Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

– Elon Musk

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

– Hannah Arendt

“I do not like to state an opinion on a matter unless I know the precise facts.”

– Albert Einstein

1. Career-Centric COIN: An SWJ Retrospective

2. China Is Waging a ‘Gray Zone’ Campaign to Cement Power. Here’s How It Looks.

3. How Trump Loosened the Rules for Hunting Terrorists

4. Trump’s Choice in Ukraine: Chamberlain or Eisenhower? By Paul Wolfowitz

5. Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 23 as Polish prime minister warns against appeasing ‘barbarians’

6. Trump weighs new sanctions on Russia, days after pausing military aid and intel sharing with Ukraine

7. U.S. Bolsters Position as World’s Top Arms Exporter

8. A Presidency of Upheaval Emboldens Trump

9. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March

10. An Assessment of Critical Minerals, Strategic Competition, and Ukraine

11. There is free-riding among the US military services, too

12. Pentagon investing millions in battlefield rapid disease detection

13. The U.S. Army, Artificial Intelligence, and Mission Command

14. Nuclear Proliferation Will Haunt ‘America First’

15. How to Understand Air Force Information Warfare Using Football

16. ‘Lambs to the slaughter’ (Part 1) How the CIA failed its officers in Cuba and the FBI failed them at home

17. For this French senator, Trump is a traitor—and Europe is now alone (French Senate Speech on Ukraine - Speech Transcript)

18. Princeton nuclear physicist Liu Chang leaves US for China in fusion energy quest

1. Career-Centric COIN: An SWJ Retrospective

A thoughtful and thought provoking essay. It's Interesting to compare Ken Gleiman and Jim Gant. I served with Ken when he was a team leader in Okinawa and I was "forced" to get to know Jim Gant after he wrote his famous article and before he deployed to Afghanistan (after being diverted by Admiral Olson from a deployment to Iraq because of his "One Tribe at Time" article). I can say that the gap between the two is greater than the Pacific Ocean. Of the two, clearly Ken is and always has been the quiet professional.

And I am so grateful to Ken for taking the lead with Small Wars Journal and revitalizing it at Arizona State University.

Career-Centric COIN: An SWJ Retrospective

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/10/career-centric-coin-an-swj-retrospective/

by Jan Gleiman

03.10.2025 at 06:00am

Editor’s Note:

This essay is the first in a new series at Small Wars Journal called RETROSPECTIVES. In this series, we are asking authors from our community to submit articles that reflect on their own works from 10+ years ago. Ideally, these are essays that you published with us or articles that were frequently cited in SWJ as part of the discourse on small wars and irregular warfare. We ask that you reflect on your thesis with the power of hind-sight on a personal and professional level. For our inaugural article, our Editor-in-Chief, Ken Gleiman, reflects on the first article he ever published back in September of 2011.

My Jerry Maguire Moment

I published an essay in Small Wars Journal in 2011 that coined the phrase, “Career-centric COIN.” I was a Special Forces Major at the time and had just entered my second year in Fort Leavenworth at the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). The essay was a sort of a Jerry Maguire moment in my career, or at least it felt that way for me. If you’re not familiar with the movie, there is one scene where the title character, played by Tom Cruise, pours his heart out into a monograph that highlights everything that’s wrong with his industry, the firm he works for, and how to fix it. He then prints multiple copies and leaves one for every person in his company. Initially greeted with praise, McGuire is soon fired for his vision that goes against the grain.

I did not get fired for my essay. I did receive some praise and attention, though not nearly as much as another Special Forces Major, Jim Gant, whose essay One Tribe at a Time made an undeniable impression across the national security community. While I admired Jim Gant (and still do!) I didn’t think much of his piece which I called “Gant’s Rant.” Perhaps with a touch of jealousy, but I believed Gant put too much focus on tribal engagement.

In retrospect, I think a bit more of it. It was personal, passionate, and very persuasive. My monograph and article were historical, analytical, and empirical. Despite the moderate praise I received for my very academic article, there was a patronizing dismissiveness from more than a few senior Army leaders. Some agreed with my arguments but effectively patted me on the head – cynically suggesting that that’s just the way it is. Somehow, I was smart, yet naive for pointing out the scandal of the haphazard organization of the COIN campaign in Afghanistan that wasn’t optimized with centralized authority and decentralized execution. Gant got sent back to Afghanistan to his beloved valley to engage with tribes and raise Afghan Local Police. He then tragically spiraled. I was sent to Afghanistan to do plans for the special operations command and try to figure out how to sustain the Afghan Local Police program politically, logistically, and operationally.

The Argument

The central thesis of my essay was two-fold. First, the United States designed its counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan against all evidence of what might be considered best practice from both history and theory. Second, the United States justified its counterinsurgency design on secret and sometimes overt military service and bureaucratic interests, as well as on the interests of their leaders, and those of other civilian agencies. The evidence backing my thesis was everywhere – from the decisions made about doctrine, to staffing, tour length, talent management, and especially in chain of command and command-and-control relationships. The military had replaced unity of command with a thin veneer called “unity of effort” top to bottom.

The Journey

The essay was based on my master’s thesis (more of a book really) that I had written while attending Command and General Staff College (CGSC). The Organizational Imperative: Theory and History on Unity of Effort in Counterinsurgency Campaigns was no ordinary CGSC paper. I came to CGSC unwillingly. I already had a master’s degree. I had graduated from Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute (now the McCourt School of Public Policy) several years before. I had two combat tours and numerous operational deployments, but it wasn’t enough. I was young and arrogant enough to believe that I didn’t need any additional directed education. I studied and read widely enough on my own and I had heard that CGSC was not very rigorous. But I was compelled to go to clear a hurdle for promotion; and so, I went.

I’d often watch the faces of instructors as they tried to remain stoic to such undermining comments. It was the face of defeat, concealed with stoicism.

I found the intellectual experience at CGSC wanting, despite some very committed professors. There was no challenge. It was easy to pass, hard to fail, and annoying to others if you excelled. At that time, academic excellence had no real impact on one’s career, assignments etc. Senior leaders who occasionally stopped by to address the student body openly belittled the curriculum routinely playing to audience of students by saying, “It’s only a lot of reading if you do it.” I’d often watch the faces of instructors as they tried to remain stoic to such undermining comments. It was the face of defeat, concealed with stoicism. (I’d see that same face of defeat on my peers in late August of 2021 when everything in Afghanistan collapsed.) I was always impressed by some of the instructors though. They’d bounce back from these awkward moments and move on to teach their next lesson with passion. Some did not bounce back. (Same with my peers in August 2021).

But these incidents aligned with the general attitude about CGSC that it was supposed to be one year of respite from the long hours and the grind of deployments and training cycles. CGSC was a time to refresh and recharge. Spend time with your family. Improve your golf game or learn something new.

I took a different view (and still do). While I empathized with the need to spend time with my family, I thought the degree of the diminished attitude toward education and the study of war was distasteful. We were a country at war. Our salaries were funded by taxpayers. We would all be moving on to positions of greater responsibility to lead America’s volunteer Army and win. Sure, it was important to recharge and spend time with families but under such circumstances, we should have been studying our asses off, learning everything we could about our profession. But I learned very quickly, don’t be that guy that raises his hand at the end of class.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only person that felt this way. One day I was told that I had been nominated for a new program called the “Art of War Scholars” program. The new program would be intense, would involve original research, and would focus on historic campaigns analyzed in depth, width, and context in the spirit of the old sage, Sir Michael Howard. The new program would be led by an Oxford educated professor with a few others helping (the stoic ones I mentioned earlier). I accepted right away.

Professor Dan Marston was brutal. My arrogance dissipated in the first week. Marston set us on an academic crucible that to this day remains the toughest academic experience of my life (PhD included). We studied war like our lives, and the lives of others, depended on it. It was a lot of reading, and if you didn’t do it, everyone would know. Worst of all, you’d hear it from Marston in his matter-of-fact Boston accent. It was like an historically inclined Good Will Hunting had just shamed you in front of your peers…how you like them apples?

We studied historical cases in depth, width, and context focusing mostly, but not exclusively on counterinsurgency. Vietnam, Malaya, Dhofar, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan to name a few. We studied theorist of war from Clausewitz to Mao, Galula, Trinquier, Thompson, Kitson, MacKinlay and more. The names became celebrities to us. Even better though, we were given a budget to do research. Originally, we were going to go to Afghanistan amid the conflict and conduct historical interviews and fact finding. That plan changed when General Stan McChrystal was fired and instead, we traveled around the US and the UK to interview soldiers and leaders returning from the conflict. Using semi-structured interviews that would assess key pieces of our individual research questions, we interviewed over 100 people…hundreds of years of combat experience. We also interviewed Vietnam veterans and British SAS veterans of the campaigns in Dhofar and Northern Ireland. I even got to meet and have drinks with Sir Frank Kitson on more than one occasion. A true example of a warrior scholar. “Call me Frank,” he said. My friend Mike looked at me in shock as if to say, “Like hell we will. You’re Frank *&^%$ Kitson.”

The Evidence

That experience formed the basis of the evidence for my monograph and SWJ article. The interviews demonstrated that there was widespread frustration and disagreement about the organization of the campaign. Cross purposes, lack of unity of command, unity of effort by exception, overlapping battlespace, Afghan counterparts answering to multiple advisors, etc. I was certainly not the first to point out these problems, nor was I the first to point out the not-so-distant mirror of Robert Komer and the too-little-too-late examples of reform under the CORDS program.

Before I finished writing my thesis, I had the opportunity to share my findings with the just-fired and newly retired McChrystal. Like most former Rangers, I greatly admired “Stan-the-Man.” ( And still do!) He was my Battalion Commander at 2nd Ranger Battalion back in the 90s. I asked him about the organization of the campaign from top to bottom and even shared examples of the structure employed by Templar in Malaya and others. I asked why we were pursuing career-centric COIN rather than organizing for victory. He said.

“Why wouldn’t you do that? Counterinsurgency is a complex problem that required unity of effort and a unified solution. This is how it was for all players, the less unified we were the harder it was. I know that key leaders at the highest levels did not push for more power and authority. Should they have? If a commander or ambassador asks for that now he wouldn’t get it and in the very act of asking he would create scar tissue and once rejected there would be bad blood. We need a BRAC-like solution, a blue-ribbon panel, to design and recommend it. Then we need a President and/or Congress to approve it. It is just too hard to get done when those asking and proposing are part of the deal.”

In the SWJ essay and in my monograph, that quote was attributed to a “high ranking ISAF General Officer.” McChrystal and I agreed at the time that I should not attribute that quote to him. He was sensitive to the the potential of causing more controversy and making the Obama administration’s job harder than it already was. A few weeks ago he agreed that I could name him for this retrospective. Everybody knew; nobody could say anything.

In Retrospect

The reasons for the U.S. failure in Afghanistan are numerous and interconnected. There is a whole congressionally mandated commission trying to illuminate the answers. The most thoughtful analyses of failure highlight the themes from Career-Centric COIN as just one part of many causes of failure.

What happened to our civil-military dialogue? Why couldn’t a commander or Ambassador ask for more authority and then organize whole of government advisory efforts at the province, district, or tribal levels? Could a Commander propose such a thing now? Should the United States find itself as an interventionist power in another counterinsurgency (Gaza?!), designing such a campaign would not be the first critical question in need of an answer, but it would come soon enough.

The last section of the essay is called, “It’s Bigger than Afghanistan.” That was certainly true then as it is now. We are all watching President Trump and Elon Musk rapidly deconstructing the federal bureaucracy. As I watch it unfold, I want to believe that some good might come of it, despite the questionable constitutionality and recklessness of the whole business. Perhaps a more lean and agile bureaucracy? One that could adapt to the sui generis aspects of a given campaign foreign or domestic? A younger me would try to have some of that optimism. That’s NOT what’s going on though. To reform our federal bureaucracy to allow us to tailor the organization of campaigns would require analysis and empirical study. The current effort is more personal and motivated by passion and persuasion. It seeks to weaken the federal bureaucracy, not make it more effective or agile. Our democracy may become the victim of this passion, much as Jim Gant’s mental health became the victim of his passions. But the right way to do it; the analytical and empirical, seems just too hard?

In retrospect, I still believe in rigor for professional military education. I see too many senior officers with little to no historical consciousness and reckless beliefs in their own abilities. Too much passion and persuasion, too little education, analysis, reflection…

In retrospect, I don’t think I changed anything. At most, I made some people aware of one more reason why Afghanistan was a losing endeavor. There was barely enough political will to send the military to the other side of the earth and to foolishly try to change a whole society, but there was not enough political will to change ourselves to make success (generally defined) more likely.

As I said in the original article:

“As our planning for the campaign in Afghanistan has evolved, it seems we looked at our tools of national power several times, recognized that we could not reorganize them to suit the mission for which we were engaged and so we just drove on. Yet, in essence, we drove on to fix and reorganize the governments of an entire complex state and whole society of tribes, ethnicities, and identities. Somehow, we thought it easier to do that, than to fix our own institutions.”

Maybe that’s the simple lesson which has a greater generalizability beyond counterinsurgency or even military campaigns. It should serve as a warning to others today. Whether it’s the management of the migrations of people or the changing dynamics of the world order, these complex things are new enough that the design of your old organizations might not fit. If you are willing to invest blood and treasure to change a highly complex environment that you only partially understand, but you’re not willing to use thoughtful analysis and historical consciousness to change your own organizations to do it, then you’ve just found the embryo of hubris and strategic failure.

Tags: COIN, counterinsurgency, Special Operations, Special Operations Forces

About The Author

Jan Gleiman
Jan K. Gleiman (Ken) is the Editor-in-Chief of the new Small Wars Journal. He is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and the Associate Director for Irregular Warfare at ASU's Future Security Initiative (FSI). He is the co-author of Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century. (Cambria Press 2024)
View all posts Editor-in-Chief

2.China Is Waging a ‘Gray Zone’ Campaign to Cement Power. Here’s How It Looks.

Please go to the link to view the interactive article, maps, graphics, images, and photos at the website.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-expansion-taiwan-himalayas-146aff72?st=c6cWgb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Excerpt:

The Wall Street Journal reviewed years of ship-movement data, satellite images, flight-tracking information and other measures of Chinese activity. Taken together, it shows a clear intensification of tactics meant to intimidate rivals and deepen China’s control.

...

These two fleets—the largest of their kind—are now ubiquitous in the South China Sea, far outnumbering their counterparts from competitor nations. Acting in tandem, they sail, swarm and skirmish—enforcing China’s will, clustering in sensitive spots at virtually all times and ousting rivals from waters to which those nations are entitled under international law.

The Philippines, a U.S. ally, has borne the brunt of the onslaught since 2022. China has used aggressive tactics, restricting the Philippines’s ability to operate inside its own exclusive economic zone.

China Is Waging a ‘Gray Zone’ Campaign to Cement Power. Here’s How It Looks.

Years of ship-tracking data, flight paths and satellite images show a clear intensification of Beijing’s tactics across a swath of Asia

By Niharika MandhanaFollow and Camille BressangeFollow

March 9, 2025 9:00 pm ET

From the choppy waters of the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait to the frozen ridges of the Himalayas, China is pursuing a relentless campaign of expansion, operating in the hazy zone between war and peace to extend its power across Asia.

Beijing carefully calibrates each move with the aim of staying below the threshold of action that could trigger outright conflict. But, step by incremental step, it has pushed deeper into contested areas, exhausting opponents and eroding their strength with a thousand cuts.

Whether it is probes by war planes, maneuvers by coast guard ships or the creeping construction of new civilian settlements, China is constantly pushing boundaries in what security strategists call the “gray zone.” It tests the limits of what its opponents consider tolerable behavior, escalating a bit with every new action.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed years of ship-movement data, satellite images, flight-tracking information and other measures of Chinese activity. Taken together, it shows a clear intensification of tactics meant to intimidate rivals and deepen China’s control.

South China Sea

Nowhere offers a better look at China’s gray-zone playbook than the South China Sea, where Beijing has shifted the balance of power bit by bit to become the dominant force.

The waterway is subject to a welter of competing claims, but tensions flow largely from China’s assertion that it is entitled to nearly all of the South China Sea. That puts it at odds with half a dozen other governments that also have claims there. It has also created tensions with the U.S., which doesn’t want a vital artery of global trade to turn into a Chinese lake.

Beijing has tightened its grip on the South China Sea through a series of steps stretching back more than a decade.

It began in 2013 by turning reefs into artificial islands. Then, it steadily militarized those islands with runways, radar and missile systems. At the time, some American military leaders dismissed the installations, arguing they would be sitting ducks in a conflict. But the island bases were pivotal to the next phase of Beijing’s gray-zone campaign: establishing a persistent, unmatched presence across the South China Sea.

China’s coast guard began to use the outposts to rest, refuel and take shelter from bad weather, enabling it to undertake long patrols without having to return to home ports hundreds of miles away. The number of ships grew and they were bolstered by another potent shadow force—swarms of fishing boats acting as a maritime militia to bulk up China’s presence.

These two fleets—the largest of their kind—are now ubiquitous in the South China Sea, far outnumbering their counterparts from competitor nations. Acting in tandem, they sail, swarm and skirmish—enforcing China’s will, clustering in sensitive spots at virtually all times and ousting rivals from waters to which those nations are entitled under international law.

The Philippines, a U.S. ally, has borne the brunt of the onslaught since 2022. China has used aggressive tactics, restricting the Philippines’s ability to operate inside its own exclusive economic zone.

“If you look at China’s coast guard and its maritime militia over the last three years—you would see a dramatic increase in the number of ships and the depth of the penetration,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a U.S.-based research initiative focused on gray-zone activities. “It’s taken on the character of a maritime occupation.”

Events at Sabina Shoal last year showed China’s ability—and willingness—to escalate, despite international opprobrium. It tightened its hold on the area in September after forcing a Philippine coast guard ship, which had been anchored at Sabina Shoal for months, to withdraw. The Philippine vessel pulled back after China’s coast guard and militia ships repeatedly blocked Manila’s attempts to deliver basic necessities to the crew.

China accuses the Philippines of stirring trouble. It has rejected a 2016 ruling by an international tribunal that said Beijing’s broad claims to historic rights in the South China Sea have no legal basis. Its Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

The Philippines has responded to China’s actions in the South China Sea by shining a light on them—releasing videos and detailed accounts of Chinese aggression and casting Beijing as a bully. Its approach has helped coalesce greater international support for Manila. But China’s reliance on gray-zone tactics—rather than, say, a direct assault to capture contested sites—has meant that the Philippines hasn’t invoked its most powerful tool, its mutual defense treaty with the U.S.

Taiwan

Over the past five years, China has engulfed Taiwan in an ever-thicker fog of gray-zone hostility. On most days, Chinese military aircraft fly toward Taiwan’s main island and across the median line—the informal boundary splitting the Taiwan Strait. Just a few years ago, even a handful of such crossings would have made the news.

The intensification of air activity is unmistakable. In 2021, Chinese sorties into Taiwan’s de facto air-defense identification zone, or ADIZ—which stretches beyond a territory’s airspace and enables it to monitor approaching aircraft—numbered 972, according to PLATracker, a site that collects and analyzes such data. Last year, the sorties crossed 3,000, straining Taiwan’s defenses and heaping pressure on its leadership.

Number of median-line crossings , monthly

200

100

150

250

300

350

400

Sept.

2020

300

Aug. 2022

302

Number of Chinese

military sorties

in Taiwan’s ADIZ

July 2024

210

250

’21

200

150

Oct. 2021

196

100

Sept. 2020

’22

Aug. 2022

446

2021

’22

’23

’24

Number of days on which Chinese aircraft entered Taiwan’s ADIZ

’23

Apr. 2023

259

350

314

300

271

268

250

240

200

’24

July 2024

437

150

100

’22

’24

’23

’21

The skies near Taiwan were particularly busy in August 2022 when Beijing launched major military exercises to protest a visit to Taiwan by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That month, it sent 446 sorties into Taiwan’s ADIZ.

China considers Taiwan to be a part of its territory and has vowed to take control of the democratically governed island. It chafes at U.S. support for Taipei.

The sorties have grown in number, frequency and scope. A few years ago, Chinese aircraft were heavily concentrated to Taiwan’s southwest, according to an analysis of their flight paths reported by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense and mapped by Damien Symon, a researcher at the Intel Lab, an intelligence consulting firm. In 2023, their routes extended all around Taiwan’s main island, including the more-distant east side.

It isn’t just aircraft. Beijing is deploying an expanding mix of forces, making Taiwan’s security picture more complex and more onerous to track. Those forces range from warships, coast guard vessels and research ships to drones, fishing fleets and more—in ever-greater numbers and in new patterns.

Last year, Beijing sent dozens of mysterious high-altitude balloons near and over Taiwan’s main island, floating as many as 57 in one month, forcing Taipei to study their paths and puzzle over their purpose.

Beijing has also established a provocative new pattern of mounting high-profile exercises involving its army, navy, air and missile forces to express its anger at political developments. It has undertaken five large-scale drills in 2½ years—including the one in 2022 after Pelosi’s visit—simulating a blockade of Taiwan.

Each iteration has displayed new elements, from the firing of missiles and use of an aircraft carrier to the deployment of coast guard ships to encircle Taiwan. The now-regular surge of Chinese forces around Taiwan is aimed at sending a message to Taipei: capitulation would be better than conflict.

Taiwan and the U.S. have failed to come up with a response that would prevent China from undertaking these exercises or halt its near-daily pressure.

While Washington is largely focused on deterring an invasion of Taiwan, security analysts say China may not launch an outright war, or even a blockade. It could instead impose a quarantine on Taiwan, said Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That means China could restrict air and maritime traffic into Taiwan and tighten its control over the flow of commerce using its coast guard and other law-enforcement forces, rather than its military. Lin, whose team has mapped out possible quarantine scenarios, said one could even begin with a major military exercise.

“A lot of things could start rolling, start happening on the spot,” she said. “When we think about what China could do in the gray-zone space—the very broad gray-zone space—we really need to think creatively that there are lots of large-scale activities that China could do.”

Himalayas

Traveling westward, the physical terrain changes from maritime to mountainous, but the gray-zone landscape is similar. Long stretches of China’s land borders with India and the strategically located nation of Bhutan are contested and unresolved despite decades of talks between the countries. Beijing has quietly built dozens of village settlements along these boundaries—not all of them on established Chinese territory.

China has been moving waves of people, mainly Tibetans, into many of these settlements. Official footage, and videos on Chinese social-media sites such as Douyin, show families arriving in buses, at times clutching images of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Uniform rows of newly built houses await them, Chinese flags fluttering overhead. Signs proclaim Chinese sovereignty.

Bhutan’s Foreign Ministry said the boundary between Bhutan and China is the subject of ongoing negotiations between the two sides. The new Chinese settlements along Bhutan’s northeast border are “beyond the mutually agreed line during the boundary talks between Bhutan and China,” it said.

On Bhutan’s official maps, the areas of some of the recent Chinese construction fall within Bhutan’s marked borders. The maps, together with parliamentary discussions and ministerial statements over past decades, cast these areas as Bhutanese territory, according to Barnett, who is a professorial research associate at SOAS University of London.

Barnett says Chinese actions in these borderlands have progressed in six stages over a few decades. First, in the 1990s, China sent herders to disputed areas claiming customary grazing rights, much like the historic rights it asserts in the South China Sea. Then it dispatched official patrols to support the herders, squeezing out Bhutanese pastoralists. After that, temporary shelters or checkpoints emerged, to later be upgraded into robust outposts.

Next, China built roads linking these remote areas, said Barnett. Then, to consolidate control, it made villages and populated them.

Graphics sources: Ray Powell of SeaLight (South China Sea ship-tracking data); PLATracker, based on data from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (Taiwan median-line crossings, Chinese military sorties in Taiwan’s ADIZ); Damien Symon of the Intel Lab, based on maps from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (China’s air sorties near Taiwan); Maxar Technologies, Planet Labs PBC (Himalayan satellite images); Robert Barnett (Chinese settlements)

Write to Niharika Mandhana at niharika.mandhana@wsj.com and Camille Bressange at camille.bressange@wsj.com

3. How Trump Loosened the Rules for Hunting Terrorists

I had no idea that Seb Gorka wields this much power and is leading the US ' counterterrorism fight.

