Quotes of the Day:

"When we suddenly realize that all these non-war actions may be the new factors constituting future warfare, we have to come up with a new name for this new form of war: Warfare which transcends all boundaries and limits, in short: unrestricted warfare."

– Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang, Unrestricted Warfare 1999

"As we see it, a single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy country's exchange rates or exposes the leaders of an enemy country on the Internet, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons."

– Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang, Unrestricted Warfare 1999

“All these things represented an intense visual shock to the entire world, including the Iraqis, and it was from this that the myth about the unusual powers of the U.S.-made weapons was born, and it was here that the belief was formed that “Iraq would inevitably lose, and the U.S. was bound to win.” Obviously, the media helped the Americans enormously. We might as well say that, intentionally or otherwise, the U.S. military and the Western media joined hands to form a noose to hang Saddam’s Iraq from the gallows. In the “Operational Outline” that was revised after the war, the Americans took pains to suggest that “the force of the media reports was able to have a dramatic effect on the strategic direction and the scope of the military operations,” while the newly drafted field manual FM100-6 (Information Operations) goes even farther in using the example of the media war during the Gulf War. It would appear that, in all future wars, in addition to the basic method of military strikes, the force of the media will increasingly be another player in the war and will play a role comparable to that of military strikes in promoting the course of the war.”

– Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang, Unrestricted Warfare 1999

1. The 1st Potomac Dialogue Bridging the Divide: The Vital Role of the Asia Pacific in Global Security and Economic Stability

2. In Pentagon shakeup, some see bid for more covert action, less oversight

3. To China, DeepSeek is more than an app—it's a strategic turning point

4. Trump Wants to End the War Fast. Russia Has Its Own Timetable.

5. GOP Email System Infiltrated by Chinese Hackers Last Summer, New Book Reveals

6. Chinese Warships’ Plan for Live Fire Drills Unnerves Australia and New Zealand

7. Three Years Into War in Ukraine, Trump Ushers in New World for Putin

8. Corporate America Is Not Raring to Return to Russia if Trump Lifts Sanctions

9. The Human Terrain Program Done Right: Legacy of the Soviet Partisan Movement and the Underground Struggle

10. Trump and Hegseth’s Pentagon purge undermines the armed forces

11. Trump Sweeps Out Biden’s Officers

12. We led the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force. Trump’s purge is dangerous.

13. Key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk's latest demand in his cost-cutting crusade

14. Ending military diversity efforts will cost us talent and readiness

15. Trump holds Black History Month event as some agencies skip recognition after anti-DEI order

16. Trump vows to add Black icons to proposed National Garden of American Heroes

17. A Threshold Moment in Terrorist Trends and Targeting?

​18. What Makes Air Force Reconnaissance “Special”?

19. Is independent, nonpartisan legal advice from military lawyers on the chopping block?

20. Letter from the Board of Directors (Irregular Warfare Initiative)

21. Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals

22. The Right U.S. Strategy for Russia-Ukraine Negotiations

23. A More Corrupt World Will Be Bad for America

24. America Needs a Sovereign Wealth Fund

25. China orders military changes to prepare for "engaging in warfare"

26. Can the Ukraine War End in 2025? A Realistic Strategy for Peace

1. The 1st Potomac Dialogue Bridging the Divide: The Vital Role of the Asia Pacific in Global Security and Economic Stability

For all who might be interested in supporting and contributing to our conference this October, please see below.

https://subscribepage.io/potomacdialogue_2025_sponsors

See the CAPS website here: https://apstrategy.org/

The 1st Potomac Dialogue

Bridging the Divide: The Vital Role of the Asia Pacific in Global Security and Economic Stability

CAPS Annual Washington D.C. Conference

Venue (TBD) Washington D.C.

October 16th - 17th 2025

The Asia Pacific region is poised to define the 21st century. As a crucible of economic dynamism, driving trade, investment, and innovation, its security and prosperity are indispensable to global stability and equitable development. Yet, the region confronts complex challenges, from territorial disputes to the risk of military escalation. In this context, economic security – ensuring uninterrupted economic flows –contributes to preventing conflict.

The Potomac Dialogue, hosted annually by the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy (CAPS) in Washington, D.C., provides a vital and consistent platform for stakeholders to engage in pragmatic discussions. These dialogues foster deeper understanding and awareness of critical issues, generating tailored solutions for diverse stakeholders both during the event and in its aftermath. This sustained engagement is essential for navigating the complex challenges and opportunities facing the Asia-Pacific region and charting a course toward shared prosperity.

Core Sessions

Key Stakeholders

• International Corporations
• Public Sector Practitioners, including government representatives
• International Organizations
• Policy-Engaged Academics
• Global Youth Groups

Proposed Approach

• Identify and secure funding support from leading international corporations and organizations within ASEAN and APEC nations, including the US and Europe.
• Convene annual collaborative sessions that bring together corporate representatives, public sector practitioners, and policy-engaged academics.
• Facilitate open discussions to capture the authentic voices and perspectives from the region on pressing security and economic policy issues.
• Synthesize the insights generated from these sessions into strategic recommendations for each nation's policy consideration.
• Engage global youth groups as participants to amplify the next generation's input and ensure long-term sustainability.

Expected Outcomes

• Enhance the global visibility of Asia-Pacific nations' perspectives on security and economic policy.
• Strengthen the collaboration between the private and public sectors within the region.
• Provide actionable insights to inform the strategic implementation of each nation's policies.

Deliverables

A comprehensive report of actionable recommendations for all stakeholders.

Become a Sponsor

Contact us for additional details about the event and to discuss sponsorship opportunities.

Note: at this time please contact us only for partnership and sponsorship interest.

Invitations to the event will be sent at a later date.

2. In Pentagon shakeup, some see bid for more covert action, less oversight

While everyone is going to be focused on and fascinated with covert action we must not neglect the fundamental irregular warfare activities that are conducted under Title10 and that are by nature long duration, relationship dependent, and focus on working through, with, and by indigenous forces and populations which requires a force that is organized, trained, educated, equipped, and optimized for these irregular and unconventional warfare operations as well as support to political warfare against the "Dark Quad" (China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea) as well as violent extremist organizations.

We must not become overly enamored with and lured by the sexy nature of covert action. We need to execute the basics of irregular warfare well if we are going to win in strategic competition in the gray zone between peace and war.

In Pentagon shakeup, some see bid for more covert action, less oversight

Trump's unconventional pick for Joint Chiefs chair brings deep special-warfare experience.

By Patrick Tucker

Science & Technology Editor

February 23, 2025 09:23 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

The selection of John Caine as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may signal a new emphasis on irregular warfare and covert operations, enabling swifter action with fewer legal constraints and less congressional scrutiny, say former military and senior defense officials who have worked in the intelligence community, special operations, the Defense Department, and the White House.

The nomination of Caine—a retired Air Force lieutenant general—and the early dismissal of Gen. CQ Brown were part of an unprecedented purge announced on Friday by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also announced their intent to replace Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations; and the judge advocates general—essentially the top lawyers—of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Hegseth was also reported to have fired his senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short.

“General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience,” Trump said in Friday post announcing the moves.

An F-16 pilot with more than 150 combat hours and a Distinguished Flying Cross, Caine first moved into special operations when he helped hunt SCUD missiles in Iraq in 2003, CNN reported. Five years later, he was leading the Joint Special Operations Task Force - Air Directorate in Iraq, according to his official bio.

In 2016, he received his general’s star and became assistant commanding general of Joint Special Operations Command, an elite group even among special operators. From 2018 to September 2019, he was deputy commander of Special Operations Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve,

Little is publicly known about Caine’s role in Operation Inherent Resolve, which has been battling the Islamic State since 2014. But the role of air strikes, including covert ones, grew after September 2017, when Trump delegated airstrike approval to the operation’s commanders, effectively removing the requirement for White House oversight on such missions. Trump also designated ISIS-held territories as “active hostile zones.” Combined with the use of new sensors and AI-powered data-fusion tools, these developments intensified anti-ISIS airstrikes, according to a 2022 Defense Department review.

In 2019, Caine became the Pentagon’s director of Special Access Programs; two years later, he became associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency—essentially, the Pentagon’s top liaison there. Both jobs put him in close proximity to some of the most highly secret missions and operations.

In a post announcing his intent to nominate Caine to be the military's top officer, Trump called him “instrumental” in the 2019 recapture of ISIS-controlled territory.

“Many so-called ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered," he wrote.

One former senior White House official said Trump picked Caine for his experience and talent running covert operations, his understanding of expanded authorities, and the personal rapport that developed between the men during Trump’s first term as president.

Trump and the expansion of irregular warfare

But some see in Caine’s nomination—along with the ousters of the JAGs and the SecDef’s military advisor and Trump’s own record—a bid to evade legal strictures on the president’s use of military force.

“The JAG firings are actually more worrisome than the senior officer reliefs, because everyone two-star and above serves at the pleasure of the President, but reaching down into the organization to remove the legal constraints is far more insidious,” said Kori Schake, a former senior official at the National Security Council and at the State Department.

The president’s power to use military force is checked under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which requires the chief executive to notify Congress within 48 hours of sending forces into combat. If that deployment is to last longer than 60 days, Congress must authorize the deployment—at least technically. In recent decades, that has rarely been the case.

But Title 50 also narrows the scope of congressional oversight for covert missions. In “normal” circumstances, only the House and Senate intelligence committees must be notified in advance. Under “extraordinary” circumstances, the president need only notify the so-called Gang of Eight—the bipartisan leaders of both houses of Congress and the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees—and in some circumstances, need not do so in advance.

Meanwhile, Title 18 acts as a further check on executive power, by imposing criminal liability on government personnel who commit crimes as part of a mission. For example, a covert action that involves assassination, could draw legal challenge under Title 18’s prohibitions against murder, conspiracy, and extrajudicial killings.

One former senior intelligence community official and one former senior defense official said that Caine’s rise, following Trump’s previous actions enabling an expansion of covert activity, portends far greater use of irregular and covert operations.

“Stuff like turf wars over [Title 50 and Title 18] and funding lines are less likely to drive the bus in the next four years,” said the former intelligence official.

Moreover, Trump has been installing covert-warfare operators in key positions. The list includes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret who also served as the former vice president Dick Cheney’s counterterrorism advisor. Another is Ron Johnson, a former CIA science and technology liaison to U.S. Special Operations Command, who is awaiting confirmation as Trump’s ambassador to Mexico.

The former intelligence official said those selections point to better interagency collaboration and coordination, which would be a good thing.

“Can’t have intel, mil, diplomacy…operating in silos when the threats are both foreign and domestic. My bet is that this whole admin will look to use whatever department or agency-level authorities and resources are best suited to fulfilling the commander-in-chief’s stated intent.”

But the former defense official said that Trump appears to want to rely far less on traditional large-force deployments, in part because such deployments require congressional oversight and approval. New authorizations for the use of force are unlikely, the official said.

All of that will factor in potential engagements against Mexican drug cartels, which Trump has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

One constitutional legal expert with deep expertise in national security and classified work said the selection of Caine, coupled with the removal of top service lawyers who would likely object to Trump’s personal interpretation of presidential war powers, means “if the Trump White House is looking to wage a covert war in Mexico, they certainly could.”

A new era of irregular and covert warfare

On the one hand, lawmakers from both parties have said that the United States should make irregular warfare a higher priority. And Russian and Chinese grey-zone activities have been a mounting challenge for the United States and allied militaries, especially since neither country need work through legal restrictions or processes in employing such capabilities.

The former intelligence official welcomed the selection of Caine and what they saw as the likely new focus or emphasis on irregular and covert operations, describing it as “refreshing to see some potential for a tightly-integrated national security apparatus across all elements of presidential power. The country has some very significant challenges ahead.”

But history suggests that covert operations do not always achieve the desired results, especially when treated as a panacea solution rather than a tool to be employed among other implements of institution-building.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, famously championed a sort of irregular-warfare doctrine against adversaries in the Middle East, marked by the use of high-tech weapons and agile special-ops missions. But that fast-in, fast-out approach didn’t account for the changing social dynamics on the ground, which grew increasingly unstable in places like Iraq. And Rumsfeld was averse to the sort of long-term civil and military engagement that might be described as “nation-building.”

Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was also fond of covert operations to put down the North Vietnamese forces. But this strategy of incremental escalation eventually provoked North Vietnamese activity around the Gulf of Tonkin, leading to more U.S. military involvement.

The constitutional law expert said, “Trump’s particular affinity for this type of force projection is consistent with his Hollywood-esque view of national security. Secretive, limited oversight, and deadly.”

Several of the officials we spoke to either knew or interacted with Caine, personally. They all described him as intelligent, well-liked, and highly respected among both the military and intelligence communities.

But his installation by Trump suggests that the president expects little of the pushback that his last appointee—Gen. Mark Milley—ultimately gave him. The former defense official said Trump has systematically “taken out people who were able to restrain him.”

The removal of members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not for cause but simply to install a new president’s pick is unprecedented, and counter to the intent of congressional action, said Charles Stevenson, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies and author of SecDef: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense.

“Yes, it's precedented for an administration to replace military people, but the Congress, first in the 1960s, and then again just a few years ago with regard to the chairman, instituted set terms. They wanted to insulate the senior officers, members of the chiefs, from turnover with the new administration. That's why they wrote the laws that way,” Stevenson said.

And not just Trump, but Hegseth, he added.

“The JAG [firing] looks as if he is emphasizing: ‘I want people who have my interpretation of the laws of war, not the established traditional ones.’ That's kind of shocking,” Stevenson said.

Bradley Peniston contributed to this report.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

3. To China, DeepSeek is more than an app—it's a strategic turning point

Excerpts:

As AI-driven military applications move toward the center of modern warfare, Chinese analysts believe that DeepSeek’s rapid advancement signals a shift in the global balance of power in military AI. This could be an overstatement, not just because of its lesser performance compared to competing systems, but potential chip shortages that may handicap its adoption—though Chinese media argues these shortages have spurred domestic firms to pursue independent innovation.

However, it is this belief, in both China and the United States, about the importance of DeepSeek that may be as important as the underlying reality. A lesson from both China’s cognitive-warfare theories and the history of arms races is that perceptions often matter more. China’s now-proven ability to develop and deploy sophisticated AI solutions, and in ways that U.S. firms were unable to achieve first, doesn’t just challenge existing technological hierarchies. It has changed how Chinese leaders view their own capabilities and appears to have compelled the United States and its allies to reassess their strategic positioning in an accelerating AI arms race.

To China, DeepSeek is more than an app—it's a strategic turning point

Beijing views the AI tool as a breakthrough that reinforces its strategic autonomy and reshapes the U.S.-China balance of power.

By Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer

February 21, 2025

defenseone.com · by Tye Graham

During this year’s Lunar New Year celebrations, a remote village in China’s Guangdong province became an unexpected center of attention. Crowds of visitors flocked to the hometown of DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, eager to glimpse the modest house where one of China’s most influential AI pioneers had grown up. Once an unremarkable rural enclave, the village was now decorated with banners reading, "Welcome home, Wenfeng—your hometown is proud of you!"

The celebrations contrasted sharply with the U.S. reaction to the Hangzhou-based company's announcement of a ChatGPT-like AI tool: “a collective wail from the White House, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.” For U.S. political leaders, it was, as President Trump said, a “wakeup call” that China could not just compete, but maybe leap ahead in key technologies with major national security implications. It poked a hole in the self-confident narrative of the handful of U.S. tech oligarchs who increasingly drive domestic politics. And it shocked stock markets, sparking a sell-off among major AI firms over $1 trillion.

But to Chinese policymakers and defense analysts, DeepSeek means far more than local pride in a hometown kid made good. They view it as a breakthrough that reinforces China’s strategic autonomy and reshapes the balance of power in the U.S.-China AI competition. By demonstrating an ability to innovate under sanctions, bypass Western technological barriers, and accelerate AI advancements on its own terms, China has sent a stark message: it can and will compete at the highest levels of AI development.

Beijing believes DeepSeek will not only reduce its reliance on Western technology but lay the groundwork for an AI ecosystem that could challenge U.S. leadership in commercial and military domains. The implications thus extend far beyond technology, raising urgent questions about the future of global AI governance, economic competition, and security stability.

Chinese commentators have described DeepSeek’s development as a direct rebuttal to U.S. efforts to constrain China’s AI progress through chip-export restrictions. Pan Helin, an expert with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, hailed DeepSeek as a testament to the country’s ability to chart an independent technological course, circumventing reliance on U.S. semiconductor supply chains. China’s Science and Technology Daily boasted that, unlike previous models that relied on high-end NVIDIA GPUs, DeepSeek’s architecture employs cost-efficient innovations, allowing it to function effectively without cutting-edge Western hardware. A prominent Chinese financial information and services platform wrote that it has lowered the barriers to AI development in China, enabling a more distributed and resilient AI ecosystem.

This is an incomplete narrative, of course. Chinese state media does not mention that DeepSeek's current architecture primarily used NVIDIA H800 GPUs (which comply with U.S. export restrictions by limiting interconnect bandwidth more than advanced chips such as the H100), as well as likely relied on a stockpile of tens of thousands of NVIDIA chips for its earlier stages of training and development. Some speculate that DeepSeek may have accessed H100s and other restricted NVIDIA GPUs through intermediaries in Singapore, potentially bypassing U.S. export controls. These concerns have triggered investigations by U.S. authorities and Singaporean regulators. In any case, reports indicate that limited access to advanced AI chips may restrict DeepSeek’s future ability to compete with Western counterparts at the highest levels of performance — a limitation that its founder, Liang, has also acknowledged.

Regardless, DeepSeek’s breakthroughs in unsupervised learning and hybrid neural network architecture provide a competitive advantage, according to a prominent Chinese financial information and services platform. By optimizing model efficiency and reducing dependence on vast computational resources, DeepSeek has lowered the barriers to AI development in China, enabling a more distributed and resilient AI ecosystem. This shift is described as having profound implications for China’s long-term strategic resilience, reducing its vulnerability to U.S. sanctions while reinforcing the credibility of its self-reliance doctrine.

Furthermore, DeepSeek appears to validate the CCP’s strategy of catalyzed growth within China’s AI supply chain. The Chinese government has long provided state funding for AI research at national and provincial levels, and promoted regulatory frameworks that prioritize indigenous innovation. Beyond this most recent success, China Daily noted that domestic component production for AI development has surged from 19 percent to 64 percent, reflecting a concerted effort to localize the entire AI ecosystem.

Not just a technological milestone

Other Chinese commenters have framed DeepSeek as not just a technological achievement, but a geopolitical statement. Hu Xijin, the nationalistic and outspoken former editor of Global Times, characterized DeepSeek’s success as evidence that U.S. sanctions have "failed to block China's progress." This goes deeper than just celebration. By positioning DeepSeek as a challenge to Western dominance, Beijing seeks to expand its influence in the international AI governance framework and counteract what it views as U.S. technological hegemony.

Chinese state media has promoted DeepSeek’s open-source model as an alternative to Western AI ecosystems, portraying China as a leader in global technological cooperation. DeepSeek’s development aligns with China’s broader strategy of AI-enabled soft power projection. The model’s superior Chinese-language processing capabilities and its adherence to state-mandated content controls reflect Beijing’s long-term ambition to establish AI as a vehicle for ideological influence. While Western models prioritize free-flowing information, DeepSeek's strict censorship mechanisms ensure alignment with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official narratives, making it an attractive tool for Beijing’s global digital strategy and for use by any foreign authoritarian government partners.

Beyond its commercial and diplomatic significance, DeepSeek has been celebrated for its potential military applications. Chinese military analysts highlight DeepSeek’s ability to improve intelligent decision-making in combat scenarios, optimize weapons systems, and improve real-time battlefield analysis. Given China’s longstanding emphasis on civil-military fusion, the innovations powering DeepSeek could be integrated into military AI development, supporting autonomous weapons platforms, cyber warfare capabilities, and intelligence processing.

Xu Bingjun, a senior researcher at the Beijing-based Huayu think tank and the state-affiliated Liaowang Institute, wrote: "DeepSeek represents a paradigm shift in military AI, offering a cost-effective, high-performance solution that can revolutionize battlefield intelligence. Its ability to process vast amounts of data in real-time enhances strategic decision-making, reduces human error, and enables more effective deployment of autonomous systems." The researcher further emphasized that DeepSeek’s low computational cost presents strategic advantages for China’s defense sector, as it allows for the training of advanced AI systems on consumer-grade hardware. This cost efficiency lowers the barriers to entry for AI adoption within China’s military-industrial complex, accelerating the People’s Liberation Army’s modernization drive and enhancing its ability to conduct AI-enabled warfare.

Chinese military analysts also claim that DeepSeek’s AI capabilities extend to multiple domains of military application. The system’s ability to analyze battlefield conditions in real time could improve situational awareness, enabling faster and more accurate command decisions. Moreover, its advanced reasoning and predictive modeling might optimize war-gaming simulations, helping commanders anticipate enemy movements and refine tactical responses. In autonomous combat, DeepSeek’s AI models may support the development of intelligent unmanned systems, such as drones, robotic ground units, and naval platforms, boosting China’s asymmetric warfare capabilities.

Xu also asserts that DeepSeek might provide an edge in network defense operations, using deep learning and anomaly detection to spot and neutralize cyber threats. Chinese cyber security firms, such as Qihoo 360, have already begun to incorporate DeepSeek’s AI models into their cyber security products. The system’s integration into China’s defense infrastructure could also enable more resilient communication networks, reinforcing command and control mechanisms in contested environments.

As AI-driven military applications move toward the center of modern warfare, Chinese analysts believe that DeepSeek’s rapid advancement signals a shift in the global balance of power in military AI. This could be an overstatement, not just because of its lesser performance compared to competing systems, but potential chip shortages that may handicap its adoption—though Chinese media argues these shortages have spurred domestic firms to pursue independent innovation.

However, it is this belief, in both China and the United States, about the importance of DeepSeek that may be as important as the underlying reality. A lesson from both China’s cognitive-warfare theories and the history of arms races is that perceptions often matter more. China’s now-proven ability to develop and deploy sophisticated AI solutions, and in ways that U.S. firms were unable to achieve first, doesn’t just challenge existing technological hierarchies. It has changed how Chinese leaders view their own capabilities and appears to have compelled the United States and its allies to reassess their strategic positioning in an accelerating AI arms race.

Tye Graham is a Senior Researcher with BluePath Labs and a retired U.S. Army Foreign Area Officer.

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security.

defenseone.com · by Tye Graham

4. Trump Wants to End the War Fast. Russia Has Its Own Timetable.

Excerpts:

The Kremlin has said it isn’t interested in a simple cease-fire because it is convinced the Ukrainians could use a pause in fighting to rearm. Instead, Putin wants to deal with what he calls “the root causes” of the conflict, which he has said include Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and an anti-Russian government in Kyiv.

Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground on the front line in Ukraine, and Moscow has a long history of using a grinding military advance to improve its position in negotiations. It is a strategy Moscow has employed from Syria to the talks at Yalta during World War II.

...

“There’s a considerable amount of doubt inside the Kremlin that Trump and his people understand the difficulty or the complexity of the issues that have to be dealt with,” said Thomas Graham, a former White House adviser on Russia to George W. Bush who returned from a trip to Moscow earlier this month.

...

Ukraine is unlikely to be very different as negotiations continue. Indeed, the position of the Ukrainians, who are expected to join talks at some point, and potentially the Americans will only worsen as Russia continues driving further west, nibbling at Ukrainian territory. Those successes have likely emboldened more hawkish elements of Russia’s military and political elite. 

“As Russia’s position improves on the battlefield, the Russians are only going to up the ante,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the U.S. think tank Rand. “I can only imagine the officers in the general staff are trying to convince Putin that now is the time to put their foot on the gas and push for maximum territorial gains.”

Meanwhile, Russia will likely be pushing for conditions similar to those that they negotiated in Istanbul at the beginning of the war. In those talks, Russia demanded that no foreign weapons would be allowed on Ukrainian soil and that Ukraine’s military would be pared down to a specific size, limiting everything from the number of troops and tanks to the maximum firing range of Ukrainian missiles.

Russia wants an end to the intelligence sharing between Washington and Kyiv, which remains unacknowledged by either side and has helped Ukraine strike at some of Russia’s most sensitive targets, said a person briefed on Russia’s positions. 

Trump Wants to End the War Fast. Russia Has Its Own Timetable.

