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Quotes of the Day:
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."
– Eric Hoffer
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."
– Henry David Thoreau
"People in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than governments."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
1. Iran, Escalation, and the Strategy of Denial
2. C-UAS Operations: We Need a Single Pane of Glass
3. Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific
4. Elbridge Colby and the Reordering of the Indo-Pacific
5. Lawmakers From Both Parties Push Navy to Award Mega Submarine Contracts
6. U.K. Delays Controversial Deal Linked to U.S. Military Base After Trump
7. Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare
8. Soldiers Experiment With First-Person-View Unmanned Aircraft Systems
9. A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation
10. China uses a ‘whole-of-society approach’
11. The Risk and Reward of US Intervention in Iran
12. Violent Militias Stand Between the U.S. and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches
13. Former Venezuelan Generals Seek to Assist Maduro’s U.S. Prosecution
14. Shattering the Software Stovepipes: How to Close the US Military’s Technology Integration Gap
15. Cognitive Warfare Is Cheap—and That’s the Problem
16. The Transatlantic Defense Business Politics Can’t Break
17. Arctic Hot Takes Need a Cold Reality Check
1. Iran, Escalation, and the Strategy of Denial
Summary:
Mark Haselton argues the Trump administration’s Iran approach, marked by escalating rhetoric, loosely bounded objectives, and transactional coalition management, risks undermining the December 2025 NSS and January 2026 NDS, both centered on denying China regional hegemony in Asia. He contends U.S. high-end assets are finite, and prolonged Middle East escalation can become “forever war” inertia that absorbs naval forces, ISR, air and missile defense, tankers, and precision munitions needed for deterrence in the Asia-Indo-Pacific. Beijing watches U.S. capacity and alliance cohesion for openings toward a Taiwan fait accompli, while Moscow may probe if the U.S. anchor looks stretched. Denial depends on credible concentration and trusted coalition access, which inconsistent narratives and transactional diplomacy can erode.
Comment: This is one of the best critiques of deterrence by denial I have read. Mark treats alliance confidence as combat power, so loose talk about Iran becomes a readiness problem in Asia because partners hedge when they doubt judgment. It also warns that “bounded” operations drift into structure, and once posture becomes routine, you lose the option to surge where the decisive fight sits.
If denial against China is the organizing principle, what concrete cap on forces, munitions, and time would define “bounded” Iran action in practice?
When public claims swing from “obliterated” to “weeks away,” how do allies decide what is true, and how much does that uncertainty slow permissions and integration?
If a Taiwan crisis and Middle East escalation converge, what is the first mission you would stop doing, and who accepts the risk you just created?
See the analysis of Bridge Colby's strategy in the Foreign Policy article by Alejandro Reyes.
Iran, Escalation, and the Strategy of Denial
substack.com · The Old and Bold
The Self-Inflicted Path to a Multi-Theater Crisis
The Old and Bold
Feb 25, 2026
https://vaberet.substack.com/p/iran-escalation-and-the-strategy?utm
The Trump Administration’s handling of Iran, characterized by escalating rhetoric, loosely bounded objectives, and increasingly transactional coalition management, risks undercutting the strategy articulated in the National Security Strategy (December 2025) and the National Defense Strategy (January 2026). At a moment when concentrated power and durable alliances are indispensable to deterring China, diverting high-end military capacity and eroding allied confidence could weaken Washington’s ability to prevent the most consequential outcome of all: a fait accompli in Asia.
Having spent years writing strategy in the Pentagon and later working China and Middle East problem sets within the intelligence and defense communities, I do not treat those documents as aspirational rhetoric. They are operational guidance. When colleagues suggested that Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial offered insight into how this administration conceptualizes great-power competition, I approached it as a framework for execution rather than an academic exercise. With Colby now serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and helping shape the 2026 National Defense Strategy, the book is not merely intellectual history. It reflects governing intent.
At its core, the argument is sound. In a multipolar world defined by near-peer competition, especially with China, the United States must prioritize denying Beijing regional hegemony in Asia. That requires disciplined prioritization, credible military deterrence, and durable alliances capable of absorbing pressure across theaters. It also requires restraint in secondary theaters so that finite military capacity and political capital are not diluted.
That is why the current trajectory with Iran is concerning.
Iran is not benign. It employs proxy warfare, coercion, and nuclear brinkmanship as instruments of statecraft. It threatens U.S. personnel and partners and destabilizes critical maritime corridors. I have no illusions about the regime’s intentions. Iran must be countered.
But how we counter it matters.
Prioritization Under Constraint
Strategy is choice under constraint. The United States no longer enjoys the margin of dominance that once allowed it to manage multiple major theaters simultaneously. The “Two Major Theater War” construct has faded not as a slogan but as a practical reality.
High-end naval forces, long-range strike assets, air and missile defense systems, ISR platforms, tankers, and precision munitions are finite. They are also the backbone of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. When those assets are persistently absorbed in reactive operations elsewhere, the opportunity cost is strategic.
Escalation in the Middle East, if not clearly bounded, risks becoming structurally consuming. Sustained strikes, broadened targeting, and layered defensive deployments against Iranian retaliation can evolve into enduring deterrence obligations. Missile defense batteries remain deployed. ISR stays fixed. Naval rotations extend. Over time, posture becomes routine.
This is how modern “forever wars” begin. Not through invasion, but through inertia.
Colin Powell’s warning, “You break it, you own it,” applies in contemporary form. If escalation fractures regional equilibrium, Washington becomes the default guarantor against instability. That commitment does not sunset easily.
The issue is not whether Iran is dangerous. It is whether engagement untethered from prioritization risks enabling the pacing challenge elsewhere.
China Is Watching
Beijing studies American capacity with clinical focus. Chinese planners understand readiness cycles, industrial throughput, stockpile depth, and reinforcement timelines. They map U.S. constraints against their own political calendar.
Xi Jinping has tied national rejuvenation to reunification with Taiwan and directed the PLA to develop credible contingency capability by 2027. That deadline does not mandate action, but it shapes planning. Capability paired with perceived opportunity is combustible.
A Taiwan fait accompli would not require operational perfection. It would require speed, information dominance, and allied hesitation. If China assesses that U.S. reinforcement timelines are longer than advertised, that munitions stocks are thinner than assumed, or that alliance cohesion is brittle under stress, deterrence erodes.
Strategic opportunism exploits distraction and often arrives under the radar.
If the United States appears absorbed in a prolonged Middle East confrontation, burning high-demand assets and negotiating coalition permissions under pressure, Beijing may conclude that the risks of testing U.S. resolve are declining.
Denial rests not only on capability, but on credible concentration of that capability in the decisive theater.
Europe and the Anchor Problem
Europe matters to this equation not as a distraction, but as an enabler. A capable, increasingly self-reliant NATO allows the United States to prioritize Asia without inviting opportunism elsewhere.
European nations have increased defense spending since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That progress is real. But force integration and industrial expansion move on timelines measured in years. If U.S. commitments in the Middle East become structural, America’s ability to reinforce Europe rapidly in a crisis is strained.
Moscow does not require dramatic escalation to benefit. It requires doubt about reinforcement timelines, political endurance, and alliance cohesion. Probing behavior becomes more attractive when the American anchor appears stretched.
Europe also functions as a force multiplier in the competition with China. Industrial coordination, export controls, and financial alignment strengthen Western leverage globally. Those advantages depend on confidence that the United States is strategically disciplined.
Overextension in one theater reverberates across others.
Credibility as Combat Power
At a time when denial hinges on coalition cohesion, rhetoric and coalition management are operational variables, not stylistic choices.
Denial cannot be executed unilaterally. It depends on allied basing and overflight permissions, shared intelligence, synchronized sanctions, integrated air and missile defense, and the political will to absorb economic and military risk. That alignment rests on trust in American judgment.
When Iranian nuclear facilities were described as “obliterated” in June 2025, escalation risks appeared justified by decisive outcomes. If that assessment had remained durable and verifiable, the gamble would have seemed proportionate.
Months later, describing Iran as “weeks away” from breakout forces allies to reconcile competing narratives. Either earlier claims overstated effectiveness, or current assessments overstate urgency. Without disciplined explanation, coherence suffers.
This is not semantic. When outcomes and urgency diverge, partners question whether assessments are stable and evidence-based or politically contingent. That uncertainty shifts risk calculations onto coalition members. Faced with ambiguity, they hedge. Decisions slow and operational complications multiply.
Transactional diplomacy compounds the problem. Treating basing or overflight as leverage rather than the product of consultation projects volatility. Allies rarely walk away, but they grow cautious. Access becomes conditional. Political backing softens.
In coalition warfare, credibility is combat power.
As confidence erodes, the mechanics of denial degrade. Access slows. Integration weakens. Political backing becomes less certain precisely when speed and unity matter most. That is the pathway to convergence.
The Worst Case: Strategic Convergence
The nightmare scenario is not defeat in a single theater. It is simultaneous strain across multiple theaters.
What happens if the United States is locked into a prolonged confrontation in the Middle East, with forces committed, munitions flowing, and senior leadership attention absorbed, just as tensions spike in the Taiwan Strait?
China does not need to defeat the United States outright to alter the regional balance. It needs to identify moments when American capacity is stretched and allied decision-making slows. Sustained U.S. commitments in CENTCOM draw from the same pool of naval forces, air assets, missile defense systems, ISR platforms, and precision munitions that would be required to respond rapidly in the Indo-Pacific. Those constraints are visible, measurable, and factor into Beijing’s calculus.
If U.S. carrier strike groups are cycling through extended Middle East deployments, if air defense interceptors are being expended in response to regional escalation, and if stockpiles are replenished more slowly than they are consumed, the margin for rapid concentration in Asia narrows. China could interpret that environment not as weakness, but as opportunity. Even limited coercive actions, including quarantine measures, gray-zone pressure, or incremental military moves short of full invasion, become more attractive if Beijing assesses that Washington’s ability to surge decisive force is constrained. Strategic advantage does not require total distraction, but requires only enough doubt about American bandwidth to shift risk calculations.
Layer Europe onto that equation. If Moscow perceives the American anchor as distracted or structurally constrained by sustained commitments in the Middle East, the incentive to probe increases. European security leaders are already speaking with unusual candor about the risk. Senior German commanders have warned publicly that Russia retains the capacity to mount a limited attack on NATO territory and that a broader confrontation within the next several years cannot be dismissed. German defense officials have also cautioned that Europe must prepare its logistics, medical support, and mobilization structures for the possibility of high-intensity conflict. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They reflect a sober reassessment of Russian intent and capability.
Deterrence rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. It erodes when adversaries perceive distraction, hesitation, or misaligned priorities within alliances. If U.S. attention and high-end capabilities are increasingly absorbed in managing escalation with Iran, both Beijing and Moscow may conclude that the threshold for testing allied resolve has lowered. Strategic opportunism thrives on perceived imbalance.
Convergence means three theaters under pressure at once, not because of decisive defeat in any one, but because cumulative commitments narrow options and force reactive decisions.
Great powers should choose where to assume risk. They should not drift into simultaneous exposure.
Discipline Under Pressure
None of this argues for ignoring Iran. The regime poses real risks to regional stability and U.S. interests. It must be addressed.
But it must be addressed with bounded objectives, restored verification mechanisms, coalition backing, and strategic discipline. Open-ended escalation that consumes high-end capacity and erodes allied confidence risks enabling the very pacing threat we seek to constrain.
The Indo-Pacific remains the decisive theater. Preventing Chinese regional hegemony is the central long-term objective of U.S. strategy. Every major decision should be evaluated against that organizing principle.
The United States retains immense advantages. Our alliances remain formidable. Our adversaries face internal constraints of their own. But advantages magnify only when aligned with allies and applied with prioritization.
Strategy is not the demonstration of capability. It is the disciplined allocation of it.
If we communicate clearly, build consensus, and keep the Indo-Pacific balance of power as our lodestar, we can manage Iran without undermining denial.
If we do not, we risk achieving the one outcome denial was designed to prevent, not because we were overpowered, but because we were overextended.
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substack.com · The Old and Bold
2. C-UAS Operations: We Need a Single Pane of Glass
Summary:
Bill Edwards argues C-UAS operations are failing less from missing sensors than from fragmented command and control. Operators must juggle many disconnected interfaces, networks, symbology, and update rates, which drives cognitive overload and fragile kill chains where detection does not reliably cue identification or mitigation. He says most mitigation is procedural and compliance-based, workable for “clueless careless” hobbyists but brittle against deliberate, evasive, or autonomous threats. The fix is an architectural mandate for a single pane of glass, a common operating picture integrating detection, tracking, mitigation status, airspace context, and policy-aware decision support with secure interoperability. He warns cybersecurity-driven physical isolation often increases operational risk and that AI should support fusion and prioritization, not add more panes.
Comment: Extensive graphics at the link.
C-UAS Operations: We Need a Single Pane of Glass
by Bill Edwards
02.25.2026 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/25/c-uas-operations-a-single-pane-of-glass/
The Core Problem: Fragmentation When the Interface Becomes the Adversary
The counter unmanned aerial systems (C‑UAS) operator leaned over her workstation, eyes darting between a cluster of windows scattered across her graphical interface. Each pane represented a different data layer, a different sensor, a different fragment of the operational picture she was expected to hold together in real time. This was on one monitor, but several others existed as well. As she toggled and switched her focus between them, the degradation of situational awareness was immediate and unmistakable. What began as a manageable task with a single data stream quickly became cognitive overload when multiplied across six or more independent feeds. The operator was no longer fighting the drone; she was fighting the interface. In that moment, the system itself became the adversary. This is not an isolated observation. It is a systemic flaw that has quietly embedded itself into the fabric of modern C-UAS operations, and unless we confront it directly, we will continue to ask operators to perform the impossible. Now, multiply that by potentially six or more data streams in a layered sensor approach, and you have just created operational paralysis. We have given local law enforcement sensors, not solutions. We must do better.
The following ideas and analysis are based on operational observation, system behavior, and first-principles command-and-control common practices logic, rather than a single study, product, or doctrine publication. While established concepts from joint operations, cybersecurity architecture, and human factors inform the discussion, the conclusions reflect an assessment of how C-UAS systems are currently deployed and operated in practice, particularly at the state, local, tribal, and territorial levels.
Why C-UAS is a Command-and-Control Challenge
Over the past several years, we have made significant progress in small C-UAS thought, technology, and operational approaches—but we still have a long way to go. The recent SAFER SKIES legislation is a positive step, yet it falls short in several critical areas. More importantly, it has introduced real confusion among state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) and military stakeholders regarding what and when it authorizes operations—particularly when it comes to the mitigation mission.
Law enforcement agencies in major metropolitan areas are doing their best to set the conditions for safer skies, as are military installations across the country. In practice, however, many are primarily tracking small drones using RF-based detection systems such as AeroScope—a system sold by the world’s largest drone manufacturer, DJI Technology, based in China. While newer detection systems are emerging that extend beyond proprietary DJI Technology protocols and potentially a full-spectrum signals capability, the practical reality is that most mitigation today is not technological; it is procedural. Operators identify a drone and attempt to contact the pilot, asking them to land, and military installations still disagree on defining the perimeter for authority to act. In both cases, this is a compliance-based outcome, not a defeat mechanism. This approach works because the majority of drone contacts fall into the “clueless–careless” portion of the threat triangle—hobbyists, uninformed operators, or individuals unknowingly violating airspace restrictions, and this is a good thing, but it will not always be the case. In reality, systems, policies, and architectures built around this assumption collapse rapidly when confronted with deliberate, evasive, or autonomous threats. A malicious or technically competent actor will not respond to phone calls, door knocks, or verbal commands. The most concerning gap in current C-UAS operations is not a single sensor or legal authority—it is the absence of a unified visualization interface, which practitioners consistently refer to as a single pane of glass.
The Single Pane of Glass
In essence, this is the one-stop operational environment detection, identification, tracking, mitigation status, airspace context, and decision support into a coherent, intuitive display. In military terms, this is simply a Common Operating Picture (COP). Shockingly, many current C-UAS operations lack a single pane that brings all the tools together in one place for decision-making. Operators are often forced to manage multiple independent sensor systems, each with its own user interface, map symbology, alert logic, and update rate. RF detection appears on one screen. Radar tracks appear on another. EO/IR video feeds are displayed elsewhere. Mitigation tools—if authorized—are controlled through entirely separate consoles. The operator effectively becomes the fusion engine, mentally correlating timestamps, geolocation errors, track IDs, and confidence levels in real time.
This is cognitively expensive in a mission environment that demands speed, clarity, and decisiveness. This fragmentation extends beyond visualization into data transport and communications architecture. Detection sensors and mitigation systems often reside on entirely separate networks—one on municipal long-term evolution (LTE), another on FirstNet (potentially), another on Starlink—with no shared data schema or latency guarantees. The outcome is not merely inefficiency, but fragile kill chains. Detection fails to reliably cue identification, identification does not consistently drive mitigation, and mitigation effects are not immediately visible in the operating picture.
This condition undermines core principles of command and control. Unity of effort collapses when systems operate in isolation rather than as a coherent whole. Decision advantage is lost when operators are forced into manual correlation and workarounds. System resilience degrades when mission success depends on parallel, disconnected communication paths instead of an integrated architecture. Meanwhile, training and sustainment demands grow disproportionally, as each additional interface requires separate expertise, certification, and ongoing proficiency.
Even more critically, the lack of a single pane of glass prevents scalable operations. A city managing a marathon, a stadium, and an airport simultaneously cannot afford bespoke sensor stacks and custom integrations at each site. Without a unified COP, C-UAS remains artisanal rather than operationalized. To be clear, this is not a technology availability problem. Sensors and effectors exist. Data fusion engines exist. What is missing is an architectural mandate—a requirement that C-UAS systems integrate into a unified command-and-control layer with standardized data models, common symbology, role-based access, and policy-aware decision support.
