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Quotes of the Day:
"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are."
– Anais Nin
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
– H.L. Mencken
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
– Gertrude Stein
1. The Long Telegram and the Long Cold War
2. Ukraine and the New Way of War
3. Trump Approaches Legacy-Defining Moment on Iran: A Deal or War
4. MQ-9 drones sharpen US eye on China's Pacific moves
5. US Army lets soldiers flaunt their drone skills in first-ever competition
6. When it comes to drones, the Pentagon should mind the experience gap
7. AI is the future of warfare and US is in the lead
8. A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
9. Date set for US President Donald Trump’s trip to China
10. The signal and the noise: How media fragmentation is changing politics and what governments need to do to adapt
11. Exclusive | U.S. Intelligence Says at Least 15,000 at Large After ISIS Detention Camp Collapses in Syria
12. How four years of war have changed Russia
13. The moment of reckoning between America and Iran
14. How commercial drones make the Pentagon’s ‘Blue UAS Select’ list
15.
Note: I will be overseas for the next month so my daily dispatches will be sent at different times.
1. The Long Telegram and the Long Cold War
Summary:
Francis P. Sempa argues the Cold War’s emergence was clarified in early 1946 by George F. Kennan’s Long Telegram and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. He surveys debates on Cold War origins, contrasting conventional accounts, revisionist historians, and more nuanced scholarship, while highlighting John Lewis Gaddis’s evolution as archives opened. Sempa also notes James Burnham’s claim that the Cold War began in 1917 and stresses the ideological dimension of Soviet policy. Kennan depicts Soviet Marxist-Leninist dogma plus insecurity as incompatible with lasting coexistence, urging Western cohesion and force. Churchill likewise warns of Soviet expansion, subversion, and “fifth columns,” calling for Western strength and unity.
Comment: Who is our Kennan today? Is someone in the US embassy in Beijing going to write a new "Long Telegram?" Or has one already been written and sent?
Ideology is the engine and geography is the terrain, so strategy must target belief systems as much as borders. Kennan and Churchill were early warning sensors, which implies modern states still fail at strategic listening until crisis makes the message audible.
The Long Telegram and the Long Cold War
modernagejournal.com · Francis P. Sempa
George Kennan and Winston Churchill gave early warnings about conflicts to come.
Francis P. Sempa
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February 19, 2026
https://modernagejournal.com/long-telegram-cold-war-kennan-churchill/254622/
Eighty years ago this month, the Cold War was emerging into U.S. and Western consciousness, despite the work of those within our government and society who consciously or unconsciously advanced communist goals. Just five months after celebrating V-J Day and the end of the Second World War with our Soviet “allies,” George F. Kennan, then a relatively unknown American diplomat assigned to our Moscow embassy, wrote a Long Telegram to his superiors in the State Department about the nature of the Soviet communist threat to the West. The classified telegram arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. A few weeks later, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a commencement address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and announced to President Harry S. Truman (who was in attendance) and the world that the Soviet Union had erected an “iron curtain” across central and eastern Europe.
The origins of the Cold War have been studied and endlessly debated by scholars since the late 1940s. The conventional view is that the Cold War began sometime in 1945–46, due to Soviet violations of wartime agreements signed at Yalta and Potsdam in the form of the forced communization of Poland and other central-eastern European nations; Soviet meddling in postwar Greece, Turkey, and Iran; Soviets’ subtle pressures on West Berlin; and the slowly emerging revelations of Soviet espionage networks within the United States and other European countries. There were, to be sure, some influential revisionist historians, such as William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperowitz, and Gabriel Kolko, who laid as much, if not more, blame on the United States for the origins of the Cold War. There were also scholars, such as Melvyn Leffler in his magisterial A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, who took a more nuanced view of the Cold War’s origins based on the geopolitical perceptions of both sides. But most scholars—a good example is Hugh Thomas, whose book Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1946–1946 received widespread acclaim when it appeared shortly before the Cold War’s end in 1987—while critical of some aspects of U.S. and Western postwar policies, placed most of the blame where it belonged, on Stalin and Soviet policies.
Perhaps the best historian of the Cold War is John Lewis Gaddis, whose works The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972), Strategies of Containment (1982), We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), and The Cold War: A New History (2005) present a meticulous and evolutionary assessment of the origins of the conflict. Gaddis began this intellectual journey at a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when many Americans were questioning the wisdom and morality of the country’s anti-Soviet policies and completed the journey when the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent opening of Soviet archives revealed the soundness of those policies. Gaddis concluded this journey with his magnificent biography of George Kennan, which appeared in 2011.
Other Cold War observers, however, believed it was a mistake to pinpoint the conflict’s origins in the mid- to late 1940s. The political philosopher, former Trotskyist, and onetime U.S. intelligence analyst and consultant James Burnham identified the beginning of the Cold War in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. Burnham first publicly asserted this idea in a little-remembered article in Partisan Review in the summer of 1944 titled “The Sixth Turn of the Communist Screw.” Burnham at the time was working for the Office of Strategic Services and had written a classified paper that spring that claimed the Cold War had already begun even though the U.S. and Soviet Union were “allies” in the ongoing Second World War. In the article, Burnham set forth six phases (or “turns”) of Soviet policy aimed at the extension of Soviet control throughout the world. Burnham’s point was that the Cold War was part geopolitical and part ideological, and the true origins of the conflict were ideological. Burnham later wrote an influential Cold War trilogy—The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1952)—about the nature of the Soviet threat and a U.S. and Western strategy to win the Cold War.
George Kennan and Winston Churchill also recognized the importance of the ideological aspects of the Cold War. Kennan served in the Soviet embassy in the 1930s, during the latter phase of the Soviet famine caused by the collectivization of the farms and during Stalin’s purges (known as the Great Terror). Kennan at that time, like his boss Ambassador William Bullitt, understood that the Soviet state was leading an international communist enterprise that sought the overthrow of the capitalist world. In his Long Telegram, Kennan noted that the Soviet Union “lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’ with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” He cited a speech delivered by Stalin in 1927, in which the Soviet dictator proclaimed that the battle between socialism and capitalism “will decide the fate” of the “entire world.” Kennan also noted that within the capitalist world the Soviet Union could count on the aid of “communist parties” and other “progressive” elements “whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be ‘objectively’ favorable to interests of [the] USSR.”
In the Long Telegram, Kennan emphasized the importance of Marxist-Leninist “dogma” in Soviet affairs, which, combined with the traditional Russian sense of insecurity, meant that Soviet leaders acted on the belief that “there can be no permanent modus vivendi” with the United States. The Soviet worldview held that Soviet power could only be secure, Kennan explained, when the “internal harmony of our society [is] disrupted, our traditional way of life [is] destroyed, [and] the international authority of our state [is] broken.” America’s response to this challenge, Kennan wrote, must combine “cohesion, firmness and vigor” because while the men in the Kremlin were “impervious to [the] logic of reason,” they were “highly sensitive to [the] logic of force.” Kennan would later expand on this recommendation in his pseudonymous article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”
Kennan’s Long Telegram, although a classified document unknown to the American public at large, created a sensation in official Washington. President Truman and his top national security advisers read it and acted on it, initiating what would become known as the policy of containment. Kennan would later be assigned to teach at the National War College and be appointed to head the State Department’s policy planning staff. Through Kennan’s Long Telegram, Washington policymakers became conscious of the beginnings of the Cold War.
Churchill had understood the ideological and geopolitical challenge of Soviet communism since its conquest of Russia in November 1917. In a series of speeches in the House of Commons and elsewhere after Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia, Churchill described the Bolsheviks as “a foul combination of criminality and animalism,” a “pestilence” that was the worst tyranny in all of human history. He recommended that Britian should “resist by every means at [its] disposal the advances of Bolshevist tyranny in every country in the world.” He predicted that the Soviet government would seek to conquer or subvert the nations of eastern Europe. The Bolsheviks, he said, are “fanatics who are the avowed enemies of the existing civilization of the world.”
At the time, Churchill was at the War Office and suggested that Britain provide aid to the “Whites” who were battling the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Britain did so, but only half-heartedly, exhausted as it was by the strains and consequences of the recently concluded First World War. While it is true that Churchill during World War II became an ally of the Soviet Union, he did so out of geopolitical necessity, memorably stating after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union that Hitler’s regime was “indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism,” and that he would “unsay no words that I’ve spoken” about the Soviet regime. Toward the end of the war, Churchill attempted to persuade the physically exhausted and mentally fatigued President Franklin Roosevelt to wage war with a view to postwar trouble with Stalin’s regime, but to no avail.
At Westminster College on March 5, 1946, now out of power, Churchill, in a speech he titled “The Sinews of Peace,” warned the world, like Kennan had warned official Washington two weeks before, that the Soviet Union had “expansive and proselytising tendencies;” that it had erected an “iron curtain” from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea behind which it was communizing the nations of central and eastern Europe; that it was exerting pressure upon Turkey, Iran, and Berlin; that it was fomenting trouble in China and other parts of Asia; and that communist “fifth-columns” were posing a challenge to “Christian civilization.” The Soviets, he said, do not want war but the “fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” Like Kennan, Churchill called upon the United States and the West to confront the Soviets with “strength” and political cohesion. Recalling his days in the wilderness in the 1930s, Churchill lamented, “Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention . . . and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.”
Just as Kennan’s Long Telegram galvanized official Washington, so, too, did Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech galvanize the Western world for the “long twilight struggle” ahead. Eighty years ago, Kennan and Churchill, each in their own way, provided the intellectual foundation for the United States to wage Cold War until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
modernagejournal.com · Francis P. Sempa
2. Ukraine and the New Way of War
Summary:
Lissner and Warden argue Ukraine is a tutorial in twenty-first-century limited war under nuclear shadow. They draw four strategic lessons: nuclear use risk is real; destructive, protracted conventional war can persist; escalation thresholds are not preset but emerge through probing, signaling, and tacit bargaining; and coalition friction over risk tolerance is inevitable. They warn nuclear threats can constrain but often fail to coerce capitulation, while gradual “salami-sliced” escalation can expose hollow redlines. The United States should update policy and planning for limited war, expand credible response options across cyber, space, and conventional tools, prepare for long wars of attrition, and align expectations with allies and quasi allies before conflict.
Excerpts:
Planning is crucial. But wars never unfold exactly as envisioned. The United States must hone its skills in probing and tacit negotiation. Adversaries will try to constrain and deter U.S. actions while seeing what they can get away with under U.S.-imposed limits by testing the seriousness of American threats to escalate. At times, the United States will need to intentionally escalate to an advantageous position. At other times, slow escalation or self-restraint may be the best way to discourage escalation by adversaries. In every case, policymakers must ensure that the risks Washington takes are calculated and aimed at bringing a potential conflict to an acceptable close. And in every case, Washington should make the necessary investments in its strategic stockpiles, its defense industrial base, and its national resilience against cyberattacks and economic shocks to prevail in a protracted conflict. Such careful calibration will require intense coordination with coalition partners fighting alongside the United States. Whenever possible, Washington and its partners should carry out joint exercises designed to align expectations in advance of a conflict. But exquisite coordination on strategic messaging and signaling in the midst of hostilities is also essential, particularly with Taiwan, where restrictions on contact between Washington and Taipei constrain joint peacetime contingency planning and operational integration.
Above all, the war in Ukraine has shown the United States that it needs a new theory of victory for wars that feature great-power aggressors attacking U.S. allies or quasi allies. Only by linking credible threats, calibrating escalation, and managing coalition partnerships can Washington and its allies prevail in wars that remain limited in intensity and scope but nevertheless take a massive toll.
Comment: Nuclear threats are a weapon of the mind first, meant to narrow choices and chill support, so the real battle is over what leaders believe is permissible. If thresholds are made in war, not before it, then preparation is less about fixed tripwires and more about disciplined probing, messaging, and controlled risk. Coalitions are a second front, because mismatched risk tolerance can fracture strategy even when interests overlap and the enemy is clear.
Ukraine and the New Way of War
Foreign Affairs · More by Rebecca Lissner
Learning the Right Lessons for the Conflicts of the Future
March/April 2026 Published on February 17, 2026
Tara Anand
In the nearly four years since Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has repeatedly confounded expectations. A conflict that many analysts anticipated would be short and devastating for Kyiv has proved prolonged and costly for both sides. Ukraine’s ability to defend its territory, innovate militarily, and rally the United States, European countries, and others to its cause has far exceeded most projections. Russia, for its part, has underperformed militarily but regenerated its forces, improved its tactics over time, and sustained its economy at levels that have surprised even the keenest observers. As the largest land war in Europe since World War II rages on, and with the shape of any future peace or even cease-fire still uncertain, more surprises surely lie ahead.
Already, militaries around the world are looking to Ukraine’s battlefields, seeing in the cutting-edge technologies and tactics new lessons for the future of warfare. Less considered, however, are the strategic lessons of the war, the first since the fall of the Soviet Union in which two major nuclear powers have found themselves on opposing sides of high-stakes hostilities, even if only indirectly. Although the United States is not a combatant, Washington and Moscow are deeply engaged in shaping the trajectory of the conflict and, by extension, the evolving nature of escalation, deterrence, and warfighting in the twenty-first century.
Washington should not wait until the war’s resolution to conduct a comprehensive assessment. It can already take away four important lessons. First, the risk of an adversary using nuclear weapons is real and cannot be dismissed. Second, even under the nuclear shadow, protracted and highly destructive conventional war remains possible. Third, escalation thresholds are not fixed in advance; they emerge through ongoing contestation and tacit bargaining during war. And last, friction with allies and partners, particularly over questions of risk tolerance and escalation management, is inevitable. These lessons suggest that limited war with a nuclear-armed adversary is a scenario for which the United States must more intensively plan and prepare.
To put these lessons into practice, Washington must update its policies and defense planning for limited conflict to ensure it has the flexibility it needs to wage—and win—wars in the twenty-first century. And it cannot do this alone: it must coordinate closely with prospective coalition partners before the next conflict begins, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of total alignment. Doing so will make U.S. security guarantees more credible and, should deterrence falter, its escalation management far more effective. If Washington fails to learn from its experience in Ukraine, however, it will find itself dangerously ill equipped to wage a great-power war, at a moment when the likelihood of such a conflict is growing.
NOT-SO-EMPTY THREATS
For decades after the Cold War, many American policymakers and defense planners treated nuclear weapons as largely irrelevant to high-end conventional war. The durability of the post-1945 tradition of nonuse fostered the belief that the use of nuclear weapons had become politically and morally unthinkable—even for authoritarian leaders facing military defeat. The war in Ukraine is a stark reminder that this view was always too sanguine.
