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Quotes of the Day:
"The struggle itself towards the Heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
– AlbertCamus
When plagiarism becomes a way of life for a group in a society, they eventually create a legal system that justifies the act, and a moral system that embellishes it.
– Frederick Bastia
"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
– Adre Gide
Note that I am traveling on the West Coast this week so my daily distro will be slightly erratic.
1. The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom
2. JFK’s legacy endures with induction as Distinguished Member of the Special Forces Regiment
3. China Calls Out NSA in Bold Cyber Claims—But What’s the Endgame?
4. Wannabe GI Jane sues Navy after her dream of becoming first female SEAL comes to a crashing end over age
5. Trump Administration Draft Order Calls for Drastic Overhaul of State Department
6. New Thinking Needed on National Defense
7. To Counter China in Southeast Asia, Take Indonesia Seriously
8. Leveraging the Force We Have with Modified Concepts of Operations
9. The Latticework: Indo-Pacific Security Moves Beyond US Naval Primacy
10. UNIVERSAL MILITARY TRAINING: A FIRST STEP
11. Joe Biden Made More Than 600 Grants to Stop ‘Disinformation.’ Donald Trump Now Has a Plan for Them.
12. No, the President Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Ruling
13. Taiwan a critical US partner: Schriver
14. China’s military pressure near Taiwan is up 300 percent: What it means for the US
15. China tests non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, science paper shows
16. The Danger of a Trump Doctrine for Taiwan
17. Southeast Asia’s Quiet Revolt Against the Dollar: Should the US Be Worried?
18. Trump’s Courage to Fight
19. Actions create consequences: time and diplomacy by Cynthia Watson
20. Why I resigned in protest from National Defense University
1. The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom
A powerful essay that needs to be read by all leaders. And it requires deep reflection from all of us.
The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/naval-academy-speech-censorship.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE8.NKlJ.9e-O80htTdRm&smid=url-share
April 19, 2025
Underclass midshipmen lined up during the commissioning and graduation ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy on May 24, 2024.Credit...Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
By Ryan Holiday
Mr. Holiday had been asked to give one of the Stutt Lectures at the U.S. Naval Academy on April 14.
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.”)
When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)
Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:
In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”
It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”
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At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.
Just a few short years after completing his studies, in September 1965, Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.
He would spend the next seven years in various states of solitary confinement and enduring brutal torture. His captors, sensing perhaps his knowledge as a pilot of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” a manufactured confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that led to greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sought desperately to break him. Stockdale drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mind-set of his oppressors.
“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’’’
In his writings and speeches after his return from the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments,” which he used to describe his experience as a captive. He and his fellow P.O.W.s were asked to answer simple questions or perform seemingly innocuous tasks, like appear in videos, and if they declined, there would be consequences.
No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life with which to speak at.
As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many times already. More important was the topic of my address: the virtue of wisdom.
As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted.
“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from The New York Herald Tribune at a news conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing.” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the previous years, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. He concluded, “Let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”
The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?
Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library, and as heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the removed books is about Black soldiers in World War II, another is about how women killed in the Holocaust are portrayed, another is a reimagining of Kafka called “The Last White Man.” No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.
The decision by the academy’s leaders to not protest the original order — which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and common sense — has put them in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action.
In many moments, many understandable moments, Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a P.O.W. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, prevented the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life and perhaps even returned him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
Ryan Holiday is the author of “Right Thing Right Now” and creator of Daily Stoic, a daily email featuring advice based on ancient philosophy.
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2. JFK’s legacy endures with induction as Distinguished Member of the Special Forces Regiment
Photos at the link. Important Special Forces history:
Excerpts:
During his presidency, in October 1961, after watching a demonstration of Special Forces capabilities at McKellar’s Lodge, Kennedy approved the Green Beret as the official headgear of Army Special Forces during his visit to Fort Bragg.
Following his visit on April 11, 1962, Kennedy penned an official White House Memorandum stating, “The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom."
Shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, as a tribute to his support, Yarborough added Kennedy’s name to the U.S. Army Center for Special Warfare, the previous name of the SOCoE. Named in his honor, the institution reflects Kennedy’s unwavering belief and executive sponsorship of unconventional warfare. His contribution to the fabric of Special Forces history was filled with many accomplishments and honorable service in the military, leading to his induction into the regiment.
JFK’s legacy endures with induction as Distinguished Member of the Special Forces Regiment
By Elvia Kelly, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and SchoolApril 18, 2025
https://www.army.mil/article/284772/jfks_legacy_endures_with_induction_as_distinguished_member_of_the_special_forces_regiment
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Show Caption +
In an honorable and dignified ceremony marked by historical significance, former President John F. Kennedy was officially inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Special Forces Regiment in Pinehurst, North Carolina, April 11.
The U.S. Army Regimental Honors program recognizes individuals who have significantly contributed to the welfare, strength, and legacy of a regiment. The ceremony honored Kennedy posthumously, recognizing his visionary support for Special Forces and his enduring influence on modern warfare.
Jack B. Kennedy Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson, accepted the official acknowledgement of Kennedy’s induction into the regiment from Maj. Gen. Jason C. Slider, commanding general of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, the Special Operations Center of Excellence (SOCoE).
“Today, I’ll never forget it,” Schlossberg said, who accepted the distinction on his family’s behalf. “I can’t think of a better way to honor President Kennedy by teaching new generation to live by the values that he did and to hold them to the same high standard that history holds them to. The Special Warfare School is a living tribute to all that my grandfather stood for.”
In addition to Kennedy’s contribution to Special Forces history stood the former schoolhouse commander at the time, Lt. Gen. William P. Yarborough, whose determination parallelled the vision in establishing what would become the next generation of lethal warfighters, the Special Forces Soldier.
“Yarborough was a warfighter,” Slider said. “He fought and commanded in World War II with the 82nd Airborne Division. He was a leader of men, and he cared for them. He created the silver wings many of us are wearing tonight. He also designed the paratrooper jump boots. He was an infantryman, but his legacy is “the father of the modern Green Berets.”
Michael Yarborough, Lt. Gen. Yarborough’s grandson, attended the ceremony on his family’s behalf.
“This letter marked the milestone in the transformation to the Army as it responded to a wide variety of new and emerging threats that included unconventional warfare in faraway places like Vietnam,” said Yarborough, during his remarks at the induction ceremony. “Six months before he penned that letter, Kennedy visited Fort Bragg and my grandfather at the Special Warfare School […] I’m confident that President Kennedy, if he visited Bragg today, would look to Special Forces to bring any capabilities and moral character the Army needs as it continues to defend our country.”
The significance of the ceremony reflected a milestone in Special Forces history, the 63rd anniversary of Kennedy signing the memo that authorized the wearing of the Green Beret on April 11, 1962.
Because of Kennedy and Yarborough’s deep-rooted legacy in paving the path for Army special operations forces, the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School stands as a living legacy of their contributions and a pillar of excellence in the world of special operations military training and force generation.
Kennedy’s military history traces back during his time as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Kennedy’s actions spoke to his character when he commanded a PT boat in the Pacific. In 1943, his boat, PT-109, was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Despite his own injuries, Kennedy led his crew to safety. After World War II, Kennedy would go on to be elected as a democratic congressman for Massachusetts, serving three terms, and eventually becoming the 35th President of the United States of America in 1960.
During his presidency, in October 1961, after watching a demonstration of Special Forces capabilities at McKellar’s Lodge, Kennedy approved the Green Beret as the official headgear of Army Special Forces during his visit to Fort Bragg.
Following his visit on April 11, 1962, Kennedy penned an official White House Memorandum stating, “The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom."
Shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, as a tribute to his support, Yarborough added Kennedy’s name to the U.S. Army Center for Special Warfare, the previous name of the SOCoE. Named in his honor, the institution reflects Kennedy’s unwavering belief and executive sponsorship of unconventional warfare. His contribution to the fabric of Special Forces history was filled with many accomplishments and honorable service in the military, leading to his induction into the regiment.
While the induction falls on the anniversary of the signing of the memo, the induction references an action taken when Kennedy was first interred into Arlington.
At that time, moments after the assassinated president's casket descended into the ground, boughs of pines were laid on the mound, and his 47-man Special Forces contingent that supported his internment was leaving, former Command Sgt. Maj. Francis Ruddy, the U.S. Army Center for Special Warfare command sergeant major, overcome by emotion, laid his beret down on the grave site.
"It was pretty much a reflex," Ruddy said 14 months later with a New York Times reporter. "I stood there with a feeling of complete helplessness. I felt we lost a truly great person."
When Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie returned to Arlington at midnight, they found Ruddy's beret among the pine boughs that laid on top of the piled dirt. Ruddy explained to the Associated Press days after the funeral that "we considered it appropriate that it be given back to him."
“President Kennedy’s confidence in our formation, his investment in our force, and his understanding of unconventional warfare leads us to stand as ready to respond to our nation today as we did 60 years ag,” said Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, commanding general of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, during the induction ceremony. “As past Green Berets were able to stand guard over President Kennedy and honor his leadership in his family’s time of need; today, we Green Berets codify his legacy as one strongly intertwined with our own.”
During the ceremony, Schlossberg presented Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, commanding general of the U.S. Special Operations Command, with a page of Kennedy’s famous West Point speech in 1962 that included President Kennedy’s notes and edits from over six decades ago.
“On behalf of all of us, we formally welcome you to the Special Forces family,” Fenton said, during closing remarks.
Kennedy remains the only American president officially inducted into the Special Forces Regimental Hall of Fame as a Distinguished Member of the Regiment. His image, depicted in Special Forces halls and classrooms, continues to inspire generations of warriors. The ceremony not only honored his past contributions but also reaffirmed that his ideals remain firmly embedded in the heart of special operations.
To read President John F. Kennedy's biography from the ceremony, visit https://www.swcs.mil/Portals/111/DMOR_2025_SF_JFK.pdf
3. China Calls Out NSA in Bold Cyber Claims—But What’s the Endgame?
Excerpts:
Tsukerman further told ClearanceJobs that at the heart of China’s posture is its vision of “cyber sovereignty” – as in the idea that each state has the absolute right to control and police the internet within its borders, free from external interference.
...
“China is lobbying hard in multilateral forums – like the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – to rewrite the rules of cyberspace in its image,” Tsukerman continued. “It seeks a system where surveillance, state firewalls, and nationalized tech stacks are not violations of human rights, but standard operating procedure. Publicly accusing the U.S. of cyberattacks becomes ammunition in this ideological campaign, reinforcing its pitch to Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: ditch the Western-led internet; join the ‘neutral’, ‘orderly’ digital sphere with Chinese infrastructure.”
...
“The danger is that it’s successfully convincing a sizable swath of the world that it’s justified – and that its model of tightly controlled, state-centric cyberspace is the future,” Tsukerman explained. “The U.S. and its allies can respond tactically to these accusations – but unless they offer a coherent, values-based alternative for global cyber governance, they risk losing the digital Cold War not on the battlefield, but in the courtroom of global public opinion.”
China Calls Out NSA in Bold Cyber Claims—But What’s the Endgame?
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2025/04/18/china-calls-out-nsa-in-bold-cyber-claims-but-whats-the-endgame/
Peter Suciu / Apr 18, 2025
Cybersecurity
Last week, China accused the United States National Security Agency (NSA) of carrying out cyberattacks during February’s Asian Winter Games. Beijing maintains that the NSA targeted essential Chinese industries, while also accusing the University of California and Virginia Tech University of being complicit in the attack.
Three NSA agents were even identified by the Xinhua state-run news agency.
“We urge the U.S. to take a responsible attitude on the issue of cybersecurity and … stop unprovoked smears and attacks on China,” ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said in a news briefing.
Valid Claim or Deflection From Chinese Hacking?
Even casual observers of the cybersecurity sector may find it a bit surprising that China would take such a firm stance, given its ties to state-sponsored hackers and its past allegations of conducting cyber operations against the West.
“It’s the oldest dance in cyber geopolitics: Beijing cries foul, points fingers at the NSA, and pretends that cyberspace isn’t a mirror where both sides throw stones while living in digital glass houses,” explained geopolitical analyst Irina Tsukerman, president of threat assessment firm Scarab Rising.
Moreover, Beijing’s latest allegations came just weeks after the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed sweeping charges against 12 Chinese nationals for their roles in hacking activities that had targeted U.S. federal and state systems on behalf of the Chinese intelligence services in recent years.
It is an example of turnabout being fair play suggested Evan Dornbush, former NSA cybersecurity expert, who told ClearanceJobs, “We learned from U.S. press that Chinese representatives admitted a connection to the ‘Typhoon’ attacks that broke into US infrastructure, including home routers and water filtration centers.”
Dornbush added that China is now accusing the U.S. of carrying out cyber warfare.
China’s Tit-for-Tat
The fact that three NSA employees were named is just the latest cyber melodrama. Washington is no more likely to hand over the three named individuals to Beijing than the Chinese dozen will be sent to the U.S.
“It’s less a smoking gun and more of a theatrical performance – one part cyber forensics, two parts propaganda,” Scarab Rising’s Tsukerman told ClearanceJobs.
She added that we shouldn’t be surprised that the U.S. conducts such operations, not in the slightest.
“Cyber espionage has long been a cornerstone of modern statecraft. The NSA’s job isn’t to knit sweaters and play Sudoku; it’s to gather intelligence, especially on strategic rivals,” explained Tsukerman. “The real shock would be if it weren’t probing the networks of a country that hacks Western think tanks, infiltrates defense contractors, and hoovers up intellectual property like it’s going out of style.”
It could be described as a form of “selective outrage” on both countries’ parts.
“China has mastered the art of cyber intrusion, and now it wants to claim the moral high ground. That’s like a pickpocket filing a police report because someone else swiped his wallet,” added Tsukerman. “‘The pot calling the kettle black’ doesn’t even begin to capture the irony here.”
To use another idiom, neither Beijing’s allegations nor Washington’s charges will change the proverbial price of tea in China (although tariffs might). It also won’t stop such activities from occurring.
“Public comment on offensive cyber operations from both parties doesn’t fundamentally change anything for the defensive community,” said Dornbush. “The best advice is to assume that you and your organization are being targeted for exploitation, and invest in effective risk mitigation strategies- including high-quality monitoring and response capabilities.”
Chinese Outrage
Even more telling than the actual accusation is the timing and the delivery. That includes the publicly naming of alleged NSA agents, which isn’t just about transparency. Rather, it could be seen as a move straight from the political warfare playbook.
“It’s meant to embarrass, to distract from internal failings, and to frame the U.S. as the aggressor in the eyes of the Global South,” noted Tsukerman.
It is a way for Beijing to maintain a moral high ground and question why it is called out for the exact activities.
“But the comparison doesn’t quite hold. Western cyber operations, while certainly robust, tend to focus on national security and counterintelligence,” Tsukerman continued. “China’s approach, on the other hand, is industrial-scale economic warfare – think less ‘spy vs. spy’ and more ‘smash-and-grab’ in the global tech market.”
In that way, Beijing’s outrage is less about being hacked and more about being hacked back.
“When China goes public with accusations against the U.S. – especially in cyber matters – it’s rarely just about the breach. It’s about narrative control, strategic positioning, and information warfare dressed in legalese,” said Tsukerman. “This latest stunt, where Beijing not only accuses Washington of a cyberattack but brazenly names alleged NSA operatives, isn’t simply reactive outrage – it’s a calibrated component of a broader digital power strategy with global stakes.”
China Exporting Its Cyber Sovereignty
Tsukerman further told ClearanceJobs that at the heart of China’s posture is its vision of “cyber sovereignty” – as in the idea that each state has the absolute right to control and police the internet within its borders, free from external interference.
“It sounds innocuous, even reasonable, until you realize it’s a Trojan horse for authoritarian digital control. The endgame isn’t just censorship at home – it’s exporting a model of internet governance where free speech is redefined as a security risk, and foreign platforms operate only under party oversight or not at all,” she added.
This may have strategic ramifications.
“China is lobbying hard in multilateral forums – like the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – to rewrite the rules of cyberspace in its image,” Tsukerman continued. “It seeks a system where surveillance, state firewalls, and nationalized tech stacks are not violations of human rights, but standard operating procedure. Publicly accusing the U.S. of cyberattacks becomes ammunition in this ideological campaign, reinforcing its pitch to Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: ditch the Western-led internet; join the ‘neutral’, ‘orderly’ digital sphere with Chinese infrastructure.”
In that light, the outrage over NSA activities is more of a political stunt than a moral stance. It’s not about stopping cyber espionage, but is instead about dominating the narrative, reshaping global norms, and casting itself as a digital underdog battling imperialist overreach.
Moreover, the danger isn’t that China is outraged.
“The danger is that it’s successfully convincing a sizable swath of the world that it’s justified – and that its model of tightly controlled, state-centric cyberspace is the future,” Tsukerman explained. “The U.S. and its allies can respond tactically to these accusations – but unless they offer a coherent, values-based alternative for global cyber governance, they risk losing the digital Cold War not on the battlefield, but in the courtroom of global public opinion.”
4. Wannabe GI Jane sues Navy after her dream of becoming first female SEAL comes to a crashing end over age
Hmmm.... 42 years old?
