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Quotes of the Day:
"One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say."
– Bryant H. McGill
"This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible."
– George Santayana
1. Secret U.S. Drone Program Helped Capture Mexican Cartel Bosses
2. Zelensky to Meet Trump in Bid to Salvage U.S. Support
3. Rubio Can Unhijack ‘Human Rights’
4. Military-Tech Startups Vie for Billions as Hegseth Shakes Up Pentagon Spending
5. Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow
6. Chinese military unveils new data unit to help naval commanders make decisions
7. China amends military regulations to emphasise the need for war readiness
8. Israel Missed Signs in Plain Sight Hamas Was About to Attack, First Oct. 7 Probe Finds
9. Israeli Army Admits It Underestimated Hamas Before Oct. 7 Attack
10. How Chinese PLA’s latest forays off Australia cap years of maritime tensions
11. Ukraine’s European allies head to Kyiv for tutoring in drone warfare
12. Is Cyber Revolutionary or Barely Relevant in Modern Warfare?
13. Relearning the Timeless Lessons of Land Operations in Asia
14. Trump’s Missile Defense Initiative: A Strategic Imperative for the United States
15. Does J.D. Vance Know Anything About European Democracy or Security?
16. The Real Threat of Chinese AI
17. Trump continues the American tradition of abandoning allies
18. Dennis Blair: Pentagon purge a sign of dangerous times ahead
19. Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel
1. Secret U.S. Drone Program Helped Capture Mexican Cartel Bosses
Not so secret anymore.
One of the challenges of working "though, with, and by" is OPSEC. But it is something that must be planned for as operations cannot be kept secret for long.
Excerpts:
The drones, many of them MQ-9 Reapers used in counterterrorism operations around the world, are based for a week or two at a time at Mexican airfields, the officials said, highlighting the deep bilateral security cooperation between the two countries. Being based in Mexico enables the drones to spend more time over surveillance targets in the lush mountains of western Mexico that are home to the world’s largest fentanyl smuggling organizations, instead of flying back and forth to the U.S., the officials said.
Gen. Ricardo Trevilla, Mexico’s defense minister, said the American drones provided intelligence that led to the arrest last week of the security chief of Iván Archibaldo Guzmán, a son of “El Chapo” who is in a turf war with other factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the biggest drug-smuggling outfits in Mexico.
U.S. drone intelligence also led to the arrest of the elder Guzmán, commonly known as “El Chapo,” in Mexico in 2013 and 2016, the Mexican and U.S. officials said, though he escaped prison twice. In 2023, drones helped find “El Chapo’s” son, Ovidio Guzmán, who had taken over the drug business with his brothers.
Secret U.S. Drone Program Helped Capture Mexican Cartel Bosses
Intelligence provided by the unarmed drones was essential to the arrests of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, one of his sons and other top drug smugglers
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/mexico-cartel-us-drone-boss-capture-a0c8e429?mod=latest_headlines
By Steve Fisher in Mexico City and Vera Bergengruen
Follow in Washington
Feb. 28, 2025 5:30 am ET
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection MQ-9 Reaper drone at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., near the U.S.-Mexico border, in 2022. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
The U.S. has secretly flown unarmed drones from Mexican airfields to spy on drug cartels, leading to the arrests of kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, one of his sons and other drug lords, U.S. and Mexican officials said.
The flights, operated by the Department of Homeland Security and the Central Intelligence Agency at the Mexican military’s request, have also provided vital information for large drug seizures, the officials said. Using cameras that can capture a license plate from 20,000 feet above, the drones feed surveillance video on cartel smuggling operations, and map out clandestine labs, to authorities on both sides of the border, the officials said.
The drones, many of them MQ-9 Reapers used in counterterrorism operations around the world, are based for a week or two at a time at Mexican airfields, the officials said, highlighting the deep bilateral security cooperation between the two countries. Being based in Mexico enables the drones to spend more time over surveillance targets in the lush mountains of western Mexico that are home to the world’s largest fentanyl smuggling organizations, instead of flying back and forth to the U.S., the officials said.
Gen. Ricardo Trevilla, Mexico’s defense minister, said the American drones provided intelligence that led to the arrest last week of the security chief of Iván Archibaldo Guzmán, a son of “El Chapo” who is in a turf war with other factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the biggest drug-smuggling outfits in Mexico.
U.S. drone intelligence also led to the arrest of the elder Guzmán, commonly known as “El Chapo,” in Mexico in 2013 and 2016, the Mexican and U.S. officials said, though he escaped prison twice. In 2023, drones helped find “El Chapo’s” son, Ovidio Guzmán, who had taken over the drug business with his brothers.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on the program, while the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán following his 2016 arrest by Mexican special forces. Photo: Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press
Strains have emerged in the U.S.-Mexican security partnership since President Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and migrant smuggling. Trump has declared a national emergency along the southern border, deployed 4,000 troops there, and has repeatedly floated the idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. Last week he designated Mexico’s top drug gangs, including the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, as foreign terrorist organizations in what some experts say may be a precursor to potential military strikes.
Trump’s threats of unilateral military strikes on Mexican soil have led to domestic backlash that could pressure President Claudia Sheinbaum to curtail the sensitive security cooperation with the U.S., political analysts in Mexico have said. At the same time, Mexican officials have raced to head off tariffs and show Trump that they have the drug and migrant smuggling issues under control.
The CIA’s covert drone program in Mexico has been in operation for more than two decades, current and former Mexican officials said. The Mexican government acknowledged the U.S. Customs and Border Protection drone flights in 2011, emphasizing that these operations were supervised by Mexican agencies.
The public discussion of bilateral security programs, such as the deployment of drones in Mexico, has long been kept under wraps, former U.S. officials said. Details about the programs’ scope, the operation from Mexican airfields, and their role in high-profile arrests like that of the son of “El Chapo” haven’t been previously reported.
“The Mexican military is very capable, and if we enable them by providing intelligence support, they will go after our common threats,” said Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the former commander of U.S. Northern Command, which includes Mexico. “We just need to do it quietly and not brag about it,” he said.
The Mexican government is now on the defensive as public scrutiny of the program increases. The congressional leader of Mexico’s ruling party said he would ask the country’s defense ministry to provide information about the program because of potential foreign intervention.
Sheinbaum said the drone program forms part of a bilateral security and drug interdiction effort that goes back years. But in response to the nationalist outcry over Trump’s threats, her administration proposed a law last week to stiffen penalties for acting on behalf foreign governments without official clearance.
American drones have been flying over Mexican airspace since the early 2000s, around the time that “El Chapo” made his first of two escapes from Mexican prisons. The drug lord became a prominent leader of the Sinaloa Cartel in the early 1990s and helped turn it into an international drug-trafficking juggernaut, making him one of the most wanted men alive.
In the years after his escape, the U.S. began to provide imagery of his whereabouts, a former Mexican official said. It took more than a decade to recapture him.
American drones have been flying over Mexican airspace since the early 2000s. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
In 2013, drones flew over Sinaloa’s mountains to gather intelligence on “El Chapo” for the Mexican military. Surveillance footage showed people building a hunting lodge. “We knew that’s where he met with his sons,” said Scott Brown, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security who helped lead the investigation. But timing with the Mexican military didn’t work out for the arrest, Brown said.
Authorities eventually captured “El Chapo” at a hotel in the Sinaloa beach resort of Mazatlán in 2014. A predator drone used in the capture was deliberately crashed into the Pacific 20 miles south of San Diego after a mechanical failure, Brown said.
A few months later, in 2015, “El Chapo” staged another spectacular escape from a maximum-security prison through a long tunnel. The U.S. again sent drones to locate him.
For weeks leading up to the capture, drones scanned large swaths of Sinaloa state, identifying where he stayed at night, daily travel routes and restaurants he frequented.
Then, Brown said, after weeks of surveillance, Mexican special forces were ready to take down the drug lord at one of his hide-outs when authorities got word that Hollywood actor Sean Penn and Mexican soap opera star Kate del Castillo were boarding a private jet from Los Angeles to meet “El Chapo” that same day. Authorities immediately called off the raid and stopped surveillance, Brown said, to avoid putting the lives of the two visitors at risk.
By the time Mexican special forces moved in on “El Chapo” in January 2016, Mexican and U.S. authorities had a detailed map of his routines. A drone hovered above the Sinaloa city of Los Mochis as special forces raided one of his safe houses. “El Chapo” fled through a secret tunnel built under a bathtub in the house, walked through the city sewer and stole a car. He was then captured by a local police officer who spotted him.
Drone video feeds were also crucial for the capture of “El Chapo’s” son, Ovidio, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Along with his three brothers, collectively known as “the Chapitos,” Ovidio inherited his father’s empire and helped build one of the world’s biggest fentanyl production and smuggling operations, U.S. authorities say.
At 4 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2023, Mexican special forces descended on a fortified compound where Ovidio was hiding, just north of the cartel stronghold of Culiacán, the Sinaloa state capital. A Black Hawk helicopter, armed with a six-barrel rotary cannon, strafed the compound, pushing back cartel gunmen armed with .50-caliber sniper rifles, allowing ground forces to move in, said people familiar with the operation.
Hovering 20,000 feet above was a Reaper drone beaming a high-definition, night-vision, live video feed to Mexican security headquarters. The feed was invaluable, the people said, allowing commanders to assess movements and reposition special forces in real time.
The raid on Ovidio’s compound left some 150 Sinaloa gunmen and 10 soldiers dead. Ovidio, who was on the U.S. most-wanted list, was arrested and later extradited to the U.S.
Write to Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com
2. Zelensky to Meet Trump in Bid to Salvage U.S. Support
It seems like the entire Trump political base has turned against Ukraine. I fear it is going to be a challenge for Zelensky to maintain US support.
Zelensky to Meet Trump in Bid to Salvage U.S. Support
The Ukrainian leader hopes to finalize a mineral-rights agreement with Washington and appeal for security guarantees
https://www.wsj.com/world/zelensky-to-meet-trump-in-bid-to-salvage-u-s-support-2e656025?mod=latest_headlines
By Michael R. Gordon
Follow and Ian Lovett
Follow
Feb. 28, 2025 5:00 am ET
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to use his Friday visit to the White House to try to reset his relationship with President Trump as the U.S. presses for speedy negotiations over the fate of his country.
The past few weeks have been rocky for Kyiv. After Zelensky refused to sign an earlier version of a mineral-rights agreement, Trump called him a “dictator without elections” and accused Kyiv of starting the war, which started when Russian forces began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. More troubling for Zelensky, the U.S. began talks with Russia that didn’t include Ukraine.
But recent progress toward an accord, which is likely to be continued during his visit, has improved the atmosphere. On Thursday, Trump said that he couldn’t believe that he ever called the Ukrainian president a dictator and praised the courage of the Ukrainian military.
“We’ve given him a lot of equipment and a lot of money, but they have fought very bravely,” Trump said in a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Whether Zelensky can use Trump’s transactional approach to diplomacy to obtain the security guarantees he is seeking is an open question.
Zelensky wants the mineral-rights deal to lead to firm security commitments from the West for Ukraine. Trump has ruled out support for NATO membership for Ukraine. But Zelensky and his European allies have been discussing other potential arrangements, including European troops stationed in Ukraine in the case of a peace settlement. Without such guarantees, Ukrainians fear that Russia could sign a cease-fire agreement, rebuild its arsenal, and then invade Ukraine again.
President Trump has repeatedly declined to say publicly whether the U.S. might provide indirect support for a prospective European peacekeeping force in Ukraine, despite entreaties this week from French President Emmanuel Macron and Starmer, who has said a U.S. “backstop” is vital.
During a Wednesday cabinet meeting, Trump said the question was premature and that a peace agreement needed to be hammered out first.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much. We’re going to have Europe do that,” Trump said during his cabinet meeting Wednesday. “Europe is their next-door neighbor. But we’re going to make sure everything goes well.”
A senior Trump administration official said Thursday that the U.S. wouldn’t put boots on the ground in Ukraine but suggested that some forms of indirect support might be open for discussion as long as U.S. troops weren’t “in harm’s way.”
But the Trump administration’s reluctance to say where it stands on security guarantees might create a dilemma for Ukraine and its European allies, which are likely to be reluctant to commit to enforcing a peace agreement without knowing where Washington stands.
The meeting with Trump is a chance to understand whether Ukraine will continue to have U.S. backing. Over the last several weeks, questions have been raised over whether the U.S. would continue to send military aid to Ukraine, or even sell the country weapons.
“We need to understand where we stand with the United States of America,” Zelensky said on Wednesday.
Zelensky has signaled that, in exchange for continued U.S. support, he would be willing to pay an economic price, including by providing access to its natural resources—oil and gas, as well as critical minerals. Ukraine is believed to have deposits of at least 20 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers critical. These include lithium, graphite, titanium, uranium and rare earths, a collection of 17 elements that are essential for everything from cellphones to the defense industry.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, hoping to widen the rift between Kyiv and Washington, floated the idea that the U.S. could strike a deal to mine critical minerals in Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com
3. Rubio Can Unhijack ‘Human Rights’
I hope he will put human rights upfront for north Korea (my bias) as Reagan did with the USSR.
We should reflect deeply on the first paragraph in the excerpt below. It is what makes America great. You either believe in American ideals or you do not.
The ideals expressed in this paragraph along with the 1919 Korean Declaration of Independence as well as the 8.15 Unification Doctrine form the basis for the Korean Dream for unification.
Excerpts:
Human rights have long been a driving moral force in America’s foreign policy. Ronald Reagan made the case against Soviet expansionism and oppression in the language of human rights. The rights to life, religious freedom, freedom of expression, and due process of law are all rooted, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, in natural law and enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. An understanding of rights as deriving from the inherent and equal dignity of every person echoes the American Founders’ prophetic proclamation “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable rights.”
During the Obama and Biden administrations, the State Department reconceived human rights to advance left-wing causes, from castigating countries like Poland for laws that uphold the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions to funneling foreign aid on behalf of gay rights and transgender ideology.
This reconception of human rights spurred Secretary Mike Pompeo to establish the Commission on Unalienable Rights in 2019, under the chairmanship of Harvard legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon. In its report, the commission outlined the historical Western conception of rights and recommended that the U.S. be “cautious” about “expanding” it.
Rubio Can Unhijack ‘Human Rights’
The Founders’ definition of the term is ripe for revival.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/marco-rubio-can-unhijack-human-rights-reverse-progressive-politicization-b2e2ab5e?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s
By Robert P. George
Feb. 27, 2025 5:26 pm ET
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister at the State Department in Washington, Feb. 10. Photo: craig hudson/Reuters
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken swift action against woke Biden-era policies. Passports now list a holder’s sex, not “gender,” and there’s no “X” option; and U.S. embassies are forbidden to display “pride” flags or any other banners than the Stars and Stripes.
These efforts are important and commendable. But Mr. Rubio can do more. He can reinstitute the State Department’s efforts during the first Trump administration to restore the original understanding of human rights. Over the past 30 years, the definition of human rights has been reworked by progressives to promote socially liberal causes and woke dogma.
Human rights have long been a driving moral force in America’s foreign policy. Ronald Reagan made the case against Soviet expansionism and oppression in the language of human rights. The rights to life, religious freedom, freedom of expression, and due process of law are all rooted, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, in natural law and enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. An understanding of rights as deriving from the inherent and equal dignity of every person echoes the American Founders’ prophetic proclamation “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable rights.”
During the Obama and Biden administrations, the State Department reconceived human rights to advance left-wing causes, from castigating countries like Poland for laws that uphold the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions to funneling foreign aid on behalf of gay rights and transgender ideology.
This reconception of human rights spurred Secretary Mike Pompeo to establish the Commission on Unalienable Rights in 2019, under the chairmanship of Harvard legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon. In its report, the commission outlined the historical Western conception of rights and recommended that the U.S. be “cautious” about “expanding” it.
The effort to stifle “legitimate debate by recasting contestable policy preferences as fixed and unquestionable human rights imperatives,” the commission’s report noted, “promotes intolerance, impedes reconciliation, devalues core rights, and denies rights in the name of rights.”
In his recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance expressed the U.S. government’s concerns about violations of human rights—especially freedom of speech and religion—not only in Russia and China, but even in democracies like Germany, Sweden and the U.K. In bluntly condemning the policing of speech in Germany and thought in the U.K., where people have been arrested for praying silently, Mr. Vance sent a message that protection and promotion of human rights is in the U.S. national interest.
Mr. Rubio ought to revive the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and use it as a guidance document to reform human-rights policy. Americans deserve a State Department that defends rights that accord with the constitutional order that our Founders established.