Since its February 2022 full-scale invasion, Russia has consistently made nuclear threats aimed at terrorizing Ukraine, sapping its fighting spirit, and limiting Western support. Much of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s saber-rattling rhetoric is bluster. But in the fall of 2022, the combination of public signaling by Putin and U.S. intelligence assessments led Washington to consider Russian nuclear use to be a real possibility. Over the summer, Ukraine’s counteroffensive had made significant gains in Kharkiv and pressured Russia’s position in Kherson, seemingly catching Russian forces off guard. Suddenly, the catastrophic collapse of Russian lines seemed plausible, opening a path for Ukraine to march toward Crimea, potentially producing a cascading collapse of the Russian army that could threaten Putin’s regime.
In that context, Putin issued his most direct nuclear threat. In September 2022, he declared that Russia “will certainly make use of all weapon systems available” to defend its territorial integrity, adding that the statement was “not a bluff.” U.S. intelligence corroborated the seriousness of Russia’s warning. Later, in 2024, CIA Director William Burns publicly confirmed that the U.S. intelligence community had seen a “genuine risk” of nuclear use if Russia’s army lines collapsed. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan subsequently characterized the likelihood of Russian nuclear use as a “coin flip.” At the time, the United States issued public and private warnings to Russia that the use of nuclear weapons would result in serious consequences, and the Biden administration encouraged China and India to counsel Moscow against it.
Russian lines ultimately held, and Putin’s willingness to employ nuclear weapons was never truly tested. But Moscow’s willingness to contemplate nuclear use against a nonnuclear state carries a sobering implication: the norm against the use of nuclear weapons is fragile, and the possibility of nuclear use is not unthinkable. In a direct war between NATO and Russia, the nuclear risk would be even higher and could involve both nonstrategic and strategic nuclear weapons.
Repairing a pipe at Darnytsia Thermal Power Plant in Kyiv, February 2026 Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters
Nor is Russia the only source of concern. North Korea is building a diverse arsenal, including weapons explicitly designed for tactical use, and its leader, Kim Jong Un, has signaled that he would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons in a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Beijing’s long-standing pledge against nuclear first use likely makes its nuclear threshold higher than that of Russia or North Korea, which have made no such commitment. But it remains to be seen whether that policy would hold if China were to face defeat in a conflict over Taiwan. The temptation to use nuclear weapons in such circumstances will only grow as China develops a larger arsenal with a wider reach.
The takeaway for the United States is not that it should retreat in the face of nuclear threats. Doing so would encourage adversaries to exploit Washington’s risk aversion and possibly invite nuclear coercion. Instead, the United States must look back to the Cold War, when the threat of Soviet nuclear use loomed over every aspect of U.S. foreign policy, and take nuclear risk seriously while preparing to deter and, if necessary, manage escalation. This is an especially challenging task when dealing with quasi allies such as Ukraine or Taiwan that lack formal defense commitments with the United States, creating greater ambiguity around American obligations.
The United States needs to refresh its policies and plans to defend U.S. and allied interests against Russian, Chinese, and North Korean threats without inordinately risking nuclear escalation. That begins by updating assessments of how the war in Ukraine may have altered adversaries’ nuclear strategy and, in particular, their thresholds for nuclear escalation. Doing so will give policymakers a clearer understanding of how to limit conflict across a variety of scenarios, including by exercising selective self-restraint and giving adversaries off-ramps. Washington also needs to expand the set of credible and well-developed military options for responding to nuclear escalation—including offensive cyber, space, and advanced conventional capabilities, as well as theater nuclear capabilities—to enhance deterrence and, should deterrence fail, give the president ample courses of action.
THE LONG HAUL
The war in Ukraine laid bare the reality of nuclear risk in the twenty-first century. But it has also demonstrated the limits of nuclear threats in compelling submission. Despite Russia’s overwhelming nuclear advantage, nuclear weapons have not given Moscow the coercive leverage many assumed they would, since Ukraine has denied Russia its primary war aims. Ukraine repelled Russia’s initial invasion, has maintained its sovereign independence, and has inflicted enormous losses on Russian forces, with more than a million casualties and the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment. Kyiv has not capitulated to Moscow’s threats and has gradually escalated its own operations. Ukraine has launched strikes on targets inside Russia that many analysts once viewed as likely nuclear redlines, including attacks on oil and gas infrastructure, logistics hubs, the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, and even Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bomber fleet. Ukrainian forces have also carried out incursions into Russian territory, occupying as many as 530 square miles inside Kursk in 2024.
Yet Russia has not responded to these actions with nuclear use. Moscow appeared to most seriously consider nuclear escalation not in response to Ukrainian strikes on its territory but when its frontline forces faced the prospect of a rout. Russia’s relative restraint suggests that it does not see nuclear weapons as simply more powerful bombs to be employed when militarily convenient. Nuclear use, Putin has correctly judged, would carry enormous risk, including domestic and international backlash and likely U.S. retaliation.
Still, the war has demonstrated that even if conflicts do not escalate beyond the nuclear threshold, they can involve sustained, highly destructive conventional warfare, especially when escalation is gradual and losses accumulate slowly. Indeed, protraction could be the price Washington pays for escalation management. By attempting to prevent escalation to keep a great-power war limited, the United States would likely create the conditions for a more protracted conflict.
Nuclear weapons have not given Moscow the coercive leverage many assumed they would.
For U.S. policymakers and planners, this lesson should prompt a reassessment of the prevailing assumptions about future wars with Russia or China. Although short, decisive conflicts remain possible—a rapid Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan or a Russian thrust into the Baltic states, for example—and early nuclear escalation cannot be ruled out, the war in Ukraine undercuts the idea that great-power wars would necessarily be brief or quickly escalate to nuclear use. A desire to keep the conflict geographically or militarily contained, the fear of nuclear use, and the difficulty of either winning outright or finding an acceptable off-ramp may instead push adversaries to fight prolonged wars of attrition while attempting to contain escalation.
To deter—or, if necessary, defeat—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a U.S. ally in the Indo-Pacific or a Russian attack on a NATO member, the United States must be prepared to deny its adversary a quick operational victory and either escalate to win or prevail in an extended war. A long war would create extraordinary demands on U.S. forces and burn through stockpiles of munitions, missiles, and air defenses. It would damage the U.S. economy, disrupting international trade and supply chains for critical goods and manufacturing inputs. The United States has begun to address some of these challenges, most notably by investing in the defense industrial base, but it has not done enough to prepare for protracted wars of attrition and less-piercing acts of aggression, such as a sustained blockade of Taiwan.
This lack of preparation could force Washington’s hand strategically. If the United States were less equipped than its adversary to fight a protracted conflict, it may feel the need to escalate early and dramatically—including potentially to use nuclear weapons—to curtail the conflict before it found itself stretched too thin. Washington relied on this escalation strategy to defend NATO during the Cold War out of necessity, but it has spent the decades since seeking to instead maintain conventional military superiority to place the burden of escalation on adversaries and avoid being boxed into its riskier previous approach. Today, preparing for protraction, arduous as it may be, is the only way to provide the White House with the full complement of options required for a great-power conflict.
BARGAINING PHASE
In Ukraine, the United States and Russia have each attempted to find limits on warfare that would achieve its desired objectives at the lowest possible cost. But neither entered the war with a clear, shared understanding of the other’s escalation thresholds. Only repeated probing, signaling, and adjustment by Washington and Moscow revealed how far each would be willing to go. This process of negotiation and contestation, rather than a fixed understanding of escalation thresholds, is likely to define any future great-power war.
In the run-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion, Washington and Moscow set the initial parameters of escalation. In December 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden said that putting U.S. troops on the ground to deter or defeat a Russian invasion was “not on the table.” Biden wanted to avoid a direct conflict that would come with the significant risk of nuclear escalation—or, as he put it, “World War III.” Putin, for his part, sought to deter direct intervention by third parties and prevent—or at least limit—support for Ukraine by the United States and its allies and partners. He warned “those who may be tempted to interfere” that “Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”
After the invasion, Washington and Moscow began a process of active probing and tacit bargaining. The Western alliance refused to heed Putin’s threat and continued providing significant economic and military assistance aimed at enabling Ukraine to preserve its sovereignty and retake lost territory. Biden made clear that the United States would defend “every inch of NATO territory,” warning Putin against expanding the conflict or interdicting military assistance provided through Poland and Romania. Moscow attempted to deter the United States from providing tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles that would enable Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory.
Firing toward Russian troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, January 2026 Oleg Petrasiuk / Reuters
In most instances, concerns over escalation did not drive the Biden administration’s decisions about what assistance to provide. The United States wanted to give Ukraine the best chance to win the war, and with limited funding made available by Congress, Washington was skeptical of the military utility of high-end capabilities compared with more immediately useful alternatives such as air defenses and artillery rounds. The United States also had its own significant shortfalls in weapons stocks and needed to conserve them for other contingencies.
Russia did, however, find ways to shape the calculus in Washington and other NATO capitals by threatening escalation. Moscow tested what it could get away with short of a direct kinetic attack on NATO: jamming Western space capabilities, carrying out a sabotage campaign against infrastructure and logistics targets in Europe, conducting incursions into NATO airspace. Doing so allowed Russia to create a perception in Washington and European capitals that it might be willing to escalate. That concern, in turn, led the United States and its NATO allies to circumscribe their on-the-ground military and intelligence cooperation with Ukraine; delay the provision of long-range strike capabilities, such as the surface-to-surface ballistic Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS); and put limits on the types of Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory they were willing to support or tolerate.
Yet over the course of the war, the United States and its allies and partners contravened nearly all the limits on Western assistance that Russia attempted to maintain. By probing Russia’s threats and gradually escalating its support for Ukraine’s forces, Washington was able to “salami slice” away Russia’s purported escalation thresholds, exposing most Russian threats as hollow. Meanwhile, Western intelligence sharing and operations support have enabled the Ukrainian military to use increasingly sophisticated capabilities to great effect.
Before the war, it would have been unthinkable that the United States would go as far as it has in facilitating long-range strikes into Russia without inviting a direct attack against NATO—and if the United States had taken that step in the first days after the invasion, it may have provoked such a response from Russia. But because the Biden administration escalated its assistance gradually, each step looked like an incremental change, not a dramatic jump. Before providing ATACMS, the United States sent Ukraine shorter-range missiles and one-way attack drones. Before enabling strikes on targets in Russia, the United States supported attacks against occupied Crimea.
U.S. allies and partners will not always be more risk tolerant than Washington.
To be sure, this strategy had its limitations. Although Ukraine has been able to prevent conquest and impose severe costs on Russia, it has little prospect of recovering full control of its entire territory any time soon. It is doubtful that any form of military assistance would have been a silver bullet, but in retrospect, Washington withheld some assistance and constrained Ukrainian operations longer than necessary: although earlier provision of ATACMS would not have made the difference that the most vocal advocates of their use suggest, the Ukrainian military could have employed them to target logistics hubs, airfields, and other high-value targets well behind the front in order to disrupt Russian operations and support Kyiv’s counteroffensives in 2023 and 2024.
In the event of a conflict with Russia or China, bargaining over escalation thresholds will again prove critical in determining the costs both sides will endure—and in determining which side emerges victorious. Unlike in Ukraine, a war with Russia or China will likely invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the Taiwan Relations Act, or a bilateral mutual defense treaty, meaning that direct U.S. involvement will not represent the most consequential threshold. But even then, the parties will bargain over significant conflict thresholds, be they strikes on national territory, attacks on critical infrastructure, or nuclear escalation. Washington must be prepared to probe, signal, and maneuver along the escalation spectrum—sometimes restraining itself, sometimes escalating deliberately—to establish advantageous limits that provide the United States the military freedom to achieve its desired objectives while minimizing the cost and risk.
Beyond deterring nuclear attack, the United States must be prepared to set limits on conflict. Conflict in space and cyberspace, for example, may be unavoidable, but Washington should nonetheless seek to spare its most important assets in space, including those that facilitate nuclear command and control, and prevent cyberattacks that could permanently damage critical infrastructure, such as the power grid or the financial system, by threatening severe consequences while withholding commensurate attacks. On land, Russia and China will hope to protect their own territory so that they can strike and resupply with impunity. The United States must be prepared to escalate and probe, seeking to conduct select strikes on mainland targets from which Moscow and Beijing are likely to launch aggressive attacks. Washington should still exercise restraint in the intensity of strikes on these mainland targets to deter large-scale retaliatory strikes. Precisely because any limits will emerge through tacit bargaining, it will be impossible to establish these thresholds in advance of a potential conflict. Washington needs approaches to warfare designed as much for probing as for military effect.
AGREE TO DISAGREE
As much as the war has showcased NATO’s capacity to come together in support of a threatened partner, it has also tested Washington’s ability to manage a coalition during a high-stakes conflict and made clear the limits of Washington’s control of escalation management. Ukraine has demonstrated a higher tolerance for escalation risks, particularly those associated with strikes on Russian territory, than the United States and some of its NATO allies have. It has also acted without U.S. input, at times working at cross-purposes with the United States. These dynamics would exist even if Washington were fighting alongside treaty allies, but they are particularly challenging when the United States must come to the aid of quasi allies such as Ukraine and, in the event of a conflict with China, Taiwan.
Ukraine’s forces are fighting for the survival of their country with military, intelligence, and other forms of assistance from the United States and other partners. Washington can decide the scope and scale of the security assistance it provides and include end-use restrictions on how the Ukrainian armed forces employ U.S. weapons. But since the United States is not a combatant, key tactical, operational, and strategic choices ultimately lie with Kyiv.
The United States and Ukraine have at several points diverged in their assessments of the risk-reward calculus of strikes on targets in Russia. Whereas Washington counseled caution, particularly in using U.S. military materiel to hit Russian territory, and encouraged a focus on operations that would degrade Russia’s occupying forces or otherwise disrupt Russian military operations, Kyiv consistently sought permission for deeper strikes against a broader range of targets, seeking to weaken Russia’s military operations, impose economic and political costs on Putin’s regime, and bolster Ukrainian morale. Although Ukraine generally honored the limits the United States placed on it, it conducted the invasion of the Kursk region using American equipment without Washington’s approval or coordination. Kyiv also used its own drone capabilities, over which Western governments could exert less control, to strike critical infrastructure and targets thought to have symbolic importance for Moscow. This divergence is hardly surprising; Ukraine was not concerned about provoking a Russian attack on NATO. If anything, drawing the West directly into the war would be a boon for Kyiv.
Ukrainian service members under an antidrone net in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, January 2026 Serhii Korovainyi / Reuters
But U.S. allies and partners will not always be more risk tolerant than Washington. If Russia had employed nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Kyiv feared that follow-on strikes might devastate its armed forces or kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in population centers, Ukraine, in the nuclear cross hairs with much to lose, might have proved less risk tolerant. The United States, by contrast, might have felt that with the norm against nuclear use already shattered, its leadership of the global nuclear order was at stake. As a result, Washington might have been willing to take on more risk, including potentially entering the conflict directly.
