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Quotes of the Day:
"Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal."
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
– Isaac Asimov
“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. National Security Council expected to be overhauled under Rubio
2. The Beiping model: How China could absorb Taiwan without a war
3. ‘We’ve Got a F--king Spy in This Place’: Inside America’s Greatest Espionage Mystery
4. F.B.I. Dismantles Elite Public Corruption Squad
5. The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters
6. China’s 2025 National Security White Paper: ‘Holistic Security’ Amid Rising Global Tensions
7. U.S. Loses Last Triple-A Credit Rating
8. How Russia’s Call for Peace Talks Turned Into a Diplomatic Defeat for Putin
9. Here are 5 takeaways from Trump's first major foreign trip to the Middle East
10. What or Where Is the Indo-Pacific?
11. Nvidia to Set Up Research Center in Shanghai, Maintaining Foothold in China
12. Comey’s ‘86 47’ Post Is Latest Social-Media Misadventure for Ex-FBI Boss
13. The Trump Doctrine of the Deal
14. US general details China military plans to defeat US in Taiwan war
15. VCNO Kilby Sees ‘Tremendous Opportunity’ in American Shipbuilding
16. Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation
17. Trump Sends a Message: The Gulf Is No Longer China’s Playground
18. Amid lawmaker concerns, CYBERCOM head says SOCOM-like model is best way forward
19. US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return
20. US prepares for long war with China that might hit its bases, homeland: Peter Apps
21. Is the U.S. Abandoning the Fight Against Foreign Information Operations?
22. Trump administration fires nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America
23. Making law of war training optional is a recipe for disaster
24. ‘The Fate of the Generals’ Review: MacArthur and Wainwright in the Philippines
25. In Gaza, Long-Suffering Palestinians Are Directing Their Anger at Hamas
26. AI is the future of war
27. On War in 2027: Five Principles to Guide the Army Transformation Initiative
1. National Security Council expected to be overhauled under Rubio
Combining State and NSC functions provide an opportunity.
The convergence of unconventional diplomacy and political warfare offers a framework to address 21st-century geopolitical challenges, where adversaries exploit gray-zone tactics below the threshold of conventional war. President Trump’s disruptive diplomatic approach, prioritizing unpredictability and direct engagement, aligns with George Kennan’s 1948 vision of political warfare, which emphasized the "employment of all means short of war" to achieve national objectives. By integrating diplomatic, economic, informational, and military tools under a unified strategy, the U.S. can counter revisionist powers like China and Russia, nonstate actors such as ISIS, and transnational threats like cyberattacks.
Kennan’s Cold War era concept of political warfare, defined as "the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace" remains relevant but requires modernization. Today’s approach must synchronize unconventional diplomacy (e.g., coercive economic measures, cyber operations, and proxy engagements) with irregular warfare (e.g., special operations, influence campaigns, and security sector assistance). The consolidation of diplomacy, development, and information under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, provides an opportunity to harmonize these efforts.
The rise of gray-zone conflict demands a paradigm shift. Adversaries like China’s UNrestricted Warfare "Three Warfares" doctrine and Russia’s hybrid tactics in Ukraine thrive in the gap between U.S. diplomatic and military responses. By centralizing political warfare under Secretary Rubio’s leadership, the U.S. can:
- Exploit Strategic Asymmetry: Use SOF and cyber capabilities to counterbalance conventional force disparities.
- Preserve Conventional Readiness: Free DoD to focus on large-scale combat operations while State handles sub-threshold competition .
- Reclaim Initiative: Proactively shape environments through economic statecraft and influence campaigns, as envisioned in Kennan’s original framework .
The time is right for this model. The 2025 State Department reorganization eliminating redundant offices like the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) creates a leaner structure optimized for political warfare. In this way America can wage a sustainable, cost-imposing competition against adversaries, ensuring its primacy in an era of perpetual conflict short of war.
National Security Council expected to be overhauled under Rubio | CNN Politics
CNN · by Alex Marquardt, Alayna Treene, Kristen Holmes, Kylie Atwood · May 14, 2025
President Donald Trump's motorcade prepares to depart the White House on April 20 in Washington, DC.
Al Drago/Getty Images
CNN —
A significant overhaul of the National Security Council at the White House is expected in the coming days, including a staff reduction and a reinforced top-down approach with decision-making concentrated at the highest levels, three senior Trump administration officials told CNN.
Staffed by dozens of foreign policy experts from across the US government, the NSC typically serves as a critical body for coordinating the president’s foreign policy agenda.
But under President Donald Trump, the NSC’s role has been diminished, with the pending overhaul expected to further reduce its importance in the White House.
“NSC as we know it is done,” an administration official said.
The NSC did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Multiple sources said they anticipate the shake-up of the White House’s national security apparatus to take place once Trump’s Middle East tour this week is done.
From the onset of the Trump administration, building out the NSC was an arduous process because of strict background checks that prioritized loyalty to Trump over everything else. And even after people were hired many were swiftly fired in a series of purges since Trump took office.
These days, there is little in the way of meetings that shape the president’s national security agenda, one official said. And for those still there, to keep their jobs some current NSC staffers are being re-interviewed by the Office of the Presidential Personnel as the reshaping process remains fluid, three sources said.
Most recently, national security adviser Mike Waltz was ousted from his role and nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. The changes have come as the president and his closest advisers, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have grown increasingly frustrated with how the NSC has operated in Trump’s first few months in office.
National security adviser Mike Waltz looks at his phone as he prepares for a TV interview at the White House on May 1, in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Skepticism toward the NSC became even more pronounced after Waltz inadvertently added a journalist to a messaging app group chat about highly sensitive military strikes in Yemen.
With Waltz possibly headed to New York to be Trump’s UN ambassador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been tapped as interim national security adviser. He and special envoy Steve Witkoff were already dominating Trump’s foreign policy agenda, with Waltz sometimes edged out, sources say.
Rubio’s personal perspective on how the NSC should operate is unclear, but sources close to the White House say that keeping a small staff will be a necessity if Rubio wants to stay in the good graces of Trump’s inner circle.
“The influential players in Trump’s White House believe that the NSC is a bureaucratic impediment,” said a Republican lawmaker who has had regular meetings with the NSC in recent months, noting that Rubio will have to follow the lead of players such as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Sergio Gor, who runs the White House personnel office.
The future of Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, remains unclear. Multiple sources say that Wong is expected to be pushed out even though he continues to lead the NSC day-to-day for now, under Rubio.
Still, Wong was integral to Trump’s engagements with North Korea during his first term, so other sources say that Trump may opt to keep him in some capacity due to that experience.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then-national security adviser Mike Waltz speak with the media following meetings with a Ukrainian delegation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on March 11.
Saul Loeb/Pool/Getty Images
NBC News reported the expected overhaul of the NSC on Wednesday.
The overhaul comes as the administration faces a wide range of foreign policy challenges, including bringing the Ukraine war to an end; striking an Iran nuclear deal; seeking a ceasefire in Gaza and developing a comprehensive China policy on the heels of an intense trade war between the two countries.
One senior administration official defended the impending shake-up, noting that recently Republicans have run a much smaller NSC than democrats.
Conversations regarding who will eventually lead the NSC, and how the president wants to reshape the way it operates, are ongoing, two of the officials told CNN. The president has come to view Rubio as a key operator on all of his foreign dealings and initially selected him to replace Waltz because much of his portfolio at the State Department has overlapped with that of the national security adviser.
Rubio, who has told people close to him he is preparing to stay in the role for up to six months, has been relying on State Department aides to help with his new portfolio at the NSC, according to one senior administration official and a State Department official.
A Senior State Department official said that all discussions regarding the NSC are a work in progress, but acknowledged that a slimming of the foreign policy apparatus is likely. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has been asked to take on more State Department duties over the last few weeks, the State Department official said, specifically related to the handling of calls with counterparts, meetings and some future travel.
The State Department official added that there is “no clear direction” as to how it is all going to work. “They have to get through this (Middle East) trip first,” the person said.
The departures have only deepened the chill among the staff at the NSC, which has many looking for an exit.
A previous purge was triggered by pressure on Trump from Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who once claimed 9/11 was an inside job.
Rubio heads directly from the president’s trip to join a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Antalya, Turkey, this week. But while he is in Turkey, Rubio will attend the first round of Russia-Ukraine talks and meet with the Syrian foreign minister, Trump announced in Saudi Arabia.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN · by Alex Marquardt, Alayna Treene, Kristen Holmes, Kylie Atwood · May 14, 2025
2. The Beiping model: How China could absorb Taiwan without a war
The development of the "porcupine defense" and societal resistance and resilience is the only one that can help Taiwan defend themselves against this threat outlined below. Although very politically sensitive for the US and the Taiwanese, it can provide advice and assistance to senior leaders to help them see the need for and to develop the political resistance within the whole of society to defend against PRC/CCP subversion. It helps answer "my what" if question: If a free and democratic Taiwan is important to US national interests, what if the PRC/CCP is successful in its unrestricted warfare strategy and subversion campaign to be able to orchestrate the political conditions for Taiwan to accept their re-absorption back into the PRC. There is nothing we can do after that happens but there is an option for not only contributing to deterring war but developing the societal resistance and resilience to deter the desire for occupation because the PRC will perceive that it will never pacify the Taiwan people. And it will contribute to the successful defense against PRC/CCP subversion and protect Taiwan from the orchestrated political activities of the United Front Work Department and PRC/CCP intelligence services. The development of a holistic "porcupine defense" is an economy of force mission that can achieve multiple strategic effects against both war and subversion.
The Beiping model: How China could absorb Taiwan without a war | Lowy Institute
Victory can be achieved through the slow erosion of political
cohesion, without triggering a Western military response.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/beiping-model-how-china-could-absorb-taiwan-without-war
lowyinstitute.org · by Vincent So
Much of the current discourse on Taiwan centres around one scenario: war. The prevailing imagery involves amphibious landings, missile strikes, and an Indo-Pacific showdown with global ramifications. Yet the most plausible outcome may be the one least discussed: China could secure Taiwan without firing a shot.
The goal is not to convince Taiwan that reunification is just. It is to persuade it that reunification is unavoidable.
Beijing may already be applying a template that resembles its 1949 takeover of what was then called Peiping (Beijing). Known as the Beiping model, it involved General Fu Zuoyi, commander of the city’s Nationalist forces, negotiating a peaceful surrender to avoid destruction. The Chinese Communist Party took the city intact, quickly cementing its political and symbolic victory. No battle was fought but the war was effectively lost.
This model is increasingly relevant to Taiwan today. It suggests that victory can be achieved not through kinetic escalation but through the slow erosion of political cohesion, economic independence, and societal confidence, all without triggering a Western military response. The signs are already visible.
Political pressure without military escalation
China’s use of grey-zone tactics against Taiwan is well documented. Airspace incursions, cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, and economic coercion are routine. But their purpose is not purely to destabilise. It is to desensitise, normalise pressure, fragment decision-making, and encourage a sense of inevitability about unification.
What makes this strategy potent is its gradualism. It does not provoke a clear moment of retaliation. There is no single provocation to rally against. Instead, Beijing’s actions invite compromise, delay, and adaptation by Taiwanese elites and international observers. Over time, resistance is not crushed, it is absorbed.
If the Beiping model relies on one psychological lever, it is resignation. The goal is not to convince Taiwan that reunification is just. It is to persuade it that reunification is unavoidable.
Elite persuasion and economic dependence
One does not need to look far to find the elements of elite influence already in place. Many Taiwanese business leaders have substantial commercial exposure to mainland markets (although they are trying to reduce it). Others maintain political ties or family connections that span the Strait. The effect is subtle but powerful: a cautious attitude towards open confrontation, and a preference for ambiguity over escalation.
Beijing’s strategy plays to these instincts. It does not need to install collaborators. It needs only to offer economic, political, and social pathways that make quiet accommodation seem more prudent than principled resistance.
The 1949 analogy may seem distant, but the mechanisms are familiar: surround the target, cut off its lifelines, speak directly to its leadership, and wait. Strategic encirclement becomes political invitation.
Why the Beiping model appeals to Beijing
For Chinese policymakers, the benefits of a non-kinetic resolution are clear. A full-scale invasion of Taiwan would be enormously risky, both militarily and economically. It could result in significant Chinese casualties, galvanise international backlash, and trigger export controls that damage China’s semiconductor supply chain and broader economy.
Resistance is not crushed, it is absorbed.
By contrast, a negotiated or bloodless political resolution, however manufactured, allows Beijing to achieve its core objective without enduring the costs of war. It would validate the narrative that the Chinese Communist Party is a historical force of unification and modernisation, not destruction.
It would also place the United States and its allies in a bind. If Taiwan concedes under internal pressure, can external intervention be justified? Would there even be a political consensus to respond?
The role of information warfare
In any Beiping-style scenario, narrative control is critical. The 1949 surrender was not framed as defeat but as a decision to spare lives and preserve order. A contemporary equivalent in Taiwan might be presented as a constitutional reform, an interim arrangement, or a new cross-Strait political dialogue.
Beijing’s messaging architecture, spanning media, academia, and online communities, is increasingly well positioned to craft such a narrative. And Taiwan’s fragmented media environment offers ample entry points for both manipulation and selective amplification.
In a scenario where resistance seems futile and international rescue uncertain, the most effective weapon may not be a missile, but a message.
Implications for allies
For Australia and other regional partners, the Beiping model presents a deterrence dilemma. Most allied planning is geared toward repelling military aggression. But how does one deter surrender? What if the loss is political rather than territorial, a failure of will rather than of capability?
If allies do not prepare for this possibility, they risk being caught rhetorically flat-footed. Worse, they may invest resources in capabilities that arrive too late to matter. Strategic ambiguity works best when both sides believe war is possible. But it offers little leverage in a conflict defined by gradual acquiescence rather than sudden invasion.
The quiet threat
The Beiping model is not a certainty. Taipei is not Beijing, and 2025 is not 1949. But as a strategic blueprint, it deserves far more attention. Not because it is dramatic but because it is not.
It may unfold slowly, in paragraphs rather than headlines. It may avoid the spectacular in favour of the familiar. And it may be precisely for that reason that it succeeds.
lowyinstitute.org · by Vincent So
3. ‘We’ve Got a F--king Spy in This Place’: Inside America’s Greatest Espionage Mystery
Fascinating stories and troubling reporting on the future of counterintelligence.
Excerpts:
Szady is more optimistic. He agrees with Patel that the bureau needs to change to overcome perceptions of political bias after the investigations of Trump. Yet he says weakening counterintelligence or splitting it into another agency would be a mistake. “The bureau is still in the best position to be the lead agency to counter national security threats” alongside partners like the CIA, Szady said. As a law enforcement entity — and not a spy agency — the FBI is designed to make cases that are prosecutable in court while respecting the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
Redmond, his former colleague — and former target of the investigation — concurs. Splitting out or weakening the FBI’s counterintelligence capability, he said, would be “fucking crazy” and a detriment to the type of long and intensive investigations that are so vital.
It took nine years of digging to arrest Ames and seven to get Hanssen. In the U.K., it took nearly 40 years to publicly unmask the last of the Cambridge Five, a network of spies that ravaged British intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Many of the key clues that helped cut through disinformation and deception to identify them came from Russian sources. Solving the mystery of the “Fourth Man,” former intelligence officials say, will likely hinge on another Russian source coming forward with new information.
But if Patel weakens or cripples the FBI’s counterintelligence capability, he’ll do the same to its ability to recruit, vet and protect such assets. “[The FBI and CIA] recruit sources all over the world,” said William Murray, a former CIA station chief and senior operations official. “They know what the penalty is going to be if they get caught. They’re going to get shot right in the back of the fucking head.”
‘We’ve Got a F--king Spy in This Place’: Inside America’s Greatest Espionage Mystery
Politico
Two former top spy hunters offer exclusive new revelations about their quest to solve America’s greatest espionage mystery and what’s at stake with Kash Patel in charge of the FBI.
Illustrations by Hokyoung Kim for POLITICO
By Derek Owen and R.M. Schneiderman
05/16/2025 05:00 AM EDT
Derek Owen is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.
R.M. Schneiderman is a writer and editor based in Nashville. He's the former deputy editor of Newsweek and has been on staff at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
On the night of March 10, 1986, Michael Sellers parked his car on a dark Moscow street and peeled off his disguise: a Mission Impossible-style prosthetic mask that made him look like a Black colleague who worked at the embassy. He’d used it to slip past the guards watching the diplomatic compound where he lived. But he’d still have to be careful. On paper, Sellers was an ordinary American diplomat, but the KGB had identified him as a CIA officer and kept him under heavy surveillance.
Sellers quickly changed into another disguise — a typical Soviet overcoat, glasses and a fur-lined Russian chapka hat with built-in hair extensions — before ditching the car to blend into the crowd. He took a circuitous route to shake anyone who might be following him. His mission was to meet a valuable asset the agency had cultivated inside the KGB.
About a year earlier, in June of 1985, the Soviets had begun foiling dozens of sensitive American operations and rounding up agents working for the CIA and FBI. A few were lucky enough to escape. Some were sent to the gulag. Most got a 9mm bullet to the back of the head. The bloodbath was part of what the press dubbed the “Year of the Spy,” but the losses continued long after 1985. “There was a gut-wrenching sense of free fall,” Sellers writes in his forthcoming book, Year of the Spy, which chronicles the agency’s turbulent Cold War battle with the KGB in Moscow. “We didn’t know what had caused this disaster.”
Sellers hoped his agent, whom the agency codenamed “COWL,” might have information about how the Soviets were catching so many of their assets. But if the KGB unmasked COWL, he would be the next to die. COWL had been acting erratically and missed a scheduled meeting four months prior. His behavior led many in the CIA to worry he’d already been exposed, but the agency was desperate for information; it felt like the risk was worth it.
Two hours after he’d left the embassy, Sellers changed into a third disguise — a wig and mustache — then arrived at the pre-arranged meeting site: the parking entrance to an apartment building in Moscow’s tree-lined Lenin Hills district. But when he spotted COWL, Sellers sensed something was wrong. The once strong and confident man had lost weight and was cowering like a beaten dog. COWL had clearly been arrested and tortured. Sellers knew exactly what was coming next: a half-dozen vehicles descended. A group of KGB officers burst out of them, grabbed Sellers, threw him into a van and sped off towards Lubyanka, the KGB’s neo-baroque headquarters.
After hours of interrogation, the Russians released Sellers and expelled him from the Soviet Union. COWL fared far worse — he was tried and executed. To this day, his fate makes Sellers wonder: How did the KGB unravel the agency’s network of spies in Moscow?
The intense, decades-long investigation to answer that question would ultimately involve counterintelligence experts at both the FBI and the CIA. Among them: Paul Redmond, an abrasive, literary savant with a penchant for bowties and F-bombs, who became the head of CIA counterintelligence in the mid-1990s. His FBI counterpart was David Szady — the “Z-man,” as his peers called him — a charismatic, driven former chemistry teacher who, like Walter White in reverse, traded in his beakers and Bunsen burners for the rush of chasing spies at the bureau. He eventually became the FBI’s head of counterintelligence after 9/11.
Between 1985 and 2006, both Redmond and Szady played key roles in mole hunts that uncovered three high-profile Soviet spies responsible for the deaths of more than a dozen American assets. These investigations were among the most extensive and grueling in U.S. history. Hundreds of U.S. intelligence officials came under suspicion — a top spy hunter would become one of the prime suspects — disrupting or destroying some of their careers. “These are painful investigations,” Szady said. “They take a long time. But you have to run them to the end.”
In a series of exclusive interviews with POLITICO Magazine, Szady and Redmond — along with dozens of other former intelligence officials — revealed new details about their work together and the controversies that developed between their agencies as the FBI tried to solve what is arguably America’s greatest espionage mystery. Was there yet another Soviet mole — a so-called “Fourth Man” — at the highest levels of American intelligence?
That crucial search may now be imperiled by Kash Patel, the MAGA diehard and director of the FBI, who has expressed his desire to reorient his bureau away from intelligence work. In September 2024, Patel appeared on The Shawn Ryan Show and lambasted the FBI and its leaders, claiming they’re part of a Deep State conspiracy against Trump, going back to the Russia investigation that dogged his 2016 campaign and his first years in office. “The biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops,” he said. “I’d break that component out of it. I’d take the … employees … and send them across America to chase down criminals.”
The FBI says it’s committed to catching spies. But if Patel follows through on this idea, he might weaken or even eviscerate the Bureau’s counterintelligence capabilities, making it easier for America’s enemies — China, Russia, Iran and others — to infiltrate the U.S. government and private companies. “We’re going to catch fewer spies and only know about the spies when it’s too late,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, said. “That’s really dangerous.”
The prospect that the hunt for the “Fourth Man” — and other longstanding, deadly, spy vs. spy cases — might be ignored, is an affront to those who suffered and died from the betrayal, according to former counterintelligence officials. “If there’s someone out there who was the ‘Fourth Man,’” Sellers said, “there’s blood on their hands.”
‘We’ve got a fucking spy in this place’
For the Americans, the devastating compromises didn’t end with COWL. As 1986 dragged on, the KGB nabbed four more CIA assets. In October, the FBI learned that two agents they’d cultivated inside the Soviet embassy in Washington were dead. Months earlier, the KGB had lured both men back to Moscow to face trial and execution.
At CIA headquarters in Langley, Redmond, then the head of counterintelligence for Soviet and Eastern European operations, was deeply involved in the agency’s effort to find out what had happened. At first, they blamed Edward Lee Howard, a disgruntled former CIA officer who had been fired in 1983 for drug use, deception and theft. A KGB defector fingered Howard as a mole in August of 1985, but he fled to Moscow before the FBI could arrest him. The CIA quickly realized, however, that Howard couldn’t explain all their burned ops and dead assets. The agency was still losing people in Moscow, most of whom Howard had no knowledge of. To complicate matters, the KGB had been sending a stream of disinformation and double agents — fake defectors, fake scientists, even a fake priest — to try to dupe the CIA. “Nothing in this business,” Redmond recalled, “is what it fucking seems.”
As the Soviets were rounding up and killing U.S. assets in 1985, some of Redmond’s colleagues had a thought: What if a mole wasn’t the culprit? What if, for instance, their communications were compromised and that’s how the KGB had done so much damage so quickly? To test the theory, Milt Bearden, the CIA deputy division chief, along with Redmond and a small group of other high-level CIA officials, launched a clever cloak-and-dagger operation to find out. Bearden flew to Kenya, Redmond said, while another officer went to the CIA’s Moscow Station. Both sent cables falsely claiming the agency had recruited loyal KGB officers in Nairobi and Bangkok. If Moscow recalled their officers in either city, the CIA would know the Russians were listening. The KGB took no action against the officers mentioned in the cables, leading Redmond and his colleagues to conclude the Russians hadn’t tapped into their communications.
A few months later, however, as the KGB continued to foil CIA operations, the Soviets launched another, more elaborate, deception of their own. Beginning in March of 1986, around the time of Sellers’ arrest, they sent the agency a series of letters from a fake volunteer calling himself “Mister X.” These letters cast aspersions on a CIA officer, but perhaps most tellingly, they also warned that the KGB had penetrated the agency’s encrypted communications. This was a cunning lie, as the CIA already knew from their false cable operation. And for Redmond, the elaborate nature of the Mr. X deception was a clue. “They were trying to protect something really big in the CIA,” he told POLITICO Magazine. “That helped me get attention from upstairs that we’ve got a fucking spy in this place.”
Soon, Congress started paying attention as well. Paul Joyal, director of security for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, recalls that the committee was “horrified by the [CIA’s] stable of Soviet assets wiped out in such a short period of time.” But initially, CIA leadership was reluctant to admit they might have more traitors in their ranks. Endless Soviet mole hunts had paralyzed the agency during the 1960s and 1970s. Senior CIA officials had seen the damage those investigations had done to operations as well as the lives and reputations of those who’d fallen under suspicion.
Despite the lack of enthusiasm, Redmond and a small team of trusted CIA colleagues launched a series of investigations, some in conjunction with the FBI. These mole hunts continued for more than three years as Redmond moved into a management position in the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern European division. But when he returned to spy hunting as the deputy chief of the agency’s newly created counterintelligence center in 1991, he realized they had made little to no progress. Redmond quickly pushed for a new mole hunt and added two FBI investigators to the team. Together, they built momentum and finally homed in on a second spy, CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who was flaunting his wealth. He drove a Jaguar and paid cash for an upscale house in Arlington, none of which he was seemingly able to afford. They turned the case over to an FBI squad led by Special Agent Les Wiser, who found the evidence they needed to prosecute Ames. Investigators pinned at least 10 dead assets on Ames’ treachery. Rudy Guerin, one of the FBI agents who debriefed the spy, described him as a “suit and tie serial killer.” In 1994, a judge sentenced Ames to life in prison.
The fact that it took the agency nearly a decade to nail Ames ignited outrage on the Hill. In response, CIA director James Woolsey reprimanded 11 top CIA officials. Yet he praised Redmond for keeping the investigation going, calling him the “[lone] voice crying out in the wilderness,” The New York Times reported. Woolsey soon promoted Redmond to be the associate director of operations for counterintelligence.