Wannabe GI Jane sues Navy after her dream of becoming first female SEAL comes to a crashing end over age
https://nypost.com/2025/04/19/us-news/long-island-womans-g-i-jane-dream-ended-by-age-discrimination-lawsuit/
By Kathianne Boniello
Published April 19, 2025, 7:30 a.m. ETA wannabe-G.I. Jane’s dream of becoming the first female Navy S.E.A.L. ended because military recruiters delayed her application so long that she aged out, she claimed in a lawsuit.
The US Navy officials failed to advance Amanda S. Reynolds’ application, then told her in the fall that she would no longer qualify for Naval Officer Training Command in Newport, RI, because she’d be over the age limit of 42 by the time she graduated, according to court papers.
“The opportunity . . . was kind of taken away from me. I would like that to be reinstated,” Reynolds, 41, told The Post. “I would just like the outcome to be determined by the merits instead of by some sort of technicality.
Amanda Reynolds said she wants a chance to become a US Navy SEAL.
Leonardo Munoz
“I could have gone to officer candidate school in February, [but] they delayed my application without reason or cause and then they told me I was too old,” she said.
The Long Island lawyer first sought to join the Navy in 2018.
“I was working in litigation for 12 years, and I kind of got burnt out working 24/7,” the Woodbury resident said, calling the SEALs “such a more noble cause.”
An avid long-distance runner and swimmer who is SCUBA certified, Reynolds said the special forces “kind of jibed with my physical pursuits.”
In a personal statement submitted as part of her efforts to enlist, Reynolds wrote of her “Viking-like pursuit” to be a SEAL.
“As an American, I was born with what I can only describe as an inexpressible, indefatigable nature to dream,” she wrote. “And so, dream I do — never forgetting it is only under the auspices of this great nation’s military who protects my inalienable right to do so that I may.”
Service runs in the family, Reynolds said. Her grandfather served in the Norwegian Ski Patrol; her uncle was an American World War II pilot shot down in the Pacific, and her older brother is an FBI agent.
Reynolds, who was working to become a personal trainer, is SCUBA certified and is a runner, claims recruiters delayed her application without explanation.
Courtesy of Amanda Reynolds
“I hope to serve as this country’s first female Navy SEAL Officer, so that there may be a second, and a third, and an infinitesimal many more female candidates who might impress upon you these shared values in the very same way,” she wrote.
But her dream stalled almost from the get-go.
Reynolds, who is representing herself in her Brooklyn Federal Court age-discrimination case against the US Navy, claimed she was “sworn into” the Navy in Brooklyn in 2018 but “was never assigned anywhere or deployed.”
Reynolds filled out “enlistment paperwork” in 2019, according to the Navy, which had “no record of service” for her.
She then moved to Utah where she worked as a lawyer and revisited her enlistment in 2020. But she was was arrested in July 2020 for allegedly driving under the influence, a misdemeanor which was dismissed in 2023, court records show.
She returned to Long Island and again chased her dreams of joining the SEALs, but found recruiters were quick to urge her to use her legal skills in the military’s Judge Advocate General.
She claims recruiters told her that “age waivers were always obtainable.”
“I was really gearing up to participate in the pipeline process, really taking all the right steps to proceed with the application,” she said. But the app “was not submitted” by recruiters and “unjustifiably delayed,” she claimed.
The Navy declined comment on the litigation.
The Defense Department opened the military’s elite units, such as the SEALs and the Army’s Green Berets, to women in 2016 but no woman has ever finished the process to become a SEAL.
“It was never really about me being a female SEAL, it was just about me being a SEAL who happened to be a woman,” she said.
5. Trump Administration Draft Order Calls for Drastic Overhaul of State Department
"Personnel is policy." Disrupt first, rebuild later (if ever)?
Eliminating these bureaus and the professionals who work in them is sending a strong (wrong?) signal to the world. The "adversarial cooperators (China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea per the ODNI 2025 Annual Threat Assessment) will certainly be celebrating this action because they are a threat (an information and ideological threat) to their rule. This will be very disappointing if the draft order is enacted.
I know I will get responses of anecdotes of fraud, waste, and abuse and of seemingly foolish actions and programs. But I doubt any who tout those anecdotes have any idea of how these diplomats contribute to our national security mission. This is of course the problem for the entire national security community - the inability to communicate with the American people to help them understand the important work they are doing. - All they receive is the sensational negative narrative from political opponents of this work.
Excerpts:
The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed by President Trump this week, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.
The signing of the executive order would be accompanied by efforts to lay off both career diplomats, known as foreign service officers, and civil service employees, who usually work in the department’s headquarters in Washington, said current and former U.S. officials familiar with the plans. The department would begin putting large numbers of workers on paid leave and sending out notices of termination, they said.
Trump Administration Draft Order Calls for Drastic Overhaul of State Department
The draft executive order to be signed by President Trump would eliminate Africa operations and shut down bureaus working on democracy, human rights and refugee issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/politics/trump-state-department-overhaul.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE8.Jaza.o7J5p9Rt8vK3&smid=url-share
Listen to this article · 5:38 min Learn more
The State Department headquarters in Washington.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Edward Wong
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent and former Beijing bureau chief who reports on foreign policy from Washington and often travels with the secretary of state.
April 20, 2025,
4:00 a.m. ET
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A draft White House executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department, including eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent.
The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.
The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed by President Trump this week, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.
The signing of the executive order would be accompanied by efforts to lay off both career diplomats, known as foreign service officers, and civil service employees, who usually work in the department’s headquarters in Washington, said current and former U.S. officials familiar with the plans. The department would begin putting large numbers of workers on paid leave and sending out notices of termination, they said.
The draft executive order calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats, and it lays out new criteria for hiring, including “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision.”
The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”
Elements of the executive order could still change before Mr. Trump signs it. Neither the State Department nor the White House National Security Council had immediate comment on the order early Sunday.
The proposed reorganization would get rid of regional bureaus that help make and enact policy in large parts of the globe.
Instead, the draft says, those functions would fall under four “corps”: Eurasia Corps, consisting of Europe, Russia and Central Asia; Mid-East Corps, consisting of Arab nations, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan; Latin America Corps, consisting of Central America, South America and the Caribbean; and Indo-Pacific Corps, consisting of East Asia, Southeast Asia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Brussels this month.Credit...Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin
One of the most drastic proposed changes would be eliminating the bureau of African affairs, which oversees policy in sub-Saharan Africa. It would be replaced by a much smaller special envoy office for African affairs that would report to the White House National Security Council. The office would focus on a handful of issues, including “coordinated counterterrorism operations.”
The draft also said all “nonessential” embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa would be closed by Oct. 1. Diplomats would be sent to Africa on “targeted, mission-driven deployments,” the document said.
Canada operations would be put into a new North American affairs office under the Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s authority, and it would be run by a “significantly reduced team,” the draft said. The department would also severely shrink the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.
The department would eliminate a bureau overseeing democracy and human rights issues; one that handles refugees and migration; and another that works with international organizations. The under secretary position overseeing the first two bureaus would be cut. So would the office of the under secretary of public diplomacy and public affairs.
The department would also get rid of the position of the special envoy for climate.
The department would establish a new senior position, the under secretary for transnational threat elimination, to oversee counternarcotics policy and other issues, the draft memo said.
The Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance would absorb the remnants of the United States Agency for International Development, which has been gutted over the last two months by Mr. Rubio and other members of the Trump administration.
As for personnel, the memo said, the department needs to move from its “current outdated and disorganized generalist global rotation model to a smarter, strategic, regionally specialized career service framework to maximize expertise.”
That means people trying to get into the Foreign Service would choose during the application process which regional corps they want to work in.
The department would offer buyouts to foreign service and civil service officers until Sept. 30, the draft said.
The draft order also calls for narrowing Fulbright scholarships so that they are given only to students doing master’s-level studies in national security matters.
And it says the department will end its contract with Howard University, a historically Black institution, to recruit candidates for the Rangel and Pickering fellowships, which are to be terminated. The goal of those fellowships has been to help students from underrepresented groups get a chance at entering the Foreign Service soon after graduation.
The draft executive order is one of several internal documents that have circulated in the administration in recent days laying out proposed changes to the State Department. Another memo outlines a proposed cut of nearly 50 percent to the agency’s budget in the next fiscal year. Yet another internal memo proposes cutting 10 embassies and 17 consulates.
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department.
6. New Thinking Needed on National Defense
We cannot afford a $1 trillion defense budget.
Conclusion:
We need new thinking—something that doesn’t come naturally to large bureaucracies like the one in the Pentagon—about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible. We should remain hopeful that the new leadership in the Pentagon will shake things up.
March/April 2025 | Volume 54, Issue 3/4
New Thinking Needed on National Defense
Senior Correspondent, Asia Times
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/new-thinking-needed-on-national-defense/?_hsmi=356993800
The following is adapted from a lecture prepared for delivery at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri.
Defending America and America’s friends and allies is expensive. If you add up the price tag—not even including secret programs or the cost of U.S. intelligence—our current defense expenses stand at $875 billion per year. When you add the cost of intelligence, which is vast, the total cost of defense rises to about $1 trillion annually.
Despite these expenditures, the Ukraine War has exposed some dramatic inadequacies. We have learned that America’s arsenal as it stands today would be quickly depleted in any future sustained conflict. And we’ve learned that our allies are in far worse shape.
This raises the question of how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict. Consider, for instance, the remarkable fact that, unlike Israel, we have no national air defense system.
Historically speaking, the heyday of American defense production was during World War II. Vast civilian industries were converted to produce guns, artillery, tanks, and jeeps—and new plants were commissioned to build airplanes and ships.
In World War I, the U.S. sent 4.8 million soldiers directly or indirectly into the war, mainly in Europe. We also sent 1.325 million horses and mules to the battlefield, depleting America’s equine stock. The U.S. came into the fight with no tanks, and at war’s end we had no tanks. We had 45 commissioned transport ships and another 80 former Merchant Marine vessels.
By contrast, in World War II, we sent 16.8 million soldiers to fight in Europe, North Africa, and Asia—around four times more than in World War I. And we manufactured 2,751 Liberty ships in 18 shipyards, turning out three ships every two days.
Such a feat of production is inconceivable today. Building a cargo ship takes years, and most of the production takes place outside of the U.S. The availability of shipbuilding slots has been reduced, particularly in the most prolific shipbuilding nations. China’s delivery time now averages around three years, with tankers at 2.8 years and liquid natural gas vessels even longer. Dry bulk carriers ordered in 2024 are currently expected to be delivered in 3.6 years on average.
In World War II, the U.S. manufactured around 300,000 aircraft, including 63,715 fighters and fighter-bombers for the U.S. Army Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Today, the total number of fighter aircraft in the Air Force, Navy, and Marines is 2,531, about 25 times fewer.
Of course, we have new generations of weapons today that never existed before. These can be summarized under the name “precision guided munitions” or PGMs. Some PGMs are relatively inexpensive, but most of them require sophisticated electronics and multiple sensors. Many require support when in flight and guidance from satellites, most notably the Global Positioning System (GPS), which is run by the U.S. Air Force and costs over $2 billion per year to operate. All of these PGMs are time consuming to build, test, operate, and maintain.
A key lesson of the Ukraine War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.
Another weakness of our defense manufacturing capability is that we depend heavily on global supply chains. Specialized parts may be produced in the U.S., but sometimes they come from other countries, including China. When supply chains are disrupted or certain parts are no longer manufactured, defense production grinds to a halt. The U.S. must reverse this trend quickly if we are to remain dominant.
Consider the fact that most of the first person view (FPV) drones—drones controlled by a remote pilot using video cameras—that are being used on the battlefield in Ukraine and elsewhere are built with parts made primarily in China. This supply chain dependence is a direct result of the globalization of industry and the offshoring of America’s manufacturing—mostly to Asia and especially to China.
While U.S. law requires that more than 50 percent of each piece of defense hardware consist of American-made parts, that standard—already inadequate—runs up against the reality of the outsourcing of goods that are no longer made in America. The defense industry can only control the supplier network tangentially by trying to ensure that components meet military specifications (MILSPEC). Even then, there is a significant number of cheaters who produce substandard parts for expensive military platforms. In some cases, MILSPEC cannot be applied and only commercial parts can be purchased.
A further problem is presented by the fact that our defense industry largely depends on global companies whose priorities do not necessarily include producing parts for defense manufacturers. Both for economic and ideological reasons, the relationship between defense companies and their leading suppliers (usually high-tech companies) is often fraught. Some of these companies won’t even bid on government contracts, which they say are burdensome, impose onerous workforce and electronic security requirements, and are ultimately not profitable. In addition, many workers in high-tech industries will not participate in defense research for political reasons. As artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies are becoming increasingly important to the ability of the U.S. to maintain its warfighting edge, this problem grows ever more acute.
Then there is the problem of time. The lifespan of a fighter jet—from the design stage to retirement—can last as long as 50 years. Modern high-tech industries are designing, fielding, and retiring products in a much shorter time frame, and they have no interest in manufacturing products that they deem obsolete. Forty years ago, I asked Bob Noyes, a cofounder of Intel, to look at one of our strategic missile systems where we were encountering supply problems. He recommended that the government itself needed to produce the older (or “sunset”) technologies, because no one else would be willing to do it for us. The same problem persists today.
American defense companies essentially consist of three types: (1) the big four—Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, and General Dynamics—who dominate in terms of contract awards; (2) second-tier companies, some of which are innovative while others are just looking for a contract; and (3) the suppliers. The big four often buy up innovative companies, which sometimes leads to good results, at least for a while.
A complicating factor is that the competition to acquire new technology, such as artificial intelligence, is dominated by non-defense companies with deep pockets. While defense companies are sometimes chasing the same innovations, there are no assurances they will succeed when outbid by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, or even offshore corporations. While the U.S. government helps defense companies by underwriting critical research and development, the Defense Department does not assist them with acquisitions of high-tech companies.
Almost all modern defense systems need complex software. For example, the F-35 stealth jet runs on more than eight million lines of code. As artificial intelligence capabilities increase in aerospace and defense, the amount of code will expand and new types of processors will be added to the F-35 and many other platforms, such as missiles, tracking systems, fire control systems, and intelligence gathering devices. New AI systems will make the kinds of decisions that are currently made by soldiers, pilots, and command centers and will have the ability to process information at astonishing speeds. This is an excellent opportunity to make the old equipment much better and more effective. One important question is whether our major defense companies will be able to recruit enough high-tech talent to do the job.
We are living in a time when autonomous systems are taking over parts of the battlefield, including in the Ukraine War. But we are not alone in fielding these autonomous AI-driven systems. China and Russia are making tremendous progress in this area. Consequently, our challenge is to upgrade our AI fighting systems rapidly. American defense companies are lagging behind their foreign competitors, and the help they need is unlikely to materialize internally. It is urgent that they team up with commercial AI developers, who should be encouraged to assist with national security priorities.
***
I worked in a multinational defense company, then the eighth largest in the world, with annual revenues of over $20 billion. But like almost all such companies in the U.S. and Europe, it was built through the acquisition of smaller firms that were combined to make one big corporation. The same is true of today’s big defense companies.
Typically, if a defense company is contracted by the government to produce a PGM, such as the Stinger missile, it will build a facility to do that. When the contract runs out, or there are no more significant exports, the special facility is shut down. This poses a serious problem if the U.S. urgently needs to surge production of that PGM.
One solution to this problem would be the construction of a single flexible facility that could produce a range of PGM products using the same labor force. In that case, restarting a production line could be done much more quickly and easily. This would require suppliers to agree to a consolidation plan to build their products in a common facility. In other words, we need a national security version of Elon Musk’s Gigafactory.
One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China. In effect, we have two defense budgets: one for us and the other for our enemies. Despite various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies bleed us dry.
But cyber is only one area where our adversaries are actively working to damage us. They are using all the tools of espionage at their disposal in an effort to replicate our most advanced defense and commercial technologies. This relieves them of huge costs and speeds up their development schedule for new weapons such as ICBMs, submarines, advanced radars, and satellites.
We must take the steps necessary to protect our defense investments. If we don’t, we may one day find ourselves engaged in a conflict with an enemy who is much better prepared for the fight than we are.
An important thing we learned very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. A thoughtful national defense establishment would have drawn the conclusion from this that we should launch a crash project to develop an effective and inexpensive answer to drones. But no such project was launched. So when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles. A grade-schooler could do the math. That is not a sustainable defense policy.
Recently, by the way, forces on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried methods.
We need new thinking—something that doesn’t come naturally to large bureaucracies like the one in the Pentagon—about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible. We should remain hopeful that the new leadership in the Pentagon will shake things up.
7. To Counter China in Southeast Asia, Take Indonesia Seriously
A view from Australia.
Can we do this in today's political and national security environment?
(I think we must).
Excerpt:
A U.S. military presence, a respectable trade agenda and the continuation of the civic virtues with which the U.S. has traditionally inspired the world, would win Southeast Asia for Uncle Sam. Indonesia is the biggest nation about which Americans know the least, yet its influence has been substantial. For Washington to lose that influence would be tragic, unnecessary and dangerous. But it would make Russia—and China—very happy.
