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Quotes of the Day:
"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel . . . And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth."
– Mark Twain
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead."
– Ernest Hemingway
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
– George Washington
1. Pentagon Official at Center of Weapons Pause on Ukraine Wants U.S. to Focus on China
2. US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
3. Australia will not commit troops in advance to any conflict, minister says
4. China Behind Pro-Palestinian Movements, Study Finds HS Today
5. PERSPECTIVE: Disinformation 2.0: Deepfakes Hit the Frontlines of Global Influence Ops HS Today
6. Misinformation lends itself to social contagion – here’s how to recognize and combat it
7. Who Is Winning the World War?
8. Drones Are Key to Winning Wars Now. The U.S. Makes Hardly Any.
9. In the Hills of Australia, Pacific Allies Are Training to Fight China
10. Trump’s Cuts Are Making Federal Data Disappear
11. A Never-Ending Supply of Drones Has Frozen the Front Lines in Ukraine
12. Why Indo-Pacific Deterrence Needs Bipartisanship
13. How the West can beat the rest – Armies must learn from their mistakes
14. Special Operators Pursuing Autonomy, Open Architecture for Aircraft, Drones
15. Trump Doctrine is the Nixon Doctrine 2.0
16. Warfare Without Sailors? Lockheed and HavocAI Are Betting on It
17. US containerized missiles: stealthy firepower, high strategic cost
18. Partners in Deterrence: China and Russia’s Deepening Military-Technical Ties
1. Pentagon Official at Center of Weapons Pause on Ukraine Wants U.S. to Focus on China
China, China, China.
But we cannot successfully compete with China, nor defeat it in war, without the strength of our alliances.
Nor is "victory" against China a success if we lose all our allies.
As I told Bridge to his face a year and a half ago on Voice of America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z0DM_M_mHc) his views on Korea are in direct support of Kim Jong Un's political warfare strategy
Notice Frank's words here - on "managing the strategy formulation process."
Excerpts:
As a deputy assistant secretary of defense during Trump’s first term, he played a major role in the drafting of the 2018 national defense strategy, which urged a shift from a focus on counterterrorism that the Pentagon adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to countering China and Russia.
Colby’s role wasn’t without turbulence. Trump’s defense secretary at the time, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, was frustrated with Colby’s emphasis on defending Taiwan, participants recall.
“I think Bridge did a really good job in managing the strategy formulation process,” said Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine colonel who was brought in by Mattis to help draft the strategy document. “But in making Taiwan the hinge point of our military competition with China, he had a narrower focus than Secretary Mattis on what the strategy needed to do.”
Colby elaborated on his views in his 2021 book, “The Strategy of Denial,” in which he argued that the defense of Taiwan was vital because of its proximity to China, along with Japan and the Philippines, forming what Pentagon strategists refer to as the first island chain in the Western Pacific.
His focus on China, he noted in the book, included arguing that Russia could be a “potential collaborator” with the U.S. in an anti-Beijing coalition. And he warned against including Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because the country was “highly exposed” to a Russia attack “while offering no meaningful advantage to the alliance that is remotely comparable to the costs and risk that their defense would impose on it.”
Pentagon Official at Center of Weapons Pause on Ukraine Wants U.S. to Focus on China
Memo highlighting U.S. weapons shortages influenced decision to pause some arms shipments to Kyiv
By Michael R. Gordon
Follow and Lara Seligman
Follow
July 13, 2025 5:00 am ET
Elbridge Colby has been pressing to boost the U.S.’s military position in the Western Pacific. Photo: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg News
Key Points
What's This?
- Elbridge Colby, a Pentagon official, is pushing to refocus the U.S. military on countering China.
- Colby’s memo on Ukraine arms requests and depleted U.S. stockpiles factored into a temporary suspension of shipments.
- Colby’s prioritization of China has caused friction with some Republicans and allies over military spending and strategy.
WASHINGTON—Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, wants to refocus the U.S. military on countering China. That has put him at the center of the Trump administration’s abrupt moves on providing weapons to Ukraine.
It was Colby, a 45-year-old grandson of a former Central Intelligence Agency director, who wrote a memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early June outlining how Ukraine’s requests for U.S. weapons could further stretch already depleted Pentagon stockpiles.
The memo didn’t have a recommendation and was described by a defense official as a tool for assessing how arms deliveries would affect U.S. stockpiles. But some officials in the administration and in Congress say it figured in the Pentagon’s decision to suspend some arms shipments to Kyiv, a move President Trump later reversed.
The incident exemplifies Colby’s push to make good on years of U.S. vows to boost its military position in the Western Pacific, his supporters say. But it also highlights the contrary pressures on an administration that, in its first months in office, has already launched major military operations against Iran and the Houthis in the Middle East while continuing military deliveries to Ukraine.
Colby “has been thinking very deeply about how the United States can best defend itself in an era of constrained resources,” said Dan Caldwell, a former adviser to Hegseth. “A lot of policymakers have refused to accept that reality.”
Colby has turned down interview requests about his views on helping Ukraine and in urging U.S. partners in Asia and Europe to step up their defense efforts. But in a social-media message Saturday, he said that he would continue to press allies to boost their military spending, even if some “might not welcome frank discussions.”
Some of those frank discussions have included pressing Japan and Australia to make clear what military steps they are prepared to take in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the exchanges. Colby’s efforts have surprised some officials in the region because the U.S.’s longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity” has avoided an explicit statement about what actions Washington might take if Chinese forces moved against Taiwan, and even Trump hasn’t spelled out what he would do. Colby’s discussions were earlier reported by the Financial Times.
In arguing for doubling down on China, Colby is known as a “prioritizer” who favors limiting U.S. obligations outside Asia to free up resources to counter Beijing. In so doing, he has differentiated himself from “restrainers” who have urged that the U.S. pull back from overseas commitments, as well as traditional Republican hawks.
Though presidents from both parties, starting with Barack Obama, have called for focusing U.S. national security strategy on China, putting the idea into practice has proven difficult, partly due to new threats that have emerged outside Asia and partly due to the Pentagon’s longstanding commitments in Europe and the Middle East.
Colby’s calls to de-emphasize demands on U.S. forces other than in Asia have left him out of step with some Republicans.
“For many years, GOP ‘prioritizers’ have argued that the United States should not strike Iran or aid Ukraine because it must husband its resources for a possible war with China,” said Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, who was a national security adviser to the 2012 Mitt Romney and 2016 Marco Rubio presidential campaigns. “President Trump, in contrast, believes ‘America First’ requires continued U.S. involvement in multiple regions of the world.”
When Trump nominated Colby to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy in December, the fissures among Republicans over national security came to the fore. Colby received a hearty endorsement at his March confirmation hearing from Vice President JD Vance, who has long been a skeptical voice on providing billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine and has called Colby a friend.
Colby was grilled by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) about his past statement that it was feasible to contain a nuclear-armed Iran. Colby amended his stance in that confirmation hearing, saying that Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and that he would provide the president with military options to stop it from doing so.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the only Republican to vote against Colby’s confirmation, lambasted him for promoting policies that could lead to “geostrategic self-harm.”
Colby has deep family connections to the foreign policy establishment through his grandfather, former CIA Director William Colby. “Bridge,” as he is known in Washington, attended school in Japan, where his father worked for an investment bank, before graduating from Harvard University.
Colby and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon meeting with officials from Peru in May. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
At Yale Law School he was a housemate of Jon Finer, the former deputy national security adviser to President Joe Biden. Even then, Colby’s contrarian foreign policy priorities were evident: He was a rare Republican who opposed the war in Iraq.
Colby has written that the 2003 Iraq war and the lengthy U.S. occupation was a “historic error” that squandered vast resources. He argued in a 2012 article against striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying it would provide Tehran “every incentive to reboot the program with greater vigor.”
As a deputy assistant secretary of defense during Trump’s first term, he played a major role in the drafting of the 2018 national defense strategy, which urged a shift from a focus on counterterrorism that the Pentagon adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to countering China and Russia.
Colby’s role wasn’t without turbulence. Trump’s defense secretary at the time, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, was frustrated with Colby’s emphasis on defending Taiwan, participants recall.
“I think Bridge did a really good job in managing the strategy formulation process,” said Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine colonel who was brought in by Mattis to help draft the strategy document. “But in making Taiwan the hinge point of our military competition with China, he had a narrower focus than Secretary Mattis on what the strategy needed to do.”
Colby elaborated on his views in his 2021 book, “The Strategy of Denial,” in which he argued that the defense of Taiwan was vital because of its proximity to China, along with Japan and the Philippines, forming what Pentagon strategists refer to as the first island chain in the Western Pacific.
His focus on China, he noted in the book, included arguing that Russia could be a “potential collaborator” with the U.S. in an anti-Beijing coalition. And he warned against including Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because the country was “highly exposed” to a Russia attack “while offering no meaningful advantage to the alliance that is remotely comparable to the costs and risk that their defense would impose on it.”
But Colby’s call for reprioritizing Pentagon strategy was tested after Russia invaded Ukraine the following year and turned to Beijing for help in expanding the Russian defense industry. Instead of dealing with China in isolation, Washington has faced the prospect of simultaneously deterring two geographically disparate adversaries that have been cooperating.
Colby is playing a pivotal role in policy debate and the crafting of a new defense strategy that will set spending and force deployment goals for years to come.
Some current and former officials who share Colby’s goal of boosting American capabilities in the Pacific say he may be better at standing on principle than bringing allies along. Colby has irked Tokyo by urging that it commit to boosting military spending to 3.5% of its gross domestic product, they say. With policy disagreements over military spending and tariffs, Japan put off high-level talks with the U.S. that had been expected in July.
A review Colby is conducting of a 2021 agreement—known as Aukus, under which Australia will get nuclear-powered attack submarines from the U.S. while contributing several billion dollars to the U.S. defense-industrial base—has concerned Australian officials.
In an interview with Australian television last year, Colby said it would be “crazy” for the U.S. to provide attack submarines to Australia unless the Pentagon can be assured it would have enough for itself, adding that the U.S. would be “lucky” to get to the 2030s without a conflict with China.
But it was the classified memo that preceded the pause in arms deliveries to Ukraine that especially spotlighted Colby’s views. It tallied the numbers of weapons sought by Ukraine along with how many the U.S. has in its stocks for training and warfighting around the world. Trump later told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wasn’t responsible for the pause in shipments that followed, which he has since lifted.
Wess Mitchell, a former senior State Department official who once started a policy organization with Colby called the Marathon Initiative, said the Pentagon official’s focus on making tough decisions to deter China is driven by concern that the U.S. is overstretched.
“Bridge has put his finger on the real problem and said ‘Let’s give priority to the main threat even if that means we have to accept trade-offs in the other regions,’ ” Mitchell said. “People may disagree with his approach, but it is driven by a legitimate concern, which is we don’t currently have the resources for a three-front war.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com
2. US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
What will the US do in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan?
Are we still practicing strategic ambiguity? Why can't our allies?
Is this the way to ensure alliance support for contingencies throughout the Asia-Indo-Pacific?
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
Trump administration says it is trying to prevent war but raises eyebrows by calling for commitments from Australia and Japan
https://www.ft.com/content/41e272e4-5b25-47ee-807c-2b57c1316fe4
Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · July 12, 2025
The Pentagon is pressing Japan and Australia to make clear what role they would play if the US and China went to war over Taiwan, in an effort that has frustrated the two most important American allies in the Indo-Pacific.
Elbridge Colby, under-secretary of defence for policy, has been pushing the issue in meetings with Japanese and Australian defence officials in recent months, said five people familiar with the discussions.
The push is his latest effort to convince US allies in the Indo-Pacific to enhance deterrence and prepare for a potential war over Taiwan.
A US defence official declined to comment about the request related to Taiwan, but stressed the “animating theme” of Colby’s discussions with allies was “to intensify and accelerate efforts to strengthen deterrence in a balanced, equitable way”.
Those talks include efforts to persuade allies to raise defence spending amid rising concern about China’s threat to Taiwan. But the request for commitments related to a war over the island is a new demand from the US.
“Concrete operational planning and exercises that have direct application to a Taiwan contingency are moving forward with Japan and Australia,” said one person. “But this request caught Tokyo and Canberra by surprise because the US itself does not give a blank cheque guarantee to Taiwan.”
The US has long had a policy of “strategic ambiguity” under which it does not say if it would defend the island. Former president Joe Biden on four occasions deviated from that, saying the US would intervene. But Donald Trump has echoed other presidents in refusing to say what he would do.
Zack Cooper, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “It is very difficult to get allies to provide specifics about what they would do in a Taiwan conflict when they don’t know either the scenario’s context or America’s own response.”
“President Trump has not committed to defend Taiwan, so it is unrealistic for the US to insist on clear commitments from others.”
The push has been aimed at Japanese and Australian defence officials, and not higher levels. A second person said there was a “collective raising of eyebrows” from representatives in Japan, Australia and other US allies.
Japan’s defence ministry said it was “difficult to answer the hypothetical question of a ‘Taiwan emergency’.” It said any response would “be implemented on an individual and specific basis in accordance with the constitution, international law, and domestic laws and regulations”.
The Australian embassy in the US did not comment.
Colby’s push follows other actions that have sparked anxiety. The Financial Times last month reported he was reviewing the Aukus security deal that will enable Canberra to procure nuclear-powered submarines.
Colby has also urged European militaries to reduce their focus on the Indo-Pacific and focus more on the Euro-Atlantic region. The FT also reported recently that Japan cancelled a high-profile ministerial meeting with the US after Colby abruptly increased the US request for more defence spending.
The Pentagon was forced to defend Colby in recent days after reports he was responsible for the decision to block weapons for Ukraine, which was shortly afterwards overturned by the president.
But the debate about Taiwan planning comes as Tokyo and Canberra feel pressure from Trump to boost spending, which allies of Colby say is very important given the rising threat from China in the Indo-Pacific region.
“We are coming to our allies in the Indo-Pacific, very similar to what the president did in Europe, and saying this is the threat environment,” said the US official. “Obviously, some of these are tough conversations, including on defence spending. But we think it will leave us all in a better place.”
The official said the administration was confident that Japan and Australia would boost defence spending more quickly than European allies had.
“We don’t think it should — nor can it — take 20 years. Not just because it is in our interests, but because it is so much in the Indo-Pacific allies’ interests as well.”