But it didn’t take long for the FBI and the CIA to realize Ames didn’t account for all the blown agents and operations. Another spy was still out there, still passing secrets to the Russians and still putting lives at risk.
Daring Escapes and Caviar Debts
Among the dozens of compromises the FBI felt Ames couldn’t explain was the case of Oleg Gordievsky. He was the KGB’s head of London spy operations, while living a double life as a British agent in 1985. Shortly after the CIA learned that Gordievsky was secretly working for the U.K., the KGB recalled him to Moscow, a clear sign they suspected him of being a traitor. Realizing that someone uncovered his espionage, Gordievsky alerted his British handlers at the MI6 spy agency, and they smuggled him out of the U.S.S.R. in the trunk of a car.
During Ames’ debrief, FBI interviewers determined he couldn’t have compromised Gordievsky. “We pulled all the dates for the timing and they just didn’t seem to work,” said Wiser, the FBI squad leader. It couldn’t have been Howard either — he was long gone by the time the CIA learned Gordievsky’s identity. Wiser hopped on a flight to London to interview the KGB turncoat in person. The FBI’s takeaway: another spy was out there, maybe even more than one.
And so, starting in 1994, the FBI expanded its mole hunt. Dozens of FBI agents and analysts, led by supervisor Mike Rochford, worked with their counterparts in the CIA to catch the spy or spies who were still passing secrets to the Russians and getting American assets killed. Their target’s codename: GRAYSUIT.
The investigation started with a pool of over 200 potential suspects. By 1996, Rochford’s team had whittled it to just over 10. Both FBI and CIA investigators felt rising pressure from their leadership to wrap up the investigation. Agents and analysts at the Bureau conferred with the top analysts in the CIA and they all agreed that the most likely suspect was an officer working in counterintelligence for the agency named Brian Kelley. “They had me convinced,” remembered Szady, who became the FBI executive in charge of the CIA’s analysts in its counterespionage group at Langley shortly thereafter.
As the hunt dragged on, FBI investigators surveilled and interrogated Kelley and even members of his family. Kelley was suspended from the agency, as was his daughter, Erin, also a CIA officer. His oldest son Barry recalls FBI investigators telling him his father’s arrest was “imminent.” For months Kelley’s children lived in dread of the day they would pick up a newspaper to read their father was “the worst spy since Benedict Arnold,” recalls Barry. The arrest never happened. The FBI never found any hard proof Brian Kelley had betrayed his country. But it feared more people would die unless they quickly wrapped up the case. As the decade came to a close, more than 19 agents working for U.S. intelligence had been killed, captured or disappeared.
Then, in 2000, Rochford and the FBI recruited an ex-KGB source who had exactly what they were looking for. He’d hand-copied GRAYSUIT’s entire KGB file and even pilfered a tape-recording of the spy speaking to his Soviet handlers from a phone booth in Fairfax County decades earlier. The catch? The source was in deep debt to the Irkutsk Mafia over a caviar deal gone bad and wanted a lot of money to give up the material. The FBI compensated the source with cash and benefits valued at $7 million and orchestrated a brazen operation to smuggle the mole’s top-secret KGB files out of Moscow.
Those files arrived at FBI headquarters in November 2000. Most of the investigators expected they would contain proof of Kelley’s treachery. The moment they heard the voice on the tape, however, they knew it was someone else. (Kelley was reinstated at the CIA in 2001, but neither the bureau nor the agency could undo the damage they had done to his life and career. He died in 2011.)
At first, the actual spy’s hushed speech, along with the poor recording quality, made it difficult for the bureau to identify him definitively. But FBI investigators pulled together key clues from the files that pointed unequivocally not toward Langley but someone inside their own building: Robert Hanssen, who’d run the FBI’s Soviet analytical unit in the 1980s and was now a liaison to the State Department.
It was a shocking, demoralizing moment for the bureau, especially after they’d been wrong about Kelley. Even worse, as the FBI prepared to gather evidence to arrest Hanssen, it realized that even he didn’t account for all of the dead agents and ops gone bad going back to 1985 — including the case of Gordievsky. That and dozens of other clues pointed to someone beyond Howard, Ames and Hanssen — a “fourth man.” The FBI realized it would have to start all over, looking for yet another spy.
‘I’m absolutely certain it was a CIA guy’
There was always a chance the FBI investigators were wrong — that no such mystery mole still lurked inside the highest echelons of the American government. But the mere possibility of it was a national security nightmare. In addition to threatening the lives of agents working for U.S. intelligence, such a high-level spy might also have access to military secrets, making it easier for America’s adversaries to kill U.S. or allied soldiers. Perhaps the most chilling possibility, though, was that this Russian asset had recruited a network of spies capable of undermining America for generations.
Outside of the FBI, and across other intelligence agencies, rumors spread about another Russian mole. Was it a man? A woman? Multiple people? Or was it all a mirage in the murky world of counterintelligence? Sporadic mentions of a mole leaked to the public. In their 2003 book, The Main Enemy, Bearden and James Risen first dubbed the alleged spy “the Fourth Man.” “I’m absolutely certain it was a CIA guy,” said Bearden, who was the deputy in charge of Soviet Bloc operations in 1985. “I didn’t come to that conclusion easily.”
Decades later, Robert Baer, a CIA officer turned best-selling author, dove into the mystery with his 2022 book, The Fourth Man. It’s about a secretive CIA unit composed of three women who began to review the agency’s blown cases in 1994. The evidence led them to create a profile of a possible spy or spies. Some of the leads would later turn out to match Hanssen, the FBI turncoat, though the women were instructed to disregard suspects in the bureau. Other leads, they told Baer, appeared to match one of their own bosses — Redmond, the senior CIA officer who had hunted down Ames. But after a series of conflicts with senior management, Baer writes, their superiors cut the three women off from access to the files they needed to pursue their leads. The only copy of their work disappeared, leaving them to fear someone had tampered with the investigation.
The book provoked intense backlash inside the intelligence community, in part because Baer named Redmond, who has never been charged with a crime. “Robert Baer’s book is hogwash, filled with mistakes and misinformation,” Redmond said in a written statement after its release. In an unprecedented public rebuttal, a cadre of former senior CIA officials came to Redmond’s defense. They pointed out numerous alleged errors in Baer’s book, disputed the conclusions and credibility of the three CIA investigators, and one even questioned whether the FBI seriously investigated anyone after Hanssen’s arrest in 2001.
But the FBI’s commitment to the hunt should not be in dispute, according to Szady. The bureau took the possibility of a “Fourth Man” seriously enough that it had profiled some of the CIA’s high-level officers. Szady, who became the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence in 2002, oversaw a series of probes and investigations during this period. All of them, he said, were based on credible leads and sources. “There was never a let up,” he said.
In the mid-2000s, the FBI received new intelligence reinforcing the idea that the KGB had a fourth mole in the highest ranks of the CIA. By 2005, the bureau had enough evidence to open a full, codenamed investigation into the new leads, and was trying to narrow the pool of suspects. But investigators ran into Washington politics when the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, began considering one of their targets to head the National Counterintelligence Center. Szady had no choice but to inform Negroponte that the bureau was scrutinizing this senior intelligence official as a potential Russian spy. “The [FBI] Director agreed he should be briefed, [but] we weren’t saying anything about guilt” said Szady. “We told him ‘These are the facts’ and left it up to Negroponte.” (Negroponte was unavailable for comment.)
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Redmond — for the first time — confirmed that he was a subject of this FBI investigation and that he withdrew from the nomination so as not to taint the position. “I passed a message through one of [Negroponte’s] assistants that [he] should take me out of consideration,” Redmond said. “[I told him] I am damaged goods because there is this investigation of me.”
The ordeal pitted Szady’s FBI counterintelligence officials against Redmond, his former CIA counterpart — a man he liked and respected. It also exacerbated the lingering hostility from the Kelley investigation. Yet after months of aggressively chasing every possible lead, the FBI never found any hard evidence that Redmond had ever been a spy. They closed the investigation into him in 2007. “You can’t depend just on analysis,” like looking at compromised cases and source reporting, Szady said. “I learned my lesson on that with Kelley.”
Szady doesn’t believe Baer should have named Redmond in his book. Until there’s an indictment, he said, the bureau doesn’t want the subject or the public to know there’s an investigation. If something leaks, it could taint an innocent person’s reputation. The timing of Negroponte’s decision to consider Redmond, he added, was unfortunate. But investigating the veteran CIA officer was the only responsible thing to do, Szady maintained, based on the bureau’s leads and Redmond’s high-level access to sensitive operations. Even Redmond said he agrees: “I’m not pissed that the FBI investigated me. I would’ve investigated me. We lost a lot of cases and not all of them can be explained.”
Sellers, meanwhile, remains haunted by the mystery of the “Fourth Man.” In the decades since his arrest in 1986, he’s imagined what it was like when KGB executioners shot COWL and dozens of others like him in the basement of a Soviet prison. “It played like an unwanted movie in my mind,” he said. While researching his book during the 2000s, a period of detente with Russia, Sellers connected with many of the KGB men who had worked against the CIA back in the ’80s. He acquired thousands of pages of documents and dozens of hours of interviews. In one, a former KGB investigator hints that crucial information they used to identify COWL came from a source beyond Howard, Ames or Hanssen — seemingly evidence of a “Fourth Man.” Yet this clue, Sellers warned, could simply be part of an ongoing deception by the Russians. “Ninety-eight percent of what they tell you is true,” he said. “But it’s the other two percent that can get you in real trouble.”
Redmond said Russian intelligence is likely still spreading disinformation about the matter. During his debrief in 1994, Ames told one of the CIA’s key investigators, Jeanne Vertefeuille, that he and the KGB had planned to frame her as the spy in order to protect him. If the Russians were protecting yet another mole, a “Fourth Man,” Redmond said, they would have a good reason to frame him, too.
The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.
Today, 40 years after the “Year of the Spy,” the mystery of the “Fourth Man” remains. “All of the evidence, when taken as a whole picture, leaves too many compromises that can’t be attributed to known spies,” Szady said. “That’s my opinion, yes, there was a ‘Fourth Man.’”
And the FBI and CIA won’t know what damage this spy may have done to ongoing U.S. intelligence operations until they are caught and questioned. “That’s why there’s no statute of limitations on espionage,” Szady added.
‘We could be leaving the door wide open’
Szady retired in 2006 but the bureau remained so concerned about another spy that two FBI special agents interviewed a former CIA officer in 2019 about the matter, according to the officer. Three years later, before Baer’s book came out, officials from the bureau interviewed him as well, making the trek to his mountain home in a remote part of Colorado. The FBI investigators gave few details about what they were looking for and never mentioned anyone by name. “What their visit definitely did,” Baer said, “is tell me the FBI’s interest in the ‘Fourth Man’ is ongoing.”
Or it was. After several months of chaos and trepidation at the bureau, Patel has yet to publicly set a clear course for counterintelligence. The FBI appears to be moving to a regional command structure, according to The New York Times, but hasn’t announced further changes to its capacity to thwart spies, other than to suspend an analyst involved in investigating Russia’s 2016 election meddling.
“The FBI remains committed to counterintelligence investigations,” the bureau said in a statement to POLITICO Magazine. “Our adversaries continue their efforts to steal sensitive and often classified U.S. government and private sector information. The FBI will continue to be aggressive in detecting and disrupting their efforts.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, continues to make friendly overtures to Moscow — reportedly halting the Pentagon’s offensive cyber operations against Russia, for instance. But few intelligence officials expect the Kremlin — let alone China or Iran — to suddenly stop spying on America. “They’re going to double or triple their efforts,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI agent who was head of counterintelligence across all federal agencies from 2012 to 2014. “We could be leaving the door wide open.”
Szady is more optimistic. He agrees with Patel that the bureau needs to change to overcome perceptions of political bias after the investigations of Trump. Yet he says weakening counterintelligence or splitting it into another agency would be a mistake. “The bureau is still in the best position to be the lead agency to counter national security threats” alongside partners like the CIA, Szady said. As a law enforcement entity — and not a spy agency — the FBI is designed to make cases that are prosecutable in court while respecting the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
Redmond, his former colleague — and former target of the investigation — concurs. Splitting out or weakening the FBI’s counterintelligence capability, he said, would be “fucking crazy” and a detriment to the type of long and intensive investigations that are so vital.
It took nine years of digging to arrest Ames and seven to get Hanssen. In the U.K., it took nearly 40 years to publicly unmask the last of the Cambridge Five, a network of spies that ravaged British intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Many of the key clues that helped cut through disinformation and deception to identify them came from Russian sources. Solving the mystery of the “Fourth Man,” former intelligence officials say, will likely hinge on another Russian source coming forward with new information.
But if Patel weakens or cripples the FBI’s counterintelligence capability, he’ll do the same to its ability to recruit, vet and protect such assets. “[The FBI and CIA] recruit sources all over the world,” said William Murray, a former CIA station chief and senior operations official. “They know what the penalty is going to be if they get caught. They’re going to get shot right in the back of the fucking head.”
Politico
4. F.B.I. Dismantles Elite Public Corruption Squad
F.B.I. Dismantles Elite Public Corruption Squad
Disbanding the group, which was responsible for rooting out corruption in Congress and fraud across government agencies, appears at odds with a major priority of the Trump administration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/us/politics/fbi-public-corruption-squad-trump.html?utm
The moves could reduce the F.B.I.’s capacity to fulfill one of its core missions: leading major investigations into public corruption cases.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Adam GoldmanGlenn Thrush and Devlin Barrett
Reporting from Washington
May 15, 2025
The F.B.I. is disbanding a squad that handles investigations into members of Congress and fraud by federal employees, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that comes as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate or marginalize units responsible for public corruption cases.
The squad’s members are likely to be reassigned, potentially asked to do immigration work, and its work is expected to be merged with one of the other corruption units in the bureau’s Washington field office, according to a person familiar with the changes.
The special agent in charge of criminal matters at the field office — who was recently responsible for investigating the Biden administration’s green energy grants — was also pushed out of his job, those people said.
The moves, some of the most drastic to date by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, could reduce the bureau’s capacity to fulfill one of its core missions: leading major investigations into public corruption cases that have included, among many others, the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump led by the special counsel Jack Smith.
It follows the decimation of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which had its staffing cut from more than two dozen personnel last fall to a skeleton crew of four to six prosecutors now, according to people briefed on the moves.
Since returning to office, President Trump has taken other actions to downgrade federal law enforcement’s ability to hold the powerful and well-connected to account. He has granted clemency to political allies, fired those who brought cases against the Capitol rioters, and supported the dismissal of bribery charges against the New York mayor, Eric Adams, which prompted the resignation of prosecutors.
A spokesman for the bureau did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
A bureau official briefed on the decision-making process said that the disbanding of the unit was not intended to limit future investigations and that cases would now be farmed out to other teams as part of Mr. Patel’s reorganization plan. The special agent in charge chose to return to a position in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division, the official added.
The F.B.I. squad, based in the Virginia suburbs, has vast experience handling complicated investigations involving public officials. Getting rid of it also seems at odds with one of the administration’s stated priorities — eliminating fraud, waste and abuse across the federal government, former officials said.
The unit’s disbanding was reported earlier by NBC News.
The bureau’s Washington field office also oversees two other units that investigate corruption in the District of Columbia and Virginia, one of which is expected to pick up some of the duties of the squad that is being dissolved.
The squad works with many other agencies to unearth graft at places like the Pentagon and State Department and has built a reputation for making cases that lead to successful prosecutions. That includes Jack Abramoff, a disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of influence peddling in Washington.
In addition, the unit helped send two Democratic congressmen to prison and oversaw sensitive inquiries into the Clinton Foundation and the former governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, another Democrat.
More recently, agents on the squad investigated a wide-ranging effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election by creating slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in states he had lost. As part of that investigation, federal prosecutors accused Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The administration has acted on other fronts to limit investigations into public corruption. Officials previously ordered the shutdown of an initiative to seize assets owned by foreign kleptocrats, dialed back scrutiny of foreign influence efforts aimed at the United States and replaced the top career Justice Department official handling corruption cases.
In February, President Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries, arguing that such cases hurt the United States’ competitive edge. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said of his decision to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.
Mr. Trump has also issued a wave of pardons to people accused of graft, including three former Republican members of Congress: Duncan Hunter of California, Chris Collins of New York and Steve Stockman of Texas.
He also pardoned former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat who was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated after he was elected president.
Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, his administration officials demanded that corruption charges against Mr. Adams of New York be dropped — suggesting, without evidence, that the case was brought by a glory-seeking Biden appointee and would impinge Mr. Adams’s compliance with the administration’s edicts on immigration enforcement.
In April, a judge dismissed the charges.
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: In Latest Rollback, F.B.I. Dismantles Elite Public Corruption Squad. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
5. The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters
A comprehensive report from the National Bureau of Asian Research.
The forward from Admiral Paparo and the Table of Contents are below.
The PLA in a Complex Security Environment
Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters
https://www.nbr.org/publication/the-pla-in-a-complex-security-environment-preparing-for-high-winds-and-choppy-waters/
Edited by Benjamin Frohman and Jeremy Rausch
May 15, 2025
The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters features papers from the 2023 People’s Liberation Army Conference convened by the National Bureau of Asian Research, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s China Strategic Focus Group, and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The volume examines how Chinese leaders assess China’s external security environment, including both the opportunities and threats presented; how this assessment is driving changes to the PLA’s strategy, planning, and modernization efforts; and how the PLA’s posture and capabilities are evolving in key theaters of interest to the United States, including the Taiwan Strait, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.
Foreword to The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters
by Samuel J. Paparo
May 15, 2025
This is the foreword to The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters.
I am honored to present The PLA in a Complex Security Environment: Preparing for High Winds and Choppy Waters, the latest volume from an essential conference series on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) convened by the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), the China Strategic Focus Group at United States Indo-Pacific Command, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. This volume explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is thinking about the use of force in an increasingly complex security environment and assesses the CCP’s capability to employ the PLA to achieve its strategic objectives. The superb work of the authors provides a rigorous and insightful assessment of how CCP threat assessments are driving the PLA’s modernization efforts, strategy, and operational posture.
China continues its aggressive military buildup through a rising defense budget, a rapidly modernizing conventional force, an exponential increase in space-based capabilities, and an alarming nuclear weapons expansion. Beijing also continues to wage increasingly aggressive gray-zone operations against U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, significantly raising the risk of an incident or miscalculation that could lead to loss of life or spark a wider conflict. In the Taiwan Strait, Beijing is employing all elements of comprehensive national power to coerce Taiwan and the international community to accept that unification is, in fact, inevitable. Although China claims it prefers to achieve unification through peaceful means, Xi Jinping will not renounce the use of force. These actions pose an important question for the U.S. Department of Defense, interagency, and broader China-watching community: to what extent is Xi preparing China for war?
This PLA Conference volume contributes to the expanding global conversation on China strategic intentions by examining the CCP’s perceptions of China’s external security environment and tracing how these judgments direct whole-of-society preparations for intensifying strategic competition with the United States. It offers unique insights into the primary ideological lens through which Beijing assesses its security environment, as well as the impacts these assessments have on party-army relations. The volume then leverages this context to explore how the PLA’s missions, strategy, and operational posture are evolving along with whole-of-society efforts to compete with the West. It also examines the lessons the PLA may be drawing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including how the PLA may be applying these lessons to its assessments of its own strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the volume assesses three operational theaters—Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—and the future role of the PLA in achieving its objectives in each.
This work offers insights for understanding China’s strategic approach to military modernization for potential unification by force that planners, policymakers, and warfighters can leverage toward designing effective and achievable objectives. I am proud to sponsor this conference, and I commend the organizers and participants who contributed their collective discernment to make this volume possible.
Admiral Samuel J. Paparo is Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command.
Contents
Foreword .......................................................vii
Samuel J. Paparo
Introduction: China’s Military Strategy and Posture in an Increasingly Complex Security Environment ....................................1
Benjamin Frohman and Jeremy Rausch
Chapter 1 – “Profound Changes Unseen in a Century”: China Assesses Its Security Environment ...........................15
Kim Fassler
Chapter 2 – Stabilizing the Boat: Revisiting Party-Army Relations under Xi Jinping ................................................41
Joel Wuthnow
Chapter 3 – China’s Transition to a War-Oriented National Defense Mobilization System .............................................65
Erin Richter and Howard Wang
Chapter 4 – Lumbering toward the China Dream: The PLA’s Strategic Mission Through 2049 and Beyond ................................91
Timothy R. Heath
Chapter 5 – PRC Lessons Learned from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Implications for a Taiwan Conflict ................................111
Maryanne Kivlehan-Wise and Tsun-Kai Tsai
Chapter 6 – Assessing the PLA’s Strengths and Weaknesses for Achieving the PRC’s Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127
Dennis J. Blasko and Rick Gunnell
Chapter 7 – Imposing the Fate of Sisyphus? The PLA as an Instrument of National Power and Force Preparation toward Taiwan ............149
Andrew S. Erickson
Chapter 8 – The PLA as a Part of China’s Strategy in Southeast Asia ..175
Ketian Zhang Chapter 9 – Competing for Access: China’s Growing Security Interest in the Pacific Islands ............................................193
Peter Connolly
About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227
6. China’s 2025 National Security White Paper: ‘Holistic Security’ Amid Rising Global Tensions
Excerpts:
Another major theme is the interplay of security and development. The white paper points out that “high-quality development” cannot be realized without “high-level security” and vice versa. It therefore positions economic resilience as an integral aspect of national stability, both as an end and as a means. This approach highlights China’s dual strategy of expanding domestic consumption while restricting cross-border data flows, foreign investment, and academic exchanges, all in the name of national security.
The document also highlights China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), proposed by Xi in 2022, which advocates for shared security and multilateralism while opposing “bloc confrontations” and generalization of security by Western powers. The GSI positions China as a defender of the Global South and as an alternative to U.S.-led coercion. The white paper declares China’s commitment to both its own security and the common security of the region and the world, by emphasizing cooperation on non-traditional threats such as climate change, pandemics, and cybercrime.
My interpretation of the above is that it confirms my assessment that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan)
China’s 2025 National Security White Paper: ‘Holistic Security’ Amid Rising Global Tensions
“National Security in the New Era” will see the CCP expanding its “absolute” leadership over a wide variety of domains.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/05/chinas-2025-national-security-white-paper-holistic-security-amid-rising-global-tensions/?utm
By Sanoop Sajan Koshy
May 16, 2025
Credit: Depositphotos
On May 12, China’s State Council Information Office released a white paper on “National Security in the New Era” – an extensive document that outlines China’s evolving security policy in a world the government characterizes as unstable and volatile. It’s not hard to understand why, given the heightened global uncertainty in the Asia-Pacific region, marked by changing power equations, technological competition, and ongoing flashpoints from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea.
The white paper presents the idea of a “holistic security” approach to national security that includes politics, economy, military, science and technology, and societal domains under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Even though the document seeks to present China as a source of stability in the Asia-Pacific, the sections on sovereignty, ideological resilience, and systemic risk management raise important questions about the implications for regional trust, global governance, and domestic freedom.
The “holistic” approach to national security is a framework first articulated by Xi Jinping. It expands the traditional idea of security to cover nontraditional security threats emerging from cyberspace, artificial intelligence, biosecurity, public health, etc. This approach declares the “people’s security” as the final aim, in order to approve citizens’ sense of “fulfilment, happiness and security.” But it strongly prioritizes “political security as the fundamental task” – referring to upholding the CCP’s absolute leadership and the socialist system – and national interests as the guiding principle.
This emphasis on political security is accompanied by an appeal for China to modernize its legal and institutional structures. The white paper highlights the recent laws introduced, covering cybersecurity, data protection, counterterrorism, etc., as part of its efforts to build a strong security shield against “black swan” (unpredictable) and “grey rhino” (high-probability) risks that could disrupt China’s modernization. It also prioritizes technological self-reliance, calling for investment in key infrastructure and indigenous innovation to minimize exposure to foreign sanctions or supply chain disruption.
Another major theme is the interplay of security and development. The white paper points out that “high-quality development” cannot be realized without “high-level security” and vice versa. It therefore positions economic resilience as an integral aspect of national stability, both as an end and as a means. This approach highlights China’s dual strategy of expanding domestic consumption while restricting cross-border data flows, foreign investment, and academic exchanges, all in the name of national security.
The document also highlights China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), proposed by Xi in 2022, which advocates for shared security and multilateralism while opposing “bloc confrontations” and generalization of security by Western powers. The GSI positions China as a defender of the Global South and as an alternative to U.S.-led coercion. The white paper declares China’s commitment to both its own security and the common security of the region and the world, by emphasizing cooperation on non-traditional threats such as climate change, pandemics, and cybercrime.
Regarding the Asia-Pacific, however, the white paper reveals mixed notions. It declares that China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and development interests are non-negotiable, especially in the cases of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and maritime rights.
China pledges to “inject stability” into regional affairs through economic partnerships and dialogue on one hand, citing Beijing’s role in maintaining overall peace despite territorial disputes in the South China Sea and tensions with Japan over the East China Sea. On the other hand, its portrayal of external pressures as existential threats, including accusations of U.S. containment and support for Taiwan’s separatist forces, could escalate distrust among neighbors already cautious of Beijing’s assertiveness.
