Quotes of the Day:

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

– Bill Gates

"The strength of a society is its commitment to justice and equality." (and) "The greatness of a society is measured by its commitment to justice/"

– John Locke

"We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."

– Kurt Vonnegut

1. Evolving the OODA Loop for Strategy

2. The Superpower Has Left the Building: Munich 2025

3. Will it be Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?

4. Senior Trump officials rally as pick for Pentagon policy post faces flak

5. Tom Cotton under scrutiny for alleged ties to anti-Trump NGO funded by USAID

6. JD Vance intervenes as Republican feud over Pentagon nominee Elbridge Colby’s Iran views spills into the open

7.  Who’s Running the Defense Department?

8. Is Scrapping USAID Prudent or Pernicious?

9. The Death of Government Expertise

10. FACT CHECK: Telegraph’s NATO-Ukraine Report Full of Misleading Claims

11. Planned U.S.-Russia Talks Over Ukraine Throw Europe Into Crisis

12. CIA Security Breach: How A Government Efficiency Order May Have Exposed Operatives

13. The Bolduc Brief: The Department of Government Efficiency - A Misguided Endeavor

14. In Focus with Curtis Fox: Rethinking the Special Forces Mission

15. Niall Ferguson: J.D. Vance Picked a Fight in Germany. Will He Get One in China?

16. The False Promise of Strategic Bombing

17. China Doesn’t Want to Lead an Axis

18. The Army and the New Paradigm of Ground Combat: Lessons from Ukraine’s Failed 2023 Counteroffensive

19. Armed Neutrality for Ukraine Is NATO’s Least Poor Option

20. Munich Insider: If US Throws Ukraine Under a Bus, Others Will Stand Alongside Kyiv – Bill Browder

21. Trump’s gamble

22. (UK) Special Forces blocked 2,000 credible asylum claims from Afghan commandos, MoD confirms

23. China Says US Has 'Gravely Backpedaled' on Taiwan

24. The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration

25. Is China’s military really built for war? New report questions Beijing’s arms buildup

26. Clarifying Language for Victory

1. Evolving the OODA Loop for Strategy

Graphics at the link.

I have always enjoyed studying the OODA Loop and it has always been a useful mental model for me. I have always thought it could be useful for strategic thinking and I think Frank and Thomas have provided a valuable framework that I think would please COL Boyd (though he would not think it is complete unless they had a hundred or so vu-graphs to go explain it all).  

The one criticism I have with the original OODA loop concept and how it is used is that there has always been a focus on time and specifically about being able to act inside the adversary's decision cycle. In general I think that is a valuable way to operate (especially if you are a fighter pilot in a dogfight). However, I have always thought that the OODA loop can also be applied more deliberately as a long term planning process where sometimes haste makes waste especially when we are operating in an information and influence environment where effects may not be realized for days, weeks, months, and even years (or when you want to lay the foundation to achieve effects the device time and place which may be in the very distant future).

But I like the modified nonlinear concept proposed here: The 4-D model of discovery, design, decide, and disseminate/monitor.

Two quotes from this excellent essay jumped out to me are from HR McMaster and his concept of strategic empathy and GEN McCrystals' idea that our biggest enemy is ourselves.

What is necessary is an active effort to learn and appreciate what GEN McMaster called strategic empathy, which he defined as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary.”22

...

However, retired GEN Stan McChrystal insists that the greatest risk to our organization is from ourselves.38 Our lack of empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking leave us open to surprise from foreseeable hazards.  

While the concepts are applicable across policy, strategy, and campaigns, it is especially valuable (and necessary) for operations in the information and influence space. Strategic empathy is of course built on the "know your enemy" concept from Sun Tzu but I would argue it goes much deeper to try to see the situation through the adversaries eyes (and even deeper than red teaming).

Conclusion:

Like Clausewitz, Boyd deserves his place in the pantheon of useful philosophers of war. Oddly, both never really finished their work, and we are left with some questions to resolve on our own. We are not surprised Boyd’s various concepts resonate with many theorists and practitioners exposed to warfare. Despite the critics, we believe that any conception of warfare remains on solid ground with Boyd’s ideas about relative tempo, uncertainty, decision making, and adaptation. The convergence between Boyd and the Marine Corps is tied to their common emphasis on adapting to new circumstances in conflict. Ian Brown stresses, “such adaptability required a mind-set that could recognize when circumstances changed,” and the ability to “process the new information, and make those decisions necessary to adapt and triumph.”46 As noted earlier, the Army and the Navy also see some virtue in many of Boyd’s ideas.

We do not contend we have discovered the Rosetta Stone, but we offer this alternative model to help further leverage Boyd’s construct, especially for higher staff levels. We argue that Boyd would be happy to debate about the modified loop we have developed. Boyd hated dogmas and expected his ideas to germinate and evolve. Locking into a single mental model was tantamount to failure, or as Boyd colorfully put it, “You’ll get your pants pulled down.”47 His key point was to not become predictable or locked into templates which he labelled as cognitive stagnation.  

While some of Boyd’s ideas can and should be challenged, his thinking “has shifted strategists, planners, and operators from mass-based to tempo- and disruption-based conceptions of war, conflict, and competition.”48 We should continue to build on that at all levels of war. The extensive use of the OODA loop model for decision making is a testament to the pervasive utility of this concept. Yet, Boyd’s contributions go well beyond the OODA framework and are worthy of serious study. However, they do not represent the final word.  In fact, it is quite likely that the late Col Boyd would be unhappy if his provocative insights did not engender more debate and evolution. 

Evolving the OODA Loop for Strategy

By: Col Thomas C. Greenwood & LtCol Frank G. Hoffman

https://www.mca-marines.org/magazines/marine-corps-gazette/

Posted on February 15,2025

Article Date 01/03/2025

A new application of Boyd’s model

The work of the late Col John Boyd has significantly influenced the doctrine and concepts of the U.S. armed forces for the last 30 years. Boyd’s achievements during his Air Force career include substantial contributions to fighter tactics and aircraft design.1 Yet, he is better known for his ever-evolving and eclectic theoretical efforts to define conflict and for his simple decision-making model, the famous “OODA loop.”2

In this article, we introduce another construct for consideration. The authors are avowed maneuverists, who find value in Col Boyd’s wide-ranging theories, notwithstanding his contempt for battles of attrition, which are sometimes unavoidable. Boyd’s detractors criticize the underlying historical cases he drew upon and his lack of published substantive scholarship. But over the last two generations, he has arguably offered better frameworks for thinking about warfare (especially at the tactical level) than anyone else. A concept that addresses uncertainty, cognition, moral factors, feedback loops, continuous adaptation, and time-competitive decision making is quite powerful. His theory rightly stresses the value of relative tempo vice just acting faster, which Boyd clearly understood. 

Thus, we are not surprised that Boyd’s conception of war as a violent and time-competitive clash to disrupt an opponent’s mind and force cohesion has traction with many in the U.S. military and Marine warfighting doctrine.3 Boyd was respected and praised by numerous students of war.4 Additionally,  having numerous devoted acolytes, the late strategic theorist and prolific author Colin Gray, counted Boyd as an honorable mention on his list of favorite strategic theorists.5 “The OODA loop may appear too humble to merit categorization as a grand theory,” Gray observed, “but that is what it is. It has an elegant simplicity, an extensive domain of applicability, and contains a high quality of insight about strategic essentials.”6  Scholars at the Army War College support this assessment.7

Boyd’s thinking also influenced the development of the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine and underpins the Army’s concept of mission command, which embraces the delegation of responsibility and decision making down the chain of command to ensure tempo is not ceded to the enemy.8 The Navy’s Next Generation Air Dominance program, involving unmanned loyal wingmen flying with sixth-generation manned fighters, continues to assess the implications new technology will have on cockpit decision-making.9

Moreover, Boyd’s OODA construct (see Figure 1) has been popularized in both military and management circles and has taken root in the military doctrine of many NATO countries. 

Figure 1. Boyd’s full OODA loop. (Figure provided by authors.)

But as previously noted, Boyd’s work is not without controversy or criticisms.10 Some scholars found the leap from Boyd’s cockpit experiences difficult to scale up to the operational and strategic levels of war.11 One critic labeled him a “blind strategist” who was “in the dark” due to his fraudulent reading of history.12 According to this critic, maneuver warfare somehow “corrupted the art of war” and is responsible for the catastrophic decisions made in Iraq and Afghanistan. That critique is both facile and hyperbolic. The most balanced observers of Boyd’s research acknowledge that he was not a professional historian and that his selection of historical cases reflected some bias.13

These shortcomings tempted some Army officers years ago to wishfully give the OODA loop a sendoff into academic oblivion.14 These authors focused on the simple four-step OODA loop, which is a shorthand description. They would be justified based on that abbreviated understanding. But they overlooked Boyd’s richer and expanded version that better depicts his thinking.15 There have been other efforts to construct alternative concepts including the critique–explore–compare–adapt loop and, in Australia, a pair of analysts proposed an act-sense-decide-adapt (ASDA) cycle.16 The ASDA concept stressed the competitive learning and adaptation aspects of warfare, as did Boyd.17

An Alternative Approach

Changes in the global security environment since the 1980s and ineluctable demands confronting today’s strategic planners suggest Boyd’s OODA loop could use a modest update. Thus, we propose a 4-D Model of discovery, design, decide, and disseminate/monitor. This builds upon Boyd’s OODA cycle while expanding his concept to enhance its relevance to the strategic level of war. Underpinning the need for the 4-D model are the following drivers:

• The deliberative nature of strategy is less about making fast decisions and more about identifying and deeply understanding the right problem and the rigorous generation of a sound solution.  
• The collective character of strategy formulation, including group dynamics between commanders, allies, staffs, and specialists, and not just one individual’s cognitive cycle. The importance of discourse in building a shared understanding needs reinforcement.18
• The opportunity to incorporate advances in the cognitive sciences and other sciences that have occurred since Boyd developed his framework.19
• The thrust of the military design movement has steadily influenced strategic planning.20
• The need for a more explicit recognition of the role of risk in strategy formulation and implementation.  There are new dimensions of strategic risk that transcend traditional concepts of risk to mission and forces that must now be accounted for: the risk that action or inaction poses to democratic governance, the global economy, and nation-states’ ability to marshal both manpower and materiel to meet the exigencies of protracted war.  

In Boyd’s time, few fighter pilots or infantry commanders had to worry much about these factors. Today, they may find themselves quickly assigned to a combatant command headquarters and tasked with writing war plans and operations orders in an era of strategic competition and gray zone challenges. Thus, Boyd’s focus on operational or tactical success using the OODA cycle requires some translation for staff officers who are required to think strategically in peacetime but not yet moving to the sound of the guns. 

The “4 D” Model (Discovery, Design, Decide, Disseminate/Monitor)

Our proposed model is presented in Figure 2. We came to recognize from Boyd that these are not isolated steps; instead, they are interconnected by information flows from continuous feedback loops.21 Our model blends Boyd’s interdisciplinary efforts with additional elements and attempts to help modern-day commanders and their staffs apply it to their critical command functions. To represent the nonlinear and continuous interaction that Boyd intended, we revised our version as depicted in Figure 3. This depiction came out of Boyd’s writing about the nonlinearity of warfare and seeks to better reflect the interactive nature of the various components. 

Figure 2. (Figure provided by authors.)Figure 3. (Figure provided by authors.)

Discovery

In place of observe, we propose discovery, which connotes a more active effort to learn and understand. Obviously, the Observe step is drawn from Boyd’s experience as a fighter pilot. Observing is not irrelevant to fighter pilots nor strategists, but a more proactive search is needed to build a comprehensive understanding of the strategic environment and the particular strategic culture of the adversary. What is necessary is an active effort to learn and appreciate what GEN McMaster called strategic empathy, which he defined as “the skill of understanding what drives and constrains one’s adversary.”22

In the discovery component, we include the identification and attempted resolution of “known unknowns” and an effort to satisfy the commander’s information requirements. We also include a recognition of the perspectives and mental modes, heuristics, and biases of key leaders and strategists, as Boyd properly noted. 

An integral component of the discovery step involves identifying political constraints (actions that must be taken) and restraints (actions that are not authorized) that will shape the design step. In an era of great-power competition between nuclear-armed adversaries, escalation control and the political imperative to find acceptable off-ramps will impact the design of strategies involving the use of force between nuclear powers and their surrogates.

Design

In lieu of orientation, we have labeled the next step of the process as design. Whereas Boyd used orientation to capture the elements of sense-making, leading to analysis and synthesis, our model explicitly uses some of the simpler components of design as practiced in joint and Service planning methodologies. Design is not a single step; it is a developing awareness based on constantly changing circumstances and imperfect information. In Boyd’s briefing lectures, he stressed that orientation never ceases but rather constantly evolves as it takes in new data.23 “Orientation isn’t just a state you’re in,” he claimed, “it’s a process. You’re always orienting.”24 Likewise with design.  

Some aspects of design theory have been incorporated within the existing joint planning process.25 While this has not been the sweeping paradigm change design advocates would like, it has helped generate the desired outcomes of the design movement (more creativity, critical thinking, challenging outdated frames, etc.). We agree with proponents who embrace complexity and novel ways to make sense of dynamic and non-linear environments and who want to exploit divergent thinking and leverage deep reflection.26

Yet, the notion of design theory and military applications is in flux. Now, as was the case a decade ago, there is little agreement on exactly what design thinking is or how to best apply it in strategy or operational art.27 The field is split between purists and pragmatists.28 While recognizing that design theory is a valuable but rather philosophical approach, we are practitioners who appreciate pragmatic applications.29 Design theory is not inconsistent with Boyd’s work, given his emphasis on complexity and systems theory, as well as the cognitive sciences.  

Design is a useful intellectual approach that can assist planners who must grapple with wicked or ill-structured problems that are non-linear, interactively complex, and have no stopping rule or final end-state.30 But planners who ignore Boyd’s ideas and attempt to use design to overcome war’s inherent ambiguity and uncertainty will be gravely disappointed.31 At best, ill-structured problems can be managed or mitigated and not permanently solved. Instead of seeking some sort of utopian end state, planners must be content with achieving an acceptable sustainable state.32

Our conception of design includes problem framing, the first step in any serious strategy formulation process.33 That enables multiple diverse approaches (or courses of action) to be generated to resolve the gap between a perceived environment and a desired change. Design generates ideations in the form of potential solutions or mitigations, and these are fed into the analysis and synthesis process via the gaming of options or courses of action. All of this is interactively refined by discourse and collaboration among commanders and staffs. Critically, the insights gleaned from this process will almost always require the approaches or courses of action to be modified, necessitating yet another round of testing and experimentation before the Commander takes a decision.  

Although doctrine still encourages strategists to develop a Theory of Victory, such verbiage can lead to over-reach when identifying the ends for which military force is going to be used. States acquire nuclear weapons to immunize themselves against regime change and existential defeat. Victory implies an outcome that is much more favorable than returning to the status quo ante or a negotiated settlement involving major concessions from both belligerents. History informs that the former is difficult to achieve and so a Theory of Success may have greater utility during strategy formulation.

Decision

The next component of the framework is the actual decision. Boyd appropriately labeled decisions as a hypothesis. This hypothesis represents a causal relationship between actions and desired ends, which is the operative theory of success in the evolving strategy.34

The commander is responsible and accountable for this decision as well as the degree of freedom of action for independent judgment that he or she delegates to subordinates and coalition members.35

In our model, we included strategic risk as an element in the decision component. Risk is an enduring reality in both strategic and operational decision making. The rigorous assessment of risk is or should be a critical and explicit step in strategy development. There is always a risk to any strategy thanks to the unrelenting reality of uncertainty in human affairs and especially war.36 Yet, it is often a weak link in U.S. strategy formulation and decision making.  

Strategic risk is more than the risk to mission or force in joint risk analysis. It can come from many sources, both internal and external.  Most of the time we look for risk from vulnerabilities or external events. The joint doctrine note on strategy suggests that risk analysis is an implicit function and relegates it to the assessment phase. It states, “Implicit to the implementation of a strategy is the identification of its associated costs and risks.”37 This is limiting and slightly problematic. Risk considerations should be explicit and start with the development of a strategy as well as execution and refinement from assessments. However, retired GEN Stan McChrystal insists that the greatest risk to our organization is from ourselves.38 Our lack of empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking leave us open to surprise from foreseeable hazards.  

Risk assessment is a continuing process based on new information, or planning assumptions that reveal themselves to be inaccurate. A strategy and design team will look at risk in its gaming and synthesis. However, a conscious effort to accept risk or modify a strategy is the responsibility of the senior official approving the strategy. Risk is not well understood, and risk management is not applied consistently and explicitly at the policy and strategic decision-making levels. The U.S. strategy community needs to sharpen its appreciation for risk as a requisite step in testing strategic choices, making risk-informed decisions, and implementing strategy.  

The inclusion of risk within the strategy process is now well recognized in U.S. doctrine but not by Boyd. Hence our inclusion of it as an explicit item to improve our capacity to appreciate risks to and from our strategy.39

Dissemination and Monitoring

After a decision has been made, it must be disseminated to all subordinate actors in such a way that captures the commander’s intent and logic. We have not used “act” since higher-level headquarters themselves do not act as much as support implementation and assessment.40 They do direct action across their formations, which must be continually assessed and which may generate the need to adapt the strategy or how it is being implemented. We specifically include monitor as a part of a commander’s function (and his staff) as it supports both mission command and documents the vital assessment process. Monitoring vice control is a notion we have absorbed from Boyd himself.41 Boyd felt that control was too focused on limiting freedom of action, which is the opposite of what learning and rapid adaptation are supposed to achieve.

Monitoring includes adopting useful assessment metrics that can help senior commanders and the civilian leaders they serve to answer the most difficult wartime question of all: is our strategy working? Bogus metrics and failing to ask this question frequently enough during a campaign can undermine the virtuous cycle of learning inherent to Boyd’s overall concept.  

Regarding transitions and change, as the Russo-Ukraine war demonstrates, war is a competition in learning and adaptation.42 This is just as true at the strategy level as it is in the conduct of warfare.

Pitfalls

Strategists must be mindful of pitfalls that can lead to less-than-optimum outcomes or outright failure. We expect our adapted model will help ameliorate them. Richard Rumelt believes that “a good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it. Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.”43 Nor are big audacious goals and broad arrows on a map conducive to sound strategy. Some of the most dangerous pitfalls to remain aware of include:

Ignoring or Stifling Criticism

• The discovery step includes gathering as much relevant information about the problem as possible—the security environment, adversaries, friendly forces, allies, and partnered nations, and required resources to implement and sustain the strategy. A bias toward happy talk and good news can result in overly optimistic judgments that seep into the design step and lead to developing facile courses of action and the downplaying of associated risks. Prudent strategists are wary of too much sunshine intruding on the process and jealously guarding their objectivity and dispassionate analysis. 

Forgotten Assumptions

• Strategy making takes time. Edward Miller has noted that “strategists are not clairvoyants,” and the development of War Plan Orange for defeating Imperial Japan in World War II was “a plan nurtured over thirty-five years.”44 Admittedly, this is a long time. Nevertheless, regardless of duration, strategy development requires that planners keep track of the assumptions underpinning their thinking and constantly cross-check them against reality. Circumstances will dictate whether old assumptions should be refined or discarded, and new ones adopted. A seemingly simple assumption like “country X or Y will or will not provide U.S. forces basing access,” can have an outsized impact on strategic outcomes. It is the impact that discarded, or newly adopted assumptions, have on the overall strategy—and the imperative to understand their second and third-order effects—that matters most.  

Interagency Cooperation

• A strategy that integrates all elements of national power will, by necessity, involve multiple Executive Branch departments and agencies—each with its own unique organizational cultures and resource limitations. Understanding the role civilian agencies have in the strategy, and their timelines for execution, which, in most cases, differs from when the positive effects of their actions will be realized (i.e., financial sanctions and tariffs imposed, mobilization of industrial base, etc.) is crucial. Involving the interagency at the outset of the 4-D process will help promote a realistic understanding of what these stakeholders are bringing to the table, or not. 

Rigid Adherence to the Plan

• Good strategies have some organic flexibility baked into their design so they can adapt to changing circumstances during implementation. Strategy refinements and modifications are almost always necessary to meet the moves and countermoves of a thinking adversary. The U.S. “Europe First” strategy during World War II allowed for operations in the Pacific and Mediterranean without causing decision makers to lose sight of the ultimate prize. Throughout the war, military objectives were expediently modified to exploit success and more effectively align resources with changing operational and strategic priorities. There is a reciprocal relationship between policy and strategy during war that should occur naturally.45 Identifying the shifts and the strategic trade-offs that should be made and for what reasons is strategic acumen of the highest order. 

Conclusion

Like Clausewitz, Boyd deserves his place in the pantheon of useful philosophers of war. Oddly, both never really finished their work, and we are left with some questions to resolve on our own. We are not surprised Boyd’s various concepts resonate with many theorists and practitioners exposed to warfare. Despite the critics, we believe that any conception of warfare remains on solid ground with Boyd’s ideas about relative tempo, uncertainty, decision making, and adaptation. The convergence between Boyd and the Marine Corps is tied to their common emphasis on adapting to new circumstances in conflict. Ian Brown stresses, “such adaptability required a mind-set that could recognize when circumstances changed,” and the ability to “process the new information, and make those decisions necessary to adapt and triumph.”46 As noted earlier, the Army and the Navy also see some virtue in many of Boyd’s ideas.

We do not contend we have discovered the Rosetta Stone, but we offer this alternative model to help further leverage Boyd’s construct, especially for higher staff levels. We argue that Boyd would be happy to debate about the modified loop we have developed. Boyd hated dogmas and expected his ideas to germinate and evolve. Locking into a single mental model was tantamount to failure, or as Boyd colorfully put it, “You’ll get your pants pulled down.”47 His key point was to not become predictable or locked into templates which he labelled as cognitive stagnation.  

While some of Boyd’s ideas can and should be challenged, his thinking “has shifted strategists, planners, and operators from mass-based to tempo- and disruption-based conceptions of war, conflict, and competition.”48 We should continue to build on that at all levels of war. The extensive use of the OODA loop model for decision making is a testament to the pervasive utility of this concept. Yet, Boyd’s contributions go well beyond the OODA framework and are worthy of serious study. However, they do not represent the final word.  In fact, it is quite likely that the late Col Boyd would be unhappy if his provocative insights did not engender more debate and evolution. 

>Col Greenwood (Ret) currently works as a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, VA.

>>LtCol Hoffman (Ret) was, until his retirement, a Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Defense University, Washington, D.C.

Notes

1. Barry Watts and Mie Augier, “John Boyd

on Competition and Conflict,” Comparative Strategy 41, No. 3 (2022).

2. Which for those not familiar with the construct stands for observe, orient, decide, and act.

3. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 1, Warfighting, (Washington, DC, 1997).

4. For positive assessments of Boyd’s many contributions see Grant T. Hammond, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001); Chet Richards, Certain to Win, (Bloomington: Xlibris 2004); Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2005); Ian T. Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (Quantico: Marine Corps University Press, 2018).

5. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

6. Ibid.

7.  Clay Chun and Jacqueline Whitt, “John Boyd and the “OODA Loop,” War Room blog, Army War College, January 8, 2019, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/podcasts/boyd-ooda-loop-great-strategists.

8. Jamie L. Holm, An Alternate Portrait of Ruin: The Impact of John Boyd on United States Army Doctrine, (Fort Leavenworth: School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Command and General Staff College, 2021.)

9. John Robert Pellegrin, “Boyd in the Age of Loyal Wingmen,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 2024, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/june/boyd-age-loyal-wingmen.

10. Robert Polk, “A Critique of the Boyd Theory—Is It Relevant to the Army?” Defense Analysis 16, No. 3 (2000); and James Lane, “A Critique of John Boyd’s A Discourse on Winning and Losing,” Research Gate, February 2023, unpublished thesis, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368470051

_A_Critique_of_John_Boyd%27s_A_Discourse_on_Winning_and_Losing.

11. James Hasik, “Beyond the Briefing: Theoretical and Practical Problems in the Works and Legacy of John Boyd,” Contemporary Security Policy 34, No. 3 (2013).

12. Stephen Robinson, The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Way of War (Dunedin: Exile Publishing, 2021).

13. Frans Osinga, “Getting a Discourse on Winning and Losing” A Primer on Boyd’s ‘Theory of Intellectual Evolution,’ Contemporary Security Policy 34, No. 3 (2013). 

14. Kevin Benson and Steven Rotkoff, “Goodbye OODA Loop,” Armed Forces Journal, October 2011, http://armedforcesjournal.com/2011/10/6777464.

15. David Lyle, “Looped Back In,” Armed Forces Journal, December 2011, http://armedforcesjournal.com/perspectives-looped-back-in.

16. David J. Bryant, “Rethinking OODA: Toward a Modern Cognitive Framework of Command Decision Making,” Military Psychology 18, No. 3 (2009).

17. Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, “OODA Versus ASDA: Metaphors at War,” Australian Army Journal 6, No. 3 (2009).

18. T.C. Greenwood and T.X. Hammes, “War Planning for Wicked Problems,” Armed Forces Journal, December 1, 2009, http://armedforcesjournal.com/war-planning-for-wicked-problems. See also Ben Zweibelson, “Seven Design Theory Considerations, An Approach to Ill-Structured Problems,” Military Review (November–December 2012).

19. Frans P.B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Thinking of John Boyd (New York: Routledge, 2006).

20. Ben Zweibeleson, Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation (Abingdon: Routledge 2023).

21. Alistair Luft, “The OODA Loop and the Half-Beat,” Strategy Bridge, March 17, 2020, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/3/17/the-ooda-loop-and-the-half-beat.

22. H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: Harper, 2020); H.R. McMaster, “Developing Strategic Empathy: History as the Foundation of Foreign Policy and National Security Strategy,” Journal of Military History 84 (2020); Allison Abbe, “Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security,” Parameters 53, No. 2 (2023); and Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Force Quarterly 38, No. 3 (2005).

23. “The OODA Loop and the Half-Beat.” 

24. John Boyd, cited in Brett and Kate McKay, “The Tao of Boyd, How to Master the OODA Loop,” Unruh Turner Burke & Frees, September 15, 2014, https://www.paestateplanners.com/library/Tao-of-Boyd-article-2016.pdf. 

25. Daniel E. Rauch and Matthew Tackett, “Design Thinking,” Joint Force Quarterly 101, No. 2 (2021).  See also the Army Design Methodology and Marine Corps Planning Process.

26. Ben Zweibelson, “Fostering Deep Insight Through Substantive Play,” in Aaron P. Jackson ed., Design Thinking Applications for the Australian Defence Force, Joint Studies Paper Series No. 3 (Canberra: Center for Strategic Research, 2019).

27. Aaron Jackson, “Design Thinking: Applications for the Australian Defence Force,” in Aaron P.  Jackson, ed., Design Thinking: Applications for the Australian Defence Force (Canberra: Australian Defence Publishing Service, 2019).

28. Aaron P. Jackson “A Tale of Two Designs: Developing the Australian Defence Force’s Latest Iteration of its Joint Operations Planning Doctrine,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 17, No. 4 (2017).

29. Ben Zweibelson, “An Awkward Tango: Pairing Traditional Military Planning to Design and Why it Currently Fails to Work,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 16, No. 1 (2015).

30. “War Planning for Wicked Problems.”  

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Andrew Carr, “Strategy as Problem Solving,” Parameters 54, No. 1 (2024).

34. On Theory of Success see Jeffrey W. Meiser, “Ends+Ways+Means=(Bad) Strategy,” Parameters 46, No. 4 (2016); Frank G. Hoffman, “The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy, Theory of Success,” Joint Force Quarterly 97, No. 4 (2020); and Brad Roberts, On Theories of Victory: Red and Blue (Lawrence Livermore Laboratory: Center for Global Security Research, 2020).

35. Lawrence Freedman, Command, The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022).

36. Colin S. Gray, Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

37. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Doctrine Note 2-19, Strategy, (Washington, DC: December 2019). 

38. Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico, Risk: A User’s Guide (New York: Penguin, 2021).

39. A point stressed by a former Combatant Commander, see Kenneth F. McKenzie, Melting Point: High Command and War in the Twenty-first Century (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2024). See also Frank G. Hoffman, “A Weak Element in U.S. Strategy Formulation: Strategic Risk,” Joint Force Quarterly 116, No. 1 (2025). 

40. Drawn from Jim Storr, Something Rotten, Land Command in the 21st Century (Havant: Howgate, 2022).

41. Boyd, slide 32 from “Organic Design for Command and Control,” May 1987.

42. Mick Ryan, “Russia’s Adaptation Advantage,” Foreign Affairs.com, February 5, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russias-adaptation-advantage. For a deep study of adaptation in Ukraine see Mick Ryan, The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2024).

43. Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (New York: Crown Business, 2011).

44. Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991).

45. Dan Marston, “Limited War in the Nuclear Age: American Strategy in Korea,” in Hal Brands, ed., The New Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).

