Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well."

– Margaret Atwood

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

– Robert A. Heinlein – Time Enough For Love

"And so, to those tempted by despair, I say: Remind yourself that the world is what we make it, and that to the making of it each one of us can contribute something. This thought makes hope possible: and in this hope, though life will still be painful, it will be no longer purposeless."

~Bertrand Russell

1. Man behind one of the most audacious military operations ever

2. Drone Attack Shows Why Ukraine Will Win This War

3. Russia and Ukraine Ratchet Up War While Trying to Show Trump They Want Peace

4. Ukraine Defaults on Sovereign Bond Payment

5. Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged

6. White House may ‘jazz up’ Trump’s briefings as he ‘doesn’t like reading’

7. Thousands of Ukraine’s children vanished into Russia. This one made it back.

8. What We Can Learn About Xi’s Rule by Studying His Father’s Life

9. Where Warfighting Meets Wisdom: A 10-Day Strategic Reckoning on Power, Purpose, and the Future of Special Operations.

10. Winning Without Victory: The Rise of the Universal Soldier in the Fourth Age

11. Educating the Warrior-Scholar: The JSOU NEXT Leap – Rethinking Education for Strategic Relevance.

12. Mountain Warfare: ‘Fighting’ the Mountain to Fight in the Mountains

13. Learning From History: Seek Patterns, Not Exceptions

14. The War of Revision Is Coming – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the start. Taiwan could be the next battlefield.

15. Inside Fort Carson’s ‘Monster Garage’: The launchpad for the Army’s future drone warfare

16. Peace Through Strength Starts with Reforming the Pentagon

17. Cutting commands is just the start for broken military system

18. Pentagon pushes US dronemakers to innovate as quickly as Ukraine does19.

19. Introducing Cogs of War - War on the Rocks

20. How We Fight: Manning, Training, and Equipping for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle

21. Putin’s sickening statistic: 1m Russian casualties in Ukraine

22. Ukraine Hits Crimean Bridge for the Third Time—This Time Underwater

23. American Democracy Versus Chinese Governance: The Ultimate Contest

24. How Chinese drones could defeat America

25. The end of Taiwan's strategic flexibility

26. Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Foreign Policy? Reality TV Politik

1. Man behind one of the most audacious military operations ever

Audacious, brilliant - and of course so well planned - how many superlatives can we use to describe this historic operation?

Some of the video clips of aircraft being destroyed on the tarmac under sustained attack I have seen on social media are truly sensational.

But will it be a game changer?

What will be the strategic effects over time, if any?

Is this a "Pearl Harbor" or a "Doolittle raid?" It is certainly not a Hiroshima - but will it cause one in retaliation?

Video and photos at the link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14773455/How-Ukraine-pulled-Russias-Pearl-Harbour-sleeper-agent-Kazakh-warehouse-drivers-carried-117-kamikaze-drones-5bn-damage-RICHARD-PENDLEBURY-reveals-sensational-inside-story.html

Man behind one of the most audacious military operations ever

Daily Mail · by Richard Pendlebury · June 3, 2025

In the annals of high espionage, derring-do and successful madcap military schemes, Artem Tymofieiev surely deserves his place. The Russians would certainly like to know his whereabouts today. A nationwide manhunt is underway.

The mysterious Mr Tymofieiev has been identified as the Ukrainian secret agent who ran one of the most audacious and brilliantly executed military operations in modern history.

Operation Chastise, the Dambusters Raid – in which RAF Lancasters breached two Ruhr dams with bouncing bombs in 1943 – has long been the yardstick against which other unlikely coups de main have been measured.

I would argue that Operation Spider's Web, which the Ukrainian Secret Service – the SBU – executed on Sunday afternoon, exceeds even that exploit in breathtaking scope and impact. Simultaneously, across three time zones and thousands of miles from the Ukrainian border, swarms of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones struck four Russian air bases.

These were home to the Kremlin's strategic long-range bombers.

Yesterday Kyiv claimed that in a stroke it had destroyed 34 per cent of Russia's heavy bomber fleet, inflicting some $7billion worth of damage.

Mobile phone footage of palls of smoke rising from the bases during the attacks, video feed from the drones and satellite images of the aftermath: all seem to bear out the claim.

The operation was an astonishing triumph. Russian military bloggers have likened the attack's surprise and devastation to that inflicted by the Japanese on the US Navy at Pearl Harbour. But how on earth did the Ukrainians manage to pull it off?

Russian media published a photo of the suspected organiser of the airfield drone attacks, claiming he's Ukrainian

As more information emerges from a triumphant Kyiv and a humiliated Moscow, we can start to piece together the Spider's Web story.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Russia's heavy bomber fleet has caused widespread death and destruction. Originally designed during the Cold War as strategic nuclear bombers, the aircraft have been repurposed to carry conventional 'stand-off' cruise missiles.

These are launched from inside Russian airspace, well out of reach of Ukrainian air defence systems.

All three of the heavy bomber variants in service have immense payloads. The TU-95 'Bear', a turboprop relic of the 1950s, can carry 16 air-launched cruise missiles. The TU-22 'Blinder', Russia's first supersonic bomber, has the capacity to launch the supersonic Kh-22 missile, which has the speed to evade most Ukrainian air defences. The TU-160 'Blackjack', Russia's most modern strategic bomber, can carry up to 24 Kh-15 cruise missiles on one mission.

These planes have brought nightly terror to Ukrainian cities.

Nothing could be done to stop them, it seemed.

Due to the growing range and accuracy of the Ukrainian attack drone fleet, the bombers had been moved to bases deep inside Russia that weren't vulnerable to retaliation. Some were as far away as Siberia and the Arctic Circle.

So, 18 months ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky summoned SBU chief Lieutenant General Vasyl Maliuk and told him to find a way to take the war to the heavy bombers' hideouts.

Ukraine's drones were hidden under the roofs of mobile cabins, which were later mounted onto trucks. They were then piloted remotely to their targets

How though to strike thousands of kilometres beyond the range of Ukraine's furthest- reaching missile or drone? Not to mention penetrating one of the world's most sophisticated air defence systems?

Then someone had an idea that must have sounded crazy at first – like Barnes Wallis suggesting his bouncing bomb.

Why not drive the kamikaze drones in trucks up to the perimeter of the air bases and launch them over the fence?

To do this, the drones would need to be smuggled into Russia and hidden somewhere secure. When the time came to attack, the UAV swarms would have to be concealed on commercial vehicles that would not arouse suspicion.

And that is aside from the issue of launching the drones at the targets in such a way that would not expose the operators or agents on the ground to immediate reprisal or capture.

A base was needed inside the Russian Federation from which the Spider's Web logistics could be marshalled and the attack launched. That meant, of course, there would have to be a Ukrainian agent on the ground, far behind enemy lines, at enormous personal risk.

The indications are that the location chosen for Spider's Web's Russian 'office' – as President Zelensky called it – was the small city of Chelyabinsk. It lies more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow but – and this might have been significant for the smuggling aspect of the operation – only 85 miles by road north of the border with neutral Kazakhstan.

Russian mili-bloggers have identified a warehouse in Chelyabinsk as being the Spider's Web hub. Rented for 350,000 rubles (£3,250) a month, this was allegedly where the drones and their launchers were assembled and sent on their way. Zelensky also suggested that the 'office' was next door to the local headquarters of the FSB – the federal security service that replaced the KGB. He did not reveal the location.

Head of Ukraine's Security Service Vasyl Maliuk looks at a map of an airfield amid Russia's attack

But who was to run this extremely complex and high stakes operation?

The man whom the Russian Interior Ministry suspect of being the local mastermind is of course Artem Tymofieiev. His name and photograph are being circulated by the authorities, his capture a priority.

According to Russian sources, Tymofieiev was born in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, lived in Kyiv and moved to Chelyabinsk 'several years ago', working as an 'entrepreneur'.

Was he a sleeper agent from the start? If so, he made no secret of his support for Ukraine, friends are alleged to have said. But how could he be a threat in such a strategically insignificant place, thousands of miles from the war?

He was, as one Russian blogger has put it, 'a wolf in sheep's clothing'. The drones were to be carried to the targets and launched remotely from wooden cabins carried on the flat beds of heavy lorries. According to President Zelensky they were then piloted remotely to their targets.

Four air bases had been identified: Belaya airfield in Irkutsk oblast, Siberia, more than 4,000km from Ukraine; the Olenya air base in the Arctic Circle near Murmansk; the Diaghilev air base in Ryazan oblast; and a base near the city of Ivanovo.

How to get the drones from the Kazakh border to these places? Chelyabinsk is 2,000 miles from Murmansk, 1,750 miles to Irkutsk and more than 1,000 miles to the other two bases.

But such distances are routinely traversed by Russian lorry drivers. And that was the brilliantly simple method by which this high-tech attack was progressed.

Russian TU-95 Bear strategic bombers at the Olenya airbase on the Kola Peninsula being destroyed by Ukrainian drones thousands of miles away from the front line

The explosion seen from a road as bystanders are stopped in their tracks

'Artem' seems to have employed four unwitting heavy goods drivers to transport what they thought were simply wooden framed houses to different locations across the Russian Federation. According to the SBU, the drones were hidden under the house roofs. According to Russian sources, the trucks were all registered to 'Artem'.

Driver Alexander Z, 55, from Chelyabinsk has reportedly told investigators he received an order to transport 'frame houses' to the Murmansk region from a businessman named Artem, who provided the truck.

Driver Andrei M, 61, reportedly said he was told by Artem to transport wooden houses to Irkutsk. Driver Sergey, 46, had an identical story. He was told to transport modular houses to Ryazan. Another driver was sent to Ivanovo.

So the scene was set for Spider's Web's spectacular denouement.

The 48 hours leading up to Zero Hour saw Ukraine's intelligence services demonstrating its ability to launch ever deeper strikes into enemy territory – and Russia striking back with record ferocity. Last Friday, Ukraine struck targets in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. Seven thousand miles from the frontier, this was the furthest that Ukraine had hit inside Russia.

The following night, at least seven people were killed and another 69 injured, after a train bound for Moscow was derailed by an explosion in Bryansk oblast, which borders Ukraine.

Retaliation was not long coming. Within hours Russia launched its biggest drone blitz of the war – 472 UAVs in one night.

The following morning, Sunday, June 1, a Russian missile struck a training ground in Dnipro oblast, killing 12 soldiers and wounding 60 more. This prompted the Commander of Land Forces Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi to tender his resignation.

A blow for Ukraine. But as nothing to what it would strike in return.

Sunday, June 1, approximately 1pm local time. It is Russia's Military Transport Aviation Day.

While en route, Driver Alexander Z had been called on his mobile by an unknown person who told him exactly where to stop. This was the Rosneft petrol station next to the Olenya air base.

Driver Andrei M had been briefed to park at the Teremok cafe in Usolye-Sibirskoye, beside the Belaya base. Almost as soon as the drivers stopped where instructed, the world seemed to explode around them.

According to the SBU, the truck trailer roofs were 'remotely opened' and the drone swarms launched from within. They had only a few hundred metres to reach their targets.

Surprise was complete and local defences helpless. As all four attacks were launched at the same time, it seems, no alert could be usefully circulated.

Social media footage of the Belaya attack appears to show drones emerging from the rear trailer of Andrei M's articulated wagon. It is parked on the far side of a busy highway which runs alongside the air base perimeter.

EXCLUSIVE

Kamikaze drones so lethal if they spot you, you're dead: No wonder Ukrainians call them The Monster

What looks like roofing panels are lying on the ground beside the truck, suggesting that they were blown off rather than hinged.

Driver Sergey did not even get the chance to stop before the roof of his Scania truck's trailer blew off and more drones began flying out and towards the target base.

Some 117 kamikaze drones were used in the attacks, according to President Zelensky, controlled by the same number of pilots.

Each air base could have been hit by as many as 30 drones simultaneously. Sources suggest that the SBU used Russia's own mobile network to communicate with and guide the large 'quadcopter' drones. To do so they must have had Russian sim cards or modems.

The targets were sitting ducks, the destruction immense.

The Ukrainians released video from a drone flying over a line of Russian heavy bombers neatly parked at Belaya. One of the bombers is hit by another drone, which explodes as the camera drone approaches.

Among the 41 aircraft claimed destroyed by the Ukrainians is a Beriev A-50 early warning and control plane, of which Russia has fewer than ten.

The first satellite images of the aftermath at Belaya appear to show six TU-22 type bombers destroyed and a TU-95MS visibly damaged.

'We will strike them at sea, in the air and on the ground,' the SBU declared. 'If needed we'll get them from the underground too.'

And what of the mysterious Mr Tymofieiev? All those behind the operation 'have been in Ukraine for a long time' now, the SBU claims. Spider's Web's triumph, it seems, is complete.

Additional reporting by Oleksandr Kostiuchenko

Daily Mail · by Richard Pendlebury · June 3, 2025

2. Drone Attack Shows Why Ukraine Will Win This War

Excerpts:

This weekend’s drone operation is a further step on the path to victory. I don’t know what form that victory will take, or whether it will be the front, the rear or its regime that will give in first in Russia. But the balance of power is increasingly clear.

On one side, a ridiculed general staff, an ultimate weapon that is greatly diminished and discredited, troops so demoralized that they fight only with the support of North Korean, Chinese, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi and Iranian mercenaries.

On the other side, a patriotic citizen army, motivated and knowing why it combats—an army that has proved its mastery of the most advanced military technologies, its excellence not only in trench warfare but also in the new remote and ghost warfare.

Ukraine will defeat Russia on the battlefield or impose the terms of a just peace. Either way it will win the war.

Drone Attack Shows Why Ukraine Will Win This War

It is Kyiv’s latest of many demonstrations of audacious brilliance.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ukraine-will-win-this-war-drone-attack-in-russia-d74759ac

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

June 2, 2025 4:42 pm ET

A truck allegedly used to release Ukrainian drones in Irkutsk region of Russia, June 1. Photo: /Associated Press

The Ukrainian operation on Sunday was a coordinated attack on four airports in Russia reaching as deep as Siberia. It neutralized 41 “strategic aircraft” and was a brilliant technical performance.

Over more than 18 months, hundreds of drones were smuggled deep into Russia. They were loaded onto civilian trucks with double-bottomed trailers, where they were concealed inside mobile boxes. The tops of those boxes—remotely controlled by operators in Ukraine but connected to the Russian telephone network—opened at the appointed time, allowing the drones to take off. All 41 targets were carefully studied for months by Ukrainian intelligence, and they exploded simultaneously without civilian casualties.

This is the Ukrainian equivalent of the September 2024 pager attack in which Israel annihilated nearly all of Hezbollah’s active forces. It is one of those operations of crazy audacity and unparalleled ingenuity that make military history. It will be taught for ages in war schools.

This achievement was a slap in the face to Russia—and not the first. At the beginning of the war, there was the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of its fleet, sunk off Odesa by two Ukrainian-made missiles. Then, the double strike on the Kerch Bridge, Vladimir Putin’s pride, the jewel of his cardboard crown and a symbol of the continuity he believed he was establishing between Crimea and Russia. Last year, half of Mr. Putin’s fleet in the Black Sea was destroyed. The other half retreated pitifully to Novorossiysk or the Sea of Azov. Also in 2024, Ukraine staged an offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.

Sigmund Freud spoke of the three humiliations on Western man—inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself. If Volodymyr Zelensky had the heart to laugh, he could speak of the five humiliations he has inflicted on that enemy of the West: Russia. Mr. Putin and his people stand exposed as braggarts, paper tigers. Ukraine is David to the Goliath of Russia, nearly 30 times its size.

Sunday’s operation is further proof that the Ukrainian army, through sacrifice and adversity, has forged itself into the boldest, brightest and best in Europe. I witnessed its evolution as I prepared my documentaries on the war.

I filmed its geeks tinkering, hidden in forest huts, their first makeshift drones. For another film, the drone battalions of Lyman and Kupiansk closed the sky in place of their overly timid allies. This winter, in Pokrovsk and Sumy, high-tech command rooms where battles were fought at a distance. I even heard—at the time without fully understanding—Mr. Zelensky announcing that his engineers were developing a new generation of drones capable of striking Russia up to the Arctic.

Today, all the cards are turned. Mr. Putin terrorized the world with his nuclear blackmail. There was an army capable of calling his bluff—and it did.

“Just say thank you,” Vice President JD Vance lectured President Zelensky during their February altercation in the Oval Office. All of us should thank Ukraine, a small nation that has grounded a third of the bombers that promised apocalypse to Warsaw, Berlin or Paris.

This weekend’s drone operation is a further step on the path to victory. I don’t know what form that victory will take, or whether it will be the front, the rear or its regime that will give in first in Russia. But the balance of power is increasingly clear.

On one side, a ridiculed general staff, an ultimate weapon that is greatly diminished and discredited, troops so demoralized that they fight only with the support of North Korean, Chinese, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi and Iranian mercenaries.

On the other side, a patriotic citizen army, motivated and knowing why it combats—an army that has proved its mastery of the most advanced military technologies, its excellence not only in trench warfare but also in the new remote and ghost warfare.

Ukraine will defeat Russia on the battlefield or impose the terms of a just peace. Either way it will win the war.

Mr. Lévy is author of “Israel Alone” and director of the Ukraine documentary “Our War,” forthcoming June 11. This article was translated from French by Emily Hamilton.

who recently testified on military posture

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Will an increase in defense spending enable the U.S. to close the gap in the drone market? According to North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan, 'China's drone output in 2024 was $29.4 billion, at least four times the amount of money that the United States is spending, with far lower, by an order of magnitude, unit costs.'

Appeared in the June 3, 2025, print edition as 'Ukraine Will Win This War'.

3. Russia and Ukraine Ratchet Up War While Trying to Show Trump They Want Peace

Will the continued military operations give one side or the other an upper hand in negotiations?

I will keep going back to this comment from Dr. Cynthia Watson. How will this dynamic play out and who has the upper hand or the winning hand in negotiations and military operations?

the objectives of subjugation versus survival are so fundamentally divergent.

Russia and Ukraine Ratchet Up War While Trying to Show Trump They Want Peace

The two sides talked for less than an hour in Istanbul and a halt to the fighting seems out of reach for now

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-ukraine-war-attacks-trump-peace-7a3212a8

By Alexander Ward

, Michael R. Gordon

and Matthew Luxmoore

June 3, 2025 12:09 am ET

deep in the heart of Russian territory.

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WSJ’s Ukraine Bureau Chief James Marson explains Ukraine’s clandestine drone attack, known as “Operation Spider’s Web,” on Russia’s air force. Photo: Governor of Irkutsk region Igor Kobzev/Telegram via Associated Press

Key Points

What's This?

Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russian airfields signal a new, dangerous phase of the stalemated war.
Talks in Istanbul yielded a prisoner-exchange agreement but failed to cool the grinding 40-month war.
Trump’s administration appears divided on how to handle the conflict, with minimal pressure on Russia.

WASHINGTON—Ukraine’s weekend attacks against military airfields deep inside Russia signal the long-stalemated war is entering a perilous phase, with both sides seemingly intent on escalation and prospects for a U.S.-brokered peace deal receding.

Only a day after the Ukrainian drones dealt a blow to Russia’s bomber fleet in a brazen attack that stunned Moscow, the two sides met for a second round of talks in Istanbul after President Trump declared again that he wanted a quick deal to halt the fighting.

The meeting lasted barely an hour, producing an agreement to exchange prisoners but nothing more. Instead of cooling off, the grinding 40-month war seems to be growing even hotter—with minimal pushback from Trump.

Russia has struck Ukraine with an avalanche of missiles and drones in recent weeks, hitting a range of civilian targets and killing or wounding many civilians. It is likely to intensify those attacks in response to Kyiv’s drone strikes ahead of a summer offensive now in the planning stages.

The second round of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul on Monday. Photo: Ministry Of Foreign Affairs Of T/Zuma Press

Ukraine had relied on the production of strike drones capable of flying hundreds of miles into Russia, hoping to offset its disadvantage on the ground and make up for U.S. aid that is expected to diminish in the months ahead with airstrikes that produce outsize effects.

Ukraine says that its Sunday attack damaged or destroyed more than 40 aircraft, while experts have documented about 14 strikes on Russian bombers—a huge setback for Moscow either way.

One question is whether the spiraling attacks will spur the administration to engage more deeply in the peace process—or walk away, as U.S. officials have repeatedly threatened to do. Trump last week appeared to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a two-week deadline, threatening to “respond a little bit differently” if he concluded the Russian leader was stringing him along.

Trump’s vow to walk away from the war is unrealistic, some analysts said. “Walking away extends the fighting,” said William Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the George W. Bush and first Trump administrations. “It would be an admission of failure.”

Putin still appears to be calculating that Trump has no appetite for siding more closely with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and would rather disengage from the conflict than impose long-threatened additional sanctions on Moscow’s oil experts or revive large-scale U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine.

Smoke rising over an area in eastern Siberia after a Ukrainian drone attack. Photo: Governor of Irkutsk region Igor Kobzev/Associated Press

Zelensky is in a tighter spot given his sometimes tense relationship with Trump, which resulted in a brief cutoff of U.S. intelligence and military support after a disastrous Oval Office meeting in February. He has sought to show the White House he is ready for a truce even while rebuffing Putin’s draconian demands.

“It was the Russians who chose to continue the war, even under conditions where the entire world is calling for an end to the killing,” Zelensky said in a Sunday address to the nation. “And pressure is truly needed, pressure on Russia that should bring it back to reality.”

If the Trump administration has a strategy beyond appealing to Putin to halt the fighting in return for territorial concessions and other inducements, it has yet to make one clear. Former President Joe Biden sought to contain the conflict by imposing sanctions on Russia and establishing limits on how Ukraine could use some U.S.-provided missiles.

But Trump hasn’t sought to ratchet up the economic and military pressure on Russia. And he has yet to actively involve himself in planning for Ukraine’s defense, including coordinating on future weapons needs. He has been unusually silent about Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian bases.

Zelensky told reporters Monday that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed a four-leader summit for later this month featuring himself, Trump, Putin, and the Ukrainian leader. But the administration hasn’t said whether Trump would attend such a meeting.

Absent international pressure, the fighting this summer could even intensify as the Kremlin strives to shift the front lines.

Fighting in eastern Ukraine last month was the most intense this year, according to Deep State, an independent Ukrainian front-line analytics group. Russians have occupied about 170 square kilometers of territory after pushing Ukrainians out of the Russian region of Kursk earlier this year.

The most active fronts include Sumy and Pokrovsk, Zelensky said, adding that Ukraine is using all its strength to prevent Russia’s buildup for a forward thrust.

A continually brutal war wasn’t what the Trump administration had in mind. As a candidate Trump vowed to end the war within a day, a characterization he now claims was sarcasm.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then-national security adviser Mike Waltz met with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia. They secured Kyiv’s agreement to a 30-day cease-fire in the hope that Russia would soon follow suit, setting the stage for talks that would end the war.

But Moscow balked at agreeing to a truce, demanding that what it terms the “root causes” of the conflict be addressed—shorthand for barring Ukraine from accepting Western assistance and diminishing its sovereignty as an independent state.

Ukrainian firefighters and rescuers at the site of wreckage following an overnight attack last week. Photo: kozlov/epa-efe/shutterstock/Shutterstock

In Washington, the only pressure appears to be coming from Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) plan to introduce legislation next week that would impose steep tariffs on countries that buy Russian energy and uranium. If the measure passes, and Trump doesn’t veto it, the punishment would dovetail with a new sanctions passage the European Union is putting together.

The brief talks on Monday produced some progress on humanitarian issues but made no headway toward a truce.

Ukraine said a memorandum on peace terms promised by the Russian side in the aftermath of a May 16 meeting was only shared with the Ukrainians once both delegations sat down Monday in Istanbul.

In any event, the Kremlin proposal reported by Russian state-run media differed little from the maximalist demands Moscow has been advancing for months: that four disputed Ukrainian territories be officially recognized as part of Russia, that Ukrainian troops abandon those areas, and that Kyiv abide by a neutrality policy that would keep it from joining the European Union or NATO. Also included was a limitation on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces.

It was another sign that Russia is determined to keep pressing the war it started. Ukraine, meanwhile, will continue to take bold steps in its defense.

“If Russia had agreed to a cease-fire,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tikhyi told reporters Monday, “I guess the planes would be intact right now.”

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

4. Ukraine Defaults on Sovereign Bond Payment

How will this affect the war, negotiations, and Ukraine's future?

Excerpts:

The International Monetary Fund has said that a failure to restructure the warrants would constitute an important risk for Ukraine’s other financing agreements, including a $15.5 billion facility provided by the IMF and the $20 billion restructuring pact made with other holders of its sovereign bonds.

The IMF and Ukraine reached a “staff-level” agreement last week to provide another $500 million under the program, though the IMF noted that restoring debt sustainability hinges on making a revenue-based fiscal adjustment and continued implementation of its debt restructuring strategy.

On the battlefield, Ukraine made a significant breakthrough on Sunday, destroying more than 40 Russian warplanes with a carefully planned drone attack.

Ukraine Defaults on Sovereign Bond Payment

Kyiv declined to pay holders of warrants linked to the country’s GDP as it battles Russia

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-defaults-on-sovereign-bond-payment-03267386

By Alexander Gladstone

June 3, 2025 5:04 am ET|WSJ Pro

Russian strikes damaged buildings in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Photo: Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters

Ukraine has incurred a sovereign credit default after electing not to make payments owed Monday to holders of $2.6 billion of its debt securities.