Kremlin sees advantage in drawn-out Ukraine talks and using the battlefield to shape negotiations

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-wants-to-end-the-war-fast-russia-has-its-own-timetable-1d1c70f1?mod=latest_headlines

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled an unhurried approach to Ukraine peace negotiations. Photo: Sergei Bobylev/Zuma Press

By Thomas Grove

Follow and Alan Cullison

Follow

Feb. 23, 2025 11:00 pm ET

President Trump’s high-speed effort to end the war in Ukraine is on a collision course with Russia’s negotiating tactics and President Vladimir Putin’s goals in the conflict.

After the first meeting in years between U.S. and Russian officials in Riyadh, the Kremlin is already preparing the ground for interminable talks ahead. 

Putin tried to temper expectations last week about negotiations reaching a quick conclusion: “It will take some time. How much time it will take, I am not ready to answer now.” 

For Russia, talks with the U.S. are a victory in themselves, because they help end the isolation imposed upon Moscow by the Biden administration, which had refused to engage with the Kremlin after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Kremlin has said it isn’t interested in a simple cease-fire because it is convinced the Ukrainians could use a pause in fighting to rearm. Instead, Putin wants to deal with what he calls “the root causes” of the conflict, which he has said include Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and an anti-Russian government in Kyiv.

Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground on the front line in Ukraine, and Moscow has a long history of using a grinding military advance to improve its position in negotiations. It is a strategy Moscow has employed from Syria to the talks at Yalta during World War II.

From second left: Kremlin officials Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov met with U.S. delegates Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz in Riyadh last week. Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry/Zuma Press

In recent days, U.S. policy appeared to be shifting decisively in Russia’s favor, with Trump blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war and calling him a dictator.

But translating that shift into agreements at the negotiation table will be challenging. Putin has aims that extend far beyond the territorial gains his forces have made in Ukraine. The Russian president wants to limit the size and power of Kyiv’s military, ensure the country’s permanent neutrality and control the direction of its political future. While Trump has said he thinks it is “impractical” for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the country’s constitution has enshrined that as a long-term goal.

“There’s a considerable amount of doubt inside the Kremlin that Trump and his people understand the difficulty or the complexity of the issues that have to be dealt with,” said Thomas Graham, a former White House adviser on Russia to George W. Bush who returned from a trip to Moscow earlier this month.

Ukraine’s forces in the east will be key to stopping Russia from further strengthening its negotiating position. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

To achieve its aims, Russia might try to shape negotiations by pressing its offensive on the battlefield. Some of Moscow’s biggest diplomatic victories of the last century were clinched at the negotiating table while Russia was creating new military realities on the front line.

For years, Russia participated in negotiations over an end to Syria’s civil war while delivering to former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad small arms, air defenses and armored personnel carriers used against protesters and rebels. Moscow ultimately intervened on Assad’s side, clawing back territory for Damascus and cementing the Syrian leader’s grip on power, which collapsed late last year.

Similarly, in the final year of World War II, Joseph Stalin shifted to more hard-line demands in negotiations with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Soviet troops pushed Nazis out of Poland with increasing speed. The results had disastrous consequences for Warsaw and other Central and Eastern European countries the Soviets ruled over for nearly half a century.

Soviet tanks in the Polish city of Poznan in 1945. Photo: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin sit together at the Yalta Conference in Crimea, where the three leaders discussed the postwar reshaping of Europe. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“Stalin was able to improve his negotiating position vis-à-vis Churchill and Roosevelt because his troops were creating new realities on the battlefield,” said Sergey Radchenko, Cold War expert and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “You can see the way Putin thinks in similar terms.”

Ukraine is unlikely to be very different as negotiations continue. Indeed, the position of the Ukrainians, who are expected to join talks at some point, and potentially the Americans will only worsen as Russia continues driving further west, nibbling at Ukrainian territory. Those successes have likely emboldened more hawkish elements of Russia’s military and political elite. 

“As Russia’s position improves on the battlefield, the Russians are only going to up the ante,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the U.S. think tank Rand. “I can only imagine the officers in the general staff are trying to convince Putin that now is the time to put their foot on the gas and push for maximum territorial gains.”

Meanwhile, Russia will likely be pushing for conditions similar to those that they negotiated in Istanbul at the beginning of the war. In those talks, Russia demanded that no foreign weapons would be allowed on Ukrainian soil and that Ukraine’s military would be pared down to a specific size, limiting everything from the number of troops and tanks to the maximum firing range of Ukrainian missiles.

Russia wants an end to the intelligence sharing between Washington and Kyiv, which remains unacknowledged by either side and has helped Ukraine strike at some of Russia’s most sensitive targets, said a person briefed on Russia’s positions. 

For now, Russia is pushing ahead with the assault that has devastated eastern Ukrainian cities such as Chasiv Yar. Photo: AFP PHOTO / DONBAS SPECIAL FORCES BATTALION OF THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL GUARD

As talks unfold, the U.S. has means to pressure Moscow, such as by tightening restrictions on Russia’s oil exports or sending yet more military aid to Kyiv. Trump hinted bluntly at such measures shortly after taking office, posting on his Truth Social platform that Putin had better “make a deal” and “we can do it the easy way or the hard way.”

But Trump has lately signaled that he prefers a polite conversation, and aides have been dialing back their mention of sanctions. As Trump tries to conclude a quick deal with the Kremlin, he will have two options to prod talks forward—pressure Moscow or pressure Kyiv, said Graham, now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump’s recent harsh criticism of Zelensky indicates that he has decided to pressure Kyiv, the easier target of the two, Graham said.

But, in addition to the complexity of negotiations, Putin doesn’t want the Trump administration to think that it can quickly dispatch Russia as a problem, move on and ignore relations with Moscow. The Kremlin perceived that was Joe Biden’s strategy when he assumed the presidency in 2021, something that only kindled resentment in Moscow, Graham said. 

Under Biden and Barack Obama, the U.S. sought to punish Russia in part by limiting or severing contacts in an effort to isolate Moscow globally. The resumption of dialogue is by itself a victory for the Kremlin.

“They want to be engaged with the United States for some time,” he said. “They don’t want the United States or Trump to think that this is a matter of two or three months to get it all done, and now I just focus on China and forget about the Russians.”

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com

5. GOP Email System Infiltrated by Chinese Hackers Last Summer, New Book Reveals

Are members of the Dark Quad colluding to conduct unrestricted warfare against the US?

GOP Email System Infiltrated by Chinese Hackers Last Summer, New Book Reveals

The previously unreported intrusion came as the Trump campaign was hacked by Iranian operatives

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-rnc-hack-us-election-48890e7b?mod=latest_headlines

By Meridith McGraw

Follow and Dustin Volz

Follow

Feb. 24, 2025 5:00 am ET

The Republican Convention took place in Milwaukee in July. Photo: angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

WASHINGTON—As the Republican National Committee was gearing up for its convention in Milwaukee, it was also quietly dealing with a serious security breach of its internal communications by hackers with ties to the Chinese government, according to people familiar with the matter.

In early July, Microsoft reached out to top party officials to inform them that the hackers had for months had access to the RNC email system, the people said. The previously unreported breach is revealed in reporter Alex Isenstadt’s forthcoming book, “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” The Wall Street Journal viewed an excerpt of the book, which will be released next month, and verified the hack.

RNC officials believed the hackers wanted inside information about how the GOP was planning to address Taiwan in its party platform, the people said. In 2016, the RNC called for a free-trade agreement with Taiwan as part of its 60-page platform. But the 2024 platform, which was released in the run-up to the convention, was whittled down to just 16 pages. There was no mention of the island. 

After learning of the hack, top RNC officials and Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita decided not to alert the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the breach because they were concerned the information would be leaked to the media, the people said.

The RNC learned of the hack in the days before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., the people said.

Microsoft and the RNC declined to comment. “China firmly opposes and combats cyberattacks and cyber theft in all forms,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

It wasn’t clear how far-reaching the breach was or how many emails may have been accessed. The U.S. has accused Chinese hackers of a range of cyber-espionage attacks in recent years, including devastating intrusions into U.S. telecommunications systems that allowed the spies to listen in on phone calls of select targets, including Trump himself.

The intrusion into the RNC came at roughly the same time as a separate hack of the Trump campaign by Iranian operatives, who stole files and tried to disseminate them to American news organizations for publication. Most journalists didn’t publish the documents.

The Iran intrusion became public knowledge after Politico reported on its receipt of documents from an individual who used the alias “Robert.” 

Despite not notifying the FBI, elements of the U.S. government were aware of the breach of the RNC email system by Chinese hackers, according to a person familiar with the matter, though it wasn’t clear how officials learned of it. U.S. intelligence agencies possess an array of sources and methods, including digitally spying on foreign hackers’ activities, that inform their understanding of nation-state cyber threats and election interference attempts.

State-backed Chinese hackers have for decades targeted Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns for espionage, viewing their internal communications and documents as lucrative targets that can yield insight into the policies and personalities of an incoming administration, according to U.S. intelligence officials. 

Hacking a party committee offers “adversaries the ability to map relationships between key political actors, and then also potentially get a window into policy shifts or policy thinking and how that might play out if that target comes into power,” said Laura Galante, a top cybersecurity official for the U.S. intelligence community during the Biden administration.

In 2008, Beijing’s cyberspies successfully infiltrated both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns. And in 2016, both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and the Democratic National Committee suffered breaches at the hands of Russia, which weaponized stolen emails as part of a hack-and-leak interference operation intended to denigrate Clinton and boost then-candidate Trump’s electoral prospects.

Write to Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

6. Chinese Warships’ Plan for Live Fire Drills Unnerves Australia and New Zealand

Excerpts:

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, said that she was concerned about the lack of “transparency” in relation to the exercises and the notice given Friday, and said she would raise it with her counterpart, Wang Yi. They were scheduled to meet later Friday at the G20 meeting in South Africa.

The ships, a guided missile cruiser, a frigate and a supply vessel, were first detected off Australia’s northeast coast last week. This week, they passed through waters about 150 nautical miles from Sydney, well outside Australia’s territorial waters but inside its exclusive economic zone.

Australian officials have stressed that the Chinese ships have been traversing regional waters legally, but that they were closely monitoring their movements.

Chinese Warships’ Plan for Live Fire Drills Unnerves Australia and New Zealand

The vessels were sailing in the Tasman Sea, and their announced intent to perform exercises prompted a call for commercial flights to divert course.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/world/australia/chinese-warships-drills-new-zealand.html

Australian sailors watching the Chinese ships last week, in a photo released by the Australian authorities.Credit...Australian Defense Force via /Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Victoria Kim

Reporting from Sydney, Australia

Feb. 21, 2025

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Australia, China and New Zealand? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Chinese warships that have been sailing south along the eastern coast of Australia gave notice on Friday of their intent to conduct live fire exercises in international waters between Australia and New Zealand, forcing commercial flights to divert and putting the two countries on edge.

The three naval vessels, which include one of the most powerful warships in the Chinese navy’s fleet, were outside Australia’s exclusive economic zone when the drills took place, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia told reporters.

The ships were first detected in the region last week, according to Australian officials.

While the Chinese vessels appeared to have acted in accordance with international law, the Australian and New Zealand militaries were closely monitoring them, Mr. Albanese said. He said it was not immediately clear what, if any, live fire drills were conducted Friday.

Analysts have said that the unannounced presence of the warships near Australian territorial waters — thousands of miles away from the Chinese mainland — was a show of force.

In Beijing, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry described the actions of the ships as “far seas exercises.” They were organized by the People’s Liberation Army’s Southern Theater Command, which also oversees the navy’s activities in the South China Sea.

“The drill was carried out in a safe, standard and professional manner in accordance with relevant international law and international practice,” the spokesman, Guo Jiakun, said.

Airservices Australia, which manages air traffic in the region, said in a statement that it had advised airlines and radioed pilots with planned flights to avoid parts of the Tasman Sea “as a precaution."

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, said that she was concerned about the lack of “transparency” in relation to the exercises and the notice given Friday, and said she would raise it with her counterpart, Wang Yi. They were scheduled to meet later Friday at the G20 meeting in South Africa.

The ships, a guided missile cruiser, a frigate and a supply vessel, were first detected off Australia’s northeast coast last week. This week, they passed through waters about 150 nautical miles from Sydney, well outside Australia’s territorial waters but inside its exclusive economic zone.

Australian officials have stressed that the Chinese ships have been traversing regional waters legally, but that they were closely monitoring their movements.

Li You contributed research.

Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region. More about Victoria Kim

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 22, 2025, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinese Warships Unnerve Australia and New Zealand. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

7. Three Years Into War in Ukraine, Trump Ushers in New World for Putin

Three Years Into War in Ukraine, Trump Ushers in New World for Putin

Fresh possibilities have emerged for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with a change of power in Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/world/europe/putin-trump-russia-ukraine-war.html

Ukrainian soldiers firing at Russian targets from the front line this month. President Vladimir V. Putin dug in on the battlefield to wait out Western resolve in a longer and more onerous conflict than Moscow had expected.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

By Paul Sonne

Reporting from Berlin

Feb. 24, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia took the stage in Sochi, Russia, last fall, two days after Donald J. Trump won the U.S. presidential election, and spoke of the dawn of a new world order.

“In a sense,” Mr. Putin said, “the moment of truth is coming.”

It may have already arrived.

After three years of grinding warfare and isolation by the West, a world of new possibilities has opened up for Mr. Putin with a change of power in Washington.

Gone are the statements from the East Room of the White House about the United States standing up to bullies, supporting democracy over autocracy and ensuring freedom will prevail.

Gone, too, is Washington’s united front against Russia with its European allies, many of whom have begun to wonder if the new American administration will protect them against a revanchist Moscow, or even keep troops in Europe at all.

Mr. Trump, having voiced desires to take Greenland, has pursued a rapid rapprochement with the Kremlin, while sidelining shocked European allies and publicly assailing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

Image

A photograph released by Russian state media showing Mr. Putin attending a wreath-laying ceremony in Moscow on Sunday. For years, he has fixated on reversing the influence the United States has gained in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.Credit...Sergey Bobylev/Sputnik

It is a rapid shift of fortunes for Mr. Putin. He dug in on the battlefield — despite mounting pressures and costs — to wait out Western resolve in a far longer and more onerous conflict than Moscow had expected. Now, the Russian leader may believe his moment has come to shift the balance of power in favor of the Kremlin, not only in Ukraine.

“I think he sees real opportunity, both to win the war in Ukraine, effectively, but also to sideline the U.S. not just from Ukraine but from Europe,” said Max Bergmann, a Russia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who worked at the State Department during the Obama administration.

The Russian leader’s “grandiose objective,” Mr. Bergmann said, is the destruction of NATO, the 32-country military alliance led by the United States, which was established after World War II to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

“I think that is right now all on the table,” Mr. Bergmann said.

The opening represents one of the biggest opportunities for Mr. Putin in his quarter-century in power in Russia.

For years, Mr. Putin has lamented the weakness Russia showed in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and has fixated on reversing the influence the United States has since gained in Europe at the Kremlin’s expense.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, Mr. Putin issued demands to the United States and its European allies that went far beyond Ukraine, proposing the resurrection of Cold War-style spheres of influence in a Europe divided between Moscow and Washington.

Image

President Trump’s return to the White House has shifted the geopolitical environment in Mr. Putin’s favor.Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

He demanded that NATO agree not to expand farther east to any nations of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine. He also asked the United States and its Western European allies not to deploy any military forces or weaponry in the Central and Eastern European countries that once answered to Moscow.

Many of those nations, such as Estonia, Poland and Romania, have been NATO members for decades and would be difficult to defend against a Russian invasion without pre-positioned troops and equipment.

“In Putin’s view, it’s the most powerful countries that should get to determine the rules of the road,” said Angela Stent, emerita professor of government at Georgetown University. “Smaller countries, whether they like it or not, have to listen to them.”

Never mind, Ms. Stent said, that Russia lacks a superpower economy. “But it does have nuclear weapons, it has oil and gas and a veto on the U.N. Security Council,” she said. “It’s just power, hard power.”

At the time, the West immediately rejected Mr. Putin’s prewar proposals as unthinkable. The Russian leader is now almost certain to revive them in impending negotiations with Mr. Trump, a longtime skeptic of NATO and American troop presence in Europe. That has prompted a crisis among European allies, who are worried about what the U.S. president might concede.

“There is something very big going on at the moment,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. “This is not business as usual. This is a very different administration, and it’s very hard to see how trans-Atlantic relations will be the same at the end of this.”Editors’ Picks

Even if Mr. Trump’s return has shifted the geopolitical environment in Mr. Putin’s favor, the Russian leader has suffered serious setbacks over three years of war, and so far has failed to achieve his goal of bringing Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit.

Image

A NATO-related training exercise in Romania last week. Mr. Trump is a longtime skeptic of the alliance.Credit...Andrei Pungovschi/Getty Images

Russia turned the tide on the battlefield, wresting about 1,500 square miles of land from Ukraine last year, but still has not taken the full territory of the four Ukrainian regions the Kremlin formally “annexed” in 2022. Though Ukrainian forces are reeling from personnel shortages, there has yet to be a vast Russian breakthrough causing a complete collapse of the Ukrainian lines.

Mr. Putin’s gains have also come at a significant cost. Russia is suffering losses from 1,000 to 1,500 dead and wounded per day by some estimates.

Russia’s war economy is showing strains, with 10 percent inflation, sky-high interest rates and sputtering economic growth, despite gargantuan state defense outlays. NATO has expanded to include two more nations in Russia’s backyard, Finland and Sweden, the opposite of what Mr. Putin intended.

“If you’re sitting in the Kremlin looking at this, yes, there is an opportunity, but don’t get your hopes too high,” said Thomas Graham, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as a top White House adviser on Russia during the George W. Bush administration. “A lot could change quickly, and at the end of the day, Trump is unreliable.”

To end the war, Mr. Graham added, both parties need to agree to stop fighting. Ukraine and its European backers most likely will not simply accept a raw deal that Mr. Trump cuts with Mr. Putin, despite intense pressure they might face from Washington.

“This is a lot more complicated than simply Putin and Trump sitting down and signing a piece of paper basically prepared by Putin,” Mr. Graham said, noting that he “wouldn’t pop the champagne corks in Moscow right now,” even if Russia appears to be in a better position than it once was.

Heading into talks, Mr. Trump faces the added difficulty that Mr. Putin is not a popular figure among the American public. Any deal seen as Kremlin appeasement could prove difficult to sell at home, though the vast majority of Americans favor a quick end to the conflict, which Mr. Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Image

A billboard showing an advertisement for military service in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday. Mr. Putin’s gains in the war have also come at a significant human cost.Credit...Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock

Last year, more than eight in 10 Americans expressed a negative view of Russia, and 88 percent said they did not have confidence in Mr. Putin to do the right thing in international affairs, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Nearly two-thirds of respondents called Russia an enemy of the United States.

Mr. Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who has been leading the talks so far, has in the past called Mr. Putin “bloodthirsty,” “a butcher” and “a monster.”

Mr. Putin, however, has benefited from changes in the information landscape and increasing admiration in the right-wing media universe, led by the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who visited Moscow to interview him last year.

Three years ago, Ukrainians successfully took to Twitter to popularize their cause around the globe at the outset of the invasion. But disinformation, often friendly to the Kremlin, has flourished on the platform since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022 and later rebranded the social media giant as X.

Federal prosecutors last year said they had unearthed a covert Russian campaign to spread Kremlin-friendly messages by funneling money to right-wing American influencers through a Tennessee-based media company.

The Western countries that lined up against Mr. Putin are facing their own problems at home. The two most influential countries in continental Europe — France and Germany — have been mired in political dysfunction for months and gripped by the rise of Kremlin-friendly far-right parties, now enjoying the backing of both Russian and American officials.

In the United States, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary has ordered senior leaders to begin the process of identifying major cuts in military spending. Some incoming top officials at the Pentagon have pushed for a significant withdrawal of American forces from Europe to focus on China, arguing that Europeans can handle their own defense.

Mr. Putin and his advisers would welcome the change.

“I would imagine if they are smart, they would adhere to Napoleon — when your enemy is destroying itself, don’t interfere,” Mr. Graham said. “I think that would be the approach at the moment.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.

Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine. More about Paul Sonne

8. Corporate America Is Not Raring to Return to Russia if Trump Lifts Sanctions

Is the potential for profits great enough to offset the risk of dealing with a dictator and oligarchs who will likely be sanctioned again as they continue to conduct malign activities as well as crimes and human rights abuses against their own people as well as in those countries where they are undermining freedom and democracy? How will their shareholders react to doing business in Russia?

Corporate America Is Not Raring to Return to Russia if Trump Lifts Sanctions

The White House promised “incredible opportunities” if Moscow ended the war in Ukraine. But Russia’s economy is struggling and the business environment is unpredictable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/business/trump-russia-ukraine-invest.html

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, an estimated 1,000 corporations have left or curtailed operations in Russia.Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

By Patricia Cohen

Patricia Cohen, who covers global economics and business, reported from Nairobi, Kenya.

Feb. 24, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The Trump administration is sending a startling message to corporate America: After three years as an international pariah, Russia could once again be open for business.

President Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal to end the war. And Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, told a delegation from Moscow in Riyadh last week that the United States and Russia could pursue “potentially historic economic partnerships” and “incredible opportunities,” if Moscow ended its war.

The question, though, is whether American businesses are interested.

And the answer, analysts and investors agreed, is not likely.

“I don’t think America’s big businesses are going to rush back into Russia fast, if at all, and surely not soon,” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics.

The invasion of Ukraine launched by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in February 2022 caused a sudden and swift flight of foreign companies as the United States, Europe and other countries imposed punishing sanctions and cut off most trade. Since then, more than 1,000 corporations have left or curtailed operations, according to a database compiled by the Yale School of Management.

The Russia that they left, however, is not the Russia they would be returning to.

The country’s war-driven economy is struggling with 21 percent interest rates, labor shortages and a shrinking number of middle-class consumers.

Then there is the unpredictable business environment in a country where the rule of law can easily shapeshift into the ruler’s law. American companies must contend with the risk of Kremlin decrees that impose new fees, taxes and price controls; restrict the ability to send profits and dividends back home, sell assets or make management decisions; and seize private businesses.

Image

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, in Riyadh last week. He told a delegation from Moscow that the United States and Russia could pursue “potentially historic economic partnerships.”Credit...Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein

In just the last month, the government has stepped up efforts to expropriate Russian-owned businesses as well. And on Friday, Mr. Putin declared that he wanted Russian companies to have “certain advantages” over foreign ones “that return to the market.”

There is also the possibility of further policy shifts on Russia in Washington, if not now, then possibly in four years, after the next election.

“No one is going to spend a lot of money in Russia if they think the policy is going to change overnight,” said Mark Walker, a senior adviser in the sovereign advisory practice at Lazard, an investment bank. And Moscow cannot be trusted to stay open to foreign investment. “It’s a regime that’s hard to do business with,” he said.

Even if the United States were to lift all of its sanctions, thousands of others imposed by the European Union, Britain, Japan and other countries could remain in place, hampering supply chains and threatening company profits. On Monday, the European Union approved a 16th package of sanctions against Russia.

“The Russian business environment is extremely difficult, the risk of expropriation is high and the Russian economy is not exactly booming,” said Agathe Demarais, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The American firms that have stayed in Russia don’t fully control their revenues and assets, Ms. Demarais said. Companies deemed “unfriendly” by the Kremlin often had to sell their businesses for pennies on the dollar and pay a 35 percent surcharge — labeled a “voluntary” contribution — to the government. Those that remained have been barred from returning a large chunk of their profits to their home country.

Other Western firms like Danone, Carlsberg and the Germany energy company Uniper have had their assets seized.

The Trump administration is pursuing what most analysts believe are fanciful economic opportunities in Russia as it has targeted Mexico and Canada, which are America’s biggest trading partners. U.S. manufacturers have complained that the president’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on those two longtime allies would cause severe harm by increasing costs and disrupting supply chains.

Russia, of course, controls vast swaths of land a storehouse of oil and gas and a nuclear arsenal. But it has been a bit player in the global economy. Before its troops invaded Ukraine, the country was responsible for just 1.7 percent of the world’s total output.

Trade with the United States was minuscule. In 2021, exports to Russia accounted for 0.4 percent of total U.S. exports — roughly the same amount as Honduras. And most multinationals in Russia earned no more than 1 percent of their global revenues there, according to researchers at Yale.

Scale of U.S. trade with Russia

Source: U.S. Census BureauBy The New York Times

“Even before 2022, the environment was already challenging, but there was money to be made,” said Elina Ribakova, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “Now the risks have increased dramatically, but there is no money to be made.”

In the 2000s, the soaring price of oil fueled a growing Russian middle class with an appetite for foreign goods and cars. “That dynamic no longer exists,” said Ms. Ribakova, who is also vice president for foreign policy at the Kyiv School of Economics.

