Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide?”

– Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1837 Address delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of history.

– George Orwell

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

– Heinrich Heine

1. This We’ll Defend – Our Promise to America

2. Falling stars? Army weighing massive cut to generals, PEO offices and AFC power

3. Hegseth shouldn’t be using Signal, but the SCIF system is terrible

4. Judge Orders Trump Officials to Disburse Funding for Radio Free Europe

5. In Brief: Foreign Policy Surprises in Trump’s First 100 Days

6. How President Trump’s Second Term Is Changing (long list of things)

7. The United States needs a victory plan for the Indo-Pacific

8. What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned book burning? (Part I and Part II)

9. Detained on verge of U.S. citizenship, Mohsen Mahdawi speaks from Vermont prison

10. Vernon Walters— Renaissance Man

11. Can Trump Broker Peace in Ukraine: Prospects and Challenges?

12. Playing for Time – Why Trump's Ukraine proposal is causing headaches for Putin by Sir Lawrence Freedman

13. Marines special ops focus on data at the edge, FPV drones in the air and AI on the way

14. Cut Army structure, not Army end strength

15. Hegseth backs admiral for Middle East post, passing over Army general

16. Awake Before the Sound of the Guns – Preparing Advisors for Conflict

17. Hegseth ‘proud’ to end Women, Peace and Security program

18. Why the US will lose against China

19. For Saudi Arabia, Normalization with Israel Doesn’t Make Sense Now

20. Senior PLA ideology official Miao Hua removed from China’s top legislature

21. As war with Russia drags on, Ukrainians wage parallel ‘revolution of dignity’

22. SOF Week — Where Trust Becomes Decision Advantage

23. China spy fears at air bases lead to string of tourist detentions

24. Saigon 1975: A Memoir – A personal account of the chaotic collapse of South Vietnam

25. The Fall of Saigon: 50 Years on – lessons can be identified, but not learned

1. This We’ll Defend – Our Promise to America

This We’ll Defend

Our Promise to America

Gen. Randy A. George, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael R. Weimer

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2025/Defend/

Download the PDF

This year, our Army celebrates a major milestone. For two and a half centuries, the Army has answered the call to defend this Nation. Our motto, “This We’ll Defend,” is more than just words—it is why we exist and our promise to the American people. For 250 years, as the world changed and the battlefield evolved, our promise has not wavered.

America’s Oldest Institution

The Army’s origins date back to before we were even a country. In the spring of 1775, the shot heard around the world at Lexington and Concord led to fighting between colonial militias and British forces. But to secure our independence, the country needed one collective, professional force.

On 14 June 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved “that six companies of expert riflemen be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; … and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”1

With this act, the Continental Army was born, transforming disparate colonial militias into a unified force under national authority. Since then, American soldiers have stood ready to defend freedom.

The Army’s history is a story of selfless service in defense of our Nation and its values. It is also a story of adaptation—from the battlefields of the Revolution and the Civil War to the beaches of Normandy and the islands of the Pacific, from the frozen hills of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan and the dusty streets of Iraq. Every generation of soldiers has faced new threats, and every generation has overcome those threats.

A Legacy of Adaption and Transformation

The Army’s ability to adapt and transform is one of the key reasons it has remained the world’s premier land force for 250 years.

During the Civil War, the Army introduced repeating rifles and used railroads and telegraphs to coordinate and move troops and supplies. In World War I, the Army shifted from trench warfare to combined arms operations, incorporating tanks, artillery, and air.

World War II saw the Army grow to over eight million soldiers, mastering amphibious warfare in the Pacific and conducting the largest waterborne landing in modern history at Normandy.

The Army continued to innovate in Vietnam, pioneering helicopter warfare to rapidly deploy troops into battle. The Gulf War showcased the effectiveness of precision strikes and maneuver warfare, resulting in a quick, decisive victory.

In response to the 9/11 attacks, the Army adapted to counterinsurgency and urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over the years, we have proven that the ability to transform is just as important as the ability to fight. The challenges of the future will be different from those of the past, but no matter the challenge we will always adapt, overcome, and win.

Transforming for the Future

Today’s Army is the most capable and lethal force in the world. Our adversaries are evolving, and we must stay ahead. That is why we continue to transform. We are transforming in contact, meaning we are adapting and innovating even as we continue to meet current threats.

We are investing in the right capabilities to ensure our formations are more lethal, more mobile, and more survivable. This includes uncrewed and counter-uncrewed systems to expand our reach and counter emerging threats, electronic warfare systems to dominate the electromagnetic space, and a next-generation network that integrates more easily across echelons and shrinks our command post footprint.

Being ready to fight and win is about more than just having the right equipment—it’s about having disciplined, well-trained soldiers who can operate in any environment, under any conditions, against any adversary. The American soldier is the most skilled and disciplined warrior on the battlefield. We live a culture of warfighting and excellence because that is what the American people expect and what our mission demands.

Our readiness is bolstered by our families and loved ones. Their unwavering support allows us to focus on the mission, knowing we have a strong foundation at home.

This We’ll Defend

As we celebrate this milestone, we remember the sacrifices of previous generations and honor their legacy by continuing to serve with courage and integrity. We honor them by always staying ready.

In an era of rapid change, our focus remains clear: warfighting, delivering combat-ready formations, continuous transformation, and strengthening the profession. For 250 years, the Army has been America’s force of decisive action. That will not change. We do not pick our fights, but when called, we will fight, and we will win.

We are the United States Army, and This We’ll Defend.

Randy A. George

General, U.S. Army

Chief of Staff

Michael R. Weimer

Sergeant Major of the Army

Note

Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol. 2 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1905), 89–90, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llscd/lljc002/lljc002.pdf.

2. Falling stars? Army weighing massive cut to generals, PEO offices and AFC power

Excerpts:

When informed of the details of the plan, John Ferrari, a senior nonresident fellow at AEI and retired Army Maj. Gen., said, “The CSA [Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Randy George], along with the new administration, is really looking hard at reducing the bureaucracy to enable the actual fighting units —so overall a good first step with more needed.”

An Army official confirmed that senior leaders are weighing this structural shakeup, but said a decision has not yet been made or no actions taken. A spokesperson with Army public affairs declined to comment and several other offices, including the service’s acquisition shop, did not respond to questions by press time

Falling stars? Army weighing massive cut to generals, PEO offices and AFC power - Breaking Defense

A document outlining one possible scenario reduces the PEO shops from 13 down to 9, merges Army Futures Command with TRADOC.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · April 29, 2025

An Army general received his fourth star during his promotion ceremony on Nov. 8, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Carolina Sierra)

WASHINGTON — The US Army is weighing a massive overhaul that would see a reduction in the number of general officer billets and restructure the service’s organizations charged with developing requirements and buying weapons, Breaking Defense has learned.

While no decisions have been made, the tentative plan would leave the Army Chief and Vice Chief of Staff as the only functional component four-star general officers, reduce the number of Program Executive Offices (PEOs) managing weapons programs, and merge Army Futures Command (AFC) with Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).

Two sources in industry have seen a document laying the plan out, while another three have heard details that match the document, they tell Breaking Defense. A timeline for such a plan being executed, or if the plan will go through at all, is unknown, but industry is taking it as a sign that major changeups are becoming inevitable with the Pentagon’s largest service.

When informed of the details of the plan, John Ferrari, a senior nonresident fellow at AEI and retired Army Maj. Gen., said, “The CSA [Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Randy George], along with the new administration, is really looking hard at reducing the bureaucracy to enable the actual fighting units —so overall a good first step with more needed.”

An Army official confirmed that senior leaders are weighing this structural shakeup, but said a decision has not yet been made or no actions taken. A spokesperson with Army public affairs declined to comment and several other offices, including the service’s acquisition shop, did not respond to questions by press time

Futures Command Without A Future?

When AFC was stood up in 2018 under the first Trump administration, a four-star general was placed at the helm and charged with speeding up the requirements process in order to get tech and weapons into soldiers’ hands quicker. At the time, part of TRADOC’s mandate was redirected towards AFC, with the new command assuming responsibility for shepherding in new weapon requirements. As part of that change, for example, AFC created cross-functional teams (CFTs) around requirement portfolios like aviation, ground vehicles, long-range fires.

According to the circulating document, the service is considering merging AFC and TRADOC together, and taking those CFTs and converting them back to Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate — an organization inside the service that helps develop and integrate capabilities based on doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities.

“Some of this is back to the future, for example, AFC mostly came from TRADOC and so putting it back makes sense,” Ferrari said. “Additionally, AFC was premised on devolving to its acquisition authority and that did [not] happen, so it is a brave leader who says we tried it and it is not delivering results we expected and admits that out loud.”

General Officer, PEO Reductions

Both AFC and TRADOC are four-star billets right now, as are Army Forces Command and Army Material Command. Under the proposed plan, they would be downgraded to an undisclosed level.

As a result of those billet downgrades, only the Army Chief of Staff and Army Vice Chief of Staff desks would be run by four-star generals, according to the tentative plan. (Presumably the combatant commands and component commands would remain four-star posts, but the document does not address those structures or any changes that may be coming.)

Proposed changes to the Army’s structure do not stop with AFC and TRADOC.

If senior military leaders ultimately sign off on the plan, the 13 Army PEOs that exist today will be pared down to nine.

To get to that number, PEO Ground Combat Systems and PEO Combat Support & Combat Service Support will merge into one shop, while PEO Command, Control, Communications, and Network, and PEO Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors will also merge. The PEO for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation would be eliminated. (The document does not detail the additional change required to get down to nine PEOs).

“Thirteen PEOs is a lot given how small the Army procurement budget actually is; one can imagine this might be the first step of a broader acquisition streamlining; each PEO is a bureaucratic stovepipe, and each PEO injects exponentially more synchronization issues, so this is a big move but getting to many fewer than nine is probably needed,” Ferrari speculated.

Downgrading the PEO billets is also on the table.

Today, each PEO is typically helmed by either a two-star or one-star general. But according to the paper, the remaining nine PEOs would all be one-star billets. The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, currently helmed by Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, would also be aligned for a downgrade to a one-star post. The document notes that this would only occur once Rasch left, meaning this could potentially be a roadmap for how the service handles the other billet downgrades — waiting for a higher-level officer to leave before being replaced with a one-star.

While Ferrari broadly supported that possible shakeup, one industry official said the plan to have only two functional four-star generals is “insane” and would hamper the PEOs ability to move out on programs.

“It absolutely neuters the ability of the program offices to have maneuver space in the decision-making process,” the source added. “One-stars don’t have the sway of power.”

3. Hegseth shouldn’t be using Signal, but the SCIF system is terrible

Excerpts:

The heart of the problem is the requirement to handle classified information in what’s known as a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility. These are often cramped, stuffy, windowless rooms that don’t fit the real-world need for mobile, dispersed, secure communications. Worse, inside a SCIF, military and intelligence officers often can’t use the internet or the newest AI models. The system imprisons information more than it protects it.

“SCIFs as a means to protect classified discussions and systems have been an outmoded security practice for more than 20 years,” argues Aaron Brown, who spent 20 years as a CIA officer and Army Ranger specializing in counterterrorism and now runs a technology start-up called Lumbra. “The SCIF was built for a bygone era in the 1970s and 80s when communications were easy to control, and the speed of business didn't require persistent access to the internet.”

...

But thousands of military and intelligence officers face similar dilemmas every day. CIA case officers, for example, require fast-moving data from the internet to conduct operations. But if they’re stuck inside a SCIF overseas, or in the vast headquarters complex at Langley, they need special permission to access the internet. Some walk out to their cars to use their phones, according to former officers; others bring their phones inside SCIFs. Both are no-nos.

People break these rules to get the job done. Brown told me during an interview that CIA counterterrorism officers who need to make split-second decisions while running assets are in a no-win situation. “Either one would abide by the rules and risk the operation failing, due to an inability to coordinate at the speed of counterterrorism, or break the rules and bring a forbidden device into the SCIF.” His conclusion, based on experience: “Our best leaders are going to pick the operational pace over the rules every time, setting up an impossible dilemma.”

Opinion

David Ignatius

Hegseth shouldn’t be using Signal, but the SCIF system is terrible

The cumbersome, outmoded technology is a bad fit for the demands of national security work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/29/hegseth-signal-scif-classified-information/?utm

April 29, 2025 at 3:32 p.m. EDTToday at 3:32 p.m. EDT

5 min

240

The entrance to the sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, used by members of Congress in the basement of the Capitol. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used poor judgment and sloppy security practices when he sent highly sensitive targeting information to colleagues, friends and family on the Signal commercial messaging app.

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

But the “Signalgate” flap illustrates a problem that transcends Hegseth’s poor performance at the Pentagon. Government technology for viewing and sending classified information is so cumbersome and outdated that it drives people to use insecure work-arounds such as Signal. Using the government’s current technology, military and intelligence officers simply cannot move at the speed needed to operate most effectively.

The heart of the problem is the requirement to handle classified information in what’s known as a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility. These are often cramped, stuffy, windowless rooms that don’t fit the real-world need for mobile, dispersed, secure communications. Worse, inside a SCIF, military and intelligence officers often can’t use the internet or the newest AI models. The system imprisons information more than it protects it.

Opinions on the Trump administration

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Trump helped elect a liberal leader in Canada

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Leana Wen

What Kennedy gets wrong about autism’s causes

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Catherine Rampell

No, thank you. I don’t want to appear on one of Trump’s ‘lists.’

April 29, 2025

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Jim Geraghty

Beware, consumers, tariffs are already damaging the supply chain

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Eduardo Porter

The U.S. is not Venezuela — but Trump is closing the distance

April 28, 2025

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Philip Bump

The bubble that created Trump is the reason he’s stumbling

April 28, 2025

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Serena Mayeri, Amanda Shanor and Alexander Volokh

Trump’s fake emergencies are the real crisis

April 28, 2025

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Theodore Johnson

Trump’s ‘plan’ for Black Americans was mostly a bait and switch

April 28, 2025

Opinion

Editorial Board

The week Trump looked for off-ramps — and heeded warnings

April 26, 2025

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Philip Bump

Republicans don’t think Trump can ignore the Supreme Court — for now

April 25, 2025

Opinion

Jason Willick

Taking MAGA seriously on migration and due process

April 27, 2025

“SCIFs as a means to protect classified discussions and systems have been an outmoded security practice for more than 20 years,” argues Aaron Brown, who spent 20 years as a CIA officer and Army Ranger specializing in counterterrorism and now runs a technology start-up called Lumbra. “The SCIF was built for a bygone era in the 1970s and 80s when communications were easy to control, and the speed of business didn't require persistent access to the internet.”

Following Opinions on the news

Following

Hegseth used Signal because he wanted to keep other senior officials updated on the Trump administration’s plans to bomb Yemen. For speed and simplicity, he used a chat group set up by national security adviser Michael Waltz, called “Houthi PC small group,” to send information about targets and timing. Inexplicably, he employed another Signal chat to share similar information with his wife, personal lawyer and others. A dozen former military and intelligence officers I’ve talked to say his actions were irresponsible and would normally lead to disciplinary action.

But thousands of military and intelligence officers face similar dilemmas every day. CIA case officers, for example, require fast-moving data from the internet to conduct operations. But if they’re stuck inside a SCIF overseas, or in the vast headquarters complex at Langley, they need special permission to access the internet. Some walk out to their cars to use their phones, according to former officers; others bring their phones inside SCIFs. Both are no-nos.

People break these rules to get the job done. Brown told me during an interview that CIA counterterrorism officers who need to make split-second decisions while running assets are in a no-win situation. “Either one would abide by the rules and risk the operation failing, due to an inability to coordinate at the speed of counterterrorism, or break the rules and bring a forbidden device into the SCIF.” His conclusion, based on experience: “Our best leaders are going to pick the operational pace over the rules every time, setting up an impossible dilemma.”

SCIF-mania also limits the ability to use the latest AI models that are transforming national security — or even simple internet tools such as Google search. Brown says he waited 18 months for permission to use Google in a classified space and finally gave up. The need for military and intelligence officers to experiment with large-language AI models is acute. But Brown says the Pentagon and the intelligence community, while now accessing earlier AI models, can’t broadly use the latest models, including Open AI’s ChatGPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 2.5, or Anthropic’s Claude 3.7.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that SCIFs are in very large part to blame for the IC’s technology deficits,” Brown argues. “It means that we now have an entire generation of intelligence and DOD practitioners that have almost never used these advanced AI systems.”

What’s agonizing is that technologies exist that could break the SCIF barrier. But the Pentagon and the intelligence community have been slow to adopt them. Take the problem that Hegseth confronted — the need for a quick, secure mobile device that could be used safely by national security officials around the world.

There’s a fix for that, devised by a mobile phone company called Cape, founded by a former Special Operations sergeant named John Doyle. Cape has devised a virtual mobile network that disappears from the normal cellphone net. The phone is nearly impossible to hack or trace, according to Doyle.

“Modern mobile is how we all communicate — from teenagers glued to Snapchat to soldiers on the frontline in Ukraine to our nation’s elected officials,” argued Doyle in an email. “It’s a national imperative to make secure commercial mobile work for everyone’s needs, including defense and intelligence professionals.”

Yet government security officials are stuck with legacy systems. “Officers are demanding these new systems and tools, but innovation is blocked by outdated security practices, overly rigid counterintelligence policies, and inefficient acquisition processes,” Brown contends.

There are mobile SCIFs, too — prefabricated units that can be placed in a home or unclassified workspace. But too few are available, and it can take up to a year to get permission to install one, intelligence veterans say.

Hegseth was a poor choice as defense secretary because he lacks the management and technological experience to break through the security logjam. He behaves as though rules don’t apply to “warriors” like him. Rather than using a work-around, a real leader would champion a movement to transform the Pentagon’s archaic technology practices, symbolized by the four confining walls of the SCIF.

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly criticize the article's attempt to attribute the reckless handling of classified information to outdated SCIF systems. Many commenters argue that the use of Signal by Hegseth was a deliberate choice to avoid transparency and accountability, rather than... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

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By David Ignatius

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “Phantom Orbit.” follow on X@ignatiuspost

4. In Brief: Foreign Policy Surprises in Trump’s First 100 Days

In Brief: Foreign Policy Surprises in Trump’s First 100 Days

https://warontherocks.com/2025/04/in-brief-foreign-policy-surprises-in-trumps-first-100-days/

Kori Schake, Patricia Kim, Max Bergmann, Alex Vatanka, and Jeremy Shapiro

April 29, 2025

Members

Today marks the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration. We asked five foreign policy and national security experts: What has surprised you most about Trump’s first 100 days?

Judge Orders Trump Officials to Disburse Funding for Radio Free Europe

The news organization relies almost exclusively on congressional funding, which the Trump administration has held up for weeks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/radio-free-europe-funding-trump.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

Listen to this article · 6:31 min Learn more

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The headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague in February.Credit...Martin Divisek/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Minho Kim

Reporting from Washington

April 29, 2025

Updated 8:43 p.m. ET

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to disburse congressionally approved grant money it has withheld from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a federally funded news organization that provides independent reporting in countries with limited press freedom.

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the Trump administration to pay the news organization $12 million for its April funding. Judge Lamberth appeared to close a loophole from his previous ruling, which allowed the Trump administration to effectively hold funds for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty while facially complying with the court mandate.

“In this case,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “it was Congress who ordained that the monies at issue” should go to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in legislation signed by President Trump himself.

“In short: The current Congress and President Trump enacted a law allocating funds to the plaintiffs,” he concluded.

The judge, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, also offered an unusual defense of the federal judiciary and its nonpartisan nature, as Mr. Trump has in recent months called for federal judges’ impeachment and his administration has teetered toward open defiance of courts in some cases.

In recent months, Judge Lamberth wrote, “people from both inside and outside government have variously accused the courts — myself included — of fomenting a constitutional crisis, usurping the Article II powers of the presidency, undercutting the popular will or dictating how executive agencies can and should be run.”

He continued: “The subtext, if not the headline, of these accusations is that federal judges are motivated by personal political agendas.”

Judge Lamberth rejected the assertion that he was dictating administration policy in an abuse of power or siding with the news organization out of admiration for its journalistic work.

“When President Reagan nominated me to this bench,” he said, “I swore that I would discharge my duties ‘without respect to persons faithfully and impartially under the Constitution.’”

He added: “I am governed by that oath every day. I am not a political actor, and I have no agenda to press. I believe that the same is true of my colleagues on the federal bench.”

The White House did not immediately issue a response to the ruling.

In March, the Trump administration terminated the grant for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty after Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Judge Lamberth temporarily blocked the grant termination about a week later, saying Mr. Trump cannot unilaterally shut down an organization funded by Congress.

After the ruling in March, the administration reversed the termination but kept withholding the money, asserting that it was negotiating new terms of the grant agreement with the outlet, also known as RFE/RL.

In the proposed agreement, Trump officials sought powers to pause funds for the federally funded broadcaster and shut down parts of its programming, moves that Radio Free Europe argued were forbidden by Congress to ensure journalistic integrity.

The agreement would also allow the Trump administration to determine the members of the outlet’s board, an authority Congress revoked in 2020 after Mr. Trump’s appointee at the global media agency meddled with the news group’s editorial decisions.

The news organization had asked the Trump administration to disburse the money it was owed for April so it could keep its operations going as they negotiate a new contract, but the government ignored the request multiple times.

Trump officials also went eight days without responding to the news group’s email until a few hours before a hearing in front of the judge.

“Turning a blind eye to the defendants’ delay tactics,” Judge Lamberth wrote, referring to the Trump officials who were sued, “would be a naïve conclusion, allowing the agency to indefinitely evade judicial review.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which reports in nearly 30 languages and reaches 47 million people every week, was on the brink of collapse before the court reinstated its funding.

It had terminated most contracts with freelance journalists, missed payments on office leases and furloughed more than 120 employees. The news group, a private nonprofit that has an independent board and hiring authority, receives 99 percent of its budget from congressional funding, according to court filings. Radio Free Europe’s lawyers said the news outlet would have ceased all operation by June without more funds.

The ruling follows another issued by Judge Lamberth, who ordered the Trump administration to restore operations at Voice of America, another government-funded news outlet the administration moved to shut down by putting nearly all of its employees on paid leave. Unlike RFE/RL, Voice of America is a federal agency whose journalists are government employees.

Mr. Trump has attacked Voice of America as “the voice of radical America,” and accused the outlet, which delivers news to countries such as Russia, China and Iran, of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda.”

Judge Lamberth had also ordered the administration to halt its efforts to shut down two other federally funded newsrooms: Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. But he stopped short of granting that relief to Radio Free Europe at the time because the government and the news organization were still negotiating.

During a hearing on Monday, Abigail Stout, the Justice Department lawyer on the case, argued that the court should not intervene in an active contract negotiation, as such actions could set a precedent that could bind the government’s hands in hammering out deals with other parties.

Judge Lamberth did not find her argument convincing.

Radio Free Europe lawyers “are not saying they are unhappy with the conditions,” the judge said, interrupting Ms. Stout. “They are saying the terms are illegal.”

When RFE/RL’s counsel, Thomas R. Brugato, approached him and said he had six points refuting Ms. Stout’s arguments, the judge again interjected.

“Only six?” Judge Lamberth asked, smiling.

Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.

6. How President Trump’s Second Term Is Changing (long list of things)

100 days

How President Trump’s Second Term Is Changing

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/28/us/trump-100-days-actions.html

There have never been 100 days like this.

President Trump was sworn in for a second term in January intent on transforming America and its place in the world. From his first hours in office, he has relentlessly driven domestic, economic and foreign policy in risky new directions; taken a chain saw to the federal work force; challenged the authority of the courts; and sought to purge liberal influence from government, education and culture.

The result has been a chaotic blur of new initiatives; judicial, political and economic backlash; and neck-snapping reversals. It has tested the nation’s ability to process disruption — and of American democracy’s resilience in the face of a president whose views of his power have prompted warnings of creeping authoritarianism.

The consuming conflicts of one day regularly give way to wholly new ones with stunning rapidity: pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, stripping out-of-favor officials and former advisers of security details, proposing to turn Gaza into a resort town and Canada into a 51st state, blaming a plane crash on diversity initiatives, presiding over a contentious cabinet meeting with Elon Musk, installing his personal lawyers to run the Justice Department, firing inspectors general, closing down U.S.A.I.D., igniting a global trade war, berating Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office, deporting migrants without due process and edging toward a constitutional crisis by defying judges on multiple occasions.

If the 100-day mark is an opportunity to pause to reflect on what this presidency has meant so far — and what it could mean in its remaining 1,361 days — it offers one clear lesson. In this second time around, Mr. Trump is intent on using every hour to pursue an agenda shaped by a shifting mix of grievance, short-term political calculation, long-held belief and the experience of his first term.

Here’s a deeper look at how Mr. Trump has already made his mark.

— Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

foreign policy

Treaties, Alliances and Soft Power Are Out. Raw Power Is Back In.

By David E. Sanger

Doug Mills/The New York Times

“I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States,” President Trump said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their now-famous altercation before cameras in the Oval Office in late February. “But you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out” with the Russians.

And lose, he went on to suggest.

It is hard to encapsulate the revolution in America’s approach to the world in these past 100 days in any one episode. But with that public humiliation of Mr. Zelensky, once regarded as Churchill in a T-shirt, Mr. Trump sent a clear signal about what was to come: the end of an era that began 80 years ago when the United States helped design a world of rules, international agreements and norms to constrain the powerful from seizing territory and to empower the weak without resorting to war.

So the real message of that argument was that international law was out and power — raw, preferably nuclear-backed — is back in. In Mr. Trump’s view, the world is divided into two kinds of countries: those that “have the cards” and those that don’t. With nothing to put on the table, Mr. Trump was arguing, Mr. Zelensky would have to take whatever terms being given to end the war.

That reflects Mr. Trump’s long-held view of how the world works. Unconstrained by establishment advisers, he seems determined to deal largely with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China. In this spheres-of-influence world, international law is fine until inconvenient, borders are up for negotiation, and the vague soft power gains of providing aid to the world’s neediest are unnecessary.

The other message of the encounter between the American and Ukrainian leaders was that Mr. Trump wanted to switch sides and normalize relations with Moscow. At a minimum doing so would open up business opportunities. Some around him argue it could interrupt Russia’s burgeoning partnership with China.