Ukraine’s Finance Ministry said last week the planned nonpayment was part of the nation’s broader strategy as it aims to complete a comprehensive restructuring of its sovereign obligations that will “ensure long-term debt sustainability without threatening Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction.”

The debt securities, which are structured as warrants linked to Ukraine’s gross domestic product growth, were left out of a larger restructuring of the country’s sovereign bonds last year.

Kyiv has been in negotiations with a group of foreign institutional investors who own the warrants, though the two sides have thus far been unable to reach an agreement. In a statement, the investor group said it was disappointed by the default but “remains ready and willing to engage with Ukraine to implement a mutually acceptable solution.”

The warrants, issued in 2015 as part of a prior restructuring of Ukraine’s debts, entitle holders to payments should the nation’s GDP growth surpass 3%. Ukraine reported a 5.3% growth rate in 2023, driven by domestic war production and foreign aid.

Ukraine’s Minister of Finance Sergii Marchenko said in April that the GDP warrants were “designed for a world that no longer exists,” and that Ukraine’s modest economic growth in 2023 wasn’t a sign of surging prosperity but a “fragile rebound from a nearly 30% downturn caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion.”

The International Monetary Fund has said that a failure to restructure the warrants would constitute an important risk for Ukraine’s other financing agreements, including a $15.5 billion facility provided by the IMF and the $20 billion restructuring pact made with other holders of its sovereign bonds.

The IMF and Ukraine reached a “staff-level” agreement last week to provide another $500 million under the program, though the IMF noted that restoring debt sustainability hinges on making a revenue-based fiscal adjustment and continued implementation of its debt restructuring strategy.

On the battlefield, Ukraine made a significant breakthrough on Sunday, destroying more than 40 Russian warplanes with a carefully planned drone attack.

Write to Alexander Gladstone at alexander.gladstone@wsj.com

5. Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged

Excerpts:

U.S. officials said that Ukraine did not give the Trump administration advance notice that forces with Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., were planning the attack, which targeted several air bases inside Russia, including one in Siberia.

In carrying out the strikes, Ukraine deployed agents far from its borders. For instance, the distance from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to Belaya Air Base, one of the targets, is more than 3,000 miles. The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.

One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that the drone strikes had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.

“‘Spiderweb’ showed what modern war really looks like and why it’s

Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged

The attack demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to use relatively cheap drones to take out expensive aircraft and to strike sites far from its borders.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that Sunday’s drone strikes, known as Operation Spider Web, had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.Credit...Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

By Helene Cooper Julian E. Barnes Eric Schmitt Lara Jakes and Adam Entous

Published June 2, 2025

Updated June 3, 2025, 12:51 a.m. ET

In launching an audacious drone attack on airfields and warplanes deep inside Russia, Ukraine is continuing to change the way wars will be conducted in the 21st century, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.

American and European security officials said battle damage assessments were still coming in from the attacks, which took place Sunday, but they estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, dealing a serious blow to Russian’s long-range strike capabilities.

Officials said Russia’s losses included six Tu-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles.

The attack, known as Operation Spider’s Web, hurt Moscow’s prized strategic capabilities. But just as significantly, it demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to strike nearly anywhere in Russia, and to destroy warplanes costing $100 million or more with drones with price tags as low as $600, according to one U.S. defense official.

Image

Russian Tu-95 long-range strategic bombers, shown during a military parade rehearsal in Moscow in 2018, were among the warplanes destroyed by Ukraine’s attack.Credit...Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

U.S. officials said that Ukraine did not give the Trump administration advance notice that forces with Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., were planning the attack, which targeted several air bases inside Russia, including one in Siberia.

In carrying out the strikes, Ukraine deployed agents far from its borders. For instance, the distance from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to Belaya Air Base, one of the targets, is more than 3,000 miles. The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.

One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that the drone strikes had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.

“‘Spiderweb’ showed what modern war really looks like and why it’s so important to stay ahead with technology,” he wrote on social media.

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Mr. Zelensky said the operation had been in the works for a year and a half.

American officials said they expected that Russia would mount a significant retaliation against Ukraine for the strikes. U.S. intelligence has not, so far, identified what Russia is likely to strike, but officials believe Moscow could renew drone strikes on civilian targets, hit the energy grid or launch new waves of intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Since Russian forces first invaded the country in February 2022, Ukraine has been retrofitting, or “MacGyvering,” inexpensive and readily available commercial drones into effective combat weapons that it has deployed on the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces, using portable, shoulder-fired missiles called Javelins and Stingers, thwarted Russian tank convoys heading for Kyiv early in the conflict.

Ukraine put rocket systems on speedboats, increasing its naval warfare ability. Ukrainian forces destroyed Russian targets with slow-moving, Turkish-made attack drones and inexpensive plastic aircraft modified to drop grenades and other munitions. They targeted Russian ships in the Black Sea with Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

The United States has assisted Ukrainian drone manufacturing, spending millions to build up their production capability and transferring some key technology.

But Ukraine “has now taken warfare to the next level,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia.

“They are showing that you can now coordinate drones in order to achieve strategic effect,” Dr. Farkas, who is now the executive director of the McCain Institute, said in an interview.

Image

Ukraine has been retrofitting inexpensive and readily available commercial drones into effective combat weapons.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the strikes show that “nowhere in Russia is safe,” and that Ukraine is “shaping a new type of warfare.”

A senior U.S. official said it was too soon to assess the full effect of the Ukrainian operation on Russia’s strategic bombers, in part because the Russians may be able to repair some of the targeted aircraft.

The official said that the drones did a “significant” amount of damage, but that the attack alone would not force Russia to scale back its offensive operations inside Ukraine.

Keeping the operation secret is not surprising, officials said, because any leak of it beforehand would have endangered the forces carrying it out.

Ukraine has always been protective of its operational security; even more so in recent months since senior Trump administration national security officials inadvertently disclosed operational American strike plans in Signal group chats. There currently is no joint planning between the United States and Ukraine on strikes in Russia.

U.S. officials said their Ukrainian counterparts understood that Russia’s strategic bombers, which can carry nuclear weapons, were off limits for the United States. The Ukrainians did not tell the Americans about their plans, knowing that the United States would object.

A defense official in a NATO country in Europe said Ukraine’s strikes have already led to discussions as to whether allies needed to reassess their vulnerabilities. The official, like others interviewed for this article, was not authorized to discuss the security matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russian drones and other weapons at the Center for Naval Analysis, said “we are slowly coming around” to threats posed against American military bases by drones.

“When it comes to large military bases that have a lot of aircraft parked on the tarmac, the lesson from the Ukrainian attack is that such a strike can potentially come at any moment,” Mr. Bendett said on Monday. “At this point, it’s unlikely that our bases feature comprehensive protection against short range threats.”

James Patton Rogers, a drone warfare expert at Cornell University, said that Western powers were particularly vulnerable at the many military bases they have in other countries, like the small, so-called lily pads in the Middle East and Africa, where a range of extremist groups and other ground conditions make it nearly impossible to issue a standard kind of protection.

That was the case in the deaths in 2024 of three U.S. Army Reserve soldiers at a remote desert base in Jordan, near the Syrian border, known as Tower 22, where Mr. Rogers said an Iraqi attack drone appeared to have shadowed an American drone as it prepared to land, and then struck.

Some officials said Ukraine’s drone attacks could be viewed as a gift to the United States. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has repeatedly argued that Ukraine is managing to harm the war capabilities of Russia — an U.S. adversary — said on social media on Sunday that “the ever-resourceful Ukraine used creative drone warfare tactics to successfully attack Russian bombers and military assets.”

Ben Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe, said in an interview on Monday that “it’s safe to say that there has been a significant reduction in Russia’s capability to launch cruise missiles.”

But General Hodges and several other people said that Ukraine’s strikes should, at least, force the Trump administration to rethink its plans for a “golden dome” missile defense shield, which President Trump unveiled last month.

The Pentagon is drawing up plans for the project. Administration officials say it will be a next-generation military system designed to guard against a variety of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles deployed by adversaries such as Russia.

But the missile shield as envisioned wouldn’t protect the United States from the types of drones Ukraine used.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian airfields show that the $175 billion that Mr. Trump wants to spend on the shield project “is a misapplication of resources,” said Alexander Vindman, a Ukrainian-born former U.S. Army officer who served on the National Security Council in 2019.

Ukraine’s successful targeting of Russian strategic bombers shows that the United States should be looking at “how to defend our strategic assets against drone attacks,” he said.

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Berlin.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

Lara Jakes, based in Rome, reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. She has been a journalist for nearly 30 years.

Adam Entous is a Washington-based investigative reporter focused on national security and intelligence matters.

6. White House may ‘jazz up’ Trump’s briefings as he ‘doesn’t like reading’

I wonder how Ukraine's drone strike was briefed at the White House.

The "simple" question is what information does the President require daily to be able to make sound national security decisions.

White House may ‘jazz up’ Trump’s briefings as he ‘doesn’t like reading’

Tulsi Gabbard looking to revamp routine written reports into Fox News-style broadcasts with cartoons, it is claimed

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/06/01/white-house-jrump-briefings-doesnt-like-reading/?

Connor Stringer

Deputy US Editor

Thousands of Ukraine’s children vanished into Russia. This one made it back.

Illia’s mother died in the siege of Mariupol and Russian officials put him up for adoption — until his grandmother traveled into Russia to bring him home.

June 1, 2025

10 min

148

Illia Matviienko, 12, shows one of his favorite Lego toys at home in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, on April 12. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

By Lizzie Johnson and Kostiantyn Khudov

UZHHOROD, Ukraine — The boy from Mariupol still wasn’t ready to walk to the bus stop alone, so just before 8 a.m., he and his grandmother set off for school together. He reached for her hand, zipping her fingers in his own, and stole a sip of her coffee.

Illia Matviienko was almost 13 but still got lost easily. Three years had passed since his mother bled out in his arms after a Russian shelling, since a neighbor chipped her grave in the frozen winter of their yard, since soldiers found him alone and took him deeper into the occupied Donetsk territory, where he was put up for adoption.

There, he almost became a different boy: a Russian one.

Until his grandmother, Olena Matviienko, spotted him in a 26-second Russian propaganda video. Illia became an extraordinary test case for how, and whether, Ukraine could claw back its missing children — a journey that took Olena across four international borders and deep into Russia.

“I wouldn’t have found him if I didn’t see the video,” Olena, 64, said during three days of interviews last month at their home in Uzhhorod, in far western Ukraine. “He would be with a different family now. How much would he remember of who he was?”

Illia’s return in 2022 after weeks in a hospital in occupied Ukraine showed the difficulty of just getting back one child — let alone the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children now at the center of Kyiv’s demands for peace. Deported or disappeared into Russia, their plight has united American politicians to pressure President Donald Trump for their safe return and spurred war crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his deputy, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, for their illegal transfer — charges a Kremlin spokesman disputed as “outrageous and unacceptable.”

Illia and his grandmother, Olena Matviienko, 66, take a walk in the city center. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

Olena journeyed across four international borders and deep into Russia after seeing Illia in a 26-second video. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

During a meeting at the Vatican in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed directly to Pope Leo XIV, asking for the church’s assistance in bringing the children home. Ukraine wants a full accounting of all the children taken to Russia and their repatriation as part of any peace settlement.

Following World news

Following

Exactly how many children are missing is unknown.

The Conflict Observatory — part of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has consistently provided the most accurate data but will shutter on July 1 because of Trump’s federal funding cuts — has verified that at least 19,500 children were forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine, funneled into reeducation camps or adopted by Russian families, their identities erased.

The real number is probably much higher, senior Ukrainian officials say, but cannot be proved because of poor recordkeeping. “Maybe 50,000. Maybe 100,000. Maybe higher. Only Russia can provide us with this information,” said Mykola Kuleba, former children’s ombudsman for Ukraine and head of the nonprofit Save Ukraine.

In three years of full-scale war, only a small fraction of them have been returned — about 1,300 children — in deals brokered by Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Holy See, as well as in covert rescue missions run by volunteers.

Progress is slow and excruciating because Russia “changes their names, their place of birth, their date of birth,” said Daria Zarivna, an adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff who works on the Ukrainian initiative Bring Kids Back UA. “All ties are cut.”

‘I was Ukrainian’

Illia was taken to a hospital in the Donetsk region where he was going to be adopted by a Russian social worker until his grandmother stepped in. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

The scars from the leg injuries Illia sustained in the Russian shelling in Mariupol in March 2022. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

When Olena first brought Illia home to Uzhhorod in the spring of 2022, he slept with the lights on and the bedroom door wide open. Sirens and loud noises terrified him. He had four friends at school but feared no one understood what he’d been through.

As one of the first children to return from Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Illia’s case soon went public. Olena began receiving calls for him to testify in front of roomfuls of politicians. He agreed to speak to anyone who would listen.

Germany’s parliament came first. Illia was instructed to ignore the crowd, to only look at the person speaking to him. By the time he appeared at the United Nations last year, he was no longer nervous. He waited his turn, then carefully answered questions. He was barely visible behind the microphone — his unruly thatch of dark hair and moon-pale skin obscured.

And then he told his story.

The Russian soldiers found him a day after his mother died, he said, starting at the beginning.

It was March 2022, and for weeks, he and his mother, Nataliia, had cowered in a basement in Mariupol, melting snow to drink and cooking over an open fire when their gas ran out. They ventured outside to look for food — and were badly injured by the Russian shelling of a nearby building. Illia’s legs were bloody and shattered, the back of his left thigh a gaping wound. Nataliia sustained a serious head injury. She dragged her son into a nearby apartment building. They fell asleep inside, arms knotted around each other.

The next morning, Illia awoke to stillness.

A neighbor took Nataliia’s body away. Then, men in Russian uniforms arrived and drove Illia to a hospital in the city of Donetsk, 75 miles from the siege. Orphans from Mariupol filled the third floor. Illia listened to doctors debate whether to amputate his left leg before opting against it. He had surgery without anesthesia, he said, and was later interviewed on camera about his mother’s death by a stranger.

Instead of looking for his family or contacting his home country, as required by international law, officials issued him a Russian birth certificate and put him up for adoption. A social worker visited his hospital room, gifting him an orange plush Garfield cat and teaching him a Russian poem about a bear. She said she planned to adopt him.

“I didn’t want to go,” Illia said later. “It was Russia, and I was Ukrainian.”

He befriended the boy next door, Vitalii, whose parents were also missing. Nurses told the boys that they — along with 30 other children — would soon be sent to Moscow.

Illia wondered where his grandmother was.

Olena’s journey

“He didn’t believe it was me,” Olena said. “He lost his hope. He didn’t actually believe I would come and bring him back to Ukraine.” (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

Olena shows a photo of her daughter Nataliia and a photo of her makeshift grave in Uzhhorod. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

More than 800 miles away in Uzhhorod, Olena was reeling. A family friend had sent her a Russian propaganda video posted online of Illia in his hospital bed, speaking into a blue-and-red microphone.

Olena grew up in the eastern industrial territory that Russia now controlled, working as a machine operator in a factory, then selling bread and cookies for a local bakery. When Illia’s father abandoned Nataliia at six months pregnant, Olena vowed to help her daughter take care of the baby.

She wasn’t breaking that promise now.

The only document she had to prove Illia was her grandson was a copy of Nataliia’s passport. Volunteers at a local shelter helped her get copies of the rest — Illia’s reissued Ukrainian birth certificate, her housing registration, custody paperwork, the police investigation into her daughter’s death. She tucked the documents in a clear plastic bag and contacted the Presidential Office, which launched a first-of-its-kind special operation to get Illia back and, through volunteers in Russia, helped Olena get in touch with the hospital in Donetsk.

On the phone, the head doctor told her Illia’s adoption was pending.

“Don’t you dare,” she remembers telling him.

Within weeks, Olena and another man — whose young granddaughter, Kira, was also being held in Russia — boarded a special diplomatic train to Poland. Once there, Olena said they flew to Moscow on a private plane provided by a Russian oligarch, then took a 20-hour train to Donetsk. In the early years of the war, such an audacious journey was still possible, but now it’s often not, officials say.

After finally reaching the hospital, Olena wrapped a distraught Illia in her arms.

“He didn’t believe it was me,” Olena said. “He lost his hope. He didn’t actually believe I would come and bring him back to Ukraine. Not until the very last minute … did he believe it.”

The lucky one

Illia with his friend Eldar at school in Uzhhorod. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

As one of the first children to return from Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Illia’s case went public and he's testified about his experience. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

In the park out front of his school, Illia kissed Olena goodbye.

He cut across the damp grass and veered inside, past a map of Ukraine — Crimea still tethered to the rest of the country, Mariupol tucked safely within its borders, Russia separated by a thick line of black.

In Room #40, he sat near a window with a friend until class began. After a short quiz, his teacher Tetiana Dolgova observed the nationwide moment of silence for all the war had taken.

“Thank God this city is remote from the front lines,” she told the students. “We need to remember every day who gave their lives for our happiness and freedom. It’s not only about our servicemen at the front lines. Your classmate Illia witnessed the awfulness of this war with his own eyes.”

When the students turned to look at him, he didn’t duck his head. He was more confident now, the years dulling some of his memories.

He could still recall Mariupol — how he and his mother would ride the city bus to the beach and wade in the cool waves of the Sea of Azov, and in the winter their snowball fights — but he thought about it less frequently.

Photos from a family friend showed his former home in rubble, his two boxes of Lego gone, his five outdoor cats and two dogs vanished. Another photo showed his mother’s grave, a wooden cross planted near the fence in the yard, overgrown with parched yellow grass — a place he could never visit.

In Uzhhorod, Illia keeps his belongings on his grandmother’s ironing board. The orange Garfield cat from the Russian social worker. A blue snake gifted by Olena after he testified to The Hague. A whale from Portugal, where he attended a 17-day rehabilitation program. A bunny from Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv, where he is still in treatment for his legs, the shrapnel shifting painfully during gym.

“I will have them forever,” he said of his plush animals. “They represent periods of my life and memories, from Donetsk to here.”

He celebrates two birthdays now: the day he was born and the day Olena realized he was alive.

Illia knew he was lucky. Russia had upended his life as he knew it — but he still had his identity. He was old enough to remember who he was. Unlike so many other Ukrainian children, he’d been found. Sometimes, he wondered if Vitalii, his friend in the hospital in Donetsk, had been, too. Or maybe he was now living in Moscow.

“I wouldn’t have found him if I didn’t see the video,” Olena said. “He would be with a different family now. How much would he remember of who he was?” (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post)

Serhiy Morgunov and Serhii Korolchuk contributed to this report.

What readers are saying

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By Lizzie Johnson

Lizzie Johnson is an investigative reporter on The Post's narrative accountability team and the author of "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire."follow on X@LizzieJohnsonnn

8. What We Can Learn About Xi’s Rule by Studying His Father’s Life

We seem to be seeing similar stories from some media outlets lately.

Xi certainty has a fascinating family story.

Excerpt:

In a new biography of Xi Zhongxun, the China scholar Joseph Torigian addresses this question and contributes greatly to our understanding of China. The book, deeply researched, tells the story of a man torn between his humanity and his loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, offering insights into the party’s workings and the human suffering that shaped his son’s governing style and conception of power.

What We Can Learn About Xi’s Rule by Studying His Father’s Life

Xi Zhongxun was purged by the Communist Party he served and went on to help reform Chinese politics. His son is the most authoritarian leader since Mao.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/business/xi-zhongxun-biography-father.html

By Li Yuan

June 3, 2025
Updated 12:43 a.m. ET

One June evening in 1976 when a neighbor visited Xi Zhongxun, a former vice premier who had been exiled to a factory in central China, he found the old man drinking cheap liquor and crying alone in the dark. Mr. Xi explained that it was his son Xi Jinping’s birthday. The old man felt guilty that Jinping and the family suffered so much during the Cultural Revolution.

A month later, Xi Jinping, who had just turned 23, visited his father, who made him recite two of Mao Zedong’s famous speeches from memory: “On Contradiction” and “On Practice.”

The Cultural Revolution ended that fall with Mao’s death. Xi Zhongxun would go on to become a national leader in the 1980s with a reputation as a reformer. His son Xi Jinping would become China’s top leader in 2012 and chart a more authoritarian course than any leader since Mao.

One of the most enduring debates — and, for many people, deepest disappointments — in contemporary China is why Xi Jinping did not live up to his father’s image. After both were persecuted under Mao’s autocratic rule, why has Xi Jinping’s reign come to echo Mao’s cult of personality rather than the more open, institutionalized governance that his father most likely would have preferred?

In a new biography of Xi Zhongxun, the China scholar Joseph Torigian addresses this question and contributes greatly to our understanding of China. The book, deeply researched, tells the story of a man torn between his humanity and his loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, offering insights into the party’s workings and the human suffering that shaped his son’s governing style and conception of power.

“Some may wonder why Xi Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his father,” writes Mr. Torigian, an associate professor at American University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. “Perhaps the better question is, How could Xi Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?”

Image

Xi Jinping in an undated photo with his father; his wife, Peng Liyuan; and his daughter, Xi Mingze.Credit...Imago/Alamy Stock Photo

The book, “The Party’s Interests Come First,” is a portrait of the inherent contradictions within the party, where top leaders lived distorted lives. In an unforgiving system, they are destined to be both perpetrators and victims.

Mr. Torigian writes that the book, set to be published on Tuesday, is not intended to be a psychological analysis of Xi Jinping. But understanding Xi Zhongxun’s life illuminates the path that led to the China that his son now rules. The complexity of the father’s career, marked by idealism and trauma, ambition and restraint, lives on in his son’s governance, both as legacy and warning.

Throughout Xi Jinping’s life, Mr. Torigian writes, he has remained loyal to two institutions that demanded absolute obedience: party and family. His father, by multiple accounts, was a “ferocious disciplinarian.” As a child, Xi Jinping was required to kowtow to his father during the Lunar New Year — an incorrect gesture would earn him a spanking. The New Year tradition continued into adulthood. Even after he rose to prominence, he would stand respectfully to one side and wait for his father’s signal before sitting.

“The party and the father, often both ‘unfairly’ disciplinarian and strict, might, perhaps counterintuitively, together have inspired a particularly potent form of zeal,” Mr. Torigian writes.

Xi Zhongxun was born in 1913 in a village in a northwestern province, Shaanxi, one of China’s poorest regions. He joined the Communist movement at 13. By 32, he was head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Northwest Bureau, and by 46 a vice premier. People in the book describe him as earthy, charming, easygoing and courteous. Even the Dalai Lama, who worked with Xi Zhongxun in the 1950s before fleeing Tibet, recalled him as “pleasant.”

At times, Xi Zhongxun appeared to genuinely care about ordinary people’s lives. He believed that the Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe and that Mao-style strongman rule should never be repeated. He helped establish the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a central element of China’s early attempt to open up to the world, and was more tolerant of dissent than most Chinese leaders.

But as Mr. Torigian observes, “Xi’s ‘liberal’ sensibilities were only relative, and they could swiftly change.”

In early 1950, Mao was not happy that only about 500 counterrevolutionaries had been executed in the northwest. Mr. Xi, overseeing the region, responded by escalating the crackdown and later pledged to “kill more to create awe and terror.”

Image

Xi Jinping, right, in 1988 when he was Communist Party secretary in Ningde in Fujian Province.Credit...Associated Press Photo/Xinhua

Many Chinese assumed that Xi Zhongxun opposed China’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, given his reformist reputation. As vice chairman of China’s Parliament during the 1980s, he had championed the rule of law and press freedom. He had even proposed a bill to protect dissenting views.

Yet once the party decided on a course of action, he stood by it, as he had throughout his career. Ten days after the Tiananmen massacre, he visited wounded soldiers and called the event a “glorious page” in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

His son Jinping was much more skeptical of the students in 1989. To him, their behavior echoed the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. “Without stability and unity, nothing is possible!” he said in a speech just weeks before the bloodshed while serving as party secretary of Ningde in Fujian Province.

To this day, Xi Jinping has remained intolerant of dissent and has emphasized stability and unity, sometimes at great human cost.

So politically, is he an heir to his father’s legacy or — as some suggest — the successor to Mao’s autocratic mantle?

“Xi Jinping likely doesn’t see himself as rejecting his father’s legacy, nor as following Mao Zedong’s line — at least not the Mao of the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Torigian told me in an interview. “He seems to view himself as forging a middle path — neither as far left as Mao nor as liberal as the reform era.”

This may help explain the contradictions of Mr. Xi’s rule. He has strengthened national security and party control over ideology, priorities that have often held back the economy. Still, he has remained focused on growth. Some Chinese have termed that dual ambition “mission impossible.”

The most striking aspect of Mr. Torigian’s book is its unflinching portrayal of the party’s cruelty, not just toward the wider Chinese public but toward its own ranks. Its campaigns and purges left behind staggering numbers of people who were killed, imprisoned or persecuted.

Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962, after Mao accused him of engaging in anti-party scheming. The suffering extended far beyond his family. According to the book, some 20,000 people were persecuted as part of the “Xi Zhongxun anti-party clique.” At least 200 were beaten to death, driven insane or severely injured. For years, Xi Zhongxun’s secretary recalled, the old man couldn’t bear to hear the word “implicated.”