The United States should recognize the inevitability of wartime friction with its coalition partners and plan accordingly. The need for such planning is particularly acute with respect to quasi allies such as Ukraine and Taiwan, for which the United States has devised no mature processes for peacetime planning and wartime combined operations. But even when the United States comes to the defense of a treaty ally and can assume more direct control, national interests and leaders’ political incentives will invariably diverge. And because of the proliferation of long-range weapons systems, U.S. allies will be independently capable of inflicting meaningful damage on adversaries. Washington and its partners can reduce friction by seeking alignment ahead of time on questions of military strategy and escalation management.
With its treaty allies, Washington should revisit joint military plans and test command structures by conducting realistic war games and exercises. With Taipei, it needs to develop a common understanding of how command and control would work if the United States were to intervene to defend Taiwan, using war games, alongside official and unofficial dialogues, to surface and resolve disagreements over operational risk tolerance, escalation management, and war termination. And with Ukraine, although Kyiv and Washington already cooperate successfully, the United States should take advantage of any cease-fire to jointly plan for how to fight renewed Russian aggression, especially if Washington extends a security guarantee and NATO allies deploy forces in Ukrainian territory.
THE FIRES NEXT TIME
The war in Ukraine has been a tragic and costly tutorial in twenty-first-century conflict. Both sides have mobilized and reshaped their societies, attacked a variety of important targets, and suffered devastating casualties. The great-power wars of the future could be even more destructive.
Yet these wars are likely to remain limited rather than total, because all sides want to achieve their objectives while containing costs and avoiding nuclear catastrophe. This challenge is not novel; it was a hallmark of the Cold War. But the war in Ukraine is a harbinger of a new era of limited war. Preparing for it demands a theory of victory rooted in favorable escalation management, refined through constant interrogation of escalation thresholds, and translated into refreshed U.S. strategies, plans, and capabilities that expand options available to the president. By showing that it can come to the defense of allies and partners at an acceptable risk level, the United States will strengthen deterrence by making its intervention more credible in the eyes of its adversaries.
Escalation management is not only about avoiding nuclear war. The United States must also shape how its adversaries fight under the nuclear shadow by threatening higher costs and greater risk if they cross certain thresholds. Future wars between the United States and Russia or China are likely to extend into their respective homelands and into space and cyberspace, and Washington will need to figure out what limits it ought to maintain on conflicts in those domains.
Planning is crucial. But wars never unfold exactly as envisioned. The United States must hone its skills in probing and tacit negotiation. Adversaries will try to constrain and deter U.S. actions while seeing what they can get away with under U.S.-imposed limits by testing the seriousness of American threats to escalate. At times, the United States will need to intentionally escalate to an advantageous position. At other times, slow escalation or self-restraint may be the best way to discourage escalation by adversaries. In every case, policymakers must ensure that the risks Washington takes are calculated and aimed at bringing a potential conflict to an acceptable close. And in every case, Washington should make the necessary investments in its strategic stockpiles, its defense industrial base, and its national resilience against cyberattacks and economic shocks to prevail in a protracted conflict. Such careful calibration will require intense coordination with coalition partners fighting alongside the United States. Whenever possible, Washington and its partners should carry out joint exercises designed to align expectations in advance of a conflict. But exquisite coordination on strategic messaging and signaling in the midst of hostilities is also essential, particularly with Taiwan, where restrictions on contact between Washington and Taipei constrain joint peacetime contingency planning and operational integration.
Above all, the war in Ukraine has shown the United States that it needs a new theory of victory for wars that feature great-power aggressors attacking U.S. allies or quasi allies. Only by linking credible threats, calibrating escalation, and managing coalition partnerships can Washington and its allies prevail in wars that remain limited in intensity and scope but nevertheless take a massive toll.
REBECCA LISSNER is Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Adviser to the Vice President during the Biden administration.
JOHN KAWIKA WARDEN is Senior Deterrence Analyst at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served as Director for Strategic Stability and Arms Control at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
Foreign Affairs · More by Rebecca Lissner
3. Trump Approaches Legacy-Defining Moment on Iran: A Deal or War
Summary:
The article frames POTUS at a legacy-defining crossroads on Iran: accept a strict deal curbing Iran’s nuclear program or initiate military action with uncertain, hard-to-control regional consequences. POTUS demands no uranium enrichment, limits on ballistic missiles, and an end to support for proxy groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, while building the largest U.S. air-power concentration in the Middle East since 2003. Iran denies seeking a bomb, rejects ending enrichment, refuses missile talks, and insists on major sanctions relief. Iran threatens retaliation against ships, troops, and the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. officials warn postwar outcomes are uncertain.
Comment: If retaliation threats target oil flows and maritime trade, what is the U.S. threshold for absorbing economic pain, and how does that shape deterrence?
If regime change is contemplated but succession is likely to empower IRGC hard-liners, what theory of victory justifies action when the end state is undefined?
Trump Approaches Legacy-Defining Moment on Iran: A Deal or War
WSJ
If diplomatic efforts to end Iran’s nuclear program fail, the president’s appetite for a potentially lengthy war will be tested
By Alexander Ward
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, Laurence Norman
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, Robbie Gramer
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and Michael R. Gordon
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Feb. 20, 2026 8:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-approaches-legacy-defining-moment-on-iran-a-deal-or-war-ae3fe857?mod=hp_lead_pos5
President Trump during a December news conference at Mar-a-Lago. Alex Brandon/AP
WASHINGTON—President Trump is at a crossroads that could define his legacy: He could sign a deal that curbs Iran’s nuclear program, or launch a war with hard-to-control consequences for the U.S. and the Middle East.
Trump has said he would prefer a strict agreement that stops Tehran from ever being able to develop nuclear weapons—a potentially historic breakthrough. Should Trump instead order an attack, in the hope of coercing the Iranian regime or even bringing it down, he would be risking a major conflict that could envelop the rest of his presidency.
The moment is one of Trump’s own making, according to officials and analysts. He promised in January to support Iranian street demonstrators protesting the regime’s violent repression, but no U.S. intervention came.
Trump then laid out a set of demands for Tehran: no more nuclear enrichment, strict limits on its ballistic missiles and an end to support for regional proxy militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Meanwhile, he built up U.S. forces on Iran’s doorstep, assembling the largest concentration of air power in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
If Iran, which denies seeking a nuclear bomb, rejects Trump’s demands, the U.S. leader’s options range from a limited initial strike to try to pressure Tehran into concessions to a prolonged bombing campaign aimed at destroying the regime and its military.
An image provided by the U.S. Navy shows the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, in the Arabian Sea. Hannah Tross/U.S. NAVY/AFP/Getty Images
The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to slap down Trump’s use of tariffs could make a U.S. attack on Iran more likely, said Wilbur Ross, who was commerce secretary in Trump’s first term. “I don’t think he can take this loss and then be seen as backing down on Iran,” he said.
Iran has threatened significant retaliation against any U.S. attack, vowing to sink American warships, attack U.S. troops in the region and close the Strait of Hormuz, a sea lane vital to the world’s oil supply. Gulf states, which could be targeted, are worried.
Even if war leads to the fall of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, what might follow is highly uncertain, U.S. officials said. Many analysts said hard-line members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would be the most likely group to take control.
Trump is left facing “a lot of risk and not particularly attractive options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.
Even so, Trump is charging ahead into a showdown that could go a long way toward defining his place in history. He has reached this point without seeking congressional approval or making his case to the American public, even as he had criticized previous presidents’ wars in the Middle East.
Officials said Trump has gained confidence about the benefits of wielding U.S. military might since he ordered successful strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites in June and captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro last month.
Those were short, narrowly targeted operations, according to analysts. Trump has yet to launch a large-scale, potentially lengthy war with an adversary capable of striking back hard—including against oil markets and maritime trade.
“We have never actually seen what Trump’s tolerance for absorbing pain is,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior U.S. official and an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, adding that the president prefers military missions that risk few American casualties. “Unless Trump is sure the U.S. is able to take out everything Iran has up front, there is great risk in what follows.”
A White House official said Trump’s instinct is always to engage in diplomacy and make a deal before resorting to other options.
While Trump has criticized U.S. interventions aimed at regime change in the Middle East, he wavered on that stance in January, when Tehran violently suppressed mass protests. Weeks of unrest showed that the Iranian regime is at its weakest position in decades.
An antigovernment demonstration in Tehran early last month. AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged Trump to seize the moment and bring down the regime before it regains its strength. Other U.S. allies in the region, including Gulf countries and Turkey, have urged caution.
Trump’s decision is likely to hinge on whether Iran’s maximum concessions meet his minimum demands.
After talks were held in Geneva, Vice President JD Vance said this past week that Iran was failing to acknowledge or address what the U.S. has said is necessary for a deal.
Iran will present a detailed, written proposal to the U.S. in the coming days, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday in a “Morning Joe” interview on MS NOW. He said he hoped that serious negotiations over the proposal would then take place.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi speaking during a meeting in Geneva this past week. Cyril Zingaro/Press Pool
The Trump administration is debating internally whether a deal would need to cover only Iran’s nuclear program, or extend to its missiles and proxy militias, according to U.S. officials and Middle East officials briefed on the deliberations.
Some of the officials said a deal limited to Iran’s nuclear activities would be a win for Tehran.
Iran has so far shown no willingness to soften the hard-line negotiating stance that it has maintained for two decades, despite Western military threats, hefty sanctions and armed clashes with Israel and the U.S. that have inflicted significant damage on its nuclear program and military capabilities.
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Tehran has repeatedly said it would never give up its uranium-enrichment program, a crucial element of its nuclear activities and a prerequisite for building a nuclear weapon. It has so far refused discussions with the U.S. on curbing its ballistic-missile program, which it has long relied on to compensate for the weakness of its air force. Tehran has also insisted that any concessions must be matched by significant sanctions relief from the U.S. to help its battered economy.
“Trump has given himself some flexibility here, whether intentional or not,” said Eric Brewer, a former White House official who worked on Iran during Trump’s first administration. The U.S.’s full set of demands would amount to “complete surrender” for Tehran, he said.
The U.S. last year proposed that Iran keep its civilian nuclear-energy program. Low-enriched uranium would be supplied to Tehran by an international consortium outside the country that Washington would organize and oversee.
The idea of providing Iran with fuel has featured in negotiations over many years, but Iran rejected the idea of eliminating its indigenous uranium-enrichment program and depending on foreign sources of nuclear fuel.
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the February 21, 2026, print edition as 'Trump Faces Legacy-Defining Moment With Iran'.
Alexander Ward is a national security reporter covering the White House and State Department for The Wall Street Journal in Washington. Alex’s reporting focuses in particular on the inner workings of the National Security Council and how top players in an administration formulate and execute foreign policy.
Alex was previously the White House and national security reporter at Politico, where he was also the first author of its "National Security Daily" newsletter. Before that, he was Vox's White House reporter covering foreign policy and worked at the Atlantic Council think tank covering national security and military affairs.
Alex has won numerous awards for his reporting and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist along with Politico colleagues for Supreme Court coverage.
In February 2024, Alex published his first book, "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump." He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Laurence Norman is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Robbie Gramer is a national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal in Washington. He previously worked at Politico, where he was a reporter and the lead author of the newsletter NatSec Daily. Robbie has reported from over two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East. He has reported from the halls of Congress, remote research stations in the Amazon rainforest and aboard Norwegian coast guard cutters high in the Arctic Circle. He was also the host of Foreign Policy magazine’s award-winning podcast, “After Hotel Rwanda,” about the kidnapping of a Rwandan human-rights activist and U.S.-led efforts to free him.
Before his career in journalism, Robbie was associate director of transatlantic security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Robbie graduated from American University with a degree in international relations.
Michael R. Gordon is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He has covered seven wars and reported on the State Department and the Pentagon. He is the author of “Degrade and Destroy: the Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.” He is also the co-author, along with the late Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, of three definitive histories of U.S. wars in Iraq: “The Endgame,” “Cobra II,” and “The Generals' War.”
He previously worked for 32 years for the New York Times, where he was posted in Moscow, London and Washington.
WSJ
4. MQ-9 drones sharpen US eye on China's Pacific moves
Summary:
Gabriel Honrada argues the United States is expanding an MQ-9 Reaper network across the Asia-Indo-Pacific to watch China persistently, link allies into a shared ISR architecture, and pursue “deterrence by detection.” It cites deployments at Kadena (USMC and USAF), Kunsan in South Korea, and Basa in the Philippines, plus partner buys by Japan, Taiwan, and India. Honrada stresses MQ-9 roles beyond sensing, as a network hub for JADC2 and ABMS and aligned with Agile Combat Employment concepts. But it warns the platform is vulnerable in contested airspace, pointing to Houthi shootdowns and China’s layered air defenses, making the MQ-9 a potentially attritable linchpin.
Comment: Isn't the MQ-9 gkind of old school these days?
MQ-9 drones sharpen US eye on China's Pacific moves - Asia Times
asiatimes.com · Gabriel Honrada
MQ-9 Reaper is becoming the backbone of US surveillance in Asia — and a stress test for deterrence against China
by Gabriel Honrada
February 18, 2026
https://asiatimes.com/2026/02/mq-9-drones-sharpen-us-eye-on-chinas-pacific-moves/
As the US spreads a dense web of MQ-9 Reapers across the Indo-Pacific to monitor China, it is making a high-stakes bet: that persistent drone surveillance will deter Chinese aggression—but these assets also risk exposing a critical vulnerability in America’s defense strategy if confronted by sophisticated adversaries.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the US is expanding a network of MQ-9 drones across the Indo-Pacific. This move sharpens surveillance pressure by combining long-endurance reconnaissance with strike options and by knitting allies into a shared intelligence architecture.
The turboprop MQ-9, which can operate up to about 50,000 feet and has been used in missions including the 2020 killing of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, is being positioned and upgraded to widen coverage near China’s periphery, including with the MQ-9B SeaGuardian’s new sonobuoy-dispensing capability for submarine hunting.
The US Marine Corps has stationed six MQ-9s indefinitely at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, alongside eight Air Force drones already there, with another squadron at Kunsan in South Korea and a US Marine Corps unit deployed to Basa Air Base in the Philippines, putting the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait and South China Sea under persistent watch.
The US is also exporting the platform: Japan plans to double its Coast Guard MQ-9Bs to 10 and buy 23 SeaGuardians by 2032; Taiwan has ordered four; and India has agreed to buy 31 more after border clashes with China.
The proliferation creates a “collective intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) web” that raises deterrence and escalation risks, even as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) claims it can counter the drones with air defenses, jamming or comparable unmanned systems.
Noting the increased use of MQ-9s against China, the South China Sea Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a Chinese think tank, notes in a September 2025 article that the MQ-9 Reaper is becoming a mainstay of US and allied reconnaissance against China because it sits within a layered, expanding unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network that emphasizes persistence, coverage, and low-risk presence.