The situation is particularly sensitive for Japan because the push for more spending — including one from Colby that was publicly rebuked by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba — comes ahead of upper house elections on July 20.
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The official said the US understood that it had to be sensitive to the political considerations of allies.
“That is something we all have to work through,” the official said. “It’s tough, but things simply must become fairer and more equitable for this to work — which it must. That is why we have leadership.”
The official said the Pentagon had received “positive” indicators on higher spending from Japan and Australia, but stressed that it was “critical for us all that we see results”.
Some allies believe Colby is ignoring their concerns in his pursuit for stronger deterrence. The official said that was “demonstrably untrue”.
“We are investing tremendous amounts of time and energy to work with allies to find ways to address our shared challenges in ways that leave us both better off,” he said.
Additional reporting by Leo Lewis in Tokyo
Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · July 12, 2025
3. Australia will not commit troops in advance to any conflict, minister says
One allied answer. What do you expect the Minister to say publicly?
Why can't we practice quiet diplomacy?
Australia will not commit troops in advance to any conflict, minister says
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/australia-will-not-commit-troops-in-advance-to-any-conflict-minister-says
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Australia's Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy at the 10th Asean Defence Ministers' Meeting Plus in Jakarta, Indonesia, Nov 16, 2023.
FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Published Jul 13, 2025, 10:23 AMUpdated Jul 13, 2025, 09:20 PM
SYDNEY – Australia will not commit troops in advance to any conflict, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said on July 13, responding to a report that the Pentagon has
pressed its ally to clarify what role it would play
if the US and China went to war over Taiwan.Australia prioritises its sovereignty and “we don’t discuss hypotheticals”, Mr Conroy said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“The decision to commit Australian troops to a conflict will be made by the government of the day, not in advance but by the government of the day,” he said.
The Financial Times reported on July 12 that Mr Elbridge Colby, the US under-secretary of defence for policy, has been pushing Australian and Japanese defence officials on what they would do in a Taiwan conflict, although the US does not offer a blank cheque guarantee to defend Taiwan.
Mr Colby posted on X that the Department of Defence is implementing President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda of restoring deterrence, which includes “urging allies to step up their defence spending and other efforts related to our collective defence”.
China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own and has not ruled out the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te rejects China’s sovereignty claims, saying only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking in Shanghai at the start of a six-day visit to China that is likely to focus on security and trade, said Canberra did not want any change to the status quo on Taiwan.
Mr Conroy said Australia was concerned about China’s military build-up of nuclear and conventional forces, and wants a balanced Indo-Pacific region where no country dominates.
He said China was seeking a military base in the Pacific, which was not in Australia’s interest.
‘Goal is no war’
Talisman Sabre, Australia’s largest war-fighting exercise with the United States, opened on July 13 in Sydney Harbour and will involve 40,000 troops from 19 countries, including Japan, South Korea, India, Britain, France and Canada.
Mr Conroy said China’s navy might be watching the exercise to collect information as it had done in the past.
The war games will span thousands of kilometres from Australia’s Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island to the Coral Sea on Australia’s east coast, in a rehearsal of joint war fighting, said Vice-Admiral Justin Jones, chief of joint operations for the Australian Defence Force.
The air, sea, land and space exercises over two weeks will “test our ability to move our forces into the north of Australia and operate from Australia”, he told reporters.
“I will leave it to China to interpret what 19 friends, allies and partners wanting to operate together in the region means to them. But for me... it is nations that are in search of a common aspiration for peace, stability, a free and open Indo-Pacific,” he said.
US Army Lieutenant-General Joel Vowell, deputy commanding general for the Pacific, said Talisman Sabre would improve the readiness of militaries to respond together and was “a deterrent mechanism because our ultimate goal is no war”.
“If we could do all this alone and we could go fast, but because we want to go far, we have to do it together and that is important because of the instability that is resident in the region,” Lt-Gen Vowell said.
The US is Australia’s major security ally.
Although Australia does not permit foreign bases, the US military is expanding its rotational presence and fuel stores on Australian bases, which from 2027 will have US Virginia submarines at port in Western Australia.
These would play a key role in supporting US forces in any conflict over Taiwan, analysts say. REUTERS
4. China Behind Pro-Palestinian Movements, Study Finds HS Today
Read the 32 page report form George Washington University at this link: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs5746/files/2025-07/CCP Influence in US Pro-Palestinian Activism.pdf
CCP INFLUENCE IN U.S. PRO-PALESTINIAN ACTIVISM
JULY 2025
JENNIFER BAKER
Excerpt:
The report’s conclusion is straight to the point: what appears to be a spontaneous grassroots protest is, in some cases, being shaped and supercharged by a foreign government with a vested interest in fracturing U.S. society from within. With increasing clarity, the evidence points to the CCP leveraging financial resources, propaganda channels, and ideological partners to wage an information war—one that weaponizes the optics of justice to cloak a deeper strategy aimed at using domestic dissent in the U.S. to project weakness abroad, while casting China as a principled champion of peace and justice.
The question for us is when are we going to effectively compete in the information domain or are we going to cede the information battlespace to CHina and the CRInK?
Are our current methods of cracking down on pro-Palestinian activism (and anti-Israeli activtism) effective? Do the attacks on our universities by the government counter these Chinese activities or do they contribute to Chinese objectives by causing further fracture of US society? The enemy is NOT our fellow Americans or American institutions. It is the external malign activities of China and the CRInK.
I hate to keep beating the dead horse but I will. President Trump's 2017 National Security Strategy had it right. You can change Russia to China or even the CRInK:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
Access the 2017 NSS HERE
China Behind Pro-Palestinian Movements, Study Finds HS Today
By
Matt Seldon
July 9, 2025
hstoday.us · July 9, 2025
Chinese influence networks are playing a growing role in U.S.-based pro-Palestinian activism, according to a new study from The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. The report connects the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to a network of activist groups and media operations that echo Beijing’s strategic messaging while undermining U.S. interests at home and abroad.
The investigation zeroes in on Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. businessman based in Shanghai, as a central figure channeling CCP-aligned funding and narratives into U.S. activist networks. Singham, through a web of nonprofits and affiliated organizations, is alleged to finance groups that have pushed anti-Israel and anti-American messaging under the banner of social justice and Palestinian solidarity.
Groups such as the People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and the International People’s Assembly are identified as key facilitators of this influence campaign. These organizations helped launch the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) protest movement following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack. According to the report, the campaign’s media and organizing efforts closely mirror China’s broader global messaging strategy: casting the CCP as a moral counterweight to the United States while exploiting moments of geopolitical crisis to expand Beijing’s narrative reach.
The coordination between these groups is not incidental, the report argues. It highlights shared ideology, joint media production, and aligned logistics as evidence of a cohesive ecosystem shaped by foreign influence. China’s state-run media has further supported the effort by amplifying antisemitic tropes and anti-Western sentiment in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, reinforcing themes circulated by these U.S.-based activist organizations.
The report’s conclusion is straight to the point: what appears to be a spontaneous grassroots protest is, in some cases, being shaped and supercharged by a foreign government with a vested interest in fracturing U.S. society from within. With increasing clarity, the evidence points to the CCP leveraging financial resources, propaganda channels, and ideological partners to wage an information war—one that weaponizes the optics of justice to cloak a deeper strategy aimed at using domestic dissent in the U.S. to project weakness abroad, while casting China as a principled champion of peace and justice.
Click here to read the full report.
(AI was used in part to facilitate this article.)
hstoday.us · July 9, 2025
5. PERSPECTIVE: Disinformation 2.0: Deepfakes Hit the Frontlines of Global Influence Ops HS Today
Ready or not? They are coming for us.
Excerpts:
Final Thought: We’re Not Ready
Deepfakes do not need to be perfect. They just need to feel “true enough” to the right audience, at the right moment. Our natural cognitive biases ensure that if an image looks right, further inspection often isn’t required.
Disinformation is not about winning arguments. It is about shifting perception, undermining trust, and creating confusion. Deepfakes are simply the latest weapon in that arsenal, and they are being used right now.
Unless we get ahead of this—politically, technically, and culturally—we risk losing control of the information space entirely.
PERSPECTIVE: Disinformation 2.0: Deepfakes Hit the Frontlines of Global Influence Ops HS Today
By
Tom Sefton-Collins
July 9, 2025
hstoday.us · July 9, 2025
State-backed actors and disinformation-for-hire networks are already using deepfakes in real operations. The tools are public, the threat is active and we are not ready.
We’ve Entered a New Phase of Information Warfare
We are now operating in a world where seeing is no longer believing. State-backed actors and disinformation-for-hire networks are already using deepfakes in real operations. The tools are public, the threat is active, and we are not ready. State actors and disinformation-for-hire groups are actively deploying deepfakes, not just as test cases, but as real tools in live operations.
These are not future threats. They are present-day capabilities, and they are accelerating.
You may have spotted some; however, it is worth remembering that you probably weren’t the target audience. The target audience has already observed it, reacted, and moved on. Recent examples from Russia/Ukraine and Iran/Israel have demonstrated the pace and capability available to every information actor.
The Toolkit is Public, and That’s the Problem
You no longer need a cyber lab or state-level funding to create a deepfake. Tools like DeepFaceLab and Avatarify are being used in real-world campaigns, and complete tutorials are readily available. Pre-trained models, plug-and-play workflows, and community support all exist in plain sight.
Telegram groups share operational advice. GitHub hosts codebases. Discord servers help users troubleshoot. Freelancers openly advertise synthetic content as a service.
The barrier to entry has collapsed, and hostile actors are exploiting it.
State-Backed Deepfake Operations: What’s Already Happened
This is not speculative. It is operational.
Iran – Fake News Anchor Broadcast In 2023, an Iranian group linked to the IRGC hijacked live-streamed TV in the UAE to insert an AI-generated news anchor under the banner “For Humanity.” The avatar delivered false Gaza casualty figures, supported by a ticker of fabricated statistics. Microsoft linked the campaign to the IRGC. Telegram channels associated with the attackers posted clips bragging about the insertion. This was a coordinated operation combining cyber intrusion, synthetic media, and psychological targeting in real time.
Russia – Zelenskyy’s “Surrender” Deepfake During the early weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a deepfake of President Zelenskyy appeared, calling on troops to surrender. It briefly aired on a hacked Ukrainian news outlet before being removed. It was crude. That did not matter. While it failed tactically—no soldiers were fooled—its strategic impact was significant. The goal was confusion, hesitation, and disruption. The video’s mere existence forced a global conversation about deepfakes, becoming a form of meta-propaganda that gained international visibility. In disinformation terms, this counts as impact.
China – Synthetic Avatars in Propaganda Videos A Chinese influence network known as Spamouflage used AI-generated avatars to deliver pro-Beijing messages in English. These videos appeared on a fabricated outlet called Wolf News and were created using commercial corporate training software. The execution was low quality, but the intent was clear. It marked the first confirmed use of synthetic personas by a state-aligned propaganda network, testing methods for future, more sophisticated campaigns.
Disinfo-for-Hire – The Mercenary Model In parts of Africa, deepfakes linked to Wagner networks have circulated to stoke anti-Western sentiment. More broadly, investigations into disinformation-for-hire outfits have revealed commercial offers for synthetic video creation, voice cloning, and fake persona deployment. This is not just about state capability. It is about commercialised disinformation services available to anyone willing to pay.
The Real Threat: The Collapse of Trust
This is not just about being fooled by a single fake video. It is about what happens when the information environment becomes untrustworthy by default.
Once deepfakes exist, any genuine footage can be dismissed as synthetic. This is the liar’s dividend—the ability to discredit truth by pointing to the possibility of fakes. We are also seeing cognitive fatigue take hold. People are overwhelmed, so they stop verifying. That is the point. Not persuasion, but paralysis.
Getting Ready: A Call for Proactive Measures
Sounding the alarm is not enough; a purely defensive posture is destined to fail. A comprehensive strategy requires a multi-layered approach that moves beyond reactive detection.
First, we must champion technological standards and public literacy. Efforts to create verifiable media, such as the C2PA watermarking standard, are a critical step. These must be paired with widespread public education campaigns to build resilience and skepticism toward unverified content.
Second, platforms must move from reactive content moderation to proactive accountability. This includes disrupting the infrastructure used to disseminate fakes and de-platforming the commercial networks that sell these services.
Finally, we must acknowledge that in this new environment, waiting for an attack is too late. The most sophisticated threats require an active defence. This necessitates the development of proactive counter-operations, such as those being pioneered by a new generation of specialist firms that focus on mapping and disrupting hostile actors before they can launch their campaigns.
Final Thought: We’re Not Ready
Deepfakes do not need to be perfect. They just need to feel “true enough” to the right audience, at the right moment. Our natural cognitive biases ensure that if an image looks right, further inspection often isn’t required.
Disinformation is not about winning arguments. It is about shifting perception, undermining trust, and creating confusion. Deepfakes are simply the latest weapon in that arsenal, and they are being used right now.
Unless we get ahead of this—politically, technically, and culturally—we risk losing control of the information space entirely.
hstoday.us · July 9, 2025
6. Misinformation lends itself to social contagion – here’s how to recognize and combat it
Inoculation is a key defense component. (but we do not like vaccines - note my attempt at sarcasm).
Excerpts:
Inoculation against social contagion
So how much can people do about this?
One way to combat harmful contagion is to draw on an idea first used in the 1960s called pre-bunking. The idea is to train people to practice skills to spot and resist misinformation and disinformation on a smaller scale before they’re exposed to the real thing.
The idea is akin to vaccines that build immunity through exposure to a weakened form of the disease-causing germ. The idea is for someone to be exposed to a limited amount of false information, say through the pre-bunking with Google quiz. They then learn to spot common manipulation tactics used in false information and learn how to resist their influence with evidence-based strategies to counter the falsehoods. This could also be done using a trained facilitator within classrooms, workplaces or other groups, including virtual communities.
Then, the idea is to gradually repeat the process with larger doses of false information and further counterarguments. By role-playing and practicing the counterarguments, this resistance skills training provides a sort of psychological innoculation against misinformation and disinformation, at least temporarily.
...
In the end, whether we’re empowering people to resist the insidious creep of online falsehoods or equipping adolescents to stand firm against peer pressure to smoke or use other substances, the research is clear: Resistance skills training can provide an essential weapon for safeguarding ourselves and young people from harmful behaviors.