Image

Xi Zhongxun making a speech at Xi’an in June 1949.Credit...History/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

Later Xi Zhongxun, already exiled to a factory, was kidnapped by the Red Guards, humiliated and beaten at what were known as struggle sessions. He was jailed in solitary confinement and did not see his family for eight years. Xi Zhongxun seemed to have developed mental health problems, which led him to weep constantly. One of his daughters killed herself. He had three children from his first marriage and four from his second marriage, including Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping was 9 when his father was purged. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, he, too, was persecuted and humiliated at struggle rallies, and he was incarcerated twice. At 15, he left Beijing to toil in an impoverished village in Shaanxi Province and did not return until 1975 to attend Tsinghua University. He would later say he “suffered more than most people.”

Though both father and son endured deep suffering, neither wavered in his loyalty to the party. “In the party, suffering meant ‘forging,’ or strengthening one’s willpower and dedication,” Mr. Torigian writes.

The theme of forging runs throughout the book and helps explain Xi Jinping’s strength and his blind spots.

I wrote in a previous column that President Trump launched a trade war against a leader unafraid to make his people endure hardship. When youth unemployment soared in 2023, Mr. Xi urged young people to “eat bitterness.”

In this sense he has echoed the tone and mind-set of his father, steeped in revolutionary struggle, disciplined hardship and an unwavering belief in the party’s moral authority.

The question is whether enduring hardship holds meaning for China’s young generation. “When Xi Jinping says that every generation must fight its own battles, is it a rallying cry or a weary echo of the past?” Mr. Torigian asked. “It’s hard to say.”

Final Word: Why Readers Should Care

This isn’t just a Substack series. It’s a strategic reckoning. As national and global security continues to be defined by forces that defy old boundaries—climate migration, AI disruption, cyber war, ideological fracture—the need for a new Special Operations ethos is not optional. It is existential.

The Fourth Age does not promise clarity. It promises complexity. And in that complexity lies both peril and promise.

Special Operators—indeed, all who seek to shape the strategic future—must now become something more than tacticians. They must become strategic translators, capable of operating at the nexus of kinetic and non-kinetic domains. They must be universal soldiers not only in form but in thought.

As this series unfolds, may it provoke the kind of critical discourse and strategic vision that our moment demands.

The Fourth Age has begun. The only question is—how will we meet it?

Where Warfighting Meets Wisdom

A 10-Day Strategic Reckoning on Power, Purpose, and the Future of Special Operations.

https://compoundsecurityunlocked.substack.com/p/where-warfighting-meets-wisdom

Isaiah Wilson III

Jun 01, 2025

Where Warfighting Meets Wisdom: A Survey of the Fourth Age of Special Operations

By Dr. Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, former Education Executive, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) | President Emeritus, Joint Special Operations University (JSOU)

This Series collectively explores the evolution, education, identity, and strategic role of Special Operations Forces (SOF) in the Compound Security Era, and at the 5 Year marker of the “JNEXT” Change Initiative.

What follows is a tailored 13-day Substack mini-series publishing sequence. This series strategically weaves thematic arcs to engage readers in understanding and reimagining national defense through a SOF-centric lens, with a compound security competition (CsC) framing.

“In the Fourth Age, victory is not seized by mere force, but earned through foresight, forged in complexity, and held by those who think, act, and endure.”

Introduction:

The Fourth Age is upon us. The past twenty years have seen an evolution—not just in the methods of warfare but in the very character of power, purpose, and legitimacy in the use of force. We live now in an era where the boundaries between war and peace are blurred, threats are multi-vector and compounding, and the actors shaping geopolitical outcomes are as likely to be data farms or drones as they are soldiers on the ground. In this transformed battlespace, Special Operations Forces (SOF) are once again at a strategic inflection point.

This Substack series, titled "Special Operations in the Fourth Age: Rethinking Strategy, Identity, and Power," marks a ten-day journey into this new domain of strategic thought—a terrain shaped not by traditional battlefields but by what I’ve called the Compound Security Dilemma (CSD) and Compound Security Competition (CsC). It’s a world in which old doctrines break down, and new forms of warfare—cyber-enabled, ideologically networked, and commercially intertwined—rise to define the terms of global contestation.

From Legacy to Liminality: Why This Series, Why Now?

This series emerges at the five-year marker of the USSOCOM “JNEXT” change initiative—a moment meant to signal not a cosmetic reform but a generational shift. JNEXT was never about modernization for its own sake; it was, and remains, about redefining special operations education, campaigning, and identity for the Fourth Age of conflict.

This age is not one of counterterrorism per se, nor even classic state-on-state conflict. It is the Compound Era—a period marked by contagious complexity and the emergence of a strategic ecosystem where military, diplomatic, technological, informational, and commercial forms of power intersect.

Thematic Arcs: What Readers Can Expect

Over the next ten posts, we will navigate thematic arcs designed to both interrogate and reconstruct the foundation of SOF identity and practice.

Each installment will reflect one of the following focal areas:

Strategic Education: How institutions like JSOU became think-do tanks, and why SOF must now be warrior-scholars.
Operational Identity: Exploring the emergence of the "Universal Soldier"—a concept born not of sci-fi fantasy, but of strategic necessity.
Campaigning Under Compound Conditions: Revisiting Clausewitz in an age where proxies, pandemics, and private-sector actors all participate in “warfare”.
Compound Counterterrorism: From ISIL to the Red Sea to cyber-maritime threats, what “winning” looks like has changed.
Polycentric Defense and Statecraft: A new geostrategic architecture is needed—one that integrates 3D+C (Defense, Diplomacy, Development, and Commercial strategy) across faultline zones like the IMEEC corridor.

Each post is enriched by mini-podcasts, audio commentaries, and strategic anecdotes drawn from lived experience—from Iraq’s early days to North Macedonia’s NATO bid to the transformation of transition services for U.S. veterans.

Why the “Fourth Age” Matters:

This concept, developed through years of operational, academic, and institutional experience, marks a departure from classic war epochs. The First Age (tribal combat), Second (state-centric wars), and Third (industrial and nuclear competition) now give way to a new age characterized by:

Blended Threat Vectors: Where terrorism, great power competition, and non-kinetic influence warfare intersect.
Network Sovereignty: Where power lies in influence, ideology, and information architectures, not just physical terrain.
Human and Climate Insecurity: Where the battlefield may be a flooded delta, a refugee camp, or the digital marketplace.

The Fourth Age demands not only strategic adaptation but a full spectrum rethinking of what it means to lead, educate, and operate as a special operator.

Toward a Theory of Campaigning in the CsC Age

We must reframe campaigning itself. In the past, strategy followed geography. Today, it must follow convergence. That means integrating capabilities across domains and disciplines—what W.i.S.E. Consulting terms “compound campaigning” under a “polycentric defense” architecture. It requires a mindset that is just as comfortable analyzing trade flows and TikTok trends as it is charting troop movements.

Success in the Compound Era means out-thinking and out-lasting, not just out-fighting. It demands intellectual interoperability across military, academic, technological, and commercial lines. That’s what this series is here to enable.

Final Word: Why Readers Should Care

This isn’t just a Substack series. It’s a strategic reckoning. As national and global security continues to be defined by forces that defy old boundaries—climate migration, AI disruption, cyber war, ideological fracture—the need for a new Special Operations ethos is not optional. It is existential.

The Fourth Age does not promise clarity. It promises complexity. And in that complexity lies both peril and promise.

Special Operators—indeed, all who seek to shape the strategic future—must now become something more than tacticians. They must become strategic translators, capable of operating at the nexus of kinetic and non-kinetic domains. They must be universal soldiers not only in form but in thought.

As this series unfolds, may it provoke the kind of critical discourse and strategic vision that our moment demands.

The Fourth Age has begun. The only question is—how will we meet it?

Upcoming in the Series:

Day 1: The Fourth Age of Special Operations: Beyond Victory and Terrorism

Bonus: 5-min Audio Commentary: "Sun Tzu, MacArthur, and the Universal Soldier"

Day 2: Educating the Warrior-Scholar: The JSOU NEXT Leap

Bonus Podcast: “Intellectual Engines in a Tactical World”

...and more to follow.

Stay tuned. Stay strategic. Think, act, endure.

— Ike.

10. Winning Without Victory: The Rise of the Universal Soldier in the Fourth Age

When I read "universal soldier" I am reminded of this song, "The Universal Soldier," from Buffy St Marie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDBbIXqQkao

He's the Universal Soldier

and he really is to blame.

His orders come from far away no more.

They come from him and you and me,

and brothers, can't you see

this is not the way to put an end to war

Of course here is the response song from Jan and Dean - "The Universal Coward:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb6tnpFuUa8

He’s young, he’s old, he’s in-between

And he’s so very much confused

He’ll scrounge around and protest all day long

He joins the pickets at Berkeley

And he burns up his draft card

And he’s twisted into thinking that fighting is all wrong

https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/jan-berry-universal-coward-1966/

But I digress. Ike gives us a third archetype.

Excerpts:

In the final analysis, the Universal Soldier is not just a military role. It is a civic archetype. One that stands between chaos and order. Between fear and foresight.

Victory is not always marked by a flag planted or an enemy vanquished. Sometimes it is measured by the absence of collapse. By the preservation of peace. By the resilience of a republic that does not fall.

To “win without victory” is not to abandon power. It is to redefine its purpose.

That is the calling before us.

Let us answer it with clarity, courage, and the wisdom to shape the age we now enter—not as warriors alone, but as stewards of peace in the compound era.

Winning Without Victory: The Rise of the Universal Soldier in the Fourth Age

Day 1, Episode-1: Setting the Strategic Stage.

https://compoundsecurityunlocked.substack.com/p/winning-without-victory-the-rise

Isaiah Wilson III

Jun 02, 2025

Winning Without Victory: The Rise of the Universal Soldier in the Fourth Age

By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III

Editor’s Note:

This essay was born from my participation in a global strategic panel hosted by the École de Guerre—France’s premier military education institution—held on March 3, 2021, in collaboration with RUSI and Harvard.

As part of the session titled "How to Be Better Prepared to Face Indecisiveness and Endless Wars?", I had the privilege of speaking alongside Admiral (Ret.) William McRaven and Dr. Eugene Kogan. My assigned topic—“The Universal Soldier”—invited me to paint a broad-strokes portrait of the future warrior-leader: one capable of thinking and acting beyond traditional concepts of victory, war, and even the battlefield itself.

What follows is that portrait—expanded into a longform reflection on leadership, strategy, and the compound security dilemmas of our time.

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

— Sun Tzu

“The soldier above all others prays for peace.”

— General Douglas MacArthur

We now stand at a threshold moment in military and strategic history. The world’s geopolitical terrain has shifted beneath our boots, not with a loud detonation, but a deep tectonic grind—subtle in the moment, undeniable in its effects.

We’ve entered what I’ve called the Fourth Age of global security competition. It is defined not by neat borders, singular enemies, or linear fronts, but by compound security threats—where disinformation, climate fragility, ideological extremism, and gray zone aggression all converge across multiple domains.

And it is in this new terrain that a new kind of warrior must emerge.

Let me introduce you to what I call the Universal Soldier.

The Identity Crisis of Modern Special Operations

Today’s special operations forces (SOF), like the nation they serve, are undergoing an identity crisis. After two decades of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, the mission set has evolved, but the strategic soul-searching has only just begun.

The questions before us are profound:

How has the character—not just the conduct—of global competition changed?
What roles, missions, and force structures will define the utility of SOF in the coming decades?
And more importantly, what kind of leader is needed at the point of this new spear?

These are not just institutional questions. They are civilizational.

Foresight #1: Landscapes Have Changed. So Must We.

The landscape has fundamentally changed. We now operate under the logic of what I’ve called the Compound Security Dilemma (CSD)—a convergence of geopolitical, environmental, economic, and informational threats, each amplifying the others.

This isn’t the Cold War redux. This is a new operating system.

SOF can no longer be thought of as a “specialized” adjunct to conventional power. In the Fourth Age, today’s special operator is tomorrow’s new conventional.

This is the first insight: the Universal Soldier must be a hybrid force-multiplier—able to operate across the tactical, strategic, technological, and moral spectrum. An operator whose skill set is not narrow but compounded.

Foresight #2: Back to the Future—Winning Without Victory

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, especially when we ignore its verses.

During the Cold War, SOF were often used not to fight, but to shape—through deterrence, strategic partnering, and soft influence. They were instruments of presence and persuasion as much as precision.

The future must rediscover this. Not every victory requires a battle. To win without victory is to prevail without collapse.

Our adversaries know this. China and Russia today seek positional advantage not just through military dominance, but by building influence—political, economic, technological—at key geostrategic “strong points.” These include Arctic routes, undersea cables, and digital infrastructure. The next fight may not look like a war at all.

The Universal Soldier must be a native to these nexes. Not just a fighter, but a forger of space, influence, and stability.

Foresight #3: The Portrait of the Universal Soldier

So, who is this future soldier?

Let me paint the portrait plainly:

Hyper-Enabled: Armed with decision-edge technology, AI-driven situational awareness, and integrated ISR, but never reliant on any single tool.
Highly Educated + Highly Responsible (H.E.²R.O.™): Ethically grounded, politically astute, and strategically literate.
Strategically Placed: Operating not just at the “point of action” but with impact across the whole-of-government, whole-of-nation, and whole-of-society.
Integrator of Statecraft: Combining kinetic precision with diplomatic presence, information operations, and influence-building missions.
Fidelity-Bound: Rooted in the civilian control of the military and committed not just to success, but to meaningful service to the nation.

This is not a dream. It is a demand.

Integrative Statecraft in the Fourth Age

What will future SOF missions look like?

They will be dynamic, trans-regional, and integrative. Operators will:

Shape adversary and partner behavior in ambiguous gray zones
Reinforce resilience in allied nations through “strong-pointing”
Partner with foreign forces in unconventional resistance campaigns
Build trust bonds in societies before disinformation or violence can fracture them

And they will do this while being fluent in the technologies, languages, and ethical judgments that define tomorrow’s battlefield.

The age of “kicking doors” as the defining SOF narrative is over. The age of shaping, enabling, and educating is here.

The Quiet Professionals Reimagined

The ethos of the “quiet professional” is not obsolete. It is now more vital than ever.

But it must be expanded—not only to include tactical humility, but strategic literacy, cultural fluency, and civilian trust. The future SOF leader must be as comfortable writing a national resilience framework as they are deploying forward in a contested zone.

Today’s threat landscape is too complex for brute force or rigid doctrine. It requires artists of influence, architects of transition, and warriors of peace.

Conclusion: Beyond the Edge of Victory

In the final analysis, the Universal Soldier is not just a military role. It is a civic archetype. One that stands between chaos and order. Between fear and foresight.

Victory is not always marked by a flag planted or an enemy vanquished. Sometimes it is measured by the absence of collapse. By the preservation of peace. By the resilience of a republic that does not fall.

To “win without victory” is not to abandon power. It is to redefine its purpose.

That is the calling before us.

Let us answer it with clarity, courage, and the wisdom to shape the age we now enter—not as warriors alone, but as stewards of peace in the compound era.

Subscribe to Compound Security, Unlocked for more essays like this—connecting doctrine to democracy, strategy to soul, and foresight to action.

11. Educating the Warrior-Scholar: The JSOU NEXT Leap – Rethinking Education for Strategic Relevance.

Excerpts:

As the Fourth Age matures and the Fifth and Sixth beckon, SOF stands once again at the vanguard—not only of defense, but of American redefinition.

In this sense, the story of SOF is inseparable from the story of the Republic.

When our institutions are frayed, SOF may offer a model of integrative teaming.

When our narratives grow hollow, SOF can help craft new ones—rooted not in nostalgia, but in clarity.

And when our adversaries seek to divide, obscure, and disorient, SOF may again serve as the nation’s first responder—not with shock and awe, but with patience and presence.

In that future, the next generation of H.E.².R.O.s may not wear camouflage. They may operate in labs, in cyberfields, in diplomatic missions, or on satellites. But what will bind them all will hopefully continue to be a shared ethos: For Nation, Not Self.

The story of JSOU NEXT is not an endnote. It is a preface.

The prologue to the future we are already writing.

“Sometimes fiction tells the truth that history hasn’t yet written.”

Educating the Warrior-Scholar: The JSOU NEXT Leap

https://compoundsecurityunlocked.substack.com/p/educating-the-warrior-scholar-the

Day 2, Ep2: Rethinking Education for Strategic Relevance.

Isaiah Wilson III

Jun 02, 2025

"A Nation's Think-Do Tank: Rethinking Special Operations Education for the Fourth Age"

By Dr. Isaiah "Ike" Wilson III

A Critical Reflection and Strategic Foresight on JSOU NEXT at the Threshold of America's Compound Insecurity Era

In an age when democracies tremble, alliances strain, and old rules of war morph into new forms of conflict, the imperative to rethink how we educate those charged with defending the Republic could not be more urgent. For America’s Special Operations Forces (SOF), this necessity takes on existential proportions.

And nowhere is this reckoning more deeply felt—or more strategically approached—than within the quiet but vital walls of the Joint Special Operations University.

Established at the turn of the millennium as the intellectual engine of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), JSOU’s mission has always been clear: educate the operator. But clarity of mission is not constancy of method. In fact, the last five years have seen JSOU undergo what may be the most ambitious transformation in its history—a deep, deliberate, and disruptive metamorphosis known as JSOU NEXT.

This isn’t a rebranding exercise. It’s a reformational leap.

And it's one that could reshape how America thinks about power, professionalism, and purpose in the conduct of war.

From Counterterrorism to Compound Competition

To understand the scope of JSOU NEXT, we must first understand the strategic context that birthed it. Following two decades defined by counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, SOF entered the 2020s at a crossroads.

The tactics honed in the post-9/11 era—direct action raids, partnered force development, surgical interventions—while still necessary, were no longer sufficient. The return of great power competition, the rise of disruptive technologies, and the fracturing of the liberal international order ushered in a new era: one marked not by clarity, but by compound insecurity.

This “Fourth Age” of SOF, as JSOU thinkers would frame it, was not simply a sequel. It was a paradigm shift—what Clausewitz might call a “change in the grammar of war.” Conflicts today span domains: cyber, cognitive, informational, economic. They sprawl across actors: states, non-state proxies, digital empires, private networks. And they occur not just in battlefields, but in minds, markets, and the molecular edges of emerging technology.

In such an age, the most strategic weapon may be neither missile nor man, but mind.

Hence, JSOU NEXT.

What Was JSOU NEXT?

JSOU NEXT was an institutional reimagination: a full-spectrum strategy to modernize the university into what it now calls a “Think-Do Tank”—a fusion of applied research, integrative education, and fielded foresight capabilities.

The initiative orbited three “Big Ideas”:

Develop a strategic theory of the Fourth Age of SOF—one that integrates compound threat theory, irregular warfare, integrative statecraft, and the role of SOF below the threshold of armed conflict.
Rebuild the faculty model to blend traditional academics with operational practitioners—Title 10 scholars and GS and Contractor-based operator-scholars—creating a faculty fusion more attuned to today’s operational realities and future uncertainties.
Design modular, outcomes-based education through Learning Pathways that were to be(come) anticipatory, research-informed, and globally networked, rather than episodic and insular.

The goal? To produce what JSOU called the H.E.².R.O.: the Highly Educated, Hyper-(Tech & Teaming)Enabled, Responsible Operator. A SOF leader fluent not just in tactics, but in geopolitics, ethics, emerging tech, and alliance strategy. One who can out-think as well as out-fight, and who understands that discretion, design, and deterrence are as vital as destruction.

From Reactive Training to Strategic Education

JSOU NEXT has also reframed the “why” of SOF education. Gone would be the days when training equated to rote readiness. Instead, JSOU aimed to cultivate foresight—the ability to think and act not just faster, but further.

This meant:

Expanding JIIM-C (Joint, Interagency, International, Multinational, Commercial) integration as a default rather than an exception.
Establishing Learning Pathways that provide over 300 contact hours in distinct but interlocking arenas: strategic influence, emergent tech, integrative campaigning, ethical leadership, and support to resistance and resilience.
Building a constellation of partner institutions—from Arizona State and Tufts to global SOF centers—to serve as regional nodes in a networked hub-and-spoke architecture of education, research, and outreach.
Operating with what JSOU calls the “Speed of SOF”—a fusion of operational urgency and intellectual depth delivered in real time to commanders and components.

Challenges and Cautions

But every transformation invites scrutiny. JSOU NEXT was (is) not without friction.

Some critics argued, then and now, it risks academic overreach, attempting too much, too quickly. Others worry about balancing intellectual ambition with operational pragmatism—especially when budgets, billets, and bureaucracies still reward legacy models of learning.

The true test will not be in white papers or PowerPoint. It will be in the field: Can JSOU NEXT graduates out-think our adversaries in contested regions? Can they build coalitions in gray zones, maneuver in informational spaces, and design campaigns that avert war rather than escalate it?

If they can, then JSOU won’t just continue as a school. It will be(come) a strategic weapon.

A Final Word: From Grindstone to Guardian

JSOU NEXT offered a bold answer to the compound question of our time: How does America sustain military and moral advantage in an age of global disorder? The answer, as JSOU continues to suggest, is not just smarter weapons or deeper budgets, but sharper minds and truer ethos.

In this way, the university continues to strive to be(come) what it was always meant to be: not a think tank, not a training camp, but a “grindstone”—sharpening the edge of SOF’s advantage for the Nation.

If the Fourth Age of SOF demands warriors who are also statesmen, campaigners who are also scholars, and tacticians who are also theorists—then the JSOU NEXT Initiative may have been the very fulcrum on which America's future advantage pivots.

And if continued to be done right, it will be the place that shapes not just how we fight, but why we fight—and who we become in the doing.

From the Fourth Age to the Fifth: Sentinels, Not Just Soldiers

The Future of SOF anthology—conceived at the Joint Special Operations University during the formative years of the JSOU NEXT initiative—was a deliberate fusion of FICINT (fictional intelligence) and doctrinal futures thinking. It imagined the world not as it was, but as it could plausibly become.

In that speculative work, we meet a fictive character: General Manion, a future Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command writing a reflective directive in the year 2045. Her task? To capture the wins, the losses, and the legacy of what JSOU NEXT dared to do during the Fourth Age of SOF. Her tone is sober. Measured. Occasionally proud—but never triumphalist.

Through Manion’s retrospective eyes, we glimpse a world transformed by compound threats and informational warfare, where the value of SOF is no longer just kinetic precision but epistemic legitimacy.

Manion doesn’t only recount battles fought. She recounts institutions forged, minds sharpened, and strategies designed to keep the Republic agile in the face of accelerating entropy.

It is in the spirit of that imagined future—a lens of foresight braided with lived experience—that this real-world epilogue now turns to face the present. Because what Manion reflected upon from 2045 is already beginning to unfold today.

And what follows now is not an ending, but a call to recognize: the page is already turning ...

Epilogue as Prologue:

Beyond the Fourth Age – Special Operations at the Edge of the Fifth

By the First Age to the ‘end of the beginning’ of the Fourth Age, the story of U.S. Special Operations Forces had already become legend: from the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of Tora Bora, from rescue operations in Iran to resistance support in Ukraine, SOF had earned its place in the American strategic psyche—not just as warriors, but as the nation’s frontline thinkers, fixers, and foreshadowers.

Yet today, the story begins anew. Not with rupture, but with recognition: the Fourth Age continues, perhaps as a relatively short(end) period of transition; and the Fifth Age of SOF is not a sequel—it is/will be an evolution.

If the Fourth Age (2021–2045) is/was about rebalancing toward strategic competition, integrated deterrence, and anticipatory education, then the Fifth Age—emerging now—demands strategic reinvention under the shadow of a deeper national reckoning. One not merely about military adaptation, but about national identity itself.

We are a nation at a threshold-crossing—where the question of who we are collides with the imperative of what we must become.

The Fifth Age: Sentinels, Not Just Soldiers

This new era is defined less by kinetic warfare and more by the orchestration of influence—by positional advantage, digital maneuver, and “gray zone” entanglements where visibility is a liability, and presence must be paired with subtlety. Here, SOF must be sentinel and signal, not merely spearhead.

Fifth Age SOF—what the fictive, “foresighted” General Manion would later describe as the “H.E.².R.O. generation”—are no longer measured solely by firepower or fitness, but by cognitive agility, moral clarity, and the capacity to build coalitions of consequence across every domain: kinetic, cyber, informational, and cognitive.

JSOU’s legacy and the JSOU NEXT initiative stand now not as academic detours, but as crucibles of this transformation—where strategic foresight becomes the bedrock of doctrine, and learning becomes a form of long-range targeting.

Hints of a Sixth Age: Beyond the Human Loop

But even as the Fifth Age dawns, the contours of a Sixth Age already appear on the horizon.

This is the age of transhuman warfare—where emergent technologies challenge not only the nature of combat, but the nature of command. Here, the SOF warrior must integrate—not only with partners and machines, but with augmented systems that blur the line between biological and artificial intelligence.

In this future, SOF will confront enemies that are not simply rival states, but viral ideologies, autonomous actors, and fractured global systems. The terrain is no longer geographic—it is informational, emotional, existential.

We are preparing operators not just to act, but to interpret, influence, and inoculate—in real time, under scrutiny, and often in isolation. This will require a renaissance of strategic storytelling, psychological insight, cultural literacy, and ethical intelligence as vital as any physical weapon.

Toward a National Reimagining

As the Fourth Age matures and the Fifth and Sixth beckon, SOF stands once again at the vanguard—not only of defense, but of American redefinition.