And Russia’s No. 1 export — oil and gas — directly competes with the United States’ own energy sector. Even U.S. oil companies that once had operations in Russia, like Exxon Mobil, do not appear eager to make big investments there.

The United States, the European Union and dozens of other countries have also severed a wide range of financial ties with Russia. They jointly barred Russia from using Swift, the system used around the world to complete financial transactions. And they froze billions of dollars owned by the Russian government but held in Western banks.

The United States, which dominates global banking, could abandon this united front. Mr. Trump could decide to permit American banks to once again process transactions in dollars involving Russia. That would remove an enormous barrier that has crippled many companies’ ability to conduct business with Russia.

According to Yale’s tally, roughly two dozen American companies, including franchised restaurant outlets of Subway and T.G.I. Fridays, are still doing business in Russia. Dozens of companies are operating but have postponed new investments and slimmed down operations.

Image

A Subway restaurant in Saint Petersburg, Russia. About two dozen American companies, including franchised restaurant outlets of Subway and T.G.I. Fridays are still doing business in Russia.Credit...NYC Russ/Shutterstock

Companies that stayed in Russia would probably welcome an end to U.S. sanctions. And Russian officials are trying to pique American interest. On Friday, the first deputy prime minister, Denis Manturov, said the government would consider allowing Boeing to resume the purchase of titanium if the company was ready to return, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

But deterrents to re-entering Russia remain.

Unwinding the tangle of sanctions — as well as countermeasures enacted by the Russian government — would be a long and complicated process. So would sorting out the legal and financial mishmash left by the exit of foreign companies.

Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at Wells Fargo, said it’s unlikely that any American banks would return to Russia. “Never say never,” he said, but “Wall Street has become much more surgical about where they make their investments relative to times past.”

Citigroup had the largest presence in Russia of any American bank but has mostly exited. There’s almost no chance that it would return, particularly since it has been retreating on consumer banking in most global markets. A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment.

Image

A Citibank branch in Moscow in 2022. The bank had the largest presence in Russia of any American bank before the war but has mostly retreated since then.Credit...Getty Images

Many companies are still sitting on losses. PIMCO, one of the world’s largest asset managers, saw the value of its Russian bond holdings decline by more than $1 billion in 2022.

“I think there will be more interest in recovering old investments rather than taking on new risk,” said Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Even some debt investors who built their careers betting on dicey outcomes said it was too soon to be thinking about returning to Russia.

As Ms. Ribakova at the Peterson Institute said of Russia: “The biggest problem here is just that there’s not money to be made.”

Maureen Farrell, Joe Rennison, Danielle Kaye and Niraj Chokshi contributed reporting.

Patricia Cohen writes about global economics and is based in London. More about Patricia Cohen

9. The Human Terrain Program Done Right: Legacy of the Soviet Partisan Movement and the Underground Struggle

Excerpts:

The first verses of the Soviet anthem mention an “unbreakable union of freeborn republics created in struggle by the will of the people.” In Russian group consciousness, free will and its relation to authority have been a consistent theme. The Marxist movement was built on the work of Marx, but also on the Gramsci’s analysis of free will and meaning-making. The Soviet Resistance Movement was instrumentalized by Russia in three major ways.

First, the partisans and the underground struggle became synonymous with righteous, anti-fascist fighters. History was re-framed and reality on the round was altered.

Second: Frame and Re-Frame. To understand a society, one must showcase a greater focus on understanding how people use and understand language, not the actual language alone. As it relates to US foreign policy and security and defense policy, it is imperative to never lose sight that the central aim of Russian foreign policy is to dilute US power and influence globally. Moreover, it is equally critical to understand and accept that our American Weltanschaung is not identical to the Russian one, nor is it to any ally, partner, or foe. Akin to all aspects of Russian statecraft, the concepts of underground, underground struggle, and partisans are intertwined with the development of Russian political and strategic cultures. It would be a grave strategic mistake to evaluate Russian strategic posturing by reducing it to imperialism or authoritarianism. Yes, by American standards, the Russian Federation has an authoritarian leadership and no doubt, Russian foreign policy is expansive. Nonetheless, these are the problem variables, not the solution. Whether we like it or not, the Russian Federation is a great power, a nuclear power, a nation-state with vast resources and intricate human terrain networks of influence worldwide. President Putin pursues a realist foreign policy, and one of the central legacies of the Soviet partisan movement is exactly that: Human terrain influences stay-behind networks in Europe and beyond. In order to counter them, the US must go back to the George Kennan school of political warfare, embrace its story, and do a much better job at understanding Russia in the Russian cognitive frame. Words matter. Words create our thoughts and our thoughts create behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and actions. The Soviet partisan movement was a solid building block in the foundation of the intellectual and cognitive invasion of Europe (yes, Europe, not just Central and Eastern Europe).

Finally, as it relates to Russian operational art, the significance of resistance is, at the very least, two-fold. First, Russian operational art is a means to construct asymmetric elements in pursuing great power strategic advantages, while internally, it manifests itself through a thorough control of opposition elements and dissident speech. In Russian operational art, asymmetric activities include Special Operation Forces (SOF), the actions of the internal opposition, and the information activities. Nonetheless, the Russian approach to information activities is not what Western-centric sources tend to think of.

Finally, the national experience of resistance movements is vastly different. It is as important for the American strategist to study resistance movements in Europe as it is to study European history and conventional armed forces. In the case of the Soviet partisans, they developed in close proximity to Soviet political and strategic cultures, and this process was heavily influenced by the militarized intelligence apparatus stemming back from before the CHEKA or NKVD, but also by the psycho-social elements of Soviet nation-building.

The Human Terrain Program Done Right: Legacy of the Soviet Partisan Movement and the Underground Struggle

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/24/the-human-terrain-program/

by Olga R. Chiriac

|

02.24.2025 at 06:00am

“War’s nature is violent, interactive between opposing wills, and driven by politics. War’s character, its conduct, constantly evolves under the influence of technology, moral forces (law or ethics), culture, and military culture, which also change across time and place.”

It is common to hear analysis and commentary about the ever-changing character of war: the known is becoming unknown; the predictable, unpredictable. It is also almost unanimously agreed upon that organizations and people who can rapidly and effectively adapt are more likely to prevail; those who cannot, will fail. And while this perception seems to prevail, as a scientist who studies societies, cultures and peoples, I argue that it is equally – if not more important – to understand the human element of war and warfare. An essential part of understanding said human experience is understanding the stories and narratives that people use to communicate this experience to others, especially to the immediate group. Words matter. At a community/tribal level, group memory, shared experience and perception of the immediate and not so immediate past are essential building blocks of social identity. Finally, it is this social identity that plays an existential role in the national narrative and, if needed, for the will to fight in a populace.

Tzarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation have managed to skillfully integrate the human element in their military art. Resistance movements and a populace’s will to resist are closely connected to the socio-cognitive profile of the indigenous people. Historical experience plays a major role, but so do socio-economic factors, language, and the information environment. The central thesis of this article is that Russia has successfully implemented what we tried in the US, namely the Human Terrain Project. A foundational element of this method to prosecute political warfare was the Soviet partisan movement.

Historical Experience in Russia

In Russian language sources, the definition of resistance is intertwined with Soviet experience of Word War II, the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Resistance Movement was a liberation movement against fascist occupiers and regimes, as well as against collaborators in Europe during World War II. The movement developed in the occupied territories as well as in the countries of “the fascist bloc.” It also included the activities of the governments of the occupied countries, patriotic organizations, and parties in exile. The participants of the movement used various forms and “methods of struggle,” namely: failure to comply with the orders of the occupiers, anti-Fascist propaganda, assistance to persons persecuted by fascists, intelligence activities in favor of allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, strikes, sabotage, demonstrations, and even armed uprisings. While the concept cannot be found in currently available open-source Russian doctrinal documents, the concept can be found in speeches, interviews, academic articles, conventional media and  social media, as well as in films (both artistic and documentary), music, and various cultural products.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviets developed and finessed a new technique of resistance: partisan warfare. It is foundational to understand and accept that language is a fundamental element of human cognition and, therefore, in order to understand Russian understanding of resistance, it is important to clinically evaluate the way the concept was born and constructed in Russian collective consciousness. Partisan warfare is a sort of Russian style resistance; one that leverages human terrain stay behind networks comprised of intelligence operatives and assets as well as local populace and community influence vectors. At the time, a significant and novel element was that guerrilla warfare, or what Russian sources sometimes call revolutionary warfare, was not a regular guerrilla operation per se, but a thoroughly, almost professionally, developed force, auxiliary to but also instrumental for the conventional formations of the Red Army. On the ground, the Wehrmacht was concurrently fighting the Red Army and the partisan movement. Stalin himself spoke first of these formations, the people’s militia: “Comrades! Our forces are inestimable. The workers of Moscow and Leningrad have already begun to create a people’s militia of many thousands to support the Red Army”.The socio-cultural cognitive elements of the partisan movement can be identified today in direct or indirect manifestations in European strategic consciousness. Their implications for societal resistance capacity to territorial as well as psychological invasions are significant.

In Russian sources, a partisan movement is a type of struggle of the masses for the freedom and independence of their country or social transformation, which is conducted in the territory occupied by the enemy (controlled by a reactionary regime). The main form of partisan warfare is armed struggle conducted by partisan formations (brigades, detachments, groups, etc.), propaganda, and agitation aimed at undermining the political, military, and economic activities of the occupation authorities. Another important target is the morale of the enemy.

The Soviet Partisan Movement (Советское партизанское движение)

The Origin Story

The most important origin documents on the organization of the partisan movement, what Russian sources also call the underground struggle, were the directive of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) of June 29, 1941 and the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) of July 18, 1941 “On the organization of struggle in the rear of the German troops.” Joseph Stalin himself had given the order for the establishment of partisan movement(s) in a speech he gave on July 3, 1941. The order clearly required for the Soviet war establishment to form mounted as well as unmounted partisan units. Stalin also underlined the significance of society in war, the Soviets understood the importance of the human element in warfare. A major assignment for the partisan units were diversion groups created for the purpose of combat-partisan warfare everywhere. Tasks included, but were not limited to, blowing up bridges and roads, damaging telephone and telegraph communications, and setting woods on fire, waste disposal sites, and transportation elements. The ultimate goals were to create “unbearable conditions for the enemy and all who help him in the occupied areas.”

The word “partisan” comes from the Italian Partigiano – persons who voluntarily took up arms, fighting in the territory occupied by the enemy, and not part of the regular armed forces. In the 1930s in the USSR, such people were called “red partisans“, that is, “the one who previously participated in partisan actions in the Civil War on the side of the Red Army”.

The partisan movement developed primarily in Belarus and Ukraine, but it essentially existed in all Soviet republics. By August 1, 1941, more than 230 partisan groups and detachments (over 10,000 people) were operating in Belarus alone. Only a few months later, by October 1941, 738 partisan detachments had been formed in Ukraine. In total, by the end of 1941, about 3,500 partisan detachments and partisan formations were created. In addition to operating as major disruptors of economic life in occupies territory, the Movements acted as a very powerful psychological weapon to discourage local populations from becoming collaborators. This element is significant because after the end of WWII, the Soviets used the same techniques in reverse. Namely, after the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, the Kremlin sent intelligence officers all over Europe to infiltrate the political, economic, educational, and cultural spaces. A common finding that came up during academic interviews I conducted was that another way to leverage the infiltration method was to select citizens of the satellite states, send them to the USSR for indoctrination, and then send them back to their home country, usually with a Soviet-born spouse. To be covered operatives meant to infiltrate the human terrain in the host country. This had a meaningful impact on local populations, on the education system, and on societies in general. It is something that was strong enough to resist the test of time and the “transition to democracy” after the conclusion of the Cold War. The Soviet partisan movement was a powerful psychological “cultural inoculator” against socio-cultural erosion by occupation. These socio-psychological elements of the movement are most relevant to today’s events in Europe; nonetheless, some of the least explored, analyzed, understood, and discussed in Western academia and research forums.

Structurally, the movement(s) included employees of state security agencies, members of the NKVD troops, and military intelligence officers, but also civilians. Specifically, what literature calls “special units” began to be formed at the intelligence departments of the fronts, preparing reconnaissance and sabotage groups for operations in the deep rear of enemy-occupied territory. So, only the intelligence agencies of the Western Front from the beginning of the war until August 1, 1941 – 500 scouts, 17 special partisan detachments and 29 reconnaissance and sabotage groups – were trained and transferred to the rear of the German troops. Nonetheless, partisans were operating both in the physical and the human terrain, and the ladder is reaping significant strategic benefits in present-day Europe. In fact, a noteworthy role in partisan success in WWII was the political rigidity of the German invaders who remained indifferent to the necessity to win the cooperation of the local populace of the occupied territory. The Germans were relying heavily on superior technology and more manpower. In later years, during the Warsaw Pact days of the Cold War, Soviet-centralized control/rule manifested, among other things, through a re-education of sorts. In all occupied countries, the Politburo sent civilian operators to penetrate the human terrain of all satellite states and to sabotage any historical demeanor of local resistance movements. Furthermore, these political partisans were tasked with infiltrating the education system, the military, the sciences, and, of course, the local intelligence community. Resistance, as a form of warfare, can be conceived as part of a layered, in-depth national defense strategy.

In the Human Terrain Program, the central idea was correct, but the application fell short. Instead of a tactical cultural awareness program, it should have been a multi-agency strategic level intelligence program. This is what the Soviets essentially built. When a non-Soviet regime occupies the Kremlin, the benefits of the program are even felt today. By leveraging behavioral and social sciences, and by integrating the human terrain and societies in the operational concept, the success was not dependent on the political inner workings of the Kremlin.

The International Character

A district trait of the Soviet partisan movement was its international character. If general resistance movements are born out of grass roots, informal, civil society rooted currents, the Soviet partisan was as diverse as the Soviet Union herself. At first glance, this might seem like a natural expression of the multitude of peoples and religious groups in the territory of the USSR, but at a closer look, it is easy to identify the intentionality of Soviet planners to control the movements narrative – the partisan is the anti-fascist fighter who opposes the invader and is ready to die for the ultimate goal: defend the motherland but also the Communist Party and its ideals and values. This element will resurface over and over again in post WWII communist propaganda, both in the USSR and in its satellites in Central and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, one consequence was the intellectual high jacking of local narratives that belong to local populaces, of the resistance movements across the former Warsaw Pact States and in today’s Post Soviet space. In Romania, for instance, the resistance was complex: there were communist elements, fascist elements, and also regular peasants fighting against forced collectivization or intellectuals loyal to Romania and the monarchy. They were all lumped together into the “fascist narrative,” denigrated and silenced in history books and across the Romanian socio-cultural space. The population was not educated about its own past and at present this is leveraged by all political segments in Romanian society, ultimately eroding the democratic essence of the Romanian Republic.

In Poland, the total number of Soviet citizens who fought in 90 Soviet or mixed Soviet-Polish partisan detachments and groups was 20 thousand people. In Czechoslovakia, a total of 3,000 Soviet partisans fought, in Yugoslavia – more than 6,000 people. In France, at the beginning of 1944, there were up to 40 partisan detachments and almost the same number of groups in which up to 4,000 Soviet citizens fought.

In the partisan detachments of Italy, 5 thousand Soviet citizens participated in the fight against fascism. In Italy the Soviet Partisan Movement together with the Italian resistance fighters participated in military operations in Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Piedmont, Veneto, Liguria and other regions. Fedor Poletaev, Fore Mosulishvili, Nikolay Buyanov and Daniil Avdeev were awarded the highest award of the Italian Republic-the Gold Medal “For Military Valor”. Seven more of their comrades were awarded Silver and Bronze medals.

Participants of the movement were also operational in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Bulgaria, Greece and other countries. In France, as in other countries, many representatives of the Russian emigration participated. It cannot be denied that the movement made a significant contribution to the defeat of fascism in WWII, nonetheless, it was a means to and end for the Stalin regime and later for the Soviet leadership and due to the aforementioned highjacking of local narratives, this was the one aspect that dominates in societal consciousness at present.

It is important for the American strategist and commander to never loose sight of the fact that the Soviets in general and the Partisans in particular cannot be reduced to one definition, nationality, religion or gender. Wether in a negative or positive mental frame, the Soviet partisan are etched in European consciousness.

Applications in Contemporary Russian Operational Art

The most obvious contemporary example of how impactful the partisan movement was in the human terrain is the war in Ukraine. Russian strategic goals in Ukraine were very clear from the beginning; namely, a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime (nothing new here), “de-Nazification,” or the Kremlin euphemism for crushing any trace of Ukrainian nationalism, demilitarization, or leaving Ukraine without combat power sufficient to defend against another Russian attack, and “neutrality,” meaning no ties with Western organizations such as NATO or the EU, and no Western aid programs. All of them are directly linked to Soviet partisan warfare.

The carefully-crafted narrative and the psychological inoculation, in tandem with infiltration, produced and reinforced the stories/narratives desired by the Russian leaders. Humans think in stories. Humans and inherently the human brain and human nervous system are an indispensable component in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), referred to as Human-Cyber-Physical Systems (HCPSs). Western-centric social science discussions often pivot around emerging security challenges, where cognitive attacks can exploit vulnerabilities of human cognitive processes, and eventually affect human behaviors, ultimately damaging the HCPS. The Russian perspective, if you will, is far more complex. First, it stems from decades of scientific research and philosophical debates about the very nature of society, about how the human mind works and around consciousness. These debates are taking place beyond the war planning rooms and are scientific, rather than ideological, in nature. In addition to this, the Russian World paradigm, now the official Russian narrative for advancing its goals in IR, is heavily influenced by socio-cultural cognitive development theory which posits that human cognition is rooted in language, culture, and social environment as mediated by caregivers and community. The advancement of narratives is not limited to cyber campaigns; they are a real element in Russian motional consciousness and, therefore, seamlessly present in pull discourse. For instance, Sergey Naryshkin, who serves as the Chairman of the Russian Historical Society, opened the round table “Resistance Movement: People, History, Memory” with a speech that underscored that the memory of our compatriots who participated in the Resistance movement is preserved, thanks to the efforts of specific people-historians (конкретные люди-историки) and public activists. Mr. Naryshkin underlined that for many of them, the history of the Resistance is part of the family memory. Mr. Naryshkin also used key words: people-historians, namely scientists who document not historical events, but the evolution of Russian consciousness, of Russian peoples. Historical memory is experienced as a group/community/society. It is at the basic, tribal level, that we tell and understand stories.

Some Conclusions

The first verses of the Soviet anthem mention an “unbreakable union of freeborn republics created in struggle by the will of the people.” In Russian group consciousness, free will and its relation to authority have been a consistent theme. The Marxist movement was built on the work of Marx, but also on the Gramsci’s analysis of free will and meaning-making. The Soviet Resistance Movement was instrumentalized by Russia in three major ways.

First, the partisans and the underground struggle became synonymous with righteous, anti-fascist fighters. History was re-framed and reality on the round was altered.

Second: Frame and Re-Frame. To understand a society, one must showcase a greater focus on understanding how people use and understand language, not the actual language alone. As it relates to US foreign policy and security and defense policy, it is imperative to never lose sight that the central aim of Russian foreign policy is to dilute US power and influence globally. Moreover, it is equally critical to understand and accept that our American Weltanschaung is not identical to the Russian one, nor is it to any ally, partner, or foe. Akin to all aspects of Russian statecraft, the concepts of underground, underground struggle, and partisans are intertwined with the development of Russian political and strategic cultures. It would be a grave strategic mistake to evaluate Russian strategic posturing by reducing it to imperialism or authoritarianism. Yes, by American standards, the Russian Federation has an authoritarian leadership and no doubt, Russian foreign policy is expansive. Nonetheless, these are the problem variables, not the solution. Whether we like it or not, the Russian Federation is a great power, a nuclear power, a nation-state with vast resources and intricate human terrain networks of influence worldwide. President Putin pursues a realist foreign policy, and one of the central legacies of the Soviet partisan movement is exactly that: Human terrain influences stay-behind networks in Europe and beyond. In order to counter them, the US must go back to the George Kennan school of political warfare, embrace its story, and do a much better job at understanding Russia in the Russian cognitive frame. Words matter. Words create our thoughts and our thoughts create behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and actions. The Soviet partisan movement was a solid building block in the foundation of the intellectual and cognitive invasion of Europe (yes, Europe, not just Central and Eastern Europe).

Finally, as it relates to Russian operational art, the significance of resistance is, at the very least, two-fold. First, Russian operational art is a means to construct asymmetric elements in pursuing great power strategic advantages, while internally, it manifests itself through a thorough control of opposition elements and dissident speech. In Russian operational art, asymmetric activities include Special Operation Forces (SOF), the actions of the internal opposition, and the information activities. Nonetheless, the Russian approach to information activities is not what Western-centric sources tend to think of.

Finally, the national experience of resistance movements is vastly different. It is as important for the American strategist to study resistance movements in Europe as it is to study European history and conventional armed forces. In the case of the Soviet partisans, they developed in close proximity to Soviet political and strategic cultures, and this process was heavily influenced by the militarized intelligence apparatus stemming back from before the CHEKA or NKVD, but also by the psycho-social elements of Soviet nation-building.

Tags: irregular warfare, OPART, operational art, Russia, Soviet Union, USSR

About The Author

• 
  
• Olga R. Chiriac
• Dr. Olga R. Chiriac is the Project Europe Director with the Irregular Warfare Initiative (joint production of Princeton's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point). She is also a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. Her book, “Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation: Implications for Black Sea Security” was released February 2024 by Palgrave Macmillan. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olgarchiriac/ X: @olgarchiriac https://x.com/olgarchiriac

10. Trump and Hegseth’s Pentagon purge undermines the armed forces

​I asked my AI friend about the MAGA Hat controversy:

Lt. Gen. Dan Caine has consistently denied wearing a MAGA hat, contrary to President Trump's claims. Multiple sources corroborate this denial:

1. A military official who worked with Caine stated, "Gen. Caine doesn't have a MAGA hat. He's never put one on"12.
2. Another senior officer close to Caine emphasized, "He's a professional soldier, not a politician"3.
3. The New York Times reported that "General Caine has told aides he has never put on a MAGA hat"67.
4. Multiple military officials have disputed Trump's version of events, insisting that Caine has maintained an apolitical stance throughout his career3.

These denials highlight a discrepancy between Trump's public statements and Caine's reported actions, underscoring Caine's commitment to maintaining a nonpartisan position as a military leader.

Citations:

1. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/dan-razin-caine-trumps-pick-top-us-military-119083623
2. https://apnews.com/article/trump-joint-chiefs-chairman-razin-caine-military-41b3faeaefd4d965dc22b15b0223ec58
3. https://www.newslooks.com/trump-picks-retired-lt-gen-dan-caine-as-joint-chiefs-chair/
4. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/23/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs/index.html
5. https://www.yahoo.com/news/know-dan-caine-trump-pick-225723571.html
6. https://outsidethebeltway.com/dan-razin-caine-nominated-for-joint-chiefs-chairman/
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html
8. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-talking-him-years-dan-155536037.html
9. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-caine-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-b2702852.html
10. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-dan-caine-joint-chiefs-chairman.html
11. https://www.newsweek.com/who-dan-caine-three-star-general-who-claimed-isis-could-defeated-one-week-2034849
12. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/brown-generals-fired-trump/
13. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/22/g-s1-50348/dan-caine-new-chairman-joint-chiefs
14. https://economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/dan-caine-trumps-surprise-pick-for-joint-chiefs-but-their-connection-dates-back-to-iraq/articleshow/118472660.cms
15. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-makes-maga-hat-wearing-killer-chairman-of-joint-chiefs/
16. https://www.aol.com/retired-air-force-lt-gen-100047102.html
17. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hes-real-general-how-trump-chose-dan-caine-be-top-us-military-officer-2025-02-22/

Opinion

Max Boot

Trump and Hegseth’s Pentagon purge undermines the armed forces

How to damage military morale and recruiting? Trump and Hegseth seem to be trying to find out, alas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/23/trump-hegseth-pentagon-generals/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_opinions

February 23, 2025 at 3:34 p.m. ESTYesterday at 3:34 p.m. EST

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., left, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Jan. 27. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump did serious damage to America’s soft power by moving to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and defund the National Endowment for Democracy. Now he seems bent on damaging U.S. hard power, too.

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

In a Friday night massacre, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of of staff the Air Force, along with the top lawyers — the judge advocates general — for the Air Force, Army and Navy. Another female officer — Adm. Linda Fagan, commandant of the Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — was fired by the administration last month.