Until this gap is addressed, SLTT agencies remain trapped in a reactive posture: competent at talking compliant operators down, poorly positioned to defeat autonomous or adversarial systems, and dangerously dependent on the operator’s ability to mentally fuse chaos under stress. Just look at a new concept for fiber-optic-controlled small drones. These platforms are navigated via a cable resembling a fishing line that essentially makes them invisible to detection if radar is not present in the stack. Even more urgent are recent reports of these drones being used in urban environments with increased fiber protection and strength to allow for maneuvering in and around structures. C-UAS is no longer a sensor problem. It is a command-and-control problem. Without a true single pane of glass, we are asking operators to fight a three-dimensional, high-speed problem with two-dimensional, disconnected tools.
Constraints: Cyber, Policy, and AI
Cybersecurity considerations and operational paradox are the next issue. In many current C-UAS deployments, individual sensors are intentionally placed on separate communications networks. This is often justified as a cybersecurity measure, based on the belief that isolating systems reduces the risk of compromise or lateral movement by an adversary. While this concern is not unfounded at the network level, its operational consequences are frequently misunderstood. Cybersecurity-driven segmentation is valid when applied as logical separation within a well-designed architecture. It becomes problematic when it results in physically isolated systems that cannot share data in real time. Situational awareness fragments, latency increases, and operators are forced to manually correlate information across multiple interfaces and networks. A measure intended to increase security instead introduces a predictable operational failure. In practice, the widespread use of separate communication modality links for detection and mitigation systems is often driven as much by vendor risk avoidance, acquisition silos, and policy ambiguity as by true cyber strategy. Without an architectural authority defining how systems should securely interoperate, vendors default to isolation because it is simpler to certify and easier to defend contractually; however, it creates the next level of complexity for the C-UAS team.
The result is a paradox: hypothetical cyber risk is prioritized over operational risk. Fragmented communications prevent the formation of a true common operating picture, degrade sensor cueing and track correlation, and slow decision-making precisely when speed and clarity are most critical. Rather than increasing security, this approach transfers risk to the human operator, who becomes the ad hoc fusion engine—unlogged, un-patchable, and under extreme stress. A cyber-resilient C-UAS architecture does not require isolated situational awareness. It requires logical segmentation, one-way data publishing, role-based access controls, and visibility into network health—all while maintaining a unified operational picture. When designed correctly, cybersecurity and operational effectiveness are mutually reinforcing rather than competing priorities.
So, what is the key operational reality check? No single product today universally delivers every element of the ideal COP straight out of the box. Today’s C-UAS solutions generally fall into several categories. Some focus on sensor fusion and unified display platforms that come closest to delivering a true common operating picture. Others offer modular sensor and effector stacks that are technically capable of integration but require deliberate architectural design to function as a coherent system. A third group consists of defense- or platform-centric integrated solutions, often optimized for military operations and environments rather than the legal, operational, and resource constraints faced by SLTT agencies.
Finally, there are solutions designed as plugins into broader command-and-control ecosystems, such as ATAK or TAK, that extend existing situational awareness tools rather than replacing them. The reality of the industry, however, is more nuanced. While some vendors claim to provide unified situational awareness, many in practice deliver integration layers or APIs intended to feed an external common operating picture. A fully seamless, low-latency, standardized COP—one that integrates detection, tracking, mitigation control, and policy overlays into a single operational view—still largely requires custom systems engineering and integration work for each deployment. Furthermore, the industry landscape reflects this tension. Defense-centric solutions often excel in military environments but lack the policy-aware overlays required for SLTT operations. Still, these remain far short of visualization at the operator level that provides ease of use, stable environments, and a clear picture of what decision should be made. In short, we do not lack capability; we lack integration, architectural discipline, and operational mandates. This could not be more important now than ever. SAFER SKIES has begun delegating mitigation authority to SLTT, and these tools will become part of the “kit” needed to secure our most vulnerable facilities, venues, and sensitive sites. Integration between detection and defeat sensors is not a want; it is a need.
Now, let’s discuss the maturity of artificial intelligence and considerations for this concept. Artificial intelligence is often presented as the solution to C-UAS complexity, but in practice, AI has largely been bolted onto the very fragmentation it is supposed to fix. Many current systems apply machine learning narrowly—improving RF classification, object recognition in EO/IR feeds, or anomaly detection in radar returns—without addressing the broader command-and-control problem. The result is better individual sensors, not better operations. An AI model that improves detection accuracy by 10% is of limited value if its output still appears on a separate screen, with different symbology, latency, and confidence logic than every other system in the stack. In this context, AI risks accelerating data generation while worsening cognitive overload. Where AI does matter—critically—is at the fusion, prioritization, and decision-support layers. A true single pane of glass is not just a visualization challenge; it is a reasoning challenge. AI is uniquely suited to perform the correlation work that operators are currently forced to do mentally: associating RF detections with radar tracks, reconciling sensor confidence levels, resolving geolocation error margins, and maintaining persistent track identity across sensor handoffs. Properly applied, AI becomes the fusion engine—reducing dozens of raw inputs into a smaller number of high-confidence, explainable operational objects that an operator can act on.
Equally important, AI enables temporal and spatial compression of decision-making. In a fast-moving, three-dimensional environment, the question is not simply what is in the air, but what matters now. AI-driven prioritization can assess intent indicators, flight behavior, proximity to protected assets, historical patterns, and policy constraints simultaneously—surfacing the few tracks that require immediate attention while suppressing noise. This is not autonomous engagement; it is cognitive offloading. The human remains the decision authority, but the machine continuously curates the problem set so that attention is focused where seconds truly matter. AI also plays a decisive role in policy-aware decision support, particularly for SLTT operations operating under constrained legal authorities. An AI-enabled COP can continuously evaluate detected activity against geofencing rules, temporary flight restrictions, event-specific authorities, mitigation permissions, and collateral risk models—presenting operators with not only what can be done, but what is legally and operationally appropriate in that moment. Without this layer, operators are forced to recall policy from memory under stress, introducing hesitation precisely when speed and confidence are required. With it, AI becomes an enabler of disciplined action rather than an opaque black box. However, none of this is achievable without architectural discipline. AI cannot compensate for disconnected networks, proprietary data models, or isolated sensor stacks. In fact, AI systems perform best when data is standardized, time-synchronized, and shared through a unified command-and-control layer.
Without a single pane of glass, AI becomes just another pane—another alert stream competing for attention. With it, AI becomes the force multiplier that finally allows C-UAS operations to scale, adapt, and remain resilient against autonomous and adversarial threats. In short, AI is not the answer to C-UAS fragmentation—but it is indispensable to solving it. The future of effective C-UAS operations lies not in autonomous defeat, but in AI-enabled command and control: machines doing what they do best—correlating, prioritizing, and reasoning at machine speed—so humans can do what only they can do: make accountable, lawful, and confident decisions under pressure.
Next are the operational and policy implications associated with this challenge. The speed of decision-making boils down to manual correlation of multiple interfaces, which slows response times. In high-tempo operations, every second counts. Resilience under stress is critical when systems are disconnected, and operators must act as the fusion engine, errors multiply, and the likelihood of mission failure increases. Training and sustainment multiply when each interface requires separate proficiency. Without standardization, operational knowledge becomes fragmented and difficult to maintain, and vendors cannot be everywhere all the time to provide expertise on the system or repair when needed. Scalability should not be complex because a city cannot deploy bespoke systems for each event. Without a single COP, C-UAS remains a collection of unscalable efforts.
Path Forward: Scalable, Secure, Integrated C-UAS
The path forward is straightforward. What is needed is a single, integrated operational environment—one that fuses detection, identification, tracking, and mitigation into a shared common operating picture. That environment must provide policy-aware decision support aligned with SLTT legal authorities, enabling operators and commanders to understand not just what is happening in the air, but also which actions are permissible in the moment. It must also employ logical network segmentation and role-based access controls that satisfy cybersecurity requirements without degrading operational effectiveness. Critically, the architecture must scale across multiple sites and jurisdictions, supporting coordinated operations rather than isolated systems. Finally, it must standardize data models, symbology, and alert logic across all sensors and effectors, ensuring that information is consistent, actionable, and immediately understandable at every level of command. Until such an environment exists, agencies will remain reactive—good at talking compliant operators down but poorly positioned to defeat autonomous or adversarial systems. Operators should not be expected to mentally fuse chaos under stress; technology must do the heavy lifting.
Lastly, and potentially of the utmost importance, one of the most critical challenges in C-UAS operations is the compressed time and expansive spatial environment in which operators must act. Small drones move quickly, unpredictably, and in three-dimensional airspace that often overlaps with crowded urban areas, critical infrastructure, and multiple simultaneous events.
Operators are required to detect, identify, track, and mitigate threats across this dynamic space in seconds, while simultaneously accounting for airspace restrictions, operator compliance, and collateral risk. When multiple sensor systems are disconnected, the mental effort needed to fuse spatially distributed information in real time becomes overwhelming. Anyone who has attempted to do this in real-time, live environments will attest to the complexity. Decisions that demand split-second accuracy across both time and space are slowed, degraded, or occasionally impossible, creating operational gaps that adversaries can exploit. Additionally, those in the decision seat want to have the confidence backed by technology support to make the best decision they can when detection and ultimately defeating tools are used to protect people and events from nefarious drone activity. In essence, the time-compressed, multi-dimensional operational environment transforms fragmented tools into a critical vulnerability, not just an inconvenience—and every second spent mentally fusing chaos is a second the public is exposed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the challenges facing C-UAS operations are not rooted in a lack of sensors, authorities, or emerging technologies. They stem from a failure to treat C-UAS as a true command-and-control problem. Over time, we have layered capability on top of capability—radar, RF, EO/IR, analytics, and mitigation tools—without requiring them to function as a coherent operational system. The result is not superiority, but complexity. Operators are surrounded by data yet deprived of clarity, empowered by tools yet constrained by fragmentation. This fragmentation carries real consequences. It slows decision-making in time-compressed environments, transfers integration risk to the human operator, and limits scalability across jurisdictions and events. It also creates a false sense of progress, where incremental sensor improvements mask structural weaknesses in how information is fused, visualized, and acted upon. In an era of autonomous, evasive, and increasingly sophisticated threats, this approach is not merely inefficient—it is unsafe.
The path forward does not require waiting for a perfect product or a revolutionary sensor. It requires architectural discipline and operational intent. A single pane of glass—implemented as a true common operating picture—must become the baseline expectation, not an aspirational feature. Detection, identification, tracking, mitigation, airspace context, policy constraints, and decision support must live in the same operational environment, governed by standardized data models, consistent symbology, and secure but connected networks. AI should not add noise to this picture, but reduce it—performing fusion, prioritization, and reasoning at machine speed so humans can decide with confidence. Most importantly, this shift is about respecting the human at the center of the system. Operators should not be expected to mentally fuse chaos under stress, reconcile conflicting data streams, or shoulder institutional risk through improvisation. Technology exists to shoulder that burden—if we demand that it be integrated, disciplined, and operationally coherent. C-UAS has reached its inflection point. As mitigation authorities expand, threats evolve, and public exposure increases, the margin for fragmented operations disappears. We are not late to this problem, but no longer early enough to afford half measures. Delay is no longer an option when proven data fusion solutions exist. Information is scattered across systems, and decision-making fractures at the worst possible moment. We must integrate, standardize, and operationalize C-UAS in a single pane of glass—because the next adversary will not respond to phone calls. The next adversary will not overwhelm us with better drones; they will exploit our inability to see, decide, and act as one.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Counter Unmanned Aerial System, cyber security
About The Author
- Bill Edwards
- Bill Edwards is the Director of Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) Operations and Training at ENSCO, after retiring from the military in 2018. Edwards has more than 35 years of expertise in operational and technical security, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, surveillance, and counter-surveillance.
- Before coming to ENSCO, he founded and operated Phoenix 6 Consulting, a customized security services firm. He also led Thornton Tomasetti’s security consulting group as a principal from 2018 to 2022. Recently, he led Building Intelligence’s directorate as President of the Federal and Public Safety to promote federal awareness of the firm’s trusted access management software. Edwards served as the Director of Intelligence for Theater Special Operations Command-North (USSOCOM), a position requiring extensive collaboration across the U.S. government security enterprise. He designed a cohesive counter-terrorism network with the U.S. Department of Defense, law enforcement, and inter-agency partners known as the“Blue Network,” while simultaneously building connections and networks abroad to support U.S. Homeland Security needs. Edwards has extensive experience in homeland security, homeland defense, and C-UAS security, safety, and emergency preparedness.
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Find all his work at: William “Bill” Edwards CPP, PSP, PCI, CPD | LinkedIn.
3. Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific
Summary:
Jon Reisher argues the modern information environment is algorithmically biased, amplifying polarization and filter bubbles that the PRC exploits through influence campaigns, including “spamoflauge” and local-voice impersonation. He proposes a partner-enabled Cognitive Warfare Framework to raise sovereign resilience and alter Beijing’s risk calculus. Core elements include a multinational Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell to synchronize social-media campaigns, measures of performance, and legal-diplomatic messaging, plus a Pacific Cognitive Commons data lake to share sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates. He links cognitive warfare to deterrence by denial, emphasizing distributed, authentic local voices, unclassified evidence sharing, and low-cost tools such as AI, bots detection, and template-driven messaging. He uses Palau to illustrate how small states could counter PRC influence and election interference through training, micro-grants, and coordinated campaigns.
Comment: Thanks to the IWI-SWJ partnership so we can read this again. This is one of the most important topics of national security in this era.
Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific
by Jon Reisher
02.25.2026 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/25/cognitive-warfare-2/
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of the Irregular Warfare Initiative as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on January 12, 2026 and is available here.
“Psychologically, the PRC is trying to cause mental disarray and confusion, in order to weaken fighting will and determination to defend ourselves.”
–Taiwan Ministry of National Defense
Editor’s Note: This article was submitted as part of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, in which authors were invited to explore how the United States and its partners can use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations. This article stood out for its innovative framing of cognitive warfare as a tool of deterrence and alliance-building, and for its practical recommendations on how small Indo-Pacific nations can leverage information operations to uphold international norms. We have edited the piece after its selection.
The balance of the modern global information environment has become algorithmically biased, with social media platforms tailoring content to users’ preferences and reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs. By isolating users in personalized filter bubbles, these algorithms amplify confirmation bias and cultivate increasingly polarized online echo chambers, distorting users’ perceptions of reality and fueling societal division—conditions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has learned to weaponize.
This is particularly true in small, strategically important countries in the Indo-Pacific, where the PRC orchestrates influence campaigns to propagate pro-Beijing narratives and discredit critics. For example, in the Philippines, a Chinese embassy–funded marketing firm called InfinitUs created fake social media accounts that praised China’s actions in the South China Sea, disparaged the U.S.–Philippine alliance, and amplified anti-American content under the guise of local voices. This kind of targeted political propaganda, sometimes called “spamoflauge,” illustrates how hostile actors exploit algorithmic amplification to reinforce existing rifts.
How, then, can the United States address the PRC’s systemic use of information warfare, given its unrestrained employment of misinformation against the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific? Part of the solution lies in adopting a partner-enabled Cognitive Warfare Framework: a construct designed to strengthen sovereign resilience while changing the PRC’s perception of risk in conducting influence campaigns or irregular warfare. At the center of this framework is a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): a multinational staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influence measures of performance, and legal-diplomatic messaging across the information environment. The framework would also establish a Pacific Cognitive Commons, an open-architecture data lake where partners and the CWOC could share sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time. Finally, the framework would provide local information power brokers technology grants with an emphasis on transparency and strengthening partner capacity.
Protecting International Norms Through the Human Dimension
Global stability depends on shared international norms, which the PRC has attempted to undermine by leveraging gray-zone tactics that allow Beijing to operate below the threshold of open conflict. Keeping with communist ideology, the PRC assiduously works to control information and narratives at home and abroad, developing information campaigns that weave together public opinion warfare, legal manipulation, and psychological pressure to erode the foundations of international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For instance, China’s assertion of the Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea disregards established maritime boundaries and challenges UNCLOS provisions, while simultaneously pressuring neighboring states to acquiesce through coercive presence operations and persuasive narratives.
In effect, China’s strategy aims to redefine the status quo without triggering direct confrontation. This gradual erosion of norms matters because agreements like UNCLOS provide more than legal clarity; they underpin stability by setting predictable standards for state conduct, constraining unilateral aggression, and legitimizing collective responses. When these norms weaken, predictability gives way to coercion, and the international order drifts from one rooted in law to one governed by opportunism or an alternative set of rules and facts of Beijing’s choosing—which it also backs up through concerted information campaigns and lawfare.
Countering China’s human-centered, narrative-driven strategy requires a response anchored in the human dimension—one that empowers authenticity and local voices across social media platforms, civil society fact-checkers, civil literacy education, and independent regional journalists not influenced or financed by outside state sponsors. Doing so can create an organic, scalable information network that makes it easier for civil society or the public to identify illegal behavior and misinformation in real time.
Furthermore, China fears empowered, networked activism which is why Beijing devotes significant resources to monitoring and managing the online activities of its own population. When taken in context of the South China Sea example raised earlier, the more that U.S. allies publish unclassified drone footage, crowdsource maritime data, or use artificial intelligence (AI) to expose PRC narratives and falsities, the higher the reputational cost incurred by Beijing, and the harder it becomes to alter political conditions with impunity.
In cognitive warfare, repetition across multiple media vectors—as opposed to amassing volume on one platform—becomes the metric of success. That is because one source of information is easier to counter than a network of different voices across multiple platforms and domains. As a result, every social media post, newspaper opinion piece, or fiery YouTube video can serve as a micro-deterrent that sustains truthful narratives.
Building Alliances Around Shared Cognitive Effects
Cognitive warfare is the deliberate shaping of perceptions, narratives, and decision cycles and is a decisive precondition for a strategy of denial against the PRC. Cognitive warfare also entails the purposeful manipulation of information, technology, and social dynamics to influence how audiences perceive reality, decide, and act, effectively turning perception itself into the primary battlespace. An effective cognitive warfare campaign to deter China’s aggression would emphasize messaging that upholds international norms, signals costs to China’s aggression and PRC stability, demonstrates allied unity, and integrates low-cost information effects to skew Beijing’s cost–benefit calculus long before crisis.