But this is an encouraging excerpt though perhaps he is only applying this to the fight against terrorisim but I hope it can be applied more broadly to our allies, most of which are aligned with US interests and values.

Excerpt:

“President Trump, when he says America First, he doesn’t mean America alone,” Gorka said. “He means America will pursue its national interest, and if you share our interests and our values we will work with you.”

How Trump Loosened the Rules for Hunting Terrorists

‘We undid four years of insanity,’ counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka tells The Free Press.

By Eli Lake

03.09.25 —

U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-loosened-rules-terrorists-gorka

Mohammad Sharifullah, alleged co-conspirator in the murder of American soldiers at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan. (@FBIDirectorKash/X).

0:00

-9:03

When Dr. Sebastian Gorka started his job as the senior director for counterterrorism at the White House’s National Security Council, one of the first things he did was order new lanyards for his team with eight letters and an ampersand: WWFY & WWKY. These cryptic abbreviations were drawn from a quote from Gorka’s boss, President Donald Trump: “We will find you, and we will kill you.”

Gorka has fashioned that directive into a new policy that streamlines the process for the CIA and U.S. military to find, fix, and finish terrorists all over the Islamic world. The old protocols held that the president or national security adviser had to sign off on every strike. Now the authority to approve these air strikes and drone strikes sits lower down the chain of command.

“We undid four years of the insanity of the 8,000-mile UAV joystick,” Gorka told The Free Press.

In practice, one U.S. intelligence official told The Free Press, midlevel CIA and military officers in charge of targeting teams now have the authority to approve the operations. Another senior Trump administration official told The Free Press, “There are still significant levels of checks and balances in place, and the president has confidence in his military to act within their lawful authorities.”

To demonstrate the change in approach, Gorka relayed a story of a visit to a facility where analysts were watching an ISIS command center near Bosaso, Somalia, composed of a complex of caves. Gorka learned that the analysts had been watching the ISIS recruiter and facilitator, Ahmed Maeleninine, for a year and a half.

When Gorka briefed Trump in early February, the president was bewildered that Maeleninine and his henchmen had not been taken out. “What do you mean, we’ve been surveilling them for a year and a half? Kill them,” Gorka recalled Trump saying. On February 11, U.S. Africa Command announced that Maeleninine had been killed along with 13 other ISIS operatives. Gorka said he watched the operation unfold at a secure location with national security adviser Mike Waltz. “We watched that cave complex turned into a sheet of glass,” Gorka said.

Since Trump took office in January, the U.S. has killed at least 23 jihadists in air strikes in Syria and Somalia. These strikes include a February 23 drone attack that killed a facilitator for al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, Hurras al-Din, trumpeted a week later on social media by U.S. Central Command. That strike appeared to use a missile known as the “Ninja bomb” that slices and dices the target instead of exploding on impact, a munition designed to minimize civilian casualties.

Gorka said that one of the first things he did after taking the job on January 20 was to tour the intelligence facilities and military locations where “our patriots are sitting in places watching bad actors, staring at massive computer screens, tracking people who killed Americans.” According to Gorka, these targeting teams were often frustrated. “For four years these patriots were watching terrorism foment and report[ing] it up through the chain of command, and nothing happened,” Gorka said.

Biden did approve air strikes against jihadist targets, and increased the pace after the 2024 election. On December 8, Biden authorized a series of air strikes on ISIS training camps and facilities in central Syria, following the fall of the Assad regime. One month later, on January 8, Biden approved a series of strikes against underground weapons storage facilities controlled by Houthi terrorists in Yemen. But the most high-profile air strike of Biden’s presidency came on August 1, 2022, when he approved a strike that killed al-Qaeda’s leader and Osama bin Laden’s former deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, while he stood on the balcony of a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan.

That said, the Biden administration often left the intelligence analysts who track terrorist financiers, facilitators, and operatives watching their targets for months on end without approving the air strikes. “Biden engaged in minimal targeting,” said Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has reported on U.S. counterterrorism operations for more than two decades.

Sebastian Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism at the White House’s National Security Council. (Dominic Gwinn via Getty Images)

“It’s about time they loosened the rules of engagement for targeting terrorists,” Roggio added. “The process was too restrictive in the past and could lead to missing out on high-value targets.”

The use of drone strikes to kill terrorists abroad was ramped up as a tactic during the Obama years, though it was derided by progressives and libertarians as part of the “forever wars.” There have been some debates on the legality of drone strikes against targets in countries where America is not formally at war, such as in Pakistan.

For the restrainer wing of the Trump coalition, a military tactic deployed throughout the Islamic world cuts against the “America First” foreign policy that promises to end forever wars and focus resources at home. While Trump has mostly governed as a restrainer so far in his second term, Gorka said the president’s “America First” approach to foreign policy should not be confused with isolationism.

“President Trump, when he says America First, he doesn’t mean America alone,” Gorka said. “He means America will pursue its national interest, and if you share our interests and our values we will work with you.” Indeed, this could be seen as a continuation of Trump’s first presidency where he unleashed the U.S. military and CIA to dismantle the Islamic State.

Gorka first came to the White House in 2017 with Steve Bannon, the 2016 Trump campaign’s top strategist. He didn’t last long in the first Trump administration and was pushed out a week after Bannon’s first break with Trump in August of 2017. Gorka remained loyal to the president, though, and transformed himself into a bombastic right-wing media personality. Before joining the second Trump administration, Gorka hosted a talk show for the Salem Radio Network and a weekend program on Newsmax TV.

The biggest win so far for Gorka in his new job has been the arrest by Pakistan authorities of the man who reportedly plotted and facilitated the infamous 2021 suicide bombing at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul Airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and 160 Afghan civilians. On Wednesday the suspect, who had been extradited to the U.S., appeared in a Virginia courtroom and was charged with providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.

One administration official said the Pakistanis were cooperative after the U.S. provided detailed intelligence on his whereabouts. The suspect’s name is Mohammad Sharifullah, but he was known to the spies and soldiers tracking him as “Jafar.” His capture was a stroke of extraordinary timing. In his speech to Congress on Tuesday, Trump himself announced that the terrorist was in U.S. custody. For Gorka, it was an opportunity to cross off the top name from a whiteboard that lists his counterterrorism team’s top priorities.

Gorka said that on day one, he placed two priorities at the top of that whiteboard: “hostages,” referring to the more than 50 Americans wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world, and “J,” which stood for Jafar.

“I made it clear that we would move heaven and earth. . . to kill or capture Jafar, the architect of the massacre at Abbey Gate.” Less than two months later, Gorka was on a tarmac where he was able to see his prey for himself. “I looked into that man’s eyes and I was looking into the Devil and the pit of hell,” he said.

He was not the only one. Also on the tarmac was Gorka’s National Security Agency briefer whose team had been tracking Jafar since that terrible day back in 2021. Gorka recalled that his briefer said, “We decided to come here because my team has been tracking Jafar since the explosion. Can I introduce you to our linguist from Afghanistan, whose family was trapped in Afghanistan after Abbey Gate? We just wanted to be here to see Jafar in U.S. custody.”

Gorka was impressed. “This has been personal for them,” Gorka said. “After the principals left the plane, I looked at Jafar in his face. And then in gaggles of three, I took every analyst who had been hunting this man down for three and a half years to look at this man in custody.”

4. Trump’s Choice in Ukraine: Chamberlain or Eisenhower? By Paul Wolfowitz

In addition to threatening military force to ocerce north Korea and the Chinese Peoples' Volunteers to sign the Armistice (and this threat has contributed to the Kim family regime's desire for nuclear weapons ever since. At the same time Eisenhower threatened to cut aid to Korea if President Rhee did not agree to the armistice. However, unlikeUkraine today he also provided the highest form of a security guarantee; he agreed to the Mutual Defense Treaty which was signed 2 months after the Armistice. The MDT is still a very relevant and useful agreement today (see the entire treaty pasted below this article. I like it's Article III better than the NATO Article 5 because it recognizes that the commitment to mutual defense is based on each nation's constitutional processes which I think is more realistic than an automatic response. Note that the drafters of the MDT seemed to be very prescient as they did not mention north Korea but only threats to both countries in the Asia-Pacific region which is one point that keeps the MDT relevant today. Although I have not found it written in any of the history, interpreting the MDT today it might be said the drafters were anticipating Korea as a potential power projection platform for US interests. Did they have such foresight?

It is so nice to see Korean being discussed as somehow useful and still relevant. After Paul Wolfowtiz said in 2004 that US forces in Korea were a waste, I attended an NDU speaker event and I asked the snarky question to Doug Feith if I should consider all the years I had spent in Korea as a waste (and would my 5th tour there that I was soon to undertake be even more of a waste).

Also, RE the UN. It was the first and only time the UN ever gave a mandate for a military force to conduct large-scale combat operations to defend a nation's freedom (that was not even a member of the UN). And as know it only happened because of the Soviet boycott over the ROC (Taiwan) and PRC. And it never did and never will happen again. It may be the only time the UN ever acted in such a strategically significant way. But because it did so only because it was allowed to by the Soviet boycott, the Soviets (and later the PRC) learned the lesson and the UN and UN Security Council have been neutered ever since.

In regard to Ukraine, if history were to rhyme, I thought that we would offer a security guarantee to Ukraine. I am sure I am naive but I thought the mineral deal was actually laying the groundwork for such a guarantee. Given POTUS' focus on "deals over doctrine" I thought he would want to make the deal to provide the rationale for a security guarantee. Since he does not believe in doing something for "altruistic" reasons there would be a business/economic incentive to guarantee Ukraine security. But again, I am demonstrating my naivete.

Excerpt:

Chamberlain wasn’t wrong to fear a war so terrible that British citizens would “be digging trenches and trying on gas masks” because of what he called “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” But appeasement didn’t prevent war—it invited it. Chamberlain’s misplaced trust in Hitler failed to prevent the war that he feared and made it much costlier than a defense of Czechoslovakia would have been.

Trump’s Choice in Ukraine: Chamberlain or Eisenhower?

To avoid another Munich, follow the example of the 1953 armistice that resolved the Korean War.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-choice-in-ukraine-chamberlain-or-eisenhower-567ee1da?st=pR6Vwk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Paul Wolfowitz

March 9, 2025 1:53 pm ET

President Dwight Eisenhower speaks during a news conference in Washington, Dec. 10, 1958. Photo: Associated Press

Mark Twain supposedly said history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. My colleague Stephen Kotkin, an eminent historian of Russia, puts it this way: “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does have recognizable patterns.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and anyone else in President Trump’s circle with a sense of 20th-century history should remind him of two contrasting patterns for ending or preventing a brutal war. One leads to lasting peace; the other, to disaster. For shorthand, they might be called Eisenhower 1953 and Chamberlain 1938.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s pattern was effective diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force, followed by a strong deterrence posture. In 1953, as the Korean War dragged on, Eisenhower signaled that the U.S. was willing to escalate militarily if necessary. This, combined with a change in the attitude of the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death, produced an armistice that ended the bloodbath and has held for more than 70 years. Although the North Korean regime remains hostile and oppressive, the peace has endured.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s pattern was the opposite. The September 1938 Munich Agreement forced Czech Prime Minister Edvard Beneš to cede his country’s most defensible territory—the westernmost Sudetenland—in exchange for empty German promises to Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier. After a meeting with Hitler and Mussolini from which Czechoslovakia was excluded, Chamberlain returned to London waving a piece of paper he called “peace for our time.”

“Our time” passed in the blink of an eye. Within six months, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Within a year, he had occupied Poland, followed by Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. After the French collapsed, Britain barely escaped total disaster at Dunkirk.

Chamberlain wasn’t wrong to fear a war so terrible that British citizens would “be digging trenches and trying on gas masks” because of what he called “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” But appeasement didn’t prevent war—it invited it. Chamberlain’s misplaced trust in Hitler failed to prevent the war that he feared and made it much costlier than a defense of Czechoslovakia would have been.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in a BBC studio, Sept. 3, 1939. Photo: Getty Images

History never repeats exactly—Ukraine today is different from Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Chamberlain was trying to prevent a war, whereas Ike was trying to stop one. But the Chamberlain pattern remains relevant. Mr. Trump isn’t wrong to want to stop seemingly endless bloodshed. And Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t wrong to warn against paper agreements with a tyrant who has a record of breaking them. The question is whether Mr. Trump chooses the path of Eisenhower or Chamberlain.

There’s much anxiety, particularly in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, about the conspicuous failure of diplomacy at the recent Oval Office meeting. Yet one must be careful about drawing too many conclusions from individual indications, particularly when a lot may be going on behind the scenes. For instance, although negotiating with Vladimir Putin without the Ukrainians present follows the disturbing Chamberlain pattern, this week’s planned summit in Saudi Arabia between the U.S. and Ukraine could be a positive sign of a different direction.

Eisenhower faced significant challenges in dealing with South Korean President Syngman Rhee, who faced domestic pressure to pursue total victory. Mr. Zelensky faces comparable pressure. He will likely need to compromise on the open-ended promise, often voiced by the Biden administration, to fight for “as long as it takes.” Convincing the Ukrainian people to accept a compromise armistice that leaves Russia occupying significant portions of eastern Ukraine won’t be easy. But it will likely be necessary to achieve an enduring end to the, war, since there is little chance that Mr. Putin will agree to full restoration of the Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, which Russia promised to respect when it signed the Clinton administration’s 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

To gain public support for an unpopular compromise, Mr. Zelensky will need firm assurances of continued arms supplies to deter Russian aggression, along with a European military presence on the ground, backed by the U.S. In addition, Ukraine will require massive financial assistance for reconstruction, particularly from wealthy nations in Europe that have the greatest stake in the outcome. The American people need to see that the burden of preserving peace is being shared.

Ultimately, Ukrainians should envision victory not in terms of regaining lost territory but as rebuilding and strengthening western Ukraine as a free, sovereign, independent and flourishing nation like South Korea. Even though Koreans north of the armistice line suffer terribly under one of the world’s most tyrannical dictatorships, South Korea can fairly claim that it won that war by stopping when it did and saving uncountable thousands of lives.

From the outside, we can’t know whether Mr. Trump is following the Chamberlain pattern. If he is, he has time to change course. He still has the opportunity to follow the example of Eisenhower, the bold but prudent leader who knew when and how to stop a bloody and costly war.

Mr. Wolfowitz is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia (1986-89) and deputy defense secretary (2001-05).

ARTICLE I

The Parties undertake to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations, or obligations assumed by any Party toward the United Nations.

ARTICLE II

The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of either of them, the political independence or security of either of the Parties is threatened by external armed attack. Separately and jointly, by self help and mutual aid, the Parties will maintain and develop appropriate means to deter armed attack and will take suitable measures in consultation and agreement to implement this Treaty and to further its purposes.

ARTICLE III

Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties in territories now under their respective administrative control, or hereafter recognized by one of the Parties as lawfully brought under the administrative control of the other, would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

ARTICLE IV

The Republic of Korea grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about the territory of the Republic of Korea as determined by mutual agreement.

ARTICLE V

This Treaty shall be ratified by the United States of America and the Republic of Korea in accordance with their respective constitutional processes and will come into force when instruments of ratification thereof have been exchanged by them at Washington.(2)

ARTICLE VI

This Treaty shall remain in force indefinitely. Either Party may terminate it one year after notice has been given to the other Party.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty.

DONE in duplicate at Washington, in the English and Korean languages, this first day of October 1953.

UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNITED STATES (3)

[The United States Senate gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the treaty subject to the following understanding:]

It is the understanding of the United States that neither party is obligated, under Article III of the above Treaty, to come to the aid of the other except in case of an external armed attack against such party; nor shall anything in the present Treaty be construed as requiring the United States to give assistance to Korea except in the event of an armed attack against territory which has been recognized by the United States as lawfully brought under the administrative control of the Republic of Korea.

[The United States communicated the text of the understanding to the Republic of Korea in a note of January 28, 1954, acknowledged by the Republic of Korea in a note of February 1, 1954. The text of the understanding was included in the President's proclamation of November 17, 1954.]

(1) TIAS 3097, 5 UST 23602376. Ratification advised by the Senate Jan. 26, 1954, and ratified by the President Feb. 5, 1954, subject to an understanding; entered into force Nov. 17, 1954. Back

(2) Ratifications were exchanged Nov. 17, 1954. Back

(3) TIAS 3097. Back

5. Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 23 as Polish prime minister warns against appeasing ‘barbarians’

Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 23 as Polish prime minister warns against appeasing ‘barbarians’ | CNN

CNN · March 8, 2025

Firefighters work at the site of a Russian strike on a residential area in Dobropillia, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Saturday.

State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Reuters

Kyiv, Ukraine CNN —

Russian missiles killed at least 23 people in a second night of heavy strikes on Ukraine, a stark toll the Polish Prime Minister described as the result of appeasing “barbarians.”

The attacks come as the Ukrainian war is at a critical point, with the United States having halted military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv as part of efforts to pressure it into accepting a peace agreement. The move has left Ukraine even more vulnerable to Russian attacks.

“This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X Saturday. “More bombs, more aggression, more victims. Another tragic night in Ukraine.”

Russian strikes on the eastern city of Dobropillia killed 11 people and wounded at least 50 – including seven children, in attacks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said were “deliberately calculated to cause maximum damage.”

“It was one of the most brutal strikes, a combined one,” Zelensky said in his nightly address on Saturday. He described a double strike on Dobropillia, where the second one hit just as rescue workers arrived on scene to attend to the victims of the first.

On Friday, after threatening Russia with sanctions to force through a ceasefire, US President Donald Trump said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was “doing what anybody else would do” in taking advantage of the current battlefield dynamics.

The White House also has suspended Ukraine’s access to commercial satellite imagery purchased by the US government through the company Maxar, spokespeople for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Maxar said Friday.

Ukrainian authorities said that more people could be trapped under the rubble in Dobropillia, with at least eight residential buildings in the area damaged in the attack.

Zelensky accused Moscow of “thinking not about how to end the war, but about how to destroy and capture more” as long as the world “allows” the war to continue.

He said Kyiv continued to “actively communicate” with European countries and was “in constant contact with the American team” to coordinate efforts to end the war.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a call with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Friday and told him Trump was “determined to end the war as soon as possible and emphasized that all sides must take steps to secure a sustainable peace,” the State Department said.

A resident walks past the site of a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Odesa, Ukraine, on Saturday.

Nina Liashonok/Reuters

Zelensky has said he will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia next week ahead of negotiations between Kyiv and Washington. After that, his team will stay in Saudi Arabia “to work with our American partners,” he added.

US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office on February 28.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Local officials said on Saturday that over the past day, Russian attacks had killed at least 23 people and wounded more than 50 in eastern and southern Ukraine.

In addition to those killed in Dobropillia, Russian attacks elsewhere in Donetsk killed nine others and wounded 13, according to local authorities.

Separately, a drone attack in the eastern Kharkiv region also killed three people and injured seven, Ukraine’s emergency service said, while five people were injured in attacks on the southern Kherson region, according to local officials.

Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 79 out of 145 drones launched by Russia overnight, while 54 drones did not reach their target.

Russia also used at least three missiles in its attack, the air force said, adding that it shot down at least one of the projectiles.

The attacks came just days after a deadly Russian airstrike on Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Zelensky.

Under pressure in Kursk

Meanwhile, Ukraine is under severe pressure in the Russian region of Kursk and may soon lose a key logistical support route to its forces, according to Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers, after the arrival of fresh North Korean troops bolstered Russia’s offensive operations inside its own borders.

Ukraine launched a shock incursion into Kursk in August – the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II – in the hope that it could divert Russian troops from eastern Ukraine and improve its hand ahead of potential ceasefire negotiations.

Although the invasion may have slowed Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, Kyiv has since lost about half of the territory it once occupied in Kursk. Moscow has called in foreign reinforcements and deployed some 12,000 North Korean troops to the region, according to Ukrainian officials and Western intelligence reports.

This week, military bloggers from both countries have warned that Ukraine’s hold on the territory is more tenuous than at any point since it launched the incursion, with Moscow’s forces entering Ukraine’s Sumy region and threatening to cut off Kyiv’s troops in Kursk.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN · March 8, 2025

6. Trump weighs new sanctions on Russia, days after pausing military aid and intel sharing with Ukraine

Which country receives the worse punishment?

Trump weighs new sanctions on Russia, days after pausing military aid and intel sharing with Ukraine

By AAMER MADHANI and CHRIS MEGERIAN

Updated 2:30 PM EDT, March 7, 2025

AP · by AAMER MADHANI · March 7, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday he is “strongly considering” levying new sanctions and tariffs on Russia for its war against Ukraine, floating the possibility of new pressure on Moscow just days after he ordered a pause on U.S. military assistance and intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said he was considering the action “based on the fact that Russia is absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield right now.”

He added that the prospective sanctions could remain in place until the two sides come to a ceasefire and peace settlement.

The sanctions threat came as Trump faces criticism for increasing pressure on Ukraine to reach a deal while playing down or even denying Russia’s responsibility for starting the war with its invasion three years ago.

“To Russia and Ukraine, get to the table right now, before it is too late,” Trump added in his post.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday that the U.S. has kept its sanctions in place on Russia and “will not hesitate to go all in should it provide leverage in peace negotiations.”

Joe Biden’s administration over the course of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine imposed thousands of sanctions on Russian firms, people and ships as well as a price cap on Russian oil, among other actions.

Bessent called Biden’s sanctions on Russian energy “egregiously weak” and “stemming from worries about upward pressure on U.S. energy prices.”

“Per President Trump’s guidance, sanctions will be used explicitly and aggressively for immediate maximum impact,” Bessent said. “They will be carefully monitored to ensure that they are achieving specific objectives.”

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters Friday there is still a “heck of a lot” of room to put further pressure on the Russian economy through sanctions.

“President Trump is adamant that we need to get everybody to the table, and we could do that with carrots, and we could do that with sticks,” Hassett said.

Russia launched overnight attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities with dozens of missiles and drones, officials said Friday, hobbling the country’s ability to deliver heat and light to its citizens and to power weapons factories vital to its defenses.

The barrage — which also pounded residences and wounded at least 10 people — came days after the U.S. suspended military aid and intelligence to Ukraine to pressure it into accepting a peace deal being pushed by the Trump administration.

Without U.S. intelligence, Ukraine’s ability to strike inside Russia and defend itself from bombardment is significantly diminished.

But Trump, in an exchange with reporters, shrugged off the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of the intelligence pause to inflict more pain on Ukraine.

“I think he’s doing what anybody else would,” Trump said of Putin.

And Trump again questioned whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is committed to getting a peace agreement to end the conflict. “It may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising, because they have all the cards, and they’re bombing the hell out of them right now,” Trump said.

Trump is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and special envoy Steve Witkoff to Saudi Arabia next week to meet with Ukrainian officials.

Trump, days into his second, nonconsecutive White House term, said targeting Russia’s oil revenue was the best way to get Moscow to end its nearly three-year war against Ukraine. He leaned in on the idea that OPEC+, the alliance of oil producing nations, holds the key to ending the war by reducing oil prices.

But that push has been received coolly by OPEC+ nations, which include the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Trump has had a complicated history with Putin. The Republican president has even raised the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in making the case for why he believes he can trust Putin to not restart his war on Ukraine if a truce is reached.

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump told Zelenskyy during last week’s contentious Oval Office meeting that led to Trump pausing aid and intelligence with Ukraine. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?”

___

Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed reporting.

AP · by AAMER MADHANI · March 7, 2025

7. U.S. Bolsters Position as World’s Top Arms Exporter

Will our defense industry take a hit due to tariff trade wars?

Would many jobs in many states be at risk as those in the global arms market look for other suppliers? And if so how will we revitalize our defense industrial base?

Shouldn't we seek to take advantage of increased defense spending in Europe? Do our economic and security policies support that? Or do we just take it for granted that Europe will remain "a crucial buyer of U.S. weapons?"