Misinformation lends itself to social contagion – here’s how to recognize and combat it
theconversation.com · by Shaon Lahiri
Misinformation on social media has the potential to manipulate millions of people.
In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines. Nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a “face of pure evil,” complete with images of blood and gore.
Experts believe that the girls suffered what is known as a mass psychogenic illness, a psychological condition that results in physical symptoms and spreads socially – much like a virus.
I’m a social and behavioral scientist within the field of public health. I study the ways in which individual behavior is influenced by prevailing social norms and social network processes, across a wide range of behaviors and contexts. Part of my work involves figuring out how to combat the spread of harmful content that can shape our behavior for the worse, such as misinformation.
Mass psychogenic illness is not misinformation, but it gives researchers like me some idea about how misinformation spreads. Social connections establish pathways of influence that can facilitate the spread of germs, mental illness and even behaviors. We can be profoundly influenced by others within our social networks, for better or for worse.
The spreading of social norms
Researchers in my field think of social norms as perceptions of how common and how approved a specific behavior is within a specific network of people who matter to us.
These perceptions may not always reflect reality, such as when people overestimate or underestimate how common their viewpoint is within a group. But they can influence our behavior nonetheless. For many, perception is reality.
Social norms and related behaviors can spread through social networks like a virus can, but with one crucial caveat. Viruses often require just one contact with a potential host to spread, whereas behaviors often require multiple contacts to spread. This phenomenon, known as complex contagion, highlights how socially learned behaviors take time to embed.
Watch the people in this video and see how you react.
Fiction spreads faster than fact
Consider a familiar scenario: the return of baggy jeans to the fashion zeitgeist.
For many millennials like me, you may react to a friend engaging in this resurrected trend by cringing and lightly teasing them. Yet, after seeing them don those denim parachutes on multiple occasions, a brazen thought may emerge: “Hmm, maybe they don’t look that bad. I could probably pull those off.” That’s complex contagion at work.
This dynamic is even more evident on social media. One of my former students expressed this succinctly. She was looking at an Instagram post about Astro Boy Boots – red, oversize boots based on those worn by a 1952 Japanese cartoon character. Her initial skepticism quickly faded upon reading the comments. As she put it, “I thought they were ugly at first, but after reading the comments, I guess they’re kind of fire.”
Moving from innocuous examples, consider the spread of misinformation on social media. Misinformation is false information that is spread unintentionally, while disinformation is false information that is intentionally disseminated to deceive or do serious harm.
Research shows that both misinformation and disinformation spread faster and farther than truth online. This means that before people can muster the resources to debunk the false information that has seeped into their social networks, they may have already lost the race. Complex contagion may have taken hold, in a malicious way, and begun spreading falsehood throughout the network at a rapid pace.
People spread false information for various reasons, such as to advance their personal agenda or narrative, which can lead to echo chambers that filter out accurate information contrary to one’s own views. Even when people do not intend to spread false information online, doing so tends to happen because of a lack of attention paid to accuracy or lower levels of digital media literacy.
Inoculation against social contagion
So how much can people do about this?
One way to combat harmful contagion is to draw on an idea first used in the 1960s called pre-bunking. The idea is to train people to practice skills to spot and resist misinformation and disinformation on a smaller scale before they’re exposed to the real thing.
The idea is akin to vaccines that build immunity through exposure to a weakened form of the disease-causing germ. The idea is for someone to be exposed to a limited amount of false information, say through the pre-bunking with Google quiz. They then learn to spot common manipulation tactics used in false information and learn how to resist their influence with evidence-based strategies to counter the falsehoods. This could also be done using a trained facilitator within classrooms, workplaces or other groups, including virtual communities.
Then, the idea is to gradually repeat the process with larger doses of false information and further counterarguments. By role-playing and practicing the counterarguments, this resistance skills training provides a sort of psychological innoculation against misinformation and disinformation, at least temporarily.
Importantly, this approach is intended for someone who has not yet been exposed to false information – hence, pre-bunking rather than debunking. If we want to engage with someone who firmly believes in their stance, particularly when it runs contrary to our own, behavioral scientists recommend leading with empathy and nonjudgmentally exchanging narratives.
Debunking is difficult work, however, and even strong debunking messages can result in the persistence of misinformation. You may not change the other person’s mind, but you may be able to engage in a civil discussion and avoid pushing them further away from your position.
Spreading facts, not fiction
When everyday people apply this with their friends and loved ones, they can train people to recognize the telltale signs of false information. This might be recognizing what’s known as a false dichotomy – for instance, “either you support this bill or you HATE our country.”
Another signal of false information is the common tactic of scapegoating: “Oil industry faces collapse due to rise in electric car ownership.” And another is the slippery slope of logical fallacy. An example is “legalization of marijuana will lead to everyone using heroin.”
All of these are examples of common tactics that spread misinformation and come from a Practical Guide to Pre-Bunking Misinformation, created by a collaborative team from the University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action and Jigsaw, an interdisciplinary think tank within Google.
This approach is not only effective in combating misinformation and disinformation, but also in delaying or preventing the onset of harmful behaviors. My own research suggests that pre-bunking can be used effectively to delay the initiation of tobacco use among adolescents. But it only works with regular “booster shots” of training, or the effect fades away in a matter of months or less.
Many researchers like me who study these social contagion dynamics don’t yet know the best way to keep these “booster shots” going in people’s lives. But there are recent studies showing that it can be done. A promising line of research also suggests that a group-based approach can be effective in maintaining the pre-bunking effects to achieve psychological herd immunity. Personally, I would bet my money on group-based approaches where you, your friends or your family can mutually reinforce each other’s capacity to resist harmful social norms entering your network.
Simply put, if multiple members of your social network have strong resistance skills, then your group has a better chance of resisting the incursion of harmful norms and behaviors into your network than if it’s just you resisting alone. Other people matter.
In the end, whether we’re empowering people to resist the insidious creep of online falsehoods or equipping adolescents to stand firm against peer pressure to smoke or use other substances, the research is clear: Resistance skills training can provide an essential weapon for safeguarding ourselves and young people from harmful behaviors.
theconversation.com · by Shaon Lahiri
7. Who Is Winning the World War?
We are at war. Unrestricted Warfare. War is politics with bloodshed and politics is war without bloodshed (Mao). Do we understand this?
Excerpts:
But both the Ukrainian stalemate and the Iranian retreat are clarifying reminders that the ultimate outcome of this conflict depends on the revisionist power, the People’s Republic of China, that hasn’t directly joined the fights. China is at once a much more serious rival to America than either Russia or Iran and also an extremely cautious player, content to watch its tacit allies make their plays without, say, handing Iran a nuclear deterrent or sending the People’s Liberation Army to help Russia take Kyiv.
This cautious distance could reflect a fundamental weakness of the revisionist bloc — that it’s purely an alliance of interest between regimes that don’t trust one another, don’t have as much in common as we still have with our European and East Asian allies and struggle to work effectively in concert.
But it could also reflect a confidence on China’s part that time is on its side, that its investments in technology and energy are going to lap ours soon enough and that all our efforts now reflect a fateful squandering of resources given what Beijing has planned for the later 2020s.
Without certain knowledge of those plans, American foreign policy needs both a better long-term strategy to stay ahead of China and a lot of short-term Trumpian flexibility. Not restraint or hawkishness alone, but both an openness to peace and a capacity for warmaking, matched to the ebb and flow of a global conflict that won’t have any simple end.
My thoughts on the CRInK and the exploitable weaknesses:
The real threat might be what the US intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment describes as “adversarial cooperation.” Although the US considers China as the “pacing threat,” I argue that US alliances and partnerships must recognize and address the larger threat of cooperation, collaboration, and collusion among the so-called “CRInK.” At the heart of this strategic competition between the “CRInK” and the modern nation-states is an ideological contest. This requires deft use of the diplomatic and informational instruments of power and not only the military and economic tools. The permanent crises Kaplan describes are a result of the conflict between open and closed societies.
We should ask ourselves what brings the “CRInK” together and how is it like our alliances? There are four reasons for their cooperation: Fear, weakness, desperation, and envy. They fear the strength of our alliances as despite our current frictions time and again we have demonstrated the power of alliances. They have inherent weaknesses within their political systems that make them vulnerable – Putin’s weakness is highly visible in his war in Ukraine, his inability to keep Assad in power, and the support he is currently unable to provide to Iran. They are desperate for support, particularly Russia and north Korea as seen in their current military cooperation. Lastly, they envy our alliances. However, they will never share the values and trust that we do, and their relationships can never be more than transactional. This is playing out with Iran who is receiving very little support if any from the members of the “CRInK.” There are already cracks in the “CRInK” that we should exploit.
These threats require a strategy of comprehensive deterrence, agile response, seizing the initiative, and unified resolve. We cannot fight yesterday’s wars. We must prepare for tomorrow’s contingencies while addressing the ongoing crises throughout the world.
Opinion
Ross Douthat
Who Is Winning the World War?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/opinion/trump-russia-china-iran.html
July 12, 2025
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
When future historians study the arc of American foreign policy, they will probably fold all the major events since 2020 — our pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — into a unified narrative of global conflict.
If we’re fortunate, that will yield academic treatises with titles like “The Empire Tested: America and the World, 2021-2030.” If we’re unlucky — meaning, basically, if the United States and China eventually fall into a ruinous war — then the struggles in Ukraine and the Middle East will be retroactively assigned to histories of World War III.
We are not, as yet, inside that kind of conflagration. But it’s useful for Americans to think about our situation in global terms, with Russia and Iran and China as a revisionist alliance putting our imperial power to the test. And it’s also important to recognize that this kind of conflict is an endurance test, a long and winding road, in which it’s easy to fall prey to mood swings and judge the outcome prematurely.
We’ve had a lot of these swings in the last few years. In 2021 and early 2022, the rout in Afghanistan and our overpromising to a vulnerable Ukraine made America look ineffectual … right up until Vladimir Putin actually invaded his neighbor, at which point his military setbacks and our success in rallying support for the Ukrainians yielded a lot of chest-thumping about the superiority of liberal democracy and the permanence of American hegemony.
That optimistic mood lasted through the failure of Ukraine’s last major counteroffensive and the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, against Israel, at which point there was a swing back toward pessimism. American power was stretched too thin; our Israeli allies were taken unawares by their enemies, the Russians were regaining ground, our arsenal was almost certainly inadequate to protect Ukraine and Israel and defend Taiwan, and all of this under a president debilitated by advancing age, a grim symbol of a crumbling imperium.
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This sense of multi-theater crisis helped to restore Donald Trump to power. Then the initial months of his administration inspired fears that he would end the global conflict by effectively surrendering — abandoning allies and making deals with dictators while retreating to a Fortress North America.
Yet right now that’s not how the landscape looks. Trump’s decision to bomb the Iranian nuclear program and the muted Iranian response has capped off a period in which Tehran’s regional power has crumbled under sustained Israeli assault. Meanwhile, our NATO allies are boosting their military spending and Trump is suddenly praising the alliance, while Russia’s gains in Ukraine remain a punishing grind and there’s a possibility that Putin threw away the best deal he was likely to get. Add in the strength of the American economy, even amid the Trumpian trade war, and it seems that maybe we’re winning the world conflict again. “Rah-rah! Pax Americana forever!”
OK, not quite. The damage to Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated the threat, and Israel’s Gaza war remains a humanitarian crisis without a clear political endgame. Trump’s walk-back of his Department of Defense’s attempt to triage resources by withholding weapons from Ukraine doesn’t change the reality that our weaponry is limited and does require triaging. Putin’s failure to make the most of Trump’s diplomatic outreach doesn’t change the fact that Russia is still slowly gaining ground.
But both the Ukrainian stalemate and the Iranian retreat are clarifying reminders that the ultimate outcome of this conflict depends on the revisionist power, the People’s Republic of China, that hasn’t directly joined the fights. China is at once a much more serious rival to America than either Russia or Iran and also an extremely cautious player, content to watch its tacit allies make their plays without, say, handing Iran a nuclear deterrent or sending the People’s Liberation Army to help Russia take Kyiv.
This cautious distance could reflect a fundamental weakness of the revisionist bloc — that it’s purely an alliance of interest between regimes that don’t trust one another, don’t have as much in common as we still have with our European and East Asian allies and struggle to work effectively in concert.
But it could also reflect a confidence on China’s part that time is on its side, that its investments in technology and energy are going to lap ours soon enough and that all our efforts now reflect a fateful squandering of resources given what Beijing has planned for the later 2020s.
Without certain knowledge of those plans, American foreign policy needs both a better long-term strategy to stay ahead of China and a lot of short-term Trumpian flexibility. Not restraint or hawkishness alone, but both an openness to peace and a capacity for warmaking, matched to the ebb and flow of a global conflict that won’t have any simple end.
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A correction was made on July 12, 2025: In an earlier version of this column, the dates of events in Afghanistan and Ukraine were misstated. “The rout in Afghanistan and our overpromising to a vulnerable Ukraine” were in 2021 and 2022, not 2001 and 2002.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2025, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Is Winning the World War?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
8. Drones Are Key to Winning Wars Now. The U.S. Makes Hardly Any.
A very good (and important) question must be why?
Excerpts:
Neros, which is providing about 6,000 drones to Ukraine this year and produced the drone that appeared in Mr. Hegseth’s video, has been described by some U.S. military leaders as their best alternative to China’s DJI. The Archer sells for about $2,000 each, making it one of the most affordable models. But Neros produces only about 1,500 Archers per month in a factory where 15 workers assemble them by hand.
Mr. Monroe-Anderson, a former drone racer, said he was ramping up production and wanted to build a factory capable of making a million drones a year. He aspires to compete with DJI, but acknowledged the daunting odds.
“It is so much better than really any other company in the world,” he said of DJI. “That’s the reason why it is important to do what we are doing.”
Drones Are Key to Winning Wars Now. The U.S. Makes Hardly Any.
A four-day test in the Alaska wilderness shows how far the U.S. military and American drone companies lag behind China in the technology.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/business/drones-us-military-manufacturing-lags.html
By Farah Stockman
Farah Stockman observed a military training exercise outside Fairbanks, Alaska, involving drone prototypes developed by U.S. companies.