No one knows how this grand experiment in raw geopolitical power politics will play out. Most European leaders say they are horrified; Asian allies are more circumspect, but fear empowering Mr. Xi to test the theory by squeezing Taiwan.

Tellingly, on his first trip abroad in his new term, for Pope Francis’ funeral, Mr. Trump held one detailed conversation, with Mr. Zelensky. He shook the hands of a few European leaders, but passed on the chance to talk about tariffs, or the future of alliances. Instead, he headed straight for his airplane to return to the America he says comes first.

Immigration

Trump’s Immigration Measures Cause Fear, but No Surge in Deportations

By Hamed Aleaziz

Rebecca Noble/Reuters

Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends when she was surrounded by federal agents, some of their faces obscured by black masks.

Supporters say her offense appears to have been that she was the co-author of an opinion essay in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel. She was swept up by the government as part of what the Trump administration has described as a campaign against antisemitic activists on campus.

President Trump rode to re-election on promises to crack down on immigration, and he has taken extraordinary measures to do so. He has targeted student visa holders and legal permanent residents who took part in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. He has jettisoned due process and sent undocumented immigrants to a megaprison for terrorists in El Salvador, including at least one by mistake.

The administration has placed migrants’ names in Social Security’s “death master file” to cut off their access to bank accounts and other financial services. He has pressured countries to retrieve their citizens, sent people to third countries far from their homes and invoked a wartime law to remove migrants without due process.

He has fulfilled a signature campaign promise, essentially sealing the southern border with Mexico even as he welcomes white South Africans as refugees.

U.S. border officials also are using more aggressive tactics, which the administration calls “enhanced vetting,” at ports of entry to the United States, prompting concerns even among American allies about travel to the United States.

But for all of the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts continue to fall short of the mass deportations he vowed to carry out. Overall, the number of flights and their destinations look largely similar to those under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Federal Government

Musk and Trump: A Partnership and a Bureaucratic Bull Rush

By Theodore Schleifer

Eric Lee/The New York Times

Even Elon Musk seemed a little surprised to be there.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Mr. Musk said with his trademark staccato laugh. The press pool walked into the Oval Office and saw the world’s richest man and his young son X over President Trump’s right shoulder. “Come here often?”

Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were about two weeks into a presidential partnership that had turned into a bureaucratic bull rush. Mr. Musk had turned federal agencies inside out, but he had offered no public explanation of his grand strategy. Inside the Oval, with X on his shoulders, Mr. Musk said again and again that it was all about rooting out fraud. And, in his telling, there was plenty of it.

U.S.A.I.D.? Fraudsters. The Social Security Administration? Fraudsters. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Fraudsters.

Those are just three of the agencies where Mr. Musk and his team of almost 100 aides have run roughshod, getting into seemingly daily fights (and lawsuits) against the federal bureaucracy. He has narrated it all in real time on social media. Mr. Musk has sought to cut the number of people drawing a government paycheck by hundreds of thousands, and to give the president more authority than Congress would like to unilaterally reduce federal payments.

Over 250,000 people have had their jobs cut, planned to be cut or have taken a buyout, according to a New York Times tally.

But while Mr. Musk’s group took drastic actions like shutting down America’s foreign assistance agency, the effort is not expected to come close to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s promise of cutting a trillion dollars of waste out of the federal budget.

Mr. Musk has also angered several top Trump officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio during an explosive cabinet meeting in March, and gotten into a power struggle with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over the I.R.S.

For all the drama, Mr. Musk’s relationship with the president has proved durable. Mr. Trump has for the most part been fine having Mr. Musk around, and clearly Mr. Musk likes being there. It is a transactional relationship for two deeply transactional leaders. Mr. Musk has said he will leave Washington next month, but few think he will be out of the picture.

Retribution

A Campaign to Exact Revenge, Using the Powers of the Presidency

By Charlie Savage

Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Perhaps the most salient example of President Trump’s penchant for revenge came on April 9, when he directed the Justice Department to try to pin a crime on a specific person: Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official from his first administration.

Mr. Krebs had enraged the president by contradicting baseless claims that Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election because electronic voting machines were compromised. But there was no evidence to believe Mr. Krebs had broken any laws.

That did not stop Mr. Trump, whose message was clear: Opposing him publicly means risking punishment at the hands of the federal government.

Since returning to the presidency, Mr. Trump has brazenly used his official powers to carry out a retribution campaign against his perceived enemies. His subordinates have fired career prosecutors at the Justice Department who played a role in investigating Mr. Trump or his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The president terminated taxpayer-financed security protection for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, and others who went on to criticize Mr. Trump, including John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

The president has threatened his perceived opponents with state sanctions. He has urged the Federal Communications Commission to remove the licenses of broadcast networks that have covered him in ways he does not like.

Mr. Trump is bullying universities, demanding ideological changes to hiring and academic policies and freezing huge research grants.

He has signed executive orders singling out law firms that employed or represented people he considers opponents. He has signed presidential orders that target former officials he dislikes for “reviews” by the federal government, in search of any evidence that could be used to prosecute them.

Some of Mr. Trump’s targets have capitulated, but others are fighting him in court. Yet even if he ultimately loses, his legal bills are being paid by taxpayers.

And Mr. Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement power for revenge may be the most aggressive move of all. Mr. Krebs has since resigned from his job and said he must focus full time on defending himself.

Tariffs and Trade

Trump Called It ‘Liberation Day.’ But His Tariffs Triggered Panic.

By Ana Swanson

Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

On April 2, President Trump walked out in front of a crowd of officials, reporters and workers in hard hats assembled in the White House Rose Garden and unveiled his plans for remaking the global trading system. The president hoisted up a poster with the tariffs he planned to charge on imports from foreign countries and said the day would be remembered as “Liberation Day.”

“We are finally putting America first,” Mr. Trump said.

The announcement ended up triggering panic among foreign officials and investors, and tipped the United States into a full-blown trade war with one of its biggest trading partners, China.

While Mr. Trump is often cast as a product of the 1980s or the 1950s, he has lately taken to pining for the period after 1890, when tariffs were the primary expression of economic policy. In February, he added a 10 percent tariff to Chinese exports, saying that Beijing needed to halt exports of fentanyl and the chemicals that make it. Beijing retaliated, putting its own tariffs on U.S. products and introducing other measures to hurt U.S. companies.

The same situation played out in March, when Mr. Trump added another 10 percent tariff on Chinese exports, and China answered with more restrictions of its own.

But it was after Mr. Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April that tensions really surged. China was the only country to immediately retaliate, and Mr. Trump singled them out for punishment. Just hours after his own tariffs went into effect, Mr. Trump decided to pause them for 90 days for other countries, but he announced drastically higher rates for Chinese imports, writing on social media that the country “PLAYED IT WRONG.”

Products from China — the second-largest source of goods for the United States — now face a minimum tariff of 145 percent, and in some cases the levies are much higher. U.S. exports now face a 125 percent tariff going into China. For entrepreneurs and farmers that rely on trade between the countries, particularly small businesses, that has been crippling. Some companies have stopped trade altogether, and bookings for the ships that carry freight from China to the United States have plummeted.

U.S. officials have toyed with the idea for years of “decoupling” from China for national security reasons. With little warning, the countries have suddenly dived into that scenario.

Trump officials, including Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, have described the situation as “unsustainable.” But the United States and China have not held substantive talks, and it is not clear how the governments will resolve the rift. So for now, the standoff continues.

Economy

Expecting Recession? How Trump’s Shifting Policies Have Upended the Economy.

By Ben Casselman

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

In a Fox News interview with President Trump in early March, Maria Bartiromo pointed out that there were “rising worries” about an economic slowdown.

“Are you expecting a recession this year?” she asked.

“I hate to predict things like that,” Mr. Trump replied. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”

News coverage of the interview focused on Mr. Trump’s refusal to rule out a recession. But his answer was arguably less remarkable than the fact that Ms. Bartiromo felt the need to ask the question at all.

When Mr. Trump took office, he inherited an economy that was the envy of the world. Yet within weeks, consumer confidence was plummeting, businesses were pausing planned expansions and investors were questioning the safety of U.S. government debt. Forecasters debated which was more likely: a mere recession, or “stagflation,” in which growth stalls while inflation rises.

Those fears are the result, most directly, of Mr. Trump’s ever-shifting trade policies, which threaten to drive up consumer prices, disrupt global supply chains and inspire retaliatory tariffs from U.S. trading partners.

But the disruptions are not limited to trade. Mr. Trump’s threats to fire Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, have roiled financial markets. His immigration policies have led some employers to complain that they are struggling to find workers. The administration’s cost-cutting efforts, led by Elon Musk, have resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs and resignations among government workers and put billions of dollars in federal funding in limbo.

Perhaps more than any specific decisions by the administration, business leaders say that the near-constant shifts in policy — tariffs that are imposed and then suspended, workers who are fired and then reinstated — have made it almost impossible to plan ahead. Economists say that uncertainty alone could be enough to cause a recession if businesses respond by pulling back on hiring and investment, as surveys show many have already begun to do.

Still, the evidence of a downturn has so far shown up mostly in surveys and anecdotes, not in measures of actual economic activity. Job growth has been solid. Layoffs remain low. Consumer spending faltered at the start of the year but has since rebounded. That suggests that while the risk of a recession has risen, one is not yet inevitable.

Imperialism

Greenland? Canada? The Canal? The Mystery Behind Manifest Destiny

By David E. Sanger

Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Walk into the Oval Office these days and there is an unfamiliar visage on the wall, just above the gold-enhanced mantel: James K. Polk. For those with only vague memories of high school American history, his appearance is no accident. It was Polk, the 11th president, who seized Texas and much of the Southwest and pushed America’s borders to the Pacific.

He was, in short, the hero of manifest destiny, a phrase President Trump revived for his inaugural address. When visitors come to the White House now, Mr. Trump, not known for his intense study of his 19th-century predecessors, notes that Polk “got a lot of land.”

Which helps explain Mr. Trump’s fascination with acquiring Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal and turning Canada into the 51st state.

It started in earnest 13 days before his inauguration, when Mr. Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago club, was asked whether he would rule out using “military or economic coercion” to get the lands he covets. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said, insisting that economic or national security imperatives were so vital that “you might have to do something.”

Ever since, he has repeated the threat again and again, unconcerned that his words were fueling resistance movements from Denmark — which protects Greenland — to Canada, where the Liberal Party has been revived because it is standing up to Mr. Trump.

He is hardly the first to be interested. Secretary of State William Seward sought Greenland after he bought Alaska in the 1860s. Harry Truman wanted it in the opening days of the Cold War. But only Mr. Trump has talked about actually taking it by force. And that, of course, is unnecessary. The United States once had dozens of bases on Greenland, but it shrunk them down to one. An existing treaty allows Mr. Trump to greatly expand the American presence.

The United States could do the same in Panama, and already an American hedge fund has struck a deal to buy out some Chinese facilities. Canada, on the other hand, has no interest in becoming the 51st state, a phrase Mr. Trump has used so often it has become distinctly unfunny to the Canadians.

Diversity and equity

In a Moment of National Tragedy, Trump Equates Diversity With Incompetence

By Erica L. Green

Kenny Holston/The New York Times

It was the first national tragedy of President Trump’s second term: An American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River in late January, killing 67 people. After a moment of silence and condolences for the families whose loved ones were still being pulled from the water, Mr. Trump saw fit to cast blame.

Citing no evidence, Mr. Trump said diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered standards for air traffic controllers.

It was a crescendo moment in Mr. Trump’s campaign to eradicate programs and practices aimed at reversing the effects of systemic inequities from the federal government, and virtually every sector of American life.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump equated diversity with incompetence, and effectively aligned himself with people who use diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., as a proxy for race, a dog whistle for white grievance, and a catchall for societal ills.

The programs were created to serve as guardrails for civil rights enforcement, and to help remedy inequities faced by groups that have historically been discriminated against, such as minorities, women and people with disabilities.

But Mr. Trump left no doubt about his intent when, during his remarks, he also blamed what he characterized as Obama-era policies for the hiring of ill-equipped air traffic controllers. “They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” he said. “We want the people that are competent.”

The declaration reflected Mr. Trump’s instinct to frame major events through his political lens, and use tragedies to further his ideological goals.

On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that required the elimination of all D.E.I. programs, personnel and practices, in an effort to deliver on his promise to usher in a society that is “colorblind and merit-based.” The order unleashed an avalanche of activity throughout the federal government that has sought to reframe the country’s history of racism and discrimination by denying that it existed.

culture

For Trump, the Arts Had Become ‘Too Wokey’

By Robin Pogrebin

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Just a few weeks into his second term, President Trump stunned the arts world by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

He fired board members who had been appointed by Democrats, breaking with precedent at the institution, which had prided itself on bipartisanship since its founding. And the president — who boycotted the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after several of the stars it featured criticized him — told his new board of loyalists that he would like to see “slightly more conservative” figures celebrated.

While Mr. Trump complained that the center’s programming had become too “wokey,” his new team has been vague about its plans besides promising “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.” But his takeover incited a backlash, prompting several prominent acts, including the popular musical “Hamilton,” to cancel upcoming engagements at the center.

It was a shocking turn of events, given that U.S. presidents rarely pay much attention to arts or culture, let alone seek to play such an active role in them. But it underscores the lengths to which Mr. Trump has gone as he aggressively moves to bend some of Washington’s biggest cultural institutions to his will, while seeking to impose his views of American history, diversity and gender on federally funded entities.

Mr. Trump also took aim at the Smithsonian Institution — which includes 21 museums, libraries and the National Zoo — accusing it of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Having tried eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term only to be blocked by Congress, where the programs enjoy bipartisan support, Mr. Trump is targeting both in other ways this time around.

The humanities endowment canceled most of its grants and made plans to redirect some resources toward Mr. Trump’s priorities, including his proposed patriotic sculpture garden called the National Garden of American Heroes.

And the arts endowment announced that it would require organizations seeking grants to promise not to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology.” Those requirements are being challenged in court amid questions about what kinds of cuts the Trump administration might seek at the arts endowment.

Social Media

At the White House, a Cascade of Content for Social Media

By Shawn McCreesh

Doug Mills/The New York Times

In President Trump’s White House, the substance is the show.

One of the defining characteristics of the second Trump administration is how so many of its top officials behave like influencers.

There is a constant cascade of content meant for social media consumption. The images, videos and stunts served up to the public are meant to provoke, to hype, to bend reality. And yet, in their way, they are oftentimes some of the truest and most defining expressions of the administration and its approach to policy and governing.

Elon Musk waving around a chain saw was more than an instantly viral moment. It so clearly communicated how he saw his role in Washington — more so than any interview or soft-pedaling explanation he or the president would offer about what the Department of Government Efficiency was up to. It is a defining image of the first 100 days.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, using men in a Salvadoran prison as props for her social media content said so much about what was to come as the administration began its campaign of sending migrants there without due process.

Attorney General Pam Bondi giving binders of what she called the “Epstein files” to right-wing influencers was a stunt so hollow it actually backfired — it turned out there wasn’t much in there, and the influencers revolted. But it also seemed to communicate something about the administration and where its priorities lie, and how it feels the need to please some of the basest parts of its base.

In the span of a month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted 16 videos and still photos of himself working out with troops around the globe. That the posing and posturing for the public continued even as the Pentagon descended into turmoil over his rocky leadership seemed to say something, too.

Mr. Trump has often sought to create his own versions of reality, taking steps to constrain independent news coverage while amplifying the voices of influencers and openly supportive outlets he has invited into his orbit. And how his cabinet members behave is completely in keeping with that approach.

Doug Mills/The New York Times, Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times, Tyler Hicks/The New York Times, Graham Dickie/The New York Times, Eric Lee/The New York Times, Scott McIntyre for The New York Times, Secretaría De Prensa De La Presidencia, via Reuters, Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times, Doug Mills/The New York Times, Pool photo by Jim Watson

Produced by Jeffrey Furticella, Rebecca Lieberman, Matt Ruby and Marisa Schwartz Taylor.

7. The United States needs a victory plan for the Indo-Pacific

Excerpt:

Writing the victory plan

The US national security establishment remains focused on planning for a short, sharp war with China conducted around Taiwan in the first island chain. But such a war between two great powers, like so many before, will almost certainly become a long war of attrition. In planning for such a conflict, the United States needs a new victory plan. In writing this, planners should look to the Victory Program of World War II as a model. This process began with problem framing at the global scale, enabled estimates of the forces needed to win, and maintained the industrial base and work force needed for matériel production. In following this process, the United States could develop a credible plan to win a protracted war in the Indo-Pacific region. And in strategically communicating this plan to China, the United States may prevent such a catastrophic war from occurring in the first place.

The United States needs a victory plan for the Indo-Pacific

By Brian Kerg

atlanticcouncil.org · by aroh · April 29, 2025

April 29, 2025 • 9:00 am ET

Click on the banner above to explore the Tiger Project.

The United States desperately needs to plan for a long war in the Indo-Pacific region.

A troubling gap exists between US industrial capacity and the production requirements to sustain and win a war with China. While such assessments generally focus on shipbuilding due to the maritime focus of conflict scenarios, the same disparity exists in military platforms across all domains of warfare, such as aircraft, armor, ground-based air defense systems, and others. Defense analysis on these myriad gaps is abundant, but most evaluations are piecemeal in nature, focusing only on a single platform or domain, rather than taking a holistic approach to the problem.

This disjointed assessment is compounded by the lack of a rigorous analysis of the wartime manpower requirements to operate new platforms. Producing the ships, aircraft, and fighting vehicles to sustain a war against China—which would almost certainly be protracted—isn’t enough. The platforms must also be manned and supported. A guided missile destroyer, for example, requires a crew of more than 300 sailors. A single squadron of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters requires hundreds of maintainers, air controllers, fuelers, and other support personnel to remain operational. And while opening phases of a war with China would predominantly be an air and maritime fight involving ships, aircraft, and precision munitions, a long conflict fought for years would likely require nearly a hundred divisions of ground and amphibious forces from the US Army and Marine Corps.

Generating the personnel to man such a force would almost certainly require a draft— and getting the numbers right is itself a complex challenge that demands a delicate touch. The skill sets required for the force must be balanced against the domestic workforce’s nonmilitary needs. Skilled laborers and trained knowledge workers will be needed in abundance to sustain the production of a US war machine. In short, properly planning a national mobilization for a long war with China is a daunting task that has not yet been engaged in detail by the national security community. Developing even a “plan to plan” for mobilization can be overwhelming. Where should analysts start? Thankfully, history provides a road map.

Lessons forged in war

In the final months leading up to the United States’ involvement in World War II, senior US policymakers noted a similar disparity between military-industrial capacity and the requirements to mobilize the nation for a war with Germany. After identifying US objectives in such a war and the combat power of the enemy, planners calculated the number of US combat divisions required to fight and win. This, in turn, enabled estimates of matériel production and the skilled laborers needed for military manufacturing. Comparing this to existing, peacetime US industry, its labor force, and its draftable population, a program was written for scaling up production while executing a military draft. The result was the Victory Program, which forecasted the military forces, their missions, and matériel requirements the United States would need to defeat Germany with uncanny precision.

Quite simply, the United States needs a modern victory plan for a war against China in the Indo-Pacific. Like its predecessor, this plan must account for all requirements to win a protracted war and tap into all forms of power available to the United States. For this plan to serve as an effective deterrent, the plan and its rigor should be clearly communicated to key leaders within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While the scope of such a document would be wide and deep, the following considerations are essential.

Good strategy starts with clear objectives

With the WWII Victory Program, lead planners first took care to determine the nature of the problem they were trying to solve. This enabled the identification of a national policy objective, facilitating the development of an appropriate military strategy. It was only then that planners were postured to estimate the military forces needed to pursue that strategy and reach the determined objective. The Victory Program took as its core assumption that US policy, should it be pulled into the war, would be to eliminate totalitarianism from Europe and deny imperial Japan control of the western Pacific. All other planning flowed to support this core objective and anticipated US participation in a long, global conflict.

In planning for a long war with China, US planners must frame the problem appropriately. Too often, national security practitioners frame war-games and exercises as short, decisive conflicts focused primarily around Taiwan and in the “first island chain.” But wars between great powers are rarely short affairs and instead tend to expand horizontally while grinding on for years. The hot wars raging today in Ukraine and the Middle East bear testament to this brutal reality.

As such, a victory plan for a war against China demands framing the problem in terms of a global war, with several theaters and multiple adversaries, focused on destroying the military capabilities of the CCP and its cobelligerents wherever they may be encountered. The Victory Program was careful to consider the “potential enemies” of the United States in its calculations, and a modern victory plan must similarly consider horizontal escalation and simultaneous fights against forces from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Sea power is essential—but not sufficient

The Victory Program was focused on building the army that the United States would need, and it consequently assessed the number and types of US Army divisions needed to fight per the plan’s strategy. This task was also scoped in terms of three key missions, described as hemispheric defense, defending outlying possessions, and overseas task forces. An Indo-Pacific victory plan would similarly need to identify the right forces for the right missions.

While defeating the CCP’s island-landing campaign against Taiwan will be one mission, hemispheric defense, regional air defense, theater sustainment, and other global missions will also inform US force structure. Premier naval and amphibious forces will certainly be required as more regionally focused war-games suggest, but the military will also need forces capable of achieving dominance in all domains and against other probable enemies of the United States.

At the same time, the types of forces and platforms needed will shift depending on the phase of the war, enemy action, and the level of support from allies and partners. For example, missile defense will see more demand so long as the enemy maintains robust long-range strike capabilities, but this may change if the enemy’s precision munitions begin to dwindle and its ability to replenish its magazines is denied. Similarly, naval forces might be the nation’s priority at the beginning of the war, but ground forces that can seize, hold, and defend terrain may become a greater requirement later in the war.

Achieving economic and industrial balance

Generating such forces doesn’t just happen. In preparation for World War II, a balance had to be sought to avoid undercutting the industrial and farming base to keep the nation in the fight and on its feet, while also conducting a draft of unprecedented scale to fill out the formations needed to win. Notably, the first round of this draft occurred well before the United States was itself involved in the hostilities raging in Europe and the Pacific.

Similarly, the formations required for an Indo-Pacific victory plan could only be filled by a large draft. Additionally, the warfighting platforms, munitions, and other matériel needed for a protracted struggle can only be produced by an informational and industrial base manned by a critical mass of skilled workers. This poses the risk that indiscriminate drafting could strip the work force of the skilled workers essential to matérial production.

Planners must identify the key industrial bases the government needs to mobilize and in turn determine which skilled workers should be retained to support these bases, to avoid impairing US war-making potential. Deliberate thought must be put into determining whether an individual is more valuable to the war effort with a rifle in hand or on the production line for munitions, ships, aircraft, and other essential matérial.

Open discourse as a deterrent

While such a planning effort is critical should a war occur, it offers its greatest deterrent value if the CCP is aware of its existence.

The gaps in US readiness for a protracted war are many, known, and widely discussed within US policy circles. While such open discourse is a key strength of the US system and enables more honest assessments of gaps and in turn a path for improvement, it could also exaggerate CCP assessments of its own capability and will vis-à-vis the United States. Put another way, the frequent and grim assessments by the United States of its warfighting shortfalls could feed into China’s own campaign of public opinion warfare, and inflate China’s confidence in its ability to win.

The deterrent effect of any capability or redline is muted if the adversary is ignorant of its existence. The rigor and utility of a new US victory plan for the Indo-Pacific region should not be a hand of cards held close to the vest, but laid out on the table to demonstrate US resolve and long-term commitment to such a struggle should it break out. In this way, the plan could help tip the scales of deterrence and prevent such a war from breaking out at all.

Writing the victory plan

The US national security establishment remains focused on planning for a short, sharp war with China conducted around Taiwan in the first island chain. But such a war between two great powers, like so many before, will almost certainly become a long war of attrition. In planning for such a conflict, the United States needs a new victory plan. In writing this, planners should look to the Victory Program of World War II as a model. This process began with problem framing at the global scale, enabled estimates of the forces needed to win, and maintained the industrial base and work force needed for matériel production. In following this process, the United States could develop a credible plan to win a protracted war in the Indo-Pacific region. And in strategically communicating this plan to China, the United States may prevent such a catastrophic war from occurring in the first place.

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Kerg is an active-duty US Marine Corps operational planner and a nonresident fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also a 2025 nonresident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a 501(c)3 partnered with Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions or opinions of the US Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US government.

The Tiger Project, an Atlantic Council effort, develops new insights and actionable recommendations for the United States, as well as its allies and partners, to deter and counter aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Explore our collection of work, including expert commentary, multimedia content, and in-depth analysis, on strategic defense and deterrence issues in the region.

8. What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned book burning? (Part I and Part II)

Excerpts:

The second reaction I’ve encountered since the Navy announced Nimitz Library’s book purge is disappointment. “Why did the Naval Academy cave? If broad exposure to the arts and sciences is so valuable for the education of a naval officer, then why not push back? Since when have the Navy and Marine Corps backed down from a fight?”

I’ve been struggling and continue to struggle with these questions. I’ve decided, therefore, to make this a two-part Substack post. I need more time to think about this. I’ll fire off Part II of this essay next week.

...

As I drafted this essay, I tried to put myself in the boots of the Colonels and Captains who were, no doubt, consulted. How would I have advised the CNO or the Superintendent of the Naval Academy if I were on his/her staff? Never in my career have I recommended a course of action that would foreseeably end a flag officer's career. This occasion, therefore, would have been a first. After examining the prudence, legality, and morality of Secretary Hegseth's orders, considering my duties to USNA students and faculty, and weighing the grave harms and substantial goods that would result from either action, I would have recommended disobedience. If, indeed, taking a stand for academic freedom at the service academies meant sacrificing remarkable military and academic careers, this would have been a righteous hill to die on.

Continuing with my thought experiment, if the CNO or Superintendent responded, "Thank you for your input, Captain Herbert, but that's not what we're going to do," I would have fully understood. It's the essence of a moral dilemma that a legitimate case can be made for and against both actions. I would, however, have reminded the admiral that we will likely get another chance to take a principled stand, or not, for academic freedom. Extortionists always come back for more.