Hegseth justified this purge based on the supposed need to restore the U.S. military’s “warfighter ethos” and to stop focusing on DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. But the actual message the moves might send is far more chilling: namely, that the armed forces should be run by White men, and (as made clear in the selection of Brown’s replacement as Joint Chiefs chairman) that those men will be chosen more for perceived political loyalty than for professional qualifications.

Initially, he made this sound like an 8 percent cut in the overall defense budget, which would be disastrous at a time of growing threats from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Hegseth then clarified that it was an 8 percent cut from existing programs to be redirected into new priorities such as the “Iron Dome for America.”

But that is hardly more reassuring, since the Iron Dome plan to erect a ballistic missile defense across the entire country is an impractical boondoggle that could cost as much as $100 billion annually, i.e., more than 10 percent of the entire defense budget. If defense spending weren’t increased, those funds would have to come from existing programs that are far more important to the national defense. “It appears that Army programs, especially Army force levels, will be a major target for significant cuts,” Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense, warns in the Hill.

Budget cuts, damaging as they might be, are something the Pentagon has dealt with before. There has never been anything like the purge of generals that Trump has just undertaken. Vice President JD Vance is, of course, right that presidents have fired generals before. He cited the examples of Harry S. Truman firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Barack Obama firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal. But such firings have been exceedingly rare, and they were always for an obvious cause: MacArthur for challenging Truman’s strategy in the Korean War and McChrystal for allowing his staff to make disparaging comments about Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to a reporter.

Trump and Hegseth have not specified what it is that Brown and Franchetti have done to justify their firings beyond vague complaints alleging their prioritization of DEI. Most notably, during the protests over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Brown made a video about the discrimination he had faced during his own rise to the top of the military.

But he is a well-respected, well-qualified commander who has always made clear that his priority is mission accomplishment, not diversity for its own sake. Given the distinguished records compiled by both Brown and Franchetti, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were let go simply because one is a racial minority and the other a woman.

In his 2024 book, Hegseth insinuated that Brown was promoted because of his race: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote.

That’s a gross calumny of a general who has logged more than 3,100 hours of flight time in an F-16 (including 130 combat hours) and previously served as deputy commander of Central Command, commander of Pacific Air Forces and chief of staff of the Air Force. (He was appointed to the latter post by none other than Trump.) The suggestion that Brown was chosen for reasons other than merit is pretty rich coming from the least qualified defense secretary since that post was established in 1947.

Hegseth’s aspersions on Brown and other distinguished officers are all the more galling given who has been nominated to replace Brown as Joint Chiefs chairman: Retired Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine would need a waiver from the president because he doesn’t fulfill the statutory qualifications for the post. The law requires that anyone serving as chairman have been either vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a service chief, or the commander of a combat command. Caine’s highest-ranking military assignment was as deputy commander of a Special Operations task force fighting the Islamic State in Iraq.

He seems to have been chosen because he made such a big impression on Trump during one meeting in Iraq in 2018. Trump has often claimed that Caine told him that the Islamic State could be defeated faster than others had suggested and then, vowing to kill for Trump, proceeded to don a “Make America Great Again” hat. If so, this would have been done in defiance of rules against military personnel wearing political paraphernalia while in uniform. But the New York Times reports that Caine has denied wearing a MAGA hat, and The Post reports that John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser and accompanied him to Iraq, never heard Caine say or do what Trump claims. Officers who know Caine say he is apolitical.

It is quite possible — likely, even — that Trump will be as disenchanted with Caine as he was with generals he previously appointed, such as Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or, for that matter, Brown. But the fact that Caine might have been chosen for political reasons — even if those reasons aren’t based in fact — nevertheless sends a troubling message to the armed forces. So, too, does the firing of the judge advocates general, who are charged with enforcing compliance with the nation’s laws and the laws of war. Taken together, these moves suggest that Trump and Hegseth are trying to manipulate the armed forces for political ends while planning to ignore the rule of law. If so, that would endanger the values that have made the American military great.

“Political interference in military leadership — especially dismissing generals and admirals based on ideological loyalty rather than competence — has repeatedly led to disastrous consequences,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling warned in the Bulwark on Friday. “Whether driven by paranoia, sectarianism, or a desire for greater personal control, politically motivated purges have a history of weakening armies, undermining national security, and, in the worst cases, leading to battlefield defeat.”

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly suggest that Brown's firing is perceived as politically motivated and based on false premises, contrasting with McChrystal's firing, which was due to his public criticism of the President and Vice President. Many commenters express concern that Trump's... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

View the conversation 852

By Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.

Following

11. Trump Sweeps Out Biden’s Officers

​This is why the administration should stop the focus on DEI as the scapegoat. DEI is dead in the military. The military follows orders just as it has under every President. 

If the issue is incompetence and failure among military leaders then explain it that way. But let's stop using DEI as a scapegoat.

And note the important point in the excerpt: The new leaders will speak truth to power about readiness and lethality. Will the administration heed their advice and recommendations?

Excerpt:

Mr. Trump wants to banish identity politics from the armed forces, and we’re all for it. But the officer corps follows orders, and DEI culture can be cleaned up quickly. The main U.S. military problem is much larger: a force that is declining in weapons procurement, lethality, and operational effectiveness. On that score, let’s hope Mr. Trump’s nominees will tell him the truth, even if he doesn’t want to hear it.

Trump Sweeps Out Biden’s Officers

His Friday purge targets DEI, but the bigger issue is military decline.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-sweeps-out-bidens-officers-his-purge-of-generals-targets-dei-but-there-is-a-bigger-issue-09b1e02e?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Feb. 23, 2025 5:22 pm ET

Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

As Commander in Chief, President Trump has the power to fire and promote military advisers as he chooses. The question that occurs after his Friday evening purge of Pentagon leaders is whether he wants personal loyalty or honest military counsel.

Mr. Trump and Defense chief Pete Hegseth relieved six officers of duty, including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). Other Presidents have sacked military leaders, notably Barack Obama’s decision to dismiss Stanley McChrystal after a magazine reported that he had made critical comments about Mr. Obama.

Such dismissals usually come with a specific reason or performance failure. Messrs. Trump and Hegseth offered no reason for Friday’s purge, except for a general assertion that they will make choices based only on merit and war-fighting ability.

In that case firing CQ Brown as chairman of the joint chiefs is unfortunate. Air Force Gen. Brown’s legacy includes his 2020 document “Accelerate Change or Lose,” warning that air dominance isn’t an American birthright and the force would have to change quickly or risk defeat in the next war.

He understands the challenge from China and has thought about how to defeat it, arguing for more modern equipment and embracing new tech. He didn’t get as far as the Air Force needs but at least he was pushing. He also cut a low political profile as chairman, a welcome improvement over his press-hungry predecessor, Gen. Mark Milley.

Firing Adm. Lisa Franchetti as navy chief is a closer call. The Biden Administration did her no favors by making her elevation more about group identity than her command experience. The Biden Administration picked her over Adm. Sam Paparo, but he has been more valuable on the front lines of the Pacific command than sitting in the Pentagon.

It’s been many years since the Navy had an effective top officer. All of the recent CNOs have presided over the Navy’s managed decline. Politicians bear the heaviest blame for a fleet that is 50 ships too small, but the CNO should be explaining the strategic risks and lighting a fire for the funding to arrest the trend.

The firing of the senior judge advocates general (military lawyers or JAGs) is the least concerning, despite the media panic that this will lead to an era of lawlessness. The JAG corps has had embarrassing prosecutorial mistakes in recent years. In rules of engagement, they now can lean too far toward risk elimination over mission success.

Mr. Trump’s replacement nominee for Gen. Brown, Dan “Razin” Caine, is unconventional as a three-star called out of retirement. He lacks the command experience typical of the post and seems to have little brief in the Pacific. But he wins high marks from officers who served with him, and former national security adviser John Bolton says he never saw Mr. Caine wear a MAGA hat on the overseas trip that Mr. Trump describes.

Mr. Trump wants to banish identity politics from the armed forces, and we’re all for it. But the officer corps follows orders, and DEI culture can be cleaned up quickly. The main U.S. military problem is much larger: a force that is declining in weapons procurement, lethality, and operational effectiveness. On that score, let’s hope Mr. Trump’s nominees will tell him the truth, even if he doesn’t want to hear it.

You may also like

Embed code copied to clipboard

Copy LinkCopy EmbedFacebookTwitter

0:20

Paused

0:17

/

6:19

Tap For Sound

Journal Editorial Report: Elon Musk puts the IRS in his sights. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News

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

12. We led the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force. Trump’s purge is dangerous.

​Various views in these letters to the editor of the Washington Post following the headlined letter from former military leaders.

We led the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force. Trump’s purge is dangerous.

Politicizing the military means Americans won’t get the protection they need.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/23/trump-hegseth-joint-chiefs-navy/

Yesterday at 2:19 p.m. EST

8 min

306

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 11: General Charles Q. Brown, USAF, during a hearing for reappointment to the grade of general and to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the US Senate in Washington, DC. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Regarding the Feb. 23 front-page article “Pentagon cull sends U.S. into unknown”:

As former secretaries of the military departments and retired four-star uniformed officers, we are deeply alarmed by the decision to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations and the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force without due cause. These actions by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth jeopardize the strength, stability and integrity of our armed forces.

For 236 years, the U.S. military has upheld the principle of civilian control — a cornerstone of our democracy and an essential guarantee of sound national security decision-making. Civilian control means military leaders are mindful that it is the president and his appointed civilian defense leaders who set policy, which the military executes by implementing the president’s lawful orders. But this principle does not compel military leaders to demonstrate partisan loyalty to the president or to execute unlawful orders. Their oath is to support and defend the Constitution, not of loyalty to any individual.

Healthy civil-military relations require mutual trust and respect so civilian leaders will seek out the “best military advice” of the nation’s nonpartisan career military leaders, who will in turn be unafraid to provide that counsel. Civilian control and healthy civil-military relations are what make America’s system for providing for the nation’s security both unique and effective. They are designed to ensure that our armed forces serve as effective instruments of American foreign policy rather than as a tool for domestic political ends.

Firing officers for implementing the policies of previous civilian leaders undermines these principles, creating an untenable environment where military leaders risk retribution for following lawful orders at the time those orders were given. If the defense secretary seeks change, he should adjust policy, not purge personnel.

Abruptly removing general and flag officers without adequate justification disrupts the chain of command, weakens morale and exacerbates challenges in an already turbulent global security environment. Open and honest communication between civilian and military leaders is vital to effective defense policy. These firings risk politicizing the military. They send a chilling message that will discourage senior officers from providing the candid military advice necessary for sound strategic decisions.

Our military’s effectiveness depends on stable, nonpartisan leadership dedicated singularly to defending the nation. Changes in military leadership should be guided solely by national security needs, not political motivations. The men and women who serve our country — and all Americans — deserve nothing less.

Steve Abbot, Arlington

The writer, a retired Navy admiral, was deputy homeland security adviser.

Thad Allen, Vienna

The writer, a retired Coast Guard admiral, was the 23rd commandant of the Coast Guard.

Louis Caldera, Bethesda

The writer was the 17th secretary of the Army.

George Casey, Arlington

The writer, a retired Army general, was the 36th chief of staff of the Army.

Debbie Lee James, Lighthouse Point, Florida

The writer was the 23rd secretary of the Air Force.

Sean O’Keefe, Skaneateles, New York

The writer was the 69th secretary of the Navy.

The DOD we need

Former Navy secretary Richard Danzig’s Feb. 10 op-ed, “Deploy Musk to the Pentagon,” is absolutely correct that the Defense Department must become far more efficient. Whether Danzig’s recommendation to unleash technology wielded by Elon Musk will work remains to be seen, especially given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plans to slash the defense budget. But I believe there is a more profound obstacle to this transformation: profound disorganization that, unless dramatically changed, will impede any transformational efforts.

Consider this organizational nightmare: The Pentagon is divided among the five services; the Office of the Secretary of Defense; the Joint Staff; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs; the Combatant Commanders; and the Materiel Commands. There are too many decision-makers who lack the broad authority needed for real efficiency.

The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations system also makes it impossible to move with speed and flexibility no matter how many waivers are issued. And as long as Congress cannot pass a budget and relies on continuing resolutions, real efficiency can never be achieved.

A new National Security Act that organizes the Defense Department for the 21st century is vitally necessary. But how is a dysfunctional government able to accomplish this? Cuts to technology, budget and staff are not solutions.

Harlan Ullman, Washington

The writer, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, is a member of the Congressional Commission on the Future of the Navy.

The value of diversity

As a former public affairs officer at Robert E. Bush Naval Hospital, I can attest that our diversity, equity and inclusion programs were well-designed, interesting and truly created inclusivity.

During my decade at the hospital, enlisted associations put on a steady flow of heritage-month celebrations that were informative, inventive and sometimes spectacular. And there was always good food — none of it provided at cost to taxpayers. The events, in deference to the public we served, were always conducted during the lunch hour.

During the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month celebration a few years ago, a Marine Corps major told stories of growing up in the Philippines and how his enlistment changed his life. Enlisted service members and their families performed Thai and Philippine dances. A video of New Zealand’s haka dance was presented with informative commentary. Attendees dined on lumpia, roast suckling pig and many side dishes.

These activities were not only celebratory and commemorative; they also directly built unit cohesion and strength. Forty percent of our U.S. citizenry is non-White. The Defense Department has made long strides in promoting diversity and reaping the rewards of a fighting and support force second to none in the world. Let’s not retreat and sacrifice the meaningful ground we’ve gained.

David Marks, Yucca Valley, California

What diversity taught me

I applaud Theodore R. Johnson’s Feb. 13 Thursday Opinion column, “DEI made our military strong. I know.”

I, too, am a retired military officer. During my service, which lasted from 1967 to 1993, I, too, benefited from my racial identity: White. But I gained even more because the Defense Department learned — only after a long internal struggle — that a diverse, equitable and inclusive military is a stronger force than one that is ethnically limited, unfair and exclusive.

I attended my first race relations class in 1970. They continued throughout my career. And I benefited from serving alongside all sorts of men and women.

As a young commander in the mid-1970s, my Latino first sergeant, Chief Gonzalez, saved my career by helping me avoid bad decisions; in the early 1980s, Chief Master Sgt. Winters, who was Black, played a similar role.

In the late 1970s, I flew with one of the first female pilots in the Air Force. She flew the same as I did. No difference. Then, when I commanded a flying squadron in the early 1980s, one of my executive officers was Eileen Collins, who later was the first woman to command a space shuttle.

Then, in the late 1980s while assigned to the State Department, I worked with a civilian GS-9 who happened to be a woman and Black. She taught me the tremendous value of a dedicated civil servant. I gave her more and more responsibility and am glad to say I was instrumental in getting her promoted to GS-15. She earned it.

The problem with DEI is not the requirement to treat people equitably or inclusively. The problem is the catchall name and the fact that DEI became, in some people’s eyes, almost as important as warfighting. The new administration is right to get rid of the name, as well as the program offices, with all their misguided measures of success.

But let’s not ever get rid of the fact that this country was and still is founded on the principle that all men — and women — are created equal.

James East, Springfield

The need to reconcile

In their Feb. 14 Friday Opinion essay, Ty Seidule and Connor Williams argued that “‘Bragg’ is back. Now stop renaming military bases.”

Both of these men served on the commission that removed the names of Confederate soldiers from U.S. military bases. Doubtless they worked hard and do not want to see their efforts repealed. However, two of their efforts should be undone. The U.S. Military Academy followed the Naming Commission’s recommendation to remove a bust of Robert E. Lee from West Point’s Reconciliation Plaza and to modify other markers there. Which leaves the question: Who was reconciling? Similarly, the commission was successful in having a memorial to reconciliation removed from Arlington National Cemetery. Are we truly unable to commemorate the healing of our nation?

How about we make a deal: Restore Reconciliation Plaza and the reconciliation memorial, and be done with renaming. If Americans who actually fought in the Civil War could reconcile with one another, we should strive to do the same.

Tom Hafer, Arlington

13. Key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk's latest demand in his cost-cutting crusade

​Perhaps there are multiple "Catch-22's." Everyone would be able to describe their contributions every week. So if they have not been describing them to their supervisors then is that an indictment on the supervisory functions of the workforce? If everyone complied with the order how would the DOGE wiz kids evaluate them? I am sure their algorithm is set to do exactly what they described - if you do not submit a report then it will be considered a resignation and the entire data bases of federal employees will be used to send out letters of termination to all those who do not comply. 

So what happens when the entire workforce does not comply?

Is the entire workforce (or a significant amount of employees) going to play chicken with Musk and his wiz kids? Could this be worse than any government shutdown caused by Congressional and President action (or non-action) in the past?

Key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk's latest demand in his cost-cutting crusade

By  STEVE PEOPLES, ERIC TUCKER and AMANDA SEITZ

Updated 8:28 PM EST, February 23, 2025

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 23, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — Key U.S. agencies, including the FBI, State Department and the Pentagon, have instructed their employees not to comply with cost-cutting chief Elon Musk’s latest demand that federal workers explain what they accomplished last week — or risk losing their job.

The pushback from appointees of President Donald Trump marked a new level of chaos and confusion within the beleaguered federal workforce, just a month after Trump returned to the White House and quickly began fulfilling campaign promises to shrink the government.

Administration officials scrambled throughout the weekend to interpret Musk’s unusual mandate, which apparently has Trump’s backing despite some lawmakers arguing it is illegal. Unions want the administration to rescind the request and are threatening to sue.

Some officials are resisting. Others are encouraging their workers to comply. At some agencies, there was conflicting guidance.

One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” on the request until noon Monday.

“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by The Associated Press.

Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege: “I have received no assurances that there are appropriate protections in place to safeguard responses to this email.”

Musk’s team sent an email to federal employees on Saturday giving them roughly 48 hours to report five specific things they had accomplished last week. In a separate message on X, Musk said any employee who failed to respond by the deadline — set in the email as 11:59 p.m. EST Monday — would lose their job.

Pushback to Musk’s demand

Democrats and even some Republicans were critical of Musk’s ultimatum, which came just hours after Trump encouraged him on social media to “get more aggressive” in reducing the size of the government through his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, was among the members of Trump’s party who had concerns.

“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this,” Curtis, whose state has 33,000 federal employees, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages. ... It’s a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., questioned the legal basis the Trump administration would have for dismissing tens of thousands of workers for refusing to heed Musk’s latest demand. The email did not include the threat about workers losing their jobs.

For Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., there was no doubt: “The actions he’s taking are illegal,” he said on “Face the Nation.”

Trump mocked the affected workers in a meme Sunday on his social media network. The post featured a cartoon character writing a list of accomplishments from the previous week led by, “Cried about Trump,” “Cried about Elon,” “Made it into the office for once,” and “Read some emails.”

Some federal agencies aren’t complying

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, an outspoken Trump ally, instructed bureau employees to ignore Musk’s request, at least for now.

“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” Patel wrote in an email confirmed by the AP. “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”

Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent his staff a message Sunday that may cause more confusion. Martin noted that he responded to Musk’s order.

“Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply,” Martin wrote in the email obtained by the AP, referring to the Office of Personnel Management.

“Please make a good faith effort to reply and list your activities (or not, as you prefer), and I will, as I mentioned, have your back regarding any confusion,” Martin continued. “We can do this.”

The night before, Martin had instructed staff to comply. “DOGE and Elon are doing great work. Historic. We are happy to participate,” Martin wrote at that time.

Officials at the Departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security were more consistent.

Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary of state for management, told employees in an email that department leadership would respond on behalf of workers.

“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” Nagy wrote in an email.

Pentagon leadership instructed employees to “pause” any response to Musk’s team as well.

“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” according to an email from Jules Hurst, deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses.”

The Homeland Security Department told employees that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time” and that agency managers would respond, according to an email from R.D. Alles, deputy undersecretary for management.

Job cuts across the government

Everett Kelley, president of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, said in a letter Sunday to the administration that it should rescind Musk’s request and apologize to all federal workers by the end of the day.

“We believe that employees have no obligation to respond to this plainly unlawful email absent other lawful direction,” he wrote, describing Musk as “unelected and unhinged.”

Thousands of government employees have already been forced out of the federal workforce — either by being fired or through a “deferred resignation” offer. There is no official figure available for the total firings or layoffs so far, but the AP has tallied hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected.

Musk on Sunday called his latest request “a very basic pulse check.”

“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk wrote on X. “In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.”

He has provided no evidence of such fraud. Separately, Musk and Trump have falsely claimed in recent days that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments.

Meanwhile, thousands of other employees are preparing to leave the federal workforce this coming week, including probationary civilian workers at the Pentagon and all but a fraction of U.S. Agency for International Development staffers through cuts or leave.

___

Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writers Byron Tau, Ellen Knickmeyer, Matthew Perrone and Tara Copp in Washington and Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report.

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 23, 2025

14. Ending military diversity efforts will cost us talent and readiness

Ending military diversity efforts will cost us talent and readiness

militarytimes.com · by Nellie Fly · February 21, 2025

Editor’s note: This op-ed was authored by an active-duty service member who requested anonymity due to concerns about potential retribution for expressing views on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the military. Military Times granted anonymity and the use of a pen name for the author to express their views freely.

Do you know what data drove the Air Force pilot height requirements until 2020?

It was a 1967 anthropometric study that analyzed data from only men.

While it’s understandable why a male-only sample might have been the norm at the time, most agree its relevance has long passed. Despite this, the 1967 study continued to shape aircraft development and pilot selection — meaning it informed how to design cockpits and the height required to most effectively fit in those cockpits — for over five decades. This led to 96.3% of male candidates meeting the height requirements, while only 66% of women — and even fewer Black, Hispanic and Asian women (26%, 28%, and 39%, respectively) — proved eligible. These effects went unaddressed for years, despite a 20-year shortage of over 2,000 pilots undermining military readiness.

I’m not saying that leaders ignored the pilot shortage and intentionally disqualified women (and to a greater degree, minority women) from serving as pilots in 1967, since then or today. But I am saying that 1967 biases and restrictions shaped Air Force policy that went unchecked for decades, resulting in unnecessarily discriminatory accessions requirements until 2020.

And even though 2020 represents a big step forward in maximizing pilot talent and addressing the pilot shortage, the discriminatory damage is not done. This is because pilots, who are disproportionately selected for high-level Air Force leadership roles, become the policymakers and enforcers later in their careers. Thus, an antiquated height requirement that unintentionally limited the diversity of those who could become pilots will continue to undermine diversity in our highest ranks decades from now.

Lack of diverse leadership perspectives is precisely what enabled the 1967 all-male-data-driven requirements to persist for decades. And if a woman directly affected by the policy hadn’t researched the policy’s history, and used her voice to educate leaders on its discriminatory impacts, the Air Force pilot height requirements likely would not have changed.

Thankfully, that woman’s voice was amplified by an Air Force Barrier Analysis Working Group, or BAWG. These working groups evaluate how available data, practices and policies may undermine military readiness (like the pilot shortage) or create barriers to military service. They use data and desired readiness outcomes to offer solutions for maximizing talent across demographics.

Unfortunately, these working groups were dismantled following President Donald Trump’s executive order on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, known as DEIA, which claimed that diversity initiatives were divisive. By blanketly canceling these programs, leaders failed to account for their impact on national security. Beyond concerns of fairness versus divisiveness, many abolished programs enabled preparedness for future conflicts to ensure our unchallenged global presence.

Those who argue that barriers to women’s and minority members’ service don’t affect national security should consider two points: 1) who is willing and able to serve, and 2) how the military engages in modern conflict.

In 2020, only 23% of young Americans met the military’s medical and behavioral standards, and women qualified at higher rates than men. Additionally, studies show future conflicts will rely more on intelligence, medical support and technological expertise than brute strength. And women make up the majority of many of those professions. For example, over 85% of U.S. nurses and 76% of health care professionals are women.

As the risk of war with major powers grows, the military will need diverse talent more than ever. Historically, the military has expanded to include women during wartime but contracted their roles afterward. This cycle appears to continue today, creating risk for those serving.

One concrete example of these risks is gear development. Despite women being eligible for all combat roles since 2013, efforts to ensure fitting body armor have been slow. A 2023 Army report revealed that 44% of women in Army Special Operations faced issues with ill-fitting equipment.

Without intentional research to understand these issues, the problem would have remained unaddressed.

Now that the problem is known, it needs to be corrected, along with other health and readiness gaps that BAWGs were addressing, such as developing urinary devices for women to use on extended flights, enabling women’s access to reproductive care and improving shaving waiver processes that disproportionately affect Black men. But executive mandates to stand down anything that may be construed as “DEIA,” alongside pressures to disregard race and gender, creates a new gap. Who will take on these readiness imperatives now?

