​Quotes of the Day:

“No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”

– Mark Twain

“Imagination should be used not to escape reality, but to create it.”

– Colin Wilson

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

– Willa Cather

1. How Political Polarization Is Killing Grand Strategy

2. Trump Arms Ukraine But Still Wants Out by John Bolton

3. Hegseth Attends Meeting on Ukraine After Skipping Last Session

4. Why Putin keeps making the same Ukraine mistakes by Mick Ryan

5. Chinese Officers Questioned U.S. Government Employee About His Army Service

6. China says Wells Fargo executive ‘involved in a criminal case’

7. How China Curbed Its Oil Addiction—and Blunted a U.S. Pressure Point

8. Vodka Toasts With the Dictator of Belarus: How Diplomacy Gets Done in Trump 2.0

9. The Real Meaning of the State Department RIF

10. Kyiv as the New Berlin: Ukraine’s Role in Modern Espionage Conflict

11. See How Drones Are Dominating Every Corner of the War in Ukraine

12. Iran’s Leaders Turn to a New Brand of Nationalism After Israeli and U.S. Attacks

13. In Search of Trade Deal, Philippines’ Leader Will Meet With Trump

14. The for-profit companies behind Israeli-U.S. nonprofit Gaza aid plan

15.  SOF News: Drones on the Battlefield

16. Allied Arsenal: Building Strength Through Shared Production

17. Book Review - Into the Void: Special Operations Forces after the War on Terror

18. America Should Assume the Worst About AI

19. Tariffs Won’t Fix the Country’s Reliance on Foreign Medicines

20. 'He Will Win No Further': How Trump's New Ukraine Plan Aims to Finally Stop Putin

1. How Political Polarization Is Killing Grand Strategy

​Yes it is going to change every four to eight years unless a unifying concept can be developed because that is the nature of our federal democratic republic. . It is unlikely that we will have another NSC 68.

However, here is a discipled process I recommend we consider to try to ensure some continuity.:

Project Solarium 2.0: Can Eisenhower’s Cold War Strategy Work Today?

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/project-solarium-2-0-can-eisenhowers-cold-war-strategy-work-today/

Conclusion:

When no one knows where America’s grand strategy is headed, it ceases to be strategic at all, becoming weak, ineffective, and ultimately unfit for a world that increasingly demands clarity, speed, and conviction.

How Political Polarization Is Killing Grand Strategy

The National Interest · by Andrew Latham

Topic: Politics

Region: Americas

July 20, 2025

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A United States that abruptly changes its strategy every four years is not one other countries will trust or respect.

One of the most common political phrases in modern America is that the country has never been more divided. Whether it appears in the news, throughout government, or even at family gatherings, the term “political polarization” has become a defining feature of the national conversation. Yet, this polarization reflects more than just dividing domestic partisan disagreement. It represents dramatic national shifts across American culture, ideals, and perspectives, and this division does not stay confined within the national borders. It ripples outward, actively shaping how the United States interacts with the world. As politics at home splinter, American grand strategy is also beginning to crack.

The United States, since its inception, has always been a more politically polarized country than most. Its two-party system has stood in some form or other since the late eighteenth century, and most internal questions, from slavery to tariffs, have always been home to fierce ideological battlegrounds. Yet, when it comes to grand strategy abroad, the United States has often retained a greater bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and national interests abroad.

Whether it be Westward expansion in the nineteenth century, isolationism in the early 20th century, or internationalist interventionism after the Second World War, American grand strategy has historically reflected a relatively unified vision of the nation’s role in the world. Today, however, that consensus is fracturing. Political polarization has begun to directly erode the foundations of bipartisan American grand strategy, making it more volatile, inconsistent, and reactive. As administrations alternate between competing ideological extremes, long-term planning gives way to short-term political maneuvering, weakening America’s credibility and coherence abroad.

The most notable example of this can be seen in the divide over US involvement in international agreements. Over the late 1900s, the United States played a founding role in dozens of global agreements, including the United Nations, NATO, NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization. At home, support for these decisions was relatively high on both sides of the political aisle. Yet today, modern Democrats and Republicans are split more than ever over the United States’ further role in such agreements.

In 2016, President Barack Obama enrolled the United States in the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty to mitigate climate change. After President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2017, President Joe Biden reinstated the United States’ participation in it upon taking office in 2021. Four years later, Donald Trump immediately withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Within a decade, the United States has floundered in and out of a major international agreement four times.

In recent years, political polarization has also profoundly influenced American grand strategy toward key allies, such as Europe, NATO, and Israel, transforming previously stable relationships into partisan flashpoints. Traditionally, bipartisan support underpinned US commitments to European security and NATO, reflecting a shared understanding of their strategic value during and after the Cold War.

However, the first Trump administration, with its skepticism toward multilateral institutions and European allies, marked a sharp departure from long-standing policy. With these divides more or less along party lines, political polarization at home has started to sprout internal rifts about America’s role in global security. Simultaneously, support for Israel, once a bipartisan norm, has become increasingly polarized.

Republican leaders have embraced an uncritical, hardline pro-Israel stance, symbolized by the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2019. Segments of the Democratic Party, however, have voiced growing concerns over human rights and US complicity in Israeli military actions, leading to new movements to change the current American-Israeli grand strategy.

This greater inconsistency in American foreign policy, due to domestic polarization, significantly undermines American grand strategy as a whole by weakening international trust, reliability, and credibility. When other nations witness abrupt reversals in major American policy areas, such as NATO commitments, climate agreements, or Middle East diplomacy, they begin to question the stability and longevity of US positions.

Strategic partners who once relied on American leadership for security, economic coordination, and global governance can become increasingly hesitant to enter into long-term agreements, knowing that a future administration might abruptly change course in just a few years.

This erosion of trust diminishes the United States’ ability to build and sustain coalitions, deters smaller nations from aligning with US interests, and emboldens rival powers like China and Russia to fill the leadership void. As America becomes seen less as a steady global anchor and more as a volatile actor, its grand strategy suffers—not from a lack of power, but a lack of perceived credibility and stability.

Yet these concerns are not just theoretical; they have played out in real time throughout both Trump administrations. The initial withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement signaled to the world that the US was no longer committed to leading the fight against climate change, prompting other countries to question America’s environmental leadership. Similarly, Trump’s repeated criticisms of NATO, particularly his suggestions that the US might not honor Article 5 commitments unless allies increased defense spending, sent shockwaves through Europe and raised doubts about the alliance’s long-term viability.

In the Middle East, the abrupt withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria in 2019 left Kurdish allies vulnerable and signaled to partners that American security guarantees could be revoked without warning. Further waffling over American guarantees of Taiwanese defense and back-and-forth support between Russia and Ukraine has only spurred more uncertainty.

As Americans become more divided on how to manage domestic economics, cultural changes, and identity fissures, the purpose and effectiveness of our foreign policy diminishes. From this, a growing sense emerges among allies and adversaries alike that American commitments are conditional, inconsistent, and subject to reversal.

Countries—and even Americans themselves—can no longer point to the current American grand strategy with clarity or confidence. What once guided US actions abroad has become a shifting, unstable reflection of internal discord. In this uncertainty, American grand strategy is no longer evolving—it is dying. And when grand strategy dies, what remains is the prospect of oblivion: a nation too divided to chart its own course, too reactive to lead, and too inconsistent to be trusted.

When no one knows where America’s grand strategy is headed, it ceases to be strategic at all, becoming weak, ineffective, and ultimately unfit for a world that increasingly demands clarity, speed, and conviction.

About the Authors: Andrew Latham and Liam Athas

Andrew Latham is a Senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, where he focuses on military strategy, great power politics, and the future of warfare. His work has appeared in The National Interest, RealClearDefense, 19FortyFive, The Hill, and The Diplomat. He is also a tenured full professor of International Relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.

Liam Athas is a researcher at Macalester College.

Image: Zimmytws / Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Andrew Latham

2. Trump Arms Ukraine But Still Wants Out

​Excerpts:

Mr. Trump is building his own off-ramp from Ukraine. He satisfied immediate demands for aid by Ukraine’s beleaguered defenders but avoided long-term commitments. It’s telling that he stressed that Kyiv should not strike Moscow. He showed “toughness” by giving Russia a 50-day deadline, while suggesting only gauzy consequences for failure, but he warned Ukraine it must also be serious about a cease-fire, a built-in safety valve for himself.

By the time the 50-day deadline arrives, Mr. Trump will be free to find reasons to do nothing against Russia, washing his hands of the whole affair. He knows he has failed even to approximate his campaign pledge to achieve a cease-fire in 24 hours, and he has no interest in further underlining that failure.

I would be happy if Mr. Trump followed Reaganite “peace through strength” principles. Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and their ilk would find it distressing. Unfortunately, at this moment, the president still tilts toward isolationism. Ukraine’s American supporters ignore this at their peril.

Trump Arms Ukraine But Still Wants Out

He’s sending Kyiv Patriot air defenses, but he’s building himself an off-ramp.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-still-wants-out-of-ukraine-defense-spending-war-russia-europe-5f966b5f

By John Bolton

July 21, 2025 3:46 pm ET

A Patriot missile mobile launcher outside the Fort Sill Army Post near Lawton, Okla., March 21, 2023. Photo: Sean Murphy/Associated Press

President Trump’s decision to send more Patriot air-defenses to Ukraine was the right call. Supporters of Kyiv’s struggle against Moscow hope this signals renewed commitment from the White House to back Ukraine with U.S. military assistance. Maybe.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump seems more interested in extricating himself from Ukraine, diplomatically and militarily. And his decision highlights larger concerns about America’s lackluster defense spending and its economic readiness to boost military production.

Optimists about Mr. Trump’s Ukraine intentions cite three points: his decision to authorize the Patriots; his 50-day deadline for Russia to accept a cease-fire; and his threat of tariffs and secondary sanctions against Russia if no cease-fire emerges. But these points don’t necessarily signal Mr. Trump’s newfound support for Ukraine. Instead, they underline Mr. Trump’s misery at remaining ensnarled in the Ukraine-Russia conflict—a war he sees as Europe’s.

Reports that Mr. Trump would send long-range missiles to Ukraine proved incorrect. And the Patriot decision, while justifiably welcomed by Kyiv, is only temporary. As Mr. Trump declared July 15, “You know the side I’m on? Humanity’s side.”

Faced with potential shortages in U.S. air-defense stockpiles, Mr. Trump’s clearest course would have been to send Patriots to Ukraine while telling Congress to fund more air-defense production urgently. He could have stressed that Patriots were needed most in Ukraine, and the unhappy trade-off proved why Congress must pass immediate, dramatic funding increases for them and other air-defenses. Moreover, he could have pointed to how his successful strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June used 14 of our 20-to-30 bunker-buster bombs, revealing a shortage in critical U.S. munitions.

He did nothing of the kind. He was defensive, not proud, and purely transactional. He stressed that Washington isn’t giving Kyiv anything, only manufacturing Patriots and getting paid for them by NATO allies who pass them—or previously delivered Patriots—to Ukraine. This is foolish, as if the finances somehow outweighed the decision’s geostrategic benefits to America.

Mr. Trump’s determination to avoid the implication of more protracted military aid revealed his unspoken motives. His efforts at distraction ironically demonstrate how well-functioning politico-military alliances can work: transferring assets among members to deploy them on the most important fronts. He also hasn’t lost political support even from Republicans previously opposed to aiding Ukraine militarily.

The fundamental issue is Mr. Trump’s ignoring of inadequate defense budgets, including the current spending Congress is planning for fiscal year 2026. His own requests wouldn’t have increased funding, but, fortunately, Congress is making significant additions. Without more forward-thinking from Mr. Trump, his second term could become a defense-budget desert.

The Kremlin and many close observers see the 50-day “ultimatum” to Russia as a license to continue unstinting attacks on Ukraine until the 49th day. That has been the pattern so far, with Russian offensives on a new front still likely. Not only is Vladimir Putin not wilting under the pressure, he continues trying to manipulate Mr. Trump by offering to facilitate a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, an ongoing White House priority.

Mr. Trump says he’s disappointed in Mr. Putin but also insists he’s “not done with him.” Washington’s threats about what happens after 50 days are nearly meaningless. Tariffing Russian exports to the U.S. means next to nothing—in 2024 Russian exports were only $3 billion. Threatening secondary sanctions against Russian oil-and-gas importers such as China and India is risible, as market reactions since Mr. Trump’s pronouncement have indicated.

Mr. Trump is building his own off-ramp from Ukraine. He satisfied immediate demands for aid by Ukraine’s beleaguered defenders but avoided long-term commitments. It’s telling that he stressed that Kyiv should not strike Moscow. He showed “toughness” by giving Russia a 50-day deadline, while suggesting only gauzy consequences for failure, but he warned Ukraine it must also be serious about a cease-fire, a built-in safety valve for himself.

By the time the 50-day deadline arrives, Mr. Trump will be free to find reasons to do nothing against Russia, washing his hands of the whole affair. He knows he has failed even to approximate his campaign pledge to achieve a cease-fire in 24 hours, and he has no interest in further underlining that failure.

I would be happy if Mr. Trump followed Reaganite “peace through strength” principles. Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and their ilk would find it distressing. Unfortunately, at this moment, the president still tilts toward isolationism. Ukraine’s American supporters ignore this at their peril.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the U.N., 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Speaking on July 17, 2025, the U.S.’s top commander in Europe, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, discussed working with Germany on the Patriot transfer to Ukraine, NATO’s recommitment to collective security and the capabilities he needs most from industry. Photo: U.S. Dept. of Defense/Sam Yeh/AFP

Appeared in the July 22, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Still Wants Out of Ukraine'.

3. Hegseth Attends Meeting on Ukraine After Skipping Last Session

Hegseth Attends Meeting on Ukraine After Skipping Last Session

The defense secretary’s attendance may signal a turnaround as President Trump’s tone shifts on his willingness to support Kyiv against Moscow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/politics/ukraine-trump-hegseth-weapons.html

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participated in a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Monday.Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

By John Ismay and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

July 21, 2025, 4:16 p.m. ET

Days after President Trump shifted his tone on Ukraine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participated in a meeting on Monday of the roughly 50 nations supporting the embattled country.

The meeting was held virtually and led by the defense ministers of Britain and Germany.

The collection of countries, which is known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, was founded during the Biden administration by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. But Mr. Hegseth has largely taken a hands-off approach, ceding leadership of it to Britain shortly after Mr. Trump took office in January.

When the contact group met in person at NATO headquarters in April, Mr. Hegseth opted to call in. He did not participate in the next meeting, which was in June.

Mr. Trump initially expressed deep skepticism of giving U.S. military support to Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022. But last week, he said the United States would help Europe send more weapons to Ukraine and warned Russia that if it did not reach a peace deal within 50 days, he would impose a new round of punishing sanctions.

A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on Monday regarding Mr. Hegseth’s role in Monday’s meeting. The Defense Department said in a statement that it would not comment on internal discussions between the administration and partner nations.

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

A senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the meeting to discuss internal planning, said the United States expected “several countries” to commit to purchasing additional “capabilities” — weapons, munitions and equipment — to donate to Ukraine.

Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly said their greatest need is more air-defense systems like the American-made Patriot and the interceptor missiles they fire, which are effective against Russian ballistic and cruise missiles.

In recent weeks, Russia has launched waves of missiles and drones into Ukraine nearly every night.

While Patriots were to be part of the discussion at Monday’s contact group, the official said there would be a separate meeting specifically about them later this week, perhaps on Wednesday.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave Ukraine tens of billions of dollars worth of arms from the Pentagon’s stockpile. But Mr. Trump has said the United States would sell military hardware to countries supporting Ukraine who would then provide them for use against Russian attacks.

Switzerland announced last week that it was told that the United States was diverting five Patriot systems that the Swiss had previously ordered from Raytheon.

Germany and Norway are expected to buy those the Patriots instead to replenish some of their stockpiles and provide some to Ukraine as well.

Switzerland had expected to begin receiving the systems in 2027, its government said in a statement. It is not clear whether any full Patriot battery — which includes a radar, a control station, launchers and missiles — is ready to be shipped. But some individual parts, such as the launchers, might be.

Earlier this month, hours before Mr. Trump announced the new arms transfer policy, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Germany and Norway were both prepared to buy Patriots for Ukraine’s war effort if Mr. Trump approved.

Mr. Zelensky and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany discussed additional German weapons aid to Ukraine. “We are ready to purchase additional Patriot systems from the U.S.A. to make them available to Ukraine,” Mr. Merz told reporters after their meeting.

Germany has offered to buy two systems and Norway a third, European officials said.

Lara Jakes contributed reporting.

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.

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

4. Why Putin keeps making the same Ukraine mistakes

​Excerpts:

What might be the outcome of Putin’s current stance? Putin has demonstrated a capacity for agile opportunism throughout his rule of Russia. But, as the last few years have demonstrated, this approach does not always lend itself to effective strategy or positive long-term outcomes. Despite his speeches about the historic role that a Russian nation has played, and will play into the future, these narratives from Putin are not the same as good strategy.

There are two useful lessons in this.

First, that authoritarian powers by the nature of their power structures and decision-making approaches, have vulnerabilities. This is important to understand as democracies face a sustained, multi-generational confrontation with the major authoritarian powers of the world. An understanding of authoritarian vulnerabilities can provide insights into where these nations might be targeted to degrade their aggression, resources and influence.

The second useful insight is that an integrated national security ecosystem that encourages debate while nurturing a balance between short term adaptation and long-term strategy is essential for securing positive long-term national outcomes in the 21st century. With Australia and the United States each developing a National Defence Strategy for release in 2026, investing in this approach to contemporary national security is crucial.

Putin’s instinctive opportunism to continue attacking Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s recent ultimatum might be useful for him domestically. But it may turn out to be very bad strategy.

Why Putin keeps making the same Ukraine mistakes | Lowy Institute

Moscow’s aerial escalation after Trump’s peace ultimatum

reveals the flaws of authoritarian decision-making.

lowyinstitute.org · by Mick Ryan

In the past few days, the US president issued another ultimatum to the warring parties in Ukraine, although this time, Donald Trump focussed his ire on Russia. Apparently sick of seeing Russia’s accelerated aerial assault on Ukrainian cities and its increasing toll of civilian suffering, Trump agreed to send more air defence weapons to Ukraine.

In the military, we like to talk about picking stupid enemies to fight if possible. Putin, a cunning yet brutal opportunist, has demonstrated again that he might fall into the “stupid enemy” category when viewed from a perspective of long-term strategy.

Putin’s response to Trump’s call for a new peace deal otherwise face new sanctions in 50 days has been to engage in several nights of air raids on Ukrainian cities with hundreds of drones and missiles. Russia’s trade with America presently sits at about $3 billion per year. Tariffs on this trade are almost certainly not going to shift Putin’s calculus. But if he continues his single-minded dedication to the subjugation of Ukraine – his unchanged goal since the start of the war – might he force a humiliated Trump into increasing the flow of US weapons to Ukraine?

Every single one of Putin’s assumptions was proven wrong within 24 hours of the Russians crossing the Ukrainian frontiers.

For a Russian Army that is making small progress on the ground, but taking massive casualties in doing so, this might be disastrous. This increased US aid would help Ukraine with its defence. More importantly, it would provide a boost in morale for Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, as well as governments in Europe worried about Russia’s aspirations for other military adventures.

Putin has form in this regard.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin made three crucial strategic assumptions. First, he believed the Ukrainian government was weak and would fall under the pressure of Russian military operations. Second, he assumed the Ukrainian military was weak and would not fight for long if challenged by the “might” of Russia’s military. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Putin assumed that NATO would not offer significant diplomatic or military assistance to Ukraine, given their generally supine approach to Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Every single one of Putin’s assumptions was proven wrong within 24 hours of the Russians crossing the Ukrainian frontiers.

The Ukrainian president, issuing his now famous “I need ammunition, not a ride” appeal, united his nation. Ukrainian resistance inspired an until-then moribund NATO to energise and massively step up military and intelligence support for Ukraine. As a consequence of this, and the gritty courage of the Ukrainian military, Putin’s rapid thrust towards Kyiv bogged down. In the face of Ukraine’s creative asymmetric defensive strategy, a battered and cowed Russian army was repulsed in the north and forced into a humiliating retreat back across the border into Belarus and Russia.

Another instance of Putin’s lack of deep strategic competence since then includes his campaign to rule the waves in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians, without a conventional naval surface fleet, built an entirely new uncrewed maritime strike capability, enhanced with naval missiles, special forces and foreign-supplied intelligence, and forced the Russian Black Sea fleet into another humiliating retreat across to the eastern shores of that large body of water.

Putin’s brutality, and the incentivisation of brutality against civilians and Ukrainian soldiers, has also spectacularly backfired. Putin awarded medals to the military unit responsible for the Bucha massacre, which has placed him squarely in the cross hairs of investigators in The Hague. Ukrainians, because of Putin’s strategy of brutalisation, know that as bad as the war is now, losing to Putin and being subject to his occupation would be much worse. Putin’s actions ensured that a Ukrainian surrender is now a very unlikely scenario.

Extinguishing a fire in Shevchenkivskyi district in the aftermath of a Russian missile and drone strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, 21 July 2025 (Kirill Chubotin via NurPhoto/Getty Images)

A final example of Putin’s opportunism that is likely to result in poor strategic outcomes is his embrace of China and North Korea in the past three years. Russia has signed strategic partnership documents with both nations since 2022. China and North Korea are now critical enablers of Russia’s war effort. And despite the strategic truism about the importance of alliances, Russia’s expanded strategic relationships with these two Asian dictatorships appears to be resulting in a Russia with a long-term reliance on Chinese trade and finance, and North Korean weapons. Great powers, which Putin believes Russia is, should never be so beholden to other nations.

Democracies face a sustained, multi-generational confrontation with the major authoritarian powers of the world.

What might be the outcome of Putin’s current stance? Putin has demonstrated a capacity for agile opportunism throughout his rule of Russia. But, as the last few years have demonstrated, this approach does not always lend itself to effective strategy or positive long-term outcomes. Despite his speeches about the historic role that a Russian nation has played, and will play into the future, these narratives from Putin are not the same as good strategy.

There are two useful lessons in this.

First, that authoritarian powers by the nature of their power structures and decision-making approaches, have vulnerabilities. This is important to understand as democracies face a sustained, multi-generational confrontation with the major authoritarian powers of the world. An understanding of authoritarian vulnerabilities can provide insights into where these nations might be targeted to degrade their aggression, resources and influence.