A strategy of denial in the information environment depends on an alliance ecosystem that can see, understand, and signal faster than the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can maneuver. Strategic denial is vital in the information dimension because once a narrative takes hold it is more difficult to counter or debunk an entrenched line of thinking. In economics this is known as a first mover advantage. Furthermore, RAND’s analysis of denial underscores the importance of credible, distributed American forces backed by partners that are willing to accept risk on behalf of each other. Modern technology lowers the barrier to collaboration by providing narrative toolkits, bot-detection software, and TikTok templates—open-source tools that can be shared with any cognitive warfare partner.
While the previous sections addressed integrated and combined information operations, the need for structure—a central body where practitioners and local actors can coordinate, seek guidance, and reinforce shared narratives—becomes essential. That’s where a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC)—a multi-national staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influences measures of performance, and crafts legal-diplomatic talking points—comes in. Creating such a cell could allow even the smallest coast guard in Oceania to punch above its weight if it is integrated with partner information platforms along a coherent information campaign. The CWOC would operate with the flexibility of modern intelligence-sharing agreements, while focusing specifically on coordinating a cohesive, multinational cognitive warfare campaign.
Technology as the Key Enabler
Technology is the new equalizer in modern warfare and is the primary conduit to conduct cognitive warfare at the speed and scale required of the modern information environment. Low-cost, effective technologies have proliferated in the last several years. Particularly with regard to access to free Large Language Models (LLMs) and cheap drones. As a result, humanity is experiencing a rapid expansion of accessible capabilities and, in effect, a democratization of cognitive warfare–related technologies.
The PRC fears the democratization of technology because cheap quadcopters, commercial SATCOM, and open-source AI capabilities make it possible for even the most remote village in the Indo-Pacific to collect evidence counter to PRC narratives, live-stream it to global audiences, and auto-translate subtitles within minutes. Additionally, the greater a U.S. partner’s technological tempo (firmware drops, fresh data, rapid prototype cycles), the more uncertain Beijing becomes concerning their ability to obscure (and therefore leverage) their own Irregular Warfare campaigns below the conflict threshold.
Illustrative Scenario: Palau
Palau, a strategic archipelago east of the Philippines, is one of three Pacific nations that formally recognize Taiwan. Located in the second island chain, Palau sits between a U.S. base in Guam and the Philippines, a key American partner against Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. With a population of around 17,600, this U.S. ally draws significant attention from the PRC, whose influence in Palau poses risks to broader American power projection.
Absent an organic capability, and due to a lack of regional resistance frameworks like the cognitive warfare framework, the PRC employs targeted social media campaigns and strives for full control of Palauan information networks. Most notably, efforts to prop up a pro-Chinese newspaper, Tia Belau, represent the kind of systematic attempts to control local perceptions of PRC activities. Ultimately the owner of Tia Belau unsuccessfully attempted to launch a media venture promoting Palau in China in 2018. Although that initiative failed, Beijing continues to wield economic leverage over Palau and makes concerted efforts to interfere in Palau’s elections.
Under a cognitive warfare framework, Palau can counter PRC influence by identifying threats, such as social media manipulation, via the CWOC headquarters. Alternatively, the CWOC can also support grass roots counter-PRC influence campaigns.
For example, once a PRC influence operation or territorial incursion s identified, the CWOC can first empower local voices through training, small grants, and cost effective tools such as Generative AI to create and disseminate investigative content exposing PRC intentions. A second step would entail a coordinated narrative campaign across varied languages and media platforms by CWOC member states. Finally, the content would further amplify local efforts by distributing coordinated information campaigns across the Indo-Pacific and leveraging the content against adversarial messaging networks.
Establishing a Cognitive Warfare Framework in the Indo-Pacific
A partner-enabled cognitive warfare Framework that counters PRC influence campaigns would require the following initial steps:
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Fund a Pacific Cognitive Commons: maintain an unclassified, open-architecture data lake where local partners and CWOC upload sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time.
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Institutionalize the Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): establish the CWOC under the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue plus ASEAN invitees and rotate leadership quarterly to reinforce ownership. Require members to coordinate information campaigns and provide resourcing to the cognitive warfare Framework.
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Tie Technology Grants to Outcomes: establish a fund and then release micro-grants to partners and local journalists or social media influencers who publish verifiable evidence of norm violations, incentivizing transparency. CWOC members would conduct training on provided technology via online or in-person engagement.
Conclusion
A partner-enabled cognitive warfare framework would complicate the PRC’s risk calculus by introducing uncertainty in the information space well before conflict, and sow doubt in Chinese decision makers before considering even the smallest forms of aggression. Partner-enabled cognitive warfare shifts the strategic high ground from geography to mindset and brings strategic competition to where the PRC has been prioritizing for decades. Technology-enabled signaling by the United States and its allies would amplify alliance actions, reinforce the states’ sovereignty and international order, and convince Beijing that any attempted aggression would trigger a multi-spectral backlash it cannot afford. Perception is nine-tenths of deterrence, and if wielded effectively, the United States and its partners have the opportunity to wield the loudest megaphones.
Tags: Cognitive Warfare, INDO-PACIFIC, Indo-Pacific security, IWI Republish
About The Author
- Jon Reisher
- Jon Reisher holds a master’s degree in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and has multiple deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Middle East.
4. Elbridge Colby and the Reordering of the Indo-Pacific
Summary:
Alejandro Reyes argues the 2026 National Defense Strategy is a doctrinal settlement, not a snapshot. It formalizes China as the pacing threat, with Russia secondary, and north Korea and Iran as acute regional disruptors, alongside instability in the Western Hemisphere. The strategy centers on homeland defense, denial in the Asia-Indo-Pacific, allied burden-sharing, and industrial revitalization. It reflects Elbridge Colby’s denial framework, now implemented as governing doctrine and filtered through a POTUS-driven, transactional realism that reduces ambiguity and tightens alliance expectations. Geography, especially the first island chain, becomes decisive. Allied agency is redistributed by contribution and operational relevance, risking brittle compliance under stress.
Excerpts:
The 2026 National Defense Strategy marks the point at which denial becomes doctrine. The framework that Colby once argued now appears as settled premise. China is treated as the pacing challenge, deterrence by denial anchors force planning, and geography is decisive. The Indo-Pacific is the primary center of gravity, with the first island chain serving as the critical defensive perimeter. Alliance burden-sharing is no longer aspirational but foundational.
Colby’s public remarks underscore this translation. In his first overseas speech as undersecretary of defense for policy, delivered in South Korea in January 2026, he cast the strategy as a rejection of post-Cold War abstractions untethered from power and geography. Stability, he argued, would depend on maintaining a favorable balance of power through credible deterrence. The logic mirrors The Strategy of Denial, but what had been an intellectual correction now appears as governing doctrine, presented as the restoration of strategic realism under presidential direction.
Here, the Trumpist lens becomes fully visible. The 2026 NDS retains Colby’s architecture but hardens and reorders it in ways shaped by the president that it serves. It demands differentiated responsibility across the Indo-Pacific.
Comment: This doctrine turns prioritization into enforcement, so allies will feel less protected by reassurance and more measured by output. The first island chain becomes a test of loyalty and logistics, and states on that line will face sharper pressure to align their forces, budgets, and posture. The strategy may deter China faster, yet it can also harden resentment.
Some questions for Bridge:
If denial in the Asia-Indo-Pacific is the center of gravity, what commitments does the strategy quietly treat as discretionary elsewhere, and who pays the first price when risk is “accepted” outside the main theater?
When allied burden-sharing becomes an enforceable obligation, how do you prevent transactional leverage from degrading trust, and how do you keep compliance from becoming performative?
If the strategy compresses agency around Taiwan through geography and posture while keeping declaratory ambiguity, what is the decision rule for action when ambiguity meets a fast-moving fait accompli?
But here is my real substantive question: How does Bridge's strategy of denial counter China's Cognitive warfare? (unrestricted warfare, three warfares, "all-warfare," etc.). I fear Bridge and his strategy are only focused on the main kinetic fight (which I concur we absolutely want to deter and deny) and specifically on Taiwan. How does this strategy address what some of us assess to be China's larger strategy?
The deterrence by denial strategy is, frankly, very conventionally focused.
My assessment is that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).
And let me ask a blunt question: What good does it do for the US to "save" Taiwan but lose Korea? And vice versa?
Elbridge Colby and the Reordering of the Indo-Pacific
Foreign Policy · Alejandro Reyes
The influential Pentagon official is narrowing choices available to U.S. allies.
February 23, 2026, 10:15 AM
By Alejandro Reyes, an adjunct professor and senior fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World at the University of Hong Kong.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/23/elbridge-colby-indopacific-trump-china/
When the United States releases a National Defense Strategy, it is tempting to read it as a snapshot of the moment—a reflection of the threats, priorities, and politics of a particular administration. The 2026 National Defense Strategy demands a different take. It is less a snapshot than a settlement: the point at which a decade-long argument about U.S. power, limits, and prioritization hardens into enforceable doctrine.
This strategy does more than elevate China as the pacing challenge or place the Indo-Pacific at the center of U.S. defense planning. It narrows the range of acceptable ambiguity, restructures alliance expectations, and quietly redraws how much room U.S. partners across the region have to maneuver.
Formally, the strategy defines a security environment shaped by four core challenges: China as the primary pacing threat, Russia as a persistent but secondary adversary, North Korea and Iran as acute regional disruptors, and growing instability in the Western Hemisphere. It responds by organizing U.S. defense planning around four lines of effort centered on homeland defense, denial in the Indo-Pacific, allied burden-sharing, and industrial revitalization.
The coherence of the National Defense Strategy is not accidental. It reflects the maturation—and political transformation—of a line of strategic thinking most closely associated with Elbridge Colby, who today serves as the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, the Defense Department’s chief strategist and third-ranking official.
Colby occupies an unusual position in modern Washington. He was the lead official behind the 2018 National Defense Strategy, later systematized its logic in his provocative book The Strategy of Denial, and then returned to government in Trump 2.0 to oversee the drafting and implementation of the 2026 strategy. Few officials have shaped U.S. defense thinking so directly across diagnosis, theory, and implementation.
That continuity gives the 2026 strategy a clarity that is rare in American defense policy. It also reveals how ideas change under political pressure. The new document carries forward Colby’s denial-based framework but applies it through a distinctly Trumpist lens—shaped less by formal theory than by instinctive nationalism, territorialism, and power politics.
What began as an effort to discipline U.S. overextension has become a governing doctrine that tolerates less ambiguity, imposes sharper expectations, and narrows the space for maneuver, particularly for allies situated along the Indo-Pacific’s most contested frontiers.
Trump sits at the center of a boardroom table with his mouth opens as he speaks into a microphone, flanked on both sides by members of the military. All are dressed formally in business suits or military uniforms.
U.S. President Donald Trump (center) in a meeting with military leaders in Washington on Oct. 23, 2018. Win McNamee/Getty Images
The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) marked a genuine turning point in U.S. defense thinking. For the first time since the early post-Cold War period, it stated unambiguously that interstate strategic competition, rather than terrorism, had become the central organizing problem of Washington’s defense planning. China and Russia were identified as revisionist powers seeking to reshape regional orders and constrain the choices of others. The document emphasized eroding U.S. military advantage, contested domains, and the reality of finite resources.
Yet the 2018 NDS was also deliberately incomplete. Even as it stressed prioritization, it affirmed the need to maintain favorable balances of power across multiple regions. The Indo-Pacific was elevated, but Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere all remained core theaters. Alliances were described as the United States’ durable asymmetric advantage, and reassurance remained central. The strategy named the problem while deferring its resolution.
The document had to reassure allies and signal prioritization without fully embracing its consequences. Scarcity was acknowledged, but explicit trade-offs were avoided. The document conceded that the United States could no longer do everything everywhere, yet it stopped short of specifying which commitments were structural and which were discretionary.
In hindsight, the 2018 NDS cleared the ground. It ended the illusion that the post-Cold War order could be sustained indefinitely, leaving unanswered the question that prioritization inevitably raises: If the United States must choose, where—and how—should it concentrate power?
A Chinese military helicopter flies against a hazy blue sky overhead as tourists mill about a large structure of rocks and a crumbling old building.
A Chinese military helicopter flies past tourists at a viewing point over the Taiwan Strait, on Pingtan Island, the closest point to Taiwan in China, on April 7, 2023.Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
That question is what Colby sought to answer in The Strategy of Denial. Published a few years after the 2018 NDS, the book pushed the logic implicit in that document to its conclusion. Where the NDS diagnosed great-power competition, The Strategy of Denial supplied an architecture.
At its core lies a stark proposition: The United States does not need to dominate every region to remain secure, but it must prevent any rival—above all, China—from achieving regional hegemony. In practice, this means concentrating U.S. military power on denying China control of Asia rather than pursuing global primacy or relying on threats of punishment after the fact. Deterrence, in this framework, rests on making aggression infeasible and war irrational.
Geography does much of the work. Colby anchors deterrence in the physical realities of the Indo-Pacific, particularly the first island chain, a Cold-War-era strategic term for the line of islands and archipelagos that run along the western Pacific rim of the East Asian mainland. He treats the chain as a defensible perimeter that is critical to blocking Chinese power projection. This logic forces uncomfortable conclusions. Some commitments are more defensible—and therefore more credible— than others. Sustaining denial requires accepting risk elsewhere.
Equally important is what the book avoids. The Strategy of Denial is not a manifesto for retrenchment or a populist critique of alliances. It treats alliances as indispensable but conditional, valued insofar as they support the central strategic objective of preventing Chinese regional hegemony. The aim is discipline rather than provocation.
In this sense, The Strategy of Denial resolved the ambiguities of the 2018 NDS. It accepted that prioritization entails exclusion, that credibility must be differentiated, and that U.S. strategy must be organized around a single overriding problem. What remained uncertain was how such a bounded theory would fare once translated back into governing doctrine.
Vance, standing in a dark suit and tie, leans over to shakes hands with a seated Colby, dressed similarly. Namecards on the desk in front of them identify the men.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (left) greets Colby during Colby’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on March 4, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The 2026 National Defense Strategy marks the point at which denial becomes doctrine. The framework that Colby once argued now appears as settled premise. China is treated as the pacing challenge, deterrence by denial anchors force planning, and geography is decisive. The Indo-Pacific is the primary center of gravity, with the first island chain serving as the critical defensive perimeter. Alliance burden-sharing is no longer aspirational but foundational.
Colby’s public remarks underscore this translation. In his first overseas speech as undersecretary of defense for policy, delivered in South Korea in January 2026, he cast the strategy as a rejection of post-Cold War abstractions untethered from power and geography. Stability, he argued, would depend on maintaining a favorable balance of power through credible deterrence. The logic mirrors The Strategy of Denial, but what had been an intellectual correction now appears as governing doctrine, presented as the restoration of strategic realism under presidential direction.
Here, the Trumpist lens becomes fully visible. The 2026 NDS retains Colby’s architecture but hardens and reorders it in ways shaped by the president that it serves. It demands differentiated responsibility across the Indo-Pacific.
Homeland and hemispheric primacy move from background assumptions to explicit foundations. Where The Strategy of Denial treated the Western Hemisphere as largely secure, the 2026 strategy treats the Americas as a strategic sphere requiring active denial and control. The effect is to extend denial logic beyond Asia to the United States’ own neighborhood, making hemispheric security a prerequisite rather than a backdrop to Indo-Pacific prioritization.
Alliance logic shifts as well. In Colby’s book, alliances are indispensable but conditional. In the 2026 NDS, conditionality becomes enforceable obligation. Defense spending, industrial capacity, and political resolve are framed as prerequisites for strategic centrality, pushing alliance realism into a more transactional register.
These shifts do not repudiate denial. They show what happens when a theory designed to discipline U.S. overreach is filtered through a presidency that prizes territorial clarity, leverage, and visible resolve. Colby supplies the structure. Trumpism supplies the pressure.
Trump leans in close to whisper something in Xi's ear as they shake hands while standing in a building doorway. U.S. and Chinese flags are displayed on either side of the door. Aides in suits are clustered off to the side as they watch.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands as they depart following a meeting at in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30, 2025.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
One of the most consequential effects of this translation is how it reconfigures allied agency. By narrowing priorities and hardening expectations, the 2026 NDS does not eliminate options for U.S. partners but reshapes them, producing a more differentiated landscape of alignment and autonomy.
For decades, many allies benefited from U.S. security guarantees while maintaining diversified economic and diplomatic relationships, including with China. The 2026 strategy tightens that slack. By anchoring deterrence in denial along specific geographic perimeters, it makes allied behavior structural rather than supplementary.
This does not force a binary choice between Washington and Beijing. Economic engagement with China remains compatible with stability so long as it does not erode the strategic balance. What becomes less sustainable is security ambiguity among states whose geography places them at the core of the denial architecture.
The result is a more differentiated alliance system. States that invest in defense capacity and assume operational responsibility gain greater latitude and influence. Those that seek maximum flexibility while minimizing contribution face a narrowing range of credible options. Hinging persists, but it is increasingly conditional.
Eight military ships at sea head toward the camera, the white waters of their wakes extending off toward the horizon.
South Korea, the United States, and Japan sail in formation during a joint naval exercise in international waters off South Korea in this handout image on April 04, 2023. South Korean Defense Ministry/via Getty Images
These dynamics play out unevenly across Asia.
Nowhere is agency more compressed—or more consequential—than around Taiwan. Although the 2026 National Defense Strategy does not name the island directly, its emphasis on denial along the first island chain, of which Taiwan is a key strategic part, places it at the center of the regional balance. In The Strategy of Denial, Taiwan is the linchpin: Its loss would fracture the defensive perimeter and push U.S. and allied forces back toward the central Pacific.
The 2026 strategy reflects this logic while avoiding overt declaratory commitments. It prioritizes denial-oriented capabilities, resilience, and force posture around the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s agency lies less in diplomatic maneuver than in preparation, investing in survivable defenses, and aligning its posture with a strategy designed to make rapid conquest infeasible. Political ambiguity may persist; military ambiguity becomes harder to sustain. Taiwan is expected not only to be defended but also to be defensible.
