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Quotes of the Day:
"Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless."
– Eric Hoffer
"Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."
– John Adams
"The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience."
– Lech Walesa
Apologies for the abridged version today. I only have a short layover in Istanbul and theThe wiFi was spotty on the flight her and I am not sure what service we will have on the flight to Ulaanbaatar.
1. Niall Ferguson: America Is in a Late Republic Stage—Like Rome
2. This ‘Bunker Buster’ U.S. Bomb Could Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
3. How Things Could go from Worse to Devastating for Iran
4. U.S. Strike on Iran Among Options Trump Is Considering
5. Israel Built Its Case for War With Iran on New Intelligence. The U.S. Didn’t Buy It.
6. ‘Regime Change’? Questions About Israel’s Iran Goal Pressure Trump.
7. General in charge of Army’s Next-Gen C2 experiment takes command of unit getting prototype
8. China sends mystery transport planes into Iran
9. China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say
10. China and US Tussle for World's Seaports
11. Imagining the Near-Future of American Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific
12. Iran: Regime Carries Out Massacre In Kermanshah Prison Under Shadow Of War With Israel – OpEd
13. Peace Through Strength Requires a Strong Defense of Human Rights
14. US ally doubles down on missiles angering China
15. Conflict between China, Philippines could involve U.S. and lead to a clash of superpowers
16. Army expects to make more than a million artillery shells next year
1. Niall Ferguson: America Is in a Late Republic Stage—Like Rome
Don't be put off by the headline. This is a thought provoking interview. The excerpt below is a very succinct analysis of the current situation and how we might have arrived here. But your mileage may vary.
Excerpts:
Well, I don’t agree that the United States is somehow aligning itself in any way with the axis of whatever you want to call it, authoritarians, upheaval, or ill will.
What’s odd about the last four years before Trump is that the Biden-Harris administration came in and was welcomed by liberals around the world. “The adults were back in the room.” American foreign policy was going to respect alliances again, and it all went disastrously wrong. The allies have been sorely disappointed. The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq War, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.
What went wrong? The answer is a disastrous failure of deterrence that really began in Afghanistan in 2021, got a lot worse in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and got even worse in 2023 when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Israel. So I think one has to understand the reelection of Donald Trump as partly a public reaction against a very unsuccessful Democratic administration, a little bit like what happened in 1980 when Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and repudiated Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.
I don’t think Donald Trump’s reelection is a big win for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Quite the opposite. I think it’s bad news for them.
06.17.25 — U.S. Politics
Niall Ferguson: America Is in a Late Republic Stage—Like Rome
The historian and Free Press columnist on why America makes a terrible imperial power, how we got ourselves into Cold War II, and why the real culture war has only just begun.
By Nathan Gardels
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-america-late-stage-republic-rome-china-russia-cold-war?r=7i07
This article was produced by and originally published in Noema magazine.
Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson recently sat down with Noema magazine editor in chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the Trump agenda, the conflict with China, polarization in America, and his own conversion to Christianity. This interview is excerpted from a forthcoming Berggruen Institute podcast, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Nathan Gardels: Under the Trump administration’s radical sovereigntism, it appears America is joining the other axes of upheaval, China and Russia, in seeking to build its own sphere of influence, one that challenges the liberal world order founded by the U.S. after World War II.
How do you see this unfolding?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I don’t agree that the United States is somehow aligning itself in any way with the axis of whatever you want to call it, authoritarians, upheaval, or ill will.
What’s odd about the last four years before Trump is that the Biden-Harris administration came in and was welcomed by liberals around the world. “The adults were back in the room.” American foreign policy was going to respect alliances again, and it all went disastrously wrong. The allies have been sorely disappointed. The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq War, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.
What went wrong? The answer is a disastrous failure of deterrence that really began in Afghanistan in 2021, got a lot worse in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and got even worse in 2023 when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Israel. So I think one has to understand the reelection of Donald Trump as partly a public reaction against a very unsuccessful Democratic administration, a little bit like what happened in 1980 when Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and repudiated Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.
I don’t think Donald Trump’s reelection is a big win for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Quite the opposite. I think it’s bad news for them.
President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Let’s just break it down briefly. Many people wrongly thought that it would be beneficial to Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump were reelected. I don’t think this war is going to be ended on Putin’s terms, if it’s going to be ended. Secondly, maximum pressure is now back on Iran. That’s important. Thirdly, tariffs have been increased on China, so the pressure is on China. Little Rocket Man in North Korea is still waiting to get whatever is coming to him, but I don’t think it’s going to be a love letter from the Trump administration.
In short, for the axis of ill will, it’s bad news that Trump is back.
NG: I didn’t mean it in that sense. I meant upheaval in the sense of the liberal international order of free trade and trusted alliances across a unified West. America is moving toward a way of governing itself that is unencumbered by a rules-based system in global affairs that takes into account the interests of others. Trumpist America is leveraging its mercantile might to get its way.
NF: I am always reminded when people talk about the liberal international order of what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: It was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. And the same is true of the liberal international order. It was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly. It’s actually an illusion that such a thing ever existed after 1945.
There was a cold war in which two empires, an American and a Soviet, struggled for power, and the United States at no point ceased to exercise power in the classical sense.
I read so many commentators saying, “How terrible and shocking it is that the United States is reverting to empire after the wonderful time of the liberal international order.” I wrote a book 20 years ago called Colossus, making the point that the United States has been an empire for many years and didn’t stop being an empire in 1945.
The interesting thing about the Cold War was that both empires accused the other of imperialism, each claiming that it wasn’t imperial. But they both, in fact, functionally were empires.
The United States today has much in common with the empires of the past, particularly in its ability to project military and naval power all around the world. So I think we should probably be a little bit more skeptical about the concept of a liberal international order.
Read
Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Foreign Policy? Reality TV Politik
What’s interesting about Trump is that he’s open about it. He wants Greenland. He wants to retake the Panama Canal. And so, in a sense, we’ve gone back to the era of President William McKinley at the turn of the 20th century. But that’s not surprising, because Trump told us in the campaign back in the summer that McKinley was his hero, and that was not just the “tariff man” McKinley, but clearly also the McKinley who acquired, after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines with an option on Cuba. So I think we are just back in a late 19th-century mode with Donald Trump.
One of the points I made in Colossus was that the United States is not actually very good at being an empire by the standards of, say, Britain in the 19th century. There’s a structural problem with an American empire, which is worth spelling out.
There are deficits that make it hard to be an effective empire. There’s a deficit in terms of manpower. I mean, America imports people. It doesn’t really export people. Very few Americans want to spend large amounts of time in hot, poor, dangerous places. Hence, the six-month tour of duty for the military abroad.
A parade is held for the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in Moscow, USSR, on November 7, 1967. (via Getty Images)
There’s another kind of deficit, which is the fiscal deficit. America can’t afford to occupy zones across the planet the way the British or the French did.
Presently, there is also the problem that America is now spending more on debt interest payments than on the defense budget for the first time in its history. When that is the case, you’re probably in trouble. That’s been true, more or less, of every empire since 16th-century Spain.
And finally, there’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly, and that makes it very hard to complete them, whether it’s in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
All these are structural problems. The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business, and this causes American power to oscillate. There are periods of strength, then there are periods of retreat. And after Trump overreaches, which he doubtless will, there’ll be another bout of retreat. We’ve seen this movie several times.
NG: How do you see the constellation of powers evolving going forward?
NF: We’re in Cold War II, and we’ve been in it for at least six years.
The People’s Republic of China is playing the part of the Soviet Union, and the United States is the United States. First of all, you can tell it’s a cold war because there are only two superpowers.
The second is that there’s a clear ideological difference between the two, and it’s become more pronounced since Xi Jinping became the Chinese leader and emphasized the Marxist-Leninist roots of the People’s Republic of China.
The United States, even with Donald Trump as president, is fundamentally different. It’s a two-party system, not a one-party system. It’s a system in which the rule of law is real in the sense that even the president is constrained by the law. He may not like it, but he is, and he will be, and that’s fundamentally different from China.
And as in the first cold war, they’re engaged in a technological race as well as in classic geopolitical contests over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Cold War II is still at a relatively early stage. Yet, already, more or less everything that’s going on in the world can be seen in that context. For example, the war in Ukraine was like the Korean War in 1950, the moment that a hot war made it clear that the world was now a world of two blocs.
If you look at who supports Ukraine and who supports Russia, it is basically the same as who supported South Korea and who supported North Korea in the early 1950s. The Middle East was also a Cold War theater. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was probably the most important in those days, and here we are again. Fifty years later almost to the day, there’s a surprise attack on Israel, and we all have to focus, once again, on the Middle East.
Taliban security personnel stand guard along a street at a checkpoint in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan on April 4, 2023. (Omer Abrar/AFP via Getty Images)
So, I think it’s easier to figure this out if one just thinks that we had an interwar period from about 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, until 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power, and certainly until 2016, when Donald Trump came to power.
In that interwar period between the two cold wars, we all had a great time. Give or take the odd financial crisis or terrorist attack, there was relative peace.
Importantly, being back in a cold war is no guarantee that the outcome will be the same, that the U.S. somehow wins all cold wars.
China is a much more formidable opponent than the Soviet Union ever was. So this is a tougher cold war for the United States. Let’s just understand that we had a very nice interwar period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now there’s a new Marxist-Leninist superpower that is an even bigger challenge than the last one.
NG: So it’s basically a bipolar order going forward?
NF: Yes. And you can see that if you spend time in Europe.
Europeans would like to be players, but they’re not. They can’t exercise strategic autonomy. The war in Ukraine was thrust upon them as a result of the failure of American deterrence. Once that deterrence failed and Russia launched its invasion, it was the American decision to support [Volodymyr] Zelensky when he refused to flee. That, in turn, forced the war and the European allies. Essentially, Europe has been a passenger. European leaders have talked for years about strategic autonomy. The war in Ukraine revealed that they are very far from having it, and it will take many years for them to have it. They are also not contenders in the AI race, and that is pretty fundamental.
“The liberal international order was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly.” —Niall Ferguson
NG: China and Russia regard themselves these days as “civilizational states,” a way to legitimize their power through the continuity of history. In response to that, you have a lot of people in the West—Elon Musk, [Italian prime minister] Giorgia Meloni, [Hungarian prime minister] Viktor Orbán—saying what they are about is defending their own civilization.
For the Italian prime minister, Western civilization means, as she has put it: Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism. So this is kind of a mirror reaction to the claims of Russia and China. Do you see this as an element of the conflict? That it’s a cultural and civilizational clash as well as an ideological one?
NF: Yes, I do. I wrote a book called Civilization quite a few years ago. The subtitle was The West and the Rest. The argument of the book was that something very extraordinary happened in the world around 1600. People from Western Europe started to leap ahead of the rest of the world in a variety of different ways. They evolved different systems of governance predicated on competition rather than political monopoly. That’s important.
They also pioneered a scientific method that was different from anything that had been done before, and far more effective at establishing ways of managing the natural world as well as understanding it. They also built systems of law—common law and civil law—based on the idea of private property as the foundation. They pioneered modern medicine. They had a different attitude toward consumption and work.
All these different ideas and institutions evolved over time, uniquely in the West, by which I mean Western Europe and the places where people from Western Europe settled in large numbers, like North America.
Other civilizations existed around the world, such as Islamic civilization, but that was fundamentally different. It achieved a great many things, but it didn’t achieve what I’ve just described. Chinese civilization was far more advanced in, say, the year 1000 than anything in Western Europe. But for most of the next millennium, China stagnated.
That is history. Now we are living through the end of that period of Western ascendancy.
An employee packages garments for the online Chinese e-commerce company Temu at a clothing factory in Guangzhou, China, on April 16, 2025. (Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images)
Why is that? It is because the rest of the world finally realized, if you can’t beat them, join them. And so, people in non-Western societies, beginning in Japan, downloaded the killer apps of Western civilization. It’s amazing that it took so long. It took into the late 20th century for China to accept that there really was only one path to prosperity, and it involved markets, it involved science. You couldn’t rig those because of Mao’s ideological predilections. Once they finally recognized this, the Chinese caught up and they caught up really quickly.
If you think of history as starting in 1600, there is not a huge difference between Chinese and European incomes. But it diverges spectacularly all the way until 1979, when, on a purchasing power basis, the average American was 22 times richer than the average Chinese. Now, in 2025, it’s maybe three times because there’s been a dramatic reconvergence. That’s the story of our time.
The problem for the Chinese is that they did not download all the killer apps. They were never willing to download the political competition app; that is to say, the idea that there should be competition between institutions, branches of government, and parties. Without that, they can’t really have rule of law, because you can’t have rule of law if there’s no accountability through a system of justice.
So what the Chinese did was to say, “Yeah, we’ll take science, and we’ll certainly take modern medicine, we’ll have a consumer society, and we’ll have a work ethic, but we just don’t want those institutions that presuppose competition and private property rights.” That is why, in my view, their system can’t succeed. It is incomplete and thus fundamentally doomed. Over the next 10 or 20 years, it will unravel.
Still, in the short term, China poses a grave threat not only to the U.S. but to its allies. There is, first of all, the dramatic race for military parity. And the threat is especially dangerous right now because the United States and its allies are terribly overstretched and underfunded. We are in a situation in which, because of the end of the first Cold War, we thought we owed ourselves a peace dividend that led to a drastic decline in investment in defense technology. That complacency has left us very vulnerable, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.
“There’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly.” —Niall Ferguson
Right now, there’s a window of great danger, as there was in the 1930s and as there was again in the 1960s and ’70s, when totalitarian regimes had a capacity to wage war on free societies and conceivably could win such a war. We must not allow them to acquire a decisive technological—and particularly military technological—advantage, because if they have it, they’re highly likely to use it. Assuming we do that, over a 10- or 20-year time frame, free societies are likely to prevail because they will be more innovative.
NG: Where does AI fit into all this? It seems a comforting myth in the West that China can’t innovate. But look at the Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which matches the best of the West in generative AI, no less, as an open-source model.
NF: A great deal of confusion has come into this debate because people use terms like artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) interchangeably. Large language models are a part of AI, but not, in my view, the most important part.
Much of what they do is, in a sense, fake human discourse and allow us quickly to generate texts that seem human, though they’re not generated through human intelligence. This is a toy, really. It’s a toy that allows you to generate books in seconds. It allows you to generate images in seconds. These things are essentially fake human content. There’s some use for this. It probably poses a mortal threat to search engines like Google’s. But that’s not what matters about AI.
What matters is its ability to do scientific research on a scale never before possible and, because of the harnessing of enormous computational power, to discover and design, for example, new viruses. It’s the power of the scientific AI that should worry us.
Chinese president Xi Jinping looks on during a ceremony to mark China’s 10th Martyrs’ Day at Tiananmen Square on September 30, 2023, in Beijing, China. (Ken Ishii/Pool/Getty Images)-
It’s also clear that you can have AI-enabled weapon systems in which decisions about targeting and shooting are not taken by human actors, but are taken much more rapidly by artificial intelligence. What worried Henry Kissinger in the later years of his life were not the LLMs but the applications of AI to scientific research, and particularly to weapons systems.