In this sense, the story of SOF is inseparable from the story of the Republic.

When our institutions are frayed, SOF may offer a model of integrative teaming.
When our narratives grow hollow, SOF can help craft new ones—rooted not in nostalgia, but in clarity.
And when our adversaries seek to divide, obscure, and disorient, SOF may again serve as the nation’s first responder—not with shock and awe, but with patience and presence.

In that future, the next generation of H.E.².R.O.s may not wear camouflage. They may operate in labs, in cyberfields, in diplomatic missions, or on satellites. But what will bind them all will hopefully continue to be a shared ethos: For Nation, Not Self.

The story of JSOU NEXT is not an endnote. It is a preface.

The prologue to the future we are already writing.

“Sometimes fiction tells the truth that history hasn’t yet written.”

12. Mountain Warfare: ‘Fighting’ the Mountain to Fight in the Mountains

Cold weather operations are just damn hard.

Excerpts:

The U.S. military needs the ability to train not just a cadre of military mountaineers but entire units and their leaders in mountain warfare, to the battalion task force, air-ground task force, special operations task force level at a minimum. While the Marines’ Mountain Warfare Training Center does run a number of battalion reinforced Marine Air-Ground Task Force mountain exercises a year, the California locale is limited. Suitable locations will allow entire units to acclimatize by ‘sleeping low’ around 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) while ‘training high’ over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) and occasionally over 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) into high Alpine and glaciated terrain. The central Rocky Mountains in Colorado and the North Cascades in Washington each meet some, though not all, of these requirements. Sites within the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex (JPARC), including the new Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center–Alaska (JPMRC-AK) training center, may offer the best solution. However, units deploying to Alaska will still require extensive training in the lower 48 states first, particularly for winter exercises. Unit training requires a larger qualified instructor force, making maximum use of all possibilities, including National Guard and Reserves, civilians, contractors, or government service, certified by the American Mountain Guide Association.

Ultimately, the joint force will require a mountain warfare proponent or executive agent within the Department of Defense and a Joint Mountain Warfare Center synchronizing service training and procurement, to include Arctic and cold weather operations. Mountains are difficult places to survive in, they are difficult places to move through, and they are difficult places to maneuver and operate. Therefore, mountain warfare must be prioritized long before any mountain operation.

Mountain Warfare: ‘Fighting’ the Mountain to Fight in the Mountains

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/03/mountain-warfare-fighting-the-mountain-to-fight-in-the-mountains/

by Lance R. Blyth

06.03.2025 at 06:00am

A U.S. Marine participates in a medical evacuation exercise during in iteration of the Winter Mountain Leaders Course at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, Calif., Feb. 13, 2019. The purpose of the Winter Mountain Leaders Course is to train ground combat arms military occupational specialties in mountain warfare tactics, techniques and procedures to serve effectively as force multipliers to their units during combat operations in complex, compartmentalized, mountainous terrain. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Rachel K. Young-Porter)

Mountain warfare is back. For proof, look no higher than the Himalayas, where Indian and Chinese forces have faced off in the Doklam since 2017 and in Ladakh since 2020. For the first time since World War I in the Alps, thousands of troops are deployed year-round in readiness for mountain warfare. By way of a definition, Carl von Clausewitz wrote in On War that “the influence of mountains on the conduct of war is very great . . . this influence introduces into action a retarding principle.” Mountain warfare is therefore the ways and means by which military forces overcome the “retarding principle” of mountains.

The United States military, especially its ground combat and special operations forces, needs the capability to train individuals and units—battalions, brigades, task forces—for mountain warfare for two reasons. First, the U.S. has been “100% right 0% of the time” when predicting where the next war will take place. Since nearly one-fourth of the world is covered by mountains, 10% of the planetary population lives in mountains. Mountains harbor a disproportionate share of the world’s conflicts. The chances are high that the U.S. will have to fight a mountain war sometime, somewhere. As mountain warfare requires months of individual and unit training in both summer and winter, it cannot be delivered just-in-time. Secondly, mountain warfare capabilities are useful for operations in rugged terrain, cold weather, the Arctic, high-altitude conditions, and other potential operational environments.

Mountains

Mountains inhibit military operations due to the combined effects of climate, elevation, and slope. Mountain slopes are generally 15 to 45 degrees, with cliffs near vertical or even overhanging. At the highest altitudes, and with enough annual snowfall, slopes can be covered with glaciers or permanent snowfields, or are tundra in the summer. High-angle rock and debris slopes, with cliffs, talus (rocky debris), or scree fields (smaller rocks) are below, and lower still are the floors of ancient valleys and degraded slopes, generally with thicker soil cover and forested or grassy.

Below are valley floors of river-deposited materials, separated by the slopes above, accessible only by passes. The impact of mountain slopes is that moving up them takes time. Swiss mountain guide Werner Munter developed a calculation to estimate overall time to move through the mountains. In his calculation, covering one kilometer horizontally takes 15 minutes. But that same one kilometer vertically takes two-and-a-half hours, ten times longer. A mile on the level calculates to 30 minutes, but a mile of climbing takes four-and-a-half hours. In the mountains, everything takes longer to do and more energy to do it.

Mountains are generally defined by their elevation or altitude, the height above sea level, running from a few hundred meters or a thousand feet up to over 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet. Less oxygen is present at higher altitudes. Atmospheric pressure and oxygen pressure fall roughly linearly with altitude to be 50% of the sea level value at 5,500 meters (18,000 feet) and only 30% of the sea level value at 8,900 meters (29,000 feet). The lack of oxygen has a number of effects. Physical performance suffers, sleep is disturbed, and vision, taste, mood, and personality can change, especially over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet). Nutrition suffers due to a lack of taste, or nausea, and dehydration is common. Altitude exposure can lead to altitude sickness with symptoms ranging from headaches to hallucinations and, in some cases, death within twelve hours. In the mountains, everything is thus harder to do.

Mountain climates are cooler and wetter than the surrounding plains. Temperatures drop 1-2º Celsius (3-5ºFahrenheit) per 305-meter (1,000-foot) gain in elevation and may differ by as much as 4-10º Celsius (40-50º Fahrenheit) from day to night. Mountains force air masses and storm systems upward, leading to precipitation and winds. Winds are constant in the mountains, with wind velocity increasing with altitude. Wind interacts with temperature, potentially pushing the actual thermometer reading many degrees lower in a wind chill. The rapid rise of air masses over mountains creates precipitation. Rain and snow are common in mountains, and, depending on the region, snow may be possible at any time above 1,500 meters (5,000 feet). Thunderstorms are more prevalent in interior mountains with continental climates, and snow and wind squalls can accompany them above timberline. Lightning strikes typically hit ridges and summits, especially in the summer. Storm fronts, widespread atmospheric events, in the winter storms bring low temperatures, high winds, and blinding snow or blizzards, often for many days.

Mountain travel thus risks a number of heat and especially cold-related injuries. Heat injuries include heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and sunburn at all times of the year, and snow blindness in the winter. Cold injuries comprise immersion foot, frostbite, and, most serious of all, hypothermia, when the body’s core temperature drops to 35º Celsius (95º Fahrenheit) or lower. As hypothermia, or exposure, comes about when the body produces less heat than it is losing, it can be experienced even when the temperatures are above freezing. In the mountains, you need more time and energy to do anything and everything you do creates the potential for injury or exposure, possibly freezing to death in the middle of summer.

Mountain Warfare

Mountain warfare thus seeks to overcome the retarding elements of slope, elevation, and climate by ensuring forces have the means to survive and be mobile in the mountains so that they can maneuver in the mountains. Troops need specialized mountain equipment, dressing in layers—base, mid, shell, insulating, “overwhite”—and wear boots appropriate for the terrain and season. To avoid exposure, troops operating in the mountains require sleeping bags and tents appropriate to the temperatures and climate. To ensure nutrition, individuals have to consume lightweight, high-calorie food, preferably heated by stoves, which will also melt snow to avoid dehydration in winter. To carry all the required equipment and more, troops will need packs with enough technical features (attachment points, ski carry loops, extra pockets) for the mission, but not so many as to get hung up on a climb. And they also need two to three weeks to become acclimated to the thinner air and cold of the mountains.

Mountain warfare is more than just surviving in the mountains. Troops need to be mobile in the mountains, requiring crossing the slopes, climbing and descending the elevations, and dealing with the climate that defines mountains. Such efforts demand specialized training for specific skills and knowledge. Troops need basic mountain training, in both the summer and winter, including courses on mountain survival, mountain navigation, and rock, snow, and ice climbing. Instruction should also include glacier travel and crevasse rescue, avalanche risk management, and avalanche rescue. Individuals need to learn to ski, with a pack and weapon, to an advanced beginner/low intermediate level in order to stay in control and limit injury-causing falls. And they need instruction in the basics of backcountry skiing to learn movement techniques through avalanche terrain. A portion of personnel, historically around 10%, will need advanced skills to function as leaders and advisors in mountain terrain. These include lead climbing, alpine (above tree line)climbing, mountaineering on rock and snow, advanced avalanche training, and the skills of ski mountaineering to move through steep terrain. And all these specialized mobility skills need specialized gear: a mountaineering-certified helmet, harness, ice axe, crampons, snowshoes, and skis with bindings and skins that allow the skier to go uphill as well as down, and avalanche safety equipment. More advanced skills require more advanced gear: ropes, climbing racks for rock and ice, and ice tools.

Unique to mountain warfare, however, is the reality that the skills, equipment, and experience for mountain mobility and survivability are found in the civilian mountaineering and skiing communities. Civilians are often better at the basic mountain skills and have better gear than the military. Outdoor retailers Arc’teryx, Patagonia, and Outdoor Research, for example, maintain militarized versions of their popular civilian clothing lines. Colorado-based IcelandicSkis makes a military-specific Personal Snow Mobility (PSM) ski system. The primary resource for survival and mobility skills and instruction lies in the American Mountain Guides Association’s certified rock, alpine, ski guides, and mountain guides. Backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering are readily viewable on the Internet. Too often, therefore, when ‘mountain warfare’ is mentioned, it is the ways and means of survival and mobility in the mountains that are thought of and focused on, not the actual employment of force in the mountains.

To employ force in the mountains and to maneuver in the mountains, entire units and particularly their leadership also need specialized training, particularly for higher altitudes, in summer and winter. In order to survive, leaders have to learn how to acclimate their troops and how to employ a specialized logistical system of trucks, helicopters, and pack mules to move the needed food, water, fuel, munitions, and materials up to their forward elements and casualties back down. Leaders must learn that every action takes more time in the mountains. On foot, units must move slowly with adequate rest between marches and not carry loads of more than one-third of their body weight. As mountains limit the effectiveness of aviation, units must rely on fire support from artillery and mortars employed in sections or individual tubes, given mobility limitations. Finally, leaders need to understand that the key terrain for maneuver in the mountains is that which enables survival and mobility: high points, passes, main supply routes, road heads, and staging points.

An offensive maneuver in the mountains thus focuses on interdicting an opponent’s ability to survive and be mobile, especially their logistics. Any attack must utilize the mountains as an avenue of approach, particularly from unexpected directions, by climbing or skiing, for example. The attacker’s ability to support and supply the advancing force will determine how deep the attack can go into enemy territory. While envelopment and infiltration are the primary forms of offensive maneuver in the mountains, aiming to leverage an enemy out of their defensive line, mountain maneuver ultimately comes down to the ability and willingness of small units to conduct near-frontal attacks along narrow, exposed ridges and up tight, observed valleys.

A mountain defense seeks to ensure the survival of the force and preserve its mobility. While mountains appear ideal for the defense, the terrain makes it difficult to reinforce any defensive position or counterattack and allows an attacker to pick their point. The defensive line is a string of strongpoints on reverse slopes, controlling key terrain, with patrols and observation posts on forward slopes. Typically, only one-third of the force, at most, will be forward in combat; the remainder will be in reserve and at rest. It is difficult to build shelters and fortify positions since bringing the materials necessary forward and upwards strains the logistical system. The space between opposing lines and between strongpoints, combined with mountain terrain, makes patrols and raids by platoon-strength forces the most common form of defensive combat.

Mountain Troops

Given the difficulties mountains create for military operations and the specialized techniques and technologies required to overcome their inhibiting influence, the U.S. military possesses the basics for mountain warfare. It has the doctrine, including the Army’s Mountain Warfare and Cold Weather Operations and the Marines’ Mountain Warfare Operations, supplemented by training circulars, techniques publications, and various reference guides. The U.S. Military has layered systems of clothing, such as the Protective Combat Uniform (PCU), specifically drawn from mountaineering practices, including the Generation III Extended Cold Weather Clothing System (GEN III ECWCS). Appendix E of the Army’s Mountain warfare publication lists a variety of mountaineering kits with harnesses, ropes, carabiners, crampons, etc., with the all-important national supply number. The Marine Corps has purchased a military ski system that is a cross between snowshoes and skis, allowing for maximum individual mobility.

The U.S. military offers various locations for individual mountain training. The Army has the Army Mountain Warfare School (AMWS) at Camp Ethan Allen in Vermont and the Northern Warfare Training Center (NWTC) at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Both teach basic and advanced military mountaineering techniques, though the NWTC focuses on cold-weather training. The Marine Corps maintains a Mountain Warfare Training Center (MWTC) in Bridgeport, California, with mountain leader, assault climber, and scout skier courses, along with communications, medicine, animal handling, survival, and planning. The special operations community has the Special Operations Warfare Mountain Training Center (SOWMTC) at Fort Carson, Colorado, teaching summer and winter operator courses. However, these schools teach individuals, only a few hundred annually, to provide cadres for units. As examples, per Chapter 10 of Mountain Warfare and Cold Weather Operations, the Army intends to train one to two basic mountaineers per platoon, two advanced mountaineers per battalion, and one master mountaineer or mountain leader per brigade, while the Marines foresee having two winter mountain leaders per company and a squad per platoon or one platoon in a battalion trained as scout skiers, as noted in Chapter 12 of the Mountain Leader’s Guide to Winter Operations.

The U.S. military needs the ability to train not just a cadre of military mountaineers but entire units and their leaders in mountain warfare, to the battalion task force, air-ground task force, special operations task force level at a minimum. While the Marines’ Mountain Warfare Training Center does run a number of battalion reinforced Marine Air-Ground Task Force mountain exercises a year, the California locale is limited. Suitable locations will allow entire units to acclimatize by ‘sleeping low’ around 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) while ‘training high’ over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) and occasionally over 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) into high Alpine and glaciated terrain. The central Rocky Mountains in Colorado and the North Cascades in Washington each meet some, though not all, of these requirements. Sites within the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex (JPARC), including the new Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center–Alaska (JPMRC-AK) training center, may offer the best solution. However, units deploying to Alaska will still require extensive training in the lower 48 states first, particularly for winter exercises. Unit training requires a larger qualified instructor force, making maximum use of all possibilities, including National Guard and Reserves, civilians, contractors, or government service, certified by the American Mountain Guide Association.

Ultimately, the joint force will require a mountain warfare proponent or executive agent within the Department of Defense and a Joint Mountain Warfare Center synchronizing service training and procurement, to include Arctic and cold weather operations. Mountains are difficult places to survive in, they are difficult places to move through, and they are difficult places to maneuver and operate. Therefore, mountain warfare must be prioritized long before any mountain operation.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Air Force Academy or Department of Defense.)

Tags: Clausewitz, military terrain challenge, mountain warfare, trategic mobility, World War I

About The Author

Lance R. Blyth
Command Historian, NORAD and US Northern Command, and an Adjunct Professor of History, US Air Force Academy. A backcountry skier with a history problem, his research and writing focus on mountain warfare, recently publishing Ski, Climb, Fight: The 10th Mountain Division and the Rise of Mountain Warfare (Oklahoma, 2024).

13. Learning From History: Seek Patterns, Not Exceptions

Excerpts:

To reiterate, the central issue of Holowinsky and Dickson’s open letter is not their actual belief about what will offer the best outcome for the Ukrainian people; rather, it is their use of history as a source and legitimator of the strategic decisions they believe will bring that outcome to fruition. Using a single historical example cannot give any solid indication as to how something as complex as a war and its aftermath might, or even should, unfold. Any advice irresponsibly derived from such a method will be of limited value.

Taking lessons from history for informing foreign policy advice is vitally important, but only when those lessons are drawn from the insight of observed patterns, which suggest probable outcomes. Advisors should equally highlight notable exceptions and clearly elaborate on the conditions that led to both outcome types. Importantly, they should also caveat their findings with the observation that there is nothing to say that the current situation will turn out like any of the case studies. At the end of the day, any decision-maker has to, and can only, take decisions based on the conditions and objectives of the here-and-now. After all, it’s not 1940, and Ukraine isn’t Finland.

It might be concluded from all this that “learning from history” is maybe not all that useful a term when it comes to using the past to inform political decision-making in the current day. It might be better, rather, to say that “studying history allows for the observation of patterns which offer suggestions of probable types of outcomes which should be taken on board to inform decision-making. Any advisor and decision-maker should remain clear-sighted as to the limits to which these really can form the basis of solid prediction or sound advice.” It’s more cautious, certainly, and fails to roll off the tongue quite as well, but it is more responsible and will make for better advice.

Learning From History: Seek Patterns, Not Exceptions

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/03/learning-from-history-seek-patterns-not-exceptions/

by Samuel Reynolds

06.03.2025 at 06:00am

On March 15, 2025 Small Wars Journal published an open letter by Yurij Holowinsky and Keith D. Dickson to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In this letter, they used the example of Finland’s experience since 1940 as the inspiration for advice about how to bring the Russo-Ukrainian War to an end in a way that best safeguards Ukraine’s current and future interests. There is, however, a fundamental issue with their open letter that requires highlighting.

The issue in question is how they use history to support their advice. To champion a particular policy by drawing strong comparisons with a single historical event – with the underlying assumption that its outcomes could be replicated in the modern day – is an improper and irresponsible use of history as an advisory tool. The real source of good historical learning for advisory purposes is in observable patterns – not one-offs.

Seek Patterns, Not Exceptions

Just because something happened before doesn’t necessarily mean that it will happen again. Every situation is driven by unique individuals, ideas, and conditions as well as shaped by each new event in often unpredictable ways. Even the most likely outcomes can turn out very differently than might be imagined. As such, using a timeline which stretches across eighty years (as Holowinsky and Dickson do) to advocate for a decision in the here-and-now is overly ambitious to the point of unwise.

None of this is to say that history can never be used to potentially inform future events – it can and should be – but there is a specific way in which it should be done: namely, finding patterns which suggest types of outcomes that may be more probable in similar situations, both now and in future.

To champion a particular policy by drawing strong comparisons with a single historical event – with the underlying assumption that its outcomes could be replicated in the modern day – is an improper and irresponsible use of history as an advisory tool. The real source of good historical learning for advisory purposes is in observable patterns – not one-offs.

Finding such patterns requires drawing upon large numbers of examples to find common themes among situations that, in their details, are often very different. Exceptions should also be highlighted, and both the patterns and the exceptions require good explanations as to why they occurred. These patterns can help to provide tentative suggestions for how events might play out in future – even decades ahead, potentially, but more often (and more likely) only for more short-term circumstances.

An added benefit of all this is that, while drawing from a single historical episode can be dripping in bias and preferred realities, potentially affecting any advice being given, drawing from lots of case studies can compensate for this.

One notable episode of the Russo-Ukrainian War that provides a good example of why failing to draw from the observable pattern can be problematic is Ukraine’s 2023 Summer Offensive. Despite the high hopes placed on it, it should not have been that surprising that it made little headway, considering the mountain of examples of similar attacks often stalling far short of their intended goals, or taking much longer to achieve success than expected. For instance, this was very common in the First World War and the Iran-Iraq War. There are, of course, notable exceptions: the Battle of Messines in 1917 went very well, as did Ukraine’s own offensive to liberate the Kharkiv region in 2022. However, proclamations that 2023’s offensive could have been as significant as the Battle of Normandy or may, more specifically, have shared similarities with Operation Cobra, were wrong and seemed to pick the notable exceptions rather than the observable pattern.

The Critical Importance of the Unforeseen

A healthy caution in applying observed patterns too confidently is always advisable – while an idea of probable types of outcomes can be derived from an assessment of patterns, these cannot be viewed as the wisdom of a modern Delphic Oracle. The people, political systems, cultures, economies, and more that exist in the modern world are different from those that came before and are different from those that will exist in the future. This will have an impact. Significantly, even over a very short period of time, societies can shift rapidly in their wants, motivations, and ideologies.

Drawing from a single event cannot illustrate the patterns, exceptions, and randomness that can then be used to more reliably inform one’s advice. It will instead hobble decision-making by forcing a very one-sided or shallow blinder on the decision-maker.

It’s equally important to keep in mind that, sometimes, something comes out of the blue to change things in totally unforeseeable ways. The souring tensions which sparked the First Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC were made worse due to the political developments arising from the aftermath of an earthquake. It was the sudden proclamation that Prince Dmitrii had apparently survived his assassination and was returning to take the throne that thrust an already chaos-stricken Russia into a long and destructive civil war in the early 17th century. Furthermore, no one could have foreseen that Greece’s war effort against Turkey in 1920 would have been suddenly impacted in the way that it was by the elections and succession crisis that followed King Aléxandros dying of sepsis after being bitten by a domesticated monkey.

Advice that seeks to successfully learn from history keeps in mind the multitudinous factors, unforeseen events, and unknowns that characterize it and which illustrate just how quickly states of affairs can change. Developments in our own day highlight this fact just as effectively as those in the distant past. After all, how many would have expected in 2022 with Russia on the retreat from Kyiv that, in 2025, they would watch Ukraine also have to fight North Korea and have the US demand preferential access to their natural resources, as well as bully their President on live TV? Could many have imagined in 2023 that it would have been Germany, who did not want to allow their tanks to be sent to support the Ukrainian Army unless the US also sent their own, which, just a little over two years later, would be calling for Europe to become more independent from the United States and pushing for a massive rearmament program?

Drawing from a single event cannot illustrate the patterns, exceptions, and randomness that can then be used to more reliably inform one’s advice. It will instead hobble decision-making by forcing a very one-sided or shallow blinder on the decision-maker. This is the central issue with Holowinsky and Dickson’s use of history in their open letter. Using Finland’s experience alone as the basis for advice on how to guide Ukrainian state policy, however desirable such an outcome might be, is both irresponsible and unhelpful. There is little, except hope, which suggests that Ukraine’s situation might turn out even remotely similar to Finland’s over an eight-decade period from making peace with Stalin to joining NATO, even if Ukraine wanted to copy it.

Innumerable Wars and Endless Possibilities

There are countless instances of states being invaded by larger neighbors and holding on tenaciously against the odds, with outcomes different to those experienced by Finland, that have relevance to Ukraine’s situation. The advisory hobbling caused by forming advice on the basis of a single case study, as mentioned at the end of the last section, can be illustrated well with one of these examples – namely, the Dutch in the “disaster year” of 1672.

During that year, the Dutch lost massive amounts of territory to the existential threat posed by the invading forces of France and Munster but managed to stabilize their defensive line and more than hold their own at sea against the combined might of England and France. By continuing to fight despite the odds stacked against them, they were able to drive the English from the war and, eventually, supported by the full intervention of an anti-French alliance, took back their territory. While the Finnish had joined the EU and NATO in the eighty years following the Winter War, the Dutch – over that same timeframe – fought in a series of global wars and suffered further invasions and economic decline while experiencing the passing of their “golden age” as a leading global player. Regardless, their territory was still in one piece, for which their determined resistance in 1672 and the widening of that war played a major role.

Advice to Zelenskyy could thus be formed on their example: that to ensure Ukrainian territorial integrity in the long-term, he should choose to fight on as the Dutch did and wait for the war to widen so that he can benefit from the resources and operations of his co-belligerents to be able to save his country from absorption (and to hope that he isn’t partially eaten by an angry lynch-mob along the way).

Advice that seeks to successfully learn from history keeps in mind the multitudinous factors, unforeseen events, and unknowns that characterize it and which illustrate just how quickly states of affairs can change.

However, this is not well-constructed, history-informed advice. Above all, it obfuscates the differences between the situations faced by decision-makers in 1672 and those in 2025: the international system and the values underpinning the conduct of foreign policy are very different; for one thing, Louis XIV’s France was not a nuclear-armed state as Russia is, which greatly alters the dynamics of modern decision-making when considering potentially escalatory actions. Some might argue that this difference, in fact, makes waiting for increased foreign assistance less of a realistic option for Ukraine – not least as foreign public opinion about its importance, or support for it, shifts.

Invasions are very complex, and their outcomes are shaped by equally complex and unique conditions. Finland survived the Soviet invasion of the 1940s and, one lifetime later, joined NATO as a prosperous member of the European Union; yet while Mexico survived the American onslaught of the 1840s, it was at the cost of defeat, thousands of lives, and 55% of their pre-war territory – their next few decades were marked by instability, civil war, and further foreign invasion. The Danes held off the combined might of the German states in the 1840s and ‘50s and were to be invaded again in the 1860s, effectively abandoned by their allies, and forced to sign away a massive chunk of their territory, with 40% of their people. In more recent times, Iraq swiftly collapsed in 2003 before being plunged into over a decade of civil conflict and insurgency, which paved the way for the rise of ISIS and their global terror campaign. Few (if any) of these outcomes were assured, but were rather the result of personal choices, cultures, political systems, unexpected events, and more that were all shaped in a myriad of ways by what came before.

