Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”

–Carl Sagan

"Fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by traveling."

– Migue; de Unamuno

"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

– Albert Einstein

1. United States Champions Free Expression, Ceases Censorship Frameworks

2. Foreign disinformation about Charlie Kirk's killing seeks to widen US divisions

3. Trump Claims Excessive Criticism of Him on TV Is ‘Illegal’ and ‘No Longer Free Speech’

4. After testing Poland’s drone defenses, Russia tested its disinformation response too

5. The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army

6. Channeling Augustus: On Agentic Offensive Information Operations

7. Why We’re Drowning in Conspiracy Theories

8. Russia leverages Kirk shooting for propaganda as false claims surge

9. U.S. Government Is Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal

10. NATO Planes Intercept Russian Jet Fighters Over Estonia

11. Senate confirms Mike Waltz as UN ambassador

12. Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access

13. U.S. in Talks With Taliban on Returning Counterterrorism Forces to Afghan Base

14. 'Conventional Weapons Would Be Sufficient': China Issues Stark New Warning on Taiwan

15. House intel chair seeks to reform ‘disjointed’ counterspy system

16. Pentagon Needs Digital Command for New Approach to Key Tech

17. Pacific nations care about survival and prosperity, not contests for influence

18. China bristles at US Army’s Typhon missile launcher in Japan

19. Ukraine Gains Leverage With Strikes On Russian Refineries

20. Airpower for the Post-Dominance World: Restoring US Air Superiority Through a New Combined Arms Approach

1. United States Champions Free Expression, Ceases Censorship Frameworks

The USG has retired from the battlefield of operations in the information environment. But our adversaries are conducting information and political warfare campaigns as if operations in the information environment is their main effort.

It is up to us. Again, recall this from the 2017 NSS (President Trump had it right in 2017):

"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 the 2017 NSS HERE

My thoughts also from 2017:

The Cyber Underground – Resistance to Active Measures and Propaganda: “The Disruptors” - Motto: “Think For Yourself”

https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/the-cyber-underground-%E2%80%93-resistance-to-active-measures-and-propaganda-%E2%80%9Cthe-disruptors%E2%80%9D-mot-0

United States Champions Free Expression, Ceases Censorship Frameworks

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/09/united-states-champions-free-expression-ceases-censorship-frameworks/

Press Statement

Thomas "Tommy" Pigott, Principal Deputy Spokesperson

September 17, 2025

The United States has ceased all Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation and any associated instruments implemented by the former administration. On April 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the closure of the Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The Framework, initially launched by the GEC to counter so-called disinformation, devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda. These actions align with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Order on Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship, which prohibits federal censorship and promotes freedom of expression.

Through free speech, the United States will counter genuine malign propaganda from adversaries that threaten our national security, while protecting Americans’ right to exchange ideas.

2. Foreign disinformation about Charlie Kirk's killing seeks to widen US divisions

Should be no surprise.

Here is a list of articles from various sources describing what is going on.

Foreign influencers are doing their best to spin the Charlie Kirk assassination

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/nx-s1-5544235/kirk-assassination-foreign-influence-disinformation

After Charlie Kirk’s killing, false claims flourish online — with help from US adversaries

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/17/charlie-kirk-shooting-disinformation-russia-china-iran-00570357

After Kirk Assassination, AI ‘Fact Checks’ Spread False Claims

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/after-kirk-assassination-ai-fact

Russian, Chinese, and Iranian State Media Exploit Kirk Assassination

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russian-chinese-and-iranian-state?utm

A US neo-Nazi fight club is using Charlie Kirk’s killing to recruit new members

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/active-clubs-charlie-kirk-killing-new-members?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Foreign disinformation about Charlie Kirk's killing seeks to widen US divisions

AP · DAVID KLEPPER · September 17, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia moved to amplify online conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing just hours after it happened, seeding social media with the frightening claim that America is slipping into civil war.

Chinese and pro-Iranian groups also spread disinformation about the shooting, with those loyal to Iran’s interests backing antisemitic conspiracy theories while bots linked to Beijing claimed that Kirk’s death shows that the United States is violent, polarized and dysfunctional.

America’s adversaries have long used fake social media accounts, online bots and disinformation to depict the U.S. as a dangerous country beset with extremism and gun violence. Kirk’s killing has provided another opportunity for those overseas eager to shape public understanding while inflaming political polarization.

“Charlie Kirk’s Death and the Coming Civil War,” tweeted Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, whose influence earned him the moniker “ Putin’s brain,” referring to Russia’s president. Pro-Russian bots blamed Democrats and predicted more violence. Russian state media published English-language articles with headlines claiming a conspiracy orchestrated by shadowy forces: “Was Charlie Kirk’s Killer a Pro?”

Foreign disinformation makes up a tiny fraction of the overall online discussion about Kirk’s death, but it could undermine any efforts to heal political divisions or even spur further violence.

“We’ve seen multiple Russian campaigns attempting to exploit” Kirk’s killing, said Joseph Bodnar, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. In many cases, the campaigns aren’t adding new claims but are recycling ones that emerged from American users. “They’re picking up domestic actors and amplifying them.”

Adversaries tailor disinformation

In each case, those spreading the disinformation have tailored it for their own ends. Chinese propaganda has focused on the violent nature of Kirk’s death, painting the U.S. as a nation of violent gun owners and political extremists.

Russian voices have tried to tie Kirk’s death to U.S. support for Ukraine, even spreading a conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government killed Kirk because of his criticism of that aid.

Pro-Iranian groups took a different tack, claiming Israel was behind Kirk’s death and that the suspect was set up to take the fall. This conspiracy theory caught on with white supremacist groups in the U.S., showing how corrosive claims can easily spread online despite oceans and linguistic and cultural barriers.

False and misleading claims can spread quickly following big news events as people go online to look for information. Artificial intelligence programs that can create lifelike video and audio can make it even harder to find the truth, as can AI chatbots that routinely offer up false information.

It happened again following Kirk’s killing, when misinformation about the shooting and the suspect quickly spread online.

In recent years, groups looking to spread confusion or distrust have seized on hurricanes, wars, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disasters, as well as the attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump.

The details vary, but the conspiracy theories pushed by foreign adversaries all suggest American institutions — the government, the media, law enforcement, health care — are failing and can no longer be trusted, and that more violence is likely.

Calls for social media companies to crack down

Regardless of the source of the information, social media companies should do more to stop both foreign disinformation and domestic calls for violence, said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which tracks online disinformation.

Posts calling for retaliatory violence following Kirk’s death have been seen 43 million times on X alone, according to the center’s research, though it can’t say which posts came from foreign sources.

Platforms like X “are failing catastrophically to limit the reach of posts that celebrate murder and mayhem,” Ahmed said.

Russia, China and Iran have all denied targeting Americans with disinformation. Officials in China have specifically pushed back on claims that Chinese social media bots are being used to amplify false claims about the Kirk shooting.

“China condemns all unlawful and violent acts. That said, we firmly oppose some US politicians accusing China of ‘instilling disinformation and encouraging violence,’” a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry posted on X.

For foreign adversaries looking to sow discord in the U.S., disinformation can be highly effective — and cheap. For authorities trying to keep the public informed, the false claims about Kirk’s death are a potentially dangerous effort to hijack American discourse.

“There is a tremendous amount of disinformation we are tracking,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said at a recent press conference about Kirk’s killing. “What we are seeing is our adversaries want violence. We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”

Cox urged people to ignore bogus claims that seem designed to elicit fear — and suggested that Americans log off social media and spend time with family instead.

AP · DAVID KLEPPER · September 17, 2025

3. Trump Claims Excessive Criticism of Him on TV Is ‘Illegal’ and ‘No Longer Free Speech’

This is not meant as a partisan comment from me. Free speech is absolute.

The comment I do want to make is this: What struck me this week is why we still need an FCC. Why didn't the FCC get "DOGE'd?" It only regulates local broadcast stations and not cable networks or the internet. M ost people get their news from social media (e.g., YouTube and TikTok). The FCC is now an anachronism. Why don't we just eliminate it? Do we really need it? That is the question we should be asking.

Excerpts:

ABC pulled Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” on Wednesday, just hours after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened the network.

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

“Do you see a difference between cancel culture and consequence culture?” Mason asked.

“I’m a very strong person for free speech,” the president replied. “But 97, 94, 95, 96% of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts are against me. The stories are– they said 97% bad. So, they gave me 97, they’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

Trump Claims Excessive Criticism of Him on TV Is ‘Illegal’ and ‘No Longer Free Speech’

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/trump-claims-excessive-criticism-of-him-on-tv-is-illegal-and-no-longer-free-speech/

Michael Luciano

Sep 19th, 2025, 5:54 pm

5616 comments

Play Video

President Donald Trump claimed that beyond a certain point, criticism of him on television networks is “illegal” and “no longer free speech.”

On Friday, Trump took questions from reporters in the Oval Office, where Jeff Mason of Reuters asked about the ongoing fallout after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, which culminated in ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Jimmy Kimmel appeared to suggest, erroneously, that Kirk’s assassin is a conservative.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said on Monday’s show.

ABC pulled Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” on Wednesday, just hours after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened the network.

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

“Do you see a difference between cancel culture and consequence culture?” Mason asked.

“I’m a very strong person for free speech,” the president replied. “But 97, 94, 95, 96% of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts are against me. The stories are– they said 97% bad. So, they gave me 97, they’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

It is unclear where Trump got the 97% figure from. Even if true, such criticism is protected speech under the First Amendment.

He later added, “So, I think it’s very sad, but I think reporting has to be at least accurate, at least accurate to an extent. Again, when somebody is given, 97% of stories are bad about a person. That’s no longer free speech. That’s no longer anything. That’s just cheating. And they cheat, and they become really members of the Democrat national committee. That’s what they are, the networks, in my opinion. They’re just offshoots of the Democrat national committee.”

Watch above via Fox News.

4. After testing Poland’s drone defenses, Russia tested its disinformation response too

After testing Poland’s drone defenses, Russia tested its disinformation response too

Politico · Sam Clark · September 12, 2025

Disinformation tried to blame the drone incursion on Ukraine and make out Poland to be weak and confused.

An analysis center within the country’s national research institute, NASK, had noticed increased levels of disinformation. | Adrian Grycuk/Creative Commons/Wikimedia

September 12, 2025 7:48 pm CET

It was not just Poland’s airspace that Russia entered earlier this week. It was cyberspace, too.

Poland’s cyber chiefs held emergency meetings on Wednesday and Thursday after Russian drones entered the country’s airspace in the early hours of Wednesday morning — leading it to scramble fighter jets and invoke NATO’s Article 4.

By Wednesday morning, an analysis center within the country’s national research institute, NASK, had noticed increased levels of disinformation, which it attributed to Russian and Belarusian “services.”

Poland published detailed explanations of the disinformation it had identified being spread on social media and news channels — exposing how Russia coupled a disinformation campaign with its physical intrusions into NATO territory, and the subsequent fallout.

Some of the identified narratives included that Ukraine allowed the drones to pass into Polish airspace to drag Poland into the war, the incident was a “theater” orchestrated by Kyiv and Warsaw, that Belarus warned Poland of the incoming drones and even that the Polish army was preparing to attack Belarus.

The aim of the disinformation, Poland said, was to redirect responsibility for the violation of airspace from Russia to Ukraine and to portray the Polish army and security services as weak and confused.

The public should “exercise extreme caution” when it comes to publicly-shared information, especially on social media, Poland's digital ministry said — warning people not to “give in to emotions,” particularly when they see videos or photos. Successful disinformation feeds on people’s heightened emotions, research has found.

Posts pushing these narratives and others have garnered millions of views, the ministry said Thursday. Its security services are providing verified information to the public on an “ongoing basis."

Related Countries

Belarus Poland Russia Ukraine

Related Organizations

NATO

5. The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army

A pretty sophisticated effort? Are we ready?

Have we even recognized our adversaries' strategy? Do we understand their strategy? Are we EXPOSING their strategies to inoculate the American people against their malign activities? Are we willing to conduct a superior political warfare and information campaign to seize the initiative in the "operations in the information environment "space?

Is it still easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between someone's ears?

The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army

Dina Temple-Raston

Erika Gajda

September 19th, 2025

therecord.media

On a jet-lagged April morning earlier this year, Brett Goldstein’s phone buzzed with a message from a trusted colleague asking him to check out a link he’d just found.

Goldstein, a former government technologist and now a special adviser at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for National Security, was in the middle of a conference. Later, back in his hotel room, he scrolled through to the message again. The note was insistent and included a link.

“I hate links,” he said.

Still, he was curious, so he scanned the link for malware, ran a few checks, and clicked — and what appeared on his screen was a trove of PDFs all written in Mandarin. There were pages of dense Mandarin characters, something that looked like technical schematics, and then, strangely, photos of prominent Americans.

“At first I thought it was spam,” Goldstein remembered. But as he scrolled through the files, he realized it was something else: a leak. He had a speech in the morning, but he couldn’t resist cutting and pasting chunks of the document into a large language model to see what he really had.

“I’d tell myself, ‘I need to go to sleep,’ and then, ‘But I need to see what this is.’ Over and over again,” he said.

The cache appeared to be internal documents from a little-known Beijing-based company called GoLaxy, and they seemed to lay out a chilling new approach to information warfare: an army of AI personas, engineered to look like us, think like us, and win our trust. Not the blunt-force troll farms of Russia, but something intimate, surgical, and already operational.

Hour after hour, he fed chunks of Mandarin text into the model. Schematics, PowerPoints, internal briefs spilled out. The theme was unmistakable: persuasion.

“It turns out it’s talking about a sentiment system … in China,” he said. So someone is trying to convince someone else to have a certain view.”

Digital doubles

The most startling sections described “personas.” Not bots recycling slogans, but carefully constructed digital identities. “I start seeing mentions of Hong Kong and Taiwan and I’m scrolling through it and I’m like, I think they’re talking about personas here,” Goldstein said.

These weren’t crude avatars. They were digital doubles — plausible enough to slip into a social feed, argue politics, offer consolation. They didn’t just broadcast; they listened and adapted. “What we’re seeing with artificial intelligence and generative AI is you can really create detailed personas that are, in theory, tailored to the individual,” he said.

Goldstein recognized the technique because he had been studying rough versions of personas for years. “A decade ago, I would create clusters of people — Midwest, white, male, whatever politics, this economic bracket,” he said. “You’d have 10, 20 variables and that was considered good enough.”

Back then, the archetypes were blunt: white guys in Ohio, single moms in Michigan, retirees in Florida. The Chinese approach, by contrast, was precise — personas handcrafted for a single target. And according to the 399 GoLaxy pages, they were already at work in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and possibly in the United States.

“When I saw photos of Americans in the deck, I thought, oh boy. We’ve come across something that’s a threat,” he said. “We need to get this out as fast as we can to help educate people and start thinking about defenses.”Goldstein knew he couldn’t tackle this alone. “It required more than one Brett to make this happen,” he said.

So he turned to Brett Benson, a Vanderbilt professor of political science who had lived in Taiwan, spoke Mandarin, and studied the dynamics of armed conflict. When Goldstein first shared the files, Benson was cautious.

“Initially I was very skeptical,” he said. “I told him I didn’t really know what to make of it and I needed to spend some more time with it.”

In the leaked documents, GoLaxy described itself as a private enterprise. But as Benson dug deeper there was more to it than that: the company had been founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it employed nearly 1,000 people, and, according to the documents, maintained ties to both military and civilian intelligence.

“They claim in the documents that they serve Chinese national security and national strategy interests and goals,” Benson said.

Before the machines

For years, Chinese information operations had been relatively clumsy. During the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, state-backed accounts on Twitter and Facebook pushed official slogans and clunky memes. They were easy to spot, often recycling stock photos and repeating identical lines. American officials dismissed them as amateurish compared to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had seeded more sophisticated narratives during the 2016 election.

But even then, China’s ambitions were clear. It poured resources into censorship and surveillance at home, while experimenting with influence abroad. What the GoLaxy documents suggest is that Beijing has leapt from imitation to innovation — replacing mass-produced slogans with AI-tailored whispers, aimed at the weak spots of individual minds.