Whatever we may say about how we’ll restrain ourselves, I don’t think there’s any guarantee that China will restrain itself. We know the kind of work they were already doing on viruses before AI, the “gain-of-function research” that very likely was connected to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan. I shudder to think what kind of experiments are going on now with AI that makes it possible to conduct far more radical scientific exploration of virus structures. That’s just one example of why we should be worried.
For most of history, things that went on in the natural world were unintelligible to human beings, so we attributed them to gods or other extraterrestrial forces. The thing that’s interesting about AI is that it has created a new possibility of bewildering outcomes that we cannot explain. And we won’t attribute them to gods. We’ll attribute them to large language models. We’ll attribute them to AI. What worried Kissinger was the sense that things were going to become as unfathomable as they had been to medieval peasants.
NG: So all those advances in knowledge take us back to a kind of ignorance.
NF: Yes, they basically demote us. Artificial intelligence is the creation of an alien and superior intelligence in our midst, not coming from far away in another universe. In our imagination, we always assumed aliens would come from another world. But it turns out that we’re going to build them ourselves and endow them with intelligence that will ultimately be superior to us.
We should be very wary of where that is likely to lead. At the very least, we risk sharing the fate of the horses. Now, horses still exist, and very picturesque they can be. But long ago, they ceased to be the main form of transportation for human beings who needed to get somewhere in a hurry. Just as they were replaced, we are in danger of replacing ourselves the way we once replaced the horses.
“The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business.” —Niall Ferguson
NG: We’ve had this kind of extremely liberal open society in America that accommodates radical woke thought. Now things seem to have shifted to the prevailing ascent of what some call “the strong gods—family, faith, and nation,” that hearkens back to traditionalist Christian values. Are we witnessing the last sigh of liberalism as the dominant philosophy, or just going through another cycle that will turn again?
NF: I think what was striking about the Great Awokening, the last diffusion of extreme progressive ideology, was how intolerant it was. It made life extremely unpleasant on university campuses because the intolerance of radical progressives for any ideas to the right of themselves was a distinguishing feature of their brief reign of moral terror. In truth, for most of the last 60 years, most people retained considerable allegiance to faith and to nation and to family. You might have been flying over them between Los Angeles and New York, but that was, broadly speaking, the case.
What happened in the 1960s was that the elites, beginning in the English-speaking world, embraced a quite radical social change in which sexuality was far less strictly controlled, in which a whole range of different beliefs were given legitimacy and the gods of the Victorians of the 19th century were ridiculed and mocked.
What happened in the last 10 years was that the radical left, having been entirely defeated in the field of economics, decided to adopt a radical identity politics, aiming to transform our understanding of American history and of today’s American society in a way that was deliberately divisive and hostile to individual identity. It reemphasized racial difference, abandoning the notion that a society could be color-blind. It weaponized categories like “transgender,” a tiny minority of people.
All of these things were calculated to create a new and revolutionary cultural environment. This was achieved to a large extent in many universities, but it didn’t really extend very far. And in fact, when one looks at the polling around the last election, you realize that the left of the Democratic Party on a whole range of issues, like, for example, the rights of transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, diverged so far from mainstream opinion that they were almost off the charts. Mainstream opinion, regardless of whether it was the opinion of a white person or a brown person, hadn’t moved nearly as far on those identity issues as the left wanted to go.
So what has happened isn’t really a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.
Ukrainian servicemen conduct a field training exercise in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on February 16, 2025. (Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images)
NG: So this silent majority, culturally and politically, has basically reemerged.
NF: It never went away, but simply reasserted itself in the face of a very intemperate, radically progressive movement that had detached itself from social reality. When Richard Nixon used the phrase “silent majority,” it was in response to anti-war protests in 1968-69. He understood that if you just did the numbers, the people protesting were a tiny minority of Americans. Most Americans were not actually with them, and so the appeal to a silent majority was a shrewd move by Nixon to exploit the fact that most people are, in fact, quite socially conservative and are not particularly interested in revolutions in their norms.
But the left forgot that again, and it walked into the same trap that the left walked into in ’68, which was to go too far in radicalizing relations between the sexes and relations between the races. If you go too far in that direction, the silent majority says, “Hang on, we’re going to stop being silent as long as it takes to shut you up.”
NG: In your personal life, both you and your wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have converted to Christianity. Does that fit into this larger cultural moment?
NF: My parents left the Church of Scotland before I was even born. My mother, as a physicist, was a strict rationalist, long before anyone had heard of Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker. I was brought up in a household in which the official line was that life was a cosmic accident.
I abandoned atheism, which is a form of faith in itself, in two steps. First, through historical study I understood that no society based on atheism had been anything other than disastrous. In fact, the correlation between repudiation of religion and extreme violence is very close. The worst regimes in history engaged in anticlerical activity, the Bolshevik regime, or say, Mao’s regime in China, not to mention the Nazis. Like [Alexis de] Tocqueville, I didn’t have any religious faith, but I felt it would be good if people generally did.
The second step that led me to become a Christian was the realization that one couldn’t organize one’s life as an individual or as a family without religious faith, and that the teachings of Christ are an extraordinarily powerful and revolutionary solution to some of the central problems of human existence.
“A revival of religious faith is probably the only way that we in the West will be able to withstand the challenges that we currently face.” —Niall Ferguson
We haven’t come up with anything better. Indeed, all attempts to come up with alternatives have, I think, been failures. So, for very personal reasons, my wife and I arrived at Christianity because there seemed to be no other way for us to live good, fulfilled lives and be effective parents.
A revival of religious faith is probably the only way that we in the West will be able to withstand the challenges that we currently face. It’s simply not feasible for us to have the strength to withstand the challenges from the Communist regimes in China and North Korea, the challenges from the nihilistic fascist regime in Russia, the challenge from Iran, the challenge from radical Islam. We can’t withstand those challenges with the scriptures of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. That’s not enough.
NG: President Trump has launched a tariff war, as promised, mostly aimed at China. Your thoughts?
NF: Donald Trump in 2016 was the first politician in a generation to stand up to the Chinese challenge. That was one of the reasons he won. And in his mind, tariffs were an important instrument for that return to a more combative approach. But it is not the only instrument. I don’t think we can separate the tariffs from the tech war. They weren’t separate in 2018-19, and they won’t be separate now.
The United States then not only imposed tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S.; more importantly, it imposed export controls on critical technology, particularly semiconductors going to China. We can trace that back to Trump, but it was stepped up by Joe Biden.
That is actually more important than the tariffs in the U.S.-China rivalry, because they strike at China’s ability to compete technologically, particularly in AI. That’s why this isn’t just going to be a tit-for-tat game about tariffs. It will also involve measures relating to technology, including the kind of rare earth minerals that China has considerable control over. Those things matter, not least because of their importance to technology in the West.
NG: You wrote a book a few years ago, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook.
What we have today is a social media ecosystem that both concentrates control—the tower—but also empowers a multitude of voices—the square. Republics have always put in place checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place. One of the impacts of this diversity of voices and fragmentation of the body politic is that different tribal silos don’t speak to each other.
NF: It occurs to me now that Americans are in much the same place as people in Glasgow when I was growing up. In Glasgow, there were two completely separate communities, Catholics and Protestants, Celtic and Rangers. They did not intermarry. They barely spoke when they met. They fought.
Americans have arrived at a Glaswegian state of polarization along partisan lines. Republicans and Democrats occupy separate cultural spaces, separate networks. Soon, there won’t be Democrats on X; they’ll all have gone to Bluesky. And this means that the two communities are becoming entirely separate, to the point that there is no longer intermingling across the partisan divide.
“In our imagination, we always assumed aliens would come from another world. But it turns out that we’re going to build them ourselves and endow them with intelligence that will ultimately be superior to us.” —Niall Ferguson
That’s quite dangerous, I think, for a republic, not because there’s no public sphere. It still exists. It’s just that the two rival clans or rival sects refuse to engage with one another in good faith.
I don’t know how you fix that. It may be inherent in the way that the internet has evolved structurally that we have ended up in a giant Glasgow. I’m not quite sure where that leads, probably just to a kind of schizophrenic politics, in which small changes at the margins in a small number of counties in a small number of states cause the politics to swing radically from Rangers to Celtic, from Republicans to Democrats.
And each time this happens, we see more of the pathological behavior we saw at the end of the Biden administration, with the wild, preemptive pardoning of family members.
If I could strike a very pessimistic note for a moment, there is some sense of being in the late republic in America today, by which I mean that the institutions of the republic are being corroded by a latent civil war in which the stakes of political defeat become too high. That’s something of what eroded the Roman Republic and paved the way to the Empire.
My sense is that history has always been against any republic lasting 250 years. So this American republic is in its late republican phase with the intimations of empire, to bring our conversation back to where it began. That is the thing I worry about most as an American.
To read the original Q&A and similar essays in English, visit noemamag.com.
2. This ‘Bunker Buster’ U.S. Bomb Could Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
Excerpts:
If the U.S. were to get involved, it would make sense for it to take on hardened targets like Fordow and Natanz, said Mick Mulroy, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. Destroying them could take half a dozen MOPs apiece, he said.
...
Israel has a plan for Fordow and the ability to carry it out on its own, a senior Israeli military official said without elaborating. It is also taking a broader view of its mission by attacking Iran’s military leadership and nuclear scientists as well as components of the nuclear program itself.
Ehud Eilam, a former researcher for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, said Israel could send a large number of its own, smaller penetrator bombs to dig their way into Fordow, as Israel did when it killed the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bunker under Beirut. It could also try a risky commando raid or more-covert means such as cyberattacks and targeted killings, he said.
An MOP dropped by a B-2 bomber could be simpler and better.
“The approach with the highest confidence of success would be a U.S. strike,” said William Wechsler, who was deputy assistant defense secretary for special operations under President Barack Obama.
This ‘Bunker Buster’ U.S. Bomb Could Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
The 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator is considered by analysts to be the best chance at getting through to deeply buried targets
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/bunker-buster-bomb-iran-israel-conflict-fordow-1a65efca?st=2RAbGe&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
By Benoit Faucon
Follow and Andrew Dowell
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June 17, 2025 7:00 pm ET
The GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator, is designed to be delivered by B-2 stealth bombers. Photo: U.S. Air Force/AP
The best shot at knocking out the most fortified part of Iran’s nuclear program comes down to a giant U.S. bomb that has never been used in war.
The GBU-57—also called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator—is a 30,000-pound behemoth encased in a high-density steel alloy designed to plummet through 200 feet of mountain rock before exploding.
Military analysts said that large bunker buster has the best chance of getting through to such targets as the Fordow uranium-enrichment facility, which Iran buried under a mountain. Its existence has driven speculation that the U.S. could get involved in Israel’s attack.
“This is really what it was designed for,” said Mark Cancian, who matched bombs to targets in the military and later worked at the Pentagon on procurement and budgeting, including for programs like the MOP.
Before bunker busters, the military figured it could turn to nuclear weapons to blast through mountains, but those were seen as unpalatable for political reasons, said Cancian, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Later, the U.S. worked on a new conventional alternative and spent about $400 million to develop and refine the MOP, he said. The U.S. now has around 20 of the giant explosives, he said, designed to be delivered by B-2 stealth bombers.
“It’s a really specialized weapon for a very specialized set of targets that don’t come up very often,” Cancian said.
Approximate penetrative power of U.S. bunker busters
Missiles are dropped at a 45° angle to maximize depth
0 feet
reinforced concrete
GBU-28C
Mass: 4,000-5,000 lbs.
Explosive fill: Tritonal
100
MOP GBU-57
200
Mass: 30,000 lbs.
Explosive fill: Polymer-bonded explosives
Estimated depth of Fordow enrichment plant
300
Note: Depth of missile strike is dependent on ground material; measurements shown are depth in reinforced concrete.
Sources: RUSI, staff reports
Adrienne Tong/WSJ
Israel on Friday launched a campaign of intelligence operations and hundreds of airstrikes aimed at setting back Iran’s nuclear program and hobbling its regime.
Israel notched direct hits on Iran’s underground centrifuge halls at Natanz, some 140 miles south of Tehran, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But it has yet to attack Iran’s other enrichment site, Fordow, in central Iran, near the holy city of Qom.
The U.S., which hasn’t joined Israel in the attacks, began building up its military assets in the region in recent days, including bringing in a second aircraft-carrier group. President Trump, who has pushed for a diplomatic solution all year, has turned more bellicose, suggesting Tuesday on social media that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be killed and calling for unconditional surrender.
If the U.S. were to get involved, it would make sense for it to take on hardened targets like Fordow and Natanz, said Mick Mulroy, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. Destroying them could take half a dozen MOPs apiece, he said.
Fordow site
Terrain-protected ancillary services building, likely including HVAC equipment
Main centrifuge hall
Tunnel
entrances
Checkpoint
Security
perimeter
Note: Centrifuge diagram is schematic and may not be to scale.
Sources: Institute for Science and International Security (annotations); Maxar (satellite image)
The United Nations atomic-energy chief has warned of safety concerns from attacking nuclear sites, but other nuclear experts say the radiation risks of an attack on Fordow are low.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported radiological and chemical contamination inside Natanz, which was bombed Friday, but normal radiation outside.
“If anything were to be dropped on Fordow, there is not a risk of radiation contamination from the attack outside of the site,” said Scott Roecker, vice president for nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank.
Israel has a plan for Fordow and the ability to carry it out on its own, a senior Israeli military official said without elaborating. It is also taking a broader view of its mission by attacking Iran’s military leadership and nuclear scientists as well as components of the nuclear program itself.
Ehud Eilam, a former researcher for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, said Israel could send a large number of its own, smaller penetrator bombs to dig their way into Fordow, as Israel did when it killed the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bunker under Beirut. It could also try a risky commando raid or more-covert means such as cyberattacks and targeted killings, he said.
An MOP dropped by a B-2 bomber could be simpler and better.
“The approach with the highest confidence of success would be a U.S. strike,” said William Wechsler, who was deputy assistant defense secretary for special operations under President Barack Obama.
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com
Appeared in the June 18, 2025, print edition as 'The 30,000-Pound Solution'.
3. How Things Could go from Worse to Devastating for Iran
Is regime change a possibility? If so, what are we doing to prepare for the possibility? The eventuality?
To put in in doctrinal terms the question that we should all know to ask: who has been conducting unconventional warfare preparation of the environment for what comes next? If we are not (or have not been) conducting UW PE we are going to get caught flat footed as we almost always do. I could make the case that we should be conducting UW PE for all the CRInK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) eventually these authoritarian regimes will likely collapse based on their own inherent internal contradictions. Sure some look strong at the moment but it will happen- gradually, imperceptibly, and then all at once.