The second useful insight is that an integrated national security ecosystem that encourages debate while nurturing a balance between short term adaptation and long-term strategy is essential for securing positive long-term national outcomes in the 21st century. With Australia and the United States each developing a National Defence Strategy for release in 2026, investing in this approach to contemporary national security is crucial.

Putin’s instinctive opportunism to continue attacking Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s recent ultimatum might be useful for him domestically. But it may turn out to be very bad strategy.

lowyinstitute.org · by Mick Ryan

5. Chinese Officers Questioned U.S. Government Employee About His Army Service

​Excerpts:

The next day, the two embassy officials and the Commerce employee took an Air China flight to Beijing, the cable said. The employee was under surveillance by Chinese officers the entire time. A man with no luggage sat in the row in front of the American and appeared to be watching him and the embassy officials, the cable said.After the group arrived in Beijing, the U.S. diplomat saw people taking photographs of her and of the man while they sat at a restaurant next to the man’s temporary housing near the U.S. Embassy, the cable said.

“He is growing more deeply concerned about his overall situation, as well as the safety and security of his Chinese relatives based in Chengdu,” the cable said.

The White House National Security Council referred a request for comment to the State Department. The department had no comment on the details of the case on Monday morning. Hours after this article was posted online, it confirmed that an employee of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was put under an exit ban while traveling to China in a “personal capacity.” The department also said it was “engaged with Chinese officials to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.”

When a reporter in Beijing asked about the case on Monday, Guo Jiakun, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said: “I don’t have information to provide. China is a country under rule of law and handles the entry and exit affairs in accordance with the law.”

Chinese Officers Questioned U.S. Government Employee About His Army Service

The man, a U.S. citizen, is barred from leaving China by the Ministry of State Security, the country’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/politics/china-exit-ban-us-government-employee.html

The Commerce Department employee is one of a handful of Americans barred by China from leaving the country, in a shadowy practice called an “exit ban” that the Chinese government has used for years. Credit...Vincent Thian/Associated Press

By Edward Wong

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent in Washington and a former Beijing bureau chief who has written a new book on China. He has been reporting on diplomacy from Asia this month.

July 21, 2025

Updated 8:05 p.m. ET

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Chinese intelligence officers began tracking an employee of the U.S. Commerce Department this spring, when he was in southwest China and where he has family members, at one point interrogating him about his prior service in the U.S. military, according to a U.S. government document.

The man, who is an American citizen, has been prevented from leaving China since mid-April, according to the document, a State Department cable that was obtained by The New York Times.

The cable, from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, was dated May 2 and sent to officials in Washington, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House aides on the National Security Council.

On April 14, the Chinese officers seized the man’s passport, credit card, cellphone and iPad while he was in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, the cable said. The officers, who worked for the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence and counterintelligence agency, returned the passport on April 22 but told the American he could not leave the country. His wife is in the United States.

The cable gives a glimpse into the operations of the secretive Ministry of State Security as it increased pressure on the American during his stay in China. It also lays out efforts by U.S. diplomats to get him to Beijing from Chengdu in early May, while Chinese officers continued to conduct surveillance on him.

The man’s situation became public over the weekend, after American news organizations reported on his plight. The cable obtained by The Times did not identify the man by name or give details about his background, but it offers new information about his situation.

China’s restrictions on the American come at a precarious moment, as President Trump tries to carry out a trade war against the superpower rival while also courting Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, whom the American president has spoken of in flattering terms. Mr. Rubio said during a trip to Malaysia this month that “the odds are high” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi would meet this year.

The Commerce Department employee is one of perhaps dozens of American citizens barred by China from leaving the country, in a shadowy practice called an “exit ban” that the Chinese government has used for years. The targets are often but not always ethnic Chinese, and many are former citizens of China. Some have been involved in business disputes in the country.

In recent years, Chinese intelligence and security officials have been given greater power to scrutinize and detain foreign citizens and their Chinese associates in hunts for so-called subversive elements.

Another U.S. citizen, Mao Chenyue, who is a Wells Fargo banker, has also been barred from leaving China.

The State Department cites the exit ban practice in its Level 2 travel advisory for China that urges visitors to “exercise increase caution.” In November, the department lowered its advisory from Level 3, “reconsider travel.”

The Commerce employee eventually told U.S. diplomats that the Chinese officers’ questioning “focused heavily” on his U.S. military background rather than his work for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a unit in the Commerce Department, the cable said. The man told the Chinese officers about an entry-level job he had held at a nuclear institute in China, his graduate studies in engineering at a university in Puerto Rico and his work maintaining Black Hawk helicopters while he was in the U.S. Army.

His case became so contentious that a senior U.S. diplomat and a diplomatic security officer went to Chengdu to meet with him. The diplomat observed “heavy surveillance” around the Commerce employee when the two met on May 1, the cable said. The diplomat planned to accompany the man to a meeting the Ministry of State Security had scheduled for him that day, but it was postponed.

The next day, the two embassy officials and the Commerce employee took an Air China flight to Beijing, the cable said. The employee was under surveillance by Chinese officers the entire time. A man with no luggage sat in the row in front of the American and appeared to be watching him and the embassy officials, the cable said.

After the group arrived in Beijing, the U.S. diplomat saw people taking photographs of her and of the man while they sat at a restaurant next to the man’s temporary housing near the U.S. Embassy, the cable said.

“He is growing more deeply concerned about his overall situation, as well as the safety and security of his Chinese relatives based in Chengdu,” the cable said.

The White House National Security Council referred a request for comment to the State Department. The department had no comment on the details of the case on Monday morning. Hours after this article was posted online, it confirmed that an employee of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was put under an exit ban while traveling to China in a “personal capacity.” The department also said it was “engaged with Chinese officials to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.”

When a reporter in Beijing asked about the case on Monday, Guo Jiakun, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said: “I don’t have information to provide. China is a country under rule of law and handles the entry and exit affairs in accordance with the law.”

Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2025, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: China Is Preventing an Employee of the U.S. Government From Returning Home. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

6. China says Wells Fargo executive ‘involved in a criminal case’

​I wonder if these Americans of Chinese descent refused to provide the MSs with information they wanted. Perhaps they refused to be one of the thousand grains of sand. (https://www.cppr.in/articles/chinese-intelligence-a-thousand-grains-of-sand)

Excerpts:

There are at least several dozen Americans, many of them ethnic Chinese, who are under exit bans, experts and former officials said. The exact number is difficult to ascertain because typically these cases come to the attention of U.S. authorities through self-reporting, and most do not learn they’ve been placed under a ban until they try to leave, or they don’t want to call attention to the case and make resolution more difficult.

Both bans punctuate Washington and Beijing’s increasingly strained relations as the Trump administration remains locked in a trade war against China and views the world’s second largest economy as a geopolitical rival.

China says Wells Fargo executive ‘involved in a criminal case’

Beijing confirmed that China-born, Atlanta-based Mao Chenyue is banned from leaving the country. This comes during a trade war with the Trump administration.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/21/china-wells-fargo-exit-ban/

July 21, 2025 at 6:03 a.m. EDTToday at 6:03 a.m. EDT

A person enters a Wells Fargo branch in New York City on July 18. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing confirmed Monday that Mao Chenyue, an Atlanta-based executive for the bank, had been banned from leaving China. (Kylie Cooper/Reuters)

By Kelly Kasulis Cho and Lyric Li

A U.S.-based Wells Fargo executive who was recently blocked from leaving China is under criminal investigation, China’s Foreign Ministry announced Monday, offering no further details about the charges she faces or the expected duration of her exit ban.

Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.

Mao Chenyue, who was born in Shanghai but works in Atlanta as a managing director at Wells Fargo Bank, has been barred from leaving China, foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun confirmed. The Wall Street Journal first reported the ban, citing people familiar with the matter.

Wells Fargo said Friday that it was “working through the appropriate channels” to secure her return to the United States.

It was not immediately clear whether Mao had an American passport, or if she remained a Chinese citizen. Reuters reported last week that Mao is a U.S. citizen.

“Ms. Mao Chenyue is involved in a criminal case currently handled by Chinese law enforcement authorities and she is subject to exit restrictions in accordance with the law,” Guo said at a news briefing Monday. “Chinese and foreigners alike have to abide by Chinese laws. China will protect her lawful rights and interests throughout the investigation,” he said.

Following World news

Following

Exit bans in China generally require a lower threshold from authorities than indictments and formal detentions, experts told The Washington Post, and the county’s sweeping national security law has allowed for individuals to face travel bans for actions that would be considered legal in other countries.

Beijing has added to the number of laws regarding exit bans since 2018, according to a 2023 report from the rights group Safeguard Defenders, expanding the ambiguity surrounding activities that could run afoul of the rules.

While the reasons for the criminal investigation into Mao remain unclear, experts say that exit bans and criminal investigations can sometimes be used as a way create leverage to use against adversarial parties, such as particular businesses or the United States.

“These are political, tit-for-tat measures that China sometimes can use,” said Simona Grano, a China expert at the University of Zurich. “It wouldn’t be the first time they actually use these kind of measures exactly at the right moment to send some political signaling or even to blackmail or coerce a country.”

People walk on the Bund promenade, with Shanghai World Financial Center in the background, where a Wells Fargo office is situated, on July 18. (Go Nakamura/Reuters)

A Chinese American who works for the U.S. Commerce Department is also facing an exit ban after he failed to disclose on his visa application that he worked for the U.S. government, The Post reported Sunday, citing four people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The man, whose name was not disclosed, was on a trip to visit family members and was employed by the Patent and Trademark Office.

There are at least several dozen Americans, many of them ethnic Chinese, who are under exit bans, experts and former officials said. The exact number is difficult to ascertain because typically these cases come to the attention of U.S. authorities through self-reporting, and most do not learn they’ve been placed under a ban until they try to leave, or they don’t want to call attention to the case and make resolution more difficult.

Both bans punctuate Washington and Beijing’s increasingly strained relations as the Trump administration remains locked in a trade war against China and views the world’s second largest economy as a geopolitical rival.

7. How China Curbed Its Oil Addiction—and Blunted a U.S. Pressure Point

​Energy security = economic growth = domestic political security = the CCP remaining in power.

How China Curbed Its Oil Addiction—and Blunted a U.S. Pressure Point

Government boosts domestic production and EV industry in the name of national security; 14 million chargers

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-oil-demand-lower-b5ae15ed

Oil storage tanks on the outskirts of Shanghai. Photo: Bloomberg

By Brian Spegele

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July 21, 2025 9:00 pm ET

BEIJING—China’s thirst for oil drove global demand for decades. Now a government campaign to curb that addiction is nearing a milestone, with national consumption expected to peak by 2027, then begin to fall. 

Chinese officials have long worried that the U.S. and its allies could hamstring the nation’s economy by choking off its supply of foreign oil. So China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into weaning itself off the imported stuff by reviving domestic production and swiftly building the world’s leading electric-vehicle industry.

“The energy rice bowl must be held in our own hands,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said.

Across China, fleets of gas-guzzling Volkswagen and Hyundai taxicabs are being replaced by electric models designed and produced locally. Last year, nearly half of passenger vehicles sold in the country were either all-electrics or plug-in hybrids, compared with 6% in 2020.

In a remote corner of China called the “sea of death” for its harsh conditions, oil workers are trying to coax more crude out of the ground by drilling holes as deep as Mt. Everest is high. State-owned PetroChina reported $38 billion of capital expenditures last year, nearly as much as Exxon Mobil’s and Chevron’s combined.

China boosted oil output by 13% from 2018 to 2024, to around 4.3 million barrels a day. Crude imports fell nearly 2% last year, though they have rebounded slightly this year as some Chinese companies built stockpiles. 

Inside China’s Dark Factories Where Robots Run the Show

Play video: Inside China’s Dark Factories Where Robots Run the Show

Inside China’s ‘dark factories,’ robots help to build electric cars around the clock, transforming Chinese EV industry into an existential threat to American and global automakers. Photo: WSJ

China’s biggest state oil companies and the International Energy Agency all forecast that China’s demand for oil will likely peak within two years, while gasoline and diesel demand has already topped out.

China won’t stop importing oil. It still brings in roughly 11 million barrels a day, about 70% of what it consumes, up from less than three million a day 20 years ago. And overall oil consumption is likely to decline only gradually as China’s demand for oil to make petrochemicals continues to grow.

Nevertheless, Xi’s campaign will have ramifications for global energy markets, with billions of dollars of Chinese oil imports projected to vanish in coming years. In June, the IEA, a Paris-based organization that tracks global oil consumption, slashed its forecast for Chinese demand in the 2028-30 period by more than one million barrels a day from its year-earlier prediction.

Many oil-exporting nations are eager to retain a slice of China’s market. Russia has been selling oil to China at a discount to ensure Beijing keeps buying. Saudi Arabia has invested in Chinese refineries to shore up long-term contracts to supply those facilities with oil. 

During a trip to Beijing in March, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive lavished praise on China, telling Xi that China was “inspirational and admirable” and “an oasis of certainty” in an unpredictable world.

The campaign has been costly for China’s government. The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington pegged Chinese government support for electric vehicles at $231 billion from 2009 to 2023. Many of the nation’s electric-vehicle makers are unprofitable. Overproduction has spurred a brutal price war at home, and rising EV exports that have fueled trade tensions.

Energy ‘revolution’

In late 2013, when China overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest net oil importer, its reliance on foreign crude looked set to grow unchecked, accounting for about half of global demand growth over the prior decade.

Soon after, Xi gathered his economic team and told them China needed an energy “revolution” to protect national security.

A worker on an offshore platform in the Bohai Sea off China’s northeast coast. Photo: Du Penghui/Zuma Press

Beijing was leery of relying too much on Middle Eastern oil, which had entangled the U.S. in that region’s conflicts for decades. Xi also was facing domestic discontent over choking smog, attributable in part to the surging numbers of cars on China’s roads.

During the first Trump administration, as relations between the two nations deteriorated, Chinese government strategists grew concerned about the nation’s reliance on the Strait of Malacca. Most of the ships importing oil and gas to China go through that narrow passage near Singapore, leaving them susceptible to intercept by the U.S. Navy in the event of a conflict.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Paul Dabbar has estimated that if China lost access to all seaborne oil-and-gas imports, its economy could shrink by as much as 17%.

Xi’s call for action ignited a flurry of government activity to boost its nascent EV industry. Not only would EVs help slash oil demand, they offered China a chance to leapfrog automakers in the U.S. and elsewhere after years of struggling to catch up to them in producing internal-combustion engines.

To reduce the cost of EVs, Beijing exempted them from a 10% sales tax—a program estimated to have cost more than $100 billion since 2018.

Nearly 500 companies sought to make EVs. Some were founded by executives with little experience running car companies, who burned through government money before flopping. By 2019, EVs and plug-in hybrids accounted for only a fraction of the market, with many Chinese consumers still hesitant to make the switch.  

The turning point came late that year when Tesla, with strong backing of Shanghai’s government, opened its first factory in China. 

“For the first time, Chinese consumers saw a really appealing, futuristic automobile,” said Michael Dunne, chief executive of auto consulting firm Dunne Insights. “It was good-looking, it was fast, it had all these highly attractive elements to a consumer.”

As EV sales surged, the government ramped up subsidies for companies to build public charging ports. It also required new apartment buildings to provide infrastructure enabling residents to easily install their own. 

As of May, China had more than 14 million charging points, nine times as many as at the end of 2020. The U.S., by comparison, has around 230,000 public and private chargers, in addition to hundreds of thousands at private homes that are more difficult to track.

An EV charging station on display at the Auto Shanghai show in April. As of May, China had more than 14 million charging points. Photo: go nakamura/Reuters

The production line for electric-vehicle maker Zeekr in Ningbo, China. In recent years, sales of EVs have surged in China. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

In Shanghai, the city provided EV buyers with free green license plates while auctioning plates for traditional cars for more than $10,000.

Cities replaced diesel-powered buses with electric ones. By 2023, more than 80% of China’s city buses were all-electrics or hybrids.

Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology reported $18 billion in net profit over the last three years and invested more than $7 billion into research and development. Today, CATL and rival BYD say their R&D spending has enabled each of them to develop technology to charge cars in just five minutes.

These days, China’s EV factories are symbols of its manufacturing prowess. Less than 100 miles south of Tesla’s Shanghai operation, Chinese carmaker Zeekr has automated entire processes such as welding, with more than 800 robots doing the work. 

One of its cars, the Zeekr 001, has a range of up to 466 miles—about 180 miles more than the median range of an EV in the U.S. Inside a showroom recently, a salesman voice-activated a massage function built into the driver’s seat, while one of the car’s apps played Chinese karaoke classics on a video screen. 

In the U.S., sales of EVs and hybrids have risen more slowly than in China, to 20% of light-vehicle sales at the end of last year, from 12% in early 2022, according to research firm Omdia. But high EV inventory levels at some dealerships suggest a limit to U.S. demand, and Congress is scrapping tax credits of up to $7,500 for EV purchases to save money for other priorities. 

Drilling push

China’s desire for energy independence dates all the way back to former leader Mao Zedong, who once dispatched tens of thousands of workers to search for oil in China’s northeast to ensure China wouldn’t be dependent on imports.

The discovery in 1959 of a massive deposit near the city of Daqing became the stuff of Communist Party lore, with “Daqing Spirit” coming to mean hard work in the face of challenges. But production at Daqing and other fields couldn’t keep up with the surge of demand following China’s economic reforms. 

As the government prioritized EVs, state companies began cutting domestic oil output, preferring to import more of the crude they needed from less expensive sources abroad. 

In July 2018, Xi personally intervened, ordering state-owned companies to revive domestic production to safeguard national security.

Three state-owned oil majors invested an additional $10 billion the following year in exploration and production. They zeroed in on offshore areas such as the South China Sea and the Bohai Sea off the country’s northeast coast, as well as remote reserves near China’s western border with Kyrgyzstan, in a region called the Tarim Basin.

Cnooc, the company focused on offshore reserves, accelerated its drilling cycles to bring oil fields online more quickly. It teamed up with Chinese technology giant Huawei to digitize its operations, using tens of thousands of sensors to collect data and improve decision-making. 

By 2023, the Bohai oil field accounted for 50% of the growth in China’s oil output. Cnooc also increased production in the South China Sea by more than a quarter since 2020. In that expanse of water off South China, the government has aggressively enforced disputed maritime claims against its neighbors.

Cnooc said in a written statement that it aimed to raise its total oil-and-gas production as much as 15% between 2024 and 2027, and that two-thirds of its production would continue to come from China.

In the deserts of the Tarim Basin crews are exploring some of the nation’s deepest reserves. Summer temperatures can top 120 degrees, and in the winter they can hit minus 20. Such ultradeep exploration is expensive, with some wells costing three times as much as shallower traditional wells, a Chinese oil executive told state media. 

The Shenditake 1, China's deepest-ever exploratory well, and an oilfield facility in the Bohai Sea.

Xinhua via ZUMA Press

In 2023, Xi held a video call with Tarim Basin oil workers, praising their “indispensable contributions” to the nation. About 5% of China’s total oil and gas output last year came from the basin’s deep reservoirs, a number Chinese oil executives intend to increase.

As of May, PetroChina’s parent company, China National Petroleum, said it had drilled 193 wells in the Tarim Oilfield at least 5 miles deep. In the U.S., many wells are a mile or two deep.

In February, the company said it completed its deepest-ever exploratory well—the Shenditake 1—at nearly 7 miles deep. State media said it is the world’s second-deepest vertical well, after a scientific well drilled by the Soviets many years ago. 

“Advancing into the deep-Earth is the only path forward for the future development of oil and gas in our country,” said PetroChina vice president He Jiangchuan.

A sign greets workers at the gates of the drilling site. “Challenge the forbidden zone to forge the tools of a great power,” it said. “Strive to become pillars of guaranteeing energy supply.”

Grace Zhu contributed to this article.

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com

8. Vodka Toasts With the Dictator of Belarus: How Diplomacy Gets Done in Trump 2.0

Vodka Toasts With the Dictator of Belarus: How Diplomacy Gets Done in Trump 2.0

Politico · by DYLON JONES

Washington And The World

John Coale, a Trump lawyer-turned-envoy, reveals the wild story of how America secured the release of 14 political prisoners.

Belarusian opposition activist Siarhei Tsikhanouski (second from right) and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, (right) pose for pictures with other Belarusian activists and former political prisoners during a rally in Warsaw, Poland, on June 26, 2025. | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

07/20/2025 07:00 AM EDT

A bus carrying 14 political prisoners with bags over their heads hurtled through the lush Belarusian countryside one morning last month, its destination unknown. Five years after President Alexander Lukashenko launched an unsparing crackdown on dissent in the former Soviet nation, some of the captives feared they were about to be executed.

Among the group was the prominent dissident Siarhei Tsikhanouski whose wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, became the face of the Belarusian opposition movement after his arrest in 2020.

As the bus approached its destination, their minders from the Belarusian security services — which still goes by its Soviet name the KGB — removed the bags from their heads but told them to keep their eyes fixed on the floor. “We kept looking ahead all the same,” said Ihar Karnei, a Belarusian journalist who was among the group and had been imprisoned for two years. “We were interested: Where were they taking us?”

The bus pulled up to a field not far from Belarus’ border with Lithuania. The door of the van flew open, and they received a surprising greeting: “President Trump sent me to take you home.”

The man speaking to the bewildered prisoners was John Coale, one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers and now a deputy special envoy to Ukraine. It took a moment for the reality of what was happening to sink in.

“They were terrified,” Coale recalled in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. “Opening that door and getting them to realize that ‘You are free’ was quite a moment.”

The prisoner release, a goodwill gesture by the Belarusian leader, marked the continuation of a cautious diplomatic opening between the United States and Belarus. The fraught relationship between the two countries came to a standstill in 2020 when protests against rigged elections were met with mass arrests and thousands of people were swept into the country’s vast prison system.

But the release also wouldn’t have happened without Coale’s efforts to forge a relationship with Lukashenko, including over a long lunch with vodka toasts.

“I did two shots, didn’t throw up, but did not do a third one,” said Coale.

The episode offers a window into the highly personalistic way in which foreign policy gets done during Trump’s second term in office, as the president has tapped a slew of close friends and allies to serve as his envoys and implement his agenda abroad. Critics have balked at their lack of experience; after all, they smirk, can real estate magnate Steve Witkoff really lead negotiations to conclude Russia’s war on Ukraine, tackle Iran’s nuclear program and end Israel’s war in Gaza?