On a patch of dirt in the vast wilderness in Alaska, a long-range drone roared like a lawn mower as it shot into the sky. It scanned the ground for a target it had been programmed to recognize, and then dived, attempting to destroy it by crashing into it. But it missed, landing about 80 feet away.
On another attempt, a drone nose-dived at launch. On a subsequent try, a drone crashed into a mountain.
These drones weren’t flown by amateur hobbyists. They were launched by drone manufacturers paid by a special unit of the Department of Defense as part of an urgent effort to update U.S. capabilities. For four days last month, they tested prototypes of one-way drones by trying to crash them into programmed targets, while soldiers tried to stop the drones with special electronic equipment.
The exercise aimed to help U.S. defense contractors and soldiers get better at drone warfare. But it illustrated some of the ways in which the U.S. military could be unprepared for such a conflict. The nation lags behind Russia and China in manufacturing drones, training soldiers to use them and defending against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. military officials and drone industry experts.
“We all know the same thing. We aren’t giving the American war fighter what they need to survive warfare today,” said Trent Emeneker, project manager of the Autonomy Portfolio at the military’s Defense Innovation Unit, which organized the exercise in Alaska and paid for the development of the drone prototypes that flew there. “If we had to go to war tomorrow, do we have what we need? No. What we are trying to do is fix that.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged that the country has fallen behind, and he announced a series of new policies and investments in drones that he vowed would close the gap. In a video released on Thursday, he cited outdated rules and procurement processes as making it too difficult for commanding officers to buy drones and train their soldiers to use them.
“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones,” he said, “we were mired in bureaucratic red tape.”
Image
Members of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division participated in the training exercise in Alaska.Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times
Image
Trent Emeneker, project manager of the Autonomy Portfolio at the military’s Defense Innovation Unit, which organized the exercise and paid for the development of the drone prototypes that flew there.Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times
The video came on the heels of an executive order signed by President Trump last month called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” which directs federal agencies to fast-track approvals for American drone manufacturers and protect the U.S. drone supply chain from “undue foreign influence.”
But it will take time and money to grow a domestic industry capable of producing enough drones to meet the needs of the U.S. military. Although the United States has excelled in developing large, complex unmanned aircraft like the Predator and Reaper drones, which cost tens of millions of dollars apiece, today’s conflicts have been dominated by swarms of smaller, inexpensive drones that are largely produced with components from China.
The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Drones have become a weapon of choice on modern battlefields. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, soldiers beat back the Russian invasion by adding deadly modifications to the Mavic, a drone sold to hobbyists by DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Versions of the Mavic cost between $300 and $5,000, according to online retailers.
DJI, of Shenzhen, China, accounts for about 70 percent of all commercial drones sold globally for hobby and industrial use, such as aerial photography, package delivery and weather research. The privately held company sells its equipment to customers in the United States — there’s even an authorized store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — but U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones. The company declined to share market data, but industry experts estimate that DJI’s output far exceeds that of any other drone manufacturer.
“No one even comes close,” said Bobby Sakaki, chief executive of UAS NEXUS, a drone industry consultant. “DJI can make millions of drones per year. That is a hundred times more than anybody in the United States can make.”
Although DJI is not a military company and said it cuts off customers who use its drones for armed conflict, its near-total dominance of the market for drones and drone components has caused alarm in Washington, where some lawmakers want to ban its products so that a domestic industry can flourish.
But it will take time and money to grow a domestic industry capable of producing enough drones to meet the needs of the U.S. military. Enter Silicon Valley investors who have been pouring money into American drone companies, anticipating that the Defense Department will place a large order for American-made drones. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has invested more than $1 billion in Anduril Industries, an American defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. joined the board of Unusual Machines, another U.S. drone maker, last year.
About 500 companies manufacture drones in the United States, producing fewer than 100,000 a year, according to Ryan Carver, communications manager for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, a nonprofit organization of industry professionals. But many are start-ups without a track record of production or sales. Founders jockey for the chance to show off their wares to military units that are beginning to work with drones. The changes announced by Mr. Hegseth on Thursday, which make it easier for commanders to buy drones, will intensify that competition.
“Everyone wants to win the Army’s big drone contract, get their billion-dollar check and go retire on an island somewhere,” said Nathan Ecelbarger, chairman of the U.S. National Drone Association, which promotes the rapid advancement of drone and counter-drone technologies.
Image
A Ukrainian drone pilot in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine in April. Ukraine has modified Chinese-made hobbyist drones for military use against the Russians.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Image
Ukrainian soldiers monitoring Russian drones in the Kharkiv region in May.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
But the exercise in Alaska showed how hard it can be to develop homegrown drone capabilities.
The first two days of testing were full of setbacks. Two companies were testing prototypes of a long-range unmanned craft that could fly for hours, navigate without GPS or a human operator, and crash into a target that it had been trained to recognize. They were among four finalists — out of more than 100 applicants — to get the money from the Defense Innovation Unit to develop the systems. Two other companies were set to test their prototypes in Ukraine.
The craft made by Dragoon, a start-up in Tucson, Ariz., experienced engine trouble and then issues with navigation. It failed to hit a target. But on the final day, it recognized a target — an M113 armored personnel carrier — and swooped down to crash into it. The hit was considered a success, even though the target had not been the one intended.
“We have got a lot of work to do to make it operational, for sure,” said Jason Douglas, one of three co-founders of Dragoon. “But those were huge steps.”
AeroVironment fared worse. At first, its drone failed to launch. Then one crashed into a mountain after its navigation system was blocked, narrowly missing a group of soldiers who stood with their jamming equipment. Although one of its drones flew long distances, and successfully crashed into a target with the help of GPS, the prototype never hit a target once its GPS was blocked.
Paul Frommelt, a spokesman for the company, noted that the exercise was a chance to collect data on “an experimental variant of one of our products.”
While many small drones are controlled by human operators, the Defense Innovation Unit has been trying to develop semiautonomous systems that can be trained by artificial intelligence to recognize targets — enemy tanks, for instance — and attack them even if communication with the human operator is cut.
“Do we need a capability like this? Yes. I think that is very clear in the modern battlefield,” said Mr. Emeneker, who is a civilian contractor for the D.I.U. But he acknowledged that the project might not succeed. “Things haven’t gone as smoothly as I wanted. It’s clear that there are some still really hard technological challenges to overcome.”
Video
ModalAI, a company that participated in the exercise, testing some of its equipment.CreditCredit...Video by Ash Adams
The soldiers who participated in the exercise, most of them from the Electromagnetic Warfare Platoon of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, experienced their own problems. On a mountaintop, they set up six tall electronic jammers, which looked like slender microphones attached to black tripods. They emitted radio signals that were supposed to overpower the signals sent by the drone operators. But those jammers — some of which were designed more than a decade ago to fight the war on terror — had hardly any effect. Neither did the backpacks containing newer drone-disarming equipment that some soldiers wore.
The team had a drone-buster, too — a huge gunlike device that looked like something from the movie “Ghostbusters.” But no one bothered to try it. “That thing never worked,” one man said.
Over time, the soldiers improved. By the fourth day of the exercise, they had figured out how to use their jamming equipment more effectively. A black suitcase-sized box called a Magpie worked particularly well, they said.
But Lt. Col. Scott Smith, director for the nonlethal effects section of the 11th Airborne Division, said the exercise highlighted how much more work Americans needed to do to prepare for a conflict involving drones.
“Their equipment just doesn’t have the desired effect against the latest technology,” he said.
Chris Bonzagni, a drone industry consultant with Contact Front Technologies who helped put on the Alaska test, said many of the American drones that were initially delivered to Ukraine failed on the battlefield because they were outdated or easily jammed by the Russians.
“In Ukraine, the companies delivering tech to the war fighters are with them all the time, observing firsthand what is working and what is not,” he said. Ukraine has also become a drone-making hub because its soldiers and engineers are forced to master drone technology to survive, something Americans have not experienced yet.
The event was held at the Yukon Training Area, a military site about an hour south of Fairbanks, because it was the only place where organizers could get permission to fly the drones while soldiers tried to try to jam them, Mr. Emeneker said. The electronic signals used to disrupt drones can wreak havoc with civilian aircraft, radios and cellphones, making it difficult to get clearance to conduct such exercises in populated areas.
Some U.S. drone companies do their testing and development in Ukraine. That may be why one drone stood out in Alaska: a small, short-range quadcopter created by Neros, a start-up in El Segundo, Calif., with an office in Ukraine, which was testing a radio.
That drone, called the Archer, managed to hover about 10 feet over the soldiers’ heads, despite their jamming equipment. Its radio toggled between multiple frequencies, switching every time soldiers tried to jam it. It carried a jar of strawberry jam, a joke from Soren Monroe-Anderson, the 22-year-old chief executive and co-founder who piloted it with what looked like a video game controller.
Image
Soren Monroe-Anderson, center, is the chief executive and co-founder of Neros.Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times
Image
Joey Killeen of the start-up Neros, prepared a drone to launch during the exercise.Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times
Neros, which is providing about 6,000 drones to Ukraine this year and produced the drone that appeared in Mr. Hegseth’s video, has been described by some U.S. military leaders as their best alternative to China’s DJI. The Archer sells for about $2,000 each, making it one of the most affordable models. But Neros produces only about 1,500 Archers per month in a factory where 15 workers assemble them by hand.
Mr. Monroe-Anderson, a former drone racer, said he was ramping up production and wanted to build a factory capable of making a million drones a year. He aspires to compete with DJI, but acknowledged the daunting odds.
“It is so much better than really any other company in the world,” he said of DJI. “That’s the reason why it is important to do what we are doing.”
See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, Founders Fund, DJI Innovations, U.S. Department of Defense
9. In the Hills of Australia, Pacific Allies Are Training to Fight China
So do we want to sacrifice this important capability and these important alliance relationships in return for our demand that they make a public acknowledgement of a commitment of troops to the defense of Taiwan?
I would guess that behind closed doors they are all in and in fact we should consider that actions speak louder than words and these actions (and their continued actions) are speaking very loudly so as to make a public commitment unnecessary. Remember "talk softly and carry a big stick?" We are showing a pretty big trilateral stick here.
In the Hills of Australia, Pacific Allies Are Training to Fight China
Australian, Japanese and U.S. troops expand joint training as Beijing flexes its military power
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-deter-us-japan-australia-training-exercise-15c219e1
By Mike Cherney
Follow | Photographs by Ioanna Sakellaraki for WSJ
Updated July 12, 2025 12:00 am ET
Key Points
What's This?
- The U.S., Japan, and Australia are increasing joint military exercises to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific.
- Exercises like Southern Jackaroo and Talisman Sabre aim to enhance interoperability and deter Chinese aggression.
- Despite challenges like language barriers, the three nations are deepening military cooperation through training.
TOWNSVILLE, Australia—In the rugged hills outside this coastal city, Japanese and Australian artillery crews fired in tandem on a distant target. They were assisted by U.S. Marines, who were embedded with the Australian gun teams.
The live-fire drill was the culmination of Southern Jackaroo, an expanding annual exercise in the Australian bush in which the three nations’ forces practice working together as allies.
Although top officers didn’t call out any foe by name, troops taking part said it was clear that they were training to fight China.
As Beijing’s military steadily expands its forays in the Pacific, U.S. allies in the region are realizing they could easily be drawn into a conflict with China. They are responding by bolstering their forces and increasing joint drills to ensure they can work together seamlessly.
A primary goal of the combined displays of force is to complicate Beijing’s planning and convince the Chinese leadership that it would be too risky to use military force to assert territorial claims.
Troops fire artillery during Southern Jackaroo. The annual exercise took place outside Townsville.
Australia and Japan, both of which have security pacts with the U.S., have emerged as essential U.S. partners in the Pacific. If a war were to erupt, Washington would want Tokyo to sign off on the U.S. using its Japanese bases to confront China and for Australia to send aircraft, ships and troops to Japan to help the fight, some defense analysts say.
“If there’s any argument to be made for a collective approach to deterrence in the region, it’s these three countries,” said Jeffrey Hornung, the Japan lead at Rand, a think tank.
On Friday, the U.S., Japan and Australia further bolstered their cooperation with a new naval logistics agreement that covers activities such as refueling and reloading missile systems, which could be vital to improving their defenses.
Australia is also gearing up to host the three-week Talisman Sabre exercise opening Sunday. The exercise will involve 19 nations, including the U.S. and Japan, and more than 30,000 personnel.
Multinational maneuvers are the new normal as the U.S. and its allies prepare for a possible confrontation with China over Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island that Beijing claims as its territory.
Marines are briefed before a live-fire exercise during Southern Jackaroo.
About 3,000 troops took part in this year’s exercise.
China has spent years building up its military—it now has the world’s largest navy—and is using that extra heft to expand its influence, including in areas beyond the “first island chain,” which includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
China sent an aircraft carrier group to waters east of Iwo Jima, a remote Japanese island, for the first time in June, prompting alerts from Tokyo. In another foray this year, China conducted naval drills near Australia.
At the same time, Beijing has continued to send its armed forces into the waters and airspace around Taiwan. It has expanded its operations in the disputed South China Sea near the Philippines and is increasing its activities in the Yellow Sea, a strategic area between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula.
“The Chinese are stretching their legs,” said Kelly Magsamen, who was chief of staff to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the Biden administration. “Their military modernization has been at a pace that is pretty astounding. And then once you create a military, you start using your military, and you start pushing further and farther afield.”
Beijing has accused the U.S. and its allies of spreading false accusations about the threat from China, and it has denounced the drills as provocations that disrupt peace and stability.
Australia and Japan have emerged as essential U.S. partners in the Pacific.
Training is picking up all over the region. In one recent exercise, U.S. tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft carried Marines and Philippine troops to beaches and a nearby airfield where they practiced repelling an adversary. In another, F-35 jet fighters from the U.S., Japan and Australia trained together for the first time in Guam, a U.S. island territory with an expanding military role.
About 3,000 troops took part in this year’s Southern Jackaroo, the most since the exercise started in 2013.
Australia and Japan are longtime U.S. allies that host American troops and have militaries that can complement U.S. forces with missiles, surveillance assets and logistical support. They rely on the region’s waterways for trade, so maintaining stability and access is crucial. A paper published by Australia’s defense department in 2015 said that 54% of the country’s trade passed through the South China Sea on its way to northeast Asia.
