systems” promise. He describes mass protests in 2019, a crackdown, Lai’s arrest, the closure of Apple Daily, and Lai’s recent sentencing to 20 years after already spending five years in solitary confinement. Stephens suggests Xi may use Lai as a bargaining chip in future trade talks, but says the larger failure is Western realpolitik and transactional politics that treat human rights as secondary. He argues liberty is the core issue in confronting China and that dissidents are the free world’s most effective weapon.

Comment: We must speak up. We must give voice to the dissidents in every country and especially the CRInK, and to all those who are oppressed. Bret Stephens implies the West’s shift from dissident advocacy to transactional dealmaking hands authoritarian leaders a low-cost tool: imprison one brave voice, then negotiate as if nothing happened. If liberty is “the business,” not a distraction, what would Western policy look like if it treated prisoners like Jimmy Lai as strategic focal point rather than a humanitarian footnote? We need a human rights upfront policy and strategy. We must not forget who we are.

Dissidents Are Silenced, and the West Moves On

NY Times · Bret Stephens · February 10, 2026

Bret Stephens

Feb. 10, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/opinion/jimmy-lai-hong-kong-freedom.html

Credit...Kin Cheung/Associated Press

Listen to this article · 5:30 min Learn more

Opinion Columnist

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I once sat with Jimmy Lai on a remote Hong Kong beach as he told me the story of his life.

How his mother had been taken to a labor camp after the Communist Party came to power in mainland China. How a taste of chocolate given to him by a passenger from Hong Kong had inspired him to stow away on a boat to the British colony. How he had worked his way up from the floor of a glove factory and how he had started Giordano, the casual clothes maker, the name inspired by a napkin from a New York pizza shop. How the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre galvanized his political activism. How he had started the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan “An Apple a Day Keeps the Liars Away.”

“I believe in the media by delivering information, you’re actually delivering freedom,” Jimmy told The Times in 2020. It’s as precise a defense of an independent press as I’ve ever seen.

From the beach we went for lunch and talked about politics, political philosophy and religious liberty. That was in 2009, a few years after Jimmy had won a showdown with the Hong Kong government over a proposed security law that would have gutted Hong Kong’s freedoms — freedoms that were supposedly guaranteed for 50 years after Britain returned the territory to China in 1997 under the promise of “one country, two systems.”

But it was clear then that Beijing had no intention of keeping its word, and it became clearer after Xi Jinping came to power and accelerated the regime’s assault on Hong Kong’s rights. That culminated in mass protests in 2019 against a heavy-handed extradition law, a violent police crackdown, Jimmy’s arrest the next year and the closing of The Apple Daily the year after that.

On Monday, Jimmy, who has already spent five years in solitary confinement, was sentenced to a 20-year term, a de facto life sentence for an unwell man of 78. Six former Apple Daily senior staff members also received lengthy prison terms. The most generous interpretation of the decision is that Xi intends to use him as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations when he next meets President Trump in Beijing in April. Less generously, that it is simply the reality of a China that has reverted to type under its Maoist leader.

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But there’s another side to this story, equally dismaying, which is the abandonment of dissidents as a public cause in the West.

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Fifty or 40 years ago, the free world cared profoundly about names like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Sharansky in the Soviet Union, or Biermann, Havel and Walesa in the captive states of Central Europe. As late as 2007, George W. Bush attended a conference of dissidents in Prague, underscoring their importance to an American foreign policy that paid more than mere lip service to the cause of free societies.

That changed after 2008 when realpolitik — never absent from U.S. foreign policy — roared back. People associated Bush’s “freedom agenda” with the Iraq war, seeing the former either as a cynical cover for an immoral war or as an expensive American delusion that we could plant democracy in barren soils. In 2009, Hillary Clinton went to Beijing as secretary of state and declared that China’s human-rights issues “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.”

In other words, there was more important business to transact.

Under Trump, U.S. policy became that much more transactional and immoral. The president justifies his chumminess with Vladimir Putin by claiming a moral equivalence between Russia and America — “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” as he told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News in 2017. And for all of Trump’s talk about running Venezuela, the regime continues to imprison its political opponents while the administration treats the country as an oil play.

What this crass worldliness misses is that human-rights issues typified by cases like Jimmy’s aren’t distractions from more important business. They are the business.

Our confrontation with China today (like our confrontation with Russia, or with the Soviet Union in the Cold War) is not over terms of trade or maritime and territorial disputes. It is about the place of personal liberty in the political order. Every other issue is downstream from that. Respecters of liberty will find ways to work out their differences peacefully. Non-respecters won’t. Any agreement the West signs with Xi or Putin will ultimately be violated the moment it becomes inconvenient to them.