Excerpts:

European spending on defense is likely to keep rising. Earlier this month, Germany said it would exempt military spending from its strict fiscal rules. The U.K. and Denmark have also announced plans to spend more on defense, while the European Union has proposed a $158 billion fund to bolster military spending and support Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron has for years called on European nations to buy more weapons locally, in part to ensure sovereign control over them. France is now the world’s second-largest arms exporter—having leapfrogged Russia—and accounted for almost 10% of global shipments in the five years ended in 2024, according to Sipri’s data.

...

Buyers of foreign weapons are typically dependent on the seller for spare parts, continued expertise and even the ability to update and run software on their equipment.

“If the U.S. has indeed restricted access to software in military capability already supplied to an ally, it will have profound implications for the future foreign sales,” said Philip Dunne, a former British government minister in charge of defense procurement and exports.

In a sign of the sensitivities, the U.K.’s Defense Ministry announced a major purchase of drones for Ukraine on Thursday and described their manufacturer, Anduril, as Anglo-American. California-based Anduril, which manufactures in the U.S., describes itself as an American company. The ministry declined to comment.

...

European defense stocks have rallied in recent weeks on news of spending increases. Shares of Britain’s BAE Systems, the region’s largest defense contractor, are up more than a third so far this year. Germany’s Rheinmetall and radar maker Hensoldt are both up more than 80% year to date.

By contrast, U.S. defense stocks, including Lockheed Martin LMT 2.63%increase; green up pointing triangle, are flat to lower this year.

To be sure, some analysts say Europe will likely remain a crucial buyer of U.S. weapons.

...

It would be difficult for Europe and the U.S. to extricate themselves from each other’s weapons supply. The U.S., for instance, provides the missiles for Britain’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent, while U.K. companies supply various components for the F-35. U.S. companies also have plans to manufacture more in Europe.

But for Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington who now heads a defense conference, there is now a potential issue of trust with the U.S.

“If it is possible that with some stroke of the pen, the U.S. can stop intelligence cooperation and even weapon deliveries that are already in transit on the way to Ukraine, what does this signal to us?” Ischinger said. “It signals that nothing should be taken for granted.”

U.S. Bolsters Position as World’s Top Arms Exporter

America has benefited from rising European spending, though Trump’s Ukraine policy is raising concerns about future purchases

https://www.wsj.com/business/u-s-bolsters-position-as-worlds-top-arms-exporter-6b389c1f?mod=latest_headlines

By Alistair MacDonald

March 9, 2025 7:01 pm ET

An F-35 flies over Denmark, one of many European countries that have bought or ordered the American jet fighter. Photo: Bo Amstrup/Associated Press

American defense companies have increased their dominance of the global arms trade, buoyed by European nations snapping up U.S. jet fighters and missiles.

The U.S. accounted for 43% of global weapons exports over the past five years, up from 35% in the previous five-year period, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think tank.

The Sipri data show how the U.S. arms industry has been the key beneficiary of rising European defense budgets in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as President Trump pushes the region to increase military spending.

A Presidency of Upheaval Emboldens Trump

The velocity of his early moves has enthralled supporters but risks hurting Republicans in future elections

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/a-presidency-of-upheaval-emboldens-trump-8567880c

President Trump following his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. Photo: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg News

By Molly BallFollow

March 8, 2025 9:00 pm ET

As opponents cry chaos and some in his own party grow anxious, President Trump appears not cowed by his critics but emboldened—determined to double down on the disruptions he’s set into motion.

From a certain perspective it may feel like the world is falling apart: the federal bureaucracy being dismantled, the trans-Atlantic alliance under strain, the stock market swooning amid seesawing tariff threats, a government shutdown possible in less than a week’s time. Yet it is testament to Trump’s dominance that upending so many institutions has only marginally dented his popularity so far. And it has created an unusual and tense political dynamic as Republicans and Democrats alike brace for the consequences to play out.

“People like action. They appreciate that he’s doing things—the momentum, the velocity,” said David Urban, a GOP lobbyist close to the White House. Urban said his friends from his hometown in western Pennsylvania and his classmates from West Point all love what they see: a president with the political courage to finally tackle longstanding problems. “There is short-term disruption, but the American people wanted to see disruption. That’s why they sent Trump—they’re tired of a government that’s so inefficient and feckless.”

The dynamic was evident as Trump addressed a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, exhorting Americans to “get ready for an incredible future, because the golden age of America has just begun.” Throughout the nearly two-hour address, the Republican side of the House chamber erupted in raucous cheers, while Democrats sat sullenly on the other side of the room, largely refusing to cheer.

To Trump’s allies, the speech was a triumph that showcased his decisiveness and strength. “That was a speech by a president who’s at the zenith of his power, exuding confidence that everything’s going to be all right, this is all going to work out, believe in me,” said Urban. Americans, he said, are enthusiastic about the good things they see happening, such as a massive reduction in border crossings and announcements of large foreign investments.

Congress needs to pass funding legislation to keep the federal government running past Friday night. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Opponents believe a backlash is building and that Republicans may pay a price in upcoming elections. “There’s a chaos and a disorder that is really disturbing people,” said former Republican Congressman Charlie Dent, who represented a swing district in Pennsylvania until 2018 and supported Democrat Kamala Harris last November. Trump, he added, “just seems to be doubling down on everything he’s been doing and charging forward, not factoring in the political consequences to his decision-making.” Dent said he was particularly perturbed by Trump’s dismantling of the decadeslong geopolitical order and the trampling of the separation of powers.

In polls, voters’ opinions of the new administration have been middling, a reflection of Trump’s polarizing nature and the nation’s entrenched divisions. Trump is less popular than other modern presidents at the beginning of their terms, enjoying little of the usual bipartisan honeymoon, and many of his individual actions, such as pardoning Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, are unpopular. Several recent surveys have found that voters see him as insufficiently focused on the economy. Yet the disruptions he has unleashed haven’t caused his approval rating to plummet. In a polling average released this week, the political analyst Nate Silver found that Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings were evenly matched at 48% apiece. Many voters appear to be waiting to see where it all goes.

Some Republican officials are publicly and privately anxious about signs of discontent. Lawmakers’ phones in Congress have been ringing off the hook for weeks, overwhelming the phone systems on Capitol Hill. Anguished constituents, urged on by liberal groups, have packed representatives’ local public meetings, leading GOP leaders this week to advise members to stop holding in-person town halls. “They’re doing this for the cameras,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters. “I think it’s wise not to play into it right now.”

Many Republicans fear the economy could continue to worsen amid government layoffs and Trump’s on-again off-again tariff threats. Friday’s jobs report was steady but slightly below expectations as unemployment ticked up. Inflation is up, and consumer confidence is down. Administration officials have cast these developments as a short-term adjustment to a better economic future as companies are incentivized by tariffs, deregulation and energy production to create more jobs in the domestic private sector.

More difficulties lie ahead for Trump’s legislative agenda, as Congress struggles with Trump’s conflicting demands. He has called for all of his 2017 tax cuts to be made permanent and several more to be imposed, such as eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, while insisting that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security can’t be cut. Absent large new tax increases that no Republican has endorsed, experts say Trump’s promise to quickly balance the federal budget is impossible and deficits and debt will continue to balloon. Democrats charge that cuts to popular programs are inevitable. Meanwhile, the federal government is set to shut down on Friday if Congress fails to pass a funding bill, and congressional leaders are currently at a stalemate.

Surrounded by supporters, President Trump entered the House chamber Tuesday for an address that would last nearly two hours. Photo: Ben Curtis/Associated Press

To be sure, many of the big changes Trump boasts about are less than meets the eye. The administration hasn’t significantly increased the pace of deportations of illegal immigrants from that achieved by President Joe Biden. The budget savings claimed by DOGE have frequently turned out to be illusory and add up to barely a rounding error on the federal budget. Some critics wonder if Trump’s presidency is essentially theatrical in nature, creating the impression of the major change voters say they want while actually keeping real-life dislocations to a minimum. Trump has used his powerful bully pulpit to impress the public with the idea that any temporary unpleasantness is merely the price of progress.

Democrats’ response to Trump’s address on Tuesday epitomized their party’s discombobulated state. Texas Congressman Al Green was thrown out of the chamber after he stood to yell at Trump, shaking his cane as he shouted that the president had “no mandate to cut Medicaid.” Some Democrats wore pink in an apparent attempt to send a pro-woman message, while a contingent waved black auction-style paddles printed with slogans such as “MUSK STEALS” and “PROTECT VETERANS.” Several declined to attend or walked out as the address wore on, a steady trickle that only increased the GOP’s dominance of the chamber.

Afterward, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan gave the Democrats’ official response, a plea for sensible centrism against a backdrop of American flags. Many in the party’s base are apoplectic at Trump’s actions, yet the party manifestly can’t decide if what is called for is normality to contrast with the chaos or abnormal measures for abnormal times.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, and the way Democrats are behaving is clearly insufficient,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican operative who left the party over Trump and now helms a super PAC that has released ads accusing Trump of betraying veterans and siding with America’s enemies.

Perhaps no moment better captured the current political climate than a little-noticed interaction before Trump’s speech began on Tuesday night. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat, stood silently along the center aisle as Trump entered the House chamber, wearing a grave expression and holding a piece of paper on which she had written, “This is NOT Normal.”

As Trump brushed past her, mobbed by the ecstatic Republicans on the other side of the aisle, one of them, Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas, reached across behind the president, snatched the sign out of Stansbury’s hands, and threw it into the air. As it fluttered to the ground, Gooden resumed applauding, while Trump marched on, oblivious.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D., N.M.) held up a sign as Republican lawmakers greeted President Trump ahead of his speech. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@wsj.com

9. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March

Access the entire FDD foreign policy tracker at this link: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/03/07/trump-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-march/

Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

fdd.org · · March 7, 2025

Welcome back to the Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.

President Donald Trump opened negotiations with Moscow by undercutting Ukraine while doing nothing to pressure Russia. Getting a good deal will require the opposite. Then again, Trump has himself admitted he does not “care so much” about the agreement’s specific terms. Rather, as Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg explained, Trump’s chief goals are to end the fighting, disentangle the United States from the war, and “reset relations with Russia.” The silver lining: Europe is now more serious than ever about stepping up.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is looking for around $50 billion in cuts, which the Pentagon says will be reallocated to other defense priorities. The administration reportedly ordered Cyber Command to halt offensive operations against Russia, while dismantling efforts by other agencies to counter foreign malign influence. Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top officers for political reasons, sending a dangerous message to American service members.

Meanwhile, Washington sought to bolster security and economic cooperation with Japan and India, whose leaders Trump hosted at the White House. The administration began targeting Iranian oil revenue and greenlit a major arms package for Israel, while Trump proposed turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Check back next month to see how the administration deals with these and other challenges.

Trending Positive

Trending Neutral

Trending Negative

Trending Very Negative

International Organizations

Nonproliferation and Biodefense

Sunni Jihadism

Syria

Turkey

10. An Assessment of Critical Minerals, Strategic Competition, and Ukraine

An Assessment of Critical Minerals, Strategic Competition, and Ukraine

https://divergentoptions.org/2025/03/09/an-assessment-of-critical-minerals-strategic-competition-and-ukraine/

Estelle Denton-Townshend has a PhD from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. She currently works at the University of Waikato where she is a teaching fellow. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature, nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.

Title: An Assessment of Critical Minerals, Strategic Competition and Ukraine

Date Originally Written: 4 March 2025

Date Originally Published: 9 March 2025

Authors and / or Article Point of View: There is potential for a significant shortage in the global supply and refining capacity of critical minerals and metals. This shortage will significantly impact the relationships between countries that have these essential manufacturing inputs and those that need them. As the global political order shifts, this issue will become more significant, impacting alliances and intensifying the strategic competition between the U.S. and China.

Summary:

The demand for critical minerals is surging due to their pivotal role in the green-energy transition, defence systems, and advances in AI. China maintains a dominant position in the supply chains, including the refinement of numerous critical minerals. Ukraine, which possesses 22 types of critical minerals, faces significant challenges to secure access to these materials from both its adversary, Russia, and its ally, the United States. This scenario highlights the intense geopolitical competition for these resources. Critical minerals are essential for the prosperity and security of states in the emerging era of decarbonization and advanced AI.

Text:

The demand for critical minerals is increasing due to their growing importance for the green-energy transition, defence systems, and advances in AI. The EU’s critical minerals list includes 34 minerals, while the U.S.’s list comprises 50 [1]; [2]. Ukraine possesses 22 of these critical minerals [3]; [4]. NATO identifies 12 minerals as critical for the Allied defence industry of which Ukraine has six [5]; [6]. As noted by Andy Home, a senior metals columnist for Reuters, due to supply vulnerabilities, critical minerals and metals are a “new bargaining chip on the geopolitical table” [7].

In the now infamous press conference on February 28, 2025, President Trump sought to finalize a deal that gave the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, and he wanted this deal secured before a security guarantee was discussed. President Zelenskyy made it clear he wanted a security guarantee upfront. However, this transactional approach to geopolitics became unstuck as Zelenskyy, Trump and Vice President Vance publicly argued over the deal [8].

In the press conference Trump made his administration’s goals clear:

As you know our country doesn’t have much raw earth minerals. We have a lot of oil and gas, but we don’t have a lot of the raw earth. What we do have is protected by the environmentalists but that can be unprotected, but still, it’s not very much. They have among the best in the world in terms of raw earth. We are going to be using that, taking it, using it for al l the things we do including AI and including weapons, military. It’s really going to satisfy our needs. So, it’s something that we just worked out really well. We have a lot of oil, lot of gas, but we don’t have raw earth. This has just about every component of the raw earth that we need for computing, for all of the things we do. This puts us in great shape [9].

Trump’s focus on rare earth minerals is set against a backdrop of strategic competition with China, and the U.S. desire to spend less defending Ukraine against Russia. As Trump stated on his Truth Social account, “this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean [sic] as separation” [10]. However, isolating the critical mineral issue reveals several interesting points. The U.S. Geological Survey states that China dominates the world’s rare earth market, extracting 240,000 tonnes by the end of 2023 and holding reserves of 44 million. The U.S. is the second largest producer extracting 43,000 tonnes in 2023 and having reserves of 1.8 million tonnes [11]; [12]. China also dominates the refining process of critical minerals and is the world’s largest importer [13].

The day after the Biden administration worked to limit China’s chip sector development, the Chinese Commerce Ministry issued a directive on the sale of dual military and civilian use materials to the U.S. due to national security concerns. Restrictions were placed on the export of superhard materials like graphite, gallium, germanium, and antimony to the U.S. These minerals have extensive military applications [14]. Shortly after this exchange of trade restrictions, in January 2025, the Trump administration imposed 10% tariffs on all Chinese goods. Minutes later, China responded with trade restrictions on five critical minerals used heavily in military, information technology, and clean energy products: tungsten, indium, bismuth, tellurium, and molybdenum [15].

The U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly highlighted the urgency of securing supply chains for critical minerals, including rare-earth minerals. Manifestations of rising strategic competition, such as U.S. pressure on NATO countries to spend more on defence, European fears of Russian encroachment, wariness over Chinese intentions in the Indo-Pacific, the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Gaza war, and rising global tensions, have all contributed to increased military spending. Accordingly, U.S. General James Rainey, commander of the U.S. Army’s Futures Command, points out that the race for dominance in AI, machine learning, and quantum computing is generating evolutionary changes in the character of war [16]. These changes are adding significant momentum to the global race to secure critical minerals. Adam Burstein, the U.S. technical director for strategic and critical materials, confirms the significance of these materials: “virtually every Defense Department system, from unmanned aerial systems and fighter jets to submarines uses critical minerals” [17].

The exponential growth of AI is heavily driven by commercial markets, and this has further intensified the demand for critical minerals [18]. Critical minerals are needed in the manufacturing of AI components such as semiconductors. Furthermore, as AI technology develops it will require an accompanying surge in power demands. Many experts worry about the ability of existing power grids to account for a massive rise in electricity demand. This increase in demand for electricity will also contribute to additional pressure on critical mineral supplies [19].

As climate mitigation and adaptation of green technologies advance, new supply chain anxieties have emerged. The shift towards sustainable energy is not simply limited to reduced use of fossil fuels but also requires increased use of new materials. In fact, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), clean energy is the key driver of the rise in demand for critical minerals [20]. “A clean energy system is much more minerals- and metals intensive than a conventional fossil fuel energy system, and even with increased circularity, the implications for the extraction of raw materials, and for global competition to secure access to them, are enormous” [21]. According to the IEA if countries meet their current carbon neutral projections, the demand for the critical minerals will triple by 2030, and quadruple by 2040 [22]. Supply chains are not only at risk from geopolitical disruptions from adversaries, but there is also the risk of damage to new and existing mining infrastructure from extreme weather events fuelled by climate change [23].

Returning to the dispute in the oval office, Trump told Zelenskyy that he “doesn’t have the cards right now” [24]. Through the strategic lens of critical raw materials that might not be completely accurate. Most countries are placing a strong emphasis on technology development and the transition to green energy. China currently has a significant advantage in the refining and supply of critical minerals and metals, and this is a significant dynamic in U.S.-China strategic competition. This situation provides Ukraine with some leverage for future negotiations. However, Trump has paused military aid to Ukraine, while insisting that a deal is still possible [25]. His actions belie the U.S.’ commitment to its allies and demonstrate the importance of self-interest in transactional relations.

Endnotes:

[1] European Commission. Critical raw materials. European Commission. [Online] 2023. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/raw-materials/areas-specific-interest/critical-raw-materials_en

[2] Ukrainian Geological Survey & Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine. Ukraine: Mining Investment Opportunities. State Service for Geology and Mineral Resources of Ukraine. [Online] 2024. https://www.geo.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/presentations/en/investment-opportunities-in-exploration-production-strategic-and-critical-minerals.pdf

[3] Duggal, Hanna and Ali, Marium. Mapping Ukraine’s rare earth and critical minerals. Al Jazeera. [Online] 28 February 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/28/mapping-ukraines-rare-earth-and-critical-minerals

[4] Ukrainian Geological Survey & Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine. Ukraine: Mining Investment Opportunities. State Service for Geology and Mineral Resources of Ukraine. [Online] 2024. https://www.geo.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/presentations/en/investment-opportunities-in-exploration-production-strategic-and-critical-minerals.pdf

[5] NATO. NATO releases list of 12 defence-critical raw materials. NATO. [Online] 11 December 2024. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_231765.htm

[6] Ukrainian Geological Survey & Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine. Ukraine: Mining Investment Opportunities. State Service for Geology and Mineral Resources of Ukraine. [Online] 2024. https://www.geo.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/presentations/en/investment-opportunities-in-exploration-production-strategic-and-critical-minerals.pdf

[7] Home, Andy. Commentary: Critical minerals take centre stage in world politics. Reuters. [Online] 1 March 2025. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/critical-minerals-take-centre-stage-world-politics-andy-home-2025-02-28/

[8] Volodymyr, President Zelenskyy, Trump, President Donald and Vance, Vice President James D. Watch Trump and Zelenskyy’s full remarks during White House meeting. Youtube. [Online] 25 February 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOv4x_FIsc

[9] Volodymyr, President Zelenskyy, Trump, President Donald and Vance, Vice President James D. Watch Trump and Zelenskyy’s full remarks during White House meeting. Youtube. [Online] 25 February 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOv4x_FIsc

[10] Trump, President Donald. Truth Social. [Online] 2025. https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1892242622623699357

[11] Cordier, Daniel J. Rare Earths. US Geological Survey (USGS). [Online] 2024. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2024/mcs2024-rare-earths.pdf

[12] Rockwell, Keith. How China is weaponising its dominance of critical minerals trade. East Asia Forum. [Online] 19 February 2025. https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/02/19/how-china-is-weaponising-its-dominance-in-critical-minerals-trade/

[13] Weihuan, Zhou. Why China’s critical mineral strategy goes beyond geopolitics. World Economic forum. [Online] 19 November2024. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/china-critical-mineral-strategy-beyond-geopolitics/

[14] Lv, Amy and Munroe, Tony. China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate. Reuters. [Online] 4 December 2025. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-exports-gallium-germanium-antimony-us-2024-12-03/

[15] Shivaprasad, Asthitha, Lv, Amy and Jackson, Lewis. What are the five critical metal exports restricted by China. Reuters. [Online] 5 February 2025. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/what-are-five-new-critical-metal-exports-restricted-by-china-2025-02-04/

[16] Seffers, George I. Gen. James Rainey: Man-Machine Integration May Revolutionize Combat Arms. Signal. [Online] 17 August 2023. https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/gen-james-rainey-man-machine-integration-may-revolutionize-combat-arms/

[17] Vergun, David. Securing Critical Minerals Vital to National Security, Official Says. US Department of Defense. [Online] 10 Janary 2025. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4026144/securing-critical-minerals-vital-to-national-security-official-says/

[18] The Oregon Group. Fourth Industrial Revolution: Articial Intelligence and the next critical minerial supercycle. The Oregon Group. [Online] 2024. https://theoregongroup.com/themencode-pdf-viewer/?file=https://theoregongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-next-Critical-Mineral-Supercycle-The-Oregon-Group.pdf#zoom=page-width&pagemode=thumbs

[19] The Oregon Group. Fourth Industrial Revolution: Articial Intelligence and the next critical minerial supercycle. The Oregon Group. [Online] 2024. https://theoregongroup.com/themencode-pdf-viewer/?file=https://theoregongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-next-Critical-Mineral-Supercycle-The-Oregon-Group.pdf#zoom=page-width&pagemode=thumbs

[20] International Energy Agency. A new frontier for Global energy security: critical minerals. International Energy Agency. [Online] 2024. https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals

[21] Carrara, S., Bobba, S., Blagoeva, D., Alves Dias, P., Cavalli, A., Georgitzikis, K., Grohol, M., Itul, A., Kuzov, T., Latunussa, C., Lyons, L., Malano, G., Maury, T., Prior Arce, A., Somers, J., Telsnig, T., Veeh, C., Wittmer, D., Black, C., Pennington, D. Supply chain analysis and material demand forecast in strategic technologies and sectors in the EU – A foresight study. European Commission: JRC Publishing Repository. [Online] 2023. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC132889

[22] International Energy Agency. A new frontier for Global energy security: critical minerals. International Energy Agency. [Online] 2024. https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals

[23] Carlin, David and Arshad, Marheen. Sectoral Risk Briefings: Insights for Financial Insitutions. UN Environment Programme. [Online] May 2024. https://www.unepfi.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Climate-Risks-in-the-Metals-and-Mining-Sector-1.pdf

[24] Volodymyr, President Zelenskyy, Trump, President Donald and Vance, Vice President James D. Watch Trump and Zelenskyy’s full remarks during White House meeting. Youtube. [Online] 25 February 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOv4x_FIsc

[25] Shalal, Andrea, Slattery, Gram. Trump pauses all U.S. aid to Ukraine after angry clash with Zelenskiy. Reuters. [Online] 4 March 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-halts-all-us-military-aid-ukraine-white-house-official-says-2025-03-04/

11. There is free-riding among the US military services, too

Wow. This is a proposal that would shake up the services especially as over the last decade or two some services have become more service oriented than joint focused (as if they had gotten tired of Goldwater Nichols).

Excerpts:

To achieve an effective joint force, the Department of Defense should start with a joint force design, deliberately integrating domain-specific expertise into a unified force design. Such a design would prioritize the creation of options over the creation of platforms, ensuring military capabilities align with overarching national security objectives, not just individual service preferences.

This joint force design should also identify those common pool resources which are chronically underfunded in service budgets, acknowledge their critical importance to the entire joint force, and drive resources to them.

To make that happen, the Pentagon ought to move some acquisition authorities away from the services, structuring the budget around the joint force design rather than just service-specific priorities. The current Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System often fails to align funding with the true needs of the joint force, resulting in inefficiencies and capability gaps. Reforming Pentagon budgeting is therefore essential to ensure US defense dollars are used efficiently and effectively and not misallocated because of unproductive bureaucratic competition among the services.

Rethinking and redesigning the current force structure is not merely an option — it is a necessity for maintaining military advantage in an increasingly complex global security environment.