Although the white paper highlights China’s “social harmony” and low crime rates as evidence of effective governance, its broad definition of security raises questions regarding legal transparency and human rights. Including security agencies in the legislation process of technological and economic policies may enable state surveillance and censorship in the name of risk prevention. Similarly, despite international criticism of China’s policies in Xinjiang and Tibet, the white paper’s emphasis on “ethnic unity” and “religious harmony” may indicate a continued reliance on coercive measures.
The world will be watching to see if Beijing’s implementation of its “holistic security” doctrine promotes true stability, as China claims, or if it is a fig leaf for the CCP extending power overseas and reinforcing control at home, as its critics allege.
Authors
Guest Author
Sanoop Sajan Koshy
Sanoop Sajan Koshy is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship (2024-25) as an exchange scholar at the Beijing Normal University.
7. U.S. Loses Last Triple-A Credit Rating
Troubling sign for our economy?
U.S. Loses Last Triple-A Credit Rating
Moody’s downgrades the U.S. government, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs
https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/u-s-loses-last-triple-a-credit-rating-bfcbae5d?st=k1m31L&utm
By Matt Wirz
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and Sam Goldfarb
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Updated May 16, 2025 9:52 pm ET
Moody’s headquarters in New York City. Photo: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Key Points
What's This?
- Moody’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating to Aa1 due to large deficits and rising interest costs.
- Runaway budget deficits mean U.S. government borrowing will balloon at an accelerating rate, Moody’s said.
- The move strips the U.S. of its last remaining triple-A credit rating from a major ratings firm.
The U.S. has lost its last triple-A credit rating.
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. government on Friday, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs.
Expanding budget deficits mean U.S. government borrowing will rise at an accelerating rate, pushing interest rates up over the long term, Moody’s said. The firm said Friday that it didn’t believe that any current budget proposals under consideration by lawmakers would do anything significant to reduce the persistent gap between government spending and revenues.
The move strips the U.S. of its last remaining triple-A credit rating from a major ratings firm, following similar cuts by Fitch Ratings in 2023 and S&P Global Ratings in 2011. Moody’s downgraded the U.S. to Aa1, a rating also held by Austria and Finland.
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s wrote in a statement.
Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, blamed the Biden administration for adding to the nation’s debt and criticized Moody’s for the timing of its downgrade.
“The Trump administration and Republicans are focused on fixing [former President Joe] Biden’s mess,” he said. “If Moody’s had any credibility, they would not have stayed silent as the fiscal disaster of the past four years unfolded.”
The Moody’s downgrade comes as Republicans in Congress are trying to fashion a giant tax-and-spending bill that would extend expiring tax cuts, add some new tax cuts, reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance and boost border enforcement and national defense. It is expected to increase budget deficits by about $3 trillion over the next decade, compared with a scenario where the tax cuts expire as scheduled Dec. 31.
House Republican spending hawks blocked the bill on Friday, trying to accelerate spending cuts and hasten the end of clean-energy tax breaks.
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President Trump’s trade policies have sparked high levels of uncertainty over the future of the U.S. economy. Four chief economists break down their forecasts for a recession, increased inflation and more. Photo Illustration: Xingpei Shen
At the margin, the Moody’s downgrade could put pressure on the market for U.S. Treasurys, which has already been hit by expectations for greater borrowing and stubbornly high inflation.
Treasurys, however, rallied after S&P’s 2011 downgrade, in part because the economy was weak, demonstrating that investors still considered the U.S. the world’s safest bet. Few expect the Moody’s downgrade to spur market turmoil this time. The U.S. remains the world’s largest economy and the benchmark against which other countries are measured.
But some investors said the downgrade could exacerbate the damage the recent trade war has done to that exceptional position. And that might compel global investors to lift the premium they demand to buy U.S. debt, which could drive benchmark yields beyond their recent level around 4.5%, likely stressing growth and market sentiment.
“That could generate an even bigger deficit because the cost of servicing our debt would also go up,” said Michael Goosay, global head of fixed income at Principal Asset Management.
In explaining the downgrade, Moody’s focused almost exclusively on the U.S. fiscal position, playing down other issues such as President Trump’s criticism of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, which has raised questions about the central bank’s ability to maintain its independence.
“While recent months have been characterized by a degree of policy uncertainty, we expect that the U.S. will continue its long history of very effective monetary policy led by an independent Federal Reserve,” Moody’s wrote.
While institutional arrangements, such as separation of powers, “can be tested at times, we expect them to remain strong and resilient,” the statement read.
For years the U.S. was one of a select group of nations rated triple-A by Moody’s, but the rise of debt levels around the world has pared that figure to 11.
Moody’s shifted its outlook on U.S. debt to stable, noting the nation “retains exceptional credit strength such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency.”
Top lawmakers quickly issued statements responding to the downgrade.
“This downgrade is a direct warning: our fiscal outlook is deteriorating, and House Republicans are determined to make it worse,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “The question is whether Republicans are ready to wake up to the damage they’re causing.”
Rep. French Hill (R., Ark.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the downgrade was “a strong reminder that our nation’s fiscal house is not in order.” House Republicans, he said, “are committed to taking steps to restore fiscal stability, address the structural drivers of our debt, and foster a pro-growth economic environment.”
Write to Matt Wirz at matthieu.wirz@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the May 17, 2025, print edition as 'Moody’s Reduces U.S. Credit Rating'.
8. How Russia’s Call for Peace Talks Turned Into a Diplomatic Defeat for Putin
Excerpts:
Putin’s insistence to only be represented by junior aides in Istanbul excluded any possibility for a serious negotiation or commitment toward a cease-fire, making him look disrespectful to Trump, said Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul-based think tank Edam. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to complain about the relatively junior Russian delegation, saying that only a meeting between Trump and Putin could achieve a breakthrough.
Zelensky made the most of the situation, telling reporters ahead of the Istanbul talks that “Trump needs to believe that Putin actually lies.”
The EU, meanwhile, has been preparing to add pressure on Moscow. It is now drafting new sanctions including a ban on Nord Stream 2, a key natural gas pipeline connecting Russia to Germany. The pipeline was completed in late 2021 but never came online because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Part of it was blown up by a team of Ukrainian commandos and civilian divers in 2022.
Indeed, the European maneuvering this week appeared designed in part to stiffen pressure on the U.S. to join them in tightening sanctions on Russia, said John Herbst, a retired U.S. diplomat who is now a senior director at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
Still, the question remains whether the U.S. president is willing to wield his power to put his Russian counterpart under more pressure to move toward peace—especially whether he will shut down Russia’s economic lifeline: its energy exports.
For that to happen, “it needs to become clear to Trump that there is no volition in Moscow,” Ulgen said. “It’s not clear to me that Trump has internalized this.”
How Russia’s Call for Peace Talks Turned Into a Diplomatic Defeat for Putin
Germany, France, the U.K. and Poland outmaneuvered Putin by persuading Ukraine’s Zelensky to accept Trump’s cease-fire demand; Russia’s leader balked
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-putin-ukraine-peace-talks-ecba739b
By Bojan Pancevski
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and Alan Cullison
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Updated May 17, 2025 4:07 am ET
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on a call with President Trump during a summit in Tirana, Albania, on Friday. Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/epa-efe/Shutterstock
Key Points
What's This?
- Talks in Istanbul, proposed by Putin, indicate he’s not ready for a Ukraine deal.
- EU leaders are trying to convince Trump that Putin is the obstacle to peace in Ukraine.
- EU is drafting new sanctions, including a ban on Nord Stream 2, to pressure Moscow.
Peace in Ukraine remains as elusive as when Russian tanks first streamed across its borders more than three years ago. This week’s talks in Istanbul—talks that Vladimir Putin himself proposed—show he isn’t yet ready to do a deal. They might also show President Trump that the Russian leader really is the obstacle to peace that the Ukrainians and their European backers claim he is.
All the parties involved—Ukraine, Europe and Russia—staged their own elaborate performances in Turkey to influence the American president.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a show of being willing to meet with his Russian counterpart and talking with senior Western officials.
European leaders, for their part, helped Zelensky calibrate his approach after his dust-up with Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the White House earlier this year.
Putin’s gambit largely involved not turning up at all, delegating the task of handling the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years to some relatively minor officials after he himself had suggested the discussions. Their refusal to consider Trump’s proposal for a 30-day cease-fire effectively put the matter on ice.
Instead, Putin’s invading army intensified its bombardment of Ukraine even during the talks. Hours after the Istanbul meeting, a Russian drone struck a bus in the northeastern Ukrainian region of Sumy, killing nine people and injuring four. Local authorities declared a period of mourning and described the attack as a war crime targeting a civilian transport.
Zelensky traveled to the Ukrainian Embassy in Ankara this week. Photo: Mustafa Kaya/Zuma Press
Putin has signaled that his demands haven’t changed since the beginning of the war. Those demands have included territorial concessions by Kyiv, a radically downsized Ukrainian military and promises that Ukraine would never join NATO and that no NATO troops would be stationed in Ukraine.
Moscow says a cease-fire would only serve Kyiv’s interest by giving Ukraine’s armed forces time to refit and rearm. It has argued that any peace deal for Kyiv will only get worse with time because Russian forces are advancing deeper into Ukraine. Now Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies are reporting that Russia is amassing troops in the east of Ukraine in preparation for a renewed offensive, in an apparent bid to grab more territory before committing to any serious negotiations.
By sending a low-level delegation, identical to the one he sent to Turkey in 2022, Putin has flagged that he intends to stake out a position that Ukraine will likely find unacceptable, said Thomas Graham, a distinguished scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Graham noted that during those talks early in the war, Russia’s military had suffered setbacks in its invasion, but not yet the catastrophic reversals of later that year that tarnished its reputation as a land power.
Putin’s hard-line strategy risks annoying Trump, who has lately appeared irritated with Putin for his intransigence, and who has come under increasing pressure at home to stiffen sanctions on Russia. European leaders, too, have sensed an opportunity to finally persuade an exasperated Trump to do more to back up his cease-fire demand.
“Putin put himself firmly in the wrong by not showing up,” Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Thursday night, adding that no one can say that Europe hasn’t made enough of an effort to end the war.
Russia sent junior representatives to the peace summit in Istanbul. Photo: Burak Kara/Getty Images
“We will now try everything to empower Ukraine to be able to defend itself from the Russian attack, and Putin will eventually understand that he can’t go on like that,” the conservative German leader said.
Friday’s meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian sides in Istanbul was the culmination of a carefully plotted diplomatic play by the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and Poland. After Zelensky’s face-off with Trump in the White House, they counseled him to unconditionally accept Trump’s demands, including the call for a cease-fire, several European officials said.
The four leaders had several calls with Zelensky before visiting him in Kyiv last week, where they coached him about how to handle Trump’s unpredictable approach to brokering a peace deal. The group then spontaneously called Trump on his cellphone to inform him that Zelensky fully accepted his cease-fire proposals.
They then issued an ultimatum to Putin to accept a cease-fire or face sanctions against Russia’s vital oil and gas exports. European diplomats say their newly found resolve was made possible by the change of guard in Germany, where Merz is now willing to accept harsher sanctions against Moscow.
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President Trump said “nothing’s going to happen” with the Ukraine peace talks until he and President Vladimir Putin get together. The Kremlin announced that Putin would be skipping the direct negotiations in Turkey. Photo: Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Caught flat-footed by the diplomatic offensive, Putin then proposed a peace summit in Istanbul—which he then refused to attend, instead dispatching junior representatives without a broad mandate to negotiate.
The EU initiative, which European officials say was designed to convince Trump that Putin is refusing his mediation, is a significant coup for both Zelensky and his European peers, who long struggled to rebut Trump’s criticism that they aren’t doing enough to end the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
“This allowed Europe to finally become the party of peace,” said Ivan Krastev, a fellow with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna who has met the Russian president on several occasions.
The onus is now on Putin to explain to Trump why he is refusing his initiative for a cease-fire, despite the offer from Zelensky and his European supporters, as well as leaders from nations such as Turkey and Brazil, Krastev said.
Putin hasn’t dropped demands that include territorial concessions by Kyiv and a radically downsized Ukrainian military. Photo: Pavel Byrkin/Press Pool/AP
“From the very beginning, this has the aspects of a circus,” said Graham, of the Council on Foreign Relations. “This was a show for one individual, and at the end of it all the question is, Who does Trump believe gave the better performance?”
Trump, who was in the wider region on a series of state visits, made some cryptic remarks about the possibility of joining the discussions in Istanbul himself until it became apparent that Putin wouldn’t be there.
Putin’s insistence to only be represented by junior aides in Istanbul excluded any possibility for a serious negotiation or commitment toward a cease-fire, making him look disrespectful to Trump, said Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul-based think tank Edam. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to complain about the relatively junior Russian delegation, saying that only a meeting between Trump and Putin could achieve a breakthrough.
Zelensky made the most of the situation, telling reporters ahead of the Istanbul talks that “Trump needs to believe that Putin actually lies.”
The EU, meanwhile, has been preparing to add pressure on Moscow. It is now drafting new sanctions including a ban on Nord Stream 2, a key natural gas pipeline connecting Russia to Germany. The pipeline was completed in late 2021 but never came online because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Part of it was blown up by a team of Ukrainian commandos and civilian divers in 2022.
Indeed, the European maneuvering this week appeared designed in part to stiffen pressure on the U.S. to join them in tightening sanctions on Russia, said John Herbst, a retired U.S. diplomat who is now a senior director at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
Still, the question remains whether the U.S. president is willing to wield his power to put his Russian counterpart under more pressure to move toward peace—especially whether he will shut down Russia’s economic lifeline: its energy exports.
For that to happen, “it needs to become clear to Trump that there is no volition in Moscow,” Ulgen said. “It’s not clear to me that Trump has internalized this.”
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
Appeared in the May 17, 2025, print edition as 'Negotiations Signal Putin Isn’t Ready for Peace Deal'.
9. Here are 5 takeaways from Trump's first major foreign trip to the Middle East
The five:
1. A trip that played to Trump's ego
2. A trip focused on deals, but overshadowed by a plane
3. Even many Republicans think accepting the plane would be a bad idea
4. Trump got what he wanted — without any public conversations about democracy or human rights
5. The trip's focus was deals — with a little learned about his stances on Syria, Iran, Gaza and Ukraine
Here are 5 takeaways from Trump's first major foreign trip to the Middle East
NPR · by Domenico Montanaro · May 16, 2025
President Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attend a bilateral meeting at the Saudi Royal Court on May 13 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Trump was greeted like royalty during his four-day trip to the Middle East.
There were opulent palaces, fighter jet escorts, a parade of camels and much more.
It was exactly the kind of pomp that makes Trump, with his love of a gold-plated lifestyle, envious.
His focus, he said, was on securing money and deals for the United States. The Gulf states obliged, trying to curry favor with the president through investments, arms deals and buying Boeing planes while giving a very lavish one away.
Here are five takeaways from Trump's trip:
1. A trip that played to Trump's ego
Trump is someone who values fealty, power and glitz. He has gotten the fealty from staff and Cabinet appointees in this second term. He has ogled at the power of autocrats, like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Russia's Vladimir Putin. He spends lots of time at his glitzy Palm Beach, Fla. home, Mar-a-lago, and redecorated the Oval Office with lots of gold.
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"You see the new and improved Oval Office," Trump boasted earlier this month during a meeting with Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney. "As it becomes more and more beautiful with love, you know, we handle it with great love and 24-karat gold — that always helps, too."
He got much the same during this trip to the Middle East — genuflecting, leaders who rule with iron fists and marbled, golden glamour.
2. A trip focused on deals, but overshadowed by a plane
President Trump tours the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, including the mausoleum of the late founder Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Dr. Yousef Al-Obaidi, Director-General of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center (SZGMC) and Ameena Alhammadi, Acting Director of Culture and Knowledge Department of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre on May 15 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Trump is on the third day of his visit to the Gulf to underscore the strategic partnership between the United States and regional allies including the UAE, focusing on security and economic collaboration. Win McNamee/Getty Images
There were lots of financial agreements struck between the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, including: Qatar's state-backed airline buying Boeing jets, Qatar taking billions in U.S. arms, UAE building an artificial intelligence campus, Saudi Arabia investing in medical and military research, as well as other deals on oil.
But Qatar's gift to Trump of a 747 to replace Air Force One has been the thing that has gotten the most attention and drawn criticism — for different reasons — left, right and MAGA.
Described as a "flying palace" worth some $400 million, Trump is enamored with the jet. He called it a great "gesture," noted, "I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer" and said: "I could be a stupid person, saying, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.'"
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Trump called it a gift to the Defense Department, but it's not a plane that would be sticking around after Trump leaves office. He said it would be decommissioned and sent to his presidential library.
There are already newly designed Air Force One jets that Boeing is building, but Trump has been frustrated with delays.
"I've been doing this for four days," Trump said on his last day of the trip. "I leave now and get onto a 42-year-old Boeing. But new ones are coming, new ones are coming."
3. Even many Republicans think accepting the plane would be a bad idea
Accepting the plane would seem to violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that bars such gifts from foreign leaders and could also only get a couple years of use.
It would also need to be refurbished to check for listening devices, as well as broken down and put back together to meet the security requirements of a presidential aircraft. That could take years and has a significant additional cost.
Trump may just ignore all that and fly it anyway — above strenuous objections even from within his own party.
"There are lots of issues around that that will attract serious questions," Senate Republican leader John Thune of South Dakota told reporters of the plane.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. used an ancient metaphor on CNN, warning against the gift. "It seems to me the Greeks had something like that a long, long time ago," he said, "and somebody happened to bring a golden horse inside of a community."
The ever-colorful Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana delivered this on Fox News: "I trust Qatar like I trust a rest stop bathroom. … With those guys, trust in God, but tie up your camel."
Trump is coming back from his trip facing lots of pushback for many reasons about the gift, including for wanting to accept a $400 million plane while urging doll-and-pencil austerity on other Americans.
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4. Trump got what he wanted — without any public conversations about democracy or human rights
President Trump meets with business leaders at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on May 15 in Doha, Qatar on the third day of his visit to the Gulf to underscore the strategic partnership between the United States and Qatar, focusing on regional security and economic collaboration. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Normally, American presidents who visit the Middle East talk of forging new relationships, but also are closely watched for how they talk about encouraging democracy. Trump, though, talked about a Middle East he sees as evolving beyond "tired divisions" and "defined by commerce not chaos," "technology not terrorism."
"The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities," Trump contended in remarks from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
"Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves. The people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way," Trump continued. It's really incredible what you've done."
Trump's reductive and sanitized version of the region ignores, for example, the "sportswashing" of countries like Qatar, which won the right to host the 2022 FIFA soccer World Cup, through bribes, according to the U.S. government. It also built stadiums with international workers that saw dangerous working conditions and deaths.
It ignores the UAE trying to show itself as progressive on the world stage, while suppressing dissent and imprisoning dissidents, as well as its treatment of migrant workers and more.
It ignores that a Washington Post columnist disappeared from a Saudi embassy in Turkey. It was later discovered he had been killed in a gruesome attack that U.S. intelligence says was ordered by the country's de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman.
That's to say nothing of women's rights, the lack of free elections and concentrations of wealth passed down through a select few royal families.
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For Trump, it seems that none of that matters. It's transactions over principle, a pivot away from American moral leadership.
Taking a shot at former presidents, Trump said, "In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins."
5. The trip's focus was deals — with a little learned about his stances on Syria, Iran, Gaza and Ukraine
Trump was on this trip to get signatures on the dotted line at the bottom of the page. But it was impossible to totally escape some of the major international flashpoints.
He made news by lifting sanctions against Syria that have been in place for decades. He gripped and grinned with the country's new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, someone who until recently had a $10 million bounty on his head for his arrest by the United States for his past association with Al Qaeda.
Though Trump was critical of past American presidents, who have gauged foreign leaders by looking into their "soul" — a reference to George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin — Trump heaped praise on Syria's new leader.
He judged him to be "attractive" and "tough" with a "very strong past. Fighter."
"He's got a real shot at holding it together," Trump surmised. "He's a real leader. He led a charge, and he's pretty amazing."
On Iran, Trump continued to be eager to forge a nuclear deal, saying the U.S. was "in very serious negotiations with Iran for long-term peace." He added, "It'll be taken care of 100%, it'll be done nicely or not nicely and the not nicely is not a good thing for them. We're talking to them and I think they've come a long way."
Publicly, there was no serious in-depth discussion of Gaza, and Trump again floated the idea of the U.S. taking over the strip and making it a "freedom zone." But it also seemed that Gulf leaders may have said something behind closed doors, because Trump noted, "We have to help also out the Palestinians. You know, a lot of people are starving in Gaza, so we have to look at both sides."
Trump also talked about the Ukraine-Russia talks taking place in Turkey. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Turkey, Trump wanted to attend, but Putin was a no-show. Not only that, but Russia sent a low-level diplomatic delegation.
Russia watchers see what Putin is doing as another delay tactic, as he continues to try and advance in Ukraine.
At some point, Trump has to make the choice — whether he will continue this dance with Putin or if he loses patience.
The fact is Trump made a lot of big promises about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but has so far not been able to deliver. He's running into some big personalities with Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, so far, are not bending to Trump's will.
Read more of NPR's reporting on Trump's Middle East trip
NPR · by Domenico Montanaro · May 16, 2025
10. What or Where Is the Indo-Pacific?
I was unaware of the first part of this excerpt but well aware of the second. But it will always be the Asia Pacific to me.
Excerpts:
The term can be traced back to the work of German political scientist and geographer Karl Haushofer – a favorite of Adolf Hitler – in the 1920s. But it only really began to take hold in the think tanks and foreign policy-setting departments of Washington and other Western capitals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
...
The phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” – also coined by Abe in a 2016 speech – quickly became the centerpiece of U.S. regional diplomacy. It emphasized freedom of navigation, respect for international law, and democratic solidarity.
...
For now, the Indo-Pacific framing has reshaped how policymakers, military planners, and diplomats think about Asia’s future. It provides a vocabulary for coordinating alliances, building new partnerships, and addressing the challenges posed by China’s expanding influence.
Yet its long-term success will depend on whether the framework can genuinely accommodate the region’s diversity − and whether it can be seen as something more than just a mechanism for great power competition and a thinly veiled strategy to contain China.
What or Where Is the Indo-Pacific?
How a foreign policy pivot redefined the global map.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/05/what-or-where-is-the-indo-pacific/
By Andrew Latham
May 17, 2025
Credit: Depositphotos
Open a book of maps and look for the “Indo-Pacific” region – it likely won’t be there.
Yet the Indo-Pacific is now central to how many countries think about strategy and security. It describes a region spanning two oceans and dozens of countries, encompassing many of the world’s trade routes.
The Indo-Pacific did not emerge from the patterns of ancient trade, nor from long-standing cultural or civilizational ties. Instead, the concept comes from the realms of political science and international relations.
The term can be traced back to the work of German political scientist and geographer Karl Haushofer – a favorite of Adolf Hitler – in the 1920s. But it only really began to take hold in the think tanks and foreign policy-setting departments of Washington and other Western capitals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
It coincided with a shift in the global balance of power from unipolarity – that is, dominated by one superpower – to multipolarity over the past decade or so.
“Confluence of the Two Seas”
For much of the Cold War, the United States treated the Pacific and Indian oceans as separate theaters of operation. Its military forces in the area, known as U.S. Pacific Command, focused on East Asia and the western Pacific, while the Indian Ocean figured mainly in energy security discussions, tied to the Middle East and the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea.
Strategic maps during that era divided the world into distinct zones of interest. But China’s economic rise, India’s growing influence, and the increasing strategic significance of sea lanes across both oceans since the end of the Cold War blurred those old dividing lines.
The Indian Ocean could no longer be treated as a secondary concern. Nor could the Pacific be thought of in isolation from what was happening farther west.
Japan helped give political voice to this emerging reality. In 2007, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo stood before India’s parliament and spoke of the “confluence of the two seas” − an image that deliberately linked the Indian and Pacific oceans as a single geopolitical space.
Abe’s message was clear: The fate of the Pacific and Indian oceans would be increasingly intertwined, and democratic states would need to work together to preserve stability. His vision resonated in Washington, Canberra, and New Delhi, and it helped set the stage for the revival of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad.
In 2018, the United States made the shift official, renaming U.S. Pacific Command the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
What might have seemed like a bureaucratic rebranding was in fact a serious strategic move. It reflected the growing recognition that the rise of China – and Beijing’s growing influence from East Africa to the South Pacific – required an integrated regional approach.
Framing the challenge in Indo-Pacific terms allowed Washington to strengthen its ties with India, deepen cooperation with Australia and Japan, and reposition itself as a maritime balancer across a vast strategic arc.
The phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” – also coined by Abe in a 2016 speech – quickly became the centerpiece of U.S. regional diplomacy. It emphasized freedom of navigation, respect for international law, and democratic solidarity.
But while the rhetoric stressed inclusivity and shared values, the driving force behind the concept was clear: managing China’s expanding power. The Indo-Pacific framework allowed Washington to draw together a range of initiatives under a single banner, all aimed at reinforcing a rules-based order at a time when Beijing was testing its limits.