Ditto for Trump — as our trade partners and treaty allies have all found out over the last year.

Marco Rubio issued a brief statement on Monday asking China to grant Jimmy a “humanitarian parole.” It won’t do. What Jimmy needs isn’t the mercy of a totalitarian state. It’s a global campaign on his behalf by decent people who understand that in dissidents like him rests the case for human freedom, its nobility and necessity, against remorseless foes. They understand, too, that those dissidents are also the free world’s most effective weapon, because nothing is more dangerous to a dictatorship than the marriage of courage and conscience in the hearts of its own people.

One day, hopefully, we’ll have an administration that gets this.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Jimmy Lai and the Future of Freedom

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NY Times · Bret Stephens · February 10, 2026

18. Sweet Nothings: Rutte’s Trump-Whispering Is Counterproductive

Summary:

Leonard Schütte argues NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s “Trump-whispering” is risky. Rutte has used lavish public flattery and careful summit management to keep favor with POTUS, help ease the Greenland dispute, and secure a new NATO defense-spending pledge of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, while keeping the Hague summit short and focused to avoid a blowup. Schütte says the success of this approach may be overstated, since European threats of retaliation may have mattered more, and psychology suggests submissiveness can invite contempt. More important, Rutte’s fixation on placating POTUS comes at the expense of NATO’s needed “Europeanization” as U.S. strategy shifts away from Europe and Ukraine received less attention.

Excerpt:

The NATO secretary general should walk a fine line. He should of course continue to use his extraordinary influence with Trump to keep the United States engaged, but simultaneously and quietly prepare the alliance for much less, perhaps even no America in the future. That means driving, rather than blocking, the “Europeanization” of NATO by replacing those U.S. troops, assets, and command-and-control capabilities most urgently needed for Europeans to defend against Russia. This is undoubtedly a herculean task, as European capability gaps and dependency on the United States are real. But as the Trump administration (and in fact previous administrations, too) has amply demonstrated, maintaining the status quo is untenable. By denying the grand strategic shifts underway in the United States, Rutte’s approach risks leaving Europe unprepared for when U.S. retrenchment from the continent occurs and provides excuses for those Europeans inclined to avoid hard decisions. Rutte has helped Europeans buy time. He should now switch gears and push Europeans to use it.

Comment: The article implies Rutte is buying time with flattery, but he may be spending the alliance’s adaptation window, leaving Europe less prepared for U.S. retrenchment. If the United States is reorienting away from Europe, what concrete Europeanization steps should NATO prioritize now, even if they risk irritating POTUS in the short term?

Sweet Nothings: Rutte’s Trump-Whispering Is Counterproductive

warontherocks.com · February 11, 2026

Leonard A. Schütte

February 11, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/sweet-nothings-ruttes-trump-whispering-is-counterproductive/

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte might have been the only European in the room who enjoyed President Donald Trump’s lengthy, meandering speech last month at the World Economic Forum at Davos. He was lavishly praised not once but twice by the president, who called him an “excellent Secretary General” and, later, “a very smart man.” In subsequent bilateral talks, Rutte appeared to have used his chemistry with Trump to help reach a framework deal on the future of Greenland, which at least for the time being has eased tensions between the U.S. administration and Europeans. This episode was only the latest sign of Rutte’s ostensibly outsized role in managing the president.

Indeed, Rutte and his predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, have perhaps been the two premier non-American Trump-whisperers. Both built close accords with Trump based on public flattery and behind-the-scenes diplomacy. And both are credited with effectively using their influence to pull Trump back from the brink of destroying the alliance. However, there are important differences between their approaches and in the historical context, too. Rutte has not only gone much further in flattering Trump, crossing the border into undignified obsequiousness — for example, by referring to Trump as “daddy.” But at a time when grand strategic shifts in the United States and continued Russian aggression require a fundamental readjustment of the alliance, his strategy of subordinating everything to placating the U.S. president has also come at the expense of driving NATO’s urgently needed “Europeanization.” While perhaps momentarily successful, Rutte’s Trump-whispering thus ultimately risks weakening, not strengthening, the alliance.

BECOME A MEMBER

Stoltenberg’s Playbook for Managing Trump I

NATO secretary generals have long been treated as peripheral figures — more secretaries than generals. European politicians usually close to their retirement have traditionally served in this post that comes with few formal powers. NATO, unlike the European Union for example, remains a heavily intergovernmental organization in which member states formally call the shots. However, this view of NATO officials as mere passive servants of the allies is outdated, if it ever was accurate. An emerging research agenda has highlighted the increasingly important role secretary generals play, particularly in crisis situations, across major international organizations, including NATO.