SCSPI mentions that the MQ-9 provides “tactical support and strike capabilities” while contributing to a “layered and collaborative large-scale UAV ISR network” in the South China Sea and surrounding areas.
It also adds that the MQ-9’s long endurance, rotational deployments to bases such as Kadena in Japan and Basa in the Philippines, and growing share of close-in sorties—about 30%—make it a core, routine instrument of sustained pressure and situational awareness near China’s periphery.
Such operations carry immediate tactical and operational effects. Platforms such as the MQ-9 are part of a broader effort to use persistent unmanned surveillance to strengthen deterrence in the Western Pacific.
In line with that, Travis Sharp and other authors mention in a July 2023 US Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report that “deterrence by detection” holds that China is less likely to undertake opportunistic aggression if it knows it is being watched constantly and that its actions can be publicized widely, making surveillance with attribution central to deterrence.
Sharp and others argue that detection and retaliation are inseparable: surveillance enables targeted retaliation and buys time to “mass sufficient combat power to prevent a fait accompli.”
They add that by using existing, long-endurance, non-stealthy UAVs, the concept seeks affordable, near-term, real-time situational awareness over areas such as the South China Sea, East China Sea, and Taiwan Strait by repurposing assets already in service rather than building new forces.
Lawrence Stutzriem mentions in a November 2021 article for the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies that the drone should be reimagined not just as a sensor or shooter but as a network hub that “connects sensors and shooters at the battlespace edge,” acting as a communications node, relay, and datalink integrator within a larger system-of-systems.
Stutzriem highlights roles in Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and Advanced Battle Management Systems (ABMS), where MQ-9s can provide resilient connectivity, extend command and control (C2), and distribute data across joint and allied forces, reducing reliance on scarce high-end aircraft.
He also notes experiments showing MQ-9s supporting distributed, austere operations and integrating multiple platforms into a common operational picture, effectively making the drone an airborne networking layer rather than only an ISR platform.
Operationally, MQ-9 dispersion among US allies and partners is best understood as one piece of a larger posture-and-access competition. It aligns with the US Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) operational concept, which disperses aircraft and small support teams across many shifting, austere bases to complicate PLA missile targeting, preserve sortie generation, and keep airpower operating within China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) envelope.
However, proliferation and dispersal may not substantially enhance the survivability of what is fundamentally a vulnerable platform. As Douglas Barrie and other writers argue in a November 2024 report for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the MQ-9 is increasingly vulnerable in contested airspace, using Houthi operations as a central empirical case.
Barrie and others note that in Yemen, the Houthis assembled a patchwork air-defense network from legacy surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), repurposed legacy air-to-air missiles (AAMs), and Iranian-supplied systems such as the “358” loitering surface-to-air missile, which proved “limited” against manned aircraft but “effective against medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) UAVs” such as the MQ-9.
Barrie and others report that the Houthis claimed to have shot down 33 coalition MALE UAVs and later claimed to have shot down 11 US MQ-9s during the Red Sea crisis. They also state US officials acknowledged several losses, illustrating how even non-state actors can attrit MQ-9s without changes to tactics or defenses.
If the MQ-9 proved vulnerable to even rudimentary air defenses, its survivability against China, which has far more sophisticated weapons than irregular groups such as the Houthis, is questionable.
As the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) shows, China has an overlapping air defense network in the South China Sea, complete with radars, fighter jets and SAMs such as the long-range HQ-9 system – far more advanced than what MQ-9s have had to contend with against the Houthis in Yemen.
Also, while losing an MQ-9 may not be as politically sensitive as losing a fighter aircraft due to the former’s lack of a human pilot, each MQ-9 downed presents a significant financial and capability loss. Each MQ-9 costs around USD 30 million in 2025, and losing even one could significantly degrade ISR and networking capabilities for US and allied forces.
In the end, the MQ-9’s expanding Indo-Pacific web may sharpen deterrence and knit allied forces together. Still, against China’s layered defenses, it also risks becoming a costly, attritable linchpin whose losses could expose the fragility of America’s surveillance-first strategy.
asiatimes.com · Gabriel Honrada
5. US Army lets soldiers flaunt their drone skills in first-ever competition
Summary:
Soldiers from across the U.S. Army competed in the first annual Best Drone Warfighter Competition in Huntsville, Alabama, sponsored by the Army Aviation Association of America. With more than 800 attendees and teams from every Army unit, the event mirrors Best Ranger and other skills contests, but focuses on unmanned systems. Competitors run three lanes: Best Operator, Best Tactical Hunter-Killer Team, and Best Innovation. Events include an FPV drone obstacle race, a paired field exercise to engage targets, and an innovation pitch to judges. Leaders said the goal is harvesting soldier-driven tactics, rapid modification skills, and lessons drawn from Ukraine, with future interest in swarms and autonomy.
Comment: The drone warfighter.
US Army lets soldiers flaunt their drone skills in first-ever competition
armytimes.com · Zita Ballinger Fletcher Feb 19, 2026, 09:01 AM
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/02/19/us-army-lets-soldiers-flaunt-their-drone-skills-in-first-ever-competition/
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — Soldiers from across the U.S. Army showcased drone warfare skills and ideas in the service’s first annual Best Drone Warfighter Competition held here this week.
The competition, launched on Tuesday, is an Army event sponsored by the Army Aviation Association of America. It drew over 800 attendees and competing teams drawn from every Army unit.
It mirrors existing Army competitions such as Best Sapper, Best Ranger and Best Sniper, with emphasis on drone warfare. Soldiers compete in three lanes for the titles of Best Operator, Best Tactical Hunter-Killer Team, and Best Innovation.
The lanes include a drone racing obstacle course, a cross-country field exercise in which soldiers pair up to take out targets, and an innovation lane which sees soldiers showcase drone technology they’ve developed to a panel of five judges.
Prioritizing soldier ideas
“These lanes absolutely inform and tell us what kind of skills we need to train to make them the best at what we expect them to do,” Col. Nicholas Ryan, director of Army UAS Transformation and Lessons Learned Manager at the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence, told Military Times.
The focus of the competition is not on gaining points or acclaim but developing recipes for success in the unmanned domain, Ryan said.
All lanes focus on gathering input from soldiers about what drone technology is proving effective and why, encouraging participants to share solutions.
Additionally, the innovation lane gives soldiers experience with building and modifying their drone equipment - an essential skill in the fast-moving domain.
“That fabrication and modification aspect is also something we’ve taken from Ukraine because that’s what their operators do and it’s necessary for them to adjust their equipment to meet their mission demands,” Ryan said.
“It is now built into our UAS training courses teaching them how to 3-D print, how to design, how to code and how to build their own drones.”
What makes a good drone operator?
Soldiers competing in the Best Operator lane raced Neros Archer FPV drones. The Neros was chosen to establish a baseline for competitors to showcase their skills on a standard drone platform, offering a modular design that is easy to repair.
The lane saw soldiers fly drones through an intricate obstacle course and perform complex maneuvers.
While some operators were not used to racing, Captain Jacob Bickus, officer in charge of the Army Drone Team, told Military Times that hands-on practice is essential to build skills through familiarity.
“Even though it’s racing, it’s still good practice for them to build their skills,” Bickus said.
Asked what makes a good drone operator, Bickus told Military Times that the most important quality is to have an open mind.
“They have to be creative and innovative, and have an engineer problem-solving mindset because with these drones there are so many intricacies and knowledge you have to have to be able to proficiently operate them,” he said.
Drone swarms and autonomy
Future iterations of the Army competition event could incorporate drone swarm tactics, though that depends on the pace of developing technology, Ryan told Military Times.
“We absolutely want it in the Army, and want to use it in the Army. It’s not there just yet,” he said.
“That is absolutely a task and a requirement we do want to incorporate which we refer to as the one-to-many control, so one operator controlling many drones simultaneously.”
Drones are now an essential tool within the Army and the competition will help identify how the service can strengthen existing capabilities, Ryan explained.
“What we’re seeing is that is going to be a common capability and piece of equipment across every formation of every type and any group of soldiers,” Ryan said.
He added that fully autonomous systems may be suitable to performing some basic tasks for the Army in the future.
“There will be so many mission sets that drones can do and various types of technology across ranges of autonomy, and that’s something that we’re looking at very closely as well.”
About Zita Ballinger Fletcher
Zita Ballinger Fletcher previously served as editor of Military History Quarterly and Vietnam magazines and as the historian of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She holds an M.A. with distinction in military history.
6. When it comes to drones, the Pentagon should mind the experience gap
Summary:
Sara Willett argues the Pentagon’s main unmanned-systems challenge is not technology availability but adoption: integrating drones and autonomy into how the military fights, sustains, and trusts systems at scale. She says “buzzy” newcomers matter, but experience in reliable hardware production, industrial capacity, maintainability, and battlefield support is decisive. Systems must work on time, every time, under austere conditions, and be producible in appreciable quantities. She warns vertically integrated startups may struggle to deliver and sustain. A better path is teaming: traditional defense OEMs paired with innovative AI software vendors via open architectures, and partnerships that leverage commercial mass production. She adds experienced firms also bring critical real-world data to train AI models.
When it comes to drones, the Pentagon should mind the experience gap - Breaking Defense
breakingdefense.com · Sara Willett
An executive from Textron argues that while new entrants can help the Pentagon, the department needs to remember that experience matters.
By Sara Willett on February 20, 2026 11:45 am
As US and allied partners push to develop, produce and field military technologies for the modern battlefield, they are leaning into lessons learned from Ukraine and other recent global conflicts. Unmanned and autonomous systems are a major focus, and to have lasting impact must fit seamlessly into how wars are fought and sustained.
When it comes to unmanned systems, the US military does not have a technology problem — there are dozens of viable options in existence that would improve our capabilities to deter and wage wars. Rather, we have a technology adoption problem. The challenge lies in how these technologies fit into the ways our military operates and wages war, and trust by human operators in both the technology and the application must be created if those technologies are to be successfully accepted, produced and fielded in appreciable quantities.
In developing these systems, government leaders should recognize that experience and expertise from their industry partners is just as important for securing military advantage as the technology being provided. The buzziest technology won’t matter if warfighters don’t trust it, or if a start-up is unable to produce the systems at scale.
Simply put, autonomy and unmanned systems only create real advantage when tied to hard-fought experience in hardware production, industrial capacity, and the associated specialized expertise that comes with real-world experience.
If warfighters are to trust and widely adopt such systems, these machines must successfully do their intended job, on time, every time. Experience is required to reduce risk and ensure that high quality hardware is produced at scale, and able to be readily used and supported on the battlefield without substantial external assistance.
It is companies with experience providing scaled quantities of military hardware that is reliable, maintainable, and effective, done at a reasonable cost, which are best positioned to provide the backbone onto which new autonomous capabilities and enabling software can be added.
There is significant risk as to whether companies without such experience, particularly those which strive to be fully vertically integrated autonomy software and hardware providers, can perform when needed, fit seamlessly into military operations, and be supported under austere conditions.
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That doesn’t mean new entrants should not be part of the industrial base solution. In fact, there are several options for how to combine these new firms — which often come armed with great new ideas — with experienced members of the defense industrial base.
A recent surge of teaming combinations between traditional aerospace and defense hardware providers and new technology software firms suggests a better path, marrying traditional original equipment manufacturer abilities with innovative specialized software technologies. For example, the unmanned systems market has seen a number of industrial partnerships joining traditional providers with a range of AI-enabled software vendors offering advanced computer vision and perception systems, as well as mission-focused autonomy. What is required are core vehicle autonomy systems ready to accept specialized AI-enabled technologies through open architecture approaches.
Another new business model being explored is through partnerships that leverage commercial mass production capabilities, offering large volume production capacity at lower costs. For example, several unmanned surface vessel makers have teamed up with existing boatbuilders and shipyards, joining existing platform construction knowhow and capacity with new unmanned and autonomy technologies. Such arrangements were the rare exception a decade ago.
Companies with deep military experience offer another vital advantage: high quality data on which to train AI models. With defense moving to AI-enabled everything, and those models only as good as their training data, having large amounts of data from autonomous and unmanned operations in real world threat environments is vital.
For example, several companies operate drones on a contractor-owned and -operated model and have collected data from millions of hours of unmanned operations, generally in real world threat environments supporting US and allied global operational deployments. The domain specific insight provided by this data is difficult to obtain and can be applied to a wide range of unmanned and autonomy solutions, including training specific AI applications such as target recognition models and improved predictive maintenance.
Warfighters are relying on autonomous and unmanned systems at ever increasing rates. They need companies which know how to develop and build machines and do so in a manner that best fits how the US military will fight and sustain them on the battlefield.
At the end of the day, we are talking about the security of the United States. And for that, experience still matters.
Sara Willett is Vice President of Uncrewed Land and Air Systems at Textron Systems.
breakingdefense.com · Sara Willett
7. AI is the future of warfare and US is in the lead
Summary:
Stephen Bryen argues AI, more than drones, is reshaping war by enabling targeting, operational design, and battle assessment, and he claims the United States holds major advantages in investment, companies, and operational use. He cites AI roles in conflicts and operations including Gaza, US-Israel actions against Iran, Venezuela, interdiction of “rogue” tankers, and Ukraine. He says China is advancing fast and Russia is applying AI to drones and systems like “Svod,” but both lag US capacity. His core warning is vulnerability: US reliance on commercial AI and cloud systems could invite compromise through model extraction, malicious prompts, and narrative poisoning by adversaries and even “friends,” making AI security the decisive weak point.
Comment: Good news? If accurate we must not become complacent.
AI is the future of warfare and US is in the lead - Asia Times
asiatimes.com · Stephen Bryen
Without stronger AI system security, America’s edge in AI warfare may not last against China and Russia’s hackers
by Stephen Bryen
February 17, 2026
While many experts have focused on the significance of drones in the new reality of warfare, the AI revolution is a much bigger deal. AI now enables drones to be far more impactful, helps select and prioritize battle targets, designs tactical operations and assesses results that go beyond iterative evaluations.
While AI is changing the battlefield space and the US has massive advantages, there are also significant risks that AI systems could be compromised by US adversaries and perhaps even by “friends.”
Recently AI has played an important role in several conflicts: the Gaza war (Operation Gideon’s Chariots); US-Israel operations against Iran (Operation Rising Lion); the capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela (Operation Absolute Resolve); operations to locate and stop “rogue” oil tankers; and the Ukraine war, where AI is playing a major role.
If the US and Israel take action against Iran in the coming days, planning and operations would likely be supported by AI.
While the US and Israel are among the leaders in using AI to support military operations, other consequential players are emerging. China is well along in developing home-grown AI engines; Russia is using AI for drones and tactical operations; and US allies, especially the UK, France and Germany, are implementing AI in intelligence and military development.