There is free-riding among the US military services, too

Defense News · by Maximilian K. Bremer and Kelly A. Grieco · March 10, 2025

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has vowed to serve as the Pentagon’s “change agent,” reforming the acquisition process and placing emerging capabilities in the hands of warfighters faster.

This is a tall task.

Truly disrupting the Pentagon will require starting at the top, specifically adopting a comprehensive joint force design, in which capabilities are developed and integrated cohesively across all military services, domains and functions.

This approach is especially critical for identifying capabilities vital to the joint force, but which no single service has a major interest in funding, because they are “common pool” assets.

By the Joint Staff’s own admission, joint force design is “necessary to produce a unifying vision for the future of the Joint Force.” Yet the U.S. military lacks such a future-oriented framework for guiding joint modernization priorities and timelines. While the Joint Warfighting Concept outlines a broad approach for how the Joint Force should fight in a future conflict, it lacks specificity about which services are expected to provide what future capabilities and on what timelines. As the Marine Corps commandant lamented in 2023, the services lack “a common aimpoint … that says this is where the Joint Force needs to be 5, 6, or 7 years into the future.”

Instead, each branch independently develops its own separate force design, laying out operational capabilities required at varying future dates. The Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, which is now known as “Force Design,” emphasizes a lighter and more mobile force armed with long-range sensors and precision-strike weapons. The Navy’s Force Design 2045 proposes a hybrid fleet, in which surface and subsurface uncrewed vessels augment traditional naval assets, while the Air Force’s One Force Design envisions a mix of stand-off, stand-in and asymmetric capabilities designed to attack an adversary’s kill chains. The Army is expected to unveil its new force design later this month.

The problem with this approach is that too often, the driving force behind service choices are budgetary considerations rather than a joint strategic vision. The competition for a larger share of total obligation authority promotes spending on service-centric warfighting capabilities while simultaneously reducing investment in the service-provided capabilities needed to generate and sustain U.S. military power.

This puts the entire joint force at risk.

In economic terms, capabilities like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, data connectivity, and logistics are “common pool resources” — when they are procured by one service, they can be used by all under a joint command. Because these assets are non-excludable, each service has incentives to free-ride on the investments of others. Here’s the rub: The validity of each service’s force design depends on the other services’ investments in common pool resources, but there is no forcing function to enforce their provision across the joint force.

Take the Marines’ Force Design as an example: it assumes robust Navy support, including logistics, intelligence, and mobility. The Navy’s Navigation Plan 2024, however, make no mention of the Navy’s important role in supporting and sustaining Marine stand-in Forces. Why? Because no joint mechanism exists to ensure service force designs either fulfill these dependencies or envision forces which are not dependent on common pool resources.

This is particularly troubling because U.S. military advantage increasingly requires cross-domain, and therefore cross-service, solutions.

A common understanding in force design is that each service should strive to dominate its own domain. Each domain — land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace — offers unique advantages that, when combined, generate more robust and flexible national military capabilities. Each domain also has specific vulnerabilities best mitigated from other domains, and possibly by other services. For example, ground forces have limited visibility from the ground, but, with access to the air, space, and even cyber domains, have the potential to see further. While domain expertise is essential, an overemphasis on domain-centric superiority can undermine the fighting effectiveness of the joint force, particularly when it leads to missed opportunities to develop new capabilities that operate across multiple domains.

To achieve an effective joint force, the Department of Defense should start with a joint force design, deliberately integrating domain-specific expertise into a unified force design. Such a design would prioritize the creation of options over the creation of platforms, ensuring military capabilities align with overarching national security objectives, not just individual service preferences.

This joint force design should also identify those common pool resources which are chronically underfunded in service budgets, acknowledge their critical importance to the entire joint force, and drive resources to them.

To make that happen, the Pentagon ought to move some acquisition authorities away from the services, structuring the budget around the joint force design rather than just service-specific priorities. The current Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System often fails to align funding with the true needs of the joint force, resulting in inefficiencies and capability gaps. Reforming Pentagon budgeting is therefore essential to ensure US defense dollars are used efficiently and effectively and not misallocated because of unproductive bureaucratic competition among the services.

Rethinking and redesigning the current force structure is not merely an option — it is a necessity for maintaining military advantage in an increasingly complex global security environment.

Col. Maximilian K. Bremer, US Air Force, is the director of the Advanced Programs Division at Air Mobility Command.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University.

This commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the US Defense Department, or the US Air Force.

12. Pentagon investing millions in battlefield rapid disease detection

A wise investment. The military needs this. And it will have greater benefits than the military. It will be keeping with the great tradition of the military - scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit society.

Pentagon investing millions in battlefield rapid disease detection

militarytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · March 7, 2025

When the COVID-19 pandemic paralyzed the world, the U.S. military was forced to conduct hundreds of emergency medical evacuations out of combat zones, pause critical training evolutions, and redirect vast amounts of medical and logistics resources toward fighting the mysterious and deadly disease.

Today, with COVID-related panic in the rearview, researchers are focused on Pathogen X – a hypothetical next pandemic-causing disease that might be mitigated or contained with better preparation.

Rapidly diagnosing and categorizing Pathogen X is one of the use cases officials at the Pentagon’s Chemical and Biological Defense Program reportedly see for GeneCapture, a developmental technology that creators and funders say can diagnose infections and pathogen families within an hour for about $20 per test — compared with 72 hours and around $160 for more conventional broad-edged testing.

To date, the military has invested nearly $12 million to support the development of GeneCapture as a deployable diagnostic tool, with the bulk of that funding coming from the Chemical Biological Defense Program, or CBDP, and the Defense Health Agency.

The development team, out of the HudsonAlpha Institute in Huntsville, Alabama, is also raising funds to begin clinical trials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, whose certification is a pre-requisite for any military fielding or deployment.

Retired Army Col. Dave Zimmerman, a 29-year medical officer who commanded the 65th Medical Brigade in Korea and served as a director at the Office of the Surgeon General, told Military Times he could have used the GeneCapture device in his younger years as a medevac pilot.

“Having a capability on board for your flight medics, where we get a Nine Line [medevac request], we fly to a location, the medic gets out and starts assessing — the more tools the medic has, the better he’s going to be able to treat the patient,” said Zimmerman, who now acts as an independent advisor and consultant for GeneCapture.

“And there’s been many instances in Afghanistan where we would fly and someone would be injured and have some kind of illness and we wouldn’t be able to know until we got back to the hospital. … I’ve been deployed six times, so I’ve seen a lot of things in many different countries. And this is what I would want for my soldiers now.”

Zimmerman added that the size of the diagnosis device, which is portable and handheld, and its ability to test blood or fluid samples without needing refrigeration or temperature control are also conducive to battlefield uses worldwide.

A built-in nano-library of billions of germ-matching probes identify the pathogen(s) in an hour without a lab. The goal is to provide easy to use, affordable, rapid bioweapon surveillance in remote applications. (Courtesy of GeneCapture)

If GeneCapture sounds a little bit like Theranos, a blood-testing startup that made headlines and attracted supporters — including former defense secretary Jim Mattis — before imploding amid revelations of fraud and bad science, the team has heard it all before. When that scandal became public, according to GeneCapture CEO Peggy Sammon, the surrounding suspicion and cynicism had “a bad ripple effect” on all technology development in the space.

“We’re so different from Theranos. They were trying to determine, fraudulently, what’s the chemistry in a small sample of blood,” she told Military Times. “We’re saying, ‘What living organism is colonizing your body? What’s living in the sample?’ We’re totally different setups … and a comment I’ve made to a lot of people is [that] you can’t win eight [military technology development] contracts without showing actual data.”

Officials with the CBDP said they couldn’t comment on the technology or their plans for it, but did confirm the office’s involvement with GeneCapture.

The technology that enables this novel medical capability is what the development team calls “direct RNA capture,” which uses an array of probes within the diagnosis device to determine the unique genetic signature for each pathogen by the presence of its RNA, an identifying molecule for living organisms.

“If that RNA is in the sample, it attaches and lights up, and that’s how we know what it is,” Sammon said, noting that conventional PCR disease testing requires a testing solution and depends on a reaction that takes time to develop to determine the presence of a specific pathogen.

According to GeneCapture materials, internal testing is ongoing for the diagnosis of urinary tract infections — an application the FDA has shown particular interest in — as well as bacterial and fungal wound infections; animal and plant toxins; and biothreats such as dengue fever, coronavirus, influenza, typhus, lassa fever and Pathogen X, among others.

The technology’s inventor, Dr. Krishnan Chittur, was motivated to find a better diagnosis method after his infant daughter was diagnosed with an infection and placed on antibiotics for three days while doctors waited for lab results to determine what exactly was making her sick.

Sammon, who met Chittur in 2009 and has helped the team raise some $7 million in private funding in addition to government grants, said working with the military on its needs has helped to ruggedize the platform — they worked to develop a cartridge-reading device about the size of a toaster that does not require laptops, delicate pipettes or test tubes.

“We’ve tried to look at this as, How can this be more rugged?” she said. “If you get so focused on it, you come up with something that works. And I think others have not looked at it this way.”

Zimmerman said he’s currently working with GeneCapture to help coordinate a private test in Kansas City, where, though the military wouldn’t be formally involved, soldiers would be able to “put their hands on” the prototype and provide feedback.

He said he’s particularly enthusiastic about the promise of GeneCapture for the yet-to-be-determined conflict of the future, which may involve new weapons and mystery threats and variables.

“When you go into … a war in the future, there’s a lot of unknown, right? Because the enemy always gets a vote. And you never know how you’re going to be attacked or what you’re going to be exposed to,” Zimmerman said. “Having the best and simplest equipment for your medical professionals to help diagnose what’s wrong with the patients is critical. … I’m all about giving the soldier the advantage when it comes to saving others’ lives.”

13. The U.S. Army, Artificial Intelligence, and Mission Command

Conclusion:

Realizing the goals of the Army Campaign Plan to build a data-centric force capable of conducting multidomain operations at echelon before 2030 requires developing a concept for conducting mission command through algorithms. The integration of AI and machine learning applications across the force will not replace the core tenets of mission command nor diminish the need for shared understanding, trust, initiative, and mission-type orders (i.e., centralized planning, decentralized execution). Rather, building a data-centric Army requires visualizing and describing how to execute mission command as a dialogue between man and machine. This process starts, like the history of mission command, with education.

The U.S. Army, Artificial Intelligence, and Mission Command - War on the Rocks

Benjamin Jensen and Maj. Gen. Jake S. Kwon

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · March 10, 2025

It is 2028. An infantry company, acting as an advanced guard, maneuvers to support an attack in the Indo-Pacific. Each platoon consists of manned-unmanned squad teams using autonomous ground vehicles equipped with sensors, mortars, and loitering attack drones. The company commander, analyzing real-time data from small reconnaissance drones, satellites, and predictive terrain models, quickly identifies key terrain to secure the flank. He assigns a platoon to the position and directs others to adjust fires in support of the main effort.

As orders flow, algorithms assess terrain, readiness, doctrine, and historical cases to generate engagement area options. These recommendations include named areas of interest and high-value target assessments based on possible enemy orders of battle. Platoon leaders refine these insights and issue rapid guidance using troop-leading procedures. Mission command is now a fusion of human and machine judgment, enabling data-centric warfare.

This vignette reflects key aspects of the Army Campaign Plan and the drive to field a data-centric force capable of what is known as “multidomain operations” at echelon before 2030. The land domain is central to generating effects across other domains, requiring leaders to achieve situational awareness faster than adversaries. Success depends on leveraging data for targeting, maneuvering, and disrupting enemy cohesion. Decision advantage — visualizing battlespace geometry and acting faster than the opponent — becomes the new theory of victory.

At the heart of this transformation is a redefined approach to mission command in the age of AI-driven warfare. Militaries worldwide are racing to integrate AI into command systems, seeking to accelerate tempo and coordinate unmanned swarms. Yet, what does this mean for mission command?

Modernization alone will not suffice. Without a deliberate shift in leader development, the Army risks falling short of its campaign plan and National Defense Strategy objectives. This approach should start with changes to leader development and how the Army educates the force. Specifically, the Army will need to ensure combat leaders understand the basics of AI and machine learning, as well as how new systems aggregate data to make recommendations. Second, the institution will need to build on ideas in the Army Learning Concept to help leaders at echelon envision the future fight while capturing data about decision-making. This feedback loop will help the Army refine algorithms sorting the stream of data and adapt to context in a manner that makes mission command possible in human-machine teams.

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Mission Command: Origins and Evolution

Mission command in U.S. military doctrine enables decentralized execution, allowing subordinates to adapt to battlefield friction. The U.S. Army defines it as an approach to command and control that empowers subordinate decision-making based on competence, mutual trust, shared understanding, commander’s intent, mission-type orders, disciplined initiative, and risk acceptance. Mission command is both a collection of individual attributes and a system for adapting to change on the battlefield based on philosophy, education, and culture in the profession of arms.

The concept has evolved across generations, with each era drawing from history and technological change to refine its principles. While often attributed to the Prussian military, its origins and reference points are more diffuse in American history. For Civil War leaders and reformers Phil Sheridan and Emroy Upton, it was a merger of Prussian technology and mobilization techniques with American tactics. For many it was the mastery of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. After World War II, Army generals including William Depuy and Donn Starry proclaimed seminal case to understand mission command shifted to how German forces fought outnumbered on the Eastern Front and employed a mix of tactics to deny breakthroughs. In more recent years, everything from capturing Eben-Emael in 1940 to the 2003 Thunder Run served as crucial cases for articulating what mission command is for a generation.

The resurgence of mission command post-2012 reflected lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, where centralized control failed to keep pace with battlefield complexity. In 2012, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey released a white paper on mission command. The text set off a wave of doctrine updates and debates that culminated in the 2019 publication of ADP 6-0 Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces.

The central idea was that the basic principles of mission command, including commander’s intent, mission-type orders, and decentralized execution, required adaptable leaders. This vision is consistent with earlier treatises on command that focused on the role of individual initiative in a larger system of education. Mission command fosters initiative by relying on education and shared experiences rather than rigid procedures. It thrives in training and education environments that prioritize decision-making, risk-taking, and problem-solving over rote learning. Tactical decision games, field exercises, and mission rehearsals reinforce common reference points, enabling rapid communication and adaptation in combat.

This vision differentiates mission command from learning based on school-preferred answers and a managerial approach to leadership. This conceptualization means that mission command is as much a philosophy as a system for command and control that is based on education and shared experiences. Early critiques of the Army’s post-2012 mission command efforts highlighted bureaucratic garrison training as a constraint. Effective mission command requires not just philosophical grounding, but practical reinforcement in unit-level training and decision-making.

Training and education remain essential. Soldiers should learn how to interpret crucial cases, including reenacting them as decision games and map exercises to ground their technical expertise and enable mission command. Outside of formal education, leaders use new networks to create common understanding through activities like mission rehearsals. Collectively these activities produce tacit knowledge that facilitates rapid communication and decision-making, but they are always context-bound, thus supporting decentralized execution.

Mission Command and AI/Machine Learning

The concept of algorithmic warfare links to the emergence of battle networks and concepts like “mosaic warfare,” which envisions war as a data-centric complex adaptive system. Just as the telegraph changed the ability of land forces to coordinate dispersed formations, modern battle networks are often global and touch multiple domains and dimensions. In Chinese military doctrine, this phenomenon is one of the driving trends changing the character of war, creating a need for “multi-domain integrated joint operations.” The sheer volume and rate of information drives a need to better integrate AI and machine learning to create a common operating picture and decision advantage. In Chinese military doctrine, this is referred to as “intelligentized warfare.” All modern militaries are pursuing the ability to build, fight, and protect kill webs — often cross-domain — at machine speed faster than their adversaries. This race depends on data, infrastructure, and talent to field new technologies and the primary algorithms that drive decision advantage.

These new technologies and the resulting mosaic kill webs don’t replace mission command. Rather, they augment it. Soldiers find new ways of articulating intent and delegating execution through algorithms to human-machine teams. Taken to its logical conclusion, this implies a soldier could express the commander’s intent to a machine (i.e., autonomous swarm) as long as the algorithm had a common set of contextual reference points with the soldier. The soldier would state the objective and expanded purpose, including any limitations and preferences for the algorithm to execute. This process could include feedback, with statistical analysis providing assessments of the alignment of ends with means and the probability that the mission can be executed given current readiness.

This interaction implies that the Army should have a living inventory of contextual references as data that can facilitate the communication of intent. Just as map exercises, staff rides, and wargames historically served as forums for honing creativity, judgment, and operational art, there is a need for new forums that produce tacit data for human-machine teams.

As technology changes, the education system should adapt to create a culture of learning that helps soldiers take advantage of new systems and develop new tactics and missions. This adaption should capture and code data to enable all parties — human and machine — to build an inventory of conceptual reference points.

Adapting the U.S. Army to an Era of Algorithms

First, the Army should codify how it intends to capture, process, store, and disseminate data from the tactical edge, across the theater, and back to sanctuary. Gaining and maintaining decision dominance is predicated on the ability to leverage large, diverse, and authoritative datasets. The Army should be clear on what types of data are important for its warfighting and business systems, particularly in a resource-constrained environment. With policies governing data provisioning, replication, and disposal across battlefield and theater nodes, the Army can ensure the right data is available at the point of need, mirroring its logistics enterprise. Soldiers would not only make algorithm-driven decisions at critical moments but also enable dynamic reprogramming — both at the tactical edge and in sanctuary — as adversaries adapt tactics and waveforms.

Second, the Army should reinvest in professional self-development and education along the lines mapped out in its new learning concept. Too often, existing online training does not directly address tactics and basic professional competencies. Soldiers should be required to learn common tactics and operational understanding, regardless of their specialty or whether they are in the active force, guard, or reserve component. Tactics and understanding how the Army fights should be a foundation and yet, there is no required online training or learning curricula that allows soldiers to demonstrate competence much less pursue mastery. Lethality starts with knowing how the Army fights. Worst still, there are few opportunities for tactical decision games incorporating the use of AI. The learning concept offers a vision for addressing these deficiencies but the Army — and Congress — will need to fund it to turn it into a reality and a foundation for data-centric warfare. This includes developing a data infrastructure that learns from its students and better tailors content to their needs.

Third, the Army should determine how it intends to train soldiers of all specialties on data literacy and algorithmic warfare. With today’s budget constraints in mind, initial steps could prudently focus on basic data literacy and familiarization with the principles of data-centric warfare — essentially a rubric of “all getting some, with some experts getting all.” While specialization within warfighting functions or branches helped the Army maintain its combat overmatch through expertise, the societal disruption caused by AI requires overlaying technical education across the profession of arms. Every soldier should understand data, how it is used in AI, and how it can be manipulated. Additional professional military education should address more complex topics and application skills for more senior leadership and staff roles. Again, the Army Learning Concept offers a vision to this end, but it will require resourcing and fundamental changes in training and education to become a reality.

Finally, as the Army changes its unit of action focus from the brigade to the division, so too should it change the nature of its training for multi-domain operations. While the profession of arms requires tough and realistic training that simulates the hardships and depravations experienced in combat, the complexity of multidomain operations will require stressing the cognitive capabilities of commanders and staff continually in garrison. Synthetic environments can be tailored to individual and collective training tasks — a capability already being used in Ukraine to hone air defense. The Army can pull data from these virtual battlespaces to build digital twins that leverage AI and available data sets to simulate the volume, speed, and consequences of algorithmic decision recommendations. The result will be constant, iterated sets and reps that help combat leaders gain familiarity with systems to trust agentic outputs and build the resiliency to withstand the tempo of data-centric warfare.

Conclusion

Realizing the goals of the Army Campaign Plan to build a data-centric force capable of conducting multidomain operations at echelon before 2030 requires developing a concept for conducting mission command through algorithms. The integration of AI and machine learning applications across the force will not replace the core tenets of mission command nor diminish the need for shared understanding, trust, initiative, and mission-type orders (i.e., centralized planning, decentralized execution). Rather, building a data-centric Army requires visualizing and describing how to execute mission command as a dialogue between man and machine. This process starts, like the history of mission command, with education.

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Benjamin Jensen, PhD is the Frank E. Petersen chair for emerging technology at the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting and a senior fellow in the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also a reserve officer in the U.S. Army.

Maj. Gen. Jake S. Kwon is the director of strategic operations in the Headquarters, Department of the Army G-3/5/7. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect official positions of the U.S. Army and/or Department of Defense.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · March 10, 2025

14. Nuclear Proliferation Will Haunt ‘America First’

Excerpts:

The history of nuclear proliferation suggests that any decisions to shelter or encourage allied proliferation are likely to be permanent. With the exception of South Africa, no other state — not even Ukraine, which never had control over the weapons on its territory — has ever relinquished its nuclear weapons. Despite the remarkable success of the United States in leading nonproliferation efforts worldwide, the proliferation genie does not easily reenter its bottle. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is a lasting mark on international politics, and America’s freedom to maneuver, even if by “friendly states.”

Compared to these potential costs, the administration should tread carefully as it seeks to revise longstanding compacts with its treaty allies around the world. While Trump reels at the peacetime costs of sustaining forward-deployed conventional forces in Europe and Asia, seeing them as evidence of the United States being taken for a ride, the alternatives could be far more costly to the United States. Unleashing a cascade of nuclear proliferation, or rebuilding American economic strength in the aftermath of nuclear conflicts, would be far more expensive than sustaining the U.S. extended deterrence approach.

The surest way for the “crazy” power of nuclear weapons to boomerang back at the United States — constraining our freedom of action and potentially chain-ganging us into conflicts we seek to avoid — is for Washington to actively dismantle the extended nuclear deterrence architecture it so carefully crafted over three-quarters of a century, which managed to keep new allies from getting the bomb. In addition to reinstalling the software of extended deterrence, in order to prevent allied proliferation, the United States may have to make adjustments to the size or composition of its own deployed nuclear force posture. This will ensure that its hardware remains credible for deterrence, as well as assurance — some degree of vertical proliferation may be necessary to stanch the threat of horizontal proliferation, an oft lost point.

The post-Cold War conflation of nuclear nonproliferation with the so-called liberal order was understandable given the geopolitical context of the 1990s, but for the United States, is largely ahistorical. If Trump wants to pursue a grand strategic project with the goal of keeping ‘America First’, nuclear nonproliferation — not just by adversaries but also by allies — is an essential pillar.

Nuclear Proliferation Will Haunt ‘America First’ - War on the Rocks

Ankit Panda, Vipin Narang, and Pranay Vaddi

warontherocks.com · by Ankit Panda · March 10, 2025

It is no coincidence that Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland openly raised the possibility that his country may need to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Both major parties in South Korea are doing the same. This is a response to what is happening in Washington, where the Trump administration is renovating America’s post-World War II grand strategy, tossing aside hard-built alliances, norms on global trade, and much else. Coercive tariff threats, territorial expansionist rhetoric, and expressions of trans-national far-right political solidarity are in. Liberal values and support for what American presidents once described as a “rules-based order” are out. Trump has openly said that allies can no longer reliably count on America, or its nuclear forces, as their ultimate security guarantor. Tusk’s willingness to consider a nuclear arsenal should therefore not be surprising. Indeed, other American allies around the world are considering the same, as well as alternative nuclear-sharing agreements that once seemed fanciful. This will be the potential price of gutting American extended deterrence commitments, the most successful nonproliferation tool the United States has had for three-quarters of a century.

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, to friend and foe alike, has been a core bipartisan pillar of American foreign policy for decades. Perhaps some Trump administration officials greeted Tusk’s announcement warmly. Indeed, it is no secret that President Donald Trump himself and some of his prominent advisors have shrugged at the prospect of nuclear proliferation, despite the president’s open discomfort with nuclear weapons and his musings about nuclear disarmament as a part of a deal with Russia and China. To be sure, proliferation to American allies might mean big savings on the peacetime costs of forward deployed troops and avoiding entanglement in crises in far-flung theaters.