In 2021, I published a research paper in the journal International Affairs on how then-Secretary General Stoltenberg had a “striking degree of agency in helping NATO survive” Trump’s first term. The U.S. president had been extremely critical of the alliance and repeatedly threatened to withdraw. Drawing on more than 20 interviews with NATO and national officials, I detected three tactics used by Stoltenberg to avert this. First, he publicly flattered Trump. Playing to his narcissism, Stoltenberg continuously praised Trump for his “leadership on defense spending” and credited him for an “extra $100 billion allies would have added to their defense spending” by the end of Trump’s first term. And Trump proved receptive to Stoltenberg’s adulations, exclaiming that “the media never gives me credit but he gave me credit, now we’re up to way over $100 billion.”

Second, Stoltenberg used the procedural powers as chair of the North Atlantic Council to avert disaster at the most perilous moment for NATO during Trump’s first presidency: the NATO Brussels summit in July 2018. Following a highly contentious meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the first day of the summit, tensions escalated the next day when Trump threatened fellow allied leaders that the United States would “go its own way” should his burden-sharing demands not be met. Sensing the impending danger, Stoltenberg called for an impromptu crisis meeting on burden-sharing — an unusual move given the ritualistic nature of NATO summits. This allowed Trump to vent his frustration and put pressure on Europeans to make concessions before taking credit for almost all NATO reforms undertaken since 2014 in the subsequent press conference, letting him walk away with a sense of victory.

Third, Stoltenberg effectively built coalitions with supportive actors in the U.S. foreign policy establishment to coordinate policy and shield NATO’s Russia policy from the attention of Trump. Defense Secretary James Mattis became Stoltenberg’s main point of contact. This enabled NATO to reinforce its defense and deterrence posture through the “readiness action plan” and the establishment of enhanced forward presence, despite Trump’s calls to the contrary. In sum, I argued that Stoltenberg’s “astute leadership” was critical in helping the alliance survive.

Rutte’s Playbook for Managing Trump II

Rutte has taken a page out of Stoltenberg’s playbook. Selected for the role of NATO secretary general because he had already forged close relations with Trump when he was still the Dutch prime minister, Rutte adopted Stoltenberg’s tactics of public flattery. At the NATO summit in the Hague in 2025, he infamously described Trump as the “daddy” (even if this was uttered in the context of tensions between Iran and Israel). Prior to the summit, he had sent Trump a text, which the latter posted online, which effusively congratulated the president: “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done … Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” As Trump’s Davos speech illustrates, in so doing Rutte has managed to win favor with the president.

Rutte also learned from Stoltenberg’s success as a meeting manager and designed the Hague summit with one goal in mind: preventing a public row. He shortened both the summit proceedings and the traditional declaration to cater to Trump’s attention span. The agenda was also laser-focused on the approval of a new defense spending pledge, according to which allies would commit to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense (3.5 percent on core defense and 1.5 percent to defense-related issues) by 2035. Ukraine received much less attention compared to the previous summit, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky relegated to the sidelines of the meeting. In the end, the summit achieved the important agreement to increase defense spending, which allowed Trump to hail it as his personal triumph.

Compared to many other international organizations, NATO has so far weathered the wrath of Trump. Rutte’s role in allaying the American president has undoubtedly been significant: In addition to helping convince the president to ease his threats against Greenland, his flattery has evidently struck a chord with Trump and appeared instrumental in ensuring a smooth NATO summit, which was by no means predetermined. In doing so, he has — theoretically — bought NATO time.

However, Rutte’s Trump-whispering approach is problematic and could ultimately prove counterproductive for two reasons. First, the success of Rutte’s approach may be overstated. One reading of the Greenland issue is that it was not so much Rutte’s personal diplomacy that led to Trump’s climbdown, but in fact Europe’s threats of retaliation. Given other examples of countries successfully pushing back rather than submitting to the president, a strategy of strength rather than sycophancy may work better against Trump. Indeed, research rooted in psychology suggests that submissiveness to the bully only invites more contempt.

Second, even if one accepts that Rutte has been successful in preventing the worst in the short term, his overriding prioritization of pleasing Trump comes at the cost of adapting NATO. Stoltenberg could still pursue a policy of mere survival because he could plausibly hope that Trump was only an aberration and rely on “adults in the room” to help manage him. But Rutte cannot. A fundamental U.S. strategic reorientation toward the western hemisphere and Indo-Pacific (though the administration’s China policy remains ambiguous) and away from Europe is underway. This is aggravated by the administration’s ideological antagonism toward Europe, as evidenced by both the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. To survive, NATO Europe needs to prepare for a contingency in which the United States offers much less, if any, assistance to defending the continent.