The South China Sea occupies a different category. While strategically important, it is not treated as a denial centerpiece. Here, the strategy tolerates greater variation in state behavior. Southeast Asian claimants retain wider agency within clearer limits.
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This differentiation is visible across regional actors. The Philippines, through expanded access arrangements and closer operational cooperation, moves nearer to the outer edge of the denial architecture. Vietnam, not referenced in the strategy and not a formal ally, retains greater latitude to hinge while deepening security ties with Washington. Diplomatic and economic engagement with China continues, but security choices that erode the military balance face tighter constraints.
The Korean Peninsula sits between these poles. The 2026 NDS signals maintained deterrence against North Korea while placing greater emphasis on South Korean self-reliance and burden-sharing within a broader Indo-Pacific balance. Seoul gains autonomy in conventional defense but less latitude to free ride. Economic and diplomatic flexibility persists; military ambiguity does not. The alliance is recast less as guardianship against a discrete threat than as part of a wider denial posture.
Beyond the denial core, the strategy is more flexible. The 2026 National Defense Strategy places less emphasis on minilateral groupings than on functional alignment. India, though not mentioned, retains significant strategic autonomy, which the strategy appears to accept as compatible with regional balance. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue coordinates without binding. AUKUS integrates deeply among a smaller subset of trusted partners. The result resembles what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has described as “variable geometry”: tight integration where geography demands it and looser coordination where autonomy still serves strategic ends.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations occupies the outer edge of this architecture, largely by omission. The strategy does not treat the region as an institutional anchor deterrence or expect its members to enforce denial. Their agency lies instead in shaping the regional environment through access, infrastructure choices, and diplomatic posture.
Even here, limits are visible. As denial logic hardens elsewhere, autonomy becomes more conditional, bounded less by formal alignment than by whether local choices reinforce or complicate the balance of power.
Taken together, these dynamics reveal what the 2026 National Defense Strategy represents. It does not abolish agency for U.S. partners. It redistributes it. Geography, contribution, and operational relevance now determine how much room states retain to maneuver—and how much discipline they are expected to accept.
This clarity may strengthen deterrence in the short term but carries risk. Alliances long accustomed to flexibility may comply when conditions are benign yet resist when discipline demands real sacrifice. A system that relies less on reassurance and more on enforcement must contend with the possibility that predictability becomes brittle under stress.
The deeper significance of the strategy lies not only in what it says, but in what it closes off. It narrows the space for permissive alignment and signals that the next phase of U.S. strategy will test not only adversaries but also partners accustomed to discretion. Whether denial holds as governing doctrine will depend less on its internal coherence than on how allies respond when clarity constrains rather than comforts. That is the wager that the United States has now made.
Foreign Policy · Alejandro Reyes
5. Lawmakers From Both Parties Push Navy to Award Mega Submarine Contracts
Summary:
Bipartisan lawmakers are pressing the U.S. Navy to award long-delayed contracts for at least 15 submarines, warning further slippage could damage the highly specialized submarine industrial base and slow production. Congress approved up to 13 Virginia-class attack submarines in 2023 and five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines in 2025, but no block-buy deals have been signed despite expectations some Virginia orders could be placed as early as 2024. The package is valued near $100 billion and would go to General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII Newport News Shipbuilding, the two prime submarine builders. Navy officials declined to explain timing but called timely awards a priority.
Comment: Submarines are key to our national defense. But I am biased since my father worked at Electric Boat in Groton when I was growing up.
Lawmakers From Both Parties Push Navy to Award Mega Submarine Contracts
WSJ
Republicans and Democrats are concerned about delays on deals valued at roughly $100 billion
By Marcus Weisgerber
Feb. 25, 2026 9:44 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/lawmakers-from-both-parties-push-navy-to-award-mega-submarine-contracts-22defcaa
General Dynamics’s Electric Boat facility in Groton, Conn., is a key site for the submarines’ construction. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
WASHINGTON—Republicans and Democrats in Congress are pushing the Navy to award contracts for at least 15 submarines after months of delays, arguing that waiting any longer could harm the bespoke manufacturing base that the Navy relies on.
Congress approved the construction of up to 13 Virginia-class attack submarines in 2023 and five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines in 2025. No deals have been signed yet, despite expectations that orders for 10 of the Virginia-class vessels would be signed as early as 2024.
The entire deal could be valued at around $100 billion for General Dynamics’s Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, which together lead the construction of all of the Navy’s submarines.
Lawmakers from both parties are warning that the delays could slow submarine production, which the Navy has vowed to speed up.
Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the contracts are necessary to send a signal to companies.
“I fully expect the Navy to quickly move forward with this block buy contract, one that will save the taxpayers money and preserve the health of the submarine industrial base,” Wittman said in a statement. Wittman, whose congressional district borders Newport News Shipbuilding, noted that most components used for making submarines are so specialized that only one supplier makes each of them, and that delaying contracts can endanger such businesses’ viability.
Rep. Joe Courtney (D., Conn.), who represents the district that is home to Electric Boat, said signing the contract is critical to shipbuilders and supply-chain companies as they try to hire the right workers and stay in business. “There is huge bipartisan agreement that we need to grow the submarine fleet and that it’s time for the Navy to move forward and eliminate any risk that a contract delay could cause,” he said in a statement.
A Navy spokesman declined to give reasons for the delay or say when the contract would be awarded but said that increasing submarine production rates is a top priority.
“The Department of the Navy understands the importance of timely contract awards to support stable, predictable shipbuilding and supplier workload,” the spokesman said in a statement.
The Virginia class is an established class of attack submarine, each costing around $5 billion, that can strike targets on land and ships at sea. The Columbia class is a newer model submarine, expected to cost roughly $9.3 billion each, that can launch nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Both are nuclear powered and can operate discreetly in waters around the world, allowing commanders to launch covert strikes.
Congress this month confirmed Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher to oversee submarine production in a new position that reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg.
Executives at General Dynamics’s Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding have said they don’t know when contracts might come through.
The delayed submarine deals have frequently come up during quarterly earnings calls, with analysts pressing executives for answers about the timing of the contracts.
“To be quite honest, we don’t know” when the contracts will be awarded, General Dynamics Chief Executive Phebe Novakovic said during the company’s quarterly earnings call last month. “We know that both of those contracts are out there, the demand is there and it’s simply up to the government when they come to us.”
HII Chief Executive Chris Kastner said the company has been “engaged heavily with Electric Boat and the Navy to get it behind us.” He noted that Congress’s recent passage of defense appropriations for fiscal 2026 could help get the deal finalized.
“We think that needs to get done by the end of the first half of the year,” Kastner said on an earnings call this month. “We need to make sure that we don’t incur risk related to a delayed start on that program.”
Congress has approved billions of dollars in recent years to support specialized suppliers and alleviate shortages of skilled workers in the submarine industrial base.
Those investments are paying off as vendors have delivered parts on time and are increasing production rates, according to Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, the Navy’s program executive officer for nuclear-armed submarines.
The Columbia class, the Navy’s top acquisition priority, is “the largest, most complex submarine this nation has ever built,” Weeks said. It is intended to replace the Navy’s 14 Ohio-class submarines, 12 of which are older than their designers intended them to be, Weeks told an industry conference in California this month.
The Navy has been trying to boost production of submarines in recent years as its fleet ages. The service and companies have been making investments at shipyards as they try to meet the Navy’s goal of building one Columbia-class and two Virginia-class submarines a year by 2028.
The Navy already operates 24 Virginia-class submarines.
The Navy previously awarded contracts for several Columbia-class submarines. Construction of the first began in October 2020. It is about two-thirds complete, according to Weeks. The Navy expects to receive it in 2028. Construction has begun on two other Columbia-class vessels.
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Marcus Weisgerber is a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, where he covers the Pentagon and defense industry. For nearly two decades, Marcus’ reporting has focused on the intersection of business and national security. He spent nine years as the business editor of Defense One, where in 2018 he won a Jesse H. Neal Award for his coverage of the Pentagon and defense industry.
Marcus also has written for Defense News and Inside Defense. He served as vice president of the Pentagon Press Association from 2015 to 2022. Marcus graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English and Journalism.
WSJ
6. U.K. Delays Controversial Deal Linked to U.S. Military Base After Trump
Summary:
The U.K. is pausing parliamentary consideration of a deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after POTUS criticized the plan. British officials said the government will not proceed without consulting Washington and has long maintained it will not implement the deal without U.S. approval. Under the agreement signed last year by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritian leader Navin Ramgoolan, the U.K. would hand over the islands while leasing back the Diego Garcia base for 99 years, paying Mauritius just over £100 million annually. Diego Garcia is a key U.S. facility in the Indian Ocean, viewed as increasingly strategic amid China’s rising influence and ties to Mauritius.
Comment: This is alliance politics in plain sight: sovereignty becomes a bargaining chip, and the base is the real center of gravity.
If London says it will not move without U.S. approval, what leverage does Mauritius still hold, and how might China exploit that pressure point around Diego Garcia?
U.K. Delays Controversial Deal Linked to U.S. Military Base After Trump Criticism
WSJ
Government says it won’t hand over islands that host the Diego Garcia base without Washington approval
By David Luhnow
Feb. 25, 2026 1:28 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/u-k-delays-controversial-deal-linked-to-u-s-military-base-after-trump-criticism-58f1d50c
Fuel tanks at the edge of a military airstrip on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago. Reuters
LONDON—The U.K. is holding up a controversial deal to give up sovereignty over a handful of islands in the Indian Ocean that host a key U.S. military base after President Trump criticized the plan.
The deal to hand over the Chagos Islands, which host the Diego Garcia military base, to Mauritius won’t continue to go through Parliament until the government consults with the Trump administration, U.K. officials said on Wednesday.
“We are pausing for discussions with our American counterparts,” Foreign Office Minister Hamish Falconer told Parliament. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritian leader Navin Ramgoolan signed the deal last year, but it is subject to parliamentary approval.
U.K. officials have said previously they won’t implement the deal without U.S. approval. A foreign office spokesman said discussions were continuing with the U.S., though he disputed the idea that Britain was delaying implementing the deal, saying there had never been a timetable.
Diego Garcia, a small atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, allows the U.S. to project power across a vast part of the region and is seen as increasingly strategic at a time when a more assertive China is rivaling U.S. influence in the Indo-Pacific, including a close relationship with Mauritius.
Last week, Trump said the U.K. should resist growing international pressure to give up the islands, saying it was giving in to “Wokeism.” “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” he wrote. He had previously supported the plan, but has flipped back and forth several times.
Under the deal, the U.K. would hand over the Chagos to Mauritius and lease the base back under a 99-year deal, paying Mauritius just over 100 million pounds, equivalent to $135.5 million, a year for the long-term rental.
The British government, which has come under pressure from Mauritius and some international bodies to give up its last African colony, has said the deal is the only way to ensure the long-term security of the base.
Ben Judah, a former adviser in the Starmer government, wrote recently that it was pressure from the Biden administration that helped push the U.K. to strike the deal. Judah said giving sovereignty to Mauritius would help U.S. and British interests by preventing the island from allying long-term with China.
“If you understand Mauritius is a swing state in the great game against China the picture becomes clearer,” Judah wrote.
Trump has blown hot and cold on the deal. Shortly after he took office, Trump initially gave his cautious support for the deal, only to come out against it, then supporting it again, before pivoting once more last week. Trump’s criticism last week came only a day after the U.S. State Department said it supported the deal.
To make way for a U.S. base, Britain detached the islands from the administrative control of Mauritius, which sits 1,300 miles away from the Chagos, in 1965, three years before Mauritius gained its independence. Since the 1980s, Mauritius has lobbied to gain control of the islands, which were cleared of a few thousand inhabitants in the early 1970s.
In 2019, the International Court of Justice reached a nonbinding decision that the U.K. should give up sovereignty. The British government, worried that international pressure would only grow, began negotiations with Mauritius in 2022.
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
David Luhnow is the U.K. bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal. Before that, he was editor for Latin America. David grew up in Mexico to American parents and received a bachelor's in economics from The College of William and Mary. He is married with two children.
WSJ
7. Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare
Comment: Rob Burrell did a great job assembling a cast of characters to put this together.
Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare
by SWJ Staff
02.25.2026 at 05:19pm
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/25/resilience-resistance-lessons-irregular-warfare/
Check out this JSOU publication, Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare, which offers what the editors describe as “the first canon for SOF, interagency, and conventional forces to understand irregular warfare, competition, and deterrence.” This volume helps practitioners and students “appreciate the dynamics of intrastate conflict as well as internationalized intrastate conflict” while examining how adversaries employ “asymmetric strategies… to subvert the world order, including the malign activities of the CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations.” The book also delivers practical relevance by emphasizing that “practitioners can use this information to inform campaign planning as well as contingency plans.”
Identifying Gray Zone and Hybrid Warfare
Part I “provides foundations in resilience and resistance” through interdisciplinary perspectives in military science, political science, sociology, and history, supported by case studies including Cuba, Laos, Tibet, and Colombia.
Part II then “builds on those foundations” by operationalizing these concepts through “a data-centric approach to understanding and quantifying intrastate conflict” and by examining “the strengths and weaknesses of a coalition approach to achieving collective security.”
The volume also explores how “cyber, AI, and space will intersect with the deployment of SOF teams,” and has an applied case study on Iran that demonstrates how resilience and resistance frameworks can help in “measuring and quantifying available opportunities to influence change.”
Tags: asymmetric warfare, Hybrid Warfare, influence operations, interagency, irregular warfare, Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), Resilience, resistance operations, Special Operations Forces (SOF), unconventional warfare (UW)
About The Author
- SWJ Staff
- SWJ Staff searches the internet daily for articles and posts that we think are of great interests to our readers.
8. Soldiers Experiment With First-Person-View Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Comment: Transforming in contact.
Soldiers Experiment With First-Person-View Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Feb. 25, 2026 | By Army Spc. Rebeca Soria, 3rd Infantry Division |
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4414304/soldiers-experiment-with-first-person-view-unmanned-aircraft-systems/
The Army's 3rd Infantry Division is revolutionizing how ground forces employ unmanned aircraft systems through specialized UAS operators assigned to the 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, which officials say is critical to winning on the modern battlefield.
Combat team soldiers have fundamentally changed how drones are used at the brigade level by spreading the technology across the entire force and establishing a hub for testing innovative capabilities, said Army Capt. William Langley, brigade collection manager.
"UAS is important on the modern battlefield today because it is a very fast-paced battlefield," Langley said. "The faster you can receive information and sense the enemy, the faster you can react, and whoever reacts first wins."
The unit combines electronic warfare, UAS and launch effects platoons — a reorganization that provides tactical advantages on the battlefield. Soldiers are experimenting with various payloads on drones, including electronic warfare sensors and advanced capabilities for operational missions.
Army 1st Lt. Declan McKeown, UAS platoon leader, said the combat team aims to improve operational effectiveness by using its platoons to gather intelligence and respond to threats faster than traditional methods allow. "The enemy wants to find us first, so it's a competition between the enemy and us to utilize our systems to be able to sense, track and maintain tactical advantage," McKeown said.
The innovation comes as the 3rd ID participates in the Army's Transforming in Contact 2.0 initiative, which accelerates how combat formations test and adopt new technologies. The division has been designated as an initiative unit, positioning it at the forefront of procurement and experimentation with different platforms.
"Innovation is necessary for the 3rd ID to be successful because, as we have seen in recent conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and other places around the world, the way we fight battles is changing at a rapid pace, and we must continue to modernize to maintain our readiness for future operations," Langley said.
A recent training exercise at Fort Stewart, Georgia, during Spartan Focus 26, featured 6th Squadron soldiers conducting UAS training with C100 medium-range reconnaissance systems configured with 3D-printed training rounds. The exercise incorporated lessons learned from Ukraine, where low-cost quadcopter drones have been widely used in recent conflicts.
The division's approach has significantly improved the decision-making cycle, allowing forces to gather and process intelligence much faster than previous methods, McKeown said, emphasizing the importance of soldiers maintaining situational awareness.
"Whoever sees the enemy first can react first, and can respond more effectively, which leads to operational success," he said.
Soldiers continue to experiment with electronic warfare payloads on medium-range reconnaissance systems and test various configurations on first-person-view drones to determine system limitations and capabilities. The ongoing innovation includes stressing equipment through rigorous training to understand what works best for operational units.
The division's 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade has also integrated unmanned systems manufacturing capabilities, training soldiers on expeditionary manufacturing cells that enable rapid 3D printing of drone components in the field. Soldiers printed more than 90 unique components in hours rather than waiting weeks for ordered parts.
Langley said being a part of the 3rd ID during this transformative period presents unique opportunities.
"This is an exciting time to be part of this unit, and it's a great time to test our new capabilities and to really release the creativity of soldiers at every level," he said.
9. A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation
Summary:
A CNN report cites a new OpenAI finding that a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT inadvertently exposed a large influence and intimidation operation targeting Chinese dissidents abroad. OpenAI says the official used ChatGPT like a diary to track the campaign, which allegedly included impersonating U.S. immigration officials to threaten a U.S.-based dissident and using forged U.S. county court documents to seek takedowns of dissidents’ social media. OpenAI assessed the operation involved hundreds of operators and thousands of fake accounts across platforms and matched the ChatGPT descriptions to real online activity, including a 2023 false death rumor supported with a fake obituary and images. OpenAI banned the user.
Comment: This shows transnational repression has become systematized, with scale and process, not just ad hoc harassment. The operator used AI as a planning ledger, which means the weak point is often the human workflow, not the platform’s code. The tactics blend identity fraud, legal forgery, and narrative sabotage, so the target is not only speech but credibility and social standing.
A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation
kten.com · Sean Lyngaas, CNN
https://www.kten.com/news/politics/a-chinese-official-s-use-of-chatgpt-accidentally-revealed-a-global-intimidation-operation/article_71e9607c-a42a-5772-86a8-5a4b6d486abf.html
(CNN) — A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.