However, welcoming more nuclear-armed countries, even if they are friends of the United States, threatens core American interests. Trump’s “America First” instincts rely on and relish unrestrained American power and primacy. As such, Trump may find that the longstanding American interest in nonproliferation actually serves his worldview rather than compromises it. Allies with nuclear weapons will complicate America’s ability to exercise its power. They’re more likely to chart independent, possibly oppositional political and economic policies. And perhaps counter-intuitively, they might make it more likely that the United States gets dragged into a nuclear crisis or war.

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The Real Costs of Nonproliferation to American Power

While U.S. policy makers in the post-Cold War decades focused global nonproliferation attention on countries other than allies — notably India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran — the looming shifts in a U.S. grand strategy that may bring America home have, in recent years, put the focus on allies. Until now these allies, including South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Poland, have been able to forswear nuclear weapons because they were ultimately shielded by the American nuclear umbrella.

Early in the Cold War, following the advent of nuclear weapons, the United States did not intuitively grasp the reasons why nuclear proliferation to its friends would harm its interests. It was only in the early 1960s, after France sought a nuclear weapons capability to assert its independence from the United States and NATO’s nuclear deterrent mission, that Washington began to really introspect on the value of nonproliferation for its own interests.

The United States worked hard during the Cold War to prevent proliferation — not just by its adversaries but also its allies. A combination of security commitments, forward-positioning of U.S. conventional and nuclear weapons, and a lattice-work of dialogues, exercises, and information sharing agreements formed the heart of a U.S. strategy that “extended” deterrence to what is now more than 30 allies. Rendering this credible was a constant effort for the United States. This was especially true at the height of the Cold War and has become more pertinent recently amid growing threat perceptions in Europe and Northeast Asia alike.

This strategy, backed by a large U.S. nuclear arsenal, a flexible nuclear posture, and an explicit political commitment to extend these tools to the defense of Europe, let the allies safely focus on other ventures. European democracies focused on economic growth and trade and the well-being of their citizens, enabled by U.S. aid. In turn, these actions stimulated the U.S. economy, creating a massive long-term marketplace for U.S. producers. The commitments Washington undertook made nuclear weapons acquisition by allies and partners unnecessary, and rather than pursuing expensive, dangerous nuclear weapons programs, allies agreed to maintain a non-nuclear status and built wealth instead.

The origins of what became an enduring strategic preference for nonproliferation at the time had little to do with high-minded ideas about liberal internationalism, political solidarity with democracies, or values. It was good for American security interests. The spread of nuclear weapons, U.S. policymakers observed, would only serve to limit America’s freedom of action in the international system and endanger U.S. interests. Simply put: Nuclear proliferation to both allies and adversaries dilutes the privileges of power the United States enjoys.

‘America First’ Needs Nonproliferation

In the contemporary context, this quite literally means that pursuing a grand strategy that seeks to place ‘America First’ at the heart of U.S. statecraft should prize nonproliferation. Most importantly, allied proliferation complicates America’s ability to exercise its hard power, limiting the privileges of primacy that Trump so relishes.

First, in practical terms, allies today that consider building their own nuclear arsenals need to contend with the strategic and technical barriers to actually doing so. Ukraine, Poland, South Korea, and even Taiwan all would face the potential of an explicit renunciation of U.S. protection or assurances if they chose to pursue nuclear weapons. While some in these states may argue this is today’s status quo with the Trump administration’s approach to alliances, they would face the problem of vulnerability to attack as they sought to build the bomb. Reprocessing and enrichment facilities will be hardly invulnerable to attack, and their adversaries — Russia, China, and North Korea — will have ample incentive to consider sabotage, conventional air strikes, or worse. Russian, Chinese, or North Korean attempts to kill our proliferation-curious allies to stop them from getting there could drag us into a major conflict, as they would certainly threaten the stability of the global economy and thus American interests.

Second, even with friendly countries that might successfully proliferate, the actions they take after acquiring nuclear weapons may force Washington to intervene in crises or wars against its own interests. For instance, an ally may force a U.S. president to step in and prevent dangerous nuclear signaling or use, as has been the case in the past with the United Kingdom, France, and Israel in 1956; Israel in 1973; and India and Pakistan after 1998.

A newly emboldened but still weaker nuclear-armed ally or partner may try to provoke a major U.S. adversary, pulling the United States into a crisis as a mediator, or worse. With more nuclear-armed states, the intersection of crises that may implicate U.S. interests with nuclear weapons uncontrolled by Washington becomes far more likely. In a world of reduced U.S. influence on multiple, skittish new nuclear decision-making centers in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere, states are less likely to consider Washington’s opinion before engaging in nuclear threat-making — or use — to address local grievances or right historical wrongs.

This would hardly serve an ‘America First’ world. The potential for metastasizing nuclear crises assuredly contradict the goal of the “strategic prioritization” that former and incoming officials support.

In addition to diminishing American power, further proliferation anywhere — especially by prosperous, democratic allies of the United States, like South Korea — is likely to beget further proliferation everywhere. While some U.S. officials may be comfortable with a nuclear South Korea, they should ask whether they are comfortable with all that may follow in total — such as Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, all supporters of today’s nonproliferation regime. Should this dam break, the United States’ relative power and influence stands to decline. And Trump’s dreams of a denuclearization pact with Russia and China will be completely out of reach in a world where multiple new nuclear aspirants emerge. Keeping ‘America First’ in that world becomes a lot more challenging. Keeping nuclear use from occurring, and potentially embroiling the United States, an ally, or other economic partner in a conflict, becomes much more unpredictable.

The history of nuclear proliferation suggests that any decisions to shelter or encourage allied proliferation are likely to be permanent. With the exception of South Africa, no other state — not even Ukraine, which never had control over the weapons on its territory — has ever relinquished its nuclear weapons. Despite the remarkable success of the United States in leading nonproliferation efforts worldwide, the proliferation genie does not easily reenter its bottle. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is a lasting mark on international politics, and America’s freedom to maneuver, even if by “friendly states.”

Compared to these potential costs, the administration should tread carefully as it seeks to revise longstanding compacts with its treaty allies around the world. While Trump reels at the peacetime costs of sustaining forward-deployed conventional forces in Europe and Asia, seeing them as evidence of the United States being taken for a ride, the alternatives could be far more costly to the United States. Unleashing a cascade of nuclear proliferation, or rebuilding American economic strength in the aftermath of nuclear conflicts, would be far more expensive than sustaining the U.S. extended deterrence approach.

The surest way for the “crazy” power of nuclear weapons to boomerang back at the United States — constraining our freedom of action and potentially chain-ganging us into conflicts we seek to avoid — is for Washington to actively dismantle the extended nuclear deterrence architecture it so carefully crafted over three-quarters of a century, which managed to keep new allies from getting the bomb. In addition to reinstalling the software of extended deterrence, in order to prevent allied proliferation, the United States may have to make adjustments to the size or composition of its own deployed nuclear force posture. This will ensure that its hardware remains credible for deterrence, as well as assurance — some degree of vertical proliferation may be necessary to stanch the threat of horizontal proliferation, an oft lost point.

The post-Cold War conflation of nuclear nonproliferation with the so-called liberal order was understandable given the geopolitical context of the 1990s, but for the United States, is largely ahistorical. If Trump wants to pursue a grand strategic project with the goal of keeping ‘America First’, nuclear nonproliferation — not just by adversaries but also by allies — is an essential pillar.

Become a Member

Ankit Panda is the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the host of Thinking the Unthinkable for War on the Rocks.

Vipin Narang is the Frank Stanton professor of nuclear security and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as acting assistant secretary of defense responsible for nuclear deterrence policy during the Biden administration.

Pranay Vaddi is the senior nuclear fellow at the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently served as President Joe Biden’s senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation on the National Security Council.

Image: Lisa Simunaci via U.S. Department of Defense

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Ankit Panda · March 10, 2025

15. How to Understand Air Force Information Warfare Using Football

A very interesting and creative analogy.

But I note there is no mention of psychological warfare (PSYWAR) or psychological operations (PSYOP) or military information support operations (MISO) which I think are a necessary component if you want to affect adversary behavior,

Video at the link: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-information-warfare-football/?utm

Excerpt:

Information warfare involves using military capabilities in or through “the information environment” to affect adversary behavior and protect against adversary attempts to do the same. It encompasses several fields, including cyber operations, electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO), public affairs, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and weather, but none of that really rolls off the tongue..

How to Understand Air Force Information Warfare Using Football

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · March 7, 2025

March 7, 2025 | By David Roza

AURORA, Colo.—As deputy commander of the 16th Air Force, the organization responsible for information warfare, Maj. Gen. Larry Broadwell has a difficult task explaining what he does to outsiders.

“It’s hard to really understand the importance of it,” Broadwell said March 4 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “I was trying to explain this to my dad at the breakfast table one time, and he just wasn’t getting it.”

Broadwell’s father isn’t the only one; a 2024 report by the RAND Corporation said information warfare in the Air Force lacks clear roles and responsibilities, adequate resources, and a unifying identity, which can contribute to unclear expectations of what information warfare can do and how it fits into the joint force.

“Airmen cited a sense of paralysis related to this issue, noting, ‘without a [socialized] definition of IW, everyone in the USAF IW community is unsure of how to proceed, what it means, and what is expected of them,’” RAND wrote.

Information warfare involves using military capabilities in or through “the information environment” to affect adversary behavior and protect against adversary attempts to do the same. It encompasses several fields, including cyber operations, electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO), public affairs, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and weather, but none of that really rolls off the tongue.

Broadwell realized he needed an analogy, so he created one using America’s most popular sport: football. While U.S. military leaders frequently use football terminology to make a point, Broadwell’s analogy was unusually elaborate and took about two minutes to explain during a panel discussion.

It starts with the offensive coordinator, the coach who manages a football team’s offense. The offensive coordinator calls a play and relays it to the quarterback via a radio in the quarterback’s helmet. The quarterback briefs the plan with the rest of the offensive unit in a huddle, but the quarterback can change the play based on what he sees on the line, also known as calling an audible.

“He gets to the line, looks across at the linebackers, he says, ‘Hey, looks like the linebackers are kind of soft on their heels, they’re probably going to drop back into coverage,’” Broadwell said. “I’m going to call an audible, I’m going to hand it off to the running back.”

The quarterback hands the football to the running back, who runs the ball two yards before being tackled by the defending team.

“A success? Maybe,” Broadwell said. “So that’s kind of where we are today, but where I see information taking us in the future is a much more enhanced position.”

The analogy starts the same way: the quarterback gets the play from the offensive coordinator and goes to the line. But instead of guessing what the defense will do, the quarterback gets the intercepted play that the defensive coordinator sent to the linebacker.

“So he knows not what it looks like, but what they’re actually going to do,” Broadwell said.

This time, the quarterback can call a more effective audible because he knows exactly how to evade the defensive linemen. In Broadwell’s analogy, the quarterback fakes a handoff to the running back to distract the linebackers, which buys him time to throw the ball.

“Here’s where it gets good,” Broadwell said. “He looks across the field and he doesn’t have to decide who’s open. Information tells him who’s open. So the 1.34 seconds an NFL quarterback has to make a decision, he makes that decision immediately.”

Stretching the analogy even further, information warfare enables mid-flight updates to the football, telling it to adjust to a different receiver if the original is about to be covered by a defending player.

“So as that safety crashes down, now there’s an in-flight update provided to the football, and it no longer goes to the star receiver who was running a 10-yard out,” Broadwell said. “You see where this is going, it goes to the open receiver to score a touchdown.”

Information warfare, Broadwell summed up, “is the difference between a two-yard gain and a touchdown.”

Timothy Jackson breaks a tackle from Jaylon McClinton on Nov. 2, 2019 during a game against Army at Falcon Stadium. U.S. Air Force photo/Trevor Cokley

Now What?

The football analogy makes the case for information warfare, but the tough part is how to implement it when the football is a fighter jet, a pallet of humanitarian aid, or some other effect.

“The trick for us is to figure this out, because information is going to be readily available to us,” Broadwell said. “It’s figuring out what information in this analogy gets to the quarterback, what information makes it to the football so that we can score the touchdown.”

Indeed, decision-makers may find themselves overwhelmed by all the information coming from sensors in space, underwater, and everywhere in between. Other officials made similar points at the symposium.

“If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said our analysts need more data,” said Greg Ryckman, deputy director for global integration for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Today, I would tell you that they’re swimming in data, and they have to figure out how to make sense of the data.”

The 16th Air Force launched the Phoenix Initiative to develop better information management solutions with industry and academia.

“The white hot areas of innovation are areas where the tactical expert is confronted with a problem and he meets with academia and/or industry to solve the problem,” Broadwell said.

But there are still challenges in terms of organization, funding, and focus. Last year, RAND critiqued the Air Force for not publishing formal, actionable requirements laying out the exact roles and responsibilities for IW organizations, which frustrates and confuses both IW Airmen and the non-IW groups they work with, RAND wrote.

The Air Force also plans to elevate Air Forces Cyber to a service component command, which leaves question marks over the future of the 16th Air Force, since AFCYBER is a significant proportion of the 49,000-strong unit.

“We’re elevating our cyber forces and there are a lot of intertwined capabilities where we and [National Security Agency] particularly work together,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said during a visit to 16th Air Force in October. “At the end of the day what drives the decision is going to be what’s going to make us more competitive, what’s going to put us in a better position to compete with China, not just in near term, but over long-term strategic competition.”

AFA Warfare Symposium

Cyber

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · March 7, 2025

16. ‘Lambs to the slaughter’ (Part 1) How the CIA failed its officers in Cuba and the FBI failed them at home

‘Lambs to the slaughter’ (Part 1)

How the CIA failed its officers in Cuba and the FBI failed them at home

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/lambs-to-the-slaughter-part-1?utm

Jack Murphy and Sean D. Naylor

Mar 10, 2025

∙ Paid

The U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, in March 2016 (State Dept. photo)

It was about 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, and two CIA officers were sitting in the window of the Green Eggs Café at the corner of 13^th and Locust Streets in downtown Philadelphia, catching up with each other and enjoying a leisurely breakfast.

Adam and Michael (not their real names, which the CIA forbids them to use) were in Philadelphia to receive treatment for a debilitating range of symptoms from which they – and about two dozen others – had been suffering since their service in 2016 and 2017 at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. In almost all cases, the onset of these symptoms, which included dizziness, vertigo, headaches and nausea, had been sudden and, to those affected, inexplicable.

As other U.S. personnel posted elsewhere came down with similar symptoms, the federal government insisted on using bureaucratic gobbledygook to refer to those episodes, calling them “anomalous health incidents.” But the feds were too late. Because the phenomenon first came to light in the Cuban capital, some in CIA headquarters were keen to tie it to the Castro government, so they fed a catchy name for the symptoms into the public sphere: “Havana Syndrome.”

For many, including Adam and Michael, the symptoms not only continued for several months, but worsened. Some never fully recovered.

What made the Havana victims’ circumstances even worse was the lack of support they received from their own agency. Senior CIA officials tried to convince them that they were imagining things, even as the evidence mounted that they had been attacked. Adam, Michael and their colleagues felt betrayed.

“They just did not want to believe us,” Michael said.

(Officially, Adam is only allowed to say he was a U.S. government employee in Cuba who retired from the CIA. However, the agency allows him to acknowledge that in 2018 then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo awarded him the Exceptional Service Medallion, a CIA award given “for injury or death resulting from service in an area of hazard.” The High Side independently confirmed that Adam was working as a CIA case officer in Cuba.)

Now, in Philadelphia, the next unsettling turn in their story was about to unfold. As Adam tucked into his pancakes, they noticed a tall, white, middle-aged man on the sidewalk photographing them with a camera that was slung around his neck.

The lean, white-haired man was only 15 to 20 feet away “at most,” Adam said. “We noticed he was pointing the camera at us in the window and was taking pictures, and we both looked at each other and then looked around the restaurant, and we’re like, ‘What is he taking pictures of?’”

Other than themselves, the café was almost deserted. And unlike the colorful mural that decorated the building on the other side of the parking lot across the street, which the photographer was ignoring, the beige walls around the restaurant’s large windows were bland and unremarkable.

A photo taken by Adam of the outside of the Green Eggs Cafe immediately after they were photographed sitting in the window. (Photo courtesy of Adam)

“It’s just the restaurant window, with me and [Michael] in the window, and a plain concrete wall,” Adam said. Michael and Adam were sure that the man was there to photograph them, even though, Adam said, he tried to “obfuscate” that fact by sometimes pointing the camera away from them. “He was very much focused upon the two of us,” Michael said.

The mystery photographer who Adam and Michael were convinced was focused on them. He ignored the colorful mural behind him. (Photo courtesy of Michael)

After a few moments, the mystery photographer stepped behind a lamppost. “He’s checking his pictures on his camera to make sure that whatever it is has turned out … then shuffles back over in front of the window, and he starts photographing us again,” Adam said. At this point, Michael pulled out his iPhone and took a series of photographs of the man. After spending no more than two minutes taking photographs, according to Adam, the individual ducked into a nearby alleyway and disappeared.

They mystery photographer turns away from the window in which Adam and Michael were sitting. “He’s trying to pretend like he wasn’t photographing us … but it didn’t work,” said Adam. (Photo courtesy of Michael)

But that wasn’t the end of it, according to Michael, who said that as he and Adam walked away from the café, the man reappeared behind them, tailing them for about a dozen blocks before they split up to throw him off.

Adam and Michael notified local FBI counterintelligence agents of what had happened, giving them the photos Michael had taken. Using closed circuit cameras in the area, the agents traced the man’s path to and from the café, according to Adam. He had been staying at a nearby hotel, where cameras caught him taking an elevator down and exiting the building with two women, with whom he walked down the street before taking a left on 13^th Street, close to the café, at which point the women went their own way.

After taking his photographs at the café and then tailing Adam and Michael, the man returned alone to the hotel, checked out and caught a cab to the airport, from where he took a flight to another country that the FBI declined to identify to the CIA men. Nor would the bureau tell them where the mystery photographer was from, other than to acknowledge that he was a foreign national, according to Adam.

Michael, however, said that he learned secondhand from security officers at CIA headquarters that the man “had ties to Cuba.” Whatever his origin, the FBI told Adam and Michael that the government had “flagged” the man’s identity in case he ever tried to re-enter the country.

The encounter alarmed the CIA officers. “Why would you go take pictures of a concrete wall, with just a window with two guys eating breakfast, and then immediately leave the country?” Adam said. “Something doesn’t add up.”

Although they had no evidence of malfeasance on the photographer’s part, to Adam and Michael the episode appeared to be the latest incident in an extraordinary campaign of harassment that made it clear someone was trying to intimidate them and other Havana Syndrome victims long after they had returned to the United States. This campaign used spy-versus-spy tactics that CIA officers often face in hostile capitals such as Moscow and Havana but from which they had previously been presumed safe in America.

In addition to overt surveillance, these intimidation tactics included breaking into, stealing from and fouling their homes, remotely accessing and tasking their phones, and mailing sinister packages to them from abroad, all while the victims fought bitterly against an intransigent CIA bureaucracy that seemed to have little interest in helping them recover from their injuries.

The wide-ranging intimidation campaign, which has not been previously reported, targeted not only Havana Syndrome patients, but their doctors and other medical staff. The harassment became so egregious that the CIA deployed its Threat Management Unit to ensure that the homes of Havana Syndrome victims were as secure as possible. Nevertheless, the CIA and the FBI displayed so little interest in figuring out who was behind the campaign that some targets wondered if the agency itself was the guilty party.

As members of the original Havana cohort contended with this intimidation campaign, the number of Havana Syndrome cases continued to grow, with scores of CIA, State Department, FBI and other U.S. government personnel stricken in locations ranging from Guangzhou, China, to Vienna, Austria, to Washington, D.C. But even as the numbers grew, the truth about Havana Syndrome remained frustratingly out of reach, hidden in “the wilderness of mirrors,” as legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton described the world of spy and counterspy.

For this two-part series, The High Side spoke with several of the original CIA victims whose experiences in Havana first brought the “anomalous health incidents” phenomenon to the public eye, including some who have never spoken out before. The High Side also consulted doctors and other medical experts who have studied Havana Syndrome, as well as military experts, some of whom reported that the U.S. government has long had a directed beam device that causes symptoms similar to those experienced by Havana Syndrome victims.

It all begins with the question: What really went down in Havana?

Adam is the former CIA officer sometimes referred to as Havana Syndrome’s “Patient Zero,” although he was not the first U.S. official in Havana to suffer the symptoms that define the condition.

Before joining the agency, Adam was a part-time police officer in Maine, working long hours when people flooded into his town during the warmer months. It was a good job, but traveling on his own time expanded his horizons and got him thinking about bigger things. “I wanted to see the world,” he said.

Adam applied to every federal agency he could. But there was a government hiring freeze in place, with few exceptions. One of those was the CIA, which called him back first. Adam came down to Virginia to complete the application process for an operations officer position, even though he knew little about the world of espionage.

In 2014, Adam started his CIA training, which typically occurs at “The Farm,” the agency’s facility at Camp Peary, Virginia. It was fun, he said. It turned out he was good at learning tradecraft and putting it to use when running surveillance detection routes or meeting with the role players acting as sources.

At the end of the course, the graduates were handed envelopes containing pieces of paper with the locations of their first duty assignments written on them. Adam and his best friend opened the envelopes and, without reading, stuck the pieces of paper with the country names on them on their foreheads and played a guessing game with each other. As it turned out, Adam was heading to Cuba.

Some newly minted officers with less stressful assignments were out the door within a few months. But Havana was considered a very difficult city in which to operate, and before he left for a case officer assignment there, Adam had to undergo advanced tradecraft training. This would have included the Hostile Environment Tradecraft Course, in which, seven days a week for two months, students receive grueling training that, according to a former graduate of the course, simulates working in high-risk locations like Cuba, Russia and China, where the host nation security force conducts aggressive counterintelligence against the CIA.

During the HETC course, “you probably average two to four hours of sleep a night,” said the course graduate. “It is the most intensive surveillance detection class the U.S. government has and there’s a huge washout rate,” said a former senior CIA operations officer.

Next, Adam had to attend Spanish language school. He also spent a lot of time at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, reading historical accounts of Cuba, including some by other CIA officers who had done tours there.

Although Cuba was historically a denied area, harassing surveillance hadn't been really bad there since the late 1990s, according to Adam. Still, the Interior Ministry’s intelligence service, the Direccion de Inteligencia, was known to assign a team of shrinks to figure out how to psychologically break CIA officers stationed there. The DI’s tactics included breaking into a CIA officer's residence and urinating in his mouthwash, flattening car tires, and cutting electrical lines, Adam said. CIA officers assumed, and sometimes knew for certain, that the DI had wired their homes, fixed tracking devices to their cars, and was otherwise scrutinizing their every move.

These intense counterintelligence efforts had limited the CIA to recruiting – at best – only a few genuine assets in Cuba, according to a former senior CIA official. (On paper, there may be dozens more assets, but nearly all of them are DI double agents, the former senior official said.)

However, the CIA decided to take advantage of the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba and the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana by getting much more aggressive about attempting to recruit Cubans to spy for the United States, according to Adam. Before he went down, he said, he was given “a pep talk” by the chief of operations at the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Mission Center – an old Russia hand who told him that the agency was now adopting a “gloves-off” approach to Cuban operations.

Scuba, cigars … and scorpions

Adam arrived in Cuba in October 2016 and moved into his embassy-assigned residence, which was the lower half of a split-level house. (Another U.S. official lived in the upstairs apartment.) Although this was to be Adam’s home for his entire tour, it had previously been used as housing for U.S. personnel on temporary duty, and was known to have attracted more-than-average attention from the DI’s counterintelligence operatives, according to Adam.

That trend continued during Adam’s first few weeks in country. Cuban operatives drained his water cistern, cut his internet lines, and one night, when he finally lost his surveillance tail, they broke into his home, piled up his clothes and urinated on them.

Other embassy officials, particularly the CIA officers, received treatment that was similar, but fine-tuned based on how they reacted, according to Adam. “They find out what works for you and then they keep doing it … and try to break you with it,” he said.