But, for one, Rutte’s focus on Trump crowds out political capital for other initiatives. The Hague summit epitomized a new “era of low expectations.” NATO avoided potential disaster only by agreeing to much higher defense spending. But allies failed to make real progress on other substantive issues — including on forging a common position on support for Ukraine, a plan and timeline for shifting some of the burden of defending the continent to European allies, and strengthening the credibility of the non-U.S. nuclear deterrent anchored in NATO.

For another, Rutte actively prevents the adaptation of the alliance beyond just higher defense spending. Based on his reality-distorting view that there is “total commitment by the [United States] to NATO Article Five,” he has opposed, even ridiculed, European initiatives to proactively seize some of the burden of defending Europe. He clings onto the notion that greater European efforts would create a self-fulfilling prophecy of driving U.S. retrenchment, dismissively telling Europeans to “dream on” and wishing them “good luck” if they thought they could defend the continent without America. This belittling of allies is not only unbecoming of a secretary general, but also undermines the credibility of Europe’s deterrence posture.

Shout It: “Europeanize” NATO

The NATO secretary general should walk a fine line. He should of course continue to use his extraordinary influence with Trump to keep the United States engaged, but simultaneously and quietly prepare the alliance for much less, perhaps even no America in the future. That means driving, rather than blocking, the “Europeanization” of NATO by replacing those U.S. troops, assets, and command-and-control capabilities most urgently needed for Europeans to defend against Russia. This is undoubtedly a herculean task, as European capability gaps and dependency on the United States are real. But as the Trump administration (and in fact previous administrations, too) has amply demonstrated, maintaining the status quo is untenable. By denying the grand strategic shifts underway in the United States, Rutte’s approach risks leaving Europe unprepared for when U.S. retrenchment from the continent occurs and provides excuses for those Europeans inclined to avoid hard decisions. Rutte has helped Europeans buy time. He should now switch gears and push Europeans to use it.

BECOME A MEMBER

Leonard A. Schütte, Ph.D., is an international security program fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He has published widely on European security, U.S. grand strategy, and German defense policy.

Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · Grace Parcover · February 11, 2026

19. Best Battalion in the Army

Summary:

George Kalergis recounts learning what “best” meant as a young artillery officer in Vietnam. As an aerial forward observer, he saw accuracy was similar across units, but speed varied widely, until one battery fired its first round in forty seconds, proving a higher standard. He later visited that unit and found no trick, only disciplined routines and a fire direction officer who enforced an explicit time expectation. He carried this into later roles, setting a thirty-second standard and training it, even in peacetime settings that rewarded appearances over combat metrics. As an S-3 under Lt. Col. Dave Meade, he built a battalion culture around measurable mission standards, and excellence spread into maintenance, discipline, and daily performance.

Comment: it is good to reflect well on the experiences of our younger days. And the experience of others can provide us with useful lessons. And leadership lessons are timeless.

Best Battalion in the Army - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · George Kalergis · February 11, 2026

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/best-battalion-in-the-army/

I wasn’t what you’d call a typical career Army officer. I started as a drafted enlisted soldier, then fought my way through Officer Candidate School. OCS was the hardest thing I had done up to that point, and the fact that I wasn’t a spit-and-polish kind of soldier made it harder.

But I did like leadership. And I liked the clean purpose of field artillery: Shoot. Move. Communicate. Put accurate fire where it matters, when it matters, for soldiers who are pinned down and running out of time.

Six months after commissioning, in January 1967, I was on my way to Vietnam having fired only three training artillery missions from a camp stool at Fort Sill. My fourth would be in combat.

I was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry as an aerial forward observer, with the additional duty of right-side M-60 door gunner on a Huey gunship. I’d never been on a Huey and hadn’t even seen an M-60 up close, much less fired one, and now I’m hanging out the door with it.

Because we covered a wide area of operations, I got to request fire from many artillery units. That gave me a strange advantage for a brand-new lieutenant: I could compare units in real time. And I quickly learned something nobody ever put in plain language during training: Nothing takes longer to hit a target than a round not fired.

As an aerial observer, two things mattered more than anything else: first, how fast the first round is fired after my request; and second, how close it lands to where it’s supposed to land.

Accuracy was similar between different units, but speed is where the real spread showed up. For the first several weeks, it took anywhere from two to five minutes from the end of my request to the first round leaving the tube. At first, I assumed the batteries hitting the low end of that range are doing well.

Then one day I called a mission and the first round fired in forty seconds.

Forty. Seconds.

It stopped me cold. It was like watching someone do the same job under different rules of physics. Why are they so fast? Why are they so much better than the rest?