Mr. George is a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.
4. Military-Tech Startups Vie for Billions as Hegseth Shakes Up Pentagon Spending
Military-Tech Startups Vie for Billions as Hegseth Shakes Up Pentagon Spending
Venture-backed companies see opening to take business from traditional defense contractors
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/defense-spending-contractors-hegseth-startups-3c510191?mod=latest_headlines
By Drew FitzGerald
Follow, Heather Somerville
Follow and Nancy A. Youssef
Follow
Feb. 28, 2025 5:00 am ET
Palmer Luckey is founder of Anduril Industries, one of the newer military contractors whose technology is under consideration by the Pentagon. Photo: Philip Cheung for WSJ
Silicon Valley-linked defense companies are seizing on their newfound influence in the Trump administration to address the Pentagon’s shifting focus, pitching their services in fields ranging from autonomous drones to a newly named “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.
Newer contractors like Anduril Industries, Palantir Technologies and Epirus are lobbying for new contracts and working to convince Pentagon officials that their technology will better equip the military. Many see the Pentagon’s pivot toward new missions as a key chance to win a bigger share of its budget, though their success is far from assured.
“I’ve been advising companies and venture firms to just jump on this train because we don’t know how long it will last, but it is incredibly favorable to defense tech,” said Jacqueline Tame, the acting executive director of Silicon Valley Defense Group, which liaises between defense-tech startups and the Pentagon.
In one case, Pentagon officials are reviewing an outside proposal to build a defense system using technology from Anduril, Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan is a response to President Trump’s January executive order to develop a next-generation missile defense shield that the administration called the Iron Dome for America, an effort since renamed the “Golden Dome.”
The defense-tech sector’s missile-defense pitch is one of a few options the Defense Department could pursue to meet the president’s requirements, which include a satellite network and space-based interceptors. The executive order requires the Pentagon to submit an implementation plan for the missile shield by late March.
Other companies see opportunities after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the department to look for ways to save 8% each year for five years and give priority to programs such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which includes drones from Anduril. Hegseth also wants to ensure the department still spends money on attack drones, autonomous systems and drone-defense technology—tech development that is often coming from startups—according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
A U.S. soldier carrying an Anduril Ghost X drone at a training area in southern Germany. Photo: armin weigel/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Hegseth’s memo signaled the department’s new funding priorities are moving away from some bigger weapons programs and the traditional contractors that serve them.
Redirecting some of those resources toward new programs could boost midsize defense-tech companies Anduril and Palantir, and offer younger startups a toehold inside the Pentagon. Silicon Valley has long hoped for this opportunity. Despite years of promises from the department that it will buy more startup technology, venture-backed companies still receive only about 1% of Defense Department awards, according to data from software firm Govini.
During his confirmation process, Hegseth said the military should look for areas where it “can more aggressively embrace our commercial partners” in space and expand into new mission areas.
Established defense contractors have traditionally soaked up most of the funding for big, complex military programs in space and on the ground. Expensive and complicated weapons that take many years to develop have given the traditional contractors perennial spots atop the Pentagon’s budget. Reluctance within the Defense Department to spend money on unproven startups has helped to keep the large military contractors dominant.
“This might be the administration where the old industrial defense structure finally breaks and they get beat out by the startup guys,” said Tanveer Kathawalla, a managing partner with Pioneer1890, a buyout firm of venture-backed companies in national-security fields. But, he said, “We have yet to see the primes strike back.”
Taking business away from the defense primes, as the established military contractors are known, would likely face opposition from members of Congress whose districts are home to these massive companies, which employ a lot of people. Defense primes are also large campaign contributors and have lobbying firepower and yearslong relationships with key members of congressional leadership, particularly on the armed services committees.
Stephen Feinberg appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing as deputy secretary of defense Tuesday. Photo: Ben Curtis/Associated Press
Many specific program decisions are on hold until Congress confirms other senior Pentagon nominees. The White House picked several private-sector executives for top Pentagon jobs, including Cerberus Capital Management co-Chief Executive Stephen Feinberg as deputy defense secretary.
The tech industry and its private-capital backers have greater access to Pentagon officials than in prior administrations. Department officials have met with venture capitalists including Joe Lonsdale, who has funded and helped to start some of the largest industry players, to discuss military spending priorities. Trae Stephens, a partner with Peter Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund who helped launch Anduril, has consulted with the Trump administration on reshaping military priorities, and was considered for a top Pentagon role.
Defense-tech companies have jockeyed to better position themselves for the possibility of lucrative awards by forming technology-sharing partnerships that would allow them to share the proceeds of bigger contracts from the new administration. Anduril and Palantir, for instance, announced a consortium in December to sell their artificial-intelligence technology to the U.S. government.
“We’re pretty optimistic,” Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said on a recent earnings call. “These forever software projects that cost an insane amount, that don’t actually deliver results, they’re sacred cows of the deep state.”
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com, Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com
5. Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow
Very interesting thesis.
Excerpts:
Trump certainly knows that as soon as there is a peace agreement, China, Iran and North Korea will help Russia rearm — and that in time, Russia will reconstitute its forces and rebuild its defense-industrial base in preparation for a new offensive.
To stop that from happening, the United States needs to help Ukraine establish deterrence. And that will require allowing Ukraine to purchase the American weapons it needs to discourage Russia from ever restarting the conflict. The minerals deal creates a mechanism to repay the United States for the weapons we have given Ukraine over the past three years, but not for Ukraine to buy weapons in the future to defend our joint investments.
Jack Keane, a retired Army general, and I laid out a plan in these pages on transitioning Ukraine from an aid recipient to a defense consumer, and using frozen Russian assets and loans guaranteed by Ukraine’s natural resources to buy weapons. This will be crucial if we want to ensure that the war never starts up again, and Ukraine’s resources can be developed for the benefit of both countries. This does not require a new agreement or action by Congress; the mechanisms for such sales exist under existing law.
But this deal is a critical step forward. Russia wanted to diminish Ukraine economically, politically and militarily. With this deal, Trump has enhanced Ukraine economically and politically. Now, to secure our new investments, the United States must enhance Ukraine militarily as well.
Opinion
Marc A. Thiessen
Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow
A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/27/minerals-deal-ukraine-russia/
Yesterday at 6:30 a.m. EST
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a videoconference in St. Petersburg on Feb. 18. (AFP/Getty Images)
The minerals deal negotiated between the United States and Ukraine is a devastating development for Russia. Indeed, it is in some ways more important than any peace deal President Donald Trump might negotiate to end the fighting. Once implemented, it will mean that Russia has effectively lost the war.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to conquer his neighbor. Instead, the United States has just gone into business with Ukraine — entering into, as the agreement puts it, “a durable partnership” with Kyiv to jointly develop Ukraine’s untapped minerals and other natural resources and pledging “a long-term financial commitment to the development of a stable and economically prosperous Ukraine.”
With this deal, the United States is now invested — literally, not figuratively — in what the deal calls “a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine.” That means the United States now has a massive financial incentive to help safeguard Ukraine’s independence. If Ukraine survives, the United States will stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars; if Ukraine falls, we get nothing. After all, does anyone think that if Putin conquers Ukraine, he is going to repay the United States for the weapons we gave Ukraine to fight his troops? Of course not.
The deal creates “a Reconstruction Investment Fund” that will be jointly owned and managed by the two countries. Ukraine will contribute 50 percent of all revenue earned from the “future monetization” of all government-owned natural resource assets, including “minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, and other extractable materials.” The fund will use this revenue to “invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase the development” of its natural resources, as well as “infrastructure, ports, and state-owned enterprises.”
Those who say Ukraine failed to win security guarantees in exchange for the minerals deal are missing the point: The minerals deal is a security guarantee. Trump has made clear that he is not going to send American troops to Ukraine. But with this deal, he is going to send something better: American workers, bulldozers and earthmovers.
“It’s a great deal for Ukraine, too, because they get us over there,” Trump explained during his Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “We’re going to be working over there. We’ll be on the land. And you know, that way it’s this sort of automatic security, because nobody’s going to be messing around with our people when we’re there.”
With the minerals deal done, Trump must now negotiate a peace deal that secures his investment by making sure the war ends — and never resumes. Ukraine’s minerals only have value to America if they are extracted from Ukrainian soil, processed and sold. If Ukraine does not have security, that won’t happen. U.S. businesses won’t be able to mine for minerals under fire from Russian forces and will not make long-term investments in Ukraine if they fear the fighting will resume. And if they don’t invest, American taxpayers won’t get paid.
Trump certainly knows that as soon as there is a peace agreement, China, Iran and North Korea will help Russia rearm — and that in time, Russia will reconstitute its forces and rebuild its defense-industrial base in preparation for a new offensive.
To stop that from happening, the United States needs to help Ukraine establish deterrence. And that will require allowing Ukraine to purchase the American weapons it needs to discourage Russia from ever restarting the conflict. The minerals deal creates a mechanism to repay the United States for the weapons we have given Ukraine over the past three years, but not for Ukraine to buy weapons in the future to defend our joint investments.
Jack Keane, a retired Army general, and I laid out a plan in these pages on transitioning Ukraine from an aid recipient to a defense consumer, and using frozen Russian assets and loans guaranteed by Ukraine’s natural resources to buy weapons. This will be crucial if we want to ensure that the war never starts up again, and Ukraine’s resources can be developed for the benefit of both countries. This does not require a new agreement or action by Congress; the mechanisms for such sales exist under existing law.
But this deal is a critical step forward. Russia wanted to diminish Ukraine economically, politically and militarily. With this deal, Trump has enhanced Ukraine economically and politically. Now, to secure our new investments, the United States must enhance Ukraine militarily as well.
6. Chinese military unveils new data unit to help naval commanders make decisions
He who controls the data controls everything.
Chinese military unveils new data unit to help naval commanders make decisions
The new unit is designed to enhance the use of data resources and develop advanced training methods
Enoch Wong
Published: 3:00pm, 28 Feb 2025
The Chinese military has formed a new data unit to help naval commanders make decisions – something that could be extended to other branches of the armed forces in future.
A report in the official People’s Liberation Army Daily said the naval training unit was building an “expert” team to enhance the use of data resources and develop advanced training methods.
The report said a recent naval exercise had seen thousands of combat data points being swiftly analysed and compiled into a report that was given to ships.
The unit’s leader, who was not named in the report, said that simply possessing data was insufficient adding: “Timely processing, precise analysis and effective application are essential to unlocking the full potential of data and generating enhanced combat power.”
The report said the team included “data collectors”, who gather mission-critical, foundational and dynamic data, and “data managers,” who organise and standardise data from various sources.
“The unit has leveraged data to deeply analyse combat strategies, assess force deployment under different threat scenarios and accelerate the development of training environments and simulation tools,” PLA Daily added.
Song Zhongping, a former PLA instructor said: “In addition to supporting commanders in making precise decisions during operations, the data system also allows for post-combat reviews and identifying weaknesses in ship formations when defending against incoming missiles. This helps commanders refine tactics and improve coordination.”
Song said the newly created system could provide valuable insights for advancing the PLA’s data processing capabilities and may one day benefit the entire military.
He added that the US and Russian military had already adopted similar strategies, but said what set the PLA apart was its transition from manual assessments to information-based systems.
He said in future it may also be able to use artificial intelligence to make even more accurate evaluations.
China airs footage of Fujian aircraft carrier featuring advanced catapult launch system
“Although standards remain consistent, the methods and the precision of assessments have dramatically improved. In this context, creating standardised, scalable mechanisms for data collection and processing is crucial,” Song added.
Song also highlighted technology’s importance when dealing with the complexities of naval warfare.
The challenges of unpredictable weather, sea surface conditions and underwater environments need a much greater volume of data to be gathered, analysed and processed than other branches of the service.
This makes the development of advanced data-driven methods even more critical for improving operational effectiveness, Song said.
The announcement came amid a drive to modernise military training. President Xi Jinping has stressed that the PLA needed to adapt and has called for better technological training for service personnel.
Enoch Wong
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Enoch Wong joined the Post in 2024 as a Senior Reporter on the China Desk after over a decade with institutions like Tsinghua University and UN-affiliated organisations across Asia, Africa and Europe. A Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University specialising in China-US relations and
7. China amends military regulations to emphasise the need for war readiness
Readiness is perishable because training is perishable. The best armies sustain their investments in training over time. (I am thinking back to our old Army training doctrine and maintaining that "band of excellence" between the peaks and valleys of training time and resources.)
China amends military regulations to emphasise the need for war readiness
The revisions require the PLA to make winning battles its top responsibility and to be prepared for more overseas missions
Xinlu Liangin Beijing
Published: 9:00am, 28 Feb 2025
Beijing has rolled out a series of amendments to its regulations on the People’s Liberation Army, putting a stronger focus on the importance of war readiness and overseas missions.
Set to take effect in April, the amendments emphasised that “winning battles should be the military’s top responsibility” and directed the PLA to establish a “fundamental focus on preparation and readiness for combat,” according to state news agency Xinhua.
In a report last Friday, Xinhua said the revised regulations would “further enhance the rule of law within the military, cultivate a solid force that is loyal to the party, capable of fighting effectively and maintains a strong sense of discipline and integrity”.
The change is part of Beijing’s efforts to refine and enhance its legal framework and regulations amid intensifying geopolitical tensions with the United States and in the South China Sea.
It also echoed the goals of President Xi Jinping, who also chairs the Central Military Commission. He has said the PLA must modernise by 2035 and become a top-ranked military by 2050.
More details of the three revised regulations were released this week after they were signed by Xi. They covered wide-ranging areas including the PLA’s internal affairs, discipline and military formations.
A tally by the Post of words and word frequency compared the revisions with trial versions of the regulations that were released in 2018 and found that the latest wording placed more emphasis on combat preparedness and overseas task forces.
The new regulations on internal affairs urged soldiers to “foster a strong fighting spirit, combat style and fighting will”.
They should also “be prepared for war at any time” and “focus on studying military affairs, researching warfare and enhancing combat capabilities to improve the ability to win battles”.
The corresponding paragraphs from 2018 struck a more constrained tone, asking the PLA to “master the skills of combat”.
The new rules require military units to incorporate wartime management as a crucial component of training exercises and drills.
Chinese President Xi visits Taiwan-facing island after PLA blockade drills
“They should plan, organise, and implement these efforts in a coordinated manner, as well as conduct comprehensive assessments and evaluations. This approach aims to strengthen the awareness of management for combat readiness within the troops and enhance the overall level of wartime management.”
A whole new chapter has been added requiring military units to implement a bugle call system, enhance the management of bugle usage and “create a strong atmosphere for combat readiness and preparation”.
The updated regulations also introduced stringent protocols for safeguarding military secrets, especially placing detailed controls on electronic devices usage – seen as crucial in an era marked by rapid technological advancement and information warfare.
A new section has also been added specifically for the management of overseas missions, reflecting China’s ambition to project a disciplined and capable military image abroad.
A stand-out feature in the revisions was the emphasis placed on wartime conduct – the term “wartime” appears 49 times, in contrast to the mere five mentions it received in the 2018 version.
The guidelines also distinguished between different categories of military honours, awards and the handling of disciplinary measures according to wartime parameters, ranging from “wartime” and “peacetime” to “major non-war military operations”.
The last concept was a new addition. Such operations could include humanitarian help, disaster relief, peacekeeping missions and other activities aimed at maintaining stability, security or providing support in a non-combat context.
Xinlu Liang
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Xinlu Liang joined the Post as a Graduate Trainee in 2021. Previously, she wrote obituaries for lives lost in California as a Covid-19 reporting intern at the Los Angeles Times and interned at
8. Israel Missed Signs in Plain Sight Hamas Was About to Attack, First Oct. 7 Probe Finds
Israel Missed Signs in Plain Sight Hamas Was About to Attack, First Oct. 7 Probe Finds
Military investigation looked at 77 battles and key decisions made in the hours leading up to the assault
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-oct-7-inquiry-report-41ea7efa?mod=hp_lead_pos9
By Dov Lieber
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Feb. 27, 2025 12:00 pm ET
The Oct. 7 attack erupting over the border on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, when fewer troops were along the border than usual. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Image
TEL AVIV—The first Israeli military commission into the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks found that military officials were blindsided by the Hamas-led assault after badly misinterpreting the militant group’s intentions and vastly underestimating its capabilities—right up to the attack.
Signs of an impending assault were everywhere. But even preparations by Hamas as blatant as militants activating Israeli sim cards and moving its forces to designated gathering points on the evening of Oct. 6, 2023, weren’t treated with urgency by Israel officials, the report concluded.