What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned book burning? (Part I)

The book purge at the United States Naval Academy

https://substack.com/inbox/post/161646469?r=foves&utm

Roger Herbert

Apr 18, 2025

Just over two weeks ago, the Navy announced that, at the direction of Secretary of Defense Hegseth, it had removed from the shelves of the Nimitz Library 381 books deemed to violate President Trump’s executive orders to eliminate materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion from federal institutions. Since then, I’ve encountered two reactions to this story from acquaintances curious about the thoughts of a former Naval Academy professor (I taught ethics).

The first reaction has been one of surprise. For many, learning that Nimitz Library holds texts (or at least once held texts) that aren’t directly and obviously related to military matters contradicted – in a positive way – their preconceptions of what a military academy is and does. “Yes, Maya Angelou is a remarkable poet and memoirist, but what can I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing teach Midshipmen about fighting wars?”

This reaction reflects a lack of familiarity with the mission of our service academies and, more broadly, the nature of officership in Western militaries. Contrary to stereotypes, there is no field of endeavor in which a well-rounded education, in both the STEM fields and the liberal arts, is more urgently required. Naval Academy graduates manage nuclear reactions hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface, apply the concepts of aeronautical engineering at many times the speed of sound, and routinely order other human beings to run toward the sound of the guns when prudence would suggest running away. In preparation for service in “the Fleet,” Midshipmen must not only master the laws of thermodynamics and the equations that describe lift and thrust, but they must also acquire a fundamental understanding of what constitutes a lawful (and unlawful) order, why it’s imperative for their troops to observe principles of just conduct in war, and how humans respond to danger, fear, chaos, uncertainty, pain, and exhaustion.

In short, there is no branch of human knowledge that is not relevant to the art and science of leading troops in combat. Officers who are unfamiliar with Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Newton, Melville, Tolstoy, Crane, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Hemmingway, Tim O’Brien – and, yes, Maya Angelou – are not as prepared as they could and should be. And because the moral, intellectual, and physical preparation of America’s officer corps is so consequential to America’s security, the Naval Academy should be (and is!) among finest institutes of higher education in the nation. The Naval Academy is ranked #4 among national liberal arts colleges in the latest rankings from US News and World Report (West Point and the Air Force Academy are tied at #8). It also ranks #10 in the number of students awarded Rhodes Scholarships between 1904 and 2023 (West Point is #5 and Air Force Academy is #13).

Sustaining all of this requires world-class libraries at the Naval Academy, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. Unfortunately, Nimitz Library is now 381 books dumber than it was before Secretary Hegseth’s misguided intervention. Two copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf still sit on Nimitz Library’s shelves, while Janet Jacob’s Memorializing the Holocaust has been removed. Trump administration auditors were okay with The Bell Curve, a book that argues that Black men and women are intellectually inferior to white people, but Gresson, Kincheloe, and Steinberg’s decisive takedown of The Bell Curve is gone.

Two US institutions stand out as uniquely worthy of American pride: higher education and the military. I say this because there really are no close seconds or near peers to America’s colleges and universities or to America’s military might. Over 1.1 million students from around the world came to America last year to study at our colleges and universities. As for US military power, it is unprecedented in the history of our species. The US spent more on its military last year than the next 10 countries combined and has done so for decades.

With one order, Secretary Hegseth has managed to degrade both of these institutions. The book-purge order makes sense only if its intent is to undermine the Naval Academy’s academic credibility, diminish its prestige as a premier institute of higher learning, and promote mediocrity in the Ensigns and Second Lieutenants it commissions into the Navy and Marine Corps. Otherwise, Secretary Hegseth’s order is breathtakingly stupid. Even if we disregard the obvious harms that result from any narrowing of the intellectual landscape of Nimitz library, the titles selected for removal send an unambiguous signal to ethnic and racial minorities (especially Black alumni, students, and prospective students), women, non-Christians, and LGBTQ people that USNA does not value scholarship by them or about them. Among the predictable results of Secretary Hegseth’s very public assault on academic freedom at the Naval Academy are the loss of talented faculty who rightfully view academic freedom as a non-negotiable term of continued employment, the degraded ability to attract the best young scholars to backfill the imminent brain drain at the service academies, and the associated erosion of student quality as prospective students and their parents watch USNA’s academic status fall vis-à-vis colleges and universities that have not been academically compromised by culture wars.

The second reaction I’ve encountered since the Navy announced Nimitz Library’s book purge is disappointment. “Why did the Naval Academy cave? If broad exposure to the arts and sciences is so valuable for the education of a naval officer, then why not push back? Since when have the Navy and Marine Corps backed down from a fight?”

I’ve been struggling and continue to struggle with these questions. I’ve decided, therefore, to make this a two-part Substack post. I need more time to think about this. I’ll fire off Part II of this essay next week.

Roger Herbert's Substack

What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned book burning? (Part II)

The book purge at the United States Naval Academy

https://substack.com/inbox/post/162074262?r=foves&utm

Roger Herbert

Apr 24, 2025

In Part I of this post, I assert that the US Naval Academy's status as an academic powerhouse is no accident. Academic excellence is essential to USNA's mission: developing Midshipmen "morally, mentally, and physically" for service as officers in the United States Navy and Marine Corps. A necessary condition for preserving its prominence is a full-throated commitment to academic freedom, the right of USNA scholars – professors and students – to explore ideas and express opinions without undue intrusions from the institution or the government. As I argue in Part I, Defense Secretary Hegseth's order to remove 381 books from the shelves of Nimitz Library for political reasons is an egregious rejection of this cherished ideal.

In Part II, I examine and critique the decision to comply with Secretary Hegseth's order.

Prudence, Legality, Morality

Given their martial trappings, it's ironic that America's service academies are far less capable of pushing back against government intrusion than civilian colleges and universities. Unlike the presidents of Columbia, Harvard, or Ohio State, the Superintendent of the Naval Academy (the service academy equivalent of a college president) doesn't answer solely to a board of trustees. He or she is bound by oath to "support and defend" our Constitution. Article II Section 2 of that hallowed document establishes the president as commander-in-chief of the military. In other words, Admiral Davids, the 65th Superintendent of the Naval Academy, ultimately reports to Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States. "The prez" is "the supe's" boss.

That oath serves as an ethical North Star for officers in the US military, one constant in a morally complex and politically tumultuous universe. There is, therefore, a strong and necessary bias toward obeying orders from above (and expecting obedience from below) according to a constitutionally ordained chain of command. The bias toward obeying orders from the civilians sitting atop that chain of command – the President and Secretary of Defense – is especially strong. America's survival as a democratic republic depends on our unequivocal commitment to the ideal of civilian control of the military.

However, as any newly commissioned officer can attest, the bias toward obedience is not an absolute edict. Not all orders are created equal; they vary along three axes: prudence, legality, and morality. Naval Academy Youngsters (sophomores) learn that naval officers should challenge imprudent orders if time permits but then salute and enthusiastically carry them out if the boss insists. Officers should also challenge unlawful orders, time permitting. However, unlike orders that are merely imprudent, palpably illegal orders must be disobeyed, regardless of the circumstances or the seniority of the person issuing the order. Indeed, failure to disobey an unlawful order is itself unlawful.

The most complex combination is an order that, while legal, is immoral. A common example is an order that would cause unnecessary human suffering. A specific example is the case of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. When Thompson observed what appeared to be American troops firing on Vietnamese civilians, he disobeyed orders to "return to base" and set his helo down between the Vietnamese villagers and an advancing platoon of US soldiers led by Lieutenant William Calley. Hundreds of Vietnamese noncombatants were killed during what became known as the My Lai Massacre, but hundreds more were saved because Thompson disobeyed a lawful but immoral order.

Midshipmen study the Hugh Thompson case. The learning objective is for the Mids to understand that doing the right thing could potentially require them to disobey a lawful order. However, they also learn that disobeying lawful orders, even if they're clearly immoral, is risky. Assessing the morality of an action is typically more challenging than determining its legality; morality is inherently less precise than black letter law. Officers who disobey lawful but immoral orders may earn praise. Alternatively, they may face dismissal, criminal procedures, or even jail time.

Analysis and Critique

How does Secretary Hegseth's book purge measure up against these three criteria?

Regarding its prudence, Hegseth's order earns low marks. It insults large swaths of the USNA community by implying that the offending books – mostly by or about people of color, women, non-Christians, or LGBTQ people – are somehow dangerous. It infantilizes the Midshipmen (adults all) by suggesting they're incapable of critically evaluating novel ideas without becoming indoctrinated by them. It risks a flight of talent as professors who rightly reject constraints on academic freedom seek positions better insulated from government influence. Over time, the brain-drain, and the associated challenge of attracting new scholars, will erode the quality and prestige of a Naval Academy education and, consequently, the quality of prospective students it attracts. A bottom-up erosion of the quality of America's officer corps is inevitable.

For the presidents of MIT, Princeton, or UCLA, prudential considerations alone are sufficient grounds to kill bad ideas. For the Superintendent of the Naval Academy, however, defying an order solely because of its monumental stupidity would be unlawful. The Superintendent can disobey Hegseth's order and keep faith with her oath (and stay on the right side of the law) only by making a case that the order is palpably illegal or immoral.

The legal basis for Secretary Hegseth's order is President Trump's executive order titled "Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling," which the Trump administration specifically extended to include the military academies. Executive orders function as law within the executive branch; they can mandate action by federal agencies (like the service academies) and are enforceable by the courts. Executive orders cannot, however, conflict with existing laws. In a 4 April letter to the Army, Navy, and Air Force Secretaries, Democratic Representatives Adam Smith and Chrissy Houlahan criticized USNA's book purge as a "blatant attack on the First Amendment." That seems right to me. Viewpoint discrimination – government interference with public discourse by censoring one side of the argument – is prohibited under the First Amendment. I hope a party that can demonstrate standing in the courts comes forward to challenge the constitutionality of this McCarthy-esque executive order. However, until the executive order is overturned by the courts, by Congress, or by a future president, the Navy and Naval Academy have no choice but to treat Secretary Hegseth's order as lawful. (I'd be most grateful if a reader with a law degree would challenge this conclusion.)

That leaves us with ethics. Does compliance with SECDEF's order require the Naval Academy to do something immoral?

In short, yes. Promise-breaking is an archetypically immoral act (Kant employs "lying promises" to prove his categorical imperative). The Naval Academy is breaking a promise to its faculty and students by complying with Hegseth's order. USNA has long pulicized its commitment to the norms of open academic inquiry. For example, its Faculty Handbook and past accreditation reports claim that USNA civilian faculty enjoy the same academic freedom protections observed at civilian institutions. The Nimitz Library website is even more explicit:

Intellectual and academic freedom have been cornerstones of academic thought and rigor for over a century in higher education in the United States. The Nimitz Library is dedicated to these core principles of building knowledge in its acquisition, promotion, and retention of scholarly materials. Thus, the librarians actively acquire resources from content creators that encompass the full spectrum of voices and perspectives available.

Without assurances that the Naval Academy embraces academic freedom just as enthusiastically as any civilian college or university, many top candidates – prospective faculty and students alike – would have accepted offers elsewhere. USNA's diligent compliance with SECDEF's assault on academic freedom reveals that its assurances were hollow promises, principles to be jettisoned when honoring them became hard.

Some may argue (though I would not) that removing 381 books from a collection that includes hundreds of thousands of titles is hardly an infringement on academic freedom. Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts, and Naval Academy grad, cautions against underestimating the dangers. "Book banning can be a canary in a coal mine," he told a New York Times reporter. It "could predict a stifling of free speech and thought." Indeed, it could. A week after NYT ran Admiral Stavridis' warning, Naval Academy officials canceled a scheduled lecture after the speaker, Ryan Holiday, refused to refrain from addressing the book purge. Stavridis' canary didn't last long.

Sound moral reasoning, as taught at the Naval Academy, must also account for the consequences of a prospective action. Generally following the utilitarian tradition, Midshipmen learn that the morally right thing to do is the action that introduces the most "net good" (or least net harm) into the world.

When considering the prospect of disobeying Secretary Hegseth's book purge order, the "harms" side of the ledger is chilling. For starters, the acting Chief of Naval Operations (the former CNO was recently fired, ostensibly for her commitment to DEI) and the Superintendent would have been fired straight away. While this detail wouldn't have influenced either officer – both are pillars of honor and integrity who are entirely motivated by the interests of the Naval Academy, the Navy and Marine Corps, and the nation – it would certainly have influenced the loyal staff advising them.

The primary harm that likely deterred the CNO and Superintendent from taking a principled stand was the prospect of a vindictive administration effectively dismantling the US Naval Academy as we know it. Harvard's situation illustrates the lengths to which the Trump administration will go to punish any institution that openly defies it. But because Harvard is a private and extremely well-endowed institution, it seems likely that it will weather the attack. By contrast, the federally funded Naval Academy has no private sector breakwater to protect it from executive branch retribution. Through mass firings and ideologically based hiring, the administration could transform one of the world's premier institutions of higher learning into little more than a trade school. Given this dire prospect, it's reasonable for anyone to conclude that the net harm resulting from defiance of SECDEF's order would overwhelm any good that might result.

That conclusion, however, relies on the assumption that sacrificing 381 books will satiate the administration's interest in the US Naval Academy. This assumption ignores Columbia's experience with appeasement. Columbia's good-faith concessions have thus far only inspired new demands while restoring none of its funding. Both Columbia and USNA may be guilty of underestimating the scope and scale of the Trump administration's ambitions vis-à-vis higher education. The administration has signaled through Project 2025, comments from senior administration officials, and threats from the president himself that the administration intends to fundamentally dismantle the culture of higher ed, seize sovereignty from the "Marxist maniacs" and "leftist lunatics" who currently dominate academia, and ultimately enlist America's colleges and universities in the service of promoting conservative values. In short, the book removal order is likely only the beginning, not the end, of government intrusion on academic freedom at the service academies. When you pay protection money, it's never "one and done."

What about the good outcomes that would have resulted from a joint letter from the CNO and the Superintendent of the Naval Academy advising SECDEF that they cannot in good conscience carry out this imprudent, potentially illegal, and definitely immoral order? The signal of confidence in and respect for the Brigade of Midshipmen – especially those of color, women, and LGBTQ orientation – would have profoundly and positively influenced these future leaders for decades. It would have confirmed for the professors and students who accepted offers from the Naval Academy – while turning down offers from Brown, Cal Poly, and Texas – that USNA's commitment to academic freedom was genuine, not an empty promise. Finally, defying SECDEF's repugnant order would have resulted in headlines featuring Harvard and the US Naval Academy as guardians of academic freedom in America.

What was the right thing to do?

So, what should the Navy and the Naval Academy have done? Anyone who maintains that the answer to this question is obvious either doesn't understand the essential importance of academic freedom to the growth of human knowledge or doesn't comprehend the burden of military command. Both options are defensible, and both are costly. Nevertheless, a decision must be made.

As I drafted this essay, I tried to put myself in the boots of the Colonels and Captains who were, no doubt, consulted. How would I have advised the CNO or the Superintendent of the Naval Academy if I were on his/her staff? Never in my career have I recommended a course of action that would foreseeably end a flag officer's career. This occasion, therefore, would have been a first. After examining the prudence, legality, and morality of Secretary Hegseth's orders, considering my duties to USNA students and faculty, and weighing the grave harms and substantial goods that would result from either action, I would have recommended disobedience. If, indeed, taking a stand for academic freedom at the service academies meant sacrificing remarkable military and academic careers, this would have been a righteous hill to die on.

Continuing with my thought experiment, if the CNO or Superintendent responded, "Thank you for your input, Captain Herbert, but that's not what we're going to do," I would have fully understood. It's the essence of a moral dilemma that a legitimate case can be made for and against both actions. I would, however, have reminded the admiral that we will likely get another chance to take a principled stand, or not, for academic freedom. Extortionists always come back for more.

Photo credit: Robert J. Baldock

9. Detained on verge of U.S. citizenship, Mohsen Mahdawi speaks from Vermont prison

I recommend listening to this at the link and hearing the young man describe the situation in his own words.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5377484/columbia-student-mohsen-mahdawi-citizenship-arrest

I would dare say that he has a better understanding of and trust in America, the courts, and the American people than those who support his deportation. That was a helluva bait and switch. Come for your final citizenship interview only to be arrested to be deported.

Detained on verge of U.S. citizenship, Mohsen Mahdawi speaks from Vermont prison

Updated April 29, 20258:25 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

Leila Fadel

Jan Johnson

Kaity Kline

NPR · by By

Mohsen Mahdawi sits for a picture at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, Vt. on April 28. Leila Fadel/NPR

The April 14 detention of Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was caught on video as he flashed a peace sign while being taken from an immigration office in Colchester, Vt. He told NPR's Morning Edition he'd arrived thinking an interview there would be his final step to becoming a U.S. citizen after 10 years of living and learning in the United States.

Instead, after sitting for a naturalization interview and signing a document pledging allegiance to the U.S. and to protecting and defending the Constitution, he was arrested by masked agents in Homeland Security jackets.

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In the first media interview with any of the Trump administration's student detainees – all at risk of deportation — Mahdawi spoke to Leila Fadel in the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, Vt., where he's awaiting a court hearing Wednesday in a petition that argues government officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech and his right to due process.

Before the interview, he said he had been meditating to find calm, as he does every day.

"I am centered internally. I am at peace. While I still know deeply that this is a level of injustice that I am facing, I have faith. I have faith that justice will prevail," said Mahdawi, who co-founded Columbia's Palestinian Student Union and was president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association.

Mahdawi, a lawful permanent U.S. resident who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, is among multiple international students facing deportation – ostensibly over their advocacy on several campuses against Israel's war in Gaza.

His lawyers are arguing in federal court in Vermont that Mahdawi was detained "in retaliation for his speech advocating for Palestinian human rights" and that his arrest and detention are part of a policy "intended to silence and chill the speech of those who advocate for Palestinian human rights."

The Justice Department Monday submitted new court filings that included a two-page letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that the "activities and presence of Mahdawi in the United States undermines U.S. policy to combat antisemitism." It added that protests like those Mahdawi led at Columbia "potentially undermine the peace process underway in the Middle East," where efforts for a ceasefire have stalled.

Right now some 59 hostages taken from Israel are still being held by Hamas in Gaza, about half are believed dead according to Israel. Meanwhile Israel has been withholding aid from Gaza for eight weeks and Palestinians are going hungry as they endure daily attacks.

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Monday's court filing did not provide any evidence of the accusations against Mahdawi in the letter, including those of threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders. The government argues that the federal court in Vermont should not grant Mahdawi's request for release because it does not have jurisdiction in foreign policy matters.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to NPR's request for comment.

In response to the court filings, Mahdawi's lawyer, Luna Droubi, said the accusations in the letter are "completely false." Mahdawi has been very vocal in his opposition to antisemitism.

"Mr. Mahdawi is a person of complete and full principle who believes in the human dignity of every person," she told NPR. "The government's just scraping at the bottom of the barrel to try to find something, anything that is simply leading to punishment of students for their advocacy for Palestinian rights."

The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

On his confidence that justice will prevail:

First of all, seeing the people of Vermont, the people in the United States raising their voices, saying this is unjust and we don't accept it gives me faith. Second, I believe in a system of democracy and I have faith in the justice system here. And the last one, which is the most important to me, what gives me faith, is seeing the resilience and the strength in my people in Gaza. After all of the pain and destruction and the genocide that they went through they still hold on hope and they have strong faith.

Note: Mahdawi calls what is happening in Gaza a genocide. It's also what Israeli and international human rights groups like B'tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and Amnesty International have deemed Israel's response in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel. The 2023 assault killed nearly 1,200 people and Hamas took 251 hostages, according to the Israeli government. Israel denies the accusation of genocide.

On a decade of experiencing of American liberties:

Before coming to this country, freedom was just a concept. But the actual experience of freedom of movement to travel among 50 states, freedom to breathe the breeze of the ocean, and to feel your toes in the sand. This is the first place I have experienced this freedom of speech where I will not be actually retaliated against or punished for saying my mind.

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Do I still feel this way? I think it's in jeopardy. I think this is a red flag, not only to me, but to the American people who care about freedom, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have the hope that this country will fulfill its promise.

On the day he was detained:

When I get the appointment the first thing was uh… is this a trap or is it legit? And I realized directly that I am dealing with two extreme opposite poles. One is becoming a citizen with full rights, and the other one is being detained and having no rights.

I see the risk, I see the opportunity, and I want the American people to see this, too. To see this level of injustice. That I am doing everything legally, that I have prepared and studied for the Constitution and that I went willingly and respected the law, did everything the way how it's supposed to be done.

On his First Amendment case:

When I speak of injustice, I remember Martin Luther King. And when he says injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And the injustice that I am facing here and the injustice that the antiwar movement is facing, is also connected to the injustice that the Palestinian people are going through.

We're talking about 55,000 people have been killed. We see children being killed, amputated, losing their parents, no homes. This is what's moving us. And when I signed on the Pledge of Allegiance, I signed to protect and defend the Constitution. I am practicing here my constitutional rights, not to call for any destruction of anyone, not to fight anyone. I'm saying we need peace. We need to stop the war. And we want children, all children, to live in peace, without fear and without trauma.

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Note: Gaza health officials say more than 52,000 people have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023.

On the government's allegations that his continued presence in the U.S. would have adverse consequences on foreign policy and that he allegedly "advocated for violence, glorified and supported terrorists, and harrassed Jews":

The government is gaslighting the American people and especially the American Jewish communities. In fact, we had so many Jews and Israelis who actually joined us in saying ceasefire now. So they are actually weaponizing antisemitism in order to destroy the hope that this America has, which is universities and liberal institutions. They are part of the checks and balances actually of this country, of any democracy.

On his hopes of becoming an American citizen:

Do I want to still be an American? I have showed my will, my desire to become an American in a place that I call home in Vermont. And the American government has denied me this opportunity by setting me up, actually deceiving me. So now it's up to the American people to decide what path they would want to take, whether to have the path where they welcome me as a citizen of this country or not. And I also want to remind everybody, the definition of the government in the Constitution, we the people and I am counting on the people who I've got the chance to know, as kindhearted, good people to stand up for what is right.

NPR · by By

10. Vernon Walters— Renaissance Man

I came across this article about a brilliant man who devoted his life to selfless service to our nation in some very incredible ways.

He is really a historical figure worthy of study. Where are men and women like him today? He should be an inspiration to all of us.

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Vernon-Walters-Renaissance-Man.pdf

Studies in Intelligence Vol. 46 No. 1 (2002)

Vernon Walters— Renaissance Man

In Memoriam

Henry R. Appelbaum

"An honest patriot of enormous talent, his was an exceptionally rich life of service to country and humanity. A natural leader; he rose to excellence in every profession he entered—soldier, intelligence ofﬁcer, diplomat." —From a statement by DCI George J. Tenet, February 2002

Lieutenant General Vernon A. Walters—a bluff, jovial, astonishingly talented man who served from 1972 to 1976 as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI)—died in Florida on 10 February 2002 at the age of 85.

Walters’ multi-faceted professional life included several interrelated careers. He was a fast-rising military ofﬁcer; a respected intelligence expert; a savvy US ambassador; a globe-trotting presidential envoy; and an

accomplished author. Walters was also a gifted linguist and translator, talents that played an important role in his rise to prominence. And his friends knew him as a highly entertaining mimic and raconteur.

Early Years: Vernon Walters was born in New York City on 3 January 1917. His father was a British immigrant and insurance salesman. From age 6, young Vernon lived in Britain and France with his family. At 16, he returned to the United States and worked for his father as an insurance claims adjuster and investigator.

Education, Language Prowess: The future general’s formal education beyond elementary school consisted entirely of a few years at Stonyhurst College, a 400-year-old Jesuit secondary school in Lancashire, England.

He did not attend a university. In later years, he seemed to enjoy reﬂecting on the fact that he had risen fairly high and accomplished quite a bit despite a near-total lack of formal academic training.

Among his most remarkable achievements were mastering some six West European languages, learning the basics of several others, and later becoming ﬂuent in Chinese and Russian. Throughout his professional life, Gen. Walters enjoyed drawing a crowd by engaging in impromptu cocktail- party linguistic "battles of wits" with other multi-lingual people. In one version, a person would engage two others in conversation. Each time a participant’s turn came to respond, he or she had to speak in a different language. Apparently the game went on until only one of the participants had an unused language left in which to converse. Walters no doubt fared well in such encounters.

Military and Civilian Achievements: Walters joined the Army in 1941 and was soon commissioned. He served in Africa and Italy during World War II, earning medals for distinguished military and intelligence achievements.

His linguistic skills helped him obtain prized post-war assignments as an aide and interpreter for several Presidents:

· He was at President Truman’s side as an interpreter in key meetings with America’s Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin American allies.

· His language skills helped him win Truman’s conﬁdence, and he accompanied the President to the Paciﬁc in the early 1950s, serving as a key aide in Truman’s unsuccessful effort to reach a reconciliation with an insubordinate Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Commander of United Nations forces in Korea.

· In Europe in the 1950s, Walters served President Eisenhower and other top US ofﬁcials as a translator and aide at a series of NATO summit conferences. He also worked in Paris at Marshall Plan headquarters and helped set up the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe.

· He was with then-Vice President Nixon in 1958 when an anti-American crowd stoned their car in Caracas, Venezuela. Gen. Walters suffered facial cuts from ﬂying glass. (The Vice President managed to avoid injury.)

· His simultaneous translation of a speech by Nixon in France prompted President Charles de Gaulle to say to the US President, "Nixon, you gave a magniﬁcent speech, but your interpreter was eloquent."

Diplomat and Special Envoy: In the 1960s, Gen. Walters served as a US military attaché in France, Italy, and Brazil. Two decades later he was a high-proﬁle US Ambassador to the UN and then to West Germany. He also served as a roving ambassador, performing sensitive diplomatic missions that included talks in Cuba, Syria, and elsewhere. He was sent to Morocco to meet discreetly with PLO ofﬁcials and warn them against any repetition of the 1973 murders of two American diplomats in the region. (In a much earlier visit to Morocco, he had given a ride on a tank to a young boy who later became King Hassan II.)

While serving as a military attaché in Paris from 1967 to 1972, Walters played a role in secret peace talks with North Vietnam. He arranged to "smugle" National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger into France for secret meetings with a senior North Vietnamese ofﬁcial, and then smugle him out again. He accomplished this by borrowing a private airplane from an old friend, French President Georges Pompidou.