None of these examples have been chosen to actually recommend alternative strategic paths for the Ukrainian government, nor in an attempt to show any particular observable historical pattern. On the contrary, they’ve been chosen to highlight the enormous diversity and unpredictability of historical outcomes and to hammer home the fact that just picking the outcome of one example runs the very real risk of oversimplifying what is, in reality, highly complex. Advice which seeks to responsibly learn from history must take this great level of complexity into account when advocating on behalf of particular pathways, or face creating too flat and one-sided a perspective. This is not at all to say that Holowinsky and Dickson have purposefully ignored other examples in order to paint a specific yet unrepresentative image of how the future may unfold, but the effect is the same, and it makes their advice irresponsible and unhelpful.

The (Cautious) Exception of Analogies

A distinction should be briefly drawn, however, between using single historical episodes as the basis for advice and using single historical episodes to draw analogies as a rhetorical device. While the former can be highly problematic, the latter can be an indispensably useful communicative tool.

Using a single historical example cannot give any solid indication as to how something as complex as a war and its aftermath might, or even should, unfold. Any advice irresponsibly derived from such a method will be of limited value.

The value of analogies is that they can quickly and effectively convey to a decision-maker a certain level of personal or cultural understanding without directing them towards any particular course of action. For instance, if a decision-maker in 2022 didn’t understand the significance and achievement of the Ukrainian success in withstanding Russia’s initial offensive due to a lack of familiarity with the military dynamics of the situation, but they were familiar with Ancient Greek history, then their comprehension might be greatly aided by drawing an analogy with the significance and achievement of the Greeks’ success in withstanding the Persian invasion of 480 BC. This is not the same as advising them to do anything on the basis of this single historical example, but simply helps them to better appreciate a complex situation in a well-tailored manner.

“Well-tailored” is an important qualifier. It always pays to be cautious when formulating analogies and to remember just how easily they can unintentionally or subconsciously advise a decision-maker when framed as anything other than simply illustrative. Caution is also very much called for when those analogies might touch upon events which are sufficiently emotionally or culturally weighty that they effectively force mental blinders upon the decision-maker’s understanding of the current event. Having to overcome any unintentionally evoked, well-entrenched perceptions in order to give the advice one actually intended will cause more hassle than the analogy is worth and make it effectively useless as a communicative tool. Knowing which historical events can’t act as useful analogies is just as important as knowing which can.

Conclusion

To reiterate, the central issue of Holowinsky and Dickson’s open letter is not their actual belief about what will offer the best outcome for the Ukrainian people; rather, it is their use of history as a source and legitimator of the strategic decisions they believe will bring that outcome to fruition. Using a single historical example cannot give any solid indication as to how something as complex as a war and its aftermath might, or even should, unfold. Any advice irresponsibly derived from such a method will be of limited value.

Taking lessons from history for informing foreign policy advice is vitally important, but only when those lessons are drawn from the insight of observed patterns, which suggest probable outcomes. Advisors should equally highlight notable exceptions and clearly elaborate on the conditions that led to both outcome types. Importantly, they should also caveat their findings with the observation that there is nothing to say that the current situation will turn out like any of the case studies. At the end of the day, any decision-maker has to, and can only, take decisions based on the conditions and objectives of the here-and-now. After all, it’s not 1940, and Ukraine isn’t Finland.

It might be concluded from all this that “learning from history” is maybe not all that useful a term when it comes to using the past to inform political decision-making in the current day. It might be better, rather, to say that “studying history allows for the observation of patterns which offer suggestions of probable types of outcomes which should be taken on board to inform decision-making. Any advisor and decision-maker should remain clear-sighted as to the limits to which these really can form the basis of solid prediction or sound advice.” It’s more cautious, certainly, and fails to roll off the tongue quite as well, but it is more responsible and will make for better advice.

Tags: Foreign Policy, History, Russia, Russia-Ukraine War, strategy, Ukraine

About The Author

14. The War of Revision Is Coming – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the start. Taiwan could be the next battlefield.

And note the reference to the new series "Zero Day" in Taiwan.

And "adversarial coordination" per the recent DIA report is a real thing that we must be concerned with - not just China alone.

Excerpts:

“Every day you see it,” Mr. Hegseth said. “China’s military harasses Taiwan. These activities have been paired with China’s rapid military modernization and buildup—including huge investments in nuclear weapons, hypersonics and amphibious assault capabilities.”

Mr. Hegseth isn’t the only one sounding the alarm in the Indo-Pacific. Even New Zealand is waking up to the peril and plans nearly to double its defense spending. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, India and Australia are all boosting budgets.

But the world crisis is bigger than Asia. China, aligned with Russia, North Korea and Iran, has formed an axis of revisionist powers aimed at challenging the existing world system on every continent, at sea, in space and in the cyberworld.

The War of Revision has already begun in Ukraine, and families across the country huddle in bomb shelters as Russian missiles and drones bring the war home to civilians. Stunned into sobriety by a combination of Russian aggression and American unpredictability, Europe is awakening from a generational slumber. Britain’s Labour government has targeted 3% of gross domestic product in defense spending; Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is aiming for 5%.

...

Let’s hope an American distributor musters the courage to bring this series to American screens. More broadly, any patriots still working in Hollywood need to think about how their skills can help Americans wake up to the growing peril. Something scarier than the Redcoats is coming, and we need new Paul Reveres.

The War of Revision Is Coming

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the start. Taiwan could be the next battlefield.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-war-of-revision-is-coming-russia-china-taiwan-national-security-4e2184a7

By Walter Russell Mead

June 2, 2025 4:39 pm ET

The Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong in waters off Taiwan, March 31. Photo: handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan “could be imminent,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned last week at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

“Every day you see it,” Mr. Hegseth said. “China’s military harasses Taiwan. These activities have been paired with China’s rapid military modernization and buildup—including huge investments in nuclear weapons, hypersonics and amphibious assault capabilities.”

Mr. Hegseth isn’t the only one sounding the alarm in the Indo-Pacific. Even New Zealand is waking up to the peril and plans nearly to double its defense spending. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, India and Australia are all boosting budgets.

But the world crisis is bigger than Asia. China, aligned with Russia, North Korea and Iran, has formed an axis of revisionist powers aimed at challenging the existing world system on every continent, at sea, in space and in the cyberworld.

The War of Revision has already begun in Ukraine, and families across the country huddle in bomb shelters as Russian missiles and drones bring the war home to civilians. Stunned into sobriety by a combination of Russian aggression and American unpredictability, Europe is awakening from a generational slumber. Britain’s Labour government has targeted 3% of gross domestic product in defense spending; Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is aiming for 5%.

No serious person wants war, but decades of neglect have hollowed out Western defenses, and both the military foundations of American power and the political underpinnings of our alliance system are in poor condition. Between the steadily rising challenge from the revisionists and the uncertain responses of the defenders, peace grows more fragile as the challenges rise. A new era of great-power war isn’t inevitable, but it is getting harder to prevent.

All democratic societies will ultimately have to reckon with this unwelcome global transition from a postwar to a prewar era in world history. Frontline states like Taiwan already live in this new reality.

“Zero Day,” a 10-part television drama depicting the descent of the self-governing island into war with the mainland, offers a window into an all-too-likely future. Jillian Kay Melchior wrote about the first episode for the Journal last month. Since then, I’ve seen the entire series. The show’s creators hope to find an American distributor, so I promised no spoilers. But I can say that “Zero Day,” composed of self-contained episodes depicting the effects of cross-Strait tensions, offers both an intimate look at Taiwanese society and an invaluable introduction to a looming great power conflict that could upend all our lives.

The people of Taiwan in “Zero Day” are almost infinitely diverse. Characters include online influencers and their artificial-intelligence lovers, low-life racketeers, nagging moms, cops and politicians both honest and otherwise, conscripts cowardly and courageous, worshippers of a goddess who offers to make her devotees’ dreams come true if they will pay the price, spies, double agents and dysfunctional families.

What they share is the desire to get on with their lives and to steer clear of war. As tensions rise, the characters consider their options. Accept mainland rule as inevitable? Fight? Flee to America, to the mainland, to any other destination to avoid the coming inferno? When the chips are down, what do you really believe in? Family? Friendship? Self-preservation? Your bank book? Your country?

The creators of “Zero Day” understand that the next round of conflicts won’t be like your grandfather’s wars. The great conflicts of the last century were primarily industrial wars, in which the side that turned out the most weapons was likely to win. Industry still matters, but information technologies and cyber capabilities will shape the next round of conflicts. In “Zero Day,” plots pivot around Chinese efforts to subvert Taiwan’s military tech, to hack its command-and-control network to retarget missiles, and simply to recruit internet influencers to shill for China through the shrewd use of bots and AI. Every facet of society, from the highest reaches of the political and military establishments to street gangs, is a battlefield in the struggle for Taiwan.

“Zero Day” is an example of an information war as well as an examination of one. Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture covered 40% of the show’s budget. It was a controversial project in a polarized Taiwan. One director withdrew from the project due to safety concerns. More than half the crew asked that their names be omitted from the credits, fearing retaliation.

Let’s hope an American distributor musters the courage to bring this series to American screens. More broadly, any patriots still working in Hollywood need to think about how their skills can help Americans wake up to the growing peril. Something scarier than the Redcoats is coming, and we need new Paul Reveres.

Russians' failure and/or Russia's success

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The Head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, says that with ever-closer cooperation between China, Russia and North Korea, 'each country now compensates for the other's weaknesses,' and a win in Ukraine will embolden China's military ambitions.

Appeared in the June 3, 2025, print edition as 'The War of Revision Is Coming'.

15. Inside Fort Carson’s ‘Monster Garage’: The launchpad for the Army’s future drone warfare

Inside Fort Carson’s ‘Monster Garage’: The launchpad for the Army’s future drone warfare

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · June 2, 2025

Army Sgt. Wyatt Pickett flies a drone at the Monster Garage at Fort Carson, Colo., on May 16, 2025. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)

FORT CARSON, Colo. — Sgt. 1st Class Jovani Vasquez spent a week learning about the new aircraft that he would fly for the Army — a small, commercially available drone that is cheap enough to break and replace without a lot of paperwork.

To keep the football-sized quadcopter flight-ready and improve his own flying skills, Vasquez scours online forums and YouTube tutorials, he said.

“Then there’s tactical employment. It is a beast in itself,” he said recently during a tour of the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade’s Monster Garage, the home of a platoon-sized unit innovating how the 4th Infantry Division incorporates small, cheap drones among its soldiers. It’s an initiative underway in most Army divisions to keep up with rapidly evolving battlefield technology.

“[Drone flying] started as a hobby, you know, flying in open spaces, clear lines of sight,” Vasquez said. “Now, the [Defense Department] is trying to take those and apply that to where you want to be concealed. You’re completely changing the way that these systems were created.”

In the Monster Garage, a converted pilot locker room at the Army base in Colorado Springs, he and other soldiers practice sending the drone through hoops and under camouflage netting and then landing it safely on a target. In the field, soldiers experiment with the range and capabilities of drones, and the ease at which they can be repaired.

They’ve practiced using the drone as a supply delivery system, for surveillance and as an explosive device. They also tested the limits of where and how the drones can take off. In a video taken earlier this year, the drone — a Litehawk UAS — takes flight from a soldier’s back.

A basic system retails for about $40 on Amazon.

The video monitor of the small drone system used by the Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Innovation and Standardization Platoon in the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colo., on May 16, 2025. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)

Established about four months ago, the unit calls itself the Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Innovation and Standardization Platoon, or the Dragonflies. Its twofold mission is to figure out what exactly it can do with these small drones, create standards and then teach the combat units of the division how to incorporate the drones into the work of infantry formations, cavalry scouts and logistics operations.

The work is part of a larger Army initiative to get drones quickly into the hands of all types of soldiers — not just specially trained operators — in response to the ongoing use of drones in conflicts around the world. Ukraine used a fleet of more than 100 relatively cheap drones Sunday to strike four airfields deep inside of Russia, possibly damaging up to 1/3 of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet, according to The Associated Press.

The following day, Russia launched more than 470 drones against Ukraine in a war that has dragged on for three years.

Divisions across the U.S. Army have stood up platoons to serve as the local experts of unmanned flight with support of the 2nd Battalion, 13th Aviation Regiment at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., which falls under the 1st Aviation Brigade at the Aviation Center of Excellence. The battalion previously trained operators and mechanics for the Shadow Unmanned Aerial System that the Army decommissioned last year. Now the school is training soldiers to go out and fill the operational need of small drone systems and be subject-matter experts for others, said Lt. Col. Kent Monas, the battalion commander.

“Any soldier could be trained to go fly these,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re trained on their M-4 rifle. All soldiers can operate one of these, and we can maximize the amount these systems that are out there.”

Army Sgt. 1st Class Jovani Vasquez watches a drone prepare to launch at the Monster Garage at Fort Carson, Colo., on May 16, 2025. ( Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)

The Shadow system, which Vasquez operated at the start of his Army career, required access to a runway and needed a launcher system to take flight. It became “too logistically burdensome,” Monas said.

Now the Army is looking at various capabilities instead of investing in one system, he said.

“What they use in Hawaii may not be the same thing that they need to use in Alaska or Europe or down here in Arizona,” Monas said. “Whatever the mission set, it can be adapted for those missions.”

The Army has even created an umbrella acronym to refer to the many small, cheap drone systems it is using across units — purpose built, attritable systems, or PBAS.

Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, said the service is taking a bottom-up approach to integrate drones.

“Our soldiers have a really good mindset for innovation,” he said May 19 at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.

To match that, the Army needs agile funding, George said.

“I think we have to buy things that are modular and open system architecture so that you can put an active protection system and change things out,” he said. “We just really have to change how we’re doing business.”

At Fort Carson, the Dragonflies are not just playing around with new capabilities for drones, they’re also opposing other units during field training so the soldiers know what their enemies can do with a drone.

“We’ve been out there in the field teaching people how to react to small [drones],” said 1st Lt. Nicholas McDonald, the Dragonflies platoon leader. “It’s a very evolving concept, but things like passive air defense, concealing your signature, whether that be physical or [electronic], that’s something we’re trying to teach and integrate as well. … If they’re flying drones overhead, how am I reacting?”

Moving forward, the platoon is focused on procuring more components for drones and different aircraft with more capabilities, such as surveillance and enhanced camera operations, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Cullen McCauley, the 6th Air Cavalry Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment operations officer for unmanned systems.

“What we’re primarily focusing on right now … is a smaller aircraft that anybody can take out of their ruck, launch it and see over the next hill. And then, how close do you have to be to what you want to see to use this thing?” he said.

A small Unmanned Aerial System maneuvers through an obstacle course in the “Monster Garage” on April 23, 2025, at Fort Carson, Colo. (William Rogers/U.S. Army)

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · June 2, 2025

16. Peace Through Strength Starts with Reforming the Pentagon

A view from Anduril Industries.

Excerpts:

My company, the defense technology company Anduril, was built for exactly this ethos. Founded in 2017, we operate on an entirely different business model: instead of relying foremost on taxpayer dollars to develop capabilities, we leverage our own private capital dollars upfront to build novel capabilities and provide a finished product manufactured at scale on operationally relevant timelines. Beyond Anduril, an entirely new ecosystem of NTDCs – flush with more than $7 billion in capital raised in just the last two years alone – is prepared to arm warfighters with devastatingly effective tools.

Taxpayers should be encouraged by these efforts which drive towards two key outcomes: fielding the most lethal military in the world and ensuring the best investment of their tax dollars. These bold legislative steps matched with ongoing innovation in the defense industrial base suggest another future is possible – one where capabilities are delivered on time and on budget.

There isn’t much time to get this right. Washington’s focus on cutting inefficiencies at the Pentagon while investing in new military technologies is critical if we are to maintain peace through strength.

Peace Through Strength Starts with Reforming the Pentagon

By Megan Milam

June 03, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/06/03/peace_through_strength_starts_with_reforming_the_pentagon_1114091.html

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman once quipped that the best way to enhance the defense procurement process was to take all its regulations and appeals paperwork and burn it in the Pentagon parking lot. He was onto something.

We can end decades of inefficiencies by simply cutting onerous regulations and updating outdated statutes governing defense procurement. Advances in military technology desperately demand the Pentagon change how it does business. Capitol Hill and the White House are poised to drive those changes.

While everyone recognizes the United States military needs the most advanced technology, it’s less understood that how it buys those weapons is outdated by at least 50 years. Federal acquisition requirements are a thicket of red tape, and congressional oversight of this regulatory mess has become similarly byzantine.

This bureaucracy-driven contracting regime no longer supports the core mission of the Department of Defense: ensuring our military has the tools to deter great power conflict. It shuts the door for opportunities to expand the defense industrial base, which would bring in new capacity and private capital to a sclerotic system.

Despite injecting billions of dollars of private investment into the defense technology ecosystem, non-traditional defense companies (NTDCs) receive a tiny percentage of defense contracts, in part due to the insurmountable structural barriers to entry. The NTDC category isn’t just some fancy moniker. While this term is often used to describe new entrants to the defense industrial base, many of which are leveraging private capital to develop capabilities instead of relying on government funds to do so, its legal definition is convoluted and inconsistent. As a result, for many NTDCs, the regulatory costs of competing for a contract often outweigh the reward of winning it.

While many American companies sit on the sidelines, unwilling or unable to clear the Pentagon’s bureaucratic hurdles to providing advanced defense capabilities, our adversaries are sprinting ahead. Luckily, Capitol Hill and the White House alike recognize the promise of our new defense technology ecosystem and are moving quickly toward solutions that modernize the acquisition process.

Adjustments that focus on acquiring weapons at the speed of technological development are a crucial step forward. These goals can be achieved in part by modernizing statutes governing NTDCs to account for the internal research a given company does, as well as further leveraging use of commercial contracting processes. These alone would spur private investments needed to grow the next generation of defense technology companies, while strengthening competition and expanding capacity within the defense industrial base.

On a bipartisan, bicameral basis across the Armed Services, Appropriations, and Foreign Affairs Committees, Congress is prepared to act on this challenge. Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) recently stated that we need revolutionary changes at the Department of Defense, while House Armed Services Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) has publicly called on the Pentagon to look more like Apple than a 1950s car manufacturer in how it embraces innovation.

Last year, Chairman Wicker released the FoRGED (Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense) Act, which proposes critical reforms to pull defense budgeting and acquisition into the 21^st century. On the other side of the Capitol, leaders of the House Armed Services Committee have indicated they plan to propose their own reforms to these bureaucratic and outdated processes.

Complementing these efforts, the executive branch has already released multiple executive orders, including those focused on leveraging commercial capabilities, accelerating our production of weaponry, and reforming the foreign military sales process. Combined, these actions lay solid – and timely – foundations for the future.

It’s also fitting that as these reform efforts take root, lawmakers are using reconciliation to modernize our military by investing in critical capabilities and supporting the expansion of the defense industrial base. Under the leadership of Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), the House Armed Services Committee recently approved legislation to invest $150 billion in defense priorities through reconciliation. In addition to investments in traditional platforms, like manned aircraft and ships, the defense reconciliation bill proposes investments in newer capabilities like counter-drone technologies and distributed autonomy – both beneath the waves and in the skies. As proposed, this funding represents a singular opportunity to rapidly invest in advanced technologies beyond the traditional budget process – defense technologies that NTDCs are well-positioned to provide.

My company, the defense technology company Anduril, was built for exactly this ethos. Founded in 2017, we operate on an entirely different business model: instead of relying foremost on taxpayer dollars to develop capabilities, we leverage our own private capital dollars upfront to build novel capabilities and provide a finished product manufactured at scale on operationally relevant timelines. Beyond Anduril, an entirely new ecosystem of NTDCs – flush with more than $7 billion in capital raised in just the last two years alone – is prepared to arm warfighters with devastatingly effective tools.

Taxpayers should be encouraged by these efforts which drive towards two key outcomes: fielding the most lethal military in the world and ensuring the best investment of their tax dollars. These bold legislative steps matched with ongoing innovation in the defense industrial base suggest another future is possible – one where capabilities are delivered on time and on budget.

There isn’t much time to get this right. Washington’s focus on cutting inefficiencies at the Pentagon while investing in new military technologies is critical if we are to maintain peace through strength.

Megan Milam is the Senior Vice President for Government Relations at Anduril Industries.

17. Cutting commands is just the start for broken military system

Excerpts:

The military’s failures stem from a personnel system that fuels careerism, indulges the military-industrial complex, and endangers troops. Historical missteps in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan underscore the cost of this dysfunction.

With a new DoD leadership and public support for reform, the April 30, 2025, memo’s call to cut waste and prioritize effectiveness aligns with this blueprint. By dismantling the industrial-age personnel system, the Pentagon can create a military that values ethics, rewards merit, ensures transparency, and eliminates bloat — reducing the impulse to engage in endless wars and protecting servicemembers from needless harm.

Cutting commands is just the start for broken military system

This isn't about politics. Overhauling the promotions and imposing new standards of merit and transparency is something all Americans can embrace.

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Donald Vandergriff · June 2, 2025

This isn't about politics. Overhauling the promotions and imposing new standards of merit and transparency is something all Americans can embrace.

Jun 02, 2025

On April 30, new Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Stuart Scheller, a former Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, announced his intent to push for military reform, echoing the frustrations that led to his 2021 court-martial for publicly criticizing the Afghanistan withdrawal.

His call for accountability resonates with my decades-long work as an advocate for transforming the broken U.S. military personnel and leadership systems and addressing the deep-rooted issues in military culture. These would include bloated bureaucracies, careerism, a lack of ethical leadership, and fossilized military doctrine — all which Scheller’s remarks brought into sharp focus.

I see Scheller’s appointment as a unique opportunity for change, but there is a lot of work to do.

A broken system

The U.S. military’s personnel system fosters a leadership culture that often serves the military-industrial complex’s interests over national security.

The “up or out” promotion model incentivizes officers to prioritize career advancement over mission success, rewarding those who avoid controversy and align with the status quo. This dynamic aligns with defense contractors’ desires for perpetual overseas operations, as prolonged conflicts drive demand for weapons, logistics, and services.

For example, the Pentagon’s reliance on costly, high-tech systems — like the $10 billion Littoral Combat Ship program, plagued by design flaws — reflects a preference for feeding contractor profits over delivering practical warfighting tools.

Similarly, the 20-year Afghanistan campaign, costing $2 trillion, enriched defense firms while strategic missteps prolonged the conflict, exposing troops to unnecessary risks. This culture not only fuels endless wars but also sidelines innovative leaders who challenge wasteful or escalatory policies, leaving servicemembers to bear the human cost.

A reformed military would prioritize mission success and troop safety over bureaucratic inertia and contractor interests. By fostering ethical, merit-based leadership and streamlining operations, the system could avoid reckless engagements and ensure servicemembers are deployed only when necessary.

My reform strategies — tested at West Point, Fort Benning, and with allies like Ukraine — offer a path forward, emphasizing four pillars: ethics, merit, transparency, and efficiency.

Ethics: Fostering moral courage

Adopting Mission Command, a decentralized leadership philosophy, empowers junior leaders to make decisions aligned with clear objectives, fostering moral courage over blind obedience.

Unlike the current zero-defects culture, which punished Scheller’s principled dissent, Mission Command would encourage leaders to prioritize duty and troop welfare, reducing reckless deployments driven by careerist or contractor pressures. For instance, ethical leaders could have questioned the prolonged Afghanistan presence, sparing lives lost in later years.

The U.S. Army War College study by Dr. Leonard Wong and Dr. Stephen J. Gerras, titled "Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession", published in 2015, examines systemic dishonesty within the U.S. Army. The study argues that the overwhelming number of administrative and training requirements imposed on officers makes it impossible to fully comply, leading to routine misrepresentation or "ethical fading."

Merit: Rewarding competence

Replacing the “up or out” system, emplaced in 1917 by the Navy, then by DoD in 1947, with a flatter, merit-based structure would promote leaders based on real-world skills — adaptability, critical thinking, and tactical innovation — rather than time served or connections. This would retain talent and ensure leaders prioritize mission success over appeasing defense contractors or chasing promotions.

Competent leaders who move up though this process are less likely to endorse unnecessary operations that endanger troops.

Transparency: Building trust

Opaque promotion and assignment processes breed distrust, as soldiers see favoritism at play. Clear, open criteria for advancement, tied to mission-relevant metrics, would rebuild confidence. Transparent assessments of force effectiveness could expose strategic errors — like those in Iraq or Afghanistan — before they escalate, preventing servicemembers from being sent into poorly planned conflicts fueled by external interests.

The 2001 Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study emphasized building trust through decentralized decision-making, mission command, and strong leadership ethics. If implemented in the DoD today, it could enhance operational efficiency by empowering lower-level commanders to make rapid, informed decisions, fostering agility in complex battlefields. It would strengthen unit cohesion and morale by prioritizing trust-centric leadership, aligning with modern warfare's demand for adaptability.

Additionally, it could improve public trust in the military by reinforcing ethical standards and transparency, addressing recent declines in confidence (e.g., 45% public trust in 2021 per Reagan Institute Foundation). This approach could also bolster recruitment and retention by cultivating a culture of accountability and professionalism.

Trimming ranks and headquarters

The most recent study addressing negative officer and headquarters bloat in the Department of Defense is the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report titled General and Flag Officers in the U.S. Armed Forces: Background and Considerations for Congress [R44389], updated on March 8, 2024.