The report offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts. The influence operation appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms, according to OpenAI.
“This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report’s release. “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. It’s about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once.”
CNN has requested comment on the report from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC.
ChatGPT served as a journal for the Chinese operative to keep track of the covert network, while much of the network’s content was generated by other tools and spread through social media accounts and websites. OpenAI banned the user after discovering the activity.
OpenAI’s investigators were able to match descriptions from the ChatGPT user with real-world online activity and impact. The user described an effort to fake the death of a Chinese dissident by creating a phony obituary and photos of a gravestone and posting them online. False rumors of the dissident’s death did indeed surfaced online in 2023, according to a Chinese-language Voice of America article.
In another case, the ChatGPT user asked the AI agent to draw up a multi-part plan to denigrate the incoming Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in part by fanning online anger about US tariffs on Japanese goods. ChatGPT refused to respond to the prompt, according to OpenAI. But in late October, as Takaichi took power, hashtags emerged on a popular forum for Japanese graphic artists attacking her and complaining about US tariffs, according to OpenAI.
The report comes amid a battle between the US and China for supremacy over AI. At stake is how the technology is used on the battlefield and in the boardroom of the world’s two biggest economies.
The Pentagon is in a standoff with another prominent AI company, Anthropic, over the use of its AI model. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline to comply with demands to peel back safeguards on its AI model or risk losing a lucrative Pentagon contract.
The report from OpenAI “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations,” Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official focused on emerging technologies, told CNN.
“US-China AI competition is continuing to intensify,” said Horowtiz, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “This competition is not just taking place at the frontier, but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”
The-CNN-Wire
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Latest Headlines from CNN
kten.com · Sean Lyngaas, CNN
10. China uses a ‘whole-of-society approach’
Summary:
Nicholas Eftimiades argues Chinese intelligence operates with a “whole-of-society approach,” using citizens at home and abroad and targeting not only militaries but also economic, political, and community sectors. He says recruitment often begins on LinkedIn, where large numbers of people have been approached, sometimes starting with requests for unclassified material offered for money, then moving toward clandestine handling. Chinese services seek individuals with financial stress, personal weaknesses, or emotional strain, and increase payments as the value of information rises. He says Greece is attractive because China is deeply embedded economically and politically and can leverage relationships to collect NATO-relevant data. He frames this as global political warfare exploiting open societies.
Comment: Poltical warfare. How does our focus on the first island chain defend against (or deter by denial) this global malign activity? (yes a somewhat sarcastic comment I know).
China treats the social layer as a collection platform, so the perimeter is not a fence or a base, it is the everyday online life of a target. The true tripwire is secrecy, because the moment a “business” contact demands concealment and separate devices, the operation has already crossed into espionage. Economic access and political goodwill can become an intelligence corridor, and once that corridor exists, NATO details become just another set of “collection targets” to pull through it.
China uses a ‘whole-of-society approach’ | eKathimerini.com
ekathimerini.com · Athanasios Katsikidis · February 24, 2026
Chinese intelligence services target individuals with personal weaknesses, financial difficulties or emotional problems, often on social media
https://www.ekathimerini.com/in-depth/interviews-in-depth/1295950/china-uses-a-whole-of-society-approach/
Why did the Chinese intelligence services target Greece? What does the recruitment of the 54-year-old Hellenic Air Force wing commander, who has allegedly confessed to passing secret military data to his Chinese “contacts,” reveal about their modus operandi? What do we know about the way Beijing’s secret networks work?
Kathimerini asked these questions to Nicholas Eftimiades, a former CIA intelligence officer who retired from the US Department of Defense and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Eftimiades, who currently works as an assistant teaching professor of homeland security at the School of Public Affairs at Penn State University, has written the book “Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics.”
How does the Chinese espionage system work?
What we have seen is that China uses what we call a “whole-of-society approach,” which is key to understanding its espionage activities. While most intelligence services around the world mainly target foreign intelligence services and foreign armies – and their activities are limited to official mechanisms, such as diplomatic missions or civilians – China is said to not only employ but also legally require the cooperation of its citizens, both within and outside its borders. This creates significant challenges in practice, as its targets include foreign armies, economic and political interests, as well as political leaders and various communities. Thus, it presents a particularly wide range of what we call “collection targets” and they employ and use their population in China and abroad to spy on their targets.
From his confession, it appears that the wing commander was recruited through LinkedIn. How is the initial approach made?
This is one of many cases that appear to have started on LinkedIn. The British reported that approximately 20,000 individuals were approached through LinkedIn, the French approximately 9,000, and the Germans around 10,000. So, we see thousands of people being targeted. It is well known that in the past, even interns at the Chinese Ministry of State Security searched LinkedIn for people with access to useful information. LinkedIn is the only foreign social networking platform allowed in China, partly because the government believes it can exploit it. Initial approaches often start with a request for an unclassified document, for which significant sums of money are offered. After the initial response, the relationship expands and becomes clandestine, suggesting espionage activity. In some cases, according to media reports, the process begins with what we call targeting or spotting and assessing the individual on LinkedIn and then moves quickly to a meeting with someone who presents himself as a businessman, but who is in fact seeking to recruit them for espionage. For counterintelligence services internationally, a particular concern is that identification and initial approaches can now be made using artificial intelligence, so it does not even involve a human in the loop.
But extending the question, who is easier to recruit and what weaknesses are they looking for?
We see a number of motivations that lead certain people to be recruited by Chinese intelligence services, particularly in the category of espionage. This differs from “economic espionage” or stealing technology. In the category of espionage, money is the primary driver, a simple and very age-old pattern of behavior. There is a whole targeting process that is followed. The aim is to identify individuals with personal weaknesses, financial difficulties, or emotional problems. There have been reports of instructions to agents to assess, for example, whether an individual is going through a difficult period due to divorce, whether they are facing financial problems, whether they are financially stable, or whether they are satisfied with their life and work. All these are areas that Chinese intelligence uses to exploit, to recruit people, and conduct espionage.
We read that the recruiter, under the pseudonym “Steven,” introduced himself as a businessman. When exactly does a professional contact turn into espionage? In other words, what is the tipping point?
That’s the great question in the intelligence community. In practice, the critical point at which a relationship transfers over to becoming espionage is when it becomes clandestine. That is, when there is a request for no open communication: “Don’t tell your superiors we are meeting here in third countries,” or for encryption tools and separate devices to be used to take pictures of classified documents. When the nature of the relationship becomes clandestine, that is when it is true espionage.
According to the information that has come to light, the Greek officer initially received small payments of around €500 to €600 before the payment increased to €15,000 per three months. How do you interpret this pattern of dependence and control?
Payments are used to control the “asset” and are part of the trade craft as well. This strategy changes as the individual begins to produce more valuable information. The more valuable the information becomes, the greater the payments. Some may start with low amounts, while for an important document, they are often paid €3,000-€5,000. They are then encouraged to provide even more nonpublic and classified information, which is valuable to the services.
One of the questions that concerns us is why Greece was chosen.
China is very deeply penetrated into Greece, mainly economically, but also politically, thanks to a strong economic relationship. This means that many politicians seek to maintain good relations with China. Nothing wrong with that. However, it is clear that it leverages those relationships to get information that it needs from NATO, such as facilities, communication links, capabilities, and aircraft, for military applications, not only for China’s defense, but also in arms sales and things like that.
What would you describe as the greatest vulnerability of Western societies that China exploits?
The greatest vulnerability of Western societies is their social conditions. China conducts “political warfare” on a global scale, based on an “unrestricted doctrine.” It includes media warfare, economic warfare, drug warfare, and other forms of influence, all documented in Chinese doctrine. What China calls “political warfare” or “unrestricted warfare” does not use military means, as the West does, but political, economic, and social tools to disrupt the social environment. It is a “war without physical violence.” On the other hand, the West finds it difficult to deal with this threat, as our institutions and societies are open and free. There is no easy balance between protecting against this type of social threat and preserving the democratic values that Greece gave the entire world. And that is where the West struggles.
US China Security Espionage Interview
ekathimerini.com · Athanasios Katsikidis · February 24, 2026
11. The Risk and Reward of US Intervention in Iran
Summary:
Jesse Ramsdell argues the Trump administration’s posture toward Iran shows military adventurism, with a buildup suggesting more than leverage for nuclear talks that Iran is unlikely to concede. He says Iran faces renewed protests and some openness to limited U.S. help, but society is divided, so any action should support Iranians rather than impose regime change. He warns Iran is not Venezuela and that unilateral regime change would be disastrous. If strikes occur, he argues they should focus on weakening the IRGC through targeting mid-level and senior officials and military sites used for retaliation, while avoiding population centers and not removing Ayatollah Khamenei to prevent a destabilizing power vacuum. He urges coupling any force with communications support, information operations, encouragement of defections, and a clear exit and day-after plan, noting Iran will retaliate and Tehran will exploit foreign-intervention narratives and U.S. election politics.
The Risk and Reward of US Intervention in Iran
by Jesse Ramsdell
02.25.2026 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/25/the-risk-and-reward-of-us-intervention-in-iran/
A new wave of military adventurism is dominating the Trump Administration’s international policy, no doubt influenced by the recent US operation in Venezuela. The latest target of US adventurism, and perhaps one of the most persistent challenges from Trump’s first presidency, is Iran. The size of the US military buildup in the region indicates more than just saber rattling to influence Iran to make concessions in ongoing nuclear negotiations, which Iranian officials are unlikely to do. The Iranian regime is experiencing a particularly fraught litmus test with protests having recently started back up again, and a growing desire for regime change that saw some of the largest protests in Iran over the past decade. Further, anecdotal evidence indicates that some Iranians may even be open to targeted US intervention, although Iranian citizens are deeply divided on US engagement. To be clear, any US intervention should be in support of the Iranian people—not at their expense. Regime change, which Trump and other US officials have hinted at, cannot be made unilaterally, as in the case of Venezuela. It would be a recipe for disaster that could mire the US in a prolonged conflict and risk alienating Iranian citizens.
Any US action should focus on empowering the Iranian people. President Trump has already been presented with a variety of policy options. With the President appearing to favor military action, the US could engage in targeted strikes that focus on weakening the Iranian regime. To be successful with this strategy, the US should focus on the Iranian military, specifically mid-level and senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials, and military sites that Iran would likely leverage for retaliatory strikes. Such targeting would diminish the IRGC’s ability to retaliate and weaken its base of power in the Iranian regime. If the US takes this approach, it must not target population centers—even at the risk of delaying the removal of key military figures—as doing so would directly undermine any support from the Iranian populous. Further, the US should avoid removing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly. Doing so would create a power vacuum that has a high chance of plunging Iran into chaos either through a military takeover, political infighting, or even civil war. Any US military action must stay focused on how to help the Iranian people achieve sustainable, long-term regime change rather than going for flashy, high-risk operations.
Iran is not Venezuela. Military intervention alone will not be enough to overthrow the regime. Even limited strikes intended to shift Iranian leadership’s calculus in ongoing nuclear negotiations with the US will be insufficient to exact meaningful concessions from the Iranian regime. The US must couple any military activity with providing tangible support to the Iranian people. This could take the form of providing access to infrastructure to communicate and plan protest activity, some of which it has already done through US efforts to smuggle Starlink terminals in Iran. Further, the US should engage in informational operations, signaling to the Iranian people that the US will support them, but that regime change is in their hands—where it should be. One approach would be sending messages to protest leadership, fractured as it is, while dually aiming to chip away at security services’ power. Encouraging non-IRGC security services, such as the Law Enforcement Command or the less ideological conventional military, Artesh, to defect could help sustain protest movements. So far, there have been few, if any, defections, although mid-to-low level defections would indicate a weakening of the regime’s control and provide a much-needed swell to the protest movement.
In the event of a direct confrontation, there are inherent risks that US officials must consider. The US has been accumulating a heavy military presence in the region over the past month, but US officials, particularly the President, must not give into hubris that the US could strike Iran and obtain an easy victory. Such illusions are bound to mire the US in a conflict that the US is not ready to sustain. President Trump’s reported confusion as to why Iranian leaders haven’t capitulated yet is a warning that he is not taking the threat of Iranian retaliation seriously enough. Whether the US conducts limited strikes or a more sustained campaign, Iran will respond. As of June 2025, Iran’s ability to retaliate has been significantly curtailed, and its regional partners’ ability to support Iran has diminished, but Iran and its partners could still levy significant damage to US bases, personnel, and US allies in the region.
Military intervention also carries the risk of stoking fears among Iranian citizens of broader foreign intervention, given Iran’s storied history of foreign states meddling in Iran’s domestic affairs—most notably through the 1953 coup of Prime Minister Mosaddegh which has been attributed to the US and UK governments. Iranian leadership will inevitably use this to its advantage in an attempt to maintain control. Such a move risks undermining the very support the US would seek to provide and could give the Iranian regime the opportunity to further dig in and rally regime supporters. Separately, with 2026 being a US election year, Iranian leadership will likely seek to exploit the inherent political risks associated with a military intervention. US officials must be clear-eyed and ready to accept this risk.
Before beginning any operations, the US must have an exit strategy and day after plan in place, something that appears to be notably absent in what has been leaked or shared with the press regarding internal deliberations. As was seen most recently in Venezuela, success depends not just on the initial operation but whether long-term change can be sustained. Entering into a conflict without a clear, actionable exit strategy is a recipe for disaster. A day after plan must also keep in mind the needs of the Iranian people. It should include any necessary hand-offs of power and ensure that the US has adequately impowered the Iranian people so that they are the ones who are dictating the direction of the Iranian government. Anything less should be considered a failure.
Direct US intervention is risky but could provide the much-needed support for Iranians seeking a regime change. The current situation in Iran presents a rare opportunity for the US, one that it cannot afford to squander. Regardless of what happens next, the US must be willing to accept the risk direct military action carries and must keep Iranians’ interest and needs at the forefront of all decision making. Only then will there be lasting change in Iran.
Tags: Iran, Iran nuclear weapons, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), nuclear weapons, Preemptive Strike, Preemptive War, Proxies, proxy war
About The Author
- Jesse Ramsdell
- Jesse Ramsdell is a former government analyst with expertise on Iran. He holds an M.A. in Security Policy Studies from The George Washington University with a focus on US national security. He previously served as an editor of the International Affairs Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal.
12. Violent Militias Stand Between the U.S. and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches
Summary:
Southern Venezuela’s jungle holds major deposits of gold, diamonds, and coltan, but armed criminal groups control much of the mining territory in Bolívar and Amazonas. These groups, including the ELN and FARC remnants, have scaled mining to industrial levels and function as de facto local government, imposing rules, collecting 10% to 20% cuts of gold output, and enforcing order through punishments and executions. The Venezuelan military reportedly enables the system for profit. The Trump administration wants access to critical minerals to reduce reliance on China, but experts doubt U.S. companies can secure safe access without dislodging the militias. Illicit gold and “black sands” move through Colombia, with laundering and health harms like mercury exposure and malaria.
Violent Militias Stand Between the U.S. and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches
WSJ
Illegal mining has reached an industrial scale in the country’s southern jungles, where the government has no control
By Ian Lovett
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| Photography by Oscar B. Castillo for WSJ
Feb. 25, 2026 5:30 am ET
INÍRIDA, Colombia—A few miles up the river from this border outpost, vast mineral riches are buried in the Venezuelan jungle.
There are diamonds, huge deposits of gold and—of most interest to the Trump administration—coltan, a compound dubbed “blue gold,” which contains elements needed for cellphones, electric vehicles and more.
Since the U.S. raid that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, Trump administration officials have repeatedly expressed their desire to access these minerals—part of a larger plan to break China’s stranglehold on the supply of critical minerals used in modern technology.
But getting at the riches of the jungle won’t be easy. Armed criminal groups control vast swaths of territory in southern Venezuela, including the gold and coltan mines.
In the sprawling states of Bolívar and Amazonas—located in Venezuela’s undeveloped south, where much of the territory is inaccessible by road—the armed groups have pushed small gold-mining operations to an industrial scale and effectively stand in as a local government.
Rainforest is clear-cut to make way for open-pit mines. New arrivals at the mine are signed in. The guerrillas collect a tax, of sorts, for each ounce of gold pulled out of the ground. Child labor is rampant. Thieves are often forced to pick up trash as punishment. Murderers have been publicly executed.
The only state institution active in the region—the Venezuelan military—abets the criminal gangs’ dominion of the mines, in exchange for a cut of the profits.
“The guerrillas,” said Wilson Torres, a longtime miner. “They control everything.”
Private companies are lobbying the U.S. government to open access to the mining region. Trump administration officials, who are already restoring diplomatic ties with Venezuela, also see an opportunity, with gold around $5,000 an ounce and coltan growing in geopolitical significance.
“Venezuela also is rich in reserves of critical minerals,” Caleb Orr, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, said at a news briefing this month, adding that the administration wanted to ensure “that American and other aligned companies have fair access to the Venezuelan market.”
Securing safe access for U.S. companies would first require ousting armed groups like the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and remnants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC.
“At the moment, I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, a research organization.
Long, metal-hulled boats are used to move goods to Venezuelan mines.
Making matters more difficult, a truce between the ELN and the Segunda Marquetalia, a FARC offshoot that refused to disarm, broke down last year. The ELN assassinated some of its rival’s commanders and took control of more territory and lucrative mines, said miners and experts who study the guerrillas.
“The criminal groups understand that mining is the future,” Dickinson said. Unlike drugs, she said, “the product is not illegal, and it’s extremely easy to launder.”
For decades, the Venezuelan government offered refuge for Colombian guerrilla groups. After the FARC, the largest group, agreed to disarm as part of a 2016 peace deal with Colombia, Venezuela deepened its ties with the ELN.
Armed groups have since grown in Venezuela, and taken control of more mines in the country’s south. Some of the mines have become makeshift cities, workers said, with pharmacies, hair salons, restaurants offering satellite internet and television. Satellite images of Yapacana National Park in Amazonas show deep gashes in the earth, where miners have dug enormous open pits.
The criminal groups take a cut—usually around 10% to 20%—of the gold that each machine pulls from the pit.