Rejecting Zero-sum Thinking
Not every country has enthusiastically embraced this vision. Many Southeast Asian states, wary of being drawn into a competition between the United States and China, have approached the Indo-Pacific concept with caution. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ document titled Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, released in 2019, deliberately avoided framing the region in confrontational terms. Instead, it stressed dialogue and the centrality of Southeast Asia – a subtle rebuke to visions that seemed to pit democracy against authoritarianism in stark, zero-sum terms.
The breadth of the Indo-Pacific concept also raises difficult questions. It covers an enormous range of political, economic and security realities. The priorities of small island states in the Pacific differ sharply from those of major continental powers such as India or Australia. Treating the Indo-Pacific as a single strategic space risks flattening these differences and could alienate smaller nations whose concerns do not always align with those of the major players.
The Indo-Pacific Today
Recent shifts in Washington’s foreign policy also complicate matters. The Trump administration’s skepticism of alliances has created doubts among regional partners about the reliability of U.S. commitments. Even as the Indo-Pacific idea gained traction, questions remained about whether it represented a long-term strategy or a short-term tactical adjustment.
The Biden administration maintained the Indo-Pacific framework, launching the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity to provide an economic counterpart to the security-heavy focus of earlier years. But the central strategic challenge remains the same: how to manage China’s rise without forcing the region into a rigid geopolitical divide.
For now, the Indo-Pacific framing has reshaped how policymakers, military planners, and diplomats think about Asia’s future. It provides a vocabulary for coordinating alliances, building new partnerships, and addressing the challenges posed by China’s expanding influence.
Yet its long-term success will depend on whether the framework can genuinely accommodate the region’s diversity − and whether it can be seen as something more than just a mechanism for great power competition and a thinly veiled strategy to contain China.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Authors
Guest Author
Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a professor of political science at Macalester College.
11. Nvidia to Set Up Research Center in Shanghai, Maintaining Foothold in China
Nvidia to Set Up Research Center in Shanghai, Maintaining Foothold in China
The plan follows the White House’s recent move to tighten curbs on China’s access to Nvidia’s high-end AI chips
https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-shanghai-china-research-center-d0138dab
By Raffaele Huang
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Updated May 16, 2025 10:00 pm ET
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a conference in March. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small/Reuters
Key Points
What's This?
- Nvidia plans to open a research and development center in Shanghai to maintain its presence in China.
- The facility will help Nvidia understand Chinese customer demands and design U.S.-compliant products.
- Nvidia aims to navigate export controls and compete with domestic companies like Huawei.
SINGAPORE—Nvidia NVDA 0.42%increase; green up pointing triangle plans to open a research-and-development center in Shanghai, its latest effort to maintain a foothold in China after the Trump administration’s attempts to tighten export controls for its AI semiconductors.
Chief Executive Jensen Huang visited China in April and discussed the plan with Shanghai’s mayor, who welcomed it and offered to provide support, according to people familiar with the exchange.
The details
With the new facility, Nvidia NVDA 0.42%increase; green up pointing triangle seeks to beef up its teams that study and convey the demands of its Chinese customers to the company’s headquarters, helping Nvidia design products that are competitive in China and compliant with U.S. rules, people familiar with the matter said.
Since 2022, Washington has required licenses for exports of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China. That has reduced China sales, which accounted for 13% of revenue in its last fiscal year, down from 26% before the export restrictions.
The company is seeking to lease an office space in Shanghai for the new facility to accommodate existing employees and potential new hires, the people said. Officials in the city, where Tesla’s China plant is located, have told the company that it would offer tax breaks and reduce red tape for its new project, the people said.
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WSJ’s Asia Business, Finance and Economics Editor Peter Landers explains why Nvidia’s H20 chip is caught in the middle of the escalating tech war between China and the U.S. Photo: Al Drago/Press Pool; David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
The context
“We are not sending any GPU designs to China to be modified to comply with export controls,” a company representative said in a statement, referring to graphics-processing units.
The company has repeatedly created downgraded variants of chips after Washington tightened its rules so that it could keep selling to China. The practice has angered some U.S. officials, who were upset the company wasn’t being more helpful in curbing China’s AI advances.
Nvidia has said it follows U.S. export rules and has advocated for selling to Chinese customers rather than ceding the market to domestic companies such as Huawei Technologies, which are filling in the gap left by Nvidia and its American peers.
The big picture
Nvidia has some 4,000 employees in China, about half of which are in Shanghai. Some engineers in the country have been supporting the company’s global development projects and research in frontier sectors including autonomous driving.
Nvidia has recently told some major customers in China that it is seeking to lower the performance of the H20, the latest chip Washington put under export controls, so that it could comply with the new rules, people familiar with the matter said. It also told clients that it’s designing a compliant chip based on its more advanced Blackwell architecture. Any new chips for China will need U.S. approval, which is finalizing details of its export rules.
“We are not redesigning any chips at any location in China,” said the company representative.
The Financial Times earlier reported Nvidia’s plan.
Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com
12. Comey’s ‘86 47’ Post Is Latest Social-Media Misadventure for Ex-FBI Boss
Wow. Comey is just as childish as the rest of us who post memes for political effects. You would think he would know better (and that he would have known this would happen to him). Social media is a dangerous medium. It can be hazardous to your (political) health.
Comey’s ‘86 47’ Post Is Latest Social-Media Misadventure for Ex-FBI Boss
President Trump and his supporters accuse former FBI director of advocating violence
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/james-comey-instagram-trump-3fbda263
By Sadie Gurman
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Updated May 16, 2025 6:43 pm ET
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Trump officials are criticizing former FBI Director James Comey for a now-deleted post that they claim calls for the assassination of President Trump. Photo Illustration: Elise Dean
WASHINGTON—James Comey’s active presence on social media has been unusual for a former FBI director. On Thursday, it landed him in a pickle.
In an Instagram post, Comey wrote “cool shell formation on my beach walk,” under a photo of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47.” Trump officials pounced, accusing Comey of calling for President Trump’s assassination, as “86” is old-time slang for “get rid of” and Trump is the 47th president.
Comey later said he didn’t realize the numbers could be associated with violence and took the post down, but not before drawing the attention of the Secret Service and spurring Republican calls for his arrest. Secret Service agents were questioning Comey Friday night at their Washington office, a law-enforcement official said. Comey voluntarily submitted to the interview, the official said.
“It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind,” said Comey, whose long career in law enforcement included investigations of organized crime and the Italian Mafia as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump fired back Friday on Fox News, adding that he would leave it to Attorney General Pam Bondi to decide whether to pursue Comey, a case current and former prosecutors said would be difficult to bring and even harder to prove in court.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
A now-deleted post of shells arranged to spell ‘86 47.’ Photo: Uncredited
Trump fired Comey in 2017, during the bureau’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign was connected to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The president and his allies continue to seethe about Comey, complaining of disparate treatment in the way he handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation compared with the Trump-Russia probe, which dogged his first presidency. (The special counsel investigation it spawned concluded the campaign didn’t conspire with Moscow.)
Comey, who has since become a top Trump critic, talked about his career and experience with the president in his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.” His latest social-media dust-up comes just ahead of the publication of his third novel, “FDR Drive,” a crime thriller about a radical right-wing podcaster who incites murder in the name of patriotism.
Comey didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday.
“He is the former head of the FBI, so he’s got to know that whenever he does something like this there’s going to be eyes on it,” said John Fishwick, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia during the Obama administration. “If you’re in law enforcement, it’s different than being a politician. You should know not to fool around with stuff like this.”
Even if an investigation doesn’t end in charges, Fishwick said it could drag out over time, with searches of Comey’s devices and interviews of neighbors “to see exactly what happened here.”
After keeping a low profile immediately after his ouster, Comey later that year confirmed he was the author of a previously anonymous Twitter account under the pseudonym “Reinhold Niebuhr,” the theologian featured in Comey’s undergraduate thesis at the College of William & Mary. A reporter at Gizmodo traced the account to Comey.
Donald Trump shaking hands with James Comey in 2017. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
The revelation was unusual at the time, as it was unheard of for the leader of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency to have a social-media presence, though it appeared he was mostly just liking tweets about the bureau and himself. Comey had the account concealed, albeit somewhat thinly, under the handle @projectexile7, a reference to a federal gun-violence-prevention program he created when he was a top federal prosecutor in Richmond.
Later in 2017, Comey stirred rumors that he was running for higher office when he tweeted a pensive photo of himself standing alone—wearing running shoes—along a road in Iowa, with the message, “Gotta get back to writing. Will try to tweet in useful ways.”
The curiosity it generated is now a distant memory, as Trump’s current FBI chief Kash Patel has embraced social media for personal and professional purposes. Patel created the first official X account for a bureau director, where on Thursday he shared that the FBI was aware of Comey’s seashell post and would “provide all necessary support” to the Secret Service.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
Appeared in the May 17, 2025, print edition as 'Comey Is Investigated Over Social-Media Post'.
13. The Trump Doctrine of the Deal
(and unconventional diplomacy)
The Trump Doctrine of the Deal
The President is offering a foreign-policy realism built on commerce, but shorn of American idealism.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-doctrine-foreign-policy-saudi-arabia-speech-c039713a
By The Editorial Board
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May 16, 2025 5:37 pm ET
President Donald Trump Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
President Trump stormed through the Middle East on the first foreign trip of his second term this week, and he didn’t shrink from bold moves or confident assertions. His big speech, in Saudi Arabia, even laid out what might be called a Trump Doctrine, if that phrase can be used about a President who is so transactional.
Mr. Trump is offering a form of foreign-policy realism rooted in good commercial relations and a focus on negotiating peace and stability. He doesn’t much care what kind of government countries run as long as they want good relations with the U.S. He’s looking for deals, even with enemies. He thinks mutual interest in prosperity can overcome even strong ideological differences—and he has no interest in promoting American values, including liberty or democracy.
His Middle Eastern policy is taking this doctrine on a test drive. He took the advice of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to repeal sanctions on Syria’s new Islamist government. He even met the former jihadist now running Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whom he called “attractive, tough.” In Trump world, those are the highest compliments.
This is a gamble but it could pay off. The U.S. has an interest in keeping Iran and Russia from dominating Syria. If the U.S. can help Mr. Sharaa balance Turkey’s influence, and Mr. Sharaa can help prevent conflict between Turkey and Israel, a new era of stability in that bloody corner of the Middle East might be possible.
A bigger question is Mr. Trump’s growing enthusiasm for a nuclear deal with Iran. True to his doctrine, he is appealing to the mullahs in Tehran with the promise of commercial riches if they give up their nuclear ambitions.
This appeal has been tried before, however, and came a cropper because Iran’s regime is ideological. It wants a regional Shiite revolution that dominates the Sunni Arab states and pushes Israel into the sea. If the Ayatollahs reject Mr. Trump’s offer because they are bent on retaining the ability to become a nuclear power, then what will Mr. Trump do?
He says he wants peace above all else, and the test will be whether his deals with adversarial states are short-term expedients or longer-term strategic victories. His deal with Iran, however it goes, will tell us something about his plans for China as well.
Mr. Trump’s aversion to ideology—to promoting U.S. values—led to the biggest mistake of his trip, which was a needless attack on his predecessors. He praised the sparkling new cities of the Arab countries and claimed they are solely the handiwork of those nations.
“The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities,” he said. He went on to slam the “nation-builders” and “interventionalists,” by which he clearly meant George W. Bush and the last two Democratic Presidents.
The Iraq and Afghan wars weren’t successful in hindsight, but Mr. Trump ignores that they began as realist efforts in the wake of a jihadist attack on America. He also forgets that the emirs of the Gulf have long been protected by America’s foreign military deployments that let them nation-build. Mr. Trump’s slam against his predecessors resembles Barack Obama’s infamous Middle East “apology tour.”
In his pursuit of stability and American restraint, Mr. Trump’s policy may be imitating Richard Nixon’s detente in the Cold War. Nixon also downplayed ideological differences in pursuing arms control deals and a stable balance of power. But that policy failed in the end because the Soviet Union’s leaders weren’t interested in stability. They were interested in maintaining, and spreading, their Communist revolution.
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War with a combination of realism and American idealism. He built American hard power and was willing to engage the Soviets, but he also wasn’t afraid to tell the truth about their crushing of freedom in Russia, Eastern Europe and beyond.
In his desire to repudiate his domestic opponents, Mr. Trump would do well to avoid disdaining American values. They are still admired by the people who flock to our shores.
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Free Expression: Great-power theory would relieve the U.S. of some burdens, but poses risks to the national interest. (03/04/25) Photo: Xie Huanchi/Sergei Bulkin/CNP/Zuma Press
Appeared in the May 17, 2025, print edition as 'The Trump Doctrine of the Deal'.
14. US general details China military plans to defeat US in Taiwan war
Here is the link to his prepared statement: https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Updated Long Form House Select Committee 12 MAY.pdf
Excerpts:
U.S. officials believe Chinese leader Xi Jinping has instructed the People's Liberation Army to be capable of taking Taiwan by 2027, even if he does not necessarily intend to give the order that year. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in President Donald Trump's administration have stressed deterring China means making an invasion as costly as possible.
...
In his Thursday remarks at a House hearing focused on the Chinese Communist Party, retired General Charles Flynn, the former commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, told lawmakers that "the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is no longer distant or theoretical."
In a statement prepared ahead of the hearing, Flynn pointed to the enormity of the challenge China would face in mounting an amphibious assault—factors he said help offset the yawning capabilities gap between Taiwan's military and China's.
To pull off a fait accompli, Flynn noted, Chinese forces would need to cross the 100-mile Taiwan Strait under heavy fire. Upon reaching Taiwanese shores, they would need to establish—and hold—beachheads.
In Taiwan's cities, People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops would then face urban warfare against defenders dug into fortified positions. Finally, China would have to achieve all this before the U.S. and its allies could fully commit their forces to an intervention.
US general details China military plans to defeat US in Taiwan war
Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · May 16, 2025
A former top U.S. defense official has warned lawmakers that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is "no longer distant" amid rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
Charles Flynn, retired general and former commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, also laid out the steps the People's Liberation Army would need to accomplish such a feat.
Why It Matters
China has vowed to unify with Taiwan, which it considers its territory, though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled there. Beijing, in recent years, ramped up military activities around Taiwan to punish the island's Beijing-skeptic ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
U.S. officials believe Chinese leader Xi Jinping has instructed the People's Liberation Army to be capable of taking Taiwan by 2027, even if he does not necessarily intend to give the order that year. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in President Donald Trump's administration have stressed deterring China means making an invasion as costly as possible.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry via email for comment.
What To Know
In his Thursday remarks at a House hearing focused on the Chinese Communist Party, retired General Charles Flynn, the former commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, told lawmakers that "the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is no longer distant or theoretical."
Flynn spoke at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Also testifying were Mark Montgomery, former director of operations at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and Kurt Campbell, deputy secretary of state from 2024 to 2025.
Taiwanese soldiers take part in a drill at a military base in Taitung County on January 21, 2025. Taiwanese soldiers take part in a drill at a military base in Taitung County on January 21, 2025. Chiang Ying-ying/Associated Press
In a statement prepared ahead of the hearing, Flynn pointed to the enormity of the challenge China would face in mounting an amphibious assault—factors he said help offset the yawning capabilities gap between Taiwan's military and China's.
To pull off a fait accompli, Flynn noted, Chinese forces would need to cross the 100-mile Taiwan Strait under heavy fire. Upon reaching Taiwanese shores, they would need to establish—and hold—beachheads.
In Taiwan's cities, People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops would then face urban warfare against defenders dug into fortified positions. Finally, China would have to achieve all this before the U.S. and its allies could fully commit their forces to an intervention.
Flynn emphasized that while analysts often focus on China's rapidly growing navy, air force, and rocket force, the country's ground forces ultimately determine the outcome.
"If the PLA Army cannot land, cannot maneuver, cannot hold ground, and cannot subjugate the people of Taiwan, it cannot win. If we can prevent them from even attempting to cross, we deter the war altogether," he told lawmakers.
What People Are Saying
Former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, in an opening statement submitted before the hearing: "Taiwan's future is deeply intertwined with America's own—our economies, technologies, and societies are inextricably linked—making a strong and secure Taiwan a vital U.S. strategic interest.
"Meeting this moment requires a whole-of-government approach. Congress, the Executive Branch, and civil society must all play an active role in deepening engagement with their Taiwan counterparts. This includes strengthening our defense and economic partnerships with the Taiwan government, supporting Taiwan's meaningful participation in international organizations, and expanding educational, cultural, and scientific exchanges."
What Happens Next
Washington maintains a decades-old policy of "strategic ambiguity" on whether it would come to Taiwan's defense, which could mean being dragged into the U.S.'s first hot war with another nuclear power.
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 · May 16, 2025
15. VCNO Kilby Sees ‘Tremendous Opportunity’ in American Shipbuilding
Establish a JAROKUS Shipbuilding consortium.
VCNO Kilby Sees ‘Tremendous Opportunity’ in American Shipbuilding
https://news.usni.org/2025/05/14/vcno-kilby-sees-tremendous-opportunity-in-american-shipbuilding?utm
John Grady
May 14, 2025 6:30 PM
The future Flight III Arleigh Burke USS Ted Steves (DDG-128) launches at Ingalls Shipbuilding in August. HII Photo
The acting head of the Navy sees “tremendous opportunity” for American shipbuilding with the focused White House, Navy secretariat and Congress aligned on rebuilding the industry.
“We’re not satisfied with current production from our yards,” Adm. James Kilby said Tuesday at a Center for Strategic and International panel on global security featuring the service vice chiefs. He said Chinese yards “can build 200 times our rate” of commercial and military vessels in a year.
“We’re making investments in the shipbuilding base [and] we’re making investments in the submarine base” to build a new workforce, upgrade yards and speed building and repair, he added.
Kilby also said the Navy was looking beyond its traditional shipbuilding prime contractors as it moves toward a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet through its Project Overmatch initiative. “I need to keep it cheap, attritable,” he added.
Speaking last month at the Sea-Air-Space Symposium, he said, “the challenge for us is to really robustly lay out a roadmap to get [a hybrid fleet]. We’ve had some fits and starts there, so we must do better. Our initial focus is 2027 though, [for a] capability that will help us in the Pacific.”
Regarding the earlier spending freeze on the Landing Ship Medium because of rising costs, he said “We’ve been wedded to the compliance piece in the requirement” in what the Marine Corps needs from this ship for its new island-hopping regiments.
Kilby said he thinks new approaches with off-the-shelf designs can meet current needs.
For the Landing Ship Medium, USNI News reported in April that Naval Sea Systems Command issued a pre-solicitation notice to Bollinger Lockport Shipbuilding ahead of a sole-source award for a single hull. The hull will be based on the Israeli Logistics Support Vessel (ILSV) under a provision included in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. At the same time, NAVSEA issued a second notice to secure the technical data package.
Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding – originally VT Halter Marine – delivered the vessels based on an earlier U.S. Army design.
When asked about growing Chinese-Russian military cooperation, Kilby said, “We need to view this as a global problem. We need to be able to do handoffs” among combatant commanders of assets like submarines.
Marine assistant commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney, assistant commandant, said the days of a “short, sharp [single conflict] in a 100-hundred mile strait” are over. The new level of Sino-Russian cooperation signals that conflict in one place has implications in another, cutting across areas of responsibility held by combatant commanders. “We’ve got to have answers for these arrangements,” he added.
In prepared testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, Mahoney said, “At the operational level, we are witnessing the importance of possessing and maintaining a depth of magazine sufficient for protracted operations, and the rise of space as a critical warfare domain.”
At the CSIS event, he stressed that “depth of magazine” went beyond weapons to people and budgets. “We need to reform and refine resources” in a holistic approach to addressing the challenge, he said.
That included examining barriers newer businesses face in entering the defense market. “Software pathways keep you relevant,” Mahoney added.
Kilby pointed to the joint Navy-Pentagon investment in Danville, Va., as a model for developing a skilled defense industry workforce familiar with additive manufacturing. The Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence “builds upon experience and collaboration across a consortium of industry and academic experts,” a Navy press release said.
It’s “not a smelter, but working with computers,” Kilby said.
But modernizing is severely limited by Congress failure to pass budgets on time, Kilby and Mahoney said. Continuing resolutions have been needed in 18 of the past 20 years. This year’s reconciliation helped provide new starts for battle force ships and unmanned systems, Kilby said, “But I got to sustain them in the future … to do what they need to do.”
“Maybe something is better than nothing,”, Kilby said, but using expensive missiles to down cheap drones like the Navy has in Yemen isn’t cost-effective. “We need to look a little broader than we did before.”
16. Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation
We have met the enemy and he is us.
The government (and former contractors as well) is unable to provide for the national defense in the information and influence domain.
Of course the question is not only whether it can but whether it should or should even try? What is our personal responsibility?
Part of the problem is the discrimination between internal partisan political warfare executed for partisan political purposes versus external political warfare executed by state and non-state actors with hostile intent against the American system. There is a fear that protection against the external threat bleeds over to and stifles the internal partisan influence operations or the tools to defend against the external threats are weaponized for domestic political purposes by the party that controls the executive branch of the government.
How do we protect against the external threat while allowing internal political activities to continue unhindered, especially when the external threats are deliberately targeting those internal political activities with the very hostile intent to undermine the legitimacy of the American political system? And how do we protect against the use of external disinformation and influence activities by domestic political groups who find the external disinformation useful to their political cause? This may be one of the most difficult and complex strategic and national security dilemmas of the 21st Century.
My only answer is what President Trump wrote in his 2017 NSS:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
Access the 2017 NSS HERE
Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation
Federal agencies say that by axing the funding they are protecting the First Amendment. Critics see it as stifling scientific inquiry into sources of harmful online content.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/business/trump-online-misinformation-grants.html
By Steven Lee Myers
The Trump administration has sharply expanded its campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online, abruptly canceling scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country.
The grants funded research into topics like ways to evade censors in China. One grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence. Another, at Kent State University in Ohio, studied how malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media.
Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that.
The campaign stems from an executive order that President Trump issued on Jan. 20 vowing to protect the First Amendment right to free speech, but the scale of it has prompted criticism that it is targeting anyone researching misinformation. The intent, the critics have said, is in fact to stifle findings about the noxious content that is increasingly polluting social media and political discourse.
“When you ask Americans, these are things they’re really concerned about,” said Lisa K. Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, whose grant to study how the repetition of lies reinforced them was among those canceled. “They want to know what can be done.”
The cuts are part of the administration’s broader push to cut federal spending, but they also reflect a conviction among conservatives that the government used researchers at universities and nongovernmental organizations as proxies to restrict content on Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms.
The researchers say those claims conflate academic study about the spread of misinformation or disinformation with decisions made by tech giants to enforce their own policies against certain kinds of content, as they did when they suspended the accounts of President Trump and others involved in inciting violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
With Mr. Trump back in power, the claim of widespread government censorship has animated policy decisions across the federal government — from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which shuttered its unit tracking foreign influence operations, to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which faces a $491 million budget cut in programs that addressed election misinformation or foreign propaganda.
Last month, the National Science Foundation, a government agency that finances much of the scientific research in the United States, began canceling hundreds of grants. Most focused on studies involving issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, but scores singled out work on online content.
The cancellation has jeopardized research in universities in virtually every state, leaving researchers scrambling to find funding for projects that in many cases are only partly completed.
Each Friday since then, the foundation has announced new cancellations. It has now cut more than 1,400 grants, including 75 more last Friday. In all, the grants were worth more than $1 billion, according to a list compiled by two researchers, Scott W. Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross, the executive director of rOpenSci, a nonprofit software foundation. None of the grant abstracts reviewed by The New York Times called for censoring content.
“That’s really not the nature of our research,” said Marshall Van Alstyne, an economist at Boston University, referring to censorship. His team lost a grant for research on ways to encourage social media users to verify the sources of their posts to incentivize accuracy.
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Marshall Van Alstyne’s team lost a grant for research on ways to encourage social media users to verify the sources of their posts to incentivize accuracy.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
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Various papers, including one on fake news, listed on a whiteboard in Dr. Van Alstyne’s office at Boston University.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The National Science Foundation declined to respond to questions but posted a series of statements on its website saying that among other things it would “not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” (Malinformation refers to content that could be true but is manipulated to change its context. A common example cited is revenge pornography.)
Many of the cuts seemed arbitrary, even by the administration’s stated justification.
Eric Wustrow, a computer engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied ways to sidestep censorship — in China, not the United States. “It’s possible that maybe they saw the word censorship and thought that it couldn’t mean anything but censoring them,” he said, referring to Republican officials.
The foundation’s notifications claimed that the cancellations could not be appealed, though its policies stated otherwise.
“Even though they haven’t been following their own procedures guide, I’m doing my best to follow the guidance that has been laid out in prior procedures,” said Marianna Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, whose grant to study the way children adopt cultural stereotypes at a young age was canceled.
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A grant that Marianna Zhang of New York University had to study how children adopt cultural stereotypes was canceled.Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
The cuts have also angered Democrats on Capitol Hill. Last week, a dozen members of the House wrote the foundation’s new acting director, Brian Stone, saying the administration was “unparalleled in its hostility to American science.”