To Counter China in Southeast Asia, Take Indonesia Seriously
Putin and Xi are wooing the world’s fourth-largest nation with military and economic promises.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/to-counter-china-take-indonesia-seriously-trump-administration-national-security-8c24a5b7?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1
By Greg Sheridan
April 17, 2025 4:41 pm ET
Russia's President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Indonesia's President-elect Prabowo Subianto at the Kremlin in Moscow, July 31, 2024. Photo: maxim shemetov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The news that Russia is seeking to station air-force planes in Indonesia was sensational, instantly denied and almost certainly true. Although it’s a characteristically murky tale, it carries lessons that the Trump administration should note.
One is that the U.S. is unlikely to win the strategic, military, economic or technology competition with China unless it has a strong position in Southeast Asia. Another is that the China-Russia alliance is tighter than ever, and it’s increasingly global. A third is that if you want to understand Beijing’s strategic policy in Asia today, you should look to the geography of Japan’s military campaigns in World War II.
The open-source military and security website Janes.com first reported a Russian request for use of the Indonesian Manhua air-force base, on Biak island in the remote Indonesian province of Papua. The story caused a stir in Australia because Biak is only 850 miles from Darwin, with its substantial U.S. military presence. Australia’s Defense Minister Richard Marles reported that his Indonesian counterpart, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, told him the report was untrue. But don’t be reassured.
Indonesia is a nation of 290 million. It proclaims fidelity to the Non-Aligned Movement, so a permanent foreign base on its territory is extremely unlikely. Like all giant nations—its population is smaller only than India, China and the U.S.—Indonesia can be somewhat self-obsessed. It’s the giant of Southeast Asia. Under President Prabowo Subianto, a former general and defense minister who was for some time banned from entering the U.S. on human-rights grounds, Indonesia has grown much closer to Russia. Like New Delhi, Jakarta is strategically promiscuous. It signed a defense agreement with Australia, but Russia is its biggest military supplier.
Shortly after he was elected, Mr. Prabowo went to see Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Military cooperation was high on the agenda. Mr. Prabowo took Indonesia into the Brics grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Indonesia opposed the trilateral Aukus agreement, which will see Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
Indonesia and Russia engage in substantial trade in commodities. Russia has sought a presence in Southeast Asia for some time, looking unsuccessfully to revive elements of its old alliance with Vietnam. While it won’t get a permanent base in Indonesia, there are other ways Moscow could secure an enhanced military presence there. It has, for example, based air-force planes in Biak in the past.
We in Australia know something of hosting allied forces without establishing a foreign military base. Pine Gap, in Australia’s Northern Territory, is one of America’s most important signals-intelligence stations. It’s a joint U.S.-Australian facility, not technically a U.S. base. Similarly, U.S. Marines, ships and planes rotate through Australia.
It’s likely the presence of such U.S. forces in Australia is an important part of Russia’s thinking regarding Indonesia. Russia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Sergei Tolchenov, responded to the air-base story with a statement confirming that military cooperation is at the heart of Indonesia-Russia relations. But these are purely bilateral, he said, not aimed at any third country. He also claimed, preposterously, that U.S. forces in Australia were the real military risk in the region, especially U.S. missiles that could hit Indonesia and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries.
Why would Russia pick a verbal fight with the U.S. in Australia and Indonesia, when Mr. Putin is performing the dance of the seven veils with President Trump over Ukraine? One reason would be to oblige Beijing.
Xi Jinping has been on a tour through Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia. His message in the wake of the Trump administration’s erratic tariff performance is that Beijing is a more reliable partner than Washington. This complements Beijing’s efforts to gain military presence and leverage throughout the region. Most Southeast Asians are scared of China and want the U.S. to balance its influence. But, with the exception of Singapore, they’re all either poor or middle-income nations. The Trump tariffs were a huge shock, and more than anything ran against the stability the U.S. once represented.
China’s presence in Indonesia is complicated by the past persecution of ethnic Chinese there, and the association with Indonesian communism in the 1960s. Russia doesn’t have that baggage. It could possibly wrangle an occasional, even a regular, military presence. Indonesia and Russia conducted their first joint maritime exercises in November.
Finally, recall the geography of Japan’s Pacific war. It was fought in Southeast Asia and in the islands of the South Pacific. Beijing has tried repeatedly to sign security agreements with Pacific islands nations such as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. U.S. and Australian intelligence take it as given that Beijing wants a military base in the South Pacific.
China’s military presence, supplemented now by Russia, threatens U.S. forces in the region and increases Beijing’s ability to intimidate, coerce and influence other nations. For American allies like Australia that’s bad news. It’s bad for the U.S. as well.
A U.S. military presence, a respectable trade agenda and the continuation of the civic virtues with which the U.S. has traditionally inspired the world, would win Southeast Asia for Uncle Sam. Indonesia is the biggest nation about which Americans know the least, yet its influence has been substantial. For Washington to lose that influence would be tragic, unnecessary and dangerous. But it would make Russia—and China—very happy.
Mr. Sheridan is foreign editor of the Australian.
8. Leveraging the Force We Have with Modified Concepts of Operations
Excerpt:
By moving past legacy concepts of maritime task forces and air combat formations to re-thinking the manned force as the infrastructure for projection of distributed combat capability enhanced by a true weapons enterprise conjoined with the payload revolution enabled by autonomous systems, we can leverage the force we have and make more capable in the near term and provide a more effective means for force development going forward.
Leveraging the Force We Have with Modified Concepts of Operations
04/17/2025
By Robbin Laird
https://defense.info/featured-story/2025/04/leveraging-the-force-we-have-with-modified-concepts-of-operations/
Recently I talked with my colleague Brian Morra, who served in the USAF and worked in defense industry for several decades. We discussed the challenge of how to enhance “the fight to night one force” in the short to mid-term.
He started by citing an example which highlights how the force can leverage its C2 and ISR advantages mentioned earlier by Secretary Wynne to shape new con-ops. The case is of the USAF working with the U.S. Navy in ship defense – both combat and commercial – against the Houthis in the Middle East.
As he noted, the Houthis have been using a wide range of strike capabilities against shipping. The dilemma of using high-cost weapons to defend against much cheaper projectiles has been a key problem.
The USAF came up with a con-ops innovation to deal with the problem. F-16s operating in the Middle East have been using their LITENING targeting pods to identify targets and to kill or degrade those targets using laser guided weapons hitherto used in air to ground operations. The aircraft can carry weapons for higher value targets but have used a much lower priced weapon to kill many of the Houthi’s projectiles.
This kind of thinking – leveraging core advantages but empowering the force with a much larger weapons arsenal of lower cost weapons – is clearly one example of the way ahead.
But this example illustrates a key element of shaping a more effective way ahead – let the warfighters doing the tasks shape operational changes that can drive acquisition decisions.
This is an illustration of Wynne’s bulk up policy prescription.
What Morra went on to emphasize was that we need “to prioritize a philosophy of doing something smart with capability we already have. We have C2 and ISR advantages and significant asymmetrical capabilities. How can we leverage these capabilities to provide the warfighter with a significantly enhanced and cost-effective arsenal of weapons of various sorts?”
To be able to do so, the Defense Department has to unleash a multi-faceted and substantial weapons production base, not limited to a small number of providers building only exquisite and high-priced weapons.
As Morra put it: “How do we leverage the kind of central nervous system capacity that we’ve developed and invested in, and we’ve thought about largely in terms of exquisite weapon systems, and how do we can achieve our objectives with a mix of weapons, and we can turn dumb bombs into precision weapons with a kill web?”
A major shift in terms of the defense industrial base is needed to deliver the kind of mass which a highly capable C2/ISR enabled force can use in a diversity of security and warfighting situations. For this to happen, DoD needs to generate the demand and industry will respond.
The C2/ISR “brain” increasingly is very capable for the distributed force, so the challenge is how to leverage it with new concepts of operations and provision of greater mass of lethal and non-lethal weapons.
A good example of only a limited use of what we and are allies already have in their arsenal is the F-35 fleet. The deployed force could direct a much wider range of strike if the weapons were available to the combat force.
And Morra underscored that the new radar developed by Northrop Grumman for the F-35 will bring significantly enhanced capabilities to what I have referred to as the “flying combat system.”
Morra underscored: “The new Northrop Grumman radar to be fielded on the F 35 will completely transform the F-35. The radars that Northrop has deployed on the F 35 in the past have been extremely capable, the most capable in the world.
“But this next block upgrade is a step function greater in capability, and it really becomes, in a more profound way, what you’ve talked about for years, a flying combat system.
“It really becomes a C2/ISR platform that is has no real peer, and that’s coming within the five-year timeframe we are discussing. How do you think about that new radar capability in the same way that those smart people thought about the LITENING pod married up with relatively cheap rockets?
“What’s the analog there? It may be the command and control of lots of cheap loitering munitions or lots of relatively inexpensive UAVs, not just the expensive cooperative combat aircraft. I’m talking about smaller, less expensive things that could be commanded and controlled from these new F 35s which are going to have just an unbelievable capability,”
By moving past legacy concepts of maritime task forces and air combat formations to re-thinking the manned force as the infrastructure for projection of distributed combat capability enhanced by a true weapons enterprise conjoined with the payload revolution enabled by autonomous systems, we can leverage the force we have and make more capable in the near term and provide a more effective means for force development going forward.
9. The Latticework: Indo-Pacific Security Moves Beyond US Naval Primacy
With all disrespect Kurt Campbell who I think coined "latticework" to describe the US relationship with friends, partners. and allies, a lattice is a weak structure. I prefer to use the description of our "silk web" of bilateral, multi-lateral, mini lateral relationships of our friends. partners,and allies.
The Latticework: Indo-Pacific Security Moves Beyond US Naval Primacy
The responses of key U.S. allies – Japan, Australia, and the Philippines – to Washington’s maritime capability-commitment gap reflect the future of Indo-Pacific security.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/the-latticework-indo-pacific-security-moves-beyond-us-naval-primacy/
By Tyler Bray
April 18, 2025
Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States, conducting a Maritime Cooperative Activity (MCA) in the South China Sea, April 7, 2024. Participating units included Royal Australian Navy ANZAC Class frigate HMAS Warramunga, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force JS Akebono, Philippine Navy vessels BRP Valentin Diaz and BRP Antonio Luna, Philippine Air Force and Navy aircraft, and a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon along with USS Mobile (LCS 26).
Credit: U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Liz Dunagan
The United States faces a dangerous strategic contradiction in the Indo-Pacific: expanding security commitments alongside eroding capacity to fulfill them. At the heart of this contradiction lies what can best be described as a “capability-commitment gap.” While the United States has strengthened security pledges to Indo-Pacific partners, its capacity to sustain this posture has deteriorated to crisis levels.
U.S. shipbuilding capacity now represents just 0.1 percent of global market share, while China commands 46.6 percent, creating a staggering disparity in the ability to sustain naval power in any prolonged confrontation. This represents a form of hollow maritime power – outwardly impressive but internally weakened in capabilities that translate hardware into strategic effect.
This gap has not gone unnoticed by regional actors facing daily Chinese gray zone operations. Rather than simply lamenting the United States’ decline, they are constructing new security arrangements and reimagining their roles in a regional order no longer dominated by a single maritime hegemon. The result is not a simple fracturing of the U.S. hub-and-spoke alliance system but the emergence of a “latticework” of interlocking security relationships with distributed responsibilities.
The responses of key U.S. allies – Japan, Australia, and the Philippines – to Washington’s maritime capability-commitment gap reveal significant insights about the future of Indo-Pacific security. While the gap presents grave risks, it has also catalyzed a more networked security architecture that may prove more sustainable than the system it is replacing. Whether this emerging framework can effectively deter Chinese aggression remains an open question. Still, its development represents the most significant restructuring of regional security arrangements since the end of the Cold War.
The Scale of Maritime Decline
Understanding the full implications of the U.S. capability-commitment gap in the Indo-Pacific requires grasping the unprecedented scale of its maritime industrial decline. According to a U.S. Navy estimate, “China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.” This disparity is not merely academic; it will translate directly into strategic consequences in any prolonged conflict scenario. Maritime power is uniquely dependent on industrial capacity. Unlike land warfare, where armies can retreat to regroup, naval defeats often result in the permanent loss of complex vessels that take years to replace.
Technological superiority alone cannot offset industrial capacity disadvantages in maritime competition. Even advanced vessels require replacement when damaged or destroyed, a reality that China’s industrial advantage directly addresses. Hull count matters in sustained operations. China’s ability to replenish losses at 230 times the U.S. rate creates an unsustainable asymmetry in any prolonged conflict. Moreover, China has significantly narrowed technological gaps in key domains like anti-ship missiles and undersea capabilities, while simultaneously maintaining overwhelming production capacity, combining quantity with increasingly comparable quality.
The origins of this decline are multifaceted, reaching back to the post-Cold War period when defense consolidation and globalization hollowed out the U.S. shipbuilding workforce and infrastructure. In the meantime, the United States faces a dangerous interim period in which its strategic ambitions increasingly exceed its ability to sustain them.
The implications for Indo-Pacific security are significant. In previous eras, U.S. naval dominance provided both deterrence against aggression and reassurance to allies. Today, this foundation is eroding precisely when regional tensions are escalating. Perhaps most concerning is what this capacity gap means for extended deterrence. The credibility of U.S. security guarantees has traditionally rested on both will and capability. While political will remains subject to debate, the capability dimension faces unmistakable material constraints.
Regional Responses to Maritime Decline
Japan’s Strategic Recalibration
Japan’s response to the United States’ maritime decline represents perhaps the most extensive strategic shift in Northeast Asia since World War II. Once constrained by its pacifist constitution and content under the U.S. security umbrella, Japan is now undertaking a comprehensive recalibration of its defense posture.
After decades of maintaining military expenditures below 1 percent of GDP, Japan has committed to raising its defense budget to 2 percent by 2027. More significant is how these funds are being allocated – Japan is systematically developing capabilities that complement declining U.S. maritime power, including anti-ship missiles, maritime patrol aircraft, and submarine capabilities. Notably, Japan has reinterpreted its constitution to permit “counterstrike capabilities,” allowing it to target enemy bases in response to an attack.
Beyond hardware, Tokyo is reimagining its strategic relationships. While maintaining the U.S. alliance as the cornerstone of its security strategy, Japan has pursued new security partnerships, including the 2022 Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) with Australia and the 2024 RAA with the Philippines, Japan’s first such agreements in Asia. This creates a framework for Japanese troops and equipment to directly support the Philippines during crises in the South China Sea.
Australia’s Maritime Hedge Strategy
Australia’s strategic response differs markedly from Japan’s yet reflects similar underlying concerns. Historically reliant on U.S. naval power while focusing on land forces, Australia is rapidly pivoting toward a maritime-focused defense posture that serves as both a hedge against U.S. decline and a complementary capability within the broader regional security architecture.
The centerpiece of Australia’s strategy is the AUKUS agreement, a trilateral security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom that will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. By committing to nuclear propulsion technology, Australia is positioning itself to assume greater responsibility for deep-ocean deterrence missions traditionally handled by the U.S. Navy’s attack submarine fleet – precisely where the United States’ industrial limitations are most acute.
What makes Australia’s approach distinctive is its emphasis on maintaining strategic depth through diversified relationships. Australia has expanded security cooperation with Japan, executing joint exercises that strengthen maritime deterrence without direct U.S. facilitation. This hedging extends to Australia’s defense industrial base, with significant investments in domestic shipbuilding capabilities and partnerships throughout the region.
The Philippines’ Front-Line Dilemma
Perhaps no country better exemplifies the consequences of the United States’ capability-commitment gap than the Philippines. Situated at the nexus of South China Sea disputes and possessing limited indigenous defense capabilities, the Philippines faces daily confrontation with Chinese maritime coercion while navigating the uncertainties of its ally’s maritime decline.
The Philippines’ front-line position was made starkly apparent in recent confrontations at Second Thomas Shoal. In March 2024, the China Coast Guard conducted dangerous maneuvers and used water cannons against a Philippine supply vessel, resulting in minor injuries to seven crew members. These actions occurred despite U.S. naval assets in the region, revealing China’s calculation that a U.S. military presence would not translate into direct intervention.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration has responded with a multifaceted approach combining enhanced U.S. cooperation, diversified security partnerships, and nascent capability development. The cornerstone is the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which has expanded from five to nine designated facilities for U.S. rotational forces, including bases facing the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
Recognizing the limitations of relying exclusively on U.S. capacity, the Philippines has aggressively pursued security relationships with other regional powers, announcing trilateral coast guard exercises with the U.S. and Japan and deepening military cooperation with Australia.
The “Latticework” vs. “Hub and Spoke”: A New Security Architecture
The collective responses of Japan, Australia, and the Philippines to the U.S. capability-commitment gap are not merely individual adaptations but components of a broader structural transformation in Indo-Pacific security architecture. What is emerging is a fundamental shift away from the traditional “hub-and-spoke” model that has defined U.S. alliance relationships since the Cold War, toward what strategic analysts increasingly describe as a “latticework” approach to regional security.
