Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Remember that the White House has always wanted to be well regarded by the media. That has not changed. It’s just that the media that the White House wants to be well regarded by has changed fundamentally, in the direction of right-wing and left-wing extremes, exacerbated by a noticeable increase in self-righteousness, and politicians have moved with the times. This fragile, finite earth of ours rests, above all, on moderation, which this new age of technology is fundamentally undermining. This is what at root fuels our permanent crisis. Remember that Weimar had moderate leaders, until one day it didn’t. At least we can take solace in the fact that our institutions, as imperfect as they are, are far more robust than Weimar’s.”

— Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan

"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. That intellectuality is more vigorous that has attained its strength gradually. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider — and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation — persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree."

– Alexander Graham Bell

“In a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian."

– William J. Donovan — OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War by Maochun Yu

1. Rising Lion: Escalation, Objectives, and the Logic of Targeting

2. Why Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Is Missing in Action

3. Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment

4. Actions create consequences: Powell’s 14th rule – are we paying attention? by Dr. Cynthia Watson

5. Israel's Extraordinary Spy Teams Inside Iran

6. Harding Project – My Turn at the Desk by Zachery Griffiths

7. Three Alternative Approaches to Deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific

8. Rules of the Game (for Israel)

9. We Need a Marine Corps, Part II: A Corps Confounded

10. Revisiting the Implications of Iran’s Long-Range Weapons Capabilities

11. China’s central bank chief expects new currency order to challenge dollar

12. What Would It Take to End the Regime in Iran?

13. The Rampant Leadership Corruption Plaguing China and Russia

14. Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Cannot Be Dismantled from the Air

15. Asean may be ‘insufficient’, but it’s indispensable, says academic

16. Army promises to deliver analysis on sweeping changes in 10 days

17. An Islamic Republic With Its Back Against the Wall

18. Ramifications of the Death of Iran’s (Former) President Ebrahim Raisi

19. Making Golden Dome Work: Innovation Lessons from the Cold War

20. Drones, Missiles, and a Battle of Chinese and European Fighter Jets: Lessons on the Future of War from the Indian Subcontinent’s Skies

21. The ‘jacked gorilla’ general pushing Trump to strike Iran

22. Hegseth defers to general on Pentagon’s plans for Iran

23. Why Ukraine's Drones Have Fiber Optic Cables Attached, Explained

24. U.S. Army Demonstrates Anti-Ship Potential in the Philippines

25. Why Putin Still Fights by Lawrence D. Freedman

1. Rising Lion: Escalation, Objectives, and the Logic of Targeting

Excerpts:

Operation Rising Lion is unfolding at a moment of profound strategic consequence. This analysis has highlighted three essential elements that will shape the outcome of the campaign and its broader implications. First, while Iran’s ability to escalate is constrained, the regime may respond in unpredictable ways – especially if it feels cornered. Second, Israel’s objectives may extend beyond destroying Iran’s nuclear program; overwhelming operational success or shifting political conditions brought on by that success could push its aims toward regime change. Third, although targeting is not a substitute for strategy, it can generate paralyzing effects that my force Iran to recalculate. Warden’s Five Rings concept provides a useful construct for examining this dynamic of the conflict.

These three dynamics do not exist in isolation. As escalatory actions narrow political options, objectives may expand. Expanded objectives may alter the logic and scale of targeting – accelerating the pace and scope of the conflict.

The future is uncertain. But these three dynamics—escalation pathways, evolving objectives, and the logic of targeting—are elements to watch.

Essay| The Latest

Rising Lion: Escalation, Objectives, and the Logic of Targeting

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/19/rising-lion-escalation-objectives-and-the-logic-of-targeting/

by Jay Pasquarette

06.19.2025 at 06:00am

Operation Rising Lion represents a significant moment in the ongoing confrontation between Israel and Iran. The consequences wrought by Iran’s persistent destabilization of the region through proxy groups for years and insistence on advancing their nuclear program – despite repeated warnings from the United States and Israel – are already severe.

Although it is early, there are three elements of Rising Lion to pay close attention to: (1) how escalation progresses and where it may lead, (2) what Israel’s true strategic objectives are given the means it has already committed and the risk it appears willing to assume, and (3) how the logic of targeting can shape an adversary’s decision-making. Each of these dynamics may influence not only the outcome of this conflagration but the possibility for a better peace when the fighting stops.

Escalation Ladders and Thresholds

The fundamental question of how far this conflict could escalate may be a function of degraded Iranian capabilities and limited means available to Tehran. Iran’s ability to respond convincingly and in a way which preserves the legitimacy of the Ayatollahs is likely to be materially constrained. Years of sanctions, the degradation of military infrastructure at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Mossad, and the weakened state of Tehran’s proxy network has done much to weaken Iranian strategy. However, a cornered Iran with limited options may escalate asymmetrically or worse. Tehran might feel forced to make unpredictable, drastic actions that are unforeseen by Israel and the United States.

This begs the question of off-ramps for both sides – and the degree to which they are already narrowing based on actions already taken. For Israel, an off-ramp could follow decisive operational success – such as the destruction of key Iranian nuclear infrastructure. A decisive military achievement paired with U.S. diplomatic assurances to maintain pressure on Iran through non-kinetic approaches might provide the opportunity to off-ramp and de-escalate the conflict. Alternatively, for Iran, a plausible off-ramp may include symbolic retaliation which seeks to preserve what little credibility Iranian leadership has left followed by a return to the negotiating table with the United States. However, in the absence of meaningful options, Iran’s leadership may perceive that de-escalation means capitulation – which further reinforces the increased risk that Iran may lash out in unpredictable ways.

Iran retains several tools: militias in Iraq, missile arsenals, cyber capabilities, and a demonstrated willingness to target U.S. interests or forces in the region in the past. A key question is whether Iran will consider striking U.S. forces this time. The logic behind this move could be to impose costs, signal defiance and resolve in the face of overwhelming odds and widen the crisis in order to pressure Washington to restrain Israel.

A strike on U.S. forces or assets may not be designed to restore deterrence but to compel external intervention before Iran suffers an irrecoverable strategic loss. This dynamic introduces a perilous degree of unpredictability into the crisis. Iran’s willingness to target civilians also introduces a dangerous element into escalatory dynamics. Tehran’s decision to attack population centers – predictable as it may be in response to Israel’s audacious attack – reveals a strategy aimed at psychological destabilization which is unlikely to generate strategic affects due to the Israeli populace’s hardened disposition. However, this tactic will likely limit options and reduce the utility of potential off-ramps for Israeli leadership.

Ultimately, the Israeli strategy behind Rising Lion rests on two central assumptions: (1) the threat of an Iranian nuclear sprint is real and that Iran’s current leadership, if unchecked, will continue its current course and (2) Iran possesses a plausible degree of intent to use a nuclear weapon against Israel once it obtains the means to do so. But in carrying out their operational plans and developing escalatory options, both Israel and the United States should remain alert to the possibility that, under extreme duress with few viable options remaining, Iran may escalate outside of expected bounds.

Strategic Objectives: Destruction of the Nuclear Program or Regime Change?

Publicly, Israel has framed the operation primarily as a defensive campaign to destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s nuclear program. However, the ends chosen at the outset of any conflict often change, and drastic operational success and failure can generate its own momentum which affects strategic and political objectives. The United States learned this in 2003 in Iraq and in 2005-2006 as a blistering insurgency took hold of the country.

There is risk that Rising Lion could evolve in the same way. If the campaign achieves significant success – as some argue that it already has – then Israel may face pressure, both internally from their populace or externally by countries that have an interest in seeing the Ayatollahs toppled, to expand its objectives beyond degradation of the nuclear program to regime change. For many in Israel’s security establishment, Iran’s regime is not only an existential nuclear threat – it is the architect of a years-long campaign of violence against the Israeli state through proxy groups. Hezbollah’s missile threat against Israel’s north, Hamas’ brutality on October 7th 2023, and other countless acts of terrorism funded by Iran have likely oriented the will of the Israeli populace toward a posture of retribution rather than de-escalation, reducing the appetite for restraint. In other words, Israeli leadership wields an unquantifiable but crucial weapon: a preponderance of political will derived from broad public consensus on the threat posed by Iran. Consequently, that grants Israeli decision-makers increased flexibility in the conduct and escalatory options of the campaign.

The technical feasibility of achieving the strategic objective of destroying the Iranian nuclear program through military means also shapes how objectives may evolve. If the IDF determines that Israeli military power alone is insufficient to destroy Iran’s nuclear program – due to over-optimism about its own abilities, Iranian resilience, or another unforeseen reason – then regime change may emerge as the only remaining pathway to a day-after scenario in which the nuclear threat no longer exists. The logic behind this decision could rest on the assumption that a post-Ayatollah Iranian government, informed by the lessons and consequences of the ongoing conflict, will reassess if the pursuit of nuclear weapons is in Iranian interest. Therefore, this assumption rests upon something far more flimsy – hope. That is, this assumption is guided by the hope that this hypothetical governing body will opt to abandon the program altogether as a way to reintegrate with the region and seek peace. Additionally, the assumption that the new governing body would not seek to re-establish a political-religious regime like that of the Ayatollah’s.

But a strategy oriented towards regime change raises questions about the day after. Who will govern Iran? Can elements of a fragmented Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) be controlled and re-molded into a bureaucracy to maintain order in a post-Ayatollah Iran? Who ensures stability in the Persian Gulf if the regime collapses?

The U.S. experience in Iraq remains instructive. Removing Saddam Hussein from power removed a threat, but it also dismantled the Iraqi state and unleashed a decade of instability, revealing the incredible challenges associated with “nation-building.” Democracy does not spring forth from the ground once an autocratic regime falls. It requires domestic buy-in, institutions, legitimacy, and external support – all which are currently lacking in Iran. To this point, regime change has not been overtly articulated by Israel – although the signs are already pointing in that direction. However, if the regime’s overthrow becomes an inherent outcome of Rising Lion, a dangerous uncertainty may be the result. The U.S. may be drawn into shaping a post-Ayatollah Iran even if it never anticipated or desired that outcome.

Ultimately, the question of who shapes “the day after” is critical. If Israel seeks to topple the Iranian regime and re-shape the regional order, it must anticipate the second- and third-order effects of regime collapse. Otherwise, the outcome of Rising Lion could produce more instability than previously anticipated.

Targeting is not Strategy – But it Can Cripple

Military power alone – and operational success – rarely delivers strategic success. With airpower serving as Israel’s primary tool so far, targeting is a central mechanism through which Israel seeks to transcend operations to achieve political objectives. When employed within a coherent framework, targeting can do more than destroy – it can paralyze.

Ideas about how to prosecute war and military doctrine are rooted in national contexts and the strategic culture of individual states. However, certain analytical frameworks can offer valuable insights across different scenarios. One such framework is John Warden’s Five Rings theory – a framework developed within the American military, and influential in shaping air campaign planning for Operation Desert Storm – a lens through which to examine Israel’s apparent targeting logic in Operation Rising Lion. This is not to suggest that Israeli strategic thinking is directly influenced by Warden’s model, nor to dismiss the existence of Israeli strategic concepts. Rather, despite widespread criticism of its real-world applicability, Warden’s model provides a useful, if simple, framework for analyzing the effects of targeting choices and inferring potential strategic objectives. It allows for a peek into Israel’s strategic calculus, understanding what they might be trying to achieve by looking at what they are hitting. Despite the model’s top-down perspective, it offers a structured way to understand how targeting decisions can be linked to broader strategic goals and provides a valuable starting point for analysis.

Warden’s Five Rings theory visualizes the adversary’s system is visualized as five concentric rings: (1) leadership, (2) essential systems – in this case, nuclear facilities – (3) infrastructure, (4) population, and (5) fielded military forces. The inner rings, particularly leadership and essential systems, are the most critical.

Israel – wittingly or not – appears to be implementing this logic on some level. Strikes on hardened facilities (Ring 2) have been paired with attacks on IRGC headquarters and command nodes (Ring 1), while air defense assets (Ring 5) have also been targeted. Notably, the fact that Israel has not directly targeted Iran’s senior leadership – the Ayatollahs – suggests an intent not to decapitate the regime, but to force it to recalculate. The initial objective – in addition to destruction or severe degradation of the nuclear program – may also be to induce paralysis. By degrading the regime’s capacity to operate coherently and maintain command and control, Israel is attempting to force Tehran into recalculating its ability to escalate further. Seeking to create cognitive and systemic disruption – paralyzing the regime – by denying it the ability to communicate, govern, or mobilize – can achieve strategic objectives without prolonged combat or stumbling into protracted war. Or so the theory goes.

Importantly, targeting strategies must remain adaptive. If Rising Lion remains focused on the nuclear program, attacks will prioritize Rings 2 and 3. But if strategic objectives shift toward regime destabilization, Rings 1 and 4 will take precedence—seeking to fracture elite cohesion and influence public perception through a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic methods. If the conflict becomes protracted or increasingly violent, the conventional wisdom associated with Israeli targeting norms may also shift. Israel has preserved the distinction between military and civilian targets thus far, focusing its air campaign on strategic infrastructure (Ring 3), leadership nodes (Ring 1), and nuclear facilities (Ring 2). However, if Iranian attacks cause mass casualty events in Israeli population centers, pressure on domestic political thresholds may push Israeli leadership to respond by shifting towards Ring 4. Although this possibility remains difficult to comprehend in the current moment, its emergence would mark a significant shift in Israel’s strategic logic and moral posture.

Yet targeting without strategy is dangerous. Over-targeting could produce unintended blowback, harden Iranian public resolve, or collapse governance structures needed to manage the chaos of the day-after scenario. As Rising Lion progresses at the operational level, the central challenge for Israel will be to employ a targeting logic which seeks to achieve political effects without unleashing consequences it cannot manage.

Conclusion

Operation Rising Lion is unfolding at a moment of profound strategic consequence. This analysis has highlighted three essential elements that will shape the outcome of the campaign and its broader implications. First, while Iran’s ability to escalate is constrained, the regime may respond in unpredictable ways – especially if it feels cornered. Second, Israel’s objectives may extend beyond destroying Iran’s nuclear program; overwhelming operational success or shifting political conditions brought on by that success could push its aims toward regime change. Third, although targeting is not a substitute for strategy, it can generate paralyzing effects that my force Iran to recalculate. Warden’s Five Rings concept provides a useful construct for examining this dynamic of the conflict.

These three dynamics do not exist in isolation. As escalatory actions narrow political options, objectives may expand. Expanded objectives may alter the logic and scale of targeting – accelerating the pace and scope of the conflict.

The future is uncertain. But these three dynamics—escalation pathways, evolving objectives, and the logic of targeting—are elements to watch.

About The Author

Jay Pasquarette
Jay Pasquarette is an Army officer and Strategic Planner for the Headquarters, Department of the Army. He lives in Alexandria, VA with his family.

2. Why Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Is Missing in Action

Let's stop using resistance to describe terrorist groups. The legitimate resistance will be among he iranian people who rise up to reject the totalitarian rule they suffer under,

Why Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Is Missing in Action

Militia groups allied with Tehran have mostly stayed out of its war with Israel

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/axis-of-resistance-iran-israel-strategy-103e6226

Demonstrators waving the flags of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah rallied in Tehran’s Revolution Square over the weekend. Photo: atta kenare/AFP/Getty Images

By Sudarsan Raghavan

, Summer Said

and Saleh al-Batati

June 18, 2025 10:00 pm ET

Key Points

What's This?

Iran’s allied militias, once a pillar of regional influence, are now prioritizing their own survival amid escalating conflicts.
Hezbollah and Hamas have been weakened, while Iraqi militias focus on economic gains and the Houthis prioritize their own interests.
Israel’s intelligence penetration within Iran has shocked Iran’s allies, leading to caution and a focus on self-preservation.

For decades, Iran’s leaders built up a network of allied militias in the Middle East that shared a hatred of Israel and America to gain regional influence and protect the regime. But as the theocracy is now fighting for its own survival, its allies are missing in action.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, once seen as the most powerful in Iran’s Axis of Resistance, hasn’t fired a single missile since Israel attacked Iran. Its military capabilities and leadership have been decimated by Israeli forces over the past year. Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, is a shadow of itself after 20 months of war with Israel that has seen its leaders killed and Gaza destroyed.

In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite militias haven’t targeted U.S. military bases, as they have in the past. And Yemen’s Houthi militia fired several missiles at Israel on Sunday, but have remained silent since.

Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment

The President can reverse Biden’s Afghan legacy by helping Israel eliminate Tehran’s nuclear threat.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/iran-israel-donald-trump-deterrence-fordow-nuclear-d2ac6ef0

By The Editorial Board

June 17, 2025 5:36 pm ET

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Photo: -/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Joe Biden’s Presidency began to decline the day he abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban. American deterrence collapsed, and U.S. enemies saw their moment to strike in Ukraine and the Middle East. Donald Trump now has an opportunity to reverse Mr. Biden’s Afghan legacy and restore deterrence if he helps Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

These are the strategic stakes as the U.S. President contemplates whether to assist Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. Losing the war but still resisting the dismantlement of their nuclear program, Iran’s leaders are hoping Mr. Trump will come to their rescue with more delaying diplomacy.

Yet, as Mr. Trump has said many times, Iran can end the Israeli assault by agreeing to roll up its nuclear program. Dismantle its enrichment capacity under international supervision, destroy its centrifuges, and allow for unhindered future inspections. Iran’s refusal to do so, even as it risks losing much of its non-nuclear military power and top commanders, shows that the regime wants a nuclear weapon more than it wants peace.

The world is watching closely to see how Mr. Trump responds, especially the hard men in Moscow and Beijing. Does he help a close ally remove a global threat to peace, and diminish a member of the axis of U.S. adversaries? Or does he listen to the voices of American appeasement on the left and right who fear any use of force more than they fear a nuclear-armed radical regime?

Some argue that since Israel is doing so well, there’s no need for the U.S. to join the fight. But as capable and creative as Israel is, it lacks the firepower to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear sites from the air. The United Nations nuclear watchdog says Israel has severely damaged the underground enrichment facility at Natanz. That still leaves Fordow, buried under a mountain. Destroying enrichment at Fordow will take America’s deep-penetrating bombs and the bombers to deliver them.

Others fear that aiding Israel will invite Iran’s retaliation against U.S. troops and expand the war. Yet that’s what Iran threatened to do if Israel attacked, and so far it hasn’t followed through. Iran knows such an attack would invite a far more fearsome U.S. response than bombs dropped on its nuclear sites.

The isolationists say bombing Iran would be another nation-building exercise, but no one is talking about sending American ground troops. An Israeli ground incursion is more likely if the U.S. doesn’t bomb Fordow. Destroying the nuclear sites could end the war sooner, and at less cost in lives on both sides.

The Biden precedent is instructive here, and not merely on Afghanistan. As Russia invaded Ukraine, and Iran’s Houthi proxies attacked U.S. ships in the Red Sea, Mr. Biden’s strategists shrank from a robust response because they feared “escalation.” In practice this meant Russia and Iran controlled when and how to escalate. Mr. Trump can’t possibly want to box himself into that corner.

Iran or its proxies could unleash terrorism against Americans, but that’s nothing new. They’ve been doing it for decades going back to the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. The one time in the last 25 years when Iran restrained itself was after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. The mullahs feared they were next.

All of which means that this is a crucial deterrence moment for the new Trump Administration as much as for Israel. The world takes a measure of every new President, even one like Mr. Trump who has served before. He campaigned for re-election as a peacemaker, and U.S. adversaries are looking to see what that means for how Mr. Trump will respond to pressure and strategic threats.

If the U.S. won’t help one of its strongest and most loyal allies finish the job of eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat in uncontested air space, the message to China will be that there is no chance the U.S. will defend Taiwan. Everyone will see it—from the Kremlin’s commissars to the Communist bosses in Beidaihe.

But if Mr. Trump helps Israel enforce his own red lines against Iran’s nuclear program, he can send a message that American deterrence means something again. The Afghan fiasco, and the other failures of the Biden years, will recede that much further into history’s rear-view mirror.

WSJ Opinion: Israel Attacks Iran's Nuclear Program

Play video: WSJ Opinion: Israel Attacks Iran's Nuclear Program

Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.)

Appeared in the June 18, 2025, print edition as 'Iran Is Trump’s Deterrence Moment'.

4. Actions create consequences: Powell’s 14th rule – are we paying attention? by Dr. Cynthia Watson

This is probably one of the most thoughtful and thought provoking (and important) essays I have read in a long while (And Dr. Watson writes a thought provoking essay nearly every day that is worth reading). I hope the Administration will heed Dr. Watson's advice.

However, with great trepidation I have some disagreement with my long time friend and mentor.

First, I fear the pottery barn rule is the excuse for not taking action when that action may be necessary. If we break it, do we really buy it? Do we have to buy it?

I do agree that externally imposed regime change is a folly because it leads Americans to make the strategic error of trying to rebuild the new nation in the US or western image.

But if a regime falls organically from within it will be up to the people of that sovereign nation to rebuild their own new country. Sovereignty and self determination of government (by the people themselves) are the principles we should believe in and adhere to. We should not conduct operations to externally impose regime change but we should take action if it is US and international security interests. Even if that means violating the sovereignty of a country like Iran to eliminate the nuclear threat.

The support for my positions comes from Dr. Watson's own writing here.

Excerpts:

Understandable U.S. retaliation in the weeks following the attacks helped remake the remnants of this old society into a more modern and like-minded country, prepared to serve as a shining example of our benevolence in the new era. Instead, the truly breathtaking infusions of assistance, military force, technological upgrades, and other steps deemed modernizing failed to prevent the same harsh Islamic Taliban from retaking the country a quarter century after their demise.

I believe we are absolutely justified in conducting a punitive expedition against AL Qaeda and the Taliban that supported them. We successfully accomplished that in December 2001. However, we know now that our externally imposed regime in Afghanistan, while justified due to the horrific attack on America, failed because rather than return Afghanistan over to the Afghans after the Taliaban were ousted, we embarked on the hubristic project to create a model nation in our image which led to what is now an obvious failure. Let's have a "15th Powell Rule" – "don't make the same mistake twice" (and we did in our war of choice with Iraq). Or a third time if we choose to externally impose regime change in Iran rather than eliminate what is the threat to our and our allies national security, the Iranian nuclear program. If that results in the fall of the Mullahs at the hands of the Iranian people then so be it. It does not mean we "bought" iran because we attacked the nuclear program. That is for the people to decide what comes next whether we like what comes next or not.

Conclusion:

We are, at our heart, optimists who believe we are uniquely able to accomplish more than anyone else. However, in conclusion, the Pottery Barn analogy is more applicable today than it was in 2003 because Iran is a larger and more significant entity, and the United States is poorer and more divided. Perhaps I am too pessimistic on this dreary Wednesday, but I am certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s a much bigger task than supporters are conveying.

Actions create consequences, after all. Let’s be sure we do our diligence rather than operating on hopes and erroneous assumptions. We won’t have all of the answers but we would be daft to ignore the obvious questions in this process.

I fully agree with this conclusion. If we conduct military operations to externally impose regime change, then yes, we will have bought the problems we have created. But we must not use the 14th rule as an excuse not to take decisive military action when it is in our national security interests, e.g., eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat to the US, Israel, and the world. But here is where we need to think hard - if the destruction of the nuclear capability lead to the fall of the regime, what actions can, should we, and must we take to help the Iranian people establish their nation without the US conducting nation building.

I do not believe we should conduct externally imposed regime change because of the Pottery Barn Rule. It will not turn out well for us. On the other hand I believe we have the responsibility to help oppressed people to free themselves and after they do free themselves we can appropriately help THEM to rebuild their nation. DE Opresso Liber - to help the oppressed free themselves. It must be done by them. It cannot be done by us. But we can help without owning the problem. That is the strategy we should seek.

Actions create consequences

Upgrade to founding

Powell’s 14th rule

are we paying attention?

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/powells-14th-rule?

Cynthia Watson

Jun 18, 2025

The late Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell was a remarkable figure. An African-American son of Jamaican immigrants who raised him in the Bronx, Powell served in the Army during the upheavals of the Vietnam War before becoming National Security Advisor, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He concluded his public service as Secretary of State during George W. Bush’s term—and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I learned that he was a riveting speaker, able to reach his audience with seeming ease as he disarmed them by taking off his Army “blouse” (a lightweight jacket to civilians) when he began a lecture during his time as Chairman.

Powell’s “rules of leadership” appeared (and perhaps still do) on many officers’ desks as they sought to capture his pithy wisdom to apply on their own.

The Department of State edited his statements from his 2012 memoir, It Worked for Me, into a list published on “Share-America” during his tenure at Foggy Bottom between 2001 and 2005.

It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning. Leaving the office at night with a winning attitude affects you more than you alone; it also conveys that attitude to your followers.
Get mad, then get over it. Everyone gets mad. It’s a natural and healthy emotion. My experience is that staying angry isn’t useful.
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. Accept that your position was faulty, not your ego.
It can be done. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Don’t surround yourself with instant skeptics.
Be careful what you choose: You may get it. You will have to live with your choices. Some bad choices can be corrected. Some you’ll be stuck with.
Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision. Superior leadership is often a matter of superb instinct. When faced with a tough decision, use the time available to gather information that will inform your instinct.
You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours. Make sure the choice is yours, and you are not responding to the pressure and desire of others.
Check small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things — a feel for what is going on in the depths of an organization where small things reside.
Share credit. People need recognition and a sense of worth as much as they need food and water.
Remain calm. Be kind. Few people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos.
Have a vision. Be demanding. Followers need to know where their leaders are taking them and for what purpose. Good leaders set vision, mission, and goals.
Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers. Those who do risk wasting their time and energy.
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. If you believe in the likelihood of success, your followers will too.