But the envoys bring the prospect of a direct line to the president and the chance to bypass State Department bureaucracy. They are also free to say and do things that traditional U.S. diplomats might not be able to.

“It’s sort of easier to have an eye-to-eye conversation with the president’s right hand,” said Artyom Shraibman, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dispatching the national security advisor or secretary of State (currently Marco Rubio in both cases), could be seen as a full legitimization of Belarus’ isolated president, said Franak Viacorka, chief of staff to Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition leader.

“But if we speak about envoys — an envoy’s task is to make deals, to solve crises,” he said.

Coale’s adventures in Belarus began with a call from the State Department in late April with a special request. Was he willing to go to Minsk to meet with Lukashenko, a man often described as Europe’s last dictator?

“Fine,” said Coale. Could he fly out the next day? “Not fine,” he replied. “But I did it anyway.”

The 78-year-old Coale is a plainspoken, veteran litigator perhaps best known for helping to broker a $386 billion settlement from Big Tobacco in the late 1990s. He’s also had a winding political life; a longtime Democrat, Coale endorsed John McCain in 2008 and befriended Sarah Palin, before backing Democrat Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential bid.

In 2021, he led Trump’s longshot lawsuit against social media companies, accusing them of censorship. “The woke stuff has moved me to the right,” he said in one interview. He first met Trump some 20 years ago through his wife Greta Van Susteren, the former Fox News host who has interviewed the president on numerous occasions.

Days after the call, Coale and a handful of U.S. diplomats crossed the border from Lithuania into Belarus, stopping on a country road to swap out the diplomatic license plates on their vehicles so as not to attract attention.

They arrived at Independence Palace, Lukashenko’s residence in central Minsk which, with its glass facade and swooping metal roof, is the size of a small airport terminal. “It’s so big that Tom Brady couldn’t throw a pass from one end of the lobby to the other,” Coale said. The imposing complex on the capital’s Victory Avenue was built as a symbol of the country’s independence, according to the website of the Belarusian president.

That sovereignty was always tenuous. One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, Lukashenko has long relied on subsidies from Moscow to prop up his ailing economy. In 2022, Belarus was used as a staging ground for Russian troops in their full-scale assault on Ukraine which further cemented his alienation from the West.

Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994, preserving many of the institutions and habits of the country’s Soviet past. He has proven skilled at playing Russia and the West off against each other, flirting with Washington and Brussels to get Putin’s attention or secure relief from economic sanctions imposed on the country. Political prisoners have often been used as a bargaining chip. In 2015, Lukashenko released all those deemed wrongfully detained, prompting Europe and America to lift some sanctions.

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The reprieve was to be short-lived. Over 5,000 people have been convicted of politically motivated charges over the past five years, according to the Belarusian human rights organization Vyasna, and some 1,150 remain in prison. Trump has made freeing wrongfully detained Americans a priority of his foreign policy, creating an opening for authoritarian leaders like Lukashenko to get his attention. Within a week of Trump’s inauguration in January, Belarus unilaterally released U.S. citizen Anastasia Nuhfer from prison.

“Lukashenko is afraid of Trump,” said Viacorka. “[He] knows very well how to deal with ordinary politicians, but he doesn’t have a clue how to deal with these strong and unpredictable leaders like Trump.”

Three more political prisoners were released in February, after Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Chris Smith quietly travelled to Belarus, becoming the most senior U.S. official to visit the country in over five years. By April, they were on the cusp of getting another American citizen released and dispatched Coale in a bid to seal the deal.

Over a long lunch in the palace, Coale was tasked with getting to know the garrulous Belarusian leader. “They told me to charm him. To yuck it up with him, so I did that,” he said. “[Lukashenko] brought up stuff about the State Department and I said, ‘Yeah all they want to do is blah blah blah,’ so he loved that.”

Lukashenko struck Coale as smart, savvy. “He does want better relations with the United States,” Coale said, adding that the Belarusian leader seemed keen to play a role in negotiations regarding the war in Ukraine.

At some point vodka — Lukashenko’s own personal brand — was brought out and the toasts commenced. The Belarusian president offered a toast to Trump. Smith, the State Department official, nudged Coale to reciprocate, as is customary in the region. Coale followed suit with his own toast to Lukashenko, and soon, he began to worry about his stomach.

As the afternoon wore on there were more toasts, and while there was little talk of politics, the two men got to know each other. A relationship was developing. “It was all fun,” Coale said.

Lukashenko seems to have agreed. Hours later, the American delegation got what they had come for as the Belarusian authorities handed over Youras Ziankovich, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was arrested in Moscow in 2021 and accused of plotting a coup against Lukashenko. The U.S. government deemed him wrongfully detained earlier this year.

Discussions continued behind the scenes into the summer and by June, another prisoner release was set in motion.

When she awoke on the morning of Saturday June 21, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had little idea that she was about to be reunited with her husband, Siarhei. A popular YouTube blogger, he was swiftly arrested after attempting to run against Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential elections.

Tsikhanouskaya, a soft-spoken former teacher, took up her husband’s mantle after his arrest and was herself quickly forced into exile in Lithuania, becoming the most recognizable face of the Belarusian opposition. For five years she has shuttled between global capitals to raise awareness about her country’s political prisoners, often carrying a folder bearing a photograph of her husband.

On the morning her husband was released, Tsikhanouskaya was flying back from Poland to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. She knew that Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, had been in Belarus the night before with Coale and that negotiations about a prisoner release were underway. She speculated with her chief of staff, Viacorka, who might be released but didn’t dare expect her husband would be included.

Having been held without access to anyone on the outside for over two years, Siarhei was on a shortlist of some 200 prisoners deemed a priority for release by Belarusian human rights defenders on humanitarian grounds. The majority of the 14 people who were about to be released were citizens of other countries who had been swept up in the crackdown, or, had some kind of affiliation with the West.

It wasn’t until the morning of the release that Coale learned the final details of the prisoners to be freed.

As Tsikhanouskaya made her way back to Vilnius, the bus carrying her husband and 13 other political prisoners made its way to the Belarusian border with Lithuania, after the KGB handed them over to Coale and representatives from the State Department.

By the time the now-former prisoners made it to the border, it was hours since they had been fed. Many were gaunt after years of meager prison rations. Siarhei, once a bear of man, emerged from prison unrecognizable with hollow cheeks. “For some reason, in one of our cars was a whole basket of little Tootsie Rolls,” said Coale, which they passed around the group. As they waited to be processed into the country, Coale and the other diplomats passed their cellphones around so people could call their loved ones and let them know that they had been released. “Nobody had any idea this was happening,” he said.

In the Vilnius airport, Tsikhanouskaya received a call from her husband, with whom she hadn’t had any contact in over two years. “When I heard the voice of my husband on the phone, it was a huge surprise,” she said. He told her: “My dear, I am free.”

While Trump’s efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine have run headlong into Putin’s intransigence, Tsikhanouskaya hopes that her country could offer the diplomatic victory that Trump craves so dearly.

“Belarus can be a success story for President Trump,” she said. “[A] free, independent Belarus is in the interest of the USA as well.”

Lukashenko also senses an opportunity to return to relevance as the U.S. president seeks to strike a deal between Russia and Ukraine, said Shraibman of the Carnegie Endowment. “He wants to be relevant to the peace process. He wants to speak to the big guys. This is a prize in itself.”

But Belarus isn’t Switzerland. “Lukashenko is so, so deeply dependent on Putin and Russia these days that it is simply beyond the power of the United States, no matter how hard it tries, to decouple these two countries,” Shraibman said.

Coale isn’t too preoccupied with Lukashenko’s diplomatic dance. “That’s for Rubio to worry about.”

“I look at the thing of, can I free some more people,” he told me. “And if it plays into my purpose and what I’m trying to do, I don’t care.”

9. The Real Meaning of the State Department RIF

​Two sides to every coin. And where you stand depends on where you sit.

The Real Meaning of the State Department RIF

The American Conservative · by Peter Van Buren · July 21, 2025

Politics

Bloat has been a chronic problem at Foggy Bottom. This is a start.

Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Peter Van Buren

Jul 21, 2025 12:03 AM

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player...

RIP—er, RIF, State Department as we knew you.

One of my early duties during my over two and a half decades working for the State Department was to “support” Secretary of State James Baker’s official visit to London.

I read up on current policy, made sure I had my passwords and combinations in hand in case they needed crucial documents from the embassy after hours, and shined my shoes. Baker traveled with a large party, taking up a whole floor in a very nice central London hotel. Then I got a taste of real Foreign Service life: My first task was to make sure every TV in all the rooms worked. After Baker arrived, I was to get the required wake-up time for each member of the staff and, at the conclusion of my overnight shift the next morning, call each to summon them to breakfast, despite the hotel having a very nice complimentary service that did just that same thing. Later I became known as “Ambassador to Harrod’s” after having to escort so many Mrs. Important Somebodies shopping while hubby was on a diplomatic business trip to the UK.

While there were of course better days, and things may have changed since I left, I can’t guarantee you that a Foreign Service officer (FSO; no doubt a “special assistant”) isn’t right now walking two steps behind some assistant secretary, carrying his briefcase for him. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t shed too many tears alongside those who claim recent staff cuts at State are the end of diplomacy or ceding territory to the Chinese or any such nonsense.

State is a bloated, corpulent, insular, risk-averse, academically inbred, stifling, overly bureaucratic, back-stabbing, stodgy, mid-20th century institution that lost its mojo after the Cold War ended; everyone who worked there would admit it if they weren’t afraid of the “corridor reputation” that drives promotions, assignments, and retirement gigs at think tanks and universities. In Senate testimony, the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio complained the State Department decision-making process was far too cumbersome. He described receiving a memo requiring 40 people to approve before it landed on his desk. “We can’t move at that pace in this world,” Rubio said.

The staff cuts give State perhaps its last chance to become useful in the foreign affairs community, or to forever watch the big flexes continue to go to the CIA, NSC, or military, while State is lucky to be assigned to check to see whether the TVs work in all the adults’ hotel rooms.

The history of this last chance began many institutions ago, as post–Cold War secretary after secretary would come into office ordering a third-party efficiency study, which was quickly ignored. They then added vertical stacks of offices designed to service pet projects and find new purpose. (Hillary was the worst, with whole sections of the building filled with offices frantic about women’s rights, LGBT stuff, and tin stoves for Africa, all mostly designed to provide B-roll footage for her upcoming presidential campaign.) Secretary Colin Powell arrived from the Pentagon aghast at the slowness of getting things done in Foggy Bottom, but was quickly consumed by the bureaucracy before he abandoned State in the worst pet project of all: staffing up the Iraq War reconstruction effort and Embassy Baghdad, then the world’s largest mission.

The more recent history starts in February of this year, when some 2,000 DOGE-adjacent RIF notices were sent out to domestic State employees. Those State employees, alongside people in nearly two dozen other agencies sued, claimed President Trump had no constitutional authority to fire Executive Branch employees like that. The cases found a sympathetic judge (on the West Coast, of course) who issued a nationwide injunction (of course) reprieving the workers for a few months.

Meanwhile, there were budget cuts. A hiring freeze. A freeze on the infamous FSO intake exam. About 1,400 employees resigned or retired “voluntarily.” State rewrote its own rules for issuing RIFs to allow it to eliminate employees by job title and work area, making it easier for the department to pick and choose which people would get the axe. Then, earlier this month, the constitutional case made its way to the Supreme Court, where 8–1 (Kentanji Brown Jackson dissenting—of course!), issued a decision saying Trump indeed did have the authority to fire. The RIFs followed three days later, on July 11.

A reported 1,107 local Washington-area civil service employees were RIFed, in addition to nearly 246 Foreign Service Officers currently on domestic assignments. Including semi-voluntary retirements and resignations, the total workforce reduction at State since Trump took office is about 3,000 people, some 15 percent of the total. “Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities,” the department said in a notice to staff.

Though State provided no statistical breakdowns, talk suggests impacted offices include the Bureau of Cyberspace and Policy, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Bureau of Energy Resources, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Multilateral Trade Affairs Office, Office of Agriculture Policy, Global (Climate) Change, and others, for a total of 132 offices within bureaus. It does not appear many RIFs—if any—touched one of State’s largest internal organizations, the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Consular controls the issuance and revocation of visas worldwide, as well as U.S. passports, both now firmly in line with Trump’s America First agenda.

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Sources indicate personnel affected seem to have been pulled from all levels of experience, as the RIF was largely based on the job someone unfortunately held as of the cut-off of May 29. It is said on the FSO side high ranking as well as senior Foreign Service officers were included, and at least one domestically assigned ambassador and one person who was headed out to be a Deputy Chief of Mission abroad. State has signaled no further domestic reductions are planned at present, and has been coy about any serious plans to cut back diplomatic staffing abroad. (The latter is probably a mistake if cutting waste is the goal; see here. Domestic changes without changes overseas are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the ship of State.)

Some employees seeking to retain their jobs will reach out to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a three-person panel that hears appeals to firings and other disciplinary actions the federal government takes against civil servants and FSOs. The problem is that the board has so far this year already received 11,166 appeals, about twice its typical workload. The board is also not fully staffed, ensuring a years-long backlog. Another Hail-Mary pass: The federal judge who first blocked Trump from implementing mass layoffs before the Supreme Court intervened said she plans to litigate the legality of individual agency workforce reduction plans. The FSO employees’ association created a defense fund for those headed to court to somehow try to reverse the RIF.

Back here on earth, it is best to ignore the Democratic crybabies saying this RIF will damage the U.S. on the world stage. There is still plenty of work to be done for real change at Foggy Bottom and meanwhile there are still plenty of State Department employees at work in line with the department’s new America First orientation, as opposed to its grasp-at-relevance purple-haired global orientation. No one likes to see decent people lose their jobs because they were inadvertently caught up in something bigger than themselves, but the changes at State are long overdue and very necessary if the institution is to survive as anything but America’s concierge abroad.

The American Conservative · by Peter Van Buren · July 21, 2025

10. Kyiv as the New Berlin: Ukraine’s Role in Modern Espionage Conflict

​Excerpt:

As Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty and chart its course toward Euro-Atlantic integration, it is poised to assume a role strikingly similar to that of Berlin during the Cold War: a strategic nerve center where the ideological and intelligence struggles of global powers converge. The U.S. and NATO now have the opportunity and the imperative to craft a new doctrine of 21st-century intelligence engagement that is agile, integrated, and responsive to the realities of hybrid warfare. By investing in human intelligence network, cyber defense infrastructure, counterintelligence operations, and narrative resilience, the West can help transform Ukraine into a secure, intelligent, and resilient partner in the ongoing struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Just as Berlin once symbolized the front line of the Cold War, Kyiv may become the emblematic city of a new era of global rivalry—a permanent frontier in the invisible war over influence, perception, and control. In this sense, Ukraine is not merely a battleground but a bellwether, and its success as a modern-day Berlin will be central to the future of European and global security.

Kyiv as the New Berlin: Ukraine’s Role in Modern Espionage Conflict

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/07/22/kyiv-as-the-new-berlin-ukraine-role-in-modern-espionage-conflict/

by Reece Snyder, PA-C

|

07.22.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract

Kyiv and greater Ukraine now serve as the modern geopolitical and espionage frontier between NATO and the Russian Federation, mirroring Cold War-era Berlin. Intelligence operations have

evolved from traditional surveillance to advanced cyber warfare, with Ukraine at the center of this transformation. Deepening intelligence integration with NATO positions Ukraine as a

permanent stronghold of Western resilience and a critical front in the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

Introduction

During the Cold War, Berlin epitomized the global ideological divide, serving as a crucible for espionage activities between the Western allies and the Soviet bloc. The city’s unique status—partitioned yet accessible—made it an unparalleled theater for intelligence operations. Intelligence agencies from both sides saturated the city with operatives, informants, and surveillance equipment, turning Berlin into a dense network of espionage activity. In Battle Ground Berlin: CIA vs KGB in the Cold War, David Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev, and George Bailey describe the city as the “frontline of the spy war,” detailing covert missions ranging from surveillance to sabotage. Perhaps the most audacious of these was Operation Gold, a joint CIA–MI6 venture that involved constructing a 1,476-foot tunnel beneath East Berlin to tap Soviet communication lines. Though ultimately compromised, the operation demonstrated the extraordinary lengths intelligence services went to in pursuit of strategic advantage.

Adding to this dynamic, Paul Maddrell explains that Berlin’s open border in the pre-Wall years was particularly advantageous for Western services, who exploited the city’s porous divide to infiltrate East Germany, exfiltrate assets, and run informant networks. Yet this openness cut both ways: the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) also operated aggressively within the western sectors, placing informants in key institutions and cultivating a massive internal surveillance apparatus. This system of mutual penetration turned Berlin into more than a symbol of division—it became a functional, living battlefield of information where both sides engaged in an intelligence cold war with very real consequences.

In the 21st century, Kyiv has emerged as a striking parallel to Cold War Berlin, both in strategic importance and in the scale and scope of clandestine activity. Geographically positioned between NATO member states and the Russian Federation, Ukraine is both a buffer and a prize in a renewed confrontation between democratic and authoritarian blocs. Since 2014, and particularly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has aligned more closely with Euro-Atlantic institutions, deepening its political and military cooperation with NATO and the European Union. This pivot westward has alarmed the Kremlin, which sees Ukraine as critical to its regional sphere of influence. As Ramesh Kumar notes, this perceived encroachment by NATO has triggered an intensification of Russian intelligence operations, aimed at undermining Ukrainian sovereignty and deterring further Western integration.

Just as Berlin’s divided status and symbolic weight made it a magnet for espionage during the Cold War, Kyiv’s central role in the modern security architecture of Europe has made it a hotbed for contemporary intelligence warfare. Government buildings, military command centers, energy infrastructure, and digital networks have become key targets. What was once a Cold War of tunnels and listening devices has now shifted to fiber-optic cables and malware. The methods have changed, but the game remains the same.

Indeed, espionage in Ukraine today reflects the evolution of spy craft from physical to digital domains. In Berlin, success depended on agents crossing checkpoints undetected or intercepting analog communications. In contrast, Ukraine has become a proving ground for cyber warfare, where attacks can be launched anonymously and at scale. Matthew Aid and other scholars have highlighted how cyber operations have become central to modern intelligence, and Ukraine offers sobering examples. In 2015 and again in 2016, Russian cyberattacks disabled portions of Ukraine’s electrical grid, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of citizens. These attacks, attributed to the GRU-affiliated hacker group “Sandworm,” demonstrated the utility of cyber operations in destabilizing critical infrastructure without firing a single shot. As Kristie Macrakis points out in her study of Cold War spy-tech, innovation in intelligence methods has always been a measure of strategic power—Ukraine is now where such innovation is tested in real time.

Beyond cyber attacks, Ukraine has also become the site of renewed focus on counterintelligence and internal subversion. During the Cold War, East Germany’s Stasi maintained control through pervasive internal surveillance, embedding informants throughout society. Jens Gieseke documents how the Stasi created an atmosphere of fear and compliance, capable of identifying threats and sabotaging foreign espionage efforts from within. A similar dynamic is unfolding in Ukraine today. Russian intelligence services, building on Soviet-era networks and tactics, have been implicated in recruiting collaborators within Ukrainian political and military institutions. These operatives have attempted to pass information, sabotage defenses, and even plan assassinations. HyunJun Seo describes these actions as updated manifestations of Cold War subversion strategies, repurposed for hybrid warfare. In response, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), bolstered by Western training and technical support, has undertaken aggressive counterintelligence measures—raiding pro-Russian cells, arresting collaborators, and intercepting communications. The internal intelligence struggle in Ukraine thus mirrors the pervasive paranoia and vigilance of Cold War Berlin, where every citizen could potentially be an asset or a threat.

While digital and covert operations shape much of today’s conflict, the battle for narrative control has become no less significant. In Cold War Berlin, propaganda played a central role: both blocs sought to win hearts and minds through controlled media, cultural diplomacy, and ideological messaging. The United States funded radio broadcasts and literary journals, while the Soviet Union staged grand exhibitions to showcase the virtues of socialism. In today’s Ukraine, the same contest of ideas is waged across social media and digital platforms. Further, this highlights how Russia deploys large-scale disinformation campaigns to spread confusion, erode trust in Ukrainian institutions, and fragment public support for NATO in the West. These campaigns often involve false narratives about Ukrainian nationalism, war crimes, or Western corruption, carefully crafted to inflame existing divisions. NATO and EU institutions, in turn, have increased efforts in strategic communication, counter-disinformation programs, and support for independent journalism to ensure that truth can compete with state-sponsored deceit.

Taken together, these developments signal a transformation of Ukraine into the 21st-century equivalent of Cold War Berlin—a city and country at the intersection of opposing worldviews, and a stage upon which intelligence services wage a quiet but consequential war. The espionage landscape in Kyiv today features a fusion of Cold War legacy tactics and new-era innovations: from human intelligence and surveillance to cyberattacks and psychological operations. Ukraine is not just a theater for military confrontation; it is a living laboratory for modern espionage. The same structural conditions that once made Berlin a battleground of shadows now apply to Ukraine: strategic geography, divided loyalties, ideological stakes, and a powerful enemy determined to undermine the country’s path toward sovereignty and integration with the West.

As history cycles forward, the lessons of Cold War Berlin offer a valuable lens for understanding the current intelligence war in Ukraine. The methods have modernized, the actors have evolved, but the stakes remain chillingly familiar. In Kyiv, as once in Berlin, the fate of a nation—and perhaps the stability of a continent—may be determined not only by armies, but by the invisible hands of espionage.

While peace does not look to be on the horizon, the United States and NATO as a whole, must prepare for when the war turns cold. To effectively counter Russia’s entrenched intelligence presence and assert informational superiority, the United States and NATO must expand and adapt their intelligence strategies in Ukraine. While current efforts have focused on signals intelligence (SIGINT), cyber defense, and real-time battlefield reconnaissance, the situation demands a deeper, more multidimensional intelligence infrastructure tailored specifically to Ukraine’s hybrid warfare environment.