The hub-and-spoke system was designed for a unipolar moment when U.S. maritime dominance was unquestioned. In this model, each U.S. ally had robust defense ties with Washington but limited security cooperation with each other. The United States served as the central hub through which regional security was coordinated, with bilateral alliances radiating outward like spokes.
Today’s latticework architecture represents a qualitative departure from this model. Rather than channeling all security cooperation through Washington, Indo-Pacific allies are developing direct bilateral and minilateral security relationships that complement rather than replace the U.S. alliance system. The development of multilateral defense partnerships among U.S. allies and partners – often referred to as a “latticework” – is not solely a platform for order-building. It creates a more complex, interwoven network of security relationships with multiple nodes of coordination and capability.
This transformation is evident in the proliferation of new security arrangements that bypass Washington as the central coordinator. The Philippines has expanded its partnership with South Korea, which recently elevated relations to a strategic level, ordering two missile corvettes from Hyundai Heavy Industries. Japan’s defense agreements with Australia and the Philippines, as well as emerging security ties between Japan and India, all represent direct partner-to-partner relationships that function regardless of immediate U.S. involvement.
Minilateral groupings have become a defining feature of this latticework approach. The quadrilateral grouping nicknamed the “Squad” (United States, Japan, Australia, and Philippines) represents one such configuration focused specifically on maritime security in the South China Sea. Unlike the broader Quad (United States, Japan, Australia, and India), which addresses a wide range of regional issues, these targeted minilateral arrangements focus on specific security challenges and geographic areas of concern.
China’s Exploitation Strategy
The capability-commitment gap in U.S. maritime power does not exist in a vacuum. China has developed a sophisticated strategy to exploit this growing vulnerability, focusing precisely on the space between the United States’ expanding security commitments and its declining capacity to fulfill them. Through carefully calibrated “gray zone” operations, Beijing has found ways to advance its territorial claims and strategic position without triggering conventional military responses.
These operations target institutional seams rather than testing military capabilities directly, allowing China to incrementally alter the status quo while avoiding scenarios that might trigger decisive U.S. intervention.
The strategic logic behind these operations is evident in recent confrontations in the South China Sea. At Second Thomas Shoal, Chinese Coast Guard vessels have consistently harassed Philippine resupply missions, using water cannons and dangerous maneuvers that fall short of kinetic combat but effectively constrain Philippine access.
What makes these operations so effective at exploiting the capability-commitment gap is their deliberate targeting of institutional rather than military vulnerabilities. China’s message with recent near accidents is, “You don’t want to escalate this.” The U.S. Navy maintains a significant presence in the South China Sea, conducting freedom of navigation operations and deploying carrier strike groups when tensions escalate. Yet this military presence has proven insufficient to prevent China’s incremental advances.
The most troubling aspect of China’s exploitation strategy is its effectiveness against the emerging latticework security architecture. While regional powers have developed more networked security relationships to compensate for potential U.S. capacity shortfalls, China has adapted by calibrating its gray zone tactics differently in each maritime theater. Operations against Japanese interests in the East China Sea differ markedly from those targeting the Philippines in the South China Sea, even as both advance China’s broader strategic objectives. This tailored approach prevents the formation of unified regional responses.
Navigating the Transition
The Indo-Pacific stands at a pivotal moment as the U.S. capability-commitment gap forces a fundamental reconsideration of regional security architecture. What emerges will not be a simple abdication of Washington’s leadership nor a seamless continuation of the post-Cold War order, but rather a more complex, multipolar security environment with both promising resilience and concerning vulnerabilities.
The defining feature of this emerging order is distributed responsibility. As U.S. naval dominance becomes constrained by industrial limitations, regional powers are assuming roles once monopolized by the United States. Japan’s constitutional reinterpretation allowing counterstrike capabilities, Australia’s nuclear submarine acquisition through AUKUS, and the Philippines’ expanded basing agreements all represent pragmatic adaptations to a security environment that can no longer rely exclusively on U.S. capabilities.
For the United States, addressing this transition requires three concrete shifts in strategic approach:
First, prioritize industrial capacity restoration with targeted investments in naval shipbuilding infrastructure. Rather than pursuing marginal increases across all domains, the U.S. should focus on rebuilding the specialized workforce and production capabilities that translate directly into sustained maritime power. This means structural economic policies that reverse decades of industrial hollowing, not just increased defense budgets.
Second, embrace the latticework architecture by formalizing mechanisms for partner-to-partner coordination. The U.S. should establish institutional frameworks that enable regional allies to coordinate maritime security operations without requiring Washington’s direct facilitation. This means developing shared command structures, interoperable systems, and pre-authorized response protocols that function during communications disruption.
Third, develop asymmetric counters to China’s gray zone strategy through a unified approach to maritime law enforcement. Rather than treating each confrontation as isolated, the U.S. and its partners should establish a common legal and operational framework that raises costs for incremental territorial aggression while avoiding military escalation.
For Japan, Australia, and the Philippines, the path forward involves complementary capabilities rather than redundant ones. Japan’s focus on missile defense and anti-ship capabilities, Australia’s investment in submarine warfare, and the Philippines’ development of coastal defense systems create a distributed deterrent that is greater than the sum of its parts. The challenge will be ensuring these specialized capabilities remain coordinated through regular exercises, shared intelligence, and combined planning.
This transition from Pax Americana to regional multipolarity is not a distant prospect but an accelerating reality. The redistribution of maritime responsibilities is likely to unfold over the next three to five years, with critical inflection points tied to Japan’s 2027 defense spending targets and Australia’s nuclear submarine acquisition timeline. However, the latticework architecture’s development could accelerate dramatically in response to any significant crisis, particularly in Taiwan or the South China Sea, that exposes the practical limits of U.S. maritime capacity.
Regional powers are not waiting for some future deterioration but adapting now to what they perceive as an already manifest capability-commitment gap. The next 24-36 months represent a critical window in which institutional frameworks must evolve to match the operational realities already taking shape across the Indo-Pacific.
Authors
Guest Author
Tyler Bray
Tyler Bray analyzes strategic competition and maritime security dynamics with a focus on institutional resilience. His work examines how historical frameworks illuminate contemporary shifts in global security architecture.
10. UNIVERSAL MILITARY TRAINING: A FIRST STEP
Conclusion:
The world is at a perilous point with ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and rising tensions in the South China Sea. The United States is scrambling to rapidly reinvigorate its industrial base and modernize its military with the most lethal equipment and new technologies. Yet without trained men and women in these formations, readiness is impacted, and the nation is unprepared. Mobilization of personnel is a form of deterrence and UMT is a first step in the right direction.
UNIVERSAL MILITARY TRAINING: A FIRST STEP
It is essential therefore that universal training be instituted at the earliest possible moment to provide a reserve upon which we can draw if, unhappily, it should become necessary.
—Harry. S. Truman
warroom.armywarcollege.edu · by Doug Orsi · April 17, 2025
Over eighty years ago, America debated whether it should adopt universal military training (UMT). The country opted for selective service instead, but in the meantime the U.S. Army tested the UMT concept with a pilot short-service training program. Doug Orsi suggests running another such pilot to demonstrate how we might create a large group of trained civilians ready for service. He argues that UMT could be a step toward a more secure United States.
It is essential therefore that universal training be instituted at the earliest possible moment to provide a reserve upon which we can draw if, unhappily, it should become necessary.
In the waning days of World War II, there was a debate among the War and Navy Departments, Congress, the White House, and the national press over the need for universal military training (UMT). With the war in Europe over but fighting ongoing in the Pacific, the U.S. military jointly recommended the adoption of UMT to improve military readiness. Similarly, the new president, Harry S. Truman, advocated UMT as part of a program to strengthen “the Nation’s long-range security.” While often conflated with “universal military service,” UMT is significantly different and deserves a reexamination to prepare the U.S. for current security challenges posed by Russia and China. Current military and civilian leaders would do well to consider the nation’s initial unpreparedness to fight World War II. The United States should re-evaluate the potential benefits and drawbacks of UMT, and the steps needed today to increase our national preparedness and deterrence in an uncertain security environment.
What UMT is and is not.
The concept of UMT is not new. Shortly after the nation’s founding, General Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War, advocated the training of militia to serve as the wartime contingency to the small-standing army. The Militia Act of 1792 did not include this training requirement, which meant during wartime, volunteer militia entered active military service with little baseline training and caused delays in creating ready units. History has repeatedly shown that the call for volunteers and the creation of new units takes time and increases what we today call military strategic risk (or military risk) for the nation. In the early-twentieth century, many Americans were outspoken about the nation’s unpreparedness as they watched Europe embroiled in the Great War. The national outpouring of concern led to the Preparedness Movement and the creation of officer training camps in response to the possible involvement of the United States in the war. Since World War I, the U.S. form of universal military service has actually been “selective service,” a draft in which candidates are called up and screened, ensuring that those individuals who meet certain standards are conscripted into the military. This allows individuals with critical skills necessary for the economy and national defense to serve the nation through working in mining, industry, and other needed occupations.
Universal military training is predicated on the idea that a small peacetime military cannot rapidly expand for large-scale combat operations against a peer competitor without a large body of trained citizens to draw from. The risk due to the time gap from the start of a declared national emergency to having trained personnel to serve in newly created formations is too great. A key issue with initiating selective service at the beginning of a crisis is that it will take the U.S. Selective Service System at least 6 months to induct the first person into the military after Congress passes and the president signs legislation calling for a draft. Place on top of that required basic and advanced individual training (AIT), it will be over a year before these service members can form new units or fill out those requiring replacements. Can the nation wait this long to rapidly expand its military in the event of large-scale combat operations that will generate large numbers of casualties?
Even after the challenges of mobilizing the army for World War I, UMT failed to make it into the National Defense Act of 1920 and the United States found itself again unprepared when World War II began in 1939. The war in Europe and tensions in the Pacific led the United States to implement selective service from 1940 through 1945. The Army saw a massive expansion of its active-duty end strength from 269,023 to over 8,000,000. This unprecedented growth of manpower caused second and third-order effects due to the challenges of training, equipping, and fielding operational units. Although personnel in those quantities may never be needed again, the combat losses taken by both Ukraine and Russia over the last two years have required both nations to mobilize their populace.
The Universal Military Training concept published by the War Department on 25 August 1944 and jointly with the Navy in May 1945 suggested that all young men complete one year of military training after finishing high school and before entering the workforce or higher education. Those sent to the army would complete basic and AIT, learn to operate in their military specialty within a training unit, and then complete realistic, large-scale combined arms maneuvers. For Navy and Marine Corps trainees, this final phase would include serving onboard ships and conducting amphibious operations. After one year of training, these men would be released to their peacetime pursuits and remain in a “Citizen Reserve” for five years. During this period, they would only be subject to recall in a national emergency declared by Congress.
In 1947, the Army created a UMT pilot program at Fort Knox, Kentucky with the goals of validating the concept and highlighting its benefits to the nation. There was valid criticism that the army stacked the deck by selecting above-average inductees (by qualification standards) and placing extra resources of staff, trainers, and facilities for one test battalion (commanded by a brigadier general). Results were unsurprisingly positive and additionally, the army’s active-duty 3rd Armored Division at Fort Knox implemented elements of the UMT training program, validating the concept of creating UMT Training Divisions to conduct collective training during their one year of service. Despite the positive results from the pilot program, UMT did not come to fruition.
By 1948, the campaign to implement UMT failed for a variety of reasons. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was getting hotter, as tensions were increasing in Europe. The cost of the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), including the buildup of the newly independent Air Force and its role in national defense, led to Congress not passing the UMT bill but rather the Selective Service Act of 1948, implementing continuous selective service to bolster the increased manpower requirements for a large standing Army. Regardless of its demise, it is worth reviewing UMT’s benefits and possible drawbacks, and value for today.
[I]n today’s security environment, a nation’s ability to mobilize its populace and industry in the face of aggression is a means of deterrence.
Benefits
Supporters viewed UMT as a means to increase deterrence by maintaining a general reserve of trained men that could rapidly increase force structure in times of national crisis. This would allow the United States to maintain a small, peacetime active-duty force and reduce the need for selective service to fill a large standing army. Supporters of UMT foresaw the unpopularity of continuous selective service that rocked the U.S. during the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. Having a large general reserve, like the Individual Ready Reserve, would speed up mobilization in the event of a national emergency. Speed is relative, but as mentioned earlier, having a replacement in months rather than a year improves readiness. Military leaders such as General George C. Marshall believed that UMT, along with an economy geared toward defense production, would have deterred the start of World War II.
Similarly, in today’s security environment, a nation’s ability to mobilize its populace and industry in the face of aggression is a means of deterrence. Recently, retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan wrote that [mobilization] “is a statement of will. The development of a mobilization plan, much less its implementation, is a demonstration of will by a government and a nation.” Marshall and Truman realized this eighty years ago and the principle is valid today. The United States and its allies need to demonstrate the ability to rapidly expand the peacetime-sized military in the event of a national emergency. Without having a viable general reserve of trained personnel, the costs to the nation may be too great to bear. Universal military training is not truly “universal” for every 18-year-old man or woman in the nation. A strong and healthy economy requires men and women to also serve in the public and private sectors in a multitude of occupations that support the nation. The size of the UMT program must be informed by the cost of maintaining a general reserve against the level of deterrence it provides while maintaining a robust economy.
An additional long-term benefit of UMT is that it addresses the decoupling of the military from American society. This program will expose more citizens to military service, and in turn allow them to pass on its virtues in communities across the country, helping to decrease the gulf that currently exists. Other benefits of UMT include serving as a pipeline for those who wanted to continue to serve on active duty, or part-time in the National Guard and Army Reserve. It also served as an access point for the path to becoming officers through ROTC and attendance at the service academies.
Finally, some may believe that having a large body of trained soldiers only available for a national emergency may not be worth the cost of training that force and maintaining them “just in case.” The UMT option will require additional active-duty end strength to serve in the institutional Army to train, and then lead the organizations required to conduct collective training. This workforce comes at a cost to operational units supporting existing or contingency operations. With a budget failing to meet readiness and modernization requirements, this additional burden may not be worth the cost.
A First Step Forward: (A New) UMT Pilot
A shift from the current all-volunteer force to UMT would be an enormous shift for not just the military but the country as a whole. To help both the DoD and public understand some of the consequences, both positive and negative, the army should borrow an idea from the 1940s and seek approval to conduct a limited experiment of a short-term training period (six months to a year) followed by five years of service in a general reserve or Individual Ready Reserve status. Dr. Andrew Hill and COL Paul Larson recommended something similar in recruiting soldiers for a one-year active-duty commitment followed by up to ten years in a Modified Individual Ready Reserve. For the army, a realistic target for this pilot is 9,400 soldiers a year, providing a 47,000-soldier general reserve after five years. This equates to five percent of the AY25 Total Army’s military end-strength of 943,100 soldiers. Possible incentives for those selecting this option are offering modified benefits via the various existing GI Bills or health care options similar to those offered by the Army Reserve or National Guard while serving in the general reserve. The benefit of this option is to build a capacity over time that would deter potential adversaries from threatening the United States and our way of life.
Piloting UMT will require showing the American people that this concept is both required for deterrence and beneficial to the nation. Military advertisement campaigns have always touted the ability to serve the nation and learn new skills. The UMT path provides a slight twist on the existing Army Reserve and National Guard path. The military must market itself to those Americans who desire certain skills but do not want active or reserve duty service connected with the existing paths. Seek out this population who want to learn skills needed by the military (e.g., truck driving, welding, information technology etc.), and then assign them to the general reserve. The original UMT model sought 17 through 20-year-olds for training. By opening the age range to 25 years of age, you can also target those who are seeking a career change. The incentive for the commitment is civilian workforce training, with the added benefit of discipline, and esprit de corps offered by the military plus the benefits listed above. Possible enticements for service in combat arms skills could be improved benefit packages. There is also the incentive to speed up the path to citizenship through serving in UMT.
A pilot UMT will not solve the current personnel issues for the AVF and may initially take away from it. There is the chance that those with the propensity to serve may choose the short-service option over serving on active duty or in the Army Reserve or National Guard. For several years, the Army’s requirements have exceeded the available active-duty end strength. Although the inability to recruit seems to be abating, the precipitous drop in overall end strength over the last few years will take time to correct. What the DoD can do is reevaluate what the true requirements are and either seek Congressional approval to increase end-strength or reduce requirements.
UMT will increase the burden on the institutional Army to conduct initial and advanced training and cadre organizations required to conduct collective training. To mitigate the drain on manpower away from the operational force, the army can leverage existing occupational training of potential candidates. With an age range of 17-25 year olds, the service can take advantage of men and women already qualified with skills required by the army and provide them with a short but intensive period of individual and collective training before being assigned to the general reserve. The army needs to be innovative and forward-looking, seeking skills for the wars of the future and not just the past. Robotics, drone operators, and possibly even first-person gamers are needed skills, as seen in Ukraine today. These men and women can have the additional benefits of possible student loan repayment. Logistics, information technology, and healthcare fall into this category also. This path is like the Direct Commissioning program for chaplains, lawyers, medical providers, logisticians, cyber experts, and other critical officer specialties. During World War II, over 100,000 civilians were direct commissioned into the military with these and other technical skills and backgrounds. The benefit of this program creates Soldiers with the needed skills who require less time in the training pipeline, thereby reducing the overall costs to improve deterrence.