Those officials believed Hamas was either doing a military exercise, preparing to defend from an attack by Israel, or potentially readying small pinpoint cross-border raids. The indicators were reminiscent of events over the previous year, strengthening the misconception among military officials that nothing was out of the ordinary.
The findings, the result of the highest-level probe into the worst attack on Israel in the country’s eight-decade history, shed new light on the scale of Israeli intelligence failures and scope of Hamas’s planning. Officials misread Hamas, dismissed planning documents pointing to an assault by the group and overlooked clues in the lead-up to the multipronged attack that triggered more than a year of fighting and shook the Middle East.
The details will likely prompt further reckoning in Israel where no politician and only a handful of military figures have resigned over the failings, though the report doesn’t apportion blame.
Israel missed crucial clues while looking elsewhere
Hours before the attack, senior military officials stayed up late into the night discussing suspicious behavior by Hamas that day. Israeli military chief of staff Herzi Halevi told his deputies to gather more information for a briefing later the next day. No one thought time was a critical factor, Israeli officials said.
However, Israel’s top general in its north was summoned late that night to army headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israel’s military was preoccupied by a potential attack in its north by Hezbollah militants from Lebanon after months of tension with the group, making Gaza a blind spot that ultimately became an easy target for Hamas.
The Gaza rulers, who had lain low for two years after a weekslong fight with Israel in 2021, took advantage that October Saturday, erupting over the border on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah when fewer troops were along the border than usual.
Herzi Halevi was Israel’s military chief of staff at the time of the attacks. Photo: amir cohen/Reuters
Hamas blew past Israel’s worst-case scenario
In gaming out an assault from Gaza, Israel’s military planners assumed a worst-case scenario in which Hamas tried to breach four to eight points along the border, the report found. In fact, the militants attacked nearly 60.
Hamas’s first target was the Israeli base responsible for the area around the Gaza Strip, where it killed the top commanders and wiped out Israel’s intelligence capabilities in the area. The strike left Israel blind for three hours as the broader operation unfolded and allowed waves of militants to cross the fence into Israel unopposed.
Militants had free rein to attack military bases, kill civilians at a desert rave and in agricultural communities. In total, 1,200 security personnel and civilians were killed that day and 251 people were taken hostage. It would take 5½ hours to get reinforcements to the area and three days to fully repel the attackers.
“No one anywhere in Israel was able to say on 6:29 a.m. on Oct 7. that Hamas is about to perform a major attack on Israel,” referring to the time that Hamas fired 1,400 rockets into Israel to divert attention from its ground invasion. “There was no such person in our system.”
Israel did have regular soldiers in intelligence and observers in the field who warned Hamas was planning an attack. But that information wasn’t enough to dissuade senior intelligence officials from the overall assessment that Hamas didn’t want a war.
Hamas fired 1,400 rockets into Israel to divert attention from its ground invasion. Photo: said khatib/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Israel discovered Hamas’s plan years before the attack
Even after discovering in 2022 a Hamas plan to attack southern Israel, the country’s officials determined that the document, named Operation Jericho Wall, was more an aspiration than an actual assault manual and that Hamas wasn’t interested in starting a war.
The theoretical plan for an attack on southern Israel had been approved by Hamas in 2019, and received operational approval in August 2021. By April 2022, Hamas was already considering dates for the attack, which was only known to a select few, but for which thousands of operatives had trained for years in preparation.
“We ended up with a strategy that collapsed on Oct. 7,” said a senior military official who briefed reporters ahead of a summary of the investigation’s public release on Thursday. The military hasn’t said when the full report will be released to the public.
Some in Hamas had planned a surprise attack against Israel in 2014, but were overruled, the probe said. A war broke out that summer and Hamas officials came away with little but an understanding that the next major conflict would need to start with a surprise attack, the Israeli officials said.
The origins of the Oct. 7 attack stretch back to 2016, with the rise of the group’s now-deceased leader Yahya Sinwar through the leadership ranks, the investigation said.
Israel had believed Hamas was focused on building a state in Gaza and trying to take control of the West Bank, before any major confrontation. That was true, the Israeli officials said, until Sinwar took control and reoriented the group toward a direct attack on Israel. But Israeli intelligence missed the strategic shift, the probe said.
Hamas launched the October 2023 attack, its own officials have said, after seeing the internal upheaval in Israel caused by a controversial plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary.
As the assault neared its crescendo, Mohammed Deif, the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s military chief, called on all Gazans to grab any weapon they could and storm Israel, at which point thousands of civilians stormed across the border, looting and engaging in violence. By noon on Oct. 7, 2023, there were 5,600 militants and civilians from Gaza inside Israel. Israel only had hundreds of soldiers defending the border that morning.
Israel was blind for hours as attack began
Starting at 6:29 a.m., as Hamas fired rockets, 1,500 fighters invaded.
“We are at war,” Israeli brigade commander Asaf Hamami said over the radio at 6:45 a.m.
The first hours of the attack were the most damaging and deadly for Israel because it had no eyes on the ground after its chain of command had been destroyed. Some soldiers and commanders drove themselves to southern Israel after seeing reports on social media about the attack but large-scale reinforcements took hours.
“The big challenge in those critical hours was to understand what was going on,” said a second senior military official.
Israel had one to two drones in the air at the time the attack began but lacked the forces on the ground. The military said friendly fire incidents were limited but wouldn’t specify a figure.
The first hours of the attack were the most damaging and deadly for Israel because it had no eyes on the ground after its chain of command had been destroyed. Photo: baz ratner/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Hamas hoodwinked Israel, which believed its own intelligence hype
Hamas deceived Israel into thinking its priority was economic concessions to strengthen its rule over Gaza, the Israeli military officials said.
Hamas sat out fighting between Israel and another smaller militant group in Gaza following its 2021 battle with Israel. That led Israeli officials to assume Hamas had been deterred.
Crucially, Israel had misjudged how much Hamas thought Iran, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel’s own Palestinian citizens would join the battle. Hamas ultimately never received the full backing from any of these groups, though Hezbollah launched rockets across Israel’s border, creating a two-front war that divided Israel’s forces.
Israeli intelligence lacked any real internal criticism of its thinking, an official said. In recent decades, military intelligence had strayed from the key mission of providing an early warning and become deeply involved in providing tactical intelligence for Israel’s wider military operations.
“The specific intelligence details that popped up during that night [of Oct. 6, 2023] weren’t strong enough to break a yearslong conception,” said the official.
The high-level probe has shed new light on the scale of Israeli intelligence failures and the scope of Hamas’s planning. Photo: Associated Press
What’s the upshot for Israel?
The central takeaway of the probe was that Israel can’t allow threats to grow on its border, as it did with Hamas and Hezbollah.
The report recommends Israel establish an intelligence unit whose sole purpose is to evaluate warning signals, significantly increase the size of the military and beef up border defenses.
The Oct. 7 survivors have been pushing for a formal state commission of inquiry, which would have more power to hold bodies or individuals to account. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the demand, saying Israel must first finish the war.
Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com
9. Israeli Army Admits It Underestimated Hamas Before Oct. 7 Attack
Cohen and Gooch: military failures are a result of three things: A failure to learn. A failure to adapt. A failure to anticipate.
The IDF seems to be demonstrating the highest of integrity and transparency in admitting, taking responsibility, and apologizing for its failures. On a smaller scale I am reminded of MG Garrison after Somalia in 1993 when he accepted full responsibility and did not blame the political leaders (even though they had denied his request for resources that could have prevented the tragic loss of our soldiers).
Excerpts:
The report avoided criticism of Israel’s civilian leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The inquiry focused solely on the military and was not conducted in coordination with other security agencies or the political echelon, said the report.
IDF officials, when briefing reporters, denied claims that military resources had been diverted from Gaza to the West Bank for political reasons. Unlike Gaza, the latter Palestinian territory contains tens of thousands of Jewish settlers and they form a key part of the ruling coalition’s support base.
The IDF has already apologized for failing to prevent Oct. 7 and some of its most senior leaders have resigned. They include Herzi Halevi, the head of the armed forces, who steps down on March 6, and Yaron Finkelman, the chief of Southern Command, which oversees Gaza.
...
The report lays out the foundations for a revised Israeli security strategy that’s already being implemented in Syria and Lebanon. The IDF has kept positions just inside each country’s borders.
“We cannot allow a threat to develop near the border,” says the report. “Removal threats must be prioritized.”
The report calls for the Israeli military to boost its size and resources. It cites a “need to increase deployment along the borders, including ground fire capabilities, aerial firepower, and intelligence gathering.”
Israeli Army Admits It Underestimated Hamas Before Oct. 7 Attack
Placards of Israeli hostages held by Hamas hang in destroyed house in Be’eri, Israel, on Dec. 20, 2023. Photographer: Maja Hitij/Getty Images
By Galit Altstein
February 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM EST
Israel’s military admitted it underestimated and misread Hamas before the attack of Oct. 7, 2023, saying it thought the militant group had neither the intention nor the ability to carry out such a devastating operation.
In the first major inquiry into the failings that lead to the worst single-day atrocity in the country’s history, the Israel Defense Forces said it viewed Hamas as a secondary threat relative to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group in Lebanon, and Tehran itself.
It believed Hamas, a Palestinian organization governing Gaza, wasn’t interested in a full-on war with Israel, according to the report published on Thursday. The IDF also thought Hamas would be incapable of an attack like the one it launched on southern Israel, with thousands of fighters crossing over from Gaza. They killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage.
The report avoided criticism of Israel’s civilian leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The inquiry focused solely on the military and was not conducted in coordination with other security agencies or the political echelon, said the report.
IDF officials, when briefing reporters, denied claims that military resources had been diverted from Gaza to the West Bank for political reasons. Unlike Gaza, the latter Palestinian territory contains tens of thousands of Jewish settlers and they form a key part of the ruling coalition’s support base.
The IDF has already apologized for failing to prevent Oct. 7 and some of its most senior leaders have resigned. They include Herzi Halevi, the head of the armed forces, who steps down on March 6, and Yaron Finkelman, the chief of Southern Command, which oversees Gaza.
The report said Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ now-dead leader, first thought of an Oct. 7-style undertaking in 2016, two years after he was released from an Israeli jail. By 2021, he’d come up with an operational plan.
Since 2018, the military had information on Hamas’ blueprint for a large-scale attack that included an “above ground” charge. However, over the years, it was generally interpreted as unfeasible.
In 2021, intelligence was obtained describing plans for an offensive targeting Israeli communities and military outposts around Gaza. Israel’s various security agencies failed to connect this to earlier information or raise the alert level for a large, surprise attack.
On the night of Oct. 6, 2023, the report says the IDF detected signs of an attack, including dozens of sim cards being switched on in Gaza and irregular conduct by Hamas operatives. Yet none of the signals was deemed strong enough to break the military’s years-long assumption that Hamas had no desire for an all-out assault, the report said.
Early the next morning, Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the US and many other countries — fired hundreds of rockets into Israel from Gaza and sent its operatives across the border fence. They broke through around 144 points and soon overran military bases, before rampaging through kibbutzim and a music festival.
Israel’s subsequent air and ground offensive has destroyed much of Gaza and killed more than 48,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the Mediterranean strip.
Hamas and Israel agreed to a six-week ceasefire in January, which is set to end on Sunday. The two sides are still negotiating over whether the truce can be extended and on what terms.
The report lays out the foundations for a revised Israeli security strategy that’s already being implemented in Syria and Lebanon. The IDF has kept positions just inside each country’s borders.
“We cannot allow a threat to develop near the border,” says the report. “Removal threats must be prioritized.”
The report calls for the Israeli military to boost its size and resources. It cites a “need to increase deployment along the borders, including ground fire capabilities, aerial firepower, and intelligence gathering.”
10. How Chinese PLA’s latest forays off Australia cap years of maritime tensions
How Chinese PLA’s latest forays off Australia cap years of maritime tensions
Australia’s growing presence in South China Sea and Taiwan Strait seen to underscore commitment to Western aims to curb China’s influence
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3300439/how-chinese-plas-latest-forays-australia-cap-years-maritime-tensions?utm
Zhao Ziwen
Published: 10:45pm, 27 Feb 2025Updated: 11:17pm, 27 Feb 2025
China’s recent live-fire naval drills in the Tasman Sea off southeastern Australia highlighted continued tensions between the major Indo-Pacific powers, particularly in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
China’s vast territorial claims over most of the South China Sea are contested by several Southeast Asian neighbours, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
The Taiwan Strait represents an even more critical issue for Beijing, which sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary and regards any transit by foreign vessels as a challenge to its sovereignty.
The United States – Taiwan’s main international backer and arms supplier – has been most active in asserting “freedom of navigation” rights in the strait, with its allies including Australia, Germany and Canada also doing the same in recent years.
Most nations, including Australia and the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.
Australia does not have any territorial disputes with China, but its expanding naval and air presence in the region is seen to underscore its commitment to freedom of navigation and Indo-Pacific security as the West tries to counter China’s influence.
We examine some of the major incidents between China and Australia in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, as well as the recent Chinese navy actions off Australia, which put both Canberra and Wellington on alert and prompted the diversion of dozens of commercial flights.
2022: Australia in the South China Sea and East China Sea, China in waters north and west of Australia
Former Australian prime minister and China hawk Scott Morrison’s last year in office was one of the most tense in the country’s maritime stand-off with Beijing.
In February 2022, Canberra accused a Chinese navy vessel of directing a laser at its P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the Arafura Sea off northern Australia, calling it “unprofessional and unsafe conduct” that could have harmed the pilot’s health.
Beijing dismissed the claim as “malicious” misinformation and said Chinese vessels were carrying out “normal navigation” in the high seas.
Then in May, Chinese intelligence collection ships were spotted operating off the Australian west coast near defence facilities.
Also in May, an Australian P-8A Poseidon aircraft – carrying out what Canberra described as “routine maritime surveillance” – was intercepted by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet in the South China Sea. The Australian military said the intercept “resulted in a dangerous manoeuvre which posed a safety threat” to the aircraft and crew.
Australian media reports at the time said that the J-16 released flares and a cloud of chaff, some of which was ingested in the P-8A’s engines.
In July, Australian media reported that the frigate HMAS Parramatta was closely tracked by the Chinese navy’s nuclear-powered submarine, a warship and multiple aircraft as it sailed from the South China Sea to the East China Sea – a route that would inevitably pass near Taiwan.
Neither Beijing nor Canberra officially confirmed the information.
The HMAS Parramatta is seen in 2021. Photo: Shutterstock
2023: Australia in the East China Sea, China off northeastern Australia
In July that year, a Chinese vessel was spotted in the Coral Sea, off northeastern Australia.
Australia responded by deploying an aircraft to carry out surveillance and establish contact with the vessel. The vessel was believed to have been positioned off the Queensland coast, trying to collect sensitive information on the international Exercise Talisman Sabre, according to Australia’s ABC News.
Talisman Sabre is a major biennial US-Australia military exercise carried out alongside more than 10 other partner nations.
In November, an Australian vessel operating in the East China Sea near Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) accused China of carrying out an “unsafe and unprofessional” interaction.
China denied any military activities took place within the Japanese EEZ, arguing that there was no official demarcation between China and Japan in the relevant waters.
Canberra said a Chinese navy destroyer used sonar pulses that injured Australian military divers. China rejected the accusation as “totally inconsistent with the facts” and asserted that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) only conducted “tracking, surveillance, identification and verification” of the Australian vessel.
It is unknown whether the site was close to Taiwan.
2024: Australia in the Yellow Sea, Taiwan Strait, South China Sea
In September last year, the Australian Navy’s HMAS Sydney sailed through the Taiwan Strait with a New Zealand vessel, drawing strong criticism from Beijing.
Australia also joined multiple multinational patrols in the South China Sea with the US, Japan and the Philippines.
In October, it took part in a joint drill with Canada, France, Japan, the US and the Philippines off the coast of the Philippines’ northern Luzon island, which faces Taiwan.
Further afield, an Australian military helicopter flew over the Yellow Sea in May last year, an action Canberra said aimed to ensure that the UN sanctions imposed on North Korea were enforced.
Australia said the PLA dropped flares above and several hundred metres ahead of the helicopter in international waters.
2025: Australia in the South China Sea, China off eastern Australia
Earlier this month, an Australian P-8A surveillance aircraft was intercepted by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet in the South China Sea, with flares released within 30 metres (100 feet) of the aircraft.
Canberra said its aircraft was on routine patrol in international waters and condemned the PLA move as “unsafe and unprofessional”.
Beijing, on the other hand, accused Australia of “deliberate infringement and provocation”, calling its presence in the region a violation of Chinese sovereignty.