The National Institutes of Health also canceled at least a dozen projects specifically involving misinformation or conspiracy theories, including ones that examined how they undercut treatments for cancer, the human papillomavirus, H.I.V. and Covid-19.
The agency did not answer written questions about the cuts, but in a statement referred to the slogan popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the health secretary: Make America Healthy Again. “N.I.H. is carefully reviewing all grants to assure N.I.H. is addressing the United States chronic disease epidemic,” the statement said.
The Pentagon, meantime, has slashed funding for the Minerva Research Initiative, a program started in 2008 to support social science research in areas that could have an impact on national security in global hot spots.
One study, completed last year by two researchers at the University of Tennessee, Catherine Luther and Brandon Prins, documented how Russia stoked anti-American sentiment in international media before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Even before the cancellations of the grants, the field of researchers examining harmful content online had been under attack from Republicans in Congress and lawsuits in courts.
The social media giants that once supported the work — especially Facebook and Twitter, before it became X under Elon Musk — have also backed away from efforts to moderate what users see on their platforms. Without government support, research into the ills that inflict the internet will wither.
“I’m almost certain,” Dr. Van Alstyne said, “this is going to lead to a vastly more polluted information environment.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
17. Trump Sends a Message: The Gulf Is No Longer China’s Playground
Excerpts:
Trump’s decision to make his first major foreign visit to Riyadh rather than Brussels, London, or Tokyo is a deliberate signal. It indicates that the United States no longer views the Middle East as a peripheral concern, but as a vital theater of strategic competition with China. The scale of the announcements confirms that message. Saudi Arabia has pledged $600 billion in US-linked investment, including more than $100 billion in arms acquisitions. At the same time, Washington is preparing a deal to provide the kingdom with access to advanced US semiconductors—a move intended to shut China out of future Gulf infrastructure in AI, surveillance, and cloud computing. These agreements are part of the administration’s strategy to push back on China’s expanding influence by making digital sovereignty central to US security partnerships.
This shift is also visible in the administration’s approach to Syria. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Damascus is not a random concession to the post-Assad regime. Rather, it is an attempt to reenter a strategic theater that the Obama administration ceded to China, Russia, and Iran. For years, Beijing has shielded Bashar al-Assad’s Syria at the United Nations and positioned itself to lead postwar reconstruction efforts alongside Russian firms. US sanctions helped ensure Moscow and Beijing had minimal competition in that space. The sanctions’ removal signals a renewed American effort to prevent Beijing from monopolizing a strategically central part of the Middle East.
If Trump’s Gulf tour is successful, he will have made significant moves to push back against growing Chinese influence, reassert American dominance, and reassure longstanding allies. In a region marked by shifting allegiances and strategic uncertainty, the visit underscores Washington’s renewed commitment to shaping the balance of power, not just reacting to it.
May 14, 2025
Hudson Institute
Trump Sends a Message: The Gulf Is No Longer China’s Playground
Zineb Riboua
https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/trump-sends-message-gulf-no-longer-chinas-playground-zineb-riboua?utm
President Donald Trump’s arrival in Riyadh at the outset of his broader Gulf tour signals a calculated attempt to reassert American power in a region where the United States’ retrenchment has reduced its influence. Over the past decade, China has exploited this political and strategic vacuum to expand its presence across the Middle East. By enmeshing itself into the Gulf’s infrastructural, financial, and technological development, Beijing has steadily tilted the regional balance in its favor. Trump’s visit is the first direct attempt to halt China’s momentum and reestablish the United States as the principal outside power shaping the future of the Gulf.
The stakes of Trump’s visit are high. While the US narrowed its military footprint and deprioritized the region in its diplomatic strategy, Beijing quietly deepened its Gulf relationships. For example, it brokered the normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023. China is investing heavily in the Middle East because Beijing sees the region as an integral—not secondary—theater in its strategy for displacing US influence and reshaping global power dynamics. In particular, the region gives Beijing different options for challenging American dominance. Five factors drive this calculus.
First, the Gulf could provide the energy China needs to sustain its industrial economy. Producers in the region supply nearly half of China’s crude imports, and Beijing views long-term energy security as essential to regime stability.
Second, the Middle East serves as a geopolitical corridor linking East Asia to Europe and Africa. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has prioritized ports, logistics corridors, and commercial access points throughout the Gulf, which give Beijing leverage over key maritime and overland trade routes. More importantly, the Digital Silk Road, the technology pillar of the BRI, is projected to contribute up to $255 billion to the gross domestic product of Gulf Cooperation Council countries and generate 600,000 tech-sector jobs by 2030.
Third, the region can provide China with capital and opportunities to export its technology. Sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could be deep, politically stable sources of investment for Chinese firms, making Gulf states ideal partners for Beijing as it seeks to globalize its industrial policy and scale its technology platforms. At the same time, Gulf states are pursuing rapid digital transformation. This could grant Chinese firms greater access to funding and the opportunity to shape emerging technology ecosystems from the ground up. As an example, Saudi Arabia signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s Huawei in 2022 to develop cloud computing and high-tech infrastructure in Saudi cities. The deal coincided with the Chinese president’s visit, which Beijing considered its largest diplomatic push in the Arab world.
Fourth, the Middle East can help China undermine US export controls and sanctions regimes. The region—especially sanctioned actors like Iran—and China can work together to circumvent Western restrictions. By leveraging regional networks and opaque financial channels, Chinese firms facilitate the transfer of sensitive technologies and capital, eroding the effectiveness of US sanctions and exposing the limits of Washington’s economic power. China has also developed a way to import Iranian oil while avoiding Western financial networks and shipping services. Using dark fleet tankers, Iran ships oil to China and receives payments in renminbi through smaller Chinese banks. With major state-owned refiners pulling back due to sanctions risks, around 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports are now handled by “teapots,” which are small, independent Chinese refineries.
Fifth, the Middle East provides China with operational space to weaken US-led coalitions and discredit American influence. By engaging both US allies in the Gulf and adversaries like Iran, Beijing positions itself as a strategic alternative unconstrained by Washington’s political conditions. Through state media, diplomatic outreach, and security partnerships, China promotes anti-US narratives that frame American policy as destabilizing and self-interested. This messaging resonates across the Global South and erodes US authority in key regions.
The consequences of China’s influence campaign are becoming increasingly visible in US defense relationships across the region. One example is the collapse of Washington’s sale of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE. Washington warned Abu Dhabi that the Gulf state’s recently built network of Huawei communications equipment could be used to surveil sensitive F-35 infrastructure. But Abu Dhabi did not comply with the US request to rip and replace the Chinese equipment. Within a year, the $23 billion F-35 deal fell apart, weakening one of America’s most advanced defense partnerships in the region.
This disagreement among once-close allies demonstrates Beijing’s long-term strategy. China aims to undermine US influence while avoiding military confrontation by embedding itself in systems that are difficult for host nations to remove and even harder for the US to contest. As Mao Zedong articulated in On Protracted War, the objective is not to defeat the enemy in a single stroke, but to wear down its position over time until resistance becomes untenable. China has retooled this logic for the digital age, applying it methodically across strategic theaters—nowhere more visibly than in the Middle East.
China leverages its engagement with the Middle East as a Trojan horse to entrench its influence through three key mechanisms. First, Chinese technology platforms integrate artificial intelligence–driven surveillance and governance systems directly into state institutions, which normalizes those states’ dependence on China for infrastructure and standards.
Second, cooperation agreements make China integral to core state functions like communications, making it difficult for Washington to compete for access and leverage. And third, Beijing’s deals aim to lock in long-term energy ties while expanding petro-yuan transactions to chip away at the US dollar’s position as the global standard. This model positions Beijing as an indispensable partner in everything from data to finance to security.
Trump’s decision to make his first major foreign visit to Riyadh rather than Brussels, London, or Tokyo is a deliberate signal. It indicates that the United States no longer views the Middle East as a peripheral concern, but as a vital theater of strategic competition with China. The scale of the announcements confirms that message. Saudi Arabia has pledged $600 billion in US-linked investment, including more than $100 billion in arms acquisitions. At the same time, Washington is preparing a deal to provide the kingdom with access to advanced US semiconductors—a move intended to shut China out of future Gulf infrastructure in AI, surveillance, and cloud computing. These agreements are part of the administration’s strategy to push back on China’s expanding influence by making digital sovereignty central to US security partnerships.
This shift is also visible in the administration’s approach to Syria. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Damascus is not a random concession to the post-Assad regime. Rather, it is an attempt to reenter a strategic theater that the Obama administration ceded to China, Russia, and Iran. For years, Beijing has shielded Bashar al-Assad’s Syria at the United Nations and positioned itself to lead postwar reconstruction efforts alongside Russian firms. US sanctions helped ensure Moscow and Beijing had minimal competition in that space. The sanctions’ removal signals a renewed American effort to prevent Beijing from monopolizing a strategically central part of the Middle East.
If Trump’s Gulf tour is successful, he will have made significant moves to push back against growing Chinese influence, reassert American dominance, and reassure longstanding allies. In a region marked by shifting allegiances and strategic uncertainty, the visit underscores Washington’s renewed commitment to shaping the balance of power, not just reacting to it.
18. Amid lawmaker concerns, CYBERCOM head says SOCOM-like model is best way forward
As an aside one possibility could be to give all the Combatant Commands SOCOM like authorities. Of course that would cause huge pushback by the services (and probably by the geographic combatant commanders who are not resourced for execution of such authorities). Perhaps all the Functional Combatant commands should have SOCOM like authorities (which of course was given service like authorities in Nunn-Cohen of Goldwater-Nichols).
Amid lawmaker concerns, CYBERCOM head says SOCOM-like model is best way forward - Breaking Defense
Reps. Don Bacon and Richard McCormick shared concerns over the SOCOM-like model in today's hearing.
breakingdefense.com · by Carley Welch · May 16, 2025
Lieutenant General William Hartman, acting commander of the US Cyber Command and performing the duties of director of the National Security Agency, during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, May 15, 2025. (Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — As Congress continues to weigh the idea of a separate cyber force, the head of US Cyber Command told lawmakers today that internal Pentagon findings point to a different solution.
Instead of a stand-alone cyber force or siloing each service’s cyber operations, Lt. Gen. William Hartman, the acting head of CYBERCOM who is also performing the duties of the NSA chief, said the combatant command would benefit by adopting a model more in line with the structure of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
“We had a requirement from Congress, NDA section 1533 [from the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act], to analyze the force presentation model for the cyber force. We developed an operational planning team from CYBERCOM and across the Department of Defense in order to look at three models,” he told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on cyber, information technologies and innovation.
Hartman, who recently took over for ousted NSA and CYBERCOM head Gen. Timothy Haugh, explained the three potential force structures were a separate cyber force, siloed cyber operations in each service, or to adopt a “SOCOM-like model.”
“Our preference was the SOCOM-like model,” Hartman said, though he did not provide details on how CYBERCOM will adopt such a force structure.
As it is now, military services provide a set number of digital personnel to CYBERCOM for its operations. Similarly, services provide their own special operations warfighters to various parts of SOCOM. But both models bring inconsistencies since each service has its own recruitment and training regulations, promotion structures and pay and incentive models. Because of this, lawmakers voiced concerns over CYBERCOM adopting a SOCOM-like model.
Republican Rep. Richard McCormick of Georgia said that such a move would cause CYBERCOM to be more siloed instead of operating as a cohesive, unified combatant command. He added that since SOCOM personnel are trained in accordance with their specific missions, the force model may not carry over well to CYBERCOM — pointing out that Hartman, and Haugh before him, have said CYBERCOM personnel should be uniformly trained so they can be “interchangeable” between missions.
“The different services of special operations, or SOF operations, are each unique and perform different missions, like SEALs versus joint tactical attack controllers. You talk about CYBERCOM managing common training requirements so that regardless of uniform, everyone is trained to operate as interchangeable,” McCormick said.
“That’s what worries me, is that we’re bumping up against this. The services want to have their own silos […] it hampers us to do the mission correctly. I’m just really worried that we should put a lot of thought process into this before we jump on this, that we understand that we look before we lead.”
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who chairs the subcommittee, said that he believes the SOCOM-like model for CYBERCOM is “the best,” but it does have its pros and cons. One of the cons, he said, is that CYBERCOM personnel must do “service buy-ins,” or become a member of a service before joining CYBERCOM. He said this hinders the command’s ability to have a uniform, interchangeable workforce, as opposed to having one cyber service where every warfighter is trained the same.
“One of the things it takes to make the SOCOM model work is service buy-ins, and that means they got to recruit and they got to provide trained people to Cyber Command at a level that they need. They also got to develop cyber leaders within their promotion system and growing leadership,” Bacon said. “I’m not sure that we’re doing adequate there.”
Hartman countered that the services “have done a good job at presenting forces to CYBERCOM,” but admitted they could do better with a “more efficient model.”
“Our assessment is that there is a more efficient model in order to take a basic trained service member and create an expert trained service member that gets at the idea we call ‘mastery,”’ he said. “So instead of trying to do that across all the services, we do believe there’s an opportunity using CYBERCOM service like authorities, CYBERCOM joint force trainer authorities, in order to build that mastery in the force.”
He did not expand on what such authorities would look like.
The DoD’s wish to move forward with a SOCOM-like structure for CYBERCOM comes as the department is moving forward with its CYBERCOM 2.0 initiative — a plan unveiled by former CYBERCOM head Gen. Paul Nakasone to create a comprehensive evaluation of the command to determine what needs to be improved for the future.
Broadly, CYBERCOM 2.0 aims to create a cyber warfare innovation center to bolster relationships with industry; an advanced cyber training center; a new force generation model within the military branches; and a talent management task force.
19. US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return
Of course some (Machievelli) would argue that “It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both.”
Please go to the link to view the graphics. https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/
US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return
Politico · by Giovanna Coi · May 12, 2025
- News
- Politics
The world is more divided than ever, but there’s still something (nearly) everyone agrees on: The U.S. is unloved.
America’s reputation took a particularly massive hit in EU countries. | J. David Ake/Getty Images
May 12, 2025 7:00 am CET
By
The United States is becoming less popular globally in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to new data.
The 2025 Democracy Perception Index summarizes attitudes toward democracy, geopolitics and global power players, and canvassed more than 110,000 respondents across 100 countries.
A majority of people surveyed had an overall negative perception of the U.S., marking a steep decline from last year. America’s reputation took a particularly massive hit in EU countries — perhaps unsurprisingly, as U.S. President Donald Trump has called the bloc “horrible,” “pathetic” and “formed to screw the United States.”
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief and founder of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation that coauthored the index, said he was “not surprised that perceptions of the United States have fallen so sharply.”
Meanwhile, China kept improving its global standing, overtaking the U.S. for the first time and recording mostly positive perceptions in all regions except Europe. Russia, the reputation of which tanked in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is still (slightly) more unpopular than the U.S. — though its image is also improving.
Trump’s reputation is in line with that of his country. The survey showed he’s less popular worldwide than his Russian and Chinese counterparts, Putin and Xi Jinping.
Trump recorded the worst score among a range of political, cultural and spiritual leaders that includes X owner Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the late Pope Francis, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian.
Israel emerged as the country with the worst global reputation of those included in the poll, especially in the Middle East and South Asia. Israel is unpopular even in European countries that have historically been its allies, such as Germany, signaling growing discomfort with its government’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes.
The data used in this story came from an online survey conducted by Nira Data and the Alliance of Democracies between April 9-23, 2025. The sample was 111,273 drawn across 100 countries, with an average sample size of around 1,100 respondents per country. Nationally representative results were calculated based on the official distribution of age and gender for each country’s population.
20. US prepares for long war with China that might hit its bases, homeland: Peter Apps
Excerpts:
Senior U.S. officials have repeatedly briefed that they believe Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, although they say no direct decision appears to have been made yet to order that attack.
As Washington and Beijing square up for that potential fight, their military preparations - now taking place on an industrial scale on both sides in a manner not seen in decades - are themselves becoming a form of posturing and messaging.
Chinese officials deny they are working on a tight specific timeline. However, Beijing has become increasingly assertive in its sovereignty claims over the island where Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek set up his government in exile after losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Ever since the 1979 U.S. recognition of the China’s communist government as the country's legitimate rulers, successive administrations have maintained "strategic ambiguity" over whether they would intervene if democratically governed Taiwan was attacked. The Taiwan Relations Act passed the same year, however, commits the U.S. military to having updated plans to prevent any effort from Beijing to change the status quo.
While President Donald Trump has said he will never make a solid commitment one way or another – unlike predecessor Joe Biden who had gone further than any recent president in pledging to fight for Taiwan if it was attacked – a recently leaked official strategy document described deterring a Chinese attack as the Pentagon’s top priority.
That means ensuring the U.S. is both visibly and genuinely prepared for what might be a long and brutal fight. As one senior U.S. officer put it this columnist this month: “If China attacks Taiwan and we decide to intervene, that is not a war that is likely to be over quickly."
Such a conflict would likely see both casualties and destruction on a scale that would far outstrip anything in the "war on terror" conflicts that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks.
US prepares for long war with China that might hit its bases, homeland: Peter Apps
By Peter Apps
May 16, 20258:26 AM EDTUpdated a day ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-prepares-long-war-with-china-that-might-hit-its-bases-homeland-peter-apps-2025-05-16/
Commentary
By Peter Apps
U.S. and Chinese flags are seen in this illustration taken March 20, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
LONDON, May 16 (Reuters) - Earlier this month, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Doug Wickert summoned nearby civic leaders to Edwards Air Force Base in California to warn them that if China attacks Taiwan in the coming years, they should be prepared for their immediate region to suffer potentially massive disruption from the very start.
In a remarkable briefing shared by the base on social media and promoted in a press release, Wickert - one of America's most experienced test pilots now commanding the 412th Test Wing - outlined China's rapid military growth and preparations to fight a major war.
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.Cutting-edge U.S. aircraft manufactured in California’s nearby “Aerospace Valley”, particularly the B-21 “Raider” now replacing the 1990s B-2 stealth bomber, were key to keeping Beijing deterred, he said. However, if deterrence failed that meant China’s would likely strike the U.S. including nearby Northrop Grumman factories where those planes were built.
"If this war happens, it's going to happen here," Wickert told them, suggesting attacks could include a cyber offensive that included long-term disruption to power supplies and other national infrastructure. "It's going to come to us. That is why we are having this conversation... The more ready we are, the more likely to change Chairman Xi’s calculus."
Senior U.S. officials have repeatedly briefed that they believe Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, although they say no direct decision appears to have been made yet to order that attack.
As Washington and Beijing square up for that potential fight, their military preparations - now taking place on an industrial scale on both sides in a manner not seen in decades - are themselves becoming a form of posturing and messaging.
Chinese officials deny they are working on a tight specific timeline. However, Beijing has become increasingly assertive in its sovereignty claims over the island where Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek set up his government in exile after losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Ever since the 1979 U.S. recognition of the China’s communist government as the country's legitimate rulers, successive administrations have maintained "strategic ambiguity" over whether they would intervene if democratically governed Taiwan was attacked. The Taiwan Relations Act passed the same year, however, commits the U.S. military to having updated plans to prevent any effort from Beijing to change the status quo.
While President Donald Trump has said he will never make a solid commitment one way or another – unlike predecessor Joe Biden who had gone further than any recent president in pledging to fight for Taiwan if it was attacked – a recently leaked official strategy document described deterring a Chinese attack as the Pentagon’s top priority.
That means ensuring the U.S. is both visibly and genuinely prepared for what might be a long and brutal fight. As one senior U.S. officer put it this columnist this month: “If China attacks Taiwan and we decide to intervene, that is not a war that is likely to be over quickly."
Such a conflict would likely see both casualties and destruction on a scale that would far outstrip anything in the "war on terror" conflicts that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks.
REBUILDING WARTIME AIRSTRIPS
Across the Philippines and western Pacific, U.S. military engineers are now rebuilding sometimes long-unused airstrips dating back to World War Two, intending to deploy small groups of aircraft to many places at once to maximise survivability.
Beijing has invested heavily in what are termed “Anti-Access Area Denial” (A2AD) capabilities, mainly long-range missiles, with an intention of keeping U.S. warships - particularly aircraft carriers - out of its nearby waters. That would make U.S. aircraft flying from bases slightly further out even more important - but Beijing would likely hit those locations too.
Showing Beijing that the U.S. and its regional allies – principally Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia – have both the capacity and willpower to handle those attacks and keep on fighting is now growing part of U.S. messaging.
Images and video from military drills held in recent weeks on the Japanese island of Okinawa – part of the “first island chain” that also includes Taiwan – showed U.S. Air Force combat engineers ready with bulldozers and construction equipment to immediately fix damaged runways and other essential systems.
This month, the Washington Times quoted a senior U.S. defence official saying that the U.S. territory of Guam would be a "major target of Chinese missile strikes" in the opening stages of any war around Taiwan.
The Pentagon has invested more than $7 billion of additional construction work on the territory, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth describing the 6,400 U.S. military personnel stationed there as "the tip of the spear" in the Indo Pacific.
"We're going to learn a lot (from the air defence systems on Guam) and apply them to defences on the continental United States," Hegseth told reporters and civic officials, adding that the U.S. would respond to an attack on Guam as it would for any other strike on its territory.
The new Trump administration has made building up missile defence for the continental United States – the so-called “Golden Dome” system – a top priority, designed to intercept both conventional and nuclear long-range weaponry.
Guam Governor Lou Leon Guerrero welcomed Hegseth’s comments, but expressed concern that the territory – which also provides support for other islands and independent territories – was ill-prepared for either major conflict or natural disaster, with its only hospital having less than thirty beds.
Some officials now believe those preparations should extend to being ready to handle the aftermath of one or more limited nuclear strikes from China or North Korea, which they now believe could be a feature of any coming war without wider escalation to a much larger exchange of atomic weapons devastating larger targets such as cities.
That was one of the findings of a recent series of wargames conducted by the Atlantic Council including current and former U.S. officials. The resulting report concluded that there was a growing risk that any Chinese attack against Taiwan might also be accompanied by North Korea moving against the South (or indeed that any war launched by North Korea might be taken by Beijing as an opportunity to move against Taiwan).
THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
A report to Congress last July examining the risk of simultaneous conflict with Russia, China, North Korea and potentially Iran reached a similar conclusion, warning that the U.S. population was not sufficiently prepared for the disruptions in supplies and services such a conflict might produce, through cyber attacks and interruption of supply chains.
Keeping supplies coming would almost certainly a challenge for both sides. The U.S. Indo Pacific Command has talked repeatedly about using smaller and larger drones, including robot submarines, to create a “Hellscape” in the Taiwan Strait to block Chinese forces.
Still, U.S. commanders acknowledge China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now has its own hefty ability to target U.S. planes and ships, rendering it vital to forward locate equipment and weapons stocks early in advance – particularly as China’s missile range improves.
This month, head of U.S. Indo Pacific command Admiral Sam Paparo said the “depth and range” of China’s military drills were now increasing fast, including exercises to invade and blockade Taiwan while also striking port and energy facilities.
Beijing is also publicly highlighting its ability to conduct such actions, presenting them as a key part of seizing the island. "If Taiwan loses its maritime supply lines, its domestic resources will quickly be depleted, social order will fall into chaos and people's livelihoods will be severely impacted," said a Chinese military official in one video released by the PLA.
"I remain confident in our deterrence posture, but the trajectory must change," Paparo told congressional officials in April, warning that while his forces currently retained enough superiority to deter a Taiwan invasion, that advantage was being rapidly eroded as China built up forces.
"There are gaps in defence fuelling support points," he said. "Those are the locations where aircraft and warships would load fuel and distribute fuel. There are shortfalls in our tanker fleet and keeping enough fuel in the case of a contingency. And there are gaps in the combat logistics force in order to sustain the force."
U.S. weapons stockpiles are also a growing worry, a concern made worse by months of strikes on Yemen believed to have further depleted stores of critical Tomahawk land attack missiles which the U.S. has been firing faster than it built for several years.
"God forbid, if we were in a short-term conflict, it would be short-term because we don't have enough munitions to sustain a long-term fight," said Republican Representative Tom Cole from Oklahoma, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, at a hearing earlier this week with acting U.S. Chief of Naval Operations James Kilby.
Kilby warned of further shortages of torpedoes and antiship missiles, saying the Pentagon needed to look at other manufacturers who might be able to produce weapons that were not quite as good but which were "more effective than no missile".
"If we go to war with China, it's going to be bloody and there's going to be casualties and it's going to take plenty of munitions," Kilby said. "So our stocks need to be full."
By Peter Apps; Editing by Toby Chopra
21. Is the U.S. Abandoning the Fight Against Foreign Information Operations?
It appears so. The current administration seems to believe that the weaponization of tools to prevent foreign disinformation against domestic political activities is a greater threat than foreign disinformation with hostile intent to harm the American political system. ( and I too believe it is absolutely wrong to weaponize such tools for domestic use - but it is also wrong for domestic parties to exploit foreign disinformation to achieve domestic political effects. The question is how to achieve balance between the two?).
But I too remain optimistic and believe in the resilience of democracy.
Excerpts:
At home, the U.S. government’s commitment to combat foreign malign information operations is very much in question. The issue is toxic within the administration, and personnel engaged in such efforts are being sidelined and pressured and then dismissed.