The guerrillas impose other demands as well, which they lay out at regular governance meetings: no fighting, no drugs, no theft.
Two members of a musical ensemble said that, in 2022, they showed up at a mine in Yapacana National Park to play a concert—only to find when they arrived that the woman who contracted them refused to pay.
Four of the mine’s leaders—one each from the ELN, the Segunda Marquetalia, the Venezuelan national guard and the local indigenous group—met for 40 minutes at a table outside. Then they expelled the woman from the mine and told the band they could play at the guerrillas’ nightclub.
Inírida residents playing pool at a night venue. A gold trader tabulating recent transactions in his shop.
Before the band went on, a group of women stripped onstage. Then the group played for more than 100 people who danced or sat at tables drinking. During the show, the guerrillas made a pound of gold selling beer, the band members said.
A 38-year-old gold miner said that, after he got into a fight with another miner, he was tied up in the sun for a day without food or water. Another time, he said the guerrillas shot a murder suspect in public.
There are other dangers as well. The same miner said his 21-year-old stepson was killed when a boulder fell into the pit, crushing him. Malaria is rampant at the camps, and last year, the miner said, he came home to find he had malaria, dengue fever and kidney failure.
In Inírida, a small regional capital on the Colombian side of the border, the entire local economy is tied to Venezuelan mines. Each day, long metal-hulled boats set off toward the border carrying goods to sell at the mines, plus an extra drum of oil to pay off the Venezuelan national guard. Studies have found dangerous levels of mercury in the residents’ bodies.
“We buy gold” signs line the town’s main street. Though buying gold from the illicit mines in Amazonas is illegal, shopkeepers said enforcement was rare. Miners, who are paid in gold, smuggle small plastic bags of it over the border. Larger smuggling operations, such as those run by the criminal groups, often bring shipments all the way to Bogotá, some 500 miles away, or other major cities to be processed and laundered into the legal supply, experts and shopkeepers said.
Two young men who melt and process gold say they worry about their constant exposure to noxious chemical products such as mercury.
Coltan is harder to move covertly. The ore is refined from earth often referred to in the region as “black sands,” which is needed in large quantities to be valuable.
The Colombian navy—which patrols the rivers in the area—began making large-scale coltan seizures in 2024, according to Brigadier General Wilson Martínez, commander of the navy for the Orinoquía region, which borders the mining region of southern Venezuela. That year, the navy stopped a truck carrying 16 tons of black sands worth nearly $400,000.
The armed groups collect fees from those mining the black sands, which can contain other valuable metals as well, Martínez said. He said it is difficult to prove that the material was illegally extracted—or even what it contains.
“If you don’t have technical instruments to verify that it is coltan, it is very complex to seize it,” Martínez said.
At an Inírida gold shop, the owner said that every few months he trucks shipments of black sands, often containing elements such as tin and tungsten, to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where he sells it for roughly $9,000 a ton.
Inírida’s economic fortunes are closely tied to Venezuelan mines.
“The Chinese buy it,” he said. Most coltan—along with other minerals used in modern technology—is refined in China. The Trump administration has been scrambling to secure a supply of the critical minerals that doesn’t rely on Beijing.
For several years, miners said, the Venezuelan national guard has conducted periodic raids on illegal mines. In the weeks since Maduro’s removal, national guard officials have posted videos showing them burning planes that move supplies to and from the mines, in an apparent effort to show the U.S. they are cracking down.
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The raided mines often reopen shortly, and new ones open deeper in the jungle, where indigenous leaders say they press young women into prostitution and mar the soil and water with mercury, making traditional farming and fishing impossible.
Cristina Vollmer Burelli, the founder of SOSOrinoco, which tracks illegal mining in southern Venezuela, said criminal groups still control the mines “in partnership with civil and military authorities in the area.”
WSJ
13. Former Venezuelan Generals Seek to Assist Maduro’s U.S. Prosecution
Summary:
Two former senior Venezuelan officials convicted in U.S. cases are seeking to cooperate against Nicolás Maduro in his U.S. prosecution. Former Maj. Gen. Cliver Alcalá, serving nearly 22 years after a 2023 guilty plea to providing material support including firearms to the FARC, says he has information about alleged crimes by Maduro and allies and wrote to POTUS offering broad cooperation. Former intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal, extradited in 2023 and who pleaded guilty last year to narcoterrorism conspiracy and other offenses, is in talks with prosecutors to be a cooperating witness; his sentencing was postponed to April 16. Prosecutors typically require full admissions and corroboration. Maduro and Cilia Flores are detained in Brooklyn and are due in court March 26.
Former Venezuelan Generals Seek to Assist Maduro’s U.S. Prosecution
WSJ
At least one official is in active talks with prosecutors about serving as cooperating witness
By James Fanelli
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and Corinne Ramey
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Feb. 25, 2026 9:00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/former-venezuelan-generals-seek-to-assist-maduros-u-s-prosecution-b9148fb7
Former Venezuelan Maj. Gen. Cliver Alcalá, with headphones, in federal court in New York in a sketch from 2024. Elizabeth Williams/AP
Former Venezuelan Maj. Gen. Cliver Alcalá was working an early-morning shift in his U.S. prison’s kitchen one Saturday when his country’s ousted president suddenly appeared on TV. Nicolás Maduro, whom federal prosecutors have accused of being Alcalá’s co-conspirator, had been seized by American forces from his palace in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital.
“Since then, I have to tell you that I sleep more peacefully,” Alcalá, who once tried to lead his own ragtag coup against Maduro, said in a telephone interview from his medium-security facility in Maryland.
Alcalá and another former top official accused of conspiring with Maduro to traffic vast amounts of cocaine into the U.S. view the capture and potential criminal trial of Maduro as a golden opportunity to assist the U.S. government in its prosecution of the ousted president—and, in turn, help themselves.
Alcalá, 64 years old, is serving a nearly 22-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2023 to providing material support, including firearms, to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a former rebel group. He still denies some of the allegations against him—which presents a high hurdle for working with prosecutors—but openly claims to have information about alleged crimes committed by Maduro and his allies.
“I remain at your disposal to collaborate broadly with your government, with the aim of contributing to the security and justice of your country and mine,” Alcalá wrote in a letter to President Trump from prison.
Another alleged co-conspirator, former Venezuelan spy chief Hugo Carvajal, is in talks with prosecutors about being a cooperating witness against Maduro, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Nicknamed El Pollo—the chicken—Carvajal was the first Venezuelan official indicted in the U.S. case, in 2011. He began criticizing Maduro in 2017 and two years later threw his support behind a U.S.-backed opposition leader.
Former Venezuelan intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal appeared at a 2019 extradition hearing in Madrid. Emilio Naranjo/Press Pool
U.S. authorities pursued Carvajal, also a former general, for years, but he repeatedly slipped through their fingers. He was extradited to the U.S. in 2023 and pleaded guilty last year to narcoterrorism conspiracy and other offenses. He was scheduled to be sentenced this week, but the judge postponed the proceeding until April 16.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is handling the Maduro case, declined to comment.
In his own letter to Trump in December, Carvajal offered to provide the U.S. government with information about what he said was Maduro’s involvement in drug trafficking and coordination with the gang Tren de Aragua.
“I write to atone by telling the full truth so that the United States can protect itself from the dangers I witnessed for so many years,” Carvajal wrote.
Prosecutors frequently rely on co-conspirators as witnesses in criminal cases, especially ones involving drug-trafficking allegations. Such cooperators give jurors an inside look at the alleged criminal activity.
“When you have generals in superkey positions involved, it substantiates the narrative that this was a state-sponsored drug-trafficking conspiracy,” said Sandalio Gonzalez, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated Maduro and others in Venezuela.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan typically require cooperating witnesses to plead guilty to all the charges against them, corroborate the government’s allegations and admit to any other crimes they committed during their lifetime. “Prosecutors aren’t going to count on someone to testify if they aren’t even agreeing to the facts of their indictment,” Gonzalez said.
Since their capture and arrival in New York to face charges, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been detained at a Brooklyn federal jail, which has been under increased security. Late last month, a Venezuelan consular official visited them to facilitate access to any needed services, according to a court filing. The two defendants are scheduled to appear in court on March 26. Their case likely won’t go to trial for months, if not years.
Lawyers for Maduro and his wife didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The payoff for cooperating witnesses can be substantial.
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In another high-profile drug-trafficking case, one cooperator, a former mayor named Ardon Soriano who testified against former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, admitted to killing 56 people. A judge sentenced Soriano to time served. Trump pardoned Hernandez late last year.
Without cooperation, Alcalá and Carvajal are likely to spend much of the rest of their lives behind bars.
Alcalá said that if he were to get out of prison, he would return to Venezuela. “I love my country,” he said. “I have no other destination than my country.”
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
James Fanelli is a reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s law bureau covering federal prosecutors in New York. He was previously the Greater New York bureau chief. Before joining WSJ in 2018, Jim was a reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and a reporter at DNAinfo.com and the New York Post.
Corinne Ramey is a reporter covering federal law enforcement and white-collar crime for The Wall Street Journal. She frequently writes about investigations and criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including those related to public corruption and financial crime. She also covers New York investigations into Donald Trump and his family business.
Cory previously covered state courts and economic development for the Journal's Greater New York section. Before joining the Journal in 2015, she worked as a professional violist. She is originally from Dayton, Ohio.
WSJ
14. Shattering the Software Stovepipes: How to Close the US Military’s Technology Integration Gap
Summary:
Ryan McLean argues the joint force faces an “integration gap,” not a capability or funding gap. The Department of Defense is buying and fielding modern command-and-control enablers, but it cannot reliably connect them into a coherent, sustained warfighting system. He highlights three enabling technologies already proliferating through major initiatives: enterprise ontology management, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), and zero-trust network architecture. The shortfall is organizational: data models and interface standards are scattered across repositories, classification domains, and sponsors, often in PDFs rather than machine-readable code. He calls for a unified registry of standards and data models, machine-readable interoperability specifications, and modernized operational test and evaluation suited to commercial software and AI delivery.
Comment: What governance authority can compel a single, discoverable, machine-readable integration baseline across government and commercial systems without turning speed into another stovepipe?
Shattering the Software Stovepipes: How to Close the US Military’s Technology Integration Gap - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · Ryan McLean · February 25, 2026
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/shattering-the-software-stovepipes-how-to-close-the-us-militarys-technology-integration-gap/
In the 1950s, American strategists warned of a bomber gap. By the end of that decade, the fear had shifted to a missile gap. In both cases, the perception of a gap drove enormous defense investments that ultimately formed the backbone of a credible nuclear deterrent. Today, the joint force faces a different kind of gap. It is not a deficit in capability relative to an adversary. It is a failure to connect the capabilities it already owns. A true modular open systems approach is itself a strategic deterrent—a force that can reconfigure, integrate, and adapt faster than an adversary can target it is a force that deters conflict. But the Department of Defense has not yet closed this integration gap.
The money is flowing. The tools are arriving. Integration, however, is stuck several decades in the past. Absent marked change in how it makes integration a shared government-commercial responsibility, the department faces an integration gap that risks handicapping today’s commercial modernization push as merely experimentation. Warfighters require fielded and sustained combat capability—not science projects.
Having spent fourteen years building, testing, and fielding command-and-control technologies across the defense enterprise, I believe the joint force’s greatest risk in realizing the Joint Warfighting Concept is not a funding gap but an integration gap. Three foundational technologies—enterprise ontology management, conflict-free replicated data types, and zero-trust network architecture—are already proliferating through military formations. This is occurring through major investments like the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control, the combatant commands–focused Global Information Dominance Experiment, and the Marine Corps’s nascent Project Dynamis, among other significant joint force initiatives.
While the department is making the necessary data infrastructure investments with high urgency, it is missing three key ingredients that are required to sustain the present rate of innovation. First, the department needs to maintain a central, accessible, machine-readable body of data models on which the Joint Warfighting Concept depends; second, it needs department-wide leadership on integration standards across commercial and government systems; and third, it needs a modernized operational test and evaluation process that can keep pace with commercial AI-enabling technologies. The argument is no longer about whether to invest. It is about whether soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, and guardians can use these tools together for strategic, operational, and tactical effects.
I am a flight test engineer at the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center and a major in the Air Force Reserve. As a former federal civil servant and civilian highly qualified expert, I oversaw the department-wide adoption of the Tactical Assault Kit software suite and led the Maven Smart System program as it scaled to the combatant commands. From these vantage points, I have watched the military’s data infrastructure strain under the weight of its own ambitions—and I have seen what works.
The Tools Are Arriving
The Joint Warfighting Concept, now codified as Joint Publication 1, Volume 1, demands an observe-orient-decide-act cycle that is faster, more resilient, and more expansive than any prior generation of warfare. To deliver that, the department is making substantial investments in three categories of enabling technology.
The first, ontology management, solves the entity, relationship, and hierarchy resolution problem at scale. The Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) funds the Maven Smart System, which has scaled from a small prototype to a $1.3 billion contract ceiling serving most, if not all, combatant commands, the Joint Staff, and the Marine Corps. Separately, the Army awarded Palantir a $10 billion enterprise contract consolidating seventy-five existing contracts under a single data and software platform.
The CDAO also awarded the Open DAGIR other transaction agreement to onboard third-party capabilities into a government-owned data environment. Projects like Open DAGIR deliver enterprise ontologies to an ecosystem of modular capabilities, systematically combining data streams across multiple dimensions to produce consistent entities and relationships for those modular capabilities to use for targeting, fires, logistics, personnel, and other doctrinal warfighting functions. Think of an ontology as a shared vocabulary and rulebook that tells machines how to interpret and connect disparate data: a radar track, a satellite image, and a signals intelligence report all referring to the same ship.
To be sure, Palantir is not the only ontology provider. Companies like Technergetics have produced government-owned ontology management capabilities and fielded them on operational networks. Ontologies keep the vast data of today’s battlespace organized and accessible.
The second enabling technology, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), efficiently distribute that connected and converged data across environments with intermittent or degraded connectivity. CRDTs are common throughout modern technology offerings, and the military is gaining immediate advantage by fielding them. The CDAO is funding a three-year, $100 million Anduril Edge Data Mesh pilot in December 2024, while the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control is funding two data mesh prototypes with Anduril and Lockheed Martin valued together at nearly $130 million. CRDTs are key to these future-focused projects. They allow many users to operate on the same data simultaneously with minimal risk of divergence, even when network connections are intermittent—precisely the conditions the joint force should expect in a fight against a peer adversary. Products like Ditto and Lattice are two prominent examples of CRDTs proliferating through military formations.
The third enabling technology is zero-trust network architecture, which provides the security wrapper. The Department of Defense has long acknowledged that it cannot produce all of these technologies organically, and a 2025 executive order on defense acquisition reform went further, mandating a “first preference for commercial solutions” across all pending defense contracting actions. Zero-trust architecture, when properly deployed, makes military data flows generally invisible and inaccessible to adversaries—allowing sensor data to reach shooters, and shooter data to reach sensors, with minimal bandwidth overhead. The government continues to make major investments and progress toward the realization of its zero trust strategy, including tactical edge implementations.
Together, these three technologies enable a comprehensive data mesh that connects the global sensing enterprise with the tactical shooter enterprise, replacing the centralized hub-and-spoke model that has defined military command and control for decades.
But having the tools is not the same as having them work together. The government and commercial engineers who are trying to wire these systems into a coherent whole face a scattered landscape of implementation standards published in different formats, data models maintained by different organizations on different networks, and validation processes that were designed for a slower era of acquisition.
Those standards, models, and processes are the key to unlocking the value of ontology management, conflict-free replicated data types, and zero-trust network architecture—because the value of a data mesh, like any network, grows as the square of its connected nodes. This is Metcalfe’s law in action: Every system that cannot interoperate is not merely absent from the network but actively reduces the return on every system that can. The tools are arriving. The integration is not.
The Integration Gap
The problem is not that interoperability standards do not exist. Standards like the Open Mission Network Interface have gained wide adoption across the combined joint all-domain command-and-control space precisely because they were published as code and made available to developers. The problem is that the specifications, data models, and interface definitions the joint force depends on are scattered across multiple repositories, classification domains, and organizational sponsors—each with different access requirements and different levels of machine readability. A software engineer at Fort Bragg and a data officer at Indo-Pacific Command are often solving the same integration problem independently because neither can easily discover what the other has already built.
The policy mandate to close this gap already exists. The tri-service MOSA directive requires modular open systems approaches in all new acquisition programs. The software acquisition pathway mandates iterative, continuous delivery of software capabilities using published DevSecOps reference design specifications. Continuous delivery ensures warfighters can frequently and securely receive and use the latest features, much like your smartphone apps do today. And the Department of Defense’s API strategy recognizes that application programming interfaces are essential to interoperability and joint warfighting, just like any common banking, rideshare, or navigation app is essential to life in a digitally integrated society. In the age of AI, the government has a leading role to play in the safe, suitable, and effective integration of these systems. That role begins with making the authoritative standards findable, accessible, and consumable as code in one place.
Pockets of excellence exist. The enduring problem, though, is that these repositories are fragmented across different classification domains, different authentication schemes, and different organizational sponsors. The git.mil repository houses various government-centric projects and is easily accessible to Common Access Card holders. The TAK.gov code repository hosts the Tactical Assault Kit software suite as well as the Open Mission Network Interface specifications. The STITCHES repository is the long-term home of DARPA’s mosaic warfare integration suite. The Test Resource Management Center provides a rich repository of models for modeling and simulation purposes.
Modern commercial vendors also provide their own software development kits and application programming interface documentation on their public websites.
The Defense Logistics Agency’s ASSIST database is the official Department of Defense repository for military specifications and standards, and the agency’s data modernization initiative is making progress toward digital delivery. But ASSIST has historically published these standards as PDF documents—human-friendly, not machine-readable. (No, uploading the PDFs into GenAI.mil and asking Gemini for a JSON or Protocol Buffers structure does not make them machine-readable.)