Powell is at least as well known for advising President George W. Bush to approach regime change in Iraq with the greatest caution, citing the “Pottery Barn” rule: you break it, you own it. It’s his 14th rule, of course.

Let’s explore the implications he raised because one might wonder why ousting what I described Monday as “an odious”regime could be worse than the bloody mullahs.

Americans often think of regime change as a means to oust a single individual, almost invariably fixating on a single person as if that were how all bad governments operate, without considering the myriad consequences, truly exemplifying actions that create consequences.

We are masterful at identifying who we don’t want, but not as strong on the next step: what government do we think would be better for our national interests? It turns out that this is tres tres tres difficult for outsiders, much less in a place as polarized as the United States these days.

I suspect that most of us unconsciously assume we can replace the bad guys with a more equitable, just, or participatory government, but that is rarely the case. In the pre-MAGA days, our mantra was that we wanted “democracy,” except whole swaths of the past decade focused on eliminating participatory governance in favor of a selected few. We sometimes no longer even add the phrase “provide a better standard of living” because Americans seem less concerned about others, focusing instead on their conditions.

Yet, once a repressive regime relinquishes power, we repeatedly forget there is no magical replacement easy to pull off the shelf to replace it.

And regime change is expensive for someone. At Pottery Barn, when your kid breaks the $2500 vase, you are on the hook to pay for it. Powell cautioned that paying for a country’s government replacement is not optional; it can be expensive in many ways.

The changes in our government over the past five months are relevant and likely hobbling. In 2025, our government systematically degraded or eliminated several key instruments of statecraft essential for these activities because they were deemed wasteful. To recap a couple of examples, the State Department is downgrading much of its overseas presence by professionals trained to appreciate conditions on the ground by speaking the relevant languages and understanding the cultures of other nations (particularly in Africa). USAID provided not only infusions of advice and aid but branded what we were doing. We also eliminated foreign assistance, one of the most fundamental building blocks of a post-regime change strategy anywhere, because providing aid—even when it’s technical assistance rather than cash—is too expensive. Both of those decisions alone significantly hamper our ability to influence what goes on elsewhere, much less actively remake a government (which I am not advocating for reasons below).

We are definitely amidst a federal debt crisis, but the State Department responsible for both examples is one of the smallest cabinet department by workforce and budget. Ignorance and memes don’t alter the reality that we no longer occupy a central role as advocates for good or representative governance, as we did for decades. We don’t think this matters, it seems, so others will fill the void of offering a post-regime change vision.

Powell’s analogy had other implications, however, forgotten in the aftermath of the debacle in Afghanistan. Regime changes essentially by Afghans themselves, with some external support, in the 1990s ousted the reactionary and brutal Taliban, but the country devolved into its more traditional regional enclaves and tribal governance. (I am not a sociologist, so I am not going to argue whether it was tribe or warlord or sect; it was not a country under a functioning national government).

However, Afghanistan remained a distinct entity on the map despite its poor governance. Kabul remained the capital of a loosely linked population of 19.5 million at the turn of the millennium, but no government provided coherence to the place. No security forces protected the place for outside intervention, leaving instead vast areas we later labeled “ungoverned spaces” where Islamic radicals brought nefarious ambitions as they took refuge from their nations of origin. The zeal they imported facilitated the 9/11 attacks on us, thousands of miles away.

Understandable U.S. retaliation in the weeks following the attacks helped remake the remnants of this old society into a more modern and like-minded country, prepared to serve as a shining example of our benevolence in the new era. Instead, the truly breathtaking infusions of assistance, military force, technological upgrades, and other steps deemed modernizing failed to prevent the same harsh Islamic Taliban from retaking the country a quarter century after their demise.

Countless words cover the explanations for why this occurred. Debates persist regarding who or what was to blame or what tweaks would have ensured success, but we failed miserably in the post-regime change mission despite spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. The failure involved not only Afghan governance but also the reputation of the United States, which had misunderstood the context within which it had operated for twenty years.

Iraq, of course, is the most recent painful exposure. The initial April 2003 glow of success in ousting the long-ruling and brutal dictator Saddam Hussein revised the history of the Middle East (contributing to today’s conflict, of course) while destabilizing Iraq itself. The United States found our massive military power was unable to rebuild an Iraqi government in our image nor to quell the divisions within a multi-variable society, despite billions of dollars and many lives invested in response.

No matter the amount of cash we infused, Iraqis had their own cultures (sic), their hierarchies, and their allies and partners who did not want a new Iraq under the watchful eye of Americans seeking to restructure the region. It took us less time to recognize this along the Tigris and Euphrates, but it was no less painful or expensive a lesson. Additionally, in attempting to replace the dictatorship with a democracy empowered the election winners of those elections to befriend whomever they wanted. The Shi’ite majority, it turned out, liked their Iranian brethren far more than we did, expanding the Islamic Republic’s role in the Arab world in a menacing, if unforeseen, way.

Iraq today has the trappings of a representative system, but it hardly ranks as one of the world’s most respected governments. Shi’ia and Sunni alike still oppose one another within the country. At the same time, the neighborhood watches them with the same low-level anxiety it had during most of Saddam Hussein’s wretched regime over twenty-five years.

Lest we think this problem is limited to the Middle East, we need look no further than Haiti as an example of how every evil regime can lead to another. The Duvalier family exploited the western half of the island it shares with the Dominican Republic for decades until Baby Doc’s rule proved so loathsome in the 1980s that pressure forced him to flee. The subsequent five decades had a few points of brightness, such as occasional elections that garnered apparent popular support, but without the structural changes to society that would allow them to persist. Instead, the Republic of Haiti remains the site of nearly constant upheaval, whether because of earthquakes, hurricanes, gangs, or one element of the military seeking to oust another.

Iran is much larger, wealthier, and more cohesive as a nation than Afghanistan, but that may provide comfort, as these conditions offer different challenges. Is it impossible that regime change could go well in Iran? No, of course not but the implications could have wide effects over decades.

I refer you back to Powell rules 5-Be careful what you ask for as you may get it (and not like it, of course), and 7-You can’t make someone else’s choices (as they don’t respond well much of the time). He was thinking of history he had witnessed.

None of this endorses poor or repressive governments like Teheran, Khartoum, or Caracas. It is, however, the long-term grit and persistence of those within a society that lead to improvements following regime change rather than outsiders walking in with a script to improve conditions. The occasional successes, such as the Philippines since Ferdinand Marcos’ fall under U.S. pressure in 1986, primarily result from domestic forces rather than foreigners “solving” the problem, and societal transformations require decades rather than a few months or years.

The successes also almost always have an identifiable widespread opposition rather than merely seeking to rid the country of the bad. Yet, too much of the conversation on Iran still seems stuck on what we don’t want. Powell reminded us that the Pottery Barn owners hand us the broken pieces with which we must make some choices.

The current proclivity for many Americans, especially those in leadership positions, is to say problems “over there” aren’t ours; someone else will have to deal with them as we are only interested in America First.

Support appears to be growing, with Republicans weighing in to endorse the objective. Texas Senator Ted Cruz advocated for advancing our interests, while his South Carolina colleague “would love to see” the mullahs fall.

Really?

Make sure we know the next several evolutions in global politics. Are there possibilities resulting from this regime change that make things less tolerable for us (the Israelis likely would have a different calculation)?

What instruments do we retain for assisting others as they seek to replace the bad with something better? Or would we prefer Russia or China do that? China certainly wants to maintain access to Iranian petroleum since this source provides 80% of Beijing’s imports.

China has maintained a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries for 70 years. That reflects their determination not to justify anyone intervening in their activities and the reality that in the 1950s, the PRC had few resources for outside adventurism; it also served to avoid entanglement in other countries’ problems. Making nice with whoever is in power saves Beijing some effort, as they see us repeatedly focused beyond the bilateral U.S.-PRC competition.

The primary import of the Pottery Barn analogy today is not that we lack the tools or understanding of Iran to remake the society; we don’t have the resources in an era when we are wrestling with our expenditures, theoretically in response to a federal debt of tens of trillions of dollars. The idea of Iranian regime change is folly because it’s a country with tentacles that could affect us, yet we have far more limited financial means to do much than at any point in our history.

We assume that a post-mullah Iran would no longer facilitate terrorism around the world: why are we so sure of that? Do we think a post-Islamic State would turn its back on selling petroleum to the PRC? Why do we assume Persian or Iranian nationalism would subside, particularly after an externally-driven conflict, to make things much easier with the Arab states, Israel, or anyone else? Do we have evidence of any of these things that seem to be hidden assumptions?

The predecessor Pahlavi dynasty in Iran had good relations with the United States, but our interests did not align closely. We sought access to Persian petroleum and intelligence spots to watch the Soviet Union. The Shah sought international prestige, wealth, and personal power; his SAVAK, domestic security goons, pursued Iranian dissidents around the world like several despicable authoritarians. He promoted a secular culture, but Iran, despite forty-five years of religious intolerance, still represents the heart of the Shi’ite sect for tens of millions of adherents. If the Pahlavis could not stamp out Islam, why would we think regime change would accomplish that?

We have ended several programs that could argue to Iranians why our system merits their consideration for a new era. Our societal conditions, however, are not compelling as an alternative, with cross-cutting tensions befuddling much of the world. We don’t bring Iranians here, nor do we send examples of tolerance or hope under shackled programs.

We are, at our heart, optimists who believe we are uniquely able to accomplish more than anyone else. However, in conclusion, the Pottery Barn analogy is more applicable today than it was in 2003 because Iran is a larger and more significant entity, and the United States is poorer and more divided. Perhaps I am too pessimistic on this dreary Wednesday, but I am certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s a much bigger task than supporters are conveying.

Actions create consequences, after all. Let’s be sure we do our diligence rather than operating on hopes and erroneous assumptions. We won’t have all of the answers but we would be daft to ignore the obvious questions in this process.

I welcome your criticisms, challenges, historic revisions, or anything else. Please feel free to weigh in. I also encourage you to share this if you find this valuable.

I appreciate your time. I thank the paid subscribers who make this possible. $55 for annual subscriptions or $8 a month make a difference in the work I bring you.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Michael Crowley, “‘Regime Change?’ Questions About Israel’s Iran Goal Pressure Trump”, NewYorkTimes.com, 17 June 2025, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/politics/regime-change-israel-iran-trump.html

“List of Federal Departments“, federalpay.org, 18 June 2025, retrieved at https://www.federalpay.org/departments

Colin L. Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and In Leadership. New York: Harper, 2014.

ShareAmerica, “Powell’s 13 Rules for How to Lead”, ShareAmerica.gov, 19 October 2021, retrieved at https://archive-share.america.gov/colin-powell-13-rules-how-to-lead/

5. Israel's Extraordinary Spy Teams Inside Iran

HUMINT is still king. Boots on the ground still matter.

Rather than the fictional James Bond, I actually think Major General William J. Donovan is smiling. This is the power of the fusion of intelligence and special operations. (and yes, drones matter, long range precision strike matters, air superiority matters, missile defense matters but we must never forget HUMINT and boots on the ground matter too and are unlikely to be replaced in the near future and probably not ever)

Israel's Extraordinary Spy Teams Inside Iran

https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/israels-extraordinary-spy-teams-inside?

James Bond Is Smiling

Richard Pollock

Jun 19, 2025

James Bond is smiling.

Among one of most astonishing revelations about Israel’s lightning military attack against Iran is its bold decision well before the war began to insert large, secret operational teams into the Islamic country.

“Operation Rising Lion’s” clandestine operations will go down in military history as the most ambitious covert military offensive in modern warfare. The press has briefly noted it, but they are missing the real story.

Israel’s secret Iranian operations led by Mossad, the country’s spy agency, have not stopped. They are ongoing. And only a few are talking about it.

One who is talking about this omission and is dialed into this extraordinary military campaign is John Spencer. He currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and is Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project,

Spencer told me that, indeed, Mossad is continuing to aggressively and freely operate throughout Iran. “Most mainstream media treat Mossad’s presence in Iran as something that happened in the past. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the current reality,” he said.

“Mossad has a long track record of building deep operational infrastructure inside enemy territory. There is every indication that those networks are still in place and active. They are likely supporting real-time targeting of regime leadership, missile systems, and mobile launchers, while also disrupting Iranian internal security from within,” he told me.

For the moment, let’s briefly note what we know about these covert operations. Mossad surreptitiously moved into Iran parts for hundreds of quadcopter drones equipped with explosives and created a factory inside the country to stealthily assemble them.

They brought them in with suitcases, commercial trucks, and shipping containers. The secret agents also shipped in ammunition and weaponry to attack Iranian missile bases. The drones were launched from inside the country.

On-the-ground, agents attacked Iran’s air defense system and targeted its missile launchers. Other Mossad commando units positioned guided weapons from open areas near Iranian surface-to-air missile launches and fired away.

Some Mossad units were hidden in vehicles, where they deployed sophisticated technologies to disable Iranian air defense systems.

James Bond is smiling.

The psychological and real-world impact on Khamenei appears significant. As Reuters reported on Tuesday from Dubai, Khamenei today is a “lonely figure” who “has seen his main military and security advisers killed by Israeli strikes, leaving major holes in his inner circle.”

The Supeme Leader, age 86, is in hiding, but on Tuesday President Trump posted, “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target,” he stated. “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”

Spencer also says Mossad most likely is working with Iran’s underground resistant movement which despise Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and his brutal autocracy. He’s ruled Iran with an iron fist since 1989.

The urban warfare specialist told me Iran’s dense cities permit Mossad agents to move about freely. “Cities like Tehran, Esfahan, and Mashhad offer complex terrain for covert activity, but more importantly, they are filled with freedom-loving Iranians who do not support the regime.

“That reality creates both opportunity and cover for infiltration, movement, and the safeguarding of intelligence assets. The combination of hostile terrain and sympathetic civilians makes Iran’s cities not just targets, but platforms for internal disruption,” he said.

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on X that the IDF has destroyed the Iranian regime’s internal security headquarters, the core of the dictator’s repressive machinery.

Although the last six days have made spy history, it’s not the first time they have worked undercover against the Islamic Jihadis.

Last year, the world was stunned when Ismail Haniyeh, the billionaire Chairman of Hamas was killed in Tehran while attending the country’s presidential inauguration. Haniyeh was killed while he was sleeping in a presidential guest house.

And, of course, the world was captivated by Israel’s “Beeper” attack in which Israel activated explosives inside personal beepers carried by thousands of Hezbollah fighters who were stationed throughout Lebanon.

The enormity of Israel’s accomplishments is breathtaking. In the first 24 hours, Iran’s top military and intelligence leadership was decapitated.

And the assassination of top military commanders continues.

On Tuesday the Israel Defense Forces eliminated Maj. Gen. Ali Shadamani only a few days after took over from his assassinated predecessor. Mossad most likely provided some intelligence to the IDF about his whereabouts.

Shadamani was Iran’s War-Time Chief, the most senior ranking commander and one of the military’s closest confidants of Iran’s Ayatollah, according to the IDF.

Aaron Cohen, who formerly worked in special operations for Mossad told Fox News the spy agency’s infiltration has been occurring for years. “This was years in the making. Deep cover teams, full logistical coordination and total operational control.”

Cohen added, “So my take is this is psychological warfare, going after those generals, eliminating 20 of the top generals. And it tells the regime, Israeli is already here, and we know where you sleep, and we don’t miss.”

Spencer agrees. “The fear that Mossad is already inside, watching and waiting, is corrosive. It forces leadership to question their inner circle, disrupts trust between commanders, and triggers internal purges. Every strike deepens paranoia. Every assassination forces a recalculation. This environment is possibly paralyzing for many decision-makers. When officials no longer feel secure enough to communicate, gather, or move freely, their ability to lead, plan, or respond effectively breaks down” he says.

On Wednesday, the Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on X, “I warn the Iranian dictator: Whoever follows in the path of Saddam Hussein, will end up like Saddam Hussein.”

Hussein was eventually captured hiding in a hole in Iraq. Could that be Khamenei’s future?

The days and weeks ahead should be fascinating. We will see the open military operations of the IDF, but we’ll probably not see the hand of the Mossad, now the world’s premier spy agency.I

6. Harding Project – My Turn at the Desk by Zachery Griffiths

This is one of the overlooked and underappreciated initiatives by the CSA, General George, while the Army is transforming in contact. Emphasis on thinking, adn writing, the development of intellectual capital is the critical investment in the future of our Army. The Harding project initiative is one I hope all future CSAs will sustain.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence but I think there is a greater propensity for our young officers and NCOs to "read, think, write, repeat" (to borrow a meme from a writer's substack).

I have been informally observing the writing of our young military personnel for more than two decades ("A Small Wars Journal Retrospective: Twenty Years of Crowd-Sourcing Irregular Warfare Studies", https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/25/a-small-wars-journal-retrospective/ ) I see more young officers and NCOs urgent than ever before. That is one of the best indicators of the health of our Army (and the other services as well).

But most importantly Zach and the Chief have revitalized the Army writing platforms, the branch journals. Although I have no way to prove the causal effect, perhaps someday one of Zach's successors will be able to conduct a study and look back to see what a great contribution the branch journals and the CSA's emphasis on writing made to the Army transforming in contact.

Harding Project Substack

My Turn at the Desk

https://www.hardingproject.com/p/my-turn-at-the-desk

Zachary Griffiths

Jun 19, 2025

As I conclude my time leading the Harding Project, I’ve found no better words than those of its namesake. In 1938, Lieutenant Colonel Forrest Harding wrote a farewell to the readers of Infantry Journal. His “Valedictory,” excerpted below, reminds us that the hard work of editing, publishing, and stewarding professional discourse is always personal—and always worth it.

Shortly after this issue rolls from the presses we shall clear our desk for the first time in four years and bow our successor to the chair that sits before it. Our feelings at this little ceremonial will be mixed. We shall experience a distinct sense of relief in the knowledge that we have no more editorials to write, manuscripts to reject, queries to answer, deadlines to make. But there will be regrets. We shall miss the bimonthly kick of seeing each new issue in its finished form, the attainment of successive circulation objectives, the fan-mail comment approving new departures, the satisfaction of seeing an important Infantry enterprise grow under our direction; and most of all we shall miss the many contacts with our fellow Infantrymen that go with the office we have held. During our four years as editor of The Journal and Secretary of the Infantry Association we have come to know the Infantry of the lire components as it is given to few to know it. This alone is compensation for the grief that goes with the job.

For the gains made during the four years of our editorship we make grateful acknowledgement to those who are responsible for them. On the editorial side we have been fortunate in having had Captain C. T. Lanham and Staff Sergeant J. R. Ulmer as associates. As a diagnostician and operating surgeon of manuscripts we believe Captain Lanham to be without a peer among military editors. Sergeant Ulmer’s special aptitude is for handling production, make up, and layout. Both of our associates have been prolific in ideas for the improvement of The Journal. Their aim has been to make ours the best magazine in the military field both in content and appearance. The files of The Journal carry the evidence of their talent and their craftsmanship.

On the business side, the efficient organization headed by Mr. A. S. Brown, the office manager and bookkeeper, has shown notable zeal in promoting the interests of the Association and in serving its patrons. We inherited this organization from our predecessor along with a financial position based on real values. We have carried on with the same people and followed the sound policies of the previous administration. In brief, we have built on the solid foundation laid by Colonel Camp with the workmen he turned over to us.

Besides Mr. Brown, who has served The Journal faithfully and well for nineteen years and bids fair to continue to serve it for nineteen more, two other key men have made important contributions to the growth of the business. These are Technical Sergeant C. R. Miller, our one man circulation department, and Mr. N. J. Anthony, private secretary to the editor and office factotum. Sergeant Miller's industry and system and Mr. Anthony's initiative and general usefulness have kept the wheels turning smoothly in a period of expansion.

But it is not only to the immediate Journal family that we would pay tribute in our farewell editorial. We have had other help in our effort to increase the usefulness of our Infantry magazine. Many have worked with us to get The Journal into the hands of an ever-increasing number of those who have need of the military instruction that the editors put between the covers. The boosters are not all Regulars. Neither are all of them Infantrymen. The three components and most of the arms and services are represented on the long list of officers who have brought in the new subscribers. From time to time we have spoken of the services rendered to the Infantry by these gentlemen. In this, our last editorial, we wish to make acknowledgement of our personal debt to them for carrying, in our time, the circulation of The Journal to heights once thought unattainable.

When we started the Harding Project, the Army’s journals less content, less often, and more erratically. The force had fewer outlets to share what it learned—and fewer reasons to try.

Today, they stand renewed. Every branch journal now publishes on the Line of Departure, a web-first, mobile-friendly platform launched last fall. Together, they release more than two new articles a day and reach over 15,000 unique readers a month. The journals are once again part of professional development, with updated guidance in Army regulations and a citation requirement in NCO education. And behind the scenes, Harding Fellows are now embedded in the editorial process, building a new generation of editors-in-chief (Apply today!).

Subscribed

None of that happened alone. This effort would not have been possible without Captain Theo Lipsky, my co-founder; Sergeant First Class Leyton Summerlin, the first deputy director; Sergeant First Class Marcel Blood, the current deputy; and Captain Sarah Chamberlin, the Substack editor. Our partners at Army University Press—Colonel Todd Schmidt, Colonel Andrew Morgado, and Dr. Don Wright—brought rigor and reach. The Modern War Institute’s team, especially Colonel Patrick Sullivan and Mr. John Amble, gave us a launchpad. I also thank the Harding Fellows and everyone else who believed in and invested in this effort. And this work would not have gone far without the support of General George, General Brito, Lieutenant General Beagle, and Sergeant Major of the Army Weimer.

Like Harding, I’ll miss the “bimonthly kick”—though ours came faster, on your phone, not in print. But I’m confident in what comes next. Major Kyle Atwell now takes the guidon with continuity provided by Sergeant First Class Blood.

The desk is in good hands. Thanks for reading, and for writing.

7. Three Alternative Approaches to Deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific

This essay coincidentally makes me think of Robert Kaplan's latest book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. I read it hastily a few months ago but I am taking the time to re-read it more thoroughly while I am spending long hours on an airplane on this trip.

What Kaplan's book and Dr. Simon's excellent essay say to me is that we cannot separate regions of the world. We are more interconnected than ever and that in my opinion, not theirs, it is folly to have China only national security strategy. Is China as the "pacing threat" really useful? There is no doubt China is the strongest military competitor (save perhaps for the number of nuclear weapons Russia has) and we must plan for that fight. But we cannot neglect nearly everything else as we are wont to do. This is because the threat that is greater than China is the cooperation, collaboration, and collusion of the CRInK (China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea). The greater threat than China alone is this "adversarial cooperation" as outlined in the ODNI's annual threat assessment. We cannot be a one trick pony and only focus on China.

Excerpts:

That the center of gravity of the China and Russia threats is regional incentivizes U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to concentrate the bulk of their attention and resources in upholding collective security in their respective regions. That is the message coming from the Trump administration, with which U.S. allies seem to broadly agree. This follows a bifurcation logic. However, U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific face a strikingly similar problem: how to implement deterrence by denial in their home regions while relying on a single, distant external security guarantor. This underscores the potential for cooperation. Meanwhile growing Sino-Russian coordination — and the specter of a two- or multi-front war — could eventually push the United States and its allies closer to integration.

Distinguishing between the “downstream” or operational aspects of deterrence and the “upstream” — the generation of the concepts, capabilities, technologies, skillsets or doctrines — can help clarify which approach to pursue. Thus, for instance, focusing upstream could give the United States and its allies flexibility downstream, for example by moving towards a “cross-theater” ecosystem of shared concepts, doctrines, capabilities, technologies, and standards geared for deterrence by denial. Reducing and standardizing the systems, platforms, and munitions produced within the U.S. alliance ecosystem would generate gains in efficiency, scale, and speed of delivery. This would leave the United States and its allies in a better position to outproduce and outmatch their respective competitors, especially in a context of military and industrial protraction and attrition.

A cross-theater ecosystem upstream offers the versatility to navigate all three ideal-type approaches to deterrence. It would be compatible with bifurcation downstream — U.S. allies could still focus primarily on their respective regions — and premised on cooperation upstream. And it would allow the United States and its allies to dial up towards integration (upstream and/or downstream) according to changes to strategic circumstances, policy preferences, or national interests.

Three Alternative Approaches to Deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific – War on the Rocks

Luis Simón

warontherocks.com · June 19, 2025

Whether the United States defines China as a global threat or a predominantly regional one will have pervasive implications for U.S. alliance and deterrence strategy in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The second Trump and Biden administrations agree on a key fact: China constitutes the most serious and systemic challenge to U.S. power and interests. Yet, they seem to disagree on how to characterize the nature and scale of that challenge. Whereas the Biden administration construed China as a global challenge, the Trump administration regularly emphasizes the centrality of the China threat in the Indo-Pacific.

Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump’s insistence on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine to focus on China has reignited debates about the opportunity costs of supporting versus not supporting Kyiv, and how that may impinge on America’s overall strategic position vis-à-vis Beijing. Three alternative visions for deterrence could help make sense of these dilemmas and their implications for U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific: bifurcation, cooperation, and integration.

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Trade-offs Versus Payoffs

Those arguing that Washington should cut Ukraine loose have emphasized the importance of strategic trade-offs. According to this logic, the fact that a dollar spent in Ukraine is a dollar not spent on deterring China means supporting Ukraine is a strategic distraction — one that weakens America’s position in the Indo-Pacific.

Those in the “support Ukraine” camp have argued that standing by Ukraine can actually generate strategic payoffs in the context of competition with China. Payoff-related arguments come in different shapes and forms. Some argue that standing up for norms of acceptable state behavior whenever and wherever they are challenged sends a powerful deterrent signal to Beijing in relation to Taiwan. Others speak of strategic sequencing, and argue that degrading Russian military power in Europe today can set the foundations for prioritizing the China threat in the Indo-Pacific tomorrow. Others have viewed the war in Ukraine as a useful learning experience or an opportunity to revitalize America’s alliances and defense industrial base.

All the above points are valid, but they are also questionable. Research in international security shows that a great power’s reputation for upholding certain norms or commitments must be assessed in the context of each specific case, and not treated as a global or abstract commodity. Concretely, whether and how the United States decides (not) to react to Chinese aggression against Taiwan will be determined by the relative value Washington assigns to Taiwan, and not by whether or how Washington may have responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Relatedly, the war in Ukraine may indeed have given the United States an opportunity to revitalize its alliances — by both strengthening NATO and fostering greater cooperation between its Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific allies — and its industrial base. However, a similar reasoning can be applied to China. The war has led to a significant strengthening of the Sino-Russian partnership as well as a series of interlocking partnerships linking those two countries with North Korea and Iran. Moreover, enabling Russia’s defense-industrial and operational effort through the export of dual-use goods and technologies has further stimulated China’s pace of industrial production, which remains higher than that of the United States. The question, therefore, is not so much whether America’s alliances or industrial base can benefit or are benefitting from supporting Ukraine, but rather whether they are benefitting more than China’s.

At the heart of this trade-offs-versus-payoffs debate lie a series of questions around the nature and scale of the Chinese challenge, which are in many ways reminiscent of Cold War-era debates about the nature of Soviet challenge:

Should China be seen as a regional (i.e. Indo-Pacific) threat or a global one? How much effort should be devoted to countering China in the Indo-Pacific versus countering China elsewhere? How important is it to counter Chinese influence in Europe vis-à-vis other regions? How much energy should be devoted to countering a low-cost Chinese effort to create instability in regions like Europe or the Middle East? And how deep does Sino-Russian strategic cooperation run?

Regional Versus Global

Ranking threats and regions — and figuring out how the two intersect — is central to strategy. There is a vibrant scholarly debate about the relationship between the regional and global “levels of analysis” in international security. Are regions subject to their own rules, actors, and dynamics, and thus relatively autonomous from broader, global geopolitical dynamics? Or do global or “systemic” geopolitical dynamics supersede or even determine regional outcomes?

Because threats travel more easily at short distances, the degree of security interdependence is more intense within regions than across them. That logic is enshrined in balance of threat theory, which associates balancing and alliance formation not only with “raw power” but with geographical proximity, the local distribution of capabilities and intentions, and dismisses discussions on system polarity as too abstract and indeterminate.

However, exogenous forces can impinge on a region’s security dynamics, sometimes decisively. Global powers are in fact characterized by their ability to “see through” regions, so much so that their decision to engage or not engage in a particular region is often driven by broader strategic considerations. That characteristic is particularly salient in the case of “seapowers” like the United States, who think about space and geography in more expansive terms than “landpowers.” As famously argued by Nicholas J. Spykman, while land powers think “in terms of continuous surfaces surrounding a central point of control,” seapowers think “in terms of points and connecting lines dominating an immense territory.”

Whether the global level of analysis projects more or less prominently onto the regional one is always contingent on a variety of factors. Two can be highlighted here: first, the nature and intensity of global power competition, and second, the importance assigned by global powers to different world regions.

To be sure, while a global approach to strategic planning can elude a much-needed reflection on trade-offs and priorities, a region-centric approach has its shortcomings too. Thus, for instance, during the Cold War, the United States and its allies recognized both that competition with the Soviet Union was global in scope but also that its center of gravity laid in Europe.

Focusing on the China threat at large versus the China threat in the Indo-Pacific has different implications for grand strategy and for defense strategy. Therefore, a key practical question for the United States — and its allies — is how to reconcile the assumption that the Indo-Pacific region constitutes the center of gravity of the China threat with the imperative that China’s moves in other regions ought to be monitored — and often countered — too.

The notion that everything matters in competition with China cannot obscure the reality that not everything matters to the same extent. Chinese presence or influence in sub-Saharan Africa will not be perceived as threatening to U.S. interests as Chinese presence in regions that are geographically closer to the United States or have a higher economic or strategic value, like Central America or Europe. Accordingly, U.S. efforts to counter Chinese influence in one region must be proportional to the effort devoted by China to gaining influence therein. In that sense, the costs or efforts China may incur to destabilize a certain region may be lower than the ones the United States may incur to stabilize it. That means the United States should probably be ready to let some things go. As argued by President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor Mac Bundy, “if we guard our toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, we will lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.”

Three Alternative Approaches to Deterrence

How, then, should the United States and its allies think about deterrence in an era of simultaneous threats in Europe and Asia? To make sense of this question, I outline three distinct, ideal-type approaches to deterrence and alliance-management in Europe and the Indo-Pacific: bifurcation, cooperation, and integration.

Bifurcation

Bifurcation entails treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as separate and distinct theaters, shaped by different strategic geographies, actors, and dynamics, and thus maintaining a regional approach to defense strategy and force planning tailored to the nature and needs of each theater and competitor.

Bifurcation allows to establish a sharp distinction between the China and Russia threats and how to approach them. It suggests that the United States should focus on the bigger threat and deprioritize — or even accommodate — the lesser threat, even if growing Sino-Russian coordination represents a persistent obstacle to bifurcation. Because bifurcation entails a strict separation between the two regions and alliance ecosystems, it allows for a much more tailored competitive strategy against China (the decisive threat), one that takes into account China’s specific capabilities and proclivities as well as the geography of the Western Pacific.

This approach assumes the acceptance of a higher degree of risk to U.S. alliances and interests in Europe. But it’s a calculated risk. The fact that America’s defensive perimeter in Europe enjoys comparatively much more geostrategic depth than in East Asia, and that European allies are — both collectively and individually — in a comparatively stronger position vis-à-vis Russia than Indo-Pacific allies vis-à-vis China means the U.S. can trade space (in Europe) for time (in the Indo-Pacific). Taking such strategic realities as a point of departure, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby has alluded to Winston Churchill’s famous dictum “if we win the big battle in the decisive theater, we can put everything straight afterwards.” Bifurcation thus assumes that if the United States gets things right in the primary theater, everything else will eventually sort itself out.

A bifurcation framework emphasizes the salience of trade-offs in U.S. defense planning and resources, the need to establish clear priorities, and underscores the fact that U.S. allies in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific are competing for U.S. attention and resources. It also entails strengthening U.S.-led alliances in the Indo-Pacific and keeping cross-regional links between U.S.-led alliances to a minimum.

Cooperation

Cooperation, in turn, is premised on the need to reconcile the notion that security threats are primarily regional with the recognition that strategic dynamics in Europe and the Indo-Pacific theaters are somewhat intertwined. Cooperation calls for a “cross-” or “inter-” theater approach to deterrence and alliance management, as opposed to a two-theater or one-theater framework.

This approach assumes that the United States can “slice its force” and can, at a minimum, leave a layer of strategic enablers in the secondary theater — command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, nuclear deterrence, ballistic missile defense, intermediate- and long-range conventional missiles or advanced electronic warfare capabilities — even as it focuses the bulk of its energy in the primary theater. This means that America’s European allies can focus on developing front-line, denial-centric forces and building a force structure that can do the heavy-lifting by plugging into America’s superstructure of enablers.

Under a cooperation framework, fostering collaboration between U.S. allies in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific allies might make sense but only as long as it is clear that the allies’ main focus should be on their respective regions. The emphasis would therefore be more on cross-theater collaboration in defense-industrial and technological matters and less on military and operational cooperation.

Even if Asia is a predominantly air-sea environment and Europe an air-land one, U.S. allies in these two regions face similar strategic problems, namely how to implement deterrence by denial in maturing anti-access and area denial environments against nuclear armed adversaries, and how to facilitate access and movement for the United States to continue to be able to project overwhelming power and thus retain punishment options. This underscores the potential for synergies.

Thus, moving toward a cross-theater ecosystem of shared operational concepts, doctrines, capabilities, technologies, and standards geared for deterrence (by denial) could simplify standards and reduce the number of systems, platforms and munitions produced by NATO and its so-called Indo-Pacific four partners — Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand. Such an approach could yield significant gains in terms of efficiency, scale, and speed of delivery.

Integration

Finally, integration would entail treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a single theater, conceiving of China and Russia as a bloc, and developing an integrated approach to deterrence and alliance management across both regions. This does not necessarily mean that European and Indo-Pacific allies should extend mutual defense commitments to each other’s regions or even assign permanent forces to each other’s regions. But it would require much stronger links between both alliance ecosystems in areas like command, control, intelligence, and defense planning.

Integration could, for instance, bring U.S. and allied forces under a single combatant command with responsibility over both the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic. Such an approach would assume that the United States cannot “slice its force” in wartime. Concretely, should a contingency break in Asia, the United States would be compelled to move its entire force (enablers included) to the primary theater, and thus be unable to leave a (meaningful) layer of strategic capabilities in the secondary theater. Since Europe and the Indo-Pacific would both be part of a single combatant command, the trade-offs associated with U.S. prioritization would be transferred from the strategic level to the tactical or theater one, and would be equivalent to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a U.S. officer) deciding to concede space in NATO’s southeastern flank for the sake of the northeastern one. These would become operational decisions, thus arguably easing dilemmas about trading space in the secondary theater for time in the primary theatre, not least as allies would be plugged into an integrated command, control, and force planning architecture.

The Nuclear Variable

The distinction between bifurcation, cooperation, and integration may become clearer at lower levels of conflict intensity, and blurrier at higher levels. Extended nuclear deterrence is a global capability that provides the ultimate backstop of all U.S. alliances. However, it can be augmented by theater-level nuclear capabilities, as is the case with NATO today. That allows for some degree of bifurcation at the nuclear level as long as conflict above the nuclear threshold stays limited in scope.

The U.S. geographic combatant command structure does in fact already reflect a multi-tiered approach to this conundrum, with Strategic Command responsible for all nuclear threats together and European Command and Indo-Pacific Command focused on their respective regions up to the level of limited nuclear weapon employment. In that regard, extended nuclear deterrence in a bifurcation context requires a non-strategic nuclear posture tailored to the regional nuclear challenge, which at present is different in the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific.

Conclusion

The question of whether bifurcation, cooperation, or integration is best for the United States or its different allies, or which is likely to prevail, hinges on a dynamic geostrategic and political context, including factors like U.S. domestic politics, allied preferences, the intensity of the threat in both regions, and the level of coordination between China and Russia.

That the center of gravity of the China and Russia threats is regional incentivizes U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to concentrate the bulk of their attention and resources in upholding collective security in their respective regions. That is the message coming from the Trump administration, with which U.S. allies seem to broadly agree. This follows a bifurcation logic. However, U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific face a strikingly similar problem: how to implement deterrence by denial in their home regions while relying on a single, distant external security guarantor. This underscores the potential for cooperation. Meanwhile growing Sino-Russian coordination — and the specter of a two- or multi-front war — could eventually push the United States and its allies closer to integration.

Distinguishing between the “downstream” or operational aspects of deterrence and the “upstream” — the generation of the concepts, capabilities, technologies, skillsets or doctrines — can help clarify which approach to pursue. Thus, for instance, focusing upstream could give the United States and its allies flexibility downstream, for example by moving towards a “cross-theater” ecosystem of shared concepts, doctrines, capabilities, technologies, and standards geared for deterrence by denial. Reducing and standardizing the systems, platforms, and munitions produced within the U.S. alliance ecosystem would generate gains in efficiency, scale, and speed of delivery. This would leave the United States and its allies in a better position to outproduce and outmatch their respective competitors, especially in a context of military and industrial protraction and attrition.

A cross-theater ecosystem upstream offers the versatility to navigate all three ideal-type approaches to deterrence. It would be compatible with bifurcation downstream — U.S. allies could still focus primarily on their respective regions — and premised on cooperation upstream. And it would allow the United States and its allies to dial up towards integration (upstream and/or downstream) according to changes to strategic circumstances, policy preferences, or national interests.

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Luis Simón, Ph.D., is director of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and director of the Brussels office of the Elcano Royal Institute.

Image: U.S. Navy via DVIDS

warontherocks.com · June 19, 2025

8. Rules of the Game (for Israel)

I am sure this will rub some people the wrong way but I hope some will reflect on it.

Although this is sarcasm I think it describes the truth of the hypocrisy that exists in our "rules based international order." This is really important. Ours and the west and like minded democracies’ hypocrisy is just incredible and this pithy essay lays it out perfectly.

I just hope we fully support Israel and protect it from our like minded democratic friends. With friends like Israel has, who needs enemies?

I am reminded of this excerpt from Robert Kapan's book. (by the way, the thesis of his book is that the entire world today (not a single or specific country) can be compared to the Weimar Republic after WWI).

“This is certainly not a world governed by a rules-based order, as polite gatherings of the global elite like to define it, but rather a world of broad, overlapping areas of tension, raw intimidation, and military standoffs. Indeed, there is no night watchman to keep the peace in this brawling, tumultuous world defined by upheaval. Globalization, which is based on trade, the large-scale movement of people by jet transportation, and rapid technological advances in the electronic and digital realms, fits neatly together with a world in permanent crisis. That is because the permanent crisis demands a dense webwork of interactions between crisis zones across the earth, which globalization produces. Ukraine, Gaza, and other major wars have their effects amplified, rather than assuaged, by globalization. A Weimar-type world, in the sense that I mean it, would be impossible without globalization.”

— Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan

Rules of the Game

israpundit.org

Peloni: It is said that ridicule sometimes presents the best arguments, but in this short and insightful essay, what reads as ridicule is in fact the imposed reality which the West has fashioned for Israel alone. It is a sad betrayal of the values upon which the West was founded, values which were in fact adopted from the Jewish traditions of old, but this is the reality which Israel finds itself today, struggling against the same antisemitic game of ‘For the Jews Only’ once again. And so we will find the means by which to survive this latest attempt to manipulate us against ourselves by our enemies, and hopefully prepare for a better tomorrow, a tomorrow which might hopefully be better informed by these betrayals of today than we stand informed today by similar betrayals of previous generations.

Gary Epstein

They are trying to kill me.

Yes. We understand. It is regrettable. We understand your concern.

Good. Will you make them stop?

Uh-no. We respect their sovereignty and right to self-determination.

Will you do anything to discourage them from proceeding with their murderous intentions?

Yes. Of course. We will express our deep concern. And you possess the right to defend yourselves, as long as your response is proportional.

Thank you. I would prefer if you would dissuade them, or punish them, or join me in the fight, but if that is impossible, I understand what I must do. But just for clarification, let me point out that they indiscriminately attack civilians with lethal weapons. Is it proportional for me to do the same?

No. That would violate the law of war.

But they are violating the law of war.

Yes. We find that regrettable and reprehensible. You are a Western-style democracy. You must embrace Western values.

Fine. May I use the bombing by the Western powers of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg as models for my response?

No. Now you are just being silly. Those cities were populated by our enemies. The cities you are talking about are full of innocent bystanders. Your dispute is with their leaders. Your proportionate response must reflect that. And while we are on the subject, those innocent bystanders require electricity and nutrition. We think that it is your responsibility to provide those.

You understand that they are indiscriminately shooting lethal rockets into population centers?

Yes. As we noted, quite regrettable. But if you do anything remotely similar, it will be a war crime, requiring a strong international sanctions regime.

Is what they are doing a war crime?

We don’t understand the question. The UN supports them. The Human Rights Commission defends them. Even poor, battered President Macron is on their side. Move on.

Just let me make sure that I understand this so that I can act accordingly. The rules that apply to them do not apply to us. To the extent that there are any universally applicable laws, we must observe them but they are free to violate them. And this is fair because . . .

. . . you are Jews.

This is fair because we are Jews. Thank you. We now understand with absolute clarity how to proceed.

This essay was originally published in Times of Israel and is reprinted by permission.

June 18, 2025 | Comments »

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9. We Need a Marine Corps, Part II: A Corps Confounded

Excerpts:

The good news is that a middle ground always lies between any dichotomy, and the middle ground is all the more viable when the dichotomies are exaggerated and repairable. Critiques in Part 1 and 2 of this series are intended to strip away presently unhelpful debate over Force Design to get to some positive recommendations.

In my next article in this series, I will offer clear, viable options for existing amphibious assets. Some positive adjustments to Force Design are already underway. A special operations capable Marine expeditionary unit was rebuilt in an effort to wedge the Marine Corps back into the global crisis response mission, embracing its historic middleweight role. The Marine littoral regiment can fight if needed, even if it is not yet up to intended capability. And we can consider “stand-in force” a stand-in name for what could be an even more aggressive, and therefore more compelling, actualization of the expeditionary advanced base force concept. A hint to effective rebranding sits in plain sight in the littoral regiment’s existing mission set.

More importantly, the heart and soul of the Marine Corps — its infantry battalions — remain strong, capable, and available. Since war has not fundamentally changed, strong, capable infantry have not been rendered irrelevant. In fact, infantry were the most consistent component in all 423 cases in my study: As I noted above, both sides employed infantry one-hundred percent of the time in all cases. No ground was taken or retained without infantry fighting onto an objective or holding fast. Past is not prologue, but longstanding and unaltered trends in ground combat suggest the United States will need reliable Marine combined arms infantry for the foreseeable future.

We Need a Marine Corps, Part II: A Corps Confounded – War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · June 19, 2025

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of three articles on the U.S. Marine Corps. The first article was published on June 16, 2025.

In just over 20 years, the Marine Corps has gone from being America’s reliable middleweight force in readiness to more of a secondary, general purpose backup force. Today, marines are more likely to find themselves assisting special operations teams and U.S. Army crisis response task forces than spearheading operations. Without meaningful change, a dangerous question resurfaces: “Why do we need a Marine Corps?”

In the first article in this series, I argued that there is an opportunity to reverse this slide. My research shows that broadly shared and influential assumptions about modern warfare are flawed. War has evolved but it has not dramatically changed. Therefore, some capabilities divested in the initial phase of Gen. David Berger’s force design plan should be recouped.

And while special operators and Army units have seized the lead on crisis response, the Marine Corps is still the only force that has the baseline capability and organizational culture to field on-call, fully integrated, combined arms units to respond to everything from noncombatant evacuation operations to large-scale amphibious assault. With some changes, the Marine Corps is the best organization to spearhead global competition against China outside of the so-called nine-dash line. It is also the ideal irregular warfare force in readiness.

In this bridging article I address the flaws in the core assumption driving defense-wide force innovation and design. The character of war is not changing dramatically. Indeed, my view is that the very concept of war having a discernable, universal character is flawed.

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Current Perceptions About the Character of Modern War

Common perceptions of the so-called character of modern war are too often influenced by unfounded histrionics. Popular culture is breathless about the impact of drones, precision munitions, AI, and other technologies on the conduct of warfare. Over-the-top videos and articles proliferate, with titles like “The Missile That Changes Everything!,” and “This new advanced drone is insane!” An article claims that with advances in AI, the “central psychology of war will disappear.” It would be easy to dismiss all this out of hand if it were not reiterated in only slightly less hyperbolic terms by senior military officers and institutions.

While paying lip service to the vague notion that war has some kind of enduring if ill-defined nature, senior U.S. military leaders have repeatedly stated and written that the character of modern war is changing so dramatically that it puts at risk every existing military concept and capability. Joint Warfighting cemented these highest-echelon views: “In 2023, we are witnessing an unprecedented fundamental change in the character of war.” In other words, war as marines might experience it in the mid-2020s and beyond would little resemble iconic battles like Iwo Jima, Khe Sanh, or Fallujah. Failure to embrace dramatic change would therefore be disastrous.

Other senior leaders have been more circumspect. But these broadly held maximalist beliefs about the changing character of war clearly influenced the original Force Design 2030. While then-Commandant David Berger may not have bought into all of the hyperbole, he seemed to argue that fundamental changes in the character of war was moving the standing Marine force towards obsolesence. He wrote: “I am convinced that the defining attributes of our current force design are no longer what the nation requires of the Marine Corps.” This was not just Berger’s thinking: It resulted in part from nearly two decades of often contentious debate within the Marine Corps. Still, his central rationale for change stemmed from the perception that increasing range, accuracy, and availability of precision-strike munitions would effectively preclude traditional assault-from-the-sea-style amphibious warfare operations.

There are several problems with this argument as originally written, each of which I address in my new book, Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War. Most importantly, the core of this argument builds from an empirically unsubstantiated description of modern warfare. Broadly held assumptions about modern war emerged from a recurring but mistaken belief that shocking discontinuities, or revolutions in warfare, periodically render standing capabilities obsolete.

On close examination, the concept of a revolution in warfare dissolves into unprovable opinion. It provides no solid ground for the strategic theories or force designs we now embrace. Fed by illusions and vague ideas, current arguments for wholesale military transformation are distorted and detached from reality. But there is a clear, evidence-driven rationale to sustain both a robust amphibious combined-arms force and the more technical elements of Force Design — including the stand-in force — in some form. Both advocates and critics of Force Design have made relevant points that drive towards a reasonable middle-ground solution.

War As It Is

In the new Ground Combat Database I provide a large set of coded battle data describing 45 cases from World War II through 2002, and then 423 more modern battles and skirmishes fought between 2003 and the end of 2022. This modern set includes the major battles fought by the United States and its allies and partners in Iraq and Afghanistan; over 150 battles fought in civil wars in Syria, Libya, Sri Lanka, Mali, Yemen, and Myanmar; other counterinsurgency fights in places like the Philippines, Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria; and the war in Ukraine from 2014 on.

Collectively, these battles describe land war — including amphibious operations at places like Al Faw, Iraq; Kilali, Sri Lanka; and Mariupol, Ukraine — as it has actually been fought, not as it has been imagined. It turns out that global ground combat from 2003 on has been functionally similar to war as it was fought in 1942. Of course, missiles make ship-to-shore operations more dangerous. Drones and some other precision munitions, both of which were employed in World War II, have recently proliferated to smaller states and irregular forces. And it is clear that drones have had a significant impact on some battlefields. However, given war’s many idiosyncrasies, extrapolating from Ukraine or any other single case (e.g., Nagorno-Karabakh, 2020) is unwise.

Drones and advanced technologies like AI should not be discounted, of course. But even the real evidence of drone proliferation and battlefield value does not justify the technophilic and technophobic exaggerations now used to characterize modern warfare. It is possible for two things to be true at one time: New technology can be proliferating quickly and the most common aspects of land warfare can remain generally consistent. Across 423 modern battles, including 61 from Ukraine, old-school tanks were employed by at least one side in 69 percent of cases; manned aircraft and artillery were used by at least one side in 82 percent of cases; armed or armored light vehicles by at least one side in 96 percent of cases; and infantry were employed by both sides in every case.

War As It Is in Ukraine

Prima facie learning from the more recent and widespread employment of AI, ground robots, and smaller aerial drones in Ukraine is stimulating more eager acceptance of technophilic and technophobic characterizations of modern warfare. Some evidence is indeed compelling. Since at least mid-2022, a daily firehose of drone compilation videos, frontline testimonials, and volumes of provable, concrete evidence of drone strike successes have influenced many U.S. military experts and senior leaders to argue for an immediate reshaping of America’s ground forces for advanced drone war.

Possibly tens of thousands of drones from both sides in the war in Ukraine are lost each month to countermeasures, drone–killing drones, high winds, or technical failures. And while drones fly overhead, fighting continues apace on the ground. In Ukraine and on other global battlefields, actual ground combat remains generally consistent with World War II-era combat. Infantry and armor move to contact, assault, ambush, and defend. Soldiers kill each other with rifles, machineguns, rockets, and grenades, very frequently at intimate ranges. Brutal knife fights like this one (exercise caution before viewing) still occur. Together, infantry weapons, mines, unguided rockets, artillery rounds, mortars, and manned air-delivered munitions almost certainly have caused a preponderance of modern battlefield casualties from 2022 through mid-2025. All the factors that constitute combined arms combat as described by the Marine Corps in the original 1989 version of its core doctrinal publication, Warfighting, are as relevant in 2025 as they were towards the end of the 20th century.

So, there is a provably dichotomous reality in which advanced technology use meshes with 20th -century-style ground combat. This dichotomy challenges essentialist concepts like the transparent battlefield. Belief that movement of any kind on or behind the front line in modern warfare cannot be hidden from drones is unsubstantiated. Surprise is difficult in Ukraine but often achieved — see, for example, Kursk 2024. And drone countermeasure technology and proliferation are in their infancy — a rebalancing should be expected. This cycle of measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure, and so on, is an enduring feature of warfare.