The cache listed dossiers on 2,000 American public figures, thousands of right-wing influencers, and at least 117 Republican members of Congress. Screenshots offered proof of concept: names and faces instantly recognizable. “Yeah, that was a little bit disturbing,” Benson said.

And he and Goldstein thought: if GoLaxy could do this with politicians and influencers, what could they do with ordinary citizens?

The method was straightforward and relentless: scrape millions of data points from social platforms, build psychological profiles, and use generative AI — China’s version of ChatGPT, called DeepSeek — to animate them.

“These are fake but highly realistic AI-generated bots,” Benson explained. “It’s a made-up online profile that looks like a real person, interacts like a real person. Much more subtle than the Russian operations we saw in the 2016 election. They’re very, very tailored.”

What unsettled them most was their fluidity.

“The thing that really blew me away is the adaptability of the personas,” Benson said. “That’s the part that’s kind of spooky. They’re subtle, realistic, human-like, and their ability to engage and shape narratives.”

The rainy day

For years, U.S. officials puzzled over China’s massive data heists — from the breach of the Office of Personnel Management in 2015 to the hack of Starwood hotels three years later. The explanation was always the same: Beijing was hoovering up all this data for a rainy day.

Benson believes the day has come.

“That was the big revelation to me … the data mining efforts paired with AI have the capacity to engage in a front of cognitive warfare that I didn’t really think about before,” he said. “I think this is the new frontier in national security.”

Then, when the researchers prepared an opinion piece for The New York Times this summer, the paper reached out to GoLaxy for comment. Almost immediately, sections of the company’s website began to vanish.

“Pages were disappearing,” Goldstein said. “We were watching in almost real time and just thing after thing was being deleted. There was a whole section on government relationships, and that just disappeared.”

GoLaxy, for its part, denied everything when Times reporters reached out for comment. They did not respond to The Record’s request for more detail. What is clear is the deletions were aimed at changing the narrative.

The warning

Goldstein now spends his time developing ways to distinguish AI personas from humans. “I just wanna understand what’s an AI versus a human,” he said. “Because the alternative is, if we can’t solve this and we don’t know human versus machine, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Benson, for his part, is focused on getting the public to understand what’s at stake.

“That it’s here,” he explained. When asked what “it” meant, he didn’t hesitate: “AI-generated propaganda, or AI-generated information manipulation is here.

“When I use ChatGPT, I increasingly trust it. I think a lot of people increasingly trust it. But there are other forums where AI is being used to manipulate information, to sow doubt, to generate disinformation, and disorientation. I wish more people understood that — that’s not a science fiction future. That is here.”

therecord.media

6. Channeling Augustus: On Agentic Offensive Information Operations

We are hardly playing defense, are we really ready to go on the offense? (I certainly hope say).

Excerpts:

Using agentic information operations, the United States can dive deep into adversary territory for influence. From source curation through to content creation, timing, and deployment, AI agents present useful opportunities. And, as Lindsey and I wrote back in 2021, leaders can use the fracturing of the internet to control their own populations, capabilities since supercharged by AI. The United States must avoid any urges to further fracture the internet and, most importantly, should not deploy these agentic information operations tools domestically.

Beyond our shores, offensive information operations must be conducted in an ethical and morally appropriate way. As a recent piece by uniformed officers in Military Review rightly asserts, “As AI becomes more integrated into military [information operations], ethical considerations must be at the forefront of its deployment.” To be clear, the United States does not have to play fair against foreign targets who will not temper their own agentic information operations, but the United States should always look to mitigate the risk to civilians. For example, AI-enabled content should never encourage, condone, or otherwise excuse civilian harm. AI tools can and should be used to mitigate this and other types of risk by simulating thousands of potential outcomes in seconds, helping operators peek around corners and look into the future.

Humans must also have multiple points of control in the loop to ensure standards are upheld. Given our access to top talent, the best and latest technologies that are being developed domestically, thanks to robust entrepreneurial ecosystems, and concerted infrastructure investments, we can still win without stooping to their level.

Channeling Augustus: On Agentic Offensive Information Operations

csis.org · Commentary by Erol Yayboke Published September 19, 2025

Photo: New Africa/Adobe Stock

The CSIS Futures Lab recently produced a report on agentic warfare. This Commentary builds on that work with a specific focus on the role of AI agents in information operations.

Emperor Augustus Caesar pioneered the effective use of propaganda in ancient Rome. As the grandnephew and successor to Julius, Augustus leveraged information to consolidate power and further ideals of peace and stability, known as the Pax Romana. What made Augustus effective was his ability to create messages that resonated; what made him a pioneer was his ability to time and target the messaging. With the advent of AI tools, the United States finds itself at the start of a new chapter in political propaganda machinery. Yesterday’s bots are today’s agentic trolls, undermining fragile democracies at lightning speed. The United States now faces increasing AI-powered offensive attacks from rivals and an underutilization of AI to go on offense ourselves, particularly concerning timing and targeting within ethical and moral guardrails.

Offense-Defense

As shown in Table 1, national security commentators have recently noted that AI capabilities that did not exist a handful of years ago can now be scaled and repurposed for information operations. These scholars point out that AI offers tools that the United States and its friends and allies can leverage to defend or go on offense against our adversaries.

Image

Erol Yayboke

Senior Fellow (Non-resident), Futures Lab, Defense and Security Department

Programs & Projects

Remote Visualization

The fixation on defense by commentators thus makes sense: It is of critical importance to understand and counter the content generation capabilities of AI deployed by rivals of the United States. The defenses of the United States must always be better than rival offenses.

The offensive focus on how the United States can best create its own content is also necessary. However, focusing on what to deploy is insufficient. Any good football coach will tell you that (1) the best defense is a good offense and (2) you first must master blocking and tackling.

Particularly in the context of offensive information operations, the targeting and timing of content deployment are as important as the content itself. Put simply, what matters is not just the what, but to whom and when. Here is where AI-powered agents can help.

The Who and the When

As Lindsey Sheppard and I wrote back in 2021, there are real national security risks to the increasing segmentation of the internet. In 2025, the internet is an even more fragmented place. From the Great Firewall in China to similarly active censors in Russia and Iran, penetrating foreign information environments is as challenging as it is critical for offensive information operations.

But it’s not impossible. The first step is painting a picture of the target’s online ecosystem. What online entities regularly post meaningful content? What platforms do they use? What do they talk about? How influential is their content? Who else is fighting for eyeballs in that information environment?

Existing Tools

Large language models like Claude and ChatGPT, to search engines like Google, Baidu, and Yandex, are extremely useful but, on their own, will not reliably allow you to find, scrape, and analyze high-quality sources of information. Additionally, while more data is accessible for search thanks to AI, this new research tool “makes the problem of sifting through and making sense of such massive quantities of accumulated data qualitatively more difficult.” In practice, extracting meaningful signals from raw data streams is both technically complex and resource-intensive.

AI agents can be trained to use the most appropriate language model and relevant search engine(s). They can also figure out precise locations of sources and can regularly evaluate and update source lists. They can work as a team, evaluate one another’s work, suggest high-quality sources to human users in a matter of seconds, and be programmed to regularly revisit their work in living, breathing online spaces. The result is a quickly painted, dynamic, transparent, and human-verified portrait of the internet as it exists in the target environment. As CSIS Future Lab colleagues rightly pointed out, “AI agents are only as good as the information they process.” Feeding them closely curated—and therefore more trusted—sources in the top-of-the-funnel will produce more useful results than the firehose.

The ability to know to whom content should be targeted should be coupled with knowing when to deploy the content. Here, AI agents can be deployed to scrape content from the sources they found and that humans have validated. Other agents can be used to verify, sort, and filter curated artifacts. Still others can analyze and understand the content, presenting distilled toplines to busy operators and commanders, flagging anomalies or shifts, and even suggesting options for time and place of message deployment. And yes, they can even be trained to generate appropriate content for the appropriate audience to receive at the appropriate time.

The bottom line is that even the best content will be less effective if inappropriately targeted and timed, especially across a fractured internet.

Guardrails

Using agentic information operations, the United States can dive deep into adversary territory for influence. From source curation through to content creation, timing, and deployment, AI agents present useful opportunities. And, as Lindsey and I wrote back in 2021, leaders can use the fracturing of the internet to control their own populations, capabilities since supercharged by AI. The United States must avoid any urges to further fracture the internet and, most importantly, should not deploy these agentic information operations tools domestically.

Beyond our shores, offensive information operations must be conducted in an ethical and morally appropriate way. As a recent piece by uniformed officers in Military Review rightly asserts, “As AI becomes more integrated into military [information operations], ethical considerations must be at the forefront of its deployment.” To be clear, the United States does not have to play fair against foreign targets who will not temper their own agentic information operations, but the United States should always look to mitigate the risk to civilians. For example, AI-enabled content should never encourage, condone, or otherwise excuse civilian harm. AI tools can and should be used to mitigate this and other types of risk by simulating thousands of potential outcomes in seconds, helping operators peek around corners and look into the future.

Humans must also have multiple points of control in the loop to ensure standards are upheld. Given our access to top talent, the best and latest technologies that are being developed domestically, thanks to robust entrepreneurial ecosystems, and concerted infrastructure investments, we can still win without stooping to their level.

Augustus may not have worried too much about negative repercussions on innocent civilians, and ancient Rome did not have the internet, so there are limitations to the titular analogy. But he strategically deployed the latest technological tools (e.g., custom gold coins) and undoubtedly would have utilized AI agents for more than just the what, especially in the name of greater peace and stability. And that is a strategy worth channeling.

Erol Yayboke is a senior fellow (non-resident) with the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is also the chief operating officer at FilterLabs.AI.

The author would like to thank Jose M. Macias for his valuable contributions.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

csis.org · Commentary by Erol Yayboke Published September 19, 2025

7. Why We’re Drowning in Conspiracy Theories

Why We’re Drowning in Conspiracy Theories

https://www.thefp.com/p/charlie-kirks-murder-and-the-conspiracy-machine?utm

Why antisemitic myths keep returning, and what Kirk’s assassination tells us about the dangers of conspiratorial thinking.

By Matthew Schmitz

09.19.25 —

U.S. Politics

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“Now Charlie Kirk’s death is being used to accuse Jews of underhandedness and blackmail,” writes Matthew Schmitz. (Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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Assassins often have unclear motives, but evidence is accumulating about what led Tyler Robinson to allegedly kill Charlie Kirk. The bullets were inscribed with anti-fascist messages. Robinson’s mother informed the government that her son had recently become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” Robinson told his romantic partner, a trans-identifying male, that he had “had enough” of the conservative activist’s “hatred,” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Given the available information, it is reasonable to conclude that Kirk was killed on account of his political views by someone who believed that his death would advance anti-fascism and transgender rights.

And yet some on the left have suggested that Robinson was in fact a MAGA Republican. Others have suggested that, whoever killed Kirk, the victim was asking for it with his dangerous rhetoric. What these responses have in common is an assumption that the right is always to blame for political violence, even when it is committed by the left.

Read

Je Suis Charlie

But an equally conspiratorial, reason-defying reaction has emerged in the independent media that wields so much influence on the American right. Figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson found in Kirk’s death an occasion to criticize Jews and Israel, doing their best to inject a suggestion of Jewish culpability into the conspiratorial brew even as they paid tribute to Kirk. Meanwhile, a predictable assortment of online cranks who see Jewish conspiracy behind the weather and any other event beyond their own control suggested that Kirk might have been murdered by Mossad. All this has been a reminder that for all the failings of traditional media, serious problems beset the independent media that proposes to take their place.

At the center of the controversy is the suggestion that Kirk was subject to undue pressure—even blackmail. Owens claimed that Bill Ackman, a pro-Israel financier, made “threats” after Kirk questioned Israeli policy. Carlson claimed that pro-Israel donors to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s organization, “tormented Charlie Kirk until the day he died,” and that one such person canceled a $2 million donation. Megyn Kelly said that Kirk felt “pressured” to take a pro-Israel stance, and cited an article by the left-wing writer Max Blumenthal—debunked here—that claimed Kirk felt he was subject to pro-Israel “blackmail.” Ian Carroll, a former guest of podcaster Joe Rogan, suggested that Israel was “the most likely culprit.”

Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has spent a remarkable amount of time denouncing Israel and its supporters in the United States. But he has shown less interest in debating the actual details of Israeli tactics and strategy than in insinuating that Jewish power has corrupted the United States. For example, in a recent podcast episode, Carlson claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest- forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.”

An equally conspiratorial, reason-defying reaction has emerged in the independent media that wields so much influence on the American right.

Now Kirk’s death is being used to accuse Jews of underhandedness and blackmail. It isn’t clear why any donor should feel obliged to support Turning Point USA if he doesn’t like the speakers they are hosting, or how his refusal to donate could constitute blackmail.

But the accusations have less to do with the logic of the case than with the unfortunate utility of anti-Jewish rhetoric when argument fails. Accusations of Jewish blackmail play a prominent role in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fabrication published in 1903 that has received a new lease on life in an internet age of fabrication and conspiracy, such as the unsupported claims about Epstein’s intelligence connections.

The term antisemitic, like racist, has lost its sting for many people. Indeed, an idea’s association with antisemitism now gives it a strange appeal on those parts of the right that are most eager to seem independent of and opposed to the establishment. In order to build their audiences, independent media figures must distinguish themselves from established institutions. One way to do this is to discuss the supposed truths that “they” want to hide from you. For this reason, independent media tend to traffic in what the political scientist Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge”: claims that are regarded as having truth value precisely because they are denied by institutional authorities.

Some of the stigmatized knowledge on offer from these sources seems harmless or silly. Take Carlson’s interest in flying saucers, or Owens’s claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron is a man. But figures who trade in forbidden knowledge have incentives to take up anti-Jewish calumnies that still have the power to shock and titillate, such as the claim that Jews have blackmailed leaders across the West.

For a person who instinctively mistrusts official knowledge, and tends to believe whatever the authorities deny, the very fact that antisemitic claims are subject to public condemnation makes them worth considering. This is why, as Barkun notes, some members of the UFO subculture, which initially had nothing to do with Jews, have ended up claiming The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are true.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that independent media figures are unwilling to take responsibility for the influence they enjoy.

It is no coincidence that these sorts of ideas are gaining traction in corners of the right, which over the last decade became increasingly alienated from establishment institutions such as universities, news organizations, and large companies. An important moment came in 2014, when Brendan Eich was forced out as the CEO of Mozilla. Critics objected to his decision to donate money to Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Eich’s ouster signaled that people with traditional views on marriage (today, they are roughly one-third of the country) were no longer welcome in the halls of power.

Over the next decade, more and more people failed the purity tests. Feminists who believe that there is a biological basis to sex were accused of being “genocidal.” A New York Times op-ed calling for the deployment of troops to quell rioting was said to to put the Times’s “black @NYTimes staff in danger.” The media’s own adoption of far-fetched ideas—such as the claim that Donald Trump colluded with Russian intelligence to win the presidential election in 2016, and that no public gatherings except Black Lives Matter protests were allowable in the summer of 2020—further eroded its credibility. By excluding legitimate views as “disinformation” while peddling fantasies, the mainstream forfeited the credibility that would have helped it in countering lies that now flourish online.

This widespread mistrust created the conditions for right-wing independent media, whose stars enjoy vast and rapt audiences, not to mention access to Trump-aligned Republicans, from the president on down. And yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that independent media figures are unwilling to take responsibility for the influence they enjoy. Kelly’s unsubstantiated speculation in a conversation with Kirk that Epstein was involved with Mossad is a case in point. When the American Jewish Committee pointed out that Kelly was echoing anti-Jewish tropes, Kelly complained. What she failed to do was provide evidence for her claim, or failing that, retract it.

Read

Understanding Tyler Robinson’s Motives

At the same event, Carlson complained that “nobody’s allowed to say” that Epstein worked with Israeli intelligence—despite the fact that he himself was saying exactly that to an audience of thousands at a major conservative gathering. Carlson is the most influential pundit on the American right. His self-conception as a put-upon dissident speaking dangerous truths is wildly at odds with reality.