The world is at a perilous point with ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and rising tensions in the South China Sea. The United States is scrambling to rapidly reinvigorate its industrial base and modernize its military with the most lethal equipment and new technologies. Yet without trained men and women in these formations, readiness is impacted, and the nation is unprepared. Mobilization of personnel is a form of deterrence and UMT is a first step in the right direction.
Douglas Orsi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Command Leadership and Management (DCLM) at the United States Army War College. He is a retired Army colonel who has written previously on professional military education and mission command.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, Department of State or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: President Harry S. Truman’s advisory commission sent a proposal to Congress for a program intended to stop Soviet expansion in Europe and to rebuild Western Europe’s economies that were destroyed during the war. The proposal included military aid to Greece and Turkey, and universal military training for American men 18 years old and over. The commission believed universal military training would support the US’s threat to defend Western Europe from soviet aggression. June 3, 1947
Photo Credit: Berryman Political Cartoon Collection via the National Archives Catalog, image expanded via Fotor AI.
warroom.armywarcollege.edu · by Doug Orsi · April 17, 2025
11. Joe Biden Made More Than 600 Grants to Stop ‘Disinformation.’ Donald Trump Now Has a Plan for Them.
Excerpts:
In Congress, powerful Republican lawmakers are now working with the Trump administration to identify further spending cuts. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told The Free Press some of the awards that are still active “may spark us to do additional things in some of the areas we haven’t quite dug into yet.”
In February, Jordan’s committee said the National Science Foundation funded “artificial intelligence–powered” censorship tools used by social media companies. The NSF previously said it “has no role in content policies or regulations.” It declined to comment for this article.
Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he is helping identify programs to cut as part of a State Department reauthorization process updating its policy priorities for the first time in more than two decades. The GOP-led committee “won’t let unelected bureaucrats waste taxpayer dollars censoring speech or pushing anti-American ideology abroad,” Mast told The Free Press.
This month’s new requirement by the State Department forcing some award recipients to certify “compliance with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” applies to a $2.6 million grant to a Vermont-based nonprofit organization called World Learning, which said it would “build societal resilience to disinformation/misinformation.” The “no-cost amendment” was also added to a $100,000 grant to Tanzanian website Jamii Forums for fact-checking.
The status of some grants also remains unclear. Washington State’s broadband office was awarded $16 million to help thwart “online misinformation.” A Trump administration official said the money is on hold as part of an investigation into $2.7 billion in Biden-era “digital equity” grants.
But Amelia Lamb, a spokeswoman for the broadband office, told The Free Press, “We haven’t received any notice about potential cancellation and we’re proceeding with business as usual.”
Joe Biden Made More Than 600 Grants to Stop ‘Disinformation.’ Donald Trump Now Has a Plan for Them.
Top federal officials are ‘just getting started’ on a cancelling spree, they tell The Free Press.
By Gabe Kaminsky and Madeleine Rowley
04.16.25 — U.S. Politics
https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-biden-made-600-grants-to-stop-disinformation-misinformation-donald-trump-cancels-awards
(Illustration by The Free Press)
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Near the end of the Biden administration, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, were awarded a $683,000 federal grant to investigate how misinformation and disinformation on social media impact “vaccine acceptance among black and Latinx individuals.” UC Irvine said it would enroll “followers of known vaccine-hesitant influencers” and “develop a tool” to visualize its findings.
The award is among more than 800 federal grants and contracts since 2017, totaling more than $1.4 billion, to help curb speech considered by the U.S. government to be misinformation and disinformation. More than 600 were made during the years when Joe Biden was president.
The Biden years saw heightened public scrutiny of some of these programs, which Republican lawmakers and free speech groups criticized as “censorship” devices in the U.S. That culminated in an executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office that accused the government of violating the free-speech rights of Americans “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ ”
But until now, it has not been clear just how much taxpayer money was spent on these programs and how many federal agencies were involved in the effort. Indeed, it was only when The Free Press began contacting agencies for comment about programs listed in federal documents as active that officials in the Trump administration began to scrutinize them more closely—launching investigations and evaluating internal policies.
Since then, federal officials have terminated at least several dozen programs related to misinformation and disinformation, according to documents and interviews.
After The Free Press asked the National Institutes of Health about last year’s grant to UC Irvine, it was canceled. The NIH also canceled a $22.4 million award to progressive Latino advocacy group UnidosUS for a campaign to counter misinformation and disinformation about Covid.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya sent an email, two days after the agency received The Free Press’s questions, that was marked “URGENT” and instructed employees at the government’s primary funder of medical research to investigate grants and contracts related to “fighting misinformation or disinformation.”
An NIH spokesperson told The Free Press that the agency is “taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned” with new priorities.
A senior State Department official said the agency “is just getting started” on cuts there.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has vowed to end “censorship of the American people” by the State Department, and the agency is quickly taking steps to align with that mission. On Wednesday, Rubio placed on leave dozens of full-time staff who had worked at the Global Engagement Center. Republicans had accused the office of censorship under Biden and moved to shut it down in late 2024.
After The Free Press sought comment from the State Department for this article, officials began adding “no-cost amendments” to some awards, requiring the recipients to certify “compliance with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.”
At the Pentagon, officials are also reviewing all contracts to ensure alignment with Trump’s executive order, a senior Pentagon official told The Free Press.
The official said the Pentagon has begun changing internal terminology that describes certain programs as countering disinformation and misinformation to “countering adversary propaganda and information operations.”
Misinformation is often defined as false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is typically viewed as a form of propaganda that is intended to mislead. The U.S. has funded many anti-disinformation initiatives aimed at repelling interference in U.S. elections by foreign adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran. Those anti-U.S. efforts include sowing discord on social media.
Trump’s executive order directed the Justice Department to work with other agencies to investigate “the activities of the federal government over the last four years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies” of Trump’s anti-censorship order.
The edict was the culmination of Republican-led investigations, lawsuits, and other efforts in Congress during the Biden years to block funding to groups the GOP accused of unconstitutionally silencing speech, including theories about a lab leak causing Covid-19 and news reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The largest active anti-misinformation award is a $979 million Pentagon contract with defense company Peraton to help the U.S. military counter foreign adversaries. As part of the program, Peraton is working with the U.S. Central Command to identify threats to U.S. national security, according to a person familiar with the contract. Peraton declined to comment.
“A range of adversaries are actively trying to spread false information to Americans, and part of the job of the government should be to try to stop that,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “I am always surprised that that is a controversial take.”
Critics have said the abundance of federal funding created an opportunity for the recipients of grants and contracts to inject their political views and meddle in U.S. policy.
“A large number of these projects cynically employed the ‘misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation’ framework to counter their political adversaries, with U.S. government funding making it possible,” said Andrew Lowenthal, chief executive of a free speech watchdog group called liber-net.
He is a former research fellow at Harvard University and worked on the Twitter Files, an archive of internal Twitter communications opened up to journalists by Elon Musk to shed light on the social media platform’s content moderation policies.
Liber-net compiled anti-misinformation and anti-disinformation programs into a publicly accessible database. The database offers the fullest picture yet of such programs and includes awards from as long ago as 2010.
While many of the grants have been fully paid out or terminated, others, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, remain active.
Some of the active awards involve groups criticized by Republicans in recent years for allegedly fueling censorship.
For example, federal documents show $6.8 million in active grants to the University of Washington from the National Science Foundation. UW researchers said “inaccurate or misleading information has emerged as a growing threat to American democracy.” Most of the money is aimed at crafting “literacy resources” that help “rural communities and black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities” identify misinformation.
In 2020, the House Judiciary Committee said in a report that a group called the Election Integrity Partnership, which UW co-founded, had “worked with social media companies to censor true information, jokes and satire, and political opinion,” despite its stated purpose to fight misinformation and disinformation.
Victor Balta, a UW spokesman, told The Free Press that the funding has helped support “work to study the ways online rumors spread during crisis events and times of uncertainty, including the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections, the Lahaina, Maui, wildfire in 2023, and the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign.”
That work included a study that criticized right-wing social media accounts for their “politically-driven villainization” of “professional journalists,” citing Republicans blaming the media for the attempted assassination of Trump in July 2024 at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
“To be clear, these projects in no way amount to ‘censorship,’ as they have not contributed to the removal or labeling of social media content,” the spokesman said.
Another award recipient, disinformation tracking company Graphika, also helped launch the Election Integrity Partnership. Graphika holds three contracts worth a total of $5.3 million through the Department of Defense.
Meghan Hermann, a Graphika spokeswoman, said the contracts “relate to technology for analyzing online activity by U.S. adversaries in foreign military theaters.” She said the company isn’t aware of its technology or data being leveraged by the U.S. government for censorship.
Researchers for the Election Integrity Partnership have insisted that it didn’t suppress domestic speech and examined disinformation only related to false election-related claims.
The senior Pentagon official said the contracts are part of the agency’s congressionally authorized mission to counter foreign propaganda.
But the agency is being careful to ensure it is aligned with Trump, the official added.
In Congress, powerful Republican lawmakers are now working with the Trump administration to identify further spending cuts. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told The Free Press some of the awards that are still active “may spark us to do additional things in some of the areas we haven’t quite dug into yet.”
In February, Jordan’s committee said the National Science Foundation funded “artificial intelligence–powered” censorship tools used by social media companies. The NSF previously said it “has no role in content policies or regulations.” It declined to comment for this article.
Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he is helping identify programs to cut as part of a State Department reauthorization process updating its policy priorities for the first time in more than two decades. The GOP-led committee “won’t let unelected bureaucrats waste taxpayer dollars censoring speech or pushing anti-American ideology abroad,” Mast told The Free Press.
This month’s new requirement by the State Department forcing some award recipients to certify “compliance with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” applies to a $2.6 million grant to a Vermont-based nonprofit organization called World Learning, which said it would “build societal resilience to disinformation/misinformation.” The “no-cost amendment” was also added to a $100,000 grant to Tanzanian website Jamii Forums for fact-checking.
The status of some grants also remains unclear. Washington State’s broadband office was awarded $16 million to help thwart “online misinformation.” A Trump administration official said the money is on hold as part of an investigation into $2.7 billion in Biden-era “digital equity” grants.
But Amelia Lamb, a spokeswoman for the broadband office, told The Free Press, “We haven’t received any notice about potential cancellation and we’re proceeding with business as usual.”
For another scoop by The Free Press about how Trump’s executive orders are upending Biden-era funding, read Gabe Kaminsky’s piece, “Trump Administration Freezes $2.7 Billion in ‘Digital Equity’ Grants.”
12. No, the President Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Ruling
No, the President Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Ruling
The exaggerations on both sides are spectacular. The truth? There’s less to the case than meets the eye.
By Jed Rubenfeld
04.16.25 — U.S. Politics
https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-supreme-court-deportations
President Donald Trump welcomes President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to the White House April 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee via Getty Images)
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Donald Trump has this week “defied a Supreme Court ruling” to “return” an “innocent person” being held in a Salvadoran “gulag.” That’s according to my colleague, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, who says we are witnessing “the beginning of an American policy of state terror.”
He is referring to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who has been deported to El Salvador. Perhaps you caught the meeting between Donald Trump and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office this week, when CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked the two leaders about the case (watch it here).
Snyder’s statements are sensationally wrong. And they are only one egregious example of the over-the-top and inaccurate way in which this case has been framed by Trump critics. But the administration has also engaged in serious distortion of this case, for example when it says that it won in the Supreme Court 9–0.
So what are the facts, what’s the law, and what’s likely to happen next?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia entered the United States illegally sometime around 2011. After being arrested in 2019, he faced a series of immigration hearings. In April of that year, an immigration judge found that Garcia was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang; that finding was upheld by the Board of Immigration appeals. This finding made Garcia clearly deportable.
Six months later, a different immigration judge issued a “withholding” order—an order saying that there was one country to which Garcia could not be deported: El Salvador. That judge found that Garcia was legitimately fearful of being attacked by a different criminal gang and should not be sent back. That withholding order—which is country-specific and does not render Garcia non-deportable—was apparently not appealed and has never been reversed.
Last month, the administration sent hundreds of alleged illegal aliens to a Salvadoran maximum security prison called CECOT (in English, the “Terrorism Confinement Center”). Garcia was among them. The government has acknowledged that his inclusion was an “administrative error,” given the existence of the 2019 withholding order prohibiting Garcia from being sent to El Salvador.
Garcia’s lawyers sued, and a federal district judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, quickly issued an order requiring the administration to “facilitate” and “effectuate” Garcia’s return to the United States. That order went up to the Supreme Court, with the administration asking the Court to vacate the order in its entirety. On April 10, by a vote of 9–0, the Court upheld Judge Xinis’s order that the administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return.
However, the Court did not uphold Judge Xinis’s order that the administration must “effectuate” Garcia’s return. Instead, the Court sent the case back to Judge Xinis, saying that she must “clarify” what she meant by “effectuate,” with “due regard” for the president’s power over foreign affairs. (Three Justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—said in a separate statement that they would have upheld Judge Xinis’s order in its entirety.)
So what’s the difference between facilitate and effectuate? A lot.
Facilitate means to make something easier. Providing an airplane for Garcia’s flight home—the example used by Attorney General Pam Bondi—would facilitate his return. The administration’s position is that it is perfectly willing to facilitate Garcia’s return, if El Salvador were to release Garcia from CECOT—something it has not yet done.
Effectuate means to make something happen. In other words, Judge Xinis had ordered the administration to take whatever steps necessary to bring Garcia back to the United States, no matter what. The problem is that Garcia is now in Salvadoran custody. A district judge cannot order El Salvador to do anything, and no one thinks Judge Xinis could order the administration to use the military to force Garcia’s return against El Salvador’s will. The Supreme Court’s refusal to uphold Judge Xinis’s effectuation order acknowledges this reality: The administration cannot be ordered to return Garcia because Garcia is now in Salvadoran custody. In this respect, the Court’s order was a major win for the White House.
As a result, it’s wrong to say that the administration is defying a Supreme Court order to “return” Garcia. Under the Court’s order, the administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return and keep the lower court informed of its actions. The White House may be dragging its feet—and it’s not exactly putting pressure on Bukele to let Garcia go. But it has not (yet) defied the Supreme Court, in part because the Court’s short, ambiguous order did not define facilitate and did not say exactly what the lower court can and can’t do when it comes to clarifying effectuate.
So what will happen next? Judge Xinis can—and likely will—order the administration to take concrete steps to induce Bukele to turn Garcia over. She could, for example, order the administration to stop paying El Salvador for detaining American deportees if El Salvador refuses to let Garcia go. Such an order would almost certainly be appealed, and the case might then return to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court might then reject any or all of Judge Xinis’s orders, on the grounds that they interfere with the president’s foreign affairs powers. But if the Court were to uphold an order and Trump were to defy it, then people can legitimately say we’re in a constitutional crisis. The administration has not to this date defied any Supreme Court order—nor has it clearly defied any lower court order either.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and her children attend a vigil for her husband during El Salvador’s president’s visit to the White House. (Astrid Riecken/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
But whatever happens, bear two points in mind.
First, Garcia remains detainable and deportable, even if he is eventually returned to the United States. In principle, he could be deported to any country other than El Salvador—and he might even be deported back to El Salvador if a court determines that the 2019 withholding order is no longer valid. (There is an argument that the withholding order has been invalidated by the fact that MS-13 is now a designated terrorist organization.)
Second, this case is not the bombshell threat to due process that Trump opponents are claiming. Garcia has had a lot of process—several different immigration hearings. Contrary to what you may have read, this is not a case where the administration is claiming a right to deport anyone it chooses without ever giving that person a right to be heard. The administration should not have deported Garcia to El Salvador contrary to the withholding order, and once this “administrative error” was discovered, the administration should have owned it and corrected it.
Nevertheless, this case involves an acknowledged illegal alien who was found by an immigration judge to be a member of a criminal gang now designated a terrorist organization, and that judge’s finding was upheld on appeal.
Due process is a bulwark of the Constitution and the rule of law, and the courts must not allow its violation. But Trump opponents, like Professor Snyder, are making a mistake when they try to paint this case as a massive assault on due process. For now at least, this case is another example of the hyperbole over a Trump run-in with the courts outrunning the facts of the case.
Read Jed Rubenfeld’s previous column for The Free Press, “The Legal Trick Being Used to Trip Up Trump.”
13. Taiwan a critical US partner: Schriver
Yes we need a strategy of deterrence. But is it possible to "prompt" China to reconsider its Taiwan policy? Would we give up a core or vital interest?
Taiwan a critical US partner: Schriver
STRATEGY: The US’ goal is to buy more time by maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region and prompting China to reconsider its Taiwan policy, Randall Schriver said
- By Fang Wei-li and Esme Yeh / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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- Washington has reasons to consider Taiwan a critical partner and would likely continue its commitments to Indo-Pacific allies and partners, former US assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs Randall Schriver told the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium XIII in Taipei yesterday.
- Speaking via a prerecorded video, Schriver said Taiwan is one of the US’ critical partners, as it not only plays a key role in the semiconductor sector, but is also the eighth-biggest trading partner and the sixth-largest agricultural product export market to the US.