It is a logical fallacy to assume that trends of any kind are irreversible, and it is unwise to bet on a future military force predicated on the idea that drones, or AI, or any other technology has or will indelibly change either the character or nature of warfare. Those kinds of forecasts have been made repeatedly since at least the end of the 19th century and have repeatedly failed to come true. While the forms of weapons, equipment, and technology change over time, their functions in land warfare remain generally consistent: Find the enemy, launch things to destroy him or force him to quit, and move to, seize, and hold terrain. War does not revolt — it evolves unevenly in function even as its form remains fairly consistent over time.

Working from this evidence-driven, tempered, evolutionary, and long-term view of at least land warfare, the idea of a flexible, full-spectrum, middleweight Marine Corps is appealing.

Force Design As It Is

This all brings us back to Force Design. Berger’s plan set in motion two important alterations to the structure of the Marine Corps, one additive and one broadly reductive. It added — or to be fair, adapted — the stand-in force in the form of a new Marine littoral regiment while sharply reducing service-wide combined arms combat power. Together these two changes feed into the unresolved conceptual change that underwrites the recommendations I make in Part 3 of this series.

A Marine littoral regiment is a highly modified version of the standard Marine infantry regiment. Revolving around a single infantry battalion, the new regiment is designed to break down into discrete platoon-sized teams with attached anti-ship and anti-air missiles, advanced sensors, cyber, and other high-technology capabilities. Its central purpose appears to be to deter and deny adversary operations in the littoral space, which generally equates to an area from the shoreline out to roughly 200 nautical miles. Platoons that effectively compose the stand-in force are designed to operate stealthily in order to survive what is described as a “mature precision strike regime.”

Critics of the Marine littoral regiment and the stand-in force question the ability of these units to remain unseen and to survive in a high-threat environment. I share those concerns. In a conflict with China, it seems likely that the Chinese will either ignore these platoons because they do not pose a significant threat, or they will find and destroy them because they do pose a threat. However, Marines are likely to die in any wartime scenario. Even if they are spotted and are killed, they may still have helped deter and deny maritime space to some extent. In this way, the stand-in force is a highly risky but reasonable capability in a Chinese context. Risk is probably no higher than in a combined arms ground fight with a People’s Liberation Army Ground Force unit.

It is not clear, however, that the Marine littoral regiment would be broadly useful outside of the Far East Asian maritime context. Successful operations and exercises in the European theater under Task Force 61/2 show that some of these concepts and capabilities could be applied against a Russian threat. But no aspect of Force Design has really been tested in combat. Some advanced missiles and other technologies that underpin the stand-in force remain on the drawing board or are still undergoing experimental testing. This is all normal for a new, experimental design. But hard, lingering questions about capability and mission alignment counsel against broader extrapolation and force change.

A less tangible but equally relevant concern with the Marine littoral regiment is the lack of a compelling mission statement. Historically, the mission of a Marine infantry regiment has been unflinchingly direct: Locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy’s assault by fire and close combat. While even that wording is now a bit fuzzier, the mission of the Marine littoral regiment appears to be to “persistently operate” in a support role to the Joint Force, providing a menu of possible missions it might undertake. Nebulous language like this exacerbates concerns over the regiment’s purpose and, therefore, over the larger purpose of the Marine Corps. This is one of several issues that can be addressed with easy, no- or low-cost adjustments.

Reduction in the service’s combined arms combat power is a greater concern than the adoption of a modified regiment. Paying for Force Design out of hide required steep cuts in weapons, equipment, and personnel. Tanks were eliminated, cannon artillery was reduced by more than two-thirds of its existing strength, planned investment in the F-35 program — a huge and controversial budget hog — was also reduced, and three infantry battalions were cut. A new amphibious combat vehicle with a light 30mm cannon was acquired to simultaneously replace aging amphibious assault vehicles, light armored vehicles, and tanks.

All of these cuts objectively reduced both the quantity and quality of firepower and ground footprint the Marine Corps will be able to contribute to a joint combined-arms fight. According to Marine Corps doctrine, combat power is the total destructive force a unit can bring to bear on an enemy at a given time. By this standard, reducing available artillery, armored direct fire systems, and air-to-surface fires without commensurate and proven replacements reduces at least ground combat power within any task-organized Marine fighting unit.

Unresolved Dichotomies

These combat power cuts helped pay for Force Design, but they also amount to self-inflicted wounds. They created an enduring set of dichotomies that drag down arguments for sustaining the Marine Corps as a service. While the Navy has moved to acquire four new amphibious ships, central concepts in Force Design and weakened combat power in the Marine air-ground task force challenge the core rationale for an amphibious fleet. Why build and sustain a fleet of ships designed to fight in an environment that renders those ships irrelevant? Why maintain amphibious ships and large combat divisions to support an assault the Marine Corps seems to be avoiding? And how can the Corps simultaneously cut manpower to pay for Force Design while also seeking out more global missions that require more troops?

Acquisition of the amphibious combat vehicle exemplifies this confusing mix of arguments and capabilities. Force Design applies the concept of a maritime, or ship-on-ship, missile-on-ship precision strike regime to ground combat. In this mindset, anything that moves on the modern battlefield can be seen and destroyed by precision strike. As the Ground Combat Database shows, this all incorrectly assumes that weapons like first-person video drones will render heavy, armored vehicles irrelevant, and that traditional weapons like direct fire cannons will have little use in modern warfare.

But the amphibious combat vehicle is a big, highly visible, lightly-armored vehicle. It will carry 13 marines behind what will necessarily be a light (read: thin) protective shell. It appears to have no built-in counter-drone systems. Its 30mm cannon will not provide beyond-line-of-sight firepower and is more likely to annoy than kill an enemy tank. That matters because main battle tanks were used in nearly 70 percent of the ground battles I reviewed, and they remain in common use in 2025 on every major battlefield including in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, and Myanmar. China may have more than 7,000 tanks in service.

If the Marine Corps intended to avoid ground combat entirely, then the amphibious combat vehicle might be useful for bringing Marines ashore for stealthy advanced base operations. But it is not at all a stealthy platform, so it seems ill suited for that role, too. This poor fit scales up to service level. Simultaneously applying Force Design while retaining a large but weakened combined arms force suggests the Marine Corps is trying to have it both ways with a force that may be unready for either way. All the dichotomies above culminate in a central problem with Force Design as it was intended and as it has been applied: The Marine Corps as it exists in 2025 is inexplicable.

Risks of An Inexplicable Force

In my last article, I argued that the Marine Corps was losing the battle for public relevance. If it is true that America does not need a Marine Corps, and that the Marine Corps only exists as long as it inspires popular support, then the Marines need a clear, straightforward, and inspiring justification for existence. While the stand-in force may indeed be a viable tactical concept, the broad — even if unfair — impression of a stand-in force of small teams of missile, cyber, drone, and radar technicians hiding on remote islands is entirely uninspiring.

Effective concept language conveys both practical intent and broader purpose. “Stand-in force” is intended to mean a force that stands to fight within (stand-in) the Chinese missile danger zone instead standing off safely out of range. But that meaning is not immediately clear and its vagueness is not compelling. Even when the meaning of “stand-in” is clarified, the idea of standing in unintentionally conveys an un-marine-like inertness that sharply contrasts with the hyper-violent task of locating, closing with, and destroying the enemy with fire or repelling assaults with close combat. When various efforts to end the Marine Corps in the 20th century surfaced, Marine leaders could always count on some impassioned public support to help save them. But no American is going to scream bloody murder for more stand-in forces.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Marine Corps has retained a large combined arms combat force that has little artillery and no tanks, works from ships that the Marine Corps itself sometimes (but, confusingly, not always) argues are barely survivable in modern warfare, and (in some of its public-facing documentation) embraces a bleeding-edge understanding of combat that, if true, would obviate its own existence.

And selling the Marine Corps on its warfighting capabilities is difficult when arguments for Force Design remain predicated on the idea that the Marine Corps is not America’s second land army, even when it clearly has been and continues to be a three combined arms division-capable second land army that is also amphibious. A Marine Corps predicated on seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies is not a Marine Corps that America needs or necessarily wants.

A Viable Middle Ground For a Middle-Ground Force

The good news is that a middle ground always lies between any dichotomy, and the middle ground is all the more viable when the dichotomies are exaggerated and repairable. Critiques in Part 1 and 2 of this series are intended to strip away presently unhelpful debate over Force Design to get to some positive recommendations.

In my next article in this series, I will offer clear, viable options for existing amphibious assets. Some positive adjustments to Force Design are already underway. A special operations capable Marine expeditionary unit was rebuilt in an effort to wedge the Marine Corps back into the global crisis response mission, embracing its historic middleweight role. The Marine littoral regiment can fight if needed, even if it is not yet up to intended capability. And we can consider “stand-in force” a stand-in name for what could be an even more aggressive, and therefore more compelling, actualization of the expeditionary advanced base force concept. A hint to effective rebranding sits in plain sight in the littoral regiment’s existing mission set.

More importantly, the heart and soul of the Marine Corps — its infantry battalions — remain strong, capable, and available. Since war has not fundamentally changed, strong, capable infantry have not been rendered irrelevant. In fact, infantry were the most consistent component in all 423 cases in my study: As I noted above, both sides employed infantry one-hundred percent of the time in all cases. No ground was taken or retained without infantry fighting onto an objective or holding fast. Past is not prologue, but longstanding and unaltered trends in ground combat suggest the United States will need reliable Marine combined arms infantry for the foreseeable future.

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Ben Connable, Ph.D., is a retired Marine officer, executive director of the nonprofit Battle Research Group, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, adjunct principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, and the author of Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War.

Image: U.S. Marine Corps

warontherocks.com · June 19, 2025

10. Revisiting the Implications of Iran’s Long-Range Weapons Capabilities

Conclusion:

As the current conflict rages on, we will see how Iranian strike weapons perform — both qualitatively and quantitatively — to generate key lessons about this conflict and events in recent years related to Iranian strike weapons and Tehran’s associated military strategy and doctrine

Revisiting the Implications of Iran’s Long-Range Weapons Capabilities

https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/revisiting-the-implications-of-irans-long-range-weapons-capabilities/

June 18, 2025

Jim Lamson

In his 2022 article, “New Missiles, New Risks: The Escalatory Implications of Iran’s Precision-Strike Weapons,” Jim Lamson argued that Iran’s acquisition of precision strike weapons had altered the balance of power in the Middle East. Three years on, and in the wake of several waves of ballistic missile attacks on Israel, we asked Jim to reevaluate his analysis.

Note: Given the fluidity of the situation in the Middle East, this article was originally published on Wednesday, June 18, 2025.

Image: Islamic Republic News Agency

In your 2022 article, “New Missiles, New Risks: The Escalatory Implications of Iran’s Precision-Strike Weapons,” you argued that Iran’s acquisition and fielding of precision strike weapons had altered the balance of power in the Middle East. What strategic assumptions about Iranian capabilities and intentions have proven correct or incorrect in the years following this analysis?

Since my article in January 2022, significant events have taken place relevant to Iranian strike weapons, most notably the current Israeli-Iranian conflict, in addition to the Iranian attacks against Israel and Israeli retaliatory actions in April and October of last year. Also, Iran conducted limited strikes against a suspected Israeli intelligence base in Iraq in 2022 and 2024 and militant groups in Syria and Pakistan in 2024. So, many important events regarding Iranian strike weapons since early 2022 have a bearing on the article. With all these examples of Iran’s use of long-range strike weapons — ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles — many of the strategic assumptions about Iranian capabilities and intentions from the article appear to remain intact, at least through June 12, 2025, prior to Israel’s preemptive attack on Iran.

First, strike weapons form a critical pillar of Iran’s military strategy for deterrence, compellence, and warfighting to respond to threats and actions from its state and non-state adversaries. Second, Iran’s strike weapons remain an essential tool to demonstrate Iranian resolve and capabilities and to try to exploit the perceived vulnerabilities of its adversaries. Third, they are key capabilities for both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s conventional military, the Artesh, for retaliatory actions and warfighting in general — a point only reinforced by technical and operational lessons Iran has learned from its use against adversaries and from watching the role of strike weapons in the Russo-Ukrainian War and even their use by Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance partners — especially Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Fourth, Iran’s employment doctrine has included “hybrid” strikes, combining missiles and drones in operations in 2024 and in the current conflict, and also a focus on retaliating against the “origins” or “sources” — that is, the sites involved in planning and implementing the initial attacks against it. Lastly, Iranian strike weapons pose risks of rapid escalation during a crisis, a dynamic seen in April and October of last year — when Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel — and so far in the current conflict. This includes Iran’s escalation to target Israeli energy infrastructure and possibly civilian targets, as well as significant pressures on Iranian commanders in the past week to “use or lose” their strike weapons and launch attacks against Israel before Israeli airstrikes destroy their arsenals.

That said, the assumptions by many analysts (including myself) about how well Iranian strike weapons would perform — especially in terms of accuracy and their ability to defeat air and missile defenses — have proven mainly incorrect. This is in sharp contrast to perceptions of their effectiveness in Iranian operations leading up to 2024 — for instance against Saudi oil facilities in 2019, the U.S. Al Asad airbase in Iraq in 2020, and against non-state actors. The vast majority of Iran’s missile and drone strikes against Israel in April and October 2024 were either intercepted or appeared to miss their intended targets. This issue has also shown itself in the current conflict (at least through June 15), where Iranian strike weapons are largely failing to demonstrate military effectiveness.

You also argued that Iran believed it had “passed the deterrence phase” and shifted the burden to adversaries to deter Iran. How have subsequent Iranian actions and regional crises validated or challenged this assessment of deterrence dynamics between Iran, the United States, and Israel?

Before the events of 2024, Iran enjoyed a level of strategic confidence, perceiving its deterrence capabilities — primarily underpinned by its missile and drone capabilities — as high vis-à-vis the United States and Israel. This Iranian perception was bolstered by statements from U.S. military officials in 2023 about Iran’s strike capabilities, including comments that Iran had “massively increased” its strike weapons arsenal, that Iran enjoyed “overmatch” against its neighbors, that “Iran is exponentially more capable than they were just five years ago,” and that Tehran was “undeterred.” Based on statements of Iranian officials before 2024, Tehran believed it had moved past the phase of “deterrence” (bazdarandegi) — where the onus was on Iran to deter its adversaries — and had arrived at the phase of “power” (eghtedar), where the onus was now on its adversaries to deter Iran.

The events of 2024, however, extinguished this Iranian (and foreign) perception, shifting Tehran’s position of strategic confidence to one of strategic vulnerability. Significantly, the surprising ineffectiveness of Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles against Israel — due to both air and missile defenses as well as the relative inaccuracy of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles — coupled with Iran’s vulnerability to Israel’s airstrikes against Iranian air defenses and missile production sites, severely impacted Iran’s perceived capabilities. This was, of course, exacerbated by the severe blows dealt by Israeli military operations to the capabilities of Iran’s Axis of Resistance partners, especially Hizballah, and also by the fall of Bashar al Assad in Syria.

As a result of these events — before we even entered 2025 — Tehran reverted from the phase of “power” to the phase of “deterrence,” where the onus was again on Iran to deter its adversaries. The recent Israeli military operations against Iran (at least as of June 16) have served to magnify this impact significantly. Israel’s strikes thus far have not only severely damaged Iran’s deployed strike weapon forces — especially ballistic missiles and their launchers — but have also impacted Iran’s development and production capabilities, in addition to Iranian attacks consuming hundreds of missiles and drones so far. Thus, in terms of the impact on deterrence dynamics, not only is the onus back on Iran to deter its adversaries but worse than that, it now will need to find a way to rebuild the capabilities to deter its adversaries — assuming Iran is not forced to give up or severely limit its capabilities (or that the Islamic regime remains in power).

Due to Israel’s damage to Iran’s offensive capabilities, Tehran will probably need to adjust its military strategy to better align it with its degraded strike capabilities and force posture. That is, Tehran will probably need to revert to its pre-2010s emphasis on “defensive deterrence” (bazdarandegi-e defai) — a strategy that is more reactive than proactive and relies on more limited offensive capabilities, rather than trying to continue its recent emphasis on “offensive deterrence” (bazdarandegi-e tahajomi) — a more proactive strategy of threats and actions that requires a robust set of offensive capabilities and force posture. In Western terms, Iran will likely need to transition its strategy for strike weapons from a “maximal” deterrence posture to one that is more akin to “limited” or “minimal” deterrence.

You suggested that traditional constraining measures — including export controls, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure — had little impact on Iran’s weapons development. What has been the actual effectiveness of subsequent efforts to limit Iran’s precision strike programs, and how have Iran’s capabilities evolved despite these measures?

Since 2022, traditional measures — such as new sanctions on Iranian organizations and foreign suppliers — appear to have had minimal effect on Iran’s development, production, deployment, and use of strike weapons, as well as their transfers to Iran’s state and non-state partners. Iran has still apparently been able to procure foreign technologies and — at least before the current conflict — was still developing, producing, and unveiling new ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles and delivering them to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Artesh. Iran also transferred complete missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicle production technology, to Russia, and delivered complete systems and assembly kits to the Houthis. However, with recent events and the likely need for Iran to rebuild, which I address below, the effectiveness of traditional measures — such as export controls and interdictions — may increase, especially as Iran will likely need to conduct significant foreign procurement of components, materials, and equipment — and perhaps of complete weapon systems — as part of its rebuilding efforts.

In addition to traditional measures, the new “measure,” of Israeli kinetic strikes in 2024 — and especially in the current conflict — against targets involved in the development, production, and deployment of missiles and drones, as well as the associated officials and organizations, are dealing a massive blow to Iran’s capabilities. In October 2024, Israeli strikes reportedly damaged or destroyed multiple solid-propellant mixing facilities across the country that were critical to producing solid-propellant ballistic missiles and the Israeli operations over the past few days will likely have a massive impact on Iran’s ability to develop, produce, deploy, and use ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles for many years to come.

Based on the developments since 2022 that you cite above, how do you foresee strike weapons playing a role in Iranian military strategy?

Looking forward, I would expect strike weapons to remain a key pillar of Iranian deterrence and defense doctrine, despite the shortcomings of 2024 and in the current conflict, in addition to any other existing or new pillars — such as trying to build nuclear weapons — that Iran may attempt. Depending on how the current conflict evolves, Iran may be forced to agree to limit or even dismantle its ballistic missile and some other strike capabilities — or perhaps even experience a regime collapse.

Iran will have much work to do if it moves to rebuild its strike capabilities. Depending on precisely what was damaged and destroyed by Israeli strikes, Tehran will need to rebuild at least some of the organizations, facilities, and supply chains — domestic and foreign — associated with the development, production, and deployment of missiles and drones. In addition to the facilities involved in the final assembly of systems, if Israel destroyed Iranian “upstream” suppliers that produce key subsystems — such as propulsion and guidance and control — for strike weapons, Tehran will be forced to acquire these items, many of which are controlled by national and multilateral export controls, from foreign suppliers as it attempts to rebuild these domestic supply chains.

Finally, assuming the Islamic regime remains in power and does not agree to limit or dismantle its strike weapon programs and capabilities, how might its attempts to rebuild proceed?

Such rebuilding efforts will be massive for Iranian weapons program and procurement managers. In addition, Tehran’s higher-level industry officials in the Armed Forces General Staff, Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will need to make difficult decisions to prioritize and streamline what domestic programs, industries, and foreign purchases to focus on within Iran’s severe resource constraints. For instance, until last week, Iran was developing and producing dozens of different kinds of missiles and drones across its defense ministry and military, all of which required their dedicated production lines and unique supply chains. As it rebuilds, Iran may need to focus on only a small number of families of high-priority missiles and drones — for instance, those with the highest value in deterring and fighting Israel and the United States — which will help save resources and simplify production lines and supply chains. But Iranian officials will still face severe tradeoffs, including which weapons programs to retain versus which to halt, as well as how to conduct such streamlining while maintaining a level of diversity to ensure some semblance of resilience to risks and disruptions to programs or supply chains. And they will be doing all of this while trying to avoid foreign detection and actions — including potential follow-on airstrikes — against their rebuilding efforts.

I expect these developments will be similar to watching Iranian efforts in the 1990s — when my career began as an Iran analyst — to rebuild, improve, and expand its weapons programs and associated defense industries and supply chains. One key difference between the 1990s and now is Iran’s advancements in “intangible” technology — the designs and expertise Iran gained that probably remain mostly intact — that will help as it rebuilds the necessary elements of “tangible” technology: missile and drone systems and their associated subsystems, components, materials, equipment, and facilities. Over the decades, Iran was able to — through technology transfers, reverse engineering, and domestic design and development — establish the explicit and tacit knowledge to ensure Tehran will not start from zero to rebuild these capabilities.

As it rebuilds, it will need to improve on these systems’ accuracy and ability to defeat air and missile defenses, based on the lessons learned from its conflict with Israel as well as from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Iran will need to focus even more on key areas such as improving guidance systems, increasing maneuverability, reducing radar cross sections, improving resistance to electronic warfare, developing systems that do not rely on satellite navigation, employing improved strike packages and hybrid combinations of systems, using decoys, and other technical and operational enhancements.

As the current conflict rages on, we will see how Iranian strike weapons perform — both qualitatively and quantitatively — to generate key lessons about this conflict and events in recent years related to Iranian strike weapons and Tehran’s associated military strategy and doctrine

***

Jim Lamson is a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Prior to that, Jim worked for 23 years as an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Image: Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia Commons

11. China’s central bank chief expects new currency order to challenge dollar

This is one the biggest threats to US national security. We must not lose the dollar as the reserve currency.

China’s central bank chief expects new currency order to challenge dollar

www.ft.com

Pan Gongsheng points to a growing role for the renminbi after decades of dominance by the US currency

https://www.ft.com/content/ed04b26c-657d-4653-859d-c5a560c6b3e9

Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People’s Bank of China, speaking in Shanghai on Wednesday © Reuters Thomas Hale in Shanghai and Cheng Leng in Hong Kong

Published7 hours agoChina’s central bank governor has said he expects a new global currency order to emerge after decades of dominance by the US dollar, with the renminbi competing in a “multi-polar international monetary system”.

Speaking at China’s flagship financial forum in Shanghai, Pan Gongsheng said the US dollar had “established its dominance” after the second world war and “retained its status up till now”. He warned of “excessive reliance” on a single currency.

“In the future, the global monetary system may continue to evolve towards a pattern in which a few sovereign currencies coexist, compete with each other, and check and balance each other,” he said, pointing to a growing role for the renminbi.

Pan said the key developments in the international monetary system during the past two decades had been the introduction of the euro and the rise of the renminbi since the global financial crisis in 2008.

The renminbi, he noted, was the world’s second-largest trade finance currency and third-largest payment currency.

His comments came a day after Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said the “dominant role of the dollar” was “no longer certain”, creating an opening for the euro to take “global prominence”.

Pan’s comments also indicate a renewed urgency in China’s long-standing push for a “multi-polar” currency system, as China clashes with the US over trade and Donald Trump’s imposition of higher tariffs.

Beijing and Washington have entered a fragile truce that reduced tariff levels from an April escalation, but tensions remain elevated under a new US administration that has shaken up international trade.

“When geopolitical conflicts, national security interests or even wars occur, the international dominant currency is easily instrumentalised and weaponised,” Pan said.

Pan and Lagarde met in Beijing last week to sign a memorandum of understanding on co-operation in central banking, which includes a framework for regular dialogue.

Pan also noted discussions around greater use of SDRs — a basket of currencies defined and maintained by the IMF — as a potential alternative that could help “overcome the inherent problems of a single sovereign currency as the dominant international currency”.

His comments coincided with multiple announcements on Wednesday related to China’s push for a more renminbi-centred currency system, including an international operation centre for the digital renminbi in Shanghai.

Six foreign institutions, including Singaporean bank OCBC and Kyrgyzstan’s third-largest lender Eldik Bank, also said they would join China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (Cips), an alternative to the Swift global payment system.

Hong Kong and Shanghai authorities also on Wednesday signed an “action plan” to strengthen financial ties, including the management and allocation of renminbi-denominated assets.

Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the PBoC and head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said Beijing would expand a scheme allowing domestic investors to buy assets outside China. Zhu said the expansion of the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor scheme would “fulfil the growing onshore needs for offshore investment”.

12. What Would It Take to End the Regime in Iran?

Excerpts:

“Iran’s brain drain is one of the highest in the world. Most individuals inside Iran would rather leave the country than stay and fight,” he said. “They are jaded by their previous failed attempts, frustrated by the older generations, who they partly blame for the uninhabitable conditions they are in, and unwilling to die for change.”

Khanzadeh also says that while “Iran has a lot of highly intelligent, politically savvy, socially conscious, and charismatic individuals who could rise up and become this leader,” most are “dead, or in prison and withering away, or they are not publicly stating their intent to avoid imprisonment or death, or they have left the country.”

Even so, the challenges associated with regime change don’t seem to have much of an impact on the streets.

“Everyone is talking about regime change; everything is ready to go,” one twenty-something musician in Tehran tells The Cipher Brief. “This is the best situation for years. I am very optimistic.”

What Would It Take to End the Regime in Iran?