The Need for People

One strategic imperative is the expansion of human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities through closer collaboration with Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and military intelligence (HUR). Given the cultural, linguistic, and historical complexities of the region, well-placed local operatives are crucial to identifying Russian sleeper agents, preventing insider threats, and gaining actionable insight into Moscow’s long-term intentions. Western agencies should invest in specialized training programs for Ukrainian personnel, modeled on Cold War-era initiatives that bolstered West Berlin’s counterintelligence capacity. Further, the west must establish their own human networks throughout Ukraine and the region. The near complete removal of permanent military and intelligence assets from the region since the onset of the war creates a dependence on outside information and secondhand information that cannot effectively the Russian Federation’s significant espionage edge.

Paired with an expanded human intelligence network, NATO should invest in decentralized, embedded surveillance platforms within Ukraine’s urban and rural environments to monitor Russian infiltration networks in real time. These could include enhanced use of drone reconnaissance, AI-enabled pattern recognition software, and joint SIGINT operations with Ukrainian assets to track enemy movements across border regions and within occupied territories. While the onset of drone involvement in modern conflict has been discussed at length, these systems still lack integration into a cohesive network in the west. The Ukrainians have developed the Delta System that integrates all this data but also allows for individual soldiers to send updates as they unfold. Applying this network, or a similarly developed network to western intelligence collection, could act as a significant multiplier to establish human and signal networks. This system could be integrated with the Ukrainian intelligence network or function independently depending on local objectives. A distributed intelligence-gathering apparatus that pairs signals, human, and geospatial intelligence that is further able to function under duress or occupation, would mirror the resilience that Cold War networks in Berlin demonstrated under conditions of political fragmentation and surveillance saturation.

Cyber Integration

Cybersecurity must also remain a central pillar of Western intelligence strategy in Ukraine, given the scale and sophistication of Russian cyber operations. Over the past decade, Ukraine has served as a testing ground for Russia’s most aggressive cyber weapons—operations that have not only targeted Ukraine’s infrastructure but also signaled threats to NATO members. The 2015 and 2016 cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, widely attributed to Russia’s GRU-linked group “Sandworm,” were among the first successful uses of malware to disable physical infrastructure on a national scale. These attacks temporarily cut power to hundreds of thousands of people and demonstrated Russia’s ability to integrate cyber capabilities into its broader hybrid warfare strategy. Moreover, the 2017 NotPetya malware attack, which initially targeted Ukrainian businesses, quickly spread globally, causing an estimated $10 billion in damages to multinational corporations and Western governments alike. This incident underscored the fact that cyber threats originating in Ukraine can—and often do—spill over into broader global security concerns.

In response, NATO and the U.S. must prioritize the development of a robust and permanent cyber defense architecture within Ukraine. This could include the establishment of a dedicated Cyber Intelligence and Response Hub in Kyiv, modeled after the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. Such a facility would serve not only as a defensive shield against Russian cyber operations but also as an active node for cyber intelligence gathering, malware analysis, and offensive digital countermeasures. Western cyber experts could be embedded within Ukrainian teams to share advanced techniques for threat hunting, intrusion detection, and infrastructure hardening. Simultaneously, Ukraine’s deep firsthand experience with Russian cyber tactics could provide NATO and its allies with invaluable insights into adversarial methodologies and attack patterns.

Furthermore, improving Ukraine’s cyber resilience will require investment in its digital infrastructure, including the modernization of government networks, critical civilian systems, and military command-and-control frameworks. Public-private partnerships with leading cybersecurity firms could bolster threat mitigation capabilities across both public and private sectors. NATO member states might also coordinate large-scale cyber readiness exercises to simulate attacks and refine real-time response protocols. These efforts should be complemented by the development of secure communication channels and encrypted data-sharing platforms to support joint intelligence operations in an increasingly contested information space.

Ultimately, as cyber operations become central to modern conflict, Ukraine’s role as a frontline state makes it a vital partner in shaping NATO’s future digital defense strategy. A strong, well-integrated Ukrainian cyber capability not only serves national resilience—it enhances collective security for all of Europe. By turning Ukraine into a cyber-forward bastion, the West not only protects a critical ally but sends a clear message that aggression in the digital domain will be met with coordination, expertise, and strength.

Unite the Message and Learn to Share

Strategic messaging and information operations also require escalation. NATO and the U.S. should deepen their investment in narrative warfare by supporting independent media outlets, funding Ukrainian cultural diplomacy abroad, and training digital influencers in counter-disinformation techniques. As with Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, modern messaging platforms—especially social media—can serve as powerful tools for promoting democratic values, countering Russian propaganda, and maintaining civilian morale both domestically and internationally.

Deeper intelligence-sharing protocols must be formalized to ensure long-term strategic coherence between Ukraine and its Western partners. While the current war has catalyzed unprecedented levels of cooperation, sustained effectiveness will require institutionalizing these efforts into permanent, structured intelligence pipelines. This could include the creation of joint intelligence task forces staffed by NATO and Ukrainian personnel, the development of secure, real-time data-sharing platforms, and the harmonization of surveillance, cybersecurity, and reconnaissance systems to ensure full interoperability between Ukrainian and NATO intelligence technologies. Such integration would not only bolster Ukraine’s defensive capabilities in the face of persistent Russian threats but also serve to embed Ukraine firmly within the Western security and intelligence community—an outcome reminiscent of West Berlin’s incorporation into NATO’s defensive architecture during the Cold War.

Conclusion

As Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty and chart its course toward Euro-Atlantic integration, it is poised to assume a role strikingly similar to that of Berlin during the Cold War: a strategic nerve center where the ideological and intelligence struggles of global powers converge. The U.S. and NATO now have the opportunity and the imperative to craft a new doctrine of 21st-century intelligence engagement that is agile, integrated, and responsive to the realities of hybrid warfare. By investing in human intelligence network, cyber defense infrastructure, counterintelligence operations, and narrative resilience, the West can help transform Ukraine into a secure, intelligent, and resilient partner in the ongoing struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Just as Berlin once symbolized the front line of the Cold War, Kyiv may become the emblematic city of a new era of global rivalry—a permanent frontier in the invisible war over influence, perception, and control. In this sense, Ukraine is not merely a battleground but a bellwether, and its success as a modern-day Berlin will be central to the future of European and global security.

Tags: Cold War, Cold War 2.0, Cyber Espionage, Cyber warfare, Human Intelligence, information warfare, Operation Spider Web, OSINT, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine war

About The Author

• 
  
• Reece Snyder, PA-C
• Reece Snyder is an Emergency Medicine Physician Assistant currently serving as a battalion PA in the Texas Army National Guard. He takes a keen interest in modern conflicts especially how they relate and affect modern strategy.

11. See How Drones Are Dominating Every Corner of the War in Ukraine

​Please go to the link to view the extensive photo collection.

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-drone-war-adef7e49?st=uZJudL&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

See How Drones Are Dominating Every Corner of the War in Ukraine

As Russia presses its summer offensive, Ukraine’s defenders work to keep their edge in drone technology

Lt. Col. Yehor Derevianko, a battalion commander in Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade.

By Marcus Walker

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 and Ievgeniia Sivorka | Photographs by Manu Brabo for WSJ

July 21, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Key Points

What's This?

• Ukrainian drones are performing various tasks, from combat to logistics, significantly affecting the war’s dynamics.
• Russian forces are increasingly suffering fatalities from Ukrainian drone attacks, surpassing artillery as the primary cause.
• Ukrainian units are developing measures like shotgun-armed drones and AI-powered systems to gain an edge in the robotic arms race.

KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine—On the sun-drenched eastern front of this grueling war, Ukrainian drones are doing more and more jobs, from killing Russian troops to evacuating casualties to bringing dinner to foxholes.

Around this city, some infantry from Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade have been stuck in their dugouts for three months. Rotating the troops must wait for fog and rain to block the view of Russian drones. 

So Ukraine’s air and ground drones bring the men food, water and ammunition, said Lt. Col. Yehor Derevianko, a battalion commander in the brigade. “We even deliver burgers.”

He’s been fighting Russian forces in Ukraine’s east since 2014, and says the war is evolving faster than ever. Drones are now so dominant that they force everything else—infantry, armor, artillery, logistics and even trench design—to adapt to a sky full of buzzing robots.

The wiry commander leads the defense of his sector from a basement full of large screens under an abandoned apartment block. Men with laptops direct drone pilots to where Russian infantry are trying to infiltrate the fields and woodlands around the city. 

Members of the 93rd Brigade monitor drone footage in a basement in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine.

On one screen, the crosshairs of a reconnaissance drone fixed on a Russian soldier squatting in a bush. A small quadcopter drone closed in slowly and dropped a grenade. It missed. 

“He’s going to die of old age out there,” grumbled Derevianko. The bush swayed gently in the summer breeze. A second grenade turned it into a cloud of gray smoke. 

Kostyantynivka, an industrial city once home to 67,000 people, is one of the main targets of Russia’s summer offensive. Moscow’s invasion forces are inching westward across the fertile Donetsk region, exploiting their greater numbers but losing hundreds of assault troops a day for small gains. Drones have overtaken artillery as the number-one cause of Russian fatalities, according to Ukraine’s military.

Dystopian fantasies

With the experienced 93rd Brigade holding firm in Kostyantynivka, the Russians are trying to outflank it via the countryside. Russian infantry must first cross miles of deadly open farmland. They try on foot or on motorbikes.

Kostyantynivka, once home to 67,000 people, is a key target in Moscow’s summer offensive.

Kostyantynivka’s train station has been destroyed by Russian shelling and drones.

Most are picked off before they come near Ukrainian lines by first-person-view drones, known as FPVs—aircraft the size of dinner plates with four rotors, controlled through a live feed on a pilot’s goggles.

The surviving Russians try to regroup, then assault a Ukrainian trench or dugout. “We have to hit them one by one, before they gather,” said Derevianko.

The most recent armored attack here was around New Year’s, when 14 Russian armored vehicles tried to run the gantlet of drones. Only two got close. Then the defending infantry hit them with rocket-propelled grenades.

But Russia’s drones are also tormenting Kostyantynivka. Their fixed-wing Orlan and Zala reconnaissance drones survey the city continually. Russian FPVs connected to long fiber-optic cables, which make them immune to electronic jamming of the signal, hit anything they see, including civilians.

Outside the tidy command basement, the city is dying. Only a fraction of its residents remain. Most shops have closed. Airstrikes scar buildings. Orange husks of burned-out civilian cars lie where they were hit by drones.

Derevianko, of the 93rd Brigade, inside an armored vehicle.

Army vehicles rumble about covered in grills, nets and other welded-on drone shields, looking like dystopian fantasies from a Mad Max movie.

Pvt. Nikita Kremnov rescues wounded infantry in a Nissan Navara pickup sprayed a dull green and sporting a full-body cage with netting. Beyond the city limits, he uses a more nimble quad bike. The last mile to the trenches is now so exposed to Russian fiber-optic drones that the battalion uses only unmanned ground vehicles—drones with tires or tracks—to carry wounded men back from a foxhole.

Kremnov was hit and wounded by a fiber-optic drone while evacuating a wounded man who was having an epileptic seizure. “There was nothing I could do about it. I had to carry on driving.”

Hiding the tanks

Thirty miles to the southwest, the city of Pokrovsk is further down the road to destruction. It hasn’t fallen so far, but the damage is extensive. The Russian advance, like slow-moving lava, is consuming every town it touches with drones and heavy glide bombs.

A Ukrainian unit launches an observation drone near Orikhiv, southern Ukraine.

Drones are doing more and more jobs in the war.

A T-72 tank of Ukraine’s 68th Jaeger Brigade hides under the thick summer canopy of a copse outside the city. The unit’s tanks work in shifts, rolling into Pokrovsk to fire at Russian targets from long range.

The Soviet-era tank was captured from the Russians early in the war. Its crew call it “Lyalya,” an affectionate name a small girl would give a doll. The previous night, Lyalya killed a group of Russian infantry with three direct hits on their dugout. 

In a drone war, tanks are useful only as mobile artillery pieces, said the company sergeant, who goes by the call sign Puma. Used in an assault, it wouldn’t even get near the fight, he said. “FPVs are just going to kill us.”

The tank had a narrow escape from a Russian FPV drone only days earlier. It was heading into Pokrovsk before dawn when a car’s headlights lit it up from behind. “Morons,” said Puma. The tank’s electronic defenses soon sensed a drone and tried to jam it.

Members of the 68th Jaeger Brigade on a tank hidden among the trees near Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine.

A mechanic works on the tank. In a drone war, tanks are useful only as mobile artillery pieces, one company sergeant said.

The crew used their special tactics, said Puma: “Accelerate, maneuver, pray.” The drone exploded yards away.

AI, lasers and shotguns

In a secret bunker under acacia groves and sunflower fields, men of the Bulava drone unit are tinkering with technology to stay a step ahead of the Russians in a robotic arms race.

Serhiy Ignatukha, the unit’s leader, holds up one kind of answer to the Russians’ fiber-optic drones. It’s an FPV armed with four 12-bore shotgun barrels.

Recently, one such drone had a dogfight with a Russian FPV. Its shotguns missed, so it downed the enemy drone by ramming it and breaking its propellers, said a drone technician known by his call sign Udav.

The unit is also working with Ukrainian drone manufacturers on more sophisticated solutions, including FPV-borne lasers that can cut fiber-optic cables.

A member of the Bulava drone unit makes antipersonnel mines to be dropped from drones.

FPVs using artificial intelligence could become the next big thing, said Udav. He held up a drone with a tiny AI chipboard. Once a pilot has selected a moving target, the drone can complete the attack autonomously from up to 700 yards away, even if jamming blocks the signal.

Improved versions are coming out every few months. “This one is the sixth generation and it has had no failures,” Udav said.

“Previously, when you saw 15 Russian vehicles, it was scary. Now it’s fun,” he said. “Sadly it’s the same for the enemy’s drone units.”

A bomb maker with the unit used a 3-D printer to make drone-dropped mines. Costing $9 each to make, the mines stick in the ground, spray out several 26-foot-long tripwires with small anchors and wait for Russian infantry.

The Bulava unit is part of Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade, which also performs ceremonial guard duties in Kyiv but mostly became a regular combat brigade after the 2022 invasion. Ignatukha and his men saw the war changing and got into drone technology, using their own salaries to buy equipment and build their skills.

The Bulava unit is part of Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade, which also performs ceremonial guard duties in Kyiv but mostly became a regular combat brigade after the 2022 invasion.

Serhiy Ignatukha, in a green T-shirt and beard, oversees the unit’s efforts to stay a step ahead of Russian drone forces in the robotic arms race.

“We had to think out of the box to survive,” said Ignatukha. The informal unit, clad in a miscellany of T-shirts, looks more like a tech startup than a palace guard.

No more lions

East of Kostyantynivka, men of the Alcatraz Battalion are fighting Russia’s infantry and trying to survive its drones. The unit, part of the 93rd Brigade, is made up of convicted criminals who have signed up to be assault troops. Honorable service gets a conditional release or pardon. The first missions last year went well, said men in the unit. But drones are exacting a growing toll.

Convicted thief Pavlo Shyptenko has survived four attacks by FPVs. He was rescuing a wounded comrade this spring when a quadcopter dropped a grenade on him. A tree branch broke the grenade’s fall, saving Shyptenko, but coin-sized bits of shrapnel still cut into his back and neck. 

Full of adrenaline, he carried the wounded man to a car and only noticed a terrible pain when he sat down to drive, he said. Now he’s telling new recruits what to do if there’s a drone above them.

“Stay still and wait for the grenade drop. Then you have three to five seconds to run away,” he said, proudly wearing an Alcatraz unit T-shirt. If a suicide drone is trying to crash into you, wait and dive out of the way, he said.

The Alcatraz Battalion interviews applicants for suitability, and doesn’t take rapists or serial killers. But it has recruited some murderers. “We are also murderers,” said the deputy battalion commander, a professional officer known by the call sign Daredevil.

On a balmy evening, men from Alcatraz trained in the woods, practicing digging covered shelters capable of withstanding FPV hits. “This one is for a funeral,” Daredevil told the diggers of a weakly protected foxhole.

Daredevil carries a scar over his right eye from when a Russian shot him in a basement gunfight early in the war. “We came out of that basement. They didn’t.”

It’s a different war today, he said. “The lions from 2022-2023, who were real warriors, no longer exist,” he said. Heavy losses have reduced the quality of soldiers on both sides. “The men now are not capable of the same feats. Now it’s a war of drones.”

Ukrainian soldiers have had to adapt to a sky full of drones.

Drones are exacting a toll on Ukrainian troops.

Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 22, 2025, print edition as 'Drones Redo Rules of War In Ukraine'.

12. Iran’s Leaders Turn to a New Brand of Nationalism After Israeli and U.S. Attacks

​Excerpts:

Amid that bleak outlook, the country’s leaders see an opportunity. Outrage over the attacks has sparked an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, and they hope to channel that into a patriotic moment to shore up a government facing daunting economic and political challenges.

The result has been an embrace of ancient folklore and patriotic symbols that many of Iran’s secular nationalists once saw as their domain, not that of a conservative theocracy that often shunned Iran’s pre-Islamic revolutionary heritage.

In the ancient city of Shiraz, a billboard depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel kneeling before a statue of Shapur I, the third-century Persian king, mimicking a frieze from the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis.

In Tehran’s Vanak Square, a popular shopping area, a billboard has been erected for Arash the Archer, the mythological figure said to have created Iran’s borders by launching his life force from an arrowhead. Now, instead of arrows, it is the missiles of the Islamic Republic being fired across his bow.

Iran’s Leaders Turn to a New Brand of Nationalism After Israeli and U.S. Attacks

The theocratic government is repurposing folklore and patriotic anthems as it seeks to channel national outrage into increasing its support at home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/world/middleeast/iran-nationalism-israel-us-attacks.html

A march during a Tasua mourning ceremony in Tehran, Iran, this month.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Erika Solomon and Sanam Mahoozi

July 22, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET

The event had all the typical trappings of Ashura, Iran’s ritualistic Shiite Muslim mourning period. The kneeling crowds were dressed in black. They beat their chests in unison. Then, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, beckoned the man leading the chants, and whispered in his ear.

Grinning, the singer broke into a tune that would have been wildly out of place at a religious ceremony for the Islamic Republic just a few weeks ago: “Ey Iran, Iran,” a patriotic anthem.

“In my soul and spirit, you remain, O homeland,” he sang, as the crowd recited the words back to him. “Wasted be the heart that does not tremble for you.”

Iran has emerged from its war with Israel — briefly joined by the United States — deeply wounded. Its military defenses are battered, its nuclear program was pummeled and its population has been devastated by a heavy civilian toll over the 12-day war.

Amid that bleak outlook, the country’s leaders see an opportunity. Outrage over the attacks has sparked an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, and they hope to channel that into a patriotic moment to shore up a government facing daunting economic and political challenges.

The result has been an embrace of ancient folklore and patriotic symbols that many of Iran’s secular nationalists once saw as their domain, not that of a conservative theocracy that often shunned Iran’s pre-Islamic revolutionary heritage.

In the ancient city of Shiraz, a billboard depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel kneeling before a statue of Shapur I, the third-century Persian king, mimicking a frieze from the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis.

In Tehran’s Vanak Square, a popular shopping area, a billboard has been erected for Arash the Archer, the mythological figure said to have created Iran’s borders by launching his life force from an arrowhead. Now, instead of arrows, it is the missiles of the Islamic Republic being fired across his bow.

Image

A billboard of Arash the Archer, a mythological figure, in Tehran. His arrows created Iran’s borders by launching his life force from an arrowhead. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

“We are witnessing the birth of a fusion of Shiite identity and Iranian nationalism — and it is the result of the attack on Iran,” said Mohsen Borhani, a law professor at Tehran University and well-known political commentator.

With no reliable polling data to offer insights on popular sentiments, the effectiveness of this patriotic craze has been hotly debated among Iranians and analysts alike.

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Some Iranians are skeptical that any newfound nationalism will increase the government’s popularity, arguing that it simply reflects the widespread anger over the Israeli and U.S. attacks.

Before the Israeli attacks, some Iran analysts had anticipated domestic turmoil this summer: Alongside an economic crisis, Iran’s water, electricity and fuel supplies had been failing as temperatures soared.

The war seems to have led to an opposite effect. Now, some Iranians appear willing to stomach more government restrictions, including the tightening of internet access. The Iranian government has also begun a massive crackdown against what it says are infiltrators and spies, but which rights groups say is also sweeping up dissidents and minorities.

President Trump and Mr. Netanyahu’s calls for Iranians to rise up against the government in the wake of the strikes has led even some critics of the Iranian government to argue that they could not countenance protesting right now.

“People do not want domestic change to be driven by foreign governments,” Lida, who works in Tehran, told The New York Times in a voice message. She asked not to be identified by her full name because of the government’s warnings against contact with the foreign media.

“It goes against my national pride that a country comes and violates my land and hits our nuclear sites,” she added. “OK, fine, this nuclear program is not my dream or aspiration, but in the end, it is part of my land and territory.”

This is not the first time that leaders of the Islamic Republic have leaned on nationalism or traditional symbols in times of crisis.

At the end of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, historians say, Iran’s revolutionary leadership often turned to nationalist rhetoric.

But the scale and scope of the latest effort to galvanize the population is different, Iran experts say.

“The revolutionary leadership has recognized that, when the going gets tough, you have to dive deep into that nationalist rhetoric to bring people together,” said Ali Ansari, the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews. “They want to use the war as a way of encouraging national solidarity — something that they haven’t had for many years.”

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Iranians marched in front of Tehran University this month while singing a version of a nationalist song that harkens back to the Pahlavi monarchy that ruled Iran before the Islamic revolution in 1979.

That approach was especially striking as the country entered Muharram at the end of June, a period of mourning in Shiite Islam that lasts for about a month.

Ashura, marking the 10th day of that period, is when Shiites grieve for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

This year, Iran’s madahs, or religious singers, brought politics into the celebrations. At shopping malls in the city of Yazd, they blended pious verses into patriotic songs that were once banned — including a religious version of an anthem penned during World War II, and often associated with the era of the Pahlavi monarchy that the Iranian revolution overthrew in 1979.

Some Iranians have not welcomed the fusion of nationalist and Islamic rhetoric, including the family of Tooraj Negahban, the lyricist who penned “Ey Iran, Iran.” The madah who recited it in front of Ayatollah Khamenei wove in religious phrases like “Iran of Karbala” and “Iran of Ashura.”

A critic of the Islamic Republic, Mr. Neghaban died in exile in Los Angeles in 2008.