The carelessness of independent media figures with facts, and their refusal to take responsibility for their claims, mattered less when they were far from power. It matters much more now that they have a great influence on the White House, and are doing their best shape policy. Of course, proximity to power may be seen as another reason for ostensibly independent and dissident voices to mutter darkly about Jews. Anyone can be a persecuted dissident—including the most influential people in the country—if our society is controlled by a shadowy cabal.

St. Augustine observed that “the presence of the prohibition serves only to increase the desire to sin.” Attempts to suppress and stigmatize false claims as “disinformation” or “hate speech” can have the perverse effect of increasing their appeal. For this reason, the best way to fight conspiracies is not simply by refuting them, but by making our universities and news organizations worthy of trust. Doing that will require reversing the purges of the last decade. It will mean bringing in people who have long been considered undesirable on account of their views. Until that happens, the allure of conspiracism will continue to grow.

8. Russia leverages Kirk shooting for propaganda as false claims surge

Again, hardly a surprise.

It is a good thing the Fourth Estate is exposing these efforts.

Recognize, understand, EXPOSE, and attack our enemies' strategies with our own superior political warfare and information strategies.

Russia leverages Kirk shooting for propaganda as false claims surge

Researchers say state-controlled media outlets in Russia and other adversary countries have sought to use the conservative influencer’s killing last week to amplify divisions in the U.S.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/18/russia-leverages-kirk-shooting-propaganda-false-claims-surge/

September 18, 2025 at 3:31 p.m. EDTYesterday at 3:31 p.m. EDT

Staff at the media outlet Russia Today (RT) in a control room in Moscow in 2018. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

By Joseph Menn

Russian state-controlled media outlets and allied social media accounts have seized on the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push narratives that favor the Kremlin and aim to divide Americans and potentially ingratiate the Russians with President Donald Trump, researchers say.

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News organizations such as Sputnik and the former Russia Today (now RT) have extensively covered the killing, the arrest and the continuing political fallout, emphasizing theories shared by Trump’s most conservative allies and highlighting comments by people who said they were unmoved by Kirk’s death.

“RT was quickly taking to amplifying insensitive or cruel response to it by Americans, sometimes tagging influential conservative accounts,” said Emerson Brooking, director of strategy at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Brooking said the Moscow-based multimedia company has waded more deeply into U.S. issues in the past week than it previously had since Trump took office in January, marking a potential change in strategy. After RT was sanctioned last September by the United States and banned by YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, it retreated from intense coverage of U.S. politics.

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Russian outlets and individuals who amplified them have also pushed Russia-centric narratives, with some commentators claiming for instance that Kirk was likely to have been killed by Ukraine for opposing U.S. aid to that country. That echoed claims made about the assassination attempt on Trump last year.

A spokesperson for the White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Iranian figures have said Israel was behind Kirk’s death, while Chinese outlets and supporters have used bogus claims to exaggerate U.S. divisions, according to research by NewsGuard, a news site rating company.

Some foreign outlets amplified conspiracy theories or false claims that circulated wildly in the aftermath of the shooting. Chinese sites, for instance, latched onto false claims from the left that suspect Tyler Robinson had contributed to one of Trump’s campaigns or was a proven follower of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as well as conservative assertions of a wide conspiracy reaching to liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a perennial target for antisemites.

Brooking said Russian propagandists may have gotten so busy in part because there was so much graphic video available for them to circulate and because the attack occurred at about 9 p.m. Moscow time, not in the middle of the night as with the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania.

Yet Russian efforts are likely to have had little impact on the heated American conversation, said Clemson University professor Darren Linvill, who tracks output from Russian troll accounts.

While Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) warned last week that Russian and Chinese bot accounts were amplifying U.S. divisions, Linvill said, the primary impetus for discord was domestic.

“I wish I could tell you this is the Russians or the Chinese,” he said. “Sadly, this is all our own doing.”

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U.S. Government Is Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal

Fee would be latest example of government getting paid for involvement in private-sector deals

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/u-s-government-expected-to-get-multibillion-dollar-fee-in-tiktok-deal-685e3944

By Miriam Gottfried

, Amrith Ramkumar

and Alex Leary

Updated Sept. 19, 2025 6:11 pm ET

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President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping approved a deal for a group of American investors to take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

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The Trump administration is expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee from investors as part of the TikTok deal.View more

The Trump administration is expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee from investors as part of the complicated transaction to take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations, the latest in a string of lucrative government deals with the private sector.

Investors in the TikTok deal would pay the government the fee in exchange for negotiating the agreement with China, people familiar with the matter said. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping approved a preliminary framework for the deal Friday.

The final structure and amount of the payment haven’t been finalized as deal talks continue but the fee could end up totaling billions of dollars, the people said. The government recently agreed to become Intel’s largest shareholder and take 15% of the sales from an Nvidia artificial-intelligence chip made for the Chinese market in exchange for granting export licenses.

Trump has mentioned the federal government could get a fee as part of the TikTok deal, but didn’t specify that it could be billions of dollars, an enormous sum for arranging a deal.

“It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office, adding that the size of the deal and money and effort put in by the government justify compensation. A day earlier, he said, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window.”

Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. TikTok’s U.S. operations could be worth many billions of dollars depending on the final outcome of the deal. Still, a fee in the billions of dollars would be unprecedented.

TikTok’s U.S. operations could be worth many billions of dollars depending on the final outcome of the deal. Photo: Allison Dinner/EPA/Shutterstock

The geopolitical components of the TikTok deal make it an outlier, an argument Trump has used in justifying taking some of Nvidia’s chip sales to China.

Traditionally, the government hasn’t been paid by companies for national-security approvals or export licenses and some lawyers say such arrangements could be illegal.

The unusual TikTok fee arrangement is part of already complicated negotiations. Congress last year passed a law banning the video-streaming app in the U.S. due to worries that China could access the data of American users. It was about to go dark before Trump swooped in at the start of his second term and pledged to arrange a deal to transfer control of the company from TikTok parent ByteDance to U.S. investors.

The agreement would end years of uncertainty about TikTok’s fate in America that dates back to the first Trump administration.

Under the structure being discussed, a group of new investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake and cloud-computing firm Oracle would own roughly half of the new U.S. entity running TikTok in America. Existing investors would hold about 30%, while ByteDance’s stake would dip just below 20% to comply with the law.

“The TikTok deal is well on its way,” Trump said Friday afternoon in the Oval Office.

In 2020, when Trump tried to facilitate a sale of TikTok to Microsoft, he said the company should pay the U.S. Treasury Department for facilitating the deal. “It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant; without a lease the tenant has nothing, so they pay what’s called ‘key money,’ or they pay something,” he said at the time.

Trump has taken a series of steps to exert more influence over the private sector in his second term, worrying some Republicans who are wary about the repeated interventions. Administration officials are weighing a plan to spur the construction of factories and other infrastructure using billions of dollars from a fund established during trade negotiations with Japan.

The government also got a “golden share” in Nippon Steel’s takeover of U.S. Steel that gives Trump the ability to appoint a member to the board of Nippon Steel. His approval is needed for many strategic moves by the company.

Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com, Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com and Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com

Appeared in the September 20, 2025, print edition as 'White House Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in Deal'.

10. NATO Planes Intercept Russian Jet Fighters Over Estonia

Seems like Russia is executing a coherent campaign that consists of actions and influence. What strategic effects are they seeking to achieve (rhetorical question, the answer to which should be pretty obvious to us).

NATO Planes Intercept Russian Jet Fighters Over Estonia

The Baltic state called for formal consultations with members of the alliance

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nato-planes-intercept-russian-jet-fighters-over-estonia-fae5c61a

By Thomas Grove

Updated Sept. 20, 2025 4:40 am ET

An image released by the Swedish air force shows a Russian jet fighter above the Baltic Sea after violating Estonian airspace. Photo: forsvarsmakten/AFP/Getty Images

NATO jet fighters intercepted Russian war planes that violated Estonia’s airspace Friday, causing the tiny Baltic state to call for formal consultations with members of the Western alliance.

The Russian jet fighters were in Estonian airspace for 12 minutes and left after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft responded, said Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. It marked the second time in two weeks that a NATO member invoked Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty, triggering formal discussions.

“Such violation is totally unacceptable,” Michal wrote on X.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that the jets were making a routine flight between the Russian region of Karelia, which borders Finland, to the exclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea. The planes, the statement said, flew over neutral waters of the Baltic Sea and didn’t enter Estonian airspace.

The NATO planes scrambled to intercept the Russian jet fighters were Italian F-35s stationed in Estonia.

Invoking Article 4 doesn’t demand a response from members but gives a framework to discuss Russia’s increasingly belligerent stance in recent weeks. Poland called for the same consultations last week after the country said 19 Russian drones crossed the border into its airspace where they flew deep into the country and were engaged by NATO radar and war planes. Some landed on their own, others were shot down.

The second round of consultations on the same topic in as many weeks could raise calls for a more muscular response to the Russian incursions. Most NATO countries are reluctant to push any measures that could provoke open conflict with Moscow, but members of the alliance agreed to dedicate more equipment to Poland after the drone incursion, including new planes and helicopters to boost security on its eastern flank.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incursion into Estonian airspace.

“They constitute a new step in this accumulation of provocations and irresponsible actions by Russia,” he said in a post on X. “I extend my full support to the Estonian authorities. A security posture will be adopted in response to these repeated violations.”

Estonia, one of the alliance’s easternmost and smallest members, has already seen a handful of airspace violations this year. The country has adopted one of the toughest stances toward Russia and earlier this year discussed the possibility of sinking Russian ships if they threatened to damage any Estonian infrastructure. The discussion occurred during a spate of suspected Russian sabotage on underwater sea cables earlier in the year.

A call for Article 4 consultations has been rare since the creation of the alliance in 1949. Until Estonia’s request, Article 4 discussions had only been held eight times.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

11. Senate confirms Mike Waltz as UN ambassador

Now with a Green Beret at the UN perhaps we can execute a counter-unconventional warfare campaign to undo the malign influence of China and take back the UN for the public good.

My assessment is that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).

Why Counter-UW?

As a nation:

We suck at UW

We suck at COIN

We suck at CT

We suck at Nation Building

But the bottom line is we suck at strategy: Both executing our own and recognizing our enemies’ strategies

Why Counter-UW?

Our opponents excel at UW, Political Warfare, New Generation Warfare, Three Warfares, Psychological Warfare and Propaganda, etc.

AQ, ISIL/ISIS, Iran, Russia, and China just to name a few

We do war fighting very well – best in the world

We need to be able to do something else well in addition to war fighting so maybe countering UW is it

Bottom line is we have to operate effectively across the spectrum of conflict and that includes countering our adversaries who are conducting unconventional and political warfare.

Why Counter-UW?

Redundant? COIN, FID, SFA Stability Operations, etc?

Irregular warfare threats are predominantly political – UW is political

Enemies conduct political mobilization

Employ undergrounds and auxiliaries and sometimes guerrilla forces

Subversion and sabotage are integral elements of UW

All of this must be countered –

2d Thesis: UW expertise provides the intellectual foundation to develop strategies to counter enemy UW strategies and operations

Bottom line: We do not need new a new doctrinal term – we need a new strategic focus to develop strategies to counter our enemies.

Thinking in terms of COIN, CT, FID, UW, Nation Building does not make us think about strategy and most importantly about countering the enemy’s strategy – Sun Tzu

Counter UW Described (not defined)

Counter-Unconventional Warfare consists of operations and activities conducted by the U.S. Government and supported by SOF against an adversarial state or non-state sponsor of unconventional warfare in order to decrease the sponsor’s capacity to employ unconventional warfare to achieve strategic aims. As such, Counter-UW may comprehensively employ political, economic, military, and psychological pressure in order to affect both an adversarial sponsor’s will and capabilities.

In execution, Counter-UW efforts are likely to be characterized as protracted and psychological-centric in nature. Counter-UW operations and activities focus on decreasing the sponsor’s efforts to support the underground, auxiliary, or guerilla force of an insurgency or resistance along with decreasing the sponsor’s will to conduct UW. These efforts may be synchronized with special warfare campaigns or surgical strike operations conducted directly against the adversarial sponsor or sponsored insurgency or resistance movement where applicable.

Senate confirms Mike Waltz as UN ambassador

The vote means Waltz will be partially in his role in time for next week’s U.N. General Assembly.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/19/mike-waltz-united-nations-ambassador-00573467

Mike Waltz speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 21 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. | Jose Luis Magana/AP

By Eric Bazail-Eimil

09/19/2025 03:12 PM EDT

The Senate voted to confirm former national security adviser Mike Waltz to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Friday, on the eve of a week of high-level meetings and debates at the U.N. General Assembly.

The Senate voted 47 to 43 to confirm Waltz for his role as U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. Security Council. Three Democrats — Mark Kelly of Arizona, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — joined all but one Republican to confirm Waltz. The lone Republican to vote against Waltz was Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who had stalled Waltz’s nomination in committee.

But Republican Senate leadership did not bring to a vote Waltz’s separate nomination to be the U.S. representative to the General Assembly. It is unclear what effect that decision will have — if any — on Waltz’s ability to execute his role while the Senate is in recess next week.

It was looking unlikely that Waltz would get a confirmation vote at all before world leaders began descending on New York for a spate of summits and high-level meetings at the United Nations next week. His nomination was returned to committee, along with those of other Trump ambassadorial picks, after Democrats protested that the way the Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced his nomination violated Senate rules.

But Trump administration allies, including Trump strategist Jason Miller, called on Senate leadership to move forward with the confirmation of Waltz and other top foreign policy and national security aides ahead of the U.N. General Assembly.

Waltz, a former members of Congress from Florida and national security surrogate for the 2024 Trump presidential campaign, was moved out of his role as President Donald Trump’s top national security aide in May, following his role in creating a Signal chat where top administration officials discussed a strike against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the presence of the editor of The Atlantic magazine.

Waltz faced some opposition from Paul in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as Paul tried to keep the committee from advancing his nomination with a favorable recommendation. Paul has not explained the source of his opposition to Waltz, but did question Waltz about his positions on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Republicans made a deal with Shaheen, the committee’s top Democrat, to free up foreign assistance spending in exchange for her vote to advance Waltz’s nomination with a favorable recommendation.

Filed Under:
United Nations,
Donald Trump,

12. Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access

I wonder if this will be challenged on First Amendment grounds:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

The freedom of the press being abridged here?

Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access

The Department of Defense will force reporters to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release, or risk losing their credential to cover the military.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/business/media/pentagon-restrictions-reporters-hegseth-trump.html

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on reporters for questions during a press briefing after the Iran strike in June.Credit...Alex Brandon/Associated Press

By Ken Bensinger

Sept. 20, 2025, 1:06 a.m. ET

The Pentagon said Friday it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense, requiring them to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.

The new mandate, described in a memorandum circulated to the press on Friday, was the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to limit the ability of the media to cover the federal government without interference.

The Department of Defense said in the 17-page memo that it “remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But it added that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”

In addition, the document constrains the movements of the media within the Pentagon itself, designating large areas of the building off limits without escorts for the roughly 90 reporters credentialed to cover the agency. Although many offices and meeting rooms in the Pentagon are restricted, the Pentagon press corps had previously been given unescorted access throughout much of the building and its hallways.

The move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public. The National Press Club called the policy “a direct assault on independent journalism” and called for it to be immediately rescinded.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the guidelines were “already in line with every other military base in the country,” adding that they were “basic, common-sense guidelines to protect sensitive information.”

Read the Pentagon’s New Restrictions on Reporters

The Pentagon said it would forbid reporters from gathering any information that had not been authorized for release, and would revoke press passes from any journalists who did not obey.

Read Document

The Pentagon’s tense relationship with the news media reflects a pervasive attitude throughout the Trump administration. The White House has repeatedly limited access to outlets because of coverage it doesn’t like, and President Trump has sued multiple news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, over their coverage.

Following the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened television stations with “fines or license revocation” if they continued carrying Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC after the comedian made comments that some interpreted as critical of the Make America Great Again movement and Mr. Kirk. ABC indefinitely suspended the show.