This was followed by the live-fire naval drills in the Tasman Sea off southeastern Australia last week.
Days later, the Chinese naval flotilla – made up of a destroyer, a frigate and a replenishment vessel – operated some 296km (184 miles) east of Hobart, Tasmania.
Zhao Ziwen
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Ben Zhao Ziwen covers China diplomacy. He majored in Arabic studies and journalism. He worked for Caixin in Beijing and spent a year in the UAE.
11. Ukraine’s European allies head to Kyiv for tutoring in drone warfare
Ukraine’s European allies head to Kyiv for tutoring in drone warfare
And North Korea is in Russia for its drone-apprenticeship program.
https://wapo.st/4kjzYVW
February 25, 2025
Ukrainian developers deliver reconnaissance-strike drones to Ukrainian army units at an undisclosed location on Friday. (Mykola Tys/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
KYIV — “Really cheap stuff is killing really expensive stuff,” Deborah Fairlamb tells me. Fairlamb is co-founder of Green Flag Ventures, a venture capital firm based here and in Los Angeles. It invests in early-stage Ukrainian companies pioneering artificial intelligence and cyber products that are dual-use, meaning with both military and civilian applications.
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We’re chatting in the lobby of the Intercontinental Kyiv hotel, which is hosting the Defense Tech Innovations Forum, a conference on defense industry technologies. It looks like a Silicon Valley tech-bro gathering, except it’s full of middle-aged Ukrainians in Steve Jobs-style black turtlenecks and men in military fatigues, with a handful of women in attendance, too. The lobby has become an upscale version of Rick’s Café in “Casablanca” — sit there long enough, and you’ll see former CIA director and retired Army Gen. David Petraeus being hailed like a returning hero, or a group of German soldiers headed to a meeting in the restaurant.
The topics discussed at the forum cover a wide array of technology developments, including encryption and electronic countermeasures, but the buzz is focused on drones. A rep from Brave1, the Ukrainian government-run coordinating platform for the rapidly growing drone sector, told me that sometimes a new development goes from a proposal to design to prototype to field-testing to front-line deployment in a matter of weeks. And then, he added, Russian countermeasure efforts begin, and Ukrainian tweaks are made, in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse.
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“In terms of what this means for America, this doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the old stuff” — meaning heavy-duty traditional military hardware — “although the old stuff, the tanks, there are some huge vulnerabilities in those,” Fairlamb says. “There are all kinds of stories of $500 drones killing $5 million tanks, on a very regular basis.” She adds that these cheap kills are occurring on both sides of the battlefield.
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With the United States’ continued role as the guarantor of European security now in doubt, given recent statements by President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the good news for Ukraine is that defense ministries in Europe — primarily from Nordic countries and the Baltics — are in attendance and absorbing the dizzying pace of change in battlefield technology.
Russia has its own visitor studying new military tech: North Korea. “The Russians aren’t just bringing the North Koreans to the front lines; they’ve got them in a number of the Russian drone production facilities, learning and telling them to go build them at home,” Fairlamb says.
Last November, North Korea’s state-run news agency reported that dictator Kim Jong Un wanted his country to begin mass production of self-detonating explosive drones. Earlier this month, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported that “North Korea is expected to start producing drones this year that will be codeveloped with Russia,” adding that Pyongyang will receive “technical help from Russia to develop multiple types of drones to be mass manufactured.”
Also this month, North Korean government aviation officials toured Russia’s premier drone training facilities and attended a major aviation expo in Moscow. The delegation visited Moscow State Technical University of Civil Aviation’s advanced technology park for drones.
Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, told the South Korean Chosun Daily last week that “the North Korean military of the future will be fundamentally different from its past. … North Korean soldiers are fast learners, adapting to modern combat tactics and strategies in just a few months. Their combat effectiveness has improved dramatically — not only with conventional weapons like tanks but also with advanced systems such as drones.”
And the Russian-Ukrainian war is increasingly a fight of drones. A recent report by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute concluded that tactical unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as drones are known, “account for 60 to 70 percent of damaged and destroyed Russian systems.” The report cautioned that Ukrainian officers emphasized the need to combine artillery with drone warfare as the most effective tactic, but it is not an overstatement to say that drones are what’s keeping Ukraine in the war. Ukrainian forces almost invariably field a mix of UAVs that includes light and heavy bomber drones and first-person view, or FPV, drones.
Sometimes, that might be all the Ukrainians field. In December, Ukrainian soldiers near Lyptsi, about six miles from the Russian border in the Kharkiv region, launched a successful nothing-but-drones assault on a Russian position. Based on interviews with military officers, the Ukraine-based Counteroffensive news site reported on what it called a “first attack of its kind,” involving “dozens of FPV, recon, turret-mounted, and [self-detonating] drones all working in tandem on the ground and in the air. … No drone swarm technology was used, which meant that each individual drone was piloted by an individual pilot.”
Picture being a Russian soldier, seeing the enemy advancing upon you, and there’s not a single human being among them. It must have felt like some far-off future imagined by James Cameron had arrived early. For Ukraine, the fervent hope is that it hasn’t arrived too late.
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By Jim Geraghty
Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent, where he writes the daily “Morning Jolt” newsletter, among other writing duties. He’s the author of the novel "The Weed Agency" (a Washington Post bestseller), the nonfiction "Heavy Lifting" with Cam Edwards and "Voting to Kill," and the Dangerous Clique series of thriller novels.follow on X@JimGeraghty
12. Is Cyber Revolutionary or Barely Relevant in Modern Warfare?
What is in between?
Excerpts:
Even if cyber operations never meet their revolutionary potential, they will constantly deliver surprise. Successful commanders may deliver an upset against a superior military force by balancing the advantages of cyber weapons with the disadvantages and the opportunities provided by their enemy. This could be especially true in critical engagements in which small advantages can lead to disproportionate impact. Modeling by J. D. Work has shown that during naval engagements between Chinese and U.S. fleets, cyber operations provided substantial “advantage over the adversary, with greater numbers of adversary vessels damaged or sunk where [cyber] options were employed in support of missile fires.” That might be the difference in any future war in the Pacific.
The real potential of offensive cyber operations may only be revealed in a more dangerous world, when states feel the need to unleash their previously reserved, most-advanced capabilities. More simply, states feeling existentially threatened will attempt the highest-risk Hail-Mary cyberattacks. Were China to invade Taiwan, or the United States and Israel attack Iran, the intensity and quality of cyber operations could surpass historical experience.
Policymakers, practitioners, and analysts should accordingly remain open-minded about the revolutionary (or relevant) potential of offensive cyber operations. In cyber, never say something will “never happen.” It is entirely possible that the criticism of the cyber-doubters will remain relevant for decades to come. Prudent risk management, however, requires hedging bets and planning for the worst.
Is Cyber Revolutionary or Barely Relevant in Modern Warfare? - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Jason Healey · February 28, 2025
Offensive cyber operations in warfare have long had the potential to be revolutionary but that promise has remained distant, being “much harder to use against targets of strategic significance or to achieve outcomes with decisive impacts, either on the battlefield or during crises short of war.”
But this assessment cannot be the whole story. Humanity is still only in the first decades of the digital age, which, like the agricultural and industrial ages before it, will last centuries. The near future is darker, with more crises and conflict between high-tech powers, than during the relative peace of the post-Cold War era, when most cyber conflicts have been fought.
This article expands on a longer work of scholarship in the Texas National Security Review, which introduced a framework to categorize offensive cyber operations in wartime. This article goes farther, to assess under what conditions offensive cyber operations may be either relevant or revolutionary during wartime.
Starting with an overview of four areas of disagreement between cyber doubters and pessimists (those that suspect cyber operations will be important and those who fear they likely will), the article continues with an analysis of the ways that cyber operations may be novel or transformative, and the ways they might be actually revolutionary.
For the near term, cyber capabilities may be more like electronic warfare or use of information technology more generally: not just relevant but “increasingly essential for mission performance” to survive in a modern military conflict.
The future lasts a long time, however, and cyber operations have the power to be win battles and wars. As technology continues to accelerate and the geopolitical environment deteriorates, no one should write off the revolutionary potential. A particular set of circumstances, and a unique leader, might use offensive cyber operations in decisive and surprising ways.
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Enthusiasts and Pessimists
As far back as 1979, some in the Department of Defense have been warning that adversaries might penetrate computers to “retarget [U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles] to impact on … friendly targets as part of a surprise attack!” But after 45 years there have been no such obvious revolutionary use of cyber power, so cyber-pessimists have accordingly cautioned against overhyped technological determinism.
Martin Libicki was an early skeptic, arguing that the “revolutionary impact of cyber warfare can be no greater than the revolutionary impact of digital networking.” An oversimplification, it turns out, as technology has repeatedly provided a marginal advantage while opening a catastrophic vulnerability. More recently, Erica Lonergan, Shawn Lonergan, Ben Jensen, and Brandon Valeriano have concluded that since offensive cyber operations “are not always easy, cheap or effective in managing destruction at scale,” they are “unlikely to produce the game-changing moment in modern warfare that many anticipated.”
There is wisdom in both perspectives.
Four Areas of Debate and Confusion
Oversimplified, there are four areas of disagreement between doubters and pessimists.
Lack of Clarity about “Revolutionary” or Relevant”
Debates between doubters and pessimists can sometimes steer to the extreme positions of “revolutionary” or “irrelevant,” rather than gradations such as revolutionary, necessary, relevant, and largely irrelevant.
To be revolutionary, cyber capabilities would need to have an effect that either (a) is novel and not achievable by other methods or (b) drastically decreased cost or increased scale. A high-end revolutionary capability would transform the fundamental nature of war, not just particular ways in which it is fought. A lower-end revolutionary capability might merely be decisive — “revolutionary” as in the 1990s’ “revolution in military affairs.”
Below that, offensive cyber operations may not be revolutionary but still necessary. Like defensive electronic warfare, they may be an often-essential part of modern battle to avoid being blinded or disrupted.
Cyber operations may be merely relevant, providing substantial, but circumstantial, advantages, used if they prove more available or effective than other capabilities. Particularly adept commanders might integrate them in stunning ways — matching their strengths with the opportunities presented by the adversary — that may be hard for others to mimic. Lastly, some capabilities in some instances may be largely irrelevant.
Characteristics of Cyberspace and Cyber Capabilities
Cyber-power doubters and pessimists tend to rely on different cyber characteristics — both of which are logical and have explanatory power.
Doubters often highlight specific dynamics of offensive cyber capabilities (such as those cited by Erica Lonergan and Shawn Lonergan: secrecy; the technical challenges of planning and conducting strategic operations; their limited effects; and the relationship between espionage and military cyber operations). Pessimists, by contrast, start with a different set of characteristics, worrying that some characteristics of the cyber domain (e.g., lower cost, scalability, cascading impact, the expanse of vulnerable systems, and system-wide vulnerabilities of the underlying global internet) permits far wider, more destructive operations than states have yet decided to engage in.
Differing Methodologies and Scope
Doubters tend to rely on evidence of how cyber capabilities has been used in the past while pessimists worry more about how they may be used in future. This means the doubters’ arguments are particularly strong, rooted as they are in data and empirical methods. However, some of the pessimists’ strongest findings — such as Erica Lonergan’s conclusion that “cyber-operations by their very nature are designed to avoid war” — reflect a design choice with predictive power only if the future looks like the past.
Lastly, many of the worst cyber incidents over the past decades are not reflected in the pessimists’ databases. Many remain classified; were not attacks but major failures which highlight deeper vulnerabilities; or were criminal attacks, such as ransomware, which seemed to lack national-security relevance at the time. Each highlight, to the enthusiasts, that offensive cyber may have more potential than has been previously tapped by states.
Precision of Analysis
Neither enthusiasts nor pessimists have always been clear about what aspect of aspect of modern warfare they were assessing. The Framework of Cyber Operations in Warfare provides one way to clarify the why, when, and where of cyber operations and improve analysis. Enthusiasts and doubters may still disagree but at least they can have more confidence they are debating about the same part of the elephant.
Assessment
Many of the tactics summarized in the framework have already been proven relevant, including during tactical engagements. Mere relevance is, after all, a low bar. But under what conditions might cyber capabilities be revolutionary, meeting either element of the definition: (a) is novel and not achievable by other methods or (b) drastically decreased cost or drastically increased scale?
Steven Biddle has written how for the last 100 years, the “modern method” of force employment — integrated firepower, maneuver, concealment, and reserves — “damps the effects of technological change.” This downward pressure ensures cyber capabilities are unlikely to be revolutionary. Using cyber capabilities to disrupt infrastructure or weapons systems might help win a war, but there are many ways to do this and cyber usually is not the cheapest, easiest, or most predictable way to do so.
Four categories of offensive cyber operations have more potential.
The first is disruption at scale, which upends traditional notions of mass. Traditionally, military force scales somewhat linearly, which does not hold for some kinds of cyber operations. Common-mode and other vulnerabilities allow one-on-multitude attacks. Destroying 1000 Iranian centrifuges does not require substantially more mass than taking down one. A cyber operation to disable a single missile-cruiser is a nice military trick but one that several missiles might accomplish just as well. But an operation targeting common-mode vulnerabilities might disable an entire flotilla, so long as they shared the same vulnerability, which could be decisive, especially in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
Second is commandeering at scale. Capturing a weapon no longer requires overpowering or scaring off the operators, just needing to overcome only the security of the computer running the system. Large, crewed weapon systems — a guided-missile cruiser or tank — should have a manual override to defeat such a tactic, though it might take time to do so or leave the weapon system with decreased capability (such as by disconnecting from the command network). Drones and other autonomous systems, with few if any humans in or on the loop, would likely be less able to defeat such subversion. As was warned back in 1979, if you rely on insecure smart weapons, do not be surprised to find them pointing back at you.
Third, in rare instances, offensive cyber operations might be a coup de main, winning without resort to traditional weapons. This would likely only be possible under three conditions: a defending state leaving itself uniquely dependent and vulnerable; faced by commanders with exceptional intelligence and offensive capabilities, and no small amount of audacity and coup d’oeil; and likely fighting over a non-existential issue in which territorial gain is not crucial to success.
Lastly, artificial intelligence might amplify the impact the novelty of cyber operations or magnifying their impact (such as launching an AI-driven worm to autonomously seek out and disable enemy systems, a super Stuxnet).
Can Cyber Deliver?
Cyber operations such as these, done predictably and at scale, could up-end Biddle’s modern method. But the most revolutionary are also likely to be the most difficult, demanding substantial intelligence, patient planning, and advanced capabilities steered by elite operators.
Revolutionary operations seem to be in realm of science fiction — at least until militaries and societies are more technology-dependent, offensive capabilities are sufficiently advanced, and geopolitics sufficiently dangerous. But don’t rule them out: The digital age will surely continue for centuries more.
More likely are cyber-enabled intelligence operations granting especially exquisite insights. These get less attention than disruptive attacks but are far more likely to shift national-security outcomes.
Also likely are cyber operations to conduct just enough of a surprise attack to either achieve a fait accompli — such as China delaying U.S. forces long enough to have achieved limited objectives in Taiwan — or as an opening attack to “keep the victim reeling when his plans dictate he should be reacting,” in the words of Dick Betts. The next victim may not be as well prepared as Ukraine was after Russia attempted to disrupt military communication with attack against the Viasat satellite network.
The potential of all offensive operations will be limited by their extremely high variance. That is, some operations might be astoundingly effective while others, seemingly identical, may fail entirely and it is difficult to know beforehand which is which. It appears, for example, that Russian cyber operations against Ukraine were less than fully effective in part because of a successful defense by the Ukrainians, the global technology sector, volunteers, and U.S. Cyber Command. But what about next time? Does Ukraine’s success tell us much about whether Iran will prevail against U.S. Cyber Command? Or Albania against Iran? Or China against Taiwan? Or Armenia against Azerbaijan?
There is no way to know beforehand. The rule of thumb in ground warfare is that an attacker should have a 3:1 to 6:1 advantage to be confident of victory. The uncertainty of cyber operations means there are no such assumptions: A global cyber onslaught might be undone by a serendipitous discovery, one of the best-defended technology giants can be hacked by teenagers, and elite defenses can be bypassed by properly updating software from a trusted vendor. This is more than just saying there can be David beats Goliath upsets: The complexity of cyberspace and cyber operations inhibits predictions of who might prevail.