“For years, you have silenced our voices. You have erased our names from books and the media,” the family wrote in a post on an Instagram page in his name. “Now that you have nothing left to shout, you are singing the same anthems you used to curse.”

Image

Government supporters gathered this month in Tehran following Israeli airstrikes.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Some Iranians, like Mr. Borhani, the Tehran University professor, argue that the theocracy’s turn to nationalism shows that religion alone can no longer galvanize Iran’s 90 million people, particularly those in their 30s or younger, who form the bulk of the population.

Others say the widespread use of patriotic tunes in Ashura rituals around the country has created an authentic new expression of Iranian patriotism.

Shahrzad, a university student in Tehran, described the shift as “engineered nationalism.”

“Authentic nationalism comes from the streets, from protests, from shared pain, not from government podiums,” she said in a voice message.

Even if the war — and the wave of nationalism it has spurred — has helped the government retain control, some question how long it will last.

“When the dust settles and people start to ask questions, they will see that there’s still no water, still no gas, still no electricity,” Mr. Ansari said. “Everything depends on the country having an economic renaissance — and it can’t do it.”

13. In Search of Trade Deal, Philippines’ Leader Will Meet With Trump

"The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must."

In Search of Trade Deal, Philippines’ Leader Will Meet With Trump

President Trump has placed a 20 percent tariff on goods imported from the country, effective Aug. 1.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/us/politics/trump-trade-philippines-marcos.html

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines at the Pentagon on Monday.Credit...Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Luke Broadwater

Reporting from Washington

July 22, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

President Trump is set to meet at the White House on Tuesday with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines, who is seeking to leverage his country’s close relationship with the United States to secure a more favorable trade deal.

Mr. Trump plans to host Mr. Marcos for lunch. The Trump administration fell well short of its goal of securing 90 trade deals in 90 days by early July, negotiating only a handful. The White House says that it has, so far, reached framework agreements with Britain, Vietnam and Indonesia, plus a trade truce that rolled back tariffs with China.

Mr. Trump has threatened higher tariffs on dozens of countries as of Aug. 1, including the Philippines, which he said would receive a 20 percent tariff. Many global leaders have been negotiating with the Trump administration in an effort to lower those tariffs further.

Before leaving for the United States, Mr. Marcos said his primary goal was to make sure that trade between the two nations was strong.

“My top priority for this visit is to push for greater economic engagement, particularly through trade and investment between the Philippines and the United States,” he said. “I intend to convey to President Trump and his cabinet officials that the Philippines is ready to negotiate a bilateral trade deal that will ensure strong, mutually beneficial and future-oriented collaborations that only the United States and the Philippines will be able to take advantage of.”

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A statement from the White House said the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Marcos would focus on a “shared commitment to upholding a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific and advancing shared economic prosperity.”

“The friendship between the United States and the Philippines is rooted in our long history, marked this year by the 80th anniversary of the shared sacrifice that led to victory in World War II,” the statement said.

The Philippines is the United States’ oldest ally in the Pacific. The United States took over the Philippines as a colony from Spain in 1898 and battled Filipino combatants for control of the country. After Japan invaded the islands during World War II, Americans and Filipinos fought together to end that occupation. The Philippines gained its independence from the United States in 1946, and in 1951 entered into a mutual defense treaty with the United States that remains in effect.

The United States runs a trade deficit with the Philippines, but it is a fraction of other Southeast Asian countries’. That is why Mr. Trump, who views the trade deficit as evidence of an unfair trading relationship, decided on a lower tariff rate for the Philippines than for many of its neighbors.

The United States continues to have an interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

Mr. Marcos has embraced the United States, reversing a pivot to China by his predecessor, and has expanded U.S. access to military bases.

The United States has deployed a missile system called Typhon to the Philippines as part of joint military drills. The ground-based launcher can fire cruise missiles that can reach the Chinese mainland from the Philippines.

Mr. Marcos arrived in Washington on Sunday and met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Monday.

“I believe that our alliance, the United States and the Philippines, have formed a great part in terms of preserving the peace, in terms of preserving the stability of the South China Sea,” Mr. Marcos told Mr. Hegseth.

He has also met with U.S. business leaders about investment in the Philippines.

Ana Swanson contributed reporting.

Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.

14. The for-profit companies behind Israeli-U.S. nonprofit Gaza aid plan

​Excerpts:

“There was a need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza,” an Israeli familiar with the group’s efforts said, but it needed to be done “in a non-U.N. way.”

In January 2024, the fledgling Gaza aid working group sought advice from Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret, CIA veteran and undersecretary of defense for intelligence during the Obama administration. Vickers was on the board of Orbis Operations, a consulting company based in McLean, Virginia, that was founded by former national security, military and intelligence specialists and which McNally purchased in 2021.

Vickers told the planners, “I’m not the guy, but I know the guy who can talk to you,” according to a person familiar with the approach. The man they wanted, Vickers said, was then-Orbis Vice President Philip Reilly, a former senior CIA operations officer with extensive experience in private security operations.

Reilly quickly gained the trust of the IDF and the Gaza planning group, and spent much of 2024 immersing himself in the details of the Gaza conflict.

Neither Vickers nor Reilly responded to queries about their involvement in the Gaza initiative.

​...

But behind the foundation, which is a registered nonprofit, is a web of interconnected U.S. and Israeli individuals, and private U.S. companies — including some that hope to eventually make money on the relief effort, according to public and private documents reviewed by The Post and interviews with more than a dozen U.S. and Israeli government officials, business representatives and others involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the controversial initiative.

Among those positioned to profit from GHF-linked contracts are a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, whose subsidiary Orbis Operations helped set up the foundation; and Safe Reach Solutions, the primary contractor overseeing GHF operations inside Gaza, which was created late last year for that purpose. SRS is owned by a Wyoming-based trust whose beneficiary is McNally Capital.

Boston Consulting Group was also engaged in the effort to stand up the GHF, on what it has said was a pro bono basis. In March, it signed a two-month contract for more than $1 million with McNally to continue assisting SRS, with later extensions in May, an arrangement first reported by the Financial Times. BCG later withdrew from the project amid controversy, and a BCG spokeswoman, Nidhi Sinha, said no payment was accepted.

The for-profit companies behind Israeli-U.S. nonprofit Gaza aid plan

Now the primary vehicle for food distribution inside Gaza, the controversial U.S.- and Israeli-backed operation is an issue in ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/21/gaza-aid-ghf/

July 21, 2025 at 8:10 p.m. EDTYesterday at 8:10 p.m. EDT

Palestinians carry bags of food and humanitarian aid provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.- and Israeli-backed organization, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on June 3. (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

By Karen DeYoung and Cate Brown

Inside the four hastily constructed warehouses in southern Gaza where food is handed out to desperate and starving Palestinians, it is relatively calm. Ration boxes stamped with the name and logo of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are distributed by local volunteers in red vests, under the watchful gaze of beefy, armed American security contractors.

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It is just outside the warehouses where most of the trouble happens. Outside is where hundreds of civilians desperately crowding toward the distribution sites have been shot and killed — many of them allegedly by Israeli soldiers positioned nearby — and where at least 20 Palestinians died Wednesday in a stampede that the GHF says was initiated by gun-toting Hamas militants.

Humanitarian aid has been one of the most controversial aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas, which is now approaching its second anniversary. In recent weeks, it has emerged as a final sticking point in negotiations over a ceasefire, placing the Israeli- and U.S.-backed GHF squarely in the crosshairs of the latest talks.

Hamas is demanding a return to the U.N.-coordinated system of aid delivery that operated in Gaza for decades. Israel charges that Hamas has corrupted that system. It wants to maintain strict controls on assistance to Gazans, using the newly created GHF as the primary mechanism for food distribution.

Critics, including the United Nations and most of the international humanitarian aid community, say the GHF is designed to further Israeli war aims by selectively and inadequately providing assistance, and by forcing Gazans to put their lives in danger for a box of provisions. In a statement released Monday, 21 European countries and others including Canada and Australia issued a joint statement saying that “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths” and condemning “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model,” it said, “is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.”

Like much of what happens inside Gaza, where Israel has banned international reporters except on brief tours led by the Israel Defense Forces, the origins and operations of the GHF remain obscure. Even more opaque is its funding. The foundation says it received about $100 million in start-up money from a government it has declined to identify. In late June, the Trump administration said it would supply $30 million to GHF operations.

A major donation initially expected from the United Arab Emirates, according to internal planning documents seen by The Washington Post, has not materialized.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has been deeply involved in the aid program, has publicly denied paying for it.

But behind the foundation, which is a registered nonprofit, is a web of interconnected U.S. and Israeli individuals, and private U.S. companies — including some that hope to eventually make money on the relief effort, according to public and private documents reviewed by The Post and interviews with more than a dozen U.S. and Israeli government officials, business representatives and others involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the controversial initiative.

Among those positioned to profit from GHF-linked contracts are a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, whose subsidiary Orbis Operations helped set up the foundation; and Safe Reach Solutions, the primary contractor overseeing GHF operations inside Gaza, which was created late last year for that purpose. SRS is owned by a Wyoming-based trust whose beneficiary is McNally Capital.

Boston Consulting Group was also engaged in the effort to stand up the GHF, on what it has said was a pro bono basis. In March, it signed a two-month contract for more than $1 million with McNally to continue assisting SRS, with later extensions in May, an arrangement first reported by the Financial Times. BCG later withdrew from the project amid controversy, and a BCG spokeswoman, Nidhi Sinha, said no payment was accepted.

The GHF has continued to deliver food to hungry Gazans: since late May, according to the foundation’s count, more than 80 million meals in boxes that are calibrated to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days. But dwindling resources have limited the number of trucks available to bring food into the enclave to about 70 to 80 per day, compared with early plans for more than 300, according to people familiar with GHF operations. Construction of additional distribution sites has also been indefinitely put off because of a lack of financing, ongoing Israeli military operations and the need to remove unexploded ordnance throughout Gaza.

Money problems, and the unknown outcome of ceasefire negotiations, have also put on hold GHF plans for a more holistic — and controversial — proposal to relocate Gazans, summarized in a 19-page slide deck distributed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in January, several people said. In addition to the food distribution, the slides included plans for GHF construction of large-scale residential compounds inside and potentially outside Gaza where “the population” could reside while the enclave was “demilitarized and rebuilt.”

The slide deck suggested that approach would allow the GHF to gain trust with Gazans — a currency that could be leveraged to “facilitate President Trump’s vision” for the battle-scarred enclave.

Aid ‘in a non-U.N. way’

The GHF concept was born as part of a larger effort by a group of Israeli military officials, Israeli businesspeople and foreign partners to support Israel’s war effort and plan for Gaza’s future. They began meeting shortly after the conflict began with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack in southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and saw at least 250 hostages taken back to Gaza.

As Israel responded to the attack, pounding Gaza with airstrikes and ground troops, it cut off the daily assistance that the 141-square-mile enclave had depended on for decades. Netanyahu’s government — long distrustful of the U.N., which coordinated deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies — justified the blockade by claiming that Hamas controlled and profited from the aid distribution.

Under pressure from the Biden administration and humanitarian organizations that said depriving noncombatants of food was a potential war crime, Israel eventually allowed limited relief to resume. But the Israelis kept a tight hold on the spigot of assistance, generating friction between Netanyahu and the U.S. government, Israel’s main source of weaponry and diplomatic backing.

“There was a need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza,” an Israeli familiar with the group’s efforts said, but it needed to be done “in a non-U.N. way.”

In January 2024, the fledgling Gaza aid working group sought advice from Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret, CIA veteran and undersecretary of defense for intelligence during the Obama administration. Vickers was on the board of Orbis Operations, a consulting company based in McLean, Virginia, that was founded by former national security, military and intelligence specialists and which McNally purchased in 2021.

Palestinians gather at a GHF aid site near the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza on June 25. (Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images)

Vickers told the planners, “I’m not the guy, but I know the guy who can talk to you,” according to a person familiar with the approach. The man they wanted, Vickers said, was then-Orbis Vice President Philip Reilly, a former senior CIA operations officer with extensive experience in private security operations.

Reilly quickly gained the trust of the IDF and the Gaza planning group, and spent much of 2024 immersing himself in the details of the Gaza conflict.

Neither Vickers nor Reilly responded to queries about their involvement in the Gaza initiative.

The Biden administration was well aware that the Israeli government and private-sector Israelis and Americans were working with the government on a plan to impose a new aid delivery system. While some in the administration were supportive, most were skeptical. But they did not directly interfere in the project.

“They were all talking — they being the Israeli government, the prime minister’s office, the IDF — sort of throwing spaghetti against the wall to find some magic formula to take the responsibility off their shoulders” to care for Gaza’s civilians, a former Biden official involved in Israel policy said.

Ambitions and incorporations

By the fall, the outline of a plan was laid out in a lengthy feasibility study compiled by Silat Technologies, an Orbis subsidiary, envisioning the creation of a nonprofit entity, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, “to safely deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

Planning documents distributed over the next several months said that the foundation’s leadership would include respected humanitarian figures such as David Beasley, former head of the World Food Program, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who now runs an institute to advise change-making political leaders. Although the U.N. and major nongovernmental aid organizations already operating in Gaza were described as an integral part, their proposed role was unclear. An elaborate social media presence and public relations program would include outreach to select journalists to promote a positive image of the GHF.

The foundation would hire a “prime” contractor to organize and supervise construction of the sites and the aid operation inside Gaza. That firm would then subcontract a private security company — ideally U.S.-based — to be the boots and guns on the ground, guarding the aid as it was transported to distribution sites and protecting the sites themselves.

The private companies lined up to service the planned foundation also included BCG, where both Reilly and Vickers were senior advisers. BCG, which later said its initial services were offered pro bono, projected $2 billion in initial operating costs for the GHF.

On Nov. 21, a new limited liability company, Safe Reach Solutions, was registered in Jackson, Wyoming, and placed in a trust administered by a local company, Two Ocean Trust. While no information in the registration documents indicated what the new company did, who ran it or whom it employed, the beneficiary of the trust and any money it made, according to three people familiar with the arrangement, was McNally Capital, the private equity firm that owns Orbis. SRS, with Reilly as its chief executive, would later become the primary GHF contractor.

Spokespeople for Two Ocean Trust and SRS declined to comment.

In a statement to The Post, McNally Capital said it “did not invest in SRS or actively manage the company,” but said it has an “economic interest” in the firm.

“Given our long-established relationship with Phil Reilly … our strong belief in the importance of humanitarian aid, and the U.S. government’s appeal for innovative solutions,” the statement said, McNally was “pleased to have supported the establishment of SRS as an important step toward meeting the full scope of humanitarian need in Gaza.”

Founded in 2008 by Ward McNally, of the Rand McNally publishing family, the firm specializes in the acquisition of aerospace, defense and technology companies.

“Obviously, McNally is a business. They’re in the business of making money,” a person familiar with the financial aspects of the project said. But “I think it’s very ambiguous whether this ends up being profitable.”

Displaced Palestinians cross the Netzarim Corridor as they make their way to the northern parts of the Gaza Strip on Feb. 9. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images)

A checkpoint test run

As the new year approached, progress toward the food aid program planning was interrupted by the prospect of a Gaza ceasefire and partial hostage release.

Israel had agreed to move its troops out of portions of Gaza at least temporarily — allowing citizens to return to what remained of their homes in the largely destroyed northern portion of the enclave. But Israeli officials insisted on a vehicle checkpoint — run by non-IDF security — on the Netzarim Corridor, a dividing line between northern and southern Gaza, to ensure weapons were not carried back to areas the IDF said it had earlier cleared of Hamas militants.

With nine days’ notice, U.S. and Arab mediators turned to the newly created SRS to organize the checkpoint. Reilly subcontracted UG Solutions, a small security firm based in North Carolina, to staff the ground operation.

Headed by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, UG had previously worked in Ukraine and Haiti, among other hot spots, and could move quickly because it had few of the classified contracts with the United States or other governments that proved to be complications for bigger security companies. The ceasefire mediators — the United States and Qatar — administered payments to SRS, the prime contractor, according to people familiar with the operation.

The ceasefire began Jan. 19, the day before Donald Trump’s second-term inauguration. Although the truce lasted only until mid-March, when Israel launched another ground invasion of northern Gaza, the checkpoint was deemed a success, with no major incidents reported.

The Netzarim operation came to be considered a test run for the food distribution operation, and SRS and UG were well positioned to take it over for GHF. On Feb. 2, the foundation was registered as a humanitarian nonprofit in Switzerland and Delaware.

The Netanyahu government had every reason to believe that Trump would support the initiative. He vowed to quickly end the war and proposed that the United States “take over” and “own” Gaza, developing it as a high-end Mediterranean resort. Food distribution by the GHF, planning documents indicated, was just the first step in a larger redevelopment plan.

A rocky launch

When the ceasefire collapsed on March 18 and the IDF resumed ground operations and airstrikes, Israel again stopped all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. As the days and weeks ticked on, thousands of tons of food and goods piled up in warehouses outside its borders; WFP and other humanitarian actors began to tally reports of starvation inside.

By early May, Israel was under mounting international pressure to end its aid blockade, and Trump was looking for progress on his promise to end the war as he prepared for a trip to the Persian Gulf.

At a May 9 news conference in Tel Aviv, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claimed the GHF as a Trump “initiative.” U.S. representatives, including Aryeh Lightstone, an official who now works with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and formerly served as an aide to David Friedman when he was U.S. ambassador to Israel, courted U.N. and humanitarian partners to sign on to the plan.

But opposition to the plan had grown. The United Nations and most aid partners refused, publicly denouncing the proposal as immoral and designed to further Israel’s war plans against Hamas by “militarizing” assistance to more than a million civilians corralled into ever-shrinking “safe zones” demarcated by the IDF in southern Gaza. Neither Beasley nor Blair agreed to sign on.

On May 22, newly named GHF executive director Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine veteran and co-founding board chair of Team Rubicon, a humanitarian organization that operated in disaster zones, released a letter he had sent to COGAT, the Israeli government coordinator for Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Its purpose, he wrote, was to confirm “our understandings of agreements” — including an understanding that aid agencies would also be permitted to distribute food and medical assistance under “existing” humanitarian mechanisms, outside the GHF program.

“GHF acknowledges that we do not possess the technical capacity or field infrastructure to manage such distributions independently,” he wrote, suggesting that the new aid mechanism should complement, but not replace, Gaza’s existing aid sector.

The night before the scheduled May 26 launch, Wood unsuccessfully sought to persuade the IDF to delay the start date by at least a week amid unanswered questions about funding, the participation of other agencies and the nearby positioning of Israeli troops. Wood resigned, and the next day, UG contractors accompanied the first convoys of GHF food into Gaza.

Some of the plans, he said in a statement, were not consistent with “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.” David Burke, a fellow Marine veteran and former Team Rubicon colleague who had been named GHF chief operating officer, also resigned. Burke and Wood did not respond to inquiries from The Post.

The GHF promoted John Acree, a former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development originally named head of the GHF operations inside Gaza, to interim executive director of the foundation.

Aid delivered by the GHF in Khan Younis in May. (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

The opening of the sites brought new problems, with tens of thousands of despairing Gazans surging toward promised food. In the first week of GHF’s operations, witnesses said that Israeli troops shot in the direction of Palestinians queuing outside the fenced distribution sites at least three times. UG contractors voiced concerns about the rules of engagement of nearby IDF troops and the safety of the Palestinians, according to several people familiar with the site operations.

Meanwhile, paid Palestinian volunteers working at the GHF sites were receiving death threats from Hamas for participating in the Israeli-backed plan. Volunteers were afraid to travel back to their families at night, but the financial planners had not budgeted to provide them with housing, running water or other supplies to stay on-site, one person said.

“There were number crunchers at every stage, asking why do we have to do this stuff,” said another person familiar with the conversations between BCG financial consultants and SRS planners. Contractors purchased some provisions for the workers out of their own pockets, the person said.

The limited number of trucks that passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza each day to the sites after Israeli inspection meant that supplies ran out too early, leaving thousands empty-handed, angry and disbelieving there was no more food to be had.

During the first week of June, BCG abruptly withdrew from the project. Amid what several people familiar with the situation said was internal criticism of perceived anti-Palestinian initiatives, the company said that members of its team had undertaken “unauthorized” efforts on postwar planning. Two senior partners, it said in a statement, had been “exited ... from the firm” and BCG “has not and will not be paid for any of their work.”

The end game

Despite ongoing problems and frequent reports of gunfire nearby, the GHF food program achieved a rhythm of sorts after a few weeks. News releases provided a daily accounting of tens of thousands of boxes of pasta, lentils, cooking oil and other commodities it distributed.

But the killing of civilians in the vicinity of GHF sites has continued. Last month, eight Palestinian volunteers were shot and killed, allegedly by Hamas, aboard a bus returning them to GHF sites after visiting their families. Early this month, this IDF said “terrorists” had tossed grenades into a distribution site, injuring two American contractors. Then came the deaths in Wednesday’s stampede.

“We came to Gaza to help feed people, not to fight a narrative war,” GHF spokesman Chapin Fay told reporters hours after the stampede deaths, publicly accusing Hamas of causing the carnage by showing up at the site with guns. Aid organizations said it was the predicted result of Israeli militarization of what should be a neutral endeavor.

On Sunday, at least 79 Palestinians were killed when food-seeking crowds mobbed a U.N. aid convoy in the northern part of the enclave and were fired on by Israeli troops, according to Gaza health authorities and witnesses. The IDF said it was “aware of the claim” and that details of the event were “being examined.”

Acree, the GHF interim executive director, repeated appeals to the United Nations and other aid organizations to cooperate with the foundation. “The demand for food is relentless, and so is our commitment,” he said in a statement. “We’re adjusting our operations in real time to keep people safe and informed, and we stand ready to partner with other organizations to scale up and deliver more meals to the people of Gaza.”

GHF contracts expire at the end of August, unless a ceasefire comes first. If and when the fighting stops, it remains unclear how much aid will be allowed into Gaza and who will distribute it. Since late June, Trump has said repeatedly that negotiations were going well and that a truce was imminent.