46. A New Conception of War.

47. Boyd quoted in A New Conception of War.

48. Brian R. Price, “Decision Advantage and Initiative Completing Joint All-Domain Command and Control,” Air and Space Operations Review 3, No. 1 (2024).

2. The Superpower Has Left the Building: Munich 2025

A sober commentary and critique. Are we on the cusp of a new world order?

Excerpts:

For the past three years, the trans-Atlantic allies have been unified and resolute in their determination to aid Ukraine and punish Russia. While the confidence that their side would prevail has waxed and waned, the common threat in Moscow pushed the allies together. With the Trump administration in office, and as the war moves — possibly — into real ceasefire negotiations, Ukraine is now proving a source of division rather than unity.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, described U.S. concessions on Ukraine’s borders and NATO membership as “appeasement.” Washington has begun pushing European countries to identify what troops and capabilities they could commit to a post-conflict Ukraine, but senior European officials privately acknowledge that they can’t execute a military mission without the United States. The Ukrainians themselves, grateful for European support, say that U.S. security guarantees are nevertheless most important. “Without support of the United States,” Zelensky said, “we will have low chance — low chance — to survive.”

It seems clear that Vance (Rubio did not speak and Hegseth, though in Europe at the time, did not attend the conference) refrained from providing details about the administration’s Ukraine plan for one simple reason: They do not yet exist. This struck many Europeans as exasperating, given Trump’s announcement that talks would start, but there is another way of viewing things. The administration was in Munich consulting allies and friends, asking questions, testing ideas, and floating alternatives. In a strange way, it’s the kind of consultation American allies across the ocean often crave.

Behind the frustration and fears of abandonment lies a major question: What will — what can — Europe do about it? On the fringes in Munich were some searching conversations about European military strength, innovation, productivity, and geopolitical self-sufficiency. The most concrete European outcome of the 2025 conference, of the commencement of U.S.-Russian talks, and of the Vice President’s big speech, was a new set of meetings. The European Union held an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Munich on Sunday. “A stronger and more sovereign Europe,” Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media, “let’s make it happen now.” He called a meeting of key leaders for Monday in Paris. No Americans invited, obviously.

This year’s Munich Security Conference was a barn burner, on par with 2007, when Putin delivered an infamous rejectionist speech, or even one at the height of the Iraq war when the United States, France, and Germany were at daggers drawn. More than anything, the proceedings this time suggest that we are entering a new geopolitical era, one with huge stakes and low predictability.

That’s why the beers in Munich are large and plentiful.

The Superpower Has Left the Building: Munich 2025 - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Richard Fontaine · February 17, 2025

National security’s Burning Man took place this weekend, as foreign policy types from around the world gathered once again in Bavaria. The Munich Security Conference years ago burst the confines of the Bayerischer Hof hotel, where a medium-sized group of officials and experts once met to talk trans-Atlantic relations. Now it’s a sprawling and frenetic affair, replete with heads of state, bilateral meetings, side events, press conferences, and off-schedule meals. Old touches remain: the Tiki bar, the schnitzel, the smoking section. And while it sometimes feels more cirque than soleil, there is still illumination to be had in Munich.

The new Trump team showed up in force this year: Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were all there, as was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs C.Q. Brown and a bipartisan delegation from Congress. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke, as did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and a slew of others from multiple continents. And so, the discussions revealed how leaders and thinkers are dealing with the world today.

Four themes struck me as emblematic of this year’s Munich zeitgeist.

Become a Member

Trump Acts, Europe Reacts

President Trump set the scene ahead of the conference, stunning Europeans by calling Vladimir Putin and announcing the immediate start of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in Brussels then suggested that Ukraine would not recover its lost territories, that U.S. troops would not deploy to Ukraine after a ceasefire, and that Ukraine would not become a NATO member. While few European officials quibbled with the truth of Hegseth’s remarks, they almost unanimously declared them a tactical mistake. Such concessions should be discussed at the negotiating table, most thought, and it is unwise to give away potential bargaining chips.

Hegseth seemed to walk back his remarks a day later, and the Vice President said that, in fact, “everything is on the table” in negotiations. Europeans feared being sidelined by Washington and Moscow, and Ukrainian leaders fretted about an agreement cut over their heads. Trump and his team set the ball rolling toward talks to end the war, but the terms, participants, U.S. vision and redlines, and the role of Europe in post-war security and reconstruction all remained obscure.

The possibility of an end in 2025 to the horrific war between Ukraine and Russia, alongside the entry of a Trump administration with priorities outside Europe, sparked a raft of ideas. Zelensky in his Munich remarks called for a European army, one that would include Ukraine. Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a mechanism by which if Putin ever invaded again, Ukraine would automatically become a member of NATO. Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary general, said that member states would have to boost their defense spending by “considerably more than three percent” of GDP. Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission proposed triggering an emergency clause that would allow E.U. member states to spend more on defense without busting deficit caps. Zelensky told a Congressional delegation that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a few days ago asked him to sign over 50 percent of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals (Zelensky demurred). As ideas, initiatives, and proposals flew, most conference participants expected U.S. officials to clarify their own aims and principles.

Europe Focused Outward, Washington Focused Inward

Vice President Vance’s address was widely expected to clear up some of the cloudiness around U.S. plans for Ukraine. Most suspected that he would also emphasize allied burden sharing, pressing Europe to spend more on defense and perhaps spelling out key capabilities. He might well, it was thought, emphasize the challenge posed by China, the importance of harmonizing trans-Atlantic approaches to technology, and offer a tough-love vision of allied cooperation against key security threats.

“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe,” Vance said instead, “is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.” Europe, he argued, has retreated from its most fundamental values by repressing conservative speech and political actors. European leaders had grown fearful of their own people. Citing the attack by an Afghan national on a crowd just outside the security perimeter, he said that Europe was reaping the fruits of uncontrolled mass migration. And less than two weeks before German elections, he called on mainstream parties to abandon the “firewall” they imposed to keep the far-right Alternative for Germany out of power. He said virtually nothing about Ukraine, Russia, China, or the Middle East.

This was not the speech Europeans — or even many Americans — expected, and it dominated the subsequent proceedings. Europeans resented the interference in their domestic affairs and some reacted harshly. A top European intelligence official, next to me throughout the remarks, repeatedly muttered epithets.

German political leaders reacted particularly harshly. “It is clear,” President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, “that the new American administration holds a worldview that is very different from our own, one that shows no regard for established rules, for partnerships that have grown over a long time and for the trust that has been built over time.” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius observed that Vance “is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes. This is not acceptable.” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, “a commitment to ‘never again’ is therefore incompatible with support for [Alternative for Germany].”

Resetting Expectations

Others divined different messages in Vance’s remarks. One participant said the world could be divided into two parts: those who liked the vice president’s speech and those who did not. He listened with some glee, he added, that Western Europe was being subjected to the kind of lecture so often directed at countries in other parts of the world. Some European participants saw the speech as the opening salvo in a trans-Atlantic divorce proceeding: Washington now cares about domestic issues in Europe more than external threats to the continent — as for the latter, you’re on your own. Still others thought this was the wake-up call Europe needed finally to assert its own independence, unity, and strength.

A few even suggested that spurning Europe would push the continent into China’s hands. Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave remarks that welcomed closer Chinese-European cooperation as a not-so-subtle alternative to ties with the United States. Some European experts said that, given no other choice, they might look to Beijing for partnership. All this seems quite far-fetched. The gap in values between Europe and Beijing makes trans-Atlantic differences look trivial. China is on the wrong side of the biggest land war in Europe since 1945 and enjoys a quasi-alliance with Russia. Beijing is not going to defend Europe or fulfill any of the security roles long performed by the United States. But the Trump administration’s message to Europe could hardly be more different from that of its predecessor.

Ukraine as Source of Allied Division Rather Than Unity

For the past three years, the trans-Atlantic allies have been unified and resolute in their determination to aid Ukraine and punish Russia. While the confidence that their side would prevail has waxed and waned, the common threat in Moscow pushed the allies together. With the Trump administration in office, and as the war moves — possibly — into real ceasefire negotiations, Ukraine is now proving a source of division rather than unity.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, described U.S. concessions on Ukraine’s borders and NATO membership as “appeasement.” Washington has begun pushing European countries to identify what troops and capabilities they could commit to a post-conflict Ukraine, but senior European officials privately acknowledge that they can’t execute a military mission without the United States. The Ukrainians themselves, grateful for European support, say that U.S. security guarantees are nevertheless most important. “Without support of the United States,” Zelensky said, “we will have low chance — low chance — to survive.”

It seems clear that Vance (Rubio did not speak and Hegseth, though in Europe at the time, did not attend the conference) refrained from providing details about the administration’s Ukraine plan for one simple reason: They do not yet exist. This struck many Europeans as exasperating, given Trump’s announcement that talks would start, but there is another way of viewing things. The administration was in Munich consulting allies and friends, asking questions, testing ideas, and floating alternatives. In a strange way, it’s the kind of consultation American allies across the ocean often crave.

Behind the frustration and fears of abandonment lies a major question: What will — what can — Europe do about it? On the fringes in Munich were some searching conversations about European military strength, innovation, productivity, and geopolitical self-sufficiency. The most concrete European outcome of the 2025 conference, of the commencement of U.S.-Russian talks, and of the Vice President’s big speech, was a new set of meetings. The European Union held an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Munich on Sunday. “A stronger and more sovereign Europe,” Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media, “let’s make it happen now.” He called a meeting of key leaders for Monday in Paris. No Americans invited, obviously.

This year’s Munich Security Conference was a barn burner, on par with 2007, when Putin delivered an infamous rejectionist speech, or even one at the height of the Iraq war when the United States, France, and Germany were at daggers drawn. More than anything, the proceedings this time suggest that we are entering a new geopolitical era, one with huge stakes and low predictability.

That’s why the beers in Munich are large and plentiful.

Become a Member

Richard Fontaine is the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Richard Fontaine · February 17, 2025

3. Will it be Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?

Everything is related and interconnected whether we admit it or not.

Excerpts:

Thus far Mr Trump has not shown much of his hand in the Indo-Pacific. He has imposed tariffs on China but has sought to woo its leader, Xi Jinping, perhaps in hope of striking a big trade deal. He has shown no sign of raising American defence spending to 5% of GDP (up from just over 3%), as he is demanding of European allies.

Mr Trump’s early guests to the White House included Japan’s prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, closely followed by India’s, Narendra Modi. That appears to signal a continuing focus in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, the diplomatic language about Taiwan seems to be hardening. The joint statement by Mr Trump and Mr Ishiba said they “opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion”, the addition of “coercion” being a novelty. So was the quiet change in the State Department’s website, which dropped the explicit reference to America opposing Taiwan’s independence. In contrast, the gutting of USAID and the halt in funding for many humanitarian and other projects around the world suggest Mr Trump is not serious about contesting China’s influence globally.

Strategists may talk about the “convergence” of the European and Asian theatres. But military trade-offs are becoming starker as America’s arsenals are depleted. Its munitions shortage in Asia is caused at least in part by its support for Europe, for instance in air-defence systems. Sending more of them to Ukraine means there are fewer to defend thinly protected bases in the Pacific.

If hard choices must be made, Admiral Paparo was clear about where America’s priorities should lie: “If you were to choose the world’s centre of gravity 100 years ago it would have been somewhere in east-central Europe. Today, it’s squarely in the Indo-Pacific.”

Will it be Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?

How Donald Trump’s about-turn in Europe will affect Asia

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/02/17/will-it-be-ukraine-today-taiwan-tomorrow?utm

Photograph: Getty Images

Feb 17th 2025|HONOLULU AND TAIPEI

F

OR EUROPEANS at the Munich Security Conference the talk was all about betrayal and “appeasement”. President Donald Trump’s looming abandonment of Ukraine raised fears that America was renouncing its role as the guarantor of European security. Yet the earthquake in relations across the Atlantic seemed to cause barely a ripple in the Pacific, where America’s generals and securocrats at the Honolulu Defence Forum waxed about the importance of boosting Asian allies. Perhaps, suggested one South Korean attendee, cutting a deal with Russia will allow America to focus on deterring the might of China.

The surface calm is in part the result of Asian governments lying low, either because they are indifferent to Europe’s woes or because they want to win Mr Trump’s favour (or at least avoid his ire) and hope he will continue to guarantee Asia’s security. In fact, the countries most likely to be at the receiving end of China’s military bullying have the greatest reason to fear it will be emboldened by a Russian victory.

Take Taiwan. Successive governments have argued that denying Russia a victory in Ukraine was vital to dissuading China from invading the self-governing island. The notion of “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow”, is now all the more alarming. One opposition-leaning newspaper, the United Daily News, was quick to warn that Taiwan will become an “abandoned chess piece” in the Sino-American game if it keeps clinging to America. In Japan the headline of an editorial in the Nikkei, a Japanese daily, opined: “Don’t let America decide Ukraine’s fate.” It argued that Mr Trump’s indifference to upholding a liberal world order “is extremely unfortunate, as it only undermines trust in the United States”.

India, for its part, has pursued a “multi-aligned” foreign policy, drawing closer to America while retaining close ties with Russia and, recently, improving relations with China. It may now spy opportunity in even an unstable Ukraine settlement, not just because it could import Russian oil more easily but also because a fragmenting world order could give it greater influence. In between, most countries in South-East Asia are ambivalent about America, are drifting towards China and are comfortable with Mr Trump’s transactionalism. For Singapore’s defence minister, Ng Eng Hen, America was moving from a force for “moral legitimacy” to something closer to “a landlord seeking rent”.

The mood at the Honolulu conference was undoubtedly grim, but for markedly different reasons from that in Munich. Many in America see Russia as a foe that their European allies should be able to handle, if only they would take defence seriously. China, though, is a formidable rival that can only be contained with the help of allies.

Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, warned that China was on “a dangerous course”. Its large and increasingly sophisticated wargames around Taiwan were not mere exercises but “rehearsals” for invasion of the island, and could provide the “fig-leaf” to hide preparations for war. At the same time, he sounded the alarm over the readiness of American forces. “Our [munitions] magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month for every critical joint-force element […] Critical air, missile, maritime and space platforms age faster than we can replace them currently, and we operate on increasingly thin margins for error.” China’s growing collaboration with Russia and North Korea was creating a “triangle of trouble” and turning the region from “free and open” to “contested and controlled”.

How to confront such a daunting menace? In part by adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence and hastening weapons production. But, crucially, also by working more closely with allies and partners, encouraging joint operations, collaborating in defence production and more. Their very geography, along islands that girdle China from Japan to Australia, acts as a barrier to Chinese military power in the Pacific and provides a springboard for American forces. “We can never take them for granted, and we can never make them strong enough,” declared the admiral.

Speaking in Brussels, Pete Hegseth, the American defence secretary, told European allies that they would have to take primary responsibility for their own security. America was henceforth giving priority to confronting China, which has “the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific”. What is more, Mr Trump “will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker”.

Sensing such a moment might come, NATO allies have tried in recent years to show that they can help America preserve the balance of power in the Pacific. A Canadian warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait on February 16th, provoking the mainland’s fury. A French aircraft-carrier, the FS Charles de Gaulle, is in the region conducting exercises with the American navy and regional partners. An Italian one, the ITS Cavour, came through last year. A British one will return later this year. The Trump administration seems to shrug off such efforts as pointless gestures. Mr Hegseth privately told European allies they should stick to defending their own region.

In Honolulu, though, China hawks were divided over the Trump administration’s abrupt about-turn in Europe. Some argued that “deterrence cannot be divided”. If America lost credibility as an ally in Europe, it would lose credibility in Asia, too. David Stilwell, a former state department official in the first Trump administration, flipped the equation to denounce free-riding allies. He said “weakness in one place creates weakness everywhere—these are unhealthy relationships and they breed aggression”. Some thought that doing less in Europe would lead to America doing more in Asia, such that the long-anticipated and oft-interrupted American “pivot to Asia” would at last come to pass. Others worried America would simply do less everywhere.

Thus far Mr Trump has not shown much of his hand in the Indo-Pacific. He has imposed tariffs on China but has sought to woo its leader, Xi Jinping, perhaps in hope of striking a big trade deal. He has shown no sign of raising American defence spending to 5% of GDP (up from just over 3%), as he is demanding of European allies.

Mr Trump’s early guests to the White House included Japan’s prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, closely followed by India’s, Narendra Modi. That appears to signal a continuing focus in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, the diplomatic language about Taiwan seems to be hardening. The joint statement by Mr Trump and Mr Ishiba said they “opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion”, the addition of “coercion” being a novelty. So was the quiet change in the State Department’s website, which dropped the explicit reference to America opposing Taiwan’s independence. In contrast, the gutting of USAID and the halt in funding for many humanitarian and other projects around the world suggest Mr Trump is not serious about contesting China’s influence globally.

Strategists may talk about the “convergence” of the European and Asian theatres. But military trade-offs are becoming starker as America’s arsenals are depleted. Its munitions shortage in Asia is caused at least in part by its support for Europe, for instance in air-defence systems. Sending more of them to Ukraine means there are fewer to defend thinly protected bases in the Pacific.

If hard choices must be made, Admiral Paparo was clear about where America’s priorities should lie: “If you were to choose the world’s centre of gravity 100 years ago it would have been somewhere in east-central Europe. Today, it’s squarely in the Indo-Pacific.”■

4. Senior Trump officials rally as pick for Pentagon policy post faces flak

Will this be a bigger fight than any of the cabinet officials? The difference is this opposition is coming from a Republican who supports the President. Will Senator Cotton be able to mobilize other Republicans?

Senior Trump officials rally as pick for Pentagon policy post faces flak

Elbridge Colby faces GOP fire on Hill for views on Taiwan, Iran

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/17/senior-trump-officials-rally-pick-pentagon-policy-/

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., questions former Governor Doug Burgum, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the the Interior Department as Secretary of the Interior during the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. … more >

By Bill Gertz - The Washington Times - Monday, February 17, 2025

A political battle is underway over President Trump’s nominee for the key post of undersecretary of defense for policy, with both the vice president and defense secretary voicing support for the key Pentagon pick.

Several Republican senators, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas, are reportedly questioning the choice of Elbridge Colby, citing the nominee’s views on China and other national security issues. The position requires Senate confirmation and several Republicans in the upper chamber are reportedly questioning Mr. Colby’s past policy positions.

Vice President J.D. Vance joined the fight Sunday on X, taking issue with those who say Mr. Colby has roots in the Obama wing of the Democratic Party and worked for a Democratic think tank, the Center for New American Security. After he left the Pentagon in 2018, Mr. Colby also worked for WestExec Advisers, a consulting firm founded by Biden administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years,” Mr. Vance said. “He was critical of the Iraq War, which made him unemployable in the 2000s-era conservative movement.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also backing the nominee, saying on X that Mr. Colby “was nominated because he will faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda — unlike many national security appointees in the first term who sought to undermine President Trump.”

Presidential adviser Elon Musk also asked what the concerns are regarding Mr. Colby. “Why the opposition to Bridge? What does [Mr. Cotton] think Bridge will do?” Mr. Musk stated on X.

Mr. Colby held the relatively minor position of deputy assistant defense secretary for strategy during the first Trump administration. It is unusual for someone who held that level position to be picked for the plum job of policy undersecretary, considered the No. 3 job in the Defense Department with a critical voice on policy.

Mr. Colby, an outspoken presence on social media commenting on national security issues, received a boost from Tucker Carlson, a conservative who reportedly helped block former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from getting a position in the new administration.

Mr. Cotton “has policy concerns with some of Elbridge Colby’s statements on our policy towards stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” one source close to the conservative lawmaker told Breitbart News. “Cotton has and is discussing with the White House.” Spokesmen for Mr. Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not return an email request for comment on the nomination fight.

Mr. Colby has been criticized by some Middle East experts for suggesting that Iran developing nuclear weapons is less of a concern than dealing with China. Mr. Colby wrote in the past that containing a nuclear Iran is “eminently plausible and practical.”

Conservative China hands are concerned about Mr. Colby’s views regarding the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. commitment to preventing a takeover of Taiwan by China.

He said in a 2022 speech that defending Taiwan from a Chinese attack is critical to the American strategy in Asia of containing Beijing. But he later stated the U.S. should “avoid unnecessarily poking Beijing” on Taiwan and instead should press Taipei to increase defense spending, a position Mr. Trump has advocated.

“The worst approach is upping the political temperature with Beijing with loud and symbolic measures vis-a-vis Taiwan while *not* prioritizing and enabling Taiwan’s laggardly defense efforts,” he stated on X.

Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, said in a speech last week that Chinese military maneuvers around Taiwan were not exercises but rehearsals for a future attack.

Mr. Colby has said he does not support policies that call for pushing back against Chinese provocations and aggression. His recent book, “The Strategy of Denial,” opposes the United States maintaining dominance in Asia to prevent a Chinese takeover of the region, and he argued that American policy should form a regional coalition to prevent China from dominating regional states.

Mr. Colby also said he disagrees with China critics like Matthew Pottinger and former Rep. Michael Gallagher who stated in a recent journal article that the United States needs to go on the offensive and defeat China in global competition.

“We do not need their goal of full regime change and liberalization in China to achieve core American national interests vis-a-vis China,” Mr. Colby said on X. “Pursuing that goal against China greatly raises the risks of cataclysmic war, which we must try to avoid.”

Describing himself as a conservative realist, Mr. Colby favors detente with China despite it not being a final solution to the problem of Chinese global ambitions. An aggressive strategy of seeking to oust the Chinese Communist Party from power is too dangerous, he said.

Mr. Colby has his supporters in the Senate GOP ranks ahead of his confirmation battle.

Sen. Jim Banks said anyone who opposes the Colby nomination in the Senate is opposing Mr. Trump and the voters who elected him.

“The American people overwhelmingly rejected the status quo of America Last globalism by electing Donald Trump,” the Indiana Republican, told Breitbart News. “Under Elbridge Colby, the will of the American people will rightfully be at the center of our defense policy. Opposing Colby is opposing America’s best interests.”

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

5. Tom Cotton under scrutiny for alleged ties to anti-Trump NGO funded by USAID

Are we seeing the campaign to undercut Senator Cotton due to his opposition to Elbridge Colby as USD(P)?

As an aside, who do we think is responsible for USAID providing $130 million to the International Republican Institute (IRI)? When we peel the onion back on some of the USAID alleged scandals we might find that some of the initiatives that are being supported were not decisions made by USAID but instead have been directed by Congress.

Excerpts:

While IRI is linked to the Republican Party, it has been criticized for promoting policies that often conflict with those championed by President Donald Trump.

...

This revelation about IRI’s funding comes at a time when Cotton is reportedly working behind the scenes to block Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) nominee, Elbridge Colby, for the position of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Colby, who has been a vocal opponent of the Bush/Cheney influence at the DOD, faces resistance from Cotton, adding to the tension between Cotton and Trump’s supporters.

Tom Cotton under scrutiny for alleged ties to anti-Trump NGO funded by USAID

Senator Tom Cotton’s alleged ties to the IRI, funded by USAID, raise concerns over policy conflicts with Donald Trump.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2529162/tom-cotton-under-scrutiny-for-alleged-ties-to-anti-trump-ngo-funded-by-usaid

Pop Culture & Art

February 17, 2025

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-AFP

Senator Tom Cotton, a staunch Republican from Arkansas, is facing criticism for his alleged connections to the International Republican Institute (IRI), a non-governmental organization (NGO) that has received millions in taxpayer funding, much of it from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). 

According to DataRepublican, Cotton, who serves as a director at IRI, is not paid for his role, but the organization received $130.7 million in 2024. This funding includes substantial amounts allocated to travel expenses and employee benefits, with over $12 million spent on travel and $14 million on pensions and fringe benefits.

While IRI is linked to the Republican Party, it has been criticized for promoting policies that often conflict with those championed by President Donald Trump. The organization has funded progressive initiatives, such as refugee resettlement programs through the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration. Critics argue that IRI’s focus on global initiatives aligns more with the interests of the global elite than the priorities of U.S. citizens or conservative values.

This revelation about IRI’s funding comes at a time when Cotton is reportedly working behind the scenes to block Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) nominee, Elbridge Colby, for the position of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Colby, who has been a vocal opponent of the Bush/Cheney influence at the DOD, faces resistance from Cotton, adding to the tension between Cotton and Trump’s supporters.

6. JD Vance intervenes as Republican feud over Pentagon nominee Elbridge Colby’s Iran views spills into the open

Will Senator Cruz' opposition contribute to scuttling Colby or will both Senator Cruz and Cotton succumb to the pressure from the Vice President. It is interesting to see what appears to be the issue: a nuclear Iran.  

The USD(P) is a critical position. Not only is it number 3 at the Pentagon but it is also the position of the senior DOD strategist responsible for global force posture and the national military strategy. (though the more experienced strategists are on the JOint Staff and in the Combatant Commands).

Excerpts:

Republican defense hawks like Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), among others, have privately raised concerns about Colby’s nomination, which Trump announced in December.

A source familiar explained that the senators have “concerns with specific comments involving whether it is tolerable to live with a nuclear Iran.”

JD Vance intervenes as Republican feud over Pentagon nominee Elbridge Colby’s Iran views spills into the open

https://nypost.com/2025/02/17/us-news/jd-vance-intervenes-as-gop-feud-over-pentagon-nominees-iran-views-spill-into-the-open/

By Ryan King and Josh Christenson

Published Feb. 17, 2025, 2:18 p.m. ET 

An internal GOP schism over President Trump’s nomination of Elbridge Colby to serve as the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy is spilling out into the public, prompting an intervention from Vice President JD Vance.

Colby, 45, an alumnus of the first administration, has been a proponent of shifting US military focus away from the Middle East and toward China. But his history of suggesting that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons shouldn’t be a red line for the US has rattled some GOP lawmakers.

Republican defense hawks like Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), among others, have privately raised concerns about Colby’s nomination, which Trump announced in December.

A source familiar explained that the senators have “concerns with specific comments involving whether it is tolerable to live with a nuclear Iran.”

“Members are working to ensure all Defense nominees share Trump’s position that Iran must not get a nuke, and they’re working to resolve this with meetings and a hearing over next few weeks,” the source explained to The Post.

7. Who’s Running the Defense Department?

Here is a view of Elbridge Colby that seems contrary to Senators Cruz and Cotton.

Excerpt:

One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.

But this is a scathing critique. Personnel is policy.

Excerpts:

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.

Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.

Who’s Running the Defense Department?

The key criteria for those in the top-tier positions appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · February 13, 2025

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been busy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been rooting out programs and language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The U.S. military is dutifully following his lead: West Point no longer supports those ostensibly suspicious organizations such as the Native American Heritage Forum and the Latin Cultural Club, and the Army Recruiting Command has ended its long partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

The new Pentagon boss also zeroed in on the pressing task of renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, though it’s not exactly a reversal; Hegseth ordered that the base now honor a World War II hero named Roland Bragg (a private first class who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge) instead of the odious Confederate General Braxton Bragg, for whom it was named in 1918. This change is little more than a clumsy stunt, one that manages to insult a loyal PFC while resurrecting the traitorous general—almost certainly after searching for a hero named Bragg, just so people could use the old name with a wink and a chuckle.

Americans might wonder what all of this performative inanity has to do with arming, training, feeding, and housing the most powerful military in the world, or how any of this showmanship makes the United States safer and more capable of deterring its enemies and fighting for its interests. But Hegseth, like most of Donald Trump’s other nominees, knows that his job is not to administer a department but to carry out Trump’s cultural and political vendettas.

Elliot Ackerman: Bring back the War Department

When a government department gets an appointee like Hegseth, it must still find a way to function every day, and those many tasks then fall to the deputies and undersecretaries. Sometimes, the effect is almost imperceptible. Ben Carson, for example, was tapped in Trump’s first term to lead Housing and Urban Development; he was out of his depth and it showed, but HUD slogged on despite Carson’s inexperience. The Defense Department, however, cannot run on autopilot. Mistakes made at the Pentagon can get people killed and endanger the safety of the nation. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Trump’s current nominees to other top-tier Pentagon positions aren’t much more qualified than Hegseth. As with Trump’s nominations in other departments, the key factors appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.

Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)

Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.

One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.

Eliot A. Cohen: The U.S. needs soldiers, not warriors

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.

Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · February 13, 2025

8. Is Scrapping USAID Prudent or Pernicious?

Opposing letters from twoAmerican citizens stake out the two fundamental positions in the USAID debate. Both sides make good arguments.

Is Scrapping USAID Prudent or Pernicious?

Shouldn’t government have to live by the same financial common sense used by the people it serves?