- Taiwan is also the second-largest buyer of US arms, he said, adding that the two countries’ ties are built on common values and interests.
Former US assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs Randall Schriver speaks in a prerecorded video at the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium in Taipei yesterday.
- Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
- Given that Taiwan is at the center of the Indo-Pacific region, it is indispensable to countries upholding the free and open Indo-Pacific order such as the US, Japan and the Philippines, he said.
- It is understandable that people doubt that US commitments to Indo-Pacific partners would continue or they question whether such partnerships are valued by US President Donald Trump, he said.
- Schriver said he would be cautiously optimistic about the situation, considering recent developments.
Akie Abe, the widow of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, delivers a speech at the Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium in Taipei yesterday.
- Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
- Officials of the US departments of defense and state expressed support for the US-Japan-Philippines cooperation and the reinforcement of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, he said.
- They also visited the Indo-Pacific region and the US Indo-Pacific Command, he said.
- These moves demonstrated the US’ continued investments in its Indo-Pacific allies and regional security, he added.
- Schriver expressed concern over Washington’s cuts in foreign aid and the suspension of funding for the US Department of State’s overseas scholarships and exchange programs such as the Fulbright program.
- Such soft-power tools should be resumed, as they are important in countering China’s psychological warfare in the Indo-Pacific region, he said.
- Taiwan should also take more responsibilities, he said.
- The nation should strengthen its self-defense capabilities and develop infrastructure resilience — especially in telecommunications and energy, Schriver said.
- Taiwan should also try to lessen its trade surplus with the US by increasing its investments there to stabilize bilateral ties, he said.
- Taiwan should also continue protecting submarine communications cables, addressing climate change and assisting infrastructure developments of Pacific island countries, he said.
- The US’ goal is to buy more time by maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, prompting China to reconsider its Taiwan policy, he said.
- Taiwan’s future should be decided by Taiwanese, he said.
- Meanwhile, Akie Abe, the widow of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, told the symposium that her late husband “loved Japan, loved Taiwan, and was one of the people most keen for regional peace.”
- “My husband once said that ‘a Taiwan emergency is a Japan emergency,’ which I would understand as ‘peace in Taiwan is peace in Japan,’” she said.
- Shinzo Abe admired Taiwanese values he learned from former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), she said.
- She said while some lamented Shinzo Abe’s and Lee’s passing as “the loss of two engines driving the Japan-Taiwan relationship,” she thought differently.
- Akie Abe said she is close with Lee’s daughter, Annie Lee (李安妮), who is also the chairwoman of the Lee Teng-hui Foundation, and together they would continue Shinzo Abe and Lee Teng-hui’s efforts to deepen bilateral ties.
- The symposium was co-organized by the World Taiwanese Congress and the Taiwan Nation Alliance, and focused on issues relating to Indo-Pacific security strategies and the trilateral security cooperation between Taiwan, the US and Japan.
14. China’s military pressure near Taiwan is up 300 percent: What it means for the US
Excerpts:
China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary, while most Taiwanese favor their de facto independence and democratic status. Any conflict could bring in the U.S., which maintains alliances in the region and is legally bound to treat threats to Taiwan as a matter of “grave concern.”
Paparo testified, saying that while China “attempts to intimidate the people of Taiwan and demonstrate coercive increase, these actions are backfiring, drawing increased global attention and accelerating Taiwan’s own defense reparations.”
Taiwan has reportedly bolstered its own supply chains for combat drones and increased foreign orders from the U.S. to counter action from China, saying they are in agreement with Paparo, the Taipei Times reported.
China’s military pressure near Taiwan is up 300 percent: What it means for the US
by Safia Samee Ali - 04/19/25 9:42 AM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5256216-china-military-pressure-taiwan-us/
- Commander says China is 'rehearsing' for attack
- China has long wanted to reclaim Taiwan
- Commander warns that China outproducing US in fighters
Trump: No one 'off the hook,' tech tariff exemptions temporary | Morning in America
Un
A top U.S military commander warned lawmakers over China’s significantly increased military activity near Taiwan, calling the actions a “rehearsal” for an impending invasion.
Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, gave testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week over his concerns about China’s growing operations off of Taiwan’s waters.
“In 2024, the People’s Liberation Party demonstrated growing capabilities through persistent pressure operations with military pressure against Taiwan increasing by 300 percent,” Paparo testified, adding, “China’s increasingly aggressive actions near Taiwan are not just exercises, they are rehearsals.”
Paparo said the U.S can no longer sit back amid “unprecedented aggression and military modernization” by the nation.
The Chinese military conducted large-scale drills in the waters and airspace around Taiwan earlier this month that included an aircraft carrier battle group.
The exercises involved navy, air ground and rocket forces and were meant to be a “severe warning and forceful containment against Taiwan independence,” according to Shi Yi, a spokesperson for the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command. No operational name for the drills was announced nor previous notice given.
U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo delivers his speech during an international military conference organized by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024, in Manila, Philippines. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
What China’s military posturing means for the US
In his testimony, Paparo warned that China’s military production is now outproducing the U.S. in air missile, maritime and space capabilities.
He said China is producing fighters at a rate of 1.2 to 1 over the U.S., which can lead to weakness in the high ground in the event of an attack. The nation is also building combatants at a rate of 6 to 1.8 to the United States.
“I remain confident in our deterrence posture, but the trajectory must change,” he said. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we want to win a war over Taiwan. We would stop it from happening.”
The commander also noted China’s “deepening” cooperation with Russia and North Korea has put several neighboring nations on alert.
How big is China’s military compared to the US?
China has more manpower in terms of military strenght but still not at the level the U.S. is in terms of techonogly and machinery, reported The Economist.
However, China is already on track to surpass the U.S., the outlet reported.
China’s navy is the world’s largest, and when it comes to design and material quality, many Chinese ships are comparable to America’s, according to the outlet.
While American warships and air force tend to be larger and better armed, China is catching up in an effort to modernize and outproduce the U.S.
Why is China fighting against an independent Taiwan?
China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary, while most Taiwanese favor their de facto independence and democratic status. Any conflict could bring in the U.S., which maintains alliances in the region and is legally bound to treat threats to Taiwan as a matter of “grave concern.”
Paparo testified, saying that while China “attempts to intimidate the people of Taiwan and demonstrate coercive increase, these actions are backfiring, drawing increased global attention and accelerating Taiwan’s own defense reparations.”
Taiwan has reportedly bolstered its own supply chains for combat drones and increased foreign orders from the U.S. to counter action from China, saying they are in agreement with Paparo, the Taipei Times reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
15. China tests non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, science paper shows
Excerpts:
Developed by the China State Shipbuilding Corporation’s (CSSC) 705 Research Institute, a key player in underwater weapon systems, the device uses a magnesium-based solid-state hydrogen storage material.
This material – a silvery powder known as magnesium hydride – stores considerably more hydrogen than a pressurised tank. It was originally developed to bring the gas to off-grid areas, where it could power fuel cells for clean electricity and heat.
When activated by conventional explosives, the magnesium hydride underwent rapid thermal decomposition, releasing hydrogen gas that ignited into a sustained inferno, the researchers said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese-language Journal of Projectiles, Rockets, Missiles and Guidance.
“Hydrogen gas explosions ignite with minimal ignition energy, have a broad explosion range, and unleash flames that race outward rapidly while spreading widely,” said the team, led by CSSC research scientist Wang Xuefeng.
“This combination allows precise control over blast intensity, easily achieving uniform destruction of targets across vast areas.”
Science
ChinaScience
China tests non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, science paper shows
The weapon generates a white-hot fireball that lasts 15 times longer than TNT’s fleeting flash
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3307059/china-tests-non-nuclear-hydrogen-bomb-science-paper-shows
Stephen Chenin Beijing
Published: 10:00am, 20 Apr 2025
Chinese researchers have successfully detonated a hydrogen-based explosive device in a controlled field test, triggering devastating chemical chain reactions without using any nuclear materials, according to a study published last month.
The 2kg (4.4lbs) bomb generated a fireball exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) for more than two seconds – 15 times longer than equivalent TNT blasts – without using any nuclear materials, it said.
Developed by the China State Shipbuilding Corporation’s (CSSC) 705 Research Institute, a key player in underwater weapon systems, the device uses a magnesium-based solid-state hydrogen storage material.
This material – a silvery powder known as magnesium hydride – stores considerably more hydrogen than a pressurised tank. It was originally developed to bring the gas to off-grid areas, where it could power fuel cells for clean electricity and heat.
When activated by conventional explosives, the magnesium hydride underwent rapid thermal decomposition, releasing hydrogen gas that ignited into a sustained inferno, the researchers said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese-language Journal of Projectiles, Rockets, Missiles and Guidance.
“Hydrogen gas explosions ignite with minimal ignition energy, have a broad explosion range, and unleash flames that race outward rapidly while spreading widely,” said the team, led by CSSC research scientist Wang Xuefeng.
“This combination allows precise control over blast intensity, easily achieving uniform destruction of targets across vast areas.”
The hydrogen bomb can cause extended thermal damage because the white-hot fireball it produces – sufficient to melt aluminium alloys – lasts much longer than TNT’s fleeting 0.12-second flash, according to the paper.
Wang and his team conducted a series of experiments that showed the weapon’s directed energy potential.
An extract from the research paper showing the hydrogen bomb before detonation. Photo: 705 Research Institute
Under constrained detonation, peak overpressure reached 428.43 kilopascals at two metres (6ft 7in) from the bomb – about 40 per cent of TNT’s blast force, but with a far greater heat projection range, they found.
The researchers also looked at the weapon’s other potential military applications, such as using it to cover a large area with intense heat and focusing its power on high-value targets to destroy them.
The chain reaction begins when detonation shock waves fracture magnesium hydride into micron-scale particles, exposing fresh surfaces, according to the study.
Thermal decomposition rapidly releases hydrogen gas, which mixes with ambient air. Upon reaching the lower explosive limit, the mixture ignites, triggering exothermic combustion.
This liberated heat further propagates magnesium hydride decomposition, creating a self-sustaining loop until fuel exhaustion – a synergistic cascading of mechanical fracturing, hydrogen release, and thermal feedback, according to the paper.
The paper did not disclose where the large amount of magnesium hydride used in the test came from. It also remains unclear under what conditions the People’s Liberation Army might deploy the weapon.
Until recently, magnesium hydride could only be produced in laboratories at the pace of a few grams per day.
China remains committed to ‘no first use’ principle 60 years after testing its first atomic bomb
This is because binding hydrogen with magnesium requires high temperatures and pressure. Accidental exposure to the air during the manufacturing process can lead to deadly explosions.
Earlier this year, China launched a magnesium hydride plant in the northwestern province of Shaanxi that can produce a staggering 150 tonnes of the material per year. Developed by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, the plant has achieved low production costs using a “one-pot synthesis” method, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Other uses of the solid hydrogen storage technology are being explored, including in submarine fuel cells and long-endurance drone power systems, according to openly available information.
Some notable energy-driven military tech breakthroughs in history have included the 19th century coal-powered steamers, which replaced wooden fleets, oil-fuelled tanks that redefined mobility, and the thermonuclear weapons that fuelled the Cold War arms race.
The PLA has launched a sweeping green campaign, with electric-powered warships, tanks, and space launch systems under development.
Stephen Chen
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Stephen Chen is the SCMP's science news editor. He investigates major research projects in China, a new power house of scientific and technological innovation, and their impact to humanity. Stephen has produced a large number of exclusive stories on China research, som
16. The Danger of a Trump Doctrine for Taiwan
Conclusion:
Indeed, the greatest danger to Taiwan may not only come from across the Strait, but from a strategic vacuum left by an inward-turning United States. If the U.S. proceeds to concede on Taiwan, it could create a once-in-a-century window of opportunity for China. To prepare for this, Taiwan should build stronger ties with Japan, engage in peace talks with China, and use its economic leverage. As the U.S. shadow of protection wanes, Taiwan’s survival may depend not on guarantees from the White House, but on its own strength and statecraft.
The Danger of a Trump Doctrine for Taiwan
This new doctrine of dominating the Western Hemisphere while scaling back commitments elsewhere in the world could leave Taiwan dangerously exposed – unless Taipei takes action.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/the-danger-of-a-trump-doctrine-for-taiwan/
By Philip Hou
April 18, 2025
Credit: Official White House Photo
In his first foreign policy blitz of his second term, President Donald Trump is aiming to reshape the United States’ global footprint with bold strokes: imposing sweeping tariffs on China in a bid to revive domestic manufacturing, while exploring options to acquire Greenland for its strategic access to the Arctic and to annex Canada as the 51st state to dominate the Americas. The Trump administration is also extricating the United States from its responsibilities in Ukraine through direct negotiations with Russia to end the war – even if it means justifying Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s eastern flanks on the basis that they are “Russian-speaking.”
This new Trump Doctrine of dominating the Western Hemisphere while scaling back commitments elsewhere in the world could have tangible effects on U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Will the United States continue to serve as a trustworthy partner and security backer for Taiwan, as it has for decades? A second Trump presidency may bring about a transactional U.S. retrenchment, leaving Taiwan dangerously exposed – unless Taipei adopts a more self-sufficient and politically flexible posture.
The current atmosphere between Washington and Taipei stands in stark contrast to the amiable relations during Trump’s first term, when he accepted an unprecedented congratulatory call from Taiwan’s then-President Tsai Ing-wen and initiated the visit of Health Secretary Alex Azar, the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Taiwan since 1979. Unlike former President Joe Biden, who on many occasions pledged to have American men and women defend Taiwan, Trump has refrained from offering assurances for Taiwan’s security. Instead, he has demanded that Taiwan “pay us” for protection and declined to comment on his commitments to intervene in case of a Chinese invasion. Notably, Trump characterized Taiwan as being “9,500 miles away” from the U.S. and “68 miles from China,” questioning the feasibility of keeping Taiwan out of China’s orbit.
Taiwan has historically enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Congress, dating back to the early Cold War, when U.S. General Douglas MacArthur famously described Taiwan as an “unsinkable carrier” for anchoring U.S. power in the Pacific. However, with Trump’s firm control over the Republican Party, stances on Taiwan are rapidly shifting. The Senate confirmation of Elbridge Colby, Trump’s pick for under secretary of defense for policy, signals the arrival of Trump’s America First strategy and the growing dominance of MAGA loyalists over traditional defense hawks.
Colby has consistently asserted in recent years that “Taiwan isn’t itself of existential importance to America,” nor is it “essential” to U.S. interests in preventing Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. Despite being a well-known China hawk, he backtracked on his previous calls for strategic clarity – or explicit defense commitments to Taiwan – stating during a Senate committee hearing that the “military balance vis-à-vis China” had “deteriorated dramatically.” This shift in views on Taiwan’s value to the U.S. national interest within the Republican Party portends the possibility of a Trump administration acquiescing to a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
Trump appears largely indifferent to security threats facing Taiwan; instead, he has expressed greater concern that Taiwan “stole” the semiconductor industry from the United States. His calls for tariffs on Taiwan’s chip exports reportedly contributed to TSMC’s announcement of a $100 billion investment plan for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Arizona. In response to a question about whether TSMC’s Arizona investments would blunt the impact of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Trump said that “it will at least give us a position where we have – in this very, very important business, we would have a very big part of it in the United States,” suggesting that his resolve to defend Taiwan could be contingent on the onshoring of advanced chip manufacturing.
Trump has long expressed his belief that allies are “ripping off” the United States and free-riding on U.S. security assistance. He views the Japan-U.S. defense treaty as unfair because Japan is not obligated to defend the United States. Underlying Trump’s complaints about meager defense spending by allies is the belief that the United States should not bear primary responsibility for defending them unless it is clearly in the U.S. national interest.
In light of this worldview, it is unlikely that the Trump administration would continue to meaningfully invest in military bases in Japan. Since World War II, the U.S. has maintained a global network of military bases in the Western Pacific, such as Okinawa, that has successfully deterred China from moving on Taiwan during previous Taiwan Strait crises. Deterrence against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be severely degraded without stronger U.S. forward military postures in the First Island Chain.
Trump has aimed to shrink the trade deficit with China and revive domestic manufacturing by slapping 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. But if the retaliatory tariffs from China threaten Trump’s approval rating – say, by sparking a recession or inflation that hits consumer wallets – he might trade concessions elsewhere in China-U.S. relations for better terms. If these concessions involve Taiwan, the likelihood of China testing Washington’s resolve to defend the island would increase. To illustrate, Trump could publicly refuse to involve U.S. soldiers in an invasion of Taiwan or endorse Beijing’s stance on Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The Trump administration’s hardball approach to negotiating an end to the Ukraine conflict may offer a preview of how it would handle negotiations over Taiwan. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ruled out the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO and called the reclamation of territories occupied by Russia unrealistic. The Trump administration also chose to unilaterally negotiate with Russia and withheld U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing to pressure Ukraine into accepting a deal. It is hard to believe that Trump would take a different approach to negotiating a hypothetical Taiwan deal. Taiwan may very well face a similar predicament if it refuses to sign on to Trump-led negotiations with China. Taiwan must prepare for a more transactional United States, one that prioritizes trade wins and monetary gains over long-standing alliances.