But those dismantling U.S. efforts to shape the global narrative should remember the U.S. history of countering foreign information operations. In the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used information operations against European democracies and the United States. These were seen at the time as successful, even triumphant. George Orwell wrote with despair that “history stopped in 1936,” by which he meant that Soviet propaganda was so effective that objective truth could no longer stand. Orwell could have been describing current pessimism about a “post-truth world” emerging in an age of manipulated social media and general demagoguery.
But Orwell’s pessimism proved wrong. Democracies found ways to deal with Stalinist propaganda in the early Cold War era. The United States moved from beleaguered defense to offense on the information side of the Cold War, partly through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcasted into the Soviet empire. Later, the United States supported underground free media, especially in Poland, through the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era creation. Dissidents at the time and after made clear that the news they received was of massive importance. The side of democracy ultimately won the information wars and the Cold War.
Today, it is easy to be pessimistic again. The United States and the EU had been trying, in complementary fashion, to grapple with a real problem. It took years for them to identify the most effective ways to deal with malign information operations in today’s chaotic media landscape. Just as they began to make progress, the political winds in the United States turned against those who want to tackle the problem in a way consistent with democratic values. This shift is paving the way for foreign propaganda and information operations to flourish, risking terrible damage to the American public’s understanding of the world. And it leaves Europe’s democracies to fight this problem without, for the time being, their American friends. Let’s hope the United States recovers itself before much more damage is done.
Is the U.S. Abandoning the Fight Against Foreign Information Operations?
By Ambassador Daniel Fried
Published on May 13, 2025
https://www.justsecurity.org/113163/is-us-abandoning-fight-against-foreign-info-ops/
Foreign information manipulation remains an active tool in the hands of autocratic adversaries, especially Russia and China. The Russians have continued conducting targeted malign information operations in the United States, including a campaign that took advantage of artificial intelligence to discredit the U.S. Agency for International Development. During last year’s presidential election, Chinese state actors created fake social media users to influence the political debate inside the United States. The New York Times recently published a cautionary and credible article outlining how the Chinese could launch a major information operation to support aggression against Taiwan.
The good news is that the United States and Europe, in different ways, have identified means to mitigate the damage. The bad news is that the Trump administration has begun dismantling U.S. government assets that have finally started to deal with the problem.
When it comes to the fight against foreign information operations, the dumb approach for democracies to take is content control, or censorship. The better way is to focus on transparency, authenticity, and integrity. That means exposing foreign information operations and deceptive practices big and small — for example, identifying a foreign-origin propaganda campaign and exposing the practice of mislabeling a post as domestic when it is in fact foreign-sourced. It could mean asking social media platforms to be transparent about their practices to boost or limit some sorts of posts and to be open to outside researchers investigating internal procedures, including whether safeguards are operating as companies claim.
These are the defensive steps countries can take to protect themselves. But democracies also have options for going on the offensive, including fighting propaganda with real information and support for free media. Countries that are targeted can also hit back through sanctions and other financial tools, plus, when possible, through cyber operations. With the United States, hopefully only temporarily, taking itself out of the fight against foreign information manipulation, the European Union is poised to step up. As it does, however, it may find itself in yet another fight with the White House.
Progress, Finally
After an uneven start and hesitation, especially from the Obama administration in 2016, the U.S. government finally began tackling foreign information operations the right way. It organized itself to expose foreign information manipulation campaigns in something like real time, working with private sector digital researchers — groups that have grown in number and sophistication — and with key allies, including the EU, the United Kingdom, and members of the G7.
In 2018, under the Trump administration, U.S. Cyber Command issued a document stating that the United States would “defend forward” and “persistently contest” malicious cyber activity, including Russian and Chinese information operations. In 2019, the FBI set up its own shop to counter foreign malign influence. In 2022, the United States also established the U.S. Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), operating under the Director of National Intelligence, with the mission of identifying and exposing foreign (and only foreign) malign influence operations, defined as subversive, undeclared, coercive, or criminal activities. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), originally established under the Obama administration as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to combat Islamist extremism, which it did with uneven results, turned to combating foreign malign influence operations, working under a new and welcome congressional mandate from the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.
These outfits, with mandates from the first Trump administration and then the Biden White House, quickly produced results. Cyber Command attacked and temporarily disabled the notorious St. Petersburg “Internet Research Agency,” a troll farm that had been targeting the United States. The FMIC was active during the first Trump administration, publishing its “Notification Framework” that outlined criteria for notification of foreign interference. It hit its stride during the 2024 election cycle, publishing regular reports exposing foreign (again, only foreign) information manipulation operations and working with the Five-Eyes intelligence network of countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It also supported efforts by teams from the FBI and the Department of Justice to go after illegal activity associated with foreign influence campaigns. FMIC’s reports noted that Russian information operations generally favored then-candidate Trump while Iranian information operations tended to favor Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
The United States labeled purveyors of foreign information operations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and even went further: in September 2024, the Department of Justice used FARA to indict two Russians employed by the Kremlin propaganda arm RT for illegal information manipulation operations. In September 2024, the Justice Department used money laundering and trademark laws to seize 32 internet domains used by the Russian government for malign information operations (known as “Doppelganger”); Treasury followed with parallel sanctions actions. These actions included the Sept. 5, 2024, indictment of Dimitri Simes, a well-known and prolific exponent of Kremlin policy, for sanctions violations on behalf of a Russian state-owned television network.
Energized by its new mission, the State Department’s GEC stepped up its efforts to expose Russian information operations around the world, funding efforts to identify and combat them and assembling an information “framework” of 21 countries to combat foreign-sourced information operations. The GEC was especially active in Africa, where it worked with local governments and exposed Russian information operations.
In sum, the U.S. government was, by the end of the Biden administration, pushing back on foreign information operations, the most sustained U.S. effort to do so since the Reagan administration took on what it called Soviet “active measures.”
Reaction and Reversal
The political support for continuing efforts to defend against foreign information operations, has considerably weakened under the second Trump administration, especially among Republicans.
Since 2016, much of the Trump political coalition has regarded focus on foreign, and especially Russian, malign information operations as a partisan attack on them. Some in Trump world — for example, Tucker Carlson — seem to have ideological affinity for Vladimir Putin’s form of rule; some may have concluded that Russian information operations in the United States were politically useful to them. In any case, action came fast. In his remarks announcing a State Department reorganization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the GEC of seeking “to censor speech it disagreed with.” At the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance accused the Biden administration of having “bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.”
There are indeed examples of sloppy conflation of charges of “disinformation” with right-wing media. And norms for addressing the way social media platforms promote various stories should be refined and better developed. But wholesale accusations of censorship or that efforts to tackle foreign disinformation are pushed by a “censorship-industrial complex” seem more partisan hype than reality, especially when applied to U.S. government efforts to grapple with foreign malign information ops. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals (5th Circuit) found that while the White House and FBI had crossed a line in their contacts with social media companies regarding domestic-origin posts, the State Department’s contact with social media platforms did not go “beyond educating the platforms on ‘tools and techniques’ used by foreign actors.”
The attacks on efforts to combat foreign propaganda, however unjustified or exaggerated, have been effective. Although the GEC enjoyed bipartisan support at its creation, under pressure from some on the political right, its authorization was not renewed and it was closed in December 2024. Rubio shut down its follow-on office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, in April.
In February, the Department of Justice dissolved the FBI task force assigned to monitor foreign malign information operations. The White House has also cut programs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, which was expanded during the first Trump administration) that detected cyberattacks against election systems and broader infrastructure. Whatever the motive — lingering grievance over Trump’s loss in 2020, general aversion to taking on foreign information ops, or something else — the result has been to weaken U.S. defenses.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to shut down U.S. government-funded broadcasting: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Marti (with a Cuba focus), declaring their umbrella organization as “unnecessary,” without elaboration, and “the most corrupt agency in Washington, D.C,” again, without credible evidence or even detailed allegations. In fact, broadcasting has had a good record in helping the United States go from defense to offense as it fights China, Russia, and others in the information space. The political right’s attacks on these broadcasters is another about face, especially given the long support such efforts had enjoyed from conservatives (and the long skepticism in the 1960s and 1970s about RFE/RL from some on the political left).
Europe’s Forward-Leaning Approach
Europe’s efforts to tackle foreign malign influence operations have proceeded in a somewhat different direction. The EU’s closest counterpart to the FMIC is the unit of the EU External Action Service, its foreign ministry equivalent, devoted to countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). The EU’s FIMI outfit is tasked with exposing foreign influence operations, and, like FMIC, it wisely focuses not on content but on methods of malign influence operations. Its plans include developing the basis for sanctions against the most egregious purveyors of such manipulation and interference.
The EU has also regulated social media platforms to fight information manipulation. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted in 2022, applies to social media platforms, mostly Chinese and American (foreign from an EU perspective). It seeks to apply standards of transparency to social media platforms’ algorithms, their regulation of political advertisements, content moderation, and social media checks on disinformation. Enforcement can include large fines. There has been no American equivalent to the European legislation nor, given the politics of the issue, is there likely to be for the foreseeable future.
The EU is seeking to enforce the DSA and has launched investigations of X , META, and TikTok, based on perceived weakness of X’s “community notes” to counter questionable information and perceived vulnerability of X’s blue check marks to deception; suspicion of deceptive advertising by META; and Tik-Tok’s measures — or lack thereof — to shield minors from harm on the platform and its violent and terrorist content. The EU regulatory approach has yet to be tested, but, if successful in crowding out foreign malign information operations, it could prove a basis for some regulatory fixes to social media.
Whether the EU regulatory approach can survive the Trump administration, however, is not yet clear. Tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk may fight EU regulatory strictures over X and may be able to enlist the power of the U.S. government to oppose them, a questionable use of public power to advance private interests. In his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance attacked what he termed European “censorship,” an attack that is likely to be leveled against enforcement of the DSA.
At home, the U.S. government’s commitment to combat foreign malign information operations is very much in question. The issue is toxic within the administration, and personnel engaged in such efforts are being sidelined and pressured and then dismissed.
But those dismantling U.S. efforts to shape the global narrative should remember the U.S. history of countering foreign information operations. In the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used information operations against European democracies and the United States. These were seen at the time as successful, even triumphant. George Orwell wrote with despair that “history stopped in 1936,” by which he meant that Soviet propaganda was so effective that objective truth could no longer stand. Orwell could have been describing current pessimism about a “post-truth world” emerging in an age of manipulated social media and general demagoguery.
But Orwell’s pessimism proved wrong. Democracies found ways to deal with Stalinist propaganda in the early Cold War era. The United States moved from beleaguered defense to offense on the information side of the Cold War, partly through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcasted into the Soviet empire. Later, the United States supported underground free media, especially in Poland, through the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era creation. Dissidents at the time and after made clear that the news they received was of massive importance. The side of democracy ultimately won the information wars and the Cold War.
Today, it is easy to be pessimistic again. The United States and the EU had been trying, in complementary fashion, to grapple with a real problem. It took years for them to identify the most effective ways to deal with malign information operations in today’s chaotic media landscape. Just as they began to make progress, the political winds in the United States turned against those who want to tackle the problem in a way consistent with democratic values. This shift is paving the way for foreign propaganda and information operations to flourish, risking terrible damage to the American public’s understanding of the world. And it leaves Europe’s democracies to fight this problem without, for the time being, their American friends. Let’s hope the United States recovers itself before much more damage is done.
22. Trump administration fires nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America
Baby with the bathwater. We are sacrificing part of the work force that provides effective support to US national security.
Trump administration fires nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America
Some workers at news network now face deportation as their visas are linked to their jobs
The Guardian · by Marina Dunbar · May 16, 2025
The administration of Donald Trump has terminated nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America (VOA), the US-funded international news network known for delivering independent journalism to countries with restricted press freedom.
The firings, announced on Thursday, appeared to defy a recent court order requiring the government to preserve strong news operations at VOA. The US president has criticized the news network and accused it of spreading “radical” content.
The cuts, announced on Thursday, affected mostly journalists along with some administrative staff and represented more than one-third of VOA’s workforce.
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Among those dismissed are journalists from authoritarian countries who now face deportation, as their visas are linked to their jobs at VOA.
“Today is an incredibly difficult day as USAGM terminates many of our contractors who have devoted themselves to fulfilling VOA’s congressionally-mandated mission to deliver factual, balanced and comprehensive journalism to the world,” journalists with the SaveVOA campaign said in a statement. “Among those affected are J-1 visa holders who will be forced to leave the country within 30 days. Several of these journalists come from countries where they could be arrested or worse because of their reporting for VOA.”
The group said the team was considering its next steps and remained “committed to the goal of returning all employees to their positions”.
The administration cited “the government’s convenience” as the justification for the firings, taking advantage of the workers’ status as contractors rather than full federal employees.
Michael Abramowitz, the director of VOA, called the move “inexplicable” and said he was “heartbroken” in an email to staff obtained by the New York Times. Abramowitz has filed a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from closing VOA.
The notification to employees told terminated staffers that they will be let go as of 30 May and instructed them to return their press credentials, badges and other VOA property by that time, according to the Hill.
Kari Lake, a Trump ally and senior adviser at the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, defended the decision as legally permissible. Lake had previously denounced the agency as “unsalvageable” and accused it of corruption without presenting evidence.
The federal building that houses the VOA news outlet in Washington DC was also listed for sale on Thursday.
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Senator Jeanne Shaheen, ranking member of the Senate foreign relations committee, issued a statement in response to the firings:
“The Trump administration’s gutting of Voice of America threatens access to independent media in places where it is needed most,” the statement reads. “It deeply weakens a critical and cost-effective tool of American influence and soft power. If Voice of America is silenced, PRC and Russian propaganda and lies will fill the void. To add more fuel to the fire, Kari Lake’s recent announcement that the Voice of America will now become a conduit for One America News Network is a gift to Russia and propagandists everywhere.”
She added: “Firing respected independent journalists and employees is as strategically shortsighted as it is heartless. The Trump administration’s efforts to gut and de-fund independent media will only harm the United States in the long run.”
The firings are the latest in a string of moves by the Trump administration targeting independent news organizations. The Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump appointee and the Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, has ordered investigations into NPR and PBS. Trump is also in an ongoing legal battle with 60 Minutes and CBS, and his administration previously barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office.
The Guardian · by Marina Dunbar · May 16, 2025
23. Making law of war training optional is a recipe for disaster
This cannot be right. Hopefully there is a misunderstanding for some misreporting. Law of war training must be mandatory for all soldiers (and all military personnel).
Then again this may be the perfect defense for the troops. If they do not receive mandatory training then they can plead ignorance and thus the responsibility lies with the SECDEF who does not think the law of war training is important or necessary.
Hopefully we will see clarification from the Army and the services.
Excerpt:
Defense Department and Army regulation have mandated law of war training for decades. But now, junior-level commanders are free to dispense with teaching soldiers even the most basic rules that regulate conduct in battle. This seems aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s apparent disdain for this body of law and the military lawyers who advise commanders on the obligation to abide by the law. But it is not just poorly conceived; it is dangerous.
Making law of war training optional is a recipe for disaster
militarytimes.com · by Geoffrey S. Corn · May 16, 2025
“Leader actions are emulated and exaggerated.”
The U.S. Army’s recent decision to make law of war training optional is a troubling manifestation of this axiom and an exaggeration of the disdain with which our defense secretary apparently views rules of war.
Defense Department and Army regulation have mandated law of war training for decades. But now, junior-level commanders are free to dispense with teaching soldiers even the most basic rules that regulate conduct in battle. This seems aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s apparent disdain for this body of law and the military lawyers who advise commanders on the obligation to abide by the law. But it is not just poorly conceived; it is dangerous.
The importance of such training has never previously been doubted. Defense Department policy directs that each military service “implement effective programs to prevent violations of the law of war, including: (1) Law of war dissemination and periodic training.” Periodic may not be defined, but it certainly should not mean optional. This policy reflects the calculated and logical recognition that fielding troops ignorant of basic international legal obligations related to the wars they must fight is incompatible with the values of the nation they fight for.
It is not clear who made this decision or whether it was linked to some behind-the-scenes direction from the defense secretary. It was, after all, an Army decision. But even if this change was not the result of explicit direction or encouragement from the defense secretary, it is certainly aligned with the dismissive attitude towards the law of war he has expressed.
Signaling that compliance with the law of war is optional is fundamentally inconsistent with the inherent responsibility of command. Indeed, since the adoption of the Hague Convention in 1899, operating under responsible command has been a foundation of the international legal privilege to engage in hostilities.
What was meant by responsible command was not, however, spelled out in that treaty and subsequent ones. This was almost certainly because this requirement — like all the other provisions of the regulations for the conduct of land warfare annexed to that treaty — was substantially influenced by experienced military delegates. Furthermore, these regulations were not novel, but reflective of the customary norms professional armed forces followed for decades, if not centuries. For them, legitimacy accorded to warriors was contingent on respect for laws and customs of war, and it was the unit commander who bore fundamental responsibility for ensuring such respect.
Anyone who has studied this law understands that the responsibility of command extends well beyond preparing subordinates to unleash combat violence. Indeed, were this the ultimate hallmark of responsible command, then Japanese commanders in Nanking or German SS commanders — or even Lt. William Caley of My Lai infamy — would be iconic examples of responsible command. But we know they are not, and instead are properly vilified as the antithesis of what it means to discharge the awesome responsibilities of command.
The reason they are vilified is simple: They failed to prepare and lead their subordinates in a way that navigated the complex line between legitimate and illegitimate violence in war. Yes, responsible commanders must inculcate their subordinates with an instinct for violent aggression to accomplish their missions. But they must also ensure that in executing those missions, the same subordinates preserve the line of legitimacy.
Preserving the actual and perceived legitimacy of U.S. military operations has never been considered more important. It is because of this that legitimacy now ranks among a finite list of principles for effective joint operations. As noted in “Joint Publication 3-0”, “Legitimacy, which can be a decisive factor in operations, is based on the actual and perceived legality, morality, and rightness of the actions.” It is compliance with the law of war that is the very foundation of legitimacy.
Joint doctrine recognizes that actual and perceived legitimacy is understood as a strategic imperative. One need only consider the international reaction to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza to grasp this reality. Simply put, nothing can destroy the strategic credibility of a military campaign more quickly than the actual or even perceived disregard for law and morality among the forces executing that operation.
None of this is to suggest that an annual block of instruction on the law of war will produce soldiers who are law of war experts. Such training must, of course, be focused on the very basics of the law. But it will signal perhaps the most important principle of the relationship of law and war: that even during hostilities, the ends do not always justify the means.
But the adverse consequence of dismissing the significance of the law that defines legitimacy in war is not limited to strategic disaster; it also endangers the moral integrity of our armed forces by distorting the legal and moral compass they carry into battle. Unlike most of us, they will have to live the rest of their lives carrying the burden of the human consequences of the wars they must fight. It is this law that helps them bear that moral load, because it tells them that what they did was necessary, justified and legitimate.
Secretary Hegseth’s view of the law of war now appears to have trickled down to Army leadership. His constant reference to increased lethality and aggressiveness while dismissing the importance of the law of war is a recipe for strategic disaster. Even worse, it sets the condition for a moral corrosion of our armed forces that cannot be permitted. He’s in command. It’s time for him to fulfill his responsibility and reinforce respect for this law.
Geoffrey S. Corn is the George R. Killam Jr. chair of criminal law and director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at the Texas Tech University School of Law. Prior to joining academia, Professor Corn served as an Army officer for 21 years, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. He served one additional year as the civilian senior Army law of war adviser.
24. ‘The Fate of the Generals’ Review: MacArthur and Wainwright in the Philippines
On my last day in the Philippines in 2007, I spent it on Corregidor by myself exploring the island and all the historical sites. And of course I have also visited Cabanatuan. To see those places and think about what these Americans (and Filipinos) endured is compelling.
I look forward to reading this book.
Excerpts:
Theatrical to a fault, MacArthur proclaimed he would never leave the Philippines except by direct presidential order. This he received in March 1942, and it led to his harrowing PT-boat escape from Corregidor. MacArthur chose to take his staff along, although the order did not include them. The “Bataan Gang” became MacArthur’s praetorian guard, eternally loyal to him and his view of the world. To most outsiders, however, they were sycophants operating on the fringes of reality.
Wainwright had his own circle of loyalists. He stood 6-foot-2 and weighed only 125 pounds when he entered West Point three years behind MacArthur. He acquired the nickname Skinny, and it stuck with him his entire career. Raised in a military family on frontier posts across the West, Wainwright, like MacArthur, was a 19th-century soldier confronting the new warfare of the 20th century. But, as Jonathan Horn tells us in “The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines,” that is where his similarities with MacArthur ended.
...
After three years of captivity, an emaciated Wainwright was present at the Japanese surrender ceremony on the deck of USS Missouri, not because MacArthur had invited him, but because Marshall ordered it. Marshall also saw to it that Wainwright finally received the Medal of Honor, a medal, Mr. Horn concludes, that Wainwright did not need “to find honor.” For his part, Wainwright remained loyal to MacArthur throughout, refraining from any public criticism and even taking on the unenviable task of seconding MacArthur’s longshot bid for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
In presenting this dual biography, Mr. Horn, a former White House speechwriter whose books include a biography of Robert E. Lee, travels the well-trod path of MacArthur literature, including many quotations from MacArthur’s own “Reminiscences” (1964). What makes this study worthwhile is the author’s juxtaposition of what we have long known about MacArthur with the lesser-known actions and agonies endured by Wainwright. “The Fate of the Generals” lifts Jonathan Wainwright out of the shadow of Douglas MacArthur and “back into the light.”
‘The Fate of the Generals’ Review: MacArthur and Wainwright in the Philippines
When Douglas MacArthur left the islands in 1942, Jonathan Wainwright and his forces remained in Bataan and Corregidor, to face the advancing Japanese.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-fate-of-the-generals-review-left-behind-at-bataan-f7083db7?st=Dtk69U&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
By Walter R. Borneman
May 15, 2025 10:59 am ET
Gen. Douglas MacArthur signs the Japanese surrender documents on Sept. 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, with Gen. Jonathan Wainwright standing behind him. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS
In the darkest days of World War II, Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright faced unsurmountable odds. Only one of them, however, was responsible for their dilemma. Against the threat of Japanese invasion in 1941, MacArthur had convinced George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, that the long-held American strategy to defend the Philippines by concentrating forces around Manila was flawed and that MacArthur could protect the entire archipelago. Marshall approved, and MacArthur scattered his forces and supplies across Luzon and the other islands.
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The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines
By Jonathan Horn
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Only after Pearl Harbor did MacArthur acknowledge that the well-equipped, 200,000-man American-led Filipino army he had proposed existed solely under the brim of his gold-braided garrison cap. As he reversed his islands-wide deployment, the mad rush to move men and materiel to meet the invaders on the beaches of Luzon, and to fortify that island’s southwest peninsula of Bataan, put MacArthur’s field commanders, particularly Wainwright, in an untenable position.
Theatrical to a fault, MacArthur proclaimed he would never leave the Philippines except by direct presidential order. This he received in March 1942, and it led to his harrowing PT-boat escape from Corregidor. MacArthur chose to take his staff along, although the order did not include them. The “Bataan Gang” became MacArthur’s praetorian guard, eternally loyal to him and his view of the world. To most outsiders, however, they were sycophants operating on the fringes of reality.
Wainwright had his own circle of loyalists. He stood 6-foot-2 and weighed only 125 pounds when he entered West Point three years behind MacArthur. He acquired the nickname Skinny, and it stuck with him his entire career. Raised in a military family on frontier posts across the West, Wainwright, like MacArthur, was a 19th-century soldier confronting the new warfare of the 20th century. But, as Jonathan Horn tells us in “The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines,” that is where his similarities with MacArthur ended.
Wainwright believed in an agile armed force. During his commencement speech to the graduates at Fort Riley’s Cavalry School in 1935, Wainwright argued that “mobility,” whether by horse or by mechanized vehicle, “must still remain our watchword.” When they received their orders, they “should be able to move out at once.” MacArthur’s standard mode of operation—at least early in the war—was the opposite of mobility and proved downright paralyzing in the hours immediately after Pearl Harbor.
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But in the first months of 1942, when the American public desperately needed a hero and craved any hint that America was fighting back, MacArthur obliged. With a slew of communiques wrapped around his name alone, MacArthur swept aside criticism of his vacillations and engaged in misdirection. “Instead of having to answer” to the policymakers “for the loss of his air force or his whiplash-like shift” in war plans, Mr. Horn writes, they had to answer him “for failing to meet his demands for reinforcements.”
MacArthur led the public to believe he was outnumbered in the Philippines. In fact, the Japanese troops who made surprise landings at multiple points on Luzon numbered only half his force. Yet MacArthur’s penchant for hyperbole was never more misdirected than when he gave false hope to Wainwright’s men on Bataan during his lone visit there. Japan’s “temporary superiority of the air would soon be a thing of the past,” MacArthur promised, and he “would soon reoccupy Manila.” Wainwright knew better. He saw the future in the hollow eyes and sagging bellies of his men during his daily visits to the front.