The Defense Department has been a focal point of press scrutiny this year, with media outlets revealing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified war plans in a private group chat that included a reporter and that the secretary had invited the billionaire Elon Musk to a briefing on the government’s top-secret plans if war broke out with China. Recently, news coverage has raised questions about the legality of two military strikes on Venezuelan boats that killed 14 people. On Friday, Mr. Trump said a third Venezuelan boat had been destroyed by the government, with three additional people killed.

Under the watch of Mr. Hegseth, the Pentagon has placed a series of restraints on the news media’s ability to cover the military, beginning with the decision in late January to remove four outlets from their work spaces in the Pentagon in favor of news sources, such as Breitbart News, that have provided coverage seen by the administration as more favorable.

Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has taken an increasingly adversarial position with the press, repeatedly accusing journalists of attempting to “sabotage” Mr. Trump’s agenda by publishing information leaked by “disgruntled former employees.” He has held only one press briefing, after a military strike on Iran in June.

“The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do,” Mr. Hegseth wrote on X on Friday.

Mr. Trump, for his part, suggested to reporters on Thursday that news outlets should be punished for negative coverage of his presidency.

“They give me only bad publicity or press,” he said. “I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”

Mr. Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, did not respond to a query about why the guidelines were issued now or whether the White House was involved in the decision to implement them. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the development.

The new pledge asks journalists to acknowledge in writing that acquiring or using unauthorized information would be grounds for “immediate suspension” of Pentagon access. It defined off-limits information to include both classified materials and “controlled unclassified information,” a broadly defined category that includes materials that could pose a risk to national security if released to the public.

It is not clear whether the prohibition would include soliciting information from Defense Department staff or seeking confirmation or comment on materials gathered through other means.

The Pentagon Press Association said in a statement that it was “aware of today’s new directive regarding badge access to the Pentagon and is reviewing it.”

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that the government is legally prohibited from requiring journalists to surrender their right to investigate the government in exchange for access or credentials.

“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” Mr. Stern said. “The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”

Kate Conger contributed reporting.

Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.

See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Department of Defense

13. U.S. in Talks With Taliban on Returning Counterterrorism Forces to Afghan Base

U.S. in Talks With Taliban on Returning Counterterrorism Forces to Afghan Base

Taliban officials haven’t agreed to the proposal, which are part of wider talks with Kabul officials on re-establishing ties

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/u-s-in-talks-with-taliban-on-returning-counterterrorism-forces-to-afghan-base-25d5dcd0?st=TCokkq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Lara Seligman

and Michael R. Gordon

Updated Sept. 19, 2025 4:21 pm ET

Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base in 2021. Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal

Quick Summary

Trump officials are in talks with the Taliban about re-establishing a U.S. military presence at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base.View more

WASHINGTON—Trump administration officials are in discussions with the Taliban about re-establishing a small U.S. military presence at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base as a launch point for counterterrorism operations, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations.

President Trump’s surprise announcement Thursday that he is seeking to reclaim Bagram Air Base is a potential component of a broader diplomatic effort to normalize relations with the Taliban, the people said. The talks—which are led by special envoy for hostage response Adam Boehler—include a potential prisoner exchange, a possible economic deal and a security component, according to a U.S. official.

U.S. officials and the Taliban have discussed allowing the U.S. military to use Bagram as a “launch point” for counterterrorism operations, the U.S. official said. This could involve basing manned military aircraft or drones at the sprawling installation north of Kabul, which was the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan for the duration of a 20-year war that ended in 2021.

A senior official in Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry, Zakir Jalaly, rejected the possible return of U.S. troops to Afghanistan in a social-media post, though he left the door open to other forms of cooperation.

“Afghanistan and America need to engage with each other and can have economic and political relations based on mutual respect and common benefits, without America having military presence in any part of Afghanistan,” Jalaly wrote. “Military presence has never been accepted by Afghans in history, and this possibility was completely rejected during the Doha talks and agreement, but doors to other engagements have been opened.”

Taliban military vehicles paraded to celebrate the third anniversary of Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan at the Bagram Air Base in 2024. Photo: ahmad sahel arman/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Doha Talks were negotiations held in Qatar that led to a February 2020 agreement for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan. In return, the Taliban would ensure that the country wouldn’t be used to plan strikes on the West and would discuss a “permanent and comprehensive cease-fire” with the then-Afghan government.

The Trump administration’s new talks over Bagram are very much in early stages and there has been no planning to imminently move forces to the base, the U.S. official said. Boehler didn’t respond to requests for comment. The White House referred questions to the Pentagon.

Discussions about reopening Bagram illustrate Trump’s penchant for dramatic turns in foreign policy. Trump disclosed the talks Thursday at a press conference in Britain, saying of Bagram: “We’re trying to get it back.” He added that the base is “about an hour away from where China is developing its nuclear weapons.”

Allowing U.S. forces back in would also represent a major about-face for the Taliban, which fought the American military presence relentlessly during the war, mounting regular attacks on Bagram—and which touted the U.S. evacuation in 2021 as a huge victory over what it described as foreign occupiers.

While Trump has assailed his predecessor’s handling of the withdrawal, it was his administration during Trump’s first term that concluded the agreement with the Taliban to take all U.S. troops out of the country. No provision was made under that accord for retaining Bagram, former U.S. officials say.

The Pentagon “is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the Department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe. We are always ready to execute any mission at the President’s direction,” said chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell.

Trump’s interest in Bagram was first sparked by an opinion column then-Rep. Mike Waltz wrote in Military Times in 2021 amid then-President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a person familiar with the discussions. In the piece, titled “Why Afghanistan is critical to the struggle against China, Russia and Iran,” Waltz cited Bagram as a critical strategic outpost to counter China and Iran.

“Bagram Airfield remains our sole strategic key terrain in the backyards of three of our four global competitors—China, Russia, and Iran—and we have no other options in the region,” Waltz wrote.

In highlighting the significance of Bagram, Trump suggested that the proximity of the base to China might help the U.S. better keep tabs on Beijing’s nuclear program. A former senior Pentagon official said the U.S. uses satellites and electronic intercepts to monitor China’s growing nuclear arsenal and that reoccupying Bagram would offer no significant intelligence advantage in this region.

After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban gave refuge in Kabul to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top al Qaeda leader and one of the architects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was killed in a drone strike in July 2022 that was ordered by then-President Biden.

The U.S. and the Taliban, however, share an enemy in a branch of Islamic State based in Afghanistan, which is known as ISIS-K. In 2021, Gen. Mark Milley, who was serving then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left open the possibility that the U.S. might cooperate with the Taliban in counterterrorism operations aimed at the group.

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden for handing over Bagram Air Field during the Afghanistan evacuation, but the agreement the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in 2020 required the removal of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan and turning over all the key bases.

In the final months of Trump’s first term in office, the White House even pressed the Pentagon to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from the country. A month before the presidential election, Trump wrote in a social-media post that all U.S. forces would leave soon. “We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!,” Trump wrote on Oct. 7, 2020.

After conferring with U.S. military commanders, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, according to a book he later wrote, prepared a classified memo for Trump. Concerned the Taliban weren’t living up to their end of the deal, he recommended that the U.S. hold U.S. force levels at 4,500 troops and make no further cuts until it was determined that the group was in compliance.

Trump fired Esper in early November. By the time that Trump ended his first presidential term in January 2021, the Trump administration had brought troop levels to 2,500, which was the lowest level since 2001.

After Joe Biden became president, there was a debate within his administration about whether to completely withdraw from Afghanistan or retain a modest force in the country, including at Bagram, the officials say. Biden decided on a full withdrawal, overruling the recommendation of senior U.S. military officers who favored keeping the 2,500 troops in the country.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

Appeared in the September 20, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. in Talks to Return Forces to Afghan Base'.

14. 'Conventional Weapons Would Be Sufficient': China Issues Stark New Warning on Taiwan

'Conventional Weapons Would Be Sufficient': China Issues Stark New Warning on Taiwan

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Stephen Silver · September 19, 2025

Key Points and Summary – Retired PLA Lt. Gen. He Lei told Phoenix TV that China could “resolve the Taiwan issue” using conventional weapons, while reiterating Beijing’s preference for peaceful reunification and a self-defense nuclear posture.

-His remarks came at the Xiangshan forum as China stresses joint, system-of-systems operations-Regional tensions rose with reports of a new Philippine forward base in Batanes, a strategic chokepoint near Taiwan; President Marcos Jr. said Manila couldn’t stay out of a Taiwan clash.

-In the U.S., President Trump claimed Xi Jinping promised no invasion during his tenure. Beijing called Taiwan an internal matter and affirmed peaceful aims—backed by force if needed.

Retired Chinese General Makes Some Noice on Taiwan Issue

A retired Chinese general made some jaw-dropping comments this week about Taiwan.

According to the South China Morning Post, which cited an interview on Phoenix Television, Lt. Gen. He Lei said this week that China’s conventional weapons are sufficient to “resolve the Taiwan issue,” although peaceful reunification remains China’s “preferred option.”

The implication was that nuclear weapons would not be necessary for China to defeat Taiwan, if it ever decides it wants to take the island nation by force.

The former general reiterated that the country’s nuclear policy has never changed, and that its nuclear weapons are “entirely for the purpose of self-defense.”

The general is the former vice president of the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, and the interview took place on the sidelines of Beijing’s Xiangshan military forum.

“We do not wish to possess weapons for attacking Taiwan. What we seek is a peaceful resolution,” the former general said at the forum.

“Should it become necessary to resolve the Taiwan issue by force, or to employ non-peaceful means, [we] would not require extensive high-end weapons; conventional weapons would be sufficient,” he said, per SCMP. He added that China is prioritizing “joint operations, system-based warfare and overall combat capabilities.”

In a different interview at the same conference, this time with CGTN, the former general stated that the Philippines’ “provocations in the South China Sea [are] bound to fail.”

According to reports this week, satellite imagery revealed the existence of a new forward-operating base in Batanes, the Philippines. Per Newsweek, this base is located at a “strategic chokepoint” which “would likely come into play in the event of a conflict involving China-claimed Taiwan.”

The new base will “serve as a hub for territorial defense, maritime domain awareness, and humanitarian assistance and disaster response,” the Philippine Navy’s Northern Luzon Command said in a statement translated by Newsweek.

“If there is a confrontation over Taiwan between China and the United States, there is no way that the Philippines can stay out of it, simply because of our physical geographic location,” Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. told Firstpost in August.

Trump and Taiwan

Back in mid-August, according to Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump made a surprising declaration. Trump claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping had promised him that China would not invade Taiwan for as long as Trump is president.

Trump made the claim during a televised Fox News interview.

“I will tell you, you know, you have a very similar thing with President Xi of China and Taiwan, but I don’t believe there’s any way it’s going to happen as long as I’m here. We’ll see,” the president said in the Fox interview.

China’s most advanced aircraft carrier, Fujian, sailed through the Taiwan Strait and into the South China Sea during sea trials — a step toward formal commissioning. pic.twitter.com/GryIYvm2c2

— China Perspective (@China_Fact) September 13, 2025

In response, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry declared that the Taiwan question was an “internal” matter.

“The Taiwan issue is purely an internal affair of China, and how to resolve the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at the time. “We will do our utmost to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification. But we will never allow anyone or any force to separate Taiwan from China in any way.”

A 2016 Controversy

In late 2016, after Trump was elected to his first term but before he took office, he made a call to the president of Taiwan.

China’s foreign ministry objected to the call, which, according to CNN, “overturned decades of diplomatic protocol.” Subsequent reporting revealed that former Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, who at the time was 93 years old, had lobbied on behalf of Taiwan for the call.

J-20. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Trump, despite a great deal of tension with China throughout his first term and so far in his second, has never seriously challenged the One China doctrine again.

About the Author: Stephen Silver

Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · Stephen Silver · September 19, 2025

15. House intel chair seeks to reform ‘disjointed’ counterspy system

House intel chair seeks to reform ‘disjointed’ counterspy system

Chinese espionage threat flashes 'critical' red lights to agencies

washingtontimes.com · Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Multiple U.S. counterintelligence agencies charged with neutralizing foreign spy operations lack focus and the system needs major reform, according to the chairman of the House intelligence oversight panel.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford said recent hearings and oversight since 2017 highlighted the need for legislative fixes.

“We’ve seen that we’ve kind of got a disjointed counterintelligence apparatus that just doesn’t work well together,” the Arkansas Republican said in an interview with The Washington Times. “We’re always kind of looking for this smoking gun evidence instead of taking proactive steps against those threats.”

China’s aggressive intelligence-gathering operations in the United States are the main focus of the reforms, he said. Spying by Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba will also be targeted.

The chairman spoke following committee passage last week of a major reform package within the fiscal 2026 intelligence authorization bill. The legislation is awaiting a full House vote.

The measure is called the Strategic Enhancement of Counterintelligence and Unifying Reform Efforts Act, or SECURE Act.

A major element would be the creation of a new National Counterintelligence Center, or NCIC, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The new center would replace the current National Counterintelligence and Security Center that lacks the coordinating power to fuse activities by counterspy branches within the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, military services and other security agencies.

A new mission of the center, in addition to coordinating, would be to direct and conduct counterintelligence operations. A key emphasis, according to the bill, will be setting the doctrine and requirements for the “execution of offensive counterintelligence activities.”

Critics say American counterintelligence has lacked an offensive, proactive focus and relied instead on defensive approaches.

The center will also be in charge of conducting assessments of damage caused by foreign spy cases. Such assessments in the past were often compromised by intelligence agencies that sought to hide their failures in the reviews.

Highly secret counterspy operations include recruiting foreign spies as defectors in place, using double agents or “dangles” to smoke out foreign spies, and aggressively hunting “moles” or foreign penetration agents.

The bill upgrades the definition of counterintelligence in current legislation from protecting against foreign spy threats to a mandate to “deter, disrupt, investigate, exploit,” foreign intelligence operations.

The use of deception to neutralize foreign spies and counter foreign intelligence influence operations also would be part of the new program. The new NCIC also would grant greater power to the director to conduct counterintelligence activities as the principal adviser to President Trump on foreign spying threats, in addition to working for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Mr. Crawford said he worked closely with Ms. Gabbard in drawing up plans for counterintelligence reforms. U.S. counterintelligence has not evolved at the same time foreign spying threats are increasing.

“I mean, it just seems like every week I get another brief on something else that’s CI related,” Mr. Crawford said. “We’re not running our best game.”

One problem is what the chairman called the permissive landscape in the United States that makes it easier for foreign spies to conduct operations with impunity.

“So we just feel the need to reset and start taking a more proactive approach as it applies to CI with particularly our great power adversaries,” he said.

The reforms would also codify in law an interagency National Counterintelligence Task Force currently made up of security officials from various agencies in government. On China, Mr. Crawford said Beijing’s spying operations are the major concern.

“The red lights are flashing critical levels,” he said of Chinese spying.

The Russian intelligence services are no longer the KGB but still a major worry, he said.

Mr. Crawford said the Senate version of the authorization bill does not contain the reforms. But there have been discussions with senators, and he said he is hopeful the reform legislation will be adopted in a final bill during a House-Senate conference.

“We hope that they’ll come along with us there,” he said.

The FBI is in charge of counterintelligence domestically. The bureau has suffered a string of failures, including the recent conviction of Charles F. MGonigal, the former FBI counterspy chief in New York, on corruption charges, and the firing in 2018 of FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, who ran the now discredited probe into Mr. Trump and Russian collusion.

CIA counterintelligence during the 1960s and 1970s was an independent function and played a powerful role within the agency and larger U.S. government under its chief, James Jesus Angleton, who died in 1987. Angleton, however, was forced out following disclosures of domestic spying operations and what his critics said was overzealousness in pursuing then-Soviet moles in the agency.

After Angleton, many in the intelligence community called his brand of spy hunting “sick think,” and led to a downgrading of the function.

What followed has been a seemingly uninterrupted string of extremely damaging spy penetrations. They include CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames who gave away all CIA agents to Moscow, and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen who also spied for Moscow.

Since the post-Angleton period, nearly every agency of the federal government has been damaged by foreign spy breaches, mainly involving the loss of secrets to Russia, China and Cuba.

One major recent intelligence disaster was the CIA’s loss of nearly all its recruited agents in China beginning in 2010. The agent loss was the result of turncoat CIA officers and technical breakdowns that allowed China’s Ministry of State Security to unravel the agency’s spy network.