Putting scorpions into U.S. officials’ homes was a favorite DI tactic. A CIA officer’s wife went to put on her pajamas one evening, only for a scorpion to fall out. Closer inspection revealed that it had been taped to the inside of her nightclothes, according to Adam. On another occasion, a Foreign Service officer came home to find a large scorpion waiting for her. “It had been stepped on, so half of the legs had been broken,” said Adam. “It was just walking in circles, so that she would come home and find it.”

There was no danger of the DI being spread too thin. The staff of the CIA’s Havana station could be counted on the fingers of one hand. With his incoming station chief going through HETC back in the States, Adam frequently found himself as the acting chief. He spent much of his first two months in country familiarizing himself with Havana’s neighborhoods and brushing up on the Cuban dialect of Spanish.

Away from the travails of being a spy, however, the Havana “lifestyle was ten out of ten,” said Adam, who extolled the virtues of the city’s “epic cigar bars” and exquisite scuba diving. The surveillance came on hot and heavy, but he was doing his job and loving it until 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 29, 2016.

Adam in Havana in cheerier times, before he was first attacked. (Photo courtesy of Adam)

The start of the attacks

That afternoon, during a period when he was acting station chief, Adam arrived home with plans to watch a few episodes of “It's Aways Sunny in Philadelphia” on his laptop before hitting the gym. Suddenly, it seemed as if every dog on his block began barking in unison. Then a different noise filled his bedroom, which was at the back of the house with windows pointing to the rear.

“It felt like a singular non-wavering blast of sound,” Adam told The High Side. With the noise came a sharp, intense pain, “like sticking a No. 2 pencil in your eardrum.”

After several minutes, Adam started texting his brother in the United States. “I was telling my brother in real time what was happening because I thought that if I ended up dying, they were just going to call it something shitty, like … natural causes,” he said. But from the very beginning of his ordeal, Adam was convinced that he was being attacked.

“They're firing some deafening noise maker at my apt currently,” he told his brother at 4:32 p.m. in a text message later shared with The High Side. “My head feels like it is going to explode.”

Adam tried to shrug it off, as he had done with other forms of harassment in Cuba, but the discomfort became too intense. He tried to block the ringing in his ears by covering his head with a pillow, to no effect.

A photo Adam took of himself during his first attack. Wrapping the pillow around his head did nothing to stop the ringing in his ears. (Photo courtesy of Adam)

The pain was so excruciating that Adam began to see black walls encroaching on the periphery of his vision. After about 20 minutes, he moved to his kitchen. “I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore,” he said. “I could feel the vibration in my chest of me talking to myself, but I couldn’t hear it.”

Nonetheless, moving to the kitchen provided some relief. “My ears still hurt, but they weren’t like, stabbing, stabbing, and it didn’t feel like my head was in a vise anymore,” he told The High Side.

Adam then moved to the living room, at the front of the house. Once there, his symptoms subsided. He decided that remaining there represented his best defense against his unseen attackers. “If they’ve got a device set up to hit my bedroom, it’s going to take a lot of work and it will be noticeable for them to move a device round to the front of the house to get through the front windows to get to me,” he said.

Opting to spend the night on his couch, Adam first wanted to retrieve the laptop and two phones he’d left in the bedroom. He walked cautiously back down the hall, monitoring himself for any new pain, but detected nothing. “It must be over,” he thought. But as he entered his bedroom, “what felt like a baseball bat just hit me, and I dropped to the floor.”

Crawling to his bed, Adam popped up quickly to snatch his devices and a pillow before running out of the room. That night, he could barely sleep. “I was just in pain,” he said. In the hour before dawn, when he realized he could once again hear his air conditioner, which had been running all night, he knew that at least his hearing was returning to normal, 12 hours after he had lost it.

Fearing that he was experiencing some sort of breakdown, or maybe even a stroke, Adam went to see the embassy physician's assistant the next morning. After getting a clean bill of health, Adam explained what he had experienced the night before. The PA's eyes widened. About a month previously, he had experienced something similar.

The PA and his American girlfriend had been downstairs in his house when he got blasted. They moved upstairs into the bedroom to try to escape the sound, to no avail. The PA told Adam that it felt as if the noise followed them, Adam recalled. The sound drowned out the television and air conditioning. When the PA went outside to see if there was anything going on, the sound stopped, and did not return when he stepped back inside, according to Adam.

Right after his appointment with the PA, Adam went to see the embassy’s regional security officer. Inside a bug-proof room called a sensitive compartmented information facility, Adam told him what was going on. “You could see the look in his eyes change,” Adam recalled. The RSO had also had a similar experience.

Like the PA, the RSO and his wife were hit around Thanksgiving of 2016, when he was awoken by his wife’s screaming, according to Adam. The RSO immediately heard the sound too, but the couple tried to ignore it, Adam said the RSO told him. (The High Side was unable to locate the RSO.)

Later on Dec. 30, the day after Adam was first attacked, he and the RSO spoke with U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis about what had happened to them.

The ambassador’s first reaction was anger that he had not been kept in the loop, according to Adam. “He was super-angry that this much shit had been happening to all of his people, and he hadn’t really known about a lot of it,” Adam said. (DeLaurentis told The High Side he had “no recollection” of reacting with anger when Adam and the RSO briefed him.)

But DeLaurentis also asked Adam whether the agency had done anything to the Cubans that might have prompted the attacks. Adam assured him the agency had done nothing that would have warranted such a significant response. DeLaurentis accepted the explanation and resolved to help them work toward a solution, asking Adam to draft a State Department cable describing everything that had been going on over the previous few months.

Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, speaking at the flag-raising ceremony to celebrate the re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in August 2015. (State Dept; photo)

Adam had already been giving CIA headquarters regular updates on the harassment he and the other CIA officers had been suffering in Havana, so after sending a quick cable to Langley about the events of the previous 24 hours, he drafted a longer cable for the State Department, detailing the intimidation campaign that the Cubans had been waging against him and others from the embassy.

When Adam came home at about the same time as the previous day, the same sequence of events played out: He was hit again as soon as he entered his bedroom. “I was pissed,” he said. “It refucked everything again. It all hurt. It was all stabbing pain.”

But this time, Adam had the presence of mind to record the sound he was hearing on his Samsung Galaxy phone. “I was angry now,” he said. “I was like, ‘Fuck these guys,’ so I went outside with my phone and started recording.” After figuring out which bedroom window the sound was being aimed at, he made a short recording, which he immediately sent to his brother, to preserve it in case the Cubans were able to wipe his phone.

1×

0:00

-0:28

The audio recording Adam made that night, provided to The High Side by Adam.

This pattern repeated for about a week, according to Adam. “[I’d] come home, I’d go back to my bedroom to get changed to go to the gym or whatever, dogs barked, sound starts.” But on Jan. 5, the assault on his senses changed. “The 5^th felt different,” he said. “The 5^th was not [a] localized-in-my-bedroom experience. The 5^th was this weird broad wave hitting the side of the house feel.” But the sound was still there, so he went outside and made another recording, which, together with the one he’d made on Dec. 30, he sent to Langley.

Because he was the first officer to raise the alarm about the mysterious attacks in Cuba, Adam became known as Havana Syndrome’s “Patient Zero.” But, as he was learning, he was far from its first victim.

* * *

By the time Michael landed in Havana in July 2016, he had been with the CIA eight years. That included multiple stints in Afghanistan, where he worked as a support officer for the CIA's paramilitary force and for Joint Special Operations Command’s Omega teams.

Having spent most of his career in war zones, this tour promised to be different. He was going to be the chief of support for the small CIA station, a job that entailed a variety of logistics and administrative tasks. But like Adam, he sometimes found himself as acting chief of station.

Michael’s embassy-assigned home was in a residential neighborhood, three blocks from the nearest American. The house had a large window facing the street, where there was a permanent Cuban police checkpoint. He was sitting on a couch with the window to his left in mid-October 2016 when he first experienced what later became known as Havana Syndrome.

“It felt like the [left] side of my head was going to explode from the inside out,” Michael told The High Side. After a minute, his paramilitary training kicked in. “You’ve got to get the hell off the X,” he told himself. (The “X” is what the U.S. military calls an ambush’s kill zone. Soldiers – and CIA paramilitary officers – are trained to get out of that kill zone as fast as possible.)

Michael moved quickly into a guest bedroom, putting several concrete walls between himself and the front of the house. “I was nauseous,” he said. “My head was killing me. I lost hearing in my ear.” But after moving deeper into the house, his symptoms began to dissipate.

Like Adam, Michael’s first thought in the aftermath of the attack was that something was wrong with him. He had no idea that others had undergone something similar.

But unlike Adam, Michael made no recovery from the initial attack. Not knowing how to approach others about what he was going through, he suffered in silence for weeks that stretched into months, becoming increasingly frustrated with himself at work for not being able to perform to his usual standards.

His head continued to pound and whenever he closed his eyes, he would instantly experience vertigo. He had to cling to the walls as he moved around. The hearing he lost that first night would never return.

And the attacks kept coming.

In early January 2017, shortly after Michael’s third such experience, he was sitting in the CIA station when Adam brought up what had happened to him in late December. “Have you heard this?” he asked Michael, before playing one of the recordings he had made of his attacks.

“I nearly threw up in the office,” Michael said. A wave of emotions swept over him: fear, because the sound was something he associated with “annihilation,” then anger, and finally, once they started talking through it, relief. Now he knew he wasn't alone.

‘I was a crawling zombie.’

Adam and Michael were increasingly underperforming at work. “Why is it taking us so long to get cables out?” Michael wondered. “Why do I have 50 Post-it notes on my computer to remind me to do the most basic things?”

Michael was also having trouble eating and sleeping. “I was a crawling zombie,” he said.

Adam was routinely updating his bosses at the Western Hemisphere Mission Center’s Cuba office in Langley about the attacks, but his reports seemed to be getting little traction.

Then, on Feb. 3, the station communications officer’s wife got hit badly, according to Adam. He immediately sent it up in a cable to Langley. Six days later, Michael was struck again. Soon after, on Feb. 14, Adam received a phone call from one of the mission center’s older, more experienced officers.

The old-timer said that the office was finally taking his reports about the attacks seriously.

He told Adam that he didn't know what was going on in Havana, but that many years previously, while stationed in Panama, he had suffered a more conventional injury that he had never documented. That lack of paperwork later prevented him from getting the CIA to pay for his medical care.

He advised Adam to put all the information about his injuries into official cable traffic. As soon as he was off the phone, Adam drafted and sent a cable to Langley detailing what he and others were experiencing.

A short while later the same day, Dr. Scott Andrews (another pseudonym) was in the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, scrolling through what Adam described as “sort of a collective OMS mailbox” when his interest was piqued by Adam’s cable, which the veteran officer in the Cuba office had “forwarded down to them,” Adam said.

Andrews had recently been assigned to the OMS main office at Langley after a stint working as a weapons of mass destruction analyst at the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Prior to his government employment he had worked in academic medicine in the field of occupational and environmental toxicology.

Andrews went up to the Cuba office and asked what else they had on the issues Adam had raised. The office gave him all Adam’s reports on the medical problems in Havana, which Andrews read with mounting curiosity, as he tried to figure out their cause.

When he learned that Adam had sent the Cuba office a recording of the Dec. 30 attack, Andrews tracked down the recording, which nobody at Langley had analyzed, and took it to his former colleagues in the Directorate of Science and Technology, according to Adam (whose second recording had fallen through the cracks to the extent that nobody with whom Andrews spoke was aware of it).

Andrews’ old DS&T pals worked fast. “They took that [recording] and ran it though every type of analysis that you can think of,” said Adam. What they found alarmed them.

Tearlines and demarches

On the same day he sent his cable, Adam received a high-priority reply from Langley stating that DS&T’s analysis had detected “a man-made signal … that can cause serious injury and/or death.”

That afternoon, Adam met DeLaurentis in the SCIF and relayed the gist of DS&T’s reply. The ambassador was shocked. “He requested an unclassified tearline with the same information and language that he could read verbatim to the Cubans,” said Adam.

(A “tearline” is CIA-speak for the part of a classified report that does not contain sensitive information about sources and methods and can therefore be shared more widely than the classified report. It is so called because the two sections of the report are divided by a perforated tearline, allowing them to be separated.)

The next day Adam wrote a full chronology of the attacks and sent it up in a cable to Langley, followed immediately by a separate cable outlining his conversation with DeLaurentis about the tearline. The CIA provided the tearline the following day, Feb. 16, according to Adam.

DeLaurentis used the tearline when delivering a demarche to the Cuban Foreign Ministry Feb. 17. Meanwhile, in Washington, the State Department called in Cuba’s ambassador to the United States and issued him with a similar demarche, according to Adam.

On Feb. 23, DeLaurentis met with Cuban President Raul Castro, according to ProPublica. During that meeting, Castro denied that Cuba had anything to do with whatever was happening to the U.S. personnel and offered to conduct a joint investigation with the Americans to solve the problem.

President Raul Castro of Cuba, seen here in a July 2012 meeting with then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Castro denied any Cuban role in the attacks on U.S. officials in his country. (Russian government photo via Wikimedia Commons)

In March 2017, DeLaurentis held a meeting with representatives from the Canadian, British, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and Spanish embassies, according to a diplomat who attended the meeting. DeLaurentis had two aims: to coordinate information with the other embassies in order to understand and counter whatever was happening; and for the Cubans to observe that the meeting was occurring and conclude that the Western countries were presenting a united front.

As the U.S. delegation briefed its findings about what the Americans were experiencing, the other participants were silent. But after the presentation, the Canadian charge d’affaires approached DeLaurentis and told him that staff at the Canadian Embassy were experiencing symptoms similar to those of their U.S. counterparts, according to the diplomat who was present.

Three hours later, the Cuban Foreign Ministry called the U.S. embassy to express their concern about the meeting, the diplomat said.

* * *

By the time he received the tearline from Langley and gave it to DeLaurentis, Adam’s physical and mental health were in sharp decline. Colleagues read drafts of his cables and told him they were gibberish.

He had moved into a friend’s house in Havana and was no longer hearing the sound he associated with the attacks. But he was still waking up at night with pounding headaches to find his pillow soaked in blood from nosebleeds.

Months later, after speaking with Canadian counterparts whose children had suffered similar symptoms, he realized that the headaches and nosebleeds meant he almost certainly was still being attacked, just silently. (The woman into whose house he had moved was also injured, he said.)

With the Obama administration attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, a congressional delegation was coming to visit Havana. Adam was set to brief them on Tuesday Feb. 21 and needed to prepare, but he was so exhausted and debilitated that he decided to take advantage of the Presidents Day long weekend and visit his parents in New England for a couple of days just to get some rest. He flew out on Feb.16.

TBI, or not TBI?

Back at Langley, Andrews’ questions were making senior officials nervous. When the doctor attempted to identify devices that could cause the damage that CIA officers were reporting, he was told to stand down, according to a former CIA official.

Andrews was missing something else he needed before taking the next step in his investigation: patients to examine. So, when he discovered that Adam was back in the United States for a couple of days, he asked to examine him. But Andrews’ bosses were reluctant to let him examine any Havana Syndrome victim, according to Adam.

Andrews found a way to force the issue: He revoked Adam's medical clearance, which meant he could not deploy again until an OMS doctor cleared him. The gambit worked. Adam’s bosses made sure that instead of briefing members of Congress in Havana on Feb. 21, he was meeting with Andrews in Langley.

“He ran some initial tests – hearing tests, vision tests – [and] found out that I had hearing loss on one side, which I didn’t have three months [previously] on my pre-departure medical,” said Adam. “Then he was like, ‘We’ve got to go see someone.’”

The “someone” that Andrews had in mind was Dr. Michael Hoffer at the University of Miami, a 21-year Navy veteran. Hoffer specialized in how the inner ear and outer ear interact with the brain. Andrews described Hoffer as the best ear, nose and throat specialist in the country, according to Adam. It didn’t hurt that he also possessed a security clearance.

But when Andrews called Adam the next day, it was with bad news: OMS had denied the trip, saying Miami was too far away. Instead, Adam was to see a doctor at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, roughly an hour’s drive from Washington. Andrews told Adam that he’d already booked him an appointment there for the next day, Feb. 23.

Adam and Andrews drove there in the doctor’s BMW M235 convertible. With the top down, it should have been a pleasant ride up Interstate 95, but motion sickness from whatever had happened to him in Havana ensured that was not the case for Adam. “The world is blowing by, and I want to puke my guts out,” he recalled.

At Johns Hopkins they met with Dr. Charles Della Santina, an inner ear specialist who founded and directs the hospital’s Vestibular NeuroEngineering Laboratory. After examining Adam, Della Santina’s strong recommendation was that Adam visit Hoffer in Miami.

OMS relented and Andrews called Hoffer on Feb. 24. Hoffer was in California but agreed to return to Miami early Monday Feb. 27 and meet them later that day, according to Adam, who flew down to Miami with Andrews that Sunday.

Adam was immediately impressed with Hoffer and his team. “He was amazing,” Adam said. “People wait months and months … to see him [Hoffer] and his team there. They have some of the best in the world … and every single specialist on that floor cleared their schedule to see me.”

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents dozens of Havana Syndrome victims, said “the CIA had some sort of relationship,” either with Hoffer himself or with the University of Miami, that allowed for this treatment. (Hoffer told The High Side that he had previously worked with the State Department, but not the CIA.) Asked about this, Adam declined to comment, but he acknowledged that although he both worked in Cuba and traveled to Miami using his real identity, the University of Miami “didn’t want my true name or anything in their records,” so just gave him a made-up identity as “a 50-year-old guy.”

Hoffer conducted a battery of tests on Adam, the start of an intense period of research by Hoffer and his team into the medical problems being suffered by U.S. officials in Cuba. (Because it was routine for U.S. Embassy personnel to fly from Havana to Miami, even to buy groceries, it meant that Hoffer’s embassy patients could visit him without alerting Cuban intelligence, according to Adam.)

Between March and July of 2017, Hoffer examined 25 Havana victims, sometimes within days of the onset of their symptoms. He had no doubt that the medical problems they were reporting were genuine.

“We found specific balance disorders unique to this population” along with “cognitive abnormalities and ocular motor movement abnormalities,” Hoffer told The High Side. “It is not that any one symptom was special, but the combination was pretty consistent and fairly unique.”

Asked whether Havana Syndrome could be explained by mass hysteria – as at least one later study alleged – Hoffer said that while hysteria might have played a role with people who later heard about what the first victims were suffering, some effects he observed in the initial cohort could be neither faked nor imagined.

Michael Hoffer, MD, seen here in 2008 as a Navy captain on duty in Iraq, where he furthered his research into traumatic brain injuries. Almost a decade later, as a University of Miami doctor, Hoffer would be pressured to change his TBI diagnoses of Havana Syndrome victims, those victims said. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)

Faced with a unique set of symptoms that were difficult to categorize, Hoffer diagnosed his first patients from Havana as having traumatic brain injuries, even though the symptoms weren’t a perfect match. His diagnosis angered the CIA, but not for scientific reasons, according to both him and Adam.

“A traumatic brain injury with no explanation [implies] that you’re being attacked by something,” said Adam, adding that after Hoffer examined him, agency bosses realized they would have to bring other Havana victims up for testing, likely with similar results. “You were going to have mass panic, and the government wouldn’t be able to control the narrative, which is what they wanted to do,” he said.

The CIA pressured Hoffer to change his diagnosis “because it was scaring people,” Adam said. Andrews’ boss at OMS “verbally told Dr. Andrews, ‘I need you to call Dr. Hoffer and have him remove TBI from [Adam’s] records.’” Adam said. Hoffer, however, while acknowledging that “there was a lot of back and forth” with the CIA, denied feeling pressured. “I have a strong personality so I didn't feel that [the dialog] was out of bounds, but other people may have thought it was,” he told The High Side.

Hoffer found a compromise: He refused to change his TBI diagnoses for the patients he had already seen, according to Adam, but going forward he diagnosed his Havana patients with concussions, as a concussion could result from many different types of injuries and was therefore less controversial.

Michael was another Hoffer patient. On March 22, 2017, after Hoffer first examined him, Michael, whose condition was worsening, was told by the Western Hemisphere Mission Center’s director for support to go to another location in Miami so they could speak over a secure line.

When Michael got there and got on the phone, his boss ordered him back to Cuba, despite his protests. Two days later, after just 72 hours away, Michael returned to Havana. He had only been back in Cuba for a week when he got hit again.

* * *

While Adam and Michael were going through their challenges in Havana, a CIA communications officer arrived in the Cuban capital around March 20, 2017, on temporary duty and was put up in the NH Capri La Habana hotel. Frank (a pseudonym because the CIA will not allow him to use his name in connection with his agency work) was supposed to spend two weeks in Havana, but that was soon extended to 40 days because almost the entire CIA station had been sent to Miami for medical testing.

Frank had previously served in the Navy as an enlisted corpsman and had also worked for United Airlines, NASA, and even at the Air Force’s top secret testing facility in Nevada nicknamed Area 51, where he fixed and modified aircraft. He had a master’s degree in industrial and electrical engineering, and the agency had sent him to Havana to update telecommunications infrastructure. But as often the only person in the station, he frequently ended up working on other tasks.

The harassment began on his third night in Cuba.

At first, it was just somebody trying to disturb his sleep by “dropping [what] seems like bowling balls all night in the room above,” Frank told The High Side.

Then at 3 a.m. there was a knock on the door. A female voice announced in Spanish that she was there to provide maid service. Looking out of the peephole, Frank saw a beautiful woman in a French maid outfit, posing provocatively on the assumption she was being watched. Frank respectfully declined the “maid service” and returned to bed. Immediately, the thuds above him started again.

“Every night for the next 30 nights was like that,” he said. “I would get a knock at 2 or 3 a.m. with women of different sorts … sometimes blondes, sometimes brunettes. Then the second week they sent men to see if I liked that, then back to women, and the last week it was transexuals.”

The harassment achieved its likely minimum objective. “I did not sleep a whole lot while I was there,” Frank said.

But on the third night – March 23, 2017 – whoever was trying to screw with Frank upped the ante considerably. Listening to an audiobook on his Bose headphones, he was impressed by the science fiction novel’s sound effects. Frank fell asleep listening to the audiobook, but when he got up to use the bathroom, he was overcome by a combination of a headache, nausea and dizziness. “It all hit me at once,” he said.

A few days later, Frank was in the embassy cafeteria when he saw the wife of the station’s communications officer with her head down on the table. After he asked if she was okay, she described symptoms that sounded identical to those he had experienced.

When Frank listened to his audiobook again, it contained no sound effects. He had been struck by something.

An old photo of the Capri Hotel in Havana, the site of multiple attacks on CIA officers. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

‘It was like we were lepers.’

By the time Michael got zapped again, concern was rising among U.S. embassy staffers over their colleagues’ mysterious ailments. “Word was out in the embassy at that point,” he said. “People are putting together the pieces. I called Washington and said you need to get [the CIA station personnel] the hell out of here.”

But Michael’s pleas were in vain. The same boss who had ordered him back to Havana told him there was nothing he could do about the situation, then hung up on him, according to Michael. Conversations happened over the phone rather than email and cables, as no one at CIA headquarters wanted to take responsibility for what was happening, Michael said. Some officials at Langley thought the symptoms reported by their people in Havana were simply the result of the stress of being under constant surveillance while working in a denied area, according to a former CIA official.

Even some CIA medical personnel were unsympathetic. “We don't have time for this,” the former CIA official said an OMS doctor told him. "We need to nip this in the bud. These guys are a bunch of little girls.”

OMS dispatched Andrews to Havana – officially, to find out what was really going on at the embassy; but unofficially, said Adam, his job was to “quell the insurrection.” Adam wasn’t shy about telling others that he feared for Andrews’ health if the doctor went to Havana. After Adam yelled at his boss in Langley that Andrews would be hurt, his superiors told him to take a week off.

Andrews arrived on April 20, 2017, together with two other doctors – his boss, and a State Department doctor. A van drove him to the Capri Hotel, where his room was on the same floor as that of Frank, the CIA communications officer in Havana on temporary duty. Frank had taken to sleeping in his bathroom to escape whatever was being pointed into his room.