This report highlights the increase in senior officer billets (3- and 4-star ranks) relative to total force size, noting that in 2023, there were 169 such billets compared to 155 during the Vietnam era, despite a significantly smaller force.

It cites concerns from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) about the risk of creating a "military force of bureaucrats rather than warriors" and references historical warnings, such as General John Sheehan's 1998 statement about the dangers of an overly bureaucratic military staff. The report also discusses inefficiencies, such as excessive staff layers (up to 30 in some cases), which hinder decision-making and operational effectiveness.

Additionally, a 2023 article from the Epoch Times titled Top-Heavy, Bloated Command Structure Hurts US Military Effectiveness, Costs Billions (published September 26, 2023) draws on similar themes, referencing a 2017 Joint Force Quarterly study on "rank creep." It notes that the current 900 admirals and generals (including 41 four-stars) command a much smaller force than during World War II, leading to inefficiencies and higher costs without enhancing mission success.

The bloated officer corps and sprawling headquarters divert resources from combat units, slowing decisions and insulating leaders from frontline realities. Reducing general officer positions and headquarters staff, as suggested in the April 30, 2025, DoD memo, would empower frontline leaders and focus resources on troop readiness. A leaner structure would deter unnecessary overseas commitments, ensuring service members are deployed only for clear,

achievable objectives.

The opportunity

The military’s failures stem from a personnel system that fuels careerism, indulges the military-industrial complex, and endangers troops. Historical missteps in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan underscore the cost of this dysfunction.

With a new DoD leadership and public support for reform, the April 30, 2025, memo’s call to cut waste and prioritize effectiveness aligns with this blueprint. By dismantling the industrial-age personnel system, the Pentagon can create a military that values ethics, rewards merit, ensures transparency, and eliminates bloat — reducing the impulse to engage in endless wars and protecting servicemembers from needless harm.

Donald Vandergriff

Donald Vandergriff is the Director of Adaptive Leadership Training for Nemertes. He is the author, editor or contributor to 11 books and over a 100 articles that deal with leadership, Maneuver Warfare, and Mission Command.

Top photo credit: NORFOLK, Va. (Apr. 15, 2008) Navy Capt. Patricia Cole, director of the Tailored Maritime Operations Center (T-MOC) at the Naval Network Warfare Command, inspects fellow officers during a command-wide bi-annual uniform inspection. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Corey Lewis File# 080415-N-2147L-001

Jun 02, 2025

18. Pentagon pushes US dronemakers to innovate as quickly as Ukraine does

As the old adage says: cheap, fast, and good. You can only choose two.

Pentagon pushes US dronemakers to innovate as quickly as Ukraine does

DIU’s Project GI initiative aims to embed frontline insights into a perpetual loop of design, testing, and deployment.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

A new Pentagon program is pushing drone makers to continuously improve their systems based on troops’ feedback, hoping to spur innovation that moves as quickly as the war in Ukraine.

Launched on Monday, the Defense Innovation Unit's Project GI initiative aims to embed frontline insights into a perpetual loop of design, testing, and deployment. It’s a deliberate effort to mimic how the Ukrainian military has out-innovated Russian forces by rapidly fielding and iterating drone technology under fire.

The chaotic pace of Russian electronic warfare tactics necessitates that, a factor that is likely to exist as a backdrop to more future conflict, particularly in the Asian-Pacific. It will be open for submissions on a rolling basis through December 31, (which is also a change from the traditional narrow submissions window for competitions.)

The Pentagon has been exploring ways to more rapidly acquire drones since the 2017 operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. While it has made some progress—particularly in the special operations community—those efforts largely reflect streamlined bureaucracy rather than new mechanisms for real-time adaptation and innovation, Trent Emeneker, DIU’s Blue UAS lead, said in an interview.

Rapid equipping may be one of the Pentagon’s stated goals, but “I think the reality is we see zero evidence of that happening,” Emeneker said. Even so-called “rushed efforts often take years to make it through the requirements writing process. ““Then they’ll need to get budgetary approval. That'll be another two to three years,” he said. “And that's the definition of fast within DoD today: five years to even start prototyping—not delivery, but prototype.”

Adversaries large and small—and increasingly aligned with one another—don’t face the same hurdles. Ukraine shows how modern warfare has become a contest to deploy attack drones adapted to fast-evolving enemy countermeasures.

Emeneker, who has spent considerable time communicating with Ukrainian forces and other innovators, said arms makers need far closer and more constant contact—not with contracting officers but with operators on the front lines.

One such company he spoke to is already incorporating feedback from Ukraine’s soldiers into its drone designs. “They have roving teams of engineers that go to their partner units constantly and get feedback within a kilometer or two of the front lines. They live with the guys,” he said.

One of the companies “living” alongside Ukrainians is Shield AI. Co-founder and president Brandon Tseng told Defense One that the company has teams working in Ukraine around the clock, which helped Ukraine adapt last August to intense Russian GPS-jamming that hurt their ability to target Russian missiles. Speaking on podcasts before the 2025 GLOBSEC Forum in Prague, Tseng said Shield AI’s Ukraine team “communicated the problem back to the team in the United States. Software engineers got to work, worked throughout the entire night, tested it the next day at a range in the United States, and then sent it to our forward-deployed engineers who implemented it” with 24 hours, enabling the destruction of Russian missile systems.

“The Russians will start to do things where we have to be very, very proximal to the problem, so that we can implement these quick changes. That's the speed of warfare these days. If you want to be relevant again, you have to be right next to the problem,” he said.

By normalizing that sort of deep, continuous involvement, Emeneker believes, the new program will dramatically reduce the time it takes to build or modify drone prototypes—from years to a couple of months for hardware, and far less for software updates.

“We want to start trying to solve the problem in 24 hours,” he said.

But Emeneker added that producing drones in sufficient quantity depends on reducing U.S. dependence on Chinese control over key components in the drone supply chain—items like magnets for actuators, lenses and other critical parts.

Even if the United States were to fully commit to urgently reshoring drone parts manufacturing, Emeneker estimated it would take more than a year before production could scale to meet potential demand. “You start to see incremental delivery improvements probably in six months. As we get to the nine- to 12-month mark, we start to see measurable improvements,” he said. “As we get to 15 months, we really start that hockey-stick curve of exponential deliveries.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

19. Introducing Cogs of War - War on the Rocks

Introducing Cogs of War - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Ryan Evans · June 3, 2025

It was 1940. War raged across Asia and Europe. America had not yet joined the war, but the country was beginning to prepare for the worst. Franklin D. Roosevelt sat in the White House, speaking to his fellow citizens in one of his famous fireside chats. It is worth quoting at length:

Yes, we are calling upon the resources, the efficiency and the ingenuity of the American manufacturers of war material of all kinds — airplanes and tanks and guns and ships, and all the hundreds of products that go into this material. The Government of the United States itself manufactures few of the implements of war. Private industry will continue to be the source of most of this material, and private industry will have to be speeded up to produce it at the rate and efficiency called for by the needs of the times.

I know that private business cannot be expected to make all of the capital investment required for expansions of plants and factories and personnel which this program calls for at once. It would be unfair to expect industrial corporations or their investors to do this, when there is a chance that a change in international affairs may stop or curtail future orders a year or two hence.

Therefore, the Government of the United States stands ready to advance the necessary money to help provide for the enlargement of factories, the establishment of new plants, the employment of thousands of necessary workers, the development of new sources of supply for the hundreds of raw materials required, the development of quick mass transportation of supplies… Private industry will have the responsibility of providing the best, speediest and most efficient mass production of which it is capable.

Today, as new threats and technological advancements reshape the landscape of national security, the United States once again faces a critical inflection point. Defense technology is the linchpin of American security, and adversaries are advancing rapidly.

Yet, the United States has responded only lethargically, and history punishes the slow.

From industry to private capital to political leaders to public servants toiling in the bureaucracy, our country demands and deserves better. The United States needs a holistic, agile, and better-resourced approach to integrate cutting-edge technology across all facets of defense, while modernizing legacy systems for adaptability in future conflicts.

The conversation surrounding defense technology today often skims the surface, dominated by newsletter roundups and LinkedIn-style posts more concerned with self-congratulatory vibes than asking hard questions. It’s time for that to change. Cogs of War is our answer — a commitment to do what War on the Rocks does best: leverage deep expertise and thought leadership to foster the most substantive, impactful conversation possible.

Cogs of War will provide substantive, cutting-edge analysis on defense tech and the defense industrial base in a variety of formats, including:

Podcast episodes on a new, dedicated channel (subscribe today)
Opinion pieces from renowned experts
Interviews with defense leaders, technologists, investors, and policymakers
In-depth case studies highlighting successes and failures in defense innovation
Timely coverage of legislative and regulatory developments
Creative visuals, including infographics, animations, and interactive content

To realize this ambitious vision, we are proud to partner with Booz Allen Hamilton. Their generous support provides the essential resources for this initiative, and their expertise will be invaluable as we collaborate to uncover critical, often underexplored, topics in defense technology and industry. We are united by a shared conviction: America’s defense industry demands urgent renewal, and its military technology must maintain an unparalleled edge over global rivals.

Achieving this requires a far broader and more dynamic public debate. We must bridge the gaps, engaging servicemembers, civil servants, technologists, builders, investors, and companies — from agile start-ups to established primes — who are forging our future capabilities.

However, it is essential to underscore that War on the Rocks retains ultimate editorial control. Indeed, this independence is a key priority for Booz Allen as well. This ensures that all content maintains integrity, independence, and credibility — hallmarks of War on the Rocks’ commitment to rigorous and impartial analysis.

Cogs of War needs your voice, your expertise, and your ideas. We invite you to contribute through our dedicated submissions page and join this vital dialogue.

Just as in 1940, America stands at a critical juncture, facing a future where national security is inextricably linked to technological prowess, talent, and industrial capacity. The “Cogs of War” today are not merely the steel gears of industry Roosevelt invoked — they are the lines of code, the advanced materials, the quantum sensors, and the innovative minds driving a new era of defense. The challenge is immense, the adversaries are advancing, and the stakes could not be higher. Join us at Cogs of War as we delve into the complexities, champion the innovations, and foster the collaboration needed to secure not just a competitive edge but a safer and more prosperous future.

Ryan Evans is the founder of War on the Rocks.

warontherocks.com · by Ryan Evans · June 3, 2025

20. How We Fight: Manning, Training, and Equipping for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle

Conclusion:

Two things can be true at the same time. It is an undeniable fact that the US Army is applying resources, identifying lessons learned, and devoting leadership attention to adapt faster than ever before using transformation in contact. Yet, equally true, that is still not enough. As the war in Ukraine speeds the reconnaissance-strike regime ahead of its maneuver-infiltration counterpart, the US Army cannot afford half measures. It needs to field new organizations, tactics, and equipment, at scale, to win on the modern battlefield. Separate from the decision to make reconnaissance-strike battle the tactical complement to multidomain operations, the Army can, and should, use the transformation in contact framework to apply the recommendations described above to meet clear and urgent operational needs. But adopting reconnaissance-strike battle provides the doctrinal impetus to do so.

How We Fight: Manning, Training, and Equipping for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle - Modern War Institute

Zackery Spear and Michael Culler | 06.03.25

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zackery Spear · June 3, 2025

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A week ago, we published an article in which we proposed a tactical-level complement to the Army’s operating concept, multidomain operations. We called it reconnaissance-strike battle, and argued that it would provide clarity to tactical leaders on objectives and transformation priorities, as well as a framework to organize their combat power for success on the modern battlefield. It rests on four core imperatives:

Be a hard target first.
The reconnaissance-strike complex is the first objective.
The side that owns the reconnaissance-strike complex duel wins.
Massing capability must come before massing maneuver.

However, changing doctrine is not enough. Fighting reconnaissance-strike battle necessitates change at the pace of war. Specifically, there is a vital need for fundamental and concrete adjustments to the way the US Army mans, trains, and equips in order to implement reconnaissance-strike battle. Fortunately, these changes would also support the intent already described by Army senior leaders as the basis for the Army’s transformation initiative, including transformation in contact.

Manning for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle

Reconnaissance-strike battle’s emphasis on reconnaissance-strike complexes as the first objective provides clear priorities for tactical leaders in developing organizations and capabilities for modern war. As Brett Friedman notes in a 2024 Journal of Advanced Military Studies article, “Older tactics and the traditional platforms of the armor-infiltration regime are not obsolete, but the reconnaissance-strike regime offers additional tactical possibilities that effective military forces will exploit. . . . Services must design their forces for the tactical regime they are in.”

With this imperative in mind, the US Army should reconsider its deactivation of cavalry squadrons inside its infantry divisions. While handcuffed by congressional force caps, transformation in contact provides the Army an opportunity to repurpose cavalry squadron manpower and skillsets for reconnaissance-strike squadrons in each infantry brigade, capable of deploying tactical reconnaissance-strike complexes at scale. These squadrons would address several key requirements imposed by the conditions of the modern battlefield.

First, reconnaissance-strike battle is underpinned by mature reconnaissance-strike complexes at echelon. As researchers at the Royal United Services Institute described in a study on using drones to enable mass precision strike, these complexes require not only physical platforms, but also “launch crews, command links, planning tools, intelligence support and design teams” to enable a system that “offers a commander the ability to deliver mass precision effects.” This requires a dedicated formation that can focus on this effort, mature it rapidly, train it deeply, and rehearse it as an integral part of every combined arms operation.

Second, as the mass precision strike report assessed, an effective tactical reconnaissance-strike complex needs a unit of action that can generate twenty-four strike drones simultaneously. Using average tactical drone sizes, the report continued, a mixed group of six drones could be employed from a single tactical utility vehicle and four such vehicles, each with three crewmembers—a driver, a communicator, and an operator (we suggest adding a munitions engineer to bring the crew to four)—could make up a platoon. Operating in two-vehicle sections would enable offset launch and recovery, offset antennae for communications, and multivector attacks. Three platoons in a reconnaissance-strike troop would then provide necessary redundancy for repeat attacks and the independence and modularity necessary to support a maneuver unit.

Finally, the report’s authors conclude, the need for deep intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) requires three drones to maintain a single orbit—one in flight, one being recovered, and one being prepared for launch. Given current tactical fixed-wing ISR drone sizes, three platforms, along with necessary command-and-control equipment, could be carried in two vehicles. The authors recommend a crew of three per vehicle—a mechanic who drives the vehicle, along with a communicator and sensor operator and a pilot (here, too, we recommend an additional crewmember, in this case a navigator). Six vehicle pairs would then allow a deep reconnaissance troop to generate three sustained orbits—or, when ISR capability must be surged, six simultaneous orbits during twenty-four crew operations—for the reconnaissance-strike squadron.

Recent organizational evolution in the Army has been a step in the right direction, particularly the establishment of multifunctional reconnaissance companies. But it is not enough. The success of these new companies—employed by 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Infantry Division and 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division during combat training center rotations—is providing a false sense of security. Their dominant focus on reconnaissance (with no organic drone strike capability), primarily infantry-centric role, and limited assets—as well as the limited opposition they faced at combat training centers from electromagnetic interference or a robust enemy tactical reconnaissance-strike complex—combine to invite false conclusions about the scope of further change required. In its war against Russia, Ukraine employs multiple drone battalions, some specially focused on long-range strikes, while also using assault drone companies that are a part of almost every fighting brigade. Personnel in these units undergo substantial training—one Ukrainian soldier said that seventy hours in a simulator and another seventy flying an actual drone are required. Moreover, these units are further supported by brigade-level drone workshops. In contrast, the multifunctional reconnaissance companies combine many of the right capabilities, but not in the quantity, or with the dedicated mission, to enable success in a tactical reconnaissance-strike complex duel. They also lack the structure to invest in training the large numbers of quality drone pilots that Ukraine’s experience and independent think tank analysis both suggest are necessary.

Ultimately, the US Army has demonstrated unprecedented organizational flexibility by embracing its transformation in contact initiative. It provides an in-stride method of adopting organizational change that could, for example, immediately apply an emerging reconnaissance-strike battle concept to create reconnaissance-strike squadrons out of existing reconnaissance and security formations—formations that are purpose-built to adapt to, and own, this dedicated mission set. As shown in Ukraine and the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, continuing to build massed combat power capability in infantry and armor formations without the requisite support of a robust tactical reconnaissance-strike complex invites their destruction before they can be employed to effect.

Training for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle

Reconnaissance-strike battle is easy to visualize, naturally calling to mind the necessary components of reconnaissance, fires, and maneuver that leaders need to sequence. Its focus on reconnaissance-strike tactics enables leaders to control the tempo of an engagement, isolate, suppress, and maneuver on the enemy, and win. But to employ it, units must be able to train on it. This requires two overarching things. First, Training and Doctrine Command should work with US Army Installation Management Command, US Army Forces Command, and the Federal Aviation Administration to unburden brigades and divisions by providing on-call or persistent airspace over every maneuver brigade footprint and all training areas. Units are currently limited across their installations, and exceptions to policy have to be championed from the brigade level. Reconnaissance-strike battle requires a whole-of-Army approach to enable these units to freely train drone operators, both at their operating facilities and in every field training exercise.

Second, combat training centers need to provide an opposing force equipped with a tactical reconnaissance-strike complex to teach maneuver brigades how to fight reconnaissance-strike battle. Army and Marine authors have both highlighted the need to adopt a new offensive paradigm acknowledging the reconnaissance-strike regime. Combat training centers are the premier training ground for Army tactical units. The Army needs to resource and train them to provide a modern tactical reconnaissance-strike complex for the opposing force that generates lessons learned from catastrophic failure and develops the tactics required to win against our modernizing adversaries. Maneuver is not dead; we just need a tactical-reconnaissance-strike complex to enable it.

Fundamentally, training for reconnaissance-strike battle should be guided by a simple adage: Train what kills. Units need large-scale, protected, and continuous training for a dedicated force in reconnaissance-strike drone tactics and operations. This should include training expertise in:

Small drone ISR operations, including finding, fixing, tracking, and targeting at scale, inclusive of targeting data relay through the kill chain.
Small drone dropper/bomber precision-strike operations against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, utility vehicles, artillery, other equipment, and personnel from one hundred meters of altitude.
Remote, first-person-view (FPV) precision-strike operations against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, utility vehicles, artillery, other equipment, personnel, and other drones.
Wire-guided FPV precision-strike operations against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, utility vehicles, artillery, other equipment, and personnel.
Medium and heavy dropper/bomber precision-strike operations against logistics targets, other equipment, and personnel from one hundred meters of altitude.
Fixed-wing ISR operations, including finding, fixing, tracking, and targeting at scale, inclusive of data relay through the kill chain.
Employment of loitering munitions for precision-strike operations against antiaccess and area-denial capabilities, artillery, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, utility vehicles, and other equipment.
The use of decoy drones to support and enable attack drones to reach their targets.
The use of electronic warfare and cyber tools to find enemy drone operators and their command-and-control equipment for drone-based precision strikes that save artillery shells.
The use of electronic warfare and cyber tools to neutralize enemy drones and air defense capabilities.
The use of radar to provide altitude data in support of FPV operations to counter enemy drone threats.
The use of protective cages to protect equipment from FPV strikes.
Digging in, dispersion, deception, and disguise, because survivability is lethality.
The deployment of resilient mobile networks including low-visibility satellite terminals, mobile cell towers, and mesh networks to directly link sensors and shooters for rapid closing of kill chains.

Equipping for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle

The US Army needs more quantity, more diversity, faster acquisition, and fewer constraints in building its tactical reconnaissance-strike complex capabilities. Chief among the Army’s needs are two things. First, the service must have many more drones, of many types. It needs to further accelerate drone purchases and reduce bureaucratic barriers to unit purchases, enabling tactical units to build the constellation of drones, at scale, required for modern warfare. The Royal United Services Institute report discussed above recommends five UAV classes:

Situational awareness platforms optimized for tactical reconnaissance
Tactical strike drones
ISR drones able to penetrate into operational depth
Operational strike drones
Platform-launched effects designed specifically to synchronize with and enable other weapons systems

Separately, a comprehensive report published last year by CNAS regarding drones in a Taiwan scenario recommends “a diverse fleet of aerial drones that includes a mix of higher-end and cheaper systems.” Along with acquiring good enough long-range drones for target acquisition and strikes, the United States should maintain a smaller fleet of stealthy drones capable of conducting surveillance in contested airspace and providing targeting data for standoff missile attacks. Finally, current information from Ukraine identifies the need for:

Quadcopters like DJI Mavics for frontline ISR and use as light bombers.
Remote-controlled FPV drones for local precision strike and as interceptors against enemy drones.
Wire-guided FPV drones for electronic warfare–proof precision strike.
Fixed-wing drones and large quadcopters and hexacopters as heavy dropper/bomber drones (e.g., DJI’s Mavic 3 and Matrice 300 RTK, Ukraine’s Punisher).
Fixed-wing drones for reconnaissance and as loitering munitions (e.g., Ukrspecsystems SHARK, Anduril Altius 600, AeroVironment Switchblade 600, RAM-2X).

Beyond these categories of drones, several other imperatives stand out. First, current US drones are too expensive to use at scale, fail to operate in the dense electromagnetic noise, and rely too much on GPS. The Army should look to non-US drones until these shortcomings are improved. Second, sufficient magazine depth is vital. Every month, Ukraine is losing ten to twenty thousand drones, necessitating $60 million per month for drone purchases by its frontline brigades. In contrast, the US Army has provided 360 drones to its three transformation in contact brigades, while promising “thousands” more, a fraction of the operational need. Third, the Army needs virtual training capability. The immediate purchase of virtual reality goggles built to train drone pilots will enable tactical units to train operators faster, without airspace limitation, and with less risk to equipment. Fourth, and most fundamentally, speed is essential. While the current transformation in contact and Replicator initiatives are a leap ahead, the US Army needs to move even faster to establish the production, acquisition, and maintenance necessary to support the employment and reconstitution of drones required for reconnaissance-strike battle.

And, of course, along with this diverse array of platforms, networks to facilitate the rapid acquisition, analysis, dissemination, and exploitation of information are an operational necessity. The US Army’s integrated tactical network is already driving toward the connectivity required to support disaggregated kill chains. However, current lessons provide additional emphasis on capabilities required to excel in reconnaissance-strike battle: Drones need to link directly to artillery units. ISR drones need to feed directly to strike drones. Drones must tie directly into software-based battle networks. Soldiers on the front line must have access to targeting data. And networks need to be unburdened from overclassification to allow networked precision strike at the tactical edge.

Two things can be true at the same time. It is an undeniable fact that the US Army is applying resources, identifying lessons learned, and devoting leadership attention to adapt faster than ever before using transformation in contact. Yet, equally true, that is still not enough. As the war in Ukraine speeds the reconnaissance-strike regime ahead of its maneuver-infiltration counterpart, the US Army cannot afford half measures. It needs to field new organizations, tactics, and equipment, at scale, to win on the modern battlefield. Separate from the decision to make reconnaissance-strike battle the tactical complement to multidomain operations, the Army can, and should, use the transformation in contact framework to apply the recommendations described above to meet clear and urgent operational needs. But adopting reconnaissance-strike battle provides the doctrinal impetus to do so.

Major Zackery Spear is an infantry officer currently serving in a joint assignment at US Indo-Pacific Command. He has deployed with the 75th Ranger Regiment in support of operations in Afghanistan and previously served as the brigade operations officer for 2nd Mobile Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, planning for and initiating the brigade’s transformation in contact.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Culler is an armor officer currently serving in a joint assignment at US Indo-Pacific Command. He has previously served in the 25th Infantry Division as the 3rd Brigade Combat Team executive officer and at the National Training Center as an OC/T and rotational planner. He has been deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

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

Image credit: Elena Baladelli, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zackery Spear · June 3, 2025

21. Putin’s sickening statistic: 1m Russian casualties in Ukraine

"Deathonomics"

Graphics at the link. A fascinating comparison of statistics from various wars and nations.

International | Deathonomics

Putin’s sickening statistic: 1m Russian casualties in Ukraine

His regime uses payouts to salve Russian families’ grief

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/06/02/putins-sickening-statistic-1m-russian-casualties-in-ukraine

Photograph: Reuters

Jun 2nd 2025

UNE IS turning into an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces. It started with a daring Ukrainian drone attack on airfields stretching from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north that Ukraine claims destroyed 41 large planes, or about one-third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But another, more momentous, statistic looms. Before the month ends Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000 soldiers killed or injured per day.

Chart: The Economist

Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought to also pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members: how can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition?

Russia’s human-wave attacks are “largely useless, grinding stuff” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist. “But there are no signs of exhaustion, they are just carrying on.”

The grim tally of losses comes from figures compiled by the Ukrainian general staff, leaving it open to question. But the number is not far out of line with estimates by Western intelligence services.

It also roughly tallies with attempts by Russian independent media, such as Meduza and Mediazona, to count the bodies. By this time last year, Meduza reckoned that between 106,000-140,000 Russian soldiers had died. Much of their analysis was based on inheritance records and obituaries on social media and in other outlets.

An estimate of excess mortality among Russian men based on probate records gave a figure of 165,000 by the end of 2024 with 90,000 having been added in the previous six months. Given the intensity of Russian operations for much of the past year it would not be hard to reach a figure of about 250,000 killed by now. The ratio of severely wounded to killed is thought to be about four to one, a reflection both of the severity of injuries in Ukraine and the low priority Russia gives to medical evacuation and the prompt field hospital treatment that saves lives.