In 2023, then-CIA Director William Burns said the agency was making progress in rebuilding agent networks in China after the devastating losses.

Former CIA officer Sam Faddis said the reform legislation would be good if U.S. intelligence agencies start to approach counterintelligence with more vigor.

“Fundamentally, though, it begs the question: Who is going to do it? Who will run these ops?” he said.“The FBI has no idea what it is doing in this realm. CIA has lost its edge. If we don’t change that, we are just wishing we could do better,” he said.

Michele Van Cleave, former national counterintelligence director, warned that Department of Government Efficiency efforts to cut waste and abuse pose counterintelligence risks and increases the danger of theft of information by Russia, China and other spy services.

“Having served as head of U.S. counterintelligence, I have no doubt that hostile intelligence services have been working overtime to take advantage of this golden opportunity,” Ms. Van Cleave wrote in The Hill.

“The red carpet rolled out by DOGE to our adversaries would be a difficult CI challenge under the best of circumstances, but today our counterintelligence enterprise is crumbling at the seams,” she said.

U.S. counterintelligence services are only able to provide coverage against less than 10% of the highest priority foreign intelligence personnel in or transiting the United States, Ms. Van Cleave said.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · Bill Gertz

16. Pentagon Needs Digital Command for New Approach to Key Tech

Excerpts:

The strategy is designed to echo that pursued by the U.S. during the Cold War, when it countered a large manpower disadvantage with Warsaw Pact troops in Europe through precision guided weapons and superior airpower.

Yet the strategic context is also different now, said Bajraktari, and it’s even changed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “We have a new era that’s much more confrontational, rather than competitive” between the U.S. and its great power rivals, Russia and China, he said. The situation is complicated because of the emergence of a “coalescing axis of disruptors” including Iran and North Korea alongside Russia and China. “We don’t argue that this is an alliance in the traditional sense,” he said, but there was “cooperation on capabilities, sharing of resources and other assistance that they provide to each other, diplomatically, informationally and militarily.”

Importantly, the fulcrum of strategic power is shifting, the authors argue, tilting away from the side with the largest weapons stockpiles and towards the side best able to “evolve and adapt its military equipment and its ability to quickly scale up” the production and deployment of innovative systems. “The weapons a nation can produce before the conflict ends have as much value as the weapons they possess at its start. This is now the decisive measurement of a country’s strategic depth,” the report states.

For the Air Force in particular, the proposed strategy would have big implications, Ryseff told Air & Space Forces Magazine by email.

“Mass matters—not only in the form of more manned fighters and bombers, but in scalable fleets of drones and autonomous systems that can overwhelm adversary defenses, and preserve precious human pilots for critical missions,” he said, calling on DOD to “adopt a production mindset: prioritizing speed, cost efficiency, and scale in building evolving technologies, rather than assuming platforms will remain relevant for decades.”

In the three transformative technologies the report highlights, he said, “the ability to produce quickly, update constantly, and replace rapidly will prove far more decisive than long-term sustainment of exquisite systems.”

Pentagon Needs Digital Command for New Approach to Key Tech

airandspaceforces.com · Shaun Waterman · September 18, 2025

U.S. Cyber Command operators participate in Cyber Guard 25-2 exercise on June 3, 2025, at Fort George G. Meade, MD. The exercise, in coordination with the Joint Staff, simulates scenarios that test response protocols and defensive and offensive techniques across geographic areas of responsibility. Photo by Skyler Wilson

Pentagon Needs a Digital Command as Part of New Approach to Key Technologies

Sept. 18, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org

The Pentagon needs a Digital Command and a Digital Warfare Corps, along with other changes, to take advantage of critical new technologies, according to a think tank founded by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt.

How the U.S. military takes advantage of innovation in three fields in particular—sensors, AI and autonomy—will determine if it can maintain its technological advantage over China and other potential adversaries and offset their greater numbers of personnel and equipment, leaders from the Special Competitive Studies Project argue in a new report titled “Offset X Evolved.”

Key to SCSP’s proposed strategy is recognizing that these technologies each play off and feed into the others, said James Ryseff, defense director at SCSP and one of the lead authors of the report, published Sept. 18.

“People talk about sensors and data, AI, and autonomy in silos,” Ryseff said at a launch event hosted by the Defense Writers’ Group. Better data from more effective sensors like synthetic aperture radar satellites, which can see through rain and fog, creates an information advantage. Artificial intelligence can organize and analyze that data and present commanders with options more quickly than any human staff team, meaning decisions can be made faster and better. And autonomous weapons platforms can execute those decisions at a speed and scale no conventional force can match: The prized lethality advantage.

“We have to think of these three things as sort of interconnected gears that each turns the others, as opposed to isolated silos that we can pursue independently,” said Ryseff.

Such an approach would let the U.S. “counter People’s Liberation Army’s strengths without engaging in a costly and risky attempt at a symmetrical arms race or escalation,” states the report. “Rather than trying to overmatch China ship-for-ship or missile-for-missile, the U.S. can invest in capabilities that undermine the foundation of China’s anti-access/area denial and information dominance strategies.”

To execute that strategy and truly treat the sensors, AI, and autonomy as a whole, the report authors argue the Pentagon needs to establish new organizations:

U.S. Digital Command, to take over the role of U.S. Cyber Command and also take charge of information and influence operations and electronic warfare—helping control the flow of data through sensors and AI systems and onto autonomous systems.
U.S. Digital Warfare Corps, essentially a new service branch with its own command structure to staff Digital Command and provide technological capabilities to other commands. SCSP Vice President for Policy Ylber Bajraktari compared the arrangement to how the U.S. Space Force military service presents forces to U.S. Space Command, the operational command, though Bajraktari noted that “the analogy is imperfect.”
Joint Warfighting and Innovation Command, responsible for modernizing and transforming the joint force to fight the wars of today and tomorrow and bringing together “concept development, resourcing, and innovation under one roof, with a singular focus on winning the next war.”

SCSP also recommends one percent of U.S. defense spending be set aside for a special innovation fund, initially controlled by the Secretary of Defense in close consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but later to make up the budget for the Joint Warfighting and Innovation Command.

The strategy is designed to echo that pursued by the U.S. during the Cold War, when it countered a large manpower disadvantage with Warsaw Pact troops in Europe through precision guided weapons and superior airpower.

Yet the strategic context is also different now, said Bajraktari, and it’s even changed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “We have a new era that’s much more confrontational, rather than competitive” between the U.S. and its great power rivals, Russia and China, he said. The situation is complicated because of the emergence of a “coalescing axis of disruptors” including Iran and North Korea alongside Russia and China. “We don’t argue that this is an alliance in the traditional sense,” he said, but there was “cooperation on capabilities, sharing of resources and other assistance that they provide to each other, diplomatically, informationally and militarily.”

Importantly, the fulcrum of strategic power is shifting, the authors argue, tilting away from the side with the largest weapons stockpiles and towards the side best able to “evolve and adapt its military equipment and its ability to quickly scale up” the production and deployment of innovative systems. “The weapons a nation can produce before the conflict ends have as much value as the weapons they possess at its start. This is now the decisive measurement of a country’s strategic depth,” the report states.

For the Air Force in particular, the proposed strategy would have big implications, Ryseff told Air & Space Forces Magazine by email.

“Mass matters—not only in the form of more manned fighters and bombers, but in scalable fleets of drones and autonomous systems that can overwhelm adversary defenses, and preserve precious human pilots for critical missions,” he said, calling on DOD to “adopt a production mindset: prioritizing speed, cost efficiency, and scale in building evolving technologies, rather than assuming platforms will remain relevant for decades.”

In the three transformative technologies the report highlights, he said, “the ability to produce quickly, update constantly, and replace rapidly will prove far more decisive than long-term sustainment of exquisite systems.”

He said the report “also highlights the urgent need for the Air Force to build tighter feedback loops between operators and engineers so that lessons from the field translate into software and hardware updates within days, not years.”

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org

Cyber

Electronic Warfare

Technology

17. Pacific nations care about survival and prosperity, not contests for influence

A view form Australia but relevant to us all.

Excerpts:

If Australia wants to be taken seriously as a partner, its focus should be on what it is doing—investing in people-to-people ties, climate resilience, and everyday economic opportunities that matter most to island communities—not what others in the region are doing. What gives these efforts distinct value is that they respond directly to Pacific priorities and are designed to deliver tangible, community-level benefits. Initiatives such as the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which provides vital income for families, and the Pacific Climate Infrastructure Financing Partnership, which supports resilience against rising seas, demonstrate what credible partnership looks like.

The challenge now is to make such initiatives the center of Australia’s Pacific policy, not exceptions. Pacific island countries should never be cast as pawns in a wider contest; they should be recognised as partners whose strategic importance rests in shared concerns, geography and cultural roots. Australia’s advantage will not come from attempts to expose or exclude rivals but by standing as the natural choice through genuine respect, trust and shared prosperity.

The Pacific island countries care less about narratives of malign influence and more about the essentials: survival, domestic stability and economic opportunity. Australia’s challenge is to prove it understands this, not just in words but in actions. Australia’s strategic advantage lies not in outmanoeuvring rivals but in being the partner that consistently delivers on the region’s own priorities: climate, livelihoods, and helping to protect the Pacific Way.

Pacific nations care about survival and prosperity, not contests for influence | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Francesca Ciuffetelli · September 18, 2025

Australia’s engagement with the Pacific must be built on strategic empathy rather than transactional language. Otherwise, it risks overlooking the region’s core priorities: preserving the Pacific Way and confronting the existential threat of climate change.

For Pacific island countries, sovereignty is not just about statehood or borders; it is expressed through what they call the Pacific Way: decision-making by consensus, respect for culture, and a deep commitment to collective responsibility. It means having the right to choose partners freely, to manage resources in ways that sustain both people and ecosystems, and to safeguard cultural and ecological wellbeing. In practice, the Pacific Way anchors sovereignty in resilience against globalisation, colonial legacies and the existential threat of climate change.

Papua New Guinea’s intended defence treaty with Australia illustrates this dynamic. Announced this week, the pact would commit both countries to aid each other if either suffered attack and it would grant Australian forces access to PNG facilities. Yet former PNG Defence Force commander Commodore Peter Ilau has cautioned that the agreement departs from his country’s traditional policy of non-alignment, one of being ‘friends to all and enemies to none.’ He warned that such a shift could be seen as a hasty realignment, risking economically essential foreign investment from countries such as China. Signing of the treaty has been delayed, because PNG’s cabinet reportedly failed to achieve a quorum for approving it. Australia had hoped to finalise the deal this week.

Such reluctance to finalise agreements sits within a longer history of Australian aid, where funding has often been tied to policy reforms. Although framed as supporting stability and good governance, these arrangements have fostered a perception that Australia’s engagement comes with conditions that constrain sovereignty. Against this backdrop, decisions such as Vanuatu’s delay of the Nakamal security and economic agreement with Australia or the Solomon Islands’ defence of a pact with China are not simply tactical bargaining. They reflect a recurring pattern in which Pacific leaders assert independence by resisting external prescriptions. For them, the Pacific Way is about safeguarding the agency to set national priorities, even when that requires pushing back against Australia’s preferred models of reform.

Australia continues to see the Pacific through the lens of strategic competition, casting the region as an arena or a venue for large-scale defence expansion. That language may signal resolve in Australia, but it risks eroding trust. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s 2024 remark that Australia was in ‘a state of permanent contest in the Pacific’, though accurate, reinforced fears that outmanoeuvring adversaries mattered more than empowering partners. China’s approach is no less problematic: its untied aid and elite-level courting secure political access but rarely touch the daily concerns of island communities. For Pacific nations, both narratives miss the point. Survival, prosperity and independence (not contests for influence) remain the region’s defining priorities.

Regardless of Australia’s intention, when it presents the Pacific as a battleground, it conveys the message that partnership is conditional on alignment rather than grounded in mutual respect. This results in a widening gap between intent and reception. For Australia, contest language signals resolve, but for island leaders it raises doubts about whether Australia genuinely recognises or cares about their independence or the existential threat of climate change.

Australia consistently reinforces the principle of Pacific sovereignty through its strategic communications, but sustaining trust will require translating these commitments into practice. When agreements such as Vanuatu’s Nakamal deal are delayed or rejected, we need to recognise the decisions as legitimate expressions of independence and agency, rather than unequivocally diagnosing them as products of malign influence. Such diagnoses—alongside language labelling the Pacific as a ‘strategic arena’ or ‘battleground’—disregard the autonomy of its countries, demean their key decision-makers and risk Australian approaches being viewed as purely transactional.

If Australia wants to be taken seriously as a partner, its focus should be on what it is doing—investing in people-to-people ties, climate resilience, and everyday economic opportunities that matter most to island communities—not what others in the region are doing. What gives these efforts distinct value is that they respond directly to Pacific priorities and are designed to deliver tangible, community-level benefits. Initiatives such as the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which provides vital income for families, and the Pacific Climate Infrastructure Financing Partnership, which supports resilience against rising seas, demonstrate what credible partnership looks like.

The challenge now is to make such initiatives the center of Australia’s Pacific policy, not exceptions. Pacific island countries should never be cast as pawns in a wider contest; they should be recognised as partners whose strategic importance rests in shared concerns, geography and cultural roots. Australia’s advantage will not come from attempts to expose or exclude rivals but by standing as the natural choice through genuine respect, trust and shared prosperity.

The Pacific island countries care less about narratives of malign influence and more about the essentials: survival, domestic stability and economic opportunity. Australia’s challenge is to prove it understands this, not just in words but in actions. Australia’s strategic advantage lies not in outmanoeuvring rivals but in being the partner that consistently delivers on the region’s own priorities: climate, livelihoods, and helping to protect the Pacific Way.

aspistrategist.org.au · Francesca Ciuffetelli · September 18, 2025

18. China bristles at US Army’s Typhon missile launcher in Japan

China bristles at US Army’s Typhon missile launcher in Japan

Defense News · Leilani Chavez · September 19, 2025

MANILA, Philippines — China criticized the U.S. Army’s move to deploy the Typhon missile launcher in Japan this week, warning it increases the risk of military confrontation and undermines regional security interests.

The reaction comes after the U.S. Army officially unveiled the mid-range missile system in Japan during annual bilateral exercise Resolute Dragon. This year’s iteration is the largest to date, with more than 19,000 American and Japanese troops.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday that the Asian deployment of the launchers “undermines the legitimate security interests of other countries, fuels the risk of a regional arms race and military confrontation, and poses a substantial threat to regional strategic security.”

China “strongly deplores and opposes the move,” he said, adding calls for its immediate pullout from the region.

Lin said the U.S. and Japan should “respect other countries’ security concerns and play a positive role for regional peace and stability, not the other way around.”

China made the claim weeks after showcasing its nuclear arsenal and hypersonic capabilities in a Victory Parade early this month. The parade was attended by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto.

The Typhon’s presence in Asia has ruffled China after the missile system made its first showing in the Philippines last year. China has alluded to the launchers in its annual defense white paper and repeatedly claimed the missile system destabilizes regional security.

The U.S. deployed its second Typhon battery to Hawaii earlier this year, reportedly with the intention of moving it across the region after some Asian countries requested its presence within their territories to bolster deterrence.

The Typhons’ deployment in Japan has attracted Russia’s attention.

In a commentary published on Aug. 28, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that Typhon poses a direct strategic threat and warned that should the deployment proceed, Russia would take appropriate “military-technical measures.”

China and Russia have deepened their cooperation in recent years, alarming Tokyo. Japan’s defense ministry has reported a marked increase in the presence of Chinese and Russian warships, missile systems, and fighter jets close to Japanese territories.

About Leilani Chavez

Leilani Chavez is an Asia correspondent for Defense News. Her reporting expertise is in East Asian politics, development projects, environmental issues and security.

19. Ukraine Gains Leverage With Strikes On Russian Refineries

Ukraine Gains Leverage With Strikes On Russian Refineries

Forbes · Vikram Mittal · September 20, 2025

Screen captures from a video posted on social media on September 13, 2025. The video claims to show a Ukrainian drone strike on the Novo-Ufa oil refinery in Russia.