Despite Adam’s warnings, however, Andrews didn't feel threatened. His confidence would not survive the night.

The next morning, Andrews had breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Frank, with whom he had been communicating for weeks, but had only met for the first time the previous afternoon after checking in. Andrews told Frank that he felt that he had been hit with something that night in the hotel. When they compared their symptoms, the doctor realized that they were alarmingly similar

Later that day, Andrews met with DeLaurentis but struggled when speaking to the ambassador. He returned to the United States after spending less than 48 hours in Cuba. Two days later, Hoffer examined him and concluded that Andrews had indeed become a victim of Havana Syndrome.

But even with the CIA’s own doctor suffering from the same symptoms as others who had been posted to or visited the Havana embassy, senior agency officials remained skeptical. “They just did not believe anything coming out of our mouths,” Michael said.

Adam called Michael and told him that he wasn't coming back to Cuba. Michael decided it was time for him to leave too and asked his bosses if they wanted him to destroy classified documents in the safe and zero out the “crypto” (the encryption used for secure communications) before he left. They told him to sit tight and sent someone down the next day to replace him. He handed off responsibility to his replacement and flew out of Cuba the day after with his spouse and his cat.

“I just pretty much threw the dice and dared them to fire me at that point,” he said.

Back at Langley, Michael realized he hadn’t been imagining the hostility that some at headquarters were feeling toward their Havana station colleagues. “It was like we were lepers walking through the office,” he said, adding that he was basically told to sit behind a desk and answer emails.

Nobody would defend the Havana victims in meetings, “but if you ran into them in the back hallway they would be like, 'Hey, I'm with you, I believe you, blah blah,'” said Michael. “No one had the balls to stand up and say, ‘Something happened to these people, and we have to do something to help them.’”

Michael’s colleagues seemed to be ignoring him. “People would not respond to emails,” he said.

Meanwhile, the CIA began sending officers down to Havana on temporary duty to replace the staff who had been forced to return to the United States. Michael spent an hour and a half trying to talk a junior support officer out of taking the mission. Eventually, said Adam, “she got bullied into going” by her bosses, only to return – in Michael’s description – “scrambled.”

From Langley, Adam was spending much of his time on encrypted chats with the Havana station personnel, trying to coordinate information. The chief of station, who by now had arrived in Cuba, was taking a “head-in-the-sand” approach to the problem, hoping it would just go away, Adam said.

In the 55-person U.S. Embassy, “a couple dozen” became Havana Syndrome victims, including “almost everyone” the CIA sent down on temporary duty, said Adam. “It was like lambs to the slaughter,” Michael said.

The State Department announced Sept. 29, 2017, that it was pulling out all non-essential personnel from Havana. The CIA closed its station shortly thereafter. For the agency’s Havana victims, the decision was overdue.

Keeping the station open “became untenable,” said Adam, adding that the CIA “lost the desire” to stay in Havana even faster than the State Department did. “We were targeted a lot more and faster than State,” said Adam. “It felt like open season on us. We were fish in a barrel down there.”

By April 2018, The Hill reported, only 10 diplomats were left in the embassy.

* * *

Michael's condition continued to deteriorate after his return to Langley. On several occasions, he almost drove off the George Washington Parkway in the middle of rush hour on his way to headquarters. “It was like I lost my gyro,” he said. On one occasion, after recovering slightly, he continued to Langley and visited OMS, begging for help.

“Someone tell me: What the hell is happening?” he asked the doctors.

OMS picked a neurologist in Fairfax, Virginia, for Michael to see the next day. (By the latter part of 2017, the CIA had soured on Hoffer and was no longer paying travel expenses for its officers to visit the Miami-based doctor.)

Michael duly visited the neurologist, whom he declined to name due to the doctor’s ongoing work with the CIA, but he left disillusioned. “He didn't examine me or look at anything,” Michael said. “He asked two questions about my mental health and said, 'There is nothing wrong with you, you just need to suck it up.'” The neurologist then recommended seeing a psychiatrist and walked out of the room, he said.

Experiences like that persuaded the Havana cohort that the agency no longer had their six, if, indeed, it ever had. They decided to fight back.

A guerrilla war at Langley

“We started waging war inside the building,” Michael said.

“We forced our way into meetings,” Adam said. “Stayed late and raided burn bags for classified communications showing they were trying to cover it up.” They found messages between senior CIA officers about “making sure this doesn’t get out and cause a panic,” he added. (A burn bag is a brown paper bag into which classified documents are placed before they are burned.)

“We made copies to give to the [CIA] inspector general,” said Adam. “We actively intercepted TDYers [officers on temporary duty] who were going down there to tell them what was up, so they'd pull out of the assignment. They [CIA leaders] wouldn't tell them about the risks of Havana Syndrome, so we did.

“We worked our way around problem management and fought our way to the 7th floor [where the most senior CIA executives have their offices].”

Michael and Adam met with an investigator at the inspector general’s office and laid out all their evidence of an agency coverup, including emails, cables, and legal documents. The investigator’s exact words after looking over the documents, according to Michael, were, “Jesus Christ, I've never seen anything like this.”

One document was “an admission of guilt” proving that the CIA knew what was happening but was “trying to hide it,” Adam said. The paperwork showed that the agency was trying to limit its legal liability with the officers it was sending to Havana on temporary duty by not warning them about Havana Syndrome and then “having them sign away any rights to suing the agency if they got hurt,” he said.

‘I’m going to take a photocopy of this, and you need to take this and hide it, because this is your Get Out of Jail Free card once shit hits the fan,” the investigator told them, according to Adam.

Adam and Michael declined to identify the investigator, but said he was moved out of the IG’s office a couple of weeks later for reasons that were unclear. “We don’t know what happened to him,” said Adam. “He vanished.”

The investigator who took over their case was not nearly as supportive, said Adam, adding that the replacement was “good friends with everyone in my office that we were complaining about.”

The documents that they provided the first investigator also disappeared, according to Adam. As a result, “future IG investigations were not aware of the original data dumps,” he said.

Michael next tried to become a congressional whistleblower, but an aide for then-Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told him that her boss “didn't have any time for this Havana business,” he said. (Michael said he does not recall the aide’s name.) Next, he turned to the office of then-Sen. Lamar Alexander, because he knew a staffer for the Tennessee Republican. “They had no interest in this,” Michael said.

The original CIA headquarters building at Langley, Virginia. The senior leaders’ offices are on the 7th floor. (CIA photo)

In October 2017 Havana Syndrome exploded into public view via an Associated Press article. Someone at Langley leaked the story, according to several former CIA officers, who declined to identify the person responsible.

Months later, the phrase “Havana Syndrome” began to appear in public discourse. The phrase originated from an internal CIA power struggle, according to Adam.

CIA officials fed up with the U.S. government’s reluctance to publicly blame the Cuban government for the attacks ginned up the phrase and fed it into the public sphere, he said. “The agency refused to hold Cuba accountable or do anything as retribution,” he said. “We were feeling like we were losing because we couldn’t really push back on the Cubans in any substantial way … so the big push by certain elements within the CIA was, ‘Let’s call this Havana Syndrome so it forever is tied to Cuba and the Cubans, because they did this, and this will be their legacy.’”

As to which CIA “elements” were pushing the term “Havana Syndrome,” Adam said that it included “a couple of key doctors in the Office of Medical Services … some counterintelligence guys [and] some out of the Cuba office.” When the media began to use the phrase, “it was this massive victory parade for everyone, because it was just a win in messaging in the media,” he added.

‘The vast majority of this story is classified.’

Speculation about the cause of the symptoms suffered by the original Havana patient cohort abounded. Some experts doubted that Havana Syndrome even really existed. An early report by the JASON group – a collection of elite scientists that advises the U.S. government – said that the “most likely” explanation was that the victims simply heard crickets.

The suggestion that insect noise had caused their brain injuries infuriated the Havana victims. “Even when Dr. Hoffer was talking to Washington, they were trying to blame it on other things: ‘It's just the damn crickets, it's just the damn cicadas,’” Michael said.

In response, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology “took every single recording of bugs and cicadas and crickets from the region that they could find, did a mass analysis of those, and then compared it to what I recorded,” said Adam. DS&T’s conclusion, he said, was that the two recordings were “not even close.” Common sense also argued against this theory, according to Adam. If the insects in Cuba gave people brain damage, “it would be an uninhabitable island,” he said.

A corridor in the CIA’s directorate of science and technology, which warned Adam that, based on the recordings he had taken, the attacks on him carried the risk of serious injury and/or death. DS&T also dismissed the theory that the attacks were nothing more than insect sounds, Adam said. (CIA photo)

The locations of alleged attacks also multiplied exponentially, with U.S. government employees reporting Havana-like symptoms in China, Vietnam, Austria, Georgia, Poland, Australia, Russia, Taiwan, and a smattering of Central Asian countries. Victims included CIA officers, State Department officials and military personnel.

In subsequent years, personnel from the CIA, State Department, FBI, and other federal agencies alleged that they had even suffered Havana-style attacks within the continental United States. including at the White House.

It also became increasingly clear that the phenomenon long preceded 2016’s wave of attacks in Havana, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who told The High Side that he represents “more than two dozen” victims from multiple U.S. government agencies. “I’ve been working on it for a decade – long before Havana happened,” he said, adding that his first case was an NSA employee who, along with a colleague, “got hit in a classified location” in 1996.

“Both developed a very rare form of Parkinson’s,” Zaid said. One died from it. The other is Zaid’s client.

The sheer volume of attacks, particularly on U.S. soil, is still not understood by the American people, according to Zaid. “I can absolutely verify that there are CIA domestic incidents that have not been made public,” he said, adding that he represents some of these CIA personnel. “I can also confirm there have been FBI victims domestically – I represent some of them.”

Zaid holds a top-secret security clearance (or at least did until President Trump reportedly revoked it because Zaid has represented some of Trump’s perceived enemies), which limits how much he can share of what he has learned about the incidents, but he drops tantalizing tidbits to support his contention that the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are “covering up hard evidence” that points to the attacks being the work of a “foreign adversary,” as he put it in a recent LinkedIn post.

“The vast majority of this story is classified,” he told The High Side.

Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents dozens of Havana Syndrome victims. (Photo courtesy of Mark Zaid)

‘We were begging for help, and they said no.’

A few months after selecting Hoffer as its doctor of choice to treat Havana Syndrome patients, the CIA reversed course and stopped paying travel expenses for its injured officers and family members to visit him, putting him out of reach of almost all his CIA patients, according to Adam. “By May or June of 2017, they didn't like Hoffer anymore,” he said. “He was seeing that things were starting to get covered up.”

OMS pressured Adam and the other patients not to see Hoffer, even on their own dime. “They would shit-talk Hoffer,” he said. “It was very clear they had turned on him.” OMS officials had initially described Hoffer in superlative terms, according to Adam. “Then several months in, it became, ‘He’s a whack job,’” he said.

Hoffer told The High Side that he did not know why the government essentially stopped the Havana victims from seeing him. Nor would the agency clear the Havana victims to see other doctors, even if they paid for it themselves, according to Michael.

“We were struggling to find anyone who could care for us,” Adam said. “We were ugly, pathetic, begging for help, and they said no.”

The CIA had approved 12 months of “excused absence” (paid administrative leave) for Havana Syndrome victims, “based on us being injured in the line of duty,” but was putting roadblocks in the paths of those trying to take that leave, said Adam. “They weren’t letting us use it.”

The agency was less interested in helping Adam than it was in getting him as far from Langley as possible, according to him. “They tried to send me to a war zone, then Lima [Peru], then tried to fire me,” he said. “All without helping me get medical help.”

In response to a long set of questions from The High Side, a CIA spokesperson emailed the following statement: “At CIA, we have been determined to approach this issue with care and compassion. As this complex issue evolved, we expanded access to care and resources significantly. We are committed to approaching this issue with the diligence that our officers deserve.”

In August 2017, worn down by the lack of support from his own organization, Adam left CIA headquarters for the last time. A few days before his final departure, he sent a long email to numerous agency officials.

“I can no longer jeopardize my health by continuing to defy my doctor’s recommendations and thus will be removing myself from the building on the extended leave I was promised,” he wrote, before asking for recognition for all the agency’s Havana Syndrome victims. “Though our scars are not visible, they are no less painful than those of other officers injured in the line of duty. Please help us acquire access to the excused absence we were promised and allow us to take the time we need to heal.”

None of the addressees responded.

Harassment and intimidation

It wasn’t just his declining health or despair at how the CIA was treating him that was troubling Adam. He also had the distinct impression that someone was following him.

Sometimes, he’d notice “the same vehicle … doing odd behaviors on multiple days in multiple different locations.” But the most egregious episode occurred when he was out with a friend, hiking a trail near the George Washington Parkway in Northern Virginia. Returning to the parking lot, they rounded a corner to find a group of three or four men waiting by Adam’s car. “They had smashed out the windows, but they hadn’t taken anything,” he said. “They were waiting there for us to see them.” As Adam ran toward them, the vandals jumped into a white pickup truck and sped away before he was close enough to note the license plate number.

Adam acknowledged that, as with other similar episodes he experienced, there was no way to prove that the people who bashed out his windows did so because he was a CIA officer, let alone because he was a Havana Syndrome victim.

“Could it have been a smash and grab?” he said. “Maybe, but they didn’t fucking take anything, and they sat there waiting … I’m not saying that this was specifically Cuban or Russian intelligence harassment. However, it was a datapoint in a long list of datapoints that statistically is impossible for the standard person to experience.”

‘I thought that the agency was going to kill me’

Adam wasn’t the only Havana victim to become the focus of unwanted attention upon returning to the United States.

“Almost immediately weird stuff started happening with technology,” said Michael. Someone was remotely seizing control of his phone, even when it was in his hand. “You would lose all control of your handset and it would heat up scorching hot, just [while] walking down the street,” he said. Then his phone would shut itself down. “That would happen just endlessly.”

Meanwhile, Michael was noticing that items in his apartment in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood were being moved when neither he nor his spouse were home. “I started doing the old-school taping the door, and the door would be untaped when I got home,” he said. “Somebody had been in.”

His apartment building had security cameras that covered the lobby and common areas. He spoke with the CIA’s Threat Management Unit, part of the Office of Security that, among other duties, assesses risks to officers deemed to be under threat and advises them on how to better secure their homes. “I turned all of that information over to the Threat Management Unit and they never did anything with it,” he said.

Michael began to wonder if this was the CIA trying to mess with his head. “There were just so many things [happening], and there was so little action on their part,” he said. It made him doubt his employers. “These are supposed to be the smartest people in America,” he said. “So, the only thing I could come up with is either they just didn’t want to catch it, or they had something to do with it, or a combination of the two.”

Adam was having similar thoughts. “We were not in a good place with the agency,” he said, which led him to wonder: “Was this the agency coming after me?”

Just as he had from Havana, Adam called his brother. “There’s something happening around me,” Adam said he told his brother. “I just don’t know if it’s bad guys or if it’s my own guys.”

Adam gathered all the unclassified data he’d been collecting about the attacks in Cuba and the harassment in the United States. “I put it on a USB and hid it somewhere,” he told The High Side. “I said [to my brother], ‘If something happens to me, I need you to go here and retrieve this and take it to the press.’ … That’s how bad it was. I thought that the agency was going to kill me, honestly, at one point, because I wasn’t being quiet about this, and they wanted it to go away.”

After walking out of headquarters for the last time, Adam quickly sunk into depression and struggled with suicidal ideation. “You look at yourself and think, what have I become?” he said. “I was planning to kill myself but decided to give it one final push.”

A few days later, the agency called him to say that, at the request of CIA leaders, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had agreed to conduct a clinical study of the original Havana cohort starting in mid-September 2017. The caller wanted to know if he wanted to be included in the study at the university’s health facilities, collectively known as Penn Medicine.

Adam, who technically was still a CIA officer, just one on extended medical leave, accepted the offer. However, due to the way the agency had been treating him, he was distrustful, and even hostile, when he first arrived in Philadelphia.

Nonetheless, he was happy to find himself reunited with his old teammates Michael and Frank during the study. He hadn't seen Michael in several weeks, and Frank for many months.

A professional job

Frank had returned to the United States for another CIA posting in Denver, Colorado, from where he was supposed to service communications equipment in U.S. embassies in Central and South America. But his worsening physical condition rendered him unable to travel. A 15-minute drive to his office in Denver would turn into a two-hour ordeal of severe vertigo leading to vomiting, he said.

The CIA brought him back to the Washington area. He was living in a house in the Northern Virginia suburb of Warrenton when he walked in through his front door, only to be greeted by a terrible smell. Two sliding windows in the kitchen toward the rear of the house were open and the back door was left ajar. Upstairs, in his toilet, he found the largest pile of human excrement he had ever seen.

But that wasn’t all. When he had left the house earlier that day, his three rifles – two AR-15s and an AK-47 – had been locked securely inside cases in a very hard to find location in his attic. Now all three, along with five of his handguns, were laying on the beds in his bedroom and spare room. Missing, however, were the Pelican cases for all the weapons, which Frank said cost $1,200 to $1,500 each for the long guns. Whoever had broken in had also removed the 9-volt batteries from his smoke detectors.

Frank reported the break-in to the FBI. “They noted that the lock to the front door had been picked,” Frank said.

The FBI checked the house for fingerprints and found five pairs that didn’t belong there, along with a blonde female hair of unknown origin. The burglars had also helped themselves to the cigars and rum that Frank had brought back from Havana. All in all, it amounted to a professional job, the agents told Frank.

The break-in compounded Frank’s struggle. For a spy with a master’s degree in engineering and a near-photographic memory, at least until Havana, his mental decline and loss of professional competency were bitter pills to swallow. The CIA never cleared him to deploy overseas again. When offered a chance to be treated at Penn, he jumped at it.

Mysterious break-ins at The Icon

For their first few weeks in Philadelphia, most Havana Syndrome victims stayed in hotels. But the CIA officers quickly persuaded their bosses that it would be cheaper and more secure to house them in long-stay apartments. Within a few weeks of each other that fall, Adam, Michael and a CIA security officer who’d been hit while on temporary duty in Havana moved into a historic art deco apartment building called The Icon.

But the problems they’d been experiencing since their return to the United States had followed them to the City of Brotherly Love. “We started getting harassment almost right away in Philly,” Adam told The High Side, adding that by October and November, it “really was kicking up.”

Only a few days after moving in, Adam came back to his apartment to find it not as he’d left it. “All the lights were on … [and] the TVs were on,” he said. “That’s very strange,” he thought. “Even a power cut doesn’t do that.”

He told Michael about it but otherwise kept it quiet. About a week later, Michael called Adam and asked him to come down to his apartment. When Adam arrived, Michael led him into his living room and pointed to his personal laptop, which was exactly as he’d found it when he’d come home a few minutes previously after being out for several hours: open on a table in his breakfast nook, with a photo of his diplomatic passport’s biographic page on the screen.

Michael was perplexed. The laptop was where he’d left it before he’d gone out, but he had not left it with that photo on the screen. Indeed, not only had he not called up the photo of his diplomatic passport recently, but his laptop was set to go to sleep after 15 minutes of inaction. “The screensaver hadn’t even had time to kick on,” he said, meaning whoever had been on his laptop had only just left.

In addition, the sliding door to Michael’s balcony had been unlocked. There was only one conclusion to be reached. “Someone’s been in here and has been on my computer,” he told Adam.

The Icon building at 1616 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, where several CIA Havana Syndrome victims stayed while they were treated at the University of Pennsylvania. (Photo via Wkimedia Commons)

Yet despite the CIA’s willingness to authorize their treatment at Penn, Adam and Michael were reluctant to tell their bosses about what was happening. Before calling the CIA, Adam wanted even more evidence that someone was targeting them in Philadelphia. “One’s odd, two’s a pattern, three is a problem,” he said. “That’s kind of my theory.” (Adam acknowledged that his theory likely owed something to Auric Goldfinger, the villain of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel “Goldfinger.” “Once is happenstance,” Goldfinger says. “Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.”)

Proof of enemy action came shortly thereafter.

* * *

A few days after the break-in to Michael’s apartment, the CIA security officer who was in Philadelphia to be treated for Havana Syndrome was approved to get an apartment in The Icon. She had only moved in a day or two previously when she called Adam.

“She goes, ‘The weirdest thing just happened,’” Adam recalled. “‘I just came home. All my lights are on, [and] my TVs are on max volume in the apartment.’” The woman, who was completely weirded out by the experience, was sure she had not left the apartment in that condition, according to Adam.

This was enough to convince Adam.

“That was when I called headquarters,” Adam told The High Side. “I said, ‘We’ve got to talk. We’ve got a problem. We’ve got to get security involved. There’s something happening up here.’ And that was when they then looped in the FBI and the FBI got involved.”

The FBI, the primary agency responsible for counterintelligence operations inside the United States, in turn handed the task to its small counterintelligence team in Philadelphia. The team’s performance left the CIA Havana Syndrome victims underwhelmed.

“The FBI’s fucking useless,” said Adam. “The counterintelligence squad in Philadelphia is the C team … [and displayed] ineptitude and incompetence I have never seen anywhere else before.”

As an example, he cited the three break-ins at The Icon that prompted the agency to call the bureau in the first place. Although the building was equipped with security cameras, the FBI agents “waited many, many, many, many weeks” to get their hands on the footage, by which time the camera system “had overwritten itself and it wasn’t available to them anymore,” said Adam, adding that this wasn’t the only time this happened. “They did that on multiple occasions in multiple locations.”

The front door of The Icon at 1616 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, the site of a series of unsolved break-ins to CIA officers’ apartments. )Photo courtesy AMP via Wikimedia Commons.)

In another episode, using CIA tradecraft, Michael noticed a man following him “for the better part of an hour” through Philadelphia. “I turned all of that over to the FBI, including the streets, the cameras that I walked by, everything,” he told The High Side. “They never did anything with it.”

The FBI did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions from The High Side.

The bureau’s attitude was summed up during a meeting at Langley with some of the agency’s Havana victims, as well as senior CIA officials, according to Adam. “The exact quote from one of the FBI CI investigators was, ‘We don't have the resources to track all these things down so we're going to say that it never happened,’” Adam said. (Frank recalled hearing the FBI agent say something similar.)

The bureau was equally disappointing when it came to the issue of someone remotely accessing phones, which continued happening to Michael and others in Philadelphia. Key to the phenomenon were calls to the phones in which the caller would abruptly hang up. “We were all getting them,” Adam said. Only after those single-ring calls would the problems start.

“I turned all of my tech over to the FBI,” said Michael. “They went through all of it and then they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

Michael changed phones multiple times, to no avail. “It would pause for a week or two, and then pick right back up,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to do anything with your phone … almost like it was bricked.”

After intelligence officers who were not Havana Syndrome victims reported similar phone issues, the federal government investigated and uncovered a previously unknown exploit in the cell phone system that was being deployed against U.S. spies in their own country, according to Adam. “They did find a burner cell network operating around us in Philly,” he said. “That network went dead as they closed in on it. All the phones went dark.” The FBI told Adam that the intelligence community never disclosed who was making the calls.

However, on a couple of occasions the bureau did do the right thing, according to Adam. One was the November 2017 episode at the Green Eggs Café, when the FBI used CCTV footage to track and identify the mystery photographer. The other occasion involved the same CIA security officer who had come home to find someone had turned on all her televisions to maximum volume.

One day in spring 2018, the security officer was in her apartment when she would usually have been at Penn undergoing her treatment. (“We all kept the same rehabilitation schedule for months and months,” Adam said. “You could set your clock by when we were leaving and coming home.”) To her shock, her front door swung open and, said Adam, “a dark-complexioned male” she didn’t recognize walked in uninvited. “He comes face to face with her and doesn’t say a thing. His eyes bug out, he runs out into the hallway, hits the stairs from like 17 floors up and disappears.”

The security officer immediately called the FBI counterintelligence agents. This time, they showed up in time to pull all the key card records for her front door before they were overwritten, according to Adam, who said their investigation revealed that the man who fled had used a key card issued to a maid who cleaned some of the building’s long-stay apartments. The maid turned out to have family ties to the Venezuelan government.