Even if cyber operations never meet their revolutionary potential, they will constantly deliver surprise. Successful commanders may deliver an upset against a superior military force by balancing the advantages of cyber weapons with the disadvantages and the opportunities provided by their enemy. This could be especially true in critical engagements in which small advantages can lead to disproportionate impact. Modeling by J. D. Work has shown that during naval engagements between Chinese and U.S. fleets, cyber operations provided substantial “advantage over the adversary, with greater numbers of adversary vessels damaged or sunk where [cyber] options were employed in support of missile fires.” That might be the difference in any future war in the Pacific.
The real potential of offensive cyber operations may only be revealed in a more dangerous world, when states feel the need to unleash their previously reserved, most-advanced capabilities. More simply, states feeling existentially threatened will attempt the highest-risk Hail-Mary cyberattacks. Were China to invade Taiwan, or the United States and Israel attack Iran, the intensity and quality of cyber operations could surpass historical experience.
Policymakers, practitioners, and analysts should accordingly remain open-minded about the revolutionary (or relevant) potential of offensive cyber operations. In cyber, never say something will “never happen.” It is entirely possible that the criticism of the cyber-doubters will remain relevant for decades to come. Prudent risk management, however, requires hedging bets and planning for the worst.
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Jason Healey is a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was a plankholder of the first joint cyber command in 1998 and the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director in 2022.
Image: Cpl. Armando Elizalde via Department of Defense
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Jason Healey · February 28, 2025
13. Relearning the Timeless Lessons of Land Operations in Asia
I have to be snarky and remind us of the film of great strategy:
"You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia'" - from the movie "The Princess Bride."
But on a serious note (and we must be serious about potential war in Asia) there is this conclusion:
Terrain does not change, and its challenges remain evergreen. There is no replicating it fully. It is invaluable to train on the terrain, with your ally, that you may be called to defend. Our Army’s history is one of war in Asia. Once we captured the key lessons of our operation, their historical precedent leaped out at us. It is imperative to pass this along to ensure these lessons remain learned and observed for the next campaign. JPRMC-X is the crucible for land forces that must be prepared to fight and win in Asia. There is no substitute.
And speaking of terrain I am reminded of some slight satire from Korea from patrolling the mountains of Korea with my Special Forces brothers. They used to tell us that if you could take a 3D topographcial map of the Korean peninsula and spread it flat the terroitory would be the size of China. Yes some hyperbolic exageration perhaps, but the mountains in north Korea are even more larger than in the South.
Relearning the Timeless Lessons of Land Operations in Asia - Modern War Institute
Rick Blank and Tyler Patterson | 02.28.25
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Rick Blank · February 28, 2025
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In June 2024, our unit—2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment—had a unique opportunity: we were directed to execute the first combat training center rotation forward in the Indo-Pacific. Not long ago, this would have been impossible—the Army’s premier training environments were only found at sprawling, fixed sites in California, Louisiana, and Germany. But the creation of the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center–Exportable, a capability that enables realistic training in theater, opens the door for Army, joint, and partner forces to test themselves against the particular challenges of the Pacific region. Those challenges are manifold, but we discovered important historical continuities.
As we captured our lessons learned it became clear these were the same things battalions learned during key periods of World War II—like the seizure of Luzon in 1945—and even farther back during the Spanish-American War. The experience reinforced the value of this training, not only in the strategic and operational imperatives it achieves, but in the way that it reacquaints our ground troops with the timeless challenges of land war in Asia.
The Tropic Lightning Division is no stranger to fighting on this terrain. The 25th Infantry Division spent twelve continuous years in Asia from World War II, through the occupation of Japan, and to the Korean War. After a short break, it spent seven additional years in Vietnam. The division is no stranger to this terrain. Nor is the 27th Infantry Regiment—the Wolfhounds’ long history in Asia, especially in the Philippines, traces back to 1901. This rotation in support of Operation PATHWAYS is just the latest episode in that long history. But what made it distinct is the training opportunity provided by the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center–Exportable, or JPMRC-X. This is what enabled us to learn from the experience.
United States Army Pacific executes a continual campaign in strategic competition named Operation Pathways, designed to build joint interior lines forward, create interoperability with our allies and partners, and enable US troops to learn the key terrain they may be called to defend alongside those they will be defending it with. The 25th Infantry Division has conducted the Balikatan and Salaknib Exercises in the Philippines since 2016 as a part of Operation Pathways. In 2024, however, Salaknib was conducted under the auspices of JPMRC-X, and executed west of the international date line for the first time. The No Fear Battalion (2-27 Infantry) was the tactical infantry unit assigned to work alongside our Philippine allies at Fort Magsaysay, in Luzon, the Philippines. Here’s what we learned.
The Environment
A high heat index above 110 degrees Fahrenheit paired with daily evening thunderstorms created the largest risk to the mission during the JPMRC-X rotation. The natural terrain and elevation change became the most significant risk during dismounted movements. Our battalion lost a platoon’s worth of combat power over the course of JPMRC-X due to disease and nonbattle injury, as well as heat. The environment created natural movement windows and severe restrictions that had equal effects on 2-27 Infantry, our ally, and the adversary. Adaptation to the environment was required to accomplish the mission.
Disease
Disease and nonbattle injury is historically the number one cause of casualties in this environment. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind in 2024, and we found out the hard way. It is shocking and brutally true how much the environment matters, and it still produces the most casualties. In our battalion, 116 soldiers were treated at our battalion medical station, including seventy-seven infections and sixteen heat injuries. Of the sixteen heat injuries, fifteen soldiers had mild heat exhaustion and one had exertional heat injury (no heat strokes). Additionally, there was a significant number of soldiers that suffered from gastrointestinal issues. Due to the consumption of local food, unpurified water, or other gastrointestinal issues, our battalion consumed 143 percent of its planned stock of antidiarrheals, and 97 percent of gastrointestinal medications. Typically, units preparing to deploy focus on fitness and acclimatization to reduce heat injuries. Rarely do they take active measures to prevent disease and nonbattle injury, our biggest issue. Countless historical examples should have made us think twice. As one historian has written, “The fate of besieged Bataan [during World War II] was determined not by the Japanese arms but by malaria and malnutrition.”
Physical Readiness
We must train differently. Traditional metrics are not the benchmarks for success. Being ready to win is all that matters. The current way we measure readiness drives how we train. The Army Combat Fitness Test and road marches have their place as baselines for general fitness. They do not achieve realistic preparation for this operational environment, however. Our unit went into this operation as the fittest battalion in our division based on ACFT scores, no small achievement. We learned this was not the preparation needed to meet this mission.
What we needed was a time under load for longer durations on tough terrain. There is no replacing it. The only way to be ready to walk all night is to do it. The second factor that is hard to replicate is the heat and humidity. By the time the Wolfhounds executed JPMRC-X, soldiers were in theater for over sixty days. They had acclimatized to executing long days in the heat and returning to an air-conditioned tent at night to rest. Ten days without respite was a shock to the system. Even for the fittest battalion, the environment proved exceedingly challenging.
What will we do next time? First, we will get under our rucks and off the road. We will do this deliberately and build toward tactical endurance. Conquering the hardest terrain we can find at home station will build confidence, if it is done routinely. Also, we will train with heavy rucks, but we will cut the load significantly during JPMRC-X and carry only the essential items—ammo, food, water, etc. Our Filipino partners did this exceptionally well, but we did not. Second, we will lift weights with the mission in mind. We will enable this through mission-specific lifting programs focused on the posterior chain and a deliberate recovery plan to enable the intensity of the training. We will deliberately seek out heat by shifting our workouts to the hottest parts of the day. Finally, we will continue to train deliberately upon arrival because acclimatization upon arrival is not enough. We must invest the time and deliberate planning to ensure we are ready to execute the assigned mission in the operating environment. We must accept that our traditional metrics to measure fitness may suffer.
Power Generation
The next great challenge we faced was power generation. Our battalion tactical action center (TAC) was powered by a three-thousand-watt generator and our subordinate units had thousand-watt generators. We had the requisite number of batteries to power our communications systems, calculated from our Oahu-based training. Our method had always been to recharge systems during halts using the generators: with a few gallons of gas and resupply every few days, there were no issues.
We learned the incredibly high heat index sapped the batteries of all our systems at a much more rapid rate than we had seen. Battery life was cut in half. Specific issues we discovered were the use of radios mounted in the bags of our dismounted troops, where the increased heat drained batteries rapidly. This meant that radios had to be switched off when not in use. This was a huge change to how we normally operate, with persistent communications. To meet this challenge, we have adopted a methodology based on communications windows. Communications are made during specific windows for short durations. This reduces the power-generation burden but forces a shift in how we operate. Without direct communications, higher headquarters must accept that their subordinate units are executing as tasked. Interestingly, our allies, accustomed to the challenges we were facing for the first time, already utilize this method, and it was the only method available to the generations of soldiers operating in this environment before us.
This constraint was not limited to radios. It also applies to computers and our sUAS (small unmanned aircraft systems) flying in support of operations. Our laptops in the TAC were unable to manage the heat, even in limited use. Any communication linkage that involved computer-based systems was untenable. Our sUAS batteries depleted rapidly during daytime flights and, in two instances, caused the sUAS to lose their links. This is a significant lesson and requires a significant shift in current procedures. One solution is more rugged equipment with a higher heat tolerance. We are working to acquire and test such equipment. Another solution is to abide by communication windows, and rely on systems such as high-frequency and tactical satellite radio communications for brief updates and minimal guidance. These are not new lessons. This, at its core, is what mission command is. How often did troops in the Spanish-American War or World War II receive a change in mission? It is only through technology and becoming accustomed to operating in permissive environments that we have gotten away from this key lesson. We must train how we will be forced to fight.
Communications
Every tactician knows communications only matter if they work when you need them, and JPMRC-X is the best communication exercise a soldier could hope for. We arrived in the Philippines confident in our systems, having tested them all over Oahu, and believed we achieved tactical-level interoperability. At home station and at Fort Magsaysay, we successfully linked our allies’ radio systems into our mesh network utilizing radio over internet protocol, and successfully provided mobile company- and battalion-level command and control from an MRZR tactical vehicle. JPMRC-X, however, challenged our communications architecture. Our allies were no longer embedded in our formations, and as a result, our methods were limited by the Philippine Army’s radios. In this case, our allies’ FM radio was only as good as line of sight. During our train up our communications were good. Now that we were disaggregated, we could not make a connection via radio with our allies beyond a few hundred meters and this did not meet our mission profile. Despite all our equipment and training, the fastest way we adapted to the circumstances was to conduct physical linkups.
If we can talk, we can fight. To do better next time, we must build our communication architecture to have compatibility beyond line-of-sight communications with our allies. The solutions range from low-tech and well established, such as high-frequency radio comms, to high-tech (and more expensive), such as Iridium satellite phones. The good news is that both solutions are available and easy to train.
Additionally, StarLink-enabled communications worked to a limited degree. StarLink creates an internet connection via low-earth orbit satellites. This enabled us to establish internal WiFi networks, connecting our TAC to our voice and data communications. This connection, however, could not extend to our subordinate units or our allies, unless they achieved an internet connection. We normally filled this gap utilizing cell towers, which worked until we moved into challenging terrain and the signal was gone—along with our mesh network.
We took several lessons away from this. First, redundant communications must include redundant transport options (ways to achieve internet signal). Second, we must have low-tech solutions such as high-frequency radio communications. Third, this only works if it can be linked to our allies.
In the end, our most effective method to achieve communications interoperability was the way it has always been done: face to face and through liaison exchanges on the ground. The fact is technology cannot replace this interface. People working shoulder to shoulder can overcome any obstacle. Reflecting on how our predecessors over many generations must have done it, this should have been our starting point, and we would recommend it as the starting point for follow-on units to build from.
Sustainment
Large traditional equipment is of limited use. We quickly discovered our standard equipment would not work in this environment. While our battalion is trained in off-road driving, our vehicles did not fit on the smaller unimproved roads we encountered. We spent significant time conducting route reconnaissance and discovered our MRZRs, Humvees, and local pickup trucks were the only vehicles that would traverse this terrain. This had massive implications for the way we normally do sustainment. Instead of large vehicles dropping resupply in bulk we had to transport lots of small packages much closer to our frontline troops.
The two most effective methods were aerial resupply and leveraging local nationals with their 4×4 vehicles. However, in a contested environment with a near-peer threat, aerial resupply is a high-risk endeavor and will likely be reserved for emergencies. To effectively train and match that risk, one thing we wish we had explored more was living off the economy. While the roads were small, the area was populated, even in the training area, and everywhere we went there were small stores or an enterprising entrepreneur who would have been happy to feed us, give us water, and fuel our machines for pennies on the dollar. Thriving in this environment may require operationalizing the dollar at the lowest level.
Terrain does not change, and its challenges remain evergreen. There is no replicating it fully. It is invaluable to train on the terrain, with your ally, that you may be called to defend. Our Army’s history is one of war in Asia. Once we captured the key lessons of our operation, their historical precedent leaped out at us. It is imperative to pass this along to ensure these lessons remain learned and observed for the next campaign. JPRMC-X is the crucible for land forces that must be prepared to fight and win in Asia. There is no substitute.
Major Rick Blank is the operations officer for 2-27 Infantry and served in this position during the 2024 Operation Pathways exercises. Rick has served as an operational planner at US Army Pacific and is a graduate of the Maritime Warfare School and Naval War College.
Lieutenant Colonel Tyler Patterson is the commander of 2-27 Infantry and served in this position during the 2024 Operation Pathways exercises. Tyler has taught at West Point and served in multiple assignments in the infantry, the interagency, and the special operations community.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spc. Carleeann Smiddy, US Army National Guard
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Rick Blank · February 28, 2025
14. Trump’s Missile Defense Initiative: A Strategic Imperative for the United States
Trump’s Missile Defense Initiative: A Strategic Imperative for the United States
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/28/trumps-missile-defense-initiative/
by Casey Christie
|
02.28.2025 at 06:00am
Introduction
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing his Secretary of Defense to develop a missile defense system for the United States. He has given the Pentagon 60 days to draft a plan. Predictably, the announcement has sparked debate, with some questioning its feasibility, others drawing comparisons to past initiatives like Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” and some suggesting it mirrors Israel’s Iron Dome. But none of these comparisons fully capture the reality of what is needed. This initiative is not a resurrection of SDI, nor is it an attempt to replicate Israel’s Iron Dome. Instead, it represents a hybrid approach suited to contemporary threats – one that integrates emerging technologies with existing capabilities to fill a critical gap in US defense strategy.
Much of the initial criticism of the plan is reflexive rather than analytical. Historically, missile defense has been dismissed as unworkable – until it wasn’t. When Israel first announced its intent to develop Iron Dome, many experts said it was impractical, too expensive, or unnecessary and doomed to fail. Yet today, Iron Dome has intercepted thousands of rockets and fundamentally reshaped the battlefield. Had Israel heeded early skepticism, it would be far more vulnerable to Hezbollah and Hamas barrages.
The broader issue is not just about whether the US should develop this system, but why it hasn’t done so already.
But this is not about copying Iron Dome. The threats facing the United States are different. Unlike Israel, which contends with short-range rocket attacks, the US must defend against ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, and long-range strategic strikes. Hypersonic weapons, in particular, present an immense challenge. Moving at speeds beyond Mach 5, they are difficult to track and intercept. Unlike conventional ballistic missiles, which follow predictable trajectories, hypersonic glide vehicles can maneuver mid-flight, evading current defense systems. While the US military is already researching potential countermeasures – including directed energy weapons and next-generation interceptors – it still lacks a comprehensive defense against these emerging threats. Meanwhile, China and Russia are already deploying operational hypersonic capabilities.
If the US lacks the ability to defend its homeland, no external actor will be able to rectify that mistake later.
The broader issue is not just about whether the US should develop this system, but why it hasn’t done so already. The global security landscape is shifting rapidly. China is turning the South China Sea into a militarized zone while the US remains preoccupied with internal political debates. Russia, through its war in Ukraine, is refining its missile strategies and testing Western defensive capabilities in real-time. Iran, North Korea, and their regional proxies have already demonstrated an ability to launch complex, coordinated missile and drone strikes against US assets and allies. The longstanding assumption that the US homeland is inherently secure due to geography is no longer valid.
Lessons from Ukraine: The Risks of Insufficient Missile Defense
Trump’s executive order may reflect a closer assessment of the Ukraine war than many assume. For three years, Russian missiles and drones have targeted Ukrainian cities, crippling energy grids, damaging critical infrastructure, and forcing Kyiv into a constant, reactive air defense battle. Ukraine has relied on a patchwork of Western systems – Patriot batteries, NASAMS, IRIS-Ts, and others – to mitigate these attacks. Yet even with these systems, no defense is perfect, and Ukrainian cities continue to face relentless bombardment.