Military planners owe options to the CINC. Some options such as UW require preparation to be able to execute them when the CINC demands them to be executed. But it all depends on what the CINC designates as the acceptable durable political arrangement that will serve US interests. If the regime collapses do we want to influence what comes next? Do we want the CINC to have the option to influence what comes next? Effective UW does not have to lead to nation building by the US. That is the task for the Iranian people and its next government. But our failure to anticipate what might come next and what options the CINC might demand is, well,... our failure.
Excerpts:
Sources have reported that President Donald Trump objected to an Israeli plan early on to target Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But as the conflict escalates and Trump puts more pressure on Iran to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, the idea of regime change – according to some experts – shouldn’t be off the table.
“His death would throw an already-confused regime into even more chaos, making regime collapse and change more likely,” said Roule. “Most of the world’s Shi’a follow leaders who advocate a less severe and less activist form of religious rule. He will have followers within Iran and outside, particularly among Lebanese Hezbollah, who will seek revenge and blame the United States for his killing.”
While the U.S. and Israel have killed other senior Iranian leaders in the past, including Hasan Nasrallah, Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani, Yahya Sinwar, and others, threat of retaliation didn’t have much of an impact. “But the Supreme Leader is in a different category,” says Roule. “Targeting him has likely been the subject of considerable debate within Israel, weighing the risks against the potential gains.”
It was a U.S.-led drone strike that killed General Soleimani in January, 2020 prompting fears then of massive retaliation. “It is impossible to overstate the significance of this action,” former CIA Director General David Petraeus (Ret.) told us at the time. “Soleimani was, in U.S. terms, a combination of CIA Director, JSOC Commander, and Special Presidential Envoy for the Mideast. He was the second most important person in Iran and the architect and commander of Iranian initiatives to solidify control over the Shia Crescent. He had the blood of hundreds of American and coalition soldiers on his hands and that of countless of our Iraqi and partner elements in the region.”
Roule estimates that if the Supreme Leader were to be targeted or killed in the current operation, “the weight of regime decision-making would shift dramatically, likely to a hardline group of Khamenei’s current inner circle advisors who are closely allied to the Revolutionary Guard. Appointing a successor would be difficult in wartime, but it may be possible, particularly if seen as a placeholder. Any successor would lack Khamenei’s stature, however, and thus wouldn’t strengthen the regime in the long term.”
How Things Could go from Worse to Devastating for Iran
Could Iran's Regime Survive an Escalation? Experts Weigh In.
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/damage-to-iran
17 June, 2025
How Things Could go from Worse to Devastating for Iran (How Things Could go from Worse to Devastating for Iran)
By Suzanne Kelly
CEO and Publisher
Suzanne Kelly is CEO and Publisher of The Cipher Brief
CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING – Given the state of damage Iran has suffered since Israel launched a devastating round of airstrikes targeting nuclear and military leaders last Thursday – and an increasing sense of urgency in Washington, experts are gauging the potential for things to go from worse to devastating not only for Tehran’s nuclear program, but for its regime.
As the U.S. reportedly relocates refueling aircraft to Europe, Israel’s military says it now has complete control over Tehran’s air space. Israeli officials are issuing evacuation warnings to many of the 10 million Iranians living in parts of the capital that may be targeted in the coming days. And that warning was reiterated by President Donald Trump as he abruptly left a meeting of G7 leaders in Canada on Monday.
related
“Iran should have signed the “deal” I told them to sign,” President Trump posted on social media. “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” wrote President Trump as the White House announced he was leaving the G7 meeting early “because of what’s going on in the Middle East”.
The World Wants to Know, What’s the Plan?
Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have offered to play a role in de-escalating the situation but President Trump says he’s working on something much bigger than a ceasefire.
“We have plans,” General Frank McKenzie, former Commander of U.S. Central Command told The Cipher Brief in a video interview on Friday, just hours after Israel’s airstrikes began. When asked whether the potential for U.S. involvement in Israel’s ongoing operation would be something that U.S. military planners are considering in a case like this, McKenzie explained, “We have plans for virtually any contingency in the Middle East, including this particular contingency, and we would be prepared to execute those plans if the President of the United States directed us to do so.”
While the president hasn’t yet detailed what his plans might be, he has directed the deployment of more than 30 U.S. refueling aircraft to the region. The USS Nimitz is also expected to join assets that are already pre-positioned for any potential U.S. military engagement.
How Bad is It for Iran Right Now?
Israel has already inflicted significant damage on Iran’s nuclear and military program since its airstrikes began five days ago. “The Israelis have inflicted profound damage that will set back the nuclear program many months, if not years,” former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI, Norm Roule told The Cipher Brief. “The damage includes the loss of significant personnel, with the killing of multiple senior nuclear program managers who understood how to build, manage, and maintain large nuclear programs.”
Roule says the destruction of Iran’s above-ground installations has cost Iran a key centrifuge facility and a power facility, and that the attack on the power facility likely also damaged thousands of underground centrifuges, due to the sudden loss of power.
“The destruction of a uranium-metal production facility, conversion plant, and fuel fabrication buildings at Esfahan set back a key aspect of the program needed for weaponization and fuel production,” said Roule. “The attacks appear to have caused above-ground damage at Fordow, but most of the facility remains intact, underground. Until Fordow is destroyed, Israel will not have achieved the nuclear-related goals of this operation.”
Roule estimates that complete destruction of the Fordow facility will likely require either U.S. military involvement or Iran’s voluntary dismantling of the site as part of the nuclear deal as laid out by the U.S. Administration.
But the broader damage to the country’s military has been profound and likely permanent, according to experts who note that Israel’s initial raids wiped out most of the country’s senior nuclear and military leadership, destroyed much of its air force and eroded a significant portion of its missile launch capability.
“The regime may control the streets of Tehran in name, but Israel effectively controls its near-term future,” said Roule. “Jerusalem will decide which ministries will remain intact, whether fuel depots will be destroyed, and so on. And to use a regime phrase often directed against the U.S. and Israel by Iran’s leaders since the beginning of the Islamic Republic, there “isn’t a damn thing (the Islamic Republic) can do about it.” Indeed, the Supreme Leader of Iran has effectively gone into hiding to stay alive.”
How Much Worse Could it Get?
Cipher Brief Expert and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander retired Admiral James Stavridis, writing in Bloomberg, said a possible strategy for destroying Iran’s nuclear program - as part of a joint Israeli-U.S. operation - would likely begin with a comprehensive cyberwar campaign “probably coinciding with an onslaught of cruise missiles and drones attacking Tehran’s remaining Russian-supplied S-300 and S-200 air-defense stations, and Iranian surface-to-air systems like the Bavar 373 or Khordad 15. The cyber-offensive would best be set off inside Tehran’s military electric grid: The Israelis probably have that ability — essentially cyber-boots on the ground” eventually leading to “heavy air strikes, probably led by US B-2 Spirit strategic bombers carrying 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators, aka “bunker busters.”
If Iran Strikes Back
Many experts agree that Iran, which has launched a series of retaliatory missile strikes against Israel since Thursday, would increase the number of missile strikes as well as “bombings at U.S. and Israeli embassies and commercial facilities worldwide would be likely and cyberattacks a certainty,” according to Stavridis.
“Tehran might close the Strait of Hormuz with mines, small craft and short-range surface-to-surface missiles,” Stavridis wrote in Bloomberg, “This would shut down 35% of the world’s oil and gas shipments, and it would take perhaps months for the U.S. and allies to reopen it. Tehran might also strike at Saudi or UAE offshore oil and gas facilities or even attack the Saudis’ main energy facilities on land.
Perhaps the biggest concern expressed by U.S. leaders both officially and unofficially since Thursday’s attacks began, is the potential for Iran to target American military personnel stationed in the region, who are well within range of Iranian missiles. According to McKenzie, those missiles could “gain a much higher volume of fires against those targets”.
“But here's the problem,” he told us. “If they did that, they're going to kill Americans. That's probably going to bring the United States into this war. And if the United States comes into this war as a result of an Iranian attack on American troops, I don't know that regime change would be off the table. They've got to be very much aware of this. We should remember that the overall priority for Iranian state craft remains regime preservation.”
The Implications of Regime Change
Sources have reported that President Donald Trump objected to an Israeli plan early on to target Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But as the conflict escalates and Trump puts more pressure on Iran to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, the idea of regime change – according to some experts – shouldn’t be off the table.
“His death would throw an already-confused regime into even more chaos, making regime collapse and change more likely,” said Roule. “Most of the world’s Shi’a follow leaders who advocate a less severe and less activist form of religious rule. He will have followers within Iran and outside, particularly among Lebanese Hezbollah, who will seek revenge and blame the United States for his killing.”
While the U.S. and Israel have killed other senior Iranian leaders in the past, including Hasan Nasrallah, Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani, Yahya Sinwar, and others, threat of retaliation didn’t have much of an impact. “But the Supreme Leader is in a different category,” says Roule. “Targeting him has likely been the subject of considerable debate within Israel, weighing the risks against the potential gains.”
It was a U.S.-led drone strike that killed General Soleimani in January, 2020 prompting fears then of massive retaliation. “It is impossible to overstate the significance of this action,” former CIA Director General David Petraeus (Ret.) told us at the time. “Soleimani was, in U.S. terms, a combination of CIA Director, JSOC Commander, and Special Presidential Envoy for the Mideast. He was the second most important person in Iran and the architect and commander of Iranian initiatives to solidify control over the Shia Crescent. He had the blood of hundreds of American and coalition soldiers on his hands and that of countless of our Iraqi and partner elements in the region.”
Roule estimates that if the Supreme Leader were to be targeted or killed in the current operation, “the weight of regime decision-making would shift dramatically, likely to a hardline group of Khamenei’s current inner circle advisors who are closely allied to the Revolutionary Guard. Appointing a successor would be difficult in wartime, but it may be possible, particularly if seen as a placeholder. Any successor would lack Khamenei’s stature, however, and thus wouldn’t strengthen the regime in the long term.”
Roule proposes additional considerations if in fact the regime were to fall, including the possibility of a military coup led by Revolutionary Guard officials, warning that if the country falls into chaos, it will be important to secure nuclear material as quickly as possible.
What Instruments of Power Does Iran Still Have?
Iran’s regional proxies – nurtured at a cost of billions of dollars over many years – have lost the majority of their power. Iran’s stronghold in Syria disintegrated with the overthrow of former President Bashar Al-Assad. Hamas has lost its leadership and its ability to launch any kind of significant attack after years of Israeli decimation following the brutal terrorist attack it launched on Israel in October of 2023.
“Iran has a real problem because they also lost Lebanese Hezbollah, which was their strategic hedge against Israel,” said General McKenzie. “They've been decapitated. They will replace commanders. They have people they can bring up, so the Quds force will remain a potent and capable force. That's not going to go away. But again, it serves the ultimate ends of Iranian policy. So, the question to ask is really, where's Iranian policy going to go?”
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4. U.S. Strike on Iran Among Options Trump Is Considering
And what comes next if we conduct a strike(s)?
I am sure CENTCOM and SOCCENT have been burning the midnight oil to develop options.
U.S. Strike on Iran Among Options Trump Is Considering
The president called for unconditional surrender from Iran and warned that he was losing patience
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-calls-for-unconditional-surrender-as-he-loses-patience-with-iran-773cb20d
By Tarini Parti
Follow, Alex Leary
Follow and Josh Dawsey
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Updated June 17, 2025 4:04 pm ET
President Trump disembarking Air Force One on Tuesday after returning early from the G-7 leaders’ summit. Photo: kevin lamarque/Reuters
Key Points
What's This?
- Trump was meeting with national security advisers to discuss the U.S. response to rising tensions in the Middle East.
- Trump warned Iran he is losing patience, calling for unconditional surrender and saying Tehran lost control of its airspace.
- The U.S. has expanded its military presence in the region as the war between Israel and Iran continues.
WASHINGTON—President Trump met in the Situation Room with his national security advisers on Tuesday afternoon as he considered his response to tensions in the Middle East, including a potential U.S. strike against Iran, according to administration officials.
The officials said a strike was just one of the options Trump was considering and no decision has been made. The president, who had been pressing for a diplomatic solution, wants to ensure that Iran isn’t able to develop its nuclear capabilities, the officials said. The U.S. has expanded its military footprint in the region as the war between Israel and Iran entered a fifth day.
Trump gathered his team shortly after warning on social media earlier Tuesday that he is losing patience with Iran, calling for unconditional surrender.
Trump said the U.S. knows where Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is hiding. “He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding, “Our patience is wearing thin.”
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he wrote in a separate post.
Trump also said Tehran had lost control of Iran’s airspace. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump wrote. “Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”
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President Trump called Iran’s supreme leader an ‘easy target.’ Earlier, Trump said he was seeking a real end’ to the Israel-Iran conflict, after departing early from the G-7 summit. Photo: Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
In his posts, Trump used the word “we,” but it wasn’t immediately clear if that meant that the U.S. is taking a more active role in Israel’s unfolding attacks on Iran. The U.S. has said it hasn’t joined Israel’s strikes.
Trump returned to Washington early Tuesday morning, leaving a Group of Seven leaders’ summit in Canada a day early to focus on the crisis in the Middle East. Aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters he was looking for a “real end” to the conflict, not a cease-fire.
Trump is facing political pressure from core supporters not to pull the U.S. into the conflict, reflecting his campaign trail pledge to avoid foreign entanglements. But as the president grows more frustrated with Iran, the White House has left room for possible action.
Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media on Tuesday that Trump “may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment,” but he didn’t specify what that would entail.
A Marine stands outside the West Wing of the White House on Tuesday. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“President Donald J. Trump has never wavered in his stance that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon—a pledge he has made repeatedly, both in office and on the campaign trail,” a White House account posted Monday night on X.
Although the White House has so far said the U.S. isn’t joining Israel’s attacks, American military assets have been moved to the region in recent days. A third U.S. Navy destroyer entered the eastern Mediterranean Sea to help defend Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles, and a second U.S. carrier strike group was heading toward the Arabian Sea.
Some Republican senators backed Trump’s more aggressive tone toward Iran. “We do not want to use force, but we will if we must,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) who talks to Trump regularly.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) recently talked to Trump about Iran. “I think he’s handling it very, very deftly,” he said. “And, you know, he’s been very clear, Iran’s not going to get a nuke.”
Smoke from an overnight Israeli strike on Tehran. Photo: atta kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Write to Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com and Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com
Appeared in the June 18, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Weighs Possible Strike on Iran'.
5. Israel Built Its Case for War With Iran on New Intelligence. The U.S. Didn’t Buy It.
Israel Built Its Case for War With Iran on New Intelligence. The U.S. Didn’t Buy It.
American spy agencies stand by their assessment that Iran hasn’t decided to build a nuclear weapon, but Trump now says Tehran is ‘very close.’
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-built-its-case-for-war-with-iran-on-new-intelligence-the-u-s-didnt-buy-it-55592e81
By Alexander Ward
Follow, Lara Seligman
Follow and Dustin Volz
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June 17, 2025 1:46 pm ET
Israel continued to strike the Iranian capital of Tehran on Tuesday. Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Key Points
What's This?