Reducing diversity efforts during our current state of peace might not feel risky to some. But if we enter war with a capable, competitive nation, our lack of readiness to utilize diverse talent will be undeniable. And it will be too late.

Steps taken today to end diversity efforts will return us to outdated data, hinder our ability to recruit diverse talent necessary for the all-volunteer force and increase health and safety risks for minority service members. These actions will ultimately undermine our military’s modernization, readiness and effectiveness far into the future.

15. Trump holds Black History Month event as some agencies skip recognition after anti-DEI order

​It seems that the President is not denying history while directing the elimination of DEI programs that he finds divisive. All of the agencies that are throwing out such things as Black History Month because they connect it with DEI programs should be following the example of the president. All these agencies have overreacted to the directives and may end up causing just as much divisiveness as the anti-DEI proponents accuse DEI programs of doing. And we have schools eliminating curriculum that includes such things as the underground railroad and other historical events in the name of DEI elimination. That cannot be right. We cannot and must not try to deny history in any way.

Excerpts:

The sweeping effort has sown discord and confusion across federal agencies, which have variously interpreted the order to limit how they can acknowledge race in history and culture or report demographic data on race and gender.

Joining Trump were Black political figures and activists who have been his vocal supporters. Invited guests, according to a White House official, included Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina; Republican Rep. John James of Michigan; Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; Herschel Walker, the football legend who is Trump’s choice as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas; and prison reform advocate Alice Johnson, whom he pardoned in 2020.

Other invited guests included figures from sports and entertainment, including former ESPN host Sage Steele; former NFL player Jack Brewer; and rap stars Kodak Black, Lil Boosie and Rod Wave, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the wake of his executive order, the Defense Department issued guidance declaring “identity months dead” and said that working hours would no longer be used to mark cultural awareness months such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

That seemed to clash with a National Black History Month proclamation signed the same day by Trump, which called for “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”

Trump holds Black History Month event as some agencies skip recognition after anti-DEI order

AP · by MATT BROWN · February 20, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump marked Black History Month at the White House on Thursday by making an appearance at a celebratory reception with a surprise guest, golf legend Tiger Woods, while calling out other athletes in attendance and marveling at the size of the crowd.

Trump also announced he planned to bring Alice Johnson, a prison reform advocate whom he pardoned in 2020, into his administration to work on clemency issues.

The White House’s Black History Month reception preserved a tradition, but it comes in the wake of Trump issuing a wide-ranging executive order ending the federal government’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs has disrupted its observance elsewhere.

“Today, we pay tribute to the generations of Black legends, champions, warriors and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness. And you really are great, great people,” Trump said.

Trump didn’t mention his anti-DEI crusade in as he addressed hundreds of guests in a reception in the East Room, though he did make a brief reference of the The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which highlights the lasting consequences of slavery in America.

Trump objected to the project during his first term, and in response created a commission to promote so-called patriotic education dubbed the 1776 Commission.

“The last administration tried to reduce all of American history to a single year, 1619. But under our administration, we honor the indispensable role black Americans have always played in the immortal cause of another day, 1776,” Trump said. “We like 1776.”

Trump has called DEI programs “discrimination” and pushed to eradicate diversity programs from the government, directed that DEI workers eventually be laid off and exerted similar pressure on the private sector to shift to an exclusive focus on merit.

The sweeping effort has sown discord and confusion across federal agencies, which have variously interpreted the order to limit how they can acknowledge race in history and culture or report demographic data on race and gender.

Joining Trump were Black political figures and activists who have been his vocal supporters. Invited guests, according to a White House official, included Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina; Republican Rep. John James of Michigan; Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; Herschel Walker, the football legend who is Trump’s choice as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas; and prison reform advocate Alice Johnson, whom he pardoned in 2020.

Other invited guests included figures from sports and entertainment, including former ESPN host Sage Steele; former NFL player Jack Brewer; and rap stars Kodak Black, Lil Boosie and Rod Wave, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the wake of his executive order, the Defense Department issued guidance declaring “identity months dead” and said that working hours would no longer be used to mark cultural awareness months such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

That seemed to clash with a National Black History Month proclamation signed the same day by Trump, which called for “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”

While the White House has issued its position, agencies of the government have discretion on whether to continue to recognize Black History Month, according to the official.

On Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that his department “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.” And in a diplomatic cable, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the agency’s removal of DEI policies would dovetail with “eliminating our focus on political and cultural causes that are divisive at home and deeply unpopular abroad.”

The administration has issued a deadline to schools and universities to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money. Major corporations have backtracked on DEI policies in hiring, promotion and workplace culture in recent months, with many citing potential legal challenges from the administration.

Black History Month has been recognized by every U.S. president since 1976, including Trump during his first term.

“Black History is American history. And similar to the story of our nation, it is a story of strength, resilience, and dogged perseverance,” said CJ Pearson, a national co-chair of the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council. Pearson, who is Black, has been an outspoken defender of Trump against Black civic leaders, civil rights advocates and Democrats who lambast the president as racist.

“President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King, Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character,” said Pearson, who will attend the White House event.

Other Black Republicans aren’t so sanguine about the administration’s current course or what it portends for the GOP’s nascent inroads with Black voters or other communities of color.

“Trump can build upon the coalition he pulled together in November with Blacks and Asians and Hispanics and young folks,” said Raynard Jackson, a Republican strategist. “But if they leave it the way it stands right now, Trump is going to destroy the very coalition he so marvelously brought to the table in November.”

To Jackson, DEI is a catch-all for liberal policies that are “unrecognizable” from the original intent of civil rights laws meant to promote the social and economic progress of Black Americans. But in removing and denigrating the policies, Jackson said, the White House risked being labeled as discriminatory by offering no alternative framework for how disadvantaged communities can get ahead.

“How do you have diversity without it being a mandated bean-counting situation?” Jackson asked. “They’ve done a masterful job at telling me what they’re against. I’m waiting to hear what they’re for.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump tried to reach Black voters through in-person events in Atlanta, Chicago and New York. His campaign courted Black celebrities and media personalities to boost his message. Trump’s Black conservative allies, including Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., conducted roundtables at Black barbershops and bus tours through majority-Black cities.

But Trump also frequently denigrated Black communities in his pitch and made claims that pitted voters of color against immigrants, who he said were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”

The efforts to boost support among Black voters seemed to have some success. He won a larger share of Black voters than he did in 2020, particularly among young Black men, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters in the 2024 election.

Overall, about 16% of Black voters supported Trump in November, while about 8 in 10 voted for Democrat Kamala Harris. But that represented an improvement for Trump from 2020, when only 8% of Black voters backed him and about 9 in 10 went for Democrat Joe Biden.

___

Price reported from New York.

AP · by MATT BROWN · February 20, 2025

16. Trump vows to add Black icons to proposed National Garden of American Heroes

Trump vows to add Black icons to proposed National Garden of American Heroes

by Ashleigh Fields - 02/20/25 8:52 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/race-politics/5156665-trump-vows-to-add-black-icons-to-proposed-national-garden-of-american-heroes/

President Trump shared plans to feature more than 10 Black historical figures in his proposed National Garden of American Heroes during a Thursday White House reception for Black History Month. 

“We’re picking the final sites now. It’s between various states that want it very badly. We’ll honor hundreds of our greatest Americans to ever live, including countless Black American icons,” Trump said before a crowd of guests packed in the East Room.

“The garden will predominantly feature incredible women like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Coretta Scott King,” he said to the sound of applause. 

Last month, the president amended his original executive order outlining developments for the National Garden of American Heroes to strike the goal of completing the site “prior to the 250th anniversary of the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026,” instead urging it be finished “as expeditiously as possible.”

He noted Black men would also be honored with sculptures. 

“We’re going to produce some of the most beautiful works of art in the form of a statue for men like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson — what a great athlete he was. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali,” Trump said. 

“And the late Kobe Bryant.”

The large group includes Civil Rights activists, world-renowned singers and athletes who broke barriers in sports during the age of segregation. 

“The National Garden will be built to reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism. It will be a place where citizens, young and old, can renew their vision of greatness and take up the challenge that I gave every American in my first address to Congress, to ‘[b]elieve in yourselves, believe in your future, and believe, once more, in America,’” the president described in his 2021 executive order.

Bryant, a decorated NBA and Olympic champion, is the most recently deceased person to be set for recognition at the site. 

“During Black History Month, we pay tribute to these heroes and to so many others, but not simply because they’re Black heroes, but also because they are truly American heroes who inspire all of us, very much so,” Trump declared at the Thursday event attended by professional golfer Tiger Woods, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R), among others.

His comments come in the wake of recent controversy over a series of executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion measures in the federal workforce, public education and military.

17.

​Excerpts:

Effectively countering a revived the Islamic State coupled with a myriad of existent threats means ensuring our defenses are sufficiently robust, adaptive, and flexible. Complacency about terrorism is a longstanding problem. For instance, the then-U.S. ambassador to Kenya lobbied the State Department for two years to upgrade security at the embassy in Nairobi. Her pleas were dismissed, and on Aug. 8, 1998, 228 people were killed and 4,000 were injured in a suicide truck bombing carried out by al-Qaeda. More recently, a 2019 report by a private security company urged that bollards be repaired or replaced in New Orleans’ French Quarter to prevent precisely the kind of vehicle attack that killed 14 people earlier this year. Among the damning conclusions in the report was that “security [was] handled in a patchwork manner . . . [that] render[ed] any proposal or initiative dead in the water.”

It is therefore imperative that, by anticipating threats, the appropriate countermeasures are firmly in place. This means taking the threat of terrorist attacks seriously, thinking innovatively, and dedicating resources that address the recommendations of security professionals about personal, physical, and digital security. Gaming simulations are an important tool, for instance, to prepare adequately and protect against mass casualty events at especially high value venues, such as celebratory events, concerts, and sports matches. Additional, privately funded and staffed firefighting capabilities may be needed in certain critically vulnerable locations. Defensive tactics, techniques, and procedures along with enhanced training to respond to swarming attacks and drone attacks are desperately needed given the absence of such protocols, technologies, and legal authorities. Finally, enhanced cooperation, coordination, and information sharing between the public and private sectors coupled with greater security awareness are essential to prevent future tragedies such as the one in New Orleans that kicked off 2025.

A Threshold Moment in Terrorist Trends and Targeting? - War on the Rocks

Bruce Hoffman, David Brannan, and Jacob Ware

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Hoffman · February 24, 2025

This year began alarmingly with the terrorist attack on New Orleans’ famed Bourbon Street. The assailant, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran with a troubled past, claimed to have joined the self-proclaimed Islamic State in 2024 and displayed its flag in the truck he used to mow down and kill 14 people and injure some three dozen others. That incident tragically wiped away any illusion that the threat of terrorism has passed and that groups like the Islamic State, which were more active a decade ago, had been completely deprived of their capacity to continue to inspire attacks in the United States. A hard look at recent terrorist trends and targeting highlights how we are in fact at a critical turning point in global terrorism. Terrorists are embracing new tactics and seeking different target sets in order to overcome the mostly effective countermeasures and security procedures that have thwarted their attack plans in the past.

Become a Member

Islamist terrorists in organizations such as al-Qaeda have uniquely mastered the art of coordinated, simultaneous assault, which have been among the most consequential terrorist operations of the early 21st century: including the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as well as the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings and the 2005 attacks on London transport. But the even more complex swarming attacks, such as those in Mumbai, India, in 2008; Paris, France, in 2015; and Israel in 2023, have been even more devastating. Deliberately designed to crash defenses and completely collapse any response, swarming shatters decision-making and chain of command, overwhelms first responders, and paralyzes effective, timely intervention. In one concerning development, actual human attackers are not needed to carry out swarming attacks today. Remote-controlled unmanned aerial systems, or drones, such as those that plagued Langley Air Force Base and New Jersey towns and cities last year, attacking targets in American cities would pose a nightmare that the country is patently unprepared for and unable to counter. The United States has fortunately avoided such an instance thus far, but a drone swarm targeted a military parade field in the Syrian city of Homs in late 2023, killing around 100 people. The threat is aggravated considerably by the absence of reliable counter-unmanned aircraft system platforms, as well as legal confusion of which agencies have authority to shoot down airborne systems.

Hand in glove with this trend is terrorism’s increased targeting of concerts and sporting events. Last summer’s cancellation of Taylor Swift’s planned concert in Vienna was not an aberration — nor was a July 2024 stabbing attack at a Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. The Islamic State’s attack on Paris’ Bataclan during a 2015 heavy metal concert claimed the lives of 89 persons. Its attack two years later after an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killed 23. And, almost a year ago, the Islamic State murdered 130 concertgoers at a Moscow venue. The terrorist plots to derail the 2024 Paris Olympics coupled with the Islamic State’s 2015 suicide attack on the Stade de France during a France-Germany soccer match underscore how sporting events have also been targeted. These attacks, targeting revelers, target the most innocent manifestations of civilian life, in turn maximizing the crippling effect of terrorist attacks. Precisely that message was sent on Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas launched a frontal attack on young partygoers at the Nova music festival.

Almost four decades ago, Palestinian terrorists during the First Intifada (1987 to 1993) had set wildfires as an additional means to attack Israel. Although the tactic resurfaced in that country in 2016, these kinds of arson attacks have been infrequent. In the aftermath of the terrible wildfires that have plagued the Los Angeles metropolitan area in 2025, terrorists in the Islamic State and al-Qaeda began to actively call for the weaponization of arson in the United States. By encouraging this tactic, both groups hope to further undermine the nation’s economy and spread fear among its residents. “Burn the wealth of the disbelievers . . plung[e] them into a spiral of great financial losses,” one Islamic State post urged. “All you have to do go on a ‘camping trip’ to one of the forests near residential districts, then set a fire & withdraw quietly.” In other words, climate-related vulnerabilities might allow terrorists to cause catastrophic damage, possibly outstripping the human, economic, and environmental costs of just about any terrorist attack in history.

Yet such spectacular terrorist attacks still pale in comparison to the everyday violence caused by weapons and dual-use technologies that form part and parcel of American daily life. This underscores further the formidable challenge faced by those responsible for countering these threats, who must not only account for new tactics and targeting but also nimbly prepare defenses at more traditional targets. Jabbar’s attack on New Orleans was so disquieting precisely because it was so simple. Indeed, the city of New Orleans’ decision to cancel the Sugar Bowl college football game on Jan. 2 out of an abundance of caution was testament to terrorism’s ability to disrupt. Since 2011, five vehicular attacks such as the one that occurred on Bourbon Street on New Year’s Day have killed 18 people at five local parades in the United States. Counterterrorism practitioners are then left battling two dueling dynamics: the continuation of relatively low-technology violence with the catastrophic specter of the spectacular.

Abetting this vein of tactics is the troubling development of ultraviolence having become a defining characteristic of contemporary terrorism. The Islamic State, to which the New Orleans assailant swore allegiance, arguably changed the nature of terrorism with its unbridled visual depictions of particularly gruesome executions and other wanton acts of violence. The Islamic State quickly learned that videos of these atrocities simultaneously galvanized the world’s attention and attracted recruits, donations, and support. Hence, what may previously have proven repellent was instead generating voluminous “likes” on social media and effectively publicizing the group’s existence and cause. Brian Michael Jenkins’ famous adage that “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” appears to now be outdated. It was also a means to thoroughly terrorize the Islamic State’s enemies — most especially through its wanton targeting of women and attendant rape and sexual enslavement. Indeed, the barbarity of the now well-documented assault — including accounts of torture, rape, desecration of corpses, and even reported necrophilia — demonstrates how ultraviolence has become a prominent fixture of terrorist operations over the past decade.

Effectively countering a revived the Islamic State coupled with a myriad of existent threats means ensuring our defenses are sufficiently robust, adaptive, and flexible. Complacency about terrorism is a longstanding problem. For instance, the then-U.S. ambassador to Kenya lobbied the State Department for two years to upgrade security at the embassy in Nairobi. Her pleas were dismissed, and on Aug. 8, 1998, 228 people were killed and 4,000 were injured in a suicide truck bombing carried out by al-Qaeda. More recently, a 2019 report by a private security company urged that bollards be repaired or replaced in New Orleans’ French Quarter to prevent precisely the kind of vehicle attack that killed 14 people earlier this year. Among the damning conclusions in the report was that “security [was] handled in a patchwork manner . . . [that] render[ed] any proposal or initiative dead in the water.”

It is therefore imperative that, by anticipating threats, the appropriate countermeasures are firmly in place. This means taking the threat of terrorist attacks seriously, thinking innovatively, and dedicating resources that address the recommendations of security professionals about personal, physical, and digital security. Gaming simulations are an important tool, for instance, to prepare adequately and protect against mass casualty events at especially high value venues, such as celebratory events, concerts, and sports matches. Additional, privately funded and staffed firefighting capabilities may be needed in certain critically vulnerable locations. Defensive tactics, techniques, and procedures along with enhanced training to respond to swarming attacks and drone attacks are desperately needed given the absence of such protocols, technologies, and legal authorities. Finally, enhanced cooperation, coordination, and information sharing between the public and private sectors coupled with greater security awareness are essential to prevent future tragedies such as the one in New Orleans that kicked off 2025.

Become a Member

Bruce Hoffman is the senior fellow for counterterrorism for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and CEO of The Hoffman Group.

David Brannan is a professor at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School and vice president of The Hoffman Group

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an analyst at The Hoffman Group.

Image: Department of Homeland Security via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Hoffman · February 24, 2025

18. What Makes Air Force Reconnaissance “Special”?

​Excerpts:

We recommend defining Air Force special reconnaissance as the technical service capabilities, including discreet and non-standard platforms. This approach to special reconnaissance under information warfare should include small drones, close access cyber operations, and the fine lines between signals intelligence and electronic warfare. This could be hardware designed for an aircraft and adapted to approach a target by land or sea. It could also include the radio shack solution of commercially acquired drones modified to collect signals of interest and feed into the joint force’s target acquisition networks. Many of these entrepreneurial efforts occur today, but across different units in separate major commands without the integration required to complete a targeting cycle. To improve, special reconnaissance units of action should be built against precise targets with the authorities to perform the mission. Forming a squadron in the Air Force’s information warfare enterprise could put the experts in the same room with the required infrastructure to achieve this goal.

​I think it is important to have a common understanding of "special reconnaissance" as used in US special operations. Special reconnaissance has long been one of the least understood and most overlooked missions in special operations. With help from my AI friend here:

The current doctrinal definition of "special reconnaissance" (SR) as used in the US Special Operations Command and among US special operations forces is:

Reconnaissance and surveillance actions conducted as a special operation in hostile, denied, or diplomatically and/or politically sensitive environments to collect or verify information of strategic or operational significance, employing military capabilities not normally found in conventional forces24.

Key aspects of this definition include:

1. SR is conducted in challenging environments, including hostile, denied, or sensitive areas.
2. The purpose is to gather or confirm strategically or operationally important information.
3. SR utilizes specialized military capabilities beyond those of conventional forces.

SR is one of the core activities of special operations forces, alongside others such as direct action, counterterrorism, and unconventional warfare2. SR teams typically operate behind enemy lines, avoiding direct combat and detection while collecting critical intelligence1.

It's important to note that SR is distinct from conventional reconnaissance in several ways:

1. Physical distances: SR often involves operating well beyond the forward line of troops.
2. Political considerations: SR may require clandestine insertion and the ability to work with local personnel.
3. Specialized skills: SR operators must possess advanced capabilities in areas such as remaining unobserved and collecting various types of intelligence.
4. Threat capabilities: SR teams must be able to operate covertly against sophisticated opposing forces.
5. Potential for follow-on missions: SR may involve preparing for other special operations functions1.

While this definition remains current, it's worth noting that individual services may have slightly different interpretations or applications of SR within their specific contexts56.

Citations:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_reconnaissance
2. https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp3_05.pdf
3. https://afspecialwarfare.com/afspecwar-overview/special-reconnaissance/
4. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2017/ART-011/
5. https://warontherocks.com/2025/02/what-makes-air-force-reconnaissance-special/
6. https://www.doctrine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/AFDP_3-05/3-05-AFDP-SPECIAL-OPERATIONS.pdf
7. https://greydynamics.com/united-states-air-force-special-reconnaissance/
8. https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/2290065/special-reconnaissance/
9. https://www.moore.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/2015/JUL_SEP/3ScreenLine15.pdf
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Special_Reconnaissance
11. https://www.socom.mil/about/core-activities
12. https://www.soc.mil/USASOCHQ/SOFPrimer.html
13. https://www.nsw.navy.mil/portals/27/documents/nsw_guidebook_2023.pdf
14. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS21048/71
15. https://www.airforcespecialtactics.af.mil/About/Careers/SR/
16. https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp3-05.pdf
17. https://www.airforce.com/careers/combat-and-warfare/special-warfare/special-reconnaissance
18. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS21048
19. https://www.safie.hq.af.mil/News/Video/mod/61713/player/0/Special Recon/
20. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS21048/78
21. https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Chronicles/sofpaper.pdf
22. https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/socom/sof-ref-2-1/SOFREF_Ch1.htm
23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Special_Operations_Command
24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRKgDp24wc

What Makes Air Force Reconnaissance “Special”? - War on the Rocks

John Long and Leandros Fugate

warontherocks.com · by John Long · February 24, 2025

After years of training, a recon commando marches into the briefing room and declares, “I’ve got little flying drones, cyber forensic tools, and a long-range rifle. I want a target.” The boss looks at the commando and replies, “Look, scout, you don’t have the authorities to use any of those fancy tools, take a seat in the back.” The commando nods and sits. Then an intelligence collector speaks to the boss: “I have a target, I just need a way to access it from the ground.” The boss considers the collector and says, “Listen, your job is to focus on the air. Come sit with the crew up front.” The collector and commando shrug, the briefing continues and the target window closes. We were the commando, collector, and boss in this fable too many times. The U.S. Air Force isn’t sure how to organize or train for special reconnaissance, and the current model keeps repeating like a bad joke. We think the time is right for the Air Force to deliver a harder-hitting punch line.

Integrating special warfare airmen, information warfare capabilities, and other technical elements conducting special reconnaissance missions can help. The status quo separates these communities between Air Combat Command and Air Force Special Operations Command largely based on funding, training, and mission from the last war. However, the Air Force’s re-optimization ambition may reshape many of those major commands, stand up new ones, and shuffle the subordinate units of action. The appetite for change should include a new model to merge capabilities within a dedicated special reconnaissance squadron.

Become a Member

Mission, Airmen, and Meaning

Joint doctrine defines “special reconnaissance” as actions conducted in sensitive environments to collect information of strategic importance, usually without capabilities found in the conventional force. Historically, special reconnaissance includes peculiar capabilities employing clandestine and covert mechanisms. The Air Force removed the term “special reconnaissance” from service doctrine in 2024, but invests heavily in conventional reconnaissance capability like the U-2 “Dragon Lady” aircraft and the distributed intelligence processing stations. Reconnaissance and intelligence squadrons collect sensitive information, but the assets themselves are overt. America acknowledges the reconnaissance aircraft for what they are, and the adversary treats these missions like spy planes. For example, a Dragon Lady flying over South Korea would be sensitive but not special, and everyone can figure out the intended target for collection.

The Air Force holds special reconnaissance in contradiction, re-labeling legacy weather technicians as special reconnaissance airmen for the core activity but isolating them from the information warfare enterprise. This prevents seamless integration with the authorities, priorities, and reporting mechanisms in the information warfare chain of command. The service re-optimization for great-power competition opens the aperture to re-examine this exclusionary relationship. Air Force special operations units learned many re-optimization lessons over the last few years, and the ideas have powerful advocates in Air Force leadership. This organizational change could harness the cultural advantages of special warfare commandos with the technological infrastructure and integration of the information warfare enterprise.

We recommend defining Air Force special reconnaissance as the technical service capabilities, including discreet and non-standard platforms. This approach to special reconnaissance under information warfare should include small drones, close access cyber operations, and the fine lines between signals intelligence and electronic warfare. This could be hardware designed for an aircraft and adapted to approach a target by land or sea. It could also include the radio shack solution of commercially acquired drones modified to collect signals of interest and feed into the joint force’s target acquisition networks. Many of these entrepreneurial efforts occur today, but across different units in separate major commands without the integration required to complete a targeting cycle. To improve, special reconnaissance units of action should be built against precise targets with the authorities to perform the mission. Forming a squadron in the Air Force’s information warfare enterprise could put the experts in the same room with the required infrastructure to achieve this goal.