The US must acknowledge a harsh reality: in a future conflict, no external power will be able to resupply its missile defenses in the way the US currently supports Ukraine. America is the world’s primary weapons supplier – there is no equivalent arsenal waiting to reinforce it in a crisis. Its allies depend on US protection, not the other way around. In a large-scale war, they will be too preoccupied with their own survival to offer meaningful reinforcements. Geography further complicates matters. Unlike Europe, where reinforcements can arrive by land, the US is surrounded by oceans, making logistical resupply of air defenses far more vulnerable in wartime. If the US lacks the ability to defend its homeland, no external actor will be able to rectify that mistake later.
Beyond Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): The Need for a Modern Defense Posture
One common counterargument is that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) makes missile defense unnecessary – that because major powers possess nuclear weapons, large-scale missile strikes will never happen. However, recent conflicts demonstrate that MAD does not prevent missile warfare.
MAD may prevent all-out nuclear war, but it does not deter conventional conflict or prevent limited missile strikes from shaping the battlespace. The assumption that nuclear deterrence alone can shield the US from missile threats is not just naïve – it is dangerous.
China, Russia, and Iran: The Emerging Missile Threat
The strategic competitors of the United States are not relying on MAD to ensure their security. They are actively expanding their missile arsenals, refining their operational doctrines, and testing Western vulnerabilities in real-world conflicts.
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China is modernizing its missile forces, investing in hypersonic glide vehicles like the DF-17 and developing anti-ship capabilities designed to threaten US carriers in the Pacific.
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Russia has deployed the Avangard hypersonic system, improved its air defense capabilities, and adapted its military strategies based on combat experience in Ukraine.
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Iran has built a sophisticated missile network and demonstrated its ability to overwhelm air defense systems with massed drone and rocket salvos. Its proxies have proven that even non-state actors can pose serious missile threats if not countered effectively.
The era of assuming American soil is untouchable is over. Russia’s Avangard system, capable of travelling at Mach 20, can evade existing missile defenses through unpredictable maneuvers. China’s DF-17 can strike US aircraft carriers and regional bases before forces even have time to respond. These threats are not hypothetical – they are operational, and they are already reshaping the balance of power.
The Need for a New Missile Defense Strategy
Critics of missile defense often dismiss it as too costly, too complex, or too politically charged. But history suggests otherwise. Iron Dome was doubted – until it worked. Ukraine’s patchwork air defenses were questioned – until they proved essential. Every conflict of the modern era has underscored the same lesson: having a reliable missile shield is better than needing one and not having it.
Trump’s executive order is not about reviving Reagan’s SDI or cloning Israel’s Iron Dome – it is about addressing a pressing vulnerability in US national security. The question is no longer whether the United States should develop a modern missile defense system. The real question is: why did it take this long?
Tags: Iron Dome, Missile Defense, Star Wars, Strategic Defense Initiative, Strategic Missile Defense
About The Author
- Casey Christie
- Casey Christie is the Managing Director of Christie and Associates, a London-based private military security and intelligence firm. With decades of experience in security, intelligence, and risk analysis, he has written extensively on geopolitical threats, security and defense, and modern warfare. His work has been published in The Times of London, The South African Sunday Times, and Ukraine's Kyiv Post, among others.
15. Does J.D. Vance Know Anything About European Democracy or Security?
Does J.D. Vance Know Anything About European Democracy or Security?
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/28/does-j-d-vance-know-anything-about-european-democracy-or-security/
by Emily Sorkin
|
02.28.2025 at 06:00am
On the final morning of this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC), a group of bleary-eyed journalists sat down next to me during breakfast. Each of their distinctive European voices lamented another dimension of the Trump administration’s first few weeks: the lack of strategy behind America’s engagement with Russia, Vice President J.D. Vance’s noxious speech and tacit support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what bodes for Ukraine in the coming months—and for Greenland, too, if that still matters.
One journalist commented that, despite all the much-needed media attention on Ukraine and concern over Trump’s unilateralism, many issues of European and Transatlantic security had gone untouched.
“Did you know that protests in Georgia have been going on for 80 days?” she queried. “Why is no one talking about it?”
“Probably because no one died yet,” her colleague quipped.
Yet, with all the Vice President’s unsolicited patronization of European politics, why is such a blatant demonstration of free speech and democracy, like that in Georgia, going so unnoticed?
Protestors marching to the Parliament of Georgia in Tbilisi [Source: Mariam Nikuradze/OC Media].
To the credit of MSC, my colleague Thomas de Waal had a thorough conversation with Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili at the conference. The discussion touched on the indefatigable movement of Georgians demonstrating for free speech and democracy for more than 80 days. Thousands have been taking to the streets since the Georgian Dream party suspended accession negotiations with the EU in November. Protests intensified in December when the Russian-leaning and authoritarian Georgian Dream party won contested parliamentary elections, proclaiming leader Mikheil Kavelashvili as the newly elected president.
Zourabichvili, the last Georgian president elected by popular vote, has refused to step down and is widely recognized as the legitimate leader until a replacement can be lawfully elected. In Munich, she identified the true threat to Europe’s democracy. “You get this proxy government to be put into power and … take Georgia away from its European path back to the Russian path,” Zourabichvili warned. “That’s very dangerous because if that works in Georgia … then that might be tested somewhere else.”
“Spotlight on Georgia” with Salome Zourabichvili and Thomas de Waal [Source: MSC/Heimken].
Earlier that day, Vice President Vance preached to the Transatlantic community that “democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters.” He should have stuck around to hear about actual European democracy in action.
Recent polls from the Institute of Social Studies and Analysis reveal that nearly 80% of Georgians place primary responsibility for the political crisis on Georgian Dream. And nearly 60% of respondents expressed loyalty to the protests, with 86% of Georgians supporting EU integration.
These protests are about exactly what Vance proclaims to support: unrestricted freedom of speech for all points of view and political ideologies. He promised that he and President Trump will fight to defend the right for Europeans to express their views—whether they agree or disagree. In perhaps his clearest attempt to link his pandering speech to the purpose of the conference itself, Vance declared: “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.” Meanwhile, the ruling Georgian Dream party enacts more restrictions on media, civil society groups, and assembly to further repress domestic opposition, in addition to the controversial “foreign agents” law that incited its own round of protests last year. U.S. cuts to foreign aid exacerbate these constraints on free speech and the shrinking media landscape, with independent outlets in Georgia facing closure due to blocked funding.
Since 2008, Russia has occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia. [Source: Sovereign Limits].
Vance’s ignorance of Georgia’s protests is hardly surprising, especially given Russia’s growing influence within the country. Russia has occupied around twenty percent of Georgia since 2008, though recent talks of Georgia’s reunification with Abkhazia and South Ossetia further illustrate closer relations between Moscow and Tbilisi. The Georgian Dream party increasingly embraces ties to Russia at the price of European alignment—refusing to participate in Russian sanctions, welcoming Russian business, and abandoning its links to the West.
Although Vance might not comprehend the gravity of Russian influence in Georgia, President Zourabichvili understands the magnitude of these security implications and the regional consequence of Georgia’s defense of its democracy. “What will happen to Georgia also determines your future. It determines certainly the future of Armenia … It determines the future of the Black Sea,” she explained. “It might determine the future of many elections in European countries.”
Police in Georgia disperse protestors and repress demonstrations [Source: Giorgi Arhevanidze/AFP via Getty Images].
Georgia’s exercise of its democracy does not fit well into Vance’s archetype of free speech, which centers around accommodating populist and far-right worldviews that Europe has strategically limited in the public sphere. But even fellow Republicans acknowledged the speech’s shortcomings, with Senator John Cornyn noting Vance’s failure to address the issue “at the top of everybody’s list” or much substance about America’s policy under the Trump administration. Another Republican Senator conceded privately that, despite Vance articulating key positions of this new administration, the sovereignty of each state to determine its own constitutional and free speech issues remains important to the Senator.
Yet, President Zourabichvili doesn’t see enough reaction from either the Americans or Europeans, appealing to her European colleagues directly on the MSC stage. “It’s much more than Georgian politics. It’s much more than one party winning over an opposition,” she asserted. “It is a challenge for the European Union.”
With fast-moving developments in Ukraine negotiations, it is unlikely that Georgia’s unflagging protests will garner much media or policymaker attention from either the Americans or Europeans. After all, I only became aware of the situation after a chance seating placement at a hotel restaurant in Munich.
But with ceasefire negotiations progressing and Russia continuing to intervene in European elections, Vance could learn a lot about European democracy and security from Georgia’s protests. Rather than pander to far-right parties in the name of free speech, Vance can look at a true demonstration of democracy in Georgia and see that he is sorely misinformed in diagnosing Europe’s biggest challenge supplanting Russia and China as “the threat from within.” Or, at the very least, Vance can recognize that he completely missed the mark in Munich.
Tags: european security, Georgia, munich security conference, US Foreign Policy
About The Author
- Emily Sorkin
- Emily Sorkin is the Executive Assistant to the President at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a master’s candidate in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, concentrating in International Security. Sorkin graduated with a B.A. in International Relations with Honors from Boston University, where she authored a thesis on normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
16. The Real Threat of Chinese AI
Excerpts:
AI’s Linux moment presents the Trump administration with a critical choice. It can quickly implement a comprehensive strategy to build and maintain leadership in open-source AI. This means promoting innovation, attracting global talent, and ensuring that AI development aligns with democratic values, while also working to secure the United States’ edge in computational technology. Or the administration can continue the status quo, with the risk that the United States cedes influence over AI systems’ outputs and a critical advantage in hardware to China, as Chinese-developed open-source models redirect the global market toward Chinese chip architectures and Chinese computing frameworks.
Washington must navigate this critical turning point with care. Although it must carefully weigh the risks of publicly releasing increasingly capable AI models, retreating from leadership in open-source LLMs would be a strategic error. As Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith argued in January, open-source AI offers the country a chance to demonstrate the special strengths of the U.S. tech ecosystem. The United States should reestablish its historical leadership in developing open models while keeping the ecosystem competitive and continuing to invest in critical resources—whether they are chips or human talent. Given the stakes, second place is not an option.
The Real Threat of Chinese AI
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jared Dunnmon · February 28, 2025
Why the United States Needs to Lead the Open-Source Race
Jared Dunnmon
February 28, 2025
Chinese startup DeepSeek AI's office in Beijing, February 2025 Florence Lo / Reuters
JARED DUNNMON served as Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit in the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.
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In the two months since a little-known Chinese company called DeepSeek released a powerful new open-source AI model, the breakthrough has already begun to transform the global AI market. DeepSeek-V3, as the company’s open large language model (LLM) is called, boasts performance that rivals that of models from top U.S. labs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama—but at a tiny fraction of the cost. This has given developers and users around the world access to leading-edge AI at minimal expense. In January, the company released a second model, DeepSeek-R1, that shows capabilities similar to OpenAI’s advanced o1 model at a mere five percent of the price. As a result, DeepSeek poses a threat to U.S. leadership in AI, paving the way for China to gain a dominant global position despite Washington’s efforts to limit Beijing’s access to advanced AI technologies.
DeepSeek’s rapid rise shows how much is at stake in the global AI race. In addition to reaping the extraordinary economic potential of AI, the country that shapes the LLMs that underpin tomorrow’s apps and services will have outsize influence not only over the norms and values embedded in them but also over the semiconductor ecosystem that forms the foundation of AI computing. The fact that both China and the United States clearly believe that these technologies could provide military advantages only heightens the importance of achieving and maintaining long-term AI leadership.
In focusing on DeepSeek-V3’s performance characteristics and low cost, however, observers may be missing a more important insight. Another key reason for the rapid adoption of DeepSeek’s models is that they are open-source software, meaning that anyone can download, run, study, modify, and build on them and pay only the price necessary for raw computing power. In contrast, nearly all comparable American AI models are proprietary, which both limits how they can be used and increased costs for users.
Already, leading members of the American AI community have begun to acknowledge the problems with its emphasis on proprietary, closed-source models. In late January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company may have been “on the wrong side of history” in failing to embrace open-source AI. And in February, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted a future in which both open and closed AI models shape everyday applications. Clearly, the United States can no longer rely solely on closed AI systems from big companies to compete with China, and the U.S. government must do more to support open-source models even as it strives to limit Chinese access to cutting-edge chip technologies and training data. To continue its dominance, the United States should mount a comprehensive program to develop and deploy the best open-source LLMs while also ensuring that U.S. firms are still the ones building the most capable AI models—sometimes called “frontier systems”—that are still likely to reside within highly capitalized private companies.
Simultaneously, Washington should pursue a broader policy agenda that both enhances the positioning of U.S. open-source AI on the international stage and enables America to build the core infrastructure needed to maintain AI leadership. This means not only supporting the development of open-source models in the United States but also making them easily available to open-source contributors and users, particularly from U.S.-aligned industrial, academic, and public-sector communities. Without such steps by Washington, DeepSeek points the way to a not-so-distant future in which China could use cheap, powerful, open models to eclipse the United States in AI applications and computing—thereby threatening to bring one of the most important technologies of the twenty-first century under the sway of a country that is hostile to freedom and democracy.
THE OPEN ADVANTAGE
Although open-source AI has perhaps received less attention than frontier systems in U.S. policy circles, it has long underpinned technical progress in the field. Indeed, soon after ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2022, members of the AI community began to draw an analogy between today’s LLMs and a major component of traditional computers that owes a debt to open-source software: the operating system. Just as the operating system translates human-friendly computer programs into instructions executed by machine hardware, LLMs are a bridge between human language and the information that machines process. In fact, with open-source AI models, the analogy also extends to another aspect of traditional computers: just as the open-source Linux operating system has long coexisted alongside proprietary ones such as Microsoft’s Windows, thus allowing users and developers to freely download, use, and modify its source code, open-source LLMs such as Meta’s Llama have emerged alongside proprietary ones such as ChatGPT, thus promising universal access to the intelligent systems that will power the next generation of software. With the advent of these powerful open-source LLMs, researchers have described the current era as AI’s “Linux moment.”
Generally speaking, open-source software (OSS) projects such as Linux have been strengthened by their ability to be enhanced by programmers around the world. This diverse input has enabled rapid development and enhanced security, because the systems can be simultaneously tested and improved upon by humanity’s best engineers. Moreover, because OSS projects have historically tended to be maintained by American and European entities, OSS has for decades driven Western tech innovation and leadership in many areas, including operating systems, Web browsers, databases, encryption, and even programming languages.
Embracing OSS principles, many researchers have also accelerated progress in AI development, for example, by sharing and publishing new innovations almost daily. This holds true not only for academics—who are motivated by the wide dissemination of their work—but also for AI companies, which use participation in the OSS community as an effective recruiting, problem-solving, and public relations strategy. Indeed, some of the most important contributions to open-source AI have been led by big industry players. These include Google’s TensorFlow and Meta’s PyTorch, the most widely used programming frameworks for AI; the Transformer architecture that underpins most modern LLMs, originally developed by Google; and models such as AlphaFold, an AI system built by DeepMind that predicts how proteins fold with such accuracy that its developers were awarded a 2024 Nobel Prize. This open spirit has made AI an exciting and rapidly moving field for decades and is one of the main reasons for the enormous technological and economic potential of open LLMs.
But there has also long been a fundamental tension between open-source systems and potential security risks. As in the case of open-source computing, critics have warned that open-source AI can be misused by malicious actors. With these concerns—alongside commercial considerations and competitive pressures—many big AI companies began offering their cutting-edge AI systems via chatbots or other Web portals instead of releasing them publicly. In fact, of the most commonly used American LLMs, only Meta’s Llama is an open system. And Llama has already raised concerns, with Reuters reporting in November 2024 that the Chinese government has adapted it for military purposes.
The releases of DeepSeek-V3 and the more powerful DeepSeek-R1, however, have brought the clear advantages of open-source AI back into focus. Faced with export controls that limited its access to leading-edge chips, DeepSeek has nonetheless pulled off an engineering tour de force, achieving algorithmic improvements and hardware efficiencies that have allowed its open-source LLMs to compete with the top proprietary ones from the United States. Although the exact amount of computational power DeepSeek has used to build its model is hotly debated, it is almost certainly significantly less than that available to American rivals. Indeed, DeepSeek’s LLMs are so inexpensive to run and so widely available in the open-source space that they are already beginning to power a host of new applications that were not economically feasible before their release. While this does not mean that open-source LLMs like DeepSeek’s will capture the entire market, the rapid and overwhelming response to them should not be overlooked. Since the start of the year, DeepSeek’s app has displaced ChatGPT atop the Apple App Store; DeepSeek-R1 recently has become the most liked model ever on the model-sharing platform Hugging Face; and DeepSeek-R1 is now being adopted by leading U.S. startups.