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly criticize the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), accusing it of being complicit in the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. Many commenters argue that the GHF is a facade for profit-driven motives, with ties to private equity and U.S. and Israeli... Show more

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By Karen DeYoung

Karen DeYoung is associate editor and senior national security correspondent for The Post. In more than three decades at the paper, she has served as bureau chief in Latin America and in London and as correspondent covering the White House, U.S. foreign policy and the intelligence community. follow on X@karendeyoung1

By Cate Brown

Cate Brown is a researcher for The Post's International Investigations team. follow on X@catebrown12

​15. SOF News: Drones on the Battlefield

Drones on the Battlefield

https://sof.news/drones/drones-on-battlefield/

July 22, 2025 SOF News Drones 0

Below the reader will find links to stories about drone warfare and advancement in the development and employment of drones on the battlefield from around the world. A new Army manual for tankers, several articles on how the Ukraine conflict has changed warfare, the use of AI with drones, and efforts by the Pentaton to catch up in the drone revolution.

Some Drone History. Much has been made of how the use of drones by the Ukrainians (with the Russians catching up) has revolutionized the way of war. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for ISR and dropping munitions has actually been around for a while. In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy used drones to evaluate the effectiveness of antiaircraft weapons on ships. Beginning in the early 1960s and continuing through the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force used modified target drones to gather intelligence. (CRS Report IF1273, July 21, 2025) The United States had its Predator decades ago, initially armed with the AGM-114 Hellfire laser-guided missile. (National Air and Space Museum, 2018)

Smaller drones were used by ISIS during the Battle for Mosul in 2015-2017 to drop grenades; ISIS used “One Way Attack” UAVs as well. (CBS News, 2017) Another conflict that showed the importance of drones in conflict was the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War. This brief war resulted in Azerbaijani drones wrecking havoc on Armenian entrenched forces which turned the conflict into Azerbaijans favor. (Air and Space Power Review) The primary difference with the Ukraine conflict is the scale of the use of drones.

U.S. Drone Development and Training

Tanks, Drones, and a New Army Manual. A new Army Techniques Publication (ATP 3-20.15, Tank Platoon, July 2025, 432 pages) is addressing the defensive measures a tank can use to ward off drone attacks. Apparently it involves the use of 120mm canister rounds to take down drones. The manual mentions unmanned systems almost 100 times and lists UASs as part of a tanker’s 12 “Critical Tactical Tasks”. Tanks have always had tactical methods to interdict airplanes and helicopters – some of those same techniques are being applied to drones. Story by Matt White in “The Army has a novel solution to its drone problem: Shoot them with tanks”, Task & Purpose, July 17, 2025.

Reimagining Armor in a Drone Era. The 1st Armored Division commander Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor recently said that “I think . . . that the time to reimagine armor has begun, and we have got to think about what armor will look like in the future.” He says that tank units must begin thinking about protecting formations with a layered defense with embedded drone countermeasures. “Drone warfare forces broad rethink of training, Army leaders say”, Stars and Stripes, July 18, 2025.

Autonomous Drones and “Commander’s Intent”. For quite a while first person view drones (FPV) were running rampant on the Ukrainian battlefield. These FPV drones require a human operator to drive an explosive-laden system into a target. However, jamming is becoming more and more successful in defeating these FPV drones and their operators. The challenge then becomes how to develop drones that do not use FPV techniques. Wire guided drones are one solution but the range is limited in many cases. One future development is the doctrinal concept of ‘commander’s intent’. Providing drones with a version of ‘commander’s intent’ along with artificial intelligence (AI) systems is a method being explored. “Commander’s Intent for Machines”, by Matthew Corbett, Modern War Institute, July 16, 2025.

Manufacturing Drones. The complexities of manufacturing drones at scale in the United States to compete with China and other nations is discussed in this article by Martin Feldmann and Gene Keselman. “Factories First: Winning the Drone War Before It Starts”, War on the Rocks, July 17, 2025.

New Pentagon Rules for Drones. The Defense Department will soon allow local commanders to buy drones and authorize troops to fly them in training exercises. This reduces the bureaucratic process to streamline the acquistion of drones and to train up military personnel. “Expect to see more drones during training under new Pentagon rules”, by Patty Nieberg, Task & Purpose, July 17, 2025.

Rifle Smart Scope for Countering Drones. The “SMASH 2000L” will give riflemen the ability to obtain a positive firing solution for engaging unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). This will enable a standard M4 to defeat a drone with small arms fire. “Marines to field rifle-mounted smart scope to help counter drones”, by Todd South, Military Times, July 17, 2025.

‘Top Gun’ for Drones. Camp Atterbury in Indiana will host a ‘Top Gun’ school for first-person attack drones. This is part of a new push by the Pentagon to attain “American drone dominance”. The Army and National Guard are hosting and organizing the event; however, Navy, Air Force, and Marine elements will participate as well. The event is titled Technology Readiness Experimentation or T-REX and takes part at least every year, if not more. “The Pentagon will host a ‘Top Gun’ school for Ukraine-style attack drones”, by Patrick Tucker, Defense One, July 18, 2025.

Video – Boozman on Drones. Senator John Boozman, Chairman of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee, is interviewed about drone warfare. The questions and answers revolve around the topics of mitigating the risks presented by drones and how to accelerate the fielding of forces and infrastructure that will regain and retain the US advantage in drone warfare. “Drone Warfare and Securing America’s Military Against Emerging Threats”, Hudson Institute, YouTube, July 16, 2025, 48 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmg8uCqS7w8 or read the transcript here.

Lawmakers Pressuring Pentagon to Get Serious on Drones. Parts of the draft 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is including strong language from members of Congress about the immediate need to deploy offensive small unmanned aerial systems throughout the military. The details of the NDAA drone provisions are listed in this news article by Rachel S. Cohen. “Lawmakers Push Pentagon to Speed Small Drone Use – and Counter Threats”, Air and Space Forces, July 19, 2025.

From Ukraine’s Front Lines

Ukraine’s Kill Zone. Drones are buying Ukraine time, making Russian advances on the ground tougher and tougher. The drones are swarming in the skies of Ukraine – launched by both sides in the conflict. They are cheap, deadly, and easy to use. They can quickly spot and neutralize targets. It is estimated that there are over 15,000 Ukrainian military drone crews on the front lines. “Enter the kill zone: Ukraine’s drone-infested front slows Russian advance”, Reuters, July 17, 2025.

America, Ukraine, and the Drone Revolution. David Shimer and Jon Finer write about how the Ukrainian conflict has highlighted the importance of drones on today’s battlefield. (subscription)

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/ukraines-drone-revolution

U.S.-Ukraine Drone ‘Mega-Deal’. There could very likely be a big deal in the works between the United States and Ukraine that involves the exchange of drone technology for military equipment. “Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine on verge of drone ‘mega-deal'”, Washington Examiner, July 17, 2025. (subscription)

More Drone News From Around the World

UK Army and Drone Training. Sir Julian Brazier, a former officer in the TA (with 5 years in Special Forces), writes on the need for comprehensive drone training in the UK Army. “Unshackling Training with Drones in the Army”, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), July 17, 2025.

‘Project Vanaheim’. A joint project between the United Kingdom and the United States has been initiated to ‘shape the future’ of counter UAS capabilities. Exercise Vanaheim 3 took place at the Joint Multinational Readiness Centre in Hohenfels, Germany where 20 different C-sUAS solutions were tested to counter First Person View (FPV) attack drones. However, the exercise did not include any requirement to neutralize fiber-optic wire controlled drones; one of the latest technological developments on the Ukrainian battlefield to emerge. “Project Vanaheim: How the US and UK are trying to keep up with the UAS threat”, Breaking Defense, July 19, 2025.

Drone Attacks in Iraq. A series of drone attacks have taken place in Iraq. Several oil fields in the Kurdish region have been struck as well as on several military bases. The drones were manufactured outside of Iraq but launched within Iraq. Stars and Stripes, July 18, 2025.

RSF Down Akinici Drone. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) recently (10 Jul 25) shot down a Turkish Bayraktar Akinci drone belonging to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in North Darfur, Sudan. The drone had been carrying out airstrikes. The Akinici drone is one of the latest drones on the market – it has a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) capability that can execute air-to-ground and air-to-air combat missions. The Akinici can carry an array of weapons. “Akinci drone downed in Sudan”, Military Africa, July 15, 2025. Countries currently using the Akinici drone include Pakistan, Libya, Mali, Indonesia, UAE, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.

Drones Manufactured in Africa. Both Nigeria and Ethiopia have developed and are manufacturing military drones for domestic use as well as for sale on the international market. “Nigeria and Ethiopia join forces for Indigenous UAV development”, Military Africa, July 17, 2025.

Australia and Drone Defense. Victor Abramowicz writes that Australia will soon be selecting companies to improve its drone defense capability. Plans are for a program that will detect drones with sensors, utilize systems that will neutralize drones, and a command and control system to tie it all together. The project will take time and will not deliver an initial capability until after 2030. Abramowicz argues that Canberra needs to look within the country to fill this important requirement. “For drone defence, Canberra should choose independent Australian companies”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), July 17, 2025.

Podcast about Latvia and Drones. When you are faced with a big adversary on your borders that is willing to invade other countries (that would be Russia) then you look for asymmetric advantages to offset the overwhelming numerical advantage your adversary enjoys. Latvia is looking at drones for this to partially fill this asymmetric requirement. Listen to a podcast where Ugis Noritis discusses Latvia’s budding drone industry. “Lessons Learned and a Big Play on Drones from Latvia”, COGS of War, War on the Rocks, July 14, 2025, 20 minutes.

**********

Image. Tank Defense against Drone Attack, ATP 3-20.15, Tank Platoon, July 2025, page 378.

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN44282-ATP_3-20.15-000-WEB-1.pdf

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16. Allied Arsenal: Building Strength Through Shared Production

​Excerpts:

Co-manufacturing partnerships are invaluable, evidenced by the Russo-Ukrainian war, which significantly depleted U.S. stockpiles of 155mm artillery shells. Australia and South Korea, which also manufacture 155-milliimeter shells, helped replenish U.S. stockpiles. Similarly, conflicts in the Middle East depleted U.S. stockpiles of Standard Missiles, Tomahawks, and other munitions, representing years of industrial output and raising fears that depleted weapon stockpiles undermines U.S. readiness for conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Had allies such as Japan also been producing these munitions, expenditures would be less impactful and more quickly replaced. The number of munitions expended against the Houthis alone demonstrates that the United States will need allied help in a war with a peer.

Australia and Japan are in the process of acquiring the SM-6, with Japan discussing the possibility of a co-production agreement. Co-manufacturing arrangements serve as a means of scaling production, burden sharing, and achieving geographic distribution. Opportunities exist to expand upon existing cooperative development and manufacturing agreements, such as the World War II-era National Technology and Industrial Base or AUKUS, by including more allies. For example, Australia and the United Kingdom joined the National Technology and Industrial Base in 2017, with New Zealand joining in 2023.

Paradoxically, Japan and Norway are allies that have jointly developed and manufactured missiles with the United States but are not party to either framework. This is despite the United States and Japan’s joint development and co-production of the SM-3 Block IIA for ballistic missile defense, with Japan contributing rocket motors, boosters, and nose cones to both U.S. and Japanese assembly lines. Additionally, Japan and the United States are developing a glide phase interceptor under the Glide Phase Interceptor Cooperative Development Project Arrangement. In a parallel development, Norway is establishing manufacturing plants in Virginia and Australia to meet the surging demand for its Naval Strike Missiles.

Allied Arsenal: Building Strength Through Shared Production - War on the Rocks

Trevor Phillips-Levine and Andrew Tenbusch

July 22, 2025

warontherocks.com · July 22, 2025

Throughout the 75-year history of NATO, no member has been attacked by Russia or the Soviet Union. In addition to its nuclear umbrella, the alliance achieved conventional deterrence by establishing strong interoperability standards, enabling large, distributed, and interchangeable munition stockpiles. All laser-guided weapons, regardless of origin, operate on a standardized laser pulse frequency. Networked weapons and sensors are guided through interoperable datalinks. Artillery shells and bullets are compatible and interchangeable with various allied gun systems. Today, global U.S. and allied munition stockpiles and defense-industrial capacity are at historic lows. Meanwhile, the pacing threat in the Pacific has unparalleled latent industrial strength and is becoming increasingly assertive.

In this security environment, where overmatch can no longer be assumed, deterrence requires long-range, interoperable, and interchangeable munitions to alter an adversary’s calculus. Conflicts are rapidly depleting existing stockpiles, and the United States lacks the industrial capacity to replenish them in sufficient time. Concurrently, allied defense industries require an infusion of capital, technology, and shared purpose. Co-manufacturing interchangeable weapon systems with trusted allies, particularly when combined with innovative employment concepts, presents a compelling solution. The U.S. government should seize opportunities for co-manufacturing and joint procurement of existing munitions with allies to maximize deterrence. Doing so will strengthen the credibility and resilience of the global defense-industrial base required to prevail in a major conflict.

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Deterrence By Integration and Interchangeability

The geography of the Pacific presents a different problem set than the primary threat faced in Europe, demanding different weapon capability requirements. The framework that underpinned conventional deterrence in Europe, however, can still be applied, specifically the concepts of weapon interchangeability and interoperability. Fortunately, some already exist. During the Rim of the Pacific exercise in 2024, the U.S. Navy officially confirmed the existence of its long-range air-to-air missile, the AIM-174B, an air-launched adaptation of the Standard Missile (SM) 6 that was originally designed for warships. Standard Missile variants offer capabilities for engaging air, surface, and ballistic missile targets. The SM-6 forms the proven backbone of U.S. Navy air defense, with a 40-year lineage that traces back to the SM-2. Over the past 25 years, the U.S. Navy has fielded six variants, and has additional models in development, promising longer ranges and hypersonic engagement speeds.

The revelation of the AIM-174B sent ripples through global defense communities, particularly in China, as it demonstrated a previously unknown interchangeable use case. The interchangeability of the SM-6 between surface strike and air interception missions led to ambiguity and unease amongst Chinese observers about how the missiles could be employed. A Chinese weapons journal described the reveal of the AIM-174B as a “huge threat” that fundamentally upended China’s assumptions and war plans. Despite only recently appearing in the press, the AIM-174B was part of the Navy F/A-18 pilots’ training for years, highlighting its maturity and potential for allied integration.

The SM-6 and its variants are notable for their interchangeability and interoperability. When weapon systems are interoperable and interchangeable, alliances become more potent and reinforcing to U.S. military power. Such collaboration extends beyond providing weapons through foreign military sales or licensing — it includes targeting infrastructure that completes the weapons’ kill chain and feeds into a common operating picture. For example, the United States and its allies share interoperable tactical datalinks — primarily Link-16 — as well as highly sensitive reconnaissance feeds. Interoperable datalinks increase the number of sensors and shooters within the battlespace, enhancing the combined force’s lethality and survivability in combat.

The proliferation of interoperable tactical datalinks creates an environment ideal for the SM-6 family and other types of networked weapons. All variants can receive updates via these datalinks, enabling dynamic targeting and coordination across different platforms. The SM-6 is also integrated into the Army’s land-based Typhon mid-range capability, complementing the Marine Corps’ littoral regiments equipped with the Naval Strike Missile. Additionally, the SM-6 can be containerized for launch from a variety of platforms, including unconventional vessels and wheeled vehicles already in use. As mentioned earlier, the weapon was adapted for air-launch from U.S. Navy F/A-18s, offering a range significantly greater than that of the legendary AIM-54 Phoenix. Since Australia operates the same model of F/A-18s as the U.S. Navy, this creates a natural opportunity for integration. Together, the interchangeability and interoperability of the SM-6 offer diverse employment options while simplifying operational logistics.

Another notable weapon system is the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile. Japan, the Netherlands, and Australia have signed agreements to purchase the Tomahawk, joining the United States and the United Kingdom as operators of the missile system. According to reports, Germany is also considering the procurement of Tomahawks as it builds its military capacity. Beyond expanding the user base, the addition of Tomahawks to allied inventories also provides access to the Tomahawk network, potentially allowing the United States and its allies to share a common target database that increases magazine depth for strikes, as well as the speed at which they can be engaged.

A new variant of the Tomahawk, known as the Maritime Strike Tomahawk, is being introduced with the capability to strike both land and maritime targets. This version will provide a much-needed counterweight to the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s long-range surface strike capabilities without the expense of clean-sheet designs. Moreover, as with the land-launched SM-6, the Army’s Typhon battery can also launch Tomahawks, making the system a viable option for homeland and territorial waters defense for island nations such as New Zealand.

Credible Deterrence Through Forward Presence and Distributed Manufacturing

Deterring conventional conflict requires displays of credible capability. For example, consider the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system to South Korea in 2017, which was met with anger by China and a flurry of diplomatic maneuvering. A capability cannot deter a country if it is not deployed within an area where it can be effective. Displaying a capability requires a credible presence. Furthermore, a weapon’s capability lacks credibility if its stockpiles are limited or located far from the point of use.

This principle is evident in the Chinese media’s reactions to the public revelation of the AIM-174B. While some appreciated the capabilities that the AIM-174B could bring, others expressed skepticism about its viability. Negative opinions focused on SM-6 manufacturing limitations. These reactions suggest that for the deterrent value of the SM-6 or any weapon to be maximized, it needs to overcome its manufacturing constraints and be widely distributed in the Pacific theater. During U.S. wargames, the location and quantity of weapons receive as much scrutiny from commanders as the locations and numbers of the platforms that would use them. As Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously observed, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” In all contexts, distributed manufacturing with allies provides various logistical options and eliminates single points of failure.

Chinese military commentators also focused on the concept of expeditionary land-based weapon systems. Negative opinions concentrated on sustainment aspects, but notably not on engaging the weapon system itself in warfare. This likely suggests that China understands the difficulty in targeting land-based mobile systems, such as Typhon and Marine Corps Naval Strike Missile batteries, as evidenced by the Russo-Ukrainian war. Additionally, many of China’s anti-access weapon systems focus on capital platforms, such as warships, aircraft bases, and support aircraft, rather than trucks carrying missile launchers. China recognizes it is easier to interdict the logistics that sustain such forces, and its analysts know that the U.S. Navy will likely have to expose itself to deliver replenishment. Still, the recent Balikatan exercise, which featured the first deployment of Marine Corps Naval Strike Missiles to the Philippines, drew negative attention from China, indicating that the concepts and deployments of these capabilities are concerning to them. Sustainment exposure risk can be significantly mitigated if locally produced stockpiles already exist in theater.

A Case for Allied Interoperability and Co-Manufacturing

Co-manufacturing partnerships are invaluable, evidenced by the Russo-Ukrainian war, which significantly depleted U.S. stockpiles of 155mm artillery shells. Australia and South Korea, which also manufacture 155-milliimeter shells, helped replenish U.S. stockpiles. Similarly, conflicts in the Middle East depleted U.S. stockpiles of Standard Missiles, Tomahawks, and other munitions, representing years of industrial output and raising fears that depleted weapon stockpiles undermines U.S. readiness for conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Had allies such as Japan also been producing these munitions, expenditures would be less impactful and more quickly replaced. The number of munitions expended against the Houthis alone demonstrates that the United States will need allied help in a war with a peer.

Australia and Japan are in the process of acquiring the SM-6, with Japan discussing the possibility of a co-production agreement. Co-manufacturing arrangements serve as a means of scaling production, burden sharing, and achieving geographic distribution. Opportunities exist to expand upon existing cooperative development and manufacturing agreements, such as the World War II-era National Technology and Industrial Base or AUKUS, by including more allies. For example, Australia and the United Kingdom joined the National Technology and Industrial Base in 2017, with New Zealand joining in 2023.

Paradoxically, Japan and Norway are allies that have jointly developed and manufactured missiles with the United States but are not party to either framework. This is despite the United States and Japan’s joint development and co-production of the SM-3 Block IIA for ballistic missile defense, with Japan contributing rocket motors, boosters, and nose cones to both U.S. and Japanese assembly lines. Additionally, Japan and the United States are developing a glide phase interceptor under the Glide Phase Interceptor Cooperative Development Project Arrangement. In a parallel development, Norway is establishing manufacturing plants in Virginia and Australia to meet the surging demand for its Naval Strike Missiles.

U.S. missile production capacity constraints are attributed to bottlenecks in rocket motor manufacturing and the availability of rare earth supplies from China. To address these constraints, existing agreements with allies should be expanded to establish alternative sources of supply for vital components of the SM-6, Tomahawk, and other critical weapons. In the near term, Japan’s current production of SM-3 rocket motors and boosters should be expanded to include SM-6 specifications. This expansion allows other agreements, such as the AUKUS agreement with Lockheed Martin to build rocket motors for various missiles as part of the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance enterprise, more time to build capacity from scratch.

To further mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions for raw materials and critical components, the United States should also consider incorporating testing and adopting viable substitutes into the expansion of existing weapon agreements. For instance, Japan jointly developed seeker technology for the SM-3 and manufactures advanced missile seekers. The United States should examine whether allied indigenous designs can be integrated with its weapon systems. If not, it should consider broadening licensed manufacturing agreements to include these components, provided the necessary infrastructure exists, as in Japan’s example. Alternative suppliers should also be identified for rare earths, which are essential to electronics and gyroscopes. The United States should partner with allies such as Australia and Canada on rare earth projects, extending beyond domestic initiatives, to secure these critical supplies.

Focus on Munitions, Not Capital Platforms

Many U.S. allies find themselves in similar predicaments regarding budget constraints and the development of capital platforms such as ships and aircraft. For example, New Zealand recently raised its defense budget to $8 billion (NZ$12 billion). To compare, America’s newest Arleigh Burke destroyers cost between $2.1 billion and $2.5 billion each, with an average induction rate of 1.5 destroyers per year from a mature manufacturing line. In contrast, the SM-6 costs between $4 million and $8 million, meaning that the same budget could procure over 1,000 missiles instead. Today, the United States alone can produce up to 125 SM-6 missiles annually.

Despite increases in defense budgets from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and other nations, constructing and deploying capital assets still takes years. In comparison, manufacturing and deploying munitions is much faster, especially for weapons that can be integrated with existing systems in a country’s inventory. In 2022, Proceedings published David Alman’s essay titled “Don’t Buy Warships (Yet).” Alman argued that to address immediate risks stemming from the U.S.’s lagging shipbuilding capability, the United States should prioritize procuring more munitions that can be mounted on other platforms capable of delivering them, such as submarines, land-launch systems, and aircraft. A Heritage Foundation commentary agreed, stating that the U.S. Navy’s problem is not the number of ships or aircraft but the number of munitions it can supply to them. As the analyses recognize, with any weapon system, a platform is the delivery method and the munition is what ultimately produces the effect. As the Heritage Foundation piece noted, “You can be the best shot in the world, but your expertise won’t count for much if you run out of bullets.” This reasoning applies equally to U.S. allies aiming to modernize their military in the near to mid-term, where balancing the number of bows versus arrows is essential as longer-lead projects come to fruition.