Senior Intelligence Ofﬁcial: President Nixon appointed Gen. Walters as DDCI in 1972. (The General also served as Acting DCI for two months in mid-1973.) During his four years as DDCI, he worked closely with four successive Directors as the Agency—and the nation—confronted such major international developments as the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the subsequent oil crisis, the turbulent end of the Vietnam conﬂict, and the Chilean military coup against the Allende government. According to a close colleague, Gen. Walters also "averted a looming catastrophe" for the CIA in connection with the Watergate scandal:

Despite numerous importunings from on high, [Walters] ﬂatly refused to...cast a cloak of "national security" over the guilty parties. At the critical moment, he... refused to involve the Agency, and bluntly informed the highest levels of the executive [branch] that further insistence from that quarter would result in his

immediate resignation. And the rest is history.

Gen. Walters himself reﬂected on those challenging days in his 1978 autobiography, Silent Missions:

I told [President Nixon’s White House counsel] that on the day I went to work at the CIA I had hung on the wall of my ofﬁce a color photograph showing the view through the window of my home in Florida…When people asked me what it was, I told them [this] was what was waiting [for me] if anyone squeezed me too hard.

Later Life: During the 1990s, when he was no longer a public servant, Gen. Walters worked as a business consultant and was active on the lecture circuit. He wrote another notable book, The Mighty and the Meek (published in 2001), which proﬁled famous people with whom he had worked during his eventful life.

This tribute was drafted by Henry R. Appelbaum, an editor at the Center for the Study of Intelligence. He drew on a conversation he had with Gen.

Walters in 2001; the recollections of an associate of Walters; a debrieﬁng after one of the General’s sensitive diplomatic missions in the 1980s; and open-source US government and media reports.

The views, opinions and ﬁndings of the author expressed in this article should not be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of its factual statements and interpretations or representing the ofﬁcial positions of any component of the United States government.

11. Can Trump Broker Peace in Ukraine: Prospects and Challenges?

Excerpts:

Concrete solutions must address the core issues: Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russia’s security concerns, and the interests of global powers. A potential framework could include guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence while limiting NATO expansion, implementing international oversight in disputed regions, and gradually lifting sanctions as verifiable progress is made. Trust-building measures, such as limited ceasefires and prisoner exchanges, are crucial first steps.

However, we must caution against the dangers of prolonging this conflict. The growing insecurity linked to its expansion threatens not only Eastern Europe but global stability. The war’s impact on energy markets, food security, and economic systems underscores its worldwide consequences. Moreover, the risk of nuclear escalation looms large, demanding immediate de-escalation efforts.

The success or failure of these peace efforts will not only determine the future of Ukraine but will also set a precedent for resolving complex international conflicts in an increasingly multipolar world. To move forward, a multilateral approach involving key players like the U.S., EU, China, and international organizations is essential. This approach should prioritize diplomatic solutions over military escalation, focus on humanitarian aid, and lay the groundwork for post-conflict reconstruction and a new pan-European security architecture. Given that the US-led NATO alliance is unwilling to deploy its own troops to defend Ukraine against Russia, a compromise must be sought. Ukraine’s vital interests and Russia’s security concerns could potentially be reconciled through a nuanced approach: postponing the question of NATO membership for Ukraine while offering alternative security guarantees take place under the auspices of the United Nations. This strategy aligns with President Zelensky’s early-war proposal regarding Crimea and the eastern Donbas region, suggesting that territorial disputes be temporarily set aside for future negotiations. Such an approach might pave the way for de-escalation and diplomatic progress in the ongoing conflict. Ultimately, ending this war requires balancing principled stands with pragmatic compromises, ensuring a stable peace that respects international law and addresses the legitimate concerns of all parties involved.

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

Can Trump Broker Peace in Ukraine: Prospects and Challenges?

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/30/can-trump-broker-peace-in-ukraine-prospects-and-challenges/

by Christopher Zambakari

04.30.2025 at 06:00am

The United States claims its objective in Ukraine is clear: ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and delivering Russia a decisive “strategic failure.” Yet, the reality on the ground paints a more complex picture—a grueling conflict, staggering costs, and the risk of nuclear war. Can the West’s ambitious goals, from erasing Russia’s territorial gains to regime change in Moscow, align with Ukraine’s desperate fight for survival and Russia’s unyielding security demands? The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the path to resolution remains elusive. With each passing day, the human and economic costs of the conflict continue to mount, underscoring the urgent need for a diplomatic breakthrough. The question looms: can U.S. policy bridge the chasm between principle and pragmatic peace? Can Donald Trump break rank with his predecessor and broker a peace agreement that endures?

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has deep historical roots. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Ukraine declared independence. However, tensions persisted as Ukraine sought closer ties with Western Europe while maintaining deep cultural and economic ties with Russia. In 2014, these divisions erupted into conflict when protests over then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian policies led to his ousting. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and a civil war broke out in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

In 2022, the conflict escalated dramatically when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine, with Western support, fiercely resisted, reclaiming territories but suffering immense devastation. Russia demands Ukraine’s neutrality, the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, and autonomy for separatist regions. Conversely, Ukraine insists on the restoration of its territorial integrity, reparations, and security guarantees.

Reconciling these positions requires balancing Ukraine’s sovereignty with Russia’s security concerns. The Trump administration could propose a mediated settlement guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence but barring NATO membership, paired with international oversight for separatist regions and a phased Russian withdrawal. Economic incentives, such as lifting targeted sanctions contingent on compliance, could foster cooperation. The U.S. could propose a ‘Marshall Plan‘ for Ukraine, involving both Western and Russian investments to rebuild infrastructure and foster economic interdependence in the region. Trump’s transactional approach and focus on diplomacy might uniquely position him to bridge these divides and achieve a durable peace.

The Russia-Ukraine war remains the largest land conflict in Europe since World War II. Despite ongoing international mediation efforts, diplomatic negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv have made limited progress. With the 2024 U.S. presidential election behind him, President Donald Trump has reiterated his claim that he could swiftly bring the war to an end—drawing both skepticism and global attention. Meanwhile, the war continues to exact a heavy toll on Ukraine’s infrastructure and civilian population, with no clear resolution in sight.

Global Power Dynamics

The war in Ukraine has substantially altered the map of global power dynamics. Major international players have changed their stance on peace talks. Recent events show how diplomatic efforts and strategic interests of world powers are intertwined. The war has not only reshaped regional alliances but also challenged the existing international order. As the conflict continues, it has exposed the limitations of traditional diplomatic channels and highlighted the need for innovative approaches to conflict resolution, potentially opening the door for unconventional mediators like President Donald Trump. The choice of Saudi Arabia as a neutral venue for talks signals a shift in global diplomacy and highlights the Kingdom’s growing influence in international affairs. The Trump administration must navigate complex domestic political landscapes in both the U.S. and Russia, where hardline positions on the conflict have significant public support.

US-Russia Relations Under Trump

The recently concluded Munich Security Conference revealed growing tensions between the U.S. and its European allies, with some European leaders expressing concern over potential unilateral actions by the Trump administration. Trump’s previous presidency showed mixed signals toward Russia. His administration-imposed sanctions while he personally praised Putin. The Biden administration has given Ukraine billions in military, humanitarian, and economic aid. Trump criticized this support. His promise to end the conflict within 24 hours worries allies, especially after he held back security aid to Ukraine during his first term. His transactional approach to international relations and focus on “peace through strength” might uniquely position him to bridge the divides between the conflicting parties.

China’s Role in Peace Process

Beijing has stepped up as an active diplomatic player. They put forward a 12-point peace framework that demands respecting territorial integrity, establishing humanitarian corridors, ensuring uninterrupted grain exports, and ending Western sanctions against Russia. China’s involvement in the peace process reflects its growing global influence and desire to shape international affairs. The Chinese proposal aims to balance the interests of both Russia and Ukraine while also challenging Western dominance in conflict resolution. China’s growing influence and its potential role as a mediator or spoiler in the peace process must be carefully considered in any diplomatic strategy. China’s efforts to garner support from Global South countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa, demonstrate its strategy to build a coalition of “important forces in promoting world peace,” potentially reshaping the global diplomatic landscape.

Military and Strategic Realities

The military balance in the Russia-Ukraine war has shown a radical alteration lately. Russia now has approximately 470,000 troops in occupied territories. The significant increase in Russian troop numbers indicates a sustained commitment to the conflict and poses a considerable challenge to Ukrainian forces. This shift in military presence has implications for the strategic landscape, potentially influencing both battlefield dynamics and negotiation leverage. The growing Russian military footprint also raises concerns about the long-term occupation of Ukrainian territories and the challenges of eventual de-escalation and withdrawal.

The complexity of the conflict demands a multifaceted approach to diplomacy, involving not just the two primary parties but also international mediators. Establishing neutral ground for talks and ensuring equal representation are crucial first steps. Moreover, addressing immediate humanitarian concerns, such as prisoner exchanges and civilian protection, can help build the goodwill necessary for more substantive negotiations. The involvement of respected international organizations, like the United Nations or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), can provide the necessary framework and legitimacy for these preliminary diplomatic efforts.

Building Trust Between Parties

Trust remains the biggest problem, especially when you have Ukraine’s experience with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which saw Ukraine give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances, adds another layer of complexity to the current conflict. The core elements to build trust include concrete, mutually agreed-upon terms, enforceable security guarantees, international verification mechanisms, and protection against future aggression. Rebuilding trust in this context requires a step-by-step approach, with each side demonstrating good faith through small, verifiable actions. This could involve limited ceasefires in specific areas, followed by humanitarian aid delivery and monitored troop withdrawals. Establishing a joint monitoring center with international observers could help verify compliance with agreements. Additionally, involving neutral third-party countries as mediators and guarantors could provide an extra layer of assurance for both sides, helping to bridge the trust deficit that currently hinders meaningful negotiations.

Peace prospects between Russia and Ukraine remain entangled in a web of complex challenges, from shifting global alliances to entrenched positions on the ground. President Trump’s claim of resolving the conflict within 24 hours faces significant obstacles—including deep mistrust between the parties, diverging war aims, and ongoing military escalations. Russia continues to hold substantial occupied territory, and both nations face growing strain on manpower and resources. Meanwhile, international actors remain divided on the terms and mechanisms for a sustainable ceasefire or negotiated settlement.

Peace talks will work only after building trust and getting international mediators involved. Western nations have their own ideas too. European allies are starting to see that peace might mean making tough compromises and likely territorial concessions or at least deferral of the Crimea and the eastern Donbas territorial issue for future talks.

Rebuilding after the war comes with huge challenges. The cost could reach $486 billion over ten years. The whole thing depends on reliable ways to verify agreements and solid security guarantees. International support must be coordinated for economic reconstruction. These elements are the foundations of any lasting peace agreement. This holds true whatever party brokers the deal.

Concrete solutions must address the core issues: Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russia’s security concerns, and the interests of global powers. A potential framework could include guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence while limiting NATO expansion, implementing international oversight in disputed regions, and gradually lifting sanctions as verifiable progress is made. Trust-building measures, such as limited ceasefires and prisoner exchanges, are crucial first steps.

However, we must caution against the dangers of prolonging this conflict. The growing insecurity linked to its expansion threatens not only Eastern Europe but global stability. The war’s impact on energy markets, food security, and economic systems underscores its worldwide consequences. Moreover, the risk of nuclear escalation looms large, demanding immediate de-escalation efforts.

The success or failure of these peace efforts will not only determine the future of Ukraine but will also set a precedent for resolving complex international conflicts in an increasingly multipolar world. To move forward, a multilateral approach involving key players like the U.S., EU, China, and international organizations is essential. This approach should prioritize diplomatic solutions over military escalation, focus on humanitarian aid, and lay the groundwork for post-conflict reconstruction and a new pan-European security architecture. Given that the US-led NATO alliance is unwilling to deploy its own troops to defend Ukraine against Russia, a compromise must be sought. Ukraine’s vital interests and Russia’s security concerns could potentially be reconciled through a nuanced approach: postponing the question of NATO membership for Ukraine while offering alternative security guarantees take place under the auspices of the United Nations. This strategy aligns with President Zelensky’s early-war proposal regarding Crimea and the eastern Donbas region, suggesting that territorial disputes be temporarily set aside for future negotiations. Such an approach might pave the way for de-escalation and diplomatic progress in the ongoing conflict. Ultimately, ending this war requires balancing principled stands with pragmatic compromises, ensuring a stable peace that respects international law and addresses the legitimate concerns of all parties involved.

Tags: Peace Process

About The Author

Christopher Zambakari
Christopher Zambakari holds a Doctor of Law and Policy degree from Northeastern University and is chief executive officer of The Zambakari Advisory. He is a Hartley B. and Ruth B. Barker Endowed Rotary Peace Fellow and the assistant editor of The Bulletin of the Sudan Studies Association. His areas of research and expertise are international law and security, political reform and economic development, governance and democracy, conflict management and prevention, and nation- and state-building processes in Africa and in the Middle East. His work has been published in leading law, economic and public policy journals.

12. Playing for Time – Why Trump's Ukraine proposal is causing headaches for Putin by Sir Lawrence Freedman

Excerpts:

If a surge of military activity could break Ukrainian resistance then that would be a way out of the dilemma, but the many offensive operations since late 2023 have not moved the front line as much as the Russians hoped and many independent commentators expected. Putin might look forward to more progress if Trump abandoned Ukraine completely, which could add to the Ukrainians problems with air defences, lead to shortages of long-range precision weapons, and a loss of real-time battlefield intelligence. The degree of support to Ukraine will probably decline under all circumstances but how abruptly and decisively this happens will make a big difference. With continuing US support and more sanctions on Moscow it could be the Russian position that deteriorates later in the year.

Putin therefore needs Ukraine to be blamed for the failure of the process. Yet for now it looks like Russia – quite properly - risks being held responsible. This is why Putin is looking for ways to keep the process going, so long as they do not involve actual compromises. He has even hinted at the possibility of direct talks with the Ukrainian government. His latest ploy is to offer a three day ‘humanitarian’ pause from 8 to 10 May around the victory in Europe celebrations, which take place in Russia on 9 May (although in most of Europe and Ukraine they are the previous day). Apart from the fact that Putin has made a habit of such initiatives, and they never seem to amount to as much as promised, the initiative invites the obvious rejoinders – why wait? And why only three days?

This is indicative of Putin’s general problem when he talks of peace, in that other than holding on to the land seized through aggression, about which little can be done for the moment, and denying Ukraine membership of NATO, everything else about his political demands are far-fetched and unreasonable - even to the Trump administration. American isolationists may believe that Ukraine should fend for itself and not bother the US, but they do not see it as their job to prevent Ukraine fending.

Trump and Witkoff consider that they have done Russia a great favour by insisting that Ukraine accepts the territorial status quo. That is not good enough for Putin. But what if it is the best he can get?

Comment is Freed

36Upgrade to founding

Playing for Time

Why Trump's Ukraine proposal is causing headaches for Putin

https://samf.substack.com/p/playing-for-time?utm

Lawrence Freedman

Apr 30, 2025

∙ Paid

On 27 April US Secretary of State Marco Rubio observed that the Trump administration would soon decide whether to continue to try to negotiate an end to the Russo-Ukraine War or give up and move on to other matters:

‘We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases.’

He wanted the effort to succeed:

‘There are reasons to be optimistic, but there are reasons to be realistic of course as well. We’re close, but we’re not close enough.’

This followed up a similar warning he had made ten days’ earlier when he warned that a determination would have to be made soon as to whether this was ‘doable’.

That previous announcement had sparked a flurry of activity, including a typical Putin gesture of a unilaterally announced Easter truce, which he dared Ukraine to respect. At most this led to a slight and very temporary reduction in military activity. Of greater significance were conversations between Trump’s preferred envoy (on almost anything) Steve Witkoff and Putin, as well as some meetings in Europe, although a big one expected to involve both Rubio and Zelenskyy was postponed.

The best guide as to where all this effort might be leading was who was annoying Trump most. Once again it was Zelenskyy who got off on the wrong foot as he expressed alarm at an apparent plan to get Ukraine to recognise Russian gains (which he may have over-interpreted). This led Trump to describe the Ukrainian president’s refusal to accept US terms as ‘inflammatory’. His stance would ‘do nothing but prolong the killing fields.’ But then, after Zelenskyy moderated his tone, Trump turned on Putin, following a murderous attack on Kyiv by a Russian missile which killed nine civilians. He posted, more in disappointment than anger,

‘I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!’

Meanwhile Trump’s attitude towards Zelenskyy became more emollient, after an apparently cordial meeting at the Vatican, while both were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. Never one to worry about consistency, Trump spoke warmly about his relationship with Zelenskyy:

‘Look, it was never bad. We had a little dispute, because I disagreed with something he said, and the cameras were rolling and that was OK with me.’

He acknowledged the Ukrainian president’s ‘tough situation … fighting a much bigger force.’ But he found him ‘calmer’ than before, adding ‘I think he wants to make a deal.’ As for Putin:

‘Well, I want him to stop shooting. Sit down and sign the deal. We have the confines of a deal, I believe, and I want him to sign it and be done with it.”

He suggested that Putin had two weeks or less to convince him that he wanted peace. In another post he acknowledged a point that had already occurred to many observers:

‘There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through 'Banking' or 'Secondary Sanctions?' Too many people are dying!!!’

Faced with this awkward change in Trump’s mood, the Russians have been trying to sound positive and show that they really care. Their problem, as it has been from the start of this process, is that Trump has not gone far enough in his proposals to make it possible for Putin to sign up. A game attempt by CBS’s Margaret Brennan to get Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to be forthcoming, extracted no new insights other than that Russia is ‘ready to reach a deal’ on Ukraine and that Trump is the ‘only leader’ who understands his country’s position. Then he denied that two issues on which Trump said he was pushing Moscow – children abducted from Ukraine and a potential US role in running the nuclear power station in Zaporizhzhia - had been raised.

As I noted in a previous post, Ukraine and Russia have been doing their best to ensure that the other side gets the blame for the failure of the administration’s effort and suffers accordingly. For the moment Putin may be falling behind. This is one reason why he may not want the process to end. If it is abandoned it is not clear what can take its place.

This process is clearly biased against Ukraine, in that Trump refuses to try and reverse Russia’s aggression or even acknowledge its culpability for the war. But that does not mean that it suits Putin. In this post I explore why that might be the case and how the next steps may play out.

Territory

Commentators have concentrated on Trump’s proposal that Russia be allowed to control the occupied territories for as long as a ceasefire lasts and perhaps for perpetuity.

As JD Vance put it, the central theme of the US plan is that it would ‘freeze the territorial lines [...] close to where they are today’. Vance justifies this on the grounds that it is fantasy to believe that Ukraine could retake lost lands, which is at least progress from his previous assumption that given time Russia could take whatever it wanted. As Ukraine’s central war aim is to recover all that had been lost since 2014, accepting that this is impossible is to admit failure. That the position could have been much worse is scant consolation. At most the dream of the eventual liberation of these territories can live on so long as the occupation remains de facto, and Kyiv is not required to formally transfer them to the Russian Federation. But the loss will continue to hurt and is one reason why the conflict will never be truly concluded, and why both sides will continue to prepare for a resumption of hostilities in mind.

Yet the de facto loss was acknowledged by Zelenskyy once he embraced US proposals for a comprehensive ceasefire in early March. Unless subsequent talks on a final settlement led Russia to agree to abandon some of this territory, always unlikely, the ceasefire line risked becoming frozen over time.

The position appeared to have become even more difficult when the latest US proposals were reported to require Ukraine confirming Crimea’s annexation. This is what prompted Zelenskyy’s anger, pointing out that such a step was prohibited by the Ukrainian constitution. The issue was defused when the clarification came that only the Americans would be recognising Russian control of Crimea as a sweetener for Moscow. It would mean that the US was endorsing Russian aggression but few others would follow.

The Americans also proposed a somewhat less significant concession from Russia: that it give up its demand that Ukraine hand over territory that its forces had failed to take. There was always a degree of chutzpah in this demand – like a thief insisting that not only he be allowed to keep the loot taken, but the victim also be persuaded to hand over the valuables left behind. It mattered to Putin in part because there is no particular logic in the new border but also because otherwise territory he claimed to have annexed for Russia would remain Ukrainian. The US had implied that Russia had agreed to drop this demand, which would be a unique if minor concession, but there has been no indication from Moscow that this is the case. In fact, the latest from Lavrov suggests that Russia is sticking with its maximalist demands. For all Witkoff’s long conversations with Putin he appears to have extracted no firm concessions.

All these ideas from the US side reflect a perception of the conflict as being solely about territory, encouraging the view that Putin should be happy that Ukraine is being pushed to accept the territorial status quo. They have largely come from Witkoff, a neophyte with no diplomatic experience and no background in the complex detail of this conflict. Like Trump he comes from the real estate world, which perhaps explains why he thinks that how the land is divided up is all that matters. And he appears to be in awe of Putin and impressed by stories about how Russian speakers in the occupied territories have welcomed being overrun by Russian forces.

This is pure speculation on my part but I wonder if Putin told his stories too well, so that Witkoff concluded that the big issue for Putin really was holding onto these territories and that so long as this was granted the other demands did not really matter. This thought struck me when reading the lead story in the London Times on 26 April based on an interview with Witkoff (thinly disguised as ‘a source close to Steve Witkoff’).

‘The deal on the table is that the Russian-occupied territory is going to remain occupied. Russia’s not pulling it out of it. That part is set in stone.’

After explaining that if Ukraine dared reject this plan it would lose both financial and military support from the US, the source was asked whether this was a ‘take it or leave it’ moment for Zelenskyy and replied that it was a ‘take it or take it’.

At no point did the article mention any other issues. Of course the Russians are happy for the Ukrainians to be told that they can’t have their territory back. But they want much more. And if all they get is the territory they have been systematically battering for the last three years then the ‘special military operation’ will have failed. This conflict always had a territorial aspect but the core objective was to deny Ukraine its sovereignty and independence.

Ukraine’s sovereignty and security

The closest Trump has come to acknowledging this separate agenda is conceding to Putin that Ukraine will not be joining NATO, another satisfying development for the Kremlin. This was always going to be difficult for Ukraine as existing members can block accession. It is not clear how much Trump can commit others to this prohibition, including future presidents as well as the other allies. But for now it will stand.

So though unwelcome to Kyiv it was expected. This is why for some time its focus had been on developing alternative arrangements to provide security guarantees – I highlighted that this would be the key issue back in January. There has been substantial work on what could be provided by a European-led ‘coalition of the willing’ so something will be in place in the event of a peace deal, even if it will not be the same as a NATO ‘Article V’ commitment.

The most important issue for Ukraine is whether any restrictions will be placed on its ability to maintain and augment its own armed forces. Neutralising and disarming Ukraine was the main Russian aim during the aborted negotiations of March-April 2022 and they are still a top priority for Moscow. This is therefore an essential red line for Ukraine. Otherwise Russia will always have the option, once its military capacity has recovered, to restart the war against a weakened Ukraine. Even members of the Trump team with minimal interest in Ukraine’s security found the idea that a deal could be done that left it defenceless preposterous.

Putin’s Dilemma

I have assumed since late 2022 that Putin would rather persevere with the war than agree to a peace that fell well short of his political objectives. With peace would come a reckoning and that would not be very favourable when justifying a war that has involved so many costs for so little gain.

The whole point of this operation, as launched in February 2022, was to change the Ukrainian regime and to leave it disarmed (‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ in Putin’s language). If he has failed in this then the Russian people could ask, if they were so inclined, ‘what was the point?’ When the full-scale invasion was launched Russia already had Crimea and chunks of both Luhansk and Donetsk. Whatever the claims of his propagandists Ukraine was not about to join NATO. Have all these losses – human, social, economic, political – been incurred simply to take about another 10 percent of Ukrainian territory, that has been left wrecked and depopulated in the process?

Putin would prefer to achieve his core objectives through diplomatic means but he would rather continue with the war rather than accept that he has failed. That probably remains his default position and that is why he has adopted an unyielding negotiating position insisting on terms that only a totally defeated enemy could accept. Yet he may be less sure of the wisdom of this course than he was in the past, and while he makes up his mind he will try to find some way of keeping Trump’s peace process going.

He relies on Trump continuing to match his intransigence with restraint. Unlike Zelenskyy, Putin has yet to be put in a ‘take it or take it’ position. Partly this reflects the view in Washington that the Russians have ‘all the cards’ and partly that even though the US could increase pressure Trump is reluctant to do so. When Putin avoided committing to the ceasefire proposal that Zelenskyy had accepted there were no consequences. In the light of Trump’s worries that he was being strung along, Rubio was asked on 27 April about the possibility of new US sanctions against Russia, he replied that it was ‘still not the time’:

‘The president is aware that he has these options – people ask him about it all the time but what he really wants is a peace deal. He wants the dying and the killing to stop… There are options that we have for those who we hold responsible for not wanting the peace. But we’d prefer not to get to that stage yet, because we think it closes the door to diplomacy...’

What happens if that stage is reached, and Putin is blamed for the failure?

The first problem for Putin is that if he is ever going to negotiate an end to this war this is his best opportunity: a sympathetic American administration that wants to restore quasi-normal relations with Russia, is prepared to put pressure on Ukraine and has the means to do so. Whatever he might need to do to convince Trump that he is serious about peace he would need to do much more with anybody else. Nor are there other obvious mediators. The Chinese have shown little interest. The French and Germans were closely involved in the Minsk negotiations of 2014-15, but now they would be much more partial to Ukraine’s position if they reprised that role.

In addition, Putin has a bigger agenda which only the US can address. At the heart of this is the future of the European security order - the ‘root causes’ of the conflict as his people call it. This is about the threat that he sees NATO posing to Russian security. Trump has shown little commitment to the alliance and has plans to withdraw US forces from NATO. Putin must already be delighted by the disruptive effect the president has had on all US alliances.

But Trump has been so disruptive that he has reduced his leverage. The Ukrainians are less likely to bend to his will if, whatever positions they take, Trump is still likely to reduce US support. Other NATO countries have given up trying to align their policies with those of the US and assert their own pro-Ukraine positions while still trying to say positive things about Trump in the hope that they can limit the damage. They can also restrict what Trump can offer Putin. As we saw with the proposals to end attacks in the Black Sea the US could not meet Russian demands for sanctions relief because Europeans wouldn’t go along with them. Equally, getting Europeans to spend a lot more on defence may suit Trump’s purposes but it doesn’t suit Putin’s.