“There’s such a commonality between our three countries,” said Scott Morrison, the former Australian prime minister who ramped up military cooperation with Japan and the U.S. during his 2018-22 tenure. “When it comes to the things that really matter, it goes pretty deep.”
In Australia, the U.S. is investing in air bases in the north. Marines are stationed in Darwin for part of the year and U.S. submarines are slated to begin rotations through a naval base in Western Australia in 2027.
In Japan, which permanently hosts tens of thousands of American troops, the U.S. is establishing a so-called joint force headquarters, which will have more operational responsibility and work more closely with its Japanese counterparts. An island-fighting regiment of Marines was recently formed in Okinawa and Tokyo is planning to deploy new Japanese missiles.
There are points of friction among the three nations. The Trump administration is pressuring allies to lift military spending, arguing the U.S. has shouldered an unfair share of the cost of keeping them safe. It also hasn’t spared America’s traditional friends from new tariffs.
Last month, the Pentagon began a review of the $240 billion plan that involves selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. Officials in Washington say they want to ensure that the U.S. builds enough submarines for itself.
An Australian soldier outside Townsville.
The commander of the Australian brigade at the exercise wants armored vehicles to fight together next year.
Then there are the challenges of learning to work together, as troops taking part in the exercise discovered.
In one drill, the Marines used Ospreys to act as an air assault element—much as they would when island-hopping in a conflict in the Pacific—while troops from the three countries seized and cleared terrain.
The language barrier was the most obvious obstacle, with Japanese troops relying on a small number of English-speaking interpreters. The Marines, who don’t bring personal devices with translation apps to most field training because of security concerns, said using visual aids such as maps made it easier to communicate.
There are also different operating procedures. At the artillery drill, the Japanese were more inclined to use hand-held flags to communicate, while the Australians favored sending commands digitally.
Some officers said the troops would benefit from even more complex scenarios. Capt. Jolie Brakey, a U.S. Marine artillery commander at the exercise, wants to practice more amphibious operations with the Japanese.
“I know we’re good inland,” she said. “But what does it look like embarking on one of their naval vessels? What are those procedures and how do we work those out ahead of time?”
Brig. Ben McLennan, commander of the Australian brigade at the exercise, already knows what he would like next year: armored vehicles fighting together on a maneuver range and infantry fighting in trenches.
Over time, the exercise “has achieved an extraordinary level of integration,” McLennan said. “That’s something to double down on. And that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com
10. Trump’s Cuts Are Making Federal Data Disappear
This is an "own goal" by us that could have disastrous long term effects and consequences.
I think this could/should be considered an inherent government function in the modern era - providing data for the "public good." Have we lost the concept of the "public good?" I would extrapolate from the Constitution Art II: "He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union" that our founding fathers wanted transparency of ogvoernmentand the executive branch and they would today say that providing data from executive branch agencies for the public good would be in keeping with the intent to ensure government transparency. I would argue that providing this data (which no private organization likely can gather and provide) is one of the very important public goods that the government provides to the American people.
Trump’s Cuts Are Making Federal Data Disappear
Online tools that professionals use for everything from diagnosing diseases to calculating insurance payouts are going dark.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-10/trump-s-cuts-to-federal-government-are-making-data-disappear?sref=hhjZtX76
By Molly Smith
July 10, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
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by Bloomberg AI
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- Doctors are struggling to treat patients with complex sexually transmitted infections due to certain health data being purged from public websites.
- The Department of Government Efficiency says it's canceled almost 12,000 contracts and hundreds of thousands of government workers have departed, leaving agencies gutted and holes in others, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.
- Experts say economic data is mostly still reliable, but the trend is troublesome, with funding slumping and data collection being stopped or reduced, according to Jed Kolko, who was undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce in the Biden administration.
Doctors are struggling to treat patients with complex sexually transmitted infections as certain types of health data are being purged from public websites. Insurers have lost access to a frequently consulted database of climate and weather disasters. School districts are left to work with a scaled-down version of the nation’s report card, which is critical for setting benchmarks for student achievement and allocating resources.
These datasets are collateral damage in President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the US government. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency says it’s canceled almost 12,000 contracts totaling about $44 billion in savings, plus billions more in terminated grants. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of government workers who’ve departed through voluntary resignations, firings and other exits, leaving several agencies gutted and gaping holes in others. Among them are linchpins of the sprawling federal statistical system, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as a host of lesser-known offices that research science and engineering, transportation, health and more.
Some data collection was already at risk before Trump reclaimed the White House, largely because of shrinking budgets and staff departures. Government number crunchers have also had to contend with fewer people responding to surveys, rendering efforts to assemble representative datasets more costly and time-consuming—a problem that extends beyond the US. “It’s kind of like turning off a water tap. You get less and less, and we don’t know where it’s going to stop,” says Nancy Potok, who served as US chief statistician in the first Trump administration. “We’re down to a lesser stream of data.”
Businesses rely on government statistics to inform salaries and wages and investment decisions. Officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House need data to guide monetary and fiscal policy, such as where to set interest rates and tariffs. Statistics also matter to the general public, which wants to know about the best school districts, outbreaks of infectious diseases and emergency preparedness for natural disasters.
Experts say economic data is mostly still reliable, but the trend is troublesome. At the BLS, which produces some of the nation’s marquee numbers on inflation and employment, funding has slumped about 20% since 2010 in real terms, and Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would shave an additional 8% from both its purse and personnel. Those reductions will force the BLS to concentrate on data deemed most important by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Separately the bureau decided some months ago to stop certain data collection and production for its consumer and producer price indexes.
“The threats to economic data have accelerated,” says Jed Kolko, who was undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce in the Biden administration. “The risk is that these economic statistics that we rely on get worse over time,” as in less accurate, subject to larger revisions and more reliant on imputations and estimates in place of direct survey data, he says.
A group of Democratic senators recently wrote to the BLS and its overseer, the Department of Labor, to ask how many positions the BLS has lost and to identify each change to a statistical program since Trump took office. “These numbers affect nearly every household in the country—impacting Social Security, wages, interest rates, and how businesses and families make financial decisions,” they wrote in a June 10 letter.
“The Administration is committed to every federal agency and subagency meeting their statutory requirements by publishing accurate, timely, and relevant data for the American people,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an email.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.Photographer: Bloomberg (2)
One of the first places to see data go dark was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where a January executive order to excise diversity, equity and inclusion language at federal agencies led to the removal of upwards of 200 datasets from public websites, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, while others ceased to be updated. Among those affected: an online tool that allows doctors to mine decades of CDC surveillance data on HIV, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections as well as a repository for research on pregnancy risks. The Department of Health and Human Services will stop collecting data on emergency room visits related to substance abuse.
Dr. Sarah Nosal, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians, remembers the day in early February when she noticed that popular CDC mobile apps on treating STIs and providing contraception methods wouldn’t load. She was in an exam room with a patient who had recurrent yeast infections, a condition that requires a medication regimen that varies from case to case. The apps are back up and running, but Nosal says she won’t consult them anymore because the data is compromised and incomplete. She and her colleagues are having to spend more money and effort contacting experts for information that used to be at their fingertips, and she worries patient care is suffering. “We probably don’t even know the things we’re doing wrong yet,” Nosal says. “We are harming individuals because I’m not as well informed as I was about the best care for my patients.”
Just as the administration has zeroed in on data pertaining to diverse populations, anything related to climate has also been targeted. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has retired its popular database of climate and weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The database had been a key tool for insurance agencies in assessing coverage and reinsurance—something that would have been widely consulted in the coming months as central Texas rebuilds from devastating July flooding. NOAA stopped distributing readings from a meteorological satellite program at the end of June—information that helped forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center predict whether a storm would rapidly intensify. The White House has also removed environmental mapping tools from government websites, which activists used to protect communities vulnerable to pollution and climate change.
Some of the impacts to federal data have been more subtle. The Department of Agriculture released quarterly trade data a few days late in June and without its usual comments and analysis. The statistical agency within the Department of Education, which has been stripped down to around three employees, from about 100, still hasn’t posted a publication schedule, as required by federal regulation.
Although the federal statistical system needs funds and staff to function, many stats geeks say throwing money at the problem won’t make it better. If anything, the steep cuts present technocrats with an opportunity to rethink the US statistical system, says Julia Lane, author of Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto. It’s frequently been criticized for its decentralized nature, spanning many government departments and creating inefficiencies that are hobbling efforts for a more modernized, coherent structure. Lane, a professor emerita at New York University, argues part of the solution to improving the federal statistical system may come from outside the government. “I don’t think we’re doing anyone any service by trying to preserve a dead system,” she says. “We need to pivot to green shoots that are going to cost less and be much more valuable.”
Part of that requires leaning on administrative data, such as state unemployment records and tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, that are more efficient and cost-effective to collect. While the private sector can also step in to fill certain holes, experts say it doesn’t compare to the nation’s gold standard federal statistics. “The private sector collects data for its own purposes and needs to profit from those data in order to justify the expense of collecting them,” says Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association, an advocacy group. “So if we’re going to have accurate, reliable, trustworthy, unbiased data and reporting, it’s not going to be able to come from the private sector.”
— With assistance from Zahra Hirji, Jessica Nix, Lauren Rosenthal, Brian K Sullivan, and Skylar Woodhouse
11. A Never-Ending Supply of Drones Has Frozen the Front Lines in Ukraine
Please go to the link to view the multiple videos, charts, and interactive graphics as well as the proper format.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/a-never-ending-supply-of-drones-has-frozen-the-front-lines-in-ukraine-ae29c581?st=xwb4JL&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
A Never-Ending Supply of Drones Has Frozen the Front Lines in Ukraine
The speed and scale of production means soldiers can’t emerge from their bunkers without falling prey to a drone
By Ian Lovett
Follow and Daniel Kiss
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Updated July 13, 2025 12:04 am ET
In the battle for Ukraine, the front line is increasingly at a standstill. The reason: rapid innovations in drone technology.
From just a few commercial and homemade drones, which the Ukrainians used at the start of the war to locate invading Russian columns, unmanned vehicles now dominate the battlefield.
Each side has hundreds of them constantly in the air across the 750-mile front line. Drones can lay mines, deliver everything from ammunition to medication and even evacuate wounded or dead soldiers. Crucially, drones spot any movement along the front line and are dispatched to strike enemy troops and vehicles.
12. Why Indo-Pacific Deterrence Needs Bipartisanship
I concur.
I argued that the Biden administration actually supported Trumps' first term policies (in some ways enhanced them) and that Trump should welcome the gift Biden gave him particularly on alliances.
Silk Web of Alliances: Trump’s Legacy and the Indo-Pacific’s Future
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/silk-web-of-alliances-trumps-legacy-and-the-indo-pacifics-future/
My words:
The importance of alliances in the Indo-Pacific region has been a consistent theme in US foreign policy, transcending administrations and political divides.
This continuity is evident in the through line from President Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) to President Biden’s Indo-Pacific security strategy. The incoming Trump administration must recognize and build upon this foundation as we look toward the future. An “America First” foreign policy will be most effective if it taps into the silk web of US relationships, and US allies will know and respect this.
It is also necessary to recognize the growing relationship of what has been described variously as the Axis of authoritarianism, dictators, chaos, tyranny, or the “Dark Quad.” This is a result of the recognition by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that the US silk web of relationships is immensely powerful.
These Axis players seek to counter and weaken this power while trying to harness their own. But this is a strategic competition that the US can, should, and must win. The US can do so easily when President Trump directs it to happen.
Author's conclusion:
For more than a decade, it has been easy for policymakers on both sides of the aisle to claim that the Indo-Pacific is a top priority for US interests. But it is always harder to translate rhetoric into results. President Biden and his team made important progress to transform Washington’s bipartisan consensus on the China challenge toward concrete action, but the need for urgency remains great.
Rather than reject what it inherited in the region, the second Trump administration can instead build on this bipartisan foundation. Deterring major aggression in the Indo-Pacific depends on it.
Why Indo-Pacific Deterrence Needs Bipartisanship
The National Interest · by Chris Estep
Topic: Security
Region: Asia
July 12, 2025
By: Chris Estep
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The White House should not shy away from replicating President Biden’s successful restructuring of the US strategic posture in Asia.
Deterring major aggression by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Indo-Pacific is a challenge too great for any one political party in Washington—it demands bipartisanship. The second Trump administration has inherited a strong hand in the region from its predecessor. Rather than indulge a reflexive partisan impulse to disavow what the Biden administration achieved in the Indo-Pacific, the new administration should build on these accomplishments.
The Bipartisan Roots of Regional Deterrence
While the PRC maintained its desire and invested in its capability to potentially seize Taiwan, gain mastery over the South China Sea, and dominate the wider region—all fueled by the largest military buildup since World War II—deterrence in the Indo-Pacific remained strong throughout the Biden administration.
Despite suggestions to the contrary—that Washington needs to somehow “reestablish deterrence” vis-à-vis the PRC—the truth is that the Biden administration made major investments in the US military, strengthened partnerships in the region, and won robust bipartisan support for these efforts.
Discarding the last administration’s track record risks turning the myth of lost deterrence into a reality. Instead, Trump administration officials, especially at the Pentagon, can deter PRC aggression by embracing the bipartisan roots of America’s strong position in the Indo-Pacific.
Sharpening America’s Strategic Focus
First, the authors of the next National Defense Strategy (NDS)—due for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk by August 31—can follow through on Hegseth’s demand that deterring China must remain a central priority. The first Trump administration’s NDS marked a significant shift in 2018 when it identified the PRC and Russia as America’s two long-term strategic competitors. Then in 2022, the Biden administration took the crucial step of describing Beijing as the Pentagon’s top “pacing challenge.”
The importance of codifying this commitment in the Department’s cornerstone strategic document cannot be overstated. The NDS publicly signals the Pentagon’s priorities to friends and foes alike. It offers lawmakers a way to hold the department accountable. And importantly, the NDS gives decision makers inside the Pentagon a source of authority and direction when confronting tough choices.
Faced with conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it was not always easy for the Biden administration to make good on its stated prioritization of China and the Indo-Pacific. But the previous team pressed ahead, proving it was still possible to deliver results in the region. Continuing to do so will require clarity and candor in the Trump administration’s defense strategy, especially as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have recently become even more intense.