Issues

For decades, U.S. weapons cooperation was hindered by self-imposed restrictions and politics. Strict interpretations of the Missile Technology Control Regime prevented close cooperation on weapons, even with trusted allies. Simultaneously, International Traffic in Arms Regulations approval reviews for technology transfer presented another avenue for frustration, as the presumed position is one of denial. Fortunately, policy shifts have occurred, dramatically changing the defense landscape by dropping barriers. In January 2025, new guidance was issued to allow case-by-case flexibility in the approval of various missile, drone, and space systems for the Missile Technology Control Regime. AUKUS Pillar II exempts participating members from International Traffic in Arms Regulations approvals for “military and dual-use” goods, allowing for the free flow of materials and support at the speed of business.

Partner nation politics also come into play. For example, Article IX of Japan’s constitution was strictly interpreted as preventing the export of arms outside the country. Over time, Japan has reinterpreted its constitution. First, as was the case with the co-development of the SM-3 back in 1999, allowing co-produced weapons to be exported back to the United States, and later evolved into a more liberal viewpoint, one that supports regional peace and stability. Under the current interpretation, with China’s aggressiveness serving as the catalyst, Japan is attempting to export its Mogami-class frigate and associated technology to Australia, as well as older destroyers to the Philippines in the name of regional stability. From a political standpoint, headwinds are abating.

The risk of compromise is a concern for weapons cooperation and production. For example, in 2007, Japan launched an investigation into leaked data concerning the AEGIS weapon system. In 2025, the United States placed South Korea on a watchlist due to the mishandling of sensitive lab data. As part of agreements such as AUKUS, allies must be certified to handle U.S. secrets, which is a lengthy process. Once certified, cooperation should proceed freely and without obstacles. To help with certification, the United States should offer similar support to allies as it does with U.S. defense contractors in cyber defense and physical security that were instituted after high-profile breaches. Even if an ally cannot meet strict requirements, limited partnerships should still be considered if a component they produce can be used without risking the overall system.

Concerns about U.S. budgets and their impact on allied co-manufacturing quantities can largely be mitigated. Multi-year procurement arrangements provide a stable foundation for sustained production, even when U.S. budgets fluctuate. Such arrangements create binding commitments with cancellation penalties, ensuring stability across budget cycles while reducing unit costs. Additionally, co-production could utilize a consortium model that allocates a percentage of slots to U.S. orders for contingency — if unused, these slots would be used to fulfill other orders. The fulfillment of allied orders should be the primary concern of allied co-production initiatives, allowing domestic U.S. supplies to focus on U.S. government orders. By reserving a greater percentage of production capacity for allies like Australia and Japan, U.S. budget fluctuations would become a relatively minor disruption to overall co-production efforts.

Conclusion

The current U.S. administration has placed a priority on allies committing more to their defense. Problematically, some allies’ defense apparatuses have atrophied to the point where it is challenging to build production capacity for their existing military systems due to bureaucratic impediments or the loss of industrial bases. Relying on direct procurements from the U.S. defense industry is also not a viable solution, as it struggles to fill domestic demand. For example, the current U.S. administration is reviewing AUKUS and the decision to supply Australia with Virginia-class submarines. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy stated that using U.S. shipyards to fulfill Australian orders could undermine the U.S. Navy’s position by delaying its own orders, despite Australia already committing funds to the project. These concerns extend to munitions as well, with the Defense Department halting arms shipments to Ukraine because of worries about dwindling missile stockpiles.

As China becomes more assertive and its economic and industrial-military strengths grow, the United States and its allies should identify ways to compete with a Chinese economy that focuses on large-scale industrial output. By 2030, China is expected to have a battle force of around 435 ships, complemented by thousands of missiles. With U.S. Pacific allies feeling threatened by China’s military expansion and assertiveness, it would be unwise to neglect deepening defense ties by failing to expand licensing agreements and manufacturing partnerships. Such “deals” could also be a way to offset trade imbalances with allies, an acute pressure point for the current U.S. administration, by paying licensing or royalty fees to U.S. companies. Additionally, these partnerships provide a vector for allies to allocate defense funding to revitalize their industries.

Deterrence is achieved by deploying credible capabilities and fostering strong alliances. The primary strategy is to prevent China from achieving an overmatch in the near to mid-term. The best approach is to demonstrate credible and proliferated stockpiles of interchangeable and interoperable munitions such as the SM-6 and the Tomahawk. To achieve this goal, priority should be given to leveraging existing allied production frameworks and capabilities in the near term, while building new capacity in the mid- to long term. Through co-manufacturing and integration, the United States can establish a distributed, resilient deterrent that magnifies the collective strength of like-minded nations in preserving regional security.

Trevor “Mrs.” Phillips-Levine serves as the integrated fires director for the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, where he frequently works with U.S. allies on operational planning and defense integration. Before this role, he held advisory positions focused on joint fires and unmanned systems at the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. A career naval aviator, he has completed combat deployments with strike-fighter squadrons and Naval Special Warfare units.

Andrew “Kramer” Tenbusch is an F/A-18 weapons systems officer currently assigned to Strike Fighter Wing Pacific. He previously served as a fellow with the Halsey Alfa Advanced Research Group at the U.S. Naval War College, where he conducted operational wargaming and iterative campaign analysis focused on maritime denial, fleet design, and access challenges in the Indo-Pacific, exploring how emerging technologies, allied integration, and force posture can shape competitive outcomes in contested maritime environments.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not those of the U.S. Navy, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Henry Villarama via DVIDS

warontherocks.com · July 22, 2025

17. Book Review - Into the Void: Special Operations Forces after the War on Terror

Book Review - Into the Void: Special Operations Forces after the War on Terror

irregularwarfare.org · by Eric Robinson · July 22, 2025

This book review was originally published by the US Army War College Press in the Summer 2025 issue of The US Army War College Quarterly, Parameters at https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol55/iss2/1/ and in the online book review forum Parameters Bookshelf at https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters_bookshelf/81/.

The end of the war on terrorism sparked a relentless yet often monotone debate within the special operations community over its relevance in a world dominated by peer competitors and potential high-end conflict. For a community so transformed by two decades at the forefront of global expeditionary counterterrorism, it seems natural that changes are in store again for the special operations forces (SOF) enterprise. Yet, much of the current debate over SOF roles in strategic competition starts from the assumption that its size, shape, and structure are worth preserving.

Taking a refreshing approach, James D. Kiras and Martijn Kitzen assemble an impressive array of experts in the edited volume, Into the Void: Special Operations Forces after the War on Terror. They present a positive, forward-looking vision of what makes special operations forces unique and explore how the SOF enterprise’s character, concepts, and capabilities can— and must—evolve.

Central to this vision is the premise that special operations forces are not meant to be elite; rather, they are meant to be special. This argument stands in stark contrast to the prevailing image of special operators in the war on terrorism as Spartan-like warriors on the leading edge of tactical war-fighting expertise. While such framing has been (rightfully) criticized by others,

Into the Void identifies the most harmful side effect of this warrior-first ethos— it inaccurately conflates the importance of special operations forces’ adaptability and agility with the outcome of the last, most ambitious transformation into an elite find-fix-finish force over the last 20 years.

The book’s mix of contributors—including academics and practitioners from a mix of countries and backgrounds—make a strong case that special operations forces should be boldly transformed toward operating in a peer-dominated security environment and that the SOF enterprise is uniquely capable of adapting to reduce uncertainty and deliver effects that cannot be addressed through conventional military action alone. The editors offer ample historical evidence to make this case, including chapters exploring early Australian and British experimentation in counter-subversion efforts in the Indo-Pacific in World War II (by Andrew Maher) and the mechanics of state and non-state actor development of novel special operations capabilities to overcome novel hard problems (by Ian Rice and Craig Whiteside). Similarly, Troels Burchell Henningsen makes a clear argument for special operations forces’ ability to maintain a “volatile alignment” of proxies that has borne out well in the history of successful SOF-led coalitions of fragile proxies in Bosnia, Iraq, Syria, and even occupied France in World War II.

Into the Void also presents a range of new operational concepts through which special operations forces can experiment. Pierre Jean Dehaene proposes a localization strategy that reimagines military assistance in frontline states as partner-driven, not just partner-centric. Thomas R. Searle makes the case for enduring counterterrorism assistance to partners as a democratic counterweight against Chinese and Russian autocratic expansion that stands ready to take its place. Ben Gans, Leo Blanken, and Robert Stelmack argue for SOF operators’ unique potential as multidomain integrators of physical, virtual, and cognitive effects.

Helpful deep dives into adversary thinking include Christopher Marsh, who explores likely future Russian conceptions of the gray zone through maskirovka (deception). David Kilcullen similarly breaks down Chinese organization and thinking about future roles for special operations forces in similar environments.

One challenge raised throughout Into the Void, albeit never fully settled, is how best to anchor the SOF enterprise’s core value proposition for agility and adaptation in future defense strategy to harness its full potential.

Several contributors note the growing dichotomy between increased operational demands placed upon the SOF enterprise and downward budgetary pressures for these forces to demonstrate their value vis-à-vis China and Russia, and in response, propose a range of potential SOF missions to help, for example, counter Chinese coercion in the Indo-Pacific or bolster resilience in Europe’s high north. Such menus of static options largely undersell the SOF enterprise’s real potential as dynamic campaigners. Instead of options, further work is needed to develop and articulate strategies for the agile employment of special operations forces in time and space to expand decision space for policymakers.

Overall, the book’s emphasis on adaptation and transformation remains its most important contribution and one that should resonate with policymakers and military leaders looking to move beyond simply defending the enterprise as it exists today and toward unleashing the enterprise to transform to meet the next generation of threats.

Eric Robinson is associate director, Data Science and Technology Group, and a senior research data scientist at RAND. His research focuses on special operations, great power conflict, and defense strategy issues related to competition, coercion, and irregular warfare. He leads a range of projects on these issues for sponsors in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and various components of U.S. Special Operations Command. He has served in a variety of leadership roles at RAND.

Main Image: Cover art for “Into the Void: Special Operations Forces after the War on Terror” by James D. Kiras and Martijn Kitzen | Oxford University Press, 2024 • 394 pages • $59.99

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​18. America Should Assume the Worst About AI

​Excerpts:

Planning for the impacts of AGI on national security needs to start now. In an increasingly competitive and combustible world, and with an economically fragile and politically polarized domestic environment, the United States cannot afford being caught by surprise.

Although it is possible that AI will ultimately prove to be a “normal technology”—a technology, like the Internet or electricity, that transforms the world but whose pace of adoption has natural limits that governments and societies can control—it would be foolish to assume that preparing for major disruption would be a mistake. Planning for more difficult challenges can help leaders identify core strategic issues and build response tools that will be equally useful in less severe circumstances. It would also be unwise to presume that such planning will generate policy instincts and pathways that exacerbate risks or slow AI advances. In the nuclear era, for example, planning for potential nuclear terrorism inspired global initiatives to secure the fissile material needed to make nuclear weapons that ultimately made the world safer.

It would also be dangerous to treat the possibility of AGI like any “normal scenario” in the national security world. Technological expertise and fluency across the government is limited and uneven, and the institutional players that would be involved in responding to any scenario extend far beyond traditional national security agencies. Most scenarios are likely to occur abroad and at home simultaneously. Any response will rely heavily on the choices and decisions of actors outside government, including companies and civil society organizations, that do not have a seat in the White House Situation Room and may not prioritize national security. Likewise, planning cannot be delegated to futurists and technical experts sent to a far-off bunker to spend months crafting detailed plans in isolation. Preparing for a future with AGI must continuously inform today’s strategic debates.

There is an active debate about the merits of various strategies to win the competition for AI while avoiding catastrophe, but there has been less discussion about how AGI might reshape the international landscape, the distribution of global power, and geopolitical alliances. In an increasingly multipolar world, emerging players see advanced AI—and how the United States and China diffuse AI technology and its underlying digital architecture—as key to their national aspirations. Early planning, tabletop exercises with allies and partners, and sustained dialogue with countries that want to hedge their diplomatic bets will ensure that strategic choices are mutually beneficial. Any AI strategy that fails to account for a multipolar world and a more distributed global technology ecosystem will fail. And any national security strategy that fails to grapple with the potentially transformative effects of AGI will become irrelevant.

National security leaders don’t get to choose their crises. They do, however, get to choose what to plan for and where to allocate resources to prepare for future challenges. Planning for AGI is not an indulgence in science fiction or a distraction from existing problems and opportunities. It is a responsible way to prepare for the very real possibility of a new set of national security challenges in a radically transformed world.

America Should Assume the Worst About AI

Foreign Affairs · by More by Matan Chorev · July 22, 2025

How To Plan For a Tech-Driven Geopolitical Crisis

July 22, 2025

An AI-operated robot at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, March 2025 Bruna Casas / Reuters

MATAN CHOREV is a Senior Researcher and Associate Director of RAND Global and Emerging Risks. During the Biden administration, he served as Principal Deputy Director of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff.

JOEL PREDD is a Senior Engineer and Director of RAND’s Geopolitics of AGI Initiative.

• More by Joel Predd

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National security leaders rarely get to choose what to care about and how much to care about it. They are more often subjects of circumstances beyond their control. The September 11 attacks reversed the George W. Bush administration’s plan to reduce the United States’ global commitments and responsibilities. Revolutions across the Arab world pushed President Barack Obama back into the Middle East just as he was trying to pull America out. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended the Biden administration’s goal of establishing “stable and predictable” relations with Moscow so that it could focus on strategic competition with China.

Policymakers could foresee many of the underlying forces and trends driving these agenda-shaping events. Yet, for the most part, they failed to plan for the most challenging manifestations of where these forces would lead. They had to scramble to reconceptualize and recalibrate their strategies to respond to unfolding events.

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence—and the possible emergence of artificial general intelligence—promises to present policymakers with even greater disruption. Indicators of a coming powerful change are everywhere. Beijing and Washington have made global AI leadership a strategic imperative, and leading U.S. and Chinese companies are racing to achieve AGI. News coverage features near-daily announcements of technical breakthroughs, discussions of AI-driven job loss, and fears of catastrophic global risks like the AI-enabled engineering of a deadly pandemic.

There is no way of knowing with certainty the exact trajectory along which AI will develop or precisely how it will transform national security. Policymakers should therefore assess and debate the merits of competing AI strategies with humility and caution. Whether one is bullish or bearish about AI’s prospects, though, national security leaders need to be ready to adapt their strategic plans to respond to events that could impose themselves on decision-makers this decade, if not during this presidential term. Washington must prepare for potential policy tradeoffs and geopolitical shifts, and identify practical steps it can take today to mitigate risks and turbocharge U.S. competitiveness. Some ideas and initiatives that today may seem infeasible or unnecessary will seem urgent and self-evident with the benefit of hindsight.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

There is no standard, shared definition of AGI or consensus on whether, when, or how it might emerge. Today’s frontier AI models are already increasingly capable of performing a greater number and complexity of cognitive tasks than the most skilled and best resourced humans. Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, the power of AI has increased by leaps and bounds. It is reasonable to assume that these models will become more powerful, autonomous, and diffuse in the coming years.

Nevertheless, the AGI era is not likely to announce itself with an earth-shattering moment like the nuclear era did with the first nuclear weapons test. Nor are the economic and technological circumstances as favorable to U.S. planners as they were in the past. In the nuclear era, for example, the U.S. government controlled the new technology, and planners had two decades to develop policy frameworks before a nuclear rival emerged. Planners today, by contrast, have less agency and time to adapt. China is already a near-peer in technology, a handful of private companies are steering development, and AI is a general-purpose technology that is spreading to nearly every part of the economy and society.

In this rapidly changing environment, national security leaders should dedicate scarce planning resources to plausible but acutely challenging events. These types of events are not merely disruptions to the status quo but also signposts of alternative futures.

Say, for instance, that a U.S. company claims to have made the transformative technological leap to AGI. Leaders must decide how the U.S. government should respond if the company requests to be treated as a “national security asset.” This designation would grant the company public support that could allow it to secure its facilities, access sensitive or proprietary data, acquire more advanced chips, and avoid certain regulations. Alternatively, a Chinese firm may declare that it has achieved AGI before any of its U.S. rivals.

Planning for AGI cannot be delegated to futurists sent to a far-off bunker.

Policymakers grappling with these scenarios will have to balance competing and sometimes contradictory assessments, which will lead to different judgments about how much risk to accept and which concerns to prioritize. Without robust, independent analytic capabilities, the U.S. government may struggle to determine whether the firms’ claims are credible. National security leaders will also have to consider whether the new technological advance could provide China with a strategic advantage. If they fear AGI could give Beijing the ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. critical infrastructure faster than cyberdefenses can patch them, for example, they may prescribe actions—like trying to slow or sabotage China’s AI development—that could escalate the risk of geopolitical conflict. On the other hand, if national security leaders are more concerned that nonstate actors or terrorists could use this new technology to create catastrophic bioweapons, they may prefer to try to cooperate with Beijing to prevent proliferation of a larger global threat.

Enhancing preparedness for AGI scenarios requires better understanding of the AI ecosystem at home and abroad. Government agencies need to keep up with how AI is developing to identify where new advances are most likely to emerge. This will reduce the risk of strategic surprise and help inform policy choices on which bottlenecks to prioritize and which vulnerabilities to exploit to potentially slow China’s progress.

Policymakers also need to explore ways to work with the private sector and with other countries. A scalable, dynamic, and two-way private-public partnership is crucial for a strategic response to the current challenges that AI presents, and this will be even more the case in an AGI world. Mutual suspicion between government and the private sector could cripple any crisis response. Meanwhile, leaders will need to develop policies to share sensitive, proprietary information on developments in frontier AI with partners and allies. Without such policies, it will be challenging to build the international coalition needed to respond to an AI-induced crisis, reduce global risk, and hold countries and companies accountable for irresponsible behavior.

ADVERSARIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial general intelligence will not only complicate existing geopolitical dynamics; it will also present novel national security challenges. Imagine an unprecedented AI-enabled cyberattack that wreaks havoc on financial institutions, private corporations, and government agencies and shuts down physical systems ranging from critical infrastructure to industrial robotics. In today’s world, determining who is responsible for cyberwarfare is already a challenging and time-intensive task. Any number of state and nonstate actors possess both the means and motivations to carry out destabilizing attacks. In a world with increasingly advanced AI, however, the situation would be even more complex. Policymakers would have to contemplate not only the possibility that an operation of this scale might be the prelude to a military campaign but also that it might be the work of an autonomous, self-replicating AI agent.

Planning for this scenario requires evaluating how today’s capabilities can handle tomorrow’s challenges. Governments cannot rely on present-day tools and techniques to quickly and confidently assess a threat, let alone apply relevant countermeasures. Given AI systems’ proven capacity to deceive and dissemble, current systems may be unable to determine whether an AI agent is operating on its own or at the behest of an adversary. Planners need to find new ways to assess its motivations and how to deter escalation.

Preparing for the worst requires reevaluating “attribution agnostic” steps to harden cyberdefenses, isolate potentially compromised data centers, and prevent the incapacitation of drones or connected vehicles. Planners need to assess whether current military and continuity of operations protocols can handle threats from adversarial AI. Public distrust of the government and technology companies will make it even more difficult to reassure a worried populace in the event of artificial intelligence–fueled misinformation. Given that an autonomous AI agent is not likely to respect national boundaries, adequate preparations would involve setting up channels with partners and adversaries alike to coordinate an effective international response.

How leaders diagnose the external impacts of an impending threat will shape how they react. In the event of a cyberattack, policymakers will have to make a real-time decision about whether to pursue targeted shutdowns of vulnerable cyber-physical systems and compromised data centers or—fearing the potential for rapid replication—impose a more comprehensive shutdown, which could prevent escalation but inhibit the functioning of the digital economy and systems on which airports and power plants rely. This loss-of-control scenario highlights the importance of clarifying legal authority and developing incident-response plans. More broadly, it reinforces the urgency of creating policies and technical strategies to address how advanced models are inclined to misbehave.

At minimum, planning should involve four types of actions. First, it should establish “no regret” actions that policymakers and private-sector players can take today to respond to events from a position of strength. Second, it should create “break glass” playbooks for future emergencies that can be continually updated as new threats, opportunities, and concepts emerge. Third, it should invest in capabilities that seem crucial across multiple scenarios. Finally, it should prioritize early indicators and warnings of strategic failure and create conditions for course corrections.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD HABITS

Planning for the impacts of AGI on national security needs to start now. In an increasingly competitive and combustible world, and with an economically fragile and politically polarized domestic environment, the United States cannot afford being caught by surprise.

Although it is possible that AI will ultimately prove to be a “normal technology”—a technology, like the Internet or electricity, that transforms the world but whose pace of adoption has natural limits that governments and societies can control—it would be foolish to assume that preparing for major disruption would be a mistake. Planning for more difficult challenges can help leaders identify core strategic issues and build response tools that will be equally useful in less severe circumstances. It would also be unwise to presume that such planning will generate policy instincts and pathways that exacerbate risks or slow AI advances. In the nuclear era, for example, planning for potential nuclear terrorism inspired global initiatives to secure the fissile material needed to make nuclear weapons that ultimately made the world safer.

It would also be dangerous to treat the possibility of AGI like any “normal scenario” in the national security world. Technological expertise and fluency across the government is limited and uneven, and the institutional players that would be involved in responding to any scenario extend far beyond traditional national security agencies. Most scenarios are likely to occur abroad and at home simultaneously. Any response will rely heavily on the choices and decisions of actors outside government, including companies and civil society organizations, that do not have a seat in the White House Situation Room and may not prioritize national security. Likewise, planning cannot be delegated to futurists and technical experts sent to a far-off bunker to spend months crafting detailed plans in isolation. Preparing for a future with AGI must continuously inform today’s strategic debates.