- Israel shared intel with the U.S. regarding Iran’s nuclear research, including alleged work on an explosive triggering system.
- U.S. officials don’t believe the intel indicates Iran decided to build a bomb, creating a gap in assessment between the allies.
- Experts say Iran’s activities could be part of weapons building or preparatory work to maintain the option of making a nuclear weapon.
WASHINGTON—Before launching its attack on Iran last week, Israel provided the U.S. with intelligence it deemed alarming: Tehran was conducting renewed research useful for a nuclear weapon, including on an explosive triggering system.
But U.S. officials briefed by the Israelis weren’t convinced that the information pointed to a decision by Tehran to build a bomb, according to a senior intelligence official, another U.S. official and two congressional aides familiar with the discussions.
The gap between Israel’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program and that of the U.S. helps explain why the two allies haven’t been aligned in recent days on dealing with Tehran.
The intelligence Israel shared within the last month covered multiple lines of Iranian research into technology necessary for building a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. officials. They described “a multi-point initiation system,” a technique used to detonate multiple simultaneous explosions that is used in nuclear bombs, the officials and aides said.
The Israelis also mentioned Iran’s work on neutron particles to generate a chain reaction—a critical part of nuclear fission—as well as on plastic explosives and on integration of fissile material in an explosive device, the U.S. officials said.
The U.S. response was that the intelligence only showed Iran was still researching nuclear weapons, including revisiting work it had done before its nuclear weapons program shut down in 2003, the senior intelligence official and the other U.S. official said.
The U.S. and Israel largely agree that Iran has in recent months put itself in a stronger position to build a nuclear bomb. Iran has long insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
Have you heard any signals
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President Trump spoke alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the start of the Group of Seven Summit, where nations are seeking trade deals with the U.S. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The U.S. has said publicly that Iran has conducted scientific and engineering work that could make it easier to construct a nuclear device. The U.S. estimates that it would probably take Iran one to two weeks to produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, and U.S. officials have said Iran could build some kind of crude nuclear weapon in a few months.
But the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb, an assessment Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeated in public testimony to Congress in March.
Asked Tuesday on Air Force One about Gabbard’s earlier testimony, President Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said, I think they were very close to having them.” His return to Washington early from a G-7 meeting in Canada had “nothing to do with a cease-fire,” he said.
Trump’s view that Iran is near to getting a bomb is shared by some other administration officials. “We believe that Iran is as close to having a nuclear weapon as one can get. They have all the components necessary to put one together,” a senior administration official said.
Gabbard told CNN Tuesday that she and Trump were “on the same page” on Iran’s nuclear activities.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said the scientific work Iran was conducting didn’t point to an imminent Iranian sprint to acquire a nuclear weapon. “This all looks like research,” he said, though he added, “Iran definitely wants a bomb option.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed his country’s intelligence as an indicator of Tehran’s intent to make a nuclear weapon. Photo: Ronen Zvulun/Associated Press
Before the first bombs fell last week, Trump urged Israel to hold off on strikes, asking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to let a diplomatic process over Iran’s nuclear program play out. But as the conflict has worn on, Trump has voiced more concern about Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon.
The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Israel’s campaign so far had set Iran’s nuclear work back by about five to six months, the senior U.S. intelligence official said, adding that the damage could grow as Israel’s campaign continues.
Netanyahu has publicly painted the intelligence as a clear indicator of Iran’s intent to make a nuclear weapon.
Iran was secretly working to weaponize uranium and “would achieve a test device, and possibly an initial device, within months, and certainly less than a year,” he said in a Sunday interview with Fox News. Israel could no longer hold off on attacking Iranian nuclear sites to prevent its nuclear breakout, he said.
Netanyahu also asserted that Iran intended to give nuclear weapons to its Houthi proxies in Yemen, a statement multiple U.S. intelligence officials described as surprising since they had no information to support.
“The Israelis could be drawing worst-case scenarios from bits of intel or exaggerating to suit their purposes,” said Philip Gordon, who served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser.
Experts say the activities Israeli officials detailed could be part of an active nuclear weapons building program, but could also be preparatory work to maintain the option of making a nuclear weapon. Iran still must assemble and integrate the parts of a nuclear weapon into a warhead, said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that Iran is “mere steps” away from having uranium enriched to the weapons-grade level of 90%. If Iran decided to assemble a bomb, he continued, it could have the first 55 pounds of weapons-grade material “in roughly one week and enough for up to 10 nuclear weapons in three weeks.”
Gabbard, in her March testimony, also said Iran’s “enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
The U.S. intelligence community said last July in a report to Congress that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” The report omitted what has been a standard U.S. intelligence assessment for years that Iran “isn’t currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
Tehran is signaling it is open to resuming nuclear talks with the U.S. in return for a halt to the Israeli strikes. Iranian officials said they think Israel would need U.S. help to do meaningful damage to targets, such as the Fordow uranium-enrichment facility, which is buried under a mountain.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com
6. ‘Regime Change’? Questions About Israel’s Iran Goal Pressure Trump.
If the regime collapses and new leadership emerges what do you do? Certainly no one has the stomach for large conventional military boots on the ground, from US or any external nation. But the question is how can you enable new emerging leadership and allow them to rebuild their country in a new Iranian image?
‘Regime Change’? Questions About Israel’s Iran Goal Pressure Trump.
Israel’s military campaign reminds some of America’s ill-fated Middle East interventions, which President Trump has long denounced.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/politics/regime-change-israel-iran-trump.html
Listen to this article · 8:38 min Learn more
Government supporters holding a poster of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, in Tehran on Saturday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
By Michael Crowley
Reporting from Washington
June 17, 2025
Updated 4:45 p.m. ET
In the years since America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of “regime change,” or military action to topple hostile foreign governments, has become politically radioactive in Washington.
Few political leaders have criticized the concept as much as President Trump, who has spent years attacking both Democrats and Republicans for supporting foreign interventions. In a typical campaign trail riff last summer, he told supporters that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had “sent our blood and treasure to back regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Syria and every other globalist disaster for half a century.”
But as Israel pounds Iran with airstrikes that it says are aimed at the country’s nuclear and missile programs, analysts say the assault increasingly threatens the survival of Iran’s government and may in effect be turning into a regime change operation.
That could leave Mr. Trump trying to avoid entanglement in the sort of conflict he has spent years portraying as the definition of insanity.
Israeli officials say their attacks are an urgent response to Iran’s advances in its nuclear program. But there are growing signs that their aims are expanding.
During an interview on Fox News on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was asked whether regime change was an explicit goal.
“It could certainly be the result, because Iran is very weak,” he said. He added that “the decision to act, to rise up, at this time, is the decision of the Iranian people.”
But Mr. Netanyahu has also appealed to Iran’s population — which has risen in protest many times in recent years, only to be brutally repressed — to do just that. “The time has come for you to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime,” he said last week.
In a Monday interview with ABC News, Mr. Netanyahu also said that Israel might choose to “end the conflict” by killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“This is the name of the game,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
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“It’s not how successful Israel is in taking out Fordo,” the Iranian nuclear facility buried deep in a mountain. “It is now measured by how successful they can be in taking out the Iranian state.”
Mr. Nasr noted that Israel has been striking targets with no direct connection to Iran’s nuclear program, including a Monday attack on the headquarters of Iran’s state broadcasting network. “They are trying to take away the coherence of the state — not only to conduct the war, but to function,” he said.
Mr. Trump has so far limited America’s known role to the defense of Israel. But in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, he suggested a willingness to eliminate Mr. Khamenei, saying “we know exactly where” he is hiding. “We are not going to take him out,” he wrote, adding: “At least not for now.”
And the president associated himself with Israel’s war effort, writing in a separate post: “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” with the support of American military hardware. (Despite Mr. Trump’s use of “we,” the United States is not flying missions over Iran, U.S. officials say.)
A full collapse of the Iranian state, meanwhile, would create new risks — including the need to secure Iran’s nuclear material — that would greatly increase the prospects of American involvement in the conflict.
Israel’s primary goal may be the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program, said Michael Makovsky, president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, which has backed military action against Iran.
Mr. Makovsky added, however, based on his conversations with senior political and military officials there, that Israel has always known that such a campaign could also have broader political consequences.
“They’ve hoped that, because the regime was so weak, military action could lead to the people bringing down the regime,” he said.
Iran’s leadership may share that assessment. In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Khamenei agreed to nuclear talks with President Trump earlier this year only after top Iranian officials warned him that failure to negotiate could lead to attacks by Israel or the United States. That, they said, could threaten the survival of their government.
Even some supporters of using force to seek a change in Iran’s government are careful to avoid the catchphrase that was used often during the Iraq War and subsequent Western interventions in the Middle East. They include the 2011 NATO air campaign in Libya that overthrew the dictator Muammar Gaddafi but triggered years of chaos and civil war.
Mr. Trump himself has tried to engineer the fall of at least one foreign government, the leftist dictatorship of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, which he choked with economic sanctions in his first term. But he never described his policy as regime change.
“I use the term ‘regime collapse,’ versus ‘change,’” Mr. Makovsky said, “because the term ‘regime change’ is toxic in Washington. Everyone thinks about 2003.”
In March of that year, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq and deposed its strongman, Saddam Hussein. The ensuing effort to install a friendly democratic government in Baghdad cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and to many, discredited U.S. interventionism.
The key distinction, Mr. Makovsky said, is that a regime collapse strategy does not presume to remake Iran’s government. “My view is that we shouldn’t do that. But our objective should be to pressure the regime every way possible so that the Iranian people bring it down.”
For now, Mr. Trump has kept some distance from Israel’s war. But his supporters are divided on his approach, with some accusing Mr. Trump of betraying his principles.
On Monday, two of Mr. Trump’s most prominent supporters, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon vented their frustration on a radio show hosted by Mr. Bannon.
“The point of this is regime change,” Mr. Carlson insisted, arguing that Mr. Trump was being led by Israel into what could become a “world war.” “I don’t want the United States involved in another Middle East war,” he added.
Mr. Bannon agreed, citing Mr. Netanyahu’s comments on Fox and saying, “This is a total regime change.”
“This thing has not been thought through,” he added. “It does not have the support of the American people.”
Analysts said it would be especially difficult for Mr. Trump to avoid being drawn into the aftermath of a government collapse. “The U.S. just can’t not be involved,” said Mr. Nasr, noting that, among other things, it would be essential to secure Iran’s stockpile of uranium amid any political chaos.
Some analysts fear that Iran could descend into chaos and even civil war, radiating instability throughout the Middle East. Although one U.S. official said that Mr. Khamenei had put in place a succession plan, and that in the event of his killing or overthrow Iran’s religious-military establishment would be likely to retain control — possibly with an even more extreme figure.
Even so, few in Washington would mourn the fall of a theocracy that sponsors terrorism and has for decades called for the destruction of America and Israel. And some prominent Republicans are calling for that outcome.
“I think it is very much in the interest of America to see regime change,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said on Fox News on Sunday. “I don’t think there’s any redeeming the ayatollah.”
Another Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told CBS News on Sunday he would “love for the regime to fall,” but added that “is not the purpose of this attack — yet.”
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under President Obama who was deeply involved in Iran policy, said that even some Democrats are wondering whether to root for Iran’s government to collapse.
Mr. Rhodes fears that initial success of Israel’s military campaign has created the illusion of a simple solution, something that reminds him of the early stages of another Middle East conflict more than 20 years ago.
“It looked great when the statue of Saddam Hussein fell” in the spring of 2003, Mr. Rhodes said.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
7. General in charge of Army’s Next-Gen C2 experiment takes command of unit getting prototype
Good talent management. A leader gets to put hsisresearch, theory, and concept development into practice. We need more of thi. the 4th ID ought to have the best C2 in the Army in the coming months.
Excerpts:
As the division commander, Ellis will reap what he helped develop and provide unique insights back to the Army regarding how the system better enables him to command and control his forces.
“You also, as a commander, now can ask the hard questions and say, ‘I don’t think that’s the node that we should take, maybe we could move to this one, or here’s where there’s going to be legitimate friction,’” he said. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to do that and I appreciate the chance that the Army has given me to continue to work on this problem that I’m pretty passionate about. I really enjoy this and I think it’s going to be fun to take this capability now and actually work on the scaling up to an entire division.”
Officials have acknowledged the complexity in moving NGC2 up to the division level, especially considering the prototype was kitted to mainly the battalion level at Project Convergence. As the Army seeks to move complexity up and fight as a division, enabling brigades — such as sustainment, aviation, artillery and intelligence — must be equipped with comms gear as well. These enabler units will now begin to be a top focus.
General in charge of Army’s Next-Gen C2 experiment takes command of unit getting prototype
Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, who was the director of the Army's C2 CFT and led experimentation of Next Gen C2, takes command of 4th ID, which is the next unit to receive the prototype and will scale it to a full division.
https://defensescoop.com/2025/06/17/army-next-gen-c2-patrick-ellis-commander-4th-infantry-division/?hss_channel=lcp-80356765
By
Mark Pomerleau
June 17, 2025Listen to this article
6:00
Learn more.
Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis (middle), Network Cross Functional Team, Army Futures Command, participated in a panel discussion focusing on Transforming the Unified Network at Echelon, during the Association of the United States Army’s 2024 Annual Conference, Monday, October 14th, 2024, Washington D.C. (U.S. Army photo by: Austin Thomas)
ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis will be the next commander of 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado.
The move is significant as 4th ID is slated to be the primary experimental unit for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control as that system aims to scale up to division level.
NGC2 is one of the the Army’s top modernization priorities. It’s a clean-slate design for how the Army communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.
The Army tested a prototype of the system in March at Project Convergence Capstone 5. It was the first experiment on the ground with a unit in the classified network. It was outfitted to a real battalion — an armored formation — as well as higher headquarters elements. The Army sought to use an armored unit rather than the more easy to integrate light units as a means of testing the most difficult formation first and beginning to rightsize the Army, as those lighter units have surpassed many heavier ones in new gear due to the integration challenges associated with platforms.
As part of that effort, the Army developed a horizontal operational design for NGC2 that involved a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. The application layer is where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions — such as intelligence or fires — into applications that ride on the same backbone that is all integrated together.
Ellis comes to 4th ID having just been the director of the C2 Cross Functional Team with Army Futures Command, where he spearheaded the experimental efforts of NGC2 — giving him a unique perch to now serve as the commander of the first division to begin testing it out holistically.
“It’s a great opportunity to work on this, build the relationships over the last year,” he said in a May 30 interview on the sidelines of the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on his last day as the C2 CFT director.
To date, the Army’s experimentation and modernization efforts have focused on brigades. As the division is expected to be the primary action unit in the future, the service is starting to look at how to scale capabilities across the entire 10,000-15,000 soldier unit.
4th ID will continue to iterate on the prototype and make improvements while program executive office for command, control, communications and network runs the program of record. In early April, C3N officially stood up the program office, with Col. Chris Anderson becoming the first program manager. In addition to 4th ID scaling the prototype, 25th ID will also be prototyping elements of NGC2.