The Russians have now got a further problem. In a February post I wrote about the economic challenges Russia faces because of the war – with labour shortages, high inflation, interest rates at 21% and a lack of investment in civilian infrastructure. This situation has now got worse. Oil revenues have always been essential to funding the war. Up to now, and despite sanctions, Russia has been able to sell sufficient amounts at a high enough price to stay close to its budgetary targets. Over the past month this position has changed dramatically. One of the many consequences of Trump’s disruption of world trade is that the price of oil has gone down to a level which has been flagged in the past as problematic for Russia. Even before the April shock, oil-and-gas tax revenue was down 17% year-on-year in March. The price may recover, though analysts don’t expect it to, but for as long as it remains depressed Russia will struggle to fund the war.

If a surge of military activity could break Ukrainian resistance then that would be a way out of the dilemma, but the many offensive operations since late 2023 have not moved the front line as much as the Russians hoped and many independent commentators expected. Putin might look forward to more progress if Trump abandoned Ukraine completely, which could add to the Ukrainians problems with air defences, lead to shortages of long-range precision weapons, and a loss of real-time battlefield intelligence. The degree of support to Ukraine will probably decline under all circumstances but how abruptly and decisively this happens will make a big difference. With continuing US support and more sanctions on Moscow it could be the Russian position that deteriorates later in the year.

Putin therefore needs Ukraine to be blamed for the failure of the process. Yet for now it looks like Russia – quite properly - risks being held responsible. This is why Putin is looking for ways to keep the process going, so long as they do not involve actual compromises. He has even hinted at the possibility of direct talks with the Ukrainian government. His latest ploy is to offer a three day ‘humanitarian’ pause from 8 to 10 May around the victory in Europe celebrations, which take place in Russia on 9 May (although in most of Europe and Ukraine they are the previous day). Apart from the fact that Putin has made a habit of such initiatives, and they never seem to amount to as much as promised, the initiative invites the obvious rejoinders – why wait? And why only three days?

This is indicative of Putin’s general problem when he talks of peace, in that other than holding on to the land seized through aggression, about which little can be done for the moment, and denying Ukraine membership of NATO, everything else about his political demands are far-fetched and unreasonable - even to the Trump administration. American isolationists may believe that Ukraine should fend for itself and not bother the US, but they do not see it as their job to prevent Ukraine fending.

Trump and Witkoff consider that they have done Russia a great favour by insisting that Ukraine accepts the territorial status quo. That is not good enough for Putin. But what if it is the best he can get?

13. Marines special ops focus on data at the edge, FPV drones in the air and AI on the way

Excerpts:

For his troops, Huntley said a key use of AI is in data aggregation.

“The automation of the intelligence cycle, and how to be at the cutting edge of that?” he said. “Because … that’s going to drive speed of your [decision making]. So if you’re a slow adapter on that front, you’re going to find yourself on the wrong side of that equation, and that’s not a good place to be, right?”

Still, with all the data, drones and digital revolutions at play, Huntley said that if a war breaks out in the Pacific, the battlefield may be more complex than ever, but also disturbingly familiar.

“For the people that are going to be in the fight at the tactical edge, it’s going to be very similar to what our grandfathers saw in the Pacific campaign,” he said. “It’s going to be freaking rough and nasty and all that stuff.”

Marines special ops focus on data at the edge, FPV drones in the air and AI on the way - Breaking Defense

The battlefield may be more complex than ever, but if a war breaks out, MARSOC's commander said frontline fighting will be "rough and brutal" like WWII.

By Lee Ferran

on April 29, 2025 at 4:13 PM

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · April 29, 2025

US Marine Corps Sgt. Ediberto Ponce, an intelligence chief with Headquarters Battery, 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, tracks an RQ-20B Puma on a laptop during a training exercise at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, Sept. 21, 2020. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Isaac Velasco)

MODERN DAY MARINE 2025 — As the mission for Marine Forces Special Operations Command evolved from counter-terrorism (CT) to more of a supporting role for the joint force in the case of large-scale combat operations, operators realized “very quickly” they had a problem: data.

“So you have data that is at the forward tactical edge, and you need to get to a decision-maker. And so regardless of how we’re collecting that data … somebody has to fill that gap to fuse it into a picture that a decision-maker can understand in order to authorize a lethal capability or non-lethal capability,” Lt. Col. Matthew Deffenbaugh said.

One solution, he said, is to do as much data “fusion” and analysis at the edge as possible, sending back smaller data packages that more quickly put enemy targets at risk.

“One thing that we can do because of our size — that is really hard to scale — is push that intelligence fusion to the lowest tactical level … to be able to put [lower level officers] out on the tactical edge and enable them with the intelligence and communications capabilities to fuse all that data,” Deffenbaugh said.

MARSOC is hardly the only US military organization learning to swim in the new deluge of data at the tactical edge. The collection, synthesis and analysis of the info is the backbone of the Pentagon’s sprawling Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort.

It’s also not the only cutting edge technology MARSOC is racing to incorporate into its operations, according to other MARSOC panelists appearing at Modern Day Marine today in downtown Washington, DC.

First-person-view (FPV) drones, Col. Shane Edwards said, are MARSOC’s “latest venture,” as they appear to be for just about every military, paramilitary and non-state actor in the world.

“FPV is the thing that everybody talks about,” he said. “We see it all over the place. [The] technology is ubiquitous across the board.”

Maj. Gen. Peter Huntley, MARSOC commander and a fellow panelist, said, “One thing I think that everybody recognizes, but we have all seen that the operating environment, whether you’re talking at the operational level or whether you’re talking at the tactical level, is evolving incredibly fast right now.”

“We’re operating in some of the most remote corners of the world right now, and we’re seeing that our adversaries […] just have incredible capabilities,” he said. “They said they have FPVs, right? They have the ability to sense you. They have the ability to hit you from a distance.”

It’s a capability MARSOC is pursuing itself, part of a small-drone effort that includes loitering munitions, which Huntley told reporters after the panel have already been integrated into the force. He teased a coming “breakthrough” seemingly related to getting smaller unmanned platforms — not just aerial ones — to the squad or individual level, but didn’t comment further.

During the panel, Edwards said the use of small robots has been a “gamechanger” in modern combat and so has artificial intelligence. Speaking to reporters, Huntley said MARSOC is getting on board with AI because it’s “coming, one way or the other.”

For his troops, Huntley said a key use of AI is in data aggregation.

“The automation of the intelligence cycle, and how to be at the cutting edge of that?” he said. “Because … that’s going to drive speed of your [decision making]. So if you’re a slow adapter on that front, you’re going to find yourself on the wrong side of that equation, and that’s not a good place to be, right?”

Still, with all the data, drones and digital revolutions at play, Huntley said that if a war breaks out in the Pacific, the battlefield may be more complex than ever, but also disturbingly familiar.

“For the people that are going to be in the fight at the tactical edge, it’s going to be very similar to what our grandfathers saw in the Pacific campaign,” he said. “It’s going to be freaking rough and nasty and all that stuff.”

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · April 29, 2025

14. Cut Army structure, not Army end strength

Excerpts:

The president and the secretary of defense need options, and options have value. Army force structure can be rebuilt quickly if the Army has soldiers. Army end strength cannot be rebuilt quickly, as the Army learned it its Vietnam experience of “shake and bake” non-commissioned officers.

With a new topline approaching $1T for national defense and with the Army providing cuts to civilian personnel, weapons, and other lower priority programs, the Pentagon should absolutely continue to increase readiness, but they should do it by cutting the force structure, not the end strength.

Cut Army structure, not Army end strength - Breaking Defense

John Ferrari in this op-ed recommends cutting Army structure by another 20,000 spaces while keeping the same number of troops in order to improve readiness.

By John Ferrari

on April 29, 2025 at 11:28 AM

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · April 29, 2025

Soldiers and retired Soldiers from the 89th Military Police Brigade participate in and watch the 64th MP Company, 720th MP Battalion, inactivation ceremony Jan. 16th, 2024, at Fort Cavazos, Texas. (U.S. Army photos by Sgt. Alexander Chatoff)

The Pentagon should soon send Congress its “skinny budget,” which is an outline of what it intends to spend, but without specific funding tables. Since the new administration has taken control of the Pentagon, proposals including eight percent budget trims, trillion dollar budgets, and major weapon cancellations have dominated the news. Much less discussed is a reported — and disputed — proposal to cut Army end-strength by up to 90,000 troops.

Across the services and in the Army, it’s time for realignments in operating dollars, weapon systems, research, capabilities, and posture. But those realignments should make the Army more capable and prepared, not less. While the Army needs to transform, the new administration should avoid reducing end strength in a short-sighted move to reduce costs.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is rightfully focused on the readiness of the force. History is replete with examples of unready Army forces being killed in the first battles of wars. From Kaserine Pass, to Task Force Smith, to the Iraq Insurgency, we know that unready forces, including undermanned units, risk more casualties and a higher chance of losing. The state of the Army is not as dire now as it was then, but there are cracks already showing. And while no president comes into office hoping for war, but when war finds the president, the defense secretary owes the president and the American people formations ready to prevail.

For the Army, the main threat to readiness is the disparity between end strength, the actual “faces” in the Army, and force structure, the number of jobs or “spaces” in the Army. A force is considered “hollow” when it lacks the number of “faces” needed to fill all its “spaces.” Today, in the Army, the force structure is about 470,000 spaces but it currently has an active end strength of under 450,000 soldiers. That 20,000 space gap is the definition of unreadiness, and something needs to be done to prevent unneeded losses. The Army would obviously prefer to grow its end strength to solve this problem, but the current recruiting environment and probable levels of funding takes that option off the table.

On first glance, one could say that the structure should be cut by 20,000 to make the end strength and structure match. But that would not fully solve the problem, because Army personnel are constantly in motion, moving, sick, or in school, all leaving “holes” in formations. As such, the secretary of defense should direct that all Army units be manned at 105 percent of authorized strength, to ensure that required numbers of “boots” are actually in the formations. That would entail cutting structure by another 20,000 spaces, for a total reduction of 40,000.

This would put Army end strength, or “faces,” at 450,000 with the force structure, or “spaces,” at 430,000. Within that 430,000 structure, the Army will need to move and accelerate capabilities to create more drone and electronic warfare units, more “Golden Dome” units, and others.

Another reason to not cut the Army’s end strength right now is that our adversaries are watching. While fixing shipbuilding, building the Golden Dome, and building the munition stockpiles are absolutely needed, they will take time, probably longer than the 3.5 years remaining in the administration. T.R. Fehrenbach said it best, and as one sees in Ukraine and the Middle East, “you may fly over a nation forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, if you desire to protect it, if you desire to keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did . . . in the mud.”

When you need Soldiers, as we learned in Iraq in the early-2000s, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” In this global threat environment, we need to avoid ending up in scenarios in which we really wish we had a more ready and capable Army.

The president and the secretary of defense need options, and options have value. Army force structure can be rebuilt quickly if the Army has soldiers. Army end strength cannot be rebuilt quickly, as the Army learned it its Vietnam experience of “shake and bake” non-commissioned officers.

With a new topline approaching $1T for national defense and with the Army providing cuts to civilian personnel, weapons, and other lower priority programs, the Pentagon should absolutely continue to increase readiness, but they should do it by cutting the force structure, not the end strength.

Retired US Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.

15. Hegseth backs admiral for Middle East post, passing over Army general

Hegseth backs admiral for Middle East post, passing over Army general

The defense secretary has recommended Vice Adm. Brad Cooper over Gen. James Mingus as his choice to lead U.S. Central Command.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/29/hegseth-central-command-brad-cooper-james-mingus/

April 29, 2025 at 7:51 p.m. EDTYesterday at 7:51 p.m. EDT

Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army, left, and Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command. (Spc. Parris Kersey, Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Naomi Johnson/DOD)

By Dan Lamothe and Missy Ryan

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is backing a Navy admiral as his preferred choice for a key role commanding U.S. military operations in the Middle East, passing over an Army general who had been widely presumed to be the top contender amid an ongoing naval war in the region, according to defense officials and others familiar with the issue.

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper is Hegseth’s recommendation to head U.S. Central Command over Gen. James Mingus, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Trump administration’s personnel considerations. The recommendation will be reviewed by President Donald Trump, who must submit a nomination to the Senate for the job, one of the military’s most significant.

The support for Cooper comes as Hegseth’s team scrutinizes Pentagon plans for numerous top military roles, in some cases shifting to different options than what had been favored by President Joe Biden’s administration, the officials said. Both Cooper and Mingus are seen in the Pentagon as qualified selections for the Central Command post, the officials said, but the choice demonstrates a desire by the Trump administration to continue to shake up the military’s senior ranks after ousting several leaders soon after taking office in January.

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Cooper, a surface warfare officer, has served as Central Command’s deputy commander since February 2024, and previously led all U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. Those posts have put him in an influential position as both the Biden and Trump administrations have dealt with an array of challenging issues, including the war in the Gaza Strip, tension between Iran and Israel, and the ongoing U.S. military campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen.

Follow Trump’s second term

If confirmed, Cooper will be promoted to four-star admiral and replace Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, who has served as the head of Central Command since April 2022 and is expected to retire this summer. The position is typically held for about three years, indicating that the Trump administration is behind the typical schedule in finding a replacement. Cooper would become just the second Navy officer to hold the post.

Other jobs expected to come open this year include the four-star heads of U.S. European Command, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Strategic Command.

Spokespeople for Hegseth and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for Cooper, Mingus and Kurilla declined to comment.

The Trump administration has fired more than a dozen key military leaders this year, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and the Navy’s top admiral, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, both of whom were selected by Biden. In an unconventional move, Trump in February nominated a retired officer, Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, to replace Brown, and the Senate in April approved both the selection and Caine’s promotion to four-star general.

Kurilla, who had been seen as another potential replacement for Brown, recommended Cooper as his successor at Central Command, people familiar with the deliberations said.

Before Trump’s return to office, Biden administration officials hoped to nominate Mingus but ultimately decided to leave the decision to the incoming administration, officials familiar with the issue said. A person familiar with Mingus’s thinking said they told him he was their choice.

Gen. Mark A. Milley testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2023. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Several officials familiar with the issue said Mingus may have lost out on the Central Command job because of his association with retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the influential former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly cast as a political adversary.

Admirers of Milley, who retired in 2023, have commended the brash Boston-area native for playing a leading role in guiding the military through Trump’s tumultuous first term, while critics have accused him of violating Trump’s trust by discussing the president’s behavior with journalists and describing him as a “fascist to the core” once in retirement. Hegseth’s team took action against Milley in January, suspending his security clearance, revoking his security detail and ordering the Pentagon’s inspector general to review his behavior as the Pentagon’s top general. Administration officials also had Milley’s official portrait taken down at the Pentagon.

While Mingus has steered clear of politics, he served as director of operations for Milley’s Joint Staff from October 2020 to June 2022 and director of the Joint Staff from June 2022 to January 2024. Mingus was promoted to four-star general last year and became vice chief of staff of the Army, the service’s No. 2 post. He now expects to serve in that position for at least another year and then retire, officials said. A person familiar with his thinking said that he always believed that his current position could be his last one, and he is happy to serve in that role.

Other people familiar with the deliberations said Hegseth’s recommendation of Cooper was not made because of Mingus’s association with Milley.

It was not immediately clear why Hegseth favors Cooper over Mingus, but the general’s time on the Joint Staff coincided with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The time period marked a low for both the Biden administration and the 20-year war, with U.S. troops undertaking a chaotic evacuation in which the U.S. military airlifted more than 120,000 people to safety from a single commercial runway.

The operation was marked by scenes of violence that included civilians, desperate to flee the Taliban, overrunning the airport in Kabul; an errant drone strike in which U.S. forces killed 10 civilians; and an Islamic State bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops and about 170 Afghans on the outskirts of the airport.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office this month. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Hegseth has promised repeatedly that there will be “accountability” in the Pentagon over the fall of Afghanistan, without clarifying what that means. Most senior officers involved at the time, including Milley and Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who oversaw the withdrawal as the head of Central Command, have since retired.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump leveraged the fall of Afghanistan repeatedly to attack Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July. Harris and her supporters countered that Trump’s negotiations and deal with the Taliban in 2020 promising to withdraw all troops by May 2021 left Biden with few good options and set in motion the later crisis.

U.S. military officials, including Milley, have defended their actions through the fall of Afghanistan, noting that the Biden administration did not accept the Pentagon’s recommendation to keep a force of about 1,500 troops in Afghanistan to buttress the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. Several commanders involved at the time later voiced exasperation with Biden administration officials, saying it did not appear they all understood the gravity of the situation in summer 2021 as the Taliban began to seize control of cities across the country.

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By Dan Lamothe

Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces since 2008, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan.follow on X@danlamothe

By Missy Ryan

Missy Ryan writes about national security and defense for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2014 and has written about the Pentagon and the State Department. She has reported from Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

16. Awake Before the Sound of the Guns – Preparing Advisors for Conflict

There is always the option of returning to the KMAG concept in Korea versus maintaining USFK.

Awake Before the Sound of the Guns

Preparing Advisors for Conflict

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2025/Preparing-Advisors/

Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army

Download the PDF

Maj. Harry W. Hoffman, weapons advisor for the Infantry School assigned to the Korean Military Advisory Group, watches a South Korean soldier on 9 February 1952 during target practice on a known distance rifle range in the Republic of Korea. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army via the All Hands Collection at the Naval History and Heritage Command)

On 25 June 1950, Capt. Joseph R Darrigo awakened to artillery fire in Kaesong. He was the lone American from the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) on the 38th parallel as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) initiated its assault on the Republic of Korea (ROK).1 With an armored spearhead of Soviet-provided T-34 tanks, the DPRK achieved complete surprise against the ROK Army that was not deployed for battle.2 It was the rainy season; an attack was unexpected. A third of Darrigo’s partners and most other advisors were on leave. As he hurried to assist his partners in the 12th Infantry Regiment to mount a hasty defense, he probably wished for more time: more time to organize a defense, more time for his partners and fellow advisors to mobilize for the fight, more time to advise the ROK Army, and more time to prepare them to fight an enemy ready for large-scale combat operations.

“Perhaps the most important limitation imposed upon KMAG was that of time itself,” concluded Robert Sawyer, a veteran of KMAG and author of the Army’s historical study on it.3 With more time, they might have produced an army that could have withstood the DPRK’s onslaught or even deterred them entirely. Instead, KMAG was not prepared to fight. They did not even know if they should fight or withdraw to Japan.4

KMAG was not prepared for war. In war, and preparing for war, time is the ultimate commodity. As the U.S. Army employs advisors worldwide to deter conflict and, if necessary, prevail with our partners in combat, we must ensure that we are effectively using the time that we have. We must learn from KMAG how to employ advisors for war.

It is easy to be myopic about the role of advisors, to think advisors just advise. After all, it is in the name. Army Techniques Publication 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade, defines advising as “providing guidance, coaching, and counseling to a foreign counterpart to make their operations or activities more successful.”5 However, providing guidance becomes a lesser task in large-scale combat operations, particularly when paired with a peer partner force. The partner forces we would likely fight alongside in a conflict with Russia or China are highly competent with time-tested systems. There is little time for coaching them to develop new systems as T-72 tanks approach.

In conflict, advisors’ true value comes from their ability to assess, liaise, and support. With these tasks, advisors coordinate between U.S. and partner forces to smooth over the frictions in coalition operations and achieve battlefield effectiveness. Advisors need to invest in the critical resource of time to effectively assess, liaise, and support. They need to deliberately prepare for these roles with their designated partner force.

However, advisors face a problem in preparing for conflict. Too often, they are seen primarily as a force for competition below armed conflict. In competition, advising predominates over other advisor tasks. Advisors become focused on building partner capacity, creating rapport, and hopefully influencing them to stay in the United States’ orbit. Although those are worthy goals, we need to prioritize our limited number of advisors. Considering our poor record of using advisors to build capabilities and influence partners in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Niger, Mali, Chad, and elsewhere, we should recognize that advisors are not the optimal tool to politically influence a country to either reform or align with the United States.6

Advisors are often not preparing for conflict when they are employed as a competition force. In Europe, for example, the United States could deploy advisors to Albania to help advise them on capability development, but they would be useless if Russia attacked the Baltic. Advisors cannot suddenly arrive to a conflict and expect to provide value. They will just be a burden on the partner force. They need to have already invested time with the partners they will fight with so that they are not caught even more flatfooted than KMAG. Although KMAG was surprised, at least it was in the right country and already had invested time into its relationship with the ROK Army.

Assessment

To be effective, advisors need to have time with their partner force to have a deep understanding of them. T. E. Lawrence had spent years as an academic studying the Middle East, but he still was an outsider to the specific context of the revolt in the Hejaz. Even though he was supposed to be an expert, he recognized his limited understanding, explaining that “under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”7

Those “odd conditions” are not just surface-level, outward displays of culture. Advisors need a deeper understanding. Advisors need to know their partner’s strategic culture, theory of victory, economics, demography, and geography. They need to understand the military’s personnel system, doctrine, and military-industrial base. They need to understand the logic of why a partner operates. This all takes time.

Staff Sgt. Jacob DeMoss (left), Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade, advises soldiers from Bulgaria’s 1st Mechanized Battalion, 61st Mechanized Brigade, during training on urban operations in Marino Pole, Bulgaria. (Photo by Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army)

Frequently, the United States undervalues the time it takes for such understanding. It has been overconfident in the universality of its expertise and approach to war. As an example of the U.S. Army’s historic lack of focus on understanding, it has put minimal investment in language training. In KMAG, hardly any advisors learned Korean. In a survey of 255 advisors in 1953, no respondent reported using Korean to communicate with their partner.8 These trends repeated in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Today’s advisors in security force assistance brigades (SFAB) do not undergo any language training. When working through interpreters or relying on partner forces that speak English, advisors miss nuance and cannot identify when issues are concealed.

Advisors are too valuable of an assessment tool to be missing such nuance. Advisors are the lone Americans with a hand on the pulse of a partner force. Without the ground-level understanding provided by advisors, senior decision-makers act in a void. In the latter years of the war in Afghanistan, without advisors at the local level, policymakers were ignorant of the Afghan army’s will to fight. In Korea, by 1953, the U.S. Army recognized the importance of information provided by KMAG. KMAG advisors were tasked with a dual mission “to advise” and “to function as an information gathering and reporting agency.”9

Whether due to lack of time, language, or understanding, at the war’s onset, KMAG did not provide accurate reports. Its commander, Brig. Gen. William L. Roberts, claimed that “the South Koreans have the best damn army outside the United States!”10 With advisors sending such assessments, Time reported on 5 June 1950, “Most observers now rate the 100,000-man South Korean army as the best of its size in Asia ... And no one now believes that the Russian-trained North Korean army could pull off a quick, successful invasion of the South without heavy reinforcements.”11 Twenty days later, that same North Korean army smashed through the ROK Army.

Such wrong assessments were made even though the ROK Army had no tanks, medium artillery, heavy mortars, antitank weapons, and combat aircraft, and it lacked spare parts with 35 percent of its vehicles unserviceable.12 KMAG had emphasized developing internal security forces for Korea to defeat communist guerrillas.13 Even though the ROK government was concerned about an invasion from the North and pushed to develop a force to deter a conventional invasion, the United States did not support providing heavy equipment to Korea.14 KMAG influenced this decision by reporting that the Korean terrain did not lend itself to efficient tank operations.15

KMAG had not accurately assessed the threat. They had not prepared the Koreans to deal with enemy armor and “had talked endlessly about the insignificance and vulnerability of Soviet tanks.”16 Therefore, the Koreans did not have the tools to deal with armor. There was not a single antitank mine in Korea that could have blocked mountain roads.17 In a crucial opening penetration at Uijongbu, forty tanks filed through the narrow valley. A regretful U.S. military advisor recalled, “If one antitank crew had been able to pick off the lead and rear tanks, the thirty-eight others would have been sitting ducks.”18 But advisors had not assessed that they needed that capability.

The tanks foiled repeated attempts by ROK commanders to reestablish a defense. KMAG had advised their Korean counterparts on a defense plan, but it was “hasty, ill-advised, and impossible.”19 They did not base the plan on an accurate assessment of the capabilities of the newly created ROK commanders and staffs.

For a more contemporary example of shortfalls in assessments, I observed American-led training for a Ukrainian brigade that was not grounded in an accurate assessment of the brigade’s capabilities or the Russian threat. Although the training was on the military decision-making process (MDMP), the trainers did not understand the Ukrainian planning process or the staff members familiarity with MDMP. The trainers did not know how the brigade would be employed, so they reverted to a standard program of instruction for an American brigade. Even though the Ukrainian brigade would soon be thrown into the defense, its staff trained on attacking against a single enemy battalion with a three-to-one superiority in all warfighting functions. In the scenario, the Ukrainians had to breach a single two-hundred-meter minefield. The scenario was not grounded in the reality of Russian capabilities, force densities, or defenses in depth. If advisors had time to assess the brigade, they could have optimized the brigade’s training to properly prepare it to fight the Russians.

Advisors need to have accurate assessments from the tactical to strategic level. KMAG had been wrong in their assessment of the strategic situation, but ROK had been right in their appreciation of the threat from the North. The partner force’s strategic assessments will often differ. They will also have different political objectives. Advisors must understand the potential friction that can come from these differences.

At National Training Center (NTC) Rotation 24-03, I experienced a realistic scenario of friction from differing political objectives. I was partnered with a division from the fictional country of Pirtuni in a scenario that simulated a Russian invasion of Poland. Like the Polish in 1939, our partner wanted to defend forward near their borders to prevent a fait accompli. They did not want the enemy occupying their land and then digging in, as Russia has done in Ukraine. However, 1st Armored Division (1AD), the U.S. Army unit fighting alongside the Pirtunians, had expected them to withdraw toward 1AD to allow 1AD to destroy the enemy. Without advisors understanding this friction, 1AD would not have been in a position to affect the battle.