After six weeks I left the squadron to replace a forward observer who had been killed with A Company, 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry. I spent the next four months on the ground, conducting search-and-destroy missions in the rice paddies, mountains, and jungles.

We rotated for three weeks in the field and one week back on an LZ—a helicopter landing zone—providing security. By chance, the unit that had fired so rapidly for me was located on one LZ we provided perimeter security for. So I went to see them.

I was expecting a secret. A trick. A wizard behind the curtain.

But there was no magic. Just discipline.

The unit’s fire direction center ran like clockwork—no wasted motion, no confusion. The crew members knew their jobs, knew why they mattered, and knew they were extremely good at them. Most importantly, their fire direction officer set a clear expectation—forty seconds—and proved it could be done, repeatedly, until it became the new standard.

That’s the lesson I took with me for the rest of my career: Standards aren’t slogans. Standards are enforced reality.

Later, when I served as a fire direction officer, I set our standard at thirty seconds, and we lived there consistently, even beating it at times. It could never be fast enough for us. This is the practical education I never got in any school.

A few years later, I became a battery commander of a 105-millimeter unit in Korea. Vietnam was still going on, so I assumed the chain of command shared the same understanding: Speed and accuracy are the bedrock of artillery.

Strangely, I was wrong.

We only go to the field to actually shoot the howitzers a couple times a year (budget constraints). The rest of the time, the important metrics became the ones you can inspect on a Tuesday morning: barracks scores, appearance, rates, reports. Unlike the other units in the division artillery, I scheduled dry-fire training anyway and set hard goals—because if you can’t do it dry, you won’t do it live.

Higher headquarters inspectors were impressed in the moment, but when it came time to write evaluations, that wasn’t always what rose to the top of their minds. It’s easier to reward what’s visible every day on charts than what matters when it counts. Most seemed ignorant of the standards my battery lived by.

Then in 1974 I was promoted to major and my new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Meade, selected me as S-3 (operations and training). He picked me because we had already talked about what matters: speed, accuracy, and combat readiness—not as theory, but as a standard you can measure with a stopwatch.

The first thing he said to me was, “Somebody has to have the best field artillery battalion in the Army, and it might as well be us.”

I had been waiting my whole career to hear that.

We took the standards I learned in combat and built our training around them. The soldiers responded immediately. Most young men didn’t join the Army to polish floors and cut grass. They joined to become competent at a real mission (blowing things up!). They understood something many peacetime officers forget: Pride comes from mastery.

Soon we were consistently firing accurate first rounds in under thirty seconds and proving it in training evaluations. And something else happened that surprised a lot of people but didn’t surprise me. When a unit becomes excellent at its core mission, excellence spreads. Maintenance improves. Barracks improve. Discipline improves. Not because someone threatens the unit’s soldiers—but because success is contagious when leadership respects the mission and the standard is real.

We all knew we had the best battalion in the Army.

That lesson I learned from an artillery unit in Vietnam—that standards matter—stayed with me throughout my career. Others took me longer to learn, but they largely revolve around what to pay attention to. Attention isn’t just vigilance. It’s honesty. Most of us don’t fail because we don’t see what’s happening. We fail because we see it—and then explain it away.

So, here’s a short inventory of what I learned to notice, late in life, after I ran out of reasons not to:

Pay attention to what gets softer over time. Institutions don’t usually break loudly. They fade. Clarity gets replaced by comfort one meeting at a time.

Pay attention to who tells the truth when it costs them. Watch how they’re treated. That tells you what the system really values.

Pay attention to certainty. Certainty feels like control. But where curiosity should live, certainty often moves in instead.

Pay attention to behavior when no one is watching. Beliefs are cheap. Behavior is not. Character lives in restraint and quiet protection of others.

Pay attention to what exhausts you. Some arguments drain you because they’re empty. Not every battle is cowardice to avoid. For some, it is wisdom to walk away.

Pay attention to how you handle your own mistakes. Shame freezes you. Responsibility moves you. “I was wrong” is a rare sentence—and a powerful one.

Pay attention to what actually reduces suffering. Not what sounds good. What works. A boundary. Silence. Truth. Consistency. Showing up again without drama.

I don’t have a theory of everything. I don’t trust anyone who does. But I learned lessons about the most important things. In Vietnam, the lesson was simple: Time matters. Later I learned the deeper version: Attention matters—because what you ignore today becomes your normal tomorrow.

George Kalergis is a retired US Army officer and Vietnam combat veteran. This article is based on an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, The Year the Greek Survived.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Staff Sgt. Gilbert L. Meyers, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · George Kalergis · February 11, 2026

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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