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-scrapping-usaid-prudent-or-pernicious-aid-budget-disease-war-0cd0baf3?mod=latest_headlines

Feb. 17, 2025 12:56 pm ET

The USAID building in Washington, Feb. 1. Photo: annabelle gordon/Reuters

I was struck when I saw the chart showing the top 10 USAID recipient countries in 2023 (“Musk-Targeted Agency Provides Aid Around the World,” U.S. News, Feb. 4). The chart shows that spending by USAID, for only the top 10 recipient countries, totaled $25.24 billion. That seemed odd considering that in 2023 the U.S. had more than $34 trillion of debt. I recognize that even if the entire 2023 USAID spending of about $42.5 billion had been used to pay down debt it would have covered 0.13% of the 2023 U.S. debt bill. Yet isn’t that more sound financial action than borrowing money to give it away? I have to wonder whether the people who serve in the government shouldn’t also have to live by the same financial common sense used by the people they serve. Most of us can’t give away money we don’t have. The U.S. government shouldn’t either.

Dorothy Scott

Davidsonville, Md.

It would be a tragedy if USAID is shut down when there is famine taking place in war-torn Sudan, among other emergencies. We need USAID’s life-saving programs to help war victims in Ukraine, Gaza, Democratic Republic of the Congo and other places in desperate need. The Food for Peace program, which was started by President Dwight Eisenhower, is part of USAID. Food for Peace supports life-saving feeding programs for severely malnourished children. We can’t have those shut down when lives are on the line.

USAID programs save lives and promote stability across the globe. Without such aid, we will have increasing chaos and famine. You can’t have a peaceful world under such desperate circumstances.

William Lambers

Cincinnati

Appeared in the February 18, 2025, print edition as 'Is Scrapping USAID Prudent or Pernicious?'.

9. The Death of Government Expertise

The question is whether we are on the path to a "Great Reset"of the federal bureaucracy that will better serve the American people and ensure our national security and national prosperity?

This is a scathing critique of DOGE and the administration.

The Death of Government Expertise

Why Trump and Musk are on a firing spree

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · February 17, 2025

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

Trump allies make noises about expert failures—and yes, experts sometimes do fail. In particular, MAGA world continues to demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic. (Those are arguable charges; Trump himself presided over a wave of shutdowns in 2020.) None of these complaints explains why DOGE teams have been unleashed in places such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for American spy satellites. Worse, Musk’s team accidentally posted sensitive information from NRO in what one intelligence official called a “significant breach” of security.

Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform

DOGE also blundered into dismissing hundreds of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency within the Energy Department that is responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. It’s one thing to be angry about having to wear a mask at Costco; it’s another to engage in the apparent indiscriminate firing of more than 300 people who keep watch over nuclear materials. (The agency backtracked on Friday and rescinded some of those terminations.)

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect.

You can see this resentment almost every time President Trump (and Co-President Musk) speak. No one is allowed to know more about anything than Trump. When pressed, Trump will defensively say things such as “I’ve read a lot on it,” an implausible claim from a man who is famously reluctant to read. Musk, for his part, commands a personal fortune so large that it dwarfs the GDP of many small countries, and he brags about having a top U.S. security clearance—but he bristles at any doubts about whether he is, in fact, the most accomplished player of the video game Diablo IV.

For Trump and his allies, this kind of resentment is tightly threaded into practical and self-interested concerns: Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery. Meanwhile, Musk and others believe that money should translate directly into power, and that their wealth should confer intellectual legitimacy. Such people chafe at the reality that getting their way still sometimes requires arguing with experts, and that opposing those experts requires knowledge. Their solution is not to listen or learn but to try to replace those troublesome pencil necks with pliable servants.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon firsthand: More than a year ago, Musk’s occasional sidekick David Sacks was so offended by an online disagreement with me about the Russia-Ukraine war that he publicly made a large donation to the GoFundMe page of a part-time professor in Canada whose views more closely aligned with his own. He did this in my name, as if that would help him gain the upper hand in an argument that required facts and expertise.

Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again

Another dynamic at play is that Trump, Musk, and many others treat “experts” and “elites” as functionally indistinguishable. This is a dishonest claim, but it is useful in mobilizing public sentiment against experts in the name of a mindless egalitarianism. It is also part of the overall ruse: The DOGE assault has nothing to do with merit or equality. Indeed, Musk’s attack on federal agencies, with one group of privileged and educated people trying to displace another, is the most intra-elite squabble Washington has seen in years.

A similar resentment may also drive the young volunteers who are waving Musk’s name in front of career government servants. Washington has always been full of disappointed strivers who feel they’ve been kept out of the game by snotty social and intellectual gatekeepers—and, as a former young striver in the capital, I can affirm that there’s some truth in that. Now they’re in charge and more than ready to become obnoxious new elitists themselves. (“Do I need to call Elon?” one young DOGE-nik reportedly snapped when a federal official had the temerity to deny him access to sensitive information.)

In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · February 17, 2025

10. FACT CHECK: Telegraph’s NATO-Ukraine Report Full of Misleading Claims

My recommendation within this debate (substitute NATO for US):

Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it.   Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

FACT CHECK: Telegraph’s NATO-Ukraine Report Full of Misleading Claims

Kyiv Post debunks The Telegraph’s report on Ukraine’s battlefield tactics, exposing inaccuracies, misleading claims, and questionable sources saying Ukraine ignored NATO training and strategy.

by Stefan Korshak, Julia Struck, Steve Brown | February 17, 2025, 4:55 pm

kyivpost.com · by Stefan Korshak, Julia Struck, Steve Brown · February 17, 2025

Kyiv Post has fact-checked The Sunday Telegraph’s report claiming NATO is frustrated with Ukraine’s battlefield tactics and weapons use. The article, which cites unnamed British defense sources, alleges that Ukraine’s armed forces (AFU) misuse Western-supplied arms and resist the adoption of NATO training.

Notably, defense experts, including military analyst Nicholas Drummond, have challenged the claims in the Telegraph article, calling them baseless propaganda intended to weaken Ukraine’s war effort.

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“This is utter nonsense. It’s Russia trying to create a plausible narrative to discredit Ukraine, divide NATO, and help secure a peace deal that favours Putin’s agenda,” Drummond wrote on X.

Below, we examine the claims made in the report and the reality behind them.

The Telegraph: “Kyiv’s troops are understood to be combining Western-donated weapons with Soviet-style tactics, in a misstep which has led to a significant amount of squandered Nato weaponry.”

KP: This is wrong. The Ukrainians do not use Soviet tactics; instead, they use their own take on the tactics necessary in a situation where they have a firepower deficit. The main Ukrainian battlefield weapon is drones, which obviously were never part of the Soviet army.

The Telegraph: A British soldier who trained Ukrainian troops said that Kyiv’s forces were using UK-supplied NLAWs costing around £20,000 each like RPGs – cheap, reusable Russian grenade launchers. The source claimed Ukrainian troops had to provide videos showing correct usage but were instead seen firing multiple NLAWs at once – salvos worth over £100,000.

Other Topics of Interest

Scholz ‘Irritated’ by Ukraine Troop Deployment Questions

The German chancellor said discussions on German troop deployments were “immature” when prompted by a reporter after Monday’s emergency summit in Paris.

KP: This is a single unnamed source and a video of a single engagement. This is not to say the incident did not happen, but, by doctrine and general practice, Ukrainian soldiers are careful with the use of NLAWs and similar weapons because they are so rare and powerful.

The article offers no evidence to support the argument that the wasteful tactics in the video are widely practiced across the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Also, the “efficient” use of expensive weapons is often set aside in war when lives are at stake. In Afghanistan, NATO forces routinely used Javelin missiles, which cost about four times that of NLAW, to attack individual Taliban fighters. It is unfair to generalize about the entire AFU based on actions that NATO troops may have also taken in combat.

The Telegraph: Sources said there wasn’t enough time to fully teach Ukrainians advanced NATO tactics. Training in the UK and Ukraine was compared to the fast-tracked courses for British reservists, where months of instruction are condensed into just two weeks.

Besides the time shortage, some Ukrainian troops reportedly resisted NATO tactics, arguing they didn’t suit battlefield conditions that Western trainers hadn’t experienced. Tensions sometimes ran high. In one instance, British Army trainers in Ukraine allegedly reached for their sidearms, fearing possible violence.

KP Debunking: There is no evidence that these events happened, and military commentators are divided on the view that [unproven] NATO tactics are suitable for Ukraine in the real-life battlefield that none of the quoted experts have experienced.

NATO can call on support from the world’s most powerful air force, while Ukraine has next to none. NATO units and, more importantly, their combat leaders train for years in peacetime while the AFU is fighting a real war with continuing losses to soldiers and commanders who have to be replaced in weeks, not years.

The NATO “system” is based on the assumption that casualty rates will be low and claims that Ukraine’s resistance to conducting operations using NATO procedures are a mistake and a shortcoming.

However, the AFU has three years of experience against a peer opponent, while NATO has none. Ukraine has accepted much of what they have been taught but uses tactics that are more appropriate to the circumstances they find in this unique situation.

The Telegraph: “The Russian army probably has more Javelins than the British Army now,” a British source said, adding that although he and his colleagues supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, the effort to support Kyiv “was built around lies.”

KP: This claim from an unnamed source is speculative, as no one can precisely know how many Javelins are in the British army or how many Russia has captured. Over three years of war, no source has published text, video, or photographic evidence of more than three Javelin missiles purportedly captured in combat by Russian troops – and that was in 2022 and 2023.

It’s reasonable to say Russia has captured a few dozen Javelins, but claims of hundreds or thousands are unsupported – with no evidence of the weapons being used against Ukraine.

Though the exact number of Javelins in the British Army is not public, estimates based on open sources suggest the UK likely has between 1,000 and 5,000 Javelins – far more than Ukraine is likely to have lost to Russia.

The Telegraph: “It is alleged that Ukrainian troops would often miss targets with Brimstones as they were using older Soviet-era mapping systems.”

KP: This claim is unsourced. The article does not specify who is making the allegation and does not give details of when this is said to have occurred.

The Telegraph: “Sources also described instances of corruption when training Ukrainian troops in Ukraine. Lorries carrying equipment would occasionally go missing, and shipments of vehicles would arrive at units stripped of parts, ‘including seatbelts.’”

KP: This claim is difficult to credit because the sole source of the information are unnamed and unidentified “sources.” Further, this statement gives no context of the scale of alleged corruption. A single instance of such apparent corruption in a military the size of the AFU – some 800,000 men and women – would be evidence of a force run to standards higher than NATO. “Instances” are a quantity of more than one.

The Telegraph: “After Ukraine’s 155th Brigade, which was entirely NATO-trained in France, disintegrated this winter due to ‘complete organizational chaos’ and heavy losses, some Ukrainian officers spoke out against NATO training methods.”

KP: The claim that the 155th Brigade “disintegrated” is misleading. While Ukrainian media reported issues with its organization and training, these were addressed with command changes. The brigade is now holding positions successfully, and despite some cases of soldiers leaving or refusing to fight, describing it as having “disintegrated” is an overstatement.

The Telegraph: General Oleksandr Syrsky, who is ethnically Russian and trained at the Moscow Higher Military Command School in the 1980s, became Ukraine’s commander-in-chief in 2024.

In 2023, a leaked German army document claimed that Ukrainian forces were not following lessons from Western training, reducing the effectiveness of NATO weapons and tactics. It said that Ukraine was breaking up NATO-style formations into smaller units and not adopting Western maneuver warfare, blaming this on long-standing traditions within Ukraine’s military leadership.

KP: This is yet another misleading passage. General Syrsky led Ukraine’s successful offensives in Kharkiv, Kherson, and Kursk, using combined arms and mobile tactics, not Soviet-era doctrine. The policy of breaking large units into smaller ones is a practical response to frontline crises and manpower issues, not a preference.

While the article claims AFU doesn’t apply NATO tactics, it overlooks the fact that NATO trainers lack the experience of the type of conventional war that AFU commanders have gained over three years of fighting. Additionally, comparing a two-month AFU training program to a full NATO brigade’s readiness is an unfair comparison.

kyivpost.com · by Stefan Korshak, Julia Struck, Steve Brown · February 17, 2025

11. Planned U.S.-Russia Talks Over Ukraine Throw Europe Into Crisis

Planned U.S.-Russia Talks Over Ukraine Throw Europe Into Crisis

France’s Macron convenes emergency meeting of military powers as Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine’s future without them

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/planned-u-s-russia-talks-over-ukraine-throw-europe-into-crisis-e87decb3?mod=latest_headlines

By Stacy Meichtry

Follow, Laurence Norman

Follow and Nick Kostov

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Updated Feb. 17, 2025 4:44 pm ET

French President Emmanuel Macron, left, welcomes Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk for meetings in Paris on Monday. Photo: Aurelien Morissard/Associated Press

PARIS—Europe’s main military powers were scrambling to reclaim a seat at the negotiating table after the Trump administration sidelined them from talks with Russia over the future of Ukraine and the continent’s broader security.

French President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency meeting of European leaders inside the Élysée Palace on Monday, after he held a 20-minute call with President Trump. The flurry of diplomacy aimed to show that Europe still has a role to play in resolving the Ukraine war, even as senior U.S. officials traveled to Saudi Arabia this week for direct talks with Russia.

The idea that the fate of Europe might be decided without direct European participation has alarmed the continent’s capitals. European governments weaned their economies off Russian fuel exports and poured billions of military aid into Ukraine as part of a war effort they regard as crucial to the region’s security.

Now the snub from Washington has also raised pressure on Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other leaders to define how they plan to contribute to any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

In recent days, the Trump administration has asked European governments to fill out a questionnaire, clarifying whether they are willing to send troops in to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force and what other capabilities they can provide as part of a security guarantee for Ukraine. The leaders must also discuss how to increase European military spending and fund longer-term assistance for Kyiv.

Officials said the talks in Paris made minimal progress in crafting a common position, with little detailed discussion on what kind of security guarantees Europe was prepared to offer.

After Monday’s meeting, North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on X that Europe was “ready and willing” to provide security guarantees to Ukraine and “to invest a lot more in our security.”

The U.K.’s Starmer said that Europe would play its role in securing any emerging peace but that the U.S. must provide a backstop to European security guarantees. The U.S. has signaled it wouldn’t put troops in Ukraine or commit to entering the conflict if European troops came under attack. Washington is also opposed to Ukraine joining NATO.

Starmer said that the European discussions were still in the early stages and that he would meet again with his European colleagues after returning from Washington next week where he will meet Trump.

“A U.S. security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again,” he warned.

Russia recently bombarded the Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

A destroyed road in Pokrovsk. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

For months European countries have dithered. Only a handful of European countries—Britain, France and Sweden—have so far signaled they are willing to send troops into Ukraine as part of a peace deal. When a core group of leaders gathered in Brussels in December, they shied away from any serious discussion of what security guarantees Europe could offer, deciding it was best to wait for Trump to take office and lay out his plans.

“The Europeans knew, but they were in a state of denial,” said Élie Tenenbaum, director of the Paris-based IFRI Security Studies Center.

The European Union is hamstrung in part by an erosion of public support for the leaders of its two biggest economies: Germany and France. Germany is slated to hold elections this Sunday that are likely to lead to weeks of negotiations over a future government. Macron’s government, meanwhile, is cash-strapped and lacking a majority in Parliament. The constraints have hobbled Macron’s yearlong push to expand military aid to Kyiv.

Even the scheduling of Monday’s Paris meeting was a challenge. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted on leaving early—to continue campaigning—while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni arrived at sundown.

Speaking to reporters after leaving the talks, Scholz bristled at what he called “an inappropriate debate at the wrong time about the wrong topic,” adding that the war was still under way.

“I am even a little confused by these debates, I want to say that quite openly,” he added.

Much of the debate in Europe has focused on what role, if any, European troops would play in Ukraine.

U.S. officials have talked about European troops as a peacekeeping force, perhaps helping to man any border that emerges from a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. That could see European forces acting as a tripwire, demonstrating their commitment to keeping Ukraine secure.

However there are already discussions behind the scenes about whether that would be too risky. Instead, some European officials say that any troops on the ground should be more of a reassurance force stationed away from the potential border or that European troops in Ukraine would take on roles such as training Ukranian forces.

Emmanuel Macron speaks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Paris on Friday. Photo: gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Time is short for the Europeans. Senior Russian and U.S. officials are due to start talks on Tuesday in Riyadh. U.S. officials told the Europeans at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that they didn’t see a direct role for them in the negotiations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov echoed that view in comments on Monday.

Ukraine hasn’t been invited to join Tuesday’s discussions although Washington has assured Kyiv that negotiations to end the war will be conducted between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington mediating. President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine won’t accept any agreements that come out of the U.S.-Russian talks without its presence.

Hovering over all the talks is the question of who will foot the bill for Ukraine’s security. Washington wants Europe to drum up additional funds to ensure Ukraine receives enough military assistance to keep up the fight while negotiations are under way with Russia.

European leaders have committed to a major buildup in domestic military spending and to rebuild defense industries that have shrunk since the Cold War ended. A new economic package on defense and Ukraine could be worked up by March, a senior European official said. Trump has said European countries should be spending 5% of their economic output on defense. EU countries spend an average of 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

Write to Stacy Meichtry at Stacy.Meichtry@wsj.com, Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Nick Kostov at nick.kostov@dowjones.com

Appeared in the February 18, 2025, print edition as 'Europe, Left Out Of Talks, Sounds Alarm'.

12. CIA Security Breach: How A Government Efficiency Order May Have Exposed Operatives

CIA Security Breach: How A Government Efficiency Order May Have Exposed Operatives

sofrep.com · by Guy D. McCardle · February 17, 2025

7 hours ago

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The shadowed folds of the CIA emblem remind us that even the most secretive institutions are not immune to breaches and controversy.

In a disturbing development, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has potentially jeopardized the security of some of its personnel. An unclassified email containing the first names and last initials of employees hired within the past two years was sent to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) at the request of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This action, intended to comply with President Trump’s executive orders aimed at reducing the federal workforce, has raised significant concerns about the potential exposure of covert operatives.

The Role of DOGE in Government Restructuring

For the few of you who may have been a rock for the past few months, DOGE is a newly created advisory body under the Trump administration aimed at streamlining and restructuring federal operations. Unlike traditional government agencies, DOGE does not have statutory authority, meaning it cannot enforce policies or regulations on its own. Instead, it operates as a commission or advisory board, providing recommendations for government reform. Its primary mission is to identify inefficiencies, reduce wasteful spending, and eliminate duplicative programs across federal agencies.

To achieve its goals, DOGE works closely with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to propose structural reforms and cost-saving measures. A major focus is on regulatory review, particularly in light of recent Supreme Court decisions that could impact existing regulations. Rather than pushing for new legislation, DOGE aims to drive change through executive action using existing laws. This approach allows for quicker implementation of reforms without needing congressional approval.

Another key aspect of DOGE’s agenda is workforce optimization. The initiative promotes in-office work, encourages early retirement incentives, and seeks to enhance overall efficiency in federal employment. Additionally, DOGE is actively involved in technology modernization, working to update government systems, improve software, and increase productivity across agencies.

To implement its recommendations, an Executive Order has established DOGE Teams within federal agencies. These teams coordinate with the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS) to execute the administration’s efficiency agenda. However, DOGE is not a permanent fixture in the federal government—it has been designed as a temporary initiative, with plans to disband by July 4, 2026.

While DOGE’s role in government restructuring is ambitious, its power remains limited to advisory functions. Any significant policy changes, budget cuts, or the creation or elimination of agencies will still likely require congressional approval.

Unclassified Email: A Breach of Protocol

The recent incident where the CIA was forced to send an unclassified email containing a roster of newly recruited employees is a serious security lapse with potentially dangerous consequences. Even though the email only included first names, hire dates, and last initials, foreign intelligence agencies could analyze this data by cross-referencing it with publicly available records to identify and target these individuals. This creates a counterintelligence threat, putting new CIA recruits at risk before they have even completed their probationary period.

In a disturbing development, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has potentially jeopardized the security of some of its personnel. An unclassified email containing the first names and last initials of employees hired within the past two years was sent to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) at the request of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This action, intended to comply with President Trump’s executive orders aimed at reducing the federal workforce, has raised significant concerns about the potential exposure of covert operatives.

The Role of DOGE in Government Restructuring

For the few of you who may have been a rock for the past few months, DOGE is a newly created advisory body under the Trump administration aimed at streamlining and restructuring federal operations. Unlike traditional government agencies, DOGE does not have statutory authority, meaning it cannot enforce policies or regulations on its own. Instead, it operates as a commission or advisory board, providing recommendations for government reform. Its primary mission is to identify inefficiencies, reduce wasteful spending, and eliminate duplicative programs across federal agencies.

To achieve its goals, DOGE works closely with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to propose structural reforms and cost-saving measures. A major focus is on regulatory review, particularly in light of recent Supreme Court decisions that could impact existing regulations. Rather than pushing for new legislation, DOGE aims to drive change through executive action using existing laws. This approach allows for quicker implementation of reforms without needing congressional approval.

Another key aspect of DOGE’s agenda is workforce optimization. The initiative promotes in-office work, encourages early retirement incentives, and seeks to enhance overall efficiency in federal employment. Additionally, DOGE is actively involved in technology modernization, working to update government systems, improve software, and increase productivity across agencies.

To implement its recommendations, an Executive Order has established DOGE Teams within federal agencies. These teams coordinate with the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS) to execute the administration’s efficiency agenda. However, DOGE is not a permanent fixture in the federal government—it has been designed as a temporary initiative, with plans to disband by July 4, 2026.

While DOGE’s role in government restructuring is ambitious, its power remains limited to advisory functions. Any significant policy changes, budget cuts, or the creation or elimination of agencies will still likely require congressional approval.

Unclassified Email: A Breach of Protocol

The recent incident where the CIA was forced to send an unclassified email containing a roster of newly recruited employees is a serious security lapse with potentially dangerous consequences. Even though the email only included first names, hire dates, and last initials, foreign intelligence agencies could analyze this data by cross-referencing it with publicly available records to identify and target these individuals. This creates a counterintelligence threat, putting new CIA recruits at risk before they have even completed their probationary period.

Beyond individual threats, the exposure of sensitive information—even in a limited form—violates core intelligence security protocols. Unencrypted emails are vulnerable to interception, meaning unintended recipients or hostile actors could gain access to this data. Since unclassified emails travel over the open internet, they can be accessed by unauthorized individuals and stored on Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers, where the information may persist until overwritten, extending the risk of compromise.

This breach also violates the need-to-know principle, a fundamental security practice ensuring that sensitive information is shared only with those who require it for their duties. By failing to restrict access, the CIA increased the risk of social engineering attacks, where adversaries manipulate or deceive targets to extract more classified information. Even a small piece of leaked data can be exploited to build a broader intelligence picture, making it easier for foreign agencies to infiltrate, manipulate, or threaten U.S. intelligence operations.

It is important, I would say critical, to remember here that it was not the CIA’s idea to send this information in such a manner to DOGE. It was requested of them. If it was so potentially harmful, why didn’t the Agency simply refuse the request? This is an excellent question…one I don’t have the answer to. It is possible that complying with the request was, in a way, giving the middle finger to a body they did not respect (DOGE). It may have been their way of saying, “Sure, we’ll give you what you are asking for, but by complying with your stupid request, it means these people can never go undercover, essentially damaging their careers and wasting years of training.” That’s my personal take on it, and it is within the realm of possibility that I am wrong.

This incident serves as a critical reminder of the importance of maintaining strict security protocols, even when handling information that isn’t officially classified. Intelligence personnel and agencies must remain vigilant, ensuring that even seemingly minor details are protected to safeguard national security and the individuals who serve in these sensitive roles.

John Kiriakou’s Perspective

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, recently shared his thoughts on the security breach on the Dalton Fischer Podcast. If you’ve ever heard him speak, you know he is not one to mince his words.

Kiriakou, who previously led counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, expressed deep concern over the incident. With his experience in sensitive operations—including the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda member—he understands the importance of protecting intelligence assets. He emphasized that exposing the identities of CIA personnel, even unintentionally, could jeopardize their safety and compromise national security.

Beyond this breach, Kiriakou also discussed major internal changes at the CIA, such as government buyouts being offered to the entire agency workforce. This suggests that the CIA may be going through a period of restructuring, which could increase security risks if not handled carefully.

Given Kiriakou’s history as a successful whistleblower, particularly regarding the Enhanced Interrogation Program, his insights on this latest security failure carry extra weight. His comments highlight ongoing concerns about how sensitive information is handled within the intelligence community and raise serious questions about the CIA’s ability to protect its personnel and operations.

Legal and Security Implications

The recent security breach has serious legal and security implications. While the email only contained partial names, it still exposed sensitive information about intelligence personnel—especially those in their probationary period. This mistake creates a huge security risk, as foreign intelligence agencies could cross-reference the data with public records to identify and target these individuals. New recruits are particularly vulnerable, making this a major counterintelligence concern.

Beyond security risks, the legal implications of this breach are just as concerning. The incident may violate federal data protection laws, which are designed to safeguard government employees’ personal information. Additionally, those responsible for the breach could, in theory, face criminal charges, including fines or even imprisonment, depending on the severity and intent behind the mistake.

This incident also raises serious compliance concerns, questioning whether the CIA is properly following security protocols and data protection regulations. The situation is likely to draw ongoing attention from Congress, leading to increased oversight and possibly new legislation to prevent similar breaches in the future. Ultimately, this serves as a critical reminder that even information that isn’t officially classified must still be handled with the highest security standards to protect intelligence personnel and national security.

Congressional Response

Congress reacted swiftly and harshly to the CIA’s sending an unclassified email containing the names of new hires, calling it a serious national security risk.

Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, strongly condemned the action, stating that it jeopardized the safety of intelligence personnel. He called it a “catastrophic development for national security” and warned that exposing the identities of officials working in sensitive operations could make them direct targets for China.

Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also criticized the email, calling it an “absolutely avoidable counterintelligence threat.” He indicated that the House Intelligence Committee would be looking into the matter, suggesting that the breach likely resulted from negligence rather than malicious intent.

Adding to the criticism, Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) took to the Senate floor, sarcastically remarking on China’s ability to easily decipher the minimally redacted names in the email. His comments emphasized just how severe this security failure could be.

The Need for Stricter Oversight

Protecting the identities of undercover intelligence operatives is absolutely essential for national security, mission success, and personal safety. These agents often operate in dangerous environments, infiltrating terrorist groups, hostile governments, and criminal networks. If their identities are exposed, they become immediate targets for assassination, kidnapping, or retaliation. Their families and associates could also be put in serious danger.

Beyond personal safety, intelligence operations take years to build, requiring undercover officers to gain trust and gather critical information. If an officer’s cover is blown, the entire operation could fall apart, leading to lost intelligence and wasted efforts. It also threatens national security, as adversaries could exploit, manipulate, or eliminate valuable intelligence sources, leaving the country blind to potential threats.

Exposed operatives are also at risk of blackmail and coercion, which could force them to leak false intelligence or even turn against their own country. Additionally, intelligence work depends on foreign informants and partnerships with allied nations. If an agency is seen as careless with classified information, informants may refuse to cooperate, and foreign governments may limit intelligence-sharing, making it harder to track global threats.

A breach of intelligence personnel also damages an agency’s credibility and integrity. If an organization fails to protect its own people, it sends a dangerous message that national security isn’t being taken seriously. This can lead to diplomatic conflicts, especially if foreign governments discover that intelligence agents were operating within their borders. In some cases, it could result in expulsions, legal actions, or even retaliatory measures.

At the end of the day, undercover operatives accept enormous risks to protect their country. Exposing their identities is more than a security failure—it’s a betrayal of those who put their lives on the line to keep the nation safe.

Wrapping Up

The short-sighted exposure of CIA personnel through an unclassified email reminds us of the delicate balance between governmental efficiency and security. While initiatives like DOGE aim to streamline operations, they must not do so at the expense of the safety of those who serve in clandestine capacities. As John Kiriakou aptly warns, “Protecting the identities of our covert operatives is paramount; any lapse in this duty can have dire consequences.”

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

One team, one fight,

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

Subscribe Now

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sofrep.com · by Guy D. McCardle · February 17, 2025

13. The Bolduc Brief: The Department of Government Efficiency - A Misguided Endeavor

Will the "Great Reset" of the federal bureaucracy pay off for the American people?

Excerpt:

In conclusion, while the aspiration for greater efficiency in government operations is commendable, the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency may ultimately prove counterproductive. Instead of fostering true reform, it risks falling prey to political machinations and misunderstanding the nature of governance itself. Effective governance requires nuanced, insidiously layered considerations of the needs of the populace and a commitment to legislative integrity rather than a superficial focus on efficiency metrics. The quest for a more effective government must prioritize structural and cultural reforms within existing frameworks rather than the creation of new bureaucratic entities. It is crucial to remember that true effectiveness lies not in measurement alone but in an unwavering commitment to serving the public good.

The Bolduc Brief: The Department of Government Efficiency - A Misguided Endeavor

sofrep.com · by Donald Bolduc · February 17, 2025

11 hours ago

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Retired General Donald C. Bolduc argues that the proposed DOGE is a misguided reform that may exacerbate bureaucratic inefficiencies.