Recounting battle scenes with riveting prose, Mr. Horn minces no words in his descriptions of the horrors of Bataan. The food stores that MacArthur had ordered to be held in reserve never made it to Bataan in sufficient quantities. Surrounded, malnourished and seemingly deserted by MacArthur, who had ordered them there, Wainwright’s troops became, as one correspondent labeled them, “the battling Bastards of Bataan.”
Two months after MacArthur escaped from Corregidor, Wainwright, placed by Marshall in overall command of the islands, had no choice but to surrender the Philippines or face mass extermination. MacArthur was livid. He never forgave Wainwright, thinking the surrender impugned MacArthur’s prior actions—which in many respects it did.
Shortly after MacArthur fled to Australia, Marshall recommended MacArthur for the Medal of Honor for his defense of the Philippines, an award calculated to boost American morale. After Wainwright’s surrender, amid rumors of the Bataan Death March, Marshall recommended Wainwright for his own Medal of Honor. It would show the world and Wainwright himself—who battled doubts and depression about how even his own family viewed him—that he had fought honorably. Opposition to the medal came from only one person—Douglas MacArthur. Wainwright’s actions did not measure up, MacArthur told Marshall, who chose to defer the award and avoid a wartime dispute with MacArthur.
After three years of captivity, an emaciated Wainwright was present at the Japanese surrender ceremony on the deck of USS Missouri, not because MacArthur had invited him, but because Marshall ordered it. Marshall also saw to it that Wainwright finally received the Medal of Honor, a medal, Mr. Horn concludes, that Wainwright did not need “to find honor.” For his part, Wainwright remained loyal to MacArthur throughout, refraining from any public criticism and even taking on the unenviable task of seconding MacArthur’s longshot bid for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
In presenting this dual biography, Mr. Horn, a former White House speechwriter whose books include a biography of Robert E. Lee, travels the well-trod path of MacArthur literature, including many quotations from MacArthur’s own “Reminiscences” (1964). What makes this study worthwhile is the author’s juxtaposition of what we have long known about MacArthur with the lesser-known actions and agonies endured by Wainwright. “The Fate of the Generals” lifts Jonathan Wainwright out of the shadow of Douglas MacArthur and “back into the light.”
Mr. Borneman is the author of “MacArthur at War” and “The Admirals.”
Appeared in the May 17, 2025, print edition as 'A Tale of Two Generals'.
25.In Gaza, Long-Suffering Palestinians Are Directing Their Anger at Hamas
As they logically should. Will this make a difference?
In Gaza, Long-Suffering Palestinians Are Directing Their Anger at Hamas
More people who are tired of the hunger, sleeplessness and ever-present threat of Israeli airstrikes are demonstrating against the militant group
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-palestine-hamas-protests-d1b3c34f?st=CSG242&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Palestinians protested against Hamas in the Gazan town of Beit Lahiya in March. Photo: Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
By Sudarsan Raghavan
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, Suha Ma’ayeh and Abeer Ayyoub
Updated May 17, 2025 10:49 am ET
Key Points
What's This?
- Gazans are increasingly protesting against Hamas due to hunger, airstrikes and the perception it prioritizes its survival over civilians.
- Anti-Hamas protests began in Beit Lahiya in March and spread, with people demanding an end to the war and for Hamas to cede control.
- Social-media influencers are amplifying the protests, filling a void due to militant threats against journalists in Gaza.
As the Gaza war nears its 20th month, pressure is building on Hamas from different fronts—not least of which is the growing anger among ordinary Palestinians who have had enough of the hunger, sleeplessness and the ever-present threat of airstrikes from Israeli forces.
Israel says it has started to expand its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, potentially displacing more Palestinians and occupying territory. The specter of starvation is growing from two months of Israel blocking humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave after a fragile cease-fire broke down. A U.S.-backed aid distribution is being planned, which Israel says would prevent Hamas profiting from seizures of food and fuel deliveries to civilians. An Israeli airstrike this week targeted Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, which if proven to be successful would be a big blow to the militant group.
But few expected Hamas to be wrestling with the most visible internal challenge to its authority since it seized control of the Gaza strip in 2007: the people it professes to represent.
Hamas has ruled harshly, often jailing and killing its critics or threatening them into silence. Yet a simmering, continuing resistance has added to the pressure on Hamas, especially in northern Gaza, where the town of Beit Lahiya is the epicenter of anti-Hamas protests that began in March.
Crowds of people have chanted ‘Hamas out’ with little repercussions from the weakened militant group. Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg News
After the demonstrations erupted in the town, they quickly spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip. Chanting “Hamas out,” large crowds, often at great risk, have demanded an end to the war and Hamas to cede control of the enclave. Since then, smaller but boisterous protests have taken place, where fear of Hamas has seemingly evaporated.
On social media, influencers—many of them Palestinians based in Egypt, Turkey, Europe and the U.S.—are urging Gazans to rise against Hamas and amplifying the protests globally. They are filling a void created by militant threats against journalists in Gaza, forcing many reporters to self censor their coverage of opposition to Hamas, said the Committee to Protect Journalists on Thursday.
“I consider myself the voice of the protests,” said Hamza al-Masri, a Turkey-based influencer, who has more than 1.2 million followers across several platforms. “Hamas has terrorized people in Gaza.”
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What is unfolding in Beit Lahiya and on social media opens a window into how Hamas misinterpreted the shift in sentiments of many Gazans. It also represents an unprecedented collective defiance against the militants.
“The general feeling among Palestinians all over Gaza, not just Beit Lahiya, is that Hamas doesn’t care about their lives or suffering,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University—Gaza who now lives in Cairo. “The general feeling is that Hamas cares more about its own survival.”
In Beit Lahiya, “they’ve lost a lot of their wealth, they’ve lost a lot of their cultivated land in this Israeli assault,” he added. “That’s why they are speaking out loudly against Hamas.”
An antiwar protest in Beit Lahiya. Photo: Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
A Hamas spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the discontent.
In recent days, the pressure on Hamas has intensified. Early on Friday, Israeli airstrikes targeted Beit Lahiya and nearby Jabaliya camp, killing scores, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. The Israeli military didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Beit Lahiya strikes. In a statement, the military said its air force had struck what it called over 150 targets throughout the strip, including terrorist cells and military structures. Later, the Israeli military said that it had been conducting strikes and mobilizing troops over the past day as part of an expanded offensive to take control in parts of Gaza.
A senior Hamas official on Saturday said that a new round of Gaza cease-fire talks with Israel is under way in Doha. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Hamas returned to the negotiating table after the Israeli military began its new offensive in the enclave.
The strikes are generating more discontent.
“People are very angry,” said Ahmed al Masri, 26, an activist in Beit Lahiya who says he has no connection to Hamas, after the airstrikes. “There is no safe place. What’s happening to us at the hands of both the occupation and Hamas is absurd and insane. This rage is against Israel and Hamas.”
Hours before the airstrikes, Hamas released a statement claiming they had released their last living American hostage seized in the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Edan Alexander, as a goodwill gesture to President Trump. A Hamas official said the understanding was that his release would result in the entry of humanitarian aid in Gaza and negotiations for a permanent cease-fire.
A U.S. official said Alexander was released by Hamas without any conditions.
Israel has blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza, prompting the threat of starvation. Photo: mahmoud issa/Reuters
While the protests have subsided in most areas as Gazans wrestle with deepening hardships such as finding food, medicines, clean water and shelter, a few hundred protesters took to the streets in Beit Lahiya three weeks ago. Calls are out for more protests on Saturday, one activist said, after the strikes on Friday. Nearly half of all Gazans support the protests, according to a poll released earlier this month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an independent nonprofit based in Ramallah.
Located 4 miles north of Gaza City and less than 2 miles from the Israeli border, Beit Lahiya is wealthier than most areas. Many of its roughly 100,000 population are farmers and agricultural workers who once thrived off economic links to Israel, especially exporting strawberries, which locals refer to as “red gold,” and flowers across the border and to Europe.
Now, residents have seen their properties destroyed, breeding resentment against both Israel and Hamas.
“Beit Lahiya was the vegetable and fruit basket of the entire Gaza Strip,” said Yousef Rajab, 30, a resident. “We lost our land, our livelihoods. What’s left for us?”
Airstrikes launched after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel crushed homes before Israel sent in ground forces, forcing tens of thousands to flee.
In mid-January, following a cease-fire deal, residents returned to their shattered neighborhoods, shocked by the destruction, said residents and activists. They began to rebuild their lives, but in March the cease-fire collapsed, as Israel launched further airstrikes after talks to extend the truce stalled. Soon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants arrived in Ahmed al Masri’s neighborhood in Beit Lahiya. They began launching rockets made from sewage pipes into Israel, he and other residents said.
Israeli airstrikes on Friday killed scores of people in Beit Lahiya, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. Photo: saber/epa-efe/shutterstock/Shutterstock
Tens of thousands have been displaced in Gaza City and across the enclave. Photo: saber/epa-efe/shutterstock/Shutterstock
Israeli forces then dropped leaflets on the town, ordering residents to evacuate their homes again. Those orders were the tipping point, said residents, protest leaders and analysts.
“That’s when things really exploded,” said Ahmed al Masri. “People had had enough. We didn’t want war. We didn’t want Hamas.”
Anger spread through the town, including among influential families and clan elders. They met with activists and residents who then called on Facebook for people to take to the streets. Others went door to door or drove a car with a loudspeaker, encouraging protest.
“The fear barrier was broken when the evacuation orders came,” said Rajab.
Hamas in previous years swiftly cracked down on protests. This time, some militants threatened protesters and unsuccessfully tried to disrupt the demonstrations. But the group, weakened by months of Israeli attacks, didn’t systematically shut down the open defiance with force.
When the protests started in late March, Hamza al Masri said he called some of the activists to express support from his base in Turkey.
The 37-year-old influencer, from Beit Hanoun, joined the militants as a teenager, attracted by their religious stance and calls for Palestinian liberation, he said. By his late 20s, he was disillusioned. In 2017, Hamas militants repeatedly detained him, beat him and held him for as long as eight days to stop his critical social-media posts.
“I reached a point where it was either I commit suicide or leave Gaza,” said Masri, who fled the territory in 2021.
Like many Gazans, Masri at first voiced support for Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, seeing it as a long overdue response to Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians. But as the war and suffering deepened, he changed his mind. In last week’s poll, 37% of Gazans said they approved of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, down from 71% in March 2024.
As thousands took the streets in front of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, Masri stayed in touch with protesters, encouraging them to send videos and photos. He posted them on Telegram and other social-media portals. Many other social-media influencers around the world were posting as well. The protests went viral.
“It was clear Beit Lahiya wasn’t alone,” said Masri.
26. AI is the future of war
Is it? Is it the future of "everything?"
Excerpts:
“(T)he effect of AI is much, much more than the machine gun or plane. It is more like the shift from muscle power to machine power in the last Industrial Revolution,” says Peter Singer, a professor at Arizona State University and a strategist and senior fellow at the US think tank New America, who has written extensively about AI and warfare.
“I believe that the advent of AI on the software side and its application into robotics on the hardware side is the equivalent of the industrial revolution when we saw mechanization.” This transformation raises new questions “of right and wrong that we weren’t wrestling with before.” He advocates setting “frameworks to govern the use of AI in warfare” that should apply to those people who are working on the design and use.
One of the issues Singer calls “machine permissibility” is what the machine should be allowed to do apart from human control. He calls attention to a second issue “that we’ve never dealt with before,” which is “machine accountability.” “If something happens, who do we hold responsible if it is the machine that takes the action? It’s very easy to understand that with a regular car, it’s harder to understand that with a so-called driverless car.”
On the battlefield, would the machine be held responsible if the target was mistaken or if civilians were killed as a result?
AI is the future of war - Asia Times
Autonomous weapons and cognitive warfare are reshaping global military strategy and already determining who wins and loses
asiatimes.com · by Leslie Alan Horvitz · May 17, 2025
In the 1983 film War Games, a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response) is about to provoke a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but because of the ingenuity of a teenager (played by Matthew Broderick), catastrophe is averted.
In the first Terminator film, which was released a year later, a supercomputer called “Skynet” decides to exterminate humanity because it’s perceived as a threat to its existence rather than to protect American nuclear weapons.
Although these films offered audiences grim scenarios of intelligent machines running amok, they were also prophetic. Artificial intelligence (AI) is so commonplace that it’s routinely applied during a simple Google search. That it is also being integrated into military strategies is hardly any surprise.
It’s just that we have little understanding of the capacity of these high-tech weapons (those that are now ready for use and those in development). Nor are we prepared for systems that have the capacity to transform warfare forever.
Throughout history, it is human intelligence that uses the technology, not the technology itself, which has won or lost wars. That may change in the future when human intelligence is focused instead on creating systems that are more capable on the battlefield than those of the adversary.
“Exponential, insurmountable surprise”
Artificial intelligence isn’t a technology that can be easily detected, monitored, or banned, as Amir Husain, the founder and CEO of an AI company, SparkCognition, pointed out in an essay for Media News.
Integrating AI elements—visual recognition, language analysis, simulation-based prediction, and advanced forms of search—with existing technologies and platforms “can rapidly yield entirely new and unforeseen capabilities.” The result “can create exponential, insurmountable surprise,” Hussain writes.
Advanced technology in warfare is already widespread. The use of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs)—commonly known as drones—in military settings has set off warnings about “killer robots.”
What happens when drones are no longer controlled by humans and can execute military missions on their own? These drones aren’t limited to the air; they can operate on the ground or underwater as well. The introduction of AI, effectively giving these weapons the capacity for autonomy, isn’t far off.
Moreover, they’re cheap to produce and cheap to purchase. The Russians are buying drones from Iran for use in their war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have been putting together a cottage industry constructing drones of their own against the Russians.
The relative ease with which a commercial drone can be converted into one with a military application also blurs the line between commercial and military enterprises. At this point, though, humans are still in charge.
A similar problem can be seen in information-gathering systems that have dual uses, including satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft, ground and undersea radars, and sensors, all of which have both commercial and military applications.
AI can process vast amounts of data from all these systems and then discern meaningful patterns, identifying changes that humans might never notice. American forces were stymied to some degree in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they could not process large amounts of data.
Even now, remotely piloted UAVs are using AI for autonomous takeoff, landing, and routine flight. All that’s left for human operators to do is concentrate on tactical decisions, such as selecting attack targets and executing attacks.
AI also allows these systems to operate rapidly, determining actions at speeds that are seldom possible if humans are part of the decision-making process. Until now, decision-making speed has been the most important aspect of warfare. I
f, however, AI systems go head-to-head against humans, AI will invariably come out ahead. However, the possibility that AI systems eliminate the human factor terrifies people who don’t want to see an apocalyptic scenario on celluloid come to pass in reality.
Automated versus autonomous
A distinction needs to be made between the term “autonomous” and the term “automated.” If we are controlling the drone, then the drone is automated. But if the drone is programmed to act on its own initiative, we would say it is autonomous. But does the autonomous weapon describe the actual weapon—i.e., a missile on a drone—or the drone itself?
Take, for example, the Global Hawk military UAV (drone). It is automated insofar as it is controlled by an operator on the ground, and yet if it loses communication with the ground, the Golden Hawk can land on its own. Does that make it automated or autonomous? Or is it both?
The most important question is whether the system is safety-critical. Translated, that means whether it has the decision-making capacity to use a weapon against a target without intervention from its human operator.
It is possible, for example, for a drone to strike a static military target on its own (such as an enemy military base) but not a human target because of the fear that innocent civilians could be injured or killed as collateral damage. Many countries have already developed drones with real-time imagery capable of acting autonomously in the former instance, but not when it comes to human targets.
Drones aren’t the only weapons that can act autonomously. Military systems are being developed by the US, China, and several countries in Europe that can act autonomously in the air, on the ground, in water, and underwater with varying degrees of success.
Several types of autonomous helicopters designed so that a soldier can direct them in the field with a smartphone are in development in the US, Europe, and China. Autonomous ground vehicles, such as tanks and transport vehicles, and autonomous underwater vehicles are also in development.
In almost all cases, however, the agencies developing these technologies are struggling to make the leap from development to operational implementation.
There are many reasons for the lack of success in bringing these technologies to maturity, including cost and unforeseen technical issues, but equally problematic are organizational and cultural barriers. The U.S. has, for instance, struggled to bring autonomous UAVs to operational status, primarily due to organizational infighting and prioritization in favor of manned aircraft.
The future warrior
In the battleground of the future, elite soldiers may rely on a head-up display that feeds them a wealth of information that is collected and routed through supercomputers carried in their backpacks using an AI engine.
With AI, the data is instantly analyzed, streamlined, and fed back into the head-up display. This is one of many potential scenarios presented by U.S. Defense Department officials. The Pentagon has embraced a relatively simple concept: the “hyper-enabled operator.”
The objective of this concept is to give Special Forces “cognitive overmatch” on the battlefield, or “the ability to dominate the situation by making informed decisions faster than the opponent.” In other words, they will be able to make decisions based on the information they are receiving more rapidly than their enemy. T
he decision-making model for the military is called the “OODA loop” for “observe, orient, decide, act.” That will come about using computers that register all relevant data and distill them into actionable information through a simple interface like a head-up display.
This display will also offer a “visual environment translation” system designed to convert foreign language inputs into clear English in real time. Known as VITA, the system encompasses both a visual environment translation effort and voice-to-voice translation capabilities. The translation engine will allow the operator to “engage in effective conversations where it was previously impossible.”
VITA, which stands for Versatile Intelligent Translation Assistant, offers users language capabilities in Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese, including Mandarin, a Chinese dialect. Operators could use their smartphones to scan a street in a foreign country, for example, and immediately obtain a translation of street signs in real-time.
Adversary AI systems
Military experts divide adversarial attacks into four categories: evasion, inference, poisoning, and extraction. These types of attacks are easily accomplished and often don’t require computing skills.
An enemy engaged in evasive attacks could attempt to deceive an AI weapon to avoid detection—hiding a cyberattack, for example, or convincing a sensor that a tank is a school bus. This may require the development of a new type of AI camouflage, such as strategic tape placement, that can fool AI.
Inference attacks occur when an adversary acquires information about an AI system that allows evasive techniques. Poisoning attacks target AI systems during training, interfering with access to the datasets used to train military tools—mislabeling images of vehicles to dupe targeting systems, for instance, or manipulating maintenance data designed to classify imminent system failure as a regular operation.
Extraction attacks exploit access to the AI’s interface to learn enough about the AI’s operation to create a parallel model of the system. If AI systems are not secure from unauthorized users, then an adversary’s users could predict decisions made by those systems and use those predictions to their advantage.
For instance, they could predict how an AI-controlled unmanned system will respond to specific visual and electromagnetic stimuli and then proceed to alter its route and behavior.
Deceptive attacks have become increasingly common, as illustrated by cases involving image classification algorithms that are deceived into perceiving images that aren’t there, confusing the meaning of images, and mistaking a turtle for a rifle, for instance. Similarly, autonomous vehicles could be forced to swerve into the wrong lane or speed through a stop sign.
In 2019, China announced a new military strategy, Intelligentized Warfare, which utilizes AI. Officials of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have stated that their forces can overtake the U.S. military by using AI. One of its intentions is to use this high-tech type of warfare to bring Taiwan under its control without waging conventional warfare.
However, only a few of the many Chinese studies on intelligentized warfare have focused on replacing guns with AI. On the other hand, Chinese strategists have made no secret of their intention to control the enemy’s will directly.
That would include the US president, members of Congress, combatant commanders, and citizens. “Intelligence dominance”—also known as cognitive warfare or “control of the brain”—is seen as the new battleground in intelligentized warfare, putting AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned.
According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, the People’s Liberation Army is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the US operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”
Controlling an adversary’s mind can affect not just someone’s perceptions of their surroundings but, ultimately, their decisions. For the People’s Liberation Army, cognitive warfare is equal to the other domains of conflict, which are air, land, and sea. In that respect, social media is considered a key battlefield.
Russia has also been developing its own AI capacity. As early as 2014, the Russians inaugurated a National Defense Control Center in Moscow, a centralized command post for assessing and responding to global threats. The center was designed to collect information on enemy moves from multiple sources and provide senior officers with guidance on possible responses.
Russia has declared that it will eventually develop an AI system capable of running the world. Russians are already using AI in Ukraine to jam wireless signals connecting Ukrainian drones to the satellites they rely on for navigation, causing the machines to lose their way and plummet to Earth.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) has explored ways in which AI systems can be developed for uncrewed systems for the air, maritime, and ground domains. At the same time, at least in the short term, official policy is predicated on the belief that humans must remain firmly in the loop.
Meanwhile, the Russians are trying to improve UAV capabilities with AI as a mechanism for command, control, and communications. MOD also emphasizes the use of AI for data collection and analysis as a natural evolution from the current “digital” combat technology and systems development.
“Raven Sentry”: AI in the US war in Afghanistan
The use of AI on the battlefield by US intelligence, while brief, showed promising results. “Raven Sentry,” an AI tool launched in 2019 by a team of American intelligence officers (known as the “nerd locker”), with help from Silicon Valley expertise, was intended to forecast insurgent attacks.
The initial use of AI came at a time when US bases were closing, troop numbers were falling, and intelligence resources were being diverted. Raven Sentry relied on open-source data.
“We noticed an opportunity presented by the increased number of commercial satellites and the availability of news reports on the Internet, the proliferation of social media postings, and messaging apps with massive membership,” says Colonel Thomas Spahr, chief of staff of the Resolute Support J2 intelligence mission in Kabul, Afghanistan, from July 2019 to July 2020.
The AI tool also drew on historical patterns based on insurgent activities in Afghanistan going back 40 years, which encompassed the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. Environmental factors were also considered.
“Historically, insurgents attack on certain days of the year or holidays, for example, or during certain weather and illumination conditions,” Spahr notes. He adds, “The beauty of the AI is that it continues to update that template. The machine would learn as it absorbed more data.”
Before its demise in 2021 (with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan), Raven Sentry had demonstrated its feasibility, predicting an insurgent attack with 70% accuracy. The AI tool predicted that attacks were more likely to occur when the temperature was above 4 degrees Celsius (or 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit), when lunar illumination was below 30%, and when there was no rain.
Spahr was satisfied with the results: “We validated that commercially produced, unclassified information can yield predictive intelligence.”
Ukraine as AI testing ground
Ever since the Russian invasion, launched in 2022, Ukraine has become a testing ground for AI in warfare. Outgunned and outmanned, Ukrainian forces have resorted to improvisation, jerry-rigging off-the-shelf devices to transform them into lethal autonomous weapons. The Russian invaders, too, have employed AI, conducting cyberattacks and GPS-jamming systems.
Ukraine’s Saker Scout quadcopters “can find, identify, and attack 64 types of Russian ‘military objects’ on their own.” These drones are designed to operate autonomously, and unlike other drones that Ukrainian forces have deployed, Russia cannot jam them.
By using code found online and hobbyist computers like Raspberry Pi, easily obtained from hardware stores, Ukrainians are able to construct innovative killer robots. Apart from drones, which can be operated with a smartphone, Ukrainians have built a gun turret with autonomous targeting operated with the same controller used by a PlayStation or a tablet.
The gun, called Wolly because it bears a resemblance to the Pixar robot WALL-E, can auto-lock on a target up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) away and shift between preprogrammed positions to quickly cover a broad area.
The manufacturer is also developing a gun capable of hitting moving targets. It can automatically identify targets as they come over the horizon. The gun targets and aims automatically; all that’s left for the operator to do is press the button and shoot.
Many Ukrainian drones, which look like those you can find at Walmart, are called First Person View (FPV) drones. Capable of flying 100 miles per hour, FPV drones have four propellers and a mounted camera that uses wireless to send footage of their flights back to operators.
With a bomb on board, an FPV can be converted into a weapon that can take out a tank. They’re cheap, too; one manufacturer, Vyriy, charges $400 each, a small price to pay to disable a tank worth millions of dollars. Vyriy derives its name from a mythical land in Slavic folktales.
If one kamikaze drone is good, dozens of them are better insofar as the greater their number, the greater the chance there is of several reaching their targets. In nature, a swarm of ants behaves as a single living organism, whether the task is collecting food or building a nest.
Analogously, a swarm of autonomous drones could act as a single organism—no humans necessary—carrying out a mission regardless of how many are disabled or crash to the ground or whether communication from the ground is disrupted or terminated.
Although humans are still in the “loop,” these weapons could equally be made entirely autonomous. In other words, they could decide which targets to strike without human intervention.
It isn’t as if Ukraine has adopted AI weaponry without any tech experience. In the words of New York Times reporter Paul Mozer, “Ukraine has been a bit of a back office for the global technology industry for a long time.”
The country already had a substantial pool of coders and skilled experts who, under emergency conditions, were able to make the transition from civilian uses (such as a dating app) to military purposes.
As Mozer reported: “What they’re doing is they’re taking basic code that is around, combining it with some new data from the war, and making it into something entirely different, which is a weapon.”
The reality is, “there’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big defense primes,” says P.W. Singer, an author who writes about war and tech. “There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big-tech Silicon Valley companies. There’s a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in small startups.”
One of those smaller startups is Anduril. After selling the popular virtual reality headset Oculus to Facebook (now Meta), Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur in his early thirties, went on to found an AI weapons company that is supplying drones to Ukraine.