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Resourcing Indo-Pacific Priorities
Second, the Trump administration’s defense budgets must ensure that the US military can still deter major aggression in the Indo-Pacific. During its four years in office, the previous administration sought significant funding for cutting-edge technology, critical munitions, and upgrades to regional bases where the US military operates. In addition to faithfully signing bipartisan legislation that authorized even more funds for these efforts, President Biden also rallied bipartisan support for major domestic spending to strengthen US competitiveness, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act.
At the same time, America’s defense industrial base has struggled, especially when it comes to producing equipment crucial for Indo-Pacific deterrence. In 2024, a large bipartisan majority in Congress took important steps toward addressing this challenge by passing nearly $100 billion in supplemental funding for US national security priorities, mostly to replenish the US defense industrial base after several years of considerable US aid to Ukraine.
This year’s budget reconciliation process has given lawmakers in the House and the Senate an opportunity to propose one-time increases for the US military in line with the new administration’s priorities, especially for the industrial base. However, some legislators have argued that defense spending under reconciliation should not substitute for sustained increases as part of the regular budget process, and that the administration’s defense spending proposal for the upcoming fiscal year should have been higher.
Budgetary gridlock on Capitol Hill compounds these challenges. The Biden administration endured well over one-quarter of its time in office under continuing resolutions, keeping much-needed defense spending lower than it could have been and constraining the Pentagon’s ability to direct taxpayer money toward more effective programs. As then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks warned, “You can’t make that time up.”
Even if an administration’s defense budget proposes the right investments for US military capability in the Indo-Pacific, congressional action is still required to fund that budget. Advancing America’s Indo-Pacific priorities in the years ahead will take even greater bipartisan cooperation between the Pentagon and Capitol Hill to reintroduce predictability to the fiscal process, devote enough funding to the right initiatives, and ensure that existing funding is executed effectively.
Compounding Results with Allies and Partners
Finally, the Pentagon can advance the previous team’s efforts to strengthen America’s military bonds with its regional allies and partners. The past four years saw the beginning of a renaissance in the Indo-Pacific security architecture, which foreign policy expert and former Bush administration official Kori Schake once called “the most consequential success of the Biden administration.”
Indeed, the list of achievements is long. The United States forged important new agreements with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines to transform its regional force posture. Washington also inked several new bilateral defense industrial deals for codevelopment, coproduction, and cosustainment with Canberra, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, and more.
With Japan, the United States announced plans to upgrade US Forces Japan and supported Tokyo’s efforts to acquire hundreds of long-range Tomahawk missiles as part of Japan’s own defense spending increases. With the Philippines, the Biden administration committed a historic amount of Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to support the modernization of the Philippine military, made possible by the bipartisan National Security Supplemental in 2024.
With Taiwan, the Biden administration used a growing toolkit of authorities—including FMF, Presidential Drawdown Authority, and Foreign Military Sales—to bolster Taipei’s self-defense capabilities. And in the Pacific Islands region, the Biden administration successfully renegotiated the Compacts of Free Association with three crucial US partners. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle voted to authorize billions in funding to fulfill the renewed agreement.
In the years ahead, the second Trump administration must draw on bipartisan congressional support to make sure these bilateral accomplishments are funded and implemented effectively.
Beyond these bilateral accomplishments, the Biden administration also launched and strengthened trilateral and multilateral networks across the region, including with Japan and South Korea; the Quad (building on progress from the first Trump administration); the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom; and Australia, Japan, and the Philippines.
Of course, the second Trump administration has called for many of these same allies and partners to spend even more on their own defense. Strengthening regional stability requires more capable allies, but deterring major PRC aggression takes more than even that. Stronger allies must stand together to show any would-be adversary that aggression is never worth the risk.
The real question facing the Trump administration today is not whether to continue these initiatives—it is where to accelerate ongoing progress, what new efforts are possible, and how best to prioritize the achievements left behind by the last team. As it takes stock of the trilateral and multilateral progress that it has inherited in the Indo-Pacific, the new administration can especially build on its deepening cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines by exploring the possibility of creating a more formal defense pact among the four countries, as called for by former Pentagon official (and my former boss) Ely Ratner.
Transforming Consensus into Action
For more than a decade, it has been easy for policymakers on both sides of the aisle to claim that the Indo-Pacific is a top priority for US interests. But it is always harder to translate rhetoric into results. President Biden and his team made important progress to transform Washington’s bipartisan consensus on the China challenge toward concrete action, but the need for urgency remains great.
Rather than reject what it inherited in the region, the second Trump administration can instead build on this bipartisan foundation. Deterring major aggression in the Indo-Pacific depends on it.
About the Author: Chris Estep
Chris Estep is a Non-Resident Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a former Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, and a former Special Advisor for National Security Communications to Vice President Kamala Harris. The views expressed in this article are his alone.
13. How the West can beat the rest – Armies must learn from their mistakes
Think about this line: "But no army composed of single sons has ever fought in history"
Are our psychological operations professionals developing themes and messages based on this idea and China's history and culture? Are we preparing the information environment now to exploit such themes both to support deterrence (create internal Chinese popular opposition to war) and if China initiates hostilities to create pressure on the CCP.
Excerpts:
China, of course, is the great unknown when it comes to combat. The country’s vast accomplishments of the past two millennia, in every realm of human creativity, were accompanied by an unending series of defeats at the hand of grossly outnumbered invaders, well documented since the Xiongnu of the 2nd century BC. Things continued like that until 1945, when the badly outnumbered Japanese troops who garrisoned much of the country could not be dislodged by either Nationalist or Communist troops, in spite of the ever-diminishing supplies they received from Japan under bombardment. Nor could the Chinese prevail against Vietnam in 1979, when they tried and failed to protect their Khmer Rouge allies in Cambodia from Vietnam’s advancing troops.
After failing to advance, and suffering some 26,000 dead, the People’s Liberation Army simply withdrew, abandoning the Khmer Rouge to its fate. Since then, China has become far richer, acquiring much more advanced weaponry in every category. But it is still unknown if Chinese units will actually fight. This is especially given the legacy of the one-child policy — now abrogated, but whose effects will linger for two decades — which means that every soldier is the only child of two whole families: both of which will be extinguished on his death.
Xi Jinping likes military parades and greatly celebrated Colonel Qui Faobao, who started the June 2020 fight with Indian troops up at the Galwan river in remotest Ladakh. But no army composed of single sons has ever fought in history, and the death of four Chinese soldiers at Galwan remained undisclosed for eight months, while the CCP made extraordinarily elaborate preparations to soften the blow once the announcement was made. And if there is even a minor clash over Taiwan, it is unlikely that only four will die.
How the West can beat the rest
Armies must learn from their mistakes
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · July 9, 2025
Why did so many insist that regime change had to be the aim of any war against Iran? They paid no attention when Washington and Jerusalem both denied any intention of trying to change Iran’s government — and some persisted in pointing out the severe pitfalls of “regime change” even after Trump’s ceasefire order had abruptly ended the fighting.
The answer is not that complicated: the naysayers desperately longed for an Israeli defeat. Some, including Tucker Carlson, even wanted an American defeat, a thing only possible if either Trump or Netanyahu had been foolish enough to send an army all the way to Tehran through a vast country 80 times the size of Israel. The overlooked implication is that, absent a lunatic attempt at regime change by ground invasion, Iran’s defeat had to be a foregone conclusion: Israel is a very modern Western state, whereas Iran is only a superficially modernised theocracy.
For a generation brought up on “post-colonial” grievance studies, taught to despise and revile the Europeans who set out in their fragile little ships to conquer the world, it is distressing to think that so little has changed when it comes to the balance of military strength. Hating the West as they do, especially “settler” states like Australia, Canada, the US and more loudly Israel, they want to see their homelands humiliated.
But everybody now understands that Israel controlled the skies over Iran for just as long as it wanted, even though it did not have even a single long-range combat aircraft nor adequate refuelling tankers. Rather, it simply had a Western air force. In practice, that means its pilots and commanders are not mere chancers, but rather earnest professionals who accept the limitations of their equipment and strive to overcome them — for example with unique air-launched ballistic missiles used as range extenders.
The essential Western quality that wins wars is the willingness to acknowledge errors and defeats, and so avoid repeating them. Hezbollah’s now-dead founder Hassan Nasrallah openly admired Israel’s investigative report on the 2006 war he himself had started, a report which respected no military secrets nor reputations in harshly criticising both Israel’s prime minister and his military chief. Both subsequently resigned for the conduct of the war.
Given the surprise October 7 attacks, which cost the lives of so many, there will no doubt be many uncomfortable revelations this time too. Together, they will most certainly end Netanyahu’s political career, in spite of his undeniably victorious strategy, if only because of his inherent and undeniable prime-ministerial responsibility. Nor should he be surprised: after the 1973 war, which also started with a surprise attack, this time on the Suez Canal, it was Prime Minister Golda Meir who had to resign and leave politics, despite having just led her country to victory against Egypt and Syria.
By contrast, Ayatollah Khamenei opened his first post-combat speech by warmly congratulating the people of Iran on their “very great” victory and the brilliant successes of their armed forces, including their magnificent “True Promise IIII” missile offensive. Perhaps readers of the Tehran Times, who had just seen major buildings in their own city reduced to ruins, were consoled by reading that Iran’s formidable missiles had ravaged both Haifa and Tel Aviv. More emphatically, they are told that Iran’s missiles destroyed Israel’s ministry of defence in the heart of Tel Aviv, and the Mossad headquarters just north of the city, both of which passing Israeli commuters can still see are perfectly intact every day.
Unmentioned in Iran’s media was the very prudent conduct of the country’s pilots: not one dared challenge the Israeli aircraft overhead. That is unfortunate, for though their planes are certainly outdated, a dogfight could have ensured the IDF pilots ran out of fuel before they could return to base.
Nor is this an exclusively Middle Eastern problem. Neither India nor Pakistan has acknowledged its air combat losses in the fighting of two months ago. On the contrary, each side has proudly recounted how many enemy fighters its brave pilots shot down, even as their respective medias have duly broadcast fantasy videos of great victories.
That inevitably means that errors are never exposed nor corrected, even as the malpractice of strictly-by-the-book routine drills, instead of real combat training, continues unabated. This is hardly a new phenomenon. A Pakistani pilot who flew with the Jordanian air force as far back as the Six-Day War is still a celebrated ace in local media. Even now, it breathlessly recounts how terrorised Israeli pilots could not survive his deadly shooting — even as the historical record shows that Jordan lost every one of its combat aircraft on the very first day of fighting.
“Errors are never exposed nor corrected”
To be sure, neither the West nor the rest is homogenous. When it comes to military professionalism and truth-telling, Japan was certainly a Western power by 1905 when it defeated the Russians in the Far East. Even ten years earlier, in fact, Japan’s fleet of older and smaller vessels had already defeated China’s modernised navy of European-built ships. By contrast, there are, and have always been, European military forces that can neither fight in earnest nor acknowledge their crippling deficiencies in combat morale and leadership.
In recent years, some of their troops have even managed to participate in the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq — without achieving anything, of course, but without being found out either. The US officers in charge did their part by assigning their allies to the least dangerous areas, but they themselves came up with their own creative remedies, including paying the enemy to allow them to pretend-patrol without being attacked. US and British officers higher up the chain of command were happy to indulge these tricks, studiously avoiding any inquiries that might have uncovered the truth.
The Biden administration did the same thing when Houthi attacks in the Red Sea disrupted global commerce. Though the Mediterranean ports in France, Italy and Spain were severely impacted, the three countries refused to intervene. Nevertheless, Biden dutifully sent the US Navy to join British warships in fighting the Houthis, while RAF aircraft flying out of Cyprus bombed Yemen too. Their French, Italian and Spanish allies, however, were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that defeating the Houthis should have been a strategic priority for them.
But when Trump found out that the Mediterranean navies were entirely absent from the fight — despite boasting hundreds of combat vessels, including aircraft carriers — he abruptly ordered the US Navy to withdraw completely. With each US missile sent against the cheap drones and missiles of the Houthis costing $2.5 million, the White House refused to follow Biden in defending European economic interests without even asking them to join the fight. And, yes, there is a European Union naval mission. But its two small vessels are prohibited from cooperating with US or British forces, and are very carefully stay out of trouble in the upper Red Sea — ultimately achieving nothing.
China, of course, is the great unknown when it comes to combat. The country’s vast accomplishments of the past two millennia, in every realm of human creativity, were accompanied by an unending series of defeats at the hand of grossly outnumbered invaders, well documented since the Xiongnu of the 2nd century BC. Things continued like that until 1945, when the badly outnumbered Japanese troops who garrisoned much of the country could not be dislodged by either Nationalist or Communist troops, in spite of the ever-diminishing supplies they received from Japan under bombardment. Nor could the Chinese prevail against Vietnam in 1979, when they tried and failed to protect their Khmer Rouge allies in Cambodia from Vietnam’s advancing troops.
After failing to advance, and suffering some 26,000 dead, the People’s Liberation Army simply withdrew, abandoning the Khmer Rouge to its fate. Since then, China has become far richer, acquiring much more advanced weaponry in every category. But it is still unknown if Chinese units will actually fight. This is especially given the legacy of the one-child policy — now abrogated, but whose effects will linger for two decades — which means that every soldier is the only child of two whole families: both of which will be extinguished on his death.
Xi Jinping likes military parades and greatly celebrated Colonel Qui Faobao, who started the June 2020 fight with Indian troops up at the Galwan river in remotest Ladakh. But no army composed of single sons has ever fought in history, and the death of four Chinese soldiers at Galwan remained undisclosed for eight months, while the CCP made extraordinarily elaborate preparations to soften the blow once the announcement was made. And if there is even a minor clash over Taiwan, it is unlikely that only four will die.
Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.
ELuttwak
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · July 9, 2025
14. Special Operators Pursuing Autonomy, Open Architecture for Aircraft, Drones
Special Operators Pursuing Autonomy, Open Architecture for Aircraft, Drones
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/7/11/special-operators-pursuing-autonomy-open-architecture-for-aircraft-drones
7/11/2025
By Allyson Park
MQ-9 Reaper
Air Force photo
TAMPA, Florida — Special Operations Command is modernizing its fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft to include more autonomy and modular open systems architecture in response to the rapidly evolving operational landscape.
The modernization of its aviation portfolios comes at a time when Special Operations Command is facing “the most complex, asymmetric, challenging threat security environment many of us have seen in over 30 years of service,” Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, SOCOM commander, said in a keynote speech at the recent SOF Week conference. “The pace of technological change is unlike anything we’ve seen.”