In an era where the effectiveness of governmental operations is increasingly scrutinized, the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to be a reactionary response to the growing calls for reform. However, upon closer examination, the concept of DOGE emerges as ill-conceived—capable of causing more problems than it purports to solve. The fundamental misunderstanding lies not just in the idea of efficiency itself but also in the practicalities and implications of instituting such a department within an already complex governmental framework.

First and foremost, the term “efficiency” is fundamentally misaligned with the nature of government operations. While efficiency is a desirable trait in appliances and machinery, its application within governmental systems is far more problematic. When we refer to our cars, heating systems, or kitchen gadgets, we measure efficiency in terms of performance maximization and resource minimization. Government, however, is not a machine; it is an intricate web of human interactions, social contracts, and public responsibilities. Simplistic applications of efficiency metrics can undermine the essential humanitarian aspects of governance, leading to detrimental outcomes such as the marginalization of citizens’ needs or the neglect of critical programs.

Moreover, the personnel tasked with overseeing DOGE may lack the nuanced understanding required to address the intricacies of government functions. Bureaucratic systems are not merely a collection of processes to be optimized; they are vibrant ecosystems influenced by cultural, social, and economic dynamics. The people appointed to lead initiatives within DOGE may find themselves ill-equipped to navigate this complexity. An individual’s experience in the private sector, however successful, is not necessarily transferable to the public sphere, where accountability and public service principles reign supreme. Without substantial expertise in governance, those at the helm of DOGE might inadvertently exacerbate inefficiencies rather than alleviate them.

Additionally, it raises questions about the role of Congress in the efficacy of government. The responsibility of crafting laws that enhance governmental effectiveness inherently lies with our legislative body. Therefore, the establishment of DOGE might serve as a means for Congress to abdicate this responsibility rather than fulfill it. By introducing a new agency focused solely on efficiency, lawmakers might overlook vital legislative reforms that could address systemic issues more directly. While there is consensus that government operations can be unwieldy and excessive, the notion that a new department can rectify deeply ingrained issues contradicts the logic of effective governance.

Critically, DOGE represents an expansion of government rather than the contraction that many advocates for efficiency might expect. It is paradoxical to think one can grow the government’s footprint to make it smaller; such an approach invites skepticism regarding the motivations behind its establishment. Observers might argue that DOGE has the potential to become a politically influenced apparatus utilized for partisan gain—a tool for retribution rather than reform. The growing politicization of governmental roles introduces the risk that the very efficiency sought may become overshadowed by political agendas and vendettas.

Furthermore, the notion of placing the world’s wealthiest individuals in charge of government efficiency initiatives raises ethical concerns. Leadership decisions should prioritize public service over private profit. The implications of entrusting such significant responsibilities to individuals who prioritize business interests can lead to conflicts that thwart the original mission of DOGE. The track record of corporate leaders, such as those involved in space exploration who may struggle with earthly operations, does not inspire confidence in their capability to address government inefficiencies.

The misgivings surrounding DOGE extend to considerations about its structure and bureaucratic weight. Proposals to elevate it to a cabinet-level position could further entrench a culture of oversight that may stifle innovation and responsiveness. Without proper staffing and a commitment to impartial governance, the potential for DOGE to achieve its objectives appears tenuous. Its recent actions can already be interpreted as politically charged maneuvers that prioritize retribution—an alarming trend exemplified by interventions into agencies like USAID.

In conclusion, while the aspiration for greater efficiency in government operations is commendable, the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency may ultimately prove counterproductive. Instead of fostering true reform, it risks falling prey to political machinations and misunderstanding the nature of governance itself. Effective governance requires nuanced, insidiously layered considerations of the needs of the populace and a commitment to legislative integrity rather than a superficial focus on efficiency metrics. The quest for a more effective government must prioritize structural and cultural reforms within existing frameworks rather than the creation of new bureaucratic entities. It is crucial to remember that true effectiveness lies not in measurement alone but in an unwavering commitment to serving the public good.

In an era where the effectiveness of governmental operations is increasingly scrutinized, the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to be a reactionary response to the growing calls for reform. However, upon closer examination, the concept of DOGE emerges as ill-conceived—capable of causing more problems than it purports to solve. The fundamental misunderstanding lies not just in the idea of efficiency itself but also in the practicalities and implications of instituting such a department within an already complex governmental framework.

First and foremost, the term “efficiency” is fundamentally misaligned with the nature of government operations. While efficiency is a desirable trait in appliances and machinery, its application within governmental systems is far more problematic. When we refer to our cars, heating systems, or kitchen gadgets, we measure efficiency in terms of performance maximization and resource minimization. Government, however, is not a machine; it is an intricate web of human interactions, social contracts, and public responsibilities. Simplistic applications of efficiency metrics can undermine the essential humanitarian aspects of governance, leading to detrimental outcomes such as the marginalization of citizens’ needs or the neglect of critical programs.

Moreover, the personnel tasked with overseeing DOGE may lack the nuanced understanding required to address the intricacies of government functions. Bureaucratic systems are not merely a collection of processes to be optimized; they are vibrant ecosystems influenced by cultural, social, and economic dynamics. The people appointed to lead initiatives within DOGE may find themselves ill-equipped to navigate this complexity. An individual’s experience in the private sector, however successful, is not necessarily transferable to the public sphere, where accountability and public service principles reign supreme. Without substantial expertise in governance, those at the helm of DOGE might inadvertently exacerbate inefficiencies rather than alleviate them.

Additionally, it raises questions about the role of Congress in the efficacy of government. The responsibility of crafting laws that enhance governmental effectiveness inherently lies with our legislative body. Therefore, the establishment of DOGE might serve as a means for Congress to abdicate this responsibility rather than fulfill it. By introducing a new agency focused solely on efficiency, lawmakers might overlook vital legislative reforms that could address systemic issues more directly. While there is consensus that government operations can be unwieldy and excessive, the notion that a new department can rectify deeply ingrained issues contradicts the logic of effective governance.

Critically, DOGE represents an expansion of government rather than the contraction that many advocates for efficiency might expect. It is paradoxical to think one can grow the government’s footprint to make it smaller; such an approach invites skepticism regarding the motivations behind its establishment. Observers might argue that DOGE has the potential to become a politically influenced apparatus utilized for partisan gain—a tool for retribution rather than reform. The growing politicization of governmental roles introduces the risk that the very efficiency sought may become overshadowed by political agendas and vendettas.

Furthermore, the notion of placing the world’s wealthiest individuals in charge of government efficiency initiatives raises ethical concerns. Leadership decisions should prioritize public service over private profit. The implications of entrusting such significant responsibilities to individuals who prioritize business interests can lead to conflicts that thwart the original mission of DOGE. The track record of corporate leaders, such as those involved in space exploration who may struggle with earthly operations, does not inspire confidence in their capability to address government inefficiencies.

The misgivings surrounding DOGE extend to considerations about its structure and bureaucratic weight. Proposals to elevate it to a cabinet-level position could further entrench a culture of oversight that may stifle innovation and responsiveness. Without proper staffing and a commitment to impartial governance, the potential for DOGE to achieve its objectives appears tenuous. Its recent actions can already be interpreted as politically charged maneuvers that prioritize retribution—an alarming trend exemplified by interventions into agencies like USAID.

In conclusion, while the aspiration for greater efficiency in government operations is commendable, the establishment of a Department of Government Efficiency may ultimately prove counterproductive. Instead of fostering true reform, it risks falling prey to political machinations and misunderstanding the nature of governance itself. Effective governance requires nuanced, insidiously layered considerations of the needs of the populace and a commitment to legislative integrity rather than a superficial focus on efficiency metrics. The quest for a more effective government must prioritize structural and cultural reforms within existing frameworks rather than the creation of new bureaucratic entities. It is crucial to remember that true effectiveness lies not in measurement alone but in an unwavering commitment to serving the public good.

Donald C. Bolduc

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

One team, one fight,

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

Subscribe Now

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sofrep.com · by Donald Bolduc · February 17, 2025

14. In Focus with Curtis Fox: Rethinking the Special Forces Mission

I think the author is basing his research on the US Army Special Operations Command Fact Book which is at this link: https://www.soc.mil/USASOCHQ/USASOCFactBook.pdf

Along the lines of the authors's arguments about slimming down SF mission I wrote in 1995 that SF should have two missions: the wartime mission of Unconventional warfare and the peacetime mission of unconventional operations with both being based on the unconventional warfare mindset of solving or contributing to solving complex political military problems while creating dilemmas for our adversaries by working through with and by indigenous forces. All other missions, FID< DA, SR, etc) would be submissions of the two overarching missions. We should keep in mind that US Special Forces is the only military force that is specially and specifically organized, trained, equipped, educated , and optimized to conduct unconventional warfare.

(Special Forces Missions: A Return to the Roots for a Vision of the Future. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/tr/ADA299300)

In Focus with Curtis Fox: Rethinking the Special Forces Mission

sofrep.com · by Curtis L. Fox · February 17, 2025

2 hours ago

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Members of the French Special Operations Forces extract a simulated casualty from a building during a mass casualty exercise during Emerald Warrior 2021. (DVIDS)

Editor’s Note: Welcome back to our weekly column with former Green Beret Curtis Fox, where we explore the evolving role of Special Forces. This week, he takes a deep dive into ‘Rethinking the Special Forces Mission,’ examining how mission creep has stretched Special Forces beyond their core competencies and why a return to their Unconventional Warfare roots is essential.

You can read the previous column here.

Presently, United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) claims that Special Forces conducts Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, Direct Action, Special Reconnaissance, Counter-Insurgency, Counterterrorism, Information Operations, Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Security Force Assistance.

There is no documented history of Green Berets ever conducting Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Counter-insurgency is somewhat of a redundant claim in that it is essentially an amalgamation of tasks that are already captured under Foreign Internal Defense, Counter-Terrorism, and Direct Action missions. Special Forces have conducted Security Force Assistance in the past, but as we will discuss later, Green Beret NCOs don’t prioritize training battalion staff and sustainment personnel. They prioritize tactical training and kinetic employment. The SFA mission gets little to no priority.

Finally, the Special Forces do not really conduct Information Operations. There are a lot of subordinate functions bundled into this term, but USASOC’s Psychological Operations Groups (PO) are designed to carry the torch of Information Operations. As the PO community works hand-in-hand with Special Forces within the same command, it’s very difficult to claim that the Green Berets are anything more than understudies regarding Information Operations.

Just a few years ago, the Special Forces mission set included just 5 basic taskings: Unconventional Warfare, Direct Action, Foreign Internal Defense, Counterterrorism, and Special Reconnaissance. Why have the five basic missions, for which the Special Forces Regiment was adequately staffed and trained, proliferated into nine expansive missions, for which the Special Forces Regiment is understaffed and inexperienced?

The Regiment needs to trim down its missions, reprioritizing for those missions in which the Regiment’s UW staffing and training profile clearly have application. Security Force Assistance, Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Information Operations are not missions that the Special Forces Regiment needs to prioritize. Counter-insurgency needs to be considered an implied task.

In understanding the future role of the Special Forces Regiment, perhaps we should look to the past.

The OSS was formed with a dual purpose mandate: to collection Secret Intelligence abroad and to conduct Unconventional Warfare. In support of Unconventional Warfare, the OSS created the Special Operations branch to organize, train, and employ indigenous guerillas against the Axis Powers, and the Operational Group Command branch to conduct deep strikes and long-range reconnaissance, often with indigenous partners, against the Axis Powers. In 1952, the Special Forces Regiment inherited both of these functions.

Since 1952, it has been exceedingly rare for Commanders to authorize SFOD-As to conduct UW, and it’s clear that SFOD-As do not overthrow hostile authoritarian governments frequently. The UW mission dates back to the famed OSS Special Operations branch and Operational Group Command branch, and UW remains a validated requirement of the U.S. Army and USSOCOM today.

The Green Berets and their historical predecessors delivered unique value by conducting kinetic operations in hostile or denied environments—usually in the enemy’s rear. Green Berets train to conduct full-spectrum special operations without persistent resupply or connection to higher command and control. Close relations with indigenous partners facilitate the Special Forces mission, utilizing local proxies not only as force-multipliers but as a means of shelter and supply.

Special Forces utilizes indigenous personnel as force multipliers to achieve campaign-level effects, conducting Direct Action and Counterterrorism actions in support of the UW mission. The Special Reconnaissance mission is meant to facilitate the introduction of U.S. forces into theater and enable the UW operations cycle. The Green Beret instructor role is an implied task within the Unconventional Warfare (UW) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID) missions, but training rendered to indigenous forces is meant to facilitate offensive action. USASOC must stop expanding the Special Forces mission portfolio.

It also needs to be understood that the Special Forces Regiment is not the only military institution that works by-with-and-through indigenous partner forces.

The Navy SEALs were stood up out of the old Underwater Demolition Teams in 1962. They almost immediately found themselves training ARVN and commandos in Vietnam. SEALs were also frequently tasked to the Phoenix Program, just like their Special Forces brothers, to lead PRUs in raids. More recently, the SEALs were tasked with FID missions in Afghanistan.

The Raiders of the Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) are also tasked similar FID and SFA missions. MARSOC was created on the orders of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld specifically to alleviate some of the mission load on the other USSOCOM components. Marine Special Operations Teams (MSOTs) were designed as an incremental update to the Army’s traditional SFOD-A, and on paper they have nearly identical mission capabilities.

The U.S. Army has also created six Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFABs). Rather than hollow-out a Brigade Combat Team (BCT) of its field grade officers and senior NCOs in order to send military advisors to an indigenous combat formation abroad, the Army decided to create SFABs to support military assistance missions. Each SFAB is a 500 soldier formation, commanded by a Colonel, and staffed with 60 cross-functional teams of 6-8 advisors. The SFAB teams are categorized as maneuver, artillery, combat engineers, and logistics advisors.

The Special Forces Regiment does not have the size and personnel to exclusively control the train-advise-assist mission sets (FID, SFA, COIN, etc.) in an active war. The Regiment was not large enough to cover all of these missions in Vietnam; nor in Afghanistan; nor in Iraq. It won’t cover all such missions in the next war.

The creation of MARSOC and the SFABs is not the slow and steady creep of outsiders into the exclusive domain of Army Special Forces. These units were stood up in recognition that there would never be enough Green Berets to go around.

Special Tactics operator during a raid on an opposing force-held village during Emerald Warrior 2021. (DVIDS)

Supporting UW/FID Through Special Forces Officers on Permanent Station Abroad

Harkening back the practices of the OSS, personnel from the agency’s myriad branches (Special Operations branch, Operational Group branch, Maritime branch, Morale branch, etc.) all worked in the legendary Detachment 101, but they did not report to superiors out of theater. The theater commander Major General Stilwell gave Detachment 101 broad guidance through a regional headquarters. OG teams (a direct analog of modern SFOD-As) in the field reported to these regional headquarters through a local forward headquarters.

The point here is that field grade officers were on the ground, with a permanent presence in theater. They advocated for the mission, deconflicted with the competing interests of other units, coordinated with other U.S. Service branches and Allies (especially the British), set up field hospitals, training facilities, and command-and-control nodes. They were the ones doing key leader engagements with local partisans. They were the ones who most needed to understand the lay of the human terrain. The SO men were standing up indigenous forces. The OG teams were conducting screening actions, reconnaissance, and raids with local partisans. These units were dependent on superiors that understood the regional paradigm to guide their tactical actions.

Special Forces needs to reconsider how it leverages field grade officers in support of the UW mission. Simply rotating Special Forces group or battalion command staff through the TSOC and JSOTF is insufficient. Conducting UW, and especially the FID sub-mission, requires regional expertise, intimate relationships with host nation officers and policy makers, and an excellent knowledge of U.S. interagency stakeholders.

USASOC needs to canvas the State Department, U.S. Embassies, GCCs, and U.S. Allies for opportunities to station field grade Special Forces officers abroad in roles that resemble the good work of Foreign Area Officers. Field grade officers should be building professional contacts in-country, participating in leadership exchange programs, observing training exercises, writing campaign concepts, and refining doctrine. Most importantly, they should serve as regional experts and liaisons for SFOD-As as they deploy to theater. The current manner in which the command staff of a Special Forces group rotates into theater to run a JSOTF under the TSOC simply does not convey.

—

Stay tuned for next Monday’s continuation of “Practice of Unconventional Warfare,” where Fox discusses the bureaucratic inefficiencies of TSOCs and 1st Special Forces Command.

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sofrep.com · by Curtis L. Fox · February 17, 2025

15. Niall Ferguson: J.D. Vance Picked a Fight in Germany. Will He Get One in China?

Excerpts:

Fourth, and most importantly, China poses a much more serious threat to American primacy in the Indo-Pacific than most Americans appreciate. Last week, a very different American—the commander of INDOPACOM, Admiral Sam Paparo—gave a very different speech from Vance’s at the Honolulu Defense Forum.

“We’re very close to that [point] where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning,” he said, referring to Chinese naval activity off Taiwan. “Their aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises as they call them, they are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

While China, Russia, and North Korea cooperate ever more openly in the region, Paparo continued, “our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month. . . We operate on increasingly thin margins for error. Our opponents see these gaps, and they are moving aggressively to exploit them.”

Under these alarming circumstances, it seems extraordinary that anyone on Capitol Hill would hesitate to confirm Elbridge Colby—author of one of the key books on this issue, The Strategy of Denial—as undersecretary for policy at Defense. Important though America’s interests may be in the Middle East and Europe, the number-one national security challenge the Trump administration faces is the threat posed to American primacy in the Pacific by the vast arsenal of warships, missiles, and other military hardware that China has amassed in the past decade.

Failure to deter China from making a move against Taiwan would be potentially catastrophic, confronting President Trump with the choice between acquiescing in a Chinese takeover of the island, the vital hub where nearly all the world’s most sophisticated semiconductors are produced, or resisting it at the risk of starting World War III.

In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Scratchy Wilson finally runs into the sheriff—the one man in Yellow Sky capable of taking him on. Like Scratchy, the Trump administration is looking for a fight with all comers. But there is one fight it should be laser-focused on avoiding—because right now, a fight with China over Taiwan is the one fight the United States could lose.

Niall Ferguson: J.D. Vance Picked a Fight in Germany. Will He Get One in China?

From Mar-a-Gaza to the Eurocrats in Munich, no one—so far—is punching back against this White House. But there is one battle the U.S. cannot afford to lose.

By Niall Ferguson

02.17.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/jd-vance-picks-fight-with-europe?r=7i07&utm

Vice President J.D. Vance speaks at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on February 14, 2025. (Tobias Schwarz via Getty Images)

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For a man who is said to have his eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald J. Trump sure is spoiling for a fight.

His administration increasingly reminds me of the character in Stephen Crane’s Wild West short story, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” Scratchy Wilson prowls the dusty streets of the one-horse town in search of a fight—any fight. The locals take cover, barricading themselves into the Weary Gentleman saloon. Scratchy is reduced to taking pot shots at the barman’s dog and the saloon door. “The man called to the sky. . . . He bellowed and fumed and swayed his revolvers here and everywhere. But “there was no offer of fight—no offer of fight.”

Even before he was sworn in, President Trump was picking fights. Like Scratchy, he started with his neighbors. He threatened 25 percent tariffs on Canada and on Mexico and spoke of annexing the former. Neither counterpunched. Indeed, both caved within days—Mexico by sending 10,000 troops to the border; Canada by appointing a “fentanyl czar” and further expanding its $1.3 billion border security plan.

Then Trump looked further afield. He demanded the return of the Panama Canal. He asked Denmark to hand over Greenland. He slapped a 10 percent tariff on imports from China. Still, no fight—just a few, limited, tit-for-tat tariffs.

The latest attempt to start a fight—and by the looks of it, the most successful so far— took place at the usually dull Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day, when Vice President J. D. Vance challenged not only the European Union but also Britain.

“EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest,” said Vance, “the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content.’ ” He went on: “It looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.” And he reeled off multiple examples of EU and UK censorship, cancel culture, and downright authoritarianism.

I enjoyed the speech. Having last year suggested in these pages that the United States was evincing late-Soviet characteristics, I admired the way Vance passed the buck by accusing the Europeans of being the new Soviets.

The very next day, as if to prove Vance’s point, there was a wild altercation in London between a man who had set a copy of the Quran on fire, and another man who assaulted the Quran-burner with an enormous knife. The book-burner, Hamit Coskun, has been charged with a “religiously aggravated public order offense.” The knife wielder has been released on bail. The coup de grace: A passerby—a delivery biker—intervened. . . to kick Coskun after he had been knocked to the ground.

We also learned on Saturday that the British authorities have charged 292 people with spreading illegal “fake news” or sending “threatening communications” since the Online Safety Act came into force in 2023. A total of 67 have been convicted.

I suspect Americans, who live in a country with a First Amendment, will be astonished to learn the details: After three little girls were stabbed to death by a jihadist in Southport last July, there were multiple cases brought against people for social media postings that broke the Online Safety Act. The government deliberately suppressed the fact that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, had been referred to the anti-extremism program “Prevent” three times and was in possession of an al-Qaeda training manual at the time of the murders. Yet people were jailed for claiming online that he was a Muslim immigrant. One man was jailed for three months for a livestreamed video on TikTok that falsely claimed he was “running for his life” from rioters in Derby. (More examples here.)

In calling this out, Vance was saying more than just that Britain and Europe have forgotten, if they ever really understood, the importance of free expression. He was also making an argument about political liberty. “Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face,” he declared, “I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. . . . No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”

He delivered this message one day after a 24-year-old Afghan national drove a car into a trade union march not far from the Security Conference, injuring 37 people and killing a 37-year-old woman and her 2-year-old child; and a day before five people were stabbed and a 14-year-old boy killed in Villach in neighboring Austria by a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker.

There is a reason many ordinary Europeans who listened to J.D. Vance’s speech loved it, despite the tut-tuts of disapproval from his Eurocrat audience. It resonated with them because the European politicians who call for restrictions on immigration have for so long been stigmatized by the European political establishment.

Instead of listening to the voters, the Europeans at Munich—and journalists across the continent—simply disregarded Vance’s argument and united to complain that his boss had made a telephone call to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as part of Trump’s diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine. Even the great Tory journalist Charles Moore fired a broadside against Trump.

He and others overlooked Vice President Vance’s interview with The Wall Street Journal, published on Thursday, which quoted him as saying “that the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if. . . Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence.” Nor did any of the administration’s critics explain how they thought Trump could negotiate an end to the war without communicating with both Putin and Zelensky, as he did on Wednesday. Henry Kissinger is no longer here to point out that you can’t end a war by speaking only to the side whose territory was invaded.

The foreign policy of the Trump administration has, as the physicists say, emergent properties, because it is the product of a highly complex system still in the process of formation. This has the commentators understandably bamboozled. For Yaroslav Trofimov and Gideon Rachman, Trump is a brazen imperialist. For Walter Russell Mead, it’s all about spheres of influence, with Trump staking out the Western Hemisphere. For The Economist, Trump is Richard Nixon’s revenge—“madman theory” put into practice—but in a way that will ultimately self-sabotage.

Really? The first 19 calls that Marco Rubio made after being confirmed as secretary of state were to India, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Israel (twice), the “rightful president” of Venezuela, Canada, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey, NATO, Costa Rica, Poland, Egypt, China, and Vietnam. Nothing very imperial, hemispherical, or delusional about that list. Secretary Rubio’s first trips have been to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, followed by Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And remember: We are not even four weeks in. Just 16 of Trump’s nominees for the most consequential jobs in the administration have been confirmed—Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the few.

If there is any theme to this first month it is simple: This White House likes to pick fights. So far, from Mar-a-Gaza to the Gulf of America to the shutdown of USAID, no one is fighting back. But that should not be interpreted as evidence of America’s unassailable imperial might. As this administration takes shape, I think four things will come clear.

First, President Trump may imagine himself a new William McKinley, who was not only a committed “Tariff Man” but also the president who acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, plus a protectorate over Cuba. But in reality, America’s strategic situation is much more like that of Britain in the mid-1930s than the United States in the 1890s. The United States has a world-spanning array of overseas commitments and a defense budget exceeding $850 billion by some measures. It also has a debt that exceeds $28 trillion, which costs $881 billion a year in interest. This means that for the first time since the 1920s it is in breach of Ferguson's Law, which states any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceases to be a great power. (More on this in a forthcoming essay.)

Second, while a good deal of attention continues to focus on Gaza, and the president’s bold plan to resettle its population, the Middle East is, in reality, on the eve of a much more important conflict. That is the war that Israel could soon launch to disable the nuclear weapons program of a gravely weakened Iran. Will the president support it? Or will he follow his dovish instincts and seek a deal with Tehran instead? That is just one of the foreign policy fights already brewing within his nascent administration.

Third, ending the war in Ukraine will take much longer than President Trump hopes. That is because Russia has no incentive to agree to a ceasefire as long as it believes its army can grind out a victory; and Ukraine has no incentive either if the West can provide no meaningful security guarantees. Peacemaking is harder than it looks, as Bloomberg recently noted. Read former Ukrainian foreign secretary Dmytro Kuleba’s grim Financial Times interview from November if you need more persuading.

Fourth, and most importantly, China poses a much more serious threat to American primacy in the Indo-Pacific than most Americans appreciate. Last week, a very different American—the commander of INDOPACOM, Admiral Sam Paparo—gave a very different speech from Vance’s at the Honolulu Defense Forum.

“We’re very close to that [point] where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning,” he said, referring to Chinese naval activity off Taiwan. “Their aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises as they call them, they are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

While China, Russia, and North Korea cooperate ever more openly in the region, Paparo continued, “our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month. . . We operate on increasingly thin margins for error. Our opponents see these gaps, and they are moving aggressively to exploit them.”

Under these alarming circumstances, it seems extraordinary that anyone on Capitol Hill would hesitate to confirm Elbridge Colby—author of one of the key books on this issue, The Strategy of Denial—as undersecretary for policy at Defense. Important though America’s interests may be in the Middle East and Europe, the number-one national security challenge the Trump administration faces is the threat posed to American primacy in the Pacific by the vast arsenal of warships, missiles, and other military hardware that China has amassed in the past decade.

Failure to deter China from making a move against Taiwan would be potentially catastrophic, confronting President Trump with the choice between acquiescing in a Chinese takeover of the island, the vital hub where nearly all the world’s most sophisticated semiconductors are produced, or resisting it at the risk of starting World War III.

In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Scratchy Wilson finally runs into the sheriff—the one man in Yellow Sky capable of taking him on. Like Scratchy, the Trump administration is looking for a fight with all comers. But there is one fight it should be laser-focused on avoiding—because right now, a fight with China over Taiwan is the one fight the United States could lose.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a columnist with The Free Press. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of the Latin American fintech company Ualá, and a co-founding trustee of the new University of Austin.

16. The False Promise of Strategic Bombing

But won't the bomber (or the drone or the missile) always get through?

Excerpts:

Even if new drones and missiles do not turn strategic bombing into a war-winning strategy, militaries are unlikely to abandon this method of warfare any time soon. For starters, it is unclear what the alternative is. Both Russia and Ukraine turned to strategic warfare as the frontlines in the ground war stagnated. The Houthis have few conventional options to coerce Israel or the international community but for its attacks on shipping and Israeli cities. Israel has more options, but with most of its resources dedicated to more immediate threats, it has resorted to blowing up Houthi oil depots as a relatively easy way to send a message, even if it is ultimately an ineffectual one.

More important, this latest evolution of strategic warfare builds on the long-standing mystique of airpower as a quick and precise form of warfare that can end conflicts quickly without unnecessary bloodshed or destruction. Early airpower theorists conceived of strategic warfare as a way to spare mankind from the horrors of World War I and later heralded it as the means of bringing World War II to a close. Reality was, of course, very different. In 1945, only half of all bombs dropped by the Eighth Air Force struck within 1,000 feet of their target. In effect, waging strategic warfare by air meant destroying cities—or at least large swaths of terrain. Sometimes this was a result of imprecise aircraft—an obstacle that today’s technology has overcome. But sometimes, as in the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the mass bombing was an intentional, though counterproductive, strategy to weaken morale, based on the same theories of airpower that still persist in conflicts today.

The new form of strategic warfare taps into many of the same deep-seated tropes about airpower. After all, the drone, originally debuted during the war on terrorism, was designed to herald in a more precise but still effective method to strike targets, just as its precursors were. And drones and missiles do allow militaries to engage in strategic warfare without necessarily resorting to the wholesale destruction of cities as occurred during World War II. But that still does not equate to a war-winning strategy.

The idea that salvos of drones or missiles precisely aimed at the right set of targets can speed an end to conflict will likely retain its cachet in the public imagination and among policymakers—even if the actual results of strategic warfare fall short. After all, the alternative theories of victory—fighting and winning on the ground—make for a messy, bloody, and costly affair.