Airman’s Guide to Information and Special Warfare

Unfortunately, the Air Force isolates special reconnaissance expertise in separate command structures based on conventions from the last war. The capabilities to collect intelligence, target enemy weak points, and exploit them with cyber effects all fall under information warfare elements in Air Combat Command’s 16th Air Force. This includes the authorities for the service cryptologic component over signals intelligence and cyber security. Like the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, the 16th Air Force Commander is also dual-hatted as the Air Force Cyber Component Commander. Frankly, this is a good thing: Establishing secure networks, building common intelligence pictures, and targeting for cyber effects all benefit from an integrated command hierarchy, stealing adversary secrets and protecting America’s.

Air Force Special Warfare includes tactical air controllers for munitions employment, pararescue experts to bring people home, and special tactics units to open austere airfields. Special reconnaissance airmen fall under the special tactics umbrella and exclusively exist in special operations formations. This enlisted career field recruits, assesses, selects, and trains commandos to collect and exploit key information, conduct electronic warfare, integrate small drones, and perform tactical cyber actions. Their training includes a variety of infiltration techniques including military free fall, maritime skills, ghillie suits, and sniper rifles. The job description excludes the word “intelligence” and holds the information warfare chain of command at arm’s length. As such, these commandos lack the authority to perform their advertised function. Merging these special reconnaissance experts with information warfare units at multiple career milestones increases the Air Force’s special reconnaissance potential, while ensuring data integration into existing systems for total force benefit.

Another integration obstacle focuses on the Air Force’s small drone procurement and integration. Under the current system, security forces own the small drone program. This makes sense for the Air Force’s key fight to get airborne, but gets complicated when bases move into other countries. The priority for any small drones around the active airfield should be to defend the base, and security forces own the mission when American sovereignty is clear. However, if the small drone targets adversary military elements outside the base, and implement special payloads to facilitate collection, the requisite authorities look more like the U-2s based out of South Korea than a drone flying over a base in Texas. This is something special reconnaissance commandos can and should train for, but employing novel technology with signals intelligence payloads requires prioritization, deconfliction, integration, and oversight. If the intent extends to a Frankenstein drone with collection and cyber effects on a single platform, then the authorities and targeting exist entirely in information warfare channels.

Forming a special reconnaissance squadron in the information warfare enterprise would utilize the authorities and cyber capabilities to allocate the best sensing assets against prioritized targets. The Air Force can fix a lot of these issues by assigning special warfare commandos, defender drone operators, and others conducting intelligence functions with the information warfare enterprise under the same unit commander. It would provide an opportunity for the proposed Air Force Cyber and Intelligence Command to task sensors and cyber effects capability to special reconnaissance commandos according to the ambitions of their career field.

Humans Over Hardware

Blending intelligence professionals, special warfare commandos, and cyber capability would build on current models in the Air Force and joint special operations community. Air Force Special Operations Command started on the right path with mixed expertise and blended leadership teams as they designed and activated several new theater air operations squadrons within power projection wings. These new units each maintain a regional focus built off legacy aspects of the combat aviation advisors’ foreign internal defense mission. However, they are not purpose-built around a technical special reconnaissance mission, and the information warfare enterprise should fill this niche.

Leaders and veterans in special reconnaissance squadrons would need cultural buy-in from special warfare and the intelligence community, and the blended leadership team should be a requirement from the start. Sharing key developmental opportunities like squadron commander, operations officer, and senior enlisted leadership, would upend traditional talent management systems, but it is worth it. Merging information and special warfare experts into a consolidated special reconnaissance squadron could help balance a commando’s “get after it” mentality with the patient attention to detail required in intelligence collection, network targeting, and cyber security. The Air Force regularly practices this at the general officer and colonel command assignment processes. Special reconnaissance formations in Naval Special Warfare and Marine Reconnaissance Battalions provide examples where intelligence officers occasionally lead information warfare and special reconnaissance professionals in consolidated units of action.

The Fast Eat the Slow

Establishing dedicated squadrons is hardly quixotic. The first years should form an initial cadre with strong skills in expeditionary cyber access, small drones, signals intelligence expertise, foreign language skills and the drive to target adversary systems and networks. Prospective candidates would need to show mental and physical capability, but Ukraine demonstrates small-drone lethality without the need for the physical baseline of an inter-collegiate athlete. Central assignment team processes can help, but digital boards, service fitness tests, electronic interviews, and peer recommendations should be enough for commanders to select the right initial cadre. If the squadron stands up in an area rich with possible hires, the ability to find members and build the unity of effort amplifies. Texas hosts the information warfare enterprise and Special Warfare Training Wing in San Antonio with the 17th Training Wing only a few hours away. Hurlburt and Arizona could be longer-term options as well based on developments in Air Force Special Warfare. This could potentially be manpower neutral as the Air Force re-allocates personnel and capability from legacy missions, potentially allowing a stand-up before 2027.

Without a dedicated squadron, special reconnaissance successes are single-serving and fail to build long-term improvement and integration. People work together on big projects and solve impossible problems because they trust partners, and the bureaucratic separation of the current model holds the Air Force special reconnaissance elements back. A squadron can bring them together and iterate success over the long term at the warfighter’s unit of action.

Great-power competition isn’t about the big eating the small: The winner will be determined by the fast eating the slow. For special reconnaissance capability, the airmen involved can be faster than the competition as soon as we stop running in circles. The Air Force should take advantage of the current re-organization to address a critical blind spot in special reconnaissance integration. Bringing the collectors and commandos together in a squadron ensures the right airmen hunt the best targets with the best capability.

Become a Member

John Long is an Air Force officer currently participating in the Director’s Fellowship at the National Security Agency. His leadership experience includes squadron, troop, and flight command in a Special Tactics Squadron, the Joint Special Operations Command, Tactical Air Control Party units, and remotely piloted aircraft elements.

Leandros Fugate is an Air Force officer currently serving at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He commanded a special operations airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance unit in the Indo-Pacific, executing air and maritime special reconnaissance missions, special operations liaison to India, and prior service at Air Force and joint special operations units.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent those of the U.S. Air Force, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Master Sgt. Matt Hecht via Spangdahlem Air Base.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by John Long · February 24, 2025

19. Is independent, nonpartisan legal advice from military lawyers on the chopping block?

​From one of our nation's foremost military legal scholars who has long been an expert practitioner.

This is a very important read because the punditry class (and many politicians and the press) that is commenting on such things as rules of engagement are for the most part uninformed. 

Is independent, nonpartisan legal advice from military lawyers on the chopping block?

https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2025/02/22/is-independent-nonpartisan-legal-advice-from-military-lawyers-on-the-chopping-block/

by Charlie Dunlap, J.D. · 22 February 2025

Last night’s announcement that the Administration is “requesting nominations for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force” is unprecedented in my memory and is, frankly, very disturbing as it implies the existing senior military lawyers are about to be fired, en masse. 

I say “unprecedented” because these are military legal officers who, unlike politically appointed civilian legal officials elsewhere in government, are never expected to be replaced on a change of Administrations. Since military lawyers are nonpartisan, no turnover is–or should be–expected in an organization like the armed forces that aims to be politically neutral.

Indeed, the Supreme Court, as discussed below, says the military should be “insulated from both the reality and the appearance” of partisanship. Mass firings by politicos don’t do that. 

To the contrary, stripping the armed forces of its senior uniformed legal advisors tasked by law to provide independent advice sends all wrong messages throughout the military legal community, not to mention to commanders and their troops.

In my opinion, Congress should vigorously demand a full explanation. And, if necessary, it should use its Constitutional powers to do whatever it takes to ensure that America’s defense establishment will have unfettered access to the kind of nonpartisan, independent legal advice from its judge advocates that current law demands and that America’s security needs.

Yes, a new Administration has the right to develop and implement policies it prefers, and to have leaders who will carry them out…so long, of course, as the policies are legal. However, this action indicates a misunderstanding of how the Department of Defense (DoD) legal community operates as it has both nonpartisan military lawyers (Judge Advocate Generals or JAGs), as well as separate civilian staffs headed by a politically appointed general counsels (GCs).

The politically appointed general counsels

Thus, in the legal realm, the partisan policymakers in the DoD are the politically appointed GCs for each service. By law, they “perform such functions” as their politically appointed service secretary “may prescribe.”

The statutory language for the DoD GC is similar in that the law says “He shall perform such functions as the Secretary of Defense may prescribe.” Additionally, the law makes the GC “the chief legal officer of the Department of Defense.” 

In short, if the Secretary of Defense or, for that matter, the President, wants legal advice from attorneys imbued with partisan ideology, there are certainly civilian DoD lawyers from whom to get it.

Military judge advocates

The top military attorneys (The Judge Advocate Generals or TJAGs) are, by design, different from their politically appointed civilian counterparts. In the first place, though the President ultimately nominates the TJAGs, he can only do so, the law tells us, if “the officer selected is recommended by a board of officers.” This no doubt is designed to help facilitate the selection of TJAGs “insulated from the reality and the appearance” of being partisan actors.

Military lawyers have a unique responsibility in the armed forces in that they serve as decidedly nonpartisan guardians of the rule of law. Indeed, the law (10 U.S.C. §9037) for the Air Force TJAG (and JAGs general) make this mandate clear:

(f) No officer or employee of the Department of Defense may interfere with-

(1) the ability of the Judge Advocate General to give independent legal advice to the Secretary of the Air Force, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, or the Chief of Space Operations; or

(2) the ability of officers of the Air Force who are designated as judge advocates who are assigned or attached to, or performing duty with, military units to give independent legal advice to commanders. (Emphasis added)

Similar provisions of law requiring independent legal advice exist for the Army and the Navy. 

The statutory architecture makes it rather clear that Congress, exercising its Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 8, Clause 14 to “make rules” for the military, did not want legal advice for the military coming solely from partisan political appointees. Rather, it wisely decided it wants no “officer or employee” of DoD to interfere with the rendering to commanders of independent legal advice by judge advocates who, as uniformed lawyers, are required to be nonpartisan.

The need for nonpartisan, independent, legal advice

And, yes, America’s defense establishment needs nonpartisan, independent, legal advice.  Military lawyers have a history of telling leaders what they need to hear versus what they may want to hear.  

An example is the controversy over torture of detainees in the years after 9/11. As Charlie Savage memorialized in his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, then Air Force TJAG Lt Gen Jack Rives was among the first of the uniformed lawyers to oppose torture and other excesses by penning a series of what Savage called “vehemently argued memos.” Believe me, that was an unpopular position in 2003.

In 2007 former Homeland Security Secretary (and previous DoD General Counsel) Jeh Johnson reflected:

I’m here to salute the JAG community…To be blunt, there are civilian political appointees around you who have tried to shape the law to fit the policy and expected you to fall in behind them. Against your most basic military training, you have had to take the extraordinary step of reminding your civilian leadership, and the public at large, of the rule of law. You were right to do so.

Rules of Engagement

Though I don’t know what prompted the decision to seek out replacements for the serving TJAGS, the Secretary’s confirmation hearings may provide some insight. He complained about “restrictive rules of engagement” that he says made it “more difficult to — to defeat our enemies.” The New York Times reports:

One of the stranger moments in a confirmation hearing on Tuesday for Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, was when a senator asked the former Fox News host to define the word “jagoff.”

The question from Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was prompted by a comment that Mr. Hegseth made to his military platoon, as he wrote in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors.” He made the comment during his Iraq deployment in 2005 after hearing a presentation by a JAG officer, or a member of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, who defend Army soldiers in legal matters.

After he and his team were briefed by the JAG officer on the proper protocols for firing on an enemy with a rocket-propelled grenade, Mr. Hegseth disparaged one of the rules of engagement, saying it was “going to get people killed,” he recalled in his book.

Evidently, there is unfamiliarity as to how rules of engagement (ROE) are developed and who directs them. As the Chairman’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 3121.01B (in place since 2005) plainly indicates, ROE comes from commanders and civilian leaders, not JAGs:Additionally, Joint Publication 3-60, Targeting, which was put in place in 2018 during the first Trump administration, shows the role the President, the SecDef, and commanders play in ROE development.

It also makes it obvious that the JAG’s role is to provide advice:

In other words, if ROE is too restrictive it is civilian political authorities – the President and Secretary of Defense – who can make whatever changes they want, so long as they comply with the law. 

While all ROE must comply with the law, in virtually every case ROE contains limits not legally required; in fact, policy limitations – not the law – are typically the source of consternation. 

The restraints not required by law exist because policymakers and commanders may believe that certain policy restrictions in a given circumstance may better achieve national goals and mission requirements. That said, they can be overly restrictive, but this is why a mechanism exists to adjust or remove entirely those policy restrictions that are proving to be counterproductive.

To be crystal clear, JAGs advise on ROE but it is the product of civilian and military leaders’ decisions. It is the SecDef and ultimately the President who bear the responsibility for ROE.

Lawfare

Why is independent legal advice from nonpartisan military lawyers so important? In the 21^st century compliance with the law is not just a legal and moral imperative, it is operationally essential. As I’ve said repeatedly for over two decades, we are living in the age of lawfare. I noted a few years ago:

In my current view, lawfare is the use of the law to accomplish what otherwise might require traditional military means – typically kinetic. 

Thus, the law can be employed as something of a weapon – an instrumentalization of the law that purists abhor but which to me reflects reality. Whether such use is for good or for ill depends much upon who is wielding it and why. There are legitimate forms of lawfare that can serve to mitigate the destructiveness of war, but there are also abusive interpretations which seek to turn adherence to the law into a vulnerability to be exploited by malevolent actors. 

The problem is that today malevolent actors are, with some real success, exploiting lawfare. There is never a time for politicized judge advocates, but it is especially important in today’s environment that the Nation and, particularly, warfighters in the field get independent legal advice from uniformed lawyers schooled by years of military experience.

I do not know any senior officers who do not count their judge advocate as among their most valued advisors in combat situations They know they will get independent legal advice that will, as noted, tell them what they need to hear versus what they might want to hear.

The indispensability of legal advice in combat operations is not an especially new phenomenon. As JP 1-04 (in effect since 2016) states:

Put another way, preserving access to nonpartisan, independent legal advice in the field from uniformed lawyers is a warfighting matter of the first order.

Concluding thoughts

Candidly, if cooler heads do not prevail, and the TJAGs are actually fired by the Secretary, anyone nominated to replace them will be viewed by many, both inside and outside the ranks, as simply a compliant politico. What is more is that the unexplained removal of the current TJAGs will also likely be considered as a petty act unworthy of the leadership of a great nation. It will make reasonable people wonder why such hasty action is being taken.

Nothing good can come from any of that.

America’s defense should not be a partisan issue, and a politicized military is anathema to a democracy. In fact, the Supreme Court has warned against even the appearance of partisanship.

In Greer v. Spock the Court approved a military directive barring partisan political campaigning on a military base as the policy rightly aimed at keeping the military “insulated from both the reality and the appearance of acting as a handmaiden for partisan political causes or candidates.” The Court added:

“Such a policy is wholly consistent with the American constitutional tradition of a politically neutral military establishment under civilian control. It is a policy that has been reflected in numerous laws and military regulations throughout our history.”

The U.S. has long benefited from the public’s trust in its armed forces. I believe a key reason the military, unlike so many institutions in our society, still retains such a considerable degree of public trust is that it is perceived as altruistic and nonpartisan.

Again, the party in power has the right to implement lawful policies. And they can rightly expect that the TJAGs and the military lawyers who work for them will carry out lawful directives, even if they happen to personally disagree.

The law for military members is rather definitive on this. The Manual for Courts-Martial provides that “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.” (The Manual, by the way, is an Executive Order prescribed by law).

The point is that America’s military continues to be best served by uniformed lawyers who have come up through the ranks and who give nonpartisan, independent legal advice, as well as those civilian counsels who are selected by the party in power to work in the Department of Defense.

Attempts to politicize the military in any way continue to be ill-suited to the best interests of America’s national security. I believe Congress needs to examine this matter to ensure that what it required in the law – independent legal advice from military lawyers – is not being jeopardized, and that such advice from JAGs is “insulated from both the reality and the appearance of acting as a handmaiden for partisan political causes or candidates.” 

Is independent, non-partisan legal advice from military lawyers on the chopping block? For the sake of America’s military and the security of our nation, we should hope not.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Update (24 Feb):  The TJAGs have been fired. I invite you to read former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall’s op-ed this morning wherein he explains why of all the firings of top military officers that took place last Friday what “frightens [him] even more is the removal of three judge advocates general, the most senior uniformed legal authorities in the Defense Department.”

20. Letter from the Board of Directors (Irregular Warfare Initiative)

Letter from the Board of Directors

irregularwarfare.org · February 23, 2025

Editor’s Note: the IWI Board of Directors approved its first annual “IWI Strategic Plan: 2025-2035” on 01 September 2024. The plan articulates IWI’s organizational purpose, strategic goals and implementation through three phases, a market analysis, an overview of its services and operations, and its organizational and leadership structure. Below is the Letter from the Board of Directors regarding the annual plan. You can view the Executive Summary of the Strategic Plan here. If you are interested in financially supporting IWI or an institutional partnership and would like to review the full plan, please contact the Chair of the Board, Kyle Atwell.

The Irregular Warfare Initiative envisions a world where irregular warfare is understood as a critical component of national security.

IWI was created as a joint venture between the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point in 2020. It remains proudly affiliated with both organizations today.

The need for IWI was identified by three military officers whose time in graduate school coincided with the transition from the Global War on Terror to strategic competition. Kyle Atwell, Nick Lopez, and Shawna Sinnott each spent the first decade of their careers deployed with Special Operations Forces around the world focused on counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency. While attending graduate school through military-funded programs at Princeton and Stanford, they realized that the expertise and insights of academia would have made them better military leaders.

However, academic research is often inaccessible for busy practitioners.

Recognizing the gap between scholars and practitioners, they created the Irregular Warfare Podcast with a simple objective: make important and impactful academic research accessible to practitioners and policymakers.

Since the first podcast was released in May 2020, the Irregular Warfare Initiative has expanded to include the publication of over 112 podcasts (garnering over 1.3 million downloads) and nearly 200 articles, coordinated over 30 community events in locations around the world, built a social media following of more than 35,000, and developed three cohorts of IWI Fellows (as of September 2024). The IWI team includes 90 volunteers, with a mix of practitioners from across the joint force and interagency, as well as researchers and academics from around the globe.

IWI meets two needs for the national security community:

First, IWI provides an intellectual base to understand the role of irregular warfare in current and future conflict. Irregular warfare is the most common form of conflict, manifesting in proxy wars between states, disinformation campaigns, economic coercion, and other efforts to punish rivals short of large scale combat operations. Additionally, intrastate conflict and violent non-state actors persist around the world, threatening regional and global stability. Irregular warfare is a permanent fixture of international security which must be understood. While much of the national security community focuses on the most dangerous risk of a major direct war between great powers, IWI ensures that attention is paid to understanding the most likely form of conflict manifesting every day around the world: irregular warfare.

Second, IWI preserves the hard fought lessons of the Global War on Terror. In the wake of the Vietnam War, there was a quick turn away from capturing lessons learned and a sentiment that the United States would not conduct a similar intervention again. IWI will preserve the human and intellectual capital of the GWOT-era so the United States, as well as its allies and partners, are prepared for similar conflicts in the future. This will preserve the legacy and sacrifice that a generation of practitioners and scholars committed during the GWOT.

The demand for IWI’s services continues to grow. To meet this demand, IWI incorporated as an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 2023. Raising monetary resources enhances IWI’s ability to expand its services.

This IWI Strategic Plan 2025-2035 outlines the mission, vision, and long term objectives for the Irregular Warfare Initiative. This document is developed and formally voted on by the IWI Board of Directors on an annual basis, and projects a vision and milestones for growth over the coming decade.

The most important aspects of this document are the organization purpose followed by IWI’s strategic goals and implementation plan. IWI’s mission is to “bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.” It does this through three strategic objectives: connect the IW community; drive public dialogue; and invest in IW leaders.

To the many volunteers and followers of IWI, we thank you for your commitment to capturing the lessons of the last two decades of conflict and understanding the most common form of conflict within strategic competition. To those who have donated to IWI or are considering doing so, we thank you for your generosity and support.

Sincerely,

The Irregular Warfare Initiative Board of Directors

Kyle Atwell, U.S. Army, Ph.D. Candidate Princeton University

Laura Jones, U.S. Air Force, Ph.D. Candidate Tufts University

Nick Lopez, U.S. Army, MPP Princeton University

Lisa Munde, U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, MA Stanford University

Shawna Sinnott, U.S. Marine Corps, Ph.D. Stanford University

Guido Torres, IWI Executive Director

Jennifer Walters, U.S. Air Force, Ph.D. Pardee RAND Graduate School

Sam Winter-Levy, Ph.D. Princeton University; Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

21. Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals

Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals

Exclusive: Terrorist group the Base appears defiant as new administration aims to deprioritize threat from far right

The Guardian · by Ben Makuch · February 24, 2025

An international neo-Nazi terrorist group with origins in the US appears to be quickly rebuilding its global and stateside ranks, according to information obtained by the Guardian from its digital accounts.

Founded in 2018, the Base has been the intense focus of a years-long FBI counter-terrorism investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen of its members arrested. It has plotted an assassination, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, which made it a proscribed terrorist organization in several countries.

By 2022, it seemed to disappear. Yet its founder and leader, Rinaldo Nazzaro, a former US special forces contractor residing in Russia, used the safety of Russian apps before the November election to recruit and reorganize during a tense political moment. At one point, he even solicited ex-American soldiers with an offer of $1,200 a month to put members through paramilitary training somewhere in the Pacific north-west.

The Base’s regrouping comes at a time when the Trump administration has made it a policy goal to move away from policing far-right extremism and during the appointment of Kash Patel – a Maga acolyte who lauds January 6 attackers and has peddled Qanon conspiracy theories – to helm the FBI. Experts say federal law enforcement ignoring far-right groups such as the Base could expose Americans to increased domestic terror threats.

Trump’s Gaza plan unites jihadist and far-right circles, experts warn

Read more

Nazzaro’s efforts, so far, appear to be paying off: the Guardian was tipped to an audio message released in mid-February from an assumed new leader of the Base with an American accent, discussing the ambitious future of the group.

After criticizing other neo-Nazi organizations such as Blood Tribe for publicly protesting against drag-queen story hours in the midwest, the voice preached covert action and quiet preparations for armed cells throughout the US rather than flashy activism.

“Are we just going to be reactionary? Or are we going to be part of the solution? The military solution,” they said. “Because inevitably we’re going to end up in some sort of military situation, what are the choices?”

The voice then describes a “black scenario” where the US government soon collapses and there’s a need to “provide for your family” and for “white women”.

“There is no political solution, only a military solution,” they can be heard saying under heavy voice modulation. “So act accordingly.”

A flurry of new images on the Base’s various social media accounts, some closed and some open, show members claiming to be in the US and across Europe brandishing pistols or military-style rifles and donning the trademark skull mask of the accelerationist neo-Nazi movement – one that demands acts of terrorism to bring down world governments.

In one photo, a member is holding a knife and what appears to be a pistol in front of the Base flag in the United Kingdom, while others feature members in Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. Last week, on the Base’s VKontakte account, it released a video showing a masked man purportedly in Bulgaria firing a pistol three times into the air with the group’s signature black flag beside him.

Real arrests show the multimedia posts aren’t a case of digital bluffing. In recent months, authorities in the Netherlands and Italy have carried out multiple arrests of suspected members on terrorism-related charges.

“The extreme rightwing terrorist organization the Base was proscribed in the UK since July 2021,” said a spokesperson for the Home Office, the department overseeing British security agencies, adding that being a member of the Base “carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison”.

Steven Rai, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), has also noticed the Base’s increased activities online.

“The Base has released a slow but steady trickle of propaganda over the past several months that has mostly highlighted their presence in Europe, so this shift in focus towards the US should raise alarms,” said Rai.

“The timing of this shift is particularly noteworthy – while neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like the Base have been on their back foot due to intense law enforcement pressure, which disrupted their most integral organizers and propaganda artists, they may sense an opening with the recent change of administration in the US.”

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, in a kind of taunt to authorities, the Base released a photo of the largest number of American members in one photo in over a year, two of them holding guns. The Base also solicited donations to a Bitcoin wallet, asking for money for weapons and ammunition. Shortly after, it thanked supporters for donations, then proudly displayed blanks they will put “to good use” and use to “train in small unit tactics”.

The FBI declined to comment on whether it will prioritize investigations into the Base or other far-right extremists in the future.