As the division commander, Ellis will reap what he helped develop and provide unique insights back to the Army regarding how the system better enables him to command and control his forces.
“You also, as a commander, now can ask the hard questions and say, ‘I don’t think that’s the node that we should take, maybe we could move to this one, or here’s where there’s going to be legitimate friction,’” he said. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to do that and I appreciate the chance that the Army has given me to continue to work on this problem that I’m pretty passionate about. I really enjoy this and I think it’s going to be fun to take this capability now and actually work on the scaling up to an entire division.”
Officials have acknowledged the complexity in moving NGC2 up to the division level, especially considering the prototype was kitted to mainly the battalion level at Project Convergence. As the Army seeks to move complexity up and fight as a division, enabling brigades — such as sustainment, aviation, artillery and intelligence — must be equipped with comms gear as well. These enabler units will now begin to be a top focus.
Ellis said one of the things he’ll be focusing on early on is continual evolution of the capability with multiple touchpoints with industry, as opposed to more periodic fits and starts.
“I’ve learned we can’t work on a problem and then come back to it three months later in an exercise, and then come back to it three months later, and then three months later we’re at [Project Convergence Capstone 6]. I think there’s going to have to be a continual evolution,” he said. “We don’t need to wait until it’s perfect and then put it in the hands of a soldier. We need to get the 60 percent in their hands and let them help us with that last 40 percent — and that’s going to require some continual interaction with units.”
Filling Ellis’ place will be Col. (P) Michael Kaloostian, who was one of two colonels that were the main architects of the NGC2 experimentation efforts for Futures Command, culminating in the Project Convergence experimentation. This will allow Kaloostain to continue work on the project as the director.
“I didn’t get a chance to pick the guy that was coming after me, but if I did get to pick, it would be the guy who’s coming in after me,” Ellis said about Kaloostian. “He’s been doing this for a year, he’s got all the technical knowledge, and then he brings that capability here. And then for me to move on and keep the relationships and some of the shared experience [is beneficial]. I think part of it is, it’s just the shared history, is now there’s a little bit of a common parlance between us. Then as you get out there you know where the pitfalls are going to be. I think some of the problems are very solvable.”
Written by Mark Pomerleau
Mark Pomerleau is a senior reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare, cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, intelligence, influence, battlefield networks and data.
8. China sends mystery transport planes into Iran
More on the CRInK - cooperation, collaboration, and collusion.
Flight graphic at the link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-sends-mystery-transport-planes-170428323.html
China sends mystery transport planes into Iran
Yahoo
A day after Israel attacked Iran on Friday, a cargo plane took off from China. The next day, a second plane departed from a coastal city. Then on Monday, yet another departed, this time from Shanghai – three flights in three days.
Data showed that on each flight, the plane flew westward along northern China, crossing into Kazakhstan, then south into Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – and then falling off the radar as it neared Iran.
To add to the mystery, flight plans indicated a final destination of Luxembourg, but the aircraft appeared to have never flown near European skies.
Concern has erupted in response over what might have been sent from China in the direction of Iran as Tehran’s war with Israel rages on.
The worry is real – aviation experts have noted that the type of plane used, Boeing 747 freighters, are commonly used for transporting military equipment and weapons, and hired to fly government contract orders.
Credit: Flightradar24
“These cargos cannot but generate a lot of interest because of the expectation that China might do something to help Iran,” said Andrea Ghiselli, a lecturer at the University of Exeter who specialises in China’s relations with the Middle East and North Africa.
China and Iran are strategic partners, aligned primarily in their opposition to the US-led world order, and in favour of a new “multi-polar” phase in global diplomacy.
Iran, too, is one of China’s key energy suppliers, sending as many as two million barrels of oil a day – so it’s no surprise that Beijing might be looking for ways to support and stabilise the Islamic Republic.
“The collapse of the current regime would be a significant blow and would generate a lot of instability in the Middle East, ultimately undermining Chinese economic and energy interests,” said Mr Ghiselli.
“Moreover, in Iran there are probably many that are expecting some kind of help from China.”
China has a history of supplying Iran despite international criticism – for example sending thousands of tons of ballistic missile materials that could be used in Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
A Cargolux 747-4R7F - Boeing 747 freighters, are commonly used for transporting military equipment and weapons
Still, in this key moment, experts say Beijing is likely approaching with caution.
Getting involved directly in the Iran-Israel conflict could torpedo any change China has to stabilise its relations with the US, Israel’s strongest ally. Beijing is still reeling from a high-stakes trade war with Washington.
“The presence of Chinese military hardware would make that impossible, especially as there are already some that are pushing for the US to join the war also to contain China by attacking Iran,” said Mr Ghiselli.
While “the likelihood remains low” of China overtly sending defence materials to Tehran, the possibility “should not be dismissed and must be closely monitored”, said Tuvia Gering, a China and Middle East specialist at Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies.
Unless independent inspections are carried out, it is not possible to know exactly what the cargo planes were carrying. In later flights, some of the aircraft appear to take off from around the same area along the Turkmenistan-Iran border, and go toward Luxembourg, according to publicly available flight data.
Cargolux, the Luxembourg-based company that operated the planes, said its flights did not utilise Iranian airspace, but the firm did not respond to questions about what they were carrying.
Cargo manifests are not considered a matter of public record, and though any dangerous goods or special loads have to be declared to the operator and handling agents, information provided could be inaccurate or misleading.
China has tried before to send weapons disguised as commercial goods, labelling drone components as wind turbine parts, according to shipments intercepted by European authorities.
A Telegraph investigation last year found that China tried to send $1 billion (£738 million) of drones to Libya, hidden behind a web of shell firms in the UK, Tunisia and Egypt, in exchange for crude oil.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
9. China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say
We should only be surprised if they were not investing heavily.
China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say
A new report comes amid rising concern about how China will use new tools to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.
Listen to this article · 5:48 min Learn more
The offices of DeepSeek in Beijing. DeepSeek is thought to be among the A.I. models that China is using.Credit...Peter Catterall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
June 17, 2025
Updated 4:18 p.m. ET
Chinese spy services have invested heavily in artificial intelligence to create new tools to speed analysis, provide early warning of threats and potentially help shape operational plans during a war, according to a new report.
China, like the United States, hopes that artificial intelligence will improve the efficiency and accuracy of its intelligence analysis, allowing it to collect more intelligence and analyze it faster and more cheaply.
The study, by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, which studies cybersecurity and other threats from nation-states, terrorists and criminal groups, comes amid rising concern about how Chinese spy agencies will use A.I. to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.
The researchers reviewed patent applications by the People’s Liberation Army, publicly available contracts and other material to better understand how China’s military and intelligence services have invested in artificial intelligence.
Recorded Future found that China is probably using a mix of large language models, technology that can analyze huge amounts of data and communicate its results in human language. Meta and OpenAI are thought to be among the American models that China is using, along with Chinese models from DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and others.
The C.I.A. and other American spy agencies have stepped up their use of artificial intelligence, both to improve analytic work and to help overseas operatives remain undiscovered. One tool developed by the C.I.A. is designed to help analysts assess the positions of foreign leaders, creating virtual versions of the officials that are powered by artificial intelligence.
The Pentagon announced on Monday that it was awarding a $200 million contract to OpenAI. The company, in a release, said its OpenAI for Government initiative would be used to improve administrative operations, including health care, but also improve work on military acquisition programs and support “proactive cyberdefense.”
Former American intelligence officials have said China’s large population has long given it a potential advantage over U.S. spy agencies, but artificial intelligence could even the playing field. Generative A.I. models can scan huge amounts of collected communications intelligence and queue the most interesting information for human analysts to examine.
Some U.S. officials said China’s investment in artificial intelligence was of little surprise, given its potential to improve analytic assessments. But the Recorded Future report found specific examples of how China could be using large language models and generative A.I. to not just improve its intelligence analysis, but also help military commanders improve targeting and operational plans.
In October, Ordnance Science and Research Academy of China filed a patent application to use various forms of intelligence to train a military model. The application talks about the ways the model could be used, such as by crafting operational plans and helping battlefield intelligence analysts analyze friendly and enemy forces, according to Zoe Haver, the author of the study and a senior threat intelligence analyst at the Insikt Group.
“This was very broad ranging, and intended to be applicable across the intelligence cycle,” Ms. Haver said.
Over the last two years, China has tightened control over information about what its military and intelligence agencies have obtained. So while Recorded Future was often able to see the military’s procurement of generative A.I. models and servers, it was not always clear how the technology would be used. But some Chinese contractors appeared to have grand ambitions.
China’s military and intelligence agencies appear to have quickly pivoted from open source and Western A.I. to DeepSeek, which unveiled a model rivaling OpenAI’s model, ChatGPT, the day after Christmas. Global interest in DeepSeek’s model exploded in January. By the end of February, military procurement records appeared showing Chinese companies quickly taking up DeepSeek’s technology.
At the same time, American firms have cracked down on China’s use of their models.
This month, OpenAI reported that it had disrupted several operations most likely originating in China that had tried to use its artificial intelligence tools in malicious ways. The operations were a combination of influence campaigns and surveillance, according to OpenAI. One of them tried to use ChatGPT to generate comments on social media sites about the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
To train a model to provide meaningful insight on intelligence, a government needs to give it access to its intelligence data, which can be difficult while still keeping classified material secure.
Chinese intelligence products are often infused with the ideology of the ruling Communist Party. Ms. Haver said a model trained on such reports would produce intelligence biased in the same way. But whether the Chinese government sees that as a problem is another question.
“Some Chinese public security researchers are talking about ChatGPT being used for intelligence,” Ms. Haver said. “And they are worried about how objectivity, neutrality, neoliberalism and capitalistic values could infiltrate Chinese intelligence work if they use foreign models.”
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
10. China and US Tussle for World's Seaports
A fight for "key terrain?"
Excerpts:
On June 11, the US embassy in Panama announced that the US government would replace Chinese technology company Huawei’s telecommunications equipment installed at 13 sites across Panama with “secure American technology.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the United States is working to counter the malign influence of China throughout our hemisphere, making the Americas stronger and more secure,” the embassy explained.
Responding to a question regarding the US attempt to equip the towers eith US technology, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at the ministry’s press conference on June 16 that the US has long engaged in surveillance, monitoring, and cyberattacks in Latin America and the Caribbean regions, bringing negative influence to the Western Hemisphere.
"Latin America and the Caribbean are not anyone's backyard. The US should put away its domineering attitude,” Guo added.
China and US Tussle for World's Seaports
Entry of Chinese state firms muddies Li Ka-shing's global ports deal
Jun 18, 2025
asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel
By: Toh Han Shih
The entrance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into CK Hutchison Holdings’ negotiations to sell its global ports signifies a global competition between the US and China for control of much of the world’s shipping destinations. Chinese success, which looks increasingly likely, dovetails with the country’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to provide infrastructure across the world.
The competition for dominance of the world’s shipping is centered on control of 45 ports owned by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing’s conglomerate in 24 nations including two on the Panama Canal. The stalling of Hutchison’s sale to a US-led consortium is also an indication that after hundreds of years of freewheeling capitalism, “it is a watershed moment for Hong Kong companies. It signifies they are no longer independent,” a former banker who asked not to be named told Asia Sentinel. “Therefore, Hong Kong companies will probably not be allowed to invest in foreign, critical infrastructure.”
The original goal of the White House was to remove China and its companies from critical logistics value chains as it relates to the strategic Panama Canal, said Dane Chamorro, head of Global Risk and Intelligence at Control Risks, the international risk consultancy.
Several Chinese SOEs, including the country’s largest shipping company Cosco Shipping Corp, are in talks to join a consortium to pay US$22.8 billion for the anchorages, Bloomberg reported on June 13. The US consortium, which originally sought to gain control, is led by BlackRock, a US asset management firm with close ties to Washington, and includes Italian billionaire Gianluigi Aponte’s Terminal Investment Ltd. The seller, CK Hutchison, is a Hong Kong-listed conglomerate controlled by Li.
BlackRock and its chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Larry Fink have a very close relationship with both China and US President Donald Trump, said Andre Wheeler, the CEO of Asia Pacific Connex, an Australian consultancy.
“The entry of a Chinese company or investor into the global ports sale complicates the entire transaction,” the former bank official said. “The purpose of the sale is not only for CK Hutchison to exit its international ports, but for the governments who own these ports to rid themselves of Chinese ownership. Many countries are de-risking themselves from China and a Chinese bidder complicates the situation and demands additional due diligence.”
Although CK Hutchison announced the ports deal on March 4, it has been stalled by strong opposition from the Chinese government and an investigation by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).
The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, China’s office in charge of coordinating with Hong Kong and Macau, on April 28 quoted Kwok Wai-keung, a pro-Beijing member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, saying if the BlackRock-led consortium succeeds in acquiring 90 percent of two ports on the Panama Canal plus 80 percent of the other 43, the largely Western consortium would own about 100 ports around the world. If that were to happen, Chinese shipping would face unfair competition, Kwok warned.
“There are a number of ‘below the surface’ issues that make me believe that the deal with a Chinese partner will proceed,” said Asia Pacific’s Wheeler. “Chinese SOEs like Cosco will be given a minority stake to placate the US and say ownership of the ports is not in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” Wheeler predicted. Ports are a key to the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Wheeler explained. The BRI is China’s mega-project to forge economic connections with other countries through infrastructure projects like ports and railway.
“However, the fundamental difference is that the US looks to ownership whereas China looks to control. This dynamic often gets lost when trying to get a uniform approach to the BRI,” Wheeler pointed out. “In reality, the focus should not be on the ownership or what flag flies over the port but on who the port operator will be.”
Even if Cosco has a small share of the consortium but is given operating control, it would give China effective control, Wheeler explained. With 80 percent of world trade being conducted via ports, whoever controls the ports has control over global trade, he added. “This has very little to do with who owns the asset.”
One likely scenario is the US gains control of CK Hutchison’s two ports on the Panama Canal, while European and Chinese companies buy the other 43, said the ex-banker, with the others to be sold on a deal-by-deal basis if a Chinese company enters the bid. “The reason is that each port’s government will have to consider its China risk. That is why the deal will be slow and complicated.”
If the Panama ports go to some US-led consortium but the rest go to another group with Chinese involvement, it would actually worsen the situation from a US national perspective, since Chinese-controlled port companies already have a commanding presence in this space globally, said Control Risks’ Chamorro. The latest example of this is the mega port inaugurated by Chinese President Xi Jinping at Callao in Peru in November 2024, the largest port on the Pacific coast of South America now.
“Of course, Beijing would benefit from that outcome as it would be a huge step forward for their involvement in the global ports sector, even if the two Panama ports weren’t included. They would, in effect, gain a foothold in 40-plus port facilities they didn’t have before. It would make Cosco or whichever Chinese port company the dominant global player,” said Chamorro.