But it is precisely strategic bombing’s continued allure that may make the future so dangerous. As access to strategic bombing technologies expands, so will the motivation and opportunity to use them, as states and nonstate actors begin to see the tools as easy and effective solutions to their security issues. As a result, strategic bombing—whether effective or not—is poised to become increasingly common. Civilian populations and crucial infrastructure will ultimately pay the price.

The False Promise of Strategic Bombing

Foreign Affairs · by More by Raphael S. Cohen · February 18, 2025

From Ukraine to Yemen, New Forms of Airpower Are Redefining—but Not Winning—Wars

Raphael S. Cohen

February 18, 2025

A car destroyed by Russian military strikes in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, February 2025 Anatolii Stepanov / Reuters

RAPHAEL S. COHEN is Director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND’s Project Air Force and Director of the National Security Program at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

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As the war in Ukraine reaches its third anniversary, it has increasingly become defined by one particular kind of warfare: strategic bombing. Russia has incessantly targeted Ukraine’s energy grid and attacked population centers near the frontlines using Iskander missiles and Shahed drones. Ukraine has aimed U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile Systems and a plethora of domestically produced drones at Russian oil depots and weapons manufacturers. Other current and recent conflicts have followed a similar pattern. The Houthis have used a range of one-way attack drones and antiship ballistic missiles to attack international shipping in the Red Sea, and have even sent missiles toward Tel Aviv, well over a thousand miles away. Israel has mostly relied on its manned aircraft strike back against the Houthis but used its fleet of drones to strike targets in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and is openly debating whether to use more cruise and ballistic missiles in lieu of manned aircraft in the future. Missile and drone strikes have also figured prominently in other conflicts around the world, from the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in 2020, over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, to the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

Aided by technological advancements in drone and missile production, both state and nonstate actors have amassed strike capabilities that only the strongest states once claimed. Despite the widely differing contexts of these conflicts, belligerents in all of them have used strategic bombing for a similar purpose: to destroy morale and incapacitate an adversary’s ability to wage war.

Although the theory of strategic bombing is not new, the way it is conducted has undergone a radical change. From the earliest days of military flight, defense theorists were fixated on the simple, intriguing proposition that airpower could win wars independently by breaking morale and destroying an enemy’s war-waging capacity. That idea is still alive today. But strategic bombing looks very different now than it did even 50 years ago. Gone are the fleets of hundreds of bombers that were deployed to drop thousands of bombs in World War II and Vietnam. In their place, salvos of drones and missiles fire precise strikes on their targets, which are often a great distance from the bomb’s operator or launch pad.

Less than a decade ago, the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes as a primary part of its counterterrorism strategy was considered as novel as it was controversial. Now, practically all militaries—from superpowers to terrorist groups—have made drone and missile strikes central pillars of their fighting. Technology has made bombing more accessible, and this change will alter how wars are fought and what conflict looks like for decades to come. But it does not resolve the more fundamental question of strategic warfare. Precise, long-range bombing may transform the means of fighting wars, but it will not likely alter their outcomes.

BYE-BYE BOMBERS

For almost a century, strategic warfare has been largely tied to a single technology: the bomber aircraft. Alternative options have always existed—imperial Germany used Zeppelin airships in World War I to subdue the city of London, and Nazi Germany developed V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles in World War II. Yet these technologies mostly proved impractical for broader application. By contrast, bombers allowed states to deliver large quantities of ordnance relatively cheaply and effectively, making them the preferred tool for aerial targeting. Initially, states based their bombers relatively close to the fight and often used them to drop unguided or minimally guided weapons near their targets. The bomber eventually became more precise, especially after the U.S. Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, where guided munitions figured prominently. But even as late as the opening phases of the Iraq war in 2003, roughly a third of munitions dropped by the United States and its coalition partners were still unguided, general-purpose bombs.

Today, however, bombers may no longer be the cheap and effective proposition they once were. Their size and radar signatures make them increasingly vulnerable to modern air defenses. Russia, for example, has lost at least five of its strategic bombers and well over a hundred other aircraft since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, thanks to Ukrainian drone strikes and air defenses. Bombers are also much more expensive than they were when they were first introduced. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, first introduced in the 1990s, famously costs around $2 billion per aircraft. The newer B-21 Raider, which is still in testing, will be cheaper, but it still has an estimated price of over $700 million. Such outlays may still be worthwhile, especially if the aircraft in question can survive enemy air defenses and still drop cheap, short-range weapons. But there are limits to how many of these bombers even wealthy countries such as the United States can buy—much less afford to lose—in a war.

As bombers are less able to penetrate enemy air defenses, militaries have turned to longer-range standoff drones and missiles. Moreover, thanks to advances in sensing and navigation, militaries no longer need humans present near a target to attack it effectively. Wars are now being fought with long range drone or missile strikes, including in Ukraine and in the Middle East, where Iran launched two missile barrages against Israel in October 2024. To the extent that Russia uses its bomber fleet to fire missiles, it is doing so from as far away as the Caspian Sea—keeping its planes well outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses.

Spurred by further changes in technology and warfare, the shift to the age of the missile and the drone will likely only accelerate. China has amassed an arsenal of thousands of missiles with varying ranges, potentially in preparation to pummel Taiwan and other would-be adversaries into submission, and it is also expanding its drone fleet. The story is much the same for Russia, which since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine has boosted its investments in drone technologies and dramatically increased its cruise and ballistic missile production, despite Western sanctions. The United States is also doubling down on drones, with programs such as the Replicator initiative, which aims to produce thousands of attritable drones, priced cheaply enough that Washington can afford to lose them in combat, by August 2025. Just as important, the United States continues to develop strategies for using its conventional bombers in high-intensity conflict as a means to deliver missiles and potentially drones at range.

DRONES AND MISSILES FOR ALL

The rise of drones and missiles has democratized strategic warfare. In previous eras, strategic bombing was largely the domain of great powers because they were the only ones who had the technological know-how and budget to maintain major fleets of bombers. In 2022, only China, Russia, and the United States had strategic bomber aircraft, and that will likely remain the case, even as the three countries modernize and expand their fleets. Building, maintaining, and employing fleets of bombers—particularly modern stealthy ones that can survive modern air defenses—is expensive and technologically challenging to a degree that most states cannot (or don’t want to) sustain. By contrast, the world of missiles and drones is far more expansive—in large part because of a low cost of entry. Today, more than 30 countries have significant inventories of ballistic missiles. And even five years ago, 100 countries and nonstate actors boasted drone fleets. Since then, the market has only grown.

The rise of drones and missiles has led to a democratization of strategic warfare in a different sense, as well: state and nonstate actors can bombard each other from much greater distances, as far as their drone motors or rocket engines allow them, and such bombardments no longer require expensive additional investments such as navies or manned aircraft. In some respects, the fact that aggression is far less limited by distance than it used to be may in the long run be the more dangerous development. It increases the risk of internationalizing conflicts even more than in the past. When strikes can be launched from more than a thousand miles away from their target, rather than from directly above, they inevitably rope in neighboring powers that have to decide whether to allow those strikes to pass through their airspace, potentially angering the strikes’ targets, or to shoot them down, potentially angering the striking power.

Missiles launched from Iran against Israel, for example, or vice versa, must fly over Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states—countries that would likely prefer to sit on the sidelines of such a conflict and that likely prefer that live missiles not pass through their airspace. A similar set of issues could easily also play out in the Indo-Pacific. For example, if the United States came to Taiwan’s defense in the case of a Chinese invasion, China might respond by bombarding American bases in Australia with missiles that would likely have to fly over Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, no matter their initial position on the conflict. In other words, missiles have the potential to rapidly turn local wars into regional or even global ones.

THEORY VS. PRACTICE

Perhaps the central question underlying this new surge in strategic warfare is whether such campaigns deliver their intended effects. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians have cast their strategic warfare campaigns as potentially war-winning blows. In September 2024, for example, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argued that Ukraine needed missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory, because they would be key for Kyiv to “prevail” in the war. The Iranians have argued that their missile barrages against Israel, despite the little damage they caused, were designed to “punish” Israel for its “crimes,” and presumably to deter future aggression. The Houthis have framed their targeting of cargo ships as a means to end Israel’s war in Gaza. Israel, for its part, says that its strikes against the Houthis were intended to deter the group from attacking Israel in the future.

But none of these purported objectives have materialized. Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have caused pain but not broken Ukrainian morale. The Kremlin, in turn, has thus far been able to shrug off Ukraine’s strikes. Iranian and Houthi strikes have been largely intercepted by Israeli air defenses. Houthi attacks on shipping have diverted hundreds of billions of dollars of trade and burnished their credentials as an Iranian proxy but yielded few other tangible victories. Israeli strikes against Houthi energy infrastructure have caused significant damage and deterred the Houthis from attacking again. In other words, the democratization of strategic warfare has led to a lot of pain, but not much else.

The question that has dominated strategic warfare since it emerged a century ago remains the central question today: Does strategic warfare work? For the moment, the answer seems to be no; at the very least, it cannot on its own win wars or, in these cases, induce an adversary to change its posture.

The reasons why strategic warfare often falls short are timeless: it does not matter whether it’s a bomber, a drone, or a missile, or even something else entirely. Drones and missile attacks can, like bombers and manned aircraft, be thwarted by modern air defenses. Even if drones and missiles hit their targets, there is still no guarantee of success. Strategic warfare typically produces a rally around the flag effect for the targeted power, unifying societies against a common foe. But states, and nonstate actors too, are often more resilient than they might appear, and they can adapt to punishing attacks. When given the choice between capitulation or resistance, they usually choose resistance—and populations often become more unified than they were before.

AN ENDURING MYTH

Even if new drones and missiles do not turn strategic bombing into a war-winning strategy, militaries are unlikely to abandon this method of warfare any time soon. For starters, it is unclear what the alternative is. Both Russia and Ukraine turned to strategic warfare as the frontlines in the ground war stagnated. The Houthis have few conventional options to coerce Israel or the international community but for its attacks on shipping and Israeli cities. Israel has more options, but with most of its resources dedicated to more immediate threats, it has resorted to blowing up Houthi oil depots as a relatively easy way to send a message, even if it is ultimately an ineffectual one.

More important, this latest evolution of strategic warfare builds on the long-standing mystique of airpower as a quick and precise form of warfare that can end conflicts quickly without unnecessary bloodshed or destruction. Early airpower theorists conceived of strategic warfare as a way to spare mankind from the horrors of World War I and later heralded it as the means of bringing World War II to a close. Reality was, of course, very different. In 1945, only half of all bombs dropped by the Eighth Air Force struck within 1,000 feet of their target. In effect, waging strategic warfare by air meant destroying cities—or at least large swaths of terrain. Sometimes this was a result of imprecise aircraft—an obstacle that today’s technology has overcome. But sometimes, as in the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the mass bombing was an intentional, though counterproductive, strategy to weaken morale, based on the same theories of airpower that still persist in conflicts today.

The new form of strategic warfare taps into many of the same deep-seated tropes about airpower. After all, the drone, originally debuted during the war on terrorism, was designed to herald in a more precise but still effective method to strike targets, just as its precursors were. And drones and missiles do allow militaries to engage in strategic warfare without necessarily resorting to the wholesale destruction of cities as occurred during World War II. But that still does not equate to a war-winning strategy.

The idea that salvos of drones or missiles precisely aimed at the right set of targets can speed an end to conflict will likely retain its cachet in the public imagination and among policymakers—even if the actual results of strategic warfare fall short. After all, the alternative theories of victory—fighting and winning on the ground—make for a messy, bloody, and costly affair.

But it is precisely strategic bombing’s continued allure that may make the future so dangerous. As access to strategic bombing technologies expands, so will the motivation and opportunity to use them, as states and nonstate actors begin to see the tools as easy and effective solutions to their security issues. As a result, strategic bombing—whether effective or not—is poised to become increasingly common. Civilian populations and crucial infrastructure will ultimately pay the price.

RAPHAEL S. COHEN is Director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND’s Project Air Force and Director of the National Security Program at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Raphael S. Cohen · February 18, 2025

17. China Doesn’t Want to Lead an Axis

Is China even capable of "leading?" Does its political system and culture and history really allow it to be a leader in the international community? Or is it only capable of controlling? (But Russia and north Korea can hardly be "controlled" by anyone).

However, this article goes beyond the title and subtitle and makes recommendations for the US. But would these recommendations walk the US into a political trap? And should we really follow the Kissinger model and neglect human rights? Or should we follow the Reagan model and always keep human rights upfront?

Excerpts:

First, the United States should redouble its efforts to dissuade Taiwan from proclaiming independence, a highly destabilizing move that would have dangerous consequences for East Asia and the world. Washington could tie its Taiwan diplomacy to private reassurance from China that it will not invade the island.

At the same time, the United States should also tell China frankly that Washington will be forced to prepare for a conflict over Taiwan unless Beijing shows through public statements and a demonstrated willingness to engage in confidence-building measures in East Asia that it is not seeking another cold war. Such measures could include reciprocating Trump’s call for arms control, developing military-to-military contacts, and refraining from provocative military exercises.

Active diplomacy is Washington’s best hope to mitigate the slide into confrontation with Beijing.

When he was national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger scolded Democrats for preaching human rights to the Soviet Union. He correctly understood that such posturing annoyed the Soviets and made diplomacy more difficult. He scored formidable victories against the Soviet Union by pioneering rapprochement with China and outfoxing the Kremlin in the Middle East, nonetheless. The United States should now channel Kissinger in its approach to China and refrain from lecturing Beijing about democratic values, which alarm China’s leaders and do little to improve human rights in China. Trump would seem to have a natural proclivity to avoid the subject, since he has never trafficked in the liberal internationalist language of his predecessors.

Trump should also offer China a direct role in bringing Russia to the table to end the war in Ukraine. Beijing already has a point man for Russia and Ukraine in Ambassador Li Hui and has already issued statements about the need for peaceful resolution. By inviting Beijing to negotiations, Trump could test China’s goodwill and, if an agreement is reached, make sure that China has a stake in implementing a cease-fire.

February 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance. The seemingly impregnable alliance was in fact riven by internal contradictions and lasted for only about ten years before it collapsed in a cloud of mutual accusations of betrayal. China’s decision to pursue modernization and development in partnership, rather than in confrontation with the West, spared it from the Soviet Union’s fate. Today, China and Russia are once again working together, but their relationship is not an alliance and is far from “no limits.” With the possibility of another cold war looming, China is uncertain about whether it really wants to lead an axis of obstinate and unreliable clients into confrontation with the United States. It is both countries’ interests to make use of this uncertainty to explore alternative arrangements.

China Doesn’t Want to Lead an Axis

Foreign Affairs · by More by Sergey Radchenko · February 18, 2025

Beijing’s Deep Doubts About Russia and North Korea

Sergey Radchenko

February 18, 2025

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia, October 2024 Kristina Kormilitsyna / Reuters

SERGEY RADCHENKO is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

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China and Russia’s 2022 proclamation of a “no limits” partnership with “no ‘forbidden’ areas” has had a far-reaching effect. The agreement implied that Beijing and Moscow were about to resurrect their long-defunct alliance that, when it briefly bound the two powers in the 1950s, projected a formidable threat that the United States could not afford to leave unchallenged.

Regardless of their various disagreements, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “dear friend” and was overheard in March 2023 telling him that the two of them were together “driving changes unseen in a century.” Their frequent meetings have produced a set of programmatic statements that highlight a shared opposition to “hegemonism”—a code word for American dominance—and promise a more “just” international order. According to Russia’s ambassador to China, Igor Morgulov, Xi has accepted Putin’s invitation to attend Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in May 2025. And their partnership has extended beyond rhetoric and symbolism: China has provided material support for Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine in the form of dual-use technologies, which have both military and commercial applications, and purchases of Russian oil and gas.

And yet China’s leadership remains conflicted about Russia, fearing entanglement in Putin’s radical anti-Western schemes and eyeing with apprehension the prospect of a cold war that China neither wants nor knows how to fight. Beijing does not want to commit to a formal Chinese-Russian alliance and bitterly resists the idea that it belongs to an “axis” of some sort with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And Kim Jong Un’s regime in Pyongyang is increasingly the main source of irritation in Beijing.

In January 2025, I took part in discussions in Beijing and Sanya, China, organized by Tsinghua University, that were intended to serve as a form of Track II diplomacy, a practice in which nonstate civil society actors from various countries meet to discuss relations between their governments. This dialogue brought together academics and former senior officials and diplomats from China, Russia, and the United States for heated but productive conversations.

One striking insight emerged from these talks: the main reason for Beijing’s seeming unwillingness to build a trilateral coalition with Russia and North Korea is that such an arrangement would call for strategic leadership by China, and Beijing is decidedly uninterested in such a prospect. That is partly because any axis led by Beijing would require a mission around which its allies could unite—and no one in Beijing seems to know what that mission should be.

China’s hesitancy to head an alliance of unreliable partners in a struggle against the West suggests that its leaders are aware of the high costs of confrontation and are hedging their bets. President Donald Trump’s unconventional diplomacy, which pairs militant rhetoric and threats of economic warfare with promises of great power cooperation with China and Russia, has added to uncertainty in Beijing about the United States’ direction. As a result, Washington has a golden opportunity to test China’s intentions through renewed diplomatic efforts, even while gearing up for containment.

LEADER’S REMORSE

The consultations I attended focused on the question of China’s relationship with the rogue regime in North Korea. In the Chinese participants’ view, Beijing did not encourage Kim’s recent pivot to Russia, which culminated in a treaty of alliance with Russia in June 2024; indeed, it seems likely that Beijing was not even consulted in advance of this move. Nor did Xi approve North Korea’s direct involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has included the deployment of some 10,000 North Korean soldiers to Russia’s Kursk region, to repel a Ukrainian incursion. This move showed Kim’s ability and willingness to act independently of Beijing, even as he continues to rely on trade with China for his regime’s survival. In offering troops and large quantities of munitions to Putin, Kim has made a point of showing Xi that he is not China’s vassal.

The Russians at these consultations lamented the lack of coordination among China, North Korea, and Russia. Putin, who meets frequently, albeit separately, with Xi and Kim, would like to have a trilateral summit to forge closer relations among all three countries. But Xi and Kim have not seen each other since 2019. The countries formerly held trilateral consultations, most recently in October 2018, but North Korea now resists such meetings, preferring the company of Russia to China.

Beijing, too, is unwilling to create a bloc in East Asia, partly out of fear that it would cause Japan, South Korea, and the United States to build a more overtly anti-China bloc. The Chinese also worry, much more than the Russians do, about North Korea’s nuclear program. The Russians have pragmatically resigned themselves to a nuclear North Korea. But Beijing, seeing the potential knock-on effects in Japan and South Korea—which could be pushed to start nuclear programs of their own—may be keen to resume denuclearization talks with Pyongyang, even if the goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula appears out of reach. Some Chinese participants expressed concern about North Korean militancy, including the possibility that the Kim regime will launch military provocations against South Korea. Unsurprisingly, China fears being dragged into a conflict by a restless, unpredictable, and generally unreliable client state—whether it is North Korea or Russia.

China’s reticence to serve as the standard-bearer for Pyongyang is not new. When, in March 1990, the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary, Jiang Zemin, visited North Korea, General Secretary Kim Il Sung promised him that “the Korean people would unswervingly continue to hold high the banner of revolution and socialism … and fight shoulder to shoulder with the Chinese people in the common cause of building socialism.” He was hopeful that, following the Soviet collapse, China would lead the struggle on behalf of the Communist cause. But Beijing, in no hurry to take up the discarded banner of Soviet socialism, demurred, focusing instead on economic reform and a pragmatic foreign policy, dubbed taoguang yanghui (“hiding one’s capabilities and biding one’s time”). China went on to establish diplomatic ties with South Korea, and although Beijing did not break with Pyongyang, the relationship never regained the intimacy of the early Cold War, when the two fought together against the United States. China and North Korea would never again be, in the words of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, “as close as lips and teeth.”

FAILURE TO SIGNAL

Chinese leaders may be looking for lessons from the last time the superpowers faced off. Historians have conflicting answers about why the Cold War started: whether Joseph Stalin wanted it or whether it was an unfortunate accident. It seems plausible that what Stalin really wanted was a great-power compromise with the United States, according to which Moscow and Washington would respect each other’s legitimate spheres of influence. The problems began when Washington and Stalin diverged on how far into Europe and Asia Moscow’s legitimate sphere of influence should extend. Reacting to what it perceived as aggressive moves by Moscow, Washington, wary of underestimating Stalin’s expansionist ambitions, pursued containment.

Beijing’s predicament today is that it does not know how to reassure the United States that it is not seeking another cold war even as it actively prepares to wage one. China’s relentless nuclear buildup, its hostile espionage operations, its militant rhetoric, and, above all, its support for Russia suggest that Xi has already made his call and that a confrontation with the United States is inevitable.

China’s relationships with Russia and North Korea remain useful in its struggle against Western hegemony. Chinese strategists think in simple geopolitical terms: the United States, leader of the West, is trying to bring China down; Putin is confronting the West with his war in Ukraine; therefore, Putin is helping China, and cannot be thrown under the bus. Similarly, China will not completely abandon North Korea, not because it approves of Kim, but because he remains a valuable weapon against the United States.

On the other hand, getting too invested in the relationship with a militant Russia would box Beijing in. Xi’s fraternal embrace of Putin has damaged China’s standing in Europe: German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock criticized China in December 2024 for “opposing our core European interests with its economic and weapons aid to Russia,” and French President Emmanuel Macron pressed Xi to curb support for Moscow during their talks in May 2024. Given that China’s trade relationship with the European Union is worth $762 billion and has become all the more critical amid China’s economic stagnation, strategists in Beijing must ask themselves whether the economic polarization that would accompany an emerging cold war is really in China’s interest. Foreign Minister Wang Yi, for his part, went out of his way at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to reassure European leaders that Beijing does not plan to overthrow the existing global order.

Yet, as the experience of the present and previous centuries have shown, economic ties do not preclude great-power conflict. Putin’s reckless gamble in Ukraine demonstrated his willingness to sacrifice lucrative economic ties to Europe for glory. And no Chinese diplomat or academic, no matter how well connected, can confidently speak for Xi who, like Putin, may yet choose confrontation with the West.

TALK ISN’T CHEAP

One of the most important ways that Xi will signal his intentions vis-à-vis the West will be the course he decides to take with Taiwan. “No one can ever sever the bond of kinship between [Taiwan and the mainland], and no one can ever stop China’s reunification,” he announced in his 2025 New Year message. Like his predecessors, Xi has refused to renounce the possible use of force to unify China and Taiwan. But unlike them, he has imbued his comments with a great sense of urgency, as if he has already made up his mind about invading Taiwan and is just waiting for an opportunity to do so.

It is possible, however, that Xi is genuinely undecided and is biding his time as he anticipates the U.S. response. Here, too, Cold War lessons apply. Stalin badly miscalculated Washington’s response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, in part because he concluded from intelligence gathered from cable intercepts that the United States would not intervene to defend South Korea. He failed to foresee how Washington’s threat perceptions and policies had evolved in response to Moscow’s aggressive moves. Xi, too, could conclude that Washington is not serious about Taiwan’s defense and act accordingly. And like Stalin, he could err in his calculation, with even more tragic consequences for the world.

Just as the escalations of the Cold War were contingent and gradual, with moments of tension punctuated by efforts to set things right, the U.S.-China relationship today is not beyond redemption, even if it is far along the road to confrontation. If it does not want to proceed from learning about the Cold War to fighting a new one, the Chinese government should not act as if it does not want a dialogue with the United States.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China during the Biden administration, faced diplomatic obstruction and had very little access to Chinese policymakers. China has snubbed the Pentagon’s efforts to maintain military-to-military dialogue, and although former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin finally met his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun in May 2024, contacts remain sporadic. Such stonewalling could be a way to signal displeasure with what China perceives as Washington’s hawkishness, but, intentionally or not, it sends another message: that Beijing is already firmly set on a new cold war.

The U.S.-China relationship is not beyond redemption.

Beijing should instead signal to Washington, in public or through private channels, that China does not plan to invade Taiwan in the foreseeable future. It should tone down public rhetoric about impending “reunification” to provide a foundation for building desperately needed trust.

Beijing should also make it clear that it does not seek an alliance with Moscow. The “no limits” partnership, which produced great alarm in the West with no gain to China, is a reminder that what Beijing says about its relationship with Russia can have direct impact on Western threat perceptions. The disappearance of “antihegemonic” language from Chinese-Russian statements will not eliminate U.S. concerns about an emerging axis, but it will at least chip away at the substantial evidence for such concerns.

Most important, China’s leaders should become more directly involved in helping end Russia’s war in Ukraine. As the key buyer of Russia’s hydrocarbons and a major provider of industrial and consumer goods to Russia, China has substantial economic leverage in the relationship, which it could deploy to encourage Putin to accept a cease-fire. A frozen conflict would not run counter to China’s interest in avoiding escalation in Ukraine, it would stabilize relations with Europe, and might even present an area of overlap between Beijing and the Trump administration, which has signaled its interest in a cease-fire regardless of a comprehensive settlement of the war. Given Wang’s comments in Munich that “all parties and all stakeholders should, at an appropriate time, participate in the peace talks process,” and Trump’s intention to hold peace talks with Russia, now is the time for China to signal its interest in a direct and substantive dialogue with the United States on the war in Ukraine.

LEARNING FROM LAST TIME

When clouds began to settle over the U.S.-Soviet relationship in 1945, President Harry S. Truman confidently predicted that he would get his way 85 percent of the time because, as he put it, “the Soviet Union needed us more than we needed them.” The reality proved more complex. Fearing that the Americans would interpret any Soviet concessions as weakness, Stalin instructed his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to “display complete obduracy.” Today, the United States, without a nuclear monopoly and facing a much more powerful adversary in China, cannot aspire to Truman’s predicted success rate. Active diplomacy, then, is Washington’s best hope to mitigate and maybe even reverse the slide into confrontation with Beijing.

First, the United States should redouble its efforts to dissuade Taiwan from proclaiming independence, a highly destabilizing move that would have dangerous consequences for East Asia and the world. Washington could tie its Taiwan diplomacy to private reassurance from China that it will not invade the island.

At the same time, the United States should also tell China frankly that Washington will be forced to prepare for a conflict over Taiwan unless Beijing shows through public statements and a demonstrated willingness to engage in confidence-building measures in East Asia that it is not seeking another cold war. Such measures could include reciprocating Trump’s call for arms control, developing military-to-military contacts, and refraining from provocative military exercises.

Active diplomacy is Washington’s best hope to mitigate the slide into confrontation with Beijing.

When he was national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger scolded Democrats for preaching human rights to the Soviet Union. He correctly understood that such posturing annoyed the Soviets and made diplomacy more difficult. He scored formidable victories against the Soviet Union by pioneering rapprochement with China and outfoxing the Kremlin in the Middle East, nonetheless. The United States should now channel Kissinger in its approach to China and refrain from lecturing Beijing about democratic values, which alarm China’s leaders and do little to improve human rights in China. Trump would seem to have a natural proclivity to avoid the subject, since he has never trafficked in the liberal internationalist language of his predecessors.

Trump should also offer China a direct role in bringing Russia to the table to end the war in Ukraine. Beijing already has a point man for Russia and Ukraine in Ambassador Li Hui and has already issued statements about the need for peaceful resolution. By inviting Beijing to negotiations, Trump could test China’s goodwill and, if an agreement is reached, make sure that China has a stake in implementing a cease-fire.

February 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance. The seemingly impregnable alliance was in fact riven by internal contradictions and lasted for only about ten years before it collapsed in a cloud of mutual accusations of betrayal. China’s decision to pursue modernization and development in partnership, rather than in confrontation with the West, spared it from the Soviet Union’s fate. Today, China and Russia are once again working together, but their relationship is not an alliance and is far from “no limits.” With the possibility of another cold war looming, China is uncertain about whether it really wants to lead an axis of obstinate and unreliable clients into confrontation with the United States. It is both countries’ interests to make use of this uncertainty to explore alternative arrangements.

SERGEY RADCHENKO is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Sergey Radchenko · February 18, 2025

18. The Army and the New Paradigm of Ground Combat: Lessons from Ukraine’s Failed 2023 Counteroffensive

A lot to parse in this essay.

Excerpts:

1. Battlefield Transparency. 

2. Mobility. 

3. Combat Power Preservation.

4. Changes to the Operations Process. 

5. Battlefield Geometry. 

6. Resourcing at the Decisive Echelon. 

7. Information Flow and Decision-Making.

Toward a Framework for the New Paradigm of Ground Combat

Isolate

Mutually Suppress

Selectively Destroy

Lastly, if the Army considers adapting its offensive frameworks, then it must also update unit training requirements; however, the challenge of doctrinal, organizational, and tactical renovation is not new to our service. As an analysis of a major division reorganization that began in the 1970s described it, “the brigaded 4-regiment division of World War I, the 3-regiment division of World War II, the five-sided battle group division of the ‘pentomic era,’ and the flexible ROAD division introduced in the 1960s [all] resulted from a recognition of obsolescence.” If the Army identifies a similar obsolescence in its organization and doctrine today—if they are not optimally suited to the current operational environment—it should take steps toward change similar to those of its past.