By investing time into assessing a partner, advisors will understand how a partner will fight based on political objectives, the enemy, the terrain, and preexisting war plans. For example, in Europe, advisors must understand how partner forces fit into NATO’s operational plans. They need to know specifically what that partner force will need to be asked to do and how ready it will be to fight so that they do not end up like the ROK Army unprepared to face T-34s.

Support

While KMAG might have assessed the threat wrong, the advisors played a crucial role in supporting the beleaguered ROK Army with air support. A month into the war, the U.S. Air Force conducted seven thousand close support and interdiction airstrikes that slowed the North Korean rate of advance to two miles a day. This support provided critical time to form the Pusan perimeter and prevent a total DPRK victory. Gen. Matthew Ridgeway said that except for air power, “the war would have been over in 60 days with all Korea in Communist hands.”20

In conflict, the access that advisors have to U.S. intelligence, joint fires, and logistics can make a decisive impact on the success of a partner force. In our recent counterinsurgency campaigns, advisors have sometimes had to withhold aid to force partners to build their own capabilities; in a desperate struggle of large-scale combat, winning the immediate fight takes priority over capability building. The moral hazard of doing for a partner what they need to do for themself becomes trivial.

Advisors from Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade, assess Bulgaria’s 3rd Mechanized Battalion, 61st Mechanized Brigade’s rehearsals for an urban operation in Marino Pole, Bulgaria. (Photo by Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army)

During the retreat toward Pusan, KMAG advisors often dropped their advisory roles and became operational. They were integrated members of ROK staffs, not simply offering advice but assisting in planning and bringing in U.S. assets.21

To support a partner force, advisors need to understand what is available and how to employ it. They need to have invested time to develop connections across organizations to understand what they can call upon and who to influence to get that support. Sawyer reports that KMAG advisors had to “beg, borrow, and steal” from U.S. Eighth Army units to receive support.22 With the way contemporary U.S. divisions and corps align assets in targeting cycles, it can be difficult for advisors to get support without fully understanding those units’ processes. During the NTC rotation, when the enemy was breaking through the Pirtuni defense, we had reached a trigger to request 1AD to seal the point of penetration with a scatterable minefield. It took over three hours for the request to be approved, far too slow to have an impact on the battle. If we had more time to establish a common understanding of release criteria and processes for the U.S. division to support the Pirtunis, we could have support that was responsive enough to matter.

In addition to supporting partners, advisors need to invest time into understanding how to support themselves. In Afghanistan and Iraq, advisors could easily rely on U.S. logistics networks. They will not have that luxury in a future war. While in Korea, operating isolated from American units, KMAG advisors ate Korean food and borrowed clothing, gasoline, and tentage from the ROK.23 Advisors will need to understand what partners can realistically provide and what acquisition and cross-servicing agreements are established to formalize such support. By understanding what partner forces can support, advisors will be able to tailor their equipment to endure a conflict even if it means using civilian vehicles and local purchases. Advisors need to ensure that they are a minimal burden on their partner forces.

Liaison

Advisors, through their liaison role, provide support to partner forces, share assessments, and achieve shared understanding across U.S. and partner forces. According to Army Techniques Publication 3-96.1, “Liaison is the contact or intercommunication maintained between elements of military forces and other agencies to ensure mutual understanding and unity of purpose and action.”24 To liaise, advisors need to understand the optimal placement of personnel and equipment to allow for effective communication. Providing an effective communication architecture between a partner and U.S. forces is a vital function of advisors.

On 28 June 1950, in the chaos of the retreat from Seoul, while three divisions and the KMAG headquarters were still north of the Han River, ROK Army engineers prematurely blew up the bridges across the river. KMAG had to ford the river. Abandoning their equipment in the chaotic withdrawal, the one vehicle that Col. Sterling Wright, KMAG chief of staff, was determined to save was his radio truck. They were able to procure a raft for the truck. The truck allowed KMAG to maintain communications with its scattered advisors and with U.S. forces in Japan. Critically, just after crossing the river, the truck allowed KMAG to coordinate with the U.S. Air Force as their first sortie roared overhead to strafe the pursuing DPRK forces.25

In Suwon, twenty miles south of the Han River, Brig. Gen. John H. Church, the new KMAG commander, set up his headquarters. He flew in from Japan with orders from Gen. Douglas MacArthur to serve as his liaison with ROK Army.26 Church suggested that the ROK chief of staff Gen. Chae Byong-duk move his headquarters into the same building. The combined headquarters established a common operational picture between ROK and U.S. forces and coordinated a coherent defense.27

Under their previous commander, Roberts, KMAG advisors had become accustomed to sharing workspace with their counterparts. KMAG did not have a separate headquarters building before the war.28 He believed that without such intimacy, advisors would not be effective. Unfortunately, during recent wars, often for security considerations, U.S. units became habituated to barriers with partners. These barriers inhibit shared understanding through both a lack of physical presence and the psychological walls of suspicion. Advisors, particularly when dispersed in small teams or as individuals, as KMAG often operated, need to be comfortable working in partner headquarters. Advisors cannot expect to show up in the middle of a fight and grab a desk. They need to invest time to build rapport, establish workspaces, and ensure that advisors have the appropriate communication systems to provide added value.

At a basic level, advisors need to analyze where they need to place personnel with the appropriate expertise in both partner forces and U.S. headquarters. Advisors cannot assume that partner forces command posts mimic U.S. practices. Each partner will have different approaches to command and control that will impact advisor placement. In a 2023 Military Review article on experiences at NTC Rotation 23-04, Maj. Zachary Morris recommended a task organization for covering a partner battalion; however, that concept was optimized for that unique partner force.29 Advisors need to develop standard operating procedures for their placement specific to their partner force. For example, partnering with the Bulgarian army, we learned that they employ main and alternate command posts, which have redundant functions across warfighting functions, unlike U.S. main and rear command posts that have specialized functions. We needed to balance our advisors between the command posts and cross-train them to cover all warfighting functions.

We also needed to ensure they had the correct communications equipment. SFAB teams have an impressive communications suite, but we need to tailor our capabilities to our partner and their operational environment. We need to be able to operate dispersed, at distance, and with appropriate bandwidth. However, we also need to minimize our electromagnetic signature to not reveal our partner’s positions.

In Europe, our partners have learned from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to use stringent practices for electromagnetic concealment. To not give away positions with military-band tactical communications, they lay telephone lines for kilometers between units. They hard-wire command posts into their national network instead of relying on satellite communications. They expect to operate in the basements of nondescript buildings. Advisors need to conform to such methods.

During our NTC rotation, we initially planned to use tactical communications; however, Ghost Team coached us that the best practice for survivability was to “hide in plain sight” by using civilian bands. We used a combination of Starlink, masked connections to the cellphone network, and hardwiring to the physical network, to minimize our signature. This approach provided us with both better connectivity and far more concealment than units that used traditional military connectivity during the rotation. We integrated into our partner’s command posts in urban areas.

In addition to integrating with partner forces, advisors need to liaise with U.S. units to coordinate efforts across a coalition. Those U.S. forces may or may not have a command relationship with the partner force, but advisors need to facilitate cooperation. Advisors need to understand U.S. units’ systems and processes before being thrown into the friction of war. Tying into those systems takes time. At NTC, we worked over ten days to troubleshoot connectivity issues with 1AD. It took time, but it revealed how important it is for advisors to establish that interoperability early. It also reinforced how difficult it would be for a partner force to communicate with a U.S. force without advisors. During Austere Challenge 24, an exercise rehearsing a defense of the Baltics, advisors from 4th SFAB proved essential in establishing digital communications between the Estonian 1st Division and U.S. V Corps.

Staff Sgt. Zachary Barber (right) from Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade, advises mortarmen from Bulgaria’s 3rd Mechanized Battalion, 61st Mechanized Brigade, during a live fire in Karlovo, Bulgaria. (Photo by Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army)

Liaison reduces friction, such as at NTC when the Pirtunian and U.S. divisions both planned to use the same locations for command posts and artillery positions. Liaisons can also prevent catastrophes in coordination. During the Korean War at Wawon, the 2nd Infantry Division instructed the newly arrived Turkish brigade to guard their flank but did not establish a liaison with them to provide shared understanding. They did not realize the Koreans in front of them were withdrawing ROK units. They engaged those ROK units and reported a victory. They assumed they had prevailed but then were in no position to fight the main strength of the pursuing Chinese forces. The Chinese overran the surprised Turkish brigade.30 Advisors coordinating between the forces of those three nations could have prevented that disaster.

Advising

Of course, advisors will still advise to assist partners in preparing for conflict. However, our likely partners will not be building a force from scratch as in Afghanistan or Iraq. They are competent militaries with tested techniques and proud traditions. To coach such militaries, advisors will need a deep understanding of how they can improve. We cannot assume our approaches are superior and just coach partners on them.

I felt strongly that I could assist the Bulgarian army on combined arms rehearsals (CAR). I had even produced a video for NTC on how to conduct CARs.31 When at a division exercise, a Bulgarian brigade commander invited me to a battalion’s rehearsal, I was excited for the opportunity to coach them. When I got to the “rehearsal,” I saw a battalion commander and his subordinate commanders in a concealed observation post, each with a map, discussing their defense while pointing out their actions on the very terrain they would fight on. It was nothing like an American CAR, but it was very productive. They synchronized their plan while conducting a recon of the terrain they would defend.

I discussed possible issues with the rehearsal. What if they could not overwatch the terrain? What if they were passing through another unit in the offense? The Bulgarians admitted that they were valid points, but why build an American-style terrain model and gather people together for a theatrical production that enemy unmanned aircraft systems might observe?

The Bulgarian rehearsal would not work in the flat, wooded terrain of the Joint Readiness Training Center or in an offense across dozens of kilometers at NTC. However, the rehearsal would work in a defense of the rolling hills in the cleared farmlands of the Black Sea Coast. It was ideal for the context that they would have to fight in. To effectively advise, advisors need time to understand such context.

Advisors Need Clarity to Prepare for Conflict

All these tasks I described take time to prepare for. Advisors can only prepare for them if they know the specific partner and context in which they will fight. KMAG struggled in the opening days of the Korean War because it did not have a specified role in conflict that it could have prepared for. KMAG did not even know if it was supposed to fight in the event of war. A few months earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had left Korea out of his description of a “defensive perimeter [that] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus.”32 The Department of the Army had not specified KMAG’s wartime mission, and the U.S. ambassador had provided no guidance.33 It also had an unclear command relationship with MacArthur’s Far East Command.34 To effectively assess, support, and liaison, let alone advise, advisors need to have a clear mission for conflict and the time to prepare for it. They need to have a defined role in operational plans and a clear command relationship with U.S. forces in their theater.

There is a trade-off here. Advisors are often prioritized to countries to serve as a competition force to establish rapport, display American commitment, and build capabilities. For advisors to prepare for their role in conflict, they will have less time to work with such partners. There is a potential middle ground, with advisors still working in countries in the competitive space but having an enduring, episodic relationship with a partner force at the front lines of a possible conflict. For example, advisors could primarily work in North Macedonia but regularly interact with an Estonian brigade, so they are ready to integrate with them if Russia builds up forces in the Baltic.

Forward-positioned advisors can allow U.S. support and coordination with partner forces in the opening hours of a conflict, but only if provided the time to understand their partner force and threat beforehand. We cannot have another lone Capt. Joseph Darrigo without the time to assist our partners in stopping our enemies.

Given sufficient time, KMAG succeeded. Before the war, advisors had little familiarity with Korea. As the war progressed, advisors were recruited from soldiers with experience fighting in Korea.35 They understood the context of the war and could effectively advise the ROK Army. By 1953, KMAG had assisted the ROK Army in growing to a six-hundred-thousand-man force that held two-thirds of the front line and took more than two-thirds of the total casualties.36 Unfortunately, the Army did not retain the lessons learned from KMAG.

Why the Army Keeps Forgetting How to Advise

America has continued to struggle in advising because it does not invest time in advisors. The U.S. Army does not allow advisors to focus on a partner and its specific context. One KMAG advisor, explaining why advisors did not learn Korean stated that there was “no point in Americans learning Korean—we’ll be in Timbuktu next year.”37 Advisors today face the same lack of incentive for a long-term commitment to understand a partner force. This shortsightedness comes from the U.S. Army’s personnel system, which does not allow the career flexibility for advisors to fully understand a partner and prepare to fight with them in conflict.38

Advisors need a long-term commitment to a partner, as Lawrence spent years in Arabia before the Arab Revolt or Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener advised the Egyptian army for over a decade before they crushed the Mahdi in the Anglo-Sudan War.39 In the U.S. Army, before the inflexible, centralized personnel system was emplaced after World War II, officers could spend years understanding a country.40 Gen. John Pershing served four years in the Philippines building ties with local leaders and speaking with the Moros without needing an interpreter.41 During the interwar period, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway spent years instructing Spanish at West Point and serving and advising in Latin America.42 Unfortunately, the personnel system in place since the 1940s does not afford advisors such time to invest in partners; rather, it has caused underperformance.

Studies on Vietnam reported that “the system of short tours destroyed continuity in the U.S. advisor effort and ensured that it was dominated by amateurs.”43 Vietnamese commanders recommended that their U.S. advisors have two-year tours to have continuity and devotion to a unit.44 A RAND survey of Vietnam advisors showed that just as in Korea, advisors did not have time to learn the language and establish true understanding. Its primary recommendation was intensive language training.45

Given limited time, advisors need a clear mission and need to prioritize their training time in understanding the partner and the context in which they will serve. Advisors currently spend too much of their time training generic tasks. Even their culminating training events are with make-believe partners like the Pirtunis. In a study of advisors, RAND reported that it was “almost impossible to find a complaint by any advisor ... who felt tactically, technically, or militarily unprepared for his duties ... however, almost to a man, advisors felt compelled to talk about the demanding challenges posed by language, cultural differences, and host-nation institutional barriers. It was in these areas—at the heart of an advisor’s effectiveness—that most felt inadequately prepared.”46 If our personnel system will not allow us to invest the time to create effective advisors, we can at least focus their limited training time on understanding their particular partner force.

Now is the time to invest in advisor’s understanding of their specific problem set. Now is the time for them to become experts on their partners and their context. Now they need to know their role—now, and not when enemy artillery is waking us up.

Notes

Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG in Peace and War (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 115, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA232746.pdf.
T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War (Macmillan, 1963), 35.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 187.
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 35.
Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade (U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2020), 4-25.
On how Afghanistan and Vietnam were failures of overly centralized governance, which military advising did little to address, see Robert Rose, “All Power Is Local,” Military Review 103, no. 1 (January-February 2023): 76–87, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JF-23/Rose/rose-all-power-is-local-v1.pdf.
T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” The Arab Bulletin, 20 August 1917, https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/lawrence.htm.
Alfred H. Hausrath, The KMAG Advisor: Roles and Problems of the Military Advisor in Developing an Indigenous Army for Combat Operations in Korea, Technical Memorandum ORO-T-355 (Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office, February 1957), 67, https://nautilus.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/The-KMAG-Advisor-Role-and-Problems-of-the-Military-Advisor-in-Developing-Indigenous-Army-for-Combat-Operations-in-Korea.pdf.
Office of the Chief, Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG), Advisor’s Procedure Guide (KMAG Headquarters, 3 June 1953).
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 7.
“KOREA: Progress Report, Jun. 5, 1950,” Time, 5 June 1950, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,812568,00.html.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 104.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 100.
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 72.
Ibid., 67.
18 “BATTLE OF KOREA: Little Man & Friends,” Time, 10 July 1950, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,805449,00.html.
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 45.
John T. Correll, “The Difference in Korea,” Air and Space Forces Magazine, 1 June 2020, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/the-difference-in-korea/.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 140.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 152.
ATP 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade, 4-43.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 127–28.
Time, “BATTLE OF KOREA: Little Man & Friends.”
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 54.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 59.
Zachary L. Morris, “Concepts for Security Force Assistance Brigade Company Task Forces in Large-Scale Combat Operations,” Military Review 103, no. 6 (November-December 2023): 67–81, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2023/Maj-Morris/.
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 211–12.
“TAC Talks EP01: A Way To CAR,” posted 28 March 2023 by TAC Talks–Operations Group, NTC, YouTube, 25 min., 3 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BxeSq0FlDo&t=18s.
Dean Acheson, “Excerpts from Acheson’s Speech to The National Press Club,” 12 January 1950, https://web.viu.ca/davies/H102/Acheson.speech1950.htm.
Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 121.
Ibid., 46.
Robert D. Ramsey III, “Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador,” Global War on Terrorism Occasional Paper No. 18 (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006), 12, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/ramsey.pdf.
Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 350.
Hausrath, The KMAG Advisor, 45.
Robert Rose, “Ending the Churn: To Solve the Recruiting Crisis, the Army Should be Asking Very Different Questions,” Modern War Institute, 9 February 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/ending-the-churn-to-solve-the-recruiting-crisis-the-army-should-be-asking-very-different-questions/.
Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, vol. 1 (Longmans, Green, 1899).
Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Free Press, 2017), 152.
B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations Ten Years After (Little, Brown, 1928), 292–93.
Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Free Press, 2017), 162.
A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam, vol. 6, Conduct of the War, bk. 2, Functional Analyses (BDM Corporation, 1980), 12-24–12-25, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA096430.pdf.
Cao Van Vien et al., The U.S. Adviser (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), 69–70.
Gerald Hickey, The American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case of Vietnam (RAND Corporation, 1965), 77, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2007/RM4482.pdf.
Ramsey, “Advising Indigenous Forces,” 109.

Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army, is a Lt. Gen. (R) James M. Dubik Writing Fellow. He commands Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade. He previously served as executive officer and operations officer for 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment; as the lead counterthreat finance planner for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Kabul; and as an observer coach/trainer at both the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center. He deployed to Zhari, Kandahar, with 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and an MPP from Harvard University.

17. Hegseth ‘proud’ to end Women, Peace and Security program

Women fight wars too. Women are affected by wars.

Excerpts:

He said the program was “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”

Hegseth also called WPS a “UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists,” claiming that “troops HATE it.”

As the program is under federal statute and can’t be outright killed by Hegseth alone, he said the Pentagon would comply with the minimum requirements of the WPS and fight to end the program during the department’s next appropriations process.

Hegseth ‘proud’ to end Women, Peace and Security program

by Ellen Mitchell - 04/29/25 12:10 PM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5272905-hegseth-pentagon-women-peace-security/?utm

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Tuesday that he had begun to shutter a Pentagon program meant to advance women’s participation in peace-building and conflict prevention, which was created by a law written by GOP lawmakers and signed by President Trump during his first term.

“This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the [Defense Department],” Hegseth wrote in a post on the social platform X.

He said the program was “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”

Hegseth also called WPS a “UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists,” claiming that “troops HATE it.”

As the program is under federal statute and can’t be outright killed by Hegseth alone, he said the Pentagon would comply with the minimum requirements of the WPS and fight to end the program during the department’s next appropriations process.

Hegseth’s move to dismantle the program is particularly notable given that Trump signed the program into law in 2017, after it was backed by multiple members of his current Cabinet while they were members of Congress.

The 2017 Women, Peace and Security Act was penned by current Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, then a member of the House representing South Dakota, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

The Senate’s version of the law was co-sponsored by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator. Rubio lauded the Women, Peace and Security Act earlier this month, saying it was “the first law passed by any country in the world focused on protecting women and promoting their participation in society.”

And Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, a former House member for Florida, was a founding member of the WPS Caucus when he was in Congress.

The Trump campaign website even cited the initiative as one of his top accomplishments for women during his first term.

The law was intended to promote the participation of women in all aspects of overseas conflict prevention, management and resolution, as well as postconflict relief and recovery efforts, to be implemented at the State Department, Pentagon and other government agencies.

The Biden administration later issued several action plan memos for how the Pentagon would implement the program in the building, most recently in December.

Hegseth later pushed back on those who had pointed out the law had been signed under Trump, claiming the Biden administration had “distorted & weaponized the straight-forward & security-focused WPS initiative launched in 2017,” though he did not provide examples.

Democratic lawmakers quickly bashed Hegseth for the move to end the WPS, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) — a top member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who helped usher the bipartisan legislation through Congress — saying the Defense secretary is weakening country’s global standing and “has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.”

“Every combatant commander who comes through my office highlights the strategic advantage WPS gives U.S. forward deployed forces,” she said in a statement.

“This follows a dangerous and disturbing pattern from the Secretary, who clearly does not listen to advice from senior military leaders. He also continues to ignore the invaluable role women play in our national security. It’s startling that just because the word ‘women’ is in the title, this evidence-based security program has been reduced to a DEI program,” Shaheen added.

Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), the co-chair of the WPS Caucus, called Hegseth’s move “outrageous and reckless.”

“The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) initiative isn’t ‘woke’—it’s smart, strategic policy grounded in decades of research and bipartisan law, signed by President Trump in 2017,” Frankel said in a statement. “Dismissing WPS as a ‘UN feminist plot’ is not just ignorant—it’s dangerous. It denies the reality on the ground, ignores our own defense and diplomatic priorities, and weakens our national security.”

Hegseth has sought to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts within the military, attacking any initiatives as “woke.” As Pentagon chief, he has ended any commemorations of identity-based celebrations such as Black History Month, removed certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy — including those on the Holocaust, histories of civil rights, racism and feminism — and ordered Army and Air Force libraries to identify books related to DEI.

Updated at 1:52 p.m. EDT

18. Why the US will lose against China

A sober assessment from the Financial Times in the UK.

Excerpts:

One reason is that China has powerful cards, too. Many significant powers already do more of their trade with China than with the US: these include Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. Yes, the US is a more important export market than China for many significant countries, partly because of the trade deficits Trump complains about. But China is also a significant market for many. Moreover, China is a source of essential imports, many of which cannot be easily replaced. Imports are, after all, the purpose of trade.

Above all, the US has become unreliable. A “transactional” US is one always seeking a better deal. No sane country should bet its future on such a partner, especially against China. Trump’s treatment of Canada was the defining moment. The Canadians have responded by re-electing the Liberals. Will Trump learn from this? Can a leopard change his spots? This is who he is. He is also a man US voters have elected twice. Moreover, breaking with China would be risky: China will not forget and is unlikely to forgive.

...

In sum, the US will not get the deals it apparently seeks and the victory over China it hopes for. My assumption is that, as this becomes evident to the White House, Trump will at least partially retreat from his trade wars, declaring victory, while moving on in some other direction.

Yet that does not change the reality that the US is indeed competing with China for global influence. Unfortunately, the US that many want to do well at this is not this US.

Moreover, Trump’s US will not do well. Its population is a quarter of that of China. Its economy is much the same size, because it is so much more productive. Its influence, cultural, intellectual and political, is still far greater than China’s because its ideals and ideas are more attractive. The US had been able to create potent alliances with like-minded countries that reinforce this influence. In sum, it has inherited and so been blessed with huge assets.

...

A US that is trying to replace the rule of law and the constitution with corrupt crony capitalism will not outperform China. A purely transactional US will not receive the wholehearted support of its allies. The world needs a US that competes and co-operates with China. This US, alas, will fail to do either well.

Why the US will lose against China

Financial Times · by Martin Wolf · April 29, 2025

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” of supposedly “reciprocal tariffs” against the rest of the world — arguably, the most eccentric trade policy proposals ever made — has, after a hasty retreat under fire from the markets, turned into a trade war with China. This may (or, may not) have been what was intended from the start. So, can Trump win this war against China? Indeed, can the US, as it is now after Trump’s second coming, hope to succeed in its wider rivalry with China? The answers are “no”. This is not because China is invincible, far from it. It is because the US is throwing away all the assets it needs if it is to maintain its status in the world against a power as huge, able and determined as China.

“Trade wars are good and easy to win”, Trump posted in 2018. As a general proposition, this is false: trade wars hurt both sides. A deal might be reached that makes both sides better off than before. More likely, any deal will make one side better off than before and the other worse off. The latter sort of deal is, presumably, what Trump hopes will emerge: the US will win; China will lose.

At the moment, the US imposes a 145 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, while China imposes a 125 per cent tariff on the US. China has also restricted exports of “rare earths” to the US. These are very high, indeed in effect prohibitive, barriers to trade. This looks like a “Mexican stand-off”, one that neither can win, between the two superpowers.

One is given to understand that the US plan (if there is one) is to “persuade” trading partners to impose heavy barriers on imports from China in return for a favourable deal on trade (and maybe in other areas, such as security) with the US. Is this outcome plausible? No.

Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.

One reason is that China has powerful cards, too. Many significant powers already do more of their trade with China than with the US: these include Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. Yes, the US is a more important export market than China for many significant countries, partly because of the trade deficits Trump complains about. But China is also a significant market for many. Moreover, China is a source of essential imports, many of which cannot be easily replaced. Imports are, after all, the purpose of trade.

Above all, the US has become unreliable. A “transactional” US is one always seeking a better deal. No sane country should bet its future on such a partner, especially against China. Trump’s treatment of Canada was the defining moment. The Canadians have responded by re-electing the Liberals. Will Trump learn from this? Can a leopard change his spots? This is who he is. He is also a man US voters have elected twice. Moreover, breaking with China would be risky: China will not forget and is unlikely to forgive.

Not least, China believes its people can bear economic pain better than Americans. Moreover, for it, the trade war is mainly a demand shock, while for the US it is mainly a supply shock. It is easier to replace lost demand than missing supply.

Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.

In sum, the US will not get the deals it apparently seeks and the victory over China it hopes for. My assumption is that, as this becomes evident to the White House, Trump will at least partially retreat from his trade wars, declaring victory, while moving on in some other direction.

Yet that does not change the reality that the US is indeed competing with China for global influence. Unfortunately, the US that many want to do well at this is not this US.

Moreover, Trump’s US will not do well. Its population is a quarter of that of China. Its economy is much the same size, because it is so much more productive. Its influence, cultural, intellectual and political, is still far greater than China’s because its ideals and ideas are more attractive. The US had been able to create potent alliances with like-minded countries that reinforce this influence. In sum, it has inherited and so been blessed with huge assets.