Much of the intelligence integration in the Ukraine war is supported by major Western organizations with deep AI capabilities. One of them, Palantir Technologies, has emerged as the premier US company in big data and analytics, teamed with Nvidia and Anthropic.
In Israel, there is a blend of military units, especially Unit 8200, and private-sector players, including well-established companies such as Elbit Systems and startups such as Skyforce for edge-computing and AI-driven battlefield autonomy, Robotican for autonomous robotics and drones and Radiant Research Labs for zero-click intelligence-gathering tools.
OpenAI (GPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and Meta (LLaMA) now control 32% of the world’s large language model (LLM) market. The Pentagon is now in a major dispute with Anthropic over its use of Claude in the capture of Maduro.
Anthropic has said it does not allow Claude to be used for military operations, despite securing a $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) in July 2025 to develop AI for national security.
The number of AI engines, including specialized systems, is rapidly growing. There are roughly 65 to 70 major AI tools that have reached mass-market status in the US, including Perplexity for search, Midjourney for art and Grok for social media.
As of this year, there are over 62,000 AI-related startups globally, with the US holding the largest share, with roughly 25,000–30,000. One recent tally suggests there are now over 90,000 AI companies worldwide, though many are “wrappers” that use the Big Three’s engines to power their own specific services.
In the US, more than $108 billion has been invested so far in data centers, not including collateral investments in power generation and grid improvements. Private investment in US AI companies reached a record $109.1 billion, according to the 2025 AI Index Report from Stanford HAI.
Not counting the billions spent for new foundries and other high-end chip-related infrastructure via the CHIPS Act, the US government is investing billions every year in AI research and development and in specific applications.
Over time, these investments will reshape the federal government’s workforce, possibly eliminating tens of thousands of jobs. It will also change military ranks and roles. The Pentagon is investing at least $2 billion a year directly and tens of billions indirectly through weapons procurement, creating a future AI juggernaut that few competitors can hope to match.
This is bad news for Russia in particular, as it lacks both the infrastructure and investment to come close to match US spending and capabilities.
Russia uses AI in drones such as the Geran-2 and the Zala Lancet. These drones are powered by older type Nvidia-made chip sets, which Russia acquires on the gray market. In early 2026, Russia also introduced the “Svod” AI system, a tactical situational awareness platform.
It uses AI to aggregate data from satellites and drones into a single map for commanders. Crucially, it is designed to “model scenarios,” offering Russian officers pre-calculated tactical options. Svod was developed as a collaborative effort between Russia’s Ministry of Defense’s research institutes and civilian software engineers tasked with digitizing the Russian military’s “kill chain.”
It is designed to solve Russia’s historical “command bottleneck” by aggregating data from satellites, drones, and reconnaissance reports into a single digital “operational picture.” It is built on the domestically developed Astra Linux operating system to ensure “technological sovereignty” and reduce dependence on Western software.
For its primary function—identifying targets in drone feeds and satellite imagery—Svod utilizes the YOLO (You Only Look Once) framework. This is the global standard for real-time object detection and is highly efficient for battlefield hardware. To process text-based intelligence reports and “reconnaissance summaries,” developers have adapted models like Mistral (French) and LLaMA (Meta).
These are embedded in on-premise, air-gapped environments to ensure data doesn’t leak back to Western servers. There is increasing evidence that Russian developers are incorporating Qwen, developed by China’s Alibaba. Qwen’s architecture is particularly adept at the complex coding and logic tasks required for situational modeling.
On the front lines, Russian AI runs on “tactical tablets” and small, ruggedized computers. Due to sanctions, these often rely on smuggled or dual-use Chinese chips rather than specialized Russian silicon.
Complex scenario modeling for predicting where a Ukrainian counterattack might occur is handled by regional command centers using server clusters that utilize diverted high-end GPUs such as Nvidia H100s/A100s obtained through third-party intermediaries.
Russia faces major hurdles in applying battlefield AI and net-centric warfare, particularly for communications. Ukraine has a distinct advantage because it uses Elon Musk’s Starlink for the backbone of its communications, a system that is currently very difficult for Russia to jam or disrupt.
Russia’s earlier access to Starlink has been severed, leaving it with ad hoc communications that are far more vulnerable to disruption, far less reliable and lacking the bandwidth Starlink provides to Ukraine. While Russia is trying to figure out alternatives, it will be some time before a workaround is found, if ever.
Meanwhile, Russia is reportedly focusing on rougher, less elegant AI solutions, using external support, mainly Chinese, on projects. Over time, there is little hope the Russians can remain competitive unless they can work out a modus vivendi with the US, much as China appears to have done when it comes to trading off access to rare earths for Nvidia products.
China is far ahead of Russia in the AI space, although it is still playing catch-up with the US. China’s wild card is its lack of modern battlefield experience. Thus, China will have to build its AI systems on estimates of battle effectiveness rather than real-world data, unless, of course, Chinese intelligence penetrates Western systems.
Little is known about the security of AI machines. The Pentagon and US intelligence agencies rely on commercial AI products, especially for real-time updates on threats and countermeasures. The recent Pentagon debacle on cloud computing systems, where it allowed Chinese engineers to provide “routine” service, suggests that, so far at least, the downside risks of relying on commercial systems are not part of Pentagon thinking.
Nor does the Defense Department have much free choice, as it does not own AI engines and outsources their use, either directly or through defense contractors. The security of AI could become the Achilles’ heel of US AI systems. Certainly, AI machines and communications will become a major target for America’s adversaries.
For example, in February 2026, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported a surge in “model extraction” attacks. Adversaries, notably from China, used automated scripts to send hundreds of thousands of prompts to Gemini to reverse-engineer its internal logic and “steal” the proprietary reasoning capabilities for their own domestic models.
A 2025 Gartner study revealed that 32% of organizations reported their AI applications had been targeted via malicious prompts. State-sponsored hackers use these “jailbreaks” to force AI agents to leak sensitive data or bypass safety filters to generate malicious code.
In late 2025, reports surfaced that a Moscow-based network dubbed “Pravda” successfully “infected” several popular AI chatbots. By flooding the internet with specific narratives, they ensured that when users asked about certain geopolitical events, the AI would repeat Russian propaganda roughly 33% of the time.
Attacks are not limited to Russia and China. Iran and North Korea have joined the fray, and other “friends” may also seek commercial advantage by attacking and exploiting AI applications or simply by using them for their own military, economic and social operations.
Given AI’s national security significance, both for military use and economic security, much greater attention to AI system security is not only warranted but essential.
Stephen Bryen is a former US deputy undersecretary of defense and special correspondent at Asia Times. This article was first published on his newsletter Weapons and Strategy and is republished with permission.
asiatimes.com · Stephen Bryen
8. A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
Summary:
The Guardian reports that US and UK intelligence built a detailed picture of Putin’s intent to invade Ukraine, warned allies and Kyiv, and even declassified material to raise alarm without exposing sources. CIA Director William Burns’ November 2021 call with Putin left him convinced war was coming, and Biden began planning. Yet many European services doubted a full-scale war was possible, shaped by assumptions about Putin’s rationality and the shadow of flawed Iraq-era intelligence. In Kyiv, Zelenskyy feared panic and economic collapse, dismissed warnings, and resisted martial law until the invasion began. US and UK also misjudged early outcomes, expecting rapid Russian success.
Comment: A long read excerpted below. Continue reading the entire piece at the link.
An intelligence failure? Failures to heed intelligence? Intelligence can be perfect on intent and still fail on performance, because enemy plans are not enemy competence. Disbelief was not just analytic error, it was psychological defense, and that is a cognitive vulnerability adversaries can exploit. Zelenskyy treated panic as a strategic threat, so he fought the information problem first, even when the tanks were already moving.
If allies share the same indications and warnings but reach opposite conclusions, what is the real failure: collection, analysis, or political risk tolerance?
When declassification becomes a tool of deterrence, how do you warn loudly without burning sources or triggering the panic the adversary wants?
If leaders reject worst-case scenarios because they feel “irrational,” what institutional mechanism forces rehearsal of the unthinkable before it becomes real?
A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
The Guardian · Shaun Walker · February 20, 2026
how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022
Written by Shaun Walker
Fri 20 Feb 2026 05.00 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia
The phone call
1-The-Beginning
William Burns had travelled halfway around the world to speak with Vladimir Putin, but in the end he had to make do with a phone call. It was November 2021, and US intelligence agencies had been picking up signals in the preceding weeks that Putin could be planning to invade Ukraine. President Joe Biden dispatched Burns, his CIA director, to warn Putin that the economic and political consequences if he did so would be disastrous.
Fifteen years earlier, when Burns was US ambassador in Moscow, Putin had been relatively accessible. The intervening years had concentrated the Russian leader’s power and deepened his paranoia. Since Covid had emerged, few had been granted face time. Putin was squirrelled away at his lavish residence on the Black Sea coast, Burns and his delegation learned, and only phone contact would be possible.
A secure line was ready in an office at the presidential administration building on Moscow’s Old Square, and Putin’s familiar voice came through the receiver. Burns laid out the US belief that Russia was readying an invasion of Ukraine, but Putin ignored him and ploughed on with his own talking points. His intelligence agencies had informed him, he said, that there was an American warship lurking over the Black Sea horizon, equipped with missiles that could reach his location in just a few minutes. It was evidence, he suggested, of Russia’s strategic vulnerability in a unipolar world dominated by the US.
The conversation, as well as three combative face-to-face discussions with Putin’s top security officials, seemed extremely ominous to Burns. He left Moscow far more concerned about the prospect of war than he had been before the trip, and he relayed his gut feeling to the president.
“Biden often asked yes/no questions, and when I got back, he asked if I thought Putin was going to do it,” Burns recalled. “I said: ‘Yes’.”
Three and a half months later, Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, in the most dramatic breach of the European security order since the second world war. The story of the intelligence backdrop to those months – how Washington and London garnered such detailed and accurate insight into the Kremlin’s war plans, and why the intelligence services of other countries did not believe them – has never before been told in full.
Ukrainian national guard personnel taking positions in central Kyiv in the early days of the war. Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
This account is based on interviews conducted over the past year with more than 100 intelligence, military, diplomatic and political insiders in Ukraine, Russia, the US and Europe. Many spoke without attribution to discuss events that are still sensitive or classified; those quoted by name are referred to by their job titles at that time.
It is the story of a spectacular intelligence success, but also one of several intelligence failures. First, for the CIA and MI6, who got the invasion scenario right but failed to accurately predict the outcome, assuming a swift Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for European services, who refused to believe a full-scale war in Europe was possible in the 21st century. They remembered the dubious intelligence case presented to justify the invasion of Iraq two decades previously, and were wary of trusting the Americans on what seemed like a fantastical prediction.
Bodies are exhumed from a mass grave in Izium, in Kharkiv region, in September 2022. UK and US intelligence services had assumed Russian forces would quickly overrun Ukraine. Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
Most crucially, the Ukrainian government was thoroughly unprepared for the oncoming assault, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spending months dismissing increasingly urgent American warnings as scaremongering, and quashing last-minute concerns among his own military and intelligence elite, who eventually made limited attempts to prepare behind his back.
“In the final weeks, the intelligence leaders were starting to get it, the mood was different. But the political leadership just refused to accept it until right at the end,” said one US intelligence official.
Four years on, there are many lessons to be drawn from these events about how intelligence is collected and analysed. Perhaps the most pertinent, as the world appears more unpredictable than at any time in recent history, is that it is dangerous to dismiss a scenario because it seems to fit outside the realm of what is rational or possible.
“I felt the evidence we presented to them was overwhelming. It’s not like we held back something that, if only they had seen it, would have made all the difference,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, on why European allies did not believe the Americans. “They were just seized with the conviction that this simply made no sense.”
Putin starts planning
The Kremlin
Continue at this link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia
9. Date set for US President Donald Trump’s trip to China
Summary:
SCMP reports the White House announced POTUS will visit China from March 31 to April 2 for talks with Xi Jinping, his first China trip since beginning a second term. The summit comes after the US Supreme Court overturned POTUS’s sweeping tariffs, which observers say may reduce US leverage and could temporarily boost trade. Relations have been rocky amid tit-for-tat tariff escalation, including triple-digit US levies and a Chinese boycott of US agricultural goods, but tensions eased after an October meeting in South Korea that produced a one-year truce. The leaders also held follow-up calls in November and on February 4. Commentators cite possible talks on an investment treaty and purchases such as aircraft and soybeans.
Comment: With tariff authority constrained by the court, both sides may treat the trip as a window to lock in a new framework before alternative US tariff tools are built. If leverage from tariffs is diminished, what concrete trade-offs can POTUS credibly put on the table in Beijing that Xi will value enough to yield a durable deal?
Date set for US President Donald Trump’s trip to China
Trump’s visit will begin on March 31 and be the first to the country since taking office for a second time
Published: 12:09pm, 21 Feb 2026Updated: 1:34pm, 21 Feb 2026
Frank Chenin ShanghaiandJosephine Main Hong Kong
Published: 12:09pm, 21 Feb 2026Updated: 1:34pm, 21 Feb 2026
US President Donald Trump will travel to China from March 31 to April 2 for talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, the White House has announced.
The summit between Trump and Xi, the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies, will be watched closely, particularly in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
Observers noted that the court’s decision could leave Trump with less leverage against China during negotiations and might give a fresh lift to trade.
The trip will be Trump’s first visit to China since coming to office for a second time – his previous trip to the country was in November 2017 during his first term.
Xi is expected to visit the United States later this year.
Relations between the two countries have been rocky since Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on China at the start of his second term. In a series of tit-for-tat actions, the White House imposed triple-digit “retaliatory” levies on Chinese goods and Beijing mounted a sweeping boycott of US agricultural goods for much of last year.
Tensions eased after the two leaders met in South Korea in October, brokering a one-year truce on tariff escalation and agreeing to stabilise ties.
The two leaders followed up with phone calls in November and on February 4.
Xi and Trump described the call earlier this month as friendly and constructive, with Xi repeating Beijing’s position on Taiwan and Trump describing US-China ties as the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
Trump added that he respected Xi and expressed readiness to work with China to ensure the relationship remained “positive and stable” during his term.
‘We have a deal’: Trump claims breakthrough after ‘12 out of 10’ talks with Xi Jinping
In the run-up to Trump’s trip, the two countries could be working on a framework for a bilateral investment treaty, as well as deals on aircraft and soybean purchases, according to James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
Speaking at an event at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney on Friday, the Beijing-based lawyer said another issue “still out there” was for China to invest in manufacturing in the United States.
He added that China had shown receptiveness to such proposals but would require “protection” in return.