The US Army must be prepared for the greatest challenges presented to our nation. And as leaders and stewards of the profession, we have an obligation to play our roles and explore methods to employ emergent technology and develop a framework that will yield battlefield success.

The Army and the New Paradigm of Ground Combat: Lessons from Ukraine’s Failed 2023 Counteroffensive - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Bryan J. Bonnema · February 18, 2025

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The current battlefield is riddled with multiple forms of contact. The combination of indirect fires, efficient and increasingly shortened kill chains, electromagnetic interference, the proliferation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—including, one-way attack UAS, thermal optics, mines, and antitank guided missile favor the defender and impose considerable risk to offensive operations. In May 2023, it is estimated that the Ukrainian Army expended around ten thousand UAS a month to conduct reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, and shaping operations. The US Army is working to adapt to these operational realities with, for instance, expanding its transformation in contact initiative to include new organizations and move into transformation in contact 2.0. But much of what that the Army envisions under that initiative—including its emphasis on short-, medium-, and long-range reconnaissance UAS—falls well short of what current battlefield conditions demand. Even if it could muster a more robust magazine of UAS platforms, the Army has not refined its offensive framework to account for the changing paradigm of ground combat. This paradigm favors the defender; it punishes decisive battle and humbles tactical leaders who believe they can simply suppress, breach, and seize their way to victory. The previous paradigm of maneuver-centric activity massed combat power, massed fires and effects, and required extensive rehearsals and synchronization. The current paradigm requires a framework that accounts for layered, multidomain threats, finite resources, tactical innovation and expedited decision making.

The characteristics of this new paradigm will require tactical leaders to employ a framework that extensively isolates enemy objectives, mutually suppresses key frontline positions and nodes, and selectively disintegrates or destroys enemy formations. To produce battlefield success, this framework must provide a governing logic to UAS employment and fires allocation, and it must fundamentally seek to preserve our most precious resource—our soldiers. The crucible of combat in today’s operational environment will expend resources and lives that the US Army, and the American people, have not experienced since the Korean War. As leaders, we owe it to our soldiers and families to assess the palatability, sustainability, and efficacy of offensive operations in today’s environment.

Ukraine and the Shattering of the Legacy Paradigm

The current tactical revolution of UAS—and its operational consequences—is illustrated by the attempted large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023. This episode in the Russia-Ukraine War deserves its own series of monographs and deeper analysis; however, even a brief description of what occurred highlights the doctrinal gaps and tactical limitations presented to mechanized formations conducting a deliberate breach in today’s environment—like the US Army’s armored brigade combat teams. To paraphrase the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, we must do more than retell the actions between belligerents—we must apply critical analysis of Ukrainian tactical leaders and their thought processes as they negotiated challenging strategic and political constraints.

Prior to Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, Russian occupiers constructed one of the “largest and most fortified [defensive lines] in Europe since World War Two.” This defensive line consisted of approximately two thousand miles of obstacle effects, layers of antitank ditches, defensive positions, mines, and layered direct and indirect weapon systems. These robust defensive measures led Western advisors to encourage a counteroffensive along a single axis—in the area of Zaporizhzhia—as opposed to the broad, three-prong attack that the Ukraine Army adopted by adding axes of attack in Berdiansk and Bakhmut, as well. (See here for a graphic representation of the two counteroffensive plans.)

Within each axis, Ukrainian forces encountered deliberate, layered, and integrated resistance. Despite Western material assistance and advising, Ukrainian forces did not achieve operational shock or substantial territorial gains. In fact, Ukrainian advancements did not advance more than approximately 7.5 kilometers along any front.

The Russian defenders, despite arguably poorer quality of troops and training, created a hellish landscape that would challenge any Western force. The tactical dilemma presented was a combined arms nightmare that required droves of platforms, resources, and time. Ultimately this tactical dilemma punished the attacker’s attempts at executing exactly what US doctrine calls for—the massing of combat power to penetrate and then exploit the breakthrough of the enemy’s defenses. The tactical environment nullified the strengths of a maneuver-centric approach that centered on finite mounted assets.

It is difficult to convey the countless variables that informed Ukrainian decision-making; however, what is certain is that the Ukrainian Army applied a combined arms breach into the problem set described. The combined arms breach—which doctrinally requires a framework to suppress, breach, and seize at a desired point of penetration—failed. Not only did the framework fail to achieve tactical success, but it failed operationally along three distinct axes of advance.

Would the US Army Do Better?

This case study requires careful future analysis; however, as stewards of our profession and resources, we should consider the efficacy of the offensive frameworks the US Army currently has in the context of the tactical environment Ukrainian forces found in 2023. Our discussion leads us to ask whether the task organization and material solutions updated based on transformation in contact 2.0, applied by US Army armored formations, would yield measurably more successful outcomes in this environment. Simply stated—could the US Army do any better than the Ukrainian armed forces given the same operational environment?

The current paradigm of ground combat, made explicit by Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, suggests seven variables that will inform the future construct of offensive operations:

1. Battlefield Transparency. UAS and precision fires enable all belligerents to see, sense, and deliver effects well beyond the FLET/FLOT (forward line of enemy troops and forward line of own troops). This new tactical revolution and changing characteristic of war imposes a grave threat to massed formations. If we cannot mass, how we will breach? And if we cannot breach, how will we seize terrain?

2. Mobility. Mines have resurfaced as a major obstacle to offensive maneuver. Our current inventory of plows, rollers, mobile bridges, mine-clearing line charges, and other mobility platforms are not sufficient to reduce the density of mines employed by Russian defensive positions.

3. Combat Power Preservation. Military forces require meaningful ways to generate mass without expending high volumes of mounted platforms and lives. This observation lends further credence to the need for small, plentiful, and distributed drones that could serve as a contact layer across the tactical FLET/FLOT. This could be a way to preserve combat power until conditions are met to seize terrain—but only if the United States invests in the required number of stockpiles required to make this a reality.

4. Changes to the Operations Process. Tactical formations need methods to distribute orders and execute the operations process in faster planning cycles and across dispersed locations. The operations process must keep pace with the modern battlefield. Our current training paradigm conditions us to execute deliberate planning and troop-leading procedures across multiple hours or even days. We then rehearse the plan on a static terrain model before disseminating updates to static command posts. The current operational environment requires formations to execute the operations process through distributed locations and under constant observation. We must not allow the operations process to prevent us from gaining and maintaining the initiative.

5. Battlefield Geometry. UAS, including one-way attack UAS, along with electronic warfare capabilities, a variety of sensors, and weapons standoff will change the scope and scale of division, brigade, battalion, and company responsibilities. Legacy planning considerations for unit frontages and depths must account for extended sensing and strike ranges.

6. Resourcing at the Decisive Echelon. The Army’s transformation in contact initiative seeks to improve the lethality of brigade combat teams; however, as a force, we have not defined which echelon will be the decisive command. US Army divisions and brigades of the future will still lack the appropriate mass, resources, logistics, and communications to act independently of their higher headquarters within the emergent operational environment.

7. Information Flow and Decision-Making. We have yet to understand the impact UAS will have on the relationship between information flow and decision-making. Our Army employs a quality noncommissioned officer corps and demands calculated risk taking and initiative; however, an empowered tactical formation assuming independent action may unknowingly maneuver toward its own demise. Future offensive frameworks should define conditions in which tactical formations exercise prudent risk and initiative under the umbrella of a deliberate offensive framework.

Based on observations of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, and informed by an understanding of these seven variables, we can establish a problem statement:

Given the high efficacy of enemy UAS, mines, and precision fires, how does the US Army manage high volumes of data across distributed locations, and then aggregate combat power in a method that enables operational endurance for follow-on operations while managing risk and preserving combat power?

Toward a Framework for the New Paradigm of Ground Combat

Again, this inquiry deserves a dedicated study supported by the tremendous resources from the Combined Arms Center, Army Futures Command, and the Maneuver Center of Excellence; however, available (unclassified) information suggests that the modern battlefield requires the US Army to reevaluate offensive frameworks if it chooses to maintain operational endurance against a prepared enemy or within a protracted campaign. Based on the variables and problem statement described above, we propose a framework, designed principally for armored brigade combat teams, that respects the defensive layers of the enemy, acknowledges the tactical revolution of UAS, and preserves our most valuable assets until conditions are set: Isolate, Suppress, Destroy.

Isolate

This phase requires the brigade to isolate battalion and company objectives. This phase does not attrit enemy formations, but degrades, dislocates, disintegrates, and disrupts key enemy systems (e.g., command-and-control nodes, electronic warfare platforms, fuel and ammunition stocks, and radar and other sensors). This phase requires the brigade to stabilize the FLET/FLOT and cover a frontage of over one hundred kilometers, compared to the legacy planning factors of three to eight kilometers. In this scenario, the brigade synchronizes and orchestrates a collection plan that leverages its organic assets as well as medium-range reconnaissance UAS and the family of UAS that reside at the squadron and battalion level. The brigade, concurrent with squadron security operations, will build the digital common operational picture of the isolated area. Simultaneously, the brigade dynamically retasks the squadron and battalions to deliver collection and fires tasks.

The squadron and battalions will contribute to the digital common operational picture, collect on the enemy, dynamically task companies and troops to deploy medium- and short-range reconnaissance UAS, and rapidly execute the operations process.

The new paradigm will demand much of companies and troops. These tactical formations will cover extended frontages within the brigade FLOT, maintain dispersion, maximize physical and digital concealment, contribute to the digital common operational picture, and be prepared to dynamically deploy UAS or ground combat power. Of note, this phase will require squadron troops to extend their legacy frontages to account for long- and medium-range reconnaissance UAS, as well as the ranges of commercial, off-the-shelf UAS. In the aggregate, these platforms will solidify the brigade FLET/FLOT as isolation occurs.

At the end state of this phase, enemy battle positions are isolated from higher or adjacent communication, are unable to synchronize fires, collection, or effects, and are unable to orchestrate a responsive counterattack or coordinated defense. These activities set the conditions for mutual suppression in zone.

Mutually Suppress

This phase masses the effects of direct, indirect, UAS, and all forms of contact onto select enemy battle positions. The brigade and battalions continue isolation measures; however, this phase should see a commitment of brigade- and battalion-level assets against enemy objectives. The brigade will continue its effects against enemy command-and-control nodes, fire direction centers, and sensors while prioritizing enemy positions. This phase requires battalions to mutually mass on select objectives.

The squadron and battalions will continue to collect on the enemy and disintegrate enemy formations, maintain a digital common operational picture, direct troop- and company-level collection, and mass lethal effects against enemy battle positions.

Companies and troops will continue to cover a frontage of extended distances, maintain dispersion, conduct survivability, contribute to the brigade common operational picture, conduct troop-leading procedures from disaggregated positions, and prepare to rapidly seize terrain.

At the end state of this phase, enemy command-and-control nodes are dislocated from subordinate units and frontline formations, and subordinate units are dislodged from each other. Select enemy battle positions receive massed fires and are severely attrited. Lastly, aggregated effects create the conditions for ground maneuver and selective destruction of critical enemy command-and-control nodes and sensors.

Selectively Destroy

This phase facilitates the point of penetration and offensive seizure. This phase also commits ground combat power—which incurs the greatest risk for the attacker. The brigade will continue to collect, disintegrate enemy counterattacks, destroy enemy command-and-control nodes and sensors, deny the enemy from reinforcing, and dynamically retask subordinate elements.

The squadron and battalions continue to collect on the enemy, mass effects, and synchronize ground maneuver. They could also dynamically retask subordinates in the event of enemy collapse, withdrawal, or consolidation.

Companies and troops should lead with metal on metal—with ground unmanned ground systems including robotic breaching assets. These platforms will shape ground objectives through direct fire and will likely absorb enemy direct and indirect responses. Ground maneuver will then quickly aggregate to conduct breaching operations and ground seizure. Formations will continue to contribute to the brigade common operational picture and be prepared to respond to emergent conditions, conduct resupply, and consolidate.

At the end state of this phase, enemy command-and-control nodes are dislocated from their subordinates and unable to orchestrate a coherent response. Select enemy positions are cleared and terrain is seized. Lastly, the brigade FLOT advances while retaining sufficient combat power for follow-on operations.

The Way Ahead

What is required for the Army to truly be prepared for the new paradigm of ground combat and its many inherent challenges—challenges like those Russia presented to attacking Ukrainian forces in 2023?

First, as stewards of the profession we should encourage healthy discourse to address these challenges and emergent threats. We should leverage the work already being done by Army Futures Command, the Maneuver Center of Excellence, and the Maneuver Capability Development Integration Directorate; however, as tactical leaders, battalion and brigade leadership who are implementing emerging capabilities owe bottom-up feedback to employ new material solutions and integrate them into a coherent framework that is palatable to our political leaders, sustainable with Army fiscal resources, and effective against our enemies. We can ill afford an operational setback like the one Ukrainian forces met with during their 2023 counteroffensive.

Second, the Army should consider experimentation with 3D printing to complement the functions of short-, medium-, and long-range reconnaissance UAS. According to a white paper produced by the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force, this new formation successfully 3D printed a series of drones while supporting an exercise in the Philippines. Army leaders and logisticians across the Pacific are beginning to see the merits of harnessing 3D printing and commercial, off-the-shelf acquisitions, which can compound advantages as 3D printing alleviates the burden of push-and-pull logistics, and could serve as an asymmetric advantage. Alongside this effort, the Army should leverage commercial, off-the-shelf small to medium UAS and components. The 1st Multi-Domain Task Force has experimented with and validated both of these modular concepts in the First Island Chain. For example, an experimental fixed-wing UAS—3d printed and built with commercial, off-the-shelf components—was built by members of the formation at a cost of just $7,000 per copy, dramatically less than the purchase prices of the Raven ($60,000) or Puma ($250,000). Future experimentation by the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force will modularize the payload of UAVs to account for evolving electromagnetic threats and operational requirements. Achieving localized mass will require the force to seek similar cost-effective measures.

Third, future dialogue should account for other novel initiatives, such as those explored in the Army Future Command’s Project Convergence capstone events. These experiments aggressively seek to advance concepts of combined joint all domain operations. It also ensures that Army future capabilities can integrate with effects from the joint force. In this extended campaign of learning, experiments should dive into the tactical level as we prepare maneuver formations to operate in a new paradigm. The Army’s recent willingness to experiment with new capabilities at CTCs (combat training centers) is commendable; however, we must still determine the cognitive direction of maneuver formations as we work to refine our operational approach to fight in the new paradigm.

Fourth, the Army should consider experimenting with tactical offensive frameworks that account for short-, medium-, and long-range reconnaissance UAS, as well as commercial, off-the-shelf systems, in support of brigade and battalion objectives. It should also consider the implications of task organization during breaching, security operations, and all offensive operations given the dynamic revolution of tactical UAS.

Fifth, the Army must refine the geographical scope, scale, and tactical responsibilities of brigade, battalion, and company formations. If a battalion has the capacity to sense 20–40 kilometers beyond the FLOT, then it absorbs a responsibility to deconflict with higher headquarters and other organizations. In turn, the brigade owes targeting priority, routes, timing, and synchronization to multiple battalions to deliver effects in an era of extended sensing and ranging. Lack of a central orchestrator risks target overkill, or worse, a desynchronized offensive effort. Past Army doctrine anticipated that an enemy “tank or motorized rifle company’s attack frontage is 500 to 800 meters” and that an attacking enemy battalion’s frontage is “1 to 2 kilometers.” The current paradigm, based on observations from the Russia-Ukraine War, suggests that battalions will sense, deliver, and synchronize activity well beyond this legacy range. We must update our offensive planning factors once we firmly establish the governing logic of our offensive framework. We must also account for the added requirements we are placing on our tactical commanders—and find creative ways to enable them to execute what this new environment requires of them.

Lastly, if the Army considers adapting its offensive frameworks, then it must also update unit training requirements; however, the challenge of doctrinal, organizational, and tactical renovation is not new to our service. As an analysis of a major division reorganization that began in the 1970s described it, “the brigaded 4-regiment division of World War I, the 3-regiment division of World War II, the five-sided battle group division of the ‘pentomic era,’ and the flexible ROAD division introduced in the 1960s [all] resulted from a recognition of obsolescence.” If the Army identifies a similar obsolescence in its organization and doctrine today—if they are not optimally suited to the current operational environment—it should take steps toward change similar to those of its past.

The US Army must be prepared for the greatest challenges presented to our nation. And as leaders and stewards of the profession, we have an obligation to play our roles and explore methods to employ emergent technology and develop a framework that will yield battlefield success.

Colonel Bryan J. Bonnema is currently the future operations chief at V Corps. He will take command of 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division in June 2025.

Lieutenant Colonel Moises Jimenez is an exercise planner and exchange officer at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu, Hawaii. He will take command of 2-5 CAV, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division in May 2025.

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

Image credit: Pfc. Frederick Poirier, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Bryan J. Bonnema · February 18, 2025

19. Armed Neutrality for Ukraine Is NATO’s Least Poor Option

Excerpt:

Ukraine’s armed neutrality is the best chance Brussels and Kyiv have for a lasting peace settlement that also preserves NATO, even if it falls short of what some hoped for early in the war. By offering Ukraine armed neutrality but no formal security guarantees, NATO members can prevent further damage to the alliance’s credibility and ensure that the alliance emerges from the Russo-Ukrainian war battered but not broken.

Armed Neutrality for Ukraine Is NATO’s Least Poor Option - War on the Rocks

Jennifer Kavanagh and Christopher McCallion

warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · February 18, 2025

When it comes to securing Ukraine’s future, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, armed neutrality is the worst option for the United States and NATO, except for all the others.

As the Russo-Ukrainian war approaches its third anniversary, the conflict may be nearing a turning point. Ukraine’s military is dangerously exhausted, facing worsening manpower shortages and the prospect of diminishing Western aid. Russia, despite steady gains, hasn’t scored a decisive breakthrough and is suffering high losses amid tightening economic constraints. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has promised to end the war and has already held discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get negotiations started.

Whenever peace talks begin, they will be difficult and complex. While questions about territory will most likely be settled on the battlefield, arrangements for Ukraine’s long-term security will be a stubborn sticking point. Several alternatives have been proposed, including NATO membership with its Article 5 guarantee, a bi- or multilateral security guarantee from the United States or a group of European states, or “armed neutrality” — which would leave Ukraine with no security guarantee but with substantial military assistance. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argues NATO membership is the only way to ensure a lasting peace, many current alliance members, including the United States, are opposed, unwilling to take on the additional security burden.

The perceived safety offered by NATO membership is a dangerous illusion for Ukraine, however. Although it is described as “ironclad,” the alliance’s Article 5 commitment is not quite the guarantee Kyiv might hope for. Article 5 does not require members to respond with military force against an aggressor, and its deliberately vague wording gives allies the freedom to decide how and when to react. As a result, past Western refusal to send military forces to defend Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 would weaken the credibility of any formal security guarantee offered to Kyiv by NATO countries. Words alone would not prevent a deterrence failure, and an American tripwire force — which might address this risk — has already been ruled out by successive presidential administrations. Worse, by extending an unreliable commitment to Ukraine, NATO would also undermine the credibility of Article 5 guarantees to existing members.

Of proposed alternatives, only armed neutrality avoids these consequences while offering the most promising chance for long-term peace. Ukraine’s armed neutrality would, however, come with responsibilities for NATO members, especially in Europe, to help Kyiv build its arsenal and fortify the continent’s own defenses.

Become a Member

Dubious Guarantees

Since Trump’s November 2024 presidential election win, Ukraine and its supporters have feared that his promise to bring the war to a quick end would halt U.S. military aid and push Kyiv into an unfavorable settlement. An imposed peace deal that leaves Ukraine with no support would not serve America’s or Trump’s interests, however. Most importantly, past research suggests that forced war settlements rarely last. Not only would Kyiv have incentives to undermine a deal that it felt pressured to accept, especially one it saw as a surrender, but Russia might be emboldened to launch a third invasion into a defenseless Ukraine, hoping to seize more territory or extract more political wins from the West. Renewed war would once again put Moscow and NATO at risk of direct conflict, while Russian geographic gains would further erode Ukraine’s sovereign territory and allow Russia to pose new threats to Ukraine’s neighbors. For Trump himself, a resumption of hostilities would mark a foreign policy failure and challenge his “peace through strength” narrative — and, if Kyiv fell, he might be faulted for “losing Ukraine.”

Trump’s early and proactive commitment to negotiations suggests that he may have at least one goal in common with Zelensky: reaching an enduring settlement to the war. Efforts to achieve a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia face a commitment problem, however. A history of distrust and broken agreements mean that neither side believes that the other will adhere to a deal. At first blush, security guarantees seem to address this problem by offering one or both sides an assurance that renewed aggression will be met with consequences, including external military support and retaliation.

Ukraine’s preferred security guarantee is a rapid accession to NATO. Recalling the toothless assurances contained in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly expressed the view that the more binding insurance of Article 5 (and the implied protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella) would be the best way to provide Ukraine the security it needs. In December 2024, for instance, Zelensky told European leaders that “An invitation for Ukraine to join NATO is a necessary thing for our survival.”

However, Ukraine’s membership in NATO is essentially a non-starter as a condition for peace with Russia and as a credible commitment by the United States and its European allies. Though there remain disagreements about Putin’s objectives for his 2022 invasion, the repeated pledge to bring Ukraine into NATO was a key contributing cause of the war, and Moscow would almost certainly prefer to continue fighting than allow it to join the alliance. Moreover, NATO has already demonstrated twice that it is unwilling to come to Ukraine’s defense when the latter has been invaded, assessing the risks to be higher than the interests at stake. This would undermine the credibility of a future NATO guarantee to Ukraine. After all, simply extending NATO membership on paper to Ukraine would not change allied cost-benefit calculations. As importantly, an uncredible NATO commitment to Ukraine would deal a devastating blow to the alliance’s existing guarantees, especially those on the eastern front, which would seem even more uncertain. While Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seemed to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine in recent remarks to other European leaders, he later walked that back, saying instead that “everything is on the table.”

A bilateral U.S. security guarantee for Ukraine would be similarly unacceptable to Moscow and unworkable for the trans-Atlantic alliance, whether it took the form of a more binding mutual defense agreement like the U.S.-Japanese treaty relationship or something more flexible like the 1975 U.S. memorandum of agreement with Israel. The United States has long been clear that Ukraine’s alignment is not a national security imperative and that the balance of resolve would always be in Moscow’s favor in a showdown over the country. Speaking in 2016, President Barack Obama acknowledged the limited U.S. stakes in Ukraine, arguing that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.” Nothing Trump or President Joe Biden have said or done has wavered from this basic assessment. Ukraine’s non-NATO status is thus the consequence, not the cause, of America’s lack of vital interest in guaranteeing its defense. In the words of former President Richard Nixon, “Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”

Given its explicit refusal to defend Ukraine in the past, any U.S. promise to do so in the future would face questions about its reliability, especially without an accompanying deployment of U.S. military forces, which Trump and his advisors have already ruled out. For his part, a U.S. miliary presence in Ukraine would also be unacceptable to Putin, who has made clear that he views the presence of American forces and military infrastructure in eastern Europe as the main threat posed by NATO expansion.

European guarantees to Ukraine might seem more credible on the surface. After all, Europe has a common interest in balancing Russia with an independent Ukraine as a buffer. If Ukraine were to become a member of the European Union, for example, it would fall under the Lisbon Treaty’s mutual defense provision. Although the provision is modeled on NATO’s Article 5, it has not been sanctified in the same way and remains more ambiguous in nature. Still, a European security commitment would bring its own limitations and complications for NATO.

Technically, European guarantees would not implicate Article 5, as European states would be acting outside the umbrella of the alliance. But in practice, it would prove difficult, if not impossible, to separate European guarantees to Ukraine from de facto NATO protection, especially if European forces were attacked. To prevent entanglement, the firewall between NATO and any European guarantor coalition would have to be extensive. Such carveouts would inevitably and significantly weaken the alliance by formally conditioning commitments that are supposed to be grounded in a substantive strategic imperative for common defense. This would present an insoluble dilemma: If Ukraine and Russia got into a future war and only some European states came to Kyiv’s defense, either the rest of NATO would have to stand aside as their allies are attacked — undermining the alliance beyond repair — or the formal limits placed on Article 5 would fail, leaving the alliance splintered between those dragged into war and those seen as reneging on their commitments.

Armed Neutrality and Its Benefits

The final option, “armed neutrality,” would come with no foreign security guarantees, but it would not leave Ukraine defenseless. Ukraine would give up its bid for NATO and likely also E.U. membership permanently — or at least for an extended period — and the country would be turned into a bristling porcupine that would be difficult and costly for Russia to invade in the future, with impenetrable barriers and anti-tank mines on its de facto borders, strong air defense capabilities, and abundant munitions. NATO would likely never agree to commit in writing to limits on Ukraine’s alliance membership, as the alliance has long insisted that no third country has a veto over NATO membership decisions. Moscow, meanwhile, would also be unlikely to accept informal assurances from NATO given what it sees as a history of broken promises from the West. Ukraine could therefore agree to formally withdraw or indefinitely pause its NATO and E.U. membership bids as part of a larger political settlement, or could commit to non-aligned, neutral status in its constitution, as Kyiv has done in the past.

As a neutral state, Ukraine would still need significant military support from the United States and Europe to build an arsenal capable of deterring Russia and defending its territory. The United States and NATO allies have limited stocks remaining and constrained defense production capacity today but, since Russia too will need time to rebuild before it can consider a renewed attack, they will have five to 10 years to help Ukraine build a credible deterrent.

Early tranches of aid would focus on defensive capabilities limited by what the United States can still provide at scale given global commitments: anti-tank mines, concrete for constructing barriers like dragon’s teeth and trenches, short-range artillery, and some types of ammunition. Though Ukraine has made some defensive efforts, there is still much it can do to make areas near its long borders with Russia inhospitable to invaders. Ukraine might also use military assistance dollars to help recruit and train a large fighting force and capable reserve. Continued investment in Ukraine’s drone development can supercharge its production of uncrewed systems, which can be used for surveillance or to harass adversary forces in the event of an attack. Later tranches of assistance might include command-and-control systems, some longer-range munitions, and armored vehicles. Initially, the United States would lead Ukraine’s rearming, but as defense production in Europe increases, it should assume primary responsibility for arming Ukraine. Ukraine’s history as a defense manufacturing powerhouse should also be leveraged by investing heavily in its indigenous weapons production. Finally, to procure sufficient air defense capabilities at all ranges, Ukraine will need to exploit many procurement pathways, including co-production arrangements between foreign and Ukrainian firms.

Critics have deemed armed neutrality “doomed to fail,” but a careful analysis suggests it is Ukraine’s least risky option. In this scenario, Kyiv would be responsible for its own security. It would have to invest in rebuilding its defense-industrial base and strengthening and modernizing its combat capabilities over the long term, with help from the United States and Europe. But along with the burdens of independence, it would also receive the benefits of self-sufficiency.

Indeed, history offers frequent reminders that the only truly “ironclad” defense is the one a country provides itself. It is — as Kenneth Waltz famously claimed — ultimately a “self-help” world. In many ways, Ukraine’s situation parallels that of Finland after World War II. Having successfully halted the Soviets in the Winter and Continuation Wars, Finland’s relative weakness nonetheless forced it to effectively accept a Soviet veto on its foreign policy, in exchange for preserving its political independence and a formidable fighting force. While “Finlandization” has been regarded by some as a synonym for capitulation and loss of sovereignty, armed neutrality in fact preserved Finland’s domestic autonomy, allowing it to enjoy political liberties and a high standard of living on par with its western European neighbors.

According to Tomas Ries’ study of Finnish defense, Finland’s postwar independence was sustained by three factors: determination to fight, a realistic balance of deterrence with “reassurance,” and the larger challenge for the Soviets posed by NATO. Armed neutrality would leave Ukraine well-positioned on these three dimensions. First, Ukrainians have shown the will and ability to defend their territory against Russian aggression despite their numerical and material disadvantage. Ukraine’s military balance with Russia is also more favorable than that between Finland and the Soviets. Second, by renouncing its NATO aspirations but building its military capabilities, Kyiv could assuage Russian concerns about Ukraine acting as a Western “springboard” while maintaining formidable independent combat power. Armed neutrality would thus balance reassurance with credible deterrence, while reducing the benefits and increasing the costs of renewed Russian aggression. Finally, as long as Ukraine is seen as aligned with NATO, Russia feels compelled to direct the bulk of its forces towards its southwestern neighbor. If Ukraine were instead neutral, Russia would have to divide its attention between Ukraine and the more powerful NATO alliance, while still securing its huge territory and many borders. Armed neutrality would allow Ukraine to turn Russia’s unenviable security environment to its advantage, leaving Ukraine to face only a fraction of Russia’s total fighting potential at a given time.