At that time, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was facing rising unrest and was looking for help from Havana, according to Adam. “They needed the Cuban intel to basically secure Venezuela and so the Cubans were all over Venezuela,” he said.

At around the same time, another female CIA victim in Philadelphia, a support officer, also had a strange man enter her apartment. When she screamed, he turned around and fled, according to Frank.

To Adam, the datapoints were adding up. “That was always my argument in work,” he said. “‘How many people do you know that have had their apartments broken into in the last year?’ and people were like, ‘Well, none.’ ‘Yeah, I know a dozen.’”

A frustrating dead end

The camera-wielding stranger outside the Green Eggs Café was not the first mystery photographer Adam encountered as he underwent treatment in Philadelphia. That person was a motorist Adam spotted as he left a rehab appointment several blocks south of Rittenhouse Square on Oct. 31, 2017.

Walking across the parking lot while chatting on the phone with his girlfriend, Adam noticed a small white four-door sedan about 50 yards away, pulled over at the side of a one-way street that ran alongside the lot. Sticking out of the driver’s window was a long camera lens. “I think someone’s photographing me,” Adam said to his girlfriend.

Adam picked up his pace. He could see the driver looking down at his camera as if checking his photos before raising the camera and pointing it out of the window again. “Now I know he’s pointing it at me because … the lens is following me as I’m coming towards him and I see the shutter flickering through the lens,” said Adam. “I was a wedding photographer, so I pay attention to cameras.”

When Adam was about 15 yards from the car and “closing in,” the man pointing the camera “puts it down in a panic and … takes off through the traffic light,” said Adam, who sprinted after the car. A series of green lights allowed the sedan to speed away, but not before the CIA officer had seen the license plate. “I’m still on the phone with my girlfriend, and I go, ‘Write this plate down,’” he said.

Adam reported the incident to the FBI agents, who investigated and then called him back and asked him to come in to view a photo lineup, in which they showed him a series of headshots and asked him to pick out the driver. Adam did so correctly, at which point the agents told him the car he’d seen was a rental, but the driver was a Bangladeshi who worked at the University of Alabama, where he was associated with a medical technology group, Adam said. He told the bureau he was in Philadelphia to attend a medical conference, according to Adam. The University of Alabama did not return multiple phone calls.

The Bangladeshi claimed to be a keen amateur photographer but told the FBI he hadn’t taken any photos of Adam or the area where Adam had seen him. However, when the bureau investigated, the agents discovered that he shared his hobby with another foreigner on the university’s staff: a Cuban man whom the bureau described as a “cultural attache” at the university. And when the bureau “dug further” into the Cuban, “they were like, ‘Oh, he’s a Cuban IO’ [intelligence officer]” operating under non-official cover, Adam said.

“There was supposedly overlap there [between the Bangladeshi and the Cuban], and so they’re like, ‘Okay, this guy may be tied with the Cuban intelligence officer,’” Adam said. The Bangladeshi’s movements after leaving Philadelphia also raised the bureau’s suspicions: Rather than flying straight back to Alabama, he had flown to Mexico.

The bureau’s Philadelphia-based counterintelligence agents made plans to head south to interview the Bangladeshi but were pre-empted by other FBI agents, according to Adam. “The field office down [near] this university … rushed in,” he said. “They fucked up the whole thing.

“The agents went in, not prepared, not counterintelligence trained, by any means, … confronted this guy and were like, ‘Hey, were you taking photos in Philly?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And they’re like, ‘We want to see them.’” Having had plenty of time to delete the photos of Adam that he’d taken, the Bangladeshi was only too happy to oblige.

“He took them to the computer, and he shows them the pictures from Philadelphia,” Adam said the Philadelphia-based agents told him. “And the dude had weird fucking pictures, like pictures of the toilet in his hotel, like weird, weird, weird pictures, but not a single picture of that intersection, of me, or of that building, And I know he was taking them, because … I could see the shutter firing.”

The Bangladeshi’s answers satisfied the local agents, according to Adam. “They go, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and left,” he said. “Never checked metadata, never checked sequencing of numbers on the photographs in the file, never checked for any manipulation.”

The agents’ naivete infuriated Adam. “If you’re doing something that you’re not supposed to be doing, like taking pictures, what’s the first fucking thing you’re going to do?” he said. “Make sure those things are on none of your fucking devices and they’re stored away.”

To Adam’s frustration, the bureau made no further inquiries regarding the Bangladeshi. “They just went in and are like, ‘Oh, no, he didn’t have any pictures of him, so I guess he’s fine,’” he said. “That was the end of that lead.”

The case of the missing coffee

Frank also received his share of unwelcome attention in Philadelphia from whoever was trying to intimidate the Havana Syndrome victims. Like Adam and Michael, he took an apartment in The Icon, and, using the same door-taping technique as Michael, soon realized it was being broken into.

For him, it began with his coffee, specifically Peet’s K-cup pods. “[Frank], for whatever reason, has this strong affinity for these little K-cups,” said Adam. “He loves them [even though] they’re expensive.”

Whether whoever was targeting him knew how attached Frank was to his coffee is unclear. But one day, he came home to find that two new cases of Peet’s he’d left on his table had been taken. He was not happy. “I could have killed his dog and got less of a reaction from him, than them stealing his fucking coffee,” Adam said. “They didn’t like [Frank].”

After a couple of weeks in The Icon, Frank moved to a hotel by the airport, and then switched to another nearby, but the harassment didn’t stop. His rooms were broken into routinely. On one occasion, a bed in which he’d been sleeping comfortably for ten days was suddenly infested with bedbugs.

Like the others, Frank was also being tailed. He detected surveillance about “a half-dozen times” while in Philadelphia, he told The High Side. All of those tailing him were Latino-looking men, some of whom photographed him. “In hindsight, I wish I’d been more confrontational, but I was told by work not to do that,” he said.

Later in 2018, after Frank had moved back to Northern Virginia but was still visiting Penn for treatment, a car rear-ended him as he was driving up to Philadelphia. A nearby policeman ensured the offending vehicle and the three people inside stayed put. Although they initially described themselves as Puerto Ricans, it later emerged that at least two of them, the driver and his father, had emigrated to Puerto Rico from Cuba earlier this century, according to Frank.

Meanwhile, the break-ins continued, always in a manner that made it very obvious that someone had been in the apartments, according to Michael: Faucets would be left on, couch cushions flipped over, cabinet doors left open but with nothing taken. “That happened to almost all of us,” he said.

Michael said he detected surveillance “probably seven or eight times” after returning from Cuba. Most of the tails appeared to be Latino, except for one black man. All but one were male, he said.

* * *

Whoever was harassing the Havana Syndrome patients also targeted the Penn staff treating them.

The phone of one of those staff members, Ragini Verma, a professor who studies brain connectivity, was hacked into. The FBI took it for analysis but did not return it or tell her what they found. Eventually, they just bought her a new phone, she told The High Side.

“The doctors started getting strange stuff a few months in,” said Adam, adding that one of his doctors received a package at her house addressed to her daughter, with a return address in Mexico. The package contained a natural medicine for treating an illness from which the doctor's daughter suffered. “They were letting everyone know that they are being watched,” Adam said.

Then, in February 2018, someone telephoned medical providers at Penn pretending to be from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and asked for Havana Syndrome victims’ medical records, according to Adam. The same thing happened to the hospital in New York City that was treating Andrews, he said.

The targeting of patients, doctors and medical records appears to have unnerved some at the University of Pennsylvania, according to Adam. “Penn removed our patient portals from the system due to security concerns,” he said. “They were worried about the safety of their staff … so they did everything they could to minimize our presence and anything that could tie us to any specific staff member,” said Michael.

Penn Medicine did not reply to multiple calls and an email from The High Side.

Things became so bad that in early February 2018 Adam moved to a different apartment building a few blocks from The Icon and installed his own spy camera in his new place. On Feb. 23, while he wasn’t home, the camera captured a woman moving through his apartment and out the front door with a cell phone in her hand. The management company couldn’t tell him whether she was an employee of theirs.

“I never got to the bottom of it,” he said. “FBI never told me who it was or what they were doing there.”

As the harassment had ramped up, he’d reported it to his doctors, who told him it was affecting his recovery. “The progress you have made is now starting to disappear,” he said the doctors told him. Eventually, he said, the doctors informed him, “The longer you stay here, the worse you’re getting. You need to leave.”

Reluctantly, Adam departed Philadelphia.

Away game tactics, on home soil

The tactics used against CIA officers being treated in Philadelphia resembled those they had faced in Havana, and those employed against other CIA officers in so-called hard target countries like Russia. What was different now was that someone was using those tactics against U.S. intelligence officers on their home turf, which is virtually unheard of.

For instance, while it’s known that Russian operatives hunt their own defectors in the United States, they’ve never gone after CIA officers here, according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer and Havana Syndrome victim. “The U.S. was always kind of seen as this no-go area,” he said.

But someone was targeting the Havana Syndrome victims, and not just the relative handful being treated in Philadelphia.

“There is a great deal of really interesting evidence of surveillance” of victims in the United States, with those doing the harassing deliberately making their presence known to their targets, according to Zaid, the lawyer. “I know of several instances where people’s power would just be turned off,” he said. “Somebody pulled the power switch … outside the house.”

He also cited a CIA client who, during the coronavirus pandemic, found a dead deer on her porch with no plausible explanation as to how it could have gotten there on its own. “It wasn’t like it got hit by a car and just wandered over there and died,” Zaid said. “It would have had to have jumped over a number of things to get where it was, and it makes zero sense.”

The CIA officer was not part of the original Havana cohort, according to Zaid. “She’s a domestic case – hit in Northern Virginia,” he said. Because her husband was in the Navy, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service looked into the case but did not seem to come to a conclusion, according to Zaid.

However, he confirmed that the FBI had investigated “a whole bunch” of events in which “the Havana folks” were targeted in 2017 and 2018. “I don’t know whatever came of it,” he said. “I never heard anything about it. It just has, like, vanished.”

* * *

Several months after the Havana victims had left Philadelphia, the CIA’s Threat Management Unit conducted “security surveys” of their houses, said Adam. “They identified weaknesses, they told us how to strengthen them [and] they [offered] us money to do that.”

The CIA’s Threat Management Unit gave Adam this folder of advice on how to protect himself and his home from whoever was threatening him. (Photo courtesy of Adam)

Unlike the FBI counterintelligence agents, the TMU established a good working relationship with at least some of the Havana victims. “They went to the end of the earth for us,” Adam said.

To Adam, the very fact that the CIA deployed the TMU was evidence that the threats he and the others were facing were real. “I don't think we were so crazy that we convinced them to deploy these resources without there being an active threat against us,” he said.

(Michael, however, was less than impressed with the TMU. In his opinion, the Office of Security had sent the unit out “just to tell the 7^th floor that they did something, and to try to get us to shut up,” he said.)

Tailed by trouble

Frank had moved into his girlfriend’s home in Centreville, Virginia, shortly after starting treatment at Penn. But he couldn’t escape the intimidation campaign. Starting in January 2019, the couple experienced three burglaries in the space of less than a year.

During the second break-in, in March 2019, someone found Frank’s medical files sitting on a desk and photocopied them. (Frank and his girlfriend discovered this by having the copier print all recent files that had been copied; the machine spat out about a dozen documents detailing Frank’s treatment.)

The episode was a bizarre echo of the attempts to access the victims’ health records at Penn. “It was almost like they were checking the damage they did,” Frank said. Again, the FBI told him the break-ins were the work of professionals.

In the third break-in, in late summer, instead of taking something, the burglar or burglars left something behind: the two cases of Peet’s coffee they had stolen in late 2017 from his apartment in Philadelphia.

Frank and his girlfriend decided to leave Northern Virginia for Miami. They were living there in 2020, while he waited to be medically retired from the CIA, when he received an odd package that had been mailed from China via eBay.

Inside the package was a business card for a Chinese company and a knock-off CIA retirement coin. Frank reported it to the FBI and handed it over. Yet again, the bureau never followed up with him.

No FBI follow-through

Adam, Michael and Frank all said that the harassment and intimidation of them tailed off in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe. But the question of responsibility for the years-long campaign against CIA officers and others on home soil has yet to be answered. It’s not even clear that anyone in the U.S. government is interested in finding out.

Almost five years after the harassment stopped (when he left the country), Michael remains unconvinced that the CIA had nothing to do with it. “After … all the shady shit that they’ve done and the way they’ve behaved throughout all of this, I don’t put anything past them,” he said.

Buttressing this theory is the extraordinary reluctance the CIA and the FBI showed in investigating the incidents. “Any and all help that we got from the agency, we had to drag them kicking and screaming to get anything done, because they just did not want to deal with it,” said Michael. As for the FBI, “they made it very clear that they didn’t want anything to do with this, that they were just doing what they were told and that they were going to put very little effort into it.”

Agents in the FBI unit assigned to investigate some of the harassment incidents complained to Zaid that when they got leads “they would always be slow-rolled or they would never be permitted to respond,” the lawyer said. “I got that directly from the people who were supposed to be investigating.” This happened often between 2019 and 2021, “when the incidents were really frequent,” he said.

The Havana Syndrome victims were disappointed and mystified by the lack of enthusiasm they perceived on the part of the FBI when it came to figuring out who was breaking into their homes in the United States.

Why the FBI did not take the intimidation campaign more seriously remains “a huge open question,” said Polymeropoulos, adding that the campaign had not targeted him. However, Polymeropoulos said he “strongly disagrees” with the theory that the agency itself might be behind the harassment. “I know some people think that,” he said. “For me, it’s not feasible … There’s no one at the agency who could do this,” because the agency lacks the legal authority to conduct such operations domestically.

If it wasn’t the agency, Michael said, then perhaps it was “them tossing it over to another government agency that’s allowed to operate in the U.S. on U.S. citizens.”

Nonetheless, “I still have a hard time convincing myself that it was the agency.” Michael said. “I still think there was an outside actor involved.” He acknowledged, however, that in order to target them in the United States, an outside actor would have to know who the Havana Syndrome victims were in the first place. To him, that left three suspects: “the Cubans, the Russians, or the U.S. government itself.”

Indeed, the skills displayed in taking remote control of multiple Havana victims’ phones in the United States point to a state actor, according to former CIA officers. “There’s only a small number of people on the planet that have the capacity … to access your phone remotely or to crack that phone remotely or to activate microphones remotely,” said Michael. “There just aren’t that many organizations that can do that.”

The few indicators of nation state culpability that the FBI and other sources have shared with the original Havana victims point, superficially at least, to Cuba: the mystery photographer with “ties to Cuba” outside Green Eggs Café, the Bangladeshi who photographed Adam in a Penn parking lot who worked at the same university as a known Cuban intelligence officer, the Cuban driver who rear-ended Frank, and the Latino appearance of the majority of people who were observed surveilling the Havana victims.

However, those were all part of the campaign targeting victims who were originally hurt in Cuba. Zaid said some of his clients were “AHI victims who do Russian counterintelligence work,” – i.e. not clients who’d been hurt in Havana – and they too reported being surveilled by mysterious individuals in the United States. In their cases, however, those individuals all turned out to be “Russian language speaking” people, Zaid said, adding that at best, this was “strangely coincidental.”

Zaid supplied the FBI with license plate numbers and photographs connected to these incidents, but, he said, the bureau never got back to him.

Having decided that the CIA was not responsible for the harassment, Adam said that left only two candidates. “The only actual people it could be is Russians or Cubans,” he said. “But they were using proxies to do it.”

Asked whether the Cubans might have been working together with the Russians, Michael replied: “only on days that end in ‘y.’”

Cuban President Raul Castro with Russian President Vladmir Putin in September, 2015. One Havana Syndrome victim said the two countries’ spy services likely cooperated in the unprecedented intimidate campaign against him and other victims in the United States. (Russian government photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Told that some indicators pointed to a Cuban role, a former senior CIA operations officer related a tale from 2020, when a CIA officer and his entire family were “hit in Central Asia” and hurt so badly they had to be medically evacuated back to the United States. Before he was attacked, the officer had been “developing” – i.e., meeting with as a prelude to possible recruitment – a Cuban intelligence officer, the former senior CIA operations officer said.

“When he returned home to the United States, he received an email from the Cuban intelligence officer, just saying … ‘How are you feeling?’” he said. “What does that mean? I don’t know, but it was certainly alarming to the officer.”

For his part, Zaid said that the most likely culprits of the intimidation campaign in the United States are those who inflicted the “anomalous health incidents” on his clients abroad, rather than any agency of the U.S. government. “I don’t think the U.S. government could keep that a secret,” he said.

* * *

As Frank, Adam, Michael and the other victims dealt with the unsettling campaign of harassment in Philadelphia, the medical experts at Penn were trying to figure out the true nature of their afflictions. What they discovered would shock them.

To be continued in Part 2

Editor’s Note: This series contains Amazon hyperlinks for books. If you buy the books after clicking on the links, The High Side will earn a small commission as part of the Amazon Affiliates program.

17. For this French senator, Trump is a traitor—and Europe is now alone (French Senate Speech on Ukraine - Speech Transcript)

This is one of the most critical speeches I have heard or read which will of course be panned by many.

Malhuret’s speech was not directed at an American audience. It was meant for the French, as some lawmakers push for quickly increasing defense spending to protect Ukraine and form an independent European defense force. But to many across the Atlantic, it was a clear-eyed take on American politics.

The transcript is below and the video is at the link https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/for-this-french-senator-trump-is-a-traitor-and-europe-is-now-alone/\\

Some comments on social media say this is a Chuchill and Kennedy equivalent speech.

For this French senator, Trump is a traitor—and Europe is now alone

thebulletin.org · by François Diaz-Maurin · March 6, 2025

French Senator Claude Malhuret speaks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Credit: Public Sénat)

“Best take on current national affairs that have taken place in the past two months,” said one user on the Bluesky social media platform.

“Someone who competently gets to the point of what many of us who deal with this daily already know,” wrote another.

These users were not reacting to the latest late-night show, a political analysis in The Atlantic or the New York Times, or even a TV appearance by a representative from the Democratic party. They were praising a French lawmaker after watching his speech on the French Senate floor on Tuesday, as it made the rounds across Europe and North America. By Thursday morning, social media posts about the speech had been viewed at least hundreds of thousands of times.

Amid the fallout after US President Donald Trump reversed an 80-year-long strategic partnership with Europe to side with Russia in the Ukraine war, Claude Malhuret, a center-right senator who was largely unknown outside France, struck a chord that resonated with both European and American audiences.

During a general session in the French Senate, Malhuret offered an eight-minute-long, extremely direct “intervention” about the war in Ukraine and the security of Europe. For the most part, however, his speech—which among other things called Trump an “incendiary emperor”—was a critique of the Trump administration. Foreign officials and lawmakers don’t generally comment about the domestic politics of another country, much less of an ally.

Malhuret’s speech was not directed at an American audience. It was meant for the French, as some lawmakers push for quickly increasing defense spending to protect Ukraine and form an independent European defense force. But to many across the Atlantic, it was a clear-eyed take on American politics.

Because the speech comes at what seems a historical moment in the transatlantic relations, a video with English subtitles and an English transcript of the speech are published below.

Full English transcript of Malhuret’s speech:

Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The ‘king of the deal’ is showing what the art of the deal is on his stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, seeing such a submissiveness, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a US President capitulated to the enemy. Never has any one of them supported an aggressor against an ally … trampled on the US Constitution, issued so many illegal executive orders, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military senior staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.

This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.

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I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to bend or resign.

Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: confront it.

And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.

What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with as its first principle the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the core of the United Nations, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

“Give me Greenland, Panama, and Canada. You can get Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe. He can get Taiwan and the China Sea.”

In the dinners of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, they call this “diplomatic realism.”

So we are now standing alone. But the idea that Putin cannot be confronted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.

Interest rates at 25 percent, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, the demographic collapse, all show that [Russia] is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.

This will be costly. It will be necessary to end the taboo of using frozen Russian assets [and] circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, which includes, of course, the United Kingdom.

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Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally—and this is the most urgent because it is what will take the most time—we must build a European defense, too-long neglected to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a way to recognize that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.

It remains to build it.

It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate the entry into the [European] Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, relaunch the anti-missile defense and satellite programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.

Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion against war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the far right and the far left.

They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of “de Gaulle Zelensky” by a “Ukrainian Pétain” at Putin’s beck and call. The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great.

But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken during the past month have finally made the Americans react.

Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social networks.

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thebulletin.org · by François Diaz-Maurin · March 6, 2025

18. Princeton nuclear physicist Liu Chang leaves US for China in fusion energy quest

Brain drain?

Excerpts:

Liu began his research career as an associate research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory before being promoted to staff research physicist at the same institute in 2019.

The nuclear specialist joins a growing list of Chinese physicists who have recently left the US.

In January last year, award-winning Chinese-American physicist Gao Huajian joined Tsinghua University as a full-time professor. More recently, computational physicist Chen Hudong – an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering – left the US after more than four decades to take up a full-time position in China.

Known as the “holy grail” of clean energy, nuclear fusion is seen by experts as the ultimate solution to the world’s energy needs, with more private companies and research organisations devoting resources to make it a reality.

Princeton nuclear physicist Liu Chang leaves US for China in fusion energy quest

Plasma specialist heads to Peking University to pursue magnetic confinement on mission to make nuclear fusion a reality

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301674/princeton-nuclear-physicist-liu-chang-leaves-us-china-fusion-energy-quest?utm

Dannie Pengin Beijing

Published: 3:04pm, 10 Mar 2025Updated: 3:28pm, 10 Mar 2025

After more than a decade in the United States, nuclear physicist Liu Chang, whose research has been crucial in the journey to achieve fusion energy, has left Princeton University for a position at Peking University in Beijing.

Last month, Liu joined the Institute of Heavy Ion Physics at Peking University’s School of Physics as an assistant professor, according to a post on his new department’s social media account.

Liu’s research has centred mainly on plasma physics and nuclear fusion. In particular, he has focused on solving problems related to the physics of runaway electrons – a kind of energy leakage – and other energetic particles in magnetic confinement fusion devices.

Magnetic confinement is now seen as the primary path to make nuclear fusion a reality. The most common fusion reactors of this type are tokamaks and stellarators.

Research by Liu has been published in top academic journals in his field, such as Physical Review Letters and Nuclear Fusion.

For example, in 2023, a team of researchers led by Liu unveiled a promising approach to mitigating damaging runaway electrons caused by disturbances in tokamak fusion devices, by harnessing a unique type of plasma wave. The study was published in Physical Review Letters.

A look inside the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor in Japan

Liu would continue to “explore the frontiers and applications of plasma physics and develop reliable solutions to mitigate breakage and escaped electrons for the next generation of nuclear fusion devices”, his new department said on its social media account.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from Peking University in 2011, Liu headed to Princeton University for graduate studies, where he obtained a PhD from the university’s plasma physics programme in 2017.

Liu began his research career as an associate research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory before being promoted to staff research physicist at the same institute in 2019.

The nuclear specialist joins a growing list of Chinese physicists who have recently left the US.

In January last year, award-winning Chinese-American physicist Gao Huajian joined Tsinghua University as a full-time professor. More recently, computational physicist Chen Hudong – an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering – left the US after more than four decades to take up a full-time position in China.

Known as the “holy grail” of clean energy, nuclear fusion is seen by experts as the ultimate solution to the world’s energy needs, with more private companies and research organisations devoting resources to make it a reality.

While nuclear fission splits atoms, such as uranium, to generate energy – the same process currently used in nuclear power plants worldwide – nuclear fusion combines atoms to release large amounts of energy, without the by-products of long-lasting radioactive waste.

Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?

In the race to dominate the technology, China, which boasts a formidable industrial chain and engineering expertise, has become an important player both in nuclear fusion research and its potential commercialisation.

Dannie Peng

Dannie joined SCMP in 2023 and focuses on science stories in China, with a particular interest in the scientific community and societal impacts of scientific advances. She previously worked for China Newsweek, covering topics including China's healthcare system, public health and

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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