Social Media Capture

Earlier this year, peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine stalled, with some claiming that Ukraine had entered the talks with “no cards" to play. Since then, Ukraine has strengthened its position, launching a series of successful drone strikes against Russian refineries, eroding one of Russia’s most important sources of revenue. At the same time, Russia is pouring increasing resources into its summer offensive and strategic drone strikes, while achieving minimal results. This combination creates a financially unfavorable situation for the Russians and provides Ukraine with much-needed leverage for the next round of peace negotiations.

Ukraine’s Strategic Strikes Against Russian Oil Refineries

Throughout this past summer, Ukraine has launched a coordinated series of long-range drone attacks against Russian oil refineries, causing major disruptions to the country’s fuel infrastructure. Reports indicate that more than ten refineries were struck during August, shutting down about 17 percent of Russia’s refining capacity, or approximately 1.1 million barrels per day. Repeated strikes on the Ryazan refinery in the Moscow area and the Novokuibyshevsk refinery in the Samara region disabled several key distillation units. Meanwhile the Volgograd plant in southern Russia had to suspend processing oil after a recent strike. Other refineries across the country have also been targeted. These attacks have continued into September, with additional facilities hit and many struck multiple times.

Long-range drones An-196 Liutyi of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine stand in line before takeoff in undisclosed location, Ukraine, Feb. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Ukraine’s ability to strike deep targets in Russia stems from advances in its drone industry. Many of these strikes appear to involve Liutyi strike drones, which are domestically produced, allowing Ukraine to use them without requiring permission from other countries. Ukrainian engineers have upgraded this platform to have a range exceeding 2,000 km while carrying a substantial payload. These drones also incorporate low-cost artificial intelligence chips for target recognition and terminal guidance, enabling them to operate in jammed environments and precisely strike targets. Thus far, Ukrainian engineers have stayed ahead of Russian counter-drone technology, and if they maintain this edge, Ukraine will retain the ability to strike targets deep in Russia for the foreseeable future.

These strikes on Russian facilities are having a direct impact on the country’s economy. They have triggered fuel shortages, driving gasoline prices to record highs and prompting Moscow to restrict exports to stabilize its domestic market. With less fuel available for export, Russia’s petroleum revenues are declining, limiting the funds available for military operations. This effect is amplified by the instability in Russian oil supplies, which encourages international customers to turn to other sources and further weakens the Russian economy. Additionally, financial resources that would have supported the military must now be diverted to repairing and protecting the refineries. Though Russia has a large economy, the damage to its energy sector represents a significant strain.

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Russia’s Increasingly Expensive War

As their economy suffers from these strikes, Russian war expenditures are increasing. Russia allocated significant resources to a large Russian summer offensive that has achieved only minimal gains while incurring heavy casualties and losing significant amounts of equipment. Many advances were blunted by Ukrainian drone strikes, which use inexpensive FPV drones to target Russian vehicles and disrupt coordinated maneuvers. Russian forces have also struggled to capture heavily fortified Ukrainian “fortress cities” and to cross rivers, limiting their ability to advance their lines. Ukraine claims that by the end of August, this summer offensive had already cost Russia 2,100 armored vehicles, 1,200 tanks, 7,300 artillery systems, and 19,000 soldiers. While these figures are likely inflated, Russia has nonetheless suffered heavy losses without seizing a single major Ukrainian city.

DONETSK OBLAST, UKRAINE - SEPTEMBER 9: Ukrainian soldiers fire OTO Melara 105mm artillery at enemy positions in the direction of Pokrovsk, Ukraine on September 9, 2025. (Photo by Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Anadolu via Getty Images

Similarly, Russia’s missile and drone campaigns have produced only limited results despite a significant increase in financial expenditure. To overcome Ukrainian defenses, Russia has expanded the size of its barrages and upgraded Shahed drones with improved navigation and control. This has driven up the cost of each attack and placing greater strain on an already pressured defense budget. However, these efforts have not been successful, as many drones are still diverted by Ukrainian electronic jamming or destroyed by an expanding arsenal of interceptor drones. Meanwhile, key sites remain protected by layered air defense systems and specialized teams dedicated to neutralizing incoming threats.

Outlook for the Russia-Ukraine War

The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is not confined to the battlefield; it also has a significant financial dimension. Moscow’s rising expenditures on manpower, equipment, and precision weapons have produced only limited gains, while Ukrainian strikes on oil facilities and other critical infrastructure have reduced Russia’s revenues. The growing imbalance between escalating costs, shrinking revenues, and minimal gains makes this approach not sustainable for Russia.

This situation will likely force Russian leaders back to the negotiating table due to growing domestic discontent, combined with international pressure. If Ukraine is able to maintain this initiative, eroding Russia’s military strength and economic resilience, it will enter these negotiations with a strong hand of “cards” to play.

Forbes · Vikram Mittal · September 20, 2025

20. Airpower for the Post-Dominance World: Restoring US Air Superiority Through a New Combined Arms Approach

Graphics at the link:

https://www.hudson.org/missile-defense/airpower-post-dominance-world-restoring-us-air-superiority-through-new-combined-bryan-clark-dan-patt?utm

Sep 18, 2025

Hudson Institute

Airpower for the Post-Dominance World: Restoring US Air Superiority Through a New Combined Arms Approach

Bryan Clark & Dan Patt

hudson.org · Shyam Sankar

Timothy A. Walton and Dan Patt of Hudson Institute will publish a subsequent report, titled Flipping the Script: Redesigning the US Air Force for Decisive Advantage, that will detail the force design and provide more comprehensive modeling of its performance. Portions of this policy memo cite and are drawn from that draft report.

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Summary

The Air Force cannot return to dominance by scaling up today’s force or chasing a single breakthrough. Adversaries now field sensors, precision weapons, and resilient command and control that are comparable to what the United States has. Meanwhile, each new crewed aircraft generation costs more to acquire and sustain, and personnel costs outpace inflation. Because the US military cannot restore dominance simply by growing or finding a new “tech surprise,” America needs to change how it finds advantage—instead of relying on platform supremacy, it should orchestrate combined‑arms warfare at force-wide scale. This approach requires a three-part force design that denies and deceives under the threat umbrella, disables adversaries’ key nodes, and dominates once defenses and magazines are degraded.

Introduction

The US Air Force (USAF) suffers from a combination of high operational tempo, low readiness, and too few aircraft that can fight the US military’s pacing scenarios. Many analysts blame the USAF’s situation on decades of inadequate investment and poor acquisition decisions by Pentagon and congressional leaders. For them, the solution is simply increasing funding to make today’s Air Force larger and better.

But the Air Force faces challenges because the threat landscape has fundamentally changed. Technology proliferation and the digitization of warfare have erased America’s traditional advantages. The USAF cannot grow in its current form because each new generation of aircraft costs more to buy and maintain than its predecessor, and personnel costs are rising much faster than inflation. While the US can still field superior capabilities in specialized domains, the marginal returns on these investments have collapsed. The Pentagon cannot procure its best platforms in sufficient numbers for a sustained Pacific fight, and the risk of employing those aircraft is too high. Meanwhile, adversaries have closed the gap in the sensors, precision weapons, and resilient command networks that once guaranteed American overmatch.

The Air Force’s inability to dramatically grow or achieve a game-changing technological advantage creates a fundamental dilemma for force planning. Adversaries like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are improving their militaries, which might be able to overcome US forces in stressing scenarios like a short-notice invasion of Taiwan.

This situation is much different from what the Pentagon faced during the past three decades. After the Cold War, the US military enjoyed dominance over its likely adversaries. So the US Department of Defense (DoD) could field a one-size-fits-all power projection force of predominantly multimission ships, aircraft, or troop formations that it could apply to any scenario. Today that approach is no longer feasible due to rapidly improving adversaries and fiscal, personnel, or industrial base constraints.

Unable to substantially enlarge or improve the overall US military within realistic budgets, for the past few years the DoD focused its force structure on what a stressing Taiwan invasion scenario would require. The Navy reduced funding for buying and maintaining amphibious ships that were less relevant to defending Taiwan. The Air Force reduced funding for non-stealthy fighters and support aircraft in favor of highly survivable fighters and bombers that policymakers thought were necessary for countering a Taiwan invasion. And the Army and Marine Corps invested in new missile systems for expeditionary operations on Western Pacific islands while divesting of rotary wing aircraft and artillery viewed as less useful in countering the PRC.

Because the US military has optimized its force for one specific scenario, it risks being unable to respond to the 95 percent of situations it is most likely to face. Figure 1 represents this dilemma by using Army Air Forces and USAF deployment data from 1943 through 2010. As the figure shows, the US deployed its air forces to combat operations at peak intensity during only about 5 percent of that period, which corresponds with the most intense portions of World War II combat.

Figure 1. US Air Forces Combat Deployment Rates from 1943 to 2010

Source: Authors, using data on Air Force deployments from a DARPA study.

Hudson Institute built on this insight in a previous study that recommended the US military size and shape the mainline multipurpose force to address the majority of likely scenarios. That study argued the Pentagon should use specialized hedge forces to lower the risks associated with high-consequence, low-probability events such as the opening days of World War II or a short-notice invasion of Taiwan.

By introducing hedge forces, the recently renamed US Department of War (DoW) could protect the mainline military from becoming a “one-trick pony” optimized for one scenario but too small or exquisite for other situations. For example, rather than cutting its tactical air forces to emphasize survivable strike for a Taiwan crisis, the Air Force could stand up a dedicated hedge force designed specifically to thwart or slow Chinese assaults against Taiwan. Such forces might be predominantly uncrewed and cost-effective, allowing them to be postured in theater without impacting the USAF’s global capacity.

The Air Force could leverage hedge forces to lower the risks mainline tactical aircraft would face and reduce the number of targets they would need to engage in high-consequence, low-probability scenarios. The USAF should exploit this complementarity in its force design.

Adding hedge forces to the mainline Air Force would also allow the service to adapt in an environment of significant uncertainty. As technology proliferation helps potential adversaries become more capable, it also enables them to become more flexible. Because hedge force units are specialized, smaller, and forward-deployed, they could more easily adapt to this challenge compared to mainline Air Force units that have extensive logistics tails, a rotational base of duplicative units, and substantial training pipelines. The Air Force could then retain a core force of fighters, tankers, strategic airlift, and other capabilities configured for flexible, multi-theater demands.

The Air Force should therefore pursue a three-pronged design. The first element, the edge force, represents the Air Force’s version of a hedge force. It employs small, mobile teams operating close to or underneath an adversary’s defensive umbrella. These units rely on rapid movement, minimized signatures, and opportunistic engagements to disrupt enemy kill chains, provide localized but lethal offensive air denial, and destroy key ground and surface targets.

The second element, the pulse force, aggregates specialized, long-range platforms and weapons capable of striking critical nodes at precisely timed intervals while operating from locations resilient to missile strikes. Rather than maintaining static positions, this element “pulses” to generate powerful but unpredictable salvos against well-defended targets, disable key nodes, frustrate an adversary’s targeting cycles, and protect valuable US assets from preemptive destruction.

Only after the edge and pulse forces suitably shape the conditions in a theater does the more traditional core force enter in strength. With an adversary’s ability to disrupt large force packages materially reduced, this third force integrates sustained strike capabilities, high throughput operations, and more robust forward basing.

This is combined arms applied to force design: edge compels enemy adaptations that pulse punishes; pulse opens windows that core exploits. This design wins by imposing concurrent, incompatible demands on the adversary’s sensing, command, and magazines—not by out-massing or out-performing any single arm.

The sections below provide a brief overview of this proposed Air Force design. It starts with an assessment of the threats and challenges facing the USAF. It then details the force design’s new elements—the edge force and pulse force—and how they work together and with the core force to achieve operational objectives. The paper then assesses the new design’s effectiveness compared to a traditional Air Force design and operational approach. Hudson Institute will publish a subsequent paper that will detail the force design and provide more comprehensive modeling of its performance.

An Improving Threat

Over the last three decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has transformed its military, and now it boasts the world’s largest navy and rocket force, the largest air force in Asia, and sophisticated space capabilities. These developments expand Beijing’s capacity to project power and deter what it views as unwarranted foreign intervention, aligning directly with its overall strategy of national rejuvenation by 2049.

Progress in PLA Air Force (PLAAF) aircraft quality and quantity is a central feature of the PLA’s modernization. Once overshadowed by aging platforms, the PLAAF now manages a substantial inventory of modern, high-performance fighters, bombers, and support aircraft. The PLAAF complements its fourth-generation aircraft with fifth-generation stealth fighters, such as the J-20, J-36, and J-50, that incorporate indigenous stealth coatings, low-observable designs, and advanced radars. The PLA is also upgrading its long-serving H-6 bomber series and developing variants like the H-6K and H-6N that can deliver a high volume of standoff precision strikes across the first and second island chains. These strikes could include nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missiles.

In parallel, the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) has transformed from mainly a silo-based nuclear deterrent into a multifaceted enterprise capable of mounting conventional and nuclear precision strikes. Its array of short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles provides layered coverage of potential conflict zones. Meanwhile, systems like the DF-26 and DF-27 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM) can hold targets at risk well beyond the first island chain, which is formed by Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The PLARF has also tested hypersonic glide vehicles that can complicate US missile-defense architectures. This transformation aligns with Beijing’s concept that a credible nuclear deterrent, coupled with rapid conventional precision strikes, can buy time and political flexibility in the early stages of a confrontation.

To protect its offensive capacity, the PLA fields an extensive integrated air defense system (IADS) that blends domestic surface-to-air missiles like the HQ-9B, HQ-19, and HQ-22 with improved Russian S-400-based technology to achieve overlapping coverage of inland, coastal, and offshore areas. Expanding PLAAF fighter patrols far from the mainland as well as electromagnetic warfare (EW) against adversaries’ target acquisition, radar, and communications systems augment the PLA’s IADS.

The PLA organizes and orchestrates its military capabilities to implement the concept of Intelligentized Warfare. Under this operational approach, the PLA uses artificial intelligence–enabled software to quickly assess sensor information so that commanders can develop effective courses of action and fires plans, often with the assistance of AI-enabled computer tools. Intelligentized Warfare depends on the PRC’s rapidly expanding military and commercial space-based capabilities for remote sensing, meteorology, signals intelligence, and navigation.

The PRC is expanding its capabilities for space control to protect its satellite constellations and hold opposing systems at risk. In addition to direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, the PRC’s counter-space capabilities include co-orbital satellites with directed energy weapons and servicing or attack mechanisms. Although many of these space programs claim purely civilian uses, the PRC’s overarching military-civil fusion strategy ensures the PLA can apply them in combat.

The PLA’s combination of air and missile modernization, integrated air defenses, and space-based enablers has undermined traditional US power-projection advantages in the Indo-Pacific. Although the PLA still confronts gaps—particularly in combat experience and global logistics—its investments point to enduring structural and technological improvements that will persist beyond the next decade. The Air Force will need to craft robust countermeasures, new operating constructs, and flexible basing strategies to maintain a credible deterrent and project power effectively in regions increasingly shaped by Chinese military influence.

Basing and Logistics Challenges

Recent assessments have found that the PLA’s precision fires and surveillance increasingly threaten US and allied air bases across the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, the PLA has systematically expanded its infrastructure to withstand or rapidly repair after missile or air strikes. These developments pose an especially acute challenge for the Air Force, which historically relied on secure forward airfields in regions like Europe or the Middle East.

In a high-intensity scenario against the PRC, the PLA will likely attack the main US operating bases in Okinawa, mainland Japan, or Guam. Ballistic missile attacks using runway-penetrating submunitions, complemented by cruise missile strikes on fuel and munitions depots, could close airfields and damage critical logistics and command functions. Meanwhile, qualitative improvements in China’s surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities increase the likelihood that repeated follow-up strikes would hamper any large-scale US buildup.

US bases in the Indo-Pacific region possess limited protective infrastructure and lack proven procedures for rapidly repairing and reconstituting damaged sites. Air Force engineers have refined reconstitution methods, such as rapid airfield damage repair. However, forces in theater are constrained by a shortage of prepositioned repair materials and the specialized personnel necessary for managing ordnance disposal at multiple sites under near-simultaneous attacks.