“It’s another example of the current US administration not thinking beyond ‘step 1’...what happens next? Well, in this case, you could actually wind up increasing China’s port presence rather than limiting it,” Chamorro pointed out.
“The diplomatic twist that hasn’t been reported is that Chinese state-owned entities Cosco and China Merchants are reportedly trying to buy a 20 percent stake in Hutchison Ports (the port subsidiary of CK Hutchison),” wrote Christopher R. O’Dea, adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute, in an article on the website of the US think tank on February 18.
The seller of the 20 percent stake is PSA International, the port company of Singapore, wrote O’Dea. “Cosco achieving part ownership of the company operating key terminals on the Panama Canal would be a post-globalization version of the Cuban missile crisis.”
Neither BlackRock nor Cosco replied to Asia Sentinel’s questions.
Kicking Huawei out of Panama
On June 11, the US embassy in Panama announced that the US government would replace Chinese technology company Huawei’s telecommunications equipment installed at 13 sites across Panama with “secure American technology.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the United States is working to counter the malign influence of China throughout our hemisphere, making the Americas stronger and more secure,” the embassy explained.
Responding to a question regarding the US attempt to equip the towers eith US technology, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at the ministry’s press conference on June 16 that the US has long engaged in surveillance, monitoring, and cyberattacks in Latin America and the Caribbean regions, bringing negative influence to the Western Hemisphere.
"Latin America and the Caribbean are not anyone's backyard. The US should put away its domineering attitude,” Guo added.
Toh Han Shih is a Singaporean writer in Hong Kong and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel
asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel
11. Imagining the Near-Future of American Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific
Excerpt:
A forward-looking IW campaign in the Indo-Pacific cannot afford to replicate historical models. The 4+1 will undoubtedly attempt to emulate or surpass US and partner IW efforts, pursuing destabilization and strategic revisionism. Achieving a more stable, prosperous, and secure Indo-Pacific requires a departure from static alliances, predictable force postures, and reactive approaches. Instead, the US and its partners must leverage the human domain and cognitive space, utilizing emergent technologies, resistance infrastructures, and decentralized communities to construct a new operational reality. So, what are the next steps? After spending time and resources to fully understand the people, the environment, adversaries, and the intended strategic outcomes, the US must design the campaign in great detail, with as many elements of the government, private sector, industry, think tanks, academia, and foreign partners brainstorming and working together. The US will likely need new and expanded authorities to execute as described here. A long-term investment must be routinely reassessed and adjusted—a decades-long endeavor. If successful, this campaign has the potential to disrupt, cut, and bleed evolving adversarial strategies while gaining time and space for the US and its partners to compete more forcefully.
Essay| The Latest
Imagining the Near-Future of American Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/18/imagining-iw-in-the-indo-pacific/
by Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
|
06.18.2025 at 06:00am
The Environment
Malign actors deploy cyberattacks, economic coercion, disinformation, and illicit gray zone tactics to destabilize the modern Indo-Pacific region. Competition in the region is currently not characterized by kinetic engagements—it is a protracted, complex struggle that advances incrementally. Economies, friendly nations, and innocent people pay the price. The primary perpetrators include the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a range of Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs) – the 4+1 construct of bad actors (while acknowledging that all current US security strategy documents explicitly highlight the CCP as the primary national security threat).
These actors destabilize the international order with hostile intent, prioritizing their interests over others’ sovereignty by subverting, manipulating, and circumventing established laws, rules, and norms to their benefit at the cost of others. To counter this, considering recent Irregular Warfare (IW) developments, this paper outlines a new IW framework designed to undermine and mitigate 4+1 aggression while pushing decentralized, offensive IW to the advantage of America and its partners. The intent of this framework is to develop an evolving irregular warfare network of actors. It would eventually encompass multiple cells that inflict damage on the CCP as it seeks to dominate maritime chokepoints, Russia as it manipulates media and elections, Iran as it targets Middle Eastern adversaries in the region, North Korea as it evades sanctions and escalates tensions, and VEOs pursue a range of political objectives through violence or the threat of violence. All of these actors employ some degree of asymmetric tactics.
The Theory of a New Irregular Warfare Approach in the Pacific
Conventional military strategies seek decisive victories within defined timelines. While complementary to conventional approaches, the IW campaign proposed here instead emphasizes shaping the operational environment, mitigating adversarial influence, and securing enduring strategic advantages over years or decades. These goals are accomplished through sustained influence activities, gaining and maintaining legitimacy (for both the US and its partners) among local/regional populations, and operational successes—both big and small — while minimizing large-scale confrontations. Though targeting the 4+1 through more direct methods will always be an option, this campaign prioritizes human-domain solutions. It leverages localized partnerships and unconventional approaches to build, enhance, and empower resilient networks. The desired outcome is to diminish malign influence and ensure a persistent competitive advantage for friendly actors.
While maintaining proficiency in traditional warfighting capabilities remains essential for potential major theater conflicts, this campaign demands more than conventional defenses and doctrine—it requires autonomous or semi-autonomous resistance/insurgency elements across the Indo-Pacific, including capable operators, self-reliant economies, and resolute combatants. In addition to IW fundamentals like interagency cooperation and trust-building with partners, the campaign suggests even more unconventional, potentially contentious concepts. It requires incorporating emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, encrypted peer-to-peer coordination, and decentralized logistics. While some of these innovations are not yet fully operational, they are within reach given the pace of research and technological advancement. Diverging from reliance on partner militaries or elite units like Special Operations Forces (SOF), the campaign proposed here argues for more localized, self-sustaining IW communities. They will operate independently of persistent US presence or fragile supply chains, extending beyond military personnel to civilian populations—fishermen, maritime workers, small business owners, and the like. They will be educated and equipped to counter coercion and form decentralized, hard-to-detect cells. Embedded within societies and amplified by technology, this IW campaign will ensure greater adaptability and resilience than current constructs. It will endure beyond adversarial control through active human effort aligned with a decades-long timeline.
Successful IW hinges on dominance over cognitive perception. The CCP, Russia, and their counterparts recognize this dynamic and exploit it in what is often dubbed the “New Cold War” or “Second Cold War.” They frequently forgo kinetic strikes in favor of narrative manipulation—disinformation campaigns, fabricated news, election interference, and psychological operations—to erode trust, generate confusion, and undermine perceptions of legitimacy. Strategic planning for the US traditionally encompasses air, land, maritime, space, and cyber domains. Yet the most critical and complex domain to manage is absent from this list: the human domain.
One might argue that the human domain is inherent in every aspect of strategic planning. Ideally, that would be the case, but conflicts in American history over the past half-century suggest otherwise. Furthermore, considering the human domain may seem so obvious that it is somehow and too often overlooked, it must be prioritized. Integral to the human domain is the cognitive dimension, which must be fully acknowledged and strategically leveraged in any successful IW campaign. However, before taking action and trying to “fix” things, which is the preferred method for the US, there must be a deliberate process to understand the environment and the people in it so that any actions are not in vain. Alternatively, actors must use this deliberate process so that the wrong actions are not taken. This leverage cannot be an ancillary consideration—it must constitute the campaign’s central focus. Only after spending sufficient time understanding the motivations, grievances, and levers of each targeted population—friendly and enemy—should the following steps be taken.
Information dominance must extend beyond countering misinformation and work toward actively shaping reality for affected populations. Merely competing in influence operations is inadequate. The capability to generate and customize narratives in real-time, utilizing AI-driven content, will influence public sentiment and define it. This is the primary objective, and unfortunately, it is currently absent from existing strategies. While adversaries are not always the direct target, properly influencing public sentiment in real-time can enable friendly actors to shape the environment before adversaries respond. Emerging technologies are essential to secure this advantage, potentially including deepfake-resistant authentication utilizing blockchains and decentralized data hubs. Integrating traditional narrative techniques with advanced tools will prevent adversaries from corrupting the information space. A successful IW campaign must preempt adversarial narratives, establishing a dynamic, self-reinforcing digital network that drives public discourse based on free expression and a free press. Public discourse serves as the mechanism through which reality is constructed. Timely exposure to the truth and practical narratives will ideally positively influence decision-making, shaping outcomes before conventional military force becomes necessary.
The Practical Application of a New Irregular Warfare Approach in the Pacific
Consider a fishing village off the coast of Vietnam or Indonesia, where CCP trawlers illegally harvest fish and intimidate locals. These actions are not the result of rogue operatives; they are directed by the highest levels of leadership in the CCP. In this scenario, there is no time for headlines to distort, misrepresent, or dilute the narrative. Instead, the campaign delivers an immediate response: a team equipped with AI tools produces a video—a fisherman denouncing the perpetrators on turbulent waters, displaying the damaged nets, with GPS locations to verify the invasion of sovereignty. It disseminates from devices in Hanoi to screens in Jakarta before Beijing reframes it as “routine patrols.” This is not public relations but a genuine strategic communications instrument. It unites locals into a cohesive network, exposes the CCP’s tactics, places them at a disadvantage, and prompts reevaluation on their part. While not flawless, blockchains represent the most efficient and shareable instruments in the current information toolkit to ensure authenticity in examples like the one above. Facts are verified and unalterable to prevent falsification of the fisherman’s testimony through anti-deepfake technology. The apps for this resistance incorporate biometrics and secure keys, ensure integrity, and thwart CCP proxies from impersonating the fisherman. Data hubs distributed across the Indo-Pacific eliminate a centralized target for 4+1 to compromise or destroy. This scenario represents ground-up, irregular, integrated deterrence and can support free and fair journalism by providing reputable sources of information. This line of effort will report on what is happening so the media, often under-resourced to investigate such activities, can effectively expose and counter the disinformation and malign activities of the 4+1.
Technology alone does not constitute the entire effort. Populations must be informed. Educational institutions must train students to detect disinformation and misinformation—instilling the ability to question, “Who is disseminating this, and what is their intent?” In Manila, students should be able to dissect a CCP-orchestrated rumor regarding “US basing” and trace it to a Beijing disinformation hub. Training programs in rural areas must equip local populations to identify Russia’s financial influence schemes, North Korea’s illicit trade operations, or VEO recruiting. These illicit and hazardous activities can be countered with rigorous training and sustained education at all levels.
Large bases, centralized command structures, and prominent targets represent an outdated warfare paradigm. Agile cells are the alternative—ordinary individuals transformed into operatives. Office workers, truck drivers, market vendors, teachers, and yes, individuals with rifles in some cases—not uniformed soldiers, but locals with intimate knowledge of their communities—are critical assets. Envision a South Pacific island nation’s economic exclusion zone that covers hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Fishermen who the Coast Guard has trained detect CCP vessels encroaching—encrypted radios facilitate communication, and drones are deployed. At low cost, these individuals relay intelligence to a blogger who disseminates it unfiltered. No one awaits authorization from a senior officer—they act and adapt. If the CCP disables one vessel or Russia’s proxies apprehend an individual, the other cells remain operational and healthy. Despite one segment being disrupted, the network survives.
The community of resistance is well-equipped but not conventionally so. It is furnished with secure applications, ISR tools, cameras, sensors, targeting systems, and power sources. It is a modern-day take on the Coast Watchers of WWII, but instead of just watching for adversarial movements, they simultaneously mitigate misinformation. Locals already utilize publicly available satellite imagery in numerous regions to navigate routes and avoid bad weather. They need to be slightly better trained and armed with secure apps and devices to augment existing capabilities. This is all to create strategic challenges for adversaries and ensure there is no centralized vulnerability to exploit.
Economic warfare in the campaign warrants distinct emphasis because of its critical role in determining competitive outcomes. It must be redefined as a core component of this reimagined IW campaign. Rather than mitigating 4+1 coercion through alternative investments, the campaign must establish micro-resilience communities—localized economic ecosystems engineered to resist external manipulation. These zones would leverage AI-enabled supply chains, decentralized finance (DeFi) models, and cryptographic barter systems, enabling small nations and communities to function beyond the reach of traditional financial constraints. The goal is economic growth and autonomy, transforming supply chain resilience into a tool of irregular competition. If the necessity of extending an IW campaign beyond the military domain is not apparent, the economic warfare component clarifies this requirement. Militaries alone cannot execute this campaign. Effective irregular competition demands economic, technological, and civilian-led initiatives, creating conditions where adversaries struggle to assert dominance. The future of IW will not be determined solely by military actors but by the capacity to shape, sustain, and defend independent economic structures that deny adversaries leverage before kinetic engagement.
Financial mechanisms are essential to IW—for good and bad actors alike. The CCP restricts trade, Russia manipulates accounts or emboldens rogue regimes, Iran controls oil and exports weapons, and North Korea circumvents the rule-based order through sanctions defiance. This campaign will outmaneuver malign economic warfare with micro-resilience networks. Consider a resistance scenario where the PLA partially occupies Taiwan. Small factories and solar farms that remain functional could employ AI to reroute commodities when enemy-induced congestion occurs in different areas on the island. Locals can transact with blockchain tokens, reducing reliance on banking systems susceptible to CCP coercion. They might cultivate food, repair equipment, stockpile medicine, move people through underground systems, and develop unconventional logistics lines onto the island to ensure sustenance despite CCP blockages—thereby enabling continued resistance.
While forward basing remains an important component of US national security strategy, establishing persistent, indigenous capability enables like-minded people to defend themselves. Fixed installations will retain relevance, but US and partner assets must evolve into dynamic, nonlinear teams of teams, or to borrow a phrase from General Stan McChrystal – that integrate seamlessly into civilian and commercial infrastructure. This approach will necessitate innovations such as subsurface ISR hubs, maritime traffic manipulation tools, and rapidly deployable autonomous supply elements. This effort concurrently embodies a key aspect of IW’s contribution to furthering the US’s worldwide Defense Industrial Base (DIB) aims. In IW, the objective is to create an unpredictable support system for friends and partners while diminishing adversarial ability to operate effectively across tactical, strategic, political, industrial, and diplomatic levels. The aim is not merely to outmatch the 4+1 in firepower or logistics but to render its strategies ineffective before they can be implemented. The campaign’s logistics architecture should ideally operate as an adaptive system—drones deliver equipment to isolated combatants, AI anticipates the CCP’s next maneuver or Russia’s disinformation surge, and encrypted networks unify the effort. Governments, technology enterprises, private industry, and committed individuals work to adjust and sustain the apparatus.
Establishing IW networks in unrestricted or permissive environments is manageable. The challenge, admittedly, is finding creative ways to establish such networks in contested environments where opposition to authoritarian regimes often leads to imprisonment, threats to family members left behind, and/or death. This may be done by developing IW elements outside of the contested environment to be inserted later, enabled by communications and other logistical support. Resistance in contested environments always comes with greater risk. Whether in contested or permissive environments, the political will of all parties involved will be significant to success or failure.