For the Joint Warfighting Concept to work at machine speed, the most urgent priority is as code delivery and sustainment of the machine-to-machine standards that underpin joint interoperability: Tactical Digital Information Link–J, Variable Message Format, Joint Range Extension Applications Protocol–C, and the broader tactical datalink standards body. Critical specifications like the Open Mission Systems and Universal Command and Control Interface standards face the same challenge: In my personal experience, they are often squirreled away on stovepiped systems housed across the Defense Research and Engineering Network and require dedicated sponsorship to access them. They aren’t completely inaccessible, but there is substantial friction. Friction across many channels is a major contributor to today’s integration gap. By contrast, in the private sector, integration accelerates in the open.
If the department is serious about warfighting advantage through machine-speed interoperability and AI-accelerated decision-making, these standards need to be centrally maintained and published in machine-readable specifications—protocol buffer definitions, JSON schemas, API documents—that commercial and government developers can consume directly in their applications and, in due time, agentic frameworks.
Three Things the Department of Defense Should Do
Leaders from government and industry have already decided what products, standards, and technologies will populate tomorrow’s battlefields. The Department of Defense needs to provide opinionated technical leadership on integration standards and a modernized assessment process to sustain the current pace of innovation. Three steps would quickly close the integration gap.
First, the department should establish a unified, accessible code repository and data model registry for combined joint all-domain command-and-control integration standards. The existing repositories at git.mil, TAK.gov, and STITCHES.mil prove the model works, but they are siloed, as are many others across the military services and the intelligence community. A single authoritative registry—federated if necessary, but discoverable through a common portal—would allow any developer, military or commercial, to find the canonical data models, protocol buffer definitions, and interface specifications for the systems their software must interoperate with. This is not a technology problem. It is an organizational decision that senior leaders can make today and should not cede to industry.
Second, the department should publish critical interoperability standards—including Open Mission Systems / Universal Command and Control Interface, and tactical datalink specifications—in machine-readable formats with open access for credentialed developers. Standards locked in PDF documents and gated behind cumbersome access processes cannot drive the kind of rapid, iterative integration that commercial software development demands. If the department wants commercial firms to build interoperable products at commercial speed, it must make the specifications broadly available in the formats those firms actually use: protocol buffers, JSON and XML schema, and API documentation. The Open Mission Network Interface specifications hosted in the https://git.tak.gov/standards repository are a strong example of how this can work.
Third, the department should modernize the operational test and evaluation process for commercial AI-enabling technologies to ensure seamless transition from technology to capability. Soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, and guardians are already providing feedback on these tools in the field. That feedback needs to flow into a continuous, formalized assessment process that asks the right questions: Does this technology make discrete, doctrinal warfighting functions faster? Safer? More resilient? More distributed? The current operational test and evaluation framework was designed for hardware programs of record with multiyear development cycles. It is not designed for commercial software that ships updates monthly. The department should commit to fully proliferating working technologies based on warfighter feedback while funding continuous doctrinal assessment of these technologies’ effects on how the force fights.
The goal of modern operational test and evaluation is not to test whether the software works—that remains the job of developmental test and organizations like the Joint Staff’s J6 directorate and the services’ own developmental test functions. The goal is to assess how these investments change the character of the fight, to provide objective feedback as commercial teams iterate on their designs, and to encode these assessments into doctrine and tactics so the next unit to receive the technology arrives in theater with a playbook. While the emergence of commercial capabilities accelerates realization of the latest Joint Warfighting Concept, the objective assessment of the mission outcomes has been shelved in the interest of speed. That rigor must now be reinstated as part of the road to fielding combat capability.
From Technology to Capability
The integration gap is not a technology or resourcing problem. It is a coordination problem. Ontology management, conflict-free replicated data types, and zero-trust network architecture are no longer experimental technologies awaiting investment decisions. They are arriving on the battlefield right now, funded by major programs of record and delivered by commercial firms at commercial speed.
Cold War perceptions of the bomber gap and the missile gap drove investments that formed a credible deterrent. The integration gap demands the same urgency—because a force that can reconfigure faster than it can be targeted is a force that deters conflict. The risk is not that the joint force will fail to buy the right plumbing. The risk is that each pipe will be plumbed to a different standard, and when the force needs to push water through the whole system at once, nothing will connect.
Accessible data model specifications, a unified integration registry, and a modernized AI-focused assessment process are not glamorous reforms. They do not fly, shoot, or explode. But they will determine whether the joint force’s historic investments in AI-enabling infrastructure produce a data mesh that works across services and combatant commands—or a collection of proprietary stovepipes that merely look modern. The tools are here. It’s time to close the integration gap.
Major Ryan McLean is a flight test engineer at the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center and a student at Air Command and Staff College’s eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education. He has spent fourteen years in defense engineering leading technology programs across the Department of Defense, including the Tactical Assault Kit and Maven Smart System, and deployed to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center, the Air Force Reserve, the Department of Defense, or any other government agency.
Image credit: Chustine Minoda, US Air Force
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mwi.westpoint.edu · Ryan McLean · February 25, 2026
15. Cognitive Warfare Is Cheap—and That’s the Problem
Summary:
Sara Russo argues the key to cognitive warfare is not definitions but cost. It is cheap to initiate, hard to attribute, and far more expensive for institutions to counter. A single ambiguous legal, narrative, administrative, or informational move can trigger costly cycles of reviews, coordination, media response, and reassurance that consume time, attention, and institutional energy. The effect is cumulative, producing hesitation rather than dramatic paralysis, and shifting organizations from initiative to process. Because attribution and proportional response are difficult, classic punishment deterrence often fails; the act is cheap to repeat. Russo argues defense should focus on lowering response costs through organizational design, delegated authorities, selective engagement, and maintaining operational initiative rather than trying to answer every provocation.
Comment: Again thanks to the IWI-SWJ partnership we can read this essay again.
Cognitive Warfare Is Cheap—and That’s the Problem
February 24, 2026 by Sara Russo
https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/cognitive-warfare-costs-economic-asymmetry/
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of Small Wars Journal as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 01.30.2026 and is available here.
Introduction: The Wrong Question
Much of the debate around cognitive warfare has been largely revolved around definitions. Is it merely a continuation of information operations? A kind of psychological warfare that uses digital technologies? Or is it a completely new domain? These questions have been at the center of policy debates, doctrinal documents, and public discussions. However, by focusing on these questions, an additional issue that is as significant as the starting point of a common definition has been overlooked.
The real question, in addition to what cognitive warfare is, is why it works so persistently.
The explanation does not only lie in the novelty of the phenomenon or the technological superiority; rather, it is about the cost. The influence sphere of cognitive warfare is effective because it is cheap to start, hard to pinpoint the perpetrator, and a lot more expensive to counter. One single ambiguous action – may it be legal, narrative, administrative, or informational – has the potential to trigger a cascade of reviews, coordination mechanisms, public responses, and internal alignment activities that would overwhelm the initial investment.
The fact that this imbalance is not a mere accident but a structural one is what really causes it to challenge the deeply embedded assumptions of deterrence theory, crisis management, and military planning. Most of the time, the aim of cognitive warfare is not to achieve a decisive victory or escalate the situation. Rather, it is to survive by making the defenders assume a position that is permanently costly.
Cheap Actions, Expensive Consequences
In traditional military logic, effects are expected to scale with investment. Cognitive warfare, however, is disrupting this assumption.
An inexpensive move might set off a whole series of events: internal evaluations, inter-agency coordination, legal opinions, media inquiries, political debate, and public reassurance. Every step is logical and, more often than not, required. If one considers the steps as a whole, they take time, attention, and the unwieldy resource of institutional energy, which is difficult to regain.
What makes this asymmetry so effective is that the costs that result are very rarely visible as “defense”. The time that is spent on clarifying, aligning, or reassuring is not recorded as operational expenditure, yet it directly competes with planning, execution, and strategic foresight. So, cognitive warfare imposes what might be called opportunity costs – what institutions fail to do because they are busy responding.
Additionally, these costs are rather cumulative than decisive. No single response exhausts an organization. Instead, each response slightly lowers tempo and confidence. Gradually, the organization becomes more cautious, more internally focused, and less willing to act without extensive verification. The strategic effect is not paralysis, but hesitation, and hesitation is often enough to change the results in competitive environments. This phenomenon accounts for the reason why cognitive warfare seldom aims at spectacular moments. Its power is in quietly changing the way institutions allocate attention, prioritize risks, and justify action. Thus, the outcome is a gradual move away from initiative to management, from decision to process.
Importantly, none of this necessitates the initiating action to be credible, persuasive, or even successful in a conventional sense. Cognitive warfare does not rely on convincing audiences at first. It only requires that sufficient ambiguity be created so as to delay action, fragment authority, or redirect focus.
In this way, its power is, to a large extent, exercised not through the change of people’s beliefs, but through the change of their mental processes. Institutions, which are highly efficient in terms of accountability, verification, and coordination, find themselves having to spend resources just to be able to maintain coherence. The initiator, on the other hand, pays very little and is free to either withdraw or repeat the incident somewhere else.
The outcome is a strategic landscape where the defenders are perpetually forced to respond to low-cost provocations, which, however, have high-cost consequences.
Why Deterrence Logic Fails: Cognitive Warfare as a Cost-Exchange Strategy
Military planners are familiar with cost-exchange logic: how much an action costs an enemy versus what it costs to counter that action. In kinetic domains, this logic is clear and quantifiable. In cognitive warfare, it is seldom spoken of but is still just as powerful.
The exchange ratio is heavily weighted towards the perpetrator. It costs very little to produce ambiguity, but a lot more to clarify it. With very little effort, one can create a plausible claim, a procedural challenge, or a contested narrative. To disprove, contextualize, or neutralize it, an institution has to be mobilized.
Unlike traditional military exchanges, this cost imbalance does not require escalation to remain effective. The truth is, escalation often harms the initiator’s advantage by allowing symmetrical responses. Consequently, cognitive warfare is a game of restraint rather than intensity. It depends on situations where actions can still be denied, reversed, and are legally or politically ambiguous. At the strategic level, this changes how success should be gauged.
The goal is not to coerce immediate change of behavior, but to make the opposition feel continuous friction. Even when a claim is dismissed or a narrative collapses, the defender is the one who has borne the cost of the response. Hence, the initiator does not have to “win” the argument in order to get the upper hand in the exchange. Its power lies in the fact that it can stay cheap over time, while the defender has to be constantly investing in upholding coherence and legitimacy.
Over time, this leads to a kind of strategic fatigue. It is not a defeat in the traditional way, but a slow diminishment of the initiative. The resources that were originally intended for the proactive objectives are now diverted towards defensive sensemaking. The process of decision-making becomes slower. Authority gets more careful. The loss of momentum occurs.
That is the reason why cognitive warfare does not have to be large or intense to be effective. The effectiveness of the operation builds up through repeated actions. Every single action may be insignificant. The total cost that the defender has to bear is significant.
Traditional deterrence relies on the idea that costs can be imposed fairly. When one side takes action, the other side responds. Escalation raises stakes for both sides. Cognitive warfare disrupts this logic. To begin with, attribution is in many cases deliberately ambiguous. Actions take place within legal, political, or informational frameworks that are not clearly defined. This makes retaliation difficult to justify and easy to contest. Secondly, it is difficult to establish proportional responses. To react to a low-cost action with a strong force is to risk an overreaction; if the response is weak, the risk is that the action will be normalized. What is most significant, however, is that in many cases, not only does the response increase the defender’s costs more than the initiators, but it also may be the cause of further escalation. It may be necessary to respond through the public, legal, or institutional channels, but the cost is rarely low. Punishment deterrence loses its effectiveness when the act to be deterred costs almost nothing to repeat. Consequently, cognitive warfare is a game of patience, tolerance of ambiguity, and the ability to operate without institutional consensus for those who come out as winners. Those who depend on deliberation and procedural legitimacy are structurally disadvantaged.
The Trap of Permanent Defense: The Economics of Plausibility
Cognitive warfare operates in the layer that separates truth from falsehood. It depends on plausibility, not on proof.
Plausible claims are cheap to create and hard to definitively get rid of. In fact, even if they are refuted, they still “charge” the defender, who has to prove that he is right, transparent, and acting in good faith. The initiator, however, does not carry such a burden. This economic asymmetry is particularly visible in democratic societies and large bureaucracies. The systems that are there to secure accountability and legitimacy have to constantly explain themselves. Their silence can be taken as guilt, while their speed can be seen as too hasty. In any case, it is the defender who pays. As a result of this process, strategic fatigue develops slowly.
Institutions are not necessarily misled by misinformation, but are rather exhausted by the constant need to deal with uncertainty. Administrative friction is what cognitive warfare uses, not deception.
The biggest risk is the failure of a single cognitive operation, but rather that defense becomes the organization’s permanent way of functioning. If organizations have to constantly spend resources on verification, coordination, and reassurance, they lose their capacity for initiative. The time taken for decision-making gets longer. The willingness to take risks decreases. It becomes harder to clearly see and understand the strategic priorities. This situation is unsustainable as it turns uncertainty from a challenge that happens occasionally into a structural characteristic of the organization. Cognitive warfare is not looking for a moment of decisiveness. It aims to make normal functioning more and more costly. In such a situation, even decisions that are right seem slow, even responses that are appropriate seem reactive, and even success seems temporary. The one who has the strategic advantage is the actor who can impose costs on others without incurring them himself.
Implications for Military and Policy Planning
If cognitive warfare is relatively inexpensive, it would be strategically unwise to try to defend against it by matching the effort. The goal cannot be to respond to every provocation. The goal should be to reduce the return on investment of cognitive pressure. Three implications result from this. First, resilience should be an economic concept, not merely an informational one. The most important thing is to lower the cost of response rather than to have perfect attribution. Second, delegated authority through pre-approved decision pathways and simplified coordination can help limit the amount of energy that ambiguity consumes. Third, selectivity is also indispensable. Not every signal warrants a response. Treating all ambiguity as escalation gives the adversary the initiative. Strategic restraint helps to maintain institutional capacity. Finally, initiative is even more important than refutation. Organizations that continue to be operationally proactive deprive adversaries of the attention and delay they need in order to generate their other moves. Thus, action, rather than explanation, becomes the stabilizing force. None of these steps, however, takes away cognitive warfare. They just make it less profitable.
Why Organizational Design Matters More Than Messaging
The success of cognitive warfare depends less on the actual influence of content than on the target organization’s design. Complex institutions, especially those functioning across various legal, political, and operational domains, are highly susceptible to inexpensive disruptions due to the interdependence of their internal processes.
When authority is shared, coordination becomes essential. When coordination is essential, delay becomes possible. Cognitive warfare takes advantage of this structure by creating uncertainty at the points where alignment is most needed. The resulting friction is not a failure of leadership or competence. It is a predictable consequence of organizational complexity.
This implies that countering cognitive warfare is not mainly a communications issue. Enhancing narratives or messaging might be necessary, but it is insufficient. What matters more is the speed of an organization’s decision, action, and moving forward without requiring full consensus or perfect clarity.
In this sense, organizational design turns into a strategic variable. Organizations that are able to absorb ambiguity without coming to a halt maintain their initiative. Those organizations that are unable to do so, regardless of the accuracy or principled nature of their responses, are forced into a reactive position.
Conclusion: Rethinking Cost as a Strategic Variable
Cognitive warfare undermines the defense and policy sectors, not only because it is beyond understanding or technologically superior, but also because it is very cost-effective. It takes advantage of systems that are aimed at precision, accountability, and thoroughness by making them use their resources constantly in situations that are uncertain.
The main strategic issue is not only the influence, the narratives, or the new technologies. It is the difference in costs between taking action and defending oneself.
If institutions do not reflect on this disparity, by lowering the cost of their reaction and controlling the tendency to respond to every provocation, cognitive warfare will be welcomed as a cheap method, and this is the reason why it will continue. And in today’s competition, cheap strategies are the ones that usually last.
Sara Russo is a PhD candidate in Defence and Security Studies at the Centre for Higher Defence Studies (CASD) and the University of Turin. Her research focuses on cognitive warfare, social influence, and ambiguity as organizing forces, examining how non-truth, perception management, and emerging technologies shape decision-making, legitimacy, and coordination below the threshold of armed conflict. She works at the intersection of organization theory, strategic studies, and applied research in military and humanitarian contexts.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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16. The Transatlantic Defense Business Politics Can’t Break
Summary:
Anderson and Smith argue the Atlantic alliance is under political strain as Washington tightens conditions on support and signals a harsher view of the international order, which is shaking European trust. Yet they contend the transatlantic defense technology and investment ecosystem is expanding fast, and it may stabilize the alliance from the bottom up. European defense spending and venture funding have surged, but Europe still suffers from fragmented procurement and weak scale up, with too many national variants and too little collaborative buying. They point to NATO innovation programs as a partial workaround and urge contracts, multi year demand signals, and joint standards to turn prototypes into production while avoiding a self defeating industrial divorce.
The Transatlantic Defense Business Politics Can’t Break
warontherocks.com · · February 25, 2026
Wendy R. Anderson and Julianne Smith
February 25, 2026
https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/the-transatlantic-defense-business-politics-cant-break/
The foundations of the Atlantic alliance are shifting in ways not seen since the early days of the Cold War. Washington is no longer simply urging greater European burden-sharing: It is redefining the terms of the alliance itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the era of a coherent, rules-based international system has passed. Recent U.S. talk of “taking” Greenland, and “civilizational erasure” — alongside the decision to end U.S. security assistance to Ukraine — has rattled European capitals and eroded trust as they realize that U.S. support is increasingly conditioned on ideological alignment. Yet beneath the political turbulence, the transatlantic defense tech ecosystem is expanding rapidly — spanning venture capital, dual-use innovation, and cross-border partnerships. It has the potential to reshape the alliance from the ground up, even as political rhetoric stays hot.
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The Trump administration’s persistent pressure on allies to spend more on defense is producing tangible results. At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, NATO allies committed to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, a target that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The number of allies meeting the original 2 percent threshold has risen from six in 2021 to 32 today. E.U. member states spent an estimated 381 billion euros ($431 billion) on defense in 2025, up from 251 billion euros ($297 billion) in 2021. The will to rearm is no longer in question. It is unfolding in real time, with many European allies on track to reach 3.5 percent or more in the coming years.