Now, consider what is happening under the Trump regime: attempts to transform the rule of law into an instrument of vengeance; the dismantling of the US government; contempt for the laws that are the foundation of legitimate government; attacks on scientific research and the independence of the great US universities; wars on reliable statistics; hostility towards immigrants (and not just illegal ones), even though they have been the foundations of US success in every generation; an outright repudiation of medical science and climate science; an outright rejection of the most basic ideas in the economics of trade; an equivalence or (far worse than that) preference for Vladimir Putin, the tyrant of Russia, over Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leader of democratic Ukraine; and open contempt for the array of alliances and institutions of co-operation upon which the US-built global order rests. All this is at the hands of a political movement that has embraced the January 2021 insurrection.

Yes, the global economic order did need improvement. The case for China to shift towards consumption-led growth is overwhelming. It is clear, too, that much reform is needed within the US. Yet what is happening now is not reform, but the ruin of the foundations of US success, at home and abroad. It will be hard to reverse the damage. It will be impossible for people to forget who and what caused it.

A US that is trying to replace the rule of law and the constitution with corrupt crony capitalism will not outperform China. A purely transactional US will not receive the wholehearted support of its allies. The world needs a US that competes and co-operates with China. This US, alas, will fail to do either well.

martin.wolf@ft.com

Follow Martin Wolf with myFT and on X

Financial Times · by Martin Wolf · April 29, 2025

19. For Saudi Arabia, Normalization with Israel Doesn’t Make Sense Now

Conclusion:

Washington wants normalization, but seems reluctant to openly admit that in order to achieve progress on that front, multiple factors would have to change. Most of these factors are Israeli policies: on the Palestinians, first and foremost, but also on Iran, and, increasingly, on Syria, where Israel is also escalating with its strikes and deepening occupation of Syrian territory following the fall of the Assad regime. All of that is possible, but just remarkably unlikely. As long as that is the case, it would behoove policymakers in Washington to focus their energies elsewhere, rather than expend political capital and energy on a deal that is beyond reach.

For Saudi Arabia, Normalization with Israel Doesn’t Make Sense Now - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by H. A. Hellyer · April 30, 2025

As the Trump administration continues to widen its engagement with Iran, Washington has yet to grasp a stark reality: An Israeli-Saudi peace deal is almost certainly beyond reach in the foreseeable future. The reasons for that deserve examination, because they are emblematic of much wider trends in the region and American engagement internationally. The sooner Washington recognizes it, the better.

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Two years ago, many insisted Saudi-Israel normalization was possible through a wider U.S.-fostered “mega-deal.” The Biden and Trump administrations were only too happy to buy and promote this narrative. Shortly after being appointed Israeli ambassador to the United States in January this year, Yechiel Leiter told Israeli media that it was “closer than ever.” The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told lawmakers last month, “The president is in an incredible position to build upon what he did in his first term, expanding the Abraham Accords [which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain] to include not only the Saudis, but other Gulf state nations.”

A former Biden defense official similarly argued in February that such a deal was “within reach.” However, conditions that might have made that plausible two years ago are now completely absent, and unlikely to return in the near future.

The proposed normalization “mega-deal” centered on three components: a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty with security guarantees; a Saudi civil nuclear program with U.S. assistance; and Israeli steps toward peace with the Palestinians.

Nevertheless, circumstances have changed, regionally and internationally, in ways that U.S. leaders do not seem to appreciate. First, regarding the treaty: Riyadh’s desire for a U.S. security guarantee stemmed from its fears of Iranian regional designs. However, in 2025, the situation is dramatically different. Iranian-Saudi relations have been thawing for several years, as recently reaffirmed by the Saudi defense minister’s visit to Tehran earlier this month. The minister held high-level talks with the Iranian Supreme Leader, Iran’s president, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. The timing of these meetings was deeply significant, taking place prior to talks between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear program.

Indeed, Saudi Arabian officials have reportedly informed Iran that they would not allow their territory to be used in any future U.S. military operation against Tehran. Riyadh has made it clear that it prefers engagement with Iran, eschews the notion of escalation, and supports President Donald Trump’s efforts to close a deal with Iran, even though it opposed President Barack Obama’s deal with Tehran 10 years ago, cheering Trump’s withdrawal from it several years later.

Considering that Saudi Arabia could be a target for Iranian reprisals in the event of a U.S.-led war, it’s unsurprising Riyadh has come to this conclusion. It doesn’t mean that Riyadh won’t look for further defense industrial ties with the United States — but that would not require a deal with Israel. Indeed, Reuters reported that Washington is poised to offer Riyadh a $100 billion arms package to be announced when Trump visits the kingdom in just weeks.

As for the idea of an ambitious defense treaty, similar to American arrangements with Japan and South Korea, Riyadh abandoned the idea of a defense treaty several months ago, according to a recent Reuters report. The perhaps insurmountable hurdle of getting an actual defense treaty through Congress may have been key in this decision, but an American security guarantee is also not perceived to be as permanent as it once was, as many European nations have also recently concluded. Indeed, Washington’s shifts on the Ukraine file may have already changed perceptions in Riyadh on the value and meaning of a U.S. security guarantee.

As for a civil nuclear energy deal — for those who were paying attention, Riyadh is on track to get much, if not all of that, agreed to, without moving a jot on normalization. The U.S energy secretary’s comments earlier this month made it quite clear that the two countries were on a ‘pathway’ to getting such an agreement — again, as the result of bilateral conversations that did not include any reference to Israeli normalization.

The final element, which related to progress on Israeli-Palestinian relations, was always a difficult square to circle in the original vision of normalization. This Israeli government, formed in 2022, is the most far-right one in Israel’s history, with its orientation being quite a definitive feature long before Oct 7. It has only become more intransient over the occupation and Palestinian issue over the last two years. Israel’s war on Gaza has been accompanied by multiple, open rejections of any positive traction on progress on the Palestinian file from Israel’s government.

This has been met by a corresponding reifying of Riyadh’s position.

Saudi Arabia originally held to the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which insisted on an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, in return for normalization of Israel with not only Saudi Arabia, but the entire Arab world. But Riyadh seemed to temporarily soften this stance prior to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza. That is a thing of the past. Saudi leaders are now clear that normalization of relations with Israel could only happen in the event of the establishment of a Palestinian state. There is little to no chance that Israel would agree to such a condition in the foreseeable future.

Riyadh knows Israel’s standing among Saudis, Arabs, and Muslims globally has hit rock bottom. To then embrace Israel now — while its leader faces charges for war crime charges at the International Criminal Court, and the nation answers accusations of genocide before the International Court of Justice (legal fires Washington opposes but cannot extinguish) — would be an act of political self-immolation. That is a price Riyadh will surely refuse to pay. Indeed, the rewards appear non-existent.

Given that Israel is intent on not only continuing its war on Gaza, but has expressed support for further escalation in the West Bank, as well as making Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, the calculus in Riyadh is difficult to argue with. It didn’t help that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently suggested that a Palestinian state could be created on Saudi territory instead.

Washington wants normalization, but seems reluctant to openly admit that in order to achieve progress on that front, multiple factors would have to change. Most of these factors are Israeli policies: on the Palestinians, first and foremost, but also on Iran, and, increasingly, on Syria, where Israel is also escalating with its strikes and deepening occupation of Syrian territory following the fall of the Assad regime. All of that is possible, but just remarkably unlikely. As long as that is the case, it would behoove policymakers in Washington to focus their energies elsewhere, rather than expend political capital and energy on a deal that is beyond reach.

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H. A. Hellyer, PhD, has operated at the nexus of government policy and think tanks for the past 20 years, focusing on geopolitics and security. He currently serves as senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Formerly deputy convenor of the U.K. government’s working group on tackling radicalization and extremism, Hellyer has held positions at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and the U.K. Foreign Office.

Image: Khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary

20. Senior PLA ideology official Miao Hua removed from China’s top legislature

This seems wrong on so many levels: A military officer. In charge of Ideology. A member of the national "legislature." Removed for corruption.

Senior PLA ideology official Miao Hua removed from China’s top legislature

High-ranking Chinese general is expelled from National People’s Congress following corruption investigation

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3308539/senior-pla-ideology-official-miao-hua-removed-chinas-top-legislature?utm

Xinlu Liangin Beijing

Published: 5:15pm, 30 Apr 2025Updated: 7:29pm, 30 Apr 2025

Miao Hua, a top general at China’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), has been removed from his position as a member of the country’s legislature, the National People’s Congress.

According to a statement issued after a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Miao has been dismissed from the NPC.

Miao, who was put under investigation for suspected “serious violations of discipline” in late November, was the head of the political work department of the CMC, a role critical in managing Communist Party ideology and personnel changes within the People’s Liberation Army.

The development could suggest progress in the ongoing investigation into Miao.

The defence ministry announced on November 28 that Miao had been suspended from duty and was under investigation for alleged “violations of discipline”. The phrase is often used as a euphemism for corruption, and the lack of detailed information about Miao’s case reflects the sensitive nature of such allegations within the military.

Miao’s downfall comes as Beijing carries out a broader military reform agenda and continues President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.

Xi has repeatedly emphasised the importance of party loyalty among PLA leaders to strengthen ideological control and support China’s goal of becoming a military superpower.

Miao is the second CMC member to be removed from his position since the current leadership took office in 2022. The first was former defence minister Li Shangfu, who was dismissed in October 2023.

Both Li and his predecessor Wei Fenghe were expelled from the Communist Party in June for “serious violations of discipline”. As a result, the CMC, led by Xi, now faces an unusual double vacancy, bringing its membership to the lowest number since the institution was reformed in 1983.

In contrast to many Western military systems, China’s defence minister does not hold the most powerful military position. Rather, the CMC oversees the armed forces, with the defence minister serving mainly as the armed forces’ international representative. CMC membership gives direct access to Xi.

He Weidong, the second-ranked vice-chairman of the CMC and one of the 24 members of the Communist Party’s Politburo, has also been out the public eye in recent weeks. He, who was last seen in public on March 11, missed a series of key meetings.

Miao was last seen publicly on October 7 at the 70th anniversary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps in the far western autonomous region.

He joined the PLA at 14 and dedicated years to party work in Fujian province. His career advanced significantly after Xi assumed power, leading to roles in the Chinese navy as political commissar and eventually becoming the PLA’s youngest admiral.

Miao served as director of the CMC’s political work department and as a CMC member since 2017.

Xinlu Liang

Xinlu Liang joined the Post as a Graduate Trainee in 2021. Previously, she wrote obituaries for lives lost in California as a Covid-19 reporting intern at the Los Angeles Times and interned at Reuters Shenzhen Newsroom. She graduated with a Master’s in journalism from University of

21. As war with Russia drags on, Ukrainians wage parallel ‘revolution of dignity’

As war with Russia drags on, Ukrainians wage parallel ‘revolution of dignity’

By Howard LaFranchi Staff writer

April 29, 2025, 9:07 a.m. ET

Dnipro, Kyiv, and Odesa, Ukraine

The Christian Science Monitor · by The Christian Science Monitor · April 29, 2025

As Tetiana Heienko stood before the seated Russian officer who had summoned her for questioning, she felt something shift inside her.

A member of the town council in her village outside her beloved city of Melitopol in eastern Ukraine, Mrs. Heienko was a figure of modest local authority. So not long after Russian forces occupied the city during the full-scale invasion in 2022, she was summoned for questioning. She understood that, essentially, the officer was asking her to recognize and cooperate with the Russian authorities who were now in charge.

She thought of her garden, where she grew beets for borsch. She thought of the dolls she made and dressed in small swatches of traditional vyshyvanka pattern embroidery. She thought of Melitopol’s annual cherry festival, which had been such a glorious success the previous June.

Why We Wrote This

A story focused on

Dignity

After Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, Ukrainians continue to fight a “revolution of dignity” as they assert their own language and history.

At that moment, Mrs. Heienko knew: Everything dear to her was Ukrainian.

The low-level local representative had grown up using Russian in school. It was the language of her public life – as well as most social occasions. But this time she made a choice. She would answer the Russian officer’s questions, but she would do so in Ukrainian.

“The commandant said that if I worked with the new authorities, the local people would come along,” she says, seated in the conference room of an association that assists displaced Melitopolans in Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine she now calls home.

“When I spoke in Ukrainian, it was total shock in the room, but they understood,” she adds. “I was answering these invaders and killers in the language of my home and my heart.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Tetiana Heienko and her husband, Mykola, who were displaced from Melitopol when it was occupied by Russian forces in 2022, stand in the farmyard of their new home outside Dnipro in central Ukraine.

Mrs. Heienko’s choice, it turns out, was not unique to her.

Across Ukraine, citizens by the millions have been proclaiming their identity and independence by using their native tongue while learning, writing, working, or socializing.

Indeed, the choice of using the Ukrainian language is just one metric of a change that has swept across the country during a decade of political upheaval and war. But when asked how they and their country have changed during this time, Ukrainians usually cite the widespread and exclusive use of their language before anything else.

Since Russia seized Crimea over a decade ago, Ukrainians have chosen the language of their roots over the language of their occupiers, says Evgeniya Blyznyuk, founder of Gradus Research, a polling organization in Kyiv.

“Broadly speaking, we are in the process of growing up as a nation,” she says. “And just as with children, our use and choice of language is part of that process.”

According to her organization’s annual survey of attitudes, the share of Ukrainians speaking their native tongue instead of Russian jumped from about 40% before Russia’s full-on assault to nearly 7 in 10 today.

“That really very rapid shift in language preference is just one of the very strong indicators we find of how Ukrainians are changing in terms of identity, how they feel about their country, and what values they aspire to for building the future,” Ms. Blyznyuk says. “Ukraine can’t identify with Russia anymore.”

Viacheslav Onyshchenko/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Reuters/File

A sculpture of Catherine the Great lies toppled next to the Odesa Fine Arts Museum in Ukraine. This statue of the Russian empress once stood on the granite pedestal in Odesa’s historic center.

Ukraine’s “revolution of dignity”

Since 2011, the former Soviet republic and erstwhile domain of Catherine the Great has experienced three major political upheavals – Ukrainians deem them “revolutions.” These include the 2014 Maidan “revolution of dignity” when pro-Western demonstrators forced members of a regime beholden to Moscow to flee.

Ukraine’s surge of nationalism and quest to build a new sense of nationhood is not a unique story. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in 15 independent countries of Central and Eastern Europe rediscovering their cultures and national identities.

The results have been mixed, European experts note: from the political and economic success of the Baltic state democracies to the varying degrees of authoritarianism adopted by countries ranging from Hungary to Kyrgyzstan.

Yet while virtually all of these countries have faced some degree of Russian political pressure and covert destabilization campaigns – and some, like Georgia, have lost territory to Russian-backed separatists – only Ukraine has pursued this nation-building journey over a decade of war and a full-scale invasion, now in its fourth year.

As much as anything else, it is the rhetoric of a revanchist Vladimir Putin who insists a Ukraine independent of Mother Russia does not exist. His war that aims to force a rebellious satellite back to the imperial fold has forged a fervent sense of national unity. Even after more than three years of devastating war, there is widespread insistence that, despite Mr. Putin’s terror, there will be no going back.

A patriotism embodied by the soldiers fighting the war is on display across the country. There are flower-laden memorials to local fallen fighters that have sprouted in many small villages – often adjacent to Soviet-style monuments for World War II dead. There is also the flag-adorned memorial that extends over a large swath of Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, also known as Independence Square.

On a sunny morning in early March, hundreds of residents gather here to express solemn gratitude at a military funeral for a soldier and former protest leader during Ukraine’s 2014 revolution of dignity.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Soldiers carry the coffin of Vasyl Ratushnyi, a soldier and independence leader, in Kyiv’s Independence Square. The Ukrainian public honored the fallen soldier March 5, 2025.

Fellow soldiers, family, and friends, as well as a host of strangers, file past the open casket of Vasyl Ratushnyi at the sky-blue and onion-domed St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. Most kneel to pat his hand or kiss his brow. Later, a hearse carries the casket down the hill to the Maidan, where hundreds more gather to pay their respects.

“I came here to honor the soldier who gave his life for my life,” says a woman named Olga, who asked that her last name be withheld, during her lunch break from her job in a nearby hotel. “I didn’t know this boy, but I wish for him to know that I will honor the life of every hero with the life I live for our country.”

Two friends who came in from the Kyiv suburbs say it is important to them to demonstrate their gratitude to the soldiers fighting to keep Ukraine free. “It is thanks to people like this soldier that we have hope to live in a free country and not under the boot of the oppressor,” says Anna Mushynska, whose son Petro was killed in the war in 2024.

Her friend, Iryna Bilan, says that when Russian forces attacked her former hometown of Irpin during the first days of the invasion, she realized Russia would never give up its dream of erasing an independent Ukraine with its own identity and culture.

“It took me back to the day I turned in my written exams for graduating from music school, exams I had completed in Ukrainian,” says the retired music teacher. “The instructor very coldly told me that until I redid the exams in a civilized language, I could not hope to graduate. Remembering that as the enemy invaded my town, I realized that either Russia is defeated, or Ukraine cannot exist.”

For some, Ukraine’s public honoring of its defenders is a sign of a country rediscovering its nationhood.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Anna Mushynska (right) and her friend Iryna Bilan attend a public memorial in Kyiv’s Independence Square for the fallen soldier and protest leader Vasyl Ratushnyi.

“Part of what we see today is a change in who we consider are our heroes,” says Valerii Pekar, a noted Ukrainian futurist and professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School. “Our heroes have become those who resisted during centuries [when Russian power] sought to subdue, occupy, and erase us.”

These include the Cossacks, a warrior people who proclaimed the motto “Live free or die,” and who resisted Russian domination in the 18th century, Mr. Pekar says. It also now includes today’s soldiers who repelled Russia’s 2022 invasion to seize Kyiv and return Ukraine to Moscow’s orbit.

What the world is witnessing today is Ukrainians rediscovering – and asserting – who they are as a nation, Mr. Pekar says. “For us, independence in 1991 was a gift from the collapse of the Soviet Union; it was not anything we had to fight for. It really was not until 2014,” after the Maidan revolution and the Russian occupation of Crimea, “that we realized independence was not free,” he says.

“We can say we as a nation were born in 2014,” he adds. “We realized our independence and identity and Ukrainian culture were things we would have to fight for.”

Echoing Ms. Blyznyuk, Mr. Pekar compares the nation born in 2014 to a child growing up and vigorously discovering and developing its identity. The manifestations of this include music and literature – witness the boom in publishing in the Ukrainian language. There’s also the growth of a vibrant tech community in Kyiv and a world-class space program in Dnipro, which has shifted to defense production.

“The invasion forced a nation that was rediscovering itself to ask, ‘What are our values? What are the core virtues we want our country to live by?’” he says. “One was freedom, yes, but not just freedom from Russia. Suddenly you had an entire nation asking, ‘What do we want freedom for?’”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Valerii Pekar, Ukrainian futurist and professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, says that in 2014, Ukrainians “realized independence was not free.”

A florist who built a drone assembly shop

For Kseniia Kalmus, the answer to the question of freedom’s purpose came within hours of Russia’s invasion. At first frozen with fear, the successful floral designer in Kyiv decided she would replace her fear with action.

“It came to me that I wasn’t helpless, but I was free to do things. I was free to do my part to resist the invaders and help my country,” Ms. Kalmus says. “It seemed to me Russia could never win if Ukrainians were united and acting together to keep our freedom.”

And so the 30-something florist who had always been good with her hands would, before long, find herself building drones for the military’s use. And not just building drones, but organizing national and international fundraising events to purchase drone parts. She coordinated a roster of 35 volunteers, ranging from a 15-year-old tech wiz to a 78-year-old grandparent. Today they deliver hundreds of drones a month in a war in which 70% of military operations are now carried out by such machines.

“I loved my florist shop, but I knew that with my country in danger I needed to do more,” Ms. Kalmus says. “I’m an organizer, and organizing this is my way of fighting,” she says, gesturing toward the workshop where four assemblers are building drones.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Kseniia Kalmus, a former florist, founded Klyn Drones, a volunteer assembly shop in Kyiv. “This is my way of fighting,” she says.

The success of her volunteer drone-assembly organization underscores for Ms. Kalmus how much her country has changed.

“Three years ago most of us weren’t thinking that much about our identity and what ‘Ukraine’ means to us. Most of my friends were still speaking Russian.

“But things are so different now,” she says. “Anyone who stayed in the country,” instead of seeking refuge from the war in another country, “is now super pro-Ukrainian. We are united, but the unity is not just against our enemy,” she says. “Our unity is our strength to build our country.”

Indeed, that unity is why Ms. Kalmus chose to name her drone-assembly organization “Klyn,” the Ukrainian word for the wedge geese make flying together. “Like them, we are stronger when we are depending on each other and flying in unity.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian soldiers of the 108th Territorial Defense Brigade test-fly a Ukrainian-made Vampire drone near the southern front line in Zaporizhzhia oblast, Feb. 21, 2024.

Rediscovering a Ukrainian identity

Ukraine’s heightened sense of unity is on display in cities and villages, in restaurants, gas stations, and mom-and-pop shops, with the ubiquitous flying of the Ukrainian flag.

In the gorgeous Black Sea port city of Odesa, the sky-blue and sunflower-yellow banner now graces the granite pedestal where a statue of Catherine the Great – who, according to the Russian version of history, was Odesa’s founder – once stood.

But for some in Odesa, that ever-present symbol of national unity also obscures a lingering division between Ukraine enthusiasts and a slice of the population that remains nostalgic for Mother Russia.

More broadly, some observers of Ukrainian society caution that the country’s war-fueled assertions of unity and national identity do not mean Ukraine’s transition to a modern, Western-oriented European democracy is complete.

“For me, this trend of a rediscovery of our Ukrainian identity and culture is still very fragile,” says Taras Honcharuk, a professor of history at Odesa I.I.Mechnikov National University. “I see the grannies on the bus watching the Russian propaganda channels on their phone,” he says. “We must acknowledge we live in an infiltrated society where Russian propaganda is still very strong.”

Others recognize how Ukraine’s assertion of identity and independence remains a work in progress.

“We still have the old Soviet ways in our laws. We see the Soviet way of thinking in corruption and obscure business and political affairs where others want transparency,” says Ms. Blyznyuk. “Because of the war, the Western part of us is growing, but the Soviet part is quite stubborn.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

A statue of the Russian empress once stood on this granite pedestal in Odesa’s historic center. It now holds the Ukrainian flag aloft.

Like Mr. Pekar in Kyiv, Dr. Honcharuk says it was the “shock” of 2014 that set in motion a mental separation from Russia and a growing enthusiasm for independence and identity. Odesa experienced clashes, some of them violent, between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian camps. Some of the city’s elites shifted allegiance to a Ukraine divorced from Russia – a trend Dr. Honcharuk says accelerated with the 2022 invasion.

Also key in the Odesa historian’s eyes: In 2014, the curriculum for Ukrainian history courses was altered to include sections on the Tatars and their long history and culture in Crimea – a move that mirrored the concurrent elevation of the Cossacks as national heroes.

Still, the unsettled controversy over removal of the Catherine the Great statue tells Dr. Honcharuk that Ukraine, and especially Odesa, has not fully weaned itself from the imperial power.

“I’m a big fan of the Ukrainian flag flying on that pedestal,” he says. “But the fact it’s still a matter of debate tells me we have not yet gained our Ukrainian independence.”

At the Odesa Oblast Academic Drama Theater, director Oleksandr Samusenko expounds on what he admits is a somewhat irreverent position to take: that Russia’s war has not been all darkness and disaster for Ukraine.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

“As we fight this war, I think it is the duty of us in the arts to create the works that will amaze people and show them the value of our culture,” says Oleksandr Samusenko, director at the Academic Drama Theater in Odesa.

“Of course the war is terrible. It would be cruel to describe the death and destruction as anything good for Ukraine,” he says. “But at the same time, war is also a possibility to bring about changes that otherwise would have taken dozens of years” – or maybe not even then.

In between rehearsals for a reimagining of Nikolai Gogol’s “Marriage,” Mr. Samusenko discusses Ukraine’s complicated history with Russia. Staging a play by Gogol is in itself a statement: To the world, the Ukraine-born 19th-century writer is Russian, but Ukrainians consider him to be Ukrainian.

To Mr. Samusenko’s thinking, Russia’s obsession with subduing an independent Ukraine has accomplished only the contrary. “Our historical and cultural emancipation has been going on for 300 years,” he says, sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with “MADE IN BAKHMUT,” a proud reference to his native eastern Ukrainian city that fell to Russian forces in 2022 after a ferocious battle.

“But now as we fight this war, I think it is the duty of us in the arts to create the works that will amaze people and show them the value of our culture,” he says.

In his version of “Marriage,” Mr. Samusenko says he wanted to evoke Gogol’s roots in Ukraine. The stark set has little more than a well with a long wooden arm for dipping a bucket to collect water – a design he says is emblematic of the Ukrainian countryside.

“I want to show Ukrainians that Gogol got his inspiration from his homeland,” Mr. Samusenko says. “By presenting the play this way,” he adds, “we are showing that there are layers to Gogol that Russia has ignored.”

In his version, the play is no longer a comedy but a drama. Does the bride-to-be who spurns a line of unappealing suitors represent a Ukraine facing difficult choices? Mr. Samusenko says his point is something else.

“What I’m saying with this [reinterpretation] is that in a time of war it is easy to become cynical and cold, losing our human emotions,” he says. “But instead, we need even more to remember who we are and preserve the human part of us.”

In a time of war, a love of country

For Mykola Vlasenko, that essential human part is, simply, love.

The lanky auto repair-shop owner from Odesa says it was “love of country” that motivated him to close up his business a few days after Russia’s February 2022 invasion and join the 18th Battalion of the 35th Marine Brigade.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Mykola Vlasenko (right), a marine, sculpted a “heart of peace” memorial to represent “love for our country” and “a love for humanity.” He stands with his wife, Anna, in the village of Murakhivka in eastern Ukraine.

“Since the Crimea occupation and everything else that happened in 2014, we had been diving into our roots, learning about our culture we had been told didn’t exist, and discovering a proud Ukraine that is separate from Russia,” he says. “When those people who claimed to be our brothers came to kill us, destroy our villages, and take our lands, I knew within me that I had to join the fight to preserve us.”

Mr. Vlasenko says he realized he was experiencing the same motivation Cossack fighters had defending their lands centuries earlier.

He was inspired to employ his metalworking skills to craft a diminutive heart sculpture in the Mykolaiv region where he and his fellow marines had repelled an advancing enemy.