Critics of armed neutrality suggest that even this approach will be a deal-breaker for Putin. Some Russian leaders, like Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have suggested that a fully “demilitarized” Ukraine is a requirement for an end to the war. But Russia seems unable to achieve this maximal objective on the battlefield, and Trump therefore has room to maneuver. There may be incentives Washington could trade for Russian flexibility on military aid to Ukraine, including sanctions relief or willingness to discuss other Russian priorities, such as the U.S. role in Europe’s security. Russia could be offered assurances on the types of aid the United States and Europe would provide Ukraine — excluding intermediate range missiles, for instance. Moscow and Washington could also probably agree to prevent Ukraine from acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent. Geographic limits for both Russia and Ukraine on troop deployments or long-range strike systems might also help grease the wheels. Ultimately, haggling would be required, but a mutually acceptable deal is a realistic goal.

NATO’s Existential Choice

In addition to being Kyiv’s best option, Ukrainian armed neutrality is also the best option for NATO — especially its eastern-most members who have made Article 5 the foundation of their security. Unlike extending NATO membership to Ukraine or offering Kyiv a U.S.- or European-backed security guarantee, armed neutrality does not further threaten the credibility of the alliance’s mutual defense commitment or overburden its members with another resource-intensive and binding obligation.

Armed neutrality will not be cost-free for NATO, however, as allies will have a near- and medium-term responsibility to help build Ukraine’s military capabilities. Armed neutrality is also not a cure-all for the challenges Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has laid at NATO’s doorstep. The alliance’s initial response to the Russian invasion seemed to demonstrate that NATO had rediscovered a sense of common purpose. Over time, however, the war has pushed to the forefront the underlying tension that NATO’s eastward expansion introduced into the alliance. The ability of NATO’s original members to defend new entrants — especially the Baltic states — has always been more limited than they were willing to admit. Invading Ukraine in 2022, a resurgent Russia forced NATO members to grapple with the true cost of an expanded Article 5 commitment. Although Ukraine’s alignment has been more contentious for Russia than that of the Baltic states, owing to Ukraine’s core position in the Soviet Union and within Russian history and culture, countries on NATO’s northeastern flank may have new questions about Article 5’s durability after watching NATO waver over how and whether it could afford to support Ukraine.

Going forward, the tasks of ensuring NATO’s endurance and translating Ukraine’s armed neutrality into a long-term peace will fall largely to Europe. In particular, NATO’s European members will have to build military capabilities that allow them to match with hard power their growing commitments, including the Article 5 guarantee to the alliance’s eastern members and required support to Ukraine. These obligations cannot continue to be handed off to the United States, which has already indicated — if not in words then in deeds and actions — the limits of its willingness to defend “every inch” of NATO territory and its finite interests in Ukraine. If Europe does not step up, not only may Ukraine’s peace be short-lived, but worse, NATO itself may shatter under internal and external pressure on its Article 5 promise.

Ukraine’s armed neutrality is the best chance Brussels and Kyiv have for a lasting peace settlement that also preserves NATO, even if it falls short of what some hoped for early in the war. By offering Ukraine armed neutrality but no formal security guarantees, NATO members can prevent further damage to the alliance’s credibility and ensure that the alliance emerges from the Russo-Ukrainian war battered but not broken.

Become a Member

Jennifer Kavanagh is director of military analysis and a senior fellow at Defense Priorities. She is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Christopher McCallion is a fellow at Defense Priorities.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · February 18, 2025

20. Munich Insider: If US Throws Ukraine Under a Bus, Others Will Stand Alongside Kyiv – Bill Browder

Wow. This:

“It is premature to assume that Ukraine will be thrown under the bus by everybody. Perhaps by the Americans, but not by everybody.”

Munich Insider: If US Throws Ukraine Under a Bus, Others Will Stand Alongside Kyiv – Bill Browder

On the sidelines of the 61st Munich Security Conference Bill Browder, who spearheaded the Magnitsky campaign against Russia, gives his take on options after the war in Ukraine ends.

by Iryna Pavlova | February 18, 2025, 11:05 am

kyivpost.com · by Iryna Pavlova · February 18, 2025

Sir William Browder KCMG (known by most as plain Bill Browder) is a US businessman turned human rights activist who was one of the main drivers behind the Magnitsky justice campaign against Russia spoke to Kyiv Post about the likely outcome of “peace talks” between Washington, Kyiv and Moscow:

“It is premature to assume that Ukraine will be thrown under the bus by everybody. Perhaps by the Americans, but not by everybody.”

On the sidelines of the 61st Munich Security Conference, billed by many as “historic” as it seemed to signal a clear departure from almost 80 years of trans-Atlantic cooperation, Kyiv Post sought Browder’s views on the way ahead given his experience of standing up to Putin’s Russia.

He gave his take on the upcoming meeting between Moscow and Washington in Saudi Arabia, alternative ideas around security guarantees and realistic economic levers that the US could use in its negotiations with Russia. While he agrees there is not much reason to be optimistic about US involvement, he feels Europe has the means and [self] interest to successfully “fill the void.”

It is premature to assume that Ukraine will be thrown under the bus by everybody. Perhaps by the Americans, but not by everybody.”

KP: There was a lot of discussion at the MSC about viable security guarantees for Ukraine, should President Trump’s peace negotiations go ahead. What did you think about Senator Lindsey Graham’s idea to automatically grant NATO membership to Ukraine, if Russia breaks the terms of the deal?

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BB: It’s probably an off-the-cuff idea. Lindsey Graham’s position on Ukraine is robust. His views have been consistent with mine. He is a supporter of Ukraine and an opposer of Putin. The idea that if Russia was to break the ceasefire, Ukraine would automatically become a member of NATO is effectively making Ukraine a member of NATO right now.

What is NATO? It’s a joint defense treaty. And so, if Russia breaks the ceasefire, NATO will defend Ukraine. It’s effectively the same thing as bringing Ukraine into NATO right now.

Trump’s position, voiced by Pete Hegseth, is that Ukraine won’t be a member of NATO runs contrary to what the US administration is signaling now. There are mixed signals within the Republican Party, there are mixed signals within the Trump administration and there are even mixed signals with individuals who give signals one day and change them the next day.

And so, this whole thing looks like a shambolic mess that has not been thought through. It is basically driven by Trump’s campaign promise to end the war in one day. And I suspect, when the rubber meets the road in negotiation with Putin and in negotiations with Ukraine and Europe, whatever is discussed here in Munich will be long forgotten.

The idea that if Russia was to break the ceasefire, Ukraine would automatically become a member of NATO is effectively making Ukraine a member of NATO right now.

KP: Many western Europeans do not understand the nature of the Russian threat and the fact that Russia has been conducting a hybrid war that extends way beyond Ukraine’s borders. Do you think on the other side of the Atlantic in America there is also a certain amount of naïveté about the nature of the Russian threat and the type of regime they are dealing with?

BB: I spent the last three days interacting with various politicians and government officials and, in particular, I spent a lot of time interacting with the members of the US Congress.

What I can say with absolute certainty is that Republicans and Democrats share exactly the same position on both Ukraine and Russia. They understand Putin’s criminality, his violence and dishonesty, and they support victims of that, in particular in Ukraine.

There is no difference in views between Democrats and Republican members of Congress who were present at the Munich Security Conference.

Members of the Trump administration have a different view. Their view has been consistently dismissive of Ukraine and its security needs, and quite sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

So, one cannot generalize and talk about Americans. One can only speak about different groups of Americans. It’s just so happens that the group of Americans that are sympathetic to Putin and antagonist towards Zelensky happen to be the ones who are making decisions right now.

Members of the Trump administration have a different view. Their view has been consistently dismissive of Ukraine and its security needs, and quite sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

KP: In the absence of a strong trans-Atlantic alliance, are Europeans able to overcome their differences and take care of their own security needs, including addressing the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war? After all, many of them, such as Germany, are in economic and political crisis.

First of all, we should first look at the numbers.

The amount of [military] aid that Europe has provided to Ukraine is $145 billion against $115 billion from the US. In total Europe has been a greater supplier of military aid to Ukraine.

Europe has the ability, if necessary, to come to the defense of Ukraine and has the interest in doing so, if the US decides to withdraw its military support. Over time the US position has not been unreasonable. It has been, at least from the NATO standpoint, providing a disproportionate amount of support.

Donald Trump and JD Vance now effectively, if not in so many words, said: “Europe, you are on your own.”

Having done that, I am sure that despite the sentiments and dysfunction of Europe they will be quickly cast aside, and Europeans will do the right thing because it’s now a crisis moment. I am one hundred percent sure that Europe will step into the void and do what’s necessary because the alternative is much more expensive than the current situation.

Even though it all looks catastrophic at the moment at the end of the day there are some reasonable sober people with real resources that will do what’s necessary. It is premature to assume that Ukraine will be thrown under the bus by everybody. Perhaps by the US, but not by everybody.

Donald Trump and JD Vance now effectively, if not in so many words, said: “Europe, you are on your own.”

Various media reports suggest the start of the peace negotiations with Russians by the Trump administration this week, in Saudi Arabia. Let’s say such negotiations do go ahead, but the Trump administration quickly realizes that it is not easy to get concessions from the Kremlin. What are the most effective economics levers of influence that the US can and might apply in such negotiations?

I think that Putin is a very clever man. And he’s played every new president of the United States when they come into office since he became president.

There was George Bush who “looked into his eyes and saw his soul,” Barak Obama whose administration wanted to reset relations with Russia, Trump first time around who said he could do business with Putin and Biden who just wanted a smooth and predictable relationship with Russia.

Putin’s strategy is: he will promise the world, making all sorts of offers that he has no intention of keeping. Trump can declare victory and then Putin will breach every promise that he’s made. That’s how he operates. It’s hard to imagine that Putin will end up in a conflict with Trump because he understands that he can fake it.

The US holds all the power: if the US wanted it could, for example, coerce the Saudis to pump more oil and push the oil prices down, which would have a dramatic effect on Putin’s ability to conduct this war.

Washington could impose even more punitive sanctions, including secondary sanctions against the Chinese, Indian and Turkish oil refineries, which would basically illuminate the customers for Russia’s oil.

The US could impose sanctions on all sorts of intermediary countries that are now helping Russia break the current sanctions regime. The US has the capacity to impose economic sanctions that are more powerful than by any others in the world economy - if it chose to use them.

But my prediction is that Putin will make all sorts of unrealistic promises, Trump will declare victory, and that will be the end of the US involvement in the whole thing.

But my prediction is that Putin will make all sorts of unrealistic promises, Trump will declare victory, and that will be the end of the US involvement in the whole thing.

Bill Browder was the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, at one time the largest foreign investor in Russia. In 2005 he was denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” for his attempts to expose corruption in Russian state-owned companies.

In 2008 Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s lawyer, uncovered a massive fraud whereby Russian government officials stole $230 million of state taxes. After testifying against those involved in the fraud Sergei was arrested, imprisoned without trial and systematically tortured. After a year in custody he was killed in prison on Nov. 16, 2009..

Since then, has led the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign which seeks to impose targeted visa bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers and highly corrupt officials.

The campaign led to the 2012 Magnitsky Act, formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, is aimed at punishing those Russian officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009.

The Global Magnitsky Act of 2016 authorized the US government to sanction not only Russian but any foreign government official worldwide that is considered to be a human rights offender, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the US.

kyivpost.com · by Iryna Pavlova · February 18, 2025

21.  Trump’s gamble

Joshua Rovner says the quiet part out loud. He uses the "P" word - a "purge" of the national security bureaucracy. Of course many are cheering as they decry all the past failures of such bureaucracy.

How will the national security bureaucracy look after the "Great Reset" of the entire federal bureaucracy? We are living in interesting times.

Conclusion:

President Trump has long criticised America’s habit of getting stuck in long wars. From Trump’s perspective, these painful experiences are a damning indictment of the Washington establishment, and his approach to Ukraine is a rebuke of those who would continue to pump resources into a war with no clear idea about how to end it. Ironically, however, Trump’s preference for transnationalism and uncertainty, along with his ongoing effort to eviscerate the national security bureaucracy, will make it more difficult to implement strategies with a better chance of success. Because Trump’s approach to grand strategy increases the odds of another strategic quagmire, history may remember his second term as a grim irony.

Trump’s gamble

• February 17, 2025
• Joshua Rovner
• Themes: America, Geopolitics
• 
  

A purge of America's national security bureaucracy may have disastrous consequences in wartime.

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/trumps-war-on-the-intelligence-community/

The Pentagon press briefing room at the US Department of Defense. Credit: B Christopher / Alamy Stock Photo

President Donald Trump has been many things over years, but he has never been a hawk. Trump’s first term in the White House was a festival of coercive bluster, yet Trump was clearly uninterested in war. Like many officials from both parties, he supported counter-terrorism operations, but Trump never made good on his ominous military threats. The president issued dire warnings to North Korea and Iran, but he did not see them through. This surprised some critics, who feared that the volatile Trump was taking enormous gambles while in office. Trump’s peculiar brand of military restraint, however, was a political selling point, as was his habit of treating matters of war and peace as business negotiations that he can broker without involving US forces in the settlement. As his future vice president J.D. Vance wrote in 2023, ‘In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration. Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.’

Trump’s instincts are already on display in his approach to ending the Ukraine war. Trump is attempting to negotiate an agreement in which Ukraine would agree to territorial concessions, forego membership in NATO, and provide $500 billion in rare earth minerals in return for continued US aid. Europe would meanwhile provide a non-NATO peacekeeping force. This last point is particularly important to Trump, because it means that the United States will not obligate itself to Ukraine’s defence, whether or not Russia upholds its end of the deal. The president envisions stopping the war on terms favourable to his view of US interests, not setting the stage for a future conflict requiring US intervention.

Not starting wars will be particularly important this time around. The reason is that Trump’s approach to grand strategy – and his attitude towards his own government – will make it more difficult to win them.

A grand strategy is a theory of security, a logical story about how the state will stay safe. All grand strategies start with a set of beliefs about world politics and the sources of stability. Perhaps the world is more peaceful when there is a dominant military hegemon to maintain order and deter violent challengers. Perhaps the pathway to peace and prosperity is through the expansion of trade, institutions, and democracy. Or, more pessimistically, they might believe that world politics are inherently unsafe, given that under conditions of anarchy all states must look at each other warily. Grand strategies change because individuals come into power with different theoretical priors.

Having settled upon certain core beliefs, leaders set out to answer practical questions about diplomacy, trade, institutions, and the use of force. Those who believe in hegemony will invest heavily in conventional power projection. Not only will they increase the size and capabilities of the armed forces, but they will flaunt them conspicuously. They will also downplay arguments about ideology and institutions, given their conviction that the only language that foreign actors understand is the language of power. On the opposite end of the spectrum are leaders who believe that military deployments are provocative and dangerous. Instead of bolstering global stability, they will trigger arms races and encourage counter-balancing alliances. The world will become less stable, the nation less secure. To avoid this fate, they recommend a different set of policies: reducing the size of the military and the scope of its operations, resisting the impulse to use force for anything other than defence against direct threats to the state, and reframing diplomatic engagement to avoid inadvertently provoking crises.

States do not always have a clear grand strategy, however. Sometimes leaders struggle to articulate their basic beliefs about the sources of global stability. Sometimes they cannot choose among viable alternatives. And sometimes, as with Trump, they see value in avoiding grand strategy altogether.

Indeed, President Trump prefers a transactional approach to international politics, one which provides maximum freedom of action. Trump views principled commitments as pointless constraints. As a result, he treats alliances and institutions with scepticism – witness his apparent desire to go around NATO in Ukraine – and he abhors the kind of ideological dogma that would get in his way. For Trump, politics is no different from business, a never-ending saga of deal-making and deal-breaking. He revels in keeping his counterparts off-balance, whether they are allies or adversaries. Here again, his approach to international diplomacy reflects his attitude towards business. Trump believes that uncertainty is a source of leverage, and he encourages the idea that he is fundamentally unpredictable.

One problem with rejecting a clear and coherent grand strategy, however, is that it makes wartime strategy much more difficult. If grand strategy is a theory of security, strategy is a theory of victory. It asks more pointed questions about the use of violence for political ends. What kinds of military forces are best suited to any given conflict? How should they fight? How much decision-making autonomy should political leaders hand over to the generals? Does it make sense to escalate the war or to open new theatres of combat? And how should military forces choreograph the endgame?

Such questions have bedeviled strategists since antiquity. That said, strategic problems are much easier to solve when war serves a clearly articulated grand strategy. When there is no clear theory of security, however, it is extremely difficult to design a coherent theory of victory. Strategy in the absence of grand strategy is an exercise in frustration.

Trump’s ongoing assault on federal agencies – including national security organisations – may compound this problem. Since taking office, Trump has made good on his longstanding promise to gut the civil service. While campaigning for the presidency in 2016 he made ‘drain the swamp’ one of his early slogans, seeking to exploit the decades-long decline in public trust in government institutions. He later accused the so-called ‘deep state,’ a shadowy network of national security officials, for supposedly conspiring against him. These attacks dovetailed with a broader antipathy for big government, fuelled by industry demands for lower taxes and looser regulations.

Trump has attempted to eviscerate agencies through executive orders and Elon Musk. Executive orders are a favoured tool for presidents as they do not require Congressional consent. The downside is that future presidents can overturn them with the stroke of a pen. The courts may also intervene against executive orders, as has already been the case with Trump, if they are unlawful or if they violate the president’s constitutional responsibility to execute moneys appropriated by Congress. How the legal battles will play out is a mystery.

Meanwhile, Trump has unleashed Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on executive agencies. The name of Musk’s outfit is misleading as it is not a government department. Instead, it appears to be a small number of individuals who are carrying out directives from Trump and Musk. More an ad-hoc task force than a formal body, the DOGE representatives have encouraged employees to resign en masse in blunt and condescending emails. Again, it is not clear that any of this is legal, and courts are currently adjudicating lawsuits filed by labour unions.

Legal roadblocks may inhibit Trump’s plan to gut the federal workforce. But even if they do, the DOGE campaign has led to extraordinary churn within government, along with plummeting morale. Organisations under this kind of stress will struggle to achieve their missions under these conditions, especially if their best and brightest decide to leave public service. These effects may linger for a very long time.

National security agencies have not been spared. Employees at the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have reportedly received similar versions of the ‘deferred resignation‘ emails. According to the Washington Post, candidates for senior intelligence positions have faced a loyalty test by being asked whether they agreed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed by the Senate yesterday as the nation’s top intelligence official, has pledged to ‘streamline’ the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And Trump has publicly authorised Musk to perform some sort of audit of the Department of Defense, an ominous threat given his gleeful work in dismantling USAID and the Department of Education.

We do not know what the future national workforce will look like at the end of this process. Much depends on the cumulative effect of many individual decisions about whether to stay or whether to leave. Legal challenges may inhibit the effort to shrink the size of national security organisations, and other contingencies may also get in the way, including a falling out between Trump and Musk. We are in early days.

One thing is certain, however: Trump is taking a gamble. To his supporters, radically downsizing federal agencies is necessary to make them work efficiently while reducing waste, fraud, and abuse. Doing the same to national security organisations will help them to return to what Trump sees as their traditional missions. The intelligence community will focus on espionage and operations. The military will focus on lethality in combat. Collectively, the United States will become much more adept at spying and warfighting, which ought to make it more effective in war and safer in peacetime.

The risks are enormous. Even if Trump’s instincts about bureaucratic efficiency are correct, it will take time to recover from what amounts to a massive self-inflicted trauma. This means that, should a conflict arise, the responsible organisations will be doing so while simultaneously redefining their organisational best practices. The situation will be especially problematic if the most talented civilian defence officials exit government service, only to be replaced by political loyalists.

Similarly, a soft purge in the intelligence community may have disastrous consequences in wartime. Prewar estimates tailored to suit policymaker preferences may lead to misguided military decisions at the outset of a conflict. And an intelligence community that values fealty above all, and that rejects dissenters as political enemies, will find it difficult to reassess its earlier conclusions. War is a dynamic affair, and adapting to changing circumstances requires an analytical environment that enables constructive criticism and honest self-reflection. Trump’s policies are not conducive to such an environment.

Strategy is always hard. It is especially difficult in the absence of a clear grand strategy, and when military and intelligence agencies are unwilling to reassess the facts on the ground. Trump administration officials might consider the effects of their current actions on the conduct of a future war.

They might also usefully consult recent US history, starting with the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson escalated in Vietnam in the period between the Cuban Missile Crisis and détente with the Soviet Union. Johnson administration officials were unsure about their grand strategy during this interregnum. While they were still committed to the idea of containing communism, they were desperate to avoid another existential crisis. As a result, they were never able to answer basic questions about the value of the war itself, nor were they able to offer clear guidance to US military commanders. The result was a hodge-podge of half-hearted strategies, satisfying no one.

Decades later, President George W. Bush decided to launch a war of regime change in Iraq, based on the fear that Saddam Hussein’s regime was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence on Iraq was thin and circumstantial, and it was not unreasonable to speculate that Iraq may have some quantity of leftover chemical and biological agents from the 1980s that had not been found by international inspectors in the 1990s. But speculation based on partial information was not a particularly convincing argument of going to war, and members of the administration leaned on intelligence officials to bring their estimates in line with the administration’s public statements. The result was a shift in the tone and substance of intelligence in the fateful summer and fall of 2002, as the White House made the case for war. Moreover, the community was unwilling to reassess its views in the months before the invasion, even though new information suggested that the threat was overblown.

President Trump has long criticised America’s habit of getting stuck in long wars. From Trump’s perspective, these painful experiences are a damning indictment of the Washington establishment, and his approach to Ukraine is a rebuke of those who would continue to pump resources into a war with no clear idea about how to end it. Ironically, however, Trump’s preference for transnationalism and uncertainty, along with his ongoing effort to eviscerate the national security bureaucracy, will make it more difficult to implement strategies with a better chance of success. Because Trump’s approach to grand strategy increases the odds of another strategic quagmire, history may remember his second term as a grim irony.

Author

Joshua Rovner

More about Joshua Rovner

22. Special Forces blocked 2,000 credible asylum claims from Afghan commandos, MoD confirms

Special Forces blocked 2,000 credible asylum claims from Afghan commandos, MoD confirms

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy9l9elr95zo

1 day ago

Hannah O'Grady, Joel Gunter, and Rory Tinman

BBC News

Ben Taggart

Commandos from the Afghan 'Triples' units went into hiding after the Taliban took over the country.UK Special Forces command rejected resettlement applications from more than 2,000 Afghan commandos who had shown credible evidence of service in units that fought alongside the SAS and SBS, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed for the first time.

UK Special Forces officers appear to have rejected every application from a former Afghan commando referred to them for sponsorship, despite the Afghan units having fought with the British on life-threatening missions against the Taliban.

The MoD had previously denied there was a blanket policy to reject members of the units - known as the Triples - but the BBC has not been able to find any evidence that UK Special Forces (UKSF) supported any resettlement applications.

Asked if UKSF had supported any applications, the MoD declined to answer the question.

The Triples - so-called because their designations were CF 333 and ATF 444 - were set up, trained, and paid by UK Special Forces and supported the SAS and SBS on operations in Afghanistan. When the country fell to the Taliban in 2021, they were judged to be in grave danger of reprisal and were entitled to apply for resettlement to the UK.

The rejection of their applications was controversial because it came at a time when a public inquiry in the UK was investigating allegations that British Special Forces had committed war crimes on operations in Afghanistan where the Triples were present.

The inquiry has the power to compel witnesses who are in the UK, but not non-UK nationals who are overseas. If resettled, former members of the Triples could be compelled by the inquiry to provide potentially significant evidence.

BBC Panorama revealed last year that UK Special Forces command had been given veto power over their resettlement applications and denied them asylum in Britain. The revelation caused a wave of anger among some former members of the SAS and others who served with the Afghan units.

The MoD initially denied the existence of the veto, suggesting that the BBC's reporting had been inaccurate, but then-Defence Minister Andrew Murrison was later forced to tell the House of Commons the government had misled parliament in its denials.

The confirmation of the more than 2,000 rejections emerged in court hearings earlier this month during a legal challenge brought by a former member of the Triples. Lawyers for the MoD applied for a restriction order which temporarily prevented the BBC from reporting on the relevant parts of the proceedings, before withdrawing their application last week under challenge.

Documents disclosed in court also showed that at the same time the MoD was denying the existence of the veto, it already knew that every rejection decision made by UK Special Forces was potentially unsound and would have to be independently reviewed.

• Special forces blocked resettlement for elite Afghan troops
• Minister says Afghan commandos described 'horrific' SAS crimes
• SAS unit repeatedly killed Afghan detainees, BBC finds

Mike Martin MP, a member of the defence select committee and former British Army officer who served in Afghanistan, told the BBC the rejections were "extremely concerning".

"There is the appearance that UK Special Forces blocked the Afghan special forces applications because they were witnesses to the alleged UK war crimes currently being investigated in the Afghan inquiry," Martin said.

"If the MoD is unable to offer any explanation, then the matter should be included in the inquiry," he added.

Johnny Mercer, the former Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View, who served alongside the SBS in Afghanistan, testified to the Afghan inquiry that he had spoken to former members of the Triples and heard "horrific" allegations of murder by UK Special Forces.

Mercer said it was "very clear to me that there is a pool of evidence that exists within the Afghan [special forces] community that are now in the United Kingdom that should contribute to this Inquiry".

The MoD began a review last year of all 2,022 resettlement applications referred to and rejected by UK Special Forces. All contained what MoD caseworkers on the resettlement scheme regarded as "credible" evidence of service with the Triples units.

The government said at the time that the review would take 12 weeks, but more than a year later it has yet to be completed. Some rejections have already been overturned, allowing former Triples to come to the UK. But the MoD has refused to inform the Afghan commandos whether they are in scope of the review or if their rejections were upheld, unless they write to the MoD.

Many are in hiding in Afghanistan, making it difficult to obtain legal representation or pro-actively contact the MoD. Dozens have reportedly been beaten, tortured, or killed by the Taliban since the group regained control of the country.

"Although decisions have been overturned, it's too late for some people," said a former Triples officer. "The delays have caused a lot of problems. People have been captured by the Taliban or lost their lives," he said.

The officer said that the Afghan commandos worked alongside British Special Forces "like brothers" and felt "betrayed" by the widespread rejections.

"If Special Forces made these rejections they should say why. They should have to answer," he said.

The MoD is now facing a legal challenge to aspects of the review, including the decision not to inform applicants whether their case is being reviewed or disclose the criteria used to select those in scope.

The legal challenge is being brought by a former senior member of the Triples who is now in the UK, on behalf of commandos still in Afghanistan.

"Our client's focus is on his soldiers left behind in Afghanistan, some of whom have been killed while they wait for these heavily delayed protection decisions," said Dan Carey, a partner at the law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn.

"As things stand they have a right to request a reassessment of a decision they haven't even been told about. And there are others who think they are part of the Triples Review when the secret criteria would tell them that their cases aren't even being looked at."

Lawyers acting for the former member of the Triples also heavily criticised the level of disclosure in the case by the MoD, which has not handed over any documentation from within UK Special Forces or government records about the decision-making process that led to the rejections.

In court filings, they criticised the "total inadequacy" of the MoD's disclosure, calling it an "an obvious failure to comply with the duty of candour and to provide necessary explanation" of the process.

New evidence that emerged last week in court also showed that the MoD appeared to have rejected out of hand some applicants who served with UK Special Forces in Afghanistan after 2014 - when Britain's conventional armed forces left Helmand province - without even referring them to UK Special Forces headquarters for sponsorship.

The MoD has not explained the reasoning behind the policy, which was kept secret from applicants. A spokesperson for the MoD said that after 2014 the UK's role "evolved from combat operations to primarily training, advising and assisting CF 333, who were under the command of the Afghan Ministry of Interior".

But officers who served with UK Special Forces told the BBC that the Triples continued to support British-led operations after 2014.

"Saying the Triples didn't support UK Special Forces operations after 2014 isn't true at all," said former officer who served with UKSF.

"We had a squadron of CF 333 with us. We worked closely together. These were NATO targets, UK planned operations," he said.

The Ministry of Defence has previously told the BBC: "There has been no evidence to suggest that any part of the MoD has sought to prevent former members of the Afghan specialist units from giving evidence to the inquiry."

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23. China Says US Has 'Gravely Backpedaled' on Taiwan

China Says US Has 'Gravely Backpedaled' on Taiwan

military.com · by Associated Press Published February 17, 2025 at 6:12am ET · February 17, 2025

BEIJING — China's Foreign Ministry took issue Monday with a revised U.S. government fact sheet that removed a line on American opposition to independence for Taiwan.

The United States has “gravely backpedaled” on its position on Taiwan and sent the wrong message to “separatist forces" on the island, ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

Taiwan and China split in 1949 during the civil war that brought the communists to power in China. The defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan and set up a rival government there. Taiwan has its own government and military but has never declared formal independence from China.