Bulk fuel storage and munition distribution systems also limit air forces’ ability to sustain forward operations. Hardened underground bunkers and dispersed fuel bladders would improve survivability, but current facilities often consist of unprotected tank farms that the PLA would likely attack early. The Air Force also aggregates unprotected munitions and critical spares in rear areas. Attacking these high-value stocks would undermine the Air Force’s capacity for sustained sorties and could negate the benefits of runway repairs or hardened fuel supplies. While distributed operations under the Agile Combat Employment framework can mitigate some threats, implementing them at scale is only credible if the logistics enterprise can move supplies and personnel among a network of smaller airfields while under attack.

Planners have also highlighted potential workarounds, such as partnering more deeply with allies to increase base access. The Air Force could disperse aircraft across additional runways, such as Japanese Self-Defense Forces fields or civilian airports, to create targeting dilemmas for an adversary. However, local resistance to military air operations and the need for specialized ground equipment and hardened on-base storage may make this an impractical solution, and for the PLARF, simply scaling its missile inventory remains relatively more cost-effective.

For longer-range operations, the aerial refueling fleet’s ability to enable long-range and distributed operations hinges on resilient logistics arrangements for both tankers and receiving aircraft. Forward-based tanker units cannot function without well-protected storage sites, robust overland or over-the-shore fuel delivery methods, and sufficient runway length and ramp space for surge operations. Where runway or infrastructure capacity is too limited, or political clearances too restrictive, tankers could be forced into far rearward basing that undermines their ability to offload large volumes of fuel. These tankers then compete for available ramp and runway space with bombers and other assets.

Without a more systematic approach to logistics survivability, the Air Force could struggle to maintain a credible forward presence and fulfill allied commitments during the opening phases of a high-intensity regional conflict. Rather than relying on a single fix, the Air Force will need to integrate multiple resilience measures to address its basing and logistics challenges. These measures include dispersed forward operations, long-range pulse operations, prepositioned materials for rapid airfield repairs, low-signature fueling methods, shelters for essential command-and-control (C2) nodes, and significantly more training for engineers and ordnance-disposal personnel. In this fight, airpower is hindered less by aircraft performance than by ground vulnerability—the geometry of fuel, munitions, and repair—rendering sortie generation a transient statistic rather than a campaign variable.

A Grim Assessment

The Air Force’s basing and logistics vulnerabilities could prove catastrophic if it relies almost exclusively on tactical aircraft (TACAIR) operating from first-island-chain installations to conduct counter-air or strike operations. Even the Department of the Air Force’s own long-range forecast concedes that by mid-century Chinese ballistic and cruise missile inventories will be large enough to saturate forward locations, leaving little prospect of a reliable sanctuary. Recent modeling echoes this assessment, noting that even well-defended bases can succumb to intense, repeated missile raids that crater runways and destroy large numbers of aircraft on the ground. Once its bases are neutralized—even temporarily—the Air Force would lose its ability to respond locally, giving the PLA critical windows in which to exploit momentum or consolidate gains and achieve a fait accompli.

US dependency on forward basing might also affect the willingness of leaders in Washington to intervene. One wargame, for example, found that under various assumptions, the PLA destroyed between 200 and 500 aircraft over roughly three weeks of fighting with the USAF’s current force design. Nearly 90 percent of US air losses occurred on the ground, primarily due to concentrated ballistic- and cruise-missile strikes by the PLARF. Faced with the prospect of these losses, a US president may decline to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf.

A Force Design to Regain Advantage

Air Force leaders argue that the changing threat landscape requires a new force design that can remain relevant in highly contested areas, deliver effects from long range, and retain the capacity to support global commitments. They have characterized their needs for a new force design in terms of three mission areas (MA1, MA2, and MA3) with a specific set of attributes, similar to those listed in figure 2.

This paper builds on and refines the Air Force’s foundational ideas by mapping MA1 to the edge force, MA2 to the pulse force, and MA3 to the core force, as shown in figure 2. This alignment allows us to propose specific operational phasing, force employment models, and resource allocation strategies, all of which flow naturally from official statements and give the Air Force a practical roadmap for turning broad guidance into actionable capability.

Figure 2. Attributes of the Three Force Design Elements

Source: Authors.

Our proposed force design also builds upon prior analysis, with the edge-pulse-core force construct owing much to Hudson Institute’s original study of a Taiwan Bulwark Activation Force (TBAF)—a prototype joint edge force that integrated lightweight distributed fires for counter-maritime operations. When paired with long-range fires from submarines and bombers in the early phase of a conflict (acting like a pulse force), the TBAF helped reduce the vulnerability of US tactical aircraft and surface combatants by delaying their entry until they could survive long enough to contribute to the fight. Using the TBAF to blunt the initial amphibious assault, followed by bomber and submarine anti-ship attacks, increased the damage inflicted on the PLA and cut the US military’s projected mission-capable attrition from as high as 90 percent to only 18 percent. Preserving US forces during this early action set it up to flow into the theater additional forces that were ready to deal with a potential protracted conflict.

Target prioritization was essential to the success of this concept. Pulse attacks from bombers and submarines preferentially engaged highly survivable PLA surface combatants, while the TBAF concentrated its attacks against amphibious and air assault forces. The careful sequencing allowed US forces to degrade the PLA’s amphibious lodgment attempts without incurring unsustainable losses. Two recent war games led by the authors further reinforced these insights.

Edge Force

Small road- or barge-mobile launchers for tactical one-way-attack uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and surface-to-air missiles would largely comprise the Air Force’s edge force. By exploiting small footprints, frequent relocations, and simple camouflage, these units could survive inside an adversary’s lethal ring of precision weapons, forcing the opponent to devote inordinate resources to finding and neutralizing them. Edge force detachments would rely heavily on austere basing, including civilian ports, roads, and waterways.

Whether deployed on the Philippines’ Batanes Islands, Japan’s Sakishima Islands, or Taiwan, the edge force units’ core aim would be to disrupt enemy air forces and increase the risk to adversary objectives. As recent operations in Ukraine demonstrate, a ground force can contest airspace sufficiently to dissuade an opponent from flying crewed aircraft into an area, essentially denying it. The Air Force’s edge force units would complement those from other services focused on counter-maritime operations, such as the US Navy’s emerging Hellscape concept.

Although designed with Western Pacific contingencies in mind, edge force units could adapt to different theaters. By scaling or reshuffling the proportion of uncrewed vehicles, short-range offensive anti-air systems, or mobile launch trucks, the Air Force could reconfigure the edge force to address missile and drone threats in the Middle East, respond to potential flashpoints in Europe, or augment allied exercises aimed at dissuading aggression.

Edge force formations would employ multiple layers of organic sensors, short-range radars, and overhead uncrewed vehicles to cue their own strikes if cut off from higher-echelon intelligence. Yet they would also link into the broader Air Force enterprise, receiving, if available, real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) from satellites, a distributed sensing grid, and allied sensor networks.

To improve their resilience, small squadrons of edge force units would move from one location to another, operating from improvised forward sites that are difficult to find and identify, creating a “Scud-hunt” problem for the PLA. Launch trucks with containerized systems like those for ground-based SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles would carry both conventional munitions and newly developed drone–munition hybrids. Deception tactics, inorganic targeting, and basic concealment will help each detachment go dark as needed, reemerging only to fire on the highest-priority targets. The edge force therefore converts cheap mobility, concealment, and commercial components into a potent threat and a taxing search‑and‑intercept problem for the adversary.

The Air Force edge force’s primary function would be conducting offensive counter-air operations below the threshold at which F-35s, F-22s, or other high-value crewed assets would typically operate. As some who support expanding the role of air denial concepts have argued, halting or degrading adversary air activity can produce outsized strategic benefits even without outright air superiority. By prepositioning these small units forward and equipping them with enough magazine depth to persist through an initial exchange of volleys, the Air Force could buy time for traditional forces to mobilize while simultaneously reducing the risk that high-end jets or bombers would face on day one of a conflict. The edge force could support counter-surface strikes, mimicking the Air Force’s historic missions with ground-launched cruise missiles.

In sum, edge force units would attrite escorts, harass logistics, and raise the PLA’s weapon-per-kill requirement until pulse forces can land decisive blows. The economics are part of the concept: by leaning on commercial components and modular designs, these groups create affordable mass, are hard to pre-target, and can be iterated faster than the PLA can close every seam.

Edge force formations would build on the expeditionary and adaptive logistics pedigree of Air Force Special Operations Command. This command’s operators are already versed in clandestine deployments, refuel-on-the-fly methods, and rapidly shifting flight plans. Local partnerships with allied forces would ensure that roads, small ports, or remote airstrips remain open for essential spares, reloads, and command elements. If extended supply lines break down, the edge force’s organic sensor-to-shooter loops would preserve basic functionality in a denied environment.

The edge force’s combination of uncrewed platforms, small air defense detachments, and containerized missile launchers offers a cost-effective, versatile, and survivable layer of combat power for the Air Force. By mixing existing weapons with newly emerging drone–munition hybrids, and networking them into both local and higher-level C2 systems, the USAF can present a difficult targeting puzzle to adversaries, complicate hostile planning, and safeguard allied territory during the critical opening phases of a conflict. The result is a design that not only complements existing airpower but can also deploy forces wherever and whenever rapid denial is needed. For the edge force, the decisive metric is not US sortie count but an adversary’s allocation: it creates cheap, mobile nodes that steadily pull reconnaissance and precision munitions away from bombers, tankers, and forward bases.

Pulse Force

In contrast to the edge force’s dispersed, close-in operations, the pulse force conducts concentrated strikes from survivable bases outside the immediate conflict area. The central idea behind the pulse force is that, even under lethal or contested conditions, the Air Force can still generate timed, near-simultaneous attacks on well-defended, high-value targets to disrupt adversary operations and drive enemy forces to adjust their defensive postures.

Like artillery that sits beyond the enemy’s effective reach, the pulse force’s long-range platforms remain poised at secure airfields or even in the continental United States. While the edge force targets enemy fighters, pulse force units surge briefly to launch precision munitions and then return to defensible bases. Consisting mostly of B-21, B-2, B-52, and B-1 bombers as launch platforms, the pulse force may also include cargo aircraft rigged for palletized munitions delivery. The unifying theme is that each platform can strike at long ranges, using advanced standoff weapons and networked kill chains, thereby minimizing the exposure window to adversary defensive salvos. By design, this concept is neither tethered to a single airfield nor reliant on extensive forward build-up, though it does rely heavily on aerial refueling and robust command, control, and sensing to cue time-sensitive strikes. The pulse force spends finite, expensive standoff weapons only against truly high‑value targets (e.g., escorts, IADS, and C2 nodes), which improves the system‑level cost‑exchange ratio.

The pulse force’s hallmark, and primary challenge, is identifying priority targets over thousands of miles. Aircraft attacking moving targets in highly contested areas will require real-time data from satellites, forward sensors, and distributed intelligence grids during the brief window when they are within range and able to survive the engagement.

The most important element of the pulse force’s targeting apparatus will be space-based moving target indicator sensing, which can feed continuously updated positional data to strike aircraft or other long-range strike assets in the pulse force, dramatically shortening decision cycles. This means that, when a “pulse” is executed, aircrews will have highly accurate, time-sensitive location information on targets such as missile launchers, air defense batteries, or naval task groups—all of which are crucial to degrading enemy anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) networks. As the chief of space operations recently emphasized, the Space Force’s evolving capacity to deliver resilient missile warning, tracking, and domain awareness will be central to enabling future kill chains and ensuring that US forces can operate inside contested zones.

The pulse force will depend on a robust C2 architecture. Because the adversary can quickly relocate high-value assets, the C2 architecture will need the ability to integrate sensor data from a wide variety of intelligence sources. Instead of pursuing universal data formats, the Air Force’s emerging approach—exemplified by the Joint Long-Range Kill Chain Organization—brings together operators, technologists, and acquisition personnel from multiple services to rapidly integrate new sensors and mesh them into operational frameworks. This collaboration model directly addresses the system-of-systems nature of kill chains, aligning advanced space-based capabilities with stealth bombers and emerging long-range munitions to maximize responsiveness and strike precision. The result is a pulse force that can both hit hard and dynamically adapt to changing target sets in high-threat environments.

Just as the edge force offsets ballistic missile threats with dispersed and mobile ground-based fires, the pulse force pursues an advantageous cost exchange at scale by hitting truly high-value adversary assets. This approach is necessary because each mission pulse consumes finite stocks of sophisticated long-range munitions. More affordable palletized long-range networked munitions deployed from an airdrop offer a potential method of increasing volume, but they require a new generation of more affordable long-range weapons.

Operating from sanctuaries beyond the range of most adversary ballistic missiles, the pulse force is supposed to be more survivable, but it may still be vulnerable over time. A variety of indirect or long-range enemy countermeasures can still attack supporting tankers, C2 nodes, and even forward staging bases. Nonetheless, the unpredictability and episodic nature of pulse strikes may generate powerful coercive effects that add strategic depth—especially when integrated with the edge force’s local denial activities.

For example, if an adversary devotes substantial resources to tracking bomber or tanker flows, it will need to divert reconnaissance away from targeting the small, distributed edge force. The pulse force can then degrade critical infrastructure and air defenses to provide windows in which the edge force can engage enemy aircraft or ships. From the adversary’s perspective, pulsed attacks become a recurring menace, forcing them to maintain a high tempo of defensive readiness with all the attendant costs.

The pulse force cannot sustain continuous strikes. A finite bomber inventory, tanker dependencies, and weapon stockpiles constrain the number of sorties and the sheer volume of missiles that the force can launch, even with well-coordinated pulses. Pulses succeed when they compress the adversary’s decision cycle faster than it can reconstitute kill chains, trading continuous presence for time-dominance at the moment of contact. If an adversary can extend or protract conflict, it may expose the vulnerability that the pulse force’s standoff weapons are not infinitely replenishable. In this sense, the pulse force is part scalpel, part sledgehammer—a specialized but finite instrument for strategic effect. Yet if used in tandem with an edge force, it can impose critical losses on the adversary while minimizing US exposure to ballistic missile salvos. Over time, it sets the conditions for the core force to break open the environment for a more sustained presence.

Core Force

Almost all of today’s Air Force falls into the new design’s core force, which addresses every air mission, albeit at different scales or risk compared to the edge or pulse forces. During peacetime, forward-deployed core force units support air defense and deterrence. When a crisis emerges, core force units surge to deploy necessary Air Force and Joint Force units and augment forward-deployed core force units. In conflict, core force units operate with allies and partners from a mix of forward, intermediate, and distant airfields, and core force aerial refueling and airlift aircraft allow US forces to maneuver in the air and on the ground. Armed with conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, core force units support homeland defense, strategic deterrence, and power projection, and as noted above, their operations can contribute to edge force and pulse force missions. Core preserves the most extensive aircraft inventory for the conflicts or phases where shorter‑range weapons and high sortie rates are decisive.

Despite its broad relevance, the core force’s current and planned structure results in a force employment approach that is brittle, slow to deploy, susceptible to attack on the ground, predictable in the air, and incapable of prosecuting a high-end conflict by itself. It is also by far the costliest element of the force. As shown in figure 3, the Air Force will need to shrink the core force to resource growth in the edge and pulse forces, while also adjusting the core force’s composition to ensure it remains relevant to future operations against China and other threats.

Figure 3. Relative Resource Shifts to Implement the New Force Design

Source: Authors.

The core force’s primary missions revolve around expeditionary air operations, including light and medium strikes, offensive and defensive counter-air operations, and suppression or destruction of enemy air defenses. Fighters are central to these missions, and the Air Force is evolving its fighter fleet to achieve greater survivability and reach. The multirole F-35A is currently the USAF’s most numerous low-observable crewed fighter, and it is complemented by the F-16 for counter-air operations. Ongoing Block 4 upgrades will provide the F-35A with an internal carriage of six (rather than the current four) advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and new radio frequency (RF) and electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensors to improve its capacity for counter-air operations. Further improvements, such as fuel drop tanks and engine upgrades or replacement, could increase the F-35A’s range. However, the core force’s role in the new force design may not demand a substantially increased range. Investments in the edge force and pulse force will be more important than extending the F-35A’s reach.