AI WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
An unfortunate side effect of DeepSeek’s massive growth is that it could give China the power to embed widely used generative AI models with the values of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2023, Beijing issued rules requiring Chinese-made LLMs to align with the “core values of socialism” and to avoid spreading “problematic information” or “illegal” content. In 2024, the Cyberspace Administration of China, China’s Internet regulator, began inspecting Chinese LLMs for compliance with these rules and blocking the release of those that failed.
It is not hard to see the effect of this censorship. If you ask DeepSeek-V3 about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it says, “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question.” On other sensitive topics, the DeepSeek chatbot may overwrite itself halfway through its answer, responding, “Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” Rather than offering useful information on subjects such as the Chinese Uyghur population and unregistered Chinese house churches, the chatbot instead makes a bland statement about the strength of Chinese one-party rule, such as: “We firmly believe that under the leadership of the party, China's policies will continue to be improved, making a positive contribution to the promotion of social harmony and stability.” Tests have shown that the model will even provide skewed answers to general questions, such as “What are the most important historical events of the twentieth century?” Although DeepSeek’s LLM performs remarkably well on many tasks, it has clearly been programmed to reflect Beijing’s ideological goals and to suppress negative information about China.
The risks of this kind of control should not be underestimated. Chinese influence over TikTok has already raised significant national security concerns; Chinese-designed LLMs could pose an even greater threat to liberal values and the free flow of information. Now, as they are poised to form at least part of the foundation of the AI ecosystem in many parts of the world, these models not only spread Chinese propaganda but also expose users to cybersecurity risks. DeepSeek’s popular app, for example, has been sending U.S. user data directly to China, and researchers have already demonstrated that “sleeper agents”—potentially dangerous behaviors embedded within a model that are designed to surface only in specific contexts—could be inserted into LLMs by their developers.
Since DeepSeek’s models are already among the world’s most downloaded LLMs, the threat is immediate. Yet this chatbot could be just the beginning of a new era of Chinese dominance of open-source LLMs. If the United States and its partners do not rapidly develop their own open-source LLMs as a compelling alternative to these low-cost models, they could put at risk the West’s most important technological advantage in AI: chips.
DeepSeek's LLMs could be used to build a Chinese-driven AI supply chain.
To grasp how the future of AI chip-making relates to open-source AI systems, it is crucial to understand the dynamics behind the United States’ current leadership in high-end chips. Today, a single U.S. firm, Nvidia, dominates chip design for AI via its world-leading graphics processing units (GPUs), which power the vast majority of AI workloads today. Through CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary and difficult-to-replicate software, which translates high-level programs written by AI developers into commands optimized for running on its GPUs, the company also effectively controls a key part of the AI software ecosystem. As such, the firm has gained a commanding position in the AI computing market. Indeed, even DeepSeek’s models were originally trained on Nvidia chips that were purportedly acquired in compliance with U.S. export controls.
It might be tempting to conclude that the United States could curb the Chinese AI threat simply by further restricting access to Nvidia chips. But once an LLM such as DeepSeek’s has been trained, simply running it can often be accomplished with less advanced hardware. DeepSeek has already ensured that its models can be run on the Chinese tech giant Huawei’s Ascend Neural Processing Unit chips, which are produced by the Chinese national chipmaker SMIC. If Chinese LLMs gain a significant market share, perhaps aided by state subsidies, China could either require or provide incentives for Chinese LLMs to run on domestically sourced chips (as Chinese firms seem already aiming to do via aggressive pricing).
In this scenario, because DeepSeek’s models would have no competitors that can rival their performance at the same ultra-low costs, users around the world would likely begin paying for Huawei chips. That massive capital inflow would support growth at SMIC and Huawei and damage firms such as Nvidia, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, which underpin the West’s chip-making dominance. In the bull case for Beijing, such a change could mean that AI chipmaking begins to look like lithium-ion batteries and numerous other industries in which it has reduced the West to a bit player: The strategy involves using a combination of market-driven capital inflow and state-backed incentives to obtain a commanding share of the global market.
Left without clear rivals, the impact of DeepSeek’s open LLMs, in other words, goes beyond rapidly gaining a dominant global position in AI applications. These LLMs could also be used to build a Chinese-driven supply chain that erodes Western leadership in chip design and manufacturing and gives Beijing sweeping influence over a large fraction of information flowing from AI products not only in China but around the world.
A NEW AMERICAN STRATEGY
To counter the new Chinese AI threat, the United States needs to make a much bigger push to support its own open-source LLMs. First and foremost, the government should accelerate technical progress on and distribution of U.S.-built open-source LLMs via universities, companies, and national labs, with a preference toward those models that enhance the competitive position of Western AI technology.
Although investment in promising open-source AI companies such as Together AI, Hugging Face, and Mistral increased from $900 million to $2.9 billion between 2022 and 2023, this funding was a small fraction of the $31 billion that U.S. venture capital firms poured into the broader AI sector over the same period. To jump-start the open-source sector, Washington should create incentives to invest in open-source AI systems that are compatible with Western chipsets by, for example, mandating a clear preference in its grant and loan programs for projects that include the open release of AI research outputs. Programs such as the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, which aims to provide American AI researchers with access to chips and data sets, should also be expanded, leveraging computing resources from the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and national research labs. To accomplish these objectives, the U.S. government should also consider partnership with initiatives like Stargate—a collaboration between Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, OpenAI, Softbank, and MGX that intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years in new AI infrastructure in the United States.
Washington should further consider enhancing the U.S. technology ecosystem to better support Western open-source AI. For example, the development of a seamless cross-platform computing ecosystem that allows developers to easily leverage the best Western chipsets—among them Nvidia and AMD GPUs, Apple M-series chips, and Google Tensor Processing Units—would create an integrated computing environment with which China would struggle to compete. It would also drive demand for Western chips. Ultimately, to nip the threat of Chinese domination in the bud, the United States must make its own technologies “stickier,” ensuring that developers and users continue to opt for the convenience and power of the Western computing ecosystem over a Chinese one.
Beyond deploying more open-source LLMs, the United States must also lead the next wave of AI innovation. Although Google's Transformer architecture currently underpins most LLMs deployed today, for instance, emerging approaches for building AI models such as Cartesia’s Structured State Space models or Inception’s diffusion LLMs—both of which originated in U.S. academic labs—show promise in surpassing it. Washington should fund next-generation model development, and initiatives such as the Microelectronics Commons, a network of regional technology hubs funded by the CHIPS and Science Act, should support efforts to design and produce hardware that is optimized to run these new model architectures. Government research and acquisition orgnanizations should also prioritize testing, evaluating, and scaling products from firms such as Groq, Sambanova, Cerebras, Together AI, Liquid AI, Cartesia, Sakana AI, Inception, and others that are making big bets on new software and hardware approaches that will underpin tomorrow’s leading-edge AI systems.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son presenting the Stargate AI initiative, Tokyo, February 2025 Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
Washington must ensure that its own policy choices do not hamstring the ability of U.S. companies to compete with their Chinese counterparts on open LLMs. For instance, rather than imposing broad export controls on open-source AI models, Washington should provide incentives to companies to make their models compatible with Western chipsets and to discourage use of Chinese ones. The Federal Trade Commission should also recognize that large tech companies’ contributions to open-source AI—Google’s TensorFlow alongside Meta’s PyTorch and Llama are perhaps the most obvious examples—will be crucial to competing with state-backed Chinese enterprises and should explicitly consider a firm’s contribution to U.S. leadership in open AI as part of its determination on any antitrust action.
The United States must also do more to counter efforts by Chinese companies to undercut the pricing of American AI products. In late 2024, Alibaba cut the cost of its Qwen-VL model by more than 85 percent. While such a step could have been enabled by technical improvements, the Chinese government may also be subsidizing the company to undercut Western competitors. Washington should consider applying antidumping measures to foreign AI systems if they are clearly being underpriced to drive out U.S. competition. The government must also compete forcefully with China in third countries where Beijing may make Chinese support for infrastructure and other aid contingent on the use of Chinese AI models. Moreover, given indications that DeepSeek may have used data from OpenAI’s GPT-4 without authorization, Washington should consider applying the Foreign Direct Product Rule to AI model outputs, which could limit the use of outputs from leading U.S. AI labs by Chinese companies in the same way that it successfully reduced China’s access to Western semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Each of these actions will be more effective if other countries follow suit. Washington will need to work with partners in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere to harmonize policy approaches to these difficult topics, with the goal of creating a sufficiently large set of countries to slow the proliferation of Chinese-influenced AI models. Although large, the Chinese market is still dwarfed by the market beyond its borders. That global arena is the one that matters and where the United States must have a concerted strategy to ensure that the Western computing and AI ecosystem remains dominant for the foreseeable future.
Although U.S. export controls have limited Chinese access to the most high-end chips, Beijing clearly views open-source AI that is built on less advanced technology as a strategic pathway to gain market share. Moreover, Chinese models will likely continue to improve not only via legitimate means such as algorithmic innovation, engineering improvements, and domestic chip production but also through illicit means such as unauthorized training on the outputs of closed American AI models and the circumvention of export controls on Western chips. These strategies suggest that it is almost inevitable that Chinese companies continue to improve their models’ affordability and performance. The fact that the release of DeepSeek-V3 was followed just weeks later by the release of the more powerful DeepSeek-R1 only reinforces this point.
Ideally, Washington should seek to ensure that superior American alternatives are available as soon as Chinese entities release their latest models, thus offering users an alternative to adopting Chinese AI systems and helping maintain U.S. frontier leadership for as long as possible. The Department of Commerce’s AI diffusion framework, announced by the outgoing Biden administration in January, attempts to accomplish this by calibrating the rate at which AI technology spreads from the U.S. and its allies to the rest of the world. For example, it uses metrics such as model performance and compute requirements to guide export controls, with the goal of enabling U.S. entities to release models that are just as good—but not meaningfully better than—the best existing open-source model at any point in time. Despite the challenges of implementing such a strategy, this approach provides a foundation for managing AI capability that the incoming administration should work to refine. For example, the government could use its own computing resources to host advanced U.S. models for domestic researchers before they have been publicly released.
LEAD OR LOSE
AI’s Linux moment presents the Trump administration with a critical choice. It can quickly implement a comprehensive strategy to build and maintain leadership in open-source AI. This means promoting innovation, attracting global talent, and ensuring that AI development aligns with democratic values, while also working to secure the United States’ edge in computational technology. Or the administration can continue the status quo, with the risk that the United States cedes influence over AI systems’ outputs and a critical advantage in hardware to China, as Chinese-developed open-source models redirect the global market toward Chinese chip architectures and Chinese computing frameworks.
Washington must navigate this critical turning point with care. Although it must carefully weigh the risks of publicly releasing increasingly capable AI models, retreating from leadership in open-source LLMs would be a strategic error. As Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith argued in January, open-source AI offers the country a chance to demonstrate the special strengths of the U.S. tech ecosystem. The United States should reestablish its historical leadership in developing open models while keeping the ecosystem competitive and continuing to invest in critical resources—whether they are chips or human talent. Given the stakes, second place is not an option.
JARED DUNNMON served as Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit in the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.\
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jared Dunnmon · February 28, 2025
17. Trump continues the American tradition of abandoning allies
As usual, Don Kirk pulls no punches. He provides us with a historical reminder and only scratches the surface.
Does it make a difference that Ukraine and Taiwan are not allies but South Korea is?
He provides some ominous foreshadowing.
Excerpts:
For that matter, what about South Korea? Would Trump be likely to wage a second Korean War to protect it again? North Korea’s hereditary dictator, Kim Jong Un, grandson of Kim Il Sung, founder of the regime that’s now a “nuclear power,” as Trump has called it, today threatens our side with much worse devastation. Trump has repeated traditional calls for “Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear program, but he’s been “in love” with Kim ever since their first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Let us not forget that he spoke during his first term of withdrawing most of America’s 28,500 troops from the South, playing into Kim’s strategy for reuniting the Korean peninsula on his own harsh terms.
Kim’s new relationship with Putin, to whom he is providing arms and troops, may pave the way for another Trump-Kim summit, if Trump forces a deal with Putin on Ukraine while excluding Ukraine’s president from the process. Then look for Trump, after putting on a tough-guy show on slashing China’s enormous trade surplus with the U.S., to kowtow before China’s president, promising they would do “everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Those words, eerily similar to his praise for Putin, don’t foretell a stout defense of America’s Asian friends against Chinese bullying and worse.
Trump continues the American tradition of abandoning allies
by Donald Kirk, opinion contributor - 02/27/25 8:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5165601-trump-ukraine-lessons-history/?utm
President Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine takes me back to 60 years ago, when I first set foot in Vietnam as a journalist after covering the end of the era of anti-Americanism in Indonesia and the downfall of Sukarno.
In the face of corruption, destructive political rivalries and the failure of U.S.-advised South Vietnamese forces, the Americans were having a deeper impact on the Vietnamese than many realized. It was not that “we are winning,” as U.S. commanders claimed, but that American influence pervaded every corner of the culture of what we then called South Vietnam to differentiate it from the perceived enemy, North Vietnam.
As I flew in and out of Vietnam on extended visits from Hong Kong and then Tokyo, then spent a couple of years writing a book in the venerable Hotel Majestic overlooking the Saigon River, I came to realize how much the Vietnamese not only counted on their American ally and benefactor but also how they trusted us. Whatever journalists might write on the horrors of the war, the disruption of civilized life and the unlikelihood of a happy ending, millions of South Vietnamese depended on the American forces in their midst.
That’s why it came as such an incredible shock when the Americans cut and ran 50 years ago, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves against the North Vietnamese.
Who would have thought the Americans — big and rich, arrogant and often ignorant as they were — would not come to their rescue as the North Vietnamese poured southward, taking over town after town, base after base, until the fall of the Saigon regime on April 30, 1975? About 3 million people from South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos fled over the next two decades — hundreds of thousands on fishing boats. Tens of thousands of them died.
Likewise, as many as 2.8 million Cambodians were killed during more than three years of Khmer Rouge rule after the U.S. stopped showering the Phnom Penh regime with military aid and stopped the air support that had held the Khmer Rouge at bay.
It is easy to rationalize all this suffering by saying the Americans should never have plunged into the war there in the first place. A significant number of Americans were anti-war — many sympathetic with the communist government in Hanoi. And the American bug-out ranks as the most humiliating defeat in American history until now. It set the pattern for debacles in which U.S. forces have withdrawn, fled or yielded to the enemy when politicians willing to compromise with foes at home and abroad tired of waging war.
That’s essentially what Trump has been doing in Ukraine: begging his friend, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, for negotiations that would sanctify Russia’s gains — and set the stage for the next phase of a struggle in which the Russians would fight to take over all Ukraine, as they did during Tsarist rule and again during the communist era, with Joseph Stalin grabbing Ukraine’s rich agricultural products, notably wheat, leaving millions to die.
Ever since the defeat of the old Saigon regime, we’ve been facing more compromise and more defeat. As the winners of two world wars, having defended the southern “half” of the Korean peninsula against North Korean and Chinese onslaughts, the U.S. has suffered setbacks in just about every significant conflict in which our presidents have invested arms or lives. Vietnam may rank as our worst total defeat, but we can’t say we haven’t lost a few since then.
We are still living with the aftermath of George W. Bush’s decision to order American forces into Iraq in 2003, overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I arrived in Baghdad in June 2004 on the day Bush transferred “sovereignty” to a Baghdad regime that could hardly survive without the infusion of more than 100,000 American troops plus air support and arms. Now the regime is left with 2,000 or so U.S. military advisers offering clues on how to survive against its Iran-backed foes and remnants of the Islamic State.
Trump, in a foretaste of what he’s doing to Ukraine, abandoned the Kurds in southern Turkey and Syria to the mercies of the Turks during his first presidency. Next, though he loudly denies it, Trump shares responsibility with his much maligned successor, former President Joe Biden, for abandoning the Afghan regime that the U.S. had been defending for a decade. First, Trump pulled about 10,000 American troops out of Afghanistan and then made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw American support. As with his effort at bullying Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into compliance, so he overlooked the former Afghan government. Trump loves to blame Biden for the fiasco of the final American pullout in August 2021, but Trump had already decided the war was over for the U.S.