Other numbers are equally striking, especially in venture capital. European defense technology venture funding surged from roughly 200 million euros in 2021 to 2.6 billion euros in 2025, a more than 10-fold increase in four years. Across the wider Alliance, defense, security, and resilience startups raised a record $8.7 billion in 2025, up 55 percent year-on-year and nearly four times the 2020 level. U.S. investors now supply 40 to 50 percent of all capital flowing into European defense technology rounds, and the number of investors participating in European defense deals has increased nearly fourfold since 2019. Specialized defense funds — including NATO’s 1 billion euro Innovation Fund launched in 2023 — accounted for over a third of European defense rounds in 2025, nearly double their share the prior year.
Europe’s problem has never been innovation — it has been scale. The continent produces world-class research, talent, and founders, but they operate inside 27 separate procurement regimes, each with its own administrative burden, regulations, and barriers to competition. Some European companies, such as Helsing AI, Quantum, or TEKEVER, are building and deploying across the NATO ecosystem but they remain largely the exception. Less than 20 percent of defense procurement in the European Union is collaborative. For every single weapons type produced in the United States, Europe manufactures more than five variants, and over 60 percent of E.U.-produced weapons are used exclusively in one country.
One of us saw this fragmentation from inside NATO headquarters, where a dozen allies would show up with incompatible kit and duplicative systems, each optimized for a national market too small to sustain it. The other has seen it with founders up close, where the demo lands, the need is urgent, and then cross-border rules, accreditation, and contracting timelines turn momentum into grind. In Ukraine, the cost of such fragmentation has been painfully concrete. When Kyiv needed howitzers, E.U. member states sent more than 10 different models, creating a logistical nightmare that consumed time, parts, training, and lives. Estimates suggest that greater procurement cooperation could save 30 to 100 billion euros annually. Instead, 80 percent of defense spending still flows through national systems to domestic suppliers.
This is not an innovation deficit. It is a growth-stage capital gap and a market structure failure that continues to kill companies between prototype and production. NATO has become, almost by accident, Europe’s most effective workaround: the only infrastructure aligning capital, procurement signals, and operational urgency across 32 nations. Consider the trajectory: NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic selected 150 companies from 24 countries for its 2026 cohort, doubling intake from 2025. These companies gain access to 16 accelerator sites and more than 200 test centers across the alliance. More than 25 technologies from this effort have been adopted by allies or tested in operational environments.
Europe does not lack blueprints. It lacks plumbing. The point isn’t that everything is working. The goal is to harden an adaptable ecosystem, capable of converting urgency into operational realities, into one that has scalable pathways for future growth. What does this mean in practice? It means procurement offices writing contracts around commercially available solutions rather than specifying bespoke requirements that take years to fulfill. It means treating manufacturing scale-up as a core function of defense institutions, not something startups must bootstrap alone. And it means replacing vague expressions of interest with binding, multi-year purchase commitments, the kind of demand signal that turns a promising demo into a funded production line.
European capitals will also have to be careful about driving towards sovereign capabilities in excess. A growing trust deficit is already leading several allies to hedge, choosing capabilities made solely in Europe rather than investing in shared NATO capabilities or transatlantic co-production. That instinct is understandable, but it is strategically self-defeating. The defense tech ecosystem — talent, capital, components, and standards — is inherently transatlantic. The numbers make this plain. Between 2022 and 2023, 68 percent of E.U. defense acquisitions came from the United States, and roughly 80 percent of E.U. financial support to Ukraine was spent on non-European products. While Europe is frantically trying to correct that imbalance in the name of developing its own sovereign capabilities, layering on regulation that cuts European startups off from American AI stacks, components, and growth capital on which many already depend is not the answer. Neither are Buy European mandates that are only making fragmentation across the continent worse.
If each country in Europe continues to invest primarily in its own national defense industry, the challenges unearthed in the beginning of the Ukraine war — when it became clear that multiple countries were producing 155mm artillery to slightly different standards across different manufacturers — will only worsen. What should have been a collective asset was effectively fragmented into national silos.
Collaborative procurement, which only accounts for 18 percent of E.U. defense acquisitions today, is the clearest path forward and must be pursued both among European partners and — where strategically necessary — with the United States. But this requires pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington should recognize that an absolutist Buy American posture, particularly at a moment when the United States has signaled ambivalence about its commitments to European security, will accelerate European efforts to build sovereign capabilities that exclude American industry entirely. The goal should be interoperability and mutual dependence, not a transatlantic industrial divorce that leaves both sides weaker. NATO and the European Union both have bigger potential roles to play in this regard. NATO’s defense planning process, which was designed for an entirely different era, needs to be reformed to incentivize Allies to break the cycle of duplicative national purchasing. The E.U. Commission should use the leverage it has through ReArm Europe and the European Defence Industry Programme more aggressively to do the same. Common defense financing must explicitly make collaborative procurement conditional.
To founders and investors building in this space, and to the procurement officials, defense ministers, and legislators whose decisions determine whether promising technologies reach the field: What is being built here is both European self-reliance and alliance maintenance through business, capital, and institutional reform. It may not look like a grand strategy. But economic interdependence stabilizes alliances in ways politics alone never can — a fact that has never been more urgent than it is today.
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Wendy R. Anderson is senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. She served as chief of staff to U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter and, most recently, as senior vice president of national security at Palantir.
Julianne Smith served as U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2021 to 2024 and is a distinguished nonresident fellow in defense and security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Image: Midjourney
warontherocks.com · · February 25, 2026
17. Arctic Hot Takes Need a Cold Reality Check
Summary:
Ryan Burke argues that much Arctic strategy talk is detached from the brutal physics of operating at minus 40 Fahrenheit. Cold is not a planning factor. It is the governing constraint that breaks equipment, slows cognition, and turns simple tasks into endurance events. He says official U.S. strategies and much scholarship acknowledge harsh conditions but do not integrate human performance limits and degradation into force design, readiness, or feasibility. Burke urges dropping the assumption that persistence equals seriousness and shifting toward rotational, repeated deployments that test people and systems, then recover. The Arctic rewards preparation and punishes assumption, so credible prescriptions must start with logistics, endurance, and cost.
Comment: Can't change the laws of physics.
Arctic Hot Takes Need a Cold Reality Check
warontherocks.com · February 25, 2026
Ryan Burke
February 25, 2026
https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/arctic-hot-takes-need-a-cold-reality-check/
At –40°F, cold is not a condition simply to be managed. It is a constraint that governs everything. Equipment fails, humans slow, and mistakes compound. Any serious discussion of Arctic military strategy and operations needs to begin with and remain grounded in reality.
Unfortunately, there is an ever-expanding discourse around Arctic security that does not do this. Spend enough time in the Arctic, in winter, in darkness, in sustained extreme cold — and the reality check arrives quickly. Concepts that seem logical in a briefing room dissolve once eyelashes freeze shut, fingers lose dexterity, and the simple act of tying boot laces becomes a test of mental and physical endurance.
The Arctic security community includes many thoughtful scholars, analysts, and practitioners doing serious work. The literature created by this community has expanded rapidly in recent years, reflecting the Arctic’s growing prominence in discussions of great-power competition, force posture, and deterrence. What was once a niche area of study is now firmly embedded in mainstream strategic discourse. Now we can read many strong views about what the military should do in the Arctic: where forces should be based, how they should operate, and whether persistent, year-round presence is both necessary and achievable.
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That attention is understandable and, in many respects, welcome. But that attention sometimes leads to hyperbolic analysis and grand prescriptions overlooking the Arctic’s harsh reality. The intent here is not to indict members of this community. Nor is it an argument that only those with deep Arctic experience are qualified to think seriously about Arctic strategy. Rather, the intent is to highlight a recurring gap in the broader Arctic security discourse: a tendency to advance ambitious military prescriptions seemingly without sufficient appreciation for what the Arctic actually demands of the people, equipment, and organizations operating within it.
The Arctic is an extreme place where the environment is the first enemy, and everything else is secondary. It may be impossible to grasp the intensity of the Arctic and the constraints it imposes without having spent extended time there in winter and outside. Cold degrades equipment. Darkness affects cognition. Distance complicates logistics. Human bodies, even well-trained ones, have limits. Exposed skin freezes quickly. Metal drains heat instantly. Batteries fail. Lubricants thicken or seize. Plastics crack. Tasks that take minutes elsewhere take hours. Even a light wind at –40°F can turn manageable exposure into something life-threatening in mere minutes. Experiential knowledge does not replace thoughtful analysis, but it ought to fundamentally shape it.
Yet much of the Arctic security literature implicitly treats people as interchangeable components in a system, assuming that training and doctrine can compensate for environmental stress indefinitely. Presence is discussed as if it were an on-off switch rather than a costly, fragile condition that must be achieved and continually sustained. Logistics appear in the discourse as assumed rather than a central determinant of what is possible. The scholarly commentary, in many ways, reflects the content of the official Arctic strategies from the Defense Department and the armed forces. When these documents underweight the significance of the environmental challenges, so too will the ensuing scholarly commentary. Better Arctic analysis starts with better Arctic strategy.
The Defense Department’s 2024 Arctic Strategy describes the region as harsh and austere. The Army’s new Arctic doctrine offers rudimentary cold mitigation techniques (e.g., wear more warming layers) for ground troops. But acknowledgement and mitigation are not integration. Strategy emphasizes enhanced presence and sustained operations — doctrine explains how to stay warm. Neither fully integrates the predictable and cumulative effects of human performance and equipment degradation in extreme cold. This should be a shaping constraint for strategic ambition. Still, we read prescriptions for Arctic military strategy and operations — in some cases from the U.S. military services themselves — that are delivered with breezy confidence but sometimes fail to consider the tactical and operational requirements of executing the missions they prescribe in one of the harshest environments imaginable.
Service strategies are not tactical manuals. They prescribe the means and ways of achieving broad ends. But when strategy charges ambitious goals — persistent presence, sustained deterrence — without direction to integrate physiological and psychological limits into force design and execution, it results in conceptually ambitious and operationally detached substance. The Army’s 2021 Arctic Strategy, for example, charges the Army with “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” implying both prior dominance — which it arguably never enjoyed — and the feasibility of restoring it. Never mind the fact that the Arctic is predominantly a maritime domain, and more than half of the Arctic landmass lies within Russian territory. Even with its emphasis on Arctic-capable forces and multi-domain operations, the strategy fails to discuss human performance as a root enabler, or limiting factor, of achieving its ambitious goals.
The Navy’s Arctic Strategy is similarly mis-calibrated, calling for enhanced and persistent maritime presence. Sustained surface presence in the Arctic is an episodic event at best for the Navy. Ice-breaking constraints, seasonal accessibility, and variable sea conditions complicate the ability to maintain enhanced surface presence. And this says nothing of the men and women aboard the ships charged with executing the mission.
The Air Force’s Arctic Strategy seems more grounded in the service’s current capabilities. While human performance may be less of a constraint for sustained air operations, the Air Force strategy assumes human endurance at high-latitude bases constantly battling extreme cold and sometimes darkness. The human cost to the mission is not treated as a structural variable affecting readiness.
The collective strategies and doctrinal guidance broadly acknowledge Arctic conditions. They emphasize training, infrastructure, capabilities, presence. They rarely specify the human element central to execution and feasibility. Elevated confidence follows in the scholarly debates that — at times and reflective of strategic guidance — equally undervalue the human toll.
Scholars, analysts, and policymakers all have essential roles to play in the Arctic security discourse. But those roles are strengthened — not weakened — when analytical confidence is grounded in and tempered by environmental understanding, and when prescriptions are framed with appropriate caution about what is and is not realistic. Recommendations for more permanent bases and continuous operational presence lose credibility when they are advanced without serious discussion of how cold, darkness, distance, and human limits interact.
What does a responsible, reasonable, and feasible Arctic strategy look like once environmental and human constraints are considered as primary variables rather than footnotes? The strategic ends are for the Defense Department to determine, but the ways and means to accomplish these ends should take certain factors into consideration.
First, the Defense Department should abandon the assumption that persistence equals seriousness. In the Arctic, persistent presence is not a performative baseline measure. Persistent presence is a prohibitive condition — given current capabilities — that imposes costs on people and equipment. Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Force Space) in northwest Greenland is currently the U.S. military’s only permanent base north of the Arctic Circle (66°33’N). Other bases in Alaska south of the Arctic Circle are within the Arctic climatic region as defined in the United States. But because of their proximity to metropolitan areas and infrastructure, these bases do not replicate the extreme limitations of permanent existence and isolation north of the Arctic Circle. Even Eielson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright — both in the vicinity of Fairbanks, Alaska, just south of 65°N — are well-connected and sustained. Pituffik is both costly and logistically difficult to maintain. While Pituffik demonstrates permanent Arctic presence is sustainable, the cost of doing so is comparably prohibitive.
A more realistic approach favors rotational presence over persistent presence — short, deliberate, recurring Arctic deployments, like those the U.S. Marine Corps execute in Norway and U.S. Special Forces conduct in Sweden. These are designed to build familiarity, normalize exposure, test systems and equipment and human psyches, and demonstrate accessibility without degrading force posture beyond the limits of effectiveness. Expanding a regionally aligned force model for the Arctic – like the Army’s 11th Airborne Division – also warrants greater consideration as a strategic baseline. Arctic military capabilities should not be measured in permanence, but rather in how reliably a unit can arrive, operate and accomplish its mission, and egress with intact force posture.
Existing readiness frameworks emphasize force availability and time on station. Doctrine emphasizes cold acclimatization and injury mitigation. A readiness construct integrating physiological and psychological decline in extreme cold is underdeveloped, however. Prolonged exposure at or beyond defined tolerance thresholds will affect human performance and mission completion. Pre- and post-exposure conditions matter.
For example, a small unit that conducts repeated dismounted operations in sustained sub-zero temperatures will experience degradation in their equipment and physiology over time. Tasks will progressively take longer. Errors will increase. Day by day, these factors will add to the layers of operational difficulty. As time progresses, the enemy situation soon becomes secondary to human endurance and equipment function. Thus there is a correlation between exposure and conditional decline that should be a guiding factor in planning the means and ways of future operations to achieve operational and strategic ends.
A unit that retrogrades after five days of exposure with limited impact to personnel and equipment sustains a higher readiness rating for recurring operations than a unit returning from 10 days of exposure and corresponding conditional decline to its personnel and equipment, thus requiring extended reconstitution and recovery time, and a lower readiness rating. The specific readiness and condition metrics for equipment and personnel are better left to the engineers and physiologists to determine. Heuristics assessing human and equipment conditions before and after cold weather operations would be a valued informative basis for determining operational and tactical feasibility of strategic prescriptions. Suffice to say, however, that current strategic outlines for Arctic operations come up short in this regard, leaving much to be assumed rather than thoughtfully considered and deliberately assessed. We can do better.
The lesson is not that Arctic operations are impossible, but that duration and exposure time are the primary strategic variables affecting personnel and equipment in the Arctic. Current official strategies and doctrine insufficiently capture the human element. Prescriptions absent such analysis are assumptions. In the Arctic, nothing can be assumed. Responsible Arctic strategies and operational planning, therefore, should consider human limits, explicitly anchored to psychological and physiological metrics rather than mission ambition alone. In the Arctic, withdrawing and reconstituting is not a failure of will — it is often an expression of necessity and discipline.
Whether debating deterrence in the Arctic or monitoring or power projection, none of these require constant ground presence. Sustained air operations are realistic, but continuous Arctic land and maritime operations are neither necessary nor feasible. The U.S. armed forces should continue engaging in punctuated exercises in the Arctic and ongoing visible demonstrations of military reach via rotational force deployments and training.Permanent basing undoubtedly relieves some of the logistical burdens of projecting power via rotational force deployments, acting as a critical infrastructure node to sustain forward forces. However, unless or until there is a significant change in Arctic force posture and planning via budgetary commitments for future Arctic basing, arguments for persistent presence are not feasible, no matter how nicely they read on paper.
The Arctic does not need fewer ideas. It needs better-grounded ones rooted in the realities of the human condition. The Arctic security discourse benefits from voices that combine analytical skill with lived appreciation for environmental constraints, and from writers willing to say not just what could be done, but what might realistically be sustained — and at what cost.
For those seeking to contribute meaningfully to the Arctic debate, there is a simple suggestion, if you have the means and ability to do so: go north. Not briefly. Not in summer. Not shielded by heated tents and short visits just to say you’ve been there. Go to the Arctic in winter. In darkness. Be outside. Stay long enough for the environment to impress its lessons. Then return to the page with those lessons in mind.
And for editors who shape the boundaries of this discourse, perhaps a modest proposal: When publishing arguments that advocate expanded Arctic military presence or persistent operations, consider encouraging transparency about an author’s firsthand experience in the region. Not as a gatekeeping mechanism, but as context. Readers deserve to know the perspective from which claims are made, just as they do in other domains of expertise.
In the end, the Arctic is indifferent, unforgiving, and honest. It rewards preparation and punishes assumption. Strategies and recommendations that aspire to be credible should begin with respect for that reality. Experience does not guarantee correctness — but in the Arctic, where everything is trying to kill you, experience is often the difference between confidence and understanding.
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Ryan Burke, Ph.D, is a professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy, an affiliate professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks Center for Arctic Security and Resilience, and co-director of the Modern War Institute’s Project 6633. He is a veteran U.S. Marine Corps officer who has written widely on polar warfare and has extensive experience on the ground in conflict zones in the Middle East, Sahel, and Eastern Europe. He has also operated in extreme isolation in both polar regions during embedded training with conventional and special operations forces in the North American and European Arctics, as well as on a climbing expedition traversing previously unexplored terrain in the Transantarctic Mountains.
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or the U.S. Air Force Academy.
** Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Julie Scott via Wikimedia Commons
warontherocks.com · Daisy Johnston · February 25, 2026
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
https://apstrategy.org/
Executive Director, Korea Regional Review
https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/
Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal
https://smallwarsjournal.com/
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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