With Trump reluctant to offer security guarantees for Ukraine and shifting that burden to the EU, the United States may choose to delegate responsibility for Taiwan’s security to Japan. Under former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, Japan reinterpreted its constitution to provide a legal basis for intervening in a Taiwan contingency. Yet Japan’s constitution, which limits the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to self-defense, complicates this role. The SDF can act abroad only if an attack on an ally threatens Japan’s “survival” – a high bar to meet absent direct Chinese strikes or blockades against Japan. Even then, the SDF would likely be limited to defensive and supportive roles, backing U.S. offensive operations rather than directly fighting China near Taiwan. Moreover, public opinion further complicates matters: a majority of Japanese oppose the SDF engaging in combat with China over Taiwan, reflecting deep-rooted pacifism.
Despite the constraints on a Japanese intervention, it is still in Japan’s national security interest to prevent Taiwan from falling under Beijing’s control. If China forcibly annexes Taiwan, it could breach the First Island Chain, enabling Beijing to project power into the western Pacific and threaten Japan’s national security and access to critical sea lanes. Taiwan should thus strengthen defense cooperation with Japan. Tokyo could take the practical step of initiating technology transfers and arms exports to the Taiwanese military. For example, equipping Taiwan’s submarine program with Japan’s world-class underwater capabilities could prove decisive in thwarting a Chinese invasion fleet.
Besides working with allies, Taiwan must shield its own economy. It should also anchor its position within critical supply chains and ensure that the most cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing and research take place in Taiwan. Taiwan should recognize that U.S. domestic chip production could embolden Trump to impose higher tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, as it would shield the U.S. economy from price hikes and shortages. TSMC’s announcement to invest more in the United States, allegedly in response to Trump’s tariff threats, was also a grave mistake, as it rewarded Trump’s propensity to use tariffs as a tool in trade negotiations. Without such investment from chipmakers like TSMC, tariffs alone wouldn’t contribute to the revival of domestic chip manufacturing. Taipei should signal that any tariffs on Taiwan’s chips could be met with restrictions on future semiconductor investments in the United States, reinforcing that Taiwan’s chipmaking capacity is not easily replaceable. By remaining indispensable to the U.S. economy, Taiwan can boost its bargaining position with Trump – a professed dealmaker who often undervalues goodwill from even the closest U.S. allies.
Taipei would also be wise to initiate dialogue with Beijing to seek a political solution to the cross-strait conflict. This olive branch would demonstrate to the international community that Taiwan is a willing seeker of peace with China. While Taiwan should continue cooperating with the United States and Japan in preparing to win a war against China, the Taiwanese leadership should realize that some political concessions could prevent a bloody and potentially lengthy war without any practical changes to Taiwan’s autonomy, democratic governance, or way of life. Negotiating a political deal sooner rather than later may become increasingly attractive for Taiwan, especially if the Trump administration moves deeper into isolationism.
Indeed, the greatest danger to Taiwan may not only come from across the Strait, but from a strategic vacuum left by an inward-turning United States. If the U.S. proceeds to concede on Taiwan, it could create a once-in-a-century window of opportunity for China. To prepare for this, Taiwan should build stronger ties with Japan, engage in peace talks with China, and use its economic leverage. As the U.S. shadow of protection wanes, Taiwan’s survival may depend not on guarantees from the White House, but on its own strength and statecraft.
Authors
Guest Author
Philip Hou
Philip Hou is the president of Peace for Taiwan, a DC based nonprofit focused on Taiwan related policy research aimed at de-escalating tensions and reducing the risk of war.
17. Southeast Asia’s Quiet Revolt Against the Dollar: Should the US Be Worried?
It is a US national security imperative that the US protects the dollar as.the world's reserve currency.
Excerpts:
U.S. officials are, at least publicly, unconcerned. Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in December 2024 that she sees no serious threat to the dollar’s reserve-currency status, given that no other currency has the depth and breadth of usage globally to displace it. For now, that assessment is accurate: King Dollar’s throne isn’t toppling in the near future.
However, the quiet revolt underway in Southeast Asia is not insignificant. It signals a growing desire among emerging economies to insulate themselves from U.S. financial leverage. Over time, incremental steps can accumulate into significant shifts. If Southeast Asia’s experiments in de-dollarization prove successful – if more trade is routinely settled in rupiah, baht, ringgit, or yuan without a hitch – it could inspire copycats in other regions. Each percentage point that the dollar loses in global market share, whether in central bank reserves or trade invoicing, ever so slightly erodes Washington’s economic influence. The U.S. benefits enormously from the dollar’s dominance: it makes sanctions biting, it lowers U.S. borrowing costs, and it gives Washington unrivaled visibility into global transactions. Those advantages won’t disappear overnight, but they may be chipped away at the margins.
In Southeast Asia, a more multipolar currency system is slowly taking shape. The U.S. need not be alarmed just yet, as the dollar will remain the backbone of the international financial system for the foreseeable future. But neither can it be complacent. The innovations in ASEAN – from local currency trade pacts to digital payment links – are planting seeds of an Asia less beholden to the greenback. The quiet revolt against the dollar is still in its early days. Whether it stays symbolic or gathers force will depend on how both Asia and the U.S. navigate the new terrain of global finance.
For Washington, it would be wise to pay attention: today’s modest regional initiatives could, in time, grow into a collective challenge to dollar dominance if U.S. policymakers ignore the concerns driving them. In that sense, Southeast Asia’s moves are a warning shot that the era of unquestioned dollar supremacy is gradually drawing to a close.
Southeast Asia’s Quiet Revolt Against the Dollar: Should the US Be Worried?
The shift away from the U.S. currency is still in its early days, but the era of unquestioned dollar supremacy may be gradually drawing to a close.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/southeast-asias-quiet-revolt-against-the-dollar-should-the-us-be-worried/
By Karishma Shah
April 19, 2025
Credit: Depositphotos
A decade ago, a traveler from Singapore visiting Bangkok or Jakarta would likely rely on U.S. dollars or a global credit card to settle the bill. Today, things are changing. A Malaysian tourist in Thailand can pay for street food by scanning a QR code, with money instantly debited from their account in ringgit and credited to the vendor in baht. Such small conveniences are part of a broader, quiet revolt in Southeast Asia – a concerted effort by regional governments to reduce their reliance on the U.S. dollar in trade and finance.
For now, the U.S. dollar remains dominant in the region’s commerce. Between 80 and 90 percent of exports from Southeast Asian countries are invoiced in USD, reflecting the greenback’s long standing role as the default currency for pricing goods. Most regional currencies are also informally tethered to the dollar’s movements, and central banks stockpile dollars as reserves for stability. This dollar dependence has historically served Southeast Asia well by facilitating trade and investment. But recent events have exposed its downside and galvanized a push for change.
Economic Jolt and Geopolitical Risk
U.S. monetary policy can send shockwaves through ASEAN economies. The Federal Reserve’s rapid interest rate hikes in 2022-2023, for example, strengthened the dollar and weakened Southeast Asian currencies, fueling imported inflation and making dollar-denominated debts costlier. At the same time, U.S.-led financial sanctions – most notably the freezing of Russia out of the SWIFT payment network in 2022 – rang alarm bells across Asia. If a great power rivalry escalates, could Washington one day cut off access to dollars or payment systems?
Indonesia’s former President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo was blunt on this point: citing the Russia sanctions, he warned that global payment giants like Visa and Mastercard could be “a problem” and urged Indonesians to use domestic networks instead. Policymakers in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore have voiced similar concerns about over-reliance on the dollar. The message: to safeguard their economies, Southeast Asian nations want more autonomy in how they trade and transact.
Local Currencies and Regional Payment Networks
One prong of this quiet de-dollarization is a turn to local currencies for cross-border trade. In May 2023, ASEAN leaders meeting in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, formally agreed to increase the use of local currencies in intraregional trade. They even floated the idea of a unified ASEAN currency framework in the future to facilitate this shift. In practical terms, several countries have already been laying the groundwork. Since 2017, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines have developed bilateral local currency settlement arrangements to enable trade to be invoiced in their own currencies instead of USD. Those arrangements expanded to include major trading partners China, Japan, and South Korea. Real business is now being done in local money: Malaysia, for instance, has agreements with Indonesia, Thailand, and China to settle more trade in ringgit or other local tender.
None of these moves will erase the dollar overnight, but together they mark a strategic diversification. “When dollars are scarce or expensive, local currency settlement becomes a solution that allows transactions to continue,” explained an Indonesian economist, adding that the intent is to minimize reliance on the dollar, not eliminate it.
Another prong is building regional financial infrastructure that bypasses U.S.-centric networks. Under Indonesia’s leadership, ASEAN launched a Regional Payment Connectivity initiative in 2022 to link up national payment systems. The vision is an interoperable network of fast payments and QR codes stretching across Southeast Asia. In plain terms, this means a shopper in Singapore might use their phone app to pay a merchant in Malaysia or Thailand directly in their home currency – no need for Visa, Mastercard, or correspondent banks that route money through New York.
Early pieces of this network are already live. Singapore and Thailand have connected their domestic instant payment systems (PayNow and PromptPay), enabling real-time fund transfers with just a phone number between the two countries. Similar links now connect Singapore with Malaysia and Thailand with Malaysia, and more ASEAN members are coming aboard the scheme. By cutting out middlemen and using agreed exchange rates between central banks, these linkages make cross-border payments faster and around 30 percent cheaper in fees according to one estimate.
They also offer a degree of financial self-reliance. As the Monetary Authority of Singapore noted, such a system means fewer transactions flowing through U.S. payment giants that could be vulnerable in a geopolitical standoff. It’s no coincidence that after the Russia sanctions, Indonesia sped up plans for a domestic credit card network and instructed government agencies to ditch Visa and Mastercard for locally-issued cards to “be more secure” from geopolitics. Southeast Asia’s new payment rails serve a similar purpose on a regional scale.
Enter the Dragon: Yuan and Digital Currency Alternatives
The quiet revolt against the dollar isn’t happening in isolation – China is actively encouraging it. As the U.S. wields financial power, Beijing is positioning the yuan as an alternative pillar for the region. One major initiative is the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), China’s answer to SWIFT. CIPS allows banks to transfer funds internationally in yuan, and it’s been growing quietly. As of early 2022, over 1,280 financial institutions across 103 countries had connected to CIPS. The system processed about 80 trillion ($12.7 trillion) in yuan payments in 2021, a 75 percent jump from the previous year.
By comparison, SWIFT handles several times that amount per month, so CIPS is not a rival yet – but its network is spreading into Southeast Asia. For countries that trade heavily with China (now ASEAN’s top trading partner), using CIPS and yuan invoicing is a logical step if they wish to avoid the dollar. Indeed, more deals are being struck in yuan: China now regularly settles oil and coal trades with Indonesia in yuan, and countries like Myanmar and Laos are increasingly using yuan for border trade.
Beijing’s other play is digital currency. China’s central bank has been piloting the e-CNY, or digital yuan, which could one day enable direct currency exchanges without Western banks in between. The scale of China’s digital currency rollout is already significant – by mid-2023, over 120 million digital yuan wallets had been opened, and e-CNY had seen around 1.8 trillion yuan ($250 billion) in transactions since launch. So far the digital yuan is mainly used domestically (it accounts for only about 0.16 percent of China’s cash in circulation). But China has begun testing cross-border digital currency payments with partners in Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE as part of the mBridge project.
It’s not far-fetched that, in a few years, a Thai firm could pay a Malaysian supplier using digital yuan tokens over a blockchain-based network – completely outside the traditional dollar banking sphere. Such technology could significantly reduce the U.S. ability to monitor or control international flows. Little wonder the U.S. Treasury has been studying the implications of foreign digital currencies on sanctions and dollar usage.
Should Washington Worry?
In the short term, the dollar’s hegemony remains secure. The numbers speak clearly: the greenback still makes up nearly 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves and is used in almost half of all international payments by value. By contrast, the Chinese yuan accounts for only about 2-5 percent of global reserves and payments.
Even within ASEAN, the U.S. dollar is still the default for big-ticket commodities like oil, natural gas, and electronics exports. None of the regional arrangements ban the dollar; they merely give businesses an option to use local currencies. In practice, many traders still feel more comfortable pricing in a universally accepted currency. As one analyst noted, there is no obligation for exporters or importers to drop the dollar under the new ASEAN frameworks – it’s voluntary, and many will stick with what they know. This means the dollar’s network effect (everyone uses it because everyone else uses it) will not disappear overnight.
U.S. officials are, at least publicly, unconcerned. Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in December 2024 that she sees no serious threat to the dollar’s reserve-currency status, given that no other currency has the depth and breadth of usage globally to displace it. For now, that assessment is accurate: King Dollar’s throne isn’t toppling in the near future.
However, the quiet revolt underway in Southeast Asia is not insignificant. It signals a growing desire among emerging economies to insulate themselves from U.S. financial leverage. Over time, incremental steps can accumulate into significant shifts. If Southeast Asia’s experiments in de-dollarization prove successful – if more trade is routinely settled in rupiah, baht, ringgit, or yuan without a hitch – it could inspire copycats in other regions. Each percentage point that the dollar loses in global market share, whether in central bank reserves or trade invoicing, ever so slightly erodes Washington’s economic influence. The U.S. benefits enormously from the dollar’s dominance: it makes sanctions biting, it lowers U.S. borrowing costs, and it gives Washington unrivaled visibility into global transactions. Those advantages won’t disappear overnight, but they may be chipped away at the margins.
In Southeast Asia, a more multipolar currency system is slowly taking shape. The U.S. need not be alarmed just yet, as the dollar will remain the backbone of the international financial system for the foreseeable future. But neither can it be complacent. The innovations in ASEAN – from local currency trade pacts to digital payment links – are planting seeds of an Asia less beholden to the greenback. The quiet revolt against the dollar is still in its early days. Whether it stays symbolic or gathers force will depend on how both Asia and the U.S. navigate the new terrain of global finance.
For Washington, it would be wise to pay attention: today’s modest regional initiatives could, in time, grow into a collective challenge to dollar dominance if U.S. policymakers ignore the concerns driving them. In that sense, Southeast Asia’s moves are a warning shot that the era of unquestioned dollar supremacy is gradually drawing to a close.
Authors
Guest Author
Karishma Shah
Karishma Shah is a researcher and writer with a focus on public policy, international affairs, and political economy, particularly across South and Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, the Observer Research Foundation, and Outlook India.
18. Trump’s Courage to Fight
Excerpts:
Some say that Trump’s opponents exemplify courage in their bold attacks on his character and reputation. But talk doesn’t make them courageous, least of all because it costs them nothing. Their admonitions are purely performative means to curry favor with the media and the establishment at large, which are viciously opposed to Trump’s reforms. There is nothing courageous about yelling “F-ck Trump” into a microphone. Whatever force it has in the political sphere depends on showing that the saying is accompanied by a doing. Trump’s been talking tough for years and backs it up by action of some kind. In the moment that he rose to his feet in Butler, with his face bloodied and yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, he gave the final proof that he’s more than a tough talker.
Joe Biden’s presidency is a rich example of cowardice: insiders worked for years to conceal that the sitting president was incapable of executing the duties of the office. In the book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, longtime political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes pull back the curtain on Biden’s presidency, detailing how his staff stage-managed a declining president and hid his impairment from the American people. Biden “lived in bubble wrap inside bunkers,” the authors write. Though “the signs of decline were clear to anyone who was willing to see them,” Biden’s inner circle believed that “no one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter,” so onward they went. When the scam was exposed at the presidential debate last June, the power players in Washington again retreated to the secrecy of the backroom and hatched a scheme to cede the delegates that Biden had secured to nominate a candidate of their choice rather than the people’s choice.
For decades, presidents talked about moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but no one did until Trump. For years, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders called for tariffs to restructure world trade. But when Donald Trump did what he said he would do and imposed tariffs? That was all it took for the same people to discover their opposition to tariffs. The cowardice of Biden and the leading lights in the Democrat party contrasts sharply with the new administration. Trump and many others have gambled their reputations, fortunes, and future interests on a bold-but-polarizing agenda. They face the American people, every day, openly and fearlessly. For Trump, the most important quality for aides and Cabinet members is not loyalty but courage — and the willingness to pay a price for things that matter.
Trump’s Courage to Fight
By Waters and Ellwanger
April 17, 2025
https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2025/04/17/trumps_courage_to_fight_1104610.html
When the White House invoked the “Immortal Chaplains” to illustrate the history between the United States and Greenland, it touched on a theme emerging in the second Trump administration: the importance of courage.
On February 3, 1943, the American steamship SS Dorchester embarked with 902 souls – soldiers, merchant seamen, and civilians – bound for a U.S. Army base in southern Greenland to support the buildup of military personnel during World War II. The ship’s captain ordered those on board to sleep in their uniforms and life jackets in case of an attack by German submarines, but many disregarded the order because of heat from the ship’s engine.
Just after midnight, a U-boat’s torpedo slammed into the Dorchester’s starboard side below the water line. Four chaplains — a rabbi, a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant reverend — gave up their own life vests and guided panicked crewmembers to the lifeboats. The Dorchester sank in 20 minutes. One of the 230 survivors later recalled what he saw as he swam away from the ship: “The bow came up high and she slid under. The last thing I saw, the Four Chaplains were up there praying for the safety of the men. They had done everything they could.”