To adapt to the pace of technological innovation on the battlefield, the command is focused on increasing autonomy and modular open systems architecture on its aircraft, said Lt. Col. Andrew Sturgeon, mobility division chief in the command’s Program Executive Office Fixed Wing. The goal is to reduce crew error and workload, ensure maximum flexibility for missions and foster seamless integration with partners and allies.
Lt. Col. Benjamin Toler, division chief for emerging technologies at PEO Fixed Wing, said the command is developing and looking for autonomous capabilities to “enhance mission effectiveness and enable new operational concepts” with software platforms and provide enhanced survivability and situational awareness.
One of the “flagship” programs of record is Air Force Special Operations Command’s Adaptive Airborne Enterprise, or A2E, said Col. T. Justin Bronder, program executive officer for PEO Fixed Wing.
The goal of the program is to deliver an interoperable system of systems that enables intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities through expendable autonomous small uncrewed aerial platforms, resilient data paths and common control architecture.
The A2E program is currently doing some “good pathfinding” with the MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft, enhancing it with “a suite of additional systems, autonomy and integration,” Bronder said. It’s “very much just a pathfinder as we expand those networked, interoperable capabilities, launched effects, autonomy [and] updated human-machine interface, proliferating that … as we keep these legacy assets in the fight” and modernize them to meet the demands of Special Operations Command and the Joint Force as the battlefield continues to evolve.
Through the Adaptive Airborne Enterprise, the command is also looking to utilize “any kind of government architectures where we can for common areas like autonomy,” Bronder said. “The problems they’re tackling” in other offices “for autonomy maybe look a little bit different than what you’ve heard here, but I think there is some mutual lift in terms of leveraging similar architectures.”
Additionally, Air Force Special Operations Command currently has an assessment event underway with Special Operations Command’s innovation arm, SOFWERX, to accept, evaluate and scale down 60 white papers from industry partners on some “really niche, focused autonomy solutions” that the service can readily integrate into its current software-defined kit for the Adaptive Airborne Enterprise, Bronder said.
At press time, the assessment was not completed, but there are “potentially” more to follow, Bronder said. He urged industry partners to “keep an eye out for SOFWERX, for those types of solicitations as we open the aperture for teaming, for potentially new partners to help us solve some concrete, tactical problems in the space of autonomy and small [uncrewed aerial systems] as well.”
SOCOM’s autonomous capabilities will be “underpinned” by modular, open mission systems architectures, which will improve interoperability between platforms, facilitate rapid technology insertion and maximize flexibility and affordability for fixed wing and rotary wing platforms, keeping them “adaptable and capable in the face of evolving threats,” Toler said.
Lt. Col. Thomas Brewington, product manager of MH-47 at Program Executive Office Rotary Wing, said the pursuit of open mission systems is one of his biggest priorities, but it’s not just about incremental improvements; it represents a “fundamental shift” in how modernization is approached at SOCOM.
“We’re moving beyond traditional upgrades and embracing a more agile and adaptable approach [to] capability development and integration,” he said. Success is “the continued partnerships that we have between the program office and industry partners.”
The command needs industry to provide solutions that don’t depend on a vendor-specific stack of hardware and/or software. The more modular open architecture solutions the service can leverage to facilitate rapid upgrades, the better, Bronder said.
“We’re looking for capabilities that can integrate [and] can continue to integrate across platforms,” he said. “We are doing more and more work now across the program executive offices, so, again, really leveraging their capabilities, their architectures that they’re defining, … making sure we’re getting things that are interoperable across various systems.”
For example, the Adaptive Airborne Enterprise is working to increase modularity and integration with other program executive offices and partners. The program will “hopefully” move into working with and modernizing crewed platforms in addition to autonomous capabilities, “pretty much anything,” said Brandi Evans, division chief for airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and non-standard aviation systems at PEO Fixed Wing.
“It should be hardware-agnostic, platform-agnostic, because it is very tied to other PEOs like [SOF Digital Applications] and the architecture that they provide within their autonomy efforts,” she said. “Our software then will [enable] us to collaboratively work within an environment. Because at the end of the day, as we push things out from a permissive environment, we want to be able to have command and control at whatever level needs command and control, whether it’s on the ground, whether it’s in other air platforms, whether it’s in a maritime vessel.”
As Special Operations Command’s aviation portfolios adopt new autonomous capabilities and modular open systems architectures, the most significant challenge they face is the amount of work it takes to ensure legacy systems are interoperable and able to communicate effectively through the proper channels, Toler said.
For example, uncrewed aerial systems must be compatible and able to cross-talk with existing platforms or systems within different program offices and services, he said.
“We have to evaluate the UAS capabilities, the [command and control] and then take a look at the architectures that are resident and figure out what else are we trying to do and accomplish?” Toler said. “And that results in a significant amount of legwork in determining the trade space over how much more do you invest in the legacy system to ensure a certain compatibility with what you’re trying to accomplish, or is there a sweet spot where you have just enough?”
Additionally, the command is working on so many capabilities concurrently across various mission systems, portfolios and focus areas that it struggles to consider interoperability and the integration of future upgrades early enough in the development and acquisition process, Sturgeon said.
“Some of the challenges in the past that’s really plugged [up] the program is just making sure that we’re considering integration early and that we’re not stovepiping systems, whether it’s real estate on the aircraft, [ensuring] interoperability between all these various systems, just trying to get ahead of that earlier,” he said.
Lt. Col. Seth Green, division chief for Silent Knight Radar/CV-22 at PEO Fixed Wing, said that while the command is “always looking at” how to improve its aircraft with upgrades like new sensors and open mission systems, the end users will also inform how those systems are ultimately used on the battlefield.
“This is why I love working with SOF, because you make something really cool or something that’s really, really good, and then our aviators take that, and then they find new ways to make it better, and they use their skill sets that they have honed over decades of flying, and they use it in ways you never expected that you could use that equipment,” he said.
While the introduction of autonomous capabilities and modular open systems architectures into the fleet may be recent, the goal is still the same as it has always been, said Steven Smith, SOCOM’s program executive officer for rotary wing platforms: make sure special operators never “face a fair fight.”
“That’s [our job,] to make sure that we’ve got the technical overmatch, so that we never fight a fair fight, so that our warfighters are always going in with an advantage,” Smith said. “We field and sustain the most advanced … capability in the world, and we do that through the integration of that unique hardware” and software.
15. Trump Doctrine is the Nixon Doctrine 2.0
Not the first to recognize this.
In Charting Trump’s National Security Policy, Look to Nixon for Inspiration
by George Franco
https://smallwarsjournal.com/author/george-franco/
Excerpt:
Trump is focused on our relations with China the way Nixon focused on our relations with the Soviet Union. The Nixon Doctrine complemented Nixon’s strategic approach to the Soviet Union. The Trump Doctrine complements Trump’s strategic approach to China. A recent essay in Foreign Affairs called Trump’s approach a strategy of “prioritization.” Trump prioritizes China, just as Nixon prioritized the Soviet Union. That is what strategy and effective national security policy are all about.
Prioritization is one thing but that does not mean you can neglect other threats. Our own ODNI's Annual Threat Assessment recognizes the threat of "adversarial cooperation." And how does the tariff tools fit into this prioritization? It seems like we are deprioritizing our allies through tariffs.
Trump Doctrine is the Nixon Doctrine 2.0
By Francis P. Sempa
July 12, 2025
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2025/07/12/trump_doctrine_is_the_nixon_doctrine_20_1122312.html
Whether by design or happenstance, President Donald Trump’s national security policy resembles the national security policy pursued by President Richard Nixon between 1969 and 1974. Both presidents operated in political environments of war exhaustion—Trump with Iraq and Afghanistan; Nixon with Vietnam. Both presidents wanted to wind down U.S. involvement in wars—Trump in Afghanistan and Ukraine; Nixon in Vietnam. Both dealt with major Middle East crises by coming to the aid Israel, of our chief ally in the region, but also used leverage to restrain Israel in the interests of a broader Middle East strategy. Both presidents emphasized great power politics at the expense of peripheral interests. And both presidents responded to years of imperial overstretch by attempting to husband limited resources and shift defense responsibility to allies. The Trump Doctrine is the Nixon Doctrine 2.0.
The two presidents emerged on the political scene from very different backgrounds. Nixon grew up in humble circumstances and through grit and determination attained a law degree, served in World War II, and chose a life in the political arena that culminated in winning the presidency. Trump is from a wealthy family and used that wealth to make more money in the business and entertainment world before entering the political arena late in life. Nixon’s worldview was shaped by his reading of history and his experiences as a U.S. Senator and Vice-President. Trump’s worldview was shaped by deal-making in the ruthless world of business. Nixon was a serious student of domestic and international politics and emerged as a pragmatic conservative with an internationalist outlook. Trump is perhaps the least ideological of our modern presidents, but his instincts are conservative and nationalist.
As president, Nixon eschewed ideology and governed as a pragmatist. So does Trump. Nixon was a conventional political leader who accepted the beltway culture. Trump, on the other hand, has been our most unconventional president who plays by his own rules rather than those of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Nixon mostly surrounded himself with “insiders,” while Trump chose officials and advisers (like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard) who are willing to be as unconventional as he is. Nixon faced a hostile media, some of which never forgave him for helping to reveal the Soviet spy Alger Hiss in the late 1940s. Trump also has faced a hostile media, but has benefited, unlike Nixon, from the modern alternative media without which he may have suffered the same fate as Nixon.
The genesis of the Nixon Doctrine was Nixon’s determination to wind down America’s participation in the Vietnam War. Nixon inherited that costly and increasingly unpopular war from the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, some of whose former officials turned against the war once Nixon took office. Nixon sought to lessen the U.S. role in the fighting while supplying South Vietnam with military assistance, training, intelligence, and other aid to enable South Vietnamese forces to hold their own against the Soviet and Chinese-supplied North Vietnamese army. Nixon called the strategy “Vietnamization,” and it soon formed the basis for what was dubbed the Nixon Doctrine.
The Nixon Doctrine emerged initially from a briefing for reporters by Nixon in Guam on July 25, 1969. Nixon outlined America’s future role in Asia by explaining that “we must avoid that kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as the one that we have in Vietnam.” Nixon further stated that he hoped “this is an era . . . of negotiation rather than confrontation,” especially with the Soviet Union. We will provide military assistance to our Asian allies and keep our treaty commitments, Nixon said, but the responsibility for meeting military threats on the ground will be theirs, not ours. The U.S. is not going to fight the wars for our Asian allies, Nixon said, and “that is a good general principle, one which we would hope would be our policy generally throughout the world.”
In his memoirs, Nixon explained the key aspects of the doctrine: the U.S. was not going to make any more commitments—in addition to existing treaty commitments—“unless they were required by our own vital interests.” “[F]rom now on,” he wrote, “we would furnish only the materiel and the military and economic assistance to those nations willing to accept the responsibility of supplying the manpower to defend themselves.” Nixon extended the doctrine beyond Asia into the Middle East—furnishing military assistance to Israel, the Shah in Iran and the House of Saud, and later to Egypt’s Sadat.
The Nixon Doctrine would enable the U.S. to focus on great power politics and diplomacy—with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon believed that winding down our involvement in Vietnam and shifting responsibility for their defense to our allies complemented his triangular diplomacy with Beijing and Moscow. American troops would only be used to protect and defend America’s vital interests.
President Trump has approached the world in a similar manner. The Trump Doctrine essentially applies the Nixon Doctrine to our NATO allies and to Europe in general. Trump insisted that NATO members provide more for their own defense and take the lead in defending Western Europe from external conventional military threats, including threats from Russia in Ukraine. Our NATO allies (except Spain) have responded by pledging to spend at least five percent of GDP on defense. Trump has also pressured Ukraine to make peace with Russia, even if it is an imperfect peace like the one Nixon negotiated with North Vietnam. Trump has also urged South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan to provide more for their own defense.
Trump, like Nixon, has provided military assistance to Middle East allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and smaller Gulf countries, but has made it clear that he will not get bogged down in another endless war in the region. Nixon during the 1973 Yom Kippur War ordered an airlift of military supplies to Israel and issued a “nuclear alert” to deter possible Soviet intervention but also restrained Israel’s offensive operations to forge a ceasefire with Israel’s enemies and the beginnings of an eventual deal with Egypt. Trump aided Israel’s war against Iran by ordering a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities but has also pressured Israel to make peace with Iran and Hamas in Gaza, while at home resisting calls for using our military to bring about regime change in Iran.
Trump is focused on our relations with China the way Nixon focused on our relations with the Soviet Union. The Nixon Doctrine complemented Nixon’s strategic approach to the Soviet Union. The Trump Doctrine complements Trump’s strategic approach to China. A recent essay in Foreign Affairs called Trump’s approach a strategy of “prioritization.” Trump prioritizes China, just as Nixon prioritized the Soviet Union. That is what strategy and effective national security policy are all about.
Francis P. Sempa is a lawyer and writes on global affairs.
16. Warfare Without Sailors? Lockheed and HavocAI Are Betting on It
Photos at the link: https://nextgendefense.com/warfare-sailors-lockheed-havocai/
Warfare Without Sailors? Lockheed and HavocAI Are Betting on It
The mUSV is part of a growing push to deploy smarter, crewless vessels capable of handling complex operations in contested waters.
nextgendefense.com · by Joe Saballa · July 11, 2025
In a new push toward autonomous maritime warfare, Lockheed Martin Ventures is teaming up with Rhode Island-based startup HavocAI to accelerate the development of medium unmanned surface vehicles (mUSVs) for the US military.
The drone boats are being developed to carry weapons and conduct missions without onboard crews, offering a lower-risk way to project power at sea.
The partnership will combine Lockheed’s weapons integration experience with HavocAI’s software-driven autonomy systems.
It comes as the Pentagon increases its investment in uncrewed systems across the maritime domain.
“The future of maritime warfare is autonomous, and the mUSV is at the forefront of this revolution,” said Paul Lwin, Founder and CEO at HavocAI. “By collaborating with Lockheed Martin, we can integrate advanced weapons systems and deliver complete solutions that meet the evolving needs of our warfighters.”