“We urge the U.S. to ... stop emboldening and supporting Taiwan independence and avoid further damaging China-U.S. relations and the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait,” Guo said when asked about the revision at a daily media briefing.

The Taiwan Strait is a narrow waterway that separates the island of Taiwan from China's east coast.

The U.S. State Department removed the phrase "we do not support Taiwan independence” from the fact sheet last week. The document on America’s relations with the self-governing island is posted on its website.

Taiwan's government welcomed the move, though a statement sent to The Associated Press on Monday did not mention the language specifically.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has noted that the U.S. State Department updated the ‘Current State of U.S.-Taiwan Relations’ page ... with text that is positive and friendly toward us, reflecting the close and amicable partnership between Taiwan and the United States,” it said.

It’s not the first time the State Department has removed the phrase. It did so in May 2022 but restored it a few weeks later after a strong protest from China.

It’s unclear why the State Department changed the language again and whether it signals any shift in policy under President Donald Trump, who returned to the White House last month.

The government in Taiwan is worried that Trump might not be as steadfast a supporter of the island as his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

The U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a country but is its strongest backer and biggest arms supplier.

Trump said last week that Taiwan, a leading maker of semiconductors, had taken the chip business away from the U.S. and that he wants it to come back.

China, which says that Taiwan must come under its control, has stepped up military exercises around the island of 23 million people in recent years. The U.S. government fact sheet says that it expects “differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides.”

military.com · by Associated Press Published February 17, 2025 at 6:12am ET · February 17, 2025

24. The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration

Soon the Trump administration will own everything. And once the Great Reset of the federal bureaucracy is complete it will be unable to blame anyone. We used to have a sarcastic saying in the Army, You can only blame the previous commander for the first 30 days and then you own it all.

Excerpts:

Newhouse may be a brokenist, but she’s interested in construction, not demolition. “One of the misimpressions about the piece and about me in general is that I want to burn stuff down,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to use their energy to do that, right? It’s just about where we put our resources. Which institutions are worth putting our energy into?”

Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.

“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.

Levin recognizes the “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.” And he’s skeptical that strategy will work: “To run for office and to want to be a public official is to want to be an insider, to think that there is work to be done inside the institutions that could be constructive for society. If you don’t think that, then you’re not really going to be able to play the role that our system assigns to insiders.”

Whether or not the Trump administration is capable of fixing the institutions it considers broken, its efforts to do so will lead to much tension and drama in Washington. For those of us in the news business, it’s been exhausting. And it’s only been a month. But Newhouse thinks it’s invigorating. “The brokenists say, ‘We can do better. We can make something better than this.’ Is it an exhausting challenge? It is. Is it more exhausting to sit in the misery and the stagnation of institutions that are broken? Many Americans certainly think so.”

As Newhouse put it in her essay a little over two years ago: “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”

The ‘Everything Is Broken’ Administration

The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.’

By Oliver Wiseman

02.17.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-everything-is-broken-administration

Anti-Nixon and Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators march on the Washington Mall on May 8, 1970. (Owen Franken via Getty Images)

‘

70

56

Are Elon Musk and the DOGE boys disrupters or vandals? Should Robert F. Kennedy Jr. be in charge of public health? Does the footage of the USAID sign being removed from a government building fill you with excitement or dread? Do Tulsi Gabbard’s criticisms of the “deep state” make her unfit for the role of director of national intelligence—or precisely the woman for the job?

A good predictor of how you answer these questions—better perhaps than whether you are a Republican or a Democrat—is whether or not you are a “brokenist.”

That term, coined by Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse a few years ago, has been bouncing around my head ever since Trump returned to power last month. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced it’s the key to understanding this administration. Allow me to explain.

In January 2021, Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.

Almost two years later, Newhouse wrote a follow-up, titled “Brokenism,” which translated the ideas of her first essay into a new political rubric. The most important divide in our politics, she argued, wasn’t between left and right, but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists.” Brokenists can be on the left or the right, or in the middle, but they agree that “what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.” Status-quoists, by contrast, “are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist. Or—to pick further examples Newhouse doesn’t name in her piece—Joe Rogan? Brokenist. Matthew Yglesias? Status-quoist. (Presciently, Newhouse identified Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk as two tech world brokenists—two years before they would come out for Trump.)

Newhouse’s argument struck me as obviously true and important back in 2022. It explained how tech, Trump’s first term, Covid, wokeness, and so much else had combined to scramble our politics. After almost a month of Trump’s second term, “brokenism” looks like a more important idea than ever—the thread that connects so much of the revolution underway in Washington, D.C.

Does Newhouse agree? “100 percent,” she said when we spoke over the phone recently. This administration and its supporters are, she said, “a coalition of people who feel that whole parts of America’s governing bodies have decayed past the point of usability.”

J.D. Vance more or less tweeted as much last month when—in a push to secure the votes needed to confirm Gabbard as Trump’s intelligence chief and RFK Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services—he wrote that these former Democrats “represent parts of the new coalition in our party. To say they’re unwelcome in the cabinet is to insult those new voters.”

In other words, what binds that new coalition is brokenism.

Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, was picked because she, like Trump, believes our intelligence agencies are broken. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence has led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security,” she said in the opening statement of her confirmation hearing.

At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. took aim at a broken health system. The U.S. “has worse health than any other developed nation,” he said. The fact that he has long been pro-choice—a stance he only started to move away from after joining Trump’s team—didn’t matter. Well, it did to the editors of National Review, but the fact that their opposition didn’t make a difference only confirms the brokenism realignment. As does the fact that Chip Roy, a conservative Texas congressman and a staunch pro-lifer, enthusiastically backed RFK’s nomination. Read his explanation as to why in our pages and it’s clear that the thing he and RFK agree on—and the thing that really matters to Roy—is that America’s public health system doesn’t work and requires something more like revolution than reform. Whatever profound differences of opinion they have on other things, including abortion, are secondary.

You might think that the biggest Senate holdouts in the nomination fights over two former Democrats would be ultra-conservatives. Instead they were the self-styled moderates who are generally keen to preach the virtue of bipartisanship. According to the old left-right rules, this makes no sense. Viewed through a brokenist lens, it’s obvious. Mitch McConnell—the only Republican to vote against both Gabbard and RFK—is a quintessential status-quoist.

Time will tell if the brokenist coalition is durable. Indeed, the infighting has already begun. Take, for example, the fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon which flared up over legal immigration last month. (Bannon called Musk “truly evil” for supporting H-1B visas for skilled workers.) Their disagreement is broader than that, though. Bannon views Musk as a neoliberal plutocrat and threat to authentic MAGA populism—the problem, not the solution. “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” said Musk in response.

For Newhouse, what’s interesting about the Musk-Bannon debate “is that they’re both brokenists. What they’re fighting about is what to replace it with.”

“It’s part of the reason why I think the right has all this energy,” she said. “Because they’re not having fights about whether or not we should defend the old stuff. They’re having fights about what to replace the old, broken stuff with.”

For others, these fissures show the limitations of the brokenist framework. Yuval Levin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has spent a lot of time thinking about why we’ve lost faith in our institutions and what to do about it.

“I think it’s not so much status-quoists and brokenists as something more like building crews and demolition crews,” he told me. “There’s work needed. The institutions are broken. I think there’s broad agreement on that. The question is, is the work that is needed demolition or construction?”

Newhouse may be a brokenist, but she’s interested in construction, not demolition. “One of the misimpressions about the piece and about me in general is that I want to burn stuff down,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to use their energy to do that, right? It’s just about where we put our resources. Which institutions are worth putting our energy into?”

Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.

“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.

Levin recognizes the “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.” And he’s skeptical that strategy will work: “To run for office and to want to be a public official is to want to be an insider, to think that there is work to be done inside the institutions that could be constructive for society. If you don’t think that, then you’re not really going to be able to play the role that our system assigns to insiders.”

Whether or not the Trump administration is capable of fixing the institutions it considers broken, its efforts to do so will lead to much tension and drama in Washington. For those of us in the news business, it’s been exhausting. And it’s only been a month. But Newhouse thinks it’s invigorating. “The brokenists say, ‘We can do better. We can make something better than this.’ Is it an exhausting challenge? It is. Is it more exhausting to sit in the misery and the stagnation of institutions that are broken? Many Americans certainly think so.”

As Newhouse put it in her essay a little over two years ago: “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”

Oliver Wiseman

Oliver Wiseman is a senior editor and writer for The Free Press. Previously, he was the executive editor of The Spectator World and a regular contributor to UnHerd, City Journal, the Evening Standard, and a range of other publications.Tags:

Donald Trump

Politics

25. Is China’s military really built for war? New report questions Beijing’s arms buildup

I hope the expert Chinese military analysts will assess and comment on this report.

The referenced RAND report can be downloaded here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA830-1.html

Is China’s military really built for war? New report questions Beijing’s arms buildup | CNN

CNN · by Brad Lendon · February 17, 2025

An assault vehicle unit carries out a fire strike during actual combat training in Ningbo, China, on January 10, 2025.

Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Seoul, South Korea CNN —

China is not ready for war, according to a contentious report from a US think tank, which claims the main motivation for the ruling Communist Party’s expansive push for military modernization is to retain its grip on power – not fight an overseas foe.

Beijing has pursued a head-turning military buildup under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – previously not even one of the strongest in Asia – has started to rival, or in some categories surpass, the US military in analysts’ estimations.

Simulations by US defense experts have repeatedly shown the US – widely regarded as the world’s strongest military – having a tough time matching the PLA in a fight close to China’s shores, especially over the democratic island of Taiwan, which is claimed by Beijing.

But a report released last month by the Washington-based RAND Corp. said that despite the impressive buildup, political considerations – importantly the Communist Party’s desire for control over both military personnel and Chinese society – could hamper the PLA in battle, especially against a peer adversary such as the US.

“The PLA remains fundamentally focused on upholding Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule rather than preparing for war,” wrote Timothy Heath, a longtime China expert with RAND, in the report, titled “The Chinese military’s doubtful combat readiness.”

“China’s military modernization gains are designed first and foremost to bolster the appeal and credibility of CCP rule,” making war unlikely, Heath added.

One example Heath cited of political considerations butting up against military objectives is the PLA spending up to 40% of training time on political topics.

A soldier checks the missiles on an air fighter at a PLA military airport in a training session in east China's Zhejiang province in late August 2021.

FeatureChina/AP

“The trade-off in time that could be spent mastering the essential skills for combat operations further raises questions as to how well prepared the PLA might be for modern war,” Heath said.

Heath noted too that PLA units are led not only by commanding officers, but also by political commissars who focus on party loyalty rather than combat effectiveness.

“A divided command system … reduces the ability of commanders to respond flexibly and rapidly to emerging situations,” he wrote.

A conventional war between the US and China is a “remote possibility,” and Pentagon planners should focus on a wider variety of Chinese threats than missiles and bombs, he added.

A J-16 fighter jet flies in the sky during the 15th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, or Airshow China 2024, on November 12, 2024 in Zhuhai, China.

Chen Jimin/China News Service/AP

But other experts scoffed at his conclusions, saying that Xi had made his top military goal clear: bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control, by force if necessary.

The PLA’s buildup points to China being ready to do that, domestic control concerns notwithstanding, the experts added.

“There are much easier, cheaper, lower-risk ways to maximize party security than the bespoke warfighting capabilities Xi concertedly pursues,” said Andrew Erickson, professor of strategy at the US Naval War College.

John Culver, a former US intelligence officer for East Asia, also cast doubt on the report.

“War isn’t Plan A, but it is Plan B if events require and the material capacity of the PLA and China for such an event is strong and getter stronger,” he wrote on X.

Weapons and will

China has achieved rapid and indisputable military progress since Xi introduced sweeping reforms a decade ago.

Beijing’s intense shipbuilding program of recent years has yielded the world’s largest navy/maritime fighting force, which can operate farther than ever from China’s shores – including from the country’s first overseas military base in Djibouti.

Meanwhile, China has made advances in stealth aircraft and hypersonic weapons – and turned vast areas of its inland deserts into fields of missile silos.

A missile from the rocket force of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) takes part in military exercises around Taiwan on April 8, 2023.

Liu Mingsong/Xinhua/AP

But Heath questioned whether Beijing’s new arsenal would be effective in war.

“History has shown repeatedly that militaries sometimes fail to effectively use their advanced armaments in battle,” his report read, citing the war in Ukraine as the latest conflict where a better-armed military has failed to prevail.

Critics of Heath’s report said it’s folly to see the same weaknesses in the PLA.

“Xi repeatedly engages in difficult military restructuring efforts that prioritize improvements in realistic warfighting capabilities and impose some of the most demanding requirements conceivable on China’s armed forces,” said Erickson of the US Naval War College.

He noted that China is building both numbers – the Pentagon estimates Beijing is growing its nuclear warhead arsenal by about 100 a year – and technology, “pushing global frontiers with ambitious hypersonic weapons megaprojects.”

The human factor

Few doubt that the PLA has made great strides in both the number and quality of weapons it can field. Take for example its warships, led by the Type 055 destroyer, classified by many analysts as the most powerful surface combatant in the world.

The PLA Navy launched its 10th Type 055 last year, with as many as six more expected in the coming years. Each requires a crew of about 300 sailors.

The Type 055 guided-missile destroyer Nanchang (101) at Qingdao Port ahead of an activity to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on April 20, 2023 in Qingdao, China.

Fu Tian/China News Service/Getty Images

Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said building the high-tech warships may be easier than crewing them – because modern warships need young sailors to take on complex tasks, and that requires extensive training.

“The army could likely assimilate someone from the countryside … who might not get a lot of education … and train him up to be an infantryman. But if you want to train somebody who is able to man the controls in the combat information center in the warship, fire a missile and to maintain a missile, that requires a bit more,” Koh said.

Meanwhile, the PLA continues to struggle another personnel problem – corruption. A Pentagon report from December said a widespread anticorruption campaign within the senior levels of the Chinese military and government is impeding Xi’s defense buildup.

“I think they’ve identified it as something that really has posed great risks to the political reliability and ultimately the operational capability of the PLA,” a senior US defense official said in December.

Defining Chinese military readiness

When analysts talk about Chinese military readiness, focus quickly zooms in on Taiwan. US intelligence estimates say Xi has ordered the PLA to be ready to invade the island by 2027, if necessary.

But Heath argues that while the Chinese leader set that goal, he and other top party officials have not engaged in any concerted push to prepare the Chinese public for combat.

“Chinese leaders have made no speeches that glorify war, advocate for war, or otherwise characterize war as inevitable or desirable,” Heath wrote, noting that “China’s military has not even published a study on how it might occupy and control Taiwan.”

A launching ceremony is held to unveil China's first Type 076 new-generation amphibious assault ship, the Sichuan, at Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding, a Shanghai-based subsidiary of China State Shipbuilding Corp, in Shanghai, China, on December 27, 2024. Named after southwest China's Sichuan Province, the independently-developed new vessel was put into the water at a launch and naming ceremony.

Pu Haiyang/VCG/Getty Images

Related article China launches new amphibious assault ship in a race to rival US military

Others caution against judging Beijing’s intentions based on Western thinking. It’s unknown what Xi would consider a win in Taiwan, they say.

The amount of pain the PLA – and Chinese society as a whole – could sustain to take the island is known only in Beijing, they say.

“We have to consider the use of force by Beijing at a level that could be potentially calibrated to suit its political needs,” Koh said.

That force could be a blockade to strangle the island without shots being fired. It could be enough airstrikes to show Taipei and its supporters that China holds the upper hand in any cross-strait conflict. It could be a full-scale invasion and occupation.

Or it could be a continuation of Beijing’s relentless political pressure accompanied by the almost constant PLA presence around Taiwan, including dozens of warplanes and ships. It’s a policy that, to date, has served the Communist Party well, some analysts say.

So, why spend all that money on new weapons?

“China’s military modernization gains are not designed to conquer Taiwan through military attack. Instead, (they are) designed to help the PLA more effectively carry out its longstanding mission of upholding CCP rule,” Heath wrote.

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, aircraft of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conduct a joint combat training exercises around the Taiwan Island, August 7, 2022.

Li Bingyu/AP

Related article China tightens screws on what can be shared online about its military

Essentially, new warships and stealth fighter jets impress the public, and that makes controlling society easier, he said.

Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, agreed with that point. “Politics being primary means propaganda is more important than the military outcome,” he said.

But Koh said the PLA’s gains under Xi cannot be brushed aside as merely sending a domestic message.

“Despite those known issues within China and the PLA, I don’t think any military planner in the region is going to just dismiss the PLA as a paper tiger,” he said.

And Thompson said the PLA is indeed a capable foe for Taiwan and for the US.

“China could start a war and fight it. Could they win? How do you define victory?” Thompson asked.

“Is it a zero sum or just a series of tradeoffs?”

CNN · by Brad Lendon · February 17, 2025

​26. Clarifying Language for Victory

​Words matter. Especially in irregular warfare (IW) - :-) 

GZA - gray zone activities.

RW - regular warfare

Excerpts:

The reality is our adversaries have evolved to a point that the United States is no longer afforded the luxury of a binary concept of war. As the need to compete requires the participation of those outside of military professionals, the DoD and the joint force must find a way to effectively communicate the different domains of warfare.

The first step of this process is to distinguish RW and IW in a meaningful way. The national leadership must then provide the means for collaboration across society and stress the importance of non-military agencies being active in their role to defend the nation against IW campaigns. To assist with this, joint professional military education should become a requirement before an individual can compete for high-grade general schedule (GS) government employment and executive-level leadership positions.

The potential methods for an adversary to conduct IW is beyond capability and capacity of the military. Therefore, appropriate civilian government and non-government organizations must be prepared to deter and if needed prevail against select adversary IW operations. This paper does not suggest a nationwide call to arms, but rather calling for clarifying language for victory against adversary countries and appropriate multi-agency/organization collaborative efforts for defense. The warfighter is more than capable of conducting forward RW and IW operations and the responsible citizen is uniquely suited to deter or prevail against adversary IW operations within the US to protect their American Dream.

Clarifying Language for Victory

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/18/clarifying-language-for-victory/

by Joshua Edwards

|

02.18.2025 at 06:00am

The Reality of Modern Warfare

Effective communication is vital for any team to achieve its goals, which is amplified as a team extends from team to country. The challenge becomes daunting when considering the cultural diversity between organizations and individuals in the melting pot of our country. One problem with communication is the inability to define fundamental terminology that can be used to frame common ground to facilitate understanding across diverse organizations and people. Another problem with communication is that terminology, once established, can take monumental efforts to effectively update in the face of common practice. On other occasions, terminology is established with the constraints of cultural bias, which can fail to communicate the threat. The point of this paper is to explore the need to update concepts of Irregular Warfare, gray zone activities, and introduce regular warfare to ensure effective communication for a combined national defense effort.

The armed forces have been the focal point of national defense for centuries. The United States (US) has consistently demonstrated the ability to field exquisite game-changing capability that would deter any rational actor from engaging in conventional warfare. Nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, stealth technology, and precision weapons are but a handful of capabilities that prevented a major adversary from irresponsible escalation. Adversaries must therefore adapt outside of military pursuits to realize their ambitions. These adaptations come in the form of statecraft, economic power, subversion, coercion, disinformation, and deception aimed at military and civilian targets.

The reality of 21st century strategic competition, coupled with the limitations of legacy perspectives, resulted in the US Department of Defense (DoD) developing the Joint Concept for Competing (JCC) in 2023 and in the process updating the US military’s definition of irregular warfare (IW). According to the JCC, IW can be defined as “A form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” The JCC’s fresh perspective – enables the joint force to collaborate with interagency, multinational, and other interorganizational partners to be successful in strategic competition.

This paradigm shift paves the way for the US to update its perception of warfare by using an adversary’s (both state and non-state) perspective of warfare. In the process, the JCC implies that the defense of our nation is no longer the sole responsibility of the armed forces. The DoD, and its respective services, must realize their respective limitations in defending against IW, while civilian agencies and civil societies must assume their responsibility to take an active role in national defense against adversary IW efforts.

While the definition may be clear to military professionals, it is potentially opaque to the civilian population that is required to defend against hostile IW operations. The potential need to seek further definitions for clarity demonstrates the lack of utility for the IW definition beyond military professionals. For example, the DoD’s definition of asymmetric begins with a characterization of military operations. The DoD defines asymmetric as “In military operations the application of dissimilar strategies, tactics, capabilities, and methods to circumvent or negate an opponent’s strengths while exploiting his weaknesses.” Many of these concepts fall into what are considered gray zone activities, or GZA.

When considering GZA, there is disagreement regarding a precise definition. Clementine Starling, however, offers that “the gray zone describes a set of activities that occur between peace (or cooperation) and war (or armed conflict). A multitude of activities fall into this murky in-between – from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, and disinformation campaigns.” Arun Iyer notes the irony that open and transparent societies are a strength, yet they provide the means for competitors to operate against those societies in the gray zone. However, I submit that the GZA name incorrectly implies an area of uncertainty. This perception of uncertainty is the result of a culture that perceives war in a binary state – where a country is either at war, or at peace. This is in contrast to the reality that adversaries are surreptitiously conducting non-kinetic warfare against the US across multiple domains to prevail before kinetic fighting is needed, or to set victory conditions for an upcoming kinetic war of their choosing.

Fundamental Questions

The conventional capability of the US encourages adversaries to seek indirect approaches. As the IW annex to the 2020 National Defense Strategy asserts, “Their intent will be to achieve their objectives without resorting to direct armed conflict against the United States, or buy time until they are better postured to challenge us directly. The purpose of competition is not only to gain military advantages, but also to defeat adversaries’ strategies, shape their perceptions, and deny their strategic objectives in the pursuit of national interests.” Remember, gaining military advantage is a way, not an end in itself. The US should gain, or maintain, military advantage to deter armed conflict and establish the conditions necessary to prevail in a crisis or armed conflict. Creating these conditions should not rest solely on the military.

Clausewitz notes, “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried out with other means.” Further, he states that, “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.” War, from a traditional sense, is the violent struggle among state and non-state actors to compel an enemy to accept an unfavorable outcome. Tradition, however, does not always reflect the realities of the modern world. Reflected of the preference for tradition over reality, the DoD fails to define warfare, regular warfare (RW), nor non-violent warfare.

Two questions remain, however. First, if IW is “a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities,” what is RW? Secondly, how do policy makers communicate the danger of IW and GZA operations to non-military professionals?

Communicating Irregular Warfare

Every graduate of Joint Professional Military Education is taught that the destruction of the enemy’s military force is not the unquestionable pathway to victory. The idea of attacking the enemy outside of direct action is not new. Sun Tzu provides an array of concepts that speak of a pathway to victory that is not unique to RW. Consider the following statements:

Warfare is a path of subterfuge. Be subtle, subtle even to the point of formlessness; be mysterious, mysterious even to the point of soundlessness: Thus, you can control the enemy’s fate. Therefore it is said that victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Tire them while taking it easy, cause division among them while acting friendly. Attack where they are unprepared, emerge when they least expect it.

The Chinese way of warfare incorporates deception, shaping conditions before direct action, creating internal hostility (which reduces the enemy’s capability to operate and distracts it from recognizing the emerging threat), attacking points of weakness, and using surprise. These sage words, and others by Sun Tzu, focus on weakening an adversary’s government, economy, and civil society before engaging the adversary’s military forces.

The US’s civil society must recognize the existence of non-violent warfare, which is Sun Tzu’s preferred way to wage warfare, and by extension, potentially China’s preferred way to approach war today. This is problematic because of the historical trend of victory when one competitor adopts a simplistic interpretation of Clausewitz’s definition of victory, but they are competing against an adversary inspired by Sun Tzu. This competition leaves no room for uncertainty – what one state considers nebulous activity between peace and war (GZA) is simply non-kinetic warfare to another. Thus, the GZA fails to normalize the characterization of circumstances, which prevents policy makers and citizens from understanding the nature of Sun Tzu’s path to victory. For this reason, American society must be educated on the perceived vulnerabilities that Sun Tzu-inspired adversaries will exploit, and we should be responsible to find solutions that mitigate, or prevent, the risks to the US’s national security.

A Path Forward

The first step is clear – eliminate GZA as a term. Ambiguity in communication is a challenge, not an asset, to clear understanding. Furthermore, the definition of IW should be revised to further promote clarity. For this paper, GZA is considered a subset of a revised definition of IW, thereby simplifying the communication of warfare across the elements of national power.

To that end, if it is acceptable to consider RW as direct action against the enemy’s fighting force, then IW exists to attack the adversary’s government, economy, and civil society to degrade or render the adversary’s military forces irrelevant. Thus, IW should be redefined as the action taken against an adversary’s non-military elements of national power – the diplomacy, information, and economic elements of DIME (diplomacy, information, military, and economy). These actions are made to weaken an adversary’s political and public will, as well as their economic resources, both of which are critical requirements for the use of military force. From one perspective, this collects the diplomacy, information, and economic aspects of DIME and acknowledges how it supports the military. This is an important note because many of the US’s current adversaries have a comprehensive view of national power that extends beyond the US’s traditional view of national power (DIME). China, for instance, employs coercion and subversion to attack their adversaries’ governments, economies, and civil societies, with the intention of rendering those adversaries unwilling, or unable, to oppose Chinese strategic interests and objectives. This is “warfare without armed conflict;” or to win strategically without fighting militarily. This idea is foreign to the traditional American way of war.

 Given that RW consists of direct action against a military force and IW is direct action against the non-military elements of power, there will be some exclusion and some overlap of weapons and forces. For example, cyber warfare may be used to strike at both military and non-military centers of gravity. Thus, cyber warfare could be a subset within both RW and IW. Economic sanctions could be considered an act of IW. From a force perspective, military-on-military engagement is clearly RW. Yet, military forces that are contributing to efforts to build military-civil relationships through humanitarian assistance to undermine or prevent adversary influence are engaging in IW.

Time Sensitive Change Requirements

The US must find a way to communicate the reality of 21st century warfare to every citizen so that the US can maintain the opportunities for its citizens to live the American Dream. To be clear, the following recommendations are not that the US should model itself after China, or ancient Sparta, for that matter. Rather, the intent is to advocate for the US to educate targeted members of its society, civilian agencies, and senior civil servants on the methodologies that China is employing across the DIME while creating the language and policies to facilitate effective deterrence that are aligned with the US’s strategic interests and priorities.

Without clear communication the required defense against adversary IW efforts will be insufficiently pushed to the military to handle in its entirety. In failing to educate the rest of the US civil society in IW, the US misses an opportunity to provide a characterization for a way of war to those who are unfamiliar with Sun Tzu, and who might otherwise be oblivious to the constant Chinese attacks across DIME.

To be sure, anyone who has read the Sun Tzu’s Art of War will recognize that the US has been under attack since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, if not longer. However, because there is not a clear departure from binary concepts of peace and war, many people simply fail to understand that China is working to win before going to war, or preferably, to deter US intervention altogether. This binary perspective has led Westerners to invent the “gray zone” concept, which effectively fails to convey the dangers of what some believe are isolated incidents.

The usage of RW and IW maintains the correct level of potency to address kinetic and non-kinetic offensive operations against the country. Conceptually, RW works directly against military forces. This is a concept that is intuitive. As already stated, IW works directly against the political, diplomatic, economic, and informational elements of national power that enable an adversary’s government, economy, and civil society to function effectively in a crisis or armed conflict. The updated IW concept provided in this article provides an easily articulated area of interest. The consolidation of GZA and IW, the update of the IW definition, and the addition of RW will allow policymakers to clearly articulate the reality of contemporary warfare, thus allowing those outside of the military to take on the responsibility of defending against adversary IW operations.

As stated in the JCC:

Deterring an adversary from competing in a particular area is a perfectly valid strategy in strategic competition. Equally, the more competitive the United States shows itself to be, the greater the likely deterrent effect it will have upon adversaries.

The reality is our adversaries have evolved to a point that the United States is no longer afforded the luxury of a binary concept of war. As the need to compete requires the participation of those outside of military professionals, the DoD and the joint force must find a way to effectively communicate the different domains of warfare.

The first step of this process is to distinguish RW and IW in a meaningful way. The national leadership must then provide the means for collaboration across society and stress the importance of non-military agencies being active in their role to defend the nation against IW campaigns. To assist with this, joint professional military education should become a requirement before an individual can compete for high-grade general schedule (GS) government employment and executive-level leadership positions.

The potential methods for an adversary to conduct IW is beyond capability and capacity of the military. Therefore, appropriate civilian government and non-government organizations must be prepared to deter and if needed prevail against select adversary IW operations. This paper does not suggest a nationwide call to arms, but rather calling for clarifying language for victory against adversary countries and appropriate multi-agency/organization collaborative efforts for defense. The warfighter is more than capable of conducting forward RW and IW operations and the responsible citizen is uniquely suited to deter or prevail against adversary IW operations within the US to protect their American Dream.

Tags: Gray Zone, irregular warfare

About The Author

• 
  
• Joshua Edwards

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com