“Apparently there is a discussion about the possibility of Beijing setting up a fund to encourage Chinese investors to make manufacturing investment in the US, and similar to that encouraged of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea,” Zimmerman said.
Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Hong Kong- and Shanghai-based Pinpoint Asset Management, said the US Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s tariffs might add some fresh momentum to trade as Trump prepared for the visit.
“The US administration will likely seek alternative ways to keep tariffs on imports from China high,” Zhang said.
“But searching for and implementing such alternative tariffs may take time. If that’s the case, in coming months we may see firms frontload their exports to the US to take advantage of lower tariffs, as these may be low only temporarily.
“Meanwhile, the confirmation of President Trump’s visit to China is positive for bilateral relations. I expect the two countries to reach a new trade deal in Beijing.”
Frank Chen
A graduate from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Frank was previously with Asia Financial, Asia Times and Hong Kong Economic Journal.
Josephine Ma
Josephine Ma is China news editor and has covered China news for the Post for more than 20 years. As a correspondent in Beijing, she reported on everything from the 2003 Sars outbreak to the riots in Lhasa and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. She has been based in Hong Kong since
10. The signal and the noise: How media fragmentation is changing politics and what governments need to do to adapt
Summary:
Sam Freedman argues governments are not failing because of “comms” but because strategy and delivery matter most, and media fragmentation makes attention scarce. He says UK voters often give Labour no credit even for popular policies, while unpopular moves like the winter fuel allowance change dominate recall. Traditional channels have collapsed in reach, and even social platforms like X are weak for government messaging, with YouTube and TikTok the main growth areas. Yet TikTok favors speed, emotion, and volatility, pushing reactive politics. Paradoxically, fragmentation increases the need for broader elite consensus across many outlets, since old gatekeepers no longer suffice, making bad policy harder to force through.
Comment: A UK perspective. But lessons for us all. This is all about the human domain. Fragmentation turns attention into terrain, so politics becomes a fight for recall, and the ugly story wins because it travels. Social media can be a sensor and a trap, because it shows heat, not truth, and it can make leaders chase noise. If elite consensus matters more now, then influence operations can target the elite layer to steer mass opinion without ever “persuading the masses” directly.
If TikTok rewards outrage and speed, how does a government protect a coherent governing agenda from being hijacked by viral events it cannot control?
If elites now gatekeep through podcasts, substacks, and fragmented media, who defines “elite consensus,” and how can a government build it without becoming captive to it?
The signal and the noise
How media fragmentation is changing politics and what governments need to do to adapt
Sam Freedman
Feb 21, 2026
∙ Paid
https://samf.substack.com/p/the-signal-and-the-noise?r=7i07&utm
Blaming “comms” for an organisation’s struggles is always a misdiagnosis. It’s impossible to resolve fundamental contradictions in strategy, or cover up the inadequacy of a product, by writing a better press release. The same is true of government. Keir Starmer isn’t in trouble because he can’t find the right Director of Communications but because he isn’t clear on what he wants to do or why.
But even when the government does have something to say it can’t get anyone to pay attention. Many of their policies, from a higher minimum wage to improved employee rights and rail nationalisation, poll well individually but few voters give the government any credit for doing them, if they’ve noticed at all.
When one pollster asked people to name a Labour achievement last year by far the most common answer was “nothing”. Scrapping (and then partially restoring) the winter fuel allowance is still the thing that comes up most in focus groups when you ask for something the government has done. There’s a direct correlation between how unpopular a policy is and how many have heard of it.
This is not a new phenomenon. Dislike of a party tends to overpower the popularity of their ideas. Polling shows that when a policy is associated with Labour it becomes less attractive to voters all other things being equal (something we saw in practice with digital ID cards). But the same was true of the Tories in the 1990s. There was enormous frustration in the final years of John Major’s government that they were getting no credit for a fast-improving economy.
Bad vibes have always been hard to overcome. The problem has been exacerbated, though, by the rapid fracturing of the media environment. Traditional routes for communications have become increasingly irrelevant yet parties are still heavily reliant on them. Newspaper reach has collapsed. Physical papers are barely read by anyone of working age (Daily Mail circulation peaked in 2003 at 2.5 million and is now 600k), and their websites are also receiving fewer visits, thanks to Facebook algorithm changes and rising reliance on AI.
In 2018, 51% of people said they got some news from newspapers, either in print or online, last year that was 34%. Broadcast is falling away too. In 2019, 58% got some news from BBC1, last year it was 41%, and this is heavily skewed towards older viewers. Even more established social media platforms like X are seeing a fall-off in use for news. YouTube and TikTok are the only platforms growing.
So how are politicians supposed to get their message across? The obvious answer is set up a TikTok account and talk direct to the people. And they are trying. Starmer now has an account and a few weeks ago made the first ever policy announcement (on capping ground rents) on the platform. But this has its limits too. TikTok’s reach is still relatively small and focused on younger age groups. It’s also incredibly hard to say anything meaningful on a platform where you have, at most, three seconds to grab the viewers attention before they swipe on. Even the most popular politicians on the platform, like Nigel Farage, rarely get more than a few hundred thousand views for a post.
Simply doing a few videos alongside the standard press releases and TV interviews misses the point of how media fragmentation is changing the nature of politics. So in the rest of this piece I’ll explore the three most important adjustments politicians need to make.
Saving time
The most obvious opportunity is to stop doing things out of habit that no longer have any value. So much comms activity today is just noise that uses up limited space in politicians’ diaries and wastes departmental resources.
What is the point in coming up with endless minor announcements to brief as exclusives to newspapers that barely anyone reads anymore? Perhaps it had some value when a few million people were flicking through a physical copy every morning and so might see your story by accident. Now it’s just displacement activity that impedes good policy-making.
Why take an hour out of a busy day to do an interview for a programme which is only being watched by political obsessives? Especially when all you’re going to do is stonewall questions and repeat the same line? Back when there were only a few channels and no Netflix, this technique could work in forcing a message into voters’ brains regardless of their boredom, but now they’re just not watching.
What’s the value in spending taxpayer cash on videos and images to post on social media sites that actively throttle your output? The vast majority of posts by government departments on X have fewer than 10,000 views, with single digit likes and retweets.
As Gabriel Milland, former Head of Communications at several departments, put it recently: “We’re almost in a post-comms world. And where nothing that is communicated can be trusted, what people see and feel matters more than it has ever done.” That doesn’t mean politicians should never do media, just that they should focus on having something real to talk about when they do. The old tricks don’t work anymore, if they ever did.
At best sticking to the old habits just sucks up time that could be better used working on policy and delivery (which is why it remains a popular activity for ministers who don’t know what they want to achieve in their department). At worst outdated techniques are actively harmful. Back in the days of the Alistair Campbell comms machine it made sense to brief a story in different ways to different newspapers. Only a handful of Westminster obsessives would see both the Telegraph and the Guardian on the same day. But now those obsessives will spot that you’re briefing a “tough on immigration” line to one and a pro-human rights line to the other and will highlight it on social media. And the resulting evidence of your hypocrisy will be seen by more people than will read either article.
It’s hard to shift these habits. Most politicians like attention. Comms professionals naturally want to prioritise getting their minister in front of TV cameras and into newspapers, otherwise what’s their value? But the best of them, like Milland, realise the assumptions that underpinned their role have changed and you have to start with policy and delivery. Everyone in Westminster should learn from this and start auditing their media activity – is it actually helping in any way or would time be better spent doing something else until there’s something worth saying?
Social media risks creating a more reactive politics
Much traditional media activity is increasingly pointless, but social media can be even worse. Endless scrolling is not only a waste of time, it’s also dangerous in giving politicians a misleading sense of what people care about, especially if, like X and Bluesky, the posting population is a long way off representative.1
At the same time it’s hard to ignore because it is now so important in giving issues prominence and driving public sentiment. The problem is that the campaigns emerging via social media do so in a scattergun fashion, leading to less coherent politics. This can be manipulated by platform owners (as on Elon Musk’s “X”) but is often genuinely organic and democratic in a messy way. It was during the 2017 election that this first became apparent in UK politics, when articles about the ivory trade and fox hunting started going viral despite not being a focus of any party’s campaign. These stories played a bigger role in undermining the Tories that was understood at the time.
TikTok is especially powerful at driving bottom-up campaigning activity as its algorithm is less focused on promoting well-followed accounts and more on genuine virality. This can come from right or left. Race riots in the summer of 2024, and last year’s protests against asylum seekers in hotels, were livestreamed on TikTok, with clips generating millions of views. In the US the constant stream of videos showing ICE officers engaged in unnecessary brutality has helped shift the public mood against Trump’s immigration policies.
As algorithms have little interest in borders, the TikTokification of politics is also increasing the importance of international issues. When I talk to groups in schools and universities they will often know more about American politics than what’s going on here. Zohran Mamdani comes up more than Sadiq Khan, and ICE more than UK policing. An obvious example is Gaza. Conflict in the Middle East has always created controversy here. But the impact has been much broader this time, with Labour losing seats to “Gaza independents” in 2024 and seeing many younger progressive voters shift to the Greens. The issue hasn’t gone away and will hurt the government again in upcoming local elections.
There are potential positives here, with an electorate engaged in issues – foreign and domestic – that might have been ignored in the past, even if its via highly emotive and often inaccurate content. But it risks pushing politicians to be more reactive to events they have little control over, creating a superficial commentary-style of politics that seeks popularity from jumping on trends.
Politicians that are good at this kind of politics – noticing and responding to trends as well as feeding them – can benefit, especially in opposition. But the arbitrary nature of virality is not conducive to setting or selling a governing agenda, which requires coherence to work. Parties need to be monitoring trends, and able to react when necessary, but also to realise spending time on social media can’t substitute for having a plan and communicating it.
The importance of elite consensus
Paradoxically this means elites have never been more important in winning support for ideas. The old model of communications relied on a small number of “gatekeepers” – newspaper editors and producers of the main news broadcasts – who have now lost much of their power. Governments could manage these gatekeepers via a handful of relationships with key players, allowing them to bypass the wider elite and speak to the public. Margaret Thatcher used her hold on newspaper editors to pursue economic policies that the majority of Tory grandees, let alone economists, thought were wrong-headed. Tony Blair was able to win (brief) public support for the Iraq War, despite widespread elite concern. As late as 2010 this approach allowed the Tories to turn public opinion in favour of austerity.
The fragmentation of media has shifted power away from these gatekeepers, which makes the government’s life more difficult. That’s partly because there’s more space for genuine bottom-up concerns to rise up the agenda in unpredictable ways, but also because it’s given elites more power. When ministers want to build support for an idea they need to work harder to create a consensus across a bigger group of commentators and stakeholders. Just having the political editors on board no longer works.
The wider public still takes cues from elites but there are a far wider range of outlets through which they can have influence. These include new forms of traditional media, like GB News, as well as podcasts, substacks, and individuals with big followings on social media.
When there’s broad agreement across these groups it is very powerful. Planning is a good example. Over the past decade we’ve seen an elite consensus develop that it’s too hard to build and that NIMBYs have too much power. This has been embraced across all parts of the political spectrum. There are, of course, still groups pushing back against planning reform, but they are increasingly marginalised and have had to change their rhetoric to acknowledge the flaws in the current system. The government has leant into this to push through major changes with relatively little pushback, compared to previous attempts (as to whether they’re the right changes see Dan Davies’ post for us last week).
When this elite consensus is absent it undermines policies, even if they have support from the old gatekeepers. Much of the press was in favour of cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) but the policy was rushed and there was no attempt to build wider support. There are now plenty of avenues for opponents of the policy to point out the flaws, which in turn strengthened the position of Labour MPs who wanted to push back. Similarly, proposals for mandatory digital ID cards, which had initial public support, quickly fell apart because there were obvious holes in the government’s story that opponents could exploit.
In both examples, the fundamental problem was bad policy design, not comms, but it used to be possible to force through bad policies with gatekeeper backing. Now it’s much harder. The last government had the same issue with trying to change human rights legislation and winning support for deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In many ways this is a positive development: media gatekeepers undoubtedly had too much power in the past, and typically skewed towards the interests of their owners. It’s good that it’s harder to avoid public criticism of bad policy and that politicians have put more work into building their case.
The growing importance of elite consensus, though, presents challenges for governments. There are two adaptations required. The first is that if you want to undertake a contentious policy you have to do the groundwork to get as much of the broader elite to at least accept the problem you’re trying to solve.2
Michael Gove’s school reforms are often given as an example of a minister forcing policy through the Whitehall machine at speed. But they came after years of consensus building around the academic weaknesses of the school system. There was some opposition to curriculum and exam reforms from within the sector, but the wider pool of commentators and think-tankers were broadly supportive, which is why the Lib Dems were prepared to support the changes in coalition and even opposition parties put up few objections.
(The “blob” who were supposedly seeking to block these school reforms were a conveniently vague and non-elite enemy against which to organise support. NIMBYs play a similarly valuable role for planning reformers. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they’re low status and vaguely defined.)
The second adaptation is understanding the value of leaning into growing areas of consensus as a way to secure policy wins that fit your agenda, as happened with planning. Student loan costs are an obvious example, with plenty of posts and videos appearing in the past month from left, right and centre pointing out the inequities of a system hammering young graduates with a high effective marginal tax rate. There would be a fiscal cost to government of pursuing policy here, but they’d get a lot of support and little pushback. It’s an easy win if they want it (and one another party will take if they don’t).3
Of course consensus can’t always be built around things that matter, particularly polarised “values” issues like immigration, or economic policies that harm elites’ interests. But where it is achieved it leads to positive coverage of government which buys political capital that can be spent on policies subject to more criticism. It also reduces the general sense of “bad vibes” around government which mean they don’t get credit for anything, even if it’s popular.
It’s a commonplace to say that the fragmentation of the media is a boon for populists because it’s removed the old gatekeepers. And there is truth to this. For those willing to follow and feed public anger there are more opportunities to do so, though it rarely works for long. But if you want to pursue a coherent policy agenda, elites have never mattered more, because there are now many more gatekeepers guarding many more gates.
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1
The userbase of X is fairly representative of the population still, but those posting about politics are not, and skew right, with extreme right posts actively boosted. The Bluesky userbase skews strongly left/liberal.
2
When I talk about elite consensus I don’t, of course, mean total agreement from everyone - but a widespread belief that often crosses normal political boundaries. The two-child limit is an interesting case study. By the time the government scrapped it almost all the elite on the centre and left were convinced it was a bad policy (those that opposed scrapping it did so on the grounds it might be seen as unfair, and thus a vote loser, rather than that it was a good idea). But it also had a fair amount of support on the right, often from a pro-natalist stance. Reform briefly backed scrapping it, and even in reversing that position have (disingenously) said it can’t be afforded rather than that the limit is a good thing in principle. Criticism of the decsion to scrap it has been muted on the right and, partly as a result, does not seem to have created any substantive public backlash.