HavocAI’s unmanned surface vessel during a demonstration at sea. Photo: HavocAI
HavocAI has delivered more than 50 of its 14-foot (4.3-meter) autonomous boats to date, including over two dozen acquired by the US Department of Defense.
The company recently completed successful sea trials of a 42-foot (12.8-meter) version and plans to introduce a 100-foot (30.5-meter) mUSV before the end of the year.
A Strategic Move
Lockheed’s investment in HavocAI reflects a broader shift in naval strategy toward distributed, uncrewed operations.
mUSVs are seen as a key part of the future, offering greater range, payload flexibility, and mission versatility compared to smaller platforms.
“Maintaining superiority in maritime defense is fundamental to ensuring deterrence in contested waters,” said Chris Moran, Vice President and General Manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures.
“The mUSV is a game-changer for maritime defense, offering enhanced range, payload capacity, and mission versatility. By combining HavocAI’s innovative autonomy stack with our ability to integrate the best of American technology and deliver at scale, we can give warfighters a decisive edge in future conflicts.”
With Lockheed’s backing, the startup is positioning itself to move beyond small-scale deliveries and into larger, more capable platforms.
nextgendefense.com · by Joe Saballa · July 11, 2025
17. US containerized missiles: stealthy firepower, high strategic cost
Excerpt:
Containerized missile systems may be stealthy and scalable, but the ambiguity that makes them operationally effective also renders them legally and politically contentious. Their fusion of warehouse and warship invites hard questions about survivability, legality, and escalation, especially when deployed on allied soil in a region primed for great power confrontation.
US containerized missiles: stealthy firepower, high strategic cost - Asia Times
The launchers offer flexibility, but are controversial due to their covert nature, legal ambiguities and sensitive deployments
asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · July 11, 2025
The US military’s turn to containerized missile launchers reflects a push for stealthy, mobile firepower that complicates targeting and enables rapid deployment but comes with operational, legal, and political concerns – especially regarding their use on allied soil and civilian cargo vessels.
This month, The War Zone identified a prototype launcher known as the palletized field artillery launcher (PFAL) at Fort Bragg, after it appeared unannounced in footage from US President Donald Trump’s June visit.
Currently owned by US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), PFAL can fire most munitions in the multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) family – such as 227 millimeter guided rockets and Army tactical missile system (ATACMS) – from two pods housed in a standard container, though it cannot launch the precision strike missile (PrSM).
Concealable on trucks, railcars, or ships, PFAL supports the Army’s strategy to complicate adversary targeting. Originating from the US Department of Defense’s Strike X program, it also informed designs for future uncrewed systems like the autonomous multi-domain launcher (AML). Although no longer funded after FY2021, PFAL remains strategically relevant for distributed, expeditionary operations, especially in the Indo-Pacific.
Containerized launchers like PFAL offer operational benefits– concealability, rapid mobility and modular integration across partner platforms. Yet their covert nature also introduces tactical weaknesses, legal risks and political complications. While these systems enhance deterrence through ambiguity and dispersion, they risk civilian targeting, escalation and backlash from host nations wary of entanglement.
At the tactical level, containerized launchers complicate detection and response.
In remarks delivered at a June 2025 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), US Army Pacific Commander General Ronald Clark stated that such systems “literally operationalize deterrence,” likening them to “a needle in a stack of needles” due to their ambiguous electromagnetic signatures and visual resemblance to civilian containers.
He emphasized that their dispersed posture enables US forces to hold Chinese targets at risk across the Indo-Pacific, while avoiding traditional launcher vulnerabilities.
In a June 2025 Proceedings article, Rear Admiral Bill Daly and Captain Lawrence Heyworth IV emphasized advantages of modular, containerized payloads: low cost, ease of production and quick scalability. They noted that mounting them on unmanned or optionally manned vessels increases survivability and complicates targeting. A standardized interface allows for rapid reconfiguration, while adaptability enables distributed maritime operations with flexible firepower suited to near-peer conflicts.
However, Ajay Kumar Das noted in a July 2023 piece for the United Service Institution of India (USI) that these systems are tactically vulnerable due to their deliberate lack of radar and active defenses. Das explained that containerized launchers are designed to blend with civilian traffic, leaving them unable to detect or repel threats. He said that while concealment aids deception, it undermines survivability. He warned that such launchers, often aboard civilian-manned vessels, become “soft targets” in high-threat environments, exposing both cargo and crew to disproportionate risk in legally ambiguous zones.
Gabriele Steinhauser highlighted in a March 2025 Wall Street Journal article the operational advantages of containerized platforms such as the US Army’s Typhon system. She reported that the Typhon – mounted on trucks and deployable via transport aircraft – is “relatively easy to move,” unlike shipborne systems that are more visible and vulnerable in the early stages of a conflict. Steinhauser stressed that such mobility enables pre-positioning across the Indo-Pacific and opens avenues for allied use, injecting unpredictability into adversary calculations.
R. Robinson Harris and Colonel T.X. Hammes argued in a January 2025 article for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) that containerized launchers support rapid, cost-effective fleet expansion. They estimated that converting surplus merchant ships into missile platforms with modular payloads can be done in under two years for $130 to $140 million each, dramatically faster and cheaper than building destroyers or frigates, which take seven to nine years and billions to construct.
They advocated shifting force metrics from ship numbers to missile capacity, arguing that distributed firepower across many modest platforms complicates enemy targeting and boosts resilience.
At the strategic level, US missiles on allied territory in peacetime can be politically fraught due to sovereignty sensitivities and domestic opposition. According to Jeffrey Hornung and other authors in a September 2024 RAND report, the Philippine government is especially cautious, given legal and political constraints alongside historical baggage, requiring that any US deployment serve Philippine interests and be framed as a joint effort.
Hornung and others also point out that, in Japan, hosting offensive US systems raises concerns about escalating regional tensions and inviting preemptive strikes. They note that Japan has avoided hosting US ground-based missiles and prefers deployments on US territory or with regional partners, reflecting fears that such basing could entangle Japan in US-China conflict dynamics.
Further, Raul Pedrozo writes in a 2021 report for the Stockton Center for International Law that using merchant ships to launch precision strikes without formally converting them into warships may violate Hague Convention VII, which requires overt identification, military command and crew discipline.
According to Pedrozo, failure to meet these criteria could strip such vessels of protected status and make their use a violation of the law of armed conflict. Moreover, he adds that disguising launchers as civilian cargo risks being deemed perfidious – guilty of a treacherous act under the law of armed conflict – thereby endangering civilian mariners and undermining legal protections for commercial shipping.
Containerized missile systems may be stealthy and scalable, but the ambiguity that makes them operationally effective also renders them legally and politically contentious. Their fusion of warehouse and warship invites hard questions about survivability, legality, and escalation, especially when deployed on allied soil in a region primed for great power confrontation.
asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · July 11, 2025
18. Partners in Deterrence: China and Russia’s Deepening Military-Technical Ties
"Adversarial cooperation."
Excerpts:
Xi and Putin committed to enhancing their strategic coordination to counter what they see as challenges to global strategic stability, such as the prospective expansion of U.S. missile defense systems across the globe and Washington’s willingness to use its military might abroad.
Against this backdrop, the two sides’ military-technical cooperation is likely to deepen going forward. This means more dual-use items for Russia, quieter Chinese submarines and stronger helicopters, as well as a state-of-the-art missile attack warning system possessed by Beijing. China and Russia see these steps as enhancing their security, but they may have the opposite effect and trigger an arms race with the U.S., as Washington is likely to take further steps to maintain its military dominance. In turn, this dynamic could further strain global security architectures and complicate efforts toward strategic arms control and international stability.
Partners in Deterrence: China and Russia’s Deepening Military-Technical Ties
China and Russia’s growing military-technical cooperation aims to preserve strategic stability, but it could have the opposite effect.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/07/partners-in-deterrence-china-and-russias-deepening-military-technical-ties/
By Daniel Balazs
July 11, 2025
Credit: Russian Presidential Press and Information Service
In early May, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and to participate in the Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The two leaders issued a joint statement, expressing their opposition to U.S. defense initiatives such as the Golden Dome and AUKUS, which they deem threats to global strategic stability. They also committed “to enhancing the coordination of their approaches and to deepening the practical cooperation on maintaining and strengthening global strategic stability.”
The leaders did not specify the exact ways of this practical cooperation. A scrutiny of Sino-Russian military cooperation in recent years, however, reveals that there are several military-technical cooperation channels and projects — trade of arms and dual-use items, missile defense, submarine and helicopter development — that could be strengthened following their proclaimed effort to deepen cooperation. Advances in these areas have the potential to significantly alter the balance of capabilities in the U.S.-China-Russia strategic triangle.
Sino-Russian Military-Technical Cooperation: An Elusive Framework
China and Russia reject the idea of formal military alliances and refer to each other as strategic partners instead. Nevertheless, they still share a military partnership that relies on institutionalized interactions.
At the highest level, Xi and Putin often issue joint statements that form the guiding principles of military cooperation. At the same time, China and Russia have a Strategic Security Consultation, an annual meeting between the director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs from the Communist Party of China and the secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council, which functions as a strategic coordination mechanism between the two sides. Furthermore, Beijing and Moscow use five-year cooperation agreements to coordinate their military ties.
While this is the institutional backdrop for the two sides’ military cooperation, joint statements rarely discuss the specifics of military-technical collaboration. The details of military-technical ties usually emerge from unilateral leader statements, project announcements, trade data, analyses, and media reports.
Arms and Dual-use Items Trade
Russia has long been a top arms supplier to China, and Beijing has benefited from access to Moscow’s military technology via licensing deals. This channel of military-technical cooperation has been getting less prominent in recent years. In 2020, Russia’s share in China’s total arms imports was around 70 percent, and it dropped to roughly 40 percent in 2024. China also imported fewer types of defense products in this period: in 2020, China imported engines, aircraft, and naval weapons from Russia, while in 2024, it only imported engines. This is partly because of China’s increasing military self-sufficiency, and partly because of concerns about exposure to potential secondary sanctions for dealing with Russia.
The transfers of dual-use items benefit Russia, allowing it to secure replacements of important Western and Ukrainian components, which Moscow cannot access in the wake of sanctions and embargoes imposed on it after its actions in Ukraine. Militarily sensitive exports — the transfer of items on the Common High-Priority Items List, which includes ball bearings for tank manufacturing and semiconductors for weapons systems — from China to Russia have increased since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
As Russia and China committed to greater strategic coordination, the trade of arms and dual-use items is likely to continue. Russia is growing more reliant on dual-use items from China, and Beijing has yet to reach the level of self-sufficiency that would obviate the need for arms imports from Moscow.
Missile Attack Warning System
In 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country was helping China in building a missile attack warning system, which is only possessed by the U.S. and Russia. This move is probably a response to shared Russian and Chinese concerns about U.S. missile defense construction across the globe that diminishes their capability to execute second strikes.
The details of the system that China will build with Russia’s help are not fully known, but a 2020 TASS report elaborated on the system used by Moscow. It supplies data for anti-ballistic missile defense and provides information on space objects for space facilities, relying on terrestrial and space-based components. On land, it is composed of a web of radar stations that allow the system to detect missiles from 6,000 kilometers. In space, it uses an array of satellites to spot ballistic missile launches from anywhere on the planet in real time.
The realization of a similar missile attack warning system would significantly enhance China’s nuclear deterrent capabilities, diminishing the U.S.’s advantage in this area. The 2020 TASS report states that China and Russia made certain progress in setting up the system but shared no specific timeframe for completion. In 2023 and 2024, China and Russia had missile defense talks, but there is no information available that would verify if they focused on advancing the construction of the missile defense system.
Submarine Development
The two sides also cooperate on submarine development. In 2020, Russian state media announced that Moscow and Beijing were working on a new generation of non-nuclear submarines. Considering the project’s sensitivity, few details were shared.
An analysis speculated that the cooperation may involve “giving a Chinese submarine Russian sonar and weapons, or fitting a Russian submarine with a China-made battery” and air-independent power system. The goal of the Sino-Russian project is unclear, but non-nuclear submarines are cheaper to develop than their nuclear counterparts, so the two sides could increase their fleet at a lower cost. Alternatively, they can also reap economic benefits from the project by selling the submarines to other nations.
The collaboration in this realm goes beyond non-nuclear submarines. According to a 2023 report, China relied on Russian technology to improve the quietness of its new Type 096 nuclear ballistic missile submarine. The submarine is expected to be operational by 2030. The activities of this vessel are going to be more difficult to detect than those of the Type 094s, which China routinely uses to stage nuclear deterrence patrols.
Furthermore, a 2025 analysis hypothesized that China’s Type 041 hybrid-nuclear submarine may have received Russian technical support. This submarine reportedly has a nuclear battery air-independent power system that keeps the submarine charged continuously. This design has operational advantages — extended submerged endurance with transit speed of 9-10 knots, and enough electric power to host a comprehensive atmospheric control system, among others — that make it well-equipped for area denial, intelligence, and mining missions.
Advanced Heavy Lift Helicopters
China and Russia are also jointly developing an advanced heavy lift helicopter — a helicopter that falls within the 40-ton weight class, has a capacity of transporting 15 tons on an external sling, a range of 630 kilometers, and a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour. The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and Russian Helicopters agreed on the development of the vessel in 2021, and the first flight is expected in 2032.
Such a helicopter can transport troops, armored vehicles, rockets, and artillery. At the same time, it can be used for civilian purposes as well, such as airlifting heavy engineering vehicles to inaccessible sites in natural disasters. If the project is completed, China will have helicopters ranging from the 500-kilogram class to the 40-ton class.
Conclusion
Xi and Putin committed to enhancing their strategic coordination to counter what they see as challenges to global strategic stability, such as the prospective expansion of U.S. missile defense systems across the globe and Washington’s willingness to use its military might abroad.
Against this backdrop, the two sides’ military-technical cooperation is likely to deepen going forward. This means more dual-use items for Russia, quieter Chinese submarines and stronger helicopters, as well as a state-of-the-art missile attack warning system possessed by Beijing. China and Russia see these steps as enhancing their security, but they may have the opposite effect and trigger an arms race with the U.S., as Washington is likely to take further steps to maintain its military dominance. In turn, this dynamic could further strain global security architectures and complicate efforts toward strategic arms control and international stability.
Authors
Guest Author
Daniel Balazs
Daniel Balazs is a research fellow in the China Programme of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of his affiliated institutions.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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