Blue and yellow on one side, the red and black of Ukrainian resistance on the other, the heart holds in its center a blooming rose – “Ukraine’s national flower,” Mr. Vlasenko says, momentarily forgetting the sunflower – rising from the rich Ukrainian soil.

On a brisk morning in March, the auto-mechanic-turned-soldier drives the three hours from Odesa with his bride of one day, Anna, for newlywed photos at the heart.

The war-damaged village of Murakhivka is quiet, but Mr. Vlasenko says the village council has plans to plant fruit trees and create a proper park on the land it donated to host his sculpture.

“Our enemy wants to claim that there were never Ukrainians living on this land. But I want to say with this sculpture that we have been here for a long time, and the land has made us who we are,” he says.

Noting that “peace” and “world” are the same word in the Ukrainian language, he says, “For me this is both the heart of peace and the heart of the world. It represents love for our country,” he adds, “but also a love for humanity.”

Oleksandr Naselenko assisted in the reporting of this story.

The Christian Science Monitor · by The Christian Science Monitor · April 29, 2025

22. SOF Week — Where Trust Becomes Decision Advantage

See you there.

SOF Week — Where Trust Becomes Decision Advantage

By Chad Williamson

April 30, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/30/sof_week__where_trust_becomes_decision_advantage_1107115.html?mc_cid=8ae837617b

On May 5th, more than 20,000 people will converge in downtown Tampa for the annual Special Operations Forces Week—known simply as SOF Week. The “human terrain” has long been the SOF community’s greatest asset. And this year, that formula is operating at an unprecedented scale.

1,940 applications for 260 one-on-one meetings with SOCOM acquisition leaders
820 unique companies exhibiting, with over 40% new to the event
66 countries officially attending
1,101 meeting requests from industry to partner nations
13 countries funded by the Global SOF Foundation (GSOF) to ensure international participation

But General Bryan P. Fenton doesn’t define power through numbers. He defines it through partnerships, “In our DNA is partnering. SOF is known as a premier partner force.”

As Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Fenton oversees a global force built not just on capabilities, but on relationships—small teams operating in over 80 countries, leading coalition efforts, shaping terrain, and deterring escalation through trusted partnerships, not aggressive posturing.

As he told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, “Once you get trust, you can do everything—build partner capacity, develop capabilities, and bring together folks who otherwise may not be together.”

This is exactly why SOF Week exists. Where warfighters, industry leaders, policy makers, tech innovators and international allies do more than discuss the future—they build the relationships that will shape it.

One of those industry leaders—Jon “BigDogg” Rhone—is a retired Air Force Colonel and the current SAIC C5SIR Integration Lead. He speaks about SOF Week through the lens of people and perspective.

“To me, one of the most important aspects of the SOF Week experience is listening to other people and their perspectives. Garnering multiple perspectives is a decision advantage for mission relevance and warfighting capabilities.”

Perspective Taking

In his interview with SOFcast, General Fenton talks about the need for both theory and practice in connection to education and training of the formation. As Rhone highlights “decision advantage” being a takeaway from SOF Week, how might we justify its value? Especially in a sector where any advantage is considered a win.

In her 2023 article—Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security—Army War College Professor, Dr. Allison Abbe, posits that a cognitive component of perspective taking is a critical skill for practitioners. Through the aperture of SOF personnel and industry capabilities, Fenton and Rhone might find this relevant to their collective mission pursuit.

What if “perspective-taking” was a conscious skill that people focused on cultivating and practicing? Not only at SOF Week, but across the enterprise.

It’s not soft skills talk—it’s strategic literacy. Through her research, Dr. Abbe explores how perspective-taking is foundational to cultural competence and mission success. This approach and skill enables warfighters to understand allies before partnering—and adversaries before confronting.

Current Challenges

SOCOM has not received a real dollar increase in funding since 2019. That has resulted in a 14% erosion in buying power—nearly $1 billion lost—despite being asked to take on more global missions, operate in contested environments, and lead influence operations in the cognitive domain.

In his transcript from the Senate hearing, Fenton provided context on SOF value, “The Nation gets all of this for less than 2% of the DoD budget and 3% of its force. SOF provide an outsized return on investment to the nation.”

This mismatch between mission and resources is what makes SOF Week not just relevant—but urgent. If SOF is expected to lead in irregular warfare, its connective tissue—the places where relationships are built and coordinated—must be prioritized accordingly, and with an obvious sense of urgency.

People and Proximity

In the stewardship of SOF Week is the Global SOF Foundation (GSOF). Leading an event of this magnitude is no small task—managed by a formidable team of 32 full-time staff and over 1,400 support personnel. As SOF Week has expanded in scale and scope, its complexity has only created more opportunity.

"Yes, the numbers continue to increase, and the demand far exceeds the supply," says Chelsea Hamashin, Vice President of Marketing and Events at GSOF. "Being headquartered in Tampa affords us the opportunity to be strategic partners of SOF Week while also understanding SOF community needs for global security."

What makes SOF Week unique isn’t just the scale and scope. It’s the proximity, the people, and the perspective.

It’s the warfighters, policy leaders, international allies, tech innovators, and acquisition specialists—many of whom would never otherwise share the same room—who come together with one shared purpose, to build something no single institution can create alone. Trust.

There is no other gathering like SOF Week. Because there is no other force like SOF—one that operates globally, builds coalitions intentionally, and engages with the world not through declarations, but through presence.

SOF Week doesn’t just showcase the future of warfare. It shapes it. And in a world where advantage often comes down to relationships, understanding, and trust—SOF Week remains the place where tomorrow’s decisions are forged today.

"SOF is a national advantage for the nation." — General Bryan Fenton

Chad Williamson is a military veteran and is currently pursuing his graduate degree in national security policy. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife, Dr. Heather Williamson, and their two chocolate labs, Demmi and Ferg.

23. China spy fears at air bases lead to string of tourist detentions

A thousand grains of sand.

China spy fears at air bases lead to string of tourist detentions

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · April 29, 2025

A string of detentions of Chinese nationals caught taking unauthorized photos or filming near military bases has raised concerns over Beijing-linked spying in South Korea.

Newsweek has reached out to the Chinese embassy in South Korea with an emailed request for comment.

Why It Matters

The incidents, some of which took place near installations housing U.S. air and naval forces, recall suspected espionage cases in the Philippines and Japan, which, like South Korea, are key American security partners.

Tensions are running high as China steps up its challenge to U.S. military power across the Asia-Pacific, including efforts to assert territorial claims in the South and East China seas and around Taiwan.

What To Know

Acting on a tip from U.S. military personnel, South Korean authorities detained two Chinese nationals on April 23 for using high-end cameras to photograph planes, on suspicion of violating Seoul's Protection of Military Bases and Installations Act, according to local reports.

Police confirmed the pair had been briefly detained and warned just two days earlier for the same activity near the same facility—Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek.

The base is the center of U.S. Air Force operations in the country and home to the 51st Fighter Wing, which operates a variety of aircraft, including F-16s and A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthog" attack planes.

An F-16 Fighting Falcon is marshaled into its spot by two 13th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron ground crew members February 23, 2025, at Suwon Air Base. An F-16 Fighting Falcon is marshaled into its spot by two 13th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron ground crew members February 23, 2025, at Suwon Air Base. U.S. Air Force

The two men were released after a review determined the photos, which were taken from public streets, did not constitute a national security threat. South Korean law does not consider photographing planes from nonrestricted areas to be a legal offense.

The incident follows a similar case involving two Chinese teenagers who were arrested for violating the same law after authorities discovered they had taken thousands of photos at Osan Air Base and several other major bases and international airports.

The students, who had arrived just three days prior on tourist visas, told authorities that plane photography was a hobby.

One of them also said his father works for China's public security bureau, raising questions about whether the students had been tasked with collecting intelligence on their government's behalf.

Under current South Korean law, a suspect can be prosecuted for espionage only if found to have acted on behalf of an "enemy state," meaning North Korea. Violators of the Military Bases and Installations Protection Act face up to three years of jail time or a maximum fine of 30 million won ($21,000).

What People Are Saying

An investigating South Korean official previously told the Chosun Daily: "Given that they began photographing strategic assets and key installations almost immediately after entering the country, their actions appear premeditated."

What Happens Next

The investigation into the Chinese tourists is ongoing.

One official told the Chosun Daily there are likely more such cases that have yet to be uncovered.

About the writer

Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian security issues, and cross-strait ties between China and Taiwan. You can get in touch with Micah by emailing m.mccartney@newsweek.com.

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · April 29, 2025

24. Saigon 1975: A Memoir – A personal account of the chaotic collapse of South Vietnam

What a story. Well worth the time to read, recall, and reflect.

Asia Sentinel

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Saigon 1975: A Memoir

A personal account of the chaotic collapse of South Vietnam

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/saigon-1975-memoir?utm

Apr 30, 2025

By: David Brown

NVA at the US Embassy. Photo from the Associated Press

April 30 marks the 50^th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam. David Brown's 36-year career in the US Foreign Service began in wartime Vietnam, where he served as political assistant to the legendary John Vann, and where he married Le Thi Bach Tuyet. In retirement, Brown has chronicled Vietnam's evolution as an actor in the political and economic life of Southeast Asia. In the fall, he was serving as a foreign service officer in Japan. This is the story of his struggle to rescue his wife’s family.

Every evening in early 1975, my wife and I – trainees at the US State Department’s Japanese language school in Yokohama – tuned in to Japan’s public TV network. We were not just doing our homework; NHK’s bulletins from Saigon were our best source of news on my wife’s homeland and my former post.

The nightly news from Vietnam became ominous, then turned absolutely black when, in early March, the North Vietnamese launched a well-coordinated offensive. Within weeks, their divisions were within 60 miles of Saigon.

We’d left many friends behind in Vietnam, and of course, my wife's family. Our very public marriage five years earlier had branded her parents, sisters, and brothers as American lackeys. If Saigon were to fall to Hanoi’s forces, their livelihoods, if not their lives, would be in imminent danger.

I sent an anxious letter to a friend in the US Embassy’s consular section. He wrote back that “we will put your wife's family on our list and make sure that if we have to evacuate that they get out.” That reassured us for a while, but the military situation continued to deteriorate.

US Ambassador Graham Martin put a very brave face on it, insisting that with enough targeted assistance, by which he meant the return of US air power and the emergency aid which Congress had refused to grant, the southern part of South Vietnam could be preserved.

I didn’t believe that, nor did my wife. Comparing the reports on NHK to the letters we got from Tuyet’s family in Vietnam, it was clear that we had a much more accurate understanding of the strategic situation than my wife's parents did. They were sending notes back saying, “Oh, we have seen trouble before. We will survive it,” and so forth.

At Embassy Saigon, Ambassador Martin was dead set against running any kind of evacuation that might erode the confidence of the South Vietnamese regime and hasten its collapse.

By the middle of April, however, friends in Saigon wrote me that a semi-official evacuation operation was kicking into high gear. This operation was run by US staff still in Vietnam, drawn from the military advisory office and from USAID, CIA, and US Embassy officers. They had volunteered to stay on to the end and move as many of America's friends to the US as possible.

Some weeks earlier, in fact, I had volunteered to travel from Japan to assist with an evacuation. The answer I received ‘through channels’ was an emphatic ‘no’. An anonymous functionary in Washington informed me that the object was to get Americans out of Vietnam, not the other way around. The bottom line: There was no circumstance that would see me returning to Saigon.

That put us in an impossible situation. After much anguished conversation, Tuyet and I decided that I should go back to Vietnam, connect with friends, and persuade her father and mother to leave. If they insisted on staying in Saigon, we agreed, I should urge them to allow my wife's eight siblings to emigrate.

The next day, April 23, while I flew toward South Vietnam, a friend delivered my letter of apology to Ambassador Jim Hodgson. I was AWOL, “absent without leave.”

Night was falling in Saigon as I tried the phone numbers of friends on the staff of the US embassy there. Most had already been sent home, but on my fifth try, I connected with a friend who had a spare bed. Early the next morning, April 24, he steered me to a ‘safe house’ where Embassy staff were issuing permits for travel to the US.

I explained my mission, and a records check verified that Tuyet’s family was eligible for refugee status. Then came the hard part: I had to contact Tuyet’s parents without arousing the attention of their neighbors. I phoned a Vietnamese friend; he generously agreed to deliver my wife’s letter to her parents!

About midday, Tuyet’s older sister arrived at the safe house. Lien told me that Tuyet’s letter had persuaded her parents that the situation was indeed desperate. The whole family would leave except, she said, she and her two small children must stay behind. Captain Thao, her husband, had not been heard from since his base was overrun several weeks earlier. Meanwhile, his parents and step-siblings had reached Saigon safely. Family obligation required that Lien remain with her husband’s family. She could not leave Vietnam, she said, unless her in-laws could also emigrate.

Again, I consulted the US Embassy team that was issuing entry permits. Yes, I was told; they could provide documents for sister Lien’s in-laws as well! Lien provided a list of names and birthdates. We were told that unmarked vans would pick up both families later that day.

Waiting, I walked the nearby streets. For the great majority of Saigonese, life seemed not much changed. They continued to zoom around on their motorcycles and in their cars, bent on urgent errands.

Toward 3 pm, two black vans arrived at the ‘safe house.’ In one, behind dark windows, was Tuyet's family; each had a small bag containing a single change of clothes and a few treasured items, in particular family photos. Lien and her in-laws were in another. There were 18 individuals in all, identified on US Embassy documents.

I joined the group in the first van, and we headed for the airport. Half an hour later, we pulled up to the gate of the huge US advisory compound, now mostly empty. We held our collective breath while Vietnamese guards checked the van’s papers. They did not look inside the vans, which was surely part of a bargain between US officials and whoever, for the South Vietnamese army was responsible for comings and goings at Camp Alpha, the MACV compound.

We were delivered to a 12-lane, US-standard bowling alley, where we squatted near the midpoint of Lane #4 for the next 24 hours. Tuyet’s father and I made friends with the leaders of the groups behind and ahead of us. We were fed. We slept in place. Someone was kind enough to dim the lights.

The next morning, April 25, all the toilets were clogged up. I recruited a group of young men who helped me unclog them. I persuaded one of the American enlisted staff to rig up a few fans.

Possibly, we were again fed. I don't recall what or how. We weren't moving; we were just more than a thousand would-be refugees waiting on bowling alleys for something to happen. Someone told me that the Philippine dictator, Marcos, had forbidden further disembarkation at US bases there. The airlift was halted until new destinations could be arranged.

Toward evening, the queue started moving again. An hour later, our group was checked against a list and escorted outside. There were no lights and neither moon nor stars. We were guided to buses and driven out to the flight line, where several US transports were loading passengers in near-total darkness.

Two hundred yards to the left, a brightly lit Air France 747 was boarding passengers and, I heard later, the remaining gold reserves of the RVN central bank.

Helped by US airmen, we clambered up the wide-open cargo doors and into the belly of a C-141. The seats had been removed. Rip cords were stretched across the width of the plane. It filled up with refugees, about 12 to a row, each with a small suitcase. We were seated cross-legged, facing backward, 22 rows in all. Our contingent was among the last to board, so we were only 20 feet or so from the open cargo door.

No one spoke, no child cried as the huge plane taxied out onto the runway, revved its four jet engines and in near-total darkness took off in the steepest possible climb. Tuyet’s youngest brother and sister clung to my arms.

Perhaps 15 minutes later, the plane leveled as we crossed the Vietnamese coast. My legs ached. Taking pity on me, an airman posted at the cargo door waved me to join him. I explained how I happened to be on this flight, its sole round-eyed passenger. He told me we were headed for Guam and would land there in six hours. I begged for some paper to write a letter to Tuyet.

The sun was just rising when, at last, we disembarked at Anderson Air Force Base. It was April 26.

Anderson was the base from which B-52 bombers had dropped countless bombs on Indochina. There was no sign of them now. We were taken to a huge hangar, fed, and told to wait. I found my way to an office where I was permitted to use the US Forces telephone system.

Tuyet answered the phone at our house in a suburb of Yokohama. She says that when she heard my voice, with our baby girl on her hip, she began crying and shaking. Tuyet told me that I was not in trouble; the Embassy, she said, only wanted to know what help it could give us!

Things got sorted in the next few days. On May 1st, there was great sadness as news of the Saigon regime’s surrender spread through the refugee camp. Two days later, Tuyet’s parents, her youngest siblings, and I boarded a plane for Japan. (Lien and her babies, her 21-year-old sister Hanh, and her husband’s family were airlifted directly to a processing camp in the US.)

That summer, just before Tuyet and I returned to Tokyo for two more years, we were able to resettle Tuyet’s family in a San Francisco home we could just barely afford.

Then, in the summer of 1977, Lien’s husband Thao and trusted friends escaped Vietnam in a fishing boat. Within sight of a Philippine island, it ran out of gas, but again fortune smiled on our family: Filipino fishermen towed them to safety.

In the years that followed, our “refugee family” would build a new life in America. The rest of the story would be theirs to write.

25. The Fall of Saigon: 50 Years on – lessons can be identified, but not learned

Also worth reflecting on. Powerful concluding words worth remembering and hopefully learning from.

Excerpts:

As I’ve covered countless times here, I remember the discussions at C5F in the hours, weeks, and months after the attacks of 9/11/2001. One thing we kept referring to, as we thought that we were just going to do a punitive expedition into Afghanistan or wherever we found the guilty hiding, was that we were not going to repeat the errors of the Vietnam War.

Well, we failed. We forgot the greatest error was: arrogance.

Maybe the next generation will say, “Let’s not repeat the errors of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq”, and actually follow through. I hope so.

We owe it to the tens of thousands of Americans who died in the Vietnam War, and the thousands who have died—and multiples of that maimed—in our wars since.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, it is the least we can do.

We owe them humility.

CDR Salamander

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The Fall of Saigon: 50 Years on

lessons can be identified, but not learned

https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-saigon-50-years-on?utm

CDR Salamander

Apr 30, 2025

It’s like the fall of Saigon

Chaos. Panic. Desperations.

I don’t think younger people understand the simile above as well as those over 55 do, but as a GenX guy, I’ve heard and used it all my life—and probably always will—to describe what to the modern eye might be a Black Friday rush on Target. I was not even 10 years old when it fell, but I remember sitting with my parents watching its fall on the television.

HR. McMaster’s October 2009 article on the topic is worth a revisit today.

The key Vietnam-era conceit was that the United States had discovered the secret of using violence with minimal uncertainty and a high degree of efficiency.

And just as the opposing side of the Vietnam debate argued that an American force wedded to conventional orthodoxy was ill-suited for and failed to adapt to the challenges of combating an insurgency in the complex geographic and cultural environment of Southeast Asia, scholars such as Conrad Crane have made the point that the U.S. military was ill-prepared for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—mainly because it regarded Vietnam as an aberration and then as a mistake to be avoided.

Many historians criticize the late Robert McNamara and other architects of America’s intervention in Vietnam for having slighted the human and psychological dimensions of war and refusing to pay due respect to the complex Vietnamese communist strategy of Dau Tranh—a strategy that employed a mosaic of shifting political and military actions—and a critique of American military policy in Iraq levels a similar charge. It faults those who initially devised military policy in Iraq for having revived the Vietnam-era conceit that the United States had discovered the secret of using violence with minimal uncertainty and a high degree of efficiency: the mere demonstration of American military prowess, policy makers argued at the outset of both conflicts, would be sufficient to alter the behavior of the enemy. This flawed assumption had similar effects in each case: the United States dramatically underestimated the complexity of war and the level of effort and time required to achieve its wartime objectives.

We deferred to The Smartest People in the Room™. We thought they were the smartest because they told us they were. They went to all the correct schools, natch.

Our record of learning from the past, particularly the American experience in Vietnam, is not strong. As Yuen Foong Khong argued in her book Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, it was the misapplication of history that so muddled analysis and decision making during the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Similarly, America’s memory of the divisive military intervention in Vietnam is easily manipulated because it is foggy and imprecise, more symbolic than historical. There are dangers in the reflexive application of historical memory; it clouds understanding and justifies poorly devised policies. Thus historian Earl Tilford argued that the only true lesson of Vietnam was that the “United States must never again become involved in a civil war in support of a nationalist cause against communist insurgents supplied by allies with contiguous borders in a former French colony located in a tropical climate halfway around the world.”

It is true that the conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan exhibit many more differences than similarities. But although the uniqueness of Vietnam limits what we might apply directly from that experience, an examination of how and why Vietnam became an American war and what went wrong there can also help us think more clearly about the wars of today and tomorrow. Indeed, as long as we resist the temptation to expect simple answers from history, strategic and operational insights from the war in Vietnam can be relevant and helpful to our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What if we are making the mistake of looking for the real lessons on the tactical and strategic levels over there, when the real lessons are more over here in the psychological and mindset of America’s elite and the people they are supposed to lead?

The way the United States went to war in Vietnam was unique in American history. No one decision led to war. President Johnson did not want to go to war, yet every decision he made seems in retrospect to have led inexorably in that direction. Not that Johnson relished such decisions: he turned to his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to develop a strategy for Vietnam compatible with his domestic priorities and one that would permit the president to avoid a concrete decision between war and disengagement.

I think what was once “unique” has become a habit.

This paragraph gets close to the heart, I think, of not just Vietnam, but our actions from the Balkans to Kurdistan over the last three decades.

The principal hallmarks of graduated pressure—maximum results with minimal investment, a conviction that the enemy would respond rationally to American action, an obsession with technology as a defining element of warfare—responded to multiple needs unrelated to the actual situation. They were, however, consistent with the education and professional orientations of the architects of the American war in Vietnam. For these men— McNamara, William Bundy, John McNaughton, and the “whiz kids” who surrounded them—human relations were best viewed through the lenses of rational-choice economics and systems analysis. The persistence of nasty, divisive, “irrational” political impulses did not figure much into their worldview. Further, technological innovations had, at least in their telling, endowed these policy makers with an ability to use force in a precise and calibrated way, one that would not set loose the dogs of war.

And even closer.

Although terms like “signals” and “messages” were banished from the lexicon of U.S. military affairs after Vietnam, the search for magic bullets—and a related neglect of the human and intangible dimensions of warfare—persists even now. The strategic concept for future war that emerged in the 1990s bears a striking resemblance to an earlier, repudiated approach to the use of force. This concept resurrects a set of theories tested and found wanting four decades ago.

A point of order. This article was written in 2009, my last year on active duty. I spent the previous four years working on the operation in Afghanistan. A large part of NATO and the U.S. plan involved “signals” and “messages.” Heck, Effects Based OPLANS were thick with such things.

On the eve of the (Iraq) invasion, a senior Pentagon official predicted: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks, or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” More than six years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission.

If you recall my thoughts on the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in FEB 22,

Short-War Snake Oil Salesmen are Worthy of Little but Scorn: a bit more muted than a year ago, even in winter of 2023, American short-war salesmen continue to push the WESTPAC 72-hour victory concept. In the run up to the start of the war in the winter of 2022, Russia’s leadership was sold a quick victory in Ukraine. As we’ve discussed in prior posts, their decision making process was a classic case of multi-layered optimism filtering. Political leaders like shortcuts. They like hearing things that confirm their priors - and like flies around a barnyard, yes-men (and women) surround such personalities. Smart leaders ensure they are not surrounded by yes-men. Unwise leaders create organizations where only the obsequious rise.

Short wars are seductive and brief well. They are easy to wargame. Unless you are off Zanzibar or Grenada, they never really work out. They are products of the delusional, corrupt, or criminally incompetent - uniformed and civilian.

The errors of Vietnam and Ukraine are the errors of the mind, of the incentives and disincentives of those who are promoted and are put in positions to office advice to overly confident, insecure, and self-important politicians.

Back to McMaster’s 2009 article. That mindset always returns because it is seductive, as seen in recent discussions about how we should fight China on the other side of the Pacific.

Does this sound familiar?

The conviction that technology offered a panacea not only impeded U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to begin with but also slowed the ability to adapt once the true nature of those wars became apparent. In late September 2004, as the insurgency in Iraq was coalescing and U.S. forces were preparing for the battle of Fallujah, the secretary of defense continued to make the case that “speed and precision and agility can substitute for mass,” reiterating that the war plan was designed “to take advantage of the speed, precision, and agility that we have.” Such views go a long way toward explaining the mismatch between ends and means in Afghanistan and Iraq, where for years the United States chased ambitious aims with inadequate resources (especially numbers of soldiers and units committed).

The final two paragraphs should be shown to everyone responsible for preparing our military for what awaits across the international date line.

Like McNamara’s whiz kids, advocates of the revolution in military affairs applied business analogies to war and borrowed heavily from economics and systems analysis. Both graduated pressure and rapid decisive operations promised efficiency in war; planners could determine precisely the amount of force necessary to achieve desired effects. Graduated pressure would apply just enough force to affect the adversary’s “calculation of interests.” Under rapid decisive operations, U.S. forces, based on a “comprehensive system-of-systems understanding of the enemy and the environment,” would attack nodes in the enemy system with a carefully calculated amount of force to generate “cumulative and cascading effects.”

But the U.S. experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrated that it was impossible to calibrate precisely the amount of force necessary to prosecute a war. The human and psychological dimensions of war, along with the friction and uncertainty when opposing forces meet, invariably frustrate even the most elaborate and well-considered attempts to predict the effects of discrete military actions. Emphasis in planning and directing operations, therefore, ought to be on effectiveness rather than efficiency. The requirement to adapt quickly to unforeseen conditions means that commanders will need additional forces and resources that can be committed with little notice. For efficiency in all forms of warfare, including counterinsurgency, means barely winning. And in war, barely winning can be an ugly proposition.

As I’ve covered countless times here, I remember the discussions at C5F in the hours, weeks, and months after the attacks of 9/11/2001. One thing we kept referring to, as we thought that we were just going to do a punitive expedition into Afghanistan or wherever we found the guilty hiding, was that we were not going to repeat the errors of the Vietnam War.

Well, we failed. We forgot the greatest error was: arrogance.

Maybe the next generation will say, “Let’s not repeat the errors of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq”, and actually follow through. I hope so.

We owe it to the tens of thousands of Americans who died in the Vietnam War, and the thousands who have died—and multiples of that maimed—in our wars since.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, it is the least we can do.

We owe them humility.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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