A Complex Equation of Opposition, Leadership and Geopolitics

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/what-would-it-take-to-end-the-regime-in-iran

18 June, 2025

TEHRAN, IRAN - ARCHIVE: A file photo dated October 30, 2019 shows Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami attending the graduation ceremony for the students of the Hatam al-Anbiya Air Defense University in Tehran, Iran. ((Photo by Iranian Leader Press Off. / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images))

By Hollie McKay

Writer & Reporter

Hollie McKay is a writer, war crimes investigator, and the author of “Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield.” (Jocko Publishing/Di Angelo Publications 2021). She was an investigative and international affairs/war correspondent for Fox News Digital for over fourteen years, where she focused on war, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.

CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING – As U.S. President Donald Trump demands Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and hints that Iran’s Supreme Leader could also be targeted amid Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, experts are reconsidering the complicated equation of regime change.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday, rejected President Trump’s demand, saying, “Intelligent people who know Iran, the Iranian nation, and its history will never speak to this nation in threatening language because the Iranian nation will not surrender” and warned that Tehran would retaliate against U.S. involvement in Israel’s ongoing military operation.

Israel’s bombing campaign has sharply escalated an internal shadow conflict that has simmered for decades. While Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has insisted that Israel’s official goal is not regime change in Tehran, at least not yet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be encouraging internal uprising, hinting at the broader strategic stakes of the conflict.

“The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime,” he said over the weekend.

Inside Iran, the reaction is divisive and complex as evident at the defiant public rallies but history shows that waves of dissent in Iran have both surged and faded, often crushed by brutal crackdowns.

“There would need to be a perfect storm for the Islamic Republic to be toppled,” Reza Khanzadeh, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the U.S.-Iran Chamber of Commerce, tells The Cipher Brief saying that it is his personal view that it would require “a combination of severe weakening across all power structures within the regime, at least a 50 percent level of defection from military members of the IRGC and Basij, a national mass uprising in the hundreds of thousands – if not millions – that is perpetually self-sustaining with protesters willing to die for change.” Also critical, he says, is the need for a strong opposition leader to guide the movement.

A History of Crushed Revolts

Over the last two decades, anti-government protests including the Green Movement of 2009 - which sent thousands of Iranians into the streets to protest the results of the presidential election - and widespread demonstrations in late 2017 and 2019 in response to a significant spike in fuel prices, raised the specter of vulnerability for the regime. The uprisings were met with violent suppression and limited international support. Experts point to the regime’s unbroken chain of command and loyal security forces as key reasons.

“The main reason for this failure is that the means of repression have not cracked in Iran. They have stayed steadfastly supportive of the regime,” Karl Kaltenthaler, Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron, tells The Cipher Brief. “The Shah fell because his forces for controlling the populace started to splinter. That is not happening with the clerical regime,” said Kaltenthaler, who warns about the complicated nature of regime change. “There is no question that the regime is unpopular with many, if not most, of its citizens. But that is not enough to topple the regime.”

He attributes much of this repressive strength to the “very powerful and large security apparatus in place in Iran built around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that is very intent on preserving the regime.”

So, what, if anything, do analysts believe could finally crack the regime’s grip?

“Iran’s regime, a steel vault of clerical control, requires choking its oil revenue and banking access through merciless sanctions to ignite internal collapse. Since 1979, it’s dodged crises with cunning, so only an economic stranglehold and a youth-fueled revolt too fierce to quell can break its grip,” says John Thomas, Managing Director of international public affairs firm Nestpoint Associates. “Reform is a fantasy while the IRGC stands firm; overthrow demands splitting their ranks or crippling their command.”“Iran’s regime, a steel vault of clerical control, requires choking its oil revenue and banking access through merciless sanctions to ignite internal collapse. Since 1979, it’s dodged crises with cunning, so only an economic stranglehold and a youth-fueled revolt too fierce to quell can break its grip,” said Thomas. “Reform is a fantasy while the IRGC stands firm; overthrow demands splitting their ranks or crippling their command.”

Others point to the decisive role public messaging needs to play. “When the revolutionaries took over in 1979, one of their first major moves was to seize the state broadcasting station. They were able to declare the revolution a success and call people into the streets,” Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells The Cipher Brief. “Now, in contrast, we’ve just seen Israel bomb Iranian broadcasting infrastructure. A more coordinated effort would’ve been to message directly to Iranians. Israel has the capability—just like it’s done in Gaza and Lebanon—to deliver targeted messaging, even to specific neighborhoods.”

From his purview, the Israelis could’ve said, “We support your fight for freedom. We’ll provide air support if you plan to mobilize against a specific civic institution—not necessarily a military one. We’ll pause airstrikes from this hour to that hour.” That would’ve made more sense.”

In what appeared to be a soft-power pivot, the U.S. State Department recalled dozens of staffers to revive Voice of America’s Farsi-language broadcasts over the weekend.

Sayeh suggested that a more “strategic target” for Israel “would have been the judiciary—specifically, those who execute protesters or special police units that suppress dissent.” He also pointed to the incoherent messaging of leaving rather than standing against the oppression.

“Right now, they (Washington) are telling Iranians to evacuate Tehran while simultaneously bombing,” Sayeh said. “How can you expect people to overthrow a regime under those conditions?”

Amid increasing public pressure from President Trump and threats of retaliation by the Supreme Leader, Reza Khanzadeh warns that U.S. involvement should be restrained.

“For hopes of a positive relationship between Washington and Tehran, the United States should not play an active role in influencing Iran’s political future unless there is that perfect storm for the Islamic Republic to end,” Khanzadeh noted. “And even then, Washington’s involvement must be light-handed.”

Some analysts do see fragments in Tehran’s repressive rule. Inflation, sanctions, and isolation have contributed to the country’s economic hardships. As Israeli strikes have intensified in both scale and sophistication, they have put unprecedented pressure on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure at the same time that the country’s younger population is more connected to global ideas and less tolerant of repression.

“There’s a point of no return in geopolitics. If the regime survives this, it’s going to come out more hostile. Any new agreement with (Tehran) would just delay the inevitable,” Sayeh insists. “If this escalates further and Washington gets pulled into a war by Tehran’s retaliation, that could be a death sentence for the regime. But if it doesn’t escalate—and Iranians are left with a broken country and the same regime—then the sense of betrayal and hopelessness will deepen.”

Others predict that the entrenched power structures and the leadership’s historical survival instincts remain formidable obstacles. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that regime change “could be a result” of continued attacks, experts emphasize that the leadership’s ideological resilience, combined with sophisticated control of its internal security and intelligence apparatus, makes a sudden crumble unlikely.

As Kaltenthaler observes, “Even if Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, were killed, it would not lead to regime collapse” in large part because “there is no organized opposition strong enough inside of Iran to topple the IRGC-clerical regime.”

Khanzadeh concurred that “the unfortunate reality is, even with economic hardships and youth opposition increasing, the likelihood of there being a correlation to a sustained opposition or regime change is very low.”

“Iran’s brain drain is one of the highest in the world. Most individuals inside Iran would rather leave the country than stay and fight,” he said. “They are jaded by their previous failed attempts, frustrated by the older generations, who they partly blame for the uninhabitable conditions they are in, and unwilling to die for change.”

Khanzadeh also says that while “Iran has a lot of highly intelligent, politically savvy, socially conscious, and charismatic individuals who could rise up and become this leader,” most are “dead, or in prison and withering away, or they are not publicly stating their intent to avoid imprisonment or death, or they have left the country.”

Even so, the challenges associated with regime change don’t seem to have much of an impact on the streets.

“Everyone is talking about regime change; everything is ready to go,” one twenty-something musician in Tehran tells The Cipher Brief. “This is the best situation for years. I am very optimistic.”

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13. The Rampant Leadership Corruption Plaguing China and Russia

Excerpts:

A Rand June 2024 report said: “corruption in Russia is not a problem that can be eradicated by a change of policy or personnel, it is a feature of the system itself.”

Corruption is like a cancer that slowly eats away at leadership credibility. In 1858, reportedly during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Eventually, the people will demand transparency and openness from their governments and demand unwavering integrity from their leaders.

The Wall Street Journal June 7th Peggy Noonan column – Republican Sleaze, Democratic Slump -- mentioned: “Charges of influence peddling, access peddling --$TRUMP coins, real-estate deals in foreign counties, cash for dinners with the president, a pardon process involving big fees for access to those in the president’s orbit….” If this is the perception of some people, then these concerns must be addressed.

The U.S. is the “shining house on the hill.” All nations look to the U.S. for hope and freedom from tyranny, hunger, wars, injustice; where the rule of law governs and all people have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, the U.S. is the model for other countries, especially China and Russia, where corruption is rampant and the leaders are enriching themselves.

The Rampant Leadership Corruption Plaguing China and Russia

19 June, 2025

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/leadership-corruption-russia-china

By Ambassador Joseph DeTrani

Former Director of the National Counterproliferation Center

Ambassador Joseph DeTrani served as the U.S. Representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), as well as former CIA director of East Asia Operations. He also served as Associate Director of National Intelligence and Mission Manager for North Korea, was the Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, and served as the Director of the National Counter Proliferation Center, ODNI. He currently serves on the Board of Managers at Sandia National Laboratories.

OPINION — In March 2025 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published an unclassified report on “Wealth and Corrupt Activities of the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” It was an insightful analysis of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. It was also a primer on the excessive wealth of Mr. Xi and other former and current senior officials. Indeed, it was an expose on the hypocrisy of the leaders of the CCP.

The same can be said for the Russian Federation. Former Russian anti-corruption opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in February 2024 in a Russian penal institution, documented the excessive wealth of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a few of his close associates – Sergei Shoigu, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council.

China and Russia have active anti-corruption organizations that in fact do remove some senior and many low-level officials convicted of corruption. China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspections found over 4.7 million officials guilty of corruption. The irony, however, is that little is said about the wealth of Mr. Xi or former Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao. Journalistic research going back to 2012 found that the family of Mr. Wen and the then-incoming president, Mr. Xi, had both amassed significant wealth.

As for Russia, according to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Mr. Putin’s Party is “full of crooks and thieves.” Mr. Navalny’s 2021 You Tube film, which amassed over 100 million views in its first week, showed Mr. Putin’s extravagant palace that cost the state $1 to $1.4 billion. And Mr. Shoigu “practically openly created a corrupt network of charitable foundations through which they collected bribes from oligarchs and built palaces and vacation homes.” And then-Prime Minister Medvedev “profited from a complex business network which collected bribes by using offshore schemes and charity foundations.”

Mr. Wen’s family – mother, wife, son and siblings – controlled assets of at least $2.7 billion in 2012. Mr. Xi’s siblings, nieces and nephews reportedly held assets worth over $1 billion in business investment and real estate. And as of 2024, Mr. Xi’s family retains millions in business interests and financial institutions. It is possible – and likely – that these holdings are managed indirectly on Mr. Xi’s behalf.

According to the ODNI report: “Nearly every senior Chinese party official has moved part of their ill-gotten gains overseas for safe keeping, mostly to English-speaking countries, like America, Canada, and Australia, that enjoy the rule of law. Or to tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, Panama, or the Cayman Islands. The Panama Papers in 2016 exposed offshore companies linked to relatives of Politburo members, like Mr. Xi’s brother-in-law and Mr. Wen’s son. Hard numbers are hard to come by, but it’s known that China is hemorrhaging trillions of dollars as officials and others seek safe havens to stash their cash.” The same Panama Papers traced $2 billion to Mr. Putin, with estimates of over $200 billion available to Mr. Putin, from oligarchs and other sources, to dole out to his cronies.

A Rand June 2024 report said: “corruption in Russia is not a problem that can be eradicated by a change of policy or personnel, it is a feature of the system itself.”

Corruption is like a cancer that slowly eats away at leadership credibility. In 1858, reportedly during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Eventually, the people will demand transparency and openness from their governments and demand unwavering integrity from their leaders.

The Wall Street Journal June 7th Peggy Noonan column – Republican Sleaze, Democratic Slump -- mentioned: “Charges of influence peddling, access peddling --$TRUMP coins, real-estate deals in foreign counties, cash for dinners with the president, a pardon process involving big fees for access to those in the president’s orbit….” If this is the perception of some people, then these concerns must be addressed.

The U.S. is the “shining house on the hill.” All nations look to the U.S. for hope and freedom from tyranny, hunger, wars, injustice; where the rule of law governs and all people have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, the U.S. is the model for other countries, especially China and Russia, where corruption is rampant and the leaders are enriching themselves.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

14. Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Cannot Be Dismantled from the Air

Excerpts:

A truly effective dismantlement would resemble not strikes, but a ground incursion. It would involve seizing Fordow and Natanz, securing uranium stockpiles, capturing cascade schematics and procurement records, and either debriefing or removing scientists tied to the IRGC, AEOI, and university research programs. It would require IAEA and intelligence personnel embedded on-site, conducting forensic audits in centrifuge labs, metallurgy workshops, and simulation centers. This is what worked in Iraq and Libya: control, not just precision. No air campaign can do that from 35,000 feet.

At best, the airstrikes will buy time. At worst, they will destroy inspection leverage, push the program further underground—both physically and politically—and risk triggering the very breakout they aim to prevent. They offer the appearance of resolution, not its substance. Denial, if it is to be real, must go beyond temporary disruption. It must mean verified removal of capacity, control of personnel, and physical access to infrastructure. The hard truth is this: if disarmament is the goal—as President Trump insists when he says Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon—then airstrikes alone won’t achieve it.

Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Cannot Be Dismantled from the Air

18 June, 2025

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/iran-nuclear-airstrikes

By Carlo J.V. Caro

Carlo J.V. Caro holds a master's degree in Islamic and Security Studies from Columbia University and is a political and military analyst.

OPINION — As Israel launches one of the most expansive covert-kinetic operations in recent memory against Iranian nuclear infrastructure, a critical question returns: can airpower—supported by advanced ISR, precision-guided munitions, and even U.S. bunker-busting weapons—permanently dismantle a hardened and decentralized nuclear program? The answer is no. That remains true even if the United States committed its full arsenal of deep-penetration munitions and stealth aircraft. Iran’s nuclear system is built not just to resist physical strikes, but to survive them—strategically, legally, and doctrinally.

Start with Fordow, Iran’s most fortified enrichment site. It sits buried 80 to 90 meters deep inside the Kuh-e Daryacheh mountains. The U.S. GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator can pierce up to 60 meters of reinforced concrete under ideal conditions—but it's not designed to penetrate layers of deep mountain rock, which scatter blast effects and reduce impact. Even when a bomb penetrates, it’s impossible to confirm the destruction of IR-6 centrifuge arrays or determine the fate of enriched uranium. Destroying a building is not the same as eliminating the capacity for breakout.

Natanz, the better-known site, poses different problems. Its facilities are more exposed but have already shown resilience. The 2009–2010 Stuxnet attack disrupted rotor speeds; in 2021, a power grid attack shut down cascades. Both efforts avoided explosive sabotage to prevent aerosolizing stored uranium. Strikes on cascade halls or storage vaults could trigger exactly that outcome. Meanwhile, Iran was building new, deeper cascade chambers at Natanz—modeled after Fordow’s hardened design.

But these tactical concerns are just the surface. Since at least 2003, Iran has transformed its nuclear program into a compartmentalized, redundant network. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) oversees public-facing sites, while critical R&D, procurement, and materials engineering are embedded across the Ministry of Defense, the military-linked SPND, and IRGC-run logistics and engineering firms. Universities like Malek Ashtar, Sharif, and Shahid Beheshti—sanctioned for proliferation-related research—support advanced work on centrifuge rotors, uranium metallurgy, and simulation models. The fuel cycle is spread across multiple cities: conversion at Isfahan, enrichment at Fordow and Natanz, heavy water production at Arak. Knock out one node, and others remain. This system wasn’t built just to function—it was built to survive.

The IRGC’s Passive Defense Organization has guided this shift since the early 2010s, hardening and camouflaging sites, moving assets underground, and routing logistics through civilian infrastructure. Its approach echoes Soviet and North Korean doctrine: survive the first strike, reconstitute after. Dual-use facilities, buried nodes, and mobile corridors form a system designed not to prevent attack, but to absorb it.

A turning point in this evolution was Iran’s move to fully domestic centrifuge production. Before, Iran relied on illicit procurement networks for sensitive components like rotors and bellows. Now it manufactures them using its own aerospace and metallurgical sectors. This change has rendered traditional interdiction strategies obsolete. There are no longer foreign supply chains to target. Disrupting production now means striking sovereign industrial plants not legally defined as nuclear sites—raising major questions under international law about proportionality, attribution, and escalation.

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Since Friday, Israel has reportedly killed 14 Iranian nuclear scientists. But the strategic impact will be limited. These personnel were part of a deep and compartmentalized labor structure that includes rotor fabrication teams, enrichment system modelers, and logistics engineers—many of whom remain untouched. Iran’s nuclear knowledge is archived, teachable, and distributed through classified academic programs and military-run technical institutes. Continuity does not depend on who is killed—it depends on what survives.

Even if a strike damages facilities, it won’t provide strategic certainty. Since Iran ended its implementation of the JCPOA’s Additional Protocol in 2021, the IAEA has lost continuous access to surveillance footage and no longer has what Director General Rafael Grossi calls “continuity of knowledge.” When inspectors visited the Turquzabad warehouse in 2018—after its exposure by Israeli intelligence—they found undeclared nuclear material. That remains the only site revealed, but others may exist. And while Iran’s enrichment levels now far exceed JCPOA limits—the IAEA reports that Iran holds over 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% U-235, just one step below weapons-grade—its activities technically remain within the bounds of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows enrichment of any level as long as it’s not diverted to weapons use. Iran’s uranium metal work at Esfahan, for example, is ostensibly for reactor fuel but has clear relevance for building warhead cores. Enrichment cascades, uranium conversion, and simulation software all remain dual-use by design. A bombing campaign can eliminate equipment, but not the legal narrative, institutional structure, or strategic doctrine that sustain the program.

The weaponization side is even harder to target. A nuclear device requires more than enriched uranium—it also needs implosion systems, neutron initiators, hydrodynamic tests, and precision detonators. According to the IAEA’s 2011 annex and the Institute for Science and International Security reports from 2019 to 2020, based on documents from Iran’s nuclear archive , Iran has explored all of these. Testing at the Parchin military complex and archived core design files are part of the record. These assets are not only small and relocatable—they don’t even involve fissile material. They’re nearly impossible to detect by ISR, let alone destroy, and can only be verified through intrusive on-site inspections. Strategically, Iran is not racing to build a bomb. It is positioning itself just below the threshold—able to weaponize rapidly without openly violating the NPT. This posture, formalized by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and internalized across SPND, maximizes leverage while minimizing legal risk. And it cannot be destroyed from the air.

Nor will a strike yield reliable post-strike clarity. Iran has invested in denial and deception: false facades, buried heat sources, multispectral camouflage, and encrypted site-to-site communications. These frustrate ISR and make battle damage assessments guesswork. The U.S. faced similar issues in Iraq from 1991 to 2003, where mobile infrastructure routinely eluded satellite and aerial surveillance. Iran’s situation is worse—because there's no inspector access, and no ground-truthing. Damage can only be inferred from secondary signatures like heat plumes or seismic shockwaves, none of which guarantee success.

What Iran now possesses is structural latency. This is more than technical know-how—it’s the ability to reconstitute a nuclear program after large-scale physical degradation. Designs, enriched stockpiles, rotor manufacturing, conversion tools, simulation models, and trained scientists are spread across the Iranian state. These aren’t hidden threats. They are sovereign capabilities built into the system. The model is similar to Saddam Hussein’s “just-in-time” reconstitution strategy in the 1990s: Iraq had no bombs, but preserved enough design data and networks to restart under better conditions. Iran has deliberately adopted that same logic. As long as legal ambiguity is preserved, scientists remain protected, and facilities go uninspected, no strike can destroy the true core of the program.

Common analogies are misleading. Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor worked because the facility was pre-operational, had no uranium fuel, and no supporting infrastructure. There was no fuel cycle, no cascade system, and no redundancy. None of that applies to Iran. Today’s program is hardened, dispersed, and far closer to the nuclear threshold. Osirak is no longer a relevant model.

There’s also no historical precedent for dismantling a program as deeply embedded as Iran’s without physical access. Libya’s 2003 disarmament followed years of behind-the-scenes negotiations and was catalyzed not just by fear of invasion, but by Gaddafi’s desire to normalize relations with Western banks and oil markets. Libya never enriched uranium domestically; its centrifuges were still in crates, acquired through the A.Q. Khan network, and its warhead designs were copies of Pakistani blueprints. South Africa, by contrast, had built six nuclear weapons—but it dismantled them in secret between 1989 and 1991 under a tightly controlled domestic program, then revealed their existence only after apartheid’s end to facilitate international reintegration. The process was driven by regime transition, not external pressure, and was verified only after full IAEA access. Syria’s al-Kibar reactor, destroyed by Israel in 2007, was based on a North Korean gas-graphite design and had no support infrastructure: no enrichment, no reprocessing, and no declared energy program to obscure it. No bombing campaign can replicate the political and technical conditions that enabled disarmament in those cases.

A truly effective dismantlement would resemble not strikes, but a ground incursion. It would involve seizing Fordow and Natanz, securing uranium stockpiles, capturing cascade schematics and procurement records, and either debriefing or removing scientists tied to the IRGC, AEOI, and university research programs. It would require IAEA and intelligence personnel embedded on-site, conducting forensic audits in centrifuge labs, metallurgy workshops, and simulation centers. This is what worked in Iraq and Libya: control, not just precision. No air campaign can do that from 35,000 feet.

At best, the airstrikes will buy time. At worst, they will destroy inspection leverage, push the program further underground—both physically and politically—and risk triggering the very breakout they aim to prevent. They offer the appearance of resolution, not its substance. Denial, if it is to be real, must go beyond temporary disruption. It must mean verified removal of capacity, control of personnel, and physical access to infrastructure. The hard truth is this: if disarmament is the goal—as President Trump insists when he says Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon—then airstrikes alone won’t achieve it.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

15. Asean may be ‘insufficient’, but it’s indispensable, says academic

Asean may be ‘insufficient’, but it’s indispensable, says academic

freemalaysiatoday.com · by FMT Reporters · June 18, 2025

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Kuik Cheng Chwee said problems within the region will be more difficult to resolve without Asean.

KUALA LUMPUR:

An academic said today that while Asean may be perceived as being “insufficient”, the bloc is indispensable.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Kuik Cheng Chwee said Asean was important because it managed and mitigated intra-Asean problems. It also enhanced regional cooperation and prosperity.

He cited the dispute between Cambodia and Thailand over the 11th-century Preah Vihear Temple which the two countries are laying claim to.

“While we have problems within Asean, they would be much bigger and more difficult to resolve without it (the bloc),” Kuik, who heads UKM’s Asian studies, said at the 38th Asia-Pacific Roundtable today.

The roundtable, organised by the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia, is aimed at bringing together diplomats, foreign policy experts and analysts to discuss key issues impacting the Asia-Pacific.

Kuik also said Asean enhanced regional cooperation and prosperity and provided its members, who mainly comprised small and middle powers, with a platform upon which they were better able to navigate global trends including great-power rivalries.

It was for this reason that Asean-centrality and regionalism had been a fixture of Malaysian foreign policy for decades, even before the Anwar Ibrahim administration, he said.

“But nobody will say that Asean is sufficient,” he conceded, acknowledging its weakness when it came to matters that required urgent attention.

These sentiments were shared by Australian academic Stuart Kaye on a separate panel which addressed perspectives on maritime security.

“Does it solve crises particularly well? No, but it was not designed to do that, and it should be commended for the work it does well,” Kaye, director and professor of law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security said.

“Asean works best when it is trying to integrate what its members do into a regional roadmap, and it excels in its ability to do this on maritime issues in the South China Sea.”

He said international law assumed that some level of international cooperation was desirable, especially in semi-enclosed seas such as the South China Sea, and Asean’s ability to coordinate its response showed its commitment to multilateral cooperation in the region.

freemalaysiatoday.com · by FMT Reporters · June 18, 2025

16. Army promises to deliver analysis on sweeping changes in 10 days

Consultation is important and necessary. But how many times have we seen initiatives get crushed because consultation allowed strong antibodies to be built up. What is the balance between getting buy-in and growing antibodies?

Sometimes if you want to change at the "speed of relevance" (thanks to Ken Gleiman and Amos Fox at Small Wars Journal for coining that phrase as the motto for SWJ) we have to move fast, break things, and ask for forgiveness later. But there is a balance that can be achieved.

Excerpts:

Many decisions made as part of ATI were held in a very close circle prior to the memo’s release. In some cases, the Army left out some program leaders who could have provided deeper analysis including second and third order effects and impact to the industrial base as well as formations.

Driscoll admitted during the SAC-D hearing that other branch services were not consulted ahead of announcing the Army’s intent to cancel joint programs like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

“When that consultation occurs, what would happen is the antibodies in the system come up to stop change,” Driscoll said, “and so when we weighted the decision of, how do we actually get the most likely chance of succeeding, we decided that the best chance was to sync with the Pentagon leadership and the administration and keep it very narrow until after announcement.”

The Army consulted the other services “the night before we announced it and then very soon after it came out,” Driscoll added.

Coons followed up to note the U.S. Marine Corps was “very surprised about the JLTV cancellation” and added that there needed to be “significant adjustments.”