It would be nice to rationalize America’s decisions, from Vietnam onward, to cut and run as necessary or inevitable, but we see the same scenario playing out in Ukraine. The war, as fought with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American arms and ammunition, is not likely to end well — at least, as far as Trump is concerned — so why not make a deal with Putin? Trump may claim that he’s getting Putin to agree to settle for what the Russians have already carved out in the eastern and southeastern Donbas region, as well as Crimea, but we must assume Putin wants the rest of the country too — and will fight to get it on some spurious pretext.
Or was this all a negotiating strategy, to bring Zelensky to the table? Ukraine and the U.S. will be meeting on Friday in D.C. to discuss a “natural resources deal” as “part of future security guarantees.” Interesting, but with Russia dead-set against “peace-keepers” from European members of NATO in Ukraine guaranteeing the peace, we can be none too sure Putin will go for it.
After Ukraine, Trump will face still more challenges, but it’s questionable if he will reverse the trend. What if President Xi Jinping finally decides to take on the independent island state of Taiwan, 90 miles from Chinese mainland at the closest point? Or, what if Xi wants to attack the Philippines from bases the Chinese have built in the South China Sea, which China says is all theirs? Trump may make a show of challenging the Chinese in a terrible trade war, but we can be pretty sure that he would not order a strong defense of either Taiwan, which Biden assured we’re “committed” to defend, or the Philippines, with which Biden strengthened our alliance.
For that matter, what about South Korea? Would Trump be likely to wage a second Korean War to protect it again? North Korea’s hereditary dictator, Kim Jong Un, grandson of Kim Il Sung, founder of the regime that’s now a “nuclear power,” as Trump has called it, today threatens our side with much worse devastation. Trump has repeated traditional calls for “Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear program, but he’s been “in love” with Kim ever since their first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Let us not forget that he spoke during his first term of withdrawing most of America’s 28,500 troops from the South, playing into Kim’s strategy for reuniting the Korean peninsula on his own harsh terms.
Kim’s new relationship with Putin, to whom he is providing arms and troops, may pave the way for another Trump-Kim summit, if Trump forces a deal with Putin on Ukraine while excluding Ukraine’s president from the process. Then look for Trump, after putting on a tough-guy show on slashing China’s enormous trade surplus with the U.S., to kowtow before China’s president, promising they would do “everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Those words, eerily similar to his praise for Putin, don’t foretell a stout defense of America’s Asian friends against Chinese bullying and worse.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.
18. Dennis Blair: Pentagon purge a sign of dangerous times ahead
Dennis Blair: Pentagon purge a sign of dangerous times ahead - Breaking Defense
"The current administration claims to support a strong military. You could have fooled me," writes Dennis Blair, former Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Command and Director of National Intelligence, in this op-ed.
By Dennis Blair
on February 27, 2025 at 11:12 AM
breakingdefense.com · by Dennis Blair · February 27, 2025
Former commander in chief of the US Pacific Command, Dennis Blair, delivers a speech at a conference of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF) in Tokyo on April 13, 2015. (YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration’s recent Department of Defense leadership changes are unprecedented in their scale and riskiness. Far from bringing fresh and smart perspectives to national security, they are most likely to weaken the combat effectiveness of the armed forces at a dangerous time for the United States.
A diverse officer corps at all ranks produces higher combat effectiveness because it is drawn from a wider and deeper talent pool. The armed forces have learned over the years that not all the best military leaders are white males, and that we need to draw from the best leadership talent in the 35 percent of Americans who are not white and the 50 percent who are not male.
The armed forces bring in the best people they can attract at the start of the very competitive merit-based “up or out” promotion system. The larger the talent pool from which the entrants are drawn at the bottom, the better will be the leaders at all levels through the very top four-star positions.
Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps colonels and Navy captains have been tested and judged, and the best of them promoted through a dozen jobs over twenty-five-year careers. Only 3 percent of them are selected for general and admiral. Further promotion only gets more selective as the jobs become tougher: The roughly 300 one-star flag and general officers ultimately are winnowed down to just 38 four-star generals and admirals at the highest levels of command.
Gen. CQ Brown, the most senior African-American military officer in the armed forces and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the most senior female officer in the Navy, had worked their way through this grueling obstacle course of the military promotion system with top performance at every level of command. They were the only current members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were not white and male, and they were doing a fine job in their very difficult assignments.
Senior officers have been and should be dismissed for poor performance and for insubordination. However, the decision to dismiss Brown and Franchetti without performance-based justification will weaken the faith of all current and potential officers in the fairness of the officer promotion system and shrink the talent pool of future military leaders.
Arbitrary personnel decisions in the senior officer corps do damage beyond reducing the officer talent pool, at a time when the armed forces are fighting for talent. They also move less competent leaders into the top jobs.
The basis for promotion up the officer ranks has been superior performance, especially in operational assignments, and leadership growth potential. What has not been a factor has been connection with or sponsorship from civilian politicians or political parties. The traditions of the American military profession are operational competence, political neutrality and institutional loyalty, not political or personal loyalty or connections. Politicization of the officer corps will move the wrong people to the top military positions, where they will provide incompetent and sycophantic military advice to political leaders and poor leadership to the troops.
The experience gained in a merit-based promotion system is crucial. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the new nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, will be the least seasoned defense leadership team in modern history. Whatever their personal qualities and success early in their careers, they have not been tested in high-stakes national security leadership roles — positions where wisdom is forged under pressure, where failure carries real consequences.
History provides sobering examples of the cost of inexperience at the top. General Ambrose Burnside, General George Custer, Admiral Ralph Ghormley, General Ricardo Sanchez all had admirable personal characteristics and early careers but were not ready for the higher commands to which they were assigned.
The challenges of inexperienced leaders at the top will be compounded by removing the civilian experts. The combination of forced early retirement for senior officials and a hiring freeze of new civil servants is a shortsighted move that will save little money but likely hobble the Pentagon.
Yes, reform is needed to modernize the department. However, the problem is not the size of the civil service, but its outdated personnel system that makes it difficult to remove poor performers and reward top talent. Instead of reforming this system, the administration is choosing indiscriminate cuts that hollow out expertise when it is needed most.
Make no mistake, a weaker civilian workforce means a weaker Department of Defense — just as threats from China, Russia and rogue states demand sharper strategic thinking.
The current administration claims to support a strong military. You could have fooled me. Choosing inexperience at the highest levels, cutting without improving civilian staff, dismissing respected leaders without cause, and politicizing military promotions all point to a weakened force, not a stronger one.
These are mistakes with lasting consequences that will endanger national security and, if history is any guide, they will take blood and treasure to correct.
Admiral (ret.) Dennis Blair is the former Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Command and Director of National Intelligence.
19. Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
This is a perspective.
This excerpt jumped out at me:
One way to understand the unfolding DEI backlash is from the perspective of airmen who have been shuttled from pillar to post for 30 years, herded constantly to the next social shaping project. This reflects how military life has become a mirror for the constantly shifting faddishness of electoral politics. The services shift emphasis to maintain political approval, but will dependably go too far, flogging key messages until they collapse as a dead horse, then bludgeoning the horse. Colonels were once the umbrella shielding airmen from as much bullshit as possible. Now, they’re chain-feeding the bullshit cannons trained on the rank-and-file.
Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel
When the incentives for obedience and ambition are too strong, everybody loses
https://radarblog.substack.com/p/rise-of-the-gutless-air-force-colonel
Tony Carr
Feb 27, 2025
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I like to occasionally chat with my former self.
I think of all the past versions of myself as ghosts, whispering to me the insight essential to improved judgment and decision making as I (hopefully) grow older. You’ll have to ask those in my personal circle whether it’s actually working.
But some of these interactions are exceptionally enlightening. Someone reminded me of an old article I wrote, and after re-reading it, I had to thank my ghost.
Below, I will share the words I wrote seven years ago. I still agree with them, unfortunately. But my ghost tells me to get beyond reacting to the outwardly exhibited behavior of the system I’m critiquing and pull apart why it continues to decay.
Which leads me to share three thoughts as a preamble.
- Any system of any kind, no matter how ingeniously constructed, is dying from the moment it is born. The better the design, the more naturally durable it will be. But only via watchful and proactive remediation can its decay be slowed and its useful life extended. This goes for governments and institutions, organizations, and processes of all kinds. The article below unpacks how Air Force colonels have gone from comprising the vanguard of combat aviation to acting as glorified day care attendants whose loss of influence is inversely relative to their need for official approval. The reason I return to the issue after seven years to find it in worse condition is that nothing has been done in the interim to arrest the decay.
- If colonels are generally gutless, it’s because the Air Force wants them to be. Every colonel started as an open-slate Lieutenant, responding to organizational incentives to build a career and a body of work defining their professional identity. If being operationally obsessed and driven by taking care of airmen got colonels promoted, everyone would exhibit such qualities. Since the Air Force incentivizes fawning minionism, everyone figures out what is politically fashionable and then notoriously flies the approved banner. One way to understand the unfolding DEI backlash is from the perspective of airmen who have been shuttled from pillar to post for 30 years, herded constantly to the next social shaping project. This reflects how military life has become a mirror for the constantly shifting faddishness of electoral politics. The services shift emphasis to maintain political approval, but will dependably go too far, flogging key messages until they collapse as a dead horse, then bludgeoning the horse. Colonels were once the umbrella shielding airmen from as much bullshit as possible. Now, they’re chain-feeding the bullshit cannons trained on the rank-and-file.
- The excessive intrusion of political behavior into military life is a bug, not a feature. Civilian control of military force is a critical, laudable, stone-tablet-level stricture of our system. But we’ve long since crossed the boundary separating control from over-handling. The services have gone from being extensions of politics to extensions of ideology, changing their stripes as different personas inhabit high office. Politicians have entrenched an incentive structure that rewards military officers for silent fealty. This asks more than obedience. It demands conformity. Not only that, it demands sufficient performative activity to suggest the conformity is intellectual and not “merely” a matter of following orders. This is a huge problem. It’s one thing to insist generals follow civilian orders. Another to insist generals mold their organizations in the image of a political party.
Politics is the professional art of misrepresentation in the service of advancing particular interests.
Military leadership is the professional art of principled stewardship in the service of advancing everyone’s interests.
The two can’t coexist. One will eat the other. Which is why senior officers should act a layer of healthy separation and filtration. At this moment, they’re not just permeable. A pipe for delivering shit rather than a screen for stopping it.
Today, there is disruption afoot. With it comes the legit hope of reform.
But if all we do is shake a box of problems and lay it back down, it’s the same box. Same problems.
If the incentives for military advancement continue to showcase political enshittification, the next version of this article will be discussing the rise of the gutless flag officer.
Such an article could be convincingly written even now.
If the incentives shift, and military leadership once again becomes fashionable, we might start promoting based at least partially on character again. We might see the green chutes of tradition regenerating.
Or, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, it might be darkest just before it goes black.
Enjoy the original. Comments and challenges are welcome, as always.
The problem with promoting someone to Colonel is that doing so vests in that person a belief that s/he has been invited to the Big Time and is destined for generalship.
Both of these beliefs is almost always mistaken. But in the time Colonels are suspended in these mistaken beliefs, they avoid risk so as to preserve the path forward. They grow cowardly. They self-muzzle, self-censor, and self-limit. All to stay in the good graces of Caesar in the fervent hope he will see through the Duffle-esque veneer of mediocrity and glimpse their hidden genius, thereby finding reason beyond their feckless fealty to reward them with the appropriate tablescrap of a new rank conveyed alongside Earthly deification.
What these loyal mutts don’t understand is that they are nearly always past abeam the final approach fix of their careers. Having not run the numbers or having been wilfully allergic to the conclusions yielded by doing so, they haven’t noticed that only about 5% of the Air Force’s Colonels are promoted to Brigadier General.
This is roughly equivalent to the Below-the-Zone promotion percentages to Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel, and that’s no coincidence. If you’re not early to O-6, you have nearly zero chance of ever being an O-7, and that’s because the Air Force insists it’s Brigadiers have perfectly rounded CVs that will help them compete favorably for senior positions on joint staffs. This is keyed directly to the service’s constant vigilance about the size of its budget and the degree of independent authority it is afforded in conducting the air war. When the US made its air service independent, it created an insecure, self-loathing institution riddled with doubts about its place in the warfighting order.
Seven decades later, that insecurity is still filtering into its culture. It drives Big Blue to create generals who may or may not be good leaders, but will certainly be good bureaucrats capable of maneuvering in support of a bigger budget and greater latitude to spend it. To what end? Who cares. There is no unifying vision. Just a grapple for power, and this is the enduring nature of bureaucracy.
Back to our spineless Colonels. What I’ve noticed in the past two decades is a sharp decline in moral courage. As a first-term airman in the early 1990s, later as an NCO engaged in flightline maintenance, and in the years leading to 9/11/01 as a Lieutenant flying C-17s, I saw many examples of Colonels making courageous decisions to defy headquarters expectations and to do right by airmen.
I saw wing commanders order Enlisted Clubs to ignore underage drinking so airmen would drink on base rather than drive or carouse in the adjacent community. I saw operations group commanders cancel Friday flying when too many jets were limping. Better to give maintenance an extra shift to catch up than make weekend duty a certainty for the sake a few more training squares.
I saw a wing commander preserve full per diem for his deployed airmen because they were getting subpar service at the deployed chow hall. I even saw a deputy commander for maintenance scrub the annual PT run because his airmen had been forced to complete two unscheduled readiness exercises in the prior month, leaving no one any time to work out.
I’ve seen group commanders tell generals “no.” You can’t have that extra mission, because we’re already over-committed and we need to train. No, you can’t force us to pick up a bunch more downrange missions for this week because it will spread experience too thin and spike risk assessments for our new aircraft commanders.
No, you can’t have your pet love child upgraded in special ops to help their career because we only allow the best pilots through that door. And no, you can’t bump a newly arriving family out of billeting to accommodate the bloated coterie coat-tailing you on a visit you don’t even need to make.
But between those days and these days, something has changed.
Colonels don’t take courageous stands anymore. They’re basically latter day Master Sergeants, taking the world as they find it, following orders, and enjoying the comparative serenity of having fewer people outrank them. They’re knowledgeable and wise, but numb to mediocrity and abuse, accepting both to a fault.
Here’s why that’s a problem.
Our system is one of authority. More specifically, an intricate and ornate system of balancing, contending, and counterweighting authority structures where it is expected that those with legal authority will exercise it to the fullest in fulfilling their organizational mandates, sometimes creating marginal skirmishes with others seeking to do the same.
When one node of the system ceases flexing its authority, a vacuum is created and swiftly filled with authority emanating from a competing node in the system. In the present-day Air Force, Colonels have ceded their power to headquarters staffs and the generals who run them. This explains why Air Force bases have devolved into cultural replicas of miserable staffs, complete with the various infections that plague human cubicle farms.
Blind rule-following accompanied by robotic rule recitation devoid of reasoning. Bureaucratic manipulation, posturing, and maneuver for their own sake. Antagonism between two responsible people who work in different offices in the same organization. Terminal shoulder shrugging. Ennui. These are the wages of staff duty. They have now become fixtures of Air Force life at wing level, because our Colonels have permitted it to happen.
This is because they are gutless.
They refuse to risk anything until they realize they have no chance of making Brigadier General, at which point they become more bold and more inspirational. If they would have logically reasoned in the beginning that they had nigh on zero chance in the first place, they might have had minerals all along. What a world that would be.
So here’s my pitch to all you Colonels out there: you’re already dead.
You’re afraid to take risks because you still think there’s a chance you’ll make general, but it’s not going to happen. The sooner you recognize that you have no chance of advancing beyond your current rank, the sooner you’ll start using your authority like a proper Colonel.
(This is, of course, a paraphrase from a scene in Band of Brothers).
The Air Force once had a proud tradition of bold Colonels flipping the bird at the institution in order to guard the flame of combat capability. When it was healthy, the service promoted enough of those renegades to fortify itself at the highest levels. When it stopped doing that, calcified by decades of budget hawking, it lost something important.
It also sent a strong signal to O-6s that they would not pass muster for O-7 unless they proved at every turn they were willing to kneel and kiss the ring. Far too many have conformed to this expectation. Because of this, airmen have been robbed of the base-level leadership necessary to safeguard their interests — chiefly their ability to get the job done free from excessive harassment by the queep enforcers and mattress police.
In today’s Air Force, the spineless are rewarded far more often than renegades. This has led to a bloat of useless “senior” leaders who are far more interested in pleasing their bosses than taking care of their airmen.
We will need to see a reversal of this trend if the service is to have any chance of thriving in the future as anything more than a mediocre human filing cabinet with cool toys.
TC is a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. No, he was not passed over for Colonel, but retired before meeting the board. He currently works as an independent writer and voice on leadership, operations, and organizations.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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