Courage means feeling fear but behaving in a way that is noble and good, as the chaplains did when they acted on their deepest convictions aboard the Dorchester. Donald Trump once wrote that courage is not the absence of fear but “the ability to act effectively, in spite of fear.”
In 2016, Trump showed moral courage when he spoke the truth to American voters: a parasitic “establishment” of political and corporate interests had been exploiting our workers, farmers, and soldiers. When Trump challenged 16 opponents in the Republican primary, he exposed untruths in a conservative orthodoxy passed down from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush. Establishment foes hounded him with investigations and impeachment proceedings throughout the four years of his presidency, but Trump refused to compromise his principles or check his ambition to “make America great again.”
Emboldened by Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, the establishment connived to use the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent Trump from running for president a third time. They leveled charges against him in two federal district courts, tried him in New York state court, and indicted him in Georgia for alleged RICO Act violations. Though Trump was unbowed, his campaign manager Susie Wiles was concerned: “I just worry that if they can’t get him this way, they’ll try to kill him.” And that almost happened on July 13 at the fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, when an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear.
Where Trump modeled courage, the establishment shows only cowardice—their decade-long effort to destroy Trump has been prosecuted from the shadows, hiding behind the anonymity that bureaucratic power affords. They falsely claimed that Trump “colluded” with Vladimir Putin and Russia. They used a cloak and dagger plan to scuttle the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. And, in 2022, someone leaked a copy of the Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade; in spite of Chief Justice Roberts’ promise, the leaker remains unidentified and unaccountable.
Some say that Trump’s opponents exemplify courage in their bold attacks on his character and reputation. But talk doesn’t make them courageous, least of all because it costs them nothing. Their admonitions are purely performative means to curry favor with the media and the establishment at large, which are viciously opposed to Trump’s reforms. There is nothing courageous about yelling “F-ck Trump” into a microphone. Whatever force it has in the political sphere depends on showing that the saying is accompanied by a doing. Trump’s been talking tough for years and backs it up by action of some kind. In the moment that he rose to his feet in Butler, with his face bloodied and yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, he gave the final proof that he’s more than a tough talker.
Joe Biden’s presidency is a rich example of cowardice: insiders worked for years to conceal that the sitting president was incapable of executing the duties of the office. In the book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, longtime political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes pull back the curtain on Biden’s presidency, detailing how his staff stage-managed a declining president and hid his impairment from the American people. Biden “lived in bubble wrap inside bunkers,” the authors write. Though “the signs of decline were clear to anyone who was willing to see them,” Biden’s inner circle believed that “no one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter,” so onward they went. When the scam was exposed at the presidential debate last June, the power players in Washington again retreated to the secrecy of the backroom and hatched a scheme to cede the delegates that Biden had secured to nominate a candidate of their choice rather than the people’s choice.
For decades, presidents talked about moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but no one did until Trump. For years, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders called for tariffs to restructure world trade. But when Donald Trump did what he said he would do and imposed tariffs? That was all it took for the same people to discover their opposition to tariffs. The cowardice of Biden and the leading lights in the Democrat party contrasts sharply with the new administration. Trump and many others have gambled their reputations, fortunes, and future interests on a bold-but-polarizing agenda. They face the American people, every day, openly and fearlessly. For Trump, the most important quality for aides and Cabinet members is not loyalty but courage — and the willingness to pay a price for things that matter.
John J. Waters is a lawyer. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security from 2020-21. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X.
Adam Ellwanger is a professor at University of Houston – Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. Follow him at @1HereticalTruth on X.
19. Actions create consequences: time and diplomacy by Cynthia Watson
Excerpts:
American diplomats anchored global negotiations for decades following World War II. Suppose we do walk away from this diplomacy. Time was when our absence was notable, but today, Beijing, Moscow’s ally and our adversary, seeks to fill the voids we leave on the chessboard. The CCP decided to act as an “honest broker” for negotiations between Riyadh and Teheran just over two years ago, a surprise development for a government long on the sidelines for brokering efforts between contentious states. I have little doubt Beijing would love to swoop in again on Ukraine. The difference is it is allied with Russia, which would hardly be a neutral position. Still, a war-weary Ukraine watching Washington withdraw could decide it had no option but to capitulate to Vlad’s demands. Burnishing the negotiating skills would enhance Beijing’s position as more reliable than Washington.
Perhaps the discussions behind closed doors are closer than we realize, spurring Rubio’s tactic. But Americans must remember that most of the world acts far more slowly, deliberately, and nationalistically than we seem to appreciate. I hope we are not solely blaming the diplomats for applying their craft, as this would fundamentally misunderstand what how that instrument of statecraft serves us, day in and day out. That would truly be dangerous.
Actions create consequences
3
6
Upgrade to founding
time and diplomacy
how does the instrument work?
https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/time-and-diplomacy?utm
Cynthia Watson
Apr 18, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this morning that we will “move on” if the Ukrainian war isn’t resolved soon. Rubio’s tacit recognition of the challenges of advancing conversation on resolving the profound differences between Russia and Ukraine shows how hard diplomacy is, even for a superpower. It turns out diplomacy is not synonymous with negotiating leases on buildings in Pittsburgh.
I am not arguing that the United States always wins over others to our positions due to negotiation; that would be demonstrably false. We have yet, despite decades of meetings, to convince Iran to abandon nuclear aspirations as truewith India, Pakistan, or North Korea. We could not end the current Middle Eastern conflagration under Biden or Trump. China still treats too many of its people poorly despite generations of diplomats arguing our concerns to Beijing. The list sadly goes on.
The Northern Ireland negotiations took decades but ultimately resulted, after persistent negotiation, in the Good Friday Accord, which is still in place after twenty-eight years. It may not be perfect but the sustained efforts, following stops and starts, led to fewer killings and more settled conditions for Northern Ireland.
Diplomats are key to our sustained conversation with other countries. They provide a crucial channel to represent our interests by being on the ground and in contact with counterparts defending what they see as their national interests on behalf of their governments.
Secretary Rubio’s statement, however, illustrates a key difference between our all-too-frequent use of diplomacy and that of other countries: We anticipate diplomacy will achieve our desired results fairly rapidly. That is often not the case. I cannot quantify how frequently it does (or does not) occur, but any of us can recall positions we hold that other nations have ignored.
It’s seductive to argue that diplomats are inept, not dedicated, nor seeking to undermine any administration’s position on a particular subject. I suppose any of those arguments could be correct. Still, I am skeptical that the Foreign Service Officers I have known for decades would put their interests above the national ones. Diplomats rarely have any domestic constituency per se, but they are dedicated supporters of the national interest. They work for the individual duly elected to defend the Constitution, as does any military officer since public servants all have the same responsibility to do so. However, the State Department often confronts challenges with dramatically longer timelines since negotiation is frequently slow, deliberate, calibrated, and then recalibrated. Diplomats may appear to work at the speed of a glacier moving downhill while breakthroughs can occur rapidly when conditions have been allowed to develop.
Diplomacy is an iterative set of conversations.
Diplomats cannot use the harsh force that militaries can to resolve a problem. They do not involve the coercive means of sanctions, but those actions invariably also require far longer to achieve success than the military instrument.
Why is this negotiating process so slow? States defend their national interests, but their positions often conflict with ours.
Perhaps more importantly, we have a short attention span on many topics. American impatience with achieving desired outcomes is notoriously high because we see everything as solvable. Suppose we find the correct configuration for governance in Gaza and the West Bank. In that case, the Palestinians can be satisfied along with the Israelis despite profound differences in their assumptions, interests, and experiences. Suppose we explain to China that Taiwan has been under separate governance for 130 years from the mainland. In that case, Beijing will have to accept (in the eyes of many) that Taiwan will not necessarily reunify without an extremely high cost to the world. Whether we can even get Beijing to accept that position is not part of our calculation, as we did not consider whether an independent, democratic South Vietnam could ever result from the government in Saigon from 1954 through 1975. To our credit, we have a fundamentally optimistic vision that effort, applied right, can get to the outcome we find most appropriate.
Much of the world does not see things quite that unambiguously. The DPRK appears, as of 18 April 2025, unwilling to tolerate the vulnerability that surrendering its nuclear program would entail. The lessons the Kim dynasty took from Muammar Qaddafy’s 2011 fall in Libya following Saddam Hussein’s ouster almost a decade earlier were that nuclear weapons protect the regime’s survival. The interests Pyongyang has for its survival are far different from wanting to see a peaceful Korean peninsula divided between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea, much less one under participatory democracy from north to south.
However, the intractability of some of these interests is not a reason to stop diplomacy. Diplomatic engagement does not aim to resolve conflicts but provides a better understanding of the parties involved. It’s hard to overstate this central value diplomats offer. The ability of governments to keep channels open in case of crisis rather than having to create them during dangerously heightened tensions ought not be underestimated. If nothing else, ongoing diplomacy is an insurance policy against bad things when talks do become necessary in a crisis. Diplomacy may provide minor insight into divisions or personalities that play out years later to help solve problems.
The idea that the United States should walk away from the negotiations over Ukraine leads to questions worth pondering. Is it a forcing function to drive one or both sides to reconsider their positions? Probably, but not necessarily one that will satisfy those Americans who still believe fiercely in Ukraine’s position in this conflict. Bilateral talks between the enemies made little progress before our engagement, a characteristic I fear would recur without our role at the table.
Is Secretary Rubio saying we no longer see value in these talks because Ukraine and Russia have not agreed to a resolution over the past 90 days? Was that realistic to begin with?
What could motivate the parties to shift from their current positions to a more desirable end? I have repeatedly said I doubt Vlad the Impaler seeks peace because he has established a narrative that he will defend as a historical reality, much as the CCP claims Taiwan has always been part of China. Yet, diplomats might chip away at either of those obstacles by suggesting reinterpretations of positions. Without continuing participation, however, that would be impossible to accomplish. Our impatience could be a negotiating tactic, but coupled with reduced support and haranguing of Vlodomir Zelenskyy for starting the conflict, it doesn’t seem to indicate we see value in negotiating with these two states.
American diplomats anchored global negotiations for decades following World War II. Suppose we do walk away from this diplomacy. Time was when our absence was notable, but today, Beijing, Moscow’s ally and our adversary, seeks to fill the voids we leave on the chessboard. The CCP decided to act as an “honest broker” for negotiations between Riyadh and Teheran just over two years ago, a surprise development for a government long on the sidelines for brokering efforts between contentious states. I have little doubt Beijing would love to swoop in again on Ukraine. The difference is it is allied with Russia, which would hardly be a neutral position. Still, a war-weary Ukraine watching Washington withdraw could decide it had no option but to capitulate to Vlad’s demands. Burnishing the negotiating skills would enhance Beijing’s position as more reliable than Washington.
Perhaps the discussions behind closed doors are closer than we realize, spurring Rubio’s tactic. But Americans must remember that most of the world acts far more slowly, deliberately, and nationalistically than we seem to appreciate. I hope we are not solely blaming the diplomats for applying their craft, as this would fundamentally misunderstand what how that instrument of statecraft serves us, day in and day out. That would truly be dangerous.
I welcome your thoughts on this question as the Ukraine war approaches its 38th month. Please do chime in as that is the point to Actions create consequences.
I appreciate your time. I am especially thankful for those who support this column with a paid subscription as it allows me to read so broadly.
It’s Easter weekend and the end of Passover. I wish you joy, peace, and outdoor time.
Be well and be safe. FIN
“Good Friday Agreement: What is it?”, BBC.com, 3 April 2023, retrieved at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-61968177
Luke Harding, “US ready to abandon Ukraine peace deal if there is no progress, says Marco Rubio”, TheGuardian.com, 18 April 2025, retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/18/us-ready-to-abandon-ukraine-peace-deal-if-there-is-no-progress-says-marco-rubio
“Iran-Saudi Arabia deal casts China in unfamiliar global role”, APnews.com, 13 March 2023, retrieved at https://apnews.com/article/china-saudi-arabia-iran-global-mediator-45ec807c8fd2b2aa65eef4cc313b739d
20. Why I resigned in protest from National Defense University
As an aside, I would go back to serve at NDU if I had the opportunity.
Why I resigned in protest from National Defense University
Policy is not set in stone. It will be easier to push for necessary political changes at DOD from outside the university’s esteemed walls.
By Tim Roemer
Former U.S. Representative
April 20, 2025 08:00 AM ET
defenseone.com · by Tim Roemer
I recently resigned from my role on the Board of Visitors at National Defense University, the venerable institution of joint professional military education at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.
I did not want to leave the job. I loved advising the NDU president on military issues that affect higher education; engaging with our military officers and students about Taiwan and Ukraine; thinking about the role of AI, war-gaming, and drones in our national defense; and more.
But as the Trump administration’s defense leaders continued to commit strategic and tactical blunders that threaten America’s security, I felt compelled to do what I could about it: to resign in protest.
Some will say, because I am a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, that this decision is a purely partisan reaction to Republican control of the White House. This is false. My three decades of public service have been all about bipartisanship, reaching across the aisle to forge consensus, and seeking to put country over party.
I began my political career as a staffer for Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., who always stressed the need to attract Republican senators to help write and sponsor legislation. I served in Congress for six terms (never losing) and built a legislative reputation on being inclusive on my committees and seeking out Republicans for partners on bills. I collaborated with Republicans on the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to help us pass 39 proposals into law to protect our nation from terrorists. And I served as the American Ambassador to India, not a Democratic or Republican ambassador.
So my resignation was not for partisanship but over policy. In March, the defense secretary shared highly sensitive military information on an unsecured system, including details about how, when, and where the U.S. military would be attacking the Houthis in Yemen. This is like a bank robber posting an alert that the heist will take place next Monday at 11 a.m., using a shotgun to steal the jewels from the basement vault. It is an egregious and sloppy mistake that could have risked the lives of every military person involved in the operation.
That followed the secretary’s Feb. 21 dismissal of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown, for no substantive reason. Deeply experienced and widely respected, Brown was replaced with a retired 3-star with no strategic command experience who needed multiple waivers to take the new job. By vaulting a nominee past far more deeply qualified candidates, the secretary undermined the military’s promotion system, which was painstaking built upon learning essential strategic skills, working with a broad number of people worldwide, and earning vital trust inside the chain of command. This unprecedented ideological caprice does serious damage to morale.
The blunders go beyond the E-ring. The administration is attempting to negotiate an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, which—no matter your party politics—needs to end. But it must end fairly, with enforcement mechanisms, transparent verification, and political sustainability. Negotiations over the details of sovereignty, ceasefire, land rights, peacekeeping troops, and economic assistance are crucial to a lasting peace. Unfortunately, the Russians are gleefully running circles around the administration’s negotiators. They are prolonging the war, increasing the death toll and improving their tactical advantages on a daily basis. This process is not turning out to be in America’s military interests with Europe, NATO, and our partners. Russia, China, and North Korea all benefit from this military quagmire and diplomatic disaster.
The administration’s decision to gut and virtually eliminate the United States Agency for International Development does tremendous harm to our national security. It’s one thing to scrutinize the government budget for waste, fraud, and abuse. I fully support this effort to take a scalpel to government and trim spending toward a fiscally balanced budget. I voted this way in Congress. But destroying a program that helps our international allies address disease, improve their efforts to access food in malnourished places, and outsmart the Chinese in our soft-power battle defies basic common sense. As James Mattis—the first person Trump picked to be defense secretary—told Congress, when you slash soft-power investments, you do not save money. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition, ultimately,” Mattis said in 2013. Hopefully, Congress can help reverse this executive-branch over-reach.
I am also deeply concerned about the administration’s attacks on higher education. My worry is not so much about Harvard and Columbia universities, which have enormous endowments to sustain them and almost unlimited resources to defend themselves. But National Defense University is in a more precarious position. Lacking an endowment, NDU depends year to year on Congress and the Defense Department to allocate its budget. The administration’s ideological approach to education and its narrow focus on “lethality” suggest that the administration does not understand the importance of educating our next generation of leaders, let alone the need to train them in joint fighting skills, to update facilities with 21st-century technology, to increase investments in wargaming, and so forth.
What could possibly be next? The president could propose to build luxurious condominiums in Gaza making it the “Riviera of the Middle East,” and pledge U.S. troops and American tax dollars for decades to protect it. Well, sadly, that’s actually happened.
The word “resignation” connotes giving up a position or acceptance of something inevitable. I do not give up, nor do I believe policies are inevitable. I will truly miss the challenge of my job at NDU and the school’s superb staff, students and faculty. I believe in democracy in America, where President Trump was fairly elected in 2024, yet I firmly believe that his national-security policies must change.
By resigning, I am moving from inside the government machinery to the outside public arena to amplify the call for change. I will not give up trying to change flawed policy. We the people still have the power to make a difference and the responsibility to be involved in the fight. Our Declaration of Independence demands it.
Tim Roemer is a former U.S. Representative, D-Indiana; a former U.S. ambassador to India; and former 9/11 Commissioner.
defenseone.com · by Tim Roemer
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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