3
Naturally the wider elite still focus on their own interests, they’re just somewhat broader than those of newspaper proprietors. It’s not a coincidence that planning and student loans are both areas of consensus amongst think-tankers and commentators of right and left given how many are graduates trying to get on the London property ladder.
11. Exclusive | U.S. Intelligence Says at Least 15,000 at Large After ISIS Detention Camp Collapses in Syria
Summary:
WSJ reports U.S. intelligence estimates 15,000 to 20,000 people, including Islamic State affiliates, are now at large in Syria after an exodus from Al-Hol camp. Security collapsed after Syria’s government routed the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces that had guarded the facility for years. The U.S. assessment blames Syrian government mismanagement and weak perimeter custody after it took control last month. Al-Hol once held over 70,000 people after the 2019 defeat of ISIS’s caliphate; a Pentagon Inspector General report says more than 23,000 remained at end-2025. Diplomats assessed over 20,000 fled within days; only 300–400 families remained early this week. A UN study found up to a quarter had no ISIS links.
Comment: This is a mass release of risk and ambiguity: trained extremists, coerced family networks, and uninvolved civilians are now mixed in the wild, which makes targeting harder and radicalization easier to hide. If you cannot reliably distinguish ISIS affiliates from non-linked detainees after the collapse, what is the least-bad containment strategy that avoids both overreach and another regeneration cycle?
Exclusive | U.S. Intelligence Says at Least 15,000 at Large After ISIS Detention Camp Collapses in Syria
WSJ
Security at Al-Hol camp, which housed thousands of radicalized Islamic State family members, came apart after last month’s government offensive
By Jared Malsin
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and Dustin Volz
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Updated Feb. 20, 2026 12:24 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-intelligence-says-at-least-15-000-at-large-after-isis-detention-camp-collapses-in-syria-3ede991b?mod=hp_lead_pos9
Detainees gathered at Al-Hol camp last month. Khalil Ashawi/Reuters
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that 15,000 to 20,000 people, including Islamic State affiliates are now at large in Syria, after an exodus from a camp that held jihadists’ families, U.S. officials familiar with the estimate said.
Security experts have long warned that the wives of Islamic State fighters were effectively raising the next generation of militants at the sprawling Al-Hol facility. Security at the camp fell apart in recent weeks after Syria’s government routed the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which had guarded Al-Hol for years, raising concerns about the release of people who might have become radicalized during the years held behind the razor wire.
The size of a small city, the camp in Syria’s eastern desert at one point held more than 70,000 people after U.S.-backed forces destroyed what remained of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria in 2019. At the end of 2025, more than 23,000 people were there, according to a report this week from the Pentagon’s Inspector General.
The vast majority have left Al-Hol after the Syrian government took control last month. Western diplomats in Damascus assessed that more than 20,000 people fled the camp in a matter of days earlier amid rioting and a surge of escape attempts.
A diplomat following the situation said only 300 to 400 families remained at the beginning of the week.
The U.S. assessment attributed the escapes to mismanagement by Syria’s government and a lack of assiduous custody of the camp’s large security perimeter, the U.S. officials said.
The Syrian government, led by a former jihadist, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has acknowledged that many people left the camp for other parts of the country and says it plans to monitor any extremists and reintegrate them into society. It blamed the chaos on SDF troops, who it says abandoned the camp during the January offensive, leaving the facility unguarded for hours and making it hard to reimpose security.
The government said this week it was moving the last remaining families from the camp in Syria’s remote borderlands with Iraq to another displacement camp in northwestern Syria, where the state has stronger infrastructure.
Al-Hol’s chaotic dissolution has renewed questions from U.S. government officials, lawmakers and security analysts about the Trump administration’s decision to rapidly offload counterterrorism efforts in Syria to the country’s new leaders as America pulls its forces from the country.
A U.N. study of the camp found that up to a quarter of detainees had no links to Islamic State. Ghaith Alsayed/Associated Press
While Sharaa, a former rebel leader who led the overthrow of dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, has distanced himself from extremist groups and fought against Islamic State for years, his military and security forces include many hard-line Islamists.
Sharaa ignored U.S. warnings not to proceed with his offensive, a lightning takeover that brought about the end of a Kurdish-controlled autonomous zone that posed a challenge to his efforts to consolidate control over the country.
The Pentagon’s intelligence arm found that Sharaa’s government has demonstrated the willingness to work with the U.S. to fight terrorist groups but that the Damascus’s efforts are “limited by a lack of trained, qualified personnel, and the nascent state of security institutions,” according to a report published on Feb. 19 by the Department of Defense Inspector General.
“They have some sort of very limited experience and infrastructure set up for this,” said Alexander McKeever, an independent analyst based in Damascus. “But definitely not for 20,000 people and a significant portion of them being non-Syrian.”
The population of the camp also included many ordinary civilians who ended up detained in the chaos at the end of Islamic State’s rule, according to a U.S. defense official and experts. A United Nations study of the camp published in October found that as many as a quarter of detainees had no links to Islamic State.
The most dangerous suspects at Al-Hol were held at a separate annex and in a network of prisons across the country. The U.S. military moved some 5,700 Islamic State-affiliated prisoners from detention at a network of camps in Syria to Iraq after the government takeover of the northeast in January.
Protests and rioting inside the camp earlier this month injured a humanitarian worker, while smuggling increased and holes were cut in the camp’s fence, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
The head of the U.N.’s global refugee agency in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said Friday that the agency helped organize the return of 191 Iraqis from Al-Hol to Iraq, as efforts to move the remaining families out of the camp continue.
“Al‑Hol camp will now be practically empty,” Vargas Llosa said on social media.
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the February 21, 2026, print edition as 'Mass Exodus After Camp CollapseU.S. Says at Least 15,000 at Large After ISIS Detention Camp Collapses in Syria'.
Jared Malsin is a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Istanbul, covering Turkey, Syria and the wider region. During more than a decade of working as a foreign journalist, Jared’s work has often focused on the struggle over democracy and authoritarianism across the region and the world. He lived for about five years in Cairo reporting and writing on the long aftermath of Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 military coup.
Jared joined the Journal in 2018 as a correspondent based in Cairo covering North Africa. Since moving back to Istanbul in 2021, he has covered political and economic crises in Turkey and the ongoing civil war in Syria. He has contributed to the Journal’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine including as a reporter on the ground in the country during the war.
In a previous job as Middle East bureau chief for Time Magazine, Jared reported from the front lines of wars in Iraq and Syria and covered the 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey. During his career he has also reported from places including Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
As a freelance journalist Jared has also written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek and other publications. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale University and a master’s in journalism and Near Eastern studies from New York University. He has also dedicated years to the study of the Arabic language.
Dustin Volz is a Washington-based cybersecurity and intelligence reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His coverage focuses on the national security and geopolitical dimensions of nation-state hacking conflict, digital espionage, online influence operations, election interference, and government surveillance.
Before joining the Journal in 2018, Dustin worked at Reuters and National Journal. His reporting has been internationally recognized, including by the White House Correspondents' Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
In addition to Washington, Dustin has reported from London, Berlin and the Dominican Republic. He is a graduate of Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Prior to starting his journalism career, Dustin spent a year living in Indonesia as a Fulbright teaching assistant.
WSJ
12. How four years of war have changed Russia
Summary:
Four years of war have seeped into Russia’s daily life, even for people trying to look away. Air defenses and GPS spoofing disrupt travel, airports close often, and sanctions have made planes and building lifts harder to maintain. The economy has not collapsed, but it has been rewired around the war: defense factories boom while civilian investment, new business formation, and consumer choice sag, and expropriations chill entrepreneurship. Censorship deepens as major platforms are blocked and a state app is pushed. The legal system bends toward impunity for recruits, violence follows some veterans home, and the church sanctifies killing. Recruitment grows costlier as demographics worsen and public gloom spreads.
How four years of war have changed Russia
The fighting in Ukraine has reshaped everyday life
Feb 19th 2026|Moscow and Yekaterinburg|13 min read
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/02/19/how-four-years-of-war-have-changed-russia
Photograph: AP
Feb 19th 2026
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Moscow and Yekaterinburg
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13 min read
Listen to this story
A
middle-aged man in camouflage gets on a bus in central Moscow. He is holding a plastic bag that contains a bottle of vodka and a can of beer. Slightly swaying, his eyes blurred, he sips alternately from each container. He surveys the other passengers and says to no one in particular, “Keeping up the defence. Keeping up the defence.” The passengers look away. They are keen to avoid eye contact with a protagonist of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Many Russians try to ignore the war, which began four years ago this week—but that is getting harder. There is no sign of an impending breakdown, political or economic. But even Vladimir Putin’s repressive regime cannot paper over the many ways in which the war impinges on everyday life. Simply moving about the country, the reminders are frequent. Defence systems intended to foil Ukrainian drone attacks also confuse the satnavs of cars in Moscow and other cities. This “spoofing” can make GPS devices think they are 50 kilometres from their actual location. Drivers must study routes in advance, use paper maps or ask for directions.
Air travel is another headache. Fears of drones and other military concerns prompted more than 500 airport closures last year. Sanctions prevent the import of spare parts for planes made by Airbus and Boeing, which account for 90% of passenger flights. Last year there were 800 breakdowns—more than triple the tally of the year before. Some airlines are refurbishing old Russian-made jets, although these also often suffer breakdowns.
Even moving from street level to the upper stories of buildings can be a challenge, for similar reasons. Many lifts are made abroad, and spare parts are hard to find. When some Muscovites, angered by frequent breakdowns in their apartment block, recently started interrogating the lift repairmen about the shoddiness of their work, they retort by looking up as if towards an invisible overseer and saying, “You’re asking the wrong people.” The implication was that lasting repairs are impossible while the authorities prioritise the war over more quotidian concerns.
Net loss
Communications are becoming harder by the day. After months of restrictions, YouTube and WhatsApp are now completely blocked. Telegram, a message app and one of the main sources of information not controlled by the state, is being throttled—prompting complaints even from members of the Duma, Russia’s supine parliament. People are being pushed to use a state-backed rival, Max, which comes preinstalled on all new smartphones and tablets and is presumed to facilitate government surveillance. In theory, access to many Western websites remains possible, but in practice internet service providers allow only a useless sliver of their data to load. Top10VPN, a VPN-review service, counted 58 regional or national suspensions of the internet last year, with an average duration of 25 days (see chart 1).
Chart: The Economist
The economy has held up surprisingly well. In late 2021, before the war began, economists reckoned that Russia would grow by about 2% a year in 2022-24. In the event, it grew slightly faster than this, despite the conflict and severe Western sanctions, as oil exports boomed and the government opened the fiscal taps. In 2025 growth slowed sharply, to perhaps 0.6%. Yet unemployment remains extremely low, at 2%. Consumer confidence, meanwhile, remains near an all-time high, according to data from Levada, an independent pollster.
The aggregate numbers, however, obscure the fact that the economy has fundamentally changed. Joblessness is so low in large part because Russia’s war machine has sucked up manpower, and hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled the country. Growth in 2023 and 2024 was heavily reliant on largesse from the state, not only in terms of spending on the military but also on infrastructure and welfare.
Hire for guns
Cities like Izhevsk, in the Ural Mountains, home to the Kalashnikov Group, a big arms manufacturer, are booming. Property prices are rising and new restaurants are opening up. Other parts of the economy are doing less well. Russia, filled with brainy nerds, had hoped to compete in the ai race between America and China. In practice it is nowhere to be seen. Sanctions have restricted access to cutting-edge chips, while many of the country’s best scientists have left. Who has heard of GigaChat, an AI chatbot developed by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank?
The civilian economy shows signs of malaise. The number of new businesses registered last year was the lowest in 14 years, and fully 20% lower than in 2024. Wage arrears have doubled over the past year to 2.2bn roubles ($29m), much of them in the construction industry. Samolet, a giant property developer, is struggling to service its debt and has asked the government for a rescue. Avtovaz, Russia’s biggest carmaker, is operating its factories only four days a week.
Even those with means are not immune to the economic upheaval. Because of sanctions, goods that used to be imported from the European Union, or made by Russian joint-ventures with Western firms, have been replaced by Chinese substitutes (see chart 2). The result is shuttered factories and less choice for consumers.
Chart: The Economist
There are plenty of drags on the private sector, such as a big rise in corporate tax last year. But a big disincentive to invest has been a wave of expropriations that has gathered strength as the war has dragged on. It started with foreign firms that left Russia at the start of the war. Their assets were quickly seized and redistributed. For example, the Russian operations of Danone, a French yogurt maker, were sold for a song to a nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov, a militia leader and Kremlin crony.
The asset grab soon expanded to Russian business. The latest case is Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, which was once valued at $5bn. The authorities confiscated it from its owner and sold it at auction for less than $1bn—half the asking price—to a subsidiary of Sheremetyevo airport, which is linked to Arkady Rotenberg, one of Mr Putin’s cronies. Even unluckier is Vadim Moshkovich, one of Russia’s richest men and owner of Rusagro, an agricultural conglomerate that is a tempting target for kleptocrats. Russian court rulings forced him to redomicile the firm from Cyprus to Russia. Last year he was jailed for fraud. The company is being eyed by an entity headed by Dmitry Patrushev, the minister of agriculture and son of Nikolai Patrushev, a former intelligence chief and member of Mr Putin’s inner circle. “Why would I invest and expand if it will be taken from me tomorrow?” an entrepreneur asks.
In the 2010s Russian prosecutors filed no more than one expropriation petition a year. Since the start of the war more than 500 firms had been expropriated, most of them Russian-owned. They include hotels, shopping centres, pasta factories and distilleries. A year ago Igor Krasnov, the prosecutor-general, boasted to Mr Putin that he had recovered 2.4trn roubles “for the benefit of the state”. A few months later Mr Krasnov was appointed the chief justice of Russia’s Supreme Court.
The war has deformed the legal system in many ways. People who join the army are routinely cleared of past crimes, no matter how depraved. Verstka, an online media outlet, has counted 1,112 court cases, including prosecutions for murder and rape, that have been suspended or dropped because the accused have signed military contracts. As part of the standard benefits package for new recruits, Mr Putin has granted soldiers immunity from prosecution while in service for relatively serious crimes, including theft and battery.
Some soldiers remain violent after returning home. Over the past four years around 1,000 people have been killed or injured by participants in the war, according to Verstka. Half of the murders were committed by ex-convicts recruited to the army from prisons. Although such offenders are usually tried and returned to prison, they often receive lenient sentences.
More than 150 men from Revda, a 60,000-person suburb of the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals, have died in the war. Last year two sisters, aged nine and seven, were run over and killed outside a supermarket after a car skidded off a slippery road and ploughed into the store. The driver was a 37-year-old corporal, drunk and on drugs, who had recently returned home from the front. He had had his licence revoked three times in the past, but all the associated penalties had been annulled owing to his participation in the war.