Conclusion
A forward-looking IW campaign in the Indo-Pacific cannot afford to replicate historical models. The 4+1 will undoubtedly attempt to emulate or surpass US and partner IW efforts, pursuing destabilization and strategic revisionism. Achieving a more stable, prosperous, and secure Indo-Pacific requires a departure from static alliances, predictable force postures, and reactive approaches. Instead, the US and its partners must leverage the human domain and cognitive space, utilizing emergent technologies, resistance infrastructures, and decentralized communities to construct a new operational reality. So, what are the next steps? After spending time and resources to fully understand the people, the environment, adversaries, and the intended strategic outcomes, the US must design the campaign in great detail, with as many elements of the government, private sector, industry, think tanks, academia, and foreign partners brainstorming and working together. The US will likely need new and expanded authorities to execute as described here. A long-term investment must be routinely reassessed and adjusted—a decades-long endeavor. If successful, this campaign has the potential to disrupt, cut, and bleed evolving adversarial strategies while gaining time and space for the US and its partners to compete more forcefully.
Tags: China, China-Taiwan, China-Taiwan Relations, INDO-PACIFIC, information dominance, information warfare, irregular warfare, US-China
About The Author
- Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
- Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations at the Department of Defense’s Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia.
12. Iran: Regime Carries Out Massacre In Kermanshah Prison Under Shadow Of War With Israel – OpEd
I have not seen any other reporting on this.
Iran: Regime Carries Out Massacre In Kermanshah Prison Under Shadow Of War With Israel – OpEd
https://www.eurasiareview.com/18062025-iran-regime-carries-out-massacre-in-kermanshah-prison-under-shadow-of-war-with-israel-oped/
June 18, 2025 0 Comments
By Mahin Horri
In a stark display of the Iranian regime’s brutality, security forces massacred prisoners in Dizel-Abad prison in Kermanshah on June 16 after the inmates pleaded for safety.
The incident began after a nearby military site was struck by an Israeli airstrike, causing an explosion that shattered the prison’s windows and shook its walls. Fearing for their lives, inmates in wards 2, 3, and 8 began protesting, demanding to be moved to a secure location away from the immediate danger zone.
The regime’s response was not protection, but a hail of live ammunition. As one report from inside the prison starkly noted, “The prisoners insisted they be moved from areas where windows had shattered and where they feared further missile strikes. The regime’s answer was bullets.”
A calculated act of repression
Instead of de-escalating the situation, prison authorities deployed the regime’s anti-riot Special Units, who met the prisoners’ pleas for safety with beatings and gunfire. According to eyewitnesses, these forces deliberately targeted the prisoners. At least 10 inmates were killed and over 30 were wounded in the assault.
A preliminary report described the attack as a “deliberate and cold-blooded act” against “unarmed, defenseless inmates who were merely trying to flee a danger zone.” In a cynical move to conceal its crime, regime authorities are already reportedly planning a cover-up, intending to falsely claim the prisoners were killed by shrapnel from the airstrike, not by the gunfire of their own forces.
The Dizel-Abad massacre is not an isolated incident but a chilling symptom of a regime gripped by panic. Facing mounting popular resistance, a deepening economic crisis, and growing international isolation, the clerical establishment is responding with brute force. This atrocity follows a disturbing and dramatic spike in the regime’s use of capital punishment, with at least 41 people executed in the last week alone. This turn toward heightened violence underscores the regime’s desperation as it senses its grip on power weakening.
An urgent call for international accountability
The international community cannot stand by as the Iranian regime murders prisoners who are pleading for their lives. The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) has issued an urgent call for justice and immediate international intervention.
In a statement, the PMOI demanded, “We urge the UN and the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran to immediately investigate the Kermanshah prison massacre, identify the victims, and hold perpetrators accountable.”
The Social Committee of the PMOI has also called on citizens in the Dizel-Abad area to help identify the victims and report details of the crime to ensure the truth is exposed to the world. This brutal massacre is yet another stain on the regime’s appalling human rights record and a clear signal that only decisive international action can begin to hold this unchecked tyranny to account.
Mahin Horri
Mahin Horri writes for the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
13. Peace Through Strength Requires a Strong Defense of Human Rights
There is nothing wrong with working from the moral high ground. There is strength in a human rights upfront approach. Human rights are not only a moral imperative, they are national security issue. the CRInK dictators must deny human rights to remain in power.
Conclusion:
U.S. policy should strive to achieve Reagan’s vision of America as a shining city on a hill. To give up on that vision is to give up on what makes America great. The future of U.S. foreign policy is brightest when we craft and implement policies that effectively advance both U.S. interests and human rights.
Peace Through Strength Requires a Strong Defense of Human Rights
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/06/peace-through-strength-requires-a-strong-defense-of-human-rights/
Ethnic Uyghur demonstrators take part in a protest against China in Istanbul, Turkey, October 1, 2021.(Dilara Senkaya / Reuters)
By Olivia Enos
June 16, 2025 6:30 AM
The future of U.S. foreign policy is brightest when we craft and implement policies that effectively advance both U.S. interests and human rights.
R
ecently, the Trump administration formally notified Congress of its plans to reorganize the State Department. Plans include drastic cuts to both personnel and funding at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the bureau at the U.S. Department of State most responsible for safeguarding freedom and human rights abroad.
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Reducing bureaucracy and the size of the federal government is a worthy endeavor. Yet this announcement came amid rising threats to U.S. national security from the authoritarian governments of nations such as China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and others. An increasingly dangerous world stage makes it all the more obvious that a restructuring which comes at the expense of a strong national defense and a robust arsenal of tools to defend human rights is not just shortsighted. It also forgets what made Ronald Reagan’s peace through strength possible.
Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, some in the State Department have spearheaded cuts and reorganizations that have severely deemphasized human rights as an element of U.S. foreign policy. Efforts to provide life-saving aid through USAID have been temporarily stymied or face uncertain futures, critical nodes of information provided through Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty have been cut off, and civil society organizations devoted to defending human rights find themselves without government support.
During Trump’s first term, the administration’s commitment to defending religious freedom often meant that human rights were highlighted and defended. In his second term, the administration’s foresaking of human rights tools is being justified, in part, as a necessity to remove “wokeness” from the State Department. But most of the specific programs on the chopping block are not ideological in nature. Instead, Reaganite policies designed to safeguard fundamental freedoms and human rights are being cut. To the extent they have lost sight of their original mission, they need to be reformed, not eliminated.
Honor and Ukraine
Trump’s Apology Tour
After the Ayatollahs
These figures in the second Trump administration are not the first around a president to underappreciate the strategic importance of good human rights policies. Republicans and Democrats alike have too often failed to see the significance of human rights in foreign policy. In the past, this oversight has forced the U.S. to fight adversaries with one hand tied behind its back.
Some in the Trump administration are undermining the very tools and apparatus that make it possible to counter authoritarians’ disinformation, provide relief to political prisoners, counter transnational repression, offer safe haven to dissidents and freedom-loving individuals, and ultimately shift the balance of power within a country. These features had nothing to do with a “woke” agenda. Rather, many of these policies were designed to protect the kind of freedoms Americans hold most dear: freedom of speech, association, the press, religion, and more.
There need not be a conflict or even tension between serving American interests and protecting human rights. In fact, protecting these freedoms elsewhere serves American interests. U.S. policies designed to safeguard human rights serve not as a last but rather as a first line of defense against authoritarians. The utter disregard by authoritarians for the rights of their own peoples, if left unchecked, nearly always threatens American security. Thus, today, the U.S. isn’t just fighting with one arm tied behind its back. It’s as though we have lost a limb entirely.
Degrading U.S. capabilities to respond to authoritarians is not without consequences. America’s adversaries — those countries that pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security — share a common denominator: Each one violates human rights (in most cases, both domestically and abroad) to maintain power. Which is why they all hate America’s promotion of human rights: They view it, rightly, as a challenge to their nefarious designs — which depend on subjugating their own peoples.
Take China. The Chinese Communist Party is one of the gravest of threats to U.S. national security. The CCP relies on the tacit compliance of the Chinese people to ensure carte blanche approval of its agenda. The CCP’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs, for example, advances the CCP’s core foreign policy goals: to maintain sovereignty and safeguard internal stability. And the Uyghurs aren’t the only targets. Chinese Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong, and others face immeasurable persecution, as does the intelligentsia, including human rights lawyers and high-profile dissidents.
The CCP’s efforts to undermine human rights don’t stop at China’s borders. Pro-democracy activists — ones the Trump administration supported during the first term — are facing threats on U.S. soil. And their families in Hong Kong are targeted because of their advocacy here in the U.S. and abroad. The CCP feels most threatened when their citizens exercise and enjoy full human rights.
Uyghurs Need More Than Just Tough Talk from the Biden Administration
Religious Persecution in China Must Be Called Out
Downplaying human rights, therefore, threatens national security. It gives the CCP (and adversaries like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others) permission to violate human rights both domestically and abroad, to undermine and threaten U.S. (and other countries’) sovereignty without consequence, and removes obstacles of resistance to policies that harm U.S. interests.
Deprioritizing human rights leaves valuable leverage on the negotiating table and concedes hard-fought ground that granted the U.S. the ability to weigh in on matters of values in the first place. U.S. victories in World War II and the Cold War granted the U.S. the authority and capacity to secure freedom for Americans and to defend freedom where it was under threat abroad. Our adversaries would love nothing more than for the world to forget about those victories and what they enabled.
Reagan understood that America at its best requires a strong national defense and robust national security apparatus, as well as a commitment to defending human rights and values at home and abroad. His idea of the U.S. as a shining city on a hill isn’t just an ideal. It’s a reality that all Americans should strive for.
What would that reality look like?
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It’s not too late for the administration to change course. While there is merit in reevaluating what works and what doesn’t, increasing government efficiency, and reducing the size of government, current efforts should look for ways to strengthen, rather than undermine, tools of human rights statecraft.
The recent past provides good examples of a rightly ordered foreign policy that advances both human rights as well as U.S. interests. Again, one can even look to Trump’s first term for such examples. The first Trump administration’s prioritization of freedom of religion or belief committed U.S. leadership to defending the human rights of people of faith (and of no faith) alike. These policies didn’t just inspire action by governments. They also generated momentum through civil society after Trump’s first term ended — momentum the Biden administration could not stop and actually continued.
Another excellent example of good human rights policy is the Bush administration’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDs relief, or PEPFAR. It has saved more than 26 million lives through its efforts to treat and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDs. PEPFAR is a U.S.-led aid triumph at providing life-saving relief. It thus also strengthens American leadership, to the bitter envy and enmity of our adversaries.
The final example is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA. The act used a traditional trade tool to achieve human rights ends. Its “rebuttable presumption” stated that all goods produced with Uyghur labor are presumed to be produced with forced labor and are therefore prohibited entry into U.S. markets. As of July 2025, more than $3 billion in goods have been investigated and over $800 million in goods denied entry into the U.S. The law advances the national interest as well as human rights — an ideal template for all such policies.
All of these policies share one critical attribute: They have advanced U.S. and global interests while safeguarding and defending human rights. Future policies can and should enjoy similar success in advancing freedom and liberty domestically and abroad.
They can do so by:
- Making better use of traditional national security tools to achieve human rights ends. For example, more skillfully employing sanctions and other financial tools to increase the risk to individuals and entities of violating human rights
- Ensuring that concerns about and support for human rights are better integrated into diplomacy with our adversaries, placing premiums on securing the release of political prisoners, and elevating the voices of pro-freedom dissidents
- Striving to provide safe haven to persecuted people, especially those who are securely vetted and share beliefs about the value of human rights and good governance
- Providing access to information that equips people in closed societies with the information they need to either facilitate change from within or flee to freedom beyond their countries’ borders
- Emphasizing and expanding policies that are inherently lifesaving
U.S. policy should strive to achieve Reagan’s vision of America as a shining city on a hill. To give up on that vision is to give up on what makes America great. The future of U.S. foreign policy is brightest when we craft and implement policies that effectively advance both U.S. interests and human rights.
14. US ally doubles down on missiles angering China
If China does not want to be upset it can stop threatening counties in the region. But every country has the right to self defense.
US ally doubles down on missiles angering China
Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · June 17, 2025
ByMicah 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.
The Philippines' defense chief has again pushed back against China's claim that hosting U.S. missiles in the country amounts to a provocation.
"It's none of China's business; it's for Philippine defense," Gilberto Teodoro said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes when asked to respond to Beijing's objections.
Why It Matters
China asserts sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, citing historical rights—a position that puts it at odds with competing claims by the Philippines and several other neighbors. In recent years, Manila has stepped up its response to China's growing presence within the Philippine maritime zone.
Fierce clashes between Chinese and Philippine forces near disputed reefs have, on several occasions, left Philippine sailors injured. These incidents have put Manila's Mutual Defense Treaty with Washington in the spotlight, raising questions of whether U.S. forces could be drawn into a conflict with nuclear-armed China.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry with a request for comment outside of office hours.
What To Know
On the latest episode of 60 Minutes, which aired Sunday, Teodoro compared China to "the proverbial schoolyard bully." "It just muscles you over," he said.
The conversation turned to the Mid-Range Capability, or "Typhon" missile launcher, which the U.S. Army deployed to the Philippines ahead of joint military drills in April.
The system can be equipped with Tomahawk missiles—whose maximum range of 1,200 miles puts much of China's east coast within reach—as well as shorter-range Standard Missile 6s. Army officials have said the SM-6 is the only U.S. missile currently capable of intercepting a hypersonic missile, such as those possessed by China and Russia, in late flight.
A U.S. "Typhon" launcher is seen in Northern Luzon in the Philippines on April 8, 2024. A U.S. "Typhon" launcher is seen in Northern Luzon in the Philippines on April 8, 2024. Ryan DeBooy/U.S. Army
China has repeatedly called for the Typhon to be removed from the Philippines.
Asked by interviewer Cecelia Vega whether the missiles are there to stay, Teodoro said he could neither confirm nor deny such a plan.
"What happens within our territory is for our defense," he said. "We follow international law. What's the fuss?"
Teodoro said he didn't know how the feud would end, but indicated the Philippines will not back down.
"All I know is that we cannot let [China] get away with what they're doing."
A Hague-based arbitral court's 2016 decision dismissed China's sweeping South China Sea claims. Beijing maintains that the ruling was politically motivated.
The 60 Minutes interview aired just two weeks after a tense back-and-forth between Teodoro and senior Chinese defense officials at the Shangri-La Dialogue defense forum in Singapore, where the Philippine official said a "deficit of trust" in China was the greatest obstacle to a solution to tensions in the South China Sea.
What People Have Said
Ray Powell, the director of the Stanford University-affiliated maritime analysis group SeaLight, told 60 Minutes: "China has decided that at this point in their history, they are large enough so they can buck the law."
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at the Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore on May 31: "We're watching very closely China's destabilizing actions, and any unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the South China Sea and the First Island Chain—by force or coercion—is unacceptable."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters in February: "The Philippines has worked with the U.S. to bring in the Typhon system. It's placing its national security and defense in the hands of others and introducing geopolitical confrontation and the risk of an arms race into the region…China will not sit idly by when its security interests are harmed or threatened."