Army promises to deliver analysis on sweeping changes in 10 days

Defense News · by Jen Judson · June 18, 2025

U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll promised Congress today the service would show its homework in 10 days on how it decided to consolidate commands, restructure formations and cancel or restructure a slew of weapons programs.

In a memo to the Army, the service secretary announced in early May that major change was underway and dubbed it the Army Transformation Initiative.

Yet many of the decisions laid out in the document lacked clear analysis behind them, such as a plan to consolidate Army Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command into one entity and cancel programs just as they were crossing the finish line like the M10 Booker light tank and the Robotic Combat Vehicle

Driscoll tallied the amount of spending planned over the next five years for programs the service will cancel or reorient to roughly $48 billion. The service will reallocate funding into innovative efforts to transform the Army into a highly mobile and lethal force, service leaders are saying.

“I agree the Army must change and modernize how it fights and must take into account significant changes in technology,” Sen. Chris Coons, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee said in a June 18 hearing.

“But, bluntly, months after you’ve announced the Army Transformation Initiative, this committee hasn’t received detailed or substantive analysis as to why the Army is planning to cancel or reduce 12 programs of record, consolidate or reduce staffing at 21 commands or how the investments you’re proposing will significantly enhance battlefield lethality,” he said.

Coons pressed Driscoll for a timeline to deliver more answers to congressional committees.

“We’d be happy to come by any time, but I think very specifically, you will have that detail within 10 days,” Driscoll said.

While Senate appropriators largely agreed a transformation is necessary for effective deterrence of major adversaries, many were skeptical over a variety of decisions the Army has made as part of the initiative.

“We don’t serve either the taxpayer or the common defense with blank checks for vaguely defined priorities. We want to see the analysis behind the specific bets the Army wants to place on ATI. We want to understand the second order effects on industry, other services and allies,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Many decisions made as part of ATI were held in a very close circle prior to the memo’s release. In some cases, the Army left out some program leaders who could have provided deeper analysis including second and third order effects and impact to the industrial base as well as formations.

Driscoll admitted during the SAC-D hearing that other branch services were not consulted ahead of announcing the Army’s intent to cancel joint programs like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

“When that consultation occurs, what would happen is the antibodies in the system come up to stop change,” Driscoll said, “and so when we weighted the decision of, how do we actually get the most likely chance of succeeding, we decided that the best chance was to sync with the Pentagon leadership and the administration and keep it very narrow until after announcement.”

The Army consulted the other services “the night before we announced it and then very soon after it came out,” Driscoll added.

Coons followed up to note the U.S. Marine Corps was “very surprised about the JLTV cancellation” and added that there needed to be “significant adjustments.”

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

17. An Islamic Republic With Its Back Against the Wall

They could just decide to surrender as President Trump suggested.

News Analysis

An Islamic Republic With Its Back Against the Wall

The Iranian regime finds itself in its most difficult position 46 years after the revolution that brought it to power. But does it mean the end?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/world/middleeast/iran-islamic-republic-regime.html

Watching Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s message to the people of Iran, in Tehran, on Wednesday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen reported from Tehran in 2009 as the country rose up to protest what was seen as a stolen presidential election and the Islamic Republic seemed to teeter on the brink.

June 19, 2025

Updated 7:54 a.m. ET

Beneath Israel’s bombs lies an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis.

An 86-year-old autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rules this restive nation, as he has for 36 years, in his role as guardian of the revolution, a conservative calling at which he has proved adept. The supreme leader is no gambler. But his system, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and he is now up against the wall.

Over six days of fighting, Israel has struck the Natanz enrichment facility where a majority of Iran’s nuclear fuel is produced, killed at least 11 of the regime’s top generals and several nuclear scientists, bombed oil-and-energy facilities, taken complete control of Iranian air space, and sent tens of thousands of people into flight from Tehran.

At least 224 people had been killed across Iran as of Sunday, a majority of them civilians, a spokesman for Iran’s ministry of health said. But the figure was sure to have grown as Israel’s bombardment continued in the days since. Iranian missiles have killed at least 24 Israelis.

“The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Khamenei is in the most difficult situation he has ever faced.”

The ayatollah has faced threats to his rule before, though, and come out with his supremacy intact. In 2009, when millions of people took to the streets of Tehran to protest what was seen as a stolen presidential election, I watched as state-licensed thugs repeatedly beat brave women demanding dignity and freedom. For a few days, the future of the regime stood on a knife-edge. But with utter ruthlessness it prevailed. Many demonstrators were dragged off to be tortured, sodomized, and in the case of several hundred of them, killed.

Whether the current difficulty facing Iran’s regime will lead to its demise remains to be seen. Isolated cries of “Death to Khamenei” rise into the night sky, but popular protests are impossible under bombs, and always risky under the thumb of the government. There are no obvious leaders to steer any political transition for the same reason.

Image

Smoke billowing after an Israeli strike, as seen from Tehran, on Wednesday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Ayatollah Khamenei remains defiant. He responded on Wednesday to President Trump’s threat to his life and call for “unconditional surrender” by saying that “Iran stands firm in the face of imposed war, just as it will stand firm against imposed peace, and it will not yield to any imposition.”

These were words typical of a proud nation that rose against the West almost a half-century ago through Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution, deposing the Shah and imposing “Death to America” as its weekly refrain.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

But the insurrection never delivered the freedom it had promised. Frustration, whether over hijabs imposed on women with no desire to wear them or over chronic and crippling mismanagement, grew.

Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45 percent since 2012, and many people are desperate. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies. Iran did reach a nuclear agreement with the United States in the last years of the Obama administration, but Mr. Trump shredded it in his first term.

“The one message the Iranian people wants to get across is that having done all this and wreaked this kind of havoc, make sure the end of this is that the horrendous regime is gone,” said an Iranian businessman based in the United Arab Emirates, who requested anonymity because of the Islamic Republic’s habit of imprisoning its opponents.

At the same time, as the Israeli bombing persists, there are signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison. For some, Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself. In Iran’s neighborhood, Pakistan, India, Russia and Israel all have nuclear warheads.

“Even if we are part of the opposition, we cannot remain indifferent to an invasion of our homeland,” Saddagh Zibakalm, a political science professor who notably refused to trample on U.S. and Israeli flags at a Mashhad university in 2016, wrote in an Iranian newspaper. “We cannot stay silent, or worse, support the aggressor.”

Image

A demonstration in Tehran against Israeli attacks on Iran on Saturday in front of a model of the Jerusalem-based Dome of the Rock building.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

When Israel bombed the headquarters of Iran’s state-owned broadcaster on Monday, causing the anchor in a black chador to cut short her screed against “the aggressor’s assault on the nation’s soil” and “on justice and truth,” the reaction was mixed.

Middle East Tensions: Live Updates

Updated

June 19, 2025, 7:47 a.m. ET3 hours ago

Some Iranians were overjoyed to see a woman in attire many Iranian women reject scurry for cover as the widely detested source of the Islamic Republic’s relentless propaganda was shut down with a loud boom. Others felt torn.

“Damn you Israel! I can’t believe I’m writing in support of the state broadcaster,” Hossein Dehbashi, an author and historian who was sentenced to six months in prison in 2022 for claiming that Ayatollah Khomeini’s son died of a drug overdose, wrote on social media.

It was probably inevitable — given that a clear majority of Iran’s population of 92 million oppose the mullahs’ regime, in the estimation of Mr. Sadjadpour and other observers — that Israel’s six-day-old military campaign would broaden in scope.

The bombing, as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, described it, began as a “pre-emptive action” to stop Iran using its enriched uranium to race for a bomb. But that limited mission already seems to have been superseded by something broader.

It always begged a core question: What would stop the regime, if it survived, from spinning the centrifuges and returning to enrichment? Although the nuclear program has never delivered a bomb, and only scant energy at astronomical cost, it has been the mullahs’ most potent nationalist symbol, much like the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951. This enraged the British, whose oil companies were affected, and led to a coup orchestrated by the C.I.A. and British intelligence in 1953.

Image

Cars lined up for gas after Israeli airstrikes in Tehran on Monday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

There are deep historical reasons, the coup among them, for Iran’s extreme sensitivity to foreign intervention, just as there are deep roots to its quest for liberty through some form of representative government, which began in 1905 with an uprising against the Qajar dynasty, driven by the demand for a constitution.

Now Mr. Trump speaks of “an end, a real end, not a cease-fire, a real end” and Mr. Netanyahu has made little secret of his ultimate objective. “We have indications that senior leaders in Iran are already packing their bags,” he said. “They sense what’s coming.”

There is no evidence, however, that those leaders who are still alive have packed their bags, and how the Israeli bombardment might end in the burial of the Islamic Republic is unclear.

Of course, chaos could ensue from the Islamic Republic’s overthrow. The recent history, in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, of despots removed through Western military intervention amounts to a cautionary tale.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would no doubt point relentlessly to Western hypocrisy over his war in Ukraine if Israel and the United States use force to topple the regime in Iran.

Already Western powers, even those like France and Germany that usually move in lock step, are split over how to proceed. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Tuesday, “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”

Image

President Trump and other Group of 7 leaders in Kananaskis, Alberta, on Monday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Speaking to the German ZDF broadcaster, he added that “this mullah regime has brought death and destruction to the world” and “I can hardly imagine the mullah regime returning to its old functions.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France struck a far more cautious note. “I think that the biggest error today would be to seek to change the regime in Iran by military means,” he said on Tuesday. “Because that would mean chaos.”

It would be foolish to underestimate the Islamic Republic’s determination to survive and the lengths it might go to in pursuit of that.

“The Islamic Republic is humiliated and not in a place it’s ever been before,” said Vali Nasr, a former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But it could still stay alive long enough to exhaust Israel and get the United States entangled in something it does not want.”

One thing is certain: If the United States does get involved in the war, it will never be forgotten in Tehran. American intervention will become part of a deep American-Iranian psychosis. Its elements already include an anti-democratic coup in Iran by American agents, an anti-Western Iranian theocratic revolution, the U.S. hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981, the American shooting down in 1988 of Iran Air flight 655 with 290 people aboard, and an ideological war that has persisted since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

That is a lot of bitter history, but one of history’s lessons is that nightmares do end. Almost nobody predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “The Islamic Republic is a zombie regime,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s fed off and spread disorder for a long time, but it’s terminally ill even if it’s still standing.”

Image

Pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei at a closed bazaar in Tehran this week.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Parin Behrooz contributed reporting.

A correction was made on June 19, 2025: An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the Jerusalem building whose model people in Iran were gathered near. It is the Dome of the Rock, not Al Aqsa Mosque.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.

18. Ramifications of the Death of Iran’s (Former) President Ebrahim Raisi

Excerpts:

It may take weeks, months, even years, for Khamenei and other powerful figures to attempt to find another suitable candidate for the position of Supreme Leader. The regime lacks a figure like Soleimani to compel the Assembly of Experts to choose that person and then legitimize him for the social base of the fundamentalist regime.

It is during this period that the regime is highly vulnerable to collapse. If Khamenei were to die before this process is complete, there is a very high likelihood of bloody struggles among the fundamentalists. This, in turn, will create conditions conducive to mass protests by the Iranian people, the overwhelming majority of whom intensely oppose the regime.

Israel’s highly successful attacks on the fundamentalist regime’s military leaders in June 2025 have further destabilized the regime. The fundamentalist regime is very unpopular. About 75 percent of the Iranian people oppose the regime. One of the main reasons that the regime has been able to remain in power is its ability to suppress the mass protests and coerce the population into submission. If Israel is able to substantially weaken the IRGC, then the regime would lack the coercive ability to suppress the population. The Iranian people may be able to overthrow the fundamentalist regime under such conditions.

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

Ramifications of the Death of Iran’s (Former) President Ebrahim Raisi

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/19/ebrahim-raisi-succession-impact/

by Masoud Kazemzadeh

06.19.2025 at 06:00am

May 19, 2025, was the first anniversary of the death of Ebrahim Raisi. His death would not have mattered greatly if Raisi were merely the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). This article argues that the death of Ebrahim Raisi, widely believed to be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s designated successor, has upended Iran’s succession trajectory, which will increase the elite factionalism and internal conflict in the aftermath of Ayatollah Khamenei’s death.

According to a 2023 report by Aman, the Military Intelligence of the Israel Defense Forces, the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was preparing the path for Raisi to succeed him in this position. It adds that other Western intelligence agencies also shared that assessment. The report further states that Khamenei not only orchestrated the 2021 presidential election to pave the path for Raisi to become president but also dismissed IRGC Gen. Ali Shamkhani (who was killed by Israel on June 13, 2025) from his position as the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in order to increase President Raisi’s power.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was born in 1939 and is 86 years old. The fundamentalist constitution grants extensive executive, legislative, and judicial powers to the Supreme Leader. According to the fundamentalist constitution, the Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 fundamentalist Shia clerics, chooses the Supreme Leader.

Khamenei had invested at least 10 years in preparing the path for Raisi to assume that position. This includes not only appointing Raisi as the Head of the Judicial Branch but also manipulating the 2021 elections for the presidency and the 2024 elections for the Assembly of Experts. Raisi was the sole candidate allowed to run for the seat from his district for the Assembly of Experts. Raisi’s father-in-law, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, is a powerful hardline member of the fundamentalist oligarchy and a powerful member of the Assembly of Experts. Finding another suitable candidate for Supreme Leader will not be easy. Raisi checked all the boxes.

Ebrahim Raisi’s Background

Raisi was born on December 14, 1960, in the shrine city of Mashhad. Both his parents claim direct descent from the Prophet Mohammad. His father died when he was five years old. His mother is still alive. Raisi had only a sixth-grade education. Raisi then attended the Haqqani Seminary School in Qom, whose founder was Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, one of the most, if not the most, extreme right-wing theologians in the past 50 years. Ayatollah Mesbah’s students and disciples have dominated the intelligence, security, and political apparatuses of the IRI. Raisi married Jamileh Alamolhoda, the daughter of Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda. She is an outspoken extremist, hardline fundamentalist, similar to her father and husband.

What distinguished Raisi was his personality. Raisi is known as “Qazi Eadam” [Execution Judge] and “Jalad Tehran” [Butcher of Tehran]. Raisi personally ordered the executions of thousands of people, many of them teenagers whose sole crime was distributing pamphlets and had already been tried and given jail sentences. Many Marxist political prisoners were executed merely for refusing to answer or saying “no” to the question of whether the Koran is the word of Allah (here, here, here, and here).

A man of mediocre intellect, Raisi was an empty vessel, willing to do anything and everything those above him wanted him to do. Raisi never expressed a thought or policy of his own. He merely echoed the official versions of events. Many Iranians have argued that Raisi shares many similarities with Adolf Eichmann, which made the Persian translations of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem a top seller in Iran.

Raisi was distinguished by several personality characteristics. First, the absolute and utter lack of conscience was Raisi’s major feature. Second, Raisi consistently exhibited absolute obedience to those above him. Third, Raisi exhibited a lack of the ability to comprehend complex phenomena or understand another’s point of view. Fourth, Raisi lacked the ability to use words and sentences correctly.

The fundamentalist regime ruling Iran has been an oligarchy comprised of various factions and sub-factions promoting conflicting views on a range of policies. Khamenei has marginalized the reformist and expedient members of the fundamentalist oligarchy. However, competition and conflicts have emerged among the hardliners and ultra-hardliners. Raisi always echoed the views of the Supreme Leader. Raisi was, in that sense, uncommon among the top members of the fundamentalist oligarchy. Raisi became the perfect vessel for various power centers in the IRI. Raisi neither possessed a social base of his own nor the intellect to challenge those who possess power. Under Raisi’s Supreme Leadership, it was presumed that those in power would retain control.

Iran After Khamenei

Those with power in the IRI include those in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Office of the Supreme Leader, fundamentalist-held financial conglomerates called “bonyad” [foundations], as well as several cliques. After Khamenei’s death, in all likelihood, the IRGC will emerge as the most powerful actor, the one with guns to enforce its will. The IRGC, however, is fragmented into various cliques. Among the most powerful and ambitious IRGC generals are Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Mohammad Ali Aziz Jafari, Hussein Salami, and Ali Shamkhani. Generals Salami and Shamkhani were killed by Israel on June 13, 2025.

Some of the most powerful cliques are networks organized around Mojtaba Khamenei, Hossein Taeb, Hossein Shariatmadari, Saeed Jalili, Ayatollah Mohammad Mehdi Mir-Bagheri, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the Supreme Leader. Taeb was the fearsome Head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization. Shariatmadari is one of the more extremist hardline theoreticians. Jalili is an ultra-hardliner and a member of the Council for the Expediency of the System. He was the chief nuclear negotiator and approved candidate to run for presidency in 2013, 2021, and 2024. Mir-Bagheri is the clerical leader of the Steadfast Front, the most extreme faction in the IRI. Ahmadinejad continues to be popular among a segment of the population and has support among some in the security apparatuses of the regime.

If the above power centers are able to reach a consensus on a candidate, then they will compel the Assembly of Experts to select him as the next Supreme Leader. If no such candidate could be found, then, in all likelihood, a bloody struggle would ensue among them to determine which one has the power to impose its will.

In the past 10 to 15 years, Khamenei had groomed two individuals to pave the way for a smooth transition to the next Supreme Leader: Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi and Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Gen. Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike ordered by President Trump in January 2020, and Raisi died in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024. Soleimani was to support and legitimize whoever the regime wanted to become the Supreme Leader. The propaganda of the fundamentalist regime groomed the IRGC Gen. Soleimani as a military hero above factional politics.

According to an interview posted on May 29, 2025, Oded Ailam, a former Head of the Counterterrorism Division in the Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, reveals that the fundamentalist regime has not been able to reach a consensus on a new person for the position of Supreme Leader.

Conclusion

It may take weeks, months, even years, for Khamenei and other powerful figures to attempt to find another suitable candidate for the position of Supreme Leader. The regime lacks a figure like Soleimani to compel the Assembly of Experts to choose that person and then legitimize him for the social base of the fundamentalist regime.

It is during this period that the regime is highly vulnerable to collapse. If Khamenei were to die before this process is complete, there is a very high likelihood of bloody struggles among the fundamentalists. This, in turn, will create conditions conducive to mass protests by the Iranian people, the overwhelming majority of whom intensely oppose the regime.

Israel’s highly successful attacks on the fundamentalist regime’s military leaders in June 2025 have further destabilized the regime. The fundamentalist regime is very unpopular. About 75 percent of the Iranian people oppose the regime. One of the main reasons that the regime has been able to remain in power is its ability to suppress the mass protests and coerce the population into submission. If Israel is able to substantially weaken the IRGC, then the regime would lack the coercive ability to suppress the population. The Iranian people may be able to overthrow the fundamentalist regime under such conditions.

Tags: Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel-Iran Conflict

About The Author

Masoud Kazemzadeh
Masoud Kazemzadeh is Associate Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He received his B.A. in International Relations from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of five books including Mass Protests in Iran: From Resistance to Overthrow (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023, 2024). He enjoys playing tennis and soccer.

19. Making Golden Dome Work: Innovation Lessons from the Cold War

Excerpts:

Recommendations

Three years and seven months remain until the president’s deadline for arguably the most complex military innovation since the Manhattan Project. To maximize the chances of success, the administration should take the following steps.

First, the president and Secretary Hegseth should affirm that General Guetlein will remain in charge until Golden Dome is deployed and judged effective.

Second, with Congress’s consent, the president should reassign General Guetlein to a new position as director, Golden Dome. It is almost inconceivable that concurrent duty as vice chief of space operations would permit anyone to fulfill either job effectively, let alone both.

Third, the president should make clear to his cabinet that the director has full authority to act on his behalf in all matters relating to Golden Dome—from coordination with affected allies, to unconstrained communication with Congress touching on multiple departments’ equities, and the many more unknown unknowns that will inevitably emerge.

These steps will be monumentally difficult, both politically and organizationally. But the success of Golden Dome will hinge on the administration’s ability to capitalize on the examples of Rickover, Schriever, and the presidents who supported them.

Making Golden Dome Work: Innovation Lessons from the Cold War - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Thane Clare · June 18, 2025

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President Donald Trump’s Oval Office “Golden Dome” announcement kicked off the most ambitious American defense project since President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union brought that project to a premature end, the Cold War still offers important lessons for defense innovators.

The most critical lesson is that Golden Dome will require an empowered leader who remains in place until it is fully deployed—a common component of the most impactful Cold War innovation success stories. The president’s designation of the vice chief of space operations General Michael Guetlein to head Golden Dome is an encouraging first step—but there is more to be done, and quickly.

Analyses by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments pinpoint four prerequisites for successful military innovation: an operational problem with no existing solution; senior leader support; receptive organizational norms and culture; and empowered innovators. Golden Dome appears to be on relatively firm footing on the first two prerequisites—but its success or failure will hinge on the administration’s ability to accomplish all four.

When it comes to rapid and effective defense innovation, two Cold War examples set the gold standard. Using these as benchmarks, we can identify the near-term decisions and actions essential to Golden Dome’s ultimate success. This first of these groundbreaking achievements is Admiral Hyman Rickover’s naval nuclear power program. Rickover’s accomplishment was astounding. “Almost none of the necessary technology was available,” wrote one chronicler. “It all had to be created.”⁠ Yet USS Nautilus was underway on nuclear power in January 1955, five years after program start.

The second accomplishment is General Bernard Schriever’s Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The first operational Atlas missile went on alert in 1959, five years after President Dwight Eisenhower designated the ICBM a top national priority.

Golden Dome: A Preliminary Scorecard

On the four prerequisites for successful defense innovation, how does Golden Dome measure up to naval nuclear power and ICBMs so far?

First, successful innovations are propelled by operational problems so vexing that they “break the strong preference of existing bureaucracies to apply their standard solutions.” Nuclear power solved such a problem. In the late 1940s, Soviet submarines based on captured German designs threatened to allow Moscow to sever the sea lanes connecting the United States to its European allies. US nuclear subs with high speed and nearly unlimited endurance could place the Soviet fleet on its heels. Atlas, in turn, addressed the possibility that Soviet ICBMs could neutralize the US bomber force at a stroke. American ICBMs would reestablish a favorable deterrent posture.

Today, the United States is vulnerable to direct attack by a panoply of aerospace threats, with no quick or easy fixes on the horizon. Golden Dome scores high on the operational problem scale.

Second, innovations succeed when senior leaders actively sponsor them and provide top cover to defeat bureaucratic antibodies. Atlas, for example, benefited from President Eisenhower’s decision to prioritize the ICBM program “above all others.” And while nuclear propulsion initially lacked a powerful sponsor, Rickover had a matchless ability to circumvent bureaucracy. Engineering his own dual-hatting as head of the Navy’s Nuclear Power Division and chief of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Naval Reactors Branch, he orchestrated the intersecting interests of the Navy and Atomic Energy Commission to make nuclear power a national priority, culminating in strong congressional support and the authorization of USS Nautilus in 1951.

Golden Dome achieves promising marks on this criterion. President Trump has made it a top priority and set a January 2029 deadline. But now his advisors, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will need to seek his continued personal engagement when the Washington budget battle throws up the inevitable roadblocks.

Third, while presidential support goes a long way, innovators and their sponsors must work constantly to avoid being thrown off course by the crosscurrents of organizational culture, including informal rules, swim lanes, and unspoken but consequential preferences and norms.

Nuclear power, for example, called for a major expansion of engineering training. But this would disrupt personnel management processes jealously guarded by the Navy’s submarine tribe. Rickover, realizing that nuclear accidents could strike a death blow to public and official support for nuclear power, instituted zero-defect safety requirements that the submarine admirals couldn’t argue with, thereby defeating their opposition.

The ICBM had an especially fearsome adversary: General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command bomber force. With four stars to Schriever’s one and an unshakeable commitment to manned bombers, LeMay dismissively told Schriever, “When you can put something on that missile bigger than a f—ing firecracker, come and see me.” His opposition continued even after Eisenhower’s order to prioritize the ICBM. The solution: Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas White cannily reassigned LeMay to be his vice chief. As White’s direct subordinate, LeMay could no longer indulge in open ICBM naysaying.

Here, Golden Dome faces major challenges. US aerospace defenses are spread across all five services and the federal civil sector. Homeland air surveillance, for example, is largely reliant on the Federal Aviation Administration. The president and secretary of defense will need to invest their time and political capital in sustained engagement with the cabinet, Congress, and industry to pave the way for success; otherwise, bureaucratic inertia, competing priorities, and the sheer complexity of this massively interagency project may prove insurmountable.

Fourth, the president and secretary of defense cannot do the heavy lifting themselves. Innovation at Golden Dome scale requires total focus and a capacity for seven-day workweeks. And while innovation may be a team sport, only one innovator can be the boss. As Rickover told Congress, “Unless you can point your finger at the one person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.” General Guetlein’s assignment to lead Golden Dome is a good step in this regard, but it is only the first. Beyond simply naming a boss, there are two more key factors.

One of these two critical factors is leadership tenure. Rickover and Schriever were present at the creation and remained until their innovations blossomed into deployed capabilities. It is unlikely that nuclear power or ICBMs would have been fielded so quickly (if at all) had their leaders been replaced midstream based on personnel rotation cycles, as is usually the case today.