Both Trump and Patel have promised “major, major” reforms of the bureau, spurring an internal war between agents and the White House, with combating far-right extremism believed to be low on the list of priorities. But the Base also acknowledged the threat of law enforcement and released a new oath for American members, which included requirements to have a personal AR-15 rifle and nine 30-round magazines of ammunition.

“I willingly accept the risk of being targeted by law enforcement as a result of my membership in the Base to include being placed on government watchlists,” reads part of that oath. “However, if questioned by law enforcement, I will say nothing.”

Colin Clarke, a terrorism expert and director of research at the Soufan Center, believes the far right has sensed their window of opportunity.

“I think groups like the Base, far-right extremist groups that are strategic, have been waiting for the right opportunity before reinvigorating their respective organizations,” he said, adding that it’s expected that Patel will direct counter-terrorism assets towards leftwing organizations. “This means that far-right extremist groups likely perceive the re-election of Trump as a green light to rebuild without fear of arrest or prosecution.”

Rai concurred: “Violent extremists are absolutely paying attention to the changes in the national security establishment in the US.”

Contacted via encrypted text, Nazzaro would not answer if the audio message was the voice of a new leader that he hired to be his proxy in the US. He did mention that the Base supports neither Republicans or Democrats and that Trump’s presidency is irrelevant to his movement.

“At worst, it gives false hope by perpetuating the erroneous notion that a political solution is possible,” he said.

Suspicions have surrounded Nazzaro and his connections to Russian intelligence agencies. Living now as a semi-defected American in Saint Petersburg, his work with US special forces during the war on terror meant he had a top secret clearance while fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But only a few years after that work, he would found a neo-Nazi terrorist group of his own that sees the US government as the enemy.

Nazzaro has denied any and all links to the Kremlin, once telling Russian state television that he has “never had any contact with any Russian security services”.

Clarke is skeptical and said that Nazzaro’s presence in Russia means “Russian intelligence services will inevitably wield influence over the Base and could be orchestrating some of the organization’s next moves, especially in terms of recruitment and propaganda”.

Western intelligence agencies are constantly warning that the Kremlin is seeking to destabilize Nato member states, including supporting violent, far-right organizations in Europe. Late last year, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, said that Russia was using “arson, sabotage” and other “actions conducted with increasing recklessness” on European and British soil.

The Guardian · by Ben Makuch · February 24, 2025

​22. The Right U.S. Strategy for Russia-Ukraine Negotiations

​ Conclusion:

If it backs Ukraine in negotiations and uses the leverage available to it, the Trump administration could secure the Israel model for Ukraine—the construction of a powerful future force with the ability to strike Russian territory if it were attacked, backed by a promise of indirect U.S. support in the event of a new war. This deal would not be perfect, as it leaves Ukraine without external security guarantees. Although there may have been a pathway to NATO, along the lines of the Norway model, under a Democratic administration, such an outcome is clearly not acceptable to President Trump. (It could still be taken up by a different U.S. administration in the future.) The Israel model provides a viable pathway to a free and independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself and deter future attack. And over time, it may serve as a stepping stone to a more durable and just peace.

The Right U.S. Strategy for Russia-Ukraine Negotiations

Foreign Affairs · by More by Thomas Wright · February 24, 2025

How American Pressure Can Bring the War to an Acceptable End

Thomas Wright

February 24, 2025

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine, February 2025 Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

THOMAS WRIGHT is a Senior Fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He served as Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council in the Biden administration.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

Ukraine has considerable leverage in upcoming negotiations with Russia—as long as the United States stands by Kyiv and adopts a negotiating strategy that creates real dilemmas for Moscow. U.S. support for Ukraine has been cast into doubt in recent weeks after a flurry of comments by Trump administration officials offering unilateral concessions to Moscow and criticizing Ukraine. Bilateral talks between Russia and the United States in Riyadh have heightened concerns in Ukraine and Europe. But these moves are a choice, not a necessity. A good deal is still within reach if Washington is willing to pursue it.

The Trump administration should enter these negotiations with a clear sense of U.S. interests, a correct diagnosis of the problem to be solved, a preferred ranking of possible outcomes, and a strategy for how to accomplish its objective. If it does that, it can secure a free and independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself and deter future attack. If the United States fails to help Ukraine exploit the advantage it has on the eve of talks, it will give Moscow a lifeline, which it will not just use in its quest to dominate Ukraine but also to damage U.S. interests globally.

RUSSIA UNDER PRESSURE

In its final year, the Biden administration, in which I served as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, prepared Ukraine for talks in 2025 regardless of who won the U.S. election in 2024. After the unsuccessful counteroffensive of 2023, the administration helped Ukraine create three vectors of action that would weaken Moscow’s ability to prosecute the war indefinitely and thus put pressure on it to negotiate seriously.

One vector was to support a strategy of asymmetric attrition. According to the Department of Defense, Russian casualties are over 700,000 since the war began and averaging 1,500 a day. Moscow’s attempts to open up a new pipeline of troops from North Korea seem to have failed, because North Korean casualty numbers have been so high that Pyongyang has not sent many more. Accordingly, if he wants to fight a long war, Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing the prospect of having to order a mobilization later this year, which he has tried to avoid in order to shield ordinary Russians from the reality and pain of the battlefront. The second vector was support of Ukraine’s long-strike campaign, initially through backing its indigenous drone program and then with the provision of long-range ATACMS. And the third was the ramping up of sanctions on Russia, including on 50 banks and on its energy sector, in order to complicate Moscow’s ability to finance a long war; one effect was a spike in Russian inflation, which exceeded 9.5%, with interest rates over 21%, at the end of 2024.

The United States also sent enough artillery rounds, rockets, air defense, and fighting vehicles to put Ukraine in a position to fight through 2025. A $50 billion allied loan, leveraging frozen Russian sovereign assets, has given Ukraine a financial lifeline. The result is that Russia is stuck. Moscow still seeks to dominate Ukraine, but it is gaining only slivers of territory in eastern Ukraine with very little prospect of making sweeping gains. It failed to cause Ukraine’s collapse through energy strikes over the winter. It still has not regained all of the Russian territory seized by Ukraine in Kursk, more than six months after Ukraine’s incursion. And all of this has been compounded by the fall of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the likely end of its military presence there.

WHY UKRAINE MATTERS

There are some observers and policymakers, including in the Trump administration, who believe that the outcome in the war in Ukraine matters little to the United States and that European security has been a distraction to the primary U.S. strategic challenge of countering China. Yet even if one views U.S. national interests through the prism of “America first” and sees little value in preserving a rules-based order or bolstering NATO, the United States has at least four core interests in preventing Russia from winning in Ukraine and in ensuring a free and sovereign Ukraine.

First, since the war began, Russia has significantly deepened its cooperation with China, North Korea, and Iran. It has received critical assistance from each—including machine tools, microelectronics, and coproduction partnerships to help reconstitute its military from China; missiles and drones from Iran; and artillery and soldiers from North Korea. In exchange, the Kremlin has provided unprecedented military and technological assistance to each, far beyond what it had previously considered. This cooperation is enduring and poses a real threat to U.S. interests. If Russia prevails in Ukraine, it will be a victory as well for each of its three partners, without whom Moscow would have already lost. This alignment of U.S. competitors and adversaries would deepen, as Russia’s partners receive their quid pro quo. There is no prospect of a peace deal driving a wedge between Russia and China—the bond between their leaders is too strong. China, in particular, will be emboldened by a Russian victory, and could draw conclusions about the willingness of the United States to stick with a partner through thick and thin.

Second, the survival of a free and independent Ukraine will be good for the United States. The Ukrainian military will emerge from the war as Europe’s third largest, after Russia and Turkey. It has pioneered cutting-edge technological developments, especially on drone warfare and the application of artificial intelligence to warfighting. It will share this technology with the United States and help Europe reconstitute its defense industrial base. The United States has already learned a great deal about the future of warfare from Ukraine. Ukraine is likely to be a strong and reliable ally for the United States in other parts of the world, including the Indo-Pacific, where it can advise and strengthen U.S. allies.

Third, a Russian victory in Ukraine would significantly increase the threat to several European states that are staunchly pro-American and spend a high percentage of their GDP on defense. These include Lithuania, which has pledged to spend over five percent of its GDP on defense in the next two years; Poland, which is on track for 4.7%; Latvia, which is at 3.45%; and Estonia, which is at 3.2%. Western European countries will not have sufficient capability to deter Russian aggression for many years, even if they immediately ramp up defense spending, and they are also likely to lack the willpower. The United States should not be abandoning an alliance commitment to sovereign nation states that are doing everything Washington asks because others in western Europe are not doing more.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the United States has an interest in a stable and peaceful Europe. Europe is the United States’ largest source of foreign investment and largest export market, and a key ally that broadly aligns with the United States on the central issues in world politics. If the negotiation goes wrong and results in a Russian victory, it will create a geopolitical black hole in Europe—one that would not be neatly siloed off from the rest of the world. This could include sowing the seeds of future conflicts that could spread beyond Ukraine, weakening pro-American states in Europe, and providing Russia with the opportunity to project power globally in a manner detrimental to U.S. interests, including in the Middle East, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific.

REDLINES

The primary problem that has to be solved in negotiations is that Russia wants a neutral and weakened Ukraine, whereas Ukraine wants sufficient security capabilities and guarantees so it can deter and defend against any future attack.

In a speech to his own Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 2024, Putin articulated a firm stance that “Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear-free, and undergo demilitarization and denazification,” and demanded that Ukraine cede the entirety of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia provinces. In a number of interviews since, he has affirmed that position and described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an illegitimate leader of Ukraine with no authority to sign a treaty to end the war. Putin has also demanded strict limits on the size and scope of Ukraine’s military, including a prohibition on “offensive” weapons, an effective Russian veto over any international security guarantees provided to Ukraine, and western security assurances for Russia.

Such an outcome would (and should) be completely unacceptable to Ukraine and its partners. No Ukrainian leadership can accede to regime change and massive limits on its ability to defend itself. Kyiv needs some arrangement that can dissuade Russia from resuming the war at a moment of its choosing. The Ukrainian government’s official position is that it wants all of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, including Crimea, back, as well as membership in NATO, so that Russia could not attack it again without triggering a wider war. There are, however, indications that Ukraine would be willing to accept a freezing of the territorial line if it came without legal recognition of Russian gains and if allies supported Ukraine’s right to regain the territory by nonmilitary means. Most important for the Ukrainians, it would be compensated with ironclad security guarantees for the rest of the country and with a pledge of political and economic integration into the West.

Accordingly, the task for the United States and its allies should be clear: to work with Kyiv on an outcome that would provide for a free and independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself and deter a future attack, and then to persuade Putin to accept it.

TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS

The various parties to the negotiations have put forward four distinct end states, each with its own logic and implications, not all of which have been properly understood. The first is NATO membership for Ukraine, which would provide Kyiv with an Article 5 security guarantee. Although the specific language is somewhat ambiguous, Article 5 has usually been interpreted by the United States (and other NATO members) as an ironclad commitment to intervene directly on behalf of an ally. With such a commitment, Ukrainians believe that Russia would be much less likely to attack again, given the likelihood that doing so would lead to war with the United States. Two variants of membership could apply in this case. Under the West Germany model, Kyiv would join NATO with the understanding that Article 5 applies only to territory under its control and pledge not to use force to retake Russian-occupied territories. Under the Norway model (based on the approach to that country’s membership at NATO’s founding, in 1949), it would agree to self-imposed limits on foreign bases, troops, naval vessels, and equipment that would be present in country—drawing a distinction, in other words, between Ukraine in NATO and NATO in Ukraine.

The second end state is what has been called the Israel model, with Washington providing enough military and intelligence assistance to enable Ukraine to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russian forces without direct intervention by other nations. In the case of Israel, U.S. support is based on various memorandums of understanding that aim to provide it with a Qualitative Military Edge (a technological military advantage over its neighbors). This would not apply in the case of Ukraine, but the United States could aim to give it a credible defense and deterrence capability, as the 2024 U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement put it. This would not be just what is sometimes referred to as a “porcupine strategy,” which implies a purely defensive position. It would provide Ukraine with the ability to use long-range missiles, such as ATACMS and JASSMs, to go on the offensive inside of Russia and elsewhere in the event that Russia invaded again.

In practice, the Israel model would require the United States and allies to commit to helping Ukraine build a force that would include layered air defense, an air force that included a significant number of F-16s, stockpiles of 155 munitions and medium-range missiles such as GMLRs, a trained force capable of combined arms operations, robust defenses along the line of control, long-range missiles, and a resilient and cutting-edge defense industrial base to produce as much as possible in country. The United States could also promise to provide Ukraine with indirect support if it were attacked again, along the lines of U.S. support for the past three years except with no restrictions on Ukrainian use of U.S. weapons.

A free and independent Ukraine will be good for the United States.

A third end state would center on a European security guarantee. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, recently told NBC that the matter of security guarantees is “squarely going to be with the Europeans,” raising the question of whether European countries could send troops to Ukraine after the war. It is unclear, however, what the purpose of such a deployment would be. Would the troops serve as a tripwire force to deter a future Russian invasion? In that case, European nations would be at war with Russia. Are they there to train Ukrainian forces and help in the recovery, but not as a deterrent force? In that case, they would have to leave the moment a new invasion seemed likely. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made it clear that if European troops did go to Ukraine, they would be operating without a U.S. guarantee. Some Europeans worry that this would give Putin an opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe—if he targeted European troops, NATO’s European members would be at war with Russia without U.S. support. For his part, Zelensky has stressed that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

The fourth end state would hinge on Ukraine’s neutrality, a demand that Russia is likely to begin any negotiation with, building on discussions in Istanbul in 2022. The key question would be what happens if neutrality is violated. Here, it is worth looking at Istanbul closely: Moscow proposed that Ukraine would not join any alliances, that the size of its military would be limited, and that security would be guaranteed by a group of countries committed to aiding Ukraine in the event of an attack. But this provision was structured to give Russia an effective veto—in other words, there was no enforcement mechanism.

Other approaches to neutrality would not work, either. In the case of Finland, after World War II, the Soviet Union was able to interfere with both foreign and domestic policy, exerting considerable control for several decades. For Austria during the Cold War, neutrality was largely respected, but mostly because a Soviet violation would have come in the context of an invasion of western Europe, triggering a major U.S. response in any case. And Belgium, which was supposed to serve as a neutral buffer with no assistance from other powers, was invaded in both World War I and World War II.

THE KREMLIN’S DILEMMAS

In approaching these possible end states, the U.S. strategy should be to create a dilemma for Russia over the type of Ukraine that it could face. The Trump administration has taken a very different view, but Washington could and should categorically rule out neutering Ukraine or formal neutrality, and instead put three options on the table: a Norway model of NATO membership, the Israel model, and a European Security Guarantee.

Each of these options has significant downsides for Russia. There is a plausible argument that the Norway model of NATO membership could be more palatable to Moscow than the Israel model or European troops, especially if it opened up the possibility of a broader discussion on some limits on Ukrainian offensive weaponry and on European architecture. These are things that would normally be rejected by Ukraine and the allies but could be discussed and considered by the alliance in the event that Russia accepted Ukrainian membership of NATO. Moreover, under the Norway model, there would not be NATO troops in Ukraine and its government would be somewhat restrained by its allies.

The Israel model, by contrast, would mean a heavily armed and insecure Ukraine that would have to fend for itself and thus be prone to anticipatory self-defense and unilateral kinetic action in the form of sabotage, covert action, and assassination. Adding enhanced indirect support would mean that if Russia ever invaded again, the United States would provide military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, as it has done for the past three years, but with no restrictions on the use of allied weapons inside of Russia.

The presence of European troops would mean that, in addition to Ukrainian rearmament, Russia would have to contend with NATO member state forces closer to its border with the ability to monitor its troop movements and train the Ukrainian forces in country. The Kremlin might take comfort in the fact that Europe is not ready to carry out this mission, but it would surely worry that a future U.S. administration would provide these troops with a security guarantee.

Washington could and should rule out formal neutrality for Ukraine.

The goal in a negotiation should be to compel Russia to confront the dilemmas it faces and to test the limits of what it can tolerate. Russia is likely to reject the Norway model, but the United States could then turn to the Israel model—preferable to a deployment of European troops that the Europeans themselves are not ready to execute effectively. In short, although Plan A should be the Norway model, the Israel model would be the fallback as Plan B.

Russia could, of course, reject the Israel model, as well as NATO and a European guarantee, and stick to its maximalist goals. That’s why the United States should continue to support Ukraine and maintain pressure on Russia, especially through asymmetrical attrition, which would make it difficult for Russia to wage a long war. The Trump administration will be reluctant to request new military assistance for Ukraine from Congress, although doing so would send an important signal to Moscow. Meanwhile, proposals that European governments purchase U.S. weapons for Ukraine will face objections in the Pentagon given how low U.S. inventories are and because of demands from other regions. One way to overcome both of these problems would be through legislation funding general munitions production, sending the signal that the defense industry should ramp up production—for the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East as well as for Europe. Some of this production could then be provided by the United States in exchange for a deal on access to critical minerals or purchased for Ukraine, funded by European governments using frozen Russian assets.

Russia, for its part, is likely to ask for punitive sanctions to be lifted and the $300 billion in frozen sovereign assets returned. These demands should be mostly rejected, with the bulk of sanctions remaining in place as long as Russia illegally occupies Ukrainian territory. (The sanctions have the added benefit of impeding deeper economic ties between Russia and China.) If the Trump administration insists on lifting sanctions, at the very least it should keep in place those that impede Russia’s military modernization, such as on microelectronics. The sovereign assets should be transferred to Ukraine in lieu of reparations, to be used for reconstruction and a rebuilding of its military. This does not need to be agreed to by the Russians; European states have the power to make the move unilaterally, since the vast bulk of the frozen assets are there.

GOOD ENOUGH

If it backs Ukraine in negotiations and uses the leverage available to it, the Trump administration could secure the Israel model for Ukraine—the construction of a powerful future force with the ability to strike Russian territory if it were attacked, backed by a promise of indirect U.S. support in the event of a new war. This deal would not be perfect, as it leaves Ukraine without external security guarantees. Although there may have been a pathway to NATO, along the lines of the Norway model, under a Democratic administration, such an outcome is clearly not acceptable to President Trump. (It could still be taken up by a different U.S. administration in the future.) The Israel model provides a viable pathway to a free and independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself and deter future attack. And over time, it may serve as a stepping stone to a more durable and just peace.

THOMAS WRIGHT is a Senior Fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He served as Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council in the Biden administration.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Thomas Wright · February 24, 2025

23. A More Corrupt World Will Be Bad for America

​Excerpts:

Trump may be right that other countries are willing to use corruption to advance their interests. But sinking to their level is a counterproductive response to this problem. U.S. companies that were not paying bribes will now be suspected of doing so; those who do pay bribes will drain their shareholders’ profits and will be complicit in national criminal enterprises that make governments more fragile, weak, and unpopular. U.S. adversaries will take advantage of the country’s newly lax enforcement standards, and the long-term damage of Trump’s decision to abandon the FCPA will outweigh any plausible short-term benefits.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho and one of the leaders of the FCPA negotiations, said, “It is no longer sufficient to simply sigh and say that this is the way business is done. It is time to treat the issue for what it is: a serious foreign policy problem.” Then as now, FCPA enforcement is a good thing for the United States. Investigations and prosecutions should be resumed—before their suspension can do more damage.

A More Corrupt World Will Be Bad for America

Foreign Affairs · by More by Richard Nephew · February 24, 2025

Trump’s Abandonment of Antibribery Efforts Will Hurt—Not Help—U.S. Companies

Richard Nephew

February 24, 2025

Outside the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., August 2020 Andrew Kelly / Reuters

RICHARD NEPHEW is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and an Adjunct Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has served in various roles at the U.S. National Security Council and the U.S. State Department.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

Some years ago, while serving as the U.S. State Department’s first coordinator on global anticorruption, I visited a country in West Africa as part of my fieldwork. During my visit, an American businessman whose company was operating an important national enterprise told me about a government official who had solicited a bribe from him. When I asked how he got out of the situation, he said it was simple: “I told him that I wasn’t going to go to jail for him.”

The law this businessman was not willing to break was the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on February 10 that paused its enforcement, flying in the face of nearly 50 years of U.S. policy and practice. Trump alleges that FCPA rules are shutting U.S. companies out of lucrative business opportunities. But the evidence for this claim is weak and scant. In reality, a lighter approach to investigating and prosecuting foreign bribery by U.S. firms will ultimately hurt American businesses and taxpayers.

American lawmakers developed the FCPA in response to a series of bribery scandals in the 1970s that had embarrassed the United States, undermined its foreign policies and international partnerships, and injured its companies. Dozens of examples exist, but a lowlight involved the bribery of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka by Lockheed, a U.S. defense contractor. Congressional debates were detailed, specific, and wide-ranging, involving expert testimony and careful consideration of a variety of issues, including the implications for U.S. economic competitiveness and how an extraterritorial application of U.S. law might be perceived abroad. The final version of the FCPA was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate and a vote of 349–0 in the House, demonstrating a prevailing national consensus that foreign corrupt practices were inimical to U.S. interests.

Since then, the FCPA has become a bedrock of U.S. international economic policy, an inspiration to other countries, and the source of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 1998 antibribery convention. It is also a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and is widely regarded, both by American businesses and their partners overseas, as what separates U.S. economic actors from those in China and Russia.

In the name of preserving U.S. economic competitiveness and his own foreign policy prerogatives, Trump has in effect asserted that only through corrupt practices can the United States compete and succeed. His order does not only denigrate U.S. firms that have managed to conduct their business for decades without corruption. Trump is also exposing all U.S. international business to the demand of bribes and favors to obtain contracts, undermining the United States’ advantages both in practice and in reputation.

INCHING TOWARD IGNOMINY

Under the FCPA, it is illegal for “certain classes of persons and entities tomake payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business.” These persons and entities include U.S. citizens and resident companies; after a 1998 amendment, they included foreign individuals and entities whose activities within the United States were also covered by the FCPA. Since its inception, the FCPA has obligated foreign companies listed in the United States to meet certain accounting requirements, such as maintaining accurate books and internal controls over transactions.

Such requirements have allowed the United States to prosecute cases resulting in billions of dollars in fines. Some of those took place during the first Trump administration. Far from penalizing U.S. firms unduly, over 40 percent of U.S. prosecutions have had foreign defendants, and foreign actors who abused the U.S. financial system to commit their crimes are amply represented on the list of the highest fines issued under the law. FCPA prosecutions have involved companies operating around the world, including some that undermined U.S. political and economic interests through corruption. Many foreign governments have greeted these prosecutions positively, not least because they have resulted in restitution paid by criminal operators and once-lost funds repatriated to victimized populations.

Still, the primary beneficiaries of the FCPA have been U.S. firms (and their shareholders) that wish to operate abroad without paying bribes. To be sure, some U.S. firms have used bribery to obtain concessions and contracts. The same history that members of Congress cited in their decision to negotiate and adopt the FCPA includes the names of dozens of U.S. companies that bribed their way into valuable concessions, procurement contracts, and deals. But paying bribes is a tricky business. For every business deal consummated thanks to a bribe, there are also examples of politicians being arrested and deals falling apart because of bribery. Bribery, after all, is a crime—Article 15 of the UN Convention Against Corruption obligates all signatory governments to make it so. Businesses that pay bribes are contributing to a crime and as a result can face legal consequences in any country where they operate.

Moreover, with the FCPA in place, eschewing bribery is not the competitive disadvantage that it might otherwise be. U.S. companies can say with clarity and resolve that they may not engage in bribery lest they be prosecuted by the U.S. government, which has a long record of successful prosecutions. Anyone who has ever engaged in a negotiation knows that one of the most valuable tools is to “blame the third party”—and the U.S. Department of Justice has, until now, been an ideal party to blame. And the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, which was passed by a bipartisan majority in 2023, has helped neutralize any lingering competitive disadvantages that might exist for U.S. companies complying with the FCPA by making the solicitation of bribes by foreign officials prosecutable as well.

Congress can push back on Trump for weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

International businesses that have complied with U.S. legislation have become leaders in encouraging government action on corruption and pushing back on corrupt practices themselves. When I was the chair of the Anti-Corruption Leaders Hub for Galvanizing the Private Sector, an initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I met with dozens of companies that were committed to fighting corruption and bribery because they thought it was in their financial interest. Members of the hub include some of the world’s leading companies, such as Amazon, General Motors, Siemens, and Tesla. They support projects such as the Blue Dot Network—an initiative created by Australia, Japan, and the United States in 2019, when Trump was in office, and now under the aegis of the OECD—which verifies the sources of financing for foreign infrastructure projects, as well as their adherence to safety rules and other compliance measures. For major firms, the loss of the FCPA will be damaging because it will become easier for unqualified firms that are willing to pay bribes to earn business that is undeserved. And companies that use corruption to get undeserved business typically perform poorly, providing deficient products, infrastructure, and services that harm consumers. The horrific collapse of housing projects in southern Turkey during the 2023 earthquakes is a case in point.