“Ukraine is a very challenging environment to learn in,” he says. “I’ve heard various estimates from the Ukrainians themselves that any given drone typically has a lifespan of about four weeks. The question is, “Can you respond and adapt?” Anduril, named after a sword in “The Lord of the Rings”, has sold its devices to ten countries, including the US.
“I had this belief that the major defense companies didn’t have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics,” says Luckey. His company’s drone, called ALTIUS, is intended to be fired out of a tube and unfold itself, extending its wings and tail; then, steering with a propeller, it acts like a plane capable of carrying a 30-pound warhead.
Luckey believes that his approach will result in more AI weapons being built in less time and at a lower cost than could be achieved by traditional defense contractors like McDonnell Douglas.
Anduril, founded in 2017, is also developing the Dive-LD, a drone that will be used for surveys in littoral and deep water. “It’s an autonomous underwater vehicle that is able to go very, very long distances, dive to a depth of about 6,000 meters (almost 20,000 feet), which is deep enough to go to the bottom of almost any ocean,” says Luckey.
Ukraine is already making its own sea drones—essentially jet skis packed with explosives—which have inflicted severe damage on the Russian navy in the Black Sea.
As Anduril’s CEO Brian Schimpf admits, the introduction of Anduril’s drones to Ukraine has yet to produce any significant results, although he believes that will change. Once they’re launched, these drones will not require guidance from an operator on the ground, making it difficult for the Russians to destroy or disable them by jamming their signals.
“The autonomy onboard is really what sets it apart,” Luckey says. “It’s not a remote-controlled plane. There’s a brain on it that is able to look for targets, identify targets, and fly into those targets.” However, for every innovative weapon system the Ukrainians develop, the Russians counter it with a system that renders it useless.
“Technologies that worked really well even a few months ago are now constantly having to change,” says Jacquelyn Schneider, who studies military technology as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, “And the big difference I do see is that software changes the rate of change.”
The War in Gaza: Lavender
In their invasion of Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have increasingly relied on a program supported by artificial intelligence to target Hamas operatives, with problematic consequences.
According to an April 2024 report by +972 Magazine (an Israeli-Palestinian publication) and Local Call, a Hebrew language news site, the IDF has been implementing a program known as “Lavender,” whose influence on the military’s operations is so profound that intelligence officials have essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Lavender was developed by the elite Unit 8200, which is comparable to the National Security Agency in the US or the Government Communications Headquarters in the UK.
The Israeli government has defended Lavender for its practicality and efficiency. “The Israeli military uses AI to augment the decision-making processes of human operators. This use is in accordance with international humanitarian law, as applied by the modern Armed Forces in many asymmetric wars since September 11, 2001,” says Magda Pacholska, a researcher at the TMC Asser Institute and specialist in the intersection between disruptive technologies and military law.
The data collected to identify militants that were used to develop Lavender comes from the more than 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, which was under intense surveillance prior to the Gaza invasion in 2023.
The report states that as many as 37,000 Palestinians were designated as suspected militants who were selected as potential targets. Lavender’s kill lists were prepared in advance of the invasion, launched in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which left about 1,200 dead and about 250 hostages taken from Israel.
A related AI program, which tracked the movements of individuals on the Lavender list, was called “Where’s Daddy?” Sources for the +972 Magazine report said that initially, there was “no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices (of targets) or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
The officials in charge, these sources said, acted as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions before authorizing a bombing. One intelligence officer who spoke to +972 admitted as much: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
It was already known that the Lavender program made errors in 10 percent of the cases, meaning that a fraction of the individuals selected as targets might have had no connection with Hamas or any other militant group. The strikes generally occurred at night while the targeted individuals were more likely to be at home, which posed a risk of killing or wounding their families as well.
A score was created for each individual, ranging from 1 to 100, based on how closely he was linked to the armed wing of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Those with a high score were killed along with their families and neighbors despite the fact that officers reportedly did little to verify the potential targets identified by Lavender, citing “efficiency” reasons.
“This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that his colleagues had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
The IDF had previously used another AI system called “The Gospel,” which was described in a previous investigation by the magazine, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications, to target buildings and structures suspected of harboring militants.
“The Gospel” draws on millions of items of data, producing target lists more than 50 times faster than a team of human intelligence officers ever could. It was used to strike 100 targets a day in the first two months of the Gaza fighting, roughly five times more than in a similar conflict there a decade ago. Those structures of political or military significance for Hamas are known as “power targets.”
Weaknesses of AI Weapons
If an AI weapon is autonomous, it needs to have the capacity for accurate perception. That’s to say, if it mistakes a civilian car for a military target, its response rate isn’t relevant. The civilians in the car die regardless.
In many cases, of course, AI systems have excelled at perception as AI-powered machines and algorithms have become refined. When, for instance, the Russian military conducted a test of 80 UAVs simultaneously flying over Syrian battlefields with unified visualization, then Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared it to a “semi-fantastic film” that revealed all potential targets.
But problems can creep in. In designing an AI weapon, developers first need access to data. Many AI systems are trained using data that has been labeled by an expert system (e.g., labeling scenes that include an air defense battery), usually a human.
An AI’s image-processing capability won’t function well when given images that are different from its training set—for example, pictures produced where lighting conditions are poor, that are at an obtuse angle, or that are partially obscured. AI recognition systems don’t understand what the image is; rather, they learn textures and gradients of the image’s pixels. That means that an AI system may correctly recognize a part of an image but not its entirety, which can result in misclassification.
To better defend AI against deceptive images, engineers subject them to “adversarial training.” This involves feeding a classifier adversarial images so it can identify and ignore those that aren’t going to be targeted.
Research by Nicolas Papernot, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, shows that a system, even bolstered by adversarial training, may be ineffective if overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. Adversarial images take advantage of a feature found in many AI systems known as “decision boundaries.”
These boundaries are the invisible rules that instruct a system whether it is perceiving a lion or a leopard. The objective would be to create a mental map with lions in one sector and leopards in another. The line dividing these two sectors—the border at which a lion becomes a leopard or leopard a lion—is known as the decision boundary.
Jeff Clune, who has also studied adversarial training, remains dubious about such classification systems because they’re too arbitrary.“All you’re doing with these networks is training them to draw lines between clusters of data rather than deeply modeling what it is to be [a] leopard or a lion.”
Large datasets are often labeled by companies that employ manual methods. Obtaining and sharing datasets is a challenge, especially for an organization that prefers to classify data and restrict access to it.
A military dataset may contain images produced by thermal-imaging systems, for instance, but unless this dataset is shared with developers, an AI weapon wouldn’t be as effective. For example, AI devices that rely on chatbots limited to hundreds of words might not be able to completely replace a human with a much larger vocabulary.
AI systems are also hampered by their inability to multitask. A human can identify an enemy vehicle, decide on a weapon system to employ against it, predict its path, and then engage the target. An AI system can’t duplicate these steps.
At this point, a system trained to identify a T-90 tank most likely would be unable to identify a Chinese Type 99 tank, despite the fact that they are both tanks and both tasks require image recognition. Many researchers are trying to solve this problem by working to enable systems to transfer their learning, but such systems are years away from production.
Predictably, adversaries will try to take advantage of these weaknesses by fooling image recognition engines and sensors. They may also try mounting cyberattacks to evade intrusion detection systems or feed altered data to AI systems that will supply them with false requirements.
US preparedness
The US Department of Defense has been more partial to contracting for and building hardware than to implementing new technologies. All the same, the Air Force, in cooperation with Boeing, General Atomics, and a company called Kratos, is developing AI-powered drones.
The Air Force is also testing pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft run by artificial intelligence. This next-generation drone is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets.
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The objective is to give human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. The Valkyrie is not autonomous, however. Although it will use AI and sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats, it will still be up to pilots to decide whether or not to strike the target.
Pentagon officials may not be deploying autonomous weapons in battle yet, but they are testing and perfecting weapons that will not rely on human intervention. One example is the Army’s Project Convergence.
In a test, conducted as part of the project, held in August 2020 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, the Army used a variety of air- and ground-based sensors to track simulated enemy forces and then process that data using AI-enabled computers at a base in Washington state.
Those computers, in turn, issued fire instructions to ground-based artillery at Yuma. “This entire sequence was supposedly accomplished within 20 seconds,” the Congressional Research Service later reported.
In a US program known as the Replicator initiative, the Pentagon said it planned to mass-produce thousands of autonomous drones. However, no official policy has condoned the use of autonomous weapons, which would allow devices to decide whether to strike a target without a human’s approval.
The Navy has an AI equivalent of Project Convergence called “Project Overmatch.” In the words of Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, this is intended “to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.” Very little has been revealed about the project.
About 7,000 analysts employed by the National Security Agency (NSA) are trying to integrate AI into its operations, according to General Timothy Haugh, who serves as the NSA Director, US Cyber Command Commander and Chief of the Central Security Service.
General Haugh has disclosed that as of 2024, the NSA is engaged in 170 AI projects, of which 10 are considered critical to national security. “Those other 160, we want to create opportunities for people to experiment, leverage, and compliantly use,” he says.
At present, though, AI is still regarded as a supplement to conventional platforms. AI is also envisioned as playing four additional roles: automating planning and strategy; fusing and interpreting signals more efficiently than humans or conventional systems can do; aiding space-based systems, mainly by collecting and synthesizing information to counter hypersonics; and enabling next-generation cyber and information warfare capabilities.
Ethics of AI use
Although the use of autonomous weapons has been a subject of debate for decades, few observers expect any international deal to establish new regulations, especially as the US, China, Israel, Russia, and others race to develop even more advanced weapons.
“The geopolitics makes it impossible,” says Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top negotiator on autonomous weapons at the UN. “These weapons will be used, and they’ll be used in the military arsenal of pretty much everybody.”
Despite such challenges, Human Rights Watch has called for “the urgent negotiation and adoption of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems.” It has launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which the human rights organization says has been joined by more than 270 groups and 70 countries.
Even though the controversy has centered around autonomous weapons, Brian Schimpf, CEO of AI drone manufacturer Anduril, has another perspective. He says AI weapons are “not about taking humans out of the loop. I don’t think that’s the right ethical framework. This is really about how we make human decision-makers more effective and more accountable [for] their decisions.”
All the same, autonomous AI weapons are already under development. Aside from the ethics of relying on a weapon to make life-and-death decisions, there is a problem with AI itself. Errors and miscalculations are relatively common. Algorithms underlying the operations of AI systems are capable of making mistakes—“hallucinations”—in which seemingly reasonable results turn out to be entirely illusory.
That could have profound implications for deploying AI weapons that operate with deeply flawed instructions undetectable by human operators. In a particularly dystopian scenario, an adversary might substitute robot generals for human ones, forcing the US to do the same, with the result that AI systems may be pitted against one another on the battlefield with unpredictable and possibly catastrophic consequences.
Dr Elke Schwarz of Queen Mary University of London views the AI weapon dilemma through a theoretical framework that relies on political science and empirical investigations in her consideration of the ethical dimensions of AI in warfare. She believes that the integration of AI-enabled weapon systems facilitates the objectification of human targets, leading to heightened tolerance for collateral damage.
In her view, automation can “weaken moral agency among operators of AI-enabled targeting systems, diminishing their capacity for ethical decision-making.” The bias towards autonomous systems may also encourage the defense industry to rush headlong into funding military AI systems, “influencing perceptions of responsible AI use in warfare.” She urges policymakers to take risks into account before it’s too late.
“(T)he effect of AI is much, much more than the machine gun or plane. It is more like the shift from muscle power to machine power in the last Industrial Revolution,” says Peter Singer, a professor at Arizona State University and a strategist and senior fellow at the US think tank New America, who has written extensively about AI and warfare.
“I believe that the advent of AI on the software side and its application into robotics on the hardware side is the equivalent of the industrial revolution when we saw mechanization.” This transformation raises new questions “of right and wrong that we weren’t wrestling with before.” He advocates setting “frameworks to govern the use of AI in warfare” that should apply to those people who are working on the design and use.
One of the issues Singer calls “machine permissibility” is what the machine should be allowed to do apart from human control. He calls attention to a second issue “that we’ve never dealt with before,” which is “machine accountability.” “If something happens, who do we hold responsible if it is the machine that takes the action? It’s very easy to understand that with a regular car, it’s harder to understand that with a so-called driverless car.”
On the battlefield, would the machine be held responsible if the target was mistaken or if civilians were killed as a result?
Leslie Alan Horvitz is an author and journalist specializing in science and a contributor to the Observatory. His nonfiction books include “Eureka: Scientific Breakthroughs That Changed the World,” “Understanding Depression” with Dr Raymond DePaulo of Johns Hopkins University, and “The Essential Book of Weather Lore.”
His articles have been published by Travel and Leisure, Scholastic, Washington Times and Insight on the News, among others. He has served on the board of Art Omi and is a member of PEN America. Horvitz is based in New York City. You can find him online at lesliehorvitz.com.
This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute and is republished here with permission.
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asiatimes.com · by Leslie Alan Horvitz · May 17, 2025
27. On War in 2027: Five Principles to Guide the Army Transformation Initiative
The five:
1. Drone Primacy
2. The Disadvantage of Mass
3. Leader Development
4. Risk
5. Landpower Will Remain
Regardless of drone and missile development in the future, there will always be a requirement for landpower formations on the ground to maximize system effects. Drones will not replace soldiers. An army is still required to impose will and hold terrain. Additionally, technology can always fail, weather has a vote, and it will require human thought to fill the gap or compensate for shortfalls in technological tools like AI. What is imperative is to get the right mix of personnel and drones within these formations. Airpower and seapower will be challenged by enemy antiaccess and area-denial capabilities during opening engagements. It will be the Army that holds terrain in a disaggregated manner and survives through the periods of extreme high-intensity combat until the joint force can achieve relative advantage. Army forces forward prior to conflict is key to this success. Unlike the air and sea domains, a ground force trained well in reconnaissance and strike tactics can survive for an extended time. The soldier remains the all-weather node at the center of a kill web.
Uncomfortable and Unclear
Although the threats that characterize the modern operational environment continue to evolve, their combined lethality and the challenge they will pose to US forces are clear. There is no time for professional hubris. The decisions the Army makes today to drive its transformation will determine its success in the opening engagements of the next conflict. These changes will require a whole-of-Army approach, from range operations at home station to the doctrinal template a division staff uses to initially array its forces. The required adjustments will be uncomfortable for some and should make all leaders reevaluate their decisions. But they are necessary. Using the five principles above and the Army Transformation Initiative as guideposts, Army leaders at echelon must train and evolve to ensure victory in a war in 2027 and beyond.
On War in 2027: Five Principles to Guide the Army Transformation Initiative - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joshua Suthoff · May 16, 2025
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Sometime in 2027, two US Air Force C-17s are on final approach somewhere in the Pacific’s first island chain. Over the last week, tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan have reached crisis level. Forty-eight hours ago, the US president gave the order to build combat power in the Indo-Pacific theater. The pair of C-17s are carrying key enablers and personnel to build and protect the growing intermediate staging base. However, US intelligence has missed indicators and warnings that Beijing intends to escalate to conflict, and the crews onboard the C-17s are not aware of the screen of small, one-way attack drones loitering near the airfield where they intend to land, just outside its protected ring and directly in the aircrafts’ flight path. The almost undetectable and nonattributable drones detonate in close proximity to the airframes, scattering aircraft debris and cargo—a cargo of personnel and equipment that was exquisite, expensive, and not quickly replaceable. The conflict has begun, Beijing finally turning its years of rhetoric and aggressive posturing vis-à-vis Taiwan into action.
Three weeks into the conflict, an infantry fire team on Taiwan is strongpointed in a destroyed building overwatching an abandoned open-air market that is now the team’s engagement area. Two of the team members are constantly wearing their first-person view goggles searching for an enemy target to strike or call for fire on. A third member lays wounded in the corner, sustained only by the medical expertise within the team because conditions are not right for a medical evacuation. The team leader knows he has to get other enablers in the fight as soon as the enemy appears. Remnants of the team’s company are spread in a defense across a wide frontage. A day ago, the company tried to mass to clear a building to initially establish a defense and paid dearly in casualties even before the commander could initiate the assault. For now, the teams continue to hunt with drones and fires assets all while trying to avoid the swarms of Chinese drones. Most of the core strengths the US Army once relied upon are now weaknesses. Night movements, tactical assembly areas, and causality evacuation operations are all quickly noticed by persistent enemy drones. Warfare has changed.
This is a very real scenario that the US military could face in the alarmingly near future. Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War and through conflicts in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Israel and Gaza, there has been a clear evolutionary arc in the development and use of drones and counterdrone efforts. Two emerging characteristics of this evolution are particularly noteworthy. The first is illustrated by the recent shootdown of a Russian Su-30 Flanker fighter aircraft over the Black Sea by a Ukrainian missile-equipped, sea-based drone. Cheap drones and missiles are now threatening once dominant—and astronomically more expensive—traditional platforms like ships, aircrafts, and tanks. The Su-30 shootdown—along with previous aerial drone attacks against Russian ships and the persistent drone threat faced by ground combat forces in the war—signals the powerful effects of combining multiple drones and missiles to threaten a target across domains.
The second factor indicating another leap forward in the evolution of the character of warfare is represented by the enduring drone threat and the way it requires the constant disaggregation of forces. Trenches are now giving way to small teams of concealed and protected infantry to avoid patrolling drones. These infantry units are mined in and provided overwatch by their own set of drones. These small formations, when paired with drones, have unprecedented situational awareness and can leverage a larger strike complex against the enemy.
In short, how the US Army fights going forward will be significantly different than anything it has experienced in the past, and it must match this evolutionary arc to ensure it is best positioned to win the first battle of the next war. The recent release of the Army Transformation Initiative is an important first step. Signed by the secretary and the chief of staff of the Army, it directs the service to transform into a “leaner, more lethal force by infusing technology, cutting obsolete systems, and reducing overhead to defeat any adversary on an ever-changing battlefield.” It also charges all Army leaders to drive the necessary change to ensure units are ready.
The operative question, however, is ready for what? Even though the modern operational environment seems to be perpetually in flux, it is important that leaders attempt to frame certain principles to guide how the US Army will fight going forward. These truths will serve as waypoints as we move from the familiarity of the Army’s current-day construct.
Five Principles for Army Transformation
There are five fundamental facts that the US Army must consider as it transforms warfighting and formations going forward. Each will affect different warfighting functions and different types of Army organizations in unique ways. But no warfighting function or organization can afford to assume immunity from these realities.
1. Drone Primacy
Drones in all domains are here to stay and in the future they will be the primary tool for maneuver warfare. Throughout a conflict drones will remain a critical asset. The effects and dominance of any individual counterdrone system on the battlefield will be short-lived. These systems will be the highest-priority target for an enemy’s strike complex. At least in the opening engagements of a conflict, drones will be the main effort, and as the main effort they require the correct allocation of resources and the right personnel to ensure conditions are set for success. Other branches and enablers will support drones to allow the systems to set conditions for follow-on forces. Drone warfare will be an enduring capability and threat on the future battlefield. Drones are cost-efficient, simple, and quickly produced. They allow individuals and states the ability to compete with larger adversaries. People will find a way to keep drones in the fight. Drones and missiles allow smaller nation-states to gain relative parity with more powerful states. If managed correctly, however, these more powerful states—like the United States—can leverage their industrial capacity to scale drones at levels that were until recently unimaginable. The belligerent that enters the next conflict with a deep magazine of drones and effective tactics, techniques, and procedures for their employment will have a significant advantage.
The large number of drones that will be present on any area of the battlefield will create areas of extreme high-intensity combat, especially when paired with other enablers that amplify the effects. Manned forces cannot operate or maneuver in these conditions. Countries or nonstate actors will find a way to use AI to maximize the effectiveness of drone swarms. Effective use of AI will increase efficiency, lethality, and minimize manpower requirements for drone operations and targeting. The belligerent that leverages the above factors with a reconnaissance-strike complex will have the advantage.
2. The Disadvantage of Mass
The proliferation of drones, missiles, and especially hypersonic missiles will continue to threaten the once dominant mass of the US Army and the joint force. This threat applies from the power projection of carrier strike groups, to Army divisions and brigade combat teams as they deploy and array to fight, all the way down to platoons in the once semiprotected last covered and concealed positions. Timing and setting conditions for any type of mass formation will be a major challenge, and any such activities will have to be resourced and deliberate events. It will take significant joint resources and the Army’s reconnaissance-strike complex to set and hold these conditions to allow formations to mass on the offensive. The vulnerability will exist not only in the air and ground domains, but also for the mass of formations within the electromagnetic spectrum.
3. Leader Development
The US Army’s leader development is one of its greatest strengths, and the service is well positioned due to the existing professionalism of its officers and noncommissioned officers. However, education and training will still need to be adjusted. Leaders will have to learn how to operate in extreme high-intensity combat. The constant drone threat will require US Army forces to operate and fight in small, decentralized teams until conditions are set for a convergence of forces on an objective. Leaders from the squad to the battalion level will have to be comfortable with fighting in isolated units with minimal communications. This requires leaders at the team and squad level to have the confidence and knowledge to operate accordingly. They must be able to recognize survivable hide sites and covered and concealed positions. Training must have a dedicated focus on the basics, like extended medical care, land navigation, and the ability to understand and execute commander’s intent in a manner optimized to any given situation. Education must also include the doctrinal employment of tactical drones and integrating echeloned fires. Leaders at echelon will need to train on how to manage the large number of drones and quickly sort through data for priority intelligence requirements. At the same time, as leaders learn to manage the increase in data, command posts, especially at the brigade through corps levels, must become uncomfortably small. The overarching goal is that leaders at the lowest level know how to survive in an enemy’s kill web and leverage their own to allow their small units to go on the offensive. The training will need to apply to any military occupational specialty with the smallest possibility of operating close to the front line. These training objectives will require a significant increase in available drones to meet the intent prior to conflict.
The future environment will force leaders to adapt the ways they think about and manage risk. For units, it will call the viability of existing standard operating procedures into question. An example of changing procedures is the use of a Moses pole during trench clearing. Does a formation want to clearly marks its lead position with the every present drone threat? And for the Army as a whole, as well as for the joint force, the evolving operational environment and drone and missile advancements will require a reevaluation of risk management. Since World War II, the United States has used its industrial power to send a bullet instead of a service member and use overwhelming firepower to achieve relative advantage in conflict. The abundance of drones in all domains will present an opportunity to buy down risk, while simultaneously creating additional risk across the spectrum of operations. As capabilities increase, multipurpose air or ground drones will be able to execute extremely high-risk operations like a deliberate breach with minimal human forces forward. A mechanized deliberate breach was once the gold standard for brigade combat teams to train for, but will involve an unacceptable risk going forward, given drone technology on either side of the obstacle in the offense or defense. Why send an engineer into a breach when you can send a robot to provide support by fire, another to breach, and a swarm for the initial assault? The same logic applies to other high-risk operations like mine emplacement, causality evacuation, and sustainment operations.
Conversely, the enemy drone threat—like that in the imagined scenario described at this article’s outset—will require a shift in how the US military deploys and arrays forces. The threat that Chinese hypersonic missiles pose to US carriers requires additional analysis in how the US government will assume risk when projecting combat power. Drone formations like the recent Ukrainian one credited with downing the Su-30 will need to clear the way for manned and protected assets like carrier strike groups. The assumption that there is safety in numbers will have to change until the joint force can shape the environment and reduce risk. Commanders will have to become comfortable with their forces operating in a decentralized manner. Just like the Louisiana Maneuvers of the interwar period, this is a mindset change that must be rehearsed prior to conflict to fully understand and experience the nuance.
5. Landpower Will Remain
Regardless of drone and missile development in the future, there will always be a requirement for landpower formations on the ground to maximize system effects. Drones will not replace soldiers. An army is still required to impose will and hold terrain. Additionally, technology can always fail, weather has a vote, and it will require human thought to fill the gap or compensate for shortfalls in technological tools like AI. What is imperative is to get the right mix of personnel and drones within these formations. Airpower and seapower will be challenged by enemy antiaccess and area-denial capabilities during opening engagements. It will be the Army that holds terrain in a disaggregated manner and survives through the periods of extreme high-intensity combat until the joint force can achieve relative advantage. Army forces forward prior to conflict is key to this success. Unlike the air and sea domains, a ground force trained well in reconnaissance and strike tactics can survive for an extended time. The soldier remains the all-weather node at the center of a kill web.
Uncomfortable and Unclear
Although the threats that characterize the modern operational environment continue to evolve, their combined lethality and the challenge they will pose to US forces are clear. There is no time for professional hubris. The decisions the Army makes today to drive its transformation will determine its success in the opening engagements of the next conflict. These changes will require a whole-of-Army approach, from range operations at home station to the doctrinal template a division staff uses to initially array its forces. The required adjustments will be uncomfortable for some and should make all leaders reevaluate their decisions. But they are necessary. Using the five principles above and the Army Transformation Initiative as guideposts, Army leaders at echelon must train and evolve to ensure victory in a war in 2027 and beyond.
Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Suthoff recently served as the commander of 3-4 Cavalry. He currently serves in Colorado with his wife and five children.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Pfc. Matthew Keegan, US Army
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joshua Suthoff · May 16, 2025
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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