Another reason to attach relative fidelity to the casualty figures is that, to an unusual degree, they are attributable to those sustained by soldiers in action. In most wars, a high proportion of deaths, even among combatants, are the result of disease, famine, accidents and deliberate persecution of people in occupied territories, which inherently defy the best attempts at statistical accuracy.

A good example is the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003. By far the most lethal conflict of the 21st century, it is believed to have been responsible for 5.4m deaths, most of which were from disease and hunger. In the second world war, out of the nearly 27m Soviet citizens who died, some 6.3m were killed in action or died from their wounds.

Ukraine does not publish its own combat losses in any detail. However, in December last year, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that 43,000 have been killed and 370,000 wounded since the invasion. That is probably an underestimate. But the relatively smaller number of Ukrainian deaths compared with their enemy reflects a number of different factors.

Apart from its ill-fated counter-offensive two years ago, Ukraine has been fighting a largely defensive war. Advances in drone technology have thus far favoured defence over offence. Racing drones packed with explosives, known as First Person View (FPV) drones, that are flown into tanks or soldiers, are playing a similar role to the machinegun in the first world war. That innovation made infantry attacks so costly that neither side could break the stalemate of trench warfare until the development of new tactics and the invention of tanks. FPV drones have made these vulnerable, too. Russia has lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000 armoured infantry vehicles since the war began. Now it depends largely on infantry attacks by small groups of men, sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorcycles.

Photograph: Nicole Tung/The New York Times/ Redux /Eyevine

Another reason why Russia’s casualties are much higher than Ukraine’s is that the latter is a democracy and has only about a quarter as many people to draw upon. Thus it has to be seen to be concerned for the welfare of its troops. Its ratio of wounded to killed is thought to be about eight to one. When Ukraine’s army has appeared to be indifferent to its troops, its struggles with mobilisation have intensified.

Chart: The Economist

Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses (it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines). To put them into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war. They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today. The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses are also about ten times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president has choices. Yet he appears to be under little domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost most of the mainly professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years ago, the Kremlin has come up with an almost entirely novel way of replenishing manpower at the front without risking social destabilisation. It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by convincing most Russians that they are engaged in a war against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death, with increasingly lavish contracts for those willing to sign up.

Photograph: Nanna Heitmann/New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

“Putin believes that the Afghan War is one of the main reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics.’”

The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their thirties and forties, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist who is now a researcher at Oxford University, the signing on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), while the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.

According to a survey last October by the Levada Centre, an independent polling organisation, 40% of Russians would approve of a family member or close friend signing up. Reporting by another journalist, Olesya Gerasimenko, from a recruiting centre in Moscow last summer found that many middle-aged fathers were accompanied by their wives and children when they came to sign on, determined to improve their family’s fortunes. Mr Golts says that the impact can be seen in small towns across Russia where recruitment has been most brisk. New houses are being built, smarter cars are turning up on the streets, and nail bars and gyms are opening.

For now, believes Ms Racheva, Russian society accepts that the system is an alternative to full mobilisation. There is 88% approval of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice … and allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and injuries they endure,” Ms Racheva wrote. In other words, the contract is not just between the soldier and the state. The question which nobody can answer is how long that contract will hold. ■

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22. Ukraine Hits Crimean Bridge for the Third Time—This Time Underwater

Ukraine has full spectrum intelligence and special operations services.

Ukraine Hits Crimean Bridge for the Third Time—This Time Underwater

united24media.com · by Vlad Litnarovych

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) has successfully carried out a months-long covert operation that struck the Crimean Bridge for a third time—this time with a precision underwater explosion.

At 4:44 a.m., the first blast rocked the bridge, severely damaging underwater support pillars with an estimated 1,100 kg of explosives in TNT equivalent, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials. No civilian casualties were reported, SBU reported on July 3.

The operation, planned and executed in total secrecy, targeted the illegal structure’s underwater foundations, rendering the bridge—used by Russia as a vital military logistics route—in a critically damaged state.

Lieutenant General Vasyl Maliuk, head of the SBU, personally oversaw the operation from start to finish.

American Democracy Versus Chinese Governance: The Ultimate Contest

U.S. democracy is viewed as failing, while Chinese governance is seen as succeeding. And while Trump’s presidency may be a symptom of that trend, it’s not the cause.

https://magazine.thediplomat.com/2025-06/american-democracy-versus-chinese-governance-the-ultimate-contest

By Kishore Mahbubani

The largest geopolitical contest ever seen in human history – the China-U.S. contest – will accelerate and gain momentum in the coming decades. As I documented in my book “Has China Won?” this contest is driven by deep structural forces. American and Chinese presidents may come and go, but the contest will continue – of this, there’s no doubt.

What is doubtful is who will win: China or the United States?

There’s also no doubt about the critical factor that will determine the outcome of this contest. This was best spelled out by George Kennan way back in 1947 when he was advising his fellow Americans what would ultimately determine the outcome of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. He said that for the U.S. to succeed, it was vital for Americans to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.”

In the end, Kennan proved to be remarkably prescient. The United States won the Cold War against the Soviet Union not because of its military arsenal, but because U.S. society was undoubtedly more vibrant than Soviet society. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s GDP, even at its peak, never exceeded 40 to 50 percent of U.S. GDP. Even more critically, the American people saw a greater improvement in their standard of living than their Soviet counterparts did. Given this stunning success in the Cold War, many Americans, including thoughtful American commentators, assume that the United States will also naturally succeed in the contest against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This conventional wisdom in leading American minds is based on three fundamental assumptions, all of which need to be reconsidered. The first is that U.S. democracy is in a healthy state and is inherently superior to any non-democratic system like China's. The second is that the CCP cannot possibly create a good society with “spiritual vitality” in China. The third is that the rest of the world, which makes up around 80 percent of the world’s population, will naturally admire the U.S. system over the Chinese system.

American Democracy

After the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 and his track record in the early months of his presidency in 2025, many American liberals have begun to worry about the state of U.S. democracy. Here’s what a few leading voices have said.

Tom Friedman wrote in July 2024, before Trump was re-elected, much less in office: “Just because we managed to barely survive the Trump stress test to our constitutional order once – not without some serious damage – does not mean our democracy can survive another four Trump years with his now Supreme Court-fortified sense of impunity.” David Ignatius argued in March 2025, “There is a sickening symmetry to President Donald Trump’s actions: While undermining U.S. democracy at home, he is also trying to end U.S. government support for democracy abroad.” Paul Krugman said in February 2025 that he was worried “that 2024 may have been our last real election... maybe historians will look back and say that American democracy ended in January 2025.”

Yet even though the Trump presidency has raised some challenges, U.S. democracy was being severely challenged long before Trump was elected, much less re-elected. Indeed, many leading American voices, including Paul Volcker, Joseph Stiglitz, and Martin Wolf, had warned years ago that the United States had functionally become a plutocracy. By definition, a plutocracy is the opposite of a democracy, as it serves to improve the lives of a tiny minority of Americans and not the majority.

The evidence is clear that this has happened. An important paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman from 2018 demonstrated how the stagnation of the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population “contrasts sharply with the upsurge of income” of the top 1 percent. For the bottom 50 percent of Americans, their share of pre-tax income declined from about 21 percent of the national total to 13 percent from 1970 to 2014, while the share of income of the top 1 percent increased from 9 percent to 20 percent in the same period. In other words, 1 percent of Americans now earn more than half of the country put together – by a wide margin.

In addition, the share of household wealth held by the top 0.1 percent went from 8.9 percent to 13.6 percent, while the share held by the bottom 50 percent went down from 3.8 percent to 2.5 percent. You can see, therefore, that the United States’ people are not benefiting from democracy.

The adverse economic trends for the majority of Americans have in turn led to deteriorating social conditions for the American people. Quite shockingly, in June 2024 conservative British-American commentator Niall Ferguson pointed out that many social indicators in the United States today mirror those of the Soviet Union, including severe declines in life expectancy and public confidence in institutions. “Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway,” Ferguson lamented.

He backed this claim with sobering figures:

“The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries... between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths – again of working-age Americans – over the same period... This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.”

Ferguson added, “In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

The big question is this: how did a “democratic” American political system allow such a deterioration of the social condition of the masses? Two Princeton University economists, Martin Giles and Benjamin Page, have provided an answer. They studied the relative influence that average Americans have had on public policy outcomes compared to economic elites. Their conclusions are depressing:

“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy… Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of ‘affluent’ citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do… In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”

The most critical statement made by Giles and Page is worth repeating: “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule.”

When the majority does not rule, the U.S. political system has failed to function as a democracy. It has become a functional plutocracy. As Trump himself put it in 2015, “I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they [politicians] call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

This clear statement by Trump would seem to imply that he is aware that the system is broken and that something should be done about it. However, Trump won’t support the obvious solution – to curb the power of the rich plutocrats – since he’s part of that class himself. Instead, Trump is imposing tariffs on other countries with the goal of shifting manufacturing back to the United States. This, he believes, would create jobs to help out the working classes, especially the White working classes.

Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to work. Tariffs alone won’t bring back manufacturing. They will have to be combined with a comprehensive national industrial policy that provides incentives for manufacturing in the U.S. as well as generous worker retraining programs. Unfortunately, no such industrial policy is in the works. Most economists thus agree that Trump’s tariffs won’t bring jobs back to the United States. They will neither help the working classes nor overcome the challenge of eradicating plutocracy.

All this confirms the wisdom of David Brooks’ observation that Donald Trump “is the wrong answer to the right question.”

Until the fundamental challenge of overturning this functional plutocracy has been overcome, the United States will face a major disadvantage in the competition with China. As David Ignatius argued in 2022, “If we can’t get our act together to make decisions and keep the country solid and cohesive, no way we’re going to be able to compete with the Chinese.”

The Chinese Governance System

In contrast to the deteriorating social conditions of the American masses, the Chinese people have seen massive improvements in their social conditions in the four decades since the Four Modernizations were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. According to World Bank data, from 1979 to 2022, China’s life expectancy at birth increased from 64 to 79, while infant mortality dropped from 49 to 5 per 1,000 live births. GDP per capita (in current U.S. dollars) skyrocketed from $184 to over $12,600. The percentage of the Chinese population living at the poverty line of $2.15 a day was 72 percent in 1990; by 2017, it had dropped to 0 percent. The adult literacy rate was just 66 percent in 1982; by 2020, it was 97 percent.

Indeed, several Western commentators have acknowledged that the Chinese people have made extraordinary progress in recent decades. In an October 2024 article in International Security assessing China’s great power status, Professor Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College wrote, “China on most dimensions is not only a great power but a superpower.” Its gains were perhaps most impressive on the economic front:

“China’s economic growth since the 1980s has shocked the world. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated economic reforms in 1979 and improved its political relations with the West, the economy grew at about 10 percent per year until 2018. China’s economy doubled in size every eight years during the 1979–2018 period. As a result, the size of China’s economy has overtaken that of the U.S. economy (measured in GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity, which accounts for lower prices in China). In nominal or market terms, China has the world’s second-largest GDP after the United States… China’s economic capabilities already well exceed not only the median but the normal range for a great power.”

Lind also argued that China has become one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries; has reached great power status in terms of military capabilities; and has grown its international status and influence significantly.

Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution wrote, “China’s economic impact is powerful. But so too is its example. The country has become a showcase of what open markets can achieve. It is reinvigorating the debate on how trade can reduce global poverty.”

Ajay Banga, head of the World Bank, also outlined China’s extraordinary social progress over the past few decades:

“In 1978, 770 million people in China lived on the razor’s edge of extreme poverty. Nearly every single person – 98 percent – in the rural countryside were below the poverty line. But, the same year, China launched a determined strategy to embrace difficult reforms that fundamentally changed its development trajectory... In the decades that followed, China's workforce grew by two-thirds, creating 315 million jobs – more than 8 million per year for 38 years straight. This explosive job growth coincided with the country’s fastest period of poverty reduction in history. China’s success was so significant it was responsible for cutting the global poverty rate from 44 percent to nine.”

In Western eyes, all these improvements in the economic and social conditions of the Chinese people can’t make up for the lack of political freedom. It’s true that the Chinese don’t have the ability to vote for or vote against the Chinese government. However, they do have the freedom to vote with their feet. If they feel oppressed, they are generally free to leave China and migrate to other countries.

To prevent this, the former Soviet Union prevented its citizens from traveling freely overseas as “tourists.” By contrast, China allows its people to do so. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), in 2019, the last year before COVID-19 struck, Chinese households made 168 million cross-border trips. Chinese traveled overseas freely and returned home freely.

In short, there are many signs that most Chinese people can live with the constrained political system they have.

It’s true that many Chinese still choose to migrate overseas, including to the United States. Yet, what used to be a one-way street of human migration to the U.S. has become a two-way street of migration. What’s truly surprising is that many leading Chinese scholars in the United States, including many who had long-term tenure positions in leading Ivy League universities, have chosen to return home to China. They include nuclear physicist Liu Chang from Princeton, physicist Gao Huajian who previously taught at Stanford, and mathematician Sun Song from the University of California, Berkeley.

Renowned Chinese-American mathematician Yau Shing-Tung, who retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University, argued, “This exodus is unfortunate for the U.S. as it could diminish its research capabilities. For China, the return of these scientists means it is gaining top talent, but it also results in weakened ties with the U.S. and a loss of first-hand knowledge of advanced technologies.”

And the cause is clear: not only China’s progress, but regression in the United States. As the South China Morning Post reported, “In a survey of 1,300 US-based scientists of Chinese descent conducted between late 2021 and early 2022, 72 percent of respondents said they did not feel safe as academic researchers. And 61 percent said they had thought about leaving the United States for either Asian or non-Asian countries.”

Finally, when foreign observers try to benchmark the Chinese political system, they shouldn’t compare it just with foreign systems. They should benchmark it against its predecessors. Here, one fact is undeniable. In terms of improving living standards, the Chinese people have enjoyed the best 40 years in 4,000 years of Chinese history. This also explains the great pride many Chinese feel, contributing to the “spiritual vitality” of Chinese society.

Is America or China More Admired by the World?

Most Americans assume that in global public opinion, the United States must naturally be a more admired nation than China since it is democratic, and China is run by a communist party. Indeed, when U.S. politicians pour scorn on China and its political system, they assume that these views must be shared by the rest of the world.

For example, Marco Rubio (then a senator, now the U.S. secretary of state) wrote in 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, “If we rise to the occasion, the Chinese Communist Party will surely meet its just end in time, and July 1 will then be observed as a day of mourning in a free, democratic China. Until that day arrives, let us take a moment to reflect on, and pray for, the brave Chinese – as well as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians – who have suffered under the CCP.”

Unlike Rubio, most foreign visitors to China do not see the Chinese people suffering. They see them thriving.

There are two big facts about our world that many Americans aren’t aware of. First, only 12 percent of the world’s population lives in the West; 88 percent lives outside the West. Broadly speaking, they are described as the “Global South.” The second fact is that the Global South doesn’t share the black and white attitudes of Western countries when passing judgements on democratic versus autocratic states. They have a more sophisticated understanding of the relative merits of U.S. and Chinese societies.

This sophistication is a result of greater access to information. One of the biggest transformations that has taken place in the human condition has happened as a result of the share of the world population connected to the internet skyrocketing from 0.05 percent in 1990 (when the Cold War ended) to 68 percent in 2024. Scenes of the daily lives of U.S. and Chinese people can now be seen in great detail by the vast majority of the world’s population. As a result, the long-term trend has been one of declining respect for the United States and rising respect for China.

It’s important to emphasize here that this trend was well underway before Trump was re-elected in November 2024. According to a global survey conducted by Pew Research across 16 countries in 2021, 80 percent of respondents no longer believe that the U.S. is a “good model for democracy.” On the other hand, a Pew Research survey in 2023 revealed that in the Global South, a substantial majority viewed China positively. In Nigeria and Kenya, for instance, 80 percent and 72 percent of the survey respondents, respectively, had positive views of China. This growth in respect for China in the Global South has been attributed to China’s successful infrastructure developments in several countries, as well as its provision of millions of doses of vaccines during COVID-19 to developing nations – in stark contrast with the West’s vaccine protectionism.

Many Americans, especially liberal Americans, would like to believe that the declining global respect for the United States is a temporary Trump-induced condition, which will be rectified when Americans elects its next Barack Obama. They should carefully re-examine this confident belief. At the end of the day, the intelligence of the Global South should not be underestimated. They are aware that the United States had evolved into a plutocracy long before Trump was elected and re-elected. They are also aware that in terms of assisting poor developing countries, especially in Africa, the United States has been pulling back, while China has been stepping up.

For instance, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has pushed back against criticisms of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) being a form of “debt-trap diplomacy,” arguing that “having a road that has problems in terms of financing would be better than having no road at all and no debt.” He added, “For someone to come and complain that you are [taking infrastructure loans] with China when you are not offering any alternative, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Equally importantly, when foreign visitors visit “rich” America and “developing” China, they are struck by the poor state of U.S. infrastructure (such as roads, railways, bridges, airports, and urban centers) compared to China’s infrastructure. Yet, this stark contrast in physical infrastructure represents only the tip of the iceberg. It’s a result of the declining competence in governance in the United States and the rising competence in governance in China. Hence, if George Kennan were alive today and if he were to visit the leading Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, he would be amazed by the contrast with their respective American counterparts like Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

There’s no question that the United States can bounce back from its present travails. It’s always a mistake to underestimate the great U.S. society. Yet, until that happens, the broad trend line is clear: greater global respect for China and declining global respect for America. U.S. democracy is viewed as failing, while Chinese governance is seen as succeeding. And while Trump’s presidency may be a symptom of that trend, it’s not the cause.

The Authors

Kishore Mahbubani, a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, is the author of “Has China Won?”

24. How Chinese drones could defeat America

It seems ironic that we may be cutting ourselves off at the strategic national security knees in terms of battery technology, etc. because of the politicization of climate change.

Conclusion:

In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the US may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

How Chinese drones could defeat America

China war win coming unless US wakes up to the military importance of batteries, magnets and injection molding in making drones

asiatimes.com · by Noah Smith

Let me tell you a story about World War II. In 1940, before the entry of the US and the USSR into the war, Britain was fighting alone against Germany and Italy. Despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned, the British managed to pull off a spectacular naval victory, using innovative new technology.

They sent the HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, to attack the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto. The British aircraft disabled three Italian battleships and several other ships, without the Italian navy even seeing their opponents’ ships, much less having a chance to fight back.

But that’s just the prelude to my story, which is not about a British victory, but a British defeat. Just a little over a year after the Battle of Taranto, Winston Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to deter Japan from attacking Singapore.

Despite their own crushing victory at Taranto, the British military leadership was skeptical that battleships moving under their own power at sea could be taken down by air attack alone. They placed their faith in the power of zigzag movement and anti-aircraft guns to deter attacking planes.

This was foolish. Japanese torpedo bombers found and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse quite easily. Here is an aerial photo of the British warships, taken from the cockpit of a Japanese plane, desperately trying to evade their doom:

The great battleships — the invincible masters of the sea in previous wars — were suddenly helpless against the swarm of tiny aircraft. Winston Churchill reacted with shock and horror, and the British fleet withdrew, essentially leaving Southeast Asia to the Japanese.

The world had changed, almost overnight. Air power had brought about a revolution in military affairs. Ironclad battleships went from the single most valuable piece of military hardware to being almost obsolete overnight. Yet people who had invested their countries’ treasure in battleship fleets, like Churchill, were painfully slow to realize the shift — even when it was their own technological innovations that rendered their old weapons useless.1

OK, so there’s your old WW2 parable, with a clear moral to the story: Don’t ignore technological revolutions. Now fast-forward to 2025. We may just have witnessed something akin to a modern Battle of Taranto.

For years, Russia has used its strategic bombers — which can also carry nuclear weapons — to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine from a huge distance. The Ukrainians had attacked these bombers on the ground with drones, but the Russians simply moved them farther away, well out of reach of anything the Ukrainians could launch from their own territory.

So the Ukrainians got sneaky. They packed a bunch of drones — little plastic battery-powered quadcopters, not too different from a toy you would fly at the park — into trucks and (somehow) sent the trucks all the way across Russia.

When the trucks got close to the air force bases where the Russians had parked their bombers, the Ukrainian drones popped out of the trucks and started blowing up the bombers — and other planes — on the ground. You can see the footage of the attack here:

And you can see some pictures of the drones used in the attack here:

It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys.

Again, the world has changed, almost overnight. The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it’s ultimately not that different — it’s built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks.

Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about US$350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on.

That’s the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed.

Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War II, or Russia now — the US now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won’t be able to easily replace what it loses.

As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers.

The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar Air Force and Navy in a few minutes.

That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the US defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield.

The other question we need to be asking is: Why can’t the US just do the same thing to China, in the event of a war? We have drones, right? Weren’t we the inventors of drone technology? Don’t we have innovative startups like Anduril, and Skydio, and lots of others racing to arm our military with the world’s best drones?

Well, OK. The US did invent drone technology. But most of what we currently use are lumbering, expensive systems like the MQ-9 Reaper:

Each one of these giant drone planes costs $33 million. During the recent US conflict with the Houthis — a conflict in which the US was essentially defeated — the ragtag Yemeni militia shot down at least seven of these Reaper drones, and possibly as many as 20. America in total has only a few hundred.

The kind of drones used in the Ukrainian raid, on the other hand, are “FPV” drones — that stands for “first person view.” These are small battery-powered plastic copters equipped with explosives. There are many types, but here’s one example:

Photo by Arminform via Wikimedia Commons

These drones cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending on the type. Ukraine is currently producing thousands of these drones per day, and says it expects to be able to produce over 10,000, although either the base drone (before weapons and other military hardware are added) or the parts used to make the drone typically come from China.

Why so many? FPV drones aren’t just useful for the kind of long-range surprise attack that Ukraine just carried out. In fact, they’re steadily replacing every other type of weapon on the battlefield. FPV drones can take out tanks, including America’s best tanks. They are now estimated to cause 70% of the casualties on the battlefield — more than artillery, the traditional “god of war.” Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg explainer:

Tens of thousands of the relatively cheap and expendable machines are now buzzing back and forth over the front lines, pinpointing Russian positions, gathering intelligence to anticipate impending assaults, colliding with enemy targets or dropping bombs on them.

By early 2025, drones were accounting for 60% to 70% of the damage and destruction caused to Russian equipment in the war, according to UK-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute…

Military commanders around the world are taking note. Taiwan is investing in mass-produced drones in anticipation of a possible conflict with China. Israel has recalibrated the Iron Dome air defense system in the war in Gaza to account for maneuverable drones — one of its biggest blind spots.

European governments embarking on their largest rearmament since the Cold War have identified drones and counter-drone systems as an investment priority. The US Pentagon, which pioneered sophisticated and expensive drones sourced from big arms contractors, is looking to buy cheaper ones designed by startups and deployed en masse…

Small, light drones with multiple rotors have become the defining innovation of the war. Known as first-person view drones, they are typically controlled in real time via a video feed by an operator who can “see” through an onboard camera using electronic goggles so they can fly beyond the line of sight.

Social media is full of videos showing the machines closing in on troops, armored personnel carriers, missile batteries and command posts until the moment of impact, when the picture turns to static…Other rotor drones are used to drop grenade-sized explosives on targets and can be reused if they make it back safely.

Bloomberg says that the parts used to make Ukraine’s drone fleet are bought “online”, but that is a euphemism. They are made in China.

An FPV drone is basically:

some injection-molded plastic parts
some trailing edge computer chips (microcontrollers, sensors, etc.)
an electric motor made of rare earth permanent magnets
a lithium-ion battery

The US can still make plenty of trailing-edge computer chips, but the rest of these items are all China, China, China.

China does most of the injection molding in the world — about 82%, according to one 2024 estimate. Currently, I know of no government plan to restore America’s lost capacity in injection molding. In fact, Trump’s tariffs — if they ever go into effect — are expected to severely damage the US injection molding industry, by cutting American injection molding companies off from imports of the specialized equipment they need.

China also makes most of the electric motors in the world. This is because China makes most of the magnets, and an electric motor is basically just made out of magnets. The rest of the world is scrambling to add magnet production capacity, but for the rest of this decade, China will dominate:

Source: IEA

But this will be hard to accomplish. The magnets for electric motors are made out of materials called “rare earths”, which are almost entirely mined and processed in China.

Source: IEA

In fact, China recently slapped export controls on its sales of rare earths to the US, causing chaos in a number of US industries, and probably contributing to Trump’s decision to pause his tariffs. So far, US efforts to mine and refine rare earths have fallen short (which itself is a topic for another full post).

Finally, and most importantly, we have batteries. A battery is the essential component of an FPV drone — it holds the energy that makes the thing go. Larger drones can use combustion engines, but to get something as small and cheap as an FPV drone, you need a battery.2

China makes most of the batteries in the world. In 2022, it had 77% of global manufacturing capacity. Here’s a projection out to 2030:

Source: Visual Capitalist

Even this projection, which shows America catching up just a little bit, is probably way too rosy. It was made at a time when Joe Biden’s industrial policy — specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act — was dishing out huge subsidies for American battery factories. Here’s what that looked like:

Source: Clean Investment Monitor

This wouldn’t have put American battery-making capacity on par with China, but it would have given us a fighting chance.