The Air Force is developing the longer-range and lower-signature F-47 to eventually replace the F-22 Raptor. The F-47 will lead the emerging Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems, which includes collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) such as the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A; these two systems are candidate designs for the first CCA increment. The Air Force expects CCA Increment 1 vehicles to cost about one-third that of crewed fighters, or $25–30 million apiece. Due to their low cost and potentially large inventory, commanders could treat CCAs as attritable. However, unlike the one-way attack and counter-air UAS of the edge force, Increment 1 CCAs would require similar runways and infrastructure as fighters. As a result, they will need to operate from the same airfields supporting core force fighters and will likely support manned fighter missions as “weapon trucks” or by carrying additional sensors or electronic attack payloads.

The weapons employed by fighter aircraft will also likely evolve. Longer-range weapons such as the AIM-260 will enable distributed kill chains that allow shooters to engage targets beyond their line of sight. Conversely, high-capacity, short-range weapons such as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System allow fighters to defeat swarms of low-cost drones. And lower-cost “affordable mass” weapons such as the Extended Range Attack Munition and Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition will complement the Air Force’s current portfolio of exquisite strike weapons.

The core force also includes cargo and refueling aircraft, which provide one of the US military’s most important competitive advantages. By allowing US forces to rapidly deploy around the world and sustain operations for extended periods, the mobility fleet presents adversaries with a greater variety of potential threats across multiple regions compared to the militaries of less-expeditionary powers. Although normally considered in the context of crisis response, the mobility fleet is a key element of US deterrence.

The Air Force is recapitalizing its 1950s-era fleet of KC-135 tankers with new KC-46As. Although the KC-46A program has suffered numerous deficiencies and delays, it provides more fuel offload capacity and much-improved cargo, passenger, and aeromedical transport capacity, which helps offset demand on the airlift fleet. The USAF is also adding enhanced communication and C2 capabilities to aerial refueling and other mobility aircraft. This change will improve the aircraft’s ability to dynamically plan missions and be aware of threats.

The core force incorporates the Air Force’s ISR and EW assets, which are integral to expeditionary air operations. Fighters depend on airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) capabilities, such as those of the current E-3G, to manage air operations and provide targeting data for engagements. The Air Force is wisely planning to replace the aging E-3G with a system-of-systems approach combining space-based sensing, long-endurance UAS such as the MQ-9B Reaper, and existing crewed AEW&C aircraft. The core force’s shrinking size and role in future operations suggest this construct is more appropriate than investing a billion dollars apiece in new E-7 AEW&C aircraft. The Air Force should similarly shift its other ISR and EW platforms, such as the U-2 Dragon Lady reconnaissance aircraft and RC-135 Rivet Joint and EC-130H Compass Call EW platforms, toward uncrewed systems of systems.

Enablers

Edge, pulse, and core forces will depend on enablers that allow them to fight smarter and survive longer. The most important of these is a portfolio of capabilities for counter–command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISRT) operations that degrade PLA sensing and sensemaking. This would prevent enemy commanders from forming a reliable target picture or sequencing efficient fires. Implementing this effort would require routine discipline in RF emissions, deliberate use of decoys and jamming, and cross-domain non-kinetic effects that ride RF apertures into otherwise isolated networks to corrupt data and slow fusion at the point of use. The Air Force will need to complement counter-C5ISRT operations with efforts like Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control and the Joint Fires Network that enable more recomposable kill chains. If employed creatively, the Air Force can translate this recomposability into ambiguity for PLA commanders and initiative for the US military.

The second and complementary enabling line of effort is resilient airfields, with an emphasis on passive defense. The USAF should disperse operating sites, use camouflage and deception, prepare for rapid damage repair, build protected or underground bulk fuel storage, foster redundancy in power and water supplies, preposition mats and fill, and generate stocks sized for weeks, not days. Building out active air defenses imposes costs on the US, but a basic level of forward base resilience can complicate adversary targeting. When combined, counter-C5ISRT and recomposable kill chains complicate PLA targeting before shots are exchanged, and resilient airfields preserve forward combat power after a conflict begins.

A Changed Operational Concept

The core force will need to change how it fights to remain relevant against increasingly capable adversaries. In general, expeditionary air forces like fighters and mobility aircraft will need to remain in less-contested areas to address growing threats to airfields. The new force design accommodates this dynamic by using each force for its best purpose. Core force fighters are inefficient platforms for delivering long-range standoff munitions that are better carried by pulse force bombers. But the core force is perfectly suited for gaining and maintaining air superiority from forward bases in the later phases of a conflict. Fighter aircraft operating from nearby bases also remain one of the most effective ways to generate and maintain high sortie rates that deliver constant effect in intense or sustained campaigns.

The core force will sometimes need to fly from more contested areas to create a decision-making advantage against a peer adversary like the PRC. For example, without a forward-operating core force, the PLA could exhaust the edge force’s limited counter-air capacity, shoot down pulse force strike munitions, and attack US or allied targets in the region with overwhelming numbers of stand-in or direct attack munitions. Without the threat of core force counter-air fighters, PLA bombers could bypass ground-based forward defenses to attack intermediate and distant pulse force airfields on a greater scale. And forward-deployed core force operations impose dilemmas on the PLA, such as whether to use a higher fraction of fighter sorties for defensive combat air patrols or attacks on forward airfields. The presence of the forward core force also swells the enemy’s target set from a small number of airfields suitable for tankers and bombers to the numerous locations from which core forces can operate.

This suggests that commanders should treat core force units as a tool in the decision-making competition during the early phases of a peer conflict. They should keep enough theater-assigned core force aircraft forward, including decoys and other counter-C5ISRT capabilities, to create challenges and dilemmas for the opponent. Core forces would retrograde as the risks of remaining forward begin to outweigh the benefits of their presence, possibly leaving decoys and EW systems on forward airfields to simulate continued air operations. The Air Force should also build out sufficient hardened shelters and passive defenses to keep these core forces in theater viable when under attack.

The core force would conduct more persistent operations forward as the enemy expends its long-range missiles and the US degrades its air defenses. This would allow the Air Force to sustain strikes and counter-air attacks with less-sophisticated munitions after the pulse force expends its stock of long-range standoff missiles and edge force units are neutralized or run out of ground-based weapons.

This new operational approach will require fewer aircraft than traditional plans that expect core force strike-fighters to conduct the bulk of attacks. However, US forces will still encounter a broad array of scenarios in which core force units remain relevant. In a constrained budgetary environment, the Air Force will need to keep some core force capacity for these missions. But the new force design will require reductions in the core force to enable the USAF to address the full range of situations it could face, from regional instability to major power war.

Our proposed construct represents combined arms warfare at the force-design level: edge shapes the problem; pulse breaks key systems; core exploits the opening; and enablers make all three feasible at acceptable risk. By thoughtfully combining and sequencing these three distinct elements, the proposed force design offers a balanced approach to competing in a high-threat environment dominated by precision fires and ISR, most notably from the PLA. Each phase operates with the explicit goal of setting conditions for the next, ensuring that large-scale deployments occur only after the US military has sufficiently reduced the adversary’s ability to detect, target, and engage. The net effect is a resilient and adaptive posture that meets the demands of both deterring and, if necessary, prevailing in the most challenging conflict scenarios, while remaining versatile enough to address the wide array of global security obligations that policymakers expect the Air Force to fulfill.

Assessing the Design

To explore how different force employment concepts might perform under the sustained pressure of a high-intensity conflict, we developed a simulation tool that captures the dynamics of force employment, rocket force attacks, amphibious invasion, and airfield protection and resilience. This is a comparative analytic model, not a high‑fidelity campaign simulation; it tests concept deltas (sequencing, posture) rather than predicting absolute loss numbers. This modeling effort illuminates critical relationships between force posture, operational phasing, and campaign outcomes. The results strongly support our proposed three-part force design concept.

We examined two contrasting operational approaches to understand how the timing and composition of forces shape campaign outcomes. These scenarios, while simplified, capture the essential tension between early force presence and force preservation in a missile-rich environment. Results hold across wide ranges of base‑attack intensity, weapon assumptions, and initial inventories; details move, but the phasing advantage persists.

Strategy A: Classic Force Employment with Heavy Reliance on TACAIR

In our first scenario, US commanders employ a classic operational concept: they use forward-deployed tactical aircraft to immediately contest the airspace over and around Taiwan and attack amphibious shipping. Commanders also begin flowing tactical aircraft from other regions toward the fight. This approach reflects decades of successful US air operations where forward basing and immediate air superiority have proven decisive.

The results reveal the fundamental vulnerability of this approach against a peer adversary armed with substantial precision strike capabilities. While modern base defenses and dispersal tactics under the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept dampen some of the catastrophic on-ground aircraft losses, the traditional approach still fails in its strategic objective. In model runs, approximately 60 percent of the invasion fleet survives to threaten or execute landings by the campaign's end. The tool does not include exhaustive modeling of naval contributions, which would almost certainly improve this result. However, the simulation serves as a useful comparison.

This outcome occurs not because the PLA destroys US aircraft wholesale on their parking ramps—improved bunkers and dispersal do present a floor for such losses—but because the broader operational system breaks down. Aircraft that survive the initial missile salvos must still operate in an environment shaped by intact adversary naval air defenses. The combination of degraded runways, persistent missile threats, and powerful shipborne air defense systems creates a compounding effect that prevents effective maritime strikes during the window when ships are vulnerable.

Strategy B: A Phased, Multi-Part Approach Delivers Decisive Results

The second scenario implements the distributed and phased employment concept at the heart of our proposed force design. Rather than rushing tactical aviation forward into the teeth of the missile threat, this approach sequences three distinct elements to shape conditions for decisive action.

During the conflict’s first hours, distributed ground-based missile launchers from Air Force and Navy edge forces begin engaging the invasion fleet and PLAAF assault and fighter aircraft. Simultaneously, pulse force strike aircraft operating from distant sanctuaries systematically target the amphibious fleet’s naval air defense escorts with long-range standoff munitions. This one-two punch proves devastating. Within days, US forces eliminate the PLA escort force that would have shielded the amphibious ships from air attack.

Early in the conflict, theater-assigned elements of the core force only conduct limited operations from the theater, augmented by decoys, to complicate enemy targeting and consume PLA strike weapons. The core force then deploys forward at scale after the edge force and pulse force have degraded naval air defenses and PLAAF fighter sweeps. In addition to attacking remaining amphibious ships, core force units begin establishing air superiority as needed across the Western Pacific.

The results of this three-phase approach are striking. While air forces sustain losses, they complete the mission. Modeling suggests that the invasion fleet is essentially annihilated, with only a single damaged vessel surviving from a force of nearly 300 ships.

Additionally, the new force design and operational approach reduce aircraft losses. Strategy A requires a much larger number of tactical aircraft at air bases in the Indo-Pacific region, of which almost half the PLA can engage with cruise or ballistic missile attacks. Mostly because of missile strikes, the number of US strike fighters on the ground drops to nearly zero by the end of the first week of the conflict. PLA air defenses eliminated the bulk of the remaining aircraft, and a small percentage of US fighters were still in the air at the simulation’s end.

In contrast, Strategy B relies on edge forces in the campaign’s opening phases to blunt the amphibious assault and contest the airspace over the first island chain. The edge force buys time for the pulse force to begin maritime strike operations against the amphibious assault, prioritizing air defense escorts and then attacking transports. Tactical aircraft in the core force remain largely outside the theater until the pulse force has degraded naval air defenses and the PLA completes its initial attacks on air bases. The core force enters the fight several days into the conflict after airfield repairs restore operations at regional air bases. In the less contested air environment, the core force more effectively counters PLA air operations and holds amphibious forces at risk around Taiwan. And more than half of the US tactical aircraft deployed to the region are still able to land and park at the simulation’s end.

Key Insights for Force Design

These results, while derived from a simplified analytical framework, reinforce several critical insights that should guide force design decisions:

The primacy of mission accomplishment over territorial control. The traditional approach failed catastrophically in preventing the amphibious assault—the campaign’s main objective. Moreover, it imposed such losses on the core force that the Air Force would be unable to wage a protracted conflict or intervene in other theaters. Replacing lost aircraft would take a decade or more. Although Strategy B ceded some battlespace to the enemy early, it accomplished the operational goal and preserved tactical aircraft needed to regain air superiority in the Western Pacific.

The power of integrated, phased operations. Success stemmed not from any single capability but from the synergistic employment of multiple force elements. The edge force’s distributed launchers created continuous pressure; long-range strikes eliminated key defensive nodes; and tactical aviation delivered the decisive blow—but only after conditions were properly set.

The importance of imposing dilemmas rather than accepting them. By refusing to present concentrated targets during the conflict's opening phase, the phased approach forced the adversary to expend precious missiles against dispersed or absent targets. This dynamic engagement strategy turned the adversary's A2/AD investment into a wasting asset.

The value of patience in warfare. Counterintuitively, withholding the most capable combat aircraft until conditions were favorable proved far more effective than committing them early. This finding challenges deeply ingrained cultural notions that the Air Force’s most important contributions are fighters, but it aligns with timeless principles of economy of force and decisive concentration.

These modeling insights, while preliminary, strongly validate the three-part force structure proposed in this report. Each force played an essential and complementary role. Their sequenced employment, rather than simultaneous commitment, creates the operational dynamics necessary for success against a peer adversary’s A2/AD complex. Sequencing is the key: by withholding large fighter packages until the edge, pulse, and enabling counter-C5ISR efforts simplify the problem, finite airframes, tankers, and magazines offer a durable advantage instead of suffering from attrition early.

Future analysis will expand this framework to include joint force contributions, examine sensitivity to key parameters, and explore adversary adaptation strategies. However, the fundamental insight remains clear: in an era of precise, long-range fires and sophisticated defenses, how forces are employed matters at least as much as what forces are available. The three-part force design concept provides the flexibility and resilience necessary to transform this insight into operational advantage.

Conclusion

Traditionalists will argue that the Air Force should not be in the business of ground-based missiles and runway-independent UAS. They will also question the wisdom of shrinking the fighter fleet and other elements of expeditionary airpower to build an edge force and expand the pulse force. After all, the existing Air Force design has proved effective in every conflict since the Cold War.

The difference today is that the threat environment precludes sustained air operations in contested areas with high ground threat density. As the war in Ukraine shows, airfields within reach of enemy drones are easily attacked at scale, and fighter aircraft can be denied using a variety of short- and medium-range air defenses. Aircraft will need to operate from ever-increasing standoff ranges, making fighters extremely inefficient. In some cases, they will be infeasible for strike operations in the opening hours of a conflict against peer adversaries and a growing number of lesser opponents. In sum, the TACAIR that made the Air Force successful in the last half-century will not be decisive in the next.

Furthermore, financial and industrial challenges are driving the need for dramatic change. If the Air Force simply procures more of current and future fighters to win a fight over Taiwan, operating costs will become crippling, and it will have insufficient capacity for routine global engagements. Specialized hedge forces, like the edge forces described above, offer a more cost-effective and sustainable solution that leverages existing commercially derived and autonomous systems to fill key operational gaps without undermining the rest of the USAF’s missions. By discreetly introducing novel drones, missiles, and sensor phenomenologies at meaningful scale—while keeping public disclosure to a prudent minimum—the Air Force can force the PLA to continuously adapt, thereby imposing costs and complicating the adversary’s planning cycles.

Shaping the Air Force around a single, worst-case China invasion scenario is neither affordable nor prudent. While the PLA remains its principal military challenger, the US military still requires globally viable airpower. Uncertainty shapes strategy, and politics often create crises that break neat assumptions. Force designs should be flexible enough to handle deep uncertainty while also being laser-focused where the stakes are highest.

A redesigned Air Force should, therefore, treat major contingencies like a Taiwan invasion not as the only priority but as a core stressor that highlights the need for new operational constructs. By adopting a combined-arms approach that includes specialized hedge forces alongside a robust core force, the United States can prepare for contested fights in the Western Pacific without compromising air operations elsewhere. This more sophisticated method, inspired by both historical lessons and emerging technological possibilities, allows the Air Force to move away from having only one option to sustain the broad, adaptable airpower that global realities demand.

hudson.org · Shyam Sankar

21.

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

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