Equally crucial is delegation of sufficient authority and autonomy. Innovations rarely fit neatly into existing organizational lanes and approval hierarchies. Rickover’s Naval Reactors, for example, bridged the Navy and Atomic Energy Commission; and Schriever’s consolidated authority as head of the Air Force’s Western Development Division was cemented by the Gillette Procedures, an arrangement that sidelined the bulk of his Air Force chain of command. As Schriever noted, rapid innovation is unlikely to survive “interference from those nit-picking sons of bitches at the Pentagon.”

This may be the most serious challenge for Golden Dome. To succeed, General Guetlein must have both tenure and a span of authority that transcends not just the Space Force, but the Department of Defense. Like Rickover, he may need to wear two, three, or even more hats in other federal departments, and the formally delegated ability to direct—not just request—rapid decisions and actions by elements of non-DoD agencies. Otherwise, Golden Dome will capsize in a sea of conflicting priorities, incompatible cultures, and uncoordinated processes.

Recommendations

Three years and seven months remain until the president’s deadline for arguably the most complex military innovation since the Manhattan Project. To maximize the chances of success, the administration should take the following steps.

First, the president and Secretary Hegseth should affirm that General Guetlein will remain in charge until Golden Dome is deployed and judged effective.

Second, with Congress’s consent, the president should reassign General Guetlein to a new position as director, Golden Dome. It is almost inconceivable that concurrent duty as vice chief of space operations would permit anyone to fulfill either job effectively, let alone both.

Third, the president should make clear to his cabinet that the director has full authority to act on his behalf in all matters relating to Golden Dome—from coordination with affected allies, to unconstrained communication with Congress touching on multiple departments’ equities, and the many more unknown unknowns that will inevitably emerge.

These steps will be monumentally difficult, both politically and organizationally. But the success of Golden Dome will hinge on the administration’s ability to capitalize on the examples of Rickover, Schriever, and the presidents who supported them.

Thane Clare is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). A retired Navy captain with twenty-five years’ experience at sea and in the Pentagon, he commanded warships forward deployed to the Arabian Gulf and Western Pacific and served on the staffs of the chief of naval operations and secretary of defense. His current focus areas at CSBA are air defense, command and control, and defense innovation.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Joyce N. Boghosian, White House

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Thane Clare · June 18, 2025

20. Drones, Missiles, and a Battle of Chinese and European Fighter Jets: Lessons on the Future of War from the Indian Subcontinent’s Skies

Conclusion:

It may take a long time for the fog to clear completely. Many details of the brief conflict remain unknown or unconfirmed, and many might never be disclosed to the public. But one thing is clear: The skies over the subcontinent are no longer a regional concern—they provide insights into the future of global conflict. In particular, they unveil the performance of advanced weaponry, whether Western or Chinese, in real combat conditions. And they provide a possible glimpse into Sino-Western military competition in a real-world setting, not just on paper.

Drones, Missiles, and a Battle of Chinese and European Fighter Jets: Lessons on the Future of War from the Indian Subcontinent’s Skies - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Arsalan Bilal · June 19, 2025

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When Indian and Pakistani jets took to the skies last month, the world witnessed one of the largest and technologically most complex air confrontations in recent history. For four days, both sides unleashed precision strikes, drones, and long-range missiles in an engagement that, while brief, could reshape thinking about modern warfare in the region and beyond.

Although the fighting de-escalated as a ceasefire was brokered amid risks of a nuclear confrontation, the battle—its tactics, technologies, and consequences—offers rich insights for militaries, defense planners, and experts worldwide. With confirmed losses, unverified claims, and evolving doctrine, the air war between India and Pakistan in 2025 underscores that future conflicts may be won or lost far from the battlefield—in the invisible domains of sensors, algorithms, and contested airspace.

The Spark: A Strike and a Race to the Skies

The latest India-Pakistan crisis was triggered on April 22, when twenty-five innocent tourists and a local guide were killed in a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan-based militants for the attack and responded by launching precision airstrikes on May 7 against multiple sites, which New Delhi called terrorist camps, across Pakistani cities and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan retaliated by scrambling its jets and targeting the Indian fleet.

What followed was not a conventional border skirmish, but a complex, beyond-visual-range (BVR) aerial confrontation involving more than one hundred combat aircraft. Interestingly, neither side penetrated the other’s airspace. The missile exchanges between the adversaries took place at distances of up to one hundred miles. Among the aircraft used in the confrontation were some of the most advanced jets, including 4.5-generation fighters. The Indian Air Force is reported to have deployed, inter alia, French-built Rafale fighters armed with Meteor missiles, while Pakistan scrambled Chinese-made J-10s carrying PL-15 missiles.

While the initial air battle reportedly lasted an hour, the military confrontation between the two countries continued to escalate in the coming days. The second round of violence culminated with the Indian and Pakistani militaries striking each other’s military bases following a carefully calibrated drone war. An uneasy ceasefire came next, averting a nuclear confrontation. Still, the world is examining the momentous developments that unfolded in the South Asian skies as a compelling case study with lessons on modern warfare.

Aerial Engagement and the First Rafale Loss

The Pakistan Air Force claimed it shot down five Indian jets—three Rafales, a MiG-29, and an Su-30—during the initial phase of the conflict. While these claims remain partially unverified, and possibly exaggerated, at least two Indian aircraft losses have been independently confirmed, as well as corroborated by US officials.

A forensic analysis by The Washington Post identified wreckage consistent with an Indian Mirage 2000 and a Rafale, including debris photographed in Indian-controlled territory marked “BS 001” and the word “Rafale.” This would be the first combat loss of a much-coveted Rafale jet globally, a symbolic and strategic setback for India and possibly the Western defense industry. New Delhi procured the aircraft in 2019 to modernize its fleet and counter not only Pakistan but also China’s formidable aerial capabilities.

India has shied away from confirming or denying the losses. “We are in a combat scenario and losses are a part of it,” said a senior official of the Indian Air Force, without elaborating. Defense analyst Michael Clarke holds that “India will want to keep it only as a rumor for as long as possible,” adding that the loss of a Rafale would be “embarrassing.” Though India’s chief of defense staff recently admitted to suffering “losses,” he refrained from commenting on how many aircraft were downed, saying that numbers were “not important.”

The possible downing of a Rafale is more than an embarrassment in the grand scheme of things. It reflects the limits of Western technology in modern air combat. It diminishes global confidence in the robustness of Western military technology and, on the flip side, increases interest in Chinese weaponry. The soaring of J-10 manufacturer Chengdu’s share price following reports of the downing of Rafale lends credence to this.

The Rafale, one of the top jets in Western military inventory, is designed to maintain a relatively low radar cross section and emit a reduced infrared signature. Nevertheless, the stealth-mimicking design of Rafale could not prevent Pakistani forces from detecting the jet—and shooting down at least one. Interestingly, even this entailed technological innovation. Pakistan’s defense minister claimed that Pakistani J-10 aircraft had electronically interfered with India’s radar and communication systems a week prior to the air combat. Furthermore, reports attributed to Pakistani officials indicate that electronic warfare played a pivotal role in shooting down an Indian Rafale during the air combat. Such claims have not been verified and it is unclear if such interference played a role in the downing of Indian aircraft, since public information about the J-10’s electronic warfare suite remains limited.

The aerial confrontation also has an important element related to BVR air combat dynamics. Rafale jets are known for their maneuverability. Still, this capability did not come into play. There are indications that India may have underestimated the capabilities of both the Chinese J-10 aircraft and its combination with PL-15 guided missiles.

Another factor that may have been underestimated is the integration of Chinese military technology with Western systems. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Europe’s sophisticated Saab 2000 Erieye Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) aircraft reportedly functioned effectively with Chinese jets. Some Indian sources report that Pakistan and China collaborated to establish technological synergy between Saab 2000 Erieye AEW&C and Chinese fighter aircraft. This raises questions over the possibility of the Saab 2000 being used to provide launch or midcourse guidance to the PL-15 missiles that the J-10s were carrying.

The PL-15 vs. the Meteor: A New Missile Duel

The May military engagement offered what might be the first real-world test of two of the world’s most sophisticated BVR air-to-air missiles: the Chinese PL-15, carried by Pakistan’s J-10s, and the European Meteor, integrated into India’s Rafale fleet.

The meteor was considered a formidable weapon and a leap in the development of BVR missile technology. While some have regarded the PL-15 as comparable to the Meteor, others note that the Meteor has a significantly larger no-escape range and a superior long-range kill probability due to its ramjet motor. However, even as the brochures have been touting the cutting-edge advantage the Meteor offered, defense experts emphasize that the real-world performance of the Meteor missile is more critical than what is theoretically promised or advertised.

The Meteor, considered the most capable air-to-air missile in service on Western combat aircraft, is already being scrutinized. Following the aerial combat between India and Pakistan, global defense sectors and analysts will be asking: Does the Chinese PL-15 outperform the Meteor in real combat? The answer to this million-dollar question will have far-reaching implications for global security, politics, and defense sectors.

The PL-15 has long drawn the attention of Western analysts. With an estimated range exceeding 124 miles, a speed over Mach 5, and an active electronically scanned array radar seeker, it represents a major development in Chinese missile technology. The export PL-15E variant of the missile is believed to have a downgraded range of ninety miles. It is unclear whether Pakistan possesses and has recently used the PL-15 or the PL-15E variant of the missile against India, but this information may become known soon. Components of some PL-15 missiles fired by Pakistan reportedly came down on Indian territory—some largely intact. Intelligence agencies will now analyze the missile debris to gather information about its configuration.

As it is becoming clearer that the PL-15, no matter what the variant may have been, carried by the J-10 aircraft was used to target Indian jets, including a Rafale, Western defense industry has already started acknowledging that the Chinese missile’s capability “may be greater than was thought.” This does not bode well for the West and its allies, but the Chinese would be delighted. A viral Chinese social media video mocking the downing of Rafale reflects Chinese joy over the possible success of its airborne platform over Western technology. More importantly, the better-than-expected performance of Chinese weaponry in real combat marks a milestone in Beijing’s ambitions to project power, showcase technological superiority, and become a global defense exporter—all without directly partaking in an armed conflict.

Despite initial assessments, it will be premature to contend that the PL-15 decisively outperforms the Meteor in real-world conditions. Nevertheless, whatever the outcome, the competition will be closely watched, and it will have a massive impact on perceptions of China’s capabilities in relation to the West. Defense analyst Douglas Barrie described the duel as “China’s most capable weapon against the West’s most capable weapon.” Although evidence on actual missile usage remains sparse, one implication is already clear: Real combat is testing the theoretical edge that defense manufacturers claim in marketing brochures.

No Dogfights—But a Doctrinal Shift

Despite articles dubbing the clash “the largest dogfight to have taken place in a generation,” or even the largest since World War II, the air combat between India and Pakistan was not a traditional-style close-range aerial battle. Instead, it occurred at long distances, well beyond what we call visual range. This shift reflects the evolution of air combat from maneuver-based dogfights to long-range detection, targeting, and missile avoidance contests.

That does not make the engagement less significant. In fact, it makes it more revealing and strategically impactful. In the classic dogfights that were seen from the world wars until the Gulf War in 1991 (and in films from Top Gun to Independence Day), fighter jets engaged one another in within-visual-range (WVR) aerial combat. This is no longer the case. Close-range dogfights are deemed a contingency to the extent that if two competing fighter planes can see each other in combat, it is assumed that something has probably gone wrong. This is because BVR combat occurs beyond the pilot’s line of sight. The pilot relies on information from both onboard and offboard sensors to make decisions.

In BVR combat, which can be assumed to dominate in high-end conventional warfighting, the advantage is therefore largely determined by software, sensors, system integration, and human decision-making based on these. Because software, sensors, and system integration play a pivotal role in modern aerial combat, the traditional attributes of fighter aircraft—speed, acceleration, and maneuverability—can be seen as less important than before. Such traditional characteristics play a reduced role in both offensive and defensive capabilities of an aircraft in BVR combat.

Meanwhile, electronic warfare in BVR offers significant benefits. It can be used for jamming operations to interfere with and disrupt the adversaries’ radar, communication, and weapon-delivery systems over long distances. Such electronic warfare can be operated from both airborne platforms and ground systems for defensive and offensive purposes.

A key element that shapes BVR combat is the synchronized use of offensive weaponry. Once an enemy target is detected, BVR engagement requires medium- and long-range air-to-air missiles that can travel dozens and even hundreds of miles. Three attributes of such missiles remain paramount: speed, range, and precision. A fourth, and cutting-edge, attribute is how active the missile is: its ability to guide itself and hit the target on its own. The fire-and-forget feature allows the aircraft that fired the missile to avoid getting too close to the target, thereby reducing the risk of exposure and thus destruction.

Drones and Air Defenses

The India-Pakistan military aerial confrontation was marked by not only BVR combat but also other kinds of cutting-edge technological innovation. The most innovative component of the conflict was the use of drones, which cost a fraction of manned aircraft but deliver tangible results. This was the first time the two countries extensively used drones in a military engagement, reflecting a broader trend of integrating drones into modern warfare. The Pakistani military is reported to have attempted massive intrusions into Indian airspace using a large number of drones, not least Turkish-developed drones. For its part, India launched dozens of drones, including advanced Israeli-made loitering munitions, into Pakistan.

The purpose was to interfere with, deceive, and suppress enemy air defense systems by not only mapping and saturating them but also penetrating contested airspace to trigger hostile radar emissions, which could subsequently be targeted by other weapons, such as loitering munitions and antiradiation missiles. Critical data collected through drones could also be used for subsequent full-scale strikes. Initial evidence suggests that the drones delivered concrete dividends to both sides. It was reported that Pakistan employed drones to saturate and trigger Indian air defenses besides using crucial information collected through drones to carry out a comprehensive jamming operation and hit Indian military targets with precision. New Delhi admitted that Pakistan attacked twenty-six sites inside India and damage was done to equipment and personnel at four military bases in the wake of Pakistan’s drone operations. This could only have been achieved by degrading India’s sophisticated Russian-made air defense systems. Pakistan also claimed to have targeted and hit an Indian S-400 air defense system, although this is unconfirmed.

India followed the same modern drone playbook in the conflict. Indian drones penetrated deep inside Pakistan to map and degrade its air defense systems. These drones were reportedly equipped with electronic support measures technology to detect electromagnetic emissions from Pakistan’s ground-based air defense systems and transmit them back home. This data could then be used to locate and subsequently hit Pakistan’s air defense systems. To prevent India from gaining strategic advantage through drones, Pakistan did not shoot them down by means of missiles launched from its strategic air defense sites. Instead, the Indian drones were intentionally allowed to penetrate Pakistan’s airspace, where they were delicately shot down using soft kill (jamming and other technical methods) and hard kill (kinetic attack) tactics.

Despite Pakistan’s countermeasures, it appears that India achieved some objectives by leveraging drones. Indian drones reportedly targeted Pakistan’s radar infrastructure in the strategically important border city of Lahore. One can assume that the suppression of air defense systems through drones was instrumental in enabling Indian strikes on key military bases deep inside Pakistan.

Analysts contend that India and Pakistan’s use of drones will transform warfare in the South Asian region and beyond. The deployment of drones shows they can not only target but also be instrumental in creating vulnerabilities in enemy defense systems. On a broader level, as the India-Pakistan military confrontation reveals, the future of warfare is not just about brute force but also technological innovation, deception, and calibrated maneuvering. This is possible at low costs through drones.

A Learning Moment for the World

From Washington to Taipei, global militaries, defense industries, and experts will examine the recent India-Pakistan military clash as a case study in the future of warfare, particularly air combat. Long-range precision aerial combat, electronic warfare, drone warfare, and suppression of enemy air defenses not only defined the battlefield but also replaced traditional dogfighting in visual range. Moreover, technological, strategic, and operational innovation in the skies underlines the maxim that to have command of the air is to have victory.

The complex conflict was nevertheless fraught with risks as it was fought between two archrivals with nuclear weapons. The fact that a ceasefire was brokered should not obscure how close South Asia came to the brink, despite the creation of additional space for conflict below the nuclear threshold. On top of lessons on nuclear brinksmanship, it is urgent for global powers to understand the technologies and doctrines reshaping modern warfare and the potential implications they can have for the world.

It may take a long time for the fog to clear completely. Many details of the brief conflict remain unknown or unconfirmed, and many might never be disclosed to the public. But one thing is clear: The skies over the subcontinent are no longer a regional concern—they provide insights into the future of global conflict. In particular, they unveil the performance of advanced weaponry, whether Western or Chinese, in real combat conditions. And they provide a possible glimpse into Sino-Western military competition in a real-world setting, not just on paper.

Arsalan Bilal is a researcher at UiT The Arctic University of Norway’s Centre for Peace Studies. He is the coordinator of the institute’s Grey Zone research group that focuses on hybrid threats and warfare. Arsalan is also a nonresident fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He can be reached at a.bilal@uit.no.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Government of India

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Arsalan Bilal · June 19, 2025

21. The ‘jacked gorilla’ general pushing Trump to strike Iran

That is quite a headline.

The ‘jacked gorilla’ general pushing Trump to strike Iran

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/06/19/general-michael-kurilla-trump-hegseth-iran/

Michael Kurilla said to be power behind throne as US president mulls attacks supporting Israel

Cameron Henderson

19 June 2025

Gen Kurilla with Asim Munir, the chief of Pakistan’s army Credit: Anadolu via Getty

“Shots fired!” yelled Gen Michael Kurilla moments before charging towards the sound of gunfire to save two junior officers.

Weaving through the rubble-strewn alleyways of war-torn Mosul, Iraq, the then-lieutenant colonel was pursuing a group of terrorist suspects when three more shots rang out.

Taking bullets to the arm and both legs, one snapping his femur in half, he “performed a judo roll” and carried on firing his rifle, witnesses say. As the gunfire continued, he covered his troops and reeled off orders while bleeding on the concrete floor.

Nearly 20 years later, Gen Kurilla, who was awarded a Bronze Star for valour and now heads the US military Central Command (Centcom), is once again leading the fight in the Middle East – this time against Iran.

Known to be Israel’s favourite general and nicknamed “The Gorilla”, Gen Kurilla is understood to have been given unusual levels of authority by Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, to determine the American response to the escalating Israel-Iran conflict.

The 59 year-old has apparently overruled other top Pentagon officials in managing the crisis and has had nearly all his requests approved for more weapons and air defences for the region, multiple sources told Politico and Axios.

More than six feet tall, the “jacked” (muscular) general certainly looks the part and is known for his abrasive approach. He was investigated by the army last year for allegedly shoving a military crew member, although the outcome is not clear.

According to one former official, his tough-guy persona and commanding physical presence give Gen Kurilla powerful influence over the US defence secretary.

Gen Michael Kurilla is the head of Centcom, the US Army’s central commandCredit: US Navy

“He’s a big dude, he’s jacked, he’s exactly this ‘lethality’ look [Donald Trump and Mr Hegseth are] going for,” the ex-official told Politico. “If the senior military guys come across as tough and war fighters, Hegseth is easily persuaded to their point of view.”

The general is said to have had more face time with the US president than most other generals, according to Politico.

Where Gen Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon policy chief, have repeatedly urged against overcommitting to the Middle East, Gen Kurilla is said to be pushing for a strong military response to Iran.

As the department of defence (DoD) moves aircraft carriers and a large formation of refuelling planes to the region and the president mulls a direct military strike on Iran, there is speculation that Gen Kurilla is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

“Hegseth has sided with him time and again,” a diplomat told the website.

Hailed by Israeli news outlet Ynet as “the US general Israel doesn’t want to strike Iran without”, Gen Kurilla is a long-time Iran hawk who is expected to retire from the military this summer.

A veteran of Panama, the Gulf War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen Kurilla is seen as “one of Israel’s staunchest allies in the American defence establishment”, according to Ynet, and has travelled to the country dozens of times since he first visited as a young officer in his 20s.

“He knows the type of every munition launched at Israel that night, and where each interceptor was positioned,” an Israeli official told the news outlet last year. “Wake him in the middle of the night, and he’d ace a pop quiz better than some of our own officers.”

According to The New York Times, the general had been open to US involvement in an Israeli strike plan to attack Iran earlier this spring, combining a bombing campaign with commando raids on nuclear sites, but was blocked by Mr Trump, who favoured a diplomatic approach.

“He has been pushing for war with Iran and away from diplomacy since before Trump took office in ways that run over civilian officials,” Justin Logan, director of foreign policy and defence studies at the Cato Institute, told Responsible Statercraft.

Since taking over as head of Centcom in 2022, Gen Kurilla has pursued a strategy of military integration with Israel and regional partners to deter Iranian aggression, known as “Kurilla’s umbrella”.

The system has enabled US radar systems in the UAE and Qatar to aid Israeli defence and has included co-operation with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to Ynet.

Explaining his approach to a US House congressional committee in March, Gen Kurilla said that Iran had taken a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the region to its advantage” which could be halted by a “deep partnership” between Israel, the US and the Gulf States.

He is also thought to have played an instrumental role in pushing for sustained attacks on Houthi Rebels in Yemen in March, according to the New York Times, details of which were later made public in the infamous Signal group chat leak.

The 30-day operation cost more than $1 billion and was widely viewed as an ineffective use of resources, yet it enabled Mr Trump to strike a deal to end the fighting.

Deployed to Israel in April, Gen Kurilla is said to have passed on the news to government officials there that the US would not endorse strikes on Iran to curb its uranium enrichment programme.

He also is said to have released a statement in which he reiterated the two nations’ “ironclad military-to-military relationship”, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Gen Kurilla may have also played a decisive role in determining Israel’s decision to pull the trigger on operation “Rising Lion” last Friday, when it launched a devastating series of precision air strikes on Iranian military sites and personnel.

Although Israel acquiesced to Mr Trump’s demands in April to hold off attacking Iran, military sources told The Jerusalem Post at the time that they hoped to strike before Gen Kurilla stepped down in July, recognising him as a key ally.

“I think it’s been reported, and you know, based on my experience with him, that he takes a fundamentally different view of the importance of the Middle East than a lot of other people in the administration,” Dan Caldwell, former adviser to Mr Hegseth, told the Breaking Points podcast on Monday.

He added: “And he also, I think, believes that a military campaign against Iran will not be as costly as others.”

With time running out before Iran produces an atomic bomb and with Gen Kurilla’s retirement looming, it may well be that Israel saw its window of opportunity closing.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said: “Secretary Hegseth empowers all of his combatant commanders the same way – by decentralising command and harnessing their real-world expertise regarding the defence of their respective areas of responsibility.

“The entire DoD leadership team – from the chairman of the joint chiefs to the undersecretary of defence for policy – similarly provide courses of action and counsel to the secretary based on their expertise. The secretary then makes a decision and final recommendation to the president. This is how the Pentagon does, and should, function. Our senior leaders are in lockstep and will continue to work in unison to deliver on president Trump’s national security agenda.”

Representatives for Gen Kurilla and the White House were contacted for comment.

22. Hegseth defers to general on Pentagon’s plans for Iran

I find this excerpt below curious but not unexpected. General Kurilla is not making some kind of power grab or seeking (grabbing) assets from other theaters just to have them for his fiefdom. He is requesting (demanding) assets that are necessary for warfighting. He believes he needs these assets to accomplish the mission POTUS and the SECDEF have given him. HIs is the theater that is most in contact so he has the responsibility to ask for whatever is necessary to successfully accomplish the mission. The comment below is a result of the fact that CENTCOM has been the theater most in contact for the past two decades plus. What do the other theaters think they are supposed to do? Husband their resources for something that might happen someday in the future or provide them at the direction of the SECDEF to the theater commander who requires them at this point in time.

Excerpts:

Kurilla’s arguments to send more U.S. weapons to the region, including air defenses, have gone against Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, who have urged caution in overcommitting to the Middle East, according to the four people.

“CENTCOM is trying to grab every asset they can from every other theater,” the person familiar said, using an acronym to describe the Pentagon’s top military command in the Middle East, which Kurilla leads. “That’s what CENTCOM always does.”

Hegseth defers to general on Pentagon’s plans for Iran

U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Erik Kurilla is overruling other top Pentagon officials.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/17/hegseth-erik-kurilla-iran-pentagon-response-00411007

Then Lt. Gen. Michael E. Kurilla testifies to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 16, 2023. | Mariam Zuhaib/AP

By Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary

06/18/2025 05:55 AM EDT

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given an unusual level of authority to a single general in the latest Middle East crisis — an Iran hawk who is pushing for a strong military response against the country.

U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Erik Kurilla has played an outsized role in the escalating clashes between Tehran and Israel, with officials noting nearly all his requests have been approved, from more aircraft carriers to fighter planes in the region.

The pugnacious general, who is known as “The Gorilla,” is overruling other top Pentagon officials and playing a quiet but decisive role in the country’s next steps on Iran, according to a former and current defense official, a diplomat, and a person familiar with the dynamic.

Hegseth’s apparent deference to Kurilla undermines the image the Pentagon chief has sought to project of a tough-talking leader who has vowed to reduce the influence of four-star generals and reassert civilian control.

“If the senior military guys come across as tough and warfighters, Hegseth is easily persuaded to their point of view,” said the former official. Kurilla “has been very good at getting what he wants.”

The longtime military official — who is close with Mike Waltz, the former national security adviser and nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — has had more face time with the president than most other generals, according to one of the people, who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Kurilla is also at the end of his tenure leading U.S. Central Command, meaning he may be less fearful about pushing the president.

CENTCOM referred questions to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, who said the Defense secretary draws on officials’ knowledge and then makes a decision about what to recommend to the president.