Killing has also been sanctified by the Russian Orthodox Church, which has proclaimed the invasion of Ukraine a holy war and sent thousands of priests to the front, both to rally the troops and, in some cases, to fight themselves. At least 300 priests are believed to have signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence, receiving the same privileges as veterans.
From the start of the war Kirill, the church’s patriarch, has promised that sacrificing one’s life in it will wash away all sin, even for the unrepentant. (In contrast, an anti-war protester who displayed a sign reading “Thou shall not kill” was detained and fined for “discrediting the Russian army”.) Alexei Uminsky, a parish priest who left Russia after being defrocked for praying for peace instead of victory, told the media, “The patriarch has removed responsibility for killing in the war.”
In spite of the church’s enthusiasm, enlisting new recruits is getting ever harder. Many are men in their late 30s and 40s from small towns or villages in remote parts of the country with few skills or prospects. “They saw the special military operation as a way to catch up with their more socially advanced compatriots in terms of living standards,” explains Vladimir Zvonovsky, a sociologist from Samara. A signing-up bonus that reached 2.5m roubles in 2024 in some parts of the country (regions competed to please Mr Putin by providing lots of recruits) could be used as a deposit for a mortgage. Wages of 200,000 roubles a month was five times their average salary. It seemed a rational choice, often made together by a family.
More risk, less reward
Yet this calculus is looking ever less appealing. For one thing, many soldiers say they signed a contract for a year without realising that Mr Putin had approved a decree giving the army the authority to extend such contracts until the end of the war. They also did not expect to fight on the front line. Meanwhile, their income has been less bountiful than they had hoped, both because of years of high inflation and because survival often involves paying officers hefty bribes to avoid the most hazardous operations. If they are lucky enough to return home, they are shunned, not feted as the propaganda had promised. “I’ve been screwed” is a common refrain.
Resentment is also building among relatives of new recruits. “While our men are being destroyed there, we’re being squeezed here,” a woman says. “Every day brings new fines, bans, taxes and laws voiding property rights. Prices go up constantly. We collect humanitarian aid for the front, while officials throw parties.” The apparent ineptitude of Russia’s generals does not help: “A country with a normal army would have wrapped this up in one or three months, not dragged it out for three and a half years. He [Mr Putin] fucked everything up completely.”
The result is a shortage of recruits despite huge spending. According to Re:Russia, a network of analysts with its headquarters in Vienna, the army’s bill for manpower has gone up from 3trn roubles in 2024 to more than 4trn in 2025—around 2% of GDP. Nearly 40% of that is payments for deaths in service. Yet Russian casualties, thought to be some 1,000 men a day, may exceed the army’s intake.
A looming presencePhotograph: Anastasia Romanova
It is hard to be sure about the death toll and the labour market, since the government has become extremely secretive about demographic data—a sure indicator of grim news it is determined to conceal. In 2024 Mr Putin suspended official government population surveys until 2029. Alexei Raksha, a demographer who raised the alarm about the blackout, has been declared a “foreign agent”.
Presumably, the death of many Russian men in Ukraine and the flight of many others abroad to escape military service has exacerbated the decades-long shrinkage of the workforce. At any rate, the government is recruiting foreign workers to alleviate Russia’s labour shortage. It has made this task harder for itself by dragooning lots of existing migrant workers from former Soviet states such as Tajikistan to fight in Ukraine. An attack by Tajik terrorists on a shopping centre in Moscow in 2024, and the harassment of migrants that followed, has further deterred flows from Russia’s near-abroad. Instead the authorities are importing labour from Cuba, India, North Korea and Sri Lanka. Last year it issued 240,000 work permits to foreigners.
The war is also likely to be accelerating the decline in Russia’s birth rate. In 2023, before Mr Putin halted the release of data, the fertility rate (meaning the number of children a typical woman would have over her lifetime) fell to 1.3—the lowest level since 2006. According to a survey by Russia’s Higher School of Economics conducted that year, nearly a third of Russians have decided to postpone or completely abandon plans to have a baby because of the war in Ukraine and the worsening economic situation.
To help sustain the birth rate, the Duma in 2024 banned the promotion of childlessness. A zealous regional governor, eager to satisfy Mr Putin’s call for more babies, offered money to school-age girls if they got pregnant. Several regions are restricting abortions in private clinics. School-sponsored public forums on VK, Russia’s main social-media network, are being flooded with natalist slogans like “Want to start a new life? Just have a baby!” and “Student years are a window for reproduction”. Just as the Russian Orthodox Church has blessed the war, its priests have been enjoined, along with bureaucrats, to denounce abortion and promote pregnancy.
Ordinary Russians are not passive in the face of this onslaught. Many have downloaded VPNs, for instance, to escape digital censorship. But they are getting gloomier: some 60% expect this year to be harder than last, pollsters say. According to Russia’s official statistics, diagnosed cases of anxiety and depression rose 21% from 2020 to 2024. Prescriptions of antidepressants were up 18% year-on-year in January.
Last year many Russians had hoped that Donald Trump’s return to office would bring the war to a swift end. People started to think about what they would do when the war stopped, says Elena Panfilova, a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, a much harassed online media outlet. That optimism has ebbed away: “Everything has frozen and turned into a grey, viscous paste consisting of bombing and shooting, bargaining and lying, restrictions and repressions.” As another woman puts it, “I feel like an insect stuck in amber. Life goes on outside but your own lifetime is frozen.”
“People now realise that even if the war were to stop, things would not get back to how they were before the war and worry they will get worse,” Mr Zvonovsky says. If nothing else, when the war machine grinds to a halt, the upheaval caused by the wholesale reallocation of labour and capital will be brutal. Pollsters routinely find that the vast majority of Russians want the war to end. In December a majority also told Levada that they paid little or no attention to how the war was progressing. Like passengers on a Moscow bus, they are trying not to think about the men in camouflage. ■
13. The moment of reckoning between America and Iran
Summary:
The Economist argues POTUS has cornered himself after two months of brinkmanship with Iran. A large U.S. buildup now sits in the region, with two carriers, added airpower, and tankers, signaling capacity for sustained strikes, not a one-off raid. Diplomacy has stalled after Geneva talks, and U.S. red lines on enrichment remain unmet. The administration’s aims look unsettled: nuclear limits alone, or also missiles and proxies, or even regime destabilization. Iran may be betting it can outwait Washington and use talks to delay. But POTUS says a decision window is near, and the buildup cannot last forever.
Comment: I recall the build up 2002 before the second Gulf War and planners saying the only way to get our forces home is through Baghdad. Is the only way this time through Tehran?
The moment of reckoning between America and Iran
Donald Trump must soon choose whether to attack Iran or beat a humiliating retreat
Feb 19th 2026|DUBAI|5 min read
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/02/19/the-moment-of-reckoning-between-america-and-iran
Photograph: Iranian Army/WANA/Reuters
Feb 19th 2026
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DUBAI
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5 min read
Listen to this storyAI Narrated
A
BIT OF sabre-rattling can be useful in foreign policy. Too much of it, though, and the sabre is liable to end up pointing back at you. That is where America finds itself after a two-month standoff with Iran. Donald Trump, the president, has ordered an enormous military build-up in the Middle East—by some measures the biggest in two decades. Yet he has seemed unwilling to order a risky strike. Nor have his threats yet compelled Iran to negotiate a deal that would prevent one. Now he is left with a difficult choice: order an attack anyway, or beat an embarrassing retreat.
Map: The Economist
This crisis, the latest of many in America’s tortured history with the Islamic Republic, began in late December when a wave of protests erupted in Iran. Mr Trump warned the regime not to kill protesters. If it did, he said, America would come to their rescue. The regime ignored him and murdered at least 7,000 people, probably many thousands more. America was in no place to attack, though: it did not even have an aircraft-carrier in the region.
It is no longer so constrained. The USS Abraham Lincoln reached the Arabian Sea in late January. A second carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was ordered to the region last week. It passed through the Strait of Gibraltar on February 17th and should arrive within days. Meanwhile, dozens of warplanes flew across the Atlantic this week—from F-35s, the newest fighter jet in America’s arsenal, to the E-3s used for airborne surveillance. Accompanying them were a number of aerial-refuelling tankers.
Not since it invaded Iraq in 2003 has America deployed such an airborne arsenal to the Middle East. When it bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer, it was a one-and-done affair: seven B-2 bombers flew around the world from Missouri, and a submarine launched cruise missiles from near Iran. The current deployment suggests it is planning a bigger and more sustained attack.
The build-up has continued even as diplomats try to negotiate a deal. Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s all-purpose envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have held two rounds of indirect talks with Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister. Their second meeting took place in Geneva on February 17th. It ended without a breakthrough. Mr Araghchi said the negotiators reached “a general agreement on some guiding principles”.
In an interview with Fox News later that day, J.D. Vance sounded gloomy. “The president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through,” he said. Such pessimism was notable coming from the vice-president, who hails from the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement and has generally been upbeat about diplomacy with Iran.
It is still unclear exactly what sort of deal the administration wants. At a minimum, a new agreement would have to limit Iran’s nuclear programme, which before last summer’s strikes had enriched more than 400kg of near-weapons-grade uranium. Some of Mr Trump’s Republican allies want diplomacy to go much further: they think Iran should also agree to strict limits on its ballistic-missile arsenal and end its support for militias across the Arab world. That is Israel’s preference as well.
As ever, Mr Trump’s own statements are hard to parse. In the space of one week he said he wanted a deal that would halt Iran’s missile programme; that he could settle for a nuclear-only deal; and that it might be better just to overthrow the regime.
Negotiators have not fixed a date for a third meeting. The Americans say they are waiting for the Iranians to present a detailed proposal within the next two weeks. The State Department says that Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is expected to visit Israel on February 28th. Those timelines would suggest that an American strike is not imminent. Yet they could be feints. In June Mr Trump suggested that he would allow two weeks for diplomacy before deciding whether to attack Iran. The B-2s arrived two days later.
Planners at the Pentagon have presented him with a number of options. One is to try and assassinate Iran’s political and military leadership. It is hard to overthrow a regime from the air—but America could certainly destabilise one, especially as it is already reeling from protests and economic crisis. This might include trying to attack sites associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard. A more limited campaign would focus air strikes against Iran’s remaining nuclear facilities and its ballistic-missile sites.
None of this is likely to be decisive, however. The Iranian opposition is disorganised and divided; there is no guarantee strikes on the regime would lead to a better government. Indeed, Mr Trump no longer mentions the protests—which ended more than a month ago—as a justification for a strike. Any damage to Iran’s nuclear or missile programmes, meanwhile, may only be temporary. The lack of clarity around long-term goals seems to be one reason why Mr Trump has hesitated to order an attack.
Yet Iran has not seized the opportunity to find a diplomatic solution. Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, may wager that it is better to try and absorb an American attack than to make significant concessions. The goal is not to strike a deal but rather to use diplomacy to delay a strike.
Time is probably running out, though. Mr Trump is not known for his patience. Last month’s successful raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela may have emboldened him, even though an attack on Iran would be a very different affair. He also cannot sustain America’s massive military build-up indefinitely. The Ford, for example, has already been deployed for almost eight months (a typical deployment lasts around nine). On February 19th Mr Trump said the world would find out “over the next, probably, ten days” how the standoff will end. The moment of reckoning may come sooner.■
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14. How commercial drones make the Pentagon’s ‘Blue UAS Select’ list
Summary:
Defense News reports the Pentagon is expanding access to commercial drones through the Drone Dominance Program, starting with operator testing called “the Gauntlet” at Fort Benning to narrow 25 vendors. Ahead of that, DoD is using the Blue UAS “Blue List” to speed buying decisions by pre-clearing systems for performance and security. The site lists 54 models approved at least for training, and 29 labeled “Select” for operational use after competitive review. Blue UAS began in 2020 to reduce cyber risk and foreign components under NDAA limits. DoD plans to invest $1B, test twice yearly through 2028, and buy about 300,000 drones.
How commercial drones make the Pentagon’s ‘Blue UAS Select’ list
Defense News · Daniel Terrill Feb 20, 2026, 10:52 AM
https://www.defensenews.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/02/20/how-commercial-drones-make-the-pentagons-blue-uas-select-list/
The Defense Department this week began testing for the initial phase of its Drone Dominance Program, an effort to expand the use of commercial drones across the military.
Dubbed “the Gauntlet,” military operators will fly and evaluate uncrewed aerial systems, or UASs, at Fort Benning, Georgia, to determine which of the 25 competing vendors will advance to the next phase of the program.
However, ahead of the testing, DOD curated a list of commercial drones that meet baseline performance and compliance standards. With the list, officials aim to streamline procurement and encourage military leaders to begin buying and fielding approved systems sooner rather than later.
In December, the Defense Contract Management Agency launched the Blue List UAS website, which catalogs 54 drone models cleared, at a minimum, for training use.
Of those, 29 also received the “select” label, indicating they passed a competitive review process and are authorized for operational deployment.
With so many drone models available and the pace of change accelerating, a central question of what DOD is looking for in a commercial drone remains.
Although many observers point to use of expendable drones in the Russia-Ukraine war as motivation behind the program, DOD first established the Blue UAS program in 2020 to mitigate cybersecurity risks and reduce reliance on foreign-made components.
The Blue UAS program emerged from the National Defense Authorization Act, which prohibits the federal government from using drones and drone components from countries considered a security risk.
Experts say the Blue UAS program takes NDAA compliant drones a step further.
For a drone to be added to the Blue UAS list, it must pass rigorous testing and cyber security evaluations. In other words, a Blue UAS is an NDAA-compliant drone that’s been officially tested in the field for performance and approved by the Pentagon.
And the Blue UAS designator continues to matter. According to a report by the Institute for Defense & Government Advancement, Chinese companies dominate the global drone supply chain with an estimated 90% control of the commercial drone market. In turn, it’s difficult to manufacture drones without using Chinese-made parts.
“While these Chinese-made motors are referred to as “dumb components” experts say the issue is less about espionage risk and more about availability and resilience,” the IDGA report said. “In a conflict or trade disruption, U.S. drone production could stall almost immediately due to reliance on Chinese supply chains.”
Using the Blue UAS designator, the Pentagon, along with the federal government as a whole, aim to not just equip troops with new technology but to also boost domestic drone production.
For its part, the Pentagon’s plan is to invest over $1 billion in the U.S. drone market over the next two years through the Drone Dominance Program.
Following the “Gauntlet” testing, which is scheduled to end in March, it will resume testing every six months until 2028.
By the end of the program, the department aims to have acquired some 300,000 drones and named five primary vendors.
15.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
https://apstrategy.org/
Executive Director, Korea Regional Review
https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/
Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal
https://smallwarsjournal.com/
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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