What's Next
Speaking with Newsweek on the sidelines of the Shangril-La Dialogue, Teodoro said Manila would seek to increase deterrence against China's activities in the Philippine exclusive economic zone by pushing for "international resonance" and "building up capability resilience."
The Philippines is expected to continue holding joint military exercises with the U.S. and other countries concerned with China's growing assertiveness, including Japan and Australia.
Last year, the U.S. pledged $500 million in military aid to its Southeast Asian ally.
Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · June 17, 2025
15. Conflict between China, Philippines could involve U.S. and lead to a clash of superpowers
60 Minutes video the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-philippines-conflict-could-involve-us-60-minutes-transcript-2025-06-15/
Conflict between China, Philippines could involve U.S. and lead to a clash of superpowers
CBS News · by Cecilia Vega 60 Minutes Correspondent
If there's going to be a military conflict between the United States and China, the thinking in Washington goes, it will most likely happen if China tries to invade Taiwan. But over the past two years, tensions have escalated precariously in another part of the South China Sea — the waters off the western coast of the Philippines where an international tribunal ruled the Philippines has exclusive economic rights. But China claims almost all of the South China Sea, one of the world's most vital waterways through which trillions of dollars in goods flow each year. To assert its claims, China has been using tactics just short of war — leading to violent confrontations. The United States has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, which could mean American intervention. It's been called "the most dangerous conflict no one is talking about." And last year we saw for ourselves just how dangerous it can be…
When we boarded the Philippine Coast Guard ship Cape Engaño in August 2024, it was supposed to be for a routine mission resupplying ships and stations in the South China Sea.
But in the middle of our first night …
Sirens raged… crew members rushed between decks.
Cecilia Vega: It's 4 in the morning. We've all been sound asleep. This alarm just went off on the ship. We were told to wake up and put our life jackets on because we've just been rammed by a Chinese boat.
There was confusion… fear. Our team was told to stay inside the cabin for safety.
It was unclear if we would take on water, or if the Chinese would try to force their way on board.
60 Minutes
Philippine crew members prepared for that possibility and stood by the hatch holding clubs in case they had to fend off the Chinese.
This cellphone video taken by the Filipinos shows the moment just after impact — the Chinese coast guard ship- 269 feet long and nearly twice the size of the Cape Engaño— jammed into the Philippine's starboard quarter, the rear right side of the ship.
When the Chinese pulled away…the Filipinos found a three-and-a-half-foot hole. An officer told us we were lucky the damage was above the water line.
Cecilia Vega: There are… you can't see here in the dark — about four or five different Chinese boats surrounding us, at the moment. And the crew tells me they can see on the radar that more are coming right now
This happened about 60 nautical miles off the coast of the Philippines, and about 660 nautical miles from China, on the way to a place called Sabina Shoal.
Manila and Beijing had stationed Coast Guard vessels around the shoal in recent months, with the Philippines fearing China will take control.
In 2016, an international tribunal at the Hague ruled the Philippines has exclusive economic rights in a 200-mile zone that includes Sabina Shoal and the area where the Cape Engaño was rammed.
China does not recognize the ruling and says the South China Sea has been its territory since ancient times.
Cecilia Vega: We're just getting our first light. And now, we have a much better sense of just how surrounded we are by Chinese vessels. You can see these two right here actually say, "China Coast Guard," We're at a complete standoff. We've been here for, going on, two hours now, not moving. It's unclear whether we can even turn around and go back, if we wanted to. We're just completely surrounded by Chinese ships.
Fourteen in all… including a militia of large fishing vessels used to help occupy territory and block ships like the one we were on.
The Filipinos tried to negotiate a way out, but ultimately were forced to abandon the first stop of their mission.
Cecilia Vega: He said we're not going to Sabina
In their damaged boat… they had to take a long detour to their next supply drop, as Chinese ships followed closely.
By this time, the Chinese had already publicized their version of the incident — accusing the Filipinos of instigating the conflict and highlighting our team's faces — accusing us of being part of a propaganda campaign
Chinese video: The Philippines has turned the South China Sea into its theater … deliberately ramming a Chinese Coast Guard ship, with Western journalists right there to capture the drama…
Cecilia Vega: They're saying that this is your fault, this collision.
Captain Labay: If you do the ramming, the other ship would have the damage, not your ship.
Captain Daniel Labay, the top-ranking officer on the Cape Engaño, took us below deck to survey the damage.
Cecilia Vega and Captain Daniel Labay 60 Minutes
He told us it would not stop them from continuing on.
Captain Labay: This is our place. This is our exclusive economic zone. It's-- this is the Philippines.
Over the past two years, the Chinese have turned the South China Sea into a demolition derby, repeatedly ramming Philippine ships and blasting them with water cannons
But what we saw on the Cape Engaño represented a significant escalation — bringing the battle lines closer than ever to the Philippine shore.
Within hours of the collision, the Biden administration condemned China for what it called "dangerous and destabilizing conduct."
Cecilia Vega: This has become an international incident what happened on your ship this morning.
Captain Labay: I've been assigned here for two years, and this is just what we deal with every day.
Cecilia Vega: Is it getting worse now?
Captain Labay: Yes, it's— it's getting worse.
Cecilia Vega: What's behind this uptick in tension? What changed?
Gilbert Teodoro: I think, well, what changed is the determination of the Philippines to say, "No."
Cecilia Vega: You're standing up to China?
Gilbert Teodoro: Oh yes. Yes, and they don't like it.
Gilberto Teodoro is the Philippine secretary of national defense.
Gilbert Teodoro: The proverbial schoolyard bully is the best example of what China is, you know. It— it just muscles you over.
Gilbert Teodoro 60 Minutes
For example, he says: the aptly named Mischief Reef in the Philippines' economic zone once looked like this…. it now looks like this. In the 1990s, the Chinese took it over and started turning the reef into a military base.
As the Cape Engaño passed near Mischief Reef, a Chinese Navy destroyer appeared.
E.J. Cruise: China Navy warship, 105….this is MRV 4411…
The Filipinos repeatedly asked for safe passage…
E.J. Cruise: Please keep clear of our passage and maintain safe distance. Over.
Each time there was no response. In a game of cat and mouse, the destroyer edged forward.
The Filipinos were forced to come to a stop and adjust course to avoid another collision.
Ray Powell: China has decided that at this point in their history, they are large enough so that they can buck the law.
In Manila, we met retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Ray Powell who runs the nonprofit Sealight, which tracks China's actions in the South China Sea.
Cecilia Vega: How do they get away with this?
Ray Powell: There's a law and there's a judge, but there's no— there's no enforcer. There's no prosecutor. There's nobody to put 'em in jail
Cecilia Vega: There's no sheriff out, unless, I suppose, the U.S. decides to intervene, which then, when then becomes the world policeman?
Ray Powell: You know, that's the problem.
Ray Powell 60 Minutes
The U.S. is bound by treaty to defend the Philippines if it comes under armed attack.
Cecilia Vega: I want to understand a scenario in which that red line could be crossed.
Ray Powell: You were just involved in a situation where you were hit by a larger ship. Imagine if that ship had sunk your ship and several people had died. What would the Philippines then feel compelled to do? They probably wouldn't go instantly to war. But they might instantly get onto a war footing. They might go to the United States and say, "This looks a lot like an armed attack to us. We were hit by a ship and people died."
Cecilia Vega: And in a scenario like that, would the United States be obligated to intervene?
Ray Powell: Look, every treaty in the end depends on the political will of the parties. What I will say is if the United States fails or appears to fail to meet its treaty obligations, the entire U.S. treaty and alliance and treaty structure is built on credibility.
Cecilia Vega: Your word means nothing?
Ray Powell: If it means nothing to the Philippines, what does it mean to Japan? What does it mean to Australia? What does it mean to NATO?
The United States has not had a permanent military presence in the Philippines since 1992. Though it does conduct regular Joint 7 exercises, and last year committed $500 million in military aid to manila and another $128 million to upgrade bases.
We met General Romeo Brawner, the military chief of staff, at one of those bases, after he landed in his fighter jet following an aerial reconnaissance flight over the South China Sea.
Cecilia Vega: How much time do you spend focused on China?
General Romeo Brawner: Almost the whole day
In 2023, General Brawner visited the Philippines' equivalent of the Alamo, a grounded World War II battleship called the Sierra Madre, manned by soldiers and used to hold down Manila's claim to a disputed area in the South China Sea.
It was the scene of the most violent incident to date.
General Romeo Brawner: 60 Minutes
In June 2024, when the Philippine Navy tried to resupply those troops, the Chinese blocked the delivery… it was near hand-to-hand combat.
General Romeo Brawner: What was surprising was that they had bladed weapons with them. They had spears with them.
Cecilia Vega: You had never seen that before.
General Romeo Brawner: We have not seen that before. And they began attacking our boats. They started puncturing our boats with their spears
A Filipino Navy SEAL lost his right thumb after the Chinese rammed his boat.
General Romeo Brawner: They stole our equipment. They destroyed our equipment. They hurt our personnel. And these are the doings of pirates. I warned our personnel, if this happens again, you have the right to defend yourselves.
Cecilia Vega: If the Chinese were to fire upon your men and your men fire back, sir, that sounds like the makings of the-- the beginning of a war.
General Romeo Brawner: Yes. Yes, indeed, indeed.
Defense Secretary Teodoro told us there are ongoing conversations between Washington and Manila about which scenarios would trigger U.S. involvement
Cecilia Vega: Do you worry that perhaps some unpredictable incident at sea could cause tensions to escalate? And then, you know, suddenly the Philippines, not Taiwan, becomes the flash-point in the South China Sea—
Gilbert Teodoro: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, definitely.
Cecilia Vega: If China were to take the Sierra Madre, would that merit America's intervention?
Gilbert Teodoro: If China were to take the Sierra Madre, that is a clear act of war on a Philippine vessel.
Cecilia Vega: And you would expect American intervention—
Gilbert Teodoro: And we will react. And naturally, we would expect it.
Cecilia Vega: You're talking about a rusty old warship. How realistic is it to expect the United States to intervene over the fate of a warship like that?
Gilbert Teodoro: There are people in there, that is an outpost of Philippine sovereignty. So we're not talking about a rusty, old vessel solely. We're talking about a piece of Philippine territory in there.
President Biden invited Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the White House twice during his term, and assured him of America's support:
President Biden: "I wanna be very clear. The United States defense commitment to the Philippines is ironclad."
Last year, Washington sent the Philippines a powerful weapon during joint exercises — a mid-range missile system capable of reaching mainland China.
Cecilia Vega: That clearly angered China in a big way
Gilbert Teodoro: Well, that's none of their business. This is for Philippine defense.
Cecilia Vega: It's none of China's business that you have a missile that could reach their shores?
Gilbert Teodoro: What happens within our territory, it is for our defense. We follow international law. What's the fuss?
Cecilia Vega: Do you plan to keep mid-range missiles capable of reaching mainland China at some of your bases?
Gilbert Teodoro: I can neither confirm nor deny if there is such a plan.
Cecilia Vega: You say, "What's the fuss?" China says that you've brought the risk of war into the region by doing this.
Gilbert Teodoro: That's what they always say. Everything the world does that they don't like is the fault of the world.
Cecilia Vega: But how do you think this ends though? You don't expect China to pack up and leave, do you?
Gilbert Teodoro: I really don't know the end state. All I know is that we cannot let them get away with what they're doing.
Since our story aired, the Trump administration has continued to support the Philippines in its dispute with China. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the Philippines in March. Both he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have assured the Filipinos that the U.S. commitment to their country's defense remains iron-clad.
Produced by Andy Court and Jacqueline Williams. Associate producer, Annabelle Hanflig. Broadcast associates, Katie Jahns. Edited by Sean Kelly.
Cecilia Vega
Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and "60 Minutes" correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.
CBS News · by Cecilia Vega 60 Minutes Correspondent
16. Army expects to make more than a million artillery shells next year
Good news.
Army expects to make more than a million artillery shells next year
Armaments chief says new factories, streamlined processes will hit goal just a few months late.
defenseone.com · by Meghann Myers
The U.S. Army has nearly tripled its production of 155mm howitzer shells since the Ukraine war began, millions of which have been sent to that country’s front lines. It’s going to miss its goal of making 100,000 per month by October, but likely by just a few months.
The service’s current monthly output stands at 40,000, up from 14,500 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion more than three years ago, according to data provided by the Army. The original plan called for making about twice as many by now.
“Several of the investments that we made are just coming online now, a little later than we had hoped, but these were big bets, and we were given the mission to go fast,” Maj. Gen. John Reim, head of the joint armaments and ammunitions program executive office, told Defense One. “We put multiple bets down, and realized some risk…but we will continue to work through that.”
In February 2024, the Army announced that it aimed to produce 60,000 shells per month that October, 75,000 in April 2025, and 100,000 by this October.
So far the service has funneled nearly $5 billion into the project, mostly through supplemental funding, upgrading existing plants as well as opening new ones. Reim himself has attended seven ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings.
“You know, I tell folks all the time that we're literally making history, and that we've not seen this level of investment in our industrial base since World War II,” he said.
The investment could be a model for the other services, like the Navy, whose leaders and advocates in Congress have said time and again desperately needs investment in its shipbuilding industrial base.
Making a plan
Most of the Army’s ammunition manufacturing facilities opened during World War II, Reim said. Service leaders made only minimal upgrades to those plants in the decades that followed, a policy that accepted a certain amount of risk, he said.
A new ground war in Europe, and a would-be ally’s desperate cries for anti-tank rounds, forced their hand.
So in 2022, the service submitted the Army Ammunition Plant Modernization Plan. It laid out broad goals like increasing automation and producing more materials in the United States, as well as specific projects, like opening up a facility to produce nitrocellulose – an ingredient in all ammunition propellants – at Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia.
“At the same time, the Ukraine war started to get hot and heavy, and we were given the edict that’s like, ‘hurry up and go fast’,” Reim said.
That included surging production at existing facilities such as the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant.
“They quickly went from a single shift to three shifts, largely running almost 24/7,” Reim said.
A new facility then opened in Mesquite, Texas, with the capacity to crank out 30,000 rounds a month, followed by another in Canada, which is just coming online at a rate of 10,000 a month, he said.
The latest, opening in April in Camden, Arkansas, will crank out another 50,000 per month. Another in Parsons, Kansas, should open later this summer, Reim said, with an estimated rate of 12,000 per month.
Once those are at full production, likely early next year, the Army will surpass that 100,000 rounds-per-month goal.
At the same time, the effort has pushed the Army to re-open old production lines.
The U.S. hasn’t manufactured its own TNT since 1986. Instead, Reim said, the Army had been buying it from Ukraine and Russia, which of course are no longer options. The service has since found vendors in South America, Australia and Asia, and has secured funding for new TNT facilities.
“We've learned a lot of lessons from our Ukraine experience, and we're just so fortunate that we're learning that now, and not with our blood and treasure on the line,” Reim said.
defenseone.com · by Meghann Myers
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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