“Secretary Hegseth empowers all of his combatant commanders the same way, by decentralizing command and harnessing their real-world expertise,” he said. “Our senior leaders are in lockstep and will continue to work in unison to deliver on President Trump‘s national security agenda.”

Another defense official disputed the notion that Caine, the military’s top official, was at odds with the general on major decisions.

“Absolutely no daylight between Kurilla and Caine,” said the official, who said that both commanders present options jointly to Trump. “It’s a hand in glove relationship.”

Kurilla has an influence unseen in other administrations. Top generals are usually reined in by Pentagon chiefs, who push back on their requests to balance the global U.S. troop presence. But one of the people familiar with the dynamic between the CENTCOM commander and the Pentagon chief said they never saw Hegseth turn down a single one of Kurilla’s requests for more military assets.

The Pentagon steered a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East this week, two defense officials said, as well as new deployments of F-22, F-35 and F-16 fighter planes. This gives the U.S. two aircraft carriers in the region for the second time this year, a rare move. It also takes them from the Pacific, a signal that the Middle East is once again a priority for the administration, even as Pentagon leaders have sought tofocus their efforts on China.

Kurilla, testifying on Capitol Hill last week, said he had prepared a “wide range of options” for Hegseth and President Donald Trump to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The White House has backed the military buildup in the region, although some officials noted how easy it’s been for Kurilla to make the case for why he needs more planes, ships and air defenses.

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“He’s not worried about taking that directly to his civilian superiors,” said the diplomat. “Hegseth has sided with him time and again.”

Some former officials contend Kurilla’s influence is tied more to the nature of his job, the head of the combatant command overseeing the Middle East at a time of crisis.

“This has little to do with Kurilla himself,” said Bilal Saab, who served in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration. “There’s no resistance in the Pentagon or the NSC to moving assets to protect troops and personnel in the region.”

Despite his sometimes abrasive character — including the alleged shoving of a military crew member that prompted an Army investigation — the battle-tested and media-averse Kurilla has impressed top officials for his courage. He won a Bronze Star for leading U.S. troops in a firefight in 2005 at the height of the Iraq War despite having been shot three times. (CENTCOM said at the time that officials weren’t aware of any investigation into Kurilla.)

“He’s got the look of the general that both Hegseth and Trump are looking for,” said the former official. “He’s a big dude, he’s jacked, he’s exactly this ‘lethality’ look they’re going for.”

Officials who have participated in talks with Kurilla about military assets in the region said he also has a knack for convincing others about their importance.

“He’s extremely strategic and persuasive about what CENTCOM can do given adequate resources,” said Dan Shapiro, who until January was the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official. “That was certainly true in the Biden administration. It may be more true now.”

John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.

23. Why Ukraine's Drones Have Fiber Optic Cables Attached, Explained

There must be fiber optic cables all over the battlefield. This must be a problem for vehicles that get caught up with these capable around their axles. Or do they easily break? I remember TOW missile wires giving us a hard time and causing a lot of damage on wheeled vehicles.

This explains the superiority of fiber optic cables.

Excerpt:

Fiber optics typically offer very low latency (well under 20 ms), while wireless radio connections in drones can sometimes go over 100 ms. This is a significant improvement over the often-messy, delayed video feeds of radio-controlled drones and allows pilots to fly into buildings or other types of cover while maintaining a perfect video feed right up to the target.

Why Ukraine's Drones Have Fiber Optic Cables Attached, Explained - SlashGear

slashgear.com · by Zohaib Ahmed · June 18, 2025

By June 18, 2025 4:15 pm EST

Drop of Light/Shutterstock

You may have seen some striking images coming out of Ukraine on social media where entire fields and city streets are covered in a dense tangle of glistening thread. This is the byproduct of a transformative (and terrifying) new weapon called the fiber-optic-guided first-person view (FPV) drone. The whole point is to bypass radio jammers by creating a direct, physical link between the drone and its pilot. One of the ways this can be achieved is by attaching a lightweight spool of optical fiber to the drone.

This unspools as the drone flies and can sometimes stretch tens of kilometers long. Passing through all that wire are video and control signals, effectively killing the need for radio signals — while also making the drone almost completely immune to the radio jamming and other electronic warfare (EW) tactics that have become rampant on the battlefield. It's all a part of a broader evolution in unmanned warfare, where FPV loitering munitions are changing the battlefield. The high-bandwidth physical line also provides a much clearer connection with virtually zero latency.

Fiber optics typically offer very low latency (well under 20 ms), while wireless radio connections in drones can sometimes go over 100 ms. This is a significant improvement over the often-messy, delayed video feeds of radio-controlled drones and allows pilots to fly into buildings or other types of cover while maintaining a perfect video feed right up to the target.

A race to catch up to a Russian innovation

Libkos/Getty Images

Ukraine has been leveraging a range of high-tech tools in the war. This includes everything from Starlink-enabled recon drones to remote-controlled vehicles to counterbalance Russia's technological edge. But the introduction of the fiber optic drone in the spring of 2024 by Russia flipped the script, defying the stereotype of its military as a slow and cumbersome force. Russian military bloggers and commentators had been calling for a breakthrough to counter Ukraine's drone capabilities, and their engineers delivered.

The first model deployed at scale was the Knyaz Vandal Novgorodsky, which proved devastatingly effective targeting Ukrainian logistics routes in Kursk Oblast starting in August 2024. The impact was immediate. A Ukrainian medic named Dmytro told The Kyiv Independent, "Our logistics just collapsed; fiber optic drones were monitoring all routes."

Ukraine is now racing to close the gap. In February 2025, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces unveiled the "Silkworm," a domestically-made modular fiber optic spool. It signals a serious push to ramp up domestic production and deployment.

With new technology comes new challenges on the battlefield

Drop of Light/Shutterstock

This new technology is not without significant drawbacks. The weight and bulk of the fiber optic spool mean the drone needs a larger frame, more powerful motors, and a bigger battery. This results in a slower, less maneuverable aircraft that is easier for troops to shoot down. This high-stakes operation is a world apart from the usual rules for avoiding trouble with a recreational drone. At the same time, the physical fiber itself creates a visible trail that can be highly reflective in the sun and potentially reveal the pilot's launch position. The technology is also described as "quite fragile."

A Ukrainian commander told TWZ in an interview that any mishandling can lead to an unintended explosion or a loss of control, and the thin cable can tear or get entangled in obstacles like trees. Furthermore, the immense popularity has created a supply chain crisis. Good manufacturers have long waiting lists, while many early systems were simply Chinese components resold by firms that didn't understand the military's specific needs.

As for countermeasures against these drones, they are limited to direct physical attempts, such as shooting the drones down or trying to catch them in large nets. The tactic has proven unreliable, though, as drones have been spotted flying right under them.

slashgear.com · by Zohaib Ahmed · June 18, 2025

24. U.S. Army Demonstrates Anti-Ship Potential in the Philippines

U.S. Army Demonstrates Anti-Ship Potential in the Philippines - Naval News

navalnews.com · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · June 17, 2025

Recent U.S.-Philippine exercises in the Luzon Strait supported the development of anti-ship munitions slated for Army HIMARS.

The U.S. Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force deployed rocket launchers that will soon be capable of dedicated anti-ship operations for territorial defense exercises in the Luzon Strait during recent exercises in the Philippines.

2025’s iteration of Balikatan and Salaknib saw the Army task force deploy across the Philippine archipelago since April. From Palawan to Northern Luzon, the unit’s M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) have demonstrated their potential to strike targets during drills near the South China Sea and in the Luzon Strait.

The unit’s Long-Range Fires Battalion revealed that their Salaknib deployment to the strategic first island chain chokepoint of the Luzon Strait supported the development of “critical HIMARS munitions that are capable of striking moving maritime and land targets,” potentially referring to the service’s upcoming Precision Strike Missile (PrSM).

“These munitions coupled with relevant positions in the Indo-Pacific set conditions for the U.S. Army to provide a highly mobile maritime strike capability in a territorial defense scenario,” Lt. Col. Alex Mullin, commander of the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force’s Long-Range Fires Battalion, stated in a press release.

With an expected range of up to 500 kilometers, the PrSM is set to replace the service’s Army Tactical Missile System and achieve an anti-ship capability in future variants. Alongside the ability to target moving vessels, Increment Two of the missile’s range is set to double to 1000 kilometers. The U.S. Army conducted a sinking exercise against a maritime target in motion last summer with two PrSMs in the Pacific during Valiant Shield 24.

The Multi-Domain Task Force also deployed a launcher via vessel and aerial transport, which saw the launcher loaded onto a contracted stern landing vessel and a U.S. Air Force C-130, in a HIMARS Rapid-Infiltration drill.

“Over the past four years, the U.S. Army has coordinated directly with U.S. Air Force planners and crews on the transportation and rapid delivery of HIMARS capabilities across the Indo-Pacific. They have demonstrated the ability to access even the most austere locations, ensuring effective land-based fires throughout the Indo-Pacific,” stated the release.

A U.S. Army M142 high mobility artillery rocket system unloads off a U.S. Army landing craft, utility during a joint, bilateral, littoral campaign with U.S. Marines and Philippine Marines during Balikatan 23 on Calayan, Philippines. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Grace Gerlach)

While the drill is not unique for the Philippines, which has frequently seen the deployment of HIMARS via aircraft and vessels since Washington and Manila shifted their bilateral military cooperation to territorial defense in the early 2020s, the location of the Luzon Strait marks the latest Multi-Domain Task Force effort in the region following the Mid-Range Capability’s positioning in Northern Luzon in Balikatan 2024. The ground-based Mk.41 vertical launching system, capable of firing SM-6 and Tomahawk cruise missiles, has been stationed in the Philippines since.

A similar story is repeating with the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, which arrived for Balikatan 2024 in April and was deployed for KAMANDAG 9 in May. The anti-ship system, equipped with two low-observable Naval Strike Missiles capable of striking targets out to 185 kilometers, is set to stay in the Philippines at an undisclosed location for in-country training and exchanges with local forces.

“The combined-joint force is already employing other land-based counter maritime capabilities such as the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability and the U.S. Marines’ NMESIS. These systems bring unmatched credible deterrence capabilities to the region as the U.S.-Philippine Alliance continues to advance regional security, stability, and peace through strength.”

This forward-stationing of American anti-ship capabilities in the Philippines comes after a series of spats between Manila and Beijing over disputed maritime features in the South China Sea and an increased focus on the Luzon Strait amid Philippine concerns of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. People Liberation Army Navy warships, including carrier strike groups, have transited the Luzon Strait. The Philippine Navy has highlighted these unannounced transits to local media.

navalnews.com · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · June 17, 2025

25. Why Putin Still Fights by Lawrence D. Freedman

Excerpts:

Ukraine began 2023 hoping that it could win the war with a counteroffensive. When that failed, and with Congress refusing to vote for more assistance to Kyiv, Russia was optimistic that it would be able to pull ahead in 2024. Moscow now insists that it can prevail over the long haul. It certainly does not want its enemy to think otherwise. Putin likely still thinks that Ukraine will buckle first, but he has always underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and determination. Perhaps a tipping point will come when Moscow begins to recognize the utter futility of this war and the long-term economic damage to Russia starts to outweigh the costs of acknowledging that the war’s political objective cannot be met. Maybe some future Ukrainian operation will trigger the necessary reappraisal.

The experience of this war, however, underlines the difficulty of getting political leaders to acknowledge failure when their forces have yet to be defeated in the field and when there is no obvious compromise deal waiting to be negotiated. Neither side has a clear-cut route to victory. That is what it means to be in a forever war. It is not evident how it will end, or even if an apparent peace will be no more than an opportunity for Russia to rebuild its forces under the guise of an uneasy cease-fire. This will depend on decisions yet to be made. Ukraine’s Western allies, therefore, must be realistic about the potentially long-term demands entailed in keeping Ukraine in the war. Continuing to deny Russia victory is a form of pressure on Putin, who has so little to show for such a long and calamitous campaign. Although it may be hard to imagine a military defeat for Russia, it is possible to imagine a shift in Ukraine’s favor. If Moscow becomes convinced, contrary to its current expectations, that time is not on its side, perhaps that might yet cause it to wonder whether the moment has come to cut its losses.

Why Putin Still Fights

Foreign Affairs · by More by Lawrence D. Freedman · June 18, 2025

The Kremlin Will End Its War in Ukraine Only When It Knows that Victory Is Impossible

Lawrence D. Freedman

June 18, 2025

A resident outside an apartment building damaged by a Russian drone strike, Kyiv, June 2025 Thomas Peter / Reuters

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine and a co-author of the Substack Comment Is Freed.

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Nearly five months since U.S. President Donald Trump entered the White House promising to quickly end the war in Ukraine, it is being fought as intensively as before. Russia has not rejected the idea of negotiations, but despite Trump ruling out NATO membership or U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to offer any serious concession to put a deal within reach. At first glance, it is unclear why this is so. After all, the war is now well into its fourth year, and although Russian forces have recently made advances and regularly attack Ukrainian cities with large numbers of drones and missiles, they are still far from achieving Putin’s core objectives. Russian losses have been accumulating at a staggering pace, with as many as 200,000 casualties since the start of 2025 alone. Meanwhile, Ukrainian units have pulled off some stunning operations, including the spectacular June 1 attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force far from the border, and they are increasingly able to use long-range drones to hit military assets and oil facilities inside Russia—challenging any assumptions that Kyiv is on its last legs or that Moscow is close to a decisive breakthrough.

Given that Trump had presented Putin what he assumed to be attractive terms for a cease-fire, he could be forgiven for wondering why the Russian president is being so stubborn. If Putin wanted a way to ease his country out of the war with minimal humiliation, Trump’s offer was as generous as any that a U.S. president is likely to make. A cease-fire would not only allow Russian forces to recuperate after a grueling few years but also potentially get rid of at least some sanctions and provide a chance to normalize relations with the United States.

Yet none of these developments, or the growing economic pressures Russia faces at home, have diminished Putin’s war resolve. Rather than entertain an opportunity for a face-saving cease-fire, Russia has doubled down on fighting. Since late spring, Russia has been attacking Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with some of the largest aerial bombardments of the war. It has stepped up its latest offensive, pushing forward in Donetsk, moving into Sumy, and trying to enter Dnipropetrovsk. In fact, to close observers of the war, Putin’s intransigence and determination to take more territory at whatever the cost is not surprising. But it offers crucial insights into where the war might be headed now and what it might take to end it.

A TEXTBOOK FOREVER WAR

Although it was intended to be over within days, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine soon transformed into an inconclusive, open-ended conflict. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, I addressed the recurring problem in modern warfare of long wars. A central question was how countries cope when wars meant to be short and decisive turn out to be protracted and inconclusive. To end such a war requires both sides to bring military and political objectives into a more realistic alignment. But that becomes harder as a war drags on, with the aggressor now seeking also to avoid the humiliation of defeat and the acknowledgment that the assumptions behind the war were flawed to begin with.

Russia’s war in Ukraine offers a textbook case of this problem. Since its launch in February 2022, it has morphed from a limited “special military operation” into an existential struggle for Russia. After the campaign suffered severe setbacks in the fall of 2022, instead of looking for a way to end the war and cut Russia’s losses, Putin doubled down. In September 2022, he put the country on a war footing and announced the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces in addition to Crimea—even though Russian forces had yet to take these provinces in their entirety (and still have not close to three years later). All this made the war even harder to end. Now one of Moscow’s core demands is that Ukraine must hand over territory that Russia failed to take by force.

As with a flawed military campaign, a flawed diplomatic initiative is apt to start with a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Like Putin in 2022, Trump believed in January 2025 that he could bring the war to a quick conclusion. Putin assumed Kyiv would fall within days of the invasion; Trump claimed he could end the war “in 24 hours.” But Trump soon found that the intractable nature of the conflict meant that he, too, had to cope with a long haul, which is already testing his patience. Although the Kremlin hardly kept its demands a secret, Trump believed Russia would be happy with his proposal of an immediate cease-fire, de facto control of the occupied territories, and Ukraine denied entry to NATO.

Putin calculates that Russia’s overall superiority in strength will eventually prove decisive.

So certain was he that Putin would accept these terms that he acted as if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was the main obstacle to agreement. Trump’s first move was to explain publicly to the Ukrainian president the harsh realities of Ukraine’s weak position, especially once U.S. support was withdrawn. “You don’t have the cards,” he told him in an infamous Oval Office meeting at the end of February. When Zelensky objected, the United States even briefly suspended all military and intelligence cooperation with Ukraine to underscore Trump’s point.

Zelensky soon agreed to a cease-fire, in part to mollify Trump but also to give Ukraine some badly needed respite. Yet Putin, despite being assiduously courted by the Trump administration, refused, even as he went to great rhetorical lengths to suggest that he was still keen to work for peace. None of Trump’s generous terms—including renewed business relations between Russia and the United States—seemed to make a difference.

Although Trump insisted that he was prepared to intensify sanctions on Russia if Putin didn’t budge, in practice, the American president gave no indication that he would do so, thereby setting aside the main form of pressure available to the United States. As the spring wore on, Russian and Ukrainian teams did meet for negotiations in Istanbul, but they could agree only on prisoner exchanges. When the two sides exchanged memorandums outlining their requirements for peace, it became clear that Russia was sticking to its maximum demands on Ukrainian territory, sovereignty, disarmament, and international neutrality before a cease-fire could be implemented.

WHY PUTIN PERSISTS

Putin has multiple possible reasons for resisting a cease-fire. First, no issue is more important to him than Ukraine. Ensuring that the country can never be truly independent of Russia is essential to his legacy. Additionally, he does not believe the war to be unwinnable. Despite the grindingly slow progress of Russian forces over the last 18 months, he calculates that Russia’s overall superiority in strength will eventually prove decisive, and that in the end, Ukraine will simply be overwhelmed by Russian power. He also likely views a cease-fire along the current line of contact as inherently unstable. If Russia retained only the territories it currently holds, it would be left occupying an economically inactive, depopulated, damaged chunk of Ukraine that would need to be policed intensively. And the long border with Ukraine would need to be heavily defended.

For Putin, ending the war without meeting his core political objectives would be tantamount to a defeat and would leave the patriotic, ultranationalist bloc that he has cultivated and nurtured during the war deeply angered. The more moderate Russian elite might be relieved by such an outcome, but with so little to show for such a costly effort, there would still be a dangerous reckoning. Many would begin to ask, “Was it worth it?” and to wonder about the fallibility of Russia’s leadership.

And there are other strong motives for Putin to avoid a deal. He would lose face among his most important partners in China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as in those countries of the “global majority” that he has been seeking to impress and even lead. Furthermore, he has committed Russia to the idea that it is engaged in a long-term struggle with the West; accepting even a temporary Ukrainian truce could embolden his NATO adversaries. They might try to take advantage of any sign of weakness. Moreover, Putin knows that any sanctions relief that comes with a cease-fire will be limited and contingent. Even if Trump were inclined to be more generous, the European Union and the United Kingdom would likely resist. Finally, Putin has reason to doubt the great economic deals that Trump promises. Having pulled out of Russia’s unstable and slowing economy, many Western companies and investors will be hesitant to return.

Thus, the perils of losing loom as large as the gains of victory. If Putin thought that Trump might act in a manner that makes losing more likely for Russia, by toughening sanctions or extending military support to Ukraine, he might be inclined to take his proposals more seriously. Instead, the prospect of Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine adds to the Kremlin’s confidence in eventual victory.

HOW UKRAINE RESISTS

For its part, Kyiv believes that it has reached the limits of the concessions it is prepared to make in a cease-fire. It has accepted that it is unlikely to retake the territory that Russia now occupies anytime soon, and it understands that it will not be able to join NATO, although that would be the best guarantee of its future security. Yet the Ukrainian government also believes that it is holding its own in the fighting and is ready and able to stay in the war if no cease-fire is in view. The Russians have yet to take towns that were judged sure to fall last summer. They are currently pushing as hard as ever, but even if Kyiv does have to concede more territory, Ukrainian forces can extract an extraordinarily high price for each mile that Russia gains. More troops need to be mobilized, but the situation is far from hopeless, especially as European support is set to increase and the continent’s own defense industry is now producing much of what is needed at the front.

Although the pace of the war has picked up over the past couple of months, Russia has yet to acquire sufficient velocity to transform the situation on the ground. It has been putting more effort into mass missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, which cause damage and pain—and further test Ukraine’s stretched air defenses, but as is often the case with strategic bombing campaigns that play out over time, the target communities adapt and cope. The people of Ukraine have now endured three winters amid energy shortages, but they continue to resist. They know their likely fate if they end up under Moscow’s rule.

If the war in Ukraine is going to end through negotiations, therefore, Putin will need to be convinced not only that his political objectives are unrealistic but also that a failure to reach a deal will result in Russia’s position worsening over time. At present, that is far from clear.

What might make the difference? Moscow must be concerned by the increasing tempo of Ukrainian attacks against a range of military and economic targets on Russian territory. The most spectacular—such as the early June “operation spider’s web,” using low-tech, short-range drones to destroy more than a dozen Russian strategic bombers at air bases far from the border—were a testament to Ukrainian audacity, operational ingenuity, and technical prowess. Such strikes are embarrassing and disruptive to Russia but still unlikely by themselves to force Moscow to reappraise its war strategy. They also have not fundamentally changed the fundamental dynamics on the frontlines, although attacks on logistic hubs, arms depots, and command centers certainly help.

Since early in the war, analysts have attempted to work out at what point one side or the other would run out of vital supplies—armored vehicles, artillery pieces, shells, missiles, air defenses, and so on. In some areas, stocks have been seriously depleted. Ammunition is currently less of a problem for Ukraine, but its air defenses are a serious concern. Russia now appears to lack the capacity for maneuver warfare. Yet both sides keep going with help from their friends, and they have relied increasingly on capabilities, notably drones, where domestic mass production is possible and relatively affordable so that expendability is far less of an issue.

Moscow will need to be convinced that its objectives in Ukraine are unrealistic.

The most perplexing issue is manpower. This has been and remains a serious issue for Ukraine. Although numbers are now up (Zelensky claims to be mobilizing 27,000 a month), there is still resistance in Kyiv to conscripting 18- to 24-year-olds. On the Russian side, Moscow accepts heavy casualties for small gains and continues to find troops to send to the front despite the high risk of death and injury. Several Western analyses have concluded that the war has already cost Russia a million casualties.

Russia appears to have a Soviet-style readiness, which arguably goes back to imperial times, to throw troops at enemy defenses in the hope that some will get through. Current Russian strategy, for example, relies on small groups of troops on buggies, bikes, and foot advancing in the knowledge that most will not reach Ukrainian lines but that enough might to occupy some new ground.

Thus far, the Kremlin has found troops without resorting to a full-scale mobilization. This is because of a bounty system that uses hefty—and ever-increasing—payments to recruits. Since recruits largely come from the poorer parts of the country, the war also has a redistributive effect. Russia’s war machine is a bit like an extractive industry, in which as long as there is material that can be mined, it is good business. Still, in the end, the supplies will be limited. There are already doubts about how much more manpower the state can buy and at what price. There question remains about whether at some point the Kremlin will have to resort to more coercive methods.

This cost relates to Putin’s wider problem of whether the Russian economy can continue to sustain this level of military effort. Moscow has confounded Western expectations that severe sanctions would wreck the country’s economy and has instead enjoyed a couple of years of high growth. This is the result of a combination of shrewd macroeconomic management, high energy prices, the support of China and other Russian energy clients in circumventing sanctions, and the war boom triggered by enormous defense production. But beginning in late 2024, there were signs that Russia’s militarized economy was beginning to severely overheat, with labor shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates discouraging investment. For the first months of 2025, the Trump-induced downturn in international trade pushed down oil prices, putting further pressure on Russian coffers.

BEYOND DEADLOCK

Ukraine began 2023 hoping that it could win the war with a counteroffensive. When that failed, and with Congress refusing to vote for more assistance to Kyiv, Russia was optimistic that it would be able to pull ahead in 2024. Moscow now insists that it can prevail over the long haul. It certainly does not want its enemy to think otherwise. Putin likely still thinks that Ukraine will buckle first, but he has always underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and determination. Perhaps a tipping point will come when Moscow begins to recognize the utter futility of this war and the long-term economic damage to Russia starts to outweigh the costs of acknowledging that the war’s political objective cannot be met. Maybe some future Ukrainian operation will trigger the necessary reappraisal.

The experience of this war, however, underlines the difficulty of getting political leaders to acknowledge failure when their forces have yet to be defeated in the field and when there is no obvious compromise deal waiting to be negotiated. Neither side has a clear-cut route to victory. That is what it means to be in a forever war. It is not evident how it will end, or even if an apparent peace will be no more than an opportunity for Russia to rebuild its forces under the guise of an uneasy cease-fire. This will depend on decisions yet to be made. Ukraine’s Western allies, therefore, must be realistic about the potentially long-term demands entailed in keeping Ukraine in the war. Continuing to deny Russia victory is a form of pressure on Putin, who has so little to show for such a long and calamitous campaign. Although it may be hard to imagine a military defeat for Russia, it is possible to imagine a shift in Ukraine’s favor. If Moscow becomes convinced, contrary to its current expectations, that time is not on its side, perhaps that might yet cause it to wonder whether the moment has come to cut its losses.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Lawrence D. Freedman · June 18, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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