Undoubtedly, some businesses will celebrate Trump’s decision. After all, FCPA compliance imposes costs on firms, many of which have no intention to pay bribes, and even the notional risk of litigation is a burden for companies operating internationally. This is understandable; no one wants to be prosecuted or labor under the specter of prosecution. Yet companies now face a new problem: being actively solicited for bribes but unable to give the automatic “no” that FCPA compliance rules make easy. Many U.S. companies will have to come up with the money to pay those bribes to make and sustain deals. This burden will weigh on clean and corrupt companies alike.

Every foreign contract that U.S. companies get will now be tainted by questions of bribery. Even if untrue, the mere allegation will expose those companies to further solicitation, as there is rarely a deal in which only a single bribe is requested or required. This association will follow them everywhere they do business. After all, since they must have bribed someone to get their contract or concession in one country, why shouldn’t they offer the same in another?

Trump is risking the standing of the United States in the international anti-money-laundering monitoring system administered by the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body that coordinates standards for banking practices. Bribery and corruption are forms of money laundering, and as a member of the task force, the United States will be expected to demonstrate its compliance with its standards when the country’s Mutual Evaluation, a required process of scrutiny conducted by fellow members, begins in 2026. Even discussion of whether the United States ought to land on the task force’s “gray list”—effectively a probationary status—for having less than satisfactory standards can be costly to U.S. companies and banks. Institutions and companies that operate from countries on this list find their transactions subject to more intense scrutiny and can have difficulty acquiring financing. How members will apply such scrutiny to a financial sector as large and systemically important as that of the United States is far from clear, but that only serves to highlight just how extraordinary Trump’s moves are.

CEDING GROUND TO CHINA

Another problem with Trump’s executive order is the long-term fragility and risk it will introduce to U.S. trade relations. Corruption is not popular, and neither are those who engage in it. If and when U.S. firms are found to have engaged in corruption in advance of their business deals, the exposure will harm the United States, as happened before the FCPA was established: foreign governments that had been partners of the United States were brought down by corruption scandals, their venality enabled by the bribes of U.S. companies. When those corrupt governments fell, the United States lost more than business deals. It also lost the access and influence it once had. Avoiding such self-inflicted harm was one of the reasons for creating the FCPA in the first place. Opening the door to corruption once again, on top of the Trump administration’s evisceration of foreign aid programs, augurs a deterioration in Washington’s ability to influence political, economic, and security developments in regions that will be crucial for the United States’ future, not least in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere.

From a geostrategic perspective, Trump’s abandonment of the FCPA is a disastrous decision. It is true that foreign governments do not take the same zealous approach to FCPA implementation (or their national equivalents) as the United States has in the past. But unlike the United States today, they still pay lip service to the idea that they are faithfully and fully implementing their obligations under the 2005 UN Convention Against Corruption and the OECD’s 1999 Anti-Bribery Convention.

China will be especially eager to use Trump’s decision against the United States. Beijing has long articulated its anticorruption strategy in aggressive terms, referring to it variously as beating tigers, swatting flies, and hunting foxes while arresting scores of officials it alleges to be corrupt. Chinese leaders will point to their ongoing internal anticorruption drive and policy of prosecuting those who pay bribes as proof that their business activities are clean and honest. Meanwhile, Trump is explicitly disavowing the long-standing anticorruption ethos of the United States. Proving that China is selectively using corrupt methods to gain footholds in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the South Pacific was already hard enough; without local governments’ cooperation on FCPA prosecutions, which will almost surely dry up if the United States stops pursuing them with vigor, Washington will lose critical insight into China’s activities and the ability to hinder them.

It is reasonable to argue that, until recently, the United States was leading global anticorruption efforts and others were failing to pull their weight. But throwing in the towel will not right this imbalance. Instead, Washington should be even more aggressive in enforcing global rules and norms. And the U.S. government has ways to do this right. It has a suite of existing sanctions it could enforce against those who engage in international corruption, and it could apply additional sanctions to the financial firms, lawyers, and influence peddlers who enable corruption and to states who use it as a strategic weapon. Trump has demonstrated his willingness to use economic coercion to respond to unfair international practices, real and imagined. If there is one form of business manipulation that deserves to be countered with the tools of U.S. economic statecraft, it is corruption.

Congress can push back on Trump for weakening the FCPA, including by insisting that any nominees for law enforcement roles are committed to enforcing the FCPA and using its powers of legislative oversight to ensure their compliance. The private sector also has a role to play. American businesses can hold themselves to an anticorruption standard regardless of what the government does. The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ have codes of conduct and ethics that they can continue to enforce, and the banking community should maintain its antibribery and corruption standards for payments, and investments. After all, other countries and jurisdictions will enforce their own laws against corruption even if the United States does not, perhaps even targeting U.S. firms that engage in corrupt practices as part of the global economic competition the Trump administration is amplifying.

LONG-TERM DAMAGE

Trump may be right that other countries are willing to use corruption to advance their interests. But sinking to their level is a counterproductive response to this problem. U.S. companies that were not paying bribes will now be suspected of doing so; those who do pay bribes will drain their shareholders’ profits and will be complicit in national criminal enterprises that make governments more fragile, weak, and unpopular. U.S. adversaries will take advantage of the country’s newly lax enforcement standards, and the long-term damage of Trump’s decision to abandon the FCPA will outweigh any plausible short-term benefits.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho and one of the leaders of the FCPA negotiations, said, “It is no longer sufficient to simply sigh and say that this is the way business is done. It is time to treat the issue for what it is: a serious foreign policy problem.” Then as now, FCPA enforcement is a good thing for the United States. Investigations and prosecutions should be resumed—before their suspension can do more damage.

RICHARD NEPHEW is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and an Adjunct Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has served in various roles at the U.S. National Security Council and the U.S. State Department.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Richard Nephew · February 24, 2025

24. America Needs a Sovereign Wealth Fund

​Excerpts:

Ultimately, the risks of an SWF are worth the potential value to the nation. In the United States today, commercial technology is driven almost exclusively by the market. That means there is plenty of money for artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. But many of the technologies essential for maintaining the United States’ global primacy, such as biomanufacturing or new materials for the next generation of computing, fall by the wayside. This impedes innovation and handicaps the United States in its competition with China, which employs an enormous SWF and directs and nurtures national champion companies that dominate global markets. The United States should never seek to match China’s brute force approach to economic power. But it can establish its own fund to help forge a path to sustained technology preeminence. With relatively small amounts of money, Washington can help steer private capital toward promising companies that investors might otherwise ignore. A separate fund could support scaling up the most successful of these startups into global forces.

An SWF would also play to U.S. national strengths: the United States is always best served when government and private industry are aligned in support of the national interest, as they often were during the Cold War. But the country has yet to fully harness the energy and independence of the private sector to further a long-term vision of economic prosperity and national security. A sovereign wealth fund could. Trump’s executive order, then, could mark the beginning of a new vision for American technology leadership in the twenty-first century.

America Needs a Sovereign Wealth Fund

Foreign Affairs · by More by Sarah Sewall · February 24, 2025

Tech Dominance Requires Investment in the Private Sector

Steve Bowsher and Sarah Sewall

February 24, 2025

At the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, April 2022 Brendan McDermid / Reuters

STEVE BOWSHER is CEO of IQT.

SARAH SEWALL is Executive Vice President for National Innovation Strategy at IQT.

• More by Steve Bowsher

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

In January 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order calling for the creation of a U.S.-owned sovereign wealth fund. An SWF, Trump said, would “promote the long-term financial health and international leadership of the United States” through direct investment in “great national endeavors,” such as manufacturing and medical research. Although unmentioned by the administration, an SWF could also help maintain the United States’ technological superiority over China.

Trump’s SWF order has been overlooked amid the flurry of other executive actions, but it nonetheless presents an unprecedented opportunity for American technological innovation. Advanced technology remains the foundation of U.S. economic and national strength. Although innovation driven by private investment has allowed the country to lead in areas such as chip design and drug discovery, next-generation technology sometimes demands greater risk and patience than private capital is willing to bear. As a result, U.S. innovation often proceeds too slowly for a country seeking to lead the next technological revolution.

The right kind of American SWF could efficiently address this problem. It would identify the most important nascent technologies that struggle to attract capital, and back the best startups innovating in those industries. By signaling the national security importance of those technologies, an SWF would catalyze additional private investment toward areas of critical innovation and the supply chains that secure them.

But making an American SWF work would require care. Washington would have to insulate the fund’s managers from U.S. domestic politics, so that investment decisions are made without regard to who wins the White House or controls Congress. And although responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds would require managers to make sound financial decisions, investments must balance prospective returns with the clear strategic purpose of U.S. innovation leadership. This approach would make an American SWF unlike the investments controlled by Beijing, which has spent decades directing massive state and private resources to finance the Communist Party’s five-year development plans. Instead, Washington would use its SWF to identify priorities in commercial technology and nudge U.S. startups toward those goals—combining the interests of the nation with the dynamism and innovation of private investors.

SPREAD THE WEALTH

Washington may not have a sovereign wealth fund, but almost half the U.S. states do. Indeed, the earliest precursor of a national sovereign wealth fund was established in the United States: in 1803, Ohio created a land trust to finance public education in the state. Alabama and Mississippi followed suit after winning statehood a decade later, and Texas set up a cash-financed permanent school fund in 1854. Other states have since set up funds of their own, sometimes financed by oil revenue, for a variety of purposes.

National governments began creating funds, as well. In 1953, Kuwait directed the Bank of England to manage the sheikhdom’s oil profit, which it uses today for government spending and as a savings reserve. Abu Dhabi, Norway, and Qatar established their own public investment funds to hedge against the depletion of their oil supplies. Today, more than 90 countries have established over 160 SWFs. The amount of assets in all these funds combined exceeds $11 trillion. Although 14 countries, many with vast wealth from oil reserves, manage roughly 95 percent of the total assets invested in SWFs, many different countries have created them. In 2024, the United Kingdom created a national wealth fund capitalized at about $35 billion to advance the country’s industrial strategy.

If early SWFs were financed by commodity wealth, almost half the capital of SWFs today comes from other sources, including foreign exchange reserves, issued securities, and budget surpluses. Likewise, SWF investing initially focused on raising revenue, but many funds now aim to spark domestic economic growth by fostering foreign investment or promoting specific industries. Some promote broader policy goals, such as environmental sustainability or medical research.

The U.S. government is already familiar with policy-driven investment programs. In 2019, for example, Congress created the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) from existing U.S. loan entities to help U.S. corporations contribute to international development, including through digital infrastructure and renewable energy projects. DFC was also given the authority to make direct equity investments in companies, although it remains a small portion of its total activity. In 2023, for example, $565 million of DFC’s $9 billion budget went to equity investment. In 2024, the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) launched a program in partnership with the Small Business Administration to provide loans to private investors willing to fund companies in designated technology areas such as advanced materials and quantum science. Unlike many other Pentagon organizations, this office is not designed to create systems ready for military purchase. Rather, it is aimed at promoting long-term private-sector investment in the United States’ industrial base and technological competitiveness.

The U.S. government is already familiar with policy-driven investment programs.

The CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022, established a little-known domestic equity investing option, authorizing $500 million for direct investment in U.S. microelectronics innovation. This allocation is dwarfed by the tens of billions in tax credits and loans that the CHIPS Act provides corporations to build chip-fabrication facilities in the United States. Although the equity investing option has not yet been put to use, its structure offers the benefit of potential returns on investment that government grants and loans cannot.

Our organization, IQT, offers yet another model of equity investing on behalf of the U.S. government. IQT is an independent non-profit organization—but one funded by and for the government—that invests in early commercial technologies for use by U.S. national security agencies. Because of intensifying competition with China, we added a new line of investment to promote U.S. innovation supremacy in next-generation computing, energy security, and engineering biology. Our teams identify the most important but lagging component technologies in these areas, find promising startups to support and encourage private investors to invest alongside IQT. This pilot effort is on track to complete a dozen investments with less than $20 million.

In theory, an SWF can operate at a scale and with an influence that current options cannot. It makes sense to build on existing models and programs where possible. For example, IQT’s equity investing pilot could be scaled in size and breadth and spun out independently as part of an SWF. An early-stage equity investment effort could feed into programs to support a separate fund for later-stage companies. OSC’s loan program might provide a useful framework. And DFC’s mandate for overseas investment could be broadened to include domestic activity and given greater independence. However an innovation fund is combined and structured, it should strive to leverage U.S. private capital to greater effect at the cutting edge of these technologies, at a low cost to taxpayers.

FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

Establishing an SWF would have risks. An early-stage fund would undoubtedly invest in some companies that flounder. But fund managers can mitigate that possibility by being diligent about SWF investments, evaluating the management team and the fundamentals of prospective companies in addition to their technology goals. Washington can also complement new investments with policies that mitigate risk. Congress, for example, has proposed legislation to protect U.S. companies from Chinese dumping. In doing so, it is attempting to help companies (and the country) avoid the fate of Solyndra, a solar cell company that received $535 million in federal loans before going bankrupt, becoming the poster child for wasteful government spending. Yet the company failed in part because the United States had no plan to address the fallout when China flooded the market with cheap, subsidized solar cells. The Trump administration should anticipate Chinese dumping aimed at undermining U.S. competitors in critical minerals and other supply chains and safeguard its investments with plans to stabilize pricing and purchase innovative American technology.

An American SWF also risks becoming politicized or otherwise corrupted, as a handful of foreign SWFs have. In China, for example, state investment ties businesses to the political interests of the Chinese Communist Party (and, sometimes, to the personal interests of CCP leaders). To prevent a U.S. fund from being similarly misused, Washington should select and charter the investing entity but allow it to operate independently as a nonprofit to avoid it being hijacked by personal interests or political conflicts. The fund’s investments, the rationale behind them, and the fund’s overall performance should be transparent and publicly available. The government should conduct oversight of the fund by annually evaluating its returns, but it should have no role in its operation.

Ultimately, the risks of an SWF are worth the potential value to the nation. In the United States today, commercial technology is driven almost exclusively by the market. That means there is plenty of money for artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. But many of the technologies essential for maintaining the United States’ global primacy, such as biomanufacturing or new materials for the next generation of computing, fall by the wayside. This impedes innovation and handicaps the United States in its competition with China, which employs an enormous SWF and directs and nurtures national champion companies that dominate global markets. The United States should never seek to match China’s brute force approach to economic power. But it can establish its own fund to help forge a path to sustained technology preeminence. With relatively small amounts of money, Washington can help steer private capital toward promising companies that investors might otherwise ignore. A separate fund could support scaling up the most successful of these startups into global forces.

An SWF would also play to U.S. national strengths: the United States is always best served when government and private industry are aligned in support of the national interest, as they often were during the Cold War. But the country has yet to fully harness the energy and independence of the private sector to further a long-term vision of economic prosperity and national security. A sovereign wealth fund could. Trump’s executive order, then, could mark the beginning of a new vision for American technology leadership in the twenty-first century.

STEVE BOWSHER is CEO of IQT.

SARAH SEWALL is Executive Vice President for National Innovation Strategy at IQT.Foreign Affairs · by More by Sarah Sewall · February 24, 2025

25. China orders military changes to prepare for "engaging in warfare"

​Perhaps we will learn it is all a joke.

Conclusion:

What Happens Next?

The changes are set to take place on April 1.

China orders military changes to prepare for "engaging in warfare"

Newsweek · by Mandy Taheri · February 22, 2025

ByMandy Taheri is a Newsweek reporter based in Brooklyn. She joined Newsweek as a reporter in 2024. You can get in touch with Mandy via email: m.taheri@newsweek.com. Languages: English, French

Writers Page

Weekend Reporter

Newsweek Is A Trust Project Member

news article

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

Share

✓ Link copied to clipboard!

Chinese President Xi Jinping has approved military reforms aimed at boosting combat readiness and preparing the armed forces for "engaging in warfare," set to take effect this spring, according to the Chinese government's website.

Newsweek reached out to the U.S. State Department for comment via email on Saturday.

Why It Matters

Tensions between the United States and China remain high over issues ranging from trade tariffs to military activity in the South China Sea, particularly with a focus on Taiwan.

Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory—a claim the self-governing island rejects. Although Washington does not maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taipei, the U.S. remains Taiwan's largest supplier of foreign arms.

Xi has said that "reunification" with Taiwan is a national goal and has warned it may require the use of force.

What To Know

Xi, who serves as chairman of the Central Military Commission overseeing China's military, signed orders on regulations governing "the military's interior order, code of conduct and military formation" on Friday, the government said.

The changes are aimed at transforming China's military into "world-class armed forces," with a "more standardized order in war preparation, training, operations and daily life." The revised rules include updates to military appearance, conduct and training, with the most prominent focusing on preparing forces for "engaging in warfare."

China has previously staged military exercises and war games off Taiwan's coast, which is only separated by a 100-mile-wide strait. Taiwan maintains its own democratic autonomy from China despite Beijing's claims of sovereignty over the island.

The U.S. adheres to a decades-long diplomatic agreement of the "One China" policy, which acknowledges, but does not endorse, China's claims over Taiwan. Earlier this week, a bipartisan Senate bill to counter this policy and affirm U.S. support for Taiwan was introduced.

The U.S. recognizes Taiwan as a key partner in the Indo-Pacific region and maintains a "robust unofficial relationship" with the island, according to the U.S. State Department.

U.S.-China diplomacy is often strained over Taiwan, with Beijing notingin December statement that Taiwan is "the first red line that cannot be crossed in China-U.S. relations," and urged the U.S. to stop arming Taiwan.

The Chinese military has over 370 ships and submarines, forming the world's largest navy by hull count. This week, Australia and New Zealand noted the presence of Chinese naval vessels in the Tasman Sea, with the U.S. allies calling it "unusual."

An aerial drone photo shows China's first Type 054B frigate on January 22 at a military port in Qingdao, China. An aerial drone photo shows China's first Type 054B frigate on January 22 at a military port in Qingdao, China. Pu Haiyang/Xinhua via AP

What People Are Saying

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., told Newsweek in November: "The Taiwan question is the most important and most sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations. The U.S. government needs to earnestly abide by the One China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiqués and prudently handle Taiwan-related issues so as to avoid severe damage to China-U.S. relations and cross-Strait peace and stability."

A spokesperson for the Australian Defense Department told Newsweek on Thursday: "Australia respects the rights of all states to exercise freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace, under international law, particularly the [United Nations] Convention on the Law of the Sea."

Senator James Risch, an Idaho Republican, said on Thursday when introducing a resolution countering the "One China Policy": "Let me make one thing very clear: America does not recognize China's claim over Taiwan. Once again, the Chinese government has attempted to trick the world and subvert the United Nations for its own purposes — but we see these malign tactics and stand in support of our friends in Taiwan."

What Happens Next?

The changes are set to take place on April 1.

26. Can the Ukraine War End in 2025? A Realistic Strategy for Peace

​Excerpts:

Of course, even the United States’s more pragmatic strategy can hardly guarantee an end to the war.

Only Russia and Ukraine can make that choice. Realistically, the odds of success in 2025 are probably no more than 50%. But this approach would allow the United States to ensure its core strategic interests in Eastern Europe, including preserving a sovereign Ukraine, limiting and ultimately reducing the risks of escalation, and maximizing the odds of a durable end to the conflict sometime during the Trump presidency.

Can the Ukraine War End in 2025? A Realistic Strategy for Peace

19fortyfive.com · by Michael O'Hanlon · February 23, 2025

After three years of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have established mainly a stalemate, even if the battle is trending slightly in Russia’s favor at present.

Yet Russia is suffering more than 1,000 casualties a day, killed and wounded, and Ukraine perhaps half as many (out of a population only one-fourth as large). Both sides may decide that it is no longer worth sacrificing so much blood and treasure for minimal territorial gains.

President Trump’s return to the White House also changes the conversation, given his emphasis on the importance of ending the fighting soon as America’s top priority in the war (and I believe Trump is correct in this view, provided that Ukraine can remain a sovereign and independent country, even if I disagree with Mr. Trump about the causes of the war and the legitimacy of the Zelensky presidency).

To be sure, the wrong peace deal could embolden Putin to reignite the war somewhere down the road after rearming (if too soft) or permanently poison Russia’s relations with the West and perhaps even increase the odds of war between Russia and NATO (if too harsh) or lead to the overthrow of the Zelensky government in Ukraine and installment of a puppet regime subservient to Moscow (if too impatient/rushed).

Putin may also string out a negotiation process to play for time and greater territorial gains while he keeps fighting.

President Trump has claimed that he could negotiate an end to this terrible war quickly. I commend his priorities. To do so, however, he will need more leverage on both sides.

Time for a New Strategy in Ukraine?

A new U.S. and NATO strategy for the war might give Ukraine one last good chance to liberate stolen and occupied territory in 2025—but not necessarily.

Ending the war soon, in a stabilizing and sustainable way, should indeed be the top priority. Ukraine made some progress in its 2022 counteroffensives but far less so in 2023 or 2024. It has been arming up and gearing up for another try; there is perhaps a small chance it could succeed with a different approach this time.

But sometime in 2025, either in the coming weeks or after a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive, the United States could prioritize ending the fighting, even if Russia remains in possession/control of 15 to 20 percent of pre-war Ukraine.

Ukraine could maintain its political claims on the Russian-occupied territories but would agree not to pursue their liberation on the battlefield. Russia would agree to end the aggression and recognize that because no one can trust it going forward, there will need to be strong international mechanisms to undergird Ukraine’s long-term security.

What a New U.S. Ukraine Strategy Could Look Like

American strategy should include the following additional premises and key elements:

– Unless Ukraine somehow achieves big success in a counteroffensive in early 2025, a different and more limited U.S. and NATO weapons assistance program should be crafted for Ukraine thereafter, emphasizing defensive arms.

That new program should be open-ended since no one can predict if and when Russia will stop its aggression. So should continued economic support for Kyiv from key donors in Europe, North America, and Japan.

– Tougher economic punishment against Russia that gives it more significant incentives to negotiate an end to the war quickly.

China should be pressured to reduce industrial outputs to Russia unless the war ends soon.

Most of all, to create leverage and time pressure, by 2025, Western countries might start tapping a quarter to half of Russia’s $300 billion in frozen assets per year and giving the money to Ukraine.

That should continue until a verifiable peace is reached, at which point Moscow would regain the remaining balance of its assets.

– A declared Western willingness to lift most other economic sanctions on Russia over time if it agrees to and respects genuine peace.

-A willingness to consider other means, besides NATO membership, to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security, as a way to make a deal more palatable to Moscow and thus more negotiable and durable.

Ukraine tanks fighting. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Georgetown Professor Lise Howard and I have written of a concept that would deploy foreign military observers and trainers to Ukraine for years to come as a form of robust tripwire.

Most troops could be European; some would ideally be American to give the mission teeth and credibility with Russia.

Alternatively, as Council on Foreign Relations scholar Paul Stares and I have written more recently, were President Trump unwilling to put any American military personnel on Ukrainian soil, the U.S. role might be to help backstop a European military presence within Ukraine, perhaps with a quick-reaction force based in Poland.

To pressure Moscow to acquiesce, this offer might be time-limited; NATO could state its intention to offer membership to Ukraine if Russia refused to make a deal within say a year from the start of negotiations.

Could This Work?

Of course, even the United States’s more pragmatic strategy can hardly guarantee an end to the war.

Image Credit: Social Media of Ukraine Armed Forces.

Only Russia and Ukraine can make that choice. Realistically, the odds of success in 2025 are probably no more than 50%. But this approach would allow the United States to ensure its core strategic interests in Eastern Europe, including preserving a sovereign Ukraine, limiting and ultimately reducing the risks of escalation, and maximizing the odds of a durable end to the conflict sometime during the Trump presidency.

About the Author: Dr. Michael O’Hanlon

Michael O’Hanlon is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy and budgets, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He is a senior fellow and directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy, and Technology. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University and a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; he was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. In 2023, O’Hanlon published a book titled “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861.” The paperback version of the book, with a preface covering the American Revolution as well as the declared wars of the 19th century, came out in 2024. You can follow him on X: @MichaeEOHanlon.

19fortyfive.com · by Michael O'Hanlon · February 23, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com