Now, though, Donald Trump and the Republicans are canceling the policies that were promoting American battery manufacturing:

A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans…would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks.

Electric vehicles are crucial for battery manufacturing capacity, because in peacetime, they’re the main source of demand for batteries. Pump up the EV industry, and you pump up the battery industry too — just as the chart above shows Biden doing.

Kill the EV industry and you kill the battery industry too, just as Republicans now want to do. Harming the solar industry will also harm the battery industry, because some types of batteries are used to store solar energy for when the sun isn’t shining.

GOP policies are already mauling the American battery industry:

[M]ore [battery] projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona…

“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.

In fact, the whole boom in American factory construction that happened under Biden appears to be halting and going into reverse under Trump, thanks to a combination of tariffs and the expected cancellation of industrial policies:

Source: Joseph Politano

The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is.

Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the US refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.

Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the US may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

Notes

1 Ironically, Japan made a similar mistake, directing far too many of its scarce resources toward battleship production instead of aircraft carriers.

2 Incidentally, this is why everyone who confidently tells you that batteries can’t replace fossil fuels because they have “lower energy density” doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Yes, if you measure just the gasoline or kerosene or diesel in a combustion engine, its energy density is higher than that of any battery. But open up a car hood, and you’ll see a huge array of heavy, bulky tanks and tubes and machinery — that’s the engine required for turning gasoline into kinetic energy. Batteries don’t need an engine to covert their energy into kinetic energy — they just need some magnets. This means that the true energy density of batteries, counting the extraction machinery, compares pretty favorably with combustion engines in many applications.

This article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.

asiatimes.com · by Noah Smith

25. The end of Taiwan's strategic flexibility

Excerpts:

When American officials speak of Taiwan primarily as a strategic asset against an “imminent” Chinese threat, and when Beijing responds by framing Taiwan as an “internal affair” that brooks no foreign interference, Taiwan’s own voice gets lost in the escalating rhetoric.

Genuine strategic autonomy requires the political courage to occasionally frustrate allies and the wisdom to understand that Taiwan’s interests aren’t always identical to America’s interests, regardless of how aligned they may appear.

The current trajectory leads Taiwan toward becoming a heavily fortified, economically isolated garrison state. While this may serve American strategic objectives, it’s unclear how it serves the Taiwanese people, who deserve both security and prosperity, not a forced choice between them.

Taiwan’s greatest asset has always been its adaptability and strategic acumen. In this new era of great power competition—where defense secretaries speak of imminent threats and foreign ministries trade accusations of warmongering—it will need both qualities more than ever to chart a course that serves its own interests first.

The end of Taiwan's strategic flexibility

The island’s traditional bridge-building role faces existential threats as Washington and Beijing wage economic warfare

asiatimes.com · by Y Tony Yang

The escalating rhetoric between Washington and Beijing reached a new crescendo last weekend when US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that China poses a threat that “could be imminent,” warning that Beijing is “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.”

China’s foreign ministry fired back immediately, accusing Hegseth of a “cold war mentality” and demanding that the US “stop inciting conflict” in the Asia-Pacific region.

This verbal warfare exemplifies exactly why Taiwan finds itself in an increasingly untenable position that deserves far more attention than it currently receives.

While policymakers in Washington and Taipei publicly maintain that US-China strategic competition enhances Taiwan’s value, the reality may be far more sobering: the island risks becoming the primary casualty of this new bipolar world order.

The uncomfortable truth that neither side wants to acknowledge is stark: Taiwan’s strategic importance to America has historically stemmed from its unique position as a technological and economic bridge between Western innovation and Chinese manufacturing capacity.

As this bridge systematically burns under the weight of great power rivalry, so too does much of Taiwan’s economic relevance and diplomatic leverage.

The semiconductor trap

Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance didn’t emerge in isolation—it flourished precisely because it could serve both American technological advancement and Chinese production needs simultaneously.

TSMC’s remarkable success story is fundamentally about occupying the crucial nexus in a globalized supply chain that current US policy is methodically dismantling. When that integrated system fractures, Taiwan doesn’t automatically become more strategically valuable; it risks transformation into an expensive military outpost with diminishing economic justification.

The current export restrictions on advanced semiconductors and manufacturing equipment present Taiwan with what amounts to an impossible choice: comply with Washington’s demands and forfeit access to China—still Taiwan’s largest trading partner—or resist these controls and risk losing access to critical American technology and security guarantees.

What makes this particularly problematic is that these restrictions weren’t designed to benefit Taiwan; they’re crafted to contain China while preserving American technological superiority. Taiwan is expected to function as America’s high-tech manufacturing base while being severed from its most significant market.

This isn’t strategic partnership—it’s technological dependency with geopolitical strings attached.

Talent drain paradox

Washington’s broader restrictions on Chinese students and researchers create another unintended consequence that directly undermines Taiwan’s interests.

Recent announcements by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” reveal a critical blind spot that damages Taiwan’s long-term prospects.

When the US becomes less accessible to Chinese talent—particularly from Hong Kong and mainland China in sensitive technological fields—these individuals don’t simply disappear. They redirect to Singapore, the UK, or increasingly, remain home to strengthen China’s domestic capabilities.

Taiwan, despite its democratic credentials and technological expertise, often gets overlooked in this reshuffling because it lacks the scale and global academic brand recognition to effectively capture this displaced talent pool.

More perversely, Taiwanese students and researchers in America now face heightened scrutiny due to bureaucratic confusion over their status. The broad-brush approach to restricting “Chinese” academic collaboration frequently fails to distinguish between Taiwan and mainland China, creating unexpected barriers for Taiwan’s own academic and research communities.

End of strategic flexibility

Perhaps most concerning is how this new bipolar competition eliminates Taiwan’s traditional diplomatic maneuverability.

The Hegseth-Beijing exchange illustrates this perfectly: when American officials frame the situation in such stark, militaristic terms and China responds with equally heated rhetoric about US “provocations,” Taiwan loses any space for nuanced positioning.

During periods of US-China engagement, Taiwan could leverage relationships with both sides, executing a complex but effective balancing act that maximized its options and influence. The current zero-sum dynamic forces Taiwan into a binary choice that fundamentally eliminates its strategic autonomy.

When Washington and Beijing were economically intertwined, both had powerful incentives to avoid military confrontation over Taiwan—too much economic value was at stake. As these ties dissolve, the cost-benefit calculation for potential military action shifts dramatically.

Paradoxically, economic separation may make conflict more probable, not less. When defense secretaries openly speak of “imminent” threats and foreign ministries respond with accusations of “stoking flames,” the temperature rises to dangerous levels that leave little room for the kind of strategic ambiguity that has long served Taiwan’s interests.

The broader trend toward “supply chain warfare” poses a significant threat to Taiwan’s position as a global innovation hub. Innovation thrives on the free movement of ideas, talent, and capital across borders. As these flows become weaponized tools of statecraft, Taiwan’s ability to maintain its technological edge becomes increasingly challenging.

Taiwan’s historical success has been built on being globally connected while preserving its distinct identity. Forced economic bifurcation threatens this model at its foundation. The island risks becoming highly proficient at producing yesterday’s technology for an increasingly narrow customer base.

Toward strategic polycentrism

Taiwan urgently needs to develop what might be called “strategic polycentrism”—building capabilities and relationships that don’t require either Washington’s or Beijing’s approval. This approach demands:

Diversifying technological partnerships beyond the US-China axis, particularly with Europe, Japan, and emerging economies that offer growth potential without the complications of great power competition.

Creating new institutional frameworks that allow Taiwan to maintain economic engagement with China while preserving security relationships with the US—perhaps through multilateral mechanisms that provide political cover for all parties.

Investing heavily in indigenous innovation capabilities that reduce dependence on either American technology transfers or Chinese market access.

Building specialized advantages that larger powers cannot easily replicate, focusing on high-value niches rather than attempting to compete in mass markets.

Courage to disappoint

The most unconventional aspect of Taiwan’s current predicament is this: the island’s long-term survival may require developing the capacity to disappoint both Washington and Beijing when their demands conflict with Taiwan’s fundamental interests. This isn’t about choosing sides—it’s about choosing survival.

Taiwan’s leadership must recognize that both great powers view the island primarily through the lens of their own strategic competition, not Taiwan’s welfare.

When American officials speak of Taiwan primarily as a strategic asset against an “imminent” Chinese threat, and when Beijing responds by framing Taiwan as an “internal affair” that brooks no foreign interference, Taiwan’s own voice gets lost in the escalating rhetoric.

Genuine strategic autonomy requires the political courage to occasionally frustrate allies and the wisdom to understand that Taiwan’s interests aren’t always identical to America’s interests, regardless of how aligned they may appear.

The current trajectory leads Taiwan toward becoming a heavily fortified, economically isolated garrison state. While this may serve American strategic objectives, it’s unclear how it serves the Taiwanese people, who deserve both security and prosperity, not a forced choice between them.

Taiwan’s greatest asset has always been its adaptability and strategic acumen. In this new era of great power competition—where defense secretaries speak of imminent threats and foreign ministries trade accusations of warmongering—it will need both qualities more than ever to chart a course that serves its own interests first.

Y. Tony Yang, endowed professor and associate dean at George Washington University in Washington, DC, earned a law degree from National Taiwan University and a doctoral degree from Harvard.

asiatimes.com · by Y Tony Yang

26. Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Foreign Policy? Reality TV Politik

Excerpts:

Diplomacy turns out to be quite different from reality TV and real estate. The best diplomacy is conducted secretly, not on live TV. And when a national security strategy goes awry, bankruptcy is not an option. There is no Chapter 11 for a failed foreign policy.

Steve Witkoff assured readers of The Atlantic that he has been doing his homework. He had, he said, “read many books and watched Netflix documentaries on world conflicts (including Turning Point: The Vietnam War).” Among the things he had learned from “watch[ing] a ton of stuff on Henry Kissinger” was that Kissinger had persuaded Nixon not to end the Vietnam War before the 1972 election, because the conflict gave him leverage in the reelection campaign. “It was a sellout,” Witkoff told the magazine. He “would never be able to live with myself” if he did such a thing.

That this almost entirely misrepresents what happened in 1972 illustrates the tragedy of American amnesia. The reality was an excruciating three-year negotiation with North Vietnam’s obdurate representatives, in which Kissinger tried to exert every available form of leverage in pursuit of a peace that would preserve American credibility and give South Vietnam at least a shot at survival. In the end, it could not be done. Saigon fell.

The fall of Kyiv is not an event anyone in Washington—or in Brussels—wants to contemplate. Those sympathetic to Ukraine want to believe that, with a combination of Western aid and Ukrainian ingenuity, David can get the better of Goliath. Those—not least Trump—who would rather do deals with Goliath want to believe that, with a little help from Steve Witkoff, Goliath can be persuaded to shake hands with David and call it quits. Neither of these views is realistic. If anything, the Trump view is the less realistic of the two.

Witkoff should pause to ask himself what Netflix documentaries will be saying about his and Trump’s real-estate-politik 50 years hence. I could be wrong. Perhaps the administration will surprise me by belatedly applying serious economic pressure to Russia. But if Ukraine ultimately goes the way of South Vietnam, I doubt those documentaries will be flattering.

Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Foreign Policy? Reality TV Politik

Making peace is harder than buying skyscrapers. The president is learning this the painful way in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

By Niall Ferguson

06.02.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-trumps-foreign-policy-ea6

‘Great television,’ as Trump described the shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, is not the best approach to the task of ending Russia’s war against Ukraine. (Saul Loeb via Getty Images)

There’s realpolitik. And then there’s reality TV politik. There’s foreign policy realism, of the kind associated with Henry Kissinger. And then there’s Donald Trump’s twist: real estate-ism.

Anyone trying to assess the foreign policy of this White House needs to appreciate these distinctions. The various individuals responsible for national security in the Trump administration are united in their rejection of both the liberal idealism that informed the speeches (if not the actions) of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the neoconservative version of idealism that inspired George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Yet there is much more to Trump 2.0 than the hard-nosed realism of Richard Nixon—a key influence on Trump, as I have argued elsewhere.

No previous president has livestreamed his Oval Office meetings with foreign leaders. That week in February when Trump hosted—and, to varying degrees, humiliated—the French president, the British prime minister, and the Ukrainian president introduced to great-power politics the unmistakable style of The Apprentice, the TV show that made Trump a household name. As Trump acknowledged, his and Vice President J.D. Vance’s shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, was “great television.”

At the same time, the negotiations that he and his golfing friend Steve Witkoff are conducting in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East draw on an earlier chapter in Trump’s career. As Witkoff explained to The Atlantic, he and Trump see diplomacy as functionally indistinguishable from doing real-estate deals. “Diplomacy is negotiation,” Witkoff told Isaac Stanley-Becker. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

It is not difficult to ridicule the way Trump and Witkoff have approached the task of ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, a task Trump insisted on the campaign trail that he could achieve within 24 hours. Witkoff’s sycophantic interactions with President Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded practitioner of realpolitik, have been painful to watch. His account of these interactions in an interview with Tucker Carlson was risible.

Vladimir Putin and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff at their talks in Moscow on April 25, 2025. (Photo by Kristina Kormilitsyna via Getty Images)

The fact that the war has significantly escalated since Trump’s peace initiative began—with Russian air strikes reaching new peaks and Ukraine countering Sunday with an audacious drone attack on Russian strategic bomber bases—speaks for itself.

Yes, Trump inherited a truly terrible strategic position from Joe Biden and his foreign policy team, who substituted “de-escalation” for deterrence and watched as America’s enemies inflicted harm on its friends in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel. A formidable Axis of Authoritarians emerged under the Biden presidency, uniting China, Iran, and North Korea in support of Russia’s war. Even if the Original Sin of Biden’s mental decline and its concealment did not impact foreign policy as much as domestic policy, he certainly was not equal to the task that confronted him. As Walter Russell Mead has rightly said: “In 2023 and 2024 America needed a president who could explain. . . what we needed to do to stop the drift toward a new era of international confrontation. This is something Mr. Biden would have struggled with even if he were in full possession of his capacities; it was utterly beyond him in his diminished state.”

To those in the national security establishment currently criticizing Trump and Witkoff, Senator Lindsey Graham asks questions as legitimate as they are profane: “What the fuck have you done when it comes to Putin? How did your approach work?” Trump is far from the first president to try to schmooze Putin.

Yet the failures of the recent past do not absolve us from asking if reality TV plus real estate adds up to a strategy. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic lament that Trump is an imperialist who wants to carve up the world between the United States, Russia, and China. But it is hard to detect a coherent imperial project in the combination of territorial claims (on Canada, Greenland, and Panama), tariffs imposed as much on allies as on adversaries, and peace initiatives in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that are sometimes hard to distinguish from business deals.

Trump is sometimes called an isolationist. I have never found this convincing. But I think it is true that, compared with almost every other president in the past century, he is deeply reluctant to use military force. This is partly out of a genuine horror of getting embroiled in one of those “forever wars” that have haunted Americans from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But it is also because Trump learned in his first term not to trust the top brass of the U.S. armed forces. He will never forgive Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his communications with his Chinese counterpart in the run-up to the 2020 election and his condemnation of the subsequent January 6 invasion of the Capitol.

The odd thing is that Trump’s preference for peace over war does not truly reflect the sentiment of the electorate. Gallup polling shows that Americans today are quite strongly hostile to China and Russia (more so than to Iran or North Korea). According to a March 2025 poll, 46 percent of voters think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine in its war with Russia, up from 30 percent in December. While Democrats have soured on Israel, as a new Chicago Council survey reveals, around three-quarters of Republicans favor U.S. military support for Israel not only “until the hostages are returned” but also “until Hamas is dismantled or destroyed.” And more than two-fifths (42 percent) of Republicans said last year that, in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, they would support “using the U.S. Navy to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, even if this might trigger a direct conflict between the United States and China.”

On all these issues, Trump is much less belligerent than his own base. He is strongly disinclined to continue U.S. aid to Ukraine. He is so keen to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal that he now seems willing to allow Iran to carry on with low-level uranium enrichment. And we know from John Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, that Trump would be very reluctant indeed to risk a war with China over Taiwan. This pacifism is one of the things that Trump’s liberal critics seem unable to acknowledge. The notion that he is an imperialist or even a fascist flies in the face of the evidence that the man is a peacenik at heart. Put it this way: fantasizing about wearing papal vestments is not the usual behavior of a bellicose autocrat.

But making peace is historically harder than launching wars—or, for that matter, buying skyscrapers. Trump is learning this the painful way in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Demonstrators gather at he “Don’t Abandon Ukraine” rally in Washington D.C. (Photo by Hanna Leka via Getty Images)

What kind of “peace” does he envision in Ukraine? First, Ukraine will relinquish its claim to Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, along with all or most of Luhansk and Donetsk. Second, Ukraine will renounce the possibility of membership in NATO. Third, in place of a U.S. military guarantee, Washington and Kyiv have signed an agreement that commits the United States to invest in Ukrainian natural resources.

This might seem like a very sweet deal from Moscow’s vantage point. It has certainly required major concessions by President Zelensky. And yet we seem no nearer to a ceasefire, much less a lasting peace, than we were on Inauguration Day more than four months ago. The most the Russians have offered was a three-day ceasefire to coincide with its celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Negotiations in Istanbul in May achieved nothing because Putin was a no-show. A new round of talks that began there yesterday seems unlikely to bear much fruit.

The reason is clear: Putin shows no sign of modifying his demands not only for territory but also to limit Ukraine’s ability to arm and govern itself. Russia’s goal is not just land; it is to render Ukraine defunct as an independent state.

Despite his strong preference to blame Zelensky for the war and to woo Putin with the carrot of sanctions relief (and deals, deals, deals), Trump is being forced to admit that Putin is, in fact, the principal obstacle to peace. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia,” the president declared on Truth Social on May 25, “but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”

The same day, Trump told journalists “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time. Always gotten along with him. But he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all. We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities.” Two days later, he resorted to threats on Truth Social: “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

Unfortunately, the Russians must have read in the Financial Times about the TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) trade. The Russian response to Trump’s threats was sarcastic. “Trump’s message leaves little room for misinterpretation,” Russian state media tweeted last Tuesday. “Until he posts the opposite tomorrow morning.” When both FT and RT are laughing at you, something is wrong with your dealpolitik.

The lesson of history is entirely clear: Wars are hard to stop—unless one side wins a decisive victory. “I was intellectually convinced that Hanoi would settle only if deprived of all hope of victory by a determined military strategy,” Henry Kissinger recalled in his book Ending the Vietnam War. “But I was,” he wrote, “also the principal advocate in the administration for negotiations for a political solution.”

The Nixon administration’s effort to negotiate an end to the war can be said to have begun in earnest on August 4, 1969, though Lyndon Johnson had been trying to do the same thing since May 1968. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, though they did not secure lasting peace between North and South Vietnam, the latter of which was swallowed up by the former two years later. At best, in other words, it took Kissinger three years, five months, and 24 days to secure a very short-lived peace in Vietnam—and in the course of the negotiations, the United States frequently escalated its military pressure on Hanoi in the hope of securing a diplomatic breakthrough.

It took less time to secure an armistice in Korea than to reach peace in Vietnam: The process that began in Kaesong in July 1951 lasted two years and 18 days, and the result has endured to this day.

The implications for Ukraine are clear. With sustained Western support, it has a shot at being a version of South Korea. If America settles for an unsustainable peace, it will share the grim fate of South Vietnam. Neither outcome gets done quickly.

Russia today has four times the population of Ukraine and ten times the GDP. Russia’s public finances, inflation, and current account are all in much better shape. Even if Western support for Ukraine continues at the level of the past three years, I fear that Russia will sooner or later grind out a victory, despite the resolve and heroism of the Ukrainian people, for the simple reason that Russia has superior resources and Axis support for Russia more than matches Western support for Ukraine. House Republicans—with Trump’s encouragement—have already interrupted U.S. aid to Ukraine once. They could do it again if Trump’s mood swings once more against Kyiv. Why would Putin settle under such conditions?

To see the flaw in Trump’s strategy, you have to grasp how crucial U.S. support—financial, but especially military—has been to Ukraine’s war effort. Thus far, according to the Kiel Ukraine Support Tracker, the European Union institutions and member states have accounted for 31 percent of all aid commitments to Ukraine, 29 percent of aid actually allocated, and 35 percent of total military allocations. But the United States—one country, as opposed to 27—is responsible for nearly as much: 28 percent of all allocations and the same percentage of military allocations.

As The New York Times revealed in March, from early in the war U.S. military officers stationed in Wiesbaden used American technology and intelligence to help the Ukrainians target Russian units, equipment, and infrastructure. The provision of High Mobility Artillery Systems (HIMARS) in September 2022 was a key reason for Ukrainian battlefield success that autumn.

Later in the war, the U.S. sent dozens of “subject matter experts”—i.e., military advisers—from Wiesbaden to Kyiv. These experts helped the Ukrainians plan their drone strikes against Russian warships in the Black Sea and military assets in Crimea. They even helped the Ukrainians identify targets in an “ops box”—a zone of Russian territory—from which attacks on Kharkiv were being launched. It was U.S. assistance that made possible the massive drone attack on the Russian munitions depot at Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border.

It has often been argued that backing Ukraine was an extraordinary bargain for the United States. For a commitment of roughly $175 billion in assistance and Ukraine-related spending since the war began, Hal Brands has argued, the United States cleaned out stocks of aging weaponry, stimulated U.S. production of 155 mm artillery shells, gave contracts worth $120 billion to U.S. companies, and helped the Ukrainians kill around 200,000 Russian soldiers and destroy thousands of Russian tanks.

Ukrainian servicemen load a truck with American made missiles. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky via Getty Images)

Brands is right that, if the U.S. had not acted when Putin invaded and the Ukrainians fought back, then eventually “Ukraine would have fallen, allowing Moscow to create pervasive insecurity in Europe. Russia and China. . . would have had all the global momentum.” But the Biden administration at no point had a credible endgame. They failed to grasp that the longer the war dragged on, the more likely Russia was to grind down Ukraine—unless the West could somehow increase its military and financial support. Yet that was never politically plausible. On the contrary, it was predictable from the outset that Americans and Europeans would become “fatigued” by the war—or perhaps just bored—if it dragged on for much more than a year.

The Trump solution seemed simple: End the war. But the reality is that unless the U.S. and EU apply serious pressure to Russia, Putin has no incentive to end the war. Up until this point, the much-vaunted sanctions imposed on Russia by the West since February 2022 have been a case study in the limits of economic coercion. Russia has made more from selling energy to Europe in the last three years than Ukraine has received in aid from the EU. At the same time, European countries continue to export large quantities of goods to Russia via third countries, most of them in Central Asia.

Four steps could be taken immediately to toughen the sanctions regime—and incentivize Putin to end the war. First, the U.S. could follow Europe’s lead in expanding sanctions on Russia’s tanker fleet and the companies that provide services to these tankers. Second, the U.S. could impose tighter restrictions on Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Third, the U.S. could place additional large Russian firms on the Specially Designated Nationals blacklist, as the Biden administration did with Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas in January. (An obvious target could be Gazprom, though the European states that continue to buy Russian gas would strongly oppose such a move.) Fourth, the Trump administration could make good on its threats to impose “secondary tariffs” on Russian oil imported by other countries. That could easily form part of the current U.S. trade talks with India. These and other measures would inflict pain on a Russian war economy that is already showing clear signs of overextension. I hope the Trump administration is seriously considering at least some of these steps. But I see little sign that it is.

Diplomacy turns out to be quite different from reality TV and real estate. The best diplomacy is conducted secretly, not on live TV. And when a national security strategy goes awry, bankruptcy is not an option. There is no Chapter 11 for a failed foreign policy.

Steve Witkoff assured readers of The Atlantic that he has been doing his homework. He had, he said, “read many books and watched Netflix documentaries on world conflicts (including Turning Point: The Vietnam War).” Among the things he had learned from “watch[ing] a ton of stuff on Henry Kissinger” was that Kissinger had persuaded Nixon not to end the Vietnam War before the 1972 election, because the conflict gave him leverage in the reelection campaign. “It was a sellout,” Witkoff told the magazine. He “would never be able to live with myself” if he did such a thing.

That this almost entirely misrepresents what happened in 1972 illustrates the tragedy of American amnesia. The reality was an excruciating three-year negotiation with North Vietnam’s obdurate representatives, in which Kissinger tried to exert every available form of leverage in pursuit of a peace that would preserve American credibility and give South Vietnam at least a shot at survival. In the end, it could not be done. Saigon fell.

The fall of Kyiv is not an event anyone in Washington—or in Brussels—wants to contemplate. Those sympathetic to Ukraine want to believe that, with a combination of Western aid and Ukrainian ingenuity, David can get the better of Goliath. Those—not least Trump—who would rather do deals with Goliath want to believe that, with a little help from Steve Witkoff, Goliath can be persuaded to shake hands with David and call it quits. Neither of these views is realistic. If anything, the Trump view is the less realistic of the two.

Witkoff should pause to ask himself what Netflix documentaries will be saying about his and Trump’s real-estate-politik 50 years hence. I could be wrong. Perhaps the administration will surprise me by belatedly applying serious economic pressure to Russia. But if Ukraine ultimately goes the way of South Vietnam, I doubt those documentaries will be flattering.

Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a columnist with The Free Press. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of the Latin American fintech company Ualá, and a co-founding trustee of the new University of Austin.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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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