There is an active debate about the merits of various strategies to win the competition for AI while avoiding catastrophe, but there has been less discussion about how AGI might reshape the international landscape, the distribution of global power, and geopolitical alliances. In an increasingly multipolar world, emerging players see advanced AI—and how the United States and China diffuse AI technology and its underlying digital architecture—as key to their national aspirations. Early planning, tabletop exercises with allies and partners, and sustained dialogue with countries that want to hedge their diplomatic bets will ensure that strategic choices are mutually beneficial. Any AI strategy that fails to account for a multipolar world and a more distributed global technology ecosystem will fail. And any national security strategy that fails to grapple with the potentially transformative effects of AGI will become irrelevant.

National security leaders don’t get to choose their crises. They do, however, get to choose what to plan for and where to allocate resources to prepare for future challenges. Planning for AGI is not an indulgence in science fiction or a distraction from existing problems and opportunities. It is a responsible way to prepare for the very real possibility of a new set of national security challenges in a radically transformed world.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Matan Chorev · July 22, 2025

19. America’s Pill Problem: Tariffs Won’t Fix the Country’s Reliance on Foreign Medicines

​Is this a national security issue? I fear it is.

Excerpts:

Fixing the national security challenge of overdependence on foreign sources for critical medicines instead requires coordinated action across U.S. government agencies and a strategic mix of policy instruments. Security-minded federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, and procurement programs, such as the Strategic National Security Stockpile, could enter into limited-term, guaranteed purchase agreements with U.S.-based manufacturers of critical generic medicines. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H, could boost their investments in innovations that enable the creation of smaller, cleaner, and more cost- and energy-efficient manufacturing facilities of key starting materials and APIs. Automation, continuous production, and modular equipment could all lower the manufacturing costs for pharmaceutical production while mitigating the associated environmental risks.

The FDA, meanwhile, should streamline the clinical trial approval process and consistently enforce quality standards for generic medicines; U.S. producers have been often subject to more frequent inspections and exacting oversight than their foreign counterparts, which contributed to an uneven and uncompetitive landscape. The recent launch of unannounced and surprise FDA inspections of foreign manufacturing facilities is a positive development in this regard.

But to protect the U.S. system of biomedical innovation, the Trump administration will have to do more than just level the playing field. The United States has led the pharmaceutical industry because of the collaboration among American universities, entrepreneurs, and large drug firms, and an openness to tapping the best talent from abroad. These attributes have enabled the best ideas to emerge and develop into world-leading, life-changing commercial products. Yet this resource is not inexhaustible; the president risks squandering it through his cuts in funding for the National Institutes of Health, hostility to international students, and attacks on research universities. Diversifying and fortifying the pharmaceutical supply chain is critical, but so is investing in the innovation needed to keep the United States in front.

America’s Pill Problem

Foreign Affairs · by More by Thomas J. Bollyky · July 22, 2025

Tariffs Won’t Fix the Country’s Reliance on Foreign Medicines

July 22, 2025

An employee checks coated tablets at a manufacturing plant in Ahmedabad, India, April 2025 Amit Dave / Reuters

THOMAS J. BOLLYKY is Bloomberg Chair in Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

CHLOE SEARCHINGER is a Research Associate for Global Health, Economics, and Development at the Council on Foreign Relations.

PRASHANT YADAV is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• More by Chloe Searchinger
• More by Prashant Yadav

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Nearly 25 years ago, Americans discovered just how critical the antibiotic ciprofloxacin could be. Commonly prescribed for bacterial infections, “cipro” is also the first-line treatment for anthrax exposure. In September 2001, just one week after the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. public found itself contending with yet another nightmare: someone was sending anthrax through the U.S. Postal Service to media companies and congressional offices—ultimately killing five people and infecting 17 others. Those with even the smallest risk of exposure lined up for treatment.

Today, anthrax remains one of the deadliest and easiest biological weapons to produce. Yet 80 percent of the U.S. supply of ciprofloxacin is still imported. Moreover, most of those imports, whether from Europe, India, or Jordan, rely on key starting ingredients made in China.

It’s not just cipro. The United States is alarmingly dependent on imports for many of its critical medicines and their ingredients. Over the last two decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, U.S. pharmaceutical imports have grown by an average nine percent annually. Over just last 12 months, the value of U.S. pharmaceutical imports has ballooned 40 percent; the $315 billion pharmaceutical sector, which U.S. manufacturers once dominated, was the fifth-largest U.S. import category in 2024. By volume, China and India are the largest suppliers of drugs and their ingredients to the United States, including common antibiotics, statins, and other older low-cost generic medicines. By value, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland dominate the U.S. pharmaceutical trade, largely through their exports of top-selling branded drugs such as Viagra and Botox and patented medicines such as new weight-loss treatments and Keytruda, the top-selling cancer drug. The United States has long dominated the production of innovative medicines, but even that market segment is at risk: in 2024, one-third of the new compounds licensed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies reportedly were made by Chinese biotechnology firms.

The combination of U.S. reliance on imports for critical medicines and the geographic concentration of those supplies has left Americans vulnerable to the natural disasters, manufacturing mishaps, and strategic prerogatives of other nations. In 2023, a U.S. Department of Defense official testified that the national security risks of Chinese dominance of the global market for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)—the building blocks of all drugs—“cannot be overstated.” Should China “decide to limit or restrict the delivery of APIs to the United States,” he warned, “it would have a debilitating effect on U.S. domestic production and could result in severe shortages of pharmaceuticals for both domestic and military uses.” The United States maintains stockpiles of strategic medicines—the supply of ciprofloxacin is meant to cover 12 million people for 60 days—but emergency stockpiles are no answer for the chronic drug shortages already prevalent in the United States. Nor would they meet Americans’ health needs in a sustained crisis, such as a pandemic or an attack by a foreign adversary.

U.S. President Donald Trump has correctly surmised that the United States doesn’t make many of the everyday drugs that Americans take anymore, but his proposed remedy could make the problem worse. This month, the president promised that the country’s pharmaceutical imports would be “tariffed at a very, very high rate, like 200 percent,” which he predicted would motivate pharmaceutical manufacturers to bring production “roaring back” to the United States if they are given “a year, year and a half” delay in tariff implementation. In service of that goal, the Trump administration has launched an investigation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to determine whether pharmaceutical imports threaten U.S. national security. Notably, the security-related products targeted under Section 232 are exempt from recent court decisions that blocked Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said recently that the pharmaceutical inquiry would conclude at the end of July.

But a blanket tariff on pharmaceutical imports would only worsen the dangers posed by the United States’ growing dependency on foreign drugs and drug inputs. It would spur disruptions in supplies of essential medicines such as chemotherapy agents, penicillin, and other sterile injectable medications that have low profit margins and are complex to make and difficult to reprice under Medicaid and Medicare rules and long-term hospital contracts. Although Trump hopes this disruption will incentivize a shift to domestic manufacturing, even an 18-month transition period would not be long enough to establish new pharmaceutical manufacturing sites, which can require three to five years to build. In the meantime, patients and caregivers would not be able to access lifesaving medicines.

Overcoming the root causes of the U.S. dependency on foreign drugs instead requires understanding why some critical medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients are no longer made in the United States and why others are at risk of their production moving abroad. And it will mean coming up with effective policies for reversing those trends. Tariffs alone will not solve the problem.

THE CLIFF

Pharmaceutical manufacturing emerged in the 1930s from the dye and chemical industry and expanded dramatically with the production of antibiotics during World War II. As other labor-intensive industries moved offshore in search of cheaper labor, drug and vaccine makers stayed put for decades, anchored by high startup costs, infrastructure demands, and stringent quality, safety, and efficacy regulations.

This situation began to shift with the advent of low-cost generic medicines in the United States. In 1984, in an effort to increase competition in the U.S pharmaceutical market, lawmakers created an abbreviated pathway for approval of generic versions of drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: manufacturers would no longer have to redo all the expensive clinical trials that supported the greenlighting of the original drug. U.S. states passed laws permitting and in some cases requiring pharmacists to substitute approved generics in lieu of more expensive branded drugs, if available. In the late 1980s, insurers, pharmaceutical benefit managers, and Medicaid programs followed suit, instituting strong financial incentives for patients to use the cheapest available FDA-approved generic version.

Even with these new business practices and more favorable regulatory requirements, however, the shift from domestic U.S. pharmaceutical products to low-cost imports did not happen overnight. Two decades later, in 2004, generics only accounted for about half of all prescribed drugs in the United States, and India provided just one percent of U.S. pharmaceutical imports. At that point, most generic medicines dispensed in the United States were still manufactured in Europe, in Israel, or at home. In 1994, the United States, EU, Japan, and other advanced economies pushed for and successfully concluded the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade in Pharmaceutical Products to exempt a broad range of these products from tariffs because of their public health importance.

Around 2010, however, a generational business opportunity arose to sell low-cost versions of top drugs. Over the next five years, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry experienced a “patent cliff” when patents expired on many of the top-selling drugs in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, including Lipitor, a statin used to control cholesterol. Suddenly, a large wave of medicines started becoming eligible for sale in generic versions, and by 2016, generics represented 89 percent of all prescriptions filled nationally. Drug manufacturers in China and India rushed to claim a piece of that expanding and lucrative pie. Many U.S. drug makers either formed joint ventures in China and India or dropped out of certain product lines entirely.

The arrival of these low-cost imports transformed the structure of the U.S. pharmaceutical market. Today, generics represent more than 90 percent of Americans’ prescriptions, and Indian pharmaceutical companies supply 47 percent of these generic prescriptions. More worryingly for policymakers in Washington, approximately 70 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used by Indian drug manufacturers come from China.

FUNKY FISH AND CLEAN AIR

Although U.S. policies and business opportunities have provided incentives for hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical benefit managers, and Medicaid and Medicare programs to rely on cheap prescription drug imports, the reasons that foreign firms dominate particular pharmaceutical segments go beyond low labor costs and are often particular to the product class involved.

Environmental concerns in the United States, for instance, have played a significant role in a shift to overseas manufacturing for many older generic products, such as commonly used antibiotics and everyday cardiovascular drugs. Production of active pharmaceutical ingredients often involves chemical reactions such as fluorination and chlorination, with toxic byproducts. In the first decade of this century, Western regulators and news media began to publicize these environmental and occupational harms. News reports described how hormones in the runoff from pharmaceutical manufacturing were feminizing fish and detailed the high concentration of antibiotics discovered in riverbeds and sewage. Amid the resulting outcry, European countries and the United States began mandating environmental risk assessments and adopting new regulations for pharmaceutical manufacturers. By contrast, China and India offered more relaxed environmental laws and more affordable water and power inputs, and the potential for enormous economies of scale as more manufacturing moved to those countries.

By 2021, China accounted for one-fifth of the world’s antibiotics exports and nearly half of global exports of antibiotic ingredients. It had a reported production capacity of 14,000 tons—nearly three times that of India—for amoxicillin, a broad-spectrum penicillin antibiotic prescribed to treat a variety of bacterial infections, including ear, throat, sinus, respiratory, and urinary tract infections, especially in children. Over 20 million prescriptions for amoxicillin are written annually in the United States, sourced from generic producers in Europe, India, Israel, Jordan, and a small facility in Tennessee. But most of those manufacturers rely on APIs made in Chinese facilities in Shanghai and in the coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. If a natural disaster struck there or China withheld amoxycillin API supplies for geopolitical reasons, as it has with rare earth elements, the effects would ripple through every U.S. hospital, pharmacy, and pediatric practice within weeks.

HOGS AND HEADWINDS

For some critical medicines, U.S. regulatory changes have helped shift production abroad. Take the drug Heparin. Like amoxycillin, heparin is one of those foundational medications that make modern medicine possible. It is best known for preventing coronary disease and heart attacks, but it also works as a blood thinner that inhibits blood clots and pulmonary embolisms. It is used in everything from common surgeries to kidney dialysis to asthma medicines, and as a treatment for COVID-19. For decades, heparin was made with ingredients from cows, until the mad cow disease scare in the 1990s prompted manufacturers and regulators to adopt porcine alternatives. With that change, China, the world’s largest pork producer, also became the dominant supplier of crude heparin.

This has created a critical dependency on China. Millions of U.S. patients use the drug annually, and numerous times, fluctuations in China’s pig population have put the supply at risk. Most recently, the 2019 African swine fever epidemic devastated China’s hog farms and triggered a global shortage of heparin. In 2008, when a Chinese-made heparin API was made with a cheaper synthetic counterfeit that proved toxic, the result was 149 deaths worldwide, including 80 in the United States. Some forms of heparin have been in short supply since 2017, prompting the FDA to reverse course and encourage producers to seek approval for a bovine version.

The United States continues to lead the world when it comes to manufacturing advanced biopharmaceuticals. Drugs for cutting-edge gene and cell therapies are made at sites in California and New Jersey, and insulin, vaccines, and immunotherapy doses are produced in Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico. The United States also exports those medicines, with the COVID-19 pandemic boosting global demand for U.S.-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.

Yet U.S. regulatory hurdles and the questionable intellectual property and tax policies of other countries have started to erode the U.S. biopharmaceutical advantage. FDA approval processes for early-stage clinical research have become increasingly cumbersome, slow, and costly. The risk-adverse agency, for example, often requires extensive animal testing before researchers move on to Phase 1 clinical trials. As a result, many of those early-stage trials are now conducted abroad, often in China. Once that started, China began using its joint venture requirements and the conditions for its regulatory approval of drugs to compel foreign pharmaceutical companies to share their drug formulations, manufacturing processes, or research data with local firms and regulators. These practices have helped China establish a fast-follower strategy for drug development: Chinese companies replicate American-made innovations with only superficial tweaks or improvements. Heavy government support for AI-enabled biotechnology firms—including BioMap, the life sciences arm of the Chinese multinational Baidu, and WuXi AppTec, China’s leading biomanufacturer—is accelerating China’s emergence as a dominant biotech power. Merck and Pfizer’s recent deals with Chinese biotechnology firms for advanced cancer and cardiovascular therapies worth billions of dollars signal a growing confidence among multinational drug firms in China’s ability to develop and produce novel therapeutic treatments that meet rigorous Western standards.

For many years, Puerto Rico served as a hub of pharmaceutical manufacturing for the United States. But in 2006, the special tax credits that had encouraged Puerto Rico’s industry were fully phased out. As a result, Ireland, Singapore, and other countries began offering tax incentives to lure U.S. pharmaceutical firms into establishing manufacturing operations and subsidiaries within their borders. The result, as the economist and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Brad Setser has shown, is that American firms have shifted production of their most lucrative drugs, which are often developed through research funded by U.S. taxpayers, to low-tax settings abroad just to sell them back at high prices to American consumers. This has led not only to huge trade deficits and lost U.S. tax revenues but also the rise of competitors with highly skilled biopharmaceutical workforces and robust manufacturing bases. The U.S. health system’s reliance on important immunological and weight-loss drugs from abroad is making it less resilient.

COMMON GROUND

The Trump administration wants to use tariffs to address these vulnerabilities in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain. And its use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act makes it possible that Trump’s tariffs could last. Indeed, before 2016, the Commerce Department rarely conducted Section 232 investigations, and when it did, it usually concluded that the imports in question did not meet the statute’s requirement of threatening to “impair U.S. national security. The few that did meet that criterion never resulted in tariffs. But the first Trump administration concluded six Section 232 investigations—nearly a fifth of all such inquiries that had been initiated since the federal statute was approved in 1962. In the most high-profile 232 investigations, such as those on aluminum and steel, Trump imposed tariffs. And once in place, none of those tariffs were lifted, not even by the Biden administration.

In the public comment period this past spring, patient groups and pharmaceutical firms almost universally opposed instituting Section 232 pharmaceutical tariffs. But Trump has announced his desired outcome, and U.S. courts have afforded the president broad discretion under Section 232 to impose tariffs with no specified end date. There is also a growing bipartisan consensus in Washington that the dependence on foreign countries in the pharmaceutical sector is a national security risk.

There are ways in which the Section 232 investigation might help improve U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain resilience if appropriately targeted. For starters, a tariff that applies to key starting materials and APIs—not just finished drugs—would actually capture the products where China is dominant and thus U.S. national security at risk. The Section 232 investigation should focus on this category but also recognize that building U.S. manufacturing capacity in this area will take time. To minimize U.S. drug shortages, then, the Section 232 investigation should also differentiate, as past investigations have, between adversaries and allies, exempting critical imports from the latter as “diverse and ‘safe’ foreign suppliers.” Because previous Section 232 penalties have endured, the private sector would likely see such a tariff as durable, which would then justify the cost of sourcing from U.S. and trusted nations’ suppliers.

A 232 tariff might also target and galvanize firms that produce expensive patented drugs to shift that intellectual property from low-tax nations back to the United States, a process that can take months, rather than years. Novartis, Eli Lilly, and other manufacturers of such medicines have already announced longer-term plans to build or expand their U.S. facilities. These expensive innovative drugs are often not covered by Medicaid and Medicare pricing restrictions, which means that the firms may seek to pass along tariff costs to patients and hospitals.

In contrast, imposing high tariffs on essential generic medicines is likely to increase costs for the U.S. health-care system and exacerbate risks of supply disruptions and shortages. Makers of these products cannot easily pass along tariff costs to their customers, and low profit margins, environmental challenges, regulatory requirements, and the need for economies of scale will make it difficult to relocate production to the United States. In other words, tariffs cannot offset the economic and political forces that created vulnerabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

BEYOND TARIFFS

Fixing the national security challenge of overdependence on foreign sources for critical medicines instead requires coordinated action across U.S. government agencies and a strategic mix of policy instruments. Security-minded federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, and procurement programs, such as the Strategic National Security Stockpile, could enter into limited-term, guaranteed purchase agreements with U.S.-based manufacturers of critical generic medicines. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H, could boost their investments in innovations that enable the creation of smaller, cleaner, and more cost- and energy-efficient manufacturing facilities of key starting materials and APIs. Automation, continuous production, and modular equipment could all lower the manufacturing costs for pharmaceutical production while mitigating the associated environmental risks.

The FDA, meanwhile, should streamline the clinical trial approval process and consistently enforce quality standards for generic medicines; U.S. producers have been often subject to more frequent inspections and exacting oversight than their foreign counterparts, which contributed to an uneven and uncompetitive landscape. The recent launch of unannounced and surprise FDA inspections of foreign manufacturing facilities is a positive development in this regard.

But to protect the U.S. system of biomedical innovation, the Trump administration will have to do more than just level the playing field. The United States has led the pharmaceutical industry because of the collaboration among American universities, entrepreneurs, and large drug firms, and an openness to tapping the best talent from abroad. These attributes have enabled the best ideas to emerge and develop into world-leading, life-changing commercial products. Yet this resource is not inexhaustible; the president risks squandering it through his cuts in funding for the National Institutes of Health, hostility to international students, and attacks on research universities. Diversifying and fortifying the pharmaceutical supply chain is critical, but so is investing in the innovation needed to keep the United States in front.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Thomas J. Bollyky · July 22, 2025

20. 'He Will Win No Further': How Trump's New Ukraine Plan Aims to Finally Stop Putin

'He Will Win No Further': How Trump's New Ukraine Plan Aims to Finally Stop Putin

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Stephen Silver · July 21, 2025

Key Points and Summary – President Trump’s new hardline strategy—offering advanced weapons to Ukraine while threatening Russia with a 50-day ultimatum for a peace deal—has been met with cautious optimism from some quarters and continued defiance from Moscow.

-While former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed the move as a “turning point,” the Kremlin has publicly stated it remains committed to achieving its war aims.

-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has responded by proposing new peace talks. The starkly different reactions highlight the deep impasse, with the West now betting that the credible threat of force is the only language Vladimir Putin understands.

Putin Might Have a New Ukraine Problem…

A week ago, the White House announced a shift in policy towards Russia and Ukraine.

The Trump Administration is still pushing for an end to the war, but it has now proposed a different way of doing so: By making new weapons available to Ukraine, while also threatening new secondary tariffs on countries that trade with Russia, in the event Russia doesn’t agree to a ceasefire within 50 days.

This followed Trump vowing to end the war on his first day in office and then, later, the Pentagon briefly announcing a pause in new deliveries of weapons to Ukraine.

The idea is to hit Russia where it hurts, make them feel the pain, and force them to the negotiating table. However, more than three years of sanctions, from all directions, have largely failed to deter Russia’s goals so far in the war.

Indeed, the Russians so far have not indicated that the threats coming from Trump will deter their war aims.

According to the Associated Press, Russia is “open to peace with Ukraine, but achieving its goals remains a priority,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov indicated this week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “has repeatedly spoken of his desire to bring the Ukrainian settlement to a peaceful conclusion as soon as possible. This is a long process, it requires effort, and it is not easy,” Peskov said over the weekend on Russian state TV, as reported by the AP.

“The main thing for us is to achieve our goals,” the spokesman added. “Our goals are clear.”

Russia’s Goals for the War

As Russia made clear in the last round of peace talks that took place in Istanbul in early June, it is demanding that Ukraine give up territory, that the international community recognize that territory as Russia’s, that Ukraine’s military after the war be diminished, and that Ukraine remain neutral and not join NATO.

All of those demands are nonstarters for Ukraine.

The View From Ukraine

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has proposed peace talks, as part of what the New York Times describes as “faint signs of life… in the effort to halt Ukraine war.”

“The Russian side must stop hiding from decisions,” the Ukrainian leader said in a video message, as reported by the Times. He offered to meet as soon as this week, once again in Istanbul.

What would be discussed in the talks?

“Mr. Zelensky proposed talks on a cease-fire, prisoner exchanges, and the return of Ukrainian children deported to Russia during the war. He reiterated an offer for a direct meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, first floated in May,” The Times said of the possibility of talks.

Russia responded to the proposal.

“President Putin has repeatedly spoken of his desire to bring the Ukrainian settlement to a peaceful conclusion as soon as possible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said, per the newspaper. “This is a long process, it requires effort, and it is not easy.”

A Secretary of State Speaks

A former U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made some comments this week about Trump’s shift on Russia-Ukraine talks.

“This last week was a turning point,” Rice said at an Aspen Institute forum this week, per The Hill.

“I think the best news that we could possibly give to the Ukrainian people is that the U.S. and Europe have finally aligned around the idea that Vladimir Putin will not be stopped with words,” Rice added. “He will only be stopped if he believes that he can go no further, he can win no further.”

The secretary of state in President George W. Bush’s second term, Rice got her start as an expert on the Soviet Union, first in academia and later government. Since 2020, she has served as the director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

About the Author: Stephen Silver

Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Stephen Silver · July 21, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com